Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [65]
My father’s voice had lasted only a few minutes. I don’t talk into no plastic and holes, he always said. Like breathin on a pincushion.
He’d said Glorette was dead.
I stopped at the El Rey, one of the tiny shacks with a dropdown window that sold burritos and coffee. My father, when he came from Louisiana to California and began working groves, learned to eat burritos instead of biscuits and syrup. I wanted horrible coffee, not good coffee like my mother’s, like Glorette’s mother’s, like all the women I’d grown up with on my small street. All of them from Louisiana, like my parents. The smell of their coffee beans roasting every morning, and the sound of the tiny cups they drank from even after dark, on the wood porches of our houses, when the air had cooled and the orange blossoms glowed white against the black leaves.
But the man who handed me the coffee smiled, and his Mayan face—eyes sharp and dark as oleander leaves, teeth square as Chiclets—looked down into mine. I put the coins in his palm. Pillows of callus there. I sipped the coffee and he said, “Bueno, no?”
So good—cinnamon and nighttime and oil. “Que bueno,” I said. “Gracias.” He thought I was Mexican.
Then tears were rolling down my face, and I ducked into an alley. Urine and beer and wet newspaper. Glorette was dead. I closed my eyes.
Glorette—when we were fourteen, we walked two miles to high school, and her long stride was slow and measured as a giraffe’s. Her legs long and thin, her body small, and the crescent of white underneath the purple-black iris that some-how made her seem as if she were sleepily studying everyone. Her hair to her waist, but every day I coiled it for her into a bun high on her skull. All day, men imagined her hair down along her back, tangled in their hands. I wore mine in a bun because I didn’t want it in my way while I did my homework and wrote my travel stories about places I’d made up. Always islands, with hummingbirds and star fruit because I liked the name.
Every boy in Rio Seco loved her. But I talked too much smack. I couldn’t wait to leave. If someone said, “Fantine, you think you butter, but your ass is Nucoa like everybody else,” I’d say, “Yet all you deserve is Crisco.”
Grady Jackson had fallen for Glorette so hard that he stole a car for her, and nearly died, but she felt nothing for him, and he’d never forgiven her.
Grady Jackson and his sister Hattie were from Cleveland by way of Mississippi. Grady. He hated his name. He was in my math class, though I was two years younger, and he wrote Breeze on top of his papers. Mr. Klein gave them back and said, “Write your proper name.”
Grady said to me, “I want somebody call me Breeze. Say, I’m fittin to hat up, Breeze, you comin? Cause my mama name me for some sorry-ass uncle down in Jackson. Jackson, Missippi, and my name Jackson. Fucked up. And she in love with some fool name Detroit.”
Glorette. We were freshmen, and a senior basketball player who had just moved here was talking to her every day. “Call me Detroit, baby. Where I’m from. Call me anything you want, cause you fine as wine and just my kind.”
But Detroit had no car. Glorette smiled, her lips lifting only a little at the corners, and turned her head with the heavy pile of hair on top, her neck curved, and Detroit, who had reddish skin and five freckles on top of each cheek, said, “Damn, they grow some hella fine women out here in California.”
He didn’t even look at me.
That weekend, I was on my front porch when Grady Jackson pulled up in a car. My brothers Lafayette and Reynaldo had an old truck, and they jumped down from the cab. “Man, you got a Dodge Dart? Where the hell you get the money? You ain’t had new kicks for a year. Still wearin them same Converse.”
Grady looked up at me. “Glorette in your house? Her mama said she ain’t home.”
I saw his heavy brown cheeks, the fro that wouldn’t grow no matter