After Mother and Mima left, Colin and I had only each other. We spread ourselves out across town. We followed the Cota kids who got together. We were all tired of having nowhere to go. There were no youth centers—no facilities to keep the rain off our heads. Cota kids formed groups and rented old buildings downtown. They crammed together in trailers in the woods. Sometimes home was a dangerous place. School was an idiotic dream that faded fast. There was no taste of book-learned words in our mouths. Kids moved out on their own at young ages. They joined forces. Six or eight teenagers in three bedrooms. They played their guitars as loud as they could. They knew they couldn’t go back and redo their childhood—we could never be kids again. You only get one shot. Us Cota kids were somewhere in between childhood and adult knowledge. Something ugly that nobody wanted to see or know about.
Our houses got dirty. We were sick from lack of sleep, cheap food, too much beer, and foot traffic. Things like heat and water were intermittent. We huddled around space heaters during the winter. Every dirty plate and open container was an ashtray. There were fat fleas and starving dogs. There were mice in the kitchen, pot in the bedroom, rain on the roof, and arguments over who got the last beer. Nobody stopped by to check on us.
Hopelessness peeked into every window. It sniffed at welcome mats, stuck its long fingers into the cracks in the walls. It whispered like breezes. Rusty vehicles broke down. The Cota kids started looking tired. Desperation came in on the bottom of our shoes after a hard day. It was swallowed with our beer. It was everywhere—in every board and sheet of drywall, every piece of worn carpet, every speck of dirt and defeated dream. It dripped through the leaky roofs. It hovered over unopened mail—the bills that piled up on the cinder block furniture.
Drugs crept up on our backs and took over quickly. They would not give up. They laughed and screamed in ecstasy at our attempts to free ourselves. The houses downtown became more and more unkempt. Bald spots appeared in front yards. Real estate prices stagnated and then plummeted. We watched as crystal meth became a living, breathing entity—the tourists bought more and more land—downtown became crowded. We were suddenly presented with a way to escape. City kids came to buy drugs from us. They sold them to suburban ravers. Meth was cheap to make. There was a never-ending supply. There were no seasons or dry spells or dependency on shipments. We became caught up in the death and destruction—the black eyes, swollen lips, neglected children and piles of garbage. Meth was a reason to fight with one another. Meth was a reason for more guns. There were more crimes for the television shows that glorified police officers, demonized the poor, and served everything up as some kind of entertaining answer for the people who remained unaffected. We felt guilty with a steadfast conviction—a deep shame that burned and destroyed. It would not wipe off our pale skin. We were somehow always wrong—unfit for any other occupation. We did things that children should never do. We saw things that would haunt our nights. The city of David suddenly needed more beds for the prison business. Everyone forgot why the crimes started in the first place—no other long-term alternatives were offered. Young people were stuck with questions that had no answers. We began to think we didn’t deserve any. The news reporters just couldn’t figure it out. They talked about us as if we were a fungus blight that had mysteriously appeared in a field of flowers. We were all intrinsically wrong. It was our own fault. The violence continued. Young girls kept conceiving life. The babies ended up struggling along with the rest of us.
I remember everything in flashes—broken dinner plates on the floor, red faces, bare feet, and stolen jewelry. Thick smoke spiraled up into the glass pipes. Music played through radios in crowded living rooms. Our eyes were wet and red-rimmed. We gave each other tattoos and piercings. We used a language that was not written down in dictionaries. Our broken toilet seats were covered in urine. We were subject to sudden, violent, and irrational acts.
Meth houses never lasted very long. They burned up in their own fire. Kids got arrested or went somewhere else. Everything was turned over and stolen. Colin and I came back to the empty houses. We made our rounds—avoided the used needles sticking out of the carpets. There was never anything but random mouse droppings, dirty socks, or an odd pillowcase with blood on it. Nothing made any sense. None of it had any reason. The objects couldn’t tell the stories we needed to hear. It all happened too fast for anything to imprint itself on the walls or the linoleum or the inanimate objects lying around a scarred woodstove. Hopelessness made for short attention spans. We rambled quietly through the rooms—abandoned and lonely.
Every night, Colin and I walked through the neighborhoods along Cota Street. We wanted to know that these houses mattered—that there was a difference between depth and dominance. We watched each light and intersection. We viewed every tourist restaurant and failing business. Outside of Cota Street, there was always opposition and blame. There were rich kids at the skate park in Olympia, fair-weather punk rockers outside shows at the Capitol Theater, hippie snobs who bought drugs from us, tourists who only drove through our town without stopping. I often grew angry and violent at their casual dismissal. At how things did not actually touch them. I placed myself inches from their faces and said, “I’ll take you there—past the Crab Apple Apartments where the heroin grows wings, down by the railroad tracks to watch the dead men wander. I’ll walk with you where I come from. I’ll show you the houses that burned down without stopping, the condensation on the trailer windows. I’ll show you the places I’ve seen. Kids like you can’t get too close to the bushes. Because arms reach out across the shadows and pull you under. You’re scared you’ll be just like us. You’re afraid you’ll become another piece of trash.” So easily, I knew, it could happen to them.
Colin rolled his eyes at my big mouth. Dragged me away as I threatened. Told me none of them would understand. Explained that seeing wasn’t always believing. “I told you, Vera. We’ll find our own way.” And I tried to listen. But sometimes my anger left me shaking and bitter and kept me up at night. Sometimes, I plotted revenge. But Colin’s words always returned to me eventually. At the end of each episode, I wondered what exactly he meant.
I watched the gangs of kids saunter down Sullivan Avenue on the Northside of St. Louis. They spit slang words and stared down the whole world. I saw their colors and their swaggers. They could not be argued with. They knew the truth. They were angry. They would only get angrier. I felt the tears build up behind my eyes. I sat in the homework lab and held my head. Trinise walked slowly across the room and sat down next to me. She put her strong arm across my shoulder. She squeezed. “Miss Vera, you gon’ lose it?”
I shook my head no. I decided that the “at-risk youth” in the Northside were toughest in the Northside. And country kids were toughest in the country. And Cota kids were toughest on Cota Street. And rich kids were toughest in boardrooms and courtrooms and everywhere else that mattered.
Diamond pulled on my sweatshirt—rubbed at a spot on my boot. “Miss Vera, you know what I’m gunna do when I’m grown?”
She spoke so saucily I couldn’t help but ask, “What?”
“Live in the woods.” She set her head and her lips at her last word. She dared anyone to disagree. Her neck was steel. She looked at me with dignity—grown-up to grown-up.
“Oh! Oh! Me, too, Miss Vera!” Diandre agreed valiantly. The excited whispers flamed up and down the benches in the homework lab.
The children’s eyes shone, Live in the woods! The words were repeated like a motto that kept them afloat.
I thought about Colin walking downtown with the grimy water from the streets soaking up his pant legs—his ghost-eyes dreaming—his heart still searching. Puddles of mud threatened. The fog hovered overhead. I thought of Monique—her face smooth with youth—her eyebrows glaring above clenched, cold teeth. She wore her makeup. She fooled her college instructors. She didn’t let on that she knew things they didn’t. Colin walked by crazy places alone. His heart felt stunted. Dad pulled double shifts and waited
for Mother to come back. Colin put on his hand-me-down clothing and worked fast-food jobs. He wore the soles of his shoes down to slippery, bald-rubber flaps.
I had to remind myself that I couldn’t go back to David. The lights would flash behind me there. I’d be asked the same questions with my tired face lit up in my rearview mirror. There would forever be the red-and-blue bursts and the search beam in my eyes. There would always be the interrogation about Brady and Colin and Jimmy James. My name was on a list. Each officer wanted to be the hero who conquered the evil villains—the sad teenagers who felt empty inside.
I wished for a moment that I could be one of the reporters on the news shows Colin and I listened to so long ago. I craved to view life with detachment as if it were one long series of events that happened in a vacuum and were beyond my control. Things unraveled into various piles—violence was pigeonholed, street gangs were named. Then we all died or went to prison. I wanted to drive a big car with tinted windows. It would have heat and air conditioning. I could pick and choose where I drove—which places I passed through and which I avoided altogether.
But then the moment was gone, and my ancestry burned and boiled. My blood grew angry. I would walk those streets—every one.
I looked at Diamond and nodded my approval. “I’ll live in the woods, too,” I told her. The homework lab was silent. I told those who listened about blue Lake Cushman and vivid green river water. I told them, “Isn’t it nice to think, that if you just keep walking on street after street in the right direction, eventually you’ll get there? Eventually, you’ll be walking in the woods.”
9
SOUL FOOD
It was time to slaughter the young roosters at Granny’s house. They had to be killed before their meat became tough and hard to chew. I wasn’t there to help. But I knew when Dad chopped off their heads with an axe and hung them from a cable to let the blood drain. I knew what it felt like when Colin plunged the birds into a big metal tub filled with water that was scalding over a fire. And the sound of ripping feathers from skin. The smell of fresh chicken guts and soggy carcasses. The flow of the water from the barn pump. I knew the hands of my brother and my father were covered in blood up to their elbows. They froze the birds to eat all winter and chopped firewood for themselves and Granny. Granny picked apples. She peeled and sliced them to freeze or dehydrate. She cut the ends off the soft fruit to use for applesauce. Her kitchen was a wall of cigarette smoke, cinnamon, and sugar.
The weather turned from hot to cold all at once in Missouri. There was no fall. Just summer. Then winter.
Marvin took Trinise and me out for dinner on my birthday. The restaurant was hidden down a side street. It didn’t look like a business from the outside. There were no signs or specials. Only the robust smell of good food and loud music. Trinise gave me a hand-knitted purple scarf wrapped in white tissue paper. She ate her dinner carefully—said “please” and “thank you”—put her leftovers in Tupperware she brought from home—left a ten-dollar bill for the waitress who was her cousin. She left to meet her boyfriend for a movie.
Marvin didn’t feel like leaving so soon. He brought two bottles of beer from the bar. He was curious—wanted to know all the answers to his questions. “So, Ms. Vera,” he began. “Why did you come to St. Louis?”
I tentatively flailed to explain. It came out wrong. I promised him he didn’t understand. His long torso leaned forward. His brows furrowed heatedly. He sensed the impending larger picture—the foreboding web of confusion. Perhaps, he sensed, there were more books to read. He let the subject drop. He looked me in the eye. All the different angles melded into one. We both sensed the color of life and death. Marvin knew my army was bigger, and less unified, and much harder to convince.
“David, Washington,” he said with wonder as he fingered his goatee. The place of my birth was now elevated in his interest. His mind was dark and logical. There was a spark encased in it that nothing could smother. He was a fighter of a different kind. A thoughtful, deliberate one. My flailing fists suddenly seemed messy and primitive. I should have listened to Colin more often. Marvin leaned back in the dark booth. I moved my black-eyed peas around on my plate—tilted my beer bottle up. It was a quiet moment. I let him think.
He was deft and calm as he threw the waitress’s large tip on the table. There was a look of finality in his eyes. The beer warmed up my insides. I added to the money pile. Trinise’s cousin would let us sit there as long as we liked. The restaurant was not busy. Neither of us moved.
Marvin stared at me critically when I blurted out, “I’m not good at explaining.”
I shut up and my mind wandered. I thought of the things Jimmy James said in a low voice with his head next to mine in the dark. I heard them like a sad song. His words were not sounds. They were instincts pressed against my brain. There were things I wanted to tell Marvin. Things I thought he should know. Revelations about happiness and violence.
Behind me stood my late nights of digging into books and papers—using the library at the state college that didn’t belong to me. Above my head hovered the deep feelings of despondency. I wondered if maybe the news reporters were right. Maybe the devil was on Cota Street. I had only imagined the great ocean and the Plan. I’d been driven crazy by youth, and hormones, and desperation. In the city of St. Louis I was a country kid. And country kids are wrong a lot.
But when I closed my eyes I remembered the cold, dark place Jimmy James was in. And staring at the bloodstains of the man from Angel Road. And Brady Robbins holding on to me when both of us felt lost. How his touch was numb and listless. And he kept saying, “Annie’s dead.”
My face melted in the soul food restaurant. Timothy was fed and asleep without me. I thought about all the books that told lies. But how you couldn’t just burn books for lying. I started to talk to Marvin about the rules that kept us apart. I didn’t know how to say parts of it. The Man from Angel Road was locked up as I trembled and did not speak. I wondered how much he would change. I knew the pressures inside would be great. Prison does that. Everyone comes out different than when they went in.
Marvin stared at me. His skin was the color of crude oil—shimmery and dark. It was navy with fine points of white. His heart was big. He brimmed with history. He went to his neighborhood meetings and lived in his sneer. He wore one gold ring on his left hand. He had long, flat-muscled arms. He sat serenely but his eyes stormed—glaring white orbs surrounded brown irises. His black hole pupils were as angry as my lover’s.
I didn’t answer his look. I couldn’t. I took the last swallow of my beer. My army was the biggest, and the most confused, and the most easily led astray. It was hard to trust—it was hard for all of us.
I watched the candle flame dance in the glass holder on our table. I wondered about the streets that separated the Northside from the rich neighborhoods. The boundaries of the rez. The cement stockade of a prison. Bumper stickers that read FREE PALESTINE. I knew La Llorona would haunt the blockade planned for the banks of the Rio Grande. My heart made frantic objections to it all. Everything closed in.
But I remembered good things like church ladies cooking meals for homeless folks, and parks with playgrounds. I remembered music and art and writing. And the feeling of when there are no more words left.
Suddenly, Marvin handed me my birthday present—a book of poems he printed himself. I read the first page:
my eyes must see you, woman
your clothes and your body
I miss the feel of you in a room
the way you change things
it’s a hard place where they sent you
loud and cold in the winter
and your letters still remind me
of all you haven’t done
Colin’s chicken blood–covered hands finally rested back in David. He sat on the back porch and wondered where I was.
There were two old men at the bar playing checkers in St. Louis. Marvin didn’t say anything for a long time. He puffed on his cigar an
d waited.
“My man’s locked up,” I said abruptly. I hadn’t known the words were going to come out of my mouth. I didn’t know why they were there. The pressure had gotten to me. I felt suddenly exposed. My head spun. Marvin nodded politely. He sighed—long and hard. He stared straight ahead—kept thinking his private thoughts.
“So’s my wife,” he finally relented, “Patrice.” I felt a lot of pain there—hurt inside his belly. He was twenty-four and very tired. His words came out of a lonely pit. He looked at me and his eyes were unguarded. It was the first time I’d ever seen him.
“Do you think she’ll be different when she gets out?” I whispered.
He stared at me when he answered, “I really do not know.”
Marvin drove me back to my apartment. He shut off his engine, told me he’d walk with me up the steps. He opened his door, swung one long leg out toward the street. He touched the pavement—the toe of his boot scraped the snow and gravel. I tried to scream but I couldn’t find any words. So I made the noise behind the words. The sounds caught in my throat. I clutched and grabbed at his right arm, pulled his body down toward me. He turned questioningly—raised his eyebrows in alarm. The heavy door of his Crown Vic slammed shut.
He’d been moving quickly. Our heads were swirling. The beer had gone to his head.
Vera Violet Page 6