“Cause I’m trying to get serious with you. When you gon let me do what I want? We could get married, I ain’t playin with you.”
“I don’t want to get married. Why don’t you teach me to drive?” Shawan said. He leaned forward and touched her breast, brushing his finger against the arm she kept over herself.
“Let me teach you something else,” he said, pushing his chin forward. His hand stayed on her shirt, and Shawan felt the anger rise into her throat. She thought, Why it always what you want to do? She closed her hand around his wrist. She held it and squeezed as hard as she could, but he twisted his arm and fastened his hands around hers; his mouth was tight. Shawan looked at his hands. They were red, ruddier than hers. Hers were gold in the light from the streetlamp.
“Girl, you should see what old Spiros up to now,” Mary T. said to Cherie, crumpling her paper bag from lunch. “He messin everybody up, evil man.” Mary T. and Mrs. Badgett took lunch together now, because Mrs. Badgett had brought her tiny television to the break room so she could watch “All My Children.”
“He kidnapped that girl, Shawan,” Mary T. said. She slid into her seat next to Shawan. Leonard said, “You went and got hooked on them shows,” laughing at her excitement. “Mmm hmm,” Cherie said. “She know everybody’s business.”
“I know as much about Spiros and Brooke and them as Shawan know about deejays,” Mary T. said, smiling, brushing against Shawan.
She didn’t smile. “Don’t nobody care about them white people,” she said, looking away. “Don’t even put them with the music.”
Leonard clicked his tongue. “Ain’t no need to go off on her like that, Miss Shawan,” he said impatiently. “You been nasty all week.”
“So. She the one want to live in ice-cream land, I ain’t gotta go with her,” Shawan said. She couldn’t stop the words, or smooth her voice. It was thick and rough. Mary T. looked at her with lips drawn in at one corner.
“And who are you?” Mary T. said. “You somebody more than me?”
Shawan said nothing. She had always waited for Mary T. and Cherie to admire her voice, to ask her about music, when she came to work; now she felt herself wanting to shout at them for no reason. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking at the gray metal desk. “But them people life ain’t about nothin.”
“They got some brothers and sisters on now,” Mary T. said. Leonard came to stand behind Shawan’s chair, and he touched the back of her neck. “Not no real ones,” he said gently. “You want me to sing?”
“No. Diana’s songs is all old,” Shawan said coldly. She went into the break room, but while the drums and hands clapping bounced back at her, she cried instead of swaying.
She liked to see their suits, the elegant tailoring, how the coats made a sharp line from shoulder to hand as if nothing could soften it. Marcus had a suit like that, she thought, walking toward the bus stop. Two men who looked like bankers in her building approached, flicking their eyes over the radio quickly and then glancing away in disgust. “Everywhere you go,” one of them said, and Shawan smiled, curling her arm tighter around the metal.
The only open seat was in the middle of the bus, just ahead of the rear door. Her foot was partly in the aisle, flat on the rubber floor, to steady her body when the bus lurched and swayed. An old man sat by the window, leaning his head against the yellowed glass. She stared at his clenched hands; they were black between the wrist and knuckles, ashy gray between the fingers and on the joints.
The bus stopped often in the downtown traffic, and soon the crowds of people waiting impatiently at the crosswalks and the crush of bodies standing in the aisles of the bus surrounded her. Nearly empty buses with signs flashing for Santa Monica and Westwood passed like mirrors. She made her eyes blurry and dreamed until she felt the drag of stops much less frequently and knew they had left downtown and entered the long avenues of South-Central L.A. Her calf muscles relaxed, and she put one hand on her knee.
A young man stood up in the back of the bus and pulled a gun out of his jacket. Shawan had moved her head to the clear space by the door, and she saw him walk to the crowd’s end and turn his back. “Everybody shut up,” he said, not loudly. He faced the people in the rear of the bus, holding a shopping bag with brown-string handles, and the people near him began to drop their wallets and watches and rings into the bag. He held it with one hand, his wrist curving up and the bag falling open in front of the people he pushed it near. With the other hand he held the gun close to his waist, so that only the people he watched could see it.
He stood at the other side of the rear door for a moment, waiting as the long crush of people moved forward to leave by the front door. Shawan turned her head forward. Everybody always get off here, she thought. He gon get off, too. He moved just past the rear door and turned quickly, keeping his back to the driver and the passengers in the front. He looked down at Shawan and brought the bag close, pushing against, her when the bus began to move. She took off her watch, and he still stared, the gun pointing downward. The watch cracked against something hard at the bottom of the bag. She saw the man look out the window at the streets, at the old man next to her. He was asleep, his mouth open. He wore no watch. The man with the gun looked at Shawan’s radio, between her clenched legs. She slipped her hands up the sides and under the handle, curling her fingers around the smoothness. I ain’t givin it up. The bag quivered, and he said, “The box, man,” thrusting his head forward slightly, the way Marcus did when he talked. She sat still, staring at a point just past him and to the left, feeling the line of his body waver as the bus slowed. His knee pushed sharply into hers, and she made herself look up at his neck, round and dry, gray as a palm trunk, and then at his eyes. She didn’t blink, only let her eyes shift out of focus so his eyebrows became one thick mustache over the trembling single eye she saw.
He yelled, “Open the door, man,” as the bus stopped, and then he leaped out onto the street. No one moved. As the doors clamped together, in the moment before the gears shifted and roared, Shawan heard the gun fire. The bullet pierced the window behind the door, over the heads of the women in the long seat, and went out the other window. People curled their backs instinctively, putting their heads down. Shawan crossed her arms over the radio and leaned her head back against the metal frame of the seat. He had been shooting at her, she knew. She felt the cold iron on the nape of her neck, watched the buildings slide by, faster and faster.
When she stepped down at her stop, she turned on the music. Her heart felt out of rhythm, and her hands slipped with sweat against the metal handle. You chicken now? she thought. Too late to be chicken, too late to be gettin scary. She looked toward her house and turned to walk down the next street. She listened for the Playboys, for any voices, when she neared V-Roy’s house. It was quiet, and the car had been backed into the yard. It looked far away, dark and indistinct in the gray light of evening. Shawan undid her necklace and pulled off the key. She opened the car door, touching the primer’s roughness, and looked toward the house. When she turned the key in the ignition, the radio came on loudly.
I’ma just sit here and listen, she thought, but then the car smelled like weed and beer, not like V-Roy, and she saw the back door of the house open. Antoine looked outside. Shawan moved the gear shift the way she’d watched V-Roy move it; the car seemed to spin forward out of the driveway.
She stopped at the corner, watching the crowd of buses and cars on the avenue. Everything seemed too slow, just as it had on the bus when the man stared at her, and Shawan looked at the radio on the car seat beside her. She turned quickly onto the avenue, forcing another car to stop, and the radio fell forward. She remembered driving one night with V-Roy, watching two boys run from the sidewalk to smash the windows of the car ahead of them; they took the woman’s purse and ran. There were no boys in the doorways now, but she pushed down on the gas pedal, and the car sped toward the light. Think I’m ignorant, huh? Me and V-Roy never stupid like that. Wait till the light red, then gon stop and show me yo
ur piece, say give up the ride or give up your life. Antoine’s boys. No, baby. She saw the yellow, then red, and only pushed harder. The bus driver saw her coming. He stopped in the intersection and honked as she flew over the rut in the street. Shawan looked up, higher than the street, and tried to see where she was, which way she should drive to go to the ocean, but she couldn’t see, couldn’t remember. Another red flash appeared in front of her, and when she sped up again, she hit the front of the car heading across her path. The steering wheel pushed hard at her ribs and collarbone, and then she sat back against the seat. She tried to breathe and couldn’t. She locked the door and turned on her radio, which had fallen to the floor; she turned it up high, changed the car radio to the same station, and filled the car with music while people slapped the windows with the palms of their hands.
author’s note
Aquaboogie was first published seventeen years ago, and I still remember with vivid clarity how I felt when I got the news that the manuscript had won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. I had a six-month-old baby and our car had just died, and I propped her on the kitchen counter in a carrier and had her hold the check, if random grasping could be thought of as holding.
My husband and I bought a car with the money. We had two more daughters, and then we divorced. But I still see him nearly every day, as well as all of our family and friends. I still live in the same house, and from the back window I can see the hospital where we were all born—us, our siblings, our kids. My children are nearly grown now, and they like to joke about how pathetic it is to see me gazing out that window, to think that I haven’t gotten very far at all from my beginnings.
But I have, and yet I have never wanted to leave this landscape and these people behind. Everything I’ve written since Aquaboogie has been connected to it somehow. The character of Big Ma, in “Cellophane and Feathers,” became Marietta, the soul of I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots. Darnell, whose girlfriend Brenda was pregnant in “Safe Hooptie,” was the hero of Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, and he has shown up in The Gettin Place and played an important part in Highwire Moon. Roscoe, Esther, and other characters are in the novel I’m working on right now, which is a sequel to A Million Nightingales.
Not many writers stay. I know this. Sometimes this place is a hard place to live. So many people we’ve known have died too young, or have lost their way. Seventeen years ago, I wrote that this is a large city, and it is larger now, one of the fastest growing places in America. We were “country” back then, and are less so now. But I have chickens, as do my neighbors, and my brother used to bring avocados and oranges, and my friends bring plums and tangerines, and we all live that way even now. Back then I wrote that this is a talking place, and it still is. I write alone, but at family reunions and gatherings there are usually hundreds of people telling me stories, and I always listen to the legends of our pasts and presents—slavery and broken-down cars and wildfires and cocaine, parties and dancing and love and betrayal. I always will. I said that I wanted some stories to be on paper, rather than floating in the air with our barbecue smoke and laughter and shouts, and so these stories remain on paper, and in someone’s hands.
Before they were published in 1990, I worked on these stories for years, often writing longhand in our car while my husband was fixing it in the gravel driveway. I would be sitting in the driver’s seat, holding my notebook, while he said, “Rev the engine now,” or “Step on the brake.” The exhaust colored my words, I thought back then. That driveway is now cement, and our three daughters shoot basketball there, often with their father. But I write in the car all the time, more so than at my computer, because I’m driving kids around these same neighborhoods, to practice or to visit someone. I write my stories longhand, in a series of notebooks, just as I always have, and I realize that maybe as a southern Californian it’s not the exhaust that shades my sentences, but the promise of movement and the air in the open window while my father-in-law waves at me and a cousin calls out, “Hey, girl, did you bring your rice? I got a place for it right here. And I’ve got something to tell you right now.”
Riverside, California March 2007
acknowledgments
THE AUTHOR WISHES TO acknowledge the publication of several of the stories in this collection, some in slightly different forms, in the following: “Buddah” in TriQuarterly #71, Winter 1988; “The Box” in TriQuarterly #73, Fall 1988; “Back” in Ploughshares, Vol. 14/2&3; “Tracks” in Contact, Winter 1989; “Off-Season” in Passages North, Summer 1990; “Training” and “Esther’s” in Ontario Review, Fall 1990; “Safe Hooptie” in North American Review, Fall 1990, as “Two Days Gone.”
Thanks to Jay, Ada, Richard, and Holly.
Special gratitude to the California Arts Council, Poets & Writers, and the Watson Foundation, John and Gail Watson, Directors
About the Author
Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her most recent, Between Heaven and Here, is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus Reviews, and A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Straight has been awarded the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Susan Straight
Cover design by Angela Goddard
978-1-4804-1086-2
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