“That’s what Drew suggested, but Ernie says that it’s just a mix-up, that you aren’t perverted or anything. I’ll talk to this Donelli girl, and as long as I have your word that you’ll leave her alone, I’ll forget it. This is personnel’s fault in the first place. You’re an intelligent boy—young man. Of course you’re going to get into trouble if you aren’t challenged.”
Watching the forbidden smoke curl around his head, I imagined that Averill was some kind of devil. When I thanked him and shook his hand, something inside me wanted to scream.
I found six unused crack vials a block from the subway stop near my apartment. I knew they were unused because they still had the little plastic stoppers in them.
When I got upstairs I spent hours searching my place. I looked under the edges of the mattress and behind the toilet, under the radiator, and even down under the burners on the stove. Finally, after midnight, I decided to open the windows.
Andrew had crawled down in the crack between the window frame and the sill in my bedroom. His green body had dried out, which made his eyes look all the larger. He’d gone down there to die, or maybe he was trying to get out of the life I’d kept him in; maybe it was me that killed him, that’s what I thought. Later I found out that flies live for only a few weeks. He probably died of old age.
I took the small dried-out corpse and put him in one of the crack vials. I stoppered him in the tiny glass coffin and buried him among the roots of the bonsai apple.
“So you finally bought something nice for your house,” my mother said, after I told her about the changes in my life. “Maybe next you’ll get a real bed.”
Almost Alyce
1.
Albert Roundhouse came from a good working-class family in Los Angeles. He did well in public high school and made it through three years of state college before things started falling apart.
There was a young woman named Alyce who came into Albert’s life like a typhoon—at least that’s what Albert’s sister Luellen said.
“Alyce blew in like a storm,” Luellen Roundhouse reported to anyone who cared to listen. “She told him that she wasn’t the kind of girl that belonged to anyone or who wanted to settle down. And as much as Al tried to understand what she was telling him, he just sank under all that loving like a leaky rowboat in a summer storm.”
And it was true, what Luellen said. Sometimes when Albert gazed on Alyce’s brown body in his bed at night, he would howl and pounce on her like an animal from some deep forgotten part of the forest. And Alyce loved his hunger for her. She rolled and growled, clawed and bit with him.
And then one day she was gone—out of his bed, out of his apartment, out of the city, with Roald Hopkins, a sailor on furlough.
“He could have been called Jimmy or Johnny,” Luellen Roundhouse said. “He could have been a she for all that Alyce cared. Because she was just hungry for passion from as many lovers as possible. She told Albert that. She warned him.”
At about that time, September 1979, Albert and Luellen’s father, Thyme Roundhouse, met Betty Pann. He fell for Betty just as his son had fallen for Alyce. But Betty didn’t run away—not at all. It was Thyme who ran out. He left Georgia, his wife, the kids’ mother, and moved with Miss Pann to Seattle, where they lived in a house that looked over the Puget Sound. Thyme became a fisherman and Betty a nurse. “Blood and Fishes,” they had printed on their own personal stationery.
Georgia Roundhouse changed her surname back to Gordon but still refused to give Thyme a divorce. She didn’t quit her job as senior office manager for the city of Los Angeles, but after seventeen weeks of absence she was fired.
By then Albert was failing his classes, pining for Alyce. She had sent the lovesick student a postcard telling him that she’d left Roald for another lover, name of Christian Lovell. Her words and tone were so friendly that Albert cried for three days. Luellen convinced her brother to drop out of school and move in with their mother, each to serve as a life preserver for the other.
For a while it went as well as heartbreak would allow. Albert got a job for Logan Construction and came up with the small monthly mortgage payment. The rest of their money came from Georgia’s private savings and what little Luellen could provide from her various part-time jobs.
Albert had never done hard labor before. He manned a wheelbarrow most days, moving rock from one pile to another. He lifted and strained and grew callouses. Al was grateful for the exhaustion because it meant he would sleep rather than brood about Alyce at night in his childhood bed.
Georgia cooked dinner every day and ate with her moping son.
The mother loved Albert, but for most of his life they’d had little in common and less to say. But with Thyme gone, Georgia would find herself telling Albert about her family history. She told these stories because Albert rarely had anything to say except that he loved Alyce more and more each day.
Georgia talked about her mother and father and Great-Grandfather Henry, who had been born a slave but became a spice trader, getting his own ship and working from the port of Havana. Henry’s wife, Lorraine, had been a woman of the streets.
“Great-Granddaddy Henry married a prostitute?”
“He had got himself stabbed by a Spaniard that wanted to take over his business, but Lorraine found him bleeding in an alley and took him in. She nursed him back to health, and Henry went out and killed that Spaniard. When he came back he told Lorraine that he would marry her and build her a big house in America, where she would never have to work unless that was what she wanted.”
“He must have been the most colorful ancestor we got,” Albert said, forgetting for the moment his sorrow.
“Oh, no,” Georgia said. “Big Jim Gordon, your great-uncle on my father’s side, was the wildest, most exciting relative. Big Jim declared war on the town of Hickton, Mississippi, and fought that war for twelve long years.”
“War?”
“Oh, yes,” Georgia said with surety. “Full-fledged war, with guns and traps, dead men and blood. He lived in the woods around that town and took retribution on those that had harmed him and others of our people.”
“When was this?”
“Just after World War One and up to the Great Depression.”
“But the Gordons aren’t from Mississippi.”
Georgia smiled. It was a look of mild cheer, but Albert thought he could see how deep the pain ran.
“You only get so much a night, Al,” she said. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you how the white men in that town of Hickton hurt Jim and then paid the price.”
With these words Georgia Gordon got up and went to her bedroom, leaving Albert to wonder about his great-grandfather the spice merchant and his great-uncle Big Jim, the one-man army.