“Oh, God.”
“Now, she’s thinking of running for mayor of Decatur.”
“No.”
“God told her. And some mayor or former mayor she met on the trip said she should go for it.”
“Wild.”
Hope told Mo about the carousel. The piece was progressing. It now had a name. “Your Flying Horses.” She was not a mechanic but she would find a way to make it turn. And there would be music. Dispatch. The General and The Flying Horses. She would paint the notes for the melodies to those around the top. She had started some of the figures, his black Confederate soldier, his Lauro, and his Moses Ezekiel. She was sketching ideas for his Fanon and his Balzac. There would be W. E. B. and Booker T. and Adam Clayton Powell and even General Cleburne, who had fought for the inclusion of blacks in the Confederate ranks, and there would be John Henry. She would carve a tiny horse for each. She told Mo she was going to carve a Mo.
Coffee and desserts, two slices of king cake, were ordered. Halfway through her first cup Mo pulled a pouch from his breast pocket and announced it was a present from Abel. Pulling out a double strand of real black South Sea pearls, he said, “He gave them to me five, maybe ten years ago, he said if anything happened to him wait a while and give them to you.”
“Wow.”
“Did you ever see Waist Deep?”
“No.”
“You should watch it sometime.”
That was the last thing Mo Henry ever said to Hope that wasn’t about a drink or a flirtation. When she finally got around to watching Waist Deep she was surprised to discover it was an urban melodrama about a father stealing money to ransom back his son who has been taken by drug dealers. At the end he dies and then he shows up on a beach and the man and the boy and the girlfriend live happily ever after. The dad even brings the kid the toy he promised.
Hope loved her some optimistic Mo.
***
Near the end of January Hope downloaded what she thought were photographs Ajay had taken of Abel on Father’s Day weekend. She saw pictures of Ajay, pictures of Ajay and Hope, and two pictures of Abel himself.
Abel had commandeered Ajay’s camera— shooting over Ajay’s pics, leaving his. And so it was that Hope saw herself, saw Ajay, saw Abel, as Abel had seen them.
In the first shot, one of Ajay holding his littlest half sister high above his head, the ripped muscles of his triceps were clearly visible. In the second shot Ajay’s eyes were cast down. In Abel’s pictures everyone other than Ajay was less.
His portraits of Ajay amazed. Here was the strength wrestled out of the coalfields of West Virginia and tobacco lands of North Carolina married to the strength he had earned running on the lacrosse fields of Middle Tennessee. All the great expectations that had crowded round Abel’s crib had bloomed in Abel’s son.
Everystuff. Everything he had wished to protect first in himself, then in Tess, everything once precious in himself, then desecrated in himself, was pristine and present in Ajay. He was the only black male Abel had ever found completely beautiful.
There was a picture taken at the Ronald Reagan Airport of Ajay and the new senator from Illinois, a man with a strange name and dark skin who didn’t see everything in black and white, through the lens of being formerly enslaved. A man from the other end of Abel’s universe.
Finally she realized who Seamus was. The marine mentioned in the big speech of the Demo cratic National Convention. Between Seamus and the photograph, Hope understood that Abel would have been both shamed and inspired by the existence of a man who had done everything Abel had thought could not be done. Abel, who had spent time wanting to die and be born again as his own son, had captured the full brightness of this man of his own generation who made radically different things of this world’s realities. Compared with the senator from Illinois, Abel was just too pale. Someone had taken a picture of the three of them together. Abel looked puffy and old-fashioned.
Perhaps confusing himself with Hannibal and the senator from Illinois with Jesus, Abel had prepared to act.
Most likely, something about the way Ajay loved him, wide-eyed yet getting weary, roused Abel from slumber and he started wondering how many boys he would kill tomorrow because he had been afraid yesterday. Wondered if it was enough that he didn’t break bodies, he just broke minds.
Somehow it came clear that he did not wish to be present the day his son discovered who he had been, wasn’t convinced that Ajay would agree that Abel had parsed correctly the damage of perpetual detainment to freedom.
Someday too soon Ajay would associate his name with the Metropolitan Detention Center, with Guantánamo, with Abu Ghraib, with John Ashcroft.
There came a day when he understood that the identity he had adopted to afflict himself and his father was an identity that could defeat Ajay. That was the day he decided to go to the Rebel Yell. There came a day when Abel knew his fate was not to find a way or make a way but to block a way.
Hope got it: earth without Abel was safer for his kid and her kid and all the kids being called to the big bad war.
THIRTY-TWO
AS THE AMBULANCE doors shut, Abel consoled himself with his rule of mud: They can do no worse to me than I have done to others. The important preparation for this odd eventuality had occurred years earlier.
“He don’t need that, he needs some more CPR.” The red-cheeked redneck EMT talked out loud to himself as he changed course, laying aside the full hypodermic of adrenaline he had been holding. Yancey was responding to Abel’s smile.
This was good. Abel soon felt the man pressing on his rib cage until another bone snapped. This was very good. Abel had provoked an event. The power to escalate is a control. When you can’t reach the brake, sometimes you can reach the accelerator.
Abel let himself yelp. A yelp was better than a smile. He was forgetting the rules and he had written the rulebook. The attendant was neither a professional nor severely and recently aggrieved. The man wouldn’t have much stomach for pain without humiliation. If Abel could make him see his pain without showing weakness, the man would flinch. Abel might live till he got to the hospital.
The vehicle began to accelerate. Abel had barely started to wonder what kind of ambulance he was in, what are the capacities, before he stopped himself. The difference between possessing lifesaving technology and having a will to use it was well known to him. Personalities are more significant than technologies.
Speed intensified Abel’s awareness of being cocooned or coffined. Privacy is dangerous. He wanted the door to open. He wanted windows, windows so large everything could be seen. Wrong. The Popemobile flashed into his mind chased by an image of the navy blue Lincoln Continental car that had driven J. F. K. through Dallas on the last day of his life. Rolling slowly behind that was their old Flying Crow— the Thunderbird, the car in which he had felt so unsafe. Abel edited his thought. White men are safer in enclosed spaces. Dark men are safer out in the open. I am a white man. I will be safe. He wanted to smile again but this time he remembered not to.
Not much good ever happened after the prisoner smiled. And nothing good happened after the prisoner cried. Abel kept his face as blank as he had been taught by experience and instruction. Slow the pace.
He wanted to inventory his surroundings but his neck wouldn’t cooperate. Thinking about his neck made him think about his wives.
On the blue leatherette cot that Abel, assisted by the hillbilly EMT, intended as Abel’s deathbed, he understood himself to be a polygamous man deprived of some of his spicier privileges. The responsibility to write a child-support check should come with the right to do that which surrounds the getting of the baby you are called upon to support. It angered and confounded him to have baby-made responsibilities without baby-making rights. It felt unnatural—like the itchy blue blanket resting atop him.
Wives and necks. He wanted to be the head of the family, and she, both shes, had wanted to be the neck, turning the head whichever way they wanted. Like gravy over army meat, w
ives and necks were necessary evils, something to make the unsavory palatable.
Wives and necks and gravy. Marines and army and navy. He was glad he had recommended arming American ambulances in the Red Zone even if it was against the laws of war. Jus in bello; aggressive protection for the vulnerable; sweet legacy.
He almost wished this man standing above him were part of an extraction team, part of a plan to get him somewhere safe, somewhere in the center of the wild of the war, somewhere his death could be heroic.
Then he didn’t. It pained Abel to wish for what could not be. He would not spend the last minutes of his life in pain. He wanted to think about Sammie. He needed to think about Sammie.
Abel wasn’t sure if he hoped or feared that something between an assassination and a lynching, something other than the natural course of a freak illness, was occurring in a tin box of a trauma twinkie rolling through the Smoky Mountain night, rolling through the state where Martin Luther King (called by some denizens of East Tennessee Martin Lucifer King) had died.
Political murder is a king’s end. And King’s end. He had been working on a definition of torture right up to the moment he had left on his Thanksgiving break. That work would stop now. Torture would be defined differently in his absence. Who and what would the difference serve?
***
This feels too much like a lynching. Training was failing him. He didn’t want to pee his pants. But he would rather pee his pants than wear diapers. Lynching was a vertical death. Abel’s departure was to be horizontal. He found comfort in the geometry. He held his water.
There was a statue by Moses Ezekiel that haunted Abel. A statue he’d never taken Hope to see. A statue on the grounds of the Virginia Military Institute. Virginia Mourning Her Dead.
At the end of the day of a battle he was losing General John C. Breckinridge had hollered, “Put the boys in and may God forgive me for the order.” The boys, students some as young as fourteen, none older than twenty-two, had turned the tide of the battle. Moses Ezekiel had been one of those boys, one who had survived the battle, who had earned for VMI, the Institute, the right to fix bayonets during parades. The Confederates had won that day. Abel didn’t believe God had forgiven Breckinridge. He wondered if God had forgiven Bevel and King. Soon I will see.
He would go lying down. Lying down was a soldier’s way to die. When you die lying on the ground, the earth groans as it accepts the stain. A quimboiseur in Saint-Pierre had told him that way back when Hope loved him. She may love me again, now. She may love me again.
Everything was right again. He didn’t know what the man in the blue shirt was doing; he couldn’t feel what the man in the blue shirt was doing; and if he did, he didn’t care.
The air doesn’t care. Feet dangle; necks snap. The air is unmarked. The carefully evolving convolutions of Abel’s thought were lulling him back to the radical contentment of simple knowledge. He would die horizontal.
Or, he would not die now. There was a possibility he wouldn’t die now. Again, he wanted to smile but he did not. “It requires more to torture the dignified than it does to torture the quickly humiliated. It requires more to torture the fearless.”
When Abel had made that statement, at a private estate on Catoctin Mountain (not so very far from the Naval Support Facility Thurmont, commonly known as Camp David), some heads had nodded in acknowledgment; others had stared, challenging his attempt to pontificate on the unpontificatable. He didn’t let it bother him. He knew what he was talking about. Abel was a prodigy.
Fearless and dignified is usually foreign. He didn’t tell them that. To torture requires familiarity and antipathy. He didn’t tell them that either. He said, quoting an Agency psychologist, “Simple and most satisfying to punish is what we hate in ourselves. The puny and the humiliated catch particular and peculiar hell.” Abel would not be puny or humiliated ever again.
Waddell the ambulance man called back to Yancey the EMT with his estimate of the number of minutes before arrival at the hospital: nine.
“We don’t want to jostle him,” the old EMT hollered back, smirking. The vehicle slowed just a bit. The EMT smiled. By his best guesstimate if the trip took ten more minutes the nigger would expire in the vehicle.
Abel kept his face blank. Abel could use ten minutes. “Good enough for a white prince, good enough for me,” mumbled Abel. Assassination was a king’s death.
The EMT couldn’t make out the words, didn’t know what Abel was talking about, wouldn’t have known if he could have made out the words. Abel was talking about Sammie.
Abel was remembering swearing to himself that he wouldn’t ruin his second marriage as badly as he had ruined his first. The creature whose hand he had been holding then, Sammie, was far less promising than the woman who first had worn his ring, Hope, but he thought it possible his second bride would make it through to the end.
Abel would give Samantha less to contend with. He wouldn’t burden her with his dreams, his desire, or his love.
Abel was remembering all of that. He could not remember what had never left his mind. What had never left his mind he could just keep knowing. Dreams, desire, love, had all been given away, to a woman, Hope, who had discarded it all. Or so Abel had thought on the day of his second wedding.
In the ambulance he thought something different. Even as he remembered consoling himself with the knowledge that however hard the afternoon of the wedding was for him, it was harder for Hope; even as he remembered consoling himself with an imagined truth, as people often console themselves with what they know to be a lie. Abel had seen Hope the morning of his wedding to Samantha.
Hope had been hurrying Ajay along from the opposite side of the door as he dressed to participate in his father’s wedding. Finally dressed, he had called her back in. As she had tied the pale blue tie around Ajay’s neck, Hope had thought without wishing to think it: One dream we had came true.
Just then it seemed enough. A sudden sight of himself in his son’s eyes killed Big Abel. That’s how Abel saw it just as the ambulance man could sense the life leaking out of his cargo. The ambulance man didn’t want anybody to die on his watch. Get tortured a little, maybe; die, no. Humming the Dukes of Hazzard theme song, he put the pedal to the metal. The ambulance streaked a little faster through the soft southern night.
You and the father are in your room. It is a Saturday. You have just turned thirteen. The father has come to give you a whipping. When he closes the door to the room you are shivering. He is hissing words you have not heard him speak.
“Fuck them,” the father says. “They can’t do anything but scare you. Fuck them, child.”
You hate the sound of his voice saying “fuck.” You hate the fact he has fucked and you haven’t. You hate the way he swaggers through a world of grown folks and strands you in a world of children. You don’t hate him enough to say any of that. “What’s wrong, child?” he asks.
The door is closed and locked and quiet. Your pants are folded neatly on a chair. Your boxers, soon to be around your ankles, are snug about your waist. All is black and red. All is death and blood. There are no other colors and nothing else the colors mean: not apple, not pomegranate, not stop, not alarm, just blood; not night, not coal, not emphatic, not ink, not raven, just death.
Blood is running down your nose. He hasn’t touched you. There is blood on your fingertips. Your nose is bleeding. Because you think you are about to die, you tell the truth.
“I wet myself,” you say.
“I’ve seen men in the war wet themselves,” the daddy says. His tenderness is a heavy weight. Your thought is narrow, compressed, flattening. The father is the weight pressing your thought down. You say, “You. Ashamed of you, Daddy,” you say.
You don’t know why you say it and he doesn’t either. You start crying. You are looking into the face of the father. Your nose continues to bleed. The daddy is reaching to reassure you but you do not deserve reassurance. You are a smart boy and you know this. You push him away. You must
protect him even if he can’t protect you. You are a pollution but he doesn’t know this. You are smarter than the daddy.
Your eyes are mirrors. You try to imagine what someone opening the door would see. You stand close together, face-to-face, toes touching. You look up into the daddy’s face. The daddy looks down at you. You touch your forehead to his. You see him and he sees how you see him: smaller than the policemen, smaller than the firemen, smaller than Ben’s father.
This new connection, a shared and profound cocreated humiliation, is immediate and volatile. You are contagious to each other. You taste your own blood and cry harder. He gives you a Kleenex. You come undone and he comes with you.
You are in your bedroom. The father has come to whip you for wetting your pants. Then he closes the door to the room but you are shivering so hard the father takes you in his arms and tries to stop your shakes. His touch constricts. His hands are nowhere near your neck, nowhere near any part of you he shouldn’t touch, but it feels like he is strangling you and violating you and you shake harder to shake him off. When he helps you into your pants his hands are shaking. Your shakes are contagious.
“You ’shamed of me?” asks Big Abel.
“Shame,” you say like it’s his name. And he doesn’t slap you hard; he kisses the top of your head and takes you in his arms a baby again.
He drops the belt to the ground. Your fear is more than pain can chase away. You will not be scared into manhood. The father had wanted that, to give you the freedom of having your worst day in your past, but to go one step forward would break you. He will not break you. He kisses your forehead and your ear. The scent of you makes him worried and curious. Then he discovers, by sound, and scent, and taste, by a tingle on his lips, that you are already broken, and you believe him to be more broken still.
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