Tempest Rising (10 page)

Ramona didn’t want to hear about Dead Block. Already she was getting that prickly feeling in her
spine that always moved to her chest and felt like a slab of granite rising in her chest every time she thought about Dead Block and that missing white boy, Donald Booker. So no, she hadn’t told them about Dead Block; she hadn’t even told them how to get to the library.

She went to the stove and turned on under the hot dogs and baked beans. The sauce around the baked beans was erupting in bubbles. She stirred around in the pot and poked holes in the molasses that was separating from the sauce and glazing over. She thought about how Victoria’s face looked just then, scrunched up in pain. She counted the hot dogs again. If Tyrone stayed for dinner, there would be two extra. “That hurt one could have the extra two,” she said to the pot and the stove and the molasses-scented kitchen air.

T
yrone did stay for dinner and made much over the hot dogs and beans, said he hadn’t eaten that well in the months since he’d left his mother’s table. Ramona told him to shut the hell up, he was lying, and he knew it.

“If I’m lying, I’m flying,” he said. “And my feet are on the ground.”

Bliss laughed then, said all the kids in her class used that line. Even Victoria smiled some, despite her newly chipped tooth. Shern didn’t smile, but the ice in her glare melted a bit. The house seemed larger with Tyrone there. The air was wider, less constricted. It felt like the animosity between Ramona and the girls had more room to spread out and, in so doing, dilute. They were looser; Ramona sighed less when Tyrone was in the room. And Bliss
was especially affected, latching on to his humor, even laughing openly and loudly at his jokes.

Tyrone stayed late Saturday night. At first Ramona thought he was just waiting for those three to go to sleep so he could scoop her up and carry her to bed. But after he’d taught Bliss cutthroat pinochle, and rechecked the dressing on Victoria’s knee, and tried in vain to get Shern to talk, he got up to leave. “Not proper, Mona,” he said to the question mark in her eyes. “Your room so close to theirs, they might hear our—you know, our sounds. Nice girls, Mona, let’s not offend them in that way.”

Then Ramona asked him why now, he hadn’t resisted staying before. With all the other fosters he’d begged to stay as soon as they went to bed and Mae left to gamble at her Saturday night card party. What was so different about now?

“They were just shadows before now,” he said, “you know, blurs, and now they’re in focus, you know, real people. I wouldn’t be able to be with you with all my heart and soul the way I want to be with you if I’m worrying ’bout them hearing, you know what I’m saying, baby doll?”

Ramona didn’t push. She was relieved. She was reminded too much of her failings lying with Tyrone in that tight bedroom, sometimes not even feeling his manhood as he tried to touch her in places that should make her back arch. Instead she’d be preoccupied with the faded pink roses drooping on the wallpaper; the roses seemed so worn out, tired, like she was always tired, like if she stared at them
hard enough, the petals might fall from the roses right off of the wall and cover her as if she were dead. She once thought that she would be a model, but her legs were too big, her hips too wide, and though her hips and legs caused much lip licking among the men when she walked down Sixtieth Street, they wouldn’t work on the runway or magazine ad, the talent scout had told her, but had she considered being a pinup girl for
Philly Talk
or centerfold for
Jet,
and he knew someone shooting movies, you know, male-type movies, he’d said. After that she buried the dream of being a model under the pink roses on the wall, even under the cream-colored background of the wallpaper, and was relieved this Saturday night just to linger over a good-night kiss at the door.

P
lus Tyrone had other plans for the balance of this Saturday night. He had already walked through the shimmering darkness of Dead Block like he’d promised Bliss that he would, saw no sign of their library books, though. And then as he left the intense quiet of Dead Block and headed down a neat street of massive row homes and uniformly clipped hedges toward the noisesomeness of the hub of West Philly’s late-night frivolity, he saw a tall dark figure about to pass him on the street, and right after he said, “What’s up, my man,” and got a quick head nod for a reply, and he saw the fat slice of wrinkled beige skin running down the otherwise pitch-black
forehead, he knew it was Larry. He felt his anger rise up in him now like it had as he’d cleaned Victoria’s wound and Bliss described the feel of Larry’s lips against her cheek. Now his words were rising out of him too, and he was calling to Larry’s back, “Hey, man, hey, you, Larry.”

“Yeah? You speaking to me?” Larry turned around and pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his trench coat.

“Yeah, I am. You better stay away from those young girls you damned near molested on Dead Block this afternoon.”

“Yeah? And you better get the fuck out of my face.” Larry started walking toward Tyrone.

Tyrone knew not to back up, knew to keep facing Larry, keep his eyes on Larry’s hands; country though he was, basic rules of a fight transcended geography. “I ain’t in your face yet, you deranged old dirty old man,” he said as he watched Larry’s hands slowly come up from his pocket. Just don’t have a weapon, he thought. I think I can take you down if you don’t have a weapon.

“Those my grandkids, motherfucker, and you ain’t got a damned thing to do with them.” His hands came up empty.

“They nothing to you, fool. And I’m gonna have your crazy ass locked up if I hear about you going near them again. That is once I finish scrubbing the street with your dim-witted ass.”

Their voices were menacingly thick, pushing through this residential stretch. So much so that
three porch lights came on in a row, followed by voices that bounced down to the pavement and kept Tyrone and Larry apart.

“Who’s out there?” came from the middle porch.

“I don’t know who”—from the next porch over—“but whoever it is I’m not having this. I’m calling the cops.”

“Or throw a bucket of hot water over them”—from the third. “They want to act like animals, treat them that way. Thugs like that what’s taking this neighborhood down.”

“Sorry to have disturbed y’all, madams,” Tyrone called over the hedges to get to the porch lights. “I’m just gonna be on my way. If this other, uh, man hangs around, though, I would definitely call the cops.” He half laughed when he said it and then turned his back on Larry; he could now since Larry’s hands had come up empty.

T
yrone wondered what could make a man try to claim children that were no way his. He shook his head about it and then shook Larry from his mind completely as he turned the corner to where he intended to be, under the boastful lights and the begging-for-love music wrapping around the Strip, Fifty-second Street, where the bustling shopping district by day was transformed to a different kind of shopping under the black velvet air. People here weren’t interested in Shapiro’s shoes or Peter Pan dresses for their little girls. Even though they were
paying good money for lighter feet and pretty young things. The five-and-dime was locked and chained, but dime bags of green weed were in plentiful supply. And even though the gold shop had closed at six, liquid gold flowed freely for a price at a leather-clad bar or linen-draped table, under red and blue lights or candle flickers, at Coupe De Ville, Jamaica Inn, the Pony Tail, Mr. Silks, the Aqua Lounge. A young man could step inside any door after nine on the Strip and admire himself in the mirrored walls, maybe talk a little trash to some tightly dressed, false eyelash–batting perimenopausal divorcée. He might catch up with Milt Jackson playing the vibes at one spot or be met at another by a jukebox blaring Smokey Robinson and the Miracles calling for “More Love.” Or he might just do like Tyrone and stand on the sidewalk, because even that pulsed and gave off heat.

Except Tyrone wasn’t looking for heat. Nor trash-talking, nor liquid gold, dime bags, or pretty young things. Even though he’d sampled all the Strip’s offerings during the year he’d been here—small samplings because he still loved the Lord. But his real reason for being on this corner of Fifty-second and Walnut, his cotton shirt collar on the outside of his windbreaker jacket, struggling against the bristle in the March air to light a Pall Mall cigarette, leaning, as if he’d been leaning on corners on the Strip all his life, was for a confirmation of his manhood.

His mother had moved him from Philadelphia when he was three back to the uppity section of Vir
ginia where she was from, a furious move precipitated by Perry’s infidelities. He’d acquired the nickname Mama’s boy, growing up. Even when Perry would go down to Virginia to try to see him, try to take him out for a pop or an ice-cream cone, Tyrone would cry that he wanted his mother to come too. And Perry got so frustrated after a couple of years of three, four times a year trying to spend some time with his son and being met with Tyrone’s cries for his mother and his ex-wife’s satisfied, smug expression that he stopped trying to see him altogether. His father should have kept coming, Tyrone reasoned. One or two more years and he would have passed through that mommie-attachment stage. But a year ago Tyrone left Virginia for Philadelphia. Closed his eyes and took a hatchet to the too thick cord binding him to his overly protective mother, who, even though he was in his twenties, had tried to keep him from finally establishing a relationship with Perry (he was a teenager before he realized that his father’s name wasn’t “two-timing no-good louse”).

So as he finished his cigarette and smashed the butt on the ground outside Brick’s after-hours spot and stepped inside the blue air that rippled with perfumed sweat and laughter, adjusting his eyes to the smoky dimness, the rest of him to the cloud of heat that fell heavily once he was all the way inside, he knew that he wasn’t here entirely to satisfy a thrill for the nightlife on the Strip. He was here mostly for his father.

“You got to pay to play, daddy.” An oversized outstretched palm rose to his eye level even before the door closed behind him.

“No problem, bud,” he said, trying to thin his accent. He reached into his pocket and pulled up a five-dollar bill. “Does this cover it?”

“Covers it.” The palm closed over the money and then extended itself, ushering Tyrone deeper into the club’s dimness.

Tyrone had not been here before, but he had heard his father mention it to his patrons who frequented the Strip. “My lady, Hettie, don’t like me in there,” he remembered his father saying. “Those foxes in there hungry.”

Tyrone would try to get in on the conversations when he’d hear his father talking like that. He’d say something like “Yeah, Pops, they hungry, hunh?” But instead of a sly smile shared between men, he’d see a smirk on his father’s face that seemed to say that he was just a vulnerable country bumpkin only a knot away from his mother’s apron strings. And then the smirk would darken on his father’s face, turn to a look of parental worry when Tyrone would drop the names of his favorite spots on Fifty-second Street. “You outta your league down there, Ty,” Perry would say. “Even I watch my back on the Strip, and I cut my eyeteeth in places like that.”

This place was packed. Tyrone had to angle himself sideways to get to the bar, where he ordered a Ballantine and nibbled at the beer nuts. He took a
long swallow from the brown bottle and looked around the club. He wanted to remember the details, the table by the window where a mound of fried shrimp and crab cakes attracted really hungry foxes, the corner off to the side where couples did the bob and the cha-cha to the Four Tops crooning “Baby, I Need Your Loving,” the card game going on in the back; he could tell it was a card game by the high-roller look to the men getting the nod to go on back by the substantial bouncers. The sounds of laughter mixed with the music and booming conversations swirled around his head as if a flock of giggling, cursing geese circled overhead. He wanted to be able to drop the details on Perry tomorrow, wanted to let him know that yet another Saturday night had come and gone and he had handled himself on the Strip. He turned and looked around him; he had taken Perry’s warning seriously about watching his back, but the figure approaching him now, squeezing between the cigarette-smoking, fried shrimp–eating, hand-slapping bouquet of partyers made him straighten his back and adjust his shirt collar over his windbreaker jacket. She had a creamy brown face framed by a startling yellow headband that pushed her Afro back into a puff of hair and gave her a look of regality. Sizable gold hoops dropped from her ears, her neck, all along her tight black shell, her arms; even a gold-hooped chain belt hung around her black and yellow–striped hipster skirt. She made an opening through the clump of loud talkers that separated her
from the bar and was now walking, no, it seemed to Tyrone, floating right toward him.

She lowered her eyes, a subtle way of saying hello, he realized, as he tried to match it with his own brand of cool. But the sensation taking him over now would not be subdued and turned his mouth up into a smile so wide he was embarrassed.

“Hey, young blood,” she whispered into his ear, and he felt as though the caramel-shaded frosted lipstick she wore coated her words and melted to a warm sweetness in his ear.

“You of age, young blood, in case they start carding in here tonight?”

“I got more than a card to prove my age, baby. But how about if I start by offering you a drink?” He tried to keep a point on the ends of his words so that his drawl wouldn’t creep through.

“Scotch and soda,” she said to the bartender, who was now standing right in front of where Tyrone sat.

“Another Ballantine,” Tyrone said as he put a five-dollar bill on the bar and got down from the stool so that she could sit. He edged his body in next to her and smiled and lifted one eyebrow slightly. He hoped she could see it through the blue air; he’d come to know the effect his eyebrows had on women. Even though it still caught him by surprise when a beautiful woman responded to him with passion-tinged breathlessness. It certainly had with Ramona. Right after their first date, when they’d taken the subway over to North Philly to the Up
town to see Sam and Dave, Martha and the Vandellas, the Delfonics, after they got off the el, tired and hoarse from the audience participation those shows evoked, he offered to give her a tour of his father’s printshop. She’d seemed mildly impressed as he told her how he worked such and such printer, and mixed colors, and spread ink. And when they were getting ready to go, he raised his eyebrow, not as an overture, more just asking, so what do you think? She was all over him then; her lips covered his face, his neck, almost popping the buttons on his shirt, trying to get to his bare chest. He pushed Ramona from his mind now. She hadn’t come on to him like that since.