Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  They were standing in the lobby of an old hotel like those you see in old movies with comic, fumbling bellhops. Curls of wood climbed the tall, domed ceiling, dull brass panels gazed serenely from the elevators, and the parched paper on the walls swirled with so many flowers that Baby’s nose twitched with the acrid scent of open roses. Just beyond, there might be a grand ballroom. Thin pale women in beaded dresses might spill laughing from the elevators at any moment. But everything looked heavy, as if logged with water.

  Baby whispered, “Where are we?” He didn’t want to disturb the old men asleep on velvet armchairs by the mute TV.

  “The Tenderloin,” Samuel explained simply.

  Baby smoothed the legs of his jeans and patted down his hair as they approached the counter.

  “We need a room,” Samuel told the clerk, a fat, redheaded boy reading something on his lap.

  “We charge by the hour, not the quarter or the half hour. One minute into the hour and we charge you full,” the clerk recited to the women in his magazine.

  “We need two weeks.”

  “First and last day deposit now. Room open on the sixth floor. Shower and toilet located at the end of the hall. Cash only and don’t leave nothing on the sheets,” the clerk told them.

  The elevator gave a sigh when they told it to move. Samuel asked, “Those truckers, they ever give you money? D’you ever ask?”

  “Sure. Sometimes.”

  “Good enough,” Samuel said.

  Nights were for work, but days were for themselves. Sometimes they’d have enough money for a stretch of three or four days for themselves. For bare-chested naps in Dolores Park, chess games at the wharf, scenes from a movie, a montage of summer days. It wasn’t the sort of heat Baby was used to in Mississippi, nothing that bred flies and baked trees and blurred your sightline. It was a heat that lulled you, sang to you in deep clear chords with its palm on your belly. They didn’t have to work every night. If they worked, they worked simultaneously, sometimes as a team. That way, neither of them would ever have to sleep alone.

  One week passed. Then another. Pretty soon, a whole month. The weather started turning chilly earlier and earlier in the day, Baby remembered. Then one morning, when he staggered home from a john, placing one foot in front of another up all those steps that seemed both shallow and deep, down the dark hall whose doors oozed at him like the bellies of large animals, when he finally steadied the nauseating swilling of time long enough to work the complex machinery of the doorknob, Samuel was not there. Baby stood in the little room for a long, long time and then the floor rose and rose until it pressed against his face and the last thing he remembered thinking, so lucidly and calmly he could hear it even now:

  Well, that’s the trouble with being sheep.

  He had known it all along. He had known how it would turn out. And now here it was.

  But he had been wrong, wrong. For a hand had reached into his deep white sleep and pulled him up by the collar.

  And then that hand slapping his cheeks.

  And then Baby’s own voice screaming, accusing.

  And then Samuel’s voice: “No, no. I didn’t. I’m right here.”

  And Baby bobbed to the surface.

  Samuel had turned out Baby’s elbow and found the tiny clot nestled inside there like a beetle. But there had been no questions, no more words. There would be time for all of that later.

  Time for all of that later.

  Were they ever that young? That memory wavered uncertainly in his account of their life so far, tied off from the years that followed, like a knot in a clown’s balloon. For the Samuel who had strode confidently to the hotel counter, who slipped like a bug through a hungry city and its lymph nodes of truck stops and men’s rooms, the Samuel who could be drenched with the breaths of breathless men, that Samuel seemed to Baby now too youthful and confident to have ever been real. But more than that, and this saddened him: also irretrievable, like a toy lost in the water, like, yes, a childhood game that they’ve had to give up for this life without magic.

  Baby sighed now as he climbed the last flight of stairs.

  That was why he clung to Samuel so. They were utterly alone in the world, in the sense that no one else knew the grimy, exciting fairy tale, the furious youth that they had stepped out of once, once upon a time.

  When Samuel walked in through the door, he looked so limp and chewed up that Baby couldn’t find the heart to be angry.

  “I’m sorry,” Samuel said, sagging against the door. His voice wobbled. “I just plain fell asleep. Can’t explain it. Rode all the way out across the Bay before I woke up.” He sniffled and rubbed his nose. “You mad?”

  Baby looked him up and down.

  Samuel asked for a kiss.

  “Hells no,” Baby said. “And don’t you look to get me sick too.”

  But he lighted a kiss on Samuel’s forehead and put him to bed.

  In the kitchen, Baby hummed along with the rice as he chopped up a leek to go in with the mushrooms. Sure is a nice feeling to have your man in bed. Sure is peaceful to have your man be asleep and not be fussing over how much butter you cook your own damn mushrooms in.

  Another voice said, Amen, and Baby nodded.

  When he tried to wake Samuel for dinner, he got waved away. “Let me get some sleep,” Samuel said heavily. “I’ll be fine by tomorrow, I promise.”

  Baby felt Samuel’s forehead. Hot. Definitely hot.

  “Sure,” he said. “Sick gets what sick wants.”

  It was early enough to be restless, and Baby had counted on going to the bar with Samuel, but now it looks like he’s staying home. It’s different when a sick man’s in your bed. Can’t be hopping all over town when a sick man’s in your bed.

  Summer nights meant music and long shiny trucks and tough young men in tight jeans, the most beautiful boys he’s ever seen, under the window. This time of year, the night air was cool and pleasant, like the cool of a chilled beer can just under your nose. Young men called to each other, to passing cars. Young men who escaped the draft for lack of papers or eyebrows, the same young men who looked tough and available on the benches of Dolores Park. Baby tipped the bottle to his mouth and listened to their friendly greetings.

  Hey. Where you been, where you going?

  No place, man, no place.

  After the dishes, Baby went through the pantry: beer nuts, canned olives, bean spread, bags of salty stuff. That Samuel, he’d eat frosting from a can all three meals if you let him. Behind a gallon jug of salsa, Baby found a tiny box wrapped in red. Sneaky, Baby thought. He had half a mind to open it, but his birthday wasn’t more than a week away. If he can wait twenty-four years for this birthday, he can wait a few more days. He put the box back and tried to watch TV, but it was all the same, on every channel: news of Saigon, women running, dragging babies, running toward the embassy, mashed against an iron gate like pressed flowers. Baby yawned and finished his beer and turned off all the lights, washed up, and slid into bed naked.

  Samuel felt like a loaf of dough left to rise under a heavy towel. Instinctively, his head turned away and revealed his neck. Baby placed his face into the crook made there, but he couldn’t sleep.

  Distinctly he recalled the cushion of his mother’s body underneath him, her tiny steps blurring after a while into flight, that teenage body blowing down the streets, the world blowing by, the two of them born along the ground

  What’s that word? Buoyant. Buoyancy.

  Did she run like that, with a baby strapped to her back like a bundle of kindling, a baby that she could hold up to the powers-that-be at the embassy and push on a plane to anywhere, anywhere at all, because, after all, that baby was one of their own, even if she weren’t—

  No. She didn’t have to. Because his daddy married her. He married her when he didn’t have to, when he could’ve left her to rot and starve in the fields his men had left smoking with bodies.

  It had been a clean, safe passage.

  “This is a table
. This is a chair. And that there’s a baby.”

  “This is a railroad, Baby. You know what a railroad really is?” his daddy would ask, then laugh his deep laugh. They would squat at the edge of the tracks, Baby between his daddy’s knees, their fingers on the steel rails, waiting. Then the tremor, a tiny bird heart beating, and Baby would look into his daddy’s face. “Now? Is that it? Now?” But his daddy’s face would be calm, his eyes closed. The tremor grew more and more, a bird heart, then the heart of some larger animal, a dog’s, then a horse’s, the feather and fur and hide growing thin until it seemed the heart was beating bare in their palms, until their fingers, still on the rail, began to shake, the dense wall of sound washing closer and closer. “Now?” Baby would ask, getting scared, his legs growing soft. A boy had been killed on the tracks the summer before, his shoe caught between the wood ties. “Now?” The conductor started to blow his horn, once, then twice, then just let it wail, but his daddy would only shush him and press his fingers to the steel.

  “Trust me, child. Not yet, not yet—”

  Then at the last possible minute, Baby felt his body lifted upwards and backwards, into the air, as if blown by the wind from the passing train, blood rushing through the cords of his little neck, his heart lurching and pumping clots of thoughts and his daddy screaming “Hallelujah!” but then, just then, his feet would land on the coarse gravel again and his daddy’s arms would unwind from his torso, and it would grow peaceful and still and green again.

  “Wasn’t that something?” his daddy would say, his voice near tears. “Something, wasn’t that? Remember that feeling, Baby. Remember it. Anytime you think you know what fear is, anytime you forget what the joy of living is, remember that feeling. And you remember that I pulled you back. Me, your daddy. Never trust anyone else to do the same for you.”

  Eventually the silence took over Baby’s mind. Such quiet and darkness, he couldn’t tell how much time had passed since he first lay down. He imagined the ceiling was the surface of a sea and they were deep below, where all there is to do is concentrate on the act of breathing. Gently he slipped off Samuel’s underwear and tucked his hand where the thighs branched.

  But Samuel wasn’t better by morning, nor the day after that. The whole weekend he stayed in bed and let Baby play mother. Baby cooked up some tea he bought at the herbal pharmacy down the street. He helped Samuel into the bathtub and sponged him. Who’s my baby? Who’s Baby’s baby? On Thursday evening, Samuel felt good enough to get up and move around. Just as well, cause it was Baby’s birthday and he was going to cook up a heap of a meal.

  Samuel leaned against the side of the fridge with a glass of wine—no, with his third glass of wine—and watched while Baby chopped and boiled and washed. A small ham was sitting royally in the oven, a pot of rice simmering with its clean easy smell.

  Baby put down his knife and wiped his hands on his apron. “Twenty-four,” he said. “Lord.”

  “Did I ever tell you,” Samuel began. “Did I ever tell you how beautiful you are?”

  A radio was playing the next floor down, sad and far away. Why was it that far-away music always sounded so sad? The lightbulb, yellow and failing, flickered absently.

  Baby picked up his knife. “You drunk, that’s what you are.”

  “Beautiful ain’t even the word for it. God damn.”

  “Leave me alone if you don’t want to help me cook.”

  Samuel circled Baby’s waist and kissed his ears. “You want to do something crazy?”

  He started grinding his crotch against the cheeks of Baby’s ass. He reached around and pressed lightly on each of Baby’s nipples.

  “You want to?”

  Baby’s dick stiffened against the sink. His mouth turned up with thoughts of something illegal and wet. He turned around in Samuel’s arms and pressed himself into Samuel’s crotch.

  “Well, do you?” Samuel asked.

  Baby could feel Samuel begin to rise under his pajamas. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Samuel moved down onto one knee.

  Baby let out a peal of laughter. “Shit,” he said. “You just want to give some head.” He began to unzip his unfurling crotch, but Samuel’s face, just below, was full of piety instead of flirtation, earnestness instead of foreplay.

  “Baby, quit. I’m being serious here,” Samuel said, but didn’t continue. He stole a look at the ceiling, which, Baby supposed, was the closest Samuel ever came to being religious.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Samuel said.

  “A story,” Baby repeated. “You’re serious.”

  “Yes, I’m serious here. Okay, a story. There was this man once,” Samuel said. “This boy, actually, this kid who thought—

  “Wait, that’s dumb. Okay, wait. Geese. No, wait,” he said, and then stopped. “Wait.”

  Baby waited. Samuel got this way sometimes when he drank.

  “Okay,” Samuel continued. “Remember when we just arrived here, living in that hotel? You remember?”

  Baby nodded suspiciously.

  “There was one night when I’d headed out the door thinking I was just going to find a john, make some quick cash, whatever. But then a bus came, and I thought, sure! And then another bus came and I thought, why not! I don’t know. I just kept going and going, one transfer after another, not really sure what I was doing, but all the time doing it just the same. I thought, Baby don’t need me. He’ll be fine. And what I need him for?

  “Baby, you know how geese, when they’re born, their minds get stuck on the first thing they see, be it their mother or an alarm clock, and they follow it forever? Baby, I saw that was starting to happen with you, you were starting to get stuck on me, and Lord knows if you follow me I’ll lead you someplace awful. That’s what I was thinking.”

  Baby’s vision milked over. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m telling you this because I came back. Because I knew I had to. And wasn’t I right? Wasn’t I? When I opened the door, I thought you were dead, Baby, dead! But then you started screaming, you remember? Screaming, You fucker! You fucking left me! Didn’t you! Didn’t you!” Samuel tried to laugh at this, but he only managed to clear his throat. “And I thought, Yes, yes I did. And then, No, no. I couldn’t have, could I? Could I have?”

  Baby leaned back, hoping the counter was still there. His knees were turning to dough and liquid pushed up his throat, but Samuel caught him square in the eye and held him.

  “Listen, Baby. I been thinking. I been thinking a lot, ’specially these few days when you been taking care of me. Listen to me, Baby. I’m telling you this. I’m telling you this is how it is.” He looked down a second and when he looked back up, he was sober. “This is it right here. You and me. Two people get so used to making a life together they don’t want nothing else. Maybe there ain’t nothing else out there. Maybe all there is is in this room, right here, right now.”

  Baby could have said lots of things. He could have argued or said something smart. But he just stood there like someone dumb, holding out his hand like a begging cup as Samuel slid the ring onto his finger.

  You follow me. You follow me forever.

  Baby said yes, yes.

  Won’t be no place awful, I can promise you that.

  Baby thought, yes, good, promise.

  You a married lady now.

  Amen.

  Tell me, Baby. Tell me why. Why’s a man got to kill a woman like that?

  Sheriff’s voice trailed off. He looked sadly down at his palms, and Baby knew suddenly what he hadn’t wanted to know, what he had known all along, about that white man and his white heart beating beneath his metal star.

  Then Baby was off.

  Not so much running but slipping along the smooth rails. He could hear the train though it was miles off now, the shudder of the wood ties beneath like the timbre of a low growl that tired more and more. When the house, too, disappeared, he stopped and untied the bundle from his back, and carefully, carefully he peeled back the first layer of pa
le cotton. But there was only another layer, and another, and then only a tangle of cloth in his hands. Where were the bright eyes, the tiny fists? Where was Samuel?

  A dream. Samuel was next to him, a thick lump under the sheet. Baby placed a palm on the sheet to calm himself but there it was, there it bloomed, under his hand, spreading in a circle, spreading wider and wider. His palm came away wet and red.

  No no no no no—

  Another dream.

  New Year’s Eve.

  The air outside was wet and cold and thin, almost not enough air to breathe. Baby sat in the window watching Widow Matthews caning down the street with her eyes set dead ahead of her, determined to fight the wind and gravity itself. If the weather was warmer, Baby would’ve dangled out the window and called out to her, but now she seemed just another old woman trying to get herself home before dark. Her steps were labored, just left of sync.

  Heavy.

  Yes ma’am. That’s the feeling.

  A whole new decade was coming tonight but Baby felt just tired. More like something was ending.

  Samuel settled between Baby’s legs with a blanket around himself, his face turning orange with the sunset. Baby fed him a bit of wine from his own glass. After a while, they fell asleep. After a little while longer, they were on the bed making love.

  Samuel felt a little skinnier, it was true.

  Maybe a lot skinnier. Flesh ain’t what it used to be. Samuel’s skin, that fearful oiled skin, now took on a dullness and a thinness, like cigarette paper near the cherry, like Widow Matthews’s cloudy eye. Holding Samuel sometimes felt like holding his own bouquet of knees, and Baby imagined they were two elderly folks resting up for the remainder of their days. Then he thought, Why, we ain’t even thirty yet!

  Baby tried to remember what they used to feel like to each other naked, but he couldn’t. Body grows with you. It was gradual, like an iceberg. You keep your eye on it and it don’t seem to move at all, but if you look away and look back—