If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  That big, happy young man in the truck: What could he possibly need from her now?

  She heard Jubilee’s voice in her mind: “Just ask.” Now, that’s a prayer.

  CHAPTER 4

  At first, Khalil sat in the truck’s backseat. It was hard and shallow, but Lillie had insisted. Rayne tried to reassure her, first that the truck had airbags, and second that they would not decapitate her son. When Khalil protested that he couldn’t see anything, she brought up the old booster seat from the basement. It smelled of mildew, but when Rayne slammed it down, Khalil sat on it, because Rayne said that they had to get going, period. By the time they drove through Delaware, Khalil had eaten three bites of a sandwich, played with his handheld video game, drunk a bottle of water, and burned his mouth taking a sip of Rayne’s coffee from the ribbed steel thermos. Soon, he had to go to the bathroom.

  When they came out of the rest area, Khalil hopped into the front seat and watched pointedly for Rayne’s response. Rayne reached behind them for the booster seat, motioned for Khalil to stand, and then slid the thing under the boy and motioned for him to sit. Khalil made a face at the smell.

  “You wanna see out, don’t you? No point sitting up here and looking at the dashboard. ’Sides, I need you up where the air bags can do some good. If you’re too low down, they just knock you out…” Then he handed the iPhone to Khalil and showed him how to plug it into the truck’s radio through a wire in the glove box.

  “You got gloves in there?”

  “Nope. My grandfather said that his father used to keep gloves in his—and a gun.”

  “A gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They carried guns way back then?”

  “Yeah. In the country.”

  “They were, like, gangster. They carry guns now?” He was feeling through the wires, half expecting a pistol to materialize in a corner crevice.

  “Naw. Stop with the guns. Now, if you can figure out how to get the music on, then DJ for us. If you can’t, though, we’ll put on the radio, because I can’t stop and look while I’m driving, and I can’t stand no whole lot of questions that you can figure out yourself.”

  Khalil nodded his head seriously. They both knew that the last warning had been unnecessary. Although Khalil could chatter and play, given an adult piece of equipment or paperwork, such as Rayne’s construction documents, and a stated mission, Khalil could also puzzle silently by himself for three-quarters of an hour or more. As he played with the dial and buttons, Khalil fingered the latch on the glove box, which he now called the gun box, and doled out other questions, slowly, one every few miles, and with as much nonchalance as he could affect. “So, Dad, you drove down here before? Did you used to, like, live down there, in the country?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When you was my age?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then you left and came to Philly?”

  “I went back and forth for a while.”

  “How come?”

  Rayne didn’t answer at first. He adjusted his back with a tilt to his shoulders and a customary impatience, releasing a series of pops that relaxed and comforted him. Then he sighed heavily. Lillie was protective of Khalil—“I haven’t had any man since his father,” she’d told him early on, “because I don’t want him to be confused.”

  Had Rayne “confused” him, in their private times, here in the truck, alone, or crouching together under the overhang in the backyard, where they raked through architectural details of once-proud buildings, feeling a primitive enjoyment of the stored wealth in the plaster moldings, cast-iron ornaments, steel cable, and stone carvings? Should he have stopped him from calling him Dad in the first instance?

  And since Rayne was not his father, what did Khalil need to know about Rayne’s inner life, his family, or his past? Did he need to know about men going to prison and mothers leaving? Did he need to know how much Rayne did not know, and how it ached? Maybe Khalil didn’t need to know any of it. Or maybe he asked because he already knew. That was the most likely. This fatherless child had felt the traces of Rayne’s own abandonment; he’d sensed the loneliness that murmured beneath Rayne’s life like an underground stream, threatening to erode every good thing he managed to build over it. Surely Khalil had whiffed it, like mildew coming off the booster seat. And surely he needed to know, if not now, then soon, that men, even young men, had to fortify themselves internally, to stretch supports from where they stood to whatever wall would hold.

  ———

  If Rayne were Khalil’s biological father, he’d say: this is the family curse, this clinging and abandonment—cutting off each other like soldiers in the Civil War lopped off diseased hands, only to feel each throbbing digit for the rest of their lives. These are the strengths: an appetite for work, the blessed ability, deserved or not, to sleep through the night, intuition, when we have the sense to trust it. These things you must guard against: stubbornness, alcohol, ear infections, athlete’s foot.

  In fact, Rayne didn’t know Khalil’s inheritance, only his young and certain ability to choose. And now that the boy had chosen him, Rayne felt himself responding, not with a warm, soft-edged love, but with a protective fierceness that stunned him.

  He felt it at the school closing exercises, when the teacher forgot to call Khalil’s name for honor roll. What the fuck? Rayne felt himself starting to rise up out of his seat, a six-foot-four-inch, thick-necked bulky black man who had barely perched himself on the folding chairs in the 1970s-era cafeteria-turned-auditorium. When the teacher saw him, she quickly righted herself. (“And last, but certainly not least, our own Khalil Nixon…”) That evening, going home in the truck, Lillie and Khalil had laughed about Rayne’s momentary lapse until tears slid sideways from their matching pairs of almond eyes.

  He’d just felt it on this drive, standing in the Maryland House restroom, where a man’s eyes lingered too long on Khalil’s thin brown form standing next to him at the urinal. You lost somethin’?

  He had begun to understand what he used to think was Lillie’s overprotection of the boy. She protected Khalil from Rayne. She protected him from the sexual heat that had brought them together. Back in his downtown apartment, he used to bend Lillie over the kitchen counter on a summer night and spread both their arms out wide on the cool black stone counter, and they two would groan and buck and shout with abandon. Lillie’s lanky, athletic body somehow complemented his big, bulky frame. She’d matched him in energy and need. Then, after the first year, desire bloomed into a fullness neither had ever known or hoped to sustain. But then he moved in, and she cooled.

  He knew that the kitchen was out, but hadn’t expected that she’d shush him in bed, reminding him that Khalil, in his room, on the other side of the bathroom, might not be asleep. He hadn’t known that she would try to circumscribe, rather than welcome, his constant improvements in the house, as if to keep him from imprinting on the place. And he’d been hurt by her vigilant watch over his interactions with Khalil. He’d think to himself that Lillie went way beyond what was necessary. Then himself would think back: How would you know?

  The boy began to imitate Rayne’s turns of phrases, his hand movements, and even his big, rolling walk. Rayne felt both flattered and trapped—by mother and son.

  But now that Rayne, too, had the boy’s face and hands, his likes and needs, in his mind, he could begin to understand and forgive Lillie. At demolition jobs, Rayne reminded his men to harvest wooden balustrades and wrought-iron handles that the boy would enjoy. He knew his food preferences. Khalil loved old-time watermelons with black seeds, cheese tortellini from the Italian market; the flat section, rather than the drumette, of chicken wings baked in soy sauce and orange juice.

  “I never had a father,” he said, not answering Khalil’s question about why Rayne had traveled back and forth between Philadelphia and South Carolina. “So I don’t always know how to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Answer your questions.”

&
nbsp; Khalil had found out how to search music on Rayne’s iPhone according to listing by artist, song, and album. Now, as Rayne tried to call up a set of criteria to determine how to answer a seemingly simple question, Khalil looked to see what he recognized. His mother liked Tracy Chapman, so he played one of her songs, and then made a face.

  “Nah, don’t change it,” Rayne said. “That’s almost country. And when I first used to drive down here, that’s all you could get on the radio. That and Christian stations.”

  “This a long drive.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Who drove you, your grandfather?”

  “The first time, I think. Could’ve been more than that once; I can’t remember. Prolly was.” He made a memory, but the image that came back was the standard one that blotted out the others: his trying to pee into a jar in the car without spilling, so that they did not have to stop and risk his grandfather’s running into any highway patrols or official people at rest stations. “But then after that, I drove myself. And I listened to a lot of country music!”

  Khalil slumped in his seat.

  “Look for Ray Charles. I’ma show you country music you’ll like. Seriously. Fire it up.”

  ———

  Rayne’s body was already remembering the feel of pounding down I-95 at sixteen years old, driving alone, scared, scared, scared, in Bobo’s 1996 Ford Ranger pickup short-bed, in July, with no air-conditioning. At night, in his sleep, he could feel the road vibrating into his body.

  Bobo bought Fords because King had bought Fords. This one had been new then, compact, so that they could park it in the city, “rough little cuss,” Bobo liked to say, dependable, although dicey in the snow with its two-wheel drive. Rayne’s current Toyota—not the big Ford he took on the road—was the contemporary equivalent, even smaller, able to park anywhere, and although built on a truck chassis, easy enough to steer so that Lillie could take it, without too much complaint, to Fresh Grocer.

  In his mind’s eye, Rayne checked the glove compartment, where they used to leave the keys back before crack moved south to make small-time rural thieves as crazy as urban ones. Bobo also kept the manual there, pristine in its plastic, and his many maps, the very ones Rayne had used to navigate, outlined in yellow from the AAA headquarters in Philadelphia.

  Bobo had told him to use the cashbox under the bed and to stop only at national chain motels, and only if he had to. Though big, Rayne had a young face, so people wondered aloud where he was going alone, and why. He told them that he was being sent to his great-grandmother’s farm in South Carolina to help her take down her old hog houses, and clerks and gas attendants and onlookers would laugh and joke about the smell.

  “Boy, you got a job ahead o’ you!”

  “How many hog houses she got? You don’t know? You gonna know soon.”

  Rayne didn’t know how he’d come upon the hog house story, except that Selma had still kept a couple of hogs when he went down to live with her at age seven. It was years later that Rayne realized how well his dead great-grandfather must have built the several houses that stood strong despite years of moisture and muck. Even after Selma stopped raising hogs, the pens and the houses stood intact, giving off their complex stink. It was a shame, Selma said, because it meant you couldn’t hardly use the wood for anything else. You couldn’t take them down and build them into a shed or shore up a loose floorboard from underneath. So they stayed there.

  Joking about the hog houses distracted people from paying too much attention to Rayne’s big young black male self, or wondering why he was driving that self alone, or why he tilted with impatience as they asked him one question after another, or why he spoke, as people said in the South, as if he thought he was white. He’d tell them, if they asked, that he’d grown up with Selma in Sou’ Ca’lina, which was true, but had moved to Philadelphia, where they all talked like this, which was also true, and that now he spent summers goin down to give her a hand, which he’d do this year, at least.

  People observed his size and strength and his studied control and said that his great-grandmother, she must love to see him come and hate to see him go, that is if he put in a day’s work like it looked like he ought to be able to. He’d smile a half smile and allow as his Nana Selma could work a guy pretty hard. Then he’d take his sandwiches back to the car with a couple of bottles of Coke, and make the next leg of his illegal drive across state lines, still scared and alone, with the Pennsylvania learner’s permit that stated explicitly that the learner was permitted to drive only with an adult licensee in the car.

  When he’d told the story of his drive to Lillie, he added, as an afterthought, that Bobo had called him from jail and told him to get the truck out of the city immediately.

  She’d listened carefully and nodded. “So, at the time, did you realize that the truck probably wasn’t paid for?”

  They were lying together in bed. Rayne rubbed his hand back and forth over the smooth curve of her belly. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I felt so scared of being caught…”

  “So, I guess so. You were, like, always trying to be the parent, weren’t you?”

  He’d shrugged, but in fact felt an unfamiliar recognition. Who knew? Selma used to complain that Bobo had never grown up, and warned Rayne not to follow suit. Lying in bed next to Lillie, telling her the crazy story of driving the Ford Ranger to Selma’s, he felt something akin to relief.

  Rayne decided that Khalil did not need to know any more about the circumstances of the drive. He didn’t tell him about throwing the gun from the glove box into a ditch outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia, or the fear that made him want to relieve himself there, too, except that he was determined to be a man, and disciplined.

  Rayne was determined to be a man for this boy, now, too, and he sensed that this entire situation was still fraught for him. It was hard to tell it nice and easy, or answer the likely follow-ups: Your grandfather went to prison? What for? For how long? Did he do it? Did he do what they said?

  Ray Charles had finished and a Richard Pryor cut began to play. “Hey, Little Man,” Rayne said. “Find some other music. Something with a beat.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Reggaeton came on and Rayne debated whether or not to make a big deal of turning it off, too, since neither of them spoke Spanish. While the music played, he remembered telling Lillie:

  But what the hell else could I do? I was a kid. Somebody tells you to drive the truck to South Carolina, you drive the truck to South Carolina. That’s not being a parent. That’s taking orders.

  Being a parent means taking care of things. You only had a learner’s permit, but you drove the truck. You were down there in South Carolina, but you managed to get family members to clean his apartment, divvy up his stuff, and rent the place out.

  If he hadn’t been in jail, he would have taken care of his stuff himself. He was in jail.

  He was in jail because he shot up his TV.

  No, not because he shot up his TV, because the cops came, and he fought ’em at the door.

  Same diff.

  It’s not; he’s a black man in America.

  He knew he was black when he picked up the gun and opened the door.

  Let’s not keep having this conversation.

  But you still had to be the parent.

  Yeah, well, I never thought of it like that.

  Lillie had suggested that maybe it was easier for Bobo to blame himself than to take in the loss of King, the man the whole family spoke of as a legend, and, so far as Rayne could tell, the only man who had ever truly loved him. Bobo’s personal Bible text, given to him during the Second World War by Selma’s favorite old preacher, applied: “If the householder had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would have kept watch.” No matter the explanations, however, or Bobo’s culpability, eventually everything was taken from him.

  Everything except that 1996 Ford Ranger pickup short-bed that Rayne drove to Selma’s. In
the Graterford prison AA group, and under the sway of an old lifer-turned-Muslim, Bobo likened himself to a woman who had been raped. That’s what he said to Rayne on visits. “That’s why people use that word: they get fucked. All this time, that’s what it was to me. No matter what I did, I got fucked. My mother lef’ me with Selma, then my daughter lef’ me with you. Then the prison terms—for nothing. I have done things that I deserve being punished for. Make no fuckin mistake. But that’s not why they got me in. They got me in on bullshit.”

  Then he asked: “But what was she wearing?”

  “Who?”

  “When a woman gets raped, you gotta ask, what was she wearing?”

  “No, Pops, I don’t think that’s legal to ask.”

  “I’m talking about real people with common sense. What do they ask? You say: She got raped. They say: What was she wearing? The old-timer told me to use that common sense: look, if I got screwed, what did I do to invite it? I ain’t say ‘deserve’ it; I say ‘invite’ it.”

  Dumb little shit. That’s what you get. Rayne knew that this was not a new idea from some old-timer. This was how Bobo had always thought. It never occurred to him that Rayne could have been arrested twice over.

  ———

  “Dad?” Khalil’s touching his arm made Rayne suspect that he’d probably already called him once over the music, although tentatively. “Can I crawl into the backseat and go to sleep for a while?”

  “Sure, son. Wait, lemme pull over,” he said as Khalil threw himself, chuckling, over the seat back.

  “Pull over? Dad, c’mon!”