I rise and rise, in spite of myself: spasms of joy. Rue collapses, his wet bald head on my chest. After awhile he strokes my hair. “You taste salty,” he says, smiling. I watch his face. The face all the boys wear. Spiteful. Proud. But just a bit uncertain. Pleading, even. Another mask, and not too good a fit.
Then he’s up, pulling on his pants — lest he or I mistake all this for intimacy. “Okay, then,” he says. Just another deal, more business, my part of the bargain. Right, Player. I see your hands trembling.
He clears his throat. “Welcome to the ‘hood. You official now.”
“Part of the life here?”
“Part of what I say you part of, aight?” But his gruffness is unconvincing now.
It costs me nothing to play to the end. I ask what he expects me to ask. “When will I see you again?”
“I be back for more. When I feel like it.”
“I just wait for the word?” Fat chance, Player.
“That’s the way, baby.” He leans over and kisses me softly. “That’s the way. Check you later, hm? You be saving your sweet ass for Rue.” The door whispers shut.
Silence settles so abruptly in the room, I lose my breath — I realize I’ve been close to holding it for an hour. This is who we are, I think, watching Rue from my window. This is how we act in our neighborhood. This is all you can know.
I lie down again, rub my eyes until they’re wild with sparks, June-teenth rockets in the air … through the bursting, spinning hues I float up, down, around … stroll through the door, see myself as Rue did, a woman stripped of all her masks, spread across the sheet. Her skin’s a pale no-color in the light reflected from outside. I’m a soldier, fighting it out on the streets, cockers and junkies my comrades, under fire, most of them badly wounded … and this lady from her privileged world, who wants a taste of the real… she’s smart enough to know there’s a battle on, and she doesn’t want to be shielded … hell, I’ll give her what she wants … whatever she thinks she’s missing … pump her till her fucking eyes sting … living and losing, that’s war, baby, who’s the good, good king…
But that’s not the way it happened. If it were, I could tell myself I wasn’t responsible, but right from the start tonight, I set the rules we played by.
Did I get what I wanted? I’m not sure.
I get up, pull on my panties and a shirt, fluff my quilt on the windowsill, and watch the freight yard below. Steel tracks shoot like arteries in every direction. Boys spray-paint empty train cars, seizing the moment even as the moment moves on, the paint fading a bit as it dries. The kids wear do-rags and denims, orange jumpsuits like the ones I saw in lockup. Fireflies lift toward the stars.
A dark shape wings past the trees. Once, when I was little, Bitter told me, “In childhood, if you hold a dying bird, your hands’ll tremble all the rest of your life.” I think of the drag pit cockers. When did they first hold a dying creature in their hands?
I think of Rue tonight.
“A child weaned when the birds migrate, well, she’ll always be restless.”
Right now, Bitter’s hoodoo makes an odd kind of sense to me. Or it makes as much sense as anything else. Who’s to say everything’s not connected? A painstaking pattern of omens and spells. Who’s to say my little dance with Rue — part of a loose chain from the shut-in boy to Troy to Dwayne, these beautiful young bastards — didn’t begin in this neighborhood some twenty years ago, when the birds headed south?
And I was taken north.
My eyes fill, wetting the quilt. Living and losing.
That’s the way, baby. That’s the way.
I try to sleep. The room is dark but for patches here and there touched by refracted blue moonlight. A hot breeze razors through the freight cars below. In my stepdaddy’s house I used to lie awake, nights, wondering what to do with who I am — except in north Dallas, breezes rustled overwatered oak trees, TV antennae. I can hear Dale’s voice barreling through the rooms, “Front door locked? Check. Windows latched? Affirmative,” like the soldier he’d once hoped to be (flat feet and poor eyesight kept him safe, but bitterly restless, at home). I know what he’d say to me now. “So you had to defy your poor mama, before she’s even settled in her grave, and go back to that hellish place she saved you from. And what have you found there? The usual assortment of wastrels. Does any of this surprise you? Does it aid you in any way? Strengthen you?”
I don’t doubt he’d speak out of love for me. Genuine concern. He took pride in his wedding photos, his annual Christmas cards with our strained family portraits, his wife’s driver’s license with its predictably bad picture, but one that — washed-out, blue — revealed none of the Houston in her.
Whiteness as a bureaucratic norm, the default mode, while I’m stuck in my own Middle Passage.
I remember the night I sat at the kitchen table, my senior year in high school, filling out Affirmative Action forms for college. Dale made his evening check of the house. “Front door? Roger.” Then he paused above me and said, “You know, race is always the least interesting thing about a person.” He knew how vexed this subject was for me. Mama, who’d been helping me negotiate the paperwork, looked up at him, and said, “Yes, hon, but it’s not negligible, either.”
Oh, to have that moment back! To grab her by the shoulders, as I failed to do — shyness? shock? embarrassment? — and shout, “Tell me more! What has your experience been? What am I hearing? Regret for the choices you’ve made? What about those quilts of yours, Mama? Those slave patterns you stitch? Just what do you think you’re doing? Just what in hell do you think you’re doing?
I’m not sure she could have told me, or herself, even if I’d known enough to ask.
My own piecework lies on the windowsill now, a rough brown square softened by the moon. Sirens in the distance. I wonder if Bitter is sleeping, if Reggie and Ariyeh are making love, if Rue is out caretaking. For nearly an hour, I sit and listen to the city I’ve carried so many years inside me. Moths tap the torn screen.
17
I DON’T KNOW all of Montrose, though this is the neighborhood Ariyeh lives in. As I check the rough map I made based on Bowen’s directions over the phone, I think, wryly, how similar this process is to following Mama’s guidance — left here, honey, no right — when she was so addled by anger, denial, hurt, God knows what else, she couldn’t see two feet in front of her. No, not fair. She left you your name, didn’t she? Her quilts? She wasn’t like the mayor, who can erase whole subdivisions, canceling their tax bases with one mighty slash of a pen or by ordering his speechwriters to delete a phrase or two. Mama left a few things behind. The Crisis. C’s letter to Sarah Morgan. Maybe she wanted me to return here, after all. More likely, it occurs to me, she knew I’d come back, anyway, and she didn’t want to be entirely silent when I did.
I make a left at a corner showing growth pangs — a brand-new multistory bank on one side of the street; on the other, a dilapidated house with a bail bondsman’s sign out front, in English and Spanish. A young Mixteca stands on the bail bondsman’s lawn, glancing frantically up and down the block. She yells a couple of names.
On a call-in show on my radio, an angry right-winger blames poverty in America on unwed black mothers. Wonderful. Don’t these guys ever change? My bathtub is smarter than they are. I punch buttons until I find Me’Shell NdegeOcello singing “Soul on Ice.” The song adds to my cheer. I’ve surprised myself: I’m riding pretty high today. No nasty side effects from my one-on-one with Rue. I matched him move for move — because I was determined to — and the sucker probably knows it. As a purely practical matter, the sex has relaxed me a little, as I hoped it would.