He tried again. He entered the station of Sheila’s body on this street, at that corner, through this facade, and under that grate.
THE SQUARE QUIETENED, the stores emptied one by one. The light from the streetlamps managed to create a dim, fragmentary illusion. He turned a corner. The sidewalk glimmered like powdered light. Sparse traffic washed past. Taillights red-danced up ahead. The bar blinked in again.
He turned another quiet corner.
17
WHEN SHEILA MADE IT HOME, Lucifer was waiting for her, his eyes in the exact same spot where she last saw them that morning.
I gotta meet John at the train station. He’s going to Washington.
About the war?
Yes.
Short notice.
Well, they jus told John and he jus told me.
You gon skip work today?
I already called in. A sick day.
Jus like that?
Well—He thought about it. It’s no big deal. It really isn’t. I jus want to see John off.
I hope you’re not going.
He looked at her.
Twice he’d left her. First, to run off to the war. He was one of the first niggers over there. But they didn’t make him go. John went and he followed. Yes, he was carried to Asia on the foolish winds of John’s draft. He might follow that fool John anywhere. Brothers are brothers. And years later, he returned to the war—four trips to New York or Washington, four that seemed like one, beads strung together, a necklace of the big city’s bright lights—searching for what he had lost. Might he leave again? She cut off this possibility, snapped the beads, ground them to powder. That’s why, each day, she mixed Go and Stay Powders in his morning coffee.
Where’s Hatch? she asked.
Upstairs in his room.
Hatch!
No, don’t call him.
He’s sposed to be out with Elsa.
Don’t call him. Lucifer took a half-step forward, as if he had trouble recognizing her. He smeared a light kiss on her cheek. I bought you a lil something. He held a small box out to her. I bought it at the Underground.
The Underground?
Yes.
How can you even shop there? Sheila had lost herself the one time she shopped there. Ugly black walls that—rumor had it—were one-way glass and that concealed surveillance cameras and robotic eyes. Each shopper’s voice roared a seashell’s echo. Yes, it was the deepness that bothered her. Like being inside a big well. The elevators glass buckets drawing up lakes of people. Every floor (“level”) a marble square of tiles awash with people, merging into eddies and disengaging into new thick paths, varied schools of colorful fish. Babies sucked on the Aqua-Lungs of their pacifiers. Sucked the air thin. The world rushed and swam. She elbowed her way into an elevator. Pushed the up button. The elevator went down in one long rumbling roar. She burst from the open doors, a bull into the ring. Took five flights of escalators, riding their light free-running whine. Rode up into sunlight and oxygen.
I went there for you.
She took the box. Unwrapped it with all the enthusiasm her fingers could muster. A yellow bird rested in a nest of white cotton.
You like it?
Is it my birthstone?
I don’t know. But the man said that it’s a precious stone.
A Jew will say anything.
You don’t like it?
She said nothing.
They had these gems on sale. Emerald. The deeper the green, the better the stone. Brazilian. Don’t you like it? Lucifer did not move. Stood there watching her, waiting for an answer, breathing. The moist air of his breathing carried her. John, Lucifer, and Dallas heavy-hauled Beulah’s black steamer trunks—seventeen trunks, yes, recall them, seventeen—down 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 the small T Street apartment have held so much? where had Beulah 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.) Beulah’s departure left a free space which John and Lucifer quickly filled, and the four of them, the two sisters and the two brothers, transformed the closet-small apartment into nuptial chambers. Gracie and John would spend time in the red Eldorado, while Lucifer would touch Sheila behind the hanging white sheet.
Looking up, she caught his eyes in the light of her own. It had taken him what, seven, eight years to save up enough money to buy her a wedding ring, seven, eight years to replace the gold wedding band as he had vowed shortly after they married. Of course I do. Help me put it on.
He took the necklace. It hung between his admirable fingers, the bird gold-swinging. Navigational fingers which steered her heart. He always touched her with cool fingers—maybe he soaked them in ice water—that went hot. He touched her now, as he had in the one long-ago instant.
18
HUNDRED GATES ROSE behind a ragged screen of pine trees. When Porsha saw it, tired left her body with the sweat. Glad to be home. She made her way quickly inside and up to her loft. Once inside, she studied the spring evening. Behind clear rectangular panes of glass, she looked out over the treetops, a beautician above a client’s hair. She must prepare for Deathrow.
She bathed for the third time that day. Powdered and scented her private parts.
Her eyes shined in the silver box of mirror that held her reflection. In paradise, her eyes might not have shone so brightly. She brushed her teeth. Lula Mae, Mamma, and Gracie had all lost their teeth by age thirty. R.L. had milk gums, Mamma said. Maybe it was something in the water we used to drink. Maybe what we ate. We didn’t know back then. And thirty was looking her in the face, two years down the line. She brushed. She would halt destiny.
She checked the answering machine. One message, one voice. Porsha, hey. How you doing? This is Hatch. I went to see Inez today. She wants to see you. She says that it’s important. You can call me if you want to. Talk to you later. Bye.
TIME WAS OUTSIDE, looking on. Looking in. Deathrow was late. Freighted with waiting, she seated herself in a comfortable chair and flipped through a magazine. Her trained eye recognized her body pasted beneath another model’s face. Two or three years ago, she could easily identify her body in a photograph. However, as of late, other models had started to imitate her body. Her poses. Her gestures. Her texture. And photographers used lighting that glistened like juice on berry skin like hers.
She turned the leaves of her magazine.
A three-year-old confessed to drowning her baby cousin in a bucket of bleach and water.
Should she call Deathrow?
… idea on the very cutting edge of the mortuary business. These plastic tombstones are cheaper, lighter, and more durable than stone. And etched letters are virtually eternal. In the near future, they will be all the rave.
She was no longer reading. The print offered a resting place for her eyes. It occurred to her how little she knew about Deathrow’s origins. She had not seen a single twig of his family tree. Roots sunk in darkness. Red Hook had given birth to him. I ain’t got no family, he’d said. I’ll tell you this, he said. I been to hell and back with gasoline draws. But like I said, it ain’t where you come from, it’s where you going.
THE MOON ROSE HUGE AND RED. She had been waiting more than an hour—one identical hour repeated over and over again—sitting, and thinking of Deathrow. Had he fallen into nested sleep? The phone rang.
Hello?
Bill?
Bill?
Is Bill there?
You got the wrong number.
Is this—
She slammed the receiver down.
She dialed Deathrow’s number. The line rang and rang while she twisted and untwisted the telephone cord around her finger. The receiver grew pregnant, became too heavy
for her to hold.
SHE LIKED TO LIE ON HER BED in the dark, run her hands over her naked body. The image she saw in the mirror, the body she could see with her eyes, her fingers saw differently in the dark. The mountains of her breasts and the valley of her hard stomach were only shadows and shapes, smoothed of all desire.
19
THE SMELL OF GASOLINE ruins the cold winter smell of the day. The blaze is beautiful as it catches, weed by weed, the hedges haloed with fire, a sound like ocean, the pond shining, white as the mountains behind it. The skating is good. The balance, the ease, the sense of sailing over hard surface, the blades cutting a whistling trail of white flakes. Figure eights are his favorites, time beating in the skate rhythms of the hourglass shape. Crunching, the ice gives in like a trapdoor. He sinks. He sees the sun through the ice, a weak hanging bulb. The deeper he goes, the dimmer the light. And he is falling quickly, as if weighted, clawing out at the finger-refusing rungs of a cold ladder, the ice coming away in his hands. Bubbles rush past his face, the cold cuts through his body as he reaches for the bubbles, chain links that will pull him to the surface. Not worried about drowning; in fact, he can breathe perfectly well. It is the falling, the lack of ground beneath his feet that’s troubling. He wedges to a rest, directly in the center of the ice, unable to twitch a muscle. Can’t even turn his head. He uses his teeth.
The phone’s rhythmic ringing cuts through sleep; slices of night black-break away in a steady beat like the clanking of a train over rail ties or a hatchet falling to the chopping board, again and again. Black light freezes the hours.
Hello.
Lucifer?
Know that voice anywhere. Gracie?
John’s gone.
What?
John’s gone.
His heart fluttered—a soft rushing noise—wings unable to break the cage of his chest. What do you mean, gone?
I feel it.
He weighed the word. I see. The clock on the nightstand, glowing face and dial: 4 a.m.
Please come.
He looked over his shoulder. Sheila’s left breast peeked at him from over the sheet. Okay, I’ll come. See you soon. He hung up the phone without waiting for a response.
Who was that?
Gracie.
Gracie?
Yeah.
Gracie?
She had a feeling—
Behind him he heard Sheila roll over in her sleep.
Moonlight came silver through the window. It made objects look different, gave them glowing skin. He moved to the chair before the window and raised the shade a little. An edge of street. Splotches of light, the glow of the streetlights. The sky, a star-eaten blanket. Then slow rain and an occasional tire hissing over wet streets. Illuminated night allowed him to see a watery blur of trees that surrounded the house. Gracie’s call put a hole in his rest. A feeling.
John the engineer. Places his school ruler flat across his clipboard, curves the ruler along the clipboard and angles the train out of the station, his mouth motion-wise under the ruler’s control, accelerating, screeching—rails—easing off speed.
In the T Street apartment, Lucifer and John shared a tunnel-like room lined with Georgiana’s canned food. Lucifer’s bed faced the window—year-round, the windows stayed shut against the stink of the stockyards—the sun flashing between rushing clouds and, at night, the moon walking in light. A bed too short for him, his frosted toes hanging over the edge winter mornings. Woke early on those mornings in a humming house, while John slept in reaching distance of him, and Georgiana and Pappa Simmons in their closet-sized room. Walked through the coal-steaming apartment, wood buckling under his toes, buckling and crackling, popping like squeezed knuckles. Bathed, scrubbed his skin, shaved off his red widow’s peak—yes, shaving it, even as a child to protect himself from sharp laughter—with Pappa Simmons’s straight razor, then returning to bed and lying there, naked, warm, beneath Bingo’s wet dog smell.
The first thing Pappa Simmons did every morning, regardless of weather, was step out onto the back porch naked and check the sky, the wind. He was not red or yellow or white, but some shade between autumn and winter; his old blood ran cold and thick, and his labor-bowed legs were too slow to keep up with two growing grandsons. He never said much, kept up a black cloak of distance, fixing this or that thing around the house, hammer in hand and nails in his mouth. Georgiana polished your shoes, smoothed the wrinkles out of your clothes, combed your naps—rather, you combed your own naps before you entered her kitchen (her bacon crackling on the stove and fresh glasses of lemonade or tea on the table), lest she do it and leave you tender-headed—and checked your ears for roaches. Dress you like twins on Sunday. Put your hands (smooth) in hers (weathered) and walk you to school or church.
I don’t like that white woman touchin me, John said.
She okay, Lucifer said.
She was equally tight-lipped, speaking to stress the evils of sin, foretelling that either the dark wing of Satan or the bright cloak of God would trouble John’s sky if he didn’t change his ways.
Pappa Simmons had catapulted himself beyond the arms of religion. Counted the numbers of days since he last set foot in a church. I’m a workin man, he said. Ain’t never made no livin wit my mouth. That’s a rotten way to make a livin. You never heard him mumble a word of prayer. And he threatened to shoot Reverend Tower if the preacher ever stepped foot in his house. But he and Georgiana spent evenings in the living room reading from their Bible.
SOON AS HE THOUGHT HIMSELF OLD ENOUGH to board the train without supervision, John rode it with his running buddy Dallas. Miss Adams, Dallas’s mother, didn’t mind. Dallas was with John, and John was his brother’s keeper. Lucifer could recall no moment when Dallas didn’t exist on T Street. John and Dallas riding Bingo—a huge hound the height of your navel—saddle and all, like a horse up and down Church Street. Boy-men now, they rode the trains, working cons, three-card monte, the shell game—nickel-and-dime stuff. Small and swift, John zoomed from childhood directly into the world of power and feeling. Roll an occasional hooker on Church Street or milk fag-bar fairies for drinks.
I been a man all my life, Sam said.
Nigga, hold yo horses. We jus hustlin them fo some drinks.
Yeah, Dallas said. We jus hustlin them fo drinks. No harm in that.
You can get mo than drinks, Dave said. If you talk to em the right way.
John, Pappa Simmons warned, don’t let me catch you actin a fool behind alcohol again.
John and Dallas shaped masks from Chinese chop-suey boxes and rolled a Jew Town tailor. Officer, they looked like robots. Them Jews sure do bleed a lot, Dallas said. John looked at him, face tight, eyes flicking.
John swaggered through his days and staggered through his nights. Runaway child running wild. A boy rushing into the future.
John, Pappa Simmons said, pack yo bags. Georgiana watched from over his shoulder, silent. You grown now. Be out my house by sundown. And take Lucifer with you. Ain’t worth a damn if you can’t guard over yo own brother.
Lucifer, John, and Dallas moved into a basement apartment on Church Street, a cellarlike door opening onto a flight of cement steps down to a small vaulted room—the floor one large slab of stone, and the walls, slabs too, mixed with splinters of brick. The apartment kept a permanent chill. Rats ran over the exposed pipes. The floor sloped invisibly away to dark corners and walls. Formerly the Red Rooster, a jazz club. (The drugstore above later became a church.) How had dancing bodies cramped into this tight space? Loud talk and laughter, clinking glasses and crashing cymbals, blaring horns and bottles set down hard on tables woke you in the night. Drunken shadows moved in the darkness.
Flyin home
Fly like a motherfucker
Flyin home
Fly
John and Dallas come home bone-drunk and pass out on the floor. John singing his sing. And Dallas, silent, in that vomit-smellin pea jacket year-round, and slumped like some old rug lying about. Part of Lucifer was glad that
his roommates spent most of their time hanging on the corner of Sixty-third and Church—Brother Jack’s Lounge behind them and Lil Bit’s Give and Take Pool Hall and Barbershop down the street—holding the stones of their groins and signifyin.
Flyin home
Fly like a motherfucker
Flyin home
Dallas, yo fly open.
ALL OF CHURCH STREET cursed John’s and Dallas’s names. Lucifer had come to believe that it was the force of John’s high-stepping activities that kicked Georgiana into her grave. Her shut windows could not keep out the odor of rumor. John’s dirt, like sewage, flowed back to her.
That boy gon come to ruin, she said. After all we done. She flopped into a hard kitchen chair, heavy breathing, hand clutched to her bosom, pale—her color restored only after Lucifer fetched her a glass of water. Try not to worry yourself, he said. He just tryin his wheels out.
JUNIOR, Inez said, can’t you do right by me?
Sho, Mamma. He kissed her.
Why you act so bad?
I want to do better. I’m tryin. He gave her a sincere look. Mamma, I need your support.
My support?
Me, Ernie, and Dallas tryin to start us up a business. He left out Spider, the bookie, who liked to use his cuff links for brass knuckles.
A business?
Yeah. Tired of workin fo the Man’s chump change.
What kind of business?
It’s legal. A car shop.
What you know bout cars, other than driving like a crazy fool? And that Dallas—
I don’t need to know nothing. Ernie know everything there is to know. Ain’t that right, Lucifer?
Lucifer nodded.
Engine Ernie they call him. That nigga can—
Don’t bring that street language in my house.
Rails Under My Back Page 29