Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  “I know.” I waited. I felt poised at the edge of a pool, toppling over with exhaustion, but like the water was so cloudy I didn’t want to go in.

  Inez leaned over the edge of the crib. “I was in the shower, after I took out the bullet. Claudine said they went to Juanita’s. Two buildings down. Juanita’s helping Teeny with the meat.” The baby sat up abruptly, and smiled. “They say we might get the storm, and they gon cook all the meat today in case the power go out.”

  I went out to the porch, stood under the wrought-iron portico, and looked two buildings over. A grill had been set up next to that porch.

  The Lafitte was its own town. People watched me walking. Like the Villas, or the small villages in France where a castle dominated the hill, the same sandy color as this stone, and the houses on cobblestone streets below. When someone invaded the town, the castle’s inhabitants put down the ladder, and only the ones they wanted to save got to climb before the ladder was pulled up and the cliff face was bare again.

  But the woman who came out onto her porch with a huge tray of meat smiled beatifically, like an ancient duchess, her face round and dark under the multicolored braids that had been woven into a crown. She must be Teeny. “You lookin for Juanita?” she said. Then she pointed to the balcony above us. “Them boys upstairs like Coyote and Road Runner, can’t get along. Getting on each other last nerve.”

  ———

  I went up the stairs quietly. I didn’t want my father here. With his gun or without. I was nothing. No one. Jazen didn’t care about me, and I prayed he’d be glad to get rid of Victor.

  A woman answered the door, wearing a white blouse, black pants, and a name tag that said NAPOLEON HOUSE. She had Jazen’s slanted eyes and perfect burnished skin, his etched lips. She said, “Who the hell you?”

  “Juanita?” I said. “It’s Fantine. Glorette’s cousin.”

  She held open the door. “You? I ain’t seen you in twenty-some years.”

  “Me.”

  She looked at my white shirt, then narrowed her eyes. “I remember you. A brainiac. You wore some funny shit to school.”

  There was a thrift store next to the Paris Cinema. My attempt to look NYC—a beret, a scarf, a jacket in the Rio Seco heat. I’d forgotten that.

  She opened the door. A monster loomed in the corner, and I jumped. A Mardi Gras Indian suit, ostrich plumes waving, on a stand. “What you doin here?”

  “I came for Victor. Glorette’s son.”

  Juanita took a breath so large her whole chest rose, and then she let it out, her name tag clicking. “Then go on in there and calm him down. He actin a fool.”

  What about your son? I wanted to say. The fool in chief?

  She said, “My son in the shower. He come and go all his life. He been into that bad shit since he little, and I don’t have nothing to say to him. I’m goin across the way to check on my other boys and I gotta get to work. I ain’t got time for all this drama.” She went out the front door. I heard her shoes on the stairs, and heard the women on the porch say her name.

  I walked slowly through the exact same layout—front room, kitchen, hallway. A wave of steam came from the hallway—the water was running loudly. The bedroom door was open a slice, and I stepped just to the frame and said softly, “Victor?”

  “Yeah?”

  No one else answered. I pushed open the door and went inside. He was sitting on one single bed, hunched over, wearing the bright yellow T-shirt from the first day. Black Coral—Belize. His arm was wrapped in a different colored bandanna—almost lavender.

  “It’s me.”

  He lifted his eyes to mine and said, “Marraine? For real?” His eyes turned glassy with tears, and then he wiped at his face with the sleeve of his good arm. “My head hurts worse than my arm,” he whispered, rubbing his skull. His brain, under the thin so-pale skin. His dreads in the dirt back at Bettina’s.

  In his swollen left hand, held stiff and awkward like a wooden dipper, were two of the large amber jewels.

  Alfonso was lying in the other bed, the sheet up to his bare chest. “Purple drank. Kick your ass next day.” His hair was growing back—the stubble thicker, almost obscuring the green tattoo on the side of his head. On his shoulder, a new tattoo—swollen dark letters spelling out CALI, gleaming under Vaseline. A video camera on the nightstand—the one Jazen had stolen.

  “Victor,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  He maneuvered his bad hand and opened his pocket with his good hand, dropping the jewels inside. He pulled something from the wall. His phone charger. He put that in his pocket, too, the cord dangling. Then he lifted something from his waistband. A gun.

  He didn’t point it at me—he propped his elbow on his knee, as if even that arm was tired, and the gun was sideways, aimed over my head. But just the sight of it—I felt the burning sensation in my chest. Where I thought the bullet would strike me. “How was Paris?” he whispered.

  “Fine.” The gun was a small black revolver. Like two dark chocolate bars glued together. But with a hole facing me.

  “I bet it was,” Victor said. “That’s how I always ask you, and that’s what you always say. Before we talk about the real stuff. And then you jet off to the next place.”

  “I’m not going anywhere now,” I said. Every word was a cliché. “Let’s just get out of here and go home.”

  The shower stopped. Victor stood up slowly. He put the gun on the bed and picked up a wallet, pulling it open, extracting a bill with the swollen fingers of his left hand. He winced, and slipped the money into his back pocket. He dropped the wallet on the floor and picked up the gun again.

  “Where you headed next?” Victor said, conversationally. “New York? Italy?”

  I wasn’t smart enough for this. Not with that black hole facing me. Couldn’t speak in code. Couldn’t speak in French.

  “You and I are headed back home,” I said.

  “The Happy Place?” he said. “In LA?”

  Jazen came out of the bathroom slowly, a towel wrapped around his neck. He didn’t see us. His head was bent, while he tried to pull his jeans lower, adjusting them below the white boxers, hanging and rehanging them. His braids were gone. On his skull were random thick puffs of hair, wet, uncombed, like a child’s. The hat he’d worn in the video had covered it.

  Alfonso glanced at Victor, at me, back at Jazen. He was perfectly still in the bed.

  Victor kicked the wallet toward Jazen, and his head snapped up.

  “The fuck you doin, nigga?” he said. He bent down for the wallet and saw the gun. His eyes flicked at me, then off as if I weren’t there. Victor pointed the gun at Jazen’s chest.

  “Getting my share. Like Jimmy Cliff said. But you ain’t seen that movie either.” Victor stood with his knees back against the bed, the gun held steady on Jazen, his bad arm bent against his side. “He gave you three hundred for the video. I got shot. Took out my share.”

  Jazen said, “You ain’t about—” and moved forward. Victor raised the gun to the level of Jazen’s mouth.

  Jazen’s chest was covered with tattoos. WEST SIDE LOC in tall capitals like a skyline across his stomach. On his left arm the new tattoo—raised red skin all around the dark green gothic letters: DO OR DIE. The sheen of fresh Vaseline on him, too.

  Alfonso hadn’t moved at all. He said, “We ain’t Indians, y’all. We ain’t the damn Crow and Blackfeet, so ain’t no need to be fightin each other.”

  “Funny, nigga—you talkin about my feet?” Jazen swiveled his head.

  “What?” Victor said. “You were in Thompson’s history class?”

  “For a minute,” Alfonso said, grinning, cool as ever.

  “He gave us a big lecture on the Plains Indians, how they didn’t fight within the tribe.” Alfonso nodded, going along with it. “But you? You woulda shot me a minute ago, before you got in the shower. Cause you think I ain’t about shit.”

  “You ain’t nobody. I’m tired a your mouth. Sarrat nigga think he the shit cause he went to
college. Your mama—”

  “What?” Victor’s voice was low and deadly as a thrown rock. Like Gustave’s. Like my father’s. I couldn’t breathe.

  Past Victor was the open door of a closet. A smaller suit of feathers and rhinestones hung there, the same gold and amber as the jewels moving through Inez’s fingers. I said, “Victor, this isn’t you.”

  “Really?” he said, and didn’t even glance at me. “You sure? Cause you know me, right?” His skin was tight on his skull, his night eyes lost in wells of purple, and the gun looked so small and heavy and foolish in his hand. The bullet in his pocket—small and heavy and foolish, too.

  “My mama what?”

  Jazen said, “My moms used to say your moms thought she was some fuckin queen. All them fools wanted your moms cause she was light. She had some voodoo.”

  “Voodoo? Just cause she looked like that? You think she planned that? Way back whoever came from Africa planned to get raped, and then they got raped again, and all that light-skin shit was the lotto?” He shook his head, incredulous.

  But Jazen wasn’t afraid. He really didn’t think Victor had it in him. “My moms said your moms was—”

  “A ho,” Victor said. “Yup. She was a ho. Not like you fools call every girl a ho and trick bitch. My moms lost her mind over my pops. Like every day she lost it again. Time I was seven I got it. I didn’t look like him. I looked like her. So that made her even sadder.”

  The burning came back to my breastbone—not fear of the bullet, but shame. Of course he looked exactly like her. Beautiful. But not Sere Dakar’s beauty. Nothing of him. And she had told me that once. She’d been sitting at the glass table, and said, “Even his hands.” Sere Dakar had big hands, with long strong fingers. He’d been recruited from Chicago to play basketball in Rio Seco, but he’d refused when he got there. He said he wanted to play music.

  Victor’s sharp cheekbones and long eyelashes and storm-cloud eyes focused on Jazen with pure hate. “My moms had a job,” Victor said. “Every day she got up, drank coffee, and when the sun landed on the roof, she went to work. That’s what she told me when I was little. She left me somethin to eat. And somebody sold her the rock. You sold it to Sisia and she gave it to my moms. Or you sold it to Chess or some other dude.”

  He was nearly whispering now. “Five years since she died, and you guys were down the street. Nobody cared. Pops wouldn’t care—he got ghost before I was even born. So grab this gun and shoot me, nigga. See—you happy? I’ll call you a nigga and you call me a nigga and we’ll keep it real. Fo gotdamnizzle realio! Come on!”

  Jazen sounded far away. “I ain’t even hearin you. You like Chanel’s Chihuahua. Don’t nobody listen at you no more.” He took two steps toward the bed where Alfonso lay. I flinched, waited for the shot.

  “You gon walk away? From a halfrican like me?”

  “I’m finna take care my bidness. And you finna sit there and think about shit nobody cares about. All you ever do is think.”

  Victor shook his head. “All I wanted was a damn ride. And just chill for a day, you know?” He looked right at me. “Maybe a week.” He reached behind him to pick up his backpack from the bed, the gun still pointed at Jazen, but his left arm wouldn’t work, and the backpack dropped onto the floor.

  His face was distorted with pain for a moment. Then he opened his eyes and left the backpack behind. “Excuse me, Marraine,” he said, formal, distant, edging into the doorway, his arm touching mine, so close I could smell salt and smoky fat—inside the bandanna? “I got an appointment with a buccaneer.”

  Jazen moved his foot like a runner, preparing to launch himself at Victor. But Alfonso said, “Naw, man, don’t do it.”

  Alfonso reached under the blanket and pulled out a bigger gun, a wood-handled pistol, and trained it on Jazen’s chest. Victor was caught in the doorway with me, his bad arm sealed to my bare shoulder by sweat. Alfonso said, “Let him go.”

  “You crazy,” Jazen said.

  Victor didn’t move. His skin was hot against mine.

  “That’s my blood, man,” Alfonso said, narrowing his eyes. He held the gun steady at his chest. Egypt and Morocco along his collarbones.

  “That’s my cousin,” Alfonso said again, his voice harder.

  “Not your real cousin,” Jazen said. “Y’all ain’t blood.”

  Alfonso nodded. “Yeah. We blood family.”

  Then the room was so quiet I could hear Teeny laughing downstairs, and a car with a stuttered heartbeat in the parking lot. Boom-boom pulsing around us. Victor breathed hard beside me, his arm sliding against mine. Jazen faced the two round holes. The guns that made the silence. And in all our breathing, and waiting, the quiet was the saddest thing—Victor had no words. He said nothing. Then he turned suddenly, his arm left mine and he ran down the hallway. Something fluttered from his pocket onto the floor.

  When Jazen tried to move toward the door again, Alfonso pulled off the covers and held the gun steady on him. “Get your stuff, JZ. You got to go.”

  “How the fuck I gotta go and this my mama place?”

  Alfonso said, “My grandma told me your mama don’t want you here. She said she done with you. Grandma give me the gun, man. Where the hell you think this old .45 come from?”

  Jazen looked at me. His slanted eyes shone in the sunlight through the window.

  “I’m done,” Alfonso said. “I ain’t goin back to jail, man. I’m tired. Longer we ride, more trouble I get in, more time I do.” Then Alfonso stood up, in big flannel pajama bottoms with pink hearts. Was Inez washing his clothes?

  Alfonso kept Jazen in place. I ran after Victor, as fast as I could with my swollen feet awkward and numb. I heard the front door slam open, and looked out the window to see Victor’s shining head move through the smoke of the grill and disappear into the space between buildings.

  Alfonso was moving Jazen by moving the gun. I pressed myself against the living room wall, near the Indian suit, so close the ostrich plumes tickled my neck. Jazen was holding the video camera and a sports bag. He jammed the Raiders cap with the pirate logo over his damp hair.

  When he got to the open door that led to the stairwell, he turned and said, “You dead now. Not dead to me. Just fuckin dead.”

  “You the one out there, Zee,” Alfonso said, and his voice had a thin line of sadness. “By yourself.”

  Alfonso closed the front door. He held up the shirred waistband of the pajamas with his left hand. We went to the front window, over the second-floor balcony. We could hear Miss Teeny say, “Where you goin, baby?”

  The cap like a black duckbill from up here. The Raiders jersey, black and silver. He had stopped in the stairwell to put it on. He probably didn’t want anyone to see his tattoos here. He said, “You see my mama?”

  “She went across the yard to get some cayenne pepper.”

  Jazen went across the courtyard, the opposite way from Victor, and we heard laughter, chanting, rapping. He shouted, “Fuck you, lil nigga. You still a baby.”

  Then we heard a chorus of laughter, and a car door slam, and the speakers kick in, and what must have been the Navigator drove away.

  But Victor was gone, too.

  I went back to the hallway to see what he’d dropped. One of the concert tickets. Dave Matthews. For tonight.

  Alfonso sat on the couch. The voices and laughter floated up to us. On the coffee table were toys and CDs and video games. “Wait and see if Victor come back,” Alfonso said. “After he hear the Navigator take off. He probably hidin in the next building.”

  Alfonso lay his head all the way back. Thick muscles from lifting weights in prison. Live My Life. “I’m so tired,” he said.

  He looked exactly as he had on my own couch, a few days ago, as if he wanted to sleep through the rest of his life. What did he dream about? The gun was held loosely on his thigh. The flannel hearts.

  “Is Inez washing your clothes?”

  He nodded. The sky was still tin gray outside the window, through the branches of
the oak tree near the porch. Alfonso had shot Mando. He’d shot someone five years ago, in Rio Seco, and he’d run to Louisiana. Then, when he came home, he was arrested and did his time.

  “He’s not coming back,” I said softly.

  Alfonso shrugged, as if his shoulders were sandbags.

  I went back to the bedroom and picked up the backpack. Grimy, the canvas blackened with dirt, the straps smelling of salt meat. In the living room, I opened it. Notebooks, deodorant, T-shirt, socks, CDs, his wallet. He had his phone, his charger, the hundred-dollar bill, and the jewels in his pocket.

  An appointment with a buccaneer. He kept saying he was the one descended from the pirate—not me. Picards were from Picardy, in France. What was the connection to the first Marie-Therese?

  Outside, Teeny shouted, “Hey, now, come on! We gotta get this started.” She must be the one who cooked for everyone. Like my mother.

  Alfonso put the gun on the couch cushion between us. He flexed his fingers. “Auntie,” he said. “I heard it. When she died.”

  “Who?”

  “Victor’s moms. Glorette.”

  “You heard it?”

  He nodded. He said, “I was always in the alley then. Cause JZ was at the Launderland. And there was this crazy lady from New York. Called herself Fly. She rode around in a brown van, and she would—you know. That’s where she did her thang.”

  With the men. I said, “She killed Glorette?”

  He lifted his shoulders again. “I was in the alley, behind a tree, cause I was—I had to pee. And Glorette was there, like, maybe she was smokin or chillin. The one called herself Fly come up on her and started yellin, and she, like, jerked Glorette around and tied her hair to the cart. Maybe she broke her neck. Or maybe Glorette had a heart attack or some shit. I don’t know. I just know when I came out after a while, she was—”