Joe begins humming a tune, then sings, “Millions of peaches, peaches for free.”
Prancie knows that his end is near. He makes no sense whatsoever. And so he will never suspect.
Prancie has read the books she needed to read. Prancie has taken charge.
Apple seeds. Ground to a pulp, they are undetectable.
Joe puts his hands into the air and continues to sing. He appears to be feeling a large set of breasts.
Philomenia needs to be gracious. Philomenia needs to keep the bigger picture in mind. Prancie raises her hands to mimic her husband’s. What is he singing? About peaches. “Peaches for free,” Prancie mimics. “Peaches for free.” She rubs imaginary globes. She polishes fish bowls.
Peaches upon peaches and a number of days at the barnacle. She might make something of the opportunity yet, should Joe manage to hang on without significant care. “Back in a while,” Philomenia informs him and steps out of the room.
A peach cobbler has been preordained. Prancie reaches into the stew pot in the lower cupboard and removes her baggie of secret ingredient. She made certain to purchase a new spice grinder for the task. Shall she wear a mask? Could aspiration of any airborne particles be a problem?
“Cheesecloth should suffice,” Prancie says aloud, removing a roll from its drawer. She holds an end to the back of her head and begins to wrap the cheesecloth around and then around again. She is a kitchen bandit. “Pwew-pwew!” Prancie’s voice ricochets off the kitchen walls, her gun finger pointing to the baggie, shooting. “Pwew-pwew-pwew.” Prancie breaks out in peals of laughter. How delightfully fun. “Pwew-pwew!”
“No,” Ed says. “Essential things. Things you couldn’t live without.”
Ella stands with her arms full of shoes. “Shoes are.” She nods vigorously.
He can see she has several with no mates. He prays right there that Ella never becomes the kind of woman to whom shoes are an essential element of life. Air, clean water, shoes, food. “No, they’re not. Amen.”
A loud clump sounds from the ceiling overhead. Miles’ room. The kids have gone mad with the prospect of Ivan. The living room floor teems, swaths cut through the new piles Ella and Miles have created. A garden hose, Miles’ idea, slithers through the mess. A bin of action figure pieces has barfed out half its contents onto Ariel’s old bathrobe, Ella’s safety blanket.
When will Ed be able to clean up? When will Ariel come home? She left two frustrated messages but didn’t say when she might get back.
Miles races down the stairs wearing his old hockey helmet and pads, the jock on the outside of his shorts, his stick clattering.
“No.”
Miles spits out his mouthpiece and dances in a tough guy circle before growling, “I kick your muh fuckn ass, Ivan!” Miles crosschecks the air.
“Where did you hear that?”
Miles raises his stick over his head. “I kick yo ass!”
What?! Ed’s deltoid contracts reflexively. His hand rises an inch from his thigh. Could the instinct to backhand a smaller being actually be innate? Ed repulses himself. He didn’t do a damn thing. But his arm wanted to. How does that happen?
Now what? Parents have to react right away. Same as pet owners. You don’t do anything about it right away and you might as well punish your underlings for finishing dinner or sleeping soundly for all the understanding they’ll have concerning consequences of bad behavior.
Miles stands at the ready, proud in his old hockey uniform. In New Orleans. Ready to kick hurricane ass. “Miles,” Ed attempts calmly. “Do you really know what you’re saying?”
Ella whimpers and moves to Ed, pressing her load of shoes against his leg. “Ella, put them down. Just drop them.”
She limps to a still-clear spot in the entryway directly behind the front door and unloads.
“Miles, answer me.”
“Yeah,” Miles says.
“Tell me what kicking ass means.”
Ella turns and stands transfixed by the conversation.
“Ella, go upstairs and get your coloring books and crayons.”
Ella shakes her head. Little eavesdropper.
“Go.”
“Okay.” Ed listens to her take the five steps necessary to put her out of his line of vision, then stop. Well, so be it.
“Miles Davis May, tell me what the words you just said mean.”
Miles inserts his mouth guard. “Kitchkin bupt,” he shushes, spitty, through his mouth guard.
That’s it. Ed grabs Miles’ arm, his bicep more sinew than muscle under his skin. “Enough! I mean it! I want some straight talk from you. Take that thing out of your mouth.”
Miles pokes out the mouth guard with his tongue so that it dangles from its strap off the front of the helmet’s cage. There is no remorse in his steady gaze. “Kickin’ butt,” he repeats.
“So you’re going to kick my butt?”
“Maybe,” Miles says.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, ‘Maybe.’ ”
Ed closes his eyes, breathes again. It’s not working. He wants to spank Miles. Ed really, really wants to spank his son. Ed squats down on his haunches and grabs both of Miles’ arms. “You’re being disrespectful. I know you’re excited about school closing for the hurricane, but I won’t allow you to swear or to disrespect me. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“But Dad,” Miles says, “more, I want to kick Ivan’s muh fuckn ass.”
Ed shakes Miles. Hard. Hard enough that Miles’ little head stuck in its big hockey helmet jiggles back and forth. Ed can’t believe what he’s doing as he does it.
He stops. “I don’t care what you hear on this street, Miles! It’s not to be repeated in this house!” Ed pulls the helmet off to find Miles staring, unmistakable fear in his teary eyes.
Now Ed wants to hug his bad son, but he can’t. Ed has to be respected or nothing else will work.
Shit, of course Miles wants to be tough like the neighborhood thugs and the bullies at school. Who wants to be the wimp? No way, though, that Miles has any true idea what ‘motherfucker’ really means. Or that’s what Ed chooses to believe at the moment.
Ed gives up. He’s so damn weary. His abdomen whines with gas from all the food he ate at the Browns’. A fart now, and he’ll lose Miles for good.
Ed stands and clenches. “Go to your room. I want you to think about where you went wrong today. I’m going to come up in half an hour, and you’ll tell me what you’ve learned.”
“Dad—”
Ed raises his index finger and points up the stairs.
Miles doesn’t budge.
“I’ll carry you up there if I need to.”
Miles takes his stick and clacks his shin guards. Clacks as if he’s won the fistfight out on the ice. Unspeaking, he heads up the stairs. Ed hears Ella’s smaller footsteps race up in front of Miles’.
Where, in hell, is Ariel?
Roy, he’s off at his second-to-last bandage change before home. He said he felt like walking himself over to the other floor rather than letting some nurse do it in the room. He doesn’t have much faith in them, the nurses, but Cerise thinks they’re safe to talk to. Seems to her the nurses would rather socialize anyways.
He’s faking his pain now to get to stay with Cerise another night. He’s better than fine.
Cerise lies there and wanders in her head, back a long ways.
When Cerise went through high school, she ran the dash. Faster than any other black girl in Louisiana for her last two years. She never got to race any white girls though, so she never knew if she ran the fastest ever. Her times said she did, but then who knows what white girls coulda’ done if they’d seen Cerise’s dark legs kicking down the cinder in front of them. Can’t ever underestimate the white ladies. Cerise bets that her lady neighbor Philomenia, in her day, made a good showing. Cerise has never figured out exactly what Philomenia mighta’ done—something like gymnastics, Cerise guesses—but the lady carries her body in that way. T
he way how you know a man could hurt you something fierce, and you know it just from the way he holds his shoulders. That’s the way Cerise knows Philomenia had something.
Cerise would love to see the white lady run. Run to save her life. No. Not that, really. Cerise wouldn’t ever wish that on a soul. She’d mighta’ liked to see the young Philomenia give it her all, though, around a track loop back when. Take a hurdle or ten of ’em, maybe the triple jump.
Cerise bets Philomenia could be good in the sack but chooses not to. It’s something you can just see in a body. A body’s potential. But the white lady would have to want to be good when she’s bedding her man. There’s a difference.
Cerise hasn’t found any surfing on TV for days, although she might have dozed off before finding it. She’s taken to surveying the nurses about what they like to watch best on television. Cerise has been mightily disappointed so far. The bachelor show. And the other one that sits a contestant under the spotlight to answer questions or ask the audience for help. Or the person can call a friend. Cerise has noticed that the friends rarely seem to come through for the people sitting under the spotlight. It wouldn’t be an easy place to be. Likely they’re supposed to be the friends with the quickest internet, the ones to Google the right answer before thirty seconds run out. Marie, Cerise’s own daughter, would be a terrible phone call contact person. Cerise wonders if Marie would even answer the phone.
Roy, he’s never given a damn what he watches on the TV. Cerise sometimes thinks he waits for the commercials. He laughs at the crazy ones they all invent now. The things don’t make a bit of sense, but Roy laughs and laughs. The gum commercials from England—or maybe they make them here?—crack him up especially.
Today, after the last debridement, they told Cerise the necrosis isn’t under control. It means, in no goddamn uncertain terms, that she’s dying from her right hand up. The flesh on her palm is dead, but they have to get it under control. How the hell do you control dying flesh? She’s gotten so she’s allergic to some of the pain medications they’re giving her, throwing up, and they don’t like putting her seventy-plus years out cold each time because of the long recovery coming up from under. So it works like so: they don’t but poke her with a needle all over her hands to try to numb her. The middle’s nothing on the right. The nerves died with the flesh. But the edges, where the second-degree burns are, the shots don’t do a thing. Neither on the left. Not one thing. Pain with no words for it.
She asked if it was like gangrene. They told her not exactly.
Lady doctors, men nurses, everything’s changed.
Cerise hasn’t seen the same doctor more than twice since she woke up in her mittens. Charity Hospital is what it is. Once you’re stayin’ alive, they don’t care so much anymore. The tired doctors treat her as what they see, she knows. A black woman old as cane dirt. How much can that be worth?
“Yo,” a boy says, sticking his near-shaved head in the door. “Yo, ma’am. You Missus Brown?”
She’s never seen the person before. He looks like he has no real want in the world to be there. “I’m a Yo or I’m a Ma’am?”
“That’d be a ma’am, fo’ sho’,” he says.
Cerise nods. “Come in where I can see you full.”
The boy puts his head out into the hallway and looks around. “Aiight.” He walks in like a teeter-totter, tipping side to side. A gold medallion swings back and forth across his Saints football jersey, and the child has to hold his trousers up with his hand in his pocket.
“So who’s visitin’ me?” Cerise asks him.
“My name Alphonse.”
“An’ why’re you visitin’ me, Alphonse?”
“The Ivan’s coming. I checking up, yo. Seein’ if you needs anythin’.”
“It’s kind of you to call, but I don’t know why it’d be you’re here in my room. You know my husband?”
“That be ol’ man Roy?”
She takes no offense. She’s lucky as hell to have a real ol’ man. Makes her smile, even. Luckier than ever. “Age don’t make a man, Alphonse.”
He gives her a head jerk up, a little one, a sign of acknowledgment. “True.”
What in the world is this child doing in her room? If she could think straighter, she might recognize why or how. She’s certain he doesn’t come from Orchid, though. He doesn’t want to be here, no question. He looks up at the sliding ceiling rail that holds the dividing curtain that she and Roy have pushed out of the way. Some of the metal clip things have come out and dangle from the curtain in rusty blops. Cerise sees what they all know. Charity is the best place to be if you’re dying fast, but soon as you’re not, get out fast as you can.
Alphonse steps a weird shuffle. Cerise watches him doing something in his oversized trouser pocket. “What you doin’, boy?”
“Yo, don’ worry, lil’ ma’am.” The boy draws a roll of cash out of his pocket. It’s rubberbanded loose into an O, fat as a mirliton squash. On the outside is a twenty.
Her days behind the register help her see what it adds up to if it’s all twenties, in the range of thirty-five hundred to four thousand dollars. Cerise, suddenly, thinks she knows who the boy is in the grand scheme of the accident. She can’t take drug money no matter how kind the boy’s gesture.
“Don’t think it,” she tells him.
“Why you say that? Fear say you gone say that.”
Cerise doesn’t really understand what the child says, but she knows he’s trying to give her money for something. He has something to do with being the boss of the cause of the accident. There’s always a chain. Always an above-person, somebody higher, somebody making a bigger cut, somebody taking the risk of going to prison for longer than the lower-downs. Cerise looks down at her mitten hands resting on the thin Charity blanket. That PSW Keyshawn could eat up their savings something fierce. “No, but thank you.”
“Muzzle gone make it right when he can.”
“Alphonse, I appreciate your—No. But I thank, I thank …” Lord, they could use the money now. But the drugs kill their people. And how old can this boy be? He’s the boss? He couldn’t be more than nineteen. Cerise, she knows on the spot, will be crying for her city tonight. How terrible.
The boy tosses the roll of twenty-dollar bills onto Cerise’s bed. “Let your ol’ man do away wid it, den.” Alphonse nods a little nod at Cerise. “Missus Brown.” He goes out the door.
Cerise squints at the roll of money. It lies between her knees.
Prancie twinkles around her kitchen on her toes. Peach cobbler and peach upside-down cake cool on the counter. Prancie has never felt so light and happy. She never understood what taking true action could feel like. To be in control of others’ destinies is a wonderful and freeing sensation.
Joe, when checked earlier, said that the new mayor, Ray Nagin, has announced that those who can leave should leave. The city is evacuating in earnest now. Joe predicted that tomorrow could prove quite difficult on the highways. He said that Philomenia should change her mind about staying. He made reference to her lack of common sense.
But she will do no such thing. She has good work to do at the barnacle. If only the mayor came to visit! Imagine, the new mayor eating her treats! He took office over two years ago, but Prancie cannot help thinking of the bald man in such a manner, as somebody new. He has risen up in their fair city from a strange and new place, from a fresh land of contemporary finance and business savvy. His shiny head seems to her like the toe of a new patent leather shoe. New! New!
Former Mayor Marc Morial left more than something to be desired. How contemptible he was to attempt to change the city charter so that he might reign for yet a third time! Philomenia, repulsed by that police chief Pennington, stepped into the voting booth and made her choice gladly. Prancie could be proud. And certainly, now, here, her new mayor chooses to inform his constituents wisely and with full candor. Make an exodus! Depart!
In the middle of a particularly long twirl, Prancie stops and stares at her creations. No. What
could she be thinking? Of course she could not have the new mayor indulge in her treats. Maybe she had been caught up in the notion of meeting the man, of touching his head. Prancie would so love to just once feel his scalp. Nothing could be so intimate. The sensation might be akin to touching a newly birthed baby, she thinks, although not likely so wet.
Tomorrow, then, Prancie will take her treats to the bar. She can easily assume a hurricane party from the place. She will make her presence known. She will take control.
Prancie steps to her sink and opens the window over it. Room temperature out of the oven, Philomenia.
And there. Good Lord. The stench will destroy her gifts. The wafting scent of something curried and cloved and rose perfumed and foreign floats into her kitchen. Its exact identification proves impossible. Into her own home.
Philomenia closes the window. Peaches must taste like peaches.
“Where the hell?” Roy demands.
“He’s Michael’s boss,” Cerise answers. “I’m for sure.”
Roy has unrolled the money, and it’s what Cerise suspected. All twenties. But her memory of the thickness of bills has failed her. Maybe they used to be more crumpled, or more valued, in her time. The child has given them two hundred and fifty thin twenty-dollar bills. A dirty five thousand dollars.
Roy stands and drags a chair over to the door of their room. He props it under the knob and returns to his bed, spread out in little piles of money. “Aw, Cherry, this is somethin’.”
“Roy.”
“This,” he says pointing at the buffet of cash, “this can help us.”
“It comes from the wrong place, an’ you know it.”
Roy looks at all the money, and Cerise thinks he could really drool, make spit come out of his mouth right there over it. She sure as hell doesn’t want some drug-dealing thug thinkin’ he’s done his penance for her getting a claw hand. Her right hand might not tap out at much other than peppers on a cutting board ever till she’s done, but.
But Alphonse feeling good about paying off young Michael’s mistake can’t be part of the deal. It just can’t. Right? It can’t.
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