The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (49 page)

Tey and I sat on the curb in
front of his grandmother’s house and got all our cryin out for the day. We didn’t look at each other or try to make one another feel better. We just wailed away with our eyes shut tight and our faces up to the sky. We didn’t stop to blow our noses or keep our heads from achin. I had to wear long sleeves now, and that made it worse. I was sweaty, my hair got all poofy, and I ended up with snot and
tears on my clothes. We always felt numb when we were done, like we could just pass out.

Tey wiped his face in his shirt and whined a little. I thought he might start up again, but he coughed, and that was the end of it. I was lightheaded. I rested against my knees and closed my eyes.

“Granny’s got that itchin,” Tey said. “She put everythin on it she can think of, but it don’t go away. She said
it don’t bother her, but she always scratchin her chest.”

He was gonna make me cry again. “Tey …” I pulled back my sleeve. He poked at my arm. A large splotch of white, paper-white white, trailed up from my wrist to my elbow. All along my arm, there were these spots, like somebody beat it with a handful of pebbles.

“Will that happen to Granny?”

I put my finger to my mouth, and now the tears
were comin. “I don’t know.”

He whispered in my ear, “What the hell is that, Keisha?”

I shook my head. He looked back at his grandmother’s house, then back at me.

“I’m sure it’ll go away,” he said.

But he knew we both couldn’t know that. We’d never seen anythin like this before.

COMMUNITY NEWS
Alger MacAdams will be turning over the everyday responsibilities of his store to his only daughter,
Ms. Marla MacAdams. Mr. MacAdams has been a regular, friendly face at Alger’s Market since he opened the store in 1974. He had been
considering handing over the reins to his daughter since his wife Diana died early last February. “Marla’s been observing and helping me the last twenty-three years. She knows what to do, and I know she can do it on her own.” MacAdams intends to remain active. He
will still coordinate Second Avenue Baptist’s food drives and tutor math at Hadley Park’s Community Center. Alger’s Market is located at 1507 B on Jefferson Street, next door to Mona’s Beauty Salon behind Elk’s Lodge 41.

Caption: Alger MacAdams and his daughter greet customers outside of Alger’s Market.

Sugar Daddy – July 20

Everybody cried at Mrs. Probst’s funeral.
Everybody.
And hardly anybody
liked Mrs. Probst, far as I could tell. She cheated on all three of her husbands, she controlled the United Methodist Women, and the pastor did whatever she said. When Mama didn’t think I was listenin, she called Mrs. Probst a bitch. I had my own beef with her. She changed the services and made church even longer. But Uncle David held me while I wept, and his tears drained through my hair. Momma
had pressed my hair for the funeral and gotten it nice and straight, but the curls tightened and frizzed under Uncle David’s chin. Aunt Lil cried so hard she could barely conduct the choir. Over in the soprano section, Ryan leaned on Grandmommy, and Grandmommy did everythin she could to stay upright. Momma lay in the aisle. She didn’t even bother with appearin ladylike.

We coulda blamed this
on the Holy Spirit – He did people that way sometimes, but not everybody all at once. He might fall on one or two people, they’d shake and wail, and then they’d fall out. We wished we could do that now. All we could hear was our own shriekin and screamin. Water puddled at our feet. Our noses clogged up, and our stomachs hurt.

Mr. Hughes didn’t come. He wasn’t at church last Sunday, neither. We
didn’t look for Sugar Daddy. He hadn’t shown up to the last two weddings. We gave up on him comin here.

We planned to go straight to Swett’s after the funeral, but we had to change our clothes first. None of us really talked while we ate. Momma said, “The old biddy didn’t deserve all that
hollering,” and that was about it. We were too tired to talk, me and Momma, Grandmommy, Ryan, and Aunt Lil
and Uncle David. We had a hard enough time gettin our forks to our mouths.

I can’t lie. I wanted summer to be over with. I wanted to get back to school. I wouldn’t have to answer so many questions from people who weren’t from around here, questions about their friends or family we swore never lived here, even though strangers insisted the opposite. I wouldn’t have to explain to em about some
of the buildings in the area, why there was only half a building, or nuthin but a window or door hangin in space with no walls to hold it up. Maybe by the end of the summer, all this nonsense would go away, and I could go to sleep knowin Momma and Grandmommy hadn’t disappeared on me by the time I woke up in the mornin. The white marks on my arm would heal up, and so would Tey’s grandmother’s, and
I’d never have to worry that Daddy might come lookin for me one day, and nobody’d know who he was talkin bout.

I was lyin flat on my stomach with my arms at my sides. I hated sleepin in that position, but it was the only one that worked now. My stomach felt so hollow, like I hadn’t eaten in years, and that black hole might rise up within me and snatch me from the inside out. I started lyin like
this to stretch my stomach out, quiet it down so it quit all the grumblin.

Usually, Momma wouldn’t let me catnap durin the day, especially not durin the summer when I could be runnin around gettin exercise. Not much use for that now. Sometimes Momma didn’t feel like wakin me up after all of her cryin. I was happy when she did, though. Sometimes when I slept, I slipped down into that black hole.
Didn’t know if I’d ever wake outta it. When I opened my eyes, I felt like it had puked me up.

Momma knocked on my door and stuck her head in. “Tey wants to know if you can play.”

I sighed and got up. He was worse off than me, so I couldn’t leave him alone. He knew if his daddy came and got him and Marcus, their grandmother might disappear on em before the next time they came to see her.

We
stood on my porch and stared at the street. We struggled for stuff to do. Sometimes we squished ants out on the
sidewalk and watched other bugs carry them away, kinda like providin a bug Farmer’s Market. But we got tired of that. Without Marcus supervisin us, Tey’s grandmother wouldn’t let us set off fireworks. Marcus still wouldn’t put up with us, even though he tried to sneak his own tears by
pullin his shirt collar up over his eyes. We couldn’t play with the BB gun. We
wouldn’t
play kick ball with the other kids in the neighborhood. We only made each other cry.

“We can catch crayfish,” Tey said after a while.

I yawned. Nobody wanted us playin in the creek water, but the last couple days of July had been beat our ass. I didn’t care if I got polluted water on me or not. “Okay. Let’s
go.”

Tey got us some Mason jars, and we climbed over the short bridge on the other side of our street. The creek was more like a wide, really long gutter, and most of the time, I took for granted it was there, since there were a few houses down here we never visited. I didn’t know if it ran into a lake, or a river, or whatever. I guess it was clean water once-upon-a-time. I never bothered askin
when that was.

Tey moved some rocks around and swished his hand in the water. I sat on the concrete bank and put my head in my hands. He scooped the Mason jar down, cussed to himself when he didn’t catch nuthin, and dumped the water out. He scooped the Mason jar down several times. I couldn’t figure out what he was tryin to fish since I didn’t see no life in that water.

He screwed up his face
and held the jar to the sunlight.
“Unhhhh.”

I stood up but didn’t get in the water with him so Momma wouldn’t know where I’d been. He jiggled the jar for me. Somthin feathery swirled.

“What, you got some toilet paper?”

“Ew, girl!”

We looked at it again with our noses almost to the glass. It
was
paper, with a few larger chunks and thousands and thousands of smaller pieces spinnin round like
dust.

“Where’d it come from?” I said.

Tey kicked at the water. He pulled a large rock away from the bank. A sliver of newspaper tore apart and washed down the creek. We went down the bank and found more newspaper. Some
of it dried up on rocks and broken concrete in a shriveled mess. By the time we knew where we were, the creek had taken us past some apartment buildings and down a dirt alley
behind a street cut short by a fence in front of some railroad tracks. I never been down that way before, and neither had Tey. The houses were small, and some had been abandoned. Most of the backyards were junky, cept for one that had no grass at all. It was hard clay converted to a basketball court, with the baskets nailed to trees. The people watchin and playin were too busy to notice us passin
through.

Tall weeds almost hid the back of the house at the end of the street. The air conditioner had been ripped out, and we could see it lyin in the high grass. There was a carport, but no car. The grass was high under there too. The backdoor was open just a little, and there was a bunch of paper thrown across the porch. Some of it had blown into the yard, down into the creek. Tey pulled the
weeds out of his way and started towards the house. I yanked at his arm, and he smacked my hand.

“We gotta go back,” I said. “We can’t be trespassin.”

“I bet nobody live here.”

“Soooo?
It’s still trespassin.”

He grabbed me and pulled me into the yard. This time we wouldn’t have Marcus’s BB gun to protect us from snakes. Tey stuck his head in the hole where the air conditioner used to be. “I
bet this is how they robbed the house.”

“We can use the door,” I said, but Tey had already crawled in. He pulled me through, and we were in a kitchen. It reeked of old meat, the kind that gets forgotten at the back of the refrigerator. We pinched our noses with our shirts. Tey coughed, and I rubbed my eyes. Canisters and spices had been thrown on the floor. Our feet ground rice and pasta and
salt into newspaper clippings.

“Damn, it stinks,” I said.

Tey picked a piece of paper off the floor. Some of the type was smudged, but we made out an article on the closin of some gas station.

The table in the kitchen’d been flipped over, and it blocked our way into the dinin room. I brushed broken glass off the counter with my long sleeves, we hopped onto the counter, and jumped over the table.
The china cabinet had been smashed open, and
maybe a few plates were taken. We didn’t find any busted up on the floor. The smell got worse in the hallway. There were so many books and binders everywhere we couldn’t help but step on em. The basement door at the end of the hall was open. We peeked into the bedroom with more cutouts from newspapers and stacks of photo albums toppled over. Even without
somebody sackin the place, there was hardly any room in there to move around or sleep.

“I don’t think whoever robbed the place got anythin valuable,” Tey said through his shirt. “Do you wanna go in there?” It’s where the stink come from. I’d never seen a dead body before a mortician fixed it up nice, let alone reported I’d found one. I nodded.

Tey took one step into that den, started coughin,
and ran into the basement. I stood in the doorway and didn’t go no farther. He sat on the couch, head laid back, and his blood dirtied up the cushions. He didn’t have nuthin on on top, but his pants were old, like sumthin they wore in the 70s. He was big, but not fat, how old men can get a little wide with a round belly. The bookcase had been thrown over him, or it landed across his legs when the
robber pushed it outta the way. I figured he was already dead when that happened. He didn’t look like he tried to avoid it. From where I stood, I couldn’t tell if he’d been shot in the head or been hit, but he was readin the paper when he died, which I guess was the way it shoulda been. It was pinned against his legs and the bookcase. I couldn’t tell if his eyes were wide open or closed. He was
a dark man, and his face was just pudgy enough to keep the wrinkles from bein deep in his cheeks. He had big hands. His knuckles were thick, and the skin over them was rough.

“Keishaaa …”

Tey had turned the light on down in the basement. Scrapbooks and photo albums piled high to the ceilin. They were numbered by year. Tey sat on the dirty orange carpet flippin through a binder in his lap. I
took the closest to me – “Students 2005.” The man had pasted articles and pictures from
The Sentinel
and
Black Nashvillian.
There were pictures he’d taken from high schools. Track meets. Basketball games. Scores from all of TSU’s and Fisk’s wins. I recognized my middle-school auditorium. He had several shots of one of our choral nights. There was a National Merit Scholar list from
The Tennessean.
Four of the names were
highlighted in blue. I knew one of them, Tony Diggs. Ryan went to school with him. She talked to him every once in a while cuz he wasn’t too ghetto. Uncle David thought they’d make a good couple, if he let Ryan date.

“What you got?”

“Weddings. They
real
old,” Tey said. He held the book up for me. Lots of black and white photos with the bride and groom headin down the aisle.
Next to each one was the announcement for the weddin from the newspaper.

A couple of tears slipped down my cheeks. Sugar Daddy was upstairs. Tey stared at me all wide-eyed. If I started cryin again, he wouldn’t be able to control himself, neither. I crawled in between the stacks lookin for the 50s and 40s. I pulled books out, and cobwebs flew in my face. We both sneezed. Sugar Daddy had articles
for promotions and store openings and new partnerships and offices. Laundromats, and dress shops, and dime stores. Soda shops and diners. The clippings mentioned streets I never heard of before. There were photos of buildings I never seen.

“Keisha, I’m gettin sick.”

“Wait.”

Maybe he had a photo of my grandfather in front of his barber shop, maybe of my grandfather
in
his barber shop cuttin
hair. Or my grandfather, whichever one, as a postman. Or Grandmommy’s weddin. I turned up more dust and cobwebs. They burned my eyes. Me and Tey coughed and sneezed.