There Will Be No Miracles Here Read online

  I think of how it all began and think of another boy in my fifth-grade class, Mauricio, who must have also had some strange things going on in his life at the time. One afternoon, he decided to lie down for a while in the middle of the road. Mauricio’s plan was to lie there until a car ran him over, which would have worked if the first prospective car had not been driven by someone who noticed a small boy in the road ahead, on his back. Mauricio didn’t flinch as the car approached (that’s what I heard) but didn’t put up too big a fight when the driver picked him up and carried him to the principal’s office or wherever he was taken. He was back in class at his earliest convenience but for some reason, perhaps the same reason that led him to lie in the road, did not return with his homework assignment.

  Mauricio! Ms. Davis cried. Now you listen to me. You can go on out and lie down in the street alllll you want to. But until somebody truly runs you over you had better not walk in my room without your assignment. You are not THAT crazy, baby love.

  But what if he was? Or what if he had more sense than anybody else in that classroom? Maybe Mauricio took a few good looks at the strangeness of his life and, having seen more than enough, decided to just lie down in the street and take his chances there. And young Mauricio, who might have had the right idea all along, was struck with the paddle and doused with medication and, I bet, given another chance to try fifth grade—while I, his mad submissive counterpart, toed the line so well and for so long that somewhere along the way somebody said I had a gift—a gift!—when what I had was more of a sickness. And Ms. Davis and Ms. Vance might very well have saved me—never made me go home after school, told me I was it, whatever it was, and I am grateful but I ask myself should I—should we—have joined Mauricio in the street? Two mad boys and too much strangeness, one reformed, one revolting. Oh, Mauricio, I sure wonder what you’re up to these days, haven’t seen you in so long, but I do think of you sometimes and wonder.

  I understand now why someone had stenciled a slogan in green paint above the entryway to Thornton’s upstairs corridor, reserved for fifth and sixth graders.

  WHAT YOU ARE TO BE YOU ARE NOW BECOMING

  So it was. For me. For Mauricio. And even for my mother and father, by the final night the family spent together at the house on Marsalis, toward the end of 1997.

  It wasn’t a full night. Sometime after dark but before bed, Tashia allowed me to hang out in her room for a while. She had flushed most of that too-cool-for-little-brothers stuff out of her system, a process that coincided with her newfound commitment to the local animal shelter. We heard a scream: Mama. Daddy had pulled a fork on her. Not an industrial fork or anything, just the kind of fork you eat dinner with until you decide to stab your wife. Deciding thusly, Daddy pulls the fork and Mama screams. She runs into Tashia’s room and picks up the phone. 911, of course. Either she hangs it up, just a warning, or Daddy runs in and hangs it up on her behalf. Whatever the case, the police do not like people playing on the 911 line and so they rushed immediately to our house and began their investigation. I was not questioned. The police also hate to show up anywhere without producing some results, good or bad, so they advised the woman to leave with her children. We three left in our nightclothes, in a hurry, Mama’s face on but runny in places. I assume we left in the Benz, since the cops didn’t take us anywhere and nobody picked us up and we didn’t walk. We arrived, someway, at Old Ox Road like Indians following the leaning pole in a daze of divine insight. No knocks no doorbells no explanations, that I remember.

  The way Granny stood over me as I ran water for a bath made me worry that we could not stay there, even though we had no where else to go. She hovered in the doorway—Now what is going on?—but didn’t holler when I kept looking into the water, silent. Just shuffled away, going from room to room—Now what IS going on?—as if she would find her house empty again if she moved from station to station, asking the same question. She returned to the bathroom door. I was still there. Still didn’t know what was going on, what chain of events had turned a smiling husband and wife into a fork-wielding man chasing a screaming woman. Still don’t know. Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of a slippery slope and find, instead, a cliff. Maybe that’s what happened to them that night or maybe, bless their hearts, they had spent a great deal of energy keeping it together—since my tenth birthday, since the seizure, since the beauty convention or the move to Columbus or the first time they met. Who knows? It’s amazing, either way, how quickly you can become a thing you’d never thought of being and may not even want to be.

  chapter FOUR

  Dead, for example.

  It still seems odd, how quickly Papa died. One day he was admitted to the hospital, after a new stroke or due to effects of an old one. A few days later, Daddy—who, by the way, moved in with us on Old Ox shortly after we fled him and the house on Marsalis—said C’mon Scooter, and though I probably did not hurry I still grabbed my shoes and went.

  The hospital seemed far too big for the few patients and visitors inside. We were shown to Papa’s room, which seemed too big for him. Too cold. He lay in his big bed, propped up. Asleep. Say something to Papa, Scooter, Daddy said.

  I didn’t want to wake him up, so I just patted Papa’s arm, which was also too cold, I thought. I whispered Hey Papa and, not knowing what else to say, patted his arm again. Daddy dragged a chair over to Papa’s side and said, respectfully, Hey Daddy. Papa was covered with a thin blanket and Daddy rubbed the blanket, perhaps to add a little heat. He rested his hand on the blanket, over Papa’s shin. Laid his forehead on the back of his hand.

  He let out a cry so loud, so untamed, that I thought at first he might be laughing like the good old days, but then I saw that there was wetness streaming down his hand to the thin blanket, and then, though I had never seen nor heard him cry before, I knew that he was weeping. Uncle Moe, his eldest brother, who had been standing in the corner, took me out into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind us. He’ll be all right. But on the other side of the door I could hear my daddy calling out through all those sobs. Wake up, Daddy, he begged. I’ll take you on home, said Uncle Moe.

  Later that evening Daddy called me at Granny’s house. I’m on my way to pick you up, he mumbled. There was wailing in the background. Why, Daddy? I asked. He hung up in my face.

  I don’t remember speaking to him, even seeing him, again before Papa’s service. Or at the service, though I know that he was there. It was hard to see anybody in that great mass of mourners, genuine and not—some both, like me. It is true that I was sad, shed honest tears, but it is also true that whenever Luke began to cry I started crying, too, just to be sure nobody thought that anybody was more sad about this death than I was, or that Papa meant more to anybody else than he meant to me. And sure enough, every time I began to weep somebody looked upon me with concern and somebody else put my head in their bosom and I suppose that you could surely say I was an awful human being at eleven . . . but death makes people, even children, do strange things.

  For example: around the time Papa died, Daddy sold the house on Marsalis for twenty-seven thousand dollars, which did not include the value of all my and my sister’s belongings that were left behind or moved to storage and then lost when the fee went unpaid. The Benz must have been sold, too, since some post-death morning Daddy stumbled into Granny’s house and said he’d been in an accident. Outside, instead of the Benz, was a silver Buick with its windshield bashed in.

  In April, Uncle Moe called Granny’s house phone and said that Daddy had been shot and was in the intensive care unit. Later he appeared on her porch and said to me and Tashia C’mon y’all, you need to go see your daddy. That was news to me, but I complied, of course, and rode out to the hospital and stood at the foot of Daddy’s bed. Aside from the staples running down his stomach he looked like he was going to make it and he did, depending on what you mean by making it.

  I did not see him for some time after that. My sister did,
one morning on her way to school. She was riding with Granny down Marsalis, when there, on the corner, she saw her father. They saw each other, in fact. He did not recognize her.

  That was August, I believe. In September, Daddy was arrested for stealing cigarettes from a corner store. Twenty-seven thousand dollars had not lasted long. Sure would have been nice of him to share a couple dollars with me or my sister or with Mama, especially around Christmastime. Just like the past two years, I’d ripped a single sheet of paper from my notebook and titled it “Casey’s Christmas List,” wrote 1 on the left side of the first line, and Computer next to the 1. Submitted it far in advance. Early Christmas morning Mama presented a large wrapped box, big enough for a CPU. I rushed to tear that shiny paper to shreds and find my satisfaction but instead found a two-tiered VHS rack. I didn’t have any VHS movies, though, besides the Ben-Hur that Auntie O had bought me some years back.

  Mama flashed that yet-shining smile. You like it, Man? I flashed a smile right back. Mmhmm, Mama, I sure do. Thank you! I remain one of the very best liars you will ever meet, thanks to my mother and father, who also taught me never to ask anybody for anything.

  For example: I did not ask Clarice to courier me downtown to the Lew Sterrett Justice Center to see my daddy. And yet she surely did, at least once, pick me up and drive the back roads to the jail, pulled into the underground parking lot, past the enclosed outdoor exercise area. Walked with me inside, where I was inspected like I’d committed a crime myself, and then sat, waiting, in those welded-together chairs until it was time to go sit in a single bolted-down chair and look at Daddy through that dingy thick glass and talk to him through that spit-aroma’d phone receiver. I hope you don’t get the sense that I had something against people in jail or even my daddy, though I guess I did have a few things against him at that time. It’s just that I did not and do not understand why moral support has to come at the expense of children. I would have gladly, maybe, written a letter or something, but I had no interest whatever in going to jail to see anybody and I bet many of the other children—all those I’ve seen dragged off to prison to take a portrait in front of that palm tree background like they’re at Disneyland or somewhere similarly magical—would also like to stay away from jail, just as everybody else I’ve ever met prefers to stay away from jail. If we are fighting, as we should, to set folks free from jails, then we should also have sense enough to keep innocent children away from jail, too.

  But even if I had not been tramped down to the prison, I would not have escaped my father altogether. When a once-great man decides to lose it, or accidentally loses it, somebody is liable to write about it in the papers, even if you’re only twelve and have done a decent job keeping your business to yourself.

  * * *

  —

  Casey—Ms. Davis slid up to my locker one March morning—are you all right? She looked so concerned that I wondered for a moment whether I was all right, not wanting to lie to her.

  Yes, ma’am.

  She hooked her arm through mine and shuttled me to her desk. Handed me, folded over between her red fingernails, a copy of that day’s Dallas Morning News. On the front page, above the fold, was Rod Gerald just where I’d last seen him, behind the glass down at Lew Sterrett, with the headline Lost Options: Once the Pride of Texas, S. Oak Cliff Star Saw Life, Dreams Sacked by Drugs.

  The story also took up the space below the fold and some of the inside of the first section, photos and quotes, you name it.

  It’s not sad, Clarice told the News. It’d be sad if he wasn’t guilty.

  I thought it was pretty sad either way, but what did I know. I was only twelve and was too young to have an opinion. Not, of course, too young to die or be caught up in the Rapture. And no longer too young to be taken to the Facilities to see my mother.

  There were so many of these places around Dallas—Green Oaks, Timberlawn, Cedars, etc. etc.—and each was the same, more or less: an office-like building hidden behind trees, full of whispers (What’s the patient ID?) and brochures (“Signs Your Child Is Suicidal”) and buzzers. Door after door of buzzers. Mama and her associates were kept behind the final buzzered door, though not for yearlong stints, if only because by 1999 the insurance companies didn’t put up with anybody asking for too much help. So she was kept there for a week, two weeks, maybe, and Tashia and I were taken there, wherever there was, to visit once these stays began, sometime after Papa died.

  Each Facility had its own approach to visitation. One, within a larger hospital, reserved a lounge where you could sit with your relative without supervision, as long as you whispered and never needed to go to the bathroom. Another designed separate wings for drug recovery and psychiatric care, each wing with its own communal visitation area and its own little lawn or smoking corner. Thanks to the News, I know that Tashia and I visited Daddy at least once pre- or post-jail in the recovery wing. I’m inclined to say we visited Mama in both wings. I’m also inclined not to say that. Multiple people alleged that she needed recovery around this time, and she confessed to it at least once, and I’ve repeated it. But a drugged person sometimes closely resembles a manic person, and both drugs and mental illness can rejigger the brain in such a way that memory becomes unreliable. So since I never saw my mother use any drug and I am not convinced that her people, me included, did enough work to know the root cause (let alone the effects) of her behavior—and since I know of many children who would lie to protect their mother’s honor—I will only say for sure that we visited her in the wing where she received psychiatric care, if you want to call it that.

  I won’t tell you what I saw in there. Either you’ve been to such a place yourself and know, or you haven’t been and should be glad. All I’ll say is this: if I ever get the chance to hold someone accountable for what I saw and heard, what was done and not done to and for my mother and all those other patients . . . well, I sure hope I have the guts to take it. But I also hope I’m in the mood to be honest and tell whoever was responsible thank you. The Facilities never failed to keep her in one place for a while. But a while ain’t forever and so, in those days, the day always came when she was sent back into the world, a free woman, threw off the yoke of catatonia, with plans, big or small, and places to go, and a new promise: I’ll be right back.

  To be fair, I remember her telling me that only once. I was standing or squatting in the front yard. She flung the screen door open, rushed down the two small steps, not panicked, excited maybe, face on and shades on. I believe she had her purse. She cut through the yard, between the hedges and a chinaberry tree. Smiled at me as always and tossed those words—Baby, I’ll be right back—K Mama see you later! I took her at her word. I also assumed that right back meant in a few hours or later today but nighttime came and then the next day and maybe a few more next days, too, I can’t remember. But I do remember glancing up the street every few minutes while I played in the yard and I remember staring out the window in the living room once I went inside and I remember listening for the front door in the night, however many nights went by before she came right back.

  As I later learned and proved myself, once you get away with a major lie a whole new world of possibilities opens up, possibilities that don’t require lying at all. That might explain why she only said I’ll be right back that single time. There was another afternoon she simply was not there when I got home from school and, some unknown string of days later, called, cheery Hey Man I’m over on Moonglow tell somebody to come pick me up. We did that right away. And an evening when Shon spotted Mama speed-walking behind the little shopping center on Red Bird and invited her to get in the car and come back home. She arrived, still smiling, talking fast, no gifts but herself.

  I want to say I remember yet another capture-reunion: a sunny afternoon, me in the backseat of Granny’s car, Tashia up front. Up ahead, alongside the highway, I saw a woman with burnt-blonde hair. Granny there go my mama right there pull over! She pulled over. Put her
hazard lights on. I stuck my head out the window and yelled over all the highway traffic, waving—Mama c’mon get in the car! And boy she was so glad to get off her feet she hurried down the grassy hill and hopped on in.

  The only problem with that memory is I know that, many times, I mistook random women on the sides of roads for my mother, imagined many schemes for stumbling upon her, trapping her even. So I can’t swear that this highway sighting was real. Hope and delusion, often hard to distinguish, also make folks do strange things sometimes.

  For example: I turned to sorcery. It wasn’t any serious voodoo business, really. Some days of absence had passed and it struck me, as from above, that I could conjure up my mother just by walking perfectly: from the top of Old Ox Road at R. L. Thornton down to Granny’s house, placing one foot, one foot only, in each sidewalk square. I could not let two feet land inside the same square. Could not let any part of any foot touch the lines between the squares. Could not skip a square, all the way to the last square at the last blade of grass that separated Granny’s lawn from her driveway. I bullshit you verily not: it worked. No missteps, reached the driveway, looked at the porch, saw my mother there, cigarette in hand. Hey Man! Hey Mama where you been? She didn’t tell me but it didn’t matter.