“If things were different, I’d have your baby, Johnny. I want you to know that,” she said as gently as words can pass through lips.
“What kinda things?” I asked.
“Fucked-up things, Johnny, so don’t ask. Don’t ruin the morning,” she responded.
We stared at each other for five more minutes with pauses for the occasional blink—nothing lost, still locked on to each other, heart, breath.
“I’ve made up my mind. I’m gonna love you forever. Whether you like it or not,” she offered.
I believed her.
I was too angry to cry in the dark. I asked and they told me. Noelle’s father would die soon.
As I walked back home from the woods, cold drizzle fell. I would never be a farmer. The ground doesn’t yield for the mark of Cain. I listened for the red cicada but heard nothing.
When I returned to bed I wanted to pray, but I knew nobody would listen. Cain. Untouchable. Unforgiven. Walks alone.
The next morning I began to see them more frequently—the dead.
• • •
I was driving down MLK. Black Jesus riding shotgun. Sonnier was passed out drunk in the backseat. Black Jesus leaned against the door, talking to himself about ninety-nine-cent tacos at Jack in the Box and Spike Lee’s School Daze.
“Hold tight. I ain’t seen it yet. You be talkin’ too damn much,” I blurted.
“That shit’s good, dawg. Make a nigga wanna go to college,” he responded.
At Old Spanish Trail Road the traffic started. Sunday afternoon at MacGregor Park. I was angry that day. Angry and uptight and lost. School was recall and dice games. Social was talking on the phone and dates, petty dates, talking about nothing, not really selling myself but reminding myself that something better was going to happen if I let it. If I got out of my own way. If I didn’t use the magic. Something was wrong with it.
“You need to go to church, Johnny,” Black Jesus asserted. I ignored him—didn’t want to mismanage my expectations.
“You sittin’ in the car right now so let’s have church,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
We edged on in traffic surrounded by competing car stereos—a thousand angry bands marching slowly to the majestic pines of Third Ward. A thousand black faces encased in depreciating glass and steel, marching to fellowship, marching to communion. The Median Man jogged by wearing a shirt reading: “Reparations Now!” An old black man sold barbeque out of his wayworn pickup hauling a huge, black, bellowing pit in the parking lot of the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Faces in cars yelling at one another like rowdy inmates in a crowded cellblock waiting on rec time. Waiting to get out of the cell, the car, the hood. Anxious to see and be seen. I turned up the radio, looked around for the cops, then took a long swig from a forty-ounce.
I could’ve saved her, Noelle. She should’ve told me. Why didn’t she tell me? Sonnier said I could’ve saved her. Black Jesus said it wasn’t really cool to kill yourself. It didn’t matter anymore. Noelle was dead.
You never recover when your first commits suicide. You blame yourself for imaginary reasons, knowing that those reasons are fiction but wanting to believe something. Maybe it’s Catholic guilt. Maybe I was her swan song.
Socially, the incident had a life of its own, caught in the rumor mill. Some girls were scared of me, whispering that I literally drove the girl crazy. Creole girls learned of my grandfather’s first wife from their grandmothers. He drove that po’ girl crazy with that fiddle, chère. Don’t mess with him. Dem Boudreauxs are crazy, dey witches. They were right.
Noelle and I never talked about that witch business after that day on Hippo Hill, but I knew she was drawn to it. She wanted it for herself. Why else would we fuck when she was on her period? It wasn’t about pregnancy. It was about power and the perception of power. A young woman’s foolish fantasy after too many love-magic poems and baths for Ochun’s blessings and Betty Wright–laced all-night spades games with her strange empowered ghetto-ass girlfriends who smoked joints in feathered roach clips and sucked off bourgeois Bellaire High School boys to Edith Piaf and incense (never strawberry).
If you know what that means, then you’ve met one of her kind or you’re part of the tribe. They come in all shapes, races, languages, and lifetimes—la belle femme extraordinaire. Adventurous. Distant yet intimate. The smartest woman you’ve ever met even though you know damn well she’s probably diagnosed or she’s so fuckin’ gorgeous that everyone simply ignores the fact that she’s a gotdamn lunatic. Usually unacknowledged parental defiance is the undertone, but that’s nothing. She’ll make you actually believe she’s the first woman you’ve ever met in your life. You might believe it. She wants you to believe it, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your momma. She wants you to believe in her. And by your believing in her, she will, if she’s really part of the tribe, convince you that you believe in yourself. This is her gift. La belle femme extraordinaire. Without surgery or séance, she becomes part of you and you never notice. She only asserts one thing with a smile—lips rounded, curved—
“You never needed me, Johnny. Remember that. You never ever needed me. I know about you, darling. When you touch me, when you’re inside me, I know. I know that you’re the one that’s fucked-up in the head. You think it’s me, but nawh, lover, it’s you. And you know it too. You one of them voodoo niggas. You don’t need me.”
That’s what she said after I came in her and she told me she’d “jump off the Transco Tower before she’d bring,” and I quote, “my red nigger witch baby into this world if black folks ain’t got no power.” She wasn’t sad or angry. She was serious. And while I helped her douche out my little red nigger witch sperms while she sat on the commode, she offered plaintively—
“He ain’t gonna let me have no baby, Johnny, so don’t worry.”
I was too relieved to ask who. I should’ve asked at that moment. Learned what hid behind her eyes. But that particular night there was a Jones Gents’ party at the U of H student rec center, and I had plans to meet my boys there. I should’ve asked.
Now, after the funeral and the rumors, I was alone again in the tree, listening to the train and the mouse, listening to them whisper about me. Them. The dead. They whispered in Creole and the tongue of the Dahomey. They were noisy.
I was drunk at MacGregor Park, sitting in my car parked at a gas station on Calhoun Road. Music blasted. “Hey, Johnny!” The faces spoke but I didn’t hear them. The train roared from the ground, screaming. But I tuned it out—numb—all of it. My seat was dropped, but I kept my head up, looking around for her, knowing she’d never show. I wasn’t present or tardy. I was absent, floating in a flood of brown faces, and I still couldn’t swim. I had nothing to ask for, prayer.
Cassette deck tuned to Funkadelic with the bass ramped up, Garry Shider crooned slowly about water signs. Noelle was an Aquarius.
By the middle of the song, Raymond Earl had come out of nowhere to my car door holding out a handbill, saying something about Donnie Carter. I was so fucked-up on lost and alcohol, I said, “Who?”
I took the handbill. Donnie Carter looked back at me. The handbills were everywhere—
“Donnie Carter—Missing.”
In black and white, his face was up and down MLK, stapled between posters for the Fresh Fest at the Summit and posters for an Angleton rodeo with special guest championship bull rider Arthur Duncan, who’d be signing autographs. I had seen the flyer all over the place, but I never really stopped to look at it.
Donnie Carter was last seen at the Greyhound bus station in Downtown Houston. He was wearing black parachute pants and an orange OP. Donnie liked orange.
We blamed Pork Chop for Donnie’s disappearance later at the car wash by MLK and Bellfort. Everybody was there and everybody was quiet. Niggas don’t say much when they’re feeling guilty. Shoulda tuffined him up. Shoulda showed him how to fight. Man, not after some muthafucka done tow’ your booty hole open. Raymond Earl glared at Pork Chop.
&n
bsp; “Why yawl lookin’ at me?” Pork Chop pleaded.
But Raymond Earl didn’t care. Nobody ever talked about Lil’ Ant. Nobody could admit it because nobody saw it. Pork Chop tripped the little dude, causing him to fall into traffic and die. And Pork Chop never answered for that and this enraged Raymond Earl. They were gonna fight. We could see it. Raymond Earl had that look—he was gonna swing on Pork Chop in the name of Lil’ Ant and Donnie Carter. I got in my car and left just as Raymond Earl started taking off his shirt.
thirty-one
dirty polaroids
On the brochure for the University of Pennsylvania, a nice multicultural collection of college students stand around a bronze bench where a bronze Ben Franklin sits, one arm atop the back, bespectacled, reading bronze notes. The students smile. He grins too. In the background, a stone building hides behind serpentine ivies. The cobblestone pathway is aged but clean. The bronze is polished. The smiles appear genuine. I looked closer, studying the pigment on the glossy card stock, fingers tracing the running ivies upward. Upward. Upward. Wake up.
The voices were louder now. And they were not in agreement. The only voice I recognized was Sonnier’s. Clear as a bell. Grouchy. Vulgar. I wanted to believe that I’d played no part in Noelle’s death or her father’s. I needed to believe that.
It was after two o’clock in the morning. I was drunk again, parked on North MacGregor Drive looking at houses that I always wanted to grow up in. Mike was in one of these massive homes gambling with bourgeois boys—the kind with BMWs, big allowances, and not a care in the world. And I was drunk because I hurt, the world frightening me, taunting—both Polaroids—flipping back and forth like butterfly wings. I was seeing things that I shouldn’t see. And why not? Violence was an intimate friend, an old friend.
I glanced at the brochure again. The bronze smile everlasting. Father knew what I was going through, though we never spoke of it. He was one of us—Those-That-Know. I was one of him and he, one of me, connected to Sonnier, bound by blood and profane DNA. Why me, God? Don’t you see I’m innocent?
I placed my hands on the steering wheel and examined them. All they had done, ruined, held, built, caressed—pointing with cosmic authority and designing a new truth with intentions. This can’t be right.
The forty-ounce was empty. Damn! Can’t buy it after 1:00 A.M.
He whispered. I listened.
“Ti’ John! Ti’ John, wake up!” Mother yelled while banging on my bedroom door.
Ten minutes later, I pulled onto the dirty road of South Park nothing. The barn had burnt to the ground, killing all thirty-six horses—burnt alive like witches.
Father sat on the ground crying as the fire inspector surveyed the damage.
“Hey. You all right?” I asked Father as I slowly walked toward him. But he was distracted, drawing on the dirt. I moved closer and passed a foot over his grievance. He stopped. I took a knee.
“Don’t do that,” I told him.
He wouldn’t look at me.
On that day, John Frenchy gave up drugs, alcohol, and the gift. The Trinity was broken.
thirty-two
johnny boudreaux’s complaint
Houston, Texas, c. 1991
Booger’s body had been found by Taub’s hunting dogs a few weeks back. No one was sure exactly how long he had been living in the woods or what he’d managed to eat because his body did not appear malnourished. In fact, the exact cause of death was a mystery. They found him lying on his stomach in a field of dandelions with a large, flattened refrigerator box below him as a canvas. Crayons and pencils were scattered everywhere. He was drawing when he passed, and the coroner’s report said that he had a huge smile on his face even though his body was badly decomposed. There was no funeral—nobody to claim the body—so Father Jerome agreed to say a Mass in his memory.
His final picture was that of a horse, and signed at the bottom right corner was—
“Delano Tiberius Jackson.”
Thud, thud, thud, thud.
My license plate frame shuddered with each punctuated bass drop emitted from the soundbox of four six-by-nine-inch Sherwood speakers safely sitting in the small hatch of my gray ’84 Volkswagen Rabbit. Seven in the morning and headed to school. Senior year. College applications were mailed, addressed far away from Harris County and the mighty Gulf with its wicked ways.
MLK Boulevard was teeming with low-wage workers headed to the grind, little black schoolchildren collected at bus stops, winos uncorked for the morning’s first taste—the same collage of dirty Polaroids. I rolled up the block bumping the Geto Boys, hoping that the line at the Jack in the Box drive-thru wouldn’t be long. It was time for breakfast. Two tacos for ninety-nine cents and a Coke. Breakfast of champions. Still exhausted from folding towels at T.J.Maxx until eleven the night before, I wiped the sleep out of my eyes and settled my focus on the passing collage. Tired. Tired of it all, seeing dirty strange things lying atop each other, demanding to be seen, demanding to be understood. Passing St. Philip’s, I saw Lil’ Ant playing helicopter. I waved. Why not? Despite my less than enthusiastic drive to school, the day held some promise—an announcement would be made today. Today I would have a moment of glory.
I finished my breakfast with a burp as I careened into the student parking lot. Several clusters of students loitered around, waiting for the first period bell. Nineteen minutes. More than enough time to increase my meager minimum-wage earnings.
Scooby, Leon, and the rest of the varsity defensive line were already congregated by Country’s Regal, shaking the ivories. I parked and walked over with seven dollars in hand. The shooters knelt around a small towel lying on the concrete—ghetto felt. I could smell the undeniable stench of cheap wine and malt liquor from a few teen breaths. Perfect. Coupled with the early hour, alcohol was sure to affect their alertness. I might only need five minutes. The key to shooting craps in the streets is conversation, getting your opponent to double up on his bet by command. It requires a very delicate application of shit talking, coaxing your opponent to bet more than he intended. Now the delicacy of the coaxing was dependent upon who was being coaxed. One wrong word to the wrong person could result in a shooting or stabbing, so attention to psychology was critical.
By the time I stood up with most of their money, a few had blurted several threats as sweat collected in their vacant hands. But nobody was going to touch me. I was the senior class president.
First period.
I strolled down the hallway like a peacock and not because of my winnings. Word had spread quickly that I was on the front page of The Houston Post. And not because I had shot anybody or caught a football or signed a record contract. I had made it to the cover of the newspaper because I was intelligent.
Despite the low graduation rate in South Park and the glaring statistics predicting my doom, I had been accepted to every college I had applied to, including three Ivy Leagues. Teachers cheered. Students whispered and smiled. I was a beacon for all the potential that South Park held in its grimy hands. I was hope and everybody knew it.
Mr. Davenport, the guidance counselor, approached with pride, as though he had something to do with it.
“Well, John, looks like you’re on your way to the big time.”
“Yeah, it looks that way.”
And I kept on strolling. He didn’t lift one finger to help me during the application process. I was graduating on time, so his job was done. I had already learned that God helps those who help themselves. And if anybody was responsible for my newfound celebrity, it was Mother. After twenty years of her answering the phones at the school district administration office, word got around that her son was something special. In no time a reporter called my house for an interview, saying that he was looking for an emotional story of hope. The reporter wanted to show those rednecks that good things could happen in South Park. I was to be the poster child.
My schoolmates offered a mix of snide remarks and praise for the accomplishment. None of our sports teams ever made
it to the play-offs, so the mere mention of our high school on the front page was exciting. I couldn’t wait until homeroom announcements, when the principal would surely offer me praise in front of the whole school.
Dazed, daydreaming about the future, the riches, the fame. How far could I go? And what would it be like on the other side? The bronze smile and cobblestone. I hadn’t yet stepped foot past Texas or Louisiana, but I was certain that exotic lands awaited me. Lands I had read about or seen on TV. Lands where nobody knew me or where I came from. Lands where I could start over, free from assumptions, free from burdensome context, free from Sonnier and South Park. I would leave this place soon. South Park. It would become a memory tucked away in the abyss. And as much as South Park was a part of me, I longed for the moment to be free from its drunken stupor, unleashed into verdant pastures of optimism, to walk in fields where daisies bloomed promise.
Homeroom.
For the senior class president, homeroom was the prescribed “roam freely” period, although I took such liberties throughout the day. The duties were minimal, visit senior homerooms and make announcements. Senior Prom was on autopilot, senior T-shirts were ordered, and the senior class gift was determined. There really wasn’t anything for me to announce, but I made my rounds anyway, still gloating and anxiously awaiting the principal’s voice echoing my name in the empty corridors. I wanted to hear that echo, so I kept my visits brief, mere pass-throughs. My last stop was in the music wing adjunct building with one senior homeroom in the band room. I approached the building, opened the door, then I heard it—
“Aah, teachers and students, I’m sure some of you may have heard but one of our students is featured on the front page of The Houston Post for academic excellence. Our very own Johnny Boudreaux. Students, John is a great example of that Jones spirit and I hope his accomplishments encourage all of you to strive for excellence. John, I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say we’re all very proud of you, son. That’s all.”
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