Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  “Look at your feet,” he would say, like she’d been working at 7-Eleven all day. Convenience. “You should get your feet done like Sisia. Look like they hurt. And get your toes did. Ain’t that how y’all say? ‘I done got my toes did.’”

  Glorette smiled.

  VICTOR WAS AFRAID of fingernails. He’d cried when he was little and Sisia came over and Glorette didn’t know why. Sisia wasn’t pretty. She was dark and her cheeks were pitted like that bread. Pumpernickel. What the hell kind of name was that for a bread?

  Sisia was a brick house, though. She liked to say it. A real mamma-jamma. 36-24-36 back in the day. More like 36-30-36 now, but still Glorette heard men say, “Close your eyes, man, and open your hands, and you got something there, with that woman.”

  But it was the fingernails that Victor cried about. Long and squared-off and winking with gems or even a ring through the nail. Lynn Win bored a hole through the tip and hung the jeweled ring.

  Claws. For animals.

  But now only women were supposed to fight with them. You could scratch a man’s face, but then he’d probably kill you. You could scratch his back—some men wanted you to dig nails into their backs, like you were out of control, and that made them lose it, their whole spines would arch and tremble. But some men, if you dug your nails experimentally into the wider part below their shoulderblades, the cobra hood of muscle, just frowned and elbowed your hands off. “Don’t mark me up and shit,” they’d say, and then Glorette knew they had a wife or woman at home.

  But Glorette just used her regular nails. Her claws. The ones God gave her. The ones Victor said were designed different from apes and chimps, and different from cats and dogs. I don’t think we ever dug, he’d say. Not like badgers or rabbits. And we didn’t need the fingernails to hold onto food or anything. So it must be just for fighting, but we didn’t have teeth like the cats or dogs to bite something on the neck and kill it.

  I think they’re just leftover, he’d say. From something else.

  Sere had a vein on his temple, from his hairline toward his left eyebrow, like twine sewn under his skin. When he played his flute or drums, the vein rose up but didn’t throb. It wasn’t red or blue, under his brown skin, not like the white baby Glorette had seen once at the store whose skin was so pale that blue veins moved along its head and temples like freeways.

  But Victor’s temples were smooth and straight, though he thought all the time, read and wrote and did math problems and studied for graduation tests and played music and didn’t just listen but wrote down all these bands’ names and dates and song titles. He asked her once, “This song, the one you like so much. Poinciana. What is it?”

  She thought for a long time. “A flower? I don’t know.”

  One crystal of salt from a cracker on her tongue. The cracker exploding like hard-baked snowflakes and pieces of rock salt on her molars. Then a white sludge she could work at while they walked.

  She had to have saltines when she was pregnant with Victor.

  Sisia’s aunt used to eat starch. White chunks of Argo. Only one she wanted. That box with the woman holding corn. Indian woman. Corn turned into knobs of snow that squeaked in the teeth. Like new sneakers on a basketball court, Chess used to say when they were young.

  The corn husks were green skin when they peeled off. The milky white when a fingernail pierced a kernel. How did that turn to starch?

  The leaves of the coca wherever those Indians grew it. And how the hell did it turn to little chunks of white? Baby powder cornstarch flakes of White-Out powdered sugar not crystals not cane sugar and molasses like her mother would only use like Louisiana. They cut the cane and crushed it in the mill, her mother said. Mules going round and round. Then the juice had to boil and boil and boil, and finally sugar crystals formed. Diamonds of sweet. Diamonds of salt. On the tongue. But this chunk—which she picked up out of the empty dryer drum while Jazen watched from outside, her twenty in his pocket—she couldn’t eat.

  It had to turn to gray smoke inside her mouth, her throat, her lungs. Insubstantial. Inconvenience. The convenience store. Controlled substance. Possession of a controlled substance, but if you smoke it or swallow it when they pull up you ain’t in possession. It’s possessin you. Ha. Sisia laughing. Chess laughing. Come on. Let’s go home.

  He liked to pretend her couch was home.

  Swear he would ask her to make grits. The tiny white sand of corn. Not crystals. Not chunks.

  Call it cush-cush back home, her mother used to say. Victor had eaten grits at his grandmère’s house and loved to call it that. Cush-cush.

  Victor was sleeping now. His math book open on his chest. Sere’s brain. My brain? He had the third-highest grades in the whole damn school. His ramen was in her hand. The plastic bag handles were rolled into pearls by now.

  ***

  SHE WALKED DOWN the alley behind the taqueria, more for the smell of the put-away beef than anything else. Ain’t no charge for smelling. She paused beside a shopping cart parked against the chainlink fence. The slats of vinyl worked through the fence. Sideways world. She smoked her last rock, in a pipe the man had given her. Pipe made of an old air-freshener tube blown larger with a torch.

  The chunk was yellow and porous. Small as aquarium rock. The fish in the pet store went in and out of the ceramic castle. Her head was pounding. Maybe he gave her some bad coca. A bad leaf.

  Someone was behind her. Sisia. Sisia was ready to quit for the night. Glorette was tired now. She had Victor’s ramen in her hand.

  She heard a voice kept all up behind front teeth. “Old crackhead bitch,” the voice said. “See if that hair real now. One a them fake falls. Drink yo damn soda? You ain’t gon pop nobody now.”

  Not Sisia.

  Fingers dug into the hair she’d twisted so tight hours ago, at the base of her skull, and pulled hard enough to launch Glorette backward, and then the silver handle of the shopping cart was beside her eyes, and the girl was tying her loose hair to the handle.

  “Real enough,” the girl said. “But this ain’t the nineties. You ain’t Beyoncé. You some old J-Lo and shit. You finished.”

  She was still behind Glorette. Her footsteps went backward. Was she gone?

  Glorette couldn’t untie her hair. Her hands shook. She was bent too far. Spine. So far backward that she could only look up at the streetlight just above. She felt pain sharp like a rat biting her heart. Teeth in her chest. A bad leaf? I taste salt. A crystal. The teeth bit into her chest again. Just a muscle. Victor says just a muscle like your thigh. Flex. She closed her eyes but the streetlight was brighter than the moon. Yellow sulfur. The sun. Like staring into the sun until you were blind, until the thudding of your heart burst into your brain and someone slid chalk sideways into perforated stripes across your vision until you couldn’t see anything.

  LA REINA

  ON THE FIRST Monday in October, the campus police car rolled to a stop in front of the lot, and the officer got out slowly, eying the four Hondas parked in the trampled grass under the pecan trees. Victor was sitting on the porch, reading the William James book for World Religions class. For the first time, he’d washed crow shit off Irwin’s Acura.

  On his headphones: Average White Band’s “Schoolboy Crush” and Gino Vanelli. Marcus had given him a Black-White-Guys mix. He slid the headphones down.

  “How you plannin on protectin these vehicles, son?”

  Big old campus security brother, Victor thought. Gotta say vehicles. Like a real cop.

  “Son?” The cop said it again.

  Guarding them with my life, pops, he thought. I ain’t your son. You ain’t my daddy. I’m just doin my job. Pops.

  “With my eyes,” Victor said. “Sittin right here. All day.”

  “And when you have to pee?”

  “I don’t.” He looked at the officer’s big shoulders and belly in the uniform. No prostate trouble for me, dude. Prostate. Prostrate. Prosthetic. Your proboscis. My prognosis.

  The officer walked to the lo
t’s edge. “You got a permit for this?”

  “For sittin on my grandpa’s porch?”

  The man stopped and folded his arms high on his chest, looking at the small house, the peeling yellow paint on the porch pillars, the picture window Victor had just washed. “Your grandfather? He buy this place from old Mrs. Batiste?”

  The cop looked vaguely familiar. Light-skinned, eyes hidden behind the requisite shades, but something about his mouth. Victor thought, So you tellin me you know everything about the street.

  “Yeah.”

  “You done bought four Hondas and you lived here since September?”

  “Nope.”

  “So these ain’t your cars, son?” Now he took off the sunglasses and glared at Victor. His badge said N. Belarde.

  They ain’t yours either. Uniform don’t make every damn car in the college lot yours. And you definitely drivin a Nova or Camry. Somethin old or boring.

  “I take care of em like they’re mine.” Victor didn’t move from the chair. The hoods of the cars faced him, since he had Irwin and his friends back into the spaces he’d marked with chalk in the dirt. He wasn’t ready to back the cars in yet himself, because even though he’d be eighteen in December, he’d never learned to drive, which in Southern California meant his life was seriously fucked-up.

  THEY WERE ALL of the opinion that what he’d missed was a crib, and then a bed. A bed with a comforter featuring Transformers or Ninja Turtles. Wait—Mutant Ninja Turtles. Vital distinction for somebody. Bedspread, comforter, quilt. How did the middle one comfort you more than the others?

  He’d missed Flintstones vitamins, his aunts had said. He had to look up Flintstones on the school computer. Flint was a stone, so the word seemed pointless, but Fred was funny.

  The teachers in conference with his mother at school, her sitting all legs in the desk-chair, staring out the window at whatever trees grew in the elementary school courtyard; his aunts in the kitchen of Uncle Enrique’s house in the orange groves of Sarrat; the cops in the fluorescent room when they’d taken him to jail after the idiot had shot up the apartment in The Riviera.

  His mother knew trees. Showed him how to find bees in the pepper tree trunks, spiders in the eucalyptus bark shedding long flat sheaves.

  In fourth grade, they studied California Indians, and Victor found a perfect piece of bark for his project. She took him to the riverbed, where the paddle-shaped cactus grew everywhere, and on the smooth green skin were cottony white insects. Their blood was magenta, a color he’d never seen, even among her eyeshadows and nail polish. She showed him how to paint the bark with designs in bug blood.

  She used to keep the bark picture in her trunk. The lock had been busted over and over, when people broke into it, but they threw the bark aside looking for money or rock or jewelry. Then someone got pissed when he couldn’t find anything, and he broke the bark in half and threw it on the floor.

  So she glued it together, and wrapped magenta ribbon from Rite Aid around each end, and hung it on the wall. No one would care about it then. And he saw her staring at it sometimes, when she lay on the couch. At each apartment, she hung it on the wall near the door.

  The bug was cochineal. An SAT word. A fucking SAT word.

  IT WASN’T THAT big a deal. She had sex with men who weren’t his father.

  His father had disappeared before he was born. So she couldn’t have sex with him. Sere Dakar, some musician from Detroit.

  Other moms had sex with their husbands, whom they hated, according to Bir and Amitav, both of whom told Victor that their parents had arranged marriages back in India before they came to California. Amitav’s mother had only hung out with his father for three hours before they got married.

  Other moms had sex with other women’s husbands, according to all three Logans who actually spoke to Victor after AP Art History. Or they had sex with guys they met at bars downtown, especially Marlo’s Place and Greensleeves and So Cal Brewing Company. The guys bought them drinks and dinner. His moms got two or three rocks.

  Morsels. Kernels. Nuggets. Pebbles. Not shards—that would be sharp and splintery. Not crystals—that would be glittery and multifaceted. Grains—too miniscule.

  Decomposed granite was grainy. Three kinds of rock—igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic?

  On Fridays, she’d had sex only with Chess, who was annoying as hell. Old-school brother with bow legs who had played three years of college ball at UCLA and bragged about his nickname, which apparently came from his ability to move the other players around the court with some skill. As he did now at the YMCA. So Victor rolled his eyes and left to hang out when Chess showed up, promptly at 11 on Fridays, with food and, yeah, rock—even though he acted like he wasn’t that guy.

  Chess had been shot in the parking lot of Sundown Liquor five days after Victor’s mother died, in August, and though the cops never found out who’d done it, Victor’s cousin Alfonso had disappeared that night. Whether that was about money or rock, Victor didn’t care.

  He knew it used to take $100 for Chess to keep Glorette at his crib all night. Even though that meant quiet, and if they had a TV at the moment Victor could watch whatever he wanted, he used to hate Fridays.

  The shows were dismal. He sat up with his SAT book and made lists. Dismal, distinctive, dystopian, utopian, Sisyphean. In Oneida, New York, they practiced eugenics in an attempt to create a utopian society. Sisyphus rolled that boulder up every time. His mother put another tiny rock in the pipe.

  They weren’t even shiny.

  But she had the system down, until that night.

  ***

  BACK ON THE first Saturday in May, he was registered to take the SAT. His high school history teacher, Marcus Thompson, had paid for it—and he’d left ten dollars for Victor to buy the number two pencils and some coffee for that morning.

  “Make sure you eat,” Marcus said, awkwardly.

  Victor said, “We got plenty of food.”

  He remembered being really hungry when he was three. She didn’t come home. He sat on the balcony. Maybe Jessamine Gardens. He couldn’t remember anything except his stomach was eating his backbone. He could feel something creeping up there. Vertebrae. He couldn’t breathe and so he sat outside, and his uncle Reynaldo found him because they were looking for his mother.

  Kindergarten? When he coughed really hard and finally she came home and put him in the shower with her and they sat in there all night, the moisture beading up on her hair like pearls and then collapsing into nothing. The water going inside his lungs and somehow cleaning out the burn.

  Memphis. The only name he had for the man. When he was ten. The cigarettes. Memphis lit a new one for each time, and when he was done he left them on the floor of the bedroom.

  But now she had it down. He was seventeen. So she left ramen, orange juice (and she bought Tropicana, not that Sunny Delight shit), and pistachios in the kitchen. The staples. And most nights, she brought home the scheduled items from El Ojo de Agua. He said to her, “Shrimp burrito from the Eye?”

  The Eye of Water. Jesus Espinoza, this guy in AP History, said that was from a town in Michoacan, where his father was born. Some shrine.

  The shrimp burrito had beans, rice, cabbage, tomatoes, sauce, and fried shrimp. $3.99. It was the size of a small log. A dusty white log. And Victor ate one every Tuesday. Wednesday was fish tacos. Thursday was tamales.

  Friday was Chess, and Saturday she was gone until dawn. Sunday she slept. He ate whatever his grandfather brought from Sarrat—gumbo or beans and rice or ham. Always oranges.

  She had her part as down as she could, and Victor had his part down cold. Perfect 4.0. Registered for the May 6, 2000 SAT. Last one of the year. Everybody else would be juniors, but he could finish college apps late and Marcus would help him.

  It must have pissed off those other moms, when their kids mentioned him. This black dude with weird hair and he’s really light so he’s like, not even really black, and his mom is, like, a crack ho—that’s just what e
verybody says, okay, she is—and he gets like, 97 or 98 on everything. Like, never lower. For reals.

  He had the second-highest grade in the class in AP European History, the second-highest in AP US History, and the third-highest in AP Art History.

  No one could beat Logan Maas. He would be number one in the senior class even if he did smoke weed every day, even if he’d told Victor one night that his dad put him in a closet when he was twelve because he brought home a B”, and his dad was pastor at a big church and loved to say Spare the rod, spoil the child. No one would get number two away from Amitav Kumar, even though he blazed out with Logan, and loved to joke that his mom was seriously pissed that he was the only number-two Indian at any high school in Rio Seco. Probably in all fucking Southern California. Probably in other states, too.

  Logan and Amitav kept asking Victor to blaze, and he’d hang with them in the parking lot at Jack in the Box, where everyone went to get high because it was two blocks from school and the lot was huge, with pepper trees all around the edge where no one paid attention, and the cops never went to Jack. They all ate at Logan Huntsman’s father’s deli. Every day you’d see squad cars parked there.

  The four other Logans—the secondary Logans, who hung out with the two Hunters, the Piper, and the two Dakotas—hated his ass. Two girl Logans and two boy Logans. Brown-haired girl Logan had green eyes like olives, one of those girls who wore her hair in a ponytail and it was thick and long so you could see the reason they called it that. She asked him all casual as often as she could without seeming insecure, “So what’d you get on the test?”