by Ed Park
Surreptitiously, as if the noise could see me, I snuck out my right pinkie to pause the dictation. It took me a few moments to recognize the piano music in “Moanin’” emerging into the room, white and cool and clean as a coast of gesso.
When I’m working, I play the jazz station softly. It’s the only way I can transcribe the depositions. It keeps me in my chair, in my office, typing the details of yet another chicken-processing plant worker who had a finger sliced off while “disassembling” a chicken, or the line cook who suffered third-degree burns to both hands when the oil in a hundred-pound fryolator boiled over.
I don’t hear the music. Consciously. It is translucent, light breathing life inside me. With the music, I inhale. I exhale, push my thoughts away from the voices, the names, the endless stream of blood keeping my lights on, keeping the collectors at bay.
I froze at the desk I had made out of cinder blocks and an old door I found in the basement, wondering if I had really heard anything. Mingus nimbly laid his bass line down, playing to me from beyond the veil. I could see his hands, his knuckles knobs of ginger, hot inside yet soothing. They reached out to comfort me where I sat while a trumpet laughed, Wa-wa-wa! Then, sliding right between the clapping of the hi-hat, there was that sound again. A groan rising from the warped floorboards of my dining room.
The closet was jammed with boxes of books and there was nowhere else to hide. If I’d bought the desk from Ikea instead of just bookmarking it in my browser, it would have been big and sturdy enough to hide under. Damn Peace! I had passed up the desk thinking of her. It was $279, and maybe I could have justified that for work, but there was no way in hell I could justify paying $349 to ship it to Buffalo, New York. Buffalo, Montana, maybe, but on the real, is Ikea outsourcing its shipping to Somali pirates? I was being responsible. I was being grown. I was the one thinking of someone, thinking of her while she was thinking of him. While she was with him. She was with him the last few months we lived together, I’m convinced of it. Gilles.
He’s Haitian. Mr. Exotique. I used to be the exotic one, Lenny Kravitz with a twist—black father, Jewish mother. Peace used to love to play with my dreads, loved that I was a painter. Gilles’s head is cleanly shaven, smooth and shiny as polished soapstone. He’s getting a degree in communication and leadership at Canisius so he can return to Haiti and better serve his people.
She’d met him in early winter. Peace had wanted me to go to a fund-raiser for Haitian earthquake victims being held at a gallery in Allentown. She and her supervisor from the no-kill shelter were attending a silent auction and wine tasting. I knew the gallery; it was run by an older woman with wild green eyes and a spark of red hair. She looked like a wood sprite. I’d sold three paintings from my thesis, “The Color of Emotion”—Crimson Staked Heart, Lavender Lust, and Fear of Love in Black and White—but when I’d tried to show in her gallery, she turned me down.
When Peace came home from work and reminded me about the fund-raiser, I was just crawling out of the paxilated cave I had been in all day. Paxil, I’m convinced, was created by cavemen who go out and gather and hunt while you sit in darkness awaiting the spirit contained in the pill, tiny and blue as a robin’s egg. Inside is the hope of warmth, unborn shadow, the joy and press of a woman against you in a corner of the night. But the hope and spirit never fully spark. All you get is smoke, a burning in the eyes, and the hard flint of promises that cannot ignite the wet tinder clotted in your heart.
I told Peace I wasn’t going. “Figures,” she said, still wrapped in layers and layers. She had walked from work, and it was snowing. “What do you do for anyone?”
I shouldn’t have said anything. I was in no mood for her. I was in no mood, period. “What do you do that’s so great?” I asked. “Take care of those wretched animals all day?”
Her cheeks were flooded with color, two lush blooms of Sarah Bernhardt peonies. “You should be grateful for those wretched animals because if it wasn’t for them needing a place to stay, you wouldn’t have a place to stay. They’re feeding you. I’m feeding you! . . . You don’t even paint anymore. All you do is make excuses. Your dad died. You’re broke. You’re blocked. No one wants to buy your work. What work?”
Canvases stood atop easels in the dining room of the apartment we shared, but I hadn’t painted a stroke for months. I’d lost track of the days and nights of emptiness.
“You don’t understand anything about what I do,” I said defensively. The rectangular windows of whiteness stared at me, mocked me.
“I’m taking She-Ra with me,” Peace said, grabbing the leash. “I wouldn’t want her wretchedness spoiling your evening.”
I didn’t say anything. She-Ra was her dog, a pit bull–dachshund mix she had gotten from the shelter before we met. Most of the dogs at the shelter were pit bulls or pit bull mixes. When I used to pick Peace up from work, they barked like fiends from their wall of cages. The cats were in cages on the opposite wall, crouched, squint-eyed, gazing around suspiciously. Along the back wall there were small cages with fat, languid, pink-eyed rabbits that looked like they had been passing joints all day. Observing them all, I would wonder how it was discovered that they were unwanted. Who snitched on the stray cat? Didn’t want to pat the bunny? Said that one bite from a pit bull was one too many? No matter when I went, the animals were always the same. Even when they weren’t the same animals, they were the same animals. Peace was their savior, their jailer.
The night she went to the fund-raiser, I cried when she left, and took a pill hoping it would light my cave. I would cook breakfast for Peace in the morning. Take her to work. Pick her up. I would sleep all night, and in morning the light would be right for painting. The truth was, I was running out of the hope of light.
I had gotten my cache of Paxil from Mom. After Dad died, her doctor put her on it and while she settled his estate and slowly emerged from the shock of his sudden death, she had accumulated a half-dozen bottles of pills. She asked me to bring them to a drug take-back site over at the fairgrounds because she didn’t want to flush them—that was bad for the fish, for the drinking water. I told her I would. I put the bag containing them into my car trunk and forgot about it until after the take-back was over. I then put them in my sock drawer. I would flush them. Mom would never know. I didn’t care if the fish got drugged, and I only drank bottled water. And then there was this. This shadow, a streak of onyx pressing against my heart.
Dad had left me nothing. Mom was moving to Scottsdale and selling everything except a rental property on Jefferson Avenue. Dad owned it and four others sprinkled through the Fruit Belt, Cold Springs, Humboldt Park. Mom didn’t feel up to maintaining them, and tracking down tenants for rent. The week after I got the Paxil, she called to tell me I could live in that house if I wanted. She would keep it in her name. All I had to do was pay the taxes on it and the utilities.
“If you can manage that for a year, I’ll sign it over to you. You can do what you want with it then,” Mom told me.
A brush of heat swept up my neck into my face. My forehead broke out in sweat. “If Dad wanted me to have a house, to have a . . . anything, he would have left it to me. He could have left me money. You can sell it and give me the money. I can use it to pay down my student loans.”
Mom said coolly, “Let’s be honest, it’s going to take you a lifetime to pay them off.”
“You sound like Dad!” I accused. “You don’t need a piece of paper to prove you’re an artist,” I mimicked.
Mom stayed calm, stayed on track. “Has it ever occurred to you that your father was right? You should have never borrowed that kind of money for graduate school.”
“I know how much I owe,” I told her, though I had not told her, told Dad, told Peace, told anyone. The last bills I’d received—well, that I had opened—totaled $158,147.55.
“This isn’t Let’s Make a Deal, David. You’re twenty-seven years old. You want to live in the house, or you don’t. It’s up to you. I can have my realtor put the house on Je
fferson on the market too.”
I was silent for a few moments, and then told Mom, “I need to talk it over with Peace first.”
“Work things out with Peace. But as soon as the sale closes for this house, I’m leaving town.”
* * *
When I picked Peace up from work, I told her about Mom’s offer. She wanted to see the house.
“Why?” I asked. “It’s just up the street from Gigi’s. The East Side isn’t safe.”
We were stopped at a light. “Wait, so it’s safe to go to a restaurant on the East Side, but not live over there? Thousands of people live there. You lived there as a kid.”
“But I don’t remember it. We moved to Orchard Park before I started kindergarten. People are always getting shot on the East Side. I mean, it’s an if it bleeds, it leads gold mine for the evening news.”
I hit the CD button. Teena Marie was holding a long “looooooooove,” about to lay it down on Rick James. Peace punched it off. I punched it back on. Teena was still on the same note.
“Like no one gets shot on the West Side,” she said as Teena, finishing the line, moaned softly.
“On the Puerto Rican West Side they do,” I said. “Not where we live.”
“Dude, you don’t know how racist you sound!” Peace yelled. She had to duel with Teena, so I turned the player off this time and got blasted with a horn because the light had turned green.
“I’m not racist. How can I be racist? I come from the two most repressed people in the history of the planet,” I insisted.
Peace was still screaming: “And the Irish have had it easy? Tell that to my grandparents. David, you’re being a total tool. I wish my parents had money. Your mom’s giving you a house and you don’t want it!”
“With strings attached,” I said. “I’m not a tool, and I’m definitely not a puppet. I’m not going to dance for her money—my dad’s money either.”
“Next month the rent’s going up by fifty dollars. Do you have an extra fifty dollars a month? Do you have fifty dollars, period?” asked Peace.
My heartbeat went tribal. Buppta, bupp, buppbuppbupp, buppta, bupp, buppbuppbupp. Was this how it was with Dad? Driven out of this world by the runaway rhythm of a drummer’s beat? I punched the CD player back on. Peace didn’t reach over to stop Rick James from begging Teena to hold him one more time, to lie to him about everything being all right.
When the song wound down, I glanced at Peace and asked softly, “Are you all right?”
She was slunk down in her seat. She didn’t say anything.
“I’d have to get a gun if we move to that house. I’d need one for protection.”
“And you could kill someone? David, you won’t even kill flies.”
That was true. I didn’t kill flies; I would release them out a window.
Peace spent all day rescuing animals, but let one fly get into the house and she would hunt it down and dispatch it into the next world with a flip-flop.
“I wouldn’t be getting a gun to kill anyone. I would be getting it for, like I said, protection. We’re not moving over there, so it’s a moot point.”
After a few minutes of silence, Peace said, “Dude, you’re totally getting a job. Like yesterday.”
Buppta, bupp
* * *
Peace probably would not have believed I was thinking of her as I flew across the hall and grabbed the gun from my nightstand, an upside-down milk crate. I had been meaning to stop by and see her all summer. Now it was turning fall. I slid out into the dark hallway and, putting winter in my voice, yelled down the stairs, “Get the hell out of my house or I’m going to shoot you!”
My voice echoed. The beating of my heart filled my ears. Rushing in between that sound was someone calling my name. I pressed my back against the wall, and listened to a small voice in the night.
“David, it’s me! David! It’s me. Malcolm. Don’t shoot. It’s Malcolm!”
I reached for the light switch and told him to turn on the light in the dining room. I heard him cross the creaking floor, and then saw the rush of light. “You’re alone, aren’t you?”
“I got my Xbox.” He stood in my empty dining room, wearing a wifebeater and a pair of red, white, and blue Bills Zubaz. He didn’t have anything on his feet, and he was holding the Xbox to his chest. A backpack was hanging from one shoulder.
“You know, you don’t break into people’s houses at three in the morning in this neighborhood, in any neighborhood, without risking getting shot.”
Malcolm looked at me and a flood of words poured out: “I didn’t break in, the back door was unlocked. I knocked on your front door because I seen a light was on upstairs and I could see you, and I called your name but not too loud because I ain’t want my daddy to hear. So I went round back. My daddy, he put me out . . . Why you still holding the gun on me?”
I eyed Malcolm, eyed the gun in my hand. I had it pointed it at the floor. It’s a BB gun identical to a police service pistol. When I was painting the mural on the side of house, I made a point of having it stuck just far enough outside my waistband to be seen by everyone, by anyone passing by. I wanted it to be known that I fit in here.
I don’t know how much good a BB gun would have done with Malcolm. He’s three hundred pounds, at least. I don’t know how many times I would have had to shoot him, if I had to shoot him.
I was going to buy a real gun. That had been the plan. I priced a nine. Five hundred dollars. Even if I had scraped up the money to buy one, I would have wanted a permit to carry it concealed. The application for that is crazy. They wanted me to provide four character references, nonfamilial, the reason why I wanted to carry a concealed weapon, where I was going to keep it at home, if I was on medication, my work history, did I have any mental or emotional problems. Really, it’s no wonder people buy illegal guns. I bought the BB gun on Amazon. Forty dollars, and the shipping was free.
I stuck the gun in my waistband. “Look, Malcolm, I’m not going to shoot you. I’m working. I’m sorry about your dad putting you out and everything. You can use my cell to call someone to come get you.”
Malcolm started crying. I mean, no shame in his game. The kind of crying I did when I was four and Mom wouldn’t buy me the Battle Armor Skeletor from the Hills Department Store because all she came in for was work socks for Dad. Malcolm cried like that, or maybe like I cried the day I moved out from Peace and into here. I left while she was at work, packed my entire life into my 2004 Ford Taurus. It only took me one trip.
“I don’t got nobody to call,” Malcolm said between sobs. “Daddy told me I have to get back in school, go in the morning, or I had to get out. And, and, and, I told him I wasn’t going. Then he told me I got five minutes to pack. I grabbed this first.” He patted the Xbox. “My grandmama gave it to me.”
I had to get back to work so I could send off my transcription in the morning. I told him he could stay the night, sleep on the futon couch in the front room. “But you’re going to have to go back home and work things out with your father in the morning.”
Malcolm started crying again, this time more softly.
“Give me your backpack,” I said.
He let it slide from his shoulder, and it hit the floor heavily.
I took it and led Malcolm to the couch. He plopped down in the middle of it. His nose was running, he was sweating. He wiped his face on his shirt. I could tell he was embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say to him.
“I ain’t going back to school. They mean to me, and they don’t stop. I don’t care what Daddy say. He don’t have to hear it. They make fun of my name, and it ain’t funny! They laugh, and it ain’t funny!”
I leaned against the door trim and shook my head. “Where do you go to school?”
“East,” he sniffled. “They don’t act like they in high school. For real, they act like kids.”
“They are kids. You’re a kid. This is all going to pass by. It’s going to be like a dream years from now. It won’t matter . . . Look, I�
�m going to grab a quick coffee before I head back upstairs. You want one?”
Malcolm shook his head. “Can I hook up my Xbox to your TV?”
“I don’t have one,” I said, heading to the kitchen.
I turned on the light to see my back door was wide open. I shut it, locked it.
Malcolm had followed behind me. He asked, “Why not?
“Why not what?”
“You don’t have a TV. Was you robbed? Ain’t hardly nothing in here. Look like you was robbed,” said Malcolm.
“No, I wasn’t robbed. I don’t own a TV.”
“Me and Daddy got five. One in my room. His room. The living room. The kitchen. One in the bathroom . . . You was acting like I was breaking in here. Robin Hood the one need to be breaking in here so he can hook this place up.”
I smiled when he said that. “I’m working on hooking it up. I’m buying myself a desk today,” I told him.
I made myself a single, and frothed a cup of milk for Malcolm that drizzled with vanilla syrup. We returned to the living room because there wasn’t anywhere else to sit, and Malcolm looked around at the walls.
He said, “You got a crazy man coming out your wall.”
“That’s Dr. Lonnie Smith,” I told him. “And he’s not crazy.” I explained that he was a famous jazz musician, that he played the organ and was from Lackawanna.
“Is he a Muslim? He look like a Muslim. My mama left my daddy for a Muslim and he was crazy. They live in New York City now.”
“He’s Sikh,” I said, looking at the regal blue turban. “That’s a religion. The men don’t cut their beards.”
“Is he dead? My daddy say you painted Rick James because he was dead.”
“Dr. Smith isn’t dead. Not that I know of, and I don’t remember saying that,” I replied, sipping my coffee. “About Rick James. Exactly.”
* * *
It was the beginning of summer in Buffalo when I moved in here, a season of light. I sat up nights working, and it was just as well. I couldn’t sleep. I was coming down off the Paxil. I’d finish up around seven, having seen the light before the sun itself. Potter’s pink, cadmium orange. I couldn’t stand it, the beauty of the clouds painted so hopefully, the grace of green leaves emerging from darkness in the tree outside my window, stretching beyond the roofline. I didn’t have money for curtains, so I put aluminum foil up on my bedroom windows. It blocked the coming of the light. Even having been up all night, I could hardly sleep during the day. When I did, I would fall asleep briefly and have nightmares. I couldn’t remember the details, but I would wake with my tribal heart. In my cave. Stalked by shadows, by spirits of the slipped and fallen, the quick and the dead.