Leaving: A Novel (15 page)

She pushed it out next to the bed and opened it. Inside were photographs, originals for the charcoal sketches, a letter, and other receipts. The letter had a painting on it of two people dancing and inside, written in long, round, cursive:

Greensboro, Alabama, 1967

Sorry I didn’t write sooner but I’m real busy. Isn’t it funny that so much time passes and seems like a long time and like a short time at the same time. Anyway, I hope you’re doing well and say hi to Ruby and Corbet and little Lida for me. We just saw the movie
The Graduate.
I really liked it. It’s exactly how I feel: lost. It would have been nicer to see it with you. But anyway, it’s actually nicer now, don’t you think? I kind of only remember the good stuff. Charles says Hi too. I know you won’t believe it, but we really did not plan this. We’re not always thinking about it. I don’t know if that makes sense. Anyway, I hope you’re doing well. Good luck

—
Alexandra

Lida dumped the box on the ground and sifted through the photographs. She found a picture of Easton and Ruby when they were much younger, standing by a field, a picture from South Carolina. She looked at Easton closely. He was dressed nicely in a Buster Brown striped shirt and a cap; his hands were at his sides—not in his pockets, which might have meant something. He was looking straight ahead. He smiled: a normal smile.

There were not hundreds of pictures of her, like an obsessed man might have. There weren’t any of her, really, except one where she was a baby in his arms and Ruby and Corbet stood by their fishing poles at the pier in San Leandro. There were not nude pictures or pictures with women’s faces crossed out. There was only one picture with a woman, a White woman, from a long time ago. Easton wore grease-covered blue overalls, and the woman was smiling, like he’d never said a mean word to her in his life.

Lida put down the photo and stood. She looked around the room, at the bulbous red candleholder covered in a fishnet pattern, the poster of John Coltrane in lingering smoke, the wooden stereo speakers—looked for something else, for anything that revealed he might have done to another woman what he’d done to her; that it wasn’t because of her that he’d done it.

But she saw nothing. Nothing out of place, nothing unusual.

She stepped up onto the bed and stood in its sinking center. She bent her knees and began to bounce. She bounced up and down. She jumped harder and harder until she started to get a little air.

“Rabbit,” she whispered. She had her arms out at her sides, and with every jump, she said the word louder, like she was calling for someone hidden in the room. “Rabbit. Rabbit. Rabbit!” she yelled and filled the whole house with her voice. She bent her legs all the way down like she was going to jump up to the ceiling, but instead, with a second thought, she absorbed all the downward momentum into her body and stopped completely, as if she heard something on the staircase. She waited, spooked, the hairs on her arms raised, like a frightened porcupine. But she heard nothing more. She sat down, got off the bed, and walked quietly out of the room.

Downstairs, she put on her dress and jacket. She picked up the suitcase she had packed and left.

SANTA RITA JAIL

EVERY MAN AND
woman needs respect—to feel valuable—and we learn how to get that feeling from our parents and our culture and our peers. When we were babies, if we did something “good,” we got a kiss or some food, some kind of safety. And when your friends come up to you and say, Man you are a tight rapper, or man you are smart, then you keep doing what you’re doing because you feel respected. We get that food or that kiss or that safety and we feel righteous, we feel like we’re getting what we deserve.

Now, each culture’s got its own standards for respect, rules that kids learn from their parents and peers that get passed on down. If you do something that the family approves of, you feel good and you do it again. But the knowledge of what your culture thinks of as good can be eliminated.

For fifteen generations your African culture was squeezed out of you; each slave child knew less about getting respect as a free man and learned more about the culture of the slave. During those four hundred years of slavery, there was only one lesson to learn: that we were inferior to the White race. Respect would come in the form of how strong you were, how much work you could do for him, how obedient you were, how much you could get at auction, how many children you could give the master, how attractive you could be to him, or how much you fought against him. It’s for him or against him, but it’s always about him. There’s no respect on our own terms.

Today I read to you from
American Negro Slavery:

Those on the block often times praised their own strength and talents, for it was a matter of pride to fetch high prices. On the other hand if a slave should bear a grudge against his seller, or should hope to be bought by someone who would expect but light service, he might pretend a disability though he had it not.

You don’t believe me. You say you never would have ingested that poison pill of White supremacy. But what if you were a child born into slavery, if you’d grown up as a slave, your father and your grandfather and your great-grandfather were slaves on this same plantation? And you knew the rules, and when you played by the rules, life was as good as it ever got, and when you broke them, it was bad. That was the lesson we were taught every day when we woke up in the morning, when we couldn’t speak “properly,” when our parents couldn’t read or write, when we didn’t get rich and didn’t wear fancy clothes, when our homes were run-down, and even the smallest White child could tell our parents to pee in their pants. And learning this one lesson helped us survive, helped us keep our fingers from getting chopped off, our backs lashed, and our minds from making us crazy. We couldn’t earn respect or sustenance by being educated or running a business or writing books, so we took to the ways of earning respect that were offered us if we wished to survive, the way a man will become a cannibal if there’s nothing else to eat.

CHAPTER 8

OCTOBER 1993   •   RUBY 55, LOVE 14

LOVE CAME FROM
upstairs, where Li’l Pit was sleeping for the first time. Ruby drank from a blue ceramic cup of cranberry tea and sat in Corbet’s old rocker. She shook her head.

“Near the end of the month, there ain’t nothin else coming in to give him.” She pulled a black crochet afghan with colored flowers over her knees, one that she’d made for Lida when she was a baby. “All we got is beans and rice as it is.”

“I can get money,” Love said.

“That’s what’s bothering me.”

“I mean a job.”

Ruby nodded her head and rocked slowly with her hands around the steaming cup of tea. “You got a job in mind?”

“Mmm-hm.” Love opened up the denim notebook with the insects in it.

“Now, if we was back in South Carolina, I’d just say, go on out and catch us some more fish.” She laughed. Love turned the plastic page and straightened the Apollo butterfly.

“There was a red path road that went off to the Edisto River, where Ronal, your granpapa, use to take Love E. And you could catch enough fish for two weeks, that is before the pesticides kill everything. That’s what he say. That’s what Ronal print in the paper.” She stopped and looked into her tea. Love waited for her to continue, but when she began again, she seemed to have lost her train of thought.

“When Love E was ’bout your age, he took a razor and cut off the tail of a dead rattler and he use to take that everywhere, say it’s his lucky rabbit’s foot. And it came true too. One day he was walkin home from town and there, layin straight across the path, sleepin, was another rattler. He could a gone ’round in the cornfield, I spose, but that wasn’t him. Ronal taught him there ain’t no way round a problem but straight head-on. So he take his lucky rattle out a his pocket and start rattlin it. Well, the snake wake up and start slippin toward him, least that’s how he tole it. It must a been a girl rattle he had, ’cause it start comin right toward him, but he kept on a-rattlin his rattle and the snake kept a-comin on to him. That stupid bline ole snake come right on up to Love E’s foot and blam, he kick it in its head, dead, like that. Least that’s how he tole it. Had himself two lucky rattles then.”

She took a sip of her tea and smiled.

“How much you think these bugs worth?” Love held up the whole folder.

“You’re not to go sellin those bugs.”

“They’re mine.”

“I’ll find a way to feed that boy. Don’t go sellin those bugs. They yours. You just a chile, and it ain’t your burden. What you want me to make you two for Halloween?”

“I’m too old for that shit now.” Last year at the home, he’d been a vampire.

“Don’t you swear in this house, you hear?”

The two front glass windowpanes exploded, pulling the curtains down with them. At first it wasn’t clear what had happened, only that they found themselves on the floor. Then a second gunshot cracked the air and scattered painted macaroni off the heart picture on the back wall above the kitchen entrance.

“Ronal,” Ruby screamed. “No! Ronal!”

Love lay flat, the denim notebook over his head, face-to-face with Ruby. She had spilled her tea on the rug. Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t seem to be looking at him.

“ESO, Ace Trey!” came a shout from the street. Two more gunshots shattered the upstairs windows. Love closed his eyes, his chest bone pressing hard into the floor with every breath. He knew how this worked. He’d seen it in the movies and on TV. Soon there would be other cars, and they’d enter the house, shoot them in the back of the head with Uzis, spray-paint the room with their tags. He waited for the footsteps on the porch. There was silence. Then the car peeled out and roared up Cranston.

They waited on their stomachs for a moment. A few loose shards of glass fell to the floor. Ruby put her hand on Love’s shoulder, her eyes streaming with tears. She pulled herself up to her knees and looked at the shattered bay windows. She shook her head. The night air blew in, and they shivered.

Li’l Pit walked softly down the stairs holding on to the wooden railing, his head shaved clean from the lice cure. He stopped halfway and stood there silently in his new white underwear.

*   *   *

THE NEXT DAY,
Love went to the liquor store on the corner. Freight spoke softly to him, putting an arm around his shoulders. “I’m not about hurting people.”

They were at the back of the store, behind a row of tomato-sauce jars on perforated white particleboard shelves. The convex mirror on the ceiling showed their reflection to the store clerk up front, a thin, older man with a gray beard. He looked up into the mirror, caught Love’s eye, and quickly turned back to watching the World Series on the portable TV hanging by the cigarette rack.

“You don’t have to kill no one,” Freight added.

Curse in his wheelchair and stick boy hung around just outside the door of the white stucco building, both wearing the same black sweatshirt and blue jeans.

“But you’ve got to understand, I can’t take any chances. You’ve got to earn our trust. Then we’re down for each other. First you got to tell me what’s up with these punks jackin up the ’hood.”

Love shrugged.

“Do you see my lips moving?” Freight backhanded Love in the chest and sent him stumbling a few steps. Then he ran over and caught him delicately like a dropped fruit. “Don’t do me like that, homie. That hurts my heart.” He put his arm back around Love’s shoulders. “You just have to show me that you trust me. I don’t want to see you hurt yourself. You want me to protect you, don’t you? Everyone needs to be taken care of.” He helped Love stand and brush off his pants. “Tell me who it was. I’ll let you pull the trigger.”

Love didn’t answer, and Freight turned back to face him.

“You’re hurting me, blood.” Freight pushed him with both hands into shelves of cereal. Love fell down to the floor and crushed a green box of Apple Jacks. “I don’t like what you’re making me do.”

“Hey,” the clerk yelled, then looked down and talked more softly. “Come on, FT, that costs us.” Freight didn’t turn his head or answer the clerk. He was in a locked stare with Love. Curse wheeled himself inside, casually took a look, then wheeled out again.

Love didn’t speak but he didn’t look away either.

“You got
dokyou,
” Freight said to Love. “You don’t let no one push you around. That’s something to trust.” Freight reached his hand into his sweatshirt pocket and dug around. Love scanned the panel of utensils hanging to his right—can openers, plastic spaghetti strainers—but saw nothing sharp enough to defend himself with.

Freight pulled out a screwdriver. He threw it on Love’s stomach.

“I got an old Toyota in Berkeley near the flea market. Bring it back to me here. No one else will ever touch you again.”

Love held the screwdriver in his hand, point up. He stood and kicked the cereal to the side.

“What color is it?” he asked.

“How do I know what fucking color it is? Any color you want.”

Love waited for Freight to move out of his way. Instead, Freight made himself bigger, put his hands on his hips so the remaining space was filled by his elbows, boxing Love in by the cereal shelves. “What are you waiting for, blood?”

Love didn’t say anything. He knew this game. He walked straight into Freight’s left arm, then came the slap on the back of his head. Love’s eyes teared up, but he continued to walk out the door without looking at Curse or the stick boy.

He crossed Cranston and walked fast, breathing hard through his nose, his jaw clenched. He purposely walked in the path of every oncoming pedestrian. He stared straight forward and narrowed his eyes. Men and women in business suits and some kids coming home from school all walked around him without meeting his eyes. The only one who looked at him was a young man in a purple and blue tie-dye, his ponytail jumping from side to side. He smiled at Love and mumbled something about a nice day.

“What the fuck you looking at, dog!” Love yelled and held the screwdriver up to the man’s face.