The Perishing, page 15
He thinks about it.
His eyes smile. I’ve never drawn him with smiling eyes. “I believe strangers can grow together. Especially when they’re meant to. Don’t you?”
NINETEEN
LOU, 1931
I write: The Endurance Flight Girls: Edna Mae Cooper and Mrs. Bobbi Trout landed at the Los Angeles Municipal Airport this week after spending 122 hours and 50 minutes in the air. It was a new endurance record for women and Morris said I could write the story. I’d begged him. Just one story on women.
A crowd of five hundred people met Cooper and Trout at the airport when they landed and when they were asked how they felt, Edna said, “Guess we may have lost a little weight, but we feel fine.”
Mrs. Trout, the transport pilot, said, “I wouldn’t want to go up again tomorrow, but I hated like the deuce to have to come down. I’ve never felt better.”
Their mood was pleasant, and they seemed physically fit.
I reread my last line, Their mood was … It’s not right. I scroll down the typed page a short distance and fold it over my typewriter so I don’t have to remove it. I take my thin, flat eraser disk and rub its abrasive edge over each typed letter, one at a time, carefully—Morris hates spots on the paper where it was scraped of errors. I use my eraser brush to shoo away the crumbs and paper dust and keep them from falling into my typewriter. Even a small buildup could cause the bars to jam in their narrow grooves.
I retype the line: Despite their cheerful mood and physical fitness, they were rushed to the California Hospital for observation.
That’s better.
I tear it out of the typewriter like a tooth from the gums of a child and hold it out in delight. Morris’ll love this one. My best work!
I lower it to my desk and see a man in my doorway, standing behind my page. It’s not Morris. How long has Jefferson been standing there?
“Looks like a good story,” he says, and I don’t know if that’s a question. Or what I’m supposed to do now.
He sits across from me on the chair somebody stored down here and I wonder if it’s really him there. Should I draw him again? Is this a vision so I can draw him right this time?
“Can I read it?” he says.
He must be a dream—brown vested, tartan pattern, repeating grids of navy and black laid over his long-sleeved button shirt, his coat flung over one shoulder like a brown model in his Sunday best on a Thursday. Out of place like a piece in the wrong puzzle. He belongs at the fire station and places related to him, not in this basement with me, voyaged across his oceans and onto my island.
“Can I read it?” he repeats.
I look down at my unnumbered pages. He’s real. “It’s not very good,” I say.
He smiles at me and it forces mine. He says, “Morris said it’d be alright to come down and chew on your ear about the Route. Maybe an op ed you could write?”
“The Route?”
“City plans to destroy our neighborhoods. I swear to God, Black slaves who were brought here against their will and Natives are the only ones who should have any say on where the Route goes. We’re not immigrants.”
I feel hot around my neck.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have sworn.”
“You can swear,” I say. His cheeks come alight with my words, forming a new smile. One I’ve never drawn. My voice deepens on its own. “You can do whatever you want.”
He clears his throat.
I cringe at my words and stack my story pages on the girls like there’s more than two pages—a whole novel of phrases—switch their order and then write a page number on each. 1., I write. Then, 2.
“Here they are,” I say. “Take your time.”
He reaches for them and I can’t let go. We hold them together like a communion wafer, holy, his spirit speaking to me in tongues I can’t decipher.
I let go.
“Any chance you can come to the station tomorrow for the Sam Haskins celebration?” he says. “First Black man hired by the Los Angeles Fire Department. You can cover it for the paper. I can ask Morris for you specifically.”
I want to nod yes but I’ve made enough errors.
“Will you? For me,” he says. “I want you to come.”
We meet eyes.
He’s my dream alive.
The engine is on display at the center of the fire station. STATION 4 is painted on its side in gleaming gold. From here on the sidewalk, I can see him between the red-painted wheel arches and the folded hose. I’m an hour early. Miscounted the time it would take to walk here from home in heeled shoes. Apparently, I could run in these.
He’s rehearsing his speech, and his voice is leaving my stomach in shambles, my legs lead-weighted.
Quiet now. He flips through the pages of his speech and they crumble and slice air.
Two men, including Sandy, are shouting to each other on the side of the building. They’re washing a second engine, preparing it to go outside along the street where lamps are strung with decorated paper—bright red, white, and blue, the colors of our flag—for parades, for pride. An American flag drapes this engine’s bonnet. The Fourth of July is in just a few days’ time.
Jefferson’s voice begins again, booming loudly without a microphone, and his tone kisses me, leaving trails of goose bumps up my back and along my arms like the footprints of tiny dancers.
He isn’t dressed properly, wearing his cream-colored work trousers and white t-shirt, untucked above his hanging suspenders. The cut of his arms is like a boxer’s. I can see the shape of his chest through the thin white material.
“Is someone there?” he says to the empty hall.
I raise my hand and step out from behind the engine wheel where I’d moved. “It’s me,” I say shyly.
“You made it!” he says, walking toward me, excited, and I can’t help but smile. My skin flushes.
“Am I the first one here?”
He points to outside through the window, where Sandy is fixing the flag on the engine and talking to someone. Women in white aprons are walking in and out of the building behind them. “Food preparers,” he says, and sets down his speech. “They won’t be in the dining hall for another few minutes. We can talk about Sam Haskins there if you want?”
“I don’t want to get in the way,” I say. “I’m early …” He takes my hand and I let him.
We go to a back room, a large hall where already-prepared food is covered. Chairs have been set in a circle around the space, leaving the center for dancing.
At the far side of the room, behind a short wall, fresh-squeezed juice and water pitchers in buckets of chopped ice are out on a long counter. We stop there behind the wall, where he pours himself two waters and gives me one, then hops up on the countertop and pats the place next to him. Our thighs touch when I join him.
“What d’you wanna know about Sam?”
“Can we start with your story of becoming a fireman and move into how Sam’s legacy allowed you to be here now?”
He nods as he drinks from his glass. Sets it down and begins with a story about his father and uncles, who fought fires in Georgia. It was there that he knew he wanted to be a firefighter, but the older men would tell him that this was a young man’s game and he’d dismiss them. “I thought I could do this forever,” he says, “but now I know what they meant. Having to get up at any time of the night when there’s a call, the weight of the equipment, getting up on the truck. The weather. Thirty-two and my body is already feeling like it’s time to retire. I’m not like Sandy,” he says.
“It’s not the death?” I ask him. “That’s not what makes you want to retire? Seeing it all?”
“Why?” he says, refilling his water glass. “Natural selection. I see death almost every shift. Everybody has to play their card.” He finishes his water in a few gulps; his lips are wet. “If I ask you a question, will you answer?”
“Sure.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen or eighteen.” When I’d arrived, my social worker had settled on sixteen and I don’t know if I believe her.
“Or?” he says, laughing. “So, in other words, you’re afraid to share things with me?”
No, I want to tell him everything.
Footsteps move at a smart pace in the hall, coming toward us, jogging. Sandy Paul leans into our space. The way he eyes me and him together makes me feel guilty for doing my job.
“Time to get ready, boss,” he says, and Jefferson hops down from the countertop, shakes my hand like ending a men’s business meeting, and walks out with Sandy. I don’t know whether to stay or go.
I slide off the counter, straighten my dress. Sandy Paul circles back and tells me to eat something while I wait.
The hall is filled now with life and music and dancing, like a low-budget Hollywood party in South Central L.A., but the last Hollywood party I snuck into was with Esther. The Hollywood Hills. Esther said, “If you’re anybody in Hollywood, you need this invitation.” And she had it.
The party wasn’t like the whites-only parties in Santa Monica. There, all were welcome. Jews, Blacks, and anybody else with a gift or charm. Albert Einstein. Charlie Chaplin.
The driveway leading up to it was a giveaway to its glamour. Lit like glowing candy floss, and Mary Pickford couldn’t have chosen a better color. Blue. Mrs. Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had been silent film stars and, true to their art, their home was extravagance in sign language. “Welcome to Pickfair!” the young men said that night, opened our car doors and continued in their glee even after they saw we weren’t white.
Esther and I stumbled past the front door, where we were washed with glints of light reflecting from crystal chandeliers above us, hanging like rain drops on silvery spider webs.
Mary and Doug were two of the four founders of the motion picture studio United Artists. But before they were lovers, Doug was one of the founding members of the Motion Picture Academy and hosted the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. His father was a Union soldier during the Civil War, a lawyer from Pennsylvania who was Jewish. But after his father left, Douglas’s mother changed his surname from Ullman to Fairbanks but that’s only the rumor. And, anyway, this is L.A., where anybody can be whoever they say (and can pass for)—by name or appearance—and nobody worth knowing requires confirmation. Before his fame in Hollywood, he published a self-help book called Laugh and Live, and it lauded the power of positive thinking as a means to raise one’s social prospects.
Clearly, it worked. Their palace was proof. Hors d’oeuvres were pedaled on sterling trays in the hands of white help. Skinny dancers with flat chests swung and bobbed over the music while Esther spoke differently with different people. With agents, producers, actors, and other “important people,” she offered broken English that also sounded guttural, like Cantonese, but with others she’d use a drawl-free midwestern accent that wasn’t hers either. It was her game.
When the tune “Maple Leaf Rag” exploded from the belly of the piano, everyone in the room squealed and rushed to the floor, their bodies jumping, the pianist tapping his fingers wildly across the white teeth of his piano, missing the black ones.
The crowd whooped and hollered and clapped between the melodies, added their own notes. Esther pulled up her dress to show her legs and feet, was sure-footed, spinning and wild like the hair of the man playing piano, his blond strands like hay circling in a bunch like propellers, like Esther. Jaunting, jumping, leaping. “Come on, woman!” Esther told me, and grabbed my hand. But the crowd was wild, as if dancing to the song of their lives.
They created a circle, standing side by side, and made an opening on the dance floor. They did small bouncy steps as they waited and watched couple after couple go into the center and perform dance moves. The risky ones summoned cheers.
“Come on! It’s our turn!” Esther said, yanking on my arm.
“I can’t go in there!” I told her, and just then another couple took their turn inside.
“What are you afraid of?” Esther said. “You can dance.”
“I’d rather just dance here,” I said. To this day, I wish I had said yes and charged in. But I didn’t.
“Oh, don’t be a pansy,” she said. “And for once in your life, don’t be a bystander.”
Inside this station, music is as electric as it was that night with Esther. “There you are,” Jefferson says, his voice a chiming alarm, like we’d had an appointment. “Knock knock,” he says.
“A knock-knock joke?” I say over the music.
“Come on. Knock knock?”
“Who’s there?”
“Wendy.”
“Wendy who?”
“Wendy hell, you gon’ come from behind this wall and dance with me?”
I can’t help but laugh. “We can’t just dance!”
“And be the only ones who aren’t?” Around the room, folks are dancing moves that haven’t been stolen yet, almost everybody partnered indiscriminately, friends with friends; even food servers have been roped in. “At my party,” he says, “everybody dances.”
I won’t be a coward this time. I slide my shoulder blades slowly downward. Roll my hips, circle my wrists in slow turns with them. I flick the bottom of my dress, raise the seam from the floor, show my legs, my feet, and these new shoes.
“I thought you’d be at the colored paper by now.” Another man’s voice rises behind me like tires screeching before an accident. Metal Wally.
“You don’t have to stop dancing,” he says.
I wasn’t gonna, but I am straightening my clothes. “I’m sorry to hear the layoffs didn’t go well for you. I’m still at the Times.”
“Don’t be sorry, I took the severance, wanted to leave anyway. See.” He flicks his badge. “With L.A.’s Snooper now. The real heart of the city. I chose to put my talent on something that matters. You must be Captain Clayton?” he says to Jefferson. “You’re my first assignment.”
“Then I’m honored,” Jefferson says.
“I’ll work my way up, see,” Wally says, and leans into Jefferson like he’s telling a secret. “Truth be told, was tired of waiting for my chance at the Times. They should be called Behind the Times. They don’t have any vision. So watch yourself with her. The Jews run that paper anyway. Trying to take over the world.”
Wally’s eye catches a person more interesting than us across the room, and to see what he sees prompts a hush; the music is background noise. The Black woman is standing in a delicious form-fitting dress, her peach heels like rubber stoppers at her feet, holding in all that sass. Her face is like a European white woman’s, tanned honey, more movie star than commoner. Jefferson doesn’t say “excuse me” or “bye” before he leaves my side for her and does it with haste, like an ocean wave ready to drown her in himself.
“Isn’t his wife a doll?” Wally says.
I watch Jefferson hold her. They fit together. Of course she’s his wife. They’re both the kind of people who’d spend their lives wanting for nothing. And she’s the woman who changed the path of her life for him. Her heart’s possibilities in exchange for his.
TWENTY
SARAH, 2107
I was asked by my public defender whether I killed the man because I flew into a jealous rage.
“Is that your defense?” he said.
I didn’t answer.
If I killed a man, it wouldn’t be for jealousy. Even if he cheated, because I don’t believe in adultery.
That it’s all bad.
But saying so is not other people’s permission to be human. To lie. To cheat. To steal from the one who loves them. Or from those they’ve pledged their monogamy (or some form of it) to.
What I do believe in is the gift of pain and grief that adultery brings. In pain’s power to ground us inside the consequence of our choices. Our partnering. To make us inhabit ourselves long enough to ask, What am I doing with my life? Few actions can plunge people into a personal free fall the way adultery can. Make them look at their smile on the outside and vice burning on the inside of their contradictory selves and ask why.
Like murder.
Presuming you get caught.
Presuming you’d care.
And presuming you’d want to know why you’re lying and breaking promises and hurting people.
But justice isn’t about what you want.
You don’t decide.
Your community does. Your victims do. No matter how much you try to manipulate, they’ll remember their memories, not yours, for the rest of their lives.
How many lives, how many deeds, can I still remember? Are there really thirty-six people in the world who are supposed to be righteous and stay righteous, to justify the existence of the world in the eyes of God? I’ve heard there were eleven. I’ve heard fifteen.
No matter, I must not be among them. Jury found me guilty using circumstantial evidence, which means they guessed from the bits of evidence they were given and determined—as fact—that I’d been overcome by the heat of passion and killed him.
I’ve been called “emotional” before.
What woman hasn’t?
But all humans—men, women, and other—are indisputable emotional beings, though we associate reason and rationality with order, calm, and control, emotion with chaos and unpredictability. Rational behavior is dependent on emotions.
The brain motivates us based on what it’s learned—what’s helpful or hurtful—so emotions rise and roll before we’ve made what we think is an emotion-free, rational, and reasonable decision. So I guess I was emotional when I killed him.
But which emotion? Fear?
And what does it mean to act in self-defense when you can’t die or be wounded for long? Defense of being inconvenienced? Like fighting against wearing a mask in a pandemic because you—personally—will likely recover if you get it? Forget other people you pass it to. If they die, it was because it was their time to. So for the man I killed, I was merely an instrument of natural selection.
No, I wouldn’t lie about that.
I have self-control.
I have my mind. It was my decision to act and it was also an accident. I’m not a killer.
