Rails Under My Back (16 page)

You niggas need some work, Beulah said.

Them two Jones boys—Sheila began.

Lucifer, Gracie said. And John. The one wit those brown eyes.

Why you worried bout em? Sam wanted to know. You mus like them brown eyes.

—got jobs washing windows. In Central. Good money too.

Now, what we need with work? Sam said.

Tell her, uncle. We had plenty work in the joint.

Well, Beulah said, why don’t yall go back there and press some license plates.

License plates? Woman, I worked in the infirmary. And he assisted me. Sam hooked his thumb at Dave, who sat stretched back in the wooden chair, leg hooked over the arm.

Look, I don’t care if you—

Don’t say it, Sam said. Beulah, you know I know you. Don’t say it.

Beulah gave him a hard look.

Look, woman. Get it straight. We ain’t workin fo no chump change.

And we ain’t luggin round that kid no more. Dave flicked a nod at Cookie. Like to break my back. Shit, silks ain’t serve me no hard labor. Jus a straight sentence.

Yeah, Sam said. We ain’t her daddy.

And we ain’t gon pretend.

Sides—Sam smoothed his conk with the palm of his hand, followed its movement of waves, wet leaves—we fin to light out fo California and see R.L. Surprise visit.

Yeah. Surprise visit.

The only way you lazy niggas get to California is if it come to you.

That’s mighty fine wit me, Beulah. Mighty fine. But I ain’t luggin round that two-hundred-pound baby no mo. Sam hooked his thumb at Cookie, who sat crooked and twisted in the wooden wheelchair—the one that Gracie, years later, stuffed in the pantry, beyond Hatch’s and Jesus’s curious reach, the toddlers mistaking it for a rocking chair—body both tense and limp, legs smooth, round and slack as ropes, tiny feet motion-ignorant on the running board. Nothing straight about her, even with the leather belt holding up her waist, face lax, mouth open, completely relaxed, or tired perhaps, just tired. Only her eyes moved, watching you come in and out of the room, blank and unblinking, dead fish stare.

Got that right, Dave said.

I was so glad to get shut of them niggas when they went off to the service, Beulah said. War didn’t change them none. Always askin, beggin, Sister, how bout lettin me hold some change. Then Dave go, Aw, Sam, don’t ask her. She cheaper than Jack Benny. Sam and Dave worry me so that sometimes I wish they’d never come back from Bataan. Buried there wit all them Japs.

Beulah worked nights—spring and summer—so she could attend baseball games during the day—That Paige, oh that Paige; his curveball hum like a Roadster—and Sheila worked nights so she could watch Cookie during the day. When you returned from work, you and Sheila would lift Cookie down the three flights of stairs—a trip someone would make for seventeen years until your gains ebbed away and Cookie drowned in a sea of pneumonia—so you could take Cookie strolling in the park. You took her there every day, through lazy snow or sun slanting with wind. Circle Park was beautiful then, fields of red and yellow and pink roses, fields wide as the moon. The sky large, white, clear: a huge drop of milk. The grass neat. The hedges trimmed. Wind in the air. The iron streetlamps free of rust and the stems so brown and tall, and the lantern so wide and green, you mistook them for trees. And you circled the lanes, palms firm-gripping the handlebars of the wheelchair—hanging on the course of your life. The stroll was just that easy; a single movement, a slight turn of the handlebars, returned you to the apartment door stoop. You removed the keys from your purse.

Why, Miss Gracie. John watched her with those brown eyes. You need some help gettin Cookie back upstairs?

Yeah, Miss Gracie, Dallas echoed. You need some help gettin Cookie back upstairs?

John stood there, hat in hand, head bowed, thin waves of hair shining, the cut of his eyes directed where the hat brim would be, stood there, before a spillage of leaves on the vestibule doorsteps.

Thank you, boys.

John and Dallas slipped out of their blazers—
no, Dallas wearin that old funky nasty pea coat
—folded them neatly over their shoulders, and stooped like stretcher carriers, hands positioned on the wheelchair. Okay, John said. On the count of three. One. Two. Three. John and Dallas lifted Cookie in the air and carried her up the stairs, never missing a breath, their heels tapping cutting rhythm. Set her down—Cookie slobbered a smile—and stood waiting before the front doors, watching Gracie.

Yall want something to drink?

Yes’m.

Yes’m.

Have a seat. They did as Gracie ordered. She got them cool lemonade in Beulah’s mason jars. John tilted his head back and drained his jar, throat working. Dallas did the same. John watched her—she thought of herself, how her skin gleamed like black milk—feet several inches above the floor. He was so small and Dallas so large that Gracie expected John to hop in Dallas’s lap like a ventriloquist dummy. But he watched her. She assumed the men wanted a tip. Took two quarters from her purse and pushed it into their hands.

Wish I could give yall mo money.

John watched her, eyes wide as stage lights. Why, we don’t want no money. Here. He reached out and took her hand, his own moist with heat, and put the quarter inside it. Dallas did the same, parroting, watching her with wino eyes, flood-delta red eyes. She returned her hands to the safety of her lap.

The windows let in chunks—square after square, box after box—of summer. It was a hot day, and the sun made the screen shimmer. Yellow light—line after line—streamed inside her window and tangled itself with the glow of the hanging sheets.

Dallas, where you from? She said it to break the ice. She smelled raw oysters on his breath, the raw oysters with hot sauce that everyone in Woodlawn knew he bought from Brother Jack’s Lounge, this only child of smooth-skinned Vanilla Adams, who worked the white folks’ houses but never showed the wear, this boy who could fix anything that went bad, radios, toasters, space heaters, electric blankets, humidifiers, refrigerators, and (later, when people began to afford them) televisions.

I was born by a golden river in the shadow of two great hills, Dallas said.

Nigga, John said, stop that clownin.

You stop.

You still drinkin that wine? Gracie asked.

Dallas shaped the brim of his Dobb. John flipped his on, fit it in place, pushing down softly. Dallas did the same.

I takes a nip every now and then. How you know?

Nigga, she smell yo breath.

You a lie. Dallas put his nose into the cup of his palms and blew air, testing.

Don’t mind him, Miss Gracie. He still kinda young.

IT WAS MONDAY ALREADY and the service had been a good one.
Moses parted the Red Sea, allowed the people of Israel to escape the waters through the hollow of his reed staff.
Gracie had carried the service home with her, like a take-out order. She could still hear the chorus of laughter and amens, ringing shouts and pleas, stomping feet and clapping hands. Cotton Rivers helped Reverend Tower back into his seat, the older man shaken by the force of his own sermon. Rivers was always helping. Draw his handkerchief at the first bead of sweat on Tower’s brow. Some folks in the congregation called him Bird Dog, cause it was his job to hunt out the places on Church Street most needing redemption. His job to follow Tower, that Cleveland Sparrow tagging along, each holding up one sleeve of Tower’s flowing robe, absorbing its power.

Someone knocked on the door, hard and fast, like a fire warning. Gracie opened it. John, hat in hand, head bowed, the wings of his eyes lowered.

Hi, Miss Gracie.

Why, John.

The careless lifting of his brown eyes. I thought you might need some help.

GRACIE HAD WATCHED LUCIFER AND JOHN grow from two pint-sized boys in railroad caps—John the pint, Lucifer (two years older) the quart—whose laughter disrupted Reverend Tower’s solo flights—
I know there are some greasy souls here today, tryin to slip their way up into heaven
—boys who shot down his heavenly sermons like clay birds with their filthy tongues—
Though I speak with the tongues of angels, and have not charity, I am becoming as sounding brass, or tinkling cymbal
—slipped their snores into his verbal pauses, and Reverend Tower would wake them with biblical anger.
If you boys wanna snore, go to Catholic mass!
It was her duty to shepherd the children from the chapel to the bathroom, and there they would be, Lucifer and John, aiming two streams of urine at the ceiling.

Nigga, you can’t piss fo shit.

Piss better than you.

Well, can you piss this high?

Higher.

And Gracie would feel some new feeling circling around her heart, circling and rising, while Lucifer and John held their faces tight, roping in their grins, until she snatched their ears, their hands panicking, trying to slip their worm-small penises into the sanctuary behind their pants zippers. The entire congregation knew they were being raised by the grandfather, Pappa Simmons, the squat nigga with a touch of Indian, or a dash, depending on who you asked—the roll of something wild in his yellow-red features; the gray of his eyes had crushed out the brown;
Was he blind?
; his words were so ancient they crumbled to the carpet before they reached your ear—and Georgiana, his white-looking wife, both worn down from sharecropping back home and hauling city sugar and mail sacks, their old flesh and down-home ways left in the dust by the quick city steps and ways of the boys. Yes, she had watched them grow from mannish boys in railroad caps, the skinny rails of their legs beneath baggy slacks, to teenagers, two young men in tweed or plaid golf caps and peg pants. How could she have known then that these two boys held men’s seeds, that these seeds would someday crack open and the newborn beings would accept the agreeable weight of manhood, would carry the silver rails of Sam’s coffin, help to bury the old seed. Yes, they grew, stretched out of their tweeds, their swelling heads shrinking their boy caps—they replaced them with man-holding Dobbs—Lucifer upwards and John sideways, til no britches could hold them, they going one way and restraint the other, Lucifer running errands, and John running the streets with Dallas and Ernie and Spider and the other bad niggas who kept up a heavy traffic between the clubs and lounges on Church Street. Couldn’t pass a corner without seeing John and Dallas pitching pennies, tossing the coins easy and graceful like life rafts.

How you, Miss Gracie?

Yeah, how you, Miss Gracie?

She could feel their eyes warm on her behind as she passed.
Maybe not Dallas’s eyes, eyes that did not absorb a flicker of light. Frozen wells.

Then, who could have known that, years later, John would beat Dallas within an inch of his life, and still later, that he would strap her, Gracie, to the bed after she told him, You sleepin in sin, both asking and answering. She saw his belt raise but closed her eyes to its sting. She searched high and hellwater for her keys. Could find them nowhere. Believed John had robbed her of them, as he had first surprised her with the burning damage of his words.
Why you think I be out there? Why you think? I like you but I don’t lust you.
So surprised she still didn’t know what instrument he’d used to whip her, his belt or his tongue. He opened roads in her back and walked them. She sought her keys, found them in the space under the bed, locked the door on her way out of the apartment, and caught the first taxi. Trucks flew through the yellow-lighted streets. A yellow moon.
The moon’s taking a piss, John said.

She explained to Inez and George—the man John would never call father, spit at the suggestion—what had happened, the story both heavy and formless from the water in the words.
You thought George woulda whispered a word of it to Lucifer, Check on John. Go check on yo brother. George probably wanted to and maybe he did, though how could you tell cause Lucifer always watched you in flicking glances, as if you were more than vision could bear.

George took car keys out of the cookie jar. I’m gon kill that bastard.

George, Inez said, now wait. Junior didn’t—

Damn, Inez. Open your eyes.

But Gracie was the one paralyzed by a blinding fright.

George shook the car keys in Inez’s face. Damn, Inez. Open your eyes. Shook them again.

WALL-TO-WALL PEOPLE—crowded dots in an impressionist painting—load the car. Don’t be such a bitch, lady. What’s wrong? Didn’t you get what you needed last night? The hog is just ahead, shoving its way through the car. Damn, homey? Think you a football player? He slaps a grip on hog’s shoulder. Feels a burning sensation in his stomach. The hog has cork-screwed him with its tail.

The hog runs for the mouth of the tunnel, three-toed feet slipping on the tracks like a woman in high heels.

He surges and plunges, a windmill, all legs and arms, snatching his feet up almost before they touch the ground. The hog spins on one leg—the chubby shank, the monkey-wrench calf—brings the other high in a wide arc, and catches him on the side of the head—the temple, right? the church at both sides of your head—then, hollow pain, like someone knocking a pipe bowl against a table’s edge. The old roundhouse kick. Hog knows its licks and flicks.

He has to guard against the hands—paws?—the narrow fingers in-grown perfect for the old eye gouge.

He sees an opening. Drop-kicks the hog in the balls. (Know my flicks, too.) Son of a bitch, the hog says, hands over his balls, Adam holding the fig leaf.

They are tangled between the rails—which one is the third, the hot jolt of raw electricity?—rolling, two contestants in a mud-wrestling match. The hog stinks bad—pickle juice?—and is covered with scratchy, stubbly skin, three-day-old beard over the whole week of its body. It tickles. He locks his teeth onto the hog’s tonguelike ear. (Wait, raw pork is bad for you.) Hog considers returning the favor, but it is dignified, the low blow beneath him. These humans …