How good is your rouge and your paint? Your plaster of Paris? Can it cover up waste? The bones of grief? “We’re fine,” I say. “Thank you.” He withdraws.
The casket glows, gray, in the light of six candles, each the size of a cereal box. The room smells of roses and also of rust from an old air-conditioner in the window. Three or four unruly hairs stand up on Grady’s head. Lifelessness has hardened like mud on his cheeks. Last night I dreamed of Mama in an open hole in the ground, looking natural and calm, as if she were taking a nap.
But there’s nothing natural about Grady. If he were a manikin, I’d say he was poorly made. If we propped him up, he’d fall apart. This is a corpse. The ugliness of the word is exactly right. Whatever was human here has fled. All that’s left is inertia. A rigid and useless container.
Bitter plucks Grady’s sleeve. “What did you do to yourself?” he whispers, shaking. A humming in the walls. The wiring. “What in the world did you do?” He starts to sink. Yes, I’ll be burying him soon, I think. Like a keepsake; tucking away all that’s left of my old life. Just a little rag and bone. My throat tightens. We lean against each other. I help him outside and back into the car.
Crespi stands by the funeral home limo, at the Magnolia Blossom’s gate. A brackish smell — shrimp and brine — sails on the breeze from the Ship Channel. While the preacher prays over Grady’s grave, and mourners fan themselves with programs from the service, I stare across the street at Bitter’s yard, remembering muggy afternoons just like this when Ariyeh and I were kids playing “Jail.” She was the sheriff, I was the thief. She’d shut me inside a cardboard box. “You’re a bad, bad girl and I have to lock you up.”
Of course, I thought. Look at me.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”
It was just a game, but each time we played it, I felt indelibly shamed.
They want to make you into a monster.
Near Crespi now, the white men I’d noticed before, strolling among the tombstones. With them is Rufus Bowen. I lower my shades. They watch our party for a moment — did Bowen catch me looking? — then walk half a block to a black and white Volvo.
You’re a bad, bad girl, and you’ll never know why.
A woman next to the reverend gives him a sultry smile as he drops wet dirt onto the casket.
Tonight, when Bayou Slim makes his appearance at Etta’s, interrupting Grady’s wake, the room gets still. His forehead is creased like a snappy pair of slacks. His fingers shiver. He doesn’t even make it through one song. The melody’s an agony, the beat a punctured truck tire. He quits abruptly, drops his head, then rouses himself to beg a few coins. Stumbles out the door.
Several Gulf Coast bluesmen adopted “Bayou” as part of their stage names. “Heads or Tails” is a local standard. Echoes of my father? Simple coincidence.
But I get up to follow, glancing to make sure Bitter is okay. He’s hugging one of the brandy women, who’s wearing a Lady Day gardenia.
I scan the parking lot. Pickups. Sun-blistered vans. Across the street the Flower Man’s house is ablaze: Christmas lights, Halloween devil lights, lanterns, candles, flashlights bolted to the wall. They shine randomly into a field snapping with little white bugs. Train wheels clatter somewhere off to the west. My daddy’s gone, my daddy’s gone, my daddy’s gone. I pull Elias’s letter from my pocket and let it drift away on the breeze.
Then I see him in a tumbleweed snarl. He brushes his pants, tosses a bottle into the field, hoists his guitar case onto his shoulders: piggybacking a clubfooted child. “Slim?” I call. I cross the street.
He squints at me.
I stop a few feet from him. “I just wanted to tell you, sir …”
“What’s that?”
“I enjoy your music.”
We’re face to face in the Flower Man’s pink and purple light. The glare makes the ground, our clothes, our skin seem rough, made of tarp. Slim’s brearh is rank; his eyes like Bloody Marys. “Music?” he croaks.
“I think you’re a lot like my daddy used to be. No,” I say. “No. I think you’re exactly like him.”
“You need a daddy?” The voice is whiskey in a cracked wooden cup. His belly rumbles.
“No. Maybe.”
He touches my arm. I start to touch him back, but he coughs, “Got a buck?”
“Sure.” I laugh. “Sure I do.” But I don’t. I’ve left my purse in the gut bucket.
“Thank you,” he says, though I’ve given him nothing. He weaves away through the weeds.
14
SOME OTHER TIME/ROOMS/DAILY, WEEKLY RATES, says the sign. Six stories. Wood and brick. Peeling tan paint. The rooms are furnished — bed, table, chest of drawers — and they’re only fifty dollars a week. I nod hello to the man behind the lobby desk as I carry my case to the stairs. He’s wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, eating a plum, watching an old Star Trek episode on a portable black-and-white TV. He doesn’t offer to help me. The plum leaks on the scarred oak countertop.
The stairs are dark and narrow, littered with Sprite cans, crumpled Camel packs, want ads, broken glass. Sour fried food. I emerge onto the third floor’s radish-colored carpet. Loud voices, thumping from behind closed doors. Peanut shells line the baseboards. Earwigs sift among them. I’m beginning to have second thoughts — I’d noticed the squalor before, when I’d checked the place out, but it didn’t seem this depressing.
My room reassures me. Large. Wide windows. I flop my suitcase onto the creaky spring bed. Torn strips of dark blue wallpaper curl like the petals of an iris. The closet smells of men’s suits: sweat, watery cologne. An old rubber doll’s head lies on its ear in a corner. A single coat hanger.
An empty Lipitor bottle sits in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror in the bathroom. Someone has painted a twisting vine around the hot water knob in the shower. Part of a Stephen King paperback lies shredded on the toilet tank. Of course the faucet drips.
Cooing sounds next door, through the walclass="underline" an elderly man and woman consoling each other. The windows overlook an abandoned freight yard, flatcars loaded with late morning light. A yellowed mattress curls in a field of sunflowers and weeds. Grime sprinkles the windowsill.
For the first time ever I have my own place in Houston. My birth city. My home. I try to imagine living here, driving to work, hanging out with Ariyeh.
Bitter wasn’t happy I left his house, though I assured him I was only two blocks away and I’d eat with him every night. He wore three nutmegs tied in a rag around his neck and sipped tea steeped with anise seed and corn shucks: bad blood medicine. “If I’m sick as you say I am, Seam, how can you leave me?”
“I’m not leaving… so you admit you’re sick?”
“Nothing my spells won’t cure. I’m talking ‘bout you. How you feel.”
“You won’t let me be a nurse, will you? Will you? No. You’re determined to end up like Grady.”
“That’s low, Seam.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle, but it’s true. You heard what the doctor said. Your symptoms are severe enough to warrant more tests. Yet you sit here doing nothing. It’s like my stepdad when Mama was sick, smiling all the time — ’Everything’s hunky-dory!’ Anyway. It’s better this way. You’ll get your space back, I’ll have some privacy, and maybe my spine will loosen up. Keep your cell phone handy. You’ve got the number of the pay phone over at my place, right?”