Blueschild Baby

by George Cain

  I’m hesitant, nervous before my audience with the king. The room is silent, but they are in there. I smell them. Bright Sun and Flower, fearfully frozen behind the door awaiting identification. Friend or foe. So long have they lived in this room, it stinks of them and leaks into the hall. Sulphur, cigarettes and decaying flesh, a stench so moist and clinging, no amount of air can dispel it.

  It is the smell of the dead season, fall, in a Texas penitentiary. One knew the season had changed, the death of the fall was then. But there was no slow diminution of summer. One day it was summer and the next, fall full-grown. No change in weather, no browning or falling leaves to tell me. But the crickets were dead and dying, and only a day before I had kicked them up at every step filling air with their raucous cry and answer. Then they lay heaped upon the ground, small forms dotting the earth like dried balls of clay flung from a turning wheel. Their decomposition fouled the air. A heavy yellow mist, fetid and rotten, rose from them. I breathed it in, tasting on my palate, in my stomach and wanted to vomit. Sun’s room smells the same and betrays his presence. I knock softly and Flower queries. “Who?”

  “Georgie.”

  “It’s Georgie, Sun.”

  “Well let him in woman.”

  As always, Sun is holding court, surrounded by his motley crew of buffoons and servants who perform for him and carry out an occasional order, stick a knife in a back or go to the store for eats. Their only reward, the shelter of this room and an occasional fix. From his throne, the always unmade bed, Sun carries on the business of his kingdom. I am a black knight-errant whose fealty is desired, so am summoned to sit beside him. Flower is his woman, the reigning queen, she is dangerous and carries a switchblade to protect her man. Who would expect the knife from that quarter, comely black child of innocence? She is lately out of the hospital, suffering from tuberculosis and heroin.

  I ask her health. “How you doing Flow?”

  “Okay Georgie. Was sick awhile with TB, just got out the hospital. Signed myself out. They wanted me to stay six months. Couldn’t stand it any longer, so I came on back. On the welfare now, got an apartment on Ninety-seventh Street. I just come by to be with Sun awhile. We’re not supposed to be together. So they give him an apartment downtown here and me one uptown. But I stay down here with Sun and we go up there when we get tired.”

  Overcome for a moment, she pauses and nods, then continues. “I’m feeling good though, but that’s only cause I got out. I need these streets, they’re in my blood. I’m okay long as I can run these streets with Sun. Then everything’s okay, don’t feel no pain, junk takes care of that. Cough and spit blood every now and then, but it ain’t nothing.”

  Tired of his lady’s monologue, Sun silences her with a gesture and turns to me. His head is monumental with close-cropped, deeply receding hair, features strongly Indian and broken nose. The joke is, such a head on that gnome’s body. He can barely carry it about he is so short and hunched over. He whispers so the others in the room cannot hear. “How many do you want?” From somewhere deep in his pants fly he pulls out the plastic wrapped packets of bags and hands me three. I give Flow the money and reaching into her bosom she pulls forth crumpled bills and views them strangely for a moment as if she were surprised at their appearance. Recovering, she adds mine to the pile and shows her hollow breasts as she replaces them, then moves to the window and draws the shade.

  “Why don’t you get off here? Know you don’t feel like running the streets with stuff on you.” Sun has planted a seed bursting in my brain, returned is my fear of the police. I cannot walk the streets with heroin in my possession, it distorts my posture, making me furtive and sneaking, unable to meet anyone’s eye. This is the curse of Cain, not to have committed crime and yet burdened with guilt.

  “Flow get my things out, Georgie’s going to get off.”

  She rummages in a box overflowing with clothes and finding the apparatus, sets it up on the table.

  I dump the stuff in the cooker, add water, cook, and tie up. Then draw most of the solution into the dropper. I plunge it into my arm, apopping and crackling as it tears through old scar tissue, then the click of a punctured vein and I squeeze the bulb. There is no longer anything dramatic or pleasurable about junk, it is only medicine, a restorative to enable me to function. It is done and the world returns to normal. Inanimate objects in the room no longer try to impose themselves upon me as had happened in the street, they are passive now, awaiting an aggressive consciousness to affirm their reality. My sickness has left, it is like waking. Rising from his bed, Sun walks to the cooker to see how well I’ve paid him. Junk is the coin of this realm, money is only the labor to acquire it. He is satisfied and draws it up. There is a lull in the world, a comfortable peace, all is still for a moment. Lack of heroin insulated me from the sounds and activities, but now awareness comes.

  Head buried between her legs, gagging on spit, Tracy screams across the room. “Georgie today’s my birthday, I’m nineteen years old. We’re having a party, right momma?”

  “That’s right baby,” Flow answers.

  “Come and kiss me Georgie.”

  “Kiss her for her birthday,” urges Sun, and I move to do so intending to cheek her, instead she grabs my head and presses her lips to mine, choking me with tongue and saliva.

  “A birthday kiss. Don’t try and fuck her,” laughs Sun.

  “Leave her go,” slobbers the white boy, awake now in the corner. Letting her go, I fall back on the bed.

  “Tommy wake up,” Tracy calls to him. “Meet Georgie.”

  “Hey man.” Words stumble from his mouth guttural and moist. All the while he struggles to keep his head up and eyes open.

  “Don’t I know you Georgie? Damn it’s hot in here, open the windows Sun.”

  “They’re open.”

  “Take your shirt off,” suggests Flow, and he strips to his pants and begins picking his toes, sweating like a pig. His white skin is covered with tattoos and shines like plastic. It is hot, and I take my shirt off and begin tearing my flesh, leaving long fingernail trails across my skin and an open wound here and there that bleeds freely. I scratch an itch as if it were the most gratifying act in the world, deriving the utmost satisfaction from it, physical and mental. The dope makes you itch and nod. Nodding as if your spine were rubber, with closed lids. Closed lids signify your closing off the world and turning inside to find and order the chaos about you. We’re all sitting shut up in this room, shut up in ourselves.

  “How’s the stuff?” asks Sun.

  “Nice, real nice.”

  “Thought you’d go for it. I knew you’d be by tonight. Told Flow, Georgie’d be by to score. You hooked again?”

  “Don’t know, haven’t stopped to find out.”

  “Still working?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t know how you do it. You need to give this shit up and go on back to school. When I heard you were fucken around, couldn’t believe it. Georgie Cain, the intellect, big time basketball star, it was a bitter pill baby. How long ago was that?”

  “Five years Sun.”

  “Yeah, five years. Been a long time. How old are you now, twenty-one, two?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “You’d be playing pro ball and teaching now. You always said you wanted to teach.”

  I hate when they talk of my past as if I were a failure, I’m still alive and that is more important than any success, there is more than one way of dying and I was dying horribly. There was no me, only bits and pieces of everything and everybody, bound and tied to a whole race of people, black people, obligated to die and suffer making it for them. They don’t see my addiction in its proper perspective. My need to live life unhindered, with no ties. The only way was to be rejected by those who respected and loved me, then I could begin anew. The process is nearly complete. Someday soon, I shall emerge as Georgie Cain.

  “I still want to teach.”

  “Why don’t you go on back to school? You could make it.”<
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  “Been thinking about it, but I don’t have it any more.”

  “Don’t have it! Shit. You’re only twenty-two, your whole life is still ahead. You’re only a kid. If I were your age and knew what you know, I’d have it made. I remember when you first showed on the set, you were a fucked-up cat, always talking from the books, but now you’ve lived some, you know what it’s all about, and combined with all your knowledge, you can make it.”

  “I’m like Flower, Sun. These streets got me, I’m hooked.”

  “You know Georgie, this dope thing used to be a hell of a game, it was worth the hassle, when you had cats like Cicki Bones and his brothers putting junk on the street. The scag was boss and the time was light. They didn’t fuck with you much then. But now they call it the dying game. I’m in it cause I can’t do nothing else, welfare ain’t enough to live off. I want, need, like every motherfucker out there and this is the only way I can do it. Whitey wasn’t letting me go to school or teaching us nothing then. But you kids got it made today. They’re begging for niggers to come and do things.”

  There it is again, they all want you to be a martyr, cloaking it in the guise of personal success, you can make it nigger if you try and the price is loneliness, because when you make it, you ain’t black no more and you ain’t white, somewhere in between.

  “Momma I love you,” moans Tracy.

  “I know baby, I know,” Flower answers.

  “Ain’t that a bitch. She calls Flow momma. Flow black as coal and she whiter than white, and she really means it. She and Flow live together. Kind of take care of each other. Flow’s sick and Tracy keeps an eye on her.”

  “Yeah Georgie, we take care of each other, Tracy and me.”

  “No, no!” Tommy screams from a nod.

  Tracy shakes him awake. “What’s the matter? You dreaming again? God damn. You’re getting to be a pain in the ass, always screaming. You ain’t in the joint no more.”

  “I’m sorry baby, can’t help it. I’ll get over it.”

  “I hope so. He’s like that all night. When we’re at Flow’s, he keeps us up with all his screaming and shit. I love momma and she needs rest. You with your noise all night, I don’t know what they did to you in that place.”

  “Yeah, Tracy takes care of Flow.” The junk is having its effect, Sun is repeating himself, soon he’ll be off the bed and into his little dance and Flower will sing, the king and queen will perform for me.

  “We take care of each other, Tracy and me. Listen, dig how I met her. Was coming out the building one day and the cop had her in the hall asking for identification and whatnot. You can see she’s only a kid. Guess he thought she was a runaway or something, I’d seen her around the block, knew she’d fucked around, but we’d never said nothing. Anyway, I walk up to her and I say what’s wrong baby and she says, ‘Momma, this policeman . . .’ The cop, he don’t even let her finish, but turns and looks at my black face, then her white one and back to me again and says, ‘Is this your daughter.’ I say, ‘Yes she’s my daughter.’ I’d just come out the hospital then, was looking healthy and had some decent clothes on. He just shakes his head and says, ‘Well she shouldn’t be out so late,’ and walks off. We been together ever since.”

  “That’s something, ain’t it,” mumbles Sun. “Wish I could’ve been there to see the cat’s face.”

  The white boy tries again. “Don’t I know you Georgie?”

  “No I don’t think so.”

  Feeling me tense, Sun tries to ease the situation. “Georgie just got back.”

  “I just got out the joint myself, Monday. Did a nickel at Attica. Five calendars, it was a bitch.”

  Why doesn’t he carry a sign around his neck, telling the world? He and Sun are thinking that having done time, there is the common ground, a meeting place and this will ease the tension. It’s like the other niggers in the joint who called me brother, automatically assuming because I was black, having shared the experience of blackness, we were closer than say two other people meeting for the first time. But it ain’t so, a black is as treacherous as a white, all bear watching and familiarity does breed contempt.

  “Tracy’s my woman, last time I saw her, she was a little kid.” Extending his arm, he shows me how little. “She used to hang with my kid sister. I hit the bricks Monday and I’m out hunting a fix and who do I run into but her. She scores for me and we all got straight, me, her and Flower. Flow’s a good woman, she got big heart, but Tracy surprised the shit out of me.”

  “Tommy you got money?” Tracy asks.

  “No baby, I’m busted.”

  “Tommy it’s my birthday. I want to get fucked-up.”

  “You’re fucked-up now baby, you don’t need no more jive.”

  “Tommy you got money?”

  “I told you no.”

  “Tommy buy me a bag, please baby.”

  “I ain’t got no money.”

  “You stingy cocksucker, I know that faggot you screwed gave you some money. After all I did for you, you won’t even buy me a bag. Dig this creep, will you. Flow and I pick him off the streets, let him flop at the pad, score for him, bring him here to Sun’s and he don’t want to buy no dope. Tommy please, it’s my birthday, don’t do me this way, I’m nineteen today, I’ll get you the money back tomorrow. You know I will.”

  Reaching out, he pulls her from the chair. “Bitch what’s wrong with you?” And they stare into each other, both incapable of any real emotion or violence. They are dead, even her scathing retort was mumbled in toneless monologue. His anger was only a polite query. Releasing her he feels in his pocket and pulls out bills, counting them he puts one in his pocket and passes the rest to Sun.

  “It’s your birthday baby, so we’re going to celebrate. Have a party.” He reaches over and turns the radio on. “Sun give me six bags. Flow get the works, I’m turning everybody on.” There is a great commotion to oblige and Tracy hollers, “First!” She smooths hair from her forehead and lights a cigarette. Proud of her power and arrogant. They cook the junk up and we all get off. Flow cleans the works, stashes them, then sits on the bed next to Sun and begins nodding. Sun gets up from the bed and without a word begins dancing in time with the music, a swaying and bending low. Like a snake being charmed, his grotesque body moves fluidly beneath the beautiful head and tells a story. It’s a mad man’s mime, with steps slow-moving, drug-hindered, a falling low. This must have been the dominant medium, before the invention and limitations of speech. He tells of his blackness and bares a soul. Tommy never having seen this performance is embarrassed by its frankness and turns away. Tracy is high and uncaring. She is still and her fingernails are turning blue. Flower watches his every move as I do. There is his childhood, the marriage to Flower, the prisons, the police, the dope, his wanting what every other motherfucker wants. All this he tells in a dance. With a gesture a million empty words are spare, and he would give up his sotted life for mine, if he could. The music stops and he is frozen in lassitude, sweat runs from every pore staining his clothes and falls to the floor. He is no longer with us, but somewhere in vastness, rushing past the moon and stars, bumping against time and space, an instrument, not a will of his own, in some unknown hand. He is poised but a moment and crashes to the floor, groveling about and slobbering like an epileptic. Tommy frightened rushes from his chair to help and Flower has a knife at his throat.

  “Don’t touch him, don’t touch him.” She raises the gnome, lays the noble head cross her lap, rocking and singing in a voice tired-toned and weeping, sounding like Billie. She is a bitch singing love to her man. Tommy looks to me for enlightenment.

  Tracy is out and dying of narcotic poison. The blueness is stealing up her fingers and air passes gently through her open mouth, no one notices it but me.

  “What’s happening?”

  Flower stops singing and cuts her eyes at him as if he’d committed heresy. I wave him silent making him understand everything is all right. He falls back in his chair and closing his eyes begins scratch
ing his crotch. Flower resumes singing in her blues voice the piece playing on the radio and Tracy is dying. Flower sings well enough to be a professional, but she is old and no one but us will ever hear her.

  Sun is awake now and stares at the ceiling. Flow sings softly in his ear and he smiles. Footsteps sound in the outside hall and she reaches over and turns the radio off, gesturing us to silence. Tracy cannot make a sound, the bitch is dying. Someone comes up to the door, hesitates, then retreats, stops, approaches again and then knocks. Sun pushes Flower from the bed and sends her to the door.

  “Who?”

  “Santo,” comes the muffled reply.

  “Santo, I don’t know no Santo. See what he wants,” says Sun.

  “What do you want?”

  “Is Sun there?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Give me three.”

  She cracks the door. “Oh. It’s you. It’s Saint, Sun.”

  “Tell him to wait a minute.”

  “Just a minute Saint.”

  Sun goes digging in his fly and brings up three bags. Flower takes the money, then passes the dope out through the crack. She locks the door and pushes a chair against it. Puts the money with the rest, pats it in place and returns to bed.

  Tommy pulls his chair across from Tracy and sits facing her, holding the dead hands. He can’t open his eyes and struggles to stay conscious. Leaning forward to kiss her lips, he misses, banging against her. The limp head flies over the back of the chair and hangs like the neck is broken. He puts his hand on her breasts. Even near death, she moves slightly to elude him. He leans over her like some strange beast and tries to kiss her lips again, but the head rolls crazily and will not be still. His hands go to her crotch and she doesn’t move. His face contorts with lust and rage, he tries to kiss her but the elusive head will not oblige. He is red and running short of breath, slaps her and the sound raises us. Seeing the dead girl, Flower screams and pulls her blade forcing Tommy to the corner.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why didn’t you say something? She’s taken an O.D.” Turning to Tracy, begins slapping her to bring her around. But it is late. There are blue circles under her eyes.