Tempest Rising (8 page)

“Cold as shit out here today, little ladies,” he said.

The girls closed in the spaces between them and repositioned the books they carried so they could link arms in a huddle. “Stupid old man,” Bliss said. “Probably drunk. Go on, man, get,” she warned. “Or I’ll tell our daddy to shoot your ass off.”

Shern pushed her elbow into Bliss’s side. Told her not to talk to him. “Just walk normally,” she insisted.

The tall dark man kept pace with the girls and threw his head back and laughed a bellow of a laugh. “You wouldn’t do that, would you? You wouldn’t tell your daddy to shoot my ass off. For one thing, your daddy’s dead.” He stilled his laugh
and now had a mocked softness to his voice. “Plus I’m your own flesh and blood.”

“You don’t know us,” Victoria said tenuously, more a question than a declaration. She was walking on the end closest to the man, and the scent of pinecones and burned wood seemed to rise from his clothes in jagged bolts. It was acrid and went right to her head and made her feel dizzy and confused.

“Are you crazy talking to him?” Shern yanked Victoria’s arm.

“But he might know something—”

“Shush!” Shern cut her off. “He’s crazy, he’s drunk, whatever.”

“But maybe he knows the aunts and uncles if he knows us,” Victoria half wailed. “Maybe he can tell them where we are; they must not know where we are since we’ve been here a whole month and they haven’t tried to see us.”

“It’s the courts that are keeping them from us.” Shern yanked Victoria’s arm again, and Victoria cried out. “Now, do you want this drunk-up old man following us all over the place? We talk to him and he’ll think he’s making sense and we’ll never get rid of him.”

The stranger continued to talk in uninterrupted streams. “Yeah, I’m your own flesh and blood, yes, I am. Sad child that doesn’t know their own line. You part of my line, directly descended from me.”

“Wait a minute.” Bliss stopped suddenly. “I know who you are.”

Shern and Victoria stopped too. “Don’t talk to him, Bliss, just don’t,” Shern yelled in her sister’s ear.

“Look, though, look.” Bliss pointed wildly. “He’s the man who tried to take Mommie from the aunts and uncles. See the scar where Aunt Til went upside his head.”

They all three looked at him, at the thick beige scar running down his forehead that looked like steak gristle. They were startled and mesmerized to see the subject of so many Sunday night dinners standing right in front of them.

“She was my child, my baby girl.” He moved in closer to the girls. His voice went to a lower tone. “I’m Larry. Girl, I know you know me; look at you, you the spitting image of me. I’m your granddaddy. Come give me a hug.”

“My aunt Til said you couldn’t have fathered my mother because you don’t have a pecker.” Bliss spit the words out right before Shern grabbed her from behind and covered her mouth and tried to drag her away.

“Lies! They told you lies! She was mine, and so are you.” He opened his arms toward the girls. “Now come give me a hug. Come on, you with the dimple in your chin, you first.”

He lurched forward, and all three girls turned at the same instant and started to run, galloping, determined runs. They quickly put space between themselves and Larry. But right then Victoria tripped over a slither of a hole in the grainy concrete
and fell. She fell hard. She cried and spit bloody fragments of teeth and curled on her side and clutched at her knee, which felt as if it had just splattered like grade A extra large eggs hitting a concrete floor.

“Victoria, oh, my God, Victoria,” Shern screamed in a panic as she let her library books drop so she could help her sister run away.

“Oh, no, you’re bleeding, Tori,” yelped Bliss as she spun around in fast circles.

Shern hoisted Victoria up and half dragged, half pulled her to the doorway of the abandoned bread factory. She propped her up at the bottom of three short steps. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” she whispered over and over to try to calm Victoria and herself.

Larry was where they were now, still calling for a hug, still chanting, “Lies, lies, they told you lies.” The air around him had turned filmy and rippled with his voice as the wind rose and the sun fell and his words dipped and peaked with the wind and mixed with the deserted block and the sound of flapping as every wren in the park, it seemed, was roused at that instant and took flight. Even the sun had gone from butter drips to a red bruise in the sky and was chilling and especially affected Victoria and looked like the ribbon of blood that circled her mother’s wrist that morning last month.

Victoria could no longer tolerate Larry’s words, or the pine and wood smell coming off his clothes
and hitting her nose like pinpricks, or the red-tinged sky. She started to scream hysterically. “Make him stop! Please make him go away!”

Bliss ran right in front of him and stomped her foot like she was trying to make an alley cat run. “Stop saying that, you old crazy, just stop it.” She rolled her neck around like the bad girls at school when they talked back to the teacher. “You’re not our grandfather. You’re not!”

He did stop then and flashed his eyes. His eyes looked amber from the reflection of the waning sun and froze Bliss where she stood.

The commotion in the air outside his bedroom window woke Mister from his nap, and he sat straight up all at once in his bed, actually his cot, his bedroom window actually the window on the lower level of the abandoned bread factory. His home was actually the bread factory where he’d lived since 1961, a reformed man of the streets struggling with a habit and an attitude and three different varieties of VD. The habit he kicked cold turkey over four days of chills and sweats and vomiting and cramps after his young wife moved everything out of their apartment when he’d gone to cash his veteran’s check, which used to take two, three days sometimes to cash. The VD was cured from VA-dispensed penicillin. The attitude took care of itself, dissipated over months of living alone down here in the cozy corner of the bread factory in relative grand luxury considering some of the foxholes he’d known since he’d also served in the Korean War.
He’d feed the squirrels through the window down here and reflect on aspects of the human condition ranging from the existence of God to capitalism to race relations to whether Smitty or Schaffer made the best hoagies. Now he was wide-awake and on alert; he always woke alert, another habit he’d picked up in Korea. He moved to the window and cupped his hands against his face and peered out. Then he grabbed his heavy black coat and ran outside and around the corner to where the girls were.

Shern saw him first. She said a silent thank-you when she saw him. His face was dark brown and wide, and his eyes hung low and looked sad as if someone were pulling on the skin beneath his eyes. He had a flat-footed walk that reminded her of how her father used to walk. The sad eyes and the arch-less feet made her think she could trust him, and even the air got still as he approached; the acrid scent of pine and wood yielded to the butter-tinged aroma of rising bread.

“Get away from them gals,” he yelled to Larry.

Larry had just picked Bliss up and was trying to kiss her cheek, while Shern kicked and punched at him and Bliss tried to claw his face. Victoria hobbled from the sidelines, screaming, “Please, God, make him go away.”

“Hey, Larry, you old crazy fool,” Mister called, “put that little gal down, put her down, I say.”

“You the crazy one,” Larry yelled back. “You ain’t even got enough sense to live in a house, living in an abandoned factory and you calling me crazy.”

“I’ll tell you what, though,” Mister shot back, “I bet I got a baseball bat in there with your name all over it, don’t make me go whip it out.”

Larry turned to look at Mister directly.

“Oh, yes, I will, try me, just try me.”

Larry coughed a low-pitched cough that sounded like a lion’s growl. “But these my grandkids. Look at them, look just like me.”

“Am not!” Bliss gave Larry one final kick and wrenched herself free while he and Mister argued. She and Shern each grabbed Victoria under the arms and ran like hell to get back to Mae’s.

F
ive minutes bled into ten to fifteen to an hour. Ramona turned the knob on the gas stove to lower the flame under the hot dogs and baked beans. She went into the living room yet again straight to the window and watched the night and the wind shaking hands on the front porch. No girls yet. Didn’t matter how turned around they must have gotten trying to find their way to and from the library, they were an hour late. What a whipping she wanted to give them for making her worry like this, like the kind she’d been raised on: an ironing cord strapping right around the meaty part of her calf until red welts came up in a pattern that would have been beautiful were it not against skin. That’s what those girls needed in her mind; that’s what the whole band of fosters had needed over the years. The ones taken from their parents by the courts, the ones
given up on, the truants, the orphans, the runaways.

She went back in the kitchen and lifted the lid from the pot and counted the hot dogs, which looked like logs turning over in red-dirt mud. Mae always told her that it was bad luck to count food; she counted now for spite. Two apiece, that was it; she dared one of them to ask for the extras.

She wiped at her sweater and folded the edges along the waist of her Wranglers and went back into the living room and looked out the window for signs of those three. Nothing, just the dark porch air.

She lifted the cover on the boxy hi-fi stereo. Her stack of Sam Cooke 45s were already disked up and sitting on the spindle, waiting to fall. She flicked the lever and sat on the velvet ottoman and waited for the stereo to go through its rotations. The ottoman was the only piece of sitting-on furniture in the room that wasn’t swathed in custom-made plastic covers. The covers were seam-stitched in royal blue thread; Mae insisted that they match the carpet. Ramona tried not to look at the royal blue–bordered chair covers. Tried not to remind herself how much money Mae squandered. Mae had even taken to calling Lit Brothers furniture department, pretended to be Ramona, and ordered nightstands, lamps, face-sized mirrors. When Ramona challenged her shortened paycheck with the bony-necked accountant, said she’d only charged a Maybelline face powder and a tube of lipstick that week, and the accounting person came down on the selling floor and pulled Ramona from a customer
who was just about to purchase a half dozen Hawaiian print shirts and showed Ramona the order sheet for a nightstand and lamp and mirror, Ramona had feigned a lapse in memory, focused on the bones jutting out in the accountant’s neck, and said yes, she’d ordered the nightstand and lamp and mirror but she didn’t think the deductions would start until the following week. She was too embarrassed to let anyone know her own mother had such tangled, knotted ways, that she could be so mean and devious to her only natural child.

The stereo clicked loudly, and then Sam Cooke’s voice rushed in like a mushroom of air that wrapped Ramona up, and for an instant she felt like she was riding on the music, floating, like Sam Cooke’s voice was floating through the room as he sang about the change that was going to come, and for an instant it didn’t matter that she was almost to her mid-twenties, unmarried, barely able to save two quarters to move from this house filled with plastic slipcovered furniture and child after child showing up for her to have to help her mother raise.

She sang out loud that a change has got to come and danced herself around the room in wide circles until footsteps on the porch startled her away from the music and dropped her with a jolt. “It’s about fucking time,” she muttered as she ran to the front door and snatched it open, ready to grab Shern, Victoria, and Bliss into the house one at a time by the throat. It wasn’t the girls, though. It was Tyrone, grinning sheepishly and shivering against the wind.

“My lucky day,” she said, voice tinted with sarcasm, “you’re early, and they’re late.”

“I’m not here yet for our—you know, our date.” His face broke into an apologetic grin. “Me and my pops was just riding through here, my doggone car broke down again—”

“Your car went again?” She wanted to scream it.

“Yeah, bad plugs, I think. Anyhow Pops picked me up—”

“Your car went again.” This time she sighed it, resignedly. She looked beyond him to the black-on-black ’65 deuce and a quarter parked in front of the door. “I thought you said your father was with you. No one in that car.” Her breath caught in the top of her throat at the thought of his father.

He let the opened storm door rest against his back. He touched his finger lightly to her lips. “If you let me, I’m trying to tell you my pops had to stop in ’cross the street at Miss Hettie’s, had to drop off a printing job. So I figured I’d ring your bell and steal a kiss from my baby doll.”

He whispered it and smiled and ran his finger through her hair. “Nice,” he said, “so soft, brings out your cheekbones swept up like that too.”

Ramona jerked her head and pulled his hand from her hair. “Please, I just got it done this afternoon, and you ready to mess it up already.”

“No, I’ll wait till tonight to mess it up.” He winked.

“Yeah, well, where we going tonight besides here?” She folded her arms across her chest and tapped her foot impatiently.

“Well,” he stammered, “thought you were the only one minding those girls till your mother gets back on Tuesday. How we going anywhere when you have to baby-sit them?”

“That oldest one is thirteen,” she said, now tapping her fingers across her arm to the same impatient rhythm of her feet. “Shit, I was taking care of a whole roomful of foster kids by the time I was thirteen, cooking and cleaning for them too. So if you had a plan of a nice evening for you and me, that oldest one is more than grown enough to stay here for a few hours and watch those other two. I guess that’s why we ain’t been nowhere decent the past month, you feigning it off on me having to watch those girls. Well, consider yourself on notice, I don’t have to spend every waking minute with them, okay?”

“Well, I didn’t know.” Tyrone’s eyebrows receded to the space on his forehead they always found when he was embarrassed. “That’s why I haven’t planned anything, you know, you seem so preoccupied with those girls.”

“Those brats. I’m not hardly preoccupied with those spoiled little rich girls. Mhn. Thought I was gonna have to slap that oldest dead in her mouth this morning. And now they’re late, like they think they’re old enough to run the streets after dark.”

“They don’t seem like the type to be out-and-out defiant, Mona. I’ve gotten to know them kind of well playing tic-tac-toe and checkers with them. Maybe they got lost or something. But I’m sure
you’ve told them how to get from point A to B around here.”

Ramona felt her stomach drop a little when he said that. “I’ve told them what they need to hear.” She stopped so her words could stay angry, so her guilt and worry over the girls being late wouldn’t poke holes in her voice and sift through the anger and come out with her words.

He looked beyond her into the living room. Now Sam Cooke was singing “You Send Me,” and the muscles in his arms twitched at the thought of holding Ramona in a close grinding slow drag. He pulled the collar up on his corduroy jacket. “It’s cold out here, baby,” he whispered.

“Well, they dressed warm, I made sure of that, all the coats they came here with got put to some use today. I’ve never seen kids come with so many extra coats, three coats apiece, not counting the suede jackets. Such excess,” she said, shaking her head and sucking in the air through her teeth.

He rubbed his hands up and down her arms. “Come on, let’s get you out of this cold doorway.” He was whispering again. “Can’t have my baby catching no draft.”

“No, I’m just catching hell, saddled with these kids by myself their first month here. And the breaking-in period with any of them is always the hardest. And these three are particularly grief-stricken.” She backed into the doorway, fixing her eyes on Tyrone’s father’s car. Then it was just the closed front door she saw as he pushed it to, then his
tan corduroy jacket as he pulled her in close and tried to mash his mouth against hers. She shook herself from him and walked toward the kitchen.

Tyrone tried to hold his good nature against her mood. He’d come to know this side of Ramona that was like splintered wood. Sometimes he wished that she were more like the other women who just blossomed when they were around him. Big smiles, sometimes even a fullness would come up in their eyes and make them appear serious and intense, like if he were to just tap them, their passions would break through in bubbling rivers. He reasoned that Ramona didn’t have to gush like sap oozing from some maple in the spring; she was too beautiful for that, he told himself over and over, with her saucy eyes and healthy legs and fleshy lips. He told himself that now as he watched her walk away.

“Where you say your daddy went?” she asked again. “May be he can give me a ride around the block to see if I see traces of those three.” She talked quickly, hoping to mask the excitement in her voice over riding with his father. “Dummies probably did get turned around. Before they left from here this morning, I told them specifically to be back here before the sun fall.” She said all this with her back to him.

“I don’t know how long Pops is gonna be; Miss Hettie’s probably going through the printing he did line by line. How ’bout if you and me walk and see if we see them?” He caught up with her back and let his hands rest along the side of her hips; her Wran
glers were stiff, and he rubbed his hands along the curve of her hips and felt an uncoiling of his essence that was so forceful it surprised him. “I’ll ring Miss Hettie’s bell and tell my pops to go on home without me. That way we can walk as long as we need to. We can snuggle against the wind too.” He tried to nestle his chin against her shoulder.

Ramona yanked his hands from her hips and jerked her shoulder upward against his chin. She thought she heard his teeth snap together. “I don’t want to walk.” The words burst through her lips with much more force than she’d intended and sputtered now through the room like a balloon that’s losing its air and flying and falling fast and unpredictably. “If I had wanted to walk, I would have already walked, okay. I want to ride. I’ll be glad when you can piece together enough money to buy a car that runs longer than a day. I mean, even if you had planned something for this evening, we gonna have to be jumping on and off buses like poor people, and it’s all cold out.” She stopped and exhaled and turned to look at him. “Plus I need you to stay here, I mean, if you think your father’ll take me to go look for them. Won’t nobody be here to let them in if you go too. So I was gonna ask you to do that.”

“Oh, you was gonna ask me to do that?” He stood in the center of the room, watching the balloon fly until it landed at his feet, his arms hung, his eyebrows down now to that lower spot they went to when he was hurt.

“Is that a lot to ask?” She said it softer. She could see how low his eyebrows were. That’s what she’d first noticed about him, when the women’s contingent of the gospel choir clacked about this new, fine guy, Perry the printer’s son, up from Virginia to live with his father, “tall and muscle-bound,” they’d said; “slim waist; wide, straight back; good hair; grin that opens his face and softens the hard line of his nose. Girl, Ramona, you got to see him,” they’d said; “coloring that’s like a purple-brown; mix that with someone light like you, girl, y’all would have some pretty babies,” they’d insisted. But it was his eyebrows that caught Ramona and made her think that for once she could settle into an honest relationship. They were coal black and thick and had their own life the way they dipped and bowed and punctuated in the most genuine way whatever else his face was showing. Now they looked to her as if they wanted to drop to the floor.

“Look”—she walked toward him—“the sooner those brats get here, the sooner I can lose this attitude you the only one here to absorb. You do want me to lose this attitude?” She widened her eyes and fixed them on him. The muscles in her face loosened; she let her hips go in an exaggerated side-to-side swing. “Don’t you, baby? Don’t you want me to lose this attitude so I can be nice to you?”

Sam Cooke was at the end of the song. Tyrone was pudding now, and he knew it. He cleared his throat and licked his lips, which were dry. He
moved like a robot. “I’ll go get my pops; then I’ll come back here and wait to let them in.”

Ramona watched him leave. She smoothed at the edges of her French roll, which were soft and silky straight.