Rails Under My Back (55 page)

The early years, Red was closer to Hatch than his own skin. Gracie and Sheila dressed them the same for Sam’s funeral (viewing?).

Sam stands with one pants leg rolled up, offering his prized wooden stump for all the world to see. The stump moves with effortless, hidden will when he walks, like a hinged puppet limb. Stationary beneath him now as he mixes shaving cream in his old army helmet.

Yall niggas get bigger every time I see you. Soon I’m gon need me a chain saw to barber yall big heads.

My mammy say don’t use no straight razor, Hatch says.

Is yo mammy here? … I’ll cut you first since you got the brave mouth. Now hold still.

Sam works his sparkling straight razor between his fingers like a potato peeler. Shaves Hatch clean. Cleans Red the same. Two slick-bean twins.

Why you use that sword on my head? Red says. You ain’t sposed to be usin no spear on nobody’s head.

Hatch signed both of their names—
Hatch Jones, Jesus Jones
in the same hand—in the Visitors’ Book that slanted on a lectern under a remembered light.
Dearly departed.
In the scripted program, Hatch saw his great-aunts Beulah, Big Judy, Koot, and his grandmother Lula Mae listed as Sam’s
survivors.
Had Sam beached these women from the drowning waters? Had this dead man carried them—floating them on the log of his wooden leg—but allowed life’s tides to drag him into the dark drifting deep? Long ago, the dead man had planted himself in Hatch’s and Red’s hearts and grew; now, both of their heads yearned for the shining contents of the casket. Two faces and two eyes, they both peered into the coffin—

Touch him.

Nawl. You touch him.

Chicken.

Scaredy cat.

—hoping to view the undertaker’s stitches that had reattached Sam’s severed head.

She ain’t cut off his head, Dave said. Just buried that ax deep in it.

Like a log.

They found a bottle of Iron Ass next to his head. That’s how they knew it was his woman that’d done it.

Sam, if I’da just been there to lift up yo dyin head, Beulah said. You died too soon.

Damn, Hatch said. How old was he?

You died too young.

He was an ole-ass nigga.

Red, you be ole someday too.

Never.

Why was only one half of the casket—Sam’s stiff powdered bust—open to sight? To hide Sam’s wooden leg?
Perhaps a bird had laid tiny eggs in his tree leg.
He thought about Sam’s wooden leg, waxed and shiny like Sam’s dead skin—a birthday candle carrying the long, thick wick of Sam’s years. Who would inherit it?

Sam’s wood leg stomp so hard on the floor that his empty Old Rocking Chair bottles and his girlfriend’s Iron Ass bottles twink like chimes. Sam sit you in one chair, Red in another. Hand on hip, Porsha say, Uncle Sam, my mamma say, don’t you be usin no straight razor on they head. Sam pull the straight razor from the sheath of his blazer pocket. Uncle Sam, my mamma say
—

Girl, you gon cut they hair? Sam run the razor once twice across his strop. Flip it over. Run it once twice across his strop. Then peel you and Red clean as apples.

Sometimes he would threaten to cut you and Red with the dead Jap sword he kept under the bed.

The next day, to lift their spirits, Uncle John took Hatch and Red to Fun Town—it was a satisfaction to take them about with him;
This is my son. And that’s my nephew. My brother’s boy
—the amusement park on Ninety-fifth and Stony Island. Three circus rings in a constant blur of motion with clowns, acrobats, and animals.

Nothing like Riverview used to be, Uncle John said. Boring. This might as well be the zoo.

Quick go-carts snapped popcorn sounds. A sweat-slick slide rolled your round butt like a ball bearing down five flights of friction—yes, you felt like a Coke bottle sliding down the chute of the red vending machine in Uncle John’s garage—and a Ferris wheel afforded a giant’s-eye view of Central and all the city’s five boxes.

The one at Coney Island is better, Uncle John said.

It would be the only view and visit, for the city vaporized Fun Town soon after. From then on, Uncle John—this horse of an uncle and father carrying the two of you piggyback—took you and Red to the traveling amusement parks—trucks arrive with the first blink of sunlight; skinny white trash unload them; the park is open for business before the last fingers of sun scratch the horizon—that occupied the vacant lots on Church Street, Stony Island, or Jeffery Boulevard.

YOU AND RED straddled broomsticks and rode (yes, straw-maned horses) the plains—Giddy-up! Giddy-up!—of the small apartment on Kenwood in Woodlawn. The two of you rode hard and fast on your bikes, knees bumping against chests, through the decaying streets of Woodlawn, Englewood, South Shore on a single, shared breath of oxygen. Your need to know stretched an invisible telephone wire through time and distance, connecting sleeping mouth to sleeping ear; you and Red passed dreams back and forth like a joint. Wind expanded the sails of your windbreaker jackets and sent you coasting along through the hood, light, weightless, never losing breath, a race of radiance, running, watching the world blur past, forgetting that you are running, one corner followed by another corner, one street by another street, wrapped in the silence of flight, wind lathering your faces with cool air, blowing. Fevered days followed again and again. At Rainbow Beach or Oak Street Beach you sought sun-filled life, rash physical joy. The air filled with conversation. Waves galloped in like horses, and the two of you lay for hours flat against hot sand—fine, like brown sugar, shaking it out of your toes; damp sand that absorbed red root life, bloodlines—and watched the sun through the huge waves.

Flooded by images of the Gemini moon landing, you and Red—at
your
suggestion—raced into Sheila’s garden, found two forked branches, and cut a circle in the grass so perfect you could have laid a foundation. Used the red of Sheila’s roses to magnify the circle. Stood inside the circle and waved at the men on the moon. The men waved back. Porsha—
she wielded the body of a woman even then
—chastised you and Red with keen slaps.

Balanced, the two of you frog-kicked at either end of a seesaw, gravity-free, astronauts frog-leaping over the moon.

Come on, Red, you said. Let’s get on the carousel.

Okay, Red said.

Bounced bowlegged to the carousel. You and Red grabbed the sides and ran with everything you had, shoving it, shoving, sending it around and around—Don’t yall go too fast on that thing, Porsha said—the images blurring in a stream of speed and motion, and hopped on, round and round with dizzy speed, four hands gripped tight to the iron bars, four arms stretched full, elbows locked, roiling, shaking back and forth, the spin of a potter’s wheel, you and Red leaning away from the center, heads all the way back, necks craned, straining the muscles, the world flicking swiftly in and out of vision, the steady backward rush of air, then Red sailing forth, cut from the line of motion, an astronaut sucked into outer space. You saw him for a moment, a moment lost in a blur of images. The carousel spun you back to the same spot. You let go too. Sailing. Landing. Your body cut a groove through the dirt. The two of you crying, more from fear than pain—later, Porsha treated a few nicks and scratches—and then an image waded into your wet sight. A double image. Your eyes tried to fix its outlines. What yall tryin to do? Porsha said. She smacked you. Smacked Red. Get me in trouble? Smacked you again. Smacked Red.

By day, you and Red would missile-pitch hot dogs—smothered with heat-seeking mustard—into stadium crowds.
Now, that Satchel, Beulah said, he could make a ball walk, make it slow down to a crawl, and his curves were so smooth his fingers leaked oil.
By night, catch sparkling lightning bugs.
Fireflies
you called them, for the fires glowed in the night with secret treasure. You would cut out the fuzzy sticky yellow lights from the thorax and store them shining in dull-glassed mason jars.

Once lived a nigga named Zoom, Red said. The fastest nigga on earth. So quick that he could beat his reflection in a mirror. Could catch his own farts in a bottle befo the poot escaped his butt and the air got funky. That’s the end of my tale. Ain’t no mo. Bang yo mamma til my dick get sore.

Who taught you that lie? you asked. Uncle John?

My secret to tell. Noah pissed and the water fell. The world ain’t flat. The world ain’t round. It’s just one strip up and down.

THE CHURCH ROCKED. Soul-saving song. You and Red dropped into a split, then rocked back into position and grabbed imaginary microphones.

Red spit into the collection plate and passed the plate to you.

The spit watched you like a silver eye.

Spit! Red whispered.

No, you said.

Chicken, Red said.

No I ain’t. Jus don’t want to that’s all. You tucked the collection plate under the wooden pew like a commode.

The choir sang dimensions. Cotton Rivers climbed the piano and Cleveland Sparrow mounted the organ. On wings of words, dead souls floated up above the podium, ascended, like sky divers. Tongue-tied angels flapped humming wings in the rafters. Two forks of sermon catapulted you from the hard wooden pew into the heavens. You saw God at work.

WHO WANTS TO GO inside the spaceship? Red said. He slapped the old refrigerator, earthbound and rusting in a glass-choked alley. A shock of red hair escaped beneath the visor of a red baseball cap jammed onto the back of his head. The visor pointed right at the sun.

Not me.

Not me.

Not me.

What’s wrong? Scared?

Damn straight.

Let a man do a man’s job.

It took three of them pulling on the handle to get the door open and expose the brown insides.

Uh. You gon go in there? Stinks. Somebody took a dump.

Shut up, stupid. That ain’t no dukey. Mildew. Don’t you know nothing?

Don’t care what you say. I stays away from dukey. Hey, Abu, yo mamma been in there?

Nawl, yo greasy grandmamma.

Ain’t nobody said nuthin bout yo mamma. I don’t play that shit.

Shut up. I’m gon inside. Hatch—

Yeah.

You shut the door behind me.

Okay.

Red climbed inside, forcing his long body into a ball, the red cap still on his head.

Okay, shut the door.

You couldn’t, so Abu and the other boys all leaned their weight into it. Door shut, they waited.

Red, you aw ight?

Yeah. Now open the door.

They tried.

Open the door.

They tried.

I said open the door.

They tried.

Quit fuckin around. Open the door.

They tried and tried. Much breathing and sweating.

Look, I ain’t playin. Open the door.

We can’t.

Open the door.

They tried.

Open the door.

They tried.

Open the door.

They tried. Then it came, the entire door breaking away like ice.

Red sat there, curled, not even trying to get out, the red cap wet with sweat. It would take you years to dilute the memory (never forget) of the tight twisted face under the baseball cap. The die was cast: this face Red would carry for the rest of his life.

JESUS’S CONICAL HEAD OF RED HAIR rose above the steering wheel of his car, sun on the evening horizon. Uncle John’s surprise. Jesus hadn’t asked for it since he would ask nothing of anybody, and Uncle John hadn’t promised it, all he said,
Hatch, I’ll get you one too;
he never did—a Frankenstein monster (a butchered white Volkswagen Rabbit) that Spokesman had pieced together with junk from Uncle John’s Funky Four Corners Auto Shop. The muffler tied up under the chassis like a broke-dick dog.

You got to park it on level ground, Uncle John said. He filled the tank the same way he’d filled Gracie with his raging wine. The emergency brake don’t work. Park it on level ground or it might roll away.

The two of you, you and Jesus, Hatch and Red, loved to take it white-smoking through the hollow roar of the interstate—heard above the cracking of desiccated leather—bumps on the highway shaking laughter out of him, out of you. Drive all the way to Decatur—black cows dotting the landscape, farm quiet wrapped around you—zooming past farm boys in muscle cars and state police armed with chain saws and ten-gallon Stetsons. And on into the white trash section of Kankakee. (But never to Beulah’s house itself. She pissed a fit whenever she saw Jesus.) Trailer homes propped up on concrete blocks. Rusted cars on deflated tires that had long forgotten motion. Look at them white motherfuckers! Can’t drive for shit! Slow down and flash nigga grins at old ladies.

HUSH, Sheila said. John, don’t start that stuff bout how you don’t celebrate Christmas.

Why not? Uncle John said.

Hush.

Why not? And, Hatch, I’m surprised at you. Sposed to be a man of the Book. Any fool who read the Bible know that Christ ain’t born today. Ain’t that right, Gracie?

Gracie showed no reaction, as if she hadn’t heard the question.

Pagan holiday, Uncle John said.

It’s only pagan if you pagan, you said.

What? Uncle John said.

Only if you believe in pagan things. Know that you are pagan.

What? Uncle John said. Hatch, thought you was smarter than that. He meant it; you gathered that from the look in his eyes. I expect more.

I know, you said.

Well, if you know, why you celebrate Christmas? Uncle John’s fire hadn’t cooled.

Tradition.