Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  Across the street is Chino. Men’s Correctional Facility. The wards laugh and sing back to Fred like they’re Snoop Dogg: “I’m on my way to Chino, I see no reason to cry…”

  He says, “Lord knows Mr. Doggy Dogg ain’t gonna be there when you are.”

  The Chicano kids talk Spanish to Reyes, and he looks back at them like a statue wearing shades. The big guy, Michaels, used to play football with Rey. He has never looked into my face since I got here. My nephew Alfonso used to play football, too. He used to say, “Come on, Michaels, show a brotha love, Michaels. Lemme have a cigarette. You can’t do that for a brotha, man? Brothaman?”

  Alfonso thought this was a big joke. A vacation. Training for life. Called it the country club. Now he’s out riding the streets again.

  I never said a damn thing when he winked at me. Now I watch them walk domino-lines to class and to the kitchen and the laundry and the field. Sleepy and Spooky and Dre Dog and Scooby and G Dog and Monster all tattooed on their arms and heads and necks. Like a damn kennel. Nazis with spiderwebs on their elbows, which is supposed to mean they killed somebody dark. Asians with spidery writing on their arms, and I don’t know what that means.

  “I’ma get mines, all I gotta say, Auntie Clarette,” my nephew always said when he was ten or eleven. “I ain’t workin all my life for some shitty car and a house. I’ma get mines now.”

  I couldn’t help it. Not supposed to look out for him, but when they changed rooms, when they were in the cafeteria, I watched him. I never said anything to him. But I kept seeing my brother in Alfonso’s fool forehead, my brother and Bettina in their apartment back when Alfonso was a baby, nothing but a couch and a TV. Always had something to drink, though, and plenty weed.

  Swear Alfonso might have thought he was better off here. Three hots and a cot, the boys say.

  We watch the laundry screens, the classrooms, and I don’t say anything to Fred for a long time. I keep thinking about Danae’s reading tonight, takes twenty minutes, and then I can wash a load of jeans and pay the bills.

  “Chow time, baby,” Fred says, pushing it. Walking behind me when we line everybody up. They’re all mumbling, like a hundred little air conditioners, talking shit to each other.

  It was a year of extra worrying I didn’t need, back when Alfonso would line up with his new homeys, lips moving steady as a cartoon. He would grin at me. My brother said, Take care my boy, Clarette. It’s on you.

  No, I used to holler back at him. You had seventeen years to take care of him. Why I gotta do your job? How am I supposed to make sure he don’t get killed?

  The wind blows past all those bald heads. So hot. I know the words are brushing the back of the necks in line, the Chicano kids wanting to fight, black kids moving their fingers down by their legs like I can’t see gang signs, and I walk over with my stick. “Move,” I say, and the sweaty foreheads go shining past like windshields in a traffic jam.

  “Keep moving,” I say louder. I feel all the feet pounding the asphalt around me and I stand in the shade next to Fred, tell him, “Shut up” real soft, soft as these boys still talking yang in the line.

  I HAD A buzzing in my head all day. Since I got up at five to do two loads of laundry and make a hot breakfast and get the kids ready for school. So hot in August—and now because the school downtown’s so crowded, they said we had to start year-round schedule. Crazy. I dreamed me and Glorette were running in the groves like we used to. Racing down the furrows after they ran the irrigation, splashing in the water. Bare feet.

  When I get home, I start folding the towels and see the bus stop at the corner. I wait for the kids to come busting in, but all the voices fade away down the street like little radios. Where are those kids? I go out on the porch, and the sidewalk’s empty, and my throat fills up again like that spicy meat’s caught. Rey Jr. knows to meet Danae at her classroom. The teacher’s supposed to make sure they’re on the bus. Where the hell are they?

  I get back in the van and head toward the school, and on Palm Avenue I swear I see Danae standing outside the barbershop, waving at me when I’m stopped at the light.

  “Mama!” she calls, holding a cone from the Dairy Queen next door. “Mama!’

  The smell of aftershave coats my teeth. And Rey Jr.’s in the chair, his hair on the tile floor like rainclouds.

  My son. His head naked, a little nick on the back of his skull when he sees me and ducks down. Where someone hit him with a rock last year in third grade. The barber rubs his palms over Rey Jr.’s skin and it shines.

  “Wax him up, man,” Rey says, and I move on him fast. His hair under my feet, too, I see now, lighter and straighter. Brown clouds. The ones with no rain.

  “How could you?” I try to whisper, but I can’t whisper. Not after all day of hollering, not stepping on all that hair.

  The barber, old guy I remember from football games, said, “Mmm-mmm-mmm.”

  “The look, baby. Everybody wants the look. You always working on Danae’s hair, and Rey-Rey’s was looking ragged.” Rey lifts both hands, fingers out, like he always does. Like it’s a damn sports movie and he’s the ref. Exaggerated. “Hey, I thought I was helping you out.”

  I heard the laughing in his mouth. “Like Mike, baby. Like Ice Cube. The look. He said some punks was messin with him at school.”

  I go outside and look at Rey Jr.’s head through the grimy glass. I can’t touch his skull. Naked. How did it get that naked was tough? Naked like when they were born. When I was laying there and his head laced with blood and wax.

  My head pounding when I put it against the glass, and I feel Danae’s sticky fingers on my elbow. “Mama. I got another book at school today. Sheep in a Jeep”

  When we were done reading, she fell asleep. My head hurt like a tight swimcap. I went into Rey Jr.’s room and felt the slickness of the wax.

  IN THE MORNING I’m so tired my hands are shaking when I comb Danae’s hair. I have to take her to Rey’s mother, since I pulled weekend shift. “Pocahontas braids,” she says, and I feel my thumbs stiff when I twist the ties on the ends. I stare at my own forehead, all the new hair growing out, little explosions at my temples. Bald. Rey’s bald now. We do braids and curls or Bone-Strait and half the day in the salon, and they don’t even comb theirs? Big boulder heads and dents all in the skullbone, and that’s supposed to look good to us?

  I gotta watch all these wards dressed in dark blue work outfits, baggyass pants, big old shirts, and then get home and all the kids in the neighborhood are wearing dark blue Dickies, Rey is wearing dark blue Dickies and a Big Dog shirt.

  Like my sister-in-law Cerise says, “They wear that, and I’m supposed to wear stretch pants and a sports bra and high heels? Give me a break.”

  Buzzing in my head. Grandmère said we all got the pressure, inherited. Says I can’t eat salt or coffee, but she doesn’t have to eat lunch here or stay awake looking at screens. Get my braids done this weekend, if Esther got time for me. Feels like my scalp has stubbles and they’re turned inside poking my brain.

  Here sits Fred across from me, still combs his hair even though it looks like a black cap pushed way too far back on his head. He’s telling me I need to come out to the Old School club with him and JC and Beverly sometime. They play Cameo and the Bar-Kays. “Your Love Is Like the Holy Ghost.”

  “What you do last Sunday? You had the day off, right?” he says.

  “I worked an extra shift. My grandmère took the kids to the cemetery.” I drink my coffee. Metal like the pot. Not like my grandmère’s coffee, creole-style with chicory. She took the kids to see her husband’s grave, in the military cemetery. She told Danae about World War II and all the men that died, and Danae came home crying about all the bodies under the ground where they’d walked. Six—they cry over everything. Everything is scary.

  I worked the extra shift to pay off my dishwasher. Four hundred dollars at Circuit City. Plus installation.

  I told Rey Jr., “Oh, yeah, you gonna load this thing. Knives go in like thi
s. Plates like this.”

  He said, “Why you yelling, Mama? Ain’t no big thing. I like the way they get loaded in exactly the same every time. And I help Grammere Marie-Claire all the time with dishes. I just don’t let Daddy know.”

  He grinned. I wanted to cry.

  “USED PIANO IN the paper cost $500. Upright.”

  “What the hell is that?” Rey said on the phone. Hadn’t come by since the barber.

  I tried to think. “The kind against the wall, I guess. Baby grand is real high.”

  “For you?”

  “For Rey Jr. He fooled around on the piano at school, and the teacher told him he has natural talent. Now he wants to play like my grandpère did in New Orleans.”

  Rey’s voice got loud. “Uh-uh. You on your own there. Punks hear he play the piano, they gon kick his ass. Damn, Clarette.”

  I can get louder now, since I got this job. “Oh, yeah. He looks like Ice Cube, nobody’s gonna mess with him. All better, right? Damn you, Rey.”

  I slam the phone down so hard the back cracks. Cheap purple Target cordless. $15.99.

  Next day I open the classifieds on the desk across from Fred and start looking. Uprights. Finish my iron coffee. Then I hear one of the wards singing. “Three strikes you’re out, tell me what you gonna do?”

  Nate Dogg. That song. “Never Leave Me Alone.”

  This ward has a shaved black head like a bowling ball, a voice like church. “Tell my son all about me, tell him his daddy’s sorry…”

  Shows us his pass at the door. “Yeah, you sorry all right,” Fred says.

  The ward’s face changes all up. Eyes go little and mean. “Not really, man. Not really.”

  My grandmère would say, “Old days, the men go off to the army. Hard time, let me tell you. They go off to die, or they come back. But if they die, we get some money from the army. If they come back, they get a job on the base. Now them little boys, they go off to the prison just like the army. Like they have to. To be a man. They go off to die, or come back. But they ain’t got nothin. Nothin either way.”

  Wards in formation now. The wind is still pushing, school papers cart-wheeling across the courtyard past the boots. Sometimes I still check for Alfonso, in the back like he used to be every day, like a big damn Candyland game with Danae, and it’s never over cause we keep picking the same damn cards over and over cause it’s only two of us playing. I still think he’s here, even though I saw him in a Navigator last week getting a Coke at Rite-Aid—his friend all Thug Life and spitting right past me.

  I breathe in all the dust from the fields. Chino hay fields all dry and turned now, the dirt flying past us. Two more hours today. Wards go back to class. The boy singing lifts his chin at me, and I stare him down. Fred humming something. What is it?

  If this world were mine, I’d make you my queen… Old Luther songs.

  “Shut up, Fred,” I tell him. I don’t know if he’s trying to hook up with me or not. He keeps asking me about Rey.

  “All them braids look like a crown,” he says, smiling like a player.

  “A bun,” I say. He knows we have to wear our hair tight back for security. And Esther just did my braids last night. That’s why my temples ache now.

  “They went at it in the laundry room again Thursday,” Fred says, looking at the screens.

  I stare at the prison laundry, the huge washers and dryers like an old cemetery my grandmère took me to in Louisiana once, when I was a kid. All those dead people in white stone chambers with white stone doors. On the monitor, I see the wards sorting laundry and talking, see JC in there with them.

  “Can’t keep them out of there,” I say, watching their hands on the white t-shirts. “Cause everybody’s gotta have clean clothes.”

  At home I stand in front of my washer, dropping in Danae’s pink t-shirt, her Old Navy capris. One trip to Old Navy in spring, one in fall is all I can afford. And her legs getting longer. Jeans and jeans. Sometimes they take so long to dry I just sit down on the floor in front of the dryer and read the paper, cause I’m too tired to go back out to the couch. If I sit down on something soft, I’ll fall asleep, and the jeans will be all wrinkled in the morning.

  But the wards here always press their jeans. In the laundry, that’s the big deal. The creases have to be perfect.

  SIX HOURS INTO the shift, even after four Advil, my forehead still feels like it’s full of hot sand. Gotta be the flu. I don’t have time for this shit. I re-do my hair, pull the braids back, put a softer scrunchie around the bun.

  Seen Sisia at Esther’s last night. She always hated me in high school, hated all of us from Sarrat because we were light. But she started hanging out with Glorette years ago—when they both fell in love with the wrong guys and then they got on the rock. Before I went up on Esther’s porch for my appointment, I heard Sisia say, “Glorette ain’t never had to get braids. Ain’t never had to sit for ten minutes or do shit with all that hair she got. Not her whole damn life. I done spent half my money on my hair and nails.”

  I was thinking, You spent the other half on crack, and she said to me, “You got all that pretty hair, why you scrape it back so sharp?”

  “Where I work.”

  “You cookin somewhere?”

  “Nope. Sittin. Lookin at fools.”

  She pinched up her eyes. “At the jail?”

  “CYA. Chino.”

  Then she pulls in her chin. “They got my son. Two years. He wasn’t even doin nothing. Wrong place wrong time.”

  “Chino wrong place, sure.”

  She gets up and spits off Esther’s porch. “I come back later, Esther.”

  Esther says, “Don’t trip on Sisia. She always mad at somebody.”

  Shouldn’t be mad at me.

  “I didn’t got her son. I’m just tryin to make sure he comes home. Whoever he is.”

  Esther nods and pulls those little hairs at my temple. I always touch that part when I’m at work. The body is thy temple. My temple. Where the blood pound when something goes wrong.

  My laundry’s like people landed from a tornado. Jean legs and shirt sleeves all tangled up on my bed.

  “You foldin?” I said last night, and Rey Jr. pulled out his jeans and stacked them in a pile like logs. Then he slapped them down with his big hand.

  “They my clothes.”

  “Don’t tell your daddy.”

  “I don’t tell him much.”

  His hair growing back on his skull. Not like iron filings. Like curly feathers. Still soft.

  Now Fred puts his comb away and say, “Give a brotha some time.”

  “I gave him two years. He’s been tripping for two years, okay?”

  “That’s all Rey get? He just goin through some changes, right?”

  “We have to eat. Kids got field trips and books to buy.” The wind bashes against the gates and they squeal like my grandmère’s chickens. I’m not telling him, but I’m working overtime tonight cause I want a real piano. Not a cheap keyboard.

  Two years. The laundry piled on my bed like a mound over a grave. On the side where Rey used to sleep. The homework. Now piano lessons.

  Fred says, “So you done?”

  “With Rey?” I look right at him. “Nope. I’m just done.”

  “Oh, come on, Clarette. You ain’t but thirty-five. You ain’t done.”

  “You ain’t Miss Cleo. You ain’t on TV predicting futures.”

  “You need to come out to the Comedy Club. No, now, I ain’t sayin with me. We could meet up there. Listen to some Earth, Wind and Fire. Elements of life, girl.”

  Water. They missed water. Elements of life: bottled water cause I don’t want the kids drinking tap. Water pouring out the washing machine. Water inside the new dishwasher—I can hear it sloshing around in there.

  I look out at the courtyard. Rogue tumbleweed, a small one, rolling across the asphalt.

  “Know what, Clarette? You just need to get yours. I know I get mines. I have me some fun, after workin here all day. Have a drink, ta
lk to some people, meet a fine lady. Like you.”

  “Shut up, Fred. Here they come.”

  Reyes leading in his line and I see two boys go down, start punching. I run into the courtyard with my stick out and can’t get to them, cause their crews are working now. The noise—it’s like the crows in the pecan grove by Sarrat, all the yelling, but not lifting up to the sky. All around me. I pull off shirts, Reyes next to me throwing kids out to Michaels and Fred. Shoving them back, and one shoves me hard in the side. I feel elbows and hands. Got to get to the kid down. I push with my stick.

  I swear I thought I saw Alfonso. His face bobbing over them like a puppet. “Get out of here!” I yell at him, and he’s grinning. I swear. But it’s not him. I reach down and the Chicano kid is on top, black kid under him, and I see a boot. I pull the top kid and hear Reyes hollering next to me, voice deep as a car stereo in my ear.

  Circle’s opening now. Chicano kid is down, he’s thin, bony wrists, green-laced with writing. The black kid is softer, neck shining, and he rolls over. But then he throws himself at the Chicano kid again, and I catch him with my boot. Both down. Reyes kicks the Chicano kid over onto his belly and holds him. I have to do the same thing with the black kid. His lip split like a pomegranate. Oozing red. Some mother’s son. It’s hard not to feel the sting in my belly. Reyes’ boy yelling at me in Spanish. I kick him one more time, in the side.

  I bend down to turn mine over, get out my cuffs, and one braid pulls loose. Falls by my eyes. Bead silver like a raindrop. I see a dark hand reach for it, feel spit spray my forehead. Bitch. My hair pulled from my temple. My temple.

  My stick. Blood on my stick. Michaels and Reyes take the wards. I keep my face away from all the rest, and a bubble of air or blood or something throbs next to my eyebrow, where my skin pulled from my skull, for a minute. Burning now, but I know it’s gonna turn black like a scab, underneath my hair. I have to stand up. The sky turns black, then gray, like always. They’re all heading to lockdown. I make sure they all see me spit on the cement before I go back inside. Fred stands outside talking to the shift supervisor, Williams, and I know he’s coming in here in a minute, so I open the classifieds again and put my finger on Upright.