that, having drained it out of their own lives in the course of making a pile, and so they move in and build great big houses and shopping malls, and create the quaint, where once there was real.
Of course, the Grove is not as ruined as it might have been because black people live there, in their own mini-ghetto west of Grand and south of McDonald. In America, if you are willing to tolerate the sight of a black face on the street you can get a good deal on your housing and the developers will not bother you until they have chased all of them away.
We live on Hibiscus Street off Grand, in a neighborhood that clearly is scheduled for gentrification, being on the good (or white) side of Grand, but that repels the money boys still because half the houses are owned by black people who have not yet been taxed out. They are Bahamians and Dominicans and African-Americans. The rest of the inhabitants are white people who don’t mind this or positively love it. Myself, I’m as indifferent to race as it is possible to be: that is, I am somewhat racist, like everyone else in my nation. There is no escape. On our street we have several run-down cinder-block apartment houses, painted pink or aqua, so there is transience and a moderate amount of crime. This is fine with me; the transience is cloaking; I have nothing to steal; I can defend my body against anything but a gun.
Our apartment is above a garage, painted brick red with white trim, like a barn. The front room has two tiny windows looking out on a dust-and-shell driveway, and the back room, where I sleep, has a big sliding glass window from which you can see a tangled hedge of cream hibiscus and pink oleander. The window is so large and the room is so small that when the window is open it is almost like sleeping outside, or in an African house.
In my bedroom is a thin mattress, resting on a door, supported by six screw-on legs, each of which stands in a can half full of water. This is an old fieldworker trick to keep the roaches from chewing the dead skin off you while you sleep. The child sleeps there now. I have my string hammock, slung from hooks in the wall, low, so I can watch her and touch her if I wish. The rest of the furniture is junk from the garage or collected during walks around the neighborhood: a warped pine bureau with two out of three drawers, a chaise lounge I restrung with thick cotton rope, a pine table, three mismatched wooden straight chairs, a pink fur bean bag, a brick-and-board bookshelf. Over the table is a hanging bulb in a Japanese paper globe. Next to the kitchen is a tiny bathroom, with a stained claw- foot tub with shower and the usual facilities. Its once-white walls are scabrous with mildew. We have no air- conditioning. A fourteen-inch Kmart fan blows garden air over us at night. The one closet is an anal-obsessive’s fantasy of order, although I don’t recall being particularly obsessive when I was living real life. It’s just that I’ve spent a lot of my time in VW vans, and Land Rovers, and tents, and hovels, and boats, and I’m very good at storage and retrieval. Kmart sells a nice line of wire-rack organizers and I’ve bought largely in their closet department. When I moved in here, the walls were pink-orange and the floor was covered with avocado shag. I decided that, if I was going to die here, I didn’t want my last sensory impression to be avocado shag, and so I ripped it up and replaced it with cheap black vinyl tiles and I painted the walls white. The walls are bare. When I was laying the tiles I found a corner missing out of one of the four-by-eight plywood sheets of the floor. I made a plywood hatch for this hole, and tiled over it, and it fits so closely that you have to yank it up with a big glazier’s suction cup. What I have to hide, I hide there.
After Kmart, we drove to the Winn-Dixie, where I now shop. I used to eat so little that it wasn’t worth going to the supermarket and I’d just pick up something, yogurt, or chicken, or soup, at a convenience store. That’s where I found the child, in a mini-mart on the east side of Dixie Highway, down south someplace. I forget what I was doing there, but sometimes, at night, in the summer, the sticky heat and the insect noises remind me of Africa, and I have to ride, to hear the mechanical sounds of driving and smell exhaust, the dear stench of my homeland, and feel the wind of speed on my face. At around two in the morning, I went in to get a cold drink and she was there, filthy, in ragged shorts and a torn pink T-shirt and flip-flops, standing in the aisle. She was shaking.
I said to her, “Are you okay? Are you lost?” She didn’t answer. The woman behind the counter was fussing with the frozen slush machine and had her back turned. I walked away to the drink console.
As I reached for a cup, I heard the first slap and looked around. The mother was there, a large tan woman in her twenties, with her hair in curlers under a green print scarf. She was wearing Bermudas and a tube top that barely covered her bobbling breasts. Whoever she had once been, that person was gone, or in deep hiding, and only a demon stared out of the red-rimmed eyes. The child was holding her hand to her ear, and her face was screwed up like a piece of crumpled tinfoil, but she made no sound.
“What did I tell you? Huh?” said the mother. She held a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor in one hand. With the other she beat the child, big roundhouse blows that knocked the little girl against a frozen-food lowboy hard enough to bounce.
“What did I tell you, you stupid little bitch? Huh? (Slap.) Huh? Did I tell you not to move? (Slap.) I told you not to move, didn’t I? (Slap.) Wait’ll I get you back home, I’ll fix you good. (Slap.) What the fuck you lookin’ at, bitch?”
This last was directed at me. I pulled my eyes away from the scene and left. I stood with my cold hands pressed to the warm hood of my car and took deep breaths. I thought of what the Olo say, of something that happens between an adult and a particular child, part of their weird rearing practices. But that was in Africa, I told myself. I tried hard to shut down the feeling.
I heard the door of the mini-mart slam open and the mother and her child emerged and walked toward the corner of the little building. There was a dark alley there that led to the next street, where I supposed they lived. It was a typical South Dade highway-side neighborhood, small concrete-block stucco houses, a few low apartment buildings, still looking bare and exposed after Hurricane Andrew. The woman was holding her forty-ounce beer bottles slung over her wrist in their plastic carrier bag, and was dragging the child along by the arm, twisting it cruelly, muttering to herself. The child was trying to relieve the pain by turning herself toward the woman and in the process, just as they passed into the alley, the girl got in the way of the woman’s legs and she tripped. They both went down on the rough limestone gravel. The woman saved her bottles and let the girl fall on her back. Then the mother yelled out a curse and got to her feet and kicked the girl in the side. The girl curled up into fetal position and covered her head with her pipe-cleaner arms, whereupon I ran up to them yelling, “Stop that!”
The woman turned and glowered at me. “Get the fuck outa here, bitch! Mind your own fuckin’ business.” I moved closer and I could smell the sweat and the alcohol boiling off her.
“Please. Let her alone,” I said, and she took two staggering steps toward me and launched a clumsy overhand blow at my head.
I caught her arm in hiki-taoshi and brought it around behind her back, ude-hineri, and bent her over double and marched her a few yards away and pressed her face into the gravel. I had not done any serious aikido in years but it turned out to be something you don’t forget how to do, like riding a bike. I said, “Stay here, please, I’m going to see if your little girl is all right.” And I rose and walked back to where the child lay unmoving.
I suppose I was on autopilot by then, in some kind of trance from the African thing that was happening, which is not all that uncommon among the Olo, but still unexpected in a South Dade mini-mart, and that is the only excuse for what I did next. The mother did not stay put but came after me in drunken rage, cursing, and I whipped around and caught her left wrist and spun her out in jodan-aigamae-nagewaza. In aikido dojos, subjects of this throw go easily into a forward roll to their right and bounce up smiling; but now, in the dark alley, the woman’s 160 or so pounds were lofted at speed through the night with the force of her own charge, and her head struck the corner of the Dumpster parked there with a dreadful, final sound.
Thick blood poured from an angular dent in her head, and a dark stain was spreading along the center seam of her Bermudas. She was as still as the loaded trash bags that surrounded her. I did not check to see if she was as dead as she appeared, but went to the child and took her hand. She came willingly with me and we got in my car and rolled. As I drove, I looked back into the sickly light of the mini-mart window and saw that the proprietor was still messing with the disassembled pieces of her slush machine. She had never looked at me. I had touched nothing in the store. I asked the child what her name was, but she didn’t answer. By the time we passed Dadeland, she was asleep.
I learned what her name was the next morning in the Miami Herald, a four-inch story on the first page of the Metro section. Mureena Davis, twenty-six, had died in an alley behind a mini-mart at 14230 Dixie Highway. The police believed that she had stumbled while drunk and struck her head, fracturing her skull and breaking her neck. Death was instantaneous. Ms. Davis, a single mother, had no relatives in the area, having lately arrived from Imokalee, and lived alone in an apartment near the scene. Authorities were concerned about the woman’s daughter, Luz, age four, who was seen in the mini-mart moments before the accident by Mrs. Ellen Kim, the clerk on duty. A police search of the immediate area was unsuccessful. Anyone having any information about the child is
