He hadn’t called out sick, so his job would likely call home, and Tina would discover his truancy. Cha-Cha turned off his phone. He tried to remember a time within the past few weeks when he’d felt tenderness, or any emotion at all toward Tina that wasn’t tinged with resentment. He failed.
He held no illusion of safety on Yarrow Street. In the months since his mother moved away things had gotten worse. He read the news every day, and while he rarely saw this exact block mentioned, the scenes of crimes were close enough for him to understand that they happened here too. He knew his car made him stand out, likely made him look like an over-the-hill undercover cop, but the more beer he drank, the safer he began to feel. The house next to his mother’s was long gone, so Cha-Cha could see the side and back of the Yarrow house clearly. The windows of the boys’, girls’, and parents’ rooms upstairs, the late-addition garage attachment, the verdant back alley. All of it worthless now.
The thing to do was go into the big room, he knew. Confront his fears. But what if nothing happened? Part of him would rather spend every night on his couch, never sleeping more than a few hours, than muster the courage to return to that room and find it held no special truth for him. If it turned out to be just four walls and a twin bed, then Alice would be right, and he an even bigger fool. He drank more beer.
It always took a long time for Cha-Cha to get drunk. He blamed his substantial weight and Turner genes. He drank the first six-pack and remembered he hadn’t eaten anything yet, so he drove to a Coney Island on Gratiot. When he returned to the neighborhood with his chili dogs and fries, he parked on Yarrow, across the street from the house.
Two men riding in a silver Dodge Charger pulled up parallel to his window and looked at him. The bass from their stereo made Cha-Cha’s seat vibrate. He nodded at them without smiling. They nodded back and drove away. Cha-Cha relaxed. This was the street where the first thirteen plus two later generations of Turners had been known. A face like his must have still meant something to people around here.
Up
Hours later and Lelah wasn’t destitute. Far from it, in fact. She had played at that first table for two hours, just her and the salt-and-pepper gentleman who wouldn’t make small talk. She placed $10 to $20 bets initially, trying to bide her time, and her stack of chips fluctuated but never disappeared. That should have been a good thing; the plan was to spend time, after all, but stillness eluded her. The man next to her refused to smile, and the dealers rotated to the table were all business. The casino was too quiet early in the day; even the robotic pings of septuagenarian-helmed slots couldn’t cut through the emptiness. By noon more people had arrived, but not enough stayers, just a bunch of bet-and-walk types who made it hard to maintain a good vibe at a table. Without the stillness, her mind ran over the things she’d done wrong, today and always. There was nowhere to put all of that self-loathing, no one place to stash the regret, but stillness, if it would just show up, could hold despair at bay. When she took a break for the lunch buffet she had $875. Only $75 lost.
After lunch Lelah stationed herself near a long, overhead-illuminated craps table, usually a logistical no-no for her, but it was the only place where the players looked jovial. Of course on the day that she didn’t care to win, she won. She played only on the outside, on black and 00, and won $200. A joyless gain. She changed all of her money, the entire $1,075, for chips, mostly multicolored 50s and 20s, and marveled at how short her stack felt with higher denominations. Unsatisfying. She called the waitress over for drinks, one mai tai and then another, and sat disgusted as her pink and yellow $20 chips, the same colors as her drink, came back $50 green. A woman with a very flat chest stood next to her and whooped as Lelah’s stack grew, drawing attention the way a lone wolf alerts his pack to easy prey. It was a roulette crowd—smaller, less exuberant than a craps crowd—and Lelah refused to look up at them, refused to play the role of victor. In an effort to shock and embarrass the onlookers with her recklessness she put $800 on 27, Brianne’s number, and nothing anywhere else.
She won.
“Whooo!” the flat-chested woman yelled. She clapped Lelah on the back.
The pit boss came over and approved her win so that the dealer could give her the chips. Lelah’s mental math failed as he slid her chips she hadn’t possessed in years, $100 ones. The crowd quieted, waiting on what she’d do next, and all of their attention made Lelah nauseous. She called the waitress for a bottle of water and sat out the next round.
“If you’re gonna backslide, this is the way to do it, huh?”
The voice from behind startled Lelah. She spun on her stool, breaking one of her rules by putting her back to her chips. A thirty-something white guy stood behind her. Blond hair parted to the side, out of place in an expensive-looking suit and tie.
“I don’t know you,” Lelah said, but her voice had the lilt of a question.
He squinted at her. Beyond the playfulness that he presented for show, something in his face was so unhappy, so desperate for commiseration, that Lelah rotated half of her body back to the table, a subconscious movement to ward off misery more frightening than her own.
“You probably don’t know my real name,” he said. “But you’ve heard me tell the same sad stories enough times to know me. I went by Zach?”
It was true. Lelah remembered a Zach and the story he told, about his obsession with watching the roulette ball spin, and his ex-wife not letting him see his baby daughter. Lelah nodded at him. She had nothing to say.
“I don’t remember you ever talking much,” he went on. “But now I see why. You’re a fucking pro, huh? I wouldn’t want to quit either.”
He smiled at Lelah with only the corners of his mouth. His misery assaulted her senses like bad breath.
“I’m leaving,” she said. She traded her smaller chips for larger ones, swept everything into her purse. Zach’s eyes followed her chips as they moved, then he looked over Lelah’s shoulder toward the wheel, where the ball was in motion. It was difficult for Lelah to maneuver because Zach stood so close behind her chair. He would have to take a step back for her to walk away from the table.
“Okay, good seeing you,” he said. “Congrats on your win.”
He extended his hand, presumably for a shake, but his palm was parallel to the ceiling. Like a priest seeking alms or a basketball coach soliciting a low-five. He wants a goodwill chip, Lelah realized. Well, he’d have to get it from someone else.
She stepped past Zach’s hand and away from the table. She cashed in her winnings, picked up her car from the valet, and left Motor City behind.
When she turned onto Yarrow her car and the world outside of it, save for the inverted pyramid lit by her headlights, plunged into darkness. Both of the remaining streetlights on the block had either burned out or been smashed out. Lelah knew this was always a possibility. Dozens of blocks throughout Detroit existed in dangerous darkness as the city dragged its feet replacing the lights. She drove slowly down the block, hoping neither pedestrian nor pet jumped out into the street.
It would have been idiotic to risk fumbling with the back gate in the pitch dark, so Lelah parked out front and sprinted up to the door.
The First and the Last
Cha-Cha shocked awake from a push on his back. He sat against the big room’s door, and through the crack underneath it came a faint light. The knob turned. His heart pounded and his body froze. He was still drunk, in no condition to reunite with a more aggressive incarnation of his haint. He heard footsteps retreating, and a second later a strong shove from behind knocked him forward.
Lelah switched on the big-room light and found her eldest brother in a fetal position to the right of the doorway. Two empty beer cans lay lip to lip in the middle of the floor.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Who is it? Who’s there?”
Cha-Cha’s lower back burned from the blow. The light was too bright for him to keep his eyes open. The footsteps moved closer to him, and he wondered if he might die be
fore they reached him, have a cardiac event and perish at the hands of his own idiot fear.
“Cha-Cha? It’s Lelah. Are you hurt?”
He groaned. His brain said sit up straight, but his body refused. Lelah dropped her purse and put a hand on his forehead. He swatted her away, rolled onto his back.
“Ughhh. I don’t have a damn fever,” he said. “You scared me half to death. Did Tina send you here?”
Lelah hooked Cha-Cha under the armpits and helped him sit upright on the bed. He reeked of beer. Sweat ringed his undershirt collar. She had never seen him like this before, and her fear for him made her forget that she’d just been discovered.
“You gonna throw up? You need me to help you to the toilet?”
“It’s just beer,” he said. “Of course I’m not gonna throw up.”
Cha-Cha was able to keep his eyes open now. Lelah looked as bad as he felt. Her eyelids were puffy and the bottom rims red. She hunched in a way that suggested more than exhaustion; she looked spent, and skinnier.
“Let me get you some water,” she said. “I’ll try to find a cup downstairs.”
Alone in the room, Cha-Cha took in the duffel bags pushed beneath the bed, the lone leather jacket hanging from a corner of the dresser. He hardly remembered coming inside the house, only stuffing the two remaining beers into his pants pockets and double-checking that his car door was locked. He looked around and realized that he had left his cane in the car. His knees hurt and the front of his pants were dirty. With no cane, he suspected he had crawled up the stairs to the second floor. He prayed he hadn’t crawled up to the porch, too.
Lelah returned with lukewarm water in a paper cup. Cha-Cha poured some onto his hand and wiped his face with it. He gulped the rest down.
Cha-Cha knew the duffel bags shouldn’t be here, and that they meant something, but he asked Lelah again if Tina had sent her.
“No,” she said.
“Well, what are you doing here? Looks like . . . looks like somebody’s been living here.” He shrugged in an effort to appear less judgmental.
She started crying and nodding.
“For almost a month,” she said. “I got evicted and suspended from my job cause I gambled everything away.”
She sobbed like she used to when she was a little girl. So hard that her face was red and her body lurched. When Tina had babysat her, Lelah often cried like this, whether telling him how Viola wouldn’t let her tag along to the flea market, or how Berniece and Sandra had pushed her out of the girls’ room and slammed the door. When Cha-Cha drove her home from Missouri and she told him about the way Vernon had punched her, snatched her up by the collar and slammed her against a wall, she had cried like this. Even though he was maybe beginning to feel a little angry, Cha-Cha obeyed his impulse to comfort her by putting a hand on her back.
“And Brianne hates me because I don’t know when to fucking quit with her and I feel like I’m ruining her with my guilt and bullshit. And I was sleeping with Troy’s friend and now he hates me. I hate myself, Cha-Cha. I don’t have anything and I’m tired of it. It’s disgusting.”
“Aw, Lelah, don’t say that,” he said. “Just slow down, and try to breathe.”
She stopped talking. Her body heaved.
“I’m not angry at you,” he said, although he wasn’t sure she cared either way. “So you came back home. That’s what it’s for, right? It’s no big deal. We’ll figure all the rest of it out.”
At this Lelah sobbed louder and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t wanna be saved anymore, Cha. I’ll figure it out. I have to.”
“Alright,” he said. “You’ll figure it out. I’m just tryna say it’s not as bad as it feels.”
How easy it was for him to slip into this paternal role, even when despairing in his own right. It was a gift and a burden. He thought back to the summer of ’67, before fires and bricks and trains to Glory, when it was still Lelah’s summer. How vastly different Lelah’s experiences must have been from his own, even though they grew up in the same family, in the same house, in the same neighborhood, in the same city called Detroit.
Lelah’s breath finally slowed, and she felt her heartbeat relax. This was the final confession, she promised herself. No point in telling people about her problems if nothing changed. She leaned her head against Cha-Cha’s shoulder. Through the shirt his skin felt soft and clammy. Her ears rang from the sobbing, and she marveled at how the one person she especially didn’t want to find her out was sitting next to her in the big room. Then, remembering the beer cans and him slumped in front of the door, she sat up.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I uh, I . . .” Cha-Cha started.
“Why are you up in here getting drunk on a weeknight?” Lelah asked. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
After several seconds of searching the corners of the room for an answer, Cha-Cha shrugged.
“You really don’t wanna tell me,” she said. She couldn’t imagine any reason for him to be here, no cane in sight, passed out drunk at 10 P.M. Not Cha-Cha, leader of the family, paragon of propriety.
“Don’t wanna tell you what?” he said. “I just needed to think. I’ve got a lot of things stressing me out.”
He wouldn’t tell her. That was always the way. She dumped her problems on others, they helped her solve them, but they didn’t trust her. It never even occurred to them that she might be able to reciprocate.
“Will you do me a favor and turn the light off?” he asked. “My eyes sting.”
Lelah flipped the switch, and the room became so dark that on the way back to the bed she used her phone as a flashlight. Cha-Cha laughed.
“What? What’s funny?”
“Your phone,” Cha-Cha said. “I saw your phone when you came busting in here, and I thought it was the haint. I thought a gotdamned cell phone was a ghost.”
He laughed more and burped once. The smell of chili dogs mingled with the smell of beer.
“Marlene was trying to tell me about you and a ghost yesterday,” she said.
“What she know about it? She calls herself being mad at me.”
“Francey told her what it was about, you calling everybody.”
“Oh,” Cha-Cha said, then, “Oh! When you called yesterday I was in a bad mood. I shouldn’t have snapped. Had I known you were here, I would have—”
“You would have been mad, Cha-Cha. It’s fine. I’m not supposed to be here, and I haven’t answered anybody’s call for weeks.”
“Nothing is decided anyhow,” he said. “But you been here, Lelah. You know Mama can’t come back here. It ain’t safe. The stairs are steep; we’d have to put up some kind of ramp to the porch.”
“Mama’s dying,” Lelah said, and just as soon as the words were out she wished she could take them back. Too painful a thing to just come out and say, even if true. Cha-Cha said nothing, and Lelah tried to formulate a sentence to undo her previous one.
“Tell me the story of the haint,” she said.
“You know it. Everybody knows it.”
“I don’t, not really. There’s all kinda stuff I don’t know, Cha. All I know is Daddy didn’t believe you.”
“Shit, now Mama is claiming she don’t either,” Cha-Cha said.
He recounted that first visitation with the same animated certainty other people employed to tell the story of how their parents met, or the story of their first child’s birth. It was his origin story, he realized, and if it turned out not to be true, he wasn’t sure what would replace it.
“My therapist, Alice, says I hold on to this idea of a haint because it makes me feel extraordinary,” he said. “But one, I don’t need to feel extraordinary, I’m fine with feeling ordinary. And two, why would I make this up?”
“I don’t know,” Lelah said.
They heard a faint buzz through the window, and the streetlight popped on. Cha-Cha and Lelah sat in the orange glow of tenuous Detroit Edison fa
vor, and the increased visibility in the room made both of them feel vulnerable.
“I didn’t know you were still seeing the therapist,” she said. “I thought she was expensive.”
“She is,” Cha-Cha said. “And I’m not seeing her anymore. That’s how I ended up here. We got into it cause she said I was hallucinating and I got mad. Then she tried to refer me to somebody else. So I got mad again, got some beers, and came here.”
“After all that money she never even helped you?”
She watched Cha-Cha scoot back further on the bed and lean against the wall. She couldn’t imagine what secrets he might have told a therapist. His sons, her nephews who were nearly her own age, never seemed to have any real drama, and he and Tina’s relationship was more solid than any marriage she’d ever seen, including Francis and Viola’s.
“No, Alice helped me,” Cha-Cha said. “Like I said, I got other things stressing me out, and she was helping me with that kind of stuff.”
“That’s good.”
“What’s your game?”
“What, you mean my gambling game?”
He nodded.
“I don’t wanna talk about it, Cha. It doesn’t matter.”
“But you been to the casino tonight,” he said. “I can tell cause you smell like a chimney full of cigarettes.”
She looked surprised that he would notice such a thing.
“Roulette.”
“Not slots? I thought all you girls liked slots.”
“No,” Lelah said. She grimaced. “I don’t like playing a computer, and you don’t get any chips when you win, not even coins nowadays. You just get those receipts.”
Cha-Cha could remember going to buffets at Motor City, Greektown, and MGM with Lelah and his other sisters, but had he ever seen her play before? Perhaps if he’d seen her in action, even once, he would have been able to tell she was hooked.
“Marlene gave me some money last night. And you know how people say they can’t win for losing? Today was the only time I wanted to get rid of some money and I couldn’t lose to save my life. I’ve got a few thousand now, and I don’t deserve it. At least I can give Marlene her money back.”
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