Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  “What the hell?” Michelle said, shading her eyes, trying to look for Danita.

  At the edge of the field was an ancient pale blue truck, and Albert stood beside it while another man leaned into the open hood. Then he slammed down the hood and brushed off his hands. It was my father. Five girls jumped into the truck bed and started shaking as well. They wore bikini tops and cutoffs, and another cameraman moved quickly to film them.

  No Danita. We pushed closer to the stage. The speakers were like black refrigerators. Maybe she was behind one of them. We were still twenty bodies away, but I could see three young men in black Saints jerseys now. Cane Razor held up his hands. “The choppa or the chete—cut em down!” he was rapping in his deep hollow growl. Four girls danced beside him, and six huge men wearing jerseys swayed behind him. He held up the shiny cane knife and a black automatic weapon. “The Benz or the Chevy—cut em down! Azz from the country or azz from the city—light skin sista or a black Nefertiti!”

  Another cameraman was set up just before the stage, head bent to his equipment. “Wobble for me! You got to wobble for Cane!” the words boomed. “Walk it like a model. Walk it like a dog! Back that country azz up now and make me crazy!” The crowd screamed.

  Michelle said, “There. She’s over there.”

  She pushed toward the right side of the stage, where all the production people were gathered. We swerved through the girls, their faces private, concentrating, their elbows hitting me in the sides, and then two huge security guards stood at the side of the platform. “That’s my daughter,” Michelle screamed at them, pointing to a girl in the crowd at the edge of the stage, holding a small camera.

  “Did you sign a release?” one shouted back.

  “What?”

  “Everybody up there got a signed release. You gotta get back, mamas,” he said, folding his arms. We were dismissed.

  I pulled an old press pass out of my purse. “LA Times,” I said. “I’m covering this for the paper.” He looked momentarily confused, so I grabbed Michelle’s arm and pushed around the edge of the stage. Three vans with open doors and equipment, men wearing headphones and baseball caps and T-shirts.

  Up onstage, Jazen stood beside a speaker. His Raiders cap and jersey. Then a white man said, “Where’s the LA guys? What—it’s a West Coast versus Dirty South thing?”

  Another guy said, “The bullet’s in his arm, I guess. Not even the bicep.”

  “If it’s the chest or back, yeah, that works, but—”

  A young black guy said, “How the hell I know what’s under the bandanna?” His voice sounded New York.

  I heard Victor’s voice. I couldn’t see him. Then I saw another guy sitting at a table with a monitor. Victor’s face. He said, “Elbow ain’t sexy. Fonso got the chest, but he been in prison. Time on his hands. I had time on my side.”

  A girl said, “Don’t untie it! It has to stay on to work.”

  “Danita!” Michelle tried to move toward the stage.

  Cane Razor shouted, “Got some Cali souljas up here! LA gon see if the country azz stack up! Oh, yeah, we got it down here!”

  Then Alfonso and Victor moved onto the stage from behind the speakers. Alfonso was shirtless, and he yelled, “Oh, yeah!” When he flexed his muscles, the women in the field screamed loudly, and a girl shouted out, “Cali fine!”

  They were about twenty feet from us. Victor wore a white tank top and huge jeans. He looked high as hell. Someone onstage said, “Scholaptitude—tell em.”

  Victor had a microphone. He held the injured arm up like a flag, and winced. “Was a long ride,” he said, deadpan. “From the Westside. But I’m Worldwide. I ain’t died.”

  Michelle and I were jostled until we almost fell. I smelled liquor and hairdress and marijuana smoke. Victor said in the same deadpan, “They look inculcated. She look devastated. By the obsolescence of your adolescence. Ask me why I’m peripatetic. All my life I’ll say it’s genetic.”

  One of the stage dancers writhed on Alfonso like he was a pole. Her halter top showed dark gleaming skin, and she smiled, eyes closed. “Get that, get her,” the man behind the monitor said, and Alfonso flipped out his hands like, More.

  Michelle said, close to my ear, “That’s Kelli. Danita’s best friend.”

  Victor turned away from the crowd. “I put my back into my livin,” he sang, muffled. On his shoulder, I could see pink circles. “But women want a man bring home the bacon.” He untied the bandanna and something fell on the stage.

  “What the fuck is that?” someone said. The rappers moved away and one of the girls jumped and said, “Oooh—that’s nasty.”

  One of the white men nearby said, “Get him offa there. He’s shit.”

  Cane Razor stepped forward and bent his knees, swept his arm across the stage and sang, “Out here we got brown cane sugar! I take em coun-tray! I like em chun-kay! But you got to show me what I get!”

  Two girls in front of the stage lifted their shirts and breasts fell out of their bras. “Oh yeah—do the titty bop!”

  But then someone screamed. Just one note—a lone frightened bird. Two of the big men backing up Cane Razor held up their medallions in the air and said, “We ready, nigga! We always ready! Cali ain’t shit!”

  They were looking at Jazen. He’d moved from behind the speaker, gun held at his side. “I ain’t shit?” he shouted.

  Victor didn’t move. He looked at them and said into the microphone, “Why can’t you just shoot yourself? Why’s it better if somebody else shoots you? Lil Wayne shot himself in the chest, right? Save somebody the trouble, man. Just shoot yourself now.”

  “Fuck you, sorry nigga!” Cane Razor shouted at Jazen. The women onstage screamed, but it was that excited tone—fear canceled by glee, a schoolyard fight.

  Jazen shot twice at the stage. Victor leapt off the back, but one of the girls collapsed.

  Michelle and I pressed against the tarpaper edge of the stage and held each other’s arms tight in the wave of bodies. The music stopped. An elbow hit the back of my skull, and a shoulder knocked me halfway down, but Michelle’s strong wrist held me up. “Danita, Danita,” she whispered. “Stay where you are. Stay, baby.”

  People were running, and the bodies fell away. On the stage, two big men were carrying the girl, blood dripping from her leg. It was Kelli. I turned to see the Navigator speeding over the irrigation ditch, four-wheel drive kicking in, and racing through the cane.

  Michelle leapt up onto the platform and shouted, “Give me a shirt!” One of the men pushed his tank top toward her and she wrapped the girl’s leg tightly with the shirt, then pulled an elastic from her pocket and slid it over the wrap. “We have to call 911,” she said, but the men looked offstage, where someone was yelling, “No cops! No cops!”

  The two men carried the girl down the steps and put her into a van, and it sped away. Michelle had Danita now, huddled into her arms near the speaker. Danita was tiny, her face swollen, smeared with tears and heavy makeup, her braids covered with a film of dust like cake flour. “They said they were takin Kelli to Baton Rouge. To the hospital.”

  “Where’s my car?” Michelle shouted.

  “Over there.” She looked past her mother at me, frowning. “Who’s she?”

  Two young girls were still dancing in the clearing, their small breasts barely moving inside tank tops, their eyes closed. A few more cars were scouring turns in the dirt and heading down the road. Michelle’s white Honda was alone now. A hollow loud banging—the hood of the truck coming down again. My father got into the cab with Albert. Albert saw us, and the truck rumbled past to the base of the levee, crushing go-cups and wires. “Cops comin now,” he shouted. “Go, Michelle.”

  Michelle started the Honda. I got into the Corsica. The car bucked and shuddered backwards out of the row. We drove away, past the girls who had stopped dancing, stopped waiting for their moment, and vanished into the cane stalks shaking above them.

  I followed Michelle down narrow roads through the fields. No
Navigator, no truck ahead of us. If Jazen would shoot at anyone now, what would he do if he saw us?

  When we got to Sarrat, she went to her place, and I stopped at Henri’s house.

  Henri was on the gallery. The silence was immense. I sat in the metal chair beside him, my heart hammering, just as Albert and my father rode up in the truck.

  Henri squinted at the grille. “That Philomene truck?” he said to Albert.

  “I borrowed it,” Albert said.

  My father sat on the steps and lit a Swisher Sweet. When Henri and Albert went inside, he said to me, “What I see, Jazen don’t care who he hit. Think he in a movie.”

  Albert came back out on the gallery with a laptop. “They gotta come back here. One them boys left this.” Victor’s life inside.

  “Put your car down at the barn with the truck. They think nobody home when they come back,” Albert said.

  We walked back up toward Michelle’s. My legs were on fire again. Albert’s shirt was dark with sweat. “Michelle,” Albert called from the yard.

  She opened the door.

  Danita was sitting on the couch, her lips trembling. Albert said, “I’m sorry, Michelle. Danita, baby, I thought it was a good idea to get the truck, have them girls dancin in the bed. If you call that shit dancin. The promoter from New Orleans was a old white guy. They wanted it like a competition—country girls against city girls.”

  “Which one were you?” Michelle said to Danita, voice still deadly.

  She broke into fresh sobs. “Nothing. They said I was too skinny.”

  Michelle shot me a look and said, “Them California boys?”

  “No, Mama, Cane Razor’s people.” She held up her digital camera. “Scholaptitude said better have a brain than a booty. It’s on here.”

  “Show me,” Michelle said.

  Blurry movements and faces. Music reverberated from speakers. Then Victor’s face was right there. Paler than ever, his head shorn, his eyes big and dark as plums under the dark brows which looked even more startling because his hair was gone. His left arm was wrapped in a white bandanna near the elbow. He said, “Ain’t takin off my shirt,” and lifted his good arm to drink from a white go-cup. “What is that?” I said.

  “Cough syrup and candy and Sprite all mixed together,” Albert said. “Lean. Some nasty stuff. I rather have straight-up Bacardi.”

  Two men came into the frame. A young black man with headphones, and a white guy with a porkpie hat. “Where are the guys from LA?” the white guy said. “Who’s the one with the bullet hole? What the hell smells like bacon?”

  Victor shrugged. “You ain’t lookin too rugged,” the black man said. “I thought you got shot in the chest. It’s your arm?”

  The white man said, “You wrote some lines fit the script, right?”

  Victor said, “Waste of breath, this life, this death.” He started to untie the bandanna, and the camera shifted crazily.

  “You tied bacon on his wound?” Michelle said. “With my bandanna?”

  “He asked me could he come inside and charge his phone, and then I saw the bullet hole,” Danita said.

  “If we get five minutes of footage out of this whole fucking day I’ll be amazed,” the white man said off-camera.

  I felt like touching the screen, like some country woman who’d never seen a film. Like I could touch his face.

  Michelle grabbed Danita’s face, like my mother had after I came home from Kelly Cloder’s party. Thumb deep in one cheek hollow, fingers deep in the other. “Look at me. No. Look at me. You could be dead in that damn field. For what? For this punk-ass fool from California? You had class today!”

  And Danita’s face hardened, too, under her mother’s fingerprints. “So I could take blood outta people arms all day long!”

  “You gon be a nurse!”

  “And change bedpans.”

  Michelle thrust her daughter’s face away from her. “How you think changing diapers better than changing bedpans!” she shouted.

  “Cause you don’t do it forever! Like you! Changin that old lady diapers.”

  “You do it forever if you got two kids like Kelli and now you in the hospital! Fecal waste is fecal waste, Danita. She don’t get paid. I do!”

  Michelle turned in disgust and saw me.

  “Victor’s mama said he’s in college. And look at his stupid ass today.”

  Danita shook her head slowly, frowning at me. “He said his mama dead. Been dead five years.”

  Michelle drew her whole body in, folded her arms, and stared at me.

  “He’s my godson,” I said. “My son now.”

  But her face had changed. Not the issue of my body. Not a mother. It was different.

  “You know what?” I said, to her, to all of them. “Screw this.”

  I went back down to the barn and got the picture of Glorette from the car.

  “This is Victor’s mama. She was killed in an alley five years ago. Nobody knows who. She was a damn strawberry. A crack ho, like all the jokes. Her mama was Anjolie. My mama is Marie-Claire. From right here—that empty spot by Henri.”

  Michelle walked into the bathroom and came out with my jeans, which she’d shaken out and folded, and my white blouse. “Give me back my clothes,” she said to me. “I don’t care who you really are. I just don’t want you in my house.”

  I sat in my car. The sun was going down—it was around 7:30. I’d left Michelle’s pink dress on the small wooden railing. Her trailer was dark. She’d taken Danita to work with her. From the glove compartment, I took out an envelope of museum postcards I kept for when I was stranded on a highway, or in a thunderstorm. A grainy, black-and-white Iturbide photo of a sturdy Oaxacan woman with three live lizards crowning her head, being taken to market, looking out at the world.

  I carried the envelope to the house. Cellophane wrappers like dirty glass flowers on the porch. Jolly Rancher candies. “That’s what they put in the purple drank,” Albert said. “Maybe the crazy one just drop the other two here.”

  We waited in the living room, in the dark. My father and Henri were in the kitchen. I stared at the road, then the TV. I kept seeing Mr. McQuine’s blue car come up the road. The armoire. Anjolie in the utter blackness. Her heart, hidden in the dark, scented wood. Was she afraid that even if her mother hid her there, he would break down the carved doors? Light-bright. Yella girl. Daughter of joy.

  Like me.

  Like Albert.

  “Why didn’t you ever come to Sarrat?” I said.

  “By y’all?” he said, and stroked his goatee. “Nothin I want out there. Trees. I ain’t into trees.” He looked at me. “I travel around plenty. Like they say about you. But they had taken me away from my mama, so she wouldn’t go crazy. I didn’t want to see her for a long time. Till we were both grown.” He folded his arms over his belly and grinned, like he was at a poker table. “What about you? Why you always runnin away?”

  “I’m a bagavond,” I said. “I get bored.”

  “Some people just don’t like their relatives. Rather be in the wind.”

  “Free therapy. Thanks.” For days, everyone had been criticizing everything about me. My clothes, hair, car, life. Everyone—Cerise, Sisia, even Victor. No one expected you to do it. You thought I wanted to be you?

  “In the wind,” I said to Albert. “I haven’t heard that in a long time.”

  In the kitchen, Henri played his violin for my father. An old song I’d heard when I was here before. “Bonsoir Moreau, Bonsoir Moreau.”

  My legs and feet were swollen with ant venom, and I couldn’t keep my hands away from the bites. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back I saw that Albert and my father were sitting in the dark kitchen, drinking rum. The cane knife was on the table.

  Just after midnight, Albert went outside, the screen door slapping. Then he came back in and leaned over me. “Put this sheet under you,” he whispered.

  His face was so pale, his flat straight brown hair invisible on his head, and his hand hard on my sh
oulder. A sheet under me? He was going to—

  “Put this on your legs. You scratchin too much. Get infected.” He handed me a bowl of something. “Meat tenderizer.”

  I rubbed the paste onto my skin. I didn’t look up at him.

  He went back to the kitchen. I sat against the wall for a moment, and then I went to the doorway of Henri’s bedroom, hearing him breathe like the rasp of a file.

  “You a killer, huh?” Albert said. He tapped something on the wooden table. My father didn’t answer. “You kilt more than him?”

  “Two more.”

  “You hunt em down, too?”

  “Non. Kill or be kill.”

  “Yeah?” Albert said. I heard his glass set back down.

  My father said, “German. And man down in Plaquemines Parish.”

  “But not here.”

  “Kill him here or he might kill one a them.”

  Albert said, “But you ain’t known that. You ain’t God.”

  It was quiet. He was saying maybe Mr. McQuine could have changed. Taken Albert for his son. Or sent him to school and bought him land, at least. Given him—

  Not that house.

  Albert tapped something again. I moved closer. Cane knife. Where was my father’s gun? My father looked up and said, “You thirsty?” His face was impassive. He held out the glass of rum.

  I took one hot swallow. Neither of them looked at me. My father walked behind me, back to the front room, and sat in the easy chair.

  I woke at dawn. My legs were numb. I heard a car. My father was asleep in the chair, head thrown back, his Adam’s apple like stone in his throat.

  Albert stirred beside the couch. He’d slept on a blanket, on the floor.

  Michelle and Danita were at the door.

  I said, “Michelle. I’m sorry.”

  Michelle bit her lips. Danita said, “They never came back? Victor called me last night. My mama had turned off my phone. But he left me a message.”

  Michelle cocked her head to the side and said, “He ain’t called you?”

  “I’m not even a decent godmother. He probably doesn’t believe I’m here.”

  Danita held out the phone. The message: “I’m sorry about your friend. Jazen’s an asshole. He punched the camera guy and stole the camera. Says he’s gonna put the video on YouTube and make some money. But that other dude—DJ Scholaptitude? He’s gon be at the Lafitte for one last show. New Orleans. Ain’t too many people heard a him. Maybe just you. Thanks for hooking me up with the medical care. I gotta go. Big show. Big show.”