“Why’s that?”
“So she could come on down here and join me.”
Treefrog laughs.
Papa Love turns to his mural. “You like it?” he asks.
“Yeah, man, ’course I like it. Old Faraday, man. Damn. Hate to see him go.”
“Brother’s in the blood.”
Papa Love shakes another can of paint.
“You seen that Angela girl yet?” asks Treefrog.
“Yeah,” says Papa Love. “Sister’s living with Elijah.”
“Man, you should draw her.”
“Last time I saw her, seemed like she was breathing pretty good.”
“Yeah, but you should draw her anyway,” says Treefrog.
He slaps Papa Love on the shoulder as the old man sets to work on Faraday’s chin.
* * *
In his notebook Treefrog writes, Back down under the earth where you belong. Back down under the earth where you belong. Each letter is like a perfect mirror of the one that has gone before, his handwriting tiny and crisp and replicate. He could make a map of those words, beginning at the B and ending at the g — where all beginning begins and ends — and they would make the strangest of upground and belowground topographies. And then he writes: Angela. Two A’s, one at each end. Nice, that. A good name. Lovely. An elaborate pencil mark at the end, a tail fin.
chapter 10. 1955–64
A massive blue Buick with an exaggerated tail fin cruises the neighborhood. The driver hangs his arm out the left-hand side window, an open bottle of whiskey held at his crotch. He wears sunglasses and a shirt patterned with playing cards, open at the neck to the jack of clubs. In his breast pocket a small bag of marijuana dents the cloth.
Hoofer McAuliffe steers with his knees, one hand tapping the dashboard and the fingers of the other drumming on the outside panel of the door. As he drives, he leans out the window to look at his brand-new set of whitewall tires, almost hypnotizing himself with their swirl. He takes his hand from the dashboard to grab the whiskey bottle and drinks long and deep. Whiskey streams down his chin, dribbling in the stubble. The car travels slowly, twenty-five miles an hour.
On the street’s far corner, McAuliffe notices some boys out playing with a fire hydrant. Huge jets of water stream across the road. The boys are laughing as they soak each passing vehicle, and one of the kids is pointing at McAuliffe’s car. The boys punch each other with delight, the fists sliding off one another’s wet shoulders.
McAuliffe pulls his arm in from the window, and in the quick movement of winding up the handle his whiskey bottle tumbles to the floor. He curses loud into the steering wheel and bends down to grab the bottle. He jerks the wheel and turns the car across three lanes of traffic, away from the boys. A checkered taxicab behind him blares its horn. Hoofer McAuliffe rights himself in the seat, all concentration. A man on a bicycle — salmoning his way against the traffic — swerves to avoid the Buick.
McAuliffe slams the brake for an instant, but the boys across the street have directed the hydrant water toward him, a giant fountain making an arc in the air, and he pumps down on the accelerator once more.
The traffic light is red and the accelerator goes deeper to the floor and the engine whines.
He doesn’t see the woman on the crosswalk carrying the large laundry bags in her arms. She is looking over her shoulder and chuckling at the boys anointing the street with water. A roar hits her ears—“Watccchit laidyyyy!”—and she whips around, too late. The Buick crumples the woman at the hip and she is in the air, flying, half somersaulting, clothespins tumbling out of her dress pocket, her thin frame smashing against the windshield, making a spiderweb of glass, her body rolling up onto the roof, denting the metal, her green dress billowing, the street silent but for the patter of water and the screech of tires. Her bag of laundry — cloth diapers and baby clothes — gets pinned to the front of the car. She is flung to the rear, her outstretched arm slapping against the beautiful tail fin.
She flies beyond, slamming her head on the pavement with such a thump that it is the only sound the passersby will later remember, the full dullness of her head against concrete and then the sight of a clothespin soaking up blood, other pins strewn around the street.
The Buick smashes into a mailbox — pinning the bag of laundry against it — and careens out, comes to a halt, sashayed across two lanes.
Hoofer McAuliffe is out of his car, ripping at the buttons on his shirt so that it falls open and the patterned playing cards roam to his hips. He runs back and forth between the car and the woman, beating at his head with his fists. Across the street somebody uses a wrench to turn the hydrant off. McAuliffe’s moans grow louder and he sinks down at the front of his car, on his knees, fingering the massive dents in the hood of his Buick.
It is fifteen minutes before Clarence comes running home, shouting, “Momma’s been hit by a car!”
Walker lunges from his seat and his leg hits against the record player and another scratch etches its way across the vinyl and the needle keeps skipping, skipping, skipping as father and son run for the door. Clarence helps shoulder his father down the stairs.
At the street corner Hoofer McAuliffe is rubbing his fingers over the dent in his car and he shouts at Walker, “It weren’t me! The light was green! She jumped out in front of me! See!” And he points at the imprint of her body in the hood and, beneath his breath, says, “Bitch jumped out in front of me.”
The crowd grows silent as Walker kneels on the ground and takes Eleanor’s head in his hands. The way Eleanor’s hair would touch him in moments of pleasure, like when they hunkered together over a letter and she would sweep her head sideways, the unruly red strands touching his face. Or when she drew the curtain across as the children slept and slipped in beside him in the double bed, hair mashed against the pillow. Or on the bicycle before they were married, taking her long tresses and, from the crossbar, swinging them around and giving him a red mustache, joking, “That’s what our kids’ll look like!” There were long strands of her hair left in the sink when she washed it and, as his own started to gradually peel away from his head, she would take the strands and place them on his forehead, all laughter. Brushing Deirdre’s, Maxine’s — but never enough to remove the kinks and curls. She told their daughters to be proud of the curls. The way he broke a jam jar against the wall when she came home with her locks shorn short. Eighteen months later the locks were there, long again. And once, when he mopped the floor, she came home and was so amazed that she bent her body at the waist and walked crabways across the room and let her hair trail over his work, saying that she trusted him every inch of the way. “Look!” She giggled when she got to the opposite side of the room. “Not a bit of dirt in my hair! You’re the best mopper I’ve ever seen in my life!”
Walker takes off his shirt and cushions his wife’s head, then stands and slowly walks over to the Buick. Tears streaming down his face, he smashes his fist down on the hood until it is collandered with ridges and hollows.
Later that evening, Hoofer McAuliffe is on the street, casually pointing out the dents in his vehicle. The clothes and diapers that Eleanor had been washing for her grandson have already been picked up from the ground.
* * *
He removes the metal head from the shovel at the foot of the door and leaves a note upon it.
I might be gone for a while, Pa. Please look after Louisa and the baby for me. I’ll be in the place you told me about when you were young. Don’t tell nobody. I’ll be back when the clouds clear.