Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  She took the phone back and closed it.

  “If they gone down to New Orleans, they tryin to stay with my maman in the Lafitte,” Albert said.

  Danita kept her head down, as if she were praying, and said to her mother, “You gon be mad no matter what. I kissed him. In the car. After I put the bacon on his arm. I leaned over and kissed him. But he just kept sleepin.”

  THE LAFITTE

  “RIGHT HERE?” Albert said conversationally, driving my car off the highway and down a pitted asphalt road. He stopped in front of an old two-story wooden building. A bar—the front windows were boarded up, but a rusted Jax beer sign hung from the eaves. “This where he was parked. The Time Out.”

  My father said, “This where he come to drink.”

  “Said you cut the brake lines.” Albert put his forefinger inside the goatee on his chin, like a professor studying the board to figure out an equation.

  The cane knife was back on the wall. I’d seen it when we left. Did Albert have a gun? Was my father carrying his handgun?

  Albert would never say the words—would he? You killed my father.

  He had said, “I’ll take you down to the Lafitte. My maman stay with her niece Inez.”

  But we were here, in the thrumming heat of overgrown vines and blind windows.

  I was in the backseat. Neither of them turned toward each other.

  “Oui,” my father said. “Wait till he inside. I get under the car with my knife.”

  “Said that wasn’t enough.”

  “Qui a dit?”

  “Henri.”

  My father let out his breath. “Ça suffit.” It was enough.

  “No. I didn’t even ax who he was till I made eighteen. Then I ax my maman. I found her in Vegas.”

  My father was silent. Albert spun the wheels on the gravel parking lot and turned down the narrow road again. Away from the highway. We drove into what looked like nothing but ragged forest, and then I saw Bayou Becasse Road. It wound all the way here. Albert said, “Car was wrecked, on the bayou road. Burned up. Where?”

  He went another hundred feet before my father pointed to the ditch. “La.”

  The brakes were gone, the car whirled around the corner and slid into the ditch. But Mr. McQuine wasn’t dead. I imagined him bouncing against the windshield of the old car. No air bags. But he was alive.

  We sat beside the ditch. Albert waited. Had he been waiting for this moment since he was eighteen? That August in 1975 when my father and Glorette and I were here, he wasn’t in Sarrat. But he could have come any time to California and killed my father.

  “What—you think I wanted him around? He was gon live to ninety and then die fuckin somebody and deed me the house? Me—a nigger?” Albert laughed. “I just want to know how you did it. I always thought you shot him.”

  “Jamais shoot a man, me.” My father stared at the line of trees beyond the ditch.

  He said, “I kill a German in France. Field was plow. Ice in the dirt. Mo tou soule—in the woods look for some food. German come from a bush and he don’t shoot—tro peur. I get him with the bayonet.”

  He looked at the ditch. “There—I get a piece a wood. He barely live, but he open his eyes. I hit him side of the head. That car in the ditch, and gas leak out. A match. And I gone in the woods. Mo tou soule.” My father’s hands shook slightly when he took the pack of Swisher Sweets from his pocket that said La Reina. Then he said, “Ecoute—how he do them, they can’t live. Finis.” He lifted his shoulders an inch.

  Albert stared at the ditch, filled with weeds now. No one drove here.

  He said, “I guess they thought my maman would kill me, or I would kill her. With my face.” The weeds hummed with insects. “She was in California, by y’all. I went to Vegas, to LA, and then I come back here. Work with Henri, cause I figure that land mine. But it was the old lady’s.”

  Miss McQuine was sitting in front of the morning talk shows with Titine. Waiting for her beauty parlor session.

  He turned the wheel sharply and we went backwards. Just before he pulled back onto the road, Albert said, “I used to go sit in the house. Seven Oaks. All empty. Full a spiders and rats. I went to burn it down once. But then I thought it was funny—see it like that. And he was in the ground. I was up here.”

  We got back onto Airline Highway, headed toward Baton Rouge. We passed small settlements, cinderblock bars, shacks, plantation roads. Finally Albert said, “In LA, I stole a car once, and they gave me time. I was in the cell with this Aryan dude. They didn’t know me. And I tell you, I could talk about niggers good as him. For three months, that’s all we talked about.”

  Victor’s cell phone went straight to message—mailbox full. He had his charger. Either he didn’t want to talk to me or didn’t care whether his phone worked anymore.

  At a small road, my father peered north and said, “The river right there. Mulatto Bend Road. They got Slim Harpo bury in that cemetery. He sing about King Bee.”

  King Bee—I’d heard that before. On a Rolling Stones album?

  “Slim never made no money. Drive a truck when I know him. Had a heart attack when he was forty-six. He born the year after me.”

  I looked out the window at the small settlement. Mick Jagger’s lips. Still making money. A story—Slim Harpo’s grave in a place named after people like us.

  Victor could write that story. Probably better than anyone else, after this trip. We’d come back here. Mulatto Bend. Irony abundant. We drove on the old bridge over the Mississippi. It felt like an hour, suspended over the brown water, the river that made all the others look like sidewalks or country lanes. A mighty force of whirl pools and ripples and barges and bodies. We came down off the bridge into Baton Rouge and Albert got on the interstate to New Orleans.

  I settled into my own cocoon of sweat, itch, and funkiness. I hadn’t been immersed in water since Michelle’s tub. My legs were covered in grimy layers of onion, Benadryl, and meat tenderizer.

  A steady stream of cars headed north. Albert said, “Say on TV that storm maybe change its mind out there on the water and come this way. Look like the scary people leavin now. Everybody else mixin drinks. Saturday night and a hurricane party.”

  By the time we skirted Lake Pontchartrain, drowned cypress in black water on either side of us, the air was damp and heavy again, the sky hard metal hot, with no clouds. Wouldn’t a hurricane have storm clouds?

  I’d been afraid to call Alfonso. They might take off again if they knew we were close. But I had to hope he was still the boy I knew.

  “What up?” He sounded as if he’d been asleep. “Who this?”

  “Fantine. Danita gave me your number. Where are you, Alfonso?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Right behind you.”

  He yawned. “Why?”

  “I’m coming to take Victor back home.”

  “What if he don’t wanna go?”

  “He wants to go.”

  “Maybe you don’t even know him.” Alfonso’s breath was tired and labored. “We in the Sixth Ward now. Lafitte. He gotta be a soulja.”

  “But you’re not. You’re from California.”

  “I been here before. My grandmère up in here.”

  “Soulja in what war, Alfonso?”

  “Just gotta be down. Be a warrior.”

  “If you ever read history, if you ever got Jazen to read it, you’d see that the Indian warriors, like the Crow and the Apache, they didn’t kill their own people. They were out fighting Blackfeet or other guys from down the way.”

  “You don’t get it, Auntie.” Loud music sounded vaguely from another room. A thump. “Either they yo niggas or they ain’t.”

  “Where’s Victor?”

  “I think he in the shower.”

  He hung up. In the shower? That’s what you said when you didn’t want to talk.

  We had passed through Metairie, and I could see the Superdome like an alien biscuit when Alfonso called me back. As soon as I answered, he said, “He
just came out the shower.” Then he paused. “But hold up. This ain’t good.”

  He must have put down the phone. “Zee, why you trippin?”

  Victor said, “You mean why did he try to punch me? Cause I told him his new tattoo wasn’t shit. Why is he loadin his gun theatrically, wavin it around?”

  I heard the snick-snicking of a gun. Being loaded.

  Jazen said, “You got your first bullet scar and now you think you the shit?”

  “My first scar? I got seven scars. You don’t know shit about me.”

  There was a sound like whipping cloth. Alfonso said, “What the hell is that?”

  “I got these when I was five. Cause I wouldn’t smile. Y’all got tattoos cause you wanted them. You paid to get stuck.”

  “Who did that to your back?” Alfonso said.

  “Some asshole wanted me to smile.”

  The phone snapped shut.

  “They’re fighting,” I said. “At the Lafitte.”

  “We just about there,” Albert said. The city was spread out before us now. Downtown buildings and hotels mirrored and anonymous as anywhere else, but then the white angel-topped crypts and an oak strung with glittering purple and green beads, and Albert took the car down the ramp for Orleans Avenue.

  Vieux Carré to the west. And we went east.

  Gingerbread houses, shotgun cottages with fretwork on the porch eaves, wood siding painted butter yellow and lime green and pale blue. The storybook version of New Orleans—an old woman walking with an umbrella and a plastic bag of groceries from a corner store. DANG IDEAL MARKET read the sign.

  Albert said, “They built the Lafitte in ’41, I think, and my grandpère was one of the first people to get an apartment in there. He worked on the docks at the river.”

  “Lafitte for colored. Iberville for white,” my father said.

  Albert laughed. “Yeah, Iberville give my great-great-somebody his land, and Iberville black as midnight now. Scare the shit outta them French Quarter tourists.”

  On the corner of Orleans and North Johnson, he parked. “My cousin Inez stayed here in the Lafitte all her life. Maman with her.” The two-story sandy brick buildings were beautiful, like smaller versions of the famous Pontalba buildings in Jackson Square. My father reached for the glove compartment, but then he glanced up and didn’t open it. He looked at me and shook his head. This was not the trees. This was the city.

  We walked across the oak-lined median on Orleans, and then the grass in front of the buildings. In the space between two buildings, four young boys peered out warily as we passed. “Little wannabes,” Albert said. “It’s what—ten o’clock? Early for big wannabes.”

  I kept hearing Alfonso’s voice. Either he yo nigga or he ain’t.

  The Lafitte had graceful wrought-iron balconies painted burgundy, and porticos over the front doors, and on nearly every balcony or porch were people. Talking, holding a can of soda or cup of coffee, combing hair. Three women peered closely at us from a balcony—they wore housekeepers’ uniforms. One saw Albert and her face relaxed. “Hey, baby,” she said.

  He called back, “Hey, Rachelle.”

  “Come to get your maman out the storm? They ain’t call for no evacuation. Marriott ain’t give the day off, neither.” She laughed. “Not no Saturday!”

  “They got people checkin into Marriott—gonna party,” another woman said.

  On the bottom step of the next building, a small girl sat alone, sorting through a bowl of beans. She bent her head, her six twisted braids bobbing like butterfly antennae. She reached into the red beans with two small fingers and pulled out a pebble, tossed it violently to the side.

  “Good girl,” someone called from inside the door.

  “Hey, maman,” Albert said, his hands in his pockets, standing at the base of the three steps. The girl looked up at his goatee.

  An old woman came out. Not the Claudine I remembered, with thick arms and an angry look. A frail thin woman with hair shorn close to her scalp, and ironed curls like wood shavings along her skull. Her eyes gray as fog—what I remembered as a child. And the scar on her arm a pink satin caterpillar.

  “What you been up to?” she said casually.

  “Nothin to crow about,” he said, and gave her the gentlest hug, his arms barely touching her shoulders.

  “That Enrique?” she said, squinting.

  My father nodded. He said, “Claudine. Say you sick.”

  “That why I stay here with Inez. Close to Charity Hospital.” She focused on me, and the little girl moved her eyes to mine. Her fingers roamed idly through the beans.

  “That Fantine?” She raised her eyebrows. “I heard you was in Paris right now. Alfonso told me.” She pulled me toward her in a careful hug. Then before I could ask where Alfonso was, she pointed down, inside her short-sleeved blouse. “They got this medicine go in my chest. Chemo. Call it Red Devil.” She smelled of lavender oil and bitter fumes.

  It was sweltering inside. On the coffee table were rhinestones of all sizes sorted in bowls, in varying shades of gold, topaz, and huge oblong stones white as diamonds.

  Where was Alfonso, if he had told her I was in Paris?

  A baby slept in a crib in the corner of the living room, hair in four black clouds held by rubber bands. A radio played low near her. Outside the open door, the little boys were rapping—chants with no music.

  The apartment was long and dark and spotless. We walked down the hallway to the kitchen, at the other end, with spatulas hanging from wall hooks and a pan of cornbread cooling on the counter. The back door was open, too. Had the boys run already?

  Claudine collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table, and Albert sat across from her, his forearms on the Formica, holding her hands. Then Claudine put her head into her arms and cried, her bare shoulders heaving, the knobs of bone sharp under her skin.

  A woman came from the hallway carrying a laundry basket. “Are you Inez?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m Fantine. We’re looking for Victor. My godson. He’s with Alfonso.”

  She said, “They were here for a minute. I went to take a shower.” She sat on the couch and began sorting the clean clothes. Three medical uniforms—maybe she worked at Charity. Baby T-shirts and sleepers.

  My father looked out the front window. They were somewhere nearby, Victor showing off scars and Jazen loading a gun. This was crazy. This wasn’t heroic. Past the porch, little kids were chasing each other under the oak trees in the courtyard.

  My father paced near the crib, his face gaunt, etched with lines. We could hear Claudine crying in the kitchen, telling Albert something, her voice halted by sobs. Then he said, “Mo parle vec Claudine.”

  Inez moved aside the bowls of rhinestones. She didn’t look worried. The boys must not have been arguing here. Her hair was amber, too, the rich gold of something found in a tomb. It was straightened and swirled into a stiff chignon.

  “I like your hair,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, distracted.

  “What’s the color called?”

  She looked at me sharply. “Call whatever Teeny decide to put on my head this time.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said softly.

  “That’s my grandbaby over there, and my other one on the porch. My daughter’s at work. She got breakfast shift at the Marriott. Claudine’s been helpin out. She can watch the little ones, but she can’t handle the bigger kids. She too sick.”

  Then she said, “That your godson, the one with the bullet?”

  My heart stuttered. “Yes.”

  “We took the bullet out this morning.”

  “It came out of his arm?” I felt sick.

  “Yeah. Infected, too. Somebody tied some bacon on him, I guess, so that was good. The meat musta fallen off, but it pulled that bullet near to the top. That salt pulls out the infection and the foreign body. I got it out with tweezers. I had some salt meat in the kitchen, so I put that piece on there and tied it back up. Pull out the rest of the pus.” S
he glanced toward the kitchen. “Claudine had an old bandanna.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  The little girl came inside with the blue bowl. “Just put it here, Tweety Bird,” Inez said. “They serious in the kitchen.”

  We could hear their voices. My father said, “Pas vrai, pas vrai.” Claudine’s words were twisted with anger or sorrow—I couldn’t tell which. Not true, not true.

  Inez said, “Call her Tweety Bird cause of how she ate when she was a baby. But now she watch everything like a bird, too.” The girl sat inside the circle of Inez’s arms. They sorted out the largest white jewels into one bowl, then slid them into a zip-lock bag. Then the largest amber ones.

  “Where did they go?” I whispered again.

  She kept sorting. “They made me nervous. He put the bullet in his pocket. Said he needed good luck, and I told him a bullet wasn’t no rabbit foot. My grandpère—this his rabbit foot.” She pointed to another plastic container, where an old white-furred paw was ensconced with a satin cord. “Said he got it from an old slave man. Caught that rabbit on some plantation right here. Before they build the Lafitte.” She held it up in the light. “It was high ground here. A brickyard or something. I always put it on the suit.”

  “What suit?”

  She pointed at the jewels. “Mardi Gras Indian suit. My grandpère used to be an Indian. Now my cousin. I do some of the patches.” The baby in the crib sighed again and one hand went up to rub an eye. Her fist was tiny and fierce, pushing near her nose. Inez said, “You got grandkids?”

  I shook my head, and she said, “How old are you?”

  “Gonna be forty this year.”

  She laughed. “I’m forty-two. You don’t look no forty.” She watched the baby. “How he get shot?”

  I didn’t want to say, until I knew whether or not she would call the police. But before I could answer, she said, “You know what? I’m a nurse over at Charity. I don’t even want to know. My daddy and them, they was all Mardi Gras Indians, and they use to settle their fights on one day, when they were out in the street. Now they battle, you know, with the dance. But they didn’t just go around shootin people cause they didn’t like their shoes or their shirt.”