Mislaid (13 page)

“Not if you can’t pay for it,” Diane said. “People living on squatters’ rights have no equity. To fix up a house, you need a loan. We can’t just
give
you the land. It wouldn’t be fair, when the taxpayer has to pay cash. I think moving to a town is a fair trade for not seeing your kids go barefoot to the outhouse.”

“I don’t think of this as an aesthetic issue,” Meg said.

“I didn’t say it was aesthetic,” Diane said. “It’s pretty swampy there now, but what are we going to do? Put a housing project on good farmland that’s already drained? No offense.”

Just a few months later, Meg’s shack was inspected and condemned as unlivable. Not remotely up to code. A contractor would be paid to tear it down. In its place she was offered AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), food stamps, and cheap rent in the housing project to be known as Centerville.

Meg and Karen moved to Centerville the summer before Karen started eighth grade. Temple Moody now lived right across the courtyard.

It was a one-story complex, built on a slab, with a minimum of nails and wood that hadn’t cured. You could reach up and pull the siding right off. That looseness kept the air circulating between the siding and the tar paper, which was important in such a damp environment. The newly drained soil was still putting out huge cabbage-like foliage that covered the courtyards
between the wings of the building in an almost impenetrable thicket, with pigweed six feet tall by April.

For Karen, Centerville held endless pleasant surprises: Neighbors. Playmates. TV. Telephones. Flush toilets. Long, hot showers. The paradise that is modern life.

It even had a little shopping center across the road, with a Greek restaurant (self-service, with gyros on the menu as “Mexican Taco”) and a florist.

At first Meg continued to do business with Lomax at her old place, uneasy about her new lack of privacy. She had graduated over the years from collecting mushrooms to warehousing bales of pot for over a week in exchange for sums in excess of two hundred dollars.

It was risky—the bales were fair size and fragrant—but at her old house, it had worked fine. There she had no neighbors and a moat. Almost nobody ever stopped over but Lomax, and Flea kept careful watch. But there was no question of continuing in that line. You can’t stash pot in an empty house. Sooner or later it’s going to get ransacked. And you most certainly can’t carry bales of homegrown through a federally subsidized housing project. There was no driveway in Centerville, just a busy parking lot. Who was Flea going to watch out for—everybody? Meg had to move up in the world.

Lomax had already made his career move. A childhood friend had looked him up. This was a man known as “the Seal” because he was AWOL from being a Navy SEAL. For years he took it out on the navy by running his speedboat out to the mothball fleet with a grappling hook and stealing vital parts for scrap. That was more gratifying than it was lucrative. More lucrative was a connection he made in a waterfront bar in Yorktown while eating raw clams
in an informal contest that proved to all present that he was made of sterner stuff than most men. One of the losers told him there was major cash to be made by someone with the cojones to transport certain bundles to a certain parking lot in Newport News. These were to be found strapped in inner tubes on the beaches of the barrier islands of the Eastern Shore. They originated in Colombia and had been dropped from airplanes.

The Seal was game to try it, but not naive. He agreed to take the job, but privately he planned to bring the bundles only as far as Poquoson, there entrusting them to Lomax, who would drive them to Newport News.

Once a month thereafter, Lomax accepted a package and payment in advance from his dear old friend. He sat down in Crosby Forrest’s seafood restaurant to wait, and Flea drove the bundle an hour, past stoplight after stoplight, past the MPs manning the gates to the naval shipyard and the air base, and heaved it into the bed of a pickup in a certain parking lot. It was that simple.

Then they got into a discussion about street value, and they got creative.

That was Meg’s career opportunity.

The next shipment was two bundles. One went into the bed of the pickup as usual, and the other, smaller one went to Meg’s apartment in Centerville. She didn’t do much with it. Mostly it just sat there like utilities stocks, paying dividends. All she had to do was measure level tablespoonfuls into Baggies. She worked during the morning, by natural light, so matter-of-factly that passersby would have thought she was bagging sugar cookies for a bake sale. Sooner or later Lomax always dropped by to pick them up.

She was making enough money to think about the rainy day when she would blow out of there. She was of two minds about
where she wanted to retire. Something about her current profession made her value the ethos of a hacienda in Mexico. But as a writer, she still aspired to make it in New York. Plus she didn’t feel it would be fair to Karen to move her to Spanish-speaking schools.

She subscribed to
Writer’s Market
and queried five agents about her play
The Wicked Lord
. They all said the most interesting character dies too near the start. She reacted by writing a play in two days and a night about a utopian lesbian commune defending itself from real estate interests. The villain saved his appearance for the end. The lesbians became the bacchants of Euripides, killing him in a festive manner.

It was gripping and seemed to write itself. But she knew you can’t publish material like that.

She outlined a romance novel set in colonial Virginia, with a ghost, called
Blame It on Beldene.
The draft ended on page fifteen.

As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime.

The combination of relative prosperity and a mailing address (the shack had not enjoyed rural free delivery) allowed Meg to money-order books from catalogs. Karen routinely appeared with Temple in tow to beg for Newbery Medal winners. Temple would point out that with two children reading each book, it was effectively half price.

Meg had mentally adopted Temple the day she caught him outside watching her type. As he entered her bedroom she perceived his spontaneous awe of her Olivetti’s all-powerful machinery, the medium through which Logos becomes the printed
word—their shared ideal. He lifted it as gingerly as a rifle and admired its dark curves like a tiny Steinway. She let him type a little. He left clutching an Ezra Pound couplet as though it were a fifty-dollar bill. There was something very inspiring about Temple. He made her think literature mattered.

His parents, now her neighbors, were soon her friends. His mother, Dee, turned out to be an unflappable realist quite to Meg’s taste. She had taught second grade before they closed the black schools. She had lived for thirty years in her husband’s hereditary compound before rural renewal took it away. Yet she despised nostalgia in any form.

Temple’s father, Ike Moody, also looked to the future. He expected a socialist revolution. His leftism was securely closeted. Even Dee didn’t know the extent of it. From attending party meetings and summer camps, he had acquired an excellent grasp of dialectics as a process—enough to get him blackballed from the draft, the lumberyard, the cannery, etc.—but he always had trouble with historical details. He could sort of read. As a speller he was adrift in a no-man’s-land between phonetic and dyslexic. For many years he had held a responsible position in a black-owned junkyard, selling auto parts and secondhand inspection stickers, before it was closed down for being an eyesore and an environmental hazard. Now it lay under a thick blanket of kudzu, and he and his two older sons worked nonunion construction jobs all over the state, often staying in campgrounds.

Temple was their youngest. His sister, Janice, was also still in school and had come along to Centerville. She was regarded as a strong candidate for Fall Festival Queen. She had ways and means, including hot pants that were mink in the front and suede in back. Dee would shake her head, roll her eyes, administer firm warnings, and placidly watch her fifteen-year-old daughter climb into a car with four adult men to attend a go-go concert
three hours away in Washington, DC. “I was just exactly like her to a T,” Dee explained. “She’ll put it behind her.” Meg agreed that it was probably a phase.

Dee sometimes drove Temple and Karen all the way across the James to read books in a public library. Her home library was risqué, consisting of pulp pornography for women disguised as self-help books: the horoscope of love, housekeeping with love, etc. Meg hadn’t known there was such a thing. She thought women’s pornography always promoted slatternly behavior, happy hookers and zipless fucks and so on. In love horoscopes, women were the stars, and their key concern in life was finding the ideal partner. The Aries man would be too rushed for the Gemini woman, but the Cancer man would slowly part her etc. and fondle her etc. Janice studied the books closely, and Meg couldn’t fault Dee for letting her.

Dee’s condoning of sexual freedom in children did not extend to her sons. If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key. She was proud to have no grandbabies yet. In her analysis of heterosexuality she resembled Lee.

As Karen’s classmates approached puberty, Meg realized she hadn’t thought things out very far in advance.

She thanked God for Dee and Temple. She could not imagine letting Karen play with any of the other boys, much less date them. They were very clever in their wry self-commentaries, but no good in school. Their curiosity about sex took a hands-on approach. Whereas Temple, disdaining his mother’s collection, informed himself by reading the classics. The poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art” he found especially hot. At thirteen he lay abed
with visions of the raging moon. Meg could tell because he refused to recite it no matter how much she teased him.

Janice felt his geekiness might be healed with judicious application of popular culture. By the time he was fifteen, she couldn’t take it anymore. She took him to see
Purple Rain
. The cinema was in a black part of Suffolk. The dancing started during the opening credits, and you had to get down (that is, stand up) to see much of anything. She was pleased to see that after a quart of grape soda he was not short on moves. But she had not reckoned with the artistic and philosophical repercussions. Temple emerged from the theater electrified, ecstatic, abashed, unable to say precisely what had excited him so much. He avoided eye contact. When they got home he headed straight into the courtyard and began improvising rock songs, stomping his foot to keep time. He chanted his lyrics in a monotone falsetto while waiting for the school bus. Janice hung her head.

A council of the elders was called. It was decided that Meg would take Temple to see a showing of
My Dinner with Andre
in Norfolk. A huge risk, but Meg adored him enough to put on her sunglasses and watch cap and drive him to a city—something she had never done for Karen. Temple floated out of the theater on gossamer wings, silent, thoughtful, and more bookish than ever.

Meg was moved by the movie from beginning to end. Why hadn’t the intellectuals she met ever been that nice? She remembered the role she had played in real-life dinners with real-life Andres: combination cook, waiter, and busboy. The part where Andre describes being buried alive reminded her of her whole life.

She introduced Temple to Samuel Beckett. As he and Karen stood out in the weeds, rehearsing his travesty
Waiting for Dogot
with Cha Cha, she felt so proud her heart would break. Not of
Karen. Her daughter lacked stage presence. Her reedy voice reached the kitchen window without a trace of projection or resonance. To see an actress in Karen, you had to be charitable and use your imagination. It was the larger-than-life presence of Temple that moved Meg as she watched him arrange props on a cable spool, rolled two hundred yards down the shoulder from the Centerville construction site’s impromptu dump, to furnish his set for
Crap’s Last Tapeworm
.

Dee approved of Meg’s influence. She remarked that her studious son would be the next Thurgood Marshall.

Ike said, “Not if he can’t get his nose out of a book he ain’t.”

Dee laughed at Ike and said to Meg, “He doesn’t know where I got this egghead boy, but the other boys take after him so much. I said it’s time a woman had a son for a change.”

Meg said she was down with that.

Temple’s first great love was a white girl in the drama club whose father had a hereditary union job with the power company. “Union job” was a phrase redolent of wealth and luxury. Her expensive clothes fit perfectly. She had flunked two grades, so she was the most physically mature girl in the entire “academic” track. She did not fear Temple’s dark skin. What troubled her was his prose. Being too shy to speak to her, he wrote letters. Close-written pages, front and back, torn from a spiral notebook. She felt she had a sex slave for the asking: a boy of whom she could ask absolute devotion, offering no social acknowledgment in return. No hand-holding, no publicity, no parental interference. It was an alluring prospect. But she couldn’t make sense of the letters. She brought them to Karen for interpretation.

Sitting with the girl in the school’s new media center, Karen read over a typical passage:

           
You are my Beatrice, my Odette. The passion that rules my nights, the vise grip on my trachea that cleaves my mind from the disgraced preponderance of me, wafting my spirit aloft while my body plunges into darkness with only one despairing, shameful possibility of release. Through the clenched fist of joy its tongues reach upward into my mind, the intractable flame of sorrow. All I beg is one touch of your soft hand to cool my burning eyes.

She frowned.

“Is it dirty?”

“He wants you to touch him on the eyes.”

“Didn’t you see where he talks about his Thomas?”

Karen looked the letter over and recognized a passage copied from
Native Son
. “Bigger Thomas is a character in a book,” she explained.