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Rails Under My Back

Page 60

by Jeffery Renard Allen


  She refused to look him in the face. Behold, I am of uncircumcised lips, and how then shall he hearken unto me?

  Don’t act like that, he said. He stood there, eyes shining like brown diamonds. Don’t act like that. I got to handle my business. It’s only for a few days.

  She heard silent prayer in the words. Yes, she said. I’ll be here when you get back, she said, confident that he would return to her. He would often leave his body all over the place but he always returned to her, flight bag in hand. She wasn’t much to look at and had little to say but he had an eye to see and an ear to hear.

  Whenever he left her, she kept the pain of his absence locked up in her chest. But she could open it anytime she wanted, like a jewelry box, and watch the pearl-sparkling images inside. Her buried life.

  Her thoughts were in advance of her body and she quickened her steps to overtake them. She found a quiet tree and stretched out beneath it, her back against the hard, rough trunk. Her bright red sandals and scarlet stockings made her thin legs look bigger. Two red rails that ran to Tar Lake. Trunks and trees made a black lacework around the island. Gray shadows and morning leaves. Silent light in shafts on bright grass. The morning sky bloomed above the blue horizon where black-bodied buildings formed a jagged wall. The city. Babies leaped high in the water, high above the city, like black dolphins. Birds studied their reflections in black water. For a long time she sat thinking.

  It had been a week now since John had stepped out of her life forever (never to return), made her a ghost in a strange house where she would spend her remaining hours and days wandering. Perhaps she had driven him too deep inside herself to bring him back.

  How slowly the water appeared to move. Lagging. Three steps behind the world. She recorded things never before perceived. The veining of each leaf and babies upon them like black locusts.

  John gripped the steering wheel like an eagle gripped captured prey, Jesus and Hatch chirping in the back seat of his fast-flying red Eldorado. Flustered and afraid, she fluttered about with protecting wings.

  John, please slow down. Can’t you slow down?

  Who driving?

  I’m gon be baptized, Jesus said.

  Why? Hatch said.

  So I can save.

  Save what?

  Reverend Sparrow lifted Jesus high into his arms, kneeled down before the claw-foot bathtub, and leaned the boy across his arms, light, a shovel slanted above dirt. Except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he said, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. He dipped Jesus into the water.

  He heard his pleas even before his face broke the water’s surface. John, help me! This preacher tryin to drown me.

  John rushed forward and shoved Reverend Sparrow against the wall. The water sucked Jesus in. She heard the separate sounds of the water work on his body. John swooped him up kicking and blowing and blinded. She watched the clean waters, unmoving in the tub.

  THE TREE LEAVES were too far apart to give any shade. The sun stood still and burned. Her black skin took on the orange glow of coal. Wet wind crawled off the ocean. Her body felt like dry ice, hot and cool.

  A spirit must answer to his right name. Gracie tested the belief. She called John by his true name.

  What? He put those brown eyes on her. What you call me? he said.

  Nothing. She alone understood John’s secret forms and transformations. And he made her part of that secret world.

  I ain’t think so. Deep eyes now upon the deep water.

  She walked over to the railing and stood gazing down at the lake, gray, and slightly choppy in the wake of a distant tug. The lake was like a vast stage under the glare-filled sky above, and the boardwalk and beach, seating for the audience. She was unaware of the blazing sun, absorbed completely, caught up in the play of the washing waves.

  Look, he said.

  She looked. Saw what he saw, what he wanted her to see. Lined up like train cars, several objects rushed through the water below.

  Rats, he said.

  Vile, she said. Vile. She turned her eyes away.

  He chuckled. For a long time he watched the water and said nothing. You know what?

  What?

  Dave, that sonofabitch remember everything. You know what he told me?

  What?

  Dave, well he told me that him and Sam drove out there to California to pay R.L. a visit.

  Don’t believe nothing Dave says.

  So they visit him, thinking that ole pretty R.L. was fast enough to keep one foot ahead of the fast life. No, Dave said. That wasn’t the case. Caught. His whole world tied up, tied up in Christmas tape.

  Gracie listened with greedy ears.

  All scarred up.

  Scars?

  Yep. His arms.

  Gracie said nothing.

  So Dave said. So there was ole pretty R.L. all pretty and fancied up and ditty-bopping down the street out there in pretty California and noddin so bad he couldn keep his hat on.

  TAR LAKE MOVED with laser swiftness. Babies swam, raising their legs like powerful oars, the rush of their bodies parting the rushing water. Black riders came in off the lake beckoning for her red toes. New waves rose wildly, their height massed against the horizon, against the city. She could hear a battle far off, thunder and shouting. She could smell the ride of sin. Babies ran up trees, black squirrels. Shall two know the same in their knowing? All her life, she had believed that no two were closer than she and John. He had brought her into the world and she him. Entire with each other. Now she knew, their lives had never really touched. She was alive without equal.

  She starts for the house in the serene extinction of light at sunset. The ground grows lighter and her feet move to meet it in the air. John passes up the white, wide walk, flight bag in hand. He looks at her with his marksman eyes. Touches her on the face and hands. She opens her mouth to speak, but he sends an answering smile before she can form the question.

  The house receives them. Light, creaking, a house of twigs, a bird’s nest. The floor rises under her feet. Rolls and pitches, rocks, a spray of witch’s feathers. She sinks back, wet, weak and trembling, head expanding, the carpet moving under her feet. Pushes herself up to try again.

  53

  DEATHROW STANDS in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria holding his penis.

  Why are you holding it? she asks.

  I thought it was my shadow.

  THE PARTIAL VIEW can reveal the strongest colors of the whole. North Park quilted in deep green through the window. Cloudy trees arching high in air. Huge bird nests built like penthouse apartments in tall treetops. She thinks she can see all the way to Red Hook. Buildings small, red, and hard in the distance. Fossils.

  Red flickered in her eyes. Candle flame memories of Deathrow. She thought of herself, there (Memphis, West Memphis, Fulton, Houston, the South) and here, as holding on to him. She concocted scenarios where they would meet again. So certain that he would return to her on her return to the city.

  Should she even be thinking about love now that Lula Mae was gone? And how should she feel about Lula Mae’s death? How had it changed her? Did it diminish her life or increase it? She greased her hands with Vaseline and slid them prayer-fashion into the Lazarus 1 patent pending, thinking that she might have gained the power to levitate.

  She had not.

  She cleaned her hands, grease-free. Pressed a button on a mummy-shaped remote control and popped on her bubbled black TV, bright sight and sound. A drive-by shooting, the flood, the storm overseas. Hammered cadences ripped at her as masked and camouflaged entities transformed the desert into a huge movie set. Scaffolding, prefabricated structures, false fronts, precise machines. Rockets springing up over the horizon like toy snakes released from a can. Ah, here was a possibility. Perhaps Deathrow had been drafted—Do they still draft young men?—and stamped into a soldier.

  With the television for company, she flipped through her stack of unopened mail. Bills, announcements, invitations, catalogues, and more of the same.
A glossy postcard glowed like a priceless tempting jewel.

  Decided on Bahamas instead. The water is green. The sand is pink. I’m chillin. Enjoying conch fritters. Fried plantains. Strawberry daiquiris tall as mountains. Yum. Yum. And riding John Canoe at every opportunity. Need I say more?

  Nia

  The postcard caused Porsha to remember the two letters she had found in Lula Mae’s lil house. She opened her purse and searched through the contents. Receipt for the plane tickets. Boarding passes. Reverend Blunt’s business card. (She put it aside for safekeeping. You never know. It might come in handy someday.) Funeral program. (Some extra copies for friends.) Rusty horseshoes. (She would need to mount them above the doorways for good luck.)

  Finally the two envelopes. Why had she kept them for herself, not revealed them to anyone else, secretly lifted them from the shoebox and slipped them down her dress and between her breasts like a thief?

  She quickly removed the letter from the first envelope. (The spine had been neatly cut with a knife or opener.) The envelope was stained and faded but the letter was not, the sheet of blue-lined notebook paper whiter than white after all the years.

  Dear Mamma:

  Having many things to write unto you, the story of a man is lost and the story of his image loses a little interest every time it’s retold. So I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full and the story complete.

  I have many things to write, but I will not with ink and pen. I trust I shall shortly see thee, and we shall speak face to face.

  Greet the kin by name.

  Yours.

  The second envelope was much heavier than the first. She examined every detail before opening it. Size. Shape. Texture. Color. Two spots on the triangular flap. Like eyes. (Could it be watching me? He be watching me?) R.L.’s tears? His spit?

  She removed the letter from the envelope. Fine stationery. Several folded pages—as many folds as a navigation chart—all unnumbered, no heading, no subscription.

  Brothers here, brothers there. Often did I think of the inhabitants of the deep much happier than myself.

  Words shimmered and wavered. Folded, collapsed into one another.

  To give an account of all I’ve saw, a thousand tongues would be insufficient; so please excuse my humble hand. Resolve as one may to keep to the main road, some bypaths have an enticement not readily to be understood.

  She stared as if staring would restore the words to sight.

  Though I am not present before you, my story wears an honest face. In the time of our fathers, writing was the voice of an absent person, and that absence bespoke another voice, the only voice.

  She told herself out loud, How am I sposed to read this?

  Read my little tale with reverence. Today, as I write it, all is quiet within me. You can see by my penmanship that I am not scribbling as I usually do. I’m not blessed like you. You could always write a pretty hand.

  For a moment, she imagined that the letter was written to her.

  All my life I’ve been absorbing bits of people around me. I have had business and conversation with wise folk, churchmen, laymen, fools and the like.

  Her fingers dream moist on the paper.

  It should be easy to follow the thread of my story.

  The moist pages move with wave rhythm in her fingers.

  The seams show.

  Words lift on light wings and settle like colorful butterflies on common objects in the room.

  Nobody can write their own life to the full end of it unless they can write it after they are dead. Some other must always judge us.

  The television wavers in the distance like far-off smoke.

  The pen employed in finishing my story and making it what you now see it to be has had no little difficulty putting it into language fit to be seen and read.

  She sees R.L.’s one surviving photograph, the crumpled black-and-white which gives up his form, his color, his hazel eyes.

  As you know I came out here for fresh fields to plough, new pastures. We martyr to motion. So here I am missing the changes of season.

  She sees his long legs sheathed in shining cowboy boots.

  What I have written is written. I drink this cup full to the end. And the water is sweet. I read. I think. I sleep. I read some more. God, enable me to proceed in this labor in the whole task so that when I render up at the last day an account of the talent you gave me I may receive pardon for the sake of Christ our Lord.

  She looks up from the letter and sees Deathrow in her window, his face a reflection of eternal dreaming life.

  SHE LEFT HUNDRED GATES for the summer’s first heat. Summer was already doing its work, for an old red ambulance, a long and low red hearse, was parked in front of the building, anxious for the sick or the dead. She drifted like a candle flame through the heated haze.

  Taxi!

  Where to, ma’m?

  She entered the taxi to a humming air conditioner.

  Where to?

  She told him.

  The cab pulled away under a sky that demanded to be noticed. Slow constellations wheeled overhead, fat swollen stars she had seen for twenty-eight years; none had any name or meant anything by shape or brightness or position. Thick trees bloomed on both sides of the expressway. (She’s intensely alert to trees tonight.) The air rippled like camouflage. She said his name: Deathrow. He was somewhere definite, a dot on a map. She said his name: Deathrow. If voices had legs, they could crawl into all sorts of places, unexpected, unwanted perhaps, uninvited guests, willing and hungry. Deathrow.

  She settled back in speed. Monday. The past week had rushed like a torrent. The flood had forced the new Cotton Rivers to reschedule the Great Awakening for today. (The media had it that he would declare Monday the new Sabbath.) And he had moved the location from downtown south to Woodlawn, to Mount Zion Baptist Church, which Reverend Tower had built and raised, a church high enough that every lowlife on Church Street could watch it from the deep gutter, Deacon Rivers his right-hand man, his first mate who took the helm when Reverend Tower died, directed a church where he was also to die and be remembered.

  The thought sends her.

  One, two, three, four

  Snap, snap, back, back

  Put yo hands on yo hips

  And let yo backbone slip

  Shake it to the east

  Shake it to the west

  Shake it fo the one

  You love the best

  How many years had it been since she’d lived in Woodlawn, lived where the Stone Park Rangers and the Crazy Insane Disciples waged war with death-hard fists, sharpened switchblades—steel drinks blood in the darkness—and single-shot zip guns? She remembers, they—Uncle John and Gracie, she and Mamma and Lucifer—shared a two-bedroom apartment (or a big one-bedroom that served as two) in a courtyard building on Sixty-third and Kenwood, a cramped, cavelike apartment with batlike moths, scurrying mice, slow arrogant roaches that ran antelope-quick at the sight of Mamma’s curving broom, where the old, the original Cotton Rivers’s tall pointy church rocked across the street, the church that King Kong climbed once in broad daylight, gnatlike fighter jets pestering him, while you watched from the living-room window. When you were alone, ghosts would flit across the ceiling, bump into walls, get tangled in the curtains, and tiptoe from room to room. One night a spaceship circled the building, spinning its rainbow of interplanetary lights against the drawn shades. Little men moved against the white shade screens. You threw the bedcovers over your head. Prayed for Uncle John’s return.

  Each afternoon, Uncle John would meet you in the schoolyard—Andrew Carnegie Elementary School—with the red wagon.

  How was school today? Uncle John asked with his daring grin.

  Fine. You always said fine.

  What they learn you today?

  How could you answer? Did you have a century to tell and he a century to listen? I don’t know, you said. Your hands went quickly for Uncle Jo
hn’s pants pockets to discover the treasure of gold and silver coins hidden there.

  What you want to buy?

  Some potato chips and sunflower seeds and a 3 Musketeers bar and Now & Later and some wine candy.

  The usual.

  With his muscular stride, he pulled you and your sweets up and down Church Street, up and down Sixty-third Street, all over Woodlawn, all over the South Side, along the shores of Tar Lake, that great horseshoe curve west and east around most of the city, all over Central (Central was yours, belonged to the two of you, and would be yours forever), and backward and forward in time.

  See that dead dog there?

  Yuk.

  I bet you it’s a male. Dogs get run over crossin the street chasin after that stuff.

  What stuff, Uncle John?

  You know what stuff.

  Perhaps to prove to you that he was as gallant with non-kin as with kin, he would offer other little girls a ride in the red wagon.

  Two can’t fit in this wagon, you said.

  Share, girl. Learn to share.

  To ease your jealousy, he would lift you above the wagon and bounce you in his arms.

  Throw me in the air too, Uncle John, Nia said.

  Don’t throw her, Uncle John. She might float away like that big blimp.

  A CONSTELLATION OF SIGHTS AND SOUNDS. A few hundred people were all trying to push through the wide church doors at once, their loud voices anxious and angry in the night. Long-headed TV cameras walked about freely like alien beings. Microphone booms floated above like black kites. Maybe she should turn around and go home. Besides, she wasn’t feeling her best. Round and heavy with heat. She looked around and found that she had somehow waded into the crowd, surrounded, mosaic eyes. No turning back. Besides, what did she have to fear? The organ came from inside, a raised hand directing the visitors inside the church. Progress was slow. She floated through the doors, bodies and machines brushing against her, driving her, tossing her.

  The church was large and high enough inside to hold every animal on Noah’s ark but all the pews were occupied and people stood in double rows against the walls. A kind reporter gave her his seat.

 

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