Sitting on the edge of the panel, Randy works the joystick, and as he swivels the light to bear on another target, the beam flashes past a shotgun shack built on stilts along the banks of the Black Bayou. It’s the kind of place Mom and I had to live in when I was a girl, during Berlin’s first year in Germany. I don’t remember that time really — we stayed there a while, then money started coming in the mail, and we moved.
Randy’s free arm swings around my shoulders, so that he can better point by guiding my line of sight down his finger. Then he shifts the light toward an orange dome on the horizon. “That’s Beaumont, rape capital of America. You ever want to get raped, just go to Beaumont.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I tell him, but my mind’s on that shotgun shack, how my Mom and I lived out of boxes in a place just like it when my father went away, and it seemed like he was never coming back.
“It’s a dangerous world out there,” Randy tells me. “Did you know strange black airplanes fly around here at night? Then there’s Port Arthur, home of Janis Joplin. Three tons of ammoniumphosphate fertilizer went missing there last week, and—”
I take the joystick from Randy, interrupting him, and I point the light back on the little shack. I’m not thinking about lawyers and lawsuits and warrants, but those bottles of ketchup and mustard. That’s the kind of thing you pack when you’re moving into a little house on stilts, when you’ll never see your old house again.
“If you point the light that way,” Randy says. “You’ll see—”
“Shh,” I tell him and study the house, its dangling clothesline, the rusty fish stringer on the rail. This is where normal people live, I think — vinyl siding, propane tanks. Then suddenly, a young couple stumbles out onto the porch. A man, wearing only sweatpants, stands sideways in the light, his hair sleep-wild and glowing, and the light’s bright enough to show through the bedclothes of the young woman with him.
Randy flips a toggle, and the beam shuts down. In the dark, he lifts his hands.
“There you go,” he says. “That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. You go and do something crazy like scare those people out of their bed, and you wonder why nobody asks you to the dance. They probably think we’re aliens.”
I can hear Randy, but the afterglow in my eyes only lets me see that girl, forearm braced against the light. That’s when I lean over and flip the spotlight on again. I am an alien from outer space, and I’ve come to abduct her boyfriend, occupy her house, and if I feel like it, maybe even point my disappearing ray at her. It could be all three, and the only thing this earthling can do is wince in the light, hand high like a stop sign.
THE HISTORY OF CANCER
It was the year we saw bathroom tile as a form of divination. Sparkling, hard, it held all our answers. My friend Ralph’s father came home in the early evenings, covered with white plaster, and it was our job to haul the tile out of his truck and take it out back. He never made it easy on us. The tile was hidden under junk in five-gallon buckets or stuffed in all the drawers of his toolbox. He had a huge lunch cooler with his name spelled on the side — FORST — in black electrical tape, and you never knew what to expect: it could weigh sixty pounds with stolen tile or be light as orange peels. He pulled that cooler from the cab and walked up the drive, swinging it, while Ralph and I took bets as to whether or not it would drop us to the ground when he handed it over, whether it would take both of us to drag it around back.
Forst had built a tile bin in the backyard out of old planking and sagged plywood, though to us it was a tile palace, with its long rows of shelves spilling with ceramics, great heaps of porcelain so high you had to climb over on all fours. Here we separated the tiles into mason’s boxes and old grout buckets as we sat on upturned caulking crates and discussed what a man could do with all that tile. It was clear this tile, smooth in our hands, was worth a great deal, and this was a lifetime’s worth, enough to wall a gymnasium, though in a hundred different colors. The tile palace was also the place Forst kept his magazines.
Here’s where the art came in. To separate tile by color — pink, tan, powder blue — was one thing, and separating by shape — rectangle, hexagram, star-and-diamond — was another, but we separated by kind as welclass="underline" inner corners, coping edges, facing plates, running trim. No stack of tile was too small in our eyes, and on the back of a shelf alone might be set four, yellow, rectangular elbows. Once in a while, there would be a lone tile. I had a golden-speckled round tile that I carried in my back pocket all summer, and in its burnished finish I could nearly picture the family’s house where this tile matched, could almost imagine a house in which there were no odd pieces left over at all.
I was a little jealous of Ralph, too. He had a certain condition that caused his skin to rise when you pressed on it. If you slapped his back, a few minutes later your hand would rise and appear. With your knuckle you could trace his bones underneath, and there they were. Or he would lie on the cool tile as we sorted, and we could both sit transfixed as triangles rose on his chest and stomach. Ralph couldn’t wear a belt or tie his shoes, but I wanted that, to be able to react to things that touched me funny. Sometimes Forst beat Ralph with a rope. I’d come riding up to his house on my Huffy and there he’d be, covered with running welts. Ralph would explain that it was because of the magazines or some other reasonable sounding offense, though it was always difficult to tell just how hard he’d been hit. Ralph could welt up from a Hula Hoop. Then again, Forst was the largest man I’d ever imagined, and I’d seen the way he’d swung that cooler.
This was a time of great unknowns for me, and the absolute logic of Ralph’s home had me hooked. There were simply no mysteries allowed, and I fell in with that. It’s clear to me now that Forst’s tile palace was really placed in the one spot it couldn’t be seen from the road or the alley, and I can see the sadness and resentment of a man who built a monument to his daily, petty pilferings. I can see that there wasn’t enough of any one kind of tile to even cover a dishpan. But inside that rickety bin those tiles held me in awe by their simple mass and order, by the vision of a man who would recognize their latent, unseen value, who would build a house to protect them.
I realize the women in those magazines were Filipino and not Mexican, as we’d thought. Once in a while one of their faces will come back to me, in their offset color and oversharp focus, and those forced smiles and folded bodies will erase where it was I was driving, make me overcook dinner. But in the sweltering heat of the tile palace it made sense that all Mexican women were ready to bend giggling over a bathtub, and we commented openly to that effect. On those hot Tucson summers it seemed only fitting that Ralph and I should both get beatings on a fairly regular basis, and we silently nodded that I’d just lucked out, not having a dad to give me mine. We often discussed in our scientific way the pros and cons of having a dad versus not having a dad, though we couldn’t see how clear it was that Forst wasn’t really Ralph’s father.
What was a mystery was why some nights my mother would move me from the cool of my bed to the hot seats of her Monte Carlo, why we would drive and drive — the Oracle road, Baseline, Miracle Mile — without speaking, why it was the Mexican radio station, the one where we couldn’t understand the words, that she listened to. The Monte Carlo didn’t have air so you had to choose between wet vinyl and eye-cutting wind, and one night I woke suddenly, sweating, thinking of the pink heat lamp in our bathroom, something that always seemed ominous to me as it glowed and ticked above the toilet. There was dust crossing in our headlights. The road signs were in Spanish. I moaned in a way that always won response from her, but she only cracked my window with the power button on the console. “We’re from Michigan,” she told me. “We’ll get used to the heat.”