Chapter 25
Dontay Back to Sunday School
We were in a large cabin three winding staircases below the top deck. The area was wide open with mounted flat screens and so far I'd counted fourteen leather lounge chairs surrounding and a fully stocked bar. Somehow salted ocean air still found its way through the heavy cherry wood walls. I couldn't tell if it was a live piano or just a recording coming. I couldn't help nodding along as someone played the hell out of “Bennie and the Jets” or Mary J. Blige's “Deep Inside.” Staring out of the giant paneled window as we sliced soundlessly through the black ocean my mind wandered with the chords from the piano to lazier happier days.
There wasn't a cloud in the sky. The Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel was lit up in the distance and I felt a sad pull in the pit of my stomach, tightening in my chest. Somewhere way out there was a little stretch of beach that Eva and I used to go to and bury our toes in the sand. We saw two shooting stars on a night when the sky looked about as clear as it did now and we made wishes. All I'd wished for was Eva.
So much for that; who knows what she wished for?
I snapped myself out of my reverie and looked toward my boy Bear who was busy fighting with his bowtie. It had him looking like a little dark chocolate Chippendales dancer. At least mine complemented me, with my height and baldheaded goodness. I'd rather be Mr. Goodbar or Mr. Clean than Lucky the Leprechaun. We were night and day in every way possible, which was probably why we got along so well. Ever since his girl accidentally got shot he'd been on this new-age spiritual journey, even-tempered, neat, and always organized. I was on an all-expenses-paid crash collision course with hell. He didn't even get salty when I took Eva back after being an asshole about it for a couple of years. Shit, Bear was the one with all the real business sense. When she said she wanted to start a business he walked her through building it from the ground up and even helped me on the road with all those bullshit deliveries.
“Is it fucked up that I'm still going through with this even though Destiny ain't make it?”
I was referring to the elaborate yacht party we were about to have that would be followed in a couple of days by an even more elaborate wedding.
He gave me a sideways look. “Sounds like your woman got you doing what she wants to do. Regardless of how it looks or don't look, happy wife happy life.” He shrugged. “You gave your daughter a good few months and a proper funeralâ”
“A daughter I ain't even know I had until how long ago? On top of being sick she had to think Daddy didn't want her for ten years. I could have fixed that shit sooner, man.”
I fell back into one of the many seats, the leather squeaked and the wood groaned. Splaying my long legs out in a wide V in front of me I scowled at the world in the strands of carpet at my feet. I rubbed my forehead like a dry-erase board trying to wipe away my past and the bad memories all at once.
When did things get this complicated?
“Dontay, man, all you can do is take care of the little girl you got left and don't drink or think yourself crazy behind what went down. I told you join up, let the brothers help. I put in a word or two.”
Bear smacked me hard on the shoulder. He was my ace for life; we grew up across the street from each other. Him and his pops stayed in this run-down bamboo-green ranch-style house with gray shutters. He'd always run to my place and hide out. His pops used to beat his ass like nobody's business over any- and everything. When we got to high school he started wrestling, working out, and he got big on that nigga. That's why we called him Bear, he'd raise up and scare the shit out damn every nigga in school. The next time his pop's tried to give him one of those old-school beat downs Bear handled him like light work; I opened my front door to find his Pops was at our door begging for somebody to call the police.
It was only right that he be my best man for this over-the-top dramatic wedding we were gonna have in a couple of days.
“Nigga you betta nod, smile, and get fucked up if you have to. We stuck out here in the middle of this damn water. I wouldn't walk into a room full of them champagne-campaigning friends of the bride to say you've got a cold. Let alone cold feet.” Bear huffed at me from his mighty he-nigga stance.
I stood and shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my fitted slacks and stared down studying the bronze buckles on my Cole Haans. You'd have thought I was waiting for them to give me some kind of advice instead of Bear.
Straightening my shoulders I took some breaths and started feeling like 007 in my black tux. I adjusted the lapels of my jacket and strode toward the upper deck faking a sense of confidence and purpose I really didn't feel. The air was supercharged with affluence. The hairs on my arm were standing up like I was cold but there no chill. I could feel it like a winning three-pointer, over the shoulder, at the buzzer from half court, nothing but net, eyes closed.
All the black elite and politicians were invited to celebrate and rub elbows. When I'd called and told Pops about me getting married he gave me the same surprised, disappointed congratulations. He wouldn't be making it to any of the parties or the wedding, on account of the accident he had. One of the ladders he was working off of fell four stories and shattered his vertebrae. Years of back surgeries kept him laid up and medicated most of the time.
The pianist, who was damn good, broke into Alicia Keys' “Diary.” I wandered in that direction, stopping in my tracks when my nose caught a familiar scent. If the color pink had a smell it would be the smell of lotus flowers, ginger, and patchouli in the morning. She was the only person I knew who wanted to be buried in Ralph Lauren Romance perfume and the color pink.
Back in the day, Toikea, my stepmom, would get all fancied up and take me to church every single Sunday. Growin' up my family was always on some middle-lower class shit. No matter how hard she tried Toi couldn't accept the karma for stealing and marrying another woman's husband. My family belonged to the race of niggas known as “have-nots.” When I was eight Pops started his little side thing with Toi. She was this cinnamon-brown twenty-year-old waitress with a figure that'd make an hourglass jealous. Ironically Pops met Toi when he took my moms to Red Lobster for her birthday. Moms was in the bathroom and Toi hopped on it, in more ways than one. After that me and Moms had even less than our usual.
Someone should have told Pops that house painters with families can't afford side hoes. They cost more than regular corner hoes. Seriously, you could buy some ass for less than what it cost to keep a side woman, who thought she was the main woman, happy. He'd overdraft the bank account on new rims, clothes, and jewelry that we never saw and mad weekend getaways where we didn't see him either. Money my grandparents sent for my birthday or Christmas usually went missing out the envelope; it probably paid Toi's lights or cell phone bill. The penny that brought the house down was when Pops took money out of my mom's savings account so Toi could get an abortion. I guess Toi got mad when he didn't stay the night to take care of her after the procedure. But, hell hath no fury like that of my mom's when she saw Toi had taped her abortion receipt to our front door.
My parents fought and shouted the rafters down. I was sure the neighbor's neighbors knew our business by the end of that night. I was thirteen the night my mother disappeared.
My mother's screams woke me up. They always got a little heated when they argued but they normally kept it down to sharp whispers with occasional shouts. I slid out of my bed at the sound of the front door slamming and crept to the window. The floorboards creaked under my foot and the washing machine rocked downstairs like it was trying to detach itself from the wall. I watched the silent movie out my window as my moms limped after Pops. She was holding her side like she was out of breath or hurt. Frowning, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and squinted hard through the glass. A panic alarm went off in my head the same blaring red as the stain on the side of her fitted T
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shirt. The words J
AMAICAN ME CRAZY
were barely visible on the back. She was in her house clothes, hair tied up, barefoot. I watched her grab the front of his shirt and he shoved her away.
There was no way in hell I'd let him do that to her. I was sure he'd done it, he'd hurt her, and I just knew it. After all the days we'd scrounged for lights and food. After all the times my moms had to scrape just to make sure I wasn't in school in dirty, holey jeans and my shoes was all right, he had the nerve to hurt her. Me and my mom stood eye to eye and my pops towered over both of us but at that moment anger had me feeling like an oak tree. He'd need some steel and a good fifty swings before he took me down.
I took the stairs two at a time, barefoot, in nothing but my Duke basketball shorts and a black wife beater. Mom's favorite lamp in the living room was busted and the couch was completely turned over. My stomach turned, blood was everywhere, but I kept moving. A trail of blood ran across the couch it dripped over the tan hardwood flooring ending in a puddle where I now stood, in the cul
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de
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sac exactly where I'd last seen my moms standing. Steam rose off the top of my head as I stared at the two dry, blocky outlines on the pavement. Oil from the leak in Mom's car mingled with rain, dirt, and black rocks. They were both gone.
Mrs. Nikoli came wobbling her old nosey ass over from across the way. “Dontay, sweetheart, you all right, baby? The police on the way; let's get you out of this here rain okay?”
I nodded and walked back toward my house. Mrs. Nikoli was the only white lady on our block and that made her the neighborhood first responder. Not like help, but like the first person to look and then call the police if anything popped off. She'd then be the first one to relay her findings to everyone else.
I tried to take up as much of the doorway as I could and she tried her best to look around me. “I'm good, Mrs. Nikoli. I'll be fine 'til the police get here.”
She wasn't budging that easily. Her head shook nonstop from side to side as she pointed her wrinkled hand toward the living room. “You know can't touch anything, sweetheart. If your momma is bad off, they need to see all this,” she told me.
Her words made a knot swell up in my throat and my eyes started to burn as images of how I'd seen my moms last flashed in my head. She had a point; Pops needed to get in trouble for this even if I wasn't the one to mete out his punishment. I must have blinked about a hundred times as I peered past Mrs. Nikoli and stepped onto the porch faking like I'd seen a car approaching. I dropped down hard into the little plastic chair that we used in the summer for car watching and enjoying the weather.
Thankfully she was quiet as she took the seat across from mine. We sat and listened to the rain bounce off the roof of the front porch. I kept taking deep, damp, earth
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scented breaths to calm myself down. Mrs. Nikoli smelled like black jelly beans and a distillery or Ouzo, that insanely awful liquor her late husband used to make. That's probably why she was so quiet and leaning in her seat every time the wind blew.
It took them bastards almost two hours to show up and they kept asking about my peeps doin' drugs or drinking. As far as I know the only person who'd been drinking was standing right in front of them and she was looking stuff over more thoroughly than they were. I got sent upstairs when Pops surprisingly rolled back up. He stopped in the doorway with a look of disgust on his face and sweat staining the pits of his gray undershirt that he always wore like a regular shirt after work. Mom's blood was a big, blotchy dark red moth on the front. It reminded me of one of those Rorschach patterns they show to crazy people.
There was so much blood in the house the cops wanted to know where my moms was and if she needed a doctor or had gone to see one. He said she'd been flying around behind him trying to run him off the road and he lost her. That's all I could hear with my ear pressed against the grate of the vent in my bedroom floor.
Mom's job called the next day because she didn't show up. She wasn't in any of the hospitals, wasn't at any of my aunts' places. Pops got picked up off and on for a week so he could be questioned when she still hadn't turned up. I was wondering what really happened too. He sat me down one night over his version of spaghetti. It was really just the mess that comes in a can and all he did was heat it up to room temperature. The taste was something like mixing together ketchup and Purplesau-rus Rex Kool
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Aid with lots of orange hamburger grease on top of it.
“Dontay, me and your mom ain't been one hundred for a minute.” He started talking between mouthfuls of noodles. “I know you might be upset with me now and you ain't understanding this shit but she knew we weren't working out and caused that whole scene cutting herself and shit.”
Without thinking I yelled across the table, “I saw everything. I watched you push her away.”
His chair slid back scraping across the linoleum until it slammed into the cabinets behind him. Just as my airway was cut off by his meaty fist I was pulled to my feet. He lifted me up until we were eye to eye and my toes were dangling above the floor. Pop's eyes shifted back and forth between mine, heat surged out his nostrils up against my skin, and I held my biting the inside of my lower lip. I wasn't about to be inhaling his recycled air. His fingers tightened. It felt like my lungs were about to explode inside of my chest. I struggled for air.