A Song for Carmine Page 10

  The clouds part above us, and I watch as she catches a chill and shivers from her spine.

  “I’m Z, short for Zaire. It’s cold out here; let’s go in.” She’s wearing a red sweater that wraps around her body and the same jeans from the bar; she is taller in the light than in the dark.

  The lights inside the diner are bright, and I squint as I follow her to a table in the corner with brown vinyl chairs and a red ketchup bottle in the center of the table.

  For the first few minutes at the table, we both stare at the crack in the center of the Formica, reading its lines as though it is a palm telling our future, branching out in either direction, determining our fate. I pretend to look at the menu and study the pictures of eggs and salads and burgers and feel her from across the table, shifting in her seat, staring at the glossy menu, the pictures reflecting in the glass of her eyes.

  “You know, I’ve never had coffee with a black woman before.” As soon as the last word leaves my mouth, I can’t believe I’ve said it. My hand moves to my face to try to somehow push it back in.

  She grabs her bag and gets up to leave. She moves so fast.

  “I should have known. This is some kind of game, isn’t it? Some kind of stupid dare or something, isn’t it?” She’s angry and she walks through the maze of the restaurant quickly on her way to the Honda. I get up and follow her.

  “Wait, please wait. I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say. It was, I know it was. Can we give this another try? Trust me enough for one cup of coffee?”

  She pauses at the front of the restaurant with her hand on the entrance door and she waits. When she turns around, her eyes are more focused and she looks right through me, the hurt flushing her cheeks, her bag folded under her arm.

  “Listen, I’m not an exhibit at a museum and I don’t give lessons on black history, so if that’s what you’re here for…”

  I stop her sentence and touch her on the pointy part of her elbow gently. We look at each other for a long time, customers milling around us, the music above soothing, the smell of grease hanging in the air. We both stop and breathe, and when I let go of her arm, she walks back to the table behind me.

  After the waitress has taken our coffee order, I look at her and smile and realize that something is different about her; she holds something back.

  “Let’s try this again, Z. I’m Carmine. Southern gentleman from Eton with better manners than I’ve shown you so far. I’m glad that you agreed to meet me here. You compel me for reasons I don’t understand.” I don’t recognize my voice, the humility, the neutrality; I’m so used to commanding women, moving them like pegs on a board.

  She pulls her sweater wrap around her tighter but doesn’t say anything. She looks at me intently, her eyebrows curved, her lips pursed, but the remnants of some old hurt doesn’t come out.

  When the coffee comes, she busies herself with the cream and sugar and doesn’t look up at me.

  “I once had this big life in Dallas. I was once rich. I was once powerful. But now I don’t have anything.” I begin in the middle of the story, work my way to the present, try to keep talking so I can keep her close and still.

  She listens, her hand cupping the mug, her shoulders folding in, her gaze soft and tender. This new feeling, I know what it means to share, envelops me and I let it.

  I paint the landscape of life in Dallas, the midnight meals with Ma, the sounds of Pa’s pain, college, the bus ride, today’s breakfast, the vacancy of my future, how I’ve been visiting this old preacher at my pa’s old church and about how I’m trying to learn about things like forgiveness. I watch my hands as they soar in the air and tell my stories as though I am conducting a symphony of instruments, telling each one just what to play.

  As I talk, she listens, and her body softens; I feel the energy between us change from yellow and red to purple and blue. She continues to refill her coffee and constantly adjusts the cream in it, the color changing from dark brown to a smooth toffee, the spoon clinking on the edges of the ceramic cup.

  I start to tell her the story about the boy in the warehouse, but then stop: I don’t want to scare her away, to tell her everything, to turn myself completely inside out. I pick up the menu to order.

  “Carmine, this has been nice, it really has, but I have to go now. I’ll see you around, okay?” She gets up to leave and tosses a few dollar bills on the table, pulled from her back pocket. I watch each of her movements. I don’t say anything, watch her get up and leave, mouth the word good-bye, and sigh deeply. I ask the waitress for another cup of coffee and stay in the booth until the sun comes up.

  CHAPTER 13

  I WAKE UP THE next morning to Ma screaming my name over and over, first loudly, then it fades to a soft sound, each syllable of my name rushing out of her mouth loudly but dry. I come out of a deep sleep and feel it rushing through me.

  I sit up in bed. Stop breathing. Wait. I am not sure if it is a dream I am still in or something else completely. Outside I can hear birds chirping from nests, and it all sounds the same, another morning regurgitated again, but not.

  I hear footsteps coming down the hallway and then my door pushes open.

  “Carmine, come fast, come fast. He’s not gonna make it, he’s not gonna make it.” She’s sobbing into her hands and pointing toward their room with one hand, the other holds her face, covers her mouth, part of her eye.

  I pull my legs out of bed and push to the edge. I want to know how people push one foot in front of the other at times like this. The floor feels cold on my feet.

  Ma still stands at my door. Time is in slow motion; it crawls from one moment to the next. I’ve never seen her face like this before. It’s red-hot; her wrinkles are piled up under her eyes. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I am the boy, she is the mother.

  “Okay, Ma, okay. What’s happened? Is Pa okay?”

  She slides down to the floor and holds her face with both hands now, the sobs turning into moans. I feel like I’m caught in the wild, a herd of coyotes circling me; there’s nowhere to go.

  “He’s… I think he’s stopped breathing, Carmine, I think he’s gone…” She stands up and looks at me, her eyes glassy and red; something has already left them. She’s trying to compose herself.

  “What do you mean, Ma? I just heard his bed squeak a little while ago.”

  “I went in there this morning to bring him his coffee like I always do, and he didn’t move when I called his name, and Carmine, his skin is so cold, his skin is so cold. How long has it been? Where have we been? Where did he go?”

  I pull on a pair of socks, then shoes; it seems like the thing I should do. Ma pulls her hands from her face and takes a deep breath, straightens her dress, watches my every move.

  “I knew he was gonna go soon, Carmine, I knew he was gonna go soon, but…” She’s crying again. I pull the long-sleeved shirt from the back of the chair and go to her.

  “It’s okay, Ma, it’s okay.” I hug her, look down the long hallway beyond her, tap the wood paneling in my room, and walk out.

  The house is so quiet. It’s barely after seven in the morning. I can feel the heat of the sun begin to warm the house, first the floors and then the walls; it’s all a process. Without thinking, I remember Z’s red sweater, the feel of it on my arm as I walked near her; does this thing now separate me from her, or is it all the same?

  I can smell the coffee; the whole house is filled with it. I walk toward Pa’s room and think about all the board meetings I’ve walked into, how many executives I’ve charmed, all the money I’ve made and the things I’ve owned—how none of it can help me at all right now.

  My pajama bottoms drag on the floor, and I pause right in front of his door. I can see the dry, callused feet sticking out of the blanket; he lies flat on his back, his arms beside him. The blue comforter is the same one I remember; I don’t know how these things don’t just disintegrate with time, they just keep going.

  I walk closer to the bed. I feel something moving, somet
hing aroused. Pa is alive. I pick up his wrist and feel the ashy skin in my hands. I find his pulse and count the distant beats.

  I turn around and see Ma standing in the doorway. Her shoulders are stiff and her fingers are in her mouth; she waits for me to tell her something and I am surprised. Somehow I always thought it was them against me.

  “Ma, he’s still alive, he’s not gone.” I drop Pa’s hand and walk away from the bed.

  It had all been written out months before I got here. “Let me die, just let me die.” I’d heard him say it at least a hundred times since, and Ma had it written up, a hand-scribbled note Pa’d tucked under his mattress. He wasn’t one for lawyers.

  I pass her on my way to the kitchen and think about what I want for breakfast. This day will be long, it will be arduous, it will change everything. I always thought the bend in the road would be seen miles before, a road sign, road curves sharply, then time would be going in a whole other direction.

  I move some pans around and put bread in the toaster and crack an egg and fill up a coffee cup twice and do small circles in the kitchen, shuffling from the stove to the refrigerator to the table and back.

  When I finally sit down, I chew on a piece of toast, take my time first nibbling at the crust, then take in the soft buttery center of the bread. I pretend that this is all that there is.

  I hear Ma in the hallway breathing and crying, and it’s easy to think that it’s just the TV blaring in the other room, that these are not my parts and not my people and that I can switch off the sounds at any moment.

  I pick up my coffee mug and take a sip, hold it in my mouth, try to hear something coming from Pa’s room.

  I take the last triangle of bread and soak up the egg yolk that has slipped from the center of the plate, and I slide them both in my mouth. There’s nothing else to do.

  I put the plate in the sink and rinse out my cup before going back to them.

  * * *

  When I was a boy, I’d wished for Pa’s death a thousand times. When he was at the pulpit, when he was in his shed working, when I heard him arguing with Ma in their room, most of all when he stepped out onto the front porch and called my name.

  “Carmine, son, get in here. Get yourself on in here.” He said it sweetly. I could have been mistaken; I know there was more to him even then.

  Sometimes he’d get up at the pulpit on Sunday mornings and he would seem to me like Jesus himself, wise, the son of God all along and nobody knew it. Then we’d get home after service and he’d pick up a drink or backhand me for something or just turn his face when I looked to him, point at the Book, there were so many ways that he ran from me.

  In my room, I’d plot. Sometimes I thought about messing with the brake lines in his old truck; other times I’d thought of asking kids at school to jump him; on really angry days, I would think of taking a kitchen knife to him myself, stabbing him in the gut; but sometimes I’d just wish he and Ma would move away, never telling me where they’d gone and if they’d ever come back. This one was my favorite fantasy. I’d often wake up and first thing pull the shades back on my bedroom window and look for that old truck. It was always there, but I never stopped sort of hoping.

  Death makes you think about things in a different way. I mean, what life is and isn’t. Death sorta brings all of this together, in one solitary place, you in a room with all of these things that belong to you.

  I bring Ma a cup of coffee and sit on the floor with her in the hallway.

  “One of us should be with him, Ma, one of us should be in there with him.”

  She stares off into space, and I pass my hand in front of her eyes.

  “I don’t want to say good-bye, Carmine. That’s all he’s waiting for—you and me to say our peace and tell him it’s all right. If I stay out here, he won’t go. I know he won’t.” She picks up the plastic mug and starts to take a sip, but can’t. I see her eyes fill up with tears, and I take the cup from her.

  “It’s time, Ma, it’s just time.” I look toward the window at the end of the hallway and see the tree limbs move outside of it; the green leaves scrape the window and then brush across the roof. Everything has slowed down, a reel from an old home movie; we sit and we wait for the pacing to change and the story line to move along without us, but it never does.

  “I’ll go in first, Ma, I’ll go in and talk to him and say what I want to say and tell him good-bye. I want to, Ma, I want to.” I pull myself up and lean against the wall. I look down at the top of her gray head and wait for her to talk, but she never says anything.

  I pull up the chair from the corner of the room, a small rickety piece Pa made many years ago, the first of a set that never came to be.

  I push the chair up to the bed the same way I did a few weeks earlier. His mouth is slightly open and his lips are so dry and cracked that they look like they could start bleeding if he tried to talk. The oxygen rests just under his knees; it hums from the other side of the room.

  I can hear Ma weeping in the doorway but I don’t look back.

  “I never asked what it was like for you, how things were when you were a boy, or if you actually believed all those things you’d say on Sunday mornings or late at night after you’d been drinking. I just assumed if you said them you meant them, and I learned to define life by those words.”

  I keep talking but my voice is barely above a whisper. I can see the tips of his shiny toes peeking out from the blanket, smell his sourness, feel the air hovering above us. Pa skips a breath and chokes a little; I can hear the phlegm move around in his chest; the machine hums without hesitation. I start to leave the room but I don’t, grab the edge of the blanket to hold me, twist it. I want to ride this out. I have to.

  I kneel down beside his bed and pause, put my face in my hands, and start talking.

  “See, Pa, the thing is, I don’t know what to do right now. I keep seeing this old preacher; he’s the one at the church you used to lead. Have you seen him around? Well, he keeps telling me I’ve got to learn to forgive, forgive it all. But now you’re dying.

  “I’ve lived my life by taking and by hurting and by never apologizing or looking back or caring about any but my own self. And I’ve seen some stuff, some bad stuff.

  “The preacher told me that all you have to do is take your sins to the Father. And I know he wasn’t talking about you, but see, you’ve been the only father I’ve ever known, and if there truly is a Father up above, I haven’t known him except through you, and I can’t seem to make sense of my whole life and why it’s been so hard to get love from either of you.”

  I pause for a long time, choke back tears, try to keep silent, wipe the sweat off my brow with my shirtsleeve.

  “So what am I supposed to do now?” I walk to the end of the bed and rest my hands on the footboard, pull the blanket over Pa’s feet, go back around to the side of the bed, and sit back in the chair.

  I hear Ma moving around in the kitchen; the tips of her shoes hit the kitchen cabinet doors, and water runs.

  I stare at his face. It’s sullen; there is no color left in his skin. His eyes are closed, but I can see a sliver of his old self where his lids don’t quite close, a white line and then the edges of his blue irises.

  “I know you’re still there. I know you can hear me. I know you want to hear me.” I take off the sweatshirt I’m wearing and stare at his face again. Somehow expect he’ll speak. His open mouth makes a small whistling sound as it pushes out the dry machine air, but that’s it.

  “I want you to know that I’m letting it all go, I mean it. I’m letting it all go. I will look at the past, but I won’t stare at it anymore, Pa. I won’t, and you don’t either. You go, you go in peace, and I will, too. I will try to.”

  I reach out my hand and my fingers climb the bedsheets over to his arm and down to his hand. When I close my palm over his knuckles, I expect flames, I expect electricity, I expect my insides to fold in and die. Nothing happens. I squeeze his hand a little and then let go, cup my own face in m
y hands.

  It had all happened so much easier than I thought it would, the end, I mean. I expected some kind of eponymous climax, a triumphant chorus of music, to somehow feel like a new person, or at least better about the old.

  It was quiet, the air didn’t change, the trees outside didn’t stop to wait or hear and even the mailman slid the mail through the mail slot the same as always.

  When I said my peace, finally said the thing I’d waited my whole life to say, I walk out of the room, I find Ma on the sofa, her face swollen and red, her body a stark desert. She puts her arms around me and holds me. My hands are in my pockets and I wait, smell the top of her head, then put my arms around her.

  She drops her arms to her side and walks to their room. I head to the kitchen and start washing the breakfast dishes.

  CHAPTER 14

  DAYS LATER, ON THE stairs of First Baptist Church of Eton, I am helping an elderly woman up the stairs. The small body is familiar but I can’t quite place it: the lines in her face or her glassy blue eyes or the lean of her back. But I feel as though I should know. I’m losing my edge, its teeth blunt and no longer able to cut, my salesman charm fading like a picture left out in the rain. I think I’ve known her as a boy, but I can’t be sure; I can’t remember where I might have put her in my memory.

  She leans on me for support and we walk up the old concrete steps of the church. I am wearing old jeans, my old leather jacket. I can feel the wind blow up my cuffs, in my spine; my cheeks are warm and my breath is hot. I worry my bones will fail me, but somehow I know they won’t. Every muscle feels lengthened and strained and afraid of the grief, as though it’s the enemy, bound to attack me at any moment. I don’t yet know what it means to feel some of these things or if I need to feel them to really let any of them go.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, son.” She looks me in the face, and in her eyes I can see myself, ten years old and skinny, afraid to make eye contact with a group of women. I can now remember her bringing food and Christmas presents to us the year we’d moved back to Eton from Port Arthur and had nothing. I remember the potato casseroles and breads and fruitcake and gifts that had said “boy” and “small adult woman” and even for Pa, a flannel shirt in a box marked “large adult male.”