Tempest Rising (23 page)

“Mommie, Mommie, help me,” she’d screamed. She was coughing and choking and hollering out for Mae.

“Your momma ain’t nothing but Bernie’s nigger girl,” Donald Booker sang, “Bernie’s girl, Bernie’s girl, your momma ain’t nothing but Bernie’s nigger girl from early in the morning.”

“Help me, Mommie,” Ramona cried. “Mommie! Mommie! Mommie!”

“You no-good bastard,” she heard her mother yell frantically from far away. “You leave her alone right now, right now, or I swear I’ll fuck you up.” Mae’s voice got closer as she yelled, and then she was right there almost talking in Ramona’s ear.

“Mommie, Mommie,” she sobbed, as she felt Mae grab the chain link of the swing arm and hold it still so Ramona could get down. “He was scaring me, Mommie, and making me go too high in the
swing.” She fell into Mae’s arms and rested her head against her chest, which smelled like fresh-cut grass.

“He’s not gonna bother you anymore, lil darling, Mommie’s here,” Mae said as she held Ramona to her and mashed her chin into the top of her head.

Ramona had forgotten that Mae used to do that, hold her tight like that. She took her hand from the pocket of the soft lime green robe and rubbed it through her hair. She could almost feel Mae’s chin there the way it must have felt all those years ago, moving up and down against Ramona’s head as she told Donald Booker about his bad-assed self.

“Go on, you juvenile delinquent boy, and get home where you belong before I do to you what your momma should ’ave been doing,” she said, still holding Ramona tightly. “Big as you are and you ain’t got nothing better to do than to pick with babies.”

Donald Booker poked his thin lips at Mae. He was as tall as Mae, and Ramona was almost afraid for her mother as he stared in Mae’s face like he was grown too. “Awl, shut up, Bernie’s nigger girl,” he huffed.

“Wh-what did you say to me, you heathenistic son of a bitch?” Mae unwound her arms from Ramona, stooped down lower to whisper in Ramona’s ear, stretched and reached for the baseball bat as she did. “You go start on up the slope, lil darling. I’ll be right there.”

Ramona clung tighter to Mae; she didn’t want to
leave her. Donald Booker’s chest was swelled up like he was ready to do something to Mae, spit in her face or lift his foot to kick at her. But Mae gave Ramona a hard and soft shove. “Go on, lil darling,” she said, “just stand under that wide tree with the big arms; the arms will protect you till I get up there.”

Ramona started up the slope, reluctantly. She could hear Mae telling Donald Booker that he needed a lesson taught to him. By the time she got to the top of the hill and was standing under the tree she couldn’t hear anything they were saying, as if the woods around the bottom of the park were gobbling up their sounds. She could see Donald Booker’s mouth moving, his face getting redder and closer and closer to her mother’s face, his shoulders going back and forth like he was putting up his dukes. Then his hand stretched way back and came forward right toward Mae’s face. Ramona started running back down the slope, hollering, “You better not hit my mother, you better leave my mother alone.” She saw his hand stopped in midair by the bat, sent flying way over his shoulder. Then she saw his head go back too, just like his hand had. She was close enough to hear the crack of the bat against his head, and now she could hear Mae too. “Threaten me, will you, or any part of me, I’ll teach your no-good ass a lesson you’ll never forget. Get up, you grown, you gonna jump at me, get on up, and finish what you started.”

But Donald Booker didn’t get up. Even when Mae leaned down over him, and shook him, and
slapped at his face, he didn’t get up. With Mae stooping over him as she was, all Ramona could see were his dirty canvas sneakers. Then Mae stood, and Ramona could see his head, how odd his head looked. Not just that it was swollen, but the way it was arched, as if he were getting ready to do a backward flip, as if his head and neck didn’t belong to the same body.

Ramona pulled her hands from the pocket of the soft green robe. She knitted and unknitted her fingers in quick movements that made her knuckles click, much the same way Mae clicked her knuckles that afternoon. Her drooping eye was just about shut tight, and her voice shook as she spoke. “Ramona,” she said, “this don’t look good, not good at all.” She picked up the handle of the bat and wiped it in the pleats of her belted sundress and let it fall down the hem of her dress into the grass. “Him being a white boy and all, Lord, no. This is serious, very, very serious.”

She reached for Ramona’s hand. “You and me gonna walk out of the park, and this never happened, you hear me.” Her voice shook less the more she talked.

“Huh?” Ramona asked.

“Don’t talk, just listen,” she said as she looked all around them. “We wasn’t at the park today. We took the long way home from your school because I had the taste for some fish from the fish store on Market Street. But we didn’t go into the fish store because once we got there I didn’t like the smell of
the fish sitting on ice in the barrel outside, so we came on home. Now that’s all we did this afternoon. The rest never happened.”

“What never happened, Mommie?”

“Ramona, are you messing with me or what? Now, this is important. I’m trying to get you to understand that this afternoon never happened. We wasn’t at the park today, Ramona. You don’t see Donald Booker back there laying in the grass.”

Ramona was trying to understand what Mae was saying. She turned around to look back at Donald Booker. She gasped. “He’s not laying in the grass, Mommie. Look, he’s getting up. Now he’s walking like a drunk man further in the woods. He has his bat too, Mommie. Look.”

“I’m not looking back there. And don’t you either.” She yanked Ramona’s hand. “Might turn into a pillar of salt looking back there. Ain’t no way that boy got up.”

“Yes, he did, he got up, Mommie, honest he did. Just look and see for yourself.” Ramona felt Mae’s hand clap hard against her mouth in a way that Mae had never slapped her before. It was such a forceful slap that it seemed as if night fell all at once and she could no longer see the green or smell the bread, and now she was cold too.

“Shut up! We weren’t here. We went for fish. We took the long way home. We’ll never speak about this again as long as we live. And there ain’t no way that boy got up. Just ain’t no way. Now say it. Say what we did today.”

“We went for fish.” Ramona pushed the words through her mouth, which was already beginning to swell. “You changed your mind. We took the long way home.” She sobbed the rest of it out. She was dizzy and confused as she felt her lips puff up. She waited for Mae to tell her not to cry, to call her lil darling. But Mae never did, not the whole walk home. It was a long, silent walk as Ramona kept licking her lips, nursing them, trying to get rid of the puffy, burning feeling, grabbing for her mother’s hands. Mae would hold her hand for a second or two and then drop it, suddenly, as if she’d just remembered something she’d forgotten.

And when they got home that evening and Ramona said that she was hungry, Mae told her to make herself a sandwich for dinner, and later, to take her bath on her own, to roll up her own bangs, to lay out her own clothes for the next day of school, to learn to say her prayers by herself. And Ramona, obedient child that she was, did everything Mae told her to, including the most important thing: She forgot.

N
ess, Blue, and Show made a circle around Til as she talked on the phone with the buggy-eyed clerk giving her news about the girls. “Addison Street, hunh? Mae? Ramona? No, I’m not writing it down; Bic can’t invent a ballpoint pen that could scrawl out what you just told me and make it more indelible on paper than it is on my heart right now.” She hung up the phone. “We going to West Philly,” she said. “Addison Street. We gonna talk to some one named Mae or her legal substitute, her daughter, Ramona. Gonna find out what caused Shern to have to call here and moan into the phone line. Gonna call that scary-assed lawyer too. Put him on alert. Tell him that if I don’t like what I see, he might have to come and bail me out of jail later on today.”

“I’ll call a yellow cab, Sister,” Ness said, stroking Til’s arms to try to keep her calm.

“I’ll line the boots up in the vestibule,” said Show. “We surely won’t have a merry time walking down those steps.”

“Maybe one of the neighborhood kids will come by to shovel,” said Blue. “I’ll go down in the basement and bring up the shovel, leave it out front since we don’t have time to heave ho at snow right now.”

“Any excuse to get down in that basement to your stash of sherry, huh, Blue?” Til smirked.

“Actually we do have time,” Ness called as she waved the phone. “Hour and a half delay on getting a cab delivered to our door due to the storm.”

“Go get the shovel, Blue.” Til sighed. “I’ll do it. My muscles jumping all over the place at the thought of getting ready to see those girls, I got to move around right now. You go have yourself your nip; have one for me too. Just be standing straight and tall in an hour and a half so we can get right in the cab when it comes.”

A
ddison blinked hard to shut out the gray sky barrelling in through the living-room window and almost blinding him. He hated morning. Had grown up spending most mornings trying to stay asleep. But this morning he was up thanks to the commotion in Mae’s bedroom over those girls being gone. Little Miss Goody Two-shoes done run away, and now I don’t have any amusement when I’m bored, he said to himself as he pulled the string to draw the shade down some at the living-room window. Can’t wink at her no more and watch her cower, or try to touch her half-girl, half-woman parts and get off on her hysteria.

He went to the closet to get his jacket, figured he’d rather slip and slide down the snow-covered block than be here to listen to the rumbling now coming from overhead in Mae’s bedroom. He
wanted to spit when he thought about it. Bad enough he’d had to listen to the joker hollering half the night, he hadn’t even had the decency to leave before the sun got up so Addison wouldn’t have had to catch him trying to cover his ass. He was mad at his aunt too, a rare thing, just for letting him see her like that. She was his mother’s sister all right, he thought, shaking his head, trying not to remember the times he’d seen his mother scrambling to cover her own bareness.

He stuffed his arms into his fleece-lined bomber jacket, decided he’d walk the streets and see what he could get into, maybe hang in front of Smitty’s and wait for him to open, play a little pinball. He was at the door, and right before he opened it he saw the police out front. He immediately knew they were police because they were in a ’65 Impala. The detectives in Buffalo drove the same car. Plus they had that unmistakable cops’ head, more forehead than dome. Usually that type car, those shaped heads would send him into a panic, have him running through the house for a back door, or a side window that dropped into an alley, even a crawl space where he could squeeze his tall, thin frame and elude them. But he’d been on relatively good behavior here, only shoplifted twice, a silver-toned cigarette lighter and a pack of Top paper; at both stores he’d escaped notice. No, these cops weren’t here for him this time. So he didn’t have to run through the house and find an exit into the alley. He could open the front door for a change, invite them in, offer them a seat, call
them sir. He was getting amused at the prospect. His boys back home would never believe that he’d played good host to the police in the middle of his aunt’s living room.

But right then he heard Mae and her all-night company coming down the stairs. They were arguing coming down the stairs, and Addison walked back to his bedroom, muttering curse words to himself; this joker was intent on ruining his day, first by being naked in his aunt’s bed, now by getting in the way of Addison having a little fun playing nice boy for the cops.

He pulled his shed door to and then cracked it a bit, just so he could peep into the living room and make sure the joker didn’t try any fast moves with his aunt, loud as he was talking. He could see the half-dressed white man standing in the living room, buttoning his shirt as he yelled at Mae, “Now, Mae, they’re limits to what I can do. I’m not even gonna begin to promise I can keep this from being part of the public record. Missing children is a serious thing, a very serious thing.”

“I thought you could do anything in this city,” Mae said, shaking her finger up to Bernie’s face. “Isn’t that what you’re always telling me, that you’re such a fucking power broker? Now when I really need you to broker some power, you tell me it’s too hard.”

Bernie threw his shoes against the floor with such force that Addison almost flung his door open to tell Bernie just to hold up, don’t be getting all carried
away now. He didn’t, though. He listened instead. “Now, Mae, every time you’ve needed something done it’s the most important thing,” Bernie said, stuffing his shirt into his pants. “Every time I’ve fixed the situation when your card house gets raided, or the kids report to their social worker that you’re never here, that it’s Ramona that’s always here, or when you’re late with your paperwork, even when you’re not rightfully next in line to get more kids, I’ve always fixed it. Haven’t I, Mae? But missing children, Mae, I’m sorry, I’m just sorry.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry too, motherfucker,” Mae said, and Addison had to cover his mouth or he would have shouted, “Go ahead and tell him about himself, Aunt Mae.”

Mae wouldn’t have heard him, though. She was like a typhoon blowing and spitting.

“Dammit, now, Mae, it’s missing children. I can’t touch that—”

“Well, don’t try to touch this, you whore-making son of a bitch.”

Mae lifted her housecoat. Now Addison did turn away, out of respect. The doorbell sounded, and Addison jumped. He reminded himself again that the police weren’t here for him. He closed his door all the way shut, until just a minute later it burst open frantically, Bernie standing there, red-faced and sweating. “Wrong door, my man,” Addison said, matter-of-factly. “If you’re trying to find an alley to run through, you want the next door over.”