Читать книгу Milk Blood Heat - Dantiel W. Moniz - Страница 9

Tongues

Ms. Addler keeps a word-of-the-day calendar on her desk, so in fourth period, while Zeyah tunes out her teacher’s prattle on American history, she learns new words: censure, vicissitude, caliginous, exegesis. Slick words, shape-shifting, Zey devours them, voracious.

Learn something every day, Ms. Addler’s always saying. Her teacher is young, Call-Me-Katie outside the classroom, red lipstick and stitched flowers on her garter-topped stockings that show when she crosses her legs. Once, Zey saw her French-kiss a man after school, then hop into his nice car, her grin spread large as if she, too, were a high school senior, seventeen.

Today’s word is luciferous, and Zey pronounces it wrong. No, Ms. Addler says, loo-SIF-fur-us. But Zey can’t ignore the prefix. She knows Lucifer: fallen angel, Prince of Darkness. Little horned man on the candy cigarette box. How could this word mean light? Ms. Addler says, There are all kinds of things “they” don’t want you to know. She says it real mysterious, like some slim, blonde-haired prophet—but this idea, that word, quickens in Zey, growing big in the eternal Southern heat.

At home she takes her dictionary into the bathroom—locks the door, a blasphemy—to see what it knows about the devil. She seeks a different opinion than what Pastor or her family’s Sunday Bible have to offer: 1) a proud, rebellious archangel, identified as Satan, who fell from Heaven. 2) the planet Venus when appearing as the morning star. 3) (lowercase) a friction match.

At New Life First Baptist that Sunday—Zey and her brother bookended by their parents in the pew—Duck slips his fingers into hers and tickles her palm, their signal for boredom, for something funny or ridiculous an adult has said. Duck is twelve, still accepting of his nickname and blessedly silly. Zey remembers him small, head smooth as a pebble, her mother placing him in her arms. How sweet he’d felt, yawning mouth, breath scented with their mother’s milk. He was hers in a way nothing else was. Duck sings along with the hymns, he always does, intentionally off-key, but this time Zey isn’t bored; she doesn’t sing. Instead, she watches: the collection plate going round once, twice; Pastor roaring at the pulpit, royal purple trailing from his arms; people asking for blessings, to be touched by the Spirit, falling out when Pastor presses his thumb hard between their eyes.

She listens to Pastor’s words: Brothers and Sisters, all those who accept me as the Savior shall live forever in the Kingdom of Heaven! Repent! He whips the air as if spurring something invisible. Benediction or absolution—his necessary position in the power of such things. The congregation writhes. In the pew in front of them, Sister Ruth in her flower-box hat slumps backward, speaking in tongues, this strange language flowing from the deep place where the soul lives, waiting for God to free it. The long, stray hairs under her chin tremble; her grown daughter fans her face. Others catch the Spirit, the Ghost licking through the church like flame. Pastor says, Bow your heads, let us pray, and Zey looks at them all with their faces turned down, eyes closed; the congregation, her mother, father, and Duck. Only she and Pastor keep their eyes open, and Zey examines him, the copper skin sweating from his exultations, the way he searches the room, bowed head to bowed head, as if measuring the effect of his influence. When his eyes find hers, Zey snaps her head down, too late, and doesn’t look up again until the congregation says amen. On the drive home, Zey translates the expression she’d seen flash across Pastor’s face—supercilious, enigmatic. Hungry.

After Bible study the following week, while her mother makes her rounds in her newest Sunday best, Pastor invites her into the cramped space of his office, which seems to double as storage. Boxes labeled “Christmas” and “Communion” hulk around his desk, and as Zey reads the words, she pictures their contents: Mary and the black baby Jesus in the manger; bulk orders of cheap wine and wafers of Christ’s dry, tasteless flesh. She sits in the chair in front of his desk and Pastor asks, Are you godly, girl? She doesn’t know how to answer. He then tells Zey how to be a woman—soft-spoken, subservient, devout, and clean. He reminds her about the history of Eve, how she took of the tree of knowledge, seduced her husband, and struck the entire world with her sin. How she doomed mankind to suffering, because she didn’t know her place. Zey gnaws the inside of her lip while he speaks. A trapped fly whines in the window.

Her mother learned how to be a woman here, in the faith, and her father a man, but Zey’s been to the library and looked up real history—slave ships and witch trials and women kept in bare feet. The books she borrowed were full of words like pay-gap and redline, and she noticed that in all genres, no matter literature or biography, men’s fury stained the pages, sowing lies like white seeds inside of people’s hearts. Pastor rises, squeezing around the clutter, and perches on the desk, his feet resting on either side of Zey’s. He leans down and places a heavy hand on her bare knee. We need good young girls—God-fearing girls like you—to be the backbone of our church. Do you understand? he asks, and his fingers flex.

Zey hears Pastor’s message and understands what’s beneath it: that she can have hair on her head but not in her armpits; hair on her arms but not her legs; hair between her legs . . . depending on what a man liked. That she can be looked on, but not look. Zey stares into his face, her eyes filling, heart hammering in her throat. She says nothing, cannot move until he moves, will not cry in front of him. Finally, she looks down and Pastor sits back, releasing her. He opens the door for her to leave. God blesses you, child, he tells her.

Zey turns the moment over in her mind—at school and at home and even while she sleeps. For two Sundays, she sits stricken between her parents and even Duck can’t break her free. What did it mean that Pastor, a pinnacle, the link to the Supreme, would bother to threaten her, unimportant though she is? He is Simon to so many: he says Rejoice, and they do; Repent, and they do. He says Pray, and the church goes blind.

For English, their teacher assigns The Scarlet Letter—the most boring book about an affair Zey has ever read. Her teacher asks the class what they noticed in the interactions between Hester and the town. Most of Zey’s classmates only stare; they fidget and avert their eyes. Then someone says, They hated her.

Yes! the teacher booms, startling them to attention. But why? Papers rustle in the silence. Because she was immoral? another student tries, and the teacher cocks his head, his way of questioning an answer without claiming that it’s wrong. Think about it as it applies to our own lives, our world, he says. What is the nature of hate? What’s it useful for? And Zey imagines the townspeople, their whispers and cruel laws, their narrowed eyes. How they ostracized the woman, conspired to contain her light.

They were scared of her, Zey tells the teacher, realizing it as she speaks, and he jabs a finger in her direction. Yes! Exactly that, he says. Now he’s getting excited, pacing before their desks, and Zey tilts forward in her seat, angling closer to his truth. Hate, he continues, is almost always a cover for some perceived psychological threat—our guilt or pain. Our fear. And how do we treat things of which we are afraid?

The moment with Pastor tumbles round with the grit of Zey’s learnings, chipping down until her understanding of it gleams. After the next Sunday service, as Pastor jokes with Duck and accepts praise from her parents, he lays that same hand on her shoulder, and Zey glares at it and then at Pastor before she shrugs it off. He covers the moment with a laugh, but the hand becomes a fist at his side.

Pastor phones her parents that night just before dinner and though Zey doesn’t know what’s said, later she’ll imagine him on the other side of the line spinning his lie, toad-like and sullen as he exacts his revenge. After she hangs up, her mother slaps her at the table and calls Zey outside her name­—­embarrassment, disgrace, demimonde. Disrespecting the pastor? What kind of example are you? Duck hides in the hallway, listening; Zey sees his shadow on the wall. Her mother says, What you do reflects on me!

Zey tries to explain, to defend herself against her mother’s rage, her own coursing underneath, but her mother’s so ashamed, so unwilling to see. She sends Zey to her room without dinner while her father watches from the living room, complicit in his silence.

Under the covers that night, her bedroom door taken from its hinges, Zey thinks of Ms. Addler, curled around the body of her lover like a snake, soft in her sin. She wishes she could ask her parents if it’s better to be a sinner or a prisoner, but she knows now that her mother is afraid of truth and her father wouldn’t recognize it, even if it invited him inside, offered fresh fruit.

Zey rebels against her parents for their failure to believe her, to protect her, in any small way she can. She refuses food, both physical and spiritual; she won’t step foot inside the church. She lets their punishments slide off her back. Zey makes Lucifer a mantra, speaking the name aloud, blurring it until it becomes nothing more than the language of hisses, her own version of tongues. The vibration fills her stripped room, sinking into the walls and passing through to her brother, who is sad Mama and Pop now leave Zey home on Sundays. He overhears their confusion at her behavior. Their mother wonders if they should send her away.

Duck sneaks into Zey’s room one night, climbing into bed with her, like he used to when he was small. Zey can feel him trying to word his question about why things aren’t how they used to be: Zey packing his lunches with folded notes or borrowing Pop’s car to run an errand to the grocery. He could come-with as long as he sat in the backseat, wore his seat belt, listened to his sister. Now, their parents hover like buzzards and only in the dark hours are they free.

Finally, he says, Why can’t you stop? and Zey guesses at what he means—being changed, being bad. She twines her fingers into the soft mat of his hair. There’s nothing she can tell him that he’d understand, that might bring comfort. It is the nature of light to illuminate, and she can’t, like so many, forget what she’s seen. She wishes this moment of connection was enough, but Duck’s waiting and she has to speak. Truth is beautiful, she tells her brother, quoting Emerson, but so are lies.

Duck now understands the word possessed and tells his two best friends at school he thinks this is what his sister is. He describes how she lies on the floor of her room with her legs straight up against the wall, how that peculiar sound she makes glows in the air around her head like the letter ‘S’ come to life. He tells them how Pastor pulled him aside last Sunday and told him the devil came in many forms, but most shaped like women.

They are his best friends, but he is not theirs. His friends tell other friends until the word breaks out, and suddenly, Rylan stands before him on the playground, fresh-cut fade, fat lips sneering, his father’s gold chains around his neck. His big hands hang loose as if just passing the time, the knuckles cracked and dry. He’s in Duck’s grade but held back—almost fourteen, dumb in his anger at all these smaller boys who belong.

I heard your sister’s on some Exorcist shit, he says. Head spinning around and shit. Duck mumbles, tries to move around him, but Rylan puts a solid hand on his chest. Think that bitch can spin like that on my dick?

The playground erupts, Duck’s classmates pouring one out for his defeat. Duck knows that, next to an insult to his mother, this is the worst a boy can say. He knows he can’t allow this to slide, not here with all the other boys listening. He knows before he steps forward that he’ll lose. But he does it anyway.

When her brother comes home from school, Zey, reading on the front steps, stops him at the door before she loses him to her parents’ watch. She grabs his chin, makes him look her in the face. What happened? she asks. His cheek is already swelling, blood pooling underneath the skin. His eyes are dark on hers. They’re calling you devil-bitch at school, Duck says, and Zey’s head rears back; it’s the first time she’s ever heard her brother cuss. They say you’re going to Hell.

Who says that? she asks. He says, Rylan and them. And Pastor. He pulls away from her, looks at her hard until she falls back and lets him pass into the house. Their mother fusses over him as she holds a bag of frozen peas to the bruises on his face. What happened, she demands, and Duck, ever loyal, tells them of the fight but not the reason. Their mother picks up the phone to call the principal, but their father hangs it up. Don’t shame him, he says and chucks her brother beneath his chin. I’m sure the other boy looks worse. He winks.

Zey sneaks out easily, once her parents are asleep. Though it’s dangerous for a girl to travel this way, she likes how a street can feel at night, clean, almost like she owns it. Occasionally she looks into the quiet sky, her eyes drawn to the brightest lights, and remembers how once in Science her teacher taught the class to tell the difference between stars and planets. Think about “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” he’d said. Mercury, Venus, Mars—the planets never flickered.

She arrives at New Life First Baptist some quick blocks later. In the dark, the small, steepled church looks exactly as it is: hollow, misleading. A stage. She knows the stories Pastor tells are ones he’s learned from other men, passed through generations like a plague until they become mentality, these adopted laws from a blue-eyed, man-dreamt Heaven. She thinks she knows who Ms. Addler’s “they” is, and what they hoped she’d never learn: that she is not second, not of Adam’s rib; that her whole being is God; that Pastor and those like him will continue to shout from the pulpit, raising boys—her Duck—to be hateful and scared.

Zey unscrews the cap of her father’s red canister and breathes deep. She’s always liked the smell of gasoline—when she was a kid, her father used to let her work the pump. She likes the scent of something that can burn. She douses the outsized wooden doors and steps back. Thinks for a moment of the headlines tomorrow: black girl burns down black church, and the ways in which this act will be misread; how all the white folks—some black ones too—will be so thrilled for an excuse to talk about self-perpetuated crime. She hesitates one more moment, and then she strikes the match.

Don’t.

Zey turns to find Duck standing defiant behind her. He’s in his pajamas, one eye a shiny black moon, the other swollen shut. He and Zey stand off, the match still glowing in her hand, the possibility of inferno heavy around them. Duck moves forward and takes her empty hand, and Zey lets the flame fizzle out.

On Friday Zey fakes sick, coughing into her palm, and her parents, tired of fighting, barely question her. You’ve made your bed, her mother says. Once the house is empty, Zey gets dressed, goes into the kitchen and spreads two slices of bread thick with peanut butter and apple jelly. She knows that soon she’ll walk through the door of eighteen, pass through her parents’ house into something she can’t quite see but can sense the murky edges of—the shape of her future. She will pack all her knowledge, strings of inky words—pansophy, verisimilitude—into canvas bags and wear them on her womanly body, where they’ll glow like Tahitian pearl, and when she leaves, her parents will wash their hands of her. Duck will send letters only once or twice a year. He will pen his love on cardstock; he will ask her how she is, but never when she’s coming back. Zey will remember Ms. Addler, and make a point to study her own power, to see the shadows beneath other people’s speech. She’ll remember Pastor, and his fear. At times she’ll regret not having burned the church down, but she won’t deny her brother saved her.

Zey puts the PB&J and a bag of baby carrots into a brown paper sack. She walks to her brother’s school and when she enters the main rotunda, it’s as if time has reversed. Everything’s the same as when she was here—the jungle murals on the walls, the slack-faced administrators. All the places one could count on to hide. In the dean’s office she is all dimples and smiles. She makes small chat with the woman at the desk, who’s been talking to middle schoolers all morning and is grateful for the break. My brother forgot his lunch, Zey tells her. Sweet sister, the woman says. What’s your brother’s name?

Rylan, Zey says, and the woman looks up the classroom, tells her she’ll page him to meet her on the way. She starts to tell Zey how to get there, but Zey laughs. I remember, she says.

Out of sight of the woman, Zey drops the lunch sack into the trash, and when she sees Rylan coming toward her—chubby, swaggering—her smile deepens. The boy stops short and stutter-steps, as if about to break and run, before facing her and planting his feet. She asks him, Do you know who I am?

He jams his hands into his pockets and juts his chin. Yeah, so? What you want?

Zey drops one hip, lets him see her teeth. What I hear, you’ve got something for me. She knows what she looks like to this boy, frizzy bangs falling into her eyes, skin au lait—she is Venusian, Aphrodite fresh from the sea. Rylan looks over his shoulder, tongue working inside his cheek. A student on hall pass exits a nearby classroom, but otherwise, they’re alone. Zey can guess his dilemma, his ego warring with his common sense. She sees where she should push. You scared?

Rylan kicks at the ground, and when he speaks his voice is a studied growl, the much lower register of an act. He tells her, I ain’t scared of nothing.

Then come on, she says.

He follows her into a supply closet she remembers from her time here, where students kept their science projects, their volcanoes and model suns. It’s dim inside, and smells of glue and something spilt. Zey pushes the boy up against one of the shelves, spits on her palm, and slides her hand inside his pants. He is hard then soft then hard again, and caught up, stays that way. His unwashed smell joins the other scents; his sigh is sticky against her cheek.

Zey lets him enjoy this a little, her hand slicking slow. And just when the boy thinks this is going to be something else—further clout with his playground friends, fresh material to use beneath the sheets that night—Zey’s hand clamps around him. Don’t move, she whispers into his ear, and the boy goes rigid. Zey squeezes a little harder and stares him in the eyes.

She says, Next time you fuck with my brother, I’ll find you where you sleep and rip it off. There are no shadows under Zey’s words, nothing hidden, and in that openness, the boy opens too, his fear escaping bravado and legacy to surface on his face. Zey studies it; she savors its plainness. So you understand? she says and the boy nods, because even in the dark she’s incandescent.