Mr. Chen set a steaming bowl of pork and bamboo shoots on their table. “Nice to see you,” he said. Goldfish swam in a big blue tank by the door. The fish looked like wontons floating in meager soup. A group of fine-suited men—Hugh took them for lawyers—arrived and requested the best table, by a window.
The pork smelled like peppermint.
“So now you’re pissed at all men, right?” Hugh said, trying to make a joke, to rescue the evening from its shaky start.
“No, I don’t hate men,” Alice said. “I just don’t like them very much.” She didn’t smile or laugh. Getting close to her would be as tough, Hugh worried, spearing a bamboo finger, as communicating smoothly with Mr. Chen.
They spent the rest of the dinner in near-silence. Then Hugh drove them downtown. A plastic Budweiser bottle, tall as a grain silo, fastened by guy wires to the ground, towered over Emancipation Park near the corner of Wheeler and Dowling. Radio stations gave away T-shirts, posters, cassette tapes.
Hugh bought two cups of cold beer. “Did you know Dowling Street was named for an Irish barkeep—Dick Dowling—who helped the Confederate Army win the battle of Sabine Pass?” He was fidgety, talking too much, relying on his “stuffy” old history to get him through the evening. So far, Alice didn’t seem bored. She’d even said she liked Mr. Chen’s. “He lured a bunch of Yankee boats into a nasty port, knowing they’d run aground on an oyster reef.”
Alice came from Eugene, Oregon, and had lived in Texas only two years. “I’m having a little trouble with this ‘Juneteenth’ thing. Explain it to me again,” she said.
Hugh handed her a napkin. “Okay. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. But it wasn’t until June 19, two years later, when a Union general defeated Rebel holdouts in Galveston, that slaves here—about 300,000 of them—learned the truth.”
“All that time? They were free and didn’t know it?”
“Yep. For over a hundred years after that, families celebrated the day informally. In ’79, it became an official Texas holiday.”
“Hm.”
“Something wrong? You haven’t even touched your beer.”
A man bumped them, sucking a flask of MD 20/20. The back of his T-shirt said, “Black By Popular Demand.” He raised the flask in the air, shouted, “Hallelujah!” and stumbled into a crowd that was beginning to flank the music stage. A pretty young woman with twin baby girls in her arms danced to the beat of her Walkman. The girls’ smiles sent a pang through Hugh’s tight chest.
“It’s awful to admit this, because it’s part of my job to protect civil rights and stuff” Alice whispered, “but I’ve never been around this many black people. In Oregon, there just aren’t that many—”
“Scared?”
“A little Yeah.”
Maybe five hundred people had come to see the fireworks and to listen to the blues, only a handful of whom were white. “No need to be,” Hugh said. “This is a night of joy.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Juneteenth? Sure. Come on. Let me introduce you to my friend Spider.”
They cut through a gap in an orange mesh fence to reach the backstage platform. Graffiti curled across a splintered picnic table behind a bank of lights: “We are one world of tempted humanity,” “Shit,” “Piss,” “Fuck.”
Spider was guzzling a Lone Star longneck, perched on a metal garbage can next to an ice chest. He wore a straw fedora, shades, and a light pink cotton shirt. A pair of drumsticks was jammed into his back jeans pocket.
At his feet lay a wrinkled newspaper, headlines smeared by water, beer, and mud: “Pentagon Officials Say … apes.”
“Looking good,” Hugh said.
Spider raised his arm. “Feel like a bar of iron, man.”
“Just nail down the beat.” Hugh offered him a Camel.
“Yeah,” said the bass player, a young white college student. “Use your feet.”
“Say, baby, what up?” Spider said to Alice.
She blushed.
“Can’t wait to hear you. We’ll be out front,” Hugh said.
“Break a leg,” Alice said hesitantly.
“Mm-hmm.” Spider looked her up and down. “Rather feel me a nice, firm leg, know what I mean?”
She brought her hand to her throat, started to force a laugh, then turned abruptly and stalked past the picnic table and the lights.
“What I say?” Spider asked. “Sen-si-tive. She royalty or somethin’?”
“Good luck,” Hugh said hastily, then ran, catching Alice at the rip in the mesh. “Hey?”
“I know. I know what you’re going to say. Relax, right? This isn’t the campus.”
“He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“This is just a good-time party. Sexual harassment isn’t sexual harassment here.”
Hugh’s jitters returned. What was he doing with this woman? Spider was right. She was sensitive. Arch, like Paula. He’d seen it in her from the first. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. That’s just Spider. He goofs around a lot.”
“By the way, Hugh, they never mean anything by it.”
“Okay. We’ll listen to one song then go, if you like.”
She smiled, took a big breath. “No. No, I don’t mind staying. It’s just. I’m a little nervous, like I said. I’ll settle down.”
“Sure?”
“I’m sure.”
They wove through the crowd, staying as close to the stage as they could. Each time they cut a path through chatting folks, three or four men followed closely on their heels. Hugh caught only a glimpse of them—baggy shorts and L.A. Lakers shirts—and cursed himself for tensing up. Alice’s fears were contagious.
“Do you ever worry that you’re barging into a world that isn’t really yours?” she asked him now.
“Sure. I worry about it all the time.”
“How do you reconcile yourself?”
“Respect,” he said. “I just try to treat everybody with respect.”
She nodded.
Finally, he found a cool, dry spot about fifteen feet from the amplifiers. He took off his windbreaker and spread it on the ground for Alice.
A radio DJ—Hugh recognized the voice but not the man—took the stage, in front of Spider’s sparkling black drums. “Freedom!” he shouted. The crowd chanted the word. “Friends, we’re here tonight to remind ourselves how steadfast and resilient is the African-American heart! For centuries, it has endured untold indignities—”
“Tell it!”
“—tragedies—”
“Say it, brother!”
“—shame—”
“Amen!”
“—and emerged triumphant!”
A jubilant chorus. Alice gripped Hugh’s hand.
“We must never forget: the price of Liberty is eternal vigilance!”
Applause like small-arms fire, rapid and distinct.
“Now. You ready for some blues?”
“Bring it on, bring it!”
“Welcome back, then, a Houston legend: Spider Lammamoor!”
Spider appeared from the wings, tipping his hat. Then he raised his beer in a triumphant communal salute.
The bass player started a three-chord stutter-step; Spider followed with a kickbeat. His arms and legs snapped crisply through syncopated bends and slides, through gospel and blues, rockabilly chit-chat and steaming, old-time swing. He walked the bass down double-stops and burning, bold glissandos: Look here, like that, ah-ha!
The smells of barbecued chicken and buttery corn on the cob mingled with the sizzle of hot dogs in the city’s humid air.
I carried my baby to the doctor this mornin’
This is what he said
He said, You better be careful with this woman
Man, she almost dead.
The grass smelled of moisture and fertile roots, webby leaves.
I just want my woman to be happy here
Happy wherever in this world she go.
The young men in L
akers shirts edged forward, right behind a family next to Hugh. He snuggled closer to Alice and tightened his hold on her hand.
Spider swung the band into a pseudo-waltz with a ragged gospel top. Mournfully, he croaked into a mike, “Shoo-fly in a windstorm …”
Hugh laughed. He told Alice he’d been reading WPA-era slave narratives in the Houston Public Library one day, and had come upon the story of Jeremiah Harris, an ex-slave. Harris had said fighting slavery was “like a shoo-fly in a windstorm. Peoples so tiny and the Man so huge.” Later, Hugh had repeated Harris’s phrases for Spider, and Spider had cherished them as if they were biblical wisdom.
“Shoo, shoo, shoo-fly ….” he wailed now into the silver mike.
Between sets, Hugh led Alice backstage again. Spider was reminiscing about his old cronies: Nathan Abshire, Big Maceo, One-Hand Sam. The younger musicians listened raptly. “Sam be pickin’ with his right hand, spoonin’ down that snap-bean gumbo with his left. Good Condition Boy, Sam, drank hisself to deaf right here on Dowling Street. Couldn’t make him live, no matter what we done …”
Hugh squeezed Spider’s arms. “Didn’t I tell you, man, the blues is alive and well? You sounded great. And the crowd’s eating it up.”
“Feelin’ purty good,” Spider said, popping open another longneck. “I gotta thank you, Hugh, talkin’ me back into this-here devil’s hoo-doo.”
“It’s where you belong, Spider.”
“Very nice,” Alice mumbled, teetering close to Hugh. “Thank you for the show.”
“Any time, Missy.”
Hugh felt her flinch, pressed against his back, but she just smiled. She whispered to him that the amplifiers had given her a bit of a headache, she was enjoying herself, really she was, but could they possibly—
“Sure,” Hugh said, nervous once more at the prospect of being alone with her, with nothing to distract them from the fact that here they were together. He turned again to Spider. “Gotta run.”
Spider grinned at Alice. “Yeah, I see.”
“So I’ll drop by Monday?”
“Bring me some smokes, awright?”
“All right. See you then. You’re the best, Spider.”
Hugh strolled Alice back through the park, past the giant plastic beer bottle, the hot dog stands, mothers and fathers and children, cotton candy. On the street, kids ran in packs past parked cars, excited by the music. No breeze. The air was hot. Crickets and echoes of songs. A television flickered through someone’s rusty screen door; a tricycle lay on its side in the yard.
Fireworks burst above oaks and dry pines, shading Alice’s face, first pink then yellow and green. Hugh realized, again, how beautiful she was, but this time her loveliness didn’t please him, or scorch him with prickling delight; this time he experienced solid panic. Her beauty demanded something of him. He’d asked her out several times. He’d shown an interest. And she didn’t like men very much.
He unlocked his Nova’s passenger door. As Alice was about to step inside, brakes squealed in the street. Over the grinding insistence of a hip-hop tune, a gruff voice demanded, “What you wont here, white boy?”
Hugh looked up to see the Lakers shirts—four of them—hanging out the windows of a sleek white Mustang.
“Motherfucker confused. He think he a brother, Deke.”
Alice shook against Hugh’s shoulder. He recognized the car: the cruiser from Spider’s neighborhood, the one that had circled the block while Hugh sat with Spider on his porch. He thought of snatching a golf club from his trunk, wielding it like a bat.
“It just like Black Magic say. Comin’ down here, listen our music, eat our food, dance our gig. On’iest thing he couldn’t do, Deke, was find him some nigger pussy, see, so he stuck with that pale piece of shit.”
Gently, Hugh moved Alice into the car and locked her door. He arranged his keys into spikes between his fingers and came around slowly to the driver’s side, where the Mustang idled. Respect, he thought. “We’re just leaving,” he said.
“Damn straight, motherfucker.”
The one called Deke dropped a malt liquor bottle onto the pavement at Hugh’s feet. It shattered with an ugly pop. “Stay out our ‘hood, you hear me, white boy? You occupyin’ days is through.”
“Hugh,” Alice whispered when he slipped behind the wheel. “Hugh, what do we do?”
“It’s all right.” He turned the key and inched cautiously away from the curb. The Mustang followed. Another malt liquor bottle sailed into the street, ahead of Hugh’s car. He swerved to miss the flying shards. He checked his rearview. Cigarettes flared behind the cruiser’s tinted windows.
Heavy traffic. Barking horns. Flashing fireworks. Hugh twisted down back streets in black neighborhoods, past a Latino block, through intersections where the city’s old grid pattern slid beneath the new. Garbage pails. Peeling billboards. The rattling drones of air-conditioners.
Shoo-fly in a windstorm.
In a Trinidadian barrio, in the northwest part of town, a small Juneteenth celebration was just getting under way. Salsa music kicked out of two oversized stereo speakers in the back of a Dodge pickup. Twenty or thirty girls danced in the street, wearing black and yellow Danskins, ankle bracelets, umbrella-shaped sombreros. Sweating and sexy in the heat.
Hugh didn’t see the Lakers. “Tell you what we’ll do. We’ll park the car over here, then lose ourselves in this crowd for half an hour until we’re absolutely certain those guys are gone. Then I’ll get us home.”
Alice looked around. “You’re sure this is a safe neighborhood?”
“Don’t worry.”
Confetti sprinkled the air. Children wrapped themselves in streamers. A tall, copper-colored woman beat her buttocks with a bottle as she danced to the music from the pickup. Nearly nude kids skipped around a laughing man curled like a corpse in a giant cardboard box.
Hugh kept a careful watch.
Under British rule, generations of Trinidadians had been forced into slavery in the cane fields or on large sugar plantations, he explained to Alice. At carnival time they carried whips and chains and painted their faces with flour, to parody their white masters. “A kind of play-revolution to head off the real one.”
“The real ones are still just a hair-trigger away, aren’t they?”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea we’d run into trouble. It’s just a handful of folks, I think, who can’t get beyond—”
“You go along, thinking everything’s all right, that the country’s getting better…”
Hugh heard the ideologue again, the thwarted crusader stirring inside her, and he tried to change the subject. “Would you like another drink?”
“We don’t have the faintest idea what our culture is really like, do we?” she went on. “We’re stumbling around with blinders on our eyes.”
Behind her, a young man in a Ronald Reagan mask bounced on a car hood. His shirt said, “Suck My Dick.” A woman sashayed past Hugh wearing a hula skirt and a cowboy hat. “Happy Juneteenth,” she said and patted his ass.
Alice was on the verge of tears. He didn’t know why, beyond attraction—or an apology for exposing her to the dangers of the night—but he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips, perhaps as a preemptive strike to block the moral lesson she was sure to deliver.
She looked startled. She blushed, then smiled.
“Am I over the line?” Hugh asked.
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“I don’t know, Alice.”
“Maybe we should—”
“Yes.”
They walked back to his car, holding hands. Shy as schoolkids. A Roman candle, splitting smoke in the sky, illuminated an old man pawing through a Dumpster. Hugh remembered he’d forgotten to leave food for the kittens. He wondered about the bag lady on this lovely, disruptive night.
No sign of the Mustang. He drove past the junior college, over to Montrose. In front of his place he killed the engine and shut off his lights. A water sprinkler chrred in the dark. A dog barked.
“Alice, I’m—”
“Shhh.”
Her mouth was more expressive than Paula’s, pressing and tentative all at once, exploring and waiting to be explored. Soothing, erotic, a bold surprise—imagine if she liked men! Paula had always been a nervous, furtive kisser, even when she and Hugh had plenty of private time together, away from the girls.
“Would you like to come in?” he said.
She nodded.
Stale, dusty air. Right away he opened a kitchen window and switched on a ceiling fan. “Wine?”
“Just a touch.”
An uncorked bottle of chardonnay sat in the fridge, next to three soggy tomatoes and a plate of leftovers. Broccoli-cheese casserole. The Cling Wrap floated, loose, around the dish; a putrid tang infested the room. “Whoa,” Hugh said, stepping back. “Sorry. Living alone, you know …” He scraped the food into a trash bag then set the plate in the sink, a little too hard. It chipped.
He handed her a glass of wine and pulled her gently down the hall. In his bedroom, he opened another window. He set their glasses on the night table and began to unbutton her blouse. The V of her collarbone moved sleekly inside her flesh. Angles veered surprisingly into soft planes, pockets of heat into which his hands fit, exactly.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.
As he filled her, she seemed to fill him back, gently, but thoroughly, with a spreading warmth just at the edge of his awareness.
He stayed excited even after he’d come, moaning above her, sweating lightly, dampening her belly and breasts. His body felt less like his own than like an extension of hers, fluttering, charged by their motion together.
From a neighbor’s yard, wind chimes sang like laughter through his open window. Then something else. A wailing. Alice stirred. “What’s that?”
Hugh listened closely. “Oh. Oh, it’s a bag lady.” He rubbed his face. “Poor woman. She hangs around the Dumpsters here and talks to herself.”
“Sad.”
“Sorry. I’ll close the window—”
“No. No, stay here.” She tightened her grip on his back and buried her face in his shoulder. Her sudden, apparent need brought tears to his eyes.
It Takes a Worried Man Page 19