Gettin place 97814013060.., p.20
Gettin' Place (9781401306069), page 20
“My brothers,” Lobo had said, standing between them, and Marcus was ashamed at his relief. “Let’s use words.”
He stood in the doorway now, waiting. His sight was so vague that he couldn’t walk without assistance. Marcus crossed the dusty lawn. When he’d graduated, Lobo had brought him here for the first time, saying, “Now I don’t have to give your grades. Now what you think and say is yours.”
“That doesn’t sound like your car,” Lobo said, walking beside Marcus with his sleeve always in contact for guidance. He didn’t want people taking his arm. Not yet.
“My daddy’s truck,” Marcus said, opening the door. He placed the albums carefully on the seat.
Heading up California toward the southern rim of the city, he saw the university floating in the hills like a flock of seagulls—white buildings with sharp wings and flat roofs, built in the seventies.
Brother Lobo said conversationally, “You know I have less than a year before complete darkness.”
“I know,” Marcus said,
“Or blackness.” He’d told Marcus that glaucoma ruined black people’s eyesight far more often than others’. He was only forty-five, but the disease had washed through his vision as quickly as a rising tide. Squinting hard with the eye that could see something held very close, Lobo leaned forward so that his nose nearly touched the radio. “Does it work?”
“Yeah,” Marcus said, driving slowly. Brother Lobo would recite all the statistics and diseases and killers that targeted dark skin; Marcus remembered talking to Enchantee in college, trying to impress her with his knowledge, and she’d turned to him with brows leaping together. “I don’t want to know!” she’d whispered vehemently. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Got to have music,” Lobo said, shifting the radio tuner to the right. He tried to joke about living for the oral tradition now, curling a wry grin around his big teeth.
“It’s Deep Funk Friday here at the University of Rio Seco,” said the midwestern voice Marcus had expected. “We’re in our last half hour now, and the funk’s fierce and furious on 107.9. Right, Stone?”
“Right, Bobcat. And you know what we get into now. Nothing but soundtracks, blasts from the past.” Marcus pictured the blond goatee and glasses on Winston.
“Here they go,” Lobo said, puffing out a laugh.
“Themes from Shaft, Comfy, and Superfly. Enjoy.” The dramatic splash before Isaac Hayes echoed from the radio.
The truck roared up the slight incline lined with fast-food restaurants and newer hotels. Marcus had to laugh, too. “Every week I listen, and I know I can’t hear this stuff anywhere else, but damn, it feels funny. What they say between the songs, their voices—like they’re making fun of it, but they like it. Hell, I don’t know.”
Lobo surprised him. “I don’t know myself.” He turned toward Marcus. “Marcus. Your uncle’s place is a favorite resting spot for me. You know that. And I usually go early in the afternoon, not because I don’t like to hear your uncle play the blues, but because… well, for the distinct pockets of talk I can hear before serious drinking. For the dominoes. And for your aunt’s food. You know she never looks at any of us in there. But last week, I was in the corner alone, waiting for Floyd King to show, and I heard a white man come talk to your aunt. She was in the kitchen, and he was in the doorway. He had a brother with him, a brother’s voice went first, and then the white man was asking her about prices on the place. Selling the land. Her voice went high, like I haven’t heard it, and she told them to leave her alone. ‘I told you before, go on outta here,’ is what she said.”
Marcus stared at Lobo’s fingers splayed for support on the dashboard, like delicate starfish. “Uncle Oscar wasn’t there?” Lobo shook his head and motioned toward the buildings. “I wanted you to bring me here for another reason, aside from your company. Come on.”
The strains of “Superfly” were drifting from the speakers when they opened the door to the radio station. Marcus grinned at himself in the reflection from the window. Sissyfly—you gonna mess up by and by. Not this time. I’ma handle everything.
Then Winston’s voice said, “Well, it’s about time for the man who brings us the best in soulful women. We’ve got our signature farewell, right, Bobcat?”
“For all you students out there cramming hard, working on those killer papers, here’s our cryptic message to you: ‘There Ain’t No Chicken in Harlem.’ ”
Marcus helped Brother Lobo stack his song picks, and the student named Bob, plump and pale with a shadowy brown beard, came out smiling. “You like that?” he asked, grinning. “Hey, I’m gonna rush back to my place and catch your show, man. Nobody picks Aretha cuts like you.”
The blond one came out, and Brother Lobo went inside. The blond one said, “He is the Man. The Eminence.”
Lobo’s voice in the mike was soft and steady, as always, the way Marcus heard it every week on his headphones at the gym before he went out to eat. He’d driven here a few times, but never stayed to watch.
“I’m your brother,” Lobo said, staring into the porous metal. “But these are the True Queens. The true queens of black music, their reign spanning the decades. We’ll start, as always, with Bessie.”
He said the same thing every week because, as he’d told Marcus, it wasn’t his show. It was theirs. Now he turned to Marcus and said, “You know, originally I wanted to call the show Ebony Queens, but that was too limiting. Look.”
He nodded toward the array of album covers. “I can’t see them, but I know them.” The faces, all shades of nutmeg and black and sand. “Which one’s Billie?”
Marcus handed him the album, Billie Holiday heavily made up, her skin like ancient ivory piano keys. “Your aunt looks like her, doesn’t she?” Lobo asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” Marcus said, thinking of his aunt’s somber wide mouth and high forehead, her thin, oiled hair always in a bun.
“Let me know when we get close to five,” Lobo said, turning back to the microphone.
After “St. Louis Blues,” Lobo queued up Sarah, Ella, Billie, and Clara. “Almost five,” Marcus told him, and Lobo said, “We’ll need Dinah.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said. “When I’m listening, you always say the same thing after five. A request.”
“Pick up the other phone when I do, and be quiet,” Lobo said when it rang.
Both phones lit up red, and Lobo said, “Okay.”
Marcus heard Lobo say, “True Queens, KURS.”
“Can you play some Dinah for me?” a voice said. “ ‘Backwater Blues’ and ‘Salty Dog Blues,’ like you do?”
It was Aintielila. Her voice was flat, unemotional. Marcus couldn’t imagine how her face looked right now. She always hovered in the kitchen serving food, shooting diagonal glances at anyone who bothered her.
“How you doing tonight?” Brother Lobo asked her.
“Livin,” she said.
“Working like always?”
“Where I always am. Ain’t no change. You gon play them songs for me?”
“Ain’t no change,” Lobo said, and she hung up.
Marcus stared at Lobo, whose eyes roamed the console. “Every week, same time,” Lobo said. “She never says who she is. Almost a year, and she calls every time like I won’t play them this week if she doesn’t ask.”
“She’s making pies for the weekend crowd now,” Marcus said.
“Last week I finally got up the nerve to ask her where she worked,” Lobo said. “She said, ‘In this kitchen. I got the radio on here. Don’t nobody come in here mess with me. And it feel like a real kitchen, in a real house, when you play them songs.’ Then she hung up.”
Marcus pictured his aunt rolling crusts for peach cobbler in the summer after he’d walked over with the baskets of fruit. Pecan pies when he carried over the shelled nuts. Lobo turned to the microphone and said, “This is Dinah, going out to the queen of the kitchen.”
Marcus had always thought that was just Brother Lobo being fancy. When Lobo recited the names and played the songs, Marcus leaned against the wall to close his eyes and sift through the images of all the women sliding like spilled cards through his brain.
Nina and Carmen and Esther. Marcus saw his aunt, Enchantee, SaRonn’s face. SaRonn’s outlined lips and long column of neck. Maybe Finis was hiding out at her house. His mother had said she hadn’t seen him, and she was worried.
When Lobo said, “Lena,” Marcus tried to imagine what his father was thinking, in the intensive care ward. They’d only been allowed to glimpse him, inside the forest of IVs and vines of tubes. Only his mother had sat beside the bed a short time, whispering close to his father’s ear the way Marcus hadn’t seen in years. Marcus remembered someone bringing up Lena Home’s beauty, years ago when he was little, and his father saying, “First time I seen Alma, she looked better than Lena. Looked better in a work dress and her hair all braided than any woman I ever seen.”
His father had double pneumonia, infection raging through his lungs and chest. Why had he started walking, out there at Demetrius’s place? Marcus felt his father’s weight slung across his chest; he’d only been able to carry his father inside the emergency room with Demetrius’s help.
Demetrius would be looking for him now, needing help again with the tow jobs. And Sofelia… Marcus watched Mortrice at school, the carved-hard glances that said, “Don’t come near me yet.” He’d stopped at Sofelia’s door twice, but when he asked if she’d come see Mama, she shook her head, her mouth pulling in her lips, her nostrils wide with frightened breath.
“Aretha,” Lobo recited, playing “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You).”
Marcus felt an ache in his groin and up his backbone. Some woman had sung this to Julius once in his trailer, sung it higher but just as serious. Marcus had never seen her face, but his own neck had burned where he stood in the pepper trees, listening to them laugh and then call out. He’d been fifteen or so, and the next day he’d stepped carefully through the trailer, looking at the ghost smiles left red on a glass, at one earring on the floor.
The homicide investigators had ransacked both Julius’s and Finis’s trailers several times, along with the coldhouse, looking for traces like that. Marcus was sure Julius was with some sister somewhere. No short supply of beds to conceal him. He heard the churchlike fervor in Aretha’s voice, remembered the passion in the woman’s throat slipping out the trailer window. Who the hell would ever sing to him like that?
That was what he and Lobo would end up talking about in the truck on the way home: why something always seemed missing to the women, why neither of them could give up enough of what the women seemed to want. “But that’s all right,” Brother Lobo always said.
He felt the pulsing wires of headache begin. Natalie and Chaka—he knew from listening each week that Lobo would end with the same two queens: They were the youngest.
“Pack’d My Bags” and then “Keepin a Light.” Lobo’s voice was still steady and calm, but Marcus stood up, his shoulders leaping with the chill he felt inside.
“These are for all the true queens keeping their lights shining in the window. Too many brothers have packed their bags and moved on. Traveling light. Rambling. This is for all the sisters waiting on someone. Good night,” Lobo said.
The two houses behind SaRonn’s were dark, but her window shone dim and soft behind fabric she’d pinned over the glass. Marcus knocked, and she answered right away, calling, “Who that?”
“Marcus,” he said. “Finis brother.”
“I remember,” she said, opening the door. “Come on—it’s bath time.”
He followed her down the small hallway into the bathroom, where she perched on the edge of the tub where her daughter was scooping bubbles into empty margarine containers.
“Can’t leave em for a minute when they’re in the bath,” she said, looking up at him. Her baby hairs were sculpted with shining oil to frame her face.
“You were waitin for Finis?” he asked.
SaRonn nodded, looking down at her daughter, who held out her arms to be picked up from the water. “Come here, burrito baby,” SaRonn said, rolling her into a large towel and carrying her, squirming, into the single bedroom.
Marcus stayed in the doorway, watching Willa roll on the India-print bedspread, screaming with laughter. SaRonn’s arms were rounded and strong when she picked the long bundle up again. “I see how you lookin at me,” she said. “You tryin to figure out if I have a thing for Finis, right? You one a those dudes that thinks no one can be friends.”
“Not hardly,” Marcus said, trying to lean cool against the frame. “I ain’t said nothin.”
“Yeah,” SaRonn said, smiling wide. “You didn’t have to. Look—you know why I like your brother? Not just memory lane, okay? I like sittin in the living room listenin to music with somebody who ain’t starin at my chest. We just chill out and listen to the words. Finis just got a new Sly and the Family Stone cassette. Your brother Julius found it for him at some flea market.”
“Julius?” Marcus said, and frowned.
“Yeah,” she said, gently drying Willa’s hair. “Julius bought him a bunch of tapes this week, I guess cause his place got messed up by the cops.” She looked up sharply at him again. “Finis took his Walkman and the tapes and left four days ago.”
“Where’d he go?” Marcus shook his head at his own impatient words.
She took a long time answering, picking up her daughter and tucking the glistening crown under her own neck. Finally, she said, “A song, you know. I’m tryin to think. I never heard it. Like a blues song or somethin. He said, ‘Whichaway do the bloodred river run? Run from my window to the risin sun. Dumper say, Loader sent me plenty cement and clay. Bloodred river risin six foot a day.’ ”
Marcus whistled. “Sure as hell ain’t Funkadelic.”
SaRonn shook her head. “I don’t know what it is. But he looked so sad, and he walked down that way.” She nodded toward Agua Dulce. “Away from y’all place.”
He drove to The Blue Q, glancing at the driveway of his father’s place and seeing the flatbed tow truck there. Demetrius was around, he thought, keeping an eye on the fences.
He’d left SaRonn quickly so he wouldn’t look at her chest, or her neck, or any other part of her body. He didn’t want her thinking he was like anyone else. But he also wanted to ask his uncle about the lyrics before he forgot them. With Finis, every word meant something important.
A man leaned toward the truck as soon as the tires crossed the fence line at The Blue Q. “Hosea?” he said, and then his face drew back in surprise. He was a friend of Rock’s, older and gruff. “You drivin this one, boy? How’s your daddy?”
“Intensive Care,” Marcus said. “Uncle Oscar checkin everybody out?” The man nodded and let him park.
Marcus could see by the cars that the place was full, and he knew he probably wouldn’t be able to corner his uncle. After he paid Jerry, he stepped inside the moist smoke and saw the tables circled with faces, the stage lit with one dangling, yellow-shaded bulb.
His uncle sat on a folding chair with his guitar and a jackknife, looking at the crowd. His seamed cheeks sparkled with sweat, and his head was wreathed with eerie golden smoke. Behind him was Eddie Lee, with another guitar, and a man they called Texas Jimmy, with a set of drums.
Oscar met Marcus’s eyes, and he lifted his chin a few inches. Marcus saw Aintielila leaning forward on her elbows for a moment at the serving window. Then her face disappeared into the kitchen, and Oscar said suddenly, “All right. Got fellas in here from Missippi, from Georgia. Oklahoma. Eddie Lee here, you know he one a them horse trainers they send outta Tennessee. And you know by his name where this other fool from. But every man in here know what I’m talking bout when I’m talkin bout these evil women.”
A few men shouted from the back of the room, and one woman hollered, “Evil is as evil do!”
Marcus leaned against the wall, feeling the heat laced with barbecue spice and tangled with perfume. The guitar lay, strings up, flat across Oscar’s lap, and he bent over it like he always did. His uncle slid the jackknife down the strings, making a sharp moan, and Eddie Lee picked a stair step of notes. Texas Jimmy started a beat, and Oscar said, “Somebody told me they wanted old-time. All right. This man—I’ma call him Lonnie, now.”
He sang,
Lonnie love his Treetown women
But he don’t like they evil ways
He love them old Westside women
But can’t stand they mean and evil ways
They can fuss and steal and fight
Damn near six out every seven days
A woman shouted, “Oh—and y’all niggas don’t?”
Another woman said, “He know what he talkin bout.” Marcus smiled, thinking he hadn’t been in The Blue Q this time on a Friday for years. Old-timey music and arguments.
His woman love her corn whiskey
And she drink that old homemade brew
Them women love that corn whiskey
And they drink the best homemade brew (You know that)
Get as drunk as they can be
Fight till Lonnie step between em two
People were dancing in the small area beside the stage, women’s shoulders dipping and rising to the beat. Marcus saw Floyd King, Lanier, and a few other men at a back table. His uncle moved the knife again and the strings moaned with menace.
You know he got another gal
She live down on Deep Olive Street
I mean he love another gal
Live down on Deep Olive Street
She been done killed two men
He ain’t lookin to be number three
Marcus laughed, feeling the rough wood against his shoulders. His father used to joke with Oscar about “Deep” Treetown. They talked about somewhere in Oklahoma called Deep Greenwood. “Every place got a Deep in it, if you know where it is,” Oscar would always say.
Lonnie say he got another gal
She stay over on Pablo Street
Say he got another gal
Way over on Pablo Street
