Sourland Page 22

  I had no choice but to follow the men into the residence. I saw that the young man in the filthy work clothes and baseball cap was Sonny, moving tiredly among the others, staring at the cracked linoleum floor. His jaws were unshaven. His hands were very dirty. I called to him, “Sonny? Hey, it’s Mickey.”

  He hadn’t heard. One of the young black men, eyeing me with a smile, poked at Sonny to alert him to me. When he turned, the sight of him was a shock. His face had thickened, coarsened. The burnt-looking skin was a patchwork of blemishes and acne scars. I could recognize the pale blue eyes, but the eyes were hardened in suspicion. I’d expected that Sonny might smile at me, even laugh at the sight of me, in surprise; I’d expected that he would come to me, to hug me. But this man held back, squinting. There was something wrong about his gaze. I saw to my horror that his left eye seemed to have veered off to the side as if something had caught its attention while his right eye stared straight at me. His lips drew back from his teeth, that were discolored and crooked. “Dev’a? Are you—Dev’a?”

  Devra! Sonny was mistaking me for Momma.

  I told him no, I was Mickey. His cousin Mickey, didn’t he remember me?

  I tried to laugh. This had to be funny. This had to be a joke. This had to be Sonny’s old sense of humor. But he wasn’t smiling, he continued to stare at me with his one good eye. The lines in his forehead had sharpened to creases. His nose was broad at the bridge as if it had been broken and flattened. However old you might guess this man to be, you would not have guessed twenty-one.

  “Did you come to see me? Nobody comes to see me.”

  Sonny spoke slowly, as if he had to choose his words with care, and yet his words were slightly slurred, like speech heard underwater. He’d been injured, I thought. His brain had been injured in a beating. But I came forward, to take hold of one of Sonny’s hands, so much larger than my own. Sonny loomed above me, six feet tall but somewhat slump-shouldered, his head pitched slightly forward in the perpetual effort of trying to hear what was being said to him. “I’m Devra’s daughter, Sonny. Remember, ‘Aimée’? I was just a little girl when we came to live with you and Aunt Georgia. You changed my name to ‘Mickey.’ ‘Mickey kicks ass,’ you said. You—”

  Sonny jerked his hand from mine, as if my fingers had burnt him. He might have heard something of what I’d said, but wasn’t sure how to interpret it. From what I could see of his hair, beneath the grimy cap, it had been shaved close, military-style, at the sides and back. His skin looked stitched-together, of mismatched fabrics like one of Georgia’s crazy quilts. His face shriveled suddenly in the effort not to cry. “You lied to me, Aunt Dev’a. That wasn’t the man, the man that I hurt, it was somebody else wasn’t it! Some other man you’d been married to. You lied to me, I was told you lied to me, Aunt Dev’a, why’d you lie to me? I hurt the wrong man, you lied to me.” Sonny spoke in the aggrieved voice of a child, pushing at me, not hard, but enough to force me to step backward. I was astonished at what he’d said. Though I’d heard something like this from my aunt Georgia, who’d had more than a suspicion that the man who’d actually hurt my mother had been Bob Gleason, not Herlihy. I couldn’t make sense of this, I couldn’t allow myself to think of it now. I was trying to smile, to laugh, in the old way, as if Sonny’s confusion was only teasing and in another moment he’d wink and nudge at me and we’d laugh together. I said, “Do you still like pizza, Sonny? We can have pizza for dinner. I have money.” Sonny said, “‘Piz-za,’” enunciating the word in two distinct syllables. His face shriveled and he clenched his fists as if he was considering breaking my face. A middle-aged black man who wore a laminated I.D. badge appeared beside us, laying a restraining hand on Sonny’s arm. “Hold on there, Sean. Take it slow, man.” I told this man who I was, I’d come to see my cousin, and the man explained to Sonny who listened doubtfully, staring at me. “I’m Mickey. You remember, your cousin Mickey. That’s me.” I spoke eagerly, hopefully. The filmy look in Sonny’s good eye seemed suddenly to clear. “‘Mickey.’ That’s you. Well, hell.” Sonny’s lips parted in a slow smile that seemed about to reverse itself at any moment. I said, “I’ll get the pizza. I’ll bring it back here. I’ll get us some Cokes, we can eat right there.” I meant the lounge area, where there was a table we could use. On the wall beyond, a mosaic of crudely fashioned bright yellow sunflowers in shards of tile that looked handmade.

  I hurried outside. The fresh air was a shock after the stale smokey air of Seneca House. Up the block was Dino’s Pizza. I went inside and ordered a large pizza as if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to do. Years ago, in the old farmhouse on Summit Hill Road, Sonny had brought home pizzas for us on evenings Georgia hadn’t wanted to cook, our favorite was cheese with pepperoni and Italian sausage, tomatoes, no onions or olives. Lyle and I would drink soda pop, Georgia and Sonny and Momma, if she was home, beer. I wondered if beer was allowed in Seneca House and I thought probably not, I hoped not. I hoped that Sonny would be waiting for me in the lounge, that he hadn’t forgotten me and gone upstairs where I couldn’t follow. The guy behind the counter was about twenty, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, hair straggling to his shoulders. Half his face creased in a smile. “You don’t look like anyone from here.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t look like anyone from here but maybe I know you?”

  I’d been pretending to be looking through my wallet, to see how much money I had. I laughed, feeling blood rush into my face. But it was a pleasant sensation, like the feel of hot sun on bare skin, before it begins to burn.

  III.

  PROBATE

  “Excuse me?”

  It was the third day of her new life. This life was diminished as in the aftermath of brain surgery executed with a meat cleaver yet she meant to do all that was required of her and to do it alone, and capably, and without complaint.

  She was in Trenton, New Jersey. Whatever this terrible place was—the rear entrance of a massive granite building, a parking lot partly under construction and edged with a mean, despoiled crust of ice like Styrofoam—and the winter morning very cold, wet and windy with the smell of the oily Delaware River a half-mile away—she was struck by the fact that it appeared to be an actual place and not one of those ominous but imprecise nightmare-places of the troubled sleep of her new life.

  In a brave voice she said, a little louder: “Excuse me?—I’m sorry to trouble you but is this the rear entrance to Probate Court?”

  The girl peered at Adrienne suspiciously. She had a blunt bold fist of a face. Her eyes were tarry-black, insolent. She was about eighteen years old and she was wearing an absurd faux-fox-fur jacket. In her arms she held a raggedy bundle—a very small baby—she’d been rocking, and cooing to, with a distracted air. For a full minute or more she’d been openly observing Adrienne shakily approach the rear of the courthouse along a makeshift walk of planks and treacherous icy pavement as if fascinated by the older woman’s over-precise cautious-careful steps—Does she think that I am drunk? Drugged? Is she concerned that I will slip and fall? Is she waiting for me to slip and fall?—but now that Adrienne stood before her, in need of assistance, the girl blinked as if she hadn’t seen Adrienne until this moment, and had no idea what her question meant.

  “‘Probate court’—it’s a division of the county court—I think. Do you know if I can use this entrance?—or do I have to walk all the way around to the front?” Adrienne’s numb mouth spoke calmly. In the widow’s voice one can detect not only the dazedness of the brain-injured but a profound disbelief that one is still alive, allowed to exist. Her eyes that resembled blood-specked fish eggs scooped from a fish’s gravid belly were sparkly-bright and alert fixed on the girl’s face.

  A powerful sleeping pill called Doleur, she’d taken sometime after 2:30 A.M. the previous night. In anticipation of all that she’d be required to do today, and now she was dazed, groggy; her head felt as if it were stuffed with cotton batting, in her ears was a high-pitched ringing that was easy to confuse
with sirens wailing on Trenton streets. She was thinking of how in her previous life—only just visible to her now on the far side of an abyss, and retreating—that life that had been hers until three days before when her husband of thirty-two years had died unexpectedly—she’d been a diligent and responsible person. She remembered that person. She must be that person. In preparation for this journey to the Mercer County Courthouse she’d lain in bed that morning rigid and unmoving rehearsing the journey with the manic thoroughness of a deranged actress in an unfathomable and catastrophic play.

  She hadn’t anticipated getting lost, however. In a maze of one-way streets, detour signs and signs warning NO TURNS. Much of the corroded inner city of Trenton appeared to be under construction as in the aftermath of a geological cataclysm. There were barricaded streets, deafening jackhammers. Because of excavation in the courthouse parking lot, the grinding of earthmoving machines, and more barricades, Adrienne had had to park a considerable distance from the courthouse; she’d had a terrible time finding the courthouse itself which was farther east on State Street than she would have imagined, in a run-down neighborhood of empty storefronts, bail bondsmen’s offices and pawnshops. This, the county courthouse!

  “‘Pro-brate court’”—the girl in the faux-fur jacket spoke in a drawling skeptical voice—“that’s like to do with ‘pro-bration’?”

  “‘Pro-bate.’” Adrienne spoke cautiously not wanting to offend the girl by seeming to correct her pronunciation. “It has to do with wills. Not probation but civil court. It’s a kind of court within the court, I think. The county court, I mean…”

  In her anxiety she was giving too much information. This too was a symptom of her new life—an over-eagerness to explain to strangers, to apologize. I know I have no right to be here—to exist. I know that I am of no more worth than a piece of trash. Forgive me!

  The girl continued to stare at her, skeptically. Or maybe—Adrienne wanted to think this—the girl’s expression meant only that she was interested, curious. Her nose was flattened as if someone had jammed the palm of his hand against it and her small mouth was an animated crimson wound. She was both sleazy and glamorous in her fox-colored fur jacket opened to display a fleshy turnip-shaped body in a sequined purple sweater, lime-green stretch pants and faux-leather boots with miniature tassels. Her skin resembled sandpaper, blotched and blemished despite a heavy coating of makeup. Her brass-colored hair had been corn-rowed and sprang out asymmetrically about her head like frantic thoughts. “‘Wills’—like, when somebody’s dead? Died? And you find out what they left you?” The girl gazed at Adrienne with repelled respect.

  “Well, yes. Something like that.”

  Find out what they left you. This chilling phrase flashed in the air like a knife blade.

  The girl gave the baby-bundle in her arms a fierce little shake, furrowing her forehead in thought. She was the kind of harassed young mother whose cooing is indistinguishable from chiding and whose smiles could turn savage in an instant. “Ma’am, I guess it’d be inside—what d’you callit court. If I was you I’d take this-way-in and see if they let you through. Assholes got all kinds of ‘restrictions’ and ‘penalties’ but it’s real far to the front and the damn sidewalk is all broke. I came that way.” Abruptly now there was a bond between them, of grievance. The girl was eager to complain to Adrienne about the “shitty treatment” she’d gotten at the courthouse when she’d brought her grandma to Family Services the previous month, how “nasty mean” they’d been treated and how, this morning, she had business of her own in the courthouse: “See, I’m what’s called—sup-pena’d. Y’know what that is?” Adrienne said yes, she thought she knew.

  As the girl spoke vehemently, Adrienne happened to notice something astonishing and disturbing: about twelve feet behind the girl was a stroller pushed almost out of sight between the blank granite wall of the courthouse and a parked van marked MERCER CO. DETENTION and in this stroller was what appeared to be another child, no more than two years old.

  “Oh! Is that your child?”

  “Huh? Where?”

  “In that stroller, there. Isn’t that a—child?”

  “‘Child’—what’s that? Might be just some rags-like, or some bags or somethin’, stuck there.”

  But this was a joke—was it? The girl laughed a little wildly.

  “Ma’am, you are right. Sure is a ‘child.’ You want her?”

  Seeing the startled look in Adrienne’s face, the girl brayed with laughter. Her notched-looking teeth were bared in a wide smile. Adrienne tried to fall in with the joke, which didn’t seem to her funny. She said, “She’s very”—desperately trying to think of an appropriate and plausible word—“sweet-looking, pretty….”

  “Ma’am, thanks! You sure you don’t want her?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Just kiddin, ma’am. That’s my sweet li’l Lilith, she’d been a preemie would you b’lieve?—now she’s real healthy. And you’re right, she’s pretty. She is.”

  Two small children! The harried young mother had brought two small children with her to the courthouse on this miserable winter morning. The wind was bitter cold and smelled of creosote, across the ravaged parking lot sporadic hissing outbursts of rain mixed with sleet raced like machine-gun fire. Adrienne had the vague impression—the vague, uneasy impression—she didn’t want to stare openly—that there was something just subtly wrong with the toddler in the stroller, something stunted, deformed. The small face that should have been pretty was in fact too narrow, or asymmetrical; the eyes were lopsided, unfocused. As Adrienne stared the little girl began to whimper faintly and to make a halfhearted effort to fret against the restraint of a blanket wrapped tightly about her torso pinning her arms inside.

  Yet the thought came to Adrienne, in rebuke No matter how miserable she is, yet she has them.

  How miserable that girl’s soul, yet she is not alone.

  Adrienne and her husband Tracy had had no children. Why this was, Adrienne hadn’t quite known. No decision had been made except elliptically, by omission.

  Or maybe one of them had made a decision, and had neglected to inform the other.

  In an aggrieved voice the girl was saying, “‘Pro-bration’—that’s just inside here. I know ‘County Pro-bation’—that’s the first floor. Half my family goes there—I ain’t, yet.” She laughed, as if this were a witticism. Adrienne didn’t quite get the joke, if it was a joke. “Ma’am, see, they got all these ‘departments’—‘county services’—in this place. Some days, there’s so many people going through security you have to stand outdoors—in the cold—nobody gives a damn how the public is inconven’ced. My poor grandma and me, when we came back in January, there was just one fuckin elevator workin—three fuckin elevators were broke!—so we stand there waitin like a hour for the elevator ’cause my grandma couldn’t walk the stairs all the way to Family Court on the sixth floor. I never saw any ‘probrate court’ but there’s ‘parole’—there’s ‘county pros’cutor’—on the third floor—I’m s’posed to check in there. ‘Pros’cution witnesses’—they’re waiting for me, I guess. They got my name. I was served a sup-pena. There’s some of them—‘pros’cution lawyers’—who know me by name and by my face. So if I go inside, and if they see me—I’m fucked. Except”—the girl paused, with a look of crude cunning, leaning close to Adrienne to speak in confidence—“I got to get a crucial message to somebody, that’s on the second floor—that’s ‘criminal court’—if they brought him over from men’s detention like they were s’post to, 8 A.M. this morning. His name is Edro—Edro Hodge. You’d be seeing his picture in the papers, if you live around here—there’s been some things about him, independent of him and his family—that’s to say, me. Some things about ‘material witnesses’—what the fuck that is. These shitheads that like disappeared. So who’d they blame?—Edro. Could be when you see him, he’s cuffed and his ankles shackled. Like some crazed bull they got him, to keep him ‘secured.’ Edro has got tats on his left che
ek and back of his neck and up and down his arms and his hair is tied back in a rat-tail unless the lawyer made him cut it for the judge. They treat you like shit once they get you. This ain’t Family Court! He’d be in one of those freaky orange coveralls that says Mercer County Men’s Detention. The hope is to mock and ridicule a man, to break him. But Edro ain’t gonna be broke that easy.” The girl smiled, baring tea-colored notched teeth, then her smile grew wistful, and then stricken. “Oh Jesus!—I got to get a message to Edro—it’s urgent, ma’am. Please ma’am—you look like a kind lady—say you will help us?”

  “‘Help you’—how?”

  Adrienne felt a sense of dread as the girl clutched at a sleeve of her black cashmere coat. It might have been a TV scene—a movie scene—the girl’s heavily made-up face thrust at Adrienne’s face. A sweetish-stale odor wafted from her—a smell of desperation, urgency—cigarettes, chewing gum, hair oil, soiled baby diapers. Her eyes widened: “I don’t better go anywhere near him or on any floor they’d see me—’cause I am a ‘prosecution witness’—it’s warned of me, I could be arrested like Edro. Obsuction of justis—givin a false statement to police. Interferin with—whatever shit it is, they call it. Bastards get you to say what they want you to say—you don’t hardly know what shit you are saying but it’s taped. Then you’re fucked if you try to take it back.” Adrienne stared in astonishment as the girl flung open the faux-fur jacket and tugged at the waist of her purple sweater lifting it to reveal the flaccid flesh of her midriff that was covered in bruises the hue of rotted bananas; now Adrienne saw that the girl’s forehead was bruised as well, what she’d believed to be skin eruptions were in fact welts. Obviously, “Edro” had beat the hell out of her, she was lucky to be standing. In an anguished rush of words she said, “Yes ma’am, I turned Edro in—I mean, I caused Edro to be turned in—I freaked and ran into the street near-about naked and some damn neighbor called 911—‘domestic violence’—‘aggravated assault’ is what they’d arrested Edro for the other time—that time, I wasn’t to blame—it’s just some bullshit ’cause they want Edro for the ‘material witness’ shit—what happened to them, who knows? This time, see, we’d both been drinking—I was scared—I never make a sound judgment when I am scared—the cops asked me who’d been beating on me so I told them—my nose was near-about broke and all this blood on my front—and my front-clothes torn—I told them it was Edro hurting Lilith and the baby I was scared of but he’d never hurt them—they are his own blood he knows for a fact, he has vowed he would never hurt them. In my right mind I realized this. But that wasn’t right away. Ma’am, see, I have got to get this message to Edro before they take him in to the judge. His damn fuck lawyer told him to plead ‘guilty.’ They always tell you plead ‘guilty’—makes it easy for them. They are such shitheads—‘Office of the Public Defender.’ You wear out your ass waiting for them in those chairs, nobody gives a fuck how long you wait. Also this is the ‘second offense’—‘domestic violence’—other things Edro did, the cops hold against him—they have a grudge against the Hodge family Edro says and give them a fucking hard time all they can. One thing he has got to know—Leisha is not going to swear any statement against him. If you could tell him this, ma’am—or pass him some note, I could write for you…”