Solemn Read online

  “I’m sorry.”

  Akila entered room eleven under assumption of no guest. No one was paid to be on the register. She did not have to use the master key. The door was unlocked. Pearletta didn’t understand Akila’s nice, albeit surprised, greeting. No connection whatsoever to the “Hey, how you?” and “’Member me?” and “Mrs. Hassle, right?”

  “No bother,” Pearletta said. “I need new shampoo and towels.” Then she wrapped the cream motel cover around her. She smiled. Akila pushed the cart inside. She headed for the garbage can under the dresser. She avoided taking inventory of its contents. She dumped whatever was up there into the trash can she rolled with the cart.

  “You been working here long?” Pearletta asked. Akila pulled back the blue curtain shielding a shelf stacked with linen.

  “No,” Akila answered, even more puzzled by the calm and cognitive dissonance.

  “You like it?” Pearletta asked her.

  Akila had never had time to even worry about all that. She and the baby needed money, and one of her aunts knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew the manager. She drove over to the motel she’d driven by, talked to him, and started to work. In general, despite the budget pricing and the element one star could attract, the guests were okay and even funny sometimes. As if just by having to reside in such a place, for a night or a while, gave them the need to at least dignify how they left a room behind. Most attempted a taut bed, flushed toilets, trash out in one section of the room, nothing too terrible about them left behind for another to confront.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Sit down,” Pearletta told Akila.

  “I have a lot to do,” Akila told Pearletta.

  Akila remembered a few fellas come out of the room in the last week with a complaint from a nearby lodger about old helter-skelter disco music rattling walls.

  “I would love a job,” Pearletta continued.

  A few cardboard fast-food trays, napkins, and socks littered the bed. Akila brushed off the corner of the tousled linens to sit.

  “Why don’t you get one?” Akila asked her. Pearletta rested her hands atop the covers. Akila winced at her forearms—crisscrossed with hysterical marks a child could have easily drawn in pencil as a prank. Beads of dried brown blood, scabs like stitches.

  “If I did get one, I’d want to cook, like Julia Child.” Pearletta laughed.

  Akila was shaken just from the first time someone passed her a joint. She never cared for it.

  “You wanna hear about a fucked-up person?” Pearletta asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “I like white boys, sorry to tell you. Tried ’em all, I’m ’shamed to say. I like how they smell, like sawdust or new dolls. White boys love them some stuff. Can’t get enough of it. They been coming ’round ’cause they know I got money my daddy wired, and the stuff the money Daddy wires can buy. White people never miss an opportunity.”

  “No, they don’t,” Akila agreed.

  “You gotta man?” Pearletta asked her.

  “Huh?’

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, yeah.” She said nothing of her son. She didn’t see it as good reason to make Pearletta recall. “You met him one time. He helped you…”

  “Nobody never helped me. Where your man, honey?”

  “In the Army.”

  “Oh, you got you a fine man … soldier boy! Well, ain’t we lucky?”

  “He came home last night for Easter. I’m supposed to see him later.”

  “Easter’s here,” Pearletta told Akila. “I used to skip church every Saturday.”

  “Saturday?”

  “We Seventh-Day Adventists.”

  “We?”

  “My family,” the woman said. “You believe I grew up in one of those crazy church houses? We had to go to church on Saturdays, ’cause that’s really the seventh day. And on Friday nights, we couldn’t watch TV or go to movies or read the paper or anything. It was the Sabbath. We were supposed to pray, but went to bed early.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “No, it was fun. Even now, I fall asleep early on Fridays. Pump me up to party on the weekends.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “Go to the dresser. I gotta picture over there.”

  The top of the dresser shed more light than her trailer had. Pearletta loved nylons. A few pair were balled up and worn already. Another pair in a package. Pearletta hadn’t seemed the type before to love makeup: willowy brushes, turquoise and emerald eye shadows with flecks of glitter, tubes of lip gloss. Disco looks. Two plumed perfume bottles announced themselves in a heady scent beyond them. A makeup mirror sat with a razor set upon it and a fine powder Akila guessed was not for any baby’s bottom. A picture was right next to it. In it, Pearletta flashed a big Afro waved down with a texturizer. She was reinvented, now. A redhead white loomed behind. A look so serious on his face it was silly. He had on a Tupac T-shirt. His forearm gripped Pearletta’s neck. There was a joint in his mouth, a chimney; smoke billowed all over his image.

  “Is he … your boyfriend?” Akila asked.

  “Oh no.” The woman grinned. “I’m just having me some fun. I’m waiting on him.”

  “Well, I won’t be long.”

  “No. Stay. I sent him off for it,” Pearletta said.

  “For … what?”

  “Our stuff,” Pearletta said, just like she was talking about number one on the Top 40, but Akila had yet to hear it. “He’s worse than me. Come ’round to see about me where I used to live. Trailer park out yonder. His family own the whole thing. My husband used to pay them for our plot there. Long time ago, that was. We been friends ever since.”

  “You both look like two very intelligent people,” Akila said. “I’m sure if you-all stopped some things you could start a family. Make a good life.”

  Pearletta rose up in the bed.

  “Family? Family? That ain’t shit,” she said. “Oh, I’m smart all right. I almost got a business degree. Went to school in Huntsville. Oakwood Academy. Religious school for black kids. Hah!” Pearletta stared at the ceiling as she reminisced.

  “And today, you know, it’s Good Friday. I do still pay attention. But anyway. So I skipped church one day, trying to remember my way to the theater. It was farther than I had thought. Well, I come to one of the only stoplights in this goddamned town. This car waiting to turn left. But the guy driving saw me. And there were other cars behind him, so he kept on going, straining to look at me. He almost hit the car in front of him. I get to the end of the block, by this fabric store I used to go to with my mama for things she likes to do. And the car pulled up again next to me. Out the blue.”

  “Did you holler for police? Was he trying to kidnap you?”

  “Oh honey, no. Over and over he kept on asking for my number.”

  “Seem like he was desperate.” Akila chuckled.

  “I thought the same,” the woman said. “But still. He had these really gray eyes, five o’clock shadow, big cheeks, dreadlocks … all the way up to the roof of the car. He called me, over and over all day every day, until we were talking all night. Every night.”

  Akila would never have such a story to share about Landon. That era of her life—of giggles under the covers on the telephone with boys, or even sneaking out of dorm rooms to meet them—ended before it began. She found Pearletta’s nostalgia remarkable and immature, so different from how she saw she had framed her. She enjoyed it.

  “I was supposed to meet up with the guy,” Pearletta kept on. “It was a few weeks. I didn’t know what was going to happen. So, I showed up where he told me to meet him.”

  “Was he there?”

  “Yes, he was there. But not like I had imagined him.”

  And Pearletta laughed until she cried, but she was still too high to move much.

  “He didn’t have no legs. Scared me half to death. I was walking over. He opened the car door and was just sitting there with his arms out, like a tree trunk.” />
  “But-b-b,” Akila stammered. “He was driving…”

  “That’s what I thought, too. They drive past you, look, stop. Honey, I wouldn’t even come close to the car. It was too … weird. I had been imagining he was tall. But I saw two things in his lap looked like canes. I guess they’re what he used to drive. You know they come up with everything these days. But this sucker started yelling some shit about Desert Storm. ‘I’m a soldier, doll … I swear ’fore God, I’m a soldier!’ Hmph.”

  “What you do? You keep on talking to him?”

  “Hell no, I didn’t keep on talking to him. I laughed at his ass. I laughed and laughed until I just couldn’t no more. Next day my friend asked me to go to a party. So I did. And I met my husband. Thought I wouldn’t never be scared of a man again.”

  “You still married?” Akila asked, recalling a little of it. Not much. Just enough.

  “Sometimes I wonder what might’ve happened if I hadn’t laughed at him. If I gave him a chance. Like now, I think about it all the time. If he wasn’t such a bad guy. If, due to his disability and all, he would have been good to me. Better than the rest.”

  “Don’t matter sometimes. A dog is a dog, hind legs or not,” Akila said.

  “Well,” Pearletta said, “he could’ve told me. You know?”

  “I know,” Akila said, wondering of the time.

  “Like it was this other man in a car one night, with his little girl. Out at the trailer park I used to live in. We liked each other, for a little while. They call him Red. Hah!”

  Akila missed it, but it would catch her later.

  “Now, he told me he had a woman,” Pearletta continued. “Almost twenty years married. He told me. He did. Daughter and son too. He gave me money. Sometimes.”

  It caught Akila and let her loose. Then, caught again. Finally, it slipped away …

  “Honesty the best policy,” was all Akila said, rising from the bed to go now.

  “Do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell nobody you saw me here, okay?”

  Soon as Akila said, “I won’t,” Pearletta snuggled under the covers and closed her eyes, hummed to herself. Akila felt like she was getting away with something, goofing off with a guest. She wondered if Pearletta would have liked to sit up with her and Bev, talking and cooking and watching Oprah Winfrey and pinning clothes and playing with the baby. Akila saw the television was on All My Children. That poor woman must have forgotten she turned it on this Good Friday. Akila watched the television for a few moments. She rested. She had wanted to remind Pearletta, there was always home, somewhere she could go. But the guest had already drifted off into a sleep. Akila grabbed a generous handful of soap and shampoo to place on top of the even more generous pile of towels she left. Then, she turned off the television and lights and locked the motel room door. She had just met Pearletta Hassle, and the Redvines, for the first time, it seemed to her.

  TWELVE

  It was a rare occasion Bev practiced her actually pretty nice voice. This was it.

  The friendly families reclined off excess of barbecued corn on the cob and fried chicken, two sweet potato pies Solemn and Desi consumed most of, and just enough watermelon so to wet their tongues without having to run to the few outhouses too often. Solemn and Desi wolfed down several ears of corn. Then, they ran off to find some of their more interesting classmates from school. To practice their routine. The rest thought Akila took the moment to run off to find the other girls she hadn’t seen in all the time she was in the house taking care of a baby alone. Truth was, something was strange now in looking at Mr. Redvine, fogged up in riddles and crooked talk. Soon, Landon passed the newborn on to give speeches his work, for Uncle Sam had yet to interrupt.

  “… I wouldn’t lie. They want us to shut up … make everybody think it’s all right. They just put that death penalty back on to kill the black man legally…”

  “They’re playing my jams, too, Bev,” Stephanie said. Then, “Landon, I find what you’re saying to be very interesting, and certainly true.”

  Landon confounded Redvine. Here he had a healthy son about to travel and get into shit he himself had never been able to, but still unsatisfied and hotheaded.

  “The whole barracks filled up with white boys get a good job while we slop shit. We ask to know how the communications and mechanics and surveillance work and get told not to worry about it. But when it’s time to figure out how to whip up some biscuits, we gotta be all ears. And the honkies sitting down eating and reading books…”

  “Landon, you working now,” Redvine reminded his son. “Got yourself a good, fine military position, boy. You gonna mess around and—”

  “Yeah, but only ’cause a white boy started having seizures and had to go home. It was a handout spot, not a first-choice pick. Now I come back here and see they got a whole scrapyard and refinery tore down to give white folks new mansions. What about a college or a school in walking distance for the folks round who need it?”

  “What about you change this child’s diaper?” Bev asked.

  “Mama, you ain’t never listened to nothing I’m telling you about all this.”

  Landon grabbed the baby. Redvine leaned back in a webbed lawn chair, satisfied. The infant was not used to his daddy’s arms, and the daddy was only used to letters about the baby or rare photos of him. The diaper change did not go well.

  Bev shooed him. “So you wanna shoot guns but can’t change a diaper? I tell you, men are something else…”

  “Man ain’t supposed to change no diapers anyway,” Redvine said.

  “Aw, now here you go … out here in front of people trying to front. You know you did this with your own and you do it with this one here.”

  “Not s’posed to.”

  “Would you like a cookie, or how ’bout a night with me at the Ritz-Carlton?”

  “Cookie taste better.”

  A gang of unsavory characters strolled along past their posts, dense with the budget whores and well-fed pimps everyone recognized. Behind them were strung-out salesmen who, in the high-eighties temperature, wore shark suits with wing-collared jackets fanned out into racks of gold chains and bell-bottoms, weighted down with other stolen tokens. One of Landon’s coconspirators showed up where Landon had said to meet him, with an armload of picketing signs and a handful of flyers.

  “You ready man? ’Bout as many people here as ever,” the spectacled boy said, too tense and stern to be so young. Landon nodded. The young man gave the greeting he was trained to give: “Howdy, good peoples. Sir. Ma’ams…”

  They all responded, but Bev had a thought. Solemn and Desi were nowhere in sight.

  “I should go look for the girls,” Bev said. “Plus, it’s gonna be time for him to eat soon and I ain’t got nothing for him. Gotta find Akila, too.”

  “Girls all right, Mama,” Landon said, poring over the flyers his friend had prepared. “Sit down and enjoy yourself for a change.”

  “And just what you fellas planning on doing with those?” Redvine asked. He motioned his son’s friend to put a flyer in his hand.

  “Elevate and enlighten the people, sir,” the friend answered.

  “Hmmm … I see: ‘death penalty and the black man, incarceration and the black man, front lines and the black man … Rodney King and the black man…’”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna be interested in all that today, hate to tell you boys.” Bev sighed.

  Stephanie tried to change the subject: “You know what Beverly, we should create us some flyers to pass out for our new book club…”

  “What book club?” Redvine asked.

  Bev creased a shawl to create a nest for the child, smiled at him. She turned his head to the side to put a bottle of water in it. She told them all she would be back.

  “I’ll go with you,” Stephanie concurred. “Not used to all this sitting. They’re probably at the pony rides. Theo’s been talking about those ponies all damned year.”

  “How far is
it?” Bev capped her eyes from the horizon with the straight line of her free hand. Her modest engagement stone glistened with a sunbeam’s strike.

  “Not far. ’Cross the field,” Stephanie remembered. “Near the bingo tent.”

  * * *

  Bolden’s uncles invited him out here. Some missed him. Most just had to check to see if he didn’t think he was too good to come. But, with the address on Pearletta Hassle’s DMV report turned up to a well-off Jackson, Mississippi, avenue and her mother’s call passed on to him, she was in his hands whether he liked it or not. He drove past the gate of Singer’s and cursed its recent dystopia. Everything black folks have gotta get messed up? He was one of the ones who dreamed of that baby. At the park, supposedly involved in talk and cards with family, he couldn’t help himself: when young women walked past he looked; when couples strode by he inspected; when he saw familiars he asked. And the young mother whose nipples he saw just the night before looked carefree today. So rather than remind her he let her be. Same went for those Redvines, good people, he thought. And it wasn’t nothing too much. Folks should understand a woman been through all that needing to self-medicate, hide from whispers, start all over, find herself again. But while he entertained the distant cousins who always wanted to know where his gun was, Earl Redvine came up behind him.

  “Where’s your uniform, sir?” Redvine said.

  “Should be a church suit. Sun won’t allow it.”

  “We all need to relieve stress.”

  “Gotta thank y’all for what you did for the Hassle gal,” Bolden said.

  Redvine’s face stretched. “I … I beg your pardon?” he asked Bolden.

  “Helping Pearletta Hassle move,” Bolden said. “That was nice of y’all.”

  “Oh.” Redvine came to. Then, “My wife and son did that. I had to work. I mean, I would have if I could have.”