Everyday Psychokillers (10 page)

Perhaps I am able to imagine it this way because what I notice, in the kitchen, is that while my father is tired, he is not
frightened
. He's merely enduring it. He's endured the riot like he's enduring not having money, because he knows he'll finish school and pay his debt, and then there will be some money where before there was none.

What is it when you do not become frightened when human rage is raging all around, when parts of buildings, scraps of
architecture
, pieces of
history
, you know, are spewing through the air? How can it be
inevitable
that you will pull into your crappy driveway with a busted window and missing duffelbag and there's your blond-haired wife, sleeping in the living room and your brown-haired girl with a book at the formica table in the kitchen, listening to music turned very low, glowing from a one-speaker radio? Somehow you knew it all along.

If you look it up and read about it, with those particular riots, what they say is that it was about how Officer Luis Alvarez shot twenty-year-old Neville Johnson in an Overtown video arcade. There are several amazing facts about this incident, as the story goes. For one thing, Neville's nickname was Snake, and that's how I remember him, as Snake, no lie. He was a tall narrow man with a very youthful face, is how they describe him. He was wearing orthopedic shoes with the toes cut out because he'd just had corrective foot surgery in which (and here I'm practically quoting) his large toes, bent and crooked, were (for reasons that remain mysterious to me) broken and then reset. A kind of goofy Snake, then. He had what they called a passion for Pacman, if you can imagine such a thing, and was standing there at the game machine with his toes hanging out when Alvarez approached him. Alvarez saw what they call a bulge in his pocket.

“What's that?” Chief of Police Kenneth Harms said the officer asked this Snake.

“That's a gun,” Harms said the Snake told the officer. Then the Snake, who was, they point out at this point, black, made what they call a quick movement and then Alvarez, of the often Hispanic police force (which is exactly how they put it) shot him in the head.

After a while everything starts to sound like a euphemism.

On the first of three days of streetfighting that may or may not have done what's called escalate into rioting, several hundred Miami blacks set several police cruisers, as they say, ablaze, and, as they say, sprayed another with bullets, looted several stores and trapped two detectives inside the video arcade where the shooting, you know, occurred. Crowds milled around, burning police cars, touching off—these terms kill me—disturbances. More cars got set ablaze and buildings afire, crowds quickly spilling into streets.

A man tried to break into National Freezer Co., and the police told him twice to stop it, but he didn't, so they shot him. They rammed a car into Georgia Meats. And a thirteen-year-old boy was shot in the leg. And a guy got hit in the head with rocks. People took microwave ovens, pots and pans, cuts of steak, and a penny gumball machine.

They say Snake's friends say that Snake was not a troublemaker. Then an employee (of somewhere) says, “It would be different if he was the type of kid who robbed or stole, was loud or vulgar.” He says, this employee, black, scratching his beard, quote, “He was the kind of kid who would walk up to you and say ‘Yes, ma'am.'“

Unrest (read
vampires
) had abated by about ten p.m. but earlier, hastily-called backup units reported that they were what was called under heavy attack. Crowds hurled bottles at officers, flattened the tires of their cars, overturned one police car and set two, you know, afire. A van driven by an NBC television crew was struck by chunks of asphalt. “We were just driving and looking for some stuff to film,” said Ed Garcia, holding, we presume, his camera.

On the second day, Snake died. On the third day, rioting died down.

In the kitchen I tried to put myself into the riot. I gave myself an Afro, pulled with a rubber band into a puffball on the top of my head. I gave the rubber band two green plastic beads the size of marbles, translucent like marbles, which made me younger, a little kid basically. I had a gigantic mother, who lived with me in Miami, who'd pushed the brown couch over so its back was on the floor, and shoved it against the wall of our apartment that had windows. We sat on the back of the couch and leaned against the seat, the cushions flopping over our heads like mushroom caps. We hunched like mushrooms under there, my mother like an enormous soft mushroom with the couch cushion over her head. I looked up at her and listened to glass breaking above us, and watched it sprinkle like rain, like falling stars, like fairy dust.

Then we hear a pounding above the pounding of the riot, and my mother pulls my head into her lap, because someone is beating at the door. I can peek from the folds of her body just enough to see the glint of an axe split through the cheap wood, and then the whole door tumbles in and there he is, my giant father, like the woodsman to rescue us. I can see him, and he's diagonal. He's wearing a red bandana that disguises the blood on his forehead. He wipes the sweat from his brow on his white athletic wristbands which stand out against his skin like bandages, or like handcuffs. He spies us and dives for us, sliding through the sparkling slivers across the linoleum. It's like he's sliding through water. The slivers spring into the air and fan around him. Then he's with us, wrapping his arms around my mother, who still enfolds me, and the axe is raised above us like a flag. We huddle behind the couch.

My parents are whispering. The noise outside has politely receded enough that I can hear the hum and throb of their voices through all that flesh and all those cushions. Molecules in the flesh and the cushions have politely parted enough that I can feel wisps of their breath. They're measuring their breath. They're wise, I can tell from the humming sound of their low voices, the deep, patting, hovering thrumb. It's like when you're in bed late at night and you can hear them, walls away, clanking dinner dishes, chatting. They're making this whole other world that they know, they're making you hear that it's there. This whole certainty they have, you can hear.

“Girl,” says my father, and we shift positions so we're huddled all facing each other. “Girl, I think you know what you have to do.” It's dark out. I can see, just over the couch, out the window, the highway rushing by. The red-and-white blurry lights of cars and fire are moving so quickly they are one strand. It's like the highway has cut our apartment at the waist, like it has us lassoed.

“It's not right for you to be here, girl,” says my mother. They're both sad. They're welling up. They're being strong. Above the sofa, above the highway, the sky with its many stars forms a glittering stripe.

“This is no place for a fine girl like you,” my father says. He hands me his axe. “This is so you can cut through what you must cut through,” he says.

My mother finds within the folds of her body a bundled kerchief that smells of salt and honey. “This is to feed you, like you didn't know,” she says, nudging me with her elbow to make me smile. She binds the kerchief to the axe, shows me how to settle it onto my shoulder, and then the two of them guide me through the shattered glass and splintered door. With a wave, I'm down the dark hall and gone.

Meanwhile, in a relatively tidy part of the suburb of a city that's a suburb of the real city, in the blue-gray house with a grill in the driveway, and all the matching houses around it and dark new pavement that strings them together, Chris' gaunt father with his awful breathing and his sunken gray chest is sitting at the table with her mother, caving in. He's wearing brown trousers with no shirt. His undershirt is hanging over the back of the chair, sweated through, and you can see he's humiliated, just sitting there in his own kitchen on a stool. He's ashamed because he looks nothing like a man who wore an oxford to work for thirty years. He's the color of a cutworm, smoking.

His wife, only slightly less gaunt, stirs honey into her tea and conducts with the spoon in slow motion: Christine, you have phone restriction. You are restricted to your room or to that piano, your choice.

He's embarrassed because he's not even punishing his own kid. He's embarrassed by his sailor son, who is like a giant to him and is afraid to slap him on the back, who can't really look right at him and gets shifty after a couple minutes and heads down the hall after his sister, toward the three tiny bedrooms. Chris' father creeps back into his room in the garage. He can hear his wife vacuuming the white sunken living room. He's holding an aluminum bowl in his lap to catch the enormous globules of slow-moving mucus that he produces. Even when he's coughing, he can sense the vibrations and the high hum of the vacuum.

So Chris can't pick the piano, because her mother is in there vacuuming, and back in her room, her brother, who was a science-minded child, is not looking at photos with her, he's seeing what will fit into her vagina and what simply will not. For a while, he fixates on a narrow, blond-headed doll.

In retrospect I know what it means when she comes back to school as if bent, dull for months. After Christmas she never mentions her brother again, and I am so relieved she's not going on about how funny and good-looking he is that I forget to ask how it was. But she's lieing annoying anyway, snapping at me for any dumb thing, and I avoid her more. I'm starting to make friends with girls who I know are into all kinds of fucked-up things, girls who carve the initials of rock stars into their arms with razors, girls who think I'm really wise because I listen to them so carefully and am amazed.

I'm relieved when Chris doesn't care what we do for a 3-d project on the Wild West, doesn't care what costumes we wear for the Manifest Destiny Debate, whether we use magic markers or ketchup for blood when we do the part about wounded knees. Chris doesn't care if we stand together in line for lunch, if I told Julie before her, if Rick might kiss her after Wednesday night service when they can slip behind a car for a moment, in the parking lot, when his parents and her mother are working out the details in the phone tree, bathed on the church stoop in holy stained glass light. Slowly, we're merely project partners on everything because we're used to it, and we don't even try to get her mother to let us do anything. I start doing other things. At some point, we make it official: in American Business I type her a letter saying I guess she's figured out that I'm best friends with Julie now. She types one back that is gracious. It says she will always love me like a sister but some things are just not meant to be in the end, and, because everything happens for a reason, sometimes you have to make the best of it and move on.

 

 

I'm thinking of the joggers going in circles, their sneakers like little boats, this pretend travel, this machinelike activity where the point is to move rather than to go anywhere. Battery-run. It's a kind of death. These feet in shoes like coffins, like boats along the wet black roads.

I'm thinking of how people disappear, and how I wanted to tell CiCi about Rhonda because I wanted her to stay.

I'm thinking of the red vultures' heads, moving in and out of roadkill. And those girls cutting themselves. The parrots. I will break up with you first. I will puncture my own skin.

I'm thinking of Danny Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper. If you look into it, most towns have one, a ripper or a strangler or a slasher. This one was a nipple digger, collector of these organic buttons, these sightless eyes.

I'm thinking about how psychokillers are on a quest for another orifice. Penetrate this boundary. Penetrate that. X marks the spot. Bullseye. Fucking euphemisms.

Chief's Horse

After Sandpiper, my mother worked at a training stable breaking babies, which is what you call teaching a yearling to wear a saddle, wear a bridle, carry a jockey, and run. Then she fell, broke her arm, and took a job at another place owned by another guy named Joe. It was dumpy, a cheap twenty-stall boarding stable that didn't even identify itself as Western or English, because no one taught riding there. It was humiliating but it was the only place she could find to hire her with her arm.

Ted didn't get why she kept going barn to barn, getting jerked around and hurt. She said since she was a girl she'd been taken with it: the wild horse, the warrior horse, the white horse galloping through sand with the flowing mane, the winged horse, the magical unicorn, the thrashing mustang, all of them, any of them. Ted said it was all about gambling, was she blind or what? She said You're one to talk.

I got it, but I didn't know how to say it. Something that great, that rich and deep, something that reached all through history. And you can touch it, you communicate with it, you can get on it and ride away. I'm certain a place in him understood. I mean not the horses exactly, but in his own way he had it too, that same desire for something divine.

At this place, which we just called Joe's place, some horses hadn't left their stalls in years. You could tell which owners never came because usually only Joe's stepson cleaned any stalls for the boarders, and Joe's stepson hated Joe. I knew because I went to school with him. When Scott did stalls, mostly he scooped out a couple scoops and threw a little bedding on top, so the floors just rose and rose, like the mattresses under the princess and over the pea, but soggy with filth.

Scott's mother might have convinced Joe to hire someone to help out. I think she had occasional grand impulses toward mothering, although I could be making that part up, wishing in a way. Joe could have been less of an asshole than I thought, but this is much less likely. So three days a week Scott was supposed to clean the barn. My mother did the rest. Plus, she rode some of the people's horses for them, exercised them, taught them stuff so they'd be easier to sell.

Scott was fifteen, still in seventh grade, and despite the stalls, I liked him a lot. He was an extremely good-looking kid, with dark floppy hair and the wry, angular face that boys from across the tracks always have in movies marketed to girls. But he had a minor lisp and he couldn't read and he skipped school a lot, so he'd been left back. Joe didn't pay him, just said, “Do it or I'll kick your ass.”