She does not know that Christine has left the gazebo to meet her friend at the service entrance. No one is there. Christine looks up toward the window of her own bedroom, where Heed would be looking for the jacks. The window is open; pale curtains lift through it. She opens her mouth to call out, “Heed! Come on!” But she doesn’t because her grandfather is standing there, in her bedroom window, his trousers open, his wrist moving with the same speed L used to beat egg whites into unbelievable creaminess. He doesn’t see Christine because his eyes are closed. Christine covers her laughing mouth, but yanks her hand away when her breakfast flows into her palm. She rushes to the rain barrel to rinse the sick from her yellow top, her hands, and her bare feet.
When Heed finds her, Christine doesn’t explain the bathing suit, why she is wiping it, or why she can’t look at Heed. She is ashamed of her grandfather and of herself. When she went to bed that night, his shadow had booked the room. She didn’t have to glance at the window or see the curtains yield before a breeze to know that an old man’s solitary pleasure lurked there. Like a guest with a long-held reservation arriving in your room at last, a guest you knew would stay.
It wasn’t the arousals, not altogether unpleasant, that the girls could not talk about. It was the other thing. The thing that made each believe, without knowing why, that this particular shame was different and could not tolerate speech—not even in the language they had invented for secrets.
Would the inside dirtiness leak?
Now, exhausted, drifting toward a maybe permanent sleep, they don’t speak of the birth of sin. Idagay can’t help them with that.
Heed needs more Stanback and coughs when she swallows it. A rasping cough that takes a long time to quiet.
Where does it hurt?
Name it.
Be light soon.
Then what?
I’ll carry you.
Yeah, sure.
Hey! Look what I found.
Christine holds up the pouch and empties it, spilling five jacks and a rubber ball on the floor. She collects the five and fans them out. Too few for a game. She takes enough rings from her fingers to complete the set. Stars mixed with jewels sparkle in fresh candlelight. Heed can’t bounce the ball, but her fingers are perfect for scooping.
Hating you was the only thing my mother liked about me.
I heard it was two hundred dollars he gave my daddy, and a pocketbook for Mama.
But you wanted to, didn’t you? Didn’t you want to?
Quickly Christine scoops four, then groans. The thorn in her shoulder is traveling down her arm.
I wanted to be with you. Married to him, I thought I would be.
I wanted to go on your honeymoon.
Wish you had.
How was the sex?
Seemed like fun at the time. Couldn’t tell. Nothing to compare it to.
Never?
Once.
Hey, Celestial.
I’d just as soon our picnics. ’Member?
Do I. We had Baby Ruths in the basket.
And lemonade.
No seeds, either. L spooned out the seeds.
Was that baloney or ham?
Ham, girl. L wouldn’t go near baloney.
Did it rain? Seem to remember rain.
Fireflies. That’s what I remember.
You wanted to bottle them.
You wouldn’t let me.
The turtles scared us.
You’re crying.
So are you.
Am I?
Uh-huh.
I can barely hear you.
Hold my . . . my hand.
He took all my childhood away from me, girl.
He took all of you away from me.
The sky, remember? When the sun went down?
Sand. It turned pale blue.
And the stars. Just a few at first.
Then so many they lit the whole fucking world.
Pretty. So so pretty.
Love. I really do.
Ush-hidagay. Ush-hidagay.
In unlit places without streetlamps or yelping neon, night is profound and often comes as ease. Relief from looking out for and away from. Thieves need the night in order to be furtive, but can’t enjoy it. Mothers wait for it yet are braced all through their sleeping. The main ingredient offered by the night is escape from watching and watchers. Like stars free to make their own history and not care about another one; or like diamonds unburdened, released into handsome rock.
No one answers when he calls out, “Anybody here?” Guided by the weak beam of a flashlight, Romen crosses the lobby and climbs the stairs. It will be daylight soon, but now everything is hidden. He hears a light snoring to his left through a half-open door. He pushes it wide and dapples the beam over two women. He comes closer. Both look asleep but only one is breathing. One is lying on her back, left arm akimbo; the other has wrapped the right arm of the dead one around her own neck and is snoring into the other’s shoulder. As he pours light into her face, she stirs, focuses, and says, “You’re late,” as though they had an appointment. As though stealing the car was not an impulse but an errand she had assigned him. As though what Junior told him hadn’t mattered.
He had been asleep and woke up thinking about getting something to eat when she told him.
“You left them there?”
“Why not? . . . Turn out the light, sugarboy.”
Romen was reaching to turn off the lamp but found himself scooping up the car keys instead. He got up then and dressed. Whatever Junior was saying, shouting, he couldn’t decipher. He ran—fast, down the stairs, out the door, chased by the whisper of an old man. “You not helpless, Romen. Don’t ever think that.” Stupid! Clown! He was trying to warn him, make him listen, tell him that the old Romen, the sniveling one who couldn’t help untying shoelaces from an unwilling girl’s wrist, was hipper than the one who couldn’t help flinging a willing girl around an attic. He backed out of the driveway and sped into the road. Slower, he thought. Slower. The road has no shoulders. Ditches beckoned on either side. One headlight blinked and died.
Junior huddled over her knees holding them together in her arms. Rocking back and forth, she was remembering how Romen had raised her foot from the bathwater and tasted it as though it were a lollipop. It was when they left the tub, both wet and clean as gristle, that the slipperiness had begun. A kind of inside slide, that made her feel giddy and pretty at the same time. The solid protection she’d felt the first night in the house gave way to a jittery brightness that pleased and frightened her. Lying on her back, she had closed her eyes to study it. Finally she turned to look at Romen’s face. Deep in postcoital sleep, his lips parted, his breathing light, he did not stir. This beautiful boy on whom she had feasted as though he were all the birthday banquets she’d never had. The jitter intensified and suddenly she knew its name. Brand-new, completely alien, it invaded her, making her feel wide open and whole, already approved and confirmed by the lollipop lick. That was why, later on, when he’d asked her a second time, she told him the truth. Clearly, just the facts. His response, “You left them there?”, surprised her as did his sudden rush to be gone. Reaching to turn out the lamp, he’d grabbed the car keys instead, and got dressed as fast as a fireman. She called his name, then shouted: “What? What?” He didn’t answer. He ran.
Junior left Heed’s bed and roamed the house. She didn’t want to see the Good Man or sniff out his aftershave. He had been missing for days now, and had not appeared in the hotel attic or returned to his room. Confronting his portrait, eager to report her cleverness in the hotel, she had suppressed suspicions of his betrayal, and when Romen arrived, she forgot about him. Then the lollipop was tasted, and the Good Man vanished from his painting altogether, leaving her giddy and alone with Romen. Who ran. Away from her. As fast as he could.
Confused, she paced the rooms for a while, ending up in the kitchen. There she opened the oven and, squatting down, tore pieces of crust from the blackened leg of lamb. Ravenously she jammed t
hem into her mouth. But the jittery brightness, less than an hour old, did not fade. Not then.
Romen has to carry them both. One at a time, one at a time down the stairs. Tucking the dead one into the wide backseat; helping the other one into the front.
“She gone?”
“No, ma’am. She’s at the house.”
She won’t let him go to the hospital, insisting he drive to Monarch Street. When they arrive, light is finally breaking. The windows are glazed peach; the house inhales the damp air, its siding juicy with moisture. Romen carries her down the steps into the kitchen. Before he can seat her, Junior rushes in—big-eyed, apprehensive.
“Oooo I’m so glad. I tried to get help and couldn’t find anybody, then Romen came by and I made him go out there right away. You all right?”
“Alive.”
“I’ll make some coffee, should I? Where is . . . ?”
“Get in there and shut the door.” Leaning heavily, her arm bent in Romen’s, a hand clutching the back of a chair, she nods toward L’s old rooms.
Junior looks at Romen. He looks back expecting to see pleading. There is none, only startle in her eyes, no fear or questioning. Holding her gaze without a blink, Romen watched the startle become calculation become a frown directed at the floor. Something was draining from her.
“Go on!”
Without looking up, Junior turns, goes into the room, and shuts the door.
“Lock it,” she tells Romen. “The key is in the bread box.”
He helps her into the chair, locks the door, then hands her the key.
“You got to take her to the mortuary. Find a phone and get an ambulance out here. Make haste.”
Romen turns to leave.
“Wait,” she says. “Thank you, Romen. Everything left in me thanks you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and heads for the door.
“Wait,” she says again. “Take a blanket. She might get cold.”
Alone, seated at the table, she speaks to the friend of her life waiting to be driven to the morgue.
What do we do with her?
A bullet sounds about right.
You okay?
Middling. You?
Hazy.
It’ll pass.
I bet she’s figuring out a way to get out before the ambulance comes.
No she’s not. Trust me.
Well, she’ll start yelling in a minute. Think she’s shamed?
Ought to be.
Romen returns with a blanket. “I’ll be right back,” he says. “Don’t you worry,” he says, and opens the door.
“Step on it,” she says, stroking the key with her thumb.
Should we let her go, little rudderless, homeless thing?
We could let her stay, under certain circumstances.
What difference would it make?
To me? None. Do you want her around?
What for? I got you.
She knows how to make trouble.
So do we.
Hey, Celestial.
Romen is speeding down Monarch Street, trying as best he can not to disturb his passenger. He is serene, in control now, although when he approached the car and looked back at the house, unfriendly-looking clouds were sailing over the roof of One Monarch Street, their big-headed profiles darkening all save one window, which, like the eye of a determined flirt, keeps its peachy glint.
I see you. You and your invisible friend, inseparable on the beach. You both are sitting on a red blanket eating ice cream, say, with a silver coffee spoon, say, when a real girl appears sloshing the wavelets. I can see you, too, walking the shore in a man’s undershirt instead of a dress, listening to the friend nobody sees but you. Intent on words only you can hear when a real voice says Hi, want some? Unnecessary now, the secret friends disappear in favor of flesh and bone.
It’s like that when children fall for one another. On the spot, without introduction. Grown-ups don’t pay it much attention because they can’t imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves, and so confuse dependence with reverence. Parents can be lax or strict, timid or confident, it doesn’t matter. Whether they are handing out goodies and, scared by tears, say yes to any whim, or whether they spend their days making sure the child is correct and corrected—whatever kind they are, their place is secondary to a child’s first chosen love. If such children find each other before they know their own sex, or which one of them is starving, which well fed; before they know color from no color, kin from stranger, then they have found a mix of surrender and mutiny they can never live without. Heed and Christine found such a one.
Most people have never felt a passion that strong, that early. If so, they remember it with a smile, dismiss it as a crush that shriveled in time and on time. It’s hard to think of it any other way when real life shows up with its list of other people, its swarm of other thoughts. If your name is the subject of First Corinthians, chapter 13, it’s natural to make it your business. You never know who or when it will hit or if it can stay the road. One thing is true—it bears watching, if you can stand to look at it. Heed and Christine were the kind of children who can’t take back love, or park it. When that’s the case, separation cuts to the bone. And if the breakup is plundered, too, squeezed for a glimpse of blood, shed for the child’s own good, then it can ruin a mind. And if, on top of that, they are made to hate each other, it can kill a life way before it tries to live. I blame May for the hate she put in them, but I have to fault Mr. Cosey for the theft.
I wonder what he would make of Junior. He was adept, you know, at spotting needy, wild women. But this is now—not then. No telling what this modern breed of junior woman is capable of. Disgraceful. Maybe a caring hand, a constant eye, is enough, unless it’s too late and their sleep is merely a waiting, a smoldering, like a cinder in a mattress. One no sugar in the world can put out. Mr. Cosey would know. You could call him a good bad man, or a bad good man. Depends on what you hold dear—the what or the why. I tend to mix them. Whenever I see his righteous face correcting Heed, his extinguished eyes gazing at Christine, I think Dark won out. Then I hear the laugh, remember his tenderness cradling Julia in the sea; his wide wallet, his hand roughing his son’s hair . . . I don’t care what you think. He didn’t have an S stitched on his shirt and he didn’t own a pitchfork. He was an ordinary man ripped, like the rest of us, by wrath and love.
I had to stop him. Had to.
Just as well they fought over my menu, looking in it for a sign of preference and misreading it when they did. Heed’s grasp of handwriting skills was limited, but she had to wonder in 1971 if the “sweet Cosey child” her husband was willing property to in 1958 was neither her nor Christine but a baby on the way. They never saw the real thing—witnessed by me, notarized by Buddy Silk’s wife—leaving everything to Celestial. Everything. Everything. Except a boat he left to Sandler Gibbons. It wasn’t right. If I had been allowed to read what I signed in 1964 when the sheriff threatened to close him down, when little children called him names and whole streets were on fire, I might have been able to stop him then—in a nice way—keep him from leaving all we had worked for to the one person who would have given it away rather than live in it or near it; would have blown it up rather than let it stand as a reminder of why she was not permitted to mount its steps but was the real sport of a fishing boat. Regardless of what his heart said, it wasn’t right. If I had read it in 1964 instead of 1971, I would have known that what looked like seven years of self-pity and remorse was really vengeance, and that his hatred of the women in his house had no level. First they disappointed him, then they defied him, then they turned his home into a barrel of quarreling she-crabs and his life’s work into a cautionary lesson in black history. He didn’t understand: a dream is just a nightmare with lipstick. Whether what he believed was true or no, I wasn’t going to let him put his family out in the street. May was sixty-one; what was she supposed to do? Spend her old age in a straitjacket? And Heed was almost forty-one. Was she suppo
sed to go back to a family who had not spoken to her since Truman? And Christine—whatever she was into wasn’t going to last. There wasn’t but one solution. Foxglove can be quick, if you know what you’re doing, and doesn’t hurt all that long. He wasn’t fit to think, and at eighty-one he wasn’t going to get better. It took nerve, and long before the undertaker knocked on the door, I tore that malicious thing up. My menu worked just fine. Gave them a reason to stay connected and maybe figure out how precious the tongue is. If properly used, it can save you from the attention of Police-heads hunting desperate women and hardheaded, misraised children. It’s hard to do but I know at least one woman who did. Who stood right under their wide hats, their dripping beards, and scared them off with a word—or was it a note?
Love Page 18