Those are the things I remember because there was no direct route into the picking room. You had to follow the painted pathway. You had to take the yellow stairs down. And once engulfed in that fog, you simply held you breath until you reached the freight elevator, which, everybody said, was a one-way drop, like the canary cage dangling from some miner’s hand as he takes the long ride down. And I do not know how I got out alive.
Now I look back over my life trying to see where it went right, and I find someone four years old climbing into my lap, there in the big chair, on nights when the wind rushes up through the valley. And I try to think of what to tell her when she asks where the monsters come from.
TWO WHO DROWNED
Refiner’s Fire
So many things at once. Like this.
The woman I live with is white, which for some people, I suppose, counts as an accomplishment. While for me it suggests that they must have been desperate down there, at the church. Someone must have had a vision. And someone else must have decided they needed a delegation. So you see what I mean. None of this story makes sense when you tell it straight. I’m guessing they prayed for a month before reaching the bottom of their barrel, and then they prayed some more and sent elders up here to my house, scraping and shuffling like a bunch of plantation darkies, asking me what they’ve just been asking, blaming it all on Jesus. Maybe the only truth is this one—that I don’t have any idea of what their jumbled lives are like. Maybe somebody really did have a vision. I mean, how desperate do you have to be before you start seeing things?
That’s not cynicism. I’m just tired, tired of living on the edge of chaos, images coming at you like flash cards. I’m just tired. And so I see things too.
Like it’s been raining all morning. I can see that. There are puddles and rivulets. I can see that too, though now the sun sharpens every detail along our street. Parked cars are shining like new Lego blocks. And the one tree in my yard, a live oak as big as my house, is shimmering with diamonds. I just don’t see the angel. I suppose I could have said Jesus doesn’t give a shit about the weather and I don’t believe that an angel sent you either, but that would have hurt their feelings, asked them to step outside their scope of understanding. And God knows we don’t do that.
So here we are, the peculiar couple, standing on the porch watching the delegation waddle down my walk like pachyderms. Karen’s holding on her hip a thin black child named Lamont, who is not my son, and she is saying to me, “Maybe you could just give it a try. For a few weeks. Until they’ve found a new minister.”
While I’m still burning up inside. Trying to sound calm.
“Did you ever notice,” I say, “that church committees—black or white, it doesn’t make any difference—all look like fat, greasy beggars? Except there’s not a white woman in town as fat as Hula Cole. Did you ever notice that?”
“Quinn,” she says.
“You could have dragged those people straight off the streets of Calcutta, added a few tons, and got exactly the same effect. I mean, Jesus Christ, John Powell Baity looks like that fool who played Uncle Remus in the …”
“Quinn, nobody came here to insult you.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“I think you would do a wonderful job.”
“I like the church the way it is, all singing and no sermon.”
“They need a minister.”
“They need a touch of reality. Far as I’m concerned, that pulpit can stay vacant till they find somebody from the Ku Klux Klan who’d be willing to take over for a while. What are we doing about dinner?”
“You weren’t very polite while they were here.”
“Look, polite to these people means yes. And in case you don’t remember, I already have a job. Which is the only reason they showed up here in the first place.”
“I don’t think that’s the only reason.”
… and on and on and on for the next half hour until she finally smothers the flames. Like she’s walking through the house turning out lights one by one, that kind of woman, who might one day save your life, or drive you insane. So let me tell you again. I’m not cynical. I’m just trying to protect what I own.
And what I’m talking about right now is a woman named Karen. Who lives with me. Wears a silver comb in her hair on most days and takes it out at night in a comforting ritual of gray-black strands shaken loose and brushed long. She does it in a way that suggests we are growing old together. And then, as she plucks off silver rings, turquoise bracelets, whatever jangly thing is around her neck, she places them in some solemn order upon her dresser as if praying for grandchildren. So I tease her. Every night. Because that’s the way we say it, by looking together into the same mirror and searching for a silver comb that seems suddenly, inexplicably lost in perfect camouflage. And the long dresses, I think, simply mean that she owns an art gallery, although they still remind me of the year we met. Back then we were a revolution. Now we are only an oddity. And the sweaters? I don’t know. I suppose she’s just cold.
So this is a story about us. No matter what happens in between.
You should know that there are crayons scattered over the floor because the porch of my house, which is really a veranda, is wide enough and deep enough to look like an invitation to every untethered child in town. There are crayons and piles of paper, chalk and the remnants of someone’s homework. There are two books fluttering like wounded birds. A pair of pink flip-flops. There’s a basketball. A stack of Monopoly money in green, yellow, pink, and white but no Monopoly board and no Monopoly tokens. Only a lingering argument over the money—isn’t that a surprise? And one of Karen’s hairbrushes and a knotted hair band. But there’s also a momentary calm, broken soon enough by one of the older boys, maybe eight or nine, with a mouth full of sass and that accusatory tone that they use to disguise hope.
He starts in on me, just after the damn committee leaves.
“How come,” he says, “how come you don’t never tell a story ’bout a black man?”
“I do,” I say. “I’ve written stories about …”
But he looks at me like I’m the white principal.
“Look, I already have. Aesop was a black man. So was Lemuel Hawes. Jackie Robinson. So was Abram White.”
“How come you don’t tell no stories ’bout a black man living right now? That ends happy. I ain’t no turtle.”
“Hush now. Hush,” says Karen. Patting the big one’s back. Pulling little Lamont into the comfort of her, his legs dangling on either side of her hip. “Hush now.” This time to Lamont. “You’re not hurt anymore.” And her own hair falling loose in places and the full sway of her breasts as she walks among the other children and the dangling jewelry and the smell of her. Do you see what I mean? I have no idea what their quarrel was about, and yet she’s there among them, like the shepherd, and I am here on the edge, like the dog, looking for direction.
So I adjust my glasses and tug tight the cardigan she gave me for Christmas, the way I do in class when they ask impossible questions. And I put myself where I can look over the heads of the children and down the street where another, entirely different crowd is gathering, suddenly and inexplicably. It’s like the echo of the turmoil already around us. And I’m wondering if you understand yet. Because my stomach, already tightening, realizes that there is another story, a real and urgent one, unfolding farther down the hill and that I am being drawn into it at a most inconvenient spot. I’m being pulled in again because one silly, senseless event is always tied to another, that’s what I’ve learned. And this new one at the end of my street, at the bottom of my hill, on a Sunday afternoon is far more serious than the commotion on my porch.
“How come you don’t just make up a story?” says the same boy.
“Listen,” I say. “There’s something happening.”
“Quinn …,” now she’s trying to sound like my wife. “Do you think you ought to go?”
And I give her the same glare that the kid gave me.
“I just thought you might go look. I mean, if the police … Maybe you could talk to someone.”
“I’m not the mayor of Coloredtown,” I tell her. “I just live here, same as you. And besides, whatever it is, they don’t want me in the middle of it.”
Which is more than enough to send her inside with little Lamont and two of the girls, saying thin-lipped the way she does, “Come along now,” like she thinks I can do something about every drunk who smacks his wife on the weekend. Seventeen years and she still doesn’t realize I have a history with these people. That I wear cardigan sweaters for God’s sake and steel-rimmed glasses. That I teach literature, Karen, the first black man at Baxter College who doesn’t push or pull something. And so of course they don’t trust me. I don’t even speak their language. I’ve grown used to the money. I sit on committees. How can she live with me for seventeen years and not realize?
But here I am, aren’t I, on the damp sidewalk looking back at my empty porch. The children have scattered like biddies, and here I am looking back at a wide, smiling veranda that makes my house look like a plantation house. Rattan chairs big enough for kings. And ferns on either side of the door set like African headdresses on white fern stands. And a brick walkway that leads up to gray porch steps. So we say out loud that it’s a porch, but we’ve made it, after all these years, into the one untroubled crossroads of our town where once, long ago, I sat jamming with a group of musical men who laughed and played half the night. That’s what I’m mad about. She can slam the damn door all she wants.
Because who you are determines where you live in Baxter. And I mean where you sit and stand. Professors in one part of town, businesspeople in another. Black folks over here on the hill. Which is how I’ve come to be walking down toward my neighbors who are gathering around the echoes of gunshots and the sound of a distant siren and now, suddenly, another. Because something has happened again. At first it doesn’t seem real to me without television commercials and the cool, flat flickering images. But here I am walking down my own street beneath the bare dripping limbs of willow oaks, wiping my glasses with a handkerchief and muttering to myself like a tourist lost in some insane, chattering marketplace. Even though I live in a hundred-year-old house. As close to the campus as you can get without crossing tracks.
So I walk, and it’s like descending into a dream. The Jamaican lawn ornaments, the painted doorways. Like she sent her voice to follow me into dreamland, only an octave higher; and I know before I look. It’s that boy who can’t keep himself from beneath my feet or shut his mouth long enough to breathe. Saying, “How come you don’t be the new preacher?” Just out of reach and as insistent as a mosquito. “You could preach, couldn’t you? Ain’t that what you already do?”
“I try not to.”
“Why not?”
“Why don’t you tell me what your name is.”
“I stay with my aunt sometimes, Lamont’s mama.” The inflection rising as if this were a question. “I watch him till supper time most days.”
“That’s not what I asked you, is it?”
“James Lee Kenrick. What you do for money?”
“I teach at the college, James Lee Kenrick. And besides … you don’t just wander in off the street and start preaching. Whether there’s a vacancy or not.”
“Sometimes you do. I seen it happen.”
But I walk ahead of him, down the hill, beneath cathedral-columned oaks and into the ruin of our neighborhood where two streets cross.
When we reach the edge of the crowd, we stay there, on the margin of a tragedy that’s been gathering for days. I think I can guess, but it takes Silvia to confirm it. She is Lonell’s mother. More police arrive and then an ambulance, and I’m taken into the swirl of bodies as the crowd gets jostled to one side and then another while yellow crime-scene tape goes up around the tree. Over the ditch. Across the car. Down to the hedge and back over the driveway. Then a black cop and a white cop are working together to push the crowd back. Nightsticks out and up, like this, pushing the people back into the street. But it’s Silvia that I see with electric clarity, not the building chaos around me. Silvia with wild hair and frantic flying hands. Two women who are trying to hold her up, but she keeps throwing herself to the ground, tearing at the grass, her clothes, and shrieking louder than sirens. Because it’s Lonell in the ditch, under the blue blanket; and several men have come out of the crowd to help her. While I’m thinking, God, what have we done now? But of course I already know.
I can see them behind me and to my right, three teenagers in warm-ups, as dignified as old men. Practicing their nonchalance, but managing nevertheless to lurch like vultures until one of them finally breaks a smile. “They put that mug under a blue blanket, man. Blue!” Like it was the final insult. “Gonna bury that mu’fucker in it. Serve him right!” One of them snickering. One of them staring cold hate.
And on the ground beside the tactful blanket is a policeman and another policeman straddling his chest, pumping with desperate jolts that shake his jowls. A pistol in the grass. Someone’s shoe. And more sirens in the distance. More flashing lights as paramedics arrive for the wounded cop and lift him into the first ambulance without a glance at the crumpled blanket and then try to drive away. Lonell motionless all this time, the fingers of one hand dug into the dirt as if at the moment of death his greatest fear had been falling away from the earth. While some people in the crowd have begun shouting at the outsiders, blocking the path of the ambulance because official Baxter has left behind another black boy, like garbage. Two state patrol cars now, both troopers grim and gray, moving the people out of the street and into adjoining yards. A fat teenage girl shrieking, “I hate white people!”
But of course white people didn’t kill Lonell Burns. And when I turn and look for James Lee Kenrick I see that he too is gone, lost somewhere in the crowd.
It’s a story that’s over before I arrive. A distant horrifying fantasy. Now someone will have to write about it, explain it, translate it. And it’s at this moment that I go sick and drop myself onto Baity’s white brick wall and pansies, because I know who will take it up and what she will say long before she knows herself. One of those reporters, one of those stick-thin girls graduated from the college, maybe one I’ve taught myself, as white as desert sand and as breathless and sincere as Jane Austen, and about as prepared for the cough-cough of a Glock 9 mm. Who, sometime this evening, will begin writing about life among the lowly, death in a ditch, for tomorrow’s newspaper. Poor Jane, she will be, who will let seep between her words an unconscious amazement that we are human beings. As though we were put on this planet to be discovered. And poor us, who will read and watch the television reports not recognizing anyone, least of all ourselves, as the story trickles out.
So some will rant like the fat girl. And some will scratch our heads. Because the newspaper will say a normally peaceful neighborhood. The tranquility of early evening shattered by gunfire. A troubled teen. The irony that Lonell’s own family called the police, trying to prevent bloodshed. That Officer McLane himself would be the first to die.
Then on the day after irony there will appear a second story with numbers, this one written by a feature writer from the city paper twenty-five miles away who will not add an ounce of understanding. It will say three sisters, one cousin, five rooms, and three generations in a modest dwelling on Mott Street. Ten years of schooling, eight suspensions, and several incidents. A total of twelve grams stolen from the dealer earlier in the week, three gold necklaces, and a 9 mm. And taken from Lonell in retaliation: one girlfriend, one child. Then six days between incidents. Three shots fired at Lonell in the drive-by. But no injuries. Seven minutes before Lonell can get his cousin to safety and return home for the gun. Five people who try to restrain him. Two policemen who respond to the call. One can of Mace. One scuffle on the ground. One gathering crowd. One person to reach out of the crowd and pull McLane’s arm away. And a horrible, ironic twist to the plot: three shots by Lonell striking McLane
in the neck and face. Then two shots by the second cop from point-blank range. For a grand total of ninety-seven.
It’s how they see the world.
Then I will pass the first one on the street, the girl with the sincere pencil, and she will want some words from me, the symbolic spokesman for the tongue-tied class. Because she will think I am safe and sadly white. And she will fumble for her notebook as I take down my glasses, draw out a handkerchief, and squint. Holding the lenses up to the sun like a boy burning ants, thinking furiously. How can I hate this girl who is true to her way of knowing and not hate myself, who could have told a lie nine years ago and prevented myself from observing, “It’s a tragedy.” As I examine her through the one smudged lens and fit the frames back over deaf ears. And hear myself say, “A painful moment for us all.”
The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Page 16