Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  Tabbs directs the leaf-wrapped bundles of fish toward Ruggles, who accepts them with hands the color of dark soil, a good three shades darker than the rest of his body as if he is wearing gloves.

  You want to fry these up?

  No. They’re for you.

  Back inside Ruggles gives the parcels of fish to his housekeeper. The men take seats in the parlor, a small pleasant room sparkling and grand with the eye-filling sight of red vases in the wide tall windows, vases around which nude black figures pursue each other in an endless procession. The housekeeper hurries in with a whistling teakettle and a single cup on a saucer. She sets cup-saucer on a slim table between Tabbs and Ruggles. Starts to pour. The spout releases water so slowly it takes a good minute to fill the cup, Tabbs and Ruggles waiting for filling to be done and the woman to quit the room.

  What’s up, homeskillet?

  You looking at it.

  I’m looking at it? I know there got to be more to see.

  Nothing to it. One day like any other.

  Uh huh. How those women treatin you?

  What women?

  What women? The ones that’s pretty as pee. You know how I like mine.

  I know.

  You run into a dry spell? Ruggles’s smile is even coyer now. Better get you some of that pussy oil from Wire.

  So we’re going to sit here talking about pussy?

  Homeskillet, you the one bringing me fish first thing in the morning. Sounds like a pussy problem to me.

  I wanted to catch you before you left.

  You could have caught me at the Home.

  Tabbs looks at the steaming cup of tea he hasn’t touched.

  I don’t know how you spend your days.

  What’s to know?

  Lots. Starting with who you fuckin.

  Dressed in a plain open-necked white shirt with black buttons and loose-fitting white pants encircled with a black leather belt, Ruggles sits with his left leg crossed over his right and his body inclined forward somewhat as if guarding his right side, a pose that seems to draw attention to his fit angles and lines while at the same time throwing his face in proud relief, a face exuding irrepressible vigor and excitement. His eyes do not smile when the mouth does, but his goatee moves with every facial expression like some adjustable ornament draped over his mouth. A lion’s mane of hair roars from his head, black intensity although he is starting to gray at the temples and his hairline is retreating from his forehead, low tide. Still no mistaking the sense of youthful accord in his features. Ruggles looks not yet fifty but long past forty with teeth that shine white when he speaks or smiles. When they first met—twenty years ago? or was it more? less? far less, yes? I was seven, give or take—at the Zoological Society Ruggles must have been roughly the same age as Tabbs is now.

  I’m not the only one out early. I saw Wire down by the church.

  Probably saying his good-byes.

  He’s set for travel?

  No, Ruggles says. He’s leaving us. Leaving Edgemere. Moving back to the city.

  Tabbs cannot prevent Ruggles from seeing his puzzled look.

  You didn’t know? He’s been telling everyone for weeks.

  Tabbs will say nothing about supping with Wire yesterday, about the camps and the amputations and the headache powder.

  I tried to talk him out of it.

  You should have saved your breath.

  Don’t hold it against him.

  Shutters, lattices, and doors are all flung open to the rare breeze on this hot day, the room flushed with light as if the ceiling has been lifted away. Tabbs suffers a miserable feeling of inner and outer lightness. He watches Ruggles lift his teacup with those glove-dark hands, slurp it empty, and return it to the saucer.

  It was getting cold, Ruggles says.

  Ruggles was never one to let anything go to waste, finding use for stale bread and flat beer and wormy meat. The hard impact of his presence, his fierce determined eyes, sharp chin, flat weak nose, and scrotum-shaped head, turns Tabbs’s mind to the Pygmy inside his bell-shaped cage, Tabbs a boy of Seven or eight and the Pygmy no taller than him, a grown man withstanding with silent grim impersonality the food pelted at him. Each day Tabbs would sneak inside the Ape House and quietly make his way to the Pygmy cage. Succeed in eliciting (aggravating?) the patrons’ disgust with made-up facts and chronicles about the Pygmy. As if by unspoken agreement with Tabbs, the Pygmy would act out with brazen savagery the peculiar traits of his species, gnashing his teeth, flailing his arms, gyrating his loin-clothed pelvis, and massaging his bare chest. Heedless of the bread, candy, cookies, apples, oranges, bananas, pears, and peanuts thrown into his cage until he took the offensive, his spit and piss driving patrons away. Tabbs would eat or pocket much of what had fallen short of the cage, what the Pygmy’s short arms couldn’t reach through the bars. One afternoon like so many before, Tabbs found himself in the company of a misshapen man who it would seem had not fled with the others. The Pygmy was aware of him too. The Pygmy began the first assault of many on the man, but the man only lowered his face, taking spit on the lapels of his jacket and the crown of his stovepipe hat, and urine wherever the directed streams found their mark. In this way the man endured fluids for a good quarter hour or more. The Pygmy ceased his attack for reasons only he knew and for several moments stood there in his cage gazing out at the spit-speckled man dripping from chest to shoes with piss. Then he turned away and sat down in a back area of his cage, relishing the first of his bananas. The man who had stood his ground calmly invited Tabbs to join him at his home for a well-cooked meal. Tabbs accepted without hesitation, and sometime later that night, after the man had taken a bath and changed his clothing, after both he and Tabbs had enjoyed a long rambling dinner, both belly-full, sometime during the course of that night—most of the details now are lost in Tabbs’s memory—the man offered Tabbs employment. The following evening Tabbs went to work for Ruggles—that was the man’s name—finding customers for Ruggles’s black box, Tabbs quickly realizing an easy competence in the arts of procuring and persuading so that the line of entry to the black box on average would stretch twenty men deep. Get them in, get them out. The black box a place of pleasure but hardly a place of comfort, barely long and wide enough for one person to stretch out in, let alone two, the ceiling so low that you had to stoop at all times, and completely cut off from light. Still, men came one after the next, spilling in and out from opening to closing. Seeing how well Tabbs conducted this enterprise, Ruggles brought Tabbs along with him some years later when he went into lending.

  I didn’t think you wanted the tea. Ruggles imbibes his own cup of tea.

  Of course I wanted it, Tabbs says. And I want it still. It is not the smallness of his beginnings he fears. Who he is now is whom he has chosen to become.

  I’ll have her bring another cup.

  I was not. Now I am. Watching his own changing selves, malleable shapes lacking advantage of birth and education; resourceful and limitless and fearless. Beating the odds. Tabbs wondering whether there are any others like him and the Pygmy and Tom who have escaped the cages of their keepers and refused the roles held out to them. He sees the darkness inside his head filling with bananas and pears and apples. Hears peanuts clinking against the sides of his skull. Looks and sees a fresh steaming cup on the table. Takes it up with violent speed, sips forcefully, and returns it so loudly to the saucer he fears he has broken it.

  Ruggles looks embarrassed, embarrassed for Tabbs. Ruggles has sunk back into the chair, into the softness of the cushions, his legs crossed easily in front of him. You might need still another, he says. And a fish. Smiling the words.

  Hot fluid rushing inside him, Tabbs feels an ambiguous comfort. I need your influence with a certain matter.

  Okay, Ruggles says. What?

  It’s the mother.

  Tabbs observes the friendly uncertainty scattered across Ruggles’s face. On second thought, Ruggles does not really look entirely like the Pygmy.

  Wha
t about her?

  I need you to send her away. Off the island. Just for a few days. Tabbs tries to say it as lightly as possible.

  Ruggles continues to look at him. So now it comes out.

  She commands his attention. I have to put an end to it, just long enough. I’ve tried talking to her. But how can I stop her from coming when he begs for her?

  You can’t.

  No.

  So put an end to it, all of it, for good.

  What?

  You’ve milked it for all you can.

  And gotten what, Ruggles? You found the boy.

  And you think that’s enough? Tabbs shakes his head. Can’t believe I’m hearing you say that, Ruggles. Not you.

  That’s the experience, homeskillet. I tried to warn you. Hard head, soft behind.

  Hell, I’m soft all over. But that ain’t telling me much.

  Dripping light, several swimmers outside seem to (semblance) climb in through the windows. Towel themselves dry with shadow.

  You listening?

  I’m listening.

  Ruggles makes a gesture as if to say that anything he might add would be useless. He is displeased with the turn the conversation has taken and remains silent for a while staring at the floor. Tabbs hates feeling that Ruggles knows his mind, assumptions rooted in the certainties of their long history, Ruggles filling in the blanks about all that lay between Tabbs’s first efforts before the war to free the boy from General Bethune to the freeing itself that leaf-strewn day last fall when Tabbs found Mr. David at the Home shortly after he and the mother had arrived together here on Edgemere. Knows too that correlated moment several weeks later when Tabbs returned from the city carrying the weightless boy in his arms.

  I can’t chance a week to see this through?

  So see it through. You don’t need me. You brought her here. You brought them both.

  No, Ruggles. It must come from you. She will listen to you.

  Ruggles looks up from the floor into Tabbs’s face. He looks as if he wants to erase Tabbs with his gaze. Then I better leap to it, he says.

  Tabbs says nothing in response. In a moment’s concentrated rush, he realizes that he has insulted Ruggles, never his intention.

  Where must I send her for your week? Say it and I’ll obey.

  Tabbs accepts the remark with good grace and continues to meet Ruggles’s gaze, every tendon in his body throbbing, prepared for flight. The small room feels too full with them both, with them and the swimmers and the vases. Now the difficult task of restoring the equilibrium, but no apology is likely to impose its will on Ruggles. Strong-headed. Stubborn. A reconciliation best left for another day. Tabbs looks about the room with the sensuous approval of someone who knows it well. Draws up a name—Wire—that pinches his tongue.

  Of course. Throw him in this too.

  Tabbs lets the comment drip away, him here, Ruggles there, the separate curves of a parenthesis, space between them. She can help Wire settle in, he says.

  Ruggles takes up the tea (cold now) and gives himself time to drink it in silence, dark hand strangling the white cup. Well, homeskillet. He balances the empty cup improbably on his knee. I’m glad you came for something important.

  Tabbs starts back, the beauty of day and all the bright-colored dhows tethered in the harbor growing strong in him. Each hull tilts toward its neighbor, two conjoining in a clap. He catches himself beginning again the attempts at self-persuasion, self-justification. Doesn’t relish the thought of punishing her, if that’s what it is, punishing the boy. Putting another bit of separation between them. What God join let no man tear asunder. Not his intention. Never his intention. For he must do what she can’t, restrained as she is by maternal attachments. No backing down. He never would have freed the boy from the Bethunes unless he had it inside to follow the idea wherever it took him. Remembers when the Bethune woman with a relaxed detached air took him into the stale dusty room where the boy was, a sight that raised in him a feeling of straightforward disgust. Skin and bones. Even the skin not fitting right, gone lax, like hand-me-down clothes three sizes too big. Something in him had wanted to kill the white woman, a familiar predatory self fully awakened. He pushed down the urge. Simply collected the boy as best he could and left the apartment, the glow of revenge lessening with each downward stair. He knew he had his work cut out for him, getting the boy back to health, that before all else. So much to recover, restore. But he told himself, I have the boy. Stalled, dragged back, I finally have the boy, Tom.

  I want her.

  I’m sorry.

  Bring her to me.

  I’m sorry.

  And you’ll bring her.

  That isn’t possible.

  But I’ve asked you.

  She has left you. It’s only me now.

  You took her away.

  I’m sorry. She has left—

  The boy turns his face. You turn too and see her watching from the open door, fresh from slaughtering chickens, her hands and forearms lathered in feathers.

  He feels a satisfaction that settles his mind: he is doing nothing time will not justify. What it will mean to give Blind Tom back to the world, back to the Race, and put the lie once and for all to the vicious claims for the Negro’s lack of intellect and refinement, genius and culture—the collateral and collective gains of his personal campaign against the Bethunes.

  The waves are soft and almost noiseless, starting from far out and breaking in long smooth lines at the shore. (Whatever the eye wants.) A bell rings faintly behind him. The shore swells under a confused sweep of voices, Tabbs pulled into the sight of her marshaling a herd of sea-bathing children, safety and sanity, her watertight garments overspilling with the noise of gold and silver bracelets.

  The boy makes a brutal series of movements from the chair to the piano then back again. Sits down on top of the black lacquered surface, face angled toward the floor six feet below, forehead greasy with sweat, legs swinging. Is the boy conscious of him? He has said nothing since Tabbs came into the auditorium an hour ago, two. Has he really sat for this long simply looking at the boy from a comfortable distance, following with glassy attentiveness an agitated body scrambling from one side of the chapel to the other?

  You can say if you like.

  The boy’s voice startles Tabbs. I’ve just been waiting here, waiting for you, he says.

  To do it now.

  Yes. Tabbs moves forward and takes a seat in the front row.

  You like the bottom more?

  He doesn’t understand the boy’s meaning.

  Stay if you like. Wait and wait and wait.

  Tabbs studies the coded mysteries, registering all the details of the boy’s clothing and grooming.

  The boy places his palms against his chest, a circular expanse of fingernails budding against light-colored cloth. Why did the noise go away?

  Indeed, the Home is unusually quiet. No rush of whispers, scampering feet.

  Where are the children? Where did they go?

  I guess they’ve finally learned to stay out of your way. That’s something.

  Never enough of me.

  I suppose not.

  They miss me.

  I’m sure they do. But don’t worry. They can have you when we’re done.

  The boy begins rocking back and forth where he sits, arms rowing his torso into motion.

  I thought you were about to play? The boy’s torso snaps back and forth. Tabbs can’t trust the boy’s ability to stay perched. I never told you about the first time I saw you in concert many years ago. I can still remember the fine suit you were wearing and all the people who had come to hear you. How excited they were.

  The boy rocks still, upright as before. They carried trees onto the stage.

  Flowers, Tabbs says.

  Round trees.

  So you remember those times?

  I live in this body.

  You remember?

  They kissed my hands.

  You must have enjoyed it.

>   The boy says nothing.

  Can you show me some of what you used to do?

  You need to hear?

  Yes, yes, I do.

  Why?

  Well, for one thing I’m now your manager.

  The words don’t have an impact on the boy’s face. The boy’s shoulders move once twice as if by their own accord.

  How bout it? I would really like to hear you.

  And you will pay.

  Is it money that you want?

  The boy says neither yes nor no but, Anything else?

  You know there are thousands of people who will pay to hear you, Tom. Thousands.

  I feel wonderful.

  You should because you can have it all again, all and more, anytime you want.

  One song on top of the other.

  Yes.

  Two niggers. Three.

  Yes.

  You will take me to all the places?

  I will.

  And bring the country.

  Yes.

  Tom leans forward, the piano supporting him in silence. I never had one like you.

  That’s right, Tom, you haven’t. And I promise you it will be nothing like before. We’re alike, you and I. Negroes.

  The boy does not speak his thoughts. Tabbs can hear his deep breath, his scent wafting down from high, filling the room. Darkness gaining, light an unneeded thing. He hasn’t asked for her. All this time and he hasn’t asked once. That much at least. Progress.

  Does it hurt? Tom asks.

  Does what hurt?

  Does it hurt to sit on your tail?

  Dr. McCune cleans his medical instruments, dipping each object in a glass of red wine diluted with several drops of water.

  You’re the nigger doctor, Tom says.

  Dr. McCune stops his preparations and stands over the seated Tom, considering the words. You remember me?

  I remember you. Your hands smell like eyes.

  Dr. McCune looks at his hands as if they belong to someone else. He holds them up and gives Tabbs a puzzled expression, but Tabbs stays where he is on the other side of the room, away from the Doctor and Tom, fearing that the Doctor expects him to sniff and offer an opinion. The Doctor requests soap and a fresh basin of water and washes his hands again, each finger receiving thorough and vigorous attention.