by Pearl Cleage
Which just goes to show you, the oldsters would say, leaving you alone to consider all this while they eased off to pour themselves another drink, wherever you go, there you are.
• 5
if i hadn’t asked Eddie to stop at the liquor store, none of this shit would have happened. Well, it might have happened, but it would be somebody else’s problem, which would have been fine with me. I got enough problems of my own. It’s a good thing Eddie remembered to go back for the vodka after the confusion died down because I damn sure needed a drink.
When we first pulled into the parking lot, there wasn’t another soul around. Eddie went in and I’m just sitting there being glad he offered so I wouldn’t have to jump my tired ass out of this truck again before we got to Joyce’s. All of a sudden a big old brown and white Cadillac screeches into the lot and brakes so hard it skids three feet before it rocks to a stop.
The passenger door opens up fast and a woman jumps out and drags a little boy out right behind her. He’s about a year and a half old, maybe, and has on a sagging diaper and a filthy T-shirt. His mama, I guess she was his mama but she could have been his sister, is cussing up a storm at whoever is still in the car and she sort of tosses the baby off to one side over in the direction of the pay phone to keep him out of harm’s way, then she turns toward the man who is sliding out from behind the wheel, headed in her direction.
She was little, plus she didn’t have any shoes on, so he might have looked bigger than he really was. Either way, he was big enough and he was mad. He got around the car so quickly, she didn’t have a chance to run. He grabbed her arm and shook her so hard her earrings flew off and her tiny little black skirt rode up over her behind and gathered around her waist like a wide belt. Her panties had a heart over the crotch and the lace was gone around one leg.
Then he slapped her, hard, and when her head jerked over to the side, he backhanded her the other way and slapped her again. He was screaming that he was going to kill her and she was screaming stop, stop, stop and the baby had fallen down and he was screaming, too.
Eddie must have heard all the commotion—everybody for a mile could hear it!—but I didn’t see him come out. All of a sudden he was just there. He pulled the man away from the woman and flung him back so hard the guy staggered and almost fell. The woman was scrambling around in the car looking for her shoes and her purse. The man was much younger than I’d thought. So was the girl. They looked like high school kids. I hoped that wasn’t their baby, but I knew it probably was.
The guy got up and ran at Eddie like he was going to knock him out of the way to get at the girl again. Eddie crouched down a little bit until the guy was almost up on him, then he sort of lunged forward, his arm shot out, and he hit the guy square in the Adam’s apple. The guy went down like he’d been shot, gasping and gagging and trying to catch his breath.
I sat there with my mouth open. I had come all the way to Idlewild and landed in the middle of a damn kung fu movie. The girl had her shoes in her hand now. The baby had crawled over and was holding on to her leg. They were both quiet, watching Eddie. He asked her if she was okay and she nodded, so he picked up the keys where the guy had dropped them and handed them to her. She asked if the boy was going to die, and when Eddie said no, she said she didn’t want to take the car then since she figured he would really kill her if he got himself together and she had left him stranded. Eddie nodded like that made any kind of sense. I’d have taken those keys and rolled that big old piece of car back and forth across that Negro until I got tired, but that’s just me.
Next thing I know, Eddie’s opening the door and she’s squeezing in next to me so we can drop her off at home. Her face is pretty swollen and she’s so out of it, her skirt is still bunched up around her waist. Eddie hands her the baby, who definitely needs a diaper change, and who takes one look at me and starts crying again. His mother doesn’t seem to hear it for the first mile or so, but it must have had a cumulative effect on her nerves because when we were almost there, she reached down and pinched his leg so hard that he gasped and tried to holler, but he couldn’t make another sound and didn’t for the rest of the trip. Once he shut up, the girl started muttering to herself like we weren’t even there.
“Muthafucka just lying. He know he my baby daddy. Look at his damn face. Look just like him. Nigga know I ain’t been fuckin’ nobody but him since his ass got here and he can’t give me five dollars a week? What the fuck I’m ‘spose to do for money? What the fuck I’m ‘spose to do?”
We took her to a tiny cinder-block house at the bottom of an overgrown, unpaved road with no lake at the end to redeem it. The yard was full of trash and broken toys and an ancient Ford Mustang on its own set of cinder blocks. She mumbled a quick thanks and jumped out as soon as Eddie stopped the truck, dragging the baby out behind her and finally pulling her skirt down over her little narrow behind, which she had the nerve to be switching as she went on up the walk to the house.
“Sorry about that,” Eddie said, turning the truck around and heading back toward Joyce’s.
“I wasn’t expecting to see anything like that up here,” I said.
He looked at me and smiled. “Welcome home.”
I remembered how fast he had moved back there. The kid never saw it coming. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Army,” he said. “He’ll be all right as soon as he catches his breath. That was a move the MPs used to use on us, so it’s just to slow you down, not kill you.”
“An important distinction,” I said, realizing my hands were shaking. I kept seeing that girl’s head flopping around when the guy was slapping her.
“I know that kid,” Eddie said.
I was surprised. “You do?”
He nodded. “He’s trouble.”
Seems the kid came up from Detroit a couple of years ago to stay with his sister, who, coincidentally, is the woman Joyce took to the hospital. Small world.
“There’s another sister, too. Mattie,” Eddie said. “They’re supposed to be providing a more stable environment for the young brother, but whoever sent him didn’t bother to check out the house.”
“Bad?”
“Crack.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Where do they get crack way up here?”
“From the city,” he said. “All these little towns are virgin markets for these young wanna-be gangsters. People sitting around here with nothing to do and a police force with two cops who share one squad car. They probably don’t even know what crack looks like. It’s easy money.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Crack is an epidemic with a life all its own, just like AIDS. Small-town living doesn’t save you anymore.
“I didn’t scare you, did I?” He turned sideways to peer over at me since it was almost dark now.
I shook my head. “No. He wanted to hurt that girl. I’m glad you knew how to handle it.”
“The army teaches you a lot of stuff like that,” he said, turning down the road to Joyce’s house. “The problem is, most of it is stuff you wish you didn’t need to know.”
• 6
joyce’s house, the house I grew up in, sits at the end of an oiled but unpaved road that opens out into Idlewild Lake. There are other houses scattered around the edges of the lake, but they’re spaced wide enough so that you don’t have to worry about people being all up in your business. A lot of the houses are empty now anyway. Once the white resorts started accepting Negroes, people stopped coming to Idlewild. The oldsters who put such stock in their summer cottages when this was a big-shot resort haven’t been able to interest their children and grandchildren in a place they had never seen on a travel brochure and whose name nobody had ever heard outside Detroit and Chicago.
Our parents moved here at the very end of the place’s heyday. I was five and Joyce was ready to start high school. Anybody with any practical sense could see the handwriting on the wall, but my father had a big dream about opening a new nightclub that would single-handedly bring
back the glory days. My mother, as usual, never questioned a word he said, even though they lost all their savings when the place went belly-up in one short season. My father died in his sleep, drunk and disappointed, the winter right after, and my mother never got over it.
It wasn’t a bad place to be a kid. Having a lake at the edge of the front yard beat walking across a freeway bridge to get to kindergarten. Joyce and Mitch hooked up as soon as he saw her sitting two rows in front of him in geometry class, and once they got married, and Mom made me an official orphan, it was like having real young, real hip parents.
I could see the darkness of the lake just a few hundred yards from where Eddie pulled the truck into the yard. I heard the whispering of the pine trees that surrounded the house and I realized I was truly glad to be home, even if the arrangement was only temporary.
Joyce wasn’t there yet, but I probably wouldn’t have gone to Eddie’s for dinner if she hadn’t redecorated my old room. Eddie carried my suitcases down the hall for me, and when I went ahead of him and turned on the light, I thought I’d walked into the wrong house. Joyce sent me a magazine article a couple of months ago that said blue is a healing color, and I guess it made a big impression on her because everything in here is now seriously blue. Dark blue, light blue, turquoise, midnight, robin’s egg, blue plaid, blue prints, sky blue, and navy. It would be funny except it means she’s still trying to fix it. Like if blue was the cure, I wouldn’t be wearing blue panties, blue bra, blue blouse, blue jeans, blue socks, blue shoes, and blue contacts right now.
I knew part of the reason Joyce was glad I was coming for this visit was so she could see if I still looked okay, which is the really fucked-up part of all this. I don’t look any different. I don’t feel any different. But everything is different. Every single thing. And all the blue curtains in the world can’t change that.
Suddenly the idea of sitting in that blue room all by myself, drinking too much vodka and waiting for Joyce to come home, seemed like the worst possible way to spend my first night back. Besides, I was hungry and Eddie assured me he was a good, fast cook who could feed me and have me back home in under an hour and a half. I left a note for Joyce and stuck the vodka in my purse on my way out the door. I still wanted a drink, and at this point I felt like I had earned it.
• 7
in eddie’s whole house, there was not a scrap of anything blue, except some photographs of the lake where the water and the sky came together, but that doesn’t really count. That’s real blue. Everything was sort of a soothing wheat color, except for a pile of bright red pillows stacked on the floor. There were bamboo mats, a futon couch, and a small table with two chairs. He had a couple of bookcases full of record albums. An elaborate, old-fashioned stereo system sat in the corner looking well used and well kept.
The kitchen belonged in a small restaurant. Hanging pots, stacked steamers, juicers, blenders, knives, woks, and three well-stocked spice racks. After I fixed myself a drink, he told me dinner would be ready in twenty minutes and I could put on anything I wanted to hear.
I always like to look at people’s music. It can alert you to the presence of things that you might not find out otherwise until much later. I remember going to a guy’s apartment in Atlanta for the first time and discovering that he had a huge collection of heavy metal. The bad white boys. The ones who have to go to court all the time to prove their evil lyrics and demonic chord progressions didn’t make somebody’s child shoot himself in the head. He had the good sense to be a little embarrassed about it, but I never felt the same about him after that.
Eddie looked like a jazz fan, and those dreads definitely indicated reggae. He had hundreds of records, neatly filed in alphabetical order. The first one was one of my favorites: King Sunny Ade, JuJu Music. I pulled it out of the cover and held the edges, checking for cracks. People who have grown up on CDs don’t understand the sensual appeal of a well-loved piece of vinyl. Joyce and Mitch loved their albums, even the ones that were so scratched up you could barely make out the vocals. Every scratch meant something. Every nick recalled a perfect party; every smudge, a teenage heartache.
From the condition of the cover, Juju Music was well used, but inside, it was perfect. I placed it carefully on the turntable and lowered the dust cover. This was somebody who took his records seriously. I had been wrong about the jazz, except for two John Coltranes and a Miles Davis or two, but right on the reggae. Old school. He seemed to have every album Bob Marley and Gregory Isaacs ever recorded, but he also had a serious Motown library (heavy on the Temptations and Marvin Gaye), a fair number of funk classics by George Clinton, James Brown, and the Ohio Players, and the essential Sly and the Family Stone. There was also a lot of international stuff that I was curious about, but I was too exhausted to look any further.
When I complimented him on having his music so well organized, he looked embarrassed.
“Shows I’ve got too much time on my hands.”
“Idlewild still the fun capital of the Great North Woods?” I said, wondering again why he was living here.
“Absolutely,” he said. “That’s half the reason these young people are acting such a big fool. Nothing else to do.”
He was chopping vegetables rhythmically and I liked the kitcheny sound of the knife hitting the gleaming piece of butcher block. I took my drink back over to the counter. He checked the oil in a large wok he’d put on the stove.
“You know the thing I always remember about you?” he said.
I was surprised he remembered anything about me. Last time I saw him, I was eight years old and my sister was hoping he would get there in time to stand up with Mitch at their wedding. He did, even though his uniform looked like he’d slept in it. Twice.
“I have no idea,” I said, dropping another ice cube into my already watery drink.
“You told me not to go to ‘Nam.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you did,” he said, dumping the vegetables into the wok and tossing them in the air with a slotted bamboo paddle. He made it look easy, but I know if I had tried it, we’d be eating dinner off the kitchen floor. “You waited until my date went to the bathroom . . .”
“I loved what she had on. That was the first strapless dress I’d ever seen up close.”
“Me, too,” he said, spooning the vegetables onto two plates of steaming noodles. It looked and smelled wonderful and I realized I was starving. I’d been drinking all day, but I couldn’t remember when I had eaten anything.
“When you saw me standing by myself, you came over and asked me if I was really going to go to Vietnam. When I said yes, you told me it was a terrible war and that it would be wrong and dangerous for me to fight in it. I liked the way you said that. Wrong and dangerous.”
The conversation was beginning to come back to me. Joyce and Mitch were both involved in antiwar activities, although there was never much of a peace movement in Idle-wild. When people got drafted, they had a party, got drunk, tried to talk their girlfriend of the moment into having sex, and reported for duty.
Most of the local protesting consisted of sending indignant letters to Congress and driving to bigger cities to march or demonstrate or demand something from whoever was in charge at the moment. They used to take me with them whenever I wanted to go, and I was caught up in the righteous passion of the demonstrators and their cause. When Mitch first found out Eddie had been drafted, he tried to talk him out of going and even offered to drive him over into Canada to a community of black draft resisters holed up in Windsor, but Eddie just laughed and said somebody had to protect the women and children since all the wimps were getting married and couldn’t be bothered to go.
“Did I offer to smuggle you into Canada?”
He laughed. “That’s exactly what you did. You told me Mitch probably couldn’t go right then since he had just gotten married, but you were sure he’d take me first thing in the morning.”
I could hear myself saying it, too, like it was the only reasonable way to
deal with the situation, so, of course, he was going to do it. I was always sure about things in those days. It wasn’t until recently that I started second-guessing myself.
“You obviously didn’t take my advice,” I said.
“But I should have,” he said. “You were right. Worst move I ever made.”
“Well, at least you got it out of the way when you were young,” I said. “I saved my worst moves until much later.”
“I’ll bet you wouldn’t know a bad move if you saw one,” he said.
“You’d be surprised.”
“Maybe we can compare notes one day.” He picked up both plates and headed for the kitchen.
“It’s a deal,” I said, feeling the weight of the day settling around my shoulders. It was time for me to crash, but I was going to help with the dishes first. I wanted to be sure he washed all the things I’d used in good hot, soapy water. I know that’s not the way you get it, but this was no time to be careless.
• 8
when we pulled up into the yard, Joyce was standing at the door reading my note. She turned and ran down the back steps and grabbed me in a big hug. Joyce gained a lot of weight when Mitch died, and even though it’s been two years, she’s still carrying it. Worrying about me probably hasn’t helped her diet much either. Her cheeks were so chubby that when she smiled, her eyes almost disappeared.
She reported that Eartha had a baby girl and thanked Eddie for picking me up. I thanked him for dinner and he asked Joyce if her car was still acting funny. When she said it was, he said he’d come by tomorrow and look under the hood before she went back to the hospital. I wondered suddenly if they were lovers, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like friends.
