Leaving: A Novel (52 page)

“Just calm down, dog.”

Joyce walked up to Love’s side and smiled at Li’l Pit, who looked back and forth between the two of them. They stood next to each other, both of them facing him like they’d decided already, together.

He ran down the bus stairs and passed them, across the concrete platform and back toward the lobby. Love chased him and caught him just outside the front doors of the terminal.

“Let go of me.” Li’l Pit squirmed in his brother’s arms.

“Listen. Just listen to me.”

“We suppose to be on it. We suppose to be leaving.”

“I know. We’re still gonna go to Norma. We’re still gonna go. We’re just gonna stay here a few more days, until Saturday. We’ll have a good time, like a vacation before we start over.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Just think about it. We’re gonna have all that good food and maybe earn some money and we’ll have everything so we can show up in South Carolina in style.”

“You just want to be with that bitch ho.”

“So what if I do? That ain’t nothin to you. We still gonna hang together. We still brothers.”

“But we suppose to be a team. Not a three-people.”

“We is a team, bro. But a team player got to let his man have his bitches sometimes, right?” He shook Li’l Pit, who wasn’t struggling anymore. “Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Awright then.”

Joyce came out of the terminal and stopped at a distance. She watched Love with his arms around his little brother and smiled. Li’l Pit saw her and barked loudly: “Rah, rah!”

He pulled free of Love and ran up the block. Love felt tired out already and just watched him go. He’d turn back any minute when he realized Love wasn’t chasing him. Joyce came up and stood by his side.

“The cab is waiting,” she said.

Love watched Li’l Pit run. He didn’t stop. He crossed the street and then turned up another block.

“I’ve got to wait for him here,” Love said.

“Let’s follow in the cab.” They got in and told the driver to turn where they’d seen Li’l Pit run.

The street was full of motels with unlit neon signs, each one rundown in its own fashion, parts of the names missing, some with boarded-up windows. There were a few people on the sidewalk, but Love didn’t see his brother. Knowing Li’l Pit, he’d circle back to the station again.

They drove around the block but didn’t see him outside the terminal either.

“Shit,” Love yelled.

“Don’t worry,” Joyce said. “He’s just going to wait here for you. He can’t go anywhere without the tickets. Maybe he’s on his way to my house already.”

“I’ve got to wait,” Love said.

The bus for Atlanta pulled out of the alley behind the station and turned.

“Well, now he’s got nowhere to go,” Joyce said. “Why don’t you come back to my place and wait for him.”

Love opened the door and got out of the cab. “We’ll meet you there. You should just go on. I’m gonna wait. There’s nothing else to do.”

The cabdriver sighed. “You’re racking up your time. You sure you got enough money?” he asked.

Love closed the door, and Joyce told the cabdriver to leave. Love saw her watching through the back window until they turned the corner.

Love waited by the entrance, scanning the street and crowds of people. He stood to the side of a newsstand next to a man who sat on the ground with a sign that read:
SPARE CHANGE FOR BEER, GOD BLESS AND HAVE A SAFE JOURNEY.

“Have you seen a kid with a red sweater on?”

“There a lot of people with red sweaters on around here.” The man lifted his cup.

“You a grown man. You ought to work for a living. At least do something.”

“Well, I seen somebody like you’re talking about.”

“Never mind.” Love looked back out to the street, where a convention of Japanese men dressed in suits with sunflower ties got off a city bus, and each in their turn thanked the bus driver by tipping his cowboy hat. He waited out in front of the terminal. An old woman carried her small black dog in a white cage, and it barked incessantly. She admonished it just as incessantly in a soft voice: “That’s not the way I taught you to act in public, now is it? No, that’s not how we say thank you. If you don’t behave yourself, Mommy’s going to give you a tranquilizer.” One man at the newsstand looked at a
Playboy
magazine by putting it inside a
Time
magazine, and the lady selling the magazines saw him do it but didn’t say anything to him.

By four o’clock, Li’l Pit still hadn’t shown up. Love did one last check. He ran through the terminal looking for his brother, then out to the front of the station. When he didn’t see him, he began to walk up the block. By the time he reached the cemetery, he was running, and the street blurred under him as he passed the statue of a bronze cowboy herding in his cattle.

*   *   *

LOVE WAITED FOR
Li’l Pit at Joyce’s house that night. He made spaghetti, the meal he’d always cooked at Los Aspirantes. They sat around the big table eating in silence, except for when LaTanya couldn’t stand it anymore and began to slurp her food and giggle. Love knew Li’l Pit could handle himself on the streets of Oakland, but these were different, unknown streets, and now it was dark outside.

“I should have never taken him,” he said.

“It’s not your fault he ran away,” Joyce said.

“It’s my fault we even had to come out here.”

They finished and Joyce convinced LaTanya to do the dishes while she and Love went into the living room. They sat at either end of the couch in silence, the room lit by the crystal chandelier above. Joyce took off her shoes and folded her feet under her legs.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “He probably went back to the station to sleep.”

“I’m not worried.”

“He might even be right outside in the bushes here.”

Love turned to look out the giant, arching window but saw only his reflection against the darkness outside.

“I know what will help,” Joyce said. She went to the piano and sat down on the bench. “Do you know ‘Moonlight Sonata’?” she asked. He shook his head. Her naked foot pressed on one of the brass pedals, and she placed her hands gently on the keys. Straightening her back, she leaned her body forward into the first notes.

Love sat on the couch and watched her concentrate, her eyes focused at a spot just above the black surface of the piano. He could see her fingers gracefully caressing each key, sustaining the sweet, sad notes into the lulling repetition. The music reverberated off the wooden floor, into the high spaces of the living room and back around him. The deep, longing melody surrounded him and filled him with an ache for Li’l Pit. He knew something had changed, that Li’l Pit hadn’t even looked to see if he was following. And now he was a thousand miles from home and from where he was supposed to end up. Love had an intense sense of being alone, of always having been on his own, even when he was at Ruby’s, or at Los Aspirantes, or in Ace Trey. Even earlier, with his mother. The strongest memory he had of her was of being next to her but knowing that her mind was somewhere else.

The music rose suddenly in volume, and Love watched Joyce’s fingers flowing across the keys, her hands moving together in an unconscious complexity that seemed to him a kind of magical power. It spread into her face as she anticipated the melody with a slight opening and closing of her eyes; it undulated through her chest and her strong arms. She hit the final notes and the room echoed with the ominous chords. As though a spirit were slowly draining from her, she stayed at the bench with her hands resting on the keys.

Love didn’t speak.

“I had lessons since I was six,” she said. “But I started seriously again in junior high, after we came back from France and I saw this one pianist that was really good.”

A sort of anxiety was building inside Love, something he couldn’t name, though he knew how to make it into anger. But that wasn’t what he wanted to feel. He shook his head and stood up but felt unsure where he wanted to go.

“In France?” he said.

“Yeah, you know, in Europe.”

“I know where France is. I’m not stupid.” He turned away.

“I didn’t say you were. Where are you going?”

He walked to the front door and stopped, his back still to her. She got up and followed him, put her hand out to touch his back.

“What’s wrong?”

LaTanya came in from the kitchen, and to avoid facing her, he opened the door and stepped out. He stood there with his back to them, looking out into the quiet, dark suburban street, feeling utterly separate from everyone and everything.

“What’s the matter with him?” LaTanya asked.

“Shut up.” Joyce walked back to the hallway.

“Come see my room,” she called to him. He didn’t move.

“Come on. I want to show you my room.”

“What am I going to do?” LaTanya asked.

Joyce stared at her hard, and she walked back into the kitchen. When the kitchen door shut, Love turned. Joyce was already down the bright hallway. She smiled at him and waved him in with her fingers, like a hypnotist drawing in her victim. Love smiled and went back into the house. The hallway walls had pictures of Joyce as she was growing up and her father, and in the middle a gold plaque hung in a glass frame. The gold was molded into the shape of a tall, rectangular building.

“This your daddy’s?”

“He won it. Some engineering thing.”

She walked into her room and flopped herself on her bed. It was a small bed, but high off the ground with a yellow cover on it. It had a white metal frame, and she grabbed the metal bars at the headboard, her arms stretched above her.

“You like my room?”

He’d never been allowed to be alone with a girl in her room at the girls’ house at Los Aspirantes, and he hesitated at the threshold.

“Come on in.”

He walked in but stayed away from the bed. He looked around at the pictures on the walls. There were magazine cutouts of frogs pasted all over: a little Day-Glo frog on the tip of a person’s finger, a giant bumpy red frog, and a giant web-footed jumping frog.

“You sure is frog crazy,” he said.

“They’re cute.”

“Frogs aren’t cute, they’re ugly and they eat insects.”

“Well, I like them. Besides, they turn into princes if you kiss them.”

“Don’t come near me with your frog-kissin lips.”

There was one cutout picture on the closet door of a black man in a cowboy hat, sitting on a fence and strumming a guitar.

“That’s Charley Pride,” she said.

He shrugged his shoulders and went to the other corner of the room where there was a giant gum-ball machine. Love twisted the knob.

“You need a penny,” she said.

“Give me one.”

She got up and went to a small wooden box with a dolphin carved into its side, took out a penny, and tossed it to him, then jumped back on her bed.

“Your daddy give you this?” he asked.

“Yes. It was going to be a present to one of his managers for when he first stopped smoking. But then he started again, I guess.”

Love got a giant yellow gum ball and popped it into his mouth. His cheek bulged as he chewed and walked back to her closet.

“You sure got a lot of shoes.”

“How come you don’t come sit on the bed with me?”

Love shrugged.

“Why don’t you close the door?”

He went to the door and closed it.

“And lock it,” she said. He did.

She took off her sweater and her shirt lifted up over her stomach, which she let stay that way. She patted the bed, and he walked to her cautiously like he was approaching a wild animal.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

He folded his arms. “Nothing’s the matter. I just ain’t like one of your frogs, gonna hop in so quick.” He lay down next to her on his back, crossed his legs, and propped his head up with a pillow.

“Are you going to take your jacket off?” she asked.

“When I’m ready.”

She rolled over onto his thin body and kissed him. Then she pulled back, reached into his mouth with her fingers, and took out his gum. She tossed it into a wastebasket full of tissue, then went back to kissing him. He wanted to enjoy it, but he was trying to keep himself from getting too excited. They kissed again, and he began to rub his hand over her short hair.

There was a bang on the door.

“What you want, LaTanya?” Joyce yelled.

“What you doin in there?” It was Li’l Pit.

“Hey, dog, where you been?” Love said. He felt tears come to his eyes and he stood up.

“What you doin?” Li’l Pit yelled again.

“None a your business,” Joyce said. “Go on and play.”

“Let me in.”

“See,” Joyce said to Love. “I told you he’d come back.” She went to the end of the bed and grabbed his arm.

“We got to go!” Li’l Pit said.

“Not right now, dog.”

“When?”

Love let himself be pulled back onto the bed and Joyce kissed his cheek.

“What are you doin? What are you doin?” Li’l Pit cried.

“I’m busy now. The next bus don’t leave until noon tomorrow.” Li’l Pit hit the door again and then there was silence. Joyce rolled on top of Love, straddling his body.

“See,” she said. “Now you can relax.”

He was still looking at the door.

“You’re a good kisser, you know that? You did have a lot of girlfriends.” He didn’t answer her. She took his hands and moved them down the sides of her body, over her T-shirt, and then up to her breasts. He kept his hands on them and she didn’t say anything or move away at all. Instead, she reached down and unbuttoned her jeans. She wiggled out of them and threw them to the floor. Love looked down and saw her smooth legs and pink underwear. He undid his pants, but then stood up and got under the bedcover.

“Are you shy?” she asked.

“Naw. I’m just cold.”

She smiled and got under the cover with him. They moved together again, their smooth skin sliding against each other, and then she took off her shirt. He stared at her erect nipples. She put his hand back on her and removed her underwear. Then she reached down and pulled off his underwear. She tossed it onto the floor and then touched him between his legs. He could sense himself losing control again.