The choir sings, I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms, lay this body down. Lord, I’m-a coming on home.
Reggie holds Ariyeh’s hand. Before the service, he told me he didn’t trust the cops’ version of the murders (apparently, few of the victims’ bodies have been retrieved). Johnson is in custody. No public details. No talk of a trial. No story, Reggie insists: “They’re setting this one up to just go away.” He has pals who work for the city; they’ve heard that Johnson thought it was better to kill black boys than to let them be raised in a blighted environment, where they were bound to go bad. In his foul logic, he was doing them, and the community, a favor. “Doesn’t wash,” Reggie said. “Crazy shit. I don’t like the smell of it.”
In the meantime, the victims’ parents wanted to go ahead and commemorate their children, as a healing gesture.
The missing boys’ smiles, caught by the camera, remind me of curved boats rocking in a current, drifting me back to my own Bayou City childhood, which has also vanished; to sitting in church with Mama, who’s gone missing too. Soon I’ll be done with the troubles of the world. Going home to live with God.
Flowers and wreaths spice the room with an earthy sweetness, reminiscent of Dale Licht’s aftershave (he always overdid it). I imagine him at Mama’s memorial service, weeping for a woman he probably knew better than I did. For a moment I miss him, his genuine love for Mama, his exasperated tolerance of me. I miss the love of others. Do I have the love of others? My not-family, Bitter, Ariyeh?
Coming home, Lord, coming home.
A man drops to his knees in front of the altar, asking God’s mercy. It sounds like a curse. Ariyeh wilts; I slip my arm around her.
Don’t know why I want to stay. This ol’ world ain’t been no friend to me.
16
I’M SITTIN’G on the stoop when the Beamer appears at the curb. I’m not surprised he’s found me. He’s “connected.” “My crew is in effect elsewhere. Get in.”
Righting the balance, I think. Apparently, Rufus Bowen has offered me an opportunity. Rue Morgue can point me in other directions — pull me into the dark side, and not some yuppie version of it, either. It’s taken me over a dozen years to catch up with myself. Seems I’m faced with the choices, now, I would have stumbled across if Mama had left me where I was. Naturally, I can’t nab back lost time … but missed identities?
Of course Rue Morgue has found me. I cleared the trail for him.
As I get into the car, fear touches my spine, the way someone taps your shoulder to get your attention. But I’m not as afraid as I thought I would be. Things were different for Mama — she had no options, no outs. When she met my daddy, it hadn’t yet occurred to her that high yellow was a ticket to the Thicket and beyond; every encounter was good and real and rippled outward into every other part of her life. She was at the neighborhood’s heat-blasted mercy.
Not me. I can always return to my mayor (thanks to the lift Mama gave me). I can slip back inside the great white world. This is just a game. And no matter how tough this fast-talking do-rag is, I’m in charge. After all, he’s panting after me.
He’s wearing winter boots, a Kangor cap, and an L.A. Raiders jersey. “Looking fine this evening, Ann.”
“Thank you. You, too.”
He grins. “I’ma show you my ‘hood.”
“All right.”
“Get you home, safe as milk. ‘S all about respect, see.”
No, Player, it’s about what you can do for me. Take my mind off Reggie, for one thing. Distraction. A substitute. A rough confirmation: I must be no damn good to dream of my cousin’s man. You can show me exactly how low I am. How low was my poor, desperate mama? Was it just like this with her and Daddy? Prove to me, Rue, that the world’s as bad as I think it is.
We cruise past flat, moldy-green shacks nearly hidden beneath willow limbs. A bizarre parody of an upbeat city tour. “Kick-ass form of smack — brand-name ‘President’—X-ed three of my favorite junkies here back in ‘94. I used to give ‘em lessons how not to OD, but … over here, in that alley, see, I saved a strawberry from a wack headhunter one muddy night, liked to cut on folks …”
He seems to need the outside world’s approval, wants to show me a player with street cred works as hard as a mayor’s girl. A man of his people, like Reggie.
Past a soup kitchen serving slumped men in Levi’s beneath a white neon cross. “Little boy, Raymond Evers, beaten by his parents there. Couple of real juicers. Got me some base cars over here …”
I remember running through these streets as a girl. Some of my friends were so poor they ate laundry starch for supper; their lips glowed white beneath the flickering streetlamps. In the fall, we’d sell candy and raffle tickets over in the white neighborhoods to raise money for our school. After sunset, we’d come back here and hide in a vacant lot, eating most of the candy ourselves. My friends laughed about the ofays. “They look like cartoon pigs in storybooks!” I laughed too, but uneasily, knowing how much lighter I was than my pals.
“Hey, baby, I be hella good to you!” a young man yells at a pair of strolling women. They ignore him, and he shouts, “Say, bitch, wasn’t for your chunky boo-tay, you’d have no shape a’tall!”
Rue laughs. That’s it, put them in their place, eh, Player? After all, it’s the women who hold down the jobs, who are raising the kids, who are participating in the world, while you poor boys are locked out of the action. Right? It’s our fault. Fact is, sugar, you punked out on us on the plantation, way back when, when you should have gone to war for your kids and us, and you’ve never forgiven yourself, have you? Or at least you think that’s what we think. Bitter’s generation blamed whites. You blame black women — all women, who won their rights at your sorry expense. Isn’t that the story? Well, stick with me, baby. I know all about being no damn good.
While we’re sitting at a stop sign, I notice a couple of Mixtec girls, their hair in braids, tied by leather shoestrings, sitting on a curb, spooning orange Benadryl into their babies’ mouths and cooing, “Shh, shh.” Rue looks the girls over, without comment. He’s probably figuring angles: how can I corner the Benadryl market?
We pass a candy store, its windows barred, and I’m back in the lot again, eating toffee with my friends. We were poor, but I was part of something then. In the ‘burbs, where Mama meant to “better” me, shit, I became more aware than ever of my freaky lack-of-fit…
“Fuck-up folks,” Rue says, pointing at a crowd in front of a darkened happy shop. “Sketching away the hours. Say y’all,” he yells out the window, slowing, stopping. “Need some Sudafed? Efidac? Got some Ephedrine from Mexico.”
A kid — he can’t be more than twelve — sucks vapor from an emptied air-freshener tube. I glimpse embers glowing inside it. Others pull on hand-rolled cigarettes, spilling chalky grains on their shirts. No one answers Rue, and he peels around the corner.
We stop at a low-slung building behind a boarded-up Circle K. The plywood walls are held together by rusty nails driven through Pepsi bottle caps. When Rue gets out I don’t know whether to sit or follow. Finally, I unlatch my seatbelt. “Delivery,” he says at the door. It opens a crack; a thin man in dreads, wearing jeans but no shirt, squints out at us. Cans of Night Train clutter his wooden floor. Behind him, an alcohol rehab certificate is taped to the wall next to a “Free Mumia” poster. A Virgin of Guadalupe candle. A Land O’ Lakes tub filled with soggy cereal. Above a small TV, black bananas curl on a hook. The place smells strangely sweet, like the wax lips I bought as a kid for Halloween. A noisy swamp cooler hustles in a busted corner window. Rue holds out a rolled-up Baggie. The man pulls three bills from his pocket. No words. Hand-bump. Then we’re back on the street.