Keeper of Dreams (57 page)

So the boys are crying and Sondra’s crying but all I know is, Tamika’s been under there too long, the whole time I was peeing and getting a drink and looking at the boys and checking her bed and getting this knife, she’s been under there alone in the dark scared to death and trying to hold her breath. She could hold her breath a long time, but who knows how much air she had in her when she found herself under there? It’s not like diving in when you can take a deep breath.

That was all going through my mind while I’m pulling off the sheet and the pad and I raise up the knife and I think, I can’t just jab down into this waterbed, I don’t know where Tamika is, I don’t want this knife to go right on through into my baby. So I press down on the corner and make sure she’s not under there and then I jab with the knife, and that mattress skin is tough, it just shies away under the knife, it’s not till the third time that I get that knife through and the water starts gushing out and I’m pulling the blade through the mattress, ripping through and now it cuts real smooth and Sondra isn’t crying anymore, she’s saying, “Where’s Tamika? Where’s Tamika?” Well I cut about a five-foot slice along my side of the waterbed and there’s water sloshing around, a real stink from the algae and the chemicals, it’s like the filthiest industrial pond and I’m thinking, My baby’s in that muck, I’ve got to get her out. So I plunge in my arms up to my neck, some of that stuff sloshes right into my mouth
and I spit it out but I can’t feel her under there and my first thought is, Thank the Lord, it was just a dream.

But I know it’s not a dream. I yell to Sondra, “Push her over here,” and Sondra knows what I’m talking about by now, she knows Tamika didn’t answer me when I called, so she doesn’t ask me what I’m talking about, she just gets on her side of the bed and pushes straight down onto the mattress and she cries out cause she felt Tamika under the water and Sondra says “I pushed her!” and right then I feel her bump up against my hands there in the dark water, and I grab on to her ankle and I start pulling and then with my left hand I find her arm and I pull now with both arms and she just comes sloshing right out, water all over everything, but I got my baby out of there.

No, I’m not thinking about how she got in there, all I’m thinking is, How long was she under? Is she breathing? And no, she wasn’t breathing. And I start yelling to Sondra, “Call 911!” And she grabs the phone and I hear her calling while I’m pressing on Tamika’s chest and water whooshes out of her mouth and then I go back and forth between pressing on her and blowing air into her little mouth and I’m still doing that when the paramedics come and pull me out of the way and they take over and get her on oxygen and you already heard them testify about how they saved her life.

Or partly saved her, anyway. There was brain damage from being without air so long, and so she doesn’t walk right and she has a hard time talking and she’s forgotten how to read but that’s still our little Tamika in there, we know she’s there, our little waterbaby, she’s just got to learn how to do all those things again.

As for what that social worker said, I didn’t confess to anything, but I did say what she said I said. Because she was explaining to us how our little girl wasn’t coming home till they could find out what really happened that night, and I knew she didn’t believe us because who would? Who could believe this story? How does a little girl who’s having dreams on a hot night suddenly get inside a waterbed mattress? She’s dreaming, she’s wishing she was in the water, and suddenly her wish comes true? If I hadn’t cut into that waterbed myself, if I hadn’t felt her fists pounding me from inside it, I would never have believed it. But Sondra saw that there wasn’t no cut in that mattress till the cut she saw me make, and she pushed
our baby over to me, she felt it, she knows what’s true, and we were the only ones there, and if I was making up some lie to tell you, don’t you think I’d make up a better one than this?

My lawyer, he as much as told me to make up something better. He says to me, You got to realize that it isn’t what’s true that matters, it’s what a jury can actually believe, and nobody’s going to believe what you’re telling me. And he starts telling me all these maybes, like Maybe you dropped a ring into the waterbed so you cut into it to try to get it out and maybe your daughter thought she could help you find it and when your back was turned she went into the water to look for the ring and you didn’t realize she was trapped under there until too late.

But I said to him, When I put my hand on God’s word and promise the Lord God that I’ll tell the truth, that’s what I’ll do, even if it means I lose my baby, even if it means I go to jail, because my family needs the Lord now more than ever, more than they need me, so I’m not going to spit in the eye of Jesus. I will tell it the way it happened. And as for that so-called confession, all I ever said was, “Lay it all on me. I’ll move out of the house so you’ll know Tamika will be safe, but you let her go home to her mama and her brothers.” I didn’t confess to nothing, but I took all their suspicions on myself so that when I left the house they’d let her go back home. And I kept my word, I haven’t come near the house this whole time, Sondra and I talk on the phone and I’ve talked to Tamika on the phone cause even though she doesn’t talk so good she can still hear me and I can tell her how much I love her. And no matter how this trial comes out, I know that my baby said to me, one time on the phone she said, “Thank you Daddy,” and I knew she was thanking me for waking up when she pounded on me and for getting her out of the water.

If I hadn’t believed in the impossible then I would never have cut into that waterbed. I would have stripped off the sheet and seen there was no break in the mattress and I would’ve known there’s no way she could be in there, and we would have searched the whole house and yard for Tamika and called the cops and woke the neighbors and after a while somebody would have realized there was some big lump inside the waterbed and if we’d got one of the cops to cut into the mattress or a paramedic or even a neighbor, with a bunch of witnesses, then I wouldn’t be
on trial, it’d just be some story in
Weekly World News
and I wouldn’t be trying to make some jury believe the impossible.

But my baby would be dead.

So I’m glad I’m here and I’m glad I’m on trial, because I’d rather go to jail and never see my baby again, as long as I know she’s alive and she’s with her mama and her brothers and she’s got a chance to be herself again. But I’d rather be with her. My boys need me, and she needs me. I’m a good father to my family, I never raised a hand against them, I work hard and I make a fair living. Put me in jail and that’s all gone, Sondra has to go to work or live off welfare or what her family and my family can spare. But whatever we go through, that’s fine, we thank Jesus all the same, because our baby’s alive.

And maybe I do deserve to go to jail. Cause I’m not the one who put her in the water, but I am the one who pulled her out too late.

This story was born in the process of inventing
Magic Street
. The premise of the novel is that magic erupts into the world in the middle of Baldwin Hills, an upper-middle-class black neighborhood in Los Angeles. But what form would such an eruption take? How would people know that something terrible was loose among them?

Wishes, I thought. Their wishes come true, but in horrible ways that distort the lives of everyone they love.

Having slept on a waterbed for many years, I was aware of the way that early waterbeds could get a wave action going. When you’re lying on the surface of something that ripples and undulates like water, you’re bound to imagine a whole aquarium of aquatic life underneath you. What if you felt something bump into you? Something large under the water, in a place where it couldn’t possibly be? That idea had been in my mind for years; now, thinking of wishes gone awry, I was able to put that old nasty thought to good use. What if the large swimmer in your waterbed was your own child, the one who loves to swim, whose secret wish is to swim like a fish inside . . . the nearest body of water large enough to hold you?

Horrible enough, but then the aftermath: No one would believe you.

After I wrote this first-person account, I had no idea how to use it in
the novel. Would I interrupt the book with first-person stories like this? For a couple of years I had myself persuaded that I’d go that route. But another part of me recognized this immediately as a retreat from the novel I
should
write. For every time the narrative flow was interrupted by these first-person tales, the action of the novel would stop cold. The readers would quickly realize that these first-person stories wouldn’t go anywhere. They were there just to show how cool and arty the author is.

So instead, when I wrote
Magic Street
I referred to the incidents in this story and used these people as characters, but I did not use the actual story—I didn’t stop the forward movement of the third-person narrative of
Magic Street
.

It’s easy for an author to subvert his own work by showing off his own dazzling licks as a writer. But when you’re writing fiction, there’s some serious work going on—and it’s not just the writer doing it. When I write the words of my narrative, each reader is using them as a guide to create, in his own mind, the sights and sounds, the causes and effects, the characters and their feelings and pasts. I’m guiding the reader into a small village of characters with more or less relationship with the world the reader already knows, and if I’m doing a good job, the reader is able to collaborate with me easily in creating this sequence of memories.

So why should I interrupt the reader in this good work, which both of us are enjoying, and require the reader to drop that thread and pick up a completely new one, in a different voice and point of view, when I could accomplish the same task without all the distraction? When I make the reader turn away from the story and characters and notice
me
and the tricks
I’m
doing, then what am I? I’m like a movie director who is constantly distracting the audience with odd camera angles or weird color effects, just to prove what an artiste I am. I’m like a playwright who jumps up on the stage after a particularly funny or moving scene and shouts, “Don’t look at those actors, look at
me
. I’m the one who wrote that scene you liked so well! Clap for
meeeeeeeee
!”

In other words, it’s a pitiful kind of neediness that leads a writer to be more interested in impressing his readers than in allowing them to fully involve themselves in the construction of the vicarious memories I promised to give them. It’s easy and cheap to dazzle the reader; it’s hard work
to stay invisible and guide the reader seamlessly through the experience of the tale.

Which is not to say that I never succumb to the temptation. Particularly in short stories, where the time invested in the tale is so much less, I’m as likely as anyone to play a few games and have some fun.

But most of the time, I’m quite serious about what I write, and so, like a good playwright or director, I stay off the stage, I stay out of the shot, I let the readers go about the business of living the vicarious lives I’ve created for them.

That’s why this story still existed as a separate entity. When
Galaxy Online
asked for a story, this is one that was available, because its words would never appear in the pages of
Magic Street
. I thought this was a very good story—but it didn’t belong in what I wanted to be an even better book.

Mack Street was not born. He was, in the words of the immortal bard, “from the womb untimely ripped.”

Unfortunately, there was no evil Macbeth that needed slaying by someone who was not “of woman born.” Still, Mack Street always knew that his life had a purpose—perhaps a great one, perhaps a small one, but a purpose all the same. How else could he explain the fact that he was alive at all?

He did not know why his mother decided to abort him, or why she waited so long. Was the abortion a spiteful vengeance when his father left her only a few months before their baby’s due date? Was she merely indecisive, and it took her seven months to make up her mind to get rid of the kid?

And why, when she realized the appalling fact that he was breathing, perhaps even crying those weak mews of a premature baby, did she take him all the way to Baldwin Park, far from the nearest path, and cover him with leaves so that it would take a miracle for someone to find him and keep him alive?

Still, he
was
found, by a couple of boys in search of a safe place to smoke their first joints. Just before they would have discovered that they had been cheated, and the “weed” was, in fact, merely a weed, a common and slightly nauseating one at that, the smaller boy saw the pile of leaves move, and he pulled them away to reveal a naked baby that looked too small to be real.

The bigger boy insisted that it
wasn’t
real, or at least wasn’t human. “Everybody knows that baby coyotes look human,” he said.

“You telling me this one gone grow up to be a niggah coyote?” said the smaller boy.

“Come on,” said the bigger boy. “Do the smoke first, then we tell somebody about the baby.”

“If it do us like it do my big brother, we ain’t gone tell nobody nothing for about half a day. This a tiny baby, he gonna die.”

“Little dick like that, he ain’t no niggah,” said the bigger boy, but already he was putting the supposed weed back in the Ziploc bag. “You want to take him somewhere, you do it without old Raymo, I don’t want nobody asking me questions when I got a bag of weed on me.”