Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  The wash water made a dark shape like a continent in the alley’s dust.

  “She fell in love with Sere Dakar. This musician. Your father. He took her to the beach one night, I think it was Newport, and you know, we didn’t just up and go to the beach when we were little. We were always working in the groves, and half the time Lafayette and Reynaldo didn’t have a car that would make it to the beach. But—your dad—he was already twenty, and he borrowed a car from somebody. A Nova. With a good stereo. She told me they had a blanket and they laid on the sand near the car and he played ‘Poinciana.’ Ahmad Jamal. You must have heard it. ‘Poinciana.’ She told me that was her favorite song in the world, but she couldn’t tell anyone else because we were supposed to like the Floaters and Al B. Sure. Music like that. He played another song. ‘Night of a Thousand Eyes.’ I think that was Horace Silver. These were names we didn’t even know. And—”

  I had imagined this many times, after she told me, because it had never happened to me. Never. I had waited and waited, to feel the way she described. For a night like that.

  The message stopped, and I called again. “Victor. They listened to this music, and they were lying right beside each other, and when the cassette was over—damn, we had cassettes—she told me the waves were crashing and then they’d hiss. Hiss and sparkle. She said the foam was the whitest thing she’d ever seen, cause it was so dark on the beach. She said the sand was black, real soft, and the foam was like lace that kept disappearing. She never felt like that before and she never felt like that again.”

  A man walked slowly toward my car. Middle-aged, with olive skin. He kept glancing around, and then cocked his head to see my face in the window.

  I turned away. “The cops yelled at them to get off the beach, but sometime that night—that was you. Nine months later. I’m not trying to tell fairy tales—I’m just saying that’s what you came out of. When she told me that story, we were seniors in high school. And I already knew I was going to leave. I had seen Black Orpheus. I found Brassai and Henri Cartier-Bresson in the library. I listened to Sarah Vaughan and Edith Piaf and Abbey Lincoln. ‘April in Paris.’ ”

  Before the man could come any closer, I turned in to the alley, and felt my tires crunching over the gravel, the nut shells. “I am so sorry I didn’t let you stay. But come stay with me now. Just call me, so I can know where you are.”

  This ain’t CSI Rio Seco. That’s what Sidney had said, when I asked him why he brought Glorette’s body to my brothers, why no one ever called the police. “Don’t nobody downtown care who killed her,” Sidney said to me at the funeral, the small gathering of people on my father’s land. “What clues some CSI gon find? Some white chick wearin white pants kneelin in that alley behind the taqueria lookin to see what Glorette ate? Who she done been with?”

  But my brothers and my father and Gustave had never found out who’d done it, either.

  Maybe Sisia was right, and Victor really was just sleeping in the Navigator, in the dark tinted cavern of the back, with drumbeats shaking the leather seat underneath him.

  THE VILLAS

  I DROVE SOUTH ON Palm toward downtown, where the county hospital’s old brick buildings stood like a factory that fabricated people no one wanted. We had all been born here. I drove up and down the parking lot. No Navigator. I went into the emergency room. About fifty anxious faces looked up at each person who entered—me, then right behind me a woman wearing a housecoat and blue bandanna over her hair, pushing a huge man in a wheelchair. He was missing his right leg. An ancient Mexican woman sat in another wheelchair, tiny and wizened as an apple doll, surrounded by about ten people whispering to her as if she were a queen receiving court secrets.

  I waited in line, and asked for Victor Picard or Alfonso Griffin. The woman said no one by those names had checked in.

  If they’d gone back to Sarrat, Cerise would have called me.

  At the entrance door, a woman said something to me in Spanish, pointing at my butt. I looked back, and a young man with her said, “You’re gonna lose your receipt.”

  A folded piece of paper about to fall out of my back pocket. The poem. When had he written it? Was it about him as a child, watching the helicopter, or now?

  The Villas. #24.

  I drove past the Riviera and around the corner to Jacaranda Villas. Maybe this was the one. I parked under the old pepper trees. One was filled with bees—the entire trunk hummed in the heat, with no one in the courtyard except two small children getting out a Big Wheel from under the stairs. On the stop sign at the corner, it was written three times: SKEETA.

  The same two palm trees in the center of the courtyard, bending toward the south as if bowing. My father had told me, “Glorette live in Jacaranda—sais pas when. We come to get Victor—he settin up there on the balcony. Hungry like a bird.”

  I went up the stairs. The black slanting numbers on each door, the window coolers like growling white sugar cubes attached to each front window, the trembling white blinds moving aside in two of the windows I passed. Dark fingers held the slats down in an oval like an eye, and then they went blank again.

  At #24, the blinds were torn up so badly that they hung like thick cobwebs in the window. I knocked, a flush of sweat breaking out along my shoulder blades. Would Jazen pull a gun on me? Would Victor even be alive? Would he come with me?

  A young woman peered through the blinds and said, “What?”

  “I’m looking for Victor or Alfonso or Jazen,” I said quietly, close to the window, not wanting anyone in the other apartments to hear.

  She opened the door, her whole body slanted to the side, her fingers still buried in the hair of the girl sitting on the floor near the television. Videos flashed from the screen—cars leaping, asses leaping, necklaces and curled fingers, but the sound was off. A baby slept on the couch behind the girl, arms flung out as if flying.

  “Why you lookin for Jazen?” the girl said, sitting on the couch again. She braided so quickly her fingers danced as if she were playing a saxophone, and the other girl closed her eyes.

  “I’m looking for my godson,” I said. “He’s with Jazen.”

  “The one just got out?” the braiding girl said.

  “No,” I said. “That’s Alfonso. I’m looking for Victor.”

  She shrugged, her hands still moving, harvesting hair and pulling it into place and curving the rows perfectly, bending her head to check the line. Then she glanced up at me. “He light? Like you?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “They were here a while ago. He says some crazy stuff.”

  The girl being braided said, “He was talkin bout Akon. Had me bustin up.”

  “He slept right there for a couple minutes. He was faded or somethin. But the other one, he had a tattoo on his head.”

  “He was fit,” the other girl said.

  “Jazen wanted me to do his hair, like right quick, and I said no cause I already had her. She got a wedding tomorrow.”

  The other girl’s eyes were still closed. She was smiling. She was half done—her left side was long perfect braids radiated out in a sunburst from a side part.

  “Jazen always tryin to hang here. I told him to come back tomorrow, cause I gotta sleep, and he said he ain’t had time then. I thought he’d get pissed, like he do, but he was just like, Shit, and then they took off.”

  “You don’t know where to?” I said, and she shook her head.

  I felt huge in the doorway, the metal strip humming in time with the coolers all along the balcony. Where had Victor sat? If I’d invited him to the reading, he’d probably have made them laugh, and he’d be eating breakfast tomorrow with Rick and Tony and me, talking about Gecko Turner in Spain, joking about white kids in Switzerland who wore South Pole and wanted to be Jazen.

  Her fingers moved so fast it was hypnotic. The quiet in the room, the heavy stillness of carpet and limbs and the lolling comfort of the other girl’s head—it was like an island of Greek sirens.

  I gave her my car
d. FX ANTOINE. My cell number. “Call me if Victor comes back, okay? The funny one. That’s who I’m worried about.”

  She kept one hand in place and took the card. “You live in LA? FX like that crazy stuff they do in the movies.”

  “Not much craziness to me,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Angie.” She put the card on the table.

  When I had gone down the stairs, she came out to the balcony and called down softly, “Hold up. I forgot—he had borrowed my clippers. The one with the tattoo. Can you tell him to bring them back?”

  Clippers? Alfonso?

  I drove back down Palm toward the freeway underpass, where we’d walked on that last day of junior high, the day after Sisia had caught me outside school and grabbed my just-finished braid and pulled me toward her.

  You ain’t about nobody, she said. I cut your hair that one day.

  All five of us from Sarrat had long hair—Cerise and Clarette had curls like Spanish moss that hung to their shoulders, Bettina had sun-streaked, thin hair in baby waves along her forehead, and Glorette and I had black Indian-straight hair that our mothers kept braided tightly.

  Toward the end of eighth grade, I’d taken the braid out every day before class and let my hair loose down my back. Every day I braided it again before we walked home from school, so that my mother wouldn’t get angry. But Sisia said, “Somebody need to snatch you bald, little bitch.” The rasp of scissors on my hair, metal vibrating down the strand and into the skull.

  I turned west and drove through the older part of Rio Seco’s downtown—ancient Mexican restaurant, the dry cleaners, the ancient Singer store where my mother took her sewing machine for repair.

  We saw an old man in a hat there one day—a soft brown boat on a bald head the color of a dirty egg.

  “Lord, look like Mr. McQuine,” my mother whispered, and then she blew air from her nostrils before she put her hand on the glass door below the gold lettering.

  “Who?” I said, and she startled.

  “Nobody,” she said. “Somebody die long time ago.”

  And once, when it was too hot to sleep in the summer, I had crept out to the porch and lain flat on a damp towel. My parents came out onto the steps and my father said, “Claudine boy in LA. Say he call her.”

  I listened. Claudine was Bettina’s mother. She didn’t have a boy.

  “The one from Mr. McQuine?” my mother said, sounding shocked. “Here in California? What his name—Albert? Eh, no.” Then I stood up and they were quiet.

  The Singer store was shuttered. No one sewed now. My phone rang—Victor’s name on the screen. I said, “Are you okay?”

  There was no reply. I started to repeat it, “Are—” and then heard the voices, the music, as if I were inside the Navigator. I held the phone hard against my ear.

  “Why you got your phone open, fool?” Alfonso said. “You can’t be callin nobody.”

  Victor said, “I’m just using the light. Let me check if it stopped bleeding.”

  Was his voice clotted with pain? Was it only fear? Whose blood—his or Alfonso’s? I felt a lurch in my stomach—a roller coaster, a snapping whip.

  “Don’t be textin neither,” Alfonso said. “Don’t nobody need to know where we are. Fuck that—I just got out. I ain’t goin back.”

  Back to prison. The nasal voice of Akon: I’m a soul survivor. Short brother—the middle-class son of a Senegalese father. Singalee—the first Marie-Therese was from Senegal. I whispered, “I’m right here. Tell me what to do.”

  Victor said, “Bourbaki,” and Jazen said, “Who the hell that?”

  Victor was talking to me. I knew it—as if spiderwebs had been lifted from my temples. “Bourbaki,” he said again. “That’d be a cool name. For a warrior.”

  I whispered softly, “But you’re not a warrior.”

  “Sound like a damn sandwich,” Jazen said. “Don’t be callin nobody. Cops got GPS and shit.”

  Victor was quiet. I breathed into the phone. Did he know I was here?

  “My phone doesn’t even text,” Victor said finally. “Do you see me pushin buttons? I’m just tryin to see the blood so you ain’t gotta turn on the light.”

  Whose blood?

  “Keep it wrapped up, fool,” Alfonso said, his voice blurred. Was he the one shot?

  “I ain’t turning on no light,” Jazen said. “Cops don’t need to see us. Saint Streets got all them old ladies sittin on the porch seen us go by his house like three times. They callin the cops just cause we DWB.”

  Driving While Black. In the Saint Streets. Not too far from here.

  “At least VP got us some cash,” Alfonso said.

  “Not enough,” Jazen said. “Where your uncle stay? The one you stayed with last time you fucked up.”

  Uncle? Alfonso didn’t have an uncle.

  Alfonso said, “We need gas money to go that far.”

  Jazen said, “Close the fuckin phone, nigga.”

  Victor said, “You coulda left me at Mr. Thompson’s house.”

  “He a teacher. He call the cops in a heartbeat. Close the phone, I ain’t playin.”

  His voice was secretive. Afraid. Whose blood? Crumbs. He was leaving me crumbs.

  But if Jazen had answered the door at the Villas, what the hell would I have done?

  “Cerise,” I said into the phone. “Where does Marcus Thompson live?”

  “What? He’s still married, Fantine.”

  “I just need to drop something off at his house. From Victor.”

  Children’s voices surrounded hers, like a corona of light. “Oh. Yeah, he always hooking up Victor with books and CDs. They live on St. Ignatius.” Then she laughed. “Right down the street from that house where you made me swim with them white girls.”

  SAINT STREETS

  MARCUS HAD SAID YEARS AGO, “You know the Saint Streets? I always thought they were cool.”

  The streets were narrow, shaded with huge carob trees, and the houses were mostly Craftsman bungalows from the early 1900s, with wide front porches edged by stones. The neighborhood was quiet, except for two kids skateboarding and two old women sitting on a porch.

  St. Ignatius Street was dark, with old cement-post streetlamps glowing amber between the carob branches. I squinted at the addresses, and stopped across the street from 4454. Kelly Cloder’s house—the same blue two-story, flat colonial front, black shutters, the hedges along the foundation like dusty green biscuits in the heat.

  It felt like eighth grade.

  I had wanted to swim in a pool that day. Not the canal. When we walked up this sidewalk, the yards all crisscrossed with dark hedges, I could hear the pools. The humming of all the filters vibrating in the air just above the sidewalk, near our legs, like the earth was holding in a mindless song.

  Was it the first time I lied?

  “I love your nation,” Kelly Cloder said to me after Christmas, when I’d been moved to the gifted education cluster class after I scored high on two tests. Mr. Dalton, who was young and had a blond braid he tied with leather, had told us to create our own countries.

  Kelly Cloder’s nation was Royale, a place like Monaco, Paris, and Luxembourg, she said in her presentation. Mountains with ski chalets and lakes with boats. The language was Royale, which had Frenchified words and lots of e’s on the ends.

  My nation was the island of Cigale, which was what my mother called the hummingbirds that visited her flowers. I drew bays and inlets on my map, because I’d loved those words when we learned geography. Flowers and sugarcane grew for the gross national product. I had seen sugarcane, in Louisiana. Native people spoke Evola, the language of love. Every word was backwards.

  Kelly Cloder’s eyes were as blue as an old milk of magnesia bottle.

  “You must be Hawaiian,” she said.

  I’d only smiled. Mr. Dalton was saying we needed to know words like peninsula and strait, because in a few years we’d have the SAT.

  “What island are you from?” she said. “I went to Oahu last
year.”

  I’d smiled again and thought quickly. My brothers joked about Maui Wowie—some marijuana Clarette’s brother Alphonse said he’d smoked. “Maui,” I said.

  “That’s so cool! You’re coming to my pool party, right?” she said.

  I talked Cerise into walking with me, but Glorette just shook her head. We had never deviated from our walk to school and home, and when Cerise and I went under the freeway overpass, where pigeon crap and human pee dampened the ground, she said, “I don’t even want to swim with white girls.”

  But she stayed with me as we walked downtown, past the Singer store, and down the sidewalk past big houses, and then into the narrow gap between green leaves. We went around back to where girls were pulling themselves up by the coping. White girls didn’t wear swim caps. They just ducked under the water and then lifted their foreheads to the sky, and the water streamed off their skulls and left their hair plastered smooth.

  At school, their hair was all Farrah Fawcett wings, blown back in big round curves, but at the swim party, the white girls had small heads like helmets.

  A white man stood near the sliding glass door. “Well, you girls must be looking for the powder room.” Mr. Cloder held his newspaper. “Oh—you must be the girl from Maui,” he said, studying me.

  Cerise was frozen in the entryway. He turned to her, and rubbed his first finger on his chin, his chin that looked lavender in the sun, with black dots like pepper. “You, too?” he said. His eyes changed—the pupils and the blue part. What did he see? I saw Cerise—twelve freckles on her cheeks, the baby hairs plastered to her forehead like black lace after our long sweaty walk. Then he moved toward her and put his finger on her shoulder. He rotated the pad of his finger, turned her, said, “Go that way, and you’ll find it. You’re letting out all the air.”

  I didn’t pay any attention to Cerise when she walked around the pool and navigated slowly near the shallow end, where girls were sitting at the edge, their knees bony like oranges had been sewn under their skin. I knew it was mean. But my hair would be straight as soon as it dried. I dove into the pool. If I stayed underwater, no one would see my old blue bathing suit, the one we’d gotten at Kmart.