Red Now And Laters

by Marcus J. Guillory

  Yet the entire display went well beyond cowboy hats and boots in Houston, and all of Texas for that matter. It’s no secret—Texas is a cocky state. For eleven months out of the year, a Houstonian might be a doctor or dishwasher or ditch-digger with no affiliation with, experience of, or knowledge about horses, cattle, or cowboying, but the minute February 28 (or that awkward, insistent twenty-ninth) turns to March, everybody, and I mean everybody, turns into an insta–Calamity Jane or Wyatt Earp with full rights and privileges, a monthlong masking of sorts. Now I would argue that that was more of a Texan thing because Texans have a tendency to make a big deal out of everything. But in all fairness, cowboying was part of the state’s identity, giving its residents absolute, unencumbered entitlement to cowboy hats and boots. If you’re a Texan, you can wear them and nobody has any right to ask you a damn thing, whether you own a horse or not.

  But Houston was far from a Mayberry. This was, and still is, the biggest Southern city in the country. And the expected tropes followed with it. Crime. Racism. Factionalism. Limited resources for unlimited problems. White folks still ran the state of Texas, and Houston was no exception. They had their part of town and we had ours. That simple. And although Jim Crow laws had long been abolished, their fumes hovered over the city with the humidity and smog. Sometimes obvious but most times subtle. But in the safety of South Park, I wouldn’t be exposed to that harsh reality. Well, not yet.

  With no opportunity for merriment on Ricky Street with the other boys my age, I ventured to my old faithful backyard with my Hot Wheels and G.I. Joe action figures. Hours and hours in that backyard, smelling Father’s hunting dogs’ feces, on the ground fulfilling my fantasies. Demolition derbies. Stunt jumps. High-flying acrobatics. And every boy’s favorite: war.

  Action figures warred with each other constantly, never a moment of peace, even when Mother bought me the Princess Leia action figure. Mother had no idea that the poor princess was about to get gangbanged by everybody, including two Hot Wheels cars. She had read somewhere that little boys should have female-gendered toys to develop sensitivity toward women or some shit like that. The only thing they developed was the idea that you could get booty with your clothes on. At least with plastic clothes. And for all that fucking, the fair princess was a bad Catholic because she must have been on birth control. Not one pregnancy since she arrived at Christmas. By March, I started to understand Smurfette a little better.

  As Chewbacca and Lando argued about who got to go first, I could hear the kids yelling on Ricky Street. Fuck! What were they doing? Probably something more exciting than playing with toys by yourself. And one song was playing over and over. Heavy bass line and a simple chant—“She’s a Bad Mama Jama.” I could hear that song playing all over the house, in the bathroom playing the pee-pee game, in the backyard climbing trees, eating cereal, watching cartoons. Just as fine as she can be. Princess Leia’s favorite.

  Mother opened the window blinds in the kitchen with “Ti’ John. Time to come in.”

  The sky turned burnt orange just as Chewbacca and Lando decided to double-team the princess for a quickie before they returned to my shoe box. And the voices on Ricky Street got louder. Damn! They don’t even have to come in. But tomorrow was school with Sister Marie Thérèse, who constantly reminded me that I looked like Father. No shit.

  three

  anointed

  The following Monday morning at St. Philip while Albert Thibodeaux and I were pouring salt on morning snails in front of the church, we heard a loud screech followed by a very pronounced yet muted thump right across the street on MLK. Cookie Green got smashed in between a car and a Metro bus. That’s what it sounds like when somebody gets hit by a car. A thump. Not a smash like broken glass. Not a splat like a bursting water balloon. Just a thump.

  We didn’t know what had happened. People ran toward the rear of the bus. Two or three were yelling and waving their arms at the school for assistance.

  “Somebody musta hit a dog or something,” Albert conjectured.

  “They sho’ makin’ a lot of noise about it,” I responded as we stood and watched a crowd gather at the rear of the bus.

  She was on the ground with a large crowd circling her. Sister Marie Thérèse rushed us into the hallway of the school and told us to sit against the wall. Adults moved fast, some crying, others with low, hurried murmurs. Something wasn’t right and whatever got hit wasn’t a dog. Then it was overheard. Cookie got hit by a car after she ran off the bus and decided to head across the street from the rear of the bus to get in the classroom and finish her homework before school started. The guy driving the car wasn’t paying attention and slammed into the rear of the bus with Cookie acting as a bumper. Thump.

  But this was still conjecture amongst us elementary school kids until the ambulance arrived. Most of the girls started crying, which I found odd since none of them really liked Cookie. She wasn’t the cutest and was a bit of a tattletale, but, being good Catholics, the girls found room for remorse and bawled their hypocritical eyes out.

  Some of the boys in first and second grades started crying too, probably an automatic response to the general mood. Kids will do that. If adults are crying, kids will cry without knowing why they’re crying. It’s an obligation. But the third-grade boys were too busy discussing what had happened. Cookie always running across the street without looking. She shouldna’ been on the bus anyway. Why was she on the bus? Her uncle stole her momma’s car and wrecked it. Boy, I bet he feel bad right now. Her momma be drunk. She mighta been born drunk ’cause she always fallin’ down. Various theories were tossed about as most of the staff rushed across the street for a closer look. Was she dead? Would she be in a wheelchair? Remember that witch in The Wizard of Oz who got smushed by Dorothy’s house? I bet that’s how her legs look. Oooh, that’s nasty. We were horrible, but I guess we had to process the event in our own way and we sure as hell weren’t going to cry.

  After about thirty minutes of saying a Rosary in our classroom with Sister Marie Thérèse, we heard the ambulance whine away. The teachers returned to their classes. The janitors returned to their mops and brooms. The priests returned to their rectory. Even Monday returned back to the week. But Cookie Green did not return to homeroom. She was in an ambulance, coughing up blood in between her pleas—

  “I was prayin’, Momma. Promise I was.”

  The principal decided to have an emergency assembly to explain the situation and caution us against running out into the street without looking. No shit, Sherlock.

  The assembly took almost an hour. The cafeteria ladies handed out brownies and punch like a party. Cookie should get hit more often, I thought.

  The girls were speaking of her as though she had died, recalling memories of playing jacks or jumping rope with Cookie, which I thought was some bullshit because they had never played with Cookie. Cookie played with us—the boys. Ashy legs and all like baking soda under a cookie. She had the perfect name. A skinny, little chocolate girl with a playful attitude whose skin was always ashy. But she’d share her Funyuns with you and if you promised to be her friend for a week she would give you a Now and Later candy. A red one.

  By the time the assembly was over, lunch began, followed by an impromptu special-circumstances recess that would remain in effect until school ended. Damn. Cookie needs to get hit more often.

  The good thing about going to a Catholic school filled with Louisiana expats is that lunch was the bomb. Red beans and rice with fried chicken. Shrimp po’boys. Jambalaya. Gumbo. Praline candy for dessert. All of this for school lunch. Today we had crawfish étouffée, cher bon Dieu.

  After lunch, we all headed out to the dusty, ant-bed-laden playground for a game of kickball. Third grade versus fourth grade, a bitter rivalry monitored by the lofty fifth graders, who were too busy kissing on each other.

  By the time we figured out the kicking order on the playground, Cookie Green was dead. She had died, we would be solemnly told, at St. Joseph Hospital emergency room. Police i
nvestigators found a half-eaten bag of Funyuns in her school bag. Upon closer examination of her bag, they also discovered that she hadn’t done her homework for the past two weeks.

  She had recently replaced homework with Hail Marys in quick succession. That’s what her momma told her to do to get the voices to stop. Her mother had a demon.

  Needless to say, it was an uncomfortable topic at church. Mrs. Green had been sequestered in her home to receive the sacrament—her very own home-delivery Mass complete with a homily, Communion, incense on a chain, robed altar boys, the whole thing—because after Saturday six o’clock Mass, altar boys drew lots to see who would attend the Saturday activities with Father Murdoch and his special attaché, Father Ignacios Hernandez, who was, at the time, the only priest in the Houston-Galveston archdiocese who was authorized to conduct an exorcism. Of course, the altar boys were sworn to secrecy about the exorcism with threats that if they were to speak of the ritual, the exorcised demon would find and possess them. It worked.

  However, after two months, Hernandez’s special prayers had no effect on Mrs. Green, who chose to sing Chaka Khan’s “Once You Get Started” over and over while dangling and swaying her free limbs to the funky sounds of the little Rufus band in her head despite Hernandez’s aggressive and committed incantations in Latin with a Mexican accent (which rather sounded like Brazilian Portuguese). She may or may not have been possessed, but her distraught husband was sure of one thing. She was in love and it wasn’t with him.

  It would take the death of Cookie to make those voices and the band stop. But maybe Mrs. Green should’ve let her little girl do her homework and deal with the voices her damn self. Of course, nobody but Mrs. Green knew about the voices.

  We didn’t find out about Cookie’s death until the next morning.

  Nobody talked at lunch. Not a sound. Nobody from our homeroom, Cookie’s homeroom. We knew her more than the other kids and I think that many of us were feeling guilty for mistreating her. No one admitted it, but when does a third grader admit anything if they’re not going to get in trouble? Plus the fifth graders were watching and yelling at us for treating Cookie poorly. She ain’t do nuthin’ to yawl. She just wanted to be yawl friend. She usedta give away chips and Now and Laters. They were right. Absolutely fuckin’ right. Some people want a friend, but Cookie wanted to be a friend. I think most of my homeroom made that rather mature evaluation and felt a general sense of guilt. We were extra polite to each other for the remainder of the school day.

  I was uncharacteristically quiet in the car ride home that afternoon. We stopped at the corner of Bellfort Street and MLK. I giggled and pointed at him, the Median Man, who stood in the grassy median waiting on the light.

  The Median Man was fast becoming a fixture on MLK. Forty or fifty or sixty years old with an afro beard and a physique that belonged either on a chain gang or in a comic book. He always wore gray gym sweats with a bath towel tightly wrapped around his neck. A red, black, and green headband parted his huge afro, separating his furry brows from his crown. He moved with high steps—even, measured, deliberate, exact—never breaking stride as he jogged a steady pace along MLK. He looked forward, focused, and didn’t speak to nor acknowledge anyone. If he had family nearby, nobody ever knew, and I doubt that he would speak to them if he passed them on the street. He only yielded for the traffic light and treated errant vehicles as mere annoyances like bothersome butterflies. Other than that, he looked straight ahead.

  Simple enough, right? Wrong—this was South Park, where the ordinary required poetry. As he jogged he always carried a four-foot-long iron fence post with a large cement block at one end. Damn, that had to be heavy, I thought, yet he jogged with the post over his shoulder, block to his back, every day, rain, sleet, or heat, only pausing for the occasional flood or hurricane and only when the floodwaters were well above ankle level. Weather didn’t matter. He had somewhere to go, his only route the median that divided MLK. From MacGregor Park to the dead end and back again. The clock carrying the pendulum.

  “Ti’ John, it’s not polite to stare,” Mother warned as the light changed and we continued along MLK headed home.

  I didn’t even notice who was playing on Ricky Street. Mother didn’t say a thing. It was better that way. When we got home I told Mother that I would be in the front yard. I sat on the curb and pushed a Hot Wheels along a muddy gutter, clogging the plastic wheels until they couldn’t turn. Then I pushed the little car against the clean part of the concrete, making tracks.

  Mrs. Ballard, who lived up the block, waved as she passed by in a green Cutlass Supreme, windows down, stereo blasting gospel, and smoking a funny-smelling cigarette with fat brown fingers. I looked at her bumper sticker—“Jesus Saves.” But not Cookie Green.

  “They say some girl at your school died. Did you see it?”

  I hadn’t noticed him walk up. I peered upward and saw Raymond Earl standing before me, holding a football. We were about the same height but he was a bit stout—thick legs and arms. He had a block head, square with thick, tight, dark curls, but his distinguishing feature was his thick, bushy eyebrows that prompted others to call him Eddie Munster when he wasn’t around. But his reputation preceded him. He wasn’t a bully but he wasn’t a punk. He was fearless and fair with more courage than most of the kids in the hood, even many who were older. At ten years old, he had garnered respect from kids as old as sixteen, which was quite a feat.

  “I ain’t see it,” I responded. He started throwing the ball in the air, then offered, “Wanna play catch?”

  Short routes. Long routes. Bombs. He threw it all. He was strong for his age. He was in public school like most of the kids in my neighborhood and he lived on Rue Street around the corner, but he traveled everywhere. Walking. All the time by himself. On busy MLK Boulevard. At the light, eating candy. Raymond Earl.

  Mother came to the door and told me I had to come in. I returned the ball to Raymond Earl. He didn’t say anything, just a nod. He wasn’t going home. Peeking from the living room curtains, I marveled at his calm paseo to Ricky Street. Part bravado, part nonchalance, he resembled the infamous Corduroy Brothers further up the block, who pushed nickel bags from ten-speeds and a dilapidated Lincoln sitting on blocks in their grandmomma’s front yard. But the only time Raymond Earl would run was during competition or immediate danger. That was it. I envied his stroll to Ricky Street, where he was accepted and approved. No slouching nor leaning, just appointed steps, one foot in front of the other, with purpose and direction. He walked like a man.

  Mother cooked tripe and lima beans. Yuck! Father watched J. R. Richard pitch a no-hitter against the Padres on TV. I was in my room tracing Conan the Barbarian’s muscular arms and thinking about Cookie. I wondered if she was in Heaven. Or did she turn into a ghost? What would her parents do with her clothes and toys? The big Salvation Army truck made runs through the hood twice a year, but most times there was more giving than receiving. Saw a couch in the back that you liked, then you asked for it. You paid the delivery guy a small fee to put it in your house. More than a few families in the hood had their entire homes decorated by Salvation Army. It wasn’t a big deal since everybody in the neighborhood had achieved some level of manageable poverty. Status was only a matter of your vehicle and new paint on your house. And if you had saved a few extra bucks, you installed vinyl siding. That was about it.

  I wondered if Mrs. Green would give all of Cookie’s stuff to Salvation Army for some other little girl to use. What if that little girl got hit by a car too? Would she die? Would Cookie’s stuff be cursed? I had read in the encyclopedia that some white guy had opened King Tut’s tomb and died. They said it was a curse. I guess you should leave dead people’s shit alone.

  I hoped that Cookie found somebody to play with in Heaven. Somebody who would be her friend regardless of what she gave them. Somebody to twirl the rope and let her jump. Somebody to play jacks with and tell secrets to. And before I jumped in bed, I went to a knee and asked God to be kind to Cooki
e.

  I turned off the light and listened to the train along Mykawa Road humming from a distance. I liked to think that I was Cookie’s friend and now I had lost her. But I had also gained a new friend in Raymond Earl, a worthy friend, a friend with connections on Ricky Street. I wasn’t really one to be a follower but if I had to follow somebody I thought Raymond Earl would be a good choice because for some reason, at least on Ricky Street and in my hood, he was important—he mattered.

  Four o’clock in the morning. Benson & Hedges Regular Light. He was awake. Father always started his mornings with a cigarette while he sat at the edge of the bed, thinking about God knows what. He had to go to work, and for a longshoreman that usually meant leaving the house well before dawn. Mother would get up too, put on a pot of coffee, fry a few eggs, stir some grits, and feed her man before he went to work. Then she’d go back to bed for an hour and start all over with me. I’d watch her from the dining room table while glancing at Deputy Dawg on the small TV set that sat next to a huge pile of bills.

  “Did you do your homework, Ti’ John?” she asked.

  “Yep,” I replied with a smile.

  “Keep doin’ your lessons, Ti’ John. Do that for Momma?” she said, eyes fixated on breakfast, heart and mind torn by a restless man. She saw salvation in me. I was her chance. Things would be different for me. She’d see to that. A parent’s wish.