Flying Shoes

by Lisa Howorth

  “Great,” she said, hoping that would not happen. “We’re dying to see them. Charles is really excited. And he wants to talk to you about a new show.” Mary Byrd knew she wouldn’t be going anywhere later but the blanket show. Charles could go back to Wiggs’s room, or they could do their business in the morning. Some time had to be taken to think about going to Virginia, to make some arrangements, but she couldn’t do it now. I’ll think about that tomorrow, she loved to tell herself. She was amazed that her mother hadn’t called. Maybe she didn’t want to think about it any more than Mary Byrd did.

  Finally in the car, headed down the old Fudgetown Road, they all felt a little better, out of the house and refreshed by the night air. The night was cold but clear. It was hard to believe that a winter storm was coming. An orange moon was rising but still hung up in the trees, not giving off much light. Mary Byrd had the urge to fuck with Wiggs and punched off the headlights. Even with the moon they could see the Milky Way, which was a luminous cloud in the deep country darkness. To her surprise, it was Mann who shouted, “M’Byrd! Stop! You’re scaring me!” He laughed, though. “Fool!”

  From the backseat the reclining Wiggs, who actually seemed to have sobered up a bit, snorted, “My, but we’re easily frightened, aren’t we, petite monsieur Valentine?”

  Mann ignored him. “Turn those lights on, you dumbass. We’ll get stopped or end up in the ditch.” She switched the headlights back on at the thought of being stopped and subjected to the most dreaded weapon in the county, the Breathalyzer. It wouldn’t matter that she wasn’t drunk, but if she registered at all she’d be dead meat. Charles would kill her.

  “I’m sorry, y’all, but I’ve got to go by Evagreen’s and give her her money. It’s on the way and will just take a second.”

  “Fine, but I hope we’re not eating at that charred-mystery-meat emporium in the odious shack that everyone thinks is so wonderful,” Wiggs said loudly. As if he were going to eat anything.

  “Yep,” said Mary Byrd. “That’s exactly where we’re going. You’ll enjoy it, Ed. The steaks are really good.”

  “Mis-steak, you must mean,” he said. “As long as we can bring the bottle.”

  The Pink Palace was eight miles away and a place people liked to go for a change of pace. Or just a meat fix. The Palace was just a board-and-batten shack from the outside, but inside it was all painted raw-flesh pink, and the low ceiling was covered in white glitter. Dozens of bass trophies lined one wall. The place was known for its perfectly grilled steaks, the most popular cut being a twenty-ounce T-bone that was about the size of a flattened baby. The Pink Palace motto, beloved by frat boys who regularly stole the sign and put it in front of the Tri Delta sorority house, was the pink center you crave. The Tri Delts, pretty, cheerful girls (they answered their house phone with, “Delta, Delta, Delta, can I help ya, help ya, help ya?”) who were known for liking to do it (“If you’ve tried everything else, Tri Delta”), had had a surveillance camera installed, but all that ever came of it was footage of guys in various costumes—gorilla heads and E.T. and Darth Vader masks—planting the sign again and again. Occasionally the sign went to the Bowheads’ house, the Delta Gammas, who were prissy and wore giant ribbons stuck in their hair, but they were no fun and would call 9-1-1.

  Mary Byrd went on. “It’s sparkly and colorful. You might want to shoot something. Or somebody.”

  Wiggs sighed. “Maybe. If I were Diane Arbus or Shelby Adams.”

  Mann said, “Well, I, for one, can use some red meat. I’ve been feeling puny. And I am sick unto death of chicken.”

  “I imagine so. Bok bok bagok, here chickee, chickee,” said Wiggs. “I … had a fahmm … in Affreekahh …”

  “Do you have to be such an asshole?” said Mann.

  “Horrors. An attack. Let me get my cuirass on,” Wiggs said. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, that’s what you wear.”

  “Oh, fuck yourself, Ed,” said Mann, almost amiably. To Mary Byrd, he said, “What’s a cuirass?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “If you and your little friends could buy them at Barneys, they’d be all the rage in New York,” Wiggs said.

  “You sure seem to know a lot about me and my little friends, Ed.”

  “One must know the enemy, don’t you know.”

  “Oh, I know all right,” said Mann. “Don’t I know.”

  Mary Byrd turned off onto the King Road, headed to the old Beat Five community called McCrady Hill. Many of the oldest black families had been living there since slaves were freed. There were Pegueses, Dixons, Carotherses, Isoms, and Barrs out there—black representatives (and in some cases, descendants) of all the first white settlers in the county.

  McCrady Hill was a neat, close-knit neighborhood with its own church and playground. They had even had their road paved at their own expense because the ignorant county supervisors, all white, had found dozens of excuses not to do it. McCrady Hill children were bused into the city schools to comply with all the convoluted integration laws even though the county schools were much closer. The small, modest homes were mostly the same, although some urban renewal federal architect had attempted to make them distinctive by using different, and maybe less expensive, brick than those in white neighborhoods: some houses were yellow brick, some black and yellow, some red and black. Here and there some of the original shotgun houses remained, although they were altered and added onto and patched with siding or shingles or tar paper, and had newish tin roofs. All the houses had iron grillwork storm doors. West St. Peter Methodist Baptist church stood at the end of the dead-end road, a plain, white-frame building with a small steeple and a new brick fellowship hall tacked to one side.

  To Mary Byrd, the few times she’d been to the church for funerals or weddings in Evagreen’s family, it had always seemed as close to the medieval idea of the cathedral as the center of life as any church could get. For so long, churches had been the only places black folks were allowed to gather, and even so, how many black churches had been bombed or burned? It always made her sad, going to West St. Peter M.B. and thinking of those four little girls in Birmingham.

  She did love to come out here and enjoy the difference between the houses and yards in McCrady Hill and the houses closer in town. Wishing wells, windmills, an old black kettle or a tire planter, fancy brickwork around a flower bed; even the plants in the neighborhood were different. Showier, pass-along stuff: clumps of red president cannas up against porches, wine-colored barberry sculpted into tuffets, exploding fountains of pink pampas grass, elephant’s ear, tall stands of variegated cane. Scabiosa and dinner-plate hibiscus and creepy-looking but rich, velvety coxcomb. Abelias pruned into globes. Diamond-shaped beds of Day-Glo lime and cherry gladiolus. There weren’t any fences, and it wasn’t so different from the yards of white folks out in the county, but it was a refreshing change from the faddish wreaths, pineapple banners, and organized landscaping concepts in town.

  Tonight every house on McCrady Hill seemed to have yellow porch bug lights on. Several houses still had strings of colored Christmas lights or the webbed, faux-icicle kind strung around, and two or three had translucent red Valentine hearts plastered randomly on the picture windows. The street had a warm, hearthlike glow.

  Wiggs sat forward in the backseat, thrusting his head right up between Mary Byrd’s and Mann’s, scoping out the neighborhood. “This is too wonderful,” he said.

  Mary Byrd pulled up to Evagreen’s neat little brick ranch house where several cars were already parked. The front door was open, and through the glass-and-grill storm door she could see people sitting around. She turned to Mann and said, “I’ll be right back.” To Wiggs, who was already climbing out of the car and fooling with his camera, she added, “Wiggs, please don’t wander off. This will just take a second.”

  Mann, hungry and pissed, lowered his window and said to him, “Look, don’t embarrass us, Ed. We have to live here.”

  “What are you two? The PC police? Nigras love to have pictures taken. But
I am not the least bit interested in these people. Look at this light!” He snapped a few pictures of the Bons’ house and moved off down the street in a purposeful slink, suddenly sober and as intent as a sniper on a mission.

  Mary Byrd tapped softly on the glass door with a corner of the envelope that held Evagreen’s pay. A short, round black man ejected himself from a recliner to open the storm door, which made a loud sucking sound. The man looked at Mary Byrd, almost, but not quite, in the eyes.

  “Hey, L. Q.,” she said. “How are you?”

  “All right, then,” he said, stepping back and holding the door open with one arm. “Come in, Miss M’Byrd.” This seemed a little odd. She’d never actually been in Evagreen’s house and normally she would have just handed over the envelope at the door. It was so strange that black people often saw white people as they really are, in their homes, sometimes in their most intimate state, but whites had so few clues about the private lives of black folks—their home life and families.

  “Everything all right out here?” she asked, stepping into the hot, bright living room, immediately realizing it was not.

  Evagreen sat on the sofa with two women Mary Byrd didn’t recognize. In the kitchen she could see a man talking on the phone. The furniture in the room looked clean and new and comfortable, every wall and horizontal surface displaying china knickknacks and framed photographs, things Mary Byrd knew Evagreen had received every birthday and Christmas or acquired by attending every yard sale in town every Saturday at dawn. Not unlike her own kitchen windowsill stuff. She thought she detected the very faintest note of lavender in the stifling room. There was silence. Mary Byrd could sense that no already-spoken words even hung in the air.

  “Evagreen, is—are you all right? Is something wrong?” She studied Evagreen’s impassive face, from which she knew she’d learn little.

  From a room in the hall emerged Evagreen’s son, Ken, a tall, handsome guy with a shaved head, half-dressed, or half-undressed, in wrinkled military clothes, a standard-issue pale green dress shirt and dark green pants. He looked tired. Joe Tex was faintly singing “Skinny Legs and All” somewhere down the hall.

  “Hey, Ken,” said Mary Byrd. “I didn’t know you were home.”

  “Hey, Miss M’Byrd,” the man said. “We’ve had some bad news. Mama?”

  Evagreen’s hands lay in her lap, pale palms upturned. “Angie done kill Roderick,” she said flatly, as if she were saying, “Angie just ran out to the JFC.”

  “Oh, my god, Evagreen, no!” Mary Byrd cried. “Evagreen! How could that have happened?”

  She flushed and instantly felt beads of sweat on her scalp and face. How many fucked up things could happen in one day?

  “She say he wouldn’t stay out the street. She was afraid he’d make her and the baby sick.” Evagreen opened her mouth to say more but nothing came out. Then, “He wouldn’t quit runnin’ in the street. Wouldn’t quit, wouldn’t quit, wouldn’t quit.” She looked directly at Mary Byrd and added, lower, “He beat her, too.”

  L. Q. looked at the floor and shook his head. “There was a girl,” he said quietly, “an’ other things.”

  “Oh, Evagreen, L. Q., I’m so sorry. What about Desia? Where is she?”

  “She with Angie’s friend. Cookie gone up to Memphis to carry her back, but Rod’s people up there, too,” said L. Q. “Don’t know what’s gone happen.”

  “There’s going to be a hell of a custody fight, among other things, that’s what’s going to happen,” Ken said quietly.

  “Oh, god. Evagreen, Charles knows lots of people in Memphis. We’ll find Angie a really good lawyer. With a good lawyer maybe she won’t—Angie won’t—”

  “Get the ’lectric chair?” Evagreen looked at her with something almost like amusement in her eyes. “Go to jail? She already there. Maybe she need to go.”

  “Mama,” Ken said firmly.

  One of the other ladies put her hand on Evagreen’s leg and patted.

  “Lawyer ain’t gone bring Rod back to his mama,” L. Q. said.

  The two families were neighbors and friends. Rod’s people, the Kimbros, lived close by the Bons on the King Road. She remembered Rod when he and Angie had dated in high school. He was a nice kid—a bastketball player? Maybe a little wild. What kid wasn’t. For a second she measured her own family’s tragedy against Evagreen’s. There was no doing it. Who could ever know or weigh another’s suffering? Her heart ached for the Bons and for the Kimbros; they all would now have this terrible gravity affixing them to this moment, this day, this turn of events, and to each other, forever.

  “Evagreen, I wish you’d called me! Please let us help. Let us help you find a lawyer, okay?” Mary Byrd pleaded, instantly thinking of how proud Evagreen was, wishing she hadn’t said it. Oh, was it ever going to be okay between blacks and whites? Probably not; not any more than it would ever really be okay with Muslims and Jews, or Tutsis and Hutus.

  Evagreen bent slightly toward the coffee table and picked up a big framed photograph of Angie on her high school graduation day and placed it in her lap. “Don’t need no help. Ken can take care a us.” She rubbed two fingers softly across Angie’s cheeks. One of the ladies rose and stepped out the front door.

  Mary Byrd’s face burned with regret and the heat of the room. “I … I know that. Of course he can. I know he’s a great lawyer, but it might, you might—” Her voice trailed off. She could not say, You might need a white lawyer.

  Ken stepped forward and took Mary Byrd’s hand in both his own. “Miss M’Byrd, we will figure this out and we won’t hesitate to call y’all if there’s anything you can do.” Mary Byrd remembered Ken when he was a kid, too—a serious but sweet boy with a quick smile full of teeth, and later, braces. Amazing how good-looking and poised he’d become. She remembered that Ken’s full name was Hamer Martin Kennedy Bon, named for Evagreen’s heroes: Fannie Lou Hamer, the mother, sharecropper, and civil rights leader from Sunflower County who famously said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired”; and, of course, for MLK, and for JFK, who’d been assassinated the year Ken was born. Evagreen named all her babies for heroes. Why not. If she could have gotten away with it, Mary Byrd might have named hers Mick Jagger and Aretha Franklin. From Liddie she knew that while Ken was a newborn in the hospital, one of the nurses, seeing only “HMK Bon” on his birth papers, had labeled his little plastic nursery tub his majesty the king bon. And that’s what he was to Evagreen and L. Q. Evagreen had wanted his calling name to be Kennedy, but L. Q., who normally knew better than to cross Evagreen, had said, “You crazy? Might as well call the boy Khrushchev. Uh-uh. No way, Evvie.” So he was just Ken. Always a smart kid, he won the high school Latin prize, played second base, went to the university on a full ride and then joined the Air Force. The Air Force paid his way to Tulane for his law degree, and now he was a captain in the JAG Corps. Ken and his German wife, Irmgard, lived in Wiesbaden and he was often in Somalia or the Middle East, helping soldiers sort out their legal problems and make their wills before they were sent off to be killed or handicapped in some stupid war that no mother would ever have started. Charles had always thought that Ken was CIA, which made sense, he traveled constantly. There were two children Liddie had seen occasionally. They didn’t seem to visit often.

  Mary Byrd felt her eyes welling up. “Okay, Ken,” she said. “But please keep us posted. We’ll be worrying like crazy.”

  “I will. I’ll call you when I’ve gone up to Memphis and we know more.”

  “And if you—if you need—” She held up Evagreen’s envelope. “Charles will insist.”

  “Thanks, but don’t worry,” Ken said. “We’re okay for now.”

  Mary Byrd hesitated for a second and then went over to Evagreen and hugged her. Evagreen didn’t resist, but she didn’t hug back either. Her lips moved a little, but she said nothing.

  Mary Byrd retreated, laying the envelope on a small stand near the door. “Okay. We’ll be thinking of y’all. Night.” She gave Ken a rueful, t
ight-lipped smile, and left.

  The lady outside was smoking and she exhaled a white cloud into the purple dark. “Shouldn’t be such a beautiful night, should it?”

  “No, it really shouldn’t,” Mary Byrd said, and then, “Good night,” thinking, Bad night. Bad day. Horrible day.

  Mary Byrd plopped herself into the driver’s seat as Mann said, “God, this pleasant evening is getting longer by the minute.”

  She put her head down on the steering wheel and told Mann what had happened.

  “Oh my god! That’s so awful,” he said. “Angie? How did she do it? Jeez. Where is that asshole?” He looked down the street where Wiggs had disappeared. “Here. Switch places. Let me drive.”

  They swapped seats and Mann turned the car around. He pulled on the headlights, illuminating Wiggs coming up the street, walking stiffly.

  “What’s he doing, a goose step?” asked Mann. “Fucking maniac.”

  They heard a huge, angry voice shout, “Come ’round my family again, I’ll shove that camera right up your skinny white ass! You’ll be looking at a snapshot of the dark side of your tonsils, cracker!”

  “Oh no,” said Mary Byrd. “That’s Roderick’s house. Shit.”

  Wiggs threw himself into the car. “You wouldn’t have believed it. There’s a house down there—the one that’s all lit up like a juke joint, where all the cars are. There’s something awful going on—I don’t know what—a wake or some wretched thing. You can hear the wailing from the street. I went into the yard to get some shots and all of a sudden, this—this fucking animal was on me! He nearly killed me! He nearly broke my back! He thought I was a fucking newspaper reporter! He grabbed my Leica—I’m sure this lens is ruined.”

  Wiggs blew his nose into a handkerchief and looked at it. “I wanted a picture of the window. Not those creatures. Wonderful. Now my nose is fucking bleeding.”

  “Well,” Mann said, lighting a cigarette from the dashboard lighter, “There is a god. So much for your new coffee table book, ‘Nighttime in the Quarters.’”