Playing With Matches (18 page)

I ask, “How you been doing, Miss Shookie?” I cringe at the limpness of my question.

I’m old enough now to call her by her given name, but some things never change. Others do.

Shookie’s hair is now cropped and dyed burgundy. She wears a slash of lipstick the color of blood. “You ought to be embarrassed comin’ here, girl.”

I take the bowl of mashed potatoes and set it on the table.

Auntie brings a platter of sliced roast, a great bowl of gravy, and I cannot help but look at Bitsy, who’s already in her chair, pulling a roll to bits.

“I’d like to bed Harry down on the sofa with his blue blanket while we eat.”

“No, ma’am,” Aunt Jerusha says. “You bring that boy to this table.”

And so I do. Luz takes the place where I once sat.

It’s when Uncle Cunny Gholar comes through the door, swinging his hat in his hand, that I lose my togetherness. Right at the table, my face caves in. Uncle stands there, startled, while I catch tears with the tip of my tongue. I don’t care that his hair is white and his face is old. I lost my way. And now I am found.

I only half rise before I am in his arms. He stumbles but catches us both, and we rock back and forth, and I gulp deep breaths, and my heart beats again.

I wipe at my face, but I’m dripping and a mess.

“Take your seat, Cunny,” Auntie says softly, for I see that he’s weeping too. “We all need a good meal.”

Shookie heaves an impatient sigh.

“Luz,” I say, with what dignity I can gather, “Mr. Cunny Gholar. My daughter, Maria-Luz Ryder. My son, Harry.”

Uncle comes around and takes Luz’s hand, holds it tight to his heart. He lays his other on Harry’s head. Harry leans forward, puts his chin on the table.

Uncle hangs up his hat—a fine black bowler with rounded-up sides. He pulls out his chair and says, “Shookie, I see you were first to the table. You leave anything for me?”

“You fractious old goat,” Shookie says.

For now, I am home.

Then still another man stomps up the porch steps and on in, and my heart rushes to my throat for fear someone has called the law. He nods apologetically when the screen door bangs, and dashes up the stairs. Then he’s down again, pulling out a chair, smiling at me. Auntie looks at me too, quick-like and full of meaning, and passes the roast beef to this tall blond man.

“You remember Mr. Francis Stengle,” she says. She loads potato on her fork. “From down at Oatys’?”

I do not recall.

Auntie eases the fork to her mouth. When she’s chewed and swallowed, she says, “You called him Wheezer.”

The man grins and wrests the gravy boat from Bitsy.

Then I
do
know, I remember. This handsome man—that fair hair, the pale skin. “Oh, God!” I say.

The Oaty brothers kept him under their house! Finn and I went down to set him free—but some rescue that turned out to be. Social Services hauled him away—that awful Miss Pilcher and her green station wagon.

“Francis lives here now,” Aunt Jerusha says. “He’s the chaplain down at the Farm.”

Hell’s Farm! The penitentiary?

“Wheezer?”
I say, and in spite of my fears, that’s funny somehow—for us both, I guess, because we share crooked smiles and wide-eyed looks. It’s hardly a name for a grown-up man with rolled shirtsleeves, a strong jaw, and curly hair on his arms.

“Hey, Clea,” he says.

“These are my children,” I tell him, breathless.

While I pick at my roast beef, I cannot take my eyes off him. I’m overrun with memories. Wheezer’s a pure miracle. And he’s sitting at the same place where my friend Claudie once sat. I remember that night too, all of us eating with our hands, that Alvadene
came in from the pouring rain and how, with my running mouth, I ended a friendship.

Harry, between Auntie and me, leans back in his chair. Auntie has put bits of meat and potato on his plate, a couple of green beans. She watches him for a time, then goes to the refrigerator and brings out Jell-O, which she spoons into a pretty yellow plastic bowl. Harry watches the stuff wiggle. She puts the spoon in his hand, curls his fingers around it.

“Lord, save us,” Shookie says. “Clea June Shine, you’ve spoiled that one rotten. And the other hasn’t got an ounce of meat on her bones. They both need a good tonic, and some discipline, you ask me.”

“No one asked you, Shookie,” Uncle says softly.

“It’s Clea
Ryder
now.” I wonder if Auntie’s sister always irritated me this much.

How Luz could use discipline is more than I can see, and she and I exchange faint smiles. But Shookie’s words pinch because I truly have no idea what my little guy needs.

“Harry,” I whisper, “will you drink some milk?”

Harry hooks an arm around the yellow bowl.

Aunt Jerusha says coolly, “He can have milk when he’s tried my lime Jell-O. Go on, now.”

Amazingly, Harry’s thumb slides from his mouth.

“That’s right,” Auntie says, as though she and he are the only two in the room. “And there’s more if you want.”

“Stuff’s nothing but sugar water,” Shookie says.

Harry touches the wiggly green with his fingers and licks them for taste, and although the thumb pops back in his mouth, he eyes the dish with interest.

The conversation is surface-thin. I thought I was hungry, but my belly hurts, and I’ve twisted my paper napkin to shreds.

When supper is done, and we’re clearing up, Harry takes the yellow bowl, slides from his chair, and wanders into the parlor, where he sits on the floor by Auntie’s chair—
criss-cross-applesauce
—spoon in hand and the bowl in his lap.

No one says a word.

Apparently, Wheezer occupies one of two rooms on the second floor. Shookie and Bitsy have taken the other. I wonder how long they’ve been living here, and if they contribute to the cost of things. There might be Social Security from Shookie’s years of laboring in laundries, but I doubt Bitsy’s worked a day in her life. And I know nothing at all about Bitsy’s daddy.

Until now, one scrap of logic has escaped me—when I am arrested, who will pay for my children’s room and board? If Auntie takes them, who will buy their groceries, their clothes, pay for tennis shoes and Luz’s inhalers?

If I’d thought of this before, would I have brought them upriver?

Just now I need to make up the beds. There’s a double in the attic that Luz and I will share. Harry, still gripping his spoon in his fist, will sleep on a camp cot pushed up so tight, Luz and I will have to climb over the foot of the bed.

I snap out pristine sheets, find old pillows in an upstairs closet. I dump the black plastic bag and sort the kids’ dirty clothes and wonder how much time I have. I wonder if, downstairs, Shookie’s the one who is making the call.

The sun stays up late in this part of Mississippi, but it’s dusky in the attic, with its four small windows. I put the kids down early.
Luz has a flashlight and a borrowed book. I pull the quilts to their chins even though, in the heat, they’ll soon kick them off. Auntie climbs the stairs with cold glasses of Ovaltine for them both.

Luz says, “Maybe I can get Harry to drink.”

I kiss them again and go down to find Wheezer sitting out under the willow.

Wheezer’s looking up at the lighted attic window. “Great kids,” he says, when I sit down.

“Thanks. Harry was two when we got him. His father was a police officer. Decorated—so I have that to tell him someday.”

Wheezer waits.

“Harry watched him gunned down on a street in Chicago. He had no other family. The sisters—I work with a sisterhood—”

I smile, remembering. “They told me he had a thatch of brown hair, was a thumb-sucker, and kept asking for his daddy. Thomas—my husband—well, we already had Luz.”

“Smart girl there.”

“Yes. She was eight by then, and we thought,
What’s one more?
So we took him and started the paperwork. Watched him, you know, for trauma. But in six months he was calling me Mama. And he—he called Thomas dad.”

I look at Wheezer to see if I’m saying too much. “He seemed okay until—”

Harry is nowhere happier than in my lap, or snugged up next to me, with his elbow on my thigh and his chin in his hand, as though he is the greatest thinker in the world. My favorite photo on our refrigerator was a close-up of the kids’ faces, a pencil clamped between Luz’s teeth, Harry sporting a peanut-butter smile.

“—until this storm.”

I am wrapped inside myself. Uncle comes out then, and takes a chair. He must be telling a joke, because he and Wheezer roar with laughter and slap each other’s knees. Auntie and Shookie come too. They still gather under the willow after supper.

Auntie says, “There’s lemonade—”

Not for me. I want to sit here, hugging my elbows, not recalling. I don’t want to remember anything.

26

I
suppose I need to explain,” I say.

Wheezer and Uncle move to get up, but Shookie and Bitsy seem settled in.

“Y’all stay,” I say. “You might as well hear.”

“Clea,” Wheezer says, “you don’t have to tell us anything. We’re just so damned glad to see you—”

“Yes, she does,” Uncle says. “She owes Jerusha that.”

I nod. I’m wearing a short-sleeved blouse, and I wonder if they’re looking at the scars on my arms. “Well,” I begin haltingly, leaving things out. “I went to Mexico. And then Belize City.”

Auntie seems surprised. Shookie looks like I’ve already lost her.

I recall the tramp steamer and how I had dragged my belongings ashore and stood on the street bridge and watched the fish markets below. I wandered past shaded government buildings and bare city parks, and watched children play in filthy ditch water. I strolled along Barakat Street, where funeral parlors had dark, open doorways. In the daytime, the grille fronts of tiny
farmacias
were pulled back to admit customers, and, upstairs, black women sat alone at open windows.

“The city was—wonderful. The people had amazing faces. I was wishing I had a sketch pad and pencils so I could sit on the curb and draw them. But I was never really an artist. So I bought an old Polaroid at a flea market, and I took pictures of tourists at bus stops and on the dock.”

I don’t look at my listeners.

“I wrote these clever captions across the bottoms and sold them for fifty cents American. Four photographs paid for my room for a week. The house where I lived was on Mortuary Lane.”

I cannot help but smile at that memory. For my two dollars I’d gotten a narrow bed and a bowl of clean water every morning, an outdoor toilet, and my turn at the backyard shower twice a week. At its highest point, Belize City was thirty-nine inches above sea level. From my upstairs window I watched the ocean sweep the flat beach and lick greedily at the end of the road.

I knew one thing in Belize: I was alive.

“Um, some days I caught the bus inland, or up to Progresso.” I don’t tell them about the armed soldiers who stood outside the bank, or the razor wire coiled around an elementary school that was pinkly stuccoed and blinding in the sun. Or that on one corner, hundreds of cartons of eggs were stacked under the overhang of a stall. Quarters of beef hung from hooks in meat markets, where packs of wild dogs leapt and snarled and helped themselves to the lowest parts.

“The afternoons in Belize City are wicked hot,” I say. “Over a hundred degrees. And by night the mosquitoes are thicker than soup. Worse than here—”

I knew this would be hard. But I’m coming to my favorite part.

“One day I stopped at a street infirmary to buy a bottle of
water, and I saw these women with blue scarves tied around their heads. They—did everything.”

“What everything?” Shookie asks. She
is
listening.

“They took temperatures and bandaged hurts; they handed out tortillas; they dished up soup on the beach. They rocked babies and played hopscotch with little girls. They sat with the sick. They were the Sisters of Mercy.”

“Catholics,” Shookie says, and snorts.

I’d thought so too, and I was turning away that day when a nun caught my sleeve.

Take their picture
, she’d said, pointing to a mother and a little boy, waiting their turn in a plastic chair.
She is dying
.