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Talking Story |
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From The Asian Reporter, V17, #36 (September 4, 2007), page 7.
How Hawkgirl got out of town, Part 2
Last week: Hawkgirl showed up unannounced, as usual, in Jimmy’s passenger seat. This while our man was frantic for a Dunkin’ Donut. Portland’s were gone. Under an odd August rain she said she was leaving. Finished with all this.
South Salem’s Dunkin’s was open. Always Open, his sign said. Mr. Dunkin’s dangerously sloped lot was empty, except of course for two cop cruisers glistening under summer’s fresh rain.
I shut down my baby’s clattering engine, I ratcheted up her brake. "Dung-kin Do-nuts," I announced. Hawkgirl’s eyes had fastened onto the rounded blue backs of two cops perched on Dunkin’s first two counter stools.
I got out and nipped, lickity-split, around to Hawkgirl’s door. I yanked it wide, très galant. She didn’t dig it, I know. I had it explained to me once: a Western feminist reaction to my Old World paternalistic misogynism. Something about modern women being quite able to get their own doors and coats and chairs. I read all about it in college. It gave me a headache, but I never got it.
Hawkgirl swung out her legs, those muscular thighs, those hot leather boots. She looked down at her spiked mace. She looked up at me. I looked over at those cops. I shook my head. She got out without it. I appreciated that. We walked in together.
We strode side by side, Hawkgirl and me, behind those big Salem cops with their thick black utility belts dangling clubs and cuffs and ammo and hairspray and the like. Their right hands reached back, instinctively back, to cover their gun butts, as we passed — you know: just in case this crazy krachong and his feathered girlfriend tried to get funny. At Dunkin’s. After midnight.
We took our stools at that counter’s far-far end. I didn’t take my eyes off them. Those cops didn’t take theirs off me — actually, off of her, off of my date. Off her knotted little you-know-whats, pressing against her tight yellow tank top.
I stared harder at them.
"Knock it off," Hawkgirl whispered.
I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.
"Don’t get stupid. Not here, not with them." She poked her pointy elbow between my ribs.
Still, I looked. That’s what we do. Us guys. You can’t drop your look until they drop theirs. Their look was about owning this place, owning our space, owning my girl. My look was about denying them that.
"Jimmy, don’t." She knee-knocked me hard, under our counter. "Just don’t," while making like she’s examining a peelie cuticle on her long elegant forefinger.
God, I hate it when a sister does that. Doesn’t back you up when you’re getting fronted down. By a white boy. Another totok dissin’ you, macking yours, knowing he can.
Jeez, it makes my belly burn.
Stopping hearts, stopping history
My heart was drumming in my temples.
"Stop it, Jimmy. You stop it right now," Hawkgirl hissed near my ear. She slipped her hand under my arm, she turned it into talons. And it hurt. And her anger at me was making me angrier, uglier. I mean: why be angry at me? — instead of being angry with them, about them, about this stupid intersection between us stupid men, right now, right here, at Salem’s S.E. Commercial Street Dunkin’ Donuts? Why turn on me, instead of being sick of all that awful history white people have to prop up each and every day, everywhere. Three hundred years of owning us. Like they owned our lands. Like they owned the damned tobacco and sugar and bananas we grew for their pleasure. Pineapples for export instead of rice for our wives and our babies. Fifteen generations of our family, in our own homeland.
And in their America too. The America they took by turning Indian hospitality into trickery and, in the end, into butchery. The America they make and remake into big inky sentences on solemn white paper. Words-words-words easily erased whenever they get nervous about us. About angry black men. About exhausted Chinese and Filipino labor. About their energetic Japanese neighbors. About our vigorous Mexican newcomers. All of us doing what good men always, everywhere, do to be men.
Being men, for our women. Being what men are.
Three hundred years of THAT, for this. For she and me at the far end of Dunkin’ Donut’s curved pink Formica counter. For Hawkgirl sinking her angry nails into my armpit. For her swivelling her bar stool left and right, looking for her club. Looking to clobber me with it. Looking to set me straight with it.
And me getting even uglier, cornered now by both those big white boys and this masked, this winged, brown sister.
And it was aaall going down according to standard newspaper script. Morning headlines would surely read: "Blue lawmen, duly sworn to protect Salem’s sleepy public from suddenly and inexplicably crazed colored boys, had to use deadly force to subdue one, at Oregon’s last doggone Dunkin’ Donuts late Tuesday night.
"The suspect, screaming wild about double-dipped chocolate twists, was booked into the Oregon State Hospital’s Psychiatric Unit for observation."
Dunkin’s help
Just as surely as Lloyd Center Cinema film reels run front to finish, this story was certainly heading to its self-fulfilling — those officers of the law had turned their cop looks away from that hot chica to that even hotter muchacho, they had reached for their two-ways, they had released their holster snaps.
Oh aduh’allaah, I didn’t start this fire.
Still, fire burns.
And it was all about to play out, this old-old story, when another hand, when another voice, a woman’s touch, a mother’s tenor, gently broke our cursed chain of causality. Ending it, softly.
"Que necessitas, m’ijo?" she said. Dunkin’ Donut’s counter help said. Said to me.
"What do you need, my son?" she said it again.
I looked down at her hand, her old brown paper bag hand, on top of mine. Her touch was dry and warm, like Mother Mexico. I looked up at her face, into her cacao eyes, so tired of her bad boys, so patient from her sorrows.
"What can I get you?" Soft and irresistible. Her fingertips soothing.
My blood pressure went down. My fury dissolved. " — double honey dipped, silah’kan Oma. Chocolate. One for each of us, if you please, Grandma."
She didn’t let go of my eyes, not yet. Not till she was satisfied. Not till I calmed. "You okay, m’ijo?"
"Okay, Oma," I nodded. "Terima kasih banyak."
She put her hand on Hawkgirl’s fist, covering it, melting her. Those fingernails in my armpits relaxed. "Okay, m’ija?"
Hawkgirl let a hot exhalation out her nose. A long one. "I’m okay, Grandma. Thank you very much."
She checked our eyes, Hawkgirl’s then mine, once more. "Coffees?"
"Decafs, Oma," Hawkgirl said. "Two, por favor. Cream and sugar, both."
Then she went, that late-night grandma went, on arthritic ankles, on creaky hips, back to the cops’ end of Dunkin’s forever café counter. Back to where The Law was.
They were still on their feet when she passed them, heading for Dunkin’s floor-to-ceiling donut racks. They checked her head to heels for signs of assault, of larceny, of mayhem of any kind. Nothing.
They looked briefly at Hawkgirl and me, already humbled at our counter’s far end. They settled back into Dunkin’s tall stools, back into their cop-talk, back into munching their maple bars.
Lose the past, drop that mask
That grandma came back with our chocolate twists and a coffee carafe. She set our donuts down on little wax paper squares, one for Hawkgirl, one for me. She ducked under our counter, then surfaced with two nicked-up porcelain mugs. An arc of rusty coffee she sent into them. A handful of Darigold Half & Halfs she set next to my napkin. "Anything else?"
"Tidak Oma, I said. "No Abuelita," Hawkgirl said.
"Oh yes there is," that grandma said. "Oh yes." She looked at us in turn.
"Yes Grandma," we said, Hawkgirl and me.
"Jimmy. Forget our past. Let it go. Lose it or lose my daughters. They need your eyes open, your heart free."
"Hawkgirl, drop the mask. Go if you must, but let my boys know you, so they can find you.
"And fold those wings. Walk away, so they can follow your foot prints."
"Yes Oma," we said, Hawkgirl and me.
"Now finish up and go. Be nice. Donuts’re on me." She ducked under her counter and didn’t come up again. Hawkgirl looked at me. I looked at her. I drank my coffee; she drank hers and threw down both of our chocolate double-dipped twists.
We went back the way we came: past those fat cops, north on S.E. Commercial, up on I-5, under that August rain. In the vibrato of my tired old Toyota, in the dark of our damp summer night. Hawkgirl nestled her naked face into my neck. Warm. No mask.
She whispered something — who knows what, something in Spanish or Tagalog, maybe in Hmong or could be Korean. Something soft. Lips brushing tender words.
That Wednesday, she went away.
That nasty mace stayed where it was laid.
Salamat djalan manita manis saya. Allah’s peace on your journey, my sweet sister.