The Last Suspicious Holdout, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Flip Lady (1992)
Henry (1993)
Bitch: An Etymology of Family Values (1994)
There He Go (1995)
False Cognates (1996)
Yams (1997)
Houston and the Blinking What (1998)
Five People Who Crave Sauce (1999)
The Last Suspicious Holdout (2001)
The Night Nurses (2004)
Trash (2005)
Crack Babies! (2006)
Paulie Sparks (2007)
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Ladee Hubbard
Copyright
About the Publisher
Flip Lady
(1992)
1.
History:
Raymond Brown hears the sound of laughter. He puts down his book and looks out the window.
Here they come now, children of the ancient ones, the hewers of wood, the cutters of cane barreling down the sidewalk on their Huffys and Schwinns. Little legs pumping over fat rubber tires, brakes squealing as they pull into the drive, standing on tiptoes as they straddle their bikes and stare at the house with their mouths hanging open.
Just like before. Some of them he still recognizes. He made out with that girl’s sister in the seventh grade, played basketball with that boy’s uncle in high school. This one was all right until his brother joined the army, that one was okay until her daddy went to jail. And you see that girl in the back? The chubby one standing by the curb, next to the brand-new Schwinn? She hasn’t been the same since the invasion of Grenada, nine years ago, in 1983.
The Spice Island. When the Marines landed, she was three years old, living in St. George’s near the medical clinic with her mother, the doctor and Aunt Ruby, the nurse. The power went off, the hospital plunging into blue darkness while machine gunfire cackled in the distance like a bag of Jiffy Pop bubbling up on a stove. Oh no, Aunt Ruby said. Just like before.
It’s all there, in the book on his lap. Colonizers fanning out across the Atlantic like a hurricane, not exactly hungry but looking for spice. They claimed the land, they built the plantations, they filled the Americas up with slaves. Sugar kept the workers happy, distracted them from grief. And four hundred years later you have your military invasions and McDonald’s Happy Meals, your Ho Hos and preemptive strikes. Your Oreos and Reaganomics, your Cap’n Crunch.
And Kool-Aid. These kids can’t get enough of it. They sit in the driveway, they shift in their seats, they grip the plastic streamers affixed to their handlebars. One of them kicks a kickstand and steps forward, fingers curled into a small tight fist as he knocks on the kitchen door.
“Flip Lady? You in there?”
Just like before. They roamed the entire earth in search of spice so why not here, why not now?
“Flip Lady? You home? It’s me, Calvin. . . .”
For the past few weeks they’ve been coming almost every day.
Raymond closes the curtain. He shakes his head and turns towards the darkness of the back bedroom. “Mama? It’s those fucking kids again.”
2.
The squeak of old mattress coils, a single bang of a headboard against a bedroom wall. The Flip Lady wills herself upright, sets her feet on the floor, sits on the edge of her bed and stares at the chipped polish on her left big toe. She stands up, reaches for her slippers, straightens out her green housedress, and walks out the bedroom door.
The Flip Lady shuffles into the living room where her nineteen-year-old son, Raymond, sits on a low couch, reading. Long brown body hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees as he peers at the page of the book on his lap. In an instant his life flashes through her mind in a series of fractured images, like a VHS tape on rewind. She sees him at sixteen, face hidden behind a comic book, then at seven when his feet barely touched the floor. And before that as a chubby toddler, gripping the cushions with fat meaty fists, laughing as he hoisted himself onto the couch. Without breaking her stride, and for want of anything else to say, she mutters, “I see you reading,” and passes into the kitchen.
The Flip Lady lifts a pickle jar full of loose change from the counter and looks out the kitchen window.
“That you, Calvin?” she says to the little boy standing on her porch.
“Afternoon, ma’am.” Calvin smiles.
She twists the lid off the jar, opens the kitchen door, and squints at the multitude assembled in her backyard.
Calvin plunges his hand into his pants pocket and pulls out a fistful of dimes. He drops them into her jar with a series of empty pings.
“Well, all right then,” the Flip Lady says.
Calvin glances over his shoulder and winks.
She walks towards her refrigerator while Calvin stands in the doorway. He cocks his head and peers past her into the living room. Glass angel figurines and the tea set on the lace doily in the cabinet against the wall; bronzed baby shoes mounted on a wooden plaque; framed high school graduation photos and Sears portraits of her two sons sitting on top of the TV set; a stack of LPs lined up on the floor. A dark green La-Z-Boy recliner and the plaid couch where her younger son sits with a book on his lap. Calvin turns his head again and sees the Flip Lady standing in the middle of her bright yellow kitchen, easing two muffin trays stuffed with Dixie cups out of her freezer.
The Flip Lady studies Calvin’s face as he scoops the cups out of the trays, licking his lips, eyes lit up like birthday candles. She smiles. Her boys were the same way when they were that age, crowding around her back door with all their friends, giddy with excitement as they sucked on her homemade popsicles. She used to hand them out when their friends came over to play after school and on weekends; it was a way to keep them in her backyard where she could watch them from the kitchen window. A good mother, she wanted to get to know how her boys passed their time and with whom. She wanted to memorize their playmates’ faces and study their gestures until she felt confident that she could tell the clever from the calculated, the dreamy-eyed from the dangerous, the quiet from the cruel. She hadn’t done it for money. No one had to thank her, although her neighbors told her many times how much they appreciated her looking out for their children that way.
The Flip Lady frowns. Of course, everything does change, eventually. There comes a time when a mother has to accept that the promise of sugary sweets has lost its ability to soothe all grief. They don’t want your Kool-Aid anymore. They busy, they got other things to do. One day you find yourself standing alone in the kitchen, hand wrapped around a cold cup, melting ice dripping down your fingers as you wonder to yourself when exactly the good little boys standing on your back porch became the big bad men walking out your front door.
She looks at Calvin. “How was school today, son? You studying hard, being a good boy? Doing what your mama tells you?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Calvin walks around, passing out Dixie cups to his friends.
“Well, all right then,” the Flip Lady says.
3.
What you get for your money is a hunk of purple ice, a Dixie cup full of frozen Kool-Aid. The girl in the back stares at hers. It’s not quite what she was expecting, given how far they have come to get it. According to the black plastic Casio attached to her left wrist, they’ve been riding for a full twenty minutes in the opposite direction from where she was trying to get to, which was home. One minute she was in the schoolyard unlocking her bike and the next they were standing over her, the whole group of them saying, Come with us. She knew it wasn’t an invitation but an order. They were taking her to wherever it was they went when they sprinted off after class, their laughter echoing in the distance long after they’d disappeared past the school gate. How could she say no? She lifts the cup to her open mouth and runs her tongue along its surface, absorbing flat sweetness and a salty aftertaste.
“It’s just Kool-Aid,” someone says.
The girl closes her mouth. She looks around the parking lot of Byrdie’s Burgers, where they have parked their bikes to eat. Everyone is pushing the bottoms of their cups with the pads of their thumbs, making those sugar lumps rise into the air. They’re tilting their cups to the side and pulling them out, melting Kool-Aid dripping down their hands as they flip them over, then carefully placing them back in the cups, bottom sides up. They’re sucking on their fingers, they’re licking their lips, their mouths pressed against homemade popsicle flips.
“What’s the matter? Don’t they have Kool-Aid where you come from?”
The girl looks down at her cup. She pushes her thumbs against the bottom but presses too hard; the hunk of purple ice pops out too fast and soars over the rim. She tries to catch it, but her hands fumble; it dribbles down the front of her shirt, then lands with a thud on the pavement.
“Now that’s a shame.”
The girl wipes her hands on the front of her shorts, palms already sticky. She blames her upbringing, all those years spent stuck on that rock, how to flip a homemade popsicle was just one more thing she should have known. She got the exact same looks from the kids on Grenada, after she moved there with her mother and Aunt Ruby all those years ago: What you come here for? What you want with this rock, when everybody trying to get off it? As if only white people were supposed to spin in dizzy circles like that, as missionaries or volunteers or tourists on extended leave. She can still see her former playmates in the eyes of her new school’s handful of immigrant kids, with their high-water pants and loud pol
“What a waste.”
When her mother said they were moving back to the States she’d been like everyone else she knew, picturing New York or LA like she saw on TV, not some narrow sliver of southern suburbia wedged senselessly in between. Instead she is surrounded by a whole parking lot full of distracted sucking children who don’t like her anyway.
“Go get another one,” someone says. Calvin, the boss around here, although sometimes they take turns.
“It’s only ten cents. Ain’t you even got another dime?”
“What’s the problem? You scared to go back by yourself?”
“What’s the matter? Don’t you want one?”
Of course she wants one. But she wants that one there, already dissolving into a pool of purple ooze at her feet. If she can’t have it then she wants to go home, sit on the couch, eat leftover Entenmann’s cookies from the box, and watch Star Trek reruns until her mother gets home from work at the hospital.
She looks back at the Flip Lady’s house, now halfway down the block. She’s tired of traveling the wrong way, dragging herself in the wrong direction without real rhyme or actual reason. But she also doesn’t want to cause trouble, doesn’t want to make waves. She reaches for the handlebars of her bike.
“Naw, leave it.” They lick their lips and smile. “We’ll watch it for you.”
But they lie: in a few minutes they are going to teach her a lesson about realness, about keeping it. Because even her accent is fake. Because she rides around on a Schwinn that is just like theirs, except it is brand-new.
“Go on, girl.”
Plus, she’s fat.
The girl nods her head. She knows they are going to start talking about her as soon as her back is turned. They’re a mean bunch; she’s seen them do some terrible things at school. She’s already figured out that it does no good to wander in and out of earshot of this group. Either you’ve got to stay knuckle to knuckle, packed tight like a fist, or else give them a wide berth and do all you can to not draw attention to yourself.
She turns around and starts walking. She can hear them whispering and laughing behind her, a hot humid jungle of bad moods circling her footsteps, gathering in strength with each step she takes. A flash of fear tickles her nose, like when you’re swimming and accidentally inhale water. But she does not stop walking, somehow convinced that to turn around midstride will only make things worse.
She knocks on the Flip Lady’s door, expecting to see the kind face of the woman who answered it not a half hour before. Instead it’s a man, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a blue T-shirt, a little brown Chihuahua shivering in the palm of his left hand. She stares up at flaring nostrils, dark eyes, eyebrows arched.
“What do you want?”
“I dropped mine.”
Raymond shakes his head. “No. I’m not doing this. Mama’s not here. Understand? Flip Lady gone. She went out. Shopping. To buy more Kool-Aid, most likely. So why don’t you just come back tomorrow. . . .”
A harsh peel of laughter cuts across the horizon. The girl puts her head down and reaches into her pocket. She holds out a dime like a peace offering.
Raymond recoils. “I don’t want that. What am I supposed to do with that? Girl, you better just go on home.”
He squints into the distance behind her. “Those your friends? Little heathens . . .”
The girl hears the harsh scrape of metal against concrete as the man steps past her, onto the porch.
“Hey, girl. Is that your bike?”
She winces at the sound of rubber soles pounding on the spokes and stares down at the mat in front of the door.
“Hey, girl . . . What the heck are they doing—”
She shuts her eyes, feels a stiff pressure in her groin, like a sudden swift kick against her bladder, then a sharp tingling sensation between her legs.
“Hey, girl, turn around. . . .”
The girl looks up. “May I use your bathroom please?”
RAYMOND LOOKS AT THE CHILD breathing hard with her thighs clamped together, shifting her weight from side to side. He bites his lip then nods and points down the hall, watches her sprint past his friend Tony, who is standing in the middle of the living room grinning from ear to ear.
“You from Jamaica?” Tony says as the girl rushes past. She runs into the bathroom and slams the door.
Raymond shakes his head. It’s all there, in his book, he thinks. It’s always the weak and the homely who get left behind. Stranded on the back porch, knees shaking as they quiver and dance, thin rivers of pee running down their ashy legs.
4.
The girl sits on the toilet in a pink-tiled bathroom, staring at a stack of Ebony and Newsweek magazines in a brass rack near the sink. She’s thinking about her bike, about how much she’s going to miss it. She’s only had it for a few weeks, but still. It’s something she begged and pleaded for, something she swore she needed to fit in at her new school. Now she doesn’t even want to look at it. A few minutes before the Flip Lady’s son knocked on the door and told her he would fix it so she can ride home, but it’s too late. It’s already ruined. She’s already peed herself and run away.
Everybody’s always so busy running, so busy trying to save their own skins, she remembers her aunt Ruby telling her. That’s what’s wrong with this world. We’ve got to stand together if we’re going to stand at all. The girl had liked the sound of that even if she sensed that it didn’t really apply to her. She’d seen her aunt and mother working in the clinic, stood numb and mystified by the deliberateness with which they thrust themselves into other people’s wounds. Stitching a cut, dressing a burn, giving a shot, connecting an IV. It was intimidating, the steadiness of her mother’s hand sometimes. Even now, in the midst of grief. Like some nights when her mother stomped into the living room and cut off the TV in the middle of the evening news, her voice damming the flood of silence that followed with the simple statement: “They lie.”
The girl reaches for the roll of toilet paper and wipes off the insides of her legs. She pulls up her damp panties and zips her shorts. When she opens the door she finds Tony alone in the living room, crouched down on the floor, peering behind the stack of LPs lined up against the wall.
“You feeling better?”
When she doesn’t say anything, he puts the records back. He stands up, shoves his hands into his pockets, and smiles.
“So, what, you from Jamaica?”
The girl shakes her head. “I come from here.”
“Not talking like that you don’t.” Tony walks past her and then stops. He crosses his arms in front of his chest, puts one hand on his chin and stares down at the couch.
“I lived on Grenada for a time but—”
“What’s that?”
She watches as he kneels in front of the couch. He lifts the cushion and runs his hand underneath it like he’s looking for spare change.
“Another island,” she says.
He puts the cushion back and sits on top of it, bouncing up and down a few times to force the cushion back into place.
Tony nods. “Y’all smoke a lot of ganja down there too?”
The girl shrugs awkwardly. She wonders what about her appearance might remind this man of a Rastafarian. Rastafarians wore dusty clothes, had calloused feet and thick clumps of matted hair. They sat in the waiting room, making the clinic smell like salt and homemade lye soap. Her mother checked their charts while Aunt Ruby rubbed their arms with cotton pads dipped in alcohol. When they saw the needle, Aunt Ruby smiled and told them it was just a pinprick. Don’t worry, it will be all right, she promised. Just look at me.
But, no, she didn’t smoke a lot of ganja.
“That’s all right,” Tony says. “You still got that sweet accent, huh?” He pulls a bouquet of plastic flowers out of a white vase, peers down inside it, and holds the flowers up to his nose.
“I like things sweet.” Tony puts the flowers back in the vase and reaches underneath the table, running his hand along the wood panels underneath. The girl stares down at the books stacked on top of it. And next to the table is an open cardboard box with still more books tucked inside.
