Tempest Rising (11 page)

The bartender placed their drinks; she clinked her glass against his beer bottle and then drained it. He tapped his finger against the bar to the beat of the music and pretended not to be shocked at the speed at which she emptied her glass.

“Okay, young blood, so you were gonna prove your age.” She swiveled the stool so that she was talking right in his face. He thought he could smell her lipstick. “What you proving with? A wedding band? A rap sheet? Couple of kids maybe? A draft notice? Hunh? All the cute ones dragging some kind of weight that they proving their age with. What’s your ball and chain say?”

“Whoa, baby. Can you at least tell me your name before you go off into a dissertation on such a, excuse the pun, baby, but such a weighty topic?”

“Mnh, dissertation, huh? Candy, my name’s
Candy. And you been to college, I see. You cute, and you smart. Now ain’t no doubt in my mind that some little young chick done already nailed you.”

“Ain’t a nail been hammered that can’t be pried, uh, Candy?” His drawl slipped through as he decided not to comment on how sweet she must be with a name like Candy.

“My, my, my, and from the country too.”

“Yeah, they grow them strong where I’m from, Candy.” He smiled again.

“And hard?”

“Hard and soft, baby.”

“Give me your hand, young blood, let me touch your flesh and make sure I didn’t just dream you up. And order me another scotch and soda. You just might be coming home with me tonight.”

He motioned the bartender, pointed to her glass, and she grabbed for his hand and squeezed it, and he couldn’t hold his smile and got embarrassed again as it took over his face. He knew he wasn’t going home with her; he was after all committed to Ramona. But what a story he’d have for Perry in the morning. He’d describe the yellow headband, the chain belt, the hipster skirt, the frosted lipstick; he’d say, “Yeah, Pops, I could have had one of the hungry foxes you always talking ’bout at Brick’s after-hours spot, but Ramona’s more than enough woman for me.” She was asking him now if he ever dropped acid since he’d been a college man.

“Naw, that’s a white boy thing,” he said. “I went
to a black school, Virginia Union.” He noticed the bartender set yet another fresh drink in front of her. Damn, he thought, she was on number three, and that was his last money on the bar. What was left? A dollar. He thought about what he could do. Excuse himself to go to the men’s room and then slip on out. Let her keep drinking and then feel for his wallet and pretend he’d been robbed. Or just come clean. Say something like “Hey, baby, your unquenchable thirst broke the bank.”

He was about to do just that when he felt a rough tap on his shoulder. He realized then he’d violated a primary rule of hanging on the Strip. He’d turned his back on the door.

“You the country motherfucker that threatened me over talking to my own granddaughters?”

Tyrone hunched his shoulder and turned slowly. He could smell the whiskey on Larry’s hot breath as it hit the side of his face. What had been a crowded space around the bar receded like a puddle of water evaporating from the center and left an empty circle around Larry and Tyrone. Tyrone was directly in front of Larry now, staring at the beige-colored scar on his forehead.

“Come on, you corn-fed nigger.” Larry thumbed the lapels of his trench coat. “I’ll teach you to get involved with matters between blood.”

“Awl, Larry, leave him ’lone,” Candy called from the bar.

“It’s all right, baby, I got this,” Tyrone said.

“I’m afraid you don’t.” It was one of the bouncers
who’d been guarding the entrance to the card game. “Y’all gots to take it to the street.”

“Awl, let em fight,” a high-pitched voice called from the circle’s edges.

“Yeah, it’s gonna be quick and dirty anyhow”—from deeper in the circle that had grown four deep around. “Ole Larry sparred for Sonny Liston. I would put a Lincoln on him, but I know ain’t a motherfucker in here dumb enough to put their money on the young boy.”

“Naw, break it up”—from the other side of the circle. A big man, almost as big as the bouncer, wearing a red, black, and green dashiki, pushed his way through the thickening edges of the circle. “That’s why the black man on this continent is still enslaved. We’re waging war on each other instead of against the white slave master who wants to see us poison ourselves with their alcohol and drugs.”

“Shut the fuck up,” somebody called from the back of the circle.

“Yeah, didn’t I just sit over here and watch you down a fifth of the white man’s poison?”

“And smacked his lips and asked for more.”

“Take that shit back to Africa. Shit, I came to party.”

“Wait a minute, y’all, the brother got a point.”

“Yeah, the point his hair is shaped in that needs to meet the barber’s shears.”

The red, black, and green dashiki walked to the center of the circle and planted himself between Tyrone and Larry. He directed himself to Larry. “You
ought to be ashamed of yourself. You old enough to be his father, ought to be teaching him about the struggles of peoples of African descent all over the world, and all you can do is call him out for a fight.”

“Hey, man, fuck you.” Larry started to swing at the dashiki, but the bouncer caught his fist, told him both he and dashiki had to go right this second, or he was gonna signal for his posse. He opened the door. Dashiki half pushed Larry into the outside sounds of the Strip.

Tyrone was surprised at the rate his heart thumped in his throat right now as Candy ran her hands up and down his back, told him he was not only cute and smart, but brave too. “Larry’s a serious boxer, plus all the people he knows in here,” she said, “you could have put that good-looking face of yours in serious jeopardy.”

Perry knew that too. He’d been sitting in a dark corner of the club, sipping vodka and stroking the arm of the woman sitting in his lap. Saw Tyrone come in, gawking as if he were a first-time tourist to New York amazed by the skyscrapers. He didn’t want to make his son feel like he couldn’t handle himself; he sensed he had that effect on Tyrone. So he kissed the shoulder of the woman he was with, laughed and clapped as the dancers did the bop and watusi, and tried not to keep watch over his son at the bar. Then he saw Candy walk by, knew she was working tonight because she always wore that yellow headband when she did her night job of coming on to the men at the bar, getting them to buy her
drink after drink of scotch and soda that the bartender knew to fill only with soda, plus it kept the men at the bar keeping up with her, ordering drinks of their own. He whispered to Candy that he needed a favor for old times’ sakes, then pointed out Tyrone. He had just settled back down to kiss the arm of the woman he was with, whose name he could not remember, when Dashiki approached him and asked him if he could speak to him about the plight of black men. Then the voices got loud at the bar, the rest of the club silent, and Perry almost threw the woman from his lap as he jumped up to see about his son. He told Dashiki if he was for real about saving the lives of black men, take this ten-dollar bill as paternal gratitude for saving the life of that young man with his shirt collar sitting on the outside of his windbreaker jacket.

Candy could feel Tyrone’s fast breaths as she rubbed her hand up and down his back. She glanced at her watch; it was after two, and the club was still packed. This had been a good night; she knew that the 50 percent of the take at the bar that her conversation and soda guzzling brought in was at least forty dollars tonight. Not a bad take, and she didn’t even have to be touched. But suddenly she wanted to be touched. Not by the likes of Perry, who filled this bar every weekend, wives or steady women waiting up for them to finally creep home, waiting for that hello kiss so they could confirm their sugary lies. Tonight she really did want this young blood to
touch her with his honesty, his fear, his newness to the life on the Strip.

She pulled off her yellow headband and wrapped it around her wrist, and then squeezed his neck and pulled his neck down to whisper in his ear, “Come on, young blood, I’m feeling shaky after what almost went down. Come on home with me tonight, baby; help me settle down. Please. Please.”

Tyrone tried to get his breaths to flow one into the other the way they were supposed to. His lungs wouldn’t cooperate. So he had to concentrate on his breathing. Told himself that’s why he couldn’t ponder over his love for Ramona right now. Nor could he try to figure out why, as committed as he claimed to be to Ramona, he leaned down and kissed Candy on the lips and then allowed her to take him on home.

S
unday, and Ramona was up early making salt pork and egg sandwiches for those three girls. She was muttering, like she usually muttered when she did her foster care chores. Right now she muttered about the too thick slices of salt pork, how that slab could have gone much farther if Marty at Baron’s meat market had just sliced it thin like she’d asked. Then Tyrone rang the doorbell decked out in his go-to-church clothes, his Florsheim shoes and his father’s good black suit. And after he followed her back into the kitchen going on and on about how good that meat smelled frying, Ramona recognized the suit as his father’s suit. She had watched his father, Perry, walk his smooth walk in that suit when he was a pallbearer for Mae’s cousin. She wished it were Perry in the suit right now standing in front of her. She asked Tyrone then if it was a
new suit; she didn’t want him knowing she’d studied his father so.

Tyrone responded to the way her face filled up at that instant, the way he rarely saw it fill up. He didn’t know that the way her cheeks seemed engorged right then and the way her lips parted, showing the tip of her tongue, had everything to do with that suit, with his father in that suit. And since he thought that filled-up look was for him, and since also he was feeling guilty that he didn’t feel more guilty about having allowed Candy’s gusts of passion to spin him around like a rudderless ship the night before until he spun into a pinnacle that widened and covered him like a deep, deep river, he took Ramona’s face in his hands, told her that if she wanted it to be a new suit, it could be, whatever she wanted, if he could make it happen, he would.

He was still kissing her, a thirsty openmouthed kiss, when Bliss barreled into the kitchen.

“Did anybody call you in here?” Ramona snapped at Bliss as she pushed Tyrone from her and smoothed at her flowered duster, and didn’t have a chance to think about what was different about Tyrone’s mouth.

“Boss suit,” Bliss said to Tyrone, ignoring Ramona. “Let me know when you ready to get creamed again in pinochle.”

Tyrone cleared his throat. His eyebrows were embarrassed. “Well, don’t you look like the little princess,” he said as he adjusted his tie.

Bliss did a half curtsy and rolled her eyes at Ra
mona. She was dressed for church in the clothes Ramona had laid out for her on the banister the night before: her red wool jumper with the drop waist and her white cotton blouse with the lacy, pleated collar that matched her white lacy leotards. Ramona didn’t even want to imagine how much the leotards cost. “Take your fresh-assed self into the living room and sit on the couch until I call you,” she said to Bliss. “Those other two better get the hell down here or they gonna be leaving outta here hungry, and it won’t be my fault; I’m doing my job and cooking the damned food. Even though I don’t know how that hurt one’s gonna walk to church,” Ramona said half to herself and half to Tyrone after Bliss went back in the front room.

Tyrone rubbed his hands up and down Ramona’s arms. “Mona, baby doll, she does have a name, you know.” He put his hands gently on her lips. “Repeat after me,” he said, “Vic-tor-ria. Her name is Victoria.” He kissed her before she could respond.

Shern walked into the kitchen then. She didn’t have a bounce to her step, like Bliss. She did have on a mid-heel, though. The last pair of shoes her mother had bought her, her first pair that didn’t have a corrective arch support. Ramona looked at Shern in the grown-looking shoes; she rolled her eyes back in her head and sucked the air through her teeth. She decided against commenting on the womanish shoes; the Empire-waist green velvet dress was girlish enough to hide her developing
bustline and offset the shoes. “You and that fresh-assed Bliss need to put a towel around your shoulders, so I can hot-curl your bangs,” she said to Shern. “You first, come on before I put the eggs on. And you both use the same towel, y’all don’t have any appreciation whatsoever for towels needing to be washed.”

By the time Ramona finished with Shern’s black-as-black-velvet bangs, and was wrapping Bliss’s light-brown hair around the steaming curling iron, and complaining about how damned much hair they had, both long and thick, a terrible combination for whoever was charged with its upkeep, Victoria limped into the room. Her dress was chocolate brown suede, her collar beige like her textured nylon over-the-knee socks, except her legs were bare above her mid-calf.

“Why you got your socks pushed all the way down like that? Aren’t they over the knee? Don’t you know how they supposed to go?” Ramona half barked as she blew at the steam coming off the hot curlers and clicked the handles to loosen them. She unfurled Bliss’s hair and put the curlers down on a half-burned dish towel and then combed out Bliss’s bang and fingered it into a perfect barrel shape. “You finished,” she said to the top of Bliss’s head. “Put the towel in the shed, and go back in and sit on the couch with your sister. And don’t turn on the TV all loud, I don’t like no whole lot of noise around me on Sunday morning.”

She turned back to Victoria. “So you were telling me why you got those socks bunched all down around your calf like that.”

Victoria swallowed hard and tried to choke down the remnants of the sobs she’d let loose in the bathroom while she ran the water so no one would hear. She forced herself to look at Ramona. “It’ll hurt to pull these socks up past my sore.”

Ramona’s eyes tried to stay stern but softened when she looked at Victoria, just a hint, but it was enough for Victoria to notice and take a deep breath and continue talking.

“So I folded my socks down so they still look neat.” She struggled to keep her eyes on Ramona’s face. “But if my coat rubs against my sore, that might not feel too good either.”

“Tyrone,” Ramona half pleaded, “could you check her knee?”

Tyrone came into the kitchen from where he had just been in the living room telling jokes to Bliss. “Sure I will, baby doll,” he said. “In fact, I noticed she’s limping. Probably doesn’t need to be taking that four-block walk to church.”

Ramona agreed with a sigh as she spread bread out on a plate and commenced to cover the slices with scrambled eggs and salt pork. “Yeah, well, my luck, if I leave her here by herself, she’ll fall and break her neck. Then I’ll really have some explaining to do when Mae gets back in here on Tuesday. I sure as hell hope her limp is gone by Tuesday.”

Tyrone cringed when she said the part about Vic
toria falling and breaking her neck. “I’ll walk Bliss and Shern to church,” he offered. “You can stay in and keep an eye on Victoria. Will that make you feel better?”

“As a matter of fact, it will,” Ramona said. “My choir’s singing at the night service, so I won’t even feel guilty about missing this morning since I have to go tonight. And with you with those other two, there’s no excuse for them getting lost or scared by someone like crazy Larry.” She smirked when she said that.

“Yeah, baby doll, we need to talk about Larry. Something’s got to be done about him, almost had a run-in with him myself last night; we almost came to blows right over on Chestnut Street.”

“What you doing over on Chestnut Street?” Ramona was pouring juice into glasses when she asked it, and paused and put the pitcher down and looked at Tyrone.

“I uh, I had just walked through Dead Block to see if I could find their books.” Tyrone tugged playfully on the thick barrette holding the end of Victoria’s braid in place.

“Yeah, but even going through Dead Block, Chestnut’s way outta your way, isn’t it?” Ramona was still looking at Tyrone, trying to read his eyebrows, which appeared unusually stilted against his forehead.

“Yeah, but I just felt like walking, clearing my head, and like I was saying, you might have to file some kind of complaint about that Larry, he can’t
be walking around like he got rights to those girls and he’s no relation to them, none at all.”

“Well, he’s probably harmless.” Ramona sighed as she resumed pouring juice, told herself it was morning light casting a glow on Tyrone’s eyebrows and making them look different. “Plus Larry’s sister calls the shots about what children go where, you know; we need to stay on halfway good terms with her.”

She was finished pouring juice and then started arranging silverware and napkins as she called into the living room, “Get on in here and eat.” And to Victoria she said, “You might as well take the socks all the way off, and change out of that good dress. You staying in with me this morning.”

V
ictoria spent the Sunday morning in with Ramona. They faced each other at the oblong Formica kitchen table as they ate salt pork and egg sandwiches; Ramona languished over her brewed coffee; Victoria sipped at her Ovaltine and milk. Neither spoke—Victoria because she was quiet by nature, Ramona, because there was no need to chastise or otherwise insult the child right now—so they listened to each other’s slurping sounds and the crackle of the March wind hitting the kitchen window.

Plus Ramona was preoccupied with Tyrone’s mouth. She knew men, had been experiencing them in all varieties since she was sixteen. She knew their arms, their backs, the calves of their legs. But she es
pecially knew their mouths. And Tyrone’s mouth was polite, the way it lightly touched hers and almost asked for permission before parting her lips with his tongue. But this morning his mouth had been powerful, confident, the way it came at her wide open and mashed against her lips like it was going to swallow her lips. She only knew one thing that could change a man’s mouth like that. She remembered then how his eyebrows looked pasted on his forehead when he told her why he was on Chestnut Street; it wasn’t the morning light, like she’d tried to convince herself; his eyebrows were guilty-looking. The very thought of Tyrone lying to her, maybe even running around on her caused such a thick slab of emotion to bear down on her that wasn’t even anger—she would expect to feel the how-dare-he kind of rage—but this mass of feeling falling heavy all around her like humid Philadelphia air before a rainstorm in July was a sadness so dense that it caught her off guard. She hadn’t realized that her feelings for him were that solidly strong.

She shook the image of his mouth from her head and forced herself to focus her eyes on the here and now, the coffee she was sipping, the red and white vinyl place mat, the Abbott’s dairy calendar on the wall behind Victoria’s head, Victoria holding her salt pork and egg sandwich—struggling to eat.

“Does your mouth hurt?” Ramona asked as she watched Victoria bite her sandwich using her side teeth instead of the ones in the front.

“Just a little.” Victoria lied. She so hated appear
ing hurt and needy and helpless. And right now her lips felt puffy and hot; her gums above her two front teeth throbbed even as she bit down with her side teeth. She cleared her throat and shifted in her seat and stared at the stalk of breakfast meat hanging out over the white bread and scrambled eggs. She broke the salt pork off. The eggs would be easier to chew. She tried to bite down using her front teeth. The throbbing spread and raced even up through her nose. She held the eggs in her mouth and glanced up at Ramona.

Ramona watched her intently. She couldn’t believe that the child was acting like she was fine when it was so obvious the pain she was having chewing the soft scrambled eggs. “Why you lying?” Ramona said it more than asked it as she put her coffee cup down. “I can see you hurting.” She got up from her side of the oblong table and went to Victoria’s side. She put her thumb against Victoria’s chin and held a napkin under her mouth. “Spit the eggs out ’fore you swallow them without chewing and choke to death. Then I don’t even know how I’ll be able to face my mother when she gets back in here from Buffalo on Tuesday.”

Victoria did as she was told and spit the half-chewed eggs into the napkin. Ramona’s thumb was warm against her chin as she moved it down to open Victoria’s mouth. Victoria’s mother always used to touch her chin right before she kissed her hello or good-night or good-bye. She hadn’t felt a thumb against her chin for a stretch of time that seemed so
far gone she sometimes wondered if she’d dreamed her life before now, if maybe she had always lived here with Ramona.

“How come you don’t have a cleft in your chin like your baby sister?” Ramona peered into Victoria’s mouth as she talked. “They say a cleft is where the angels kissed you. I can’t even imagine nobody’s angel ever getting close enough to that smart-mouthed youngest sister of yours, that Bliss; shit, her bad ass would scare away the boldest of angels. You about the only one out of the three of y’all that deserves a cleft in the chin, and look at you; you ain’t even got the sense to tell someone you hurting.” She tilted Victoria’s face. “Your gums looking mighty puffy. Let me mix you some warm salt and water for you to soak your gums in.”

Victoria thought she felt Ramona squeeze her chin affectionately before she pulled her thumb away. She couldn’t tell if Ramona really had or if she’d just imagined it because she’d wanted Ramona to do what her own mother used to. She was certain now, though, that Ramona had a softness about her that was as smooth and rich as her mother’s velvet evening purse. She’d sensed it from their first day here but couldn’t say it to Bliss and Shern, they hated Ramona so, and neither of her sisters had ever been able to pick up the shades in someone’s character like Victoria could. She always reasoned it was her plainness that gave her her greater insight. She wasn’t always responding to a litany of compliments like Shern with the dark, liq
uid eyes—“Where she get those Indian eyes?” people always asked about Shern; “gorgeous, just gorgeous,” they’d say—or like Bliss with the light brown hair and that snappy say-anything way about her that charmed people so. “Mnh, isn’t she nice,” is all they ever said about Victoria, at least in her mind. So since her energy wasn’t constantly stirred up saying thank you about her eyes or the color of her hair, she was freed up to see things in other people that her sisters could not, like now, the goodness about Ramona that was hidden way beyond her teeth sucking and threats of whipping their butts with the ironing cord.

Ramona mixed the warm salt and water and let Victoria rinse her mouth out in the kitchen sink. “I’m only letting you do this here ’cause you probably can’t get up the steps good; otherwise you got no business spitting in this kitchen sink, you hear me?”