Paradise (7 page)

“We don’t care about why,” said Jeff. “What I want to know is what you going to do about it?” He shot his forefinger into the chair arm on the word “do.”

Deek leaned back and spread his thighs wider, as though to welcome territory that naturally belonged to him. “What you have in mind?” he asked.

“First off, apologize,” said Fleet.

“I just did,” said K.D.

“Not to me. To her. To her!”

“Yes, sir,” said K.D. “I will.”

“All right,” Deek said. “That’s first. What’s second?”

Jeff answered. “You better never lay your hand on her again.”

“I won’t lay a thing on her, sir.”

“Is there a third?” asked Deek.

“We need to know he means it,” said Fleet. “Some sign it’s meant.”

“Sign?” Deek managed to look puzzled.

“My sister’s reputation is messed up, ain’t it?”

“Uh huh. I can see that.”

“Nothing can fix that, can it?” Jeff’s question combined defiance and inquiry.

Deek leaned forward. “Well, I don’t know. Hear she’s going to college. That’ll put all this behind her. Maybe we can help out some.”

Jeff grunted. “I don’t know about that.” He looked at his father. “What do you think, Papa? Would that…?”

“Have to ask her mother. She’s hit by this too, you know. Hit worse’n I am, maybe.”

“Well,” said Deek, “whyn’t you talk it over with her, then? If she’s agreeable, stop by the bank. Tomorrow.”

Fleet scratched his jaw. “Can’t make any promises. Mable is a mighty proud woman. Mighty proud.”

Deek nodded. “Got a reason to be, daughter going to college and all. We don’t want anything to stand in the way of that. Credit to the town.”

“When that school start up, Fleet?” Steward cocked his head.

“August, I believe.”

“She be ready then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Steward answered. “August’s a long way off. This here is May. She might change her mind. Decide to stay on.”

“I’m her father. I’ll arrange her mind.”

“Right,” said Steward.

“Settled then?” Deek asked.

“Like I say. Have to talk to her mother.”

“Of course.”

“She’s the key. My wife’s the key.”

Deek smiled outright for the first time that evening. “Women always the key, God bless ’em.”

Reverend Misner sighed as though breathable air were available again. “God’s love is in this house,” he said. “I feel it every time I come here. Every time.” He looked toward the ceiling while Jefferson Fleetwood stared at him with stricken eyes. “We treasure His strength but we mustn’t ignore His love. That’s what keeps us strong. Gentlemen. Brothers. Let us pray.”

They bowed their heads and listened obediently to Misner’s beautifully put words and the tippy-tap steps of women who were nowhere in sight.

The next morning Reverend Misner was surprised by how well he had slept. The meeting with the Morgans and Fleetwoods the previous night had made him uneasy. There was a grizzly bear in Fleetwood’s living room—quiet, invisible, but making deft movement impossible. Upstairs he’d made the women laugh—well, Mable anyway. Sweetie smiled but clearly didn’t enjoy his banter. Her eye was ever on her children. A slide. A lean. A suck of air—she bent over a crib and made quick, practiced adjustments. But her expression was mildly patronizing as if to say what could there be to amuse her and why would he try? She acquiesced when he asked her to join him in prayer. Bowed her head, closed her eyes, but when she faced him with a quiet “Amen,” he felt as though his relationship with the God he spoke to was vague or too new, while hers was superior, ancient and completely sealed.

He had better luck with Mable Fleetwood, who was delighted enough with his visit to prolong their conversation unnecessarily. Downstairs the men he had assembled, after learning what had happened at the Oven, waited—as did the grizzly.

Misner fought his pillow for a moment and convinced himself that the ending was satisfactory. Tempers banked, a resolution surfaced, peace declared. At least he hoped so. The Morgans always seemed to be having a second conversation—an unheard dialogue right next to the one they spoke aloud. They performed as one man, but something in Deek’s manner made Misner wonder if he wasn’t covering for his brother—propping him the way you would a slow-learning child. Arnold’s air of affront was coy: a formula everyone expected but knew had no weight. Jefferson’s skin was thin as gauze. But it was K.D. who irritated Misner most. Too quick to please. An oily apology. A devious smile. Misner despised males who hit women—and a fifteen-year-old? What did K.D. think he was doing? His relation to Deek and Steward protected him, of course, but it was hard to like a man who relied on that. Servile to his uncles; brutal with females. Then, later that evening, as Misner warmed up the fried steak and potatoes Anna Flood had brought him for his supper, he had looked out of his window and seen K.D. speeding down Central in Steward’s Impala. Smiling—he’d bet on it—his devious smile.

Such nagging thoughts he believed would keep him awake most of the night, but in the morning he woke as if from the sweetest of sleeps. Anna’s food, he supposed. Still, he wondered, what had K.D. been zooming to on the road out of town?

A man and a woman fucking forever. When the light changes every four hours they do something new. At the desert’s edge they fuck to the sky tide of Arizona. Nothing can stop them. Nothing wants to. Moonlight arches his back; sunlight warms her tongue. There is no way to miss or mistake them if you know where they are: right outside Tucson on I-3, in a town called Wish. Pass through it; take the first left. Where the road ends and the serious desert begins, keep going. The tarantulas are poisonous but it is necessary to go on foot because no tires can manage the terrain. One hour, tops, you’ll see loving to beat the sky. Sometimes tender. Other times rough. But they never stop. Not for dust storms or heat hovering at 108 degrees. And if you are patient and catch them in one of the desert’s random rainfalls you will see the color of their bodies deepen. But they keep on doing it in the rare pure rain—the black couple of Wish, Arizona.

Over and over Mikey told Gigi how they looked and how to find them outside his hometown. They would have been, could have been, a tourist attraction, he said, except they embarrassed local people. A committee of concerned Methodists, organized to blow them up or disguise them with cement, got started, but it died after a few preliminary investigations. The committee members said their objections were not antisex at all but antiperversion, since it was believed by some, who had looked very carefully, that the couple was two women making love in the dirt. Others, after an equally careful examination (close up and with binoculars), said no, they were two males—bold as Gomorrah.

Mikey, however, had touched the body parts and knew for a fact one was a woman, the other a man. “So what?” he said. “They weren’t doing it on a highway, after all. You had to go way out of the way to find them.” Mikey said the Methodists wanted to get rid of them but they wanted them to be there too. That even a bunch of repressed rednecks, too scared to have wet dreams, knew they needed the couple. Even if they never went near them, he said, they needed to know they were out there. At sunrise, he said, they turned copper and you knew they’d been at it all night. At noon they were silvery gray. Then afternoon blue, then evening black. Moving, moving, all the time moving.

Gigi loved to hear him say that part: “Moving, moving, all the time moving.”

When they got split up, Mikey got ninety days. Gigi was released from the emergency room with an Ace bandage on her wrist. Everything happened so fast they had no time to plan where to meet. The court-appointed lawyer came out saying no bail, no probation. His client had to do the whole three months. After calculating the sentence, minus the three weeks spent in jail, Gigi sent Mikey a message through the CA lawyer. The message was “Wish April fifteenth.”

“What?” asked the lawyer.

“Just say it. ‘Wish April fifteenth.’”

What did Mikey say to her message?

“‘Right on,’” he said. “‘Right on.’”

There was no Mikey, there was no Wish, there was no I-3 and nobody was fucking in the desert. Everybody she spoke to in Tucson thought she was crazy.

“Maybe the town I’m looking for is too small for a map,” she offered.

“Then ask the troopers. No town so small they don’t know it.”

“The rock formation is off the road. Looks like a couple making love.”

“Well, I seen some lizards do it in the desert, miss.”

“Cactus, mebbe?”

“Now there’s a possibility.”

They laughed themselves weak.

After running her finger down columns in the telephone directory and finding no one in the area with Mikey’s last name, Rood, Gigi gave him up. Reluctantly. The eternal desert coupling, however, she held on to for dear and precious life. Underneath gripping dreams of social justice, of an honest people’s guard—more powerful than her memory of the boy spitting blood into his hands—the desert lovers broke her heart. Mikey did not invent them. He may have put them in the wrong place, but he had only summoned to the surface what she had known all her life existed…somewhere. Maybe Mexico, which is where she headed.

The dope was heavy, the men always ready, but ten days later she woke up crying. She called Alcorn, Mississippi, collect.

“Bring your butt home, girl. World change enough to suit you? Everybody dead anyway. King, another one of them Kennedys, Medgar Evers, a nigger name of X, Lord I can’t think who all since you left not to speak of right here remember L.J. used to work down at the route two mall somebody walked in there broad daylight with a pistol shaped like nothing nobody ever seen before…”

Gigi let her head fall back on the plaster wall near the telephone. Outside the bodega a clerk swung a broom at some children. Girls. Without underwear.

“I’m coming, Granddaddy. I’m heading home right now.”

Most of the time she had both seats to herself. Space to spread out. Sleep. Read back issues of
Ramparts
rolled in her knapsack. When she boarded the Santa Fe, the train pulled out crowded with air force men in blue. Soon 4-H’ers crowded the cars. But when she transferred to the MKT, the cars were never full again.

The man with the earring didn’t come looking for her. She sought him out. Just to talk to somebody who wasn’t encased in polyester and who looked like he might smoke something other than Chesterfields.

He was short, almost a dwarf, but his clothes were East Coast hip. His Afro was neat, not ragged, and he wore seeds of gold around his neck, one matching stud in his ear.

They stood next to each other at the snack bar, which the attendant insisted on calling the dining car. She ordered a Coke without ice and a brownie. He was paying for a large cup of ice only.

“That ought to be free,” Gigi said to the man behind the counter. “He shouldn’t have to pay for the cup.”

“Excuse me, m’am. I just follow rules.”

“I ordered no ice. Did you deduct anything?”

“Course not.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” the short man said.

“I ain’t troubled,” Gigi told him, and then, to the counterman: “Listen, you. Give him the ice you weren’t going to charge me for, okay?”

“Miss, do I have to call the conductor?”

“If you don’t, I will. This is train robbery, all right—trains robbing people.”

“It’s all right,” said the man. “Just a nickel.”

“It’s the principle,” said Gigi.

“A five-cent principle ain’t no principle at all. The man needs a nickel. Needs it real bad.” The short man smiled.

“I don’t need nothing,” said the attendant. “It’s the rules.”

“Have two,” said the man, and flicked a second nickel into the saucer.

Gigi glaring, the earring man smiling, they left the snack bar together. She sat down across the aisle from him to expand on the incident, while the man crunched ice.

“Gigi.” She held out her hand. “You?”

“Dice,” he said.

“Like chopping small?”

“Like pair of.”

He touched her with a cool, cool hand and they made up stories for each other for miles. Gigi even got comfortable enough to ask him had he ever seen or heard tell of a rock formation that looked like a man and a woman making out. He laughed and said no, but that he once heard about a place where there was a lake in the middle of a wheat field. And that near this lake two trees grew in each other’s arms. And if you squeezed in between them in just the right way, well, you would feel an ecstasy no human could invent or duplicate. “They say after that can’t nobody turn you down.”

“Nobody turns me down now.”

“Nobody? I mean no-o-body!”

“Where is this place?”

“Ruby. Ruby, Oklahoma. Way out in the middle of nowhere.”

“You been there?”

“Not yet. But I plan to check it out. Say they got the best rhubarb pie in the nation.”

“I hate rhubarb.”

“Hate it? Girl, you ain’t lived. You ain’t lived at all.”

“I’m going home. See my folks.”

“Where’s home for you?”

“Frisco. All my folks live in Frisco. I just talked to my grandfather. They’re waiting on me.”