Rails Under My Back (11 page)

Smoke drifted in the morning light and hung bright and heavy as silk. Lucifer fought a sneeze. He let his gaze drift through the huge room. A good deal of people moving across the thick carpet, wood buckling underfoot, soaked with alcohol. People drinking, laughing, and talking, around a bench-long damask-covered table, light-ringed, sampling plates of canapés, calamari, cheeses and crackers, spinach dip, shrimp and seaweed.
Never eat none that shit. They let it sit around for weeks. Get old. Get contaminated. Make you sick.
The place was elegant, more in line with top-of-the-line airport bars. A sparkling chandelier, wall scones, tulip-shaped lamps, gilt-framed mirrors and paintings, pastoral scenes quiet and bright with flowers, lakes, and trees, abstracts with lines, dots, and colors. He hated the art, the lack of definition. Like grease stains.

Heard from Jesus? Lucifer heard the boy’s birth, noises like an angry cat.

Jesus is Jesus.

Lucifer didn’t say what he thought. Jesus. All bone. Long and skinny, a red river. Red curse of a son.

How’s Hatch? John asked.

Lucifer pictured Hatch and Jesus in the back of John’s gold Park Avenue, both boys hunched forward as if to hurry the car along. Lucifer, John, Hatch, Jesus—when had they last been together? Lucifer said, You ain’t talked to him?

Sorry I ain’t called. Been busy with the cab project.

How’s that going?

Fine. John let the silence work for him.

How long is the ride to Washington?

Ten hours. Quick. Express.

Lucifer saw his reflection in the window and, looking through the glass, saw a pigeon rise in flight from the pavement, pulsing its wings in the sunlight. You shoulda told me. I woulda made plans to go. Lucifer followed the slow circles of two silent birds revolving high in the air.

Spokesman jus called me. No warning. John’s spectacles followed the bird’s movement. Last night. John leaned his cheek against the greasy windowpane. A fresh shave. Yes, a graying in the lower part of his face.

Why didn’t he call
me?

John bright-watched him. Thought he had. Thought you’d be all packed and ready to go.

Why didn’t
you
call me to be sure?

John slipped past Lucifer’s voice. After Washington, I’m gon spend a few days with Spokesman in New York.

Good.

And Spin.

Lucifer’s heart generated a haze in his chest. Spin?

John grinned.

The shadows in the lounge swam fish shapes. Lucifer peered closely at a painting, black lines crossing into broken planes of violent color. Spin too?

John nodded.

Lucifer gave the painting another look.
Somebody actually paid money for that? White folks.
What about Webb? And Lipton? You meetin them too? Lucifer was shocked at the violence of his words. He could taste it.

Lipton? That crazy motherfucker? John shook his head. No. A bit of cigarette paper stuck to his lip. He lifted it off with a fingernail, rolled it into a ball between his fingertips and flipped it away. Jus me, Spokesman, and Spin.

FIVE YEARS BEFORE, after they had both been back in the world for twenty years, Lucifer and John shared parallel seats on a train headed for Washington. Seats close enough for them to exchange breaths. Cramped distance. Crumpled sleeping.
The slanted seat slanted dreams.
Bums lined the tracks like milestones as the train neared its destination, tossing their bottles at the speeding windows. Spin met them at the station in full uniform. He moved easy under a weight of medals.
Rallied a detachment, skillfully conducted a running fight of three or four hours, and by his coolness, bravery, and unflinching devotion to duty in standing by his commanding officer, in an exposed position under heavy fire, saved the lives of at least two of them.
Squeezed John in a choking hug. Then he hugged Lucifer with equal feeling. John’s stories had failed to capture the lineaments of Spin’s torso; the stories had never risen to his full height or lowered to his full weight. He was too large. No room for him in John’s memory and imagination. The blackness of his beard made his lips look red. This was the man who had once bent over a mine with the ease of a shoe clerk over a foot. At last we meet, he said. Lucifer’s feelings exactly. Spin was forever coming or going. He and John would pass without touching, two stars, an eclipse effect. With a toast that topped the music charts, Spin had pushed himself to another level of life and roamed the world from end to end.

I heard a lot about you.

All of it is true.

There it is.

They had loaded their baggage into Spin’s BMW—the license plate read FNG, short for Fucking New Guy, Spin’s band—and rushed to the demonstration, changing out of their civilian clothes into their neatly kept uniforms.

So this is Chocolate City, John said.

Yeah, Spin said. Niggas melting in the sun.

Spokesman met them there. He was as Lucifer remembered him from the old days, face-wise at least. Doofus-lookin motherfucker. Dark and fat like a church deacon.
His well-paying job at Symmes Electronics had put some flesh on him.
His eyes—large and black—lent the illusion of size. And his teeth sharpened the illusion. Two front teeth, a black gap of space between them, like walrus tusks, crooked, jagged. And he was still wearing those heavy brown shoes of brokerage, the kind where the heels never wear out.

Lucifer’s feelings filled with light. He was part. John, Spokesman, and Spin were famous bloods once. (Perhaps they are famous still.) The Hairtrigger Boys. Drawn to trouble as much as to the trigger. Sharpshooters who ran night missions. Twenty-five years ago when Lucifer was in the shit, word wafted that the Hairtrigger Boys had returned to their base, mission-worn, and requested water, buckets and buckets of it.
Jim, we was ready to swim.
The lifers flew in three choppers that dropped three pails, trailing from three parachutes white in the night. With his buckknife, Spin opened the first pail. John and Spokesman—using his buckteeth—opened the others. White eyes, cold and paint-thick, watched them from the pails. Steaming vanilla ice cream!
Son of a bitch.
Spin removed his jungle-logged boots.
Fuck those lifers!
Spokesman and John removed theirs.
Motherfuck them lifers!
Spin hailed a starting distance. Spokesman and John followed suit. The three set off like javelins. Sailed through the night, straight, precise, arching high, then falling, falling, dead center.
Swish!
The Hairtrigger Boys stabbed and jabbed their boots in the ice-cream pails, stomping around, marching in place, cold-swishing. Singing.
I don’t know but I been told. Artic pussy mighty cold.
There it is.

And here he, Lucifer, was, with the three of them, the Hairtrigger Boys. He was part.

Uncle Sam led the demonstration, a poster replica—Day-Glo makeup, red lipstick, Pinocchio nose—who rose above the crowd on oak stilts, tooting a party bugle that sounded with the thick power of a foghorn. The vets followed Uncle Sam, all armed with serious frowns and heavy flags hard to keep steady in the wind. Spin walked point—
he always did,
if you believed John’s stories—his solid body swaying side to side, his voice carrying—
If shit did not exist, man would invent
it—and holding in the air like an extended tree limb.

Pulled by the full gravity of Spin’s presence and decorations, Lucifer displayed his most spirited parade step. Stiff flags snapped a rainbow of shadows. A spell of keen witness. Lucifer squinted against the day. The sun dropped yellow grenades, small sharp cones that exploded in pricking yellow heat and light. Spin’s head swam high in the air. Lucifer fell into space and floated. They marched, touching shoulders until the last. Medals and all, they made a tinkling circle around Washington.

When physicists locate a new particle, they start by giving it a new name, which helps them—

Lucifer was hardly listening. He could say the words just as easily as Spokesman, for Spokesman had left his dirty fingers on Lucifer’s memory.

—identify its properties more reliably and leads more easily to the identification of still newer particles.

Spokesman spoke in a light voice with fast words running together. No waits in his voice. Tryin to science you to death. He drove the mind into dislocation, a broken angle where it couldn’t hang on.
The T Street Church Street Sixty-third Street days. Lil Bit’s Give and Take Pool Hall and Barbershop. Spokesman sat slouched down in the hard wooden chair, one leg folded over the other, scribbling something in his spiral notebook. Same way you saw him in the barber chair, pumped inches above the floor, head arched back and face working—cause Lil Bit allowed nobody to read or write while under his razor and clippers—brain calculating the volume of the room, how many shaved hair clumps it would take to fill this volume. Look, Spokesman liked to say, there a science to everything. He put science on the pool balls. Leaned over the table, working the cue stick between the crook of two fingers. Shutting one eye, then the other. Calculating angles and trajectories. Pulling his slide rule from his back pocket and measuring the green felt. Eight ball in the corner pocket. Crack! Rack em up, chump.

You’d see him talking to some fine lady on the corner, then scribbling something in his spiral notebook.

Nigga, what you doin? you’d ask.

I’m tryin to discover the simplest path between dick and pussy.

Naming is how science enlarges itself. Let’s get up early tomorrow and shoot some hoop.

You don’t wanna shoot no hoop wit me. You get hurt.

Nawl, you get hurt.

I’m gon play Nazi, you gon play Jew.

You feel that way, let’s play fo some sparklin stakes.

I don’t wanna bankrupt you.

The day’s last dregs mixed with the D.C. streetlights. Lucifer had never seen so many bums.
Here, in the city, you see them in the bus stations, the train stations—in the old days, they used to sleep near the rusting tracks, get drunk and rest they heads on the rails—a hand stretched out on a downtown corner, unlike the beggars in New York, beggars who are choosers, who will watch you cold and blank, or wear a sign saying something like Sick and Not Saved: Give.
They had entire camps, tents made from green plastic garbage bags. Cities within cities.
Recall the one, maybe the city’s first, on the edge of Eddyland, only blocks from where John lived. Will our city shed the old image for a new one? Perhaps these green cities are rotten teeth waiting for us to fall asleep one night, then slip clean and quiet under our starched pillows.
He saw a man wrapped up in greasy rags, crouched in the doorway of a building leaning like a worn heel. Another man in the next building, only curled, and one in the building after that, pacing back and forth against the cold. He gave them all the last of his change.

A cluster of lights hazed in the distance ahead of them.

Let’s go there, gentlemen.

John you can sniff out a bar from fifty kilometers.

A billow of distant music. Sure enough, a beer sign blinked, signaling their faces.

And I can hear the ringing of a register too.

Flash and cash.

And stash.

Well, good gentlemen, let’s get hammered.

They entered the bar, tramped in single file. A round table in the bar’s darkest corner looped them in. Spokesman bent down and moved his chair out twelve inches—he measured them with his eyes—in a spirit of gentle, uninterrupted abstraction.

Four of your best, sir. The good stuff.

So I been thinkin about startin my own business.

Spoke, what you know bout business?

More than you.

Spoke, John a businessman.

That I doubt.

Why?

You a businessman?

I understand the ignoble proclivities of the marketplace.

Hot damn.

He speakin cash.

Well, join me. Both of yall. Gon be plenty of money to spread around, money for everybody.

What kind of business?

Extermination.

What?

Killing—

Yeah, I’m gon call it the Black Widow Exterminating Company.

Lucifer felt he was inside an igloo. The frosted windows white-showed the world outside the bar. Alcohol-light voices lifted above the hum of outside traffic.

See, you’d always bomb the railroads first cause the trains carried arsenal and supplies from the factory to the field.

Member how they were still using those ole steam engines when the war started?

Man, they was slow.

I member gettin my assignment, then boardin the train and the coal from the engine blowin black smoke in my face. You could see it on yo tongue.

Naw. That was rationed tobacco.

Shoot, that wasn’t nothing. What bout those wartime farts? Everybody eatin all that rationed food.

And burping up rationed food.

Lucifer searched for the faces behind the voices. Five or six old-timers crowded a dark corner. Yeah, old-timers. Grunts whose legs could no longer memory march (let alone hump).
Thousands turn out to greet them. They march with careless, natural precision. Throw their hats into the cheering crowd. Theirs is a regiment of men who has done the work of men.
Legs good for Ben-Gay and whining wheelchairs. One old-timer—Christmas tree-bright—stayed constantly in vision, a floating balloon, an advertising blimp flinging parade streamers from his talkative fingers. Medals covered his body, many attached with safety pins. Big safety pins too, with colored clasps.
Like the pins we used on Porsha’s diapers.

Damn, John said.

What?

I know him.

Who?

That old-timer.

From where?

Yeah. John stroked his chin. His eyes closed in recall. Yeah. Damn, I got it! John jumped up from the table as if a hot poker had sodomized him. That’s one of Sam and Dave’s old running buddies. Before Lucifer could get a word out, John bounded over to the other table and stretched his elbows across it in conversation. His lips moved silently.
Why he whisperin?
Two of the old-timers rose, the animated one and a second man, stocky and bandylegged like a gorilla. The decorated man followed John. His shirttail stood out behind him, low-hung wings. His shoe heels had no roundness, worn down like clocks easing on to a final wind. The gorilla man bent his weight onto a cane. Took a few short steps, reaching out with the black hesitant eye of his rubber-tipped cane. Walked in a seesaw motion as if one leg was shorter than the other. He looked back. The decorated man shooed him forward, heading off a chicken in a yard. The gorilla man collapsed into a chair beside Lucifer. His cane poked Lucifer’s shin. Excuse me. The gorilla man apologetically touched Lucifer’s knee with the tips of his fingers.