The Cocaine Chronicles (6 page)

She saw the boxes and boxes of fuel filters near the window. Same size as hair color. A lil piece. Only a lil piece.

Ramen was ten for a dollar. Beef.

Now, when she looked at her hands on the counter, they were smooth and gold. She slid the dollar across. But by midnight, when she sat in the taqueria just before it closed, she would study her hands, the veins jagged like blue lightning. Her feet—it looked like someone had inserted flattened branches of coral under her skin. The skin so thin by midnight, at hands and feet and throat and eyelids.

She imagined she was swimming down the sidewalk. The pep- per trees in the vacant lot after the strip mall, where the old men used to play dominoes on orange crates, where the city had put a chain-link fence, trying to keep “undesirables” from loitering. She didn’t loiter. The streetlights shone through the pepper branches. She was under the ocean. Sere had brought a flashlight that night they went to the ocean, and he’d found tidal pools where the water only swayed in the depressions of the rocks, and the flashlight beam showed her a forest of seaweed and snails clinging to the leaves—were they leaves, underwater? stems?—and the whole world under the surface swayed.

Like now, when the evening wind moved the whole street. The pepper branches swayed delicate and all at once, the palm fronds rustled and glinted above her, and the tumbleweeds along the fence trembled like anemones.

She’d gotten a book, a child’s book, after that night at the ocean and learned the names of every animal in the tidal pool. She had waited a year for him to take her back there, but he disappeared when she was eight months pregnant, veins like fishnet stockings all stretched out along her sides.

She swam along the sidewalk now, wondering where Sisia had gone, waiting to see who was looking for her. Maybe Chess. Maybe the brown van, with New York City in the back pissed at Glorette because she’d shrugged and said in front of the woman, “Ain’t hot to me. Long as my hair up and my soda cold.”

“Pop.”

“What?”

“You mean pop.”

“I’ma pop you,” Sisia came up behind the woman and said. “Don’t nobody care if you from New York or New Mexico. Time for you to step. Don’t nobody want to get in no nasty van. Fleas and lice and shit.”

The woman spat a cloud onto the sidewalk near Sisia’s sandals. “Then why I had five already tonight? Make more in one night than you make all week. This the way in New York. Mens want some convenience. And it’s the shit up in there. I got incense and candles and curtains. So you take your raggedy country ass back to the alley.” But all this time she was looking at Glorette. “And your high yella giraffe, too.”

The custodian at the junior high said, “Just a lil minute, now. Just stand still. I ain’t even gon touch you. But it ain’t my fault. Look at you. The Lord intended you for love. Look at you. Hold still. See. See. Lord. See.”

The mop was damp like a fresh-washed wig at the back of her neck. “Pretend that’s me.” He stood close enough that she smelled Hai Karate, and then the bleach smell of what left his body and he caught in a rag.

“See.” His voice was high and tight. His white name tag was small as a Chiclet when she crossed her eyes and didn’t focus at all.

She wanted some chicharrones. Explosions of fat and chile on her molars.

When she turned down Palm to head toward Sundown, seeing Chess and two other men, thinking the chicharrones would give her enough time to let Chess see the backs of her thighs and her shoulder blades, her miniskirt and halter top better than what New York had, better than curtains or candles, it was like her thoughts brought the brown van cruising down Palm slowly, stopping at the liquor store. The woman got out and folded her arms, cocked her head to the side, the tails of her bandanna like a parrot’s long feathers curling around her neck.

Glorette turned down the alley and headed toward the taqueria instead.

“Look here,” the custodian said. Mr. Charles. But he was not old. His fade was not gray at the edges. “Look here.” He held out money rolled tight as a cigarette. “I ain’t gon bother you no more.”

The five dollar bill was a twig in her sock all day.

She sat at the table in the taqueria for a few minutes, feeling the blood move and growl in her feet. No socks. Sandals. Heels. The money not in her cleavage. No money yet tonight. When she got money she put it inside the thick hair at the back of her head, just before the bun.

Chess would give her money. But most of the men just slid a rock into her palm.

The custodian didn’t have to touch her after that. He didn’t give her money ever again. He watched her walk in the hallway, and she knew he went into his broom closet and stood there and saw her when he moved his hands. Free. A lil piece. He stood facing the mop. The string hair. Then he was gone.

They were all gone.

At the taqueria, the woman behind the counter watched her, waiting patiently. Her mop was already wet. It stood up behind her, at the back door. Her night was almost over. The carne asada was dry and stringy in the warming pan.

Just a lil piece of meat. And a warm tortilla.

She still had the bag of ramen but Victor would be asleep now. He was seventeen. He was about to graduate. He stayed up late studying and fell asleep on the couch, even though he knew she might bring someone home if she had to. The only one who always insisted on coming to her apartment was Chess. He liked to sit on the couch and drink a beer and pretend they were married. She knew it. He would watch TV like that was all he came for, laughing at Steve Harvey, like this living room was TV, too, and there were sleeping kids in the bedrooms and a wife.

“Look at your feet,” he would say, like she’d been working at 7-Eleven all day. Convenience. “You should get your feet done like Sisia. Look like they hurt. And get your toes did. Ain’t that how y’all say? ‘I done got my toes
did
.’”

Glorette smiled.

Victor was afraid of fingernails. He’d cried when he was little when Sisia came over and Glorette didn’t know why. Sisia wasn’t pretty. She was dark and her cheeks were pitted like that bread. Pumpernickel. What the hell kind of name was that for a bread?

Sisia was a brick house, though. She liked to say it. A real mamma-jamma—36-24-36 back in the day. More like 36-30-36 now, but still Glorette heard men say, “Close your eyes, man, and open your hands, and you got something there, with that woman.”

But it was the fingernails that Victor cried about. Long and squared-off and winking with gems or even a ring through the nail. Lynn Win had to bore a hole through the tip and hang the jeweled ring.

Claws. For animals.

But now only women were supposed to fight with them. You could scratch a man’s face, but then he’d probably kill you. You could scratch his back—some men wanted you to dig nails into their backs, like you were out of control, and that made them lose it, their whole spines would arch and tremble. But some men, if you dug your nails experimentally into the wider part below their shoulder blades, the cobra hood of muscle, just frowned and elbowed your hands off. “Don’t mark me up and shit,” they’d say, and then Glorette knew they had a wife or woman at home.

But Glorette just used her regular nails. Her claws. The ones God gave her. The ones Victor said were designed different from apes and chimps, and different from cats and dogs. “I don’t think we ever dug,” he’d say. “Not like badgers or rabbits. And we didn’t need the fingernails to hold onto food or anything. So it must be just for fighting, but we didn’t have teeth like the cats or dogs to bite something on the neck and kill it.

“I think they’re just leftover. From something else.”

Sere had a vein on his temple, from his hairline toward his left eyebrow, like twine sewn under his skin. When he played his flute or drums, the vein rose up but didn’t throb. It wasn’t red or blue under his brown skin, not like the white baby Glorette had seen once at the store whose skin was so pale that blue veins moved along its head and temples like freeways.

But Victor’s temples were smooth and straight, though he thought all the time, read and wrote and did math problems and studied for graduation tests and played music and didn’t just listen but wrote down all these bands’ names and dates and song titles. He asked her once, “This one, the one you like so much. ‘Poinciana.’ What is it?”

She thought for a long time. “A flower? I don’t know.”

One crystal of salt from a cracker on her tongue. The cracker exploding like hard-baked snowflakes and pieces of rock salt on her molars. Then a white sludge she could work at while they walked.

She had to have saltines when she was pregnant with Victor.

Sisia’s aunt used to eat starch. White chunks of Argo. Only one she wanted. That box with the woman holding corn. Indian woman. Corn turned into knobs of snow that squeaked in the teeth.
Like new sneakers on a basketball court
, Chess used to say when they were young.

The corn husks were green skin when they peeled off. The kernels milky white when pierced by a fingernail. How did that turn to starch?

The leaves of the coca wherever those Indians grew it. And how the hell did it turn to little chunks of white? Baby powder cornstarch flakes of Wite-Out powdered sugar, not crystals, not cane sugar and molasses, like her mother would only use, like Louisiana. They cut the cane and crushed it in the mill, her mother said. Mules going round and round. Then the juice had to boil and boil and boil and finally sugar crystals formed. Diamonds of sweet. Diamonds of salt. On the tongue. But this chunk—which she picked up out the empty dryer drum while Jazen watched, her twenty in his pocket—she couldn’t eat.

It had to turn to gray smoke inside her mouth, her throat, her lungs. Insubstantial. Inconvenience. The convenience store. Controlled substance. Possession of a controlled substance, but if you smoke it or swallow it if they pull up, you ain’t in possession. It’s possessin you. Ha. Sisia laughing. Chess laughing. Come on.

Let’s go home.

He liked to pretend her couch was home.

Swear he would ask her to make grits. The tiny white sand of corn. Not crystals. Not chunks.

Call it cush-cush back home, her mother used to say.

Victor had eaten grits at his grandmére’s house and loved to call it that. Cush-cush.

Victor was sleeping now. His math book open on his chest. Sere’s brain. My brain? He had the third highest grades in the whole damn school. His ramen was in her hand. The plastic bag handles were rolled into pearls by now.

She walked down the alley behind the taqueria, more for the smell of the put-away beef than anything else. Ain’t no charge for smelling. She paused beside a shopping cart parked against the chain-link fence. The slats of vinyl worked through the fence. Sideways world. She smoked her last rock in a pipe the man had given her. Pipe made of an old air-freshener tube blown larger with a torch.

The chunk was yellow and porous. Small as aquarium rocks. The fish in the pet store went in and out of the ceramic castle. Her head was pounding. Maybe he gave her some bad coca. A bad leaf.

Someone was behind her. Sisia. Sisia was ready to quit for the night. Glorette was tired now. She had Victor’s ramen in her hand.

She heard a voice kept up all behind front teeth. “Old crack-head bitch,” the voice said. “See if that hair real now. One a them fake falls. Drink yo damn soda? You ain’t gon pop nobody now.”

Not Sisia.

Fingers dug into her braid, at the base of her skull, and pulled hard enough to launch Glorette backwards, and then the silver handle of the shopping cart was beside her eyes, and the girl was tying her hair to the handle.

“Real enough,” the girl said. “But this ain’t the eighties. You ain’t Beyoncé. You some old J.Lo and shit. You finished.”

She was still behind Glorette. Her footsteps went backward. Was she gone?

Glorette couldn’t untie her hair. Her hands shook. She was bent too far. Spine. So far backward that she could only look up at the streetlight just above. She felt pain sharp like a rat biting her heart. Teeth in her chest. A bad leaf?
I tasted salt
. A crystal. The teeth bit into her chest again. Just a muscle. Victor says just a muscle like your thigh.
Flex
. She closed her eyes but the streetlight was brighter than the moon. Yellow sulfur. The sun. Like staring into the sun until you were blind, until the thudding of your heart burst into your brain and someone slid chalk sideways into perforated stripes across your vision until you couldn’t see anything.

Andrew Brown

JAMES BROWN
is the author of several novels and a memoir,
The Los Angeles
Diaries
(Morrow/HarperCollins).