Authors: BRET LOTT
He was quiet a while, long enough for Annie to look at me, plead with her eyes for us to get out of here and back on those streets and back to driving around Los Angeles, California.
He said, “Why don’t we just wait here until Burt gets off.” He paused.
“Looks like they got a soda pop machine inside this office here, ” he said, and nodded toward the glass door. “Think I see one inside.”
Then that door opened, and a man leaned out. He was short and balding but had thick, hairy arms. He had on a white shortsleeve shirt and thin black tie, black pants.
“Can I help you with something? ” he said.
“Nope, ” Leston said. He crossed his arms, left the cigarette in his mouth. “Just waiting on Burt to get off work.”
“Oh, ” the man said. He paused a moment there in the door, then gave a half-smile. “Burt? ” he said.
“One of your mechanics, ” Leston said, and gave a nod back toward the bays.
“Oh, ” the man said again, still with that smile. He let go the door, disappeared inside.
We were quiet, the four of us. We stood there at our doors for a while, and then Wilman said again, “Daddy? ” Finally Leston said, “How about those soda pops while we wait for Burt? ” and turned to me, looked at me across the roof of the car, across the glare of the sun on cream-colored paint, and I could see his face shivering in the heat waves up off the metal.
We’d made it into the new world, made it here on my own sheer resolve.
I’d been handed the dream, my dream of California.
But something in my husband, in his shivering face across from me and how he looked at me just then eyes squinted at the light, lips tight around the cigarette made me remember being handed by God the answers to my prayers for my own daddy, that he never come back.
Now we’d arrived, myself the one to have answered my own prayers, me the agent to get us here, and for an instant as I took in that shivering face, took in this heat, and the cars all around us, and this yellow sky, I wondered what sort of curse and blessing I’d given myself with this newly answered prayer. Wondered, too, if God had abandoned me now I was in a new world, or if at some point He might bring me back into His fold, forgive me for whatever was about to happen.
I looked at Leston, looked at him for a moment that seemed longer than the entire trip out here. I looked at him, and felt a drop of sweat roll down my temple and cheek, felt it hold on at my jaw. I touched it, rubbed it away.
I said, “Let me see if I got some change in my purse, ” and I turned, sat down in the car next to Brenda Kay, still asleep. I touched her forehead, felt her cheek. Then I got my purse from the floorboard, started digging for any change I could find in there. , CHAPTER 23.
IT’S NOT THAT YOU DON’T HAVE THE MONEY FOR THE DOWN PAYMENT, the man behind the desk said, him there in his brown pinstripe suit and vest, clothes that made it ever so easy for him to say that to us.
Leston and I sat in two hard-backed chairs, me on the edge of mine.
Leston, in his white shirt and navy blue tie the only one he owned sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, in his hands that hat, always that hat. His eyes were on the man telling us our money was no good.
“Not even with that new Plymouth out there as collateral, ” Leston said.
“I’m afraid not, ” the banker said, his face straight, mouth all a thin line.
“So what do you propose? ” Leston near whispered. “You propose we just sit in a motel for the rest of our lives, until such time as we have years of gainful employment behind us? ” “Leston, ” I said, and did my wife’s best to smile at the banker, apologize with my eyes, at the same time reaching to touch Leston’s back.
His eyes fell from the man to the hat, and suddenly what went through my head was the whole idea of Leston’s life falling in on itself again, of those nights when he’d stared too long out the kitchen window.
Already, there in the motel, we were in separate rooms, Brenda Kay and me huddled on the one single bed, Annie on the other, Leston and Wilman with their own beds apiece. We weren’t together, and I wasn’t there to hold onto him through the nights, give to him whatever magic holding him gave, let him live his days with his chin a little higher, him standing a little taller.
The problem was that I only bussed tables. Two weeks after we moved into the motel on Pico, I’d gotten a job working at Hughes Cafeteria over to the airport, bussing tables four hours a day, my days of being a server at Bailey Grammar finally bearing fruit, I sometimes laughed to Leston, though there’d been no reaction to that, only his stone silence. I Leston hadn’t even found anything yet, though it was the truth to say he hadn’t yet started to look. He just drove around each day, I knew, smoking cigarettes, taking Annie and Brenda Kay Wilman over to Bundy with his brother up and down the boulevards, just looking at Los Angeles, and the sheer size of the place and the number of people and all those cars pushing him into a corner, even if he was in the process of making that corner himself. And now here was the corner, the bank, of course, not only wanted the two of us working, but wanted us to have had those jobs for at least a year.
We wanted to put a down payment on a house with the money we’d brought with us, it dying away each week we were parked there in the motel, us renting two rooms, one for Leston and Wilman, the other for we girls.
In each room were two single beds, a hot plate on a nightstand between them, on the walls paintings of big green ocean waves breaking on black rocks, which was nothing of the beaches we’d seen so far, there was only sand here, sand too hot to walk on, sand and sand and sand on out to the blue-green sea almost invisible from the road. After a month of living in the motel, the car parked out front, school about to start for both Wilman and Annie, we’d finally decided to commit to buying a house.
The house we wanted was in an area of the town of Venice called Mar Vista, though calling anything out here a town seemed ridiculous. It was all of it just one big city. The house was a block off Bollona Creek, and we’d heard stories from the real estate agent who’d shown us the place, a man not twenty-five years old and already losing his hair, dressed in a sharp black suit and driving a Plymouth even newer than our own. He told us of the great days of Venice in America, and how a Mr. Kinney’d designed the whole thing to be a place where people’d feel like they were in Italy and just naturally soak up the culture such an atmosphere’d give off. But the water we’d seen wasn’t much more than a dumping ground for the oil wells around.
The house itself was a three-room thing set on a parcel of ground so little I heard food cooking in the kitchen next door when I stood in the bathroom, the tiny window above the tub open. It had stucco walls outside and in, a front yard no bigger than our front porch back in Mississippi, chain link fence round the back yard. One thing was for certain, we wouldn’t have to worry about Brenda Kay wandering off into any woods anymore. And though what the agent was asking for the place seemed a huge amount, he’d shown us how, if we got the right loan, we could afford the $12, 000 he wanted.
I glanced away from the banker, who eased himself back in his overstuffed chair. Outside in the lobby people were bustling back and forth, people with money to deposit in a bank, people who owned houses and held jobs that didn’t depend on the courtesy of customers eating in a cafeteria to give you tips. I looked to Leston’s hands, and saw the black grease beneath his nails, there no matter how hard he worked to get it out, there every day I’d ever known him, there when he was working the lumber mill the first day I met him after church, there when he was out blasting up the woods for the Government there when he was scratching at those same woods and selling lightered knots to niggers.
This was his life, I thought in that-moment, grease beneath his nails, always there, never leaving.
The banker said, “You could rent a house, at least until you’ve both been working solid jobs long enough. There is certainly a great deal of economic growth going on right now in the Los Angeles area thereby making solid jobs relatively easy to find.” He paused, glanced at Leston to see, I figured, if he’d get any response out of him for that remark.
But Leston didn’t move, only looked at the hat, and the man went on.
“Or you could just sit on this down payment for a year or so, and resubmit an application for a mortgage.” He tilted his head to one side, reached with one hand to the desktop, straightened the thin pile of papers there. “Or you might go the easy route, deed this house you want with a second party, have someone cosign this loan for you.” He put a fist to his mouth, cleared his throat. He looked up from the papers, smiled, his eyes giving away nothing. He said, “Do you know anyone who might do that for you? Someone, of course, who has been working a job for a while.”
Leston gave a quick laugh, shook his head. He, too, was smiling, in his smile the same nothing as the banker’s. This was all mere pleasantry here, business hiding, I saw, in how we were all of us supposed to act as human beings, courteous, smiling, as though owning a home were not at stake at all, maybe all of this only over buying a steer, a used sewing machine.
Leston said, “I sure do know that someone, ” and he stood, his eyes right on the banker, who was suddenly standing, too, Leston trying his best to hold onto things, surprise us by standing, putting out his hand to the banker.
The banker put out his hand, said, “Well, then, good. Good.” He let go Leston’s hand, placed his fingers on the desktop. He said, “That’s good.”
Leston nodded, turned. “We’ll be back here. You just hold on to them papers.” He hadn’t looked at me yet, was already pulling open the glass door, was heading out into the lobby.
I quick turned to the banker, nodded at him, my purse tight in my hands.
I smiled, and he nodded back. I pulled the door to behind I me, had to walk quick as I could to catch up with Leston, already pulling open the green glass front door.
When I made it to him he stood facing the street, hands in his pockets.
We were on Main Street, cars flying past, midday traffic here in downtown Los Angeles, people moving past us as we stood there on the sidewalk. To the right, poking out above the buildings and above these cars and above these people passing, was City Hall, that monstrous white building too white, too tall, looking down on us and everyone else.
Leston looked one way up the street, then the other, as if he were waiting for some sign to give him direction.
I stood next to him, looked up at him. Still he wouldn’t look at me, only squinted up the street, then down. The air was hot, dry, the sun too bright, I’d heard on the radio coming over here something called the Santa Ana Winds were picking up, hot wind off the desert that, the announcer’d said, always meant brushfires in the hills.
I said, “Who do you know? ” He looked down at me, finally. His body was still turned to the street, so that he was almost looking over his shoulder at me. For a moment or two the brim of his hat blocked out the sun.
He said, “You don’t know? ” “No, ” I said.
“Well, ” he said, and shook his head. His face took on a dead smile.
He turned, looked up the street again, and the sun fell into my eyes, burned into me for an instant before I closed them, turned from him.
He said, “Why, it’s the famous Burt of Bundy Mufflers we’ll get to deed the house with us.” He paused, and I looked at him again, a hand up to block that sun.
He was looking at the ground now. He gave a small, dead laugh, as dead as the smile he’d given a moment ago. He took in a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, looked to the street again.
“We’ll get our son to deed the house with us. He’s been here long enough.” He paused. “Burton Hilburn, ” he said. “Our son’ll have to cosign for us so’s we can own a house.”
He stopped, shook his head, and I could see that same smile still on him. “Burt, ” he said, just that one word, but I could hear on it, even above all this commotion and noise out here on the street, the certain dead sound of that old word he’d uttered on the canoe back on Ashe Lake, the word he’d said just before he’d flicked away a brand-new cigarette, California.
I swallowed, looked down at the sidewalk. I blinked a couple times, in my eyes still burnt-out purple circles of the sun. But then they slowly started to disappear, and I saw there on the sidewalk our shadows, short, thick midday shadows of the two of us standing here on Main Street.
Leston’s shadow turned from mine, disappeared so that it was only my shadow on the sidewalk now, and I turned, saw him moving down the sidewalk toward the huge parking lot next to the bank, his hat on tight in this wind, hands in his pockets.
CHAPTER 24.
BUT THE WORLD DIDN’T CRACK AROUND US BECAUSE OF THAT DEED, OUR son only walked through the tinted glass doors of a bank with us, sat down with his daddy and momma in front of the loan officer and anyone who wanted to take a look through that office’s glass walls at a young man with a bright blue suit on, lapels wide as his shoulders, a tie round his neck painted with a picture of a palm tree and a sunset too gloriously bright for the real thing. That was all, really, that happened, Burton Hilburn got dressed up, took a morning off from the muffler shop, and we picked him up from the apartment he shared with three other boys two blocks from work. Annie stayed home from school they were in their second week already to take care of Brenda Kay while we were gone, and we three went to the bank, where Burton signed his own good name over.
No, the world didn’t stop because of that humiliation I knew Leston was savoring up, letting fester in him, and no matter how close Leston was to the brink of whatever abyss he seemed to totter on, I wouldn’t let him fall in. I had a hard hold of him those first days we were here, sometimes felt like I had him by an ear and were leading him around that way, once we’d signed on to the house, once we’d shaken hands all around with the banker, once we were out of that ugly glass and brick building and out on the street and in the Plymouth headed to Mar Vista and the house we were about to own, I said from the back seat, “Leston, let’s stop over to the furniture place back by the motel. That place, remember? ” “Pico Furniture, ” Burton said, and glanced back at me from where he sat in the passenger seat, him still smiling, face all light, fresh from the victory I knew it was for him at the bank. He’d grinned and grinned when he’d held that pen in his hand, grinned and signed and grinned more.