“Boy’s going to kill himself,” Roy says, hefting the lid of the grill.
“Should we feed him before he does?” Cerise asks.
“Winn-Dixie?”
“No harm in food for the neighborhood.” Cerise waves at Michael Harris as he caroms past, nearly bouncing from one parked car to the next. The boy’ll take his head off with a rearview. The tires of the tiny motorcycle are nearly round and flat black, no tread in sight. “Maybe we can get the new neighbors outside.”
“Doubt it,” Roy says. “But we can be neighborly.”
“Yes, we can.”
Cerise walks back to the porch. “Dogs? More chicken?”
“Dogs, Cherry. No sense wasting.”
It’s true kids like hot dogs best, but more and more Cerise hates feeding anybody junk. And she bets the new neighbors don’t eat them, although she might be wrong. She’ll pick up more chicken too. She thinks Indians eat chicken. And probably chicken dogs. She could split the difference.
Cerise goes inside and checks on her mustard greens, her black-eyes. Almost done. Her cholesterol’s dropped since she quit with the pork. That and taking her Lipitor. She cheats both dishes using turkey bacon now. Nobody, Marie and Roy included, seems to notice, so Cerise keeps with her new recipes and stays quiet.
She pulls her handbag from the hall chifforobe and the keys from their bowl, and as she checks her hair in the mirror, Cerise can hear the whining motorbike again, the streetcar ringing its bell down on Carrollton, a Harris grandkid crying next door, a dog barking, the refrigerator kicking in, the rhythmic ticking of the overhead fan, and she understands, she understands it all, the way it’s supposed to be.
Outside on her steps, Cerise sees Michael Harris up the block, hunkered over the mini motorcycle, winding it out at full speed. If the boy had a wig on, it’d fly off. He reminds her of a buzzing bee coming down the road, a big brown bee in a white T shirt. Cerise laughs at the thought when the boy starts to bobble over the grooves in the pavement again. He doesn’t let up, though, just keeps on speeding, only this time she can see he’s losing control. He’s getting closer and weaving wider and wider like a water hose left on, snaking back and forth. Roy lowers the grill lid. The boy sits up tall in his seat, and Cerise can actually see his fingers squeeze the brake lever before he plants a foot on the asphalt. It happens so fast, and it takes an hour. It takes a lifetime.
The sitting up and the braking and his foot do something to Michael Harris’ course. His movements make him fly. Michael Harris and the motorbike somersault in the air, the boy hanging on to the bike as if the thing will save him, as if it’s a parachute.
Cerise backs up her steps despite herself. Her body has the sense before her brain how to react, what’s about to happen.
Michael Harris flies straight at Roy.
A thud, a terrible noise. Barbeque sauce strings out into an arc in the air.
Roy and Michael Harris land on their little patch of lawn near the curb. The boy crawls onto his knees, long shorts down around his thighs, his drawers showing. The miniature bike is gone. But the oil drum grill is there. There, there, there. The grill is on top of Roy.
Cerise rushes down the stairs and goes to lift the grill. Her body and her brain both have nothing to do with it. She lays her hands on.
3
Ed rushes from the dishwasher to the front window.
“What the hell was that?” Ariel calls down the stairs.
“I don’t know.” He opens the front door.
“What was that noise?” Miles asks, magically at Ed’s side.
“What was that noise?” Ella echoes, chewing on fruit leather, fingering Ed’s pant leg.
“I don’t know. Stay here.” The kids bunch up next to Ed anyway as he steps down to the sidewalk. He can’t quite see over the cars lining the street, but there’s a white tennis shoe in the gutter, and then Cerise Brown begins screaming. Ed’s scalp tingles. He clutches the kids, shoves them together. “Stay here. I mean it.” He races across the street to where old Roy Brown lies. His big barrel grill pins him to the ground.
“Get it off! Get it off!” The old woman holds her hands in the air. Something is wrong with her palms. One of the Harris boys sits on the grass a few yards away with his long shorts leg pulled up, staring at his socked foot. It flops loosely to the side. A pink bone pokes through the boy’s dark shin. In a sick second Ed realizes that the flesh on Cerise Brown’s palms is charred, one of them white and grotesquely red where pieces of it have been pulled away. Something very wrong has happened. Roy moans.
Ed bends to lift the grill, stops.
“Get it off! Oh, my Roy!”
Ed sees that the grill rests with the lid’s handle on Roy’s waist, both his arms trapped beneath. The lid is still closed, the charcoal evidently contained within. Ed risks it spilling all over the old man, though, if he does not do this right. Roy wears cotton workmen’s pants, a T shirt. Surely they have not saved Roy’s skin beneath them. Ed has seconds. Roy has seconds. Ed needs to help, but he can think of no easy way to free Roy without risking the lid opening. Ed looks down, tries to open his mind, sees his rubber-soled sandals strapped on his feet.
“Roy,” Ed says firmly, crouching, unstrapping.
“Help!” the woman wails.
“Roy,” Ed says again. “Roy Brown. Can you hear me?”
The old man nods, surely in shock, but his unblinking eyes hold Ed’s gaze.
“Roy, if you can help me,” Ed says as he scrambles to put his sandals on his hands, “I want you to try to scoot backwards exactly when I say. Do you understand?” Ed is vaguely aware of other neighbors coming their way.
“Dad?” Miles asks, his little feet appearing inside Ed’s small circle of vision there on the grass.
Roy’s eyes move from Ed’s in the direction of Miles. “Back, boy,” the old man actually says, and suddenly Ella is there next to her brother.
“Daddy?”
“Get back!” the old man roars, and the kids turn and run, and Ed puts one sandaled hand on the lid near Roy’s torso and the other opposite, on the bottom, and begins to tip the grill back up towards its wheeled legs. His arms shake with the weight, the pressure of trying to keep the lid from opening. The grill’s wheels pivot and slip. Ed feels something knot in his back.
“Now,” Ed tells Roy. “Scoot. Move now.” Ed won’t be able to hold it long.
Arms freed, the old man drags himself backwards and out from under the grill. Ed drops the heavy barrel. Gray and orange-hot charcoal spills out the opened mouth. Some kind of meat sizzles in the pile.
Ed stands and looks around. Other neighbors jog up now, the bartender from Tokyo Rose, the Tulane students from three doors down. “Call 911,” Ed tells them.
“I’m pre-med,” the bartender says and bends down to Roy. One of the Tulane students takes out her cell phone.
Ariel runs from across the street, her hair wet, a look of panic smeared across her face. She stops at the kids, grabs them, runs her hands over them, makes them turn around.
“Oh, my,” Cerise Brown says. Her palms are something from a horror movie. Ed immediately knows that he will be a better vegetarian for a long time to come.
“Ed?” Ariel asks.
Ed lunges at his family with his flippered paws, hugs them, and then sees him, sees the neighbor kid. Michael Harris still stares at his foot the way he might at an algebra equation that makes no sense whatsoever.
Prancie steps carefully across the street in her mules. She holds her coconut cream cake aloft. She has waited patiently. Finally the second ambulance left containing that terrible older Harris boy, Michael. Prancie has noticed that the Harrises have not allowed him in their home for the last two weeks and four days exactly. He comes round, however, most days. Too little too late, she thinks. But the parents’ decision does show a surprising bit of gumption.
So many folks dapple the Browns’ lawn that it feels almost festive. A wonderful mood, really. Prancie looks for the Gu
ptas. She saw through her ginger leaves that they arrived on the scene shortly after the drunk had removed the grill from Mr. Brown. Now the entire street’s worth of neighbors mills about. Children intermingle. Adults converse.
Where is that Mrs. Gupta? Certainly Prancie’s ruse will work. What could the woman do but ask Prancie into her home? No one would dare hold a coconut cream in the street for long.
“How kind of you,” Mrs. Gupta says in her thick accent, appearing in a flash out of the neighborhood tableau. “Now that the emergency has abated, a cake is exactly what this situation calls for.” The woman takes the cake from Prancie and gives it directly to Sharon Harris. “Let me get plates and forks,” she tells Sharon and then bustles across the street in her abominable orange sari.
Prancie stands with her mouth agape. She had not expected such a possibility. Catching flies, Philomenia?
Sharon Harris nods, acknowledging Prancie’s presence. “Philomenia,” Sharon says.
There is no use in allowing Sharon the new nickname, Prancie thinks. The mother has daughters whose names resemble venereal diseases. Sharon would not understand. “Sharon,” Prancie provides back, staring at her own cake, enrobed in its perfect angora blanket of coconut. It does not play well against the background of Sharon’s overly snug T shirt advertising the photograph of a passed-away Harris relative. Behind Prancie’s cake, the dates of the boy’s short life stretch across Sharon’s drooping bosom.
Watching through the ginger leaves, Prancie was not surprised to see that Sharon Harris did not climb into the ambulance as well. Indeed, Prancie admits a fluttering of admiration for Sharon mustering such reserve. Perhaps the two of them are a small bit alike. Addressing what they must.
Prancie turns at the sound of the drunk’s voice. He retells his tale. The man is a farce. A charlatan. But who on the block would know this besides Prancie?
“I did the only thing I could think of,” Ed Flank says. Prancie clenches her teeth at the man’s boasting. He is circled by neighbors and fellow drunks from the block’s barnacle, Tokyo Rose. “What else could I do?”
“Dude,” one of the Tokyo Rose parasites says, “you’re a frickin’ hero.” The young man sways and holds a bottle of beer aloft to Ed Flank.
Prancie considers returning home to her phone to report open glass containers on the street. Only cans and plastic are allowed, despite what the containers might hold, much to Prancie’s consternation. That Mardi Gras continues to rob the state of millions of dollars’ worth of interstate highway repair because the city chooses to ignore drinking outside of preordained establishments vexes Prancie daily. But she will not make that phone call just yet.
“It red or white inside?” Sharon Harris asks.
“Pardon?”
“The cake.”
Clearly Prancie has made a coconut cream, not a red velvet. “How are your grandchildren?” Prancie asks. She would very much like to have lost count of the number of illegitimate children across the street. Regrettably, she has had no such luck.
“Growing faster than you can feed ’em. Klameisha’s boy, aw. Apple of my eye.” Sharon looks around at the Browns’ lawn. “Terrible, just terrible.”
Prancie wonders if the woman feels even one tablespoon of guilt for the fact that her son caused the tragedy. “It is,” Prancie says. “Will you be going to Charity Hospital?” All New Orleanians know that Charity is the sole place for true emergencies.
“Michael ridin’ to Touro,” Sharon offers cursorily. “Just broke his leg. He act like a man, he can be a man.”
Sharon works at Touro hospital in some capacity or other that requires her to wear those ill-fitting purple and patterned hospital workers’ garments. She must still carry insurance on her Michael, being that he is not yet eighteen. Prancie considers, for a short moment, how hard it must be for Sharon to practice her version of tough love. Mothers always love their first boys best. “I suppose he will need a—”
“How Joe treatments going?” Sharon asks about Prancie’s husband.
Where is that Mrs. Gupta? The woman and her husband scurried with impressive speed across the street for the Brown emergency. “He says hello to everyone,” Prancie says. “Joe says hello.”
“So he doin’ alright?”
“Yes.”
Tectonic plates have shifted inside Ariel’s skull. If Ed is not always the passive man she has painted him to be, then he has to be somebody different. She watches Miles run around happily with the other kids on the block for the first time since they have moved here. The boys and girls both stop and heft random objects, a tiny potted azalea losing its leaves, a baby’s car seat. They growl and pretend the things weigh hundreds of pounds. Superheroes in hand-me-downs. A little girl, no older than two, squats in her loaded diapers and yanks a dead banana frond from a tree in the Harrises’ yard, holds it over her head, and shows her new teeth, looking for others to see.
Ella clings to her father, and Ariel knows their daughter won’t leave his side now for days. Word is that Ed may well have saved old Roy Brown’s life. Ariel still can’t believe what her husband managed.
Ed displays his sandals, soles up. On one of them, a melted groove marks the dirty surface. “I can’t imagine what Cerise must have felt,” Ed says to the group of neighbors and barflies.
Ariel can’t either. To lose the use of your hands … Would Ariel try to do the same for Ed? She could lift a tractor trailer off Miles and Ella, but she has to wonder what she would do for the man she married. Ariel feels shame creep up her neck. “Amazing,” Ariel says.
“Palm skin is way different than skin on the rest of your body,” a customer from Tokyo Rose offers.
Ed nods.
“Her lines will change,” Ganesh Gupta says.
“Sorry?” Ariel asks.
The man displays his own pink palms. “Her life line. Head and heart lines. I would like to see what the grafting process does. She will be a child. Her hands will say that she is a girl again.”
Such a strange and terrible welcoming party for the Guptas, Ariel thinks. Indira and Ganesh Gupta seem extraordinarily intelligent. She’s happy to have them on the block. Their children, Elizabeth and William, are nearly the same age as Ella and Miles, in reverse gender order. Ariel’s already seen Miles purposely including Elizabeth in their play. A good son. Her good son.
“Come,” Indira says, returning to the group, her arms full. “There is cake.” Ariel has learned Indira is a new women’s studies professor at Loyola University. Ganesh works as an environmental researcher, specializing in reptiles. He has a temporary position with the Audubon Zoo.
They all bump and jumble over to Sharon Harris, who holds a coconut-covered cake. “What a beautiful cake,” Ariel says. It looks like something from the cover of a magazine. “You could bake those for our restaurant.”
Sharon grins. “Miss Ariel,” she says in greeting.
“Hi, Sharon.”
Philomenia stands awkwardly next to Sharon. She offers a half-smile. Ariel doesn’t understand the woman at all. She feels like a puzzle piece from a different box. “Hi,” Ariel says to her.
“A lovely sweet,” Indira says. “Thank you.” She carries a large knife and plastic forks and plates. “Where shall we cut it?”
The kids, smelling sugar on the air, appear fast as sharks to blood.
Sharon parades the cake to the Browns’ tidy porch. “Little pieces,” she says. “A lot to go around.”
Ariel rubs Ed’s back through his shirt. “Did you lock up their house?”
“Not yet.” Cerise Brown entrusted her house to Ed with so much sense and calm Ariel could hardly believe it. The thin, proud old lady gestured with her elbow at her dropped bag and key ring on their front walk, her raised hands such a mess Ariel winced. All of it, such a crazy, horrible mess of an accident. The Harris kid’s little motorcycle was still running, lying on its side in between the banana trees, before somebody killed it.
A grungy man with a blond beard, a guy Arie
l recognizes from Tokyo Rose, says, “We need to bring flowers.”
Indira cuts into the furry icing. People agree with the bearded man.
“We should lock their door,” Ariel says, holding out her hand to Ed. He gives her the keys.
“Balloons always make me smile,” Sharon says.
Ariel looks at the woman’s T shirt. She wonders what the relationship of the boy on it was to Sharon. Ariel cannot imagine. Truly. “Balloon bouquets,” Ariel says blankly. Her head feels screwed on wrong. She sips at her free bottle of beer from the bar. She should lock the Browns’ door now, but she checks herself, thinks that locking it in front of all the friendly people, the caring people who rushed to the old couple’s aid, would give the wrong message.
She looks down. Cerise Brown’s key chain contains only three keys. How simple life must be with three keys. Between the hotel, home, and cars, Ariel herself is the begrudging bearer of dozens.
Indira and Sharon feed the littlest ones first. Philomenia stands slightly apart from the rest. “Prancie,” Indira says, “come, please, have some of your cake.”
What? What is Indira calling Philomenia? The strange neighbor’s face colors. She takes a tentative step towards the vying children. Philomenia made the cake? “It’s your pretty cake?” Ariel asks.
“My childhood nickname,” Philomenia says. The woman’s posture astounds Ariel. Straight as a ballerina.
“Wow,” Ariel says. “I mean, the cake’s really pretty.”
“Thank you.” Philomenia takes a sliver on a plastic plate and stares at it.
“How old is Roy?” somebody asks.
“He’s gotta be in his seventies,” the bearded man says, bellying up for his piece, Heineken in hand.
“Good thing Pedro’s pre-med,” somebody else says.
“Pedro’s his bartending name. He’s really Thurston.”
Babylon Rolling Page 4