by Alfredo Vea
They would discover pieces of the secret in tidbits, offhand remarks and casual slips of the tongue. Things would be blurted out, and they would share bittersweet hours of stunned, contemplative silence. Together they would learn to cook. Personal griefs and recollections would be measured, spiced, and mixed together in the course of a thousand recipes. Inexorably, the secrets would leak out over time as shattering moments of insight and regret—in soufflés that collapsed in the oven and in cassoulets that soared in taste and texture. At other times they would ooze out with the viscous perfection of poured honey.
Mai had lost a husband who could make her feel this way, a man who could do things to her—Vietnamese male things, things of smear and spittle and flying thighs. Over time she would admit that there had been another man, a man who was no one at all. Persephone had lost a man who could do these other things to her, Creole things of muscle and thrust. Both men … all three men could speak into their woman’s legs, calling out the sweetest of beasts.
Now and again, in the remaining years that they had, each woman would demonstrate what love had once been by taking the part of the other woman’s man. Each would learn to see what the male lover had seen, and far beyond. In the darkness of bedrooms in the Mission District and in Bernal Heights, each woman would become husband to the other, a pair of hands in the opaque blackness probing and sliding softly from secret place to private place, from outcropping to inlet, a craving pair of lips tasting and pecking at flesh.
“Are we lesbians, honey, if I do for you what your man did—if you imagine your young soldier on top of you when I’m doing it? Not that I can do everything he could do, but presque tout, almost everything. God, my man could use his tongue! I love that Creole lingo. That’s it! Right there. You’ve got it. Now a little side to side. Oh, that feels so good. Amos, honey, why did you leave me? I can see your face, mon cher. Amos, you could always taste me like no man ever could. No man can inhale me like that. No man on earth. Oh God, Amos, is thatyou?”
The Vietnamese woman would throw open her legs and scream out Trin Adrong’s name as Persephone, in the spiritual guise of a young Vietnamese soldier, knelt between her legs conjugating Mai’s inner dialogue. But in the throes of utmost passion, while her husband was speaking into her crotch, she would invariably reach around her friend’s shoulders to lovingly search her spine for a tattoo, for the change in texture caused by ink and needles, for the lacquered body of a sephardic fiddle. In the lowering light there would be the flutter and slap of suddenly sensitive skin, the medley of ligament and the tender intrigue of moistened knuckle and finger. In the dark, two women would sigh, tingling with hope, engorged with memory.
“Are they dead, Mai?” Persephone would whisper into the dark. “Do you feel that Trin and Amos are both dead? If they lost all of their senses, Mai, did they lose them one by one so that each power lost conferred all of its strength on the remaining ones? When their eyesight finally failed them, did their ears hear our longings? When their hearing went, in their deafness, did they ever feel us? Were they near to each other when they died? Maybe their armies met on some unknown field. They say that scent is the most powerful sense. In death, could they smell my ardor and yours? Did we rise up in their nostrils with their very last breath?”
“I think that no one is alive,” Mai would answer softly. “No one is most certainly alive.”
One sunny morning—a morning lost among so many—a pensive Persephone sat at the kitchen table dipping chà giò into a bowl of hot pho gà. She closed her eyes to better appreciate the broth and spice. The subtlety of the flavors of Vietnam had never ceased to amaze her. If there had never been a war, she thought to herself, I would never have tasted this. I would still have a husband and we would have our own restaurant. Slowly an idea—Amos Flyer’s idea—crept across her face, illuminating her skin with growing enthusiasm.
“What do you think about opening a little restaurant?” she asked without knowing if Mai could hear her. “I saw a perfect spot for it today up on Potrero Hill. I swear it’s just perfect. It’s a beautiful little business location with living space in the back. We could wake up in the morning and be right there at the workplace. The back yard is fenced in, with plenty of room for a vegetable and flower garden. We could grow our own herbs, spices and vegetables. With Amos Flyer’s pension money and my widow’s benefits, we have enough to lease the place with some left to start renovations. But best of all, behind the house is a beautiful little hill.”
Persephone was silent for a moment. Had she just acknowledged for the first time that she was, in fact, a widow?
“Until the restaurant is finished,” she began again, “we could support ourselves by selling food to go. We can perfect our recipes and do some public relations at the same time.”
She lifted the bowl to her lips to drain it of soup.
“I’ve tasted your cooking, girl, and you and I are exactly what this city needs: Vietnamese and Creole food for the soul. Yes”—she sighed—“ think we can make a big dent in this town. At least we can survive until we know what happened to our men, until the day that Amos and Trin come walking through our door.” Persephone closed her eyes again and exhaled deeply.
“Until the day …”
12
the biscuit libretto
Like a brand new trooper, a slick sleeve, a scared-shitiess FNG walking behind point for the very first time, like a grunt spooked by booby traps—punji sticks and toe-poppers—and humping through a tall stand of elephant grass, the Biscuit Boy felt his way fearfully through his newfound dreams. These were not the reveries of the past: flashy, manicured visions of a fast, new, uninsured German car, a sweaty, designer athletic suit, and a neck draped both with expensive gold chains and with the arms of a light-skinned black girl with gold lipstick and carrot-red hair.
Now he dreamed of a raucous, colorful pageant of living ebony parading and dancing in unison to a glorious cacophony of voices, brass horns, and drums. In his mind he saw a sea of swaying feathers and painted leather. He saw skirts the color of red clay soil and head-dresses decorated with the manes of lions long dead. Such sounds, such movements, and such earthen and obsidian colors had never before found a place on his pillow. He dreamed a score—an entire choreography.
Suddenly the music in his dream tumbled off-key, then quickly dissolved into complete dissonance. The drumming died away to a single self-conscious beating. A hundred smiles faded from a hundred faces. Intricate, practiced dance steps ossified into stances of frightened attention. Women held imperiously aloft en l‘air were set down to cringe and cower a terre. The suddenly stifled people, breathless and sweating, were then rudely herded offstage en masse and brought to a standstill in a place of cruel darkness that was hidden from the light of day and even from the prying eyes of God.
The revelers and serenaders, whose regal carriage had been so suddenly transmuted into postures of staggering bewilderment, were chained to cement anchors and then to one another. Next, each was forced to carry his or her own ballast to the center of a dry riverbed and watch as their captors abandoned them for higher ground. The captives waited fearfully, hour after hour, for the advent of some unknown thing. For a coming flood, came the whisper. There is a coming deluge, came the awful rumor.
The sound of onrushing water was heralded by the crying of the children, the moaning of the women, and the impotent muttering of the strongest men. One of the leaders raised his long-fingered black hand for complete silence. He then canted his head to listen. In the distance there was a deep thunder that grew louder and louder. Behind it came the towering wall of water.
From each mouth a thin wail of despair rose up vainly to meet it. In the next instant, children were pulled from their mothers’ arms and washed away. Those mothers who held tight felt their children die. One tearful mother, a woman whose face was marked with tribal tattoos, broke her child’s neck before the waters could come and suffocate him.
In mere moments, almost all the people we
re drowned and doomed to be forever forgotten. All were maimed and twisted by the sheer strength of the waters. But those few who managed to hold their breath and stand fast until the mighty deluge subsided did something that could only come to pass in a dream: their living, straining bodies changed the course of that onrushing tide. They had slowed it up and sent it down another path altogether.
In his bed at the city jail, a sleeping, sweating Biscuit Boy comforted himself by reaching beneath his soaked pillow for his cherished books. He, of all of the prisoners that had ever languished in the city jail, had somehow found a way to control his time machine. The cryptic operating instructions and the crowded panel of arcane instrumentations were right there, under the cover leaf and between the preface and final paragraph. Only he, of all the thousands of prisoners before him, had discovered that the secret dials and toggle switches that maneuvered the bed through time had always been there between the bindings.
He had just finished reading his eleventh novel since coming to jail and had already begun writing the book report that his lawyer demanded. The moment his probing fingers touched the spine of one of his books, the sleeping Biscuit Boy realized that his own tragic dream was coming true—that he, too, had been swept away by the waters. Somehow his new, hopeful dreams had become a living nightmare. He could not draw a breath. He must surely be drowning. There must surely be others of his own kind dying along with him. His arms were pinned to his side by shackles, and he felt a desperate, groping hand clamp down over his mouth. The sharp fingernails of the hand dug into the flesh of his cheeks. Some desperate swimmer must have found his body and mistaken it for a floating refuge.
All at once the waters swept him upward in the darkness, turning him head over heels and sweeping him downstream. Somewhere in the blackness his neck was snagged and turned sharply and he felt a dull pain coursing down the core of his vertebrae. Slowly the cold dullness spread, numbing his blinking eyes and forcing his blue tongue up and out of his throat. His lungs burned with hunger. Tasting air that he could not have, he dreamed that the floods had prevailed once more … and once again, there was no ark. In the distance he saw the poor, decimated hillside that had once been his home. Down below he saw his mother looking so small and sad from this height. Then he saw the face of the woman he loved.
In one final, desperate effort to swim to the surface, he kicked his feet wildly, spreading his toes for the best grip in dark water. But soon his kicks became little more than an erratic spasm, and then a mere spastic twitch at the knees. In just a few seconds his feet hung limp. As he surrendered at last to the flow, he heard one final, booming voice in the distance. It was inhumanly powerful. It seemed to fill the world. Was it the voice of God? Could it possibly be the awesome voice of God?
“They’re killin’ a nigger over there! Hey, you stupid muddy bastards, they’re killing the nigger right over there!”
It was the voice of the supreme being screaming down the mainline to the deputies that were crouched down and hiding at both ends of the darkened hallway.
“Get the fuck down here right now or the son of a bitch is gonna die on your watch! I can see his stupid face turnin’ blue!”
That brought them running, batons and metal flashlights drawn and upraised. Every light on the mainline flashed on. An electric alarm sounded and a half dozen dazed deputies advanced toward Bernard Skelley’s cell from every direction. When they arrived at his cell, the supreme being’s tattooed arm was extended from his cell bars in Sistine repose; the thumb and fingers hung lazily in a closing position; the index finger of his right hand was barely separate from the other digits and was pointing to the cell located directly across the mainline. Within his cell, the supreme being had draped his naked body with a sheet.
The deputies had been somewhat ready, the key to the cell was out, and the shift commander had armed himself with a pistol that was drawn and cocked. When the door opened, they looked up to see Calvin the Biscuit Boy hanging from the overhead light fixture, a makeshift rope tied around his stretching neck. Hurriedly, they cut him down and immediately began CPR in the open doorway of the cellblock.
The shift commander was shaking his head in sheer disgust; they had reacted too slowly. This was going to look bad in the morning report and even worse in the morning newspapers. They had been given advance warning and had failed to stop a murder in the jails. The boy certainly looked dead. He watched dejectedly as a deputy blew air into the lungs of the Biscuit Boy, while another pushed on his chest cavity. The angry shift commander felt his overdue promotion slipping away with each compression of the boy’s chest. The breath of life had come too late.
“I don’t suppose anybody saw who did this,” sneered one deputy to the cell full of men, who had seemingly just been roused from a deep slumber.
“Was it a suicide?” asked a deputy who had been told to expect some kind of an incident but had not expected to see a hanging.
“Yeah, right,” said another in a mocking voice. “First he made himself bloody, then he went and hung himself! It was supposed to look like a suicide, you idiot—just look at those cuts on his face. Someone tried to keep him from calling for help. Who did this?” he screamed at the supreme being.
“All I can tell you”—Bernard Skelley smiled—“is that they all had black skin. Beyond that, you know I can’t tell none of them apart. Never could tell none of you dusty fuckers apart. The cell was as dark as East Oakland. All I could see was teeth and eyes, like in them old movies when them niggers see a ghost. What took you so goddamn long? If it was me, I woulda just broke his fuckin’ neck, none of this phony suicide shit.”
Down the long hallway the main cellblock door swung open and slammed against the wall. The loud sound woke the entire jail population. A gurney appeared, and three paramedics rushed down the hallway toward the recumbent body.
“Somebody call the man’s lawyer,” said Bernard, as the medics knelt beside the body. “Somebody call the man’s lawyer. He’s that Mestican fella that works for me. I don’t even have to pay the bastard. He warned you fools about this. You know,” he grinned, “tomorrow mornin’ I’m walking right out of this fuckin’ place. You’re gonna have to open this door and let me out of here. Shit, by this time tomorrow I’ll be doin’ the nasty with some fine little creamy-white, Anglo-Saxon bitch, and you bastards will be right here where you belong.”
Even as Bernard screamed from his cell, Richard Skelley, the brother of the supreme being, was being booked and strip-searched at the Hayward City jail. A warrant had been issued for his arrest, and two officers had dragged him away from his ring-toss booth at the carnival. He would wail and lash out during the search, as black hands probed his body cavities for contraband.
Just days before, on a cold, foggy day in San Francisco, his little daughter and her dog Hotspur had been led down to the evidence room of the Hall of Justice to see the bedstead with the huge spread-eagle carved into its grain. Margie Skelley Dixon had held her hand as the little girl broke down sobbing at the sight. Minnie had kissed her dog’s face and begged over and over to know why her daddy had done those terrible things to her mouth and to her tummy and to her dreams, all of those painful, lonely hours of hurtful pretend.
“Skelley, Richard R., grab the wall and put your feet on those marks there on the floor. We drew lots this morning, and the loser is gonna search your asshole for contraband.”
“The contraband ain’t in his body,” one black deputy in the Hayward City jail would laugh as he landed a punch to the right eye of the struggling, aggressive suspect. “His own pasty-ass body is the contraband. Wait’ll the boys down on the cellblock find out that you’ve got short eyes, Skelley, that your white supremacist ass likes to take advantage of little girls.
“I tell you, there ain’t nothing down in that west cellblock but stir-crazy, angel-dusted, bean-eatin‘, genuflectin’ Catholic Mexicans, and them brown fuckers just worship their sweet mamacitasand their little, virginal sisters. It’s some kinda religious s
hit.”
“Yeah,” said another deputy, “them fucked-up white-boy tattoos of yours are gonna run away and hide when they get a load of all them Virgin of Guadalupe mainline tats. Mi vida loca, man. Mi vida loca. But don’t you worry none, Mr. Superman. I promise you that if one of them spics takes and shoves a knife in between your ribs, you just go ahead and pick up the white courtesy phone and one of us house niggers will come running down there lickety-split. Yowsa, boss, we sho will. I don’t know about my partner here”—he winked at his shift commander—“but I’d sure as hell be more than willing to risk my life to save your white supremacist ass.”
The two deputies laughed as they led the prisoner down the hallway to the Mexican end of the jail. “El otro lado, ” as the inmates called it. Nichos had been drawn on every wall. Each one contained colorfully drawn votive candles and icons. There were crucifixes everywhere, and rosaries were draped over every bunk en cl otro lado.
Dreams in this bay were a confused confluence of Olmec archetypes, Zapotec women, and auto parts. One vato, dreaming of a girl named “La Happy,” who had huge breasts, little resistance to suggestion, and no moral compass whatsoever, woke to see Captain Richard Skelley of the New Aryan Army as he sat down on a bunk at the entrance to the bay. The vato smiled when his bleary eyes resolved into focus and he saw the verdant spread of racist tattoos on the body of the gringo. He pushed “La Happy” from his mind and began moving from bunk to bunk, homeboy to homeboy. One by one, with a shake and a giggle, he began waking his carnales.
When Biscuit Boy awoke, he saw the faces of three nurses and a young doctor hovering above his own body. There was a bright light shining directly into his eyes and an oxygen mask strapped tightly over his mouth.