Take One Candle Light a Room Read online

  Once she kissed his palm.

  I felt warmth behind the fly of my jeans. For someone to kiss the center of my hand. I closed Tony’s fingers in on his palm, like when we were kids playing the spiderweb game. “Hey,” I said. “Don’t be a baby.”

  “I’m not,” he said, opening his eyes. “I’m being a little kid.”

  “Shut up.”

  He stood up unsteadily. “A little kid who had some scotch. Damn.”

  While he was in the bathroom, I got out my notebook, thinking of Victor. I’d written notes about the Bourbaki panorama painting. The Moroccan soldiers, their skin bruise-dark against the white, white snow of Switzerland. Victor could be the Intrepid Godson. Godmothers were always cool—fairy godmothers! Lots of writers had great-aunts or patronesses. Victor could be the Reluctant Scholar. The Light-Bright Fool. The Dread Prince. “Hey,” I called to Tony. “Have you ever been to the Dalmatian coast? Rick mentioned it.”

  He shook his head, smoothed the Band-Aid while we went back to the living room.

  “What do you think about me taking my godson to Belize or on a cruise?”

  “Rick doesn’t have the budget to pay for someone else. If you could get Vogue—but not with a kid. Wait—he’s in college?”

  “Not right now. I talked to Rick about Italy for us. I have this book on Naples.”

  “We could go to Bernalda. My mom’s grandmother was from there. She was a prostitute because some old guy in the Mafia raped her when she was sixteen.” He took the last long sip of scotch. “Said once that ten minutes was over, she could never be anything different. Let’s go write about that village.”

  He put his head back and closed his eyes. He had told me about this. In a bar in Rome. He told me about Bernalda, and I told him about the Apache, and Moinette Antoine’s mother in Azure, Louisiana. How we were on this earth because women had been raped.

  “Tony,” I said. “We have to meet Rick in the morning. You’ve got shoots forever, but I need at least two more assignments. I have a Chicago piece for The New York Times, and I’ve got the monthly outing for Los Angeles, but that’s only five hundred words.”

  He shrugged.

  “Pirates. I told Rick we could do pirates.”

  “Pirates.” Tony opened his eyes and frowned.

  “Remember I told you about Jean Lafitte? Somehow he’s one of my ancestors.”

  “You told Rick about Louisiana?”

  “No.” I’d told a total stranger at the party. Only said the word. “But everybody’s into pirates now—Cornwall, the English pirates. My godson really wants Belize, and Belize had pirates.”

  “Cool.” Tony put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes again. That meant we could talk about it later. We were the same—the idea needed time to move through our brains, like the dye florists added to the water of carnations. His cheeks had a sheen of sweat. The house was warm, and had never had air-conditioning. He said he would never sell it. He would live here until he died.

  “KCAL News at nine is next,” a woman said. “Our top story tonight—a twenty-year-old man was shot today near Warner Brothers studios. Melissa McCloud is there.”

  A blond woman gestured like a game show hostess at a blank wet spot of asphalt and said, “Earlier tonight, police kept onlookers from the crime scene while they worked to determine what happened this evening at around six.”

  Video footage showed three policemen holding up their hands and pushing back a crowd of people. Behind them, a body lay covered with something dark. Behind that was a row of black-and-white photos on a dingy brown wall.

  Dimples. I leaned forward. The scotch burned in my stomach.

  “Police have identified the victim as Armando Muniz. The victim’s brother was on a cell phone with him at the time of the shooting. He says words were exchanged between the victim, who was on foot, and a group of males in a vehicle.”

  The blond woman was standing before the backdrop of the Warner Bros. buildings, but when she turned to sweep her arm toward the street, the light spun off the sign that said FREE TAPES TO VIRGINS.

  Dimples.

  “A gun was found beside the victim, and police found blood in an area approximately twenty feet from the body, so they’re speculating that one of the assailants has also been shot. A dark-colored SUV was seen leaving the area. Anyone with information is asked to call the number at the bottom of the screen. This is Melissa McCloud reporting live from Burbank.”

  They’d gone back to Dimples. I saw Victor leaping down the last three steps below my apartment, holding the frames. He’d wanted his mother’s picture.

  I’d turned my phone off outside the Golden Gopher. I pushed the button. Three messages.

  “Marraine. Marraine. Pick up. It’s me.”

  “Marraine. It’s Victor.” I heard shouting. But he spoke low. “It’s me.”

  “Okay. Did you jet off again? Damn.” He paused. Then he sang in a whisper, “Tell me who the fuck are you?” The music behind him was loud, and then the line went dead.

  THE RIVIERA

  WHERE WOULD THEY GO? They wouldn’t be in LA. I was the only one they knew here.

  Blood on the asphalt. Someone had been shot. The boy named Mando was dead. I put my hands over my ears and heard the rushing of my own pulse. Victor with a gun?

  No.

  I didn’t want to tell Tony. Not even him. This couch—I had come to sit here with Tony, not been willing to sit on my own couch with Victor. “What are you doing?” he said, sleepily, his head still thrown back. He couldn’t drive. Too much scotch. I said, “I have to go home.”

  “See you tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  On the cracked pavement, I walked fast, pushing callback on my phone. “Victor,” I said. “I just saw the news. A shooting. What’s going on? Are you okay? I’m in LA—if you’re here, call me right now.”

  Three blocks to my place. Sweat laced my scalp when I got inside. My wood floor gleamed from the light in the courtyard.

  They had to have gone back to Sarrat. My overnight bag—I threw in two pairs of indigo jeans. The white shirt I’d just bought in Zurich, gauzy cotton with seed pearls edging the collar, was still folded on the bed. Two more shirts from the closet. Then I picked up my laptop, and the messenger bag I’d bought for Victor.

  Brown leather, nearly golden. The heavy buckle on the side. It could hold a laptop, books, anything. He had an ancient Dell that his grandfather bought him four years ago. He needed a new computer, too. I hadn’t wanted to give the bag to Victor in front of Jazen and Alfonso. It meant college. Books. Dexterism. From poindexter—a nerd. Why not dexterity? I wanted to call him and say that. Where was he? He had to have gone home. He couldn’t have shot anyone. He couldn’t have been shot.

  I called him again. “Victor. I’m coming home. I’ll meet you at your grandpère’s.”

  I hesitated in front of the chair where he’d sat. The Brassai. I put that book in the new bag, and the little notebook he’d left, and then I put in the Edgar Allan Poe.

  The Corsica was clean, since it was always covered in the carport. I tossed everything in the back. If anyone saw me in an old car like this, they’d laugh. But I hardly ever drove it unless I went to Sarrat, and no one in Sarrat laughed at this car.

  Dark blue. 1992. When I’d seen it for the first time, I said to my brothers, “You got me a pirate car.”

  Lafayette had said, “Why you always gotta say something crazy?”

  “Lots of Corsicans were pirates. They lived on an island off France. Napoleon was born on Corsica.”

  “It’s a car. Don’t forget to change the oil,” Lafayette said, and rolled his eyes.

  I turned onto Los Feliz and headed toward the freeway. But at the on-ramp I went north, toward Burbank.

  From the freeway, the red flashing lights of the police cars were visible, but I still got off and drove down the little side street before the club. At the corner, three patrol cars were parked sideways. The NBC building acr
oss the way.

  The asphalt was black and gray and stained with oil and a thousand dark liquids. Whose blood? I made a three-point turn like someone who’d just been running an errand. No way would I be able to see down that dim doorway to an empty square on the wall.

  In the parking lot beside Dimples, a huge satellite dish faced the sky. It was so old that holes were torn in the mesh, like an ancient flyswatter.

  The river was on my left again when I headed south on the Golden State Freeway toward downtown. All the rivers where I’d sat drinking coffee with Jane or Tony or swans and strangers for company. The Danube. The Avon. The Seine, the Thames, the Limmat, the Rhine. The Aare a few days ago. The LA River twisted narrow and black as tar in its channel until it slid under the freeway again.

  The César Chávez exit loomed up before me. Mando—the boy with the feathery hair and too many girls—he’d said Chávez and St. Louis.

  I took the off-ramp without thinking, and drove east. His long hair—had it come loose from the sweet oil and rested on his cheeks? He had lain in the street under the eyes of Gwen Stefani. Not Glorette. She was in Victor’s hands—was she? Did Victor hold something else in his hands? No. Not the gun.

  What could possibly have made them shoot at each other? A glare, a smudge on a stepped-on shoe. Anything.

  Boyle Heights. The streets were narrow and steep, lined with small bungalows painted pink and yellow and turquoise. I’d been here many times with Jimmy Taco. He loved to take people out for birria, a goat stew, or tacos de lengua. Tongue tacos.

  I stopped at the light. A crowd of people stood in front of a small lavender house on the corner. Two teenage boys were shouting, getting into a car. I pulled slowly through the intersection. Two young women stood in the street crying, their faces silver in the streetlight. One was the girl with the tadpole eyebrows and cursive tattoo. The one who hadn’t wanted to give Mando a ride home.

  I was shaking as I drove through the intersection and headed back toward the freeway.

  The Pomona Freeway, where Grady had driven me while I hid in the back. Three more rivers until I got home. The moon was rising from behind the eastern mountains, in the center of my windshield. I passed over the Rio Hondo, banks tangled with wild grapevine, and the San Gabriel River, a vague ribbon edged by concrete chunks.

  Sarah Vaughan’s voice filled my car. If I knew then, what I know now …

  I was coming up on the dump. La Paloma. I’d come here once with my father to empty a truckload of plastic containers someone had tossed in the groves. La Paloma rose up beside the freeway, a low mountain with its own ecosystem of spindly eucalyptus trees and fountain grass all around the base—to hide what the huge mound really was.

  Our refuse. Our midden. The place someone would excavate to know about us in hundreds of years. And whose bones would be found?

  ———

  Sere Dakar had chosen his own name. He’d told me that once, the only time I went to the club with Glorette to hear his band play. We were seventeen. She was pregnant but hadn’t told him. The band was Serengeti. I already knew I was leaving. I had a scholarship to the East Coast. Brick buildings and snow.

  When Glorette was in the bathroom, Sere Dakar sat next to me during a break. “Dakar is the capital of Senegal,” I said, trying to be smart. A brainiac. He was twenty already. “I heard you were from Chicago.”

  He said, “Uh-huh. You never heard Soul Makossa? Or Hugh Masekela? I had a friend in Chi-town named Kenya Lumumba. I gave myself my own name, since my parents didn’t have any imagination and I haven’t seen them for twenty years.”

  But I never knew his real name until Grady told me. Marquis Parker.

  Fire lit the top of La Paloma. Seagulls used to hover over the trash mountain, like a thousand white tissues drifting in the distance. Now the city had planted pampas grass that waved creamy plumes all along the roads the trash trucks drove. Natural gas came out through pipes at the summit of the steep hill, thirty years of refuse layered upon layer, and somewhere Sere Dakar might have been nothing—no hair or smile or fingers that played the flute, the heels of his hands that played the congas. Teeth? Ribs? Or was his essence rising still in vapors through the soil and burning now brightly in the torchlike flame that wavered at the top?

  I had never wanted to tell Victor the story only I knew. Murder, not abandonment. His father hadn’t left him before he was born. But now he was desperate, riding in the Navigator, holding pictures of his mother, nothing of his father, and maybe a gun. When I found him, I’d tell him everything.

  He was in the backseat. He had to have been. He would have been listening to The Who on his headphones. The blood must be Alfonso’s. Jazen would have shot Mando.

  The Santa Ana River glittered faintly before me now as the car crossed the bridge that led into Rio Seco. Dry River. The narrow slide of water, with all the flood danger taken away by irrigation and dams and the levees of broken concrete—the river tangled through bamboo and wild grapevines and cottonwoods, heading west to the ocean, passing my father’s orange groves. When I was a child and it used to rain hard for days, the angry currents swirled bank to bank like chocolate milk. Under me now, the water moved through the arrowweed—the tall straight-stemmed plant that my father said Indians used for their arrow shafts.

  All the rivers, cutting through the cities and plains. All the people surrounding the water, brown or red or blue water, green or sluggish or white-capped—all the women reaching their hands into the water for cooking and washing, all the men reaching their hands into the water for fish or stones. You never been to Africa? The Nile. Man, my people from Egypt. Egyptian Lover—that had been one of Bettina’s favorite rappers when we were teenagers. Maybe that’s how Alfonso decided to name his girls.

  The Mississippi—so wide and brown behind my great-aunt’s house in Azure. Leaving New Orleans and all the boats and ships I’d seen as a child, then sliding past the small houses where men rode out into the bayous and bays for shrimp and oysters and fish. My father’s aunt Almoinette holding shrimp curled like slick gray commas in her palm, saying to me, “That a tite bug in the water, oui, but he keep us alive. You catch so many bug, you can always eat. See he got eyes?”

  I’d bent to see tiny black spots like peppercorns. “He got eyes, too. Just like you. Think about what he see before your papa catch him up. See the water all around him, but somethin in there we don’t know. Some food for him, too, oui?”

  My phone sat in my palm like a small black sunfish with a tiny fin.

  I tried Victor again. Voicemail. I said, “Victor. I’m in Rio Seco now, so call me and I’ll come get you. I’ve got my car. I’ll be right there if you call me.”

  Home.

  I called Cerise. She answered, “What—you done partying?”

  “I just got off the freeway.”

  “Uh-huh. So you might stop by tonight, huh? If you ain’t got another meeting.” Music and voices were behind her.

  “Cerise. Did Victor make it back yet?”

  “Victor? He said he was goin up there to LA to stay with you.”

  “Yeah. He was with me earlier.” It was always at least ten or fifteen degrees hotter in Rio Seco than in LA. I rolled my windows down when I got to Main Street. The Spanish-style buildings, the blank marquee above the old movie theater, the wood-fronted strip malls with doughnut shops, pizza and nail salons. Anywhere in southern California.

  “He left with Jazen and Alfonso,” I said, turning on Palm and driving toward the Westside, where Glorette had always lived since she left Grady.

  “What? He called his grandpère and said he was with you.”

  “He was. But—” Just at the edges of downtown was the long line of citrus-packing houses, where all of Rio Seco’s wealth had once been delivered and sorted and boxed. The buildings were mostly empty. La Reina, where my father still delivered his oranges, was out near the river.

  “I told him I’d meet him later,” I said. Why hadn’t I just kept him? Kept him—like
a little kid. But he was a little kid—still curious and excited, no money, no car.

  Long ago the freeway had split downtown into two, and the dank underpass was like a cave. WESTSIDE LOC was spray-painted along the tunnel, with KILLA and $$$. Like a crazy restaurant rating. On the other side, the arroyo separated the Westside from the orange groves. Cerise breathed on the line, inside those groves. No one in Sarrat would have seen the TV news, because they never watched it. That news was all LA.

  “I’m swinging by Sundown and the taqueria,” I said. “In case he’s there. I’ll bring him with me.”

  “I’ll tell Unc Gustave,” she said.

  Esther Phillips sang, Don’t count stars, or you might stumble … and suddenly I remembered Victor saying, “Sometimes I head to the Riviera, Marraine. Just like you do.”

  The Westside used to be a neighborhood of old Victorian houses and bungalows, but they’d been cut up long ago for boardinghouses and apartments, back in the forties when so many black people moved to Rio Seco from Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana. In the sixties, some developer built the Villas—stucco apartment buildings in various pastel colors in every vacant lot along the streets named Jacaranda, Oleander, Hyacinth, and Jessamine. The apartments were long shoeboxes placed perpendicular to the streets, with wrought-iron railings and cement courtyards, and on their bland entrances were their own inappropriate names: Jacaranda Villas, Jessamine Villas, Hyacinth Villas. They couldn’t make Oleander sound pretty since everybody knew it was poisonous, so the pale blue complex with gang graffiti like black ivy around the entrance was called the Riviera.

  Victor had lived here before. When his mother showed him the palm tree sparklers.

  My phone rang, and I opened it without looking at the number. Rick said, “Can I just say how much I hate the entire idea of spa travel? Hey, you weren’t at the bookstore.”

  I parked along the filthy sidewalk, where the curb was black with tire marks and spilled liquids and fine dirt from the carob trees in the parking strip. “Tony didn’t feel good.” No guys were hanging out in the courtyard, but most of the lights were on, and the swamp coolers hummed loudly, like each window had its own beehive. “Spa travel?”