Odyssey (9 page)

He was walking down a long lane leading to the beach. It was a sultry afternoon and summer, so the sun was hot and the asphalt heated through his flip-flop rubber thongs until it felt as if they might melt. The path curved and he was carrying a cold can of root beer that his grandfather had given him twenty-five cents to buy. They drank from the same pop-top can when they were alone and Winifred wasn’t there to stop them.

The shadows were long and the air was beginning to cool. Soon he’d push the wheelchair to the edge of the parking lot and use the pay phone to call his mother to come get them.

A dozen seagulls burst suddenly into the air and wheeled high toward the sky. Something had frightened them.

Eagle James’s chair was turned away from the water. That was odd. He was slumped over and a red ribbon ran down from his nose and across the blue work
shirt that he wore every day. If Winifred wanted to wash that shirt she had to do it after he went to sleep and get it back in his bureau before he woke up in the morning.

The ribbon was glistening like it was made from nylon or fancy Chinese silk, like it was wet. And Eagle was winking but steadily, not opening his left eye and smiling as he usually did.

It wasn’t until he called and Eagle didn’t respond that Sovereign realized there was something wrong. Then he saw the pistol on the ground in front of the wheelchair and he remembered Eagle saying,
Never let ’em count you out, boy. If they comin’ to get ya and you know there’s no way out, there’s still a way
. And then he’d hold his thumb and point finger like the muzzle of a pistol up his nose. When the thumb came down Sovereign would close his eyes.

The buzzer to his apartment was mild but insistent. Sovereign woke up realizing that his dream was the answer to Offeran’s question.

“Hello?” he said into the intercom phone.

“A Toni Loam for you, Mr. James,” the doorman Axel Parman said.

“Send her up.”

At first Sovereign stood behind the closed door waiting for the knock or buzz, but after a few minutes he moved out into the hall. He tilted his head for the sound of footsteps on the hard carpet or maybe a sigh of confusion.

He was eager, even nervous. The feeling in the pit of his stomach was exactly the same as when he asked Shirley Bestman to go see
Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi
with him.

“Mr. James?” she said from down the hall.

“Yes.”

“I walked around the other way lookin’ for nine-F but it went all the way up to Z and I didn’t see it.” Her voice got louder as she approached the door.

He was about to say,
If the letters were going up why didn’t you turn around?
But he thought better of the criticism. Then he wondered at this self-censorship. For years, he realized, he’d been rude and brusque with just about everyone, but now that he needed people he bit his tongue. Before Toni he resented the fact that he was expected to gag himself; now, though, he realized that he wanted to hold back.

“Hi,” she said.

When she laid a hand on his wrist he flinched and gasped.

“I’m sorry,” Toni Loam said then. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Uh,” he grunted, discomfited by his behavior, “no. I mean, I was just surprised to feel a hand on mine. Do you want to come in, Miss Loam?”

“Uh-huh.”

Sovereign took a step back and gestured for the unseen young woman to
enter. He felt more than heard her go past and followed. When they entered into the large living room he said, “Why don’t you sit on the red chair, Miss Loam?”

He went to the white sofa and settled on the southern end.

“So, can you see now?” she asked.

“Not one whit.”

“ ’Cause you move around like you can, and you called the chair red and all.”

“I’ve lived in this apartment for eighteen years. I could have been blindfolded for most of that time and told you everything about the place.”

“And it felt like you was lookin’ right at me when I was walkin’ down the hall,” she said, still leery.

“No. I can’t see. I haven’t seen a thing in nine weeks, except for you when that man attacked me.”

“But the police said that you couldn’t identify the man.”

“I didn’t tell them because … because I’m seeing a psychiatrist who believes my blindness is mental and not physical, and if I admitted that to the police it might have gotten back to my employers and they would blame me for faking my condition and fire me. But I really am blind. I mean, I have been except for that twenty seconds or so there when that guy hit me.”

“People can go blind in they minds?” Toni asked.

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Damn. But if you didn’t tell the police why’d you tell me?”

The question caught Sovereign up short. He had gauged the girl by her limited language and articulation. If she had come to him looking for a job he would have sent her away without a second thought. But her question, whatever motivated it, got to the heart of why he’d called.

“You might have saved my life,” he said. “If you hadn’t screamed and kept on screaming that man would have probably hit me again. The police said it was a blunt instrument. He could have cracked my skull open.”

“So? That don’t have nuthin’ to do with me talkin’ an’ makin’ you lose your job or sumpin’. You already safe now.”

Sunlight was falling on his left hand. He felt the heat between his fingers.

“Ever since,” Sovereign James said, and then he stopped, remembering the vastness of that parking lot and the can of root beer that he moved from hand to hand to keep the cold from burning his fingers. “Ever since I’ve been blind I experience the world differently.”

“Different how?”

“It’s like I owe something, a bill that I forgot to pay. And it’s not just that.… It’s as if I was tied by a long rope and then all of a sudden the rope is cut and I’m free, but I don’t know where I am, much less where to go.”

“But what do I have to do with that?”

“When I could see, people touched my life all the time and I took it for granted. I thought I knew everything. All I had to do was look at somebody or hear five words out of their mouth and I thought I knew everything about them. I wasn’t grateful for a damn thing. My own father fed me and protected me from the world. He built a house for his family and one day I just took off. I didn’t even go to his funeral. Now it’s too late. But … but you came up and saved me, and if I don’t give you something, I mean something more than a reward, then I’m still
the same man I was—not worth saving.”

As Sovereign spoke a world opened up to him. He realized how much he missed his father’s father and how he had been a bad son. Maybe, he mused briefly, this was why he had never married and sired children; maybe he didn’t feel worthy to be a parent.

“I think I know what you mean,” Toni said. “It’s like my auntie G.”

“Who’s that?”

“She lived upstairs from us. My mama said that she was our auntie, but really she was Mama’s mother, only they got raised by Auntie G’s mama. Auntie G had had my mama when she was just twelve, so her mother raised them both like they was hers. Nobody said until my mama was grown, and so she treated Auntie G like they was sisters. And Auntie G lived in her rooms upstairs and was always makin’ brownies and lettin’ the little kids come up an’ watch her TV. One time when I was still little my mama got arrested and Auntie G let me live with her for seven weeks.”

“She was your grandmother.”

“She was my auntie G. And when she died, when I was twenty, nobody did nuthin’, not even Mama. The city buried her in what they call Potter’s Field and there wasn’t even no service or nuthin’.

“I was away then and when I got back I spent three weeks tryin’ to find the number of the grave site so I could at least bring some flowers for her.”

“What was her real name?”

“Giselle Breakwater. I told the people that but they didn’t care. And now I feel like I let her down.”

“No,” Sovereign James said.

“What you mean, no?” Toni said, anger threatening to come out in her voice.

“The fact that you tried to find her makes the memorial for her. You sitting here right now talking about her is better than any bouquet or eulogy. You are a living testament to that woman. No one could do more.”

Toni and Sovereign sat in the silence that followed his words. If he could have he would have seen that her brow was furrowed and her eyes were steady on him.

“There’s an envelope on the glass table between us,” Sovereign said. “It’s for you.”

He waited long enough for her to take the letter and open it. Inside she would find twenty-five twenty-dollar bills and a folded piece of notepaper saying
Thank you
.

“They wanted to give me hundred-dollar bills at the bank, but I thought twenties would be easier to deal with,” he said.

“This nice,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Um … what do you do, Toni?”

“You mean like a job?”

“Yes.”

“I work at a beauty shop part-time sometimes. I do braids mainly, but Iris teaching me about stylin’.”

“Only sometimes?”

“They got a whole lotta full-time girls. I just take their place when they out sick or sumpin’.”

“Do you like the work?”

“I like bein’ around the people there. It’s almost all women except for Albert. He’s gay and Iris say he’s the second-best stylist in the whole shop.”

“Next to her?”

“No, next to Lisa Banning. Lisa used to do them wild hairstyles for Motown singers in the eighties. Iris say that Lisa could make wine into water.”

“You mean water into wine.”

“No,” Toni said with a sneer in her voice. “Lisa say that it’s easy to turn water into wine … all you need is some fruit. But turnin’ it back—that’s the hard trick.”

Something about the banter in the language reminded him of his grandfather and their long weekend excursions down the Southern California shoreline.

“You smilin’, Mr. James.”

“I’m forty-nine years old,” he said.

“I’ll be twenty-two in September.”

“You know what that means, Toni?”

“What.”

“It means that you’re already in the twenty-second year of your life. When you’re born they say how many months old you are until your first birthday. But all that time up till then is your first year.”

“It’s like you’re always ahead of yourself,” she added.

“That’s right.”

“So you in your fiftieth year,” she said.

“Half the way into a century and all I have to show for it is a pair of crazy eyes.”

“You don’t really have to give me all this money, you know.”

“Can you use it?”

“Oh yeah. I’m livin’ wit’ my mama but she wants me to help out.”

For years after his grandfather’s suicide Sovereign wished that they had gone farther, that he hadn’t gone to buy that root beer. In his dreams he’d get to that spot along the beach wanting more than anything to go farther. But in the dreamscape the paved path had ended and he couldn’t take a step more.

And that afternoon with Toni Loam he felt that he wanted to talk more, but there was nothing else to say.

“You got somethin’ to drink, Mr. James?”

“Over there,” he said, gesturing toward the open kitchen, “in the refrigerator.”

“You want sumpin’?”

He shook his head and listened to the muted sounds of the young woman opening the refrigerator and jostling a bottle that clinked against another. Orange juice, he thought.

“Glasses are in the cabinet to the left of the icebox.”

“You sure you don’t want some?”

“No, thank you.”

“It must be hard gettin’ around in here.”

“I know the place pretty well and I have a woman come in to clean and do some light shopping.”

“Must be nice to be rich like that.” Toni had returned to the red chair.

“Rich people,” Sovereign said, “the truly wealthy, own the earth. I just rent
this little piece of turf. One big storm and it could all wash away. A moderate-sized earthquake could swallow up everything I ever did.”

“You too deep, Mr. James.”

“Call me … call me Sovy.”

“What kinda name is that?”