Iron Balloons

by Channer, Colin

  To say adapting to Dallas was hard for me at first would be a gross understatement. I spent my childhood as the daughter of a diplomat, hopping from country to country, all over the world. Most folks in Dallas have never left the state, let alone the country, except perhaps for a little foray to a gated resort in Mexico or the Caribbean.

  My daddy taught me never to pass judgment, because people are different in every country and have different values, but honestly, I never met a more self-satisfied bunch than these Dallas Texans. The state as a whole seems to be suffering from post-traumatic stress, presumably inherited from their ancestors who bravely fought at the Alamo, a battle which they seem to firmly believe is continuing to this day.

  Stony took me there once, to San Antonio. What a tiny little place the Alamo is! Nothing like you imagine. I told him so and he was offended, which means his jaw muscles pulsed and he went around stamping his feet like a bull and not talking to me for three hours.

  This is probably because, as a group, Texans are plagued with gigantomania. In Texas, bigger is always better, and theirs is bigger, no matter what you’re talking about. (Apropos of large, Stony liked to remind me ad nauseam that in college, in the locker room, his team mates called him “Mandingo.”) And my ring. Back to my ring. Stony wouldn’t be cajoled into even hinting how much it cost, so my mom talked me into getting it appraised in secret (just in case) and the nice jeweler Mr. Liebenthal at the mall told me that while it is truly a very big diamond, it is quite flawed, and only worth twenty thousand dollars. “Only?” I repeated, for this did not seem to me an insubstantial sum; however, when I called Mom in San Marcos to inform her of this news, she said over the crackling long distance line, “You’ve been sold a pig in a poke.”

  In Dallas, at first I cooked up a storm. Wonderful things from recipes I got off the Internet. The only acquaintances I had were the wives of his friends, so I had all the time in the world. In the beginning, he was late only once in a while, and more often than not, I’d get a “heads up” call. Then suddenly he stopped calling, swaggering in past midnight at least once a week, then twice a week, then three times, until I gave up cooking for him entirely. Thank God I have my little Tenney, beloved angel, who keeps me more than a little occupied. The other mothers at her school say, “You really ought to get a nanny. The Mexicans are terrific, and cheap!” What do I want a nanny for? I spend her school hours bored to tears, just waiting for her to get out so we can start our day.

  There’s this fancy store not too far away that delivers. I call in the evening, around 8 p.m., after Tenney is in bed, and I order the most outrageous things—caviar, stone crabs, chocolate mousse cake, whatever I want—and charge it to his Platinum Visa card. I like to sit out on the terrace when it’s warm enough—and it often is—and look at the skyline. It’s a beautiful, colorful skyline, a bit like Miami, with the skyscrapers all lit up. The planes flying overhead remind me of all the places I’ve been and the ones I’d still like to visit with Tenney.

  I never said a word about his being late and he never said a word about the charges to his card. Why be angry? It serves no purpose, that’s what I’ve always believed.

  Tenney was born two weeks early while Stony was in New York on business. I had what they call a placental abruption and practically bled to death in my sleep. I woke up and it was like that scene with the horse in The Godfather. I had to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance and have an emergency C-section. I was a mess. Mom couldn’t even make it up from San Marcos in time for the delivery.

  But that’s okay, it wasn’t anybody’s fault.

  The next morning I came to, and there was Tenney, my perfect baby, smiling up at me. Hello again, her eyes seemed to say, and I had a strong feeling we already knew each other from a long time ago. Tenney latched onto my breast like a little vampire, as if she’d been practicing for this moment for months.

  Awhile later, Mom staggered in from the airport and collapsed into the armchair next to the bed. She lit a Marlboro and said, “How could you do this to me? I thought I was going to have a heart attack.” I could smell fresh scotch on her breath from where I was lying on the bed. It was understandable, who wouldn’t have a drink or two after a night like that?

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Well, thank God it’s not a boy. In a million years you couldn’t have talked him out of calling the kid Stonewall Jackson Browne V.”

  Stony had an ancestor, a lieutenant whose sepia-toned photo graces the entryway, who had been a personal aide to the Great General in, if I’m not mistaken, the 2nd Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. These Southerners just can’t seem to let go of that war. I told Stony in no uncertain terms, from the moment I discovered I was pregnant, that there was no way on earth I’d saddle a son of mine with the name of a wife beater. This made him extremely angry (the muscles in his jaw again, the telltale sign), but it was Stony’s goal in life to never again break a sweat in a confrontation, except in racquetball or perhaps golf.

  “An alleged wife beater,” Stony countered icily, “if you’re talking about Jackson Browne the songwriter. And anyway, the name Stonewall Jackson Browne was in my family long before that whiney fool became a pop star.”

  We really never fought, and our polite exchanges continued along these lines for the next eight months.

  A nurse came in and yelled at Mom, “Are you out of your mind, smoking around a newborn?” I was glad, because I was afraid to ask her to put out her cigarette, she seemed so upset. Mom stuck the lit end into a styrofoam cup of water on the bedside table and it fizzled out, making a horrible smell. The nurse briskly took the cup away, holding it at arm’s length as if it contained a sample of the ebola virus.

  “Dumb cunt,” observed Mom in a haughty murmur, as she watched the nurse retreat in her squeaky shoes. This made me chuckle nervously, and my caesarian incision began to pulsate as if a hot iron were being poked into my lower abdomen.

  On the wide windowsill was a tall glass vase wrapped in a huge pink ribbon, with two dozen of the most exquisite long-stemmed pink roses I’d ever seen, and the smell! Mom handed me the card, which said, With all my love, Stony.

  “Now that was really nice of him,” Mom said in a flat tone that I couldn’t decide whether she intended as sarcastic, or not. My TMJ must have been acting up because I started to get a dime-sized ache under my left ear, burning hot to match the incision.

  Stony’s secretary Janine came by during her lunch break and her face simply lit up when she saw the roses. “Oh, my, they’re perfect. Stony said to order something nice. I thought, well, you know, pink.”

  I smiled shakily and asked her if she wanted to hold the baby. Mom chuckled ghoulishly in her chair. The pain in my jaw had spread and the whole left side of my face was aching so wickedly I could no longer feel the caesarian incision. I wanted more morphine and buzzed for the nurse, but she wouldn’t come, presumably still miffed at Mom. After a while I started to cry, so Mom went out and started to yell up and down the hall that she was an ambassador’s widow and if someone didn’t come right now she was going to call the President of the United States (a Texan, with whom our Democratic family held no clout whatsoever, but they didn’t know that).

  The nurse came running, and in a few minutes I felt better. After an appropriate interval, during which Janine rocked and cooed at Tenney, I asked them both to excuse me, I was a little tired and needed to get some rest.

  Eight years later and here I still am, in this long, high-ceilinged apartment in a tall building on Turtle Creek Road, owned by Guess Who’s corporation, with pretentious wide arches connecting the living, dining, and kitchen areas, through which you could put a bowling alley if you wanted to.

  This morning, 4:15 a.m. by my beautiful platinum Rolex that never slows down, I was sitting on the terrace, drinking a cup of warm milk in the dark, looking out at the Dallas skyline in my ashes-of-roses silk robe and nightgown from Saks (last year’s Christmas present from Stony, chosen no doubt by Janine, wit
h her excellent good taste), when the doorbell rang.

  I thought, Oh well, Stony forgot his keys again, or, Stony can’t find his keys because he’s had a few too many cocktails with a prospective buyer. But no.

  Nick the doorman didn’t have time to ring up and warn me before two big uniformed cops were standing in the apartment. One was tall, wide-shouldered, and black, and one was tall, wide-shouldered, and white. They wore dark blue short-sleeved uniforms that exposed their muscular and threatening forearms. They both had the same Texas accent that I still associate with the oxymoronic partnering of ignorance and authority. Their eyes were already old and hard in their flat, smooth, unlined faces. I wanted to cry out, I didn’t do it! even though I had no idea what it was they were about to accuse me of.

  The white one, whose nameplate read Johnston, took the initiative and stepped forward. “Mrs. Browne?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  “Mrs. Browne, your husband’s been in a car accident.”

  I continued to nod, waiting for him to tell me where I should pick him up.

  Slowly he uttered, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Browne, but he didn’t make it.”

  My mouth fell open, but no words were immediately available to me. I wondered how many times in their young lives they’d had to do this. My next thought was, My God, I’m free. But I took care not to change the frozen expression of horror on my face.

  “Oh, you poor man,” I said, placing my hand on his chest for a tiny moment. I realized my hand was shaking. “What a terrible job you have …”

  “It was a head-on collision,” the other policeman, Officer Bales, offered. “He probably didn’t feel a thing.” He reached out to take my elbow, as my knees were beginning to buckle beneath me. He guided me back to the couch, where my cup of warm milk was waiting for me on the coffee table. He sat me down. The two of them stayed standing, which forced me to crane my neck to see their faces.

  Officer Johnston shifted in his boots as if he were standing on uncomfortably hot sand. “You may as well know this now, cause you’re gonna find it out anyway—it’ll be in the papers. There was a girl in the car—”

  Oh my God—Tenney! I thought, and jumped up, obviously not thinking this through, for Tenney had been sleeping, tucked in safely, since 8 o’clock.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Browne,” said Officer Johnston.

  Officer Bales took out a little notebook and read something. “LouKreesha Smalls. L-o-u-K-r-e-e-s-h-a. Do you know this person?”

  I knew who she was. A tall, dark, callipygian waitress with dreadlocks at the Blue Bayou, where we used to go sometimes to hear music. I remembered with a sick flip of my stomach how Stony liked to make fun of her name. He and his business partner, Bucky—the Buckingham in Buckingham and Browne—kept an ongoing list of names of African- Americans they thought were particularly amusing. At the top of their list was LaPoleon, followed closely by P’are, and in third place, LouKreesha. The condescending way they greeted her whenever she came over to our table with an order, taking such pleasure in turning her name over in their mouths, made me so uncomfortable that one day I finally decided to speak up.

  As she sauntered off, swinging her wide ass, I said, “Lucrezia is actually quite an interesting name …”

  They all turned their faces toward me, their smiles suddenly frozen like ghoulish Mardi Gras masks.

  “Wasn’t she a Greek goddess or something?” said Martha Buckingham, without losing a beat.

  “She was an Italian noblewoman,” I countered. “Lucrezia Borgia. The Borgias were a prominent Renaissance family. She was one of the greatest poisoners of all time. Back then you couldn’t get divorced, so she poisoned her husbands to get rid of them. There was an opera—”

  “I knew that,” Stony interrupted quickly, one of his favorite lines. And they all cracked up.

  Later, on the way home, he told me it would be best from now on if I kept comments like that to myself. I didn’t say anything.

  I’ve been a knee-jerk liberal all of my life and proud of it, and I decided that I’d rather stay home with Tenney than go out with him and his ignorant, racist friends.

  “She’s … LouKreesha’s a waitress at the Blue Bayou,” I informed the two officers, like a good schoolgirl who’s done her homework.

  They glanced knowingly at each other.

  “What?” I demanded. “What?”

  “Well,” Officer Johnston sighed deeply, “without getting graphic”—he was blushing now, and I felt suddenly sick—“she was killed too.”

  “The position they were found in …” Officer Bales added, then shook his head as if he were truly sorry for me. “It’s gonna be hard to explain, if you know what I mean.”

  “You mean, like in The World According to Garp?”

  They stared at me, dumbfounded.

  I shook my head and brought my hands to my face to convince them of my confusion and desolation.

  It’s not even 9 in the morning and already I’ve received a slew of phone calls. Gossip and horror spread like wildfire, it’s incredible. On the very first ring, I picked up because I didn’t want to wake Tenney. It was 7 o’clock. Apparently, Martha Buckingham couldn’t wait another minute. “Oh, honey. I am so sorry.”

  I had nothing to say. I waited. She waited. I could hear her breathing fast; she sounded excited. “I told Bucky, I said, ‘Bucky, this is just bad. A … black … girl.’”

  “Yes. A white girl would’ve been so much better,” I shot back, shocked at my own sarcasm, which, as we practice it in New York, is unknown to these good Dallas folk.

  “Oh, honey, that’s not what I meant and you know it. It was just so … inappropriate. A waitress like that. I told Bucky like months ago, I said, ‘Bucky, you tell him to just quit it.’”

  Months ago? So. That meant, if Martha Buckingham knew, everyone knew. Everyone except me, the sarcastic New Yorker. “Thank you for calling, Martha,” I said woodenly, and hung up on her as she was saying, “I’ll stop by later … bring you a casserole …”

  I called the doormen and told them under no circumstances to let anyone up.

  Not five minutes later the phone rang again and I let the machine pick up. It was one of the local papers.

  Then, just now, Janine in her gentle voice, murmuring into the answering machine, “Um … Petia, pick up, honey. Please. The IRS is here at the office. It’s the Criminal Investigation guys.”

  I rushed to the phone and grabbed the receiver.

  “I’m so sorry,” Janine whispered. “They have a warrant to open the safe.”

  “What safe?” was the only thing I could think to say.

  “Well, Stony’s safe.”

  “Do you have a key, or know the combination, or whatever?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then open the safe,” I said.

  She told me that the IRS agents would be over in a little while to talk to me.

  After I hung up, I did what my daddy taught me to do back in 1978 when Idi Amin Dada gave us two hours to get out of Uganda: I took off the ring and the Rolex and hid them in the battery compartment in the back of Tenney’s talking blue teddy bear.

  I WANT TO DISTURB MY NEIGHBOR

  by Geoffrey Philp

  I always hated Friday evenings. Friday evenings meant one thing: Bible study. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a heathen. Never was, never claimed to be. It’s just that every—and I mean every—Friday evening, when all my friends were out partying, drinking, walking down Daisy Avenue with their boyfriends or girlfriends, just having a good time, I had to stay home with my mother, my Aunt Shirley, and a changing cast of guests from their church.

  Why? Well come on, the judgment was at hand.

  If I had an easy life, it wouldn’t be so bad. Let’s say if Bible study came after an afternoon of kicking back with a copy of MAD magazine or listening to a group of rastas talking about the imminent destruction of the capitalist system and the establishment of a u—no, itopia—in which weed would b
e legal, you could hear reggae on the radio at all hours of the day, pork would be outlawed, having books by Walter Rodney and Malcolm X wouldn’t brand you as a troublemaker or a reprobate, and a man would somehow, without real effort or excitement, find himself blessed with several queens who would all get along—you know, African stylee.

  Bible study came after I’d washed the dishes, cleaned my room, and cooked dinner, and it followed a routine. Aunt Shirley or my mother would call me out of my room to meet their guest. I would take my time to come out, wave and mumble a polite enough hello, then shift my weight from leg to leg as my aunt and mother explained that I wasn’t yet living in the truth, which would make the guest—every single guest—invite me to bow my head and pray with them. I would then refuse and they would come back with their second offer—to allow them to pray for me. The second they closed their eyes, I’d ease out of the room and lay in bed and listen to bootleg tapes from Jah Love, my favorite sound system, as I twirled my afro into something dread, and handwrote music reviews for Yout’ Talk, my school newspaper, while they prayed for my soul through the night.

  If you have any sense at all, you must be wondering, Well, why didn’t he just go out with his friends while the old folks prayed?

  But hear me nuh: Before you rush to judgment, just thank God or whoever you pray to that you never get one o’ my mother lick dem yet. Pass what gate? When who praying?

  Leave room is one thing. Leave house is somep’n else. But leave yard? Baba, is a next t’ing that.

  So one Friday now, what a policeman would call “the day in question,” things went as I’ve described them. I was in my room—if you can imagine a prefabricated Jamaican house: louver windows, gauzy yellow curtains, tile floors, dark wood bed with an iron spring, a trunk full o’ old clothes, walls festooned with posters of soul singers and Third World revolutionaries, and a dresser with doilies and bottles of Big Wheel, Brut, and Old Spice colognes—when a piece o’ bloodclaat bass began to roll through the house like a fog.