“How did you get out?”
“Panache sprung him,” Cuz answered, offering me a sip of Tanqueray that was almost as nasty as its diet grapefruit soda chaser.
“What, he performed one of his shitty benefit concerts and snuck you out in a speaker?”
“Power of the pen. Between his TV cop gig and the beer commercials, Panache knows some big-time white people. Letters were written, and here I am. Conditionally paroled like a motherfucker.”
“What conditions?”
“The condition that I don’t get caught. What else?”
One of the dogs began to bark. The kitchen curtains parted, spilling light onto the driveway. I flinched, even though we were out of sight.
“No need to be scared. Panache ain’t here.”
“I know. He’s never here.”
“And how you know that, you been stalking my sister again?”
“Who’s out there?” It was Marpessa, saving me from further embarrassment. I mouthed to Stevie that I wasn’t there.
“It’s just me and Cuz.”
“Well, bring your asses inside before something happens.”
“All right, we’ll be in in a second.”
The first time I met Stevie, back when he and his sister lived in Dickens, there was a limousine parked in front of their house. Except for prom night, you don’t see many limos in the ghetto. And that black stretch Cadillac — crammed from mini bar to back window with roughnecks, light and dark, tall and short, smart and stupid — held Stevie’s boys. Boys who over the years disappeared in ones and twos and, on really bloody days — threes. Bank robberies. Food truck holdups. Assassinations. Panache and King Cuz were the only homies he had left. And though Stevie and Panache really liked each other, it was a relationship that profited both parties. Panache wasn’t no punk, but Stevie gave him real street cred in the rap scene, and for Stevie, Panache’s success reminded him that all things are possible if one can get the right white people on your side. Back then Panache fancied himself a pimp. Sure, he had women doing shit for him, but what nigger didn’t? I remember Panache in the living room staring Marpessa down, rapping what would become his first gold record, while Stevie DJ’d for him.
Three in the afternoon, Mormons at my pad
Need new croaker sacks and feelin’ bad
Promising salvation to a nigger like me
Brigham Young must be stupid and high on PCP
If Stevie had a Latin motto, it’d be Cogito, ergo Boogieum. I think, therefore I jam.
* * *
“How come Marpessa’s bus is parked here?” I asked him.
“Nigger, how come you here?” he barked back.
“I wanted to leave this for your sister.” I showed him the photo of the satsuma tree, which he snatched from my hand. I wanted to ask him if he’d received all the fruit I’d sent him over the years: the papayas, kiwis, apples, and blueberries, but I could tell from the suppleness of his skin, the whiteness of his eyes, the sheen in his ponytail, and the relaxed way he leaned on my shoulder that he had.
“She told me about you leaving these pictures.”
“Is she mad?”
Stevie shrugged and continued to stare at the Polaroid. “The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks’s bus.”
“Who lost Rosa Parks’s bus?”
“White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That’s what my sister says, anyway.”
“I don’t know.”
Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. “What you mean, ‘You don’t know’? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That’d be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson’s jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way.
“Anyway, she thinks what you did with the bus, with the stickers and shit, is special. That it makes niggers think. In her way, she’s proud of you.”
“Really?”
I looked at the bus. Tried to see it in a different light. As something more than forty sheet-metal feet of trivial rights iconography dripping transmission fluid onto the driveway. Tried to picture it hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian, a tour guide pointing up to it and saying, “This is the very bus from which Hominy Jenkins, the last Little Rascal, asserted that the rights of African-Americans were neither God-given nor constitutional, but immaterial.”
Stevie held the photo under his nose, took a deep breath, and asked, “When these oranges going to be ready?”
I wanted to point to the greenish-orange balls and brag about how I’d figured out that if I covered the ground around the tree with white waterproof sheeting, not only would I be able to keep moisture from seeping into the soil, the whiteness would reflect the sunlight back into the tree and improve the color of the fruit. But all I could manage was “Soon. They’ll be ripe soon.”
Stevie took one last sniff of the picture, and then passed it under King Cuz’s cavernous nostrils.
“Smell that citrus, nigger? That’s what freedom smells like.”
Then he grabbed me by the shoulders. “And what’s this I hear about black Chinese restaurants?”
Fifteen
It was the smell that brung ’em. At about six in the morning, I found the first boy curled up in my driveway, breathing heavily, pressing his nose under the gate like a horny dog. He looked happy. He wasn’t in the way, so I left him alone and went to milk the cows. Los Angeles, for whatever reason, is chock-full of autistic children and I thought he was one of the afflicted. But later in the day he had company. By noontime, nearly every child on the block had crammed into my front yard. They spent the last day of summer vacation playing Uno on the grass and trying to see who could hit the softest. They plucked needles from the cacti and stuck each other in the behind, they popped my rose petals and scratched their names into the driveway with rock salt. Even the Lopez kids, Lori, Dori, Jerry, and Charlie, who lived next door and had two pristine acres of backyard and a decent-sized pool to play in, were circled around little brother Billy, laughing hysterically as he noshed on a peanut butter sandwich. Then a little girl I didn’t recognize staggered over to the elm tree and drowned a column of ants in vomit.
“Okay, what the fuck?”
“The Stank,” Billy said, after swallowing a mouthful of a peanut butter — and judging from what appeared to be bug legs on his tongue — and flies sandwich. I didn’t smell anything, so Billy dragged me out into the street. It wasn’t hard to see why the young girl retched; the stench was overwhelming. The Stank had rolled in overnight and settled over the neighborhood like some celestial flatulence. Jesus. But why hadn’t I noticed it earlier? I stood in the middle of Bernard Avenue, the kids beckoning me over, waving frantically like World War I soldiers urging a wounded comrade out of the mustard gas and back into the relative safety of the trenches. As soon as I reached the curb, it hit me, the refreshing pungency of citrus. No wonder the kids refused to stray from my property, the satsuma tree was perfuming the grounds like some ten-foot-tall air freshener.