Between Heaven and Here

by Susan Straight

  Victor moved quickly from the futon to the closet. He had practiced this a hundred times, stacking three boxes under his mother’s few hung-up clothes. He lifted himself to the shelf above the clothes and lay covered with an old sheet he’d left there.

  He heard the man’s breath, in the closet doorway, and then the soft kicking of his futon, and then the footsteps went back outside, and the cold air came inside until she returned.

  THE THIRD TUESDAY in September, he checked on the Impala at 7 pm. Jazen and Tiquan didn’t steal cars. But they could pay someone who did. Not that many 1964 Impalas in minty, dirty condition around—everyone wanted them.

  He closed the shed door. “Hooptie,” he said to the car, “as soon as I get some dinero, I’m hooking you up for me.” Then he’d have to learn to drive, practice where no one could see him.

  He walked the six blocks to the tiny Mexican market called La Reina. Rice, bananas, tamarind soda, and some chorizo. He hated taking money from his grandfather, who was napping in his chair, so he spent some of Irwin’s cash. On the way back, around eight, he kept to the edges of the college lots around the huge campus. He saw Professor Zellman walking toward him, styling his hornrims, his hair gelled up, his thick-soled shoes. Working it. His black restored ’65 Mustang fully sweet. He’d driven it all the way out from Brooklyn when he got this teaching job. Fort Greene, said it all the time. He had them read Vibe and The New Yorker and Rolling Stone instead of just the textbook, then write papers: compare and contrast, persuasive, descriptive. The class was tight.

  “Goddamnit!” Zellman was bent near the driver door. Glass sparkled near his feet.

  Victor moved the grocery bag to his other arm and stopped near a pepper tree on the sidewalk. Zellman always talked about how he loved NWA. But I ain’t his nigga with attitude. Wasn’t even here when the window got broken. Would he even remember me? I got the A and kicked ass on the compare and contrast paper.

  He waited until Zellman scrabbled in his briefcase for the celly, then crossed the street, holding his breath until a campus police car sped past him.

  THAT WEEKEND, HE met Mayeli.

  She and her aunt were running a booth at the weekly farmer’s market downtown. Victor had gone to look for used CDs, but he saw the t-shirts waving like stiff ghosts. T-shirts with flags—Mexico, Italy, Puerto Rico, England. Anywhere people came from before they got here. Tight—who came up with that idea?

  She smiled at him. About eighteen, with honey-dark skin and cheekbones so high they were soft pillows under her eyes. Hair pulled back into a bun, gleaming around her forehead like a new vinyl LP. She said, “You got another flag you want, we print it so.”

  Her voice wasn’t California. It wasn’t Jamaica. Somewhere between. He leaned on the booth, keeping his hands from the stark white cloth, and said, “Where you from?”

  “Belize.”

  Then, unlike Rio Seco girls who would go on and on, tell you all about themselves in long breaths, more than you wanted to know, so you would want them and want to buy something from them or for them, she closed her lips. Not like she was pissed. Closed them soft over her teeth, like she would rather listen.

  Oh yeah.

  Victor figured eight or nine hundred dollars to drop a new engine in the Impala and get a life. Maybe he could find a new backseat at Pick-A-Part, the junkyard. Take Mayeli to the movies. I ain’t askin for much.

  On Monday, leaving World Religions, Professor Barr was complaining to another woman about parking permits. “Thirty dollars a month!” she said. “To park two days a week, where I’m employed! And I can’t ever find a space! I don’t believe a factory wouldn’t charge me to park so I could come to work!”

  That night, taking clothes from the washer, he saw the dust raised from his feet against the hard-packed dirt and grass of the lot. The dust hung in the fall air for a moment, in the yellow glow of the old streetlamp against the high blue glare of the college lot lights.

  He went to Professor Zellman after class, but he didn’t hand him the flyer right away. “I heard you pay thirty dollars a month to park in the faculty lot,” he said, trying to appear non-threatening. “I live across the street, on Iris. You could park in the lot next door for twenty dollars a month, and I can get somebody to wash your car once a week. Detail, too, if you want, for ten dollars more.”

  Zellman squinted. “Picard, right? Victor? You wrote about Memphis Minnie and Led Zeppelin for the compare-contrast? They did the same song? Your paper’s right here. Brilliant.”

  Then he laughed. “You know, my dentist has this service in his parking lot. You sure you’re not from Brooklyn?”

  Victor smiled. “I’m from here. I got a flyer. People can do two days a week, three, whatever. And I’ll watch the cars better than campus security.”

  Professor Barr had come up beside them. She didn’t laugh. Her brows had been drawn on with a pencil. She whispered, “All religion begins with the cry ‘Help!’”

  “William James?” Victor asked politely. He was still remembering the pictures she’d shown in class of the untouchable man who’d had acid thrown in his face for daring to drink out of the well of a Brahmin family during a heat wave.

  Zellman threw up his hands and said, “James wasn’t parking, no doubt. Just tying up his horse.”

  ***

  THE CROWS WERE the biggest problem so far, landing purple splotches of shit on a few hoods. So he washed those cars, too. Huddling in the trees, crows were the first to get pecans every year, smart enough to drop them on the street, wait for cars to smash the hulls so they could pick out the raw soft meat.

  Victor stood in the empty lot at dusk. Three cars left. He studied the nuts hanging like green mini-bananas, thinking about the slingshot his grandfather had made when he was a kid. Thumping speakers shook the leaves when someone slowed, and he heard laughter. “Aw, nigga, now you the damn scarecrow!”

  He turned. Jazen and Tiquan. “I can lend you my nine, you get tired standin there like a fool.”

  Victor said, “Some fools stand. Some sit.”

  “Talkin shit now?” Tiquan said, and Victor turned away. Loquaciousness isn’t an attribute. Then Tiquan said, “I got five hundred right now. Five bills.”

  Victor kept walking back toward the shed, and Jazen said, “You can’t even drive that ride. A waste.”

  But Jazen didn’t add anything—the car accelerated, and when Victor glanced back, the campus police car slowed at the curb. Beefy arm. Sunglasses pink with sunset. Like a bad movie.

  “Friends a yours?”

  Victor shook his head.

  “You get a permit, son?” the officer said, glasses off. A scar on his arm when he dangled the glasses out the window. “Or I gotta call the city?”

  Victor waited for him to add whatever he’d add—threat or boast or more unnecessary information. Like Jazen, or like a girl. But he was silent as long as Victor was, and then the car glided away.

  Long horizontal scar. Keloided up, like a fat pink caterpillar made of satin. Like something Victor had seen before.

  ***

  ON THE SECOND Thursday in October, the campus cop didn’t cruise past, though Victor had watched for him all afternoon. At four, Zellman put his briefcase on the porch steps and said, “What you hearin?” He nodded toward Victor’s headphones.

  Victor slid them down. “Chili Peppers.”

  “Red Hot Chili Peppers?”

  Ain’t no other ones, Victor thought. He lifted his chin.

  Zellman frowned. Victor knew he was surprised. White band. “What’s up next in the rotation?”

  Tryin to figure me out. Wanna hear me say Nelly. My price Range is Rover. Shimmy Shimmy Coco Pow.

  “Clifton Chenier,” Victor said. “His favorite.” He nodded toward his grandfather, who sat in his chair in front of the window.

  Zellman grooved his shoulders two times. “Zydeco. Love it.”

  “Yeah,” Victor said. “See you Tuesday.”

  But Zellman shook his head
. “I’m coming in tomorrow. Friday. We have a meeting all morning.”

  “Cool,” Victor said. But when Zellman pulled out, Victor opened his notebook. Zellman and Barr—Tuesday Thursday. Monday Wednesday Friday—Patrini, the math lab tutor. Irwin and his friends every day.

  If they all came at the same time—shit. The lot could hold about seven cars easily. If he had to move cars—shit. He needed to practice backing in and turning.

  His grandfather stood in the doorway and said, “Them pecan gon fall this week. They say the wind come.” Victor threw a rock from the stash he kept on the porch and five crows rose up screeching at him. “Me and Enrique used to fight them bird for some pecan.”

  Victor sat on the porch, highlighting pages about caste systems and religions in India. His grandfather went inside to make coffee. Only two Hondas were left.

  Every day he walked across the street to go to class, and he walked home. He was gone only two hours at a time, and his grandfather watched the cars. He’d been born a mile from here, lived in every apartment building off Palm Avenue, rode a bus to school or walked. Rode in Enrique’s truck to the orange groves. He’d been nowhere. He’d done nothing.

  His grandfather had taken epic journeys. He walked a hundred miles with Enrique when they were little kids. When he came out with his coffee—so sweet Victor could smell the sugar—Victor said, “You ever eat a crow?”

  His grandfather hated chicken. He shook his head. “They sit in them tree laugh at us after the flood. Nobody eat a crow. We ain’t had no gun. Only them soldier—they shoot Enrique’s maman because some meat.”

  Victor didn’t know what to say. He wanted to know what kind of meat. Was it chicken?

  “Then a white man come get us.”

  “All of the people?”

  “Non. Me and Enrique. I was seven. Enrique, he was four. Them people on the levee, they don’t know us. He take us to Plaquemines Parish cause Enrique people there. My peoples gone. He have a mule wagon. They call him a drummer. He sell pot and pan and scissor, he sharpen them tool. Some day he let us ride on the wagon, but if he buy some things and they sit on the wagon then I have to walk. Walk all day. Sleep at night in the woods.”

  “What he give you to eat?”

  “He buy a chicken sometime. From a farm. Tell us pull them feather. I hate them little bump in the skin. Close my eyes and pull them feather and feel em float back in my face.”

  “That’s why you never eat chicken?”

  “I don’t want no bird. All them feather, all them bone.”

  “How long did it take you to get there?”

  “A long time. It was cold when we get there. He gone to all the place he always go. People say you buy two little nigger? He say I take them to Plaquemines. They say that a long way south. He say I get there when I get there.”

  His grandfather looked across the street at the new stadium, the lights up high. “Then one day he stop at a store and say Where Almoinette Antoine? Walk one more day and he leave us at her house.”

  Victor tried to picture it. Sometimes people in the apartments would say, “I’ma call Child Service on her. She need to leave that boy with somebody responsible.” But every day, he put on his clothes and shoes and went to school, so they couldn’t say anything. And he never took off his shirt around anyone. Not even her. She never saw the scars.

  “She was old?”

  His grandfather frowned. “Non. Not old, not young. She never have no children. She just say Come in here take a bath cause I clean the floor. She was Enrique’s aunt. We work on the oyster boat back then. Marinovich and his people get the oyster, and me and Enrique put in the sack and carry all them sack to the dock. She have oranges, so we pick the oranges when they ready. That how Enrique find this place, when he get out the war. California. He see all them orange on the tree.”

  “You were in the ocean? On a boat?”

  “Oyster boat go all in the Gulf. They know where the oyster bed stay. I can’t see nothing but water, and they know where to stop. Pull out them tong and rake them oyster and put em in a sack.”

  His mother had been to the beach once. Newport. At night. With his father. She told him the story three different times—when she was high and sleepy.

  Victor had planned to “Hit the Beach for Senior Ditch Day,” with Logan and Amitav, but when they opened the door of Logan’s Jeep, he said, “I’m cool. I gotta study.” It was a Tuesday, sunny and hot in October, and he kept picturing all the other Logans and Hunters, the blankets and towels and coolers, the words flying around.

  His mother was talking half to herself, in the doorway. He was in bed. She said the waves were like white clouds that hissed when they fell over. Black mountains and then like a thousand snakes hissed when the water hit the sand. She said that was the night he was conceived.

  Conception. Conceit. Concave.

  Con man. He finna run a con on Glorette. You cain’t run no con on her. She ain’t foolish. She just high. Well, that one dude run a con on her. Seventeen years ago. Left the evidence behind.

  ***

  THAT FRIDAY NIGHT, Patrini never came back for his Volvo.

  Mayeli’s aunt dropped her off so he could play her a new CD. The Kuffs. She ate red beans and rice, laughing when his grandfather whispered, “Victor say you from down past Mexico, you used to them refry beans, no?”

  “Not true!” she said in that accent. She called it Creole. The Beatles and some Spanish and when she wanted to mess with him, whole sentences he couldn’t understand. “We have red beans and rice in Belize. And Sunday dinner—stew chicken. So I cook for you one day, yes?”

  Her aunt wouldn’t come inside when she picked her up, wouldn’t even get out of her old Galant. “She says Belizeans are not the same black as Americans,” Mayeli whispered apologetically. “She thinks is perilous for us to speak.”

  “Say it again.”

  “What?” She grinned, hand on the old cut-glass doorknob. “Perilous?”

  “Yeah.”

  Perilous—I ain’t got shit, can’t drive. She ain’t gotta worry. Pitiful.

  When she left, and his grandfather went to sleep, the Volvo was still there. Victor sat in the Impala, shed door open, facing the Volvo. He’d thought it would be funny to sit here with Mayeli and eat drive-thru food, but it was fucking pathetic. And when he’d kissed her, she slid her hands up his t-shirt sleeves and onto his shoulderblades and laced her fingers.

  His back.

  He heard cars leaving after the football game. SUVs with their huge tires whining, the low-riders and Sentras bumping stereos. The street grew quiet again by midnight, and Victor felt tears running down his face, hot on his collarbone. He didn’t raise his hands to wipe them.

  He wasn’t even crying for his mother. She had scars on her ankles. He didn’t know if Memphis did that.

  He’d never really seen his own scars until last month, in the bathroom in this house. No matter how he tried to stand on the toilet when he was little, and twist to look in whatever medicine chest mirror, he could see only one or two. But here, the mirror was bigger. He could see all seven.

  He was from Memphis. He wouldn’t leave. He had light brown skin and whiskers that had embedded themselves like chocolate sprinkles from the Halloween cupcakes at school. His eyes were swimming in red. Like blood.

  He drank Cisco, and that meant he didn’t pass out like Chess, who drank Johnnie Black, or Sisia’s brother who drank tequila. Memphis just got more pissed as the sun fell. He never told them his name. It had been two days. He was waiting for something. To carry back to Memphis. They were his entertainment. He made Victor change the channel. It was back when Urkel was on TV.

  Lil nigga never smile.

  He don’t have to smile. His mother stayed in her chair at the glass table. Memphis had moved the couch across the door. That ain’t his job. My job. I smiled for you yesterday.

  He turned to Victor, who sat on the floor near the TV, where Urkel was so close his glasses looked like lakes.
You betta smile, lil nigga.

  I smiled.

  Not today you ain’t. You been in them books.

  Victor had waited for hours, until Memphis fell asleep on the couch and his mother put her head down on her arms and her mouth opened. Then he stood up slowly, legs like Gumby, and went into his room to do his homework. He had missed school.

  Memphis woke him by pulling off his t-shirt. He lit a cigarette. Seven cigarettes. Two eyes. One on each shoulderblade. Five times in the center of his back in a curve that must look like a grin. If you saw the whole thing.

  Which only Memphis had. Pink buttons now. Black before they fell off. Never seen his back, but in bed three little black discs.

  THE STREETSWEEPER WOKE him. His heart dangled in his throat for a moment. When he was little, he thought the streetsweeper was a monster. A Chinese dragon, like he’d seen in a parade on TV. All the lights, whirring brushes, hissing past him now to raise dust that settled on Patrini’s Volvo.

  He’d fallen asleep in the Impala. Zellman was staring at him, the ’Stang idling in the driveway. Zellman pulled up next to the Volvo and rolled down the window.

  “You listening to the radio in there?”

  Victor shook his head.

  “Wanna hear something?”

  Victor got out of the Impala and closed the shed door. He got into Zellman’s passenger seat. “You always up this early?” Zellman said.

  Victor could smell his aftershave. “Sometimes. Why you here? On a Saturday?” Sun poured through the branches. “You worried I wasn’t takin care of the Volvo?”

  Zellman frowned. “Hell, who’d steal a Volvo?” He put in the new Outkast CD. “I gotta work on something in the library. A piece about pimpology for this new zine.”

  Victor closed his eyes. He couldn’t think. Outkast. Wearing what his mother said looked like leisure suits. “I was waitin for Professor Patrini.”