North of Nowhere, South of Loss

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Carol says sadly. “That’s two weeks’ work.”

  “Something’s burning,” Tirana says.

  “It’s nothing. It’s just fire trucks up on the Interstate,” Solana tells Carol.

  “There’s black smoke.”

  “Any diversion.” Solana folds her arms and narrows her eyes. She could be measuring Tirana: for coveralls, for prison garb, for a coffin. “With clients like her …”

  “But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

  In the lee of the Interstate, all points are blurred by the eighteen-wheelers. We can’t see them. Thirty years ago, when our world was called forth from industrial waste and red Georgia clay, the developer had a low mountain range ordered in. Earth-movers planted it. It is forty feet high, and curves as naturally as though God himself put it there. Then truckloads of pines and sycamores arrived. All this was before my time, but I’ve figured it out. In theory, the steep strip of forest buffers us from levels of noise considered harmful. We are below the expressway. We live in its hip pocket. We rent its basement apartments. We can’t see it, its roar is muffled, but eight lanes of tractor-trailers, ambulances, police sirens, blowouts and collisions are a syncopated bass thump in our bones and under our feet.

  From my window you can see a slash of blacktop below (fifty parking spaces), then Block H opposite, then the hillslope of pines between us and the Interstate. People often stand at their windows and stare into the pines. Sometimes they gaze and inhale assorted substances. Sometimes they just gaze.

  Tirana is reading the tips of the sycamores. She is watching the pine tufts for blips of red. “I see them,” she calls. “They’re on the exit now.”

  “Tirana knows a bleeding heart sucker when she sees one, Carol, she’s a pro. She’s got you wrapped around her little finger.”

  Carol just looks at Solana.

  “It’s her funeral,” Solana says, exasperated. “Her mess. She’s got the attention span of a ten-year-old. Why do we bother?”

  “You’re so harsh, Solana.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Solana says. “Throw Tirana’s folder out,” she orders me. “She’s disqualified herself.”

  I look at Carol and she gives me a little smile, puts her finger to her lips, and shakes her head. I like Carol, I like working with her, but she feels guilty for being white. Not me. Already I think Solana was a mistake. When she looks at Tirana, her eyes say: Don’t you dare confuse me with one of those.

  “They’re turning in here,” Tirana calls.

  Solana dismisses this with a wave of her hand because ninety-eight per cent of the time, here in Eden Gardens, it’s a false alarm. But then we hear a sound like fatback spitting on a grill as big as Texas, and even Solana gets up and puts her weight against the sliding doors and goes out onto my screen porch. It is not a real screen porch, but a second-floor balcony big enough for two K-Mart chairs and a plastic table. About three years ago, to qualify for FHA improvement grants, the landlord had nylon mesh stapled to the uprights, but the mesh sags and bellies out like a sail. A four-lane throughway for mosquitoes and flies, Solana says, which is true. Also, it faces south, and the heat punches you as you open the sliding doors, so the porches are reserved exclusively for doggy doo-doo and Hibachi grills. Carol and Tirana join Solana out there, and I close the living-room window that Tirana left open, and then I go out on the screen porch and push the sliding door shut. It is interesting to me that not one of them thinks about my air-conditioning bill. The sliding door shudders and makes a farting noise. It gets stuck with twelve inches still to go. It isn’t hung right, and there is rust on its sliding track.

  “Can someone help me?” I say, but no one hears.

  The trucks are careening into our little blacktopped saucer of paradise now, trailing long red streamers of sound. In every unit, people are running out to their balconies. Kids are climbing on dumpsters or rollerblading along the footpaths between the blocks. One fire truck is stuck between Block G and Block H and turns its hose on a unit where someone’s barbecue is merely scorching steak.

  “What the fuck –!” screams the barbecue man, punching a hole through his screen. He is wearing nothing but his jockey shorts, and the blast of water gets him full in the gut. He is on the third floor, which is as high as our projects go because we are low-rise garden units, and he sort of floats at the edge of his balcony, waving his arms, as though he might swim down the rope of water to the truck.

  “Serves him right,” Solana says.

  Carol looks at her. “Oh, Solana.”

  “Oh, Solana,” mimics Solana. “You sound like my mother. Don’t try that long-suffering mama tone with me.”

  Tirana turns to look at them. “That’s funny,” she says.

  “It’s not funny,” Solana says. “It’s illegal.”

  Tirana blinks. “If you talk white and Carol talks black?”

  “It is illegal to light a grill on the balconies.”

  “But we gotta,” Tirana says. “Where else do we got? Everybody do it.”

  Everyone does. The smoke detectors go off twice a week, sometimes more. The firemen are supposed to report false alarms, and then the landlord is supposed to pay the city a fine, and then there are supposed to be fire inspections, but the landlord slips the firemen a summer bonus, and most of the firemen aren’t about to report because their own kids live in the projects, if not in these particular ones then in others that look just the same, and anyway, this is July. The children are entitled, the city owes us. There is no public swimming pool within ten miles of this place, and no grass either. The only green things are the pines and sad sycamores on the man-made slopes of I-20 and the odd shag blanket of kudzu. So the children follow the fire trucks in a swarm, cartwheeling, making whoops of sound by wumping their hands against their mouths, waiting for the moment when the blast of the hose will fly them right into Christmas.

  “Who on fire?” Tirana calls down to a kid in the parking lot.

  “Block F,” the kid calls back up. “I dunno who. Someone told me Jimmy the Pyro’s place.”

  “I know’d it.” Tirana turns to us. “That welfare-to-work shit just one more exploitation by the Man.”

  “Oh my,” Solana says, placing her hand on her heart.

  “Jamika go to work every day like they make her,” Tirana says, “and look what happen.”

  “We don’t know whose unit’s on fire,” I point out. We are still all crowding on my tiny balcony, trying to see.

  Tirana crosses all her fingers and does something strange with her arms and chants down to the parking lot: “Jamika-bird, Jamika-bird, fly back home, Your house is on fire and your children alone.”

  “Here we go again,” Solana says.

  “Fuck you, Solana.” Tirana seems to be crying. “No social worker gonna make me leave my kids all day, make me flip Burger-King patties, make me leave –”

  “And where were your little ones when you went out clubbing last night?”

  “With Denise, Miz Bitch. Me and Denise swap, but we talking ’bout one hour, two hours here, maybe three, not all-day work.”

  “All-night work is more like it. Setting the local tomcats on fire.”

  “You wouldn’t know fire if smoke was coming out o’ your ass,” Tirana says. She mimes the act of striking a match and tosses the quick imaginary flame across the room. “Why don’t you leave us alone?” she asks Solana.

  “You have no idea how great the temptation is.”

  “Jamika’s Jimmy damn crazy ’bout playing with matches. And why he do that now? Because he sending up smoke signals for his mama, that’s why.”

  “I do hope it’s not Jamika’s,” Carol says.

  Jamika is our star exhibit, our shining hope.

  Now there are flames as high as the sycamore trees. The air is full of black smoke.

  “Can someone help me?” I say, pushing my shoulder against the jammed-open door. “I don’t want this place to stink of smoke for a month.”


  “Hey, you!” Tirana calls at a boy on a skateboard. “Who burning?”

  “Block F,” the boy calls back. “Seventeen.”

  “Told you!” Tirana says.

  Carol turns pale. Jamika is in 17B. “Dear God,” she says. She presses both hands to her mouth.

  Tirana looks at her, curious. “Ain’t that something,” she asks Solana, “when white folks turn white?”

  “Regis and Jo-Jo and the baby!” Carol says, squeezing through the stuck door.

  “The firemen will take care of it,” I call after her, but she is gone.

  “Fucking Saint Carol,” Solana says.

  Tirana is hot on Carol’s trail. “I’m gonna go watch,” she calls over her shoulder. “I’ll be back, okay? I still need all them forms and shit.”

  Solana is so angry, she would scorch the balcony uprights if she touched.

  This is the way it works. Carol is the social worker, Solana is Legal Aid (she has only been with us three months), I organise. I do the paperwork. They don’t live in the projects; I do. They have degrees and framed certificates. I have no particular qualifications, other than being an expert on how to fuck up a life, which gives me a special kind of usefulness in this setting. Breathing Space is what we call our operation and it runs out of my apartment (my donation). I also run a couple of businesses on the side. My business ventures are not unrelated to the general scope of our enterprise. One business is called Ways and Means (Bad credit history? No problem. Talk to us about Ways and Means) which is an essential service in this neck of the woods; the other is Credit Repair, for those who seek a new beginning and are willing to take a slower uphill path.

  “These are your options,” I explain to Tirana, “once Solana gets you off.”

  “If,” Solana says. “I’ll have my work cut out. Possession of stolen vehicle, driving without a licence, failure to report –”

  “How was I s’posed to know it was stolen?” Tirana asks.

  “Maybe because of the California plates? Why would someone who lives in Eden Gardens be driving an out-of-state car?”

  “Because his friend was visiting, that’s what he said. I just borrowed it.”

  “That might hold water,” Solana says, “if your friend the golden-hearted lender hadn’t vanished into thin air.”

  “I hadda get Dessie to the hospital, didn’t I? What else could I do?”

  Solana raises her eyebrows and gives me a look. “You see?” Her tone implies: might as well try to explain colour to someone born blind.

  “You see?” Tirana says to me, meaning: when your kid has a fever of 103 and you don’t have a car or a phone, what’s the point of trying to explain to someone like Solana?

  “Anyway,” I say, “if Solana can get you off, and if Carol can get you an ‘extenuating circumstances’ waiver so you can keep your rent subsidy and your training job, we could start a clean-up operation on your credit.”

  “I could charge stuff again?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t advise that. But you’ll be able to get the power turned back on.”

  “Carol said you’d do that anyway.”

  “We will co-sign for you with the utility company until you’re credit-worthy again. The way it works, Tirana, there’s a gazillion rules that merchants and collection agencies are required to follow before they report you to a credit bureau, but they break the rules all the time. Sometimes it’s unintentional, because they’ve never checked the regulations, sometimes it’s just because they are impatient or boiling mad. Either way, we get them on the fine print. I get a copy of your credit history, I challenge the items one by one, the bureau has to take them off your record.”

  “Then I gotta pay all that stuff I owe?”

  “No, you don’t. The slate is wiped clean.”

  “Cool.”

  “You’ll be free to start a brand new trail of unpaid bills,” Solana says, acidly.

  “This takes a while,” I explain. “There’s a lot of paperwork. I need your birth certificate, your Social, I’ll give you a list.”

  “How long’s it gonna take?”

  “Six months, maybe more, depending on the circumstances for each item.”

  “Six months! I got to get my phone back before that. I got to think of my kids.”

  “Well, there are ways to get a phone without credit. We can work on both fronts at once. I can have you hooked up in three days, not with Bell South, needless to say, but you’ll have a number, and people can reach you there. To call out, you have to dial a whole bunch of other numbers first. You also have to pay the basic fee in advance each month, and you have to use a pre-paid card for long distance calls.”

  “How much I gotta give you?”

  “$25 when your next welfare cheque comes.”

  “Carol will give it to me.”

  “Where is Carol?” Solana wants to know.

  “She’s at the hospital,” I say. “She says it’s bad.”

  “Regis maybe gonna die,” Tirana says.

  “Carol wants us to join her when we can.”

  “Let’s shut up shop and go then,” Solana says. “If I don’t get out of this place, I’ll go crazy.”

  “Could you guys drop me and the kids off at Wal-Mart on the way?” Tirana asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “No,” Solana says. “We could not.”

  We drive past the black hole in Block F – the charred shell of 17A, 17B and 17C; Jamika’s apartment and the ones above her and below – and out of the parking lot. The entire place smells like an ashtray. “You know,” I say, “her kid may or may not have been playing with matches, but the wiring in these places is sub-standard. They’re all fire-traps. In case you wanted grounds for a suit.”

  Solana skews herself sideways in the passenger seat and studies me.

  “The problem is,” I say, “that if you won, the city would order the landlord to re-wire, re-plumb, re-roof, and God knows what else that is decades overdue. The city will say: if this work order is not carried out, et cetera, Eden Gardens will be condemned. And the landlord will say: condemn the dump, you’re welcome, because a tax write-off is pure candy to him. Ta-ra! And you’ll close off one more lousy chance of lousy housing for folks on the bottom rung.”

  Solana says nothing. She goes on contemplating the right side of my face. It’s not my good side. You want a magnifying glass? I feel like asking. After two miles of non-stop staring, I wind down my window and turn the air-conditioner off.

  “Hell, it’s hot!” she says. “Why’d you do that?”

  “Is my profile up for audit or something?”

  “I’m trying to figure you out.”

  “Don’t waste your energy. It’s not required.”

  “Why are you living in a dump like that?”

  “Is this the long census form, or the short?”

  “You a full-time bad girl? Is that your career?”

  “It’s something I’m good at,” I say, caught off guard. “Which has diddly-squat to do with anything.”

  “Let me guess, white girl. College degree from Randolph Macon or some such deb hatchery Affluent Republican parents, daddy in the oil patch or in guns. Sheer pleasure to give them this much grief.”

  “Way off base,” I say. “So far out in left field, you’re in the wrong ballpark.”

  “Was it you or Carol started Breathing Space?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “You two hired me. I could quit. I’ve got an interest.”

  “It was my idea, as it happens.”

  “That’s what I thought. And that’s what doesn’t add up. You’re not a bleeding-heart do-gooder like her.”

  “Sucking up will get you nowhere.”

  “You’re prime-cut bitch, to be blunt. Cynical, pragmatic, and no illusions whatsoever about Tirana.”

  “Watch your mouth,” I say mildly.

  “You know how to run a business on federal grants, you’re probably skimming some off the top, you’re pr
obably downright bent in a small-time-crook kind of way, but you’re a cockeyed idealist all the same.”

  “Just like you.”

  “Not just like me,” Solana says. “Not just like me at all. You couldn’t be more wrong.”

  “Wrong about you being bent? Or wrong about you being a cockeyed idealist?”

  I know I was wrong about hiring her, but I’m not going to tell her that yet. I brake for a red light and the radio from the pick-up in the next lane hits us like a tsunami. I give the driver a dirty look, then I notice the decals on his wing window and I concentrate on the road straight ahead. One decal says Charlton Heston is MY president, the other one’s a confederate flag. The guy leans on his horn. He’s on the CREDIT REPAIR side of my van.

  “Hey, you!” he calls, jerking his thumb at my sign. “That really work?”

  “Sure thing,” I say.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch.”

  “Gotta be. What’s in it for you? How’d’ja get paid?”

  “There’s a fee. You can pay in instalments”

  “I’ll bet. I’ll bet I can. You got yourself a client, baby.”

  The light changes. “Call my number,” I say, as we move off.

  “Oh, I got your number, baby. You better believe it.”

  All I need. Solana is smouldering. “Odds are good he won’t call,” I say, but she’s on a different track.

  “It’s anger drives me,” she says. “Not idealism.”

  “Yeah. Well. I do anger too, for the same reasons. Easier than sadness or despair.”

  “Oh please,” Solana says. “Don’t make me puke.”

  “Third degree burns,” Carol tells us in a low voice.

  “Will he pull through?”

  “They think it’s doubtful.”

  It’s Regis, the three-year-old, and I have to look away. Jamika is sitting at the bedside, opposite the machines and the intravenous drip. The child is inside a kind of bubble, so she cannot touch him, but she is resting her hand and her cheek on his clear acrylic sky. She has the air of being inside an invisible bubble of her own. She has the air of someone who has always known the worst will happen and has been laying in supplies. “Mama’s here, Regis honey,” she murmurs. “Mama’s here.” She says it over and over again. From time to time, she puts her lips against the bubble’s skin.