Southland (15 page)
“How much you going to charge?” Frank asked.
“How much you get for your land?”
“Not much. About four thousand dollars. But we only have about fifteen hundred left.”
“Well, the store is fifteen hundred dollars, then.”
“It’s worth a lot more than that, Mr. Larabie.”
“I want you to own it, son. Can’t put no price on that.”
And so although the Sakais had lost so much, something, too, was given. Frank took the store and made it his own. It had always been, by accident, a gathering place, a place where women bumped into each other in front of the vegetables and traded recipes for chicken; a place where tired men bought beers at the end of the day and drank them outside in the sunset. And Frank encouraged this gathering, enabled it. He set up milk crates on the sidewalk so the men could sit as they drank, and huddle the crates together, plastic scraping on concrete, or line them up and watch the people go by. He put a little table up front, near the counter, where he placed flyers for bake sales and church socials and the benefit for the high school. Where he placed, also, three folding chairs, so the women tired from working in other people’s houses could rest their swollen feet. He rewarded children who made good grades with single sticks of licorice and baseball cards (the Jackie Robinson cards he saved for those who got straight As), and gave them pocket money sometimes if they’d help him bring in the latest load of vegetables, tiny hands dragging the boxes. He even got a downtown distributor to start delivering tofu and fish,
miso
and
nori
, so that the Japanese in the neighborhood wouldn’t have to go all the way to Little Tokyo (the chitterlings and black-eyed peas had been delivered since Larabie’s time), even using his car sometimes to make Sunday deliveries to the farmers in Gardena. It was Frank’s place. But it was Larabie’s, too. Through the flowering of the business, the decline and death of Old Man Larabie, Frank never forgot that his store had a reason; that his good fortune had been someone else’s gift. And because of the store, the children, the company of people—even without surgery or minor amputation—his gangrened heart was beginning to heal, the grayed flesh to beat again with color and life.
A
LTHOUGH IN the end the police weren’t involved, Alma still felt no relief. It was the principal who called, informing her that Curtis had been implicated in the mess at the junior high school. A kind man who’d supported her own teaching application at Carver five years earlier, he sounded apologetic about the news: someone had broken in through a classroom window at Audubon, and had gone around spray-painting graffiti on the lockers and doors. It wasn’t gang-related; it was more childish fare: “Mr. Adams is a stupid fuckhead” and “Mr. Doolan likes to touch girls booties.” But the school had called the police in, and between the school officials and two officers from Southwest, they had questioned a hundred students. Finally, someone said they’d heard a couple of boys bragging, and three eighth-graders—Tyrone Cooper, Jason Buford, and Curtis Martindale—were fingered for the crime. It was clear right off that Curtis wasn’t one of the main perpetrators. He’d just tagged along, both the other boys said; he hadn’t broken any glass and had only used the spray can once. But that was far too much for Alma. As she and Curtis drove out of the school parking lot the day they met with the principal, she saw the two cops watching from their squad car. Although they’d been called in to help with the questioning, they were not asked to make the arrests, because the school had declined to press any charges and had opted to punish the boys itself. Now, the cops stared at Curtis from the window of their car, angry at being denied the quarry they’d been summoned to flush. And Alma was nervous—because of her son’s flirtation with the law, but also because of the start of the larger romance it might imply.
Curtis was sullen on the car ride home. When Alma had first walked into the principal’s office, where Curtis had been left alone to contemplate his crime, she’d whacked him on the head and yelled at him for being a fool. Now, she breathed and fumed and sucked down her words, afraid of what might come out of her mouth. Finally, though, she burst.
“What the hell did you think you were doing, Curtis? Breaking into school like that?” Her voice was touched lightly with a west Texas accent, the most obvious souvenir from her birthplace.
Curtis crossed his lanky arms, which were so angular and skinny, and with such sharp elbows, she was surprised he didn’t hurt himself. “I didn’t mean to, Mama. I didn’t know that’s what Ty and Jason was gonna do.”
“Oh, you didn’t
mean
to, huh? When they busted the window and went inside, you didn’t mean to follow? When they stuck the spray can in your hands, you didn’t mean to paint that mess on the walls?”
“I didn’t know what to do.”
“Well, you got two strong legs. You should have walked.”
“I’m
sorry
.”
“Yeah, you sorry. You sorry now, just wait till I get you home.”
She was afraid for him. Afraid of the effects of his age, his friends, the neighborhood. She
taught
kids his age over at Carver Middle School, and they reminded her of the litters of pups her family had raised near Lubbock. If you didn’t make them work, let them run, provide them with structure, they grew restless and bored and destructive. Most of the trouble her kids got into was of the minor variety—fist fights and truancy and shoplifting—but a few of them fell harder. Several of her former students were in prison now, a couple of them were dead. She’d seen wide-eyed kids worn down into nothing. And she’d seen other kids turn, like milk, into something sour and spoiled, the change sudden, final, complete. The change happened so much faster in the city than it ever had out on the plains. Crenshaw hadn’t even
been
city when she first arrived, years before, and lived in a house next to a sprawling field of barley. But it was city now, or getting there, crowded and teeming with tension. Already two of Curtis’s classmates had been arrested for robbery, and his break-in buddy, Jason, had spent six months at a boys’ detention camp for assaulting another boy.
She wondered, just briefly, if she’d done the wrong thing by becoming a teacher. She was gone in the afternoons and worked on lesson plans most evenings—had she not paid enough attention to her two young boys; had they been changing in ways she hadn’t noticed? But no, she thought—in the end, it was good that she was teaching. Alma was from a long line of women who had refused to accept the status to which their color and gender threatened to confine them. Her great-grandmother, Alice, was born into slavery, but after Emancipation, she had taught herself to read and opened the first school for colored children in east Georgia. Her grandmother, Eve, had whipped barehanded the whiteman she and her husband sharecropped for, who’d tried to shortchange them on their yearly payment of grains and chickens, and whose shame and fury they avoided by fleeing to Texas. And her mother, Alene, had been a member of the Negro Victory Committee during the war, which pressured the defense plants to hire black men, and which responded, when the U.S. Employment Service said black women weren’t interested in defense jobs, by getting black mothers and daughters and sisters and aunts to flood the agency with applications. No, her mother’s side of the family was never in question—not like her father’s side—and she had to live up to it in her own small way; she had to keep helping children. Increasingly, the parents of Curtis’s friends were unemployed, or barely making it, or vanishing altogether, and he needed to see adults with steady jobs. Both of his parents worked. Both had respectable jobs. He had two good examples. He was lucky.
But that didn’t solve the immediate problem of what to do about him now. The school had suspended all the boys for two weeks, which created another dilemma—how to keep track of Curtis during the day. She sighed deeply, and at the next stoplight, glanced at her oldest son. He was still staring out the window, looking grim. He’d always been a thoughtful child, curious and yearning. At five, he’d quietly bombarded her with so many questions—about everything from the making of ice cream to the shape of her eyebrows to why the seasons changed in Montana—that it nearly drove her crazy. He’d always been more reserved, though, than his younger brother, who now, at five, rushed head-long and happy into every new experience. While Cory jumped up on her lap to hug and kiss her for no reason at all, not caring if other people saw, Curtis would surreptitiously take her hand or gently lean against her, and move away if anyone—including her—remarked on it. Or at least he used to. In the last couple of years, something had changed. He’d turned away from her, out toward his friends, and toward whatever appealed to them on the street. As of recently, he even looked different. He’d shot up six inches—overnight, it seemed—like one of her sunflowers when she didn’t check it for a month. His body seemed stretched, all long limbs and liquid joints. And he sounded like someone else, some lower man’s voice burrowing through the boy’s voice she’d grown so accustomed to. She was afraid she was losing him, and she wasn’t going to let him go. Not after what had happened to so many other boys she knew. Not after the way she’d lost her brother, Reese.
When they pulled into the driveway, she saw Bruce’s Dodge and swore under her breath. She’d phoned her husband at work to tell him what had happened, but had specifically asked him not to come home early. Pushing Curtis in front of her, she walked through the front door, and they didn’t even make it to the living room before Bruce appeared, loud and tornado-like, and knocked Curtis against the wall.
“Boy, you better give me some good kind of reason why I shouldn’t beat your ass. Why you got to act so ignorant?” He was breathing hard, raising his hands and dropping them again. A big, hulking man with a slight afro and a mustache, he was still dressed in his gray work uniform, streaked with dirt and grease.
Curtis just touched the place where his shoulder had met the wall and moved past his father into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, pulling out a carton of milk. Bruce followed him, yanked him around, and knocked the carton out of his hand. “Don’t you walk away from me when I’m talking to you.” Milk splattered and bubbled all over the counter and floor, the carton landing in the corner by the trash can.
Alma came into the kitchen. “Bruce,” she said. She shot him a look. He raised both hands and stepped back against the sink, conceding, crossing his arms while Alma cleaned up the milk.
After she’d thrown the sponge into the sink, she tapped the table with her index finger, indicating that Curtis should sit. He did. She circled around him, wanting both to hit him again, and to hold him and not let go until he was twenty-five, thirty, grownup and away from the dealers and hoodlums, and relatively safe. “You’re damned lucky you only got suspended,” she said. Curtis nodded. “And I don’t need to tell you that this is a terrible way to end junior high school. You’re done in one month, Curtis. And you’re going to high school in September. And what the teachers at Dorsey are going to think from your record is that you’re a discipline case and a vandal.”
“That’s right,” Bruce concurred, pointing at him. “And you disrespected your
mother
, painting up that school. Don’t matter that she teaches at another school. Those teachers are people she
knows
.”
Curtis flinched but didn’t look up, treating his father as if he were simply an intrusive noise. Then he turned to his mother. “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting up. “I know I messed up, all right? But that’s not the only thing people at Dorsey gonna think about me. You know my grades are good.”
Alma stopped on the other side of the table. “Well, we’ll see how good they are
this
semester, since you can’t make up the work you’re going to miss.”
Curtis rested his chin on his hand, looking miserable. “Well, I’ll do extra credit, then. And I’ll study real hard for my finals. I can do all that in the next two weeks, when I’m not going to school.”
“That’s right,” Alma answered, sitting down. “And that’s not all you gonna do.”
And so she told him her punishment, which she’d concocted in the car on the way home. His little cousin, Jimmy, needed someone to look after him. Jimmy’s mother, Bruce’s sister Estelle, was working two jobs and didn’t get home until late at night. And at Grandpa Martindale’s house a few days before, Estelle had told her that the woman who usually took Jimmy in the afternoons was going to see her family in Georgia for a month. Jimmy’s sister would be fine—she went to another woman now, who only took care of babies. But Estelle still hadn’t found anyone to look after her son. He got out of kindergarten every day at 12:15, and now that Curtis was suddenly free, Alma figured, he could pick him up at school and keep an eye on him until she and Bruce got home from work. And since Cory was in the same class, he could take care of his little brother, too.
Curtis squinted in distaste. “Aw, Mama. They five years old. I don’t wanna be no babysitter.”
She stuck an index finger in his face. “You gonna be whatever I
tell
you to be.”
“But all my boys gonna laugh at me and stuff.”
“They would have laughed even harder if you’d ended up in jail.”
He argued and whined and pleaded his case, but Alma remained unmoved. It was impossible to change her mind once she’d set it to something, and Curtis knew he was flailing uselessly. The news kept getting worse—he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the house or see his friends the whole two weeks he was suspended. And that was all for now. He could go to his room.
With a final “Aw, man,” Curtis pulled himself up from the table and left the kitchen. Alma sat. Bruce, who’d been growing increasingly tense throughout Alma’s sentencing, now circled her as she had circled Curtis.
“That’s a messed-up punishment,” he said.
“Why?”
He ignored her, sidestepping into another topic. “It’s ’cos you’re never here, you know. With your teaching and your meetings and all the rest of that shit. Curtis don’t get enough guidance.”
If she’d been in a lighter mood, she might have smiled, for Bruce had never complained about her hours when she was working as a maid or at the paper factory. And she said nothing now about his nights out bowling or playing cards—she herself had no recreation anymore, never did things for fun, although she used to bowl, and go for walks, and take in movies with her friends. “I’m here more than you are,” she responded. “It’s not anybody’s fault the boy’s got nothing to do.”
“We got to be harder, Alma. We got to take things away from him. Maybe don’t let him run track in high school if he screws up again.”
“He
needs
to run track. If we don’t let him do that, we take away the only outlet he has.”
“Fine. If you want your son to turn into a punk, then don’t punish him. Just let him be.” Bruce leaned back against the counter again and stared at her.
“I am punishing him,” she said. “Or maybe you didn’t hear what I’ve been saying for the last twenty minutes.”
“What I heard is that you helping Estelle out, which you’re probably doing just to aggravate me anyway. You making him
babysit
. Why? You trying to make a woman out of him?”
“No, I’m trying to make a man.”
It wasn’t her intention, but it
was
a nice perk, that Bruce was so annoyed about Jimmy. She’d never understood why Bruce and Estelle got on so badly, and once she saw them together at Grandpa Martindale’s house, she knew it was Bruce’s doing. That day in the back yard, Estelle kept offering him food, smiling at him, asking about his job, and Bruce had been sullen, uninterested. Alma knew he saw his sister as just another single woman with a couple of babies, which offended him in ways she never understood. But what Alma saw was a hard-working mother who was trying to do well by her children—a mother not unlike the ones who dropped her students off at school every day. Bruce had two other sisters he ignored, Nellie and Florence, who had both moved to Riverside with their families. She had never understood this, either. And when she saw the cousins together at their grandfather’s house, her displeasure with her husband only deepened. Little James, the quiet, handsome boy whose eyes took up his entire face, was lonely and still, with a hurt so big it was visible. He and Cory were wonderful together, tearing around their grandfather’s yard, wrestling and laughing and chasing each other. But Jimmy’s eyes grew wide when he first saw Curtis. His whole face opened, and bloomed, unself-conscious as a flower. From that moment on, he was attached to Curtis’s elbow as if by a string, and he started imitating his cousin’s gestures—the slap of fist against palm when he was making a point, the sweep of hand over head when he was thinking.