Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  Shit. I called Rick and spoke low into the phone.

  “Rick. It’s me. I have a family emergency here, and I can’t get back to LA in time for breakfast. I want to hear about the bookstore. And the Dalmatian coast. Some great little villages—I’ll do some research as soon as I get a minute.”

  I called Tony. “Hey, it’s me. I have to talk to you, and I can’t come to breakfast. Please, Tony, talk to Rick about two more pieces. I need the money. My godson—he’s sick, and I’m stuck here in Rio Seco.” I looked at the fine weave of the suitcoat in front of me. “Tony. I miss you.”

  I was every other person crawling forward in line, self-absorbed, as if a beekeeper’s net of words covered my face and head. I ordered two plain coffees, added two packets of brown sugar, and brought them outside.

  My father was sitting in the car. He sipped the coffee impassively. “They burn the beans and still weak,” he said finally. Then we stared into the thick hedge of oleander, and my father said, “Time go by. We gon lose him, oui.”

  “We can’t just take off for Vegas. They might still be here. I’m calling him.”

  Victor said hoarsely, “Hey. I was sleepin.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Some Arco.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Zee and Fonso in there payin for the gas and gettin food. They left me alone. Cause they ain’t worried. I can’t fuckin drive. Everybody knows that.” And suddenly his voice was anguished. Everything he never had. The phone was hot against my cheek. “Same as it never was,” he said. “I never even learned to drive.”

  “Look for a sign.”

  “JZ said we all the same now. All three of us.”

  “If you’re headed to Vegas, we’re right behind you,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t know me if you saw me anyway.” His voice wavered and then he sounded so tired again. “My hair’s gone. I got the look. Marraine, I’m gonna die. Either the cops stop us, and Fonso ain’t goin back, or some fools see us and JZ’s got his gun out, too.” Before I could say anything, he went on. “Got so many words for gun. Heater. Burner. Jammie.” He sounded like himself for a moment. “Get my gat. That probably comes from Gatling gun. In the movies they talk about the Colt. Six-shooter.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing. The desert. I’m in the back of the car with all these sounds, and all I can do is wait for it. My arm hurts so damn bad. I just want the next bullet to go in my heart. Quick.”

  We were nearly to Barstow, the Corsica chugging up the Cajon Pass and then along the flatter high desert. There wasn’t much traffic heading to Vegas because it was so early.

  It had been a little more than an hour. The sun was already intense out here, glaring into the passenger window, and my father rolled up his long sleeves. When the phone rang, we both startled, and he handed it to me.

  Victor said, “Hey. You going to Paris today, right?”

  “What?” I said. He sounded almost like himself.

  “I told you turn off the phone!” Jazen said. “They got GPS and shit. Cops trackin us right now.”

  Victor made a decision while it was quiet. He put a superior sneer back inside his voice, one I heard him use now and then. “JZ, man, this ain’t Law & Order Cali. Nobody gives a shit. We’re both brown. He ain’t from Mexico and I ain’t from Africa.”

  Jazen said, “Shut up before I shoot your sorry ass myself.”

  Alfonso said, “I give a shit cause I ain’t goin back. Stop talkin bout shootin.”

  Victor didn’t waver. “Nothin, Marraine. I was talking bout a TV show. No. Hey, hold on. You at the airport?” Then he said, “She’s leavin for Paris in an hour. I’ma talk to her about Led Zeppelin. What—y’all gon snatch up my phone?”

  His gamble.

  “Fuck that, nigga. But don’t be talkin bout yesterday.”

  It worked. They weren’t worried about me—I didn’t act like family. My father kept his eyes on the dashboard, almost politely, as if he didn’t want to stare at my face.

  I imagined the cocoon of the backseat, the swirl of drums and synthesizer and voices all around him. His mouth close to the phone, my ear sweating. Like a lover.

  The only thing you can love more than a man is a child. He’s not a child. Not my child. Tell him a story. “Led Zeppelin,” I said. “ ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ ”

  “Yeah. ‘Stairway to Heaven’—that one song where the chick is in the hedgerows.”

  “Right. And I always think of the stairway as meaning death. The boy died, Victor. His name was Armando Muniz. Will that make it worse? If they know he died.”

  “The stairway,” Victor said. His breath rushed the phone. “All the way to the celestial kingdom, right?”

  “We’re on the way to Vegas. I think that’s where you’re going. We’ll get you out of here and take you to the hospital.”

  “You’re—” He paused. “For real? You listenin to The Who? ‘I don’t need to be forgiven.’ ”

  “There he go again,” Alfonso said.

  “ ‘Teenage Wasteland.’ He’s under twenty-one, he still got a lotta fun.”

  “But you’re not a teenager,” I said, seeing what he was saying. “You’re twenty-two.”

  “Big time.”

  “Prison.”

  “You got it.”

  “All because you went back to get that picture of your maman. She’s right here in the backseat, you know. I picked up the photo from Marcus Thompson. He’s worried, too. Everybody’s worried.”

  “Nuh-uh. Not that song. Same old sound.”

  “Okay. But figure out where you are, and tell me. We’re patient. They’ll stop for food or to sleep sometime, and we’ll come get you.”

  “You shoulda told me before,” he said softly. “About ‘Poinciana.’ I never knew. That’s fucked up. I woulda gone to the beach and played it. Tried to see it. Sittin in a Nova. Star explosion.”

  So I wasn’t a good storyteller, if I made him angry and sad. My father—his hands on his knees, knuckles huge as walnuts. He had lived a heroic life. Unc Gustave, too. My mother. They had survived floods and cane fields and war and Mr. McQuine. Who the hell was I to tell stories? I had survived Kelly Cloder, the Scion, and college. I had escaped a place where people loved me.

  I had nothing but an apartment and other people’s stories.

  The desert flew past, the engine shuddering. Papa was a rolling stone, Victor had said in my kitchen, only yesterday. He was a child of twenty-two. It was going to be so much work to finish growing him. “Listen. I found your poem. About the helicopter. It’s good. I mean, I don’t really wish you’d go to college and become a poet, cause they don’t make much money and apparently they drink a lot. They do get women. I read your notes about Water Music. Look, Victor, you’re coming to LA with me. I have room in my apartment, and my friend Tony has a big house right up the street which is empty half the time. You’re coming after Dave Matthews.” That was Saturday? “So—just be careful and call me.”

  Be careful? Like I was his mother, sending him out to the yard to play on the swing set?

  “Yeah,” he said faintly. “Later.”

  But he left the phone on. It was daytime—no one would see the little screen glowing bluish-bright. It must be lying next to Victor, and since Alfonso said nothing, he must have fallen asleep, while Jazen drove.

  I held the phone tightly.

  “Damn. Look at them Mescans in the field. Like 120 already out there,” Jazen said.

  Where would it be so hot? People working in fields?

  “They could be Guatemalans or Salvadorans, man.” Victor’s voice was weary now. The only word for the slow, old-man timbre. “Why you always profiling?”

  “Mescans hate us.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Man, that Mescan hated us.”

  “That guy? He didn’t hate us. He was just followin the script.”

  “Then why he ax the question? Why he step to us like that?”r />
  “Yeah. Why he brandish his weapon, right?” Victor whispered. “Where you from? Why you always goin blackwards, Zee? One Love. One Heart.”

  “Only white boys listen to Bob Marley, nigga.”

  “Brothas listen to him all the time, man. One Love. One World.”

  Jazen didn’t respond.

  “Nothin but desert out here. Where the hell we goin?”

  “Just passed Blythe.”

  “Blythe?” He raised his voice. For me?

  “Man, it’s gonna be a long-ass ride if y’all keep on,” Alfonso said drowsily. “What happened to the sounds?”

  “Wake up, fool. We comin to the river. You need to toss that shit. Got a body on it. We got the new ones.”

  Victor closed the phone. He was telling me what he could, and that it was up to me now. I was supposed to be in the airport, waiting for my flight to Paris. I was no threat.

  They were throwing the gun in a river. Blythe was on the 10, near the Arizona state line. We were headed the wrong way.

  It took another two hours to get back down to the 10. My father and the phone were silent. I drifted off into my head—a young woman in the Oaxacan market telling me about the dark glistening heap of mole, how she’d made it that morning even though a malevolent spirit had come inside her bedroom and tried to choke her because her next-door neighbor wanted her handsome husband, who had just bought a cab.

  I hadn’t driven longer than an hour or two in a while. A trip to Santa Barbara last year with Jimmy Taco. I’d driven to Santa Fe two years ago with Tony. He wanted to photograph the landscape on the way there. But that was for Condé Nast Traveler, which had money, and we’d rented a Jeep Cherokee.

  My father didn’t like people to drive him. He lit another Swisher Sweet. At home, he never sat this way. He crated oranges, fixed machinery, cut up wood, and when he finally sat on the gallery, as he called the porch, he always held a coffee cup. I hadn’t driven anywhere with my father in twenty years, since he’d dropped me off at USC after I’d decided I could never go back to the Ivy-Covered East.

  But I remembered the trip to Louisiana with Glorette, when we were ten. Last night, riding in the truck bed, I’d felt the air whipping past my neck. Back then, in 1975, we lay in the truck bed in the early morning darkness, wrapped in blankets.

  “You want some music, Papa?”

  He lifted his chin for yes.

  I had some CDs in my bag, in the backseat, but I reached into the glove compartment to see what I’d left there.

  “What this one call?”

  “Water Music.”

  He looked at me. “That the one you tell Victor about?”

  I nodded. “Written for a king to make a journey up the River Thames. A special song they wrote for him.”

  The music seemed all wrong, of course, with my undistinguished American car speeding down a highway through hills blackened by a wildfire.

  Suddenly my father pointed ahead of us, at the pass near Palm Springs where huge windmills spun. He said, “This way, how we come back when we done killin people. Nineteen forty-eight. They let us go at the base, and we start drivin around California. Nobody goin back to Alabama or Lousana or Missippi.”

  In the strong light pouring through the windshield, his mustache was two thin lines of black slanting along his upper lip, as it had always been. His forearms were browner than his face, raised veins like cables running down into his hands. He was eighty-two, and still coiled with energy like a man much younger. Gustave had slowed these past five years since Glorette was killed, but my father—the only word I could see was implacable. He knew every tree in the groves, every drip line, and he could still see perfectly—well enough to wait for that gopher’s small head.

  My father said, “Tommy Washington stay in Palm Spring. Missippi boy. Biloxi. He meet a girl work for some lady from Hollywood. They got maids and butlers and gardeners in Palm Spring, but they make em live on the north side. Not side them blankitte.”

  Blankitte—the white people.

  Then my father grinned. “Tommy have ten kids. They can’t stop that.”

  We came through the riven mountainsides close along the freeway now, sand dunes pale as chalk, smoke trees trembling in the constant wind. He said, “I tell Washington when we on the base, you think California different from Missippi? From Texas?”

  The music was tinny and small in the rushing wind of the car and the heat like a blow-dryer. My father said, “Four of us get a ride with OC. He from Houston. He say we better go to Los Angeles. So we go, but that too many people. Too many police. On the way back, I tell him let me off in Rio Seco, cause I see them trees. All them orange trees, like Azure. Smell the flowers. It was March. I walk down by the river and make me a camp. Till I know where I can go.”

  California. Hundreds of towns, each with a place for dark people. The ones you needed to work.

  He rested his hat over his eyes. I thought he had fallen asleep. But he said, “You been to the place where that king ride in the boat?”

  “Yeah. The Thames.”

  “You see it again when you hear the music.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You live in your forehead. When you tite, toujours.” He was quiet, and I didn’t know what to say. “Like a TV up there,” he went on.

  I waited for him to say something about how strange that was, how he and my mother had worried about me. But he said, “Mo tou soule.”

  I’m all alone.

  “I live in my forehead all them year. When I close my eye. I see the water, the river flood up and catch us, and Gustave. My maman. The body float past. All white. Even if they black. The river brown, but the skin turn white.”

  The sun was unbearable on my face and neck now. I tried to see my father at four years old, standing on a levee after the great Mississippi flood, watching his mother get shot, and Gustave, who was only seven, pushing stolen meat into my father’s mouth to save his life.

  No music for that. I saw only the water, because I couldn’t imagine the rest.

  My father was quiet for a long time, and I didn’t know whether he slept, or lived in his forehead.

  Desert Center was up a long steep incline, and by then it must have been about 110 outside. The smoke trees were ghosts tethered to the earth. My father squinted from under his hat. The mirages of puddle water were big as lakes ahead of the car. I hadn’t really slept for two days. I watched the heat gauge, and finally said to him, “I can’t tell if we have a problem or not.”

  He looked over and said, “Radiator. Open them window and turn on the heater. Tou fort.”

  All strength. The hot air blasted my face and arms, from inside and outside, until my body was covered with sweat and my eyes burned. It was like being in a small metal hell, surrounded by a larger golden hell.

  We made it over the summit, and the heat gauge stayed just at the edge of the red.

  “We get to Blythe, check that radiator,” my father said. Below us, Blythe was flatlands covered with fields, vivid green squares that stretched to the hills. Irrigation sprinklers threw water furiously over the rows, and the canals were wide as freeways.

  “Watermelon and cantaloupe right now,” my father said, looking out the window. “When I come with OC, it was all cotton. Look like snow. Never pick cotton in Louisiana, mais pick here for a month. Make some money.” He shook his head. “People say, California, that the movie and the ocean. All I see was cotton, and then I see oranges. See that same hoe like Louisiana.”

  I grow you.

  We hadn’t grown Victor very well, we hadn’t helped him enough. But what the hell were we doing? He would call and say he was at Alfonso’s uncle’s house, and we’d show up and cut him away from the other two, like a calf?

  “Papa,” I said. “Seriously, how are we gonna find Victor?”

  “He find us,” my father said. “He have to.”

  We stopped at a service station, and my father lifted the hood and went inside. I climbed into the backseat and cl
osed my eyes, which felt like dry grits were sealed inside.

  Marcus and I lay in the back of the truck. His neck like damp velvet. The wheel well with scratches like hieroglyphics.

  Esteban and I lay in the hotel bed in Barcelona. The way his sideburns were not strips of hair but hundreds of tiny filaments and my eyelashes were caught when he rested his face against mine. An entire week. But then I had to leave.

  The Scion smelled like beer and something acrid and sharp. His neck flushed red, his ears red. White people were so many different colors. The strangest thing, I’d thought.

  My father’s voice, and another man’s, near the hood. They did a few things, and then the hood slammed shut, and a man with a pushcart said into the window, “Señora, tacos?”

  He put homemade salsa on the carne asada. Tomatoes, onions, garlic, and jalapeños. My mother’s gumbo. The chopping up of vegetables and meat. Heat to counter heat.

  It must have been 115 degrees, with a drum cooker radiating heat nearby, the smoke lingering in my hair. We sat near the cottonwoods edging the parking lot, on white plastic chairs, and a truck radio played Little Anthony and the Imperials. Like Nome in winter, huddled inside an ice house, eating dried seal.

  Who would come here? Dark people in the pulsing shade eating blackened meat and listening to music that had no cultural worth to anyone who read what I wrote. I wanna make it with you …

  In the bathroom, I splashed water on my face, smoothed water on my hair, and redid my bun. Purple circles like pansies around my eyes. I called Tony.

  “Where are you?” he said. “You bailed on breakfast, and you bailed last night, too. I woke up and you were gone. Usually you turn the movie off for me.”

  “Did you see the Times today? The shooting on page two?”

  “I guess. Another bunch of candles and flowers. These kids are crazy. It looks like an Italian chapel on every corner.”

  “My godson was in the car, Tony.”

  “Victor?” Tony had gone with us to the Getty Villa, made fun of the cypresses and the gardens. But he’d loved the wrestler’s cup, too. “He didn’t do anything, right?”

  “Whoever was in the car is—” I couldn’t think of it. “Culpable.”