Velma felt her knees falling away at right angles, felt the curtain going up on a drama of none other than her own pantied stuff center stage. And so what? She didn’t have time to care, to pull the hospital gown down cause she was in the streets and in a tunnel on her hands and knees and burrowing under the quilts in M’Dear’s bed, mutton suet and sassafras oil warming her chest and cared for, cared for, and being fed tincture of something wonderful and awful from a spoon, washed down with chicken soup, while M’Dear told her that long tale of hers in a tongue not known then like Nowalemme dow ta slip Apraydelawd, not being real words till later. Speaking a special tale in a special voice and she up under the quilts sucking on a chicken bone, eager to crack the bone and crack the code, suck at the secret marrow of the thing. And M’Dear droning on: “Back in the days when the Earth was steady and the ground reliable under foot, we made our covenant with our Maker and were given our instructions …” And leading her on, into, down past familiar, drawing her from the known words and always ending talking about the power, the power available if we’d only look in that back-hall closet.
And damn if she didn’t want to get right up from between the healer’s hands, get up and quit being some “funnytime sandwich” as Mama Mae would say, and go ask her godmother about them things told at night fluffing up the pillow for her and smoothing down the sheet over the quilt to kiss her goodnight. All the talk that had begun the day Palma’d led her back by the hand from the marshes and M’Dear had said it was only proper to do one’s seeking on one’s knees, which shut Palma up and Mama Mae too. Get up and go seeking again, knock on all the doors in Claybourne and quick too before the procession began for real. Knock and be welcomed in and free to roam the back hall on the hunt for that particular closet with the particular hanging robe, coat, mantle, veil or whatever it was. And get into it. Sport it. Parade around the district in it so folks would remember themselves. Would hunt for their lost selves.
And hadn’t Nilda and Inez told her about hunting? Hadn’t Maazda explained what it was to stalk, to take over the hunted, but not with arrows or bullets but with the eye of the mind? And hadn’t she observed the difference, watched the different brands of hunting? The pulling of the bow, the pulling of the truck alongside the prey and mowing it down, taking it over. The cars pulling up alongside a woman or a kid ready to sell the self for a Twinkie. Bringing down a bird or a woman or a man stalked at a dance. Taking over a life. That was not hunting as the sisters explained it, sang it, acted it out. To have dominion was not to knock out, downpress, bruise, but to understand, to love, make at home. The keeping in the sights the animal, or child, man or woman, tracking it in order to learn their way of being in the world. To be at home in the knowing. The hunt for balance and kinship was the thing. A mutual courtesy. She would run to the park and hunt for self. Would be wild. Would look.
And up under the brass of horn and cymbals was the sister still singing faintly, “Wiiiillld women doan worrreeeee.” But it was hard to concentrate cause something was happening, she was about to surrender it up whatever it was. Well hell, she’d always been wild. And probably looked the perfect Halloween scare thing there on the stool with her matted hair and ashy legs and mouth crusty like something heaved up from the marshes.
“I might have died,” she said aloud and shuddered. And it was totally unbelievable that she might be anywhere but there. She tried to look around, to take in the healer, the people circling her, the onlookers behind. But there were so many other things to look at closer at hand. The silvery tendrils that fluttered between her fingers, extending out like tiny webs of invisible thread. The strands that flowed from her to Minnie Ransom to faintly outlined witnesses by the windows.
Doc Serge was studying the patient, watching the draping action of the rough white gown. He could do something with goods like that if he took hold of her right. She was studying the webbing, not certain she was fully conscious. How like the women in his stable years ago this woman was, women who studied themselves for some tangible measure of their allure, their specialness, but never quite knowing what it was. Money was the tangible evidence he offered of their attractiveness and his, their power and his, till they would do anything to keep his attention and his answers. He gave Obie’s wife his full attention and hugged himself. Someone would have to work with Obie now. He would work with this one. He chuckled and waited for Minnie to be done, to bring the woman through this first phase, to release her, to hand her over.
He’d have to handle it carefully and keep ole Faro well leashed and under control. It would be like grabbing for the rails and in grabbing you had to be careful. If you caught the rail wrong, you couldn’t get a foothold and you might wind up with a bunch of hot cinders down your neck from the stacks. A bad grip and a small bump over the old bridge would dump you right in the drink. An abutment coming up, racing into view as the train turned the bend, the slats of the fence merely brushing your ass if you were lucky, crushing if you weren’t. You could at least lose your hat.
They used to toast him back of the barbershop, were really toasting his hat. They called it the magic stetson, the kind of gray fedora Stagolee had killed Billy over. He’d been wise to get rid of it. Gone, there was nothing for his well-wishers to fasten on to in their need for legend and fable, nothing but what he hawked. “And that one cross the street?” And the men would press in the doorway. “Got jaws on her pussy that’d make a dead man come.” The need for magic, for legend, for the extraordinary so big, the courage to pursue so small, they would crowd him and leave him no space to turn around in and change.
Doc released his hold on himself and ran his hands over his hair. Later for hats, he chuckled to himself. There was work to do. What was Minnie fooling around about? The woman had come through already it seemed.
Doc plunged into a tomato handed him by one of the young nurses who always packed a lunch for these sessions. He smiled at her, at Minnie, at himself, widely showing all his wisdom teeth, the only thing displayed not purchased but well earned. Smiling because probing with his tongue the juicy flesh of the fruit and watching Obie’s wife come alive in a new way and ready for training, he could do nothing else.
Suddenly there was a rumbling which, though slight, captured most of the people’s attention because just at that moment the door to the hall opened. They expected to see a medicine cart being rolled in, or a laundry basket on the old-fashioned coasters, or a food truck loaded down with trays, its weight amplifying the wheel’s trundle. Fred Holt walked in, mouth open and one finger up, ready to ask how come the odd numbers on that side of the hall ran out at 31. But when he stepped into the room and spotted the gangster fella who was calling himself Doc Serge these days, and then, scanning the room, recognized the visitors who were looking at him in turn, checking their watches, frowning and turning away, he began to step back out. He’d expected a small office, a little desk, and a tidy nurse who would quietly direct him to Room 37 for a checkup. His eyes weren’t prepared for the expanse of the room or the crowd. And then it got dark and he got worried. But it was only that he had bumped into the light panel on the wall, trying to exit. It took a minute to get it together. What with the storm-blackened world outside and the sudden loss of light, it was quite dark but for the glint of metal and the sheen of cloth. And it took another minute for him to notice that the object of everyone’s attention was the pair of women near the window giving off all the light. One done up like a mummy in a shine-in-the dark shawl, it looked like. The other a feather-weight with fifty pounds of bracelets on. What the hell was going on? A séance or a jam session? What was going on? A couple of the doctors were trying to catch his eye with just that question. Prompt was one thing but this bus driver was two hours early.
He picked up his pace. It took one more minute to, one, flash the card the receptionist had given him, by way of saying he was there on his own business; two, to regret having done that, for who wants to know that the driver about to take you on the highway at fifty-five mi
les per hour is a sick man?; three, to figure out where he was and who was who. So this was the mojo lady he’d heard about. Kind of frisky-looking, he thought. Seemed like she should have some old-looking clothes on, beat-up slippers, and look like a frog.
He was working his way toward the front to take a good look, when Doc Serge started toward him. Fred thought he was about to be thrown out of the room, but the Doc fella was simply heading for the window to look out. Fistfuls of grit were being hurled against the panes. Schoolkids horsing around in the yard, he figured. But something about the way Doc was looking out of the window told Fred it wasn’t kids fooling around, but nature herself. Okay by him. It made more sense to get his checkup, grab a bite in the cafeteria if they had one, and hang around the place, maybe meet this healing lady and kill a half-hour or so until it was time to board the bus—than to try to stick to his original plan and get caught in a downpour.
He noticed there was another door. It probably led to a hallway where he would find the rest of the odd numbers, at least Room 37. Meanwhile, it felt okay to just be there. The longer he looked at the two women, especially the classy old broad, the better he felt. He glanced around the room, recognized a few familiar faces—riders, a neighbor, the boys from the barbershop. There was no one who looked like agitators or troublemakers to him. Porter had probably gotten that all wrong. It was beginning to raise sand out there, and Fred wondered if he’d closed the windows on the charter bus. If there was anything he could do without, it was a gritty seat and leaves down among the pedals. After he saw a doctor, maybe he would stroll down that way and check things out. A brown-skin girl in a green uniform, he noticed finally, was looking over his shoulder at the card he carried, Then she pointed toward the door at the other end of the room. So, he was being thrown out after all.
She might have died. Might have been struck by lightning where she sat. But then she might have died an infant gasping, but for M’Dear Sophie’s holding hands. Might have drowned in her baptism gown. Or legs wrapped round some strange man’s head, too strange for repetition ever, holding on to his ears lest he make a sudden move, balancing more than weight on the pin of her spine and thinking her heart would give out any minute and not because the fucking and sucking was all that petite mort good, but because this weirdo she’d picked up in the library of all places kept lifting his head every other stroke, his breath reeking up at her over her trembling belly, to tell her what he was going to do to her, crazy things he was going to do with broom handle and vacuum hose, as soon as he finished doing what he was doing to her. And how to pull away and get away and not be hurt? Who could tell what mad thing he was capable of? And of all things to be taking up precious space in her head, where strategies needed to be laid out and studied, but some odd piece of lesson overheard in M’Dear’s class about the master brain being in the uterus, where all ideas sprung from and were nurtured and released to the lesser brain in the head. And damned if it didn’t seem to be the case.
She might have fried in that SRO hotel that terrible summer on the road when some two-timed bitter wife sloshed gasoline under the door. Not her door but the door of a woman met on a march who wouldn’t hear of Velma and the kids sitting up all night in the bus station or taking a chance in the churchyard with blankets, but gave Velma a key to her room and gave her too the nightmare wife cursing through the door and flinging a book of matches in the puddle. And no phone in the room and the fire escape rickety and the kids, no matter how they yanked and shoved and screamed, moving like they were under water. And she was descending a rusty ladder that turned Lil James and Palma’s girls red, wondering what sort of lesson this would turn out to be when her lungs cleared and her head cleared and the anger, smoke, rage and soot gave her space to think and feel it through?
Might have bled to death in the Coke machine area because Emergency was full up and the head nurse was making it crystal clear that coloreds weren’t serviced there. Trailing blood through the ambulance yard, her bundled slip pressed against her head that’d been slam slam slammed hard against the concrete floor when a junky going nuts had been tossed in the cell with the women demonstrators while someone in front counted out the money for the fine very slowly.
But always there was a tug to come on, get up, move out nudging her back toward life. Even standing by the open drawer in the kitchen forgetting all she knew, even climbing into the oven forgetting who she was was tugged, was claimed. “Move out”—
And the assistants lifted her on the litter and carried her out of doors to the straw mat in the courtyard where well-wishers could pass by and give advice, read signs, interpret, hand her medicants fresh chopped from the bush to chew, fresh brought from the market to burn and inhale, fresh purchased from the apothecary to drink or swallow. And the ground rumbling as if a stone were being rolled away and someone reading that too. Velma, some lives ago, on the mat, on her back with feathers and bird bones and a sheet of painted bark spread over her.
Voices droning. Readings. A crab had attacked a fisherman and held on or dropped off into the sand meaning. A fig unripe had dropped from a tree and burst open, mud oozing smelling like stink fish meaning. A mushroom cap toppling like a severed head meaning. A wheel falling off its axis face down meaning. And ole Baron Sam clinking by looking for an invitation to sup. But the walkabout marabout coming sooner and sending the dancers/readers about their task, to dance, to leap about. They act the fish, then fly and are the birds, tail in the air and fingers hunched under arms they go monkey, dancing and loud, acting the medicine people who leap the healing circle and wait for what we run from troubled. They act the sun. Head, arms, hearts rich with recitation and the word. They send a child to fetch Velma from her swoon and fetch a strong rope to bind the wind, to circle the world while they swell the sea with song. She is the child they sent. She is the song.
“Be calm,” Minnie Ransom crooned, her words going out over Velma’s hunched shoulder and into the room like warm hands caressing, staying, thunder shaking the room. And it was Pony, Daniel’s twin Poindexter, who took up the song, mouth wide open now and notes cutting through the gloom. Velma tried to hear it, couldn’t hear it but felt it press against her skin, pushing her back into the cocoon of the shawl where she died again.
The gas lines, six blocks of enraged drivers lined up at the pumps and a well-wired time bomb, zombie-ized in the prison treatment center, turned into the streets running amuck. Or run down and trampled in the storming of the utility companies, or the taking of the food sheds or the Pentagon.
Dying in uniform when everyone not white, male and of wealth is drafted to fight on foreign turf but not for oil or diamonds or labor or markets, but for burial grounds. The bodies piled high near the borders of warring nations, bodies that cannot be cremated because of the smoke and the wind and the rain, and can’t be buried because missiles would be heated up by the contamination and there is no room anymore underground, space taken up by equipment and uniforms. Bodies that can’t be launched into space anymore because NASA has long since gotten a reply, and beings out there are sick of Howdy Doody and spinning satellites and telstars and intrusive rocket probes and have made the terms clear. And can’t be shipped for burial to Antarctica because the cemeteries heating up there have already melted the icecaps and tidal waves have inundated half the earth.
Might have been killed for the prize of her gum boots, mask and bubble suit in the raid. The unrecognizable children who run the streets taking over abandoned social service agencies and subways and concert halls and armories finally taking her over too. Offspring of the children who roamed in vacant lots and city dumps years before when old smoke detectors leached americium into the dirt, their clothes, their genes. Kids who dug up for fun the contaminated uniforms and instruments, the abandoned uniforms of workers hunted by the angry mob awakened too late and misdirected in their hatred. Those kids grown up twisted and wasted giving birth to the ones shunned, turned out, driven off who found each other and ran in packs and found her on
the street, beat her down and snatched her protection which would bring a high price on the open market.
Lying there on her back, smaller than she’d been in years, lighter, feeling free, shoulders no longer bowed from the weight of the suit, nostrils stinging, breathing air strongly chemical, detergent, chlorine, and something faintly remembered from the generator in chem lab when she was a student many long years ago. And the stockaded compound too far to drag herself to even though she was feeling this light. A pain in the center and she jackknifes, waiting for the convulsions to begin. She cries out but the children are moving off swiftly, the sucking sound of their spongy feet the only thing she hears. They leave gelatinous smears on the pavement and gluey smells where they’d stood beating her down onto the ground that threatens to suck her under where she lies and twists.
Her last glimpse is of something familiar, something from the old days when she was young, a slingshot in the pocket of one of the stompers. A forked stick jutting out like a willow switch that a water witch of old would use divining water, scanning the ground, dipping and nodding and finding what no geologist can find as quickly. A slingshot with which to shoot the five smooth stones against the forehead and penetrate the middle eye and pierce the veil. She is smiling, on her back staring at what used to be called sky.
She had asked a simple enough question of her teacher: Why is God called the alpha and omega? And that triggered the alphabet lesson, one symbol a week. M’Dear taught the alphabet in a way that made Mama Mae leave the room and shut the door. She couldn’t remember Y, the forked glyph whose vibe was holy to seekers. All Y had meant to her was the wishbone she and Palma tussled over, which always broke to no one’s satisfaction.
But lying there on her back she was upright in the wet street, a Babel of paths before her, but her choice made long ago. The fork in the road. The wishbone. The switch. The water witch wand. The slingshot. Y’Bird. It was all the same, somehow.
The Salt Eaters Page 26