by Z. Z. Packer
Lynnea got out of her car and walked over to Sheba. A few students she recognized looked at her, but she pretended not to see them. “C’mon,” Lynnea said, “I’ll give you a ride home.”
Sheba looked at Lynnea with annoyance, then resignation, as though she’d weighed her options and had decided she might as well get a free ride. Sheba walked with Lynnea to the parking lot, and got in the car without speaking.
“Where do you live?” Lynnea asked.
“You know where I live.”
“Our Lady of Peace. I know that,” Lynnea said, “but where is it?”
“Hollander Ridge.”
“Where in Hollander Ridge?”
Sheba’s eyes bugged out. “C’mon, Miz Davis. You really don’t know?”
“No, I don’t.” They stared at each other. Sheba sighed. A cloud of her breath hung in the cold car interior.
Lynnea pulled off and headed down Thirty-third Street in the general direction of Hollander Ridge.
Sheba gave her a jumble of directions: Erdman, Moravia, Bel Air Road, and Frankford Avenue. Then the streets got small and narrow, with turns where Lynnea hadn’t expected streets to be at all.
“Scared yet?”
Lynnea didn’t answer. Sheba called out turns; otherwise the rest of the ride was silent.
Our Lady of Peace was its own planet: singular, immense, imposing. The statue of the Virgin Mary was larger than Lynnea thought statues of Virgins should be, and was covered with pigeon droppings. A sign with a picture of a lightning bolt on it was attached to the high electric fence that ran around the building. A whitewash of floodlights illuminated the sign. Next to it, another sign, wooden and hand-painted, read: TRY TO GET IN OR OUT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND DIE.
“Well. Here you are,” Lynnea said. She thought for a moment, then said, “If you need something, or want me to visit you, give me a call.”
“I don’t think I’ll be needing your help. But thanks for the ride.” Sheba slammed the car door and clomped up the sidewalk.
Lynnea stretched her head over to the passenger window and clumsily rolled it down. “Be good. Take care of that baby.”
Sheba stood, eyes still and unblinking.
OF COURSE she had said the wrong thing: Sheba obviously hadn’t wanted the baby, but what was said was said, Lynnea thought. On the way back, Lynnea sailed through the red lights hoping to get home as quickly as possible. There she could think. Cry. Maybe fry herself an egg. She went the wrong way down one-way roads. Streetlamps buzzed here and there, but most were broken and did not flicker at all.
She came to an intersection where the traffic lights were out, looked both ways, and zoomed through. The single Whuurp! of a police siren stunned her for a moment, but she kept driving, only slower now. She thought of herself as an ant, foolish enough to believe that if she kept ambling along, the giant foot above wouldn’t come smashing down. The police car trailed her. A voice barked through megaphone static, “Pull over.”
The policeman got out and his door made its official-sounding slam. He walked over to her car, hitching up his pants as if preparing to recite a blasé Miranda. She rolled down the window. The policeman bent his head down to greet her. It was Robert the Cop.
“Hey, man. How’s it going?” She smiled up at him.
Robert the Cop whippe out his ticket pad. “You were speeding.”
Lynnea kept the smile pasted on her face. Robert the Cop wrote something on his pad. When he flipped the page and kept writing, her smile deserted her. “I just dropped off a student, O.K.?”
He walked to the back of her car to take down her license plate number. She thought about running him over. No one in Hollander Ridge would care. One less cop.
He came back around driver side and stuck his head in again.
“It’s Lynnea. Lynnea Davis. Remember me? Teacher training? Bonza? Role-play?”
“Yep. I remember. Did you know you were speeding? Through red lights?”
Lynnea tried counting to ten to calm herself, but only got to three. “Do you know what it feels like to want to go home?” she asked. “To have worked one long motherfucking day with a bunch of kids who want to strangle your ass and you want to strangle theirs and you think about that sentimental shit—that ‘if I can only reach one’ shit—and you don’t reach anyone?”
He nodded once. “Yep,” he said. He tore the ticket from the pad.
SHE SPED out of the maze of streets. There was a green light and she whooshed through it faster than the reds. She could see the outlines of two boys walking across the street the way Baltimore kids walk, sauntering and primping and strolling all at once. They were the sort of kids who thought they had all the time in the world; time to play around, time to disobey, time to do whatever they wanted. They were the types of kids who seemed to love watching faces curse noiselessly on the other side of the windshield, their vengeance against the world. Lynnea knew they weren’t going to make it across at the speed she was driving. She would have to slow down. She pressed on the horn so hard it braced her in the seat. The horn bleated.
“It’s a green light! Get out of the way!” She knew the kids could only see her yelling, that they heard none of the words. One short outline flashed her the finger like a hearty salute. The taller one saw that she was going too fast and tried to limp a bit quicker, but the finger-flasher held on to him, as though to say, They gone stop. Make ’em wait and get mad and shit.
She had a chance to slow down, and she didn’t want to. She’d scare them, for once. Make them run. Her foot slammed the accelerator for what seemed like no time at all, but when she changed her mind, trying to brake, she knew it was too late, she couldn’t stop in time.
Somehow she heard the strange hissing before she heard the brakes screech. She’d never associated hissing with car wrecks, at least not the ones she’d seen in movies, where metal crunched, tires squealed. On television, cars spun like compasses gone haywire, only to regain their sense of direction, speeding off to create other wrecks. She no longer saw the boys—the limper, the finger-flasher.
She promised herself that if these boys lived, if they turned out all right, she’d visit Sheba at Our Lady of Peace; she wouldn’t just pretend to care but would actually do something about it.
Just as she made this promise to herself, she heard the boys cursing and wailing somewhere near the front of the car’s grille. One boy howled, struggling to one foot, holding his knee, hopping around as though he were searching for someone in a crowd. The other one banged the passenger window with heavy thumps and curses. They were alive.
Lynnea closed her eyes. Of course she knew leaving the accident scene would be the wrong thing to do, just as she knew she’d never see Sheba again, knew that her teaching days were over.
She could still hear the boys, even as she reversed, even as she took off. Even as she imagined how ridiculous it would be to visit Sheba, to watch as the girl hitched up her scary fishnet stockings, her eyes narrowed and unforgiving, speaking up for every pissed-off kid in the world, “C’mon. Make me.”
The Ant of the Self
OPPORTUNITIES,” my father says after I bail him out of jail. He’s banging words into the dash as if trying to get them through my thick skull, “You’ve got to invest your money if you want opportunities.” It’s October of ’95, and we’re driving around Louisville, Kentucky, in my mother’s car. Who knows why he came down here, forty miles south of where he lives, but I don’t ask questions that are sure to have too many answers. I just try to get my father, Ray Bivens Jr., back across the river to his place in Indiana. Once we’re on the Watterson Expressway, it seems as if we’re about to crash into the horizon. The sunset has ignited the bellies of clouds; the mirrored windows of downtown buildings distort the flame-colored city into a funhouse. I can already see that it’ll be one of those days when the sunset is extra-brilliant, though without staying power.
My father just got a DUI—again—though that didn’t stop him from asking for the keys. Whe
n I didn’t give them up, he sighed and shook his head as though I withheld keys from him daily. “C’mon, Spurge,” he’d said. “The pigs aren’t even looking.”
He’s the only person I know who still calls cops “pigs,” a holdover from what he refers to as his Black Panther days, when “the brothers” raked their globes of hair with black-fisted Afro picks, then left them stuck there like javelins. When, as he tells it, he and Huey P. Newton would meet in basements and wear leather jackets and stick it to whitey. Having given me investment advice, he now watches the world outside the Honda a little too jubilantly. I take the curve around the city, past the backsides of chain restaurants and malls, office parks and the shitty Louisville zoo.
“That’s your future,” he says winding down from his rant. “Sound investments.”
“Maybe you should ask the pigs for your bail money back,” I say. “We could invest that.”
He doesn’t respond; by now he’s too busy checking out my mom’s new car. Ray Bivens Jr. doesn’t own a car. The one he just got his DUI in was borrowed, he’d told me, from a friend.
Now he takes out the Honda’s cigarette lighter from its round home, looking into the unlit burner as though staring into the future. He puts the lighter back as if he’d thought about pocketing it but has decided against it. He drums a little syncopation on the dash, then, bored, starts adjusting his seat as though he’s on the Concorde. He wants to say something about the car, wants to ask how much it costs and how the hell Mama could afford it, but he doesn’t. Instead, out of the blue, voice almost pure, he says, “Is that my old dress jacket? I loved that thing.”
“It’s not yours. Mama bought it. I needed a blazer for debate.” The words come out chilly, but I don’t say anything else to warm them up. And I feel a twinge of childishness mentioning my mother, like she’s beside me, worrying the jacket hem, smoothing down the sleeves. I make myself feel better by recalling that when I went to post bail, the woman behind the bulletproof glass asked if I was a reporter.
“You keep getting money from debate, we could invest.”
When most people talk about investing, they mean stocks or bonds or mutual funds. What my father means is his friend Splo’s cockfighting arena, or some dude who goes door to door selling exercise equipment that does all the exercise for you. He’d invested in a woman who tried selling African cichlids to pet shops, but all she’d done was dye ordinary goldfish so that they looked tropical. “Didn’t you just win some cash?” he asks. “From debate?”
“Bail,” I say. “I used it to pay your bail.”
He’s quiet for a while. I wait for him to stumble out a thanks. I wait for him to promise to pay me back with money he knows he’ll never have. Finally he sighs and says, “Most investors buy low and sell high. Know why they do that?” With my father there are not only trick questions, but trick answers. Before I can respond, I hear his voice, loud and naked. “I axed you, ‘Do you know why they do that?’” He’s shaking my arm as if trying to wake me. “You answer me when I ask you something.”
I twist my arm from his grasp to show I’m not afraid. We swerve out of our lane. Cars behind us swerve as well, then zoom around us and pull ahead as if we are a rock in a stream.
“Do you know who this is?” he says. “Do you know who you’re talking to?”
I haven’t been talking to anyone, but I keep this to myself.
“I’ll tell you who you’re talking to—Ray Bivens Junior!”
He used to be this way with Mama. Never hitting, but always grabbing, groping, his halitosis forever in her face. After the divorce he insisted on partial custody. At first all I had to do was take the bus across town. Then, when he couldn’t afford an apartment in the city, I had to take the Greyhound into backwoods Indiana. I’d spend Saturday and Sunday so bored I’d work ahead in textbooks, assign myself homework, whatever there was to do while waiting for Ray Bivens Jr. to fart himself awake and take me back to the bus station.
That was how debate started. Every year there was a different topic, and when they made the announcement last year, it was like an Army recruitment campaign, warning students that they’d be expected to dedicate even their weekends to the cause. I rejoiced, thinking that I would never have to visit Ray Bivens Jr. again. And I was good at debate. My brain naturally frowned at illogic. But I don’t think for a minute that my teachers liked me because of my logical mind; they liked me because I was quiet and small, and not rowdy like they expected black guys to be. Sometimes, though, the teachers slipped. Once, my history teacher, Mrs. Ampersand, said, “You stay away from those drugs, Spurgeon, and you’ll go far.” That was the kind of thing that could stick in my stomach for days, weeks. I could always think of things to say about a debate topic like U.S.–China diplomatic relations, or deliver a damning rebuttal on prison overcrowding, but it was different with someone like Mrs. Ampersand—all debate logic fell away, and in my head I’d call her a bitch, tell her that the strongest stuff in my mother’s house was a bottle of Nyquil.
WE’VE CROSSED the bridge into Indiana but my father is still going. “THAT’S RIGHT! YOU’RE TALKING TO RAY BIVENS JUNIOR! AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!”
Outside, autumn is over, and yet it’s not quite winter. Indiana farmlands speed past in black and white. Beautiful. Until you remember that the world is supposed to be in color.
LATER, calm again, he says, “Imagine a stock. Let’s say the stock is the one I was telling you about, Scudder MidCap. The stock is at fifty bucks. If it’s a winner, it doesn’t stay at fifty bucks for long. It goes to a hundred let’s say, or two hundred. But first it’s gotta get to fifty-one, fifty-two, and so on. So a stock increasing in price is a good sign. That’s when you buy.”
I make sure to tell him thanks for telling me this.
“Doesn’t matter what you invest in, either,” Ray Bivens Jr. says. “That’s the beauty. Don’t gotta even think about it. That’s something you won’t hear from an accountant.”
“You mean stockbroker. A stockbroker advises about stocks. Not an accountant.”
His face turns bitter, as though he’s about to slap me, but then he thinks the better of it and says, “So you know who to go to when you get some extra cash.”
“Look. I just told you I don’t have any money.” I try to concentrate on looking for gas station signs in the dark.
“You will, Spurgeon,” he says. He puts an arm around me like a prom date, and I can smell his odor from the jail. I don’t have to see his face to know exactly how it looks right now. Urgently earnest, a little too sincere. Like a man explaining to his wife why he’s late coming home. “I’ll pay back every penny. I mean that.”
“I believe you,” I say, prying his arm from where it rests on my neck.
“You believe me,” he says, “but do you believe in me?” He puts his arm back where it was, like he’s some suburban dad, a Little League coach congratulating his charge.
“I believe in you.”
His arm falls away of its own accord as he settles deeper into his car seat with this knowledge, the leather sighing and complaining under him. I take the exit that promises a Citgo, park at a gas pump. You don’t usually see insects in this weather, but the garbage can between the diesel and unleaded swarms with flies. The fluorescent lights stutter off and on as I begin pumping gas. I can hear what my mother would say, that my father is a cross I have to bear, that the Good Book says, “A child shall lead them,” and all that crap, which basically boils down to “He’s your father. Your blood, not mine.” Ray Bivens Jr. leans against the car and stretches. Then he cleans the windshield with a squeegee. After that he sniffs and looks around as though he’s checking out the scenery. When I’m finished filling the tank he says, “Hey, Spurgeon. How about breaking off a few bills? You know they frisked me clean in lockdown.”
I give him a twenty and wait in the car. He’s in the Citgo for what seems like half an hour. He’s in there so long I get out and wipe off the squeegee streaks he left on the windshi
eld. Finally, he comes back with a six-pack of Schlitz and a family-sized bag of Funyuns. “Listen,” he says, handing me a beer, “we have to make a quick stop to Jasper.”
Jasper, Indiana, is where his ex-girlfriend Lupita lives.
“I knew it,” I say, and hand back the unopened beer before starting the car. “You’re in trouble.”
He opens the can, looking as though both the Schlitz and I have disappointed him. One of the fluorescent lights overhead blinks out. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Why do we have to go to Jasper all of a sudden?”
“If you shut your mouth and go to Jasper you’ll find out.”
“This is mama’s car,” I remind him. “She wants it back.”
“Why you gotta act like everything I ask you to do is gonna kill you? You my son. I tell you to do something, you obey.”
I do obey, and hate myself for it, turning the car out to the service road. I try to imagine the worst that can await him in Seymour, figure out what he’s running from: men who’ll tie him up at gunpoint and demand the twenty dollars that he owes them, policemen waiting at his door, but those thoughts give way to the only thing we’ll find in Jasper: Lupita, watching TV, painting her toenails. I’ve been to Lupita’s place twice, but that’s more than enough. It’s full of birds. Huge blue-and-gold macaws. Yellow-naped Amazons. Rainbow lorikeets who squirt their putrid frugiverous shit on you. Tons of birds, and not in cages either. I don’t think my father liked them perching on his shoulders any more than I did, but the birds could land anywhere on Lupita and she’d wear them like jewelry.
Then it occurs to me that this is the only reason he cleaned the windshield. “You’re going to make me drive you and Lupita around so the two of you can get drunk. I knew it.”
