Ramadan Ramsey Page 10

  “Ha!” Mama Joon said to Clarissa’s proposal. “I’d rather swim.”

  She meant that, too. She was thinking of 1965. Hurricane Betsy. Recalling how she, with a two-year-old Clarissa perched on one shoulder and her overnight bag and pocketbook on the other, had waded through the rising waters to the Lafitte Housing Project and the safety of her friend Margaret’s second-floor apartment there. That’s what you did in those days when a hurricane was coming, if you were lucky enough to know someone living in the sturdy brick structures that had once deigned to mitigate poverty with comfortable, affordable housing in a central location. None of this evacuation madness. Cars jammed up on the interstate inching along at the pace of a much lesser species—the most recent exodus, which had proven unnecessary, had reduced the entire Greater Metro Area to a community of slugs. No. She really would rather swim. After hustling Clarissa off the phone with a minimal amount of haggling, she went back to prepping her roast and, as best she could, herself . . .

  Ah, Betsy! What Mama Joon remembered of that storm was not the destruction of property but the destruction of pretense, of the false sense that everything was so wonderful before the storm, of the lie that complacency was happiness—but, conversely, also the destruction of the gloom that comes with the conscious acknowledgment of that pretense, a measure of relatively real contentment with the idea of life as, well, fun. She had been renting this same house back then, before she had gotten enough money from Judge Dumas to buy it. What a shock the water had been to her ankles when she had stepped off the porch into the shallow stream that had formed on St. Philip. Then, a few blocks away as she waded around a corner—what an audacious, lapping sensation the water had given her (at her knees, along her inner thighs) when she had sunk unexpectedly into a pothole hidden by the flood and filled with sludge. She had yelped from the surprise and from the secret delight at being licked so intimately in the middle of North Villere Street. Nature was nasty! If her hands hadn’t been so busy holding up Clarissa and their belongings, she would have slapped at the surface of the water as if it were the back of a man’s head and told it, with great disingenuousness, to stop it. The rain had begun again just as she arrived at the edge of the Lafitte Project, and she pulled Clarissa to her chest and covered the child’s head with her chin. When they ducked into the hallway leading to Margaret’s apartment, she was laughing as she climbed the stairs. Clarissa, who had begun to cry when the rain started to pelt her, quieted down, less from the relief of their having found shelter than from curiosity at her mother’s mood. Tromping up the stairs to Margaret’s, Mama Joon felt alive, released. She would spend several of the best days of her life waiting for the storm to pass and, in the aftermath, for the conveniences of daily life to return: electrical power and, yes, that complicated complacency that rooted you to routine. In the meantime, the camaraderie with Margaret and her neighbors had set the tone of adventure. Beer from well-stocked coolers had flowed, as had conversation and a newfound esprit de corps. A man named Rufus had set up a grill on the balcony across from Margaret’s—which was where the best card games happened—so there was always something hot to eat: chicken, ribs, baked beans.

  When it was time to go home, she had left with a sense of dread, a fear of returning to the drudgery that attended being safe and sound, day after day. As she had walked along Claiborne Avenue, the street as dry as a desert now, watching enthusiastic workmen sweep up broken tree limbs and storm debris, she had begun to cry: it was over. The break from the ordinary. No more Miller High Life, no more close communal hum. She had paused in the middle of the street, coughed, and gathered herself. “Stop it!” she had said out loud—trying to remember the way the water had felt her up—sniffling and forcing a smile for Clarissa, who had been enjoying the walk until her mother had inexplicably grown sad. Then she had looked back at the projects (part port-in-a-storm, part French Riviera), and promised never to forget the thrill of it all, her escape from the ravages of Betsy and her little respite from the clutches of the quotidian. But she hadn’t thought about it in a long time, really. It had all come back to her now, though, forty years later, with another big storm looming, one that might possess the ironic duality of Betsy, of all life-threatening tragedy—both the strength to kill and the power to make folks feel more alive.

  * * *

  LATER THAT EVENING, as she and Ramadan sat in the living room watching the news of the hurricane on television, Clarissa came to collect the three hundred dollars Mama Joon had whittled her down to from the five hundred she wanted.

  The garlic-stuffed roast was in the oven, and it smelled good enough to smother the scent of municipal anxiety seeping in through the gaps of the window frames with the alarming specificity of natural gas. Clarissa was reeking of it when she entered the room, a full-fledged gust of worry.

  Mama Joon picked up the envelope from the coffee table and handed it to her without taking her eyes off the television. Clarissa thumbed the cash while repeating the Baton Rouge offer. Mama Joon ignored her.

  “Well, do you at least have all of your important papers together?”

  “What papers?” Mama Joon asked, glancing up with an insouciance that she leered into suspicion.

  “You know, insurance and stuff.”

  Mama Joon sighed. She knew her family assumed (correctly, of course) that she had a stash of funds someplace, plus a valuable life insurance policy. Though she never discussed her finances in any detail, her prosperity was evident in her careful and quiet largesse. She could always come up with money when necessary, say for a new roof or for an emergency with one of Clarissa’s boys. Sometimes she even spent money on things that weren’t vital at all, like the expensive toys and clothes she lavished on Ramadan. After her appendix scare, she had indeed gotten most of her affairs in order. That was nobody’s business. But with the strange mix of vapors colliding chaotically and noxiously in her living room, smothering the aromas of the roast—Clarissa’s gaseous greed, the city’s pheromones of fear—this was as good a time as any to clear the air.

  “All I know is, you better hope nothing don’t happen to me. Everything I got is going to Ramadan, and that’s that.”

  Ramadan was sitting on the floor watching the coverage of the storm as if it were one nonstop cartoon. The swirling satellite images and animated newscasters and meteorologists were almost as entertaining as SpongeBob SquarePants. He didn’t quite know what was going on, but there was suspense. Something was going to happen. The people were talking like they wanted to keep it from happening. But they kept showing the bright red-and-green moving pictures of it happening. And whatever was going to happen was beyond their control. He could tell it was just a story. Like watching a movie on DVD. Or like they were reading from a storybook. Didn’t they know you could just fast-forward? Didn’t they know you could just turn to the last page and know how things turn out? It was right there, right before you saw “The End.” Good or bad. Happy or sad. You couldn’t change the end of a movie. You couldn’t change what was already written in a book.

  But when he heard Mama Joon say his name, he turned away from the hurricane coverage to look at her. “If you want to be helpful to him”—she was staring at Clarissa but pointing at Ramadan, unaware that he was now looking at her—“and to yourself, just make sure the attorneys at Mason and Dumas, up on Baronne Street, know you’re taking care of Ramadan, and you’ll be taken care of, too. Otherwise he’ll probably wind up in a foster home somewhere with a big bank account waiting on him to turn eighteen. And you’ll wind up somewhere with nothing—here, I guess, maybe, that is, if you can figure out how to pay Ramadan rent.” She raised an eyebrow at Clarissa. “Any questions?”

  “Well—just so long as you got it all figured out.”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  Clarissa folded the envelope and stuffed it into her bra, and she was almost out the door when she decided to stop and ask the question (“any questions?”—hell, yes, as a matter of fact, she did have one) that she had always
wanted to ask. The tension of the money wedged against her left breast squeezed the words out of her chest like a moan of pleasure but she was, in fact, voicing her fundamental pain.

  “Mama Joon—why do you hate me so much?”

  “Why do you hate yourself?”

  Clarissa didn’t respond. But she knew, as brutal as it was, it was a valid question. She stood still while Mama Joon, slicing through her with a stare, said, “Maybe it’s something you did. Maybe it’s something I did. Maybe it’s something you didn’t do. Maybe it’s something I didn’t do. Maybe it’s something you’re going to do. I don’t know the answer. I really don’t.”

  If these were the options, then Clarissa did know, after all. She gloated with superiority and was half-smiling through her anger when she fired back, “All of the above!”

  Ramadan watched and listened to this exchange without truly understanding the ramifications, but he knew it was an ugly confrontation. And he knew the tension had something to do with him. He wanted it to end—and knew how to make it stop.

  “Mama Joon,” he said, tugging at the sleeve of her white cotton duster.

  “What, child?”

  “The roast,” he said.

  Mama Joon sniffed the air, and then she jumped up from her chair and hurried down the hall to the kitchen.

  Ramadan looked up at Clarissa, who shot him an accusatory glare. He shrugged and said, “I ain’t did nothing.”

  “Oh, everybody’s so innocent!” Clarissa spat at him. “Well, I ain’t did nothing either. I mean, look at me.”

  Ramadan followed her directive, starting with his aunt’s wide feet, which edged out over the front, sides, and heels of her gold Daniel Green slippers. Then he scanned up to her ashy knees; the frayed lacy hem of her short hot-pink dress; and the pooch of her stomach with its doorbell of a navel. He had reached her bosom, bulging unnaturally with Mama Joon’s money, when she said, “No, boy! Don’t look at me!” You could sometimes forget he was just a child. Like when his little slick ass played the diplomat and stopped an argument by reminding people to go check on a roast.

  “I mean, take me for an example,” Clarissa said. “What did I ever do to her? I’m as innocent as the next person.”

  But she flinched and pulled her tight traveling dress down—she didn’t feel innocent. She looked at Ramadan and thought about how she had left Alicia crying in her crib that day and picked up her own sleeping baby instead. So what if selfishness was an essential part of who she was. It saddened her, sort of, to know it, to accept it, but there it was.

  “If only your mama hadn’t died,” she said, as if to beg forgiveness or to offer condolences to Ramadan, when she was really thinking that if Alicia were alive then maybe Mama Joon would have willed both her daughters her estate, would not have felt compelled to cut her out in order to insure Ramadan’s well-being. “If only you had a daddy.”

  “I ain’t got no daddy,” Ramadan said.

  “That’s not what I mean. And of course you have a daddy.”

  “I do?”

  “Everybody’s got a daddy, Ramadan.” Then she mumbled, “Lord, this house . . .”

  “Who he is?” It was the first time he had asked anyone this question.

  “Hmph? Some A-rab from around the corner your mama was sleeping with.”

  “He’s around the corner?”

  “Nooo . . . not anymore. But his people—”

  “Where he at?”

  “The other side of the world, boy. After your mama got pregnant with you, his people sent him back home faster than you can say abracadabra!”

  “Abracadabra!”

  “Mmm hmm. That fast. I shouldn’t even be telling you this.” She arched her neck toward the kitchen, peeking for Mama Joon.

  “Why?” he asked her.

  “Cuz it’s none of your business.”

  “I want my daddy!”

  “Now here you go—shut your lil skinny ass up!”

  “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!”

  Clarissa got nervous when she heard Mama Joon clanging a pan in the kitchen, and she said, “Well, you can’t have him! I gotta go.”

  She slammed the door behind her and jogged down the porch steps. Climbing into the front seat of the car parked out front, she grumbled to Crip, “Get me the hell outta here.”

  “What’s wrong, Mama?” Crip asked.

  As they sped off, she glared back at the house and thought: What if the hurricane blew the whole damn house away? What if it blew them both away, Mama Joon and Ramadan? Then what? Any questions?

  * * *

  AFTER CLARISSA RUSHED out, having articulated for Ramadan what no one ever had—his unspoken well of longing—he turned back to the television and saw the red swirl of the hurricane roaring toward New Orleans. His pulse and breathing quickened with every rotation of the storm’s development. The images matched the torrents of heat rising in him. The jagged red ball slicing angrily through the Gulf of Mexico was the very picture of his fury. “It’s clearly getting stronger,” the weather lady said, pointing at her maps. It was as if the satellites and radars were tracking his volatility. He couldn’t read all the words he saw, but he understood the big WARNING! that kept flashing on the screen. Another word, depression, even with tropical in front of it, felt applicable to him. As he listened to the newscasters try to explain the situation, he knew something they did not: The hurricane was lonely!

  “The pressure is dropping—that’s not a good thing.”

  His rage surging, Ramadan closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and stomped on the living room floor. As if chanting a mantra, he repeated, “I want my daddy . . . I want my daddy . . . I want my daddy . . .” Then he began to run around the coffee table. After his third orbit, he slapped the basket of plastic fruit from the table across the room. An apple flew toward the side window and tapped a pane. A banana grazed the television, hitting the weather lady’s chin. “This is the big one!”

  In the kitchen, Mama Joon heard the commotion, and she shoved the roasting pan back into the oven, splashing gravy on her towel in the rush to minimize the damage of Hurricane Ramadan. She had been wondering if all the commotion about the storm would set him off. Standing at the kitchen island, she looked down the hall and saw, as suspected, Ramadan jumping up and down, pitching one of his fits. Then she watched him bestow literal meaning upon the object he was manhandling—he threw a throw pillow. Judging from the direction of his aim and the ensuing thwack and crash, it had landed against the already dented drum shade covering that cheap floor lamp in the far corner, toppling it over. She had bought it on sale at Walmart, Ramadan-ready, priced for disposability. She sighed with satisfaction—it’s wonderful when things, even like this, work out the way you planned. From where she stood, she couldn’t see what had become of the lamp, but in her mind’s eye the pillow had wedged into the shade, disengaging it from the harp. The long black metal pole was probably angled over the edge of her lounge chair, like a fishing rod. The cracked bulb would be dangling and baiting in vain a darkness it would never again defeat. Such was the fate of light—and the elusiveness of darkness. Bulbs break. Even the stars, they would have you believe, disputing your own eyes, have already burned out.

  There were those days when Mama Joon, an aging life force herself, felt as if her own light was starting to fade. But she knew if she slid the rag from her shoulder and started waving it, Ramadan, roiling in his anger, would look up, see something flickering in the distance, and be beckoned by what was left of her glow. So here she stood (while she still could), calling to that fiery one down the hall, the key to any hope she had of enduring, of continuing to shine, like a star, even after she was gone, summoning him and all of his crazy energy—an energy that would never have existed without her own—to come dive back into her and recharge her spirit.

  Ramadan had just picked up the April 2005 issue of Ebony magazine from the coffee table and was about to rip through its Kanye West cover, when Mama Joon’s flapping, gravy-encrus
ted dishrag caught his eye. In his fitful state, she did not register as his grandmother, but rather as where he needed to be: a place. Like the ferocious red blob twirling on television, which wouldn’t stop until it slammed into somewhere—maybe into New Orleans—he was going to crash into the coast of Mama Joon. He was going to the place calling out to him, the place that was ready to catch him. In its unconditional willingness to receive him, it might as well be called “home.” That’s where he was going, so that must be where the lonely hurricane that was on TV acting bad like him was going, too. The hurricane was going home.

  He flung the Ebony behind him, and as its pages fluttered through the air, he began pedaling his little legs down the hallway. The mechanics of running, purposeful and exhilarating, aided the recovery of his self-control, animosity succumbing to animation. His muscles redirected his blood to their use, away from the tumult of his frustration. With every stride, he became less like a tempest and more just a being in motion. The bull-boy emerged, teased out by his toreador-grandma. But halfway to the kitchen, something happened.

  The bull-boy knew he was not a bull-boy. Had the storm done this to him? Made him see himself? Pinpointed the eye of his emotions, somewhere deep inside? No—it wasn’t the storm. Everybody’s got a daddy, Ramadan. It was Clarissa!