Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  “Yeah. Let’s go to Slovakia for a tummy tuck. Let’s not actually go outside the windowless fortress of our medical building or meet anyone from the city or eat real food. Let’s go to Bratislava but only eat Jell-O and soup.”

  I felt the heat rush into the open window, and the smell of marijuana smoke and charred meat. On the balconies were little Weber grills like landed spaceships. A block away, on the corner of Palm and Oleander, two women walked in vague patterns. Glorette used to move along this street, this alley, this corner. Glorette in her yoga pants and sports bra. Red high heels.

  “Sounds pretty painful.”

  Rick was driving. I heard the rush of traffic behind him. “Boring even as these women were describing it to me after the reading. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So tomorrow?”

  Breakfast. I’d find Victor, take him back to Sarrat, and spend the night at my parents’ house. Then he could come to LA with me in the morning. We could talk about The Personal and Social and Cultural History of Crack. We could start college applications. We could go to a movie. Something he’d never see in Rio Seco.

  If he weren’t bleeding.

  “See you then,” I said to Rick, rubbing my eyes until I saw red. I needed to firm up two more assignments. I needed that kind of cushion.

  Victor had lived in #4 once. Two palm trees stood lonely in a courtyard planter like mine—this one had sparkly white rocks way back when, I remembered, but now just blackened dirt. I got out and walked slowly toward the trees. It had been so hot today that people were still cooking, and two of the grills glowed like campfires.

  The moon had risen high enough to be behind the trees, the perfect place for what Glorette had shown me when we were kids in Sarrat, but these palm fronds didn’t shift and toss and sparkle with silver electricity as they did in winter, when the moon was full and the sky was clean. Tonight the moon glowed like a dirty tangerine behind the lingering smog, blurry and tired above the dusty fronds, with nothing to reflect or move. Just the day’s heat still trembling in the crown of the trees.

  “What you lookin for?” A voice came from the stairwell. Same as Jazen’s, but not him. Two embers floated in the darkness like red fireflies. As a child, I had looked everywhere for fireflies, and not seen them until I got to college.

  “Nothing,” I said, and went back to my car, my eyes floating in hot tears. Glorette, kneeling next to Victor on the balcony, showing him the way the trees looked like ghostly fireworks. If he didn’t call me, I had no idea how to find him.

  On Palm Avenue, the four-lane that went straight through the whole city, I stopped in front of Sundown Liquor. It was a tiny liquor store with posters of brown women with cleavage—Mexican girls wearing halter tops and cowboy hats, a light-skinned black woman with green eyes and a bottle of golden beer in her fingers.

  Three men sat in folding chairs under the huge pepper tree in the back part of the parking lot. My brothers often came here in the evening, playing dominoes at the card table someone took home every night. But tonight my brothers were in Sarrat.

  Chess Williams, who used to sit here every night, had been shot and killed not long after Glorette was murdered, some people said because he knew who did it. Of the three men at the table, I only knew Sidney Chabert. He squinted at me and raised his chin. He knew my car. I pulled into the parking lot, just next to the alley, and he said, “How you been, Fantine?”

  “All right,” I said, because that was the proper answer. “How about you?”

  He shrugged. Sidney had been sprung for Glorette, but he’d never been with her, as far as I knew. Back when she was walking this alley, every Friday Chess used to give her fifty dollars as well as buying rock for her from someone he knew, and they stayed together all night. “In the morning, she makes him grits. Every Saturday,” my brother Lafayette had said.

  Sidney glanced up at me and said, “Five years.” He was the one who’d found her body in the alley two blocks away from here, in the shopping cart. He’d wheeled the cart to this parking lot, to my brothers. They’d taken Glorette home in their truck.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You seen her son Victor tonight? With Jazen and Alfonso?”

  The other two men were older. The one with silver threads in his rough natural said, “Them knuckleheads in the Navigator?”

  I nodded.

  “They come by about a hour ago and had a shoutin match in the alley. Some female owe a hundred bucks.” The other man nodded. The dominoes were laid out like a skeletal X-ray in the dim light under the pepper branches. “Then they drove over to the Launderland. How they do.”

  Clarette had told me they stored their rocks in one particular dryer. I said, “Three knuckleheads?” and they both nodded. So Victor was still with them. Who was bleeding?

  “They had to been fightin with Sisia,” Sidney said, slanting his head toward the alley. “She always owe them. She probably still down there.”

  His eyes were muddy, and his breath smelled like malt liquor. “Five years. Sisia still walkin and Glorette layin in the ground.” He said it like an old man.

  I touched him on the shoulder. We used to sit next to each other in math. “I know,” I said.

  I got back in the car. A mural had been painted on the wall, to cover graffiti. The skeletons of Day of the Dead, with top hats. I felt that cold web of fear like a cape across my shoulders. In Luzern, two days ago, Jane and I had crossed the Kapellbrucke, the famous chapel bridge across the Reuss River where the ancient paintings on the triangular wood panels always featured a skeleton lurking, waiting, hiding—death was always there. Victor could be bleeding to death, in the back of the Navigator. Would Jazen and Alfonso take him to the hospital, where there were always cops?

  I drove two blocks to where the Launderland was bright and day-like, the only person inside a Mexican woman wearing a pink apron and folding countless small shirts and socks like doll clothes.

  Sisia. Turning down the side street, I saw her walking slowly away from me, in the alley. Her back was to me, but I knew she heard the car stop. The set of her shoulders changed, and her head rose so her neck straightened, and her butt shifted slightly under the tight lycra.

  Black yoga pants, a black sports bra, and black high heels. Skin so dark you only knew it was skin because it shone glossy with lotion in the streetlights. She was like a parody of all those yoga moms I saw in LA every day, walking fast down the street with their phones and their toned muscles and their strollers like little wheelbarrows.

  Sisia knew the car hadn’t moved. She walked a few more steps, so the man she thought I was could see her body, how she looked like a cartoon-perfect woman, with narrow waist and long legs and ass for days, as the guys always said.

  Then she turned and walked toward the car, her little red purse swinging, her gold hoops swaying, her breasts shifting loose and full inside the bra. She did it this way because her face was covered with acne scars, her beautiful cheeks turned to orange peel, her smooth forehead to moonscape. But men still wanted that perfect body. I’d heard them way back in high school. “You close your eyes, fool. You ain’t feelin her face.”

  She bent down slowly so I saw her lush breasts first, the valley between them ghostly white with baby powder, the tops glowing, spilling into the window. I was a shadow. I said, “Sisia. It’s me. Fantine.”

  She dropped down to a crouch as if she’d been hit. “Shit, Fantine,” she said. “Why you playin me?” The alley behind her was sandy and pale, two empty shopping carts huddled under a tobacco tree with yellow blossoms.

  Then she lifted her chin. “Why you wastin my time?”

  “You want a soda?”

  “Fuckin hot all day. I gotta get me a Slurpee. I love them damn things.”

  She sat beside me, and her smell was Johnson’s powder, cigarette smoke in her extensions, and fresh nail polish. Underneath was sweat.

  “Where you stay now?” I fell into my second language so easily, even as I could still see t
he carved wooden pew and white roses in Arthur Graves’s loft. We never said “Where do you live?” as that implied a permanence that hardly anyone had. Where do you stay? Right now, for a month, a year, a few minutes? Where have you perched for this moment, until times got better or worse?

  “The Villas,” she said carefully, looking at the dashboard. She wanted to know what I wanted. “You still stay up there in LA?”

  “Yeah.” No one from here ever asked me where particularly, since they didn’t know or care about the difference between Silver Lake and Toluca Lake.

  We passed the nail salon Cerise had mentioned this afternoon. The Vietnamese woman leaned in her doorway and watched my car. Sisia suddenly opened her purse and said, “Hey, you gon buy one a these?”

  Prepaid phone cards—five of them worth ten dollars each. She held them in a stack on her outstretched palm, like an elegant layered pastry from a Paris bakery, and I thought of all the small things we traded and needed so badly now—cell phones and credit cards and phone cards and iPods. Little plastic things people killed for. Not like when I was a child, and my mother traded bags of oranges and boxes of eggs for long slabs of pork ribs from Mr. Lanier’s freshly killed pig.

  “Fantine—see, you always trippin like that, breakin off in space,” Sisia said, snapping her long fingers over the cards and turning over her hand like she was doing a magic trick. “You want one or not?”

  Someone must have stolen them, and paid her with them. I shook my head and pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot. “You seen Victor?”

  When we got out, she was about six inches taller than me in her heels. She glanced at my boots. “You always got the same damn clothes on,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was tired. “So do you.” I was burning up in my long cotton sleeves and jeans, but the night was cooling now. “Victor didn’t come by here?”

  She walked ahead of me into the cool doorway. “That who you lookin for?” She went straight back to the Slurpee machine, and mixed granular Coke slush that looked like wet brown sugar with a toxically red cherry swirl. I started laughing, I couldn’t help it, and she said, “You too good for this shit, huh?”

  I made myself one with just Coke. I’d forgotten how the icy sludge rose from the back of your throat to your temples like magic.

  “You cannot drink until you pay,” the clerk said sternly. He folded his arms over his belly, his handlebar mustache curling black over his brown cheeks.

  “Come on now, Mr. Patel,” Sisia said. “How I’ma run away in these heels?”

  He didn’t smile, but he raised his eyebrows and looked at me.

  “She okay,” Sisia said, and I put a five on the counter. He unfolded his arms. “See by how she dressed she ain’t dangerous.” She laughed, wet bubbles from the slush.

  “You’re welcome,” I said to Sisia in the parking lot.

  She said, “Shut up, Fantine. You ain’t about nobody.”

  I leaned against the car door. The slush pooled in my chest and filled me with cold, like when we were children in my mother’s yard and she crushed ice in a bag with a rolling pin and put it in cups for us with smashed mints.

  “Tomorrow’s five years,” I said. “I always wondered if you knew who did it.”

  “Who caught her back there that night?” she said in a low voice, and then she took another long pull, so that all the red disappeared from the plastic dome of her cup.

  “Do you?” I asked. They worked the alleys together, but I always imagined they lost each other when someone got in a car.

  A horn sounded from the street, and her whole face changed again. Her braids were gleaming and black, brand-new, and her eyes were dark as licorice. She whispered, “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. You ain’t never gave a shit, and you ain’t never around.”

  She put her cup on the roof of my car and started walking.

  “Did you see Victor?” I called after her, and she turned.

  “They came by about a hour ago, talkin all that yang. Told them I’d pay up at midnight, and JZ said he couldn’t wait that long. Little hard motherfucker. I said you can’t bleed a turnip and he said this ain’t Alabama. They took off.”

  They couldn’t wait until midnight.

  “Took all they stuff with em,” she said, sounding sad. The dryer empty. She’d have to find somebody else tonight. “Victor mighta been in the back. I seen another head. Maybe he was sleep. That boy can sleep anytime. You know.”

  I knew. All the tiny cramped rooms she’d shared with Glorette, getting ready to forge ahead into the night, smoking a reserve rock before they walked and walked to make enough for the next rock, and maybe one more, and if they had to take Chess or someone else back to the apartment, Victor would stay behind his flimsy bedroom door, sitting on the futon with his books and his music and his words.

  “Fantine,” she said. “You ain’t about nobody. You thought you was the shit way back in junior high. That gifted class.” She laughed, throwing her head back. Faint white lines of baby powder there as well, in the two creases of her throat. “And we caught you that day and cut your hair.”

  “That’s ancient history, Sisia,” I said.

  She shrugged. “All you got is somethin tween your legs and somethin in your head. Tell me I’m lyin.”

  She turned and walked away.

  I couldn’t tell her I always used the something in my head, but I controlled the something tween my legs, because she didn’t care.

  EL OJO DE AGUA

  I DROVE TWO BLOCKS the other way, to the part of the alley where Glorette had been killed. If Jazen was looking for someone else who owed him money, they must be getting ready to run. But how far?

  The back door of El Ojo de Agua was open, and a woman threw a bucket of wash water onto the wild tobacco trees growing near the fence. The water glistened on the shopping carts abandoned there, like rain on silver armor. A little armored burro had carried Glorette from that very spot.

  Pounding drumbeats—a lowered black Honda paused at the mouth of the alley and moved on. I got out of the car and walked onto the powdery dust. Video store, nail salon, taqueria—the back doors to each were open, because of the heat. The stinging smell of nail polish remover floated into the hot-oil smell of the taqueria.

  This was where Glorette had walked nearly every night. How had it felt, to know eyes were always stalking her? Glorette and I had looked at the picture of our mothers. We knew that what was between their legs had chased them from Louisiana.

  No Navigator. Just the fence and the wild tobacco trees where Sidney Chabert found her, their yellow blooms like tiny pencils in the dim light. Flashing blue of televisions in back rooms on the other side of the chain-link fence like lightning.

  I touched the tobacco blossoms, the same trees that grew all along the riverbed near our house, and then I saw the cross. Tied to the fence. A crucifix made of Popsicle sticks, fastened together with faded blue plastic twine, the date written in marker on the bottom. August 25, 2000. The numbers like spiders, and a rosary with plastic beads wound around the splintering wood.

  A silvery scarf of water flew past me and onto the tree. A woman stood in the back doorway of the taqueria. She put down the wash bucket and looked at me, then at the cross. Her hand rose to her forehead, down to her ribs, then shoulder to shoulder.

  Someone called to her from the kitchen. “Serafina!” She disappeared inside, and the spilled water rolled along the dry dust of the alley, not sinking in. The lopsided moon shone through the ferny branches of the pepper trees.

  Glorette used to lie in the groves next to me at dusk, when the sun turned each orange into a glowing planet. I would never have seen that if she hadn’t shown me. She felt everything. Too much. I remembered her face when she held Victor—it was almost gaunt, as if she felt Dakar’s absence so deeply it had taken away everything underneath her skin.

  Glorette walked in this dust, so long since it had rained that when I looked down my black boots were golden across the toe. The
small creamy pebble of rock in her hand, in the pipe. I had never seen it. I had always imagined it glowing like a crimson ember when she inhaled, but I had no idea what it looked like, or felt like, to be that high, that insensible, that erased. Released.

  The moon was three days past full now, moving fast above those pepper trees at Sundown Liquor. Like someone had taken a nail file to it.

  I stepped on something very hard. Around my feet were pink shells. Pistachios.

  “That boy live on them nut,” Unc Gustave used to say. “I go find him, and he live on pink nuts and Chinese noodle.”

  Pistachios and ramen. She used to buy him those every night at the Rite-Aid, Cerise said. Cerise would be in there buying shampoo or getting prescriptions for her kids, and she’d see Glorette carrying a plastic bag stacked with ramen. Ten for a dollar.

  He’d brought his pistachios to my apartment that night, back when we studied for the SAT. The pink shells like an art exhibit the way he lined them up on the polished teak—lines of five, lines of ten, while he said the words. Loquacious. Ludicrous. Lascivious. Then he piled them on top of each other like cradles—five, seven, and the stack fell over.

  I leaned against the car door and cried into my hands. He had missed the SAT. The last one he could have taken before college applications. The night before the test, after I’d dropped him off, Glorette and Sisia had brought two men home, and while Victor was locked into his room studying, they had a fight and one pulled a gun and shot a hole in the window.

  The cops took everybody. Victor, too. He wasn’t released for a week. His senior year was gone. And Glorette was killed here, a few feet away, the day he was supposed to register for city college.

  I got in the car and waited for Victor’s voicemail and said, “So it was really your maman who made me into a writer. I mean, I might have genes from Moinette Antoine, or whoever, that made me love words, but it was Glorette. I’m not just telling you this because it’ll make you feel better. But you can’t feel much worse, so what the hell.”