Freya reached out to touch Ronnie’s face.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“It sounds crazy.”
“Crazier than a niggah like you turnin’ away when a fine girl drop her draws in front’a you?”
“It’s like one day,” Ronnie said, “I gave birth to myself.”
“Like a woman?”
“Yeah. Or maybe it was like the snakes Miss Peters used to talk about—the ones that pop right outta their skin an’ come out like new.”
“You remembah that?” Freya asked.
“I remembah everything she said.”
“You are like new,” Freya agreed.
“That’s right,” Ronnie said, and then he held out his hand for her to take. “We all in different dreams, everybody in the whole world. But there’s a place where those dreams come together and, and, and when that happens it’s just so beautiful that it hurts.”
“And that’s how it is with you and this girl?”
“Yeah. She all rich and white and shit, and here I am straight outta the hood. But we come together and there’s like a, a mission or a calling that we both have to do.”
Freya squeezed his hand and said, “You might scare me more now than you did when you was a thug, Ronnie Bottoms.”
“What’s going on out here?” Alton Brown asked. He was clad only in a pair of pale blue boxer shorts.
“Lore had a bad dream and needed to lay her head down,” Ronnie said.
“Why did she have to come out here?”
Ronnie gave the half-true explanation he’d concocted, and Alton sat down on the solid block of a coffee table.
“You guys are real close, huh?” Alton asked.
“In a funny kinda way. I mean, I don’t know hardly nuthin’ about her, nor she me. But we connected like, like two different kindsa rocks rolled up on a beach.” Ronnie was remembering one of the many things he’d learned and heard from Ms. Peters.
“But you’re not her boyfriend?”
“Naw, man. That’s you.”
“How long have you known each other?” Alton asked.
“Me and Lore or me and Frey?”
“Lorraine.”
“’Bout a mont’. We used to watch the same cartoons when we was kids. Once we knew we did that, we found that we had other things the same.”
“I just met Lorraine today,” the skinny intellectual said. “I guess you could say that she swept me off my feet.”
“That’s Lorraine, all right,” Ronnie said. “She like the goddamned wind.”
“What do you do?” Freya asked Alton.
“I study literature at CCNY.”
“Books?” she asked.
“Mostly, but now they have all this what they call theory. Trying to make art into a science kind of.”
“I’ve heard a dude once said that in the beginning there was only science,” Ronnie said, “that machines were the first true intelligence and that flesh and blood life came after.”
“How could that be?” Freya said in a superior tone.
“Right now computers think faster than men,” Ronnie said, defending an uncertain turf. “They learn all kindsa shit. If you can imagine, then you could make it real. Matter’a fact if you imgine sumpin’, it is real, at least in your mind.”
“Do you go to college?” Alton asked his lover’s roommate.
Freya laughed.
“Hey, man, why don’t you grab a sofa an’ get some sleep,” Ronnie offered. “You know Lore ain’t gonna wake up till mornin’.”
“Maybe you should put her down next to me.”
“No, brother. If I let her go, she’ll just get all crazy again. Don’t worry, though—we’ll be right here across from you.”
And so Alton lay down on the opposite blue sofa while Ronnie sat upright with Freya’s head on his shoulder and Lorraine’s head in his lap. He closed his eyes, conjured up his mother’s heartbeat, and fell asleep feeling that she was, once again, alive.
THIRTY-ONE
“COME ON, GUYS, wake up,” Lorraine Fell was saying.
She had on a coral pink dress that shimmered a bit. It was low cut with the hem at her knee. She’d done her long blond hair into two pigtails, one either side of her head. This made her look much younger.
When Ronnie opened his eyes and saw her, he smiled, happy to be alive at that moment, in that room.
Freya sat up, rubbing a kink in her neck, and Alton yawned, looking around bleary eyed. The lit student had a confused expression, as if he was trying to remember where he was and who he was with.
“What time is it?” Freya asked.
“Almost eight,” Lorraine said.
“I’m gonna be late,” the teacher’s assistant whined. “I don’t even have time to go home and change my clothes.”
“You can take something from my closet,” Lorraine offered. “I got all kinds of dresses and stuff. Then I’ll get the doorman to call a car to take you to work.”
“I don’t have money for no car,” Freya complained.
“They’ll just put it on the unit bill.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Come on, let me show you what I’ve got.”
The young women went into the bedroom, and Ronnie pulled up his pants.
“This is all kind of crazy,” Alton said.
“That might be,” the ex-thug agreed, “but crazy is better than bad, and bad ain’t the worst it could get.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gettin’ shot, stabbed and left for dead, or hunted down by both the cops and gangbangers,” Ronnie enumerated. “I been on the wrong end of every one’a those situations. So wakin’ up in a high-rise penthouse might be strange, but at least it ain’t gonna kill me.”
“I have a girlfriend,” Alton replied.
“Now you got two.”
“I don’t think Christine would understand me spending the night with Lorraine.”
“Okay. Now imagine Christine gettin’ all mad an’ comin’ after you with a loaded pistol in her hand.”
“She’d never do that.”
“You see?” Ronnie said. “Things is bettah already.”
* * *
FARNHAM’S PORK HOUSE was on Eighth Avenue just a little bit south of Penn Station. Ronnie’s appointment was at 10 A.M., but he was there by 9:30.
He, Alton, and Freya, all accompanied by Lorraine, left the Van Dyne at the same time. The women had formed a temporary bond while Alton kept reaching out to touch Lorraine’s arm or hand. It was as if he couldn’t believe what had happened, what he had done.
“We should all meet tonight at Le Grand Chambre for dinner at nine,” Lorraine said on the curb before Freya got into her car, wearing a light green dress made from raw silk that had been loose on Lorraine but fit Freya just right.
“Is it expensive?” Freya asked about the restaurant.
“I’m using my father’s credit card, so as far as we’re concerned, it’s free,” Lorraine replied. And then to Ronnie, “You and I should probably go to Used-to-be-Claude’s little nest at six.”
“Yeah,” Ronnie agreed.
* * *
“CAN I GET something for you?” a café au lait–colored young woman said at the counter of the barbecue joint.
“My name is Bottoms. My parole officer, Miss Steinmetz, said that you guys had a job opening here.”
“Parole officer?” the young woman said. Her name tag read NANCY. She had a buttery complexion and eyes that hovered between yellow and green, like fancy agate marbles.
“Yeah,” Ronnie admitted. “I’m what they call on the temporary for two years, and I need a job or they’ll throw me back in prison.”
“Oh.”
Seeing the concern on Nancy’s face, Ronnie remembered that he was in a world where being an ex-con was not acceptable, like having your fly down or letting loose a ripe fart on crowded subway car.
“My parole officer, Florence Steinmetz, said that I had an appointment for a job inte
rview here,” Ronnie said, trying to make up for what he’d already said wrong.
“Oh,” Nancy said again. “I mean, I’ll go get Roger.”
She turned away from the counter and went behind a shelf into an industrial kitchen where there were three or four people working.
Ronnie appreciated standing there in what was for him the early morning, without a hangover, and free.
“Anybody here?” someone said from behind.
It was a thirty-something white man in a dark blue uniform that was sturdily designed for labor not service.
“She went to get Roger,” Ronnie said.
“Can’t work for herself?”
“I’m askin’ for a job, and Roger’s the man to see.”
“Then she should have sent somebody else to cover the counter,” the black-haired white man said.
Ronnie could hear the anger in his voice. At any previous time, he would have started a fight with him even though now he couldn’t conjure up a justification for the dead emotion.
“Can I help you?” another man’s voice asked.
Ronnie turned back to the counter, seeing that Nancy and a short, wiry black man had come out from somewhere beyond the kitchen.
“I can take your order, sir,” Nancy said to the angry white customer.
“It’s about time you got your ass out here.”
“Excuse me, sir,” the manager, whom Ronnie figured to be about forty, said, “but I will not have my employees addressed with that kind of language.”
“What?”
“This is a place of business, and I expect civility from my employees and my customers.”
Ronnie liked this man, very much.
“If that’s your attitude,” the white workman said, “then you don’t want my business.”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“You know I ought to climb over that counter and—,” the workman got out.
“Excuse me,” Ronnie said in a tone of voice that felt new to him, “but you should be goin’ now.”
There was something familiar in the sound of Ronnie’s words to the workman, who had the name HOWARD stitched in red over his left breast pocket. Howard jerked backwards, turned, and walked out of the barbecue restaurant without uttering another word.
“I didn’t need you to do that,” the black man said.
“I wasn’t doin’ nuthin’,” Ronnie responded. “He was about to lose his temper and there was no need for that. I mean, we just talkin’ ’bout some babyback ribs and French fries, right?”
The manager’s dark face broke into a smile. He pushed against his kinky salt-and-pepper hair with the three longest fingers of his left hand.
“My name’s Roger Merryman,” he said.
“Ronnie Bottoms. Miss Steinmetz send me down from the parole office.”
“Come on in through the side door, Ronnie,” Merryman offered.
* * *
“WHAT WERE YOU in for?” Roger Merryman asked Ronnie Bottoms in his storeroom-office at the back of fast-food restaurant.
“They called it armed robbery, but I didn’t use a weapon,” Ronnie said. He was thinking about Lorraine; about how he felt that something was missing when they were apart for too long. “I mean it was more like assault and robbery, but they don’t have that in the sentencing book.”
“So you’d just kick somebody’s ass and then take their wallet?” Roger was slight and dark with sharp features and piercing brown eyes with topaz highlights.
“That’s all ovah, man. I ain’t like that no mo’.”
“No?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Why should I believe that?”
“Because before, if I was mad at a man like that dude out front, I would’a hurt him.”
“That’s what you would have done if he wanted to start a fight when you told him to leave?”
“No. Not no mo’.”
“Then what would you have done?”
“I’da just grabbed him around the chest and carried him out to the sidewalk. Aftah that he wouldn’t even want no trouble.”
“Come on with me,” Roger replied as if this were a response to Ronnie’s claim.
* * *
ON THE TWELVE-BY-TWENTY-SQUARE-FOOT apron of concrete behind the restaurant, there were six big smokers made from black metal canisters set on their sides on sawhorse wooden frames.
Roger took a trash can the size of one of those smokers and put the nozzle of a water hose in it.
“This here is my meat kitchen,” Roger said as he turned on the water at full force. “One each for chicken, sausages, pork ribs, beef ribs, brisket, and one for steaks and chops. These cans are something like you.”
“Like me how?”
“They illegal. I’m not supposed to be smokin’ meat outside like this. It breaks the health law.”
“You pay off the cops and the health inspector?”
Roger smiled, and Ronnie wondered what made the little businessman agree to consider an ex-con for whatever position he had open.
“I used to be an armed robber,” Roger said as if Ronnie had put his question into words. “But I learned how to read when I was in and made up my mind to go straight. Now I get here at four o’clock eve’ry mornin’ and put a hundred pounds of meat in each can. I fire ’em up over coals and hickory chips. As we sell it off, I move the cooked meat to the right and add raw to the left. I put my father’s special marinade over it all one after the other, then wait fifteen minutes and do it again. That’s the job I want you for.”
“I got to be here at four?”
“Naw. I’ll come in then and start it all off. You come in at nine and work till six.”
“Okay.” Ronnie’s entire body undulated with the agreement. He liked the idea of a job where he had all the skills he needed from the start.
“But there’s one thing first,” Roger, the diminutive ex-con manager said.
“What’s that?”
“Turn off that water hose.”
The water was brimming over the top of the big can.
Ronnie turned off the water and wondered if this were somehow the test.
“A gallon of water weighs eight point three five pounds,” Roger said.
“If you say so.”
“This can holds just about eighty gallons.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Pick it up by the handles and lift it as high as you can.”
Ronnie squatted down in front of the can, got the heel of a palm under each handle; then he stood, thrusting up his arms as he did so. When his arms were fully extended and the water can was at the limit of his reach, he said, “Like this?”
Instead of answering, Roger watched Ronnie as the seconds ticked by. After a minute, the restaurateur said, “You can put it down now.”
Ronnie slowly lowered the can, setting it on the concrete floor with barely a sound.
“You really coulda just put that white dude under your arm and carried him out the door,” Roger said behind a sly smile.
“Uh-huh. I could barbecue this meat too. You just need to show me when it’s cooked enough to move ovah and then cooked so much that I have to take in the kitchen.”
THIRTY-TWO
WHILE RONNIE WORKED the unlicensed smokers at the back of Farnham’s Pork House, and the Silver Box’s infinite circuits pondered the question of how it could have, if only for a micron of a nanosecond, lost concentration on its self-generated prime directive; while Freya Levering was herding a group of third-graders from the recess yard to their classroom, wondering at how the brutal Ronnie Bottoms had learned to kiss so softly and passionately; while the complex molecules that composed one ten-millionth of the Laz Inglo’s soul darted through the stratosphere, listening for just the right vessel for its resurrection—while all of this transpired, Lorraine Fell was running.
She ran down Forty-second Street from Fifth Avenue to the West Side Highway. From there she kept a furious pace all the way up to the Henry Hudson Bridge, turned right,
crossed the city, and was soon headed south all the way down to Wall Street and then back up again.
While running, she found that her sight was so intently focused that she could almost see the insides of things and people, intentions and history. Children’s eyes spoke of the mammalian chronicle. Ancient buildings deconstructed, showing their foundations and bony girders under her scrutiny. The waters rose and laughed beside her, hinting at a kind of life that was unsuspected by her kind; by men and women who believed so profoundly in biological ascendance that they could not see the awareness of matter; that things were more complex than human consciousness, that the sun beating down on her head was aware of its power and of the limitations of all things, beings, and even machines.
Now and then Lorraine would stop, not because she was tired but to see the connection between her motion and her sight. When she was still, her knowledge became like memory, almost static. The waters receded into simple flowing. The sun shone but did not holler and brag. Children’s eyes were inquisitive but no longer revealed bits and pieces of the long thread of material evolution that most scientists had mistaken for the only form of life.
When she started running again, a more complex comprehension dawned once more within her. It was as if this knowledge were separate from her or, more correctly, she was merely a small part of a greater awareness that could only be obtained by motion.
She made the circuit of Manhattan six times before the jitters in her bones were sated. Her body thrummed and her mind contained thoughts that were as vast as the terrain she traveled. By the time she got back to her condo, she was grinning like child at play.
When she came into the apartment, she heard sounds from the kitchen.
“Ronnie?”
“No, baby, it’s me,” Nova Triphammer-Louise said.
The mid-height, bottom-heavy, dark-skinned woman came from the kitchen, smiling with her perfect, slightly dulled teeth. Nova’s face was round and handsome, her age somewhere past retirement.
Seeing the family servant, Lorraine felt a little like her old self again. She remembered the nights she would lie in bed, worrying about infinity, and Nova Louise would come sit beside her on the bed and they would sing hymns the old black woman knew by heart.
Nova wore black stretch pants and a peacock blue T-shirt. Her shoes were black fabric with white rubber soles.
Inside a Silver Box Page 15