The Speed of Life

by James Victor Jordan

  “There was a water snake,” he says.

  “Yes,” says Betty Mae, examining the wound. “Tell me about the snake.”

  Through tears, he tells her about falling out of Aunt Charlotte Crow’s canoe, the snake bite, then awakening to see Aunt Charlotte Crow, shrouded, laying in her canoe. He says nothing of his journey to the Lowerworld.

  “The Creator has called her home,” Betty Mae says. “It was her time.”

  “Was it father’s time?” Andrew says.

  “Yes,” Betty Mae says. She puts the remnants of the candles in her canvas bag and puts the bag beside Aunt Charlotte Crow in her canoe.

  “When the brave Seminoles were killed by the soldiers that President Jackson sent to Florida, was it their time?”

  “My, my,” says Betty Mae. “You are your old self. Questions, questions.” She regards the boy for a few moments. Then she says, “Sometimes people die before their time, like in war. The Creator has given us the power to take life and the wisdom to make it better.”

  Betty Mae takes sacred leaves from a pouch looped through by a rope belt tied around her waist, drops them in a fire, and fans the flames until there is white smoke. She takes rattles from her canoe, shows Andrew how to shake them. She shows him the steps of the Dance of the Dead, and they shake the rattles, dancing around and through the smoke as they chant.

  She scatters feathers of songbirds into the hot air. Carried by the wing-like rhythms of the bones tumbling in the rattles, the feathers float upwards with Aunt Charlotte Crow’s spirit— liquid crystal light rising from her body. With Golden Bear her spirit soars, then plunges into the water pooling in the hollow of the buttonwood tree, riding her power animal up through the core of the trunk, out through its uppermost branches, mingling with the rising feathers and wisps of cloud-white smoke.

  Rain falls. Betty Mae lashes Aunt Charlotte Crow’s canoe to her own, and with Andrew, wearing a too-large waterproof poncho and a floppy hat, sitting in the bow, she paddles away from the hardwood hammock, away from the buttonwood tree. As the canoes glide through the swamp back past the herons and snapping turtles, the swamp darters and the dragonflies, Andrew asks about the flora and fauna, Charlotte Crow’s spirit, and the Upperworld.

  “Did Aunt Charlotte Crow play the tape; did you listen to it?”

  Andrew says nothing.

  “Did you go into the hollow?”

  Silence.

  “Have you lost your voice again?”

  “No,” he says.

  Betty Mae’s wolf-dog, Wind, crouches on her forelegs and haunches on her back porch. In the backyard, Betty Mae sits in a wrought-iron chair at a round wrought-iron table, reading and making notes. Luxury sailing yachts and cabin cruisers motor by in the Intracoastal Waterway behind her home.

  It’s early, an hour past dawn. The sun, an orange areola on a cerulean breast, already sizzles. Rainbows flicker in the spray of sprinklers rotating back and forth, watering the lawn in wide semicircles.

  Wild green parrots hop in a hollow in the lawn filled with sprinkler water, bathing, squawking, until a broad-winged hawk swoops, snatching one of them in its raptor talons. The surprised prey – its life ebbing – squawks as the other parrots pester and dive-bomb the hawk to no avail.

  Barefoot, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, Andrew runs through the sprinklers. He steps in the muddy water of the erstwhile bird bath, slips, and falls. He wipes his face, smearing it with mud, steps out of his shorts. Then, in his briefs and wet T-shirt, he chases a sprinkler’s spray like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit. When the sprinkler reverses direction, he becomes the rabbit, running from the oncoming water, arced like a wave.

  When he tires of the game, he calls, “Here, Wind!”

  The wolf-dog stands, arches her arthritic back, yawns, and stretches. She trots down the steps. Andrew runs. Wind chases, runs around him until he collapses on the lawn, laughing. Wind licks his face. Then he grabs a baseball bat and smacks Wind, the blow glancing off her snout.

  On his feet, Andrew swings the bat again, this time holding it with two hands, aiming at the wolf-dog’s face. Betty Mae steps between them, catching the blow on her thigh. She grabs the bat and flings it across the yard over a hibiscus hedge, then reaches for Andrew, but he slips away, ducking under her hand, dashing after the bat. Wind cuts him off, stopping abruptly in front of him. He veers, trips, falls, and cries as a sprinkler douses him.

  Betty Mae scoops up Andrew. Heading for the house, she holds him fast as he squirms and screams. Wind follows them up the steps, across the porch, through the screen door, and into a bathroom, where Betty Mae draws a bath.

  She places Andrew in the tub.

  When she steps out of the room, he stands. Wind growls and he sits down, trembling though he’s stopped crying. He removes his T-shirt and underpants and washes off the mud.

  Betty Mae returns with a towel and dry clothes for Andrew and a towel for Wind. She rubs down the dog while Andrew dresses.

  “Why did you hit Wind?”

  “She won’t talk.”

  “She talks,” Betty Mae says. “Tells us when she’s hungry; warns us when there’s danger. So why are you angry with her?”

  “Aunt Charlotte Crow knows,” is all the boy will say.

  Billie

  This time Andrew aims his baseball bat at a baseball in a Little League game. Earlier in the day it rained, enhancing the pungency of the freshly mowed field. Threatening maroon-tinged gray cumulus clouds float overhead. The light is soft; the air is humid and hot.

  Andrew has been a student of baseball since he was five, the year the Florida Marlins first won the World Series. Now at ten in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs and a player on base, he holds the bat slightly choked, his knuckles aligned, his grip firm but not tight. He puts all his strength into the swing, taking one step forward as the bat comes around.

  The boys in the league are ages ten to twelve. Andrew’s best friend, Billie Bower, age twelve, is on deck. They are the only boys in their school with Seminole blood. Andrew is the only boy with African blood. They are in the same sixth-grade class because Andrew has skipped two grades. He is the shortest boy on either team; Billie, already six inches taller than Andrew, is the strongest and tallest. They have a bond forged in violence, murder, and silence.

  Jimmie Bower, Billie’s father, was more than half Seminole, as Karl Godfrey, Andrew’s father, had been. Jimmie, like Karl, spent time in prison. And as Karl had, Jimmie loved his son fiercely when he was sober, which, as with Karl, was infrequent.

  After as Andrew was riding his bicycle home, three of his classmates – twelve-years old and white – knocked him off his bike. Neil Baker, the largest ruffian, kicked Andrew on his thigh close to his pelvis. The pain was severe.

  Neil said, “Nigger, you come back to our school, we’ll kick in your teeth.”

  The attackers didn’t see or feel a hot, purple light rise from the sidewalk. Nor did they see Eagle beating his wings, quelling the light, not allowing it to ignite. But they did see Billie Bower approaching quickly. Neil stepped back and as he did, Billie threw a punch that landed on his ear, knocking him to the ground, where he lay beside Andrew. Before Billie could throw a punch at either of the other boys, they were already on their bikes, peddling for purchase.

  “Is he dead?” Andrew said.

  “Oh, crap,” Billie said. “Your front wheel is bent.”

  Neil, rising from the pavement, said, “Bower, you fucking Nigger lover. You’re dead.”

  Savagely, Billie kicked the boy, knocking him back down.

  This fight was the first of several. But like their Seminole ancestors, because they were vigilant and worked as a team, Billie and Andrew were undefeated in their microcosm of the racist milieu that permeated Florida, persistent racism that imbued white society from well before the state’s 1860 secession from the Union that made it one of the original seven Confederate States.

  It was the same prejudice that spawned the Over
town and Liberty City riots in the early 1980s that followed the judicially sanctioned (by an all-white jury) police murder of Arthur McDuffie, an unarmed young black man; that had continued through and beyond the judicially sanctioned (by yet another all non-black jury) vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager shot down as he was returning home from a 7-Eleven where he’d gone to purchase candy.

  Andrew and every other young black man that he knew was always aware of white people eyeing him with suspicion in public places.

  If Andrew were convicted of a crime of violence, to mitigate his punishment at the sentencing phase of the trial, would his lawyers call upon experts – sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists – to testify that rampant racism was responsible at least in part for his anti-social behavior? Possibly. But if Charlotte Crow had lived, she would have disputed that Andrew’s acts of violence were to any extent caused by his environment.

  Not long after Billie defended Andrew from his sixth-grade after-school assailants, there was another incident of violence and another secret that the boys would carry to their graves. It began innocently enough on a Saturday morning. Jimmie Bower took Billie and Andrew fishing. They stowed bait, tackle, rods, reels, and a cooler containing sandwiches, soft drinks, and a twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon into Jimmie’s twenty-foot fiberglass tri-hull boat, which had no top, open like a canoe. When they backed out of the boat’s slip in the Dinner Key marina, Jimmy was sober.

  By the time they ate their sandwiches under a cloudless sky and a sun burning the air as a blast furnace would, Jimmie had finished six cans of beer. The boys went swimming and when they climbed back on the boat, Jimmie had finished the twelve pack.

  Using small crabs as bait for the bonefish they hoped to catch, the boys cast out their lines. But Jimmie, unstable on his feet in the gently rocking boat, jammed a hook into his forefinger.

  “You shit,” he yelled. “I told you. No hard shells.” Then he backhanded Billie, hitting him on his jaw, opening a cut on his lower lip, breaking his two-front-bottom teeth.

  Jimmie raised his rod, aiming at his son’s head. Billie’s tearing eyes were riveted on the ribbed interior of the hull. A flash of charged ultra-violet light struck Jimmie’s chest like a battering ram, knocking him into the water.

  Andrew jumped overboard and forced Jimmie’s mouth open, causing him to swallow bay water as if he were breathing it.

  Billie jumped out of the boat, swam to his father and pulled him to the surface. By then, Jimmie was dead.

  “You weren’t strong enough to pull him to the surface,” Billie said. “Don’t blame yourself for not saving him. And please. Don’t tell anyone he hit me.”

  Andrew had knocked Jimmie out of the boat with intent to kill, a homicidal impulse. But why? Why hadn’t he just knocked Jimmie out of the boat? He never understood why he’d killed Jimmie. And he’d never know that by killing his first Indian, he’d fulfilled in part the prophesy his great-grandmomma, Sarah Abiaka, made just two hours before his birth: if he lived, he would kill other Indians. It would be a decade before he would kill another Indian.

  Billie piloted the little fishing boat back to the marina, with Jimmie’s body still in the water, tied to a cleat on the gunwale. As if reading Andrew’s thoughts, he said with a maturity common to children who’ve been abused, “If he’d gotten back on the boat, he’d have killed us.” He ran his tongue over his broken teeth.

  But Billie hadn’t read all of Andrew’s thoughts. Andrew was thinking about training Billie to travel in hidden reality.

  Billie told the police that when he jumped out of the boat, trying to rescue his father, he’d hit his mouth on the gunwale, cutting his lip, breaking his teeth.

  At the time of his death, Jimmie’s blood-alcohol level was 2.8, almost three times greater than the level of legal intoxication.

  At the inquest, the bruise on Jimmie’s chest and his broken ribs were explained by Billie’s mother, who said, truthfully, that Jimmie had fallen from a ladder that morning while trimming trees, said he wasn’t hurt, and had refused to see a doctor. The medical examiner was dubious, but seeing no other logical explanation, he ruled that Jimmie had drowned and that his intoxication was a contributing cause.

  At home plate, Andrew had begun his swing late but his bat hits the ball solidly and drives it inbounds down the first-base line for a single. Billie walks to the plate and hits the next pitch over the fence, winning the game with a walk-off home run.

  Part III Georges

  Twentieth Century Fox

  I was waiting in Family Law Court in downtown Los Angeles, my gut ablaze. Did that disqualify me from representing myself in my own uncontested divorce? A year earlier, Beatrice had moved out of our home in Malibu, the home she’d insisted we buy because she loved listening to the ocean.

  I couldn’t clear my head of the good times, our plans to travel, our plans to grow old together. Maybe I misunderstood the vows we made at the altar. Maybe what we’d promised was ’til half-death do us part. Maybe we’d been incarcerated by marriage. Maybe Bea’s jailbreak would trigger mine. Maybe the dissolution would be a healthy break with the past.

  And then I dwelled on the distant past, on young love, on first love.

  I wasn’t hurrying, I wasn’t late, I was ambling along a corridor of Coral Gables High in my proverbial male-adolescent self-absorption – thinking baseball, actually – when Aurora and I collided. I lost my footing, fell backwards to the floor. She said it was my fault, losing my bearings because I was gawking at her chest. She was wearing a very short red skirt and a sparkling red spandex top, the head of a metallic-silver comet covering each breast, the tails – trailing toward her trim waist – accentuating her curves. She was hot, sexy to a fault. But the fault wasn’t mine; I never saw her before she ran into me.

  My homework fell out of my notebooks, scattered over the terrazzo floor. Aurora scooped up the pages. The glitter in her fingernail polish caught the light, her red pumps shredding most of my work.

  She said, “Georges, are you okay?”

  When I think of Aurora now, I still see myself at sixteen riveted by her shapely long legs. She had classic beauty, the face of Venus di Milo. On bright days, the sun highlighted deep purple hues, like black currant, in her long dark curls. Every boy in the school knew who she was. Everyone knew her name. I was thrilled to hear her say mine.

  “Stop!” I said.

  She planted a foot between my knees, clasped my arm. Helping me to my feet, she leaned close, her tongue trembling between parted lips, spearmint breath.

  A chorus of giggles from her clique shattered the moment. They were the alpha girls with a puzzling exception— Hailey Levine, the sister of my best friend, Bruce. She wore oversize blouses to hide her chubby body. He was an athlete, upstanding, like his dad, a math and science teacher and the manager of our baseball team. Bruce and Hailey’s father, like mine, was an America-can-do-no-wrong patriot. She was a hippie, counter-culture, flouting American values, the American dream. I imagined her teasing Bruce because I’d been flattened by a girl.

  “Losers,” I said.

  “You should know,” Aurora said. “Still a virgin.”

  “I’m not— a virgin,” I said.

  Boys gathered and jeered – “Did you see that?” “She knocked him on his butt.”

  “Are you stoned?” I said to Aurora.

  “Oh, a tough guy,” she said, slapping me on the shoulder. “I like that in a man,” she said. “But you’re just a boy.”

  “And I suppose you’re Miss Maturity,” I said. The words had barely left my lips when she laughed.

  That’s when Roger Knox – a co-captain of the football team, a stoner with a giant flop of red hair, three inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than I – grabbed the front of my baseball jersey.

  “Is this creep bothering you?” he said.

  Aurora said, “Roger, get lost.”

  Roger was popular, perhaps for the very reason I detested hi
m: he never missed an opportunity to take center stage. But I wasn’t thinking about disliking Roger as he shook me.

  As if snatching a barbell, I brought up my arms, breaking his hold, knocking him backward. He looked surprised as he hit a wall of lockers with a clang, but he didn’t retaliate, not immediately. He just rubbed his elbow, grinning and nodding toward me as if saluting, then looking away, indicating the scuffle was over. The next moment he whirled back toward me, swinging his fist. I dodged his blow, which was aimed at my face, and it hit me squarely on the shoulder.

  “Bohem,” he said, “you’re dead.”

  He threw a go-for-broke haymaker. I ducked under it, then putting my weight into an uppercut, hit him just below his ribcage. With a whoosh, the air knocked out of him, he doubled over, heaving.

  Aurora’s eyes grew wide. Mr. Padilla, our math teacher – a string bean physique, the face of a moldy pumpkin, pockmarked and discolored – gripped the back of my collar.

  “Clear the hall,” he said. “Roger. The principal’s office.”

  “Miss Goldin,” he said to Aurora. “What are you doing in that shameful—”

  She leaned toward him. “I lost my propellers,” she said, in a near whisper, a conspiratorial tone, “and Georges was helping me find them.” She gave him a look, as if inviting him into the conspiracy, as if now he too would join the hunt for the missing propellers. “You know,” she said, looking around as if expecting to find them, “not all comets are jet-propelled.”

  “An astounding discovery,” Mr. Padilla said. “Shall we share it with your mother?”

  “She knows,” Aurora said, and with her heels clacking on the hard-stone floor, she walked away, her girlfriends swarming around her like drones protecting their queen. And she quickly disappeared into a whirlwind of students—poof—she vanished into thin air.

  “Helene has her hands full with that one.” He was referring to Aurora’s mother, Mrs. Goldin, an English teacher at our school.