Pulled by the full gravity of Spin’s presence and decorations, Lucifer displayed his most spirited parade step. Stiff flags snapped a rainbow of shadows. A spell of keen witness. Lucifer squinted against the day. The sun dropped yellow grenades, small sharp cones that exploded in pricking yellow heat and light. Spin’s head swam high in the air. Lucifer fell into space and floated. They marched, touching shoulders until the last. Medals and all, they made a tinkling circle around Washington.
When physicists locate a new particle, they start by giving it a new name, which helps them—
Lucifer was hardly listening. He could say the words just as easily as Spokesman, for Spokesman had left his dirty fingers on Lucifer’s memory.
—identify its properties more reliably and leads more easily to the identification of still newer particles.
Spokesman spoke in a light voice with fast words running together. No waits in his voice. Tryin to science you to death. He drove the mind into dislocation, a broken angle where it couldn’t hang on. The T Street Church Street Sixty-third Street days. Lil Bit’s Give and Take Pool Hall and Barbershop. Spokesman sat slouched down in the hard wooden chair, one leg folded over the other, scribbling something in his spiral notebook. Same way you saw him in the barber chair, pumped inches above the floor, head arched back and face working—cause Lil Bit allowed nobody to read or write while under his razor and clippers—brain calculating the volume of the room, how many shaved hair clumps it would take to fill this volume. Look, Spokesman liked to say, there a science to everything. He put science on the pool balls. Leaned over the table, working the cue stick between the crook of two fingers. Shutting one eye, then the other. Calculating angles and trajectories. Pulling his slide rule from his back pocket and measuring the green felt. Eight ball in the corner pocket. Crack! Rack em up, chump.
You’d see him talking to some fine lady on the corner, then scribbling something in his spiral notebook.
Nigga, what you doin? you’d ask.
I’m tryin to discover the simplest path between dick and pussy.
Naming is how science enlarges itself. Let’s get up early tomorrow and shoot some hoop.
You don’t wanna shoot no hoop wit me. You get hurt.
Nawl, you get hurt.
I’m gon play Nazi, you gon play Jew.
You feel that way, let’s play fo some sparklin stakes.
I don’t wanna bankrupt you.
The day’s last dregs mixed with the D.C. streetlights. Lucifer had never seen so many bums. Here, in the city, you see them in the bus stations, the train stations—in the old days, they used to sleep near the rusting tracks, get drunk and rest they heads on the rails—a hand stretched out on a downtown corner, unlike the beggars in New York, beggars who are choosers, who will watch you cold and blank, or wear a sign saying something like Sick and Not Saved: Give. They had entire camps, tents made from green plastic garbage bags. Cities within cities. Recall the one, maybe the city’s first, on the edge of Eddyland, only blocks from where John lived. Will our city shed the old image for a new one? Perhaps these green cities are rotten teeth waiting for us to fall asleep one night, then slip clean and quiet under our starched pillows. He saw a man wrapped up in greasy rags, crouched in the doorway of a building leaning like a worn heel. Another man in the next building, only curled, and one in the building after that, pacing back and forth against the cold. He gave them all the last of his change.
A cluster of lights hazed in the distance ahead of them.
Let’s go there, gentlemen.
John you can sniff out a bar from fifty kilometers.
A billow of distant music. Sure enough, a beer sign blinked, signaling their faces.
And I can hear the ringing of a register too.
Flash and cash.
And stash.
Well, good gentlemen, let’s get hammered.
They entered the bar, tramped in single file. A round table in the bar’s darkest corner looped them in. Spokesman bent down and moved his chair out twelve inches—he measured them with his eyes—in a spirit of gentle, uninterrupted abstraction.
Four of your best, sir. The good stuff.
So I been thinkin about startin my own business.
Spoke, what you know bout business?
More than you.
Spoke, John a businessman.
That I doubt.
Why?
You a businessman?
I understand the ignoble proclivities of the marketplace.
Hot damn.
He speakin cash.
Well, join me. Both of yall. Gon be plenty of money to spread around, money for everybody.
What kind of business?
Extermination.
What?
Killing—
Yeah, I’m gon call it the Black Widow Exterminating Company.
Lucifer felt he was inside an igloo. The frosted windows white-showed the world outside the bar. Alcohol-light voices lifted above the hum of outside traffic.
See, you’d always bomb the railroads first cause the trains carried arsenal and supplies from the factory to the field.
Member how they were still using those ole steam engines when the war started?
Man, they was slow.
I member gettin my assignment, then boardin the train and the coal from the engine blowin black smoke in my face. You could see it on yo tongue.
Naw. That was rationed tobacco.
Shoot, that wasn’t nothing. What bout those wartime farts? Everybody eatin all that rationed food.
And burping up rationed food.
Lucifer searched for the faces behind the voices. Five or six old-timers crowded a dark corner. Yeah, old-timers. Grunts whose legs could no longer memory march (let alone hump). Thousands turn out to greet them. They march with careless, natural precision. Throw their hats into the cheering crowd. Theirs is a regiment of men who has done the work of men. Legs good for Ben-Gay and whining wheelchairs. One old-timer—Christmas tree-bright—stayed constantly in vision, a floating balloon, an advertising blimp flinging parade streamers from his talkative fingers. Medals covered his body, many attached with safety pins. Big safety pins too, with colored clasps. Like the pins we used on Porsha’s diapers.
Damn, John said.
What?
I know him.
Who?
That old-timer.
From where?
Yeah. John stroked his chin. His eyes closed in recall. Yeah. Damn, I got it! John jumped up from the table as if a hot poker had sodomized him. That’s one of Sam and Dave’s old running buddies. Before Lucifer could get a word out, John bounded over to the other table and stretched his elbows across it in conversation. His lips moved silently. Why he whisperin? Two of the old-timers rose, the animated one and a second man, stocky and bandylegged like a gorilla. The decorated man followed John. His shirttail stood out behind him, low-hung wings. His shoe heels had no roundness, worn down like clocks easing on to a final wind. The gorilla man bent his weight onto a cane. Took a few short steps, reaching out with the black hesitant eye of his rubber-tipped cane. Walked in a seesaw motion as if one leg was shorter than the other. He looked back. The decorated man shooed him forward, heading off a chicken in a yard. The gorilla man collapsed into a chair beside Lucifer. His cane poked Lucifer’s shin. Excuse me. The gorilla man apologetically touched Lucifer’s knee with the tips of his fingers.
No problem.
Let me introduce yall to some old friends, John said. This here is Roscoe Lipton.
Lucifer shook the animated man’s hand, the bones close to cracking.
Howdy. The medals winked in the dark. I understand yall some kin to Sam and Dave, those Griffith boys.
That’s right. They—
Crazy niggas.
Lucifer studied the man’s black circling brows and his wide, unblinking owl eyes. He half remembered the man at Sam’s funeral.
Then yall must be alright.
And this here is Pool Webb.
Glad to meet you. Pool Webb extended his hand—big, gorilla big—to Lucifer. The years had not loosened the vise in his grip.
Same here.
Yeah, me and Webb here go way back, Lipton said. He used to be the super at Stonewall. I worked under him. Now he retired. And I’m the super at Red Hook.
So yall from the projects? Spin said.
Well I—
I been wanting to start something at the projects, Spin said. Lucifer knew, after the war, Spin had worked as a youth counselor. Not just in Philly, Spin said, where I’m from, but where yall live too. Maybe a basketball program.
Let me know if I can help.
Me too, Webb said. He winked.
What bout yall? Spin directed the words to Spokesman, Lucifer, and John. Yall be interested? Maybe do some officiating?
Sure. Months later, the three men would keep the promise, as Spin would keep his when he formed the Royal African Company and held seasonal lotteries at Red Hook and Stonewall which gave away thousands of acres of free land in Kankakee County to the winning families. He would also start the Basketball Demons programs, Spokesman, Lucifer, and John officiating at the games, to keep teenagers out of trouble. But that was later. The old-timers held center stage tonight.
What you drinkin?
Can I buy yall something?
Lord no, Webb said. I stopped drinkin. Sugar.
Meaning, sugar diabetes?
Well, ain’t no sugar gon slow me down, Lipton said. Nor no pig. Lipton dug his fingers into the bowl of pickled pig’s brains.
They got any oysters?
Up there at the bar.
No. Those is eggs. Pickled eggs.
Pass those nuts.
Knew a nigga that loved oysters.
Musta loved him some pussy too. Webb winked.
So, where were you stationed?
In the Pacific. Germany for a while too.
Auf der Stelle, Lipton said, watching Webb.
Crazy fucker, John whispered.
Lucifer elbowed him. Be cool. Before he hear you. He bit back his laugh.
What?
A dirty deal.
Yes, Lawd. Driving cargo. See, they had us—
A dirty deal. Lipton was looking right at Lucifer, pushing his red eyes into Lucifer’s face. These words are meant for me. A shit-low, piss-level dirty deal. Lipton’s voice came with a loud, rushed intensity, as if he shouted from a distant cliff. Raise a kid, and you think it’s over, that you done raised all a man sposed to raise, that yo work done, duty done, you think it’s time to relax, time for a lil deserved rest—
Why else come to the city?
—but then she decides to wear clothes for concrete and he don’t want to be bothered, and run off, Here, old-timer, take em, and dump the crumb snatcher on you like a lump of shit, Take this deposit, my payment—
Pavement? Like the concrete clothes?
—for all you done for me these thirty-three years. A low-down cocksucking cumchucking buttfucking shitducking dirty deal. And my girl …
The first unreasoning hush. Lucifer watched Lipton with stiff delight. Lipton spoke in birdlike bursts of rapid twitter. Voices crowded the bar, but only Roscoe Lipton spoke that night.
Need to put a sign right up here, HERE BEGINS THE TRAGEDY OF … Seen him once. My daddy. Pa if you want. A man under a Mountain Peak. Just back from overseas and got message in his stride. Stride right on to the railroad line. See ya later. I’m a railroad man.
Lucifer’s tongue ran out to meet the tasty words.
And me? A scab at seven. A strikebreaker at fourteen, the age when you got enough muscle to wield a baseball bat. Lipton’s dogtags spilled out from his shirt, swinging on their chain, back and forth, catching the light. Seven comes eleven and a man ready to marry. A lil piss of a room. Dark and dank. And stank.
Lucifer saw something. Added sight to sound. A thin bar of sunlight falls across the hall. A single bulb burns from the end of a cord, shaded by old newspaper brown from the heat.
Baby, my Baby. But the work wuz good. Payday, I’d come home and throw it—
Greens. Stinky greens. Stinky steam lifting from a pot.
—up in the air. All my money. Baby and the kids, they be jumpin for all that green snow.
Green sparkled below the surface of Lipton’s eyes. Seaweed. Lucifer saw the eyes across from him, keenly bright, unblinking, unwavering, as far apart from his life as stars in the sky.
After the war, Baby and I come up here permanent. Well, not here, you know, back home, the city, Stonewall. Lipton tapped one row of medals. Muffled metal, a shovel patting down dirt on a grave. Each bar of medal is a coffin. Some dead gook or kraut buried beneath Lipton’s glory. Didn’t know a soul. But the Veteran Burial Club directed us. Set me up with a good-payin job. So I’m here.
Yes you are.
Couldn stay there. The town was a railroad division point, full of transients, bums, hoboes, hatless men in overalls. A thousand streets that ran as one street. The whiskey went down your throat cold, without taste. He had been a moonshiner before the Mountain Peak and the over there and the stepping-off stride, my daddy, my pa, a light-skinned man, lighter than you. Yellow, as high yellow as high could get. A yellow man who passed, hanging wit the other broad-brimmed big-city men miles away, another country, in Memphis. Then one time Mamma took me there. Pointin. There, she said. There yo daddy. There.
Lipton paused. Sighed.
So I tell them, my children, I heard it all. I’m tired. Don’t give me no shit.
My girl, she come to me. What you doin here? I asks her.
Daddy, he beat me.
We all gets beat. That ain’t no reason to leave home.
But—she start.
No ifs, ands, or buts. We all gets beat.
He likes to beat me. Smilin. Likes it. In front of his friends.
A family must stick together. He a good provider.
And he threw the baby food out the window.
Git back home.
No.
Don’t make me use my belt.
He used his already.
Listen, he provide. And he gave me two grandkids. Two. To continue the line. If he spit, git down on yo knees and lick it up.
But my feelings changed. Daddy, Bobo said. Bobo, he my son. Cops had him all in handcuffs. Daddy, he say. Git her away from that nigga. Then they carted Bobo off and locked him up.
Way Bobo got round, all these kids out here might be kin. Even yours. Lipton’s eyes rippled wet light. Yours too. The wet eyes whirled John into their two wet pools. And yours. Spin sampled his drink. And yours. Spokesman calculated. Sowing oats. Whole fields of em. Nuff eatin fo a lifetime. But if he say jus this one, I believes him. This one, this girl named Sharmeta—Lady T they calls her, Lady T—now she faster than a biting flea, but I still raise her for my own. I believes him. Never know him to have no problems claimin what’s his. That polio that twisted his legs and forked his feet couldn’t slow him down none. Them crutches built him some shoulders and arms. Know how women like muscle. Flies to shit.
That’s why I say, a dirty deal. You can put that on my grave. Raise a kid, and you think it’s over, that you done raised all a man sposed to raise, that duty done, that service done, that it’s time to relax, but then she decides to wear clothes for concrete and he run off.
John whispered, He really is crazy.
Uh huh.
IF JOHN WASN’T TELLING all to be told, the three—and perhaps the five, with crazy Lipton and crippled Webb added—would have a Washington reunion, followed by a New York sortie. I will not be there. Lucifer took another gulp of gin, let it linger in his mouth, feeling both its smooth icy coolness and its heavy hotness. I will not be part. With his tongue he worked the ice cubes in his mouth. Light-headed with hunger—he’d hardly eaten any breakfast, so anxious to meet John—he had made the ride to Union Station, taking the long route, the El along and above the river, the river like a candle wick, innumerable strands washing and fli
cking. The subway—lights on the tunnel wall announcing the train’s arrival, white snakes crawling along black tunnel walls—let you out on the second level of the Underground—yes, you could avoid the revolving doors, doors you always got stuck in, your legs slower than the spin, and avoid altogether the thick crowds of Circle Boulevard and Himes Square—then you took a fart-shaking elevator up through black-marbeled bowels into the station lobby. Lucifer’s palm followed the curved edge of the wood table, back and forth. He and John had had a hearty breakfast, bowls of boiled eggs—how Pappa Simmons liked them, not runny or scrambled (food meant to be eaten, not fork-chased, he said) or sunny-side up, yellow eye watching you (food meant to be eaten not admired, he said)—stacks of pancakes, each with a mountain of jam—ah, your mouth watered for Georgiana’s perfectly circular hotcakes, her homemade jam, sticky and tasty in the memory—and plenty of meat, so much that they’d held a meat-eating contest: monkey-wrench-shaped steaks that banged against their trained intestines, fingers and fingers of sausage that poked their belly walls, and sonorous bacon. Indigestion fogged up their chest and stomachs. They agreed on a draw. Now, breakfast over and contest done, they listened with one side of their ears and talked with both sides of their mouths.
Dallas wiped the bottle on his shirtsleeve, Nigga, I don’t want the sweat of yo lips fo bread.
Jus hurry up wit that taste.
Dallas took a swig. Blood of the lamb, he said. He wiped his long, narrow dog face across his sleeve. Blood of the lamb. He handed the bottle to John.
That’s right. Let a man show you how to do it. I hold suzerainty over you. So let me wrap my dick like a leash round yo neck.
Nigga, why you always gotta preach when you get drunk? Ain’t signifyin enough?
John worked the bottle on his shirtfront, as if polishing silver. Is tiddies enough, without the pussy?
Dallas said nothing.
John drank, throat working. Brothers and Sistahs, he said, spreading his arms wide, we are gathered here today … He drank. Passed the bottle to Dallas.
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