Dominoes in Time

by Matthew Warner

  The winds and rains battered the sides of their apartment building right on into Monday, and when the electricity went out, they kept the children entertained by candlelight. But by the end of the day, they believed the worst had passed.

  Then the levees protecting the city broke. Water poured into the apartment. Tayla, Jackson, and the children wound up on the roof with a half dozen other residents, gawking at the swamp their neighborhood had become.

  “I’m scared, Daddy,” Steven said through wet shivers as Jackson lifted him into a helicopter’s rescue basket. Jackson patted the boy’s hands, which clutched the tiny white pumpkin with frantic strength.

  Tayla and the children wrapped their arms around each other and cried as the helicopter flew them to the Superdome. They left Jackson behind on the apartment building’s roof because the aircraft was full.

  He knew he was gonna die, Tayla thought. I’ll never see him again.

  But she was wrong. Jackson somehow found them at the Superdome six hours later among the thousands crammed inside. “Your clothes are damp,” Tayla said when she hugged him.

  Her husband nodded—then turned his head so he could hack into hand. His coughs came in short bursts that wheezed more than they produced anything. His face hung with a haggardness she’d never seen on him before, not even after a double shift.

  “I still have the pumpkin, Daddy,” Steven said and held it up for him to see. He was sitting in one of the athletic arena’s front-row chairs. An old woman covered with a military blanket slept in the chair behind him. Jackson smiled before dropping wearily into an empty seat.

  Although his clothes eventually dried, his coughs came more frequently over the next day, and he looked progressively more tired. Tayla tried to convince him to move to an empty cot on the main floor, but he insisted he could breathe better if he sat up.

  One morning, Jackson only took a single bite of the MRE meal he received before puking it back onto his plate. Tayla touched his face to find it burning with fever, so she fought through the crowds to a bathroom, hoping to wet a cloth to drape over his forehead. She retreated when told that there was no more running water. Besides, the bathrooms were virtual septic pools, the floors swimming with toilet paper and feces-laden water.

  A harried rescue worker pressed a bottle of water into her hands. “Take this. Someone will be around to help him soon.”

  As there was no longer any air conditioning, she nearly drowned in the sweltering atmosphere of the Superdome’s floor as she crossed back to where her family sat. There was no longer any electricity, so she stumbled twice over reclined forms she couldn’t see. Someone growled, “Watch where you’re stepping, you fucking nigger.”

  When she finally got back, Steven announced, “Daddy’s sleeping.”

  The blanket had fallen off of Jackson’s shoulders. Tayla pulled it back up—and her husband tipped over into the adjoining chair. He didn’t move.

  Sitting on the dirty floor, Rachel began to cry.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  A FEMA worker gave Tayla a receipt for Jackson’s body. After some Q and A, he filled out several forms for her to sign. The papers attested she was indigent and that the city of New Orleans should dispose of the body as it saw fit. He suggested she contact the authorities after a while to find out where her husband was buried. Tayla cried herself sick.

  By the weekend, she and the children were evacuated with thousands of others to the Houston Astrodome.

  She didn’t know what to do. They had no savings and no relatives they could rely on. The children had head colds, causing Tayla to lose whole nights of sleep as she hovered over them, worrying they would go the way of their father.

  Even the $15,000 life insurance policy Jackson had taken out on himself provided little comfort. Sitting on her cot on the floor of the Astrodome as her children and the other refugees slept around her, Tayla re-read the policy.

  It still won’t be enough, she thought. I got to raise two kids without the help of a man. Got no house or job. Once we get out of here, we’ll have enough money to live off of for a few months, but then we’ll go hungry. My children will go hungry.

  For the first time ever, she wondered if she should give Steven and Rachel up for adoption. Surely she was in hell.

  The next morning, she was contemplating this again (“Why you crying, Mommy?” Steven asked) when word came around that a nearby church was hosting an impromptu job fair for Katrina refugees. Tayla dressed the children in some of the clothes they’d received from relief workers and headed over.

  When she arrived at the church’s crowded fellowship hall, however, she found herself drawn to the small delegation of Realtors who’d set up an information table in the corner. Nobody was lined up to talk to them—unlike the Houston Chamber of Commerce’s armada of tables, where merchants conducted job interviews.

  The Realtors looked up at her when she appeared before them with Rachel in her arms and Steven cowering behind her knee. “What can you do for me?” she said. “I got me some money from life insurance. I want to get out of the shelter.”

  They asked her to sit down. They showed her information sheets about low-income rentals with four months of free rent, and about cheap houses for sale on thirty-year, no-money-down mortgages.

  A high-toned woman in a business suit, with perhaps a kinder voice than eyes, showed her an MLS printout about a blue and white house in a medium-sized town called Southwood. The house looked enormous for the price of $41,900: a forty-year-old split level with a yard and a driveway. Two bedrooms, one bathroom.

  “I agree with you,” the Realtor said. “That’s awful cheap for what you’re getting. But it’s also a fixer-upper, you see. We bought it on auction from the bank. It was a foreclosed property. We had a crew go in and clean it up and repair the gushing pipes in the basement and cure the termite infestation. It had lead-based paint in all the rooms, and we fixed that, too.”

  “So is it a dump, or isn’t it?” Tayla said, and returned the printout to the table. She pulled Steven’s thumb out of his mouth. He’d taken up the habit the day after Jackson died.

  “It’s livable. It’s also in an area where property taxes are almost nothing, and at that mortgage level you’re looking at a monthly payment of only about two-fifty a month.”

  Unsure if she was being scammed, Tayla continued talking to the woman, who assured her Southwood was a pleasant “one-horse town,” and like New Orleans, it wasn’t necessary to own a car. There was a strong African American community, plus many small shops downtown in need of minimum-wage laborers: laundromats, bowling alleys, restaurants, gift shops. The woman showed her demographic printouts and articles. “I also know at least ten self-employed babysitters—cheap babysitters—you can rely on so you can work.”

  “How about church preschools? My babies need a Christian upbringing.”

  The high-toned woman laughed a little too loudly and smoothed her impeccable suit. “Sweetheart, they don’t call it the ‘Bible Belt’ for nothing. Now, let me tell you about some of the other benefits of owning a home. What kind of deductions do you currently claim on your income taxes?”

  “What kind of what?” Tayla said. She picked the printout back up on the blue and white house.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Getting to Southwood was surprisingly easy. The bus tickets were free on account of the relief efforts, and Tayla had nothing to move except for herself and her children. Aside from the miniature pumpkin Steven still held onto and occasionally addressed as “Daddy,” they had no possessions but a few changes of clothes.

  Before boarding the bus, Tayla imposed on the high-toned Realtor once more: “I need someplace to deposit my life insurance money.”

  “I’m really not the one to help you open a bank account, sweetheart,” the woman said.

  “Well then, sweetheart, I guess you won’t be getting that sales commission you want.”

  The woman suddenly changed her mind and assisted her. She even helped Tayla contact
the life insurance company to arrange the wire transfer to her new account.

  Once in Southwood, they checked into a dumpy Econo Inn that looked like the most palatial place in the world compared to the shelters. They ate a real meal at the Denny’s on the corner and washed their clothes in the motel room’s tub. An associate of the high-toned Realtor phoned her the next day and asked when she’d be available to close on her new home.

  For the first time since Jackson died, Tayla allowed herself to smile.

  It wasn’t even that bad of a house. With its new paint job (the same color in and out) and freshly mowed grass, it looked downright upper-class compared to their apartment in the Lower Ninth.

  (Ah ah ah, she shushed herself, don’t think about the old apartment and your old life, not today. Dry your tears.)

  The neighbors never came to visit but were quiet and kept to themselves. After a week passed and they didn’t plant a burning cross on her lawn, Tayla began to relax.

  Oh, the house wasn’t fantastic by any means, with no insulation and with walls as thin as wrapping paper and a tiny hole in the upper bedroom’s window. And Southwood wasn’t what it was cracked up to be: the shopping district where she hoped to get a job was a half-hour walk away, and the grocery store and Goodwill store was a twenty minute walk in the other direction, and there wasn’t no city bus like she’d expected—but she was thankful to have someplace to live.

  Ah ah ah, don’t let yourself cry. Jackson would want you to be strong.

  After the first week, she reluctantly purchased a used car she found through the classified ads. The old, green Dodge the seller drove into her driveway had a rusted roof and torn seat cushions and an engine (the man explained) that needed a new quart of oil with every second tank of gas. But he was only asking five hundred dollars for it.

  Ten minutes of haggling later, Tayla paid him four-fifty and drove him home. I hate driving, she thought the whole way. I don’t even have a driver’s license. But I need a car if we’re gonna get around this town—if I’m gonna find a job. Our lives will get better ’cause I’m doing what I gotta do. Once I get a job, things will look up.

  It took her a whole other week to land that job. By that time, she’d filled up the car’s fuel tank twice and the oil pan once—and at three dollars a gallon for gas, it surely ate a hole through the new credit card she’d acquired. The kids’ head colds had finally gone away to be replaced by unexplained nightmares and daytime screaming fits—the screaming tizzies, her mother used to call them—and she’d spent another four hundred fifty dollars repairing the house’s air conditioning unit.

  Her new job was cleaning rooms at the palatial palace, the Econo Inn, wiping out ashtrays and scrubbing stains out of beds—and generally feeling like her late husband after a long day of work, all for the minimum wage of five-fifteen an hour and no benefits. And even then she couldn’t work as hard or as long as she would have preferred, because babysitters weren’t nearly so easy to acquire as the high-toned bitch had said. Worse, only one church had a decent preschool program, and then that was only for half the day. She’d seen all of three black folks in the entire town.

  One night, after she fed her children their fourth meal in a row of Ramen noodles, Tayla trudged into her furniture-less living room and sat down beside the phonebook. With a heavy sigh, she thumbed through the contents in search of a number for food stamps.

  Ah ah ah, she told her soul. Don’t let yourself cry. Don’t let yourself cry. But her soul wasn’t listening.

  Oh Jackson, honey, I miss you.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  By mid-October, the life insurance money was almost gone. Her Econo Inn wages were always spent before she earned them, and she charged ever more of her bills to the credit card. She contemplated whether to go to one of those cash-advance businesses out near the highway. She worried what would happen when she was forced to choose between paying the mortgage and feeding her children.

  Not that she was doing such a great job on that last account. Steven and Rachel no longer had their babyfat cheeks, and their eyes hung in sockets deeper than she remembered. They no longer smiled. They spent most of their time lying in the pile of blankets and pillows that functioned as their living room furniture, taking naps or listlessly pushing around toys she’d bought at the Dollar Store. As they didn’t own a TV, she spent most evenings trying to play with them or read them stories from the Reader’s Digest issues she stole from work. But they hardly paid any attention to her, it seemed, except as the utility that bathed, dressed, and fed them. They never looked her in the eye.

  They just miss their daddy, she told herself—fighting the worry that she was a bad mother.

  It seemed that the only thing that retained any vitality in the house was the miniature pumpkin Steven had brought with him from New Orleans. The thing was impervious to decay and had remained rock-hard. The boy placed it directly beneath the living room window and spent many hours seated before it, talking to it in a low, mumbling stream of nonsense. Whenever he did this, Rachel would sit or lie nearby, sometimes reaching out to caress it.

  It was like the pumpkin was some religious artifact and her children the priests, but Tayla knew it was just a game to them—that, or they were attached to it on account of its being the last thing their father gave them. She tried a few times to catch what Steven was saying to it, but when she came near, he stopped his guttural conversation and wandered away to do something else.

  “What you saying to the pumpkin, son?”

  He always shook his head in response.

  As Halloween approached and she contemplated getting a real pumpkin for them to carve, Jackson’s gift to the children finally began to show its age by changing color from albino white to a burnt orange. Gas buildup stretched the skin until it was visibly bloated, and she knew she’d have to throw it away soon.

  “We goin’ have to throw your pumpkin away, sweetie,” she said to Steven one morning. They were preparing to leave the house for preschool and work.

  Steven opened his eyes wide and his mouth wider. “No… no… noooooo!”

  Breaking away from Tayla’s grip by the front door, where she struggled to put his coat on him, Steven ran back into the living room. He screamed and sobbed as he collapsed in a heap before his pumpkin. Rachel crawled after him, shrieking. It was the most life either of them had shown in weeks.

  “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay,” Tayla said as she struggled to hold her children. “Mommy won’t take your pumpkin away. You can keep it as long as you want.”

  Tears and snot streamed down Steven’s face as he huddled around the pumpkin and continued to bawl. Rachel rolled onto her back and screeched as she beat her hands and feet on the floor. She appeared to be doing it for sheer pleasure.

  Finally, Tayla coaxed Steven into letting go of his prize and accompanying her back to the front door. They resumed the interrupted process of donning shoes and coat. She knew she was going to be late for work—and knew with equal certainty that she’d have to throw away the pumpkin during the night, when Steven was asleep. She knew—finally, at last—that her baby had an emotional problem, and it was wearing off on his sister. And why wouldn’t he have an emotional problem after all he’d been through?

  That pumpkin is Steven’s daddy to him, she realized. He knows his daddy’s gone, but he ain’t accepted it yet. That’s why he’s not playing or eating right. He’s grieving, and when that pumpkin goes—and Lord help me, it has to go ’fore it goes rotten and brings some disease into the house—he’s gonna cry for his daddy like he never cried before. Rachel, she’s too young to understand it all. She probably don’t remember Jackson that much now. She just does what Steven does. But Steven… oh, my baby.

  “No throw Daddy away,” Steven said as she led him to the car. “No!”

  “I won’t, sugar. I promise I won’t.”

  And as they left the house for the day, she wondered at the lies parents told their kids. Steven would forgive her eventually—espe
cially if she claimed no knowledge of the pumpkin’s disappearance in the coming night. But would she be able to forgive herself?

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The preschool teacher was also a babysitter, thank God, who provided services for only half of what Tayla made an hour. It enabled her to work a full day at the Econo Inn five days a week, so that night they all didn’t get home until suppertime.

  When they entered the living room, Tayla screamed at what she found.

  The pumpkin, God almighty, it had grown during the day. Four feet across now and nearly as tall as she was. Its growth had pushed it away from the window, where it had quietly soaked up fall sunlight for a month and a half. It lay on top of the piles of blankets and pillows where the children normally played. The burnt orange of that morning had darkened into fine red lines in some areas, like the veins on a leaf. The stem on top looked like a tree branch and was as thick around as her arm.

  Steven stood beside her and spoke quietly. “Daddy?” He stuck his thumb into his mouth.

  Rachel giggled and crawled toward the monstrosity.

  “No, Rachel!” Tayla scooped up the girl and retreated into the next room. “Steven,” she snapped, and the boy followed her.

  “Big,” Steven said.

  “Yes, honey, it’s big. I want you to stay in here with your sister.”

  She moved automatically now, approaching the pumpkin and preparing to push it out the door, maternal instincts switching on and refusing to allow her to think or feel her own fear. There was a thing in her house, bloated with disease and

  (despair)

  God knew what else. If she didn’t get it out of here, it might burst open like an overripe tomato and spew infestation everywhere.

  Breathing heavily, she reached out to it, measuring it with her hands and eyes.

  “Mommy?”

  “I’m right here, sweetie. You stay there with your sister until Mommy comes back.”

  Except that it wasn’t bloated with gases, not that she could see. Its skin—Lord help her—it pulsed. It was the skin of a great orange elephant. She ran her fingers along its long vertical creases, feeling the vibrations of some internal engine of pestilence as it swelled…