Once during a “special” lesson, Albert actually left the store to run an errand. Swan didn’t waste time with preliminaries. She pulled Henry down to the floor, tugged down his pants, climbed astride him, and unbuttoned her shirt. He’d never seen or felt anything like he did that day, the swelling heat of Swan’s chocolate-tipped breasts and the near-religious glaze in her eyes. Swan had known exactly when he was going to finish, and she slid off him and helped with expert hands, laughing as he spent himself across the ebony piano bench. But Henry couldn’t laugh. After that day, he was in love, or in something even more profound. He was like the drug-addicted musicians Albert spoke mournfully about, the ones who couldn’t go more than a few hours without a fix.
Henry could not stop thinking about Swan. His grades plummeted, and his mother noticed. He started riding his bike through the colored section of town, trying to get a look at Swan sitting on Albert’s porch. The first time she saw him doing this, Swan knitted her brow in an angry frown and did not wave. The next Thursday, Henry found Albert waiting in the teaching room, saying Swan was too sick to teach. Henry immediately stopped riding his bike on the wrong side of Louisiana Avenue.
The next Thursday he found Swan waiting in the teaching room as though nothing had happened. When Albert started giving a church organist a lesson in the main room, Swan stood up and began playing the piano Jerry Lee Lewis style. As Henry gaped, she reached back with her right hand, flipped up her skirt, and pulled down her panties without stopping the bass line with her left hand. By this time Henry had lost his childish nerves. He dropped his jeans and plunged into her from behind, amazed that she could play so perfectly while he thrust so hard. But on this occasion Swan didn’t realize he was going to finish, and neither did he—not until the moment had passed. Suddenly Swan was twice as slippery as before, and she jerked away from Henry as though he’d scalded her.
“I’m sorry!” he cried, yanking up his pants in shame. “It was an accident!”
Swan’s face went twice as dark as usual. “Boy, you and your little thang gonna get me with child!” She sat on the bench and looked down at her little bush while her father played a hymn on a Hammond organ in the next room. “Run up the street to the gas station and get me a pop,” she said crossly.
Henry looked blankly at her. “A pop?”
“A Dr. Pepper! A hot one, if you can get it. Hurry.”
“What do I tell your father?”
“Tell him … tell him you bet me a Dr. Pepper that I couldn’t play something.”
“Like what?”
Swan nearly swatted him. “What do I care? Charlie Parker. Get going, dummy!”
When Henry returned, Swan took the ten-cent bottle of soda into the bathroom. It was only years later that he learned a fizzing Dr. Pepper had been a primitive method of birth control used by desperate girls in the days before the Pill.
Swan eventually got over her anger, and things continued as before, but most of what came after had been blurred by the passing years. What Henry remembered most was how tense that summer had been, how the sky would pile up each afternoon with slate-gray clouds that looked full of rain but brought only dry thunder. People on the street were grouchy. The white people were tense, the blacks scared or angry. The air felt so still that noises sounded different than usual. To make things worse, Henry’s father came home and stayed for three straight weeks. All he talked about was “nigger trouble” all over the South, and the “goddamn Kennedys twistin’ up LBJ.” Henry’s only escape was the hours he got to spend at school or with Swan.
One August afternoon, while he and Swan sat on the store steps, Albert walked out, looked at the sky, and said, “This drought done turned the ground into a drum.” Swan poked a stick in the dust and said, “What you talkin’ ’bout, Daddy?” Albert sat down and illustrated his words with his flattened hands. “The ground is the top head, the bedrock the bottom, and precious little water between. Every time a truck goes by, I hear the earth echo. Everybody’s prayin’ for God to send rain. White and black, they prayin’ the same words.”
Henry liked it when Albert talked this way, and he wondered why he seemed more in tune with these thoughts than Swan. Swan lived so instinctively that she seemed to care nothing about codifying feelings into language. If it rained, it rained. If it didn’t, she’d make do with the heat.
“Is it ever going to rain again?” Henry asked.
Albert did something then that he’d never done in public: he laid a comforting hand on Henry’s shoulder and squeezed. “Son,” he said softly, “I think maybe a storm’s comin’ that could wash away everything we know.”