Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Tony! I’m the one that put him in the car.” The Formica counter was hot under my palms. I told him about yesterday, and last night.

  “Now you’re in Blythe? What the hell are you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know.” A pink silk orchid on the counter, with curly moss in the clay pot. Like Louisiana—Glorette and I tangling our fingers in what hung from the trees. “Today’s five years since Glorette died. And I hadn’t even talked to her, not for real, not for years.”

  “Because you love me.” He wasn’t laughing.

  “Well, that’s fucked up.”

  “Yeah. It is.”

  “You were easier to love,” I said.

  He paused. “I mean, most things I see, I imagine how you’d see them. Like a twin, I guess. So stop getting sentimental. And what you’re doing is crazy. When my cousin goes on a drunk roll in Philly, I don’t go get him. I let someone else do that.” He paused. “I’m heading to the studio. Rick probably called you. We talked about the Dalmatian coast. Pula and some other little towns. Very preserved. We could fly into Venice, actually. And we could just go on down to Naples and my grandmother’s area on that same trip. Save a lot on airfare.”

  “Except I’m on a road trip with my father.” I looked in the mirror again. Like Ash Wednesday rubbed there around my eyes. “Your grandma and my great-great-great-grandma, getting attacked by rich guys. Wonderful story. But Victor got shot in the arm,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Tony’s voice went deeper. “My cousin got shot in the arm in Jersey. If it’s the upper arm, you can lose enough blood to die. He had surgery.”

  “He says his arm’s on fire,” I said.

  “You better hope the bullet didn’t sever a tendon.” I heard his car stop. “FX. Call me. I can be anywhere pretty fast.”

  In the car, I opened my mouth to tell my father what Tony had said, but then I realized my father had warned me not to tell anyone about Victor—and the steering wheel burned my fingers. A boy had died for nothing. For three words. I wanted Jazen and Alfonso to be arrested. To stop shooting people. But I didn’t want Victor gone, too.

  If we did find Victor, and took him, and cops stopped us, we were—what? Co-conspirators? Accessories. What a word.

  “Papa, if they left the state, and we help Victor evade arrest—”

  My father whispered, “You want him in prison? Boy like him? He ain’t no man. He a child.”

  “What if he doesn’t want us to find him?”

  “He call again. He ain’t give up. So we don’t give up.” My father finally looked into my face. His eyes were like cold water, like the Swiss lakes. “You inconvenience, oui? After you call your friend in the bathroom? You busy?” He shook his head. “Victor survive all them years with his mama. He ain’t finish.”

  I always pictured the Colorado churning, tinted the red of sandstone like its name, the way it was in parts of Utah. But I’d forgotten that here, under the bridge just east of Blythe, the river was wide and deceptively placid. Bluish green—a color I had always thought of as lagoon.

  Sleek boats and Jet Skis buzzed around below us, herky-jerky like battery-powered toys. And white people with Ray-Bans and skin tanned to that deep reddish-brown—cuite. Not molasses, which you could see in any store. But cuite—the thickened, boiled by-product of sugarcane I’d had in Sarrat, way back then.

  Water Music. Violins serenading the barges. Victor’s notes: The newspaper reports “persons of quality” as the other celebrants. The date was auspicious: 7-17-1717.

  This river was probably littered with guns, bodies, bottles, and even cars.

  “Last night, mo pense c’est Victor sit at the table,” my father said again. “But I see that you. Toujour by the river, you.”

  The desert here wasn’t beautiful at all. It was bleak, brown, and the small scrub and rocks looked almost like trash strewn accidentally across the landscape. No plateaus or red-tinted stone formations or purple striations. A lot of faded beer cans.

  I got out the ancient road atlas from under the seat. I hadn’t looked at it in a few years. “How far to Louisiana?” I asked.

  “About twenty-fo hour, you drive straight through,” he said. Then he took a long time to light another Swisher Sweet. I cracked open the window, which made a layer of hot air mix with the cold. “Depend on what them boys do. And see where we are in Texas.”

  “Texas?”

  He turned his face away and said only, “Oui.” His smoke was snatched out of the sliver of open window.

  Nothing but dry sandy white riverbeds below each bridge after that.

  He took deep pulls on the cigar. I could hear the ember glisten and work. After a long time, he said, “I remember when Sidney Chabert bring Glorette body in the shopping cart, to Lafayette and Reynaldo. We make that coffin, me and Gustave.”

  “Gustave buried his only child,” I whispered.

  My father nodded. “Nineteen twenty-seven, his maman stay in the house when the water come. That flood. He never see her body. We up on the levee, where they bring us, wait for the boat. Boat take the blankittes, but we stay on the levee. Dead horse, dead cow, dead pig go by. Then they shoot my maman, and she fall into the water.”

  She had been holding his baby sister. I knew this. My mother had talked about it a few times, in the kitchen, late at night. The baby was wrapped inside my father’s mother’s shirt, to keep her safe from insects, and so she could nurse. There was no food.

  “She float down. See her back, me, and the shirt rise up. Like—” He lifted his hands from his thighs—fingers curled—like a bubble.

  “Rise up so fast. That air. Under her shirt.”

  The gray course ahead of the car was flat, lines of tar in the cracks like snakes. Snakes in the water, too. My mother had said.

  What was her name? The baby? She was only months old. Gustave had killed someone’s pig, further down the levee, with a hammer, and then cut up the meat and brought it in his shirt to my grandmother.

  She was still my grandmother, though I had never seen even a photo of her. She was the granddaughter of Moinette Antoine.

  Gustave squatted by the fire my grandmother made, from splintered chair legs, and waited for the meat. But the National Guardsmen smelled the smoke, and they shot her for the stolen meat.

  My father took the last deep draw and the smoke hid his face. “Never have a body. My maman. Fish eat her body. She have cousine—Marie. They meet two men in Azure—on a boat. Say, come up to Sarrat. And then the one man, he get kill in a bar. Gustave papa. The other one, he just run away. Les cousines, they work the field. Say, When we get pay, we go back home to Azure.”

  She died for her child. My father closed his eyes and slept like a child, and the tires hummed and the landscape stayed unvarying and brown except for the burned-out hulks of cars abandoned on side roads. Those were charred black as crow wings, and they’d never fade no matter how hot the sun beat down.

  He missed the Gila River, which was a dry bed, and the Salt River, a pale channel of sand, but woke up when traffic slowed past Phoenix.

  The sun had fallen behind us, to a red suffusion in the smog and haze of the west.

  “We in Texas?” my father said, his voice thick with swallowed cigar smoke and sleep.

  “No,” I said. “Past Phoenix.” I had put in Esther Phillips again. I couldn’t help it. Don’t count stars, or you might stumble. Someone drops a sigh, and down down down you’ll tumble …

  Marcus. The smell of him. In my imagination, I moved him to the park below Sacre Coeur, in Montmarte, the shadowy corridors leading up to the church and the winding streets past it. Dark. Not just sex, but his throat, collarbone. The way it had felt, my fingers against his shoulder blades.

  But my father said, “That sun go down, you find a place. When we in Texas.”

  There was a strange hoarseness in his voice. Not sleep, or smoke.

  Terror. What had he dreamed of?

&nbs
p; We were about three hours behind them, maybe more. We’d passed hundreds of miles of scorched earth and bushes like dead coral. How many bodies were buried in the deserts—the Sonoran and Mojave and Gila wilderness? Jazen had sped along this same freeway—did he see a place to dump Victor? Victor was useless to him.

  Mando. His picture in the newspaper, on the seat behind me. His hair slicked back. He’s darker than me, Victor had said. He was just a boy, too.

  The sun edged down behind us, the sky to the east glowing blue and neon almost in the reflection. The other side of sunset. The moon would be more lopsided tonight when it rose.

  “Drive all night, we be in Texas in the day,” he said, and I could hear the strain in his attempt to remain calm.

  “Then we’d better get gas, and eat dinner. Get some coffee.”

  It had been years since I was on the road with no itinerary and no Tony or Jane or someone to meet. I suddenly wanted the illusion that I could choose something—anything—about this day. “Rick?” I said into the phone.

  “You okay?” he said immediately, his voice Mayan coffee charged. “Tony said you were having some family issues.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” The fluorescent tubes at the gas station began to pop and hiss. My father was filling up the tank. “I’m in Tucson.”

  “You went to Tucson? On August twenty-fifth? Who the hell are you writing for? Satanic Weekly?”

  “No. I just ended up here.”

  “O-K. For fun?”

  “Rick.”

  “FX. Hey—are you alone?”

  “I’m not here to party. I just need a good restaurant. I’m tired of fast food.”

  He sighed, and I heard fingers tapping on the keyboard. “Tucson—I got something in my inbox about Lapis. Some brand-new restaurant. Check it out, and if it’s not too chronically hip or pathetically cute, maybe you can do a short piece.”

  “I can’t write anything right now,” I said. “Not right now.”

  “FX. Are you okay?”

  “I am.”

  He accepted the lightness and dismissal. “Shady. You must have found the Gentleman with a Tie and don’t want to tell me yet. So call me. Tony and I made up a good list this morning. And today I got a big press release about some medical spa in Slovakia. Frickin medical tourism. One of the advertisers is hot on it. You want something fixed?”

  “Very funny. I’ll call you, Rick.”

  ———

  My father didn’t hate white people. That was simplistic. He didn’t hate them, and he wasn’t afraid of them.

  He thought of them like coyotes. Sometimes he admired them from a distance. He had a healthy respect for their cunning desires, atavistic impulses, and greed. He watched them, studied them, and was at every moment of his life prepared to defend himself and his blood against them.

  Aversion. My father’s entire being changed when he was around white people. We sat at a small table along the wall, in the bar since it was too late for the restaurant. His body was stiff, his face impassive. I watched him listen. The words all around us as foreign and sharp to him as if I were in—Turkmenistan, surrounded by older men.

  I’d have to save the word for Victor. It was the same hardening and wariness in white people, as if shellac replaced sweat and blood, whenever young black men pulled up at a corner. Or when they got into an elevator.

  My father sat in a cowhide director’s chair. The room was dark except for the ceramic luminarias, replicas of paper bags holding lit candles. So far Lapis meant the electrified blue paint on the adobe buildings, the purple lavender lining the walkways, and the indigo leather on the furniture, with tiny barrel cacti on the table.

  “Blankitte love them cactus,” he said softly.

  My father was like all farmers, all over the world, without his head covering. His face paler than his arms and hands, his neck somehow tender and vulnerable, and he squinted in the dim candlelight.

  “Just coffee,” he said. “Pas fam, me. Them tacos.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said. “We have to eat something decent, and then I’ll sleep while you drive.”

  The server came back and smiled, patient and bald and quite cheerful. “The crab cakes are amazing,” he said.

  I shook my head no. We’d pulled up crabs from traps in the bay near Azure. Never order crab in the desert. “Where you from?” he asked, and I was inexplicably surprised.

  “Louisiana,” I said, and his whole face lit up like a child’s.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “I used to work at Tante Zoe’s Cajun Restaurant in Dublin. They called it Dublin’s French Quarter. We had the best blackened redfish. But it wasn’t New Orleans. New Orleans is the most amazing place in the world.”

  My father’s face was secretive and despairing.

  “But I’ll bet those Irishmen hated hurricanes,” I said, smiling back. “Too sweet.”

  “You know it,” the server said. “Hey, there’s a hurricane on TV! People are mixing up those drinks right now.”

  We glanced at the bar screen. Hurricane Katrina was beating up on Florida, the news said. Palm trees sticking up out of water like toilet brushes.

  My father waited until he was gone. Then he said, “Give em crazy name. Camille. Nineteen sixty-nine. Camille take out the end of Comtesse.”

  “Comtesse?”

  “House up the river. They have a slave jail. Brick house, four of em. For the ones they steal. Jean Lafitte bring people there. After he steal em from the ship.”

  Just like that. “Victor mentioned pirates yesterday. To the girl in the apartment.”

  “When I run liquor, back then, people say Comtesse got spirit. Ghost. The big house fall in the river long time ago—1902. Say them spirit have to stay in the slave jail.”

  “Could Albert be down there? In Azure?”

  My father shook his head. “Albert—maybe Sarrat. Maybe New Orleans.” He poked at the polenta when it arrived. “This couche-couche?”

  “Kind of,” I said. The polenta was formed into a cake and grilled with prominent stripes, with black bean and corn relish on the side.

  All grits. All ground corn. The slaves ate couche-couche. “You went in the building?”

  He said softly, “I keep liquor bottles in there. Cause people afraid.”

  “How we doing here? How’s that blue corn? Intense, huh?”

  I gave him that fake smile, small as the Mona Lisa’s, and nodded.

  No one cared about our stories, Cerise used to say. When we found out about Mr. McQuine, after Kelly Cloder’s party, she told me, “I’m not tellin somebody we got here to California cause a some nasty old white man. Shit.”

  The bathroom had lapis tile borders. The paintings on the wall were Georgia O’Keeffe–style flowers. Dark irises, nearly black, with sword-like foliage.

  In the car, I had put on my white shirt from Zurich, forced my swollen feet into the black boots, and redone my hair again. It was so dirty it stayed flat and docile in the bun, which was fine with me. I wanted so badly to be me again. Just for an hour.

  The soap was a vivid blue ingot. Not lavender but musk. I had black musk soap from Provence in my bathroom at home, and linen embroidered towels from Brussels. They made me happy every time I used them.

  Suddenly my mother’s voice came—That make me happy. The crushed peppermints in a bowl, the sunflowers in a green vase, the bougainvillea like a magenta curtain over the carport.

  In the street, shouts rose up, and loud music bumped from cars. Always the same drumbeats, if not the same drivers. Classes must have started at the university nearby.

  “Don’t you want to call Maman?” I said.

  I dialed home and handed him the phone, and walked away. I was still his daughter. Stay out of grown folk talk.

  The stunted trees in the courtyard were hung with blue lights. I walked to the sidewalk. CVS. Ben & Jerry’s. Bars where noise rushed out like a wet roar. Clothing stores with urban chic and southwestern wear.

  The boys in
front of me were definitely college freshmen, out having their first week of freedom. One had spiked black hair, glistening like a thousand fishhooks, and his pale scalp showed through in the streetlights. The tender skull. Filling with knowledge.

  “Brah!”

  Two more spilled out of a bar. “Yo, bro, come in here and let’s get fucked up!”

  “Bro, I’m already one with the gangaweed, man. I can’t handle anymore. The guy in my hall has major stash.”

  “For real, bro. We’re just kickin it.”

  “Lookin for the hookups, brah. Hey, dog!”

  The mass of them on the sidewalk. Kobe Bryant flew in a window across the street.

  What kind of jersey had Mando been wearing? I couldn’t remember. It was black.

  The boys moving past me now. What would they say if Victor and Jazen and Alfonso were walking ahead of them? Or behind. Nervous glances. Hey, bro. S’up, bro. Hats sideways, backwards, forwards. Mando’s hat. Mando had gone to pick up free tickets but he had a gun in his waistband. Who had he expected to see but someone who threatened him? Whose territory was this, outside a university, boys like the Scion making their own language out of another language?

  My father was beside me, holding the phone as if it were a stone. “That’s it?” I said.

  He met my eyes. “Rien a dit. We don’t find him yet. Gustave say only 100 today. He got the water on.”

  A girl pushed past me. Her green T-shirt read KISS ME, I’M IRISH.

  Slavic. Nordic. Germanic. Gaelic. Italian. Tony and I had joked about these T-shirts. I’d said, “No shirt for me? Kiss Me, I’m Senegalese? Mixed with Burgundian?”

  More boys in a crowd, hair glittering and shining, blond waves and black spikes and Armani waistbands showing. All the designer names scrolled above their butts, while they hitched up their jeans. Baggy because they’d had no belts in prison.

  One dropped his wallet. “Yo, dog, wait up!” he called.

  Jazen. Alfonso. But not. And Victor? In his skinny jeans? They’d still think he was a gangbanger. Loc Mafia.

  He was a mutt. Like me. I was his mother now—I felt it behind my ribs, along my shoulder blades, the fear that someone would shoot him again. The physical ache. I wanted him back.