There Will Be No Miracles Here Page 4

  What’s that, Mama?

  This is Mama’s mascara, Man.

  Huh? I could never fully make out what she said when she put this stuff on, since she always pulled her mouth tight like she was placing the last bolt in the Brooklyn Bridge and didn’t want to kill a million people by losing focus.

  Mascara, baby. Mascara.

  Ah, okay.

  When I wasn’t watching this from the toilet, we’d talk. Well, I’d talk, and she’d offer giggles and uh-huhs in return. Every now and then I had an idea I wanted to share, the first of which came to me when Daddy’s friend Charlie Brown visited. I had never seen Charlie Brown before and haven’t seen nor heard from him since, but he spent one night with us, leaving parked outside a white spaceship the length of three or four parking spots. He called the spaceship an eighteen-wheeler and called himself Truck Driver. Charlie Brown said he had seen the whole country, and that he slept whenever he wanted to, on a bed in the back of the spaceship’s main cabin. When he wanted to bathe, which he didn’t have to do every day, he just eased off the road and went into a big gas station to wash off and buy a soda pop. Charlie Brown made enough money to live just fine and even to send his little boy Power Rangers action figures. Before he left us, Charlie Brown let me sit in the captain’s seat of his spaceship, and even though I was small I could see over all the cars and some of the houses and could imagine what it would be like to ride that spaceship and look down over all the land for the rest of my life. I decided then that I, too, would be a truck driver.

  The first person I told about my plan was Auntie O, my mother’s oldest sister and my godmother, whose chest was so fantastic you could sleep on her during church without leaning far, who always carried Juicy Fruit in her purse, a romance novel in her backseat, and a vodka-grapefruit toddy in her hand, and whose face was so flawless, perfectly painted with shimmer and color, that she never let anyone kiss her directly. She had been Miss North Texas State (or something close) in her twenties and, lacking any banner to carry around in middle age, decided to put her name on the license plate of her gold Honda: O West.

  Auntie O, I’m gonna be a truck driver when I grow up.

  Chile (she held chile longer than anyone else in the family), “going to be,” not “gonna be.” And, honey, uh-uh, truck driver? We don’t do that.

  Oh.

  Sitting on the toilet the next day, I told Mama that I wasn’t going to be a truck driver anymore because Auntie O said I couldn’t.

  What? Mama always bit off the end of her t’s like a hi-hat. Baby, O don’t know nothing. How’s she gone tell you what you can’t do when you grow up? Uh-uh.

  She was more upset than I had been, just as she was whenever anybody did or said anything to me that wasn’t to her liking, regardless of my fault in the matter. And so I figured that she’d heard enough of my complaints over the third grade, one being the creepy Community First deacon who drove me there and back each day, when I woke one morning to find her face already put on, her first Benson & Hedges Menthol Light already smoked, her coffee mug already lined with red lip prints, and the keys to her Mitsubishi Eclipse in her hand. Gone and get ready, Man, I’m taking you to school.

  going to school

  Get in the car. You’ll have to get in the back this is a two-door and she lets me sit in the front but sit behind me because you’ll have more room and there’s a hump in the middle so you can’t sit there sorry. Mama really can’t sing but that doesn’t stop her and her driving is shaky but that doesn’t stop her. I have my own fake wheel on my side and I can do what I want. We’re off who knows what’s on the radio I don’t but I know I can change the station anything you want to hear? K104 is on there’s a song that plays every morning that is everything.

  I love school.

  When I wake up early in the morning, I say oooh.

  Tonight K104 will play Ginuwine and you can call Cat Daddy for his Confession Sessions but in the morning we’ll all believe that school is the greatest thing to happen to us the song is just that good.

  We’re gonna take the road that loops around the city and separates my sinner family from my saint family whichever is which who knows I don’t but I’m just gonna sit up here and watch the trees zoom by ain’t it strange how these trees creep up from far away real slow almost floating in place and then when they get close enough to see our face they’re zooming by like a bat out of hell. The white line my daddy told me to watch in the rain does the same thing—so many patient dashes up ahead then a panicked streak running under our car waving bye-bye behind us. Can you feel that? It’s no care no worry no nothing. Hold on a minute.

  Mama which way are we going today?

  We’re on the right road but we’re turning in the wrong place I mean we’re turning into the other side of the street and there are cars over there that’s not where we want to go even though I don’t know much of nothing.

  Mama.

  Why won’t she answer me?

  Mama!

  I’m in the floor. I look up at her. Her arms are so stiff she’s jerking the steering wheel like it’s hurting her she’s got her head pushed back against her seat does your neck hurt why won’t she open those big eyes and look at me why does it sound like she’s swallowing something that won’t go down Gone down water stop making my mama try so hard her face is so bunched up did she smell something bad does her stomach hurt is she dead can you see what’s wrong with her? And our car’s all messed up dang that man looks mad his car’s all messed up too he’s getting out he’s mad he’s coming over somebody else from another car is coming over why do they look so mad and now like they saw something they didn’t want to see stop looking at my mama like that c’mon wake up we gotta go she’s gone she’s turned off she’s not studying me she’s got her own thing going on and didn’t even tell me about it guess I just gotta sit here not gonna cry with these people all in my business didn’t plan on my mama being dead but dead people don’t move around like that she’s a fish got pulled out the tank too soon and got some super strength in her fin arms. Now they’re knocking on the window Let her rest! Not talking to strangers! Mama c’mon get up she’s not jerking not pushing her pretty head in the seat no more can’t go no further hold on she’s coming back somebody put some water in her mouth while she was gone she’s got a strand of blonde hair stuck in her shining white tooth but now she moves. Here she is. Mascara smeared a little bit I wish she didn’t cry in front of these people. Casey—Casey—she just took a little stroll just needed a catnap—What happened?—I’m fine—What? All out of my control now some woman’s opened the door now she’s got my mama some man thinks he’s my daddy Get your hands off me! But I don’t say it got to respect adults I really want to be out of the middle of the street all these people looking at me like I got a problem this is embarrassing why did you do this Mama just sat up and left like that and messed up the car I don’t know nothing no numbers how to drive what’s wrong with you no school today.

  chapter THREE

  I bet the third grade would have been a hell of a lot more compelling if someone there, the janitor or crossing guard even, could have taught me how to help my mother—which, prior to being driven into three lanes of oncoming traffic, I did not think necessary.

  First I would have needed to know how to slide her foot from gas to brake mid-drive and turn the wheel so we could coast into a parking lot or crash into something cushiony, a ditch maybe. I would have also needed to know how to tell a seizure, a burst of electrical activity in the brain, from death, the end of electrical activity in the brain. I might have surmised then, though probably not, that Mama’s brain had done this before, a few moments before she acquired that scar on her shin. Blacked out in the bathroom, holding a mirror, she told me once I finally asked.

  Perhaps I would have then put two and two together to reckon that all this bathrooming was part of a clever ploy to avoid her regular activities, if not eve
ryone entirely. But that would have required some other knowledge I did not have at that time: what exactly bipolar meant, which sounded like a decent thing to have, since bi meant “two” and I had been taught or assumed that more was better. I also assumed, wrongly, that bipolar and manic depression were different things, since I’d overheard both terms from my mother’s mouth and others’ behind her back, though never said to me directly. If I had been spoken to I might have asked, or at least wondered, how manic depression was different from regular depression, which seemed bad enough on its own without somebody calling you a maniac, which is what I figured manic implied. They didn’t tell me nothing, though, and I didn’t ask, and I did not yet have the Internet to find out on my own why, for example, Mama was able to cry for less obvious reasons than anyone I knew, longer and more freely, and laugh for less obvious reasons, too. That these and other gifts, these imperfections that had been so good to me, were actually burdens. That she’d become a burden to herself and others back in 1992 and went, therefore, perhaps against her will, to a facility, not a beauty convention. And yet this visit must have been a waste of time for all involved, since nobody seemed any more able to help her and seemed even less interested, now that I think about it. But instead of yelling at her or calling her crazy or telling her she needed to get out of bed and do something, anybody who had a problem with her could have just asked me to figure it all out and I would have gladly done so, after some basic training and a reprieve from third grade. People always underestimate the power of children and that is probably why the world is so messed up right now.

  Anyway, all I knew that morning was not much, which I am happy to blame on the fact that I was eight years old, but I wasn’t all right and holy, either. I was embarrassed to be stuck in the middle of the street and I was also upset that Mama let those strangers see her, face undone, strapped onto a stretcher and placed into an ambulance in broad daylight. Aside from that, I was thrilled to escape school for a day and I bet I smiled when Shon arrived on the scene, earrings dangling, with her shredded jean jacket and her half-blonde half-black bob, smacking her gum.

  Hey, Man, you alright?

  Shon didn’t demand honorifics—I didn’t have to call her ma’am or auntie—she didn’t listen to Bobby Bland like Granny, or Kenny G like Aunt Ronnie (my mother’s older sister, who was like Christmas Eve all the time). Shon listened to Prince, even though she had to come home and pray after seeing him in concert. She was the one who taught me to tie my shoes, who drove me up the street to fetch my lunch kit after I threw it at an older boy and ran, who took me to Six Flags every year, where she left me with Auntie O to ride the kiddie rides because she didn’t have time to be boring. And though she was a serious lover of Christ—she told me never to touch the horoscope rolls at the grocery store because that was the occult—Shon made reading the Bible every night cool because the one she gave me had a white leather cover and gold embossed lettering.

  Mmhmm, I’m fine. And off we went.

  And before long, maybe that evening or the next day, Mama was fine, too. Back in the bathroom, smiling again, smoking. Only unconscious when she went to sleep at night, which was no big problem because she let me know—night Man love you night night Mama love you too. Her car was ruined, sure, but that was also not a problem: behind a wooden fence on wheels out at his country home in Lancaster, Papa had a cavalcade of once-luxury cars, even a Lincoln limousine now filled with wasp’s nests. From these dry bones his baby son freely chose the final three cars of our family.

  The first was a Deuce-and-a-Quarter the color of brussels sprouts, which Daddy drove only once because it wouldn’t start again. He parked it in the stale garage attached to our house, and he and his friends spoke of the Deuce-and-a-Quarter like I’d someday hear a Yale tour guide speak of the Gutenberg Bible.

  The second car, which Papa delivered with real pride—Now take care of this one, Roderic—was a 1975 periwinkle-blue Cadillac DeVille. The car was so long that its wings hung out the back of most driveways, so wide that I could lay my full body across the backseat, and so old that when I did, I would sit up with periwinkle-blue dirt all over my clothes, smelling like a home that should have been condemned by the city.

  Somehow, my mother and father decided it was a good idea to pick me up from school in this car. My elementary school, Robert L. Thornton, where Cleo and Dorothy had sent their children, sat at the top of a hill, up the street from Granny’s house, and I could see, from Thornton’s front steps, at least a block downslope in either direction. When I spotted the DeVille, I fixed my gaze far beyond it, since I believed at the time that I could be invisible if I looked invisible, which only required avoiding eye contact with anybody who was looking at me.

  Scooter!

  My technique wasn’t perfect yet. I ignored Mama’s shouts from the passenger seat.

  Scooter?

  Kept walking.

  Scooter!

  I could not get by.

  Oh hey, Auntie!

  Not the end of the world for my classmates to know that I was related to people who drove cars like this, as long as they were not my parents. I slid into the backseat and turned away from the sidewalk-side window.

  Auntie? Mama was genuinely confused, or seemed so.

  Hey man, you heard your mother calling you.

  That was the first time Daddy didn’t call me Casey or Scooter or even Man like my mother and her sisters called me. He said man like you say to a homeless person—sorry man, no change—and he didn’t look at me in the rearview mirror, just tilted his head and gripped the periwinkle-blue steering wheel and bit his lip, turning the metal key in the ignition two or three times before he pulled down the gearshift to drive us home.

  Thankfully, the Cadillac broke down before long, and we were upgraded once more to one of Papa’s favorites—a nickel-gray, early eighties Mercedes-Benz.

  The Benz, as we called it, did not smell like I was owed a lead-paint settlement, did not get my clothes dirty, and did not have a slot for eight-tracks. It had only one flaw: whenever the speedometer glided past 45 mph, the Benz stalled. We’d be on I-35 in the middle lane or zooming through a yellow light to turn from Marsalis to Loop 12, and the line would tickle 45 mph just before we pooted to a stop. So there I was again, crouched in the floor hoping nobody I knew saw me and Mama waiting for help.

  The Benz was not what I had hoped a Benz would be, though it remained faster than feet and cleaner than public transportation. And its greatest fault was not what it was but where it was and wasn’t. Even this did not matter until my tenth birthday, an event that mattered only because I had attended BB’s tenth birthday party the year before, where it seemed she got more money and more respect than she had theretofore received. So since I was eager to make it to a higher station in the world, I was also eager to be ten. But, thanks to the Benz’s absence on that day, I received, instead of honor, a question.

  * * *

  —

  Hell if I know!

  That’s what I yearned to shout at Aunt Carla, my daddy’s baby sister, when she barged into the house on Marsalis on my tenth birthday and yelled Hey y’all! to no one in particular and Where’s your daddy? to me in theory but, as loud as she was, to everybody. She was the family member I imagine you also have, the one who knows exactly the right thing to say to make public what you had only recently become privately shamed of, like getting pregnant out of wedlock or your daddy missing the biggest event in your life.

  In fairness, I didn’t send him an invitation or anything, just assumed that he would be there on time or at some point. But he often told me Scooter, when you assume you make an ASS out of U and ME, and as the celebration kicked off he was just as right as always, though he was also, for the first time, not where I wanted him to be, which Aunt Carla did not fail to point out again. Sherri, the next-oldest Gerald girl and BB’s mother, carried no fucks in her purse and so she rolled her eyes
and said Carla shut up you know Crow’ll be here in a minute. This, too, was said loud enough for me to hear, either because all my family speaks in an outside voice or Aunt Sherri wanted to pass along comfort without speaking to me directly. Whatever the case, it worked, and so I left the front door area and went to find BB, who Aunt Sherri had just whipped, and discovered her in Tashia’s room in damn good shape, all things considered, tears wiped and everything, playing with two dolls. Aside from suffering well, BB was also a great sharer and a trustworthy person, so she handed over one of the dolls and agreed not to tell my daddy, though I did not yet know this was an unnecessary precaution.

  The front door opened. Maybe I ran to see or maybe I held the doll still to listen or maybe I don’t remember what I did but I know it was not Daddy at the door because I heard Aunt Chandra, Luke’s mother, who didn’t always speak so loud but did often yell and clap with glee, sometimes without reason.

  Oh my God, Casey Wasey, you’re tennnnnnnn!!!!!

  Aunt Chandra was a mortician so spent most of her days making dead people look better (and survivors feel better) than they otherwise would. Such skills transferred well to my tenth birthday party, at least for a while, especially since Luke was with her and had brought a gift for me: a pack of toy cars, maybe ten or fifteen of them, just like Hot Wheels, almost. Since a day did come when Luke shared his room and all his food with me, I want to say that he was, like BB, a wonderful sharer, but I wonder whether he shared out of the goodness of his heart or, like so many awful rich people I’ve met (not that he was rich), out of surplus, a greedy sharing that, in each gift, is a reminder of how much the giver has left. He was only eight at the time, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t know for sure. All I know is that people kept dying and thus money kept flowing into Luke’s household, enough for him to have his own set of toy cars, a fluffy comforter on his bed, a word processor that we enjoyed until somebody looted their house, and the first nice basketball goal in the neighborhood. And some mix of Luke’s belongings and the fact that he was an abnormally cool dude for an eight-year-old led to another surplus: the great heap of friends that Luke had; so many friends that there were days when funeral home chairs had to be unfolded in Luke’s room to contain so many little boys, and the back door to Luke’s room had to be opened for ventilation. This surplus, too, Luke shared, and so his friends became my friends, chief among them BK—Big Kid or British Knight, still unsure—who was even willing to protect me with his reputation by the time we started high school, since legend was that he had knocked a boy’s eye out of the socket in the Black-Mexican War of 2001. (He grew up to be an ad man, you might like to know.) That was all still a few years off, though. For now, I appreciated Luke’s gift but did not need his room, and BK was not my friend nor at my tenth birthday party—and neither was Crow, as Aunt Carla reminded us once again when Aunt Chandra cheered Ooh come on y’all it’s time for cake!