SJ looked at the wood with a professional eye, turned it over to look at the back, where they had written with a black marker, “To Wesley, with love From Art and Ell; September 25, 2005.”
Dot asked Lucy if Wesley was all right, and Lucy said, “He allright. He just don’t like to show his emotion sometimes.”
The next day, a Saturday, Lucy and Dot’s half-sister Leeshawn took Wesley to buy a thank-you card. Lucy and Leeshawn had
formed a friendship, and Lucy would ask SJ if he was going to “hook up” with her. “She like you a lot, Samuel. You need someone around take care of you. Look like she good for you.”
Leeshawn. SJ had known her for a long time, she was younger than the rest of them, ten years younger than SJ. Leeshawn had had ups and downs, had a bachelor’s degree in communications from Texas State, but had logged some time on the dark side of the street, years ago. She had gotten married, moved to Los Angeles, where she had been for years, and had moved back a year and a half before. She worked now as a secretary for a law firm and did well, had her own place, had raised a son who lived in Albuquerque by his father.
One day, after a dinner or two in the group at Aaron’s, at the beginning of October, Leeshawn called SJ at Aaron’s in the mid-morning, saying, “I’m off for a day. Would you like to go for a walk?”
SJ, who was watching the television in his pajama bottoms and a flannel shirt, didn’t ask where or anything else, only said, “Can you come by in about an hour?” He showered, shaved for the first time in three days, put on a fresh shirt that he had bought on a trip to the mall with Dot.
At the park, walking, Leeshawn pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to SJ. He declined, saying, “I quit when the doctor told me I needed to.”
“He hasn’t given me the red light yet,” she said, lighting one.
They talked, they walked around. Leeshawn asked sensible questions about what SJ thought about the possible future in New Orleans, asked whether he was in touch with friends. She asked if he thought they had dynamited the levees, as some black residents of the Lower Nine were claiming.
“I would be very dubious on that,” SJ said. “I’m not saying they couldn’t, but I don’t think they needed to even do that. The levees broke all over. I don’t really see that they did that.”
“It does seem like folks are having a hard time getting in to look.”
SJ appreciated the concern, but it was one step too much for him to go into the conspiracy thing. Who was going to make the decision to do it? The City Council? Not with Oliver Thomas on there, a son of the Nine. The Mayor? Highly doubtful. Who else? Too much chance them getting caught. They didn’t need to anyway. All they had to do was make weak levees and that was it. He was sick of thinking about it, and he found anger hissing inside him like a python. Except pythons, he thought, didn’t hiss. Boony had carried a book on snakes all the time they were doing reconnaissance until a mortar broke his sternum and that was something that was not to be thought of, dismissed. They used to catch snakes when they were kids over by the canal or they would go and play by the St. Maurice wharf, G-men or whatever it would be at the time and I like grape and you like strawberry and Bobby’s sister like mixing lemon-lime and peach and your mama got a pussy like an old man’s dick if I catch you say that again I will whip you until you can’t walk do you hear me Samuel and they would stand on line to see Butch and sometime Mama asked them to bring her a root beer and they would sit out on the front steps over on Dorgenois and if it was a Sunday sometimes they would hear a band coming, no big fancy police escort necessary in those days, not in that part of town, and they liked the Lady Buck Jumpers and the Jolly Bunch, and some did plaster and some did lath and sometimes you find old bottles in the dirt and he remembered when Hurricane Betsy came and everything flooded but not like this, not like this, not like this, not people thrown away like garbage, and where Butch where Mama where Bobby where Boony where Mary where Rondell where Roland and Charles and Erving, where Antoine, where Bat, where Sweets and Junior and Pops and Roderick and Sharonda Serena Bailey Annie and Mr. Joe and Mr. Jimmy and Miss Emily and Bootsy Dee Minnie Buster Too-Tall Jawonda Latrell and Shondra and Toots and Toot and Turnell…
“SJ.”
He felt hot tears coming to his eyes that he couldn’t stop and he turned away to weep and so couldn’t see Leeshawn watching him, fighting back her own tears, unsuccessfully. For a few moments she let him get a hold of things, but when he didn’t, she approached and put one hand on his right shoulder and stood close to him. “I’m right here,” she said.
Later, when she dropped him off and they were saying goodbye, Leeshawn let her eyebrows go up just a little bit with the question, but not much, aware that it might be premature. SJ saw it, knew it, part of him wanted it but he wasn’t ready. That was so clear that he didn’t even think to himself,
You getting old, man
, as he might once have. And he saw, too, in her expression a hunger that was not just physical but emotional, which he did not want to disregard or disappoint. SJ hesitated as he was about to get out, and he saw her ready to take him up on any invitation to take another step.
“Give me a couple of days.”
“Allright, SJ,” she said, with just a scrim of self-protection in the tone, not distancing exactly, but a slight glaze, and SJ got out without looking back and Leeshawn started up the car and pulled away and SJ walked by himself up to the front door and inside.
Two days later he called her and she picked him up and brought him directly back to her house, where she made a vodka and orange juice for herself and plain orange juice for SJ. They sat on the couch and talked, not the easiest conversation, not the least stilted that either of them had ever had, and Leeshawn brought out a photo she had kept for more than three decades, a picture of a twelve-year-old Leeshawn with a twenty-two-year-old SJ, maybe a month back from Southeast Asia, for some reason wearing his fatigues although he remembered getting them off as quickly as he could and never looking at them again. His hair was pushing outward into a good-size Afro and he wore thick-framed black glasses and a big, thick dark black
mustache that curved down alongside the corners of his mouth almost to his chin. He looked at it wordlessly.
“What happened to those glasses, J?” she said teasingly.
“I don’t need glasses anymore except for reading. You kept this picture all this time. Out to California and back.”
“I had a big crush on SJ from New Orleans.”
He wanted to and he didn’t want to. Years, decades, really, putting such funds of energy, such resourcefulness, into functioning well, not blowing; the levers and gears and pulleys involved in keeping down the anger, and then the grief, stowing it; like a pain in his side it would sometimes obtrude and then his discipline, his strength, and yes his fear, fear above all that he wouldn’t be able to control the anger and the grief, pushing it back and keeping it in line. Now they stepped onto the first stepping-stone of what there was no keeping a lid on. Yes, you could turn it into a control situation, but SJ couldn’t stand that; he had been in a different place with Rosetta and it had changed him and he had never wanted to smudge or deface that memory by turning it into something simpler and coarser, and so he had acted in his mind as if he was in love with some women he never should have taken seriously, and finally ended by staying alone, paying out his time the best he could. And now after the grief, the holding even tighter, the aloneness magnified and the things he saw, this sound of caring, of undeniable humanity, this skin, this goodness that was different than Rosetta’s but good, too, in her way, the birthmark on her left cheek and her wide-set eyes, her smooth chocolate skin, and the subtle waft of scent coming off of her, part shampoo, part cologne she had put on, part her, and they threaded their right-hand fingers through each others’ fingers and SJ pulled her close to him, wanting this and not wanting this, but finally the softness in her skin and the rustle of her clothes as she moved toward him on the couch and he kissed her lips, which gave and gave back, he abandoned any
attempt to hold out, he needed this contact, even if it was just to know that he was still alive and capable of this, this thing he didn’t want because he had for years carried around the certainty in his muscles and veins that it cost too much. But there was something here, he sensed, that to deny or push away would mean closing the door on his own best possibilities; if he didn’t meet this moment, he would never again have any moments worth meeting.
Her hand found his belt buckle and slid down slightly over the bulge in his slacks, and SJ pulled himself back from driving down that road too quickly, and he took her hand and they went into her bedroom. There on the bed, suddenly nervous, or hesitant, she said, with a look half afraid, half almost hopeful, “I can still make a baby, Samuel,” and it was impossible to tell if she were warning him about using protection, or if she were sending out one vote of hope for the future, the two possibilities tangled together, and the intimacy of that moment hit him like a blast of wind, spoke to his own mixed impulses, a buried hope, a desire, a vision of a future that he had closed up like rooms in a house never to be used. He needed more than just to relieve himself, with the wind sucking the emotional door shut afterward with a slam. She needed more, too, but she found herself suddenly nervous about meeting him as an equal, a part of her stepping back and thinking, This, finally, is SJ. The surest and most familiar path was to give pleasure. SJ saw it without naming it in his mind—the weakness or insecurity—whatever it was he needed her right there with him, one to one, and he ran his hand through her processed hair, again, and they kissed, and kissed, and he unbuttoned her blouse and unhooked her black brassiere. Her breasts were large and all but firm, with large dark-brown aureoles around the nipples, and as he bent to lick one he saw several thin black hairs sprouting from around the nipple, and one long one. He took her breast in his hand and kissed her nipple, licked it and kissed it again and heard her lightly
moan. Instead of licking it some more, using her pleasure as his power, he began kissing the breast around it, licked her salty skin, starving for this, kissing the side where it bellied down near her rib cage, licked her skin, then kissed, then went back to her nipple again, which he licked and sucked and, finally, bit softly, eliciting a small yelp of surprise from her, sending her up on one elbow, pushing him down on his back by his shoulder and throwing one leg over to straddle him, both of them still dressed. Looking down at him, her skirt up and her sex pressing against his through her underwear and stockings, she removed her blouse, and her bra, and the sight of her breasts, and her graceful neck as she looked down at him inflamed him and he thrust subtly against her, rotating his hips and his own hard cock against her, holding her gaze, and she looked down at him now like a slightly mocking princess deciding whether to bestow a royal favor, and on whom, moving her own hips just slightly in answer to his motion, as if to assure him, finally now, that this was indeed a matching of equals for as long as it would last, whatever it would be, and she raised one eyebrow slightly and said, “Yes?”
Something in her manner, her salty, resilient manner, hit him as funny, and he chuckled, slightly at first and then more; he had not been so happy for as long as he could remember. “What are you laughing at, Mister Man,” she said, in a fake menacing whisper, falling forward slightly and placing her hands on his shoulders, pinning him down. This made him laugh a little harder, a rumbling chuckle that came from his stomach. What, indeed, was so funny? He didn’t know, but he recovered himself; too much of a laugh discharged the tension that gave intensity to sex, after all, and he put his hands on her hips and pressed against her harder and said, “I’m laughing at you thinking you can wrestle me.”
“Is that so?” she said, unsmiling, don’t-carefied, looking into his eyes not a foot from his face, a coolly appraising look, a cat regarding
a trapped mouse, eyebrow arched now in mock hauteur and disregard. “I believe I can take anything you can dish out, Mister Stuff. I don’t know if you can take it.”
SJ gave one grunting, grudged, half-laugh at this and brought one of his hands up behind her head and brought her face down to his, saying, “Let’s see about that.”
Afterward, after they had both taken showers and lounged around some, SJ wanted to speak to Leeshawn, to tell her that he was in no way sure what could be possible, that he couldn’t know where this storm would finally leave him, but she stopped him even before he could speak.
“You don’t need to say a thing, SJ. I’m not expecting anything from you. And I got my own questions I deal with, so don’t worry about I can’t handle it or anything like that. Let me tell you something,” she said, sitting next to him and putting her hand on his chest. “You gave me a gift today. We both got a gift. I’m grateful for that gift, do you understand what I’m saying? It is a blessing just to be in the world, and sometimes we forget we’re in the world. You understand what I’m saying, Samuel?”
She hadn’t called him Samuel before. “I wanted to make sure,” he said.
She nodded, not smiling, looking into his eyes. “You also need to make sure for yourself,” she said. “Don’t worry too much about me. You’ve been through a lot and I’m not talking about just this hurricane. All I’m trying to say is you need to figure out what you need for your own sake, not for mine. I’m not a schoolgirl anymore, SJ.”
SJ wanted to say that he understood, but saying it would somehow have undercut the very thing he wanted to say. And anyway what he wanted to say was more than just that he understood. He
wanted to say that he was grateful for this understanding, and for her strength and clear-sightedness.
“I can see that,” he said.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said, tartly, regarding him as she stood up and finished getting dressed. “We’ll see.”