I DROVE TWO BLOCKS the other way, to the part of the alley where Glorette had been killed. If Jazen was looking for someone else who owed him money, they must be getting ready to run. But how far?
The back door of El Ojo de Agua was open, and a woman threw a bucket of wash water onto the wild tobacco trees growing near the fence. The water glistened on the shopping carts abandoned there, like rain on silver armor. A little armored burro had carried Glorette from that very spot.
Pounding drumbeats—a lowered black Honda paused at the mouth of the alley and moved on. I got out of the car and walked onto the powdery dust. Video store, nail salon, taqueria—the back doors to each were open, because of the heat. The stinging smell of nail polish remover floated into the hot-oil smell of the taqueria.
This was where Glorette had walked nearly every night. How had it felt, to know eyes were always stalking her? Glorette and I had looked at the picture of our mothers. We knew that what was between their legs had chased them from Louisiana.
No Navigator. Just the fence and the wild tobacco trees where Sidney Chabert found her, their yellow blooms like tiny pencils in the dim light. Flashing blue of televisions in back rooms on the other side of the chain-link fence like lightning.
I touched the tobacco blossoms, the same trees that grew all along the riverbed near our house, and then I saw the cross. Tied to the fence. A crucifix made of Popsicle sticks, fastened together with faded blue plastic twine, the date written in marker on the bottom. August 25, 2000. The numbers like spiders, and a rosary with plastic beads wound around the splintering wood.
A silvery scarf of water flew past me and onto the tree. A woman stood in the back doorway of the taqueria. She put down the wash bucket and looked at me, then at the cross. Her hand rose to her forehead, down to her ribs, then shoulder to shoulder.
Someone called to her from the kitchen. “Serafina!” She disappeared inside, and the spilled water rolled along the dry dust of the alley, not sinking in. The lopsided moon shone through the ferny branches of the pepper trees.
Glorette used to lie in the groves next to me at dusk, when the sun turned each orange into a glowing planet. I would never have seen that if she hadn’t shown me. She felt everything. Too much. I remembered her face when she held Victor—it was almost gaunt, as if she felt Dakar’s absence so deeply it had taken away everything underneath her skin.
Glorette walked in this dust, so long since it had rained that when I looked down my black boots were golden across the toe. The small creamy pebble of rock in her hand, in the pipe. I had never seen it. I had always imagined it glowing like a crimson ember when she inhaled, but I had no idea what it looked like, or felt like, to be that high, that insensible, that erased. Released.
The moon was three days past full now, moving fast above those pepper trees at Sundown Liquor. Like someone had taken a nail file to it.
I stepped on something very hard. Around my feet were pink shells. Pistachios.
“That boy live on them nut,” Unc Gustave used to say. “I go find him, and he live on pink nuts and Chinese noodle.”
Pistachios and ramen. She used to buy him those every night at the Rite-Aid, Cerise said. Cerise would be in there buying shampoo or getting prescriptions for her kids, and she’d see Glorette carrying a plastic bag stacked with ramen. Ten for a dollar.
He’d brought his pistachios to my apartment that night, back when we studied for the SAT. The pink shells like an art exhibit the way he lined them up on the polished teak—lines of five, lines of ten, while he said the words. Loquacious. Ludicrous. Lascivious. Then he piled them on top of each other like cradles—five, seven, and the stack fell over.
I leaned against the car door and cried into my hands. He had missed the SAT. The last one he could have taken before college applications. The night before the test, after I’d dropped him off, Glorette and Sisia had brought two men home, and while Victor was locked into his room studying, they had a fight and one pulled a gun and shot a hole in the window.
The cops took everybody. Victor, too. He wasn’t released for a week. His senior year was gone. And Glorette was killed here, a few feet away, the day he was supposed to register for city college.
I got in the car and waited for Victor’s voicemail and said, “So it was really your maman who made me into a writer. I mean, I might have genes from Moinette Antoine, or whoever, that made me love words, but it was Glorette. I’m not just telling you this because it’ll make you feel better. But you can’t feel much worse, so what the hell.”
The wash water made a dark shape like a continent in the alley’s dust.
“She fell in love with Sere Dakar. This musician. Your father. He took her to the beach one night, I think it was Newport, and you know, we didn’t just up and go to the beach when we were little. We were always working in the groves, and half the time Lafayette and Reynaldo didn’t have a car that would make it to the beach. But—your dad—he was already twenty, and he borrowed a car from somebody. A Nova. With a good stereo. She told me they had a blanket and they laid on the sand near the car and he played ‘Poinciana.’ Ahmad Jamal. You must have heard it. ‘Poinciana.’ She told me that was her favorite song in the world, but she couldn’t tell anyone else because we were supposed to like the Floaters and Al B. Sure. Music like that. He played another song. ‘Night of a Thousand Eyes.’ I think that was Horace Silver. These were names we didn’t even know. And—”
I had imagined this many times, after she told me, because it had never happened to me. Never. I had waited and waited, to feel the way she described. For a night like that.
The message stopped, and I called again. “Victor. They listened to this music, and they were lying right beside each other, and when the cassette was over—damn, we had cassettes—she told me the waves were crashing and then they’d hiss. Hiss and sparkle. She said the foam was the whitest thing she’d ever seen, cause it was so dark on the beach. She said the sand was black, real soft, and the foam was like lace that kept disappearing. She never felt like that before and she never felt like that again.”
A man walked slowly toward my car. Middle-aged, with olive skin. He kept glancing around, and then cocked his head to see my face in the window.
I turned away. “The cops yelled at them to get off the beach, but sometime that night—that was you. Nine months later. I’m not trying to tell fairy tales—I’m just saying that’s what you came out of. When she told me that story, we were seniors in high school. And I already knew I was going to leave. I had seen Black Orpheus. I found Brassai and Henri Cartier-Bresson in the library. I listened to Sarah Vaughan and Edith Piaf and Abbey Lincoln. ‘April in Paris.’ ”
Before the man could come any closer, I turned in to the alley, and felt my tires crunching over the gravel, the nut shells. “I am so sorry I didn’t let you stay. But come stay with me now. Just call me, so I can know where you are.”
This ain’t CSI Rio Seco. That’s what Sidney had said, when I asked him why he brought Glorette’s body to my brothers, why no one ever called the police. “Don’t nobody downtown care who killed her,” Sidney said to me at the funeral, the small gathering of people on my father’s land. “What clues some CSI gon find? Some white chick wearin white pants kneelin in that alley behind the taqueria lookin to see what Glorette ate? Who she done been with?”
But my brothers and my father and Gustave had never found out who’d done it, either.
Maybe Sisia was right, and Victor really was just sleeping in the Navigator, in the dark tinted cavern of the back, with drumbeats shaking the leather seat underneath him.