The Best of Electric Velocipede (23 page)

“What are you doing with those two hood rats, KeKe?”

“We just gettin some candy. We goin straight back home. I promise.”

“You know what Auntie and Grandma will do if they find out you were here with them.”

“You know what Grandmommy’ll do if she find out you wearin lipstick.” If God gave a 14-year-old girl a jelly butt that attracted men, that was His business. But if she wore makeup to get attention, then she was askin for it.

Ryan grinned and tugged one of my braids. “So, how was the wedding?”

“Borin. Too many songs. Chants and stuff where we all had to follow. . . . It was like real church. Momma made a big deal about some guy named Sugar Daddy not bein there. How come they call him after a candy bar?”

Ryan’s girlfriends laughed. Ryan said to herself, “Ohhhh my God.”

“What?”

“You’re a ’tard, KeKe.”

“Why?”

“Look, I gotta get home soon. Mom and Dad need me to housesit. I’ll catch up with you later, okay?” She turned her back on me and started talkin to her girlfriends again.

Tey and Marcus got a bag full of Rain Blo gum, Junior Mints, candy necklaces, Lemon Heads, Gobstoppers, gummy worms, and Atomic Fireballs. All I could get were Nerds and a couple pieces of banana Laffy Taffy (my favorite). I could stick em down in my pocket and sneak into my room before Grandmommy or Momma realized I’d been to the store.

“You behavin now, baby?” Cashier Lady said when I put my candy up on the counter. That’s what she always said to us kids and the teenagers, too. She was real fat, but not jiggly fat. She didn’t have a lot of rolls. I remembered when she used to have bulges everywhere, hangin over her pants and shakin right over her elbows. Maybe I was six or seven then. She got smaller every year, sittin there behind the counter sweatin all over her stomach and armpits and listenin to the oldies AM station.

“Yes, ma’am. I been good.”

She turned to open the cash register, and I jumped. Splotches covered her cheek. One wider than my hand, but the others were tiny like somebody beat her with a handful of pebbles. It was like she had that disease where people were brown on the outside, but then they had bright pink dots all over their skin. Like somebody rubbed their black off, and they were really white underneath. Cept Cashier Lady’s spots weren’t quite like that. Her spots were white-white paper white, or gray like the papier-mâché we sometimes used in art, kinda rough and dirty. If I touched her face, I bet it would feel like that, all soggy newspaper.

“You want a bag, baby?”

I shook my head and shoved my candy in my shorts pockets.

“Then you have a good one.”

I nodded and looked away.

When we left the store, Ryan and her girlfriends were walkin up the other side of the street, past the interstate on-ramp. Ryan said sumthin I couldn’t understand (Grandmommy’d get after her for talkin so loud), and then all the girls laughed. They were still laughin by the time they got under the overpass, and some boys honked at em as they cruised by. That made Ryan and her friends laugh even harder.

“Damn, that lady’s face was wrecked.” Marcus was the first to say anythin. We’d already passed Discount 4 Less and headed round the corner. Tey didn’t say nuthin cuz he was suckin on a Gobstopper. He gave me a piece of Rain Blo, and I popped it in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to say nuthin either.

SweeTarts—July 12

When Grandmommy, Ryan and Aunt Lil got back from the funeral, Momma had lunch waitin. I didn’t want to eat with em since Marcus finally got his BB gun. (I didn’t tell Momma bout that cuz she probably never woulda let me see the boys again.) We’d been huntin round the alley when Momma called me in and made me wipe a washcloth across my face. I had to be sociable, she said. Especially with family. We ate nuthin but salad—three-bean salad and another salad with Italian dressing, mixed greens, baby tomatoes, black olives, and endamame. Momma and Aunt Lil were really into healthy stuff like endamame.

“Well, he didn’t show up today, either,” Grandmommy said. “Church’s too small for him to hide. Horny old buzzard. He always shows up in that brown suit and tired old hat. To a
funeral
.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have a black suit,” Ryan said. “It’s the sentiment that counts anyway, right? He doesn’t have to go to everyone’s funeral.” She was so much better at pretendin to be interested in adult conversations than me.

“Honey, if he wanted to get himself a decent black suit, he certainly could. It’s not about sentiment or paying respects with him. He wants to be seen,” Grandmommy said.

I scratched the itch on my wrist. Sometimes it crawled up my arm, and I had learned to just live with it. Momma poked me in the side. I forgot to take my elbows off the table.

“You know, Momma, I remember he showed up in that brown polyester suit at my wedding,” Aunt Lil said. “I can’t believe he’s recycled those same two suits all these years.”

“He had the olive one at mine,” Momma said.

“He seems to put a lot of money and effort into simply being seen. He doesn’t
have to
go to all those funerals. He doesn’t
have to
bring a present to every wedding,” Ryan said.

“Sugar Daddy? What’s his real name?”

Momma, Grandmommy, and Aunt Lil looked at me. Then they looked at each other and laughed.

“That’s a shame,” Momma said. “I can’t remember. I probably could have recalled it if you hadn’t asked.”

“The man always wanted status he couldn’t get. He’s not an educator or a doctor—I can tell you
that
for certain—but he always finds his way to our weddings, or our children’s weddings, or our grandchildren’s. How many hours does he have to spend perusing the newspaper only so he can make sure we all know he’s there? And if he could bring a present to every wedding, he certainly could have bought
one
decent black suit. Ryan, he’s never bothered to show up anywhere else—”

“Aren’t weddings and funerals open to everybody if they’re in the paper?”

“—He can’t find another way to fit in with all that running around he does,” Grandmommy said.

“May not only be the weddings and funerals of doctors and teachers and lawyers he goes to. He could go to the janitors’ weddings too, Grandma. Have you ever seen him at a janitor’s wedding?” Ryan took a long drink of iced tea and hid her mouth down in the glass. Grandmommy looked at her funny and smirked, but didn’t say nuthin.

“Did you have enough for the choir today?” Momma asked.

“It was a good turnout, actually,” Aunt Lil said. “Not enough men, but you know how that is. Mr. Hughes didn’t show up, though.”

“He’s the most reliable bass you’ve got,” Momma said. Old Mr. Hughes was always there when the choir sang. Sometimes he was the only man standin in the middle of all them sopranos and altos.

Aunt Lil shrugged. “He’s never stood me up. He promised he’d be there.”

Once it was safe and Grandmommy started talkin bout song selection, Ryan put her glass down and went back to her three-bean salad. I’d put in my time bein sociable. Momma gave me a couple SweeTarts to kill the Italian dressing aftertaste in my mouth. I went back outside cuz I didn’t know the next time I’d get to see Marcus use his BB gun before his father stole him and Tey away again.

Marcus said we’d try huntin in the vacant lot next to the Discount 4 Less. The trees across the alley and in front of the Elks Lodge hung over the open space. Easy to pick off sparrows and starlings. The grass came up a little higher than my elbows, and I kept crunchin on broken bottles.

“We got any snakes, I’ll shoot em,” Marcus said. He added he was only kiddin bout the snakes, but I didn’t need snake bites to go along with the white spot on my wrist. Maybe I scratched it too much and got impetigo after all.

Marcus told us to shut up and stand still. We couldn’t see the garbage under our feet, and if we stepped on the wrong things, we’d mess up his shot. He didn’t have great aim, I found out real quick, but he swore he was new at this. Each time he missed—truth be told—I was kinda relieved, but sad. I never saw nobody kill nuthin before, and I wanted to see as much in life as I could. (A person wasn’t worth much if they wasn’t well-rounded.) Watch sumthin flappin around one minute and then see it fall to the ground and never move again the next. One time while I waited for Daddy to pick me up for the weekend, the pit bull belongin to the boy up the street was just strollin through the neighborhood. I forgot sumthin and went to get it, and when I came back out on the porch, the pit bull was laid up on the sidewalk. Hardly any blood at all. It would kinda be like that, cept I’d finally know what it looked like when sumthin died. Bugs didn’t count. I wondered what happened when that boy found his dog. I wondered if the person who hit him cared at all. I wondered how Marcus would act if he ever shot anythin.

He aimed at a sparrow perched on a limb across the alley. Its head poked out from a clump of leaves. Me and Tey leaned forward. Marcus waited. He looked at the sparrow. Then looked behind us back at Jefferson Street. Then he looked at the sparrow. Then back at Jefferson Street.

“What you waitin for?”

He shushed me.

“C’mon, man,” Tey said.

The sparrow flew away. Marcus threw his gun-free hand in the air, rolled his head up towards the sky, and closed his eyes. “What did I tell you bout shuttin the hell up?”

“You took too damn long,” Tey said.

“Y’all didn’t see that car? Silver Buick sedan? It’s only passed by here four or five times.”

“No,” we said.

“Why are those niggas spyin on us?” Marcus said.

“Why you think they want anythin to do with us? Paranoid,” Tey said.

“Maybe cuz every time they come by, they stare right at us.”

Marcus was right. The sedan passed, and maybe it was gone for two or three minutes. Then we’d see it on the other side of the street, and it’d turn back around. They eventually parked at Discount 4 Less. A woman with a long weave curled in spirals all over her head got outta the car. A strand of hair fell in her face, and she pushed it back with a six-inch-long acrylic nail. She didn’t buy nuthin and came right back out. They turned down the alley and come straight at us.

Spiral Head rolled down her window. Another girl sat in the passenger’s seat. Her head was covered in very neat micro braids. Momma wouldn’t even let me get braids like that.

“Y’all know where we can find Mona’s Beauty Salon?” Spiral Head sounded real country.

Marcus snorted. He and Tey looked at me. I shrugged and shook my head. “Sorry, never heard of it.”

The girls raised their eyebrows. “My cousin told me Mona’s was in the shopping center across from the Discount 4 Less and behind the Elks Lodge,” Spiral Head said. “We been up and down Jefferson, but we haven’t seen a shopping center.”

“Your cousin from around here?” Marcus asked.

“Naw. She goes to State. We’ll be attendin in the fall. Just checkin out the area. Y’all sure Mona’s not around here? She said it was next to a convenience store in the shopping center.”

“Sorry, lady,” Tey said.

“Got any idea where it is?”

We shook our heads. They looked at each other a little confused and upset, but they thanked us and went on down the alley.

“What we know bout a beauty salon?” Tey said under his breath.

Actually, I could sympathize. Sorta. Not that Momma’d ever let me get my hair done in a beauty salon at my age, but one of my grandfathers used to own a barber shop. I couldn’t remember which grandfather, though. Grandmommy never talked about her ex-husband, and I’d only met him once when me and Daddy ran into him at Farmer’s Market. Nobody really discussed Daddy’s family either. All I knew about his father was he had water-wave hair, and he didn’t have no grays when he died. One of my grandfathers was a postman, and one owned the barber shop. I get them mixed up. Actually, I’m not sure about the postman thing, neither. I think I remembered hearin it one time.

My grandfather had the barber shop back durin the 40s or 50s. It was so long ago, it didn’t matter which decade. It used to be where the interstate is now. His barber shop and a bunch of other businesses. I had no idea what all those buildings used to look like. So, I could get why those girls were upset. Maybe Mona did hair real good, like my grandfather probably did. Maybe back then, after they tore down everythin, some country cat was comin to see the big city, and said he needed a good cut while he was here. It was startin to get a little scruffy up top. His cousin, or his best friend, or his brother who used to live here, told him to go see my grandfather. So, he’s lookin forward to his hair cut, and all he found when he got here was lots of construction—or maybe the completed interstate by then. That would have pissed me off too.

“You heard a Mona’s?” I asked Grandmommy when I got home. We got out the collard greens for dinner and started trimmin them since Momma wasn’t off work yet.

“
Have
I heard of Mona’s? No. Should I have?”

“I don’t know . . . .Where was my grandfather’s barber shop?” I figured I should ask her instead of Daddy. If she picked up the line while I was talkin to him, she might think he called me. I didn’t want her threatenin him with a shotgun again. “Did Daddy’s father have the barber shop?”

Grandmommy blinked and put down the leaf she worked on. “Barber shop? Oh, yes! That was your other grandfather’s. Why’d you drag that up?”

“I wanna know where it was. I never known, I never
have
known where it was.”

“It was somewhere along the path of the interstate. Somewhere near a dime store . . . I think.”

“But
where
?” I said.

“Keisha, I can’t remember . . . .You’re leaving too much of the leaf on the stem. Watch what you’re doing.”

“He didn’t start a new one?”

“Where was he going to put it? The white part of town?”

“So he didn’t get a new one? Did they pay him for it?”

“Who? The government? You know the government never paid us for anything.”

“So everybody lost their business and didn’t get nuthin back? That ain’t fair!”

“It
ain’t
?” Grandmommy said. “There was no sense in reasoning out fair and unfair. It was always unfair—”