City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  He picked up the wallet that sat on the bookcase to his right, retrieved the card he wanted, righted it, looked at it for a long moment. He checked the time. Then he picked up the phone and punched in the number and after two rings heard the oddly familiar voice say “Chuck Bridges…”

  24

  Wesley had driven under the expressway, twice, as the directions had indicated, and he still couldn’t find Alhambra, which was supposed to run north-south just on the other side of the overpass. He pulled the truck over to the curb by a hurricane fence topped with coils of brand-new razor wire that glinted in the sun, and he studied the wire-bound Houston metro map book. Just behind him cars echoed under the expressway…He pointed with his finger at the page: Baedy, Seville, Freeman, Alhambra…There’s the expressway…and there’s Alhambra…

  He looked up and around. He would try it one more time and then he would phone in to the office and ask what he was supposed to do. Put the truck into gear and made a left at the corner to go back under the expressway. He had had Tupac pumping out all over as he drove earlier, but now he kept the system off to see if he could concentrate a little better. He used to idolize Tupac, had a big picture in his room on Tennessee Street. He still listened to him now, as he drove the streets, in the moment, not sure what he was feeling. It was a familiar sound, like Kanye, 50 Cent, Mystikal…But more and more he focused on the work. He was trying to feel his way along, and not make any mistakes. New Orleans had been a recognizable landscape, a game where he knew the rules. There was a whole world in Houston, obviously, but he didn’t know what it was. He was getting to know the city schematically, at least, although the outlying areas, so spread out, were confusing and illogical, slippery, compared to New Orleans. It all felt virtual to him, like a giant video game.

  He passed under the expressway, barely stopped at the stop sign, and as he crossed the next street out of the corner of his eye he saw the sign: Alhambra Boulevard. How many times had he crossed over it without seeing it? Somehow he had gotten turned around and thought he was heading east when he was heading west.

  Two more blocks and he found Buckler Avenue easily now, made the right turn onto a treeless street paved with sand-colored cement studded with grape-sized pebbles and stones, burned-out cars at the side of the road and up on what might at one time have been grass. It was six blocks of yellow cinder-block abandoned housing projects, then blocks of two-story apartment buildings, more like hotel units, watching the numbers now, cross Iberia and here was 3124–28.

  Wesley pulled the truck over and slid it into park. After double-checking the address and scanning the street carefully before getting out—an old New Orleans habit that would never leave him—he turned off the engine, locked up, walked to unit 1-D, and knocked.

  From inside, a man’s voice hollered what sounded like “Carol.”

  Wesley waited. At the end of the building a three-year-old boy looked at him. Inside, the voice hollered the name again.

  The door opened and there was a tall, light-skinned black guy, about his age, wearing no shirt, his chest barely dusted with small curly black hair, and over his left breast the word JAUNE tattooed in dark blue script. He wore black jeans and was barefoot.

  “Allright,” the young man said. “You from the cable?”

  “Yeah,” Wesley said, looking past the young man inside the room, checking to see who else might be there. “You need a primary hookup?”

  “I don’t know,” the young man said. “My sister know what’s happening.” Turning away, he hollered the name Carol again.

  Behind the young man Wesley saw an older man approaching, tentatively, wearing a plaid shirt open to his bare chest, and with his arm in a sling. His curly gray hair seemed untended. As he came closer, he appeared to have a slight tremor in his head.

  “It allright, Pop,” the young man said. “He from the cable.”

  Wesley wondered if they were from New Orleans. The way he greeted him by saying “allright,” and also something about the way he addressed the old man. He didn’t know enough about Houston yet to know the characteristic mannerisms, but he definitely got a whiff of New Orleans here.

  “Why he got to stand outside?” A woman’s voice.

  “I been hollerin’ at you,” the young man said.

  The voice belonged to a young woman whose appearance made every word slide out of Wesley’s mind. Struck dumb would be the phrase. Plaid slacks like the Catholic-school girls wore, and an oversized blue sweatshirt that did not disguise her lithe body. She was slightly darker-skinned than the two men, but not by much, and her hair had been done in the lacquered, curly waves that were in fashion and which Wesley had never cared for. But somehow they looked correct on her. Her face was thin and smooth and her eyes were quick and intelligent and looked right into his. He felt like one of the butterflies he used to catch with his Uncle J, pinned to the board. Wesley stepped into the room at her apparent invitation, looking around.

  “You are here to do the cable hookup, aren’t you?” she said.

  Wesley looked at her and thought to himself, You better wake up Wesley…“Yeah,” he managed to say. “Where you wanted me to run it?” He looked at the papers in his hand.

  “We want one line in here and another one into the bedroom in back. You can do that today?”

  The old man made some croaking sounds, which the young woman seemed to understand.

  “We don’t know if he has a name, yet, Daddy. He been kind of quiet.”

  Wesley began to get a handle on himself enough to tell her his name, and then point to where it was sewn onto his Westco shirt, right there above the breast pocket, as if to say, It was apparent enough, wasn’t it? He said, “You’re Carol.”

  “Coral,” she said. “Louis pronounce it like that when he wants to bother me. You thinking about putting a shirt on any time today, brother?”

  The tall young man laughed, but he walked out of the room and came back a minute later wearing a shirt.

  The installation was straightforward enough, and in the course of it, and after it, over some sweet tea in the kitchen, Wesley learned that the family was indeed from New Orleans, from Gentilly, and that they had lost everything, too. They had been in the Superdome, then the Astrodome, and then they had gotten this apartment through FEMA. It was just the three of them; her mother had died years before. Before he left the house she had given him her cell phone number, and three nights later they went out to the movies.

  Wesley was very guarded the first couple of times they went out, trying to make an impression, but his charm didn’t seem to particularly impress her. He did notice that when he would tell her something about his uncle or mama her expression softened and she got warmer toward him.

  She was different from Chantrell. Coral liked to ask questions, asked him about where he went to school, what he did before the hurricane. Chantrell liked to flirt and tease all the time, always playing some kind of a game. Chantrell never asked questions; she just reacted. Her whole thing was based on how you reacted to her. That was what was important to her about you. It wasn’t as if Coral didn’t like to tease, she did. But she also, apparently, wanted to know who he was. It tripped him out a little bit. But he liked it. Initially he liked it because it flattered him. She obviously saw something in him she liked, and when they started getting close physically there was a lot she liked.

  At one point he said, “It kind of hard to know what you thinking a lot of the time.”

  “I’m trying to figure out what’s important to you,” she said, looking at him with her eyebrows slightly raised.

  It put him off balance. He had never bothered to ask himself that question.

  They had been going out for three weeks when something happened that changed things between them. They were driving to the Galleria to shop on a Saturday afternoon; he had picked her up in the three year-old Camry he had bought from Aaron’s cousin with no down payment, and they had come up to a traffic light and stopped. In the lane to their right, a
car with two young men in the front seat. They were looking over at Coral and saying things, laughing. It lasted no more than ten long seconds, but when the light changed the other car turned left in front of them, cutting Wesley off and heading down a side street.

  Wesley immediately turned after them and sped down the street, throwing his hands around as if he were in a video, cursing, saying, “I’m going fire these motherfuckers up.” Coral sat frozen, eyes wide, and after a block and a half she shouted, “Stop the car.” Wesley did not stop. One more time, with a note of something final creeping into her voice, “You stop the car.”

  Wesley braked hard and swerved to the side of the street, the other car disappearing off down the block. “Why you stop me for,” he shouted at her, gesturing with his hands.

  “Don’t you talk to me like that. Take me home,” she said.

  “I’m a man,” he said. “You understand? I don’t let nobody fuck over me. They were disrespecting you.”

  She stared at him. “Take me home,” she said.

  He threw the car into gear and did a U-turn and they drove back to her house without speaking. As they pulled up, he said, “What I’m supposed to do when somebody disrespect you?”

  She got out of the car and started up the walk toward her door. He got out of his own side and shouted at her over the car roof, “What you want me to do?”

  She turned around; he remembered the look on her face scaring him because she was so beautiful and he felt as if she was slipping away like a rope going through his hands too quickly for him to grab on to. “You figure out a different way of talking around me. Start with that. I don’t care what some bustas in a car saying about me. I don’t want to be with somebody don’t know how to control themself.”

  Then she disappeared inside the apartment where she lived, and he stood there, stunned.

  Later that night, unable to sleep, he called her cell phone. Lucy was long since asleep, and he was in his room, in the darkness. To his surprise she answered, sleepy, saying “Hello” more as a statement than as a question, which was how she did it. He liked the sound. But, hearing it, he was not sure what to say, the way he had been the first day he had met her. “It’s me,” he said. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t hang up either.

  Okay, Wesley, what will you say now? What have you learned?

  After a few moments, her voice: “You wake me up for that?”

  “No,” he said. “I just wanted to say you right.”

  She was quiet. Then she made a light grunting sound and said, “I know that.”

  He stifled the laugh her remark triggered. No use giving her all that much satisfaction. He couldn’t help being impressed by her self-possession. “All right,” he said. “So I know it, too.”

  “That’s good,” she said. They were both quiet for another few moments. “You gonna let me go back to sleep?”

  “If I was there I wouldn’t.”

  “But you not,” she said. “Call me tomorrow.”

  Lucy brought her plate to the table in the dining alcove just off the pocket kitchen—stewed chicken and greens and sweet potatoes. Television going across the room, a procession of flashing, disconnected images. Wesley watched as he ate, still in his uniform from his day at Westco Cable. Lucy sat down and started eating her food. Once in a while she looked at her son, there, across the table from her in this strange city, Houston, in which they had made a provisional and—it had to be—temporary home.

  His hair had been cut back into a neat arrangement and he wore a well-trimmed, super-thin, razor-cut mustache. When Lucy looked at him she still saw a boy, many years a boy, but becoming a man, no doubt. He put money into the house fund, did most of the shopping, had him a girlfriend, a New Orleans girl, who he met somewhere. Lucy liked her. Seemed like they were taking it slowly, which was good. He had not gotten another bike, for which she was grateful. He had one of the company trucks parked outside with all the equipment they used, cords and wires…but he was always handy. Didn’t have to worry about it wasn’t going to be there in the morning like back in the Nine. Went off to work in the morning just like a man. She thought about how strange it was that it had taken all this upset and dislocation to pull Wesley into focus. He was even finding time to coach a little football team of some displaced New Orleans boys. He was turning into a man. Sitting there watching the TV. She had apparently done something right with her life, somehow. She had made him. What she was supposed to do now, she wasn’t exactly sure. She had been thinking about getting a high school equivalency diploma and trying to find something more interesting to do with her time than braid people’s hair.

  “You want some more Barq’s, Wes?” she said, watching him.

  “Nah, I’m all right, Mama,” he said, watching the sports recap on the news.

  She wouldn’t have minded that, take some classes. SJ liked to read, and he had given her the book about da Vinci that everybody was reading, which Leeshawn had given him, but she gave up on it after a few pages, too hard to focus. She was trying not to drink and had been successful for several weeks.

  A commercial came on and Wesley busied himself catching up on the cooling food on his plate.

  “You want me to warm that for you?” Lucy said, watching her son.

  “No Mama; I’m allright.” He chewed, his leg jiggling, thinking about something, looking to see where any more meat was on the chicken. Then his leg stopped jiggling, as if something had occurred to him. She loved watching her boy, could watch him all day. To her surprise he looked right at her and said, “What’s wrong, Mama?”

  “Nothing wrong,” she said, smiling slightly, looking at him. “Baby boy.”

  He examined the chicken again and she could see him go away again in his mind, the leg starting up. She didn’t want him to go away again quite so soon, not quite so soon, and she said, “I was thinking to get a equivalency diploma. Get a high school diploma.”

  “You serious?” he said, eating, setting the bone back on his plate and smiling a little.

  “Serious as a heart attack,” she said, one of Wesley’s favorite expressions.

  “Where they got the course?”

  “I don’t know but I’m-a find out.”

  “You tell Unca J about that?”

  “Not yet; it’s something I’m thinking about is all.” She got some sweet potato on her fork and put it in her mouth, slightly self-conscious, now, and it was Wesley’s turn to watch his mother, his own mother, who had survived so much, and here they were together. After being almost sure they had lost each other. A pang in his chest, Mama, all those years of longing for her when she wasn’t there, off on a long line someplace; how was it he never hated her, never stopped wanting her to see him, and be proud of him, and somehow knowing that she was, even nights when he had to put her to bed because she was too drunk to walk, a lot to ask of an eleven-year-old boy…

  “I’ll pay for it, Mama,” he said, watching her.

  “I don’t even know where they have it yet,” she said. She was quiet then, looking off across the room, somewhere in her mind, and Wesley watched her, sadness and love flooding in, and where did they come from, these emotions that he had kept at bay for so long? He was about to tell her that he loved her, but she spoke first.

  “I’m proud of you, Wesley,” she said, looking down at the table. “I’m so proud of you, and I know you going to be all right.”

  “I am all right, Mama,” he said.

  “I’m glad we together,” she said. “I always wanted that, and…” she left off in mid-sentence. Wesley thought his mother might start crying. “I know I didn’t do right,” she said. “As a mother I’m talking about. I’m just glad I lived long enough to see you be a man.”

  Wesley looked down in his plate and pushed his fork under his greens; he did not know exactly what to do with what she had said. He ate the greens. For years he had heard his mother tell him, drunk, that she loved him, that she was sorry she was not a good mother, ask for his forgiveness. S
he had never used him as the brunt of her own demons. But hearing her, sober and present, express a deep feeling like what she had just expressed was nothing he was prepared for, and he didn’t know where to put it, so he ate. Perhaps it triggered some buried and long-standing need he had had for her to be more present in his life, a need he had made some kind of peace with, pushed down, paved over…Was he a man, he wondered to himself? Like his Unca J? He was on some road of becoming, he was all stirred up and heading for something. He didn’t know what his mother saw when she looked at him. He couldn’t know. He knew she wasn’t talking about just age.

  Lucy looked across the table and found herself, or so it seemed, able to read this in Wesley’s face, the body attitude; it cut her deeply, the awareness of all those years during which they could have been building to something more than this, although this was not nothing. But she looked at him across the table, as if he stood across a river on the opposite bank, and she wanted to tell him something that words alone can never give; she wanted to reach over to him and touch her boy again, make some kind of bridge backward across all the wasted, chaotic time. There in his shirt from work, watching the television. But, instead, she stood up and brought her plate to the sink and washed it, put it in the drainer, and prayed in her mind that they would find a place where they could live and she could see him become the man he needed to be, maybe grandchildren, but maybe be happy and find some love and stability; she knew she wanted to go back to New Orleans, it was all she knew, but she was not sure it was the right place for Wesley anymore. They would figure it out.

  Then Wesley was wide awake in the dark, suddenly, with his heart racing, he thought it was a storm dream; he had had those. Rolled to his side and saw the glowing red numbers—3:48—the free fall of wondering where, or not even wondering, but an emptiness, a removal of the customary envelope. The dream, if it was a dream, slithering away, draining, seeping into the ground before he could catch any of it…