Take One Candle Light a Room Read online

“See, you could never get up there. You too boring.” She took a sip from a glass and slid it back behind the register. “You were already gone to college then, but you never wore no makeup, nothin.”

  “You want me to apologize for going to college?” I laughed.

  “See? Just like a high yella—” She sucked her teeth and turned to the bottles.

  “Fuck you, Hattie,” I said.

  She whirled around, her hair swinging stiffly like a wing. “Oh, so now you got somethin to say? Not no big words? Just fuck you? Any dumb bitch can say that.” She flicked her nails at me in dismissal. “My mama told Grady when he started goin out to Sarrat—Don’t mess with them light-bright girls. You can’t trust them breeds.”

  Breeds. Half-breeds.

  She leaned forward, her cleavage trembling. “Neither fish nor fowl.”

  The blond girl came back. “I need change, Gloria.”

  She glared at me. I was old. No makeup. No man. No use.

  Gloria handed her the ones, and the girl cut her eyes at us both.

  “You got to buy something or go, Fantine.”

  “One cigarette,” I said. Gloria laid it in my palm, and I gave her ten dollars.

  “You didn’t have to tell him,” she said.

  “He would have found out someday,” I said.

  “Shit,” she said. “How? Wasn’t nobody but you and me up here in LA.” Her fingers were hard as a man’s on my wrist. “I loved my brother. I never loved nobody else in the world, but every day I saw my brother and we ate together. I can’t never go back home, but he came to me. And you took that away.”

  I pulled my arm from her grip. Her nails left half-moon smiles on my skin.

  Grady had told me right here, outside near the neon sign.

  I leaned against the shiny black tile, holding the cigarette. A skeletal finger.

  That night, a bucket had slammed down on the sidewalk, and someone began to wash off the tile. A homeless guy. Green army coat, black sneakers glistening with fallen foam from his brush and rag, and black jeans shiny with wear and dirt. His hair was thick and matted, but a brown spot showed on the side of his head, like the entrance to an anthill.

  He’d had ringworm in Mississippi, when he was a kid. He’d always combed his natural over that place. Grady? His hand moved back and forth over the tile, washing off fingerprints and smudges. Grady. He was missing half of his right ring finger.

  I crossed the street. He squinted, and then he walked slowly toward me, steady, knees bending, arms moving easily at his sides. He stopped about ten feet from me and said, “Fantine?”

  I nodded. He said, “I been waiting for you. All this time.”

  His hands were rimed with black, like my father’s when he’d been picking oranges. His eyes were tiny, like sunflower seeds in the deep wrinkles. All that sun. All those miles.

  “You told me you was gon come to LA. And you left for college. I married Glorette. I married her.”

  His four top teeth were gone, like an open gate to his mouth. He said, “We went to the courthouse. Me and her.”

  I said, “Grady, I came to tell you—”

  “I knew you was somewhere in LA. Me and Glorette went to the courthouse after Sere Dakar was gone. He played the flute and the congos. But he wasn’t African. I seen his ID one time. Name Marquis Parker. He was from Chicago. He coulda called hisself Chi-town. Told me he was goin to LA and play in a band. Glorette was havin a baby.”

  “He’s seventeen,” I said. “Her son.”

  But Grady stepped closer, the ripe too-sweet smell of urine and liquor and sweat rising from his coat. “No. My son. I was gon raise that boy. Dakar was gon leave her every time. So I got him in my truck.”

  I tried to remember. Grady had an old Pinto back then. “You didn’t have a truck.”

  He trembled, and breathed hard through his mouth. “Fantine. All this time I waited to tell you. Cause I know you won’t tell nobody. You never told nobody about the car. About when we walked from Pomona.”

  I shook my head. My brothers would have beat him down.

  “I waited till Dakar came out that one bar where he played. Then I busted him in the head and put him in the trash truck. It was almost morning. I took the truck up the hill.”

  “Grady,” Hattie said from behind me. “Shut up.” She held a foil-wrapped plate of food. “Eat your dinner and shut up. You ain’t done nothin like that.”

  “I did. It was a Thursday.”

  “You a lie. You never said nothin to me.”

  “Fantine—you was at the barn that night.” He held up his hand, as if to stop me, but he was showing me his finger. “Chicago had a knife. I got to the dump and went to check the back of the truck, and he raised up and took a piece a me. But I had a tire iron. Fool thought he knew me. Called me Missippi and shit. But he didn’t know.”

  I looked up at the slice of sky between buildings. Mississippi. Cleveland and Louisiana and Chicago. California. Men and brothers and fools.

  Grady tucked the plate against his ribs like it was a football. He said, “I was waitin on Fantine. She can tell Glorette he didn’t leave. I hatted him up permanent. But she still loved him. I don’t love her now. I’m done.” He brought the foil to his lips.

  “You left him there?” I said. Sere Dakar—his real name Marquis Parker. A laughing, thin musician with a big natural and green eyes. “At the dump?”

  Grady threw his head up to the black sky and dim streetlamps. His throat was scaly with dirt. “The truck was full. I hit the button. Raised it up and dumped it in the landfill. Every morning, the bulldozer covered the layers. Every morning. It was Thursday.”

  He stepped toward me. “He had my finger in there with him,” he whispered. “I felt it for a long time. Like when I was layin in the bed at night, with Glorette, my finger was still bleedin in Dakar’s hand.” His eyes were hard to see. “Tell her.”

  I pictured Glorette lying on a table, my mother coiling her hair. Higher on her head than normal, because she couldn’t lie on her back with all that hair gathered in a bun. “She’s dead, Grady. I came to tell you. Somebody killed her back in Rio Seco. They don’t know who. I’m going to see her tomorrow morning. You want me to take you?”

  Sere Dakar lying under layers of trash. Glorette braiding her hair before we went to sleep—she whispered about how his long fingers played the flute, and then rested on the side of her neck. My eyes filled with tears, until the streetlamps faded to smears and I let down my eyelids. When I looked down, I saw the wet sidewalk.

  Hattie went back inside without speaking to me, and she closed the black door hard. Grady whispered, “Where she get killed?”

  “In an alley off Palm Avenue,” I said, and his chest let out the air it had been holding. I couldn’t lie. He knew what that meant. He knew what she would have been doing.

  He walked away, that familiar dipping lope that I’d watched for hours and hours while just behind him, that night.

  A homeless man crossed the street quickly and said, “You got another cigarette, sista?”

  His hair had been braided a long time ago—clouds of new hair puffed around his forehead. We used to call that our baby hairs, all of us girls from Sarrat, and we plastered it down with Vaseline into complicated waves on our temples.

  Fish nor fowl. Our scales. Our feathers.

  Sista. He reached out his hand, cupped as if for water, and I put the cigarette inside.

  The film crew moved like a black-clad army over the sidewalks and in and out of buildings. The older security guard studied me, stone-faced.

  I called Victor. He said, “Hey.”

  I said, “Victor, where are you now? I’m sorry I was already booked tonight.”

  Then he said, “Gotcha—leave the digits. Late.” A beep. That was his voicemail.

  I put the phone in my pocket, and then slid it back out and turned it off. It had been so quiet in Brienz and even in Luzern. And I didn’t want to hear from anyone else in Sarrat about why I wasn’t
there yet.

  I moved down Eighth, the opposite way from the direction Grady had walked. I figured he just kept walking, after he knew she was dead. Maybe he walked all the way to Venice Beach and into the waves. Maybe he tried to walk home to Rio Seco and died of dehydration, and he was still somewhere in a field, under a quilt of tumbleweeds.

  I moved quickly toward the Music Center, where well-dressed concertgoers lingered on the sidewalks. The sun was bronze, lowering itself into the smog. Construction site—my fingers bumped along a chain-link fence that glowed red as if it were on fire.

  That night, when Grady ran out of gas in Pomona, we left the Dodge Dart beside the road and started walking down Mission Boulevard. The old Route 66—mythical asphalt.

  “I been walkin all my life,” Grady said. “Don’t be sayin shit to me. Just keep up.”

  We left behind the auto shops and tire places, moved past vacant lots and tiny motor courts where one narrow walk led past doors behind which we could hear muffled televisions. Junkyard dogs threw themselves against chain-link. We moved easy and fast, me just behind Grady. Walking for miles, past strawberry fields where water ran like mercury in the furrows. Past a huge pepper tree with a hollow where an owl glided out, pumping its wings once and then gone.

  That night, we walked like we lived in the Serengeti. And five years ago, Grady was still moving the same way, when I watched him disappear down Eighth Street into the darkness. Like pilgrims on the Roman roads of France. Like old men in England. Like Indians through rain forests, steady down the trail. Fools craving movement and no words and just the land, all the land, where we left our footprints if nothing else.

  VERMONT

  TONY HAD BEEN DRINKING when I called earlier—his teeth clicked like tiny castanets against glass. “You know exactly what I’m doing, FX,” he said sadly. “I swear I need a black veil.”

  I took a cab back to Los Feliz and then walked up Vermont. Tony lived on the hill, near Griffith Park. The sidewalk was steep and broken by banyan tree roots. I pushed open the wrought-iron curlicued gate. His house was a big two-story classic Spanish-style with a heavy wood door. The first time I came over, years ago, he’d put his nose up to the small window in the door, behind three wrought-iron licorice sticks, and stuck his tongue onto the glass like a pink slug.

  He had the windows open, the TV on. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said back.

  Tony was the only person who knew almost everything about me—some of my life in Sarrat, and most everything else since. He sat on the couch with his feet up on the table. He held the small glass of scotch at his navel, as if it would catch drips from the ceiling.

  “Two sips down, eight to go,” he said.

  His partner, Ian, had died last year. Ian was the pastry chef at a restaurant on La Brea, and on his way to work one morning at four a.m., a drunk driver going the wrong way on Sunset smashed into the Triumph and killed him.

  I held up the wooden goat from Switzerland. “From Brienz, this little town at the edge of the Alps where they carve. Switzerland’s famous for the cows with the bells, but one of these mountain goats butted me when I was hiking. Works for you, right?”

  Tony smiled. “You writing the piece now? If Rick wants me to go, it’ll be in two weeks, cause I have a shoot out in Palm Springs on Saturday. August 27 in Palm Springs. 114 at least. Shit.” He petted the goat. “Then I have to go home. My nephew’s wedding. Guess who’s the photographer?”

  I had to laugh. No one in my family ever asked me to write anything. The goat was big for a carving, the size of a chicken, actually. “You ever held a chicken?”

  Tony shook his head. “You know my mamma was a city girl.”

  I stood the goat on the hearth of the huge slate fireplace. On winter nights when they were both home, he and Ian had sat in front of a fire. Ian was from England, some small village where he’d lived in a cold stone cottage. He loved fire. He used to say to Tony, “We need a dog for the hearth. Sleeping right there.”

  But Tony was always gone on a photo shoot, and Ian worked long hours at the restaurant, so they had a ceramic dog for a joke. And for a year now, I had brought a wooden or stone or ceramic animal from wherever I went. The hearth was crowded with chickens, dogs, a pig from Italy, a fantastic striped winged animal from Oaxaca. I made the goat kiss the pig.

  On the couch beside him, I took off my boots. I could smell the scotch. “Never get used to it,” he said. “Each sip is like fire, and then it goes straight to my dick. Which used to be a good thing.”

  “I know.” I took the glass. One sip. So different from rum, the only thing my father and Gustave ever drank. They’d made their own, back in Louisiana. They called it something else, but it was sweet and dark. This was hot and gold.

  Wednesday had been Ian’s only day off. Every Wednesday that Tony was home, since Ian had died, he watched a movie from England and drank one glass of scotch whiskey and slept on the couch.

  “You’re going to be forty in November and I’m December,” I said. I couldn’t recognize anything about the movie. Stone house. An ocean. “What is this?”

  “Hitchcock,” he said. “Rebecca. That’s really Carmel. I didn’t know that until he told me.” The waves crashed against the craggy coastline.

  “Did you know there’s an alligator in Lake Machado?” he said, sleepily. “They’re trying to get some guy from Louisiana to catch it.”

  I laughed. The scotch was sharp on my molars.

  Tony took another sip. His toes were long and brown. My toes were short and less brown. We had sat like this countless times, here and in hotel rooms and on ships. Sometimes we traveled separately—he went to Bath or Portland after I’d gone—and sometimes we were together.

  “Conventional movie wisdom says we have a baby,” he said softly.

  “Yeah?” I put my anklebone next to his. “The craziest kid in the world? Obsessive in too many ways?” We had slept in the same bed a few times, when we could get only one room. But we had never awakened touching each other.

  “Because we’re both turning forty, and I haven’t had sex all year, and we’re supposed to regret not leaving behind our legacies.” His long hair curled around his ear. Black loose spirals, like my mother’s.

  “We couldn’t even handle a real dog,” I said. I put out my hand and he gave me the glass. Heat in my chest.

  “Everybody’s still trying to set me up,” Tony said. “They’re always pissed—‘How can you just stop having sex? It’s unnatural!’ I had a lot of sex with Ian. I’m done.”

  I hadn’t had a lot of sex. I’d had enough sex. He was right. We could turn to each other and pretend, and try to have a baby. That would be a stupid movie.

  He was the only person from my present to have been in my parents’ house. Only the fourth white person to visit Sarrat. Maybe my mother thought he was black for a few minutes, until he started talking. His skin was darker than mine, because he was always tanned, and his eyes were black and shiny as the glazed ceramic panther on the hearth. But he talked to my mother about his own mother and her cooking, and he stayed in the kitchen long enough to make her love him a little.

  I had been at his mother’s house, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She thought I was Italian and French. She had fed me his favorite soup—wedding soup, with chicken and meatballs and pasta and spinach—and joked with me about marriage. But I knew she knew about him, if not about me.

  “I have to go home. Sarrat home. Glorette died five years ago tomorrow,” I said. “Remember?”

  Tony threw his head back and stared at the ceiling. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a hummingbird trying to escape his throat. “I remember once when somebody else died. We were in France.”

  “Marseille.” I slumped down in the couch and stared, too—the ceiling was textured plaster, buttery yellow. “We were in an alley talking about Marcel Pagnol and my father called. My brother Reynaldo and Clarette had a baby. A girl. She died after a week.”

  “They waited
for you to come home. And you left.”

  I nodded. “I was going to be the godmother. I had to help bury her.”

  “You said they’d never forgive you if you didn’t come home.” His voice was soft and sleepy. “You said I was the only one who knew why you’d spend all that money.”

  “The Moors.” I stared at the hearth crowded with animals.

  “The Moors.”

  The fire—the table—the tribe. There was nothing else outside the circle that mattered. He knew.

  Tony suddenly held up his thumb like he was hitchhiking to heaven. “Splinter,” he said. “I forgot I was waiting for you to get it.”

  The kitchen light was bright. I held the needle over the stove flame. Tony sat at the long wooden table Ian had loved, with mazelike patterns of wormwood scars. I pulled his hand toward me. The left thumb was red at the tip.

  The needle opened the flesh around the black dot. I moved aside skin. The tip of the needle—under the tiny dark piece of wood. A dart and it was out, smaller than an eyelash on my own palm.

  “Stupid fence in the back is falling down,” Tony said, his voice thick. Not with pain, but with longing. Ian had done the garden. “I keep having to prop it up.”

  I swabbed the raw hole with alcohol and blew on the skin.

  How many times had I seen my mother and father close together at her table? I would hear them late at night, since my room was next to the kitchen, peer around my doorway to see them. She was fearless with splinters, and we had them all the time. She told us again and again, “Don’t be no baby. You move, it hurt worse. I don’t get it out now, you gon lose that finger.”

  Tony’s eyes were closed. I dabbed the alcohol on the wound again and wrapped a Band-Aid around his thumb.

  My mother would probe and probe, move aside the flesh on my father’s palm, his thumb, his knuckle. Then the needle would flash. “La.” She always held out her hand to show him the small source of pain. “Now you infected.” She swabbed with alcohol, blew on his skin, and then my mother would hold my father’s hand, helpless and upturned, in her own for a long time. “Dry now,” she would whisper. “I can’t have you lose no finger. I need you with all ten.”