Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  “What I always get.” Victor loved saying that. He didn’t even have to give her the percentage. It was always 97 or 98. Mrs. Mumbles had to take off two or three points for everyone—even if she had to make up some shit about one word being awkward or you forgot a comma or a space in MLA format.

  But he loved Mrs. Mumbles. Mumford. She’d been at the high school for so long she’d had three generations of Logan and Hunter and Piper. She’d had their parents named Ted and Betty in the sixties, and their parents named Horace and Eleanor in the thirties. He’d seen their pictures in the hallways.

  But Mrs. Mumbles didn’t buy into all the hype, and the old families and fundraisers and the right mom or wrong mom at Back to School Night. She never looked any of them in the face. She stared at some spot in the room and mumbled about funeral art of India and Impressionists and Cubism. She didn’t give a shit that Victor’s mother, who came to Open House because he’d told her it was the last time she could ever do that, sat in the back like the most beautiful zombie statue in the history of the world.

  She was luminous. In winter, the nights shitty and cold, her skin got dulled like the gold-leaf frame of a painting if soot and years laid a patina of darkness or haze. Then she would sleep for two days, and when the sun came out, they’d go out to the orange groves. Eat gumbo and oranges, see the grandparents, and she’d take a long shower and put almond oil in her hair.

  She’d be gilt again. And the other moms at Open House hated the way she gazed bemusedly at their fleece vests and mom jeans for two seconds before dismissing them and staring at the paintings on the classroom walls.

  The SAT plan was to get number-three scores. Logan had taken it twice, Amitav three times. Logan got a 1500, perfect score, and Amitav 1490, in October. Victor didn’t have the money in October, and in November she got pneumonia after a cold windstorm when she stood in the alley too long. His aunt Fantine helped him one weekend with vocabulary words. He chanted to himself all day and most of the night.

  Luciferous. Loquacious. Lucid. Lucent.

  He listened to Classical KUSC, just to hear adagio and arpeggio and adelante. One program featured the high school students who won national competitions in piano or violin or cello. In the interviews, they sounded like who Amitav’s mom wished he was.

  He listened to NPR, looked up the SAT word of the day in the school library, and read the dictionary. She’d stolen a pocket dictionary from Rite Aid for him.

  She never stole ramen or orange juice or nail polish or lotion or candy from Rite Aid, but she said that same dictionary had been sitting in the same revolving rack for a year. She said she knew that because she folded down one page, at the word Poinsettia.

  Her favorite song was “Poinciana,” and that word wasn’t in the dictionary.

  If no one was going to use it, and it was $12.99, she said it was fate. And she could put it back when he was done, if he didn’t mess up the pages.

  But that Friday night, May 5, some idiot came up to the apartment with Sisia and wanted Glorette. Chess was already there. The idiot was from LA. He had green eyes and big heavy cheeks like two burlap bags hanging around his nose. Had dooky braids like you saw on little girls, so he thought he was hardcore, which Victor never understood.

  He shot five rounds from his Glock and called it a night. But when the cops came they cuffed his mother and Sisia, he heard them yelling, and then they busted down the bedroom door and took Victor, even though he’d been in bed with his headphones on the whole time, and the gunfire had sounded like the crack of palm fronds falling in the wind and hitting the concrete balcony.

  ON A RANDOM night in August, somebody had killed his mother and put her body in a shopping cart behind the Eye. The next morning was supposed to be his assigned registration date for city college.

  His uncle Enrique was probably still trying to figure out who’d done it. They’d tried to make him believe she died on the couch at their house, out in the groves. Like she’d walked all that way to take a nap.

  But his grandfather didn’t care about revenge. He was just sad—so sad his voice went down to the whisper of sandpaper on already smooth wood. They had buried her next to his grandmother, in the cemetery at the edge of the orange groves. Then Victor had slept in his mother’s old bedroom for days, smelling the oranges hot on the trees, since his life was over.

  But five days later Marcus Thompson shook him out of the sheets and stood there glaring. When Victor was a freshman, Marcus had said, “Man, call me your distant uncle, whatever, just let me get you through school and into the big time. The smartest idiot I’ve had in ten years.”

  But Victor knew why. Marcus had been seriously in love with Glorette when they were seventeen. Totally sprung. He was married now and had a stepdaughter, but he still loved her. Chess, Marcus, Sidney Chabert who worked at the video store—they never got over his mother. On the dresser were bottles of perfume, dusty on their round shoulders, and inside one drawer were Valentines from her sophomore year. Queen of My Heart, someone named Narcisse had written. Funky French name.

  His mother, in the rusted shopping cart.

  He turned over and pressed his cheek against the pillow.

  Marcus said, “I got you a new registration date. Get up. Get up.”

  “Fuck that! Everybody calls it thirteenth grade, man. I ain’t goin.”

  Amitav and Logan were already at Berkeley. Blazing in a dorm room now. The two Hunters were at UCLA.

  “Get up.” Marcus rolled him out of bed and he fell on the floor. His grandfather and Uncle Enrique stood in the doorway. “He has to go to college,” Marcus said. “I mean it. He has to get—”

  Victor knew the ending. Marcus wanted to say “—get out of here,” but facing the old men who’d picked oranges and shot rabbits and rebuilt trucks, who’d tried to save his mother again and again, he knew better.

  “Victor has to get started,” Marcus said. “He can transfer after two years to the big time.”

  His grandfather said, “Take them damn thing off your ear. Put them clothes and books in the truck.”

  THEY BOUGHT A house in the city, on a narrow street at the edge of the arroyo. His grandfather had met Mrs. Batiste forty years earlier, when they’d come out from Louisiana. Her husband died ten years ago, and she went to live with her son Darnell. The little house was empty, and it was across the street from Rio Seco City College.

  “We put in them pecan tree for her back in 1970,” his grandfather said. “Nothin across the street back then but a field and some old junkyard.”

  Now the city college had expanded, building a new stadium and classroom buildings all the way to the edge of the former field. Victor carried his bag up the three steps of the cement porch and leaned against one of the wooden pillars. The house was old, pale yellow peeling paint, black wrought-iron railing around the porch that made his eyes burn with tears for a moment when he touched the rusty pitted metal. Like the railings on every second story of every apartment building he’d lived in with his mother.

  The tears descended into his sinus cavities, as always. He never let them out. Sinuses and sinews and secretions and synapses.

  His grandfather took one tiny bedroom, and he took the other. The kitchen was dusty, with cracked linoleum tiles and a counter with gold speckles inside. Formosa—that was ants. Formidable. Formica.

  Fucking thirteenth grade. Cars racing in and out of Lot 8 across the street. Victor had seen the two girl Logans in cheer squad uniforms, leaning close to a side window on a Blazer and putting on lipstick. Of course.

  The night before classes began, Uncle Enrique drove up in his ancient truck. Victor’s grandfather had never had a truck—he always rode with Enrique.

  They sat on the porch after they ate the red beans Enrique’s wife had sent in a huge pot. Victor had spent the day weedwhacking the grass and trimming the lowest branches on the pecan trees, to keep from wanting to kill himself.

  They lit Swisher Sweets. It was September 5, and over a hundr
ed degrees. They spoke in French too fast and slurred for Victor to make out more than a few words. His mother’s name.

  His grandfather hadn’t said anything to Victor most of the day. Victor sat on the bottom step. Babysitting. His grandfather should be working the groves with Enrique. He had nothing to do here but sit in his recliner and make sure Victor stayed alive.

  “You get them book at the school?” Enrique finally said.

  Victor nodded. He’d only gotten into two classes. World Religions and English Composition in a stack on the folding chair.

  “You look in that shed there?” Enrique said.

  “Maybe a washer,” his grandfather said.

  Victor went into the big side yard, almost a second lot. He remembered delivering oranges to this woman years ago, and getting a bag of pecans. She used to grow sugarcane, too. A few stalks rustled behind the house. The shed was an old leaning wooden building, narrow and long. He slid the wooden door sideways. There could have been a washer at the back, but all Victor saw was the ancient Impala, pale blue, the windshield full of cobwebs that hung low like ghostly sails.

  “INDIAN DUDE SHOWED me how to make these,” his mother said that day, crouching in the sandy dirt near the cactus. She pointed to a small tree. “He said that was Indian tobacco. Dude named Beto. He used to smoke it when he was little.”

  “We part Indian?” Victor had asked her.

  “Not that kind. Not California. When I was ten and went down there to Louisiana, the old lady said, ‘The first one come from Senegal. Marie-Therese. And some a them was Houma. Indian.”

  “That’s all?”

  “She was a mean old lady. Spoke French. The white men was French, back in the day.”

  He remembered looking at the tobacco tree. “What about my daddy?”

  “Sere Dakar. Dakar’s a city in Senegal.”

  “He was African?”

  “No.”

  BACK ON THE second Tuesday of September, Victor was on the porch looking over his notes for World Religions. The class had him tripping. Professor Barr was about fifty, with eyes green as a wine bottle and hair dyed the glistening red of pomegranate seeds. She moved her fingers like she was dancing. Hinduism. Buddhism. Counting karma. Classifying people, animals, in a hierarchy so final even death didn’t free you.

  It was 8 am. A lowered black Acura, custom muffler, racing car, kept cruising past looking for a parking place on the street. Five times. Six. Cars had been swerving into the narrow gravel drive to turn around, then racing off. Victor closed his book and stood up just when the driver pulled up and said, “Dude! You got parking in your yard?”

  He was Asian. He kept the car idling, the speakers bumping Nelly. “Serious, bro, I can’t be late for class again or they’ll kick me out. How much?”

  “How much you pay for the student lot?”

  “I didn’t get the lottery, bro. Never any spaces anyway. I’m always late to class, less I get here six in the morning.”

  Victor stared past him. Not a clue what students paid, or how much money they’d spare for an extra hour. “You got class every day?”

  “Every day. I got five tickets already on this street cause it’s one-hour parking and shit.”

  “Twenty dollars a week.”

  “Bro! You rock.”

  Irwin was his name. Chinese-American. He told his three friends, all of them wealthy kids who were doing their first year at city college to get their grades up for university. By Wednesday, the four Hondas parked in a row, black and dark blue, gleaming.

  Thursday morning was Professor Zellman’s class, at nine, so Victor got up at dawn to make Louisiana-style drip coffee for his grandfather, who was always awake by sunrise. His grandfather would have to watch the cars, just for two hours.

  He carried a load of his grandfather’s clothes and bedding out to the old washer. He had used his grandmother’s old sifter to lay flour lines in the lot after he’d weedwhacked the grass short. He was raking the few branches he’d trimmed, and when he heard Jazen’s voice from the street, the words flew around the leaves for a moment before settling on his head.

  “You farmin now, nigga?”

  Jazen and Tiquan grinned from the open windows of the Navigator. Country Grammar bumped from the speakers.

  “Rakin leaves.” Victor waited. “Where’s Alfonso?”

  “In the wind. He vacated.” Jazen studied the house. “You stay here now?”

  Victor nodded.

  “You heard that old dude Chess got gotted?”

  Victor shrugged. If Chess had gotten killed by some fool in love, he didn’t want to know.

  Jazen said casually, “I’m sorry about your moms. They catch the nigga did it?”

  Victor said, “How you know it was a nigga? How you know it wasn’t a white dude?”

  Tiquan said, “Ain’t no white dude been—”

  But Jazen’s face went cold. “He don’t know shit.”

  Victor stared back. “Don’t matter who did it.”

  “Always matter who did it. Matter who got gotted, matter who gotted em. But you ain’t interested.” Jazen stared him down.

  “No. I ain’t.” Victor felt a splinter in the wooden handle, and Tiquan looked past him and whistled, high and sharp as a rock thrown at a telephone wire.

  “That a six-four?” Tiquan said, pointing at the shed. “Damn. You gon sell me that, right? I give you cash right now.”

  “Ain’t runnin.”

  “I can see that. I don’t care. I know this dude got nothin but six-fo’s and he want another one.”

  “Ain’t mine.”

  “Don’t gotta be yours.”

  “Ain’t for sale.”

  The Navigator moved off like a blue house on wheels, and Victor heard the bass all the way inside his kneecaps.

  HE HAD NEVER told anyone—not his mother, not Marcus—about that night a month before his mother died, when he’d taken a ride with Alfonso and Jazen because he’d been walking back from school in the dark and they saw him. He’d never told Marcus how it felt, the neon lights at Sundown Liquor flickering behind his eyelids. He knew Alfonso had a gun in the glove compartment. The Navigator bumping old-school House of Pain—“Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain”—and the moon hanging low like a damn Mento. Like a commercial. And somebody want to pull up hard at the light—checkin and assessin—and you think, Hell yeah, step or drive.

  Then they’d passed Launderland, and he’d seen the empty shopping carts parked around the telephone pole at the Lamplighter Motel—like silver ponies with fat bellies waiting all patient. This ain’t the Wild Wild West. And I ain’t got a horse.

  How when they dropped him off, the neon still shook in his forehead.

  You can’t always get what you want. Irwin had been singing that one day when he came for his Honda. But he wasn’t riding with Jazen.

  “I never kill nobody, me,” his grandfather said once when Victor was ten, when he’d asked about the shotgun in the living room. “Enrique kill somebody.”

  “He kill a man?” Victor said.

  “He kill two man. But I never kill nobody, cause he do. He the one.”

  Victor had looked at his mother, sleeping on the couch, her hand cupped, held upward like she was asking for something from the ceiling. Rock. A fucking eighties drug. Disco bumped into funk and then messed up by his mother and her friends. All of them thirty-five and couldn’t grow up. Leggings and tank tops, like Flashdance reruns. Moving apartments every three months—pay a deposit, no rent, and stay ahead of eviction. Only thing moved every time was the glass-topped table she loved so much, Victor’s futon, and the trunk she’d had since she was nine, a metal box imprinted with the American flag.

  His grandfather used to say to her, “Co fa?”

  Quoi faire? What you gonna do? She sat on the floor, painting her toenails the color of cherry juice. Grandpère would say, “A secretary. They hire all the time at the city.”

  “And nobody grab my ass, want some for free?
”

  “You can’t run the street toujour. Non.”

  Then she went back to the strip on Palm Avenue: Launderland, which was always warm in winter when they’d been standing outside; Sundown Liquor, where the men filed in and out, one by one, like the leaf-cutter ants he’d seen on TV, but carrying brown paper bags.

  That time someone had stolen her mud-brown Celica from the carport at Hyacinth Gardens, and they had no phone, no breakfast, no spoons. Someone had walked off with their spoons. They ate ramen noodles for lunch and dinner with plastic forks, and Victor drank the broth, telling himself bitterly that the tiny green dots floating in the salty soup were vegetables.

  Even though his grandmother used to demand him when he was little, his mother wouldn’t give him up.

  His grandfather whispered to him, “You think you kill somebody if he hurt you?”

  His grandfather wanted to know if it ever got that bad at the apartment.

  Victor didn’t answer.

  WHEN HE WAS little, she couldn’t leave him forever at night. Sisia would watch TV for a few hours, and then his mother would come back while Sisia went out. Sisia had a face like a black orange, with pinprick scars, and her fingernails were long and painted.

  His futon was always in the only bedroom, always on the other side of the wall where the TV stood if they had one, and he could hear the chunk when the channels changed.

  Sometimes his mother had to bring them home. He put pillows over his head, but his ears had the canals that went into his brain. He’d seen a movie about the human body at school.

  That Christmas, he asked his uncles for headphones. Uncle Reynaldo said, “Lil man wanna hear some sounds. You think Santa comin down the chimney with some music?” They bought him a Walkman, which he hid inside his shirt while he slept.

  When he was eleven, she left him alone for longer. She went out at eleven and came home around four.

  He never wore the headphones while she was gone, in case someone broke in.

  Only once. Around Christmas then, too, because someone had put winking lights around the palm tree trunks in the courtyard. Some dude jimmied open the front door. Splintered the cheap frame. The lights had stopped blinking. The voice said, “Shit, ain’t nothin worth nothin in here.” Footsteps into the room.