THE PHONE RANG just after Felonise had hung up the white clothes in the backyard. It was Friday, late August, and the clothes swayed in the California wind that blew hot and soft from the moment the sun came up out here in the orange groves outside Rio Seco. The dishtowels, the sheets from the fold-out couch where Teeter had spent the night when his brother had a concert, and the white socks her daughter Cerise called Peds. The ones Felonise liked to wear at night around the house. Could wash them after one night. Cleaner than slippers.
Back in Louisiana, Mama used to say Least keep the feet clean. All that dirt from the canefields, but least don’t put dirty feet in my sheets.
Only once a week I got to wash white clothes, Felonise was thinking when she moved toward the phone. Not like the old days when me and Marie-Claire and Claudine first come out here to the orange groves and we all had to share one washer.
She opened the back door and reached for the cordless phone her daughter had bought from Target. “Hello?”
“I’m calling about Lafayette Reynaldo Martin.”
“My grandson?”
The woman hesitated and said, “Hold on, please.”
During the scratchy time when the receiver was jostled on the desk and the school women’s voices murmured like distant puppies in a yard, she hoped he wasn’t hurt. Too hot to be in school. Seemed like school in August was wrong—they supposed to play in summer. But so many kids now, Cerise said they made the school year-round schedule. The boys would be off in October.
Stove clock said 11:03. They had probably called Cerise, but she was at work and couldn’t hear the cell phone in her purse. Last year Teeter had fallen off the bars and the school had called Cerise but said she didn’t answer. Cerise had come over that night, crying until her eyes were red and swollen as peach pits.
“I was in the bathroom, maman,” she’d moaned. “The only five minutes all damn morning I didn’t have that damn phone with me.”
“He only have a sprain wrist, now. Nothing he gon remember.”
Cerise had turned up her face to Felonise and said, “Maman, they remember. The ones at the office. The teacher. You don’t know. They think, Oh, another little black kid and his mama’s some crackhead like Glorette who doesn’t even care enough to show up when we call.”
“Don’t say that about Glorette.”
“I’m sorry. But every time I see her on Palm or in Rite Aid, and she’s high out her mind, I always think she makes it harder for me. They think we’re all like her. You know the kids say Crack Ho! Like it’s a joke. All the time.”
While Felonise held the phone and heard the women’s voices getting closer, a black blur fell past her laundry and made a soft thump on the concrete patio.
“Mrs. Martin?” A different voice.
“Yes.”
“Your name is on the list to call for Lafayette, in case it’s necessary that he be picked up.” Another pause, but Felonise didn’t hear her grandson’s voice. “Are you a caregiver?”
“His grandmother.” Felonise waited. “He get hurt there at school?” She saw white—wrist bone poking out white from his skin, tooth in his palm.
“No. He was in a fight, and he’s been suspended from school for the rest of the day. I’ve called his mother, his father, and his babysitter. There’s no answer.”
She didn’t like this woman’s tone. Lafayette wasn’t no damn orphan. “His mama workin, and sometime she ain’t hear that little phone. His daddy work carpenter, and he never hear nothin. And Esther might be at the doctor. So yeah, I come and get him.”
“Well, we’ll expect you soon,” the woman said. Had to add that.
Like I was fool enough to come tomorrow. So Felonise added, “You tell him I’m on my way.”
THE CROW LAY dead on the patio beside the washline. Another baby. Furry with baby feathers, puffed out like a piece of black boa from some old costume, the small black feet curled like ink writing. Felonise pushed it onto the dustpan with her broom. She walked over to the trashcan, and when she opened the lid, the two finches from yesterday lay there on top, stiff and dry.
West Nile virus, Cerise had told her. She’d read it in the paper. That’s where she worked—at the Rio Seco Register, in the customer service place out near Pomona.
Felonise set the baby crow beside the finches. West Nile—something in the air, or in the blood, that came all the way from Africa to Southern California. Inside the birds and mosquitoes. Her yard had been nearly silent this August, no crows and jays and mockingbirds fighting over every scrap of bread and bit of old rice she threw out for them.
She closed her gate. Eight small white houses lined up along the gravel road, and the barn across the clearing. She smoothed the stray hairs back into her bun. She would ask Enrique for a ride to the school downtown. Cerise and Lafayette had moved downtown when they had Lafayette Jr., because Cerise said the school was good, and the neighborhood had good home values. But last year Lafayette had left her, moved in with his brother back here in the groves. He’d apologized formally, in her kitchen at Christmas.
“I couldn’t hang,” he said. “Gotta be perfect to live like that, Miss Felonise. Every minute. She got the boys in basketball and tutoring and piano. Lafie want to play piano like his cousin. But I’m tired when I get home from work.”
“My daughter tired, too,” she told him. “She call it the second shift. Say that her job, too, raise them two boy. She ain’t get to rest and play domino with her friends.”
ENRIQUE’S TRUCK WAS parked near the barn. Even after thirty-five years, whenever she saw the barn, where they stored the picked oranges and crates and machinery, she thought briefly of Raoul. Her husband. He’d worked only two seasons here in California. A flicker in her brain, like the news that appeared in the corner of the TV screen. He’d gone back to Louisiana to the town where they’d been born to help his uncle with the sugarcane harvest. He was twenty-five. Raoul had been driving a tractor loaded too high with cane. The foreman made him go out after two days of rain, even though Raoul told him it wasn’t safe. California nigger don’t come back for vacation and tell people what to do, the foreman said. In the rain, the wheels had slipped into a ditch and the tractor overturned onto Raoul.
Enrique was unloading boxes of fertilizer. Felonise said, “You give me a ride up there to that school? Cerise and Lafayette at work.”
They headed up the long gravel road between the Washington navel trees. The dust was heavy on the trees—no rain since spring. The green fruit was almond sized. “Which one sick?” Enrique said, his hand on the gearshift. The veins were ridged high like yarn under his skin.
“Nobody sick,” she answered. The truck waited at the blacktop road. Down that street was the elementary school Cerise and all the other kids from the groves had gone to. Agua Dulce. Mexican, black and white kids from the small communities scattered in the trees. When they turned onto the road toward downtown, she said, “’Tite Lafie get in a fight.”
Enrique nodded. “Like his daddy.”
Felonise shook her head. “No. Not like his daddy. Fight back then, don’t mean nothin. Now they can’t fight. Can’t bring a chapstick. Can’t jump off no swing.” The truck went over the canal bridge. “I gotta take him home.”
Enrique turned onto Palm Avenue, the big four-lane street that went through the whole city. To the west was the boarding house where they’d first stayed when they came to California. To the east was downtown, with old Victorian houses, Spanish-style bank buildings, the restaurants and stores. “Off Tenth Street?” he asked, and she nodded. “Why he can’t walk?” Enrique said, and Felonise was startled.
“You know,” she said. “Boogie man. Cerise and them see boogie man everywhere. Them kids can’t walk.”
She had told Cerise and the other girls only once about Mr. McQuine. The real boogie man, back in Louisiana. Not about the taste of his skin. But that Enrique had killed him.
Enrique’s hand pulled the gearshift again—the knuckles like rocks moving under his skin. His wife said he’d killed Mr. McQuine with a piece of wood—and Felonise lay awake some nights wondering if you could hear it. The skullbone smashed.
Felonise had never told anyone—not even Raoul or Marie-Claire, that Mr. McQuine—his wide brow sweating pale as new-boiled egg, his hands fat—had caught her once when she walked home from her aunt’s. His grasp on her elbow was so hard the bones ground together. She heard the sound of her bones inside her skull. He jerked her around and then said, “Oh, you one a them blue-eyed niggers!” She had ducked her head and bitten his forearm. Sweat and motor oil in her mouth, and when she turned to run, a salt-metal taste behind her front teeth that she didn’t recognize until she was in the trees.
Enrique glanced at her and said, “Too hot for school, non?” Then he turned into the residential district with two-story homes, historic plaques, hedges tall as walls. Past this was Olive Heights Elementary. He stopped the truck in the school parking lot.
Felonise said, “Go head home. I stay with him at his maman’s. Wait for her.”
Enrique knew her daughter. He said, “She be more upset than the boy, oui?”
Felonise nodded. “She want him happy. That’s the only thing.”
FELONISE HAD BEEN here a few times, waiting with Cerise at the back fence when the kids were let out. Cerise worked 6 am to 2 pm, and she always said, “We gotta be early to pick up.”
“Why?”
“Cause these other moms start lining up at the back fence an hour early so they can watch the kids on the playground.”
“They don’t work?”
“They work inside the home, okay?” Cerise put on lipstick, quickly. “They’re like a club. They volunteer at the school, they’re here all day. Bring their kids lunch.”
“Ain’t no cafeteria?”
“Very funny, Maman. Their kids want something from Taco Bell or Wendy’s.”
“Why we gotta be early, too?”
Cerise had given her a long look. She had parked her car behind a white SUV with soccer ball bumper stickers. “So the boys can see us. See we’re here. Like everybody else. So everything is exactly the same, Maman. You don’t get it.”
She was right. There was already a parade of mothers down this sidewalk, standing with arms crossed in that waiting pose, laughing and talking, eyes on the playground. One woman had her hands splayed like starfish on the chainlink, peering inside, and then calling out to the toddler next to her, “There she is! I see Madison! She’s playing tetherball. Do you see her? See big sissie?”
She remembered sitting with Marie-Claire, having one last cup of coffee while they heard the children’s voices skittering down the gravel road when they walked home from school. “There go peace and quiet,” Marie-Claire used to sigh. “Here come war.”
Now Felonise looked down the long line of chainlink by the playground, lit gold by the sun and vibrating a little in the wind. No children were on the playground—probably too hot for recess. School in August—foolish.
The sidewalk to the office was lined with scraggly rosebushes. Would Lafayette be inside the principal’s office? She stopped for a drink at the fountain near the door, and when she looked up, a drop hanging from her lower lip, tickling just exactly like when she was a child, she was startled by a young man who said, “Wow. I never see grownups drink from there.”
He must have been a teacher. He smiled, blue tie and white shirt, his jeans faded. When he held open the door for her, Felonise wiped her mouth quickly with her wrist.
“They’re all convinced it’s toxic,” he said, grinned once more, and walked down a hallway. She heard him say, “Hey, Lafayette. How’s math?”
Her grandson said cheerfully, “Okay. Numbers don’t lie. Like you said last year.”
Three women at the front desk looked at her with blank faces. Three clipboards were stacked on the counter near Felonise. The door to her left was marked Principal. It was closed. Three folding chairs were lined along the wall. In one, a red-haired boy sat staring at his backpack, which crouched between his legs like a fat black dog with tags dangling everywhere.
“Lafayette,” she called softly toward the hallway.
“Excuse me,” said the woman in the middle. She was white, her hair short dark wings around her forehead. Her hand rested on her phone as if it were glued there. “Are you here to pick up a child?”
“Lafayette Reynaldo,” Felonise said. Add the middle name, they knew you weren’t fooling.
“Grandmère!” He came down the hallway. “I was in the bathroom.”
The other boy lifted his head and looked up at Lafayette. Then he said, “I need to call my mom again.”
Was he the one? Lafayette didn’t even glance at him. He picked up his own black backpack. “You have to sign, Grandmère,” he said.
“Excuse me,” the woman said again. “Ma’am, I’ll need your ID so I can write down the number here.”
Felonise looked at the clipboard and piece of paper. A list of names, scrawled signatures, and times.
“I need to call my mom again!” the red headed boy said, and Felonise heard the words sharp. That was him. The boy. This was a competition. She had arrived first.
“We called her, Cody. She said she’s on her way.”
“Whatever,” the boy said. Felonise let herself look at him. Reddish-brown hair in shiny spikes, like a wet cat sat on his skull. She glanced away before seeing his eyes.
Cerise had told her a hundred times to always bring ID with her, because the school wouldn’t let the boys out unless she had it. “What other old lady gon show up to steal em?” Felonise had said, and her daughter said sternly, “Just bring it, Maman.”
She lay on the counter the California ID she’d had to get five years ago for this purpose. “This isn’t a driver’s license,” the woman frowned.
“I ain’t a driver,” Felonise said, and then sealed her teeth inside her mouth. She wanted to hurt this woman. She wanted to throw the wire basket at her head. Lafayette’s elbow was near hers. He was almost as tall as she was.
“Mom!” The other boy was talking into a cell phone now. “I told you to come get me now!”
The woman was looking at Felonise’s wrist. The black wires and blue beads of the macramé bracelet Cerise had made for her twenty years ago, some craft project, and the wires had tightened eventually so that the bracelet never came off. The woman wrote on the lines and turned the clipboard around. Felonise signed like Raoul had taught her years ago, like he’d learned to sign when he came to California. Just make a big loop for your first letter and then a straight line, like you in a hurry. Don’t make no X here. They don’t know the X here.
“The vice-principal will have to okay this,” the woman said. “Because he’s suspended.”
Felonise let out her breath and turned around. The other boy said, “Tell them to wash it out then, Mom! Hurry up.”
He closed the little phone and held it in his hand. Then he looked up at Lafayette. His skull moved to the left, and his tongue made a lump in his cheek. He was not sorry.
His cheeks had light freckles like crushed cornflakes. There was a trace of blood on his lip, a torn spot. A keyhole. She grabbed Lafayette’s hand. A tiny torn spot between his knuckles. Raw pink.
“You apologize?” she said to Lafayette, and the entire office became quiet.
“We both apologized,” he said impatiently. He was not afraid. His chin was lifted.
“What he apologize for?” she said.
The boy’s hand tightened on his phone.
Lafayette said, “He called me a bunch of names.”
“What you call him, you?” she said to the boy. His hair glistened.
The principal’s door opened. The man put out his hand immediately to Felonise. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Mr. Nonebeck, the new vice principal. I’m responsible for discipline.”
She put her hand in his for a moment. He was tall, with brown hair and glasses and one of those faces like every newsman on television.
Felonise folded her arms. She said, “What this boy call names?”
“Ma’am, you can’t speak to him.” Mr. Nonebeck moved easily between her and the red-haired boy. Felonise felt Lafayette against her shoulder. The space between the counter and the door was crowded, and the wind blew sharply outside, rattling the windowshades. “We’ll be setting up a meeting for you with the principal and Cody’s mother and me.”
Felonise said, “Set up a appointment, me? To talk to a boy?” She looked at his throat. “He call some names. I like to know what names.”
“You must be his guardian,” he said, his voice still very easy.
“No!” Lafayette shouted now. “That’s my grandma. My mom and dad are at work. They’ll come in tomorrow.”
In that minute, the women breathing behind her, their phones and computers and wire baskets around them, the edge of the counter at her back, she understood what Cerise had been trying to tell her for six years. Since kindergarten.
Raised by his grandmother. So sad, these days. No responsibility. No mother, no father, just a legal guardian.
“What names?” she said, making her voice low and deadly, the voice she used when she wanted Cerise to be afraid, back when she was a child. This man was a child. He couldn’t be more than thirty-five.
“I heard the n-word in our earlier discussion,” the vice-principal said, voice not nervous at all. “But as I said, this is something we’ll—”
“‘The n-word’?” Felonise said. She took a deep breath and felt her own chest fill with air, felt her breasts inside her bra puff up, like a bird’s. “You just say nigger. Don’t nobody call out n-word on no playground. They talk about nigger.”
She said the word the way she had heard it a thousand times. Loud, on the sidewalk, at the edge of the road, in her own mother’s kitchen.
“They say nigger.” She said it again, because she knew it made their hearts clutch for a moment. Like a motor with a stick pulled in.
Lafayette said, “Actually, he called me a wigger.”
The boy Cody looked away, at the posters on the wall.
“A what?” Felonise said. Her grandson was moving toward the door, pulling her gently. How had he done that? He had taken all the air from the room, it was swirling around him now. He had some kind of power, because then he laughed. “A wigger. Whatever.”
He rolled his eyes and pushed open the door, and the blinds flapped in the wind. Felonise followed his backpack outside. A picture of a mountain embroidered on it.
“How did you get here?”
“Your grandpère.”
He nodded. The wind sent leaves across the sidewalk and through the chainlink like confetti. “I like the wind,” he said. “Mom hates it. She says it makes driving home really hard.”
Felonise nodded. “All that dust kick up. She probably get the message now. She worried.”
He grinned, but then he dropped his head. “She’s totally freaked out.”
Felonise thought of her daughter speeding down the freeway, having gotten the messages and not knowing Felonise was already here. She told him, “You wait.”
She walked back toward the office. Another woman was struggling to open the door in the wind—carrying bags, her hair damp and streaked, the smell of chemicals wafting behind. She glanced back at Felonise’s face and frowned. Then the wind pulled the door closed behind her.
My eyes, Felonise thought. She look at my eyes. The window was open. She heard the secretary behind the counter. “Would a woman that age really wear contacts? Seriously. It just looks weird.”
The younger woman said, “Everyone wears contacts now.”
White people never learned. The vice-principal said, “They were really distinctive, that’s true. Very blue.”
Then the secretary said, “Cody, honey, your mom’s here.”
The mother said, “I was at the salon. Hey, you guys didn’t eat all the doughnuts I brought this morning.”
Felonise pulled the door open and stood in the threshold. She said, “Excuse me. Call my daughter back on her phone and tell her I came for Lafayette. So she don’t worry.”
Mr. Nonebeck began to smile and nod, and Felonise held up her hand. She looked at the damp-haired woman. She said, “Discipline come from the Bible. From disciple.”
She let the door close behind her so hard the plastic slats danced.
THEY CROSSED THE street. It was only six blocks to Cerise’s house. In this part of downtown, the houses were small and pretty, wood-frame with porches and trim around the windows.
“He kept sayin, You got served. You got served. Every time I missed a basket.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He wouldn’t shut up. Every day he kept sayin, You ain’t down. You ain’t down for shit. He cusses all the time, and none of the playground supervisors ever hear.”
“You bet not be cussin.”
“I don’t! They keep asking me to play ball. The first week of school, they were all like, Get him, get him, cause they thought I had skills.”
“Skills?”
“Yeah. They were like, What you play, what you play? And I said piano. Then every day Cody’d be like, You a waste, man, if I looked like you I’d fuck up every nigga on the playground.”
“Lafayette Reynaldo.” Eucalytpus leaves swirled around their feet like brown and silver fish.
“It’s not like how you said it.” He stopped to adjust his backpack again, and took out a small plastic package with dinosaurs dancing. Fruit snacks. The jelly-like things they ate all day, he and his brother. Felonise smelled the sharp scent of juice. “They’ll be like, Hey, my niggas.”
“Talkin to you?”
“Everybody.” The fruit shapes were gone. A glistening sludge showed on his teeth, and he shrugged.
“It wasn’t like, all the stuff he said. He just wouldn’t shut up. Every day. He was like, You ain’t a true nigga. You a wigger.”
“Wigger.”
“A white boy wants to be black.”
She paused at the next corner. The round curb, the specked cement, the wind in her nose. All the women in the office. “You sure black this mornin.”
They walked for two more blocks, and she could see her daughter’s yard, the wrought-iron trellis and gate her son-in-law had put in near the sidewalk.
Lafayette turned to her impatiently. “I don’t want to go home. I want to go to your house. Did you cook yet?”
“Long way to my house. I ain’t cook yet.” She paused, looking at the sidewalk under the tunnel of old oak trees.
But she was secretly happy. When they’d walked back to Palm Avenue, she waited a few more minutes, the faded bougainvillea blossoms near their feet, and then said, “Why you hit him then?”
Lafayette looked across the street at the Wendy’s. “Cause it was just like, every day, I know you play. So today I played, and then he was like, Why play the piano? Nobody plays the piano, and I’m like, Alicia Keys, and he said, So you a bitch now? Then I had to hit him.”
The cars went past in rushes of hot air. Lafayette said, “There he is. Cody and his mom. At Wendy’s.”
The truck was so tall Felonise could see its metal guts underneath. The red-haired boy was staring at them. His mother spoke to the woman working the drive-through window, and then Cody’s mouth opened. She looked up from her lap—she must have been getting the money—and focused on Felonise.
She puffed up her hair with her fingers, almost like that old way, the beehive, Felonise remembered. In the sun, it was striped. White-blonde and honey-brown, and underneath, black as oil. Beautiful as strange pulled taffy.
Their mouths moved behind the glass. Lafayette said, “He always eats Wendy’s. I hate their fries.”
Then the truck moved forward, and stopped at the corner for the signal. Lafayette had just pushed the WALK button. The woman peered out her open window. “So wait, Cody, you can’t go back to school today? You’re gonna miss Red Ribbons?”
Felonise saw Lafayette roll his eyes.
“Because of him?” The words floated from the open window. “That kid?” Her hand dangled outside the window. Her fingernails were long and pink.
Felonise looked at Lafayette, but he was laughing now. He wasn’t afraid. She said, “She want talk to me, better make an appointment,” just as the woman turned left and sped off down the avenue.
Felonise tried to remember what Cerise said, when she tried to explain it to Big Lafayette. “Look,” she’d shouted once, when the boys had been to visit all weekend and hadn’t done something they were supposed to do for Jump Rope for Heart Health. “Look! These women are killing me because I don’t sign up for anything, and Lafie’s in the gifted classes with their kids, okay? Serious. If you don’t give a shit, fine, but I do. They remember everything. I get one time not to show up at the office right when they call. The perfect mommies, they leave yoga class right when the cell rings. Or if they’re late, the office staff knows them and they’re in there joking around when they show up, talking about they had to pick up the paper plates for the teacher luncheon and look what centerpieces they got at the craft store.”
They were coming up on the last big intersection of downtown, where they would cross under the freeway bridge. Glorette was walking up Palm Avenue. Felonise saw her in the distance. Thin arms, tall hair. “I’m not her,” Cerise always said. “Glorette. But they don’t know.”
The Greyhound bus station was down this street, where Felonise and Marie-Claire and the others had come all those years ago to stay in Batiste’s boarding house. To get away from Mr. McQuine. His skin like hardened Crisco. His blood on her teeth.
“Grandmère,” Lafayette said. “The light’s green. You okay? You hot?”
“No. This just a baby walk, not how we use to walk in Louisiana.”
“So when he called me a bitch some spit got on my cheek. He was all up in my face.”
Felonise waited. He was silent, breathing hard. “That when you hit him?”
“Daddy told me to hit him back if he got me first. Mama doesn’t know he said that.” Lafayette kicked a pile of gold dates off the sidewalk. “I felt spit on my cheek and I remembered Mr. Nonebeck said you could get arrested for spittin on people. Cause of AIDS. It’s like assault or somethin.”
Felonise reached for his hand at the crosswalk and then remembered. He was eleven years old now. She held her arms loosely at her sides until the chirping sound began, the sound that meant walk. The first time she’d heard it, the electronic tweet-tweet-tweet had startled her because she’d never heard a bird like that, and it sounded so loud and close to her hair.
She couldn’t tell him. If spitting was assault, half of Louisiana would be in prison. She had left Sarrat when she was sixteen. Raoul said he didn’t want no other girl, and he came out to California when she turned eighteen, and they got married. Felonise never went back to Louisiana until he was dead.
Mr. McQuine’s nephew, Mr. Daniel, had told Raoul to go out on the tractor. Ditches all full of rainwater, earth like flour paste between the canerows. They told her Raoul said no, and Mr. Daniel said, California nigger don’t tell people what he do and don’t. Get up there.
She had taken Cerise. Was she three? What had her daughter remembered from that few months, when they’d buried Raoul in a closed casket because so little was left of him? It was 1968. Had Cerise remembered how when they went to the store at the crossroads they had to wait in back for Miss Joan to hand them the rice and sugar and coffee they needed to cook for the wake? Miss Joan said, “Think this California? That what put your man wrong.” And Miss Joan’s husband, Mr. McQuine’s nephew, spit snuff in a brown stream onto Cerise’s foot, on her new funeral shoes.
“MAMAN? MAMAN?” SHE imagined her daughter’s voice, frantic on the answering machine at home. “Maman? I just got the message from the school on my cell. Did you go get him? Damn. I’m on my way.”
ANOTHER CROW LAY dead in the vacant lot. Recently dead—his feathers still had the glossy purple and gold sheen of movement and flight and disdain. A huge flock of crows lived in the pecan grove at the other side of Enrique’s property. The birds had been there for decades, according to the old Mexican men who lived in the next grove. In fall, when pecans were heavy in the trees, the raucous cries and fighting were usually so loud that Felonise closed her windows. But this year, the sky was quiet.
West Nile virus. AIDS. Spitting and mosquitoes.
She looked at her grandson’s cheek. A smear of dust like a caterpillar on his cheek—was that from him wiping off the spit? She wet her thumb and erased it. Now my spit and that boy spit mix up.
“Why you didn’t spit back at him?” she said.
Lafayette laughed. “Grandmère!” he said. “You know how hot it is on the playground at recess? And it’s all windy today.” He moved his backpack on his shoulders. It was so heavy he had a red mark along his neck, she saw. “Plus, he didn’t spit on purpose. He’s just goofy. He gets scum at the corner of his mouth all the time cause he has so much saliva in there.”
“Saliva.”
Lafayette laughed again. “Yeah. Saliva has acids to help the stomach break down our food. We had that in science class. We masticate our food and then it goes down our esophagus with the help of saliva. It’s pretty gross.”
Felonise couldn’t help but smile. “Uh-huh.” But how was that different from her telling Cerise to chew her food, not just swallow it? Everyone said the same things, over and over, forever.
Wigger.
They passed through the arroyo, where the tumbleweeds rolled down the canyon.
“Like big old Chia Pets!” Lafayette said, in the wind.
“From the devil!” she said back.
“What you want to masticate when we get to my house?” she said, as they started down the narrow blacktop road toward the groves. He lifted his head higher, to see the orange trees like a dense forest before then.
“Whatever.”
When they walked down the gravel road, the wind softened suddenly, in the tunnel of dark trees. Lafayette crunched into the nearest irrigation furrow and picked up two dried navel oranges, black and hard, fallen from last year. He threw them down the road. “Who’s here?” he shouted toward her, and then caught up. “Are my uncles here?”
“Nobody here but me and your grandpère,” she said. “Everybody workin.” She pointed down to the barn. “You can go down there.” She took his shoulder and turned him toward her. His eyes clear and golden as weak tea. “Don’t say nothin to your grandpère bout no names. Tell him you fight some boy for a ball. I mean it. You hear?”
He nodded and pulled away. “I know,” he said, impatiently. “I know.”
ONE FINCH HUNG upside-down in the bedraggled sunflowers. As soon as she got inside, the phone rang.
“Maman! This is why you need a cell phone!”
“No. They call me here and I went got him.”
“But I was going crazy!”
“Uh-huh.” Cell phone ain’t stop that. Where had her daughter gotten this nervousness about everything, this wire Felonise imagined strung between her braids and down her neck, twitching and coiled and different-colored as the wires inside this transparent phone?
“Grandpère give you guys a ride?”
“Uh-huh,” Felonise said.
“I thought you would take him home, so I tried there, but—”
“Cerise. He want come here. He’s fine.”
Her daughter was silent. There was the sound of a woman laughing in the background. The other customer service operators.
“What happened? According to him?”
Felonise looked out her window at the white wash, the other finches gathered at the feeder she’d filled this morning. Yellow finches with their shivery chirp. “Some white boy call him names. Lafie hit him.”
“That’s gonna go on his record.” Her daughter sighed into the phone—a baby wind. “The secretary called me. She said Mr. Nonebeck is gonna call me back to set up a conference tomorrow. Like I can get off before two. The other mom practically lives at the school.”
“You seen this boy? Redhead. Name Cody.”
“Cody Smith.” She heard Cerise say something to someone else. “Hold on, Maman.” Her hand made a smear of sound on the phone, and her voice disappeared as if she fell down a hole.
When she came back, she said, “Well, you need a cell, okay? Then he wouldn’t have to wait so long in the office. It probably made him feel worse because he had to sit there with everybody looking at him.”
“I taken him out of there and the other boy still waitin.”
“What?”
“The mama was gettin her hair done. She got that all-color hair. It’s pretty. Just don’t look like hair.”
“She came while you were in the office?”
“Oui. And she got a big truck. She pass us while we walk home.”
“You were walking? Oh my God, Maman. Why did you walk? Grandpa Enrique didn’t drive you?” Cerise’s voice rose higher.
Felonise dished out leftover rice and chicken for two. “Lafie want to walk.”
Felonise heard it. They had seen Lafayette walking with an old lady. Walking, like—what did he call it? Losers. Like losers. Losers walk.
Her daughter said, “I have to go, my break’s over. I’ll call you later.”
The few birds at the feeder struggled against the wind and fell away. Cody. She remembered when Lafayette first started at the school and Cerise told her that she’d overheard the mothers at the back gate saying, “I can’t believe someone would name their kids Lexus and Chanel. Oh my God.” Cerise did the imitation perfectly. She heard these voices every day. “And I was thinking, Dakota, Cody, Cheyenne—you name your kids after what, places you’ve never seen?”
Lafayette came running up from the barn into the yard. The birds scattered up to the branches of the pomegranate tree. What a strange fruit, she’d thought, when she first saw it here. In Louisiana, fall meant waiting for sugarcane—sweet sticks to chew and suck. The pomegranate seeds had been so beautiful that when she put a handful in her mouth and bit down, the sourness way behind her back teeth made her cry at first, and Enrique had laughed.
“Think she got some candy out here in California!” he said. Marie-Claire said, “Pomegranate come from far away, too. In the Bible they tell you. So leave her alone.”
Lafayette came inside with the smell of the barn—motor oil and citrus rind. “You know what you name for?” she said, grabbing his arm.
“Some dude from France.”
He went straight to the refrigerator and left a dark handprint on the door while he leaned down to see what was inside.
CERISE CALLED BACK an hour later, crying so hard that Felonise knew she must be in the bathroom or the parking lot. “Maman. He called back. Mr. Nonebeck. He was saying weird stuff like, ‘There was an exchange of fluids, and so we have to take this very seriously.’”
Exchange? Felonise dried the pan, the phone tucked into her shoulder. Like kissing. Saliva.
“Lafie hit the kid so hard he was bleeding.” Cerise’s voice was shivering. Shivering like when she was a child and couldn’t stop crying.
Felonise felt her chest fill with heat. “Don’t have to hit the lip hard to make it bleed,” she said. “Baby—”
“This is Lafie’s permanent record! Next year when he gets to junior high the teachers will read this and think he’s a little thug. These mothers will all be in the same damn PTA there, too.”
The Peds were dry. Felonise stacked them on the couch. Funny little socks. Dove wings. Her daughter said, “Maman?”
“You so much smarter than me,” Felonise whispered. “I didn’t raise you to be so smart. You—you make yourself that way. Lafayette raise himself to be smarter than you.”
“See?” Cerise was angry now, and Felonise could hear the anger evaporating the tears. Almost thirty-six and still the same. “You think it’s so easy, but it’s not!”
She was walking now—her breath huffed into the phone. It was 12:40. She was on lunch break. “I can’t get off early today, but I’ll be there by two. Damn, Teeter’s still there.”
“Cerise,” Felonise said, the deadly voice, until her daughter stopped. “Listen to me. I know what you talk about. At that school. Enrique take us back at two. We meet you there. So you be there like always, to get Teeter. So they see all of us.”
In the silence she heard the finches, the click of silverware through the holes in the phone. She breathed into the other holes. “You hear me?” she said to her daughter. “I be at that back gate.”
LAFAYETTE FELL ASLEEP at one o’clock, on her couch, the shadow of the pecan tree branches waving over his face as if someone stood there with a fan. Felonise watched him. He wasn’t used to walking that far. At two, she thought of Cerise coming quickly down the elevator of the building she’d said was tall and mirrored and standing where the vineyards used to be. Cerise would move quickly to her car, to the freeway, and then be stuck in traffic. She talked about it all the time.
At 2:04, she woke her grandson and made him wash his face and hands. She split a pomegranate in half, and they sucked the elusive red juice and spit the seeds like soft white rice into a bowl.
They were crowded in the front seat of Enrique’s truck. Kids couldn’t ride in the back now—against the law. Enrique said, “Marie-Claire say Clarette work late at the prison. Her kids come over tonight. You bring them boys, too. They all eat by us.”
The truck crossed over the arroyo bridge. Enrique said, “You walk a long way today.”
Lafayette nodded. He looked scared now, of what his mother would say.
Felonise put her hand on her grandson’s backpack. There was no back available to pat.
Enrique looked past the boy at her. The scar at his cheek—three slanted marks like some Chinese writing the teenagers tattooed on their arms. But that was a board with three nails. Swung by a drunk white man when he was in the Army, he told her once.
He left them at the back gate.
THE SIDEWALK WAS full of women. The chainlink fence was covered with red satin bows and signs with big painted red letters.
“Red Ribbon Day,” Lafayette sighed. “Just Say No to Drugs.”
They walked slowly up through the mothers who were adjusting bows, little kids too small for school beside them. “The first-graders come out and do the fence with the PTA moms,” Lafayette whispered to her.
Felonise leaned against a car while people passed her. The car door was hot against her backside. Cerise had said he had to wear red shirts all next week. He used to bring home Indian headdresses in November. Brown waxy crayon-shaded picture of Rosa Parks in February.
Raoul had died in December. Mr. Daniel say, Nigger, I tell you if it’s too much water. Cause niggers can’t swim. But you can drive. Drove all the way from California, cause you think you too good to live here, and now you don’t want work.
“Grandmère,” Lafayette whispered, nudging her with the backpack. “You can’t lean on cars cause they might have an alarm. Come on.”
But Felonise saw the black truck, parked right up by the back gate. Metal rungs like giant staples below the doors. To climb in? How you carry grocery up there?
The mother came out from a crowd by the fence. She motioned, and the passenger window melted down. “Cody!” she said. “Your little brother needs your help over there. I told you to put that phone away. Go help Dakota with his poster.”
“Mom, I’m suspended. I can’t go on the playground. That’s the rules.”
Felonise saw his elbow, then his face. A faint crescent moon of fat behind his chin.
The crowd shifted along the fence. A man walked down the sidewalk. The vice principal. “Let’s get all the scraps and trash up off the ground now, okay?” he called, in that reasonable voice. “We’re getting close to the last bell.”
Lafayette bumped her with his backpack when he stepped between two parked cars. Felonise grabbed his arm. “Where you go?”
“I’m not supposed to be here either.”
“You ain’t here. You waitin for your mama.”
“I don’t want to see her!” he said, his eyes narrowed in the sun, his hand over his forehead like he was saluting.
Felonise heard Cerise’s car then, the little shriek when she turned the corner—like a trapped bird, but Big Lafayette said it was a worn-out brake pad. She parked somewhere in the long line of cars, then came up the sidewalk toward them. Lafayette didn’t cry. He just folded his arms, rolled his eyes, and stepped back onto the sidewalk. The boy named Cody leaned out of the truck and saw Lafayette, then pulled back his head like a snail feeling a finger.
The mother came toward Felonise now. She was carrying a black plastic trashbag, bending to pick up the tiniest scraps of red ribbon and construction paper swirling like confetti in the wind. “Oh my God, I haven’t even had time to wash my hands! We’ve been here since lunch! But the fence looks great!” she shouted to Mr. Nonebeck, who was handing her one of the water bottles he carried in a cooler.
“Lafayette?” Cerise said behind her. “You okay, baby? Come here.”
Her daughter’s voice too high. The crying was caught in her throat, where it would stay. What was that hot wetness you trapped inside your… that tube where the food went down? It wasn’t tears. It came up from your chest.
In the silence she knew the mother had seen Cerise and Lafayette now. She held her trashbag at her thigh, looked past Felonise, and lifted up her right hand to point. She said, “Your kid isn’t supposed to be here. He—”
Felonise pulled an old handkerchief from her purse. She grabbed the mother’s upraised hand. It was grimy with fence dust and sticky from tape. The pink fingernails were tipped with white like frosting. Felonise spat into her handkerchief and pushed down the fingers, and wiped the center of the woman’s palm. She rubbed hard and said, “Here. Now you clean.”
She didn’t look up at the woman’s face. She wanted to tear a little flesh from the wrist with her teeth. This kind of woman made Cerise cry. She made Cerise cry and hide in a hallway and swallow the burning that came up from her chest. She might say welfare mama when she told the story tonight. Crack ho.
Felonise folded the woman’s fingers over the ball of wet cloth and looked up at the blue eyes. Saliva. A crime. Black lashes like brooms for a tiny doll. She said softly, “These ain’t contacts. My grandmère get them from a wigger.” She pointed at the boy hidden in the truck. “He know,” she said. “That my grandson, and when you see his mama tomorrow, in that meeting, you remember me.” Her own eyes burned hot—she gave the woman the look that Raoul used to say could start the back of someone’s head on fire. All she ever had—that look. And her teeth.
She let the hand go, and it popped up like a handle on a slot machine.
Then she turned toward the man she knew was approaching her. He held a frosted plastic bottle and said, “Ma’am?”
Mr. McQuine’s nephew only gave water once a day in the field. Sometimes he put mud in it. Felonise drank it anyway. He would say, Don’t look at me with them devil eye. Blue eye don’t make you white.
She would say, Hat don’t make you a man.
Felonise fitted her lips back over her teeth again and walked past him to where Cerise stood, shaking her head, holding her fingers to her temples as if she’d been stung by the tiny hairs had curled there, the ones Felonise used to damp down in waves.