Love (18 page)

“. . . who have stood by me faithful all these years. In case of her death, if she leaves no will her own self, everything goes to . . .” Heed pauses, smiles. “Solitude Johnson.”

Yeah. Sure. Junior scribbles quickly. She has practiced her Good Man’s handwriting to perfection. “Is that all?” she asks.

“Shh!”

“What?”

“I hear something.” Heed’s eyes widen.

“I don’t.”

“It’s her.”

“Christine? I don’t hear anything.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Heeds stands up, glancing around for something to use for protection. Nothing is available.

“Stop worrying,” says Junior. “If she gets close, I’ll—”

“Fool! She’ll wipe the floor with you!” She snatches the pen from Junior and waits. Both hear the measured footsteps ascending the ladder. Both watch the crown, then the face rise into the light. The eyes are terrible. Christine enters the room and stands still. For breath ease? To decide? Junior breaks into the quiet.

“Oh, hi,” she says. “How’d you get here? We were just looking some stuff up. For her book, remember? Dates have to be checked, right? That’s what research is all about, they say.”

If they hear her, they give no sign. Christine remains still; Heed is moving, cautiously taking one step, then another, the Bic clenched between palm and powerful thumb. The eyes of each are enslaved by the other’s. Opening pangs of guilt, rage, fatigue, despair are replaced by a hatred so pure, so solemn, it feels beautiful, almost holy.

Junior’s head tracks left to right, like a tennis fan’s. She senses rather than sees where Heed, blind to everything but the motionless figure before her, is heading—one footfall at a time. Carefully, with the toe of her boot, Junior eases the piece of carpeting toward herself. She does not watch or call out. Instead, she turns to smile at Christine, whose blood roar is louder than the cracking, so the falling is like a silent movie and the soft twisted hands with no hope of hanging on to rotted wood dissolve, fade to black as movies always do, and the feeling of abandonment loosens a loneliness so intolerable that Christine drops to her knees peering down at the body arching below. She races down the ladder, along the hall, and into the room. On her knees again, she turns, then gathers Heed in her arms. In light sifting from above each searches the face of the other. The holy feeling is still alive, as is its purity, but it is altered now, overwhelmed by desire. Old, decrepit, yet sharp. The attic light goes out, and although they can hear boots running, the engine start of a car, they are neither surprised nor interested. There in a little girl’s bedroom an obstinate skeleton stirs, clacks, refreshes itself.

The aroma of baking bread was too intense. Cinnamon-flavored. He wasn’t there. Although Junior couldn’t tell yet what he might be thinking, she was sure he would laugh when she told him, showed him the forged menu his airhead wife thought would work, and the revisions Junior had made in case it did. Sorry, Solitude. She pushed a little harder on the gas pedal. It was a long shot, sudden, unpremeditated, but it might turn out the way she dreamed. If either or both got out, she would say she fled to get help or something. But first she had to get to Monarch Street, find him, share the excitement and her smarts. She parked and ran down the steps. The kitchen door was wide open, swinging in icy air. Christine must have left not just in a hurry but in a fit. She hadn’t turned the lights or the oven off, and a shriveled leg of lamb clung to its juices caramelizing in the pan. Junior turned the knob to “Off,” then wandered the rooms, irritated by the odor of burnt meat hiding his cologne. He was nowhere, not even in his study, so she went directly to him. Good. There he was. Smiling welcome above Heed’s bed. Her Good Man.

On Monarch Street Romen pedaled into the driveway. Leaning his bike on the garage door, he noticed steam coming from the Oldsmobile. He touched the hood. It was warm. When Junior answered his knock she seemed to him as beautiful as it is possible for a human to be. Her hair, like it was when he first saw her: soft, loud, mixing threat and invitation. The sci-fi eyes were bright and she was wearing smile number thirty-one. They made out where they stood and he did not think to ask where the women were until Junior led him up to the third-floor bedroom.

“Look what I got.” Junior was propped in Heed’s bed under the man’s picture. Naked, waving a folded sheet of paper. Romen hadn’t looked at it.

“Where’s Mrs. Cosey? I never knew her to leave this room.”

“Visiting her granddaughter,” Junior laughed.

“What granddaughter?”

“Lives over in Harbor, she said.”

“No kidding?”

“Come here.” Junior yanked back the covers. “Take your clothes off and get in here.”

“She’ll catch us, girl.”

“Not a chance. Come on!”

Romen didn’t want to do it with that face hanging on the wall, so he pulled Junior into the bathroom, where they filled the tub to see what it was like underwater. Confining, he discovered; not as groovy as he thought it would be until they pretended to drown each other. They sloshed water and called each other filthy names until, like spent salmon, they fell apart, sucking air at opposite ends of the tub. He angled away from the spigot, she resting her head on the rim.

Feeling strong and melted at the same time, Romen reached under the water and raised Junior’s misshapen foot above it. She flinched, tried to yank it out of his hands, but he held on and held on, looking closely at the mangled toes. Then, bending his head, he lifted them to his tongue. After a moment he felt her soften, give, so when he looked up he was surprised to see how dead her sci-fi eyes were.

Afterwards, beneath the covers in Heed’s bed, he woke from a short nap and said, “Serious. Where are they?”

“At the hotel.”

“What for?”

Junior told him then what had happened in the attic. She sounded like a TV newsreader, remote, faking lather about an incident of no importance.

“You left them there?”

“Why not?” She seemed genuinely surprised by his question. “Turn over. Let me lick your back.”

“I hate that picture. Like screwing in front of your father.” Her saliva was cool on his spine.

“Then turn out the light, sugarboy.”

9

PHANTOM

Heed can’t look. Christine has covered her feet, in perfect fourth position now, with a quilt and gone to search for something to ease the pain. There could be all sorts of items sequestered by May: liquor in a toilet tank, aspirin in a flue. Heed hopes for the first because there is no water and she would like to pass out from drunkenness rather than agony. Her bones, fragile from decades of stupor, have splintered like glass. The ankles are not the only joints she believes are cracked. There is a dullness in her pelvis and she can’t lift her right leg. Christine has propped her against the wall since there is no mattress on the bed. In her wisdom, when the hotel closed, she sold everything possible.

Drawing a ribbon of breath, she blocks any tears that may be lurking like memories behind her eyelids. But the forget-me-nots roaming the wallpaper are more vivid in this deliberate dark than they ever were in daylight and she wonders what it was that made her want it so. Home, she thinks. When I stepped in the door, I thought I was home.

Christine’s familiar tread interrupts her efforts to remember more. She has found things: among them matches, a box of hurricane candles, a can of Dole pineapple, and some packets of Stanback powder. She lights a candle, securing it in its own drippings. If she can manage to open the pineapple, Heed can swallow the powder. Wordlessness continues as Christine uses a ball peen to bang a stud nail into the rim of the can. When she succeeds, she opens two packets and sifts the bitter powder into Heed’s mouth, alternating it with the juice. She pulls the quilt up around her shoulders because Heed is shivering.

They both had expected a quarrel. Who’s to blame? Who started it all by hiring a thief and who made it necessary by consulting a lawyer? Whose fault is it they are abandoned seven miles from humanity with nobody knowing they are there or caring even if they do know? No one is praying for them and they have never prayed for themselves. Still, they avoid rehearsing accusations, a waste of breath now with one of them cracked to pieces and the other sweating like a laundress. Up here where the solitude is like the room of a dead child, the ocean has no scent or roar. The future is disintegrating along with the past. The landscape beyond this room is without color. Just a bleak ridge of stone and no one to imagine it otherwise, because that is the way it is—as, deep down, everyone knows. An unborn world where sound, any sound—the scratch of a claw, the flap of webbed feet—is a gift. Where a human voice is the only miracle and the only necessity. Language, when finally it comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.

You know May wasn’t much of a mother to me.

At least she didn’t sell you.

No, she gave me away.

Maple Valley?

Maple Valley.

I thought you wanted to go.

Hell no. But so what if I did? I was thirteen. She was the mama. She wanted me gone because he did, and she wanted whatever he wanted. Except you. She was Daddy’s girl. Not you.

Don’t I know it.

I bet she made your life a horror movie.

Her own too. For years I believed she was hiding stuff just to devil me. I didn’t know it was Huey Newton she was scared of.

She thought the Panthers were after her?

Among others. She wanted to be ready. In case.

Yeah. For the real revolution: twenty-year-old boys fighting to bed sixty-year-old women.

They could do worse.

They did do worse.

You ever meet any?

No. I was out of it by then.

Was it worth it?

No question.

I called you a fool, but I was jealous too. The excitement and all.

It had that.

You sound sad.

No. It’s just. Well, it’s like we started out being sold, got free of it, then sold ourselves to the highest bidder.

Who you mean “we”? Black people? Women? You mean me and you?

I don’t know what I mean. Christine touches Heed’s ankle. The unswollen one.

Sssss.

Sorry.

It’s broke too, I guess.

I’ll get us out of here by morning.

Christine lights another candle, heaves herself up, and crosses to the dresser, opening one drawer after another. In the top one she finds crayons, a small cloth pouch; in the middle one mice scat and the remnants of a child’s underwear: socks, a slip, panties. She pulls out a pale yellow top and holds it up for Heed to see.

That’s your bathing suit.

Was anybody ever this small?

Mine in there?

Don’t see it. Christine wipes perspiration from her face and neck with the fabric, then tosses it on the floor. She moves back to Heed and seats herself with difficulty at her side. Candleflame lights their hands but not their faces.

Was you ever a whore?

Oh, please.

People said.

People lied. I never sold it. Swapped it, though.

Same as me.

No you didn’t. You were too young to decide.

Not too young to want.

Well? Was he good to you, Heed? I mean really good?

At first. For a few years he was good to me. Mind you, at eleven I thought a box of candied popcorn was good treatment. He scrubbed my feet till the soles was like butter.

Damn.

So when things got bad I relied on May and you to explain it. And when that didn’t work I blamed everything on when he started losing money. I never blamed him.

I always did.

You could afford to. The sheriff wasn’t breathing down your neck.

I remember him. They fished together.

Fished. I’ll say. He forgot what every pickaninny knows. Whites don’t throw pennies in your cup if you ain’t dancing.

You saying Buddy Silk broke him?

Not him; his son, Boss. He was friends so to speak with the father but the son was another breed of dog. He did better than break him. He let him break hisself.

How you mean?

A little loan here, a bigger one there. Went along and went along. He had to pay, you know, to stay open and sell liquor in the place. It was tight but okay. Then the old Silk died and the new one upped the fees. We couldn’t pay the bands, the police, and the liquor man too.

How’d you manage for so long?

Luck. I found some fishing pictures.

Heed gives Christine a look.

No.

Oh, yeah.

Who? Where?

Who cares who? And “where” was the bunk, the deck, the pilot’s chair, anyplace and anything on board. Make you think twice about what a fishing rod can catch.

Men have the shortest memories. They always want pictures.

Huh.

Heed sighed, picturing Boss Silk. Herself standing there, afraid, wavering from damp sweat to chill. Wondering if he wanted sex or just her humiliation; or maybe the money he’d come for plus a quick feel. Shame he wanted, for sure, but she didn’t know if it included her tits. In any case, she had been sold once and that was enough. “Here’s something he wanted you to have.” She handed him a brown envelope and hoped he would think it was money. Then turned her back to let him open it in private and to convey her own ignorance about men’s business. When she heard him remove the contents, she said, “By the way there’s another envelope used to be around here somewhere. But it was addressed to your mother care of the
Harbor Journal.
If I find it, should I give it to her or mail it to them? Want some iced tea, suh?”

Heed recounts the meeting in mammy accent with bulging mammy eyes. They chuckle.

Did he? Have a set for the old lady?

I made that part up.

Hey, Celestial.

Aw, girl. When did we first start that?

Playing at the beach one day, when they were about ten years old, they heard a man call out “Hey, Celestial” to a young woman in a red sunback dress. His voice had humor in it, a kind of private knowing along with a touch of envy. The woman didn’t look around to see who called her. Her profile was etched against the seascape; her head held high. She turned instead to look at them. Her face was cut from cheek to ear. A fine scar like a pencil mark an eraser could turn into a flawless face. Her eyes locking theirs were cold and scary, until she winked at them, making their toes clench and curl with happiness. Later they asked May who she was, this Celestial. “Stay as far away from her as you can,” May said. “Cross the road when you see her coming your way.” They asked why and May answered, “Because there is nothing a sporting woman won’t do.”

Fascinated, they tried to imagine the things she does not hesitate to do regardless of danger. They named their playhouse after her. Celestial Palace. And from then on, to say “Amen,” or acknowledge a particularly bold, smart, risky thing, they mimicked the male voice crying “Hey, Celestial.”

Except for the words they had invented for secrets in a language they called “idagay,” “Hey, Celestial” was their most private code. Idagay was for intimacy, gossip, telling jokes on grown-ups. Only once was it used to draw friendly blood.

Ou-yidagay a ave-slidagay! E-hidagay ought-bidagay ou-yidagay ith-widagay a ear’s-yidagay ent-ridagay an-didagay a andy-cidagay ar-bidagay!

Ave-slidagay. That hurt, Christine. Calling me a slave. Hurt bad.

It was meant to. I thought I would die.

Poor us.

What the hell was on his mind?

Search me.

When he died I said Bingo! Then right away I took up with somebody exactly like him. Old, selfish, skirt-chasing.

You could have stayed here if that’s what you wanted to be tied to. He had so many women I lost count.

Bother you?

Sure.

Did L know what was going on out on his boat?

Probably.

I meant to ask you. How did she die?

How you think? Cooking.

Frying chicken?

Uh-uh. Smothering pork chops.

Where?

Maceo’s. Dropped dead at the stove.

She never came back after the funeral?

Nope. I thought you’d come back for hers. Didn’t May write you?

She did, but I was in a fancy apartment banging my head over some rat.

The doctor?

Kenny Rio.

Traded?

Bought. Like a fifth of whiskey. And, well, you know, at some point you have to buy more. I lasted three years. Miss Cutty Sark.

You were nobody’s liquor.

Neither were you.

What then?

A little girl. Trying to find a place when the streets don’t go there.

L used to say that.

Jesus, I miss her.

Me too. Always have.

We could have been living our lives hand in hand instead of looking for Big Daddy everywhere.

He
was
everywhere. And nowhere.

We make him up?

He made himself up.

We must have helped.

Uh-uh. Only a devil could think him up.

One did.

Hey, Celestial.

Even in idagay they had never been able to share a certain twin shame. Each one thought the rot was hers alone. Now, sitting on the floor braving the body’s treason, with everything and nothing to lose, they let the phrase take them back once again to a time when innocence did not exist because no one had dreamed up hell.

It is
1940
and they are going by themselves to play at the beach. L has packed a picnic lunch for them and as always they will eat it in the shade and privacy of Celestial Palace: a keeled-over rowboat long abandoned to sea grass. They have cleaned it, furnished it, and named it. It contains a blanket, a driftwood table, two broken saucers, and emergency food: canned peaches, sardines, a jar of apple jelly, peanut butter, soda crackers. They are wearing bathing suits. Heed is wearing one of Christine’s, blue with white piping. Christine’s is a yellow two-piece; midriff, it is called. Their hair has been quartered into four braids so they have identical hairstyles. Christine’s braids are slippery; Heed’s are not. They are walking across the hotel lawn when one remembers that they have forgotten the jacks. Heed volunteers to get them while Christine waits in the gazebo and guards the food.

Heed runs into the service entrance and up the back stairs, excited by the picnic to come and the flavor of her bubble gum. Music is coming from the hotel bar—something so sweet and urgent Heed shakes her hips to the beat as she moves down the hallway. She bumps into her friend’s grandfather. He looks at her. Embarrassed—did he see her wiggle her hips?—and in awe. He is the handsome giant who owns the hotel and who nobody sasses. Heed stops, unable to move or say “Excuse me. Sorry.”

He speaks. “Where’s the fire?”

She doesn’t answer. Her tongue is trying to shift the bubble gum.

He speaks again. “You Johnson’s girl?”

The reference to her father helps and her tongue loosens. “Yes, sir.”

He nods. “What they call you?”

“Heed, sir.” Then, “Heed the Night.”

He smiles. “I should. I really should.”

“Sir?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

He touches her chin, and then—casually, still smiling—her nipple, or rather the place under her swimsuit where a nipple will be if the circled dot on her chest ever changes. Heed stands there for what seems an hour but is less than the time it takes to blow a perfect bubble. He watches the pink ease from her mouth, then moves away still smiling. Heed bolts back down the stairs. The spot on her chest she didn’t know she had is burning, tingling. When she reaches the door, she is panting as though she has run the length of the beach instead of a flight of stairs. May grabs her from behind and scolds her about running through the hotel. Orders Heed to help carry sacks of soiled bed linen through to the laundry. It takes only a minute or two, but May Cosey has things to tell her about public behavior. When she is finished telling Heed how happy they all are that she and Christine are friends and what that friendship can teach her, Heed runs to tell Christine what happened, what her grandfather did. But Christine is not in the gazebo. Heed finds her behind the hotel at the rain barrel. Christine has spilled something on her bathing suit that looks like puke. Her face is hard, flat. She looks sick, disgusted, and doesn’t meet Heed’s eyes. Heed can’t speak, can’t tell her friend what happened. She knows she has spoiled it all. In silence they go on their picnic. And although they fall into the routine—using made-up names, arranging the food—the game of jacks cannot be played because Heed doesn’t have them. She tells Christine she could not find them. That first lie, of many to follow, is born because Heed thinks Christine knows what happened and it made her vomit. So there is something wrong with Heed. The old man saw it right away so all he had to do was touch her and it moved as he knew it would because the wrong was already there, waiting for a thumb to bring it to life. And she had started it—not him. The hip-wiggling came first—then him. Now Christine knows it’s there too, and can’t look at her because the wrong thing shows.