“I got potato skins with cheddar and bacon!” I answer. “Who wants some?” It’s hard to step through them, all sitting on the floor like this. Especially holding a tray in my hand. “It’s very dark in here,” I point out. “But I guess you need that for a standard séance. I haven’t been to one before, but it’d be odd with all the lights on, probably. Not really the same mood-builder.”
“Reveal yourselves once more! Let us praise you with our belief, bathe in your miracle!” my daughter begs the universe.
“These’re T.G.I. Friday’s. Not the take-out, but the frozen kind. I swear to God though, you can’t tell the difference. They’re delicious.”
“Pops, shut up!” The crowded room, already hushed, becomes quieter. I leave the hors d’oeuvres on a sawhorse and walk back to the kitchen again.
“Get it out of your system! You can’t have séances at Whitman!” I say back to her, because I’m so happy.
Whitman College. It’s got a lovely theater and dance program, a cute little town, and sure the whole area was founded on the massacre of the Indians but where in America wasn’t? It’s in Washington State. Not in Seattle either — out in the boonies, far, far from Germantown. They’ve even offered Tal a little scholarship money; the insurance payment from the house fire should cover the rest. Good things come to those who wait, to burn down their homes.
They all leave, eventually. Even One Drop, who hovers, surely waiting for Sun to appear. “It’s all cool, brother. Just being a supportive community and all. You should come out, hang with us sometimes. We got a domino game going every Thursday,” he offers.
“Yeah, sure. Maybe, sometime,” I brush him off. “Sorry there were no ghosts!” I yell at the last of them, as I see them off at the door, anxious to have it closed once more. A few laugh it off, wave goodnight. They’re not bad kids, they’re just all up in my house.
I walk out with the last of them, onto my porch. “Goodbye,” I tell them, which is fancy talk for It’s midnight Friday, school is out, go the hell home. The accordion, it goes now in the distance, having politely waited until Tal was finished. I go back in, grab my coat and hat. Go out to find Spider.
Mélange is on my goddamn lawn. With their RVs, their single-wide trailers, their rows of those little house-looking things. It turns out the latter are called “park models,” which makes sense because they are parking their asses on my lawn. They’ve put them in rows, and grass alleys already show the wear of foot travel. It’s dark, but the windows light my path. I’ve heard the Mulattopians living here call this stretch Biracial Boulevard. They call the residential area they’ve formed on the east lawn hosting the RVs class A through C, Mixed Mews, although I’m partial to the name Halfie Heights and use this moniker exclusively when mentioning it. Some of the biggest Oreos have parked there, possibly because it’s the end of the property closest to the whiteness of Chestnut Hill. The sunflowers made the southern, North Philly end of the lawn their homestead, in a place they call Little Halfrica. Nobody uses the word segregation, though.
They’ve all been here for months. Swarming in the day after the “sighting” and acting like someone died and left them the place, instead of me. Roslyn offered to pay rent, most likely on Sun’s urgings, though we don’t talk about it. And it’s acceptable, the little sum that Roslyn pays me for the circus she brought to my Germantown. I’d have had a better bargaining position if I wasn’t leveraged by my concern for my daughter and Sunita Habersham, but it’s okay for now. Not a fortune but enough to erase the last of my hesitation.
The grounds of Loudin Mansion have become a village to vagabonds. The long trailers resting behind the garage, used as classrooms during the daytime, comprise the commercial district. Over a hundred people during school hours, reducing to around forty-five at night. People who pee and shit. I pass the porta-potties, hold my breath till I’m on the other side. People who leave piles of trash every day. We have one dumpster by the gate. It’s nearly full. I know from being woken up by the process that it was just cleared at five this morning. People who listen to music and even play music of their own and who sit around and laugh and get drunk sometimes and sing out loud.
“Big dubs!” One of the sunflowers yells to me. One of the fine young mixed men of the new generation. His homeboys, they all wave, go back to shooting craps before the heat of a drum of burning scrap wood. From the paint on the planks, I recognize them as loose pieces that were resting by the garage. They’re burning my father’s house, incrementally. The wood’s moist; it smokes and smells of the chemicals it’s covered in, but it’s old and porous and breathes life into the flames. I notice the propane tanks, just ten feet past the barrel, and all the other ones for many yards in all directions.
In order for a propane tank to explode, it has to be surrounded by fire, and then have its container punctured with a big enough hole that the fuel and oxygen can circulate and properly ignite. If the hole isn’t big enough, the gas will ignite, but only in a sustained blow of flames. If you want a boom, if you want to see the full tank burst in an inferno about the size of an elephant — not too big, not too small — you need at least a two-inch hole for complete exposure. A shotgun blast seems to work pretty well, according to the latest videos I’ve searched. Not on my phone, lest the record incriminate, but on Spider’s.
He sits in front of his Airstream, on the porch he’s made out of cinder blocks, fingerless gloves on to play his button accordion in the late spring chill. Spider keeps getting into his song, going a few notes, then getting lost, starting over again. Either his hands are stiff or he lacks the skill, or some combination.
“It’s the rhythm. I can hit the notes; that’s not the issue. It’s the beat. It’s polyrhythmic, tricky. But that’s the African. Here, this is what it sounds like it without.” Spider tries again. This time he’s slow, full of clarity, and boredom. It’s every uninspired elementary school recital.
“It’s polka. Without that beat, it’s polka. It’s just European. But you bring in the African rhythm, and you get zydeco. Check it.” Spider concentrates. He stares forward, up. His jaw slack. His ink-stained arms clench, and the music comes, and I hear it. The riffs, the excited, flourishing moments. Spider still messes up, but he gets further this time. Enough that I can hear what he’s going for.
“ ‘Eunice Two-Step.’ Total mulatto music. You know, if we, like, called ourselves ‘bi-ethnic’ instead of biracial, that would clarify a lot of this. I tried to get Roslyn to go for that but she wasn’t hearing it. But that’s what it’s about: culture, ethnicity. It’s not about race. Race doesn’t exist. Race is a false paradigm created by Kant to—”
“Your phone,” I stop him, because he’s high. It has a zebra-print case, and zonkey as the lock screen image. “Listen — can I ask you, if I started taking in all the used propane tanks and got them refilled for a fee, do think anyone would buy them?”
“Yeah, whatever,” he says, opening up his phone’s gallery, browsing through the photos. “You didn’t take any pictures, man! How’d the séance go? No shaky tables? No lights going out or strange voices?”
“Only thing strange is that anyone actually believes that shit.”
“Don’t be a spoilsport. Communities need a shared mythology. It brings them closer.”
“Yeah, but come on. ‘The First Couple’?”
“Everyone here’s already haunted by one interracial couple: their own parents. Real ghosts aren’t that big a jump.”
The trailer next to his is a streamlined fiberglass teardrop, street-traffic orange. So tiny that you can only stand up in the small section you walk into through the door, an upright crawl space shared with a stove, oven, and bathroom shower. On the other side is a small table with space for a person to sit on each side, except when a cushion is laid on top to make a bed. It is a bed now. Sunita Habersham lies on it. It’s cold, but she’s still nude, on her back on top of the comforter, seemingly unable to endure the weight of anything holding her down.