Fanon (16 page)

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When it's the next frame of the movie and after it the next and next and next, enough frames per second to restore an illusion of motion, of life to a scene that for an instant seemed neither old nor new, seemed outside time as if time sleeps when we sleep as if time slows down when motion slows and somehow we inhabit a slowed-down seamless space outside time, disembodied in the stoptime of a snapshot or perfect word until we return to ourselves and the movie that never stops seems to start up again because we're watching again and our attention's seized again by what appears to move across the screen, but something's wrong, the next frame, next scene can't possibly be the next, it doesn't follow, we've missed something, something has intervened, the boy has moved from the corner and is lying shot to death in the vacant lot next to Mason's. Where have we been.

[Dissolve to a woman in a wheelchair on a balcony of a six-story public housing facility for the elderly. The recessed balcony, guarded by a solid, waist-high metal wall, is long and narrow, a space in which two and a half coffins lined up head to foot or assbackwards, foot to head, would fit snugly. The woman is approximately eighty years old. Depending on the light, the distance, and the angle from which you shoot, she can seem decades younger, decades older. Retain a tight focus on her face the entire time she delivers her monologue. Her features should more or less fill the screen, unnaturally large at first, monstrously oversized features, a wasteland of skin so the viewer doesn't feel comfortable, confronted on an exaggerated scale by the mix of familiarity and strangeness any human face expresses. The closeups of elderly faces in
In Praise of Love
could serve as a guide here.]

The Woman: Well, I was outside, you know, like I like to be if the weather's decent, sitting up here in this chair, minding my own business (you mean minding everybody's business, don't you, Mother dear), a hot day in a hot spell, middle of the afternoon I remember because they said on the noon news expect thundershowers or
thunderstorms later today breaking up the heat and cooler tomorrow the man promised but you know how changeable the weather is and they get it wrong it seems to me as often as they get it right but I listen anyway and to give credit where credit's due they did warn people about the terrible winds and the flooding this spring and it's a good thing too they got that right because the storm tore up Pittsburgh, big trees down everywhere and roads closed, people's basements full of water and I saw on TV the whole insides of some of those houses out in the suburbs floating away but nobody hurt bad or killed thank goodness and thanks to the weather people too I guess, to give credit its due, anyway no sign of rain on that afternoon the news had promised rain the heat still laying like a wool blanket down there in the streets and I'm up here a little sleepy the way I get some afternoons, tired, though it seems I don't do much of anything these days except sleep, sitting here dozing off, then trying to wake myself up by thinking about what I might fix for my dinner and nothing I can think of sounds like much I don't know some days why I bother to eat just don't have the appetite I once did but you know the eating habit not a good one to break so this afternoon I'm telling you about it's around time to start thinking about fixing some little thing or another for my dinner but I'm not coming up with much with nothing really I have a taste for because I'm never hungry the way I used to be hungry chasing all day after youall and it worries me some because you know your mother always loved to eat, that's where you got that big appetite of yours and I know it won't be me anymore, not myself anymore if I don't care about the food on my plate and it's late in the afternoon school-bus time but no school bus because it's summer I can't say the hour exactly, I hate to look at my watch, I love my watch because you bought it for me but I don't let myself get in the habit of checking the time all the time it just makes the hours go slower time gets heavy on your hands when you're always watching the clock you know like heat's worse when you think
of heat so it's best not to think heat if you're trying to stay cool, best if you put your mind on something nice and cool and sometimes time flies if you leave it alone it used to fly anyway when I had no watch no time to myself not with all youall needing this or that or your father's table-waiting white shirts to iron, the food, food, food everybody looking for every hour of the day, mouths open, hands out, I'm hungry Mom my hands always busy and time seemed to fly but when you stop and really think about it, time doesn't change doesn't go fast or slow just goes on its own sweet time, it's the same time really going fast when youall were little and going slow now with me locked up in this chair still the same time it's always been, only me that's changing when I stop to think about it, me coming here a baby to this old earth and leaving here old and still the same time it's always been since long before I got here and long after I'm gone from here the same time, not slow, not fast the way people say it goes I have that thought sometimes and it doesn't go any further than I just said, just a dumb old woman's thought I think sitting here cause I don't have nothing better to do than sit in this wheelchair and think while I watch the people down there in the street doing whatever it is they think they're doing I bet you walk up to one with a microphone in your hand like on TV they wouldn't know what to say if you asked, What are you doing, ma'am. Why are you out here in these streets with the sun beating down on your nappy head. I wonder sometimes if anybody has the slightest idea of what they think they're doing except they're doing it, like me sitting up here in this chair, doing it because I did it yesterday and got used to doing it and now it's what I do, it's too late it's not really worth thinking about too much if you think about it. Listen to me going on. See, that's what happens when you're alone. You start to talking to yourself. Harebrained conversations don't stop, don't start or stop just come from nowhere and go nowhere you talking to yourself just to hear somebody talking, talk that wouldn't make the slightest bit of
sense to anybody else besides you and as a matter of fact makes precious little sense to you sometimes, you're just talking to hear somebody talk and you're the only one listening so it don't matter start on one thing and jump to another thing without finishing what you started who cares just a way to pass the time and sometimes time goes faster that way or maybe slower you don't want to know either way so don't look at your watch, it might make a liar out of what you want the time to be and still a long way to go before it's time to get ready for bed not bedtime yet the sun's still up it's bright afternoon sleepy-head old fool, school's just out, school-bus time if the school bus had been running that July afternoon I'm talking about and I remember thinking there's a clock inside me with no hands on its face but I hear it tick-tock telling me the school bus taking the children home been here a couple minutes ago and stopped just down from the corner of Frankstown and Homewood to let the little boy lives cross the street off, stopped and he hopped down that last tall step and scoots across Frankstown Avenue, looking both ways up and down like I holler every time he better look, the bus stopped sure as if I'd seen it stop and seen him hopping down and crossing with my own two eyes, though I know good and well no school and no school bus in summer.

No school bus ever when I was a little girl. I walked to Homewood School. Walked Cassina Way to Dumferline up Susquehanna or up Tioga to Homewood Avenue and right on Homewood to Hamilton left on Hamilton you know the way as well as I do why am I telling you how to walk to Homewood School from Cassina Way it's just about the same way you walked from Finance Street to get to the same raggedy building I walked to when I was little and your children would go to school in the same building today if you had little children and the school was open today if you hadn't got yourself together and moved away from here, same old trifling building except they stuck a new brick front on it and parked some trailers for
classrooms in the schoolyard where we used to play hopscotch and chase one another around like wild Indians I don't need to tell you how far I walked on which streets it wasn't really all that far but back then seemed like a long ways a long walk from home past other people's houses a long way because I didn't know the names of any of the people lived in those houses, not much of a walk when I think about it today you know as well as I do the school's not very far except in a little girl's mind who needed her mother to walk with her and hold her hand the first couple weeks of school and anytime after that she could blackmail her mama squeezing tears out my eyes there on the front step and Mama in the doorway Mama please, please that little hussy begging with her crocodile tears so her mama would walk her to school not really far except I couldn't take one step of the way today not put down one foot after the other and walk two steps if the pot at the end of the rainbow sitting on the pavement full of gold shining two steps away it's me and this chair that's how it is now the walk to Homewood School mize well be a million miles I'm done with walking but there was something I wanted to tell you and I'm trying to get out the words but I'm old and my tongue's starting to stumble and soon it's going to be just as hopeless as these useless legs where was I going I was walking on my way to Homewood School a little girl walking on Susquehanna Street in the empty morning early just me no mama with my hand in hers up Susquehanna just past where Dumferline cuts in and three cute houses set back from the street with fences out along the sidewalk, not rowhouses like the rest on Susquehanna and the other streets I walked to get to school these three houses separate small neat homes Italian people kept up nice, you know, the way they do, vegetable garden along the side green striped awnings and grass and flowers, rosebushes in front like Mama grew in the front yard when we moved to Finance Street from Cassina Way I think half the roses in Homewood from cuttings Mama gave people from her rosebushes everybody passing said
those sure some beautiful red roses, Mrs. French. You sure do raise some beautiful roses. I used to daydream sometimes passing those three particular neat little set-back houses pretend I lived in one or pretend I had a dollhouse at home looked just like one of those houses I could play with full of tiny furniture and tiny people I'd move from room to room, sit them on chairs or lay them down on their tiny beds to sleep or
tack-tack-tack
walk one of those stiff-legged dolls up the steps for some reason I don't know now and probably didn't know then either just
tack-tack-tack
up steps and in and out of rooms busy you know for reasons I can't say and don't matter really just tiny people busy in their tiny homes just a little girl daydreaming how pretty and busy her house would be if she was grown up and had a house and next thing I know a big snarling dog so close it sprays slobber on my bare arm, big dog up on its hind legs barking and snapping, tearing around then it drops down off the fence and runs in circles then brams its mean self up on the fence again and I can't even say, grateful as I was for that fence, what kind of fence it was, wire I think, a strong fence thank goodness with steel posts and that twisted steel wire maybe so it don't go nowhere but my heart in my mouth I just knew no fence could hold in that wild animal jumping and barking and whipping around in crazy circles to get at me and eat me up steel and wire or could have been wood I think each set-back house had a different kind of fence. All I remember is running fast as I could cross the street and promising God if he saved me from that dog I'd never walk next to those fences again and never did, never even thought about trying again ever in life. After I got away from the nasty dog come running and biting at me that morning, I always crossed Susquehanna before I got to the place where those three houses set with their green grass and flowers and fences and painted all nice and clean, never ever let myself get caught over there where the dog hated me. I made sure to cross over and would cross today if God put me back on my feet and let me walk the
sidewalks again. Funny thing is I kept crossing Susquehanna long after that dog, I started to say giant dog but to tell the truth I can't really say how big or what kind of dog it might have been, bigger than a timber wolf to me when it ran at me trying to bram down the fence to get me but that was then, those were a little scared child's eyes, the little girl I was then who didn't know any better but now here's what I really wanted to tell you. Once when I walked you to Homewood School I was holding your hand in mine and crossed you over to the other side of Susquehanna and then further up the block, near the corner, I marched you back across Susquehanna Street to the side we'd been on in the first place after we turned from Dumferline and you always were a smart little boy you looked up at me as if to say, What you doing, Mama, almost as if you knew we'd gone out of our way for no good reason crossing and crossing back and probably by that time after all the years it took for me to grow up, well, almost grow up, grown enough anyway to get married and have you and for you to be a boy old enough to start school and big enough to begin learning your alphabet and numbers and your own way so you could leave the house in the morning and walk to Homewood School by your own self, and after all those years if you would have asked me that day why we crossed, I would have been ashamed to say because after all those years I was showing you a way didn't really make a bit of sense, the dog long dead, the three cute separate houses all rundown, maybe not even sitting there any longer, maybe a dead vacant lot dead as the dog and I'm teaching you my fear, teaching you to cross, teaching you to look out for something bad not even there anymore.

And I said all that to say this. The spot right outside Mason's bar along the vacant lot where the weeds were high before the city came and cut them, where the boy they shot laid there and died and left the mark of his body in the mashed-down weeds, that very spot where the worst thing happened to their son, I saw a couple had to be
the dead boy's mother and father who else could it be with the boy's little sister by the hand, standing there on Frankstown, all three of them staring down at the spot where the weeds had sprung up again after the boy's body lying there had mashed them down to its shape, the three of them staring and I wondered how in the world they knew the exact spot where he'd died. I was sitting outside right up here the night they shot him and I heard the shots and watched the boys shot him running down Frankstown and him lying so still in exactly that spot I will never forget, never, never forget, I could go right to it now if you pushed me over there and draw the spot and he'd fit in my drawing just like he fit the spot that night. I don't know how his people knew the spot because I watched and watched the carryings-on after the paramedics covered up the boy's face and took his body away on a stretcher, watched the detectives marching through the weeds, cops searching up and down the alley behind Frankstown, watched the ambulances and trucks with searchlights and paddywagons and a hook-and-ladder firetruck and one with big spools of hose for god knows what reason unless they had the good idea to burn Mason's to the ground and wanted fire engines sitting at the curb so the fire wouldn't spread, armies of men and machines and big lights all kinds of commotion after they carried the boy off in a black van and I watched it all, watched till everybody left and it was quiet again as it ever gets around here and I never saw the couple that night I'm sure I never saw them till I saw them in broad daylight the next afternoon the boy's mother and father I'm certain, the right age, right look, with a little girl by the hand must be the poor boy's sister, I said to myself, the three of them coming up Frankstown and stopping after they passed Mason's right beside the exact spot where I'd watched a boy lying so still I had no doubt from the first moment I saw a dark shape not moving down there in the weeds he was dead, and the three of them walked up like I just said and stood still a minute then they started moving, hugging one another and forgive me
god for thinking and saying this they danced a kind of grief jig, the little girl watching, the two grownups moving jumpy like it hurt them to move and hurt too much not to move, like they had to shake their feet and hands in jerky little circles and shuffles, you know, because the air, the ground all the sudden too hot or too cold to touch, circling around each other, each one needing to fight that cold, that fire their own way, the best way they could and then all three hugging again and after that they dropped down on their knees, raising their arms, kissing the ground, swaying real slow, mashing down the weeds in the exact same spot the son's body had mashed them the night before and I thought of leading you by the hand to Homewood School and wondered if I remembered something terrible could I pass it on to you without saying a word and remembered your big eyes on me after I'd crossed you back and forth across Susquehanna for no good reason and I wondered if you saw in my eyes that nasty dog and if you'd always cross at the same spot I crossed you and now I'm asking myself and asking you too, could a person hold open in their mind the dead boy's place in those weeds for his people to find and drop down on it like I saw them drop. Could it have been me thinking of him lying there, right exactly there, me leading them, guiding them to him so they see him though nothing's there.