Rails Under My Back (43 page)

Even if Inez was standing right before your face, she wasn’t
there.
Worst of all, Inez kept no portrait of Pappa Simmons readily visible to the visiting eye. You had to search through dusty photo albums to find his face and form. Photographs don’t lie.
Inez was a looker in her day. Mad pretty. And George made a handsome soldier.

In the failed daylight, Inez stood on the walk before the house—one of the small, low houses that George claimed the government had built for soldiers returning from the war—her thin frame etched against the sky, as if she had been awaiting Porsha’s arrival. Colorless beside the marigolds, tulips, and roses (red, pink, and yellow). The rotten handwriting of time scribbled up and down her face.

Inez. Porsha kissed her on the cheek. Felt wrinkled skin beneath her lips. How are—

Terrible.

Can’t you ever look at the bright side of things?
What are you doing out here?

Junior was here today.

John? Today? When?

Your father did something terrible.

My father?

He stole all my money?

He did what?

He stole my key.

Wait a minute. Lucifer. He—

Stole my key.

Key? What key?

To my safety-deposit box.

Porsha held up her hands as if to push Inez away.

He got all my money, my bonds, my stocks, my savings, my valuables, my certificates. Everything. Inez was crying now, hands over her face, the fingers larger than the shrunken head. Porsha guided her up the porch steps, hands on her thin shoulders, through the door, past the flower-filled sitting room—cream-colored plastic-covered antiques, and clam-shaped glass bowls offering candy—through the cramped living room, no larger than a chessboard square—the sketch of Inez done in Mexico, two photographs, Champions of the People (King and the Kennedy brothers), and God Save the Kings, that hovered above Inez’s head on the chair where she always sat, the latest issue of
Jet
on the TV stand—past the guest bedroom where Porsha had always slept when she visited, patting Inez’s back—burping a baby. Inez, get some sleep. Everything will be okay. She helped Inez to bed. Tucked her underneath ancient covers.

It don’t matter, Inez said. I’m going home. Going home. Soon. Soon. Good Lord break of day. And with that, she fell asleep, eyes shut painfully tight.

Porsha moved down the hall to the patio—as a girl, you imagined it an island, separate from the rest of the house, separate from everything else; deserted island populated by you and Pappa Simmons—where George sat at the glass table, bent over his newspaper, eyes swimming beneath his reading spectacles and magnifying glass throwing his face in large relief. The portable radio blared the baseball game.

Porsha. He looked up as she entered. His eyes, despite the spectacles, were watery and weak.

Porsha flopped down onto the couch beneath the world map where red thumbtacks indicated all the countries Inez and George had visited: Morocco, England, Italy, France, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Turkey, Spain—
Spain would be an island without the Pyrenees
—and more.

George put the magnifier down on the glass table, clicked off the radio. His eyes were uneasy behind the heavy reading glasses. I didn’t hear you come in. His white sleeveless T-shirt fit snugly against his firm flesh. He shifted his feet, gloved in backless house shoes.

Inez was out front.

Out front? George removed his glasses. I thought she was in the bed.

No, she was out front.

I didn’t hear her go out. She gets worse and worse. I can’t watch her every minute.

Why don’t you get some help?

George watched her.

You know, have someone come in a few days a week?

I already looked into that. You know how much they want?

Porsha watched him. No. How much?

George eased back in his seat. I’ll tell you it’s a lot. More than I can afford. We’re not rich.

Porsha fought back her words.
He got all kinds of money, Uncle John said.
She sat, not speaking, until she settled down inside herself. Was Lucifer here today?

Lucifer? Lucifer never comes here. You know that. John was here.

Today?

No, last week sometime. The week before. He wanted money.

Same ole same ole. John always wanted money. Family legend, Inez gave him ten thousand dollars cash to open a lounge, and another ten thousand to open a garage, five thousand down payment for Gracie’s house, and a thousand here and a thousand there to pay his taxes, keep the hounds abay, and stay out of jail. John had squandered a good deal of their money, tens of thousands.

Inez says that Lucifer stole all her money.

He ain’t stole nothing. I took her safety-deposit key and moved the money into a new account. In her state, you can’t tell what she might do. And no matter what John does, she will always—He’s got some scheme now about buying cars cheap at auctions and sellin them for high profit. Guess he’ll never learn. He’s been tryin to get her to sell the house.

I need to lay down, Porsha said. Flame spread a red plant through her body.

What’s wrong?

Nothing.

Are you okay?

I’m gon lay down. Rest before I head back.

Okay. Tell your mamma I want to see her.

I will.

Don’t forget.

SHE LAY ON HER BACK and watched the cloud-dark ceiling. Memory hovered like rain. The air heavy with perfume. Beneath the perfume, other scent. She could breathe in the air-carried aromas of other nights. She always had trouble breathing here. No fresh air. The one small window above the bed that George had nailed shut against burglars—he didn’t like bars, the black wrought iron so familiar to every house on the block and in the neighborhood—until Inez had forced him to remove each nail—A guest has to breathe, she said—one by one. He had removed them with a grimace, as if extracting his own teeth. Then Inez had him stick an air conditioner into the window. Porsha had memorized in this room all the shadows and how they changed, memorized the exact spaces between things. Limited choices. She could sleep either here or in the basement bedroom, the humid, damp, and musty room like another world beneath the house, where Pappa Simmons had spent the last years of his life. The room you reached down the pantry stairs. (After all, the stairs were the pantry, Inez’s mason jars neatly arranged on shelves, book-fashion. You could actually fold a thick wooden door over the stairs and seal off the basement, lid and cigar box.) Had they buried him down there?

The real man in the flesh, not the memory, would come to the guest bedroom and look in on her.

Girl, how can you sleep in there? He pinched his nose. You’ll suffocate.

I’m okay, Pappa Simmons.

Well, come shut the roof for me.

She followed Pappa Simmons, the old man walking slow, slow, concentrating on each step. He moved so slow that you hardly saw any movement at all, and by the time he made it to the pantry, you felt you had walked and waited miles.

Need any help?

Jus shut the roof.

And the small old light white red man slow-moved down the pantry stairs, one by one.

Good night, Pappa Simmons.

Good night. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

She shut her eyes. Slipped beneath the covers. The comfortable buzz and hum and scratch and whirl of cotton and thick wool—the air conditioner blew chill—to warm the night. A steady wave of snoring rode through the house. Lying there now, the bed holding her above the floor, she turned again and again. Shaped in the darkness. Shaped.

He trots along the vine-matted trail, erect in the saddle, head motionless, flicking his rod over the horse’s flanks to keep off the flies. His spurs rake the mount’s belly until it bleeds. Dry branches crack beneath hooves. He bends his head down and presses it against the horse’s neck. Tries to put his mouth next to the horse’s ear. Angry breathing. Hard hooves.

WHERE EVERY SOLDIER tugged home a thick, brick-heavy album of snapshots proof positive that he and his buddies were true swinging dicks, John brought back only a few photos, all black-and-whites touched up for color, like the posters of jazz singers fronting the nightclubs on Church Street. Lucifer’s favorite, the one he held now in his hand, previously angled in the corner of his bedroom mirror, where it so angered his wife: John arcing for a dive into an ocean, arms thrown back birdlike (winged flight) in peculiar light—light full of years—suspended for an infinity.

Lucifer returned the photograph to his wallet, a secret deposit that only John could clarify and claim. He gazed steadily at a patch of night in the train window—earth and sky folded in darkness—until the darkness revealed a long line of trees like dancers at John’s Recovery Room, and a scatter of swift-flying swallows in the sky, their wings folded in the moonlight. He followed them as they swirled then flushed into Tar Lake. He watched the city blink and drift and wink and glitter and sink away. He longed for sleep but his mind was like the train, a rocking blue-steel cradle.

John ain’t called.

What?

As the Lord is my witness, John done a lot of evil things but he never once missed a call.

Yesterday, he had been convinced that John’s blood had cooled. Now it had flared up again. His disappointment mounted to anger against himself.
Watch him, Pappa Simmons said. Watch yo brother. Be his keeper. He startin to ramble. And he can get inside of anything, even if it has a fence around it.
He had arrived at a splendidly clear understanding of the problem that engaged him.

Lucifer had packed light, a single bag. (
Travel light,
Pappa Simmons liked to say. Travel-bound, Pappa Simmons and Georgiana never needed more than what their tackle box could hold.) Dodged Sheila’s point-blank questions.

How are you gonna help John? You know as well as I do, whether it be God or the devil, his spirit ain’t never seen no rest.

He’s my brother.

John. John’s just an excuse.

An excuse for what?

And stole away. With a firm and sure step, he took the path that led to Union Station—the great concourse of steel and stones, the soaring arches, train whistles arching and echoing—twice in as many days. Many years ago, he had followed John to war and now he was following John again, destination New York. Perhaps further.

HE SQUEEZED THE WHITE LETTER in his shocked hand and carried word to Pappa Simmons and Inez. John been drafted.

Pappa Simmons stood with his hat in his hands trying to catch the words. Inez ran from the room, her yellow face wet with failure.

John slapped Lucifer on the back. Let’s go get drunk. Celebrate.

The high wind that carried you flylike into the shit began at Fort Dix, the downstate holding station only minutes away from Miss Beulah’s Decatur. There, you yellow-waited and waded through cornfields, pondering the steel-blue actuality of war.

Mister Buster Brown Mister Buster Brown

Don’t let nobody turn you around.

Then they sent you eight hundred miles away for basic and airborne training to Fort Campbell, set on a forest-covered and brick-shadowed hill—great sweeps of pine poked the skies; Christmas, you chopped down a tree and shipped it to Sheila by train—surrounded by thick underbrush and swamps, huge water oaks with gnarled roots reaching for the salt shore. (You felt and tasted salt, but you didn’t recognize this water as ocean.) By day, you learned to ride wheezing wind, your body breathing easy. And fireflies blinked points of light in the night-darkened forest—a firefight, only quiet, noiseless. Then they boarded you on a train—black earth sprawled outside the window, place folded into place, the train a continuous loop of image and motion—headed for California. From your angle at the window, seeing inward, tree-covered and snowcapped, and later another state, clouds like frozen smoke above brown-skinned mountains. Each ridge a fist, running knuckles and joints. Blood began moving inside you. These mountains were made by the Lord. They showed his hand, every brown finger and thick knuckle of it. Foothills rolled with scattered balls of bushes. Bushes pale green, almost silver. Later, the flare-lit ridges of more mountains. Then the mountains themselves, still and white. A second ridge of gray-veiled mountains, the afterimage, the negative. Night also revealed the first palm tree you ever witnessed, dark-wrapped. So this must be California. Houses shoulder to shoulder. Out the left train window, skeletal frames of new houses under construction, desalination plants. And out the right train window, a million lights flickering through a rolling valley in the shadow of a brown stone monster. Fresh morning brought fresh light. Fresh red-colored sun. Green tufts on brown-bodied mountains. Green cemeteries. Palm trees with trunks thick as elephant legs, swaying slightly, their bladed leaves scraping the air. High streets like vertical statues. And a streetcar, a slow movement of color going up a hill. You spent one night in Port Chicago—you saw ocean (fish billowed in slow motion beneath the water) but never got to touch it—then they shipped you off by early dawn drizzle. You pushed off for shores of another world.

THE WAVE CURLS and throws you down with a dash on green beach like a trash heap before miter-shaped mountains. Ground that is terra firma one minute, dirt, mud, or water the next. Jungles slow and green as turtles. Manhigh elephant grass—rolling patterns of water that shift and never settle—corralled off by half-submerged bamboo fences. Brown grass lined with the delicate shadows of barbed wire. Motionless heat, the sun falls, lead rain.

Here, everyone is vulnerable to blood. Flies smell through the flak down to the flesh. Sir Charles knows his shit. A ready-made nightmare in black pajamas. Sneaky too. Contaminate your C rations with black leeches. Or crawl up your unaware asshole—this Oriental suppository—a confirmed cholera kill. And beware of Mamma-san, her clit curled like a scorpion’s tail.

Here, distances change, thanks to the trickery of mountains and plains. Faraway things seem close and what’s close seems faraway. Time dense and real. Once you are short, you begin to see yourself as from a distance, like standing at the depot and waving at yourself on the train; you think in blocks of time no longer than a day, enter its passage on the improvised calendar scratched into the side of your helmet.