Everyday People Page 5
An enemy could be as eternally close as a friend; a feud could make two men brothers for life. Fortunate are those for whom everyone can be turned into a stranger, Auntie Mei thought, but this wisdom she did not share with Paul. He had wanted her only to listen, and she had obliged him.
Chanel, giving more details and making Auntie blush at times, was a better storyteller. She had slept with an older married man to punish her father, who had himself pursued a young woman, in this case one of Chanel’s college classmates. The pregnancy was meant to punish her father, too, but also the man, who, like her father, had cheated on his wife. “He didn’t know who I was at first. I made up a story so that he thought I was one of those girls he could sleep with and then pay off,” Chanel had said. “But then he realized he had no choice but to marry me. My father has enough connections to destroy his business.”
Had she not thought how this would make her mother feel? Auntie Mei asked. Why should she? Chanel replied. A woman who could not keep the heart of her man was not a good model for a daughter.
Auntie Mei did not understand their logic: Chanel’s depraved; Paul’s unbending. What a world you’ve been born into, Auntie Mei said to Baby now. It was past midnight, the lamp in her bedroom turned off. The night-light of swimming ocean animals on the crib streaked Baby’s face blue and orange. There must have been a time when her mother had sat with her by candlelight, or else her grandmother might have been there in the darkness. What kind of future had they wished for her? She had been brought up in two worlds: the world of her grandmother and her mother, and that of everyone else; each world had sheltered her from the other, and to lose one was to be turned, against her wish, into a permanent resident of the other.
Auntie Mei came from a line of women who could not understand themselves, and in not knowing themselves they had derailed their men and orphaned their children. At least Auntie Mei had had the sense not to have a child, though sometimes, during a sleepless night like this one, she entertained the thought of slipping away with a baby she could love. The world was vast; there had to be a place for a woman to raise a child as she wished.
The babies—a hundred and thirty-one of them—and their parents, trusting yet vigilant, had protected Auntie Mei from herself. But who was going to protect her now? Not this baby, who was as defenseless as the others, yet she must protect him. From whom, though: his parents, who had no place for him in their hearts, or Auntie Mei, who had begun to imagine his life beyond the one month allocated to her?
See, this is what you get for sitting up and muddling your head. Soon you’ll become a tiresome oldster like Paul, or a lonely woman like Chanel, telling stories to any available ear. You can go on talking and thinking about your mother and your grandmother and all those women before them, but the problem is, you don’t know them. If knowing someone makes that person stay with you forever, not knowing someone does the same trick: death does not take the dead away; it only makes them grow more deeply into you.
No one would be able to stop her if she picked up Baby and walked out the door. She could turn herself into her grandmother, for whom sleep had become optional in the end; she could turn herself into her mother, too, eating little because it was Baby who needed nourishment. She could become a fugitive from this world that had kept her for too long, but this urge, coming as it often did in waves, no longer frightened her, as it had years ago. She was getting older, more forgetful, yet she was also closer to comprehending the danger of being herself. She had, unlike her mother and her grandmother, talked herself into being a woman with an ordinary fate. When she moved on to the next place, she would leave no mystery or damage behind; no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her.
HIGH PURSUIT
Mitchell S. Jackson
BLOOD PULLS UP in a near-new new Caddie, heaven white, with flesh-colored guts and the white walls on his tires thick as rulers side by side. It’s the kind of ride that hurts my feelings to look at but I can’t keep from looking at it, from hawking him as he parks and cools out wearing a grass-green velour tracksuit—unzipped so you see he’s shirtless—in reptile cowboy boots. He swaggers across the street and up the pathway, the same path that from the time I was a wee bit has been my chore to keep swept and weeded. Like in the few years since he night schooled his way to a diploma, dropped out of the only college for miles, and got booted out the house, he’s become a grownass man who believes in himself so much you can’t convince him not to. He stops just short of the porch and cheeses. I set my magazine (I stay in these custom car magazines) aside and stand.
What it is? he says.
Long time no see, I say.
You can whiff him from a distance. He smooths silky freshpressed strands that make it hard to tell we’re brothers by the head. Aw, Maine, you know, he says. Been out here in high pursuit.
He fingers the thumbthick gold herringbone dressing his neck, peeps Moms’ Plymouth in the driveway. He asks where she is, and I tell him in the house sleep ’cause she’s fresh off a double and said she’s ushering evening service. Blood asks what I’m into, if I’m down to roll, and since it’s my day off, what the fuck am I supposed to say—no? No sooner than we pull off, he turns his 8-track low and gets to highsighting about his Brougham, about how much get-up the engine got, how smooth it drives on the freeway, about how he ain’t yet decided what his custom plate will say. He runs his hand over the fur smothering his steering wheel, fiddles the handmade Playboy logo and forest of spanking-new Evergreen air fresheners hanging from his rearview.
Blood wheels over to the park in North East with the rose garden. Bloomed roses everymuthafuckinwhere and you can’t not smell them if you try. We stride a couple laps in the garden catching up on the latest family business, Pops’ latest appeal, Moms working a trillion double shifts to cover his legal fees, our sister’s firstborn—a baby boy that Blood had yet to see.
Say, you still down there scrubbin them white folks’ rides for a little bit of nothin? Blood says.
They say I’m bout to come up for a raise, I say. Plus, the tips is cool when the weather breaks.
Oh, I beg to differ, Maine. You know I know that elbow-and-ass work ain’t never cool. He pulls out a bankroll that, no bullshit, would choke an Old Testament camel and peels off enough to make me good and envious. Check it, he says. Give some to Mom and say it’s from you. Give some to Sis and say it’s from me. And the rest is fuckoff funds.
Before Blood second-guesses his largesse, I shove the bread in my jeans and tell him, Right on.
We stride another half-lap with him a half-step ahead and me thinking of them days when you used to couldn’t tell me nothing about Blood. How it used to be that if you said something even halfway on its way to being sideways about my older brother to me, it was a prime cause for me going upside your head. How summers you used to couldn’t find me and Blood apart for more than a few ticks: picking berries, building a tree house, stealing ten-speeds. When you saw him coming, you saw me fresh on his heels.
You can hear the hoop court’s chain nets ching every so often, hear kids hollering and whooping on the playground, hear a hooptie in tragic need of a muffler stuttering up the street. Hold up, I say, and touch his shoulder. He swings so we’re facing each other, and I crane so we’re eye to eye. Allbullshitaside, I say. Is it really that sweet?
Aw, Maine, it’s a toothache, he says. I tell you no lies.
• • •
Before visions of high-profile pimpin and flaunting, flaunting around North East in a Caddie, Blood pushed an AMC Pacer and worked graveyards at EastWest Janitorial. Can’t tell you how many mornings he’d slump home smelling fetid as fuck with the whites of his eyes the color of industrial cleaner, then one morning—memorable even more for it being my first day at the car wash—he stomped into the attic room he and I shared, snatched the nametag off his work shirt, slammed it on the floor, and stomped that joint to shards. They can have this shit, Maine, he said. They can have this shit forever.
; Quit bullshittin. You ain’t quittin, is you? I said. What you gone do now?
What I shoulda been did, he said. What I was born to do, he said. Check it, a nigga done lived his everlast day on his knees.
The next evening Moms, who was weeks into ushering first and second Sunday services, called devotion, and Blood dawdled into the living room long after me and Sis stood smug over our circle.
Well, have a seat, Moms said.
With all due respect, Mama, not tonight, he said. Not tomorrow night neither. Matter fact, no more nights.
What? Moms said, and called him by his full name. What’s this foolishness?
Foolishness? he said. Seem to me like foolishness is us down here every odd evening, praising the same God that let a white man put Pops in the penitentiary.
Moms, all the mirth sucked out her face, stood taller than I’d seen in life. So, I guess you got your heart set on being a heathen, huh? she said. God knows I can’t stop you. But I tell you what: you won’t do it livin here.
Blood tramped upstairs and made racket rummaging. He came back down an hour or so later, hefting a dingy duffel and a suitcase. He floated over and gave my shoulder a squeeze. He kissed Sis square in her forehead and went to hug Moms, but she crossed her arms, huffed, and gave him her back. He loaded his car alone in quiet, told us, Love is love, bid us a beauty contestant’s wave, and eased the front door shut. Nam one of us saw him again till after the New Year flipped.
In retrospect, Blood’s defiance was a declaration—to his damn self, to Moms, to the world, a stance that, truth be told, made him a hero to me, too, made me question whenif my nuts would ever swell that size, if I could summon the daring to seize from the world what I wanted, to proclaim who I am as this bitch keeps spinning.
• • •
Got the munchies something vicious, so I tramp down to the corner store on the corner of Union Ave and Failing. From a block or so off, I spy some broads standing against the wall, all of them in bikini tops, skirts cut so high you don’t have to work to see their prize, and heels too tall for sure footing. See a car pull curbside and the girls scramble to the window and barter not more than a hot minute before one of them hops in, and the driver eases off as if what just went down was on the up and up. The unchosen totter back to the side of the building. This, mind you, is nothing I ain’t witnessed under moonlight, but under a bright sun—well, that’s something else. It’s damn near stunning, and moreso when I behold who I’d trade a lung to unsee—my ex, my one love. The best advice is to mind my motherfucking business, but see that’s the thing about advice, though: we need somebody to give it to us. Ill-advised, I slug over to where she stands. She straightens her skirt and bra top, seeming about as happy to see me as she would be to see the police.
Nah, no, no, I say. Not you too. What you doin out here?!
She smacks her bright red kissing lips, waves a hand.
You out here like this? I say. How this happen?
She huffs. Just like you to be askin how, when what you need to be askin why, she says.
She’s the one. Let me fingerfuck freshman year, pop her cherry—quiet as it’s kept, popped mine too—when we was sophomores. The one that tutored me through a math class I wouldn’t have passed in this life or the next without her. Was game for us wearing matching outfits to house parties. Was my date for homecomings and prom. We broke up last summer—I’d cheated her into tears for the last time; not too long after, I waltzed across the stage with my diploma in hand, and though I’ve heard rumors since, I ain’t had the heart to ask. This close, I can see she’s wearing a cheap wig, that there’s a scar on her cheek that she’s tried to mask with blush. C’mon, I say, and grab her by her bony wrist. We leavin.
She jerks free with strength, peers into my bony chest, and judges, as has been her gift, my percent of punk—too high. We ain’t goin nowhere, she says. Unless you is payin.
• • •
While Moms pulls a swing shift, me and a couple of my patnas pass a J of homegrown and watch welterweights trade haymakers on the old console a crew of us moved upstairs once Pops began his bid. The blather champ among us gets to bickering with me about who’s up on the scorecards, and in the midst of our back-and-forth, Blood flaunts upstairs wearing a silk shirt, slacks, reptile boots, a Cubanlink chain, and a fucking gold nugget watch.
What it is? he says.
Can’t call it, I say.
He lazes on the couch beside me and asks if he can blow with us. When the J reaches him on its circuit, he pulls deep, holds it and holds it, exhales a cloud, waits and waits, and shakes his head. Well, I’ll be goddamned! Y’all down here puffin bunk, he says, and digs Zig-Zags and the fattest gram bag in all the world from a pocket. He opens it, tells me to smell, and I scent myself good and covetous. When it reaches him again, he rolls—Blood’s a twisting phenom—a tumescent J on the shoebox top we keep near for the cause. He admires his handiwork from up close. He sucks a lungful and, beats later, coughs like he might got TB. Now that, he says. That right there’s some killer.
He passes it to me, and I know in a pulse he ain’t in the least bit overstating the truth. By the time the judges announce the fight’s final scorecards, I’m high as dying stars and paranoid Moms will rush home early from her shift and, instead of, per her norm, calling from the base, will stomp upstairs, condemn my patnas into purgatory, and make me the latest and last of whom she bore bounced permanent out the house. Blood rolls another pregnant J, seeming oblivious about this prospect. But why shouldn’t he be, when, as far as any of us can tell, he’s making it happen?
Shit, I’m the one life’s happening to.
One of my patnas asks to see Blood’s watch, and he unclasps it and tosses it to him. My patna runs his fingers over the ridges, smashes it against his ear, measures the weight in his palm. What’s this shit, solid gold or somethin? he says. This shit heavy as a motherfucka.
Pimp tools, Blood says. These hoes out here choosin.
We awe Blood’s gold glory between us and back to him. He cuffs his sleeve and fastens it back on his wrist. Another patna asks how Blood got in the game and he mentions this old head he met at an after-hours spot, explains how the old head took a liking to him, said he was a natural, started putting him up on game.
What he tell you? my sycophantic patna asks. Yeah, what he say? another one chimes, because we’re all, in our own way, waiting on a blueprint, or else a rescue plan.
Blood hops up and struts in front of the TV. He turns the sound almost mute. Say, Maine, this grade A is sold. Never pro bono, he says. So, if anyone of y’all so much as check a nickel, you owe me cents. He hits the J, breaths a troposphere, cough-sneezes, and knocks his fist against his chest. First off, it’s rules to this shit, he says. And the first rule is ain’t no such thing as halfhearted pimpin. Rule number two, ain’t no love nowhere in it. When the game begins, friendship ends. Keep it purse first and ass last always, he says. Keep a ho in arrears and do it with this here, he says, and touches his temple. Keep it head down, hand out. And don’t turn down nothin but your collar, he says. Earn a name in the game but don’t black-eye it with that gorilla shit, he warns. Tell a ho, you’re in high pursuit of a new prostitute. Tell her, let your next move be your best move. That you don’t need her, you want her. That it ain’t a force thing, it’s a choice thing. Stay ten toes down and it’s greater later. Say, Maine, it’s rules to this shit, he says. Blood leans against the TV, flashes his pearl white voltage at us lackeys. Whatever you do, don’t neva let it slip your mind that pimp is what you do and who you are.
You really believe that shit? I say.
Say, Maine, we believe what we want to, he says. Get it how you live.
• • •
It’s the first dry day after days of rain, rain, rain, and cars are marathoning off the line, so if I play it right, I can bop home with a pocketful of singles at shift’s end. This, though, depends on outhustling, by bounds, the white boy that, most days, no matter how tough I scrub,
buff, simper, clocks a grip more tips than me. The belt conveys a Buick off the line and I hustle to it quick-fast, hedging that, since it’s a latemodel, there’s, forthcoming, a brag-worthy tip for a proper wipe and shine. Hopeful that is, until I see baldface, highbooty, feels-cursed-cause-he’s-a-nigger type, gump over and linger beside it. He fiddles his belt turning his khakis to floods, straightens his geek glasses, crosses the arms of a buttondown buttoned at his throat—in effect dashing all hope of more than a few coins for my effort. But I go at it with grit anyhow, because you never can be sure till you’re done. Plus, I ain’t trying to give the manager forever-threatening-to-suspend-me-for-petty-shit even a hint of just cause.
Once I finish, I turn my towel into a white flag and dude stalks a lap around his ride. His second go-round, he swings open a door and swipes the jamb and holds his finger close enough to me to, in most other circumstances, warrant me slapping his face clean the fuck off.
Is this what you call done? he says.
Sorry about that, sir, I say, and the next moment want to shove my fist in my mouth for sounding like a punkass lickspittle. He hovers while I rewipe the jambs. How’s that? I say.
How’s what? he says. He ducks inside and plucks a phantom mote off his floor mat. The motherfucka complains of smudges on the paint, streaks on the windows, dust on the dash, dirt on the license plate, a pebble in his spokes, an ash tray that still smells faint of ashes.
Moms preaches a man who don’t work is a washout, a burden, and since I’m loath to be her latest proof, I stoop to rub this and that and trail this low-octane sucka as he gestures at smashed bugs on his bumper and fender and tar on the car’s underbelly that no amount of scrubbing will clean. He points to another complaint and I take a knee in the wet gravel and feel sharp pebbles gouge my skin. Sheesh, what do I have to do to get decent service around here? he says.