Home Front Lines

by Brenda Sparks Prescott

  “Care for a cigarette?” he asked. He held out a pack.

  “Why would I—?”She had automatically swerved away from him, but perhaps his relaxed stance or maybe it was his wispy try at a moustache that pulled an easy laugh out of her. “Why not?” Her fingers glanced off his as she drew a cigarette. As he replaced the pack and offered a lighter, she leaned into it and then squinted at him as smoke rose. “Your mother know you’re out?”

  “No, Miss,” he said with solemn face.

  She laughed again. She was older than he, but it didn’t matter. She introduced him to the party circuit, and when that route brought him face-to-face with Phinn in a darkened, smoky living room, the girl was snuggled up to Ray and drinking from his highball glass. He was a Johnson, after all.

  It took a while for his new behavior to catch up with him, but near the end of the school year, when a knife fight tumbled down the stairs at another late-night gathering, the police arrived at the Johnson home. His mother called for Phinn, angry resignation drawing down the corners of her mouth and leaving teeth marks on her lower lip. The cop stopped her with an abrupt palm and the name of her youngest child. Afterwards, when the cops had left him with stern words and a promise his mother had been forced to repeat too many times for her sons, they sat at the kitchen table. He couldn’t look at her as she spoke softly of her disappointment in him. Her words laid a hot poker across the knuckles of his clasped hands. “Why?” she asked over and over. All he could do was shake his head.

  That summer, for the first time, he took a ride familiar to many black sons of the North. He went back home to his mother’s side of the family, back to a home he had never visited before. His journey took him to southern Illinois, which he thought of as going out West, but no cowboys greeted him when he stepped off the Greyhound Bus. He did meet the clenched mouth vowels of his mother’s people, who lived on the banks of the Mississippi River. His grandmother ran a small restaurant with the help of his aunt, and any child sent back home was expected to work in it. He started with clearing tables, filling salt and pepper shakers, washing dishes, slicing potatoes, and tipping and tailing long string beans. In the early mornings, before the heat shimmered the hills and bluffs, he hoed the rows of a garden his grandfather had planted along the railroad right-of-way. He swung the sharp blade with care, mindful of the gleeful tales echoed about his middle brother’s summer residency when he mistakenly chopped up young potato plants.

  In the restaurant, Ray was swift, quiet, and courteous, and offered to do more than he was asked. In idle moments, he rearranged the shelves in the kitchen so the dishes and pans came off of them in the order in which they were needed. His organizing ways cut down on collisions and heated exchanges during the busiest parts of the day. His grandmamma was quick to correct but slow to praise, but after only a matter of days, she brought in a younger cousin of his to clear and wash dishes. Then she took it upon herself to teach Ray how to cook to her satisfaction. He learned how to cut a whole chicken into parts, dip the pieces in buttermilk, and dredge them through flour laced with salt and pepper and fresh herbs from the kitchen garden. He fried them in the big cast-iron skillet at a heat that crisped the outside and seared the sweet juices of freshly slaughtered meat inside. He learned to turn the furthest pieces first and not to jerk his hand away when the oil popped and landed in burning drops on his forearm. She made him eat his entire first batch. Too much salt scalded his tongue and left sores in his mouth. After that he was much more careful to add in smaller measures and taste even the dry flour mixture for the right balance.

  Grandmama never did say how good he was to his face, but one day he heard a customer say, “Miss Frances, your chicken is extra good today.”

  “Should be,” Grandmama said. “Nita’s youngest made it. Had him practice ’til he got it right.”

  “Nita’s youngest,” the woman’s voice repeated. “The one that was out here picking up dishes a while back?”

  “Hm hmm.”

  By now Ray was leaning in the kitchen doorway. He cradled the peach pie—one slice gone—in his hands, ready to offer it if Grandmama asked him what he was doing standing idle.

  “Now why she send all these hard-headed boys back here but she don’t come herself?” the woman complained. She was a big, tall woman whose pressed hair had gone scraggly and dull in the heat. She sat facing Ray on the window side of the middle table.

  Grandmama shook her head. “Just wish she’d had more like this one.” She whipped her dish towel in the direction of the kitchen. Ray leaned back, as if the cloth had brushed him. “He takes after us. Not at all like that Johnson boy Nita married. Remember when he almost burned this place down?” That was his father she was talking about. Everyone said the oldest three took after him, but Ray wanted to shout that half of his blood was Johnson blood, too.

  Across from the customer sat a much younger woman with her back to the kitchen. Her hair was pulled back into a neat bun and her beige top was crisply pressed. Ray noticed her calm, straight posture, but her caramel-colored hands floated around the table, straightening her napkin, re-aligning her knife, switching the pepper to the other side of the salt. She turned her head to watch a crowd of teenagers saunter past the cafe and waved when one of the boys cupped his eyes to peer in the window. The quick glimpse of her profile spoke of both a woman in bloom and one that had not yet left all of childhood behind.

  In New York, a desirable young lady like that would be out of his league, Ray thought as he faded back into the kitchen. But he wasn’t in New York, and neither was she. They’ll be talking about this Johnson boy, too, he vowed. He deftly cut and plated two pieces of the peach pie and scooped vanilla ice cream onto the dishes. He swept out of the kitchen and over to the young lady’s table and placed the desserts in front of her and her older companion.

  “We didn’t order this,” the older lady said, but she plucked her fork from her dinner plate.

  “Compliments of the chef,” Ray said with a slight bow.

  They all glanced at his Grandmama. She’d been known to snatch away a fork poised before an open mouth if she didn’t like what was going on in her cafe. Yes, she was persnickety, but everyone—black and white—agreed she served the best food in town. She inspected the desserts while Ray remained stooped with his hands behind his back. “I swear you’re going to drive us all into the poor house,” she said. That was her favorite prediction to levy against any relative who dared to work in the cafe. Meanwhile, Ray and the girl were pretending not to look at each other. Grandmama’s face softened into an almost smile before settling back into its usual frown. “Boy, the least you can do is clear those dinner plates.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Ray skimmed the older woman’s plate onto his forearm as he was taught and turned to her companion, who had picked up her plate in both hands. None of his furtive glances had prepared him for the fullness of her beauty. All thoughts ceased. His fingers pinched thin air two inches above the plate and remained like a crab claw stranded over the table. A New York woman would’ve laughed straight into his bewildered face. This one. He saw the making of a decision in the settling of her shoulders. No one else saw because they were all too busy guffawing at his school boy freeze. He saw, and though he didn’t understand why, his Johnson blood understood what.

  She calmly lifted the plate until it met the back of his outstretched hand. “Roessel’s.” Her gaze met his before traveling on to her companion.

  “What?” The word indistinct around a mouthful of pie.

  “You asked me where we got that good beef we had last Sunday. We got it at Roessel’s.” She was actually answering a question that Ray was too scared to ask: can I see you again? Yes, he heard her say, at Roessel’s, where the crowd gathered in the parking lot after hours. He worked later than most of his peers who quit when the sun went down, and until now he had no good reason to hang out there.

  Later, after the girl had gone, the afternoon lull meant that his cousin cleaned and set the tables a
nd his aunt did paperwork and ordered food for the next day while Ray and his Grandmama worked side-by-side on prep for the dinner hour. He cut up chickens and she chopped eggs he had boiled and peeled for the potato salad.

  “What’s her name?” Ray asked.

  “Who?” Grandmama threw the chopped eggs into a large ceramic bowl. Her upper arm jiggled as she stirred its contents with a wooden spoon. The sharp odor of fried foods lingered in the air around them.

  “The girl with the peach pie,” Ray said.

  “Oh her. That’s coming out of your pay.” She turned back to the chopping board and spilled out a number of pimento olives. Most folks thought that olives were the sign of a sophisticated potato salad. She rolled them into a line to be chopped, but suddenly took a full gander at her grandson. He felt her silence and scrutiny. He kept whacking at the chicken, but he wondered if she might be thinking about the time that another Johnson boy had come to town and had asked the same question about her daughter. Did she wish no one had answered?

  She turned back to the salad. “Betty Ann McBride. We don’t know her people.”

  Understood.

  The cafe’s routine continued, and the dining room filled with customers and emptied out again as the evening crept toward his Roessel’s debut. Grandmama still opened the cafe in the morning but no longer stayed until closing at night. By the time he wiped down the sink and turned out the kitchen light, only his aunt was left, counting the day’s take, to make him promise not to stay out too late. He checked his reflection for flour smudges in the broadside of the chrome toaster before pushing through the back door into the hazy, buzzing night. He zipped across the open field behind the cafe but paused in his rush when the ground dipped into an unexpected cool spot. Fireflies hovered, the centers of small halos of light. The most natural moments, a refuge in a slight change in topography, reminded him the most of the pleasures of a city summer night, of the heat held by the sidewalks suddenly left behind as you entered the park, drawn by the bursts of laughter as friends played the dozens and called each other’s parentage into question with ever more far-fetched claims.

  Roessel’s was a low-slung wooden building at the southern end of Main Street. With a different store front, it could’ve been a truck repair shop or a warehouse, but instead it was the “big” market in town that stayed open late and always had a well-stocked cooler of soda pops. The street lamp out front afforded enough light for a passing adult to see who had gathered at one end of the building, but not enough to keep the kids from slipping liquor into their sodas and other clandestine activities. Whites and Negroes hung together, but didn’t mix as couples. Not in the light, anyway. As Ray approached the den of loungers he sought out Betty Ann. She didn’t turn away; nor did she beckon. Not at first. Much later, when he had travelled more in the adult world, he realized that Betty Ann must have known how to work a roomful of males since she could pull herself up by the bars of her crib and make eye contact while sucking from her bottle.

  If she had taken him up right away, at least one local boy may have wanted to stab him in the neck and dump him in some cornfield to become a speed bump for a harvester that fall. Because Betty Ann had rules. More than half the young men lounging against fenders or propped up against the store’s wall knew her major one by heart: No going all the way. Ray could see them slit their eyes at her even as they laughed and joked. He also met Jessie, her brother, that night. Jessie offered him a cigarette, extended a lit match, said, “There’s me, Norbert, Howard, and Tom. Then there’s our sisters’ husbands—Freddie and Elmer.” He shook out the match and tossed it past Ray’s shoulder into the night. “Just me and little Norbert here right now, rest of them’s in the Army. But they will all go AWOL for family.”

  Understood.

  But Betty Ann also had plans. And when a well-built New York boy showed up he fit right into them. It took her two weeks to work him into her regular rotation and another couple to work the other fellows out. By then, the crowd looked forward to his stories about rent parties and train rides to Harlem to sneak into clubs. She played him and he let her. There was nothing else to do. He arranged the spices alphabetically and the knives by size. He wrote letters home about picnics among the bees on the banks of the Mississippi and the violent storms that shook the ends of the earth.

  And he fried chicken.

  He saw boiling oil when he closed his eyes. He no longer noticed its hot speckles on his forearm. He learned Betty Ann’s various rules and how they all had exceptions. He assumed a girl as popular as she had already made an exception to her major rule. He wasn’t surprised that August night in the cemetery on the hill when she didn’t stop him at the usual time. They lay on a blanket they had used earlier for a picnic by the river. Heat lightning flashed over Missouri to the west and lit up tall columns of thunderheads. He slipped into her but was surprised by a current of resistance he didn’t know existed. She grunted as he pushed past. He froze.

  She moved first, rocking her hips. He matched her. Those New York women had an itch he had learned to scratch, but none of that compared to this. This falling, falling, and never wanting to stop. Wanting it to always be now, never wanting it to be after. Later, she straightened her clothes as fat raindrops fell. He thought he glimpsed blood on her handkerchief as she folded it away in her pocketbook. They never spoke about that. They didn’t have to. They were one.

  End of summer and he wanted to cry. She didn’t, so he couldn’t. She had a plan, and certain things happened in a certain order. In her plan, love came first. The only certain thing that happened to be out of order was Lonnie. He was on his way to being born by the time Betty Ann arrived in New York that fall.

  The Man with the Spanish Shoes 2

  AFTER DINNER, ROSITA said, “Let’s sit inside tonight.” It was stuffy inside, cooler out, so Ramón knew she wanted to discuss a topic not for the neighbors’ big ears. He was tired after another day of fighting the inertia of unhappy workers and worrying about his brother’s loyalty, but he stayed up until all their girls had gone to bed. He, too, had sensitive thoughts to voice. He followed his wife into the kitchen. Most of the house was furnished with the history and tastes of the Monteros, but the Formica-topped kitchen table where they now sat had been his mother’s. Rosita bent over to sweep up two small barrettes from the tile floor and dropped them on the table beside the day’s newspaper. No matter how much she scolded the girls, the small things still escaped her control. Her skin glowed with perspiration. She wiped a drop away from her cheek with the back of her thumb.

  “Our children will go without us for now,” she said.

  Quique was gone. What could she be thinking? “How? Why now?”

  “The Sisters Montero have pledged to get all of our children off the island.” Rosita lifted her dark, wavy hair from her neck and let it fall again.

  Ramón felt a familiar stir, despite the serious conversation, or maybe because of it. He folded the newspaper and pushed it aside. “What happened?”

  Rosita settled her elbows on the table. “Lola saw missiles, the worst ones. With her own eyes. She was coming home after cooking for the Soviet soldiers and was asleep when the Russian driver took a wrong turn. Such a little mistake. But then the Russian captain . . .” She covered her mouth with both hands, as if she were praying into her fingers.

  “What happened?” Ramón said again, softer. He reached across the table and spread his slender hands flat in front of his wife.

  She spoke from behind her steepled fingers, her eyes wide and brimming. “They shot him—the boy—the driver—just like that. He was just a boy, Lola said.”

  Ramón shook his head slowly. He turned his palms up and Rosita clasped his fingers.

  “If they have so little regard for Russians,” Rosita said. She squeezed harder. “They’ll think nothing of taking Cuban lives.” She sniffed. Her nose had reddened with her tears.

  He loved her at that moment, not the he didn’t love her most of the time. But this. If he
were dying far from home while defending a cause he wasn’t sure of, he would want some unknown local woman to mourn him simply because he was a mother’s son. For this he could almost forgive the flirtations on the beach and at the club, the new shoes instead of meat from the black market, the insane loyalty to her sisters.

  “The Sisters have a plan?”

  She drew her chair closer. “I’m not supposed to tell. Even you.”

  He sat back and threw his hands into the air. Those goddamn Sisters, thick as thieves. His moment with Rosita was ruined. “Then don’t.” Maybe he shouldn’t say anything about his brother. And he certainly couldn’t say anything about her brother’s disappearance.

  “Ramón, no.”

  He went to the cupboard and took down a red juice glass and a bottle of rum. He poured himself three fingers’ worth.

  “Mami!” Margo’s voice floated down the hall. She was their youngest, sensitive to the appearance of saints and the psychic noise of arguments.

  “You see? You’re upsetting her,” Rosita said, rising from the table.

  “How do you know? Maybe it’s the Madonna again. She seems to like your family.”

  Rosita skirted the table and strode out, leaving Ramón to his rum. He sipped the warm drink and thought for the first time what their evenings would be like without that small voice to interrupt them. He wanted to wait until the whole family could leave together, he, Rosita, Virginia, Alma, and Margo, moving as one. But it was not to be. He had gotten used to the idea of movement, but not of separation. Well, he would have to see exactly what the plan was. Rosita returned and sank into her seat. He slid his glass across to her and she took a sip.

  “Which boat?” he asked.

  “Carlos—”

  “Figueroa? Never.”

  “He’s family.” A distant cousin on her mother’s side.

  A whole other clan he had to deal with. “So what? That lizard takes advantage of young girls whose parents pay good money for safe passage. Then he gets sloshed at the Bohio and brags about it. No, I’m not letting Virginia near him.”