The Lamentation of Their Women Read online

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  pre.

  “Hello,” answered some whiteman. “Good morning! Could I speak with—?” He mispronounced her last name and didn’t abbreviate her first, as nobody who knew her would do.

  “Who dis?” she repeated. “And what you calling about?”

  “Young lady,” he said, “can you please tell me whether Miss Jean-Louis is there or not. Will you just do that for me?” His tone all floured with whitepeople siddity, pan-fried in condescension.

  But she could sit here and act dumb too. “Mmm … it’s hard to say. She be in and out, you know? Tell me who calling and what for and I’ll go check.”

  Apparently, the man was Mr Blah D. Blah from the city agency that cleaned out Section 8 apartments when the leaseholder dropped dead. Guess whose evil Aunt Esther had died of a heart attack last Thursday on the B15 bus? And guess who was the last living Jean-Louis anywhere?

  “But how you calling me—it’s almost noon—to say I got ’til five, before your dudes come throw all her stuff in the dumpster?”

  “Oh good,” exclaimed Blah D. “I was worried we weren’t communicating clearly.”

  “She live out by Jamaica Bay! It’d take me two hours just to get there.”

  “Miss Jean-Louis,” he said. (Public servants nearing retirement, who never got promoted high enough not to deal with poor people anymore, black people anymore, have this tone of voice, you ever notice? A certain tone.) “There’s no requirement for you to go. This is merely a courtesy our office extends to the next of kin. The keys will be available to you until five.” Blah hung up.

  “Fuck you!” She was dressed for the house, a tank top and leggings, and so went to her room for some sneakers and a hoodie.

  Mama was scared of Esther, said she was a witch. Both times they had went out there, Mama left her downstairs, waiting in the streets, rather than bring her baby up to that apartment. Now, she didn’t believe in that black magic bullshit, of course, but she also wasn’t trying to go way the hell out there by herself. Mama, though, wouldn’t want no parts of Esther, dead sister of the dead man who’d walked out on her some fifteen years ago. Naw, better leave Mama alone at work and call her later.

  She’d get Anhell to go. They were suppose to had been broke up with each other at least till this weekend coming, but whatever. She could switch him back to “man” from “ex” a couple days early. Wouldn’t be the first time. I’m a be over there in twenty, she texted.

  She put a scarf on her head and leff out.

  1

  how can I word this?

  you ain’t been perfect

  Damnit. Forgot the keys to his place back in her other purse! She texted again from the street, and then hit the buzzer downstairs for his apartment. That nigga was definitely up there parked on the couch, blazed out and playing videogames. She knew it, and leaned on the button, steady.

  “Yo! What?! Who is this?”

  “I leff Mama’s without the keys. Lemme up.”

  “’Nisha?”

  “Yeah! Ain’t you get my texts? Buzz me in, nigga.”

  “I was, uh … I been busy. Could you, like, uh, wait down there real fast for me, baby? Just one minute.”

  With her thoughts on buried treasure in the far east of Brooklyn, not on boyfriends who step out the minute you turn your back, she wasn’t ready for the panicked fluttering that seized her heart and bowels, the icy flashes that turned sweaty hot—the anger, pure and simple.

  Chick or dude. What would it be this time?

  Dude. Not too long, and Anhell’s piece got off the elevator and crossed the vestibule toward the outer doors. Dude looked regular black, but was obviously Dominican from the loafers and tourniquet-tight clothes. He lived, you could tell, at the gym. Titties bigger than hers, a nasty V-neck putting his whole tattooed chest out on front street. Mas Líbranos Del Mal. Heading out, he politely held the door so she could go in. No words, they kept it moving.

  The problem was, if you liked pretty boys, and she did like pretty boys, then Anhell was it. You couldn’t do no better. She looked okay—damn good, when she got all dressed up, her hair and makeup tight. But Anhell was pure Spanish butterscotch. Lightskin, gray eyes, cornrow hangtime to the middle of his back. He answered the door in a towel, naked and wet from a quick shower. Hickies on him she ain’t put there.

  There’s rules to whooping your man’s ass. He tries to catch and hold your fists, dodge your knees and elbows and kicks, but accepts in his heart that every lick you land he deserves. You don’t go grabbing a knife, or yanking at his hair, either, as the electric fear or pain those inspire will make him lash out with blind total force, turning this rough game real in a way nobody wants. Stay in bounds, babygirl, and you can whale on him till you’re so tired you ain’t mad no more, and his cheating bitch ass is all bruised up and crying. But fuckit. She wasn’t really feeling it today. After getting in a few solid hits, she let Anhell catch her wrists. They were on the floor by then and he hugged her in close and tight, starting up with them same old tears and kisses, same old promises and lies.

  “’Nisha, what can I do? Whatever you need, just tell me what I can do. I’ll do it.”

  Stop laying with them hoes! With them faggots! But this was just the little sin, the one convenient to throw back in his face. She might not even give a shit anymore, if she ever bothered to check. What couldn’t be fixed was his big sin. The one they’d cried about, fucked and fought about all the time with fists and screams, but not once ever just said the words out loud, plain and clear. Now that a couple years had slipped by it was obvious they were never going to say the words at all.

  You know what you did, she said. You know what you did. And Anhell did know, and so for once shut up with all the bullshit. They lay for a while just breathing, just embraced, their exhausted resignation like a mysterious disease presenting the exact same way as tenderness. “My aunt died and left me all her shit.”

  “¿La bruja?”

  “Yeah. I need you to come out to Brooklyn with me, see if there’s anything worth something.”

  “My case worker coming by tomorrow.” Anhell felt good, smelled good, left arm holding her, right hand stroking her shoulder, back and ass in a loop that made everywhere he touched gain value, feel loved. “You know I gotta be here.”

  “We just going out there,” she said, “look around, and then come straight back. It ain’t no all night kinda thing.”

  “Well, lemme get dressed and we’ll head out.” He let her go and sat up.

  “Wait,” she said. “Hol’ up.” She hooked her thumbs under her panties and leggings. “Eat me out a little fowego?” She rolled em to her knees.

  It’s gotta be hard, right, when they keep asking for what you can’t give, but so good, when they want exactly the thing you do best? Anhell grinned. “I got you, mami.” He pulled her leggings down further, rolled her knees out wide. “Lemme get in there right…”

  Somebody suicide-jumped at Grand Central, so the 5 train was all fucked up. They were more than three hours getting out there.

  Block after block of projects like brick canyons, a little city in the City, home to thousands and thousands and not one whiteface, except for cops from Long Island or Staten Island doubled up in cruisers or walking in posses. It was warm as late summer, the October rain falling hard enough to where you’d open your umbrella, but so soft you felt silly doing it. Anhell walked just behind, holding it over her, the four-dollar wingspan too paltry to share. Drop by drop his tight braids roughened.

  Aunt Esther’s building was over a few blocks from the subway. Not one of the citysized ones, but big enough. The kind, you know, with the liquor store-style security booth at the entrance, somebody watching who comes and goes.

  “Excuse me,” called the man behind the plastic. “Hey, yo, Braids—and you, Miss? Visitors gotta sign in.” Behind the partition, he held up the clipboard.

  They went over to the window and scribbled their names. Though basketball-player-tall, up close you could see he wasn’t grown. Just some teenage dropout on his hood brand cell, Youtubing bootleg rappers.

  She tapped the plastic. “It should be some keys in there, waiting for me,” she said. “So I can get into my aunt’s apartment.”

  “Nobody tole me nuffen about that.”

  “What’s that right there?” she said, pointing to the desk beside the boy’s elbow, where an envelope lay with her
name written across it.

  He gave this revelation several blinks and turned back. “Well, you gotta show some ID, then.”

  She got out her EBT and pressed it to the partition. Squinting, the boy leaned forward and mouthed the name off the card, Tanisha Marie Jean-Louis, and then, slower than your slow cousin, compared this to what was written on the envelope, Tanisha M. Jean-Louis.

  Although allowing, at last, that these two variations fell within tolerance, the boy still shook his head. “Naw, though … I don’t think I can give you this. You suppose to show a driver’s license.”

  His stupidity flung her forward bodily against the partition. She smacked her palms on the plastic to lend the necessary words their due emphasis. “Nigga, this New York. Ain’t nobody out here got no fucking driver’s license. You better hand me that envelope!”

  2

  ain’t nobody gon’ sleep

  here tonight!

  To the left of the elevator the hall continued around the corner, but 6L, Aunt Esther’s apartment, was in the cul-de-sac to the right.

  Stink rushed out as the front door swung in. Week-old kitchen trash. Years of cigarettes. Old ladies who piss theyself. Ole Esther had caught her heart attack on the bus, so at least there wasn’t that, not the funk of some bloated mice-nibbled corpse leaking slime.

  On a corner table inside the door was a huge, nasty religious mess. Ugly dolls, rat bones, weird trash. If all Satan’s blue-black devils had wifed all God’s blue-blonde saints, then a gaudy likeness of their brats was painted on the clutter of seven-day glass candles. She went over to take a look. Breathing through some open window the moment after Anhell followed her in, a breeze slammed the front door shut. The sudden breathless dark had him slapping at the walls desperately until he found the lights. She sneered. “Come peep this. She was on some real hoodoo shit.”

  “No, mami.” He came over reluctantly. “This ain’t Voodoo or Santería, ni nada parecido. Your Auntie ain’t bought nunna this at no botánica. Look at that.”

  “Yeah? A cross—so what?”

  “You don’t see nothing weird about it?”

  Though fancy and heavy-looking as real silver, it was just cheap ass plastic junk when she thumped a finger against it. Rather than about-to-die, the face of Jesus looked more like a man nutting, but apart from the crucifix being upside down she couldn’t see what had Anhell all freaked out. She shrugged.

  Anhell was superstitious. His grandma had wanted him to go to Miami for some expensive Catholic thing, accepting his saint or some shit like that. But his trifling ass had just bought tracksuits, Jordans, and smoked up all the money she’d left him. Now, he touched the bare skin of his neck as if there should’ve been beads hanging there, some guardian angel to call on today of all days. Her pretty babyboy, so full of regret! She saw how she could fuck with him.

  There was a Poland Spring, label ripped off, in the middle of all that voodoo mess. She picked it up.

  “You can’t drink that, ’Nisha!”

  “It ain’t even been open yet.” She cracked the seal, untwisting the cap to show him. To fuck with him. “It’s clean.”

  “It’s blessed water,” Anhell said. “Cursed—blessed, I don’t know what! But I swear to God, don’t drink it, ’Nisha.”

  “Mmm,” she sighed, after gulping down half the bottle. “I was sooo thirsty, though…!”

  He got quiet, but she could read these signs from being hugged up with him on the couch so many nights. Forcing him to watch the kind of movies she laughed at, but turned him into a motherless six-year-old, afraid of the dark. While she rummaged the apartment, pulling out drawers and dumping worthless old lady trash onto the floor, Anhell followed close, brushing up against her as if onna’ccident. He was scared as shit and wishing she’d change the channel. But, no, nigga. This is the show. This is what we’re watching.

  Not under the mattress, not in the dresser, she didn’t find a fat stash of benjis anywhere. Ratty old bras, holey socks, musty dresses. She sorted highspeed through a folder labeled “important papers,” dropping a blizzard to the ground as her audit turned up nothing but Social Security and Con Ed stubs, obituaries clipped from newspapers, yellowing funeral programs. Her father’s. But the treasure had to be buried in here somewhere. Anhell came to sit by her on the edge of the coffee table. He jumped to his feet when it teetered up like a seesaw. There!

  “Get that end,” she said.

  They dumped over the coffee table top, its old school Ebonys and dish of peppermints scattering. Underneath was a trunk, a real pirate ass looking trunk. Now we’re talking!

  No hinges or latches were visible on it, but when Anhell tried to pry up the lid, he fell back on his butt, saying, “Shit’s locked up tight.”

  She said, “No, it ain’t,” and effortlessly lifted the lid herself. Folded up inside was a tall, tall man or woman, long-dead and withered black and dry as stale raisins, their longest bones broken to fit fetus-style in the confines of the chest. Anhell screamed all girly and jumped back onto the couch. She rolled her eyes at him. “Dead. And how many times I told you what dead means?” she said. “Can’t do nothing to you, Anhell. Nothing to worry about!” He started whining but she ignored him.

  There were two things in there with the body (its skin cheap-feeling, just leatherish, like a hundred-dollar sofa from the ghetto furniture store, and the body weightless and unresisting as piled laundry). One was a shotgun that could have come from the Civil War, half made of wood. She set it aside. The other was her baby, a knife equal in length and width to her own arm, its handle protruding from a rawhide sheath.

  You-know-who sidles up and offers … what? Change. Not for the better, not for the worse, just a change. But one so huge that you can’t even dream it from the miserable little spot, miserable little moment you’re at now. And don’t go expecting wishes granted, or that kind of boring shit, because transformation belongs to a whole ’nother category. But, oh, babygirl, this could be a wild hot ride. Are you down?

  Anhell had slipped off the couch and knelt beside her. He was reaching toward the shotgun, but hesitating too … up until she did it. Until she pulled out the long knife, no, machète, from the leather sheath that flaked apart in her hands like ancient pages from an ancient book. Anhell picked up the gun.

  Oh, fuck yeah!

  It felt like being at the club, three, fo’ drinks in, every chick in the place hating, every nigga tryna holler—and then your song come on. The beat drop. She felt loose as a motherfucker. “Ooo, Anhell.” Groaning, she wedged the heel of a hand down between her thighs. “You feel that, too?”

  Yeah, the nigga was feeling it! She oughta know that look on his face by now, about to bust a really good one.

  She tested the machète’s edge with a fingertip and found it all the way dull, however sharp it looked. Even pressing down hard against the edge hardly dented the pad of her thumb.

  Anhell, too, reached out wanting to test the edge of that weird machète. But then he sort of thought twice, stopped short, and shied his hand right on back again. Just like that, she got it. Understood all the possibilities for black magic murder. “Come on, papi,” she purred, cat-malicious. “Don’t you wanna see what kinda edge it got?” She nudged the machète out toward him—very recklessly. Woulda cut his ass, too, if he hadna jumped back so quick. “You ain’t skurt, is you?”

  She was getting her hands all wet in somebody’s blood today. That was for damn sure.

  “Whoa, ’Nisha! Why you playing, though? Back up with that!”

  Keys rattled in the lock and the front door swung open.

  Two dudes in Dickies and t-shirts came in talking whatever they do over there in Czechoslovakia or Ukraine. The workers were the right color to come to New York and get fat business loans or good union jobs right off the boat, buying a house on a tree-lined street, and all set up for the good life, before their kids even graduated high school. Perhaps for supernatural reasons they didn’t notice the shotgun and machète. For natural ones, she and Anhell weren’t invisible exactly, but seemed to the workers’ eyes only two vague black and brown shapes where they didn’t belong.