Fireworks burst above oaks and dry pines, shading Alice’s face, first pink then yellow and green. Hugh realized, again, how beautiful she was, but this time her loveliness didn’t please him, or scorch him with prickling delight; this time he experienced solid panic. Her beauty demanded something of him. He’d asked her out several times. He’d shown an interest. And she didn’t like men very much.
He unlocked his Nova’s passenger door. As Alice was about to step inside, brakes squealed in the street. Over the grinding insistence of a hip-hop tune, a gruff voice demanded, “What you wont here, white boy?”
Hugh looked up to see the Lakers shirts — four of them — hanging out the windows of a sleek white Mustang.
“Motherfucker confused. He think he a brother, Deke.”
Alice shook against Hugh’s shoulder. He recognized the car: the cruiser from Spider’s neighborhood, the one that had circled the block while Hugh sat with Spider on his porch. He thought of snatching a golf club from his trunk, wielding it like a bat.
“It just like Black Magic say. Comin’ down here, listen our music, eat our food, dance our gig. On’iest thing he couldn’t do, Deke, was find him some nigger pussy, see, so he stuck with that pale piece of shit.”
Gently, Hugh moved Alice into the car and locked her door. He arranged his keys into spikes between his fingers and came around slowly to the driver’s side, where the Mustang idled. Respect, he thought. “We’re just leaving,” he said.
“Damn straight, motherfucker.”
The one called Deke dropped a malt liquor bottle onto the pavement at Hugh’s feet. It shattered with an ugly pop. “Stay out our ‘hood, you hear me, white boy? You occupyin’ days is through.”
“Hugh,” Alice whispered when he slipped behind the wheel. “Hugh, what do we do?”
“It’s all right.” He turned the key and inched cautiously away from the curb. The Mustang followed. Another malt liquor bottle sailed into the street, ahead of Hugh’s car. He swerved to miss the flying shards. He checked his rearview. Cigarettes flared behind the cruiser’s tinted windows.
Heavy traffic. Barking horns. Flashing fireworks. Hugh twisted down back streets in black neighborhoods, past a Latino block, through intersections where the city’s old grid pattern slid beneath the new. Garbage pails. Peeling billboards. The rattling drones of air-conditioners.
Shoo-fly in a windstorm.
In a Trinidadian barrio, in the northwest part of town, a small Juneteenth celebration was just getting under way. Salsa music kicked out of two oversized stereo speakers in the back of a Dodge pickup. Twenty or thirty girls danced in the street, wearing black and yellow Danskins, ankle bracelets, umbrella-shaped sombreros. Sweating and sexy in the heat.
Hugh didn’t see the Lakers. “Tell you what we’ll do. We’ll park the car over here, then lose ourselves in this crowd for half an hour until we’re absolutely certain those guys are gone. Then I’ll get us home.”
Alice looked around. “You’re sure this is a safe neighborhood?”
“Don’t worry.”
Confetti sprinkled the air. Children wrapped themselves in streamers. A tall, copper-colored woman beat her buttocks with a bottle as she danced to the music from the pickup. Nearly nude kids skipped around a laughing man curled like a corpse in a giant cardboard box.
Hugh kept a careful watch.
Under British rule, generations of Trinidadians had been forced into slavery in the cane fields or on large sugar plantations, he explained to Alice. At carnival time they carried whips and chains and painted their faces with flour, to parody their white masters. “A kind of play-revolution to head off the real one.”
“The real ones are still just a hair-trigger away, aren’t they?”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea we’d run into trouble. It’s just a handful of folks, I think, who can’t get beyond — ”
“You go along, thinking everything’s all right, that the country’s getting better…”
Hugh heard the ideologue again, the thwarted crusader stirring inside her, and he tried to change the subject. “Would you like another drink?”
“We don’t have the faintest idea what our culture is really like, do we?” she went on. “We’re stumbling around with blinders on our eyes.”
Behind her, a young man in a Ronald Reagan mask bounced on a car hood. His shirt said, “Suck My Dick.” A woman sashayed past Hugh wearing a hula skirt and a cowboy hat. “Happy Juneteenth,” she said and patted his ass.
Alice was on the verge of tears. He didn’t know why, beyond attraction — or an apology for exposing her to the dangers of the night — but he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips, perhaps as a preemptive strike to block the moral lesson she was sure to deliver.
She looked startled. She blushed, then smiled.
“Am I over the line?” Hugh asked.
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“I don’t know, Alice.”
“Maybe we should — ”
“Yes.”
They walked back to his car, holding hands. Shy as schoolkids. A Roman candle, splitting smoke in the sky, illuminated an old man pawing through a Dumpster. Hugh remembered he’d forgotten to leave food for the kittens. He wondered about the bag lady on this lovely, disruptive night.
No sign of the Mustang. He drove past the junior college, over to Montrose. In front of his place he killed the engine and shut off his lights. A water sprinkler chrred in the dark. A dog barked.
“Alice, I’m — ”
“Shhh.”
Her mouth was more expressive than Paula’s, pressing and tentative all at once, exploring and waiting to be explored. Soothing, erotic, a bold surprise — imagine if she liked men! Paula had always been a nervous, furtive kisser, even when she and Hugh had plenty of private time together, away from the girls.
“Would you like to come in?” he said.
She nodded.
Stale, dusty air. Right away he opened a kitchen window and switched on a ceiling fan. “Wine?”
“Just a touch.”
An uncorked bottle of chardonnay sat in the fridge, next to three soggy tomatoes and a plate of leftovers. Broccoli-cheese casserole. The Cling Wrap floated, loose, around the dish; a putrid tang infested the room. “Whoa,” Hugh said, stepping back. “Sorry. Living alone, you know …” He scraped the food into a trash bag then set the plate in the sink, a little too hard. It chipped.
He handed her a glass of wine and pulled her gently down the hall. In his bedroom, he opened another window. He set their glasses on the night table and began to unbutton her blouse. The V of her collarbone moved sleekly inside her flesh. Angles veered surprisingly into soft planes, pockets of heat into which his hands fit, exactly.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.
As he filled her, she seemed to fill him back, gently, but thoroughly, with a spreading warmth just at the edge of his awareness.
He stayed excited even after he’d come, moaning above her, sweating lightly, dampening her belly and breasts. His body felt less like his own than like an extension of hers, fluttering, charged by their motion together.
From a neighbor’s yard, wind chimes sang like laughter through his open window. Then something else. A wailing. Alice stirred. “What’s that?”
Hugh listened closely. “Oh. Oh, it’s a bag lady.” He rubbed his face. “Poor woman. She hangs around the Dumpsters here and talks to herself.”