“You’d rather that than lay up in my bed?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” she said, bewilderment in her tone. “OK. I guess it could be like our little nickname.”
That night Albert reclined on his futon feeling like he’d passed into a new land, a new place. There was a woman like Alyce who didn’t mind being called by that name.
He was smiling and sober and hopeful for something he could not quite imagine.
Through his window he could see the crescent moon. Then a loud banging from the hall brought him to his feet.
The footsteps passed his door and continued down toward Alyce’s room.
He came out into the hall and saw the backs of two men. They had crew cuts, T-shirts, and tattoos.
“What do you want?” Albert demanded.
The white men turned.
“This ain’t your business,” either Toad Boy or Westerling said. “We just want the bitch.”
Albert surged forward throwing his fists, getting hit twice for every blow he delivered. He pushed and fought and struggled in the narrow passage. The men hit him, and he felt pain, but it was like a far-off experience, like the memory held in an untouched bruise.
He felt something hard strike the side of his head and fell, happy to give in to the pull of gravity. Someone kicked him in the chest, then in the head. They kept up like that for thirty seconds or so.
Albert expected even more punishment, but there was a shot and then another shot.
“Let’s get outta here!” one of the men shouted.
After the third shot the same man squealed in pain.
By then Albert was on his back looking up at the ceiling. Alyce ran by and was gone for a minute, maybe two.
Albert closed his eyes for a moment.
“Are you all right?” Frankie, no, Alyce, asked.
Albert opened his eyes, caught a glimpse of his friend, and then passed out.
He woke up in a hospital bed feeling surprisingly healthy. His jaw hurt, as did his side. He turned his head and saw a middle-aged black woman sitting in a chair. She was heavy but not fat, wearing a gray dress and holding a dark blue purse.
“Al?” she said.
“Lu?”
“Baby, I was worried that you were gonna die lyin’ right here next to me.”
“What happened?”
“Somebody called the police and told them that you was all beat up in this buildin’. They came and found you. You had my name and address in an old alligator wallet. The cops said there was the smell of gunpowder in the air. But you didn’t have no gunshot wound.”
“It was only me?” Albert Roundhouse asked.
Nodding, Luellen said, “The police wanna question you.”
The interrogation lasted an hour or so. The men who broke into Albert’s illegal squat were named Toad Boy and Westerling. They kicked the shit out of him, and then there were shots. He didn’t know if anyone else lived on that floor. He’d only happened upon the place that day.
The hospital discharged Albert when he told them that he didn’t have insurance.
His sister offered to fly him back to Los Angeles.
“I’d like to go back to school, Lu,” he said. “I’d like to study history and find out what really happened with Great-Uncle Big Jim and the town of Hickton, Mississippi.
“You can come live with me,” she said. “Daddy got sick after Betty Pann died. He bought a house in LA, and I took care of him till he passed.”
“I have eighty-three thousand two hundred ninety-seven dollars and forty-two cents,” Albert said.
“You do? Where you get that?”
“The money I collected while saving souls. I can give it to you, and then I won’t be a charity case.”
Starting Over
As I do almost every day, I’m starting over again, again. Now that I’ve passed the sixty-year mark, it seems as if each day is a new passage, a more deeply felt loss, or some unexpected plateau achieved.
When I was younger, life was a self-contained ebb and flow, as predictable as the tides under Luna. Breakfast and a drive, work from nine to five, the children as they became enthralled with one activity and then moved on without warning to new interests. Back then their lives changed daily, while Marguerite and I remained the same for them, even when we were lying, even when we feigned feelings and interest. She loved the children, and they her and me, and I loved the kids and her too. My feelings in the early days did not waver, not even when Marguerite and Gary Knowles ran away together and she was gone for twenty-three days while I was left alone to care for Juan, Alexander, and Trish.
I told the kids that Marguerite had gone back east because her mother was sick. The sanatorium, I said, was in a place where telephones didn’t work. I didn’t know that Gary had left Marguerite a week into their flight. He just needed somebody to help him out of the jam of his life: his alcoholic wife, their angry children, and the mounds of debt. He didn’t know that he was using my wife, and she couldn’t see past the euphoria of a world without whining children and a commonplace husband plucked off the rack.
“Jared?” she said, on that first call after she’d left me and he’d left her.
I was surprised, not about her call but because the only emotion I felt was relief.
“Yeah, Marge?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have to be. My mother is staying with us, and the kids think that your mom is sick.”
“I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you too.” It wasn’t really a lie. Marguerite’s departure left a crease like the misshapen dents in my fatty thigh when I sit too long on a wrinkled sofa. When I was young those crinkles used to smooth out in a few minutes, but as I have gotten older I find that they last, sometimes for hours.
“Can I come home?” she asked.
“It’s your home too.”
“You should know that we used protection,” she said.
This pedestrian vow made me think about insurance. I wondered if I could start a business that would insure a person’s life to remain as it was after having been violated by betrayal or, worse, a simple loss of faith.
“Come on home, Marguerite,” I told my closest friend. “The children will be so happy that we’ll probably have to take them to the zoo or something.”
* * *
That was a long time ago, before we broke up for good.
The final rupture came years later. Juan and Trish were out of college by then, and Alexander was slogging his way through his sophomore year. He never made it to the halfway point, but I didn’t see any problem with that. Alex liked to fish and got a job on a boat up in Alaska for a summer. He was the only black man on that boat or in the little coastal village where he’d met Solla, a Native woman who bore my first grandchild, Senta.