Then JOEL trips out of the car and into DORI’s arms.
PART IVNow That I’ve Ruined Everything I’m So Fucking Free
Chapter 49
New Orleans heat was the heavy kind. To hear Joel tell it, it was like “wrapping a wet towel around your head and ducking inside an oven.” This heat took him out the first time he went with his father in the fields. It wasn’t unusual for a seven-year-old to help their parents at work then, but Joel was sickly (asthma), and his lungs betrayed him. His knees buckled, his head went limp, he fell into the grass. His father would spank him later, but he was never taken into the fields again.
Joel had the kind of rough childhood that didn’t feel so rough; it was the texture of the time. Being taught with tattered textbooks but not learning a thing. Being turned away from ice cream shops in the summer, sulking back into that heavy heat. Beat by bored white boys, beat by a bitter father. That’s just how things were.
His ninth-grade teacher Mrs. Maisie saw his potential. “You got to apply yourself,” she said. “Put your head down, focus on your studies.”
It was good advice. He was accepted to Xavier his senior year of high school. It was nothing like the commands from white bosses to “put his head down” working in an office in Baton Rouge years later.
Some alcoholics recall their first drink. Joel didn’t. He just knew he somehow became the kind of person who drank when he was sad, and he was sad all the time.
He was drunk when he met Dorinda. He’d never have grabbed her otherwise. She walked past, curls pulled tightly back, a woman with class. He stumbled over himself to get to her. When she gritted her teeth at him, he thought of his mother.
His mother, Catherine, had been his father’s third wife. Her beauty was mythic. So was her attitude. She’d eluded marriage until that no-good knothead Cassius boy up the street, the one with the sleepy eye, returned from service banging on her door. He’d told her that thing she hated being told,One day you gone be my wife.She thought him arrogant, but he’d seen something she hadn’t and that was the future.
Cassius knew that Catherine’s threats had no teeth. He’d successfully leashed the kind of woman who swore she’d never get close enough. But this wasn’t the mother Joel was thinking of when he named his daughter. He was thinking of the Creole banjee bitch from Louisiana who pointed a rifle at his father and spat, “Touch my baby again and this bullet gone straight through that lazy eye.”
When Joel held his baby for the first time and felt this same feral love, it undid him. She stirred, hiccupping, her body the length of his forearm. How fragile her little life was when life was fragile enough. That’s why he had to give her a strong name.
For years, Dori had struggled to get pregnant. “Drinking can impact male fertility,” the doctor had told them. After that appointment, Joel drank four beers and slept for hours. Dorinda cried, begging him to get up, todosomething. But what could he do?
He swore off drinking when he discovered Dorinda was pregnant. He hadn’t drank in months, but when he saw his baby girl, he drank that night, waking up sicker than ever. Sometimes you were done with stuff, but it wasn’t done with you.
“Stop all that negative talking,” Dorinda said when he confided in her. It wasn’t negative, he thought, if that’s how things were.
He never felt understood by anyone, not even his wife, but understanding wasn’t everyone’s fate. He could live with that. What he couldn’t live with: his little girl pulling away from his hugs when he stunk of Maker’s, his wife crashing empty beer bottles on the kitchen floor just to sweep up the glass.
He quit for good when Catherine turned twelve. He wanted his family back. He hadn’t known being sober wasn’t enough. His wife wasstill fleeing into another man’s arms. His daughter still saw him as a burden.
Maybe they could see that the hole with the sadness inside was still there. Maybe they understood him better than he thought.
Chapter 50
My dad wasn’t dead, he just shot himself in the foot. I helped my mom lower him onto the grass bed in front of the house. Blood grew on his shoe the way sunflowers open in sped-up movie montages to show the passing of time. I was entranced by my father’s red foot, the small hole in his shoe, trying to understand it. But my thoughts kept tripping right up to the point where I understood what was happening, then flickered off. I was still at the kitchen table, trying to turn back time. Would they chop it off? Would he be confined to a wheelchair? It was a floundering feeling, having no grasp on what came next. I couldn’t look at his face. I didn’t want to see the pain on it.
Standing on the curb, Auntie Lisa was on the phone with a 911 operator saying, “Yes, yes, he’s still conscious, yes, there’s blood, no, it was self-inflicted, no, no, no.” I hadn’t realized that I’d stumbled inside the house until I watched myself from the other side of the room ripping a thin black scarf from the closet hanger. I came back out and kneeled at my father’s foot. The air felt like it had thinned since a second ago. I didn’t understand what I was doing, only that I was doing something, only that I needed to keep going. Every movement I made felt like trying to run through pool water, dense and restraining and helpless. I remembered then why I’d gotten the scarf: I had crappy tourniquet training through the restaurant. I tied the fabric as tight as I could around his sole, hands shaking.
“What do you think you’re doing?” my mom said.
I blinked. “I’m tourniqueting.” I sounded like someone I didn’t know, like a little girl.
My dad yelped at the sudden pressure. My mom pushed my hand aside. “Enough,” she said. I perched on my knees, staring at our car, the door still wide open. Everything happened through a foggy film. We were outside now, my dad was shot now, my aunt was on the phone with 911 now. I repeated this sequence of events in my head until I believed it, but I didn’t really believe it.
My dad’s face had settled into a calm shock when I finally looked, his eyes damp. My mom was eerily calm too. With her palm, she drew circles on his chest. “You’ll be all right. The ambulance is coming.” Her resigned tone as she told him to breathe felt ominous, like a shadow crawling up the entire street.
I was embarrassed when the ambulance came wailing toward our house, announcing that we were the ones to whom something bad had happened. Curtains were pushed aside, faces appeared in windows, sleepily alarmed. The sky had darkened, deep pink stripes. Our next-door neighbors wandered out in their night clothes, saying, “Is everything all right?” as if ambulances appeared when everything was all right. I wanted to scream at them for looking at us. I became very worried about my hair, the frizzy curls around my face. Taking my palm, I smoothed them down with a compulsive focus that became less about my appearance and more about having an object under my control.
The police arrived, concentrating their efforts on the “crime scene” while the EMTs tended to my father. When they said only one person could accompany him in the ambulance, my mom told me to go. I looked at her, confused. Her blush had smeared with sweat, her curls flat from the evening’s humidity. She didn’t entertain my look of confusion and got into the car with Auntie Lisa. Through the rear window, I could see them talking, Aunt Lisa shaking her head, then my mom shaking her head before her face poured into the cup of her hand.
Even as my father was lifted onto a gurney, rolled into the back of the ambulance, tied up with tubes, he insisted that he was fine.
“You know you shot yourself, right? With a literal fucking gun.” My voice was so hoarse I wondered if I had screamed and hadn’t realized it. This sometimes happened to me when I woke from a nightmare, hearing a scream but not knowing it’s mine.
My dad said he was fine. Ignoring him, I asked one of the EMTs, “Is he going to be okay?”
