Tempest Rising

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Tyrone had not been here before, but he had heard his father mention it to his patrons who frequented the Strip. “My lady, Hettie, don’t like me in there,” he remembered his father saying. “Those foxes in there hungry.”

  Tyrone would try to get in on the conversations when he’d hear his father talking like that. He’d say something like “Yeah, Pops, they hungry, hunh?” But instead of a sly smile shared between men, he’d see a smirk on his father’s face that seemed to say that he was just a vulnerable country bumpkin only a knot away from his mother’s apron strings. And then the smirk would darken on his father’s face, turn to a look of parental worry when Tyrone would drop the names of his favorite spots on Fifty-second Street. “You outta your league down there, Ty,” Perry would say. “Even I watch my back on the Strip, and I cut my eyeteeth in places like that.”

  This place was packed. Tyrone had to angle himself sideways to get to the bar, where he ordered a Ballantine and nibbled at the beer nuts. He took a long swallow from the brown bottle and looked around the club. He wanted to remember the details, the table by the window where a mound of fried shrimp and crab cakes attracted really hungry foxes, the corner off to the side where couples did the bob and the cha-cha to the Four Tops crooning “Baby, I Need Your Loving,” the card game going on in the back; he could tell it was a card game by the high-roller look to the men getting the nod to go on back by the substantial bouncers. The sounds of laughter mixed with the music and booming conversations swirled around his head as if a flock of giggling, cursing geese circled overhead. He wanted to be able to drop the details on Perry tomorrow, wanted to let him know that yet another Saturday night had come and gone and he had handled himself on the Strip. He turned and looked around him; he had taken Perry’s warning seriously about watching his back, but the figure approaching him now, squeezing between the cigarette-smoking, fried shrimp–eating, hand-slapping bouquet of partyers made him straighten his back and adjust his shirt collar over his windbreaker jacket. She had a creamy brown face framed by a startling yellow headband that pushed her Afro back into a puff of hair and gave her a look of regality. Sizable gold hoops dropped from her ears, her neck, all along her tight black shell, her arms; even a gold-hooped chain belt hung around her black and yellow–striped hipster skirt. She made an opening through the clump of loud talkers that separated her from the bar and was now walking, no, it seemed to Tyrone, floating right toward him.

  She lowered her eyes, a subtle way of saying hello, he realized, as he tried to match it with his own brand of cool. But the sensation taking him over now would not be subdued and turned his mouth up into a smile so wide he was embarrassed.

  “Hey, young blood,” she whispered into his ear, and he felt as though the caramel-shaded frosted lipstick she wore coated her words and melted to a warm sweetness in his ear.

  “You of age, young blood, in case they start carding in here tonight?”

  “I got more than a card to prove my age, baby. But how about if I start by offering you a drink?” He tried to keep a point on the ends of his words so that his drawl wouldn’t creep through.

  “Scotch and soda,” she said to the bartender, who was now standing right in front of where Tyrone sat.

  “Another Ballantine,” Tyrone said as he put a five-dollar bill on the bar and got down from the stool so that she could sit. He edged his body in next to her and smiled and lifted one eyebrow slightly. He hoped she could see it through the blue air; he’d come to know the effect his eyebrows had on women. Even though it still caught him by surprise when a beautiful woman responded to him with passion-tinged breathlessness. It certainly had with Ramona. Right after their first date, when they’d taken the subway over to North Philly to the Uptown to see Sam and Dave, Martha and the Vandellas, the Delfonics, after they got off the el, tired and hoarse from the audience participation those shows evoked, he offered to give her a tour of his father’s printshop. She’d seemed mildly impressed as he told her how he worked such and such printer, and mixed colors, and spread ink. And when they were getting ready to go, he raised his eyebrow, not as an overture, more just asking, so what do you think? She was all over him then; her lips covered his face, his neck, almost popping the buttons on his shirt, trying to get to his bare chest. He pushed Ramona from his mind now. She hadn’t come on to him like that since.

  The bartender placed their drinks; she clinked her glass against his beer bottle and then drained it. He tapped his finger against the bar to the beat of the music and pretended not to be shocked at the speed at which she emptied her glass.

  “Okay, young blood, so you were gonna prove your age.” She swiveled the stool so that she was talking right in his face. He thought he could smell her lipstick. “What you proving with? A wedding band? A rap sheet? Couple of kids maybe? A draft notice? Hunh? All the cute ones dragging some kind of weight that they proving their age with. What’s your ball and chain say?”

  “Whoa, baby. Can you at least tell me your name before you go off into a dissertation on such a, excuse the pun, baby, but such a weighty topic?”

  “Mnh, dissertation, huh? Candy, my name’s Candy. And you been to college, I see. You cute, and you smart. Now ain’t no doubt in my mind that some little young chick done already nailed you.”

  “Ain’t a nail been hammered that can’t be pried, uh, Candy?” His drawl slipped through as he decided not to comment on how sweet she must be with a name like Candy.

  “My, my, my, and from the country too.”

  “Yeah, they grow them strong where I’m from, Candy.” He smiled again.

  “And hard?”

  “Hard and soft, baby.”

  “Give me your hand, young blood, let me touch your flesh and make sure I didn’t just dream you up. And order me another scotch and soda. You just might be coming home with me tonight.”

  He motioned the bartender, pointed to her glass, and she grabbed for his hand and squeezed it, and he couldn’t hold his smile and got embarrassed again as it took over his face. He knew he wasn’t going home with her; he was after all committed to Ramona. But what a story he’d have for Perry in the morning. He’d describe the yellow headband, the chain belt, the hipster skirt, the frosted lipstick; he’d say, “Yeah, Pops, I could have had one of the hungry foxes you always talking ’bout at Brick’s after-hours spot, but Ramona’s more than enough woman for me.” She was asking him now if he ever dropped acid since he’d been a college man.

  “Naw, that’s a white boy thing,” he said. “I went to a black school, Virginia Union.” He noticed the bartender set yet another fresh drink in front of her. Damn, he thought, she was on number three, and that was his last money on the bar. What was left? A dollar. He thought about what he could do. Excuse himself to go to the men’s room and then slip on out. Let her keep drinking and then feel for his wallet and pretend he’d been robbed. Or just come clean. Say something like “Hey, baby, your unquenchable thirst broke the bank.”

  He was about to do just that when he felt a rough tap on his shoulder. He realized then he’d violated a primary rule of hanging on the Strip. He’d turned his back on the door.

  “You the country motherfucker that threatened me over talking to my own granddaughters?”

  Tyrone hunched his shoulder and turned slowly. He could smell the whiskey on Larry’s hot breath as it hit the side of his face. What had been a crowded space around the bar receded like a puddle of water evaporating from the center and left an empty circle around Larry and Tyrone. Tyrone was directly in front of Larry now, staring at the beige-colored scar on his forehead.

  “Come on, you corn-fed nigger.” Larry thumbed the lapels of his trench coat. “I’ll teach you to get involved with matters between blood.”

  “Awl, Larry, leave him ’lone,” Candy called from the bar.

  “It’s all right, baby, I got this,” Tyrone said.

  “I’m afraid you don’t.” It was one of the bouncers who’d been guarding the entrance to the card game. “Y’all go
ts to take it to the street.”

  “Awl, let em fight,” a high-pitched voice called from the circle’s edges.

  “Yeah, it’s gonna be quick and dirty anyhow”—from deeper in the circle that had grown four deep around. “Ole Larry sparred for Sonny Liston. I would put a Lincoln on him, but I know ain’t a motherfucker in here dumb enough to put their money on the young boy.”

  “Naw, break it up”—from the other side of the circle. A big man, almost as big as the bouncer, wearing a red, black, and green dashiki, pushed his way through the thickening edges of the circle. “That’s why the black man on this continent is still enslaved. We’re waging war on each other instead of against the white slave master who wants to see us poison ourselves with their alcohol and drugs.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” somebody called from the back of the circle.

  “Yeah, didn’t I just sit over here and watch you down a fifth of the white man’s poison?”

  “And smacked his lips and asked for more.”

  “Take that shit back to Africa. Shit, I came to party.”

  “Wait a minute, y’all, the brother got a point.”

  “Yeah, the point his hair is shaped in that needs to meet the barber’s shears.”

  The red, black, and green dashiki walked to the center of the circle and planted himself between Tyrone and Larry. He directed himself to Larry. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You old enough to be his father, ought to be teaching him about the struggles of peoples of African descent all over the world, and all you can do is call him out for a fight.”

  “Hey, man, fuck you.” Larry started to swing at the dashiki, but the bouncer caught his fist, told him both he and dashiki had to go right this second, or he was gonna signal for his posse. He opened the door. Dashiki half pushed Larry into the outside sounds of the Strip.

  Tyrone was surprised at the rate his heart thumped in his throat right now as Candy ran her hands up and down his back, told him he was not only cute and smart, but brave too. “Larry’s a serious boxer, plus all the people he knows in here,” she said, “you could have put that good-looking face of yours in serious jeopardy.”

  Perry knew that too. He’d been sitting in a dark corner of the club, sipping vodka and stroking the arm of the woman sitting in his lap. Saw Tyrone come in, gawking as if he were a first-time tourist to New York amazed by the skyscrapers. He didn’t want to make his son feel like he couldn’t handle himself; he sensed he had that effect on Tyrone. So he kissed the shoulder of the woman he was with, laughed and clapped as the dancers did the bop and watusi, and tried not to keep watch over his son at the bar. Then he saw Candy walk by, knew she was working tonight because she always wore that yellow headband when she did her night job of coming on to the men at the bar, getting them to buy her drink after drink of scotch and soda that the bartender knew to fill only with soda, plus it kept the men at the bar keeping up with her, ordering drinks of their own. He whispered to Candy that he needed a favor for old times’ sakes, then pointed out Tyrone. He had just settled back down to kiss the arm of the woman he was with, whose name he could not remember, when Dashiki approached him and asked him if he could speak to him about the plight of black men. Then the voices got loud at the bar, the rest of the club silent, and Perry almost threw the woman from his lap as he jumped up to see about his son. He told Dashiki if he was for real about saving the lives of black men, take this ten-dollar bill as paternal gratitude for saving the life of that young man with his shirt collar sitting on the outside of his windbreaker jacket.

  Candy could feel Tyrone’s fast breaths as she rubbed her hand up and down his back. She glanced at her watch; it was after two, and the club was still packed. This had been a good night; she knew that the 50 percent of the take at the bar that her conversation and soda guzzling brought in was at least forty dollars tonight. Not a bad take, and she didn’t even have to be touched. But suddenly she wanted to be touched. Not by the likes of Perry, who filled this bar every weekend, wives or steady women waiting up for them to finally creep home, waiting for that hello kiss so they could confirm their sugary lies. Tonight she really did want this young blood to touch her with his honesty, his fear, his newness to the life on the Strip.

  She pulled off her yellow headband and wrapped it around her wrist, and then squeezed his neck and pulled his neck down to whisper in his ear, “Come on, young blood, I’m feeling shaky after what almost went down. Come on home with me tonight, baby; help me settle down. Please. Please.”

  Tyrone tried to get his breaths to flow one into the other the way they were supposed to. His lungs wouldn’t cooperate. So he had to concentrate on his breathing. Told himself that’s why he couldn’t ponder over his love for Ramona right now. Nor could he try to figure out why, as committed as he claimed to be to Ramona, he leaned down and kissed Candy on the lips and then allowed her to take him on home.

  8

  Sunday, and Ramona was up early making salt pork and egg sandwiches for those three girls. She was muttering, like she usually muttered when she did her foster care chores. Right now she muttered about the too thick slices of salt pork, how that slab could have gone much farther if Marty at Baron’s meat market had just sliced it thin like she’d asked. Then Tyrone rang the doorbell decked out in his go-to-church clothes, his Florsheim shoes and his father’s good black suit. And after he followed her back into the kitchen going on and on about how good that meat smelled frying, Ramona recognized the suit as his father’s suit. She had watched his father, Perry, walk his smooth walk in that suit when he was a pallbearer for Mae’s cousin. She wished it were Perry in the suit right now standing in front of her. She asked Tyrone then if it was a new suit; she didn’t want him knowing she’d studied his father so.

  Tyrone responded to the way her face filled up at that instant, the way he rarely saw it fill up. He didn’t know that the way her cheeks seemed engorged right then and the way her lips parted, showing the tip of her tongue, had everything to do with that suit, with his father in that suit. And since he thought that filled-up look was for him, and since also he was feeling guilty that he didn’t feel more guilty about having allowed Candy’s gusts of passion to spin him around like a rudderless ship the night before until he spun into a pinnacle that widened and covered him like a deep, deep river, he took Ramona’s face in his hands, told her that if she wanted it to be a new suit, it could be, whatever she wanted, if he could make it happen, he would.

  He was still kissing her, a thirsty openmouthed kiss, when Bliss barreled into the kitchen.

  “Did anybody call you in here?” Ramona snapped at Bliss as she pushed Tyrone from her and smoothed at her flowered duster, and didn’t have a chance to think about what was different about Tyrone’s mouth.

  “Boss suit,” Bliss said to Tyrone, ignoring Ramona. “Let me know when you ready to get creamed again in pinochle.”

  Tyrone cleared his throat. His eyebrows were embarrassed. “Well, don’t you look like the little princess,” he said as he adjusted his tie.

  Bliss did a half curtsy and rolled her eyes at Ramona. She was dressed for church in the clothes Ramona had laid out for her on the banister the night before: her red wool jumper with the drop waist and her white cotton blouse with the lacy, pleated collar that matched her white lacy leotards. Ramona didn’t even want to imagine how much the leotards cost. “Take your fresh-assed self into the living room and sit on the couch until I call you,” she said to Bliss. “Those other two better get the hell down here or they gonna be leaving outta here hungry, and it won’t be my fault; I’m doing my job and cooking the damned food. Even though I don’t know how that hurt one’s gonna walk to church,” Ramona said half to herself and half to Tyrone after Bliss went back in the front room.

  Tyrone rubbed his hands up and down Ramona’s arms. “Mona, baby doll, she does have a name, you know.” He put his hands gently on her lips. “Repeat after me,” he said, “Vic-tor-ria. Her name is Victoria.” He kissed her before she could res
pond.

  Shern walked into the kitchen then. She didn’t have a bounce to her step, like Bliss. She did have on a mid-heel, though. The last pair of shoes her mother had bought her, her first pair that didn’t have a corrective arch support. Ramona looked at Shern in the grown-looking shoes; she rolled her eyes back in her head and sucked the air through her teeth. She decided against commenting on the womanish shoes; the Empire-waist green velvet dress was girlish enough to hide her developing bustline and offset the shoes. “You and that fresh-assed Bliss need to put a towel around your shoulders, so I can hot-curl your bangs,” she said to Shern. “You first, come on before I put the eggs on. And you both use the same towel, y’all don’t have any appreciation whatsoever for towels needing to be washed.”

  By the time Ramona finished with Shern’s black-as-black-velvet bangs, and was wrapping Bliss’s light-brown hair around the steaming curling iron, and complaining about how damned much hair they had, both long and thick, a terrible combination for whoever was charged with its upkeep, Victoria limped into the room. Her dress was chocolate brown suede, her collar beige like her textured nylon over-the-knee socks, except her legs were bare above her mid-calf.

  “Why you got your socks pushed all the way down like that? Aren’t they over the knee? Don’t you know how they supposed to go?” Ramona half barked as she blew at the steam coming off the hot curlers and clicked the handles to loosen them. She unfurled Bliss’s hair and put the curlers down on a half-burned dish towel and then combed out Bliss’s bang and fingered it into a perfect barrel shape. “You finished,” she said to the top of Bliss’s head. “Put the towel in the shed, and go back in and sit on the couch with your sister. And don’t turn on the TV all loud, I don’t like no whole lot of noise around me on Sunday morning.”

  She turned back to Victoria. “So you were telling me why you got those socks bunched all down around your calf like that.”