This Side of Providence (11 page)

“That's bullshit,” she says, her face turning red. She acts like she's got balls but on the street she'd be scared to talk to me. I laugh at her.

“You think that's funny?”

“I think you're funny,” I say, still laughing.

“Why?”

There's a picture on her desk of a family in front of a fake Christmas tree. I can't find her face in the crowd. “All white people are funny.”

“Let's keep this about you, Arcelia.”

“Me? Okay. I don't write letters.”

“Why not? What are you afraid of finding out?”

I pick my fingernails, cleaning out food I don't remember eating. “I'm not afraid of anything.”

“Prove it,” she says. “Write a letter to someone. Anyone. Your children. Your family. Yourself. I don't care. But say something.” She drinks coffee from a Boston Bruins cup. From the look on her face it's cold. “Have the courage to come clean.”

“Shit, I been clean for almost two months.”

“Come clean about your past. About who you are and what you did to get here.” She pushes the notebook toward me again, this time knocking the pencil to the floor.

“That's a lot to write,” I say, picking up the pencil.

She smiles. “You've got time.”

She pours her coffee into a plant on her windowsill. I was wrong—it was only water. But I was right about it being cold.

“Yep,” I say. “Nothing but time to waste.”

“It's not a waste if it helps you. That's what therapy is.”

I roll the notebook into a tube and tuck it under my arm. I
put the pencil in my hair like a chopstick, the way I see Chinese ladies do it.

“Don't lose that pencil,” she says as I'm walking out. “That's worth a lot in here.”

Back in my room I unroll the notebook and hide it with the pencil in my magazine. Then I put it all under my bed and don't think about it for the rest of the week. But on Sunday night—after I try for three hours to call my house and nobody ever picks up—I suddenly need it. While the other girls are watching a rerun of
Law & Order
, I go into my room and lie down on the bed and think about what got me here. I want to talk to my kids and I want to talk to Lucho, but I only got myself—then I remember the notebook.

I get it out and write
“Querida Arcelia”
at the top of the page, like I used to write “
Querida Mami
” in my journal after she died. I laugh out loud when I see my name on the page, in the middle of a page as white as snow. When I stop laughing I write
“Quien eres?” Who are you?

I'm quiet for a long time, thinking about all the ways to answer that question. Finally, I start to write. At first it's a list and then I write in sentences and next thing I know I fill up most of the sheets in that notebook. I tell myself I never have to read it again if I don't want to, but I have to write it down—all of it—without leaving out the bad parts or the parts I don't want to remember. I put it all down, my whole life on a notebook filled with striped paper from the ACI, and then I put it back in the magazine and hide it under my mattress.

When I close my eyes I don't see all the flashes I usually see. The voice in my head—the one I turn off with drinking and drugs and running as fast as I can—is pretty quiet and next thing I know it's morning and they're calling for bed check and I'd actually stayed asleep all night. The first time I did that since I got here in May.

Snowman

P
rovidence is a dark city. Even when the sun is out you can miss something. Even in the summer when the days are long, some things just never get lit.

I am also dark, but you wouldn't know it to look at me. I'm like a hundred-watt light bulb; I make people squint. They tell me I have a condition called leukoderma, which means I have essentially no pigment in my skin or hair. Translation? I am completely white, except for a few patches of brown on my hands, knees, and elbows. Freaky, huh? But that's not the only thing that makes me different. My eyes are a light blue you would find in the waters of the Caribbean, not on a black kid from South Providence. Toni Morrison was wrong—I have the bluest eyes.

Some people don't know what to do when they see me, so they look away. Others stare at my skin like it's parchment covered by some ancient text they're trying to figure out. A few come right out and ask me what the hell happened to my face. Those are the ones that I talk to.

I don't use the term
albino
. Don't like it. It makes me think of a lab rat or a genetically modified pit bull some gangster would pay a lot of money to lock in a case. I've been called dozens of names in my life—whitey, Casper, ghost, spook, marshmallow, paper-plate, rice-man, milky, vanilla, light bulb, Charmin, Wonder bread, ice cream, tampon, new socks, Elmer's, cotton, goose, coconut, yogurt, sheets, cocaine, sugar, and salt—but the one I like the best, the one I let people call me,
is Snowman. It just fits.

When I was a kid I used to love that scene in
Frosty the Snowman
when he got locked in the greenhouse and melted away. Everyone else thought it was sad but I remember thinking it was cool that he could disappear anytime he wanted to, just by going into a warm room. I wanted to have a power like that. So when they started calling me Snowman I let it stick. I didn't beat anyone up and I didn't complain to the teacher. I started answering to it and writing it on my homework till even the principal was calling me Snowman and Dayton Lewis ceased to exist.

Truth be told, I'm an orphan. Been one a long time, way before my momma died. My parents met at a high school dance and married three months later, the day after my momma graduated at the top of her class from Hope High School. After a tour in Vietnam my daddy got a job at the post office. By then my momma was pregnant, so she quit her job at the phone company to wait for her first child to be born. They bought a small house off Elmwood Avenue and she filled the nursery with books she bought at yard sales for a nickel each. It took her the entire pregnancy to get through
Moby Dick
, reading every night to her doting husband and the restless baby, who, even in the womb, would not sleep.

I came early. It was a long and painful labor, one my momma thought she might not endure. When the doctor pulled me out by forceps, she was passed out from a shot of Demerol; my daddy was in the car listening to the Yankees beat the Red Sox in extra innings. I was almost an hour old before I saw either one of my parents. He was gonna name me Junior, Floyd Rutherford Lewis Junior, but when I came out white—or worse, actually, with no color—he told my momma she could call me Dayton after her favorite uncle, the first black undertaker in the state of Rhode Island. He's the one we moved in with after my daddy left, the one who paid for ten years of Catholic school without my momma even asking. He was also the one who left me his entire estate when he died from a heart attack at sixty-five and had no heirs. Left me his house and the business and $37,000 in cash. I still own the house, but I sold
the business and used the cash to buy my first rental property.

When my daddy moved out he left me something, too: the set of Lincoln Logs he got for my first birthday and didn't stay around long enough to give me. Momma never let me play with them, but she did take them out to show me every year, cursing his weakness for leaving, and her own for staying behind. They never divorced and she never remarried, but she did have another baby, mostly to prove to herself that there wasn't anything wrong with her, that none of it was her fault. I was twelve when Justin was born, a perfect brown-skinned boy with curly dark hair like my momma's and almond-shaped eyes that made women in the street ask if he was part Eskimo. Momma would smile and deny it, but he could've been for all I knew. I never met his daddy and my momma never spoke his name. She said Justin belonged to both of us, and until the state came and took him away from me, I believed her.

When people ask me why I like to walk everywhere, I tell them I like to feel the ground. I like to step where someone else has already walked. Don't matter what type—pavement, sidewalk, grass, cobblestone, brick, or dirt—I'll walk on anything solid. Most of the city's cobblestone streets got paved over by the time I was in high school, but there are still a few spots left downtown and on the east side where the rich people live. Sometimes I walk over the Point Street Bridge just to feel the stones under my feet. I imagine all the tires that have touched them, all the horse's hooves, and it makes me feel like I'm a part of something bigger than I am.

I probably walk about five miles a day, depending on how many jobs I got. I like to work 'cause it keeps me moving. Can't get anything done by sitting in one spot. If anybody asks, I call myself an entrepreneur. They don't usually ask more questions after that. But really I'm just a businessman, and like any good businessman, I've had to diversify. Some of my ventures are legal, like renting vending machines at the high schools, and some are not so legal, like introducing people to the
pharmaceuticals of their choice. Just for the record, I'm not a dealer. I'm just the middleman. I find customers for the big dogs and I take a cut. If I was dealing full-time I could bring in two or three grand a day, but I'm not a greedy man. What I am is a smart man, so every dollar I make I put right back into my business. I am also a free man, and I want to keep it that way. To do so, there are six simple rules I have to live by:

1. Don't spend money on flashy cars. (I walk everywhere.)

2. Never talk on a cell phone. (Don't own one.)

3. Never let customers know where you live. (Nobody knows where I live.)

4. Never have a girlfriend. (Last one was in kindergarten.)

5. Always have a job. (Since I was sixteen.)

6. Never use what you're selling. (Not even once.)

In the ten years I've been working I haven't broken a single rule. That's what makes me different from the average dope-slinging joker, and that's why I still got a clean record. The cops might know who I am (I'm not stupid enough to think I blend in) but they don't know what I do, and I plan on keeping it that way.
Can't find what you can't see, can you?

Out of all my jobs there's only one that feels like constant work: being a landlord. Every day I ask myself why I wanted to take care of something. I never really come up with a good answer, just keep coming back to the idea of permanence. The need to own something. To have something belong to me. I've got six houses now: two in Olneyville, two in Federal Hill, and two in the West End. What's it add up to? Six headaches. I'm not sure if it's the plight of all houses, or just these hundred-year-old Victorians we've got here in New England, but something's always going wrong. Mostly it's a problem with the house, like a busted hot water heater or a leaky roof, but sometimes it's the tenants themselves, fighting over a parking space or somebody's colicky kid or neglecting to pay the rent on time.

I don't want to make it about race, but usually that's what it comes down to. Like most things in America. My white tenants don't bother me much. They usually keep to themselves; don't mess with me and don't mess with anyone else in the house.
Quiet. Predictable. On time. The black folks? Late. Loud. Always complaining. The Spanish? Shit, they're real consistent: something's always broken; someone's always yelling.

The folks on Sophia Street are ridiculous. Ever since the mom got locked up, the first floor's been late with their rent every month. That's three months and counting. Could've collected a lot of late fees if I was an asshole. But I'm not. I feel sorry for those kids. I know what it feels like to be left alone like that, to have to take care of your home when you don't even know how to take care of yourself. It's not their fault they can't pay the rent. But of course, it's not mine either. If I let them miss a month then all the others will think they can get away with it, too. And then it multiplies and next thing you know everyone's living rent-free like this is the projects. Hell no. This is not some government-assisted-everybody-gets-their-own-patio-but-the-hallways-smell-like-piss-and-if-you-don't-keep-your-kids-inside-they'll-get-shot-on-the-front-porch program. Please don't do me like that. This is a legitimate business operation. I rent out clean, comfortable apartments in fully inspected houses for affordable rates. I don't care who you are and I don't care who your momma is—if you can't pay we don't play. It's nothing personal; it's business.

By the 15th of August all my tenants are paid up except for the ladies on Sophia Street. I guess the term
ladies
is a stretch. Lucho ain't like no lady I've ever known.

I stop by the apartment first thing in the morning, pissed already. Don't make me come looking for you. I ain't no doctor. I shouldn't have to make house calls.

The boy answers the door in his pajamas. He stares at me without speaking and doesn't invite me in.

“Is Lucho around?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “She's out.”

“You know when she'll be back?”

“Uhhh, no.” He eats a handful of sugared cereal straight from the box. “She doesn't like me asking a lot of questions,
you know? It's not like I'm her mother.”

“But she's coming back, right?”

“Of course she's coming back. She lives here.” He gestures around the room like I should recognize all her things.

“'Cause nobody's seen her around in the last week. That's a pretty long time to be ‘out.'”

He shrugs. “She moves kinda slow.”

“Uh huh.” I nod my head like I believe him.

He shoves another handful of cereal into his mouth and coughs hard like a smoker. I smell the corn and sugar on his breath. The smell is familiar but I can't place it.

“Who else lives here?” I ask him.

“My sisters.”

“How many you got?”

“Two.”

“So there's three of you.”

He appears to be counting in his head. “Yeah. And Lucho.”

“Right, of course. When she's here.”

“Right.”

He puts the box of cereal down on the floor and wipes his sugary hands on his pajamas. The gesture makes him look like a toddler, and I suddenly think of Justin at that age, how I used to feed him in the mornings when my momma was too sick to get out of bed, the cancer already eating her body from the inside out. It's been twenty years, but I can still see the plastic spoon in his chubby fist, can hear his squeaky voice talking about butterflies and balloons and helicopters that fly so high in the sky, can feel the scratch of the dried milk on his top lip as he leans up to kiss me, saying “Love you, love you,” and laughing until he chokes, as if the happiness had come bubbling out of his chest and got caught in his throat.

The boy looks at me. “You all right?”

I shake my head to clear the memory. “She leave you any money for rent?”

“Rent?” He blinks like he can't see me clearly.

“Yeah, it was due two weeks ago.”

“How much is it?” He asks like he's about to pull the cash from his pocket.

“Three-fifty.”

“Three
hundred
fifty?”

“Don't say it like that, that's a good price. I was doing your mother a favor.”

He closes the cereal box. “Lucho didn't leave no money.”

“Well, I hope she comes back then. For your sake, kid.”