Rails Under My Back (82 page)

Faces turned to watch them with angry curiosity. Bodies closed around them. They could go no further.

Damn! Hatch said. Fuck! He stood sorting the city and Sabine Hall from his eyes, from the air, the night.

Dressed in colored spangles, the demonstrators knock him about, unbalanced, unsteady, left right, bell, pendulum. Their commands and demands on walls, windows, hands, backs, faces, bobbing in the air, spit into ghostly acts on the night.

The cops open their mouths to say, Come on, come through me. Their teeth are gates.

Hatch feels air damp with anticipatory sweat.

God cannot lie, Abu says. He stands trembling like a terrified tourist in a big, notorious city. God has no reason to lie.

Moonlight falls with a tarnish. The moon (or the fallen sun) holds like a red bull’s-eye. Patterned stars dangle weblike in shafts of moonlight. Clothe bodies in subtle threads.

The demonstrators open their lungs to dark fire. One short rebel runs forward, throws a burning something, then darts back. The cops do not move or react, their foundation built of fire-resistant materials. Hatch wonders at the beauty of their blue bodies in the black night. Blue bodies proudly bearing new uniforms with blue crossed suspenders.

The demonstrators move forward without fear. The days cannot touch them. Hatch hears anger and repeats its sound. He absorbs the beautiful scent of standing, belonging, purpose. A light goes on in him, somewhere, inside. His call of discovery.

The lead officer shouts health-giving words through a bullhorn, voice crackling with feedback. The demonstration leader answers in words seasoned with salt. Hatch follows it all, enjoying himself, chuckling, taken from high moment to high moment.

Cops red-stain faces with straight-beamed flashlights. Blinded, Hatch brings language rightly to his tongue. You fucking pig!

The blue wood horses gallop off into shadows. The blue cops scuttle forward. The square street breaks into shapeless chance. Hatch stands silent and even, breathing in and out, staring at waves of cops. Uncertain. Possibilities flying apart at the speed of thought.

Butcher-fashion, a cop chops downward at Hatch with his billy club. Hatch meets the hatchet with Mr. Pulliam’s old army bag. The nightstick recalls its circle and sets out again. Hatch can see the cop clearly before him, gnats crashing into his glass face mask. His eyes turn into stars. Hatch keeps his shield high and searches about him, searches, needing, hoping, wishing for more invisible darkness.

Abu!

He waits for Abu’s returning touch.

Abu!

The crowd is half running, half flying like chickens. Pecking at the cops. Scratching. A nightstick settles red like a bird on some guy’s face.

Hatch stumbles through the dizzy dark. Lives tumble into him. The doors go shutting in the distance, knocking like bowling pins. All the windows are webbed over. The city opens around him. The earth hanging in nothing.

SHOULDA SEEN THAT dog come flyin outa that burnin buildin. One of those ugly pit bulls, runnin red and wild and fast wit a fiery leash round its neck. Barkin flames. White foam drippin from its fangs like beer on tap. But Birdleg didn’t run. Couldnah run even if he’d ah wanted to. Damn cripple. Nawl, he didn’t run. Hell, he didn’t even
walk.
He jus stood there framed by fire. Jus stood in his window looking out, calm, unmoving, unhollering …

You approached the closed casket, cautious, keeping your distance, your body refusing to get close. You stood, your mind moving, telling you what you had to do. Pay respect. Pay homage to a fallen flyer. You took one step, two steps, and another. Closer now. You felt faint heat, like the warm hood of a recently run car. A sugar smell lingered in smoke scent. You leaned forward and placed your palms on the closed casket. Fire moved through the touch lines. Traveled up your arms. You pushed the casket open. Rising steam drew you back. He, the remembered, the departed, sloshed around, a soup of ash, shit, and blood.

Night birds cut the air to rags. He walks, breathing in the broken spaces, the memory that was more than memory, the image that was no longer image, sealed up tight inside him like preserves in one of Lula Mae’s mason jars.

Voices around him like crickets. Strollers here and there, soft, fuzzy, out-of-focus flowers in the galloping world. And cops with snail-like faces retracting inside helmets.

He makes no attempt to hide himself. Safe in something better, greater than himself.

His clothes sag with the weight of blood. I’m here, he says, wanting to hear the sound of his own voice.

He sees stars lensed in perfect stillness. He can see clearly the way his invisible wounds are shaped. Shaped in the light of the likeness. Birdleg.

Gooseneck streetlamps drop nooses of slow swinging light. Mosquitoes pop and ping against hot, illuminated glass. The sun is still hours away. He will be gone by then.

Memory ambushes him, a drama of familiar names, faces, and scenes, which he translates into fact and feeling. He sees his own birth, the first flash of being, emerging from red ‘Sippi clay. He sees his lungs, great bellows, stoking his first fiery words. Sweat gathers next to his eyes. Quickening moisture. He counts every hair of his former sickness with mathematical precision. Carries it all back to the old place, a distant well. He will not remember. He will not dream.

Entire, the Red Hook buildings stand close together like friendly neighbors. He is surprised at the ease it takes him to return to Birdleg’s secret nest. A maze before when Lady T brought him here. A map now. He finds clean clothes—red—on the bare steel floor, neatly ironed and folded, waiting for him. He removes his old clothes. No use to him now. Naked, burns them in the center of the steel floor. Blood angers the fire. Flame rises tall and ragged, bear and claws. His body swells into open space around him. Red giant.

He wraps himself in the new clothes. They become him. A good clean color. His reflection wiggles and waves through the walls, red fish. He chuckles at his ability to multiply. A single red wave reinforced by another red wave and that wave reinforced by still another and on and on. All possibilities and probabilities.

Miles of switches, wire, and cable promise a glad net for the master fisherman. Glittering dials and buttons watch him like big frog eyes. He watches back with a renewed force of vision. Metal rubs against his hands, persistent and teasing, hungry dogs. His hands respond with heavy grace.

His naked feet rumble. Fire. Flame. Force. Foundation splinters. Concrete powders. Motion overpowers his stomach. He steadies himself. The city’s roar sinks away, subsumed by silent rising. Birds arrow by, shaking space easily from their wings. He waves his hands at stars that begin to show over the trees. He directs his eyes down at the lamplit city miles below his bare powerful feet. Tar Lake no larger than a tear. Twelve rivers all threadthin. Rhythmic cornfields like yellow waves.

Red Hook pulls away from the earth.

12/12/90–3/6/98

New York, Chicago, New York

JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN is a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia. He taught for many years in the writing program at the New School as well as at Columbia University and New York University. Allen is the author of five books, including the novel
Song of the Shank,
which is loosely based on the life of Blind Tom, a nineteenth century piano virtuoso and composer who was the first African American to perform at the White House. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Rails Under My Back
won the
Chicago Tribune
’s Heartland Prize for Fiction, and Allen’s short story collection,
Holding Pattern,
received the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. He is also the author of two collections of poetry. Allen is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a grant in Innovative Literature from the Creative Capital Foundation, and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Born in Chicago, Allen holds a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the founder and director of the Pan African Literary Forum, and is the fiction director of the Norman Mailer Center Writers Colony.

www.jefferyrenardallen.com

Book design by Debbie Glasserman. Text set in Electra. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.