Millie accompanied Bones back to the store and while he loaded the crates of records into a rented van, she sat on a stool in the corner and tapped her fingers on her tan polyester pants to Freda Payne singing “Band of Gold.” When what remained were the empty, dusty shelves and the broken light fixtures, Bones went to her and took her hand.
“This was our child,” Millie said. “Our only baby. He loved it so, my Jimmy did. Going to have to start calling him Old Jimmy now.” She smiled. “What’s next for you, Young Jimmy? You taking these records back to Memphis?”
Bones imagined riding the sweaty bus across town and walking back through the doors of WKWK 1080 AM. He imagined the face Ulysses would make when he did. He thought about Floyd searching for love in the whorehouse and his father, with his belt, the switch, the wrench in his hand. His father who had not loved him the way Old Jimmy had loved his record store. Bones’s throat felt like he’d swallowed a jagged stone.
“No,” he said and shook his head at Millie. “No. I ain’t going back to Memphis.”
“Well, don’t open up downtown,” Millie said and pointed out the dirty plate glass windows toward the deserted street. “Maybe go on up there where Ethel’s nephew opened that store selling saxophones and whatnot. In that area they call the Loop. Old Jimmy used to say that he’d a done better up there.”
“The Loop?”
“Yeah, you’ll like it there, Young Jimmy,” Millie said. “All sorts of weirdos in the Loop.” She leaned her soft, haloed head against his shoulder and laughed.
The new store hadn’t been open two hours before Fred Bosch walked in. He looked about thirty years old, with light-brown skin and a rough, full beard. He entered the store like a turtle, eyes first, long neck following behind, and when he stood up straight, he was a half a foot taller than Bones. Bones decided, based on the green sweater with the worn-out sleeves, he was either a bum or a professor. Bones had seen plenty of both in his few weeks setting up the store in the Loop. Either way it didn’t matter, this was his first customer. Bones went over immediately and introduced himself.
Fred nodded at him briefly, his fingers rapidly flipping through a nearby stack of records. “You a dominoes player?” Fred asked.
“No, sir.”
“What you call yourself Bones for then?”
“Just a nickname.”
“What do you call this place? Bones’s Records?” Fred asked and chuckled a little.
Bones smiled. “Nah, I reckon as soon as someone buys a record, I’m going to call it whatever that record is.”
Fred stopped flipping and looked square at Bones. “So if I buy a Chopin record, you’d call the place what? Chopin’s Records?”
“I guess I’d have to, but I ain’t never heard of no Chopin.”
“He was a composer from Warsaw, Poland,” Fred said. “Favored solo piano concertos. Where’d you come upon these records, Bones?”
“I bought ’em from Jimmy’s Records that done closed downtown.”
Fred’s face opened up into a full smile. “These are Jimmy’s records?” he asked.
“Shol is,” said Bones. “Bought ’em off his wife Millie few months back.”
Fred looked around frantically. “Where’s the jazz?”
“Over there,” Bones said pointing to the corner.
Fred damn near pushed Bones out of the way and rushed across the store. “Oh, I’m good now,” he said. “I am good.”
Bones walked back behind the counter and watched him, waiting. When Fred came up to the register with only three records in his hands, Bones said, “That’s all you want? You been up in here for hours.”
Fred held up a copy of Triple Threat and said, “This here, this is Roland Kirk’s first record and it’s worth a hell of a lot more than two dollars.”
“It is?” Bones said.
“Listen,” Fred said. “First thing you might want to do is get to removing as many of these stickers as you can before someone else walks in. Jimmy, as much as he knew about music, and as much as he was one of the best men I ever knew, never did charge enough for his vinyl.”
“How am I supposed to know how much to charge?” Bones asked.
“Damn, what did you do, wake up one day and decide to open a record store?”
“Something like that,” Bones said.
“How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Twenty. How old are you?”
“Older than twenty,” Fred said. “Listen, I got a couple of collectors books at home. I could bring ’em by. They’d at least help you know which ones of these you got that are worth real money.”
“Are you a collector?”
“I guess you could say that,” Fred said. “Got about three thousand records in my collection. It’s not much, I know, but I like to think I got three thousand of the good ones.”
“Three thousand? Jesus H. Christ,” Bones said. “You wouldn’t want a job, would you? I mean taking the stickers off the records and helping me out? I can’t pay you much, but you can have first dibs on the records and I’ll sell ’em to you at cost.”
Fred, who only ever spent his money on records, had been on his way over to Blueberry Hill to see about a job as a dishwasher. He looked at Bones to see if he was serious. “Hell yeah, I want a job.”
“My man,” Bones said.
“In the meantime,” Fred said, “you’re going to sell me this record for two dollars and you got yourself a name for your store.”
“What’s that,” Bones said, “Roland’s Records?”
Fred shook his head. “I’m going to do you one better,” he said. “I’m going to make you look like you are a whole lot cooler than you actually are, okay?”
Bones nodded.
Fred held up the record. “This brilliant man, this genius of a musician, he had a dream, see? And in the dream, he was told to change his name, so now he isn’t Roland Kirk anymore, he’s Rahsaan Roland Kirk.”
“Ima call the store Rahsaan’s Records?”
“You’re going to call the store Rahsaan’s Records,” Fred said.
“Now that is cool,” Bones said. “Sounds like the name of a black person’s record store.”
Fred looked at Bones sideways and said, “Whatever you say, but I don’t think you’re fooling anyone, white-boy-named-Bones.”
TRACK 8
For the
Good Times
CORDELIA DIED IN THE morning of May 22, 1985. Cyrus had gone out to buy bread and when he got home, there was a magnified silence to the apartment that made him drop the bread on the floor and run to the bedroom. It was too late. She was already gone; only the shell of her was left, the sheets pulled up to her chin. She died before Cyrus could ask her the one thing that needed to be asked. So many times he had started to, but then looked into her sunken, ancient eyes, and thought, Not now, Cyrus. It can wait. But death didn’t wait. It arrived and he hadn’t asked her how or when, they were going to tell Francis and Octavian the truth. He and Cordelia both needed be there when the boys learned that Cyrus wasn’t Francis’s real father.
Cyrus was left holding their secret like a bag of stolen goods. He didn’t know whether to lay it down or bury it with her. He wasn’t sure that he would be able to do alone what they’d always said they would one day do together.
He walked into the living room and flipped on the receiver. He lowered the needle on the song Cordelia had asked him to play the night before. Nina Simone’s husky voice rang through the apartment and chased death from the corners where it was trying to hide. As Nina asked the blackbird why it wanted to fly, Cyrus felt his wife’s spirit lift up from the places where it still lay.
Cyrus eyes filled with hot, heavy tears. “Fly, baby girl,” he whispered. “Just don’t fly too far from me.”
When Cyrus met Cordelia in 1972, Francis was the most troublesome, barely three-year-old boy he’d ever laid eyes on. Back then they didn’t have terms like ADHD or
PTSD. Kids like Francis were simply bad, or wild if you were being polite. From where he sat, it seemed that something drove the child, told him to do exactly what he wasn’t supposed to do, things that didn’t even make sense—like sitting his little butt down in the middle of Hanley Road and flat refusing to move, or trying to eat the Ajax from under the sink. Most mothers he knew would have beat the child, but not Cordelia. She refused to even spank him. Said no one who loved another ever needed to hit them. And Cordelia was so beautiful as she looked at her son with exhausted eyes, lips drawn down into a dark curve. And who was he to tell her anything? He was merely an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department, the ink still wet on his PhD.
Why she finally decided to spank Francis, in the Ladue Library no less, he couldn’t remember. No matter the reason, it had been a bad choice. Ladue was the richest, most conservative and white place in the entirety of St. Louis County and Cyrus imagined every white woman in the library that day had been raised by a black nanny, or had a black woman at home raising their own children. Yet Cordelia, a young black mother whacking her son’s backside with a copy of Make Way for Ducklings, meant a call to social services. It meant Brenda Brooks, with her home-perm, pockmarked skin, and vodka breath covered by Doublemint gum at Cordelia’s front door, asking to come in.
She inspected the house, opened Cordelia’s refrigerator, drummed her Lee Press-on-Nails on top of the pages of Cordelia’s manuscript, and eyed the reckless pile of dirty laundry behind the bathroom door. She scribbled things on a yellow legal pad and told Cordelia she’d be hearing from her.
The next day Cordelia burst into Cyrus’s office unannounced. Since his course was over, and it wouldn’t be looked on with suspicion, he and Cordelia had begun officially seeing each other, and things were tenuous. Cyrus was surprised to see her there and tried not to be distracted by her flowered sundress or the way the Ethiopian cross she wore rested in the open oval of her collarbones. How her bracelets rang like delicate church bells as her hands flew around while she spoke.
Brenda Brooks, she told Cyrus, said to think about sending Francis to her relatives in North Carolina or consider that he might wind up in foster care.
“They can’t do that, can they?” Cyrus said.
“I think they can do whatever they want to do.”
“I have a friend who is a wonderful attorney,” Cyrus said. “This isn’t his field but how about we start by…”
Cordelia shook her head. “I don’t need you to call your friend,” she said. “What I need is for you to tell her we’re going to get married.” The pain in her face was as wide as the ocean, and Cyrus wondered if making that pain go away would be as simple as telling a lie he wished were true.
“You think that’s all it’s going to take?”
Cordelia sat down heavily in the wingback chair on the other side of the desk. She wiped away the thin line of perspiration from her forehead and looked directly at him. “And that you’re his father,” she said.
All Cyrus could think of was that she was beautiful. That the worry on her brow, the sweat on her shoulders, the curve of her mouth gave him not a single reason to say no. And the next day, Cyrus sat down in Brenda Brooks’s office wearing his Armani suit and his best silk tie, even though it was damn near ninety-five degrees outside.
He refused her slack offer of a glass of water. “Can we get started?” he said. “I’ve got a course to prepare for.”
“Tell me about your history with Ms. Dixon,” Brenda said.
Cyrus adjusted the cuffs of his shirt, crossed one leg over the other, and began to spin a tale of romance and memories. He filled it so fully that Brenda Brooks stopped chewing on her ballpoint pen and sat back in her chair and listened. When Cyrus got to the enchanting details of Francis’s birth, Brenda Brooks held up her hands. “Enough,” she said and stamped Dismissed on the file.
Cyrus walked out of her office dabbing his face with his handkerchief and believing every single word he’d just said. He rushed, bewildered, downtown and stumbled into Levi’s Jewelry like a drunken man. Levi was the only jeweler Cyrus’s father ever trusted to repair his pocket watch, and Levi rejoiced as he helped Cyrus pick out a ring. “Platinum,” Cyrus insisted, “because she’s better than gold.”
When Cordelia opened her front door, Cyrus heard Al Green coming from the stereo, and he kneeled right there on the porch, pushed the ring into her hands. She looked down at Cyrus. “Are you doing this because you love me,” she said, “or because you want to save me?”
She was wearing a long, printed orange skirt and a thin white t-shirt with no bra underneath. And for a moment, Cyrus let himself imagine what it would feel like to run his tongue across one of her nipples. He knew right then that he would be happy for the rest of his life if he could spend every moment learning everything there was to know about Cordelia. He grabbed her softly around the ankles and lowered his head. “Both,” he said. It was the most truthful thing he ever uttered in his life.
Francis had been so young. He had never laid eyes on his real father, and Cyrus and Cordelia mulled over what words would help a little boy who couldn’t sit still for two minutes understand the difference between biological and adopted parentage. And as every day of living together as a family passed, that difference seemed more cloud-filled and complicated to explain. So they waited. They were going to tell him, they told each other, one day.
TRACK 9
Beast of
Burden
OCTAVIAN’S MOTHER’S BODY WAS gone before he got home, but as soon as he walked in the apartment, he knew. He saw the way his father’s skin was drawn so tight against his face that Octavian could see the gray shape of his skull, and he knew. Death had already come and gone. Octavian wondered if his mom died when he was in music class singing “Wade in the Water” or if she died during science hour while he was building a terrarium. Maybe she died at lunch recess when he sat alone in the tunnel still trying his damnedest to draw that picture of Francis.
Cyrus lifted his eyes from the table. “Can you tell me where Frankie is, so I can go get him?” he asked.
Octavian had an empty and sharp feeling as he imagined his father coming face-to-face with City Ass Cedric. “No,” he said. “I’ll get him. I need to walk.”
Octavian had kept his promise and it had been months since he had been to Cedric’s apartment. He passed the stores in the Loop, crossed the streets at the crosswalk and with every step, he waited for the tears to come, waited for his heart to thrash, to break. But somehow, his feet kept moving—as if the sidewalk moved underneath him. And the thought that he would never see his mother again did not fill him with despair, or unbearable pain. Instead Octavian felt the heavy burden of relief that he would no longer have to see her try to smile at him and only be able to wince, would never again have to smell her dying flesh.
When Cedric opened the door, Octavian tried to push past, but Cedric planted his feet. “I thought I told your brother to tell you to stop comin’ around here?”
Octavian took a deep breath. “Francis needs to come home,” he said.
City Ass Cedric must have seen something different in the way Octavian looked deep into his weed-glazed eyes, because he opened the door and said, “Frank’s in there.”
The bare floor was strewn with pieces of unopened mail, newspapers and empty Chinese food containers. A broken yellow chair stood in the corner, beside a folding table littered with Styrofoam cups and beer cans overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes. Francis lay asleep on a green-and-brown plaid couch with a missing cushion. He was shirtless, with one long arm thrown over his head and the other hand shoved deep into his favorite pair of faded jeans with the frayed knees. He had turned fifteen in March, and sleeping there like that, he looked older and younger at the same time. Octavian pressed the soft brown flesh of his brother’s bare arm, but Francis didn’t move.
“Watch out,” Cedric said and pushed Octavian aside. He shook Francis hard a
nd yelled, “Yo Frankie! Wake up!”
Francis opened his heavy eyes and said, “What the fuck, man?”
Cedric pushed Octavian forward.
Francis tried to focus on his face. “Tave,” he said, “what did I tell you about coming here?” The words came out thick and stuck together.
Octavian held his hand out and said, “It’s time to go home, Frankie.”
Francis withdrew from Octavian’s hand like he might burn at his touch.
“I said, come on. Mama’s dead.”
With his mother gone, Octavian thought Francis would disappear into Eastgate and never return. But instead, Francis stopped hanging out there altogether. He said he only wanted to be around Octavian. It was like old times again, sitting on the floor of their bedroom listening to music. But Cordelia was gone and now Francis couldn’t listen to soul like he used to.
“It reminds me too much of Mama,” he explained. He became obsessed with classic rock and made Octavian listen to the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and his favorite, Pink Floyd.
Francis got up early and made his bed. He went to school every day and tried to be better. But by summer, Francis’s bed was never made right, he couldn’t get the corners tight enough and he’d spend an hour making and unmaking it until his hands started to shake and Octavian would push him aside and do it for him. Octavian’s clumsy result was somehow satisfactory. And it was more than the bed. Francis was afraid. He whispered his fears to Octavian in the darkness of their bedroom. What if Cyrus died? What if Octavian died? What about nuclear war and hurricanes, tsunamis?
“We live in the middle of the country, Frankie,” Octavian told him. “I don’t think we need to worry about tsunamis.”
Octavian escaped his brother’s fears by falling into books. He read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, devoured Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, and read everything and anything Marvel. In July, when Octavian turned eleven, Cyrus bought him a new color television, a VCR, and all three of the Star Wars movies on big, thick black tapes.
There You Are Page 9