Yellow Note, Blue Note

THE CAR WAS IDLING in the Park Inn’s loading zone.

Raf hurled our bags into the trunk and whomped shut the door with full force.

I yelled, “I can’t put up with you like this, Raf! Your great big emotions! No more.”

“You have to go in with me,” he said, driving onto the sandlot for a used-car dealership in the Fifth Ward.

“Why, are we buying a car?”

We were. An ’81 Seeger-Z hatchback automatic the color of smoke, we were buying. With tax it cost five hundred dollars.

Our salesman was heat frantic in the glass-walled office. In metal-tipped boots, he clomped back and forth; fists balled up in the pockets of his vanilla suit pants. He had the phone receiver caught between his shoulder and ear. We sat waiting in scoop chairs. He arranged for a title, registration, plates.

“This is a good car we’re buying?” I asked Raf.

“Umm, no.”

“But it’ll run?”

“For a month at least.”

“Why are we buying such a car?”

“Consider the rental rates and gas for that thunder mobile you got,” he said. “This’s a money move. Same reason we’re renting a house.”

“Where? What city?”

“This city. I spotted it yesterday, doing my five miles. I already talked to the landlady. We’re buying a car, renting a house. . . . We’ll be set for what’s to come.”

“Leaving is to come! Why aren’t we leaving?”

“Paige,” Raf said. “Apart from your being in love with Raymond . . . We haven’t served out our sentences yet.”

Raf’s choice of house was a tilting two-story whose wood siding needed paint. Before the house and its garage lay a yellow patch of yard with a three-foot Francis of Assisi birdbath.

A boat on a trailer took up the driveway.

“Boat,” I said. Its hull and cabin were salt-eaten, both the same noncolor as the house.

“That’s no pleasure craft,” Raf told me. “That mother worked for a living.”

He led me onto the house porch, where a few old metal folding chairs were gathered.

I saw across the street a low cinderblock structure—the Stonewall Jackson Elementary. Neighboring to the south was a brick apartment building. A paper sign on its padlocked entry door said, DESGLAISES MENTAL HEALTH HOSPITAL—CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. Through fronds and elephant grass off the other porch rail, I made out the furrowed wall of a liquid-oxygen company.

“Houston has no zoning laws,” Raf said.

He said, “The house is unlocked. You can go on in.”

“But do I want to?” I said. “Raf, really. You’ve got summer-school kids across the street, yowling because they’re hot and miserable and have to go to summer school; a condemned mental asylum next door; an explosives factory in the side yard . . .”

“My kind of place,” Raf said.

“And now we’re driving a car that some boys built in metal shop. I truly dislike you.”