You hungry?
No. I ate. He lied. Memory brought hunger.
If you are hungry all you have to do is speak up.
No—
But you know, I don’t do any cooking. These hands. She raised them. One day when you’re old—
Inez?
—you’ll understand. George, Junior is hungry. He want some chicken. Inez?
Some chicken. Think I can drive like this? I’m not dressed. She smoothed her palms over her white cotton housecoat. Shuffled her matching house-shoed feet.
You can stay in the car, Inez. George spoke from down the hall.
Wait, Hatch said. I don’t want any—He let it go. You want me to drive?
No, Inez said. You relax. You are a guest.
The three left the patio, walked out to the garage, and took their places in the car. Hatch in the back seat and George shotgun with Inez. She curved the car onto the gravel-covered alley. Took the alley slowly, then curved the car onto the street.
Okay, George said. Now make a left at the corner.
She did.
Stay on this street.
She did. She drove, steadily, both hands on the steering wheel, face intent on the road and George’s directions.
There it is, right up there.
How was poor-sighted George so precise? Was he speaking from memory or instinct?
I see it. She eased the car into the lot.
Park over there.
She did.
Keep the engine running.
She did. She carefully took neat, clean bills from her purse and handed them to Hatch. There you go, Junior. Buy a box.
Yall want any?
No.
Buy some for yourself, George said.
Hatch ordered the cheapest box and pocketed the change. Boxed chicken under his arm like a football, he ducked back into the car.
Now back out the way you came, George said.
But the sign says—
I’m telling you the right way to go.
But those arrows there—
Inez, just do what I say.
She didn’t.
What are you doing?
She said nothing.
Inez, what are you doing?
Shut your damn mouth unless you going to drive. She swung the car into the streaming avenue, just missing another car. She drove on steadily. Drove past their turn. George said nothing. She turned left and moments later, they were back at the chicken shack. This time she turned right, at the wrong corner. It went on like this. They circled the chicken shack again and again and again.
Make a right at the corner, Hatch said.
Okay, Junior. She made a right.
Now, there’s the alley. Turn left.
Thank you, Junior. She turned, car bouncing, tires crunching on gravel. See, they fixin the street. Junior, you see?
Yes, Inez.
Those cobblestones ruin the tires. She pulled the car before the garage. George got out. Hatch got out.
I’ll park it, George said.
Okay. Inez made her way for the house. Junior, come on.
You see what jus happened? George whispered. You see? George took Hatch’s silence as acknowledgment. She spend all her time in that garage. All her time. He blinked back his anger. Tell yo mamma to call me. I got to tell her something very important.
I will.
Be sure and tell her.
I will.
Better yet, tell your sister to come out here.
I will.
Tell her.
I will.
10
SHEILA LEANED OVER THE EDGE of the platform—a wood-and-iron structure rising stories above the street—to see if her morning train was coming. A yellow oval shimmered near her face. A young Oriental woman watched her, small, prim, and delicate in a red dress suit. Her hand held firm to the black leather purse strapped over her shoulder. Her eyes were sharp and curved, glinting swords. Hear they don’t like to be called Oriental but Asian. Oriental like saying Negro. Or nigger. Bet she own a cleaners. Or a restaurant. Or a grocery store. Turned her face away when she and Sheila locked stares.
The rails looked white and fragile under the sun. Sheila often wondered what Sam felt when he fell under the speeding train and lost his leg. Nawl, I didn’t pass out. I tried to get up and walk away. Crawl away. I remember looking up at the third rail high above me. I felt like one of those limbo dancers. Cause after it happened, all he did was look her in the face from his hospital bed and say, Niece, I gotta learn to use my wings again. Then he looked at Lucifer. Sam and Dave were big on teasin Lucifer and John.
He say war or whore?
Yall been fightin a war or a whore?
What kinda fightin yall do over there?
Sam, these niggas ain’t do no fightin.
Yeah. Ain’t been gone but a year.
What kinda fightin can you do in a year?
Shit, take a year to learn how to kill a man good.
Boy, Sam said, that train reared back like a horse to keep from hitting me. Lucifer didn’t crack a smile. Like worn-out brooms, his eyebrows cast shadows over the soft light of his black eyes.
Sheila could not remember where Lucifer the boy ended and Lucifer the man began. The stern face of the seven-year-old child she had seen for the first time at one Sunday service was the same stern face of the forty-seven-year-old adult she had seen this morning, the boy-man-husband who would never set foot in a church today. Unless somebody died. With her white fingers, Georgiana would dress her two grandsons for church—fine clothes too that her white hands scrubbed and washed and pressed for; fine clothes, not the cheap tight-fitting wash-once-and-wear-once Jew Town clothes—greased their thorny naps, shiny as grapes, and hurried them off to Mount Zion. Georgiana would hammer home the importance of religion, cause, as everybody knew, Pappa Simmons spit when he heard the word ligion. He wasn’t much on ligion, or anything else white after those crackas back home had cheated and tricked him out of everything he had. If I’da kept my hand on the plow, he said, I’d still be back there in bad man boss’s cheating fields. So much fo the weak will inherit. Lucifer and John—Sheila seems to remember that damn fool Dallas as one with the Jones brothers; yes, she recalls three boys, a trio, so she sketches Dallas in one or two remembered scenes, a faint image like chalk on paper, a tentative figure that scatters and disappears at blown breath—would cut the fool in church. And Beulah would spend Sundays at the baseball park—Damn, fool, can’t you hit no ball? Don’t be scared of it. He pitch mean but knock his teeth out! So after service, Lucifer would fix her a plate of food, carefully placing her buttered roll so that it wouldn’t topple off of the plate, and bring it to her at the T Street apartment Sunday evening. Miss Beulah he called her. Thank you, Beulah said. You a fine boy. An angel. Wish I could make it to church. But I can’t. Lucifer also mowed the courtyard—mowing with Pappa Simmons’s rusty scythe, mowing with that same expressionless face and the same hollow eyes. He would always take time to speak, How you, Miss Sheila?—and carried Sheila’s groceries.
One morning, he spoke:
Miss Sheila, may I speak to you?
Lucifer.
I never seen nobody get the Holy Ghost like you.
Sheila didn’t know if she should blush. Had he embarrassed her?
I mean. I never seen nobody do it that pretty.
Her eyes lit up inside. Yes, it had happened to her last Sunday, as it seemed to eventually happen to all of the church’s sisters. Bloat with the Holy Spirit. Music beats round the rim of your ears. Air flows solid and cold with fire. Your lungs crumble, sprout legs, then run free of your body, leaving a black hole in your bosom. A stranger enters. Yes, a stranger inside you, shaking the bars of your chest, gnawing through the iron with her teeth, flailing her arms, kicking her feet, running from one corridor to another and screaming FIRE!, breaking free of the cage and into the light, running dead into the glowing face of the spirit. So you must keep moving cause your body is FIRE!, red a
nts ravaging skin. And the striding shadow of the spirit riding you, holding on, with one hand thrown up in testimony, against your strong steady bucking. White-gloved ushers hold on too.
You know John and Gracie spending time together.
She looked at the set of Lucifer’s shoulders. He was over six feet tall and weighed better than two hundred pounds, though he wasn’t a handsome man. Yes. I know. Seen the spirit in her eyes.
Well, I decided. You the one I want. He said it real matter-of-fact, like asking for a job.
Is that right?
Yes, ma’m.
She thought a moment. Decided to feel him out. A levelheaded young man. Both feet on the ground. An earthling. So unlike his brother John. What makes you think you can have me?
Jus informin you.
Sheila didn’t know what to say.
Jus informin you. His eyes were clear black stones, hollow and unchanging, eyes without taste or heat. Keep em open while we do it. Keep em open.
Thanks.
You welcome.
Anything else?
Well. He paused, hesitant perhaps. I don’t want nobody but you.
Really?
I don’t ever want nobody but you. He was still, quiet, waiting, a ticket conductor.
From then on, Lucifer met her in the courtyard each morning. Miss Sheila, thought you might need me to carry yo bags. She let him carry the bags to the El. Then she rode the train and took two buses to the Shipcos’ house in Deerfield, far beyond the sprawling arms of Northern Central. After work, she returned and found Lucifer’s waiting eyes on the platform, unmoved, heavy as stone. So it would be. Morning and night, Lucifer stood heavy on the platform, the wood boards swaying beneath him. I don’t want nobody but you.
He rarely revealed emotion, whether happy or sad. He kisses the flesh around her slip straps. He had put time into constructing this face. Spent his life building the hard outer hull, only for her to be drawn into the soft inner life. His tongue works two places at once. He invited her inside. His tongue wiggles between the halves of her breasts. Walk around. Explore on any terms you want. I don’t ever want nobody but you.
Sheila heard, Here, these for you. Two black pearls heated her open hand. Light flashed against the black pearls and the whole world rearranged, a black flood.
With his reliable wings, Lucifer launched full flight into the dark future. She followed.
The first time he came inside her, he jerked twice, and she felt him plop out two seeds of sperm, two black seeds that bided their time. That was Lucifer, still, quiet, waiting.
BIRDS SHATTERED THE GLASSY TRANSPARENCY of the morning. Soared, suspended in air, light pulsing in their wings. Waves of air heated Sheila’s face. The Oriental woman’s eyes rushed toward her, two black circles coal-burning, flicking and fading. With something sharp at heart, she looked around the bend, silver rails curving and disappearing behind a building corner. The train appeared, gliding slowly and silently several hundred yards down the track. These slow Els, slower than the subway, even during rush hour. Sheila, Hatch said, these trains so slow. How come they jus don’t fly? She always took the subway home through the rapid shortening evening. El in the morning, subway in the evening. Each day: half and half. She didn’t like the subway, trains smashing through the darkness, darkness black as the space inside a hoodlum’s hood, so she took the Dan Ryan or the Englewood El to work. But they an eyesore. What you see outside the window. Dull glass in vacant lots, trails of bold grafitti, cementless chimneys, the bowed legs of collapsing porches, burned-out buildings like moth-eaten suits, rusting cars like rotting apple cores, and garbage stacked high.
Somewhere down in the street hammers and saws were busy. The sun was up, all the way clear of the distant lake behind Red Hook and Stonewall. Metal. Everything is metal. The lake enclosed the projects in a bubble, like a toy paperweight. Sheila expected shaken plastic snow to fall. In the far distance a freight train curved into view like a black snake. She counted fourteen cars. The long train like a chain linking the two projects.
Perhaps these trains would stop at Union Station, where Lucifer had gone to meet John this morning. Ain’t heard a word from John in a month, then he up and call and Lucifer rush off to the station, a dog returning his master’s stick. And miss a day of work, too. But she could forgive Lucifer. Brothers are brothers. Forgive him. I’ll jus let him think I’m mad. Might earn me something.
Sides, John ain’t my problem. I don’t sleep wit him. Gracie do.
Gracie was like the ancient women back in the old days at Mount Zion, bitter and alone, crying about men long gone when their own wrinkled flesh had caused their suffering. When their own blindness had shoved their heart into the dark outdoors. They take their pain out on you. Snap bitter words with the least justification.
Gracie hadn’t been in the city a quick minute before she bring Jack home (T Street) to meet Sheila and Beulah. Sheila took one look at Jack. Compassion wilted. She wanted to beat him to death with his hammer-heavy wine bottle. His beard blackened his yellow skin. Sheila tried to touch his outstretched hand but couldn’t. Beulah gave it the lightest squeeze. His red eyes wouldn’t look Beulah in the face. Later, Beulah told Sheila in private that back home she had dated Jack while Koot dated him. My own sister. I lived in one town and Koot another. By accident we found out.
Sheila told Gracie.
Mind yo own business, Gracie said. He mine.
Didn’t really surprise Sheila. Gracie liked to graze in other people’s meadows. That’s why she had to leave Memphis.
Don’t you know that’s the easiest way to get killed? Lula Mae said.
Lula Mae, Beulah said, let me talk to her.
Why don’t you talk to yoself, Gracie said.
Beulah loaded up thirteen black steamer trunks, and John, Lucifer, and Dallas heavy-hauled them down the two flights of stairs, loading two trunks at a time into John’s red Eldorado, one in the red open trunk mouth (trunk for trunk), and the other canoe-fashion on the roof. Seven trips to Union Station, and another seven trips to carry Beulah’s twenty-seven boxes (how could this small apartment have held so much? where had she hidden it all?), the Eldorado stuffed so full that only John could squeeze inside it, the stacked boxes causing the red roof to sag above his head, the car to creak along. (Christ, Beulah. You gon wreck my ride.) Left a free space in the apartment on Kenwood (Woodlawn)—Cookie’s expanding wheelchair had forced yall out of the T Street apartment, elastic wood stretching as age pulled Cookie long and slack—which John and Lucifer filled, and the four of them, the two sisters and the two brothers, transforming that closet apartment into nuptial chambers, the apartment they shared for the single year before John and Lucifer went off to war, and that they shared for seven more years after John and Lucifer returned. Gracie and John would spend time in the red Eldorado, while Lucifer would touch Sheila behind a hanging white sheet. He always touched her with cool fingers (maybe he had soaked them in ice water) that went hot.
Dallas followed John everywhere like a compass. The two would sprawl over the living-room couch laughing about some private joke. Dallas followed Sheila with angry knowing eyes.
Dallas lay like a pinned butterfly beneath John. John leaned forward, pushing the stakes of his knees further into Dallas’s shoulders. Then John hit Dallas, hit him and kept hitting him, quick straight stiff punches that did not miss.
If you gon get beat up, Dave said, you might as well fight.
Lucifer, you said, ain’t you gon do something? You gon let John kill him?
Lucifer did not move. Waited.
You (and Gracie and Lucifer and John) had witnessed John’s transformation from boy to man, the boy-man whose face expressed every feeling quickly and vividly. The man was something to see. Lucifer, John, and Dallas had shared a basement apartment on T Street. Three steps down, then a hall leading to gray cement walls that breathed Dallas’s smell, the stink of old drink. 40 Acres. Cheap wine. Your nose watered the minute you entered. Once a week, in t
hose months before you and Lucifer married, you mopped and wiped down the walls with ammonia. But the stink remained, as if the walls had been painted with vomit.
Even the lame, the deaf, and the blind knew that Dallas and John would hit every port of call (white port, cheap wine) on Church Street, from Seventy-third to Sixty-third and back again, in a matter of hours. Sing those foul corner songs that demanded foul corner faces, twisted mouths, broken curbs. Drink made dangerous words slip out of Dallas’s mouth. When he got drunk, his eyes would get wide and black, two open shoe-polish cans, and he would try to rumble. John, Dave said, you better tell this nigga something before I shoot him. And what could John do? Drunk-stumble into somebody’s door, so hard that the door jumped in its frame.
And everybody knew that John liked to lay with woman, that itch he had to scratch. Mind yo business, Gracie said.
Marriage did not change John. He brought his business to Gracie’s doorstep and invited it inside. What did Gracie do? Let it happen. Right under her nose (how could she not smell the stink?), right in her home. Mind yo business. Stay outa mine.
Sometimes Sheila would watch Gracie pouring out tea, swinging her leg beneath the kitchen table, lifting a spoon to her mouth, and hated her for these things, murderous actions. Then, all of their years together would rush at Sheila. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, all hid? all hid? You and Gracie and R.L. and Sam and Dave and Nap playing Catch Me and hide-and-seek in the thirteen pecan tree clusters that surrounded Daddy Larry’s house and barn. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, all hid? all hid? The boiling hatred would simmer down to pity. Gracie, Sheila would begin, don’t you know—
It’s my business, Gracie would say. He mine.
After Porsha was born, John would strap the baby in his Eldorado and take her red-speeding through the streets. Sheila told with her eyes what her mouth wouldn’t speak. John bought a red wagon and pulled Porsha everywhere in it. Same way he used to wheel Cookie (Jack’s product) around in the park when he courted Gracie. Her body was liquid in the wheelchair. Her muscles moved under your fingers like water-filled balloons. Lucifer would return from work each day with some gift for his daughter, usually something cheap, depending on how far his little money would carry him. John offered candy, cookies, and pop. Gracie watched it all.
Rails Under My Back Page 20