Hold It 'Til It Hurts

by T. Geronimo Johnson

  When they passed under I-10/US-90, Bryant threw bottles of water to the people stranded above. They were met with thanks and curses, and one clear, plaintive voice asking, “Can’t you give us a ride? Please?” Bryant ran his light along the bottom of I-90, trying to see where it ended. “Where does that road lead?” he asked Achilles.

  “Across the river,” said Achilles.

  “Why don’t they just cross the river? It isn’t flooded over there.”

  “I don’t know,” said Achilles. He didn’t know how to explain the roadblock that the Gretna police had set up to keep survivors out. Besides, those reports might not even be true. They were too senseless to be true, as was the alleged shooting on the Danzinger bridge or the vigilantes in Algiers shooting blacks. “Take me back.”

  “We have two hours left.”

  “Take me back now,” said Achilles.

  At Mrs. Delesseppes’s, he tossed pebbles at Ines’s window, pleading for her to come down or let him in, which she refused until he said, “Wexler isn’t dead.”

  She came outside but remained a few feet from him, shaking her foot as she did when expecting bad news. He couldn’t see them but knew there were two tiny indentations in her lower lip.

  He showed her the photograph of the squad under the airplane wing together, headed out for R&R. “You’re right. Wexler isn’t dead.”

  “I heard that.” She slapped the air.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you. I’ve wanted to say it since the day we met. My brother is in the morgue.” He pointed to the photo. “My brothers,” he said. “These are my brothers. All of them.”

  He pointed to Merriweather. “This is Merriweather.”

  He pointed to Wages. “This is Wages.”

  He pointed to Wexler. “This is Wexler.”

  He pointed to Troy. “This is Troy. He’s in the morgue. I identified the body in Atlanta.” He couldn’t lie anymore, but the truth choked him. Unable to finish, his body slipped out of his control, all snot and tears, What a fag. Don’t be a sissy, Connie. How can you think under fire all pussy-lipped? Is that all snot, that slimy skein stretching across his fingers, that salty, bitter assault on his tongue? Ines put her hand to her mouth and guided him to a seat on the porch stairs. He didn’t talk Troy out of enlisting, he wasn’t there when Troy needed him, he didn’t do enough, he didn’t even avenge Troy’s death.

  Ines hushed him, leading him into the house, his cries echoing in the living room and amplified by the hall. At last they were in the kitchen, where Ines gave him a paper bag to breath into, and Achilles spoke through the bag. “Dead, so many.” He tried to say more, but all he could get out was that he felt like he was dying, needed to die, didn’t deserve to live, why hadn’t he died, why not him?

  “I didn’t do enough. I tried. I swear I tried.”

  A few bleary-eyed strangers appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. Ines waved them off. Achilles turned away and calmed himself.

  “Oh, no.” Ines squeezed Achilles’s hand. “Achilles, baby, I know you did.”

  She was insistent on this point, and the more insistent she was, the worse Achilles felt, until a sob escaped him, and that look on her face, like the look on his mother’s face the night Troy first came home, the look that meant she took his tears to mean something they didn’t, and the tighter Ines held him the more he melted into her arms, and the more he did, the more he despised himself for crying, for failing his brother, for needing her so, for only doing his best, which his drill sergeant always said was just enough to get you killed.

  “My poor Achilles. And they said there’d never be another. And Troy, poor Troy.”

  CHAPTER 20

  OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, ACHILLES INCREASINGLY REGRETTED opening up to Ines that night. The week before the funeral was especially hard. He hadn’t told her much more that evening, stopping short at her reaction to learning that Troy was adopted. Now every day she shared a new tidbit about transracial adoption, prefaced always by “Poor Troy.” Not in the motherly voice she used when his favorite team lost; it was a reassuring voice, the voice of heartfelt commiseration, a miracle seemingly reserved for women: the ability to care, really care, about events that affected others. At times this emotional proxy was soothing. When his frustration reached the limits of his expression—a shake of the head, a curse, a groan—she took over with a heartfelt sigh, a breathy murmur, a doleful moan, her profound empathy his release. Ines was his professional mourner, for which he was grateful until she began mourning his brother.

  Poor Troy: That’s cultural genocide. It robs the black community of its most precious gift, children. Whites aren’t equipped to socialize a black child. Even when raised by their own parents, black children raised in white neighborhoods have identity issues. They’re never prepared for the real world. He doesn’t know his heritage, or why people treat him as they do. It’s like when you let a puppy sleep in your bed and lie in your lap and jump up and lick people in the face and everyone thinks it’s so cute, then the puppy grows, can’t fit in the bed, is too heavy for your lap, and scares people when he jumps. He’s a sweet puppy inside, but everyone sees a ferocious beast.

  Achilles resented the unintentional comparison, the implication that his parents had been less than earnest in their efforts. Achilles and Troy had grown up in a mixed neighborhood, equal parts Catholic and Protestant, with some Jews mixed in. Their parents for years allowed Christmas without Mass and Easter without new suits. When Achilles entered sixth grade they even tried Kwanzaa, stopping on the third day only because of Achilles’s protest. Though one had seven candles and the other nine, too many visitors mistook the kinara for a menorah, resulting in confrontations during recess when people asked questions he couldn’t answer. After working hard to fit in during elementary school, he didn’t want to blow it by showcasing his difference, or besting any of his friends at sports.

  Everything was O.K. with his friends—until they met his mom, or asked about his real name, or met his brother. A sensation that it was only temporary hung over most relationships. Hell, one day he turns eight, the next he has a brother.

  Achilles wasn’t the only one put out by Troy’s sudden appearance. Ken was equally distressed. Achilles and Ken would ride bikes and catch frogs and often eat at each other’s houses. They were the best kickball players in the neighborhood and started a gang of two, their biceps emblazoned with magic marker tattoos—a one in a circle. Achilles preferred playing at Ken’s house, because otherwise Troy would march out demanding to play and invariably didn’t swing the bat fast enough or kick hard enough or run quickly enough, and someone would tease him, and Achilles would try to ignore the whole thing. This strategy worked until one afternoon when they were playing kickball and Troy missed the ball on the last play. Ken yelled “Stupid,” feigning a slap. Troy flinched and ran, looking back over his shoulder at Ken while running at full speed until tripping over his own feet, scraping his knee on the hot gravel and yelping while he grabbed his right ankle like a baby. That was okay until Troy, seeing his mother in the window, started swinging, even though he only came up to Ken’s chest. Even that was okay until Achilles, trying to break them up, accidentally elbowed Ken in the nose. Ken said, “He doesn’t even like you. He’s not even black.”

  As Achilles helped Troy to his feet, Troy’s shirt slipped up to his shoulder revealing a crude circle with a one in the middle. Troy shot him a hateful look and placed his hand over the tattoo like it was a wound. While Achilles watched, Troy stormed into the house rubbing dirt into his tattoo and Ken slipped into the woods rubbing spit onto his. Troy told his mother that Ken had called Achilles Black! She gathered them to her lap and said they were his parents, always! When their father came home, he said, “We’re your parents and love you both like you’re our own children.”

  Troy persisted. “But Ken said Achilles is black and he’s not my brother.”

  Their father placed Achilles and Troy on the corduroy couch, their legs grazing the carpet,
and sat on the ottoman facing them.

  “Your skin color doesn’t matter, and never let anyone tell you otherwise. You could just as well be purple. In fact, here we’re all purple from now on. Purple people eaters.” Troy laughed. That was his favorite story. Their father rubbed their heads and explained that anyone who said race mattered was ignorant. But words weren’t enough, and, soon after, their father started what Achilles and Troy would later jokingly refer to as the diversity action plan. As they liked to say, their father invented DAP.

  Every Friday night for a month, following the airing of Roots, they ate at Happy Garden, wolfing down fried rice and egg rolls under the protection of red lacquer dragons. The owners’ son, Sam, was in the same grade as Achilles and worked in the restaurant on weekends, busing tables and refilling glasses, when he wasn’t watching ice skating on the TV behind the bar. Friday nights, Achilles’s father escorted Sam, Troy, and Achilles to the skating rink. Troy found his wings. He flew across the ice but couldn’t stop, always bearing down on his brother or father like an unavoidable accident. Achilles spent most of his time on his back. And Sam, for all his enthusiasm about watching, didn’t actually like to skate, and moped around the ring like he was incarcerated, tiptoeing on his blades with an exaggerated T-rex gait. This playdate lasted three weekends before Sam, sensing that his imprisonment was terminal, decided to get to know his two cellmates by sharing his Chinese name and inquiring about their real names, their African names.

  Their father sighed when Troy repeated the question. They had just dropped Sam at Happy Garden and now sat in the cab of their father’s truck, Troy in the middle, his head barely at Achilles’s shoulder. When Achilles met his father’s gaze, he knew he’d intercepted a look meant for adults, the kind his parents gave each other when it snowed on a school day.

  “Boys, your names are your names, your real names. And this isn’t going to make sense now, but don’t let other people’s problems become your problems. You are better. Be the ones to beat.”

  Achilles knew his father hadn’t meant that they were better than other people, only that they had to live by a higher standard: walk away from fights if you can, flatten the bastard if you can’t, and remember that sticks-and-stones stuff. He understood that everyone was equal. But his father didn’t understand that Achilles didn’t start the fights, though he was always blamed for them, though even that made sense when he overheard a counselor explain, “Some kids are just more violent.”

  The more Ines spoke, the more he sympathized with his parents. He’d never considered how hard they worked to protect him from the world. Ines thought it hard for kids. It wasn’t. How difficult, though, it must have been for his father, who knew he wasn’t a purple people eater. Was it like a commander sending troops to an uncertain fate?

  The Conroys hadn’t made the world. Ines couldn’t understand that, couldn’t understand that his parents weren’t to blame for how he felt when she uttered those two words, Poor Troy. She couldn’t understand that Achilles was that puppy, nay, beast. Miles from home, he was just another black man, as he learned with Charlie 1. He loathed his birth parents intensely, more than he’d ever imagined it possible to detest people he’d never met and wasn’t paid to kill. This animosity was invoked whenever she uttered those two words, as she did that morning of the funeral.

  Achilles was in the bathroom wrestling his tie when Ines came in, stood behind him reflected in the mirror, and said, “Your friends had it so hard, especially poor Troy.” She said it as she always did, like she’d realized only at that moment how bad Troy had it.

  She wore panties and a bra, the high nylon waist and sheer legs giving her the look of a mannequin. When she fixed her bra, readjusting the straps with a snap, rolling her shoulders like a wrestler and drawing one fingertip and then the other under the underwire, the familiar, warm glow oozed through his stomach, and the hairs on the back of his neck danced as he imagined biting one gaping hole in the crotch of her pantyhose and her wearing them all day. His mouth watered until she added, “White parents who adopted black kids back then didn’t have support groups.”

  Enraged, he couldn’t complete the full Windsor he’d practiced all week, the knot Wages had tied in the wee hours, and that Achilles was therefore determined to wear that day. Ines tied it for him—a perfect plump triangle—and snapped at him when he took it off in the car because it felt too tight. She snapped again when she had to retie it in the cemetery lot. A few cars away, a little boy underwent the same ordeal, his mother straightening his tie and collar and lapels, every so often yanking his ears. Their eyes met. The boy looked scornfully at Achilles, as if to say, Haven’t you figured it out yet? They ended up being only feet from each other in the procession to the grave. When the kid gave him another contemptuous look, Achilles stopped short of scratching his chin with his middle finger.

  As the preacher spoke about the word of God becoming flesh, ashes becoming ashes, and Wages returning home, Achilles wondered who was left to bury. In every direction, swarms of black umbrellas huddled like compound eyes. Unlike at their father’s funeral, where Troy and Achilles had silently flanked their mother, knowing it was their job to be strong, Achilles found it hard to hold back the tears. It was the first time he had cried since Lamont Jackson died. This felt like a service for all of them: Jackson, Wages, Troy. Though Ines often claimed he’d been emotional at the movie screening—That’s how I knew you were special—he didn’t recall feeling anything. Today, he couldn’t look anyone in the eye. It had been like that for the past few weeks. Whenever he met a stranger’s gaze, he wondered whom they’d lost, and if they’d find them. It was like traveling through a war zone, the faces of the survivors hungry, desperately searching, scanning passersby. People stopped him in the street, yelling or tapping his shoulder to get his attention, their smiles fading when he turned and they saw that Achilles wasn’t their son, or father, or friend, or brother, or neighbor, or even the postman (he had been thrilled to bump into his postman at Lee Circle, even though he was a short, stocky, ill-tempered Episode 1 vet to whom he had never before spoken).

  As the preacher droned on, Ines leaned on Achilles to adjust her shoes. She regularly shifted her weight from foot to foot. Her mother’s feet were a half size smaller, as was her dress size. Ines wore a simple black sleeveless dress with a black shawl draped over her shoulders, camouflaging the zipper that wouldn’t close. The dress fit like candy coating, threatening to crack every time she bent from the waist. Under other circumstances, he would have thought she wore it only to remind him of what he was missing, but he knew they were her mother’s clothes. She adjusted her other shoe, leaning on him again, and he put his arm around her, pulling her close to warm the chill in his bones. They were trapped in the shade under an overhang, next to crypts stacked like the drawers of an oversized apothecary. Like most New Orleans cemeteries, all the tombs at Mt. Olivet were aboveground, walled in to prevent floods from washing the coffins away, and arranged like a grid with the graves geometrically aligned along parallel roads wide enough for cars to pass, and with a few alleys limited to foot traffic. It was arranged like a city, except everyone was dead, as were most of the people he knew.

  The service was small. Achilles, Ines, Mrs. Wages, and Bethany’s family were the sole attendees. Wexler hadn’t come, as expected. They’d long ago agreed there was no need to attend each other’s funerals.

  He’d wanted Wexler to come, and maybe even Naomi. They could both meet Ines. They would see that he was different now, and Naomi would feel, well, he didn’t know what she would feel, but she would see that he wasn’t all bad. That would have meant telling Ines everything, but what did he have to lose? Never mind that Ines admitted coming back to the condo only because she felt sorry for him, couldn’t bear another night at her mother’s house, and was horny that night, that one night, that one night only. He brought that on himself, he knew, trying to laugh off his teary breakdown, blaming it first on the full moon, then on alcohol, then on
hormones, meaning he needed sex. Never mind that they lived like roommates of necessity, like relocated refugees, she in the bed and he on the couch, knocking before entering the bathroom, eating only the food they individually bought, carefully refolding the newspaper like considerate travelers. He could live with that as long as he could live with her.

  After Wages’s service, they held no jazz procession because these now required a permit. The permit office had reopened the day before, but there was no jazz procession permit division. No one knew if it would be a new department, or considered a parade, or a protest. The last jazz procession Achilles had seen was blockaded by nearly twenty blazing police cars, the trombonist arrested for disturbing the peace. Ines, who was in the car with Achilles, called it an outrage and heartbreaking. Watching the pallbearers struggle to remain poised, the coachman soothing the horse—frightened by the sirens—with sugar cubes, and the mourners’ expressions of disbelief, Achilles had agreed with her. At least she didn’t say I told you so. Though he hated to admit it, Ines was right about transplants taking over. What else could you call it when people called the police to complain that a funeral march was disturbing the peace and squad cars arrived within five minutes? BK—before Katrina—you wouldn’t see a cop in the Tremé until the day after a homicide. The coroner often arrived before the cops.