“Now you’re making fun of me,” Tommie said, but she was smiling.
They were still looking at dresses when Deedee and the kids came to find them.
“We only have an hour before Daddy comes,” Jean said, tugging on Tommie’s arm. “Ma said we can have ice cream. Come on.”
Tommie gave Naomi a questioning look.
“It’s fine. I’ve got plenty of ideas,” Naomi said. And she did; her mind was awash in patterns and textures, the perfect lines to the dresses. She’d even managed to keep Wash and Henry out of her thoughts for most of the morning.
“Ice cream, then!” Tommie said. “Might as well enjoy myself before you start measuring me for this dress.”
◊ ◊ ◊
On their way to the ice cream parlor, Katie fell back from the tangle of kids and slipped her arm through Naomi’s. Deedee and Tommie were still a little ways behind them.
“Hi,” Naomi said, smiling and remembering what the twins were like at six, how they loved singling a grown-up out to get a little extra attention.
“Can I ask you something?” asked Katie.
“Okay.”
Katie squinted at Naomi. “Do you know any dirty ones?”
“Dirty ones?”
“Dirty Mexicans. I heard a man at the oil festival say there were heaps of dirty Mexicans in San Antonio.” She opened Naomi’s hand and examined each of her fingers. “See, you’re not dirty at all, but I thought maybe you knew some folks who were.”
NAOMI From her tree, Naomi listened to the small winter sounds of the forest. Time spooled out slowly. Although her coat kept her body warm, her hands were cold even inside her pockets.
She was about to slip a finger up under her coat sleeve and scratch at her arm, but she thought of the warning from Tommie’s mother earlier that day while she and the twins were at their house for Thanksgiving dinner. “Don’t worry that or it’s liable to scar worse,” she’d said as she handed Naomi an enormous piece of pecan pie. Even if Mrs. Kinnebrew had smiled when she said it, Naomi felt the rebuke. First that she’d been careless enough to burn herself. Second that she didn’t have the sense to minimize the ugliness.
The burn was healing, and now the layer of damaged skin was flaking away. Sometimes Naomi found herself picking at the scaly bits. The skin beneath looked raw and pink against the brown of her arm. It itched mightily. She clamped her hands between her thighs to keep from scratching.
Little by little, feeling came back into her fingers. Even if it was cold, she knew ways to warmth. She opened her legs a little, pressed back against the crumbling interior of the tree, and slid a hand under her dress. As her fingers worked, the heat came up in her slowly. She felt it rise and rise until the joy of it overtook the quiet of the tree.
She froze when she heard them. The twins and Wash, walking along the path toward the river. She shouldn’t have been surprised. After all morning playing with Tommie’s cousins and then the long sit for the big dinner, the twins had been ready for a different sort of fun. With Henry suddenly tired of daddying, the twins melted back into the woods with Wash every chance they got, taking Edgar along for their adventures.
“Let’s try it again,” Beto was saying. “Come on, Edgar, fetch! Get the stick.”
Cari burst into giggles.
Then came Wash’s voice. “Cats are made to disobey,” he said, laughing. “Y’all don’t hold your breath for that cat to listen.”
All kinds of forgetting were possible in the tree. Naomi could forget the grime she scrubbed from the sinks, the slap of wet sheets against her ankles as she flung them over the clothesline, the breakfasts and lunches and dinners waiting to be made and eaten and cleaned up. She could forget the stares at school and Miranda’s icy words. Inside the tree, she could forget the girl she saw Wash with at his house and the ones at Mason’s. She could forget that Wash belonged to the twins first of all.
She forgot until, for a moment, she remembered only Wash’s laughter and the late-summer light through the trees by the river. The memory of his smile kindled hers, even now.
She began to touch herself again, this time with the memory for company. She missed Wash with her whole body. The missing was hers entirely.
DECEMBER 1936
WASH “Lord, Washington,” Mr. Crane said. He let his glasses slip down on his nose and reached up to massage his temples. “Coldest December I can remember. This weather’s got to break soon. School’s heating bill was three hundred dollars last month.”
Wash shook his head. “That’s a lot of money.” As he said it, something nagged at the back of his brain. For once it wasn’t Naomi.
Mr. Crane went on. “Can you imagine what it’ll be this month, what with it even colder? Maybe the holiday will save us.”
They were standing at the edge of the lawn in front of Mr. Crane’s house, the only grass that anybody had loved hard enough to get it to take hold. That had been Wash’s doing, like most of the work around the superintendent’s house. Wash frowned and surveyed the land in front of the school. The few flimsy trees were naked of leaves, and a long scar snaked across the packed dirt. A week before, he’d help lay the pipe for a new Parade Oil bleed-off line that ran straight across the school grounds. As he studied it, an idea clicked into place.
“Three hundred dollars, you said, sir? To the gas company?” Wash asked.
Mr. Crane nodded. “I reckon we’re the best customer the gas company has. Except maybe Mrs. Quimbly. I hear she keeps that house so hot that you can fry an egg right on her hardwood floor.”
“Older folks have their ways,” Wash said, but his mind was already on something else.
◊ ◊ ◊
“Hi, Ma,” Wash called when he got home.
“Afternoon, James Washington. Go on and pay Booker.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He slipped a quarter into the tin, hanging on to a dime and a few pennies for himself. “Is Pa home?”
“He’s at his desk. Wash up before you bother him.”
Wash turned on the kitchen faucet, lathered up his hands, and scraped the dark moons of dirt from under his nails. Then he went to find his father.
Jim Fuller greeted Wash without looking up from his paper. He got a few issues of the Chicago Defender every month or so from his cousin Lewis, who sometimes worked as a porter on trains from Chicago to Dallas and was something of a radical.
Wash took the paper as a good sign and launched into his plan.
When he was done explaining, his father removed his reading glasses and set them on top of his paper. “What makes you think they would want to give us the money?”
Wash pulled one of his mother’s cane-back chairs over to the desk. “The way I figure it, it won’t cost them anything.”
Jim shook his head. “They won’t see it that way.”
“But there’s a bleed-off line going right past the school. Today Mr. Crane was saying that they paid three hundred to the gas company this month. Why pay at all when there’s free gas right there?”
“Hold on, son, not everybody thinks using green gas is a smart idea—”
“We use it here. And it works fine with the regulator they put in at our school.”
“There’s a lot more variation in pressure when it comes to those bleed-off lines.”
“I know they’ve got a good regulator. Come on, Pa. Half the county heats with the raw gas. Who’s going to complain?”
His father scratched his chin lightly. “It’s an idea,” he said. “But the last time Mr. Crane found money to help us out, the school board went and used it to put up those electric lights on their football field. Out of spite, I think.”
“Here’s how I figure it. I give Mr. Crane the idea about using the Parade line. Once we tap into it and he has the instant savings, we go see the school board with a plan for how we’d use three hundred dollars. All the numbers will match up, and everybody comes out looking good.”
“I wouldn’t expect too much, son. They’ll think of something they wan
t to do with the money themselves.”
“That school is already a palace, Pa. They’ve got everything. You should see the chemistry lab, the uniforms they have, brand-new encyclopedias in every classroom, a whole room full of typewriters and another with electric sewing machines. They’re flush. We could get some new textbooks for our kids, equipment for the shop class, maybe even a microscope. We’ve got to try for it, anyhow.” As Wash talked, the plan began to take shape, offering the possibility of a kind of satisfaction he hadn’t felt in weeks.
“I’ll give it some thought, James.”
Wash sucked his teeth. “I thought I could go ask Mr. Crane tomorrow about the gas line—”
“I said I’ll give it some thought. Don’t go sticking your neck out just yet.”
“But—”
“You’ve got to be cautious when it comes to white folk. Especially when money’s tight everywhere.”
“There aren’t money problems over there, Pa, I’m telling you that.”
“Maybe not, but they can always talk about the economy, how we all have to make do and tighten our belts. What we’ve gotten hasn’t changed since the crash. They didn’t bump up our budget when the oil came in, not even when our enrollment went way up.”
“And you’re just going to go along with that?”
“For the time being, yes. What’s got you so concerned—”
“Come on, Pa!” The words exploded out of Wash. “You wouldn’t stand up for your own people if your pants were on fire.”
“Watch it, James Washington Fuller. You think twice before you use that tone with me, do you hear?”
“Yes, sir,” Wash mumbled.
“Retract your statement,” Jim said. His face was shiny with sweat. The heat of the righteous, he probably believed. The heat of the goddamn coward, Wash thought. It felt good to speak out finally. Wash didn’t care that much about the extra money. But he needed something to do, wanted something to happen. Above all, he wanted to put his mind on something besides the one girl who seemed to want nothing to do with him.
“I retract it.” Wash said the words a little too loudly for sincerity.
“Good,” Jim said.
◊ ◊ ◊
Wash opened his eyes and squinted. Even though it was hardly anyone’s definition of morning yet, his father had switched on his light and was standing in his doorway with his arms crossed. “Wake up, son.”
Wash pushed up on an elbow and wiped a bit of crud from his eye.
“Go ahead and tell Mr. Crane your idea,” Jim said. “About the gas, I mean. But be smart about it. You find a way for him to feel like he thought of it, you hear?”
Wash grinned. “Kept you up all night thinking on it?”
His father sighed. “I suppose you did.”
Wash yawned and pulled his blankets up over his head. “I think I should insult you more often.”
◊ ◊ ◊
After his father closed the door, Wash tried to go back to sleep, but he couldn’t. He was thinking about her again. Naomi. She’d been giving him the cold shoulder for more than three weeks now, and he still couldn’t guess at her reasons—beyond the obvious, which was that neither of them had any business starting anything. That wasn’t explanation enough, though. Not when they had shared those long mornings together. Not when he knew what it was to make her smile.
It had been a long time now since he’d been close to a girl, more than a month. When Rosie Lynn cornered him again after church last week and invited him to go on a walk with her, he’d been tempted, but only for a moment. Even if Naomi wouldn’t talk to him, she was worth holding out for.
Wash spat into his palm and took his dick into his hand. He tried to imagine the feel of her braid, the soft skin by her mouth. He closed his eyes.
He couldn’t get anywhere; the thought of her body came with the thought of her. And when Wash thought of Naomi, he fell into thinking about the why of her anger and the how of fixing things between them. He’d figure out what had soured the air, and he’d put it right.
He sighed and slid to the edge of the bed. He reached underneath and ran his hands along the slats until he felt the rough edge of newspaper. He pulled the packet out and carefully unwrapped the pictures inside. He had Nina Mae McKinney, Josephine Baker, and a photo of two Harlem nightclub dancers posing together.
He picked the Harlem girls, slid the rest of the photos underneath, and began again.
NAOMI Naomi checked the clock in the kitchen and then went back to dusting. She wanted to finish before supper so that the twins could help her sweep and mop. She’d already scrubbed the muddy tracks from the back door to Henry’s room and rubbed away the grimy fingerprints on the edges of the kitchen sink. It was more than holding the oil field mess at bay; the more she cleaned, the less of Henry was in the house. With her sponges and scrub brushes and mop, she wiped him away daily.
She pushed the door to Henry’s room open with her foot and walked in. She avoided his space as much as possible, but she didn’t want to make the neglect too obvious.
On the dresser, she found a pile of soiled handkerchiefs and a scattering of dirt-crusted fingernail clippings. Forcing down her revulsion, she picked up the handkerchiefs with her cleaning rag and dropped them into the laundry basket in the hall. She used the rag to gather the parings into her dustpan and then wiped the dusty dresser top clean.
She squatted and swept under Henry’s bed, being careful not to disturb his shotgun or the boxes of birdshot and buckshot he kept there.
On the nightstand, Henry’s Bible was still open to Psalm 77. The drawer was partway out. Without thinking, she pulled on the handle. The furniture was badly made and the drawer stuck on the frame, but it jerked open a few inches. Near the front, she saw a photograph of Henry and Estella. Naomi recognized the blue dress her mother had worn on their wedding day. She couldn’t be sure, but Naomi thought that her mother’s expression was already tinged with regret. She turned the photograph over and saw her mother’s handwriting in faint pencil. Nuestra boda, 29 enero 1925. Beneath the photograph, there was a small tin of Romeos. She made sure not to touch it. For the first time, it occurred to Naomi that a tin like this could have saved her mother. Had the doctor suggested it? Catholics weren’t supposed to, of course, but that didn’t stop anyone. Even Abuelito sold them. Fina had showed her one afternoon when they were watching the store alone. The tins of Ramses and Romeos were kept behind displays of aspirin and skin lightener in a plain wooden box labeled “para hombres.” She could not fathom that Henry had been unaware of this possibility, but there was no way of knowing. And anyway, knowing would not bring her mother back.
Naomi laid the photograph back down and gave the drawer another tug. A fifth of Four Roses thudded to the front along with a Colt revolver. Naomi stared at the gun. Her pulse raced. This was different from the shotguns meant for deer and unlucky birds. A revolver was a gun for killing people.
She shoved the drawer closed and spun around, nearly tripping over her dustpan and broom. She scooped them up and ran to the other bedroom.
She could not think, could barely breathe. She could feel the tears threatening as she reached under the bed for the guitar case, which she opened with trembling fingers. She found the braid coiled inside her mother’s old dress and slid her fingers along it, stroking the brittle fringe at the end. “Para ti, mi amor. Cuídalos, mi amor,” her mother had whispered, pressing the braid into her hands along with the shears and the care of the twins.
Now Naomi held on to the braid and whispered a prayer into her pillow. Keep them safe. Keep them safe.
But only she could keep them safe. There was no one else. She slammed the case closed and ran for the door.
◊ ◊ ◊
Naomi sprinted down the path toward the river. She needed to see that the twins were all right. She was going to bring them home, get them fed, put them to bed, tell them one of the stories about their mother that they were always hungry for. That gun—she had to find a w
ay to get it out of the house. She had to make Henry change. And if she couldn’t? If she couldn’t, she would take the twins away. To Tommie’s. To Muff’s. Back to San Antonio. With Henry, there was too much danger, too much risk.
Before she broke through the trees, she heard a plop, then laughter. A moment later, there were three small splashes and a whistle of admiration.
“Beto, Cari,” she called as soon as she could see them down by the river. “Time to go home.” She did not look at Wash. Would not look at him. She thought of his other girlfriends, the false intimacy that amounted to lies. He was no better than Henry.
She had not thought to put on her coat, and the cold raised the hairs on her arms.
“Hi, stranger. Long time, no study,” Wash called, grinning and waving.
Naomi ignored him and called down to the twins again. “It’s late and the weather’s turning bad. We’re going home now.”
Cari and Beto glanced up at the bright blue sky whisked with feathery clouds, but they stayed down by the river. They wore their new coats and had their hands full of small stones for skipping.
Naomi raised her voice. “I said let’s go. Don’t think you’re too big for a spanking.” She rubbed her arms hard, scraping the last bits of flaking skin from the burn in the process. She blinked back tears at the sudden pain, then locked her arms across her chest and lifted her chin.
“Y’all come on,” Wash called as he scaled the bank in a few steps. “Hey, what’s the matter?” he asked once he got closer.
“Cari! Beto!” she shouted again. The twins got slowly to their feet. Naomi turned to him and said in a hoarse whisper, “I don’t want you hanging around with them anymore. I can’t risk them being out and about with a—with a liar!” She flung the words at him, immediately feeling lighter and freer.
Wash looked as if he’d been struck. “Liar? I’ve told a few whoppers, but not to you. Never—”
“Never? I saw you with her ... That girl at your house. Just before that you acted like ... you made me think ... And there were girls talking at Mason’s...” It sounded silly put into words; it wasn’t as if they’d made any promises to each other, unless she counted a question about sweethearts and a wink. Plus there was common sense to think of. Probably Wash had never thought to cross the lines that marked out who could be loved and by whom.
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