Given Page 11

  PART FOUR

  That’s what ghosts are . . . spirits living inside you. Your

  eye is like a movie projector, shining them out.

  — Darcey Steinke, Jesus Saves

  LIVING WITH RAINY AND FRENCHY ON THE ROW had been, in comparison, easy: we had separate cells so we weren’t on top of one another, and we didn’t have to share a bathroom. Now Rainy had become afraid of the dark, and insisted the lamp be left on beside my bed at night, as if light were enough to ward off loneliness. Dark creep me out, she said, make my head stand on end.

  Frenchy, on the other hand, with her see-in-the-dark eyes, shrank from any kind of light. When I tried to compromise by switching off my bedside lamp and lighting a candle instead, Frenchy said the sound of the flame hurt her ears, and drew away from me into one of the room’s dark corners. She could barely tolerate daylight. During the days she took to wearing my aviator shades that she had coloured over with a black Crayola to further prevent any vestiges of light from seeping in, but if she woke in the night and blew out the candle beside my bed Rainy would wake, too, and start shrieking. (Back on the Row Frenchy used to call Rainy a human tuning fork. When she struck a high note hard enough, she could break bulletproof glass.)

  Their presence, every minute of the night and day at the farm, was yet another test — a daily reminder of what Vernal had said when he decided to tell me he’d had a vasectomy. He couldn’t bear the idea of having children because all they would ever be able to fulfill in him would be his worst fears. He said that with Brutus and me in the house his life had started to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat, and he couldn’t make room for anyone more. After a while I felt him begin to push the rest of the world out — first his friends, then his family, then everyone he’d ever loved, and finally, even me. “There’s only room in the lifeboat of your life for one person,” he told me. “You have to choose yourself.”

  I discovered later that Vernal had stolen this from a novel he’d been reading, the way he got most of his feelings, secondhand, through characters in books, but this was Vernal’s power — to save himself — and also one of our irreconcilable differences. (After I gave birth, Angel had called forth my own capacity to love: that was his power. I would no longer choose myself, to save myself, that is. I went down and the sea swallowed me. But each time I came up for air I saw Angel waving to me from the shore. It was the sight of him, even as he grew more distant every day, that kept me from ever letting go, from all-the-way drowning.)

  Rainy named my room the Apocalypse Now Suite, after the staccato beat of the ceiling fan that sounded like a helicopter coming down from the skies. She spent much of her time slipping between the wall and my dresser to try and do her hair on the other side of the mirror. When you dead, she said, don’t matter what side of the mirror you lookin on. Both be the same shade of nuttin.

  Even without a reflection Rainy managed to style her hair in whatever shape took her fancy — her favourite being a helicopter with moving rotors. With her dead twins a red mist swirling around her I expected to see her rise, like a medevac chopper along the edge of the South China Sea, scooping up Frenchy where she sat beside her boy on the banks of the Perfume River trying to breathe life back into him.

  What you doing? Frenchy would ask.

  My hair? Rainy would say.

  But Frenchy and Rainy had, in most ways, stopped paying attention to the way they looked, and especially to matters of personal hygiene. Even from a distance I could smell on them the odour of death. Only people who have never smelled death, in the flesh, would say it smells sweet.

  Rainy admitted she’d been the one who’d switched the radio to God Listens every time I’d left the room. She’d taken the mirror in the bathroom down, too, hoping to find herself on the other side, and then hadn’t been able to remember how to put it back up again.

  It had been Frenchy who had closed the window when I went downstairs: she said the sound of water rushing over the stones in the creek hurt her ears. On TV you could turn the volume down, but here there was nothing she could do but use a couple of tampons to block out the roar. (She confessed to having opened my tampons without asking, and borrowing a few.)

  When we had first arrived on the farm, she said, she had enjoyed hearing the creek, but after a while the sound changed — the noise of the water rushing around the stones kept her awake at night. Instead of hearing the lullaby of the water over stones, right away in tune with it Frenchy’s mind would begin to replay the judge addressing the jury, or handing down her death sentence. Frenchy wanted my help to move the rocks in the stream. If we could just alter their pattern, the way the stones were arranged on the bottom of the creek bed, she felt she could get them to change their tune. Frenchy had always believed that by transforming the world around her she would find peace. (In prison it had been a train that kept her awake. She got so obsessed she took legal action against the railroad company, claiming they were deliberately harassing her. When the train passed the prison at 2:16 every afternoon, it whistled and woke her up.)

  My friends kept odd hours, preferring to sleep during the day. Sometimes, late at night, Rainy would creep downstairs and bring back a sugar fix from the kitchen. Other times she would begin endlessly sweeping.

  Twice I had been awakened in the night to the fshhhh fshhhhh fshhhhh sound of her sweeping moonlight from the walls. Rainy had earned her name because at one time shopping and crying had been her hobbies. Now it was crying and sweeping. Take the “s” out of sweep and weep’s all you got left, Frenchy said. You be cryin and weepin both at the same time, yo.

  I weep all I want, Rainy replied. Weepin bring me closer to God.

  Aged Orange had been banished from my room the day my friends had moved in. Frenchy claimed her boy was allergic to cats — if he were exposed to their fur his body would break out in hives and he’d look like he’d been sunbathing naked when a bomb went off in a strawberry patch. Aged Orange was demoted to being an outside cat and spent much of his time clinging like a monkey to the screen doors of the patio, ever hopeful that I would relent and let him in.

  I soon discovered the real cause of Aged Orange’s banishment — the white rat with red eyes who lived in the lining of the HE’s long black waistcoat and lived on whatever fell from his mouth as he tried to eat.

  “Why does it have to be a rat?” I asked Frenchy, exasperated.

  You catch one and don’t gatt his ass — you got a friend fo life, Frenchy replied, kissing the rodent on his greasy lips.

  Despite his youthful appearance, the HE was a sickly boy. Pus oozed from the sides of his head where the bugs had chewed off his ears when his mother had left him to die on the riverbank. He slept standing up, one blind eye open, and from the way he sometimes behaved, slapping his head against his open palm, first one side, then the other, I wondered if the bugs has infested his brain. (On Tranquilandia a runaway slave was punished by having his ears stuffed with carnivorous insects and sealed shut with wax.)

  He wanted the windows covered, day and night, and closed the curtains whenever he could. He lit incense and placed the Qur’an on the bedside table that he had moved to the wall of my room facing east, the wall he would face daily for the five prayers.

  A smelly, bloody discharge issued from both his nostrils and he sniffed constantly, making a glock-glock-glock sound in his throat, and blowing his nose, over and over again, into his red-and-white checkered kaffiyeh. He sounded like a cat trying to cough up a massive hairball.

  The day Frenchy took the time to scrub more than just the surface of blood off her boy’s face I could see God had tested him more severely than he had tested the rest of us. I saw the place where her bullet had struck between his eyes, severing his optical nerve and lodging itself above his nose. She couldn’t be convinced that she had left her son blind. He saw, she insisted, what the rest of us couldn’t see. Her boy saw with the eyes of the heart.

  The HE was responsible for the fly infestation in my room. Not only were t
he flies drawn to the blood he left behind every time he moved, but when the HE’s hair got too unruly Frenchy tried to slick it down with a daub of butter that she also used to polish his boots. The butter attracted the flies, and they stuck to the HE’s body as if he were a living twist of flypaper; only once when a fly landed on him did I see something come loose inside him, as if the boy’s brain had finally got word that the body it lived in had been badly hurt, and he tried to smash off what was left of his face, and broke my water jug in the process.

  The HE, anyone could see, was still angry at having been shot by his mother and left to die. Frenchy said she’d seen her boy manifest himself in a thousand different violent ways. It be what the angry dead do, she said. Rainy was of the opinion that Frenchy’s boy ought to do a few therapy sessions around his murder issues.

  Boys who had been made by hate, I learned, didn’t want to be unmade. In the ten years or more the HE had been dead, he had been fighting more than just his own battles.

  After Frenchy shot her boy and left him by the river, he’d been reborn. He hadn’t been a natural reborn killer, he had had to work hard to make the name he had earned for himself. I asked Frenchy if being shot in the bank robbery hadn’t changed his mind about shooting other people. You stop eating ham sandwiches just cause Mama Cass choke herself on one? Frenchy said.

  The HE spent his teenage years toughening himself up, driving splinters under his fingernails then lighting them on fire, killing time by lying in a burlap sack full of biting ants, in the hot sun. He had joined the army and been sent, along with 10,000 other children, into the line of fire and across minefields. The children were deployed so that their bodies would explode all the mines (the donkeys were “too stubborn” to do it), and clear the way for the soldiers who came after.

  Each child wore a plastic key around his neck, the key that would open the gates to Paradise once he had died a martyr’s death. At one time the keys had been made of iron, but iron had become too expensive and too many of them were needed.

  Before stepping onto a minefield Frenchy’s boy would wrap himself in his desert-sand-coloured blanket (the one on which his dog slept at night) so that his body parts wouldn’t fly in all directions after a mine had been detonated. When the dust finally settled, after the ker-boom of a detonation, he never saw anything more of the other children who’d been at his side. Maybe a scrap of burned flesh or a shard of bone lying around. That was all.

  Day after day the HE detonated mines, wrapped in his blanket; he got up each new morning and set out across the minefields, willing and eager to die over and over again. He blew up so often and so spectacularly that he was given the name shahid as-said, the happy martyr, one of God’s Chosen, the HE, the Holy Explosion. By the time his mine-jumping days came to an end he was left with as many pieces of shrapnel in his body as he had bones.

  When the human wave of children had swarmed the land and won the day, The HE began his training as a soldier. He was made to dig his own grave and was buried alive, next to a corpse, for days. He learned how to handle grenades and machine guns. While many of the other children didn’t survive the first few days — they suffocated in the earth, or threw the grenades too late and blew themselves up — it was the dog test that was hardest for Frenchy’s boy. He loved dogs and would sooner poke out his own eyes than have to watch one be mistreated in any way.

  His handlers hauled him out of bed one morning and drove his dog — the one he’d shared his blanket with — across the parade ground, and shot him. They shot to wound, then ordered the HE to slit his throat. When he refused he was given a rucksack full of river stones that he had to run with on his back, until he collapsed. He lay in the sun, dying all over again, a different kind of death, and the hurt dog limped over and lay down beside him and licked his face. Frenchy said her boy dug a grave for his dog, put its body in the rucksack, and made a cairn out of the river stones. He buried his heart, that day, too, under those stones, knowing a broken heart is an open heart and he couldn’t risk ending up like his dog, bleeding and licking his master’s hand for the rest of his afterlife on earth.

  The next day he woke up ready to kill dogs.

  Rainy’s twins spent their first days at the farm in a red mist, hovering around their mother’s head, wailing whenever the rat poked his head out of the HE’s shirt, reaching a pitch they only could have inherited from their mother, one that caused the windows in my room, and the bathroom mirror, to crack. Rainy added to the problem by ignoring their terror, complaining because we didn’t have TV — the only reality she knew that could save her from her life — reminiscing about the bad old days back on the Row where we all watched “westruns” every Friday night, and the first time she saw a vision of the “Version” Mary in her bowl of microwave popcorn.

  Then, early Sunday morning, the twins, who had been fed on anger, who had sucked it in with their mother’s milk for the short six weeks of their lives, manifested themselves before my eyes, as Twin Terrorists. I was lying in bed listening to Radio Peace and Love when their transformation took place. They appeared out of their fine red mist, covered from head to toe in voluminous white robes. They wore white veils, too, that concealed their heads, so that only their burnt-almond eyes were visible to the world.

  As far as terrorists went, the twins were fairly low maintenance. They prayed for two hours a day, standing, stooping, and kneeling in devotion, and spent most of their free time — the way some girls obsess about their first menstrual period — talking about strapping on their first explosive belt loaded with nails and screws to make the damage from the blast more deadly.

  Rainy was distraught when she saw what her twins had become. You take a huge rip off of yo bong and be smoke and coughin and homies be dyin from how much smoke and coughin there be, that be a suicide bonger, she said. She didn’t approve of children being used as human killing machines. In her religion the power over human life — including the right to take it away — belonged exclusively to God.

  Frenchy tried to explain to Rainy how “sacricide” bombers didn’t think of themselves as killers of innocent people, but as being on call for a holy cause. Muhfo walk in, shout jihad! put the truth back in killin, his body be da bomb. All you needed, she said, were nails, an explosive, a battery, a switch, a short bit of cable, a couple of chemicals, and a sturdy belt with large pockets. That and be pumped to sacricide yo self.

  Rainy thought about this. What he get hisself? Seventy-two-year-old version chillax wid in Paradise?

  Now when the HE began going glock-glock-glock I realized what it meant: he was getting ready to detonate, to relieve the pressure building up inside his head. The only way Frenchy could distract him from blowing us all to kingdom come was by naming off sniper rifles — Remington, Beretta, Mauser, Savage, Parker-Hale, Sig-Sauer, Dragunov, Steyr — like some kind of deranged child’s lullaby.

  I got out of bed and rummaged through the coffin where I’d hidden Hooker’s bottle of vodka, opened it and took a swig. Rainy said pass that bottle, road sister but Frenchy stopped her. You been dead too long, girl. Don’t start wid that now.

  Rainy had always said she could drink any man under the table if she wasn’t already under the table with him to begin with. But she never got drunk — she was too angry for that. The booze would always vanish into some black pit in her soul.

  I put the bottle under my pillow where Rainy couldn’t get at it, and lay back down on the bed. She stretched out beside me, smelling worse than something dead that had been exhumed. I told her if she was going to stay in my room she had to start washing at least once a week. And I said I didn’t want her, with those needles sticking out of her veins, always cozying up to me on the bed.

  Rainy, who once told me she thought her heart was located in her neck, replied that the needles were there for a good reason — to keep her heart from falling out. Then she began to cry, the viscous tears stuttering down her cheeks. Rainy had the ability to work up a tsunami of tears that would send you sc
rambling for drier ground. In the broken heart of her life she was like the bottomless well grown-ups warned their children to stay away from.

  Crying was the one thing she had left that could get my attention. Her tears were brown and pungent smelling; they leaked from her eyeballs and all her joints. Whoever had made Rainy over had done a terrible job.

  I got a facecloth from under the bathroom sink, ran hot water into a bowl, and added a squirt of liquid soap to get rid of the vinegar smell. I hoped I wouldn’t catch Rainy’s crying disease — I’d kept my tears on the inside since I’d lost my son, and I and wanted it to stay that that way. “You got to hide things to keep love, coverin’ up, puttin’ everything on the outside and crying in yo oatmeal on the inside,” Frenchy, when we became friends, had explained.

  I gave Rainy a towel and told her to dry her face and especially her neck to stop the needles from rusting any further. I said I was going downstairs; Frenchy complained I was no fun to be with anymore, all I did was read books and sleep ever since we had come to this house. Rainy had smeared the brown fluid all over her face with the towel so that it looked worse than ever.

  Beyond my window the sky had turned the colour of old gravestones. I left the room when Rainy began reciting “Tree Bline Mice” to the HE’s rat, as if it were a fundamental morality lesson, and the twins started shrieking in stereo and jumped up on my bed, hiking their long skirts up over their knees. I closed the door behind me, wishing I could lock it and lose the key. Knowing, at the same time, losing my two friends and their dead kids who’d come back to get the mothering they’d missed, wasn’t an option.

  Tree bline mice,