Victory Over Japan (23 page)

And there she is, Miss Crystal, that has been as good to me as my own sister. Lying on that bed.
I'll get her out of there. Someday. Somehow. Meantime, she say,
Traceleen, write it down. You got to write it down. I can't see to read
and write. So you got to do it for me
.

How to write it down? Number 1. Start at the beginning. That's what Mark
advise me to do. So here goes. I remember when Miss Crystal first came to New Orleans as a bride. It was her second time around. There was this call
from Mrs. Weiss, senior, and she say, Traceleen, Mr. Manny has taken himself a bride and I would like you to go around and see if you can be the maid.
She has a boy she's bringing with her. She's going to need some help.

It's a day in November and I dress up in my
best beige walking dress and go on around to Story Street which is where they have their new house. She's waiting on the porch and takes me inside
and we sit down in the living room and have a talk and she tells me all about her love affair with Mr. Manny and how her son has been against the
marriage but she decided to go on and do it because where they was living in Mississippi he was going to school with a boy that had a Ku Klux Klan suit
hanging in his closet and they had meetings in the yard of the school and no one even told them not to. Rankin County, Mississippi.

Then I tell her all about myself and where I am from and she says are you sure you want to go on being a maid, you seem too smart for
this work and I says yes, that's all I know how to do. She says, well, I can be the maid for a while but I'll have to get some education
part time and let her pay for it because she doesn't believe in people being maids. I've got a lot of machines, she says. You can run the
machines. When would you like to start?

I'll start in the morning, I said. I'll be over around nine.

The next day was Saturday but Miss Crystal hadn't even unpacked all the boxes yet and I wanted to help with that so I'd know
where things were in the kitchen. I got off the streetcar about a quarter to nine and come walking up Story Street and the first person I run into is
King Mallison, junior, Miss Crystal's son by her first marriage. My auntee Mae had already told me what he done at the wedding so I was prepared.
Anyway, there he was, looking like a boy in a magazine, he's so beautiful, look just like an angel. He's out on the sidewalk taking his
bicycle apart. He's got it laid out all over the front yard. It's this new bicycle Mr. Manny gave him for a present for coming to live in
New Orleans.

“I'm Traceleen,” I said. “I'm going to be the maid.”

“I'm King,” he said. “I'm going to be the stepchild.”

So that is how that is and
a week later the bicycle is still all over the front yard and there's about ten more taken apart in the garage and King says he's started a
bicycle repair shop but it turns out it's a bicycle stealing ring and Mr. Manny's going crazy, he thinks he's got a criminal on his
hands and Miss Crystal's second marriage is on the rocks. One catch. By then she is pregnant with Crystal Anne.

Number 2.
This is a long time later. There has been so much going on around here I haven't had time to write any of it down. First of all Miss Crystal got
home from the hospital. I had her room all fixed up with her Belgian sheets and pillowcases and flowers on the dresser and the television at the foot of
the bed so we can watch the stories. She didn't even notice. She was so doped up. What she had from the fall was a brain concussion. So why did
they give her all those pills? I looked it up in Mr. Manny's
Harvard Medical Dictionary
and it said don't give pills to people
that injure their heads.

Then many days went by. Sometimes she would seem as normal as can be. Other days she's having
headaches and swallowing all the pills she can get her hands on. Anytime she wants any more she just call up and yell at a doctor and in a little while
here comes the drugstore truck delivering more pills, Valium and stuff like that. Then she'd sleep a little while, then get up and start talking
crazy and do so many things I can't write them all down. Walk to the drugstore in her nightgown. Call up the President of the United States. Call
up her brother, Phelan, and beg him to come shoot her in the head. Mr. Manny he can't do anything with her because she is blaming him for her fall
and telling him he tried to kill her so he has got to let her do anything she likes no matter what it costs. But I can tell he don't like her
taking all those pills any more than I do.

Meantime King came home from his vacation and start in school. Mr. Manny's having
to help him all the time with his homework. Much as they hate each other they have to sit in there and try to catch King up. All this time he still
hasn't caught up from the school he went to in Mississippi.

Then Miss Crystal she start talking on the phone every day to
this man that is a behaviorist. He's hooked up with this stuff they got going on at Tulane where they are doing experiments on the brain. They got
a way they can hook the brain up with wires and teach you how to make things quit hurting you.

Well, behind all our backs Miss
Crystal she sign up to go down to the Tulane Hospital and take a course in getting her brain wired to stop pain. Then one afternoon after I'm gone
home she get Mrs. Weiss, senior, to come and get Crystal Anne and she goes in a taxi cab and checks herself into this experiment place on Tulane Avenue
and first thing I know about it is Mr. Manny calling me to find out where she's at. Then he calls back and says he's coming to get me and
we're going to this hospital to see what she's up to. King overhears it and he insists on going along.

Here's
what it's like at that place. A Loony Bin. All these sad-looking people going around in pajamas with their heads shaved, looking gray in the face.
Everybody just crazy as they can be. This doctor that was in charge of things looked crazier than anybody and they had Miss Crystal in a room with a
girl that had tried to kill herself. That's where we found her, sitting on a bed trying to talk this girl out of killing herself again. “Oh,
hello,” she said when we came in. “Tomorrow they're going to teach me to stop the headaches. I'm going to do it by willpower.
Isn't that nice, isn't it going to be wonderful.”

“Pack up that bag,” Mr. Manny said.
“You're not staying here another minute, Crystal. This is the end. You don't know what these people might do to you. Come on, pick up
that robe and put it on. We're leaving. We're going away from here.”

“Come on, Momma,” King said. For
once he and Mr. Manny had a common cause. “You can't stay here. The people here are crazy.”

“I don't
care,” she said. She laid back on the bed. “I don't care what happens. I have to stop these headaches. Whatever I have to do.”

“Please come home with us,” I put in. “You don't know what might happen.”

“Momma,” King said. He was leaning over her with his hands on her arms. “Please come home with me. I need you. I need
you to come home.” That did it. He never has to ask her twice for anything. She love him better than anything there is, even Crystal Anne.

“My head hurts so much,” she says. “It's driving me crazy.”

“I know,” he
said. “When you get home I'll rub it for you.” So then she gets up and goes over to the suicide girl's part of the room and
explains why she's leaving and we close up her bag and the four of us go walking down the hall to the front desk. This is one floor of a big tall
building that's the Tulane Medical Center. It's all surrounded by heavy glass walls, this part of the place. About the time we get to the
desk a guard is locking all the doors for the night. Big cigar-smelling man with hips that wave around like ocean waves. Dark brown pants with a big
bunch of keys hanging off the back. Light brown shirt.

“Come on,” he says. “Visitors' hours are over.
You've got to be leaving now.”

“We're taking my wife home,” Mr. Manny says. “She's
checking out.”

“She can't leave without authorization from the physician,” the boy at the desk says.

Miss Crystal's just standing there, this little bracelet on her wrist like a newborn baby. Only she's Miss Crystal. Now
she's getting mad. It had not occurred to her she couldn't leave.

“She's scheduled for surgery in the
morning,” the deskman says. “You'll have to have Doctor Layman here before I can release her.”

“Release her!” Mr. Manny runs a whole law firm. He's not accustomed to anyone telling him what he can do.
“She's not a mental patient. She can leave anytime she damn well pleases.” I look over at King. He's got this look on his face
that anybody that knows him would recognize. Look out when you see him look that way. He's very quiet and his face is real still. The guard has
come over to us now to see what the trouble is. We're standing in a circle, with the crazy patients in their pajamas on chairs in front of a
television, half watching it and half watching us. Then King he walks around behind the guard and takes his keys. So light I couldn't believe what
I was watching. Then he moves closer and reach down and take his gun and back up over beside the television set. “Take her on out of here,
Manny,” he says. “You can pick me up on Tulane in a minute. Go on, Traceleen, go with them.” Mr. Manny, he opens the door and Miss
Crystal and Mr. Manny and I are out in the hall. King, he's standing there like in a movie holding that big old heavy-looking pistol.

Then we're out in the hall and down the elevator and running across Tulane Avenue to the parking lot. And we get into the car and
circle the block and here comes King. He's locked the guard in the Loony Bin and thrown the keys away but he's still got the gun in his
pocket. After all, he was born and raised in Mississippi. Then he's in the car and we are driving down Tulane Avenue. I will never forget that
ride. Miss Crystal's crying her heart out on Mr. Manny's shirt and Mr. Manny and King are so proud of themselves they have forgotten they
are enemies. That isn't the end.

When we got home I put Miss Crystal to bed and Mr. Manny he starts going all over the house
like he's a madman and throws out every pill he can find and then he comes and stands at the foot of Miss Crystal's bed and he says,
“Crystal, get well. Starting right this minute you are not going to take another pill of any kind or call one more goddamn doctor for another
thing as long as you live. I have had it. I have had all I can take.
Do you understand me. Do you understand what I mean?
”

“He's right, Momma,” King says, coming and standing beside him. “We've had all we can take for now.”

WHAT'S a story of this type for?
What's any story for? To make us laugh I guess. Look at Mark, he tells a story, then he just busts out laughing, holding his hand on his knee the
way he do. Mark's my husband, he's so sweet you wouldn't hardly know he is a man. Pick up the front of a Buick with no help. And
sweet, sweet as sugar cane.

Sometimes I start telling a story that's sad and the first thing anybody says is how come? How
come they went and did that way? Nobody says how come when you tell a funny story. They're too busy laughing.

How come? How
come they went and did that way? That don't figure. That don't make no sense. Like Mr. Alter that come and stay with Miss Crystal all
spring, then go home and shoot himself. 1976, I guess we won't forget that year. They wasn't in love either, not Mr. Alter and Miss Crystal.
He was her business partner in that magazine. Francis, she called him. Francis said this and Francis said that. Mr. Manny got sick of hearing it.

Mr. Alter wasn't in love with Miss Denery either, that sleep with him when he was here. He wasn't in love with none of them
that kept calling him up. Oh, he was a pretty man. I can't picture him with holes in his chest. It just don't make a bit of sense. He seem
like such a happy man. Everyone in town calling him up whenever he was here, men and women. He'd just be wore out. He'd say, Traceleen, tell
them I'm not here. Tell Miss Allene I'm taking a nap. Tell Miss Louise I'm gone to the coast.

How could he go and
shoot himself with all those people loving him to death and wanting to talk to him all day? I couldn't blame them. He was the prettiest white man
I ever did see in my life. And strong, strong as Mark. Didn't look like a poet. He looked more like a dock worker. All that curly black hair. And
those big black eyes. Look like he just fill up a room with himself when he come in. Even Mr. Manny couldn't resist him even if he do get sick of
Miss Crystal saying what he said all the time. “Stay another week,” he'd keep saying. “There's nothing going on in the
mountains. Stay with us. Crystal wants you here.” Then Mr. Alter he'd unpack his bag and stay another week. March, April, May.

Miss Crystal, she just adore him. She'd even take care of Crystal Anne just to show off to him what a good mother she was. Mr.
Alter, he loved little children. You didn't ever have to make them leave if he was around. He loved Crystal Anne and would let her rock on his
foot while he talked, she'd hang on to his knee. But the one that loved him the most was King, Miss Crystal's son by her other marriage.
King loved him the hardest of anyone. He started coming straight home after school and doing his homework and reading any book Mr. Alter recommended to
him. He'd read it that day. Then too, Mr. Alter'd take him on walks and adventures. King was fourteen then, just the age for adoring
someone. They went to all the cemeteries around town and made notes on the names for Mr. Alter's poems. They went together to a Martin Luther King
march. And downtown to Ape Day when they had five Planet of the Apes movies in one day. They went to a jazz festival at the Catholic cathedral. All like
that. They had become real close friends. How could you shoot yourself with a young man adoring you and copying every move you make? That's doing
wrong, that's doing very bad even if he was a famous poet. Well, I shouldn't talk so loose like that. I shouldn't be the one to cast
the stones.