Octavian’s one-room white pine cabin sat behind a big house owned by Abigail Quincy, who was part Penobscot Indian and a descendent of the original Boston Quincys. She had told Octavian her blood had an assortment of American stories to tell, and not one of them ended happily. Abigail loved Octavian. She knit him thick, intricate sweaters in the winter and brought him baskets of vegetables from her gardens in the summer. And she was the only one in Maine who called him Tave.
Back in his cabin, Octavian checked his phone again. His father hadn’t left him a message, and Octavian didn’t want to call him back, not yet. Instead, he put on the Lee Morgan Sextet album and started to make a fire. He didn’t really need one, but in Maine, August nights could get cold, and building a fire in the old wood stove in the corner calmed him. He had a whole system that started with building a tent of newspaper, kindling and small logs. Then he set the door ajar to listen to the roar of the paper, the cracking of the dry wood.
The room was warm before Octavian picked up the phone and pressed the return call button. As it rang, Octavian saw his father as if he were in the room with him. Cyrus Munroe, PhD, in his faded orange reading chair in the corner, with his feet on the matching ottoman. Octavian watched as he put his velvet bookmark in place before he stood up. Saw how he smoothed the ancient pleats of his pants and adjusted the cuffs of his button-down shirt. His hair was silver and cut tight to his head, and his shoulders slumped a little as his slippered feet walked across the living room, to where the phone hung on the wall in the kitchen. Octavian heard the whirring of the old refrigerator before his father spoke.
“Munroe residence. Cyrus Munroe speaking.”
“Dang man, why do you take so long to answer the phone?” Octavian said, relieved to hear normalcy in his own voice.
“That you, Tave?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“You know I don’t go running for the telephone.”
“Yeah. I know. You alright over there, Pop? St. Louis is all over the news.”
“I’m alright. Went out to Ferguson yesterday, but I didn’t stay long.”
“I figured you’d already been out there. I was worried you were up in the middle of it.”
“No, no,” Cyrus said. His voice as calm as the dusk. “Those young folks are taking care of business from what I saw. I think I’ve had enough brutality and tear gas in my life.”
Octavian added another log to the fire and watched the blue and copper glow. “I saw I missed your call,” he said.
“Dreamt about your mother last night. I didn’t even see her, just smelled her.”
Octavian nodded. He hated those dreams. The ones where he’d be walking through town and become spellbound by her scent. He’d turn, sure to see her right behind him, but she would vanish. “It’s been a while since I had one of those.”
“But listen,” Cyrus said, “that’s not why I called. The reason I called is because…at that school where you work, there are kids with problems, right?”
“Basically,” Octavian said. “It’s a therapeutic school for kids who struggle with mental health issues. Why?”
“There’s this new boy who moved in next door, and he has been yelling at his mother, calling her an array of interesting names. Yells so loud he wakes me up.”
“That’s impressive. He must really be yelling. You don’t wake up easy.”
“I haven’t seen or heard a sign of anything that looks fatherly and I was wondering what I should do? Should I invite him over? Maybe he needs, I don’t know, somebody to talk to.”
“That’s a great idea, Pop.” Octavian smiled at the thought of his father still needing to be a father. “Not sure whether or not he’ll do it, but it’s worth a try.”
“Well, I have to admit I want to wring his little white-boy neck,” Cyrus said, “but I’ll think on it.”
“Pop, you seen Bones lately?”
“I’ve been meaning to go down there, but it’s been a minute. Why?”
“He texted me today. Told me he’s closing Rahsaan’s. Said he’s throwing a party next month, inviting everyone back.”
“I guess I better go down there and find out what he’s talking about. Would that mean you’d come home?”
Octavian’s mind moved in slow, fading circles like the ending of ripples in a pond. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, you let me know.”
“Why?”
“I have to get you and Francis’s room ready is all.”
He hadn’t been home in years and Francis had been dead for more than two decades. Still, it was Francis’s room as much as it was his.
“You think Mina will come?” Cyrus said.
“Mina Rose?”
“Yeah, Mina Rose, what other Mina do you know? Wouldn’t you like to see her?”
“I don’t know, Pop.”
“Well, I know I’d like to see you.”
“Alright,” Octavian said. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, invite that kid over from next door. Play chess with him or something. It’ll do him some good.”
“Chess, that’s a good idea. I figured you’d know what’s best.”
There was a pause and Octavian heard his father sigh. “Too bad I couldn’t have played chess with Mike Brown,” Cyrus said. “That cop probably could have used it, too.”
“That’s true, Pop,” Octavian said. “That is definitely true.”
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, CYRUS looked out onto the empty summer Wash U quad. As long as the weather allowed for it, Cyrus walked to and from work every day, but in the late summer, he tended to wait for the sun to go down and the furious heat of the day to subside before heading home. That day, Cyrus decided to leave the office a little earlier. The sun was still out and it was still plenty hot, but not as bad as it could have been for an August evening in St. Louis.
Cyrus felt the tiredness of his bones from being awoken the night before by the yelling between the woman and her teenage son next door. And being tired made Cyrus think about death. The idea of death itself, or even dying, didn’t trouble him. It was the inability, the infirmity of the old before they died that he didn’t take to. Recently, when he had to write his age down on a piece of paper, or had to scroll endlessly through a website’s drop-down menu to find the year he was born, he blinked solidly. Was he really seventy-six years old, for crying out loud? Wasn’t his father that old? No, no, his father was dead.
It astonished Cyrus that he still missed his father. Jackson Munroe, with his diligent, calm face, had been Cyrus’s hero and his haven. Jackson was a mail clerk on the Union Pacific train, and for two weeks every month he traveled across the country. Those two weeks were a time of torture for the only child. Long days when his mother, Fabiola, had Cyrus buttoned up swiftly and off to pay social calls, give teas and volunteer at the hospital or visit his ancient grandmother.
Jackson knew this and as soon as he returned, he would take Cyrus into his study that was lined from floor to ceiling with books. There he would tell Cyrus stories of Indians and cowboys and prairie grass so high settlers were known to lose their children in it. After that, he read to Cyrus from plays, novels and ancient poetry, and Cyrus would listen until his head grew heavy. Then Jackson would fill the pipe he bought from a trading post in Utah with his favorite Scottish tobacco, put on Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, or Hoagy Carmichael, and send Cyrus off to bed. Words and melodies Cyrus didn’t understand wrapped his dreams in the sweet, smoky smell of faraway lands.
Jackson died soon after Cyrus graduated from Harvard. But not before he’d carefully packed his pipe, his last remaining jar of tobacco, and his pearl-handled letter opener in the velvet-covered box and sent them to Cyrus. Cyrus wished there could be a guarantee that he would die like his father, who got into his bed and drifted peacefully into death. He decided that if he started to go the route of his mother, who after Jackson died, developed a natural flare to her nostrils as if something always stank, and began t
o lose her way home from the grocery store, he’d have to find a way out. Maybe I can convince Octavian to shoot me, or poison me, he thought. We’ll have to talk about that if he comes home. Cyrus granted himself a minute of hope that Octavian might come home. They’d seen a lot of places in their yearly vacations together: Macedonia, Savannah, Trinidad at least six times, Mexico City, Highway One between Big Sur and Oregon. But it would mean something more if Octavian came home. It would mean he had healed. Or at least was beginning to.
Cyrus walked the extra block past his street into the Loop, where young people moved with the sense of postponed passion common to late-August nights. He felt the solitude of a familiar place that had become unfamiliar, as he passed the new organic juice bar and the frozen yogurt joint that used to be a comic book shop, the Starbucks that had once been Francis’s favorite sandwich place when he was young. He walked on through the automatic swinging door of Rahsaan’s Records, where everything was too bright and familiar for loneliness. The smell of the plastic, the vinyl, the gray carpeting that had never been properly cleaned, all brought Cyrus back to the days when Octavian worked there. To the days even before that, when he and Octavian and Francis would go together, the boys’ pockets full of lawn-mowing money.
The music that played was never the same, but often it was something Cyrus recognized—an old Blue Note recording or a Marvin Gaye tune, perhaps Muddy Waters or the Ohio Players. After a while he even recognized some of Octavian’s favorite rappers. MCs, Pop, they’re called MCs—you know, like Masters of Ceremony? KRS-One, Rakim, Run-DMC, Guru, the godforsaken Geto Boys Octavian had insisted on playing nonstop for an entire weekend until even Francis was drawn up with worry.
“Pop, don’t you think you should make him turn that off?” Francis had asked. He stood outside the door to their bedroom while angry voices reverberated around the room. Francis must have been around nineteen at the time, and sober again. Sober and urgently clean—clean hands, clean eyes, clean skin, the creases ironed tightly into his acid washed jeans. Cyrus looked in at Octavian lying on the floor, his head fiercely close to the speaker.
“I mean, it ain’t good for Tave to be listening to these, these…um…hoodlums, talking about smoking dust and robbing and raping and killing over and over like that. I don’t know. He might start thinking it’s cool.”
Cyrus smiled at him. “Why don’t you tell him, then?”
Francis pushed open the door but didn’t go in. “Yo, Tave,” he yelled. “Me and Pop think it’s bad for you to keep listening to this…this negativity.”
Fifteen-year-old Octavian, his box cut and fade always perfect back then, his skin losing a fight with acne, rolled over and considered his brother with a look of disbelief before he rolled back and turned up the volume.
Francis marched into the bedroom with the exasperation of a child and ripped the needle off the record. “For real, Tave,” he said. “I can’t sit by and let you listen to this.”
Octavian glanced at Cyrus standing in the hall before he stood up and strained his neck so he could get as much into Francis’s face as possible. “I don’t know what you worried about, Frankie. You’re the one out there actually doing this shit, I’m just listening to it.” Then Octavian lowered the needle back onto the record and turned it up even louder, releasing the violence back into the room. He stared at Francis as if this act of defiance had been burning a hole in his pocket and said, “You got something else you wanna say?”
Francis waited for Cyrus to back him up, but Cyrus held up his hands in surrender.
“Nah, man,” Francis said. “I ain’t got shit else to say.”
“That you, Professor?”
Cyrus looked up to see Bones walking towards him. Bones wore what he always wore: a Rahsaan’s Records t-shirt, some washed out blue jeans, and a Cardinals cap pulled low over his blue eyes. His light brown hair, now thick with grays, was tied in a ponytail.
There was much about the large, white man that made Cyrus chuckle, but mostly it was Bones’s tendency to speak in black St. Louis slang that used to bring him, Francis, and Octavian to tears. They would spend hours trying to out-do each other with the best Bones imitation. Francis almost always won with something like, “I’se funsta go to the sto’, get me a grape soda.”
“My man,” Bones said with a wide grin. He pulled Cyrus into a hug of Old Spice aftershave and Cyrus let his body dissolve a bit into his old friend’s embrace.
“It’s good to see you, Jimmy.” Cyrus could never bring himself to call him that ridiculous nickname.
“Not as good as it is to see you, baby.”
“You got some coffee?”
“Is a pig’s pussy pork?”
Cyrus chuckled. “I guess it is, Jimmy.”
“Well, then, I got your coffee.” Bones laughed his deep, bluesman laugh and Cyrus followed him towards the back of the store.
Tall Fred Bosh, the one they used to call Dr. Long, and the only employee left from the old days, came out from the back carrying a box of t-shirts. Fred was at least six-foot-five and thin in every direction. He had brown skin that always looked a bit sickly, which Cyrus attributed to the fact that Fred never seemed to leave the store. He smiled when he saw Cyrus and said, “Hey there, Professor. How you been?”
“Doing alright, Fred. Doing alright.”
From the next aisle over, someone called out, “Hey Fred, can I go on break?”
Cyrus stopped. He knew that voice, would know it in a crowded room scattered with voices. It was the one that woke him in the night screaming at his mother, calling her all types of names. Cyrus readied himself to finally give the young man a talking-to. He had seen him and his mother before. Both of them small and unassuming. Cyrus remembered that the boy wore a yarmulke, deep blue velvet with silver stitching, and had shaggy brown hair falling out from underneath. His skin was pasty with gray circles around his eyes. So it took Cyrus a few beats to realize that the voice he was so sure he knew now came from a person who was wearing generous lines of black makeup around his eyes and shiny lip gloss. On closer look, Cyrus saw that it was, in fact, the same person. Except that now his shaggy hair was slicked back into a tiny ponytail and he’d traded in his nondescript trousers for some tight black leather pants. There was no sign of any yarmulke, deep blue or otherwise, but sure enough, there was the pale, white skin, and the ash-colored circles under his eyes. He had a Rahsaan’s Records name tag pinned on his t-shirt. Cyrus squinted. Adam, it said.
Cyrus opened his mouth, even brought a hand up to get the young man’s attention, but in the brief moment that Adam met Cyrus’s eyes, Cyrus saw a whole lot he didn’t understand. He forgot what it was that Octavian had suggested he do about the boy and so he quickly dropped his hand and turned to where Bones stood waiting for him at the back of the store.
The walls of Bones’s office were decorated with tacked-up aging record covers—Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers’ Free for All, Lonnie Smith’s Turning Point, De La Soul Is Dead. And around the room were autographed pictures of Bones and Chuck Berry, Bones and the Beastie Boys, Bones and Johnny Cash, The Staples Singers, Willie Nelson, the Clash, Miles Davis.
Cyrus sat down in a torn leather chair across from Bones’s desk, which was scattered with papers, most of them looking like bills. Bones held up Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life CD and said, “You cool with this?”
“I’m always cool with Stevie,” Cyrus said.
“I know that’s right.” Bones put the CD on and Stevie sang about love being in need of love today. He handed Cyrus a ceramic mug warm with coffee.
Cyrus turned the mug around in his hands. The outside was glazed a deep cerulean, the inside soft cream. Cyrus knew by the arc of the handle that the mug had been made by Octavian. “Tave send you this?”
Bones took a sip of his coffee and nodded. “Your boy’s stuff is right on time.”
Cyrus felt pride fill his chest as he held the cup and thought of Octavian making and
selling his pottery, of teaching children how to find reprieve in colors and clay. Even if he did have to be far off in some Maine woods to do it, Cyrus hoped Octavian had found a bit of his own relief. He thought again about his son’s healing, about his coming home. He studied Bones and decided not to ask about closing the store yet. He took a sip of the coffee. “You going to make it Irish or what?”
“Hell to the yeah.” Bones pulled a bottle of Bushmills from the bottom desk drawer and poured some into both of their cups. “Cheers,” he said. Cyrus raised his mug, took a short sip and felt the fierceness of the whiskey in his throat.
“You been over to Ferguson?” Bones said.
“I have,” Cyrus said. “Have you?”
“Nah.” Bones poked at a coffee-stained invoice. “I should though.”
“You should.”
“Things bad as they say?”
Cyrus shrugged and took another sip of coffee; this time the end went down smooth. “You know how they always tell one half of both sides to the story,” he said. “Some things are worse than they say, and some aren’t so bad. I haven’t seen any news coverage of the kids who are guarding the businesses from being looted, or the ones making sure the old folks are getting to church, but everyone in the country knows about the twenty or so knuckleheads—most of whom aren’t even from Ferguson, burning up the QuikTrip.”
“You think it’s going to spread out?”
Cyrus laughed. He’d been friends with Bones going on twenty-five years now, but he forgot sometimes that Bones was from a different generation. “Don’t worry, I think you’re safe.”
There You Are Page 2