Felonise folded her arms. She said, “What this boy call names?”
“Ma’am, you can’t speak to him.” Mr. Nonebeck moved easily between her and the red-haired boy. Felonise felt Lafayette against her shoulder. The space between the counter and the door was crowded, and the wind blew sharply outside, rattling the windowshades. “We’ll be setting up a meeting for you with the principal and Cody’s mother and me.”
Felonise said, “Set up a appointment, me? To talk to a boy?” She looked at his throat. “He call some names. I like to know what names.”
“You must be his guardian,” he said, his voice still very easy.
“No!” Lafayette shouted now. “That’s my grandma. My mom and dad are at work. They’ll come in tomorrow.”
In that minute, the women breathing behind her, their phones and computers and wire baskets around them, the edge of the counter at her back, she understood what Cerise had been trying to tell her for six years. Since kindergarten.
Raised by his grandmother. So sad, these days. No responsibility. No mother, no father, just a legal guardian.
“What names?” she said, making her voice low and deadly, the voice she used when she wanted Cerise to be afraid, back when she was a child. This man was a child. He couldn’t be more than thirty-five.
“I heard the n-word in our earlier discussion,” the vice-principal said, voice not nervous at all. “But as I said, this is something we’ll—”
“‘The n-word’?” Felonise said. She took a deep breath and felt her own chest fill with air, felt her breasts inside her bra puff up, like a bird’s. “You just say nigger. Don’t nobody call out n-word on no playground. They talk about nigger.”
She said the word the way she had heard it a thousand times. Loud, on the sidewalk, at the edge of the road, in her own mother’s kitchen.
“They say nigger.” She said it again, because she knew it made their hearts clutch for a moment. Like a motor with a stick pulled in.
Lafayette said, “Actually, he called me a wigger.”
The boy Cody looked away, at the posters on the wall.
“A what?” Felonise said. Her grandson was moving toward the door, pulling her gently. How had he done that? He had taken all the air from the room, it was swirling around him now. He had some kind of power, because then he laughed. “A wigger. Whatever.”
He rolled his eyes and pushed open the door, and the blinds flapped in the wind. Felonise followed his backpack outside. A picture of a mountain embroidered on it.
“How did you get here?”
“Your grandpère.”
He nodded. The wind sent leaves across the sidewalk and through the chainlink like confetti. “I like the wind,” he said. “Mom hates it. She says it makes driving home really hard.”
Felonise nodded. “All that dust kick up. She probably get the message now. She worried.”
He grinned, but then he dropped his head. “She’s totally freaked out.”
Felonise thought of her daughter speeding down the freeway, having gotten the messages and not knowing Felonise was already here. She told him, “You wait.”
She walked back toward the office. Another woman was struggling to open the door in the wind—carrying bags, her hair damp and streaked, the smell of chemicals wafting behind. She glanced back at Felonise’s face and frowned. Then the wind pulled the door closed behind her.
My eyes, Felonise thought. She look at my eyes. The window was open. She heard the secretary behind the counter. “Would a woman that age really wear contacts? Seriously. It just looks weird.”
The younger woman said, “Everyone wears contacts now.”
White people never learned. The vice-principal said, “They were really distinctive, that’s true. Very blue.”
Then the secretary said, “Cody, honey, your mom’s here.”
The mother said, “I was at the salon. Hey, you guys didn’t eat all the doughnuts I brought this morning.”
Felonise pulled the door open and stood in the threshold. She said, “Excuse me. Call my daughter back on her phone and tell her I came for Lafayette. So she don’t worry.”
Mr. Nonebeck began to smile and nod, and Felonise held up her hand. She looked at the damp-haired woman. She said, “Discipline come from the Bible. From disciple.”
She let the door close behind her so hard the plastic slats danced.
THEY CROSSED THE street. It was only six blocks to Cerise’s house. In this part of downtown, the houses were small and pretty, wood-frame with porches and trim around the windows.
“He kept sayin, You got served. You got served. Every time I missed a basket.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He wouldn’t shut up. Every day he kept sayin, You ain’t down. You ain’t down for shit. He cusses all the time, and none of the playground supervisors ever hear.”
“You bet not be cussin.”
“I don’t! They keep asking me to play ball. The first week of school, they were all like, Get him, get him, cause they thought I had skills.”
“Skills?”
“Yeah. They were like, What you play, what you play? And I said piano. Then every day Cody’d be like, You a waste, man, if I looked like you I’d fuck up every nigga on the playground.”
“Lafayette Reynaldo.” Eucalytpus leaves swirled around their feet like brown and silver fish.
“It’s not like how you said it.” He stopped to adjust his backpack again, and took out a small plastic package with dinosaurs dancing. Fruit snacks. The jelly-like things they ate all day, he and his brother. Felonise smelled the sharp scent of juice. “They’ll be like, Hey, my niggas.”
“Talkin to you?”
“Everybody.” The fruit shapes were gone. A glistening sludge showed on his teeth, and he shrugged.
“It wasn’t like, all the stuff he said. He just wouldn’t shut up. Every day. He was like, You ain’t a true nigga. You a wigger.”
“Wigger.”
“A white boy wants to be black.”
She paused at the next corner. The round curb, the specked cement, the wind in her nose. All the women in the office. “You sure black this mornin.”
They walked for two more blocks, and she could see her daughter’s yard, the wrought-iron trellis and gate her son-in-law had put in near the sidewalk.
Lafayette turned to her impatiently. “I don’t want to go home. I want to go to your house. Did you cook yet?”
“Long way to my house. I ain’t cook yet.” She paused, looking at the sidewalk under the tunnel of old oak trees.
But she was secretly happy. When they’d walked back to Palm Avenue, she waited a few more minutes, the faded bougainvillea blossoms near their feet, and then said, “Why you hit him then?”
Lafayette looked across the street at the Wendy’s. “Cause it was just like, every day, I know you play. So today I played, and then he was like, Why play the piano? Nobody plays the piano, and I’m like, Alicia Keys, and he said, So you a bitch now? Then I had to hit him.”
The cars went past in rushes of hot air. Lafayette said, “There he is. Cody and his mom. At Wendy’s.”
The truck was so tall Felonise could see its metal guts underneath. The red-haired boy was staring at them. His mother spoke to the woman working the drive-through window, and then Cody’s mouth opened. She looked up from her lap—she must have been getting the money—and focused on Felonise.
She puffed up her hair with her fingers, almost like that old way, the beehive, Felonise remembered. In the sun, it was striped. White-blonde and honey-brown, and underneath, black as oil. Beautiful as strange pulled taffy.
Their mouths moved behind the glass. Lafayette said, “He always eats Wendy’s. I hate their fries.”
Then the truck moved forward, and stopped at the corner for the signal. Lafayette had just pushed the WALK button. The woman peered out her open window. “So wait, Cody, you can’t go back to school today? You’re gonna miss Red Ribbons?”
Felonise saw Lafayette
roll his eyes.
“Because of him?” The words floated from the open window. “That kid?” Her hand dangled outside the window. Her fingernails were long and pink.
Felonise looked at Lafayette, but he was laughing now. He wasn’t afraid. She said, “She want talk to me, better make an appointment,” just as the woman turned left and sped off down the avenue.
Felonise tried to remember what Cerise said, when she tried to explain it to Big Lafayette. “Look,” she’d shouted once, when the boys had been to visit all weekend and hadn’t done something they were supposed to do for Jump Rope for Heart Health. “Look! These women are killing me because I don’t sign up for anything, and Lafie’s in the gifted classes with their kids, okay? Serious. If you don’t give a shit, fine, but I do. They remember everything. I get one time not to show up at the office right when they call. The perfect mommies, they leave yoga class right when the cell rings. Or if they’re late, the office staff knows them and they’re in there joking around when they show up, talking about they had to pick up the paper plates for the teacher luncheon and look what centerpieces they got at the craft store.”
They were coming up on the last big intersection of downtown, where they would cross under the freeway bridge. Glorette was walking up Palm Avenue. Felonise saw her in the distance. Thin arms, tall hair. “I’m not her,” Cerise always said. “Glorette. But they don’t know.”
The Greyhound bus station was down this street, where Felonise and Marie-Claire and the others had come all those years ago to stay in Batiste’s boarding house. To get away from Mr. McQuine. His skin like hardened Crisco. His blood on her teeth.
“Grandmère,” Lafayette said. “The light’s green. You okay? You hot?”
“No. This just a baby walk, not how we use to walk in Louisiana.”
“So when he called me a bitch some spit got on my cheek. He was all up in my face.”
Felonise waited. He was silent, breathing hard. “That when you hit him?”
“Daddy told me to hit him back if he got me first. Mama doesn’t know he said that.” Lafayette kicked a pile of gold dates off the sidewalk. “I felt spit on my cheek and I remembered Mr. Nonebeck said you could get arrested for spittin on people. Cause of AIDS. It’s like assault or somethin.”
Felonise reached for his hand at the crosswalk and then remembered. He was eleven years old now. She held her arms loosely at her sides until the chirping sound began, the sound that meant walk. The first time she’d heard it, the electronic tweet-tweet-tweet had startled her because she’d never heard a bird like that, and it sounded so loud and close to her hair.
She couldn’t tell him. If spitting was assault, half of Louisiana would be in prison. She had left Sarrat when she was sixteen. Raoul said he didn’t want no other girl, and he came out to California when she turned eighteen, and they got married. Felonise never went back to Louisiana until he was dead.
Mr. McQuine’s nephew, Mr. Daniel, had told Raoul to go out on the tractor. Ditches all full of rainwater, earth like flour paste between the canerows. They told her Raoul said no, and Mr. Daniel said, California nigger don’t tell people what he do and don’t. Get up there.
She had taken Cerise. Was she three? What had her daughter remembered from that few months, when they’d buried Raoul in a closed casket because so little was left of him? It was 1968. Had Cerise remembered how when they went to the store at the crossroads they had to wait in back for Miss Joan to hand them the rice and sugar and coffee they needed to cook for the wake? Miss Joan said, “Think this California? That what put your man wrong.” And Miss Joan’s husband, Mr. McQuine’s nephew, spit snuff in a brown stream onto Cerise’s foot, on her new funeral shoes.
“MAMAN? MAMAN?” SHE imagined her daughter’s voice, frantic on the answering machine at home. “Maman? I just got the message from the school on my cell. Did you go get him? Damn. I’m on my way.”
ANOTHER CROW LAY dead in the vacant lot. Recently dead—his feathers still had the glossy purple and gold sheen of movement and flight and disdain. A huge flock of crows lived in the pecan grove at the other side of Enrique’s property. The birds had been there for decades, according to the old Mexican men who lived in the next grove. In fall, when pecans were heavy in the trees, the raucous cries and fighting were usually so loud that Felonise closed her windows. But this year, the sky was quiet.
West Nile virus. AIDS. Spitting and mosquitoes.
She looked at her grandson’s cheek. A smear of dust like a caterpillar on his cheek—was that from him wiping off the spit? She wet her thumb and erased it. Now my spit and that boy spit mix up.
“Why you didn’t spit back at him?” she said.
Lafayette laughed. “Grandmère!” he said. “You know how hot it is on the playground at recess? And it’s all windy today.” He moved his backpack on his shoulders. It was so heavy he had a red mark along his neck, she saw. “Plus, he didn’t spit on purpose. He’s just goofy. He gets scum at the corner of his mouth all the time cause he has so much saliva in there.”
“Saliva.”
Lafayette laughed again. “Yeah. Saliva has acids to help the stomach break down our food. We had that in science class. We masticate our food and then it goes down our esophagus with the help of saliva. It’s pretty gross.”
Felonise couldn’t help but smile. “Uh-huh.” But how was that different from her telling Cerise to chew her food, not just swallow it? Everyone said the same things, over and over, forever.
Wigger.
They passed through the arroyo, where the tumbleweeds rolled down the canyon.
“Like big old Chia Pets!” Lafayette said, in the wind.
“From the devil!” she said back.
“What you want to masticate when we get to my house?” she said, as they started down the narrow blacktop road toward the groves. He lifted his head higher, to see the orange trees like a dense forest before then.
“Whatever.”
When they walked down the gravel road, the wind softened suddenly, in the tunnel of dark trees. Lafayette crunched into the nearest irrigation furrow and picked up two dried navel oranges, black and hard, fallen from last year. He threw them down the road. “Who’s here?” he shouted toward her, and then caught up. “Are my uncles here?”
“Nobody here but me and your grandpère,” she said. “Everybody workin.” She pointed down to the barn. “You can go down there.” She took his shoulder and turned him toward her. His eyes clear and golden as weak tea. “Don’t say nothin to your grandpère bout no names. Tell him you fight some boy for a ball. I mean it. You hear?”
He nodded and pulled away. “I know,” he said, impatiently. “I know.”
ONE FINCH HUNG upside-down in the bedraggled sunflowers. As soon as she got inside, the phone rang.
“Maman! This is why you need a cell phone!”
“No. They call me here and I went got him.”
“But I was going crazy!”
“Uh-huh.” Cell phone ain’t stop that. Where had her daughter gotten this nervousness about everything, this wire Felonise imagined strung between her braids and down her neck, twitching and coiled and different-colored as the wires inside this transparent phone?
“Grandpère give you guys a ride?”
“Uh-huh,” Felonise said.
“I thought you would take him home, so I tried there, but—”
“Cerise. He want come here. He’s fine.”
Her daughter was silent. There was the sound of a woman laughing in the background. The other customer service operators.
“What happened? According to him?”
Felonise looked out her window at the white wash, the other finches gathered at the feeder she’d filled this morning. Yellow finches with their shivery chirp. “Some white boy call him names. Lafie hit him.”
“That’s gonna go on his record.” Her daughter sighed into the phone—a baby wind. “The secretary called me. She said Mr. Nonebeck is gonna call me back to set up a conference to
morrow. Like I can get off before two. The other mom practically lives at the school.”
“You seen this boy? Redhead. Name Cody.”
“Cody Smith.” She heard Cerise say something to someone else. “Hold on, Maman.” Her hand made a smear of sound on the phone, and her voice disappeared as if she fell down a hole.
When she came back, she said, “Well, you need a cell, okay? Then he wouldn’t have to wait so long in the office. It probably made him feel worse because he had to sit there with everybody looking at him.”
“I taken him out of there and the other boy still waitin.”
“What?”
“The mama was gettin her hair done. She got that all-color hair. It’s pretty. Just don’t look like hair.”
“She came while you were in the office?”
“Oui. And she got a big truck. She pass us while we walk home.”
“You were walking? Oh my God, Maman. Why did you walk? Grandpa Enrique didn’t drive you?” Cerise’s voice rose higher.
Felonise dished out leftover rice and chicken for two. “Lafie want to walk.”
“Great.”
Felonise heard it. They had seen Lafayette walking with an old lady. Walking, like—what did he call it? Losers. Like losers. Losers walk.
Her daughter said, “I have to go, my break’s over. I’ll call you later.”
The few birds at the feeder struggled against the wind and fell away. Cody. She remembered when Lafayette first started at the school and Cerise told her that she’d overheard the mothers at the back gate saying, “I can’t believe someone would name their kids Lexus and Chanel. Oh my God.” Cerise did the imitation perfectly. She heard these voices every day. “And I was thinking, Dakota, Cody, Cheyenne—you name your kids after what, places you’ve never seen?”
Lafayette came running up from the barn into the yard. The birds scattered up to the branches of the pomegranate tree. What a strange fruit, she’d thought, when she first saw it here. In Louisiana, fall meant waiting for sugarcane—sweet sticks to chew and suck. The pomegranate seeds had been so beautiful that when she put a handful in her mouth and bit down, the sourness way behind her back teeth made her cry at first, and Enrique had laughed.
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