“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know? Oh, that Vanda was a hell raiser all right. She couldn’t have been much older than me, but into the kinda trouble that women weren’t getting into around here then, if you know what I mean.”
“Men?” I asked.
Miss Johnson laughed. “Well, I done told you, even I knew about that kind of trouble. But yeah, she was into men, but not just for being into men.”
She spoke those last words slowly, and when I still looked at her blankly, lowered her voice and looked around her living room for spies. “She was into men for the money.”
“She was a prostitute?”
Miss Johnson gave me a disgusted look, but whether it was for saying the word aloud in her home or saying it so loudly as it burst out of me, I couldn’t be sure. “I wouldn’t use that word. It wasn’t that she did it professional-like. She just needed the money.”
“I thought Isaac had a job.”
“I didn’t say they needed the money, now did I? I said she needed the money. See, she had herself a drug problem. Might not sound like a big deal now, with those kids out there dealing on the corner.” I hadn’t seen any kids dealing on the corner.
“What kind of drugs?”
“Well, I can’t say for sure. I can tell you she was messed up on something most all the time I saw her, not that I saw her that much. Seems like she slept most days, and she went down to Jimmy’s bar of a evening. To get high or get some money to get high.”
“Did her husband know?”
“Isaac would have to have been a blind man not to. Yeah, he knew. Such a good, kind man. Handsome, too. Always working, always taking care of the little girl, and trying to clean up after Vanda besides. I’m sure he tried to get her to stop early on, but then I guess he gave up, just tried to keep her from doing too much damage.”
“Did they argue about it?”
“From time to time, but not as much as you would think, with her out every night of the week. Like I said, I think he gave up on her. Or at least gave up on trying to change her. But some nights you’d hear ‘em—mostly Vanda really—screaming such filthy things. She coulda taught them kids on the corner a thing or two, with that mouth.”
“Did you ever see them fight?”
“You know, I can’t say that I did. I seem to remember after it happened that people talked about him beating on her. Somebody said he even went to get her from Jimmy’s once and made a scene, but I can’t say that I ever saw it.”
She settled back, shaking her head, then suddenly sat up so straight she almost stood from her chair. “No, wait, I tell a lie. There was one night, musta been a few months before she died. Lord, I never seen that man so angry. I was sitting in the front room reading a novel, like I always do.”
She pointed to boxes full of what looked like lurid-covered romance novels in the corner.
“I don’t know where everybody else was. In bed maybe. I heard this racket, and the porch light was on next door. There was Isaac, dragging Vanda out the front door. She was crying, but he wasn’t saying a word. At least not until he got her out of the house. I ran over to see what was going on. I was afraid she mighta done something, that something might have happened to little Noel. I used to worry about that a lot. Anyway, Vanda was crawling, hanging onto his legs, and Isaac pushed her away and down the front steps of the porch. He went after her and stood over her. I thought maybe he was checking to make sure she was OK. Vanda was just sobbing and carrying on.”
Miss Johnson stopped for a moment and hugged her arms around her body without seeming to realize it. “You know, the Lord says to love thy neighbor, but I’m just a flawed human being and I never did like that woman. I didn’t like what she did to Isaac, and I didn’t like what she did to the child. But it hurt my heart to see her in that state. And then, he looked down at her, like he could spit, and said, ‘Whore.’ That was it. Just that one word. And she kept wailing.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” she admitted. “I just stood there. Isaac went in the house and came out again with a paper bag of something, metal and glass by the sound of it, that he threw in the trash. I followed him when he went back in the house, to see if Noel was okay. He got on the phone, and I heard him say, ‘Come get your daughter. She’s not welcome here any more.’ Her folks came to pick her up that night. She was still sobbing in the yard when they showed up.”
“What about Noel?”
“I don’t know. I never did see her that night. She wasn’t standing around, and I didn’t feel like I should go nosing about, so I left. Vanda was gone a couple weeks, but she did come back. I didn’t see it. She was just there one day. And she did better for a while. Things quieted down, and she quit going out all the time. But it didn’t last out the month, and she was at it again.”
“Miss Johnson, what was in the trash can? What did Isaac throw away?”
She looked offended. “What makes you think I woulda looked in somebody else’s garbage?”
“I would have.”
She grinned. “Yeah, well, I guess maybe we have something in common then.”
“What was it?”
“Just what you think. Drug stuff, for smoking it. I might not know how to use it, but I could figure out what it was used for easy enough.”
I checked my watch and saw that it was time to leave for Ida Pickett’s. “Well,” I said as I rose, “thank you, Miss Johnson. You’ve been a big help.”
She walked me to the door and looked out carefully before opening it.
“Damn kid pushers,” she said. “You know, I just don’t get it. I don’t know what they put in that stuff to mess people up so bad, make ‘em so stupid. Just like Vanda. I thought she had everything when they moved here. She was a beautiful woman then, before she stopped eating and drinking anything that wouldn’t get her high. And here she had a good-looking, hard-working man who adored her, a sweet child and another on the way…”
I’m sure my mouth dropped in a rather unattractive fashion. “A what?”
“Oh yeah. You didn’t know that? When they moved here Vanda was pregnant, just barely showing. Maybe four or five months along.”
“What happened to the child?”
“Vanda had a miscarriage.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I stopped on the way out of town at a place Mike had recommended and got a bunch of fried chicken and sides to take to Ida’s. The smell nearly drove me insane on the trip up there, but at least it took my mind off everything else. I was having making sense of this new picture of the Thomas family home.
Lazarus didn’t look any better the second time around. It’s not that I expected the EPA or somebody to run and do a quick clean-up while my back was turned, but I’d hoped some of what I felt last time was the shock of seeing the degradation for the first time. Ida’s neighborhood did seem a little less X-Files deserted, maybe because people were coming home and getting ready for dinner. There were lights in windows and cars in driveways, but still no one abroad except Ida’s neighbor Mr. Phillips, watering his greens. He must have recognized me. This time he smiled as he nodded. I gathered up my bag and the box of wafting goodies and walked to the fence at the front edge of his property.
“Hello,” I called to Mr. Phillips.
“Good evening,” he said. “Mighty fine weather.”
“Yes, sir, it is. What are you growing in there?”
“Well, I just started some squash and peppers, but I don’t know how well the squash’ll take. They like a lot of space. Then I got tomatoes here—beefsteak and cherry—and mustard in the back. I’ll be starting the chard soon.”
“Frilly edged or broadleaf?” I asked, referring to the mustard.
“Broadleaf,” he replied, with a scandalized look. I didn’t know there was a hierarchy among mustards. As I walked toward Ida’s front steps, Mr. Phillips glared at her house, perhaps wondering what kind of frilly edged element she was bringing to the neighborhood.
It
hadn’t occurred to me until knocking on her door that my impulsivity might be considered rude. What if she didn’t like chicken, or thought I was insulting her cooking? What if she kicked me out and I ended up eating it all myself? Okay, so the way I was drooling right now, the eating it all part didn’t sound so bad. What if I had something really important to worry about? I still looked at Ida apologetically when she opened the door.
“My stomach’s on eastern time, and I thought you might be ready for an early dinner too.”
“Is that from Lorna’s?”
“I think that was the name of it. Used to be an old Tastee Freez. The signs are still in the parking lot.”
“Did you get biscuits or hush puppies?”
“Both. And cole slaw and collards.”
“Honey, what are you waiting for? Come on in.”
We went in to the kitchen, where Ida set out paper plates, tall glasses of iced tea, and a roll of paper towels. She grinned. “I’m really living high now. I won’t even have to do dishes.”
I put a little of everything on my tripled up paper plates and dug in. “Mmm,” I moaned, through a bite of juicy well-seasoned chicken breast. “Just like a picnic. Except inside.”
“I can’t remember the last time I ate outside.” Ida’s gaze went involuntarily in the direction of the quarantined playground.
I put down my food. “Ida, if I’m being too personal you can kick me out and keep my chicken, but I have to ask. Why do you stay here?”
A smile brushed her lips. “Well, I guess that is hard for you to understand, young as you are. But this is the first and only house my husband and I ever owned. This used to be a nice neighborhood, full of life. My husband and I couldn’t have children of our own, but we used to walk to that very park in the evenings, watching over the neighbor kids and waiting for the sunset. We did that every day for so many years, until close to the end when Ernest got too weak to leave the bed.” Ida looked down at her plate and gripped her tea glass tightly with both hands. “We lived our lives in this house, and my Ernest died in this house. It’s been over 2 years since he’s died, but I’m nowhere near ready to let go yet.”
She released her grip and took a small sip from her glass. “You know what’s so strange to me? This earth, this air and water is no different today than it was 15 or 20 or even 30 years ago. The damage was already done by then. We just didn’t know it. To think of all that life going on, when really everything around us was as dead then as it is now. We just didn’t know it yet.” I looked away as she dabbed her eyes with a piece of paper towel.
“I’m sorry, Ida.”
She stretched her arm out and patted my hand. “Aren’t we all, honey aren’t we all?”
After another fortifying sip of tea, she went on. “You know, even if I wanted to leave, if I was ready to leave, I couldn’t. I can’t afford to. I couldn’t give this house away, much less sell it. And I don’t have any children or anyone left to move in with. Unless we can get the government to buy us out, a lot of people around here’ll be stuck.”
We sat for a while, pushing our food around on our plates. It seemed we’d both lost our appetite. “Boy, I am just a ray of sunshine. What do you say we leave this stuff here and go look at family pictures? I pulled all of my old photo albums down. I thought you might want to look at them.”
“That sounds nice,” I told her. And it did.
As we flipped through old albums and boxes of loose pictures, I learned more about the Thomas family. Ida and Isaac’s parents, John and Iris, were long dead. Their father John had died in an accident when Ida was 15 years old. Their mother Iris had died several years later. It was her funeral that had brought Isaac and Noel to Lazarus on the one occasion that Ida had seen them together, the only time she’d met Noel and the last time she’d seen her brother alive.
There had been another Thomas child, the eldest son named Jacob. Three years separated each of the children, with Ida in the middle and Isaac the youngest. Jacob died of leukemia at age 11. It had been diagnosed late, and Jacob had died within a matter of months, but they still incurred a significant debt of medical bills. With the grieving family pinching pennies and John working a second job, they had nearly paid off the bills when John himself died. Of course, his death had left them in an even more precarious financial position. Iris got work at one of the factories, and the children did odd jobs for money until they were old enough to be consistently employed.
Ida held out a picture and indicated a handsome, broad-shouldered young black man posing as a sort of he-man in the grassy front yard of a house. Small children hung from his flexed arms and clung to his thick legs. A head tilted next to his own where another child hung down his back from his neck. Everyone was laughing.
“Lord, he was strong. He always wanted to play football. He tried once, I think it was his sophomore year, but he couldn’t skip work for the practices.”
She laughed. “I think the coach was even more disappointed than Isaac was. He came over and talked to momma about it, and she would’ve tried to work something out but Isaac wouldn’t let her. He said putting food on the table was much more important than a bunch of guys getting their pants dirty trying to knock each other down.”
At the next picture Ida sucked in her breath. This showed a slightly older Isaac, still a teenager but starting to show the man he would become. His straight black eyebrows, full without being bushy, were softened by the kind eyes they framed and a mouth reminiscent of a child’s doll, cupid-shaped and just short of feminine. He stood facing the camera, his mouth closed but smiling, with his arm around a woman, his eyes focused on her rather than the camera lens. The woman had an hourglass figure, her tiny waist blossoming into full hips and breasts, and her short skirt showed off long tapered legs. Her dark hair was cut short, fluffed out about an inch all around her head. Her face was radiant, her brown skin flawless with the exception of a dark mole that brought even more attention to eyes that were almost too large for her face. She was gorgeous, a black Marilyn Monroe.
“That’s Vanda,” Ida whispered, transfixed by the image of the woman her brother had murdered. “I’d forgotten how beautiful she was.”
“How did they meet?”
“I’m not sure. She was a year older than him, and I think he’d just started his senior year. She could have had any man she wanted.”
Ida gave a short laugh. “In our less charitable moments, some of us jealous females said she’d already had every man she wanted. Now, with the benefit of age and experience, and an absence of raging hormones, I’d have to say that was unfair. I doubt she slept around any more than any other girl back then, which incidentally wasn’t much despite what was going on in the rest of the country. Whatever brought her and Isaac together, I’m sure she was faithful to him. At least, in those early years when I saw them.”
“Were they good together?”
“At first, but everyone is at first. They seemed very happy, but gradually Isaac starting behaving differently toward everyone else. He and Vanda seemed to focus all their energy on each other. His grades had never been much more than average, and they started slipping.”
“That’s not that uncommon in a graduating senior.”
“True, but he also started missing work. We didn’t see him at home as much. Not that I was at home much either. I went through a couple of bad boyfriends around that time. I think maybe we were both, Isaac and I, going through the teenage rebellion that we’d put off for years of being responsible children.”
“He did manage to graduate, barely. Then he got a factory job—not where mom worked, he made sure of that—and started making some money. He and Vanda were always together. They still seemed okay for a while, but after about six months or so, I started hearing about problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Well, the thing about Vanda is, she was her momma’s favorite. She was headstrong and probably a little spoiled, and she always got her way. She wanted more for Isaac and fo
r herself than just working at a factory in Lazarus. I don’t know what exactly, but she always had dreams in her eyes. When it didn’t happen right away, I think she got frustrated. She and Isaac started hanging out in bars, first on weekends and then during the week. Isaac didn’t spend many nights at home anymore.”
“One night he and Vanda came in, half-drunk, to pick up some of his clothes. They had a big fight with momma, and she blamed all of his ‘wicked ways’ on Vanda.” Ida smiled. “As you can imagine, that didn’t go over very well. Isaac moved out, and apparently they had the same fight over at the Harrisons, because Vanda moved out of there too.”
Ida sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Things got worse before they got better. I don’t know if this is true, but bad news usually is. I was told they were living in some dump because all of Isaac’s money was going to drugs for the two of them. Hard stuff. Then he lost his job. I don’t know if that knocked some sense into him, or he just couldn’t support their lifestyle as easily without a job. About a month later, Isaac showed up at the place where I was waitressing. He said he and Vanda were getting married at the courthouse and he wanted me to be there. Of course I went. There was another young woman there, I think one of Vanda’s cousins, but no one else from either family.”
She started flipping through the box on her lap, without success. “There should be a picture of them in here. Vanda was too thin, but they seemed happy. After the ceremony, the four of us had cake and champagne, and they announced that they were leaving Lazarus. They didn’t say it in so many words, but they’d decided to cut off contact with the families and wouldn’t tell either of us where they were going. I’d get an occasional letter, and a few years later I think Isaac started sending momma money, but there was never a return address, and not even the postmarks stayed the same.”
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