Elsewhere, California

by Dana Johnson

  Yet, Mama says. Yet.

  Uncle Cesar got something wrong with him and Keith, if he ain’t trying his hardest to turn into one of them bad niggas, and Granny just sits on the porch listening and quiet and sewing like she don’t hear nothing, acting like that half Indian they say she got in her.

  THE HILLS ARE alive with the sound of music, and I like it because I’m in the hills of Tennessee and somebody is always playing music. If it’s not me playing this movie, then somebody else is playing what makes them happy. The hills are alive with the sound of music, I sing and Keith says, The hills are alive with the sounds of shit. Turn that dookie off, Avery, for real. But I walk around with my eight-track player and play all of it, over and over again. Me a name I call myself! Raindrops on roses! Whiskers on kittens! I hate to go and leave this lovely sight! Keith and my cousin ReRe play Al Jarreau singing We Got By. They love the line when he says, You bring the beans girl and I’ll buy some wine. They sing that part loud and drag out wine like wiinne. ReRe got her fatigues on from the National Guard and she is smoking a joint, and they are sitting on the porch with Anne Marie that lives down the road with Uncle Jo Jo, who Mama said aint none of my uncle, but why we call him that then? I can’t find my tape. I have been looking and looking, and I am very careful with it because I play it like it’s going out of style, ReRe says. Keith has it, I know.

  I ask him. Where is it?

  Stop asking me about that bullshit tape, Keith says. ReRe laughs and the smoke puffs out her mouth. That’s a crazy tape, Ave, she says, and then she takes another puff. Granny is sitting in the kitchen in the house like she always does, and so I know she can hear him. Why doesn’t he care? He should care about Granny hearing him, at least.

  For reals, Keith. Where is it?

  For reals, he says.

  Tell me, I say.

  Keith says, Tell me.

  But Anne Marie scratches her cornrows and then she tells me. Look under the porch.

  I get on my hands and knees in the road and I look. I see my tape. Smashed. It’s all smashed and the tape is pulled out, looking like a whole bunch of brown worms all curled up on each other crawling all over my tape. I scooch under to get my tape. I don’t like being underneath the porch. This is where Granny’s dog King went to die after he got the mange. It’s dark and cold, and I know there are a bunch of bugs here crawling around. Roaches, fat earthworms, and ticks, a whole bunch of little red ticks that get on you all at the same time and crawl up your legs and look like somebody is coloring your legs red from the ankles up. Ticks that suck your blood. They get on you and you don’t even know it until they are so big, something growing from up out of you and you can’t believe you didn’t know they were sucking on you all that time. And bones, I see bones. Whose bones are those? Are they King’s bones? Are they chicken bones? No. They’re too big to be chicken bones. I crawl backwards on my hands and knees and pull my tape out with me. Whose bones are those underneath the porch? I’m asking Keith and Anne Marie. She shrugs and swings her legs off the edge of the porch and hums to the song and sings Al Jarreau, Flying, trying, sighing, dying. Why do you care? she says. And she sounds just like Brenna to me when she says that. Even looks like Brenna. Anne Marie is golden red with freckles on her face too, but they look different on her because her skin is already on the way to being the color of those freckles. And people say she’s got red hair but it’s really orange. Exactly ten cornrows of orange hair.

  Yeah, what you care for? Keith asks.

  It’s scary. Don’t you think it’s scary?

  Keith starts to mess with me. He makes his eyes big. He starts singing in a spooky ghost voice. The bones of Kunta Kinte, the bones of his mama, the bones of his sister and his daddy and his brother. The bones of Kunta Kinte, the bones of his mama, the bones of his sister and his daddy and his brother.

  ReRe says, Leave her alone, Keith.

  Anne Marie starts singing the song with Keith. They sing it over and over. Keith jumps off the porch and does a African dance. He throws his arms and legs all over the place like something jumped in him and is making him do the dance, like he isn’t doing it because he wants to. Idiot. I hate this song. I hate this song. I pick up the biggest rock I can find in the road and throw it as hard as I can at Keith’s head. The sound is nasty, like a stick hitting another stick. ReRe says, Don’t do that Avery, but she stays on the porch watching and keeps smoking her weed. He screams and holds his head and blood drops fall on his T-shirt and spread open like little flowers. He comes at me but I take off. I’ma get you and I’ma beat your ass, he hollers. You watch! But he doesn’t catch me that day. Not on that day.

  13

  THE LIVING ROOM is heavy with all of us. Massimo with his clenched fists, hiding the softness inside, Brenna lit up from the windows, soft light falling on her red hair, making the split ends on the top of her head look like soft sparks crackling above her. I am thinking of them both. Of myself. Keith. If I can strike a balance between so many things, maybe this will all turn out all right.

  Brenna is still leaning on me. She softly pinches the back of my neck, something she used to do to annoy me when we were kids. Usually with cold fingers, because of a Slurpee or a Big Gulp or ice that she’d been pulling out of cups and eating. “Cut it out,” I’d say. “Why do you always do that?” “To shock you,” she’d say. “Sometimes your uptight ass needs to be shocked.” But now she does it absently, out of habit, and it soothes me.

  “Brenn.” I pat her rough fingers on the back of my neck. “You should leave. It’s going to be all right.”

  Massimo raises an eyebrow and then lowers his head, nodding. When he looks up, his eyes glance over things in the room, finally landing on me. I can’t read his face. I don’t know if those sharp eyes and clenching jaw are pleased that I’ve asked Brenna to leave, or if he is angry that I took too long to ask her to leave. Brenna circles the table so that she is across from both of us. She tells us, “You’re not going to call the police.” I stand and walk toward her. When I reach her, I pull her to the door. “Massimo and I have to talk about this. It’s better if you go.”

  Brenna knows that at least if the police are called, it won’t have been because I called them. She knows that if the police are called, it will be because I lost some kind of fight. I may have tried so many years not to see Keith, but passivity, looking the other way, is not the same as putting someone in jail, I tell myself.

  “Okay, then,” Brenna says. She hugs me, perfunctory and light at first, but then sudden, like a spasm, she squeezes me, and without a word to Massimo she is out the door. She does not close it behind her, and Massimo and I are still as we listen to her start up her Honda, hear its fading chug as it backs out of our long driveway. When I cannot hear her car anymore, Massimo asks his same question.

  “Why, Avie?” He lights another cigarette and takes a deep puff before he answers the question, himself. “For years I have heard this. She is my sister. We have known each other since we are kids. That you are all tied together.” He gets up to pace and his voice gets louder. Higher. “But do you know how much shit I eat for that—” He inhales and pinches his lips tightly. “For Brenna, to be in my house treating me like I’m less than nothing. Even when she does not open her big mouth, this is what she is saying to me.”

  “But she didn’t even say anything,” I say. Thinking about how unpleasant she could have been. He walks away from the table, getting farther and farther away from me, getting angrier. “That’s right,” Massimo says. “She says nothing, as if I am not worth talking to.”

  In the kitchen, standing behind the counter, he pours some water from the tap and drinks. He tosses the glass in the sink, and something breaks. There is a high splintering sound that makes me cringe and cover my ears. “My-a God, Avie.” His pronunciation makes me feel tenderness for him; all these years in the States and he still can’t say “my God.” His face has shaded into a deep red, and when he smokes his hand holding the cigarette shakes. Fury. He is no
t good at containing it, as I used to be until recently, at keeping it moving underneath his skin slow and quiet like a stream. Instead, he fights with his fury, struggles and thrashes against it, like it’s holding him down and trying to drown him.

  “There is Brenna,” he says. “And now your cousin. What do I do? What do you want me to do? Give him a key? Make gifts of everything I have worked so hard for? Whenever I want you to ask me for something, just to tell me what it is you want, you won’t. You act as though I treat you like a whore, and anything I ask you is to spread your legs a little wider. But my-a God. When you do ask me for something.” On the floor next to the kitchen counter there is a pile of books. He kicks the pile hard and pages flutter, opening and closing like wings. Suddenly he’s sitting in the middle of the floor, breathing as though he’s just run a long distance. I make him so tired. He gives and he gives and sometimes feels as if it is never enough, but that’s only because we are not using the same currency. We can’t decide what’s being traded and how it’s being paid for. He says he will give me anything, and he gives me a lot. I say that I don’t want to be given anything, that I just want to be free. He says money is freedom, but I say only if everybody has it.

  He is sitting halfway in the kitchen and I join him, setting myself on the cool tile of the floor. He lets me take his hand this time. “Massimo.” I squeeze his hand. “I understand everything you are saying to me, but listen to what you are asking me to do. You are asking me to put family in jail. You are asking me to pick up the phone, to stand by while you pick up the phone, and send Keith to jail. You are telling me that I have to put my cousin in jail.”

  “He will have put himself in jail.”

  This is true and this is not true. This is what Massimo cannot be made to understand, unless I figure out a way to make all the stories I have told him come together so that he can understand.

  14

  MASSIMO IS IN the kitchen now, cleaning broken glass out of the sink so he can cook. Making things. Food, the occasional piece of furniture. These are the things that keep us in the world, he is always saying. “Contracts are not exciting, Avery. But making things is.” He hums. Occasionally pots and pans clash as he rummages for the right one. Plates clatter in the cabinet, and I know that he is pulling a plate from the middle of the stack, only to put it on top and search for another, changing his mind as to which dish he wants to use and in what order. He steals glances at me, tosses his gray-streaked hair out of his face only to have it fall back in his eyes. I am curled up on the couch, drawing. I keep thinking of the two drops of blood on the bed, so that’s what I’m drawing on my white pages. Dots of blood. But they don’t look right. They just look like polka dots, and blood is much more than that.

  Massimo and I never finish the argument. We have just decided to ignore the problem for now, even though we know that never works. The house is quiet, except for Massimo’s work sounds in the kitchen. He calls out, “Avie. Dodgers game, no?” I look up surprised, and his wan smile fades as he turns back to his meal. Of all the things we have taught each other since being together throughout the years, this is the most surprising. Massimo has been a soccer fanatic all of his life. But I got him to see some value in baseball, to care when he pretends that he doesn’t care at all. I turn on the radio and find the game. They are home, the Dodgers, and so Vin Scully is announcing the first few innings, urging Los Angeles to make sure they are well insured with State Farm and catching up the city on injuries, averages, and losses.

  Vin Scully is telling everybody who is listening. It’s 2–0, Padres. Full count. Bases loaded.

  THIS SUMMER IS the best cause of baseball and The Sound of Music. But Keith messed up my day. He took my tape again even though I just got another one with money Mama and Daddy sent me. I got a whipping from Granny because I busted Keith’s head open with a rock. He chased me, but I was too fast that day. Granny always hits hard with a green switch she keeps against the wall on her back door. Man it hurt. This is going to be the last time I’m going to get hurt for doing something. I ain’t doing nothing no more. I hid in the woods even though it’s scary, cause Granny is way scarier. I came out and sat on the porch because I’m thinking I’m in the free and clear. But she got me. She came up real quiet like a Indian. I’m sitting on the porch, humming Bless My Homeland Forever. She comes from the back of the house, from the kitchen, where she’s always sitting staring out the open door into her garden of greens, tomatoes, and onions. She comes around the side, and I don’t hear her because I’m humming. You think she is weak cause she’s old, but she grabs hard and whips me. She says, Stop that crying. Stop it. You don’t never treat kin like that, hear? You cousins and here he is bleeding all over the place. My legs are on fire. She stares at me with them gray eyes that all the kids on the hill are afraid of because they’re gray, not brown like everyone else’s, gray like that old well water bucket we use. They got light rings around the outside, not dark ones like they’re supposed to have. She stares at me with them eyes and then she says, Keith right. That music shit, and then she takes her switch and limps to the back of the house.

  I’m sorry when I see that rag wrapped around Keith’s forehead later. I’m lying in one of the two beds in the house on top of that lumpy mattress. I love the smell of the bed, salty and sour and smoky like dirt. I’m only afraid of the roaches that crawl along the wall and in between the wallpaper that’s peeling. They sometimes crawl in the bed with me and my other cousins. I’m lying on my back with my eyes closed and when I open them, there is Keith on the side of the bed with a box of cupcakes. Hostess. Hey, he says.

  I say, Where’d you get them? Those? I say.

  Stole ’em.

  You going to get in trouble. Why? I say.

  For you.

  I can’t eat all of those, I say. I’m fat. Everybody says so.

  Naw, dummy, Keith says. Look on the bottom.

  I turn the cupcakes over and I hear them bump up against the box and slide up against each other. There are three baseball cards on the back of the box. Rick Manning. Cleveland Indians. J.R. Richard. Houston Astros. And Ron Cey. Dodgers. Ron Cey. Ron Cey. He’s my favorite. Stubby. Big forearms like Popeye. When he bats, he grinds his back leg in the dirt over and over again, digging in, and when he runs, he waddles. The Penguin.

  Keith says, I know you like that fool. You weird, but. He shrugs and then scratches his head.

  Yeah, I say. I’m staring at the box. Man.

  Keith gets some old timey heavy scissors, and I cut out the Ron Cey card. I don’t collect cards serious like other kids. I just keep Dodger cards whenever I find them or buy them at 7-Eleven or pull them 3-D cards out of Kellogg’s. If I get a card that’s not a Dodger though, I don’t care. They go in the trash. I stare and stare at that Ron Cey card all summer long but keep it in my suitcase to be safe. I’m going to be the first woman pitcher in the majors. I’m going to come up with a special way to pitch. People are going to say, How did she get past us with that? And I’m going to be the peacemaker of the team. I’m going to be fair, treat people right. We’re going to always win. Ron Cey is going to say, You pitched a good game, Arlington. A good game. He’s going to think I’m perfect. Even better than Cindy Garvey. There’s not going to be anything to change about me. We live in a nice big house and have lots of money. Brenna never understands. Gross, she always says. He’s such a fucking grandpa. But she doesn’t know about being together on the same team, how bad that would be. Seriously dynamite.

  WELL WATER IS super good. Super cold with a taste like nickels and dimes and quarters if you put them in your mouth. I never taste water like this, except in Tennessee. Water in California smells like water in Joan’s swimming pool sometimes. It practically burns your nose, it smells way like chlorine. I like the adventure of the South, but everybody always tells me to shut up when I say it reminds me of Little House on the Prairie. I’m not talking about Laura Ingalls. I’m talking about Granny’s house. Wooden, like a cabin, but with shing
les on the roof. Granny’s bathroom doesn’t work anymore because the pipes are all messed up. So we take baths in a tub on the porch and we have to boil some hot water to mix it in with the well water. And the toilet doesn’t work, so we use the outhouse Mama says she used when she was coming up. We brush our teeth in the kitchen and spit the toothpaste out of the back door. Granny cooks on a stove, but the flames are inside of the stove, not on top. They make the flat top hot from the inside. In the middle of the living room, there is another stove that goes all the way to the ceiling, through the roof. There is a couch, and some chairs, and a television. That is the only thing that is not like Laura Ingalls. The television. Sometimes, if it is too hot, Africa hot, then we can sleep on the floor in the living room with the door open, just the screen. I love this. It feels like sleeping outside. In L.A. I could never, ever do this. Not even in West Covina would they let me sleep in my own yard. Too much wrong with the world, Mama says. You don’t need to be outside at night. Something liable to happen, she says. But Tennessee is different. We even have slept on the porch on pallets, Granny calls them.

  I tell Daddy this. How much I love that I get to feel a little like Laura Ingalls. He looks at Mama and they both laugh. Big laughs and for real. They never, ever laugh like that. Nothing is ever that funny to them. Daddy gets a serious look, though. He says, Avery, I need to tell you something. It’s 1978. You know that much, don’t you?

  He always does this. Why is Daddy talking to me like I’m a baby? Yes, sir, I say.

  And when Laura Ingalls live?

  Pioneer days.