Rails Under My Back (50 page)

A what?

A den mother. And we have lots of fun. We—

Do I get to wear a uniform like that?

Yeah, but yo parents gotta buy it.

Sheila buys it. Stitches yellow square numbers (500) into the blue khaki shirt, her needle musical in the cloth, a baton calling forth rhythm from the yellow square keys. She starches and irons the shirt. Starches and irons the crisp blue pants. Buys and blocks the half-globe blue baseball cap. Buys the yellow kerchief and shows you how to roll two corners into tight pigtail braids so that the remaining corners form a neat triangle—a bear cub centered inside it—beneath your nape. Slides on the kerchief holder. Polishes your best black shoes.

Uncle John! Uncle John! I’m a Scout.

What?

A Cub Scout of America. How you like my uniform?

ABU BOWS HIS HEAD at the sound of thunder, clasps his hands at clapping lightning, shuts his eyes at the sight of televised floods, and fears a tornado in every wind. He forms a steeple with his fingers, then whispers a prayer over his hamburger and french fries. He performs a slow order of dutiful chores. Mrs. Harris (mother and den mother) gives him permission to play. Abu and Hatch spill out Hatch’s collection of Hot Wheels cars—I only play with the best; they like real cars, like my Uncle John’s—roll them over rugs, under tables, up walls and banisters, down noisy pipes. They make tow trucks of their hands—
We can pull them anywhere
—and motors of their mouths.
Rrrrr rrrrrr.
They puzzle over scale-detailed trains. They spend hours of bent concentration constructing model tanks, battleships, and airplanes, military and civilian. Battle monsters (Godzilla, King Kong, Dracula, the Werewolf) against Superheroes (the Hulk, the Iron Man, Spiderman). Then they pit skills. Abu beats Hatch at checkers. Hatch can sense no strategy in the game and blindly moves the plastic discs from one black square to another. But he beats Abu at chess, game after game, hour upon hour—
Look, Hatch. We don’t stop playing until I win a game
—and always under twenty moves.

Who taught you how to play?

My Uncle John.

They wear serious faces, masks, as they move the chess pieces. Hatch remains silent, focused on the magic of the unspeakable. He absorbs the plastic power of each piece. The pieces flow mobile with a self-determined plan and will. His hand moves knifelike, cutting patterns.

Abu, Uncle John says. His eyeglasses are like flying saucers, high and still, reflecting over the entire position of the board. Move your rook to—

Stop kibitzin, Uncle John! You jus mad that I beat you.

Uncle John, who taught you how to play?

Spokesman. He says it’s based on medieval warfare.

Spokesman knows everything.

Well, who taught you how to play the game?

You did.

Don’t forget it.

HATCH AND ABU walk far and fast—Hatch leads the way with a firm military step—until one or the other (usually Abu) says, I quit. They discover a place so far away that it has no name. Grass, trees—the place breathes green. The ground slopes down into a deeper green, an area entirely shaded from the sun where you can pick patches of sunlight from grass beneath an oak tree. Lie and read. White water flows down over clean black stones. Fill your empty canteen with the clean-tasting water. The river glows with the full benefit of the sun’s rays, down to the stones shining like jewels. Birds and fish move in a single stream. Sunlight skims the waves; the water flashes like a buckle. You imagine it the sea, crimson as fire, and the patch of land at its center, an island retreat. You touch the water, and it replies, Yes. No matter how much or how far you walk you will never find where it begins or ends. At one point, it spills white steam against the surrounding rock—you toss a stone and listen to it plunge roaring into a black watery pit—rising yet somehow still, breath set in steel.

Wet, they sit in a dry space against a tree. The sun soon follows. Makes a square patch on the bark. Dissolves in your thoughts.

Say, you say, man is the measure of all things.

What?

Jus say, I hate God.

Don’t say that, Abu says.

I repeat, say, I hate God. You speak in a place where you can wrestle with your shadow and never lay hold of it.

No, Abu says.

Afraid?

You don’t believe in God?

No. Why should I? He does terrible things.
Why would he let Cookie deform and die? Kill Nap? Kill R.L.? Chop off Sam’s leg?
If God exists—you poke out your chest—let him strike me dead.

You better not say that. Abu scoots away from you.

We are dwarfs on the shoulders of gods, you say. The words roll across the surface of your tongue. Words you had discovered in your wide reading. We can see farther into the distance than our parents and grandparents could see. Wise up.

DOWN DOWN IN WEST MEMPHIS, Lula Mae rewards you with a present, a sunburst Sears, Roebuck guitar.

You doing good in school, Lula Mae said.

Well. I’m doing well.

But I hear yo math ain’t too good. Strive to put the bottom rail on top.

The train ride home, you sit the guitar in the seat beside you—
Red, move outa the way. Sit back there. And keep yo hands off it: it ain’t no toy
—and touch it like a friend. Home, you perch on the edge of your bed. Slant the guitar across your body. Brush the elevator-cable-thick strings but barely raise a note. Hit it harder, Jesus says. You hit it harder, give all six strings—you counted them—a firm karate chop. The hollow body echoes a sound like a rake scraping concrete. Damn! Jesus laughs. Hit it another way, he says. You do. And this way and that way and the other. In the days that follow, your novice fingers grope for the dark strings at every opportunity. You hit them again and again, determined to produce the sounds inside your head. The strings become necessary, loud blood flowing through six red veins.
Even today, your hands will sweat when you don’t or can’t touch them.
You climb inside the deep dark well of the guitar and gaze silently about. Sound and sight enter from a bright world far away. Hours pass. Then you hear footsteps approaching from down the hall. You hide the guitar in the cave under your bed. Sheila throws the door open to the sound of your musical snoring.

Dear Lula Mae,

I am well. I got one tooth out the chair fell on it. I want to see you. I got the book you sint. Sheila read too stories in it. I still got the guitar. I like them when I coming to see you again?

Love Hatch

At the first opportunity, you lug your guitar to school for show-and-tell. (It was either the guitar or your chameleon, Dogma.)

Where you get that guitar?

Down South.

Down South?

Yeah. Down South. My grandmother gave it to me.

What she doin down South?

She live there. You ain’t never been down South?

Nawl. I’m from here.

At the next show-and-tell, Abu presents a drum set to the class—
Copycat! Monkey see, monkey do
—the price tag still attached.
I can play music too.
A full set, not the kit with a single planet of drum, but the whole bright constellation of cymbals, tom-toms, cowbells, snare, and bass traps.

Dear Hatch,

Be a good boy. Don’t aggravate your mamma. Racket and confusion her. Learn to play that thing. And jump at the sun.

Love your grandmother

Lula Mae

You lug your guitar over to Abu’s house. Mrs. Harris puts the two of you in the basement and shuts the door.

What we gon call our group?

Third Rail.

At home in your room, you continue to practice. You finger notes and miss them. Fingers snap off strings, soundless. Try again. Fingers jump back, riff-ready. Switch to the right track. Gradually—seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months—you begin to
hear
it for the first time. Records are black seeds which sprout musical trees. You hack through foliage. Perched birds sing on six twanging limbs.

SO YOU PLAY GUITAR? Uncle John asks.

Yeah.

Bet you ain’t never heard Jimi?

Jimi who?

Listen. Uncle John spins the record.

Sound surprises. You hear a guitarist who is also an orchestra. One man who is six. Oak, cherry, redwood, pine, rosewood, mahogany—six limbs bunched in a single trunk of sound.

Hear that? you say to Abu.

Hear what?

I gotta learn how to play like that.

What? Hear what?

MRS. HARRIS (Geraldine you call her—behind her back) leans over the church piano, her fingers spread web-wide on the keys.

Her round, flat, black skillet face shows no movement, a black dot of musical notation. Choir-robe sleeves rolled up, her hands run slow across the ivory tracks.

She mixes sin and syncopation, tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, music-thirsty. She keeps a glass of water on the piano but never drinks it. Holy water? She bangs heavy chords. She is a grinder, not a tickler.

Reverend Ransom constructs three-hour sermons to shore up the frailty of his voice. He can’t make print crackle into life. Weak, lengthy sermons that fail to rise above the gold-edged page, to flutter about the congregation’s head and bother them to rise.
Though ye have lain among the sheepfolks, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove that is covered with silver wings, and her feathers like gold.
Sermon done, Reverend Ransom leads the congregation in fifteen minutes of song. The congregation is unable to move in their seats—except for an occasional fidget to relieve sore bench butt—never rock wood or transform their stationary pews into musical chairs.

Tough luck. No fun, no terror. You have never attended a service where someone does not get happy, shout, and dance the Holy Ghost. A first for everything.

The choir’s strong voices carry the song. Forked tongues lifting Sheila like meat from the bench. She throws her arms and spine back in a dead man’s float. White-uniformed nurses attempt to pull her back to earth. The song slows. She descends. White-uniformed nurses keep her fast to the bench. Fan her to cool the hot fuel of her spirit. She leaps straight into the air and screams, her eyes rolling one way and her body another.

My dick bigger than yours, you say.

Be quiet, Abu says. We in the house of the Lord. He might hear you.

You got a lil dick, a Christian dick.

Do not let vile words defileth your mouth.

My dick taller than a mountain. Higher than Moses.

Be quiet.

Fatter than the ocean. And deeper than Jonah.

Shut up. Reverend Ransom lookin at us.

My jockstrap slung the boulder that slew—

Children should not talk in church. Brimstone words blister your face. You face them. Reverend Ransom’s finger points antenna-like at you, sounding the depths of your heart. Boy, I shall have words with you.

After service ends, you remove the holy water from the piano, drink it—
Ah, still cold
—burp, then follow Abu into Reverend Ransom’s chambers. The reverend rises from his desk and moves toward you. His knees drum as he walks. With one look (the all-seeing eye), he takes all that he wants from you, empties you out. You are old enough to know better than to play in church.

You listen to his words. Turn them over in your mind. Study their size, color, and texture. You can use words, too. Yes,
Father,
you say.

Reverend Ransom blinks. The edges of his black robe billow back in retreat.

Yes! you shout inside. I’ve won! I’ve beat him! I’ve hacked him down. See the blood spilling red rivers into his eyes.

Reverend Ransom steadies his running eyes. Channels them for an attack. So you think you know it all. His hand disappears inside his black robe—

Oh, Lord, he gon shoot me.

—reappears with a dustpan. He holds out the dustpan between his fingers, a dangling apple. A Scout should know a thing or two about performing service.

You take the dustpan from him.

And you—he speaks to Abu. He shakes his head.

Sorry, sir. I tried to guide him.

The reverend shoves a law-heavy broom at Abu’s chest.

Get to work.

Yes, sir.

Guide him with that.

Yes, sir.

You know where to find anything else you need.

Yes, sir.

Reverend Ransom turns his wide, tall black back to you and Abu, a mausoleum. One more thing.

Yes, sir.

The reverend cocks his head over his shoulder without turning around. He burns directly into your eyes, the cleansing fire of the Lord.

Yes, sir, Abu says.

Why you say something? He talkin to me.

Don’t forget the basement.

Yes, sir.

You and Abu work. Work. Abu’s broom switches like a dancer. Your dustpan catches the rhythm.

Why your preacher talk about snot?

He ain’t say nothing bout no snot.

The Lord’s nostrils.

The two of you sweep the aisles, dust the pews, and clean grime from the wings of stained-glass angels.

Abu, why is black people blackest at the bottom of their butt?

Stop.

You know the round cup part. Like a bunch of mud settle there.

Stop. Why you keep sayin that? We in church. You want the reverend to come back?

Is that old shit? Brown shit crusted black?

You blasphemous. I been baptized.

Baptized?

Ain’t yo mamma baptize you? It’s time.

I ain’t no Christian. Christianity the Jew folks’ religion.

No it ain’t. Jews don’t get baptized. They get circumcised.