Rails Under My Back (51 page)

I’m circumcised and I ain’t no Jew.

Be quiet and clean up.

Aw right, you say, we finished here. Let’s do the basement.

Two narrow flashlight beams lead you to the basement.

Let we sweep, you say. You shine the light.

No, you hold the light. You don’t know how to sweep.

I can sweep better than you.

No you can’t.

I’ll shine the flashlight and I’ll sweep too.

I ain’t gon … what was that? Abu says.

Your mamma.

I’m serious.

Yo greasy grandmamma.

Stop rankin. We in church.

Yo, I jus heard it too. Sound like someone walkin.

Maybe it’s the preacher.

Why would he be down here?

He always—

Probably rats.

Rats?

Or a monster.

Ain’t no monsters in church.

You hear it again. Loud this time.

You point the beam. It came from over there. The beam glows a yellow eye on the closed door before you.

That’s a closet. I think.

You lean your ears to the door. Hear the noise again. Bleating? Beating? Breathing?

Open it, you say.

You open it.

What’s wrong? You chicken?

Yeah. So you open it.

You take the doorknob warm in your hand. You turn it. The door will not open.

It’s locked, Abu says. Let’s go.

No, you say. Give me that broom.

What you gon do? Abu hands you the broom.

You pluck two yellow straws. You kneel in the darkness, lean your ear to the lock. You put the two straws in the lock with one hand and work them like chopsticks as Uncle John had demonstrated.
Learned it in the army. You can open anything.
Listen for the heart. The heart sounds. You right yourself. The door opens with little force on greased hinges. But you and Abu don’t enter the room. Stay well behind the threshold.

I thought you was gon go in.

Shut up, you whisper. Who’s in there? you say, aim your voice into the darkness. Search it with your light. Crates. Boxes. And more crates and boxes. Your eyes loosen and tighten. Reverend Ransom? You feel Abu’s warm hand on your shoulder. Two red eyes peer from a dark corner. Look you in the face. You lift and aim the beam. A face springs up under the flashlight. Wings flutter.

I BEAT YOU AGAIN.

So. Least I ain’t bad at math.

Least I
know
my math.

I know mine too.

No you don’t. You a Christian.

What’s that got to do with anything?

Don’t you go to church?

I give fellowship every Sunday.

You believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?

I been baptized.

The Trinity fits no law of mathematics.

What?

How can one person be three?

THE AIR MOVES at a roiling boil. Heat you can touch. Heat that will never cool in the memory. You and Abu join hands—skin to skin, sweat to sweat—in the double field trip line—the buddy system—and march onto the yellow school bus. The driver revives the idling engine. Kids cheer. The driver maneuvers the big steering wheel and forces the bus into traffic. The sun shines merciless in blue sky. A glowing showman glistening with sleight of hand, tricking your eyes into hot shifting vision. Burns and blurs them into two halos. Song floats in the bus’s cool silver insides.

You don’t join in. Keep your quiet hands in your lap. Watch the moving world outside the window. All the streets run in numbers.

A silver flower pushes metal petals through the bus window. A battleship grows in the grass-filled garden parallel to the Museum of Science and Industry.

Look. You nudge Abu. That’s a destroyer.

No it ain’t. That’s a battleship.

Boy, you don’t know nothing.

Yes I do. Can we walk the plank?

A destroyer ain’t got no plank.

Oh. What’s it doing in that garden? Why it ain’t floating on no water?

You say nothing. Shake your head.

THE MUSEUM is the biggest house you’ve seen. Acres of walls. Lengths of steps like giant rows of teeth. Marble columns and pillars that hold the sky above the earth. Frieze-giants carved in stone.

Dutiful schoolchildren quit the bus and slip through revolving doors, one upon the heels of the next. An enormous globe lights the mezzanine.
The earth’s magnetic lines of force flow from south to north. Continental Drift.
Look and learn. The museum harbors the siftings of centuries: two layers of fossil-rich earth caged off behind glass.
Those fossils can bite!
You view the heavens through a long tube. Cold metal sends shivers through your naked eyes. Stars blink and talk.
The light from a star takes ten years to reach us. Hence, when you wish upon a star, you wish upon the past.
You and Abu—
Follow me
—enter a cabin-sized hot and cool tank.
Heat travels. Insulators. Conductors.
Muscle a pulley and chain that rolls a bowling ball over a smooth rubber course only to return it to the place of origin and shoot it into free orbit again.
A loop is an antinode, the node being the point, line, or surface of a vibrating object free from vibration.
A round antenna blinks, vying for your attention.
A loop antenna is used in direction-finding equipment and radio receivers.
A rattlesnake snaps crescent fangs.
The copperhead is related to the rattlesnake family, but he does not rattle.
Film animates the origins of life.
Whales used to walk the earth.
Dinosaurs stand frozen over lacustrine ponds.
One egg of an elephant bird provided an omelette for fifty people.
Rows and rows of stuffed birds—
birds can fly for thousands of miles without getting tired and can sleep with open wings on a moving stream of air
—hover in perpetual air. A hummingbird flaps a haze of invisible wings.
The hummingbird flies backward.
A homing pigeon curves its course.
A tiny crystal in their brain is supersensitive to the earth’s magnetic flow, which is received through their feathers and nerves.
You rub a model brain until it glows like a crystal ball.
The brain doesn’t feel pain directly.
Man evolves from ape in caged glass fragments—
natural selection selects and rejects from an indiscriminate flow of innovations
—an upward plane of gradual height.
There is a metronome to evolution. Ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent of all species that once existed are now extinct.
Bananas reach for you with plastic yellow fingers.
Musa paradisiaca is a seedless cultivated species of berry. How then did it arrive in our hemisphere before the arrival of
—

I ain’t know that a berry, you say.

That ain’t no berry, Abu says.

Nigga, read the sign.

Abu reads the caption stenciled in negative light. So what? Yo mamma a berry too.

Yo greasy grandmamma.

Abu slaps you across your nape.

Punk. I’m gon kick yo ass.

Try it. You can’t catch me.

Yo fat ass can’t run.

Run fast enough to keep up wit yo mamma.

This ain’t no time to be talkin bout nobody’s mamma. We can do that later. Look and learn.

The paruru species is an extraordinarily poor volunteer. It is difficult for this variety to spread quickly without a very active crusade on its behalf.

How come everything got a foreign name?

How come
you
got a foreign name?

My name ain’t foreign. It’s black.

You move inside a giant stone head. Speak through its hollow mouth.

Abu, tell Geraldine she can’t live in here.

Tell Sheila that.

You enter a hall of flowing mirrors that pull you along—powerless, let go, ride it out—swim your shape into shifting images of possibility. From the crest of a waterfall, you look down on a miniature of the city. Tar Lake loops around all five boxes of the city. Slims at the state line. Your eyes roam all points of the compass. They sharpen. The city stretches. So vast and yet so small that your eyes can take and piece together snatches of geography, yards, alleyways, rivers.

See, you say, that’s Central.

That’s where we live.

Yes.

Can you see my house?

No.

There go Eddyland to the west. Abu’s eyes spin like compass arrows.

That’s where my Uncle John live.

North Park to the north.

That’s where my sister live.

Porsha?

Who else.

South Lincoln to the south.

Kankakee County just south of it.

That’s where my aunt Beulah live.

Where?

Kankakee County. Decatur. She old. Real old.

Kings to the east. Liberty Island, a shapeless object stuck in Tar Lake, completely surrounded by plastic water.

That’s where Gracie live. And Jesus. They jus moved there.

In all that water?

Yeah. But Uncle John know how to make the lake stay away from they do.

Buildings backward, you walk through century-old cobblestone streets. Board old streetcar trains iron-bolted to the floor.
During the morning several negroes amused themselves by riding up and down in the various cars. We are unable to discover any reason or justification on the part of a few young men in creating riot and discord.
A whistle burns blue air to black ribbons.
Whistles were used as signals. One toot mean, Train approaching town. Two toots mean, We passing through. Jus passing through. Ain’t stopping. And the conductor stood in the caboose, swinging his red lantern.
A locomotive works its rapid elbows. You and Abu dodge the big mean-looking steam eye. Climb into the black engine room.
The sound of a train always reminds me of the clanging of steel doors, Sam said.

You got that right, Dave said.

Grab at the slow smoke of the engine.

One man stood on the track waving a warning light. When the train stopped, the armed robbers boarded the train and robbed the passengers of $20,000. Authorities couldn’t track their mobility. They were everywhere and nowhere.

Look over there.

You look. Shield your eyes at the brightness of a silver-fluted monster.

That’s a rocket, Abu says.

No it’s not. You need glasses. That’s a streamliner.

Zephyr. The first diesel-powered engine, 1934.

You think you know everything.

Matter cannot move itself.

Kinetics. The science of movement.

Physics. The study of movable bodies.

Theology. The study of the immovable mover.

Metaphysics. The study of
—

Blackness calls. Find yourselves armored in oxygen. Moonscape shadow. You two walk slow-motion. Jump. Float. Float on. Float over old Cadillacs, balloon-round.

Running boards glimmer under hot lights. Chrome bumpers shine one against the other. Engines churn black ink. It’s all here. The world’s first cars look like carriages. Cars of the twenties like trains. Forties,
cars.
Fifties, missiles. Sixties, jet planes. Seventies, speedboats.

That’s Uncle John’s car.

No it ain’t.

He used to have one of those.

How you know?

I heard. I seen pictures. I rode.

Look. Abu indicates the World War II fighter planes spider-suspended at slanted angles from the ceiling, silk-seen, on invisible strings.

You and Abu run swiftly beneath them, guarding your heads. You pilot Abu through an iron tunnel to the battleship.

This gotta be the destroyer we saw on the bus.

Battleship.

Sight deceived: CLOSED FOR REMODELING.

Damn, it’s closed.

Double damn.

You study photographs that line the corridor. (They study you.) Fighter jets on a vast deck like insignificant mosquitoes. Ant-small men swab tunnel-long guns. Damn. Look how big that ship is.

Yeah. And look at them big guns.

Yeah. Real big. Bigger than this battleship.

Bigger than this whole museum.

Bigger than the whole damn neighborhood.

Bigger than the whole country.

Bigger than the whole wide world.

The iron tunnel opens onto a maze.

A bunker. That’s what this is, a bunker.

How you know?

A warren of corridors and rooms. Tiled roof. Whitewashed walls. But the walls are really doors. DAZE MAZE. Abu squeezes a buzzer. A door spits him out of the room into another, sopping wet and crying for his mother. You continue on, determined to win the prize, a red wax bull. One room hides another room clicking clocks of every shape and description. You take several more wrong turns, wind your way through more identical corridors. Your sense of direction deserts you. You try to double back. The corridors all look alike. The same tiles. The same light. Perhaps you have only orbited the main chamber. You crawl through a tunnel-like vent. Rise into space. In front of you, a sign reads THIS IS IT. A thick red arrow points down to a lever. You pull it. Moments later, the wall spits out the wax bull, red and warm to the touch.

You run to Abu with your prize. Told you I would get it.

Man! Abu says. He blow-dries his tears. Licks his snot. Let me see it.

You let him touch it.

Man. I wish I had one.

You coulda got one.

I know. What do we do now? Anxious, Abu hops on one leg then the other as if he must pee.

Follow me.

He follows.

Bull in hand, you know what to find and think you know where to find it. You claw the air. Duck under light. Squeeze through the dark. The air quick around your head with spastic machinery. Ah, yes. Here. Here.

Is this a real coal mine?

Yes, you answer. Come on. Let’s go in.

He comes.

You board blackness. The coal car rattles down through the dark. You see Abu’s face floating in the crowded blackness.