Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  When he stepped out, he fished a cigarette from his pocket.

  “You got a light?” he asked the figure.

  It looked up.

  Baby took a breath. He took it right out of his own lung.

  It was a boy, all right.

  Instead of pulling out a match or a lighter, instead of even pulling the cigarette from his mouth and offering it to Baby, the boy leaned forward and brought his face close to Baby’s, slowly, until the tips of their cigarettes, extending from their lips, touched.

  That was it. They were lit. Every dream, all their years ahead: lit.

  A shepherd to follow.

  Samuel.

  Oh Samuel.

  Baby wiped his mouth now and felt his way back to the bed and slipped under the covers. Samuel turned toward him and grunted deeply, a happy sound. Baby’s own skin felt clean, but Samuel’s was still cooked. Outside, on the street below, he heard the heavy doors of a truck unsticking, boots landing on the sidewalk, then the door shutting. Through the window, he could see the panes of the glass on the building across the alley, the drowsy eyelets of their curtains backlit by lamps.

  It struck Baby that this was a moment not quite happening, a dream that would haze into white at any moment. This whole life of theirs so far, this sweet night, just a glimmer, without substance, and when he came to he would have to say, “Yeah, man, thanks for the light,” and walk off again into the night, across the gravel, back onto Isotope’s blue metal truck, and never look back from whatever point he might be now, instead. (And not what they had done either, back in the john, on top of the sink, pulling and pulling at each other slowly, the gorged skin of the moment popping faintly around them. No. Not that either.)

  The thought fascinated him, and he blinked to see if it were really true. Then Samuel coughed, a sound so real and ordinary that Baby smiled and cupped Samuel’s cock until it nodded off and coiled lazily into his hand, and then he felt himself fall asleep with his nose along the lip of Samuel’s right ear.

  Baby was ten again. His mama was yellow and Sheriff was white.

  Black women, some hoisting infants on their hips, floated looks above Baby’s head and tisked-tisked.

  Look at her, their eyes said to each other. Who she think she is now? Woman like that, who never needed nothing, this yellow whore who never left her plot of land by the railroad where she raised that mongrel of a child (“Look at this child. Damn near a negro. Damn near.”), this woman nobody can remember being acknowledged by so much as a nod, who was rumored to have a slanted twat so maybe that’s why a nigger would want to touch her (’cause an unschooled nigger was nothing if not curious)—who she think she is now? A nobody. Nobody.

  Still, nobody deserved what she got.

  This slip of a body that Sheriff’s men had dragged out from beneath her own house and covered with a sheet when they didn’t know what else to do with it, that someone (a man, you can bet, yes’m, a man, a jealous man) had hog-tied and slit open and stuffed in the crawl space of her own house, so cut up you couldn’t tell that the sheet over it was white originally till someone told you, so cut up even Sheriff held a handkerchief over his nose—

  Covered up, but not before the women could get a good long look at what they had compared themselves to, standing nude before their long mirrors, and what their men would’ve crawled over broken glass to get a sniff of.

  They slept a little while, then Baby woke Samuel and got dressed and went to the bar on the corner.

  Not much to look at. Just a little bitty place with a wood dance floor and lightbulbs the owners smoked out over a candle. A place so half-minded but stubborn, so airy but insistent, it felt like hot shallow breaths on the back of your neck all the time. That’s what you walked into, a room poised on the edge of sex, electrified with the possibility of what could happen between men, those deep silent fucks for which time stopped and plunged, and stopped again.

  The white boys, all fucked up on something scary, propped against the walls with their johns, would look up once in a while to watch the colored boys make like they were dry-fucking on the dance floor. And, Baby, if he felt like, would throw them a look like a hock of spit—like Yeah? So what?—without losing the roll of Samuel’s pelvis against his own.

  Samuel had grown tall and wide, shoulders like volleyballs wrapped in cotton: a flagship, a mast cutting high and steady through eddies of men on the dance floor. Half the eyes in the room were on him. The other half were on Baby.

  For Baby, though short, possessed a density, a thickness, that spoke of power, like the arc of a bow just drawn back. Half-cocked. Ready to spring. Above all that, Baby had the indifference of a man who was used to being looked at. Men looked at him and their mouths went sour from sucking on their own tongues, their noses ached with sniffing.

  If anyone knew the choreography of Baby’s body, it was Samuel.

  For it was Samuel’s body that traced out the complex logarithms for Baby to follow.

  For when they danced, they talked with their hipbones in a language only people born with the dance could understand.

  Hold still. Now grind.

  I’m slowing down, where are you?

  Give me more.

  Careful what you wish for.

  Give it. Give it.

  You sure you want it?

  I do. I do.

  People in the room still?

  For when Baby danced with Samuel, the walls of the room, the floor beneath, all fell away, ribbons from a box that held only him and his.

  Sheriff bent down and looked Baby in the eye.

  “You know what this is?” Sheriff touched the metal star on his chest. “You know what this means, boy? Means I got a right to ask questions and people got an obligation to answer me. Baby, look at your mama there. Look at her and think real hard about what I’m going to ask you because I’m only going to ask once. Baby: Where’s your daddy at?”

  Baby didn’t answer. He wasn’t ever supposed to talk to a white man, even when asked a question he knew the answer to.

  His daddy was a soldier. His daddy had said to his mama, “Soon hee, this is a table. This is a kettle. And that there’s a baby.” His mama had said, “Table. Kettle. Baby.” All his life, Baby never knew another name. His daddy had said that morning, “Baby, you go outside and play. Look what a fine day it is. It’s a fine day, ain’t it? Go outside and play. I need to have a word with your mother.” Then he had winked and patted Baby’s tummy and guided him out the door.

  So what does a white man, a sheriff at that, know about what a black man is capable of? Baby looked at the railroad tracks running all the way down to the sky until something on the edge of his vision rustled.

  The mass under the sheet had managed to sit up, bolt-straight, and lift an arm. She was pointing at the railroad. Her jaws moved up and down. She looked at her son and pointed at the railroad more intently.

  Baby tried to help. Yes, Mama. That’s right. The train. That’s where he went. The train.

  Her eyes darted between Baby and the horizon. Still she pointed, like a young child trying to show a parent where the monster was hiding. The air was hazy with flies, the trees clogged with anything else born out of the Mississippi mud that’s small enough to fly. Baby tried to please his mother by looking where she pointed, to show he understood. After a while, he realized it wasn’t the railroad at all he was looking at, but the long ragged range of Samuel’s spine.

  For it was Samuel who knew of the tea saucer on Baby’s back that was filled with cream. That was soft, runny cream left out in sunlight, the one sure mark that he was something other than black.

  No one knew where to place a man like Baby, with his dusty high yellow skin and his hair real straight in some parts and real kinky in others, with his one eye hooded and the other a clean blade of almond. It wrapped him, the passing glances of folks on the street hardening into approximating stares, the nebulous and impenetrable skin of an atom.

  Samuel was a quarter Indian himsel
f, but you couldn’t tell by looking. Bones cut so sharp and skin so dark, his head seemed in silhouette even in full light, all apples and angles. Kissing the skin of a boy like Samuel, that’s the glimpse of evil. Skin so oiled and dark you run the danger of seeing your own face in it, seeing your ugly please me please me face that no one ought to see lest you turn to salt.

  Samuel said his mother’s people a few generations back hunted buffalo, though Baby knew that buffalo haven’t been free on the continent to hunt for well over a century. They made stuff up as they went along if someone wanted a story. If Samuel’s people hunted buffalo, then Baby’s people built the Great Wall of China. (“Maybe that’s how they built that damned wall, with buffaloes.”)

  Samuel always laughed that if they had a kid together, they’d end up with one hell of a wrong-looking child.

  Well, children weren’t something too much on Baby’s mind. What’s he want with a child anyway? But you talk long enough about something that you don’t have, never going to have, and it starts to mesh right into the grain of your life so that you forget what fiction is. If Baby drank a beer at breakfast, Samuel would frown and say, “Aw, now, Papa, what kind of example is that for our girl?” If Samuel left some toenails on the pillow, Baby would chide, “I can’t be cleaning after you once that child comes!”

  Sometimes when he was alone, Baby would sense something vague just to the left and back of him, some sense of a round-headed child, a little girl maybe, sitting there waiting to get her hair braided. And he’d touch his throat and laugh at himself for thinking such a ridiculous thing and then feel a little ache after.

  Baby said: I’m sorry. I didn’t know what he was doing to you in there. I thought he was making love to you in there.

  His mama was standing now, on the steps of the porch. She was barely grown, Baby thought, barely a woman. She dipped her head and fanned the back of her neck with her hand. Open gashes draped her torso. Bones gleamed from beneath the wounds like the eyes of animals hiding in her body. Her breasts peeled to either side of the longest gash and the thick hairs of her genitals were clotted with blood.

  Baby fetched a glass from the house and filled it with water from the pump, but she didn’t want any. She seemed preoccupied. Again and again, she rubbed at her wrist, her palm. Killing time. Waiting.

  And he might have mistaken it for a twitch, but there was no mistaking. She winked.

  Samuel whined at breakfast about the milk being too cold.

  “Too cold? You getting fussy on me, or you just getting fussy on me?”

  “I ain’t kidding, Baby. Something about my head, I don’t know what, but that cold is hurting my head, like right here, right at the back of my neck.” He rolled his head to demonstrate.

  “Oh,” Baby said dismissively. “I get that, too, when I eat ice cream too fast. Just take small sips then. Be a good boy.”

  Samuel didn’t argue but sat holding the back of his neck. With his other hand, he raised the glass to his lips and took small sips like Baby said. A good boy.

  Samuel had to be down on the corner by quarter to eight each morning to catch the Muni to BART, an easier schedule than when he was just a packer and had to be there at six. Now he took care of orders and worked a clean nine to six shift. Baby himself flitted through jobs, gas stations and restaurants, mostly in the gray cold months of the year, but when the weather brightened, as much as it does in the city, he said his farewells to employment. It wasn’t that they had money, had the luxury of unemployment. They were making it month to month as it was, but it was certainly more than they were used to: Samuel was union now, and making good-enough wages to keep them both afloat for the moment.

  Mornings Baby woke with Samuel’s skin hot against his own, sometimes opening his eyes to find them blinking against Samuel’s cheek. Usually he woke first, and he might watch there a moment and not touch his lover’s face nor soothe his lover’s low murmurings against whatever dream (the final hour of dreaming being the most vivid and breathless). And if Baby could not resist touching, either the hair or the face, he might have a little more time before Samuel’s body began to wake, the tiny trembling moving up and up him until his eyes burst open and his torso heaved with breath and a yawn unclotted from his throat, all parts of one grand, luxurious, agonizing motion, as though he were pierced through and through and they were looking eye to eye, if not in love then in recognition.

  Waiting on a couple of eggs on the stove and some toast in the oven while Samuel showered and shaved, the coffee poured and in hand, Baby settled into the first pose of being separated for the day. His legs crossed at the thighs for the cold, the coffee mug halfway to his lips, his mind trying to work out the knot of some dream he might’ve had the night before.

  After Samuel left for work, Baby liked to sit in the window, one leg up, the ashtray beneath the raised thigh, and watch the street beginning to wake: cars with music drifting out as they passed, children traveling in bubbling clusters, the grocer across the street setting out displays of oranges on the sidewalk. And if it was summer, Baby liked to place his chin on his knee and wait for a nap to take him closer to noon.

  Then maybe to the park, but maybe just see what the old bookstores and record shops might have that he hadn’t seen before. He’d set out of the house with a sense of adventure, though his adventures, usually, never extended past the ten-block area of his neighborhood: the Mission. What mattered was the sense of mischief, a sense of freedom to invent his daily persona: he could be the bemused stroller, taking delight at every window front, sitting anonymously good-natured in a Mexican diner; or he could be something darker, at the station, posing the practiced casual pose from his old loitering days, cataloging the real hustlers who worked the station’s men’s room, washing their hands for long minutes, checking the shine of their hair in the mirror along with prospective johns. Occasionally one of them would try to catch Baby’s eye, but immediately they’d know him for what he was, and there’s nothing worse, nothing, than one whore propositioning another.

  Oh, the lores he invented for himself, the selves he imagined.

  The persistent drowsiness like a hand about his waist.

  Every day like this, the hours laid out before him, a large ballroom scattered with old furniture, all worn uniquely to his form, and he could sit here and there, here and there, by the window, against a building, on a bus. When asked how his day was, Baby did not recall much of anything except these kinds of poses.

  This undocking, this drifting through the day: it was a present he gave himself. A person could let himself wander anywhere he pleased, so long as he had a harbor to return to each night.

  That evening Baby met Samuel at the Sixteenth Street Station like he always did Fridays, but Samuel wasn’t there. After half an hour, Baby walked home alone, muttering to himself. Ever heard of a phone? Ever heard of calling someone to say you going to be late?

  “Brother!”

  Baby hadn’t seen the man or the commotion behind him. Two blocks up a crowd had taken over the street, dancing in the dimming light. Too festive to be another war protest.

  The man who called out to him looked overjoyed. His blond hair was wrapped to approximate a head of dreadlocks. The man threw up his hands to imitate a goalpost, so excitedly that he nearly fell over. “It’s over, bro. It’s over!” he cried.

  That was the thing. No men left in this town except fags, college students, and hippies.

  Baby tried to walk past but the man kept at his side.

  “I mean, shit! Haven’t you heard yet? Saigon?”

  Baby stopped. “What about Saigon?”

  “Saigon fell! It’s over! The war, man. You know, the war’s over!”

  When Baby didn’t react, the man paused and took a good look. Sometimes the angle of lighting brought out the narrowness and up wardness of Baby’s eyes, accentuated the wide cheeks that sloped into the corners of his mouth. And a yellow streetlight could bring out certain tinctures of his skin—

 
“Hey,” the man said. “You guys won. Congratulations.” He joined his fists together at his chest and made a little bow at Baby and then skipped off toward the crowd.

  Crazy-ass cracker.

  What the hell was there to celebrate? He didn’t follow the war too closely but Baby knew it was lots of black boys out there in the jungle, and black boys who got their legs blown off, and boys kids who just plain died, in the mud, in the jungle, pieces of them left to be found and cataloged and a letter sent. And on the flip side, Vietnam. He’d seen enough villages on fire, seen enough dirty crying children to last him another lifetime. The whole thing was a mess. So, again, what the hell was there to celebrate?

  And this was a thought that came uniquely to Baby: how you gonna talk about who won and who lost to a man that came from two peoples who, in another generation, in another war, had been bent on putting bullets through each other’s heads?

  He turned the corner and took the long route home to avoid the crowd, shaking his head. The wind was lifting leaves off the ground. He wanted Samuel.

  “Finally.” Samuel had shrugged the night they had arrived in San Francisco. Samuel was fifteen, a year younger than Baby, but he’d criss crossed the country three times over already and decided they should spend some time in Frisco, while the weather was nice.