The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (24 page)

Mills is standing next to me. I whisper, “Cheat death and shame the devil.”

“You one crazy nigger,” he says.

“I’m not dead though,” I say.

“Nah, not today, anyhow.”

I don’t want to look at that island for one more minute. I stand at the prow and look out toward the sea beyond the bay. I’ll have to rewrite my letter. I practice folding it into different shapes; if I make it pretty, Sissy might not throw it away. Maybe she’ll let Lucille hold it, a paper toy her daddy made her. I fold it into a boat, just flat, you know, with a triangle for a sail, but I don’t think little girls like boats, so I change it into a swan.

Sissy borrowed the money to get the bed back; she let them keep that armchair. A few months later I joined the service, and after I left, she took up with a man who wouldn’t gamble away the furniture. Floyd told me about it in a postscript to one of his letters. Just a postscript to tell me my wife was living with somebody else. Imagine that. Her mother must have been half dead with the shame of it. When my leave came up, I went to Philadelphia.

I went around to Sissy’s apartment in the middle of the afternoon. She and this man had a little place on a block in West Philadelphia where neither of them knew anybody. I wore my dress blues. The brass buttons shone in the sun. I felt like the son of a king come to claim his bride. I didn’t deserve to feel that way—it was a lie—but the fantasy helped me keep my head up. As I climbed the steps to the apartment, I realized that it was remarkable that Sissy hadn’t found another man before now. I’ll tell her, I thought, that I had come to offer her a divorce. We could go down to the courthouse that same afternoon. I’d free her so she could have an honorable life with this man she’d found. But then she opened the door and she was every inch my Sissy, with the mole on her cheek and her iron gaze.

“I came to get you,” I said.

She stood on the threshold looking at me and blinking quickly. I thought she might cry, but she wouldn’t give me the satisfaction.

“We’re still married,” I said. “What kind of way is this to live?”

“I’m living like a woman, Franklin,” she answered. “My mother and my sisters won’t speak to me, but it’s worth it to live like a woman. I don’t know when you suddenly got so concerned about my sacrifices.”

And there we were in a movie with me as the penitent husband and Sissy as the wronged wife. I said my lines and she said hers. I don’t know why I didn’t take my hat and go.

“I came because I love you,” I said.

“I believe you think that’s true,” Sissy said.

She never moved from the doorway. Her hands hung at her sides, and she made little fists, then released them again like she did when she was nervous. Little circles of gold, the sunlight reflecting off of my brass buttons, played across her face. I looked over her shoulder into the living room. It looked all right; it was cozy. Everything in the room was light and lifting, white curtains, a cream sofa, a pale rug on the floor.

“I’m a better man after being in the service.” I knew better than to say that to her, but I couldn’t think of anything else. “I arranged for a truck to help you move your things. I can call right now. It’d be here in ten minutes.”

“A truck!” Sissy laughed in spite of herself.

She knew I didn’t have a truck. I don’t know what I would have done if she’d called my bluff.

“A truck!” she said again and shook her head.

She let me into the apartment. I sat on her white couch. She sat opposite me in a straight-back chair with wooden armrests. I should have bought her a chair like that, instead of the armchair I got. It suited her better, she was not a slouching woman.

“I haven’t had a drink for days,” I said.

“I can’t go with you this time, Franklin.”

“So you just going to live like this with this man!”

“He has real feeling for me. I won’t call it love because I have been in love and this isn’t that, but he’s steady and kind. I feel like a lady on a rest cure. You know the kind in books, that sits in a chaise lounge all day and looks at flowers? That’s just what I do. I go to work and come home and tend the house and don’t think about anything. You wore me out, Franklin.”

I had come begging to Sissy before, and she beat the hell out of me and left. I hadn’t changed since then, but I was still so arrogant I thought I could go over there and win her back. I thought of all the things I could do: I could rage and drag her out of there with my hands, throw myself on the floor and beg for her mercy. I could tell her again that I was a changed man, but I had done all of that before. I had played all of my cards, and Sissy wouldn’t be lied to or cajoled. I caught my reflection in the living room window. I looked like a pile of fool’s gold, you had to squint from all the shine coming off of me—buttons, shoes, epaulets. I asked myself why I wanted her back so badly. I couldn’t answer the question, but I couldn’t leave that apartment either.

I got up from my place on the couch and stood crying in the middle of the room.

“I love you,” I said.

“We have to be finished, Franklin.”

She got up and took my hand. I didn’t understand how she could hold my hand like that and tell me no. She stroked my palm with her fingers. I leaned into her because I needed some strength to walk out of that door, and she was the only one I could get it from. We hugged for a long time, and then I kissed her neck and her shoulder. I kissed her eyelids and the hollow between her collarbones, and we sank down onto that white couch together.

After, while she was buttoning her blouse, she said she’d walk me out to the corner, and you know we walked out to that corner holding hands like we did when we were dating, before I messed everything up.

“You take care of yourself,” she said and turned quickly toward the house before I could reply.

That was a year ago. I have not heard from Sissy since then, until I got her letter about Lucille.

We steer the junk toward the gulf. It’s slow moving, but we are making distance. The stars and fog fade in the pre-dawn and the sky brightens. Behind us the island is a ridged black silhouette, ever receding. A sampan glides along the surface of the water near the shore of the island. Probably a fishing boat, they come out at this hour. The occupants, a boy and an old man look into the water and then at us. The boy is pointing at our junk, at me. I swear he’s pointing right at me. The old man pushes the kid’s arm down.

The sampan is lifted on a low wave, gently, like a ballet dancer lifting his partner, and pushed closer to the island. There is a boom. The boat is lifted higher on an upward moving column of water. The explosion echoes and echoes. It bounces from one island to the next. It knocks in my brain and chest. I am holding my breath but do not notice until it is quiet again, and I take a deep inhale that makes me cough and sputter. Mills lets out a low whistle, says softly, “Shit.”

I get another beer and drink half in one gulp. We will get back to the ship in two hours. I look into the water for floating body parts. I want to see the boy’s head. I ought to be forced to acknowledge what I have done. Most of my missions are at night. I shoot into the darkness and sail away before I have to count bodies. It was the same with Sissy. I was a violence in her life and left before I had to face the damage I’d done; with Lucille there would be more recklessness, more hurt, more promises I don’t keep, more destroying the people I love.

I make a wager: if I see any evidence of the boy’s life we took, I will never drink again. I set my beer on the deck and wait. I scan the water. A light-colored unrecognizable something floats toward me. I lean so far over the starboard side I nearly topple into the water. Behind me Pinky calls, “Suicide ain’t the answer!” I hear a round of guffaws. I lean and squint. The floating object appears to be a finger, then a leaf, then a discarded bandage. The current shifts, and the thing is carried away from me. I pick up my beer, finish it off. When we get back to the ship, I’ll go to sleep, and when I wake up, I’ll have the shakes and I won’t have the willpower to sit on my bunk sweating and throwing up until the liquor’s out of my system. I’ll take a swig of the whiskey stashed in my footlocker, and the days will go on as they’ve been. And it’s not like I don’t know I bet my family life on an exploded boy’s body parts. I know that. I know what it means about the kind of man I have become. Or always was? I can’t quite tell anymore. It is almost a relief to know that the people I love are free of me, that I don’t have to lie to myself, that I don’t have to pretend Lucille would be better off for knowing me.

I reach into my pocket and throw my letter for Sissy into the bay. There was a picture in the envelope, which lands in the water next to the folded paper swan. In the photo I am standing at the dock with my ship behind me. I’m in my dress blues with my white hat pulled low over one eye. On the back of the photo it says, For you and little Lucille. Love, Franklin. Saigon, 1969.

Bell

1975

A
FTER WALTER LEFT,
Bell decided to lie down and not get up again. For a month she lay in bed looking out the window to the street below. The glass was sooty. Had she known this window would be her last and only portal to the outside world, she would have cleaned it while she still had the strength and the will. Music thumped in the apartment next door. The bass seeped into her bones and skull with a thud-thud like a nail into soft wood. Bell lifted herself onto her elbows. She was feverish; the sheets hurt her skin. She renounced the pain, as she had renounced her life a month before. It had been surprisingly easy to decide to die. She simply stopped doing the things required of her: taking her medicine or getting out of bed in the morning or going to work or hoping Walter would return. There wasn’t any food left in the apartment. Bell was hungry. She felt as though her insides were nothing but air—if she got up from her bed, she would bounce lightly along the floor like a balloon.

If Bell kept still, her cough wasn’t as bothersome. It wasn’t too bad in the daylight hours, but at night it was persistent. Like most of the men I’ve known, she thought. Ha! Some nights, between the cough and getting in and out of bed for water, she hardly slept at all. The bouts bent her double and left her gasping for air. When Bell was a child, she’d gotten whooping cough and pretended the wheezing was caused by moths fluttering in her chest. My moths are restless today, she’d say, or my moths are sleeping. Now her moths were always restless, and her chest ached as though their wings were knife blades beating against the walls of her lungs. She was thin and growing thinner. Right after Walter left and Bell still had some desire, she’d reached under the covers to pleasure herself and felt her hipbones jutting out like the hard angles of a table. She had always wanted to be thin like her sisters. Careful what you wish for. Ha! Now her stomach was almost concave. Bell rubbed her hand over it and coughed.

When she could sleep, Bell dreamed of her moths. In the dreams she was a length of broken tree bough, no wider around than a sapling. Her arms and legs were bare branches growing out from her tree body. She was burnished brown like the cane Walter carried. At the top of the long stalk of her, her head was elongated and graceful like the fertility statues they sold at the African bazaar in West Philadelphia. The cough never hurt in her dreams; it was a vibration in her chest that moved up through her lungs. When it reached her throat, she threw her head back and opened her mouth. Her moths flew out—legions of them all white and silver like crystals of moonlight.

If she stayed in bed long enough, she might fossilize into a wooden carving of herself, Bell thought. Eventually someone would come into the apartment and instead of finding her flesh and bones, they would find a whittled pole polished to a high shine. Likely it would be the city marshalls. Wouldn’t they be surprised to find that they had evicted a stick. A notice had been slipped under the door: she had thirty days to vacate for nonpayment of rent. She wondered when Walter had stopped paying the rent and what he’d done with the money she’d given him for that purpose.

A couple of months before he’d given her a dress, a loud, ugly fuchsia thing that made her look like a whore. It didn’t have any tags, he’d probably taken it from some other woman’s closet. Maybe he’d brought it to her to assuage his guilt, if he had any. Likely he gave her the dress because he wanted her to look cheap. Bell was happy to please him in that way. It was the correct size, though by the time he gave it to her she was already losing weight and it was too loose on her.

Walter said, “You losing your sugar.”

“I ain’t losing nothing, baby,” Bell replied. “I got my sugar right here.”

She thrust her hips toward him. With Walter she could be as dirty as she wanted to. He had no interest in where she came from or who she had been before he met her. Bell told him that she was from a neighborhood like the one where she and Walter lived now, with trash in the gutters and cool predatory young men hanging around in front of the chicken takeout place. She pretended that she spoke like him and acted like him and was like him, though that wasn’t true, though she was Bell Shepherd from Germantown and had graduated from high school and had one year of college. But these things were so distant that they seemed like the details of someone else’s life. She knew now that she had always been a woman of base instincts. She had cycled through men of varying fortunes and possibilities until she arrived at Walter, with whom she could indulge every whim and to whom she was accountable for nothing.

He didn’t talk about his past much. He didn’t talk much at all, and if he did, it was generally about something that had happened within the last few hours. He had tried at various intervals to make his living as a number’s runner, a pimp, and a drug peddler, but he wasn’t successful because he couldn’t keep the past, even the recent past, in his mind. So he had become a petty thief and a hired hand for the neighborhood loan shark. He never had much trouble with the law. He was damned, but he was lucky, and smart for a man who couldn’t remember what had happened the day before yesterday. Bell appreciated that about him. She had been with her share of schemers and men who were forever building castles in the sky. All of those dreams made out of clouds; when it rained—and it always did—they were left with nothing but the soggy shirts on their backs. That kind of disappointment was exhausting. Walter was mean as a rat, but he didn’t tax her spirit in that way. He was the perfect man for Bell because her spirit was already worn out.

In the two years they were together, Walter had never tried to make her believe anything. He didn’t even try to make her laugh. Of course, he had the sense of humor of an armored car. He told her a story once, while they were in his car waiting for one of the loan shark’s defaulted customers.

“This a waste of my time. The man ain’t got the money to pay,” Walter said.

“So what will you do when he comes out?” Bell asked.

“Don’t worry about it.” Walter replied. They sat in silence for a few minutes.

“That discharge money they give you when you come out the service ain’t enough to buy a round of drinks. Ain’t enough for a pair of shoes. Ain’t enough for nothing.” Walter finished his sentence as though he didn’t have anything else to say.

“That’s a shame,” Bell replied. “A damn shame.”

She leaned back on the headrest and closed her eyes. Walter drummed the steering wheel with the pads of his fingers.

“Baby, you have to do that?” Bell asked. “I was going to take a nap.”

He didn’t answer for some time.

“I washed windows on them platforms.” He nudged Bell with his elbow. “You listening?”

Bell, who had fallen asleep, bolted upright in her seat. “What? Yeah, baby, mmm hmm.”

“I said I washed windows.”

“I heard you say it.”

“My cousin had a window-washing business he started, and he came up to my mama’s house and asked me to do it ’cause I ain’t afraid of shit.”

“Mmm hmm,” Bell said struggling to keep her eyes open.

“They hoisted me up there. That thing moves all around. And they got a lot of dead bugs on the windows. You wouldn’t think they’d be up so high. You ever been in a boat?”

Bell shook her head.

“This was like being in a boat,” Walter said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I was washing those windows just fine. They had me tied to a rope that hangs over the top of the building. I did tip the bucket and all the water spilled. I heard some lady yelling on the street. Heh, heh. But it don’t do to look down or you might get dizzy.”

“Sure,” Bell said.

“I was like a surfer up there. Like a mountain goat, sure of my steps, you know.”

“I thought you said you spilled the bucket.”

“You gon’ listen or not?” Walter lit a cigarette.

“Alright, baby. You were up there like a goat.”

“I cleaned forty buildings the first week. Second week more buildings. Maybe sixty that week. Good money too, for all that dare deviling.”

“How much?”

“That ain’t the point!” Walter replied.

“Oh,” Bell said.

“Maybe a hundred a building.”

“Really? That seems like a lot.”

Walter gave her a dirty look.

“Usually there’s nobody in them places, or I never saw nobody. But one day there’s some white cats.”

“Where?” Bell asked.

Walter sighed, exasperated.

“In the office! Ain’t you paying attention?”

“I am, baby, but you said …”

“Suits up in there. Talking. I’m trying to be professional, and friendly. I give them a nice smile and a little wave.”

Walter’s smiles were a little like a snarl you might see on an animal about to attack.

“These crackers pull the shade! Right in my fucking face. I say to myself, That ain’t nice, or professional, or friendly. Right?”

“I guess not,” Bell said.

“What you guessing for? What if I smiled at you right now, and instead of smiling back, you start the car and drive off? It was just like that.”

“I see your point,” Bell said.

“Anybody sees my point. A monkey sees my point.”

“Okay.”

“Shit!”

“Okay.”

“I kicked the shit out that window. I mean I put my boot in it. I almost fell off the rig. Next thing I know they hoisting me back up to the roof. I get up there, and they’re asking all kind of questions. I go down to the street ’cause my cousin’s there, and the police. And he’s talking about I had a fit ’cause of the war. I said, ‘Nigger, I lay you out right here.’ And he says to the police ‘See, I told you, he can’t control himself.’ ”

“So what happened?” Bell asked.

“I ain’t washed no more windows.”

“That’s all?”

“What else you want to happen? Shit.”

Bell chuckled. That Walter. She had a sudden craving for the soup her mother made when Bell was a little girl. If she were at Wayne Street now, Hattie would put hot mustard poultices on her chest and feed her syrup made with cooked onions and honey. No matter that Bell had tuberculosis and that nasty stuff wouldn’t do a bit of good; Hattie would give it to her anyway. How many times had she and her siblings choked down that mixture? It had cured them more often than it hadn’t. Hattie had kept them all alive with sheer will and collard greens and some old southern remedies. Mean as the dickens, though. Well, she’s an old woman now, Bell thought. She hadn’t seen Hattie in nearly a decade. And she didn’t have a single picture of her and would die without seeing her face again. Alice and Ruthie said Hattie had mellowed, she laughed now and again and smiled a lot and bounced her grandchildren on her knee. You’re going to have to go and see her sometime, they said. But it was Hattie who hadn’t called her in all of these years, Hattie who wouldn’t forgive. Of course, Bell didn’t deserve her forgiveness, that was true.

After Bell took up with Walter and moved to Dauphin Street, her sisters stopped coming around; Walter was a criminal, and Dauphin Street was the ghetto. Bell wondered if they knew which building she lived in or what the cross street was. She had been excommunicated from the family. It was the Shepherd way—if one of them was disgraced, she was cut out like a bit of rot on a vegetable. The family might not even hear of her death before she was put in a pine box and buried in the potter’s field. Was there still a potter’s field? Maybe the coroner would just burn her up and throw her away. They could dump her body in the river for all Bell cared. Maybe she should leave a note for whoever found her:
Just throw me in the Schuylkill and let the fish eat me.
She liked the idea that the men who fished the river would eat bits of her with their suppers.

Bell’s craving for soup grew stronger. If she could get out of bed, she could go to the Chinese takeout around the corner for wonton soup. She hadn’t felt desire for anything in weeks. The sensation was thrilling. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, planted her feet on the floor, and put her hands on the mattress on either side of her hips. One good heave and she’d be standing. The church in the middle of the block ran a soup kitchen on Saturdays. As if people only needed to eat on Saturdays! Anyway, it wasn’t Saturday. She would have seen the line of hungry souls stretching from the church’s front door down to the corner. That was a catcalling bunch—mostly the men, and some of the women too. Ha! She recognized a few of them as the men she used to serve at the Belmore Lounge. They were raggedy drunks trying to hustle her for cheap whiskey. She rarely made tips at that place, though now and again some fool flashed his cash—imagine flashing money around in a dump like the Belmore—hoping to get in her pants.

The Belmore was the worst place Bell had ever worked, and the dirtiest. She used to relieve herself in the alley behind the bar; it was cleaner than the bathrooms, and there was less risk of somebody drunkenly walking in on her. The customers were harmless for the most part, though Bell’s coworker Evelyn kept a knife in a sheath around her calf, like a villain in a Western. She was quick to reach for it. She’d bend at the waist like she was going to tie her shoe and the next second that knife was glinting in her hand like a silver tooth. The boss said, “You can’t go threatening the regulars.”