Nightcrawling, page 4
“Don’t got nothing else to do.” I glance inside the crib, a small mound of cloth holding the infant. “How old?”
“She about to be two months.”
I nod, not really sure what else there is to say about the baby’s smallness. I think about the photo from the funeral home and wonder if Shauna ever thinks about how easy it is to stop breathing, to be something and then be gone, to love someone and disappear.
Shauna moves to pick up her child and walks to the couch, her sweatpants rolled down around her hips with her belly bulging. She sits, sinking in deeper until she’s cocooned in the couch’s soft red, like her baby is cocooned in her breasts. Shauna swiftly pulls her bra to the side and the child latches, sucking in deep like she was starving and is relearning how to be alive, how to feed. I think about looking away, but it doesn’t seem like Shauna minds and the infant’s lips are fascinating, the way they pulse. Shauna’s eyes are still on her girl, sucking so hard I wonder how she isn’t out of breath. Shauna’s free nipple is dry and scabbed, but there is no evidence of this pain on her face, no worry of being cracked open.
“Kiara.” I don’t remember the last time she said my full name. I look at her, the lumps beneath her eyes heavy. “Don’t get caught up in their shit.”
She’s still staring at her child, like the baby will choke if she looks away, so I’m not sure what she’s talking about until the beat picks up and vibrates through my feet.
“You didn’t have to have no baby.”
Her head whips toward me. “You don’t know nothing about what I’ve had to do. I’m just doing you a favor by telling you now not to give it all up for them.” Her child stops suckling and begins to scream, and Shauna is on her feet, returning to her moaning, waiting for someone to ask, for one of the men to look at her, to wonder what’s wrong.
Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up. I don’t say goodbye to Shauna and she doesn’t even turn around to watch me leave, to head back out to a sky that sunk into deep blue while my brother asked me to do the one thing I know I shouldn’t, the one thing Shauna cared enough to warn me about: hollow myself out for another person who ain’t gonna give a shit when I’m empty.
The café lady sticks the pen behind her ear where her undercut fades from blue to hot pink and then blond, and she smiles the same way that the mean girls used to smile before they said I couldn’t sit at their table in elementary school, like she’s waiting for a punch or some kind of prize.
“We really can’t do anything if you don’t have a résumé.”
A group of twenty-year-olds all wearing matching Converse swing in through the front door of the café and the undercut woman waves them in, grabbing menus from where she stands behind the cash register. Even the way she picks up the menus makes me want to slap the pen from behind her ear, her fingers pinching like the menus are too dirty for her to touch.
“I don’t have nothing to put on a résumé, so don’t really make sense for me to bring a blank page, do it?” My hands are resting on the glass counter, the sweet potato pie symmetrical and staring up at me, taunting.
The woman moves toward where the twenty-year-olds sit at a corner booth, handing them menus, returning to grab a water pitcher. The smile has faded, leaving only the grimace that comes before and after the mean girls tell you to get the fuck away. Funny how the playground follows us.
“Look, I don’t have anything to give my manager and, honestly, I think it’s highly unlikely we would hire someone with such limited experience.” She pauses, pouts. “Maybe try Walgreens?”
When I step away, I make sure to make a fist and pound lightly on the glass display counter. Not hard enough to risk breaking it, but enough that the twenty-somethings look over at me with fear in their eyes before I swing out the door and back onto the street.
I tried Walgreens last week, CVS the week before. Even tried the MetroPCS that shares its building with the smoke shop nobody ever steps foot in unless they looking for a deal or a phone cheap enough to last them until they get out of town.
It always goes the same way: I ask to talk to the manager and either some man comes out from the back, huffing, red-faced and ready for me to leave before I even start talking or they say the manager ain’t in and I try to negotiate with one of the employees. They start shaking their heads the minute I say I don’t got a résumé and the bell hanging from the door rings like a timer on my way out, telling me I don’t got much time before my world starts to crumble. It’s hours of this, and it sinks something in me so I’m not even sure what I’m doing and then I realize I’m just wandering, that there is no destination.
Walking in downtown Oakland is like trying to find your footing on an ocean floor. Everything is big here, not like back home in East, where we keep our buildings low to the ground and our feet to the sidewalk. In downtown, it feels like everything is airborne or underground. Like if there was a compass, we’d all be levitating above directionality. Marcus and I spent a lot of time with Daddy downtown, before they inverted the buildings and sprinkled gold on the sidewalk. Before we were unrecognizable. Back then, it was a ghost town and the only people out here was the ones who slapped Daddy’s back and offered us rides in the backseat of taxis they drove before Uber came in. Back then, we were royalty simply by association with Daddy, following him to his old friends’ apartments, the ones nobody wanted ’cause they were crusted in dirt and dealing.
Now there are too many cafés on these streets, too many of the same faces bent at the neck because, in downtown, nobody gives a shit where they’re walking, who they might bump into or stumble over. They’ve got their heads in a screen, their shoes laced so tight I bet their feet have gone numb.
The one thing downtown got that nowhere else in this city really does is a whole lot of bars, clubs, holes where people find themselves wasted and dancing. At two in the morning, somebody’s always out here barbecuing right before the clubs shut down, the weed mixing with the smoke from their grills.
There’s a strip club tucked underneath a yoga studio on the corner, its metal door painted a sparkling black. I can hear the faint sound of music and even though it’s only five or so in the evening, they’ve got the door propped open. I walk into a room dimly lit by those lightbulbs that look sort of like candles, and a few lone people are propped up on stools or sitting at circular tables, lurking in the darkest patches of the place, the poles looming large in the center, one woman aerial and another bored.
I wander over to the bar, where a man stands with a rag in hand, wiping down the counter. He looks like every other bartender I’ve ever seen and it’s sort of comforting how predictable downtown is, how it’s changing in the kinds of ways that only propel more of the same, how every building seems to duplicate like this man’s tattoos down his arm.
He looks up at me and I feel small in the expanse of dark. “Can I help you?”
I breathe in. I’m not sure I want a job like this or if I could get one anyway, but I’m desperate. “I’m looking for a job,” I say, not even bothering to ask for the manager as if it will make a difference.
He nods, the gauge earring in his left ear glinting as he moves. “I can give your application to my boss if you want. He’s always looking for more pretty girls.”
“Don’t got an application,” I say, waiting for that familiar pity smile. “Or a résumé.”
“Oh,” he responds, tucking a piece of his hair back into his ponytail. “I could give him your name and phone number, I guess.” He grabs a pen and Post-it from behind the counter and bends over, getting ready to write. He looks up at me again and his nose wrinkles. “How old are you, sweetheart?”
I flinch at the name. “Seventeen.”
He stands up from his bent position, the soft grimace finally making its way to his face. “We can’t hire anyone under eighteen. Sorry, darling.”
I nod, turning back around to where the light leaks in from the open door. I used to think the only thing you got from turning eighteen was the right to vote, but now it’s clear you get more than just voting and I wish my birthday would come a little faster. Before I make my way out, I hear my name. I spin back around to see a woman materializing behind the bar, her face foreign until I squint hard enough and she is suddenly familiar.
“Kiara?”
“Lacy?”
She smiles at me, her eyebrows pointing inward just like I remember, before waving me back to the bar and then walking around to pull the stool out for me. I sit down and she pats my leg.
“What you up to, girl? I know you not old enough to be in here.” She says it with that beam, the one that don’t seem to stop.
I never really knew Lacy, at least not like Marcus did. She was his sidekick back at Skyline High and I never saw them apart, not for almost four years. Then both of them dropped out a few months before graduation because neither of them had nobody to push them into fighting the hallways for that diploma, stuff them into the cap and gown. School’s got as many potholes as the streets, always chipping, always leaving us to trip.
“You know, living,” I tell her, because I don’t wanna lie like Marcus would, but it seems too intimate for this room to hear: how everything seems to be fraying.
“And your brother?” I watch her face turn inward, twist at the corners of her lips.
“You know, the same.”
Marcus dropped Lacy the moment he found Cole, the moment he realized the real world don’t hand us shit like he thought it would. Uncle Ty made Marcus believe that miracles would come to us and he seemed to think Cole was the way in, that staying with Lacy was a segue to a life of hoping without no reward. She got a job and was working forty-hour weeks and Marcus didn’t want no part in it. All he got is half a dozen SoundCloud tracks and no paycheck and here we are: her with her hair tied up in two buns on top of her head, piercings lining her face, and looking like she owns the place. Like she don’t need no light to see. And Marcus still out here waiting, like something’s gonna change.
Lacy stands up abruptly. “You want a drink?” She’s wearing the classic bartender black, but she still shines. “I won’t tell.” She winks and returns to the side of the bar where the man was. He slipped into the back at some point and even if he was to come back, something tells me Lacy’s got more sway than him. Something about the way she moves: spine erect like redwood trees, like she’ll just keep growing upward.
I nod. “Sure.”
“What you want?”
“Surprise me?” I don’t know how to order a drink for myself, not used to anybody asking me what I want. Usually, somebody just hands me a bottle or a plastic cup and I don’t pause long enough to question it. Lacy grabs a bottle from behind the counter and then another one, pouring and shaking and stirring it all up into a glass with one of those straws that’re so skinny I wonder how anything’s supposed to get through them. She adds a cherry, one of the ones too sweet to believe they come from a tree, and pushes the glass toward me. The drink is a soft red, bordering on pink if it wasn’t for the way the cherry draws out the color.
“What is it?” I ask her.
She leans forward. “It’s a surprise. Don’t worry, you gonna like it.”
I bend my head down until my lips touch the straw and suck. It hits my tongue and it’s euphoria spreading across my mouth, like all the flavor in the world combined into a brilliant heat. “Shit,” I say after I swallow, looking up at Lacy.
She laughs. “You always loved something sweet.”
“How long you been working here?” I ask.
“Started as a stripper around the time Marcus and I fell out, but money’s a little more stable at the bar so been bartending the past few months.” The door swings open again and a small group of men in ties comes in. Lacy straightens up. “Place about to fill up, but feel free to stay. Let me know if you want a refill. It’s on me.”
Lacy smiles and leaves to follow the men to a table right in front of the stage. One of them is wearing this polka dot tie that he’s loosening and he’s looking straight at me, the corner of his mouth tilted up. I don’t know why, but his face is interesting to look at and part of me wants to touch it, feel if he has stubble, if his skin is soft enough that it would turn pink just from my fingertips. I return to focus on my drink and I wonder if I should stay, if being a young girl alone in a strip club with no money could make this night worse. But a free drink is a free drink and I’m tired of the endless walking and rejection from every employer in Oakland, so I take a sip. And another. And another. I slurp until the sugary red is gone and then ask Lacy to make me a new one.
Marcus can’t stand nothing red after Mama. It’s not like he was the only one who had to see it, but he was the one who tried to clot Mama’s bleeding wrists, pick the razor up from the floor. He was the one who told them not to take me, his newly eighteen-year-old body lengthening as if his height could give him the ability to make it through the night without thinking about the color of the water. Since then, Marcus won’t step foot in the bathroom. He showers at friends’ places and pisses at the liquor store across the street.
The sirens that day left us sitting in the only unmarked spot of the apartment, the center of the rug behind the sofa, both Marcus and I staring at the neon tape signaling another spot of DNA, as if the whole apartment wasn’t made up of us and our blood. The social worker left with the police, after an hour of questions following Mama and the ambulance. Marcus had his arm around my shoulders and every time I started shaking again, he’d scratch my arm to remind me he was still the same. I was two months from fifteen. He was the youngest adult I’d ever seen and it wasn’t more than a week later that he dropped out of school. Marcus was determined to hustle for me, to be the man.
We settled in the patch of beige-turned-brown rug and Marcus whispered in my ear, “I got you.” It was like the light finally found its way to Marcus’s mouth because he was speaking sun into me and if Mama wasn’t gonna be there no more, if Daddy was already no different than infertile dirt, then I needed my brother more than anything. He asked me what I wanted for dinner and when I told him I wasn’t hungry, he found Mama’s emergency fund in the pillowcase and ordered us three different kinds of pizza. He ate two slices of each, picked all the sausage off one of them, and left me his plate to wash up. Maybe I should’ve known it’d be like that, me washing up his dishes, cleaning up his ruins, but his arm around me, his whisper was enough for it not to matter. Marcus had claimed me. I was his.
I thought Marcus was gonna be everything I needed after that. He held my hand through Mama’s trial, through Uncle Ty leaving town, through visits to Mama in the overcrowded Dublin prison. And then, two years later, he let it go. Marcus took off to Cole’s, stopped looking me in the eye, left the newspapers he used to pore over in a pile by the door. I’ve been chasing him ever since, trying to get him to look at me.
By the time my fourth glass has emptied out to only ice, the club is full of crawling bodies, every stool and table occupied, the music thump-thumping even though I can’t place a single distinct song. All three poles are in use and dollar bills make their way into the thong of each woman giving a lap dance. There’s something about the buzz of the place that makes me feel alive, not like a girl barely scraping by but a woman free. The way the lights remain just the perfect mix of warm and not-quite-there. The way the music combines with the chatter to produce a chorus of muffled fuzz, like a melodic static. The way every time the door opens to let another cluster of bodies in, the Oakland outside seeps in: a drumbeat, somebody shouting about how we gotta beware the cracks in the sidewalk, a siren.
Lacy comes back from making her rounds with a tray of half-empty wineglasses and it don’t make no sense to me why anyone would pay for something just to not drink it. I catch her eye and point to my glass, but I can’t seem to locate the words to ask her for a refill.
She laughs. “I think you’re done, Ki,” she shouts.
I pout, spinning around on the barstool. Polka dot tie catches my eye again. He’s talking to his suited friends but staring right at me. I come back from my spin to see Lacy mixing drinks and the room suddenly feels overcrowded, like every pocket of breath has disappeared in that single spin. I shout out to Lacy across the noise. “Gotta get out of here.”
She raises her eyebrows, her figure even taller than I remember it being when her face elongates like that. “You sure you can make it home?”
I wave at her. Less at her and more at the outline of her, the figure that drags upward toward the ceiling. I lift myself off the stool and gather my footing, walking toward the door like it’s hiding something glorious behind it. I swing it open and step out onto the street. I know almost immediately that it’s gotta be after ten because Oakland’s shut down, all the lights turned off. The only people on the streets are the ones who live there. That’s what it’s gonna be like for us—Marcus and me—pretty soon. No escaping the sidewalk.
The windchill enters my body, slips under my shirt right to my belly button. Sometimes I think about where my belly button might lead to. Like if it goes to the stomach, joins the slosh of cherry red up in there, or if it’s connected to my womb.
The door to the club swings open behind me and Polka Dot is there, his hair loose from its gel in a way that looks more natural on him, like he wasn’t meant to be that tied up.
“Hey.” I’m not even sure he’s talking to me until he says, “Gray shirt,” and I have to look down at what I’m wearing to understand that he means me. I try to smile at him, but my mouth is buzzing and I think it turns up lopsided on my face, which he laughs at, a low laugh, one that never really reaches its climax.
