Loving Day (27 page)

WHEN THE PROPANE TANKS
are stacked cheerleader-pyramid-style behind my father’s house, it only takes the top one, unscrewed, to release enough gas to be ignited by the broken fuse box just two feet above. The fire bursts forth like Satan popping a zit. Within minutes, it engulfs the back of the house. And no one notices, because the festival is going with enough chaos of its own to have all senses engaged. The open window allows the destruction into the kitchen, welcoming it into the house beyond. There it rages, hidden from the party on the lawn, engulfing the staircase and climbing higher, and no one even notices. Not until the windows in front of the house burst from the heat that only minutes before was just cold kinetic potential. Someone runs for the door, but they’re stopped. Because it’s too late. Far too late. And all those other propane tanks? They go boom. Taking with them any evidence. As the explosion goes off, I walk away without looking back, like in muscleman movies. No, better: I turn with everyone else and look surprised. Even more so, because I’m losing my father’s house. Maybe I wail a bit, scream, get near One Drop
so he can hold me back from rushing in there and rescuing the hamster. I can see it. I don’t get out of the shower until the entire scene is fully visualized.

—

“Anyone need a propane refill?” I ask, and so many say yes that soon the shopping cart I push around the grass is so full I can barely get it back to the Bug. The white metal containers fill up the backseat in a pile three tanks high and I manage to fit four more in the passenger seat as well. In Kabul or Baghdad or any other place we left fighting, the sight of me driving around with so much explosive power would probably result in my arrest or shooting, but in America no ones cares. I’m just someone who really loves barbecue.

—

The only resistance I find is from the cashier at the Stop-N-Go, who only seems annoyed when I hand them all in for exchange simultaneously, forcing him to lock up the store so he can open up their little gated cage outside and allow me to clear out his entire stock.

I am a man who hasn’t slept. I am a man who instead made a list, first on paper and then—having ripped up the paper and set the pieces on fire in a dirty cereal bowl lest evidence remain—in my head. A list of the positive and negative reasons to burn a house down.

The positives are clear: gain a significant amount of income from the evil corporate underwriting industry, to free myself from Philly’s trap, to free my daughter from Mélange’s trap as well. There are other less tangible, yet still compelling, reasons. To be free of the past in a blaze of glory. To just be done with it all, all of this period, now.

The negatives are tangible and real, and I understand that fully and they cause me fear and make it so I can’t sleep and yet am so tired. I could be arrested. Arrested, and not given the insurance money. Tal could start to hate me. Sunita Habersham might hate me, permanently. All of these substantial fears, though, hinge on one major one: being caught. This is the primary fear. But I know how not to be caught. And
if I’m not caught, all of the other negatives will float away like ghostly ash.

I stop by the liquor store, purchase a flask of bourbon so flat and curved as to be almost invisible in my pocket. I drive by Tosha’s house on the way back. They’re all there, on her lawn. On the porch. The black folks who aren’t going to take it anymore. Making signs. There have to be at least thirty of them. Kamau’s testing his bullhorn. Someone’s had T-shirts made, nationalist ones, black with green and red lettering. I sit in my car, parked across the street, and it takes a minute to see that the shirts read
A people united will never be defeated
. I want one. I don’t want to be defeated either. I could go for feeling united as well. I want to open up the door, go in there, see what happens. See if a Negro who looks like a Lithuanian rugby player is allowed to put on the red, black, and green, too. Surely today. Today, I would be welcomed even.

I pull my door open, see George come out his front door, then close it again. Their youngest daughter is in his arms, sitting on his hip. She’s too big to carry. That same shirt, too big to wear, but a red belt transforming it into a dress on her. That little girl, she’s so happy. She’s seven and she has her father. And she’ll remember this day forever. I pull off after the two of them are around the side of the porch.

In front of Loudin, on the far side of the street, another crowd is already forming. A bus behind them, parked, with even more people coming out. I haven’t seen a large group of white people in Germantown for so long I think they must be a clan of sunflowers, come to celebrate the cause of biracial love. But they’re real white folks. Old ones. I see an oversized placard of the Constitution leaning on a brick wall, and I know we’re in trouble. I don’t know what the hell the Constitution has to do with any of this, but when old white folks start waving the Constitution like landlords with a lease, it’s trouble. I see this before I see the sign that says
REVERSE RACISM IS THE TRUE RACISM
. Paused at the light, I look at the guy holding that gem too long, and he comes up to my window.

“Hey buddy, take some of these, and be careful parking around here, if you know what I mean.” He winks, because he must think I’m
white. He hands me a stack of fliers. Not printed, mimeographed—I can still smell the ink.
Rest For The Raped
, it says, with a crude illustration of a crying white woman, with wings. I get as far as the sentence,
In 1954, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, Agnes Goines was raped and murdered by black man Charles Jefferson, yet her spirit may…
and then I throw it on the floor of the passenger seat, where hopefully it can later get stepped on.

When I ride up to my father’s driveway in the Bug, I know this will be the last time. I see that damned house up there on the hill, watching the circus on its lawn. If it had a memory, it would think back to the time Washington’s Continental Army did the same, and how far it had come, just by staying in the same place. It must be tired. It must be ready to go. It has reached the completion of its circle.

The Bug is barely through the gate when I’m stopped by Spider. He comes up to the side of my window and asks, “You got my tank?” and I say yes and start driving till he
whoa, whoa, whoas
me down again.

“Yo, let me get it out, right? You’re bugging, dude,” he says, then starts laughing, pointing at my father’s car. “You’re bugging, get it?”

“You see those crazy white folks across the street?” I ask him. “I mean, you know today’s going to be insane, right?”

“Ah, man, that’s nothing. Let me tell you what’s crazy: they gots a zonkey, man!” I look across the street. No zonkeys. Just honkies.

“No, at the petting zoo! There’s going to be zonkey rides! I saw it—I think it might just be a pony they painted but the kids are going to love it.” Spider opens the back of my car before I can, goes to pull a canister out, then looks at me watching him through the back window.

“You all right?” he asks.

“Oh I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. Hey, three o’clock, main stage. Don’t miss it,” he tells me, which gets me to turn over in my seat and look back at him. “You don’t remember? The Miss Cegenation Pageant, man. I think Tal could totally win,” Spider says, and starts walking away without closing the back door behind him. I drive off fast enough to close it with the certainty that I really do have to do this thing.

I try parking the Bug in the garage and carrying the tanks over, but
after straining to lug one, adjust my strategy. Slowly down the grass, about ten feet from the house, I park and start rolling them out. Straight to the fuse box. Lining up some bricks as a wedge, I lay four on the bottom, and start building up from there. I can hear the music echoing from the other side, and start dropping the tanks down in beat to cover the sound. But it doesn’t matter. No one can see into my heart, no one knows what I want or what I don’t or what I’m intending. I include myself in that ignorance. My body has its orders. My mind doesn’t even have to do anything beyond continue willing.

A small group of Mulattopians drifts back behind the house as I’m finishing, and it doesn’t even matter. When they light a joint, I point to the containers and say, “You really don’t want to be smoking around here.”

—

I watch most of the day from the front window, drinking. I am drinking to access the courage. Or I am drinking to get drunk enough to not be able to do anything at all. It changes between swigs. Once the whiskey loosens my mind, I start imagining the scene again, but can only see it darkly. I see an explosion, all the tanks lighting at once in a blaze of glory, but with me accidentally in the middle of it. If I die, I realize, Sunita Habersham will think I committed suicide, and will be destroyed by it. Maybe not destroyed, but it wouldn’t help her general spiritual growth to have another boyfriend croak, I’m sure. So I write her a note on some copy paper. It says,
If something happened to me, it’s because I’m an idiot, but not because of any self-destructive impulse. I would never do that to you, because I still love you
. Which has the balance of focused and vague I was going for. I sign it and with that productive task out of the way, I go on to check and recheck the security cameras, make sure the back one is aimed high enough to miss the show. I take the box of pictures and Tal’s things to the garage where they’ll be safe.

Then after that, I’m ready.

There’s a cake in the fridge. It’s homemade. It’s either a yin yang symbol, or patterned after a New York black-and-white cookie, I can’t
tell, but it looks delicious, and in a fire it would be destroyed anyway. So I eat it. I eat the whole cake over two hours. When more than half of it’s gone, it just seems like a shame to waste the rest of it, which is the same logic I apply to the flask.

They’re out there. Everyone on the lawn, swirling in their mass. Black and white balloons are pulled by children, tied to trailers, and line the property like they’re trying to lift us all to the half-breed promised land. And everyone past the gate, they’re just as festive. The white folks stay across the street, angry, wanting something back: their country, their dominance, their youth. Petrified of a world where they don’t make all the rules. They chant for a bit, something about this being America. I think everyone here knows that, though. I don’t think this could be happening anywhere else. Across the street from them, on our side—of the sidewalk at least—the red, black, and green balloons wave in the wind, strong. I’m pretty sure those balloons weren’t here this morning. Somebody must have been sent to get them. Someone must have thought the Loving Day balloons demanded a helium response. I can’t see the kids out there, the stone base of the fence is too high, but I see Kamau. It’s hard not to, he’s got his horn going. “Umoja!” is his favorite call. None of the white folks across the street speak Swahili, I would wager. They probably think it’s Zulu for “Sharia Law.” I see Natasha and George as well. They march together, south on Germantown Avenue, reach the end of the property, then they march north again. Repeating in an endless loop with all of the rest of the protesters, chanting whatever they can to stop the spell being cast by the larger Loving Day crowd on the grounds.

Cast with live bands. Cast with a bouncy house. Cast with lemonade and funnel cakes and white-looking people dressed in Ashanti throws and black-looking people dressed like Sally Hemings’s in-laws. There’s even a couple dressed as zombie colonists. No, they’re dressed like ghosts. Like
the
ghosts, I imagine, or they do. A white woman and a black man. The costumed couple even comes to the door of my father’s house, shaking the doorknob in shock when it doesn’t open for them. They find a more receptive audience in the news crew that
shows up hours later; I watch the duo venture outside and to the front of the queue for an interview. Everyone is eager to share their thoughts about how other people should categorize themselves. The cake is long gone and in my stomach it discovers the liquor and the horror of being inside me, but I don’t leave the building till the news van does, heading to the main stage when I see Tal standing with all the other would-be Miss Cegenation queens.

It’s not a beauty contest. It’s not a talent contest. I don’t know what the hell it is, but a large crowd has formed around the stage so I slip in and discover more as everyone else does. Tal is wearing a dress that I didn’t buy for her, presumably given to her by Sunita, from the slightly baggy way it’s fitting. The bustier top is wired to carry the weight of significant mammary heft, and on Tal it just catches air and the idea of breasts as an intellectual concept. I don’t catch the question asked of her, but the answer Tal gives is “I believe that we are the living embodiment of our ancestors, and to deny them, any of them, is, like, to deny ourselves, and disconnect ourselves from the very essence of Gaia.”

Oh so she’s referencing Gaia now, wonderful. Tal doesn’t even have any Greek in her, but the crowd loves it. They applaud. The zombie couple, they’re there, they applaud. I assumed I would recognize them from the camp on closer inspection, but even under the white face paint I can tell I’ve never seen them before. Yet they still have Sesas. On his arm, and then, when she turns, I see one on her shoulder. Looking around, new faces are the majority. It’s spreading. And all clapping for my daughter like they know her better than I do.

There’s a white lady up there in the competitors’ row—at least she looks like a Caucasian, and female—wearing a traditional Nordic bunad dress and a bone through her nose. It’s definitely a bone. I keep looking at her, waiting to discover if I should be either offended, or—what? I have no idea. I’m mystified. This petrifies me too; perhaps I should go stand across the street with the terrified ofay crew.

George looks through the bars, smoking. He looks at my daughter. The nicotine mist pours out of his jaw-dropped mouth. And then he
looks at me. It’s far, but I know he’s looking at me. I know before he shakes his head, and joins the circling rage once more.