Читать книгу Creatures of Passage - Morowa Yejidé - Страница 17

ISLE OF BLOOD AND DESIRE

Anacostia, that isle of blood and desire, was its own kind of cay. For those who dwelled there sometimes forgot where the southeast quadrant ended and the other quadrants began, and the happenings of their small spaces was the world entire. And because of the spells of fortune and misfortune cast down on that wafer of earth through the eras, each year compounded the consequences of the next, so that one Anacostian scrutinized another as if looking at the last of his kind.

Amy Riley had this feeling of obsolescence each morning when she stared across the kitchen table at her husband, Brandon, in their childless, brick-faced home on Alabama Avenue. She hailed from a bleak floodplain in the Kingdom of Delaware, where roads appeared and disappeared on maps, and struggling farmers prayed for rain to stop, each vying for the crop of another or none at all. When she could no longer bear to look her husband in the eye, she stared instead at the shark tooth dangling from the chain around his neck, a reminder of her malice and loathing, for it seemed that the possession of his trinkets—she among them—was the only thing he cared about.

Well into middle age, Amy adorned herself in the young party dresses of the day, her bluish varicose veins peeking through her nylon stockings. She felt her long blond hair was still her best feature, and she spent hours brushing it with their three dogs at her feet. But there were times in the boredom or fright that filled her days when she drifted into thoughts of the man who worked at her husband’s furniture shop. Osiris Kinwell. For reasons she found difficult to explain, she was intrigued by him, filled with primeval feelings that went beyond the limits of her sensibilities, for when she heard the dollop of some exotic nameless place in the lilt of his voice, she thought of swamps and cotillions and whips.

But even now, the way he reacted when she first introduced herself to him was puzzling. Because she expected him to be nervous in her presence since she was making a point to address him directly. But he wasn’t. Weren’t her eyes blue like the skies? Didn’t her hair stream down her back like the ladies in the Sears catalog, and wasn’t it golden like the dolls in the store windows? Despite her unfortunate circumstances and the disappointments that life had brought her, she believed (knew?) that she represented the ideal woman in the kingdoms of the land. For the television, radio, movies, and all the magazines had told her so. There were history books brimming with pictures in her image and museums filled with paintings of wars fought over women who resembled her. And there were riches made and lost with jewels snatched from dark people in dark continents and bestowed on the pale décolletages of centuries past.

Still, she wondered if he found her interesting. Different. She heard that he was a widower. Alone, except for a daughter and a sister. And she never saw him with any of the black women around there. Maybe he was lonely too? It was the loneliness that fed what was beginning to grow inside of her each time she tended a black eye or a bruise on her arm. And as her fixation on Osiris deepened, she resolved to let him know that she was accessible, a forbidden thing now within reach. She made up reasons to visit the furniture shop, where she feigned inspection of the merchandise, working her way around to the reason she was there.

* * *

Amy visited the shop for the third time on a blazing-hot Tuesday. It had to be a Tuesday, like the times before, because that was the day Brandon was not at the shop, busy as he was with his appointments with suppliers.

She began with a simple word when she saw Osiris manning the establishment: “Hello.”

Osiris looked up and nodded, surprised to see her so often lately when she’d never come into the shop before. “Afternoon, Mrs. Riley. How you been?”

Amy smiled. “Doing well. Seems like today must be one of the hottest days on record. If this heat and humidity keeps up, we might have to close earlier.” She looked up at the dust-filmed ceiling fans as if surveying the conditions. “Brandon says that maybe he’ll see about getting a new AC unit installed in here. Hope so, for your sake, with you being in that back room working.”

A regular came in and looked around and Amy waited until the customer left.

“You must be parched,” she continued. “You know if you like, you’re always welcome to a little iced tea at our house sometimes on Saturday. Brandon goes out to the country with his buddies most Saturdays, and I don’t have much to do.”

Osiris felt like something was starting that shouldn’t. For he sensed he was being hunted and handed a plate at the same time; given an offer without a choice. “Awful nice of you.”

“I know you can’t be too busy to enjoy a cool drink,” Amy said. She gazed at him, waiting for a response.

In the pause that followed, Osiris listened to a siren roar down the street.

Amy leaned against the counter, tossing her hair. “I make a mean iced tea.”

Osiris saw the message in Amy’s eyes, for it was impossible to miss. “Thank you kindly, Mrs. Riley,” he said, smiling a plastic smile. “Be sure to ’member and keep in mind.”

Amy smiled too, trying to read his expression. “You do that.”

Another customer came in and looked around and Osiris waited for the patron to leave. He picked up a piece of plywood and put it back.

“Better get on with some things here before closin’ time.”

“Well, have a good day,” Amy said, and she turned and walked out of the shop.

* * *

As the days went by, Amy sat through episodes of All My Children blaring on the television, thinking about her last encounter with Osiris, an uneasiness settling into her. She didn’t know if it was the look on his face or how he said what he said. Be sure to ’member and keep in mind … Like he was tolerating her. And she thought she saw a thin lining of something around the edges of his eyes, and this bothered her more and more. Because if she couldn’t set her value against his desire to obtain what was beyond reach, what she had been told in a million ways was forbidden and therefore superior to all, then what measure could she use? What way was there for her to be?

She rubbed the fresh bruise on her wrist and felt its pinch, her anger growing. Because the way to be can’t be this, she thought, and slowly, a lie as old as the kingdoms of the land began to take shape inside. Many years later, the same lie would form in the minds of others who stood in front of television cameras, on courtroom witness stands, and before campus review boards. But Amy had no way of knowing this as she stared at the commercials on the screen, fidgeting in her brassiere. What she knew was that the lie made the intolerable contradiction of what Osiris said and what she felt go away.

So it was no surprise that later that day, when her husband slapped her into their bedroom wardrobe, demanding to know why she was seen visiting with this nigger three times in a row, the lie inside swelled with her reddening cheek. Amy held her palm to her face and looked at Brandon with the unchecked resentment of an animal paired in captivity. And now that this new humiliation was happening, as raw and exposed as the beat ing, she couldn’t have Osiris around—couldn’t allow him to be around—knowing that he would only keep her in mind, could she? She let the tears flow down her cheek, warm and familiar, her outrage enriched and rectified by what she was about to say.

She looked squarely at her husband. “I was just trying to be nice, a good Christian. But Osiris wouldn’t leave me alone.”

* * *

Sometimes in the troubled waters of his mind, Brandon Riley thought of how his family had left the blood-soaked lands of Ireland for better places, and how now he felt that one faraway island had merely been traded for another. Anacostia used to be all white and full of the promise of fortunes, and this point was never lost on him whenever he heard the songs of Earth, Wind & Fire pouring out of car windows or smelled soul food cooking on someone’s stove. He once prided himself on having survived, thrived even, when so many others had left. Over the years he had tried to smile at the black children around the neighborhood, but found it increasingly difficult to do so as they grew older and bigger, for each one of them meant more encroachment on the spaces of his mind, his sense of position and property.

That was why he revered the shark. And ever since his first visit to the Museum of Natural History, where he viewed the great white exhibit in all its horror and glory as a child, the image of the creature was an imprint on his soul. Each time he went back to see the elegant gallery photographs or skeletal reconstructions of the magnificent beast in subsequent years, he was thrilled again by the power of the water monster. And later in manhood, when the circumstances of his life unfolded, the image of the great white was a balm to his angst, a reminder of the imperative of dominion. For he reasoned that the shark’s terrible and fatal bites in the waters of the world were justified, since others had no business being in places deemed its territory. The great white was an alpha predator, he’d learned, a survivor through the act of being what it was. And every year Brandon bought a shark tooth in honor of that untouchability, a reminder of what kind of creature he was meant to be. So that he moved about the dominion of his house, his shop, and Anacostia with the precise disposition he felt was required.

But like all frontiersmen bound by the unpredictable happenings between newcomers and natives, he felt a ceaseless unease, a permanent emergency. It was in this constant state of martial law in the confines of his mind and his home that Brandon glared at his wife when he slapped her. And as he watched the tears roll down her cheek, on time as always, on cue, he knew that she was lying about Osiris. Because it seemed that the desire which still overcame him when he watched her dress and sit in the morning sun, or when he took her in the bed, had never been mutual. That all along she seemed to want something else. And as he looked at her crouched on their bedroom floor staring at the wall, it seemed that she held yet another desire, this time for an ape with eyes too clear and a back too straight for his kind. Brandon looked upon her in full hatred of the betrayal he sensed, and prepared to untie his belt. For he’d already accepted that this was why it was not the first time he’d beaten her, nor would it be the last.