We proceeded in a slow parade, one of Mrs. Walker’s big boys in the front and the other in the back, the two of them escorting our strange family, herding us down the wide, rutted street, past graffitied doorways, past broken-down cars and plywood shanties, fire pits with smoke tendrils crawling up, raggedy hammocks strung between trees.
To look at him, Lionel gave no signs of being frightened—he bounced on the balls of his feet, looking every way at once. But about halfway down the block he grabbed my hand, and I held his, awkwardly at first, feeling his tiny fingers moving like curious animals inside my closed fist.
19.
“Now, tell me how I know you again, baby?”
“You don’t,” said Martha. “Not really. My friend Anika, she knows your grandson Wayne.”
“Wayne in Gary?”
“No, ma’am. Wayne down in New Albany.”
The woman seated regally at the end of the long dining room table snorted and held up a wagging finger. “Grandson? Please, baby. That boy Wayne ain’t no kin to me. Godson. He my godson.” She took a long drag of her skinny cigarette and ashed it out in the juice cup at her elbow. “He still down there?”
“He’s in Louisville now, I think.”
“Well, you keep well clear of him. He dumb. Dumb and small-minded, too. There’s a difference, but he both. Stay clear.”
“Okay, ma’am. I will. I’ll do that.”
“Stop calling me ma’am, baby,” said the old lady. “Everybody call me Mama.”
“Okay, then.”
Martha smiled, barely, her face and her body rigid. She didn’t call the woman Mama. She wasn’t comfortable with that—she didn’t seem comfortable with any of this. Her sunglasses were folded neatly beside her at the table, like she was playing cards and this is what she was ready to bet with, if she had to. The room was small and stuffed with greenery, potted plants and vases full of flowers, all miraculously thriving in the low-hanging choke of smoke from Mama’s contraband Camels and the dope being enjoyed by her sons, who’d walked us up.
Mama Walker was middle-aged, but no telling how middle: somewhere north of forty-five and south of sixty. She’d been beautiful once and was beautiful now, in a way, an older lady’s leathery beauty. She was dark-skinned, and her face was lined, especially at the edges of her mouth. Her eyes were alert and alive, glittering with awareness, darting every which way at once. Noticing everything.
“Them two are my babies,” she said suddenly, swiveling to me, pointing with her smoke hand at the pair of men. “Twins. Believe that?”
I looked at them, and Mama’s babies nodded in unison from the love seat, two giants side by side, a couple of defensive linemen five years out of the game, old musculature hidden deep within layers of fat. In the apartment’s back room were a bunch of other kids, much younger, arrayed on and around a heavy sofa. Lionel, at Mama Walker’s encouragement, had fitted himself down among them, become instantly absorbed in whatever cartoon garbage was playing on the plasma screen across from Mama’s sofa.
Mama Walker stubbed out her Camel, pulled a new one.
“Misery sticks, I know. But I can’t smoke them Indian things. I feel bad about it and all, but them things taste like cow shit. So how old are you, baby?” The riff on slavery smokes was directed to me; the question was for Martha.
“Thirty-two.”
“Thirty-two. Thirty-two.” She looked at Martha carefully, critically, like a fine piece of jewelry. “Tricky age for us women, ain’t it?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Different for white girls, I guess.”
Martha shrugged uncomfortably. “I guess.”
“Everything different for white girls.”
I wondered again what the hell was going on here. I wondered, too, how I had managed to get myself implanted in it.
“And just so I’m straight on it,” said Mama, tilting her long head toward the back room, toward Lionel on the sofa. “Little man’s yours.”
“He is,” said Martha, looking yearningly toward the boy. “That’s right.”
Mama nodded slowly. She was looking at the kid, judging his complexion, casting as keen an appraising eye over the boy’s color as I had over Jackdaw’s—as I had over every runner I’d ever gone after. Mama Walker, I decided without thinking about it, without wanting to think about it, was moderate pine, red tone, number 211 or 212.
“So you what?” Mama Walker turned her eyes on me. “You Daddy?”
“No, ma’am,” I said quietly, and Martha rushed in: “He’s just a friend.”
“Just a friend,” she said, her voice low and easy, almost a whisper. “Just a friend.” She leaned forward, blew smoke out of the side of her mouth, and patted me on the knee. “Nice to meet you, Just-a-Friend.”
The Walker boys, over by the door, were sharing a one-hitter, silently trading hits.
“So where is Daddy?”