by C. E. Morgan
* * *
It didn’t take long—they were processing the juveniles from the riot at the speed of light, and his adjudicatory hearing was arranged in just two weeks. Allmon was first up on the morning calendar call, his name boomed out by the PA into the hallway of the courthouse, thick with young defendants and their parents.
In that dingy courtroom, where half the windowpanes were replaced with plastic that dulled the light, they threw the book at him. But he didn’t need to read it, he already knew all the words by heart. The judge sustained the petition of the prosecutor—juvenile felony arson—and at the disposition hearing, they ordered him to camp for two years of firesetter education and rehabilitation. He never had the benefit of an attorney or even the offer for one, so he couldn’t pretend to be surprised when they sentenced him. They were calling the next case before he’d even risen to his feet in his borrowed dress shoes.
* * *
Marie came every day for two weeks following the disposition hearing. She dragged her aching, swollen body across two bus routes and five neighborhoods, using up an hour and a half and all her energy to get to the new redbrick facility on Auburn Avenue. When she finally collapsed in a plastic chair across from Allmon in the visiting room, he could smell the sweat of her exertion, her exhaustion. When she took his hands in hers, her trembling caused his hands to tremble.
She spoke with her eyes closed against the sawing agony of daylight. “They’ll keep you in school?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “They got school here every day. It ain’t so bad—this new building they got is pretty nice. They bring you dinner, so you ain’t got to go to a cafeteria or anything.”
“So they feed you?”
“Of course they feed me, Momma. I mean, they ain’t gonna let us starve.” The food was actually pretty good, much better than the white diet he’d been feeding them at home. It was damn near a relief if he was going to be honest. And that relief made him sick with guilt. He swallowed hard.
“I’m sorry,” Marie said suddenly.
He shook his head resolutely. “Nope. Nothing to be sorry about.”
“I feel like this is all my fault.”
Allmon sat back suddenly, retrieved his hands to his lap, where they fiddled with the fabric of his jeans. “Ain’t nobody’s fault. Especially not yours.” But he was looking above her head and far beyond her.
Marie reached forward to pull his hands back to her, but when he refused, when he drew his hands right back to his person with the flashing irritation that men are quick to master with women, her eyes became shot with lightning streaks of red and tears welled. “If I could have given you a father that you could have relied—”
He waved a hand and sighed and said, “Whatever. Don’t worry.” But the small, unstill voice said, Why the fuck can’t you keep a man? You should have fought harder! You should have fought for my sake!
“I know you think about Mike—”
“Fuck him,” he blurted.
“Wow,” Marie said, and sat back, but there was no anger in the word, just a kind of wonder that sounded to Allmon’s ear like self-pity.
“Momma,” Allmon said suddenly, clearing his throat, “I think it’s time you didn’t come back and just let me do this.”
Now it was Marie’s turn to sit back in offense. “What are you saying? You can’t just tell me to be away from you. I’m your mother.”
Allmon held up placating hands. “Listen, I know how hard it is for you to get out here, how much it takes. And, anyway, in a month they’re gonna send me out to camp. You won’t even be able to get out there. I’m in this, I’m gonna do this. You need to take care of your own self.”
“No—”
“Momma—”
“No.”
“Momma!” he barked. Then with a tic of his head, calm again. He said, “Momma, if you come back here, I won’t see you. That’s just how it’s gonna be. I want you to go home and take of yourself, get healthy, get back to working more. That’s the most important thing. Don’t waste none of your energy on me. Please don’t come back.”
Then he looked down, because she wouldn’t, and he didn’t want their eyes to speak anymore.
* * *
So, there was school. In two years, he learned:
1. A black line extends infinitely in white space. Put a point on a line and you can name it anything you want.
2. You are a threat to the safety of others.
3. Not exactly a part of the talented tenth, or you wouldn’t be in here, now, would you?
4. The lights on the dock are a symbol. The lights are a symbol! Do you know what a symbol is, Allmon?
5. Yours was a maladaptive and antisocial crime, its causes multidimensional. Family dysfunction factors were paramount.
6. A symbol is a metaphor. A symbol is when you stand for something.
7. I’m sick of you all thinking you can speak improper English in my class. You think the Oakland School Board’s given you permission to be ignorant? Not in my class, they haven’t! Not under my watch!
8. You can get a .38 revolver for like a hundred bucks on the street if you know where to go and who to talk to.
9. Race is a social construct and you kids just want to keep it constructed so you can whine and complain and play the victim. I’m here to make you functional in society, so you won’t grow up to be parasites on the system. But you have to choose to move beyond race. It’s your choice. You want to be a victim forever?
10. The fact you’re not a murderer right now is just dumb luck. But luck runs out.
11. Firesetter as sociological type: poor, black, broken family, unsupervised. Significant problem with aggression.
12. I am a victim. I am not a victim, a victim, not a victim. I am black. Not really, though—my dad is white!
13. Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius.
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar;
And in the spirit of men there is no blood:
O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit,
And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it! And, gentle friends,
Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.
14. It’s possible to jump a car in forty-five seconds if you practice.
15. You made your choices; now you need to face the consequences.
16. Allmon, what do you want to be when you grow up—a hoodlum? A thug? No. Well, what then?
17. Sleep. School. Basketball. Eat. Homework. Sleep. Repeat.
18. The firesetter responds maladaptively to ongoing stress, begins ideation during crisis, makes decision, gathers tools, sets fire. Elation then replaces anger.
19. When I get out of here, things are going to be fucking different. I’m going to make a new life for myself. The power is mine. All I have to do is choose.
20. You know why they killed Caesar? Because he wanted to be king.
* * *
You haven’t seen the Queen City in two years, you’ve been stuck out in the sticks at camp, so this Metro bus, it’s like a boat ferrying you from hell back to life. In your mind, the ashen neighborhood has turned in two years’ time from the dank, grimy Helltown into a shimmering Atlantis all paved in gold, yellow as a lemon diamond, where your mother is wearing a polka-dotted apron with a quarter sheet of cookies in her hand, saying: You’re a man now. And you say: I was adjudicated delinquent but have turned my life around, I was dissociated but now I feel, I do not have a father, but I do not need one to become my own man, I know there is dignity in poverty, I am not a product of my environment, I am responsible for my choices, I get to choose who I will be and now I choose to walk a straight line, I will stay away from the streets and gangs and report to my PO, because I have a future as bright as these city lights.
He wondered whether his father had visited during his absence.
>
When he slipped off the bus with his duffel at Knowlton’s Corner, the wind battered him. Unseasonably warm, with the force of a train, it slung a mad cesspool of flyers and candy wrappers, it turned leaves to razors and branches to spears. The neighborhood was still the color of ashes. Jesus. He tried not to think: everything looks the fucking same.
No, I’m changed, I’m grown, I’m seventeen.
Bent into a headwind, he pressed past the old church, past the gas station where two men were hollering at each other across their cars with gruff voices, past the furniture shops filled with cast-offs no one would ever buy, past a restaurant that hadn’t been there before, and down along the row houses, stunted like children who didn’t get enough to eat, starved of sun in the shadow of the overpass. And there was the shotgun. It too was unchanged, its gray paint peeling, its wrought-iron gate swinging by an ancient hinge, but that was all right, who really cares, because he was all right and his mother was all right, everything was going to be all right. He was clinging to the new person he was implementing in his mind, and as he approached, his feet hurried him forward without direct orders.
Momma. He was immediately assailed by the scent of rank mildew and stale cooking and something else, something lower and more personal, something animal, the odor of an unwashed person, her old, familiar smell enlarged and made pungent. Allmon stopped short in the doorway, hesitant as a first-time visitor, his pupils adjusting and one hand reaching forward in lieu of sight. First the marmoreal gleam of the linoleum, silver and gray, then the edge of old shag, then the sofa and Marie lying there with her back turned, her arms drawn up between her chest and the sofa back. His mind was jolted by time’s tricks. Had she not moved an inch in two years?
Momma. He had said the word out loud, and she started from her sleep or her daze. She came round abruptly on the sofa, rolling her weight, which spread ungainly over the entire width of the cushion. Her old shape was all wrong in the dark.
“Allmon?”
He was prepared for a new world. He was prepared to stand in that doorway like a valiant soldier returned or like a husband, all solemn and sure. But he rushed into the room like a child, flinging down his bag and actually shoving the coffee table out of the way, and as Marie was struggling her way to a sitting position, he was on his knees before her, pressing his face into the side of her arm.
“I didn’t know you were coming today. I thought it was tomorrow.”
“I’m home.”
“Babydoll.”
He looked up into her face as she was bending forward, like a groggy animal, struggling to orient in the woken world.
“Momma?”
He switched on the end-table lamp and looked at her, and it took all of his effort not to shrink. Something, some great force of life or death had come and distorted her. It was pressing her essence out of her, turning her into a balloon about to burst—her pendulous breasts and enormous, distended belly, even her cheeks, which were blooming with an unnatural, febrile red. Her eyes were cracked slats, and the few eyelashes that remained were mere black spikes. Her hairline had inched back from her temples, the lineaments of manhood forced upon her once feminine face. And worse, far worse, were the gross lines of pain etched on the face that had murmured once upon an endless time in the forever ago, Hush a bye don’t you cry go to sleepy little baby when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses blacks and bays dapples and grays coach and six white horses, hush.
He sat back on his heels, surprised by the anger in his voice. “Momma, when’s the last time you went to the doctor?”
“That’s the first thing you say to me?” She turned slightly away, but her scold was shame, as if she couldn’t look at the impossibly robust, vital, searching face of her boy not even in his prime. His very life burned her.
“Momma, what’s going on? What’s happening to you?”
“It’s fine. Better now you’re here.” Her voice was lower than he remembered, husky with disuse. She closed her eyes, and her lips pressed together.
“You still going to work?”
She just shrugged.
For a long moment he just stared at her, corralling love, rage, fear, and disgust into language. Then he said, “I’m here to take care of you. I’m gonna call that doctor we saw, gonna get you fixed up. Seriously. I promise.”
She nodded, looking straight ahead.
“We’re gonna get back on our feet. I’m gonna get some cash. Don’t worry about nothing.”
She didn’t look at him, she didn’t soothe him. She just rolled back to her position with her back turned, and her only reply was a sigh that had no more force than a hush song.
* * *
At 7:00, he was standing on the old, rain-slickened stoop. At 7:01, he was being ushered upstairs by someone he didn’t recognize, some midget in a fucking Cleveland ball cap. At 7:04 Aesop was clapping his hand over his own mouth and crying out with feigned glee like he actually missed him, like he didn’t have a hundred kids ready to join his army—“Oh shit! Smartie!”—shaking his head in amazement like here was the miracle of Lazarus, the last and greatest of all the miracles before the crucifixion, and he was actually witness to the kid crawling out of the tomb, still wrapped in his grave clothes, and gazing confusedly about at this world he thought he had left behind forever.
At 7:24 Allmon was back at work, this time as a dealer, this time with a beeper and a Glock 17.
* * *
The days were brief as the bursts from a flare, and the nights were long as everloving fuck. He was back at the Academy of Physical Education and couldn’t miss a day or show up late without his PO riding his ass, so he played that game. But then he punched the crack clock at five and worked the streets, standing on corners, hitting a couple of reliable houses until eleven or sometimes on into the deepest hours of the night, what his father had once called—
Daddy, you like driving the truck at night?
Eh, nigger’s hours.
All he needed was a solid week of work under the wheeling February sky cluttered with clusters of eyebright stars that made no sense, even less than their names—Betelgeuse, Rigel, the Pleiades and Hyades, the Orion Nebula, upstart Castor and Pollux—to raise some cash for a doctor. Then they’d get it sorted out. This was his herculean labor. This. He was supposed to be straight, he wanted to be straight, but if he looked too close the catch-22 started looking like a noose, like God himself had an APB out on him. So he refused to think. Instead, he worked the familiar streets of Northside, dealing and daring under the schizophrenic Marias, the sea of tranquillity, the sea of chaos, the sea of serenity, the ocean of storms, the ocean of indecision. Door to door on an earth not fixed, waiting for the sun not fixed, in the Milky Way, also not fixed. The goddamned galaxy itself hurtled through black useless space at three hundred kilometers per second toward no real destination, no real purpose. Every object was loose. In this mayhem, he gave himself one week.
* * *
Like that was ever going to work. He was back in it in every way—running, hanging with the crew, pocketing change, wearing a bomber Aesop gave him. He was even standing here in the kitchen again, cooking for Marie, just as he had before they threw him in 20/20 and packed him off to camp. Sly, sassy time messing with his mind, is it 1997 or 1995 or 1985 with Mike Shaughnessy about to walk in the door? No, it’s now. It’s Tuesday, you’ve been home five days, you’re cooking brats and sauerkraut, it’s just crazy how you slip into your old gambling seat at the casino, start stacking chips like you never even went anywhere. This is how addicts must feel raising a bottle to their lips after a long dry spell. He wasn’t going to lie, being on the loop again felt damn good. Both awful and good. That was probably the definition of crazy.
“Momma!” he said in his bang-the-pot voice, too loud for the space. “Time to eat! Get up!” He turned and looked at her lying there, facing the couch back. Barely ever moving. Impatience was gasoline in his veins. You know what else was crazy? How he couldn’t harnes
s his mind, how it vacillated from compassion to … Fuck! He didn’t know why she couldn’t be tougher! How she’d ever let Mike Shaughnessy get away, why she didn’t know how to fight—weren’t women supposed to be so strong?—why wasn’t she hard? Stand up and play the bitch! Their life could have been so different if she’d had a fucking backbone like the Reverend, then Allmon wouldn’t have to run all over like a pretend thug, throw his life away, be the fucking man of the house—
He wiped a hand over his face, changed roles. He cleared his throat as he carried over a plate. “Momma.”
Leaning over her, he realized with some embarrassment that her gown had fallen away from the upper slopes of her breasts, the skin there inlaid with faded stretch marks. In the room nearly overridden by shadows, he saw that the irregular lesion she had on her right hand—scarlet red and scaled with a scurfy, livid white—was repeated across the skin of her upper chest.
“Momma,” he blurted out, and the sound of anger in his own voice made him want to smack himself. But his hand was still gentle as a child’s when it touched her shoulder.
“Huh?”
“What the fuck is this? You got these all over?”
Marie came round slowly, turning clumsily, like she didn’t know where she was, or what he was saying. She could barely open her eyes. “Why are you cussing at me?”
“How long you had these sores, Momma?”
He reached down and exposed the skin around her clavicle. From her throat, down her sternum into the ribbed vale between her breasts, her flesh was a mottled landscape of enflamed, crusted, flaking sores. Her body looked beaten, or rotten.
“Holy shit, Momma,” he said, rearing back. “The fuck is this? I’m calling a ambulance right now!”
That seemed to awaken her properly, and her hand shot out to grip his wrist.
“No!”
“Right now!”
She wrenched up his wrist with all the force she possessed. All her life blazed in her eyes, everything left. “Don’t, Allmon. Don’t. I’m telling you no. The ambulance costs a thousand dollars—maybe more. I’m fine.”