The sallow woman came in first; she still looked nineteen, but she was thirty-nine. I recognized her even with boots on. Wearing a black leotard and a black thermal underwear top, but nothing to cover her face. Did she expect to be seen? Want it? I wondered where the film crew was positioned.
She dashed her flare down the aisles. So did the six that followed her.
They ran past me. I pulled the doors closed. I was still inside. We were in a room, but it felt big as the world.
After flares the protestors pulled can-horns from their coats and pumped them. The honks helped to orient people: Yes, you should be scared.
Some women in the audience screamed and others ducked their heads. The men did just about the same. Less yelling, more tucking.
The middle-aged woman, their leader in here, yelled, — No more beauty, just more art!
They’d been in a group, but then the demonstrators ran the aisles chaotically. Playing their can-horns whenever it seemed the audience might get their bearings enough to get up and slap these kids down.
Every two minutes. Horn! Horn!
This was supposed to have been fun. Except for the flares there was no light and I’d let seven imps in the room.
One problem was getting my eyes to focus.
As if the bleating cans wasn’t enough, there were audience members screaming. Then the rusty ring of auditorium seats flipping up as people stood and slamming down as they sat again.
— Less beauty, more art!
The protestors were yelling, lecturing us, but who was listening? I heard the words, but didn’t understand. It was loud enough in here that even Grandma covered her ears. When I scooted back to her, she’d pulled her cloche down over her eyes.
The rear curtains on stage pulled back, but the band was gone. There was a drum kit, but no one playing it.
With the backstage area exposed there was some light other than the hot-pink road flares. The lamps back there must have been on another circuit. They didn’t do much more than illuminate the contestants, all of them on the stage now. A crowd of forty-two crying girls.
They were confused. So were we. Forty-two of them. I tried to pick my sister out so I could go up there and get her, but I didn’t see Nabisase. A few of the girls climbed off the stage and tried to find their families. Many of them screamed, — Mommy! Mommy!
It sounded like they’d all lost one.
Maximilian started making noise. I wouldn’t even have noticed his voice among so many others, but he was holding that working microphone. He muttered, — I’ll be so glad when I get home.
Somebody should have turned the speakers off but in the commotion they’d spun the dial up to one hundred and thirty.
— I’ll be so glad when I get home.
My eyes remained half in focus, half in the basement.
I saw many more of the Miss Innocence girls climb offstage. A few jumped. You might have thought they were on fire. We were beneath them, but they joined us. A magnanimous act.
Once the stage cleared the thirty-nine-year-old guerrilla hurled balloons up there. She was right at the front, but no one bothered her. Afraid to tackle the saboteur.
Her friends joined. Four throwing balloons and three facing the audience, waving their can-horns threateningly. They didn’t have to. Everyone was scared of them. Even me.
The balloons wobbled heavily. When they hit they splattered greenish grease across the stage. Five balloons. Then fifteen. Great globs of oil stained the boards.
I tried to comfort Grandma, but she didn’t want it. I wondered if she’d seen me open the double doors. It was her hearing, not her sight, that sucked. I touched her shoulder and she pushed my hand away. Head forward, screaming, — Nabisase! into her lap.
Around us whole families stood to run and sat again. They didn’t know what to do.
I wished I had Uncle Arms in my hands so I could squeeze his lying neck. This was monstrous. I regretted helping.
When I went to the door a second time it was because I knew that I heard knocking.
It wasn’t forceful and I thought of Uncle Arms’s rapping from the other side.
My lightest touch made the doors move. I said, — Uncle Arms, I want to talk to you.
But he wouldn’t have heard me over the echoing chorus in the room. I was surprised the can-horns weren’t hoarse by now. If anyone but Maximilian was speaking I couldn’t hear it. All other voices became traffic in the auditorium. A long vowel sound; a cloud of despair; or one ecstatic outburst from the mouths of God.
One door slipped back three inches. A light was on in that service hallway now. 10,000 watts. It was a clear, vivid, luminous, incandescent, flaring flaming fucking corridor now. I covered my eyes. Twenty-five more anarchists ran past me, into the auditorium.
We should have stayed in Rosedale. I could have cheated fate. It was November 12th. I remember.
Nabisase found Grandma.
I heard my sister calling a name, but hardly recognized it as my own.
Grandma and Nabisase were to my left, twenty feet. I held the door open with my hand; I was framed by the hallway light. Easy to see me. And to see them. Grandma in her seat. Nabisase kneeling in the aisle. Both of them looking at me. Misunderstanding.
My eyes began to flutter as I let go of the door. It shut. My family was in the auditorium, but I was stuck outside. Not alone. There was one last figure here, wide as an oven and twice as tall. It wouldn’t let me in its cabin, but had come to take me now. It touched both sides of my face with its very small hands. The taste of salt water was on my tongue from crying. I opened my mouth, tried to talk, but there was a lion’s egg in my throat. Two of us, in the service hall, became entangled.
3 HOUNDS
21
Ledric Mayo could go ahead and die because I wasn’t going to help him. I was saying that to myself the whole seven-hour drive from Lumpkin, Virginia. If Nabisase and Grandma had been speaking to me I’d have told them that very same thing.
It’s what I told myself as I called in sick at Sparkle on Monday morning.
Then again at noon when I went outside to do yard work because I just couldn’t sleep. To illustrate the mood of my family: I hid the kitchen knives and that’s no joke.
— Aye nigga.
— Get that nigga!
— Get that nigga to stop cutting them bushes!
Three times Pinch yelled at me and three times I ignored him. He was with a few other guys in the yard next to mine, on the front steps of Candan’s house.
Pinch stood up when I didn’t heed his command to stop chopping at my hedge and he walked out then around into my driveway. Now I couldn’t ignore him because his beefy hand was on my shoulder. I let go of the trigger of the hedge clipper and the high — chip— chip— noise faded away.
— Those bushes never did anything to you.
He and I surveyed the hedge, which ran the length of my driveway. Twenty-five feet before it reached the backyard, where we had a less formal row of shrubs.
I was proud of myself because I’d really gone hell with the cutting. It wasn’t fair that in the summer this bramble was going to bloom into one impossible green afro which would have to be trimmed every two weeks and yet it wasn’t even really our property. The damn thing was growing from Candan’s side. The President was the one who’d planted it, so why did I have to tend one half of its features.
— That’s called being neighbors, said Pinch.
There were plenty of other reasons to be agitated, but the one that irked me most was Mr. Ledric Mayo. I really didn’t see how I could go administer to an idiot who’d poisoned his own stupid self.