Philadelphia Fire

by John Edgar Wideman

  The pitiful shoes and how happy the kids seemed. Both those things get to him. He thinks of all those hours on his back steps staring into the alley. Could you lose track of how to be happy. If you learned to wait too early, would the waiting ever end? Didn’t take very much to have fun. Splish-splash half naked in the city’s water on the steps of this monument. Wasn’t that as good as it ever was going to get? What sense did it make to wait? Wait for what? Already time for some of the girls to keep their undershirts on. Breast buds poking through wet cotton pasted to their skin. One year. Two years. How long before the journey here seems silly, not worth the trouble? Tired of being teased, embarrassed by the tricks of a body growing too fast. You bring your little brothers and sisters but hang back because of the bra, hairs under your arms, between your legs. Boys won’t leave you alone but some are sweet and you listen and suck on a piece of hard candy and sing to yourself the song you daydream the sweetest one could sing to you if he cut those other pestering, lame dudes loose, if you didn’t have to keep an eye on all those babies paddling in the water. Over your shoulder you scope a twin of your old self, no hips, no titties, wild and stronger than the boys, hollering because nobody can catch you as you slither and leap over the falls. Brown and slick as a seal. She’s you all over again. She catches your eye and you’re both places at once, free as a bird, stuck in the honey these boys churn swarming round you.

  Piles of shoes, a mountain of discarded clothes. A shower bath on the museum steps.

  Then smoke rising in the west. The city cringes and holds its nose and points a finger. Nothing is lost. In the blink of an eye a new crop playing on the steps, in the fountains flowing down the hill when summer days turn long and hot again.

  He’s imagined more than he wanted to. The boy. The girl. The fire consuming their few belongings. All the evidence up in smoke. No warehouses of shoes and eyeglasses and clothing left behind to convict the guilty. The dead were dead. What they possessed gone with them. On Osage Avenue bulldozers and cranes comb the ashes, sift, crush, spread them neat as a carpet over vacant lots. Cudjoe’s business concerns survivors. If any had survived. Simba Muntu lost, found, and lost again.

  Some city lights like planets, others like stars. Some burn steady, others twinkle and bend. Lights pulsate, crackle, hum, lights blink off and on like insects Cudjoe used to hunt in the evening, on the bushes in his backyard. He can blot out great chunks of city by positioning his hand in front of his eyes. With his hands over his ears he can quiet sirens, the babble of traffic. Maybe he’s missed the city. Or maybe he’s home to remind himself how much he hates the whole stinking mess, the funky air, the slow belly rub of everybody’s nerves on everybody’s nerves till some poor soul can’t take it and lights a match and burns the gig down around his head.

  Cudjoe sits on a hard bench. The first shall also be last. The basketball court’s empty. During the walk west he was sure he’d never make it back. Then he’d found himself collapsing on this bench. Need a crane to lift him now. He’s bolted to the wood slats. His muscles locked in a sitting position and that’s how they’ll discover him in the morning, frozen solid like one of the Lamed-Vov, the thirty-six Just Men, God’s hostages who must thaw a thousand years after they’ve done their turn of suffering on earth. The court, the whole park empty. No one’s passed since he’d sunken into the bench. Crickets and dull roar of the city all he hears behind him. Trolleys farther and farther apart. One must be due soon, clattering up Baltimore or Chester. Traffic diminished to a few madmen racing cars around the dark streets.

  At first he believes he’s hallucinating, the night chill getting to his brain as well as his muscles. He’d probably nodded off and the voices a dream he can shake off now he’s awake. He blinks. Rubs his eyes. The sound, barely louder than the sawing crickets, won’t go away. Rising from the hollow, from the bottomless black pit daybreak will change back to the hollow, are sure enough voices, a muted conversation growing more real the more intently he listens. Voices. Voices teasingly close to intelligible. He recognizes speech rhythms, single words, familiar silences between exchanges. Sounds like several different speakers though he can’t distinguish what any says. An oddness on top of the oddness of hearing voices in Clark Park in the dead middle of the night, a quality he can’t put his finger on as he strains to pick out phrases. Is the language foreign? Are these spirit voices? Little folk who emerge from their hiding places at midnight and rule the park. Is he slipping in and out of a dream? He listens. It’s not elves or extraterrestrials. It’s kids. He realizes he’s been holding his breath and exhales. Kids talking in the hollow in the middle of the night. Up past their bedtime. Like he was up past his. Maybe he should walk over. Hey, youall. It’s late. Time to go home. Where are their mothers and fathers? Where are his kids?

  Ten minutes. Fifteen. One voice dominates, rapping, scatting till they complete their business. Was it them after a silence of a minute or so, briefly outlined a block and a half away in the snowy glow of a streetlamp? They barely rumpled the curtain of darkness as they emerged from the hollow and scooted through. Cudjoe tracks cones of light under hooded posts for their bobbing silhouettes.

  Like calling roll he coaxes his body parts to attention. Necessary to address each by name, remind each of its function and duty. A first step impossible. Then it’s accomplished. And the next is worse. He’s the rusty tin woodsman clanking after Dorothy. Wasted, but he’s not ready to go home to bed yet. He can’t read his watch. Just enough illumination from a streetlight to obscure its glow-in-the-dark hands. If he had a ball, he’d drag his sorry ass onto the court and shoot around. Force his joints to loosen up. He’d be OK after a few minutes. Smooth. Perfect rainbow arc as the ball spins off his fingertips. You hear it sing as it leaves your hands. You reach for the sky. Know it’s in the hoop when you let it go. A ball pounding the asphalt would be like a drum summoning the kids. They’d share their secrets with him as they played through the night.

  If when you die no heaven no place to go where do you go when you die? You be burnt up and the ashes swept away. A broom makes ashes dust and dust flies up in the sky. Where does it go? Ashes make dust and more dust and the sky’s too heavy where do you go?

  Dust in the sky. All falls down. You snort dust in your nose. Boogers of it in your eyes. You eat dust when you open your mouth. Sky falls on your head and where do you go if there’s no place to go? No heaven. No place but this one where you tramp along beside them. They march beside you. In front and behind. Many of them, many, many. Too much dust for the sky to hold. It falls on your head. We hurry along. We lean forward to catch the weight of the sky on our backs. We are strong. We keep it up. One long step then you hippy-dip your shoulder like something in your way you got to lean and dip your shoulder and knock the thing always in your way night and day out your way. Do not open your mouth or eyes or ears. The others carry you along. Dust will drown you. No place to go it fills all your holes and you die inside a body bag sewed tight as a turkey’s butt Thanksgiving. You walk your hippy-hop walk on this street and if you opened your eyes you’d see the tracks where the trolleys slide, the wires, the birds. You can see the park without opening your eyes. You wanted to climb the trees. You are too little to reach the first branches so you can’t climb up. When you’re taller you’ll grab the ladder of branches: climb all the way up into the green belly of the tree. Up, up into its insides you could march till green hairs too skinny to hold you. You’d be a squirrel living at the very top. Where it bends and shakes and almost breaks but you hippy-hop, fly like a bird from one place to another. You never fall. You cool at the top. When the sky falls it won’t get you. You’re too high. High. High. Squirrels with their rat paws scratch from the bottom where the branches start. Little rat paws get them up. Scratching. Hurry up, hurry up across the floor at night. You throw a shoe and they don’t come for a while. Then you play dead here they come again scratching. If you could hold on you could shimmy to the first branches, climb to the top. A tree is a dress.
You stand under it and look up. Your mama’s dress and squirrels play trapeze under there. You dig but your fingers won’t stick. The squirrels scratch trolley tracks straight up. The tree is rough. They bite its skin. You touched it, rubbed it. Skin is what covers you and covers your mama. You touch hers. Rub her arm. Warm and smooth. She lets me touch it. Skin over her blood and bones. Tito wears a handkerchief over his mouth. A outlaw. His eyes are big. He’s burnt. His skin is tree skin. It’s falling. The house is burning. My mama pushes me. Roof falling in. Bombs. Bombs. Do do do do do. She screams, Children coming out. Children coming out. Tito’s skin like tree skin. Tito busting open. Everything needs something to hold it in. Hold it together. They hurry me along. They are my skin. I know this street. No need to look. Sparks on the wires. Birds. Dark is skin over us. No one sees us. We must hurry. We must hide. We must stick together. Inside of night skin so we don’t die. So our blood runs warm and safe inside because there is no place to go after you die.

  * * *

  They are discussing the price of oil and laughing. Miniature sheikhs, then the players from the court then the kids in the hollow, each one wearing a hooded, milk-white robe that merges obscurely with the darkness. The hollow’s steep black sides rise miles above their heads. You can’t see the rim. Shrill voices pipe. Laughter, squeaky, giggling, about to pee their pants because they’re laughing so hard. Faces under conical hoods are splashed and flecked and sprayed rainbow colors. Mr. Tambo inquires of Mr. Bones: How many cars can you name that start with P? Mr. Bones rubs his nappy Yankee Doodle bearded chin, stutters, P P P P Pontiac, Packard, P P P Plymouth, Por Por Porsche. As he speaks the lads scamper up the slopes, triangles of white scattering, an explosion of moths, blinking off and on in the beams of a car’s headlights. They’re still cracking up. Whatever was funny is funnier now. Cudjoe watches one of the kids—it’s Technicolor high noon, a busy intersection downtown, stylish shops and shoppers, expensive cars lining the street—raise the hem of his garment and P P P piss into the gas tank of a Mercedes. The kid winks at him, waves at the mob of scandalized citizens. Want me check the oil too?

  And part of that comic strip simply Cudjoe’s bladder making its point any way it can. He crawls out of bed. Manages to remain numb all the way to the bathroom, where he plants his feet and goes back to sleep. Takes hours to finish and he doesn’t move for days afterward, staring into the bowl, enjoying silence after the noisy rush of his waters. He needs sleep. Much more sleep. His body clock refuses to adjust to this new hemisphere. Perhaps he lost it on the flight over. Dropped thirty thousand feet from the 747, the hands spin, bells chatter, then it raises a salty geyser in the gray ocean. Nodding on his feet, weary as a whipped dog. For better or worse he is up for the day. Barely day. Barely up. Too late to turn back. Rest is what he wants, what he isn’t going to get. Why couldn’t he sleep more than a few hours a night since he’d been back?

  Mind attached to body. And who is in charge? Which is Roy Rogers and which one the Gabby Hayes sidekick? His body begging for rest. His mind jerking it out of bed, forcing it to sleepwalk. Or did a message from the bladder snatch the ghost awake?

  Mind and body. Body and mind. Was he actually someplace else, in a dimension where the stink of this stale cabinet didn’t exist? Just the idea of it? Was he sealed hermetically within glass walls manipulating a robot arm? When the titanium fingers touched an object, what did he feel? Could body know mind? Or vice versa? He’d always wondered about other animals. What went on in their heads? If you stared into the eyes of a dog long enough, would it speak, mind to mind, bear doggy witness, give up its doggy secrets? Was the animal his mind rode, the animal staring back at him from mirrors, any more likely to speak than a dog?

  He pushes open a blistered rectangle of glass above the toilet. His window on the world. Across an alley no sane person would consider entering after dark, a block of apartments extends to the corner, a row of four-story units, each defined by the zigzag iron railing of fire escape. A window in the building twin to his across the narrow alleyway is a cat’s eye in the gloom. Even on the brightest days, sunlight doesn’t grope into this valley of the shadow. Why was he up before dawn staring into this black pit? Was someone awake over there? A restless, beat-up, insomniac, lost soul, horny motherfucker prowling his apartment, peering through a porthole above his toilet, counting lighted windows?

  Didn’t you need a million windows opening, framing views of the city every morning in order for a city to come to life? Wasn’t a city millions of eyes that are windows opening on scenes invisible till the eyes construct them, till the eyes remember and set out in meticulous detail the city that was there before they closed for sleep? Wasn’t the city one vast window covered by a million miniblinds and every morning every blind snaps open, quickly, like you peel a dressing from a wound? The city appears because this vast window is unshuttered a square at a time. Visible because it’s remembered. Coming to life in the blink of an eye, the billion blinks of a billion eyes. Wasn’t he performing his civic duty, doing his sleepy-eyed bit. What if he said no to the tacky little postcard in his peephole above the toilet? And if he’s seeing, doesn’t that mean someone in one of those windows across the way must be seeing him, peeping at him between the slats of a blind in one of the dark apartments, a voyeur returning the favor Cudjoe bestows when he spies on his neighbors and makes their lives real? Weren’t countless pairs of eyes, eyes like his, needed to create the cityscape? Were they the mind animating the city’s body? Or was the city dreaming them, gathering sticks and stones to make its bones.

  She’s not up yet. His anonymous foxy friend in the second-floor flat catty-corner to his. Thirty yards maybe, separating them. Would she catch one end of a measuring tape if he tossed it across the column of air. If a sturdy bridge connected his window to hers, he wouldn’t cross it. She was close enough. Untouchable, unreachable, and that’s what he liked those hours he watched her going about her business. No name. No history. She was the body of woman. No beginning, middle, end to her life. All women. Any woman.

  Dark hair, slim, compact, but generously rounded in butt and breast. Like the woman in the park. Like the woman he’d married. Perfectly formed and proportioned the way only small women can be. When his neighbor walked naked through the rooms of her apartment, he could almost hear Caroline’s bare feet thumping. Caroline walked too loud for a person her size, thumping, punishing floorboards with each determined stride. He’d tease her. Wall Shaker, Earth Quaker, Heartbreaker, Thunder Maker. What you grinning at, gal? With the heel of his hand thudding on his desk he’d echo her footsteps. Bram. Bram. Here comes Thumper, the lead rabbit. He’d loved the sound. Her bony ankles and child’s feet, the exact harmonies of her figure. He’d memorized certain characteristic postures she’d assume, learned how grace and elegance could be endlessly permutated in her simple gestures, walking up stairs, turning the page of a book, standing at a door, curling up on a sofa. The woman in the window could bring Caroline back, the hurt back, so it was necessary she be other women too. All women. She could bless him with glimpses of a woman’s privacy. She could draw the shades and treat him as if he didn’t exist. Feast and famine. Like those extremes that were the predictable beat of his life with Caroline, extremes substituting for dependable, easy, common ground they’d never been able to establish. What had they desired from each other? Was there so much anger, so much pain because they always came so close to making it, or because five years, two kids, countless defections and reconciliations never drew them one inch nearer?

  Cudjoe knows some answers are easy. All the soft shoulders he’d sneaked away to cry on. The lies afterward. He smirks at the clown face in the smidgen of bathroom mirror. His beastly burden. His beast of burden. The woman across the alley’s not awake to keep him company. Windows are blind eyes reflecting each other, seeing nothing.

  He closes the porthole, shakes and tucks himself away. Too tired to pull off his sweatpants last night. Too exhausted to shower. Nobody sharing his bed so he�
��d just plopped down, in all his stinking gear, even the damp, binding jock. He’d promised himself one game, two at most. For old times’ sake. One game would be more than enough for the first time in months on a court. Just one game. Give me the strength to play one game and I’ll be satisfied. Plant my ass on the bench after one. Let me finish one game and I’m history. I promise.

  Then you win and slouch to the sideline and this guy on your team, he says, One more, bro. And you say, I’m beat, bro. No way, bro. And he says, C’mon, dude. Run this last one. And you say, Last one. Last one, he says.

  Then it always gets to be the morning after. And you have to pay. Why did I do it? Why’d I go too far? Her face is contorted by grief. Things are past explaining. Hurt can’t be undone. She’s sobbing. Her head ducked into her shoulder; you can’t see her face, just the witchy storm of hair. Why doesn’t she comb it? Why is she letting herself fall apart? A ball of misery huddled on the couch. A lead rabbit you couldn’t lift to save your soul. Dark hair spilling in deep folds. You don’t want to see the circles under her eyes. Her flesh slackens when she’s unhappy. When she’s hurt by one of your lies she ages years in minutes. Red welts, puffiness. The flesh sags. Heavy blood pulls down the mask of her face. It droops, wrinkles. Sobs rise off her body like bubbles bursting, blood bubbles, blue and bruised.