The Good House Read online

  When he’d gone to see her in Sacajawea that last time, he’d known it would be important to arrive in that van. But the van hadn’t been enough to do the job. Not enough to make up for the truckload of shit about to hit the fan. Tariq had flown to Los Angeles for Corey’s funeral, and he’d never made the time to go back and drive the van home, or to hire someone. It seemed pointless.

  He’d tried calling Angie at her office this morning. Her secretary told him she’d gone home for the week, which probably meant she was in Sacajawea. If nothing else, Tariq thought, the van parked in front of Angie’s grandmother’s house might motivate her to call him back sometime soon, even if it was only in anger. But he was beginning to give up on that notion, too. When Corey died, all of it had died. He couldn’t blame her—he’d disappointed her one time too many—but it was probably no accident that he’d left one of the last relics of his past parked at the place where his future had vanished. That place was only a burial ground in his mind now, the empty van a shrine.

  Traffic was mild. In twenty minutes, Tariq had reached Marcus Bookstore, which blended into the gray, downtrodden buildings around it, skeletons of better days at the corner of 39th Street on MLK. The essence of Marcus was preserved inside, a new world. Colors and music and knowledge and beauty, everywhere. That was what he loved about the store, the beauty smack in the middle of the street that could use it the most. Tariq walked in and heard Miles Davis on the store’s speakers, blowing his horn. Each time Tariq came here, the music was waiting. Miles. Coltrane. Hugh Masekela. Marcus was the medicine a doctor couldn’t give him.

  Tariq lost himself in books, which crowded every shelf, every space. Books were in stacks behind the desk, on tables, in the window. Tariq had strayed away from histories, the only section that used to draw him after Corey died, when he first started coming regularly. He’d discovered thrillers by black authors, and he was hooked. Then, the mysteries. It had taken him all this time to read Walter Mosley, and he wondered what the hell he’d been waiting for. Now, he’d come to learn there were black folks writing science fiction—and ifthat was true, he wanted to see it with his own eyes. He hadn’t known there were any black folks in outer space, not from the movies and books he’d seen when he was a kid. That was news to him.

  Tariq had never enjoyed fiction before now. Those kinds of books had seemed frivolous, except for the classics by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Claude Brown, and John A. Williams, books his brother Harry had passed to him. With so much to learn about the real world, how could he justify wasting hours wandering through realms of make-believe? With so many real problems, he’d never had time to care about imaginary ones. Now, more and more, he found that hedid have the time. He still read a biography a week, but now he read other books, too, leaving them scattered on his nightstand or in his bathrooms, spread-eagled so he could revisit them at his leisure. There were books all over his house.

  Tariq didn’t need a shrink to tell him he was replacing his addiction to coke with books, trading one for the other. He could look at his own life and see that. And except for making his eyes ache in dim lighting, Tariq couldn’t see a downside to that. He may have lost a hell of a piece of his life after Corey died, but damned if he hadn’t found something new. Nothing like the old life, nothing like having his son back. He’d give up all the books he’d read, or a chance to ever read them, if he could have Corey back. But his discoveries at Marcus were feeding him, and there were times he felt almost whole again. Brief, glorious times.

  Things were as fine now as they’d ever been since the Fourth of July—except for his damned stomach. That was the only thing that was still very much wrong. He and his stomach fought when he tried to concentrate on reading at night, and each night he read until he dropped to sleep, no matter how much it hurt. He made that decision before he cracked open the first page, and so far it was working. No pain was going to run his life.Nothing would run his life.

  The store was nearly empty tonight. The only other shopper was a smallish man in a dashiki and a necklace of cowrie shells who called himself Brother Paul. He was a smart man, but although Tariq respected his knowledge of Caribbean politics and history, he wasn’t in the mood for talking. He still felt too tight from his doctor’s visit. Tariq knew he needed to give himself space, to keep other people out of range for their own good.

  Anger management, the shrinks called it. He’d weathered moods like this once a year most of his life, and it had been hell enough then, but now the awful mood came regularly. Three or four times a week, sometimes more. The recurring pain was doing that to him, he was sure of it. It was making him angry. Tariq often wondered if anger might be his natural state now, and his moments of evenness were the exception. Another reason to keep away from coke or booze: He didn’t want to hurt someone, and these days he might. He just might.

  But there would be no dodging Brother Paul. He was already on his way.

  “Evening, Brother Hill,” Brother Paul said, cornering him beside the greeting cards, an array of brown faces and African-inspired designs.

  “Hey, Brother Paul…I’m just meeting someone here. I don’t have time to talk.” As a truly reformed liar, Tariq had come to understand that truth had its place. This past weekend, his nephew had promised to meet him here tonight, and DuShaun was the only person he felt like talking to. Rather than standing here feeling cornered, he could tell Brother Paul to move on. He let the truth set him free whenever possible, one of the perks of not being concerned about what anyone thought about him, except Harry and his nephew.

  Brother Paul gazed at him in a way that made Tariq wonder if he’d heard him. “How’s that pain in your stomach? What’s the doctor telling you?” Brother Paul said.

  Tariq felt himself start, surprised. It was the closest he’d ever come to believing someone was reading his mind, and he didn’t like the feeling a damn bit.

  “You’ve mentioned your problem to me, Brother Hill,” Brother Paul said when he didn’t respond. “I gave you my book on herbs to take home last week. You invited me to sign it for you.”

  Now that he said so, Tariq had a stray memory of taking home Brother Paul’s self-published book on herbal medicines, one with a rainbow on the cover, but he hadn’t thought about it since. Brother Paul wrote New Age healing and self-help books, a taste Tariq had yet to cultivate. He suddenly remembered talking to Brother Paul at some length last week about the pain. The brother was pretty far out there, telling him he should look for a new underground drug supposedly made from African blood, or some such pitiful Afrocentric horseshit. Tariq was surprised he’d forgotten a conversation like that, but he’d been doing that a lot lately. Forgetting things, like he had when his face was buried in coke.

  “This doctor didn’t know anything either,” Tariq said.

  “Doctors don’t know plenty.” Brother Paul spoke like a hypnotist, choosing his words carefully, enunciating slowly. “Some afflictions they don’t understand.”

  “Got that right.”

  “Your pain sounded very bad.”

  “Damn right about that, too.”

  “It’s time for you to get rid of it, Brother Hill,” Brother Paul said. The way he said it, he might have had the answer hidden in his back pocket. “Time to make the pain leave.”

  Tariq stared again, wondering if Brother Paul was toying with him. More than that, he imagined what he mightdo to someone who tried to toy with him right now, a fantasy that held more appeal than his current conversation with Brother Paul. In his mind, he could see himself grab a handful of Brother Paul’s salt-and-pepper dreadlocks, pull his face close to make his point clear—Didn’t I tell you I don’t have time for a fucking conversation?—then throw him backward with all his strength, watching his legs fly into the air as he fell into Blanche’s counter in the back. Just enough to give him a real jolt, knock his teeth together. Tariq liked the idea of that very much.

  This conversation was over, Tariq decided. Brother Paul was five-foot-six, a moth of a
man. Tariq had never hit anyone that much smaller than him in his life, man or woman, and he’d rather not start today. “Brother Paul,” Tariq said, sounding as weary as he felt, “it’s time you moved on.”

  Again, Brother Paul seemed not to hear him. He stared at Tariq with eyes that were sincere and brown, sprinkled with green flecks at the pupils’ rims. Tariq had never noticed the green before, and it caught his attention long enough to keep his eyes on Brother Paul’s. “You’ve been seeing doctors for the body. Where’s your doctor for the spirit, Brother Hill?”

  “You got a sequel to that last book you’re trying to sell me?”

  “I see your smile, but you and me both know there’s nothing to smile at. You’re stricken. And I’ll tell you how I know: I can smell it.”

  Anger vanished, with numbness washing down in its place. Tariq hadn’t mentioned the smell to anyone except doctors, least of all someone he knew only in passing. “You…smell…?”

  “It’s very strong,” Brother Paul said.

  Tariq knew the smell was strong—there was no arguing that—he just hadn’t known anyone else knew, too. Tariq had first noticed the rankness in the days after Corey’s death, not very strong at first, but omnipresent. Sometimes it smelled like charred garbage left out in the rain, and often it smelled worse. Like something rotten. Like the dead cat he and his friends had found by the curb outside their building when he was eight. Bloated. Decomposing under a hot sun, turning black. Wet or dry, the smell came to his skin, seeping from his pores. Sometimes it was weak enough to barely notice, and other times it was so overpowering, it gagged him.

  Again, the doctors hadn’t been worth shit. When the smell didn’t go away—when changing his soap and deodorant and taking chlorophyll tablets didn’t work—he’d made his tour of specialists. A dermatologist first, a neurologist next to check for a brain tumor, an internist just to round it out. Not only hadn’t those doctors offered any advice on how he could rid himself of the terrible smell, they’d sniffed him up and down and told him they couldn’t evensmell anything. Even on bad days, when Tariq smelled as if he were wearing his intestines outside of his skin.

  No one asked him why he smelled that way. No one glanced at him sidelong, or moved away from him, or avoided him outright. Even DuShaun had yet to say a word, or pinch his nose, and they lived in the same house. On bad days, when his own scent made him sick, Tariq sought out crowds to see who would notice. No one did. People brushed against him without looking back. Until now.

  Brother Paul lowered his voice, cupping his hand around Tariq’s upper arm, his biceps. “Look, Brother Hill…forgive my approach this way, but I have to speak. You know me as a man you see in the bookstore, but you do notknow me. I write books and teach African dance. I’m part scholar, part herbalist, part psychic.”

  At the wordpsychic, Tariq smiled more widely. He couldn’t help it. “Do you see dead people, Brother Paul?” he said, taunting. Corey had lovedThe Sixth Sense; he must have watched that DVD a dozen times in the year before he died, rehearsing for death.

  “I don’t know much of anything apart from what one of my aunts in Trinidad taught me, a little card-reading, so I don’t claim expert status. But I’ve smelled something on you a long time. I didn’t know what to call it, or how to broach it, so I let it be,” Brother Paul said. “But it’s worse now, Brother Hill. Much, much worse than before. It’s…perilous now. I use that word because I mean it in the strongest sense. It’s grave. You know that, too. You must know.”

  Of course Tariq knew. The thing was, he realized, he’d simply gotten used to the smell, after a time. It was hard to explain, but he wasn’t bothered nearly as much by the smell as he was by the pain. It was thepain he could no longer tolerate. Brother Paul beckoned him to lower his head closer, and when he did, Tariq noticed that Brother Paul smelled of dried flowers. He wasn’t used to standing this close to any man—it made him uncomfortable—but Tariq liked Brother Paul’s clean, untainted scent. It was almost a marvel.

  Tariq also noticed how nervous Brother Paul was. He saw a tiny, rapid pulsing in his neck.

  “Come let me read you,” Brother Paul said, close to his ear. “I live down the street, not far. Or, let me bring the cards to you so we can see what they tell us. There’s no time to wait. Let’s see what we have to do to stop that pain. Let’s stop the fire.”

  Stop the fire. Brother Paul’s voice was music, his words a revelation. Tariq had to stop the fire. He had to stop what was inside him, the thing he couldn’t see. Tariq opened his mouth to say yes, he would go with him, but he didn’t say what he’d planned. “My nephew’s meeting me here. Maybe another time.”

  Brother Paul’s face dimmed as he gazed at Tariq. “Are you sure, Brother Hill? It will only get worse, harder to cleanse. Even if you don’t see me, see someone else. You can’t wait.”

  Like most people making life-changing decisions, Tariq made his with barely a thought. “Brother Paul,” he said, “you need to leave me alone right now.”

  There were more undiplomatic words churning in his mind, words he had to struggle not to blurt aloud:I’m starting to wonder if you’re a little on the sissy side, Brother Paul. I don’t like the way you’re touching me, putting your fucking face close to my ear, and if you don’t back off, I may take you into the bathroom and find a plunger to give you what you reallywant. I can’t promise I’ll be gentle, though. Like Tina Turner said in “Proud Mary,” I hope you like it rough.

  Brother Paul’s eyes twinged, but he didn’t show real surprise, anger, fear, or anything else Tariq would have expected from someone who could perceive invisible truths so clearly. Brother Paul didn’t break his gaze or release Tariq’s arm, still holding him gently, like a minister.

  “All right, then, Brother Hill. I’m sorry to hear that. I really am sorry,” Brother Paul said in that hypnotist’s voice again. He couldn’t have sounded sorrier if Tariq had just confided to him that his doctor had said he was suffering from an advanced stage of cancer, that he had reached the tail end of the last day of his life.

  The man who was unbecoming Tariq Hill got home and found DuShaun with his feet propped up on the coffee table, watching the wide-screen TV in the dark den, Corey’s favorite old spot. “What the hell happened?” Tariq said, slamming open the refrigerator door. Ordinarily, he would reach for a beer in a bad mood, but there was no beer in the house. Instead, Tariq found a bean burrito left over from Taco Bell, and he popped it into the microwave. “Why’d you leave me there waiting at Marcus? I kept trying your cell phone. Did you forget or what?”

  DuShaun, like the muted television set, was silent at first. That wasn’t like him.

  “Boy, what’s the matter with you?” Tariq said.

  “I was just sittin’ here thinking about what you did, Uncle Tariq,” DuShaun said, softly. “That wasn’t right.”

  “WhatI did? You hang me up for more than an hour at the bookstore and then you have the nerve to talk about somebody else’s shit not being right?” The microwave beeped, telling him the burrito was ready, but Tariq didn’t retrieve it.

  “I’m talking ’bout last night.”

  Tariq walked out into the den so he could see DuShaun’s face in the glow from the television set. DuShaun was a coal-black Georgia boy, and even the light from a sixty-inch television wasn’t enough for Tariq to see a joke in his nephew’s face. He was about to ask what the joke was when he saw a woman on the television screen, someone he knew.

  What was that girl’s name? He liked to keep up with what Angie was doing, and he’d read about this TV movie, how Angie had set this actress up with her new talent agency. The actress was in a pillbox hat, driving a 1960 Buick. This was the movie about Coretta Scott King, he realized, the one that had made her famous. “Naomi Price,” Tariq said, answering his own question.

  DuShaun’s voice cheered some. “Yeah, she’s so fine, she makes your eyes hurt.”

  “Your aunt Angie represents her. I could get a message to her.”
/>   DuShaun looked up at him expectantly, and his face reminded Tariq of Corey’s.Did you really say what I think you just said? Like when he told Corey he would get him a silver PT Cruiser for his sixteenth birthday, before he remembered he’d have to discuss it with Angie first—anddamn, he realized, she’d probably have said Corey was too young to get a car. She’d have said he should work for it. And maybe she was right, but he’d said he would buy it, so fuck it. That was where secrets came in handy. That was when it felt damn convenient that Angie lived hundreds of miles away.

  DuShaun’s face went empty, and he switched the channel with the remote, to the game highlights on ESPN. He switched in time for them to see the DuShaun Hill Special from two camera angles, a perfect pass to the five-yard line. DuShaun’s eyes didn’t light up as he watched. “Naw, man, I’m still pissed,” DuShaun said. “Don’t try to change the subject. We got to air this out.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? I know you’re not here moaning because I gave that jackass a shove at the club last night. He’ll get over it. Quit being a pussy.”