think you’re funny.”
“I’m truthful.”
“Truthfully broke.”
“Warden.”
“Con-vict.”
Erycha remembered her father actually had been a convict at least one time in his life so she knew the joke was a joke with cutting power. The way his story went, he hadn’t infringed on the law in a felonious manner, he just lost control a little bit and ended up with his car in somebody else’s front lawn, a small Cupid statue severed at the loins. Early ’80s East Oakland was apparently so insane and calamitous with drugs and gunfire that drunk joyriding and minor vandalism wasn’t worth much police attention, let alone jail time. But when he was unable to pay his fine he ended up in the county pen. As this was not the first time that they had looked up and found him in County, his loved ones used up all his phone time counseling him bout how he needed to find a higher purpose in life. Religion. Or something like that.
He said that this time he spent his first free Sunday at Allen Temple Baptist Church trying to find that higher purpose. But instead he found the mechanics of praise and worship boring as the Good Book itself. All the gospel music in the world couldn’t hold a candle to a good Ant Banks record burning up a club past midnight, the most animated preacher’s sermon had nothing on the three in the a.m. testament of a girl moaning something that sounded like his name. The only worthwhile thing about church, he decided, was that there were so many fine young ladies there. Of course he knew these were morning, not night, women, but he found them irresistible nonetheless. So he spent each Sunday morning getting dressed as sharp as possible and showed up on the church steps just as the worshippers were filing out. He would pad at his face with his fingertips, whistle loud like the spirit was just too down deep inside him and would generally pretend that he, too, had come from the House of God weary with worshipping. Then, he said, he would go about meeting the righteous sisters with the blessed backsides. Maybe at eighteen, and impressionable, Erycha’s mother had been too naive to realize that he had worn more orange jumpsuits than church clothes. But seven years had smartened her.
“Con-vict . . . You know what, Morris? I love you. I love you, I love Erycha, ’n that right there’s my problem. That’s my one sole problem in this whole world. If I could just escape that, go off, do my own thing, be my own person, not have to worry bout, bout, all this. Just escape.”
“That food’s still fresh, warden.”
“I, I know, I know it is.”
Erycha knew this dance, knew its rhythms. She’d studied its intricacies of condemnation, forgiveness and eventual seduction and she knew its every last step. So even though she’d yet to learn the difference between a relevé and a Chevrolet, she could already sense the music and move out of her parents’ way, out the door, down the stairwell, across the walk. Up over the apartment gate, past the corner boys who posted like sentinels or statues along Del Rosa Avenue, across that street and into the scrub forest that lay in the narrow little gully there. Maybe after years of education and refinement, professors and critics would praise her for the naturalness of this art. But she was only six years old and for now the world was blind to her talents. Her parents had closed a door between them and her. The statues and sentinels remained blind, too. Only the small scrub forest hidden from the street seemed to know that she even existed, but it welcomed her as its child. Maybe because the forest was as unseen as she was, it became her private comfort, a shaded grove for imaginative play where the figures indifferent and dangerous that composed her usual life became dream-things. Where rude corner boys became goblins and her parents the comic jesters of the court, and she, of course, the queen.
Who knows. But Erycha conducted this shadow symphony from one thicket of scrub to the next. Piles of vegetation that to outside eyes would look like dead heaps turned into something more once she knelt down and gazed into their intricate work of dry brown branches and leaves. Then she saw the unique tangles and secrets in each. The most secret of all was the thicket where she found the white pagoda and its bullfrog: here, shadowed by a mound of abandoned construction work, piles of gravel, broken boards and such, she had chanced upon the pagoda. Gazing at it, looking it over absorbed her completely. Now she didn’t even need to use her imagination: the pagoda was about a foot high. Its white paint had begun to chip away in flecks, exposing the grayed wood from which it had been sculpted. She had seen pagodas before, in pictures in books, and always admired their spiraling design, the dragon twisted around the twisting tree, and the open house completing it. The only difference was that this one was painted white instead of black, and a bullfrog lived within its open house. Sometimes it would shade itself inside during the days and she would see it then. Other times she would have to stay awake till long after her parents and everyone else in Del Rosa Gardens, even the corner boys, had gone to bed, and then she would listen as its weird croak filled the silence. The sound mushroomed out and out, a gentle explosion. She imagined the way its head and gills had to fill up with air to make that sound. In the days when she found it stooping in the open house she would run her fingers carefully across its notched dry skin trying to learn its secrets.
The bullfrog never liked her touching him, though, and he’d bluster if she kept at it too long; then his body would expand, his eyes would get big and bright like she imagined them in the dark. But the croak never came except at night and from far away.
One night, he didn’t come home for a long, long time.
Her mother cooked dinner. They ate and waited. They took showers. Talked to Miss Simms on the telephone. Knelt and prayed for his eternal soul and ephemeral body, for their own souls and bodies, and waited for him.
About the time Erycha was used to hearing the bullfrog croak, instead she heard a different sound waking her from what had only been a light sleep. It was her mother. “Uphold Momma in somethin, OK, sweetie?” the sweetness-tinged voice asked from across the couch. “OK, Erycha?”
Her mother was a thin woman but her face was girlish with babyfat and tenderness sometimes. But looking at her across the space of couch where they’d fallen asleep, it was like God had painted her in blacks and blues: her looks had hardened and chilled with the night.
Erycha wasn’t sure what it meant to uphold a person in something and she didn’t want to ask. It was best not to ask about adults, just do as they said. She didn’t even ask what needed upholding. She followed her mother into the bedroom—the apartment’s only true bedroom, her own being an improvisation consisting of a makeshift curtain, some bedsheets, two pillows and an inflatable mattress—and let her eyes do the asking.
In the dark room she could make out a pile of her father’s things. They sat out like so much unbagged trash. Socks and shoes, two pairs of jeans, several pair of slacks, shirts and vests and thin coats; hats, a beret, a fluffy white Kangol, an open jar of Sulfur 8, a necklace and silver-colored promise ring. His car and girl magazines, his few, age-damaged albums. His manly supplies: cases of beer, a bottle of cologne. And maybe even his smell, she imagined.
His things lay heaped. It was strange that a man as big and impressive-looking as her daddy could get reduced so fast, to so little.
“Let’s gather this mess.” Her mother nodded at her. “As much things as he’s put me through.”
Erycha took a load of his things in her arms. She tucked the awkward objects in the crook of her arm like a great big football and tottered out to the center room.
She heard her mother’s voice behind her, over her shoulder. Keep it movin, girl. Keep movin. She noticed that the front door was open. The winter wind
