by Odie Lindsey
Winnie now stared at her father through the plexiglass partition. Six hundred and fifty dollars, she thought. That girl reporter couldn’t pay her outright in cash. Instead, the funds had been deemed an “honorarium” by her bureau—as if honor could be found anywhere, ever.
Winnie believed that Derby must have been about seven when he saw the dogs. The painted flags on the Platz were by then half eroded. Even the crabgrass was long dead at the base of the structure, having been starved of sunlight. Rivulets had carved into the rugged rouged earth, and she and Derby would rush outside during rainstorms to float bits of detritus and homemade toys down the water channels. (At that age, Derb had already loved to build things, perhaps as extension of the now-and-again soap figurines his father might carve for them, quarterbacks and ponies, tractors and the like.) The boy had made an armada of boat hulls out of split pecan shells, fashioning masts out of toothpicks, with gum-wrapper sails.
Nobody came near their place anymore. The house baked in summer and was clotted with mold. The pantry was a catchall for condiments, dry rice and wheat, and weevils. (Truth be told, though, Hare did sometimes join the children while they played. He would whoop and holler, and chase them around, be the Indian to their Cowboy, or the Kraut to their Joe. He loved them then, they thought. He was supposed to love them, they believed, as was proven by these collective bouts of frolic, and fits of joy.) Every drink stripped their father down to the nerves of his recurrent insignificance, pinning him again to implosion, until at some point Hare would yank one of the kids around, or break someone’s toy, or, if they were lucky, pick up a stone or cracked brick and just hurl it over the Platz at the house behind. If the latter, he would roar with laughter when the missile plunked off of the neighbor’s roof, then dare any one of those sons of bitches to come after him.
The children had learned it was best to laugh with the neighborly assaults. In contrast to what he might do if they didn’t, Hare would wink and maybe clop them on the shoulder, or knead a neck. Most importantly, he would at some point re-disappear, into the house, or into Pitchlynn for more drink.
Now and again, one of the men still left by would come across the kids as they walked home from school, or as they squatted beside some creek beneath the overpass, snaring catfish and crawdads for supper. Charity: the man or men might hand off some venison wrapped in foil, or a two-liter, or some candy, and then drive off.
Winnie would take the venison home and stab into it, as her mother had done. Yet there was never any bacon to fill in for succulence. The meat would be gamy and not fresh.
Once, she was alone, cutting across the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, walking home with a plastic sack of ramen noodles, alongside legions of ketchup and mustard packets and saltines snatched from the deli grill, when a man in a huge white pickup had pulled beside her, the diesel engine growling. She’d ignored him at first, but then stopped after he called to her several times, “Hey, girl? You, girl.”
The titanium-white pickup was a chrome-gleamed dually whose engine snarled at her like a brimstone sermon. Winnie froze as it pulled alongside.
“Hey,” the man had called again, leaning out the car window. He wore a ball cap pulled low over his white hair. Had dark sunglasses. He was familiar to her, though she hadn’t placed him at first.
“Need a lift?”
She stared until she had recognized him. “Naw,” she replied. “I don’t need nothin’.” She then turned away, and did her best not to run.
“Stop, goddamn you!” he had yelled, and she did. “Take this,” he said, holding out a couple of twenties.
Shaking, she had looked to her feet.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, wagging the bills. “You ain’t gotta do nothin’ for it. Just take the money to your daddy. Or, hell, hide it away for yourself. I don’t give a shit.”
Winnie had pounced like a mouse, snatching the bills from the man’s grip. She then darted out of the parking lot and into the litter-filled boxwoods just beyond, crouching there until the truck pulled away. It was the only time she had ever engaged Mr. Wallis.
She and Derby would play hide-and-seek for hours. They played cowboys-and-Indians and tag. They floated pecan-hull boats down the muddy rivulets in their yard. One of the siblings would often duck behind the Platz, then startle the other; they would laugh, and shriek, and chase each other around. Now and again Hare even joined them.
One afternoon, Winnie had refused to play. She told Derby to get on inside the house and stay there.
They had heard her daddy screaming at the Black family that morning, slurring his curses, as was usual. What was not normal was when Hare had actually stormed back behind the Platz to confront the family in person. Winnie remembers watching him disappear, and then hearing the piercing yelps. Yips from the litter of a mixed bitch the neighbors kept. Later, when Hare had taken off and into town, Winnie had crept behind the mural to investigate.
Now, a quarter of a lifetime later, she sat across from her father, and wondered again if he might still be able to hurt her. If any of the men might be swayed to come after her, when Hare found out that she had talked to the press about all this.
Little teaser-seeds of the feature had appeared in print, to build buzz. The full wire story itself would run within a day, the AP having distributed it to hundreds of news outlets nationwide. Millions of Americans would now learn the truth. The story would destroy any claims Hare had made about his frailty, or his family, or the smear campaign waged against all of them.
Six hundred and fifty dollars, Winnie thought. Maybe a promise of more money to come. Maybe we can get ourselves out of here. Over to Atlanta, or somewhere far-off. Hell, I don’t care, maybe someplace like Chicago. She had told the reporter about the speeches of a twisted drunk, and the lies Hare had fashioned, and the bruises on skinny arms. Of the stabs into turned venison. In a whisper, whimpering almost, she had described the litter of Lab-mix pups strung up in a tree behind the Platz. The litter her kid brother had seen, five or six of them, dangling on thin noose ropes like Christmas ornaments. She swore to the reporter that she had warned Derby not to go back there; Winnie swore that she told him to stay away from that wall.
But he didn’t listen, little bitsy kid that he was. And after Derby saw the pups, when he had bolted back to Winnie in hysterics, she struck him to the ground, and told him he deserved it.
The prison visitation room was silent, save for the rub of her child’s crayon across paper. Hare stared at Winnie as if to scar her.
“There ain’t nothin’ to say, Daddy,” she muttered.
“That’s exactly right,” he replied. “There ain’t nothin’.”
A guard stepped over. Time was up.
Hare nodded, then turned back to his daughter. “Now get Derby on script, you hear? I’ll have my lawyers put their calls in, too. We’re a family, for heaven’s sake. We need the visual.”
“Daddy, Derby’s not gonna—”
“He’d better,” Hare said. He clenched his jaw, and tapped his long fingernail against the glass. “This is my last chance at redemption. So I had better see all y’all in court.”
“I guess,” Winnie replied.
Hare looked to the child. “I love you, Ladybug. I love you so, so much. As does your mama. So if anybody messes with you at school, you just tell ’em to go to hell, from me, okay?”
“Dammit, Dad,” Winnie said.
“But Baba,” Ladybug gasped, “I cain’t use no dirty words!”
“Okay, okay.” He grinned. “I’m just kiddin’. You tell ’em to mind their own beeswax. Now, I want you to keep focused on your lessons, all right? Get smarter than your dumb old Baba, and keep bringin’ home those A’s—even in maps!”
The girl shrugged. “I’ll try, but I’m not promisin’.”
Hare chuckled to himself, then held a hand flat against the glass. “You my joy,” he said, as the child reached up to match his palm.
7
A year or so back, Sonny went to a minor le
ague night game in Schaumburg. An office event with his colleagues and clients. They had sat in a bloc in the party-deck section, high off of the right-field line, and were provided state-fair-type paper tickets with printed numbers for a raffle. His boss had handed out vouchers for two hot dogs and one bev (with anything additional coming at their personal expense). Chinese-made headdresses and tomahawks were distributed in support of the team: the Braves. The office crew had watched the game and cheered appropriately when their company, Praterian Fixtures, was announced over the ballpark PA. They had nudged on each other, some folks drinking too much. Now and again, the office manager had shushed them to announce another raffle prize, another dinner for two, or a free spring cleaning from an affiliated housekeeping service. The Plane Man never won. He had never won anything.
This was fine. He was a forgotten ex-ballplayer, now ho-hum sub-management, and he had long since gotten used to losing.
As evening took root, the stadium lights turned the ballpark into a fishbowl, and put a bubble in the sky. At the seventh-inning stretch, with half the office having slunk back onto the charter bus to nap, their vouchers long since spent, he’d come face-to-face with a small, hovering eye. A smoked-glass camera eye on a quadricopter drone that had zipped in, up and down, scanning them all, before stopping pinpoint in the air in front of his face. Staring.
Hovering. The whir of its propellers. The Plane Man, then called Eddie, and Ed, and Hobbs, and even Sonny by his mom, had seen a tiny version of himself in the copter’s camera glass—and then, after a friendly elbow to the ribs from his coworker, had looked over to witness a huge version of himself on the ballpark’s diamond big screen. His eyes were glassy, his face leached of want. Still the drone had floated, staring at him, its lens showcasing his age to everyone. He could not stop looking back at it, so he appeared frozen on the screen, as if in a photo. No smile, no wave, no tomahawk chop. Only a mention of his company before Sonny’s mouth began to tremble.
The crowd had applauded, but then bellowed at his non-engagement. To combat the growing awkwardness, the PA announcer started describing the prize, noting something about the Chicago Executive Airport.
Sonny had stared at the fractional version of himself in the glass eye, the quadricopter hovering in front of his face. When the drone had at last zipped away, an usher tapped him on the shoulder and handed over the prize envelope: flying lessons.
***
WHITE LIGHT.
He dreamed of Chicago, as seen from above. As if looking down through a camera, or a bird eye, he tracked his own movement through the city. His gaze was fueled by sunlight as he hovered through the stratosphere, coasting like a General Atomics Predator drone, like a great eye staring down, into and through himself, and at the map of his very existence. The chart of his routine had been fixed for many years: to bus, to work, to bus, to home, to mother, to grocery store . . . all laid out on a grid. Yardage.
(Back in Illinois, the frigid air and lung crush of winter at his window, he would suit up in his small apartment, and stare into his bathroom mirror, and swear to alter his life, to do something, anything different, on the way to the bus, to work, to home, to mother. He swore to inflict some deviation in, for instance, the way he stomped atop the snow to the Jewel-Osco grocery, or at the very least some variation of the groceries he bought there.) (And yet, even now, suspended in what he believed was the Mississippi forest canopy, dislocated, distorted, but in absolute, godlike command of narrative memory, of imagination and creativity, he had still followed the same routine. His mind could fly anywhere, any direction, care of any method imaginable . . . yet as he migrated through mind’s-eye Chicago, he still ducked into the crusted snow and wind, and strode straight to the bus stop; his free faculty still crowded him beneath the humming electrified wire heater inside the knife-scratched plexiglass vestibule. Exactly the same, all his life, his thoughts and body on a landlocked grid, and ruled by little bitty bullshit activities.)
Infection showed him the prism of death, casting him in and out of hallucination, revealing the long-buried memory of his father, and of Wallis Farm, and of the taste of wild blackberries, and the smell of the chinked wood and flashing of the family cabin. Sonny’s memory returned him time and again to the leaving, and to the Indian Head knife his daddy had given him. To Gabe, the man who spoke to the mules. To the ladder-back rocker that Hare had slept in, drunk.
He skittered atop time, his vision now and again inhabited by Indians, by things he’d read about and seen on television, and perhaps even heard about, some while back. Their presentations were made on the plastic image wheels of an old View-Master toy stereoscope, a clicking slideshow that showcased the tribe’s riverside fields and swidden agriculture; the intricate, densely populated mound-building communities; the global trade routes they had established for beads, and the routes that the Whites had co-established for deerskin; the etchings of long-cleared Mississippi hardwood forest.
The View-Master image wheels illuminated a past that spanned combat and barter, and famine and love and art. From historic petrograph to centralized earthworks and plaza superstructures. Intercontinental trade routes to matrilineal lineage, to . . .
Myth, history, fact, dream. A South before acreage? he wondered. Before race?
***
SONNY’S MOTHER’S West Garfield Park landscape had been decimated for as long as memory allowed. She had rented, forever, an apartment in a row house made of brick and Indiana limestone. It was right across from the elementary school, whose bustle of restless kids and buses and shouts and petty trash had decorated their weekday mornings and afternoons, forever. Over the years, the upper and lower apartments had sandwiched them with families and druggies and squatters, and, for some time, the Dr. Reverend Davie, who they suspected was a fallen sort of pastor, a repentant if not exile who still belted out gospel on every Sunday morning—“Jesus on the Mainline,” mostly—warming up for his backup spot at the pulpit. Above them, below, the spaces had trended toward Bedouinism, stop-offs for whomever might proffer first and last months’ rent, then sacrifice the latter within a short span of time, having been unable to carry the former in the first place. Pensionless grandmothers or softy poseur pimps. People unafraid to bang on your door and ask you for a dollar, or a dab of jelly, or whatever they might come up needing in a pinch, and who knew to nurture and expect reciprocal requests from you. Friendly people who brought you homemade apple crumble in empty margarine tubs, or who held fund-raiser barbecues on the front lawn on summer Saturdays just before rent was due: five bucks a plate, or, hell, four, or, Hell, gimme two bucks and don’t tell anybody. Even the memory of this delectable food-smoke crushed Sonny with want.
His mother had insisted on growing a small truck garden, at first in pots on the fire escape and rooftop, the idea being they could sell a bushel of veg at some stand or local market. For a few years now, though, she had planted rows in the empty lot next door. The dirt plot was owned by a retired beat cop who had fled their environment the instant he was pensioned. He had kept the property because it was simply too cheap to give up—and he knew that gentrification, his great subsidy, was coming someday soon. As owner, however, he was also subject to city dumping fines, so he couldn’t neglect the property in total. Thus, in exchange for the gardening space, Sonny’s mother kept the lot tidy and kept the city fines at bay. She grew good veg, and she shared it, and some folks even helped her for a season, and young kids sometimes tore the crop up as play.
The neighbors who were old enough believed Sylvia was a hippie, her holdover seventies style having arrested somewhere in the eighties. Her long hair and pilled cardigan, and bulky dress over sticklike frame; it was as if she had left any sartorial aesthetic on the battlefield of her protest days. As if she wore a shroud of that era, the late seventies and early eighties, a reminder of her former agency, of her activism, of her running away from what she had been back in Mississippi.
Chicago, Syl had learned early, was a marcher’s town, a pi
cket city, and she had thrown her body in against nukes, against education cuts, against tax breaks for the wealthy, against the mass national release of the mentally ill from institutions. She had exhausted all in order to combat the doctrine of Peace Through Power . . . and, dear lord, above all against the lie of states’ rights.
She had fought so hard against Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.
After Sylvia lost that war, the only thing left to document it was the uniform.
Once a week at least, a stout Latino man attached a bright yellow leaflet to her door handle by a rubber band. He did the same up and down the block, dangling flyers off of doorknobs or into the mouths of wall-mount mailboxes. The page was an ad on behalf of someone buying “Ugly Houses.” It had an email address and a phone number, and it promised the best price, in “Cash Money,” for even the worst of dwellings. These were the homes where families lived: Ugly. This was the thing nobody had: Cash Money. The flyer featured a smiling stick figure with a bouquet of bills in his fist.
She did not own her apartment. She knew nobody on their block who owned their apartment. With exception, perhaps, of the previous couple of years, she could only imagine her village as a ghost area of sorts, a cemetery. A tenant farm without a crop.
The trifolds of bright yellow paper were affixed to her doorknob—and she instantly threw them away. Yet a week later, every week later, the man cycled back ’round, banding new yellow brochures on the worn knobs and handles: Ugly. This was agitating to her, because the bright paper often flittered into the yard, the street, the porches, the bushes. Cash Money.
The flyer was highlighter-yellow and the wind scattered it, and the rain pasted it to curb and windshield, gummed it to the waist-high chain fence that held her garden. Every week Sylvia cleaned the waddage up. Yet a week later, more.
ONE SUNDAY, in summer, Sonny had leaned far out of his mother’s kitchen window, his face hot from sunlight, his chest and arms teetering in the open air. The bacon smoke clouded out beside him as he stretched farther away, farther on, gravity nearly taking him down. His eyes had been shut as he contemplated this potential: the falling, the flying, the energy drift of equilibrium, the dive.
