Buffalo Noir Page 12

  One morning, without ever remembering I slept, I woke with a shaft of life piercing my left eye. The foil had peeled back from one of the panes, and in it, standing in the midst of the leaves, was Horus. His bronze body was lean and muscled. His black hawk’s head was adorned with a crown, and he had a mass of braids spilling down his back. His all-seeing eye looked out at me.

  I sat up, not afraid, expecting him to speak to me. He didn’t say a word. He vanished. Then I woke up. Again. Not sure what was real. Which world was the dream. I was lying on the floor. I didn’t have a bed yet, only a sleeping bag. The foil on the windows was all intact. I peeled it off, and sitting in the tree was a huge black crow. It cawed and flew off into the blue.

  I stood up then. I shopped all day. I bought gallons of paint, a ladder, and the next morning after I e-mailed in my work, I went outside. With my gun in my pants, I began painting the south wall of my house.

  I started with the body, worked on it for weeks, as a small creep of heat pushed into the days. I sweated, and felt dizzy at times when I climbed on the ladder to complete the chest and arms. As the sun lifted in the sky, teenage boys would come up the street bouncing basketballs loudly. I would watch them out of the corner of an eye. By the time I got to the hair on the mural, I had a clearer head and an audience. Malcolm and his father would sit on the porch across the street and watch me. They ate breakfast out there, and Malcolm’s father had a speaker from a stereo in the window and would play Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Rick James, Phyllis Hyman, Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Grover Washington. A choir of the dead.

  One morning, I had come down off the ladder and was sipping a cup of coffee on the front porch when Malcolm and his father walked across the street and introduced themselves. Malcolm then promptly went back across the street and disappeared into the house.

  His father sat on the bottom step. “He’s good, my boy. Tenderhearted. He like your painting. Your work do look good, but you gonna put some sandals on him, right? He wore sandals.”

  “Horus, oh, he was always barefooted. At least from what I’ve seen.”

  “Who, was he in Earth, Wind & Fire? Them brothers always liked to dress like they just fell out a boat in the Nile River.”

  “No,” I explained, my tongue clumsy. I hadn’t talked in a month. “He’s, umm, a spirit. An Egyptian god. When you paint, sometimes ideas come to you. You dream them. They dream you. Spirits.”

  “Damn, I’m wrong, I been telling Malcolm that was Rick James you was painting. I was sure of it when I seen them braids. The Throwin’ Down album cover, except Rick didn’t wear that skirt thing you had him in. He had on a loincloth.”

  “Hmmm,” I said.

  “Hey, you the painter. I’m not. I got it all wrong.”

  “No, no, you didn’t get it wrong. There’s no getting it wrong,” I said. “Maybe they are the same spirit.”

  “If you looking for some spirits, all kinds of spirits around here.” He waved his arms. “Rick around here, still. He grew up around here, partied around here, even when he was famous. I seen him once when I was a kid. Right here on Jefferson. He signed autographs for anyone who wanted one. I got one, but I lost it. It was just on a little piece of paper. But anyway, I’ma let you get back to work. I ain’t got to be to work until three.” He got up from the porch.

  As he headed across the street, I asked, “Do you want me to make it Rick? I haven’t done the head yet.”

  He turned around, smiling broadly. “You serious?”

  I nodded.

  “Make it Rick, then,” he said, “and I’ma tell Malcolm I was right. Ain’t too many times a boy think his daddy is right about nothing. Deuces!” He flashed two fingers at me.

  “Deuces!” I said in turn.

  * * *

  This house I sat in, with Malcolm, with my fake gun, was mine, officially mine, my cave. My real home. Mom had signed it over to me, just as she had promised.

  When I had looked at the permit-to-carry application, there was one section that stopped me cold. Who would safeguard my gun if I died? I had no answer, and a part of me, a part I had buried in darkness, realized I had no one to protect me from the gun I wanted to hide. Who would protect me when the weight of darkness was too great?

  “I’m painting Harold Arlen next,” I told Malcolm. “I’m putting him outside on the opposite side of the house from Rick. He’s from Buffalo too. He wrote ‘Over the Rainbow.’”

  “My grandmama loved that song,” said Malcolm. “They played it at her funeral and it was like Patti LaBelle was really up in the church with us. My grandmama loved her. When Patti would kick her shoes off and flap like a bird, my grandmama would say she was struck by the spirit.”

  “Look,” I said, getting up, “I’ll go with you to talk to your dad in morning, if you want me to.”

  “Maybe he’ll listen to you. He like you.”

  “I don’t know about that. All I can say is, I’m sure he wants what’s best for you.”

  Malcolm nodded his head. “You hear that music? It’s spooky up in here.”

  “That’s just the radio,” I said. “I left it on upstairs.”

  “Can I leave the lights on?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes,” and I headed up the stairs.

  PART III

  Bloodlines

  Valentine

  BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Delaware Park

  In upstate New York in those years there were snowstorms so wild and fierce they could change the world, within a few hours, to a place you wouldn’t know. First came the heavy black thunderheads over Lake Erie, then the wind hammering overhead like a freight train, then the snowflakes erupting, flying, swirling like crazed atoms. If there’d been a sun it was extinguished, gone. Night and day were reversed, the fallen snow emitted such a radium glare.

  I was fifteen years old living in the Red Rock section of Buffalo with an aunt, an older sister of my mother’s, and her husband who was retired from the New York Central Railroad with a disability pension. My own family was what you’d called “dispersed”—we were all alive, seven of us, I believed we were all alive, but we did not live together in the same house any longer. In fact, the house, an old rented farmhouse twenty miles north of Buffalo, was gone. Burned to the ground.

  Valentine’s Day 1959, the snowstorm began in midafternoon and already by five p.m. the power lines were down in the city. Hurriedly we lit kerosene lamps whose wicks smoked and stank as they gave off a begrudging light. We had a flashlight, of course, and candles. In extra layers of clothes we saw our breaths steam as we ate our cold supper on plates like ice. I cleaned up the kitchen as best I could without hot water, for that was always my task, among numerous others, and I said “Goodnight, Aunt Esther” to my aunt who frowned at me, seeing someone not-me in my place who filled her heart with sisterly sorrow, and I said “Goodnight, Uncle Herman” to the man designated as my uncle, who was no blood-kin of mine, a stranger with damp eyes always drifting onto me and a mouth like a smirking scar burn. “Goodnight” they murmured as if resenting the very breath expelled for my sake. Goodnight, don’t run on the stairs, don’t drop the candle and set the house on fire.

  Upstairs was a partly finished attic narrow as a tunnel with a habitable space at one end—my “room.” The ceiling was covered in strips of peeling insulation and so steep-slanted I could stand up only in the center. The floorboards were splintery and bare except for a small shag rug, a discard of my aunt’s, laid down by my bed. The bed was another discard of my aunt’s, a sofa of some mud-brown prickly fabric that pierced sheets laid upon it like whiskers sprouting through skin. But this was a bed of my own and I had not ever had a bed of my own before. Nor had I ever had a room of my own, a door to shut against others, even if, like the attic door, it could not be locked.

  By midnight the storm had blown itself out and the alley below had vanished in undulating dunes of snow. Everywhere snow! Glittering like mica in the moonlight! And the moon—a glowing battered-
human face in a sky strangely starless, black as a well. The largest snowdrift I’d ever seen, shaped like a right-angled triangle, slanted up from the ground to the roof close outside the window. My aunt and her husband had gone to bed downstairs hours ago and the thought came to me unbidden: I can run away, no one would miss me.

  Along Huron Street, which my aunt’s house fronted, came a snowplow; red light flashing atop its cab; otherwise there were few vehicles and these were slow-moving with groping headlights, like wounded beasts. Yet even as I watched there came a curiously shaped small vehicle to park at the mouth of the alley; and the driver, a long-legged man in a hooded jacket, climbed out. To my amazement he stomped through the snow into the alley to stand peering up toward my window, his breath steaming. Who? Who was this? Mr. Lacey, my algebra teacher?

  For Valentine’s Day that morning I had brought eight homemade valentines to school made of stiff red construction paper edged with paper lace, in envelopes decorated with red-ink hearts; the valentine TO MR. LACEY was my masterpiece, the largest and most ingeniously designed, interlocking hearts fashioned with a ruler and compass to resemble geometrical figures in three dimensions. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, I had neatly printed in black ink. Of course I had not signed any of the valentines and had secretly slipped them into the lockers of certain girls and boys and Mr. Lacey’s onto his desk after class. I had instructed myself not to be disappointed when I received no valentines in return, not a single valentine in return, and I was not disappointed when at the end of the school day I went home without a single one: I was not.

  Mr. Lacey seemed to have recognized me in the window where I stood staring, my outspread fingers on the glass bracketing my white astonished face, for he’d begun climbing the enormous snowdrift that lifted to the roof! How assured, how matter-of-fact, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. I was too surprised to be alarmed, or even embarrassed—my teacher would see me in a cast-off sweater of my brother’s that was many sizes too large for me and splotched with oil stains, he would see my shabby little room that wasn’t really a room, just part of an unfinished attic. He would know I was the one who’d left the valentine TO MR. LACEY on his desk in stealth, not daring to sign my name. He would know who I was, how desperate for love.

  Once on the roof, which was steep, Mr. Lacey made his way to my window cautiously. The shingles were covered in snow, icy patches beneath. There was a rumor that Mr. Lacey was a skier, and a skater, though his lanky body did not seem the body of an athlete, and in class sometimes he seemed distracted in the midst of speaking or inscribing an equation on the blackboard; as if there were thoughts more crucial to him than tenth-grade algebra at Thomas E. Dewey High School, which was one of the poorest schools in the city. But now his footing was sure as a mountain goat’s, his movements agile and unerring. He crouched outside my window tugging to lift it—Erin? Make haste!

  I was helping to open the window which was locked in ice. It had not been opened for weeks. Already it seemed I’d pulled on my wool slacks and wound around my neck the silver muffler threaded with crimson yarn my mother had given me two or three Christmases ago. I had no coat or jacket in my room and dared not risk going downstairs to the front closet. I was very excited, fumbling, biting my lower lip, and when at last the window lurched upward, the freezing air rushed in like a slap in the face. Mr. Lacey’s words seemed to reverberate in my ears: Make haste, make haste!—not a moment to waste! It was his teasing-chiding classroom manner that nonetheless meant business. Without hesitating, he grabbed both my hands—I saw that I was wearing the white angora mittens my grandmother had knitted for me long ago, which I’d believed had been lost in the fire—and hauled me through the window.

  Mr. Lacey led me to the edge of the roof, to the snowdrift, seeking out his footprints where he knew the snow to be fairly firm, and carefully he pulled me in his wake so that I seemed to be descending a strange kind of staircase. The snow was so fresh-fallen it lifted like powder at the slightest touch or breath, glittering even more fiercely close up, as if the individual snowflakes, of such geometrical beauty and precision, contained minute sparks of flame. Er-in, Er-in, now your courage must begin, I seemed to hear, and suddenly we were on the ground and there was Mr. Lacey’s Volkswagen at the mouth of the alley, headlights burning like cat’s eyes and tusks of exhaust curling up behind. How many times covertly I’d tracked with my eyes that ugly-funny car shaped like a sardine can, its black chassis speckled with rust, as Mr. Lacey drove into the teachers’ parking lot each morning between 8:25 and 8:35 a.m. How many times I’d turned quickly aside in terror that Mr. Lacey would see me. Now I stood confused at the mouth of the alley, for Huron Street and all of the city I could see was so changed, the air so terribly cold like a knifeblade in my lungs; I looked back at the darkened house wondering if my aunt might wake and discover me gone, and what then would happen?—as Mr. Lacey urged, Come, Erin, hurry! She won’t even know you’re gone, unless he said, She won’t ever know you’re gone. Was it true? Not long ago in algebra class I’d printed in the margin of my textbook,

  MR.

  L.

  IS

  AL

  WA

  YS

  RI

  GH

  T!

  which I’d showed Linda Bewley across the aisle, one of the popular tenth-grade girls, a B+ student and very pretty and popular, and Linda frowned trying to decipher the words which were meant to evoke Mr. Lacey’s pole-lean frame, but she never did get it and turned away from me annoyed.

  Yet it was so: Julius Lacey was always always right.

  Suddenly I was in the cramped little car and Mr. Lacey was behind the wheel driving north on icy Huron Street. Where are we going? I didn’t dare ask. When my grades in Mr. Lacey’s class were less than 100 percent I was filled with anxiety that turned my fingers and toes to ice, for even if I’d answered nearly all the questions on a test correctly, how could I know I could answer the next question? solve the next problem? and the next? A nervous passion drove me to comprehend not just the immediate problem but the principle behind it, for behind everything there was an elusive and tyrannical principle of which Mr. Lacey was the sole custodian; and I could not know if he liked me or was bemused by me or merely tolerated me or was in fact disappointed in me as a student who should have been earning perfect scores at all times. He was twenty-six or -seven years old, the youngest teacher at the school, whom many students feared and hated, and a small group of us feared and admired. His severe, angular face registered frequent dissatisfaction as if to indicate, Well, I’m waiting! Waiting to be impressed! Give me one good reason to be impressed!

  Never had I seen the city streets so deserted. Mr. Lacey drove no more than twenty miles an hour passing stores whose fronts were obliterated by snow like waves frozen at their crests and through intersections where no traffic lights burned to guide us and our only light was the Volkswagen’s headlights and the glowering moon large in the sky as a fat navel orange held at arm’s length. We passed Carthage Street that hadn’t yet been plowed—a vast river of snow six feet high. We passed Templeau Street where a city bus had been abandoned in the intersection, humped with snow like a forlorn creature of the Great Plains. We passed Sturgeon Street where broken electrical wires writhed and crackled in the snow like snakes crazed with pain. We passed Childress Street where a water main had burst and an arc of water had frozen glistening in a graceful curve at least fifteen feet high at its crest. At Ontario Avenue Mr. Lacey turned right, the Volkswagen went into a delirious skid, Mr. Lacey put out his arm to keep me from pitching forward—Erin, take care! But I was safe. And on we drove.

  Ontario Avenue, usually so crowded with traffic, was deserted as the surface of the moon. A snowplow had forged a single lane down the center. On all sides were unfamiliar shapes of familiar objects engulfed in snow and ice—parking meters? mailboxes? abandoned cars? humanoid figures frozen in awkward, surprised postures—hunched in doorways, frozen in midstride on the sidewalk? L
ook! Look at the frozen people! I cried in a raw loud girl’s voice that so frequently embarrassed me when Mr. Lacey called upon me unexpectedly in algebra class; but Mr. Lacey shrugged, saying, Just snowmen, Erin—don’t give them a second glance. But I couldn’t help staring at these statue-figures for I had an uneasy sense of being stared at by them in turn, through chinks in the hard-crusted snow of their heads. And I seemed to hear their faint despairing cries—Help! help us!—but Mr. Lacey did not slacken his speed.

  (Yet: who could have made so many “snowmen” so quickly after the storm? Children? Playing so late at night? And where were these children now?)

  Mysteriously Mr. Lacey said, There are many survivors, Erin. In all epochs, just enough survivors. I wanted to ask, Should we pray for them? pressing my hands in the angora mittens against my mouth to keep from crying, for I knew how hopeless prayer was in such circumstances, God only helps those who don’t require His help.

  * * *

  Were we headed for the lakefront?—we crossed a swaying bridge high above railroad tracks, and almost immediately after that another swaying bridge high above an ice-locked canal. We passed factories shut down by the snowstorm with smokestacks so tall their rims were lost in mist. We were on South Main Street now passing darkened shuttered businesses, warehouses, a slaughterhouse; windowless brick buildings against whose walls snow had been driven as if sandblasted in eerie, almost legible patterns. These were messages, I was sure!—yet I could not read them. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Mr. Lacey as he drove. We were close together in the cramped car; yet at the same time I seemed to be watching us from a distance. At school there were boys who were fearful of Mr. Lacey yet, behind his back, sneered at him muttering what they’d like to do with him, slash his car tires, beat him up, and I felt a thrill of satisfaction, If you could see Mr. Lacey now! for he was navigating the Volkswagen so capably along the treacherous street, past snowy hulks of vehicles abandoned by the wayside. He’d shoved back the hood of his wool jacket—how handsome he looked! Where by day he often squinted behind his glasses, by night he seemed fully at ease. His hair was long and quill-like and of the subdued brown hue of a deer’s winter coat; his eyes, so far as I could see, had a luminous coppery sheen. I recalled how at the high school Mr. Lacey was regarded with doubt and unease by the other teachers, many of whom were old enough to be his parents; he was considered arrogant because he didn’t have an education degree from a state teachers’ college like the others, but a master’s degree in math from the University of Buffalo where he was a part-time PhD student. Maybe I will reap where I haven’t had any luck sowing, he’d once remarked to the class, standing chalk in hand at the blackboard which was covered in calculations. And this remark too had passed over our heads.