Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (25 page)
Read Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin Online
Authors: Colum McCann
Where are my babies? One thing I know, I used to sugar them up way too much. Eighteen months old and they were already sucking on lollipops. That’s a bad grandmother, you ask me. They’re gonna have bad teeth. I’m gonna see them in heaven and they’re gonna be wearing braces.
First time I ever turned a trick I went and bought myself a supermarket cake. Big white one with frosting. I stuck my finger into it and licked. I could smell the man on my finger.
When I first sent Jazzlyn out, I bought her a supermarket cake too. Foodland special. Just for her, to make her feel better. It was half eaten by the time she came back. She stood there in the middle of the room, tears in her eyes: “You ate my goddamn cake, Tillie.”
—
Corrie was always talking that shit about getting her a castle and all. If I had a castle I’d let down the drawbridge and allow everyone to leave. I broke down at the funeral. I shoulda kept my ’posure, but I didn’t. The babies weren’t there. Why weren’t the girls there? I woulda killed to see them. That’s all I wanted to see. Someone said they were being looked after by social services, but someone else said that it’d be all right, they said the babies got a good babysitter.
That was always the hardest thing. Getting a babysitter so we could hit the stroll. Sometimes it was Jean and sometimes it was Mandy and sometimes Latisha, but the best of them all woulda been nobody, I know that.
—
I don’t know who God is but if I meet Him anytime soon I’m going to get Him in the corner until He tells me the truth.
I’m going to slap Him stupid and push Him around until He can’t run away. Until He’s looking up at me and then I’ll get Him to tell me why He done what He done to me and what He done to Corrie and why do all the good ones die and where is Jazzlyn now and why she ended up there and how He allowed me to do what I done to her.
He’s going to come along on His pretty white cloud with all His pretty little angels flapping their pretty white wings and I’m gonna out and say it formal: Why the fuck did you let me do it, God?
And He’s gonna drop His eyes and look to the ground and answer me. And if He says Jazz ain’t in heaven, if He says she didn’t make it through, He’s gonna get himself an ass- kicking. That’s what He’s gonna get.
—
I ain’t gonna whine either before or after I do it. Well, I guess there’d be no whining
after
anyway. If you think of the world without people it’s about the most perfect thing there ever is. It’s all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up. It’s like you got Aretha Franklin in your bedroom and she’s just giving it her all, she’s singing just for you, she’s on fire, this is a special request for Tillie H., and then all of a sudden out pops Barry Manilow from behind the curtains.
It weren’t my fault. Peaches from C- 49 came at me with a piece of lead pipe. She ended up in the infirmary with fifteen stitches across her back. People think I’m easy ’cause I’m cute.
If you don’t want it to rain, don’t fuck with the clouds over Tillie H. I just hit her one good whack. It weren’t my fault. I didn’t want to juice her up, that was all. I’m not into that. Simple fact is she needed an ass- kicking.
The boss matron was up in my face. She said I was gonna have to go upstate. She said: “We’re shipping you upstate for the last few months of your sentence.” I was like: “What the fuck?” She said: “You heard me, Henderson, no cursing in this office.” I said: “I’ll take it all off for you, boss, every stitch.” She shouted: “How dare you! Don’t insult me! That’s disgusting.” I said: “Please don’t send me upstate. I want to see my babies.” She said nothing and I got nervous and said something not too polite again. She said, “Get the hell out of here.”
I went around the side of her desk. I was just going to open my jumpsuit to pleasure her, but she hit the panic button. In came the screws. I didn’t mean to do what I done, I didn’t mean to get her in the face, I just lashed out with my foot. I knocked her front tooth out. I guess it don’t matter. I’m going upstate now for sure. I’m on the pony express.
The boss matron didn’t even beat the shit out of me. She lay there on the floor a moment and I swear she almost smiled, and then she said: “I’ve got something real nice for you, Henderson.” They put me in cuffs and they arraigned me, all formal and everything. They put me in the van and booked me and brought me to Queens court.
I pleaded guilty to assault and they gave me eighteen months more. That’s near two years all together with time served. The defense lawyer told me it was a good deal, I coulda gotten three, four, five years, even seven. He said, “Honey, take it.” I hate lawyers. He was the sort who walks around with a stick so far up his ass you could’ve waved a flag under his nose. Said he pleaded with the judge and all. He said to the judge: “It’s just one tragedy after another, Your Honor.”
I told him the only tragedy is that I don’t see my babies nowhere. How come my babies weren’t in the courtroom? That’s what I wanted to know. I shouted it out. “How come they ain’t here?”
I was hoping somebody would be there, that Lara girl or somebody, but there was nobody at all.
The judge, he was black this time, he must’ve gone to Harvard or something. I thought he woulda understood, but niggers can be worse on niggers sometimes. I said to him, “Your Honor, can you get me my babies? I just wanna see them once.” He shrugged and said the babies were in a good place. He never once looked me in the face. He said: “Describe to me exactly what happened.” And I said: “What happened is that I had a baby and then she had some babies of her own.” And he said, “No, no, no—with the assault.” And I said, “Oh, who the fuck cares a flying fuck about the fucking assault, god fucking damn it fuck me fuck you and fuck your wife.” Then my lawyer shut me up. The judge looked down over his glasses at me and sighed. He said something about Booker T. Washington, but I wasn’t listening too good. Finally, he said there was a specific request from a warden to put me in a penitentiary upstate. He said the word
penitentiary
like he was lording it over me. I said to him: “And fuck your parrot too, asshole.”
He snapped his gavel on the bench and that was that.
I tried to scratch their eyes out. They had to put me in restraint and bring me to the hospital wing. Then on the bus upstate they had to restrain me again. Even worse, they didn’t tell me they was going to move me from New York. I kept shouting out for the babies. Upstate woulda been okay, but Connecticut? I’m no country girl. They had a shrink meet me and then they gave me a yellow jumpsuit. You’d need a shrink for sure if you wanted to wear a yellow jumpsuit.
I was brought into an office and I told the shrink that I was real happy to be in suburban Connecticut. Real real happy. I said if she gave me a knife I’d show her just how happy. I’d trace it out on my wrist.
“Lock her up,” she said.
—
They give me pills. Orange ones. They watch them go down. Sometimes I can fake it and tuck one of them in the hole in the back of my teeth. Someday I’m going to take them all together like one great big delicious orange, and then I’ll reach up to the jolly pipe and say sayonara.
I don’t even know my cell mate’s name. She’s fat and wears green socks. I told her I’m gonna hang myself and all about the jolly pipe and she said, “Oh.” Then a few minutes later she said, “When?”
—
I guess that white woman, Lara, worked things out, or someone did, somehow, somewhere. I went down to the waiting room. The babies! The babies! The babies!
They were sitting there on the knee of a big black woman, long white gloves on her and a fancy red handbag, looking for all the world that she just woke up from the Lord’s bed.
Down I ran straight to the glass wall and stuck my hands in the bottom opening.
“Babies!” I said. “Little Jazzlyn! Janice!”
They didn’t know me. They were sitting on that woman’s lap, sucking their thumbs and looking over her shoulder. Like to broke my heart. They kept snuggling into her bosom, smiling. I kept saying, “Come to Grandma, come to Grandma, let me touch your hands.” That’s all you can do through the bottom of the glass—they got a few inches and you can touch someone’s hands. It’s cruel. I just wanted to hug on them. Still they wouldn’t budge—maybe it was the prison duds, I don’t know. The woman had a southern accent, but I knew her face from the projects, I seen her before. I always thought she was a square, used to stand in the elevator and turn away. She said she was rightly conflicted whether she should bring the babies in or not, but she heard I really wanted to see them and they were living in Poughkeepsie now with a nice house and a nice fence, and it wasn’t too far away. She’d been fostering them awhile now, she got them through the Bureau of Child Welfare, they had to spend a few days in a Seaman’s home or something like that, but now they were being well looked after, she told me, don’t you worry.
“Come to Grandma,” I said again.
Little Jazzlyn turned her face into the woman’s shoulder. Janice was sucking on her thumb. I noticed their necks were scrubbed clean. Their fingernails too were all perfect and round.
“Sorry,” she said, “I guess they’re just feeling shy.”
“They look good,” I said.
“They’re eating healthy.”
“Don’t feed them too much shit,” I said.
She looked at me a second from under her eyebrows, but she was cool, she was. She wasn’t about to say nothing about me cursing. I liked her for that. She wasn’t a stuck- up, she wasn’t making judgments.
We were silent awhile and then she said that the girls have got a nice room in a little house on a quiet street, much quieter than the projects, she painted the baseboards for them, they got wallpaper with umbrellas on it.
“What color?”
“Red,” she said.
“Good,” I said, because I didn’t want them having no pink parasols. “Come to Tillie and touch my hands,” I said again, but the babies never once got off her lap. I begged and begged but the more I begged, the more they turned towards her. I guess maybe the prison frightened them, the guards and all.
The woman gave a smile that pinched her face some and said it was time for them to get going. I wasn’t sure if I hated her or not. Sometimes my mind sways between good and bad. I wanted to lean across and smash the glass and grab her nappy hair, but then again, she was looking after my babies, they weren’t in some horrible orphanage, starving, and I could’ve kissed her for not giving them too many lollipops and rotting their teeth.
When the bell rang she held the babies across to kiss me, against the glass. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the smell of them coming in through the little slot at the bottom of the glass, so delicious. I poked my little finger through and little Janice touched it. It was like magic. I put my face against the glass again. They smelled like real babies, like powder and milk and all.
When I was walking back out the courtyard to the pen I felt like someone came and carved my heart out, then put it walking in front of me. That’s what I thought—there’s my heart going right out in front of me, all on its own, slick with blood.
I cried all night. I ain’t ashamed. I don’t want them working no stroll. Why did I do what I done to Jazzlyn? That’s the thing I’d like to know, Why did I do what I done?
What I hated the most: standing under the Deegan among all those splotches of pigeon shit on the ground. Just looking down and seeing them like they was my carpet. I flat- out hated that. I don’t want the babies to see that.
—
—
My cell mate ratted me out. Said she was worried about me. But I don’t need no prison- house shrink just to tell me that I ain’t gonna be alive if I leave my feet dangling in the air. They pay her for that shit? I missed my calling. I coulda been a millionaire.
Here comes Tillie Henderson with the shrink hat on. You been a bad mother, Tillie, and you’re a shitass grandmother. Your own mother was shitty too. Now give me a hundred bucks, thank you, very good, next in line please, no I don’t take checks, cash only, please.
You’re manic- depressive and you’re manic- depressive too and you, you’re definitely manic- depressive, girl. And you over there in the corner, you’re just plain fucking depressive.
I’d like to have a parasol the day I go. I’ll hang myself from the jolly pipes and look all pretty underneath.
I’ll do it for the girls. They don’t need no one like me. They don’t need to be out on the stroll. They’re better off this way.
Jolly pipe, here I come.
I’ll look like Mary Poppins swinging underneath.
They got these religious meetings take place in the Gatehouse. I went this morning. I was talking to the chaplain about Rumi and shit, but he’s like, “That’s not spiritual, that’s poetry.” Fuck God. Fuck Him. Fuck Him sideways and backwards and any which way. He ain’t coming for me. There ain’t no burning bushes and there ain’t no pillars of light. Don’t talk to me about light. It ain’t nothing more than a glow at the end of a street lamp.
Sorry, Corrie, but God is due His ass- kicking.
—
One of the last things I heard Jazz do, she screamed and dropped the keyring out the door of the paddy wagon. Clink it went on the ground and we saw Corrigan coming out to the street with a muscle in his step. He was red in the face. Screaming at the cops. Life was pretty good then. I’d have to say that’s one of the good moments—ain’t that strange? I remember it like yesterday, getting arrested.
There ain’t no such thing as getting home. That’s the law of living far as I can see. I bet they don’t have no Sherry- Netherlands in heaven. The Sherry- Never- lands.
I gave Jazzlyn a bath once. She was just a few weeks old. Skin shining. I looked at her and thought she gave birth to the word
beautiful.
I wrapped her in a towel and promised her she’d never go on the stroll.
