“That make me happy,” my mother said. Every surface gleaming and shined every day, the floor swept, the white enamel sink polished with Ajax before she slept, or I did. The job my mother had when she wasn’t in the fields was holiday cleaning for Mr. McQuine’s aunt, in an old plantation house. When she told me about it, while she taught me to clean, I knew she felt superior to that old woman whose shelves were furred with dust and whose kitchen was full of mice.
Danae’s outstretched hand opened and closed twice in her sleep.
There had never been a closet in my room, since it wasn’t really a bedroom. Four long windows on two walls, then the daybed, and a narrow armoire. I opened it quietly. Heat rushed out, musty and stale. I laid my bag on the bottom shelf.
I had closed myself in here once, after the story of Mr. McQuine. I wanted to see what Tante Anjolie felt, when she was my age. It was black in front of my face, total black at first, and then a hairline of gold at the bottom of the doors. But had she seen that light?
On the top shelf of the armoire, where my old things were piled, was a cigar box. Inside were my report cards and SAT scores, my college acceptance, my first college papers. Some research I’d done on Moinette Antoine, and Marie-Therese.
I took down the box. The beautiful woman wearing a silk gown, her hair in a heavy bun. The Octoroon.
Danae murmured and opened her eyes. “Mama?”
Her eyes moved over my face when I neared the bed. “It’s Auntie Fantine,” I whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
“Who?” she said. “Where’s my mama?”
“She went home. She’ll be back in the morning.”
“Okay,” she said softly, and then closed her eyes.
In the far distance, the coyotes still spoke to each other. It wasn’t laughing, like people said, or howling at the moon. It was language, with pauses and answers.
I lay carefully beside Danae. Her braids smelled of coconut hairdress, too. Her mother’s favorite. Sweet and light. Her arm was hot against mine. She was the only girl. Like me.
What had I lost? A girl or boy? I hadn’t thought about it for so many years. Marcus. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.
HOME
WHEN THE PHONE MOOED, we both leapt awake, Danae’s elbows cracking against the wall, my arm flailing into empty space beside the bed.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said, rubbing her shoulder. “It’s not morning.”
It was dark. I knelt and got the phone from my jeans. 5:56.
“Marraine.” His voice, slurred and soft. Not the same at all.
“I’m right here. In Sarrat. Where are you?”
“I don’t know.”
I closed the bedroom door softly and went out to the living room. I sat on the couch and looked at the yard, blue and stark in the moonlight. “What do you see?” I said. “Are you on the Westside?”
“I’m in a room. With a baby.” He sounded high or delirious.
What was I supposed to say now? Just talk, calmly. “Are you bleeding? Did you get shot?”
“My arm. It’s wrapped up in a T-shirt.” His voice quavered.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yeah.”
Then he was silent. I heard nothing this time. “Where do you think you are? Not at Bettina’s? You were there earlier.”
“It’s a baby in here, on the bed next to me. A little baby. She’s sleepin on her stomach. Her butt’s up in the air like a white mushroom.”
“What do you hear?”
“TV. Lil Wayne.” He paused and took a breath so labored it sounded like sand in his throat. “I recognize this light. From the window. Some apartment I been in before.” A long pause. “Somebody snorin in the other room. And some girl talkin.”
It could be Angie’s apartment. “Victor?”
“Yeah.”
“Your phone hasn’t died.”
“I just woke up and plugged my charger in here.” He breathed hard.
“I always have my charger and laptop and clothes in a bag,” I said. “Cause I’m always on the road.”
“Marraine.” He paused, as if gathering strength. “I always have everything with me.”
It went like a splinter to my chest, the weariness in his voice. Of course he always had his things with him—he’d been on the road longer than I had. He’d never had a real place to live all his life. His backpack was his home. I remembered his futon, his CD player clutched to his chest so none of his mother’s friends could steal it while he slept. His Converses tied tight, white toes poking from the sheet like ghostly muffins.
“They poured some Bacardi on my arm. It’s all torn up. They gave me some to drink. I passed out. It hurts like hell.” He breathed out.
“Who shot you?”
“That dude. The one we saw getting tickets.”
“Who shot him?”
“Fonso,” he whispered. “Fonso said he got him in the arm, too, so I keep thinkin he probably made it to some hospital in LA. But Jazen said we can’t go to the ER. Said nobody die from getting shot in the arm.”
They didn’t know the other boy was dead. “Victor,” I said. “Are you at the Villas?”
“I can’t get up. I tried. Dizzy. I lost a lot of blood.” A silence and a rustling. “My whole arm is on fire. I think he got me in the elbow. I don’t wanna look. I had my hand up. Like it would fuckin stop the bullet. Like a stupid movie.”
“Why did he shoot you, Victor? What were you doing?”
“Carryin my moms,” he whispered. “We went back there, and I walked up there by the door. Then when I had the picture and I got back on the sidewalk, he was right there, in the alley. I was like, Damn, cause he just came up on me.”
“With a gun?”
“No. He was on the phone. Then he just looked at me. I heard the car pull up behind me. He musta seen Zee and Fonso. He got all big and said, like, Where you from?”
“Why?”
“Cause that’s what they say. Bangers. I knew what he was doin. I was like, Fuck this. I ain’t doin this. I’m tired of this shit. So I was like, Darkside. I’m from the Darkside, man. One World.”
I heard the baby stir and murmur. Little sounds. I tried to imagine the small form beside him.
“Then Zee had to lean out the window and say Rio Seco. Westside. Loc Mafia.”
A single coyote called in the river bottom, far away.
“I started runnin, like, away from the dude and the car. All that where you from—shit. But he pulled out his piece. I threw up my hand, but he got me. And then I heard somebody shoot from the car. Fonso started yellin at me to get in. The dude went down and Zee starts sayin, You know where we from now, fool.”
“And you dripped blood on the sidewalk from your arm,” I said softly.
“How do you know?” he whispered.
“It was on the news.” Wait—I didn’t want him to know the boy named Mando had died. Then they’d run for sure, and I’d never find him. “Just that someone got shot, and no further details,” I said quickly.
The baby let out the first yelp that meant sleep was over. I said, “Try to look out the window. Just tell me where you are and I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
The crying started in earnest, and Victor said miserably, “I can’t pick her up. I can’t even move my arm. It’s dead. Somebody’s comin in.”
The abrupt silence—I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, how old black phones like the one my mother still had clicked when someone hung up. A sound. This was just the voice taken away.
I had never opened my parents’ bedroom door in my entire life. I knocked and said, “Papa?”
He came out into the hallway. “I think they’re on the Westside. He just called me.”
The smell of my mother’s lotion came from the open door. She said something in French that I couldn’t hear, and my father said to me, “Get dress.”
The white branches of the huge sycamore outside shone pink from the dawn, and then the sun rose a few minutes later, alre
ady hot and gold as syrup spreading through the trees. Over a hundred again today. My head was on fire, too. My eyes felt filled with sap, and I tried to untangle all Victor had told me.
My father came out of the bathroom in work clothes. The dark blue Dickies. My mother did laundry every day—he wore dark green, then dark blue, and sometimes khaki. He said to me, “Quo fa?”
“Victor said his arm is wrapped up in a shirt. That’s where he got shot.” I kept my voice steady. “They were at Bettina’s last night, and then they left. Fonso cut their hair. They must be looking for a place to hide.”
The sycamore leaves were turning brown at the edges. They weren’t as big this year as the ones Jazen had seen on my table. I said, “It’s not like they’re holding him against his will. Alfonso’s his cousin. He wouldn’t kidnap his cousin. He wouldn’t hurt Victor. I don’t know what it is.”
“He ain’t never have no trouble, him,” my father said. “Them other two always have trouble. They know what they do. They run somewhere.”
“They don’t even know the boy is dead. At least, Victor doesn’t know. But he was passed out last night.” My father sighed, his chest rising and falling. The name tag on the shirt—not his name, only La Reina, the company brand, embroidered in thick white script. He always said that everyone in Sarrat knew his name, and if a stranger came, he didn’t need to know.
“Get your bag,” he said finally in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t say rien. Not even your maman. Put it in your car. He might be on the Westside,” he said. “Mais, he might be gone. On the freeway.”
His eyes moved onto my face. Bright turquoise in the sun, and a series of scars on his left cheekbone like complicated Chinese symbols. Like the tattoos all the boys had on their arms, words they might not even know. My father’s skin was marked with slanting cuts that had healed into feathery dark lines. From being beaten with cane stalks when he was small. Unc Gustave had told me once.
“He call you, oui?” he said. “Don’t call Gustave, him, don’t call nobody else. Call you over and over. Tell you where he is. He got raison.”
In the kitchen, my mother turned on the coffee grinder. Under the noise, I said, “I’m the last person to know what to do.”
He shook his head. “Gustave can’t drive no more. Clarette can’t go. She work at the prison. She got a gun. And your brothers—they can’t go. People know them. Like they hunt, and them other two feel like a corner. Don’t know what they do, them.”
“What am I going to do?”
“I goin with you, me. But Victor want you to come. He call, like he leave a rag tie to a tree, in the cipriere.”
The cypress swamp. Where my father had taken us when we were small.
My father said, “You talk to him. Tell him a story. How you do. When we find him, we see. See then.”
He opened the front door and went onto the porch.
How I did. Tell a story. I put the phone in my pocket and went into the kitchen. My mother had laid bacon out in strips along the wide cast-iron grill. She had a dish towel tied around her wrist, for the popping grease. She glanced at me, but said nothing.
My work had been to tell all those stories about strangers I had never seen again, though I had imagined many times going back to those little towns or ornate apartments or riverside gardens to stay for a month. To really live there. With strangers.
Gustave paused at the screen and said something in French to my father. Then he came inside, and to my mother he said softly, “Dor bien?”
It was what they said every morning. Did you sleep well? Did you live?
My father’s work had been to keep his own blood and land intact from strangers. The tribe. The trees. The circle of light at the table. I waited for my mother to pour the coffee.
I showered quickly and repacked my bag. I put on the same jeans, and one of the clean white tank tops under my Oaxacan shirt. I took my own bag from the armoire, and Victor’s bag, and for some reason, I grabbed the cigar box with the beautiful woman, too.
Danae was the only one awake, already on the porch in her pajamas, making a bracelet from thread she had nailed to a board. “Who’s that?” she said, looking at the Octoroon. I picked a piece of leaf from her braids, from the pale scalp showing between the rows.
“She’s a dancer,” I said. “A Spanish dancer.”
She grinned. “Cigars are nasty. Daddy smokes them sometimes.”
“I heard.” I pulled off one more piece of leaf—from their games last night—and said, “Tell your maman I said you look prettier than she does these days. And tell her I’ll see her as soon as I come back.”
“That’s what you always say to tell her,” Danae said, pursing her lips just like Clarette. “Then she always says you’re a bagavond.”
“Cause I always come back.” I carried my bags up the road to the Corsica, and my father stepped from the trees alongside to open the door.
PART TWO
They may kill me, baby
Bury me just like they do
My body might lie but my spirit gon rise and
Come home to you
—JIMMY REED
LAPIS
I DROVE PAST THE RIVIERA, shut up tight in the early morning heat, and around the corner to the Villas. We went up the stairs to #24. I knocked softly, and my father stood stiffly beside me, his arms at his sides.
Who did he think would answer the door? Did he have a gun? My heart raced differently this time. Angie peered through the blinds, the TV flashing behind her. She opened the door—no baby. But a different girl sat on the couch.
Angie came out onto the balcony. “They came back last night. But they were trippin.” She shook her head. “I told em they had to go. My aunt comin to get her braids done.” She looked into my eyes. “They kept callin people. They had a big fight—JZ said, You the only one ain’t got nobody, nigga. To him. He said, Talk all that yang and only one you call is your godmother and she don’t give a shit.”
I laced my hands on top of my head, my whole face hot. “I’m here.”
She took a big breath, her chest rising under her tight camisole. “Then the light one said, I got pirates. I got buried treasure waitin for me in Louisiana. My moms told me the first Picard was one a Lafitte’s pirates. He slept with his slave and that’s us. We got gold. They all laughed and then the fine one—Fonso—he said, Maybe my uncle a pirate, too.”
My father was a slight man, but suddenly he felt huge beside me in the doorway, the metal strip humming in time with the coolers all along the balcony. I didn’t understand what Victor had said. “Where’d they go?” I said.
She shrugged. “JZ always got somewhere. I’m the only one ever tell him no.”
———
I kept seeing the shorn twists of hair like tiny brown Cheetos, lying in the dirt near the box house. I couldn’t imagine Victor’s skull, naked and glistening.
My father was stubbing out his Swisher Sweet on the sidewalk. The pulsing hole in Victor’s skull, the first time I saw him. The place where the bones hadn’t fused yet, where the brain was still growing and swelling with the knowledge that someone would pick you up, or not, and love you, or not, and look into your purple eyes, or not.
We sat in the car, pepper tree branches limp as seaweed above us. “You know where Albert lives?” The son of Mr. McQuine, the pale legacy of all those terrible stories, the only tangible evidence that those stories had happened, the child no one mentioned, the boy who would be—he would be nearly fifty now. I’d never seen him, even when we went to Sarrat so long ago.
My father shook his head. “Sais pas. I heard one time he was in Vegas. Vegas three-hour drive.”
Sundown Liquor was closed, the posters fading in the August sun, edges of the girls blurring. At the 7-Eleven, a few small-eyed people stalked grumpily outside with their coffee. Sisia would be sleeping until past noon, and so would all the little dealers.
At the Arco nearest the freeway to Vegas, the Sikh owner was in the parking lot, sweepin
g trash into a dustpan. A smear of dust was a pale gold cloud on his black turban. I drove slowly around the corner to the back area, in case the Navigator was parked there while someone slept. “They need gas, too. But this is crazy. If we find them, what do we do?”
My father said, “See when we see him.”
The owner was in the doorway now. I filled up the tank and then I went over to where he stood, his broom propped beside his leg like a rifle. He studied my face—he was darker than me. “Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning. Did you happen to see three young guys in a Lincoln Navigator?” I said. “Really early. Filling up, maybe getting some food?”
He glanced past me, trying to see who was in the passenger seat of the Corsica. “Mexican boys?” he said softly, frowning at my face.
“Black,” I said. “African American. Three guys—one with short hair, and two bald.”
He pulled his chin back sharply as if he were a turtle retreating into a shell. “No,” he said. “I did not see them.”
“Thanks,” I said. There went the eyes. He’d remember if he had.
I drove across the street to the Starbucks. “They don’t even know the other boy is dead,” I told my father. “I’m going to get a paper.”
I picked up an LA Times. The photo was on the second page, like hundreds of photos from years of foolish killings. A photographer could publish a book about the irony of their vivid beauty and composition. The shrine, already huddled on the spot where Mando had died. Four candles, glowing dimly—Virgins and angels. Two bouquets, and a framed picture. His face solemn, his black hair glossy and perfect.
Victor had sounded delirious last night. Did he think he was going to die? Expect it, like Alfonso and Jazen already expected it, as if the shrines and sobbing girls were the only possible ending for them? The only end they could imagine, the only one they’d want. Not struggling to pay a mortgage or keep a woman happy or raise kids or even decide what movie to see, like all these people in line at Starbucks.
Cell phones rang like an odd burbling choir. Meetings and appointments.
Take One Candle Light a Room Page 18