Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  “Think she got some candy out here in California!” he said. Marie-Claire said, “Pomegranate come from far away, too. In the Bible they tell you. So leave her alone.”

  Lafayette came inside with the smell of the barn—motor oil and citrus rind. “You know what you name for?” she said, grabbing his arm.

  “Some dude from France.”

  He went straight to the refrigerator and left a dark handprint on the door while he leaned down to see what was inside.

  CERISE CALLED BACK an hour later, crying so hard that Felonise knew she must be in the bathroom or the parking lot. “Maman. He called back. Mr. Nonebeck. He was saying weird stuff like, ‘There was an exchange of fluids, and so we have to take this very seriously.’”

  Exchange? Felonise dried the pan, the phone tucked into her shoulder. Like kissing. Saliva.

  “Lafie hit the kid so hard he was bleeding.” Cerise’s voice was shivering. Shivering like when she was a child and couldn’t stop crying.

  Felonise felt her chest fill with heat. “Don’t have to hit the lip hard to make it bleed,” she said. “Baby—”

  “This is Lafie’s permanent record! Next year when he gets to junior high the teachers will read this and think he’s a little thug. These mothers will all be in the same damn PTA there, too.”

  The Peds were dry. Felonise stacked them on the couch. Funny little socks. Dove wings. Her daughter said, “Maman?”

  “You so much smarter than me,” Felonise whispered. “I didn’t raise you to be so smart. You—you make yourself that way. Lafayette raise himself to be smarter than you.”

  “See?” Cerise was angry now, and Felonise could hear the anger evaporating the tears. Almost thirty-six and still the same. “You think it’s so easy, but it’s not!”

  She was walking now—her breath huffed into the phone. It was 12:40. She was on lunch break. “I can’t get off early today, but I’ll be there by two. Damn, Teeter’s still there.”

  “Cerise,” Felonise said, the deadly voice, until her daughter stopped. “Listen to me. I know what you talk about. At that school. Enrique take us back at two. We meet you there. So you be there like always, to get Teeter. So they see all of us.”

  In the silence she heard the finches, the click of silverware through the holes in the phone. She breathed into the other holes. “You hear me?” she said to her daughter. “I be at that back gate.”

  LAFAYETTE FELL ASLEEP at one o’clock, on her couch, the shadow of the pecan tree branches waving over his face as if someone stood there with a fan. Felonise watched him. He wasn’t used to walking that far. At two, she thought of Cerise coming quickly down the elevator of the building she’d said was tall and mirrored and standing where the vineyards used to be. Cerise would move quickly to her car, to the freeway, and then be stuck in traffic. She talked about it all the time.

  At 2:04, she woke her grandson and made him wash his face and hands. She split a pomegranate in half, and they sucked the elusive red juice and spit the seeds like soft white rice into a bowl.

  They were crowded in the front seat of Enrique’s truck. Kids couldn’t ride in the back now—against the law. Enrique said, “Marie-Claire say Clarette work late at the prison. Her kids come over tonight. You bring them boys, too. They all eat by us.”

  The truck crossed over the arroyo bridge. Enrique said, “You walk a long way today.”

  Lafayette nodded. He looked scared now, of what his mother would say.

  Felonise put her hand on her grandson’s backpack. There was no back available to pat.

  Enrique looked past the boy at her. The scar at his cheek—three slanted marks like some Chinese writing the teenagers tattooed on their arms. But that was a board with three nails. Swung by a drunk white man when he was in the Army, he told her once.

  He left them at the back gate.

  THE SIDEWALK WAS full of women. The chainlink fence was covered with red satin bows and signs with big painted red letters.

  “Red Ribbon Day,” Lafayette sighed. “Just Say No to Drugs.”

  They walked slowly up through the mothers who were adjusting bows, little kids too small for school beside them. “The first-graders come out and do the fence with the PTA moms,” Lafayette whispered to her.

  Felonise leaned against a car while people passed her. The car door was hot against her backside. Cerise had said he had to wear red shirts all next week. He used to bring home Indian headdresses in November. Brown waxy crayon-shaded picture of Rosa Parks in February.

  Raoul had died in December. Mr. Daniel say, Nigger, I tell you if it’s too much water. Cause niggers can’t swim. But you can drive. Drove all the way from California, cause you think you too good to live here, and now you don’t want work.

  “Grandmère,” Lafayette whispered, nudging her with the backpack. “You can’t lean on cars cause they might have an alarm. Come on.”

  But Felonise saw the black truck, parked right up by the back gate. Metal rungs like giant staples below the doors. To climb in? How you carry grocery up there?

  The mother came out from a crowd by the fence. She motioned, and the passenger window melted down. “Cody!” she said. “Your little brother needs your help over there. I told you to put that phone away. Go help Dakota with his poster.”

  “Mom, I’m suspended. I can’t go on the playground. That’s the rules.”

  Felonise saw his elbow, then his face. A faint crescent moon of fat behind his chin.

  The crowd shifted along the fence. A man walked down the sidewalk. The vice principal. “Let’s get all the scraps and trash up off the ground now, okay?” he called, in that reasonable voice. “We’re getting close to the last bell.”

  Lafayette bumped her with his backpack when he stepped between two parked cars. Felonise grabbed his arm. “Where you go?”

  “I’m not supposed to be here either.”

  “You ain’t here. You waitin for your mama.”

  “I don’t want to see her!” he said, his eyes narrowed in the sun, his hand over his forehead like he was saluting.

  Felonise heard Cerise’s car then, the little shriek when she turned the corner—like a trapped bird, but Big Lafayette said it was a worn-out brake pad. She parked somewhere in the long line of cars, then came up the sidewalk toward them. Lafayette didn’t cry. He just folded his arms, rolled his eyes, and stepped back onto the sidewalk. The boy named Cody leaned out of the truck and saw Lafayette, then pulled back his head like a snail feeling a finger.

  The mother came toward Felonise now. She was carrying a black plastic trashbag, bending to pick up the tiniest scraps of red ribbon and construction paper swirling like confetti in the wind. “Oh my God, I haven’t even had time to wash my hands! We’ve been here since lunch! But the fence looks great!” she shouted to Mr. Nonebeck, who was handing her one of the water bottles he carried in a cooler.

  “Lafayette?” Cerise said behind her. “You okay, baby? Come here.”

  Her daughter’s voice too high. The crying was caught in her throat, where it would stay. What was that hot wetness you trapped inside your… that tube where the food went down? It wasn’t tears. It came up from your chest.

  In the silence she knew the mother had seen Cerise and Lafayette now. She held her trashbag at her thigh, looked past Felonise, and lifted up her right hand to point. She said, “Your kid isn’t supposed to be here. He—”

  Felonise pulled an old handkerchief from her purse. She grabbed the mother’s upraised hand. It was grimy with fence dust and sticky from tape. The pink fingernails were tipped with white like frosting. Felonise spat into her handkerchief and pushed down the fingers, and wiped the center of the woman’s palm. She rubbed hard and said, “Here. Now you clean.”

  She didn’t look up at the woman’s face. She wanted to tear a little flesh from the wrist with her teeth. This kind of woman made Cerise cry. She made Cerise cry and hide in a hallway and swallow the burning that came up from her chest. She might say welfare mama when she told th
e story tonight. Crack ho.

  Felonise folded the woman’s fingers over the ball of wet cloth and looked up at the blue eyes. Saliva. A crime. Black lashes like brooms for a tiny doll. She said softly, “These ain’t contacts. My grandmère get them from a wigger.” She pointed at the boy hidden in the truck. “He know,” she said. “That my grandson, and when you see his mama tomorrow, in that meeting, you remember me.” Her own eyes burned hot—she gave the woman the look that Raoul used to say could start the back of someone’s head on fire. All she ever had—that look. And her teeth.

  She let the hand go, and it popped up like a handle on a slot machine.

  Then she turned toward the man she knew was approaching her. He held a frosted plastic bottle and said, “Ma’am?”

  Mr. McQuine’s nephew only gave water once a day in the field. Sometimes he put mud in it. Felonise drank it anyway. He would say, Don’t look at me with them devil eye. Blue eye don’t make you white.

  She would say, Hat don’t make you a man.

  Felonise fitted her lips back over her teeth again and walked past him to where Cerise stood, shaking her head, holding her fingers to her temples as if she’d been stung by the tiny hairs had curled there, the ones Felonise used to damp down in waves.

  MINES

  THEY CAN’T SHAVE their heads every day like they wish they could, so their tattoos show through stubble. Little black hairs like iron filings stuck on magnets. Big round-head fool magnets.

  The Chicano fools have gang names on the sides of their skulls. The white fools have swastikas. The Vietnamese fools have writing I can’t read. And the black fools—if they’re too dark, they can’t have anything on their heads. Maybe on the lighter skin at their chest, or the inside of the arm.

  Where I sit for morning shift at my window, I used to see my nephew in his line, heading to the library. Square-head light-skinned fool like my brother. Little dragon on his skull. Nothing in his skull. Told me it was cause he could breathe fire if he had to. Alfonso tattooed on his arm.

  “What, he too fool remember his own name?” my father-in-law said when he saw it. “Gotta look down by his elbow to check?”

  Two names on his collarbone: twins. Girls. Egypt and Morocco. Seventeen and he’s got kids. He was in here for a year. Some LA kid got shot in the leg. Alfonso was riding in the car. They couldn’t prove he did it, but there was a gun in the glove compartment. Known associate. Law says same as pulling the trigger.

  Ten o’clock. They line up for shift between classes and voc ed. Dark-blue backs like fool dominoes. Shuffling boots. Fred and I stand in the doorway, hands on our belts, watching. From here, seeing all those heads with all those blue-green marks like bruises, looks like everybody got beat up big-time. Reyes and Michaels and the other officers lead their lines past the central guard station, and when the wards get closer, you can see all the other tattoos. Names over their eyebrows, teardrops on their cheeks, words on their necks, letters on their fingers.

  One Chicano kid has Perdóname mi abuelita in fancy cursive on the back of his neck. Sorry my little grandma. I bet that makes her feel much better.

  When my nephew used to shuffle by, he would grin and say softly, “Hey, Auntie Clarette.”

  I always wanted to slap that dragon off the side of his stupid skull.

  Fred says, “How’s your fine friend Tika? The one with green eyes?”

  I roll my brown eyes. “Contacts, okay?”

  I didn’t tell him I saw Tika last night, at Lincoln Elementary. “How can you work at the youth prison? All those young brothers incarcerated by the system?” That’s what Tika said to me at Back-to-School Night. “Doesn’t it hurt you to be there?”

  “Y’all went to college together, right?” Fred says.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Except she’s teaching African-American studies there now, and I married Reynaldo. He quit football at city college and started plastering with his brother.

  “Rey went with y’all, too, didn’t he? Played ball til he blew out his knee?”

  The wind’s been steady for three days now, hot August wind blowing all the tumbleweeds across the empty fields out here, piling them up against the chainlink until it looks like hundreds of heads to me. Big-ass naturals from the seventies, when I squint and look toward the east. Two wards come around the building and I’m up. “Where you going?”

  The Chicano kid grins. “TB test.”

  “Pass.”

  He flashes it, and I see the nurses’ signature. The blister on his forearm looks like a quarter somebody slid under the skin. Whole place has TB so bad we gotta get tested every week. My forearm dotted with marks like I’m a junkie.

  I lift up my chin. I feel like a guy when I do it, but it’s easier than talking sometimes. I don’t want to open my mouth. “Go ahead,” Fred calls out to them.

  “Like you got up and looked.”

  Fred lifts his eyebrows at me. “Okay, Miss Thang.”

  It’s like a piece of hot link burning in my throat. “Shut the fuck up, Fred.” That’s what Michaels and Reyes always say to him. I hear it come out like that, and I close my eyes. When I get home now and the kids start their homework, I have to stand at the sink and wash my hands and change my mouth. My spit, everything. Not a prayer. More like when you cool down after you run. Every night, I watch the water on my knuckles and think, No TB. No cussing. No meds.

  Because a couple months after I started YA, I would holler at the kids, “Take your meds.”

  “Flintstones, Mama,” Danae would say.

  Fred looks up at the security videos. “Tika still single, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  She has a gallery downtown, and she was at the school to show African art. She said to me, “Doesn’t it hurt your soul? How can you stand it?”

  I didn’t say anything at first. I was watching Rey Jr. talk to his teacher. He’s tall now, fourth grade, and he smells different to me when he wakes up in the morning.

  I told Tika, “I work seven to three. I’m home when the kids get off the bus. I have bennies.”

  She just looked at me.

  “Benefits.” I didn’t say the rest. Most of the time now Rey and Lafayette stay out in Sarrat, hanging out at the barn, working on cars. Rey hasn’t had a plastering job for months. He says construction is way down, and when somebody is building, they hire Mexican drywallers.

  When I got this job, Rey got funny. He broke dishes, washing them. He wrecked clothes, washing them. He said, “That ain’t a man. A man’s job.” He started staying out with Lafayette.

  Tika said, “Doesn’t it hurt your soul to see the young brothers?”

  For my New Year’s resolution, I told myself, Silence is golden. Like that old Maze song—Glorette’s favorite jam. I bet she still plays that every day, if she can keep a radio. And some quiet jazz song—“Poinciana.” She used to have a boom box, and she lived so bad it always got stolen.

  But I saw her last week at Rite Aid—she was buying lotion—and she was humming it. “That’s the golden time of day.”

  At work, cause me talking just reminds them I’m a woman. With Rey and my mother-in-law and everyone else except my kids. I looked at Tika’s lipstick and shouted in my head: I make twenty-nine grand a year! I’ve got bennies now! Rey never had health care, and Danae’s got asthma. I don’t get to worry about big stuff like you do, cause I’m worrying about big stuff like I do. Pay the bills, put gas in the van, buy groceries. Rey Jr. eats three boxes of Cheerios every week, okay?

  But I said, “Fred Harris works out there. And JC and Marcus and Beverly.”

  Tika said, “Prison is the biggest growth industry in California. They’re determined to put everyone of color behind a wall.”

  Five days a week, I was thinking, I drive past the chainlink fence and past JC at the guard gate. Then Danae ran up to me with a book. They had a book sale at Back-to-School Night. Danae wanted an American Girl story. $4.95.

  Tika walked away. I went to the cash register. Five days a week, I p
ark my van and walk into the walls. But they’re fences with barbed wire and us watching. Everything. Every face.

  “Nobody in the laundry?” I ask, and Fred shakes his head. Laundry is where they’ve been fighting this week. Black kid got his head busted open Friday in there, and we’re supposed to watch the screens. The bell rings and we get up to stand in the courtyard for period change. We can hear them coming from the classrooms, doors slamming and all those boots thumping on the asphalt. The wind moving their stiff pants around their ankles, it’s so hard right now. I watch their heads. Every day it’s a scuffle out here, and we’re supposed to listen to who’s yelling or, worse, talking that quiet shit that sets it off.

  All the damn heads look the same to me, when I’m out here with my stick down by my side. Light ones like Alfonso and the Chicano kids and the Vietnamese, all golden brown. Dark little guys, some Filipinos, and then the white kids so pale they’re almost green. But all the tattoos like scabs. Numbers over their eyebrows and fuck you inside their lips when when they pull them down like clowns.

  The wind whips through them, and they all squint but don’t move. My head is hurting at the temples, from the dust and wind and no sleep. Laundry. The wards stay in formation, stop and wait, boots shining like baby black foreheads. I heard muttering and answers and shit-talking in the back, but nobody starts punching. Then the bell rings and they march off.

  “Youngblood. Stop the mouth,” Fred calls from behind me. He talks to the wards all the time. Old-school. Luther Vandross loving and hair fading back like the tide at the beach—only forty-two, but acts like he’s a grandpa from the south. “Son, if you’da thought about what you were doing last year, you wouldn’t be stepping past me this year.” They look at him like they want to spit in his face. “Son, sometimes what the old people say is the gospel truth, but you wasn’t in church to hear.” They would knock him in the head if they could. “Son, you’re only sixteen, but you’re gonna have to go across the street before you know it, you keep up that attitude.”