Here is a sneak peek into Stories from the Afterlife (Press 53) due out in November 2007.
Trigger Finger
Thirteen and pregnant. Fact of it is, she’s a wild child. I’d guess she’s five months gone, but a little looks like a lot on her stick frame. There she is, not ten feet away from me, lying on the concrete stoop in this July heat on her side, looking asleep but her eyes are open. Not a word when I say hello. She’s wearing white shorts and a red halter top, belly like a big peach poking over her waistband. There’s a plate with some bread crusts sitting a few inches in front of her face, like someone thought to feed her like a dog. Her head rests on the crook of one of her bony arms. A fat black fly lands on a crust. She doesn’t shoo it, but it takes off anyway in a dizzy circle and lands on her hip. It’s still there when I go back inside from smoking my cigarette.
There’s four of them living up in that little apartment—the girl, her brother, her mother, and her mother’s boyfriend, though he’s only there sometimes, so maybe he doesn’t count. At first, I wondered where they all slept—did one of the kids get the couch? But lately it seems to me they never sleep. Screaming and crying at all hours, doors slamming, things flung against walls. The whole damn building shaking. I never knew white people could be so loud.
Like tonight. Or this morning, call it. I wake up at three-thirty to a cat meowing, more like howling, just outside my window. I figure it to be one of those strays living in the woods behind my apartment, and I pull my robe over my nightgown and come down the hall to the linen closet, where I also keep my broom and mop. I get the broom and round the corner to the living room, planning to go out the front door and come around the side of the house to knock the thing off my window. That window is painted shut, so there’s no other way to do it. Going out at this hour of the night, combined with having to confront some animal, when I’m not an animal person, makes my skin tingle all over.
But when I get to the living room, the sound shifts, and I realize it wasn’t coming through my window but the wall between my apartment and the neighbors. At first, because I’m still half-asleep, I think one of the cats must’ve somehow gotten in between the walls, like squirrels can do. They’re skinny enough. But when it wails again, I know it’s not any cat at all, but the girl. It’s got to be her. I step closer, between my TV and armchair, to listen. I hear a thump low on the wall, and I realize she’s leaning against it, maybe sitting on the floor. I put my hand to the wall when she cries again, a low moan, and I wonder if she’s gone into labor. That’d be the best thing for her, ask me; her hips don’t seem wide enough to pass a newborn’s head. When her moan starts again, I tap the wall, just three times, right where I think her head might be. The sound stops. I don’t hear anything for a minute. Then a rustle as she moves away.
I sit there listening, but I can’t figure what I’d do if I heard anything more. If I call the cops, they’d know it was me. The apartment on the other side of them is empty. I’m too awake to get back in bed, so I turn on the TV with the sound low. Crazy, I think. It could’ve been the mother crying. But the whine was too high, like a child. Any woman who’s had her own baby would know that sound.
It’s almost dawn by the time I fall asleep on the couch, and then I only get an hour or two. By the time Louis pulls around back in his Jeep Cherokee, I’ve had a shower, coffee and a couple aspirin, but my head aches almost as bad as when I still drank.
“Whyn’t you call me?” he says, which is what he always says when I complain. He has to duck his head to step through the door. He’s near a foot taller than me. I’ve always liked big men; and he’s that: arms as thick as my thighs, a huge chest and a heavy jaw. White people’s scared to death of him. You’d think he could have some fun with that, but it’s brought him trouble. So he moves cheerful as you please through a store or a parking lot, especially at night. He nods at everyone he sees. He doesn’t wear no trashy gangster clothes. He knows I’m not the only woman in town with a gun. He knows all it’d take is some white woman thinking he aims to rape her and his black ass could be blown away.
I’ve been raped. I know what to be scared of. For me it was four white guys jumping me when I got off from a waitress job, sixteen years old. They broke a bottle and shoved it up in me and left me to bleed to death. But I didn’t.
I take a look through the front window to see if Miss Pregnant is holding court on the stoop again. No one there. “You want to get in the middle of other people’s problems?”
“I’d set ‘em straight.”
He’s shutting the door behind him and locking it, they way I like it, chain and all. I look up at him, ready to say he must be crazy; if they’s that bad to each other, what’s he think they’ll do to him? But when he turns around, he’s smiling, and he opens his arms and I step into them, and he smells like soap and cologne, and I think, like I almost always do at least once every time I’m with him, that all the things that have happened in my life, even some of the worst, have led me to him. He is my reward on earth.
Louis wants me to go with him to see how some carpet samples look in his house. He bought it after a wall fell on him at a construction site and broke his back. He got a lawyer, and the lawyer figured out someone hadn’t bolted the wall right, which was against code. He paid off his mother’s house, too, and still had some to put in the bank. He’s doing all right. Now he only limps when he’s tired.
“I’ve been talking to Sarah about her moving out,” he says once we’re driving. He doesn’t look at me because he knows this is a sore point. Almost as soon as he bought that house, his sister started begging to move in with her three kids. Just for a while, she told him. Here she was between jobs, all alone. Like her husband left her yesterday instead of before the first kid was even born. Like those other two kids by two different men don’t say something about why she can’t get a man now. And then she’s all the time whining about how high the utilities are, when she doesn’t even pay a dime in rent.
Meanwhile, here Louis is, living with his mama. What good is having a house if you can’t even live in it? But. The only reason he came back down here at all was because he’d split from his wife. If he hadn’t been working down here, that wall wouldn’t have fallen on him, and maybe he wouldn’t have called me. That’s what I think about when I remember how the phone rang one evening and, when I answered, he said in that voice I’d never forgotten, that voice like honey pouring over wood, “What’s happening, Lullaby?” No one else ever called me that. I hadn’t heard from him in thirty years.
I pull myself back to the moment. “She gonna do it?”
He nods, winks at me. “What colors you like anyway?” he asks, and there can be no mistaking what all this is adding up to. I think of the twenty-odd years I’ve lived alone, since I came back from detox when my son was ten. I think of all the times I wondered what happened to Louis after he left. Most women would fall all over a man like him. Maybe I should count myself lucky. But mostly I just feel nervous.
“You ought to get those kids out before you put down any new carpet.”
Louis rolls his eyes and shakes his head. He knows where this talk can go. Part of the reason he let his sister live in his house all this time was because until just before he looked me up, he was driving up to Jersey whenever he could, even with his back on fire, trying to get back together with Karina. Maybe he hoped his broken back would make her take pity. Maybe he hoped his daughters would beg him to stay. He hoped wrong.
But from the corner of my eye, I can see him today just as he was, Tony’s sweet-faced cousin who brought Cedric and me food when Tony had left us on one of his drunks. Out in that shack, in those dark woods. Sometimes he’d stay past when I put Cedric to bed. Then he might pull out some beer or some shine, and we’d drink it warm out on that rickety front porch, moonlight slipping through the seams of the roof. He never tried to touch me. But I wanted him to. The drink took me out of my body, which I guess I always wanted some kind of escape from, after what had happened to me. Louis knew, but he never said. He never said, and he never touched me, and I always thought that was why.
“That girl next door,” I say when we turn down the road to his—his sister’s—house. “She’s pregnant.” I wasn’t sure before. But seeing her yesterday, there was no doubt. It’s like her belly popped out all at once.
“That little kid?” he says, frowning as slows for the driveway. He’s seen her horsing around. He called her stray cat, like those ones out back that scatter when I put out the trash, shooting like flame over the gravel.
“She was laying out on the front stoop all day. You missed it.”
“Somebody ought to call Social Services,” Louis says.
“Louis, that girl was sashaying up and down the street like she was selling it from Day One. It was bound to happen.” I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I know how the world works. If a woman—or a girl—shakes it around like she’s offering, someone’s bound to take her up on it. May not be fair, but it’s the way things are.
But Louis is probably thinking of his daughters up there in Jersey, maybe with too much time on their hands while their momma’s working. He parks and cuts the engine. “Ain’t no girl that age know what she’s getting herself into. The law says she was raped even if she tore off her clothes and begged for it. You know that. You should call.”
I unbuckle my seatbelt slow, just to have something to do to calm myself. I don’t know why this is getting to me. Maybe it’s because he seems to think I believe this girl deserves what happened to her. I don’t believe that anymore than I think I deserved it. Maybe it’s how he said You know that, like since I was foolish enough to let myself get jumped, I should be an expert on these things now.
“Maybe she wants the baby,” I snap as Louis gets out. He comes around to my side to help me out, because it’s a long way down for me. His fingertips are warm on my wrists. “Anyway,” I say, “too late to do anything about it.”
Louis presses his lips together as he opens the back end of the Jeep. I feel weak somehow. Why don’t I even want to make a phone call for this girl? Maybe because she’s white, so in my opinion she’s got a hell of a lot more going for her without doing anything. And she’s so sullen-looking. Like she don’t want my help or anyone’s. But then I hear myself telling Louis I’ll call. He smiles then, pulling out those carpet samples. He asks me if I can carry a couple, and I say yes. Sometimes I think that’s all I can say to him: yes, yes, yes.
I follow him up the front walk, and already I’m irritated again. Plastic toys all over the place, dirt patches in the lawn. He rings the doorbell, which I think is a shame, him having to ask permission to come in his own house.
Sarah’s oldest, Nico, opens up. “Uncle Louie here!” he screams over his shoulder, and then he runs off, leaving us standing there with the door open.
Louis waits for me to go in first, and then he steps inside behind me. The grimy vinyl in the foyer makes me mad, and the crooked furniture, and the dishes all over the breakfast table in the kitchen. It’s not like it’s my house, but maybe I’m already seeing it that way. Watch yourself, I think.
His sister calls out from the back. “I’m getting dressed!” Nico comes flying down the hallway again, followed by Thomas. I guess the baby must be sleeping, if that’s possible with all the shrieking. The boys jump on Louis at the same time, one on each leg. He drops the carpet squares to the floor and walks around like Frankenstein, growling and reaching down to tickle them, until they fall off and roll on their backs, laughing. They’re almost cute like that, but when they look at me, I narrow my eyes to make sure they keep their distance. They jump on him again.
“Go on out,” he says, lurching over to the sliding glass doors that open onto the little patio in back. “Go on and I’ll be out in a minute.” Somehow those kids listen to him. They sure as hell don’t listen to Sarah. Louis bends, reaching for one of the squares, and then straightens, pressing at the bottom of his spine with both hands.
“You shouldn’t be doing that crazy stuff with those kids,” I say. I reach down before he has the chance to try again and I spread each square out. They’re all shades of beige, but one is grayish, one has some pink, one is more yellow, and one is a little green.
I know immediately that I like the gray one best, but I straighten up and walk back and forth looking at them, trying to act like none of them really appeal.
“Take off your shoes,” he says.
“What?”
He catches me looking down the hall. “What you worried about?” He puts the toe of his left shoe up against the heel of his right and steps out of it. “You can’t pick out carpet without walking on it in your bare feet.” He gets his other shoe off and then sits on the end of the couch to peel off his socks.
I wonder if he’s gone crazy. “I’m not taking off my panty hose, now.”
“Close enough,” he says. He tries out my favorite one first. I step out of my navy pumps and put them up against the wall before testing the carpet. I try the pinkish one first, the one I like least. It reminds me of the color of Carrie’s belly. I put both feet on it and think of her crying the night before, like some kind of trapped animal. I look up to clear my head from all of that and I see Louis grinning back at me. “That’s gonna feel mighty fine on my toes, when I get up to make your coffee in the morning,” he says.
And for the only time since I’ve met her, I’m glad to see Sarah coming into the room just then so I don’t have time to respond. She’s nineteen years younger than Louis, a change-of-life baby. I guess their momma and daddy gave up trying, and then she came along, and they were so happy to have her that they spoiled her, so she always expected to be taken care of. Louis was like another daddy to her. When he took her around with him, people thought he was her daddy. Maybe that was how he knew to take care of me and Cedric, because of her. She’s two years older than Cedric and still dressing like a teenager. It makes me wonder if young women today have any sense at all.
“Where the boys?” she says without even a hello. She’s not trying to be rude, she just doesn’t have any manners. Maybe her momma tried; it just didn’t take.
“They outside. Which one you like best?” he asks her, and I can’t stop myself; I look at him, mouth open. Why in the hell would he be asking her? Louis tries to save himself, saying, “You ladies are better at this kind of thing,” like he’d actually meant to ask the both of us. I don’t even pretend to care. I slip my shoes on while Sarah touches a finger to her chin with a frown on her face like she’s picking out a million-dollar ring, and I walk over to the sliding glass doors, watching the boys trying to hook up a yellow sprinkler to the hose so they can cool off. I can feel the heat through the glass.
“I think this one,” she says in that squeaky girl-voice of hers, like she’s scared someone might mistake her for a grownup. I take my time before I turn around, and there she is, grinning, perched on the pink square, kneading it with her bare toes like a kitten.
It doesn’t make me feel any better that, judging from the look on Louis’ face, he doesn’t like that one, either. Maybe it looked better in the showroom, but then you get it out in the real light of day, and you see it won’t work. I say, “I think that looks cheap.” I get my pocketbook strap up over my shoulder—I never even put it down the whole time we were there—and walk out the front door without even a glance at either of them.
I know I’ve just given Sarah and her momma years of things to talk about, mainly what an uppity bitch I am, and how, seeing what I come from, I ought to behave myself. His momma is nice enough to me but she’d rather Louis be with Karina, where her grandchildren are. But I don’t care. The thing propelling me to the door is the idea of that pink carpet covering the floors of this house. I can see Louis letting her pick it out just like he’s let her stay long past her welcome. And she’s not moving anytime soon; the place is just as stuffed with junk as it always has been since I first saw it.
To his credit, Louis doesn’t take long to get out the door after me. “What’s wrong with you, baby?” he says, following me to the car.
“We ready to go yet?”
“Hey, now.” He puts his hands on my shoulders to stop me. He turns me to him. “What got into you?”
“Don’t you talk to me like I’m some child,” I say. “I see what’s going on. That woman’s never leaving this place.”
“What?”
“You see any boxes up in there?”
Louis looks down at me, truly confused, his hands still on my shoulders, and I wonder if I dreamed what he said about her leaving. “That woman is my sister,” he says quietly, still with that tone like I’ve disappointed him, the way my father sounded when I told him I was going to marry Tony.
“That’s right,” I say, stepping away from his arms. “She’s your sister. Not your child. You don’t have to let her run you.”
Louis looks at the house and then at me, shaking his head. “She don’t run me.”
“I give it two weeks and that pink shit is going to be all over the place.”
He laughs. “Is that what this is all about? A color?”
“If you think that, you done lost your mind. What do you want from me anyway? Talking about making me coffee every morning, but you don’t even have a place to live, and all I’ve got to reach you is a cell phone. You might as well be something I made up. I felt that way from the first time you called me.”
I look back at the house. Louis left the front door cracked, like he planned to go back in there. Let him do it, I think. I’ll start walking. And I don’t care what Sarah hears.
“Lullaby,” he says, doing what he can to reach me. “I’m real.”
“Then tell me this, because it’s something I don’t know, so I can’t make it up.”
I’ve got his attention now. He nods, waiting.
“Why did you call me?”
He takes a step toward me, and I take a step back. I hear the hiss of the sprinkler, the boys shrieking out back. He pulls his keys out of his pocket. “How about we just go.”
“What, you don’t want to tell me?”
“I don’t want to go through this whole thing out in the yard.”
“I don’t either,” I tell him. “But we can’t go inside your house, can we?”
Louis pinches the top of his nose, right between his eyes. There’s sweat above his eyebrows and on his chin. I like that, seeing him trying to think of what to say. “After I broke my back, I started thinking about you.”
He’s said this kind of thing before, about how having something like that happen to you can change your life. So I’m waiting for more, because I know all about that. Being sliced open and left for dead changes you, too—I could say it, but I don’t want those white trash, who for all I know are within a mile of me at this very moment, to even get breathed into the air.
Louis says, “When you’re laying up in traction you have time to think about every single day you’ve lived. If you could remember being born I would’ve done it. And I got to thinking how you used to joke about your trigger finger. You remember that? When you broke your thumb right after Cedric was born?”
“Tony broke it,” I say, my voice tight in my throat.
He looks at the ground. “You said, ‘As long as my trigger finger’s working, I’m OK.’ You remember?”
“Yes,” I breathe, rather than say. My dress is sticking to my back.
“Well, I kept thinking about that. That’s why I called.”
I’m back thirty years again, sitting on that porch in the cool of the night with him, so dark we couldn’t see each other’s faces. The night he first called me Lullaby. Because my eyes looked sleepy, he said. He didn’t know they were just swollen, still bruised, caked over with makeup I made from clay and spit. And how I loved him for what he didn’t know, sitting close enough to touch on that step, balancing a bottle on his knee, but never so much as touching me, so I could’ve dreamed him even then.
But the woman I am now is present, too. And she wonders how it took a year between Louis remembering me making fun of my broken bones, and then finally calling me on that rainy night. “You were still trying to get her back,” I said, thinking of Karina’s smile in the picture he has in his wallet even now, the smile of a woman who knows she’s beautiful. “You took me only when you knew what you couldn’t have.”
Louis touches his mouth with both hands, as if wiping away the first thing he was going to say. He drops his arms to his sides. “Woman, I never took you. I asked for you. Now, I need to know what you want from me. You want me to deny my past life and my family? That’s just not possible. You want me to love you, then you have me.”
There is nothing left in me except this flash of rage that it wasn’t him I saw at church that one Sunday, after I’d mostly healed from the rape and wasn’t limping anymore, that it had to be Tony instead, who I’d known and been scared of all my life. That Louis’ family had to choose another church, that our children couldn’t be ours together. The rage chokes me, takes my words away, even the blood from my legs, so I have to lean against him when he puts his arm around me and walks me to the car.
It’s not fifteen minutes later, Louis is driving us to get lunch, when he starts sneaking a smile at me every few seconds.
“What?”
He says, “You and that carpet. Pink shit. Lord help me.”
We laugh all afternoon. We don’t worry about the noise, making love in my bedroom in the middle of the day. Later, I ask him which carpet he liked best. “I liked the gray one,” he says, and I say, “Me too,” and that seems like a good sign.
I call Social Services the next morning. There’s a separate number if you think a child is being abused or neglected—what’s the difference? I give what I know—her first name, her age, the other people in the apartment. I give the address. I tell about the late-night yelling and banging. “She’s out on the street a lot,” I tell the flat-voiced woman. “She goes around begging cigarettes and who knows what else.” The only thing I don’t tell is about the night before, when I heard her crying. Maybe that’s because right then I’m thinking of Cedric, and how one morning when I woke up on the floor, my face aching from a beating and from the drink I’d taken to ease the pain, he had curled his two-year-old body into mine and was crying so hard I knew he’d had to have been at it for hours. That child whine, yes, I know it.
The woman says they’ll send someone out but she doesn’t say who, or when. It could be weeks. It could be cops or some lone do-gooder with a notebook. The not knowing makes me more nervous than having called in the first place.
I hang up and call Louis on his cell to tell him I did it. He tells me he’s going to stop by his house and pick up the carpet samples, which we forgot after our fight and all the making up, and then he’s going see his mechanic because there’s something wrong with his Jeep. He says he’ll come over after they get it done.
“I’ll fix you dinner,” I say, and he says OK, and I can hear the smile in his voice. But the next thing I hear after we hang up is people moving around next door. I decide to get out and take the bus over to the mall, and then I ride to the grocery store to pick up a few things. By the time I get back, it’s about time to start cooking.
I’m putting away my groceries when there’s a knock on the door. I know it can’t be Louis because I would’ve heard the Jeep. I look through the peephole, and it’s the girl, holding the screen open with her hip. I stand there, trying to decide. Calm down, I tell myself. Social services can’t be running any one-day turn-around.
She knocks again. She says through the door, “I just want a cigarette.”
I open up partway. “I don’t have any.”
She shifts her weight from one skinny flank to the other. “You just went to the store. I saw the bags.”
I take in the fact that she’s been watching my comings and goings. “You know you shouldn’t be smoking with a baby,” I say finally. I wonder what Louis would do right now. Maybe he’d just come right out with it. Who raped you?
“This baby ain’t going anywhere ‘til it’s ready,” she says. She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t bop and fidget like most teenaged girls. Something in her is dead still.
“You don’t know that.”
Her eyes flick away from mine. “You never smoked with your babies?”
“One.”
“Thanks,” she says, thinking I mean I’ll give her one.
“No, I mean I had one, a boy,” I said. “And yes, I smoked. But that was back before they knew it was bad. You want to keep it?”
“What the hell else am I supposed to do?”
I look at her for a moment. I want to slap her for two reasons. One, because I hate rude kids, especially when they’re up in my house begging. And two, if I’d ever talked that way, I sure as shit would have been slapped.
“You could’ve gotten rid of it.”
“My mother won’t go for that.”
“But she’s OK with you messing around?”
“I didn’t mess around,” she says, eyes shiny as glass, chin out, teeth gritted. Her turn to get mad. Fine by me. I didn’t ask her to come over.
“Well, all it takes is once,” I say. “But I guess you know that now.” I reach for my new pack, because I'm ready to get rid of her, and then she starts laughing.
“I wish,” she says, when I shake one out and hand it to her. She’s laughing so hard her belly jiggles up and down. “I fucking wish.”
She slams the door behind her, maybe to shut out whatever I’d have to say to that. I listen for her back door to open and shut, but it doesn’t. After a minute, I lock the back and go out the front. I can smell where she is from the smoke; she’s standing with her back against the end of the building, right under my bedroom window. When I come around the corner, she jumps, her shoulders shrugging up. I ask her what her name is. She takes her time answering, trying not to show I scared her. “Carrie.”
I say, “That was me, tapping last night.”
She drags on the cigarette and blows out again, her face as blank as a wall. I could not even be standing there. “How old is your son?”
“Thirty-three.” So now I know, because she’s pretended not to hear what I said, that it was her, sitting on the floor with her back to that thin wall, crying.
“He married?”
“No.” I want to stop there but I keep going. “He’s got two kids though, by two different mothers.” I’m not sure what I mean by telling her that. Maybe so she knows she can’t trap a man with a baby. I hate to use my son as an example. I love him. But the only person he ever stuck by is Tony, who’s living in Section Eight these days and waiting on his EBT card to roll over each month. I could tell him about how his daddy beat me to the floor and kicked me in the stomach until I passed out when I was five months gone with him. How he left us to starve out there in the woods. But he knows that; he was there. And he also remembers the years I left him with his great-aunt while I went to Atlanta, first to get away from Tony, and then to dry out. He remembers how, when I came back, still shaking, he was ten years old and had no idea who I was.
Carrie stubs her cigarette in the ground. “Well, I’m not getting married,” she says.
“Maybe you will.”
“No.” She lifts her chin, looking up past me, past the fat, sunlit leaves. “Someday I’ll live in a tent and go swimming in the ocean every day. That’s the way it’ll be.”
She walks back toward her apartment in no particular hurry. From behind you can’t even tell she’s pregnant unless you knew to look for that thickness over the hips.
When I get back inside, the phone is ringing. I’m happy that it’s Louis, but then I can tell from the way he’s talking fast that something’s wrong.
“Wait a minute,” I say, turning down the TV. “Start over.”
“She didn’t pay the taxes. The house is in default.”
“Well, just pay them.” I think about giving him the money if he needs it, but then I decide that’s gonna depend on Sarah getting out. I didn’t save all those years working at this and that job just to hand over money to support that girl.
“You’re not getting it.”
“All right, explain it to me.”
He tells me that when he went to get the carpet samples, the mailman had just come, so he decided to take the mail in. Then he saw the notice marked “URGENT” from the county tax department and opened it while waiting for Sarah to come to the door.
“It said they are gonna evaluate the house for auction to pay the past due taxes because the taxes are over a certain percent of the value.”
“You just need to go down there and work something out with them,” I say as I unwrap the chicken and wash it. I should be sharing in his worry, but right then I’m actually happy. That bitch is going to be gone from that house. Out of there, I’m thinking.
“I went down there and they wouldn’t even talk to me. The person I’m supposed to see ain’t in. So now I’m at the garage and the guy’s telling me they might need to keep the damn thing overnight.”
“You can get in to talk to someone tomorrow, I’m sure. They want their taxes more than they want your house. How you gonna get home?”
He says he doesn’t know. His mother doesn’t have a car, and of course I don’t either. After making it all those years in the woods with no car, I figured I could handle town. “What about Sarah?” I say just as sweet as you please. “She owes you a favor about now.”
“I can’t get her to save my life. I left her at the house, bawling her eyes out. I’ve been calling her there, I’ve called her cell, I’ve called Momma to see if she’s gone over there.” He sounds more than nervous; his breathing is funny. “Momma’s all upset, wailing and all. She’s about to have a stroke.”
I sit there and try to think. I keep going back to the taxes. “What did they want you to do? Pay by a certain date?”
“I told you it’s past that, long past.” His voice sounds strangled. “The letter was talking about a hearing that happened last week.”
“They can’t send you something about a hearing after the fact. Now that’s just crazy.” I’m about to say that he just needs to leave his car and get someone to bring him on over here, and we’ll talk it out. I decide I’ll give him the money he needs, whatever he needs, no strings, although I bet he’s going to get Miss Sarah out of there so fast it’ll make her little head spin. Let her move in with momma for a while, see how she likes it. Might be some birth control for her, even. “Listen,” I say, but Louis cuts me off.
“They sent it weeks ago. She just let it sit in the box. Can you believe that?”
I decide it won’t help to say that yes, I surely can. “Louis. Get your car if it’ll drive. Come over here. We can take care of this.”
He tells me he’ll catch a ride with one of the mechanics if his car isn’t ready by the end of the day, and I say OK, and then I start getting ready. I light candles and put on some smooth jazz. I make a marinade for the chicken and cut up my fattest red tomatoes for a salad, and I remember the nights, years ago, when he brought me food and comforted me when I thought the world had spit me out, and I feel warm in my chest thinking that now I can do the same for him. We can save each other on this earth, I want to tell him.
At six, I figure Louis will be here soon; the garage probably doesn’t stay open past then. I put on perfume and take a little time with my makeup and push my hair back from my face with two combs. By the time I’m dressed, I can hear some action next door. The older brother must be home because he’s blaring his rap music; I don’t know why the mother doesn’t do something about that. Course, she might like it herself. While I’m in the kitchen putting rolls on a pan, I see Carrie and her mother coming home in their blue Buick with the back bumper missing. Her mother is just a taller, wider version of Carrie. The mother gets out and heads straight for the back door, not even a look at Carrie, who is moving slow, holding onto the car door frame before pushing it shut. Her mouth is pinched, her face turned into itself, like she’s sleepwalking.
I turn the chicken in its marinade. I wonder if I should go ahead and get it cooking or wait. I turn on the evening news and watch the day’s car accidents and crimes while checking the front window every few minutes. By seven, I’m getting irritated. I don’t want to call Louis because I believe he should call me—what’s wrong with men and phones? Do they just never learn to use them, like how they can’t ever seem to write decent?
When I finally call, my stomach’s growling and I’m fuming. “Louis, after you calling me all upset you ought to tell me what’s going on here. Where are you?” I hang up. Sometimes his cell doesn’t ring but then he gets the voicemail because it starts chirping. I give it fifteen minutes and try again. “Louis, I am worried about you. Call me now.”
After another hour, with the dark gathering in the trees across the street, I’m so mad I feel like crying. There have been times when he hasn’t called me back until the next day, but never when we had plans. Didn’t we have plans? Maybe he changed his mind and went home if he had to leave his car at the shop, because there’d be no way for him to get home on the busses from here. Plus, Louis doesn’t like busses; he has a little pride about not using them. Think, I tell myself. I don’t want to call his momma, but finally I do it. She’s got that caller ID and usually won’t pick up when I call, but this time she does. She’s got no word from Louis either. I ask if Sarah’s talked to him.
“No, she over here now.” She sounds upset, and I don’t know if she’s worried about him or the house taxes.
“Please ask him to call me.”
She says she will, and I try his cell again. Nothing but voicemail.
I close the shades and turn on some lights. I gnaw on a roll, but I don’t want to give in and eat just yet. The music next door is thumping good now, TV noise humming in the walls. I hoped it would calm down over there with the mother home, but no such luck.
Normally I love this apartment, the only place I’ve ever had to myself, but right now I feel trapped in it. Still, even if I could get in a car I wouldn’t know where to start looking. I don’t know where the garage is. I don’t know where Louis spends his time when he’s not with me. I’m too old to go asking after a man’s every move. But tonight I wish I did know. I’m crying by the time I put that chicken into a baking dish and set the timer.
At midnight I finally make myself get ready for bed. I put the chicken right in the fridge. I hang up my clothes and wipe off my makeup. I’ve already cleaned the kitchen and called Louis so many times his voicemail won’t take any more messages.
I sit in bed with the lamp on, looking at a magazine, knowing I won’t sleep, not only because of Louis but also because of that damned music. It’s been a long time since I felt helpless. My worry is like a bruise in the pit of my hips. Already, someone’s yelling next door—I can hear it all the way on the other end of the apartment with my bedroom door closed. They might as well go crazy over there, I think, since I can’t sleep anyway. I get out of bed and change out of my nightgown into a pair of leggings and a T-shirt. In the living room I flip through the channels in the dark.
Eventually, I do fall asleep, I don’t know when. Then my eyelids pop open right in the middle of a dream, my ears cocked, like they did when I would sit up listening for Tony. You never forget it, that kind of waiting. It’s quiet except for my TV, which I click off with the remote. I sit up on the couch. I know some sound woke me up; I can call it back now that I’m awake. It was the sound of something being dropped hard on the floor. The floor still seems to be shivering from it, and the quiet has changed, heavy like the air right before thunder.
Another slam, and a scream, and I scream, too, because it’s the kind of cry that tears your own voice out of your throat. I’m on my feet, hunting for the phone, which I thought I’d left on the coffee table but can’t find in the dark, and I’m sure not going to turn on any lights. I stuff my hands between the couch cushions, thinking it might have slipped underneath. Another slam, this time against my wall, and more screaming, and I know it’s Carrie, and I know someone is beating the living hell out of her.
I run to the kitchen window, pull back the curtain as wide as my eye, and look out into the parking lot. The mother’s car isn’t there. Carrie’s screaming has a rhythm to it now—a couple of bursts and then a shriek that seems to keep going even after she stops. I can hear her running, the pounding in my floorboards. And I can hear a man’s voice, which, if you weren’t used to these things, you’d think was the talk of someone who’s under control. But he’s not trying to calm her down. Tony used to get real quiet like that when he was hitting me. He’d hit me and then say a few things about why I deserved it while he rested his arm. But there was something stretched tight in his voice—it makes me shake to remember it now—like a wire about to break.
I rip the cushions off the couch, and there’s the phone. I call 911 first. Then, even though I know he won’t answer by now, I call Louis just to hear his voice before the fake woman’s voice says, “Mail box 6295 is full. Please try again later.” I take the phone with me into the bedroom and take my gun out of my bedside table and sit down on my bed and load it, right there in the dark. I took a class. I don’t need to see to be able to do it.
Sit tight, sit tight, I say to myself, the gun putting its own dent in the mattress beside me. I never thought I’d be hugging myself in the dark, terrified, ever again. I listen to Carrie screaming and that terrible low voice and shit flying around all over the place next door. Stay alive, I say to her.
And right then their front door flies open so hard the storm door slaps the side of the building. The sound of breaking glass. The screaming trails like something burning all the way outside. I figure she’s running down the street, and I make myself stand up, part the blind, and look out my bedroom window to see which way she goes, so I can tell the cops. I get a fix on her just as the man tackles her in the yard near the curb. I can’t tell who it is, but I’m guessing it’s the mother’s boyfriend, or it’s just some random man. Just some trash who thinks he can do whatever he wants to a woman.
I don’t remember getting myself from that bed to my front stoop. I’m just all of a sudden standing out there, pointing the gun. I know I’ve said something, because I can feel my voice rub in my throat, but I don’t know what words make the man look up at me. By then I’m too busy trying to watch his hands, because a gun can flutter like a bird to a man’s fingertips; I’ve seen it. He’s sitting on her hip, and she’s twisted onto her side, arms over her belly until she hears me, too. Then she lifts her arms and squints where I stand in porch light, and I see the inky blood working its way down her neck, and I wish I’d thought to turn off that porch light because I am a target up here.
The man moves and I look back in his eyes, and I see then that he’s her brother, and I know he’s the one who raped her, because there can be no other explanation for this. His eyes are pale and narrow, and he is getting up.
“Give me a reason,” I tell him. I want to cry. He stands there in his baggy ghetto pants and sports jersey, brushing his straw-colored hair out his eyes. Between his ankles, his sister sobs. Maybe she’s been crying the whole time; maybe I’m just now hearing her.
“Fuck off, bitch,” he says, and since I’ve already cocked the gun, I just raise it an inch and take aim for the center of the zero on his chest. He steps off of her. Behind him the trees are flickering red and blue from the lights coming around the corner off Church Street. She’s on her hands and knees, crawling, and Brother and I are looking deep in each other’s eyes, steady as lovers. The last time a white man said bitch to me I was on my stomach, face in the gravel. But now I’m on my feet. I am as still as the air.
There’s two cop cars and an ambulance right behind them. As soon as they come out of their cars I’m setting down the gun. It doesn’t surprise me at all that one of their guns is pointing straight at me. I come down the steps slow and let one pat me down while another runs in my front door. I don’t know how many of them there are. Brother’s up against the other car, his face as dull as a club. There’s blood on his knuckles, on his neck.
Carrie’s on her back on a gurney, EMTs on either side. When I come over, she looks in my direction. “I told my mother,” she says then, her voice thick. Her hips are so small she makes the gurney look wide. Her face is a mask of blood; her nose is folded to one side, her left eye is swelling shut. She looks older than I ever thought I’d live to be.
I want to say goodbye to her. But I can’t, my jaws are shaking too hard. I watch the ambulance pull away and hope my voice comes back in time for me to give my statement.
As dawn comes, I am thankful that all the liquor stores are closed and the grocery stores can’t sell any wine or beer yet. I want a drink so bad my throat burns for it. I used to have to put my forehead to the floor when it was really bad. Nothing else worked. All through the morning I drink glass after glass of water and crouch next to my bed, rubbing my forehead on the rug. I can’t go to sleep for all my crying and peeing.
When the phone wakes me up, I’m still on the floor, and I can look up and see the sun-white sky through the slits of my closed blinds. I pull the phone off the bed and fumble to answer it. “Louis,” I say, knowing it’s him. Or wanting it enough to know.
He tells me where he is, but the words don’t make sense. “What?”
“I’m in jail.”
Somehow I get confused, and I think he’s in jail because of what happened here last night. I open the blind and see the heat pulling off the street. But then he’s asking me to pick him up, something about where to post the bond. He asks me if I can borrow the neighbor’s car.
“No, I can’t borrow any car from those people. I’ll take a cab.”
The bondsman is downtown right across the street from the county jail, which is a box the color of wet concrete. In the cells on the upper floors, there are slits for windows. The idea that my Louis and that little shit from next door could be locked in the same building makes me want to throw up.
I tell the cabbie to wait. He’s white but he can hardly say anything in English. “Wait,” I say again, and he nods. I pay the bond, then cross the street. The cabbie watches me through his dirty windshield, and I figure he’s seen a thousand of me, some woman coming to claim her man like a lost dog.
A bald deputy leads me to a room. I sit in a plastic chair and wait for half an hour. Finally, the same deputy comes back with Louis in front of him. He takes off Louis’ cuffs and tells him to take care. He tells us where the exit is. We pick up Louis’ things at the window from another deputy, a white woman with an overbite so bad she spits with every word. Before we walk about the door, he tucks his button-down striped shirt into his dark jeans and threads his belt through the loops. He’s walking off-balance; his back’s hurting.
I’m glad to see the cab still idling at the curb. “What the hell happened?” I ask.
“Just wait,” he says as we get in. He stares out the window all the way home.
When we get into my apartment, I wonder if he can sense the hitting and the blood in the air like the perfume I dabbed on the night before, expecting him. When I put coffee on, I see out the window that Carrie’s mother’s car is gone, and I wonder where she went first, the hospital or the jail.
Louis drops himself into the chair against the wall at my kitchen table. I get out cold chicken from last night and slice it for sandwiches. I haven’t eaten anything all day and I’m shaking from it, from everything. When I bring him a glass of water, he says, “That son of a bitch wouldn’t let me get my car.”
I sit down next to him.
“They were done with it. But the owner’d gone, and the guy wouldn’t let me pay up and go. Said the register was closed. And—I was like, ‘Look, man,’ but he wouldn’t do anything except stand there shaking his head.” He sucks in his breath and looks down at his arms resting on the table. “And so I just hit him. I knocked him down and got my keys off the board and he grabbed the phone and called the cops.” Louis looks at me, and there’s something flat behind those dark eyes. “And I ain’t running from no one, now.”
“Louis, what did you think—?”
“I didn’t think they’d arrest me.”
Normally I’d ask him if his brain got crushed under that wall along with his back. A white guy hits someone and it’s a dispute; a black guy does the same thing and it’s an attack. He rests his forehead on his fists. “That goddamned house.”
“That house don’t control you,” I say, and I make myself stop there. Then I tell him about Carrie, and I ease myself closer to him so our heads are almost touching, and I stay quiet when he squeezes me to him and doesn’t let go.
Later, I want to tell him, we’ll find out how he can keep his house. After that, we’ll move in, and his girls will visit in summer, and we’ll get ready for our old age and deaths together. Before I leave this place, Carrie will have her baby and start the school year late with a foster family in another town. I’ll never see her again. Her mother and brother will move out and disappear. Brother will do no time.
I touch Louis’ face. I’m thinking of the courthouse, all that’s left to be done. “We got the day ahead of us,” I say. I put a plate with a sandwich in front of him. “Let’s go on, now. Let’s just go on.”
