Jeff Rubard
2010-02-04 03:25:12 UTC
Take a look at this: I don't write like *this*.
CHAPTER ONE
Rails Under My Back
By JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Long before Jesus entered the world, blades of southern grass sliced
up the soles of his grandmother's feet. Her blood leaped from the
danger, drew back into the farthest reaches of her heart, and the
roots of her soul pulled away from the sharp earth which had nurtured
her. But nothing escapes the laws of gravity. We martyr to motion. In
step with the flowing sweep of her garments, an undercurrent of
rhythm, she cut the final strings of attachment, her children, and on
a rich spring day cut a red path to New Mexico—what business had a
nigger there; New Mexicans had yet to invent the word—for a man
eternally bound to a rakish fedora, his sweet face like a mask beneath
it, pinstripe suit, diamond horseshoe tiepin, and two-toned patent-
leather shoes. Drawn by the power of nostalgia—Hold infinity in the
palm of your hand and eternity in an hour—she swept back two years
later without a word about her lover, the father of R.L., her oldest
child. A decade later he would be thrown through the windshield of his
sparkling green (red?) Edsel (Eldorado?)—the squeal before the thud,
the skid after—his decapitated body slipping the surly bonds of earth,
sailing kitelike over a California highway, arcing over and beyond a
thicket of treetops, to touch the face of God. Jesus was convinced
that her exodus had strangled any impulse her surviving children—his
mother and aunt—had to get close to her, and had ripped open his life,
for an eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its
sorrow. The years only deepened the sorrow his family had in common.
Even a hatred like hot ice could not halt destiny.
Jesus thought he could never recover from his grandmother's
betrayal. While his mother and aunt had long purged their thoughts and
feelings of the act—it escaping through the back of their heads, into
space—it continued to haunt him, a wallet photograph that he carried
everywhere. He moved with a sort of amazement in the world, anger
fueling the furnace of his heart. With ceremonial rigidity, each day
he wore red, symbol of his unflagging fury.
He leaned over and spit. The saliva held and gleamed, suspended,
rust-flecked, then curved down to the pavement. Crashed, sizzled, and
cooled. A red coin. He leaned over to pick it up, but the coin refused
his touch. Sirens sailed into the sky, a spiral of red sound. He drew
himself erect. A strip of white asphalt stretched hot before him. He
walked. Only his brain moved. Tall earth-rooted wrought-iron fences
hovered before a cluster of houses. And beyond the fences, black and
green rhythm of trees. Trees full of birds, plentiful as leaves. The
vapor-kissed spires and steeples of North Park. The sky in fanning
torches and soaring flames. And heavy white clouds hovering, flying
saucers. The street opened into a broader one, the space between two
massive rows of skyscrapers black with a continuous throng, two busy
streams of ants. He walked with long scissors stride for Lawrence
Street, where he would catch the train to South Lincoln. The cradle of
the week, the sunny street filled with competitive radios, anxious
engines, car horns, hawking of wares, footsteps, and conversation—
disembodied voices—a kiss blown from the lips of the square, floating,
rising, and hanging above it. The sidewalk steamed with city
sprinklers pulsing wet rhythm. Jesus sang:
Shine went below deck, eating his peas
Til the water come up to his knees.
He felt air currents from the movement of cars, shoes, skirts.
Rumble and rustle tingling the blood in his rubber-soled feet. Suits
and ties and skirts and heels were beginning to change color in the
spring heat. A constant weight in their faces, the suits and ties
lugged briefcases, newspapers tucked under the left arm. The skirts
and heels sported ankle socks and gym shoes—tennis shoes, his
grandmother called them—as if they gon shoot some b-ball in the
office, arc crumpled bills (fives, tens, twenties) into steel
wastebaskets. Cut a V for the express train into Central, slowed
somewhat by purses bulging with thick paperback novels. A flyer curved
around a lamppost: MOTHERFUCK THE WAR! A hang-tailed hound jogged out
of an alley—Jesus hoped he would stray within range—and past a knot of
beggars hunched over in a corner doorway, rained-on ghosts.
Kind sir, could you—
Hell nawl. Jesus did not pause in his walking. Get a job.
Go to hell and take yo mamma wit you, just for company.
Jesus kept walking.
Cheap nigga.
Jesus kept walking.
Goofy-looking motherfucka.
Bitch, Jesus said, stopping, turning at the beggar, facing the
spit-thickened beard. Wash the fart out yo draws. He continued on.
He hadn't gone far when stench stopped him. Eighth and Lawrence,
the subway entrance—A blind man could find it. Follow your nose—a
funky mouth, with worn, broken, and dirty stairs like neglected teeth,
descending to a dark throat. The subway breathed him in. He tugged at
his ear, his fingers rough against the diamond there. He knew all
about the purse and chain snatchers who rode the trains. Rough niggas
versed in all tricks of the trade, killin, stealin, and gankin to get
paid. Once, he saw a thief hack off a woman's earlobes with a straight
razor to loot her diamond earrings. The thief wiped the blood from his
razor onto her blouse, slowly and smoothly, as if buttering a bread
slice, and Jesus wondered if the woman screamed from the sight of
blood, from the pain, or from the sensation of reaching for her lobes
to discover they were no longer there.
He had heart, a lot of it—fires could not burn it, water could not
drown it, winds could not bend it—and would sport his jewelry. He
thought: Cutthroats. Praise them. Got to have heart to cut mine out.
But ain't nobody gon fuck wit me. Jesus Jones. They are clay. I am
stone.
Two rails of level steel, the only clean things in the subway, ran
from the darkness at one end of the tunnel into the darkness at the
other end, ran over the piles of filth that filtered down from the
street two levels above. Two rails that glittered like silver needles
in the darkness, awaiting the shiny thimble of train.
A dark pulse at a distance. Jesus could feel it under his feet. He
saw pale light, then deep shadow, then glistening train, train that
came boring out of the tunnel, bellowing in the distance. Carrying
distance to him. The doors opened quick and noisy like a switchblade.
Jesus slipped inside the silver sleeve. Muscled a window seat, the
window black, nothing to see, metal brightness around him. Suits and
ties rested their briefcases across their laps. Skirts and heels
parked with their legs crossed. Then, fresh motion. The train moved
over greased tracks, a steady rumbling beneath the floor, the car
shaking from side to side. The black subway tunnel was a hollow
subterranean string stretching under Tar Lake and joining North Park
and Central. And the car, an aquarium with passengers for fish. Better
yet, a reverse aquarium, with the fish kept in and the water out.
Jesus curled up in his seat, jacket draped across his shoulders,
neck, and chest, baby-snug. The car was cold, cutting to the bone.
Lucky he had worn his thick socks. Still, the cold bit through; he
shivered, a pinned butterfly. The train swept along the curve of a
blind river (one of the city's twelve). Long after the curve had
passed from vision, it boomeranged back, remained imprinted on his
inner eyes, two spinning black half-moons. He liked double-decker
trains and wished this were one. Kind sticks to kind. But you almost
never saw them in the city anymore. Only in the suburbs. Every summer,
the family—you, your cousin Hatch, and your aunt Sheila—used to board
a silver double-decker for West Memphis, where Lula Mae live, riding
high above the rails, your thermos heavy with cold soda pop, and fried
chicken stuffed in a greasy shoebox, the aroma strong enough to haunt
future passengers for years to come, odors of food and rhythm of
rails. Eat that chicken, then lie back fat in your seat, gazing out
the window. High hills rolled all the way to the horizon. Scraggly
trees like squirrel tails. Cows still as stones. Each rail tie demands
attention. The conductor would shout out a litany of stops. And you
and Hatch would get happy.
Stop all that jumpin like monkeys in the jungle, Sheila said. You
know better. Show some home training. Do that again and I'll beat the
living daylights outa you right here on this train.
Lula Mae would be waiting at the station, accompanied by a redcap.
A woman thick in the waist, taking up space. Tall, commanding vision
from a toadstool of height. A creature of no color, so pale many
believed her an albino. You were afraid of her white skin, the smell,
the touch. Feared her black snakelike veins. And the figured scars on
her calves. Ole cotton patch. Crazy Junebug giggled giggled at her
calves. Ole cotton patch. Tar baby. Tar baby.
She saw you and kindled instantly. Over here! Waving. Go get their
bags.
Yes'm. The redcap rushed forward. Loaded the suitcases onto his
cart.
Give yo granny a hug. The thorny hairs on her bosom snatched you
before you could comply or decline.
Lula Mae?
Yes.
Why you don't shave them hairs?
Meanness rooted up in the black veins of her neck. Cause they only
gon grow back longer.
Come switching time, she would make you go out to the yard and
strip your own branch of leaves. Whip the hard branch soft against
your hardheaded behind. Whip your butt and legs with the ease of a
conducter waving his baton. After a thorough switching, sweat greased
the creases of her face. But if she had no energy to switch, if
exhaustion had sunk into her bones, she settled for a quick open hand
slap across your chops. Water would dam at the back of your tongue, a
multitude of days threatening to spill out. You ran out the house and
escaped to the red gravel road. Found there, frogs hard and flat as
soda pop cans in the desiccating sun. So you would kick them—metal
sound, scraping across the sunbaked road—or, if your fingers had
heart, pick them up and fling them, Frisbee fashion, bouncing and
skipping like a pebble on water.
But John gave it to me. For my birthday.
Yeah. His daddy gave it to him. My Uncle John gave it.
I turn seven.
I don't care if Jehovah himself give it to you, Lula Mae said.
Take that scorpion outa here.
He ain't no scorpion, Hatch said. He a chameleon, a lizard.
Houston got scorpions look jus like lizards.
This ain't Houston.
Lula Mae drew back her hand. I don't stand for no back talk.
Sheila might, but I don't. Now take that scorpion outa here.
You and Hatch carried Dogma the chameleon out to the red gravel
road.
He get crushed, you said.
No he won't. He a chameleon.
So?
He can change color. Red. The color of the road.
You laughed. What good that gon do him?
He be invisible. Cars can't see him.
Stop that chunkin! Lula Mae screamed.
Damn! Can't have no fun!
Yeah. No fun.
Lula Mae was tight on you, shoes. Watchin you hard and hateful
from her brick porch. You could see her eyes, looming, though the road
was several hundred feet away. Preacher eyes trying to burn the devil
out of you. The sun looks through your western window. Carries the
record of human deeds to the Lord each night. Legs might escape her
body—run to the yellow field across the road, high grass tall and
safe, or so you thought—but nothing could escape her eyes. Even when
you climbed high in a tree—a yolk sun cooking the sky, burning and
blinding you, with cool air singing in the branches—her high-flying
eyes would find you. Hurtful eyes that followed you everywhere, rocks
in your shoe.
Stop all that runnin! Yall catch heatstroke. Her skin was
transparent under the sun, revealing a red tracery of veins. She
snapped open her umbrella. Held back the day with her body, scraps of
sky peering in past her arms and trickles of light at her feet. She
started into the road, red gravel crunching underfoot. You and Hatch
followed behind her.
Why yall walkin behind me! Gon up there where I can keep an eye on
you.
Small houses, kin to Lula Mae's, lined both sides of the road and
Lula Mae greeted the occupants one and the same.
How you duce?
Fine.
Alright. How you duce?
Fine.
Alright.
Entered the barbershop, a bare floor, dust and splinters, a single
white cloth apron draped across a single red leather chair, and a
black plastic comb submerged — pickled — in a container of green
alcohol, causing you to recall Lula Mae's false teeth at the bottom of
a water-filled mason jar.
These here my grandsons. Cut them nice. Start wit the red one
first.
The barber positioned you in the chair, pinned the apron behind
your neck, and set to work. You sat there under the buzzing weight of
the clippers, eyes peeling motion, a circle of red hair at the
circular base of the barber's chair, skin from an apple. Then the
barber resuscitated the drowned comb. Grabbed a fistful of grease. Set
to work. There, he said.
Look nice, Lula Mae said. Real nice.
You fidgeted in the chair to chance a glance in the mirror. Your
red hair: high and crenellated, a rooster's comb.
The doors cracked open like bones. Federal Station. First stop in
Central. The car emptied. Jesus sneezed, coughed, Lula Mae's
suffocating odor on his skin. Her rhythm inside him, is what he is.
Ill will persisted in his blood. Someday—the promise stagnating,
unstirred—he would pay her a little visit, yes, surprise her. Surely,
she would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing, caught in his
thick, molten rage. What would she say? Do? Invite him to her bosom,
that valley of thorns? What would he say? Say anything at all, other
than to pronounce sentence? What would he do? What could satisfy him,
right the ancient wrongs? A white smothering pillow? A knife clean
between the ribs? A shower of stones? A quick spray of gunfire and hot
bullets bubbling the flesh? Or something slow? The body straining
against a thick pony-tail length of rope, the pulley creaking, and the
feet and legs lowering into a leech-filled well? Today might be the
day. Board a train for West Memphis. Better yet, fly down there swift
as thought and serve a death sentence.
Doors shut, closing the world out. He exhaled, expelling the rage,
eased back in his seat, and tried to relax. He still had a long ride
ahead. A long ride. All the way to South Lincoln. Red Hook. Two
hundred blocks. Four hundred. Who could say? But nothing better to do
today. Might as well chill with No Face the Thief. Puff live. He even
toyed with the idea of taking No Face under his wing and schooling
him. Thinking this with last night in mind.
You came all the way from Red Hook to find me? Jesus tightened his one-
handed grip on the steering wheel, strangling a snake to bring it
under control, let it know who's boss.
You the man, No Face said from the back seat.
The words, like the vibration of a silver wire, sent a glow of
light into Jesus's heart. Oh yeah?
Yeah. No Face pressed his face close to the back of Jesus's
shoulder, close enough to kiss him. Jesus could smell his sewer breath
and hear his heavy elastic breathing, which came and snapped back,
came and snapped back. That's what they say.
No Face pinched the Buddha's unlit end and offered it to Jesus.
Jesus took the hot end between thumb and forefinger and watched No
Face in the rearview mirror. The dark magnified every detail. Jesus
didn't look anything like No Face the Thief and was proud of it. No
Face resembled a baited fish someone had snatched from the line and
thrown back into the water. Short dreads like dynamite fuses. Face a
ravaged landscape of dark hollows, craters and caves where the flesh
had collapsed in on the bone. A checker-thick black eye patch. Word,
nigga poured acid into his eye to win a bet. A nappy mustache, round
nose boogers. Uneven brown teeth deep in his gums, ancient ruins. He
tried to move near you when he spoke. You'd move and he'd move closer.
You'd move again and so would he. Jesus trained his eyes back on the
road. Hungry feelers, headlights searched the night. He took a long
and slow suck on the Buddha; red warmth spread through his body; the
streetlights brightened, then gleamed in full glory.
That's what they say.
Why they say that? Jesus looked at No Face, so clear a moment ago,
now a small black oval on the rearview mirror. He turned his eyes back
to the road. Aimed the unlit end of the Buddha at No Face's voice. No
Face took it. Jesus smelled the seashells of No Face's armpits.
Considered lowering the window to let the night in. But a frail yellow
moon stuck to the windows and sealed them.
You know. No Face took a long toke, a deep sea diver sucking at
the mouth of his Aqua-Lung.
Motion hummed a wave through Jesus. He and No Face floated in
white space. Floated. He lowered his head, ducking danger—the car's
angled hood.
That's what they say.
From what they say, Jesus said, you the man. Everybody knew No
Face the Thief. Knew his rep. Bandit. Robbin folks wit his finger
stuck inside a dirty paper bag.
Me? I'm jus a young brother strugglin in stride. No Face watched
Jesus with his one bright headlight of an eye.
Where's the Buddha? The wheel was easy in Jesus's hands. He barely
had to touch it. The bobbing headlight beams curved, pulled the car
around a corner, and hit another car in the distance.
Ain't no mo.
Jesus heard the ashtray click open, then close.
You want me to fire up another one?
Nawl. I'm straight.
Got plenty.
You the man.
I work hard.
The curb curved the car in. Eighth and Lawrence. Like to see a
brother tryin to do sumpin fo himself, Jesus said. Not like these
knuckleheads hangin on the corner. He pointed to one or two of them,
hardly motioning, his hand still on the steering wheel.
I work hard.
I bet you do. Yo, I'll holler at you.
Want some more of this good blow. Check me anytime. We'll have a
session.
Bet.
Anytime.
Stonewall? He didn't have to ask.
No Face laughed a spiral up Jesus's spine. You don't know me from
Adam. I'm from Red Hook. I represent. Red Hook. First building. Seven-
oh-seven.
Bet.
No Face extended his hand over the seat cushion. Jesus shook it
without turning around. Where I say?
I remember.
Can you Find it?
Jesus laughed. I can find anything. The engine ignited. Sparks
fired from twig to branch and made the car glow.
Jesus spoke to himself. Hope he don't start geekin. I probably
shouldn front this nigga, but you always need some sucka willin to
work cheap.
The flash caused a new flow, waves of people crashing through the
doors. Union Station. Subway, not the distance-seeking trains stories
above. Downtown. The Loop. Now, the Loop-jammed train would follow
Central River, the spine up Central's back. He heard voices. Laughter.
Halfway there. Halfway. 707. The first building. The first from where?
He didn't let it worry him. Can't be too hard to find. He stretched
his legs, exhaling to drag out what dragged inside, and smelled the
sweet burn of pain. The residue of urban moonshine bit his stomach and
pumped acid through his body. With the pain came a warmth, a shimmer,
a pulse, a new brightness, haze. His sight blew a hole in itself. Shut
down his eyes. Darkness.
He loved darkness. Shapes moved across the interior screens of his
lids. Funny how the shut eye could fill with dark water, a well, where
shadows and shapes swam, and empty circles floated like life rafts. He
couldn't quite get the effect now. So he opened his eyes to the stares
of the other commuters. Gave them his hardest look. As a child (seven,
he figured), he saw a motion picture about a group of blond children
who channeled destructive power through their stares. (Their eyes were
probably blue, but that was before Gracie and John owned a color TV,
or perhaps the movie was in black and white.) For weeks, he'd stood
before the mirror trying to get that glow. And now, ten years later,
he still had not mastered it, but he mustered enough power to send the
eyes of the other passengers running for cover. He extended his long
legs and put his kicks on the seat in front of him. Darkness made deep
mirrors of the windows. His reflection stared back at him. Shaved head
sparkled with sun, even the veins at his temples radiant as cables. He
liked it that way, bullet-smooth, streamlined, straight and accurate.
Shaved it every day with a straight razor. (Looking down on the very
crown of his head, one would see faint black lines, like a claw print.
He wore his scars proudly.) A slit of mouth. A thin pipe of neck. Clay-
colored skin. Red freckles like dried blood. The naked razors of his
long thin lips. The sharp angles of his jawline. The tentative touches
of a red beard. Ears that stuck out antennae-like. And the big eyes,
visionary and alert.
The train broke out of the darkness, rose at the sky. Jesus saw it
with his body. Through the window, sunlight struck a glancing blow
against his cheek. He followed the sun into himself. The car shook
from side to side as if trying to rouse him awake. He opened the
suction caves of his eyes. A constant stream of images rushed past the
window: the cuts and valleys of the river (another one of the city's
twelve), angles of sail jutting from water into sky, row upon row of
three-story buildings—yes, he let his sight multiply—cluster upon
cluster of projects, and an occasional house. A small bathtub toy of a
boat puffed gray bubbles of smoke as it angled through Tar Lake—still
today, motionless—pushing water before it and tugging a huge ship
behind. He laid his head back on the dusty seat and felt the sun
getting hot on his shoulders and neck.
A red roar. The train spit him onto the elevated platform a mile
from Red Hook, the closest it could take him. With a dull gleam of
clanking metal, it pulled away from the station, the wooden planks
under his feet humming and vibrating. He stood on his perch and
watched and waited. Double distance. Sight took solid shape reaching
to his brain. The city hung enduring. Central and South Lincoln and a
river stringing them together. He sought an exit. No silk thread of
elevator to lower him through the web of scaffolding down to the
street below. Instead, a twine of stairs, unraveling strands of metal
that spiraled up from the street. He piloted these stairs, three
flights.
In patient black lines and arrows, a bus sign mapped his journey.
Yes, the bus could deliver him to Red Hook. But he wanted—needed—to
complete the final leg of the journey on foot. It's about heart. He
walked.
Streets gaping and torn with road work. Birds still as shadows.
Swift-moving clouds. A haze of sunlight. He rubbed his eyes, which
burned from being closed, and cleaned dry ash from his throat. One-
eyed beer bottles poked front grass, watching him. Heat radiated in a
circular fashion throughout his body. He moved carefully under the
shocked eye of the sun, a calf trying out new legs. Engines erupted,
rousing dogs in an alley, barking in the shadows, then the sun snuck
into the alley and a dog bursted bright, chasing a light-winged
pigeon. Scoped Jesus with ears erect, a TV antenna. Jesus hoped the
dog would stray into distance. It did not. Jesus kicked a pop can and
sent it clattering. At the end of the block, a wino lay curled up in a
doorway, vomit rolling like lava down his lips.
Long time since Jesus had seen vomit like that. Long time. (How
many years ago? Count them.) Decatur. Great-aunt Beulah, Lula Mae's
sister, was bedridden after a heart attack. Her wasted frame barely
made a ripple in the sharp-white hospital sheets (not remembered
mounds of yellow flesh propped against her home pillows), plastic
tubes following the lines of her throat, moving toward the curve of
her slow-breathing chest, then trailing off. And John—this man he knew
as his father, wild in the face, sensing the stuff in Jesus and Hatch,
their young blood purring, gurgling, lifted high, struggling to be
heard—John snuck Jesus and Hatch from under the hopeful eves of the
family into the morning, the sun's bare ribs poking through the
clouds, Jesus and Hatch perched in the back seat of John's gold Park
Avenue, a huge ship of a car. They went burning up the straight lines
and smooth planes of the highway, John driving with perfect ease, one
hand on the steering wheel, or no hands at all, using his knees
(didn't need no guardrail to keep the car on track with John squeezing
the steering wheel between his knees, narrowing the highway, making it
skinny) or chest (man and machine leaning as one toward Kankakee); he
and Dave (his main man, running buddy, kin by marriage, adopted blood)
would hold contests, one steering while blindfolded, then the other
steering with his nose, teeth, or chin, or toes; and one eye on the
rearview mirror, yes the rearview mirror where Jesus's baby boots once
dangled white—somebody had stolen them, along with John's radio and
the whitewall tires—and kicked to the motion and speed, dancing; and
the highway unraveling like a bandage, a narrow road darkened by trees
and underbrush, the car rushing and bouncing, and him swaying to the
motion—the two of you stuck your hands out of the open window, feeling
the air rush past—his stomach sucking in against itself. John would
wheel the car off the road and into every bare field, free of
cornstalks, bearing down fast on hip-hopping hares, trying to run them
out onto the road, but no luck, since rabbits were spasm-quick,
breaking from one clump of brush to another, running for the high
grass, thickets, the trees, just escaping by the skin of their buck
teeth, and John tiring of the hunt; and thirsty, charting a course—the
Kankakee River following and flowing beside the road, the river in his
memory flowing brown, heavy, and slow (slow cause John never speeded
inside city limits), always there, always working, never tiring, like
Lucifer, my uncle, so-claimed—to a liquor store, over in Kankakee
cause Decatur was a dry county then, and John bought bottles and
bottles of gin, bottles and bottles of tonic water, John mixing drinks
for the three of them, potent drinks in plastic cups, and they drank
in the dense shadows of the pear trees—fourteen trees, count em, where
they felled fruit with broom handles to satisfy hunger and adventure—
in Beulah's backyard, leaves like thin fingers of cloud, a wandering
smell of wetness, drinking through the afternoon and into the night,
he and Hatch playing musical chairs but without music, without chairs,
until Hatch babbled something about blacks in Africa being short on
corn bread, and he, short on ham hocks; then it came, someone pulled
the chairs from under their stomachs, it came, pink, flowing,
stinking, he and Hatch taking turns, their stomachs rebelling, John
laughing all the while, carrying them to the car, black John invisible
in the night, diamond ring sparkling on the steering wheel. They
couldn't have been more than thirteen.
He and Hatch were close then, the very name Hatch as familiar and
comforting as his own. They were related by blood, and though they
differed in shade—he as yellow as sunlight on an open field, and
Hatch, evening shadow—he could see in his cousin some trace of his
grandmother's appearance. Kin in will and act. Cutting the fool with
John. John, bet you can't catch us! John chased them round and round
the courtyard, them running on three-, four-, five-, six-year-old
legs, their screams lifting from the mouth of the copper-filled
fountain. You boys scream like girls! John said, chasing them, but
actually restraining himself, moving slow, cause his short bulldog
legs contained a terrible momentum, the blurred speed of hot pistons.
Close then. Double-teaming John on the basketball court. (John always
won.) Cutting the fool in church, propelling their farts with paper
fans. Or pitching and batting in the living room with a broom handle
and a rolled-up pair of socks. And basketball with a bath sponge and
lampshades for hoops. Standing tall in the swings, the chains tight in
the tunnels of their hands, pumping their legs and knees, carrying the
swings in arcs above the ground, slanting into the sky, the chains
shaking and creaking. Pedaling their bikes with slim strong ankles,
pedaling, fast eggbeaters, guiding the bikes zigzag through the
streets, wind whistling past the ears, drawing back on the handlebars,
like cowboys pulling back on reins, balancing their bikes, and the
front wheel rising for the wheelie, a cobra raised and ready to
strike, and the two of you rode the snake for a half block or more.
And in quieter moments, doctoring the broken wings of dragonflies with
Band-Aids or cutting the lights from fireflies with a Popsicle stick
and saving the sparkling treasure in a mason jar. Driving down to
Decatur, the speed of flight, fields of cornstalks bent like singers
over microphones, the sun sinking into the fields like spilled wine,
and the headlights stabbing through the darkness, and scattered
trailers like discarded metal cartridges, where John bought Buddha—
weed, he called it—from white trash.
Your seventh birthday John stormed out the front door, you and
Hatch two in kind, seated in a high-backed chair, clutching the
armrests, Dogma the chameleon—confused about color—caged in plastic
across your shared laps, and Gracie—the woman you know as mother, the
woman who grunted you into this world—holding her massive Bible at her
side, weight that anchored her, kept her from being swept away.
Every hair on your head is counted, she said. Each strand has a
name.
Well, John said. You ain't got to worry. I ain't coming back. He
let the door close.
Without hesitation Gracie turned from the shut door and slipped
into the spell of habit. Bathe, put on her perfumed gown, rub Vaseline
under her nose, grease the skin above her upper lip, lotion her body
for the motions of love, cook John's favorite meal, salmon or trout,
place the food beneath two glowing steel dishes for warmth, then retire
—her small hesitant walk, steps of a little bird—to her bedroom
rocking chair before an open window overlooking Tar Lake, her Bible
open on her lap, and patient as a fisherman, waiting for her John to
arrive with his Cadillac ways. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy
cometh in the morning. Rocking robin, rocking robin, beak-hungry for
the spermal worm. Come moonlight, John bounds through the door, and a
burning awakens her, wine color brightens her black berry face. John
leaves quiet as dew the next morning, and she returns to her rocking
chair.
Jesus heard a sound, corn popping over an open fire. Hooded niggas
circled a corner, drinking from a swollen paper bag.
What up, homes?
What up. He measured his words. He didn't look into the cave of
the hood.
Want some? A hand extended the paper bag out to him.
No, thanks.
Yo, g. You kinda tall, ain't you?
You shoot hoop?
Yo, black. Kinda red, ain't you?
Funny-lookin muddafudda.
Blood-colored.
Three quick full steps took him beyond the voices' range. A can
rolled down the gutter, its source of locomotion invisible. Red Hook
shoved his head back—as if tilted for a barber's razor, straining the
neck. Red Hook. Twelve buildings, each twenty-six stories high, a red
path of brick thrusting skyward, poking the clouds, bleeding them.
Each building a planet in configuration with the next, a galaxy of
colors. Sharp structural edges challenged anyone who entered. Word,
heard stories about project niggas throwing bikes on unsuspecting
passersby. And sure-eyed snipers who could catch you in the open
chances of their sight. Can't miss me. A tall nigga like me stand out.
And red too.
Jesus spit, saw the thought rise and fall. Above him, birds cried.
He lifted his face to the sky—black specks of birds high above the
buildings, their cries changing in pitch as they shifted in direction—
and let it crush him. The sun was almost blinding. Thick clouds of
black smoke, a ship's smokestack puffing up from the buildings. Word,
used to be able to drop yo garbage in the incinerator. Every floor had
one. Til people started stuffing their babies clown wit the garbage.
The shiny brick more like tile. A scorched dog black-snarled from the
wall. In a rainbow of colors, weighted words screamed. Too much of it,
lines and colors running together, a mess of messages. Inside a
sickle, a half-moon, letters darkened and deformed, scrawled in a
giant's hand: BIRDLEG WE REMEMBER.
Birdleg? Jesus inhaled the word into his lungs. Fact? Fable?
Ghost? Memory was so deep as to silence his footsteps. Somewhere here
was an honoring presence. Jesus felt it at his back. Shit, Red Hook!
The jets! You can get caught in the middle of something. Rival crews.
But he refused to allow this possibility to slow him. If it's gon
happen, it's gon happen. His shadow swooped high and huge above him.
He entered a vestibule the size of a bathroom. Felt it, more than
saw it. A cramped doghouse of shadows. Every vestibule inch quilted
with more rainbow-strands of words. Bare shattered floors. Long rows
of metallic mailboxes, most broken and open like teeth in serious need
of dental work. And bottled-up summer heat. A metal stairwell rigged
up and out of sight. Metal stairs? A broken escalator? Word,
stairwells often carried fire throughout an entire building. Jesus
knew. Stairwells are chimneys. Up ahead, the elevator caved. Word, in
the jets, elevator motors were mounted on each building's outside,
victim to vandals and weather. What if the elevator stopped between
floors, caught in midair, like a defective yo-yo? What if flame
climbed the yo-yo string? Are elevators chimneys too? Jesus entered. A
hard aroma of piss. He pushed the button for seven.
Doors shut. Pulleys groan into motion. Cables whine. Tug at the
muscles of his legs and belly. Rust metal walls compress on him. He
extends his arms scarecrow fashion, the walls in-moving as the car
rises, and water rising inside him, cold, making him swell. He shuts
his eyes.
Black weight drops like an anchor and knocks him flat.
Just relax.
Put your head down.
Iron fingers mine for the diamond in his ear. Hey, he warns. Be
careful. That diamond cost me ... Iron fingers squeeze his throat and
crush the words. He chokes. Voices spin above him. He feels caressing
fingers on his back—whose?—strokes of bird feather. Easy, boy. Calm
down. His hands move rakelike in Gracie's plush living-room carpet. I
said calm down. The anchor lowers. Two steel loops snap click and lock
around his wrists. (He hears them, he feels them, but does not see.)
Spikelike leaves rise high above him from the coffee table (ancient,
he has always known it)-supported by four squat curved legs, wooden
ice-cream swirls—above but close enough for him to make out small red-
and-green buds. Wait, he says. I'm money. The two cops work on the
pulleys of his arms—he is heavy with Porsha's cooking and the coin of
life—drawing them, lifting him high above the carpet, table legs,
table, plant pot (glossy green paper), the spiked leaves—bright red on
the front side, but colorless on the reverse; veined and tissue-thin,
lizard skin (Dogma the chameleon) — and small red-and-green buds,
small planets from his height, small planets dissolving in distance.
In his fury, he melts into his deep essential life, hard and heavy, a
red stone, a fossilized apple. Gravity. The cops raise their
nightsticks like black trees. Don't give us any trouble. He fights the
anger shooting through his stomach. The door flies (or hands shove it)
open. The two cops, Jack and Jill, thunder down three nightmare hills
of stairs. A blast of winter wind, a cold wind whipped up by Tar Lake.
His tongue covers, blankets his teeth against the chill.
Jack looks him in the face.
He smiles. Can't break me. Smiles. Gravity. Or frowns. His face is
so cold he isn't sure. His red eyes shove two fossilized apples into
Jack's teeth. Jack yanks down on the cuffs. Get in. He ducks his head
under the siren roof and squeezes into the low ride. The engine
squeals into life like a slaughtered pig. A thin rapid shimmer of
exhaust and the cool wind of motion. Sweat cools out of him. His
wrists itch raw with the rub of the handcuffs. He gazes through the
wedges of mesh partition that separates him from Jack and Jill.
Studies the back of their two capped heads. Then he sees a face in the
rearview mirror. Bitten by sin, Gracie said. Bitten by sin. Two wild
eyes burning in the darkness. Yet, man is born into trouble, as the
sparks fly upward. The car takes a heavy curve. He shuts his eyes.
Circular momentum.
He flutters up through the roof into the domed siren, red light
spiraling through his veins. Springs out into wet darkness. Flares,
flame to sky. Shines. Settles.
A particle of light enters his cell. Spreads like spilled ink on
paper. He feels a flutter in his spine, his back, his shoulder blades.
Peels away from the floor and starts to rise. White. Cold. Weightless.
Distance steadily shortens between himself and the light's point
of origin. He discovers that he is actually part of the light, caught,
a red worm on a bright line.
(Continues...)
(C) 2000 Jeffery Renard Allen All rights reserved. ISBN:
0-374-24626-2
*On the corner.*
CHAPTER ONE
Rails Under My Back
By JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Read the Review
Long before Jesus entered the world, blades of southern grass sliced
up the soles of his grandmother's feet. Her blood leaped from the
danger, drew back into the farthest reaches of her heart, and the
roots of her soul pulled away from the sharp earth which had nurtured
her. But nothing escapes the laws of gravity. We martyr to motion. In
step with the flowing sweep of her garments, an undercurrent of
rhythm, she cut the final strings of attachment, her children, and on
a rich spring day cut a red path to New Mexico—what business had a
nigger there; New Mexicans had yet to invent the word—for a man
eternally bound to a rakish fedora, his sweet face like a mask beneath
it, pinstripe suit, diamond horseshoe tiepin, and two-toned patent-
leather shoes. Drawn by the power of nostalgia—Hold infinity in the
palm of your hand and eternity in an hour—she swept back two years
later without a word about her lover, the father of R.L., her oldest
child. A decade later he would be thrown through the windshield of his
sparkling green (red?) Edsel (Eldorado?)—the squeal before the thud,
the skid after—his decapitated body slipping the surly bonds of earth,
sailing kitelike over a California highway, arcing over and beyond a
thicket of treetops, to touch the face of God. Jesus was convinced
that her exodus had strangled any impulse her surviving children—his
mother and aunt—had to get close to her, and had ripped open his life,
for an eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its
sorrow. The years only deepened the sorrow his family had in common.
Even a hatred like hot ice could not halt destiny.
Jesus thought he could never recover from his grandmother's
betrayal. While his mother and aunt had long purged their thoughts and
feelings of the act—it escaping through the back of their heads, into
space—it continued to haunt him, a wallet photograph that he carried
everywhere. He moved with a sort of amazement in the world, anger
fueling the furnace of his heart. With ceremonial rigidity, each day
he wore red, symbol of his unflagging fury.
He leaned over and spit. The saliva held and gleamed, suspended,
rust-flecked, then curved down to the pavement. Crashed, sizzled, and
cooled. A red coin. He leaned over to pick it up, but the coin refused
his touch. Sirens sailed into the sky, a spiral of red sound. He drew
himself erect. A strip of white asphalt stretched hot before him. He
walked. Only his brain moved. Tall earth-rooted wrought-iron fences
hovered before a cluster of houses. And beyond the fences, black and
green rhythm of trees. Trees full of birds, plentiful as leaves. The
vapor-kissed spires and steeples of North Park. The sky in fanning
torches and soaring flames. And heavy white clouds hovering, flying
saucers. The street opened into a broader one, the space between two
massive rows of skyscrapers black with a continuous throng, two busy
streams of ants. He walked with long scissors stride for Lawrence
Street, where he would catch the train to South Lincoln. The cradle of
the week, the sunny street filled with competitive radios, anxious
engines, car horns, hawking of wares, footsteps, and conversation—
disembodied voices—a kiss blown from the lips of the square, floating,
rising, and hanging above it. The sidewalk steamed with city
sprinklers pulsing wet rhythm. Jesus sang:
Shine went below deck, eating his peas
Til the water come up to his knees.
He felt air currents from the movement of cars, shoes, skirts.
Rumble and rustle tingling the blood in his rubber-soled feet. Suits
and ties and skirts and heels were beginning to change color in the
spring heat. A constant weight in their faces, the suits and ties
lugged briefcases, newspapers tucked under the left arm. The skirts
and heels sported ankle socks and gym shoes—tennis shoes, his
grandmother called them—as if they gon shoot some b-ball in the
office, arc crumpled bills (fives, tens, twenties) into steel
wastebaskets. Cut a V for the express train into Central, slowed
somewhat by purses bulging with thick paperback novels. A flyer curved
around a lamppost: MOTHERFUCK THE WAR! A hang-tailed hound jogged out
of an alley—Jesus hoped he would stray within range—and past a knot of
beggars hunched over in a corner doorway, rained-on ghosts.
Kind sir, could you—
Hell nawl. Jesus did not pause in his walking. Get a job.
Go to hell and take yo mamma wit you, just for company.
Jesus kept walking.
Cheap nigga.
Jesus kept walking.
Goofy-looking motherfucka.
Bitch, Jesus said, stopping, turning at the beggar, facing the
spit-thickened beard. Wash the fart out yo draws. He continued on.
He hadn't gone far when stench stopped him. Eighth and Lawrence,
the subway entrance—A blind man could find it. Follow your nose—a
funky mouth, with worn, broken, and dirty stairs like neglected teeth,
descending to a dark throat. The subway breathed him in. He tugged at
his ear, his fingers rough against the diamond there. He knew all
about the purse and chain snatchers who rode the trains. Rough niggas
versed in all tricks of the trade, killin, stealin, and gankin to get
paid. Once, he saw a thief hack off a woman's earlobes with a straight
razor to loot her diamond earrings. The thief wiped the blood from his
razor onto her blouse, slowly and smoothly, as if buttering a bread
slice, and Jesus wondered if the woman screamed from the sight of
blood, from the pain, or from the sensation of reaching for her lobes
to discover they were no longer there.
He had heart, a lot of it—fires could not burn it, water could not
drown it, winds could not bend it—and would sport his jewelry. He
thought: Cutthroats. Praise them. Got to have heart to cut mine out.
But ain't nobody gon fuck wit me. Jesus Jones. They are clay. I am
stone.
Two rails of level steel, the only clean things in the subway, ran
from the darkness at one end of the tunnel into the darkness at the
other end, ran over the piles of filth that filtered down from the
street two levels above. Two rails that glittered like silver needles
in the darkness, awaiting the shiny thimble of train.
A dark pulse at a distance. Jesus could feel it under his feet. He
saw pale light, then deep shadow, then glistening train, train that
came boring out of the tunnel, bellowing in the distance. Carrying
distance to him. The doors opened quick and noisy like a switchblade.
Jesus slipped inside the silver sleeve. Muscled a window seat, the
window black, nothing to see, metal brightness around him. Suits and
ties rested their briefcases across their laps. Skirts and heels
parked with their legs crossed. Then, fresh motion. The train moved
over greased tracks, a steady rumbling beneath the floor, the car
shaking from side to side. The black subway tunnel was a hollow
subterranean string stretching under Tar Lake and joining North Park
and Central. And the car, an aquarium with passengers for fish. Better
yet, a reverse aquarium, with the fish kept in and the water out.
Jesus curled up in his seat, jacket draped across his shoulders,
neck, and chest, baby-snug. The car was cold, cutting to the bone.
Lucky he had worn his thick socks. Still, the cold bit through; he
shivered, a pinned butterfly. The train swept along the curve of a
blind river (one of the city's twelve). Long after the curve had
passed from vision, it boomeranged back, remained imprinted on his
inner eyes, two spinning black half-moons. He liked double-decker
trains and wished this were one. Kind sticks to kind. But you almost
never saw them in the city anymore. Only in the suburbs. Every summer,
the family—you, your cousin Hatch, and your aunt Sheila—used to board
a silver double-decker for West Memphis, where Lula Mae live, riding
high above the rails, your thermos heavy with cold soda pop, and fried
chicken stuffed in a greasy shoebox, the aroma strong enough to haunt
future passengers for years to come, odors of food and rhythm of
rails. Eat that chicken, then lie back fat in your seat, gazing out
the window. High hills rolled all the way to the horizon. Scraggly
trees like squirrel tails. Cows still as stones. Each rail tie demands
attention. The conductor would shout out a litany of stops. And you
and Hatch would get happy.
Stop all that jumpin like monkeys in the jungle, Sheila said. You
know better. Show some home training. Do that again and I'll beat the
living daylights outa you right here on this train.
Lula Mae would be waiting at the station, accompanied by a redcap.
A woman thick in the waist, taking up space. Tall, commanding vision
from a toadstool of height. A creature of no color, so pale many
believed her an albino. You were afraid of her white skin, the smell,
the touch. Feared her black snakelike veins. And the figured scars on
her calves. Ole cotton patch. Crazy Junebug giggled giggled at her
calves. Ole cotton patch. Tar baby. Tar baby.
She saw you and kindled instantly. Over here! Waving. Go get their
bags.
Yes'm. The redcap rushed forward. Loaded the suitcases onto his
cart.
Give yo granny a hug. The thorny hairs on her bosom snatched you
before you could comply or decline.
Lula Mae?
Yes.
Why you don't shave them hairs?
Meanness rooted up in the black veins of her neck. Cause they only
gon grow back longer.
Come switching time, she would make you go out to the yard and
strip your own branch of leaves. Whip the hard branch soft against
your hardheaded behind. Whip your butt and legs with the ease of a
conducter waving his baton. After a thorough switching, sweat greased
the creases of her face. But if she had no energy to switch, if
exhaustion had sunk into her bones, she settled for a quick open hand
slap across your chops. Water would dam at the back of your tongue, a
multitude of days threatening to spill out. You ran out the house and
escaped to the red gravel road. Found there, frogs hard and flat as
soda pop cans in the desiccating sun. So you would kick them—metal
sound, scraping across the sunbaked road—or, if your fingers had
heart, pick them up and fling them, Frisbee fashion, bouncing and
skipping like a pebble on water.
But John gave it to me. For my birthday.
Yeah. His daddy gave it to him. My Uncle John gave it.
I turn seven.
I don't care if Jehovah himself give it to you, Lula Mae said.
Take that scorpion outa here.
He ain't no scorpion, Hatch said. He a chameleon, a lizard.
Houston got scorpions look jus like lizards.
This ain't Houston.
Lula Mae drew back her hand. I don't stand for no back talk.
Sheila might, but I don't. Now take that scorpion outa here.
You and Hatch carried Dogma the chameleon out to the red gravel
road.
He get crushed, you said.
No he won't. He a chameleon.
So?
He can change color. Red. The color of the road.
You laughed. What good that gon do him?
He be invisible. Cars can't see him.
Stop that chunkin! Lula Mae screamed.
Damn! Can't have no fun!
Yeah. No fun.
Lula Mae was tight on you, shoes. Watchin you hard and hateful
from her brick porch. You could see her eyes, looming, though the road
was several hundred feet away. Preacher eyes trying to burn the devil
out of you. The sun looks through your western window. Carries the
record of human deeds to the Lord each night. Legs might escape her
body—run to the yellow field across the road, high grass tall and
safe, or so you thought—but nothing could escape her eyes. Even when
you climbed high in a tree—a yolk sun cooking the sky, burning and
blinding you, with cool air singing in the branches—her high-flying
eyes would find you. Hurtful eyes that followed you everywhere, rocks
in your shoe.
Stop all that runnin! Yall catch heatstroke. Her skin was
transparent under the sun, revealing a red tracery of veins. She
snapped open her umbrella. Held back the day with her body, scraps of
sky peering in past her arms and trickles of light at her feet. She
started into the road, red gravel crunching underfoot. You and Hatch
followed behind her.
Why yall walkin behind me! Gon up there where I can keep an eye on
you.
Small houses, kin to Lula Mae's, lined both sides of the road and
Lula Mae greeted the occupants one and the same.
How you duce?
Fine.
Alright. How you duce?
Fine.
Alright.
Entered the barbershop, a bare floor, dust and splinters, a single
white cloth apron draped across a single red leather chair, and a
black plastic comb submerged — pickled — in a container of green
alcohol, causing you to recall Lula Mae's false teeth at the bottom of
a water-filled mason jar.
These here my grandsons. Cut them nice. Start wit the red one
first.
The barber positioned you in the chair, pinned the apron behind
your neck, and set to work. You sat there under the buzzing weight of
the clippers, eyes peeling motion, a circle of red hair at the
circular base of the barber's chair, skin from an apple. Then the
barber resuscitated the drowned comb. Grabbed a fistful of grease. Set
to work. There, he said.
Look nice, Lula Mae said. Real nice.
You fidgeted in the chair to chance a glance in the mirror. Your
red hair: high and crenellated, a rooster's comb.
The doors cracked open like bones. Federal Station. First stop in
Central. The car emptied. Jesus sneezed, coughed, Lula Mae's
suffocating odor on his skin. Her rhythm inside him, is what he is.
Ill will persisted in his blood. Someday—the promise stagnating,
unstirred—he would pay her a little visit, yes, surprise her. Surely,
she would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing, caught in his
thick, molten rage. What would she say? Do? Invite him to her bosom,
that valley of thorns? What would he say? Say anything at all, other
than to pronounce sentence? What would he do? What could satisfy him,
right the ancient wrongs? A white smothering pillow? A knife clean
between the ribs? A shower of stones? A quick spray of gunfire and hot
bullets bubbling the flesh? Or something slow? The body straining
against a thick pony-tail length of rope, the pulley creaking, and the
feet and legs lowering into a leech-filled well? Today might be the
day. Board a train for West Memphis. Better yet, fly down there swift
as thought and serve a death sentence.
Doors shut, closing the world out. He exhaled, expelling the rage,
eased back in his seat, and tried to relax. He still had a long ride
ahead. A long ride. All the way to South Lincoln. Red Hook. Two
hundred blocks. Four hundred. Who could say? But nothing better to do
today. Might as well chill with No Face the Thief. Puff live. He even
toyed with the idea of taking No Face under his wing and schooling
him. Thinking this with last night in mind.
You came all the way from Red Hook to find me? Jesus tightened his one-
handed grip on the steering wheel, strangling a snake to bring it
under control, let it know who's boss.
You the man, No Face said from the back seat.
The words, like the vibration of a silver wire, sent a glow of
light into Jesus's heart. Oh yeah?
Yeah. No Face pressed his face close to the back of Jesus's
shoulder, close enough to kiss him. Jesus could smell his sewer breath
and hear his heavy elastic breathing, which came and snapped back,
came and snapped back. That's what they say.
No Face pinched the Buddha's unlit end and offered it to Jesus.
Jesus took the hot end between thumb and forefinger and watched No
Face in the rearview mirror. The dark magnified every detail. Jesus
didn't look anything like No Face the Thief and was proud of it. No
Face resembled a baited fish someone had snatched from the line and
thrown back into the water. Short dreads like dynamite fuses. Face a
ravaged landscape of dark hollows, craters and caves where the flesh
had collapsed in on the bone. A checker-thick black eye patch. Word,
nigga poured acid into his eye to win a bet. A nappy mustache, round
nose boogers. Uneven brown teeth deep in his gums, ancient ruins. He
tried to move near you when he spoke. You'd move and he'd move closer.
You'd move again and so would he. Jesus trained his eyes back on the
road. Hungry feelers, headlights searched the night. He took a long
and slow suck on the Buddha; red warmth spread through his body; the
streetlights brightened, then gleamed in full glory.
That's what they say.
Why they say that? Jesus looked at No Face, so clear a moment ago,
now a small black oval on the rearview mirror. He turned his eyes back
to the road. Aimed the unlit end of the Buddha at No Face's voice. No
Face took it. Jesus smelled the seashells of No Face's armpits.
Considered lowering the window to let the night in. But a frail yellow
moon stuck to the windows and sealed them.
You know. No Face took a long toke, a deep sea diver sucking at
the mouth of his Aqua-Lung.
Motion hummed a wave through Jesus. He and No Face floated in
white space. Floated. He lowered his head, ducking danger—the car's
angled hood.
That's what they say.
From what they say, Jesus said, you the man. Everybody knew No
Face the Thief. Knew his rep. Bandit. Robbin folks wit his finger
stuck inside a dirty paper bag.
Me? I'm jus a young brother strugglin in stride. No Face watched
Jesus with his one bright headlight of an eye.
Where's the Buddha? The wheel was easy in Jesus's hands. He barely
had to touch it. The bobbing headlight beams curved, pulled the car
around a corner, and hit another car in the distance.
Ain't no mo.
Jesus heard the ashtray click open, then close.
You want me to fire up another one?
Nawl. I'm straight.
Got plenty.
You the man.
I work hard.
The curb curved the car in. Eighth and Lawrence. Like to see a
brother tryin to do sumpin fo himself, Jesus said. Not like these
knuckleheads hangin on the corner. He pointed to one or two of them,
hardly motioning, his hand still on the steering wheel.
I work hard.
I bet you do. Yo, I'll holler at you.
Want some more of this good blow. Check me anytime. We'll have a
session.
Bet.
Anytime.
Stonewall? He didn't have to ask.
No Face laughed a spiral up Jesus's spine. You don't know me from
Adam. I'm from Red Hook. I represent. Red Hook. First building. Seven-
oh-seven.
Bet.
No Face extended his hand over the seat cushion. Jesus shook it
without turning around. Where I say?
I remember.
Can you Find it?
Jesus laughed. I can find anything. The engine ignited. Sparks
fired from twig to branch and made the car glow.
Jesus spoke to himself. Hope he don't start geekin. I probably
shouldn front this nigga, but you always need some sucka willin to
work cheap.
The flash caused a new flow, waves of people crashing through the
doors. Union Station. Subway, not the distance-seeking trains stories
above. Downtown. The Loop. Now, the Loop-jammed train would follow
Central River, the spine up Central's back. He heard voices. Laughter.
Halfway there. Halfway. 707. The first building. The first from where?
He didn't let it worry him. Can't be too hard to find. He stretched
his legs, exhaling to drag out what dragged inside, and smelled the
sweet burn of pain. The residue of urban moonshine bit his stomach and
pumped acid through his body. With the pain came a warmth, a shimmer,
a pulse, a new brightness, haze. His sight blew a hole in itself. Shut
down his eyes. Darkness.
He loved darkness. Shapes moved across the interior screens of his
lids. Funny how the shut eye could fill with dark water, a well, where
shadows and shapes swam, and empty circles floated like life rafts. He
couldn't quite get the effect now. So he opened his eyes to the stares
of the other commuters. Gave them his hardest look. As a child (seven,
he figured), he saw a motion picture about a group of blond children
who channeled destructive power through their stares. (Their eyes were
probably blue, but that was before Gracie and John owned a color TV,
or perhaps the movie was in black and white.) For weeks, he'd stood
before the mirror trying to get that glow. And now, ten years later,
he still had not mastered it, but he mustered enough power to send the
eyes of the other passengers running for cover. He extended his long
legs and put his kicks on the seat in front of him. Darkness made deep
mirrors of the windows. His reflection stared back at him. Shaved head
sparkled with sun, even the veins at his temples radiant as cables. He
liked it that way, bullet-smooth, streamlined, straight and accurate.
Shaved it every day with a straight razor. (Looking down on the very
crown of his head, one would see faint black lines, like a claw print.
He wore his scars proudly.) A slit of mouth. A thin pipe of neck. Clay-
colored skin. Red freckles like dried blood. The naked razors of his
long thin lips. The sharp angles of his jawline. The tentative touches
of a red beard. Ears that stuck out antennae-like. And the big eyes,
visionary and alert.
The train broke out of the darkness, rose at the sky. Jesus saw it
with his body. Through the window, sunlight struck a glancing blow
against his cheek. He followed the sun into himself. The car shook
from side to side as if trying to rouse him awake. He opened the
suction caves of his eyes. A constant stream of images rushed past the
window: the cuts and valleys of the river (another one of the city's
twelve), angles of sail jutting from water into sky, row upon row of
three-story buildings—yes, he let his sight multiply—cluster upon
cluster of projects, and an occasional house. A small bathtub toy of a
boat puffed gray bubbles of smoke as it angled through Tar Lake—still
today, motionless—pushing water before it and tugging a huge ship
behind. He laid his head back on the dusty seat and felt the sun
getting hot on his shoulders and neck.
A red roar. The train spit him onto the elevated platform a mile
from Red Hook, the closest it could take him. With a dull gleam of
clanking metal, it pulled away from the station, the wooden planks
under his feet humming and vibrating. He stood on his perch and
watched and waited. Double distance. Sight took solid shape reaching
to his brain. The city hung enduring. Central and South Lincoln and a
river stringing them together. He sought an exit. No silk thread of
elevator to lower him through the web of scaffolding down to the
street below. Instead, a twine of stairs, unraveling strands of metal
that spiraled up from the street. He piloted these stairs, three
flights.
In patient black lines and arrows, a bus sign mapped his journey.
Yes, the bus could deliver him to Red Hook. But he wanted—needed—to
complete the final leg of the journey on foot. It's about heart. He
walked.
Streets gaping and torn with road work. Birds still as shadows.
Swift-moving clouds. A haze of sunlight. He rubbed his eyes, which
burned from being closed, and cleaned dry ash from his throat. One-
eyed beer bottles poked front grass, watching him. Heat radiated in a
circular fashion throughout his body. He moved carefully under the
shocked eye of the sun, a calf trying out new legs. Engines erupted,
rousing dogs in an alley, barking in the shadows, then the sun snuck
into the alley and a dog bursted bright, chasing a light-winged
pigeon. Scoped Jesus with ears erect, a TV antenna. Jesus hoped the
dog would stray into distance. It did not. Jesus kicked a pop can and
sent it clattering. At the end of the block, a wino lay curled up in a
doorway, vomit rolling like lava down his lips.
Long time since Jesus had seen vomit like that. Long time. (How
many years ago? Count them.) Decatur. Great-aunt Beulah, Lula Mae's
sister, was bedridden after a heart attack. Her wasted frame barely
made a ripple in the sharp-white hospital sheets (not remembered
mounds of yellow flesh propped against her home pillows), plastic
tubes following the lines of her throat, moving toward the curve of
her slow-breathing chest, then trailing off. And John—this man he knew
as his father, wild in the face, sensing the stuff in Jesus and Hatch,
their young blood purring, gurgling, lifted high, struggling to be
heard—John snuck Jesus and Hatch from under the hopeful eves of the
family into the morning, the sun's bare ribs poking through the
clouds, Jesus and Hatch perched in the back seat of John's gold Park
Avenue, a huge ship of a car. They went burning up the straight lines
and smooth planes of the highway, John driving with perfect ease, one
hand on the steering wheel, or no hands at all, using his knees
(didn't need no guardrail to keep the car on track with John squeezing
the steering wheel between his knees, narrowing the highway, making it
skinny) or chest (man and machine leaning as one toward Kankakee); he
and Dave (his main man, running buddy, kin by marriage, adopted blood)
would hold contests, one steering while blindfolded, then the other
steering with his nose, teeth, or chin, or toes; and one eye on the
rearview mirror, yes the rearview mirror where Jesus's baby boots once
dangled white—somebody had stolen them, along with John's radio and
the whitewall tires—and kicked to the motion and speed, dancing; and
the highway unraveling like a bandage, a narrow road darkened by trees
and underbrush, the car rushing and bouncing, and him swaying to the
motion—the two of you stuck your hands out of the open window, feeling
the air rush past—his stomach sucking in against itself. John would
wheel the car off the road and into every bare field, free of
cornstalks, bearing down fast on hip-hopping hares, trying to run them
out onto the road, but no luck, since rabbits were spasm-quick,
breaking from one clump of brush to another, running for the high
grass, thickets, the trees, just escaping by the skin of their buck
teeth, and John tiring of the hunt; and thirsty, charting a course—the
Kankakee River following and flowing beside the road, the river in his
memory flowing brown, heavy, and slow (slow cause John never speeded
inside city limits), always there, always working, never tiring, like
Lucifer, my uncle, so-claimed—to a liquor store, over in Kankakee
cause Decatur was a dry county then, and John bought bottles and
bottles of gin, bottles and bottles of tonic water, John mixing drinks
for the three of them, potent drinks in plastic cups, and they drank
in the dense shadows of the pear trees—fourteen trees, count em, where
they felled fruit with broom handles to satisfy hunger and adventure—
in Beulah's backyard, leaves like thin fingers of cloud, a wandering
smell of wetness, drinking through the afternoon and into the night,
he and Hatch playing musical chairs but without music, without chairs,
until Hatch babbled something about blacks in Africa being short on
corn bread, and he, short on ham hocks; then it came, someone pulled
the chairs from under their stomachs, it came, pink, flowing,
stinking, he and Hatch taking turns, their stomachs rebelling, John
laughing all the while, carrying them to the car, black John invisible
in the night, diamond ring sparkling on the steering wheel. They
couldn't have been more than thirteen.
He and Hatch were close then, the very name Hatch as familiar and
comforting as his own. They were related by blood, and though they
differed in shade—he as yellow as sunlight on an open field, and
Hatch, evening shadow—he could see in his cousin some trace of his
grandmother's appearance. Kin in will and act. Cutting the fool with
John. John, bet you can't catch us! John chased them round and round
the courtyard, them running on three-, four-, five-, six-year-old
legs, their screams lifting from the mouth of the copper-filled
fountain. You boys scream like girls! John said, chasing them, but
actually restraining himself, moving slow, cause his short bulldog
legs contained a terrible momentum, the blurred speed of hot pistons.
Close then. Double-teaming John on the basketball court. (John always
won.) Cutting the fool in church, propelling their farts with paper
fans. Or pitching and batting in the living room with a broom handle
and a rolled-up pair of socks. And basketball with a bath sponge and
lampshades for hoops. Standing tall in the swings, the chains tight in
the tunnels of their hands, pumping their legs and knees, carrying the
swings in arcs above the ground, slanting into the sky, the chains
shaking and creaking. Pedaling their bikes with slim strong ankles,
pedaling, fast eggbeaters, guiding the bikes zigzag through the
streets, wind whistling past the ears, drawing back on the handlebars,
like cowboys pulling back on reins, balancing their bikes, and the
front wheel rising for the wheelie, a cobra raised and ready to
strike, and the two of you rode the snake for a half block or more.
And in quieter moments, doctoring the broken wings of dragonflies with
Band-Aids or cutting the lights from fireflies with a Popsicle stick
and saving the sparkling treasure in a mason jar. Driving down to
Decatur, the speed of flight, fields of cornstalks bent like singers
over microphones, the sun sinking into the fields like spilled wine,
and the headlights stabbing through the darkness, and scattered
trailers like discarded metal cartridges, where John bought Buddha—
weed, he called it—from white trash.
Your seventh birthday John stormed out the front door, you and
Hatch two in kind, seated in a high-backed chair, clutching the
armrests, Dogma the chameleon—confused about color—caged in plastic
across your shared laps, and Gracie—the woman you know as mother, the
woman who grunted you into this world—holding her massive Bible at her
side, weight that anchored her, kept her from being swept away.
Every hair on your head is counted, she said. Each strand has a
name.
Well, John said. You ain't got to worry. I ain't coming back. He
let the door close.
Without hesitation Gracie turned from the shut door and slipped
into the spell of habit. Bathe, put on her perfumed gown, rub Vaseline
under her nose, grease the skin above her upper lip, lotion her body
for the motions of love, cook John's favorite meal, salmon or trout,
place the food beneath two glowing steel dishes for warmth, then retire
—her small hesitant walk, steps of a little bird—to her bedroom
rocking chair before an open window overlooking Tar Lake, her Bible
open on her lap, and patient as a fisherman, waiting for her John to
arrive with his Cadillac ways. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy
cometh in the morning. Rocking robin, rocking robin, beak-hungry for
the spermal worm. Come moonlight, John bounds through the door, and a
burning awakens her, wine color brightens her black berry face. John
leaves quiet as dew the next morning, and she returns to her rocking
chair.
Jesus heard a sound, corn popping over an open fire. Hooded niggas
circled a corner, drinking from a swollen paper bag.
What up, homes?
What up. He measured his words. He didn't look into the cave of
the hood.
Want some? A hand extended the paper bag out to him.
No, thanks.
Yo, g. You kinda tall, ain't you?
You shoot hoop?
Yo, black. Kinda red, ain't you?
Funny-lookin muddafudda.
Blood-colored.
Three quick full steps took him beyond the voices' range. A can
rolled down the gutter, its source of locomotion invisible. Red Hook
shoved his head back—as if tilted for a barber's razor, straining the
neck. Red Hook. Twelve buildings, each twenty-six stories high, a red
path of brick thrusting skyward, poking the clouds, bleeding them.
Each building a planet in configuration with the next, a galaxy of
colors. Sharp structural edges challenged anyone who entered. Word,
heard stories about project niggas throwing bikes on unsuspecting
passersby. And sure-eyed snipers who could catch you in the open
chances of their sight. Can't miss me. A tall nigga like me stand out.
And red too.
Jesus spit, saw the thought rise and fall. Above him, birds cried.
He lifted his face to the sky—black specks of birds high above the
buildings, their cries changing in pitch as they shifted in direction—
and let it crush him. The sun was almost blinding. Thick clouds of
black smoke, a ship's smokestack puffing up from the buildings. Word,
used to be able to drop yo garbage in the incinerator. Every floor had
one. Til people started stuffing their babies clown wit the garbage.
The shiny brick more like tile. A scorched dog black-snarled from the
wall. In a rainbow of colors, weighted words screamed. Too much of it,
lines and colors running together, a mess of messages. Inside a
sickle, a half-moon, letters darkened and deformed, scrawled in a
giant's hand: BIRDLEG WE REMEMBER.
Birdleg? Jesus inhaled the word into his lungs. Fact? Fable?
Ghost? Memory was so deep as to silence his footsteps. Somewhere here
was an honoring presence. Jesus felt it at his back. Shit, Red Hook!
The jets! You can get caught in the middle of something. Rival crews.
But he refused to allow this possibility to slow him. If it's gon
happen, it's gon happen. His shadow swooped high and huge above him.
He entered a vestibule the size of a bathroom. Felt it, more than
saw it. A cramped doghouse of shadows. Every vestibule inch quilted
with more rainbow-strands of words. Bare shattered floors. Long rows
of metallic mailboxes, most broken and open like teeth in serious need
of dental work. And bottled-up summer heat. A metal stairwell rigged
up and out of sight. Metal stairs? A broken escalator? Word,
stairwells often carried fire throughout an entire building. Jesus
knew. Stairwells are chimneys. Up ahead, the elevator caved. Word, in
the jets, elevator motors were mounted on each building's outside,
victim to vandals and weather. What if the elevator stopped between
floors, caught in midair, like a defective yo-yo? What if flame
climbed the yo-yo string? Are elevators chimneys too? Jesus entered. A
hard aroma of piss. He pushed the button for seven.
Doors shut. Pulleys groan into motion. Cables whine. Tug at the
muscles of his legs and belly. Rust metal walls compress on him. He
extends his arms scarecrow fashion, the walls in-moving as the car
rises, and water rising inside him, cold, making him swell. He shuts
his eyes.
Black weight drops like an anchor and knocks him flat.
Just relax.
Put your head down.
Iron fingers mine for the diamond in his ear. Hey, he warns. Be
careful. That diamond cost me ... Iron fingers squeeze his throat and
crush the words. He chokes. Voices spin above him. He feels caressing
fingers on his back—whose?—strokes of bird feather. Easy, boy. Calm
down. His hands move rakelike in Gracie's plush living-room carpet. I
said calm down. The anchor lowers. Two steel loops snap click and lock
around his wrists. (He hears them, he feels them, but does not see.)
Spikelike leaves rise high above him from the coffee table (ancient,
he has always known it)-supported by four squat curved legs, wooden
ice-cream swirls—above but close enough for him to make out small red-
and-green buds. Wait, he says. I'm money. The two cops work on the
pulleys of his arms—he is heavy with Porsha's cooking and the coin of
life—drawing them, lifting him high above the carpet, table legs,
table, plant pot (glossy green paper), the spiked leaves—bright red on
the front side, but colorless on the reverse; veined and tissue-thin,
lizard skin (Dogma the chameleon) — and small red-and-green buds,
small planets from his height, small planets dissolving in distance.
In his fury, he melts into his deep essential life, hard and heavy, a
red stone, a fossilized apple. Gravity. The cops raise their
nightsticks like black trees. Don't give us any trouble. He fights the
anger shooting through his stomach. The door flies (or hands shove it)
open. The two cops, Jack and Jill, thunder down three nightmare hills
of stairs. A blast of winter wind, a cold wind whipped up by Tar Lake.
His tongue covers, blankets his teeth against the chill.
Jack looks him in the face.
He smiles. Can't break me. Smiles. Gravity. Or frowns. His face is
so cold he isn't sure. His red eyes shove two fossilized apples into
Jack's teeth. Jack yanks down on the cuffs. Get in. He ducks his head
under the siren roof and squeezes into the low ride. The engine
squeals into life like a slaughtered pig. A thin rapid shimmer of
exhaust and the cool wind of motion. Sweat cools out of him. His
wrists itch raw with the rub of the handcuffs. He gazes through the
wedges of mesh partition that separates him from Jack and Jill.
Studies the back of their two capped heads. Then he sees a face in the
rearview mirror. Bitten by sin, Gracie said. Bitten by sin. Two wild
eyes burning in the darkness. Yet, man is born into trouble, as the
sparks fly upward. The car takes a heavy curve. He shuts his eyes.
Circular momentum.
He flutters up through the roof into the domed siren, red light
spiraling through his veins. Springs out into wet darkness. Flares,
flame to sky. Shines. Settles.
A particle of light enters his cell. Spreads like spilled ink on
paper. He feels a flutter in his spine, his back, his shoulder blades.
Peels away from the floor and starts to rise. White. Cold. Weightless.
Distance steadily shortens between himself and the light's point
of origin. He discovers that he is actually part of the light, caught,
a red worm on a bright line.
(Continues...)
(C) 2000 Jeffery Renard Allen All rights reserved. ISBN:
0-374-24626-2
*On the corner.*
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[Jeff, *presente*]
CHAPTER ONE
Rails Under My Back
By JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Read the Review
Long before Jesus entered the world, blades of southern grass sliced
up the soles of his grandmother's feet. Her blood leaped from the
danger, drew back into the farthest reaches of her heart, and the
roots of her soul pulled away from the sharp earth which had nurtured
her. But nothing escapes the laws of gravity. We martyr to motion. In
step with the flowing sweep of her garments, an undercurrent of
rhythm, she cut the final strings of attachment, her children, and on
a rich spring day cut a red path to New Mexico—what business had a
nigger there; New Mexicans had yet to invent the word—for a man
eternally bound to a rakish fedora, his sweet face like a mask beneath
it, pinstripe suit, diamond horseshoe tiepin, and two-toned patent-
leather shoes. Drawn by the power of nostalgia—Hold infinity in the
palm of your hand and eternity in an hour—she swept back two years
later without a word about her lover, the father of R.L., her oldest
child. A decade later he would be thrown through the windshield of his
sparkling green (red?) Edsel (Eldorado?)—the squeal before the thud,
the skid after—his decapitated body slipping the surly bonds of earth,
sailing kitelike over a California highway, arcing over and beyond a
thicket of treetops, to touch the face of God. Jesus was convinced
that her exodus had strangled any impulse her surviving children—his
mother and aunt—had to get close to her, and had ripped open his life,
for an eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its
sorrow. The years only deepened the sorrow his family had in common.
Even a hatred like hot ice could not halt destiny.
Jesus thought he could never recover from his grandmother's
betrayal. While his mother and aunt had long purged their thoughts and
feelings of the act—it escaping through the back of their heads, into
space—it continued to haunt him, a wallet photograph that he carried
everywhere. He moved with a sort of amazement in the world, anger
fueling the furnace of his heart. With ceremonial rigidity, each day
he wore red, symbol of his unflagging fury.
He leaned over and spit. The saliva held and gleamed, suspended,
rust-flecked, then curved down to the pavement. Crashed, sizzled, and
cooled. A red coin. He leaned over to pick it up, but the coin refused
his touch. Sirens sailed into the sky, a spiral of red sound. He drew
himself erect. A strip of white asphalt stretched hot before him. He
walked. Only his brain moved. Tall earth-rooted wrought-iron fences
hovered before a cluster of houses. And beyond the fences, black and
green rhythm of trees. Trees full of birds, plentiful as leaves. The
vapor-kissed spires and steeples of North Park. The sky in fanning
torches and soaring flames. And heavy white clouds hovering, flying
saucers. The street opened into a broader one, the space between two
massive rows of skyscrapers black with a continuous throng, two busy
streams of ants. He walked with long scissors stride for Lawrence
Street, where he would catch the train to South Lincoln. The cradle of
the week, the sunny street filled with competitive radios, anxious
engines, car horns, hawking of wares, footsteps, and conversation—
disembodied voices—a kiss blown from the lips of the square, floating,
rising, and hanging above it. The sidewalk steamed with city
sprinklers pulsing wet rhythm. Jesus sang:
Shine went below deck, eating his peas
Til the water come up to his knees.
He felt air currents from the movement of cars, shoes, skirts.
Rumble and rustle tingling the blood in his rubber-soled feet. Suits
and ties and skirts and heels were beginning to change color in the
spring heat. A constant weight in their faces, the suits and ties
lugged briefcases, newspapers tucked under the left arm. The skirts
and heels sported ankle socks and gym shoes—tennis shoes, his
grandmother called them—as if they gon shoot some b-ball in the
office, arc crumpled bills (fives, tens, twenties) into steel
wastebaskets. Cut a V for the express train into Central, slowed
somewhat by purses bulging with thick paperback novels. A flyer curved
around a lamppost: MOTHERFUCK THE WAR! A hang-tailed hound jogged out
of an alley—Jesus hoped he would stray within range—and past a knot of
beggars hunched over in a corner doorway, rained-on ghosts.
Kind sir, could you—
Hell nawl. Jesus did not pause in his walking. Get a job.
Go to hell and take yo mamma wit you, just for company.
Jesus kept walking.
Cheap nigga.
Jesus kept walking.
Goofy-looking motherfucka.
Bitch, Jesus said, stopping, turning at the beggar, facing the
spit-thickened beard. Wash the fart out yo draws. He continued on.
He hadn't gone far when stench stopped him. Eighth and Lawrence,
the subway entrance—A blind man could find it. Follow your nose—a
funky mouth, with worn, broken, and dirty stairs like neglected teeth,
descending to a dark throat. The subway breathed him in. He tugged at
his ear, his fingers rough against the diamond there. He knew all
about the purse and chain snatchers who rode the trains. Rough niggas
versed in all tricks of the trade, killin, stealin, and gankin to get
paid. Once, he saw a thief hack off a woman's earlobes with a straight
razor to loot her diamond earrings. The thief wiped the blood from his
razor onto her blouse, slowly and smoothly, as if buttering a bread
slice, and Jesus wondered if the woman screamed from the sight of
blood, from the pain, or from the sensation of reaching for her lobes
to discover they were no longer there.
He had heart, a lot of it—fires could not burn it, water could not
drown it, winds could not bend it—and would sport his jewelry. He
thought: Cutthroats. Praise them. Got to have heart to cut mine out.
But ain't nobody gon fuck wit me. Jesus Jones. They are clay. I am
stone.
Two rails of level steel, the only clean things in the subway, ran
from the darkness at one end of the tunnel into the darkness at the
other end, ran over the piles of filth that filtered down from the
street two levels above. Two rails that glittered like silver needles
in the darkness, awaiting the shiny thimble of train.
A dark pulse at a distance. Jesus could feel it under his feet. He
saw pale light, then deep shadow, then glistening train, train that
came boring out of the tunnel, bellowing in the distance. Carrying
distance to him. The doors opened quick and noisy like a switchblade.
Jesus slipped inside the silver sleeve. Muscled a window seat, the
window black, nothing to see, metal brightness around him. Suits and
ties rested their briefcases across their laps. Skirts and heels
parked with their legs crossed. Then, fresh motion. The train moved
over greased tracks, a steady rumbling beneath the floor, the car
shaking from side to side. The black subway tunnel was a hollow
subterranean string stretching under Tar Lake and joining North Park
and Central. And the car, an aquarium with passengers for fish. Better
yet, a reverse aquarium, with the fish kept in and the water out.
Jesus curled up in his seat, jacket draped across his shoulders,
neck, and chest, baby-snug. The car was cold, cutting to the bone.
Lucky he had worn his thick socks. Still, the cold bit through; he
shivered, a pinned butterfly. The train swept along the curve of a
blind river (one of the city's twelve). Long after the curve had
passed from vision, it boomeranged back, remained imprinted on his
inner eyes, two spinning black half-moons. He liked double-decker
trains and wished this were one. Kind sticks to kind. But you almost
never saw them in the city anymore. Only in the suburbs. Every summer,
the family—you, your cousin Hatch, and your aunt Sheila—used to board
a silver double-decker for West Memphis, where Lula Mae live, riding
high above the rails, your thermos heavy with cold soda pop, and fried
chicken stuffed in a greasy shoebox, the aroma strong enough to haunt
future passengers for years to come, odors of food and rhythm of
rails. Eat that chicken, then lie back fat in your seat, gazing out
the window. High hills rolled all the way to the horizon. Scraggly
trees like squirrel tails. Cows still as stones. Each rail tie demands
attention. The conductor would shout out a litany of stops. And you
and Hatch would get happy.
Stop all that jumpin like monkeys in the jungle, Sheila said. You
know better. Show some home training. Do that again and I'll beat the
living daylights outa you right here on this train.
Lula Mae would be waiting at the station, accompanied by a redcap.
A woman thick in the waist, taking up space. Tall, commanding vision
from a toadstool of height. A creature of no color, so pale many
believed her an albino. You were afraid of her white skin, the smell,
the touch. Feared her black snakelike veins. And the figured scars on
her calves. Ole cotton patch. Crazy Junebug giggled giggled at her
calves. Ole cotton patch. Tar baby. Tar baby.
She saw you and kindled instantly. Over here! Waving. Go get their
bags.
Yes'm. The redcap rushed forward. Loaded the suitcases onto his
cart.
Give yo granny a hug. The thorny hairs on her bosom snatched you
before you could comply or decline.
Lula Mae?
Yes.
Why you don't shave them hairs?
Meanness rooted up in the black veins of her neck. Cause they only
gon grow back longer.
Come switching time, she would make you go out to the yard and
strip your own branch of leaves. Whip the hard branch soft against
your hardheaded behind. Whip your butt and legs with the ease of a
conducter waving his baton. After a thorough switching, sweat greased
the creases of her face. But if she had no energy to switch, if
exhaustion had sunk into her bones, she settled for a quick open hand
slap across your chops. Water would dam at the back of your tongue, a
multitude of days threatening to spill out. You ran out the house and
escaped to the red gravel road. Found there, frogs hard and flat as
soda pop cans in the desiccating sun. So you would kick them—metal
sound, scraping across the sunbaked road—or, if your fingers had
heart, pick them up and fling them, Frisbee fashion, bouncing and
skipping like a pebble on water.
But John gave it to me. For my birthday.
Yeah. His daddy gave it to him. My Uncle John gave it.
I turn seven.
I don't care if Jehovah himself give it to you, Lula Mae said.
Take that scorpion outa here.
He ain't no scorpion, Hatch said. He a chameleon, a lizard.
Houston got scorpions look jus like lizards.
This ain't Houston.
Lula Mae drew back her hand. I don't stand for no back talk.
Sheila might, but I don't. Now take that scorpion outa here.
You and Hatch carried Dogma the chameleon out to the red gravel
road.
He get crushed, you said.
No he won't. He a chameleon.
So?
He can change color. Red. The color of the road.
You laughed. What good that gon do him?
He be invisible. Cars can't see him.
Stop that chunkin! Lula Mae screamed.
Damn! Can't have no fun!
Yeah. No fun.
Lula Mae was tight on you, shoes. Watchin you hard and hateful
from her brick porch. You could see her eyes, looming, though the road
was several hundred feet away. Preacher eyes trying to burn the devil
out of you. The sun looks through your western window. Carries the
record of human deeds to the Lord each night. Legs might escape her
body—run to the yellow field across the road, high grass tall and
safe, or so you thought—but nothing could escape her eyes. Even when
you climbed high in a tree—a yolk sun cooking the sky, burning and
blinding you, with cool air singing in the branches—her high-flying
eyes would find you. Hurtful eyes that followed you everywhere, rocks
in your shoe.
Stop all that runnin! Yall catch heatstroke. Her skin was
transparent under the sun, revealing a red tracery of veins. She
snapped open her umbrella. Held back the day with her body, scraps of
sky peering in past her arms and trickles of light at her feet. She
started into the road, red gravel crunching underfoot. You and Hatch
followed behind her.
Why yall walkin behind me! Gon up there where I can keep an eye on
you.
Small houses, kin to Lula Mae's, lined both sides of the road and
Lula Mae greeted the occupants one and the same.
How you duce?
Fine.
Alright. How you duce?
Fine.
Alright.
Entered the barbershop, a bare floor, dust and splinters, a single
white cloth apron draped across a single red leather chair, and a
black plastic comb submerged — pickled — in a container of green
alcohol, causing you to recall Lula Mae's false teeth at the bottom of
a water-filled mason jar.
These here my grandsons. Cut them nice. Start wit the red one
first.
The barber positioned you in the chair, pinned the apron behind
your neck, and set to work. You sat there under the buzzing weight of
the clippers, eyes peeling motion, a circle of red hair at the
circular base of the barber's chair, skin from an apple. Then the
barber resuscitated the drowned comb. Grabbed a fistful of grease. Set
to work. There, he said.
Look nice, Lula Mae said. Real nice.
You fidgeted in the chair to chance a glance in the mirror. Your
red hair: high and crenellated, a rooster's comb.
The doors cracked open like bones. Federal Station. First stop in
Central. The car emptied. Jesus sneezed, coughed, Lula Mae's
suffocating odor on his skin. Her rhythm inside him, is what he is.
Ill will persisted in his blood. Someday—the promise stagnating,
unstirred—he would pay her a little visit, yes, surprise her. Surely,
she would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing, caught in his
thick, molten rage. What would she say? Do? Invite him to her bosom,
that valley of thorns? What would he say? Say anything at all, other
than to pronounce sentence? What would he do? What could satisfy him,
right the ancient wrongs? A white smothering pillow? A knife clean
between the ribs? A shower of stones? A quick spray of gunfire and hot
bullets bubbling the flesh? Or something slow? The body straining
against a thick pony-tail length of rope, the pulley creaking, and the
feet and legs lowering into a leech-filled well? Today might be the
day. Board a train for West Memphis. Better yet, fly down there swift
as thought and serve a death sentence.
Doors shut, closing the world out. He exhaled, expelling the rage,
eased back in his seat, and tried to relax. He still had a long ride
ahead. A long ride. All the way to South Lincoln. Red Hook. Two
hundred blocks. Four hundred. Who could say? But nothing better to do
today. Might as well chill with No Face the Thief. Puff live. He even
toyed with the idea of taking No Face under his wing and schooling
him. Thinking this with last night in mind.
You came all the way from Red Hook to find me? Jesus tightened his one-
handed grip on the steering wheel, strangling a snake to bring it
under control, let it know who's boss.
You the man, No Face said from the back seat.
The words, like the vibration of a silver wire, sent a glow of
light into Jesus's heart. Oh yeah?
Yeah. No Face pressed his face close to the back of Jesus's
shoulder, close enough to kiss him. Jesus could smell his sewer breath
and hear his heavy elastic breathing, which came and snapped back,
came and snapped back. That's what they say.
No Face pinched the Buddha's unlit end and offered it to Jesus.
Jesus took the hot end between thumb and forefinger and watched No
Face in the rearview mirror. The dark magnified every detail. Jesus
didn't look anything like No Face the Thief and was proud of it. No
Face resembled a baited fish someone had snatched from the line and
thrown back into the water. Short dreads like dynamite fuses. Face a
ravaged landscape of dark hollows, craters and caves where the flesh
had collapsed in on the bone. A checker-thick black eye patch. Word,
nigga poured acid into his eye to win a bet. A nappy mustache, round
nose boogers. Uneven brown teeth deep in his gums, ancient ruins. He
tried to move near you when he spoke. You'd move and he'd move closer.
You'd move again and so would he. Jesus trained his eyes back on the
road. Hungry feelers, headlights searched the night. He took a long
and slow suck on the Buddha; red warmth spread through his body; the
streetlights brightened, then gleamed in full glory.
That's what they say.
Why they say that? Jesus looked at No Face, so clear a moment ago,
now a small black oval on the rearview mirror. He turned his eyes back
to the road. Aimed the unlit end of the Buddha at No Face's voice. No
Face took it. Jesus smelled the seashells of No Face's armpits.
Considered lowering the window to let the night in. But a frail yellow
moon stuck to the windows and sealed them.
You know. No Face took a long toke, a deep sea diver sucking at
the mouth of his Aqua-Lung.
Motion hummed a wave through Jesus. He and No Face floated in
white space. Floated. He lowered his head, ducking danger—the car's
angled hood.
That's what they say.
From what they say, Jesus said, you the man. Everybody knew No
Face the Thief. Knew his rep. Bandit. Robbin folks wit his finger
stuck inside a dirty paper bag.
Me? I'm jus a young brother strugglin in stride. No Face watched
Jesus with his one bright headlight of an eye.
Where's the Buddha? The wheel was easy in Jesus's hands. He barely
had to touch it. The bobbing headlight beams curved, pulled the car
around a corner, and hit another car in the distance.
Ain't no mo.
Jesus heard the ashtray click open, then close.
You want me to fire up another one?
Nawl. I'm straight.
Got plenty.
You the man.
I work hard.
The curb curved the car in. Eighth and Lawrence. Like to see a
brother tryin to do sumpin fo himself, Jesus said. Not like these
knuckleheads hangin on the corner. He pointed to one or two of them,
hardly motioning, his hand still on the steering wheel.
I work hard.
I bet you do. Yo, I'll holler at you.
Want some more of this good blow. Check me anytime. We'll have a
session.
Bet.
Anytime.
Stonewall? He didn't have to ask.
No Face laughed a spiral up Jesus's spine. You don't know me from
Adam. I'm from Red Hook. I represent. Red Hook. First building. Seven-
oh-seven.
Bet.
No Face extended his hand over the seat cushion. Jesus shook it
without turning around. Where I say?
I remember.
Can you Find it?
Jesus laughed. I can find anything. The engine ignited. Sparks
fired from twig to branch and made the car glow.
Jesus spoke to himself. Hope he don't start geekin. I probably
shouldn front this nigga, but you always need some sucka willin to
work cheap.
The flash caused a new flow, waves of people crashing through the
doors. Union Station. Subway, not the distance-seeking trains stories
above. Downtown. The Loop. Now, the Loop-jammed train would follow
Central River, the spine up Central's back. He heard voices. Laughter.
Halfway there. Halfway. 707. The first building. The first from where?
He didn't let it worry him. Can't be too hard to find. He stretched
his legs, exhaling to drag out what dragged inside, and smelled the
sweet burn of pain. The residue of urban moonshine bit his stomach and
pumped acid through his body. With the pain came a warmth, a shimmer,
a pulse, a new brightness, haze. His sight blew a hole in itself. Shut
down his eyes. Darkness.
He loved darkness. Shapes moved across the interior screens of his
lids. Funny how the shut eye could fill with dark water, a well, where
shadows and shapes swam, and empty circles floated like life rafts. He
couldn't quite get the effect now. So he opened his eyes to the stares
of the other commuters. Gave them his hardest look. As a child (seven,
he figured), he saw a motion picture about a group of blond children
who channeled destructive power through their stares. (Their eyes were
probably blue, but that was before Gracie and John owned a color TV,
or perhaps the movie was in black and white.) For weeks, he'd stood
before the mirror trying to get that glow. And now, ten years later,
he still had not mastered it, but he mustered enough power to send the
eyes of the other passengers running for cover. He extended his long
legs and put his kicks on the seat in front of him. Darkness made deep
mirrors of the windows. His reflection stared back at him. Shaved head
sparkled with sun, even the veins at his temples radiant as cables. He
liked it that way, bullet-smooth, streamlined, straight and accurate.
Shaved it every day with a straight razor. (Looking down on the very
crown of his head, one would see faint black lines, like a claw print.
He wore his scars proudly.) A slit of mouth. A thin pipe of neck. Clay-
colored skin. Red freckles like dried blood. The naked razors of his
long thin lips. The sharp angles of his jawline. The tentative touches
of a red beard. Ears that stuck out antennae-like. And the big eyes,
visionary and alert.
The train broke out of the darkness, rose at the sky. Jesus saw it
with his body. Through the window, sunlight struck a glancing blow
against his cheek. He followed the sun into himself. The car shook
from side to side as if trying to rouse him awake. He opened the
suction caves of his eyes. A constant stream of images rushed past the
window: the cuts and valleys of the river (another one of the city's
twelve), angles of sail jutting from water into sky, row upon row of
three-story buildings—yes, he let his sight multiply—cluster upon
cluster of projects, and an occasional house. A small bathtub toy of a
boat puffed gray bubbles of smoke as it angled through Tar Lake—still
today, motionless—pushing water before it and tugging a huge ship
behind. He laid his head back on the dusty seat and felt the sun
getting hot on his shoulders and neck.
A red roar. The train spit him onto the elevated platform a mile
from Red Hook, the closest it could take him. With a dull gleam of
clanking metal, it pulled away from the station, the wooden planks
under his feet humming and vibrating. He stood on his perch and
watched and waited. Double distance. Sight took solid shape reaching
to his brain. The city hung enduring. Central and South Lincoln and a
river stringing them together. He sought an exit. No silk thread of
elevator to lower him through the web of scaffolding down to the
street below. Instead, a twine of stairs, unraveling strands of metal
that spiraled up from the street. He piloted these stairs, three
flights.
In patient black lines and arrows, a bus sign mapped his journey.
Yes, the bus could deliver him to Red Hook. But he wanted—needed—to
complete the final leg of the journey on foot. It's about heart. He
walked.
Streets gaping and torn with road work. Birds still as shadows.
Swift-moving clouds. A haze of sunlight. He rubbed his eyes, which
burned from being closed, and cleaned dry ash from his throat. One-
eyed beer bottles poked front grass, watching him. Heat radiated in a
circular fashion throughout his body. He moved carefully under the
shocked eye of the sun, a calf trying out new legs. Engines erupted,
rousing dogs in an alley, barking in the shadows, then the sun snuck
into the alley and a dog bursted bright, chasing a light-winged
pigeon. Scoped Jesus with ears erect, a TV antenna. Jesus hoped the
dog would stray into distance. It did not. Jesus kicked a pop can and
sent it clattering. At the end of the block, a wino lay curled up in a
doorway, vomit rolling like lava down his lips.
Long time since Jesus had seen vomit like that. Long time. (How
many years ago? Count them.) Decatur. Great-aunt Beulah, Lula Mae's
sister, was bedridden after a heart attack. Her wasted frame barely
made a ripple in the sharp-white hospital sheets (not remembered
mounds of yellow flesh propped against her home pillows), plastic
tubes following the lines of her throat, moving toward the curve of
her slow-breathing chest, then trailing off. And John—this man he knew
as his father, wild in the face, sensing the stuff in Jesus and Hatch,
their young blood purring, gurgling, lifted high, struggling to be
heard—John snuck Jesus and Hatch from under the hopeful eves of the
family into the morning, the sun's bare ribs poking through the
clouds, Jesus and Hatch perched in the back seat of John's gold Park
Avenue, a huge ship of a car. They went burning up the straight lines
and smooth planes of the highway, John driving with perfect ease, one
hand on the steering wheel, or no hands at all, using his knees
(didn't need no guardrail to keep the car on track with John squeezing
the steering wheel between his knees, narrowing the highway, making it
skinny) or chest (man and machine leaning as one toward Kankakee); he
and Dave (his main man, running buddy, kin by marriage, adopted blood)
would hold contests, one steering while blindfolded, then the other
steering with his nose, teeth, or chin, or toes; and one eye on the
rearview mirror, yes the rearview mirror where Jesus's baby boots once
dangled white—somebody had stolen them, along with John's radio and
the whitewall tires—and kicked to the motion and speed, dancing; and
the highway unraveling like a bandage, a narrow road darkened by trees
and underbrush, the car rushing and bouncing, and him swaying to the
motion—the two of you stuck your hands out of the open window, feeling
the air rush past—his stomach sucking in against itself. John would
wheel the car off the road and into every bare field, free of
cornstalks, bearing down fast on hip-hopping hares, trying to run them
out onto the road, but no luck, since rabbits were spasm-quick,
breaking from one clump of brush to another, running for the high
grass, thickets, the trees, just escaping by the skin of their buck
teeth, and John tiring of the hunt; and thirsty, charting a course—the
Kankakee River following and flowing beside the road, the river in his
memory flowing brown, heavy, and slow (slow cause John never speeded
inside city limits), always there, always working, never tiring, like
Lucifer, my uncle, so-claimed—to a liquor store, over in Kankakee
cause Decatur was a dry county then, and John bought bottles and
bottles of gin, bottles and bottles of tonic water, John mixing drinks
for the three of them, potent drinks in plastic cups, and they drank
in the dense shadows of the pear trees—fourteen trees, count em, where
they felled fruit with broom handles to satisfy hunger and adventure—
in Beulah's backyard, leaves like thin fingers of cloud, a wandering
smell of wetness, drinking through the afternoon and into the night,
he and Hatch playing musical chairs but without music, without chairs,
until Hatch babbled something about blacks in Africa being short on
corn bread, and he, short on ham hocks; then it came, someone pulled
the chairs from under their stomachs, it came, pink, flowing,
stinking, he and Hatch taking turns, their stomachs rebelling, John
laughing all the while, carrying them to the car, black John invisible
in the night, diamond ring sparkling on the steering wheel. They
couldn't have been more than thirteen.
He and Hatch were close then, the very name Hatch as familiar and
comforting as his own. They were related by blood, and though they
differed in shade—he as yellow as sunlight on an open field, and
Hatch, evening shadow—he could see in his cousin some trace of his
grandmother's appearance. Kin in will and act. Cutting the fool with
John. John, bet you can't catch us! John chased them round and round
the courtyard, them running on three-, four-, five-, six-year-old
legs, their screams lifting from the mouth of the copper-filled
fountain. You boys scream like girls! John said, chasing them, but
actually restraining himself, moving slow, cause his short bulldog
legs contained a terrible momentum, the blurred speed of hot pistons.
Close then. Double-teaming John on the basketball court. (John always
won.) Cutting the fool in church, propelling their farts with paper
fans. Or pitching and batting in the living room with a broom handle
and a rolled-up pair of socks. And basketball with a bath sponge and
lampshades for hoops. Standing tall in the swings, the chains tight in
the tunnels of their hands, pumping their legs and knees, carrying the
swings in arcs above the ground, slanting into the sky, the chains
shaking and creaking. Pedaling their bikes with slim strong ankles,
pedaling, fast eggbeaters, guiding the bikes zigzag through the
streets, wind whistling past the ears, drawing back on the handlebars,
like cowboys pulling back on reins, balancing their bikes, and the
front wheel rising for the wheelie, a cobra raised and ready to
strike, and the two of you rode the snake for a half block or more.
And in quieter moments, doctoring the broken wings of dragonflies with
Band-Aids or cutting the lights from fireflies with a Popsicle stick
and saving the sparkling treasure in a mason jar. Driving down to
Decatur, the speed of flight, fields of cornstalks bent like singers
over microphones, the sun sinking into the fields like spilled wine,
and the headlights stabbing through the darkness, and scattered
trailers like discarded metal cartridges, where John bought Buddha—
weed, he called it—from white trash.
Your seventh birthday John stormed out the front door, you and
Hatch two in kind, seated in a high-backed chair, clutching the
armrests, Dogma the chameleon—confused about color—caged in plastic
across your shared laps, and Gracie—the woman you know as mother, the
woman who grunted you into this world—holding her massive Bible at her
side, weight that anchored her, kept her from being swept away.
Every hair on your head is counted, she said. Each strand has a
name.
Well, John said. You ain't got to worry. I ain't coming back. He
let the door close.
Without hesitation Gracie turned from the shut door and slipped
into the spell of habit. Bathe, put on her perfumed gown, rub Vaseline
under her nose, grease the skin above her upper lip, lotion her body
for the motions of love, cook John's favorite meal, salmon or trout,
place the food beneath two glowing steel dishes for warmth, then retire
—her small hesitant walk, steps of a little bird—to her bedroom
rocking chair before an open window overlooking Tar Lake, her Bible
open on her lap, and patient as a fisherman, waiting for her John to
arrive with his Cadillac ways. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy
cometh in the morning. Rocking robin, rocking robin, beak-hungry for
the spermal worm. Come moonlight, John bounds through the door, and a
burning awakens her, wine color brightens her black berry face. John
leaves quiet as dew the next morning, and she returns to her rocking
chair.
Jesus heard a sound, corn popping over an open fire. Hooded niggas
circled a corner, drinking from a swollen paper bag.
What up, homes?
What up. He measured his words. He didn't look into the cave of
the hood.
Want some? A hand extended the paper bag out to him.
No, thanks.
Yo, g. You kinda tall, ain't you?
You shoot hoop?
Yo, black. Kinda red, ain't you?
Funny-lookin muddafudda.
Blood-colored.
Three quick full steps took him beyond the voices' range. A can
rolled down the gutter, its source of locomotion invisible. Red Hook
shoved his head back—as if tilted for a barber's razor, straining the
neck. Red Hook. Twelve buildings, each twenty-six stories high, a red
path of brick thrusting skyward, poking the clouds, bleeding them.
Each building a planet in configuration with the next, a galaxy of
colors. Sharp structural edges challenged anyone who entered. Word,
heard stories about project niggas throwing bikes on unsuspecting
passersby. And sure-eyed snipers who could catch you in the open
chances of their sight. Can't miss me. A tall nigga like me stand out.
And red too.
Jesus spit, saw the thought rise and fall. Above him, birds cried.
He lifted his face to the sky—black specks of birds high above the
buildings, their cries changing in pitch as they shifted in direction—
and let it crush him. The sun was almost blinding. Thick clouds of
black smoke, a ship's smokestack puffing up from the buildings. Word,
used to be able to drop yo garbage in the incinerator. Every floor had
one. Til people started stuffing their babies clown wit the garbage.
The shiny brick more like tile. A scorched dog black-snarled from the
wall. In a rainbow of colors, weighted words screamed. Too much of it,
lines and colors running together, a mess of messages. Inside a
sickle, a half-moon, letters darkened and deformed, scrawled in a
giant's hand: BIRDLEG WE REMEMBER.
Birdleg? Jesus inhaled the word into his lungs. Fact? Fable?
Ghost? Memory was so deep as to silence his footsteps. Somewhere here
was an honoring presence. Jesus felt it at his back. Shit, Red Hook!
The jets! You can get caught in the middle of something. Rival crews.
But he refused to allow this possibility to slow him. If it's gon
happen, it's gon happen. His shadow swooped high and huge above him.
He entered a vestibule the size of a bathroom. Felt it, more than
saw it. A cramped doghouse of shadows. Every vestibule inch quilted
with more rainbow-strands of words. Bare shattered floors. Long rows
of metallic mailboxes, most broken and open like teeth in serious need
of dental work. And bottled-up summer heat. A metal stairwell rigged
up and out of sight. Metal stairs? A broken escalator? Word,
stairwells often carried fire throughout an entire building. Jesus
knew. Stairwells are chimneys. Up ahead, the elevator caved. Word, in
the jets, elevator motors were mounted on each building's outside,
victim to vandals and weather. What if the elevator stopped between
floors, caught in midair, like a defective yo-yo? What if flame
climbed the yo-yo string? Are elevators chimneys too? Jesus entered. A
hard aroma of piss. He pushed the button for seven.
Doors shut. Pulleys groan into motion. Cables whine. Tug at the
muscles of his legs and belly. Rust metal walls compress on him. He
extends his arms scarecrow fashion, the walls in-moving as the car
rises, and water rising inside him, cold, making him swell. He shuts
his eyes.
Black weight drops like an anchor and knocks him flat.
Just relax.
Put your head down.
Iron fingers mine for the diamond in his ear. Hey, he warns. Be
careful. That diamond cost me ... Iron fingers squeeze his throat and
crush the words. He chokes. Voices spin above him. He feels caressing
fingers on his back—whose?—strokes of bird feather. Easy, boy. Calm
down. His hands move rakelike in Gracie's plush living-room carpet. I
said calm down. The anchor lowers. Two steel loops snap click and lock
around his wrists. (He hears them, he feels them, but does not see.)
Spikelike leaves rise high above him from the coffee table (ancient,
he has always known it)-supported by four squat curved legs, wooden
ice-cream swirls—above but close enough for him to make out small red-
and-green buds. Wait, he says. I'm money. The two cops work on the
pulleys of his arms—he is heavy with Porsha's cooking and the coin of
life—drawing them, lifting him high above the carpet, table legs,
table, plant pot (glossy green paper), the spiked leaves—bright red on
the front side, but colorless on the reverse; veined and tissue-thin,
lizard skin (Dogma the chameleon) — and small red-and-green buds,
small planets from his height, small planets dissolving in distance.
In his fury, he melts into his deep essential life, hard and heavy, a
red stone, a fossilized apple. Gravity. The cops raise their
nightsticks like black trees. Don't give us any trouble. He fights the
anger shooting through his stomach. The door flies (or hands shove it)
open. The two cops, Jack and Jill, thunder down three nightmare hills
of stairs. A blast of winter wind, a cold wind whipped up by Tar Lake.
His tongue covers, blankets his teeth against the chill.
Jack looks him in the face.
He smiles. Can't break me. Smiles. Gravity. Or frowns. His face is
so cold he isn't sure. His red eyes shove two fossilized apples into
Jack's teeth. Jack yanks down on the cuffs. Get in. He ducks his head
under the siren roof and squeezes into the low ride. The engine
squeals into life like a slaughtered pig. A thin rapid shimmer of
exhaust and the cool wind of motion. Sweat cools out of him. His
wrists itch raw with the rub of the handcuffs. He gazes through the
wedges of mesh partition that separates him from Jack and Jill.
Studies the back of their two capped heads. Then he sees a face in the
rearview mirror. Bitten by sin, Gracie said. Bitten by sin. Two wild
eyes burning in the darkness. Yet, man is born into trouble, as the
sparks fly upward. The car takes a heavy curve. He shuts his eyes.
Circular momentum.
He flutters up through the roof into the domed siren, red light
spiraling through his veins. Springs out into wet darkness. Flares,
flame to sky. Shines. Settles.
A particle of light enters his cell. Spreads like spilled ink on
paper. He feels a flutter in his spine, his back, his shoulder blades.
Peels away from the floor and starts to rise. White. Cold. Weightless.
Distance steadily shortens between himself and the light's point
of origin. He discovers that he is actually part of the light, caught,
a red worm on a bright line.
(Continues...)
(C) 2000 Jeffery Renard Allen All rights reserved. ISBN:
0-374-24626-2
*On the corner.*
CHAPTER ONE
Rails Under My Back
By JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Read the Review
Long before Jesus entered the world, blades of southern grass sliced
up the soles of his grandmother's feet. Her blood leaped from the
danger, drew back into the farthest reaches of her heart, and the
roots of her soul pulled away from the sharp earth which had nurtured
her. But nothing escapes the laws of gravity. We martyr to motion. In
step with the flowing sweep of her garments, an undercurrent of
rhythm, she cut the final strings of attachment, her children, and on
a rich spring day cut a red path to New Mexico—what business had a
nigger there; New Mexicans had yet to invent the word—for a man
eternally bound to a rakish fedora, his sweet face like a mask beneath
it, pinstripe suit, diamond horseshoe tiepin, and two-toned patent-
leather shoes. Drawn by the power of nostalgia—Hold infinity in the
palm of your hand and eternity in an hour—she swept back two years
later without a word about her lover, the father of R.L., her oldest
child. A decade later he would be thrown through the windshield of his
sparkling green (red?) Edsel (Eldorado?)—the squeal before the thud,
the skid after—his decapitated body slipping the surly bonds of earth,
sailing kitelike over a California highway, arcing over and beyond a
thicket of treetops, to touch the face of God. Jesus was convinced
that her exodus had strangled any impulse her surviving children—his
mother and aunt—had to get close to her, and had ripped open his life,
for an eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its
sorrow. The years only deepened the sorrow his family had in common.
Even a hatred like hot ice could not halt destiny.
Jesus thought he could never recover from his grandmother's
betrayal. While his mother and aunt had long purged their thoughts and
feelings of the act—it escaping through the back of their heads, into
space—it continued to haunt him, a wallet photograph that he carried
everywhere. He moved with a sort of amazement in the world, anger
fueling the furnace of his heart. With ceremonial rigidity, each day
he wore red, symbol of his unflagging fury.
He leaned over and spit. The saliva held and gleamed, suspended,
rust-flecked, then curved down to the pavement. Crashed, sizzled, and
cooled. A red coin. He leaned over to pick it up, but the coin refused
his touch. Sirens sailed into the sky, a spiral of red sound. He drew
himself erect. A strip of white asphalt stretched hot before him. He
walked. Only his brain moved. Tall earth-rooted wrought-iron fences
hovered before a cluster of houses. And beyond the fences, black and
green rhythm of trees. Trees full of birds, plentiful as leaves. The
vapor-kissed spires and steeples of North Park. The sky in fanning
torches and soaring flames. And heavy white clouds hovering, flying
saucers. The street opened into a broader one, the space between two
massive rows of skyscrapers black with a continuous throng, two busy
streams of ants. He walked with long scissors stride for Lawrence
Street, where he would catch the train to South Lincoln. The cradle of
the week, the sunny street filled with competitive radios, anxious
engines, car horns, hawking of wares, footsteps, and conversation—
disembodied voices—a kiss blown from the lips of the square, floating,
rising, and hanging above it. The sidewalk steamed with city
sprinklers pulsing wet rhythm. Jesus sang:
Shine went below deck, eating his peas
Til the water come up to his knees.
He felt air currents from the movement of cars, shoes, skirts.
Rumble and rustle tingling the blood in his rubber-soled feet. Suits
and ties and skirts and heels were beginning to change color in the
spring heat. A constant weight in their faces, the suits and ties
lugged briefcases, newspapers tucked under the left arm. The skirts
and heels sported ankle socks and gym shoes—tennis shoes, his
grandmother called them—as if they gon shoot some b-ball in the
office, arc crumpled bills (fives, tens, twenties) into steel
wastebaskets. Cut a V for the express train into Central, slowed
somewhat by purses bulging with thick paperback novels. A flyer curved
around a lamppost: MOTHERFUCK THE WAR! A hang-tailed hound jogged out
of an alley—Jesus hoped he would stray within range—and past a knot of
beggars hunched over in a corner doorway, rained-on ghosts.
Kind sir, could you—
Hell nawl. Jesus did not pause in his walking. Get a job.
Go to hell and take yo mamma wit you, just for company.
Jesus kept walking.
Cheap nigga.
Jesus kept walking.
Goofy-looking motherfucka.
Bitch, Jesus said, stopping, turning at the beggar, facing the
spit-thickened beard. Wash the fart out yo draws. He continued on.
He hadn't gone far when stench stopped him. Eighth and Lawrence,
the subway entrance—A blind man could find it. Follow your nose—a
funky mouth, with worn, broken, and dirty stairs like neglected teeth,
descending to a dark throat. The subway breathed him in. He tugged at
his ear, his fingers rough against the diamond there. He knew all
about the purse and chain snatchers who rode the trains. Rough niggas
versed in all tricks of the trade, killin, stealin, and gankin to get
paid. Once, he saw a thief hack off a woman's earlobes with a straight
razor to loot her diamond earrings. The thief wiped the blood from his
razor onto her blouse, slowly and smoothly, as if buttering a bread
slice, and Jesus wondered if the woman screamed from the sight of
blood, from the pain, or from the sensation of reaching for her lobes
to discover they were no longer there.
He had heart, a lot of it—fires could not burn it, water could not
drown it, winds could not bend it—and would sport his jewelry. He
thought: Cutthroats. Praise them. Got to have heart to cut mine out.
But ain't nobody gon fuck wit me. Jesus Jones. They are clay. I am
stone.
Two rails of level steel, the only clean things in the subway, ran
from the darkness at one end of the tunnel into the darkness at the
other end, ran over the piles of filth that filtered down from the
street two levels above. Two rails that glittered like silver needles
in the darkness, awaiting the shiny thimble of train.
A dark pulse at a distance. Jesus could feel it under his feet. He
saw pale light, then deep shadow, then glistening train, train that
came boring out of the tunnel, bellowing in the distance. Carrying
distance to him. The doors opened quick and noisy like a switchblade.
Jesus slipped inside the silver sleeve. Muscled a window seat, the
window black, nothing to see, metal brightness around him. Suits and
ties rested their briefcases across their laps. Skirts and heels
parked with their legs crossed. Then, fresh motion. The train moved
over greased tracks, a steady rumbling beneath the floor, the car
shaking from side to side. The black subway tunnel was a hollow
subterranean string stretching under Tar Lake and joining North Park
and Central. And the car, an aquarium with passengers for fish. Better
yet, a reverse aquarium, with the fish kept in and the water out.
Jesus curled up in his seat, jacket draped across his shoulders,
neck, and chest, baby-snug. The car was cold, cutting to the bone.
Lucky he had worn his thick socks. Still, the cold bit through; he
shivered, a pinned butterfly. The train swept along the curve of a
blind river (one of the city's twelve). Long after the curve had
passed from vision, it boomeranged back, remained imprinted on his
inner eyes, two spinning black half-moons. He liked double-decker
trains and wished this were one. Kind sticks to kind. But you almost
never saw them in the city anymore. Only in the suburbs. Every summer,
the family—you, your cousin Hatch, and your aunt Sheila—used to board
a silver double-decker for West Memphis, where Lula Mae live, riding
high above the rails, your thermos heavy with cold soda pop, and fried
chicken stuffed in a greasy shoebox, the aroma strong enough to haunt
future passengers for years to come, odors of food and rhythm of
rails. Eat that chicken, then lie back fat in your seat, gazing out
the window. High hills rolled all the way to the horizon. Scraggly
trees like squirrel tails. Cows still as stones. Each rail tie demands
attention. The conductor would shout out a litany of stops. And you
and Hatch would get happy.
Stop all that jumpin like monkeys in the jungle, Sheila said. You
know better. Show some home training. Do that again and I'll beat the
living daylights outa you right here on this train.
Lula Mae would be waiting at the station, accompanied by a redcap.
A woman thick in the waist, taking up space. Tall, commanding vision
from a toadstool of height. A creature of no color, so pale many
believed her an albino. You were afraid of her white skin, the smell,
the touch. Feared her black snakelike veins. And the figured scars on
her calves. Ole cotton patch. Crazy Junebug giggled giggled at her
calves. Ole cotton patch. Tar baby. Tar baby.
She saw you and kindled instantly. Over here! Waving. Go get their
bags.
Yes'm. The redcap rushed forward. Loaded the suitcases onto his
cart.
Give yo granny a hug. The thorny hairs on her bosom snatched you
before you could comply or decline.
Lula Mae?
Yes.
Why you don't shave them hairs?
Meanness rooted up in the black veins of her neck. Cause they only
gon grow back longer.
Come switching time, she would make you go out to the yard and
strip your own branch of leaves. Whip the hard branch soft against
your hardheaded behind. Whip your butt and legs with the ease of a
conducter waving his baton. After a thorough switching, sweat greased
the creases of her face. But if she had no energy to switch, if
exhaustion had sunk into her bones, she settled for a quick open hand
slap across your chops. Water would dam at the back of your tongue, a
multitude of days threatening to spill out. You ran out the house and
escaped to the red gravel road. Found there, frogs hard and flat as
soda pop cans in the desiccating sun. So you would kick them—metal
sound, scraping across the sunbaked road—or, if your fingers had
heart, pick them up and fling them, Frisbee fashion, bouncing and
skipping like a pebble on water.
But John gave it to me. For my birthday.
Yeah. His daddy gave it to him. My Uncle John gave it.
I turn seven.
I don't care if Jehovah himself give it to you, Lula Mae said.
Take that scorpion outa here.
He ain't no scorpion, Hatch said. He a chameleon, a lizard.
Houston got scorpions look jus like lizards.
This ain't Houston.
Lula Mae drew back her hand. I don't stand for no back talk.
Sheila might, but I don't. Now take that scorpion outa here.
You and Hatch carried Dogma the chameleon out to the red gravel
road.
He get crushed, you said.
No he won't. He a chameleon.
So?
He can change color. Red. The color of the road.
You laughed. What good that gon do him?
He be invisible. Cars can't see him.
Stop that chunkin! Lula Mae screamed.
Damn! Can't have no fun!
Yeah. No fun.
Lula Mae was tight on you, shoes. Watchin you hard and hateful
from her brick porch. You could see her eyes, looming, though the road
was several hundred feet away. Preacher eyes trying to burn the devil
out of you. The sun looks through your western window. Carries the
record of human deeds to the Lord each night. Legs might escape her
body—run to the yellow field across the road, high grass tall and
safe, or so you thought—but nothing could escape her eyes. Even when
you climbed high in a tree—a yolk sun cooking the sky, burning and
blinding you, with cool air singing in the branches—her high-flying
eyes would find you. Hurtful eyes that followed you everywhere, rocks
in your shoe.
Stop all that runnin! Yall catch heatstroke. Her skin was
transparent under the sun, revealing a red tracery of veins. She
snapped open her umbrella. Held back the day with her body, scraps of
sky peering in past her arms and trickles of light at her feet. She
started into the road, red gravel crunching underfoot. You and Hatch
followed behind her.
Why yall walkin behind me! Gon up there where I can keep an eye on
you.
Small houses, kin to Lula Mae's, lined both sides of the road and
Lula Mae greeted the occupants one and the same.
How you duce?
Fine.
Alright. How you duce?
Fine.
Alright.
Entered the barbershop, a bare floor, dust and splinters, a single
white cloth apron draped across a single red leather chair, and a
black plastic comb submerged — pickled — in a container of green
alcohol, causing you to recall Lula Mae's false teeth at the bottom of
a water-filled mason jar.
These here my grandsons. Cut them nice. Start wit the red one
first.
The barber positioned you in the chair, pinned the apron behind
your neck, and set to work. You sat there under the buzzing weight of
the clippers, eyes peeling motion, a circle of red hair at the
circular base of the barber's chair, skin from an apple. Then the
barber resuscitated the drowned comb. Grabbed a fistful of grease. Set
to work. There, he said.
Look nice, Lula Mae said. Real nice.
You fidgeted in the chair to chance a glance in the mirror. Your
red hair: high and crenellated, a rooster's comb.
The doors cracked open like bones. Federal Station. First stop in
Central. The car emptied. Jesus sneezed, coughed, Lula Mae's
suffocating odor on his skin. Her rhythm inside him, is what he is.
Ill will persisted in his blood. Someday—the promise stagnating,
unstirred—he would pay her a little visit, yes, surprise her. Surely,
she would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing, caught in his
thick, molten rage. What would she say? Do? Invite him to her bosom,
that valley of thorns? What would he say? Say anything at all, other
than to pronounce sentence? What would he do? What could satisfy him,
right the ancient wrongs? A white smothering pillow? A knife clean
between the ribs? A shower of stones? A quick spray of gunfire and hot
bullets bubbling the flesh? Or something slow? The body straining
against a thick pony-tail length of rope, the pulley creaking, and the
feet and legs lowering into a leech-filled well? Today might be the
day. Board a train for West Memphis. Better yet, fly down there swift
as thought and serve a death sentence.
Doors shut, closing the world out. He exhaled, expelling the rage,
eased back in his seat, and tried to relax. He still had a long ride
ahead. A long ride. All the way to South Lincoln. Red Hook. Two
hundred blocks. Four hundred. Who could say? But nothing better to do
today. Might as well chill with No Face the Thief. Puff live. He even
toyed with the idea of taking No Face under his wing and schooling
him. Thinking this with last night in mind.
You came all the way from Red Hook to find me? Jesus tightened his one-
handed grip on the steering wheel, strangling a snake to bring it
under control, let it know who's boss.
You the man, No Face said from the back seat.
The words, like the vibration of a silver wire, sent a glow of
light into Jesus's heart. Oh yeah?
Yeah. No Face pressed his face close to the back of Jesus's
shoulder, close enough to kiss him. Jesus could smell his sewer breath
and hear his heavy elastic breathing, which came and snapped back,
came and snapped back. That's what they say.
No Face pinched the Buddha's unlit end and offered it to Jesus.
Jesus took the hot end between thumb and forefinger and watched No
Face in the rearview mirror. The dark magnified every detail. Jesus
didn't look anything like No Face the Thief and was proud of it. No
Face resembled a baited fish someone had snatched from the line and
thrown back into the water. Short dreads like dynamite fuses. Face a
ravaged landscape of dark hollows, craters and caves where the flesh
had collapsed in on the bone. A checker-thick black eye patch. Word,
nigga poured acid into his eye to win a bet. A nappy mustache, round
nose boogers. Uneven brown teeth deep in his gums, ancient ruins. He
tried to move near you when he spoke. You'd move and he'd move closer.
You'd move again and so would he. Jesus trained his eyes back on the
road. Hungry feelers, headlights searched the night. He took a long
and slow suck on the Buddha; red warmth spread through his body; the
streetlights brightened, then gleamed in full glory.
That's what they say.
Why they say that? Jesus looked at No Face, so clear a moment ago,
now a small black oval on the rearview mirror. He turned his eyes back
to the road. Aimed the unlit end of the Buddha at No Face's voice. No
Face took it. Jesus smelled the seashells of No Face's armpits.
Considered lowering the window to let the night in. But a frail yellow
moon stuck to the windows and sealed them.
You know. No Face took a long toke, a deep sea diver sucking at
the mouth of his Aqua-Lung.
Motion hummed a wave through Jesus. He and No Face floated in
white space. Floated. He lowered his head, ducking danger—the car's
angled hood.
That's what they say.
From what they say, Jesus said, you the man. Everybody knew No
Face the Thief. Knew his rep. Bandit. Robbin folks wit his finger
stuck inside a dirty paper bag.
Me? I'm jus a young brother strugglin in stride. No Face watched
Jesus with his one bright headlight of an eye.
Where's the Buddha? The wheel was easy in Jesus's hands. He barely
had to touch it. The bobbing headlight beams curved, pulled the car
around a corner, and hit another car in the distance.
Ain't no mo.
Jesus heard the ashtray click open, then close.
You want me to fire up another one?
Nawl. I'm straight.
Got plenty.
You the man.
I work hard.
The curb curved the car in. Eighth and Lawrence. Like to see a
brother tryin to do sumpin fo himself, Jesus said. Not like these
knuckleheads hangin on the corner. He pointed to one or two of them,
hardly motioning, his hand still on the steering wheel.
I work hard.
I bet you do. Yo, I'll holler at you.
Want some more of this good blow. Check me anytime. We'll have a
session.
Bet.
Anytime.
Stonewall? He didn't have to ask.
No Face laughed a spiral up Jesus's spine. You don't know me from
Adam. I'm from Red Hook. I represent. Red Hook. First building. Seven-
oh-seven.
Bet.
No Face extended his hand over the seat cushion. Jesus shook it
without turning around. Where I say?
I remember.
Can you Find it?
Jesus laughed. I can find anything. The engine ignited. Sparks
fired from twig to branch and made the car glow.
Jesus spoke to himself. Hope he don't start geekin. I probably
shouldn front this nigga, but you always need some sucka willin to
work cheap.
The flash caused a new flow, waves of people crashing through the
doors. Union Station. Subway, not the distance-seeking trains stories
above. Downtown. The Loop. Now, the Loop-jammed train would follow
Central River, the spine up Central's back. He heard voices. Laughter.
Halfway there. Halfway. 707. The first building. The first from where?
He didn't let it worry him. Can't be too hard to find. He stretched
his legs, exhaling to drag out what dragged inside, and smelled the
sweet burn of pain. The residue of urban moonshine bit his stomach and
pumped acid through his body. With the pain came a warmth, a shimmer,
a pulse, a new brightness, haze. His sight blew a hole in itself. Shut
down his eyes. Darkness.
He loved darkness. Shapes moved across the interior screens of his
lids. Funny how the shut eye could fill with dark water, a well, where
shadows and shapes swam, and empty circles floated like life rafts. He
couldn't quite get the effect now. So he opened his eyes to the stares
of the other commuters. Gave them his hardest look. As a child (seven,
he figured), he saw a motion picture about a group of blond children
who channeled destructive power through their stares. (Their eyes were
probably blue, but that was before Gracie and John owned a color TV,
or perhaps the movie was in black and white.) For weeks, he'd stood
before the mirror trying to get that glow. And now, ten years later,
he still had not mastered it, but he mustered enough power to send the
eyes of the other passengers running for cover. He extended his long
legs and put his kicks on the seat in front of him. Darkness made deep
mirrors of the windows. His reflection stared back at him. Shaved head
sparkled with sun, even the veins at his temples radiant as cables. He
liked it that way, bullet-smooth, streamlined, straight and accurate.
Shaved it every day with a straight razor. (Looking down on the very
crown of his head, one would see faint black lines, like a claw print.
He wore his scars proudly.) A slit of mouth. A thin pipe of neck. Clay-
colored skin. Red freckles like dried blood. The naked razors of his
long thin lips. The sharp angles of his jawline. The tentative touches
of a red beard. Ears that stuck out antennae-like. And the big eyes,
visionary and alert.
The train broke out of the darkness, rose at the sky. Jesus saw it
with his body. Through the window, sunlight struck a glancing blow
against his cheek. He followed the sun into himself. The car shook
from side to side as if trying to rouse him awake. He opened the
suction caves of his eyes. A constant stream of images rushed past the
window: the cuts and valleys of the river (another one of the city's
twelve), angles of sail jutting from water into sky, row upon row of
three-story buildings—yes, he let his sight multiply—cluster upon
cluster of projects, and an occasional house. A small bathtub toy of a
boat puffed gray bubbles of smoke as it angled through Tar Lake—still
today, motionless—pushing water before it and tugging a huge ship
behind. He laid his head back on the dusty seat and felt the sun
getting hot on his shoulders and neck.
A red roar. The train spit him onto the elevated platform a mile
from Red Hook, the closest it could take him. With a dull gleam of
clanking metal, it pulled away from the station, the wooden planks
under his feet humming and vibrating. He stood on his perch and
watched and waited. Double distance. Sight took solid shape reaching
to his brain. The city hung enduring. Central and South Lincoln and a
river stringing them together. He sought an exit. No silk thread of
elevator to lower him through the web of scaffolding down to the
street below. Instead, a twine of stairs, unraveling strands of metal
that spiraled up from the street. He piloted these stairs, three
flights.
In patient black lines and arrows, a bus sign mapped his journey.
Yes, the bus could deliver him to Red Hook. But he wanted—needed—to
complete the final leg of the journey on foot. It's about heart. He
walked.
Streets gaping and torn with road work. Birds still as shadows.
Swift-moving clouds. A haze of sunlight. He rubbed his eyes, which
burned from being closed, and cleaned dry ash from his throat. One-
eyed beer bottles poked front grass, watching him. Heat radiated in a
circular fashion throughout his body. He moved carefully under the
shocked eye of the sun, a calf trying out new legs. Engines erupted,
rousing dogs in an alley, barking in the shadows, then the sun snuck
into the alley and a dog bursted bright, chasing a light-winged
pigeon. Scoped Jesus with ears erect, a TV antenna. Jesus hoped the
dog would stray into distance. It did not. Jesus kicked a pop can and
sent it clattering. At the end of the block, a wino lay curled up in a
doorway, vomit rolling like lava down his lips.
Long time since Jesus had seen vomit like that. Long time. (How
many years ago? Count them.) Decatur. Great-aunt Beulah, Lula Mae's
sister, was bedridden after a heart attack. Her wasted frame barely
made a ripple in the sharp-white hospital sheets (not remembered
mounds of yellow flesh propped against her home pillows), plastic
tubes following the lines of her throat, moving toward the curve of
her slow-breathing chest, then trailing off. And John—this man he knew
as his father, wild in the face, sensing the stuff in Jesus and Hatch,
their young blood purring, gurgling, lifted high, struggling to be
heard—John snuck Jesus and Hatch from under the hopeful eves of the
family into the morning, the sun's bare ribs poking through the
clouds, Jesus and Hatch perched in the back seat of John's gold Park
Avenue, a huge ship of a car. They went burning up the straight lines
and smooth planes of the highway, John driving with perfect ease, one
hand on the steering wheel, or no hands at all, using his knees
(didn't need no guardrail to keep the car on track with John squeezing
the steering wheel between his knees, narrowing the highway, making it
skinny) or chest (man and machine leaning as one toward Kankakee); he
and Dave (his main man, running buddy, kin by marriage, adopted blood)
would hold contests, one steering while blindfolded, then the other
steering with his nose, teeth, or chin, or toes; and one eye on the
rearview mirror, yes the rearview mirror where Jesus's baby boots once
dangled white—somebody had stolen them, along with John's radio and
the whitewall tires—and kicked to the motion and speed, dancing; and
the highway unraveling like a bandage, a narrow road darkened by trees
and underbrush, the car rushing and bouncing, and him swaying to the
motion—the two of you stuck your hands out of the open window, feeling
the air rush past—his stomach sucking in against itself. John would
wheel the car off the road and into every bare field, free of
cornstalks, bearing down fast on hip-hopping hares, trying to run them
out onto the road, but no luck, since rabbits were spasm-quick,
breaking from one clump of brush to another, running for the high
grass, thickets, the trees, just escaping by the skin of their buck
teeth, and John tiring of the hunt; and thirsty, charting a course—the
Kankakee River following and flowing beside the road, the river in his
memory flowing brown, heavy, and slow (slow cause John never speeded
inside city limits), always there, always working, never tiring, like
Lucifer, my uncle, so-claimed—to a liquor store, over in Kankakee
cause Decatur was a dry county then, and John bought bottles and
bottles of gin, bottles and bottles of tonic water, John mixing drinks
for the three of them, potent drinks in plastic cups, and they drank
in the dense shadows of the pear trees—fourteen trees, count em, where
they felled fruit with broom handles to satisfy hunger and adventure—
in Beulah's backyard, leaves like thin fingers of cloud, a wandering
smell of wetness, drinking through the afternoon and into the night,
he and Hatch playing musical chairs but without music, without chairs,
until Hatch babbled something about blacks in Africa being short on
corn bread, and he, short on ham hocks; then it came, someone pulled
the chairs from under their stomachs, it came, pink, flowing,
stinking, he and Hatch taking turns, their stomachs rebelling, John
laughing all the while, carrying them to the car, black John invisible
in the night, diamond ring sparkling on the steering wheel. They
couldn't have been more than thirteen.
He and Hatch were close then, the very name Hatch as familiar and
comforting as his own. They were related by blood, and though they
differed in shade—he as yellow as sunlight on an open field, and
Hatch, evening shadow—he could see in his cousin some trace of his
grandmother's appearance. Kin in will and act. Cutting the fool with
John. John, bet you can't catch us! John chased them round and round
the courtyard, them running on three-, four-, five-, six-year-old
legs, their screams lifting from the mouth of the copper-filled
fountain. You boys scream like girls! John said, chasing them, but
actually restraining himself, moving slow, cause his short bulldog
legs contained a terrible momentum, the blurred speed of hot pistons.
Close then. Double-teaming John on the basketball court. (John always
won.) Cutting the fool in church, propelling their farts with paper
fans. Or pitching and batting in the living room with a broom handle
and a rolled-up pair of socks. And basketball with a bath sponge and
lampshades for hoops. Standing tall in the swings, the chains tight in
the tunnels of their hands, pumping their legs and knees, carrying the
swings in arcs above the ground, slanting into the sky, the chains
shaking and creaking. Pedaling their bikes with slim strong ankles,
pedaling, fast eggbeaters, guiding the bikes zigzag through the
streets, wind whistling past the ears, drawing back on the handlebars,
like cowboys pulling back on reins, balancing their bikes, and the
front wheel rising for the wheelie, a cobra raised and ready to
strike, and the two of you rode the snake for a half block or more.
And in quieter moments, doctoring the broken wings of dragonflies with
Band-Aids or cutting the lights from fireflies with a Popsicle stick
and saving the sparkling treasure in a mason jar. Driving down to
Decatur, the speed of flight, fields of cornstalks bent like singers
over microphones, the sun sinking into the fields like spilled wine,
and the headlights stabbing through the darkness, and scattered
trailers like discarded metal cartridges, where John bought Buddha—
weed, he called it—from white trash.
Your seventh birthday John stormed out the front door, you and
Hatch two in kind, seated in a high-backed chair, clutching the
armrests, Dogma the chameleon—confused about color—caged in plastic
across your shared laps, and Gracie—the woman you know as mother, the
woman who grunted you into this world—holding her massive Bible at her
side, weight that anchored her, kept her from being swept away.
Every hair on your head is counted, she said. Each strand has a
name.
Well, John said. You ain't got to worry. I ain't coming back. He
let the door close.
Without hesitation Gracie turned from the shut door and slipped
into the spell of habit. Bathe, put on her perfumed gown, rub Vaseline
under her nose, grease the skin above her upper lip, lotion her body
for the motions of love, cook John's favorite meal, salmon or trout,
place the food beneath two glowing steel dishes for warmth, then retire
—her small hesitant walk, steps of a little bird—to her bedroom
rocking chair before an open window overlooking Tar Lake, her Bible
open on her lap, and patient as a fisherman, waiting for her John to
arrive with his Cadillac ways. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy
cometh in the morning. Rocking robin, rocking robin, beak-hungry for
the spermal worm. Come moonlight, John bounds through the door, and a
burning awakens her, wine color brightens her black berry face. John
leaves quiet as dew the next morning, and she returns to her rocking
chair.
Jesus heard a sound, corn popping over an open fire. Hooded niggas
circled a corner, drinking from a swollen paper bag.
What up, homes?
What up. He measured his words. He didn't look into the cave of
the hood.
Want some? A hand extended the paper bag out to him.
No, thanks.
Yo, g. You kinda tall, ain't you?
You shoot hoop?
Yo, black. Kinda red, ain't you?
Funny-lookin muddafudda.
Blood-colored.
Three quick full steps took him beyond the voices' range. A can
rolled down the gutter, its source of locomotion invisible. Red Hook
shoved his head back—as if tilted for a barber's razor, straining the
neck. Red Hook. Twelve buildings, each twenty-six stories high, a red
path of brick thrusting skyward, poking the clouds, bleeding them.
Each building a planet in configuration with the next, a galaxy of
colors. Sharp structural edges challenged anyone who entered. Word,
heard stories about project niggas throwing bikes on unsuspecting
passersby. And sure-eyed snipers who could catch you in the open
chances of their sight. Can't miss me. A tall nigga like me stand out.
And red too.
Jesus spit, saw the thought rise and fall. Above him, birds cried.
He lifted his face to the sky—black specks of birds high above the
buildings, their cries changing in pitch as they shifted in direction—
and let it crush him. The sun was almost blinding. Thick clouds of
black smoke, a ship's smokestack puffing up from the buildings. Word,
used to be able to drop yo garbage in the incinerator. Every floor had
one. Til people started stuffing their babies clown wit the garbage.
The shiny brick more like tile. A scorched dog black-snarled from the
wall. In a rainbow of colors, weighted words screamed. Too much of it,
lines and colors running together, a mess of messages. Inside a
sickle, a half-moon, letters darkened and deformed, scrawled in a
giant's hand: BIRDLEG WE REMEMBER.
Birdleg? Jesus inhaled the word into his lungs. Fact? Fable?
Ghost? Memory was so deep as to silence his footsteps. Somewhere here
was an honoring presence. Jesus felt it at his back. Shit, Red Hook!
The jets! You can get caught in the middle of something. Rival crews.
But he refused to allow this possibility to slow him. If it's gon
happen, it's gon happen. His shadow swooped high and huge above him.
He entered a vestibule the size of a bathroom. Felt it, more than
saw it. A cramped doghouse of shadows. Every vestibule inch quilted
with more rainbow-strands of words. Bare shattered floors. Long rows
of metallic mailboxes, most broken and open like teeth in serious need
of dental work. And bottled-up summer heat. A metal stairwell rigged
up and out of sight. Metal stairs? A broken escalator? Word,
stairwells often carried fire throughout an entire building. Jesus
knew. Stairwells are chimneys. Up ahead, the elevator caved. Word, in
the jets, elevator motors were mounted on each building's outside,
victim to vandals and weather. What if the elevator stopped between
floors, caught in midair, like a defective yo-yo? What if flame
climbed the yo-yo string? Are elevators chimneys too? Jesus entered. A
hard aroma of piss. He pushed the button for seven.
Doors shut. Pulleys groan into motion. Cables whine. Tug at the
muscles of his legs and belly. Rust metal walls compress on him. He
extends his arms scarecrow fashion, the walls in-moving as the car
rises, and water rising inside him, cold, making him swell. He shuts
his eyes.
Black weight drops like an anchor and knocks him flat.
Just relax.
Put your head down.
Iron fingers mine for the diamond in his ear. Hey, he warns. Be
careful. That diamond cost me ... Iron fingers squeeze his throat and
crush the words. He chokes. Voices spin above him. He feels caressing
fingers on his back—whose?—strokes of bird feather. Easy, boy. Calm
down. His hands move rakelike in Gracie's plush living-room carpet. I
said calm down. The anchor lowers. Two steel loops snap click and lock
around his wrists. (He hears them, he feels them, but does not see.)
Spikelike leaves rise high above him from the coffee table (ancient,
he has always known it)-supported by four squat curved legs, wooden
ice-cream swirls—above but close enough for him to make out small red-
and-green buds. Wait, he says. I'm money. The two cops work on the
pulleys of his arms—he is heavy with Porsha's cooking and the coin of
life—drawing them, lifting him high above the carpet, table legs,
table, plant pot (glossy green paper), the spiked leaves—bright red on
the front side, but colorless on the reverse; veined and tissue-thin,
lizard skin (Dogma the chameleon) — and small red-and-green buds,
small planets from his height, small planets dissolving in distance.
In his fury, he melts into his deep essential life, hard and heavy, a
red stone, a fossilized apple. Gravity. The cops raise their
nightsticks like black trees. Don't give us any trouble. He fights the
anger shooting through his stomach. The door flies (or hands shove it)
open. The two cops, Jack and Jill, thunder down three nightmare hills
of stairs. A blast of winter wind, a cold wind whipped up by Tar Lake.
His tongue covers, blankets his teeth against the chill.
Jack looks him in the face.
He smiles. Can't break me. Smiles. Gravity. Or frowns. His face is
so cold he isn't sure. His red eyes shove two fossilized apples into
Jack's teeth. Jack yanks down on the cuffs. Get in. He ducks his head
under the siren roof and squeezes into the low ride. The engine
squeals into life like a slaughtered pig. A thin rapid shimmer of
exhaust and the cool wind of motion. Sweat cools out of him. His
wrists itch raw with the rub of the handcuffs. He gazes through the
wedges of mesh partition that separates him from Jack and Jill.
Studies the back of their two capped heads. Then he sees a face in the
rearview mirror. Bitten by sin, Gracie said. Bitten by sin. Two wild
eyes burning in the darkness. Yet, man is born into trouble, as the
sparks fly upward. The car takes a heavy curve. He shuts his eyes.
Circular momentum.
He flutters up through the roof into the domed siren, red light
spiraling through his veins. Springs out into wet darkness. Flares,
flame to sky. Shines. Settles.
A particle of light enters his cell. Spreads like spilled ink on
paper. He feels a flutter in his spine, his back, his shoulder blades.
Peels away from the floor and starts to rise. White. Cold. Weightless.
Distance steadily shortens between himself and the light's point
of origin. He discovers that he is actually part of the light, caught,
a red worm on a bright line.
(Continues...)
(C) 2000 Jeffery Renard Allen All rights reserved. ISBN:
0-374-24626-2
*On the corner.*
Add:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1555975097/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0769278043&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0903A7C1TCRC880BSYQX
[Jeff, *presente*]