Will Do Magic for Small Change

by Andrea Hairston

  “Bamidele is Yoruba for come home, come to the West with me.” Liam planted a sloppy kiss in Bob’s tight curls. “Or is that a lie you told to win my heart? So I’d play the prince and rescue you?”

  “You’re drunk.” Bob punched him in the gut.

  Liam flailed. “You want to go outside and wrestle?”

  My head spun. Would they fight over the past Bob wanted to hide?

  Kehinde pulled Liam away. “You’re too angry, Irishman.”

  “Somebody ought to be angry,” Bob muttered.

  “Not tonight.” Kehinde danced with Liam. “We celebrate. Eshu opens the doors from this universe to every other. Tomorrow we journey to a New World together.”

  “Eshu demands sacrifice.” I was still worried. “You must be willing to die in order to live — especially to reach a New World.”

  What would our sacrifice be?

  Pittsburgh, PA, 1987 & America 1893-1971

  Come celebrate with me that everyday

  something has tried to kill me and has failed.

  Lucille Clifton

  Hold All Of Me

  Raven Cooper had shrunk. Three or four inches. Most of his face was sliding off high cheek bones, leaving a monster brow to jut out over half-slit eyes. Slack lips formed a sneer around yellow teeth, and cloudy spit oozed down his chin. Tubes sprouted from his face and arms. Cinnamon froze in the doorway, afraid of this monster, afraid of herself. She swallowed whatever was rising up from her gut into her throat. She dug her fingers into Aidan’s thigh. He gripped her hand, and they took tentative steps across the scuffed linoleum floor. Sun shone against peach cement-block walls trying to give the room a first-day-of-spring glow. Ragged begonias strained their leaves toward a blotchy window. Flower dead heads nodded in the heat convection between window and radiator. Cinnamon stopped five feet from her daddy. Aidan halted also. Pink chairs with sagging seats and rippling backs did not invite them further in. The imprints of friends and relatives lingered on the cracked fake leather. Cinnamon hated the yellow stuffing that poked through.

  “It’s too hot in here,” she said as sweat curled under her arms. “And it…” stank. Aidan nodded. Why was he so quiet? Maybe standing in this room was as hard for him as it was for her. Probably harder for Raven.

  Since they’d told Cinnamon that her daddy was shot in the head and lying in a bed, lost in his own mind, unable to reach this world, all she’d wanted to do was get to him, touch him, rouse him. She’d secretly thought that, despite what the specialists and experts said, despite what Opal and Sekou feared, despite the elders insisting they knew no spell, no conjure to bring their son back, she, Cinnamon the Great, would be able to wake her daddy up. Opal couldn’t stand to visit him, said she never went, and flat out refused to tell Cinnamon where he was. Sekou too. Trust me on this one, Sis. Lingering is worse than gone. The elders weren’t telling, and Aunt Becca claimed she didn’t know. Cinnamon couldn’t find a single clue, no bills or letters or anything. She was certain that if Opal and everybody would stop getting in her way, stop treating her like a baby, if they’d just let her go see him… Didn’t they want Raven back? Didn’t they want a miracle?

  The monster on the bed made a gurgling sound. Cinnamon took a step back and to the side. She used Aidan as a shield. Sekou didn’t have shit to say to her now. Snow White blasted her though:

  Too stupid to know the history we’re dying from

  So stuck on ourselves —

  Can’t see the present we’re dying in

  Fuck that noise, Jack!

  As the smell of poop and disinfectant twisted in her nose, the wake-up-Daddy kiddie fantasy played in her mind:

  Raven, a jaunty turban-bandage around his head, lay in billowy white pillows and sheets, as peaceful and beautiful as an angel. Cinnamon snuck away from Opal and their sad house, rode the bus to East Liberty or maybe out to Monroeville. She tore up the stairs to the fifth floor of a grand nursing home. She easily outran the lame guards at the door who were supposed to keep naughty children out. Nobody had to tell her which room. Daddy’s door glowed. She burst in, singing his secret name — Gilidinehuyi, Cherokee for lightning — and Raven’s eyes popped open. She stopped at the foot of the bed, waiting for all of him to open up and come back. After a long sleep, after weeks and months and years of dreams, a person would need a few moments to realize he was awake, to realize she wasn’t a dream angel but his magic hoodoo child, who knew the spell to call him back to himself.

  Raven rose slowly from the cocoon of sheets and tugged at the turban-bandage until it unraveled. A round scar at the scalp line had healed forever ago. He tapped it, remembering his last conscious moments with a shudder. Cinnamon kept whispering his secret name, and Raven shook off the lingering effects of a bullet to the brain. His dreads whirled about his head, a dark storm of hair, like Kali, mistress of time, destroyer of unreality. He laughed and flexed muscles up and down his body. Cinnamon blinked, and he was dancing through the fab ’60s moves he and Opal loved to do: Funky Chicken, Mashed Potatoes, Boogaloo…

  “Cinnamon! What you doing way over there? Come here, girl, let me see how you’ve grown.” He waved her close, hugged her tight, a bear hug with growling and grumbling, and then said, “I’ve been waiting on you, spice child. I’ve been dreaming ’bout you. I knew you’d come to rescue me. I knew you’d believe in me till I had to wake up. Go get your mom. Tell her don’t be afraid to come see me. Tell my love I’ve been dreaming ’bout her too.”

  The fantasy was old and embellished over the last four years and three months, a trusty friend always running in the background. Without realizing, Cinnamon rode the bus with this fairy tale, ate every meal with its sweet promise, and took the all’s well that ends well vision to bed with her. It never occurred to her to give up hope until…

  Soft yet insistent gurgling from Raven made Cinnamon turn away. Two empty beds waited on more patients. Clusters of beat-up chairs hunkered nearby, ready to catch any pathetic loved ones who dropped by. Thank god Raven was alone this afternoon, no other coma-ghouls or sad-sack relatives. Aidan leaned into Cinnamon’s back, not much weight, just a touch of him. He smelled of the wood he’d been carving on the bus and black licorice. She squeezed her mojo bag and forced herself to turn around.

  Raven looked wrong, older than his ancient father, a prisoner in solitary confinement. Mind locked up and flesh wasting away; what was the point of holding him or anybody in this stupid room? Why not let him go on his way? Kehinde insisted a quick death was mercy. So true, because then, nobody, Cinnamon, Aidan, nor Opal, would have to come watch and wait in a smelly, depressing nursing home. Raven could be dancing Boogaloo with the ancestors. Cinnamon closed her eyes to see his fancy footwork in a city of shining ghosts. Another child of God come home, he’d be welcomed with music and light. Cinnamon opened her eyes to truth: Raven would be better off all the way dead.

  “Iris take everything to her heart. Can’t get her within a mile of here.” Aidan’s cracker-twang grated. “Redwood ain’t one to hover ’round like an ole buzzard for her only son to be dead flesh. She’d help him go out, if that’s what he wanted.”

  “Uh huh.” Something even Iris and Redwood were afraid of. That was a first.

  “Can you blame them? It took you and me two weeks to get here.”

  “Yeah.” A bruise at Cinnamon’s temples throbbed. Sore ribs ached. Ever since Star Deer had stopped substitute teaching, Cinnamon was punching someone out at school and getting smacked herself. Aidan rubbed her locked-up shoulders. He murmured Irish or Seminole. What was wrong with English? Tears Opal would have hated rolled down her cheeks. Cinnamon scrubbed at the stinging wetness with the heel of her hand. She was tired of crying and so mad she wanted to scream. How much hope had she wasted? The shrunken body in the bed was a thousand times worse than the dead dust stand-in tucked in the casket for Sekou’s memorial service. Opal was right; Redwood, Iris, and Sekou too. Visiting Daddy was the worst idea she’d ever had. Nothing to see here bette
r than a memory. She wanted to bolt.

  Aidan sucked a breath and sang a few notes. “Is that the right key?” he asked, as if she knew the damn song he wanted to sing. “What you think?”

  “How would I know?” she muttered, pissed at him for dragging her into a hell hole.

  “Help me find the key, honeybunch.”

  Cinnamon shook her head.

  “Selfish of me, not wanting to come alone.” Aidan’s fingertips grazed the bruise at her temples. He kept sucking deep breaths till his cheeks were rosy and hot, till his eyes glowed iridescent green, and then he was singing. Corny, hillbilly music wasn’t on the same planet with the sounds he made. True, his mouth was full of banjo twang, and his chest had caught a rumbling washtub bass but…the physics of sound bested her. Muscles resisting comfort resonated sympathetically with arpeggios and pounding bass. Aidan’s music was bone deep, spirit sweet. It wrung the anger right out of her. Daddy used to say, Redwood and Wildfire can sing a moment from dark to light. They can sing you to heaven and back. Daddy didn’t exaggerate. As Aidan cruised the melody, lyrics materialized out of heya bobs and na na na’s:

  Not just what you thought,

  But what you can’t see

  Not just my hand

  Hold all of me

  Not just what you need

  What if I can’t be?

  Not just what you want

  Hold all of me

  Now or never, once and forever

  Hold all of me

  Not just what ain’t right

  Not just what look bright

  But what you can’t see

  Not just ’cause you should

  Not just what feel good

  What if I can’t be?

  Hey baby, hey baby

  Now or never, once and forever

  Not just my hand

  Hold all of me

  Cinnamon sobbed and howled with Aidan. She never found the right key or a decent harmony. Reaching was good enough. Aidan slipped his arm through hers and slow-danced her right up to the bed. Blurry oscilloscopes kept a rhythmic vigil: heart rate, blood pressure, and an incomprehensible line or two.

  Raven’s left side was exposed, as if he’d shrugged off the psychedelic covers during a fitful sleep. He had thin, pale sticks for legs; swollen toes poked out the swirly sheets, each nail like the blade of a shovel. Cinnamon brushed her fingers against his silky dreads. Well-groomed and thick, they were white at the scalp with salt and pepper tips: somebody was taking good care of his hair. Fat tendrils snaked across his shoulders to a chest that looked caved in compared to what Cinnamon remembered or compared to the photographs she’d been staring at since he got shot.

  External memory hidden in the OED: Raven and Opal, sweaty and muscular, dancing under a desert moon; Cinnamon huddling next to Raven as he paints her scary dream; Raven and Sekou toting heavy tomes up the back stairs; Raven in a bright snowfield, throwing baby Cinnamon high in the air, the elders laughing in the background; Opal with her head in Raven’s lap, smiling in her sleep; Raven painting the Eiffel Tower elevator and three tiny figures on the platform. Sporting Kente cloth and crowns of braids, the trio had to be Taiwo, Kehinde, and Somso brandishing jewel-handled knives.

  A nagging oscilloscope bleeped louder than before. Cinnamon wanted to kill the awful person who snatched the life in those photos from her and Opal, stole it from Aidan, Redwood, and Iris too. The gunman had aimed at those two women, but shot her whole family — one suicide, one dead to the world, and the rest critically wounded.

  Aidan hugged Cinnamon to his chest. She was a mountain of fury about to erupt, but Aidan held all of her.

  Eleven (On a Scale from Three to Fourteen)

  “Was that you singing?”

  A chunky young man in blue scrubs stepped out of the bathroom, talking over the loud flushing noise. Aidan and Cinnamon jumped at the sound and sight of him. Cinnamon hid behind her grandfather, not ready for public display.

  The attendant(?) scowled at them. “Who are you? Who let you in here?”

  “Who are you?” Aidan’s face was as wet and snotty as Cinnamon’s. He dragged a sleeve over his cheeks and pulled his mane of white hair into a ponytail. “I reckon you got a civil tongue in that head, and I’d sure like to hear you use it.” He sounded so hillbilly cracker. Why not do the Irish brogue thing or a Seminole lilt? Maybe not Seminole, his costume was too new-age Indian on a vision quest.

  “I’m a volunteer.” The young man gaped at Raven then Aidan, disbelieving a likeness that even a mean coma couldn’t erase. “What’re you two doing here?”

  Aidan sputtered at the rude question.

  Cinnamon gathered herself and stepped forward to speak. “We’re —”

  “Family.” Panicked, the volunteer eyed her up and down.

  “What you looking at? You know me?”

  Blotchy hives broke out on his chubby cheeks and neck. “Oh, shit.”

  Aidan and Cinnamon spoke at once, saying my son, my daddy on top of each other.

  “I see that.” The volunteer looked like he needed to go back to the bathroom. Big brown eyes roamed around his head. He scratched tiny bumps popping up on his hand — probably not expecting Raven to have a white-cracker father and a black Glamazon daughter. “She didn’t come again today, so I gave Mr. Cooper a shave. He doesn’t have much of a beard. The nurses who turn him and stuff don’t bother to shave him. She told me he liked a smooth chin.” He shoved agitated hands under an oversized hospital shirt. “Thanks for singing. I play music for Mr. Cooper. Gets his eyes going, gets a few muscles to twitch, like he’s dancing. But some a-hole jacked my car last weekend, got my equipment. I usually spin the old R&B.”

  “He’d like that,” Aidan said.

  “How do you know?” The volunteer’s blotchy skin made Cinnamon scratch too.

  “We’re family.” Aidan reminded him, calm as a brick. He should tell this fool to disappear and let the family have Daddy to themselves.

  “Haven’t seen you before, and I thought I knew everyone who comes.”

  “He gets a good bit of company?” Aidan asked.

  “My man is real popular.”

  Aidan was thrilled, Cinnamon envious.

  The volunteer waved at Cinnamon. “Come ’round here. On a good day, he moves his left hand a lot.” He lifted Raven’s wrist gently. “Today seems like a good day.”

  Butterflies, helicopters, and jets fluttered in Cinnamon’s stomach. She wasn’t sure about touching a half-dead hand.

  “Go ahead,” Aidan said. “That’s his painting hand.”

  “Oh.” That got her to the other side in a flash.

  A female and a male Eshu crouched on the bedside table. Carved from dark wood and sporting knife-in-the-head crowns, they were from the same family as the pair Griot Joe gave Opal. Cinnamon whispered greetings to the master of the crossroads.

  The volunteer startled. “Eshu, right.” He pressed Cinnamon’s palm against Raven’s cool, smooth skin. Her fingers brushed bony knuckles. “Squeeze,” he said. “Not too hard, just so he knows somebody is here.”

  Cinnamon squeezed. Raven’s cracked lips trembled. Dull eyes roved under slack eyelids. Muscles twitched across his cheeks. Perhaps the sun coming from behind a cloud made him squint. A reflex? He gurgled bubbles of spit, choking, or was he saying something? She was on him now, looking for a sign.

  “No ventilator. That’s big.” The volunteer smiled at the rise and fall of Raven’s chest. “He’s ten or eleven on the Glasgow Coma Scale. He does sounds, like just now, maybe words, and flexion or withdrawal to painful stimuli. He’ll open his eyes and look right at you. Dr. Elliot says that’s a long way from vegetable matter.”

  Cinnamon squeezed Raven’s hand again. “Star Deer says, Breath is a doorway between the conscious and the unconscious mind, a direct connection to all of our selves.” She dabbed drool from Raven’s lips with a towel tucked at his neck. “What’s this scale?”

  The volunteer scratched his bushy a
fro.

  Aidan strode next to Cinnamon. “Go on man, explain it.”

  The volunteer took a deep breath. “Three is dead.”

  Cinnamon flinched. Two was deader, one deadest? “Yeah.”

  “No eye movement, no verbal, motor response to sound or pain. Fourteen is totally awake, with it.”

  Cinnamon’s heart raced. “Eleven is close to fourteen.”

  “Breathing on his own steam means the brain stem is looking good, and after four years.” The volunteer was very proud of this achievement. “His eyes track movement, and that hand, sometimes I swear that hand is talking to me.” He cleared his throat and glanced at Aidan. “Black male, gunshot victim, they don’t always get a high level of care. Why waste resources on a gangsta, you know?”

  Aidan grunted at this injustice. He should tell this fool he was Seminole and Irish.

  The volunteer grunted too. “She is on the case and gets him mucho stimulation, quality physical therapy. And Star Deer never misses a day.”

  Opal couldn’t afford that. Star must be working for free.

  “Dancing your muscles builds the brain,” Cinnamon said.

  “Nobody expected eleven though. She always believed Mr. Cooper could do it.”

  “She who?” Aidan was suddenly impatient.

  The volunteer shrugged and scratched.

  “You were all over us,” Cinnamon said. “And you don’t know —”

  “Well, see, she, she —” The volunteer pawed his mouth, mortified.

  “Spit it out!” Aidan shouted. He rarely lost his cool like this.

  “Uhm…”

  Raven’s ring finger tapped Cinnamon’s palm. “Whoa.” She resisted screaming, jumping, or doing anything to overwhelm him. Her heart thudded against the mojo bag. Aidan, calm again, studied her with a question in his eyes. Blood pounded in her ears and banged at her bruised temples. She held her breath and waited for another hand sign, for any kind of move. A full minute of beeps and Aidan and the volunteer wheezing, but from Raven — still hand, still eyes. No muscle twitch. Nothing. Even the gurgling had stopped. One tap had been exciting, yet she needed more. Several taps would be communication, a code, not a random nerve firing or wishful thinking. “Daddy,” she said. “Was that you or me?”