by Nancy Rue
Thursday evening of that week, I followed her out to her bike. “I’m going to start calling you ‘St. Leighanne,’” I said.
She gave me the two-packs-a-day laugh. “Don’t even go there. A saint I am definitely not.” She stopped cramming all that hair into her bandana and grinned. “Although I guess I ought to take that seriously, coming from an angel. All three of them call you that now.”
I grunted. “Talk about definitely not. I have moments when I want to take off my halo and start swinging it at them.”
“Of course. But do you do it?”
“No. That would send them right back to West King.”
“Then there you go.” She picked up her helmet, but she didn’t put it on.
“What?” I said.
“Whether you’re an angel or a saint or whatever it is you are that makes you nutty enough to do this, there may come a time when one of them is going to turn on you because she blames you for having to face her demons.”
I motioned for her to go on.
“Right now just not using makes them think they’re making it. They have to get clean, of course, before they can make any progress. But what they have ahead of them is going to get ugly, and you being the most secure thing they’ve probably ever had in their lives—they’re going to feel safe taking some of their frustration out on you.” She pulled on her helmet. “I’d just hate to see you get burned out.”
I leaned against one of the palms and watched her turn onto St. George Street—and longed to go with her. Just get on my Classic and cruise to the beach and beyond until I came to my senses and realized I was not equipped to take care of three addicted women and a juvenile delinquent. Even as I thought it, it sounded like the title of a bad cable show that was destined for cancellation after half a season. One I shouldn’t be starring in because I was irresponsible and flakey and never saw anything through. Except Sylvia. That was my one claim to integrity.
Really? And I am, then, chopped liver?
The Nudge was so clear that I looked around to make sure a human voice hadn’t spoken to me from behind the palm. But what human could say I’d committed to him?
“Okay,” I whispered to the fishy breeze that blew from the bay. “I’m seeing you through.”
As I crossed Palm Row to the house, I had a post-massage kind of peace—until I got to the side porch and heard all Hades opening up in the kitchen.
“You don’t be tellin’ me why I’m here. I know why I’m here.” That was Mercedes’s strident voice, going, as Desmond would say, straight up into someone’s grill work. Jasmine’s timid whine urged her to “hush up ’fore Miss Angel hear you.” But it was the third voice that pressed me onto the porch swing to wait and hear.
“You better be sayin’ the truth,” Geneveve said. “’Cause if you here to spy on me and go runnin’ back—”
“You think Sultan send me here?”
“Don’t you ever speak that name to me! Don’t you ever.”
“And don’t you never be accusin’ me of bein’ in with him, or I will—”
Her threat was cut off by Jasmine, whimpering, “She ain’t messin’ with you, Geneveve. We as scared of him as you are.”
“Ain’t no way. He ain’t done to you what he done to me.”
“But don’t you think he won’t,” Mercedes said. “When he come back and found you left, who you think he come to for information? And you know he weren’t askin’ pretty please.”
“That why you tol’ Opus Behr where to find me?”
“I didn’t tell him no such thing!”
“Then how did he know?”
“Why you askin’ me? You the one knows how Sultan operate.”
A hard silence fell. I held my breath and craned my neck toward the window in the door. Through the thin curtain I could see only shapes. Jasmine cowering on a bistro chair. Mercedes standing in the middle of the floor. And Geneveve backing her toward the sink.
“I’ma tell you one last time, Mercedes. Don’t you ever say that name to me again.”
“Whatchoo think you gon’ do to me if I do?” Mercedes said.
Although she was forced to lean against the counter, her voice was like a switchblade. I stood up, the hair on my arms standing up with me. It would probably be better to break this up before it came to fingernails and teeth. Desmond was one thing. The two of them—
“It’s not enough just me askin’ you?” Geneveve said. “What we got left but this place and Miss Angel and each other? You tell me, what else we got?”
“We got nothin’,” I heard Jasmine whisper.
I watched Geneveve’s form disappear through the doorway, Jasmine after her, leaving only Mercedes in the kitchen. When I walked in, she was at the den door, ear pressed to the crack.
“I hate him hearin’ that,” she said without turning around.
“Then why did you have that conversation in the kitchen?” I said.
“Just where it happen.” She looked at me, face hard, but eyes wary. “You hear all that?”
“Some of it. Who’s Sultan?”
She started for the dining room.
“Mercedes.”
When she stopped, midway through the room, she kept her back to me. “He what you would call her pimp. He think he own Geneveve, that’s all. You don’t need to get messed up in this.”
“I do if he’s going to come here and finish off the job he started on her—her and everybody else in here.”
She turned her head, but she still wouldn’t look at me. “That weren’t Sultan messed her up. That ain’t his style, and it ain’t his style to come here, so you don’t got to worry about that.”
“Then what do I need to worry about?”
This time she did face me, with eyes I couldn’t read. “He ain’t gon’ come lookin’ for her. Sultan don’t chase.”
“So …”
“You just got to keep her from goin’ back there, Miss Angel.” She slowly shook her head. “’Cause if she does, you ain’t never gonna see her again.”
I lay awake most of the night, tossing the scene in the kitchen and my conversation with Mercedes back and forth, turning Leighanne’s warning and Sultan’s looming existence over and over. Every time I started to doze off, Desmond’s face would flash into the almost-sleep and I’d have to go down and check on him. I must have done that five times until four a.m., when he rolled open his eyes and said, “I done my homework, Big Al. Why you got to dog me?”
There was something so incredibly ordinary about that, I almost cried. I brewed coffee and went for the half-and-half and told myself he couldn’t have heard the whole verbal catfight or he’d either be sitting in a self-imposed daze in front of the TV or trying to pick the lock I’d installed on the stereo cabinet or sketching in his notebook, curved backbone shielding it from the rest of the world.
“DearGoddearGoddearGod, let it be ordinary for him,” I whispered into the refrigerator.
“Desmond’s the one I’m worried about the most,” I told Hank later that morning at the Galleon.
I’d dropped him off at school and the women at an NA breakfast meeting and barreled into the coffee shop with the Sultan story practically out before I got to the table. Hank had a pumpkin-carrot-raisin-zucchini muffin waiting at my place.
“Why Desmond?” she said.
“Because they made the choices that landed them where they are, and they can choose to either stay there or get out. He doesn’t get to choose. He just has to go with what his mother decides for him.” I poked at the muffin with my finger. “And that’s the thing—she doesn’t even seem to be thinking about him. At all. Mercedes is more concerned about the kid than Geneveve is.”
“It’s probably all Geneveve can do to keep herself together. She knows you’ve got him handled. She’ll start bei
ng a mother when she figures out how to be a person.” Hank smiled her twisty smile. “At least, that’s my opinion.”
“And it oughta be mine, right? As long as you’re handing them out, do you think I should be worried about this Sultan person coming into my home and killing us all in cold blood? I know what Mercedes said, but her take on this could be skewed.”
Hank stopped in mid chew. “It’s a chilling thought. I’m just creeped out by how close the name ‘Sultan’ is to ‘Satan.’ I’m not one to talk about the Devil much but … hmm.”
“What ‘hmm’?”
“I’m just thinking.”
“It must be pretty heavy. You’re putting your fork down.”
“Yeah—just hear me out while I try to say this because it’s just now coming to me.”
“Been there,” I said.
“Whether Sultan is Satan or whoever he is, it seems to me we have to fight him the same way.”
“Which is …”
“With the power of the Spirit. And how do we get that?”
“Prayer,” I said. “Communion. Hanging out with people of faith. If you wait long enough, you get Nudges.” I shrugged. “That’s just been my experience.”
“Then shouldn’t it be theirs?”
“Tell me some more.”
She did the tidy hand-fold. “You’ve given them a routine of normal activities. Why not give them sacred normalcy, too?”
“So, like, regular times for prayer? Bible study? That kind of thing?” I closed my eyes and shook my head. “I’m having a hard time picturing it.”
Hank laughed. “Didn’t you have a hard time picturing them sitting in an NA meeting? For that matter, when did you ever feature yourself opening a home for harlots? What about this whole thing has been easy to fathom, Al?”
“So you’re saying make God part of their day just like everything else.”
“He’s already part of it. You’re just going to give them a chance to notice.”
I pulled out the now dog-eared notepad I’d taken to using to keep up with everything. Haircut for Desmond was scrawled at the top. “Okay,” I said as I wrote, “prayer, Scripture, fellowship—I guess that’s like meals at the table—” I groaned.
“What?”
“I’m trying to see Desmond in the dining room with his napkin in his lap.”
“Enough with the mental pictures, already.”
“Right. Okay—worship.” I stopped, a bitterness already filming my mouth.
“Problem?”
“I’m not taking them to church, Hank. My own people won’t even accept me helping these women. I know what’s going to happen if I walk into a service with three hookers. That’s one scene I can picture, and it isn’t pretty.”
Hank refolded her hands and said nothing.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“I think you’re right about not taking them just yet, but what about you?”
“What about me?”
“You still need a community of fellow believers to worship with.”
“There is so much of that that no longer applies to my church, I don’t even know where to start. In fact, I don’t want to start. Okay? Back to the women?”
“All right, erase, erase, erase,” Hank wiped the air with her palm. “I’d like to make an offer, and if this doesn’t work for you, I won’t be offended.”
“When have I ever turned down an offer from you?”
“You do it every time I try to treat you to breakfast. Here’s what I’m thinking. Why don’t I bring communion over once a week and celebrate it with you and the woman and Desmond? Whatever time works with all their meetings—”
“You would do that?” I said.
“Would I have offered otherwise? Think about it and, like I said, you can turn me down—”
“And like I said, when have I ever turned you down? Uh—Patrice?”
Her hair preceded her over the counter.
“Could you fix me one of those Throw Me Overboard omelets?”
“You mean ‘Walk the Plank’?” she said.
“Yes. Please. Hank’s treating.” I looked across the table. “Do Wednesday mornings work for you?”
And so it began. I went deeper into the new dimension and took the women with me. Most of the time they came willingly.
Amid the trips to the clinic for full physicals and, at Chief’s suggestion, testing for hepatitis and STDs and HIV and a whole alphabet soup of diseases I’d never even heard of, we gathered for morning and noon and evening prayer. I did most of the praying, so the day Geneveve whispered, “Thank you for Miss Angel, God,” I expected God to send a dove or something.
In addition to seeing dentists about meth-destroyed teeth and NA sponsors about equally damaged thinking, we sat down twice a week and looked at Scripture. I researched every harlot in the Bible and read them their stories in small pieces to fit their attention spans. I could get Desmond to work on his homework longer than they could focus on Gomer and Rahab, and that was saying something. He claimed he was too stupid to learn fractions; I claimed he was just behind and I would help him catch up if he’d stop wasting all his energy thinking up excuses not to try. The women never claimed stupidity about the Bible. They didn’t say anything, actually. They listened, gave the occasional mmm-hmm, and sometimes nodded off. I kept at it only because Hank said you never knew what was sinking in, and that nothing was going to if I didn’t pour it out in the first place.
We ate nightly around the dining-room table. I’d been right in one prediction: Desmond did not see the point in a napkin when you had a sleeve, or a fork when you had fingers, or a chair when you could grab a pork chop and walk around the house with it so you wouldn’t miss anything that might be happening elsewhere. It seemed to require all the focus Geneveve could muster to sit there herself. The first two suppers involved all of them twitching in their chairs, fumbling with their utensils, looking over their shoulders as if they were afraid somebody was going to come along and steal their mashed potatoes. I didn’t have to wonder where those instincts came from.
Once they got that the plate wasn’t going anywhere, and there was no score to run after or pimp to run from, dinner at the table seemed to be the part of the day they liked most. When on Tuesday I found Jasmine and Geneveve already at their places before I had the salad made, I knew we’d reached some kind of turning point.
“Well,” I said, “you can either sit there and wait for it, or you can help and it’ll get there faster.”
Protesting that they knew nothing about cooking, Jasmine set a somewhat cockeyed table, Geneveve tossed lettuce with nervous precision, and Mercedes took the knife from me and whacked up a red bell pepper. I tried not to imagine who she was really decimating with that blade.
When we sat down to eat, Desmond flung his arm across the table and groped for the breadbasket.
“Boy,” Mercedes said, “we got to pray first ’fore you start grabbin’ that food.”
“The Lord be with you,” I said.
Raspy, crackled, life-weary voices answered, “And also witchoo.”
It was the best meal I ever ate until the communion feast Hank spread for us the next morning at that same table. As she reenacted the Last Supper with the words, “Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you,” I didn’t have to question whether they were listening. Eyes bugged, and when she broke the round, golden loaf and offered Mercedes a piece, saying, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” Mercedes blurted out, “I ain’t eatin’ no man’s body!”
“I’m sorry. I should’ve prepared them,” I whispered to Hank.
She smiled and put the bread back on the table. “Nobody’s prepared for the miracle of the body and blood,” she said. “I think that was the perfect reaction.”
So we stopped right there in the middle of the sacrament and Hank explained the symbolism, which led to incredulous questions, the same ones I’d asked the Watchdogs when I was first told that breaking the bread reminded us that Jesus’ body was broken for us, so we could be whole. Mercedes and Jasmine and Geneveve’s responses were somewhat more colorful than my, “What? Are you serious? What does that even mean?” were six and seven years ago, but Hank’s answers were also more vivid than the ones I got.
“Al’s feeding you food here in her house so you can get strong enough to go out there and make it on your own. Jesus is feeding you Himself so you know you can’t make it unless you depend on him.”
Jasmine still had to make sure it was indeed bread and not actual flesh she was biting into. To my relief the blood of Christ wasn’t wine for this group, but I was sure it was the cup of salvation, as thirstily as their souls drank from it. At least that was the picture that came to me. I made a note to share that with Hank.
Despite Jasmine’s nightmares and Mercedes’s miniexplosions and Geneveve’s moody retreats into her room when she returned from NA meetings, it was still Desmond who provided the greatest challenge. He fought the haircut as if I’d told him we were having his ears chopped off. I once again had to threaten to take away his helmet, and I let him choose the barber since he insisted that “ain’t no white person can cut a black person’s hair.” I asked one of the African-American HOG members where he had his done, and he grinned sheepishly.
“I go to a little hole in the wall off West King Street,” he said. “It’s got bars on the windows and the owner packs heat while he’s cutting your hair, but you don’t walk out looking like RuPaul.”
That appeased Desmond somewhat, especially when I told him we could drive there on the Harley. By the time we walked into Bo’s Barber Shop, he was strutting it like Shaft. The proprietor indeed had an unconcealed weapon in a holster around his waist and cameras prominently installed in four places, and I stood nervously between Desmond and the door as if I could actually bring down an intruder in this neighborhood—without my motorcycle. But Desmond came out with a wonderful soft ’do shaped like a pharaoh’s turban, and he preened in the shop window before he put his helmet on.