The fluorescent light above Hugh’s desk began to fizzle and flicker. Though a little sunshine came from his window, it wasn’t enough to work by in the small corner office. He played with the switch. The light continued to blink, as though a small hand were opening and closing in front of it.
He called maintenance. They couldn’t get to it until late next week. He finished reading the paper in the noisy, muted light. He’d been distracted already, all morning: he’d been thinking of calling Alice Richards and asking her to Spider’s Juneteenth show. Alice worked in the Affirmative Action Office, and they’d dated a couple of times, hit it off pretty well, though they’d never gotten more intimate than a swift good-night kiss. Hugh found her enormously attractive, but she was stiff, overly zealous in her work. A thwarted crusader. She’d told him once, discussing a sexual-harassment case she’d overseen, “It’s my job to be an advocate for the innocent, which, on this campus — and in most other places, I promise you — are young women.” Hugh felt she often confused advocacy with her own anger at men, the source of which he didn’t know her well enough to trace. “When I first came to Marion, three years ago, I imagined no one could be nobler than people who teach in junior colleges,” she’d said the night they first went out. “Clearly, they don’t gravitate here for the money, right? They’ll never have the prestige of their big-shot cousins in the major universities. They’re just teachers. Servants of knowledge.”
“And you’ve learned since —?” he’d asked.
“I’ve learned since that pettiness, lust — all the nasties — are every bit as prevalent here as in the bigger arenas. Maybe even more so, since the rewards in a place like Marion are so small.” She’d laughed, ruefully. They were dining at the Warwick, which advertised itself as the Southwest’s “most rewarding hotel.” It was nice, but Hugh found it a little tacky too. The bar was decorated with plush velvet chairs with tiny egg-shaped backs, gaudy golden chandeliers, smoky wall mirrors, and copies of classical statues of nearly naked women. Houston’s idea of Refined Taste.
The hotel was located near Rice University and Hermann Park, and was surrounded by long, beautiful rows of live oaks and cottonwoods. Limousines circled a tall, colorful fountain near its entrance. The Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum were both just down the block; after show openings, Houston’s culture-birds liked to be seen sipping champagne at the Warwick wearing strapless Halston gowns or Brooks Brothers suits. In the piano bar that night, Hugh had overheard an exchange between a couple of transplanted New Yorkers. “I just adore living among the Texans,” the first woman said. “They’re such primitive sophisticates.”
“What do you mean?” her friend asked.
“I mean they don’t know what a blintz is, but if they did, darling, they’d love it.”
He’d never felt at ease in this part of town, except on the golf course at Hermann Park. He didn’t play often — sometimes after class on Monday afternoons he’d drop by, looking for pick-up rounds. Hermann was a public course, cheap, catering mostly to old black men and retirees. Its clubhouse served the best hamburgers in town.
The remaining area around Hermann Park — the hotel, the university, the med center, the elaborate brick homes — was too rich for Hugh’s blood. But Alice had suggested the Warwick and she’d appeared right at home there. He wasn’t sure she’d be comfortable at the Juneteenth Festival. But loosening her up seemed a sexy challenge. He loved to watch her cross her legs, to hear the hiss of her hose. Slow. In control. Just like Paula.
His office light crackled, winked, winked again.
Santa Anna never saw a profit from his gum. After being granted political amnesty and returning to Mexico, he died bitterly, in poverty and neglect.
The light went out entirely. Hugh paused. In the near-dark, he punched Alice’s number.
Every three hundred blocks or so, the city’s cigarette ads changed. In the Heights, the billboards showed a young white couple smoking and laughing on a sailboat. On Dowling Street, near downtown, a black couple lay on a hill, smoking and laughing. In the barrios, Chicano workers in a shower of welding sparks smoked and sweated and laughed.
“Black Magic here, tellin’ you whitey up to no good — out to put our fine young men in chains! A hundred years or more we’ve lived and sweated here, in the heart of whitey’s city, and still he don’t know us! Steal our music, steal our eats, even steal our party. Juneteenth, a Holy Day for our grandfolks — God bless it, hallowed be His name — the day Texas slaves learnt they was free. Now the pigs want to shove in and steal a profit off our past, our prayers, our good times. Cain’t see us ‘less we wearin’ their fuckin’ chains. Thurgood Marshall, James Nabrit, Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland — proud black history here in the Bayou City. We ain’t invisible. Don’t let whitey tell you no different. What do we got to do? Burn his lies! His pig-tongued talk! Brothers, sisters, next time you see whitey sniffing ‘round our broken-hearted ‘hoods, you dog him, you bite him, you ride his moony old pig-ass. You drive him the hell out!”
Static swallowed Black Magic’s voice. Hugh punched buttons until he found an R&B station. Junior Wells and “The Vietnam Blues.” He knew the tune, the lyrics a funny variation on the standard blues line “Woke up this mornin’, found my baby gone.” “Gonna wake up one mornin’,” Junior sang, “find yourself gone.”
At home, he parked his car then walked around the building to check on the kittens. The tiniest one was dead. Hugh sagged. He couldn’t tell what had happened. Perhaps it had suffocated in the crush of its brothers and sisters as they’d snuggled at night for warmth. Or perhaps its little lungs couldn’t take the city’s good intentions, the mosquito spray spread nightly by big white sanitation trucks.
He placed the kitten inside a nearby Dumpster, in a napkin-nest next to some Chinese take-out boxes. The rest of the kittens seemed fine. Now that he’d started feeding them, Hugh felt responsible for them. He set two plates of Purina Cat Chow in a tangle of English ivy, below the pyracantha bushes that protected them from predators.
On the sidewalk in front of his apartment building, two teenage girls in cutoffs and tank tops strolled past, discussing tattoos. “I just got a butterfly on my boob,” one said. She had blond hair and a pair of broken front teeth. “Looks like it’s perching on my nipple.”
“Did it hurt?” her friend asked.
“Hell yes, it hurt.”
Hugh nodded hi to them. He felt delighted that the city worked at all, when the odds were clearly against it.
On the corner, the girls bumped into the neighborhood bag lady — the one in the tumbleweed sweater — who’d come shuffling, blunt as a fullback, around a closed dry-cleaning store. Even in ninety-degree heat she wore the sweater, an orange coat, a thick wool cap, and a pair of cotton gloves. She carried half a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts sacks stuffed with Colonel Sanders boxes. Hugh had seen her digging for fruit rinds or vegetable scraps in heaps of steaming trash. He scratched his head. Had he hidden the kitten well enough in the Dumpster?