And Dorene came out from under her blanket. She went and sat on her father’s lap. She didn’t open her eyes while the war was on. Before it was over, her father’s eyes were closed too.
12
Brooding
“YOU DONE turned white, and you can’t stay here. You got to go live with white folks,” Mikey’s father told him.
“But Daddy, let me tell you—”
“Don’t ‘but’ me, boy. You ain’t got nothing to tell me that I want to hear.” With this, he pushed Mikey out the front door. It was snowing, and as Mikey tumbled into the yard he saw his arms, his legs. He was white. Dressed only in his underwear, he jumped up and headed toward the house. He would die out here. He would die. Didn’t his father know that? He must know. Mikey had to get back inside before he froze, but the house was gone, and he heard laughter.
Mikey ran toward it and found Cheryl. She was laughing at him from an upstairs window. The entire first floor of the building was bricked up, no windows, no door. There was not even a porch.
“What do you want, smarty?” she asked.
“Let me in,” Mikey pleaded.
It had stopped snowing, and a rope dropped from the window. When Mikey tried to pull himself up, he couldn’t. The rope was greased. Cheryl laughed, and the rope jerked from his hands so hard that it burned him.
“Adiós!” she said.
Mikey fell, picked himself up, and saw his arms, his legs. He was black, and he reached for the rope again. It disappeared from the window. Cheryl disappeared from the window. Then the window disappeared, filling in brick by brick.
Mikey started for home. It was snowing again, and he was lost. There was nothing around him except a nebulous, cold whiteness. He thought of giving up and saw himself lying down.
He had died, but he was not dead. There were two of him. A white him was lying on the ground, being rapidly covered with snow. The black him was watching. He had to get home to tell his father he was dead. The way it was snowing no one would ever find him, and his mother would never know what had become of him.
“Mama, mama,” he yelled, but his yell came out as barely a whisper. The wind was reaching into his mouth, taking his voice away.
“Mama, mama,” he whispered, and was surprised to hear the sound of his voice rippling through the darkness of his room. He was glad that his voice had been soft. If he had yelled, his mother would have come to him, and he did not know what he would have told her. He could not tell her that it had happened, that everything had to do with Cheryl, the Chug-a-lug, even though the Chug-a-lugs had come and gone. They had been gone for more than two weeks.
During the spring, the Zakrezewski family had moved into 24, the apartment at the end of the row where the Taylors lived. No white family had moved in in nearly four years, and their arrival seemed strange. The white flight was nearly complete. When the Zakrezewskis moved in, only two white families remained. They both lived on the very last row, right next door to each other. They spoke to their neighbors when coming or going, or upon seeing them on the street. Other than that, they were quiet and kept to themselves. To their neighbors this made them respectable. But right away the Zakrezewskis seemed different.
They had no upper lips. Not one member of the family had one. This made their faces seem unbalanced, overly long. But when the children sang about the Zakrezewskis, they made no mention of their lips.
The children nicknamed them the Chug-a-lugs, and they made up a rhyme about them:
Three skinny bennies
And two fat tubs,
We call ’em the Chug-a-lugs.
The rhyme had only this one verse, which was sung over and over. It was the kind of song that seemed not to have been started by any one child, but in the cool, dry, windy summer of 1967, all of the children knew it. This one verse was blown on the wind, and the children sang about the Chug-a-lugs like they sang about Sally Walker, Miss Sue, Miss Mary Mack. The song was never sung directly to any of the family members. It was sung when one of them was spotted around All-Bright Court. If the Zakrezewskis had listened closely, they probably could have figured out they were the Chug-a-lugs.
All the males, the father and the two boys, were very thin. Their pants rode halfway down their behinds. They were the skinny bennies. The females were fat, the mother and daughter. The two fat tubs. They were the kind of females who looked pregnant, and always would look pregnant, no matter their ages.
The little girl, Cheryl, was only seven, and she looked like a pregnant child. She was a twin, but the only way she and her brother Chris resembled each other was that they didn’t have upper lips. Cheryl claimed she and Chris were identical twins who did not look alike, and they were the only set of identical twins in the world who were a boy and a girl. And not only that, she said; her name was Chris too. They were Chris and Chris, but everyone in her family called her Cheryl so they wouldn’t get them mixed up.
Mikey asked his mother about it.
“That white girl was pulling your leg. Only two boys or two girls can be identical.”
“How come?” Mikey asked.
“That’s the way things is. That’s the way babies come.”
“Come from where? Where babies come from?”
“Heaven,” his mother said.
“Really, Mama? How they get from way up there?” he asked, pointing at the ceiling.
“Storks.”
“I never saw no stork ’round her,” Mikey said.
“Why you got to question everything, boy?”
“But Mama, Cheryl say she and Chris identical—”
“And she told you her name was Chris too. And another thing. She shouldn’t be putting her family business out in the street, even if it’s a story. That’s trashy. That’s what trash do.”
This was why the adults were wary of the Chug-a-lug clan. They put their business in the street, told their business in front of other people. A child running around telling anyone who was willing to listen that she was a two-sex nonlook-alike identical twin who was going under an alias was a child who had no upbringing.
Mikey confronted Cheryl about her story, but she would not discuss it with him. Instead, she asked him a question. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
Mikey could not believe how simple the question was. “The chicken,” he blurted out.
“Well, if you’re so smart, where did the chicken come from?”
“A egg,” Mikey said.
“Aha!” Cheryl said. “You said the chicken came first.”
Mikey was stunned.
“You don’t know where the chicken came from, do you, smarty?”
That night when he was in the tub he thought about it, pressing his eyelids together tightly, turning eggs into chickens, chickens into eggs. The answer would not come to him, and that bothered him. Mikey liked knowing about things, how they happened, how they worked.
His father came into the bathroom. “Boy, if you stay in that tub any longer, you going to turn white.”
“For real?”
“Yeah, for real. Then me and your mama will have to send you off to live with some white folks. You couldn’t stay here with us.”
Mikey looked down at himself. “For real, Daddy?” he asked, his eyes getting big.
His father laughed. “No, not for real. Can’t you tell when somebody’s pulling your leg? You need to get out the tub. The water getting cold, and you know your sisters got to get in here.”
Mikey stood up and began washing himself. “Daddy, which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“The chicken.”
“Aha!” Mikey yelled. “Well, where the chicken come from?” Mikey asked. He could not help giggling.
“God,” his father said. “Clean your neck.”
Mikey stood there holding his washcloth. He hadn’t planned on this. Cheryl had not mentioned anything about God.
“Clean your neck, or do you want you mother to come in here and wash it?”
Mikey began s
crubbing again. “Well, where God come from?”
“He always was and always will be.”
“That don’t make no sense, Daddy.”
“What you mean, it don’t make no sense? Why God got to make sense to you?” his father asked.
“But Daddy, he got to come from someplace, like the chicken. If the chicken come first, it didn’t come from a egg. If a egg come first, it didn’t come from a chicken . . . Where God come from?”
“I done told you, and don’t be asking so many questions. You always be asking so many questions. Where you get all of ’em?”
Mikey wanted to tell him that Cheryl had asked him the chicken-and-egg question. But if he told his father, it would only be proof for him, and he could hear his father saying, Your mama done told you, that child trash.
The whole family was trash, and not one month after they blew into All-Bright Court like scraps of paper caught up in a sudden upswirl of wind, they proved it.
It was not even warm yet, but the mother and father were sitting out on the cold stone front porch, drinking Genesee beer right out of quart bottles. One of the living room windows was open, and sitting in it was a Philco radio tuned to a country-and-western station. The twang of the music from the tinny radio bounced off of the low ceiling of clouds, treating their neighbors to what seemed like an interminable night at the Grand Ole Opry.
Venita had been walking over to Mary Kate’s house to take her a jar of strawberry preserves. That’s the excuse she gave Moses. She really wanted to know where the music was coming from. As she walked past the Zakrezewski house, she nodded and spoke. “Good evening,” she said.
They both just stared at her, the skinny husband, the fat wife. Then the husband told the wife, “Angela, get that goddamn Indian boy of yours to go over to the store and get some more beer.”
That was how it was discovered that the Chug-a-lugs were not a wholly white family. Cheryl confirmed it. She seemed to be the self-appointed messenger of all the trashy goings-on in her family’s life. Whatever was not evident enough by her parents’ living their lives on the front porch, she made clear.
She was the one who told Mikey about her older brother. “Paulie isn’t my whole brother, he’s half my brother and half Indian. His daddy was a stupid Indian, a whole Indian that got drunk and drowneded himself in the lake one fall. He walked right into it and drowneded. They didn’t find him until spring. The lake turned him up, and he was swole up like a balloon and half ate up by fish.”
Cheryl told Mikey this, but she did not tell him that this boy was a ghost in their family. She was too young to notice that he existed only in the periphery of their vision. He haunted the shadows of their consciousness.
Paulie watched the children while Jake and Angela were at work. He sat inside, looking through the window while they played outside. Even when he was not watching them, he rarely ventured from the dimness of the house.
Isaac had heard that this boy was half Indian, and sometimes when he was over that way, he would stroll past the house and tease him. “How!” he would yell at the boy, or give him a whoop. “Woo-woo-woo-woo. Woo-woo-woo-woo.” The boy would just continue staring blankly. Isaac was becoming a ghost himself. He was moving into the shadows of life, and he was going on the haunt.
The other parents did not stop their children from playing with the Chug-a-lugs. They might be trash, but they were only children. But the other parents would have stopped them from playing with the Chug-a-lugs if they had known about Chris and his dancing.
He had done his dance only three times, while his parents were at work. Each time, a group of children had gathered around one of the back windows. Cheryl stood outside with them. Paulie sat staring out the other kitchen window. Chris turned the radio on, whipped the knob down the dial to a rock station, hopped on top of the metal kitchen table, and pulled his shorts and underpants down.
Chris made sure he had the attention of all the faces gathered around, faces ash-purple like unwashed plums, all except Cheryl’s. Her face was round and peachy. Then Chris began dancing, jumping up and down, twisting, spinning. It was a short, spastic dance, not even a minute. To conclude the dance, Chris would grab hold of his penis and shake it at the audience.
Mikey had been there for all three performances. When Chris would finish his dance, all the children would run to the field and release their laughter in the tangle of weeds.
It was a miracle that the mothers never found out. It was a testament to the secret lives of children.
Jake Zakrezewski paid as little attention to the twins as he could. From his day shift at Capital, he headed straight for his mistress. Chris and Cheryl could be blowing through All-Bright Court like a two-sex, non-look-alike twin tornado, and Jake would not have left his mistress’s side.
He was having an affair with a ’57 Pontiac. The Star Chief. She was a two-door yellow convertible. White interior. One-hundred-twenty-two-inch wheelbase. Two hundred seventy horsepower. A black racing stripe ran along each side and flared out once it passed the door. Four chrome stars shone in the blackness of each broad stripe. Chrome rockets finished off the stripes, extending back to the taillights.
Jake would make love to her for hours, washing and polishing, shining her chrome, conditioning her seats. He would lie under her jacked-up body, bend over her open hood, listening to her purr. He spent more time attending to her needs than to anyone else’s in his family. Despite all the time he spent on her while she was standing still, he took her out only once a week.
On Fridays the whole family would pile into the beloved Sky Chief and go to Mexico. That was where Cheryl said they went, to Mexico by car on Friday evening. They returned the next night. This was surely a lie.
That boat of a car, that land yacht, which eased out of All-Bright Court every Friday evening and floated up Hanna, down Wilmuth, onto Holbrook, and then onto the pike, looked as if it could take them to Mexico, as if it could go out on the open sea and sail around the whole world. But these people, these Chug-a-lugs, these Zakrezewskis, could never get to Mexico in a day. Even in a Sky Chief.
“What they do in that car?” Mary Kate asked Venita one evening as they sat on Mary Kate’s front porch.
“They must fly,” Venita said. “That car must be a rocket ship.”
“No, they drive,” Mikey said, a little pitcher. He was standing inside the screen door.
“Go to bed,” his mother said.
Mikey went up to bed and wished he’d had a book to look up where Mexico was. He knew it was far. He remembered seeing it on a globe in school, but he couldn’t remember where it was.
Cheryl had told him that they didn’t just go to Mexico, they were Mexican.
“We speak Mexican too,” Chris had said.
“Speak Mexican,” Mikey demanded.
“I don’t have to speak Mexican to prove it to you,” Cheryl said.
“Ya’ll ain’t no Mexicans. Ya’ll Polacks,” Mikey said.
“No we aren’t,” Cheryl said. “And I’ll speak Mexican to you just to show you. Adiós!” It came out “Ay-dee-oos.”
“That means goodbye, smarty. Look it up.”
Mikey suspected she might be pulling his leg, but it made no difference. He had no way of looking up what “ay-dee-oos” was, and if Cheryl was lying, she would slip out of it. But Mikey liked this peachy, one-lipped pregnant girl.
Cheryl wasn’t really lying. Her family did go to Mexico for a day every weekend. Mexico, New York, where they had lived. Jake drove, cruising down the thruway with the top down, doing seventy all the way. Angela sat next to him, an upper lip painted on for the trip. The kids sat in the back, the wind whipping through their hair. They had to lie down for most of the ride to keep from drowning in the stream of air.
When they came back on Saturday night, the car would be packed with beer and groceries, and Jake would have an attitude. He would be looped on Genesee. The children and Angela made trips back and forth to the car to unload it. Jake spent his time go
ing over the car, letting up her top, shaking out her mats, ducking under her hood.
Arguing on the front porch was part of the ritual after the return from Mexico. The radio would be cranked up, and the twangy music would begin bouncing off of the buildings. Things stayed pretty quiet until Jake had had his fifth or sixth quart. This was when the yelling began.
All summer Jake had been grumbling about their moving. It had been Angela’s idea for them to live in All-Bright Court, to save money until they found a house. They had left Mexico so he could take a welding job at Capital. He had commuted for nearly a year, just he and his mistress out on the open road. Jake spent the week in Buffalo and drove home on weekends, but Angela couldn’t see how they were saving money that way. So they all moved, and Angela found a job at a dye plant in Buffalo. She could see the money adding up.
It wasn’t her fault they hadn’t moved out of All-Bright Court. Jake was too lazy to look for a house. There were all kinds of houses for sale right in the neighborhood. They could walk and look at them.
He didn’t want a house within walking distance of this place.
What did he expect, a house to come driving up looking for them?
No, what he did expect was some peace and quiet. And those kids. She couldn’t control them, the twins. That was her job.
Didn’t he think she worked? Didn’t he ever think she might be tired?
From what? She didn’t clean. The house was dirty.
She didn’t care about this place. She wanted a house. She was saving money.
She was saving money, all right. She was starving him. Just look at him. He was wasting away.
He was skinny when she met him. How was that her fault? He was naturally skinny.
That was true, Jake was naturally skinny. In fact, he looked like a skinny Elvis. This did not endear him to the people of All-Bright Court.
Rumor had it that Elvis had said, “Ain’t nothing a nigger can do for me ’cept buy my records and shine my shoes.” No one knew when or where Elvis had said it, and if you asked anyone how he knew this, he would say, “Everybody know. Ain’t no secret.” If Jake had listened to Elvis instead of country and western, or if he had an upper lip to curl up at them, he might have been run out.
All-Bright Court Page 9
