We Cast a Shadow

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  I was still coughing. Jo Jo patted my back. “Just take your goods,” he said. He threw a stuffed brown paper bag to the officer. The officer tossed a stuffed envelope to Jo Jo and left.

  “Sorry about that,” Jo Jo said. He explained that the cop wasn’t a real cop. Not anymore. He and his buddies had a camp out in the swamps where they ran tactical maneuvers 24/7. They needed stimulants to stay alert.

  “You mean they’re a group of crazies,” I said.

  “By definition, any gathering of humans is a group of crazies.” Jo Jo waved at the man as he drove off in his gigantic black pickup. “You look like you could use a backrub.”

  “No, thanks. Maybe a medic.”

  “Not that kind of backrub. A Blue Geisha Backrub. One of the kids camped out back said I should call it a Blue Geisha Blowjob, but that’s just crass, y’know?”

  Jo Jo explained that the Blue Geisha Backrub was a Plum, so it did what all Plums did: pumped the air back into your soul. “Two differences though,” he said. “It’s a little slower on the uptake, but more powerful. And you know that stuff I add to the Plums that warms your insides? It’s got a lot more of that.”

  “That’s three things.”

  “I guess so.” Jo Jo gave me a packet of regular Plums. Then he counted out three Blue Geishas into his palm. “You don’t want to take more than one of these a week. Trust me on this.”

  I swallowed one. Jo Jo sipped lemonade. He clicked on the television. A commercial for Paul Pavor for Mayor came on. Jo Jo sipped lemonade, which had somehow taken on the appearance of Malbec, and made finger frames with his hands. Terrible composition. I had the sensation of time stretching like a wad of currently-being-chewed gum. He sipped lemonade. Actually, it’s Zinfandel. Although I didn’t recall asking Jo Jo aloud. You can’t escape. The wall is real, and it goes on in both directions forever. Eventually, Polaire and Nigel appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

  Nigel was in blackface. My words came out in the strangest way, like cannonballs down a children’s slide: “Why. Does. My. Boy. Look. That. Way?”

  “He said he’s playing a famous musician in a play but he’s too light.”

  I tried to stand but collapsed onto my knees. Soon I was crawling. Spit drooled from my lower lip.

  He can’t look like that.

  11

  The massive Tikoloshe Housing Development aka Da Tiko aka Cargoland aka Mondayville aka The Big Oil Slick/The Oil Slick/The Slick was one of the last projects in the City and the perfect place for my guerrilla marketing squad to capture video of black locals. The Tiko was important enough to have made the National Register of Historic Places, although there was a debate as to whether it dated to the silver age of high-density housing or whether it had always been there in one form or another. It was also where I had lived for a sizable portion of my childhood, where I watched the world from the bubble-glassed bedroom of our third-floor walk-up.

  The complex was surrounded by a tall barbed-wire-rimmed fence, and we had to show our IDs to get inside. If we lost our IDs, they wouldn’t let us out.

  I was still a bit bouncy-castle-brained, so Jo Jo drove while I reclined in the back of the Bug next to Polaire. Nigel had called shotgun.

  “How about over there?” Nigel asked. I sat up, struggling, as my arms still felt like noodles. We were riding by the central field, a round patch of brown grass called Wright Park. The red-brick buildings were arranged in a multiringed circle, broken up by alleys that communicated to the gates. I once saw the complex from above while flying out of town on business. The arrangement seemed like a stylized impression of a gun muzzle, seen dead-on.

  I began to question the wisdom of coming back here, a neighborhood I assiduously avoided, especially with Nigel. The unit where I grew up was on the back side of the Tiko. And although I couldn’t see it, I smelled it as if it were landfill just upriver. And too, the Chicken Coop was just outside the fence. If anything really wacky happened, Mama would hop the fence to tell me what an idiot I was being.

  Jo Jo hopped a curb, rattling us around. We stopped. Everyone got out except me—I fell out. Jo Jo helped me. Then he squirted something up my nose, and my vision cleared.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Placebo,” he said.

  Our plan was brilliant. Create an attractive nuisance. We would set up a giveaway table and place props to get the attention of Tiko residents. Once they came around, Jo Jo would take pictures and video of me with my fellow disadvantaged people. Then he’d convert the pics and vids to pamphlets and commercials that showed how much the firm cared about “the community.” The props? Little old me and a teepee. At Jo Jo’s place, Polaire had found a double-breasted khaki tux—Jo Jo’s wedding getup—which I now wore. We’d borrowed the teepee from the smelly kids in Jo Jo’s yard, fastened it to the Bug’s roof.

  We erected the teepee, surrounding it with a few cardboard boxes of T-shirts that Polaire insisted had fallen off a truck. She draped the boxes with their contents: purple Crooked Crown T-shirts. The finishing touch was a prominent, hand-painted sign that said FREE. We were like a purple blossom in the middle of the field. The bees would swarm shortly.

  An older man walked up. “What is all this?” He stood with one hand on the front of his hip, his other hand shoved into the pocket of his football-logo jacket.

  “Take a picture with my celebrity friend and get a free shirt,” Jo Jo said from behind his video camera.

  “Celebrity? I ain’t never seen none of him.”

  “Well, you do see him now, no?” Polaire said. I shook the man’s hand. Polaire leveled her still camera and quickly took a few pictures of us.

  “I guess.” The man rubbed his chin. “What kind of shirt we talking?”

  Nigel held up a shirt. “Exclusive Crooked Crown shirts, sir.”

  The man’s face lit up. I never understood what people saw in Crooked Crown, the purple-clad pop star who seemed to be everywhere lately, on shirts, on TV, in jail. I only knew her name because Penny had been a fan of hers back when she was the lead singer in that R&B group, the one where the members each wore distinctive black face paint. But that was before Crooked Crown visited PHH for lip thinning, a nose job, skin bleaching, and the Devil knows what else, a process called demelanization or a demel or a scrub. She had been a black girl from Baltimore. Now she looked more or less like a Greek woman.

  Surprisingly, Penny seemed to like her music more since the changes. When I ribbed her about this, she said that you can’t judge a person’s artistic creations in relation to the choices they make in their personal life.

  Nigel thought Crooked Crown made good music. “We’re the only place in town that has them. And now it’s yours.” He handed over the shirt.

  The man held the shirt up and drew his hand along the fabric as if it were the finest Egyptian cotton. “She the one beat that cop up on that reality show?”

  “She was defending herself,” Polaire said.

  “My granddaughters love them some Crown.”

  “If you take one, mister, it would help my dad get a promotion at work.” Nigel smiled.

  The man grunted. “I’ll pass the word,” he said.

  And that’s how it went. Dozens of people passed by. Polaire took a bunch of photos. The boxes were soon nearly empty.

  “Maybe I give the next people a little makeup?” Polaire tapped Nigel’s head. “A darkener to bring more of an authentic atmosphere?”

  “What is it with you trying to make everyone look blacker?” I asked.

  “Not blacker. Browner. Don’t you think rich brown skin is beautiful?” She pinched my cheek. “No blue veins. No irritated reds. Just smooth, gorgeous brown.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was shitting me.

  The sun was setting when we realized that our otherwise successful plan had a flaw: no bathroom facilities. Nig
el announced he had to go. I concurred that I was in the same leaky boat.

  “Me three,” Polaire said.

  There were several shelters, as they were called, positioned around the Tiko. I had been taught to avoid the shelters growing up, as most residents referred to them as flytraps. But it seemed like some effort had been made to upgrade them to a reasonable level of safety and security. The one nearest to our setup, a flytrap with an orange-and-white-polka-dot roof, was clean swept and guarded by potted plants around the perimeter.

  But as we approached the shelter, I realized how shabby the Tiko actually looked. Yes, the high-density, brick living units were still intact. But gutters dangled from brackets. Paint flaked from doorsills. And basketball-size chunks of earth were missing as if someone had gone at the grounds with a giant ice cream scoop.

  Near the shelter, a streetlight had been knocked over, the light’s globe shattered, the globe crystals scattered like salt across a marble counter.

  “That y’all?” someone said. A man crossed the grass, avoiding the strange potholes in long strides. His dreads frolicking with his motion, I didn’t recognize him as Supercargo until he was nearly upon us. “What y’all doing up in here?”

  Nigel hugged Supercargo. “Mr. Jo Jo and Ms. Polaire took pictures of Dad with some people to make some advertisements to post on the Net so Dad can impress his boss and get a fat raise,” he said. “This is Mr. Jo Jo and Ms. Polaire.”

  Supercargo gave Jo Jo a pound and Polaire a cheek kiss.

  “Didn’t I meet y’all at this one’s wedding?” Supercargo asked.

  I wanted to correct the flap, since he was clearly confusing Polaire for Jo Jo’s ex, but Jo Jo intervened. “You met me, bro.”

  “Well, either way,” Supercargo said, “you can’t be using these.” He glanced around. “Even if the popos are playing hide and seek. Come use my place.”

  * * *

  —

  I never visited Supercargo in his nest because of my fear of the Tiko, its inhabitants, and the goings-on. I was aware of the oddness of these feelings. After all, this had been my home first. My culinary-school-trained mother and professor father picked this place as the launching pad for our family. Rougher elements of the City’s black community didn’t become the key demographic of the Tiko until their developments and neighborhoods were razed to build that NASCAR track, that apple orchard, that megamall, all following a series of unfortunate calamities, some man-made, others heaven-sent.

  We climbed the narrow stairs of building number seven. My building had been number fourteen, but the hallway smelled the same, the same sharp stink from the chipping green paint I always imagined was full of lead specifically placed to sap the intelligence of any kid unlucky enough to eat it.

  “This reminds me of my grandmother’s flat in Tunisia,” Polaire said.

  “Did your gramma like to toke up?” Supercargo asked.

  “All the time,” Polaire said.

  Nigel giggled. Some boys sat on the third-story landing, smoking weed. They tightened up when they saw us but immediately decided we weren’t a threat and went back to smoking and talking.

  This was an L-shaped building. Some were square blocks. Others, like the one I grew up in, were long rectangles. We traveled down a hall and hung a sharp left past the elevators. The elevators were a great idea, but they hadn’t worked even when I was a kid, and none of the adults I encountered back then recalled them working. If you wanted to get anywhere in the Tiko, you had to do it under your own power.

  We passed an open unit where tidy-looking white people in business casual clothing sat upright on a couch. One man, his hair neatly parted, loosely lolled his head. The women on either side of him were zonked out also. One of the boys from the hallway checked his device clock and stepped into the unit. The trio’s time was up. The Tiko was a good place to find your jollies for those with free right-of-access. Fly in from out of town. Stop at the Tiko for a tune-up and make your noon meeting with time to spare.

  Supercargo opened the door to his apartment, and a musky but not entirely unpleasant smell, like that of a recently burned forest, filled the hallway.

  “Welcome to Supercargo’s abode,” Supercargo said. “Super-cargo’ll be your guide to all things Supercargo. Please leave all negativity outside. If you can’t, please leave yourself outside.” He took Polaire’s hand high and guided her into the unit. The rest of us followed.

  “I’ll give y’all the tour.” He gestured around the room, explaining that we were standing in the den, dining room, computer center, and kitchen, all of which happened to double or quintuple, you see, as his bedroom.

  “Who sleeps back there?” Polaire pointed at a door in back.

  “Uncle Tyrod.” Supercargo chuckled. “He’s probably knocked out. Ladies first.”

  Polaire excused herself to the restroom. Nigel had gone right to a large TV and activated a video game.

  “Nice place you got here,” Jo Jo said. “Reminds me of my college pad.”

  “This is so cool.” Nigel hopped onto his haunches.

  “That boy act like he don’t get out.”

  “Dad doesn’t allow video games.”

  Polaire reentered carrying a small djembe drum. She sat next to Jo Jo on the sofa. They patted the membrane arrhythmically, making animal noises with their mouths.

  “This reminds me of my visit to Mauritania when I was a child. Those savages would…”

  In the restroom, I took my time collecting myself. I cupped cold water in my hand and popped a Plum. I smoothed my eyebrows with wet thumbs. I spun on my heel and did finger guns. I squatted in place and rubbed my knuckles along the bristly fibers of the rug. I was just ascending when I heard a scream from the main room.

  A giant stood in the room.

  “What kind of party y’all having up in here?” It was Uncle Tyrod. He stank of gingerroot. His black hedge of an Afro probably hadn’t been trimmed in months, if not years. The hair seemed to reach in all directions like an animated shadow. How long since last I saw him? Five years? Twenty-five?

  “How’s your daddy?” he said, looking down on me. I’d forgotten how tall he was. His fingernails were brown, at least two inches long, and curled like pork rinds.

  “He’s fine.” I was struggling not to look disgusted.

  “I guess I look different,” he said.

  “Little bit,” I said.

  “He one of yorn?” Uncle Ty knuckle-pointed. I told him Nigel was indeed mine. When he asked about the white people, I told him that they didn’t belong to anyone.

  Lean and muscular from his job delivering furniture, Uncle Ty had been the one all the Tiko women loved, everyone loved. He was charming, a man’s man who could cook a pot of gumbo, then go out and beat anyone in a footrace. Not anymore.

  Now Uncle Ty was shapeless and hairy and generally seemed like something that had crawled from a swamp. Something inside me twisted and fell over. My father and Uncle Ty had never exactly seen eye to eye. Sir thought of Uncle Ty as common and not living up to his potential. Uncle Ty saw Sir as confused and siddity. But they were both strong men in their own right, the patriarchs of strong houses. The last time I saw them just kicking it together was in our old unit. Sir wore an argyle sweater vest. Uncle Ty in his oversize jersey called Sir “Carlton.” But Sir was hardly a paragon of fatherhood these days. And Uncle Ty—he was hardly even a person now.

  Of course, Uncle Ty wasn’t my real uncle any more than Supercargo was my real cousin. The authorities often threw people together with no regard for their connections or lack thereof. If you needed a place to call home, you had no right to be choosy. That’s how two grown men of different generations came to live together.

  “Sorry,” Jo Jo said, gulping. “So sorry. I must have caught a bad one earlier.”

  “You had me so worried.” Polaire stroked his h
air and kissed his forehead.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Jo Jo,” Supercargo said. “I feel kinda the same way when I drink lactose.”

  Uncle Ty sat on a stool. He seemed dreamy-eyed. “Y’all like my place.”

  “It ain’t your place no more, Unc,” Supercargo said. “I’m on the rent-control papers.”

  “Whoa,” Jo Jo said. He stood. Polaire tried to stop him, but he shrugged her off and went to the mantel above the bricked-over fireplace. “It’s you.”

  “How does it compare to your crib?” Uncle Ty asked.

  “My house is okay,” Jo Jo said. “It’s empty of the people I want to see and hear though.” He glanced at Polaire. “Except for this one.” He asked if he could pick up the framed paper on the mantel.

  “I was possessed.” Uncle Ty forced his way into the spot between Polaire and Supercargo. It was a big sofa, but the middle of the thing sagged so that the three of them fell in together. Even Supercargo looked uncomfortable.

  “You don’t need to talk about problems, Unc,” Supercargo said, “not tonight.”

  “That minister who used to check on me said I’m supposed to talk,” Uncle Ty said, “and ask for forgiveness. I spent five years in Woodville before they transferred me to City Pen Special with the other crazies.”

  Supercargo stood up and grabbed Uncle Ty’s arm to pull him to his feet, but it didn’t work. Supercargo wasn’t strong enough.

  “What’s this about?” Polaire said.

  “I ate my boy,” Uncle Ty pointed his knuckle at me, “your cousin Jacques.”

  “Ho ho ho.” Polaire placed her fingertips against her neck. “You’re him? Le Cannibale Noir?” She snapped a shot.

  “I had a nightmare where I was buried under the ground. I had dirt in my eyes and mouth, but I could hear footsteps over my head.” Uncle Ty shook his head. “I was scared, and it felt real. I knocked myself out inside the dream. Then a mob with broomsticks was chasing me across a hot place, and sand turned to waves of water that washed me away. Next I knew, I was in a valley where the Devil was waiting with a pack of hellhounds. The Devil looked like a normal dude in a tracksuit, but I knew it was the Devil all the same—don’t ask me how I knew, I just did. The hellhounds weren’t even pit bulls, just Snoopy dogs—you know, beagles—but I knew they were hellhounds all the same. I run as fast as I could, but they was after me. Seemed like no matter how fast I run, they was on top of me. I climbed a mountain of dirt, and I was happy because I knew I was free. The Devil and hellhounds were ghost, and I was by myself. But my stomach was sunk in like I was wasting away. So I got on my knees and dug out all the seeds and ate them. But when I woke up for real, I was in the kitchen.” Ty pointed at the stove. “Little Jacques was in the stew pot—what was left of him—and my stomach was swole full.”