What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage Page A

yesterday.”
    “Frank?
The bad man?
Where’d you see him?”
    “Joyce took me by his house looking for Eartha. He said to tell you to
stay black.”
    I didn’t say the stuff about
Kung Fu
since I had been thinking that, too, and it made me feel guilty when Frank said it out loud. Eddie just shook his head.
    “Youngblood always looking for some contact,” he said. “Bumping through the world, looking for that contact.”
    Joyce came back out to say the hospital had finished with the baby’s tests and she seemed all right except for the cocaine, which she would have to deal with through withdrawal just like any other junkie. A hell of a way to spend your first couple of days in the real world. They had told Joyce a lot of crack babies scream when anybody touches them, but this one seems to be comforted by it. That was all it took. She came to the door with her keys in her hand and her purse already slung over her shoulder. Joyce was big on comfort.
    Eddie wasn’t finished with the repairs, so at his suggestion and his assurance that he didn’t mind walking home, Joyce agreed to take the truck. I told her I’d have something on the stove whenever she got back. She kissed me and half nodded like food was the last thing on her mind.
    After Joyce pulled off, I sat down on the steps. I could hear at least four or five different birds, squawking or singing as the spirit moved them, and I closed my eyes to see if I could identify any of them like we used to do in school, but I couldn’t. Living in the country, I’d learned to recognize bird calls. In the city, I learned to recognize sirens.
    One bird was singing louder than all the others, almost as if to insist that I remember his name. I concentrated, but nothing came to me.
    “Cardinal,” Eddie said.
    I opened my eyes and he pointed at the bright red bird swaying on a low-hanging branch above the porch.
    “It’s a cardinal,” he said again, as if I had spoken the question out loud.
    He slammed the hood and wiped the oil off his hands on a rag, reached up and pulled off his cap. His hair fell to his shoulders in a cascade of softly coiled locks. It was so pretty, I smiled, and he saw me.
    “Did you grow your hair for religious reasons?” I said as he stuffed the cap into his pocket.
    He hadn’t wanted a drink last night and he told me he was a vegetarian. I was curious.
    He shook his head. “It was Mitch. One night him and Joyce were watching a documentary about Bob Marley, and Joyce started talking about how much she liked his dreads and how she wondered what they felt like and how sexy they were. After a while, Mitch started worrying about what would happen if Joyce ever really met a man with dreadlocks and he told her since she liked them, he was going to grow her some. Then he said I had to do it, too, since he wasn’t going to be the only dreadlock in Lake County, but he couldn’t make it through the Buckwheat phase. Not enough patience.”
    I must have looked confused.
    “That’s when your hair is growing but hasn’t really locked up yet, so it’s just standing all over your head looking like Buckwheat. He kept getting mad because people would ask him if he’d forgotten to get a haircut or comb his hair or something. Joyce promised him she wasn’t going to run off with a Rasta and told him to go on and cut it if he wanted to, which the brother did that very afternoon.”
    I think that’s probably the reason dreads never caught on any more than they did. Sisters always like having enough hair to toss around, but we’re rarely prepared to endure the indignities of the in-between stages. That’s why extensions were born. Even my clients who decided to really lock up wanted some help getting started.
    “Most people twist their hair to avoid all that,” I said.
    He shrugged and raked his hand through his hair. “Misses the point,” he said. “Learning to have the patience to let nature take its course is half the lesson.”
    “Is that why you