Paradise (20 page)

Over and over and with the least provocation, they pulled from their stock of stories tales about the old folks, their grands and great-grands; their fathers and mothers. Dangerous confrontations, clever maneuvers. Testimonies to endurance, wit, skill and strength. Tales of luck and outrage. But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? About their own lives they shut up. Had nothing to say, pass on. As though past heroism was enough of a future to live by. As though, rather than children, they wanted duplicates.

Misner was hoping for answers down there on his knees. Not a growing catalogue of questions. So he did what he was accustomed to doing: asked Him to come along as he struck out, late and agitated, for the wedding reception. Being in His company quieted anger. As he left the parsonage and turned into Central Avenue, he could hear the light breathing of his companion, but no word of advice or consolation. He was passing Harper’s drugstore when he saw a crowd gathered near the Oven. From it, in a burst of tuneup-needy engine roar, shot a Cadillac. In less than a minute it passed him, and he recognized two Convent women among the passengers. By the time he got to the Morgans’ yard, the crowd had dispersed. The sugar-drunk children were racing and tumbling with Steward’s collies. The Oven was deserted. The instant he stepped inside Soane and Deek’s house, he could see that all was aglow. Menus came forward to embrace him. Pulliam, Arnold and Deek interrupted their deep conversation to shake his hand. The Carys were singing a duet, a chorus backing them. So he was not startled to see Jeff Fleetwood laughing pleasantly with the very man he had drawn a gun on some weeks ago—the freshly married groom. Only the bride looked askew.

The silence in the Cadillac was not an embarrassed one. None of the passengers had high expectations of men in suits, so they were not surprised to be asked to leave the premises. “Give these little girls their bicycles back,” said one. “Get on out of here,” said another, through a mouthful of tobacco. The younger men who had laughed and cheered them on were ordered away without words. Just a look and a head movement from a man seven feet tall. Nor were they angry about the dismissal—slightly put out, maybe, but not seriously. One, the driver, had never seen a man who didn’t look like an unlit explosion. Another, in the front passenger seat, considered the boring sexual images she had probably incited and recommitted herself to making tracks to somewhere else. A third, who had really been having fun, sat in the back seat thinking that although she knew what anger looked like, she had no idea what it might feel like. She always did what she was told, so when the man said, “Give these little girls…,” she did it with a smile. The fourth passenger was grateful for the expulsion. This was her second day at the Convent and the third day of having said not one word to anybody. Except today when the girl, Billie something, came to stand near her.

“You all right?” She wore a shell-pink gown and instead of the shower cap had tiny yellow roses pinned into her hair. “Pallas? You okay?”

She nodded and tried not to shiver.

“You’re safe out there, but I’ll come by to see if you need anything, all right?”

“Yes,” Pallas whispered. Then, “Thanks.”

So there. She had opened her lips a tiny bit to say two words, and no black water had seeped in. The cold still shook her bones, but the dark water had receded. For now. At night, of course, it would return and she would be back in it—trying not to think about what swam below her neck. It was the top of the water she concentrated on and the flashlight licking the edge, then darting farther out over the black glimmer. Hoping, hoping the things touching below were sweet little goldfish like the ones in the bowl her father bought her when she was five. Or guppies, angels. Not alligators or snakes. This was a lake not a swamp or the aquarium at the San Diego zoo. Floating over the water, the whispers were closer than their calls. “Here, pussy. Here, pussy. Kitty, kitty, kitty,” sounded far away; but “Gimme the flash, dickface, izzat her, let go, maybe she drowned, no way,” slid into the skin behind her ears.

Pallas stared out of the window at a sky so steady, landscape so featureless she had no sense of being in a moving car. The smell of Gigi’s bubble gum mixed with her cigarette smoke was nauseating.

“Here, pussy. Here.” Pallas had heard that before. A lifetime ago on the happiest day of her life. On the escalator. Last Christmas. Spoken by the crazy woman, whom she could see now in greater detail than when first sighted.

The hair at the top of her head, sectioned off with a red plastic barrette, would have been a small pompadour or a curl had it been longer than two or three inches. In the event, it was neither. Just a tuft held rigid by a child’s barrette. Two other hair clips, one yellow, one neon purple, held fingerfuls of hair at her temples. Her dark velvet face was on display and rendered completely unseen by the biscuit-size disks of scarlet rouge, the fuchsia lipstick drawn crookedly beyond the rim of her lips, the black eyebrow pencil that trailed down toward her cheekbones. Everything else about her was dazzle and clunk: white plastic earrings, copper bracelets, pastel beads at her throat, and much, much more where all that came from in the bags she carried: two BOAC carrier bags and a woven metal purse shaped like a cigar box. She wore a white cotton halter and a little-bitty red skirt. The hose on her short legs, a cinnamon color thought agreeable to black women’s legs, were as much a study in running as her high heels were in run over. Inner arm skin and a small, sturdy paunch suggested she was about forty years old, but she could have been fifty or twenty. The dance she danced on the up escalator, the rolling hips, the sway of her head, called to mind a bygone era of slow grind in a badly lit room of couples. Not the electric go-go pace of 1974. The teeth could have been done anywhere: Kingston, Jamaica, or Pass Christian, Mississippi; Addis Ababa or Warsaw. Stunning gold, they dated her smile while giving it the seriousness the rest of her clothing withheld.

Most eyes looked away from her—down at the floating metal steps underfoot or out at the Christmas decorations enlivening the department store. Children, however, and Pallas Truelove stared.

California Christmases are always a treat and this one promised to be a marvel. Brilliant skies and heat turned up the gloss of artificial snow, plumped the green-and-gold, pink-and-silver wreaths. Pallas, laden with packages, just managed to avoid tripping off the down escalator. She didn’t understand why the woman with the rouge and gold teeth fascinated her. They had nothing in common. The earrings that hung from Pallas’ lobes were eighteen carat; the boots on her feet were handmade, her jeans custom-made, and the buckle on her leather belt was handsomely worked silver.

Pallas had stumbled off the escalator in a light panic, rushing to the doors, outside which Carlos was waiting for her. The revolting woman’s singsong merged with the carols piping throughout the store: “Here’s pussy. Want some pussy, pussy.”

“Ma-a-a-vis!”

Mavis wouldn’t look at her. Gigi always uglied up her name, pulling it out like a string of her sticky bubble gum.

“Can’t you go over ten miles an hour? Cha-rist!”

“Car needs a new fan belt. And I’m not going to take it over forty,” said Mavis.

“Ten. Forty. It’s like walking.” Gigi sighed.

“Maybe I’ll just pull over here and let you see what walking’s like. Want me to?”

“Don’t fuck with me. Drag me out to that bummer…Did you see that guy, Sen? Menus. The one who shit himself when he stayed with us?”

Seneca nodded. “He didn’t say anything mean, though.”

“He didn’t stop them either,” said Gigi. “All that puke, that shit I cleaned up.”

“Connie said he could stay. And we all cleaned it,” said Mavis, “not just you. And nobody dragged you. You didn’t have to go.”

“He had the d.t.’s, for crying out loud.”

“Close your window, please, Mavis?” Seneca asked.

“Too much wind back there?”

“She’s shaking again. I think she’s cold.”

“It’s ninety degrees! What the hell is the matter with her?” Gigi scanned the trembling girl.

“Should I stop?” asked Mavis. “She might throw up again.”

“No, don’t stop. I’ll hold her.” Seneca arranged Pallas in her arms, rubbing the goose-bumpy arms. “Maybe she’s carsick. I thought the party would cheer her up some. Looks like it made her worse.”

“That stupid, fucked-up town make anybody puke. I can’t believe that’s what they call a party. Hymns, for crying out loud!” Gigi laughed.

“It was a wedding party, not a disco.” Mavis wiped the perspiration forming under her neck. “Besides, you just wanted to see your love pony again.”

“That asshole?”

“Yeah. Him.” Mavis smiled. “Now he’s married, you want him back.”

“If I want him back I can get him back. What I want is to leave this fucking place.”

“You’ve been saying that for four years—right, Sen?”

Gigi opened her mouth, then paused. Was it four? She thought two. But at least two were spent fooling around with K.D., the prick. Had she let him keep her that long promising to get enough money to take her away? Or was it some other promise that kept her there? Of trees entwined near cold water. “Yeah, well, now I’m for real,” she told Mavis, and hoped she really was.

After a grunt of disbelief from Mavis, the car was silent again. Pallas let her head rest on Seneca’s breasts, wishing they were gone and that instead Carlos’ hard, smooth chest supported her cheek as it had whenever she wanted for seven hundred miles. Her sixteenth-birthday gift, a red Toyota with a built-in eight-track tape deck, was crammed with Christmas presents. Things anybody’s mother would like, but in a variety of colors and styles because she couldn’t take a chance on having nothing that would please a woman she had not seen in thirteen years. Driving off with Carlos at the wheel just before Christmas was a holiday trip to see her mother. Not running away from her father; not eloping with the coolest, most gorgeous man in the world.

Everything had been carefully planned: items were hidden, movements camouflaged, lest Providence, the eagle-eyed housekeeper, or her brother, Jerome, see. Her father wasn’t around enough to notice anything. He was a lawyer with a small client list, but two were big-time crossover black entertainers. As long as Milton Truelove kept them on top, he didn’t need to acquire more, although he kept a lookout eye for other young performers who might hit the charts and stay there.

With Carlos’ help it was as easy as it was exciting: the lies told to her girlfriends had to be cemented; the items left behind had to signal return, not escape (driver’s license—a duplicate—her teddy bears, watch, toiletries, jewelry, credit cards). This last made it necessary to do massive check cashing and shopping on the very day they drove away. She wanted to buy more, much more, for Carlos, but he insisted otherwise. He never took presents from her in all the time she knew him—four months. Wouldn’t even let her buy meals. He would close his beautiful eyes and shake his head as though her offer saddened him. Pallas had met him in the school parking lot the day her Toyota wouldn’t start. Actually met him that day but had seen him many times. He was the movie-star-looking maintenance man at her high school. All the girls went creamy over him. The day he pressed the accelerator to the floor, telling Pallas her gas line was flooded, was the beginning. He offered to follow her home in his Ford to make sure she didn’t stall out again. She didn’t and he waved goodbye. Pallas brought him a present—an album—the next day and had trouble making him accept it. “Only if you let me buy you a chili dog,” he said. Pallas’ mouth had gone felt with the thrill of it all. They saw each other every weekend after that. She did everything she could think of to get him to make love to her. He responded passionately to their necking but for weeks never allowed more. He was the one who said, “When we are married.”

Carlos was not a janitor, really. He sculpted, and when Pallas told him about her painter mother and where she lived, he smiled and said it was a perfect place for an artist. The whole thing fell into place. Carlos could leave his job with little outcry during the holidays. Milton Truelove would be extra busy with clients’ parties, showcase concerts and television deals. Pallas searched through years of birthday and Christmas cards from her mother for the most recent address, and the lovers were off without a hitch or a cloud. Except for the crazy black woman ruining the Christmas carols.

Pallas snuggled Seneca’s breasts, which, although uncomfortable, diluted the chill racking her. The women in the front seat were quarreling again, in high-pitched voices that hurt her head.

“Exhibitionist bitch! Soane is a friend of ours. What do I tell her now?”

“She’s Connie’s friend. Nothing to do with you.”

“I’m the one sell her the peppers, make up her tonic….”

“Whazzat make you, a chemist? It’s just rosemary, a little bran mixed with aspirin.”

“Whatever it is, it’s my responsibility.”

“Only when Connie’s drunk.”

“Keep your nasty mouth off her. She never drank till you came.”

“That’s what you say. She even sleeps in the wine cellar.”

“Her bedroom is down there! You’re such a fool.”

“She’s not a maid anymore. She could sleep upstairs if she wanted. She just wants to be close to that liquor is all.”

“God, I hate your guts.”

Seneca intervened in a soft voice designed for harmony. “Connie’s not drunk. She’s unhappy. She should have come with us, though. It would have been different.”

“It was fine. Just fine!” said Gigi. “Till those fucking preacher types came over.” She lit a fresh cigarette from a dying one.

“Can’t you stop smoking for two minutes?” Mavis asked.

“No!”

“Don’t see what that nigger ever saw in you,” Mavis continued. “Or maybe I do, since you can’t seem to keep it covered.”

“Jealous?”

“Like hell.”

“Like hell, like hell. Nobody’s fucked you in ten years, you dried-up husk.”

“Get out!” Mavis screamed, braking the car. “Get the hell out of my car!”

“You gonna make me? Touch me, I’ll tear your face off. You fucking felon!” and she rammed her cigarette into Mavis’ arm.