Vigilantes of Love

by John Everson

  “I hope it’s hot,” she demanded, when she finally opened the door to my knocking, still in her long faded floral nightgown. She passed the back of her hand across her eyes and rubbed. “I barely caught a wink last night, but I don’t intend to waste the day abed.”

  She pushed the screen door open and motioned me inside. “Come in, come in. Sometimes you’re slower than my auntie Jane’s molasses.”

  I set the coffee on the kitchen table and turned to leave.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, holding my shoulder. “You don’t feel right.”

  “Just a dream,” I shrugged and grabbed for the latch.

  “Sit down, boy,” she insisted, and dragged me over to the kitchen table.

  “It’s nothing, Eva, really. An overactive imagination is all.”

  Her eyes bored into me and accepted no excuses. So I told her my story of walking by the bay in the moonlight. And of feeling the moon trying to push me in.

  She nodded knowingly, then grinned. “I knew you could hear her, if you only listened,” she said. As if this were a good thing. “Now you won’t think I’m a crazy for drawing my shutters.”

  I didn’t say anything. She took my hands in her own. “I’ve been telling her no for so long, sometimes I wonder myself why. I’ve spent these past weeks enjoying your company, but sooner or later, I have to answer her. She may have pushed your shoulder, but it’s my attention she’s trying to get.”

  I didn’t say anything as she sipped a loud slurp of coffee through the plastic spout.

  “You stay in on the night of the full moon from now on, you hear?”

  I agreed. Then she turned the conversation to her daughter in Des Moines. Eventually she shooed me out to my painting, as if I had been the one insisting on dawdling at her table.

  * * * * *

  Not long after that, I bought myself a secondhand pair of Dockers and a button-down pale blue shirt that didn’t have five or six stains down the middle, and got myself a part-time job at the Chinese grocery down on Hyde.

  They didn’t say anything about my coming to work in the same clothes every day since I was careful to wash out my shirt every night in the sink. I used my first paycheck to buy three more outfits.

  Two more paychecks and I moved into a tiny studio apartment. It was south of Market, but I was off the street and out of the tuberculosis hotels. I hung my meager wardrobe in the single closet off the kitchen, with hangers from Eva, and scrubbed the floors clean of grease and mold with wire mesh and a towel I found in a dumpster out back. There wasn’t much to boast about in the place – it had no air conditioning (a noticeable detraction as the heat began to rise and the fog disappear), no bed (I slept on the floor on a rolled-up pair of jeans) and the kitchen was really just a sink and a half-sized refrigerator sitting on scuffed tan tile in the corner of the room. The refrigerator rattled dangerously whenever the cooling element kicked on.

  But it was mine.

  And while the lock was less secure than the two rusted hinges on the front door, I didn’t have anything I was worried about the street boys stealing. It was hard to believe, but life was actually looking up.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon, weeks later, when I finally finished all the painting on her house and garage that Eva could possibly devise. The air was scented with salt and longing. Long rays of sunshine colored the ground in tints of amber and yellow, and the roses on Eva’s porch smelled stronger than bottled musk.

  The day before, a girl who I’d seen before eyeing me along with the lettuce heads at the grocery finally braved the fates to talk to me.

  “Where is the soy sauce?” she asked, admittedly not a personal question, but I took it as a good sign. She was Chinese and had shopped there as long as I’d worked there. She knew where the soy sauce was.

  I vaulted up the steps to Eva’s door filled with the sauce of a man on the rise. My brushes were clean, there was five dollars in my pocket and there was a pretty black-haired girl who might be stopping by the grocery tonight because she’d “forgotten” an item yesterday. My world was blue and green and bright.

  But Eva’s face was otherwise.

  “Can you drive?” she asked me when I got to the door.

  “Well, I don’t have a license anymore, but sure, I used to drive,” I said.

  “Take me to the airport.”

  Eva bade me stay at her place until she came home from her daughter’s in Des Moines, so she could phone me to say when she’d be back and I could pick her up at the airport. I couldn’t afford a phone at my apartment.

  What was supposed to be a few days of absence stretched longer when her daughter didn’t pull through. She was gone for weeks; after the death and funeral, she called to say she was hopping another plane to stay for a while with her son in Africa. It was Eva all the way. I shook my head and smiled at the thought of this little old spitfire touching down on the Ivory Coast.

  At 8:13 a.m. on a Saturday (her stove had one of those electric digital clocks) as I sat reading her paper at her table in her kitchen, after a night on her couch (I wouldn’t sleep in her bed – it just didn’t seem right) the phone call finally came.

  “Pick me up at three this afternoon,” she said. “At the United terminal. I’m ready to come home.”

  I almost didn’t recognize her when she came out of the terminal, lugging the one canvass bag she’d packed before leaving, along with two new plastic bags lumpy with additions. You don’t ever come back with less than you take. Always more.

  Eva had also come back with more on her mind. She’d aged two decades in two months. Suddenly she seemed as frail and weathered as an oak leaf in December. I didn’t know what to say to her. When she’d left it was to help her daughter after a car accident, and she’d come back without any daughter at all.

  I pushed her bags into the trunk and got the door for her, but she insisted on closing it herself.

  “Get in the car,” she said, shooing me away from the handle. “Let’s just get home.”

  It was a long, quiet ride from the airport; Eva stared out the window at the bay, and I tried not to punch the unfamiliar brakes too hard. I’d owned a car once but that had been many years before. Eva’s Chevy probably predated my Honda, but I hadn’t driven it while she was gone.

  When we got home, I picked up the couple of items I’d brought with me from home – a recently acquired toothbrush and my laundry – and headed for the door, eager to leave her with her own thoughts. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, staring at the floor of her kitchen and clumsily shifting my plastic sack of belongings from one hand to the other.

  Eva nodded. “Don’t forget my coffee,” was all she said.

  By the end of October she seemed back to normal. Mostly. I only really saw her in the mornings, bringing her that one-cup care package that had managed to pull me off the street and into a full-time job at the grocery store (the stockboy had quit a couple weeks before) and a one-room apartment on the skid. The week before I’d even asked the Chinese girl, Soo Lee, to a movie.

  And she said yes.

  “Have you heard from the moon lately?” Eva asked me one morning.

  I shook my head no.

  “Not since that night,” I replied. “I took your advice; I stay in when the moon is full.”

  Actually, I had long ago begun to think the incident was a product of a mind ripe with street delirium.

  She nodded absently. “Just as well. There are still things here for you to do.”

  I looked around at the freshly varnished cupboards, the recently painted back door, the newly screened front windows and put my hands out in askance.

  “What?”

  She smiled sadly and shook her head. “Tell me about your little Chinese girl. Will you take her out again?”

  In fact, I did take her out again. And again. And two weeks later, I introduced her to Eva.

  “This is Soo Lee,” I said, beaming with pride. Slurring with pride too; we’d just come from Happy Hour.

&nb
sp; “Would you like some tea?” Eva invited, but I declined.

  “We’re off to Perrone’s for dinner.”

  Perrone’s was just a diner, but for me it was living high. As Soo Lee stepped down from the porch, Eva pressed a ten dollar bill into my hand.

  “Get her whatever she wants,” she said. “And you… stay off the wine tonight.”

  I knew better than to argue.

  That night, as I walked Soo Lee home by the light of the moon, I felt a touch on my shoulders once again. This time though, it wasn’t a push, but a cool caress along my neck and shoulder blades.

  At first I thought it was Soo Lee’s fingers running down my back, but then I realized her hand was in mine. I shivered in the night breeze. She smiled at me, her eyes dark with compassion. “You are chilled?”

  “No,” I said, glancing behind me. “Your hand keeps me warm.”

  She kissed me on the cheek and it was so.

  The next morning, the hill to Eva’s house seemed flat as Ohio. I was as jaunty as a boy after his first date, and I longed to share my story with Eva, the woman who’d made it all possible.

  I was early with her coffee, but I couldn’t wait. Her shutters were already open as I vaulted up the steps and called inside.

  “Eva? Coffee Boy.”

  I’d called myself Coffee Boy since the first week of bringing her this morning treat, though I looked farther from a boy every day.

  There was no answer.

  I tried the latch. The door was open, so I stepped inside. I set the coffee down on the table, saw a paper with my name on it. I unfolded it and read the cramped, tiny script addressed to me.

  It was the first note I had received in years. And the worst ever.

  Drink the coffee, Antonio. It’s yours. Tonight I will sleep with the shutters undone. She has called me for too long. I must answer.

  My daughter is gone before me, my son is a world away. And you… you are my finest child. But you do not need me any longer. Already I can feel her pulling me to the windows, and it is only eight o’clock. She barely wakes.

  Drink the coffee, Antonio. And bring your bride to live in my home. You’ll find, in my will, that it is yours now. Aren’t you glad you painted it pink? Now you may repaint it blue if you like! Or purple! I have only one request: close the shutters on the night of the moon and hold your Soo Lee tight then. The moon has called you once, and she will never forget you. Nor will I.

  -Eva

  “Eva?” I called again, but it came out as a whispered croak.

  The morning light was climbing with heavy orange fingers through the front room, and sliding down the walls in her bedroom. I didn’t have to move much to look across the hallway and see that her bed was still made, and the white stockinged foot atop it lay still and silent.

  I couldn’t go into her room then. Instead, I sat down at her table, and slowly, with tremulous slurps, drank her coffee.

  ~*~

  LOVESONG

  “I’ve seen a lot of broken hearts in time

  and I’ve had my share as well

  Every story’s different

  but the pain’s the same, they tell.”

  –Industrial Disease, “Why Fall In Love?”

  She worked at the Record Stop and her name was Lissa.

  I write this down because they’re both gone now. Something should remain, even if it’s only the fragment of my memory. Call this my love story to Lissa. And the Stop. I do miss them both. Maybe you do, too.

  Of course, the first time I tried to get her attention, I was looking at her name badge sideways and I got it wrong. I called out “Hey Lisa,” and her manager cranked his head sideways and gave me a “you moron” look. But he didn’t say anything. They called him “The Master,” which was also the name of the alternative radio show he did late night on the local public radio station.

  “It’s Lissa,” she corrected softly, drawing out the “S” as a smile lit up that wan, thin face. She had dark wide eyes shadowing a face barely wide enough to encircle them. Her chin was narrow and her hair an intricate black maze of braids and colored beads. I think I loved her the first time I saw her. I like to think she was sweet on me, too, even if I got her name wrong.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, and I suddenly realized that I had absolutely nothing in mind to ask her. One of the store’s cats darted between my legs and I followed its path with my eyes, looking for something to pin a question on.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. My eyes settled on a poster for Mabel’s, the black-painted rock bar across the street. “Do you have the new Savage Republic in yet?”

  She followed my gaze to the concert poster. Savage Republic was scheduled to play on Friday.

  “Yeah, I think so,” she said. “Over here.”

  She slipped out from behind the cluttered counter and led me through the stacks of just-bought and unfiled used records to the “What’s New” display in the center of the store. I followed, watching the paramecia of her purple and black paisley skirt swish and swim as she moved. When she pointed to the album, displayed amid a jumble of other unfamiliar titles, I barely even looked at it, just grabbed it with one hand. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  She didn’t seem to notice, though. She pursed her lips in a quick smile and continued down the aisle.

  “Thanks,” I called after her, holding the album in my hands. I didn’t really want it; I had never heard of Savage Republic before, and I never bought new records; didn’t have the cash for such extravagance. But I spent nearly everything in my wallet to buy it that day. Turns out it was pretty cool.

  The next time I was in, I remember Lissa was at the counter as I vaulted up the claustrophobic stairs from the busy street below. Record Stop was on the second floor of the campus main street, and its narrow flight of painted steps was worth exploring all by itself. Years of graffiti covered the grey walls on the climb up, promoting bands and bars and, naturally, promiscuous sorority girls. She smiled when she saw I was waiting at the edge of the counter for her attention, and pointed me in the direction of the latest new underground release from the Bomp label.

  Lissa turned me on to a lot of cool bands over the next few weeks. Record Stop was the ultimate college music store in the ‘80s; its walls were covered with posters of alternative artists (back when the word “alternative” actually defined something) and were filled in equal measures with cool Europop LPs from Ultravox and Yello and Alison Moyet to the more obscure but national underground bands like Husker Du and The Mekons to local artists like The Elvis Brothers and Paul Chastain (who a decade later would find his niche backing up Matthew Sweet). R.E.M. had set the guitar world on its ear with Murmur a couple years before and instead of the blistering power anthem solos of the ‘70s, the store was usually filled with the echoey strumming of Galaxie 500 or the ethereal dark gothicism of Dead Can Dance and The Cocteau Twins. Or Romeo Void. Or Colourbox. You usually didn’t know what the hell the noise was coming from the speakers, but it was always edgy. Blurred vocals for blurred moods. You felt connected to something secret and powerful when you stood still and lingered in Record Stop.

  “Who’s that you’re playing?” I’d ask Lissa, after roaming the store a few minutes and listening to the often cacophonous sound raging through the store. I didn’t want it to look like I’d come in just to see her. But I had.

  “The Flaming Lips,” she said once when I asked about one particularly noisy bit of treble-heavy, punky distortion. “They suck,” I proclaimed.

  “They’re playing Chin’s tomorrow,” she said, pointing out the LIVE FROM NEBRASKA poster by the door.

  “Think they’ll hire a lead singer by then?”

  She grinned. I thought maybe I had a chance with her.

  “Who do you like?” I asked.

  She tilted her head, staring at the ceiling for a moment and then slowly began to twirl around.

  “Everything,” she proclaimed with drama, hands reaching out towards the wall displays that featured t
he latest from Joy Division, Bauhaus, Psychedelic Furs, The dB’s, and more. The New Releases wall was always my favorite because it had such diversity, and spotlighted all these bizarre albums that never hit the front window displays of other stores. Of course, the discs the chain record stores featured in their window displays weren’t even available at the Stop. Each one of Record Stop’s wall picks had a little circular sticker on it with a one or two-sentence description penned by the store manager. My favorite for weeks was an album by some band called Dali’s Car that had a cover seemingly captured in heaven. The album was like a classic painting: two figures flanked by Roman pillars, all the colors washed in skyblue and gold. I never bought it, but it looked excellent – a magical moment captured and shared without permission of the divine.

  “Even this?” I asked about the Flaming Lips song currently blaring.

  “Sure,” she said. “They have energy.”

  And then came my delivery. “You wanna go see them tomorrow with me?”

  “You don’t want to see them,” she said. “But thanks.”

  She winked at me and slipped away down the aisle, one of the store’s cats leaping across the record bins to follow her. The grey one I think.

  I sneezed and the opportunity was lost. She’d started talking to another guy who was leafing through the racks of $1.99 specials.

  I always sneezed in that store. I loved coming inside and browsing the racks and racks of albums, from the late ‘60s Simon & Garfunkel and Seals and Crofts albums reeking of the mold from someone’s flooded basement, to the Ambrosia and Toto leftovers of the ‘70s to the black and white, obscene cartoonish covers of the underground singles from the latest local bands of the ‘80s. Between the mold from old water damaged records and the cats, I always left with a runny nose.