“I was supposed to meet somebody here — ”
“They’ll be along d’rectly. Music’ll be starting up.”
No sign of a band. I set my purse on a gimpy wooden chair.
The woman — Etta? — says, “Beer?”
“Yes, please. Just a — ” Something ratlike skitters among the crates. “—Coors.”
She attacks a bottle with difficulty, using a small hand-opener. I wonder if I should go over and help her, but she seems determined. I don’t want to embarrass her in her own place. Her hands shake like water sprinklers. Finally the cap spins off, and she heads my way. “Enjoy, dear.”
“I appreciate it.” A sulfurous, ruined-eggs smell wafts from the kitchen, behind an open curtain near the bar. It’s not really a curtain but a Star Wars bedsheet. Princess Whatcha-macallit, faded. I settle at a wobbly, ash-browned table.
Fifteen minutes or so later, two men with guitars show up, one thin and stiff as a two-by-four, the other in a James Brown outfit, purple suit, black leather shoes. His hair is oily and straight. He must weigh three hundred pounds. “Etta, you gorgeous, chicken-legged mama, you! How you been, girl?” He gives the old woman a hug. She shivers, her face buried in the wedge between his breasts.
A bass player and a drummer, both sullen, arrive, start tuning, tightening, adjusting. Still no crowd. I order a second beer, watch in agony as Etta struggles with the opener. I pick at the splinter in my thumb.
Finally, just as the band seems ready to start — as if a secret signal has sounded somewhere — Uncle Bitter walks in the door, followed by dozens of other men and women, all in their fifties and sixties, I’d guess. It’s 11:20. “Bitter!” Etta croaks. “Hanging good, my man?”
“Feel like a million dollars that’s done been spent. How you coming, mon ‘te chou?”
“Poly, thank God.”
While Uncle greets the band and orders beers for his friends (pointedly ignoring me, so far), three big women sit at a table next to mine. They’re dressed in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, black crinoline and lace, red stockings. With great solemnity, they set heavy paper bags on the tabletop, then settle back in their chairs, surveying the room like teachers on the first day of class not entirely happy with their prospects. The monster in the purple suit — his name is Earl, I overhear — bows to them, saying, “Ladies.” They ignore him, but not really; their turning-away is practiced, almost choreographed, for Earl’s benefit. He knows this and smiles. I have the feeling I’m watching a long-familiar ritual, and I’m glad I got here first. I’d hate to walk in on this scene, interrupting it, drawing direct stares instead of the furtive ones I’m getting now.
White bitch: there it is again, in the ladies’ cutting eyes. They’re as disdainful of me as the sorority girls in college were when I finally told them I wasn’t really one of them and not to be fooled by my skin. I sit up in my chair, sip my beer, try not to look as discomfited as I feel. After years of this, you’d think I’d have perfected a smooth disdain of my own, but I don’t seem able to just let things ride. I’ll bet I know what kind of straightener you slap in your sorry-ass hair, I’m thinking, but I keep it to myself.
Earl palms a mike and the band eases into some blues. Leadbelly. I know it right away. All about the National Dee-fense and a woman who don’t have no sense.
At the bar, Bitter mimics Earl’s hippy movements and calls to him, “Un wawaron!”—another Creole lilt I recall from long ago: Bullfrog. Its sound warms my ears. We used to sit outside and listen to the critters late at night, Bitter, Ariyeh, and me. Earl laughs, wags a playful finger at my uncle.
Very slowly, now, the women next to me remove from their paper bags elegant glass decanters of E & J brandy, along with lime juice in plastic squeeze bottles. They order Sprites, glasses with straws, and a bucket of ice. Etta brings all this on a tray, avoiding a disaster despite her shakes. The women mix their drinks with great dignity — priests preparing Communion — their long red nails keeping time on the table to the tune.
An old man who looks to be eighty, a former professional scarecrow, dances by himself next to the beer crates, sipping from a flask of MD 20/20. Uncle Bitter finally turns my way, bearing a big, sweating can of Colt 45 malt liquor. Three fellows follow him.
“This here Seam,” he says to his friends, waving at me. They grab chairs. Old Spice and gin, tobacco, and sweat. “Telisha,” I say. “Telisha Washington. Hello.”
“This your niece?” one asks.
Uncle Bitter just smiles; the drummer raps a rim-shot, like signaling a punch line; and I realize what I should have known, of course, a long time ago. No. I’m not his niece. Not really.
My skin goes clammy and my mouth dries up. I sit unmoving, hot with shame (or exposed pride, refusing to admit to myself what was obvious all these years). Bitter ignores me again. He and his cronies toast each other, chatter, snicker when the band screws up a bar.
“Hear they shutting down the Astrodome.”
“Who?”
“City.”
“Shit. Where the Astros gon’ play?”
“Some fancy-ass new fa-cili-tee they building downtown, call Enron Field.”
“Enron? Kinda name is that?”
“Name of the gas company what shuts off your heat every winter. They be owning half the town now.”
“Own the hot and the winter’s cold.”
“Bought the balls, the bats, the protective cups.”
Bitter leans back in his chair, arms stretched on the table: a fatcat senator making deals. “I saw the first game ever played at the Dome, back in ‘65. Exhibition with the Yankees. They let colored folks in cheap that night ‘counta we passed the last bond referee-endum they needed to build the thing. It was gonna fail ‘cause they running way over budget, see, but Judge Hofheinz — he owned the city back then — he lobbied us, hard, in Freedmen’s Town, said we’d be welcome at all the events, and we could even work there and shit. We’s the ones closed the deal, finally.” He grins. “That first night, LBJ was in the crowd, and Mickey Mantle, he slammed him a homer. Real beauty, almost smacked the roof.”
“‘Member, Bitter, the Dome’s groundsmen in them days, decked out in spacesuits, raking the infield like they’s sweeping the moon?”
“Shoot, Houston booming then. Thought the moon just one of its ‘burbs.”
“Moon in better shape than Freedmen’s Town. I’d move there tomorrow, could I afford it.”
Their laughter evaporates when the talk turns to Texas City, and they reminisce about working oil rigs or cargo boats down in the gulf, the day half the coast blew up. 1947. I remember overhearing Bitter once, when I was a child, mention “terrible flames,” and I questioned Mama about it. She told me he was there that day and barely survived the explosion. “What caused it?” one of his buddies asks him now. “Oil leak? I cain’t recall.”
“Fertilizer,” Bitter says. “Ammonium nitrate, stored on a Liberty boat. Some asshole tossed a butt in the hold, and that was all she wrote. Fire spread to the refineries and Welcome to Hell.”
“‘Member Bill Southey?”