The Virgin of Flames

by Chris Abani

  Iggy reached over and rubbed the plastic pouch around his neck. He smiled at her, leaning back. June felt uncomfortable in the face of this familiar intimacy. Iggy noticed.

  “Did you know this is a photo of Black?” she said, indicating the fading photo in the plastic pouch.

  June leaned forward and peered at it through the black leather-wrapped and zirconia-studded magnifying glass she wore around her neck.

  “Really?” she said. “But you’re wearing a dress.”

  Iggy laughed and Black smiled, a little embarrassed.

  “Go on,” Iggy said. “Tell her.” To June she said: “This is fascinating.”

  Black hesitated. There was something about this female pressure that reminded him of his mother.

  “Well?” June asked, tone impatient.

  “My father told me that there is a curse on our family, that a malevolent spirit kills all the male children before they turn six. So all the boys are dressed as girls and sometimes even given girl’s names until they turn seven. Then the dress comes off and we become boys again,” he said.

  “Sort of a second birth,” Iggy said.

  “Fascinating,” June said. “So your father explained this to you as a child? Didn’t he go away when you just turned seven?”

  Black nodded.

  “To Vietnam,” Iggy said.

  “He never came back,” Black said, in a voice that sounded like a pebble dropping into a well.

  “So how did you find out?”

  “This letter. It came with the photo. After he died in Vietnam,” Black said, flipping the plastic pouch over, showing the letter. “Of course I didn’t read it until I was fifteen. Until after my mother died.”

  “That’s why he wears it like a talisman,” Iggy explained.

  “Yes, I can see that,” June said. “How do you feel about that?” she asked Black.

  “About being a girl for a while? Confused, I guess. I’m not sure. Look, I can’t get into this,” he said.

  They were silent for a while, but when June went to the bathroom, Iggy brought up the rent. It was two months overdue.

  “I’ll give it to you soon,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  Iggy nodded and arched her back. It cracked with an explosive sound, the metal loops on her back jangling melodically.

  “Oh, that was killing me,” she said.

  twelve

  jesus is my Homeboy.

  Black, sitting on the concrete lip of the River, saw the T-shirt first before he saw Bomboy Dickens. The shirt was tight, outlining Bomboy’s body, and Black fought the urge to run to him and pull the fabric away.

  “Black. How now?” Bomboy asked as he walked over.

  “I’m fine,” Black replied. He really wasn’t up for polite conversation with Bomboy. It was mid-afternoon and hot. He had just returned to the crane where he’d tried to kill himself the other day, and was still a little out of breath from climbing it. There was something about the view of the wall of Bomboy’s warehouse-abattoir that had made an impression that day, but he’d been so busy evading Gabriel he hadn’t paid enough attention. He still couldn’t tell what it was, but it would come. That was part of the process for his art: waiting.

  “Taking a break from work?” Bomboy asked him. “I saw you up there,” he added, pointing to the crane. “Nice view?”

  Black nodded, taking in Bomboy’s blood-spattered orange T-shirt. Bomboy understood meat. And knives. Black had seen him work. Seen him talk tenderly to the beef and sheep cadavers as he carved them into choice cuts. Tell his coworkers how the muscles were connected to each other, and how the tendons held everything in place like the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge, which he saw once on a trip. And Black knew enough to know that if Bomboy wanted, he could carve cadavers all day and not get a spot of blood on him. Blood was a choice he made.

  “So,” Bomboy said.

  “Are you alright, ’mano?”

  Bomboy nodded. Then:

  “You know Pedro is a mean mothafucker.”

  Black nodded. He not only didn’t know who Pedro was, he also didn’t care.

  “You know Pedro, right? With the taco stand?”

  Black shook his head.

  “Well, the other day I was buying a burrito from him, and as he chopped the meat he looked at me and said, ‘Is this how you guys killed each other back in that jungle?’ Imagine the cheek of that, eh? I mean I couldn’t eat it after that, but I still had to pay. That mothafucker.”

  Black nodded. He wondered how someone like Bomboy, who owned a successful, if illegal, business, had the time for these petty quarrels.

  “So what are you mad about? The insult or paying for the food?” he asked.

  “Paying for the food was paying for the insult,” Bomboy said. Black stared at him. If Iggy thought his head was a frightening place, he thought, then Bomboy’s must be the third circle of hell.

  “You need help.”

  “Exactly! So, how do you think I should revenge?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you let it go?”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah.”

  Black lit a Marlboro and passed the pack to Bomboy.

  “So you know what happened to me yesterday?”

  Black didn’t know and didn’t really care.

  “I saw this army recruiter at the mall,” Bomboy said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Fox Hills Mall to be exact, precise and accurate,” Bomboy added, as though it were important.

  “Is this story going anywhere? Or should I just save us some time and say, ‘Forgive that mothafucker too’?”

  “Black! Your words are wounding.”

  “Yeah? Fuck you, hijo dela chingada.”

  “Black!”

  “What? Do I look like Oprah? Tell me the story or shut the fuck up already.”

  Bomboy laughed, and then grew serious.

  “Anyway, this army recruiter said if I signed up for the war in Iraq I could become an American citizen.”

  “No shit,” Black said, stepping on his cigarette butt. “Is that who they’re sending now?”

  “I guess.”

  “So what happens if you don’t survive?”

  “I will.”

  Black nodded and lit another Marlboro.

  “This army guy said they could use men like me. Men who knew how to handle themselves, get the job done.”

  “Men who could get the job done?”

  “You know my background.”

  “But how did he know?”

  “I told him.”

  “Seems to me like you’ve already made up your mind.”

  Black looked out across the River. The rain had swelled it, and it ran fast down the concrete channel, dragging the burnt-out skeleton of a car with it.

  “Do you miss it?” Black asked. He was picking at the calluses on his palms, staring at each strip of skin intensely before dropping it into the river.

  “You know the last time I got those?” Black shook his head. “In Kigali,” Bomboy pressed on. “Defending myself.”

  “Look,” Black began in an attempt to head off the conversation.

  “The Hutu Army captured me and some other orphans hiding behind the church. They said we had to fight the Tutsi. We were afraid to refuse because we’d seen them killing people. Plenty people like this,” Bomboy said, mimicking the hacking action of a machete with his open palm. Black flinched. “They gave us cutlasses and marched us many days to reach the Tutsi Army. A week passed and we didn’t see any sign of the army so the Hutu soldiers, our people, took us to a Tutsi refugee camp, only women and children. They told us to kill them, or if we couldn’t, to cut them well well.”

  Tears were gathering in Bomboy’s eyes and Black fixed his gaze on an inflatable doll floating past them on the river. The doll was deflating fast, and the open “O” of the mouth on its crumpled face seemed even more surprised. Black shuddered as he realized that Bomboy’s tears bo
thered him more than the details of his story.

  “I cut. I was afraid so I cut. Hands. Legs. Heads. Chests. I couldn’t look. I just wanted to finish. I cut and cut until my hand blistered, until my knife was dull. Human bodies are hard to cut with a dull knife; cause many blisters.”

  “Easy, man,” Black said, casually placing a hand on Bomboy’s back. Bomboy seemed to be done talking. He looked embarrassed. Black didn’t know what to say, so he looked at the murals along the length of the concrete dip opposite. They were all his work, crawling along like modern hieroglyphics or a Minoan script. To the left, on the 4th Street Bridge, traffic, at a standstill, shook the old supports, flaking white paint into the water. A kid on a skate-board stopped on the lip of the culvert opposite them. He seemed lost in thought, but finding whatever he was looking for, he shot down the side into the water. It looked dangerous. The current was fast, but the water was, as usual, shallow in this part of the River. Black didn’t understand why the kid was doing it, but guessed the danger was the thrill. The water curved in a spray on either side as the kid came up the other lip, almost to where they sat, before sliding back again.

  Black lit another Marlboro and passed one to Bomboy. They sat smoking silently, brows furrowed in thought. Unbidden, images of Black’s mother stole upon him. Iggy was right; this was one ghost he definitely attended. He liked it, he thought. No point denying it. No, not liked, savored, and the taste in his mouth was regret like the mud cakes he made playing alone in the backyard of their house on Fourth and Soto. Mud cakes a ten-year-old boy shouldn’t have been making. He and his mother had moved here when they lost the house in Pasadena. He was the only biracial kid for blocks and it set him apart. Everyone could tell he wasn’t quite one thing or the other, and yet since his father wasn’t around no one could tell what he might be. Kids were cruel and didn’t cut him any breaks. And his mother, yelling at him, calling him her sin, her mud in the mouth from God. And so he had eaten those mud cakes. Tasted every morsel, every grain of their shame, hoarded every bite in his mouth until the saliva dissolved it all, but yet his body held on to that memory.

  But still he felt the need to punish himself more. Blaming himself for the disappearing woman that was his mother. Dying of something they wouldn’t have a name for until much later, but not dying gracefully. Instead filling the house with hate, each corner pulling in the acridity and holding it in the spiderwebs. His mother was intent on remembering this hate, or at least on making sure Black would remember this hate, so she passed it on. First by changing his name to Black, to the emptiness of this internal night she felt. Then she added to it with every look, with every late-night cry or moan, with every stench of death, decay and bodily failure, with every hateful word that she uttered, until even her hacking breath, as it suffered on, became a curse to fill even the sunniest East LA afternoon with the despair of night.

  “You know, m’ijo,” she used to say, always said, from when he was eight. “You are my punishment from God. Do you know why? Because I got pregnant before I married your father. Against my family’s wishes, I dated that moreno. And now I have to live with you. You are my living sin, m’ijo. Pray, pray that God forgives you.”

  “But I didn’t do anything!”

  “Neither did Judas, really. But still he hanged himself. Now pray to our Lady, mira, pray for forgiveness. Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with you . . .”

  He was fifteen when his mother died, and he left home to escape going into the foster care system. That memory was always at the edge of his mind, like a shadow that he would come upon. Things had been clearer then, he liked to think, but he knew they weren’t. He was just younger, younger and like a newly hatched gull, unaware of the sea’s hunger. But still, he remembered it as the only glorious time in his life: five years of riding freight trains across the country, leaving nothing behind except the occasional painting on the side of a boxcar, looking forward to the sharpness of a new town’s smell and the chance to work and fill his belly before the next train. From fifteen until he was twenty that had been his life. Until he came back to Los Angeles that night, and a little drunk, he had gone for a walk by the River and ended up under the bridge. That night put an end to his wandering, but it also brought him to Iggy and The Ugly Store. He cleared his throat. He knew Iggy said he was still searching, she said that, but he felt like he had stopped searching the day he got off that train.

  Black shuddered at the memories. He had to exorcize this ghost, he knew that, otherwise he would never find out who or what he was. Maybe if he gave it a clearer form? But deep down, he knew the form was tied to him, his mother, the Virgin and Sweet Girl. A loud bang from somewhere across the river brought him back to the present. He scanned the path opposite looking for what had caused the sound, but saw nothing.

  “Say, Bomboy, you know that project I’m working on?” he asked, turning to Bomboy.

  “The one that makes you look like a Japanese horror movie?”

  “Yes,” Black said. The joke sucked the first time. But that was Bomboy. “That one.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, I need a canvas and I think the side of your warehouse would be perfect.”

  “The whole side?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s fifty feet high at least.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “It’s not like you own the lease or anything. I’m only asking as a courtesy.”

  “I know. But I’m here illegally, you know? I don’t want to attract attention.”

  Black pointed to the gutter Bomboy had laid from the warehouse to the lip of the culvert. Blood ran in a steady stream down it into the River.

  “If that didn’t get you noticed, I don’t think one more mural in a city full of them will.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Will you pay me?”

  “Yeah, güey, with this.” Black held up a fist. Bomboy laughed.

  “A fifty-foot-high Virgin. A little obvious even for you, no?” he said.

  “That’s the thing. When I began to work on the cartoon, she turned into something else. Someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “The perfect woman.”

  Bomboy shrugged. “You lost me. Isn’t that what the Virgin is?”

  “No, this woman is different. Something else.”

  “Well, I am off to work,” Bomboy said, standing up and turning back to the warehouse. “Knock yourself out,” he added, gesturing to the wall.

  Getting stiffly to his feet, Black headed back to his van, which was parked under the bridge at Fourth. God, I’m getting old, he thought. The climb up the crane had taken its toll. He returned pushing an old shopping cart full of paint cans and plastic drums and brushes with his right hand. A ladder rattling under the cart made it hard to steer one-handed. Bomboy watched him with interest.

  “See you later,” he said, heading back to the abattoir.

  Black turned back to the wall. He would need to prep it of course. He sat down in front of it and smoked a couple of cigarettes. No hurry. White, Black thought. He needed to cover the wall with at least two coats of white paint. Only then could he sketch out the figure. He wanted to start as soon as possible because the image was burning a hole in his mind.

  Wrapping a tool belt and a length of orange synthetic rope around his waist, he propped a ladder up against the wall and climbed to the last rung. Then he drove a metal pin into the wall, stepped on it and levered up, driving another pin into the flaky concrete. He climbed the wall slowly and once at the top, he rigged up a couple of pulleys and then lowered himself.

  Mixing up a batch of paint, he used the complex system of ropes and pulleys to cover the whole wall. He was aware of being watched: the homeless pushing down the river, carts rattling; kids from the school across the culvert; people in cars speeding by on the 4th Street Bridge. But he didn’t pause and by the time the sun was low, the wall was white,
a fifty-foot-high white canvas. With an excited chuckle, he packed up and wheeled the cart two-handed back to his truck. Behind him, a plane flew in front of the sun, throwing the shadow of its wings across the wall: a dark cross on white.

  thirteen

  iggy was playing with Jesus.

  Black, just entering The Ugly Store, watched with interest as she attempted to attach a clay penis to the anatomically incorrect doll. Jesus looked resigned to the indignity.

  The table in front of her held a laptop and a few dolls. A Barbie. A pre-retirement Ken. A G.I. Joe and the more aggressive-looking British Action Man. They were all naked, clay penises hardening in the slow heat, including Barbie. Each doll was lying next to a selection of female clothing. Looking up when he came into the room, Iggy smiled.

  “Hey, Black! What’s up?”

  “Nothing. Still playing with dolls I see.”

  “I never got to as a child, so this is my time.”

  “But a penis on Jesus?”

  “He had one. And since he was probably black, it should be a big one, no?”

  Black shrugged. He peered around the café checking to see if Ray-Ray was in sight. He wanted a drink. No sign of him. He pulled a chair out from the table and sat opposite Iggy, picked up the Barbie and tested the penis with the tip of his finger. It was hard. Like him. He shifted in the chair, trying to ease the pressure.

  “You like?” Iggy asked.

  “Just what every child needs. A transsexual Barbie,” he said.

  “Here, help me dress her.”

  Black picked up a small sequined miniskirt between clumsy fingers. It didn’t look like it would fit. Not with the penis anyway. Putting the skirt down, he picked up a pair of silver plastic boots. Those would fit. He tugged them on and stood the doll up. Silver boots and a hard penis.

  “Mattel will be pleased,” he said.

  Iggy laughed. While she waited for Jesus’ penis to dry, she took the Barbie from him and dressed it, along with the other dolls. Lining them up she laughed out loud.