Rails Under My Back

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  He puts his ear to her yawning vagina.

  What you doing?

  Trying to hear the sea.

  But he wasn’t stuck on sex. He knew the value of a hug and would hold her all night sometimes, her head on the boulder of his shoulder.

  Equally drawing were his wild dangerous moments. Once, they were standing in the lobby of Davy’s Garden, waiting for a table.

  How long will it be?

  I already told you, sir. Fifteen minutes.

  Me and my baby want to eat.

  I’m sorry, sir. Fifteen minutes.

  Deathrow knocked the host’s head back with a short quick punch. Just like that. The host straightened his tie. Found them a table.

  On another occasion, Deathrow shrouded his empty plate with his white napkin, then took Porsha by the hand and led her to the men’s bathroom. (She had not finished eating. His quick teeth always finished before her.) He tipped the bathroom attendant about half what dinner would cost. Instructed the attendant to, Give us a minute. Shoved the attendant out the door, bribe money in hand. Locked the door. Checked the stalls. Washed his hands and her hands—his soap lathered them a single skin—one finger at a time. Undressed. Naked, eyes closed, they climbed into each other, a thin black seam. She held her breath. Their work was sweat and light, sweat and light. When they were done, they made a distance from one another and breathed, outstretched on the warm tile floor, smiling, faces pressed against stone.

  And then there was the time he just up and grabbed a waitress at Davy’s Garden. Some homely white girl who was working another table. Grabbed her by the arm and pulled her face next to his as if he had a secret to tell. He put his tongue in her mouth. He let her go. She cleaned her lipstick from his mouth with a cloth napkin. She tore up the check. He sat back in his chair, belly poked out with satisfaction.

  Did you have to do that?

  He looked Porsha full in the face. Clean draws can’t hide a nasty booty.

  They would talk for hours in the darkness, their lips almost touching. So she learned that he got to his station in life by magic.

  It ain’t where you come from, he said. It’s where you’re going.

  She considered the truth of this.

  Gotta take chances if you wanta get somewhere in this world.

  What you know bout chances? Young boy like you.

  Aw ight. Watch that boy stuff.

  They breathed in the darkness, his slow hand on her body.

  I know bout chances. A bitch is a bitch, but you got a vicious body, the curves that make a nigga wanna gamble. See, at Red Hook there this old bitch—cuse me, lady—

  Woman.

  Right. Woman. Anyway, there this ole ass woman live on the top flo of Buildin Three. Everybody say she a witch. Say she give you power if you go up in her. Some say she learn it when she lived way down South. Some say she got it from eatin cat food. Others say she throw parties fo the devil. All I know is, she got power. Power. And she got it to give. Why you think Freeze climbin so high up the ladder? He ain’t no better than me. Only thing is, he knocked her boots.

  Freeze? Who’s that?

  You ain’t never heard of Freeze?

  She shook her head. Should I have?

  Well—drop it. It ain’t important.

  But—

  Drop it. I’m fin to tell you about power. See, that’s the way it goes, either knock they boots or knock em upside the head.

  Why you talkin like a lowlife?

  I’m jus tellin you how the niggas see it.

  I ain’t talkin bout them. I’m talkin bout you.

  Sorry, baby.

  Finish tellin me.

  Well, people be scared of Miss Emily. Miss Emily, that’s the name of that ole witch. Nobody mess wit her. I mean nobody. And they always speak when they see her. They be like, How you today, Miss Emily? Fine. All she ever say. Fine. Ole bitch be throwin—

  Do you have to use that word? It’s disrespectful.

  Disrespectful? Baby, I got a lot of respect. All sorts of respect.

  He kissed her on the cheek. A bird peck.

  Anyway, Miss Emily always be throwin her liquor bottles out the window and bustin somebody head. You see her bout once a week. Be ridin round on one of those lectric wheelchairs and shit, you know, those ones that go real slow. Everybody be calling her Lectric EEL. EE. But we jus thinks it. Keep it way back in our mind. Call her Miss Emily to her face, cause she got power. Most ole folks be all scared to even leave they apartment and come out in the hall. And somebody crippled and ole too. But EE, she ride all round on that thing, all over Red Hook, circle all the buildings five or six times, jus creepin long in that slow lectric wheelchair. And you know the jets, all them buildings and shit, every lap bout eight blocks.

  Porsha didn’t know. She had only driven to Red Hook once or twice to pick up Deathrow.

  Niggas speak to her every time she pass. They be like, How you, Miss Emily? Fine. Do her last lap and she go right into the elevator on that thing. He pulled back, pausing to word it right. Like a worm in a dirty hole, or a roach in the wall or somephun, and ride up to her apartment.

  She look jus like a witch too. Big-ass head with these two little tiny dots for eyes. And can’t hardly see. All this thick green stuff on her eyeballs. And her body all skinny and wrinkled up. Hands all balled up like crabs. And her arms all wrinkled up like some tree branch.

  Don’t sound like nobody wit power to me, Porsha said.

  That’s because you don’t know power when you see it.

  How you know what I know?

  I know.

  You don’t know as much as you think you know.

  You gon let me finish?

  I ain’t stoppin you.

  Well, this one day, I see EE ridin round and goin slow as hell, and I jus walks right up to her, jus walks right on up to her and say, How you today, Miss Emily? then I whips out my dick.

  What?

  Straight up. Pop goes the weasel.

  I don’t believe you, Porsha said, thinking, Maybe he did.

  For real.

  You tellin a story.

  You know I don’t lie.

  Porsha thought about it. Well, what she do?

  I’m fin to tell you. I whips it out and shakes it a little, right in her face. I say, Trick fo trick. EE open her mouth and smile at me. Got all this gray shit on her teeth. Like steel wool or somephun. She say, Chillen are such a comfort to the body.

  No she didn’t?

  Straight up.

  What you do?

  What you think? I wore my jimmy.

  Niggas ain’t shit.

  Better believe it.

  Fairy tale.

  Only fairies tell tales. And you know I ain’t no fairy.

  What am I going to do wit you?

  All the good things.

  DEATHROW WAS BETTER than most of the men she’d dealt with. Trifling niggas. (One boldly told her: Baby, I’m only out for one thang. The pussy and the money.) Especially Les Payne. Fine nigga. Tall and muscular. Honey-brown skin. I got a weakness for these good-lookin browns. The rod of his penis printed against his tight jeans. Eyes you could leap into, singing and splashing. Rolled his own cigarettes (liked her to roll them for him) with Top paper—to make everyone think he fired up joints as normal people fire up cigarettes—and sweet-smelling tobacco. That was during her only year of college—Freeport University, downstate, a stone’s throw from Kankakee County, Decatur, Beulah—a decade ago.

  She met him at a Greek Club dance. Ah, remember it. Couples revolved around each other like spheres. Orderly motion. Beneath the long, skinny, white arms of the searching hall lights, she buoyed her way, mapped it out, speaking and receiving many flying words of friendship, her long fingers fluttering in every direction, clawing up cookies, cake, pie, potato chips, punch. Girl, you ate like a pig back then. But the engine was working and you could burn it off. She shone in her best outfit, a gown of polka-dotted tulle with short sleeves and puffed shoulders, a wide r
ed belt cinching her waist. She removed a silk handkerchief from her purse and cleaned her fingers, one at a time. She shot a challenging look around the room. The man she would come to know as Les invited her to dance. Immediately, they were locked in a tight embrace among a whirlwind of incessantly moving feet. She felt so light in his arms. He kept his mouth close to her ear, and his tongue …

  I gotta go. They had danced for hours.

  Why? The stroke of midnight? His eyes searched her body. Your dress gon turn into rags?

  She let slip a laugh. Not quite. Tomorrow’s Sunday. I got things to do. Cooking. Cleaning. Church. Things.

  Can I help? He batted his eyes, quick church fans.

  She felt the slightest rising of her heart. No.

  How bout tomorrow? Dinner at yo house.

  Maybe. Give me a call and we’ll see.

  Next day, he called. She heard his eyes through the phone receiver, fluttering and flapping. She accepted the previous night’s invitation. Cooked him a down-home meal. Her neckbones were his for the sucking.

  They quickly established a lovers’ routine. A fast drive away from the campus, Les Payne’s old Mustang lurching like a gurney. They drove with the windows down, laughing big laughs, cornfields breathing in their faces. A midnight walk through the fields, holding corn-scented hands. Wet moonlight changed the fields into a sea of rippling yellow and green waves. They paused in an open spot, a circle in the corn. Settled down into the blind dirt. Les Payne’s kisses moved like ants over her body. He breathed hard before he entered her, laboring like a steam locomotive. Afterward, they drove down to a quiet spot on the Kankakee River. Let the cold river water wash the manure from their bodies.

  He would drive her home every weekend, two hours away. He’s a real showpiece, Mamma would whisper.

  Is that all you can ever say? Porsha said.

  Okay, I’ll tell you what Beulah always told me. Don’t throw away dirty water until you have clean.

  Porsha prepared dinner. Les Payne snapped his napkin taut and folded it across his knees. Cut and ate his food, knife and fork machine-clean and precise. Uncle John trained his loaded eyes on Les Payne’s face. (Porsha had made sure to invite him.) He never touched his fork.

  Mamma talked.

  I had the easiest time with Porsha. During the pregnancy, I mean. Lucifer got morning sickness. And he standin there in the delivery room, lookin like he bout to pass out. Doctor gave me a cesarian. But with Hatch? Mornin sickness. And he was always kicking. Seemed like with spiked heels. All the pain. I thought it was because I was old. But Beulah said, Sheila, it’s a boy. Yes. It was, too. Ten pounds, twenty-three inches. I thought I was gon die. And the doctor didn want to give me a cesarian. To this day I don’t know why. I thought I was gon die. Lucifer and John stayed in the waitin room. I told em, You better not pass out, tired as I am. And I told the doctor, yes I told him, Sew me up and leave a hole for my husband.

  Uncle John raised his fork. Poked words into Les’s face: Them pretty boys got sugar in they blood.

  THE CAMPUS PHOTOGRAPHER, Les used his lens like his mouth, an instrument of sweet talk. Baby, let me jus take one more shot of you. God, this lens don’t do no justice to your beauty. Can’t capture all that body. Stroked her breasts, her legs, her butt. You got a bad-ass body. Smokin. Man, wish I had a body like that. He showed some of her photographs (probably in boast) to a professional friend who called her in for a shoot. The photographer put a paper bag over her head—you could weather the insult for the two hundred in cash he’d paid you—and shot her in evening wear—ah, you flushed red with embarrassment, a glowing coal; you sat and the crinoline broke like cinders—short dresses, miniskirts, bikinis, and lingerie. The photographer lined up jobs for her, fashion layouts for black magazines and ads for local newspapers and catalogues. Les Payne had given her a career.

  The career made her accept all of Les Payne’s excuses, the many hours he spent at the frat house—or so he claimed—with his frat brothers. Baby, it’s about unity. Togetherness. Brothers trying to get something in this world—batting his eyes the whole time. After all, he had branded the fraternity sign—Delta Sigma Pi—greasy and black on his biceps. Or had he carved it? What troubled her: He had acquired a name for prowess among the women at the university. Couldn’t go nowhere for him winkin at some woman or some coed grinning his name. She took all she could. She asked him, Who squeezin yo lemon?

  What?

  You heard me.

  Baby, that was all in the past. I’m a new man now.

  Where the old man you left behind?

  He kissed her. Baby, I’m straight. The words rolled out of his mouth like smoke.

  That night, she prepared for her weekend trip home. Gave him her apartment keys. He would stay and study, needed book time away from his frat brothers. She loaded up her bags and hit the road. Rode the bus as far as the city line, rolling columns of streetlamps. She exited the bus and caught the next one back to the university. Opened the door and caught Les Payne on a downstroke, doing it in her bed, the moonlight so bright that the two bodies shone yellow against the sheets.

  She quit college after her freshman year. Moved back to the city. Found an apartment on South Shore Drive with a generous view of Tar Lake. Signed on with an agency. Things were looking up.

  Hang-tailed, Les Payne came crawling back. Say, baby. Could you see your way clean? Wouldn’t leave her alone. Plead for hours on the phone. His mouth peeled off in pages. Send her cards. She gave him another chance. Her trust regained, the hang-tailed hound sneaked off for a bone.

  It was time for a change, time to dust the broom, but she couldn’t drop him. He had put his flame in her. She sought Mamma’s advice. Between pauses of her raised teacup and the clink of its return to the saucer Mamma told her how to get rid of a boyfriend.

  Daughter, write his name on an egg and toss it into the sea.

  The sea? Ain’t no sea round here.

  A river then. The waves will carry him away.

  She drove—not the 280ZX but her first car, the spanking green Camaro bought with her new modeling dollars—to the Kankakee River. She tossed three eggs for insurance.

  LOOKING BACK, she could see all the lovers from her life, singular yet source-same, like the pages of a book.

  She rises on the pyramid of Uncle John’s back. The afternoon air dances under the trees. She can touch the leaves.

  A lot of dogs get run over chasing after that stuff.

  What stuff, Uncle John?

  You know what stuff.

  Sugar Smallhouse, the exception. Central Vocational High School, eleven, twelve, thirteen years ago. Like the school’s coolest dudes, Sugar liked to bop. Intricate steps, shuffling feet, twirls, twists and splits performed by two male partners, dressed in self-named zoot suits. Broad-brimmed Dobbs. Long-lapeled blazers. Bright silk ties against blinding white shirts. Diamond stickpin and matching cuff links. Baggy pants with high waists, held up by red suspenders. Two-toned patent-leather shoes. Hair slicked with Never Nap cream. Shiny conks with warp waves flowing back like ridges on a seashell. Sugar Smallhouse was the best dancer, could dance his head off—maybe it was the way he ended a step by removing his hat, then shaking it like a tambourine—and the cutest too. Jus a sucka for them light-skinned mens. I always been. Their first date, they danced so close that she could feel his heart heaving and crashing against her breasts. He said next to nothing. His rarity of words would last the length of their three-year relationship. She had messed with—kissing (bustin slob they called it), touching (feeling on), grinding—a few boys, but he was the first she would let completely inside her. Pinch her nipples tightly erect. Finger her deep inside. Tug at her panties. Slide them over the curvature of her hips. Part her legs with cool hands, then something wet and cold on her burning pussy. She raised her head slightly, looking down, seeing his closed eyes, his tongue lapping like a dog, then pushing into her and her head falling back. He refused to believe he was the first. Where the blood? But she fel
t the pain of his slow, dry entry. He was forever grateful for her bodily gifts. If he had a penny, half of it was hers. Wise in love, he could never catch on with his studies, no matter how much she drilled him, and he graduated—remember the prom, Sugar in his black tux and you in your royal-blue taffeta dress, walking slowly and carefully, holding it up around your waist—only after falling to his knees before the principal, begging and crying. Please, sir. Please.

  Get up, son. You’ll ruin your suit.

  Off he went to the navy (radar training?)—and she to Freeport University—rather than work full-time in his father’s clothing store. They exchanged a few letters the first months.

  You datin now?

  Got to sometime, Uncle John.

  Any of those niggas act a fool, you come see your Uncle John.

  Yes, Uncle John.

  You come see me. I’ll set them straight right and quick.

  Deathrow was the closest she had come to Sugar Smallhouse—though he was darker, a quarter after midnight—to matching that feeling. Sugar was inside him, a secret astronaut directing his life, directing him back to the love she’d lost. If you dug deep enough beneath his hard exterior, you found many a kind bone. His life extended into hers, clusters of lines reaching out.

  The night before she was to move into her new loft at Hundred Gates, he phoned her.

  Meet me at the apartment.

  The apartment? Why?

  Let me bless it.

  Bless it?

  You know, bless it.

  They blessed the apartment, naked floors and walls echoing flesh and sweat.

  Hatch and his best friend Abu arrived early the next morning at the South Shore apartment to help her move. She looked forward to a new apartment and a new neighborhood. Her body needed its sleep; sanitation trucks blew garbage odor through the bedroom window; to the siren of the truck and the call of the odor she awoke every morning; besides, it was time for a move; she had lived in South Shore ever since her return to the city from Freeport.