The Orange Houses Read online

“Can’t go back there, Joe.”

  “Lemme get that coffee hot.”

  When Joe turned to refill Jimmi’s cup, Jimmi slipped away.

  chapter 12

  TAMIKA

  The Sykeses’ apartment, Thursday, twenty days before the hanging, 6:00 a.m. . . .

  She woke with an ear infection. This happened once a month. She was used to the pain. She went through the drill: scrub the ears and aids with hot soapy water, then peroxide, then coat them with Neosporin. She popped the first of the ten generic antibiotic tablets that were always on hand, always liable to upset her stomach.

  On her way to school she stopped for a daily. Fatima wouldn’t let her pay. She gave her a paper angel painted violet. “When will I see you again?” Fatima said.

  “Have to work this afternoon. Dinner tomorrow?”

  “My house this time.”

  Mik was supposed to notify the principal’s office when the speech therapist didn’t show. She didn’t. She unfolded and refolded Fatima’s paper angel. By the time the class was close to ending, she knew how to make the angel from fresh paper.

  She hated when folks felt sorry for her, but she liked to feel sorry for other folks. She wasn’t sure why. Being sixteen without a Moms? Scary. The bell stabbed her ears.

  She ducked into the bathroom, took out her aids and pressed her ears to the sides of her head. If God was real, someday he, she, whatever would answer her prayer and her ears would stay down when she took away her hands.

  Today was not the day.

  She rolled out Mom’s bunched braids and ponied her loops low to tie back her ears. Her hair was kinked, maybe even pretty.

  The new boy Jaekwon was in her art class. Punk. “Then why y’all sweating the hairstyle?” she asked the bathroom mirror.

  She got to art early and sat by the window. The Jaekwon dude just had to torture her by sitting across from her. The assignment was to sketch each other. She surprised herself by getting him dead-on except for his eyes, which she left blank like those in a Greco Roman bust.

  He drew her with footballs for breasts.

  She tried to think of anything but knocking boots with him.

  “So you death, huh?” he said to her chest.

  She imagined kissing his lips as she read them. She cleared her throat. “Death?”

  Jaekwon tapped his ears. “You kind of can’t tell. Like, you talk good. Like, not like a mental I mean.”

  “Um, like thank you.” She wondered if he was lying about her voice. Did she really sound okay?

  “Yo, you got a nice body.”

  She frowned as she felt his sneaker tap hers under the table. “Y’all best get back to your drawing,” she said.

  Tap on her shoulder: security guard chick, hand out, palm up, Mik’s hearing aids. “Left these in the bathroom again, Mika.”

  Mik forced herself to smile thanks, tucked the aids into her pocket, buried her face in her sketchpad.

  Jae tapped her hand. “Do it hurt? Straining to hear and all?”

  She studied his eyes undressing the girl at the end of the table now. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  She pressed her palm to her ear. Damned infection left her feeling as if an angry carpenter were driving at her head with a nail gun.

  At lunch the janitor was painting Mik’s stairwell spot to cover the scratchiti that still showed through: LATIN KINGS RULE, BLOODS SUCK. The paint stink dizzied her. She grabbed a bench in the cafeteria. From the far corner she watched Shanelle nuzzle Jaekwon.

  Mik dumped the usual gluey PBJ and a past ripe apple out of her brown bag. The same old note from NaNa said: HAVE A BLESSED DAY ☺

  The G swung up to her table. “Yo, how’s my shorty?” He tripped as he sat.

  Mik hurt for him. She keyed her phone: LETZ SEE IT.

  The G took out his homework, frowned at somebody behind Mik.

  Jaekwon plunked next to her, grabbed her sandwich, bit in. He leaned close to her, his eyes too pretty, cruel.

  Shanelle and her crew came over. Jae’s boys followed. Folks crowded around the table, lots of talking, whispering, hissing in Mik’s aids, too much going on, sensory overload.

  Shanelle gave Mik slit eyes as she slid into Jaekwon’s lap.

  Jae told everybody, “This chick can draw. She mad good.”

  Sha grabbed Jae’s arm. “Jae, you come over my house, I show you my drums. Play you my set, private concert style, na-mean?”

  “Chicks don’t play drums, girl, c’mawn.”

  Shanelle finger popped in Jae’s face. “I so do. Teacher said I got skills. Gonna be mad famous someday. How ’bout you, Meek-a? You play mu-sic?” Sha exaggerated her mouth and eye movements. She turned to Jae, showed him her fingers, calluses thick from hand drumming. “Check ’em out. I’m a wild woman on the slaps. Touch them tips. Feel how hard they are? Them’s musician’s scars, baby.”

  “You probably burned them on your curling iron.” Did she actually speak that thought? She was so dead.

  Laughing, screaming came from mouths stretched in long ovals. Girls snapped fingers. Boys pounded the table, bock, bock, bock!

  The concussions blew out Mik’s aids in half-second pulses, but she didn’t dare turn them off—not with Sha’s brows angled down, her lips trembling.

  “She just read you, Shanelle,” some chick said. “She read you from here to filth.”

  Jaekwon laughed, “Dag. Dag.”

  Mik scanned the cafeteria for The G, lost in the crowd.

  Hard fingers grabbed her chin to turn her head.

  “Ey!” Sha said. “Ey, Mika, you readin’ my lips now, you elephant-eared bitch?”

  That got everybody ooh-ing. Kids circled to watch the coming brawl.

  Mik left.

  Shanelle followed. She gave Mik a flatsy, kicked away Mik’s sneaker, snapped Mik’s ear.

  Mik swung first but Shanelle swung harder and decked Mik. The girls rolled over the floor in a vicious smack fight. The G got in there to try to break it up and caught a Sha slap that made his head wobble. He slumped to his knees.

  Mik glimpsed Jaekwon grinning with his boys. “I ain’t gettin’ in on that,” he said, something like that, hard to tell with all the noise polluting Mik’s junky hearing aids. “You bust it up.”

  Mik put herself between Shanelle and The G, took another shot from Sha as she protected the kid.

  A few seconds later the lunch ladies had Sha in arm locks.

  A tug at Mik’s cuff.

  The dazed G was on the floor. Shanelle’s handprint was a bright sting on his cheek. His bloody lip stuck to his braces. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry?” Mik said. Her ear throbbed where Sha smacked it. She helped The G to his feet. He was near tears as everyone laughed at him.

  Over his shoulder Jaekwon was smiling. “How I do love a cat fight,” he said.

  “Just hear me out,” the principal said. “Shanelle will be suspended. A police report will be filed.”

  Mik keyed her phone: NO RPRT

  “You don’t have to file charges, Tamika, but I have to file a statement.” The principal frowned. “Look, I know it’s not easy for you here—”

  “She can handle it,” Mom said.

  “Mrs. Sykes, as I believe I told you, we have options. The special programs school where Tamika can be with kids who—”

  “As I believe I told you, sir, regular school is just fine for my daughter. Right, Mika?”

  Mik marched out of school into the bright cold day, peeled off as she signed, I’M LATE FOR JOE’S.

  Mom followed Mik uphill. “So am I.”

  Mik stopped. HE CALLED YOU?

  “How come you didn’t tell me, Mika? The man is offering you a chance at a normal life.”

  “Normal.”

  “Wait up. I don’t want you walking alone from school anymore. That Shanelle don’t play. I saw what she did to that girl last year, that buck fifty down the side of her jaw. Y’all have that Fatima pick you up from now . . . ” Mom looked up as an orange dragonfly floated past her. She jumped back as another—purple—landed on her shoulder.

  Mik caught a third, bright red. Not bugs but paper, folded.

  “Lord,” Mom said. “It’s snowing colors.”

  Tiny angels pirouetted from the sky. Ballerinas, ball-players, birds. On a hawk’s wings was written PEACE. Mik looked for Fatima. She found Jimmi standing on a mailbox. He was releasing hundreds of paper dolls into the breeze.

  Shoppers young and old scrambled for the dolls. Everyone was laughing.

  Mik grinned.

  Jimmi slid down the mailbox and headed for Mik with a rainbow painted angel.

  Mom cut him off. “Will you please leave the child alone, James? Please now, before I call the police.”

  Jimmi bowed his head, tucked the angel into the lapel of Mom’s overcoat, stepped onto his skateboard and drifted downhill. His jeans hung loose on him, his shirt baggy, his face gaunt.

  Mik marched past Mom with DO YOU HAVE TO HATE HIM SO MUCH, MA?

  “Slow down with those hands. I can’t understand—”

  “I know you can’t.” She clicked off her aids and slumped toward Joe Knows’s joint.

  “ . . . account number already set up in your name, Sandrine, in trust for Mik. All y’all have to do is type in the . . . ” Joe fell asleep.

  Mik stopped petting the German shepherd to tap Joe’s fingers, yellowed and bent from sixty years of smoking.

  Joe picked up where he left off: “ . . . password, go to online bill paying, cut a check to the doc, hospital, whatever. I think there’s enough cash to cover everything.”

  Mom hugged him.

  “Hey now.” Joe patted Mom’s back. “This is no big deal, okay? It’s just life. And you, my friend.” He winked at Mik.
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  Mik winked back.

  “You’re thinking, maybe I don’t want to get the operation.” He tapped his temple. “Joe knows. Look, take your time. The money’s yours for whatever. I know you’ll do something beautiful with it.”

  That night Mik hit Mom’s closet and dug out the old guitar. She opened the window to let in the wind. Straddling the sill, she turned her aids on and all the way up. She plucked the low string, her cheek on the guitar’s belly. The vibrations reached deep into her head. She plucked harder, the bass note pulsing in her stomach . . .

  Plucked harder, fuzzy fingers walking her spine . . .

  Pluck—

  The string snapped, the cut-off sound cold and sharp in Mik’s ears.

  A poke at her shoulder.

  Mom was home two hours early, a dark brown starburst on her chest as if she’d been shot.

  “What the—”

  “Coolatta machine exploded. Running a stupid summer shake these fall days.” She grabbed the guitar. “How’d you like if I poked through your closet?” She dug a string out of the case, threaded the fresh E through the bridge.

  “Play for me,” Mik said. “I’ll rest my hands on the belly.”

  “I’m sure I forget how.” Mom frowned, picked at a chip in the worn fret board. “You gonna get the operation?”

  Mik looked down into the courtyard. Drunk dudes swore at each other to wake the world. She wanted to click off her aids but didn’t dare while Mom was in this state, ready to cry or scream or both. “Ma, if you never gonna play that guitar again, why you restringing it?”

  Drine Sykes shoved the guitar into her closet and grabbed a fresh shirt. “I gotta get back to work.”

  chapter 13

  FATIMA

  The Veterans Administration hospital, Friday, nineteen days before the hanging, 3:00 p.m. . . .

  Word was getting out about Fatima’s teaching. Yesterday she had two students. Today the ten chairs around the rec room table were full. Most of the students were young children taking time off from visiting their parents upstairs. One of the latecomers was a burn patient covered in bandages. A girl gasped when the man came to the table in his motorized wheelchair.

  “Sorry,” the man said. He turned for the door.

  Fatima brought him back to the table and sat him next to the shocked girl. Seeing Fatima at ease with the man calmed the girl. “Now,” Fatima said, “today we are going to make a school of newsprint dolphins.”

  She rushed from the hospital to pick up Mik from school. Mik was out front, her eyes darting about the street for the bully girl.

  “I thought she has been suspended,” Fatima said.

  “Doesn’t mean she isn’t waiting for us,” Mik said. “You’re lucky you don’t have to go to school.”

  “I am finding many wonderful books in the garbage on the other side of the reservoir, outside the college.”

  At the supermarket Fatima said, “This is ridiculous, all of the things we can buy here.”

  “This store is booty. You should see the rich folks’ markets downtown.”

  “Five kinds of apples?”

  “Apples are lame.”

  “We can only dream of apples where I come from. What is this, this star fruit? This is food to make our imaginations strong.” Fatima gathered up an armload.

  They sat on milk crates in Fatima’s yard, eating what they cooked on a grill they found on the street. The arthritic cat crawled out from the woods into Fatima’s lap. She fed him bits of fish. “I call him Every Third because he comes only every third day. He is a stray, but he lingers longer with each visit. With winter near he is realizing he needs a friend.” She said to the cat, “Do not fear, little one. My door is always open to you. How would I say this in sign?”

  “Why you want to know?”

  “For when I return to my country. To teach the children. Show me.”

  Mik showed her. Fatima was a quick study.

  Mik indicated the cinderblock fence. “Weren’t these walls pink?” She signed as she spoke.

  “I changed the color yesterday to amuse myself. Next week they will be turquoise.” The twilight sun on the freshly painted orange walls warmed Fatima. She took in the backyard: swept clean cement, plastic vines hanging from a sawed-down willow trunk, a bowl chopped into the top for a birdbath. “By springtime we will have an oasis back here for my sister’s arrival.” She hoped Mik would not ask if any word had arrived from the camps.

  She didn’t. She said, “We should paint the walls a rainbow.”

  “I know where we can get the paint. Come. In that lot back there, through all that creeping thorn, is a treasure palace.”

  Dead vines covered the house. Its windows had been smashed long ago. Gauzy bits of curtain twisted in the breeze. In the shed were enough paint buckets to cover the house. “Lots of light green here,” Mik said. “Cool color.”

  “This is the Statue of Liberty’s color, no?”

  “Never been. Hey, the dolls, why not pipe cleaners or wood or clay? Why always newspaper?”

  “It was all we had.” They pushed through the weeds choking the lot, into the abandoned house.

  “You scared?” Mik said.

  “It would be no fun otherwise, Sister Mik.”

  Graffiti covered the walls and ceilings. The staircase was carved with initials and years that went back to the 1970s. In the kitchen Fatima found a cracked clock radio and a dusty cat box. In the home office were looted medical cabinets and books that illustrated procedures for surgeries, polyp removal, abortion. Mik eyed the surgery chair. “Let’s get out of here.”

  A weed tree grew through the roof. This high uphill one could see across the valley, west to the Riverdale cliffs. Below, the Orange Houses were an ocean of lights. Up here the streetlights didn’t work. Fatima and Mik pointed out shooting stars to each other.

  “Should I get the operation?” Mik said.

  Fatima eyed the moon. “Only you can say. Operation or not, you must get your mother to teach you to play guitar.”

  “How did your mother die?”

  “We were out collecting fire sticks on a night like this, Mom, my sister and I. We saw torch lights, how do you say it here, flashlights. The men were coming. I was small, my sister smaller, we would not have made it back to camp. My mother told us to run. We did but turned back when we saw Mom was not running with us. Mom said, ‘This is nothing, what will happen next. This is nothing. Go. Go and be strong. Be happy always.’ She pushed us on and remained behind and ran in the opposite direction so the men would chase her and lose track of us. That was the last we saw of her.” Fatima clapped her hand on Mik’s shoulder. “Jimmi taught you his If game, yes?” She closed her eyes, said, “If a bright future. Do you see it?”

  “Tell me.”

  “You, my sister, and I are in Liberty’s torch.” She opened her eyes. “Look at these stars. I cannot believe that I am here, that you are here. This is all we need.” Fatima pointed to the highest point in the sky. “Do you see her? My mother. She is happy. Do you see her winking at us?” Fatima signed to the sky, HELLO, GOOD-BYE, I LOVE YOU.

  chapter 14

  TAMIKA

  Mik’s bedroom, Saturday, eighteen days before the hanging, 2:00 a.m. . . .

  Mik couldn’t sleep. She went into Mom’s room and lay next to her. Mom woke, rubbed her eyes, yawned in the gray green streetlight flickering through the curtain. “What’s wrong?”

  Mik stared into her mother’s eyes, held her hand.

  “Mika?”

  “Shhhhh. Let’s just stay like this.”

  chapter 15

  JIMMI

  The cave, Saturday, eighteen days before the hanging, 2:30 a.m. . . .

  Jimmi heated the tip of a ballpoint with his lighter. He stripped off his socks and burned small blue 6s into the secret places, the bottom of his feet, between his toes. He whispered, “My name the Mad Sixes, beast of no fixes, running on wishes, call me clown vicious. Been a while now, up the dial now, watch me, watch me, watch me rile now. Owners and architects spinning their winnings, building mad wormwood for the meek to trip in, and the devils laugh, ‘Drown, drown, drown.’”