Babylon Rolling

by Amanda Boyden

  The rest of her group shrieks.

  “Whooooooooo,” a wheezy man sighs.

  Ed can guess what the purse jabber wants to make sausage out of; context is everything.

  The Bayou View never even lost power last night. And New Orleans evidently took the wispy tailwinds of Ivan perfectly fine. Ed had already decided that they would turn around and leave immediately after breakfast when Ganesh said the mayor had advised that evacuees not return for another day.

  Miles and Elizabeth play tic-tac-toe on the sidewalk with chalk. Elizabeth has clearly discovered the foolproof double-corner-diagonal-followed-by-a-third-corner win, something that’s eluding Ed’s son. Each and every game, Miles is getting creamed. Still, he perseveres, trying to cheat, making half Os and then changing his mind when Elizabeth gives away her coming win with a smile and chalky lurch.

  He has to learn, Ed reminds himself.

  Ella, on the other hand, sulks against the painted brick wall of the restaurant in the sun, her pale scalp showing pink through her blond hair. William Gupta, ignoring children and adults alike, makes distended shapes with his entwined fingers and sings a made-up song, something about waffles, waffles, waffles, waffles.

  Sporting a Rorschach of sweat on the back of his cheap gray dress shirt, a fat man from the group behind Ed steps up to Miles on the sidewalk. “She gone beat you again,” he says. “Look how she settin’ it up. Look, boy.” The man points a shiny shoe toe at the game on the ground. “See? You can’t never let her take kitty-corners without a built-in block.”

  Miles stares openmouthed up at the stranger. He looks back down at the grid on the sidewalk and then back up again at the man. So this black Jerry Falwell has come to instruct Ed’s son in the strategy of tic-tac-toe. With his shoe. No, Ed doesn’t think so. Not today.

  “They’re just playing,” Ed tells the man.

  “It all the fundamentals,” the man says to Miles more than he does to Ed. “Next you be playing checkers and not see what coming. Dominoes. Risk. This a building block. Look, see.” The sweating man uses his shoe toe again and taps at the sidewalk.

  Ed grits his teeth. Quit with the toe, asshole. Inhale, exhale. Ed walks to Miles and kneels. “See how Elizabeth is tricking you here?” Ed points out the diagonal Xs. Miles has already lost if she plays it the same way she has for the last five minutes.

  “Yeah,” the fat man says and tries to erase Miles’ last O with his shoe. “You need to go here or here,” he directs.

  “Is it fair to give away movements?” Indira asks plainly.

  The man chuckles. “Give away the girl’s move? Oh, come on. The boy needs a fightin’ chance, don’t he?”

  The blubber contingency behind them bursts into new laughter. Ed stands and wipes sweat off his forehead. Both parties watch everybody’s moves now.

  “I don’t want to play,” Miles mumbles under the scrutiny of stares. He plops his chalk onto the sidewalk.

  “I win again,” Elizabeth says, quickly drawing how the rest of the game would have played out on the pavement.

  “Aw,” the woman in the red hat says, “he a quitter.” She laughs a big belly laugh.

  “Don’t be no quitter, boy,” the fat man says.

  “He’s my boy,” Ed says.

  The man makes a face Ed has no idea how to interpret. “Yes,” the man says and pauses, seeming to decide how he wants to react, “he sho’ is.” And then the man does something horrible, to Ed’s mind. The man raises his hands in the air in a surrendering gesture, shrugs his hefty shoulders, turns, and steps back to his group.

  The man says something to them under his breath, and they all snicker.

  Miles crosses his arms and scoots around on the sidewalk to face the street.

  Philomenia wakes with a start. She rights herself and steps from her tall bed. She does not know why she has been awakened. She walks to the bay window and looks outside. Strangely, and not as she predicted, the barnacle is silent and seemingly closed.

  Joe.

  She should be sleeping beside him in an additional bed down in the parlor, but she refuses on numerous grounds.

  Yes, Joe could be dead. There. She has thought the words again. It is likely part of the standard transition process for those left behind. She considers the possibility once more. While she slept, Joe might well have expired. She listens, but she hears nothing downstairs, as usual.

  Philomenia moves through dim moonlight to the hall. The linen closet beckons. If this is the night to change her future forever after, she will record her thoughts before descending the stairs. She retrieves the top journal and returns to her sanctuary.

  Prancie tucks her feet up beneath her bottom like a girl while she sits in the bay window overlooking her block. She finds the new, fresh white sheet of paper, sets her pen to it, and begins.

  Firstly, she finishes the supplements and postscripts documenting issues that arose this afternoon and evening with Shane Geautreaux. The man has disturbing tendencies, most especially considering his alcoholism. His compliments perplex Prancie without question, as does his seeming intelligence. The equation does not make sense best Prancie is able to decipher. His compliments are astute, to her mind, but how is it possible for him to formulate them clearly? He appears, on first encounter, to be a sane and observant individual, yet he imbibes throughout the day, ingesting no other liquid besides alcoholic beverages. “That he could be right about my personal, physical appeal but wrong in so many other ways,” she writes, “displays the absolute complexity of human beings.” What else explains a person such as Shane?

  On the other hand, Ed Flank’s disappearance from the block for Hurricane Ivan proves nothing short of divine intervention. Prancie fully believed he would loll around on his front porch until he drank himself into a stupor, holding down his fort, as it were, while his wife brought in the bacon to support the family unit. Ha! Prancie will record it. She still feels rather buoyant from her day at the barnacle. Unusual phrasing is coming easier to her for all the banter time she … she ‘put in.’

  “While his wife brings in the bacon,” she inscribes, “Ed slothfully lounges about the home. He would likely be indigent without her. I pity the children their father’s lack of gumption.”

  Still, Prancie is displeased by the fact that Ed Flank persuaded the Gupta unit to evacuate with him. Prancie had high hopes of making … how would Shane put it? Headway. Yes, headway. The pen goes to paper. “I had high hopes of making headway where the cooking scents are concerned. Unfortunately, the party has departed for grounds no less secure than that on which I now sit.”

  Prancie pauses and stares out the window at the darkened barnacle. Sometimes, on the odd night, its eternal Christmas lights have felt almost festive. They help her to believe that other individuals were still awake at the same time as she.

  Tomorrow she will feed more of the patrons who have plagued her for countless nights with their screeching laughter and their car smashing and their sobbing on her front steps, unaware that an actual person might reside within the home, might worry for the young Tulane woman with hair the color of a canary crying and crying on an actual person’s stoop.

  Prancie wishes only to be free of her burdens. Philomenia, stop. Self-pity is unbecoming.

  Prancie wishes to become her new name fully, to embrace the sound and feel and scent of it. Her new name might be a perfume, it smells so fresh. Prancie is spring grass. Prancie is the mint in sweet tea.

  She will accomplish what she has set out to then. She puts pen to paper. “Ed Flank will be heartily sorry for his mismanagement of his position in this neighborhood.” Prancie pauses. “I will, with conviction, gravity, and fairness, cleanse the street of all that must go.”

  Shane Geautreaux told Prancie that she had the most beautiful clavicles he had ever seen. Honestly, who knew he would even know such a word?

  Philomenia awakes with her cheek pressed against the glass of the bay window. The milky light of a September morning seeps into her
vision. The air is so thick these days, she thinks.

  The journal rests, splayed, across her nightgowned lap.

  Has Joe seen it? Yesterday he managed to wheel his intravenous device back and forth to the rear door to gaze at the cloud formations in the sky. He might take it upon himself to come and visit her in his final hours. He might struggle up the stairs. The journal on her lap would not be what Joe would likely find comforting in his last minutes.

  She revisits her pages and thinks momentarily that her handwriting seems less her own in the most recent paragraphs. One might surmise she had fought sleep before succumbing. It would explain the change in the cursive.

  Prancie carries the best she has to offer toward the establishment of Tokyo Rose. Her husband Joe still lives and breathes, surprisingly quite happily, with his cable television. Prancie must unquestionably continue to curb her worrying about him. Doing so gave her so much peace yesterday she can hardly define the sensation.

  This new offering of food is extraordinary, she admits. Indeed, she holds in her hands a gift the likes of which the barnacle patrons have never tasted before.

  Philomenia plucks the screen door open with the pointed toe of her sling back and calls out, “Come and get it!” She has not heard her own voice as loud as it is now in years. “Come and get it!” Oh, but it feels so good to holler. “Come and get it!” Prancie roars.

  “I heard ya’, Miss P,” Thurman III says. “Hang on.”

  When he walks over to help Prancie with her bags, Thurman III does not seem the same person she came to know yesterday. “How many do you have?” he asks with a good degree of disgruntlement.

  “I do have more food across the street. Thurman, are you all right?”

  “I’m not feeling so hot.” He blinks slowly. “A late night.” He sets the bags on a cocktail table.

  “It seems to me you closed earlier than usual last night.”

  “Yeah? Huh. Too many shots then. Aspirin, aspirin, where are you …” The young man sets out on a search behind the bar.

  Maybe Thurman will be less hungry today. If he would only leave his position here, he would undoubtedly become a moderately acceptable physician eventually. He is not serving his own best interests by working in a bar so often when there is serious studying to be done. Prancie stays attuned to her case study’s symptoms. “Is your stomach bothering you?” she asks.

  “Drive-through Taco Hell late night has its repercussions, Miss P, if you know what I mean.”

  A smile tugs at Prancie’s lips. Her treats are working. “I’ll be back in a moment with more.”

  Thurman shakes a medicine bottle. “What’s for lunch, anyway?” The loose rattle suggests few pills remain.

  “These are just the accoutrements.” Prancie flutters her hands over the bags. “The crock pot comes over next.”

  Prancie returns with her étouffée. “Here, Thurman, take this.”

  “Miss P, you call me that one more time and I’m banning you for life.”

  Prancie shakes her head. “I simply can’t call you Pedro. It maligns your father.”

  “Shows how well you know him then. He can’t stand ‘Thurman’ either.”

  She is momentarily astonished. “Well, then, why in the world did he choose to name you the same?”

  “If you want the truth, it was a stipulation of the will.”

  “Your grandfather?” Philomenia never liked the man. When Thurman Junior escorted Philomenia to her cotillion, his father did not bow as properly as he should have, as if he thought her own father had not attained the necessary social status to earn her the right of coming out. “Well, that is highly unfair. Highly.”

  “Pedro’s cool then, okay?”

  She simply cannot bring herself to look at this young man and call him by such a misnomer. “Please, I need another choice. What is your middle name?”

  He plugs the crock pot in at the end of the bar where he has created a buffet of sorts with her various side dishes. “Pedro’s my middle name,” he says. Prancie believes she is being teased.

  “And if I were to make up a new name for you? Something only I called you?” Prancie quite likes the idea.

  “Keep cooking as good as you do and you can call me Dick, all I care. Just lay off the Thurman.” Well, now, she has just been complimented again. Who would have guessed that the barnacle could produce so much praise?

  “This is what I call a spread!” a familiar voice says behind Prancie. She turns with a smile on her face to see Shane Geautreaux in silhouette, backlit in the frame of the doorway, his arms outstretched. She believes he looks, momentarily, like the savior.

  Do not expect any man to save you, Philomenia. You will be gravely disappointed.

  13

  By noon, Lil Thomas’ crying has taken over the house. Cerise wants to know, in about ten minutes flat and counting, why Marie and Thomas don’t just go home and take their boy with them. Cerise can only guess it’s ’cause she’s now officially disabled and her daughter’s friend is supposed to be her official caretaker, only nobody knows if Keyshawn knows what he’s actually doing.

  Today, Cerise’s left hand itches as fierce as the time, decades ago, she had a pH imbalance in her privates. Cerise bangs her mitten, subtly as she can, on her chair armrest. She doesn’t care if her behavior is normal or not. She absolutely cannot stop what she does. It itches and itches. The hyenas on the Animal Planet scootch their bottoms against anything they can find. Everything walking on some kind of legs has gotta scratch an itch now and again.

  Marie bounces wailing Lil Thomas on her hip and blocks Cerise’s view of the television. He sees Cerise and holds out his arms to her to be taken. It breaks Cerise’s heart. She wants nothing more than to be able to hold him, hold Roy, hell, even hold Marie in a hug, but it’s against doctor’s orders, and she can understand why. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. She’d use her hands, curl them around a baby bottom or a shoulder and bust open everything, maybe make the right hand just plain fall off. “Move out the way, Marie,” Cerise says. “Let me see these poor Alabama folks. Look it. They lost everything. The tree squashed their car and their house.”

  Marie turns around to look but stays right in the way. Lil Thomas swivels to try to keep reaching at Cerise. Just breaks her heart. Lil Thomas’ crying goes up another notch. “This not gonna work,” Cerise says.

  “You think they have good insurance?” Marie asks.

  “No, Marie. This.”

  “What?”

  “Turn that off. Turn the damn TV off. You’re gonna deafen your boy before he’s walking.”

  Marie takes the remote from the coffee table and aims it at the screen. Lil Thomas turns off his crying with the television, and the room goes blessedly quiet for a moment. Cerise can hear all three men out on the porch conversing. Roy and Thomas took a walk around the neighborhood this morning like two boys exploring a just-found ghost town. Now they all talk and talk on it, about luck and Camille and the pumping stations and the Mississippi River and the cushion of the wetlands getting eaten up. Talk and talk. It’s all Cerise can do now, and it’s the last thing she feels like doing whatsoever. Talk.

  Marie looks down at the silenced child in her arms, then looks back at Cerise, a surprised look on Marie’s face.

  “Sensory overload,” Cerise says, not even wanting to explain more. “Babies need a break.”

  “Normally he loves the TV on,” Marie says, fluffing Lil Thomas’ silky curls. His cheeks are pink, his upper lip covered in snot.

  “At your house, where he knows everything,” Cerise says, “an’ things are normal. Here it’s all new, with other people and strangeness. Use your head. You’re a smart woman. Just use your smarts and apply them to your baby. It’s not so hard.”

  Marie looks indignant first, and then she looks just plain hurt. Cerise doesn’t care. She’s sick of it all. Marie pulls a tissue from her brassiere and wipes Lil Thomas’ nose, which gets him crying all over again.

  Cerise
finds Marie’s tissue storage in her brassiere old-timey enough to want to say something about it, but she bites her tongue. “Why don’t you three go home?” Cerise asks. “Get him back into his environment. He’ll be better there.”

  “You’re kicking us out?”

  “The hurricane done passed us by, case you didn’t notice.”

  Marie stands with her mouth open. She closes it with a clack of teeth. “Right now, Mother,” Marie says, her voice so over-calm that Cerise knows she’s in for a lecture, “I know you’re in pain, and so I know not everything you say is always going to be sensitive or even pertinent. But, yes, sure, we can leave. I hope all goes well with Keyshawn. He has our numbers if there’s an emergency.” Marie gives Lil Thomas’ nose a final quick swipe. The boy twists his face away and then headbutts his mother in the chest.

  Cerise taps her left hand on the armrest. Tap, tap. How much is she supposed to put up with? And then she feels like crying. She will not. She will not give in. Tomorrow’s another debridement. Another time to see if death’s still creeping out of her right hand towards everyplace worse. “I love you,” Cerise manages. “All of you. Very much.”

  Marie isn’t even looking at Cerise anymore. She’s moving around the room picking up Lil Thomas’ toys and baby teething cookie messes and the men’s scraps with her one free hand. “I’ll go get Thomas to help pack up our bags,” Marie says and heads to the front door.

  Cerise hears Marie say through the screen door, “Mom says it’s time for us to go.”

  “Naw,” Roy says. “You stay tonight too. We have some dominoes to play.”

  “We should give you some peace,” Marie says.

  “But I don’t want you to go,” Roy says, and Cerise thinks he sounds like a child.

  “Come on, Thomas. Help me pack up. Daddy, we’ll leave the leftovers. You and Keyshawn should be able to heat them up easily enough.”