“Two hundred and twenty-five. Yeah, I know.”
“Damn.”
“I know. But, I mean, those are real horns. From a real bull.”
“Don’t even really fit you.”
“I have a freakishly big head.”
“Anyway, Viking helmets didn’t have horns.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t know you back then.”
“Whatever. I can get the money. If I have to do some, I don’t know, maybe some robbing, or, like, I know the combination of the safe where my auntie keep her money. So, yeah.”
“She keeps it in a safe?”
“Big heavy one. She got to, living in that house. She has almost, maybe, three hundred, three-fifty she been saving up to buy a new wig. Like a human-hair wig. Hair comes from India, they got these temples, you shave your head and it’s, what’s it, a sacrifice. I just get up inside that safe . . .”
“You know the combination?”
“I know everything but the last number. And the dial only goes up to fifty-nine, so.”
They approached the Jew-Tang stronghold with the stalking diffidence of cats, employing techniques of Silence and Lightness. In spite of their precautions and the intensity of focus they brought to bear, as they crept around to the back, they felt themselves observed.
“What in God’s name?”
“Oh. Hey, Mom.”
The matriarch of the clan stood at a kitchen window overlooking the back garden. It was known that she could see through shadows, whether in the corners of the world or of the human heart. At the mere sound of her voice, trained along with her eyes and ears by years of merciless study of the tendency of men and plans to go awry, the grand enterprise they had mutually proposed during the flight from the School of the Turtle fell to improbable pieces in her son’s mind. The young men turned to gaze up at her, awful in the slanting light, dressed in sober habiliments as though to go before some tribunal, probing their souls with her picklock gaze. In one hand she held a cup and in the other the strip of transparent little boxes in which she stored her mysterious week of pills, the crushed and bitter formulations from which she derived many of the strange powers for which she was legendary.
“He, uh, we got kicked out,” said her son.
“We’re fine,” said the other.
“Kicked out?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Yes,” said her son.
All the ancient schools of lying, in their mountain fastnesses, and all the techniques they taught were of no avail against this subtle matriarch with the unbeatable kung fu of her Nine Intensities Steel Gaze. The only hope for escape, her son knew, was to tell a version of the truth, to scoot your lie beneath the fingertips of her attention under a sheepskin of truth and pray for an instant of blindness.
“But, just, only for today,” said her son. “Carpet cleaning.”
“Archy is having his carpet cleaned.”
“Yeah.”
“I see. Turn it down?”
“What?”
“Can you please turn it down? What is that?”
“Return to Forever.”
“Yeesh. Thank you. And what’s with the, uh, luggage?”
“The washing machine is broken. We came over to do T’s laundry.”
The one denoted by that mystic initial nodded, but it was plain to the son that the mother disbelieved every word of the story, as she likely also would have done had he been telling the truth.
“They had a fight,” tried her son, hoisting his tattered scrap of sheepskin higher. “Him and Archy.”
“He.”
“He and Archy had a fight. Archy kicked him out.”
“What? What kind of fight?”
“Not, like, violent or anything, but, so, we just came back here to, you know. We’re back.”
His mother nodded agreeably, a clear indicator of disbelief, and dismissed her son from her consideration. “What do you have to say about it?” she asked the other young man.
For a long couple of seconds during which emperors were poisoned and kingdoms squandered and prophets calamitously disbelieved, there was no reply.
“I’m hungry,” said the other young man.
“Are you, now?” said the matriarch. “And, so, why didn’t you two come in the front door?”
It took an extended interval of mutual silent interrogation for one of them to devise a plausible reply.
“Because we were hungry? And the kitchen is in the back of the house?” said her son, and saw weariness roll across her eyes like a fog.
“Get in here,” she said.
Tired and footsore, they trudged up the steps of a fir-wood terrace that overlooked the raked pebbles and dwarf cypress of the back garden. They unslung their packs and racked their weapons and stepped across the ancient sandstone threshold of the kitchen, haunted by the smoke of a thousand banquets and revels, with its vaulted ceiling and its deep stone walls. By the time they entered, she had already lit fires, rendered fats in mighty kettles, wrung the necks of ducks and chickens.
“I got leftover pancakes in the freezer,” she said. “I can microwave them. That’s it. I have a meeting, I have a crazy day. I have to go.”
“We’re fine.”
“Honestly, Mom. For real. You can go.”
But they sat at the table where, over the years, noted rogues and gentleman killers had gathered to praise the hospitality of the house and empty its cellars of rice wine, its larders of ducks hung from hooks like pleats of a long curtain. And the matriarch of Jew-Tang lay before them a feast of noodles leafed with fat, roasted organs, pickled trotters, eggs that had lain treasured for three winters in the ground.
“Take some syrup,” she said, arms folded across the front of the short gray silk jacket she wore. “So you want to move back in?”
“He— Oops.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Julie. Here’s a napkin. Mop it up.”
“You know I don’t,” said the other. “And you don’t want me to. You don’t like me.”
“If I didn’t like you,” said the matriarch of Jew-Tang, in the epigrammatic style she favored, “I would never give you the satisfaction of telling you that I didn’t.”
“I ain’t staying.”
“Okay. So what’s the plan, then.”
The boys consulted each other by not consulting, spoke without speaking, sought each other’s gaze by keeping their eyes resolutely on their plates.
“I will break you down, Julius.”
Her son laid down his eating implements, carved from the tooth of a sea unicorn, and sighed. “It’s all stupid,” he said. “Come on, Titus, you know that it is. Like Quentin Tarantino is ever going to let you, just, ‘Oh, hi, I’m fourteen and I look twelve, so, like, which way to my trailer, motherfucker?’ ”
And his companion hid his face behind his hands and wept.
“You had a fight with your dad,” the matriarch said after a decent interval had passed, handing him a cloth to wipe his eyes.
“Whatever.”
“You can stay here,” the mother said. “You can stay here as long as you want to or need to, Titus.”
“I ain’t staying.”
“Look, I’m sure you are a genius of cinema in the budding. No, I’m serious, I read your screenplay, and what do I know, but I thought it seemed very good. But Quentin Tarantino needs you to be at least eighteen years old before he can take you under his wing. If nothing else, I’m sure they have union rules to govern that kind of thing. Now, look, I have to go. I’m already late. Can you tell me in twenty-five seconds or less what is making you sad?”
The knight of secret grief seemed to ponder this question for a period whose duration impressed his stout companion.
“She didn’t get her pillow,” he said at last.
“What? Who didn’t?”
Quickly, her son narrated, as well as he could, the failed early-morning raid by the Empress on the School of the Turtle.
“She can’
t sleep without it,” Titus said. “It’s, like, stressing her out. It’s probably stressing my brother out, too.”
“I’m sure your brother is fine,” said the matriarch. “But I tell you what.”
She left and returned a minute later carrying a cushion crafted, in barbarian lands of the north, from the innermost down of the snow goose.
With an awful solemnity, bowing her head, she entrusted them with the Long Cushion of Untroubled Slumber.
“What you boys need,” said the matriarch, “is, clearly, something
to do.”
Gwen crept up the narrow stairs, let herself in with the spare key. Slipped off her espadrilles to cross the polished wood floor of the dojo, with its faint Parmesan dusting of the smell of feet and, by the weapon racks, its dark, aqueous mirror wall. She was stalked as she passed by the hiss of her soles sticking to, peeling away from, the cold bamboo floor. The mirror wall seemed to harbor as much shadow as it banished, as if it bottled the reflections of past students, forty years of West Oakland youth trying to kick, punch, and style their way out of their lives.
Though it spooked her to be alone with that shade-haunted mirror, Gwen was glad to find the place deserted. She did not care to face her teacher again so soon. She planned to retrieve her scant belongings and be gone before Irene Jew returned from her Thursday-morning appointment with the traditional Chinese doctor who rectified her qi.
Master Jew had sent her out that morning, her resolve cinched with the knotted black belt of the old lady’s counsel, to accomplish a clear, simple, even rudimentary objective: Retrieve one pillow, used, not especially valuable. But, like everything she did nowadays—as she had realized aloud while talking to the state senator from Illinois—the rescue mission turned out to be wasted time.
It seemed probable that she had been wasting her time from her arrival in California in 1994. She looked back with embarrassment now on that Gwen Shanks, showing up in Berkeley with her nursing degree from Hopkins, a letter of recommendation to Aviva Roth-Jaffe, and grandiose plans to restore, to her obstetrically diplomate family and to the black community at large, its rich ancestral heritage of midwifery. For a long time Gwen’s gifted hands, steady nerve, and the way patients tended to fall for her skeptical good humor about their hippy-trippy whoop-de-doo had served to mask the cavernous echo, when you tuned your ear for the sound of black voices, of the waiting room. Now that silence was all she could hear. As for her marriage, she had fallen in love with Archy Stallings having no illusions about his sexual past or his strength of character. But the outbreak of forgiveness that followed each new transgression of her husband’s, as typhus followed a flood, called into question the difference, if any, between illusion and its willful brother, delusion, with its crackpot theories and its tinfoil hat.
It was not supposed to have gone like that for Gwendolyn Ward Shanks. From Mrs. Hampt’s kindergarten at Georgetown Day School, which she had entered already knowing how to read Little Women, through Jack and Jill, to Howard University, where she had graduated first in her class and been elected president of the Alpha chapter, Gwen had been trained, equipped—her father would have said that she had been bred—to succeed. To fulfill the ambitions of her ancestors and justify the care they had taken to marry well, aim high, climb hard, and pull together. Gwen recalled a lecture of Julie’s, delivered one night when he was ten or eleven, on the difference between terraforming and pantropy. When you changed a planet’s atmosphere and environment to suit the needs of human physiology, that was terraforming; pantropy meant the alteration of the human form and mind to allow survival, even prosperity, on a harsh, unforgiving world. In the struggle to thrive and flourish on the planet of America, some black people had opted for the epic tragedy, grand and bitter, of terraforming; others, like Gwen’s parents and their parents and grandparents before them, had engaged in a long and selective program of pantropy. Black pantropy had produced, in Gwen and her brothers, a clutch of viable and effortless success-breathers, able to soar and bank on thermals of opportunity and defy the killing gravity of the colony world.
It had turned out that Gwen was unprepared for life on the surface of the planet Brokeland. Over the past week, at last, she had begun to succumb to the weird air and crushing gravity of it all. Little by little she had surrendered every gift and hard-won attribute of dignity and ambition until, finally, following the incident at Queen of Sheba and the bloody mess of Baby Frankenthaler’s birth, she had lost the one remaining advantage she possessed, the most precious, the hardest-won: her cool. As Julie Jaffe would no doubt put it: Fail!
Now there was the board that had been called into session for this afternoon, empowered, duty-bound to drag Gwen through the whole botched delivery all over again. She couldn’t face that, and she couldn’t face Aviva. She no longer wanted to be a midwife, any more than she wanted to be married to Archy or stepmother to his child. She loathed kung fu, herself, and Oakland. She had never liked the Bay Area, with its irresolute and timid weather, the tendency of its skies in any season to bleed gray, the way it had arranged its hills and vistas like a diva setting up chairs around her to ensure the admiration of visitors. The people around here were fetishists and cultists, prone to schism and mania, liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken. She had to get her shit out of the little upstairs room before Irene Jew got back from the qi fixer, pile it into the back of the car, and light out for someplace. Some town without fixations, one that had sent its vinyl records to the dump and would eat any kind of an egg you set before it. She had hoisted every sail to catch the rising wind of her panic; there was no telling what bleak tropic she might yet strike.
As she crossed the floor to the poster of Lee rampant, another door swung open, nearly smacking Gwen in the face. It was the door behind which lay a half bath with a PVC stall shower, one that boomed like a drum whenever Gwen rotated herself inside it.
“Oh, I’m—Oh, hi!”
It was Valletta Moore. Though she was ravaged by time, smoke, and a ponderous hand with the makeup brush, there was no mistaking her. A pinup photo of the woman in her heyday, clipped from an old Ebony, hung on the wall of Gwen’s father’s basement workshop back in Mitchellville, where, taking pride of place among the tools on their hooks and the screws in their baby-food jars, it had troubled Gwen’s adolescence with all the ways in which Valletta Moore—tall, light-skinned, with planetary breasts—differed from Gwen, while evidently constituting her father’s ideal of black womanhood.
Even without the stiletto heels that, in the picture on her father’s wall, had launched Valletta like Saturn V rockets into the stratosphere of her Afro, the woman was tall, a couple of inches under six feet. Had to be at least fifty but showing, with the help of a skirt that seemed to have been made by taking a few passes with a black ACE bandage around her hips and upper thighs, enough leg to string with telephone wire, carry startling messages to the world. Hair pulled back tight and glossy against her head, lips shining with purple paint. Her madly green eyes, in the instant before they vanished behind a pair of big Dolce & Gabbanas, betrayed an unmistakable half-canine look of guilty surprise. Caught, Gwen thought, in the act.
Valletta Moore put her head down, shouldered a large red plastic handbag, and with a cool nod, slid past Gwen. In a blasphemous pair of heeled pumps, she went clicking across the sacrosanct floor of the dojo. The officious swagger in her gait might have been some flavor of self-possession or the cool skedaddle of a shoplifter making for the door. In either case, the streamer of toilet paper that trailed from the waistband of her tiny skirt like the banner of an advertising airplane pretty much spoiled the effect.
“Oh! Um. Miss—Ms. Moore.”
The woman stopped, and in the instant of her hesitation, the clatter of her exit echoed in the empty studio. She started to turn back to Gwen, then reconsidered. She shouldered the bag again, walked away with no reply.
“Go on, then, Valletta. Fly th
at flag,” Gwen said. “Always good to have some extra toilet paper on you. You never know.”
A taut-fleshed, claw-fingered, but elegant hand emerged from Valletta’s front of haughtiness like a stagehand sent backstage to retrieve a leading lady’s tumbled wig. The hand felt around behind with a frantic helplessness that touched Gwen enough to impel her forward to help. Valletta whipped around and jumped back when she saw what Gwen was up to.
“Hi,” Gwen said, dangling the strip of toilet paper between three fingers from about the height of her right shoulder, as if she expected a yo-yo to materialize on the other end of it.
“Look at that,” said Valletta Moore with a hint of accusation and reproach.
Like boxers or circling cocks, they appraised each other. Their respective cryonic targeting arrays were brought online and deployed. Where their gazes met, great snowbanks heaved up between them. The air chimed with the crack of ice.
“Any other way I can help you?” Gwen said. “Does Mrs. Jew know you’re here?”
Valletta Moore took in the spectacle of Gwen’s belly, squinting one eye as though staring along the edge of a plank to gauge its trueness. “Who you supposed to be?”
“Who’m I supposed to be? Like I’m trick-or-treating?”
Gwen caught a whiff of the other woman’s perfume, something dense and somehow reminiscent of the smell of Froot Loops, maybe Poison. She recalled having detected a whiff of it, like the pressure of an incipient migraine behind the eyeballs, her first night in the secret room. If Valletta Moore was not herself a former pupil of Mrs. Jew, then Gwen reasoned that maybe Archy’s father had returned to the Bruce Lee Institute, seeking refuge and shelter in the hands of his old teacher, departing just before Gwen showed up.
Great. It had been shameful enough fleeing to the dingy spider hole, behind the hidden door, when she could at least imagine herself to be following, as Master Jew had given her to understand, in the footsteps of fugitive lamas and persecuted practitioners of Falun Gong. But maybe all this time she had been filing herself alongside a squirrelly old no-account basehead and his washed-up ex-ex-girlfriend in a drawer marked, everlastingly, Fail!