All-Bright Court Read Online Free Page A

“That ain’t nothing but that old man and his crazy boy.”

3
Rapture
    I T WAS JUST before three in the afternoon and the world was ending in All-Bright Court. Venita looked out of her kitchen window, out of her yellow curtains at 92, and fell to her knees. There was a bomb, bright and hard and shining against a blue sky. The bomb was slowly moving toward her. It was stealing blood from Venita’s feet. It was making her feet cold and useless.
    They had finally done it. The Russians had finally dropped the bomb. It was only a matter of time. Venita had one consolation in these final few seconds of life on the planet: living in Lackawanna meant her death would be a swift and painless one.
    Venita’s husband, Moses, had told her, “They was worried about Florida during that missile crisis last month. But there was a real panic in Buffalo. Them Russians got it high on they list for bombing ’cause there four mills there. But it’s the Capital plant they want. The biggest damn steel plant in the world. Wait till you see it. It’s a monster.”
    Moses had told her this in the back of the Greyhound bus as they headed north four months ago. They were riding through Pennsylvania. It was the day after Thanksgiving. They had been married just two days before in Starkville, Mississippi, and were spending their honeymoon on the bus. Moses had only a week off from work, and this was already the sixth day.
    â€œTimes changing,” Moses said. “The North is something else. We got whites for neighbors, got whites living on both sides of us. Polacks, the colored people be calling them. They real nice people. They speaks, and everything.
    â€œYou know, times changing all over. When I come up here in ’fifty-eight, I had to ride in the back of the bus all the way to Pennsylvania. It’s just four years later, and you can set anywhere you want.”
    â€œWe been riding in the back all the way now. Let’s move up front,” Venita said. “Let’s see how things look from the front.”
    So Moses and Venita moved to the front of the bus and looked out the front window as snow began to fall and night began to fall, and after there was nothing left to see, they turned on the light over their seats and watched themselves watching nothing.
    The next morning the bus let them off on the pike, on a day that was cold and snowless.
    â€œThere it is, baby,” Moses said. “The eighth wonder of the world.”
    Venita was not impressed. She covered her face with both hands. “It stink,” she said. “How can you stand that smell? Smell like rotten eggs.”
    â€œYou get use to it,” Moses said. “It don’t always smell like that. Sometime it smell worser.”
    Moses walked his wife to their new house. He carried her across the threshold into a house that was cold and hollow sounding.
    â€œWelcome to Ninety All-Bright Court. This our home,” he said, and placed Venita on her feet. Then he took the luggage from the porch and went upstairs while Venita looked through the kitchen.
    She marveled at the mustard-colored gas stove and refrigerator. She adored the small pantry. It was already stocked with canned fruits and vegetables she had sent up. There was not a stick of furniture in the whole house. Moses wanted Venita to pick it out.
    â€œThree rooms of furniture for two hundred ninety-nine dollars, and on time too,” he had told her. They would get furniture on his first day off. But today he had to work.
    Moses came downstairs, changed and ready. “I’m running late. I made a pallet on the floor upstairs, but wait up for me, hear? I be back a little after eleven,” he said. “And keep the door locked, hear? You ain’t in the country no more.” Venita let him out the front door. She locked it behind him.
    Alone in the house, Venita hung the yellow curtains she was looking out of the day the world was ending. But