Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
For Oakland and its girls
The swimming pool is filled with dog shit and Dee’s laughter mocks us at dawn. I’ve been telling her all week that she’s looking like the crackhead she is, laughing at the same joke like it’s gonna change. Dee didn’t seem to mind that her boyfriend left her, didn’t even seem to care when he showed up poolside after making his rounds to every dumpster in the neighborhood last Tuesday, finding feces wrapped up in plastic bags. We heard the splashes at three a.m., followed by his shouts about Dee’s unfaithful ass. But mostly we heard Dee’s cackles, reminding us how hard it is to sleep when you can’t distinguish your own footsteps from your neighbor’s.
None of us have ever set foot in the pool for as long as I’ve been here; maybe because Vernon, the landlord, has never once cleaned it, but mostly because nobody ever taught none of us how to delight in the water, how to swim without gasping for breath, how to love our hair when it is matted and chlorine-soaked. The idea of drowning doesn’t bother me, though, since we’re made of water anyway. It’s kind of like your body overflowing with itself. I think I’d rather go that way than in some haze on the floor of a crusty apartment, my heart out-pumping itself and then stopping.
This morning is different. The way Dee’s laugh swirls upward into a high-pitched sort of scream before it wanders into her bellow. When I open the door, she’s standing there, by the railing, like always. Except today she faces toward the apartment door and the pool keeps her backlit so I can’t see her face, can only see the way her cheekbones bob like apples in her hollow skin. I close the door before she sees me.
Some mornings I peek my head into Dee’s unlocked door just to make sure she’s still breathing, writhing in her sleep. In some ways I don’t mind her neurotic laughing fits because they tell me she’s alive, her lungs haven’t quit on her yet. If Dee’s still laughing, not everything has gone to shit.
The knock on our apartment is two fists, four pounds, and I should have known it was coming, but it still makes me jump back from the door. It ain’t that I didn’t see Vernon making his rounds or the flyer flipping up and drifting back into place on Dee’s door as she stared at it, still cackling. I turn and look at my brother, Marcus, on the couch snoring, his nose squirming up to meet his brows.
He sleeps like a newborn, always making faces, his head tilting so I can see his profile, where the tattoo remains taut and smooth. Marcus has a tattoo of my fingerprint just below his left ear and, when he smiles, I find myself drawn right to it, like another eye. Not that either of us has been smiling lately, but the image of it—the memory of the freshly rippling ink below his grin—keeps me coming back to him. Keeps me hoping. Marcus’s arms are lined in tattoos, but my fingerprint is the only one on his neck. He told me it was the most painful one he’d ever gotten.
He got the tattoo when I turned seventeen and it was the first day I ever thought he might just love me more than anything, more than his own skin. But now, three months from my eighteenth birthday, when I look at my quivering fingerprint on the edge of his jaw, I feel naked, known. If Marcus ended up bloodied in the street, it wouldn’t take much to identify him by the traces of me on his body.
I reach for the doorknob, mumbling, “I got it,” as if Marcus was ever actually gonna put feet to floor this early. On the other side of the wall, Dee’s laughter seeps into my gums like salt water, absorbed right into the fleshy part of my mouth. I shake my head and turn back to the door, to my own slip of paper taped to the orange paint.
You don’t have to read one of these papers to know what they say. Everyone been getting them, tossing them into the road as if they can nah, nigga themselves out of the harshness of it. The font is unrelenting, numbers frozen on the flyer, lingering in the scent of industrial printer ink, where it was inevitably pulled from a pile of papers just as toxic and slanted as this one and placed on the door of the studio apartment that’s been in my family for decades. We all known Vernon was a sellout, wasn’t gonna keep this place any longer than he had to when the pockets are roaming around Oakland, looking for the next lot of us to scrape out from the city’s insides.
The number itself wouldn’t seem so daunting if Dee wasn’t cracking herself up over it, curling into a whole fit, cementing each zero into the pit of my belly. I whip my head toward her, shout out over the wind and the morning trucks, “Quit laughing or go back inside, Dee. Shit.” She turns her head an inch or two to stare at me and smiles wide, opens her mouth until it’s a complete oval, and continues her cackle. I rip the rent increase notice from the door and return to our apartment, where Marcus is serene and snoring on the couch.
He’s lying there sleeping while this whole apartment collapses around me. We’re barely getting by as is, a couple months behind in rent, and Marcus has no money coming in. I’m begging for shifts at the liquor store and counting the number of crackers left in the cupboard. We don’t even own wallets, and looking at him, at the haze of his face, I know we won’t make it out of this one like we did the last time our world fractured, with an empty photo frame where Mama used to be.
I shake my head at his figure, long and taking over the room, then place the rent increase notice in the center of his chest so it breathes with him. Up and down.
I don’t hear Dee no more, so I pull on my jacket and slip outside, leaving Marcus to eventually wake to a crumpled paper and more worries than he’ll try to handle. I walk along the railing lined in apartments and open Dee’s door. She’s there, somehow asleep and twitching on the mattress when just a few minutes ago she was roaring. Her son, Trevor, sits on a stool in the small kitchen eating off-brand Cheerios out of their box. He’s nine and I’ve known him since he was born, watched him shoot up into the lanky boy he is now. He’s munching on the cereal and waiting for his mother to wake up, even though it’ll probably be hours before her eyes open and see him as more than a blur.
I step inside, quietly walking up to him, grabbing his backpack from the floor and handing it to him. He smiles at me, the gaps in his teeth filled in with soggy Cheerio bits.
“Boy, you gotta be getting to school. Don’t worry ’bout your mama, c’mon, I’ll take you.”
Trevor and I emerge from the apartment, his hand in mine. His palms feel like butter, smooth and ready to melt in the heat of my hand. We walk together toward the metal stairwell, painted lime green and chipped, all the way down to the ground floor, past the shit pool, and through the metal gate that spits us right out onto High Street.
High Street is an illusion of cigarette butts and liquor stores, a winding trail to and from drugstores and adult playgrounds masquerading as street corners. It has a childlike kind of flair, like the perfect landscape for a scavenger hunt. Nobody ever knows when the hoods switch over, all the way up to the bridge, but I’ve never been up there so I can’t tell you if it makes you want to skip like it does on our side. It is everything and nothing you’d expect with its funeral homes and gas stations, the street sprinkled in houses with yellow shining out the windows.
“Mama say Ricky don’t come around no more, so I got the cereal all to myself.”