Inside a Silver Box (16 page)

*   *   *

I
T WAS A
small room dominated by a short green metal table surrounded by six chairs that had lime-colored metal frames with dark avocado padding for seats and backrests. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all green, as was the window frame. The pane in the window was painted lime. The institutional chamber reminded Ronnie of jail.

“What the fuck are you doin’ here, Ronnie Bottoms?” Freya said sharply. “And how the hell did you find me in the first place?”

“I know it’s hard to believe, but I wasn’t lookin’ for you, Frey,” Ronnie said. “It’s like I told your man Alfred, I’m here to see Miss Peters.”

“What happened to you?” Freya asked, not caring about or listening to what Ronnie had to say.

Her skin was dark like his, and her face pretty though its visage was petulant. She wore a loose-fitting coral-colored dress under a beige woman’s sports jacket—both of which served to mute the power of her childbearing figure.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Your body look different an’ them clothes,” she said, “an’ I don’t remember you havin’ no green eye.”

“I got this infection when I was up at Rikers. The doctor at the infirmary told me that it wouldn’t kill me or nuthin’, but it could do that to your eyes. And I guess I lost some weight.”

“And you look taller,” she said with some uncertainty.

“Yeah. I grew some too.”

“What you want with Miss Peters?”

She made love like that, changing the subject from one minute to the next, but Ronnie didn’t mind back then or now.

“When I got out, I started thinkin’ ’bout when I was in her class and how nice she was to me. It seems like everything good I remember comes from those two years I spent in the second grade. I feel like everything I know good I learned from her. She taught me about dinosaurs and myths and how the stars told stories.”

Freya was frowning at her one-night lover from three and a half years before. “I ain’t like I was no more,” she said. “I’m a teacher’s assistant, and I plan to get my degree.”

“I cain’t lie, Frey. I was gonna look you up too. But I’m happy you in school. If you don’t wanna get together, I could see that. I mean the last time you seen me, I was just a thug.”

“And now you got a green eye you different?”

Ronnie smiled and shook his head. “No, baby. That’s just a color. I am different, but you don’t have to believe it. No, ma’am. I know what I was and I know there ain’t no talkin’ gonna convince somebody otherwise.”

“You really didn’t come here to see me?” Freya asked.

Ronnie shook his head no.

“’Cause if the people here connect me up with a hoodlum like you, I’m bound to lose this job.”

“I’ll just tell ’em you knew my older sister, Tiffany. That way it’s like a family thing and you know you cain’t help who your family is.”

“If I leave you here, you won’t do nuthin’ to get me in trouble?”

“Are you gonna go get Miss Peters?”

“I’ll ask her if she wants to see you.”

“Then I will sit in that green chair over there and wait. That’s all.”

“And you know Miss Peters for real?”

“Tell her that it’s Ronnie Bottoms from her second-grade class, the one that she kept in from recess and lunch period every day.”

TWENTY-SIX

A
LONE IN THE
green room, Ronnie relaxed. He had spent most of his life in detainment of one type or another; like when he was sent to the bedroom that he shared with his brother, Myron, when he was bad. Later he’d been sentenced to juvenile hall, jail, and even prison. When he went to school, he often had detention either in the vice principal’s office or in a room presided over by the dour Mr. Gorsh.

The calm he was experiencing came from a sense of arrival. He left the rich girl’s condo, defeated Fast Freddie, got around the security guard, and had finally reached the locked room where he was waiting with no food or water or any idea of what Freya was doing.

After a while he went to the opaque lime-colored window and tried to slide it open, but it was bolted and nailed shut.

When he turned back to the table, Used-to-be-Claude was sitting there shirtless and shoeless in a red suit. His legs were crossed comfortably and he smiled for Ronnie.

“I can’t stay here too long,” the husk of the dead wino said.

“Is any’a this real?” Ronnie asked as he took the seat next to the simulacrum.

Still smiling, Used-to-be-Claude said, “Even ideas and wishes have form and weight. It is impossible to have conception without a supplemental series of potential and actual realities. The problem starts when those realities are misperceived.”

“You know I don’t understand what you sayin’, right?”

“You came here to visit your teacher from long ago,” Used-to-be-Claude said. “Why?”

“I been thinkin’ about her.”

“You thought about her and now you are here.”

“But maybe I ain’t here,” Ronnie reasoned. “Maybe you made all this up and then made me think it was true.”

“Even if that were so,” Used-to-be-Claude said patiently, “who’s to say that some even greater power didn’t cause me to fool you?”

“Why you in a hurry?” Ronnie said, already tired of the pointless debate.

“I cannot let the Laz find me here.”

“I thought he couldn’t see you.”

“When I am close to you or Lorraine, I am rendered partially visible to him.”

“What if you were with the both of us together?”

“If we were not within my earthly stronghold, I would shine like a nova star. The Laz is orbiting the globe, dipping down now and then into those souls that it might corrupt. It’s looking for a host to defeat you with.”

“Can you tell us where it’s at?”

“I cannot see.”

“But that’s what made Cosmo so sad about breakin’ that girl’s heart?”

Used-to-be-Claude nodded and clasped his hands. “I do not wish to destroy this world, Ronnie Bottoms. You and Lorraine Fell must find the Laz and bring it to me. You must bind him and blind him and make him helpless. Then I will do what I must.”

Used-to-be-Claude got to his feet and Ronnie stood also.

“You got it, brother” Ronnie said, extending a hand.

Instead of returning the gesture, Used-to-be-Claude hopped backwards almost to the olive wall, making sure to avoid contact.

“What?” Ronnie asked.

At that moment, the door to the green room came open, Used-to-be-Claude evaporated in a silent puff of multicolored mist, and for a moment Ronnie thought he saw the double of the red ring that had infected the lingering disease of Cosmo’s perfidy.

Ronnie turned to the door to see a tallish white woman in a gray dress suit and yellow-rimmed glasses.

“Ronnie?” the woman said.

The hem of her dress was down below the knee and there was one big pocket on her left thigh. And though her hair had more gray to it, her face didn’t look any different. This amazed the young man. It had to be at least seventeen years since he’d last seen her.

“Miss Peters?”

“How are you?” The teacher walked right up and put her arms around him.

Used-to-be-Claude out of mind, Ronnie remembered that Miss Peters would always hug him when they were alone during recess or lunch. She’d do that until he calmed down and then tell him stories or show him how to use art tools.

“Come sit,” she said. “Come.”

She took him by the arm and sat as he did.

She was holding his right hand with both of hers.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“All ovah the place really,” he said, feeling the words flow easily, “in trouble a lot but I think that’s mostly ovah now. I been in and outta jail and my mama died—”

“I’m so sorry to hear that. Your mother was a lovely woman.”

“You knew my mama?”

“She would come by every Thursday afternoon and we’d talk about you.”

“You mean me and Tiffany and Myron.”

“Sometimes we’d talk about your brother and sister, but mostly it was just you.”

“Really?”

Shona Peters had a heart-shaped face and a small mouth but thick lips. Her skin color was cream and her eyes doe brown.

“What happened to your eye?” she asked.

“I got an infection when I was in jail.”

“But you’re out of that now.”

It was then that Ronnie recalled that he had an afternoon appointment with his parole officer that day.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Why did you come here?” Miss Peters asked. “Do you need anything?”

“No. I got money and a place to live and all. I guess because I got time to think now, I was tryin’ to remember what was good in my life. All I could think of was my mama and you. She really used to come here?”

“Every week she would. We talked about how hard it was for you to concentrate on any one thing for very long. She told me what a loving son you were, about how you made her morning tea at least three times a week.”

“I remember that too. I also remember about the myths and the stars and how ants know each other by smell. You said that all bees was girl bees except when the queen needed to mate—”

Shona placed the palm of her right hand against the grown man’s cheek and he began to weep. There was no sound or gasping, just a flow of tears for something both lost and found.

That was how Freya found them when she entered the green room twenty minutes later.

“You told me to tell you when it was eleven,” she said to Miss Peters.

“Do you need me to stay?” Miss Peters asked Ronnie.

“I could sit here wit’ you for a whole mont’,” Ronnie replied, unashamed of his tears.

In his mind he likened the weeping to the living waterfall in the Silver Box’s Central Park fortress. It also brought to mind the times when Mr. Charles Burns would hose down the sidewalk in front of the old 156th Street apartment that Ronnie had lived in with his mother, brother, and sister. It felt good to see the dirt washed up from between the cracks and crevices and flushed into the gutter. Now and then Charles Burns would let Ronnie hold the hose, showing him how to make a spray by covering half its mouth with his tiny thumb. The pressure of the water tickled.

Miss Peters was looking at him, patient with his wandering mind as she had always been.

“But I got to go too,” Ronnie said at last.

“Shall we stand up, then?” Miss Peters suggested.

That was how she got him ready when recess was over. He wanted her all to himself but when she said those words, he knew that he’d have to go back to his desk and wait for the other kids.

“Freya will see you to the exit,” the elementary school teacher said at the green door.

“Miss Peters?”

“Yes, Ronnie?”

“I got a ’partment down on Fifth Avenue with a roommate. You wanna come down sometime and have dinner with us?”

“Let me see your arm,” the teacher said.

Obediently Ronnie stuck out his left hand with the palm up. Shona Peters took out a blue ink pen from the big pocket in her dress and wrote a ten-digit number on his inner forearm.

“That’s how you used to remind me about my home homework,” he said in revelation. “You’d write it on my arm and when Mama asked me if I had studies and I said no, she’d tell me to ask my arm if that was true.”

The teacher kissed his cheek and said, “Freya will take you.”

As she was walking away, Ronnie wanted to yell something but he didn’t think it was right.

*   *   *

“Y
OU REALLY GOT
an apartment on Fifth Avenue?” Freya asked him on the granite front stairs of the school.

“Uh-huh.” He was running his fingers lightly across the phone number on his written-upon arm.

“Are you gonna ask me ovah for some dinner?”

TWENTY-SEVEN

O
NLY MINUTES AFTER
she left Ronnie, Lorraine had made her way to the pedestrian path that ran along the Hudson River and went all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. From there she headed inland and through a large park she’d found.

She wasn’t going very fast, just like a sprinter in a hundred-meter race. For her this pace felt like an easy jog. She speeded up when crossing at red lights or to avoid collisions with slow-moving pedestrians or cars. The run wasn’t so fast or satisfying as it had been on the yellow dirt path but it was enough to take the edge off the tension she had been feeling in her thighs.

She came to a halt at a lonely bus stop where a young bespectacled white man was sitting reading a hardback book. An older black woman was seated on the other end of the bench.

Lorraine stood over the young man and looked down on him. He was thin and his shaggy brown hair had grown over his ears. He didn’t notice the runner.

“Hi,” she said.

He looked up, squinting from the bright sun behind her. “Hi.”

“Can I sit with you?”

“Sure. It’s a public bench.”

She sat close enough that her left thigh was pressing up against his right. He made the motion of moving over, but he was already at the edge of the bench.

“What you reading?”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

“Critics called it magic realism, but García Márquez says that every word is true,” she said. “I like it when God calls down for the beautiful young maiden to float up to heaven.”

“You read it?”

“Could you help me?” she replied.

“Wha-what?”

“I need a boy to kiss me a little bit.”

“Huh?”

“We could go over in that alley over there. That way if the bus comes, you could still make it.”

The older black woman was staring as the newly met young couple walked into the deserted brick and concrete alley.

There was a black door a third of the way down the lane. It was set in a foot or so and Lorraine pushed him against it.

When she kissed him, it was with her entire body: shoulders and breasts, pelvis and thighs—not to mention her lips and tongue.

The young man—she found out later that his name was Alton—had never felt passion like this from a woman. His girlfriend of three years, Christine, didn’t like kissing. She had read somewhere that there were always crumbs of food in peoples’ mouths, and after that, kissing always felt dirty.