A Song for Carmine

by M Spio

  “You’re all right by me,” she tells me, meeting my eyes again for a second longer this time before looking up at the sky, playfully pushing me away.

  We stay for a while longer, watch as the crowds thin and people leave the hills and head home.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I say as I lean closer and brush her lips with mine.

  She nods.

  On the ride home, we don’t talk much, my eyes focus on the lines of the road, one dashed line at a time. She rolls down her window and lets her fingers flutter in the wind like she’s playing music.

  When I park the truck in front of her building, I follow her up the stairs to her apartment, hover near her as she fumbles with the lock on her front door, feel her begin to shake as I slide the straps of her dress over her shoulders.

  As soon as the door pushes open, I take her face in my hands and just breathe with her for a few moments. The apartment is cold and dusty and dark. I’d imagined just how this might unfold, making love instead of screwing, intimacy instead of flight, but animal instincts must be forgiven and I push forward.

  My hands reach under her dress and slide up and down her; she seems to melt, finds my lips and presses her mouth so hard I can barely breathe. We fumble with clothing as we stumble to her bedroom, forgetting about lights or sounds or anything else; it’s momentum.

  She unbuckles my belt, pulls me closer, leans down and hovers over my waist before pulling my jeans down. I roll my shoulders back and take off my shirt. I stand there for a minute before I pull her up to me, touch her face, bury my head in her neck and take her in.

  I throw her onto the bed and crawl on top of her, my hands roaming her body. I push my weight onto her so she can feel me. I hear her moan beneath, wrap her legs around me. I take her thighs and open her up.

  * * *

  “Is this what you imagined it would be?” she asks me late one evening after we’ve been on the phone awhile. She’s been coming to Eton the weekends; I’ve been driving to Atlanta to have dinner with her in the middle of the week after she gets done at the club. We take turns cooking.

  I think about my answer for a while. “I could never have come close to imagining this,” I tell her, and it’s true. “When you have lived your whole life in the dark, you don’t even know what light is.”

  She gets quiet on the other end of the line, but I can hear her breathing.

  “Well said,” she says and laughs. “You surprise me all of the time, Carmine, you really do.”

  “I surprise myself, too.” I tell her about all the things Ma and I have been up to around the house and how we’ve been sharing these big, potluck meals, how I’ve been taking walks with her in the morning, trying to keep her energy levels up. I tell her that I got a repair book from the library and how I’ve been making upgrades to the old beast of a truck, new spark plugs and engine mounts, even a bed liner. I tell her about the time I took Ma dress shopping, the awkward moment in the lingerie section, how I wasn’t able to change the hot water heater at the house, but that at least I was able to find it.

  But I don’t tell her that at night I still think I hear Pa’s screams reverberate through the house, how I still feel the itch in my feet to run, how I watch the stock market, count my money, apply for jobs overseas, that I still cringe when I pass the “Welcome to Eton” sign on the way to the grocery store.

  * * *

  When I step out of the church just before dusk, the sky is a purple pink and it stretches from end to end, as far as I can see, and I feel light on my feet. I’ve gone to see Pastor Stanley again. Some of the basics are still so hard, turning wrong into right, traveling new paths when the grooves in the brain call to others. I keep thinking of Pa’s body in the ground, and it sends waves of panic through me. Being with Z takes so much presence. Sometimes it’s a real struggle just to be willing.

  “It’s a choice you make every moment, Carmine; it’s that simple. Continue to choose love and peace, and love and peace is what you will have. But it’s not always gonna be easy.” He’s grown a mustache, and his bald head still shines. We drink coffee in paper cups and nibble on day-old muffins.

  “Yes, but why can’t it be easy? Why do things have to be so hard?” I look at him pleadingly. “It was so much easier to be a bastard than to do the right thing,” I say.

  “We make it hard; it is supposed to be easy. We imagine fear instead of love because we think we’re so vulnerable. Essentially, it’s a lack of faith in ourselves, in the world, in God.”

  “But we are vulnerable, aren’t we? I’ve felt that way my whole life.” I look at him for a long time. His eyes are black and wet, but so full of peace.

  “Let the fear go, let the guilt go, and you’ll be free,” he tells me.

  CHAPTER 18

  AN HOUR LATER, I walk toward the old railroad tracks slowly. I wind up and down streets I don’t remember much about; I look at the old ridges of the mountains to the east; I go toward my future. I run Pastor Stanley’s words over in my head; I want to know peace, and this has always been in the way.

  I hear him again and again as I walk the path toward Eric’s house; I remember his name, his family from the day’s gray newspaper. I see his face when I look up and see the remains of the old dilapidated warehouse; it leans and has holes in it, the aluminum thinning, even the old silver light poles lean.

  I sit on the curb, and my mind wanders back to that inky night, the humidity in the air, the cool breeze that stretched down from the ridges of these mountains, the locusts—they were singing, it was late July.

  It’s hard to imagine myself as ever being a child, soft elbows, lilted voice, spitting tobacco into old Campbell’s soup cans. It all must have been a movie I saw once, even the hard calluses on Pa’s hands, Ma’s soft cry, all set against a fake Gulf of Mexico, so easy to imagine that none of it was true.

  A school bus stops a block up the road and some black children step off. I see their school uniforms, white shirts and khaki pants and braids moving on top of their heads as they walk; there’s a chatter among them, a vibration. They spot me sitting on the curb and slow their paces.

  I stand up and run my eyes over the silver of the new tracks lining the road across the street, hear the whistle of an oncoming train, turn around and search the house numbers to be sure I’m at the right place.

  I look down and my shoes are untied. I clear my throat for fear that my voice will squeak like it did then.

  I run a few words around in my head. Tap my foot with each syllable, practice the inflections. “I saw your boy get killed. I didn’t try to stop it. I am sorry.” It has to be simpler than that. It’s too much. I feel like that heavy rock is in my hand instead of theirs, that I’m using it to gouge his head, think his mother will spill out onto the sidewalk and blame me for it all anyway.

  I think all of this so silly and unnecessary, and I start to turn around. These old wounds are just that, old and stagnant. What can be the benefit of opening them up? Can’t peace still get in?

  The kids from the bus get closer to me and then stop; their chatter takes on a heavier tone. They’re young, almost teenagers, but not quite. The sun is in the middle of the sky and it leans down heavily; they look at me, smile, some glare and then look away. I study their round bodies, remember my gangly limbs, search their faces for what I might mean to them.

  “I’m sorry,” I yell to them. “Some of us are like me, like I was, but not all; we just don’t know any better, we don’t know anything.” They look at me strangely, but a second longer than they want to.

  I lean down to tie my shoes and they walk past me. I zip up my jacket and jingle the change in my pocket. If this is the right thing, why does it feel so bad?

  I turn around and walk two doors down to 301. The house is quiet. The welcome mat has hummingbirds on it and says, “Life is short so come on in and stay awhile.” On the porch, an old swing sways with the wind, a plant hangs from the two posts holding the porch roof up; inside, a TV vibrates.

>   I pull open the tattered screen door and knock on the wooden door softly; there are three small windows on it, but I don’t look in. When I hear footsteps shuffling across the floor, I hold my breath and wait.

  She’s wearing small pearl earrings, her hair has grayed, but her skin and face are just as smooth as nearly twenty years ago. I remember seeing her through the school bus window, at school functions; sometimes we’d see her at the grocery store. Her body is soft and round, and her voice is so tender, so tender, I shake. She sounds like Eton.

  “Can I help you?” She puts her hand on her hip and looks at me hard. She reminds me of my own ma; they are close to the same age, I don’t hear anyone in the house, and I wonder if she’s alone. A TV blares a familiar talk show host’s voice, laughing and jeering; I can see why people watch.

  “Hello. Are you Mrs. Clemsy?” I shift on my feet, try to push everything but this moment out of my mind.

  She nods and pushes a straight pin back in her hair at the nape of her neck. “Yes, I am. What can I do for you?”

  “Ma’am, you don’t know me, and I should have come a long time ago, but I know what happened to your son.”

  Her face changes. The shallow lines grow deeper and darker; her eyebrows turn in. She takes a deep breath but doesn’t say anything, holds a lot in, her lips pursed. The TV in the background grows louder when a laundry detergent commercial comes on. A school bus passes in front of the house with a big whoosh.

  I step out of the present for a moment, back then, to that night, how I considered stepping in front of that train, its sea of light like what the gates of heaven must be like. I can even feel the old rock-band shirt I was wearing, its soft cotton sticking to my chest.

  “Ma’am, I just wanted to… I came here to… see, I’ve been living my whole life with this. I’ve been tortured by it, same as you, and I’ve got to be free, and I thought if I could set you free and be free and I could come here and tell you the truth finally and ask your forgiveness and it could be better and…”

  She straightens up her body, and her words come out heavy and firm.

  “Now you listen here, son. You got something to tell me about my boy, you say it and you say it now. Otherwise you get off my porch right now.” Little beads of sweat form on her forehead. She pushes the screen door open and steps out onto the porch, stands close to me.

  I don’t turn around, but I can hear the kids behind me, the scuffs of their tennis shoes on the pavement, their chatter about what this white man is doing here and what he come to say and why he’s bothering old Mrs. Clemsy. I hear the toy phones open and close, bubble gum pop on their lips; in the periphery I see a young man smooth the hair on his head.

  “I saw them do it, me, ma’am; I saw them kill him. I sat there across from those tracks and I watched them do it. I never said a thing, didn’t try to stop them… It was some kids from school that did it, ma’am, just a bunch of kids from Eton High messing around and it was wrong, and I…”

  The world goes black when I feel the sting of her hand on my cheek. I feel the bottom of the door hit the tips of my boots and push me back. I stagger a few feet, stunned, fall to the bottom of the stairs.

  I open my eyes a few seconds later, and she hovers above me.

  “Why this? Why now?” she asks me, her chest rising and falling.

  I stand up a few feet from her, hear that old train in the distance; it sounds the same. I want to feel its wind rush past me again.

  “I should have come to you back then; I should have tried to help him…” I wave my hands in front of me, as though I’m holding two white flags. I look at her pleadingly.

  “I know who you are. You and your family ain’t never done any good in these parts.” She turns away and starts walking up the stairs.

  I go to the end of the stairs and stare up at her. She stands on her porch, hands on her hips.

  “My boy’s been dead a long time, a long time. The police never did spend any time with it. Besides, there weren’t no mystery to it anyway. Everyone knew how it went down. You should not have come here.” She wipes something invisible on the apron she’s wearing, looks up the street. The sun climbs behind the clouds and the air is cooler.

  “Ma’am, I haven’t done much right with my life; I’ve caused a lot of hurt, but nothing was worse than what I did that night, turning the other cheek. And I’m sorry, ma’am, very sorry for that. That’s why I came. Your boy deserved better than that.”

  She sighs deep, circles her neck a little; her body falls into the porch a little. She looks at me for a long time, as though waiting for the real truth to fall from my lips.

  “You should have helped my boy, God, should you have helped him…” She starts to cry, holds back, uses the apron to wipe her eyes.

  “But the past is already gone, and there’s nothing we can do about that.” She straightens, stands up tall, points her finger at me.

  “So, you, you get on out of here.” She doesn’t blink once as she says it, an older anger rising up in her cheeks. “I mean it,” she says.

  I look at her for a second longer and then turn the other way. I walk two blocks down the road before turning around one last time. She’s still standing there, looking my way. I wave a little, shove my hands in my pockets, and walk on home. It’s the best I could do.

  CHAPTER 19

  FOR THE NEXT FEW weeks, time seems to take on a mind of its own—swirling in and out, stopping at times, moving forward at a speed I’ve never known, quietly and pervasively rearranging things in my life: relationships, eating habits, even hygiene, the state of my dreams changing all the while. In a way I had to become a boy again and start over, little by little, reconstructing the mountains in my mind, the immovable structures that kept me hard and unreachable and so goddamn heavy it felt as though I couldn’t move myself during some of those years in Dallas.

  I’d never really been with anyone my whole life, never really honored or revered a person; everything began and ended with me, with what I had to prove, or the thing I felt I needed to forget. It was all new territory to me.

  “Baby, just let me in,” sometimes she’d plead with me, circling her long arms around me, the smell of her skin like pumpkin pie and lilacs. I melted and all the lines blurred within me. I didn’t breathe for fear of dislodging a single sensation.

  “Z, I’m here, I’m here. It’s just that I don’t know if I can…” And then I would need to flee; I’d leave the room or jump in the truck and drive. Other times, I was better, brave; other times I leaned into the fear, the same way you have to lean into the turn when your car is spinning out of control, the white ice beneath it turning it in circles, I was afraid of the slipperiness of love.

  Sometimes I’d ask her opinion on things like God or politics, and it always came back to color and the way the world is melting together, slowly, she says.

  When I got home that night, I finally told her about Eric. She was part of the reason I’d found the courage to do it, to try to make something right come from such a wrong past. I wanted to have a real chance with her, and I couldn’t let the weight of my guilt hold us down, keep me from her.

  “I’ve lived with it my whole life, Z. And now I’m here with you, and it ain’t right. I wanted that woman to know how sorry I’ve been, how I’ve carried that weight, how often I’d wished it’d been different, that I’d’ been different. I want you to know that, Z.” I’m sitting on the steps of my porch; she stands in front of me, and I can see a sliver of the moon behind her, hear the trees push with the wind.

  She looks at me for so long, and I’m not sure if she will turn and walk away. I wouldn’t blame her if she did. I stop breathing, wait, feel a sense of relief and fear all at the same time; the rest is out of my hands.

  “I’ve been dealing with this stuff my whole life, Carmine, my whole life. It ain’t a season to be black, Carmine; it’s a life, and in these parts you get used to watching your back and you get used to people’s ignorance, you get used to getting les
s.”

  Her voice reminds me of the way it sounded at the club that first night, sharp and jagged. I think I’ve lost her.

  “I understand, Z.” I stand up, start to walk toward her.

  “No, you don’t understand, Carmine, you don’t understand at all.”

  I try to put my arms around her, but she pushes me away. I sit back down on the steps of the porch. I can hear Ma shuffling around in the house; a few of the floorboards creak, and I can smell the dryer tumbling.

  I think about the morning at the table with Pa, how he excused it all so easily, a person dying because of his skin color. I wince as I remember the KKK rallies in the town center and how I watched his brown skin turn gray in the mildewed air of that building. If you ain’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, I can hear Diego saying.

  She rubs her face with her hands, smooths her hair, taps her feet, and then lets out a long sigh. “But it’s not your fault.”

  Her shoulders turn in a bit. She walks up the steps and sits down beside me. It is so quiet now I think I can hear her heart beating.

  “I’m sorry, Z. I hate that part of me.” I slide my hand into hers, hold it tight. “It ain’t right.”

  “You did the right thing, you did the right thing by going to her. It doesn’t make any difference, but it was right.” She squeezes my hand.

  “I want the world to be different for my children,” she says. “But change doesn’t come easily, especially not in the backwoods on these old clay roads.” She smiles, crosses her legs, and stretches them out.

  “But it has changed, Z, it has, and it will continue to.” I desperately wanted to believe this.

  There were only a handful of black people on one side of town and there was the side of town where the old whites lived, and our house was somewhere in between. A place with more fresh air than you could breathe, with dark and foreboding mountains full of life, in the pocket of earth, something else.