Rails Under My Back (9 page)

Yeah, in a wheelchair. See, she ain’t have no legs. Got nubs up to here. Jesus put the edges of his hands at the knees.

Damn. Head bent in listening.

Check it.

And she ain’t have no arms. Nubs. Right here. Jesus put the edge of his hand at his elbow.

Shit.

What kind of bitch …

And she had this special wheelchair and all she had to do was throw her hips like this. Jesus demonstrated.

Oh, I see. One of them. Big-booty bitch.

Mad back.

Word.

Lumpin.

So the father say, Yall gon out in the backyard and talk. So the nigga and the crippled bitch go out. So he start kickin it to her. And she get hot, but she ain’t never been fucked before. How you gon fuck a bitch with nubs? So the nigga see this clothesline stretched across the backyard. He gets an idea. He grabs two clothespins, then he takes the bitch out of the chair and pins one nub arm to the line, then pins the other nub arm to the line. He props an old wood barrel under her butt. Then he bump her from the back.

Damn!

Word!

Bumped that crippled bitch!

After he nut, he zip up his pants. Then he be like, See ya. Her father come out and find her three hours later. Pinned to the clothesline.

Laughter bounces around the court. Jesus is deep into it too, rejoicing from the gut.

And he left her like that?

Word.

Cold-blooded.

Hanging on the clothesline.

Word.

Heart.

But, nigga—Keylo shoved No Face’s head back—that wasn’t no joke.

You don’t know me from Adam. I ain’t said nothing bout no joke. I said a
lie.

Bitch, stop lyin. Keylo stuck a big eyedropper into the forty and suctioned up liquid into the tube. When the dropper was full, he craned back his head, poked the dropper in his mouth, and squeezed liquid from the flooded ball at the dropper’s end.

Funny story, Freeze said. He took Jesus’s shoulders into the circle of his arm. Jesus saw that his own feet were no longer touching the ground. He bobbed in the air, bobbed in the circle of Freeze’s sweat-warm arm. He could stay here, forever, and hang. Hang. Freeze released his shoulders. Anchorless now, Jesus concentrated, concentrated so as not to float away. Freeze walked a few steps, then turned to Jesus’s trailing eyes. Keylo, he said, go to the sto fo me.

Damn, Freeze. I wanna check out another one of them jokes. Lies. Stories.

Me too, No Face said.

Gon on, Jesus. Bust another one.

Yeah. Bust another one.

Stop repeatin after me, bitch.

Keylo, go to the sto fo me. Buy me a … he nodded at Keylo’s forty.

What about them stories?

Later for that.

Come on, Freeze.

Keylo.

Damn. Keylo tail-wagged off to the store—no, walking like an antelope, lifting hoof from knee.

And buy Jesus one too.

No, thanks, Jesus said. I’m straight. He fluttered his feathers.

No Face, go with him. Make sure he don’t get lost.

Aw, Freeze. But I wanna hear—

No Face.

Damn. Hey, Keylo, wait up. No Face trotted off. Jesus watched him grow smaller and disappear.

A pigeon skimmed the earth in flight, then headed toward the sky, and the sky breathed it in.

Freeze worked his arms through his T-shirt, and covered his bare chest and back. Pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pants pocket. Shook the pack until one cigarette eased its length, extended, like a radio antenna. Want a square?

No, Jesus said. I quit smokin.

Wish I could quit. Freeze pulled the antenna from the pack, tapped it against the back of his hand, then stuck it in his mouth. Using his thumbnail, he flamed a match. Where yo daddy?

What? Jesus said.

I said, where yo daddy?

My daddy? Jesus stood in a mass of tobacco smoke.

Yeah.

Jesus breathed in the silence. You don’t know me.

Freeze watched the lit cigarette end. Where yo daddy?

Hey, you don’t know me. Why you askin bout my daddy?

We got something to settle.

You must mean somebody else. He don’t even know you.

He stole a bird from me.

Sound strikes what skin is meant to shield. Jesus wobbles. What?

He stole a bird from me.

A trapdoor shuts inside Jesus’s chest. A bird?

Yes.

My daddy? Jesus fingers his chest, points to his heart.

Yeah. His name John, ain’t it?

Nawl.

His name ain’t John?

Yeah.

John ain’t yo father?

Nawl.

Who yo father?

Jesus looked into the sky. Thinking:
I get it. No Face told you. Yall running a game.
He laughed.

You think that’s funny?

Jesus drank Freeze’s milk-white eyes. No.

Ain’t John yo father? John Jones?

Yeah, he my father. So, what up?

Like I said. Freeze took a drag on the cigarette. Exhaled through his nose, dragonlike. He stole a bird from me. Light lay in four colors on his face.

You serious?

Freeze said nothing.

Jesus shook his head. Fingered the words in his mind, measured them, searched for color and sense. When did he steal it?

Freeze smoked the square down to the butt. Does it matter? He crushed the butt under his heel.

John know you?

Know me good enough to steal from me. Know me good enough to steal from me then run off and hide like a lil bitch.

Jesus let truth move inside him, let himself move around inside it.

So now you know.

Yes.

And you believe?

Yes.

Good. So then you know. Know what I need you to do. So then you know that I need you to—

I know, Jesus said. I know.

You know?

I know. And I will.

You will?

Yes. Yes I will. Yes, I’ll do it.

You can always choose—

Wait, Jesus said. He halted Freeze’s words with his palms. Pushed them back. Wait. Feet carried him away. He didn’t want to hear any more. No reason to. No reason, will, or desire. He walked, putting time and distance between himself and Freeze’s request, command, mission. Maybe Freeze did know John. Maybe. And maybe John had stolen from him. No surprise there. John was a thief. Water-slick. Easy in, easy out. And John was forever desperate, light, seeking to add some weight to his pockets. But would he accept any color or shape of pay?
God marked every sparrow, Gracie said. Every sparrow.
Gravity, Jesus carried the thought inside. Raised it. High. Descended down the spit-mottled steps of the subway.

THE TRAIN LEAVES AT TEN. John held two pieces of luggage—a suitcase and a flight bag—muscled out in each hand. Runs express. A ten-hour ride. Call you as soon as I get there tonight.

John’s promise was like money in the bank. Gracie could count on it. In thirty years he had never missed a call.

You heard from Jesus?

Gracie heard nails in his voice. No. She recalled the day John tied Jesus’s shellacked baby booties to his rearview mirror, the hanging boots running when the red Eldorado kicked into motion.

That boy slippin. If he keep it up, he be six feet deep.

I guess so. She carried two images of Jesus. The last thing she saw of him, Christmas Day on his way out her door, the black circle stitched dead center to the back of his red winter jacket, still and watchful a sinful black eye, clean and clear, smooth as the back of his bald head. And the first (minutes after his red birth), the empty cave of his bawling mouth challenging her to enter.

Don’t worry. John put his hand in the small of her back, drew her in close. She watched his brown eyes, dark, wide, bottomless, two thick high piles of leaves. Maybe we could—

But she already knew the answer before he had fully shaped the question. Maybe we could have another one. To make up for the one we lost, Jesus. She slipped her tongue in his mouth. His met hers, and they held one another, hands and tongues exploring.

He drew back. Come on, now. You know I could stay here all day. But I can’t. I gotta meet Lucifer. His brown eyes twinkled a warning, as they had done that morning more than thirty years ago—time is the seed—when she had answered his first knock on her door, when she had opened it—in those days you could open to a stranger without first looking through the cautious peephole, open without a second thought, as if the stranger had muttered magic words under his breath—and saw him standing there, the brim of his hat in the circle of his fingers, and his smooth thin girl-lips parting, blowing a bubble of words, Miss Gracie, I jus thought you might need some help.

Gracie, Lula Mae says, why take the package when you can have the man too?

Maybe all I want is his package, you say. Maybe I don’t want the man.

He’s a nice boy.

I don’t care. I don’t wanna
—

Why you always gotta be so stubborn? Sheila says.

Who asked you? You my sister. You ain’t my mamma.

Well, Lula Mae says. I is yo mamma and I think you should
—

Jus had to get in yo two cents. Your voice directed at Sheila. Gracie directs her. Next time, save it fo church.

Come on, now. I gotta meet Lucifer.

I heard you the first time.

John cut a smile, avoiding an argument. He’s at—

That figured. Before all the years and blood, he used to say, I gotta meet Dallas. His old running buddy, run off into a dust and dirt cloud of memory, his funky unwashed pea coat billowing out from his shoulder blades like a racing car’s parachute.
John and Dallas: used to be hard to know where one began and the other left off.
Why don’t you say what you mean?

What
do
I mean?

I have to meet Lucifer at Union Station cause I have to catch a train to Washington and march and check on the war.

Then to New York. John kept his grin.

New York?

Meet some old army buddies. You know. Spin. Spokesman.

New York.

The Big Apple.

Why they call it that?

The Big Apple? The early bird gets the worm. One hand on the banister’s polished oak globe, John broadened his grin. Didn’t even have to use his eyes. Kept them on a leash. Years ago, they had chased down her heart. He blew her a kiss, airborne, floating, light wings, landing, settling on her face. Be back Friday, he said. I’ll call you tonight. Lock up good while I’m gone.

Be careful, she said. She shut the door.

GRACIE LAY ALERT AS A DOG, every muscle live and attentive. She rubbed them, tingling. Narrow bars of sunlight fell across the bed—
gray and yellow mix green
—where, moments before, John had lain rolled into the sheets, motionless, face against the wall. His body fit easily into the worn groove of their mattress. Earlier, the stiff wetness of his penis inside her—
Baby, yo pussy so tight; you got quicksand in there?
—then it resting like a beached whale across his belly. A warm breeze troubled the curtain. Heat started in her face and worked down to her stomach and legs. She drifted.

The boat stopped and dawdled in the hot sun. She stood in the bow, knees bent and arms thrown back. Two pairs of red footprints walked off into the horizon.

Yes, I can swim. Water breathing in waves. Washing over skin. Wet fingers kneading the body’s clay. Moving out into depths, stabbing down into icy blackness. Then cutting up, breaking the surface, rivulets of sand brown-running from nostrils. Setting back to water, to wash clean. Yes, I can swim. The cutting machetes of my strokes. Slicing depths into icy blackness. Breaking away. Again.

Birds sang in full chorus. The mashed-in place on the pillow like the space inside a catcher’s mitt, and the hollow of his body pressed in the sheets. Though he was gone, was not in touching distance, she could still hear his breathing, feel it, nearer to her than her own. With the first rays of sunlight, he always left her. The first white light before breakfast. This had been their arrangement for the last ten years or more, since the day he tried to throw her out the bedroom window. Memory wouldn’t carry her that far back—Houston hanging like cobwebs in her mind, sun that seeds deep in famine soil, the shoving arms of the ‘Sippi—only the carrying storm of John’s words before the open window, Bitch, you wanna leave?

Hollow too in her chest where she expected pleasure, but she was determined not to let herself go back through the tunnel of years already passed, slip through mental cracks. Once, John had wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. Now. Still, it was the aloneness that filled her with love.

HER FINGERS SLID INTO THE HOLLOW created by his absent body. The year he went away to war, she immersed herself in the darkness behind her closed eyes. Her fingers rooted between the thin leaves of her Bible. She fingered him and he returned the favor, visited her in dreams, his hair loose and black and streaming to the floor like a black gown about his body. She folded herself small and got right down in the foxhole with him. But she couldn’t speak—had she left her mouth back home?—couldn’t jingle the key of her tongue.

Some of them niggas was crazy.

Yeah. Too crazy. Musta been born and raised in the jets.

They wax somebody, then flip that Ace of Spades on they fohead.

Like a black leaf.

See, those boys over there were babies.

Yeah, they called me old man. Imagine that.

But yo brother woulda done real good.

Yeah. R.L. woulda done real good.

His green eyes woulda hid him in the jungle real good.

Waiting, listening, a world in the moment, and then he was back with her, key turning in the door.

JOHN THREW HIS HEAD BACK, holding his liquor in his mouth. Shut his eyes. Worked the liquor around behind his shut teeth. Swallowed. Placed his glass quietly on the table. Removed his spectacles. Lifted them to his mouth and blew ancient dust. He cleaned the spectacles on the tablecloth, rubbing hard—the same way he rubbed his marbles as a boy, polishing them for hours, raising them glinting to his eyes, then polishing them some more with one of Pappa Simmons’s old rags—glancing up now and then at Lucifer. He fit the glasses firmly on his face.