Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 15

Marketa Winthrop had snapped her gum and taken a drag on her Kool and said, "Hun, that's about ninety-eight percent of your problem right there." Then she'd sent Sheila off to the 7-Eleven for more donuts.

Ahead, just off the unnamed freeway, Whispering Pines Junior High looks to Sheila like the sort of building where secret plans are hatched to a.s.sa.s.sinate third world leaders. Beige trapezoids of white-stuccoed concrete, no windows, sit in the middle of parking lots, which sit in the middle of bulldozed fields, which back up against farms, which still have cattle grazing in the field. No pines can be seen, and nothing and no one here whispers about anything. When they'd come to register, Sheila and Briggs had been escorted on a tour by a helmet-haired woman who was advancing her career in public education by spouting phrases such as "child-centered" and "high tech, high touch, and high teach." The woman was well put together for a school person, but around her eyes she had applied her makeup in a way that indicated to Sheila that at some point she had lived at least a marginally wild life. Did she ever imagine, back on those nights, haunting the bar at the TGI Fridays, that she'd be spending the rest of her life escorting herds of mothers and their sullen offspring on tours of a public school? Her junior tour guide had been one of those student council treasurer types, with a little too much enthusiasm for Sheila's taste.

"This is where we eat lunch. It's really neat. That's the library. It's really neat." Everything had been "neat," not just all the cla.s.ses and teachers but also the girl's fingernails and hair and brand-name sweatshirt. She was the sort of girl that Sheila and her friends would have backed into a stall in the girls' bathroom and glowered at until she broke down in tears.

The former wild liver had described Whispering Pines as the Triple A+ Magnet School of the Future.

"Your children can take Aikido, Mountaineering, Reader's Theater, Cooking with Math. It's a rich and dynamic environment."

Did they have any regular cla.s.ses here, anything resembling literature or history? These were the sorts of questions that Sheila had wanted to ask, but the whole business of finding a place to live after the divorce and a school for her son had numbed her into silence. She had discovered that in the years she had been out of circulation, the leasing offices and schools had replaced all the people who used to answer questions-simple questions such as where's the laundry room and does this school have bus service-with well-groomed robots who only knew the words memorized from scripts. If you interrupted them, they had to go back to the beginning of the tape.

"Your child will absolutely love it here," Helmet Hair had said, and for the most part Briggs did love it, but then Briggs could make friends anywhere. He'd probably win the congeniality award on death row, which is the place these people would like her to believe he was headed.

She should have known this was the wrong school. Too much perkiness in the hallways. Too many straight white teeth in too many expensive outfits. Too many Jennifers and Heathers and Jacobs and Sams. She'd had to resign from the Whispering Pines PTA after one too many conversations with parents who'd already put down deposits on their childrens' Ivy League educations. What do you have planned for Briggs? they'd asked. "I was kind of hoping he'd impregnate your daughter Brittany and move into your house," she'd thought. Sometimes Sheila wants the b.u.mper sticker on her Neon to read "My C Student Kicked Your Honor Roll Student's Wimpy a.s.s."

Thank G.o.d Briggs was resilient. These Whispering Pines people could stamp their d.a.m.n cookie cutters on him all they wanted and Briggs would still be Briggs, at least that's what she hoped. But didn't resilience wear down? Wasn't it like the rustproofing on your car? A year of rain, fine, but five years and all warranties were off.

She eyes him there in the seat beside her. Head nodding gently to some tune in his head, oblivious, whistling-against fear perhaps, but it was hard to say with Briggs. He had never been the whistle in the dark type. All Briggs knew of the hard streets he'd learned from the make-believe videos on MTV. d.a.m.n cute, silly, silly boy. He really believed he was the life of the party, everybody's best friend. He didn't even have a clue as to how much trouble he was in.

The point of all of this, of course, was to raise them up and send them off into the world, into their own happy families and into fabulous careers of their choosing, but thinking of this only causes Sheila shudders. Frankly, she was barely employable herself. Twelve years of diapers, volunteering at school, cooking nutritious meals, and then, just like that, she'd been out on the street. And while child support looked good on paper, she wasn't about to rely on regular checks from a man who couldn't figure out to at least take a cat bath before leaving some wh.o.r.e's motel room.

Publisher's personal a.s.sistant: that seemed like a glamorous enough position. On the days Sheila feels great she even believes that she is the glue that holds her office together. Most days, however, she knows this is hubris-a good former English major word. For the most part Sheila gets paid for returning clogged nail polish and to shop around for humane poodle groomers.

Even so, despite spending her days with a woman who believed it was a good idea to wear cruise wear to the office everyday, Sheila knew that there were many worse jobs. Winthrop and Rolle left plenty of time to make another plan and for her, as of late, weekly visits to Whispering Pines Junior High. The only really bad part were the hourly trips to the 7-Eleven. It had occurred to her only last week that the Pakistani man behind the counter believed that she herself consumed the mountains of junk food she hauled out of there each day.

"Not for me," she'd shouted last week, waving her hand over an a.s.sortment of Ding Dongs and packaged nuts.

"Very good, very good," he'd said. At the time she'd thought it polite, now she believes it's the Pakistani version of "Whatever."

That could be Briggs, she thinks. My son, spending his life trapped behind the counter of the convenience store, bagging up junk food for lying binge eaters.

She pulls into the visitor's parking s.p.a.ce by the front entrance.

"Sorry I'm so bad," Briggs says.

Something in Sheila's chest does a somersault. She feels herself filling up with that sensation she remembers so well from when Briggs was an infant. She would get this way when someone, usually an older woman, would lean over the carriage and cluck over her adorable child.

"Yes, he is precious," she'd concur, despite his being covered at the time with chunky yellow bits of gummed Zwieback. She'd always found this emotion unnamable. What would you call it? It wasn't pride and it was something other than love. It was a kind of ecstasy, and mixed in with that the absolute conviction that if anyone so much as plucked a hair from her angel's head, she'd hunt the barbarian to the ends of the Earth and peel him alive with a dull vegetable knife.

The parking lot bustles with her fellow happy strivers, picking up their children for the orthodontist or delivering them from the pediatrician. Shiny, bright faces of the kind that Ralph pasted into ads suggesting "Your Child Can Be a Model!" Antiseptic and crisply pink, the children in those ads, you'd order them out of the catalog, you really would. Call in your Visa number and receive in the mail one perfect blank slate, ready to mold to order. Operators are standing by.

No, honey, she thinks, you're not bad.

Tomorrow Sheila will take some personal time and drive all over this G.o.d forsaken wilderness and find some sort of school that makes sense for her child. She will take the whole day, the rest of her life if she has to. Later today she will make sure the little stud in the seat beside her understands that he has gotten on her last good nerve, that he's not anywhere near as funny and cute as they both know that he is, and-on the off chance he thinks she's playing-that she has a list of junior service academies that will permanently erase that smirk right off his handsome brown face.

For now though she leans over to her son and hooks a fingernail beneath his chin. "Listen up, Al Capone," she says. "We're going in there and we're going with version two. Tell it so even I believe it's true."

FROM Song of the Water Saints.

BY NELLY ROSARIO.

INVASIONS * 1916.

SANTO DOMINGO, REPuBLICA DOMINICANA.

Graciela and Silvio stood hand in hand on El Malecon, sea breeze polishing their faces. Silvio hurled stones out to the waves and Graciela bunched up her skirt to search for more pebbles. Her knees were ashy and she wore her spongy hair in four knots. A rusty lard can filled with pigeon peas, label long worn from trips to the market, was by her feet. Silvio's straw hat was in Graciela's hands, and quickly, she turned to toss it to the water. The hat fluttered like a hungry seagull, then was lapped up by foam. Silvio's kiss pinned Graciela against the railing.

It was a hazy day. The hot kissing made Graciela squint against the silver light. Beyond her lashes, Silvio was a sepia prince.

-That yanqui over there's lookin' at us, he murmured into Graciela's mouth. He pulled out his hand from the rip in her skirt. Graciela turned to see a pink man standing a few yards away from them. She noticed that the yanqui wore a hat and a vest-he surely did not seem to be a Marine. When she was with Silvio, Graciela forgot to worry about anyone telling on her to Mai and Pai, much less panic over yanquis and their Marine boots sc.r.a.ping the cobble-stones of the Colonial Quarter.

Pa.s.sion burned stronger than fear. Graciela turned back to Silvio.

-Forget him. Her pelvis dug into his until she felt iron.

Graciela and Silvio were too lost in their tangle of tongues to care that a few yards away, the yanqui was glad for a brief break from the brutal sun that tormented his skin. With her tongue tracing Silvio's neck, Graciela couldn't care less that Theodore Roosevelt's "soft voice and big stick" on Latin America had dipped the yanqui the furthest south he had ever been from New York City. Silvio's hands crawled back into the rip in Graciela's skirt; she would not blush if she learned that the yanqui spying on them had already photographed the Marines stationed on her side of the island, who were there to "order and pacify," in all their debauchery; that dozens of her fellow Dominicans somberly populated the yanqui's photo negatives; and that the lush Dominican landscape had left marks on the legs of his tripod. Of no interest to a moaning Graciela were the picaresque postcard views that the yanqui planned on selling in New York and, he hoped, in France and Germany. And having always been poor and anonymous herself, Graciela would certainly not pity the yanqui because his still lifes, nature shots, images of battleships for the newspapers had not won him big money or recognition.

-Forget the G.o.dd.a.m.ned yanqui, I said. Graciela squeezed Silvio's arm when his lips broke suction with hers.

-He's comin' over here, Silvio said. He turned away from Graciela to hide his erection against the seawall. Graciela watched the man approach them. He had a slight limp. Up close, she could see that his skin was indeed pink and his hair was a deep shade of orange. Graciela had never seen a real yanqui up close. She smiled and folded her skirt so that the rip disappeared.

The man pulled a handkerchief from his vest pocket and wiped his neck. He cleared his throat and held out his right hand, first to Silvio, then to Graciela. His handshake swallowed up Graciela's wrist, but she shook just as hard. In cornhashed Spanish the man introduced himself: Peter West, he was.

Peter. Silvio. Graciela. They were all happy to meet each other. The man leaned against the seawall and pulled out a wad of pesos from a pocket in his outer jacket. His eyes never left Graciela and Silvio.

-So, are you with the Marines? Silvio asked in an octave lower than usual, and Graciela had to smile secretly because her sepia prince was not yet old enough to wear long pants.

The yanqui shook his head.

-No, no, he said with an air of importance. His thumb and index finger formed a circle around his right eye. Graciela looked over at Silvio. They wrinkled their noses. Then more cornhashed Spanish.

With the help of a Galician vendor, Peter West explained, he had acc.u.mulated an especially piquant series of photographs: brothel quadroons bathed in feathers, a Negro chambermaid naked to the waist, and, of course, he remembered with the silliest grin Graciela had ever seen, the drunken sailors with the sow. In fact, the sun was not so mean to him when he wore his hat and jacket. And fruit was sweet, wh.o.r.es were cheap.

Graciela reached for the pesos before Silvio did; after all, Peter West had thrust them in her direction when he finished his convoluted explanations. But he quickly pulled the pesos away, leaving Graciela's fingers splayed open.

With the promise of pesos, Graciela and Silvio found themselves in the Galician vendor's warehouse, where Peter West had staged many ribald acts among its sacks of rice. How happy they had been to help this yanqui-man push together the papier-mache trees, to roll out the starched canvas of cracked land and sky. Silvio straddled the tiger with its frozen growl while Graciela pried open the legs of a broken tripod to look in its middle. When West lit the lamps Graciela and Silvio squealed.

-Look, look how he brought the sun in here!

Silvio shaded his eyes.

-This yanqui-man, he is a crazy.

Graciela's whisper rippled through the warehouse when the fantasy soured. The pink hand tugged at her skirt and pointed briskly to Silvio's pants. They turned to each other as the same hand dangled pesos before them.

-You still want to go away with me, Mami, or no?

Silvio's whisper was hoa.r.s.e.

Graciela's shoulders dropped. She unlaced her hair and folded her blouse and skirt. In turn, Silvio unb.u.t.toned his mandarin shirt and untied the rope at his waist. Graciela folded her clothes along with his over a pile of cornhusks. In the dampness, they shivered while West kneaded their bodies as if molding stubborn clay.

They struggled to mimic his pouts and sleepy eyes. Instead of wrestling under heavy trees by Rio Ozama, or chewing cane in the fields near bateyes, or scratching each other's bellies in abandoned mills, or pressing up against the foot of a bridge, they were twisted about on a hard couch that stunk of old rags. Bewildered, they c.o.c.ked their necks for minutes at a time in a sun more barbarous than the one outside. Their bodies shone like waxed fruit, so West wiped them with white powder. Too light. So he used, instead, mud from the previous day's rain.

"Like this, you idiots."

Where his Spanish failed, West made monkey faces, which finally made Graciela t.i.tter-only to reveal gaps where her teeth had been knocked out in a fall from a cashew tree. She found it difficult to sweetly gaze up at the beams of the warehouse as he had instructed. Her eyes remained fixed on the camera.

Then Graciela and Silvio watched in complicit silence as West approached the couch and knelt in front of them. Graciela's leg p.r.i.c.kled with the heat of his ragged breathing. One by one, West's fingers wrapped around Silvio's growing p.e.n.i.s. He wedged the thumb of his other hand into the humid mound between Graciela's thighs. Neither moved while they watched his forehead glitter. And just as they could hear each other's own sucks of breath, they felt piercing slaps on their chins. West ran to the camera to capture the fire in their faces.

As promised, the yanqui-man tossed Silvio a flurry of pesos. Graciela rubbed caked mud from her arms while Silvio, still naked, wet his fingers to count the bills. Graciela wondered if he would hog up the money, then go off to porches and storefronts to resoak her name in mud. As she wiggled her toes into her sandals, cigar smoke made her bite the inside of her cheek.

-Me amur, que pase?

This time the knotted Spanish was in Graciela's hair, the grip on her shoulder moist. Before she could demand her own flurry of colored bills, a crash echoed throughout the warehouse. Gla.s.s and metal scattered across the floor. The photographer ran toward the crash and in his frenetic efforts to salvage the film plate did not bother to strangle Silvio.

Graciela and Silvio ran from the warehouse and hid behind barrels along the dock, suppressing adrenaline giggles.

-You liked it, she said.

Silvio made a fist, then pointed to the pockets of his shorts.

-Gimme my earn, you! Graciela hissed. She clutched at his pocket. A puff of hair flopped over her eye.

-You liked it too, he said.

They wrestled, the strange arousal they had felt in the warehouse pumping through them again.

-I'll hold it for when I come for you, Silvio said in between breaths.

Graciela had to trust Silvio. She tied up her hair into four knots and ran to the market, where she should have been, before Mai sent her brother for her. Silvio kept his head down to try to hide the recently-paid-man brightness in his eyes. He should have been home helping his father with the coal. Graciela and Silvio did not know they had just been immortalized.

Absentmindedly, Graciela plucked four pieces of yucca for barter from the vendor's selection. Silvio's narrow back had disappeared into the market crowd in a swagger that thickened the dread in Graciela's throat. She was about to hand the vendor a lard can's worth of pigeon peas, only to realize that she had left it at the warehouse.

-Devil's toying with my peas.

Graciela bit the inside of her cheek. She turned away and fled.

-Ladrona! the ever-suspicious vendor yelled into the crowd, but today, as usual, no one listened.

Away from the ma.s.s of vendors, fowl, and vegetables, Graciela's chest heaved under the stolen yucca and her hair unraveled again.

Once her stride slowed down, she banged her forehead three times with the heel of her hand. Sugar! She was supposed to buy sugar, not yucca, which already grew in her father's plot. Graciela sucked her teeth, almost tasting the mola.s.ses hanging heavy in the air from the smokestacks eclipsing the hills.

-Graciela, your mai looks for you.

A woman with the carriage of a swan and a bundle balanced on her head walked from the nearby stream. Her even teeth flashed a warning as she stepped onto the road.

-Mai's got eyes all over me.

-You be careful with those yanqui-men ahead, the swan woman responded with a finger in midair. Then she walked toward the whistling ahead, bare feet sure and steady.

Graciela shaded her eyes. Tall uniformed men in hats shaped like gumdrops sat on the roadside. They drank from canteens and spat as far onto the road as they could. Graciela squatted in the dense gra.s.s to see how the fearless swan woman would move safely past them. The yanqui-men's rifles and giant bodies confirmed stories that had already filtered into the city from the eastern mountains: suspected gavillero rebels gutted like Christmas piglets; women left spread-eagled right before their fathers and husbands; children with eardrums drilled by bullets. Graciela had folded these stories into the back of her memory when she snuck about the city outskirts with Silvio. The yanqui-man in the warehouse seemed frail now, his black box and clammy hands no match for the long rifles aimed at the swan woman.

"Run, you Negro wench!" The soldier's shout was high-pitched and was followed by a chorus of whistles.

A pop resounded. Through the blades of gra.s.s, Graciela could see the white bundle continue down the road in a steady path. The woman held her head high as if the bundle could stretch her above the hats. Another pop and Graciela saw the woman drop to the ground. The soldiers milled around the screaming and thrashing in the gra.s.s. Some already had their shirts pulled out of their pants.

Behind the soldiers, Graciela scrabbled away in the blades of gra.s.s. By the time the pack of men dispersed, they had become olive dots behind her. The yucca grated inside her blouse. Twigs and soil lodged in her nails. Half an hour later, with all four hair knots completely undone, Graciela was relieved to catch a glimpse of donkeys and their cargo, vendors with their vegetable carts, a rare Model T making crisscross patterns on the road.

The air was tight as she pulled herself up and ran past neighbors' homes. No children played outside. Graciela did see horses-many horses-tied to fenceposts along the way. She could not shake the urge to yawn and swell her lungs with air.

The main road dropped into a dustier, brushier path, leading to the circle of familiar thatched cabins. Two horses were tied to the tree by the fence. Graciela could not hear her mother yelling to her younger brother, Fausto, for coal, or the chickens clucking in the kitchen. Fausto was not sitting on the rickety chair making graters from the sides of cans, saying,-Mai was gonna send for you, stupid harlot.

Instead, from the kitchen came the clatter of tin. As Graciela moved closer, the stench of old rags flared her nostrils again. Inside, Mai knelt by a soldier whose fists entangled her hair and had undone the cloth rollers. Fausto, a statue in the corner. A man wearing his mustache in the handlebar style of the yanquis calmly asked Mai where her husband hid the pistols and why he was away in the hills. Mai's face was marble as she explained that her husband had no weapons, he was a G.o.d-fearing farmer, and there was her daughter at the door with yucca from his plot, see how dirty she was from working so hard with her beloved father, come Graciela, come bring the fruits of his sweat so these gentlemen can see how hard we work.

Graciela stepped forward with thin, yellow-meat yucca she was too ashamed to say her father had harvested. The interpreter shoved Graciela against the cold hearth and jammed his face against hers.

Must be cane rum coloring his bloodshot eyes, she thought, Devil toying with her peas again, trying to stick pins in her eyes to make her blink.

-Pai don't got pistols, he only got cane rum, Graciela said.

Her eyes still on the man, Graciela pointed to a shed outside. The man twisted the ends of his mustache. With the same fingers he clamped Graciela's nose and held it until there was blood, which he wiped against her blouse.

-Now you've got my aquiline nose, he said, then sucked the rest of her blood from his fingers. This overeager display of barbarism fueled in Graciela more anger than fear. Mai, Graciela, and Fausto watched as he helped the yanqui-men load their horses with bottles of cane rum. Before taking off, they rinsed their hands in the family's barrel of fresh rainwater.

The mandatory disarmament of the city and its outskirts left a trail of new stories that would find their way back to the eastern mountains. By 1917, the country fell prey to young American men relieved that their incompetence had landed them in the tropics instead of Europe, where fellow soldiers had been dropped into a bubbling World War. For the next eight years these men sparked a war, equipped with st.u.r.dy boots, uniforms, and rifles, against machetes, rusty revolvers, and sometimes bare feet. It was a battle between lion and ant. And when an ant pinched a paw, the lion's roar echoed: in Mexico, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic.

A pa.s.sionate creditor, Woodrow Wilson, demanded that the country's debt dollars be paid back in full while World War I shook across the ocean. At roughly 2330 north longitude, 3030 west lat.i.tude, Graciela and Silvio could not distinguish the taste of gunpowder from salt in the air of El Malecon.

Graciela's swollen nose stung as she peeled away the yucca's husk. Yellow and gray veins tunneled through the tuber's white flesh.

-Sugar! I send you for sugar, and you take the morning with you, Mai said, panic still twisting her voice.

For a moment Graciela wished that the soldiers had worked harder on Mai, had left her eyes swollen shut so she could not notice Graciela's unraveled hair.

Of course Graciela could never reveal that in the two hours she had been gone the seasalt was good against her skin, and so was Silvio, and that she was even able to earn some extra money . . .

Mai blared about hard-earned peas, and money for coal, money for shoes, money for sugar, about what green yanqui soldiers do to girls with skirts aflame, how lucky they all were to have been spared. Mai whacked her daughter on the back with a cooking spoon, squeezed the tender cartilage of her ears, wove her claws into Graciela's knotted hair. And Mai sobbed at only having her own flesh and blood with which to avenge humiliation. Excuses for the lack of peas, or money, or sugar on the table were postponed until the following day, when Pai returned from the bush with better crop and a heavier whipping hand.