Tempest Rising (9 page)

T
hey landed on the porch, three piles of plaid wool, like they’d just fallen from the sky. First Bliss, then Shern, then Victoria came limping and crying. All the way back to Mae’s they talked about what could have happened: Suppose Larry had had a weapon, suppose Victoria had fallen on her head instead of her knee, suppose Larry was the type to take a young girl back in the woods of the park and do nasty things to her, suppose this, suppose that. They scared themselves so with their own imaginings that they ran as hard and fast as they could, pulling Victoria as she half ran, half hopped. The cold air in their chests had them gasping and wheezing, their undershirts soaked from perspiring, and the porch at the house they hated was such the unlikely welcome sight that they collapsed on it and heaved and coughed while their hearts settled some.
Such was the scene when Tyrone clicked the switch to turn on the porch light to the house Mae and Ramona shared.

“Hey,” Tyrone said, walking into the bright light of the porch. “I was hoping that was y’all. It’s about time. Ramona’s out looking for you. Her jaws all tight over y’all being so late.” He stooped and lightly tugged the tassels on Shern’s hat.

Shern slowly unfolded herself from the porch floor and sat up and jostled Bliss and reached beyond her to nudge Victoria. Victoria started to sob fresh all over again.

He walked over to where Victoria was. His eye went to the bloodstain seeping through the knee of Victoria’s brown corduroy pants. “Awl, man. You’re hurt? What you do? Let’s get you in the house.” He picked Victoria up and carried her into the house.

Being lifted and cradled like that reminded Victoria of the way her father used to carry her when she’d fall asleep in the rec room. She’d keep her eyes shut tight and nestle in her father’s arms, fearing that if he knew she was awake, he might make her walk on her own. She kept her eyes opened now. It didn’t matter if Tyrone tried to make her walk on her own, she wouldn’t be able to. Maybe hop. Crawl on her good leg maybe. But the pain in her hurt knee pulsed like the neon sign at the House of Hong Kong in Chinatown, where their father would take them for dinner. She imagined the bright orange letters pulsing on and off, on and off; her knee hurt less when she pictured it that way.

Tyrone let her go softly onto the couch. She sat up so her bent knee wouldn’t touch the plastic covering on the couch. She didn’t want to be the one to give Ramona reason for irritation; blood on the stiff plastic furniture, Victoria was sure, would be a serious offense. Tyrone moved the brass urn that held the powdered blue artificial carnations to the other side of the coffee table so that Victoria could stretch her leg out on the table. He told her that he had been a Boy Scout, so his first-aid training should come back to him. He laughed, hoping Victoria would laugh too.

She didn’t; she winced and let out a cracked moan as she tried to straighten out her knee. She closed her eyes, hoping for the neon sign.

Bliss and Shern pushed through the front door.

“This old crazy man talking about he was our grandfather came out of the park and chased us and made Tori fall,” Bliss said to Tyrone, and then barreled past Tyrone to get to her sister. She flopped on the floor at Victoria’s feet. She blew on Victoria’s knee. “Does that make it feel better? When Mommie used to blow on my cuts, they would feel better.” She leaned her head against the leg of the couch and said soothing words to Victoria.

“Wait a minute, what happened? Somebody chased you? Who chased you?” Tyrone asked as he moved the velvet ottoman in front of the couch where Victoria was. He sat on the ottoman and slowly started folding the bottom of Victoria’s corduroys up to get to the hurt part of her leg.

Bliss was rushing her words telling him what happened while Shern busied herself at the closet hanging her coat. “Whoa, slow down, Bliss,” he said. “You talking faster than I can listen; you know I’m a slow-talking country boy.” And then he got quiet when he had Victoria’s pants leg up, exposing the rawness, the red and pink and yellow that used to be smooth brown skin. He told Shern then that she had to be his assistant, told her what supplies to bring him, while Victoria tried not to holler out as the pulsing to the neon light faded and left just a steady glaring orange that was moving in circles down her leg.

“Just hang on, Tori,” Tyrone said in his softest voice.

Shern tried not to hear his tone of voice. She’d heard him use that tone before, when Ramona and Tyrone’s night sounds sifted through the walls and Ramona would be complaining about them, and Tyrone would try to settle Ramona down. “Well, how do you think they feel, Mona?” he’d asked in a voice that would have felt like lamb’s wool to Shern’s ears if she didn’t hate everything about this house so.

She ran to do Tyrone’s bidding, and Bliss went on with the details of how Larry had made Victoria fall. When Shern got back in the room with the first-aid supplies, Bliss was telling Tyrone how Larry had chased them right to the steps of the closed-down factory and snatched her up and tried to kiss her cheek. Tyrone’s fists were clenched, and his jaw was
going back and forth, and Shern was surprised that he could look so mean.

He started cleaning Victoria’s sore, and she made hard, sucking sounds. They were otherwise quiet as he worked; he had to be quiet, or he would have used profanity about Larry. He knew Larry from around West Philly, would see him walking especially at night if Tyrone ventured down to do some barhopping on Fifty-second Street; he’d never liked Larry’s haughtiness, the way he’d loud-talk people since he knew he was a decent enough boxer. Tyrone had half listened to Ramona recant the story told to her by Vie about the blowup over the girls’ temporary living arrangement. He was just now making the connection between Larry and the girls, how their mother had been the object of Larry’s delusions of fatherhood. And now his crazy ass was extending that delusion to these girls, who couldn’t even call on their aunt Til to split his head once again. So right now he had to be silent as he worked, while Shern handed him peroxide, then gauze, then cut tape into strips, while Bliss squeezed her sister’s hand. He had to swallow hard and push his anger into a ball in his throat and concentrate on dressing Victoria’s knee.

When he was finished with the knee and sat back and wiped the sweat that glistened on his forehead, Bliss broke the silence.

“Why you want to be with Ramona?” she asked. “She’s all mean and do. And two-faced. You’re too nice for her.”

Shern looked down at her fingernails. For once
she was glad to hear one of Bliss’s inappropriate comments.

“Wait a minute, you not being fair, Bliss,” Tyrone said. “Ramona’s sweet.”

Victoria moaned when he said that.

“Well, she is in her own way when you get to know her. Y’all just haven’t been here long enough to see her good side; she got a real sweetness about her. All right,” he conceded, “she can be a little, you know, a little snippy sometimes.”

“Sometimes?” Bliss said. “Try every time she breathes.”

“Or maybe we’re just missing her good side when we blink.” Shern looked directly at Tyrone when she said it.

Victoria made a sound that was a half laugh, half grunt. “That was pretty good, Shern.” She whispered it and shifted her leg and tried again not to holler out.

Tyrone got up from the ottoman and sat in the chair across from the couch and let a smile tickle his throat and diffuse the anger over Larry that had formed there. He tried not to picture Shern blinking and missing Ramona’s good side or he would have surely laughed out loud. Ramona was his lady; he couldn’t be joking about her to these young sisters, who apparently couldn’t see what a man could see, what he saw whenever Ramona fixed her saucer eyes on him. He leaned against the back of the chair. The royal blue seam of the custom-made plastic covers scratched his neck and he leaned forward.

That’s when he noticed how swollen Victoria’s mouth was. “Awl, man,” he said again in that voice that was making Shern feel warm and confused, “you hit your mouth too. Let’s see your teeth.” He walked back over to the couch and leaned down and gently pushed against her teeth. “Whew, it’s looks like the root is still good and attached to your gum, but you chipped a corner, right there. Let me get you some ice for the swelling.”

Right then Ramona burst through the door and moved into the living room like a flash of light popping on an Instamatic camera.

“Where the hell y’all been?” she demanded. “Didn’t I tell you to be here before it got dark out, huh? I said, ‘Don’t let the night beat you here,’ didn’t I? And don’t be looking at me like I’m the one wrong; you’re wrong.” She tore off her coat and threw it on the chair. She moved to Shern and jabbed her finger in her chest. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Shern and Victoria sat stunned, the color gone from their faces, mouths dropped. Shern pulled her head way back into her chest like a turtle trying to go into its shell. She was so unaccustomed to anybody stabbing her in the chest with a finger like that she didn’t even know how to react.

Victoria just looked down. Because she knew if she looked at Ramona, she’d see again how beautiful Ramona was, a soft, liquid beauty, and she’d wonder how anyone with such soft beauty could act so brittle all the time. She thought that if she had
just a hint of Ramona’s beauty, she’d just float on air all the time. So she wouldn’t have to feel like she was crazy, imagining being a floating beauty in the midst of Ramona’s tirade, she just looked down.

Bliss didn’t look down, though. She jumped up from where she sat at Victoria’s feet. “You better get out of my sister’s face,” she yelled up at Ramona. “We’re not afraid of you in your old cheap hairdo. We’re just polite.”

“Polite.” Ramona shrieked and wagged her finger at Bliss, who would have appeared comic if Ramona weren’t so angry. She turned again to Shern. “You, you go in the shed and bring me the ironing cord. I’m gonna give y’all what your privileged behinds been needing all your lives.”

“Hey, hey, hey, Mona, baby doll,” Tyrone said, walking into the room with ice for Victoria’s mouth. “No need for no whipping in here. Is it now, baby doll?” He went to Ramona and kissed her cheek.

Shern’s eyes darkened some when he did that, and Bliss stomped back to the couch and sat down. The plastic covering exhaled loudly.

“I’m trying to discipline them,” Ramona almost snarled at Tyrone. “They gotta listen and do what I tell them to do.”

“Awl, Mona, she’s hurt for God’s sake.” Tyrone motioned to Victoria and then handed her the ice. “Just dab that against your lips,” he said.

Ramona looked at Victoria for the first time good
since she’d been back in the house. She rarely looked at Victoria, the quietest, the plainest of the three. She was always looking at that youngest, Bliss, arguing back at her, threatening to slap her dead in her mouth. And Shern, that oldest with those eyes, who had a maturity about her that Ramona didn’t trust, she had to look at her to make sure the child didn’t have a pair of scissors aimed at her back. But Victoria was mostly compliant; she didn’t even argue with those other two like that bad-assed Bliss. Ramona suddenly felt a twinge of something other than intense dislike for Victoria, not just because the child was hurt but because she was, well, good.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked Victoria in a softer tone, not a nice tone, but at least the steel was gone from her tone.

“I—I fell.” Victoria tried to swallow the suds in her voice.

“And she chipped her teeth.” Bliss puffed out the words as if they could knock Ramona over. “So you and your momma gonna have to put out the money to get them fixed. Aren’t they, Shern?”

Ramona ignored Bliss this time. “You think she need to go to the hospital?” she asked Tyrone. “Shit, who feels like sitting up in some emergency room all night, a Saturday night at that?”

“I don’t think so,” Tyrone said. “Least not for the knee, can’t be stitched ’cause all the skin has been rubbed off, more like a burn than a cut. Got to
be kept cleaned, though. If it gets infected, mnh, won’t be pretty. She will need a dentist for that chipped tooth.”

“Damn. Just what I need, for Mae to come back here Tuesday to a hurt foster child,” Ramona said under her breath.

“Don’t let that ice water drip on the carpet,” she said to Victoria as she picked up her coat from the chair and went to the closet to hang it. It was her good coat, the one with the suede trimming. She’d worn it so Tyrone’s father, Perry, would be impressed. Not that he’d noticed. Ramona had been so nervous once she’d slid into the supple-feeling front seat of the new-smelling deuce and a quarter, and since it was a rare thing for a man to make her feel nervous, she just stared straight ahead or out the passenger side window looking for the girls. She gave one-word replies to his gentlemanly attempts at small talk, the “How’s the job? How’s your mother?” type conversation. Finally she was able to pull her eyes from the window and concentrate on him instead of the fast pace of her heart thumping under her good coat. She gasped silently when she noticed the hair curling around the thick gold band of his watch as he reached across her lap to get his cigarettes from the glove compartment. Thought she would melt from the sound of his voice as he sang along with Johnny Hartman something about you are too beautiful, and I am a fool for beauty. Knew then what he’d probably been doing at Miss Hettie’s, could tell by the drained, satisfied tone to
his voice and the way he was leaned back in the car, faraway-looking smile turning his mouth up; scent rising off of him was like he had just showered with Palmolive Gold soap. So she just looked out the window, thinking about how much she hated Miss Hettie and hoping she’d see the girls so she could jump out of the car before her nervousness showed through.

Tyrone was trying to tell Ramona how Larry had bothered the girls on Dead Block, of all places, how something was gonna have to be done about him, he was gonna have to be reported or something, and anyhow, hadn’t she warned them about being on Dead Block around midday? he asked.

She told him nothing could be done about Larry, that Larry’s sister, Vie, kept Mae with a decent income streaming through there by making sure that children were placed with Mae. Plus, she said, waving him away, she’d have to hear about it later; she had to get their dinner. She walked into the kitchen away from their voices. Bliss was telling him they’d left their library books all on the ground where they’d fallen. Tyrone said he’d walk up Dead Block on his way home and see if he could find the books. Then Ramona could hardly hear him as his voice dipped to a low, smooth rumble, and he told Victoria she was going to be just fine. And then Bliss’s voice blaring, asking him what was Dead Block anyhow.