Читать книгу Brother and the Dancer - Keenan Norris - Страница 11

The same instant his granny died in her Fresno hospital room, Touissant woke feverish and confused three hours to the South in his bedroom in his home in his suburb an hour east of Los Angeles.

He could hear his sisters downstairs. He listened until the sounds turned into words and made sense: they were leaving with Ms. Johnston and Ms. Johnston’s daughter to go to day camp. The bedroom wall stopped swimming and solidified. He rose and suddenly the fever pain wrenched him deep down, and Touissant, who believed that he would live forever, felt starkly, completely alive.

His fever rose like the fires in the San Bernardino Mountains, a homicidal element flashing up against the living world. He felt two quick acid ropes scour his lungs. When he finally half-crawled his way down the stairs and his mother told him about the death in the family, he vomited on the living-room floor.

She looked at him with a blankness that Touissant had never seen in her eyes. “I got no minutes for this,” she breathed. She put her hands on her hips and did something that made her throat sound like it was purging itself. Touissant knew that his getting sick was the last thing the family needed right now. He knew his mother was already counting out the cost of the trip to Fresno, gas money, the funeral fees, the inevitable breakfasts, lunches and dinners that she and her husband’s degrees would somehow be expected to pay for. He understood why she was frustrated and didn’t want to trouble her more. He wished he could chase the fever spiriting through him right out of his body. He watched her clean the mess, and saw how she glanced back at him furtively to judge whether he would vomit again.

“You need water,” she said.

Touissant nodded.

“Water. Hot water. Vitamin C. An antibiotic.”

In the kitchen, she rang out two vomit-soaked towels. Touissant turned and watched his dinner rice and clumps of congealed cinnamon and little undigested relics of vegetable and turkey fly wildly from the towels like water shaken from a dog. “Is that what’s inside of me?” he asked, unbidden.

She stopped. The question caught her in full motion; a stopping question. Questions without answers were an inheritance down from his dad, but they annoyed his mother; the realities of a childhood spent picking fruit and cotton in the Central Valley were as simple and inarguable as the sun and had left her no minutes to ask why life was this way or that. “You sick, or just strange?” she asked. “You sit there.” She pointed to a spot at the near edge of the living room couch. “Peace and be still there. Don’t wiggle around. Don’t move. Be still.”

Touissant did as he was told. Not a sweet woman really, she was a healer, a leader, a mother. But look for your coddling and little self-esteem stuff elsewhere, his dad liked to say, look for it where you gonna find it. His dad’s mother, the woman who had gone to her Lord before the sunrise, knew kindness and knew how to rear children with kindness. Touissant’s mother was very different. He was starting to notice important differences between women. All his life, black women had seemed like so many sisters to each other, all of them as similar as his twin sisters were to each other, a universal feminine. He was starting to see past that now.

She heard him shifting around and ordered him to be still. “Your stomach idn’t settled, idn’t close to settled. You gotta let it settle. Sit back down.”

Touissant obeyed and after a moment accepted his stillness. She was right, too: the longer he sat in place and the more fixed and motionless his body, from his toes to his intestines to his closed eyelids, the calmer was his stomach. He wasn’t even aware that his eyes were closed until a drawer jarred open and the metal of knives and kitchen utensils sounded against each other. Then the door shut hard, wood blasted against wood. Then he knew his eyes were closed because he didn’t know which kitchen drawer had been opened and closed, or who had opened and closed it. He tried to look around and saw only heat waves streaming without progress or recess, thick fluid fever lines where his sight should have been. Then there were shadows the color of faint ink blots that came and sat atop the waves. There were faint shadows where the kitchen table and the center island and the living room clock and the couch that he sat upon should have been. He wondered where his dad was.

“I’m tellin you the situation right now. My son, the fever, the unresponsiveness, the convulsions. I’m tryin my best to help my son. We’re tryin our best. My husband’s mother died this morning. He’s not himself. He’s not slept, hasn’t had any water or food. We’re tired. And now my son—.” Touissant’s eyes came open and he saw his mother’s sculpture-hard face. He could hear her speaking fast and panicked. He saw her intent eyes, eyes harder than her face. Everything about her fixed on the problem that Touissant had become. “Goddamn. Is his chest rising and falling? Yes! He’s convulsing. Why are you asking me that question? If his chest wasn’t rising he’d be dead. He’s obviously alive! Do I want an ambulance? What do you think? My son is writhing on the floor like an epileptic. My husband, a full grown man, cain’t keep him still. Is anything coming from his mouth? Do you mean, is he expectorating? Foaming at the mouth? Lady, what kind of question is that? No!” She yelled at the woman on the other end of the line. “He is not foaming at the mouth! What kind of crazy question—my son does not have rabies. This is the situation: he’s convulsing, his muscles are seizing, his eyes are open but he’s not responding when we try to talk to him. He may or may not really be conscious and aware right now.”

Touissant’s heart turned into a kicking fetus. His chest was the heartchild’s womb, demanding out with all the beating violence it could bring. His heart went faster and faster. “Shit,” he heard himself say from some point distant from his uncontrollable body.

His dad’s strong but soft-palmed hands gripped him and stilled his writhing. “You hear that, Lilly? You hear that?”

“What, Bobby?”

“He talked. He responded.”

“He’s talkin,” she said into the phone. Then to her husband: “Rub his chest.”

His dad pulled Touissant’s shirt up and his soft palms went along his narrow chest, kneading his tensed torso and abdomen. Touissant’s heart rate slowed, but sweat rafted down his skin in hot forceful currents.

“They say,” his mother knelt next to father and son, “it’s probably some sort of febrile seizure.”

Touissant jerked out of their grasp and coughed up a chunk of phlegm and stomach waste that hit the carpet and did not move. Everyone gazed at the clear block of vomit.

“God-damn,” his mother said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”

The voice on the other end of the phone blared incoherently.

“He coughed up somethin,” his mother began. “He coughed up somethin clear as day and solid as a brick. We need an ambulance.”

Touissant was still now. His seizure having subsided and the vomiting having emptied him, there was nothing left but to be still. His insides were hollow. He wanted the ambulance.

“You are telling me,” his mother challenged in terse, measured words, “that there is no ambulance? Am I understanding you correctly? Then why did you ask me if we needed an ambulance just two minutes ago? What was the purpose of that question?” Her hands went into a brief seizure and she dropped the phone. The answer at the other end of the line resonated throughout the living room: the question about the ambulance had been procedural. Its purpose was to assess degree of urgency. That no ambulances, paramedics, or emergency responders of any kind were available did not preclude procedure. Procedure had to be followed to assess risk. When she picked the phone up again, Touissant’s mother laced into the woman: “You tryina tell me ain’t no ambulance, no paramedics, no emergency responders whatsoever? Because the state closed down the gotdamn fire station?” She dropped the phone again, this time purposely.

“Recession,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.

Touissant didn’t know what a recession was except that it seemed to shut down fire stations, lay off paramedics and ground ambulances. He wondered what recessions did to hospitals, doctors and nurses. In a city an hour east of a city that actually mattered, he figured the recession might kill a whole medical system.

For reasons having to do with their jobs and collective bargaining agreements and the economy, which he didn’t understand, his parents could get medication and have their teeth fixed through Kaiser Hospital, but had to go to County Hospital in emergency situations. The family drove to the County Emergency Room, where a fat male nurse whose breathing Touissant could hear from up the hall placed him in a wheelchair, told his parents to bide their time in the waiting room and pushed Touissant a few feet before leaving him in the chaotic hospital hallway. He could hear his parents complaining just over his shoulder and knew that they hadn’t followed the nurse’s orders. Touissant watched the fat man wobble out of view. He remembered his granny all of a sudden. Not that she was dead, that he hadn’t forgotten. What returned to him was the memory of a story she had told about his dad swallowing a coin. She was still a young woman then and his dad was just a child. He had been to a downtown fair and had brought home the bronze token he found in the dirt below a row of rickety bleachers. Somehow the token got into his throat.

She took him to the Cook County Hospital Emergency Room. (Had to hitch a ride with a neighborhood man because her husband was outside the city somewhere breaking in the new Thunderbird that would soon carry his restless ass and his whole family to California.) At the hospital, the assigned nurse left the boy and his mother in the first available hallway, much as Touissant had been left by the vividly unhealthy county hospital nurse. His granny told Touissant how that was the first and last time she had seen men chained to a wall and examined orally and rectally with flashlights. These were prisoners from Cook County Prison, trucked in after nightfall for their check-ups. It was the first and last time she saw a man stabbed through the neck yet still alive enough that he was explaining the basics of football and the Bears defense to a young, innocent-looking female nurse as she wheeled him down the hallway. She had seen many other things, of course, that were just as shocking, the Southern marigolds in bloom before springtime and black soldiers arriving back from the War with their backs straight and human rights on their lips, and union strikers in Chicago and Mexicans in Fresno beat near as low as any Mississippi Negro. And it was not the first time that she had seen newly dead corpses. But it was the first time her son had seen anything so frightening. Elderly folks expired in their wheelchairs, young men dead on their stretchers with body parts only half-hidden from view, their limbs still trembling slightly when a nurse or doctor would rush past. It was the first time he had seen dead men.

Touissant didn’t like the idea of trembling corpses in Cook County Hospital. He looked around the San Bernardino County Emergency Room: Up and down the hallway where the nurse had left him other white- and blue-coated nurses idled and walked and sprinted back and forth between their respective responsibilities. Now and then someone who he figured was a doctor by the stethoscope hanging from his pocket would maneuver through. Wheelchairs with flu-ridden kids and infirm adults crowded the hall, making movement a difficult talent, part pushing, part cussing, and many acts of agility. The wheelchairs, piloted by medical professionals, family and friends and by the patients themselves, spun this way and that, dashed up and down, came and went. Two gurneys were parked at the very end of the hall. Each was a mantelpiece outfitted with a fallen flag: blankets covered what Touissant thought might be dead people. He could see what looked like the outline of a long nose, open lips and two bony knees underneath one of the white hospital sheets. The second stretcher was a little more obvious: Touissant could see where the blanket sagged back into what looked like a man’s large round head. A faint patch of red was visible where the blanket sagged. The dead man had a hole in his head.

He remembered how his granny’s story had ended: the hospital hallway scared his dad so deeply, she said, he actually digested the coin and cured his own self. By the time her husband and his Thunderbird got to the hospital, the crisis had concluded. But when Emmett Till was murdered not too long after and the body was brought back North to Chicago and lain in state at the Southside church for public viewings, he refused to go. Lines stretched for blocks on end, black folks come to see the symbol of white man’s evil. But her boy thought the body had a ghost in it and might start moving, like the bodies on the stretchers in the hospital when people got too close.

Whether he had wanted to or not, his dad had seen something important in Cook County Hospital, Touissant knew. What he had seen was scary. It had made him hate death forever. But it was important as knowledge. And now the boy realized that he had seen and learned something, too: a few days from now, in Fresno, at the funeral, his granny’s corpse, lain in her casket, would not be the first dead body his eyes would know. He had seen death already, a few days before he was supposed to, in a random way that had nothing to do with funerals or churches or family or love. He had seen two corpses and there was no going back from this. He imagined his granny’s body, how the preparers would have the make-up imperfectly done on her face, one side smudged and darker than the other. A Sunday church hat with roses but no marigolds crowning her head, sprigs of her white hair falling like unmowed blades of grass from beneath the Sunday hat. And an old frayed familiar dress to lay her to rest in. It would be a different way of dying than this under-a-sheet, mouth-open, hole-in-the-head hospital stuff. Her skin would not be a discolored shade of green as he imagined was the fate of the corpses in the hallway. Her temple would not be caked with blood that seeped into the sheet set over it. Her death scene would be a world away from what he was seeing now, but not because it would be perfectly planned and brought off. It would be different because the proper hat and flowers and things placed upon her would be put there with love and memorial knowing. These corpses didn’t have luxury like that. They were simple corpses. The boy’s young mind wrapped itself around death and the different deaths of loved and unloved people.

Now Touissant knew he would never die. Not only had he seen the hidden dead, he had had a virus steal into his body and try to kill him from the inside out. The virus had become a fever and the fever a seizure and the shape shifter had fought deep within him the way diseases and bullets got inside and killed people every day. But his body was not dying. His mind and imagination were not dying. They were fully alive. He felt more sensitive to every moment, every smallest piece of his life, every beat of his heart.

The fat black nurse, who had skin the color of new pennies, returned with two hospital-white blankets, which he laid carefully over the two gurneys at the back of the hallway. Now neither corpse could be seen. Their subtle outlines were perfectly hidden. Satisfied with that, the nurse wheeled the boy who knew that he would never die into the examination room.

Riding home in the backseat of his dad’s new car, Touissant said nothing. His dad was driving and his mother was talking. He could tell that his dad was gearing the car up and down, testing its braking and acceleration and the basic precision of its design to trick his mind into thinking about something other than Granny’s death. Meanwhile, his mother was talking in that way that meant she was absolutely sure that the things she was saying about the twins’ day-camp schedule and about the doctor’s orders for monitoring a child after a febrile seizure were of great importance.

Touissant didn’t know what to think about. His granny was dead, he knew that. His memory of her rested peacefully amid his many thoughts. He remembered that in the examination room the doctor had told his parents that it was probably the extreme summer heat of the Inland Empire, as compared to the milder summers that Touissant had experienced closer to Los Angeles and the coast when they were still in college, that had caused the seizure. The doctor’s advice was not complicated. Too much heat was bad for children, keep cool.

Touissant looked up at the sun above the San Bernardino Mountains. The sun controlled everything. It was God and the Devil. It brought seizures and killed children, as well as all the other weak things in the desert. Afternoon now: the sunscape was retreating a little at a time, dying over the mountains, allowing for evening and nightfall. Then the temperature would drop like a shot bird. And the desert would become unpredictable under that darkness, a mixing of summer and winter, everything roasted and dry but simultaneously stiffening up with the sudden wind and sunless air. Even in absence, the sun was everything; its absence as powerful as its presence, bringing cold and flu even as it scorched the earth and left the land dead and fallow.

Touissant saw a lizard perched atop a stop sign. It was a gray mannequin, the most still of all living things. Further up the way, he could see prairie dogs moving as fast as his dad’s car between their dug holes and the tree-tall tornados of dust spontaneously born of the pressing heat and hard low winds. Touissant wondered what the prairie dogs were running from; he wanted to believe that they were running for the same reasons that people do, the way his great-granddad maybe had done all those many years ago with the government coming for him to take him to the War. Maybe the prairie dogs were full of pride and anger and imagination just like Major Freeman. Maybe they were trying to outrun the sun, just like the old man had tried to outrun whatever it was he was really running from, whether war, or white people, or marriage. Those absolutes stood alongside the sun and the world the sun had made: this desert. So big, the desert stretched with the sun, on and on and on. From greater San Diego, up to the Los Angeles Basin, up to Northern California and burning out to Arizona, Nevada, Utah. The desert went on forever, an infinity of dirt and rock and low scrub and small, hard defiant life. The desert was so vast, so vast. Vaster than the pages torn from every school book lain end to end, so vast. Maybe ants living in tract home walls and roadrunners chased from newly driven fence posts and coyotes exiled to the dry gulches and prairie dogs and lizards and woodpeckers and skunks and rattlesnakes and bullfrogs were as prideful and bold as all the black folks with their money right, who had come to this hot, raw place. Maybe everything alive in this forever endless desert lived in defiance of it. Survival. Maybe that was the secret of what his life would be, something about survival.

They passed the Buddhist temple, with its always-lit lanterns rowing either side of the long walkway leading toward mysterious elaborately engraved doors, and turned toward their just-bought home. The car rolled into its new driveway. The house was their little temple; its simple three-quarters square, one-quarter pyramid design rose from the earth into dangerous light. Touissant felt absolutely blessed. His sisters were waiting in the driveway. He wasn’t sure how they had gotten back from day camp so early or why they were waiting in the driveway. He didn’t care how or why, he was happier than ever just to see them, his family. The car pulled forward and the twins stepped aside in unison. The garage door rose electronically. Dea and Kia were smiling sad smiles, the sunshine living on their perfect teeth and penny-colored skin.

In her dream, turning eight was wonderful past wonderful. The dream was a large dream and it came to her in such detail in the September night that she felt like it had belonged to her all along. She saw her parents taking her to the circus right down the street from their apartment. But when they parked the car and got out and held hands following the crowds into a high dark tent it was like entering a new world. The walk-up to the bleachers was paved with dirt that people kicked into child-sized clouds as they hurried forward. The dirt hung in the air as dust particles creating a thin, continuous veil across her vision. The tent dome ran upward in arches of dark red, dark gold, dark green, dark sunshine.

They sat in the front row only a few feet from the center ring where the action was to take place. Ushers and vendors wound through the busy aisleways. Then a bugle cried out of the darkness and a deep slow drumroll began. More instruments began to play: trumpets, tubas, a sad clarinet. A funeral march anthem played through the tent. Erycha stared over the ring, across the tent toward where the sound seemed to emanate, but she couldn’t see the players at first. They were still shrouded, invisible. The funeral march played on, its deep, gutter-low groove rumbling the bleachers.

A woman appeared at the north end of the tent. Spot-lit outside the ropes of the ring, she wore a sequined dark yellow gown that flowed all the way to her ankles. Her fat fingers sparkled with little diamonds, her headdress plumed in pale green feathers. “Soul!” she sang in full sudden ecstasy. “Soul!” The music rose like something headed into the sky. “Soul universoul . . .

“One of these mornings bright and fair

Goin’a take my wings and cleave the air

Pharoah’s army got drownded

O Mary don’t you weep . . .”

And as her singing reverberated through the still, thick air a buzz of anticipatory talk started to flow through the grapevine of bleachers. In time the word passed through enough lips that it found its way to Erycha and her parents, and they passed it between each other like a burning coal: “Here comes the band, here comes the band. South Care-lina State. The truth!”

“Drum major,” the singer said, her voice descending even further out of female range, into a low, sweet slow tone. “Drum major, now, what’s goin on?”

Stillness: the spotlight alone moved. Wandered away from her and panned in ever-diminishing illumination across the north and northwest end of the tent until it fell away completely and full gloom accompanied stillness for a long moment.

“Drum major, c’mon now. I been asked you, what’s really goin on?”

The spotlight triggered back, this time at the southern end of the tent, just over Erycha’s shoulder and aimed down along a passageway of suspended dust that flowed out to the very end of the tent itself. She turned with all the rest and looked to the swirling dust beam.

“Drum major, girl, you comin out or not? Now, these people been waited.”

The trumpets blared forth again, the clarinet called out in its light and lonely voice; then the rest of the brass section and the cymbals and the drumroll barreled on, all gut-bucketing forward in slow lurches. Subtly, new melodies and an unfamiliar rhythm arose.

“I likes what I’m hearin now. I likes what I’m hearin. Ain’t this your cue, boy?”

A small black shadow appeared at the very furthest edge of the spotlight, its slender semi-rounded shape like a shy small cat come out at daybreak. It slipped forward a step. Its white and gold tassels gleamed in the illumination. But it paused there, in a recess between slip and step and stride.

“Drum major,” the singer said, “Please! Get to steppin.”

Suddenly the music reeled out of blues, past jazz and into chaotic Southern bounce. Roiling across the space and bringing the crowd to their feet as if they were all one mind in motion, one body in dance.

The drum major sprang into view, a small but awesome frightening figure dressed in white, gold-tasseled shoes; immaculately blue-jeweled and yellow-fringed pants; a sky-colored shirt with bold-embossed letters over the heart: University of South Carolina State.

“The South Carolina State marching band, y’all!” The woman’s voice rang out. “Make noise!”

The drum major’s face was invisible between a high tight collar and the furred feathered top hat that started somewhere around the eyes and seemed to reach ten feet up in the air. Metal wings extended from its sides and back, like silver flames, seemingly weighting down the hat and the drum major held beneath it that much more. The drum major’s head tilted down and the wand he carried at his side swung like a militant third arm, every last thread of his momentum concentrated into propulsive step, like dancing on an earthquake fault line. Erycha didn’t know whether to dance or cheer or do what she really wanted to do, which was coil up in fear at the newness of it all, when the major danced past her and led the band into the center ring.

They arrayed themselves behind their leader, so many peacock plumes. The music pulled back and settled itself in a bed of down-tempo trumpets. The drums and cymbals silenced. The melody returned to its first funeral lilt. The drum major came still and stood corpse rigid, his thin shoulders forward, arms at sides, legs close together, all military precision and rigor. Erycha looked on. Her fear began to wane.

Sometimes Erycha fantasized herself in the role of a princess and sometimes even a queen, but now she wished she could be the drum major at the center of the circus orchestrating its wild careening movements. People took their lead from the drum major. They did as the major did, moved as he moved. They even went silent and came to attention when he went silent and still and brought his wand down motionless at his side.

Now, the drum major raised the wand slowly and the spotlight rose. He held the wand high like a standard in the sky. Seconds extended themselves like days. Everyone waited on that wand to drop. The drum major tilted his top hat forward and the plumes shook like so many dancers. He sliced the wand downward through the air, bringing it back to his side. In the distance, an elephant roar drowned out the band altogether. At that call, the drum major leapt over the ring ropes and quick into the dark, invisible. The other band members followed and the spot-lit stage fell empty for a moment. The elephant sounded his one booming note again. And then he and a fleet of his brothers came rushing up from the east end of the tent, up a steep incline and into the light of the circus.

Fine cedar-colored sisters rode the elephants, straddling their gray backs with lean exposed legs. Suddenly one girl in a shiny gold dress hopped to her feet atop the elephant and the crowd let out a collective gasp. Then the girl bent forward at the waist like her muscles and bones were elastic tape; she angled her forehead down onto the elephant’s neck and brought her hands down on its back and executed a perfect handstand. Her tiny dress fell inverted over her upper half and she held the pose for a good minute, perfect as any ballerina, atop the romping elephant. The elephants arranged themselves in a tight circle at the center of the ring, the girl reassumed her straddle-spot and while the elephants roared exultantly a red, black and green flag was produced from somewhere and Carthage was conquered and Hannibal’s spirit was anointed emperor of all known worlds.

When the elephants and their riders exited, recorded music began to blast from the subwoofers perched in the high corners of the tent: hip-hop bass blending with atmospheric chords. “Ladies and gentlemen,” a male voice rang out. “Next up we got a real treat for you. All the way from BK, Double-Dutch Dynamite!”

The strange beat quickly segued into an EPMD instrumental.

“BK to LA.”

Two girls and four boys cartwheeled into the ring, waving jump ropes like nunchucks. The six split into sets of three and the girl threw two of her ropes to her opposite number. Then they slipped the jump ropes to the boys at either side of them and began to dance like over lines of fire as they quickly complicated their steps into a whirlwind of runs and walks and an incredible backflip where one boy shape-shifted in the air and reformed a beautiful blackbird only to land on his feet a boy once more. The song finally broke down, instrumental, then isolated drums, and then the sound of a record shattering rang throughout the tent and the double-dutching girls feigned exhaustion and fell to the ground. All movement stopped. The next song wailed up and the performers, save one, somersaulted from the ring, jumping into darkness, their bodies dissembling way up there in the black heights, before finding themselves feet first on the ground almost outside the light, cakewalking away.

The World’s Greatest Double-Dutcher sat down in the middle of the ring wiping pearls of sweat from his brow. The other double-dutchers ran from the stage. The spotlight trained on its only visible subject: the boy.

“Chil’.” The familiar singer’s voice issued out of a space Erycha could only call nowhere. “Chil’!” The boy’s eyes widened and he stopped wiping his brow and sat up ruler-straight. “Baby, what are you doin in those street rags? Didn’t I teach you away from all of that gutter music? I wanted you to be a bonafide drum-major, a bonafide black leader. But look at you, wildin in the streets, showin-out. I won’t stand for it!”

The boy shot to his feet, rigid as the drum major.

The spotlight beamed in with a different golden color that held the boy within it like an intimate and revealing embrace. Now the audience could see the thinness of the body and fine delicate soft lines of the face. A syrup of sweet late laughter overtook the crowd as they realized the trick. The boy who was a girl leapt to her feet and executed a couple quick step moves tilting her hatless head forward as if finding new freedom or feeling the intangible weight of sudden fame.

Then: a tiger’s piercing scream sheering through the tent like a record scratched with a machete. Bongo drums began to beat far off. The spotlight hovered idly over the ring. Then four tiger cages were wheeled mechanically into the ring. A tall, high yellow queen traipsed in after the cages. She dangled a long cat-o’-nine-tails in her long fingers. She let the whip trail along the ring floor. As she went past each tiger’s cage, the animals acknowledged her with a waving paw, a wagging tail. She cracked the whip against the bars of their cages and the tigers flinched. Having greeted each animal, she came to the middle of the ring.

“Riana Guyana Moore, people, Riana Guyana Moore: the only African-American tiger tamer!”

The tamer produced a foot-long gold key from her suit pocket and began to unlock the cages one by one. The tigers sauntered out and at the gentle suggestion of the cat-o’-nine-tails they formed a diagonal line stretching from the east end of the ring to its northwestern edge. She let them stand there for a moment, easy as the day they were born. Then she whirled the whip in the air and shouted imperatives in German: the tigers obeyed, rising to their hind legs with their mouths agape and front paws surrendered useless in the air.

She kept them in that pose for what seemed like forever before cracking the whip, dropping them to all fours. She strutted a path between them, a fifth feline, her head high, her back a half-moon arc, her heels stabbing the ground with proud cat contempt.

She glided like that all the way out of the ring, completely out of sight and by some invisible order commanded the tigers to reenter their cages and allow themselves to be borne mechanically off.

The spotlight wandered away from the ring and settled on the band, tucked in a deep corner: they eased into a funeral dirge for the departing animals. A solitary drum beat in the background. Then the band shifted into a liquid interlude, the drums washing under in the saxophone’s rush, waves in passage. A clarinet cried up out of the inchoate depths and the band began to play the accompaniment to its own funeral, its own death, field songs and swing, and rhythm and blues, in an effortlessly epic movement.

The drum major staggered back to center-stage. Hatless still, in a tattered shirt and shorts and pathetically barefooted, she collapsed in the middle of the ring. The circus stopped. Everyone stared at the spot where her band had danced and played and the animals had performed and the children, she among them, had shape-shifted; they stared where their girl lay.

Finally, the singer’s voice returned. “Girl? Daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Daughter, remember God. Remember His word. His word is love. His word is the truth and the fire.”

“Yes,” she said again.

“We dance, we sing, we speak, we breathe, we walk and live in His light and in His service alone.”

On Erycha’s birthday morning, her mother gave her a lemon cake, an entire cake all for herself. This was a unique gift. She tasted the tangy frosting first and later the candied crust and sweet bread. She was very thankful for the cake, for being one day and one year older, for the prophetic vision God had granted her.

She prayed the candle flames down and sat waiting for her father, who had left some time before the bitch from welfare visited, to come home.

The smog blew in from Los Angeles and when time turned to deep summer and then from summer to September, the pollution would collect along with the heat and be like a wicked dome closing over the valley. And it was always hot. August was supposed to be the hottest month but it always turned out that September was the killer: day laborers were liable to collapse and die out in the fruit fields. Old grandmas would get it easier, pass out in their gardens. Young single mothers were a natural temperature gauge, pushing their baby-strollers either fast or very slow or not at all depending on how high the heat waves shimmered off the ground. Actual heat indexes cost too much money so people became their own indexes; they knew hot from hot and that sufficed.

There would be fires in the mountains and fires in the valleys as the dead brush succumbed to the sun. Then the air wafted in a perpetual state of recovery, after the burn.

In those early days when Erycha was still a child, time passed but change was an imperceptible movement. Like the earth’s rotation, it went unnoticed. From day to day and year to year the same strange mother and stranger-father lived on, abiding each other, fighting each other, vexing on each other. The same small, close-quartered community of blacks went on seemingly changeless. Folks went hungry, scrounged jobs, worked, enlisted, left for the other side of the world, and came home. The schools and the courts alternately pampered and screwed them. The economy cycled up and down, pivoting upon their prone bodies fixed at the base of the system. They cussed the greedy white man, the godless homos and the job-takin Messicans. They struggled, made do, developed skills outside the legitimate economy that controlled Monday through Friday and immersed themselves within the imperiling worlds of weekend work. They took three buses to take one job, played maid, braided hair, bootlegged anything popular enough to be bought twice. They provided the freaks from across town with their girl and boy and cheap pussy. They were raided by the police, got locked up, went away, came home, shot and cut each other in their front yards over drug money and other bullshit, defiled their community, messed-over their kin, passed along diseases like they did their last names.

As with every community, they were collectively close-minded, treating anything new as a trespassing cancer. This was an attitude that had less to do with people themselves, because their neighborhoods routinely housed the poor, the foreign, prostitutes, transvestites, drifters, than with the new spirit and ideas of troublemaking individuals: to say that there was no God, to submit that men who fucked men were still men, to decide out loud that the thugs in their midst were all damn Uncle Toms so worshipful of money that they thought nothing of selling their sisters and poisoning their people, was deemed not diagnosis but sickness itself, even as the community shut itself away and coughed up its lungs. Yet somehow within that closed-in space the natural goodness of folk always survived and walked on past the Devil: they bore each other’s children and raised youth that were not their own, prayed for one another, did for one another, did for the least among them, and actually practiced what politicians and professors fat-mouthed about from far away. They built the Central City Mission, their own small haven for the least fortunate among them. It was they who tore down the crack houses and ministered to the lost brothers and sisters that could still be saved from their ceaseless beasts. They laid hands upon and governed as best they could a world outsiders had long since condemned.

But their beliefs were set and immovable, as rigid as Italian ballet.

The seasons spiraled around and around and nothing changed. This inviolate world was such that Erycha hardly noticed as her body began to curve, forming a new outline, hips, breasts and female fullness. She had no idea that she was growing out of more than old clothes, that one day all she would have to do would be to walk down the street or open her mouth and raise a question to find herself spiritually exiled. Then she would have new names given to her. White girl. Educated bitch. But for now that was a long way off. For now she was still just eight and nine and ten turning eleven and eleven turning twelve and summer nights she laid her rounding body down and slept naked on her naked mattress, satisfied enough that she never had nightmares, never needed dreams.

By the time Touissant turned twelve, East Highland had evolved into a beautiful bedroom community. There were rows of palm trees columned like the slats in a shut gate across the length of its high hill. That hill, itself simple nature, had been made into a statement, dictating a separation between the East and West sides of the town, with the homes and the health food stores and the Buddhist temple along the hill’s long incline representing the city’s East, and the apartments and pawn shops and supermercados and community centers and small store-front churches in the flat lands the West. Not only the hill but a freeway separated the town’s two sides. Grandiose two- and three-story homes threw their block shadows down the length of Highland hill and onto the ghetto beyond the freeway, and when the smog would lift after afternoon, the biggest houses and prettiest palm trees stood in shadow, dark traces of a class statement.

The home a state university music professor (Touissant’s dad) and county hospital administrator (Touissant’s mom) could maintain stood toward the bottom of the hill. But the important thing was to be on the hill. Staring beyond the hill at the snowy mountain range that shone in the early sunlight like blue-white pyramids reaching for the sky, Touissant figured there must be some reason, some logic to it all. Not just the hill and how it divided his little town into the wealthy and the kinda-wealthy and the not wealthy at all, but everything else, too. Like the mountains. Why did they exist? And the snow? And the palm trees so close to the snow? And the desert so close to the snow? Why were there places so strange that they could bring winter and summer and mountain and desert, and life and death, all together along one plain of sight? Why were people born where they were born and why did they die where they died? Why and why and why?

Touissant gripped the event flyer tight in his sports-shirt pocket. His sisters had made a pastime out of leaving invitations to concerts and shows in random niches in the house. They were no longer content to drop the laminated flyers on the living room floor or on the bathroom sink, but had progressed to wedging the things in windowsills and dropping them into flower pots and placing them inside old books that would spark their interest for five or ten brittle pages before they moved on to the next unlikely excitement. Most of the flyers advertised events by foregrounding a half-naked girl posed seductively. Touissant knew that the guys who wanted the twins half-naked at their parties gave them the flyers and he knew how uninterested the twins usually were. He made mental note not to hand out raunchy flyers to pretty girls when he got old enough to do that sort of thing.

But one flyer caught his attention. It had been left in one of the violently large old war novels that Touissant’s gramps had passed down to his dad before he died. The Young Lions, the book was called. The flyer was sticking out from between pages 190 and 191, which was impressive in and of itself. Even if the advertisement had been as nondescript as all the booty-shaking flyers that found their way into the family library, he would still have remembered it for the amount of reading it implied. Either that or one of the girls had placed the flyer there just for the sake of it. The invitation itself was unique: a forum open to the public to address chronic violence in the neighborhoods of San Bernardino and West Highland. Touissant had never thought much about San Bernardino or West Highland. That area was off-limits for reasons he had never much considered. He understood vaguely that the area was blighted, recalled vaguely Dea and Kia’s offhand remarks about avoiding shows staged there, noticed still vaguely how much they seemed to know about places where they said no one should ever go. Now he wanted to know more. He hid the flyer in a place where no one would find it, and he committed the date, time and location of the event to memory.

On the bus to Seccombe Park, Touissant watched as a little girl and two little boys play-fought with each other. The kids were maybe nine, maybe ten years old. Both boys wore blue bandanas, which they flaunted like pretty scarves around their throats. Touissant knew from investigative news reports on television that these kids were Crips or playing at being Crips. He imagined a bunch of tiny children trying to do a cartoon drive-by: they would have on their blue bandanas but would be unable to see over the steering wheel or lift the gun out the window.

The bus was a block away from Seccombe when he heard a soft popping sound come from where the little kids were play-fighting.

The girl lay on the bus floor, playing dead. One of the boys stood over her, shooting her lustily with a cap gun, filling her body with imaginary bullets. After a minute, an adult on the bus yelled, “Hey! Stop!”

The kids looked up and stopped their play. The boy put the cap gun in his pocket and retook his seat on the bus. The girl stood up. The boy untied his blue flag and dusted her off with it, smoothed her hair where her artfully winged and braided cornrows had become tousled and loose.

When he reached his stop, Touissant looked around Seccombe Park for blue rags like the ones worn by the boys on the bus. The gang symbols were not hard to find and came in red as well. Tied around throats, wrapped around waists, knotted on wrists and worn round heads, it was obvious the gang members were as interested in advertisement as the event organizers. Touissant knew nothing about gangs except what journalists had told him. Those journalists had gone heavy on menace but light on real information: he had come to understand that gangs sold drugs and killed each other and killed innocent men, women and children on a regular basis. But there had been no news stories about gang members mingling at the lake, participating in anti-violence events. He wondered if the journalists had gotten it wrong, or if the organizers at Seccombe had made the mistake. He wondered whether it was a good or bad thing that formal security was nowhere visible.

There also weren’t any Mexicans there. Black people of many descriptions, from gangbangers to kids in school uniforms and folks in their work clothes, crowded the park, but there were no Mexican gangbangers, no Mexican freelance thugs, no groups of young Latinas with their figures falling out of their outfits, no older Latinas dressed like they were headed for church, no self- important middle-aged men in business suits or rugged work uniforms. Touissant had only seen this many black people in one place when the family went to visit relatives in Alabama, which made him feel good and bad at the same time. But he also knew that however he felt about black people, San Bernardino was a Mexican town. Most of the gangs were probably Mexican gangs, not black gangs. How effective, then, could a forum organized to stop violence be without a single Mexican?

A man the color of parchment paper and dressed in dashiki and sombrero began talking loudly about just that problem: “This party is supposed to be a chance for reconciliation, redemption.” The man was strutting through the massing crowd talking to no one in particular, everyone in general. “The black gangs need to make peace with regular folk. Regular folk need to make peace with the gangs. The po-lice need to make peace with the folk and the gangs. Brown folk need to unify with black folk. The po-lice need to unify with all the peace loving people here. But they ain’t here! The Mexicans ain’t here! The po-lice may be here, but they ain’t showin they faces! We can’t have true reconciliation without all parties present.”

Touissant watched the insular cliques of gang members and young women and middle-aged women and elderly women. They began talking louder, doing their best to ignore the man. Obviously he was not held in high regard in the neighborhood. Touissant looked back to the flyer: former USC All-American, NFL defensive back and San Bernardino native Vincent Deveraux had organized the event. Below the title of the forum, its date, time and location, the athlete’s figure loomed imposingly upon the laminated card. He was dressed in a business suit, not a mess of contradictory ethnic clothing. His face was drawn and stern. Touissant overheard a few girls whispering about the NFL player, wondering when he would appear, what he would look like in person, if his girlfriend would be present. The athlete was the kind of man people responded to. He had respect, unlike the man in the sombrero. Touissant hoped Deveraux would take the stage soon and get things started.

The night was desert cool, desert dry and windy, and most of the girls were wearing jeans or conservative dresses. The jeans, hugged tight to their legs and asses, were more revealing than the dresses. Some girls were plain-looking, others very pretty. One by one, he watched as the prettiest of the girls brushed past him and into the vicinity of the older guys, the gang members and the unaffiliated brothers. Being attractive, he quickly realized, was no prerequisite for a girl to ignore him. There were no prerequisites. Everybody ignored him. Even one very tall, very gawky girl about the same age as him, with a jutting emaciated collarbone and eyes that looked too big for her skull, walked past and gave Touissant a disdainful once-over with her insect eyes. He watched her go stand with a group of other loud and unattractive girls: at least all the ugly ones stay in one place, he thought to himself.

Touissant had come to the neighborhood forum to learn about the violence so close yet so far away from where he lived. But he had also come to meet people, especially girls. The grasshopper-faced girl looking at him like he was the ugly one was not a good sign when it came to meeting girls. He spent a minute telling himself that it was the absence of any but black girls that was holding him back. He told himself that he didn’t know how to relate to black girls, at least not these ghetto black girls.

Then he noticed a pretty honey-colored girl: she was standing alone just like Touissant was. She had big eyes too, but they were different somehow. Big soft doe’s eyes. Those eyes mooned off into the distance, probably wishing after something she couldn’t have or had yet to find. Touissant wanted to go and talk to her. But then he thought about all the things that could go wrong; a leave-me-alone look, a put-down, a jealous gang member boyfriend dismembering Touissant in public. He didn’t get up and go over to her. His fear and pride were invisible hands holding him in place.

After a while a butter-faced Black-Filipino kid came and sat next to him on the bench. The kid was two or three years older than Touissant, but he seemed just as ignored. “Sucks we can’t smoke out here,” the kid offered. “I got a dime ’a weed but cain’t share it with nobody. Cain’t smoke it in Seccombe my own self.”

Touissant was confused. He didn’t know what marijuana and dimes had to do with each other. “Huh?”

“Undercovers. You know what I’m sayin. The NFL nigga who put this on has undercover po-lice all around this bitch.”

“Really?!” Touissant suddenly felt safer.

“Yeah, black. This is on some inner-sanctum illuminati shit, know what I’m sayin?”

Touissant had no idea what the boy was saying now.