Lucifer?
Yes, Lucifer. Aiding and abetting.
Lucifer? Hatch chuckled. No. That can’t be right. Who—
I saw it, T-Bone said. Saw it with my own eyes.
Hatch’s head traveled in a rotating pattern. Damn. Damn. You don’t dispute fact, Hatch thought. Fact working through T-Bone. Eyes surprised into witness. Damn, Hatch said, his voice wavering. Damn. Whose bird did he steal?
Freeze.
Hatch felt something wet in his chest. Freeze?
T-Bone nodded.
From Stonewall?
You know another?
Uncle John don’t even know Freeze.
T-Bone’s toothpick curved limp and white, wet and heavy from spit and words. T-Bone tugged at it.
How?
Does it matter?
Hatch said nothing. His voice was buried deep inside. If he attempted speech, surely no sound would emerge.
Long as you know. Long as you know Freeze know. And long as you know that Freeze let Jesus know.
Jesus?
Jesus. T-Bone smiled again, less teeth this time. He read words in Hatch’s face. Jesus? Why Jesus? Ask yourself.
Hatch looked outside of himself, like a passenger in a car. Yes, he thought. Yes. Jesus. No one else. It made perfect sense.
I just thought you should know.
There, Hatch thought. There. He had it all, the hard lump of truth. He could feel T-Bone’s eyes on him like hands, shaking him, demanding response.
THE TRAIN SPENT THE GREATEST PART OF THE JOURNEY standing still. Stillness etherized the passengers. Jackals all of them. They floated now, on floods of bright talk. These jackals barely held together by cotton and steel, liquid and air. Their dens in weedy waste. Take a gun to all of them. Hatch waved off their shameful smell.
The black tunnel roared overhead. The train rocked over the clunking rail joints. Sped on, swaying to the curves. Hatch’s mind eased away from his spine. Floating, flying. A clear feeling. It made things plainer.
T-Bone had solved one riddle even as he presented another. Ah, that explained it. Yes, that explained it. John. Uncle John. So that was why he’d made himself scarce recently. A disappearance both gradual and sudden. Each day, an oxidizing of a single cell, a single organ, a single limb, until—no more John. Uncle John. But Lucifer? Why would Lucifer aid and abet? Lucifer and John, brothers in the skin, but no closeness.
Light pitched upward, ran away from Hatch, quicker the farther it went. Each shaking train window mirrored blackness. Drawn by the seat’s gravity, he was a body at rest. His mind signaled his body, Move, Act, but he could not. He ran his mind over T-Bone’s smooth black tale, shining with lacquered luminosity. Bird. Betrayal. Lucifer. John. Jesus.
THE FAMILY HADN’T SEEN OR HEARD FROM HIM since last year, Christmas. Nor did they want to. Forgiveness had wings, but Jesus had ridden it to death. His fury, like a powerful storm, had carried him to heights that had permanently separated him from the family. Now—still unknown to them—he had orbited back into their life like a red meteor.
Even before he could walk or talk, he had exercised his red will. He refused to allow anyone to feed him. He would turn his face away from the feeding hand and food like poison. Cry in anger. You had to wait for him to fall asleep, then sneak the food into his little mouth. And once, his innocent teeth had tasted Lula Mae’s big bare toe. She kicked (from reflex and fear)—I thought a rat was biting me—teeth and taste down his throat.
These events had come to Hatch’s ears through the living mouths of his family. But he had no reason to question their validity.
His eyes fell on Jesus’s long-fingered hands that balanced an old battered brown suitcase—Gracie’s? Uncle John’s?—across his high knees. Red, why didn’t you check your suitcase?
I ain’t want to, Jesus said. He turned to Hatch from the seat opposite, his face blurred and distant with sleep. They had been on the train for many hard hours. Jesus had refused to check the suitcase with his other baggage, refused to put it on the luggage rack above and kept it on his lap the whole time like a baby.
But ain’t you uncomfortable?
Jesus laughed, a deep laugh that echoed inside Hatch.
Hatch let it drop. Silence seemed to pin them in moving place.
Hatch, Junebug called, come here.
What? Hatch said. He approached. What you want? What you doing on my grandmamma’s grass?
You don’t like it?
Get off my grandmamma’s grass.
You make me get off.
You better get off.
Shut up, punk. Junebug smacked Hatch’s black face red.
Jesus cracked Junebug over the head with his milk-weighted baby bottle.
I’m gon tell yo granny, Junebug said. You crazy.
So what, Jesus said. Tell her. She ain’t my mamma.
The train checked speed, then jolted back. He knew what to expect, the pattern immediate, intuition, instinct. Lula Mae would greet them at the station—her white skin like light in the Memphis night—safe in something better and greater than herself. Two days later, her deepest heart would convert her warm smile into a permanent, burning frown. They were her prisoners for the summer, in her small, knowable world. Near summer’s close her heart would cool. Her cold tears would greet their departure home. Yall call me, Lula Mae would say. Write me.
The same thing next summer. Predictable. Why do we visit her every summer?
Red—
Don’t call me Red, Jesus said.
Hatch’s eyes collided with his reflection in the train window. Jesus’s face was so similar to his own. He sat up very straight and tried to smile.
Nasty granny nasty granny, Junebug said. Whitelady, Whitelady. Briar-patch legs.
Better not say that again, Jesus said.
Whitelady. Briar-patch legs.
Jesus’s fist exploded red.
He had the feeling that Jesus was dissolving, disappearing. Again he tried to smile. The feeling deepened, widened.
HATCH LISTENED TO THE SECRET WHISPER of Jesus’s sleeping blood. Even in the dark he could see the ever-present suitcase. One end of a thin length of cord knotted around the handle, the other looped around Jesus’s outstretched wrist that hung limply over the side of the bed. All day, he had refused to let the suitcase out of his sight, even carrying it to supper.
Lula Mae entered the room. With much racket—Jesus required the impenetrable sleep of the dead—she unlatched it (strangely, it was not locked), opened the lid, and revealed the shining secret, a pack of Kool mentholated cigarettes. Lula Mae woke Jesus with a resounding slap. She held up the pack. Boy, she said. You too young to smoke.
Jesus looked at her, her palm print clear and red in his cheek of fossilized stone. Bitch, he said, just like that, you ain’t my mamma.
The early years, Red was closer to Hatch than his own skin. Gracie and Sheila dressed them the same for Sam’s funeral (viewing?).
Sam stands with one pants leg rolled up, offering his prized wooden stump for all the world to see. The stump moves with effortless, hidden will when he walks, like a hinged puppet limb. Stationary beneath him now as he mixes shaving cream in his old army helmet.
Yall niggas get bigger every time I see you. Soon I’m gon need me a chain saw to barber yall big heads.
My mammy say don’t use no straight razor, Hatch says.
Is yo mammy here? … I’ll cut you first since you got the brave mouth. Now hold still.
Sam works his sparkling straight razor between his fingers like a potato peeler. Shaves Hatch clean. Cleans Red the same. Two slick-bean twins.
Why you use that sword on my head? Red says. You ain’t sposed to be usin no spear on nobody’s head.
Hatch signed both of their names—Hatch Jones, Jesus Jones in the same hand—in the Visitors’ Book that slanted on a lectern under a remembered light. Dearly departed. In the scripted program, Hatch saw his great-aunts Beulah, Big Judy, Koot, and his grandmother Lula Mae listed as Sam’s survivors. Had Sa
m beached these women from the drowning waters? Had this dead man carried them—floating them on the log of his wooden leg—but allowed life’s tides to drag him into the dark drifting deep? Long ago, the dead man had planted himself in Hatch’s and Red’s hearts and grew; now, both of their heads yearned for the shining contents of the casket. Two faces and two eyes, they both peered into the coffin—
Touch him.
Nawl. You touch him.
Chicken.
Scaredy cat.
—hoping to view the undertaker’s stitches that had reattached Sam’s severed head.
She ain’t cut off his head, Dave said. Just buried that ax deep in it.
Like a log.
They found a bottle of Iron Ass next to his head. That’s how they knew it was his woman that’d done it.
Sam, if I’da just been there to lift up yo dyin head, Beulah said. You died too soon.
Damn, Hatch said. How old was he?
You died too young.
He was an ole-ass nigga.
Red, you be ole someday too.
Never.
Why was only one half of the casket—Sam’s stiff powdered bust—open to sight? To hide Sam’s wooden leg? Perhaps a bird had laid tiny eggs in his tree leg. He thought about Sam’s wooden leg, waxed and shiny like Sam’s dead skin—a birthday candle carrying the long, thick wick of Sam’s years. Who would inherit it?
Sam’s wood leg stomp so hard on the floor that his empty Old Rocking Chair bottles and his girlfriend’s Iron Ass bottles twink like chimes. Sam sit you in one chair, Red in another. Hand on hip, Porsha say, Uncle Sam, my mamma say, don’t you be usin no straight razor on they head. Sam pull the straight razor from the sheath of his blazer pocket. Uncle Sam, my mamma say—
Girl, you gon cut they hair? Sam run the razor once twice across his strop. Flip it over. Run it once twice across his strop. Then peel you and Red clean as apples.
Sometimes he would threaten to cut you and Red with the dead Jap sword he kept under the bed.
The next day, to lift their spirits, Uncle John took Hatch and Red to Fun Town—it was a satisfaction to take them about with him; This is my son. And that’s my nephew. My brother’s boy—the amusement park on Ninety-fifth and Stony Island. Three circus rings in a constant blur of motion with clowns, acrobats, and animals.
Nothing like Riverview used to be, Uncle John said. Boring. This might as well be the zoo.
Quick go-carts snapped popcorn sounds. A sweat-slick slide rolled your round butt like a ball bearing down five flights of friction—yes, you felt like a Coke bottle sliding down the chute of the red vending machine in Uncle John’s garage—and a Ferris wheel afforded a giant’s-eye view of Central and all the city’s five boxes.
The one at Coney Island is better, Uncle John said.
It would be the only view and visit, for the city vaporized Fun Town soon after. From then on, Uncle John—this horse of an uncle and father carrying the two of you piggyback—took you and Red to the traveling amusement parks—trucks arrive with the first blink of sunlight; skinny white trash unload them; the park is open for business before the last fingers of sun scratch the horizon—that occupied the vacant lots on Church Street, Stony Island, or Jeffery Boulevard.
YOU AND RED straddled broomsticks and rode (yes, straw-maned horses) the plains—Giddy-up! Giddy-up!—of the small apartment on Kenwood in Woodlawn. The two of you rode hard and fast on your bikes, knees bumping against chests, through the decaying streets of Woodlawn, Englewood, South Shore on a single, shared breath of oxygen. Your need to know stretched an invisible telephone wire through time and distance, connecting sleeping mouth to sleeping ear; you and Red passed dreams back and forth like a joint. Wind expanded the sails of your windbreaker jackets and sent you coasting along through the hood, light, weightless, never losing breath, a race of radiance, running, watching the world blur past, forgetting that you are running, one corner followed by another corner, one street by another street, wrapped in the silence of flight, wind lathering your faces with cool air, blowing. Fevered days followed again and again. At Rainbow Beach or Oak Street Beach you sought sun-filled life, rash physical joy. The air filled with conversation. Waves galloped in like horses, and the two of you lay for hours flat against hot sand—fine, like brown sugar, shaking it out of your toes; damp sand that absorbed red root life, bloodlines—and watched the sun through the huge waves.
Flooded by images of the Gemini moon landing, you and Red—at your suggestion—raced into Sheila’s garden, found two forked branches, and cut a circle in the grass so perfect you could have laid a foundation. Used the red of Sheila’s roses to magnify the circle. Stood inside the circle and waved at the men on the moon. The men waved back. Porsha—she wielded the body of a woman even then—chastised you and Red with keen slaps.
Balanced, the two of you frog-kicked at either end of a seesaw, gravity-free, astronauts frog-leaping over the moon.
Come on, Red, you said. Let’s get on the carousel.
Okay, Red said.
Bounced bowlegged to the carousel. You and Red grabbed the sides and ran with everything you had, shoving it, shoving, sending it around and around—Don’t yall go too fast on that thing, Porsha said—the images blurring in a stream of speed and motion, and hopped on, round and round with dizzy speed, four hands gripped tight to the iron bars, four arms stretched full, elbows locked, roiling, shaking back and forth, the spin of a potter’s wheel, you and Red leaning away from the center, heads all the way back, necks craned, straining the muscles, the world flicking swiftly in and out of vision, the steady backward rush of air, then Red sailing forth, cut from the line of motion, an astronaut sucked into outer space. You saw him for a moment, a moment lost in a blur of images. The carousel spun you back to the same spot. You let go too. Sailing. Landing. Your body cut a groove through the dirt. The two of you crying, more from fear than pain—later, Porsha treated a few nicks and scratches—and then an image waded into your wet sight. A double image. Your eyes tried to fix its outlines. What yall tryin to do? Porsha said. She smacked you. Smacked Red. Get me in trouble? Smacked you again. Smacked Red.
By day, you and Red would missile-pitch hot dogs—smothered with heat-seeking mustard—into stadium crowds. Now, that Satchel, Beulah said, he could make a ball walk, make it slow down to a crawl, and his curves were so smooth his fingers leaked oil. By night, catch sparkling lightning bugs. Fireflies you called them, for the fires glowed in the night with secret treasure. You would cut out the fuzzy sticky yellow lights from the thorax and store them shining in dull-glassed mason jars.
Once lived a nigga named Zoom, Red said. The fastest nigga on earth. So quick that he could beat his reflection in a mirror. Could catch his own farts in a bottle befo the poot escaped his butt and the air got funky. That’s the end of my tale. Ain’t no mo. Bang yo mamma til my dick get sore.
Who taught you that lie? you asked. Uncle John?
My secret to tell. Noah pissed and the water fell. The world ain’t flat. The world ain’t round. It’s just one strip up and down.
THE CHURCH ROCKED. Soul-saving song. You and Red dropped into a split, then rocked back into position and grabbed imaginary microphones.
Michael row the boat ashore. Hallelujah!
Michael don’t wet yo draws no more. Hallelujah!
Sister help to trim the sail. Hallelujah!
Sister don’t forget to cut yo toenails. Hallelujah!
Jordan River is deep and wide. Hallelujah!
Pussy and dick on the other side. Hallelujah!
Red spit into the collection plate and passed the plate to you.
The spit watched you like a silver eye.
Spit! Red whispered.
No, you said.
Chicken, Red said.
No I ain’t. Jus don’t want to that’s all. You tucked the collection plate under the wooden pew like a commode.
The choir sang dimensions. Cotton Rivers climbed the piano and Cleveland Sparrow mounted the orga
n. On wings of words, dead souls floated up above the podium, ascended, like sky divers. Tongue-tied angels flapped humming wings in the rafters. Two forks of sermon catapulted you from the hard wooden pew into the heavens. You saw God at work.
WHO WANTS TO GO inside the spaceship? Red said. He slapped the old refrigerator, earthbound and rusting in a glass-choked alley. A shock of red hair escaped beneath the visor of a red baseball cap jammed onto the back of his head. The visor pointed right at the sun.
Not me.
Not me.
Not me.
What’s wrong? Scared?
Damn straight.
Let a man do a man’s job.
It took three of them pulling on the handle to get the door open and expose the brown insides.
Uh. You gon go in there? Stinks. Somebody took a dump.
Shut up, stupid. That ain’t no dukey. Mildew. Don’t you know nothing?
Don’t care what you say. I stays away from dukey. Hey, Abu, yo mamma been in there?
Nawl, yo greasy grandmamma.
Ain’t nobody said nuthin bout yo mamma. I don’t play that shit.
Shut up. I’m gon inside. Hatch—
Yeah.
You shut the door behind me.
Okay.
Red climbed inside, forcing his long body into a ball, the red cap still on his head.
Okay, shut the door.
You couldn’t, so Abu and the other boys all leaned their weight into it. Door shut, they waited.
Red, you aw ight?
Yeah. Now open the door.
They tried.
Open the door.
They tried.
I said open the door.
They tried.
Quit fuckin around. Open the door.
They tried and tried. Much breathing and sweating.
Look, I ain’t playin. Open the door.
We can’t.
Open the door.
They tried.
Open the door.
They tried.
Open the door.
They tried. Then it came, the entire door breaking away like ice.
Red sat there, curled, not even trying to get out, the red cap wet with sweat. It would take you years to dilute the memory (never forget) of the tight twisted face under the baseball cap. The die was cast: this face Red would carry for the rest of his life.
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