News from the World (19 page)

Authors: Paula Fox

BOOK: News from the World

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LORD RANDAL

T
AKE THE FIRST STEP
.
They said my child is laying down there, one foot, they say, half stuck in a bag of garbage like he had crawled out of it. Black beans and candy wrappers, bones, rags and coffee grounds, and Robert Brown on the stoop.

This street in the morning looks like a burnt mattress after the firemen put the fire out. The children burst out of the doors like black seed pods and they take all that glassâis it my window that broke?âand all those bottles and they smash them up after school when the street is done smoking and stinking. The children make knives from the busted springs and jump outâBam!âfrom the doors. I sayâwhoosh!âand they run away. With the springs and the glass they got plenty to do all day after school.

On this floor Mrs. Perez is shouting and hollering. She say, “Ay! Ay!,” and I say she should go back wherever she come from. Back there her husband, or whatever, could chase her through all that brush they got down there. He could mash her up where the pigs is. But here on this floor in that room with four walls and a window and a door, he got no right. I got to listen to
that
all night? She got yellow skin where he hits. And she grin at me like she won something. I see from here the snow is coming. That's right, fall down baby, cover it all up.

I take the second step.
Robert Brown is a smart boy and I don't think he's anything but drunk down there. He likes coffee black, he likes his cuffs clean and he robbed me from my pocketbook but he never drank before. Now then he got that little car, German. But where did they get the money? Where do they get all the money from when in my life you never could see that kind of sugar? My sister's boy he had money too and he was hooked when he was almost a baby and they got him and sent him to the place and he come back and got hooked again and now he lay around on the couch all day and look tired.

But Robert Brown is nobody's fool. He see them all around here on this street sleepy and scratching theyselves all the long day and leaning up against nothing. He laugh. He says, “Look at the fools, mamma!” But I don't even look.

Here is Gloria screaming again. Last summer she was throwing herself around in a pink hoop and now she got Louie. She's standing there so mad, she's rocking, and she's calling him names and shaking her little butt. Is she mad? Or what? He say, “No peace around here at all,” and he walk off and she laugh now, “Ha, ha, ha.”

But then I never seen anything like the way after a woman tells a man to get out, how she looks when he goes and stand there saying, “Ha, ha, ha,” and he don't turn around, he walk up the street with his cap just so, his hands in his pocket and don't turn around. There she is pretending she got her own business too and when he is far from her sight, she take off after him, walking fast like him, and still shaking with it. Gloria going to find out now: If you tell them to go, they go.

I take the third step.
Willie Prentice in his life got himself cut six ways and he's fixing up to fight again. I see that Portorican grinding his teeth and they are going to cut each other right here in the hall. Now, they're just looking, head turning, right, left, slow, getting ready. But the Portorican is going to scream pretty soon like a buzzsaw.

Knives. When Buddy was little and he cut his toe with the axe, our daddy poured kerosene into the cut and took ashes from the stove and poured them over that toe and bound it up with flannel and he got well.

We stole too from my daddyâsewed up eggs in the hems of our coat and went down the road to school and stopped by the store and traded those eggs for stockings and candy.

On Monday we washed, on Tuesday we ironed, on Wednesday we scrubbed the floor with potash, on Thursday we run off and did what we did.

My little brother Buddy, he threw a turtle in the fire once and it walked clean out of its shell but Robert Brown never hurt the cats around here. And he took care of that dog till it run off. He went to school and learned what he had to and he went to the store and sometimes he polished his own shoes and he watched all the fighting around here and never said nothing and he never went up on the roof with the rest of them to do what they do up there and he never stole from nobody but me. Once he asked me why
they
come around sometime and I didn't tell him they looking for colored tail or the stuff. I said they was policemen checking up. He say, “Checking up on what?” And I say the city got all these policemen and they got to do something with them.

I take the fourth step
. The old women are crowding up on me. They step when I stepâand I go slow. I don't believe Robert Brown got into a fight. He is too fast a boy. And he never got mixed up with nobody around here. No. He say he got his own friends. Then he brought her around. He say, “This is my mamma,” and she say, “Hello, Mrs. Brown.” But did she mean Mrs. Brown? She never been in a place like this before I could see and she grin all the time and she was with him like white on rice, stuck on him, grabbing him, taking him.

I say what do you want Robert with a young white girl like that and he say, “Time has changed, mamma.” He say, “I got friends, mamma.” And I say, “She got friends too and maybe they aren't your friends.”

She bring me bacon once, and flowers. Why did she do that? She think I don't know anything but bacon? Get away old women! I go down by myself and don't catch hold of my arm because I throw you all down the rest of the stairs. I throw you into the street. And they didn't see the blood with their own eyes so how they know it is there?

I take the fifth step.
He take her around in that little car and he wear a white scarf and he shoot out his cuffs like he had to go someplace to learn to do it. I told him to be careful and he say I got to learn. What did I mean and what do he mean?

They are crowding up in front of me now but I can't hear what they say because the city is taking up the garbage which they do ten times a day and ten times a night. Where do we get all this garbage from? They crowding up there in front of me but I see Whitey got a bottle of Texas rum in his back pocket and George he is going to lift it right out like it was a straight splinter. They are all looking down at the stoop. I push them away easy because they made of sticks. They weak.

I can see him. He's laying there and his foot is half stuck in a bag of garbage like they said. Is he drunk?

Because I don't see that blood. Robert BrownâRobert BrownâAre you drunk, boy?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Lord Randal” first published in
The Negro Digest
, July 1965.

“The Living” first published in
The Negro Digest
, September/October 1968.

“Sitting Down and Alone” first published in
Confrontation
, Fall/Winter 1978.

“News from the World” first published in
Short Shorts
, ed. Irving and Ilana Howe (David Godine, 1982).

“By the Sea” first published in
The Threepenny Review
, 1986.

“Other Places” first published in
The Horn Book Magazine
, January/February 1987.

“Unquestioned Answers” first published in
The Zena Sutherland Lectures
,
1983â1992
, ed. Betsy Hearne (Clarion Books, 1993).

“The Stop of Truth” first published in
Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints
, ed. Lee Burress, Nicholas J. Karolides, and John M. Kean (Scarecrow Press, 1995).

“Grace” first published in
Harper's
, June 2003.

“The Broad Estates of Death” first published in
Harper's,
April 2004.

“Way Down Yonder” first published in
Lire
, December 2005.

“Franchot Tone at the Paramount” first published in
Playboy
, December 2007.

“Frieda in Taos” first published in
The Yale Review
, Spring 2008.

“The Tender Night” first published in
The Paris Review
, Summer 2008.

“Light on the Dark Side” first published in
The New York Review of Books
, December 2, 2009.

“Clem” first published in
The Yale Review
, Spring 2010.

More Praise for

“[Fox's] voice is strikingly mature. A writer's job, she implies in the preface to this collection, is to take a âliving interest in all living creatures,' and these pieces attest to her brilliant success at that task.”

â
The Atlantic

“Paula Fox's essays and short stories all display a spare, marvelous luminosity. The author's irreducible voiceâit was the same with Virginia Woolfâcan always be heard, whatever the genre.”

âThomas Mallon, author of
Watergate: A Novel

“Deeply contemplative and disarmingly courageous, Fox's work astonishes readers with its lucidity.”

âCarol Haggas,
Booklist

“A careful glimpse into Fox's working processes, where the correspondences between varied modes provide a study of the relationship between art and life, of the way one experience can be pursued to divergent ends by different genres.”

âStephen Burn,
Bookforum

“Paula Fox is one of our greatest writers. Her prose is a model of ruthless, gorgeous efficiency, and her mind is so unnervingly alert to the messy contradictions that come with being human. These essays and stories will delight and inspire anyone who cares about literature, storytelling, and truth itself.”

âTom Bissell, author of
The Father of All Things

“Fox writes like she's living and we just happened to show up and watch. . . . To read Fox's words is to sit at her feet, to take part in what feels at times like oral tradition rather than a more scholarly mode of writing. As the stories and essays unfold in reverse chronological order, the reader becomes increasingly attuned to Fox's particular manner.”

âSarah Terez Rosenblum,
Pop Matters

“The short stories are sparely written with great economy of language while conveying the great truths of life in love, death, loneliness, and happiness. . . .
News from the World
is a âmust read' for all of [Fox's] loyal readers and is a great introduction to her gift for giving the world its ânews' in descriptive but economical language.”

âSandra Clariday, Tennessee Library Association

“Paula Fox's essays and short stories in this new compilation range wide and deep; that is, an essay will travel some ground, deposit ideas, make some assertions before coming to rest. Her gorgeous sentencesâempty of excessâsupport complicated emotions, build multiple layers of story and take us to surprising intersections where associations take on meaning.”

âRae Francoeur,
Wicked Local

Printed in the United States of America

First published as a Norton paperback 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fox, Paula.

News from the world : stories and essays /
Paula Fox. â 1st ed.