Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  Yeah.

  You ain’t heard Aunt Felonise and them talk? You ain’t listened. You hear them at Christmas, every year, talking bout Xbox and GameBoy, start with Girl, back in 1946 we sure didn’t get nothin but a orange and a scarf. Maybe two hard candies.

  Cause oranges why they all came here. California. Oranges. They left Louisiana and came to stay with my aunt in her big old house cause of some man. Then they all worked the groves out there.

  Yeah. Now he’s buried with his people. And you here. With the ones you got left.

  SONIA.

  Sonia. She gon ask me, Why couldn’t you pick somebody like that guy who came to our school to talk about college loans? He was nice.

  Probably from LA.

  I don’t know how I feel. It ain’t like I thought he would ever touch me again. Ain’t like he looked they way he used to. But I remember crazy things—how can I still remember exactly how he smelled—that old Drakkar Noir. What his shirt felt like? When we danced?

  I know. On my cheek. They don’t even dance like that. Never will. No Isley Brothers.

  Well, yeah, I heard the new song, but it ain’t like the old ones. Not like ours.

  Melisse roll her eyes when I change the station to Art Laboe Killer Oldies. She say I should be ashamed to listen to somethin with the word old in it. Then I go into her bedroom and she’s sleep, and I smell perfume on her sheets where it rubbed off—that new glittery body spray all the girls wear? And I can see sparkles on her pillow. Make me cry right then. She don’t know. All the times we talk, right, and she don’t know.

  Sonia. Girl. We didn’t know.

  I didn’t.

  Hold up—my dryer’s done, too. Them damn socks. She’s got practice twice a week, but look like them socks tangle up into a knot every night.

  Alright then. Tomorrow night.

  What did you say? You’re crazy. I tried to tell her Chess used to say, What it is, baby? And we’d say back to them boys, What it ain’t. What it was.

  RED RIBBON DAY

  THE PHONE RANG just after Felonise had hung up the white clothes in the backyard. It was Friday, late August, and the clothes swayed in the California wind that blew hot and soft from the moment the sun came up out here in the orange groves outside Rio Seco. The dishtowels, the sheets from the fold-out couch where Teeter had spent the night when his brother had a concert, and the white socks her daughter Cerise called Peds. The ones Felonise liked to wear at night around the house. Could wash them after one night. Cleaner than slippers.

  Back in Louisiana, Mama used to say Least keep the feet clean. All that dirt from the canefields, but least don’t put dirty feet in my sheets.

  Only once a week I got to wash white clothes, Felonise was thinking when she moved toward the phone. Not like the old days when me and Marie-Claire and Claudine first come out here to the orange groves and we all had to share one washer.

  She opened the back door and reached for the cordless phone her daughter had bought from Target. “Hello?”

  “I’m calling about Lafayette Reynaldo Martin.”

  “My grandson?”

  The woman hesitated and said, “Hold on, please.”

  During the scratchy time when the receiver was jostled on the desk and the school women’s voices murmured like distant puppies in a yard, she hoped he wasn’t hurt. Too hot to be in school. Seemed like school in August was wrong—they supposed to play in summer. But so many kids now, Cerise said they made the school year-round schedule. The boys would be off in October.

  Stove clock said 11:03. They had probably called Cerise, but she was at work and couldn’t hear the cell phone in her purse. Last year Teeter had fallen off the bars and the school had called Cerise but said she didn’t answer. Cerise had come over that night, crying until her eyes were red and swollen as peach pits.

  “I was in the bathroom, maman,” she’d moaned. “The only five minutes all damn morning I didn’t have that damn phone with me.”

  “He only have a sprain wrist, now. Nothing he gon remember.”

  Cerise had turned up her face to Felonise and said, “Maman, they remember. The ones at the office. The teacher. You don’t know. They think, Oh, another little black kid and his mama’s some crackhead like Glorette who doesn’t even care enough to show up when we call.”

  “Don’t say that about Glorette.”

  “I’m sorry. But every time I see her on Palm or in Rite Aid, and she’s high out her mind, I always think she makes it harder for me. They think we’re all like her. You know the kids say Crack Ho! Like it’s a joke. All the time.”

  While Felonise held the phone and heard the women’s voices getting closer, a black blur fell past her laundry and made a soft thump on the concrete patio.

  “Mrs. Martin?” A different voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Your name is on the list to call for Lafayette, in case it’s necessary that he be picked up.” Another pause, but Felonise didn’t hear her grandson’s voice. “Are you a caregiver?”

  “His grandmother.” Felonise waited. “He get hurt there at school?” She saw white—wrist bone poking out white from his skin, tooth in his palm.

  “No. He was in a fight, and he’s been suspended from school for the rest of the day. I’ve called his mother, his father, and his babysitter. There’s no answer.”

  She didn’t like this woman’s tone. Lafayette wasn’t no damn orphan. “His mama workin, and sometime she ain’t hear that little phone. His daddy work carpenter, and he never hear nothin. And Esther might be at the doctor. So yeah, I come and get him.”

  “Well, we’ll expect you soon,” the woman said. Had to add that.

  Like I was fool enough to come tomorrow. So Felonise added, “You tell him I’m on my way.”

  THE CROW LAY dead on the patio beside the washline. Another baby. Furry with baby feathers, puffed out like a piece of black boa from some old costume, the small black feet curled like ink writing. Felonise pushed it onto the dustpan with her broom. She walked over to the trashcan, and when she opened the lid, the two finches from yesterday lay there on top, stiff and dry.

  West Nile virus, Cerise had told her. She’d read it in the paper. That’s where she worked—at the Rio Seco Register, in the customer service place out near Pomona.

  Felonise set the baby crow beside the finches. West Nile—something in the air, or in the blood, that came all the way from Africa to Southern California. Inside the birds and mosquitoes. Her yard had been nearly silent this August, no crows and jays and mockingbirds fighting over every scrap of bread and bit of old rice she threw out for them.

  She closed her gate. Eight small white houses lined up along the gravel road, and the barn across the clearing. She smoothed the stray hairs back into her bun. She would ask Enrique for a ride to the school downtown. Cerise and Lafayette had moved downtown when they had Lafayette Jr., because Cerise said the school was good, and the neighborhood had good home values. But last year Lafayette had left her, moved in with his brother back here in the groves. He’d apologized formally, in her kitchen at Christmas.

  “I couldn’t hang,” he said. “Gotta be perfect to live like that, Miss Felonise. Every minute. She got the boys in basketball and tutoring and piano. Lafie want to play piano like his cousin. But I’m tired when I get home from work.”

  “My daughter tired, too,” she told him. “She call it the second shift. Say that her job, too, raise them two boy. She ain’t get to rest and play domino with her friends.”

  ENRIQUE’S TRUCK WAS parked near the barn. Even after thirty-five years, whenever she saw the barn, where they stored the picked oranges and crates and machinery, she thought briefly of Raoul. Her husband. He’d worked only two seasons here in California. A flicker in her brain, like the news that appeared in the corner of the TV screen. He’d gone back to Louisiana to the town where they’d been born to help his uncle with the sugarcane harvest. He was twenty-five. Raoul had been driving a tractor loaded too high with cane. The forema
n made him go out after two days of rain, even though Raoul told him it wasn’t safe. California nigger don’t come back for vacation and tell people what to do, the foreman said. In the rain, the wheels had slipped into a ditch and the tractor overturned onto Raoul.

  Enrique was unloading boxes of fertilizer. Felonise said, “You give me a ride up there to that school? Cerise and Lafayette at work.”

  They headed up the long gravel road between the Washington navel trees. The dust was heavy on the trees—no rain since spring. The green fruit was almond sized. “Which one sick?” Enrique said, his hand on the gearshift. The veins were ridged high like yarn under his skin.

  “Nobody sick,” she answered. The truck waited at the blacktop road. Down that street was the elementary school Cerise and all the other kids from the groves had gone to. Agua Dulce. Mexican, black and white kids from the small communities scattered in the trees. When they turned onto the road toward downtown, she said, “’Tite Lafie get in a fight.”

  Enrique nodded. “Like his daddy.”

  Felonise shook her head. “No. Not like his daddy. Fight back then, don’t mean nothin. Now they can’t fight. Can’t bring a chapstick. Can’t jump off no swing.” The truck went over the canal bridge. “I gotta take him home.”

  Enrique turned onto Palm Avenue, the big four-lane street that went through the whole city. To the west was the boarding house where they’d first stayed when they came to California. To the east was downtown, with old Victorian houses, Spanish-style bank buildings, the restaurants and stores. “Off Tenth Street?” he asked, and she nodded. “Why he can’t walk?” Enrique said, and Felonise was startled.

  “You know,” she said. “Boogie man. Cerise and them see boogie man everywhere. Them kids can’t walk.”

  She had told Cerise and the other girls only once about Mr. McQuine. The real boogie man, back in Louisiana. Not about the taste of his skin. But that Enrique had killed him.

  Enrique’s hand pulled the gearshift again—the knuckles like rocks moving under his skin. His wife said he’d killed Mr. McQuine with a piece of wood—and Felonise lay awake some nights wondering if you could hear it. The skullbone smashed.

  Felonise had never told anyone—not even Raoul or Marie-Claire, that Mr. McQuine—his wide brow sweating pale as new-boiled egg, his hands fat—had caught her once when she walked home from her aunt’s. His grasp on her elbow was so hard the bones ground together. She heard the sound of her bones inside her skull. He jerked her around and then said, “Oh, you one a them blue-eyed niggers!” She had ducked her head and bitten his forearm. Sweat and motor oil in her mouth, and when she turned to run, a salt-metal taste behind her front teeth that she didn’t recognize until she was in the trees.

  Enrique glanced at her and said, “Too hot for school, non?” Then he turned into the residential district with two-story homes, historic plaques, hedges tall as walls. Past this was Olive Heights Elementary. He stopped the truck in the school parking lot.

  Felonise said, “Go head home. I stay with him at his maman’s. Wait for her.”

  Enrique knew her daughter. He said, “She be more upset than the boy, oui?”

  Felonise nodded. “She want him happy. That’s the only thing.”

  FELONISE HAD BEEN here a few times, waiting with Cerise at the back fence when the kids were let out. Cerise worked 6 am to 2 pm, and she always said, “We gotta be early to pick up.”

  “Why?”

  “Cause these other moms start lining up at the back fence an hour early so they can watch the kids on the playground.”

  “They don’t work?”

  “They work inside the home, okay?” Cerise put on lipstick, quickly. “They’re like a club. They volunteer at the school, they’re here all day. Bring their kids lunch.”

  “Ain’t no cafeteria?”

  “Very funny, Maman. Their kids want something from Taco Bell or Wendy’s.”

  “Why we gotta be early, too?”

  Cerise had given her a long look. She had parked her car behind a white SUV with soccer ball bumper stickers. “So the boys can see us. See we’re here. Like everybody else. So everything is exactly the same, Maman. You don’t get it.”

  She was right. There was already a parade of mothers down this sidewalk, standing with arms crossed in that waiting pose, laughing and talking, eyes on the playground. One woman had her hands splayed like starfish on the chainlink, peering inside, and then calling out to the toddler next to her, “There she is! I see Madison! She’s playing tetherball. Do you see her? See big sissie?”

  She remembered sitting with Marie-Claire, having one last cup of coffee while they heard the children’s voices skittering down the gravel road when they walked home from school. “There go peace and quiet,” Marie-Claire used to sigh. “Here come war.”

  Now Felonise looked down the long line of chainlink by the playground, lit gold by the sun and vibrating a little in the wind. No children were on the playground—probably too hot for recess. School in August—foolish.

  The sidewalk to the office was lined with scraggly rosebushes. Would Lafayette be inside the principal’s office? She stopped for a drink at the fountain near the door, and when she looked up, a drop hanging from her lower lip, tickling just exactly like when she was a child, she was startled by a young man who said, “Wow. I never see grownups drink from there.”

  He must have been a teacher. He smiled, blue tie and white shirt, his jeans faded. When he held open the door for her, Felonise wiped her mouth quickly with her wrist.

  “They’re all convinced it’s toxic,” he said, grinned once more, and walked down a hallway. She heard him say, “Hey, Lafayette. How’s math?”

  Her grandson said cheerfully, “Okay. Numbers don’t lie. Like you said last year.”

  Three women at the front desk looked at her with blank faces. Three clipboards were stacked on the counter near Felonise. The door to her left was marked Principal. It was closed. Three folding chairs were lined along the wall. In one, a red-haired boy sat staring at his backpack, which crouched between his legs like a fat black dog with tags dangling everywhere.

  “Lafayette,” she called softly toward the hallway.

  “Excuse me,” said the woman in the middle. She was white, her hair short dark wings around her forehead. Her hand rested on her phone as if it were glued there. “Are you here to pick up a child?”

  “Lafayette Reynaldo,” Felonise said. Add the middle name, they knew you weren’t fooling.

  “Grandmère!” He came down the hallway. “I was in the bathroom.”

  The other boy lifted his head and looked up at Lafayette. Then he said, “I need to call my mom again.”

  Was he the one? Lafayette didn’t even glance at him. He picked up his own black backpack. “You have to sign, Grandmère,” he said.

  “Excuse me,” the woman said again. “Ma’am, I’ll need your ID so I can write down the number here.”

  Felonise looked at the clipboard and piece of paper. A list of names, scrawled signatures, and times.

  “I need to call my mom again!” the red headed boy said, and Felonise heard the words sharp. That was him. The boy. This was a competition. She had arrived first.

  “We called her, Cody. She said she’s on her way.”

  “Whatever,” the boy said. Felonise let herself look at him. Reddish-brown hair in shiny spikes, like a wet cat sat on his skull. She glanced away before seeing his eyes.

  Cerise had told her a hundred times to always bring ID with her, because the school wouldn’t let the boys out unless she had it. “What other old lady gon show up to steal em?” Felonise had said, and her daughter said sternly, “Just bring it, Maman.”

  She lay on the counter the California ID she’d had to get five years ago for this purpose. “This isn’t a driver’s license,” the woman frowned.

  “I ain’t a driver,” Felonise said, and then sealed her teeth inside her mouth. She wanted to hurt this woman. She wanted to throw the wire basket at her
head. Lafayette’s elbow was near hers. He was almost as tall as she was.

  “Mom!” The other boy was talking into a cell phone now. “I told you to come get me now!”

  The woman was looking at Felonise’s wrist. The black wires and blue beads of the macramé bracelet Cerise had made for her twenty years ago, some craft project, and the wires had tightened eventually so that the bracelet never came off. The woman wrote on the lines and turned the clipboard around. Felonise signed like Raoul had taught her years ago, like he’d learned to sign when he came to California. Just make a big loop for your first letter and then a straight line, like you in a hurry. Don’t make no X here. They don’t know the X here.

  “The vice-principal will have to okay this,” the woman said. “Because he’s suspended.”

  Felonise let out her breath and turned around. The other boy said, “Tell them to wash it out then, Mom! Hurry up.”

  He closed the little phone and held it in his hand. Then he looked up at Lafayette. His skull moved to the left, and his tongue made a lump in his cheek. He was not sorry.

  His cheeks had light freckles like crushed cornflakes. There was a trace of blood on his lip, a torn spot. A keyhole. She grabbed Lafayette’s hand. A tiny torn spot between his knuckles. Raw pink.

  “You apologize?” she said to Lafayette, and the entire office became quiet.

  “We both apologized,” he said impatiently. He was not afraid. His chin was lifted.

  “What he apologize for?” she said.

  The boy’s hand tightened on his phone.

  Lafayette said, “He called me a bunch of names.”

  “What you call him, you?” she said to the boy. His hair glistened.

  The principal’s door opened. The man put out his hand immediately to Felonise. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Mr. Nonebeck, the new vice principal. I’m responsible for discipline.”

  She put her hand in his for a moment. He was tall, with brown hair and glasses and one of those faces like every newsman on television.