It was a tired and dirty city bus that had come for him. The headlights soon filled the car. The horn blared. It filled our night with a terrible shock. Weary figures stood inside. They held on to the rails. They were pressed closely against each other. Their eyes were glazed over from working long hours at minimum wage. The bus took them quickly out of the rich neighborhoods and back to their respective projects. They stared out the windows. Recounted in their heads each and every deflation they had encountered that day. The seconds after the bus passed were long—the space of time couldn’t be measured in ordinary ways. Marvin and I were left in a mist. The 99 was going too fast to stop. The bus was wide and morbid. More seconds ticked by in which neither of us said anything. Wet garbage crawled across the road in the icy wind.
“I like your poems!” I finally spluttered. “A lot.”
Marvin looked desolate. He was suddenly shaky and sweating. Nothing really mattered as much as the woman behind cement walls. He had almost missed seeing her again. He mumbled something about me owning his soul now and adjusted his glasses with the deliberate patience that defined him.
He walked me to my door. I felt for the deadbolt and slid my key in. Marvin waited until I got inside and locked all four locks. He turned and walked down the two flights of steps back to his car. He drove the city streets for a while just to think. He made his way over the bridge to Illinois. His mind returned to his perpetual organization directed toward one goal. His thoughts pecked at the strategy unmercifully. He expanded and narrowed and grew more and more dangerous. In the dark, he made plans to liberate East St. Louis.
10
CHRISTMAS
I tried to stay inside my apartment on Christmas. Everything seemed so impossible—so out of control. I stayed in bed. I jumped at small noises. I dreamed. I wanted to believe that St. Louis was an elaborate play—an inaccurate, too-crazy script. I was cold and sleepy and saw everything through a haze. None of it was real. I wanted to wake up and be safe in my old bed. Any minute he would come back: the Man from Angel Road. I couldn’t stop pacing. I wandered in my empty apartment like a ghost. My feet drug me across the hardwood floors with my brain tumbling and maniacal behind them. I was bedridden and sleepless. I was moody and flatlined. My world was tumultuous and gray.
I lit candles and sticks of incense. I took a bubble bath with vanilla extract sprinkled into the steaming water. I rubbed lotion onto my skin. I sipped broth from a cup. I boiled water for tea but didn’t feel like drinking city water steeped in bitter, store-bought herbs.
I changed my sheets. I lay on my back on my camping mat in my apartment. I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. I flew away over the miles and miles of farmland and sundown towns and lost highways on fire. It was easy—like stepping into another room. Christmas, alone I remembered:
The medicinal herbs hang in bunches in the kitchen. I have picked them from land I know well. They offer me their faint plant smells. I stare at Jimmy James’s message written on the yellow paper. I pull the herb bunches down and unwrap the netting. I sit on the fire escape and burn them in the barbecue grill. I smell the chamomile, lavender, rose hips, and dried raspberry leaves catch fire one after the other. The yarrow comes last.
The silence and fog are intense. The rain—the wet, dark rain looms like a foreboding giant. Winter is here. It is something I cannot conquer alone. The evergreen trees hunch over me. I hold Timothy tight. The impending rainy season wants to eat us whole. We haven’t saved up enough food for the cold months. Weeds creep into the vacant lots. The steelhead bleed out of their skin in the Columbia. It is dark and wet like a demon womb. The rent is late. Timothy won’t stop crying. I pack his bags and call Nadine. I hang up the phone and stare out the window like Mother used to.
Jimmy James stands behind a thick, tall curtain of mystery. I can’t imagine him. I can’t remember the way he smells or the low tone of his voice. I don’t remember why he’s gone. It is all such a shock. He is not asleep in our bed. He is in a cold, dark place that can’t be reached by dreams or letters. There are cement walls. His wounds ache. We are young and uneducated—young and uneducated people are wrong a lot. The voice on the phone keeps telling me, “There is no bail.”
I got dressed and went out to my truck, which was covered in snow. I was angry and wanted to punch the cold metal. Even though it didn’t make any sense. Even though it would not help anything. The vinyl seat felt frigid on the back of my legs even though I was wearing long johns and thick wool pants. I put the heater on full blast and let the motor warm up.
I drove the empty city streets and looked for him angrily—the Man from Angel Road. I searched and searched the streets of Midtown that were like ghost ships—the business sectors that were empty. All the men in suits had long ago gone home to the suburbs. I drove to places I thought he might be: the central west end—the bridge with gaslights. The taxi drivers didn’t look at me—a sad spirit in a slow truck.
Jimmy James had to come back. I’d left his Kerouac books on a shelf at Dad’s house. I saved Lou Reed. I saved all his records for when we could listen together. I remembered how he propped his boots up on our wooden chairs.
He loved me even when I didn’t know how to act—loved me even more for my lack of manners and unrepentant grin. He held me after my impotent anger left me shaking and void. He reminded me that the price we paid in misery and frustration was small in comparison. I asked him why the world wasn’t fair. I asked him why some had so much and the rest so little. I asked what price they had to pay to never have to struggle—to be so untouchable and cruel and judgmental. He laughed and answered, “Baby, you already know. They don’t have souls.” And finally, I laughed with him. Laughed at myself. Kissed his cheek and put my head where it fit best—on his chest that felt like knotty pinewood.
I knew Jimmy James would come back. He would be immaculate like new snow on cold granite. I would breathe in the scent of sweat on his neck and taste his salty lips when he got off work. We would go on long camping trips—show Timothy Lake Ozette and the Hoh Rain Forest. I would have my family back. I would care for their male bodies—draw warm baths and wash away every memory of jail cells and being apart.
But the air in my truck was thick with the memory of clotted blood. My vision swam with it. The coagulated liquid choked me. It was syrupy and dark. I flailed against it in a mounting, frustrated terror.
I had to turn around empty-handed. I was forced back into my neighborhood alone. I stumbled across the parking lot at the corner market near my apartment. My fingers were cold as I lifted the pay phone receiver. I took a deep breath and called Trinise.
11
ON RESERVATION ROAD
The project Trinise lived in was crowded and bright. She introduced me to her mama, stepfather, and too many aunts, uncles, and cousins to remember. I came in time to say grace. I ate everything that was offered to me. I sat in a kitchen chair and drank warm liquor while I laughed at every joke. I helped with the dishes. I talked about the weather with Trinise’s waitress cousin—how quickly it had changed from hot to cold and how unused to such changes I was. I washed. She dried. Someone else put the dishes away.
Afterward, I made my way slowly through the living room making small talk with various relatives. I watched Trinise’s mama scold a very old man in a black sweater who tried to smoke vanilla-flavored tobacco out of a pipe inside her apartment. Her body stood incensed inside her green chiffon dress. Her neck was firm. I recognized Trinise’s poise.
I looked at the man and shrugged. He was being shooed out the back door. I asked if I could join him, and he told me grandly that it would be his pleasure.
Outside, the cold wind hit me like a wave of ice water. I stared in awe at the rectangle of brick buildings that surrounded us. There was a chain-link fence with razor wire. The St. Louis sky poured down snow. The charred brick of the city had turned to blood-red ice topped with soft, sooty white. I smoked with the old man. Our exhalations were thick and white from smoke and frozen
breath. We appreciated the quiet. I remembered how two years ago today, Monique left David.
I said good-bye to Trinise early to avoid the snow. I knew her neighborhood would not be plowed. I thought about Monique. I drove through the bright white afternoon of the midwestern winter with her confusion chasing me. Two years ago, Monique left. She deserted Cota Street as if it were on fire and about to consume her. She renounced our hometown when the sky began its long descent into months of incessant cold rain and oppressive darkness. She went to a place that was colder and drier. I wondered about her. Somewhere in Montana she was feeling the chills like I was—feeling the winter how only lonely women can. She drove over the mountain passes the last day that she could—before they got snowed over for the winter. She packed her truck with boxes of brushes, paint, and canvases. She took emergency supplies of water, wool blankets, food rations, and flares.
The summer months had been hard on Monique that year. Her eyes had grown faded and worn as my brother’s frenzied fearlessness developed. His obstinacy was frightening. Monique tried to be strong. She drove her rusted Chevy LUV like everything was fine. Colin warned her not to wander too far alone. Monique wore strapless, hand-sewn dresses and made candles and beaded necklaces to sell at the farmers’ market. Colin made threats and stayed up late into the night sitting on the Cota Street couch with the overhead lights off. He checked three times before opening the front door. Monique took pictures of the I.W.A. seal painted on the brick of the old union hall. Her snake tattoo crawled up her neck. She tried to talk Colin out of everything. But he wouldn’t listen. He kept his gun loaded. His finger on the trigger.
She told me every detail before she left. I listened like a stone to every word. There was frost on the haunted fir trees. I watched them to avoid looking at her face. I tried hard to understand. She tried even harder to explain. She talked and then held her breath. Her posture held a deep sense of shame. It hurt to watch. The engine was running in her truck. She was parked in front of the All Night Diner. The exhaust made a white cloud behind the vehicle. I reminded her to check her oil. I glanced at her face. Her voice was gravelly Patsy Cline. I encouraged her to go on. She told me about the trailer park in Montana—the one she was going to live in with her aunt. She talked desperately about the dense thicket of resin birch, children playing in grassy patches, a larch-pole fence and the dusty trail that followed it. She tried to explain the tentative, miraculous feeling that rose up in her belly. She stopped talking and held that belly. She turned to her truck and put her forehead on her arm. She left a smudge of makeup below her elbow. She told the rest of the story with her back to me—her eyes scrunched into the curve of her flesh—her voice gone wavery.
She said it was horrible finding him. Her tightly wound body sprung in an instant. She felt that she was breaking—finally losing it. The pool of blood that fanned out from his head had begun to congeal on the linoleum. It turned dark on the outer edges. She thought he was dead.
It was strange sitting in the hospital room after Colin woke up. Emotions beyond description had passed through her body during the time he was asleep. She squeezed his hand all through the afternoon. He threw up thin vomit laced with blood clots. She hadn’t slept in days. Her feelings grew distant. They turned into cold shards of glass on the horizon. Her hot lungs stopped moving. Her thumping heartbeat quieted. The intern who was on watch calculated her every move. Colin had been red-flagged for emotional instability. The intern looked young and nervous and flippant. He must have been from somewhere far away that had medical schools and no methamphetamines. He read his book and pretended to be bored. Monique knew he was listening to every word she uttered. Possibly taking notes. He was watching her flush Colin’s black-red vomit down the toilet. He was wondering about the white trash teenager he was in charge of—speculating about what it took for people to reach rock bottom, to stop grasping after strings.
Tears were locked inside Monique’s heart—they thumped against her glass rib cage. They spread rumors through her body. For the first time in her life she was delicate—a thin vase that was leaking—her insides dripping from her cracks. Her feelings came to her sporadically along with a remorse that floundered.
She left Colin in the hospital room alone to smoke a rolled cigarette on a rain-drenched wooden bench in front of the waiting room. She glared into the sky. Her world was frustrating and ugly and going nowhere. A nurse who knew her mother saw Monique’s shaking shoulders and reached out to her. She held her firmly—with a brisk hand. The nurse told her she needed to be strong. Monique’s heart raced and then stopped moving—it turned to water. It washed away the confusing noise and the bloody vomit. She told the nurse she had failed at love, and she was sorry.
Her thoughts raced when she went back to the hospital room. They swirled in the stormy, dreary silence while Colin slept in fits and woke anxiously. The dark came and hid her face.
Visiting hours were almost over.
Monique was water. Her drips found every crevice on the hospital floor. They made the white tiles wet. Her heart screamed inside her chest. It was a long, lonely sound like the train whistle leaving town. But she talked to Colin during his brief wakefulness. She told him she wanted to go swimming at the Ledges as soon as he got out. She tried to be cheerful. She talked about camping at Lake Cushman. She said, “Vera and Jimmy James will come.” He didn’t answer and she started trembling. She tried to remember: None of it had been her idea.
Colin wanted her to go to school. “The Art Institute of Seattle,” he told Dad proudly. He saw her poring wistfully over the pamphlets—wanting something she could never have. He convinced her they could save up money and move away. “Right now, we’re living paycheck to paycheck,” Colin explained. He urged her, “We’re never gonna get out of here any other way.” She knew he was right. There was no denying their unfinished GEDs and fast-food wages. Their total lack of contacts.
It was easy to start selling meth. The hard part was staying up all night in fear—imagining old friends breaking in on them. Colin lived in paranoid agony with a loaded .40-caliber handgun under his pillow. He didn’t sleep if Monique slept. He didn’t eat if she needed more. All for Monique. All so Monique could go to school.
Colin spoke before she had to leave the hospital. “Are you still here?” His voice searched for her weakly. Her attention rested on every twitch of his eyelids, every uncomfortable, restless movement he made. Her name caught inside his throat. Her water washed over him in slow splashes. It broke down his flesh. It carried his voice away and decomposed him.
“I know you got a plan,” he told her when she found his hand. “I know you got things you gotta do.” A green light on one of the machines he was hooked up to blinked. “Why are you wasting so much time hanging around this old town?”
The lights buzzed in fits. The terror of her life alone spun out in front of her. It shot off splashes of tears, and unpaid bills, and acceptance letters she did not reply to. She wanted to lock away her dreams in a metal box. She wanted Colin to be with her and forget everything else. But it was too late for that.
“We ain’t doing nothing,” he reminded her.
She let the truth hang in the air—unchallenged and stupid. Thousands of nights of “nothing” stretched before her. The loneliness stared into her eyes relentlessly. All the things they had done haunted. Her future without Colin scathed the walls. The fear of her meaningless death was now possible. It reached for her. It was hard to get away from. None of us Cota kids would be remembered in history books. The tidewater mill was silent. The polluted harbor was lifeless. There was no past. The future was covered by a thick blanket of fog.
“You need to paint all those pretty things you see.” Colin raised his bandaged head. The movement made him dizzy. He couldn’t see her. Everything was a living, dark red color—the inside of his eyelids and the murkiness that blurred his vision. His gums were rimmed in blood. He tried to keep his mouth shut while he talked. He didn’t want to scare her. “You g
otta put down on paper all those pictures in your head.” He was exasperated and stubborn. He knew that every second on Cota Street was less vivid for Monique. “You gotta do all those things you was gonna do! If you don’t, all of this is for nothing!”
She knew he was right. There was no choice now. She thought of her plans—her paintbrushes resting in mason jars of cloudy water, her cloth and cleaner and canvases. Her plans had once seemed so beautiful and colorful. But now each time she closed her eyes she pictured Colin’s blood drying on the linoleum in the kitchen. His jammed Glock in the corner. The red-splattered baseball bat thrown down chaotically. The smeared bloody handprints on the wall at Colin’s head. Her own paintbrushes scattered wildly over the carpet. One in particular near Colin had black bristles that had been dipped in red. A good painter never left her brushes out with paint on them. And she was a good painter. That paintbrush troubled her. There was only one color—the color of life and death.
Colin had forgotten about the window in the crawl space he kicked out himself when he was young. The hole was stopped up with a towel. A towel was easy to kick in silently. As Colin checked the door for the third time the five figures came up behind him. He was almost relieved as the darkness fell in red and black and screaming dizziness. The moment had finally come. He felt the first blow sharply. The rest were faded and deadened.
A voice was talking in a low frequency at his ear. It spoke in a thick, rural accent. “Tell yer sister . . .” He strained to identify the sound. He grappled with his burst and rotating brain. Was it just the drugs and money they had come for? One eye looked through a mask of torn skin at a pair of combat boots. They were black and bloody. Behind them a head bent busily with one of Monique’s paintbrushes dipped in his own blood. A head hovered near him. “Tell yer sister,” the voice had said. He didn’t know if the sound was coming from the boy or if the boy was gone and he was hearing only a memory. The voice was saying, Tell yer sister she’s on the wrong side a’ things. Tell her boyfriend move over. And he can take that bastard baby right on outta town.
Vera Violet Page 7