Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 35

"Depending on who's asking."

"Tell 'em Rita here."

"Rita who?"

"Erasmus' girl."

There is the sound of wood sc.r.a.ping against wood and Rita catches sight of a worn white T-s.h.i.+rt and muscular brown arms as the bartender moves from his chair to a room behind the bar.

The woman is done with loving the jukebox and pulls up a stool next to Rita.

The men exchange glances and then drop their eyes back down to their drinks.

"What you want Manny for?" The voice is coa.r.s.e and brittle and Rita's eyes turn to face the puffed skin and scraggly gray strands sticking out from the black blond hair.

"I got something for him," she says.

"Yeah, what you got that no other woman in here got? We all got something for Manny," the woman says and a bitter laugh escapes her. "Gimme a smoke, Lester." She orders without her eyes leaving Rita's.

Lester almost tips his drink over in his hurry to toss a cigarette down the bar, then drops a dollar down next to his gla.s.s and rushes out the door.

The woman reaches into her bosom and pulls out a lighter. Her eyes still holding Rita's, she lights the cigarette and inhales deeply.

"They ain't n.o.body too young for Manny," she mumbles to herself, then blows a stream of smoke into Rita's face. "s.h.i.+t, I was young once, too, ya know." She spits and slams her hand down on the counter. "Must be them eyes. You got eyes like a cat. Probably sneaky like 'em too."

The man that was left at the bar, digs deep into his pocket, pulls out a dollar and drops it down next to his gla.s.s. "Later, Lonnie." He yells over his shoulder before shooting Rita a cautious look and skip-walking out of the bar.

"Hey, Lonnie, he here or not?" Rita asks.

"He said he don't know no Rita or Erasmus," Lonnie says as he lazily flips through the newspaper.

"He don't know n.o.body he owe, had, or hates!" the woman laughs. "Ain't that right, Lonnie?" she screams and slaps the bar again.

"If you say so, Ursula."

"So which category you fall under, honey?" Ursula leans in and whispers to Rita's cheek.

The rancid stench of scotch and cigarettes accosts Rita's nostrils and she stands up suddenly, sending the stool toppling down to the floor.

"Oooh! This one's a little spitfire," Ursula says. "Yeah, he like 'em like that."

"That's enough, Ursula," Lonnie warns and finally moves down from the dark end of the bar. He's large, over three hundred pounds, and his stomach jiggles beneath his T-s.h.i.+rt with every step he takes toward Rita.

"He ain't here. So either buy a drink or vacate the premises," he says and lays his meaty hands down on the bar.

"He ain't here?" Rita questions sarcastically.

"He always here," Ursula whispers and then breaks down with laughter.

Lonnie shoots her another warning look before turning his gaze back to Rita.

"That's what I said." His tone is angry now.

Rita chews on her bottom lip for a moment. "Okay," she says and then, "Where's the ladies room?"

"For customers only!" Ursula screams and pounds a scrawny fist on the bar.

Lonnie rolls his eyes and says, "At the back and to the left." He turns on Ursula. "I'ma throw your a.s.s out of here, ya here me, Ursula?"

Rita moves slowly toward the dewy blackness of the back. Cigarette smoke hangs heavy in the air and the soles of her shoes makes sucking sounds against the sticky filth of the floor.

She walks slowly then turns her head slightly to see Manny seated in a large leather chair in the room at the back. He's leaned back, sleeping legs stretched out before him, arms folded across his stomach, onyx stone gleaming.

Lonnie is still fussing at Ursula, his sausage-length index finger swaying ominously in her face.

Rita moves right, slips behind the bar and into the room.

She stands there for some time, staring at his gleaming bald head, thick neck, and hands that held her down. Her eyes roll over legs that forced hers apart and shoes that left black polish streaks across her bedspread.

He sneezes and his eyelids fly open, his brown eyes hold the green of hers, the young face soft, plump, and glowing of motherhood. He smiles a sleepy smile and his eyes drop down to firm, full b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the small circles of wetness seeping through the pale pink blouse she wears.

Rita steps closer to him and he smells the talc.u.m powder she's dusted her stomach with, the sour milk the baby spewed across her skirt that Bertha dragged a wet cloth across before Rita walked blank-eyed and calm out the door.

"What you doing here?" he finally asks when his eyes grow tired of holding her and the wet spots begin to make him uncomfortable.

Rita is still seeing the shoe polish marks on the bedspread and feeling the gold band of his ring pressed between her fingers. She can hear her insides screaming, screaming and pulling apart and him breathing heavy in her neck, her hair, his skin slapping against hers, the tearing part complete and the silence that swelled inside of her and him so deep within her she feels as if her body will swallow him whole.

"What you want?" he asks, his voice filling with annoyance, his eyes looking behind her for Lonnie.

Rita wonders why she's so calm, so cool. She looks down at her hands that aren't even shaking and thinks about her heart that barely beats enough for her to breathe right anymore. Then she reaches into her pocket and pulls out the knife that Bertha uses to gut fish and before Manny can understand what's happening, before he can reach his big hands up to stop her, she brings the knife down into the center of his head.

A screaming Ursula backs away from the doorway, her purple lips a large circle, her chicken-thin hands cradling her cheeks as Rita, b.l.o.o.d.y hands and blouse soaked through with mother's milk, moves pa.s.s her.

Days later, when the police knock on Bertha's door to come and take Rita away, the O Bar was burned down to the ground when white rioters tossed fire bombs through the gla.s.s panes of businesses along Hastings, St. Antoine, and Brush.

By the time Rita was a.s.signed her number and asked to turn front and then sideways for the camera, Manny Evans' chalky silhouette was burned away to nothing and Rita was on her way to becoming Luscious #132541289.

FROM Crawfish Dreams.

BY NANCY RAWLES.

Camille Broussard sat high on the torn vinyl cus.h.i.+on waiting to shake hands with her Maker. Her wrinkled brown fingers worked the rosewood beads that had been her mother's last gift to her. She hadn't expected to die on a Thursday, an undistinguished day in her opinion, and she was disappointed to find she'd be riding to heaven in a heavily-dented Ford pickup truck. Good Catholic that she was, she had hoped for something fancier, a sky blue Cadillac with pleated wings boasting a choir of angels in the back seat. But her life had been one of diminis.h.i.+ng returns, so she wasn't altogether surprised to find herself rus.h.i.+ng headlong toward a concrete barrier in a vehicle composed entirely of sc.r.a.p.

She had been looking forward to retiring from her job. For forty years, Camille had been housekeeper and cook for the priests at St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church. Two dozen priests had come and gone, but she was still there. The church had been both sanctuary and snare, located six blocks from her home in a conspicuously unprosperous part of Los Angeles called Watts. In a place where jobs were scarce, she had depended on St. Martin's for her daily bread. Her seven children had attended the parish school; it had given her great comfort to look up from the stove and see them at play. Now they were grown. Most of them had taken leave of both Watts and the Catholic faith. But whoever wished to see her a final time would have to come to church.

Being matriarch of the Broussard clan, a family of Louisiana Creoles who relied heavily upon ritual, Camille had laid elaborate plans concerning every detail of her death: who to burden with her last secrets, who to allow at her bedside, who to trust with her final rosary. She'd peopled dying moments with a cast of penitent thousands-the scoundrels who had wronged her, the children who had vexed her, the tax collectors who had cheated her out of her hard-earned dimes. Her funeral had been scripted down to the necklace and earrings, the correct shade of velvet for the coffin lining, the number, type, and tenor of hymns, the precise expression to be frozen for eternity.Pallbearers had been preselected along with their understudies. Her plot was purchased and waiting, the stone carved with everything but the final date. She'd envisioned a priest miraculously materializing at the exact moment of death bearing one final body of Christ, one last sweet taste of Jesus which Camille, as a Eucharistic minister, was perfectly capable of feeding herself. However, she wanted the priest to grant her absolution, which she did not wish to grant herself.

In her current condition, she would have no choice but to pardon her own sins. Her plans were literally out the window. In all her planning, she had never dreamed herself foolish enough to hasten her own demise by asking Lester Pep to carry her to San Bernardino and back in his G.o.dawful deathtrap of a truck.

Pep struggled to gain control of the lunging demon, jerking the wheel from side to side-an angler with a big one. "Say your prayers!" he shouted. A sixty-two-year-old black man from Watts, he was already five years past his life expectancy.

Camille held fast to the nape of her seat. They were jiggling down the freeway at a mean tilt, seventy miles an hour in the carpool lane, not a seat belt in sight. The curving highway stretched into oblivion, a vast sea of lanes rising and falling over pillars of rock. Box houses, brown skies, beige hills, dry bushes-all were being swept away on time's noisy current. The speed with which the end was approaching confused Camille, who was sure G.o.d still had work for her to do. As fragments of her sixty-seven years flashed before her eyes, a strange vision of hope revealed itself to her. Beyond the smog and the steamy desert sun, she thought she saw Watts rising in the distance.

Camille felt a pounding on the gla.s.s behind her. Her grandson Nicholas was crouched in the truck bed pitching curses to the wind, his shaved head thumping the gla.s.s like a gigantic ball of hail. As cars swerved and dipped all around him, he gripped the metal bars that normally served as guard rails for Pep's lawn mowing equipment. The equipment had been removed to make room for the pa.s.senger, but the chains that held it in place were left to rattle and bang against the sides of the truck. Nicholas, who had just been released from three years in prison, rattled and banged along with them. Camille wondered if any beating he might have suffered at the Men's Correctional Inst.i.tute was as cruel and unusual as this one.

"Mother of Jesus!" Pep delivered a swift uppercut to the steering column and forced the truck off the meridian. The pickup bucked to a stop on the exit ramp, and Nicholas landed with a thud against the window. "Whew! That was a close one!" Pep ma.s.saged the dash. "G.o.d in heaven, I never pray except when I'm in this truck!" Camille turned around to see if Nicholas was all right.

"Oh, don't worry about him," Pep advised. "Somebody needs to knock some sense into that big head of his. So he knows better than to beat up old ladies."

Camille found herself staring directly into her grandson's eyes and nineteen years of hurt. She had raised seven children but none had tried her the way Nicholas had. Such a beautiful child he had been, but now fury scarred his countenance. She clasped the rosary in her palm. Everyday for the last three years, she had prayed a rosary for the return of his soul. As far as she could tell, a thousand rosaries later, he was not any closer to G.o.d. She was face to face with her failure.

She wanted to ask Pep to stop the truck and let the boy off right there on the blacktop in the middle of those chalky white lines. The way he was going, he would end up as a chalk outline sooner or later and she feared the yellow tape more than anything but the toe tag. When people in Watts drove past crime or accident scenes, they craned their necks to see if the yellow tape was mapping their tragedy, if the chalk outline matched the dimensions of someone they loved. Keening could still be heard in their part of town; the daughters of Jerusalem had nothing on the daughters of Watts. Camille could not bear the thought of burying her grandson, but the thought of him playing the angel of death was even more disturbing to her. He had not killed anyone yet, but he had come close enough to warrant a thousand rosaries.

Here was a child who only twelve years earlier had held the promise of a stellar future. He was so handsome that one of the Crenshaw cousins, upon spotting him at the annual beach trip, convinced Raymond and Isabel to sign their son with a modeling agency. He quickly became the family celebrity. By the age of nine, he had money in the bank and college plans, an enthusiastic agent, and two store catalogs under his belt. The limit was the sky, or in his case, the airwaves. The Broussards celebrated with gumbo the night their golden boy's first and only television commercial premiered. There was Nicholas, dressed as George Was.h.i.+ngton Carver, inventing peanut b.u.t.ter right before their eyes. It should have been his big break, but eminent historians and loudmouthed politicians suggested using Dr. Carver to sell peanut b.u.t.ter was like using George Was.h.i.+ngton to sell cherries, only worse because the distinguished scientist and inventor never would have uttered the words, "It don't get no betta than my crunchy nut b.u.t.ta." The ad was yanked off the air three short weeks, and like that of so many other budding stars in the city of the angels, the lad's golden age had come to an untimily end.

"Yo, Peanut! What happened to your head?" Some rough-looking young men were standing on the corner in front of the liquor store. Nicholas pounded the gla.s.s, in farewell or anger Camille wasn't sure, then climbed out. A lanky boy on a small copper bicycle circled the crowd. Nicholas reached out his hand and cuffed him on the ear.

Camille rolled down her window and shouted after her grandson, "Don't you dare leave without saying anything. You get back over here and thank Pep for the ride." The young men fell out laughing. Nicholas obeyed.

"Hey, man, thanks for bustin' me out the joint. I hope I can return the favor one day." He a.s.sumed a c.o.c.ky swagger for the benefit of his friends.

Camille yanked him back with one lash of her tongue. "You may have paid your debt to society," she snapped, "but you haven't paid your debt to me."

"Get off my back, Grandma. I ain't done nothin' to you." The crowd bellowed its appreciation.

"You done plenty."

"Well, I ain't goin' to confession. You ain't my judge."

"I'm worse than the judge. You fooled the judge. I would have given you life."

"You can't give me life! You ain't G.o.d."

"I'm worse than G.o.d. G.o.d didn't come to pick you up. G.o.d didn't sit at your trial everyday hoping for some sign of humanity. I don't know what G.o.d has planned for you, but I've got work for you to do. You may have served your time with the California justice system, but you haven't served your time with me."

Howls from the street corner chorus. Eyes wet with tears of laughter.

"d.a.m.n, Grandma. Why you gots to be so hard on me?"

"I'm the easy one. What do you want me to tell your father?"

"Tell him I survived the pokey. Tell him the bird man is back."

For three years, Camille had dreaded this day and now it was upon her. His day of freedom was her day of reckoning. From the moment he was dragged from this same corner in handcuffs, she had racked her mind for an explanation. Boy children don't belong to their mothers, her best friend had tried to comfort her, they belong to the world. But it was under Camille's watch that Nicholas had gone from bad to worse, and she couldn't accept that she was blameless. She had turned her eyes away from him and he had wandered into the desert. It was up to her to bring him home.

Broussards did not go to prison. So as long as Nicholas had been locked up, they had pretended he had gone off to school or war or the priesthood. Now he was out, however & they were forced to deal with an ex-con, which was harder than dealing with a dropout, a veteran, or an ex-priest. Already his two younger brothers were following his lead. They had been suspended from school so often that the office had a stack of pink slips pretyped with the Broussard name. For Broussard men, it seemed prison was the equivalent of pregnancy: how to ruin your life, take years off your youth, and shame your family at the same time. And a prison record was more difficult to disown than an offspring.

n.o.body else would go get him from prison. His parents were still too angry. His big brother had disowned him. He no longer had any girlfriends, or his girlfriends no longer had any cars. His little sister was too pregnant to fit behind a wheel. Even his Auntie Grace, who often felt kins.h.i.+p with outlaws, could not be persuaded to make the journey to San Bernardino. The prison was located not far from where Marc lived, but Uncle Marc couldn't have picked his nephew out of a lineup.

So Camille wasn't surprised when the phone rang and it was Nicholas wanting to know if she would come get him. She might could, she told him, but she wasn't going to let him stay in her house. He had tried to drive her from her house once but he hadn't succeeded, and she wasn't going to let him have another go at it. n.o.body was going to part her from her home. She had been driven from her home in Louisiana by some lowlife white criminals, but she wasn't going to let any lowlife black criminals drive her from her home in Los Angeles, especially not one related to her.

"Ain't you forgive me, Grandma?" he wanted to know.

"No," she said and hung up the phone.

Now, as she watched him stroll away, taking no shame with him, she tried to remind herself that he had once been her joy.

"When I was his age, I wanted to do everything and couldn't do nothin'." Pep turned his head to follow the ambling figure of youth. "Here he is, free to do whatever he wants, and he don't wanna do nothin'." He whipped around and stepped on the gas.

Exhaust from the truck caused the young men to hack and wheeze. They fanned themselves, clutched their necks, pretended they were choking to death. Through the mirror, Camille watched Nicholas disappear into a cloud of smoke and laughter. She pictured his slender youthful fingers plunging a knife into delicate elderly flesh. The crime was his, but she was having the flashbacks.

"I can't just let him run the streets!" Her voice was thick with despair.

"Well, you can't keep him under lock and key," Pep reminded her. "It's up to the government to do that for you." He swung a left onto Hooper.

It was then that they noticed the boy with the small copper bicycle racing alongside the truck.

Pep slammed on the brakes. "Dammit! That kid needs to be in school!"

Camille clutched the dash with one hand and her stomach with the other. The truck started to convulse. The bicycle boy raced on ahead. Pep pumped the gas in a futile attempt to engage the engine. Some children chased each other into the street. Pep blew his horn. They scattered laughing. Eventually, the truck stopped shaking and Pep could not rouse it at all.

She should have driven herself in the Studebaker, but a few weeks before she had gotten into a little sc.r.a.pe. For a hair's length of road, she had lost sight of what she was doing and plowed into the car in front of her. In her forty years of driving, she had never hit a soul. No one was hurt, but a child was crying in the back seat of the stricken car. Camille cried, too. "It's my fault," she kept apologizing, thankfully. By the time Camille drove herself home, it was twilight and difficult to see so the damage to her car one of her headlights was smashed and her right front b.u.mper dented wasn't that noticeable When she got to the house, she parked the car in backyard with all the dead cars her children had left there, and didn't tell them what had happened. When they did notice the damage, she downplayed the incident. Her insurance would surely be raised, that's what they said. But she could hear them whispering amongst themselves. She was no longer the unshakable power.

Age was beginning to take its toll. The ache in her feet was constant. Her eyes strained more to see, her ears strained more to hear. Her blood pressure was high, and so was her blood sugar. She looked at her next door neighbor. Grey had invaded his beard. His hands were veined like cabbage. Neither one of them was capable of picking up a nineteen-year-old and setting him on his feet.

"Where did we go wrong, Lester?"

"Oh, we didn't go wrong, Pretty Miss Camille. All the wells done dried up, that's all. The young people think they got to do bad just to survive. Take your boy . . ."

"He never wanted for anything!"

"You sure? How long his daddy work them s.h.i.+pyards?"

"He hired on just before the Riots . . ."

"Laid off after twenty years! Now, what kind of a upside down thing is that? It's an unforgiving world out there. All the niceties is gone! Where this boy gonna work? They done up and left with all the paychecks. An idle man is a hankering thing."

Pep spoke from experience. When he bought his house from the Broussards in 1959, he was a gardener tending the flowerbeds of Beverly Hills. After the 1965 Riots, his clients discovered they no longer needed him. So he moved his business to Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park, places where black people had enough money and gra.s.s to keep him busy. But Pep was a flower man. He didn't care for lawns and he wasn't very good at them. He couldn't compete with the teams of j.a.panese, then Mexican gardeners. He was used to operating solo. For Camille, this was the problem in a nutsh.e.l.l. What was known to successful gardeners had been known to her for generations. Collective effort brought collective achievement.

"Do you think he's redeemable?" She looked to Pep for encouragement. He had always been a positive fellow, far more optmistic than the Broussards, despite the comparatively poorer hand life had dealt him.

"I don't know, Pretty Miss," he shook his head. "Can't save n.o.body don't wanna be saved-not if he's too big to carry. You can pull a child out of a burning house, but not a grown man. And he's a child of the Riots, ain't that right? Whole city burning down and he come blazing outta his mama! Ain't smart enough to run the other way."