Intake

This is a story I wrote a long time ago, at NYU. Paule Marshall really liked it, my classmate Carl didn't so much.


Intake

The night flashes by, the highway lights blur as the van picks up speed. On the side of the van is an obese airbrushed cowboy sitting atop a mule whose weight-bearing back is bent, his belly dangerously near his hooves. The radio station is tuned to country music.

Shel Hardy sits still, her body tensed with fear and ready for action. She searches the interior of the van for a sign of a weapon. A gun would be the worst, her cowardice and caution would mix badly with terror and she would be a second too late to avoid the blast. Would she feel for a moment the side of her head gone, her limbs unable to move as he advances, not caring about the mess, wanting only....What? What would he want? No, he would have too much to lose. He owns the van and the business. It was he who answered the phone, wasn’t it?

Hello? Is this the shuttle service? Hi, two from Stanford to SFO please. United, 6:30 a.m.

At 4:50 a.m. her boyfriend is still staring into space biting his pencil and shuffling his feet. His clothes are strewn across the room, occupying every inch of space except for the enclave she has made for herself on the bed, backed up against the wall. Finally he turns to her, cross, exhausted, “I can’t go Shel. I still have four pages to write and this is for Richard Rorty for godsakes, I’m not going to write crap. You go ahead, I’ll take a cab later.” She considers the sharp blue of his eyes and decides not to push it. “Tell your family I said hello.”

She has been concentrating hard out the window, thinking of her boyfriend at school, now frantically packing, calling for a cab that will cost him twice as much as the shuttle. In a few hours he will be home with that counter full of photographs charting every step of his life. High school graduation, with a gleaming blonde at his side, first day of college, first Thanksgiving home from school, second Thanksgiving, third. And now a new set in the making. She has not managed to grace that counter just yet and she tries not to count the years she has been waiting. She turns away from the window in resolution and the van’s atmosphere settles around her, close-fitting. She hadn’t expected to be in the van alone. She hadn’t expected to have to try to make conversation with this large white man on two hours of sleep and a bitter feeling. Not that she necessarily thought of him as white, just a man, a big man driving a big van, getting her to the plane on time. Or taking her off to the side of the road and shooting her up full of lead and taking her limbs apart, leaving her in a plastic garbage bag, with only her memory like a belch lingering over the plush seat.

There had been a case in the paper a month ago: a truck driver who had killed fifteen women and finally turned himself in at the police station because God spoke to him. The man had brought along physical evidence. She imagines the scene like the beginning of an obscene joke,

A man walks into a police station in California. He pulls a breast out of his pocket and lays it on the desk of the supervising officer. The officer looks at his desk and then up at the stranger, “We’ll be right with you.”

She looks at her driver in stages, first gazing intently through the windshield at the night rising like wind--from there she can see his hands on the steering wheel, black hair settled on their pale backs. Her own hands press the armrests. In an attempt to look unconcerned she turns her head by creaking degrees and then like a door swung wide she looks straight at him and smiles.

“Not many people on the road this time of day, huh?”

The driver, a big doughy man in a shiny jacket with elasticized cloth cuffs looks at her, takes in the brown-glass skin and the tightly stretched smile. He nods, “Yeah, my favorite time to be on the road.” There is a long pause, and then he asks, “You work over at Stanford?”

The jacket bears the logo of Big John’s Airport Service, the oversized cowboy atop the pint-sized mule waving his hat and headed for sunset.

“Work at Stanford? No, I go to school there, this is my last year.”

“Huh.” He glances at her again and nods, then beeps his horn at a swiftly passing car. She fills the silence after the horn dies, “Are you from here?”

“Yeah, born and raised. Went to San Jose High.”

“Good school.”

He looks at her to see if she is joking. “Yeah.”

She wants to move her leg, to spread out a little, but she doesn’t want to call attention to her physical self. She sits still. Breathes, tries to listen to her breathing.

She is headed for home, not quite a sunset, hopefully not yet, but rather the stark and flat chill of the Midwest. How her family ended up there she is not sure, yet they seem stuck, the only spots of color in an otherwise white landscape. The heaps of snow she is no longer used to, the sky on December mornings. White, peaches and cream, porcelain and tan, just regular folks.

They are approaching the convoluted mass that is the San Francisco airport. He drives down below when she thinks he should have gone up. “Hey, I’m going to United you know.”

“Yeah, mornings you can’t go to the main level. You’ll have to take the escalator.”

“Oh.”

She gets out, pays him, smiles, relieved now.

Into the brown timeless expanse of the airport. Zombies--sleeping, watching the luggage carousel scale along. She goes upstairs, glad she packed light for once and won’t have to check anything.

She doesn’t want to stand in line and feel her exhaustion, she doesn’t want to start suspecting herself before they do. Suspect herself of what? She never does anything wrong. OK, once she smuggled some pot home in her panties, but that was too nerve wracking to repeat. She is a good citizen, a normal person, who has paid for the service she is about to use. She repeats to herself, I am completely legitimate, then snorts when she hears it in her head. Of course I am. She feels the eyes of the counter people on her and keeps walking, her teeth pulling at her bottom lip. She fields glances at her gate, what you’ve never seen a black person from Iowa before? Looks around for people she might know, aches to sleep.

Over Des Moines, god, so empty looking and layered with grudged white snow, small, twinkling faintly. Hello again.

She gets off the plane and goes to baggage claim to wait. No one is ever on time to get her. Oh god. She sees the boy she dated in high school, big brown-skinned boy who took her to new sexual heights and then patiently explained to her that she had been “played.” She edges into a corner and starts to wish herself smaller and then she catches sight of her mother. Solid, brown, smiling back at her with her own face. “Mom.”

Home in the big white Jeep, feeling conspicuous, through street lights and dirty snow, down the long strip where sidewalks are empty except for a few flannel-clad adventurers. Inside the car Etta James is playing and it is warm. “We’re so glad to have you home. Nothing much new with us . . . your brother hates his new school. Alanna is fourteen. Same old, same old.”

She looks at her mother. “Well, it’s good to see that some things don’t change.” She smiles and then laughs. “I’ve missed you Mom, school is too much lately. My classes are still full-on and I don’t know when the thesis will get written.”

They have begun the upward climb into the long driveway. She takes in the familiar brick house which looks much larger from the front than it really is, the bald trees that surround the house, and the bit of damp blue sky that is visible over the rooftop. Then she notices a dark splash on the white mailbox.

“What’s that?”

“Huh. I don’t know.” As they get closer they see that the word “nigger” is scrawled across their mailbox. They are both still. “Are you kidding me.”

Inside the house she looks out the window over the backyard. This was the front entrance when the house was built. Her head is full of monumental images, the KKK riding up the lawn, bedsheets flapping, horses charging, eyeholes menacing. People hiding in the bushes, in the trees. Her eyes fall on the short black man holding a hitching ring in his plastered fist, a bit of negricana that was left by the former owners of the house. Why have they never bothered to get rid of it? She’d go out there right now and kick it smack between the teeth but as her hand reaches for the door knob, it falls again and she scans the lawn for intruders.

Her mother leans her head against a cabinet in the kitchen, screws up her pretty brown face, “In this day. I cannot believe it. We’ve never had a problem before.”

Shel brings her head out of the refrigerator and pours her glass full of water. “Remember those cross burnings in Dubuque? When was that, ‘93?”

Her mother looks at her over her glasses, “Dubuque is over an hour away and it’s in farm country.”

“Yeah, and so are we, basically.”

She shakes her head, frowning, “That’s not true, Shel. I just don’t see it. We’ve been here for ten years, in this house for five. Who would do that? Who? Someone must have seen them, someone must have been out, the neighborhood police at least.”
Shel looks at her mother through the bottom of her water glass, “It wasn’t there last night? You’re sure?”

“I’m not sure, but I think I would have noticed.”

“Well, I guess we better report it to the police. Not that that will help, but it should be on file....in case anything else happens.”

“Anything else, huh? Who do those fools think they are? I grew up in Maryland in the 50s and if they think I haven’t seen this before...if they think they can just move me out of my place, well. They got another think coming.”

“Mom.”

Shel’s father was in his office, Alanna was still at swim practice and Raj was spending the day at his friend’s farm half an hour outside the city. When the minivan pulled up and Raj jumped out, Shel hung back. His friend’s mother hopped out behind him and waved at them all, “Heya guys, sorry he’s a little late, we had some trouble pulling them off the four wheelers. But he just kept talking all day about how his big sister was coming home, so I know he’s glad to be here.”

Confused by the wall of silence that greeted her, she looked around at them all. “Hey, sweetie, somethin’ the matter?”

“We were vandalized last night, Sharon. We’re just all a little shook up.”

“Vandalized? Now, what in the hell?”

Shel’s mother led Sharon around to look at the mailbox. “Jesus! Now, who would want to do that?”

Raj stood a few feet behind the mothers, looking through the shield of their bodies at the mailbox and its message. He turned and went into the house. Shel found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching TV. She sat down next to him. “Hey Raj. What’s up?”

“Nothing.” He tore his eyes away from Cartoon Network briefly to look at her. Encouraged, she asked, “How’ve you been?” Too late, his eyes had already slapped back. She watched the bright colors reflected on his glasses.

She tried again, “Babe. It’s not personal. Chances are, they don’t even know us. They must have read about us in the paper or something.”

They had been in the paper five years ago when they had first moved into the neighborhood. They had published the price of their house and noted that it was the most expensive real estate trade in the last six years. They had appeared in the Register again last month, her mother, brother and sister smiling out from the front page of the Metro section. The caption read, “African-Americans battling for Des Moines Public School smarts find the going is not too tough.”

Alanna walked in the door and Shel got up to embrace her. “Hey you, it’s been a while. You look good. Did you see that crap outside?”

“Yeah, Mom showed me. Her and Sharon are still out there talking about it.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Yeah, well. It’s just somebody who doesn’t know what’s good for them. If my Andre were here, there wouldn’t be no problem.”

“OK.” She studies her, not wanting to ask, because she knows her tone will be belligerent, “Who’s your Andre?”

“Andre. You know Andre, didn’t you meet him at my swim meet last time?”

“You mean that little eighth grade boy that you were with?”

“He’s not little. He could clear this up quick.”

“Alanna, what if it’s someone who’s older than fourteen that did this?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Alanna put her hand on her hip and pressed her lips together.

“OK, well you just let me know how Andre does with this one.”

“Why do you have to be like that, Shel?”

“Why do you have to be like that?” Alanna’s face crumpled, the edges of her mouth turning down. “Alanna, I’m sorry. I’m tired, I had a long flight today and since I’ve been home it’s just been....like this.”

Alanna raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, well. Rap City is on,” She smiled, though her eyes still put distance between them, “Let’s go out in the pool house, goober-head is taking up this TV.”

When the blue sky began to crust and turn dark the pool house became an aquarium, a box of light in a dark background and they went into the house, turning on the alarm behind them.

Shel sat in her room now, curled into her childhood bed: four posts, wood, a princess’ refuge. She thanked god that she did not live here anymore, that none of this was her problem. In three days she would go back to her books and her boyfriend, her friends and their campus where the green was bright enough to wash out the other colors. She sighed and willed sleep to come. It would not come, it let her go on thinking.

And after that? After her cap had been tossed, the gown worn? Would she go off with her boyfriend? Would she then earn a place on the record-keeping counter of dreams? It had been three years already and suddenly, in this bed where years collapsed, she couldn’t see how another year would make a difference. She was restless. She thought some fresh air might help her to think more clearly.

She was already downstairs, turning off the alarm before she got nervous. Fresh air? Was she crazy? Who knew what was out there? Certainly someone, something was out there that didn’t like her. But standing there in the sealed house, breathing stale air, she was as scared not to go outside as she was to go.

She opened the door tentatively, listening for the soft beep of the security system, and she looked outside. It was black, wind rustled through the almost bare trees. She stepped outside, her heart beating in her chest, her ears sensitive to every sound. The bottoms of her slippers hushed against the cement driveway. The door was cracked behind her and she glanced back at it as she made her way to the center of the driveway.

She stood there in her nightgown and slippers feeling arrows pierce her back, bullets from the left, a sledgehammer from the right. She looked up at the sky and her breath slid back into her throat, cold breath, cold night. The moon was veiled and the clouds, illuminated by the invisible light, stood out in deep contrast. In a gesture that she didn’t understand, she raised her arms up to the sky. Stretching, trying to lengthen her arms and pull herself up. She heard a movement in the bushes to her left and she froze that way, arms raised, head up. Let it come.

“Shel is that you?”

Shel closed her eyes, opened them, lowered her arms, “What are you doing out here?”

When she looked closer the question was unnecessary. Her mother was on her knees in front of the mailbox, a bucket in front of her and a rag in her hand. Shel walked over, the leaves crunching beneath her feet, icicle wind stinging her face. She reached her mother’s upturned face and towering above her she said, “Now?” She could as easily have said, “Still?”, “Here?”, or “With you?”