Bliss jabbed her finger in the air. “I don’t see what the big deal is. My gosh, she’s telling her where we’re going.”
Victoria couldn’t hold it. Told Bliss just to shut up. Then she yelled, “Shern, just ask her, ask her, just ask her, Shern.” Her yelling did unlock the air between Shern and Ramona. Ramona eased back from Shern’s face a bit.
Shern coughed a few times. They both looked at Victoria through the dining-room air. “May my sisters and I go to the library.” Shern said it quickly, startled the air as she said it; she still said it as a declarative, though. All she did really was add the “may” because there was certainly no questioning tone to her voice.
It was enough for Ramona. “Don’t let the sun-fall beat you back here, you understand me?” she commanded.
“Okay, Ramona,” Victoria said, out of breath from yelling so. “How do we get there?”
Ramona walked out of the dining room without answering. She had to. She had to gather clothes together for the Laundromat. Plus she would have called Shern a little bitch, stashing on her, challenging her like that. She might have even grabbed her by her throat.
“Oh, forget her,” Ramona could hear Bliss saying. “How hard can it be to find the library?”
They did find the library, stopped to ask the mailman if they were headed in the right direction. Stayed there all that Saturday, except when they got hungry and ventured to the corner of Baltimore Avenue for soft pretzels topped with mustard, then back to the library, where the tall windows reminded them of the windows at their real home. They lost themselves in the stacks of books in the young adult section. Checked out two books apiece—Little Women, Nancy Drew, Uncle Tom’s Cabin—then lied when the librarian asked them what they were doing so far from home according to the address on their library cards. “Just visiting friends,” Shern said. She figured they’d suffered enough all month at the Sayre Junior High School when it caught on that they were daughters to the famous dead caterer, Finch, and his almost dead wife, Clarise, and they were forced to endure the whispers behind their backs and the pitying looks in the teachers’ eyes. Shern hated that school. Some days she couldn’t decide which was worse: Mae’s house, where Ramona was always cursing under her breath, or the school, where she looked straight ahead whether she was in class or walking through the crowded, sweaty hallways to avoid conversation. She’d hold her water the entire school day so she wouldn’t have to venture into the bathroom, where, on the one and only day she’d gone in there, the bad girls smoked cigarettes by an open window and looked her up and down and called her snobby bitch. They asked her if she thought she was cute or something walking around in her real mohair sweaters and fur-lined boots. Shern didn’t answer, turned around, and walked back out more angry than afraid, even when she heard them saying to her back that if they weren’t in the middle of a smoke they would have kicked her stuck-up ass. Victoria seemed to be faring only a little better at the school. Her fearfulness over getting beaten up, “moved on,” as the people here called it, made her smile all the time, and say “excuse me, please,” if she brushed up against someone, and look people in the face lest she get called names like Shern. Bliss, though, wasn’t afraid at all, smiled only when she felt like it, adopted the hand-on-hip, roll-around-neck stance of the bad girls, imitated the teachers when their backs were turned, and acquired a small following of friends who’d lap up her inflated stories about what it was like to grow up rich. In any event, Shern reasoned this librarian would be one less curiosity seeker they’d have to put up with, even though he seemed sincere enough, took time to draw Shern a little map when she kept the lie going and asked him which bus routes did he suggest they take back home. And then they started back to Mae and Ramona’s and got lost for real.
It was the sun. It looked delicious in the sky to these girls who’d just been lulled momentarily by the fantasy lands of the books they’d read. The sun was like a glob of butter melting in a pan to make hot fudge or some other warm sweet thing that the uncles used to surprise and delight them with. They just needed the sweet brightness to stroke their foreheads for a while, so they walked toward the sun, headed west, even though Shern knew they were going wrong; she counted blocks so that when they were ready to turn around and have the sun at their backs, she’d know just how far they had to go.
They were quiet as they walked, no one was crying; their crying had gotten so unpredictable, like brushfires that start out of nowhere and go until they burn themselves out. For the moment the sun diminished the need to cry, and they were suspended in time and could forget that until last month they lived in a grand single home on an old-money block inhabited by professors from the university and a prominent black doctor and banker and that they were accustomed to ribeye steak, crystal chandeliers, and velvet ribbons for their hair. For the moment they could push from their consciousness that their father, a self-made man who’d amassed his fortune without college, had turned up dead, and their beautiful mother had had a breakdown.
As they watched the sun ooze and drip yellow down the sky, they were just three girls walking, big-legged, brown-skinned anonymous girls with velvety bangs, perfect teeth, and pile-lined good wool coats. Their thick-soled shoes hit the concrete in sync and echoed in a rhythm that was like a chant. The air did a welcoming hum through the branches and the budding leaves, and even the trees seemed to bend on the block where they now walked, like doormen bowing and extending their arms. There were no distractions here, no cars, no houses, no storefronts, no peddlers, not even other walkers. Just the girls, and a park across the street that was conceited and bragged out its ability to turn green in the spring, and a closed-down bread factory on the side where they walked that still scented the air with a hint of butter and flour and yeast when it was breezy out.
For the moment this was their block, and they reveled in its emptiness. They didn’t know, though, that this stretch where they now walked was always deserted this time of day, solely because of the superstitions of people who’d lived here for a while and who’d dubbed this block Dead Block.
And since they didn’t know, when they saw a figure in the park across the street climbing up the underside of a slope in the ground, tall and lean in a plaid trench coat and gray fedora, they just viewed him as an object of curiosity rather than one of fear.
They were oblivious to the haunting legend of Dead Block: that eighteen years before, Donald Booker, a neighborhood boy, a white boy, had vanished in this block of the park, around the time of the great changeover, when the whites began moving away from this neighborhood in a massive tidal wave, as the blacks rode the wave and rushed in behind them, eagerly filling the spaces as if they were playing Monopoly and landing on Park Place. The Bookers had resisted the influx, would call out, “Nigger, go home,” to the backs of the newcomers, write it out in chalk on the pavements in front of their homes, would even sit around on Saturday nights, talk about the crosses they should build, the brand kerosene they should use. But then their own personal tragedy hit; their twelve-year-old disappeared, last seen on the block where the girls now walked. “Like the block just swallowed poor Donald Booker up,” the neighbors canted, even though while he was in their midst, most—black and white alike—readily consented that Donald Booker was a bad seed, incorrigible, disrespectful, meanspirited, vulgar, shoplifting, hate-spewing…. But after he turned up missing and became “poor Donald Booker,” at least a half dozen dogs and cats were said to have vanished from here around the time of day when the sun was hanging way back in the sky. Brand-new Corvette Stingrays and Mustangs stalled in this block as the day got tangled with the night, and even the birds lay low until the nightfall was complete. A once-prolific bread factory had to close up and relocate a few years ago. Taxes in the city too high, was the official word. But rumor had it that the shift that started at four-thirty refused to report in the winter until after the transition from sun to moon was finished. But since the girls knew nothing about the strangeness Dead Block was said to evok
e in people and things this time of day, they took the man only as someone out walking, trying to beat the night and get to where he lived, until he jaunted across the street, straight toward them, and tipped his hat slightly and smiled.
“Cold as shit out here today, little ladies,” he said.
The girls closed in the spaces between them and repositioned the books they carried so they could link arms in a huddle. “Stupid old man,” Bliss said. “Probably drunk. Go on, man, get,” she warned. “Or I’ll tell our daddy to shoot your ass off.”
Shern pushed her elbow into Bliss’s side. Told her not to talk to him. “Just walk normally,” she insisted.
The tall dark man kept pace with the girls and threw his head back and laughed a bellow of a laugh. “You wouldn’t do that, would you? You wouldn’t tell your daddy to shoot my ass off. For one thing, your daddy’s dead.” He stilled his laugh and now had a mocked softness to his voice. “Plus I’m your own flesh and blood.”
“You don’t know us,” Victoria said tenuously, more a question than a declaration. She was walking on the end closest to the man, and the scent of pinecones and burned wood seemed to rise from his clothes in jagged bolts. It was acrid and went right to her head and made her feel dizzy and confused.
“Are you crazy talking to him?” Shern yanked Victoria’s arm.
“But he might know something—”
“Shush!” Shern cut her off. “He’s crazy, he’s drunk, whatever.”
“But maybe he knows the aunts and uncles if he knows us,” Victoria half wailed. “Maybe he can tell them where we are; they must not know where we are since we’ve been here a whole month and they haven’t tried to see us.”
“It’s the courts that are keeping them from us.” Shern yanked Victoria’s arm again, and Victoria cried out. “Now, do you want this drunk-up old man following us all over the place? We talk to him and he’ll think he’s making sense and we’ll never get rid of him.”
The stranger continued to talk in uninterrupted streams. “Yeah, I’m your own flesh and blood, yes, I am. Sad child that doesn’t know their own line. You part of my line, directly descended from me.”
“Wait a minute.” Bliss stopped suddenly. “I know who you are.”
Shern and Victoria stopped too. “Don’t talk to him, Bliss, just don’t,” Shern yelled in her sister’s ear.
“Look, though, look.” Bliss pointed wildly. “He’s the man who tried to take Mommie from the aunts and uncles. See the scar where Aunt Til went upside his head.”
They all three looked at him, at the thick beige scar running down his forehead that looked like steak gristle. They were startled and mesmerized to see the subject of so many Sunday night dinners standing right in front of them.
“She was my child, my baby girl.” He moved in closer to the girls. His voice went to a lower tone. “I’m Larry. Girl, I know you know me; look at you, you the spitting image of me. I’m your granddaddy. Come give me a hug.”
“My aunt Til said you couldn’t have fathered my mother because you don’t have a pecker.” Bliss spit the words out right before Shern grabbed her from behind and covered her mouth and tried to drag her away.
“Lies! They told you lies! She was mine, and so are you.” He opened his arms toward the girls. “Now come give me a hug. Come on, you with the dimple in your chin, you first.”
He lurched forward, and all three girls turned at the same instant and started to run, galloping, determined runs. They quickly put space between themselves and Larry. But right then Victoria tripped over a slither of a hole in the grainy concrete and fell. She fell hard. She cried and spit bloody fragments of teeth and curled on her side and clutched at her knee, which felt as if it had just splattered like grade A extra large eggs hitting a concrete floor.
“Victoria, oh, my God, Victoria,” Shern screamed in a panic as she let her library books drop so she could help her sister run away.
“Oh, no, you’re bleeding, Tori,” yelped Bliss as she spun around in fast circles.
Shern hoisted Victoria up and half dragged, half pulled her to the doorway of the abandoned bread factory. She propped her up at the bottom of three short steps. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” she whispered over and over to try to calm Victoria and herself.
Larry was where they were now, still calling for a hug, still chanting, “Lies, lies, they told you lies.” The air around him had turned filmy and rippled with his voice as the wind rose and the sun fell and his words dipped and peaked with the wind and mixed with the deserted block and the sound of flapping as every wren in the park, it seemed, was roused at that instant and took flight. Even the sun had gone from butter drips to a red bruise in the sky and was chilling and especially affected Victoria and looked like the ribbon of blood that circled her mother’s wrist that morning last month.
Victoria could no longer tolerate Larry’s words, or the pine and wood smell coming off his clothes and hitting her nose like pinpricks, or the red-tinged sky. She started to scream hysterically. “Make him stop! Please make him go away!”
Bliss ran right in front of him and stomped her foot like she was trying to make an alley cat run. “Stop saying that, you old crazy, just stop it.” She rolled her neck around like the bad girls at school when they talked back to the teacher. “You’re not our grandfather. You’re not!”
He did stop then and flashed his eyes. His eyes looked amber from the reflection of the waning sun and froze Bliss where she stood.
The commotion in the air outside his bedroom window woke Mister from his nap, and he sat straight up all at once in his bed, actually his cot, his bedroom window actually the window on the lower level of the abandoned bread factory. His home was actually the bread factory where he’d lived since 1961, a reformed man of the streets struggling with a habit and an attitude and three different varieties of VD. The habit he kicked cold turkey over four days of chills and sweats and vomiting and cramps after his young wife moved everything out of their apartment when he’d gone to cash his veteran’s check, which used to take two, three days sometimes to cash. The VD was cured from VA-dispensed penicillin. The attitude took care of itself, dissipated over months of living alone down here in the cozy corner of the bread factory in relative grand luxury considering some of the foxholes he’d known since he’d also served in the Korean War. He’d feed the squirrels through the window down here and reflect on aspects of the human condition ranging from the existence of God to capitalism to race relations to whether Smitty or Schaffer made the best hoagies. Now he was wide-awake and on alert; he always woke alert, another habit he’d picked up in Korea. He moved to the window and cupped his hands against his face and peered out. Then he grabbed his heavy black coat and ran outside and around the corner to where the girls were.
Shern saw him first. She said a silent thank-you when she saw him. His face was dark brown and wide, and his eyes hung low and looked sad as if someone were pulling on the skin beneath his eyes. He had a flat-footed walk that reminded her of how her father used to walk. The sad eyes and the arch-less feet made her think she could trust him, and even the air got still as he approached; the acrid scent of pine and wood yielded to the butter-tinged aroma of rising bread.
“Get away from them gals,” he yelled to Larry.
Larry had just picked Bliss up and was trying to kiss her cheek, while Shern kicked and punched at him and Bliss tried to claw his face. Victoria hobbled from the sidelines, screaming, “Please, God, make him go away.”
“Hey, Larry, you old crazy fool,” Mister called, “put that little gal down, put her down, I say.”
“You the crazy one,” Larry yelled back. “You ain’t even got enough sense to live in a house, living in an abandoned factory and you calling me crazy.”
“I’ll tell you what, though,” Mister shot back, “I bet I got a baseball bat in there with your name all over it, don’t make me go whip it out.”
Larry turned to look at Mister directly.
“Oh, yes, I wi
ll, try me, just try me.”
Larry coughed a low-pitched cough that sounded like a lion’s growl. “But these my grandkids. Look at them, look just like me.”
“Am not!” Bliss gave Larry one final kick and wrenched herself free while he and Mister argued. She and Shern each grabbed Victoria under the arms and ran like hell to get back to Mae’s.
5
Five minutes bled into ten to fifteen to an hour. Ramona turned the knob on the gas stove to lower the flame under the hot dogs and baked beans. She went into the living room yet again straight to the window and watched the night and the wind shaking hands on the front porch. No girls yet. Didn’t matter how turned around they must have gotten trying to find their way to and from the library, they were an hour late. What a whipping she wanted to give them for making her worry like this, like the kind she’d been raised on: an ironing cord strapping right around the meaty part of her calf until red welts came up in a pattern that would have been beautiful were it not against skin. That’s what those girls needed in her mind; that’s what the whole band of fosters had needed over the years. The ones taken from their parents by the courts, the ones given up on, the truants, the orphans, the runaways.
She went back in the kitchen and lifted the lid from the pot and counted the hot dogs, which looked like logs turning over in red-dirt mud. Mae always told her that it was bad luck to count food; she counted now for spite. Two apiece, that was it; she dared one of them to ask for the extras.
She wiped at her sweater and folded the edges along the waist of her Wranglers and went back into the living room and looked out the window for signs of those three. Nothing, just the dark porch air.
Tempest Rising Page 7