CHAPTER FIVE

Click Your Heels Together

 

THE MAN THAT gets out of the car can barely be called that—he’s so clean, so boyish, not a hair out of place, smelling of plain and simple soap. He’s got a deep-deep-vee t-shirt and a pair of skinny jeans and he walks over to Cason on the side of the road and what he says is as forthright as words can come: “Your wife and child are burning alive right now. I can stop that from happening.”

And that’s all he has to say. Cason cares nothing for conditions, wants to hear none of the details of the deal. Because no proviso or clause could possibly be worse than the death of his wife and his baby boy. Cason says yes. Not once, not twice, but a dozen times. Yes, yes, yes, the word falling out of him between hitching sobs, around snot-bubble nose and saliva-string lips.

The boyish lad touches his brow and smiles. “Good. Now it’s time to come home, Cason.”

 

 

HE SMELLS SAUSAGE cooking. Cason lurches up on the couch, almost throws up. Feels his cheek sting from where the rough-hewn cushions bit into the skin, leaving hashtags.

Pain rides him like a horse. His back itches. Something tugs at the skin there: a bandage. He feels its margins under his shirt with probing fingers.

Two black kids—one boy, one girl—run past him. The girl chasing the boy with a fat cockroach squirming betwixt thumb and forefinger.

The living room isn’t much to look at—peeling water-stained wallpaper of a paisley variety, striations of mold on the ceiling, ragged berber carpet bubbling up in spots. A small flat-screen television sits in the corner on an overturned plastic storage container. The screen is spider-webbed in the corner, the plastic around it cracked—but it still shows a picture. Some PBS kids’ show. Sid the Science Kid. The show is warped by shadow.

From another room, the girl yelps. Then screams. “Abasi hit me with a shoe!”

The boy yells: “Afrika chased me with a bug!”

“Shoe!”

“Bug!”

“Hey you kids!” Tundu yells, coming into the room, shaking a spatula. Both of the children re-enter the room. Afrika is rubbing her head. Abasi looks quietly pleased with himself. Cason sees neither shoe nor cockroach. “Afrika, what do I tell you about picking up bugs? And Abasi: no hitting your cousin with a shoe.”

“I can hit her with something else?” Abasi asks.

Tundu flicks the boy in the ear and sends them both running.

He sees Cason. Waves the spatula. “Hey, chief. You’re up.”

“Yeah. Uh.” He rubs his eyes. “This your place?”

“You betcha, man. You betcha. Hey. I got breakfast. Eggs. Sausage. And, aah, doughnuts. You like doughnuts?”

Cason looks down at his paunch, shrugs. “Guess I do.”

 

 

THE TABLE ISN’T much of a table—it’s a boxy fold-up card table shoved into the corner of a (barely) walk-in kitchen. Torn-up linoleum lines the floor. The only two appliances in the room are an avocado-green oven and a harvest-gold fridge.

But it smells good in here. Tundu puts a paper plate down, and on it sits a big floppy egg atop a couple sausage patties. On a smaller plate, Cason gets a doughnut that isn’t like any doughnut he’s ever seen—it’s triangular, like an empanada, and crusted with sugar and busted-up peanut pieces and drizzled with a zig-zag of honey.

Cason goes there first. When he breaks the ‘doughnut’ open, a cloud of cardamom perfume hits him square in the nose. Unexpected, but only serves to make him hungrier. He tears into it like a starving dog.

“What the hell is this?” Cason asks, cheeks bulging.

“I told you. Doughnut.”

“Ish no doughnut.”

“It’s a... a Kenyan doughnut, let’s say. Mandazi.”

“Ish good.”

“Yeah, yeah. Not bad, not bad.” Tundu sits, starts digging into eggs.

Cason says, “About last night.”

“Mm. What about it?”

“How much did you see?”

“I saw everything, man.”

“Everything.”

“Your wife beating the shit out of you. The... the little boy with the skillet? I see it all, chief. I see it all.” Tundu laughs.

“And the thing with the Lexus? And the woman and the...” He lets his words drift.

“Whaddya you mean, man? That lady scramble your brain with that pan.”

A thought strikes Cason: did any of that really happen?

“Maybe so.” He rubs his neck. It still feels sore.

“So whatchoo gonna do now, Mister Cole?”

“Cason. Or Case.” He cuts into the sausage. “I don’t really know. Yesterday I had a job, and it was a shitty job, but it was a job. And that job gave me a place to stay, and now...” He chews. “Both of those things are gone.”

“What’d you do for work?”

“Bodyguard bullshit. For someone who didn’t need his body guarded.” Because with a touch of his finger he could have you flailing like a fucking Muppet. “Used to be a fighter, though. Once upon a time.”

“A fighter. Like, boxer.” Tundu mimics the sweet science, both fists up in a comical boxer stance. He fake-punches the air in front of Cason’s head.

“MMA. Mixed martial arts. Little bit of hapkido, bit of Brazilian jiu jitsu.”

“You any good?”

“Was. Called me ‘The Beast.’ They said I was a rising star.”

“Why’d you give it up?”

“I….” He thrusts his tongue into the pocket of his cheek. “I just did.”

“Well, Cason the Fighter-Man, you can stay here for the rest of the week if you like. Cheap! I can even put in a word for you at the cab company. Boss is a real shit, you know—he’s both the turd and the fly eating the turd—but the job is the job and driving a cab is a bit of all right, man. Gives you time to think.”

“Thanks, T., I appreciate it. And I’ll think about it. Hey, can I grab a shower?”

 

 

THE HOT WATER’S a scorcher and the cold water’s like a winter puddle, and the shower offers nothing in between. Cason goes with the hot. Leaves him lobster red, but the pain is good. Makes him feel alive. Keyed up.

The bathroom itself isn’t much to look at. All Pepto pink tile. Small, too. One bathroom for a big family and the counter is evidence of that—everybody’s things crowd the counter, leaving little space. Soaps and off-brand toothpaste and a box of tampons and a spilled paper cup of Q-tips and cottonballs.

The mirror’s clean, but cracked. Smudged with fog from a too-hot shower.

Cason stands, fresh out of the shower. With the flat of his hand he opens up a patch of clean mirror and takes a good long look at himself.

Jesus.

He looks like microwaved hell.

He’s let himself go. Once his body was a series of knife-edges; now it’s dull and rounded. Muscle that forgot it was muscle and settled on being fat, instead.

Settled.

That word. That’s what he’s done.

He gave everything up that night on the highway. Had to. Wanted to. It was the only way. Not that it made sense. But you hit a certain point where you see that things don’t add up and you just stop caring. You tune out. Look away. Stare at the wall. Pretend that the car accident never happened. That your family was never in danger, that it was all just a dream. That the man who saved them—and by proxy, you—is nobody special, even though you’ve seen him wield power over others, a seductive sway that can’t be chalked up to a smooth chest and a dab of Drakkar Noir under the ears. Most of all, pretend that not seeing your family is your decision, not some proclamation from on-high, some supernatural law whose contravention brings down some serious and inexplicable shit.

Cason leans forward, fists finding rare real estate on the counter.

Face once handsome, now tired. Old scars and contusions rising to the surface like sunken wrecks beneath a shrinking sea.

He used to stand like this before a fight. Bobbing. Ducking. Throwing fake punches like Tundu did at the table. Give himself a little pep talk.

And that’s what he does now.

“You’re going to get them back,” he says. “You love them. They love you. Something is in your way and you’re going to find that obstacle and you’re going to remove it. If it’s got a pulse, you’ll wring the life out of it until it’s gone. And if it’s something worse...” His mind flashes back to last night. A woman exuding beauty the way a broken reactor bleeds radiation. A lunatic with wings. A monstrous driver—oh, also with wings.

Was any of that real?

Maybe it wasn’t.

Of course, if that wasn’t real—well, soon as he starts picking those paint chips off the wall, the whole image starts to flake away. And behind it lies a troubling tableau—if she wasn’t real, if E. Rose (Eros?) wasn’t real, then that means his family hates him just to hate him, wants him dead because of something he did; and that can’t be right.

Because all he did was want them to still be alive.

And now he wants to be with them again.

Cason towels off one last time, resolving to once more plow the fallow field that is his body—tighten and toughen and strengthen. If there’s a fight ahead, then he’d better be ready to throw a few punches and take twice as many in return.

 

 

OUTSIDE IN THE living room, Abasi’s got one long arm extended to the ceiling. Afrika is jumping for it, but in this game she’s destined to be the loser.

That’s when Cason sees what he’s holding.

A big red apple. The stem as black as the Devil’s umbilical stump.

Suddenly there’s a woman there wearing a nightgown and shaking an old clam-shell cell phone at the two children, her hair wild and frizzy.

“Hey, you kids are too damn loud.” She’s got Tundu’s accent. Sister. Wife. Cason doesn’t even know. “Gimme that.”

She reaches for the apple, but Abasi plays keepaway with her, too, ducking her hand and his cousin’s hand like he’s got no bones at all—just bending and twisting out of their reach and darting suddenly to the other side of the small living room.

“Mom!” Afrika yells. “I want the apple!”

“That’s actually mine—” Cason tries, but his voice is lost underneath the little girl’s sudden shriek. Abasi just laughs and goes to take a big bite of the fat fruit.

Cason has no idea what that’ll do. All he knows is, the apple is more than an apple. It’s proof that last night happened. It’s—

Well, it’s goddamn magic, is what it is.

Cason races to grab the apple out of the boy’s hand, but Tundu is there first, appearing like Batman to save the day.

“That’s not yours, little man,” Tundu says, swiping the fruit and flipping it quick to Cason. “That’s his. What I tell you? You don’t take people’s things. You do that again I’ll slap your butt so hard it’ll be white. You hear me?”

Abasi pouts and runs into the kitchen. Afrika hurries after him and her mother follows, pressing the phone to her ear.

As she passes, Cason tries to introduce himself but it’s to no avail—she just flips up her hand and keeps talking: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, Irene, no, no, you need to—listen to me—you need to just go to the salon and get it done—listen now, listen, your feet look like dead birds! Everybody says so...”

Tundu shrugs after she’s gone. “Family, you know?”

“I know. Least yours isn’t trying to kill you.”

“Sometimes I wish they would, man. You wanna go? I take you to meet Mister Urbanski—he’s the taxi boss. Like I said: real shithead, that guy, but the job is the job.”

Cason shakes his head. “Not today. I got somebody I gotta go meet.”

“Employer?”

“My brother. You mind giving me a ride?”