George walked by and stopped when he saw Geo in front of the mirror. “Where you think you going?”
“Party. Mama said we could.”
“You cut them hedges?”
Geo frowned. “I forgot. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Yeah, you will,” George said. “And you gone be up bright and early, too, ‘cause you aint going to no party.”
“But mama said—”
“I don’t care what Regina said. I’m your father and I say you aint going.”
“Father?” Geo said, quietly but still loud enough to be heard. “I don’t know what kind of father you supposed to be.”
George took a step into the room. “What you say?”
Geo glared at him, his face hard and angry like Sarah had almost never seen it. He shook his head. “I aint say nothing.”
George peered at him and for a moment Sarah was sure Geo was going to get it. But then their father turned and walked out of the room.
Geo turned back to the mirror and stared at himself for a long moment, before picking up his brush and brushing his hair.
“We aint going?” Kenny asked.
“Hell, yeah, we going,” Geo said.
Sarah shook her head. “You can’t. Daddy just said—”
“I was right here when he said it. I don’t need no playback. We going, and that’s all.”
She thought of threatening to tell, but considering the look he’d given their father, she decided against it.
He looked at her reflection in the mirror. “Come with us. It’s gone be fun.”
She hated parties. So many people not seeing her at the same time. “Will Sondra be there?” she asked.
He laughed. “Nobody invites Sondra nowhere.”
She nodded, a little relieved. “Oh. Well. Just keep an eye on Ava, okay?”
He turned around and looked seriously at her. “Why? What’s wrong with Ava?”
“Nothing, Geo. I’m just saying, look out for her.”
“I always do.”
That evening, Sarah sat on the sofa, watching television and waiting for them to come back. Their curfew was nine o’clock. At eight-forty-five, she went and stood on the front porch, looking up and down, up and down the street. Nine o’clock came, and then went. She walked down to the sidewalk and looked both ways up and down the block. At nine-fifteen, Ava rounded the corner at Fifty-Ninth and came down the street. When Sarah saw her, she ran back into the house and sat herself down in front of the television again. Ava came in, looking sleepy.
“How was the party?” Sarah asked.
Ava shrugged. “Kenny tried to kiss me,” she said, sounding bored.
Sarah frowned. She turned off the television and walked past Ava up the stairs.
“What’s wrong with you?” Ava asked.
“Nothing,” Sarah said, annoyed. She opened her bedroom door, just as Ava opened hers. “Where’s Geo, anyway? It’s past your curfew.”
Ava yawned. “He can’t be that far behind me,” she said, and she went to bed.
***
She didn’t know she was dead. She was standing in the foyer of her house, but it was colder than it should have been and there was little light. Geo was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his head leaned back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling.
Why’s it so cold, Geo? She rubbed her arms, but couldn’t feel it.
Is it? Geo asked.
Yes. She looked around. It was definitely their house, but there was something off about it. It was eerily quiet, devoid of any sound but their voices, no noise coming from the other rooms or from outside. I don’t like it. Let’s go back to the way it was.
I can’t.
She looked at him, rubbed her unfeeling arms again. Yes, you can. Let’s just go back. It’s too cold now.
He looked at her for the first time, and his eyes were very dark and very empty. I can’t go back cause I aint nothing now. I aint got nothing to go back in. My thing is broke. My thing that I was in before I came here. It got broke and that’s why I’m here.
What about my thing? Ava asked.
Your thing aint broke. You can go back. You aint here because your thing got broke, so you can go back.
I don’t want to go back.
You have to, Ava.
She felt herself being pulled, as though there was a hook right behind her navel and something was tugging at it. She reached out for her brother. Geo hesitated, then reached out for her hand. Their fingertips touched.
The next thing she knew, she was looking up at her mother.
“Mama, where is my brother?” she asked. “Where is Geo?”
***
Ava was still in her bed, still and quiet under the covers, though the room was getting hot. Regina had gone up there because neither Ava nor Geo had come down to breakfast, and neither had answered when she called to them from the bottom of the stairs. Regina had entered Ava’s room and found her still in bed, and tried not to think about how strange it was that Ava was still sleeping, Ava who was often up at dawn, drawing or painting at the sunrise. Regina called her daughter’s name and gently shook her, but Ava did not wake. And there was a moment. A moment Regina would remember for the rest of her life, when she knew Ava was not there, not in her body, which lay still beneath the covers, not in the space around her, not in the house, not in the world. Ava, her Ava, who, when Regina had once been overwhelmed with sadness and had broken down in tears while sewing up a hole in a sock, had, at two years old, climbed into her mothers lap and said, clear as morning, “Mama, I am here with you,” was no longer here, no longer with her. In that moment, the air in the getting-hot room got hotter, thicker, heavy like cooking grease, and Regina could not draw a breath. She grabbed Ava by the shoulders and shook her harder, the weight of the moment closing in on her, congealing, molding out a sticky place for itself in reality, and she shook Ava and shook her, her own face contorted in the effort, her own soul starting to split open at its corners and bleed, and then, in the quiet, in the still, that moment passed and Ava awoke, with a start and a sharp intake of breath, and looked at her mother the way she had first looked at her, a few seconds after being born, as if to say, “How did I get here?” And Regina, just like she had done that first time, held her daughter against her heart and trembled. After another few seconds, Ava pulled away, and looked at her mother just as she had as a newborn baby, and said with words this time what she had expressed without words then. “Mama, where is my brother?”
George Jr. was not in his bed when Regina rushed into his bedroom with Ava on her heels. They went downstairs to see if he had slipped by them when Regina was in Ava’s room, but Ava knew he wouldn’t be there, though she could not tell her mother that.
“He must have gone to that damn party last night,” George said, seemingly concerned only with his son’s lack of adherence to his instructions and not the question of why, if he had gone out, he had not yet returned. “I’ll take care of him when he gets back.”
“I’m going to get him,” Regina said.
Ava wanted to tell her not to go looking for Geo. That finding him would be worse than these moments of mere confusion, these moments when he was simply absent from the house, but maybe still existed, these moments before the answer came, and that once it came it would come forever, over and over every day and night. But Regina was trading her slippers for her shoes and moving for the door.
“Mama,” Ava said, and Regina turned to look at her, but Ava couldn’t say anything else before the scream came. It came through the open window at the front of the house, the big one Regina had opened to let in some air, and it slid into the house like smoke sometimes did when Mr. Liddy sat smoking his pipe on his porch. Regina opened the door and ran outside.
Another scream pierced the air and Vic and Malcolm ran by the house towards the church. Ava could see other people running that way. Regina moved to go down the front steps and Ava was there beside her, holding her back.
“Mama,”
she said again, and nothing else came out.
Regina pulled away and walked off down the street towards the crowd, slowly, with Ava right beside her, while others ran past them towards the church, drawn by the screams that were rising into the air every few seconds now. The crowd was crowded in such a way that they could not see what they were screaming about until they were right there, squeezing past the broad shoulders of Malcolm and Vic. There on the ground were two dead bodies. Kenny Goode was lying on his stomach with his cheek against the ground, his light eyes staring blankly at the shoes of the gathering crowd, a deep red gash at his throat. A few feet away from him, curled up in a ball like a tiny child, and leaning against the back wall of the church, was Geo. He was badly beaten, his face bruised and cut and bloodied, his lips busted, a spray of his blood staining the white paint that covered what had been, for a very little while, Ava’s mural.
When Regina saw her son lying broken on the ground the whole world disappeared. For a moment, all her senses failed, and she could not hear the screams of the gathered crowd, or feel the disrespectfully-bright sun on her arms, or see the horror, laid out like a gruesome diorama before her. For a moment, it hadn’t happened. In place of what was real, she saw what was desperately needed—Geo running up the street on long, strong legs, laughing. When that moment passed, though, when it cleared away like a leaving fog, she was assaulted by what was really there. The screaming, like sirens following each other around in circles on the air. The sun, a perfect, terrible warmth against her skin. And her boy, bashed up and discarded like an outgrown toy, lying in a heap against the church. The sight of it punched through her, knocking her back, and her legs gave out. She dropped to the ground, her knees smashing hard against the hot asphalt. Beside her, Ava stooped down, tried to help her to her feet, but Regina pushed her away and crawled on all fours across the few feet that separated her from her son, as people stumbled over each other trying to get out of her way. She got to the place where Geo lay, and she reached out and put her hands on either side of his swollen head, and when she felt a squishiness beneath her fingers, she felt something snap and come apart inside her. She heard a sound come up out of herself, like the growl of a feral thing, a terrified, trembling sound, and all the people around her became dangerous. She threw her own body over her son’s, shielding him from them. “I got you,” she whispered to him, as she rocked him back and forth in her arms. “Mama’s got you now.”
Ava was looking down at her mother and brother on the ground, and although she didn’t see him arrive, she knew the moment Pastor Goode appeared on the parking lot. A hush fell over the gathered crowd, like none but the pastor or Jesus himself could affect. When she looked up, she saw him standing over Kenny’s body, his face like a changing mask, first confused, then shocked, then horrified, then overcome. His bottom lip trembled and for a moment it seemed his legs might give out too. He stood there, teetering, as Vic and Malcolm stood with their bodies in almost-motion, their arms out, ready to catch him if he fell. He didn’t. He looked over at Regina cradling Geo in her arms, then back at Kenny again, and Ava could see his mind working, his eyes flashing through possibilities, the way they had when Ava had sat in his office watching him writing the end of his sermon. Now, as then, Ava thought, he was trying to decide what God had to do with it. And she knew the moment his eyes met hers that he had made up his mind.
“This is the Lord’s judgment,” he said, his eyes wide as he raised his hand and pointed at her. “This is his judgment on you.”
Every head turned towards Ava at once, even Regina’s.
“I told y’all something was gone happen,” Goode said, glaring at Ava. “I said the Lord would send down his wrath on this family, and he has! This is his punishment for your arrogance and your blasphemy! And my son got caught in it!” He looked down at Kenny again, and his voice was wet and quivering. “I told him to stay away. I told him!”
Ava wanted to say something, like how absurd it was to suggest that God had punished her by letting her brother be killed. That it was a ridiculous, bizarre thing to say. But besides her mother, who was shaking her head, no one in the crowd seemed to appreciate the absurdity, the downright craziness of it. Most of them were staring at her as though she might sprout horns from her forehead at any moment.
Pastor Goode grabbed Vic by the collar of his bathrobe. “Didn’t I tell y’all?” he said, his face close to Vic’s. “Didn’t I?”
Vic nodded. “You said so, Pastor. You said something was gone happen.”
Goode turned Vic loose and crouched down on the ground beside Kenny, laid his head on the boy’s chest and sobbed.
Vic turned and glared at Ava. “You the one caused this.” Vic looked at Malcolm, who nodded his agreement. Then Vic and Malcolm both looked around at the rest of them. Sister Hattie nodded, too, her hand over her mouth. Antoinette clutched her sister’s hand. Miss Liddy looked at Ava and shook her head. “Lord,” she said, “Oh, Lord.”
“Y’all talking crazy,” Miss Maddy said.
Miss Lucas shook her head. “The Lord don’t work like that.”
But no one else seemed to hear them, or to care if they did.
Ava watched them, these people she had known almost her whole life, who had eaten in her mother’s kitchen and worshipped beside her family for nearly a decade, watched them, right there on the parking lot, as they turned away from her family right before her eyes.
1976
George made a promise to himself on the night he left Chuck at the church that he would never go back. That the years of stealing around, of debasing himself and everyone who loved him, would end right there and then. He vowed never to see Chuck again, nor Butch, nor any of the other men with whom he had lain himself down in shame, like hogs in shit. He didn’t want to go home, either, in the evenings after work, didn’t want to look at his family and see the ways he had failed them. Instead, he walked. Leaving work he headed farther east, towards the city, seeking invisibility in the shadows of the tall buildings, anonymity on the crowded sidewalks. Walking among businesspeople, shopgirls, and construction workers, he might be just an ordinary person, a holder of no secret any worse than any of theirs, a caring husband and father, a trustworthy friend, a loved son. No one could say he wasn’t all of those things, this perfectly normal-looking man in his city-worker’s uniform.
He walked for hours every day for more than a week, as far as his legs would take him without too much protest, and when he was good and tired, and night had fallen entirely, he would stop for a bite somewhere, and then hop on a bus or find an el station and head home. One evening, he stopped in a little pizza joint and ordered a slice, and as he sat eating in a corner he looked up and saw a boy sitting a few tables away, staring at him. He was around nine, light brown with kinky, reddish hair, and he reminded George of a boy he’d known back in Hayden, a boy he tried never to think about. He looked away, closed his eyes and tried no to let the memory seep into him, but it came anyway, pulled him with it from his seat in the pizza place to a back porch railing in Hayden, Georgia.
It was a chilly day, windswept and leafy. George, then ten years old, sat watching two cats fighting in the grass behind his house. Red came around, carrying a jar with a garter snake in it. “I caught it under the bed,” he said, grinning and proud. “I’m gone take it out to Els Field and turn it loose. Come on with me.”
“I can’t. I’m waiting on my daddy to get home.”
His father was stopping by the dump on his way home, which meant he’d be making art that night, and George would be able to stay up late and watch him, and tell him stories.
“It won’t take that long,” Red said.
George liked Red, when he wasn’t being mean, wasn’t showing off for other kids the way he sometimes did. And he was bored, sitting there waiting for his father. He looked down the road and didn’t see his father coming yet. He could usually see him when he was a quarter of a mile away. He hopped down off the porch railing and called through the bac
k window into the house, “Mama, I’m going to Els Field,” and then hurried down off the porch before she could come out and tell him he couldn’t go.
They walked down back roads to Els Field. Years ago there had been a factory there, but now it was only a shell, with broken windows and overgrown plant life. Red stood on top of a rusty steel drum and opened the glass jar, tossing the snake out into the high brush. For a moment, it coiled in the air like a paper spiral.
“You ever been in there?” Red asked George, pointing at the factory.
George nodded. “Couple times.”
“I want to see inside.”
“It aint nothing in there to see.”
Red shrugged. “Still.”
They walked down a short, overgrown path to a side door, and Red pushed it open. Inside, the place was empty and caked everywhere with dust, and full of broken glass from all the busted windows. The glass shimmered in the light streaming in from outside. From a corner, a field mouse scurried across the floor and squeezed itself into a hole in the wall.
“You right,” Red said. “It aint nothing to see in here. I can see mice at home. I bet it’s scary at night, though.”
George agreed, then turned to go.
“Hold up a minute,” Red called.
George stopped, and looked at him.
“You want to do something?”
George frowned. “It aint nothing to do in here.”
“You want to see each other’s dicks?”
George blinked. Hesitated. It might be a trick, he thought. Sometimes Red was mean that way. He liked to put bugs down the backs of girls’ dresses and gum in their hair and all that kind of foolishness. But the possibility that it wasn’t a trick intrigued George. He’d never seen another boys’ dick, and he wanted to. “I guess,” he said.
Red grabbed his wrist and pulled him farther into the factory, back towards the end of a long corridor. They stood there looking at each other. “You go first,” Red said.
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