by Noy Holland
But such a beauty!
You drut. Get out, get out, don’t think you’re sneaking. You and your sneaky friends. You, man. Up. Make tracks.
“Let’s get a knife for ourselves,” my boy says, “and run out there and stick them.”
HA. The rest of you can stay.
Tell you what, here’s a tip, we go to market. Take the baby when you go to market, boys, take her anywhere there are girls. Works like a charm. You let them pet her. I take the baby down to the pool. You get a daddy in the pool they’re a swarm, watch me, little lunging strokes, the water frothing, they walk on their hands, be a horsie, swim me where I can’t swim. I do, and they are kicking; they are breathing fast in my ear.
“And we lived beside a lake?” my boy wants to know.
“We lived beside a lake.”
He’s down to stories. Suspicions, omissions. A foreign view.
“And my mother took me out in my bucket?”
“And your mother took you out in your bucket.”
“And my mother loved me very much?”
“You were her prince. Her angel. And she loved you. And you were all she saw or could think of. And she loved you. You said adnee. Awoo. And I loved you. Your papa loved you.”
“And my mother set me down in my bucket.”
Firstborn, boy-child, hoyden.
Mama, Papa, Clumpfoot, Tuk. We make mistakes, give us that. We’re only human.
Man the fires. Sweep the floors.
They say a year, tops. That’s consolation. They say, “It is all she has ever known.”
I say she used to breathe underwater. She was gilled, webbed, a rock, a frog. Amphibious. She was larval. Boiled in the heart of a dying star. She knows plenty.
So they forget: What is that?
The child knows plenty.
He is lava, lightning, Black Bart, bear. He’s a worm, torn up, a withered heart. T. rex and the woods are burning.
That’s him in the tub, hollering—hollowing, he calls it, a pirate song: hardee-eye-yay, hoodee-eye-yoo. He’s got his face bunched up around his eye patch. He is using his mother’s diaphragm for an eye patch.
“For a boat,” he says, “to kill Noodle with. Kill Noodle.”
HE KEEPS US racing: marks, get set.
“You just keep getting faster and faster,” I tell him.
He gives me a long sweet look and says, “And you are getting slower and slower, right?”
He wears his tasseled hat—which makes the wind blow—which sparks a lightning—which fells a tree.
His mother took him out into the trees one day. This was lakeside—heat and strangler fig, every manner of insect living. Great mounds. She can’t get past it. Carried him out in his bucket, in the cool of the shade she could provide.
“Let it go,” I say.
Of course she doesn’t.
Well it’s hard, it’s hard. Hand of God, you could say, but she won’t say it.
“You have to say I forgive you,” my boy says.
Forgive me, dear. Shameful of me.
You see she’s leaving.
I used to like that—the feeling that my wife was leaving. I’d hear her drive off, I wouldn’t stop her. After a time I would find some picture of her and sit with it in my chair. Then I would speak to her, as though to her, a grown man, a fool. I could make myself feel very sexy, and wanting—I wanted her, the way she tucked her feet between my ankles when we slept, or slipped her fingers into my pocket. I could conjure the smallest sweetness, hoarded, call up the least gauzy scene—the near-blue skin of her ankle, nicked, foam on the polished shore. Like watching a dream of terrific precision. The skin of her ankle was dented and ribbed where the elastic of her sock had pressed against it—glossy, a ripple, as when the tide recedes, and startling—the glare of love.
I was undone by it, wished to be, easily, in passing.
I rubbed out the print, smoothed it away—would, I should say, I never have. Another missed statistic: the incidence of men in their kitchens goading themselves to tears. Sobbing in their rockers.
Come home. Come home.
It’s still me.
Your prince. Dear old breadstick.
THEY OUGHT TO fix that door. We’ll all have dreams of it. Hooked shut. Then the stutter and wheeze.
A woman embarked. Stealing away through the wintry mix, we can’t stop her. Just as well. We’ll stay and speak of her.
She wanted sunshine. The very best for her boy, fresh air for her boy, a little sunshine. Ions, photons, vitamin D. Wanted heat. To be limbered and quiet and slowed. Be his mother. His cooling shade, soft, becalmed. The slow marvels, she would give him, the glistening ant, the lizard’s coppery pouch; mirage—puddled silver in our road, the box turtles gliding above. Her wild boy singing in a secret tongue, tongue of wind, of dog.
He’d have collections: beetles, coins, crisp skins of snakes. The beak of a bird, a tree frog. A june bug on a thread. The dream of a life she remembered. The owl in the mimosa, the armadillo asleep in the cool—you could smell them beneath our house.
She set him down. For an instant. Buzzing heat, lake light, the drowse. The wag of the brittled palmetto. She moved off, a thinking woman. Thought: sinkhole, felon, dengue, flood. Not likely. But what of the limb, the pebble thrown, the interstellar ice ball? She thought of the arc: velocity: mass: the mathematics of the cataclysmic. Perhaps the wood stork. The kid with a stick, the hand of God. The orangutan sprung from the zoo. All that.
Still she moves off.
He isn’t far, she thinks, she could hear him. She can almost even see him—should he need her. It’s just an instant, just a couple three minutes she needs just to think, she isn’t far, really, just to think some, he’s in his bucket, rocks a bit but the ground is soft, he may be sleeping, yes, likely, lucky for her, she can think now, counts the minutes—three, four, loses track—and so she milks it. She will turn back, should, he must be sleeping, poor child, the breeze from the lake, coolish today, the day pleasing. She hears an owl in the trees and she turns back—spooked—I never liked it, you hear people say they like it—the hoot, the trill, old owlers, out in the cold, a boy at your heels, and here it comes, the great swoop, quiet as a cloud passing.
She went back then. Her boy was shrieking, strapped in. Just a baby. She had set him down on a mound of fire ants. Just the tiniest things but they swarm.
She came sobbing home back through the trees to me, his bucket swinging against her legs.
We got him hosed off. You couldn’t touch him. He stuck every place you touched him. Those little blisters everywhere broke open and seeped.
Fire ants, the heat of the day, you see the logic.
We got him strapped in and sedated. Bound for the icy north. Move along. That’ll fix it. Build a rock wall; saw the trees down. Mop and mow.
The nights were quiet. Cold already and quiet when we came. Sundown, sunup. Not a bird, not a frog.
He crawled, he ran. He had a birthday. Said, “Papa, I am four almost. And after this I will be six and after that I will be ten and when I become fifteen I’ll drive and I will drive so fast and then I will be twenty. Then I will have one leg. Old people only have one leg and then I will be dead, Papa, and you will come and save me. I will be in a pond.”
We get out of the car, snow coming down, we’re rushing. He says, “Wait, Papa. I want to feel the cold.”
It is like a knife at your throat, to love them. It’s like gathering leaves in the wind.
We want the best for them both, we’re like anyone.
The smell of home, the dog at the foot of the stairs. Your wife asleep, your children. Fire humming in the stove.
We think in pictures. The dream of a life we remember and slept through while we lived.
The velvety air. The way the trees crooked down—how easy he would find it to climb them. All boy. I think of the lake through the trees where we lived, where she lived as a girl, old Angel Oak, the sw
inging vines, shrimp you could buy on the roadside. Boiled peanuts. Old coot in the steam on the median, his boy fishing the grate at his knees—a string, a hook, a giving stick—happy with that, horsing, and it made us happy to see them.
We could take a week, go see them. Get some sun on our bumpy bottoms, yellow in our hair.
It’s been a winter, don’t you say? I would say it. We came out of our house to come down here, our car was gone to the roof in snow. Still we managed, we two.
It’s a distance. Quite a drive.
She pulls her eyelashes out. We keep our hats on. She pulls her hair out strand by strand. That’s life, I guess, funny workings, not to fret. It’s just I’m—
SIT DOWN.
We all have them—little tics and such, how our minds work.
I’m not an ogre.
Give a hand. You’re very kind, you few, our small tribe, it’s just us.
The last listeners.
A warm welcome. Come on, Amherst. I give you Akron.
I’m going home to my boy. He likes to lie on my back. You know the specials? We’ll watch the specials: the horned; the frilled; the mighty bird-hipped. Ornithomimus, Avimimus. The theropods, the thecodonts. The king tyrant, T. rex.
Boy, his heart really goes.
Allosaurus, Staurikosaurus. Leipleurodon—what eats sharks.
You ought to hear him.
Yangchuanosaurus, Megalosaurus, Tarbosaurus bataar.
Velociraptor: the swift.
Troodon: the wounding one.
All the old dead meat eaters.
BARNEY GREENGRASS
He is a big Russian Jew from the Bronx. His hands are enormous. He takes the pencil from his mouth, tooth marks in the wood, and tells her, We have a psychic connection. He takes her order and comes back with four napkins to write her answers on. Now, look at me. Look away. Any city. Your favorite ice cream. Any word in the English language. Any number between one and a thousand. 978. FLOTATION. CHOCOLATE. CHICAGO. I didn’t read your mind. I fed it. The answers lucid and blocky and new.
VEGAS
When Danny and his girlfriend of many years break up, she offers, by way of consolation, to do his dental work for free. She is a dentist. Or, works for a dentist. She puts him under. Danny is so far under, he remakes the scene of a boy devoured behind plexiglass at the zoo: the boy on a dare, the bear put down, cut open. There the boy is. His face is Danny’s. The bear is a graying polar bear, the sky that crazy blue. Meanwhile Danny’s ex drags every tooth from his head with that implement they use. By the time he wakes, she’s in Vegas. His current girlfriend, revolted, makes short work of leaving him, too. What instruction might we glean from this story? What should our Danny do?
ABSOLUTION
Me and him, we’re lovers. Sure, I know, he’s a crazy motherfucker. And I’m the Banana Queen of Opelousas.
They say I’m the prettiest since Luana Lee.
But you best clap your eyes on Jimmy—he is something, too.
If you saw Jimmy down by the dirty river in his shiny turquoise truck, you’d say, Jimmy Lucas, he’s plumb got everything—a dog in the back, banking turns, his Banana Queen right close. He’d lift a finger from the steering wheel, tip his head to mean something mean. It’s the way my Jimmy is. I’ve seen it happen, I should know, I rode with him a lot.
Nights at the No Knees we ride to, Jimmy sets me up on the long bar. “Just look at you,” he says to me, his eyes wild and proud. “You boys come on, take a look at her. She is the Queen of Bananas.”
PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT me and Jimmy.
Jimmy was the first, I swear it. When I try remembering, creosote comes back best—two coats tacky on the storehouse floor, black across my back and legs. Helps cure dry rot—don’t I know? I slapped it on myself.
Oh, I’d have been down there anyhow, watching the boys ice the trains. I tell you, it’s too hot for work like that here in Opelousas. Those chunks were all of fifty pounds, nothing but hooks to hoist them with. Those boys, they were always bright with sweat.
I used to sit up in the big red oak, just sorting, my head lining up their half-bare bodies: Jimmy: Jasper: Isaac: Read. Jimmy: Isaac: Jasper: Read. Jimmy was the first, I swear it.
“Hey, Jimmy,” I sang out, real soft like, just enough for me and the birds. “Hey, Jimmy.”
He was a sight to see, standing splay-legged on the silver car, sweat running rivers down his back. A round, ugly fellow would come dawdling along, sticking bananas for safety’s sake.
“Just don’t seem quite right,” he’d say, eyeing the mercury like somebody’s momma. “Best load her up, she’s hot.”
After a spell, the peel he poked went black inside as a bullet hole.
OH, BANANAS.
Opelousas is the banana capital of the universe—cars and cars, quick up from Mexico City. Good seasons, those boys worked all night, throwing ice down the loud chute. Jasper always did the last of it. He was the oldest and he’d been to prison. Mind you, I hardly looked at Jasper. I wasn’t bad as all that. I’ve seen his black arms bare, though, veins standing out like hard-ons in church.
MOMMA LIKE TO drive me loopdy-looped as she is about Jimmy.
“My lover Jimmy,” I say in front of her. “My man Jimmy.”
She don’t stand for it. He’s a no-count. He ain’t the hitching kind. He spits tobacco juice on her kitchen floor, no two words about it.
Oh, sweet Jesus, I know. Jimmy’s got a mean streak an acre wide that puts up a fence around me, puts a little shiver in me like I just better be ready, like expect the worst, because here it’s coming.
But I like it. I don’t know. I do.
WHEN I STARTED in on Jimmy, Momma like to pinch my head off. I’d get my hair done up.
“How could you?” You could hear her across the county. “How could you?”
Lord, my momma can carry on. Some nights she’s talking a blue streak upstairs, and I lie down, dying for the train—all those explosions right in a row, and the whistle like something to run from.
Maybe I’m a sinner to sleep naked like I do.
Some nights I dream of fire, running stark down Jefferson with the neighbors gawking. Some nights Momma comes in, pushes her hands around on me.
“Child of my heart,” she says to me. “Sweet sugar child, don’t go.”
DADDY LEFT WAY back, took a liking to some Mississippi baby doll. Folks says it’s Momma I favor. But Momma wasn’t ever Banana Queen. She ain’t the contestant type. She like to lay down and get run over when Daddy brought his hussy—that’s what I call her—his hussy home.
I knew it already. One day, early from school, I spied them, out at the kitchen sink, her bent down like she was spitting up, red hair sprung every which way. Strike me dead if I lie. I saw Daddy sticking himself in her. It’s the gospel truth.
I never told Momma.
But she knew, she knew. Daddy’s hussy’s got a swing any fool wants for his porch.
Momma don’t say nothing. She just smiles sweet-like, slow in the doorway waving. Just like the Banana Queen of Opelousas. Just like me.
ME, I AIM to be remembered. That’s why the Banana Queen.
You can’t believe how it’s transporting.
It hooked me Jimmy. I’d have set up in that red oak till I grew roots, hadn’t been for this yellow crown. Luana Lee is milk soup.
Did Jimmy Lucas bat an eye?
But give me a crown appointment night, and Jimmy climbs up, clamps his hands on my face. “Ain’t you something,” he says to me. “If you ain’t a precious thing.”
Momma says it’ll teach me vanity, being a queen and all. She says it’ll make me big for my britches. I say, “Momma? Tell me something I don’t know already.”
Momma’s crazy, I can’t help it. Momma says when your life goes short, folks quit listening to you.
“How many times do we get to do this?” she says.
She says, “Fetch me a glass of water.”
<
br /> I CAN’T HELP it. I want to sleep in the woods in a queenly bed and lacquer my broken toenails. I want to dig through Jimmy Lucas. One day last summer, Jimmy set a stuffed doll astride a rail of fence. He took her to pieces, shot by shot, head first and feathers rising. I could see the inside of his mouth. The inside of Jimmy Lucas’s mouth is a dark, vibrating place.
I know.
I don’t look in Momma’s mouth. She’s got pretty lips, but she smells like dying. I bathe her in the mornings these days. I try to help her along. I set Momma down in her pink tub and she tosses her arms around my neck and whispers, “You should have killed me when you had a chance.”
A couple years back, before I got to be queen, we were loading hay on the flatbed. This is what she means—that the Devil took hold, that I meant her to flip off the back of the truck, bales of alfalfa tumbling. Momma looks like that now, like she looked that day—shiny-eyed and barely breathing, a fuse fixing to blow.
Sometimes Momma wants my mouth on her breast, like when I was her child. I lay myself down beside her, inside the darkness underneath the spread. Sometimes I think it could do me in—our nakedness, that in my mouth, I can feel her old heart pounding. I try to help her along.
LIKE TO MAKE Jimmy wild, hearing this. “Don’t you touch that old whore,” he says. “You got to have a life of your own.”
It is all of it new to me. Everybody wants something I can’t figure. Jimmy wants a baby and I say, Why? The sense of it quits me. We could get us a trailer on the outskirts of town, a place where a dog could run.
I just say, “No, Jimmy, no, no, no. You know I can’t, Jimmy, no.”
He don’t stand for it. He grabs me by my ankles and drags me around, my head knocking on the furniture. “Fuck you, you bitch,” he says to me. “Fuck you, you cunt.”
He drags me around. When he comes down on me, I must look like Momma, all sprawled out, my head thrown back like I am coming on.
JIMMY AIN’T COME around since Daddy come home, but he is all I can think of.