God's Gym (12 page)

Rastus still stands where we left him, hoodooed by the Harlem Globies' flyer. Bald, chained Rastus who's been nowhere. Doesn't even know what name his mother intended for him. Didn't even recognize his own face in the mirror till just yesterday, Hinckley time. Is the flyer a truer mirror than the one in the barbershop, the mirror Rastus assiduously keeps at his back these days as he sweeps, dusts, mops. He studies the grinning black men on the poster, their white lollipop lips, white circles around their eyes, white gloved fingers, his gaze full of longing, nostalgia, more than a small twinge of envy and regret. He doesn't know the Globies ain't been nowhere neither, not to Harlem nor nowhere else, their name unearned, ironic at this point in time. Like the jump shot, the Globies not quite invented yet. Still a gleam in the owner/driver's eye, his wishful thinking of international marketing, product endorsements, movies, TV cartoon, prodigious piles of currency, all colors, sizes, shapes promiscuously stacking up. Not Globies yet because this is the team's maiden voyage, first trot, first road game, this trek from Chicago to Hinckley. But they're on their way, almost here, if you believe the signs tacked and glued all over town, a rain, a storm, a blizzard of signs. If he weren't afraid the flimsy paper would come apart in his hands, Rastus would peel the flyer off the pole, sneak it into the barbershop, hold it up alongside his face so he could grin into the mirror with his lost brothers. Six Globies all in a row. Because, yes, in spite of signs of the beast, the players are like him. Different and alike. Alike and different. The circle unbroken. Yes. Yes. Yes. And
whoopee
they're coming to town.

Our boy Rastus sniffs opportunity knocking and decides—with an alacrity that would have astounded the townsfolk—to become a Globie and get the hell out of Hinckley.

As befits a fallen world, however, no good news travels without bad. The night of the game Rastus not allowed in the armory. Hinckley a northern town, so no Jim Crow laws turned Rastus away. Who needed a law to regulate the only Negro in town. Sorry, Rastus, just white folks tonight.

I neglected to mention an incident that occurred the year before Rastus dropped into Hinckley. The town's one little burnt-cork, burnt-matchstick tip of a dead-end street housing a few hard-luck Negroes had been spontaneously urban-removed, and its inhabitants, those who survived the pogrom, had disappeared into the night, the same kind of killingly cold night roughing up the Studebaker. That detail, the sudden exodus of all the town's Negroes, should have been noted earlier in story time, because it helps you understand Hinckley time. A visitor to Hinckley today probably won't hear about the above-mentioned event, yet it's imprinted indelibly in the town's memory. Now you see it, now you don't, but always present. A permanent marker separating before and after. Hinckley truly a white man's town from that night on.

And just to emphasize how white they wanted their town to be, the night of the fires everybody wore sheets bleached white as snow, and for a giggle, under the sheets, blacked their faces. A joke too good to share with the Negroes, who saw only white robes and white hoods with white eyes in the eyeholes. We blacked up blacker than the blackest of 'em, reported one old-timer in a back issue of the Hinckley
Daily News.
Yes we did. Blacker than a cold, black night, blacker than black. Hauled the coloreds outdoors in their drawers and nightgowns, pickaninnies naked as the day they born. Told 'em, You got five minutes to pack a sack and git. Five minutes we's turning these shacks and everythin in 'em to ash.

Meanwhile the wagons transporting the Globies into town have arrived, their canvas covers billowing, noisy as wind-whipped sails, their wooden sides, steep as clipper ships, splashed with colorful, irresistible ads for merchandise nobody
in Hinckley has ever dreamed of, let alone seen. A cornucopia of high-tech goods and services from the future, Hinckley time, though widely available in leading metropolitan centers for decades. Mostly beads and baubles, rummage-sale trash, but some stuff packed in the capacious holds of the wagons extremely ancient. Not stale or frail or old-fashioned or used or useless. No, the oldest, deepest cargo consisted of things forgotten.
Forgotten?
Yes, forgotten. Upon which subject I would expand if I could, but forgotten means forgotten, doesn't it. Means lost. A category whose contents I'm unable to list or describe because if I could, the items wouldn't be forgotten. Forgotten things are really, really gone. Gone even if memories of them flicker, ghosts with more life than the living. Like a
Free Marcus
button you tucked in a drawer and lived the rest of your life not remembering it lay there, folded in a bloodstained head kerchief, until one afternoon as you're preparing to move the last mile into senior citizens' public housing and you must get rid of ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of the junk you've accumulated over the years because the cubicle you're assigned in the high-rise isn't much larger than a coffin, certainly not a king-sized coffin like pharaohs erected so they could take everything with them—chariots, boats, VCRs, slaves, wives—so you must shed what feels like layers of your own tender skin, flaying yourself patiently, painfully, divesting yourself of one precious forgotten thing after another, toss, toss, toss. Things forgotten in the gritty bottom of a drawer and you realize you've not been living the kind of life you could have lived if you hadn't forgotten, and now, remembering, it's too late.

In other words, the wagons carried tons of alternative pasts—roads not taken, costumes, body parts, promises, ghosts. Hinckley folks lined up for miles at these canvas-topped depots crackling whitely in the prairie wind. Even poor folks who can't afford to purchase anything mob the landing, ooohing and ahhhing with the rest. So many bright lost hopes in the bellies
of the schooners, the wagons might still be docked there doing brisk business a hundred years from now, the Globies in their gaudy, revealing uniforms showing their stuff to a sea of wide eyes, waving hands, grappling, grasping hands, but hands not too busy to clap, volleys of clapping, then a vast, collective sigh when clapping stops and empty hands drop to people's sides, sighs so deep and windy they scythe across the Great Plains, rippling mile after endless mile of wheat, corn, barley, amber fields of grain swaying and purring as if they'd been caressed when a tall Globie dangles aloft some item everybody recognizes, a forgotten thing all would claim if they could afford it, a priceless pearl the dark ballplayer tosses gratis into the crowd of Hinckleyites, just doing it to do it, and the gift would perform tricks, loop-de-looping, sparkling, airborne long enough to evoke spasms of love and guilt and awe and desire and regret, then disappear like a snowflake or a sentence grown too large and baroque, its own weight and ambition and daring and vanity ripping it apart before it reaches the earth. A forgotten thing twisting in the air, becoming a wet spot on fingers reaching for it. A tear inching down a cheek. An embarrassing drop of moisture in the crotch of somebody's drawers.

Wheee. Forgotten things. Floating through the air with the greatest of ease. Hang-gliding. Flip-flopping.

Flip-floppety-clippety-clop. The horse-drawn caravan clomps up and down Hinckley's skimpy grid of streets. Disappears when it reaches the abandoned, dead-end, former black quarter and turns right to avoid the foundation of a multi-use, multistory, multinational parking garage and amusement center, a yawning hole gouged deeper into the earth than the stainless steel and glass edifice will rise into the sky.

Is dat going to be the Mall of America, one of the Globie kids asks, peeking out from behind a wagon's canvas flap. A little Hinckley girl hears the little Globie but doesn't reply.

Then she's bright and chirrupy as Jiminy Cricket and
chases after the gillies till she can't keep up, watching the last horse's round, perfect rump swaying side to side like Miss Maya's verse. Feels delicious about herself because she had smiled, managed to be polite to the small brown face poking out of the white sheet just as her mother said she must, but also really, basically, ignored it, didn't get the brown face mixed up with Hinckley faces her mother said it wouldn't and couldn't ever be. Always act a lady, honey. But be careful. Very careful. Those people are not like us. Warmed by the boy's soft voice, his long eyelashes like curly curtains or question marks, the dreamy roll of the horse's huge, split butt, but she didn't fall in love. Instead she chatters to herself in a new language, made up on the spot.
Wow. Gumby-o. Kum-bye-a. Op-poop-a-doop...
as if she's been tossed a forgotten thing and it doesn't melt.

She wishes she'd said yes to the boy, wishes she could share the good news.

Daddy said after the bulldozers a big road's coming, sweety-pie, and we'll be the centerpiece of the universe, the envy of our neighbors, Daddy said I can have anything I want, twenty-four seven, brother, just imagine, anything I want, cute jack-in-the-box, pop-up brown boys, a pinto pony, baby dolls with skin warm and soft as mine, who cry real tears.
Word. Bling-bling. Oop-poop-a-doop.

After a dust cloud churned by the giant tires of the convoy settles, the little girl discovers chocolate drops wrapped in silver foil the chocolate soldiers had tossed her. In the noise and confusion of the rumbling vehicles, she'd thought the candies were stones. Or cruel bullets aimed at her by the dark strangers in canvas-roofed trucks her mother had warned her to flee from, hide from. Realizing they are lovely chocolate morsels, immaculate inside their shiny skins, she feels terrible for thinking ugly thoughts about the GIs, wants to run to the convoy and say
Danke, Danke
even though her mother told her, They're illiterate, don't speak our language. As she scoops up the surprises and stuffs them in her apron pocket, she imagines her chubby legs churning in pursuit of the dusty column. The convoy had taken hours to pass her, so it must be moving slowly. But war has taught her the treacherous distance between dreams and reality. Even after crash diets and aerobic classes her pale short legs would never catch the wagons, so she sits down, settles for cramming food into her mouth with both hands, as if she's forgotten how good food can be and wants to make up for all the lost meals at once. Licking, sucking, crunching, chewing. The melting, gooey drops smear her cheeks, hands, dimpled knees—chocolate stain spreading as the magic candy spawns, multiplies inside her apron pocket, a dozen new sweet pieces explode into being for every piece she consumes. She eats till she's about to bust, sweet chocolate coating her inside and out, a glistening, sticky tarbaby her own mother would have warned her not to touch. Eats till she falls asleep and keels over in the dusty street.

Dusty?
What's up with this dusty. I thought you said it was snowing. A snowstorm.

Snowstorm. Oh yeah. Should have let you know that in expectation of a four-seasons mega-pleasure center, Hinckley domed itself last year.

Believe it or not, it's Rastus who discovers the girl. Since being refused entrance to the Globies' show, he's been wandering disconsolate through Hinckley's dark streets when suddenly, as fate would have it, he stumbles into her. Literally. Ouch.

Less painful than unnerving when Rastus makes abrupt contact with something soft and squishy underfoot. He freezes in his tracks. Instinctively his leg retracts. He scuffs the bottom of his shoe on the ground, remembering the parade earlier in the day, horses large as elephants. Sniffs the night air cautiously. Hopes he's wrong. Must be. He smells sugar and spice, everything nice, overlaid with the cloyingly sweet reek of chocolate.
Another time and place he might have reared back, kicked the obstacle in his path, but tonight he's weak, depleted, the mean exclusion of him from the Globie extravaganza the final straw. Besides, what kind of person would kick a dog already down, and dog or cat's what he believes he'll see as he peers into the shadows webbing his feet.

Rastus gulps. His already overtaxed heart
fluups.
Chocolate can't hide a cherub's face, the Gerber baby plump limbs and roly-poly torso. Somebody's daughter lying out here in the gutter. Hoodooed. Stricken. Poor babygirl. Her frail—make up your mind—chest rises and falls faintly, motion almost imperceptible since they never installed streetlamps on this unpaved street when Negroes lived here, and now the cunning city managers are waiting for the Dutch-German-Swiss conglomerate to install a megawatt, mesmerizing blaze of glory to guide crowds to the omniplex.

Believe it or not, on this night of nights, this night he expected a new life to begin, riding off with the Globies, the players exhausted but hungry for another town tomorrow, laughing, telling lies, picking salty slivers of the town they've just sacked out their teeth, on this penultimate night before the dawning of the first day of his new life, Rastus displays patience and self-denial worthy of Harriet's Tom. Accepts the sudden turn of fate delaying his flight from Hinckley. Takes time out to rescue a damsel in distress.

One more job, just one more and I'm through, outta here. Trotting with the Globies or flying on my own two feet, I'm gittin out. Giddy-up. Yeah. Tell folks it was Rastus singing dis sad song, now Rastus up and gone.

Determined to do the right thing, he stoops and raises the girl's cold, heart-shaped face, one large hand under her neck so her head droops backward and her mouth flops open, the other hand flat against her tiny bosom. Figures he'll blow breath into her mouth, then pump her ribcage like you would a bellows till
her lungs catch fire again. In other words Rastus is inventing CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, a lifesaving technique that will catch on big in America one day in the bright future when hopefully there will be no rules about who can do it to whom, but that night in Hinckley, well, you can imagine what happened when a crowd of citizens hopped up and confused by Globie shenanigans at the armory came upon Rastus in the shadows crouched over a bloody, unconscious little white girl, puckering up his big lips to deliver a kiss.

To be fair, not everyone participated in the mayhem you're imagining. Experts say the portion of the crowd returning home to the slum bordering the former colored quarter must shoulder most of the blame. In other words, the poor and fragrant did the dirty work. The ones who live where no self-respecting white person would, an unruly element, soon themselves to be evicted when Consolidated Enterprises clears more parking space for the pleasure center, the same people, experts say, who had constituted by far the largest portion of the mob that had burned and chased all the Negroes out of town, these embarrassing undesirables and unemployables, who would lynch foreign CEOs too if they could get away with it, are responsible, experts will explain, for perpetrating the horror I'm asking you to imagine. And imagine you must, because I refuse to regale you with gory, unedifying details.