The firemen arrived too late, looking like a bunch of lost football players. They carried their hose like a glutted pet snake and turned the nozzle on huddled pieces of slow-burning furniture. There wasn’t much left of the house.
I could hear the voices of neighbors and other people standing in the street in front of the house. From all the noises of cardoors slamming, I could tell a lot of people had gathered. The air was practically shoe-polish black from the smoke of the fire, and I imagined the faces of the neighbors would be smudged like the faces of cannibals and chimney sweeps. I imagined their eyes would be hard too, like marbles. A fire, like a mirror, was something to see and see into.
It was early morning, or at least it was supposed to be. The air was humid and close-fitting, like a wet shirt, and gray light hung low on the edge of the horizon. We felt like we were trapped in the stomach of an animal, like a thing just eaten or about to be spit out, and the sun, which barely showed itself, looked like a curious outraged eye staring inside-out at the thing it had swallowed.
I’d taken a lot of smoke, and my brother had to carry me from the ditch. I wasn’t much with myself, but I remembered him lifting me and dipping me in the ditch-water once to wash all the darkness off of me. I also remembered him carrying me at a slant down the slope of the ditch for the better part of forever, the noises of the sirens and cars and people dwindling down to the sounds of my chest water-whistling. When he laid me down on the ground the earth seemed to rush up beneath me like a roof caving in backwards, and I knew that I could hear, barely, and see, somewhat, and he stood above me sort of crooked-leaning.
“You all right?”
He said it, leaning, me barely able to see.
“I didn’t— Wait. Let me say it.” He had his hand up around his mouth; he kept taking it off and putting it back on, like fingers around a shook-up pop bottle. “Wait. Wait. Let me say it, now. I didn’t—I didn’t see her. Wait. Let me say it. Nobody got out.”
It could have been his crying then, if only it had been crying. It could have been his laughter, maybe, but it was more than that. It was a sound unlike anything I’d heard—unlike laughter or crying or music or language. It was the type of sound that rises from the throat like pressure that can’t be stopped, like a water-pumped rocket toy or a coffee kettle or an oil geyser, and my brother kept putting his fingers to his mouth, pulling them away, putting them back—and when he spoke, his words strung together in a whistle, and he didn’t take no pause between sentences like folks you see at public libraries who ought to be removed, who ought to be put away.
“Listen,” he said, that noise gushing out: “When. When they see him. Wait. Ha, ha. Just let me. Ha, ha. Just let me say it. When. When they see him there—” Hands up around his mouth, fumbling, a muzzle on the mouth of a rabid animal: “When they see him there. On the floor, there. They’ll think—” Whistling: “They’ll think he did it!”
My eyes were open then, but I wanted to close them. I knew I couldn’t. I lay there, quiet, just staring at that mouth like you might stare into a wound or the hole of a toilet, not listening to the noise that was beyond tears or laughter, not listening to that noise like choking and being choked and wanting to scream but not being able to, not listening to the whistle, or watching the way his fingers fumbled with his lips, ten soft corks and an unstopped bottle. And how, in the end, when his shaking had stopped, I decided it was closer to laughter, how if it was closest to anything, it was closest in the end to laughter.
“It’s just us”—whistling—“just me and you”— heaving now—“just the two of us”—choking on it— “and nobody else.” So it was all right if he screamed, it was all right if he let the pressure out once, because when he was through he seemed a good deal calmer, and he did not sweat as much nor put his hands up to his mouth, and I did not have to listen to his teeth talking to themselves: “Can you believe it! Oh Christ, can you believe it!”
It was light, and we had begun to walk. There was not as much blood on my brother, what from the water of the ditch and all.
“We can’t keep on like this.”
One of us said it, it didn’t matter who.
“I don’t see how we can keep on like this.”
My eyes were with the ground, watching it come up, fall back, come up, fall back. It made me sick to look at it.
“We haven’t eaten.”
“Yes we have.”
I kept my eyes on the ground, getting sick. “Sometimes you’ve eaten but you just can’t remember.”
“A lot of people haven’t eaten, but we have.”
“When? I can’t remember when.”
My stomach felt like a bag of sour water. Every once in a while it made a wounded sound, like it was leaking inside of me.
“You hungry?”
“I am.”
“No you ain’t. You just sound it.”
I wasn’t watching my brother no more. Even if I looked at him I couldn’t see him. It was as if there was something between the two of us, a body you couldn’t get through or around. The only way I knew he was there was by the sound of his voice, which didn’t sound like him anyway. For all I knew there might have been a complete stranger walking in front of me, and at that point it wouldn’t have mattered, at that point he wasn’t even there.
“Hey?”
He turned around and looked at me.
“What is it?”
“I.” I was trying to think of it, what it was I’d meant to tell him. “Listen.” His face, it wasn’t nothing but a face to me. I put my hand up to it, but it passed right through. “Listen. I’m not sure what. Tell me who you are, there. Tell me who you are.”
He got down on his knees and looked at me, but I didn’t see him. He told me.
“I don’t believe you.”
“No. Neither do I.”
He stood back up and walked beyond me, back in the direction from where we came. I asked him where he was going.
“To the ditch.”
“Again? But we just—”
“I know. I can’t walk no more. I got to float. If somebody sees me like this they’ll call the police. I can’t go around walking like this no more. You come with me, all right?”
He knew I’d follow him; he didn’t have to ask. All I wanted to know was where we were heading.
“I ain’t sure.” We were at the slope of the ditch. “You ain’t going to drown on me, now?”
I told him no, I was tall enough. Besides, it was only a sewage ditch.
“I don’t know if we’re dressed right for a sewage ditch,” he said. “I just don’t know.” He held out his hands at his sides. “You think I’m dressed all right for a sewage ditch?”
I looked at him. There was less blood on him from the first time we’d been in the ditch. I told him.
“Less blood on me. Well. I swallowed a lot of ditchwater before. Must’ve swallowed my share of blood too. Have you got that taste in your mouth?”
I didn’t know what taste he meant, so I didn’t answer him. We were wading down the sewage canal, wading through the warmth of the teabrown water. It felt like a warm bath, like a good warm Sunday bath.
“Did you hear me?”
“What?”
“Don’t fall asleep on me now. You fall asleep and the ditchwitch’ll get you. Only sonsofbitches let the ditchwitch getcha. I said you got that taste in your mouth? Do you got it?”
“What taste?” I dunked my face in the ditch and swallowed some of the water. “You mean that taste? You mean the taste of ditchwater?”
“No, no. You wanna catch bowel cancer? What I meant was the blood taste. You know. Like when you suck on a penny. Like when you put a copper penny on your tongue and let it sit there. You got that taste?”
I dipped my face in the ditch again.
“Stop that.”
“All right.”
“And answer my question.”
“About what? About the blood taste?”
He nodded his head.
“Right. Uh-huh. You got it?”
I said I did, and when I went to dunk my head a third time to drink he pulled me up by the neck and slapped me in the face.
“Don’t do that anymore.”
“I won’t. I promise. I got the taste.”
He let go of me.
“You told me already.”
I looked at him.
“I told you?”
“Uh-huh.”
We came to the part of the ditch that branched out in a fork to the old part of the bay. I touched the place on my face where my brother had slapped me, then I turned to him.
“You know,” I said. “I can’t see you. I can’t make out your face, or your voice, or who you are. You could be a haunt for all I know.”
My brother shook his head.
“Ha ha. You’re just tired and hungry is all. We’ll get something in you and your head’ll clear up. You want me to get you something for your head?”
“But I’ve got the taste.”
He studied his feet.
“I know that. I know you do. You want I should get you something that will take the taste away?”
I stared at him. Through the dimming night I could make out his features a little more clearly. There was a busted smile on the right side of his face, like somebody’d been tugging too hard on his upper lip, and the lids of his eyes twitched and squinched and fluttered. His face was washed clothesline white in the water of the ditch, and tiny flecks of dirt and crud had collected in his hair. “You want I should get you something?”
His voice was coming to itself, too, like somebody with their hand on a radio dial bringing the tuner gradually onto the right station. I said his name and felt the world draw away from me. I was under the water, and I could feel his arms grabbing.
“Come on! Jesus Christ!”
I was out of the water and my eyes were sort of rolling and the whole world looked something like the fabric of an unfolded shirt. My brother was talking to me.
“You fainted. That’s all. You only fainted. Now breathe deep.” I did it. “That’s right,” he told me.
We were coming up on a bridge that separated the canal from the old bay. I wasn’t so much moving anymore as my brother was holding me and I was moving with him. There was a trim old black man on the bridge eating something from a Campbell’s soup can, and when he saw us he put the can down and hitched his trousers and shouted.
“You boys! You there! ’M’on out of that water!”
My brother and I didn’t answer him, and the black man put his hands up around his mouth.
“I say you there! Playin’ Dead Man’s Float! You can’t be passing under this hyah bridge—I got my traps on the other side!”
The old man’s voice was pretty loud, so I could tell he was right above us. We passed beneath the belly of the bridge and into the cool and the damp of the hollow. There was a sound of water dripping, and the echo of my own breathing came at me from all sides, and I could see our shadows moving on the far wall of the bridge supporters like hands in a shadow play. We came back into the grayness of the morning and saw the black man with his head between his hands, tromping up and down and spitting into the water. He talked to the sky, as if it were the only thing that would listen to him, and he shook his fist at the water, as if it were to blame. “People do as they do,” he said. “People do as they do. You say watch out. You say looky here. Ain’t nothin’ but deafmutes, blindmen, motherfo’s, and monkeysees. And look at these tomcats, comin’ on through. Ribber rats! Homeboys! People do as they do!”
When my brother and I were a good ways from the bridge—in a deeper, swifter part of the canal where the sewage had ended and the old bay began—we pulled ourselves onto a low-tide sandbar and sat looking at the canal trailing in a thread behind us. I could see the old man moving back and forth on the narrow bridge, and I could hear that he was still shouting but had a hard time figuring out exactly what he was saying. I turned to look at my brother and noticed a wooden trap full of moving bluecrabs sitting in the water at his side.
There was a piece of cut rope tied to the top of the trap, and the knife glinted in my brother’s pants pocket.
“We’re going to sell these crabs and get something for your head,” my brother told me.
“I don’t need anything,” I said. “I feel all right.”
“We got eight dollars’ worth of bluecrab here.”
“You buy yourself some medicine,” I told him.
I watched the bluecrabs struggle in the cage. They made a funny, brutal noise, like football shoulder pads clicking together.
“I wasn’t going to buy it for myself. I was going to buy it for you.”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t need it.”
He stuck his finger into the trap, and a crab latched on to it. It didn’t seem to hurt him much.
“You passed out back there,” he said. “You were out of your head.” He loosed his finger from the crab’s clutches. “You know what I think?”
I didn’t know.
“What I think is you’re still out of your head.”
I looked at him.
“You’re the one with your hand in the crabtrap.” All told, three different crabs had latched on to my brother’s fingers. It made him smile.
“But they don’t hurt none,” he said. “They only hurt a little.”
He stood and picked the trap up by its string. “You want me to sell this for money?”
I did not answer him.
“Eight dollars,” he said. “We could get things.”
I put my hands in the water and lifted some to my face.
“All right,” my brother said. “All right, I hear you.”
He began to walk and I did not follow him. I watched him wade back into the current and saw him disappear in the direction of the bridge where the black man was cursing the sky and the water. For a while his head disappeared beneath the tide, and I knew he was tying the crabtrap to the old fishing rope. When he came out from under the water I could see the black man shaking his fist and hoisting his trousers and spitting at him. Because it did not take my brother long to swim to where he’d left me waiting, I knew he was all right again. And because he was all right I knew he would need more medicine. It was always the way.
“I give him back his crabs,” he said.
“Yes,” I told him. “I saw it.”
After resting awhile in the water we reached the shore and started walking toward the part of the old bay where the abandoned city ports and railway yards were. I wasn’t thinking about the crabs anymore, but my brother punched me in the shoulder once and looked at me and then down at the sand.
“I don’t need a bunch of goddamn crabs to get a bottle of medicine when I want one.”
“I know it,” I said; there wasn’t any sense in arguing.
Some time passed, and we hadn’t said anything. I looked at my brother and told him that I thought it was going to rain again.
He opened his mouth and tasted the air.
“Yes,” he said. “I think you’re right.”
We crossed a stretch of sand and sea oats that led to the old bay shipping yards. As my brother walked ahead of me across the squatting dunes, he gathered oats in a bundle beneath his underarm. It was illegal to pick them, and my brother knew it. He did not have to be able to read to know what he was doing was considered wrong. You could get anywhere from thirty to ninety days in jail, plus a one-thousand-dollar fine, just for picking one oat from the side of a sand dune, but my brother didn’t care. He must have had a good two dozen in his arms when he came to the lip of the old bay harbor, and as he stared out at the shipyards, which were quiet and lifeless as the marina we’d hidden in the night before, he took each of the oats and tossed them reed by reed into the stillwater of the dead bay.
“Look at her,” he said, eyes practically beneath the water. “Will you just look?”
Time was, or so our mama’d told us, that the old bay ports were the bu
siest in the area. In the night, you could hear ships calling to the lights of the harbor city, and folks would gather in bars by the port to drink and talk in different tongues and open each other up with bowie knives. But now the port lay like a fish left to spoil, the whole place reeking of salt and rusted iron, the wreck of a spongeboat sideways tilted in the gray gritted teeth of a sharp coral reef.
On one of the barges, across the harbor, I saw two girls playing Hide-and-Go-Seek. One of the girls was older than the other, and she lay resting her head against a pile of ancient-looking chains. The younger, meanwhile, hid huddled behind a heap of brokendown crates and boxes. I wasn’t sure how they’d gotten onto the barge, or why they’d wanted to get there in the first place, but I watched them chasing each other and wished that I were there with them.
The stomach of the sky had grown bigger and darker and the wind had a full wet flavor to it. I knew the next storm was bound to be terrific. My brother was headed in the direction of the old bay bridge, which stretched across the harbor a good quarter mile and led from the train tracks back into the city. The bridge wasn’t open to traffic anymore, but folks who wanted to fish off of it could pull their trucks or station wagons onto it. From where I was I could see a lot of morning people out there on the bridge. It made my brother nervous, I knew, because wherever a lot of folks gathered there was bound to be a cop around to keep them in line, and wherever there was a cop was where my brother didn’t want to be.
We were both soaking wet and must have looked like the resurrected drowned, but my brother kept his mouth shut and took to the bridge with the confidence of the man who might’ve owned it. It was tough making out the faces of the people who were fishing, the air was so ashen from the suffering sky, but what few eyes regarded us stared out in dull red pinpoints of light, and occasionally a ladyfinger of lightning would reveal a face full of weary anger and disinterest. In weather such as that it might as well have been night, and the men and women of the bridge wandered about and talked to each other in a scattered, helpless way, like dogs that have a hunch they’re about to be beaten but don’t have anywhere to run to and don’t have any way in which to fight back. So the people gathered in miserable company.
Life in the Land of the Living Page 15