Angela Flournoy - The Turner House

“You didn’t tell him nothing about Mama’s, uh, new news, did you?”

“God, Cha-Cha, no. Just go in there and say hi.”

“I dreammmed of a city called Glor-rry, / So bright and so fair. / As I entered the gates I crieeed ho-ly, / And the angels met me there.”

Someone had used every pillow in the room to prop Viola up. Her dressy black sequin turban perched on her head. She squinted in rapture, and tears shimmied down her mole-flecked cheeks. Her right hand rested lightly in her sixth child’s upturned palm.

Lonnie’s bony limbs folded into the armchair. His black leather baseball cap sloped low over his brow. Mustache: a scraggly broom; eyebrows: two inverted checks. Legs possessed by their trademark jitter inside navy blue track pants. Baby-sized teeth chipped here and there. But his voice? His voice did much to make up for all that mess.

“They carr-rried me from mansion to man-sion, /And oh, the sights that I saw. / Then I said I want to see Je-sus, / The man who diiieed for us all.”

They froze in time, Cha-Cha silent at the door, his mother closed-eyed, and his brother looking out the window, stalling before he started the chorus. Lonnie and Viola communing in a way Cha-Cha could hardly imagine. Lelah walked in, breaking the spell.

“I’ve got eggs, Mama. Just a little bit, and some bacon. Lonnie, yours is on the stove. What’re you lurking in the doorway for, Cha?”

“Big brother Charles!” Lonnie stood up and flung his right hand to his forehead in sloppy salute. “You’re lookin desk-job sharp in your business-casual slacks.”

“Oh, Cha-Cha’s home!” Viola said. She tried to straighten up on her pillows and wiped her face with her hand. “Where you been, Cha? You ain’t came to sit with me in a long time.”

She held out her hand to him, so Cha-Cha had no choice but to take it, lean in, and give her a peck on the forehead. He wondered whether his mother even remembered forsaking him in his time of need.

In four swift steps Lonnie crossed the room and clapped Cha-Cha on the back. Lelah shooed them into the hallway.

“Your car looks terrible, and it’s leaking,” Cha-Cha said.

“Hit somethin in Ohio. Fell asleep. Don’t worry about that. How are you doing?”

Lonnie walked into the kitchen. He shoveled eggs into his mouth with a wooden serving spoon.

“I’m fine. You drove here?”

“Yahp,” Lonnie said. He broke a piece of bacon in half and put that into his mouth too. “After we talked, Tina called and said Mama wasn’t doing so great. That combined with your own predicament made me hop in the car. I borrowed some money from Lily, the girl from Hawthorne I was tellin you about? We back together, I think.”

Cha-Cha remembered that he’d promised Lonnie a hundred dollars on the phone. Those desperate calls seemed so long ago.

“Miles and the girls flyin in Friday,” Lonnie said. “My girls is flyin with em, too. Didn’t wanna drive cross-country with me, I guess. Duke’s flyin out from Oakland, but it’s just gonna be him I think.”

A Turner invasion and Cha-Cha had nowhere to hide. Soon they would be hitting him with judgment and unsolicited advice from all sides. A room full of funhouse reflections of himself, distorting what he knew to be true.

Lonnie washed down his bacon with a cup of coffee from Tina’s favorite mug. He wiped his hands on the front of his track pants.

“So, what you got goin on right now? It’s still light out. You know what I always wanna do first thing I get in town.”

Cha-Cha knew: head to Yarrow Street and see what was going on.

“You remember Courtney the man? He used to wear that lime-green jumpsuit, runnin around the east side lookin like a bolt of lightning?”

“I don’t remember any men named Courtney.”

“Sure you do. He started the Yarrow Gang, but he didn’t run it for too long cause he tried to hold up that liquor store with a hammer. Remember? He was high out his mind. A gotdamn hammer. Clerk shot him in the face.”

“Oh.”

“Remember Terry Randolph? Had a twin named Tyrone? Tyrone owed some people some money, but they killed Terry instead. Slit his throat, I think, right on the basketball courts. This was around ’73.”

“No, I had Chucky by then. Working too much.”

“I know you remember how Lydia Osage got shot by the police. They were chasing down somebody who robbed somebody on Fischer and shot her when she came around the corner with her groceries?”

“Can we just ride, Lonnie? Can we just ride and not talk about who’s dead and who all got shot?”

“Sure. I’m sorry. You know I like to reminisce.”

Lonnie drummed his fingers on his knees and stared out the window. The streets were alive to him, Cha-Cha did know. Lonnie—the hallway pisser, the brick scavenger, the lead singer—had been more social, mischievous, and curious than Cha-Cha, and as such spent his teenage years making friends and enemies on blocks, dance floors, and basketball courts throughout the city. To him listing the too-soon-dead was paying homage; to Cha-Cha it was depressing.

“So you worked out the haint situation, huh?”

“What makes you think that?” Cha-Cha asked.

“Lelah said y’all had some sort of ‘experience.’ And that you’re snoring up a storm in the house.”

“I don’t know what happened, but I got too much going on to worry right now. I’m sleeping again, that’s true.”

He had been taking sleeping pills since that night on Yarrow Street. He didn’t know if the haint was still coming to him, but since he was still alive and well, he liked to believe that it was not. He was also now determined to disprove Alice’s main hypothesis; he wasn’t so pathetic that he needed a ghost to give his life purpose.

“I can’t keep thinking about something I can’t control.”

“Sounds good to me,” Lonnie said. “You been by that shrink’s house again?”

“What makes you think I been to her house? I’ve never been to her house. Lelah’s been runnin her mouth to you, and she don’t know what she’s talkin about.”

Lonnie tugged at his crotch and shrugged.

“I would’ve gone to her house. I’da gone to her house and no one but us two would’ve ever known anything, I’ll tell you that much. Specially if I’d have been as good as you been your whole life. You got a picture of her?”

“Yes. No. Not anymore.” Cha-Cha turned on the radio to discourage further conversation.

Someone had stolen the garage. The aluminum-sided late addition to the house was gone, and if it weren’t for the fact that the brick on the back of the house there looked fifteen years cleaner than the rest, it would be as if it had never existed.

“Mother fuckers ,” Cha-Cha said. He pulled the car into the back alley.

Lonnie whistled.

Some sort of ingenious, stealth operation must have taken place because the back gate lock was intact. Save for the heap of geriatric sundries on the ground, one would have been hard-pressed to find a fingerprint or scrap of evidence.

“I was just here two days ago,” Cha-Cha said. He jiggled the handle of the kitchen door. Still locked.

“Somebody missed their calling in life,” Lonnie said. “This right here’s some MacGyver shit. A multiple-man operation. For scrap metal! They musta dragged it over the fence in sections. Why not just cut the fence? They already had the tools.”

“Where the hell were the police? Where the hell was McNair , huh? The hell I’m payin him for if he can’t even tell me somebody up and stole a piece of my house?” Cha-Cha circled the pile of junk on the floor like a carrion eater. He kicked a box of Depends as hard as he could. Its side crumpled too easily. He hit the walker with his cane, lacquered wood to cheap aluminum.