The Salt Eaters (18 page)

Holding on to the rail to get off the bus, Palma didn’t have time to see him, to prepare herself, to throw open her arms, or to wonder how he’d gotten there ahead of her. There was no time to get her mind working: Had Marcus received her wire or happened to be in Claybourne for a different reason and was at the bus terminal to meet someone else? When she stepped down to the bottom step in rocky terror, gazing down at the pegged jeans, the green-lacquered toenails, the Carmen Miranda shoes, looking down in disbelief—could this be her in this getup?—she was being lifted. And all the step-by-step to-do-the-minute-I-hit-town went right out of her head. She never quite touched the curbstone. And she didn’t quite get a look at him before she smelled him and felt him, the faint vanilla fragrance warm and custardy, his soap, under the bite of citrus, the shaving cologne she’d never liked, the aggrey beads on chewed leather around his neck imprinting themselves on her sternum. Then his chin so sharp in her neck, his
beard scraping her cheek raw. He was hurting her.

Or maybe she was crying because she was that glad to be home and to find him there. Or maybe the crying was fear, his presence confirming what she’d been dreading about Velma, that something terrible had happened to her sister.

The morning before, Palma had run across a photo of her sister among the sheet music and been stunned, scared. A photo she’d never seen. Velma in shorts and halter squinting into the camera, her arms turned out so that the unsunned and exposed insides showed childlike and vulnerable, as if waiting for the shock of the alcoholed cotton and the sting of the needle. And such tension in the hunched shoulders, the neck, the torso, Palma had dropped it, and the photo had curled up tight on the floor like a white pencil. It had taken effort to flatten it out again to examine closely. Velma’s face a blur but the eyeballs black and sharp as though someone had stabbed her there with a black felt pen. Rigid, fearful, Velma had looked insane, her bush spiked out like the bromeliad behind her, the knife-like red buds the plant shot out like flames, like a jagged halo.

It was an old photo, taken the summer before at the beginning of Velma’s comings and goings, of her complaints that Obie and Lil James were driving her nuts. Talking in an odd way but never quite explaining what the matter was, complaining about sexual harassment on the job but not offering an example in that stand-up comic way she had—no anecdotes, just her reaction. And not saying why all this should be getting to her at this late date. There was nothing new about Obie’s ambivalence—should he and Velma hire help to do the “mother act” or should Velma and maybe both of them cut back on community work?—or the boy’s vacillation: one minute a responsible teenager, the next a crybaby, the next a rebellious kid. And there was certainly nothing new about
supervisors trying to do the shakedown samba. And since summer, Velma was getting more and more tense, leaving her house with larger and larger suitcases, popping into Palma’s at odd hours, coming to the breakfast table wrapped in pieced-together bedclothes—sweat shirt, rain poncho, most anything—and walking like a board, mumbling about a migraine or a nightmare or some ill-defined bad feeling she could not shake. She’d pace the kitchen unable to bend and sit down it seemed, until Palma got the kids off to school and could run a tub for her to soak.

The morning the troupe were due in Barnwell for the No Nukes rally, Velma had come to the table stiff-necked and silent and bitten right through her juice glass.

The photo—the stiffness, the blood-red flowers—had triggered in Palma the dream of the night before: Velma spitting splattered teeth into a rusty can whose ragged lid cut her lips. And Palma had rushed to the phone. Had Velma remembered to rinse her mouth out with warm salt water? Remembered to see a doctor? Palma, hanging on the phone, reliving the panic, the tedium of removing bits of glass from tongue and gums with her tweezers. Reliving the rush with a dishtowel full of cracked ice and ignoring the looks of her children.

Palma, one hand holding the phone, the other stretching out the scrolled photo, surrendered up to the flood of dream fragments, premonitions, replays of conversations: “Do you think, Palma, that suicides reincarnate more quickly than say—” She was crowded off her chair. And then her period stopped abruptly.

“Hey.” He dug her chin out of the folds of his sweater and kissed it. “It’s only me, baby. Marcus. Everything’ll be all right.” He handed her his hankerchief. He was laughing, she felt it ripple against her stomach. But she felt worry in his chest, felt a drop in the heat of his breath. She shivered.

She didn’t have time to ask him any of the questions forming in her mouth: Had he seen Velma? Heard anything? Was Obie in town? Had Marcus gone by her house, were her children all right? Had there been a burglary or a fire in the apartment? Had Velma moved back to her own house and simply forgotten to have her calls transferred from Palma’s place? Had she changed jobs again without notifying personnel? Was everything really all right? No time. Cecile and Mai were off the bus now, crowding her, waiting to be introduced, kissing her goodbye, trying to make room for the other passengers waiting to pull their luggage out of the storage compartment.

“We’ll meet up later at your place, yes? The program begins in the park at midnight?”

“But first we eat, Mai,” Cecile was insisting.

Palma tried to handle the introductions, stumbling over their names, her voice catching, the look of Nilda and Cecile so altered she could not quite get her bearings. Chezia and Inez pulling the women on in the direction of the Avocado Pit.

“Health food?” Cecile appealed over her shoulder to Palma. “Don’t let them serve me no sick-girl lunch, please. I want pig. I want conch. Fungi. Ackee.”

“Good food,” Nilda and Chezia were saying, hustling Cecile on to give the lovers space.

“I don’t favor plant-life sandwiches with cobwebs. Palma, direct us to the place of the serioso chefs.”

Marcus quickly pointed out Alex’s Bar B Q and then his hand returned to the shivery place on Palma’s shoulder. He held on to her until she gave him his handkerchief back.

“Marcus, my period stopped.” She watched him hear it, watched him wait, mull it over and wait. That was not the way to say it. But how to explain the moony womb and the shedding of skin on schedule? How to explain the pull of Velma, the tug of her clock compelling? How to relay the alarm?

Last Monday she awoke suddenly, wondering whether she could get the posters, the flyers and the T-shirts into the duffel bag. But when she opened her closet door, there was Velma in an old leotard of hers and a kitchen curtain draped like a sarong and rummaging among sheets, pillowcases, fabric, shoe boxes in search of a tampon or a sanitary pad. Then later, the morning and afternoon spent packing, checking the slides, marking the poster rolls, Palma’s period arrived eight days early. Not surprising. It always happened that way. When the children complained that Aunt Velma’s sudden appearances on the sofa or in the bathroom or in the family budget were jarring, that her visits completely wrecked the order of the house and everybody’s timetable, Palma had smiled but yes.

“Monday and then Wednesday, Marcus. Just one and a half days,” she tried again and felt him waiting, worried, his hands pressing her shoulders toward him. How to explain the dread on Wednesday in Barnwell when the flow had stopped abruptly, no sign, no stains, no bloated feeling, nothing? And then not being able to reach Velma at the apartment, the house, the job?

“The kids haven’t seen her since Monday night, Marcus.” But that didn’t explain much either. Velma often contracted with out-of-town computer jobbers, or worked odd hours on terminals all over the city. And the kids had their own peculiar schedules. He was pulling her slightly to him if she wanted to come. But she didn’t, not yet.

“Velma?” He was studying her face and she was straining to push to its surface the terror she hadn’t been able to articulate.

“Marcus, something has happened to Velma.”

He didn’t say that something was always happening to Velma, that her dogmatism or her naïveté set her up for constant happenings of a melodramatic sort. He didn’t say that
Velma had a husband, a therapist, an orgone-box partner, a godmother, a lover, a health-club masseuse and a crew of friends to bail her out of whatever she had fallen into. He didn’t say Velma was a grown woman, a wife, a mother, and not Palma’s baby sister anymore. And he didn’t press her into his chest to try to cajole her out of her anxiety. He did not embrace her closely and whisper any of the men-comforting things guaranteed to set her teeth on edge, remembering Sonny, her ex-husband: “Don’t worry about it” or “You’re overreacting, woman” or “Let’s talk about this calmly, baby.” Marcus didn’t say anything. He left her on the sidewalk and stepped into the street, snatching off his cap, and hailed a cab.

Palma was swaying on her platform shoes, staring at the velveteen-shirted back of Nilda up the street and just at that moment noticing that Nilda and Cecile were wearing each other’s hats. She inhaled deeply and felt worse. The women were in front of the rib joint talking to a brother on the roof. Flames were shooting out of the chimney, but what that meant did not register. The women had stopped and were carrying on a comic conversation with the man on the roof throwing ladles of soup from a steam-table bucket toward the fire, beans and onions sliding down the blackened brick of the chimney when he could get close.

“Save the soup, brudder. You’ve got a built-in hose, you know.”

“Much bad booze as he drink,” a passer-by remarked. “Be like pissing pure gasoline on the flames.”

Smoke billowed out of the doorway; customers sooty and choking stumbled out and leaned on cars, the bus-stop post, the mailbox, coughing. Palma could make nothing of it. It was all as in a dream. Then turning on the wooden shoes to watch Marcus playing matador in traffic, the ridge in his bush from the press of his cap like a strangling band around his head, she
wanted to reach out and touch him, lean out and fluff up his hair, rake her fingers in his bush the way he often raked in his mustache when it was time for him to leave, to catch a plane, to go home to a situation he said little about. In the bedroom door with his fingers making scratchy noises, covering his mouth, and searching for soft words to slug her with, but what could he do? And what could she do on the sidewalk in her crazy shoes, her hand out, her body leaning, but he so far away?

“Some serious cooks on Auburn Street,” Cecile was saying loudly. “Or is the establishment under siege?”

“Ultimate pig,” Chezia announced. “This is where you get the ultimate bar b q, Cecile.”

Palma was leaning forward, longing to bury her hands in Marcus’ hair. The sidewalk was moving under her as though she were on the beach, the sand sucking away underfoot. She heard the pounding of shoes toward her as if the routed customers had heard about a fish sammich giveaway down the block. Either the women had decided to eat somewhere else or they were headed for her. It was not a dream, she realized. And she was falling, coming up out of her shoes, leaning toward the clouds of too-purple smoke from the chemical plants’ stacks. And then he was there, helping her into a cab and Cecile shouting something at her as she stumbled, cracking on her shoes. And then, settled in the back seat of the cab, Palma was centered again and angry, felt mean, sensed suddenly that Velma was all right just thoughtless, selfish. Velma was always all right, it was the people around her that were kept in a spin. Palma had been vacillating between anger, dread, calm, alarm and rage the whole day. Now she settled into anger.

“She ought to leave a message with someone when she takes off like this.”

Marcus put his arm around her and nudged her bag. “We go to your place and make some calls. Do you know this Jamahl
joker she’s been seeing? Got his address or something?” He was urging her to fish around for her address book.

“That’d be just like her. Her son doesn’t even know where she is these days.” Palma was itching to know the place, to walk in, walk through walls, through that Jamahl turkey and knock Velma right off the sofa.

“Plan to strangle her this time for real? Or just threaten? Or just grumble?” He hugged her.

“I dunno.” She handed him the spiral address book; she couldn’t concentrate. She looked out of the window and tried to breathe easy. They passed Cecile and the others heading for the sidewalk café, but she didn’t see them in time to wave. The cab passed the Infirmary and Palma scratched her head. “We’d better check the hospitals,” she muttered. “She rarely remembers to take her pocketbook when she goes out these days. That Velma. She could be anywhere. And no I.D.”

The cab was turning the bend at the back of the Infirmary where the woods began. They passed the Old Tree where Minnie Ransom daily placed the pots of food and jugs of water for the loa that resided there. Old Tree the free coloreds of Claybourne planted in the spring of 1871. The elders in coarse white robes gathered round the hole with digging sticks, the sun in their eyes; planted the young sapling as a gift to the generations to come, as a marker, in case the Infirmary could not be defended. Its roots fed by the mulch and compost and hope the children gathered from the districts’ farms, nurtured further by the loa called up in exacting ceremonies till they buzzed in the bark, permanent residents. The sapling shooting upward past the wire and string armature those first few springs till the roots took hold and anchored, and the spinal column straightened on its own to tower upward from earth to sky, from soil to rain clouds even when the building had been raided and burnt to the ground. The branches, reaching away from
the winter of destruction toward the spring of renewal, the body letting go of its sap as the new halls and rooms were whitewashed, the branches stretching out and up over the first story as the collective mind grew. The leaves, like facts, like truths, unfolding slowly after much coaxing season in and season out, sporting dew in crystal-flashing splendor, shiny green atop, pale green beneath, the veins faint but sinewy awating further fertilization. The flowers, knotty black hard then berry brown, then lavender and luminous, promising the perfect fruit of communal actions. The old roots surfacing for a look around, tough, earth-hugging networks of fingers and limbs around the base of the tree that marked the beginning of the right-hand path that swerved past the generator sheds to join up with the left-hand path leading right under the buildings’ windows and out toward the woods, trod yearly by the loa who danced and stomped unseen by those pretending not to know of spirit kinship, attended each generation by a certain few drawn to the tree, or drawn to the building, called to their vocation and their roots—messenger, teacher, healer, clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairfeelant, clairdoent—waiting for the moment of eye to eye encounter and embrace, weary and impatient with amnesia, neglect and a bad press. Called upon so seldom, they were beginning to believe their calling in life was to keep a lover from straying, make a neighbor’s hair fall out in fistfuls, swat horses into a run just so and guarantee the number for the day. They were weary with so little to perform.