“Nobody deserves anything, Lelah,” he said. “It’s called favor. And all we can do is thank God for giving us a little bit, and do the right thing moving forward.”
“You sound like your wife.”
Cha-Cha shrugged.
“Have you figured out if this haint shows up at a certain time?”
“Mmm-hmm.” He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. “Between midnight and three.”
Lelah checked the time on her phone.
“It’s already eleven-thirty.”
“I know.”
“And you say it’s been coming every night?”
“Yep.”
“So it could show up whenever and I’ll see it?”
“I doubt it. Tina didn’t even feel it last night, and I figure if she couldn’t feel it, then nobody but me can see it, cause it feels stranger than it looks.”
“But Tina’s not blood,” Lelah said. When she was younger, and had felt left out, the last one still on Yarrow, she’d subscribed to this notion of blood. No matter that she didn’t know the stories behind every joke, or that the Yarrow Street that Lonnie and Netti and Quincy might reminisce about had nothing to do with the one that she knew; the same blood pumped through all of their veins. When Francis held baby Brianne to his chest, she got to hear his heart, the source of his blood, the source for all of the others after him. Blood still mattered to Lelah.
“Also, you said everybody saw it that first time,” she added.
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“And you think Mama knows something about it but doesn’t want to tell you?”
“I know she knows, Lelah.”
“Maybe she thinks she’s protecting you by playing dumb.”
He wished Lelah would leave. Let an old man be alone with his demons, or angels, or hallucinations, whatever they turned out to be. She added another variable to his experiment, and what would it mean if she didn’t see the haint? It might not be so bad, acknowledging that he’d held on to this thing like children cling to imaginary friends, but to have to admit it to himself and Lelah? Cha-Cha wasn’t ready. Pride pride pride pride pride. It threatened to ruin him.
They heard a crash outside, very close to the house. It didn’t sound like breaking and entering, not like a window kicked in, not even like a car rear-ended. It sounded like a heavy stack of dishes smashed on the ground. Cha-Cha saw no one on the street. From the big-room window he couldn’t see the porch, just its roof, but he saw a shadow stretching from the porch onto the front walkway.
“Somebody’s on the porch,” he whispered. “They knocked over a planter.”
“What should we do? You have a gun on you?”
“No I don’t have no gun. Do you? You’re the one who’s been here alone.”
“I’ma call the police.” She opened her phone, and the room filled with light.
Cha-Cha snatched it and snapped it shut.
“Let’s just wait a minute. Could be a drunk. I’m not tryna call the police on a drunk neighbor. They’ll probably leave. They can’t kick in that storm door, not with those bars.”
Lelah tried to control her breathing, but was unable to be as calm as Cha-Cha looked. She remembered recent news and rumors she’d heard about the neighborhood. That a fourteen-year-old girl had been walking home when two men in a nineties-model sedan pulled up beside her, tossed her into their trunk, raped her in an abandoned house, and left her there. That a shootout with the police near Baldwin last February had ended with a six-year-old boy shot dead. She felt like a fool.
Someone paced the porch in heavy shoes, the footfalls loud enough to reach Cha-Cha and Lelah upstairs.
Someone banged on the storm door with the toe of a boot, or a strong fist. Another empty planter crashed to the porch floor.
“Maybe they know somebody’s home,” Lelah said.
Someone stomped around the porch again and after a few minutes began whistling a cheerful-sounding tune. A tune that Lelah vaguely recognized, she couldn’t recall from where.
But Cha-Cha knew where the song was from, as well as the lyrics:
This train is bound for Glory, this train
This train is bound for Glory, this train
This train don’t pull no winkers, no crap-shooters, no whiskey-drinkers
This train is bound for Glory, this train
Lelah felt her brother’s body jerk. He jumped up off the bed.
“I’m not doing this no more,” he said. “I’m tired.”
He was out of the room and lumbering down the stairs before she could stop him.
Francis Turner had hummed the song when the two of them went fishing, when he drove them to football games, or when he worked in his tiny garden behind the house. Troy had never thought to ask Francis what the words were, but throughout his life, particularly when he was agitated, he’d caught himself whistling the tune. His eye hurt from where David Gardenhire had punched him, and he stopped kicking things over to poke at the swelling above his orbital bone. The storm door swung open, the front door after that. Cha-Cha came out, wild-eyed.
“You are not you! I know you’re not you! Leave me alone!”
Troy had no time to decipher what this meant because Cha-Cha barreled toward him, low and shoulder-first like a wrestler. Troy had failed at subduing David earlier; his long, noodly limbs moved too quickly. But Cha-Cha was solid and slow. Troy bested him as he’d been trained to by the Detroit Police Department: firm downward pressure between the shoulder and neck. Cha-Cha dropped to the floor. Troy rolled him onto his stomach, put his knee into his back, bent Cha-Cha’s arm behind him. The perfect position for cuffing.
“His hip! You’re gonna crack his hip,” Lelah said.
“Fuck his hip. He was tryna tackle me.”
Cha-Cha gurgled.
“He can’t breathe! What’s wrong with you?”
Troy eased his knee off Cha-Cha but kept him pinned by the twisted arm. He didn’t want to kill Cha-Cha, but his gut told him not to let his brother up.
Cha-Cha sucked in air as best he could. The porch was filthy, and broken terra cotta from the planters pressed into his cheek. Grit coated his tongue. He smelled the liquor sweating from Troy’s pores. I should be more surprised, he thought; I should be more surprised, but I’m not. He wasn’t even as angry as he deserved to be. Not yet, anyway. He’d come to Yarrow to face a supernatural being head-on, and instead it was his own kin betraying him, hurting and confusing him. And not just any kin, but the two he’d helped to raise before his own children were born.
“I came by here to take you home, cause I felt bad for you,” Troy was saying to Lelah. “David told me how you two, you two been sneakin around, and how you been livin here just like them crackheads in that abandoned house up the street.”
“You’re out your fucking mind,” Lelah said. “Let him go or I’ma call the police.”
Cha-Cha heard Troy laugh—a fake, movie-madman cackle—and the pressure on his back slackened. He freed his hand and rolled away, up against the porch railing. He sat up, balled his fists, ready to defend himself as best he could, but Troy did not pursue him.
“Like I said. I came over here to see if what David said about you was true, but then I seen Cha-Cha’s car outside. And I figured . . . I figure let me come inside and tell this nigga about himself for once, cause ain’t nobody tellin Cha-Cha the truth, are they?”
Troy looked over to Cha-Cha with watery eyes. He’d clearly been crying, and now his black eye was swollen shut so that he seemed to be winking fiercely.
The streetlight blinked off and back on, which reminded Lelah that they were sitting on the porch past midnight, making a scene. She knew she should go to Cha-Cha, help him to stand, but she didn’t move.
Troy sat with his back against the porch’s stair railing. He pointed at Cha-Cha. “You had me out in the snow. Why?”
“I’m not doing this with you,” Cha-Cha said. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Just leave hi
m alone, Troy,” Lelah said. David must have confronted Troy about that knife, she realized. He must have gone to Hamtramck looking for answers that Troy did not have, because Troy couldn’t articulate why he’d stolen that knife any better now than he could have twenty years prior. But Lelah could imagine her brother’s motives easily enough. It was rooted either in jealousy or in pride, and likely disguised as a prank. The sailor, Tasaka, might have been better with the ladies than Troy, or smarter, or perhaps just too flashy for Troy’s liking. She felt sorry for Troy, for Cha-Cha, and for herself. Their attempts at getting answers, or respect, or even a modicum of stillness inside their own minds were pathetic.
A car drove by and all three of them watched it pass. None of them moved to go back inside.
“I just wanted team shoes and a fuckin jersey. That’s all I wanted.”
“Jesus, what shoes?” Cha-Cha said. He spat the dirt out of his mouth. “I bought you and Lelah whatever you asked for, whatever I could scrape up some money to get.”
Troy shook his head too many times and then put his hand on his temple as if he were dizzy.
“Nah. You had me waiting out in the cold. You made me wait, and Chucky and Todd were up in that house warm.”
“Oh God, Troy,” Lelah said. “Let it go. You gotta—”
“No, no, no. He can go ahead,” Cha-Cha said. “Everybody thinks I owe them, or did something to them. Let him get out what he thinks I did.”
With permission granted, Troy wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. Jillian had come home shortly after David punched him. She hadn’t administered aid or provided much comfort; she instead asked what he’d done to provoke David. Even the woman who supposedly loved him did not expect him to be on the right side of a disagreement. Why would she want to be with someone like him? He’d left the house and drunk most of a fifth of Hennessy in his car, and then he’d driven here to save his little sister, to be the bigger person. But Cha-Cha’s car out front thwarted even this feeble, drunken attempt to do the right thing. It seemed clear then that Cha-Cha, whether directly or indirectly, had been behind many major disappointments in Troy’s life.
“You . . . you’re the reason I’m back here, you know. Back in Detroit. I wanted to help with stuff.”
“What stuff?” Lelah asked. Troy scrunched up his face at her. His lips trembled as if he might vomit.
“I’m talking to Cha-Cha, ’scuse me. I came back here for you, Cha, to help you take care of things. I even stayed here with Mama.”
“Just until you could get your own place,” Lelah said. “Don’t lie.”
Troy ignored her.
“You don’t listen is the problem, Cha. Like, with this house? I told you we should just short-sell it to Jillian, but no. It wasn’t a good idea cause it wasn’t one a your ideas. I was finna do it behind your back, too, you know that?”
Cha-Cha felt too many things at once. Rage: he wanted to smite Troy, to smack the taste directly out of his mouth. Disillusion: Alice had said that his role in the family earned him respect but not friendship. Now he saw that he’d never had respect, either. And finally, confusion: was he really so bullheaded, so closed off to his siblings, that they would spend real money just to do something without his consent? These feelings pinballed inside of him, and he felt like giving up, retiring early, selling his house and moving to a place where he was one of one, not one of thirteen. He no longer wanted to devote his life to these people.
“Yeah, I was handling it,” Troy said. “But then Lelah had to go and fuck my friend. Know what? I don’t even care you and David were fucking. But what you do to him, huh? He was damn near crying, saying we’re a toxic family and some shit about the both of us . . . the both of us needing help. Like I need help! He’s the one who can’t even get his own brother clean. And you somehow got him thinkin we’re worse than that.”
Lelah stood up, dusted off the butt of her jeans.
“I do need help,” Lelah said. “But look at you! You’re a grown-ass man, coming over here crying, looking for answers from Cha-Cha like he’s your daddy. Your daddy’s dead, he’s been dead! You got nobody to blame for your shitty life but yourself.”
Troy stood up as well. He had to lean on the porch railing to steady himself.
“You been up in this house like a squatter. Like a fuckin bum!”
Lelah advanced on him until they were nearly nose to nose. His breath was terrible, but she did not back away.
“And you tried to do some underhanded shit to sell this house, or whatever you had planned. You’re no better than me, Troy. Fuck you for even thinkin you were.”
They were screaming. Cha-Cha knew he should separate them. Lelah was a woman, and Troy shouldn’t be in a woman’s face like that, but separating them reminded him too much of how he’d intervened in their squabbles as children. So he sat and watched them, a little proud of how Lelah refused to back down. These two were his proto-children, and he had failed them. He had done better with his actual sons, but that was with Tina’s help. These two he’d tried to shape and mold when he was perhaps too young for such responsibility, and had failed. He was tired of failing, physically exhausted. In fact, he was just tired-tired. He could go to sleep right here on the porch. He thought about going to sleep as he looked down the length of it, to the far corner. There stood his haint. Or rather, there stood a new iteration of his haint, in the form of a skinny man in baggy slacks and an undershirt, its body backlit by a familiar shade of blue.
“Do you see it?” he whispered.
Lelah and Troy continued arguing.
“There there THERE! Right there! You see it?”
The haint reached both arms up over its head in a stretch. Opened its shadowy mouth and yawned. As if it was tired of haunting Cha-Cha, as if it had better things to do. But then it took a step toward him. It seemed to not register Lelah and Troy at all.
“Shut up shut up and look,” he said, but they ignored him. The haint took three more steps. Cha-Cha felt the air leave him—the world’s worst sucker punch—and then nothing.
Troy noticed Cha-Cha first. Out the corner of his eye he saw him slumped forward, mouth open. He ran to him and put his ear to his mouth. He was still breathing.
He slapped him lightly on the cheeks, and when this failed to revive him, he tried not to panic. He suddenly felt sober.
“Shit,” he said. He slung Cha-Cha’s arm over his shoulder. “We need to get him to the hospital.”
“Should I call 911?”
Troy thought about response times and cross streets. He did not trust his fellow first responders to do right by this address tonight.
“No, we gotta just drive him. Come on.”
It was slow going—Cha-Cha’s body sagged like dead weight—but Troy and Lelah got him into the back of the SUV. Troy made Lelah squeeze into the back too.
“Make sure he stays breathing,” he ordered.
In the rearview Troy saw Lelah shake Cha-Cha’s shoulder, then pinch him on the flabby underside of his arm. Cha-cha groaned but did not wake up.
“I’m gonna just keep messing with him,” Lelah said. “He’s gotta wake up.”
Troy sped down Gratiot with his hazard lights flashing. He was positive this was his fault. He must have used too much force when he subdued Cha-Cha, maybe leaned on his chest too hard. What the hell had he wanted? To be acknowledged? Even if Cha-Cha survived, Troy imagined he’d be excommunicated from the Turners forever. The desire to vomit returned.
“I found a water bottle,” Lelah said.
She uncapped it and dumped a good amount of its contents onto Cha-Cha’s face. When this didn’t wake him, she let out a terrible moan.
“What are we gonna do if something’s really wrong with him?” Lelah said.
Troy could not answer her. At the hospital he parked the car in front of the ER and ran in for help.
Cha-Cha opened his eyes as soon as the EMTs slid him onto the stretcher.
“Wait, he’s awake!” Lelah said, but they were a
lready wheeling him into the building.
“How do you feel?” she called out.
Cha-Cha hurt all over. But besides physical pain, he had no idea what or how he felt.
He was conscious, talking, and not showing signs of a heart attack, so the ER staff parked Cha-Cha in a wheelchair near a nurse station. They would not let Troy and Lelah back to see him, not even after Troy flashed his badge around. Not even after Troy put his badge back away, apologized for having flashed it, and tried to ask nicely. So they sat in the urgent care waiting room, next to people with more visibly urgent ailments than Cha-Cha’s. A teenager with a wound to the side of his neck taped over with bloody gauze. A child with a gruesome, purple-black bruise on his bony shoulder. An older man with swollen, pus-caked feet crammed into Nike slippers. A young woman with bald spots on her short salt-and-pepper hair who moaned and sniffled. Troy begged Lelah not to call Tina, or anyone else, and she obliged because she too felt guilty.
Cha-Cha waited in the back, drinking water and trying to figure out what had happened to him, until a tall male nurse with a neat beard finally came over to talk to him.
“What happened tonight? Your son said you fainted?”
“That’s not my son; that’s my brother. I don’t know if I fainted. I saw a . . . I had lot to drink earlier, haven’t slept in a while.”
The nurse repeated the procedure that Cha-Cha had already been subject to twice since arriving. He flashed a light in his eyes, checked his throat and ears. He listened to his heartbeat, stood up straight, folded his arms, frowned, and listened to his heartbeat a second time.
“You may have fainted. The fatigue and dehydration might have had something to do with it. I’m going to put you in a chair and get an IV with fluids going into you for a little while, to take care of the hydration part. And I’ll take some blood to run a couple of tests, just to be safe.”
He ushered Cha-Cha through the hallway into a windowless, holding cell-like room, where half a dozen patients whose ailments didn’t warrant a private room but who were awaiting clearance to leave lay on beds and sat in cushioned chairs.
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