Holding Pattern (2 page)

She released him and rose back to her full height.

Where’s your other suitcases? he asked. Mamma pinched him. She only pinched; she would never strike him. She’d had two stillbirths; he was her only child.

What? Blunt asked.

Where’s your other suitcases? Mamma pinched him again. If you’re coming to live with us, then where’s your other suitcases? You can’t put nothing in no one suitcase.

Blunt gave him a fierce cold look, eyelashes so stiff with mascara, they resembled tiny claws. Now, you’re a smart little boy, so you know I’m having the rest of my things shipped.

I don’t know nothing.

Mamma looked at him, hard. Blunt green-watched him. Such a pity. You look so cute in that snowsuit.

They left the station for the taxi stand. A storm had set in; snow sprayed his face, white, wet, and cold. Blunt walked over to the lead cab, a fat yellow block, and roused the driver, a short man with short thick legs.

How you today, ma’am?

Just fine, Blunt said.

The driver placed her white suitcase inside the yellow trunk.

She opened the passenger door, slid the guitar case on the floor, then held the door wide. Mamma motioned for Hatch to get in. He did. She followed. Blunt held her hat with one hand, ducked inside the cab, and seated herself. Mamma hadn’t held her own hat. Blunt shut the door. The motor roared to life. The driver slammed the taxi into gear. Where to?

Mamma told him.

Enjoy your ride.

They rode to the dull hum of the busy engine, the heat full blast, Hatch damp, his body boiling inside the meaty snowsuit. He studied Blunt’s reflection in the driver’s rearview mirror. She sat very stiff, green eyes staring straight ahead. Glad that he didn’t have to sit next to her.

Easy motion and casual heat, they cruised in bubbled metal. No one moved. No one spoke. Three monkeys, deaf, mute, and blind. They rode on past Hatch’s school, Andrew Carnegie Elementary. Mamma gestured to Blunt. Blunt nodded and smiled. Traffic started to thicken. The driver took cautionary measures, dodging around the El’s pylons, only to get pinned between a pylon and some stalled cars.

Move this thing, sir, Blunt said.

I’m doin all I can, ma’am.

Well, move it.

I’m sure we’ll be moving soon, Blunt, Mamma said.

Look, I’m paying you good money! Blunt watched the driver with her green eyes.

This will go much better if we all jus relax, the driver said.

Hatch peered through the frosty cab window. Thickly clothed people hurried by with their heads tucked against slanting wind and snow. Sheltered inside a doorway, a musician vied for attention. He was seated on a footstool, acoustic guitar angled across his body, strumming the strings and tapping an athletic shoed foot, an empty coffee can a few feet in front of him. His voice rose above snarling traffic and honking horns.

One passerby tossed him a coin. Hatch felt all twisted inside. He caught Blunt’s face in the rearview mirror. She too was watching the musician, effort in her looking. All the anger seemed to have left her. She saw Hatch seeing her and gave him an icy look.

She faced the driver. Driver, get this cab moving, she said.

He did, foot on the accelerator to race down lost time. The Progressive Funeral Home soon blinked by. Against Hatch’s expectations, both Mamma and Blunt sat oblivious. He grunted. That Blunt! She ain’t look at it cause she don’t want me to know she ain’t nothin but a phony.

They braked to a quick stop, bodies thrown forward and back. Blunt pulled rolled bills from a jumpsuit pocket, unfolded them, and licked her thumb and forefinger to catch the crispy edges. She paid the driver and tipped him five dollars. You don’t deserve a tip, she said.

He smiled. Thanks anyway, ma’am. I’m gon get yo suitcase from the trunk.

Mamma frowned at his vocabulary.

Only if you’re capable, Blunt said.

He’s using that countrified language, Hatch said. The driver shot Hatch a glance. Mamma pinched him. But he speakin street. Mamma pinched him again. Stung, Hatch’s arm was hot and hurt in the snowsuit. Hand on the door handle, he tried to make a quick exit. The door refused to budge. Frozen, perhaps. Blunt leaned across Mamma and opened it. She smiled. Hatch gave her a mean look.

They quit the cab, snow crunching underfoot. The short driver hoisted the suitcase from the trunk while Blunt pulled the guitar case from the floor.

All y’all have a nice day, the driver said. He shot Hatch another glance and grinned.

Mamma shook her head at the diction. Hatch gave the driver his meanest look.

Blunt passed the driver another five-dollar bill. Learn how to drive, she said.

Yes, ma’am. Thank you. He got inside the cab and sped off.

Three flights of stairs spiraled a challenge to the apartment above. Mamma started up, Blunt following—the suitcase in one hand, the guitar case in the other—and Hatch following her. At the top landing, Mamma leaned her tired weight on the banister, sucking for air. Seem like the
fourth
floor, she said. Blunt said nothing. Chest rising slow and easy. Hatch believed himself an excellent judge of age and had concluded that Blunt was
very
old—she was so ugly—but, having witnessed her feat on the stairs, he was now uncertain.

You got a nice apartment, Joy. She looked the kitchen over with her green eyes.

Thank you, Blunt. It’s small but comfortable.

Well, don’t you worry about that.

Mamma smiled.

Would you like some breakfast?

I sure would. Where do you keep your pans?

No. You must be tired from your trip. She lowered her eyes. Do you eat meat?

Blunt looked Mamma full in the face. Yes, Joy.

Well, let me show you to your room.

My room
, Hatch thought. He was shaking, either from cold or heat—he couldn’t tell—his arm still hot from the pinch.

Mamma looked at him. Go into the bathroom and get out of that snowsuit. She and Blunt started for Hatch’s room. He watched them.

Joy, let Hatch keep me company. Blunt stopped her body like a truck and waited for a response.

Mamma didn’t say anything for a moment. She turned and looked at Hatch. Hatch, hurry out of that snowsuit and come keep Blunt company.

Hatch watched Blunt, hard. Wind and snow had smeared the makeup around her eyes, the talon streaks of some huge bird.

Mamma came forward and gripped his hand. Be good, she whispered. Don’t be mean and selfish like your father. She had been frank about his father. Normally, these words about his bad father would have settled him. He struggled to free his hand.

Be good, Mamma said.

He knew she would not hit him. No matter how angry she became. Mind working, he stared through the distance at Blunt. Formed a plan. He would pretend he liked Blunt. Alone with her, he would give her a piece of his mind. Choice words. All right, he said.

Mamma gave him a hard look that said,
Be good.
She pushed open one of the French doors that separated her room from his, then headed for the kitchen.

Hello, Hatch, Blunt said.

Hello, Blunt.

Blunt removed her coat and hung it in the closet. Her arms were thick inside the sleeves of the red jumpsuit. She removed her hat before the dresser mirror, intent on her reflection. Hair spilled gray and long about her shoulders. With her back to him, she began unpacking the one suitcase, now open on the bed. She turned and smiled. Hummed low deep waters in her throat.
You can’t fool me
, he thought. Puffy in his snowsuit, he watched her unpack and searched for the correct way to phrase what he wanted to say.

I mean, all that happened twenty-five, thirty, years ago. Blunt chased him out of town with her straight razor. Red, they called him, though I never saw him myself. Clay colored. Bowlegged. A midget. A bad man. Like your father.

Blunt kept his ten-dollar Sears Roebuck guitar and taught herself how to play it.

Then Blunt married the preacher-mortician. I was ten by this time. They’d known each other all along. We moved into his funeral home. It was like a castle, enough rooms to sleep fifty people. Plenty places to wander and get lost.

The preacher always spoke his mind. Children make me nervous. This is what he said. I got a bad heart, and people like me, with bad hearts, also have bad nerves, if you see my meaning. I did. So I kept fifteen feet away from him. Fifteen feet. Measured it.

He was the most disliked colored man in the Rains County. He kept a stable full of horses he had never learned to ride. (His bad heart.) And he had dainty ways like white folks. Always wore a suit and tie in the blazing heat, and walked with his head up high, and breathed like a rusty well pump, and sweated like a fountain. He would place his napkin in his lap when he ate and sweat down into it. He had been in a car accident that scarred up his face pretty bad. (You should have seen it. Unbelievable.) And he never ate meat, since it aggravated his scars. This is what he said: God saw to it to give me the accident, and with it, scars and a bad heart.

The accident had given him the calling to be a preacher, but his sermons put people to sleep. (Christ is fire and water insurance!) That was what led him into the mortuary business. Preachers must eat. He was the picture of success. (They often wrote him up in the newspapers.) With the dead in your corner, you can’t fail. Not that he didn’t have his problems. Rumor had it that he disrespected bodies placed in his care. (I never saw him myself.) He carved tic-tac-toe on skin. He stuffed hollow cavities with marbles. He drained insides with a garden hose. He embalmed with shoe polish. These accusations turned away no customers. He was cheap and allowed payment by installments and gave a free vase of flowers to the family of the deceased and guaranteed his caskets to resist rust and rot for fifty years.

Then this man—his name always escapes me—took things one step further. I was sixteen. One Sunday he entered the chapel shouting and screaming and cursing and woke the snoring congregation. He voiced his charges: The preacher had removed his wife’s neck and put a short log in its place. And the preacher had wrapped that log in a pretty pink scarf to hide the evil deed. (I did see the scarf.) He pointed a sharp finger at the preacher. Your tail is mine, he said. And I got something fo that hefty woman of yours too.

The preacher’s nerves took over after that. He would not let Blunt leave the house. And when he went out into the street, he took me along with him as his eyes and ears. He would look in every direction at once, scars twitching. Then he would put one hand over his heart, desperate to calm it. But the hand would jump every few seconds, like it had been given an electrical jolt. Then the wheezing would start, and I would guide him back to the parlor. This went on for about a week; then he and Blunt grabbed their hats and coats in the middle of the night and caught the first thing smoking.

I heard what you did, Hatch said. I know what you did. Mamma had always told him to respect adults, to speak when spoken to, but Blunt deserved no respect.

She stopped what she was doing and turned to him with her green eyes and wild mascara. Her big shoulders tense and her big hands stiff. What did you hear?

You know.

You tell me.

No, you tell me. Why did you do it? Why? Speak up. Be frank.

She studied him for a moment. Sometimes it just bees that way.

Fine, he said. Neither understanding nor caring to understand, he freed himself from the snowsuit and went into the kitchen, where Mamma was.

Were you good? she asked.

Yes.

Then why are you frowning?

I don’t know.

You’ll have to try harder to be good.

Fine.

Okay.

Fine.

A burly foreigner under an ugly red hat explains to a primly dressed man behind a desk why he wants a Liberty Express card: In our country, it is forbidden to wear fur hats or ride speedboats. The white man issues him the card. He zooms offscreen in a long red speedboat. The camera zooms in on the ugly red hat, buoyant on the water. Bubbles carry it under.

How many times had he seen that commercial over the day’s slow course? They had sat in continual silence, no catching up on lost time, no planning for the found future. Mute monkeys.

Joy, why don’t I prepare dinner?

No, don’t trouble yourself. I’ll do it.

Why don’t we both do it? Blunt smiled.

You don’t have to.

It’ll be fun. We’ll do it together.

I would like that, Mamma said. But why don’t I cook and you stay here with Hatch and let Hatch keep you company?

Blunt hesitated. That’s a good idea.

Mamma went into the kitchen. Blunt and Hatch watched the television.

Quiet day, Blunt said.

Yes.

Shadow and light, her face flickered. What’s yo favorite show?

The Phony from Harlem.

They sat around the round wood kitchen table, with platters of fried chicken, black-eyed peas, corn bread, and candied yams in easy reach. They sat like quiet spectators, as if waiting for the food to perform. A roach crawled onto the table.

Mamma forced a chuckle. These roaches are about to run us out of here, she said.

Blunt smashed the roach with her hand, as swift as a judge’s gavel. Mamma turned her eyes away. Stunned like the roach, Hatch watched Blunt until she rose to wash her nasty hand.

Mamma cleared the table. All three moved into the living room, before the TV, and sat down, not saying anything. Blunt faced Hatch, some half-formed song in her wide throat.

He watched her. When you gon play that guitar? he asked. Blunt was a phony, and he would prove it.

Hatch! Mamma said.

Joy, it’s okay. She looked at Hatch. Why don’t you bring it to me?

Disbelieving, he rushed over to the guitar—invisible inside its armored case—tensed, stooped down, and lifted it. It was light, weightless. He brought it over and set it down at Blunt’s feet. Blunt shifted forward in her seat, crouched over the case, flipped open the latches, and removed the guitar. Clean bright color. Sun and flame. And thick, cablelike strings that hovered an inch above the fingerboard and the sound hole (a deep dark cave).
I bet that’s Red’s old guitar
, Hatch thought.
Too cheap to buy a new one.