There's a lady named Linda

There’s a lady named Linda at the Luxe Nail salon who doesn’t yet know her favorite customer from Grande Vista Retirement Home is never coming back. There’s the grandson of that retiree, a high school geometry whiz, who is bored and wondering if he can download Porn Hub and not get caught by his parents. There’s his neighbor down the block who reads two newspapers front to back and listens to NPR, and another guy who only knows what his Facebook feed tells him. There’s a woman who just moved to their block who has no private yoga clients now, and her three kids are fighting over Pokémon cards and it’s driving her crazy. There’s her husband, who thinks mind-over-matter will make the difference and hand-washing is over rated. There’s a man who lives behind them who shoots deer in Los Padres National Forest in the fall and has a huge locker of meat all ready to cook up, but he’s afraid if he does someone will smell the stew and break his door down and steal everything. There’s his sister, who lives across town, who went to the grocery store at 7:30 AM - because that’s when old people can go - and she almost slipped when her walker wheels skidded as she was reaching for the last can of evaporated milk. There’s her friend the cashier who doesn’t know she is positive. There’s the cashier’s mother, who has been quarantined for weeks, and can’t sleep, so she picks her hair and now her eyebrows and front hairline are gone. There’s her neighbor who left few days ago for her country get-away place. There’s her daughter who is trying to get her kids to be quiet while she has a Zoom meeting with her team at a local bank. There’s her friend at the bank who is hoarding soap. There’s their boss who is thankful he has money in his 401K. There’s his cousin whose girlfriend abuses her. There’s the campus security guard who is called about this but doesn’t want to go into the apartment because it smells like boiled cabbage and that reminds him of his time in foster care with a family that beat him. There’s his dispatcher who just ordered pizza from Woodstock pizza and now doesn’t know if she can touch the box it came in. There’s her co-worker who could solve the dilemma with the hand-sanitizer she has in her drawer but she doesn’t want anyone to know so she won’t have to share. There’s her 14-year-old at home who is tired of playing League of Legends and wants to go to Metro Entertainment to play War Hammer with his friends. There’s the clerk who works at Metro whose laptop broke just as the quarantine began and it is sitting in the repair shop, which is closed, for as long this goes on. There’s the owner of that shop who took his two daughters away to a friend’s cabin around Big Bear and is teaching them Whist, which his grandfather taught him. There’s his wife who is a nurse who has been working at the hospital on 24 hour shifts and sleeps in a motel since she can’t go home and touch her family. There’s her sister, who is pregnant, and terrified. There’s the baby’s father who is a guard in the local jail who knows prisoners are testing positive but is forbidden to tell anyone. There’s his aunt who lives in San Diego and has been taking food and clothes across the border to families stuck in refugee camps but now Mexico doesn’t want Americans crossing the border. There’s her roommate who keeps watching “Outbreak” and “Contagion” and it’s driving her crazy. There’s their other roommate who has been putting up cheerful messages on Instagram but who now can’t stop crying because her grandpa died in his bed because the hospitals are not resuscitating anyone with the virus who has a heart attack. There’s his widow who is terrified after creatures in Hazmat suits came into her bedroom and took her husband. There’s the mortician in one of the suits who wishes she could give the poor widow some words of comfort but when she tries to say something it sounds like Darth Vader and scares the old woman more. There’s the manager of the funeral home who has a refrigerator truck adjacent to his business because the bodies are coming in so fast. There’s the mechanic who worked on the truck who is a single parent with three kids and he hopes they are safe at home alone. There’s the oldest girl in the family who is watching her siblings and also a kid from across the street because their mom and dad are doing private grocery shopping for folks who can’t go to the store. There’s the customer the husband is trying to please who is asking him if they have active yeast which she needs to make bread. There’s the lady in Missouri who put up her bread recipe on the internet and now it has 182 likes. There’s a woman who hit the blue thumbs-up button on the bread recipe who wishes her boyfriend could come over but since he can’t she will spend this afternoon with her two favorite vibrators and a joint. There’s her boyfriend who hasn’t told her he wants to separate. There’s the guy he has a crush on who works at the 7-11 which for some reason is considered essential and is open. There’s the homeless woman who camps behind its dumpsters. There’s the cleaning crew who tried to get her to move but who now don’t want to be close to her so they leave quickly after tossing black plastic bags in the trash bin. There’s the garbage truck driver, husband of Linda at the Luxe nail salon, who lifts the giant dumpster and empties it upside down into his truck. He’s noticed he isn’t smelling anything today. There’s the broadcaster on CNN who tells him on the 6:00 news that is one of the symptoms of Coronavirus.  

    "So, you switched sides, huh?" Christopher Patterson wheezed as he flung his straw hat on the table.

     This old man wasn't ever going to let me live down working for Exxon-Mobil.

     "'Bout time somebody stepped up and fought for us. We are being poisoned and nobody's doing a damn thing about it."

     Vincent, was, of course, once again, out of the office.

     "How can I help you, Mr. Patterson?"

     "How do you sleep at night after what you did to the Gulf?"

     I sighed. Did I personally light a match and set off the explosion that caused the worst environmental disaster in US history?

     "I'm just a lawyer, Mr. Patterson. I never worked on an oil rig."

     "Shrimp born without eyes. Fish oozing sores. Clawless crabs. Good eating, huh?"

     "..."

     "But you didn't grow up around here. I've lived in this town all my life. Went to the Fifth Ward elementary school where our babies are being inundated with polluted air twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."

     "Well, that's why we started Fair Fight."

     He raised an eyebrow. I didn't flinch.

     "And my daughter-in-law—hell, the daughter I never had—almost didn't marry my son once he told her where he was from. She didn't want no parts of this place, so scared she was going to get cancer. Then she did."

     He wouldn't ever let me forget this chapter of the horror story either.

     "Vincent should be back before long, Mr. Patterson."

     "You'll do," he said. "Just wanted to make sure you knew about the rally at Tabernacle tomorrow evening. Don't know how many will show, but I, for one, will be there."

     I studied his face. Like so many of the residents here, he'd lost too much. I couldn't begrudge his anger, but I wasn't going to let anyone disrespect me.

     "Fair Fight will be there, Mr. Patterson. We invited the chemist who's going to share her air analysis with us."

     "Oh, so now it's us," he said and shook his head. "Particles so fine, we can't even see what's killing us. But bad days, which is most days, we can smell it."

     "Yes—well, I do have off-rig work to do," I said, and rose.

     Mr. Patterson studied me.

     "Never could trust no flip-flopper," he said before retrieving his hat.

     "Have a good day," I said.

     He half-turned and opened his mouth, then clammed it shut. The glass rattled in the door.

     Would my punishment ever end? Wasn't it bad enough that I now lived in a place where the air smelled like rotten eggs and permeated my body enough to plant tumors in my marrow? That sweat beaded on the surface of my skin as soon as I stepped outside the range of air conditioning? Where I couldn't throw a stone and

miss an oil refinery, or compressor station, or warehouse stuffed with toxic materials, or metal recycler, or salvage yard? Where people burn down their houses by using candlelight instead of electricity they can't afford, or the oil runs out so they use faulty heaters, or are on respirators because of the foul air that caused their asthma in the first place and the electricity just goes out? Where the air is contaminated as much as the water is poisoned and even the land itself is too foul to grow life-sustaining food?

At A Time Like This

At a time like this we need wonder.
At a time like this we need courage.
At a time like this we need each other, but not holding hands.
At a time like this we need neighbors, to share lamb stew even if it  is virtual; to share jokes on our Facebook feed, to share a high-five from across the street. Which looks surprisingly like a hello wave, which is what we really wanted anyway.
At a time like this we need to get to the back of the freezer and clean it out, decide about that half package of frozen peas in a new way, balanced against painful possibilities like food shortages. We aren't used to such things. Frozen peas would always be in plastic bags at Smart&Final. If ours were old we could toss them without worry. Now, we worry. Over Peas. And futures. And green-pea-less futures.
At a time like we need to snuggle and hear each other's heartbeats. When I'm scared I put my head on J's chest and the lub-dub of his heart calms me. When I'm calm I move my ear down to his stomach, where a small symphony of gurgles and bubble-sounds meet my ear and I laugh, which makes my head bounce on his tummy and he laughs, even at a time like this.

Sisters of the Good Death

     They were girls then.  Five pigtailed imps grinning at each other in a photograph while unseen hands turn the rope. Toi is front and center naturally, knees bent, tennis shoes nearly scraping her butt, hands balled into fists that graze her knees, a look of sheer defiance brightens her face. She is gazing toward her left at Margeaux, feet barely off the ground, plaits loosened, one hand on a bony hip, the other tapping Toi’s wrist as if to say, Ain’t we something? Margeaux’s eyes are locked on Tomorrow, frozen in a knock-kneed half-jump above the hopscotch pyramid, its seven square waiting for her to land. Tomorrow is laughing, mouth open wide, as she beams joy toward Margeaux, or maybe it’s Grace, partially visible, her body turned away from the jumping girls, toward the invisible hands; her four fingers grip Margeaux’s shoulder, while she turns a timid smile toward Toi, or maybe it’s Tomorrow.  I am the fifth girl, almost bent double in a fierce jump, name no longer spoken.  

      

                  

                                                                        2020

    "Something here is killing us," Shadrach Gaines said.  I scribbled while Vincent nodded.

    "It's terrible to watch people die and realize you could be next," he said. "My daddy died of cancer. My mother died of lung cancer. My brother. My sister's son. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Next-door neighbors. People down the street. My daughter. My wife."

    Another orphan. I'd lost my only sibling to another manmade chemical shortly after the Great Recession.

    “Mr. Gaines, the cancer rate in your town is 700-800 times higher than the rest of the nation," Vincent said. "According to the government, the measurements are 400 times higher than what is safe to breathe. Yours is the only community that has been exposed at these high rates."

    "On bad days, I feel my head tightening up," Shadrach Gaines said. "I remember when we used to have butterflies 'round here. Crickets. Now nothing seems to grow. Blackberries and pecans hard to find.  Oily sheen coating the water.  Don’t that beat all? A world without butterflies?"

**********

     "I ain't no whatchamacallit...no environ...mental—"

    "Yes, ma'am," I said. Here in the Fair Fight makeshift office in this blue Louisiana river town, my job is, at first glance, to listen. Then I worry a case like a dog with a bacon-filled bone.

    "But I got a problem."

    "I'm all ears," I said. Where is Vincent Scott? These pro bono situations are smack dab in his wheelhouse, not mine.

    She threw a sandwich bag of pill bottles on the table.

    "My boy can barely breathe, air 'round the plant so bad," she said.

    I studied this mother's fried hair, slumped shoulders, dead eyes. She had to be younger than my fifty-odd years, but looked so much older.

    "Got asthma so, funkiest air days, he can't go to school."

    I didn't need to ask why she didn't move. Low wealth. Modest means. Fancy ways of prettying up, poor. As in, fucked.

    "It hurt my heart to watch him looking out the window, watching other chirrun play, watching 'em go to school, and he can't even go outside and stand in the yard without losing his life."

    I had to be some kind of mental to stay down here listening to these horror stories along the serpentine eighty-five-mile stretch of the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge in mostly black towns spoiled with over 100 petrochemical plants.  I should be somewhere making real money. But Vincent knew I didn't have sense enough to leave, hence Fair Fight, our non-profit firm.

    "Come on, Toi," Vincent had said. "Let's use the twenty-plus years of skillsets we've built in litigation practice to protect the places we love down here—and we'll provide legal services at income-based rates so everyone can afford representation."

    "I don't want no parts of poor," I'd told him.

    "When I was at Yale, every time I opened my mouth, they tried to make me feel dumb. To be honest, it just made me embrace my roots even more. Come do this with me, Toi. Let's show those damn Yankees and the whole world what the South can do."

    Fool that I was, I fell for it. Not him. But another chance. To crush the opposition. Win.

    "I tell him something one minute, five minutes later, he done forgot," the mother continued. "Thought he was messing with me. But he can't remember. Worse than my eighty-year-old mama when she was alive. And she had the Alzheimer. What my boy got?"

    Kids who can't sit still. Can't pay attention. Can't learn. And if not reading by third grade, charging down that pipeline straight to Angola. The culprit to be found in the air, or the water, or the once beautiful pastureland.  All I had to do to answer her question was search my Dictionary of Ugliest Words: benzene. Chloroprene. Lead.

For her boy, my guess would be: lead; either coming out of the plant's smokestack, or leaking into the water supply.

    "Fair Fight is going to help you the best way we can." I said. "We might not win the first round, but we might win the fifth. Or the fiftieth."

    I don't know how Vincent can look these people in the eye and tell the lies he tells till we declare another victory in our madcap scramble to save the world. But I don't believe in false hope.

    "Ma'am, this battle gonna be like Davida versus two Goliaths. You ready for that?"

Welcome Charlotte. Here is where we post something each week that we want to share. We will try for Fridays and see how that works. Yee-haw!