The Perishing, page 13
Jagged lines cross my walls here in the basement. The foundation of my office is cracked so unevenly that the floor is two heights. I use the higher part of the broken floor as my chair.
I take one of Mrs. Miriam’s letters from my bag and read it. She’s been traveling more with the boys since Mr. Lawrence died. His daughter from the first marriage wanted to stay behind with her auntie so Miriam left her.
They went back east to see family, and she says she’s kept her joy since the memorial. I asked if she misses him. She wrote, “I’ll always miss Lawrence. I haven’t let him go. But I have to allow myself to live life and tell myself it’s alright to still wish he was here.” These are the stories about death that no one gets to read about.
I sit at my typewriter, which sits on a stool, a light dangling from a cable above it. I roll up my skirt from the knees till it’s a tire of cloth around my waist so I can move better. There’s no way to sit like this in a pencil skirt without it ripping up the back. Nobody’ll come down here anyway and see my legs out. Esther would’ve. She would’ve said, “Congratulations, this is a hole!” and I would’ve still been proud ’cause she was in it with me.
Morris warned me on my first day not to hang anything on the wall. “You don’t want to tempt this office to collapse on you.”
I try my typewriter. “This is L.A.,” I read aloud as I type.
“This is Los Angeles,” Morris says, correcting me, the bass of his tone startling. “Where everything can collapse any minute.”
I didn’t see him come in.
I hop off my seat, roll down my skirt.
“I thought I’d check on you,” he says.
I straighten my blouse with quickness. My sudden movements knock loose the light fixture above my typewriter, its bulb shatters on my seat.
Morris covers his face.
Glass slices a deep gash in my thigh. It bleeds at once.
My reflection in the downed silver fixture shows the blood. I cross my legs, but it’s too late. Morris already sees me bleeding.
I pick out the shard.
“Is that blood?” Morris says, cringing and staring too near to my crotch.
“Only if you’re asking because you have an extra sanitary napkin.”
He looks away. “We’ll get you a new office as soon as we can,” his hip bumps the dented doorframe as he turns on his way out.
My skin only needs a few seconds to scab and heal anew; I still have no explanation for this. All I keep thinking is what if everything Metal Wally believes about Black people, about me, is true and I’m unnatural? Because there is nothing natural about a body that does not carry its scars.
—
Morris is yelling out assignments to reporters now and some are mad: especially the world news (“real” news) reporters who think they deserve the big stories (Europe) and not the animal shelter or the groundbreaking for such-and-such, or the story about the brick wall going up around La Brea Tar Pits. I’d die to tell the story of the dinosaurs who were swallowed up and became tarry ooze in the eighteen pits of Hancock Park. Or about the brick wall and bridge being built by the City in its effort to keep Tar Pit sightseers from falling in and adding themselves to the body count.
The other reporters walk up to the front, grumbling as they yank the white sheet assignments out of Morris’s hand. “Lou,” he says over the newsroom commotion, “I want you to take this one. Officer Kerry Adams. He thinks highly of you.”
The room quiets. “Officer Adams?” I say.
“He’s joined the City Council panel. Elected to the at-large seat, deciding on this Route 66 project.”
I walk to the front. Metal Wally eyes me while Morris shuffles through the other story tickets in his hands. He pauses at one. “Wait, I want you to take this one too. The fire station. On Central,” he says. “Engine Company Four. The Negro fire company.”
The reporters start chattering again.
“Did someone die there?” I say when I get to the front and take the ticket.
“They’re having a celebration in a few days, honoring Sam Haskins, the first Black fireman employed by the City, and our relationship with the coloreds is tenuous. See if you can get an invitation to the celebration. You’ll meet with the fire captain. Jefferson Clayton,” Morris says.
My whole body stiffens.
“He’s a hero to the coloreds, and he can tell about you the colored perspective on this Route 66.”
Two months ago was the last time I saw him. Every time since when I hear the whine of a fire truck siren, I turn and walk away, covered in chill bumps. It’s like when Mr. Lawrence died. I’d be standing in a crowd somewhere and I swear I’d see Lawrence back from the dead. Once, I chased a man with a head shaped like his. When I caught up to him, I’d planned to laugh with him and say, “I knew you were playing possum!” but it wasn’t him. Mr. Lawrence is dead. And this man—J. Clayton—is from my dreams. Never living and never dead. Just a doodle on my page, now real and alive. That’s not something to run to.
“I have two other deaths due next week. I’ll pass on this Clayton one,” I say.
“Get some of their complaints,” Morris says, not asking, and using their as if I’m not Black too. “Captain Clayton’s family … his wife and his four-year-old boy are delightful too.”
He has a family?
“They’re from the South and should appreciate how good coloreds are treated here. So give the story some life this time? No walking trees. Just the living, breathing story.”
I take the ticket from Morris and say, “I’ve only worked on stories about death.”
“Which have always been stories about the living,” he says.
SEVENTEEN
LOU, 1931
The dead white woman’s door makes me uneasy. I stand in front of it, considering its lacquer shine and size, common for motel buildings. I’ll bet this was a conversion—some two-story plantation house turned into ready-to-rent rooms, by the day or by the hour. That was before the Depression stole the hope of a thriving motel business after nobody had money to travel. It’s two levels of apartments now.
The stairs on each edge of the building lead to a landing that goes from one end of the building to the other—three apartment doors upstairs are protected by a guardrail to keep the drunks from stumbling off the ledge to their deaths.
I stand in front of the third apartment. This door is wide enough to fit a woman carrying a baby on her hip while holding her toddler’s hand—a whole family coming to L.A. on vacation, their father, a military man, home from overseas.
But I’m alone now.
Someone could open this door and pull me in without me bumping the doorframe. No one would know.
Someone is vacuuming inside. More than one person. A team of cleaners, judging by the noise—sucking in and, strangely, blowing out the mess. A dusty exhale into some collection bag, I’d guess. One I’ve never seen. But cleaning machines are being enhanced rapidly these days to keep up with the changing young families. Women are encouraged to take more time for themselves in L.A.
I knock.
A wind catches my scarf, and it rises like a cat’s tail, balancing. I smooth it back down.
White children are playing on the first floor, squealing as they run past the stairwell, laughing now, headed toward the palm trees next to the parking lot where there are swings and bad ideas—an unattended merry-go-round for kids to fly off and a metal slide heated by the sun that’ll brand the backs of their thighs on the ride down.
Another white kid, maybe seven, is at the bottom of the stairs looking up at me. I smile. She doesn’t. I knock on the door again.
The 2:00 p.m. sunlight seems to have stalled between the buildings, shadows unchanging, like the length of time for those hard on their luck. Dozens of families, new to the city, are housed here. Temporarily, I’m told. That was the intention. But when the government is responsible for hospitality, something is always lost.
The curtain on the window next to the door rustles, then stops. “Hello?” I say. No answer.
A darkness inhabits the window now—a white man with stains of dark circles under his eyes. “What!” he says to me.
My voice quivers. “I’m Louise with the L.A. Times. I’m here about Mrs. O’Malley.”
“Speak up!”
“Louise … with the Times.” The curtain shuts.
A moment later, I hear his voice again: “Nigger’s at the door,” he yells to someone inside. The vacuuming does not stop.
I wait.
The door creaks open. The man from the window has opened it and, without inviting me in, he turns and walks away from me. He has a baseball bat in his hand.
I stay in the foyer a second longer, long enough to realize I should follow. “Close the door behind you,” he says.
My eyes adjust to the darkness inside the empty great room—no furniture, no images on the wall. I pass an open door on the right and shiver when I see another man, a big man, sitting close to the carpeted floor on an outdoor lounge chair, a broken Adirondack—it must be from the East Coast. His hands are inside his jacket and a glass drinking cup is on the armrest, a plate of food is on his lap. His radio is next to his foot. “You lock it?” the man in the room says.
“What?” I ask.
He sets his plate on the floor and gets up to lock the door, but he knocks his glass over, spilling cider. “Damn,” he says. But at least he didn’t shatter it. The man with the bat keeps walking without cleaning the spill and I follow behind him.
We stop at a door at the end of the hallway. He knocks with one knuckle, then opens it. The vacuum sound is loudest now.
The man tells me wait and I do.
Finally, he nods me forward and moves out of the doorway. There, at the back of the room, is a man-sized metal cylinder, a cream-colored barrel, half the size of a car, laid on its side and resting on a stand that looks like a cot. It has an opening for the head of the man who’s lying inside. There’s an opening for his head but not for his feet. His double chin is girded at his neck like bunched clothing; the rest of his reddened face is severely swollen, like a two-day-old balloon with a third of its air escaped so if you squeeze the bottom, all the air inside would rush to its over-inflated head. I imagine his whole body matches this.
The cylinder he’s lying in is the source of the vacuuming racket. I see now that it is his breathing machine. He moves his head from facing upward to the ceiling to the side to see me where I am. The machine rattles.
“Are you contagious?” I say.
“Polio’s transmitted through community pools, so no. Not to you.”
I can’t take my eyes off his machine. I’ve never seen one this close.
“Do you know why you’re here?” he says.
His frizzy brown hair is like combed-out soft curls. “Because your mother passed away,” I say, and I wonder what those knobs do. “I’ve been assigned her story.”
“Do you know why you were assigned to write about my mother’s life?”
I didn’t want to tell him because it’d be rude to remind a grieving son that his mother’s non-Protestant religion puts her squarely at the bottom of America’s whiteness. So I say, “Because I work the Death desk.”
“No, because I requested you.”
“Me, sir?”
His face holds a firm expression now, and it makes me feel like I should be paying closer attention to him, so I surrender my curiosity over his machine and look him in the eyes. He’s a pink elephant of a man, I think. Swaddled like a baby in a blanket of metal.
He begins barking like a hound, not a cough but hearty laughter. He can hardly breathe from laughing. He coughs and brings up a massive amount of phlegm and moves it to the front of his teeth, and the man who let me in goes over to him, pinches it away, and dabs his mouth with the tissue.
“Did I scare you with this device?” he says, chuckling now. “I wonder what people think when they first see it. Cost me fifteen hundred dollars, more than most people’s houses.”
The lung inhales and exhales. I talk over it. “I … I’ve never seen a device quite so grand,” I say. “An iron lung in someone’s house? I’ve only ever seen them in hospitals.”
“I had Danny there encourage the doctor who treated me to give me one. You see, the polio virus paralyzes muscles in the chest, isn’t that right, Danny?”
Danny, the man behind me with the bat, doesn’t answer.
“Polio patients can’t breathe. That’s how most people die from it in the early stages,” he says. “I’d been waking up in the middle of the night and couldn’t breathe. Doctor said it wasn’t because of polio … but what do doctors know? He just didn’t diagnose me yet. Too early.”
“Can I touch it?” I say.
“Come on,” he says.
I walk next to it. He shifts his eyes toward me, hardly moves his neck. I lay my hand flat on the shiny metal and feel my delight rise within me. I say, “I’ve read this can maintain respiration artificially until a person can breathe independently.” I’m in awe. “People who survive this stage usually recover most or almost all of their former strength, usually takes one or two weeks. Not long.”
I run my hand over the knobs, but I don’t turn them. Two small and greenish circular doors are on the side of the metal cylinder, just large enough for a man’s arm to reach inside the tank. I open a door. “Is this alright?” I say.
“Go’n,” he says. “I’m dressed.” A hospital gown.
It’s hot like an oven inside. A cookie tray. A smell of disinfectant steams off him and it reminds me of jail.
“Can you move my arm while you’re there?” he says. I feel around till I find his arm inside the tank and I adjust it. He thanks me. Something cool touches the side of my palm. A melting icepack that somebody put in place.
“Is this your first or second week inside it?” I say.
“What is it, Danny? One … two … two years?” he says.
“A year and half,” Danny says, correcting him.
“Nothing keeps people breathing better. Longer than this machine. I plan to live forever,” he says.
I close the door, step back.
On the front is a latch you’d have to squeeze to open the entire lid. “Can you get out from inside?” I say. “If you wanted?”
“A coffin,” he says, “You see the latch there. Hinges are on the back along my left side, next to the wall.” He lifts his head, shows me he’s stuck. “That’s why I’ve got Danny.”
“That sure is a lot of trust.”
“Boy’s earned it,” he says. “Sit,” he says, and Danny pulls up a chair behind me, one high enough that he and I can talk face-to-face. “My name is Vic O’Malley. My mother was Helen O’Malley.”
“Louise,” I say, and rest my purse on my lap.
We study each other up close. He has dark freckles on his cheeks underneath his eyes, like he dotted his whole face with black eyeliner. I turn away to study the room. It’s spotlessly clean.
“Shall we begin?” I say.
“Wait a minute,” he says. “Before you start asking questions, be a doll and flick that switch.”
I do. The vacuuming stops.
“I can hear you better now,” he says. “And you didn’t answer my question. Do you know why you’re here?”
“To help let the community know about your mother.”
“What do you think they need to know?”
“Let’s start with the day she died?”
“Danny, what was it? The sixteenth or seventeenth of last month? No, it was the nineteenth. She died right there where you’re sitting. Her heart gave.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and squirm in my seat. “You were her caregiver?”
“I’m a man,” he says, disgusted by my question. “She had girls. Was hard to care for too. Fired everyone. Kept most of ’em at a distance. Those closest to her she treated like slaves. Jump when she said jump. Sit, sleep, feed her when she said and not on schedule. And if they did those things, after a while, she’d give them more responsibility. But people were in and out.”
“So she had a hard time trusting people?” I write that down.
“No, it means she didn’t trust anybody she couldn’t abuse. Are we going to have a problem here with you mincing my words?”
“No, sir,” I say, and line out his first statement.
“Dan-nay!” he calls out, and Danny comes. “Git me another sack of ice, would you?”
Danny brings it in and puts it under his neck. “Some ice chips too.”
I wait for him to get comfortable, start writing my next question, reframing it.
“Who’s your people?” he says.
“Black people.”
“Naw, your family. Your parents? If we’re going to talk about my family …”
“I’m a foster.”
“By who? Who fostered you? The church?”
“A man named Mr. Lawrence and his wife, Mrs. Miriam?”
“Lawrence!” he says. “No shit. That man went through holy hell trying to keep me. No cross-race fostering, they told him. But they couldn’t find an Irish family fast enough. At eight years old I already had a reputation,” he says, proud of himself. “They couldn’t keep me in jail, could they? Juvenile hall was always packed with child robbers and fighters, it was survival, a sign of the coming Depression. You get yer ass kicked for a cookie. My social worker needed to get me out of there, and at the time, Mr. Lawrence still believed that all a child needed was love and discipline. No matter race. But the problem was me. I was a pill.”
“They let him keep you?”
Danny brings him a plastic cup filled with cold water and ice chips. He places the straw on Vic’s lips, lets him drink. Vic pushes the straw out with his tongue. “The juvenile courts,” he says, “were always going round Lawrence’s house, asking for reports about me. And he’d have to lie for me. If he didn’t, what kind of life would I have had?”
“Not a good one,” I say.
“I admit I wasn’t easy, but what child is prepared to be abandoned by his parents and, to be fair, foster parents aren’t ready either. Thank God my birth mother rallied. She got herself together. Credited it to her Catholic faith. And she got me back. But Lawrence. How is he?”
