The Salt Eaters (21 page)

“The whole town’s waiting to see the parade, Obo. The smart money says you militants are planning to shoot up the town.”

“Haven’t heard that word in a while—militant.”

“Was that a side step?”

Ahiro’s hands waited for about eight beats, then bore down on Obie’s shoulders, flattening him out again. An old blue Packard in the back lot of the Regal had moved and now he could see the double windows of Doc Serge’s office. Maybe Doc could help. Velma had never much cared for the man, but
he’d explore that. There was the woman with the gift on staff there too. Maybe. And maybe he could spring Roland and bring him home.

“I hope you don’t have any more appointments today.” Ahiro was helping him turn over, patting his back as though apologizing for having not solved the rock quarry problem. “You need some steam, the whirlpool. And if you want, I can get you back on the table around four-thirty. Your chest is like a granite slab.” His voice was sorrowful. “Obo, you know what you really need?”

Something in the way his voice dropped and trailed off made Obie hold his breath then lift his head, one eye open. Was Ahiro about to offer him a joint or was he about to hit on him? Obie squinted.

“What?”

“A good cry, man. Good for the eyes, the sinuses, the heart. The body needs to throw off its excess salt for balance. Too little salt and wounds can’t heal. Remember Napoleon’s army? Those frogs were dropping dead from scratches because their bodies were deprived of salt. But
too
much—”

Obie opened his eyes in time to see Ahiro’s hands finishing the statement, one hand flowing along a current of air, stopped by the other clenched, fisted and gnarled. And then his hands were on him again and Obie closed his eyes. Ahiro was making flat circles in Obie’s stomach with the heels of his hands, pressing then releasing. Obie felt his stomach flutter the way it had the day he’d followed Velma and lost her in the supermarket. He hadn’t known what he’d expected—a rendezvous, a visit to a fortuneteller, streaking through the streets. She’d simply gone shopping for groceries. He’d been almost disappointed. He’d hoped the new prayer partner, swami, shrink or whoever the Blood called Jamahl was, would turn out to be “it.” He would have liked something concrete to fix on.

“You’re not listening. A good cry, man. Nobody here but you and me. Your masseur is like your doctor, priest. You know what I mean?”

“Hey.” Obie gave him a brotherly punch on the arm. “I hear you.”

“Well, okay then. Too much stiff upper lip is not good for the soul. You British?”

“Naw, man.”

“Too much face it not so good either. Next thing you know, you’re forced to fall on your sword. You from Japan?”

“I heard you, Ahiro.”

“Well then, are you from Macho, whatever country that is?”

“Do your meditation and your dance, Ahiro. I’m too tired to laugh.”

“Never be too tired to laugh, Obo.” He was working on the balls of his feet and Obie was sliding up the table, his head dropping off. Looking out the window from that angle, he could see the dome of the Regal Theatre, tarnished and spattered, but shining. He could see the underside of the Infirmary’s sun deck, the weathered planks, a nest in the crook of one of the braces.

“Or too grown to cry, Obo.”

Obie lifted his head. “Hey, Ahiro.”

“What?”

“You Black?”

“I look Black?”

“You sound just like my mama.”

For a split second there when Ahiro came around the table with his arms outstretched Obie thought he was going to follow through on the mother act and gather him up in his arms. But he leaned over him, his sleeves falling in Obie’s face, and opened the window.

“Breathe deep, really deep, and I’ll have you weeping in no
time. Breathe deep. Too bad the air’s so bad in this town. But at least there’s the music.”

The raga reggae bumpidity bing zing was pouring out all over Fred Holt from the open windows up over the Regal where elderly women freed up from girdles and strict church upbringing bumped, glided and rolled to the variation of cheft telli that the four musicians on drum, oud, finger cymbals, chekere and the pan fashioned.

“Stomach flutters, ladies. Pant, pant, pant.” The dance teacher explained straight-faced—heel glide, pose, softened knee, stomach flutter, then dancing across the floor in veiled gathered pants and a coin bra—that orgasm exorcised demons and that these warm-up exercises were designed to strengthen the “central enthusiastic” muscles. The women tittered, hooted, blushed, or said “right on” with teeth gripping the lower lip in, depending on their hearing and their rearing and her delivery. Many much preferred the serious talks before the going across the floor part of the session, the part about temple dancing and sacred thighs and women worship and such like. They could deal with that. It was like the daydreaming of girlhood, the dreaming that drew them to the romance paperbacks, the soaps. But Miss Geula Khufu, formerly Tina Mason the seamstress’ daughter, saw to it that they dealt with it all: temples, cabarets, bedrooms.

“Don’t cheat the body, don’t cheat the spirit, ladies. Do the whole movement,” she was saying, singling out the three Black women and whispering, “Remember?” and then weaving her way through the group to say to the Lebanese and Greek women, “Remember?” and then confronting the one proffesional dancer in the group, a Pakistani—“Remember?” Her veil sliding off the shoulders of the other women as if to say she was not ignoring them; their roots in the sacred, their roots
in the pelvic movements were different that’s all. She touched a hip here, a knee there, correcting, coaxing, not that she expected much from most of them, they were not ancient women after all. And the one little Chinese woman who was, welllll there’d been no strong African presence in China, just a visit long ago in a golden boat with giraffes and gold and spices, a quick hello. When she was sure that no one was chafing for being ignored, she returned to the Black women, the other ancient women, arched her brows sharply, triple-timed with the brass zils, her hands, fingers snaking over her head, and mouthed the word again. “Remember?” It was all right with everyone else. The woman was a mental case. But the classes were fun and Geula was a welcomed madness.

“Follow me, ladies, and breathe like you mean it,” leading the serpentine procession past the windows front, side and back, kicking them open more widely with a flexed foot. “Shake it like you mean it, shake a wicked ass, ladies. Shake them moneymakers, ladies.” “Ladies” was always delivered with a tincture of iodine. She’d started out with “bitches,” then “witches,” which was just too much, too much. Sometimes to puff them up on rainy days she’d say “goddesses” or “queens.” That always sent the drummer right off. The women had finally sat Miss Geula down and exercised their democratic rights. There were eight votes for “ladies” and six for “goddesses.” Five held out for “sisters” and were lobbying all the time.

The pan man in dreadlocks and knitted cap aimed his mallets straight for the Academy windows, his contribution to the new community germinating there. He’d been known to use the word “postule” when referring to the way the teachers there were steady realigning cultural and political loyalties, breeding new people. But the ladies, some of them, blanched at the word and drifted away to chew on their carrot sticks and
wait for the break to end. Then he started using “seed,” which disturbed some, but excited others he noticed. Nowadays he said “enzyme” and grew to like it. It was scientific sounding, slightly mysterious, was, finally, exactly the term he’d been after to explain the work of the Academy in this moment in time in human history. Pan Man squinted, trying to make out the shapes, movements, faces even of the forms in the window across the street. It was the best place he’d found in all the seven years he’d spent in the States trying to educate people about the meaning of the pan, the wisdom of the pan. He bent low over his oil drum and played like a man possessed.

The music drifted out over the trees toward the Infirmary, maqaam now blending with the bebop of Minnie Ransom’s tapes. Minnie’s hand was before her face miming “talk, talk” graceful arcs from the wrist as though she were spinning silk straight from her mouth. The music pressing against the shawl draped round Velma, pressing through it against her skin, and Velma trying to break free of her skin to flow with it, trying to lift, to sing with it. And she did lift and was up under a sloping roof eavesdropping on herself and Jamahl in the orgone box under a pyramid and not believing a word of it, not going for one bullshit line of it, but listening to the instructions that would ease the knots. “Submit. Don’t be so damned stubborn, Velma,” groaning under the needle in her mind. And not resisting it, only him. She was not a fool. A jive nigger in a loincloth and a swami turban was a jive nigger whatever the case. Up in her perch so like the talking room of childhood, peering through the floorboards and eavesdropping on the people below. Up in the air under the roof, later, watching herself and James locked in a struggle that depleted and strangely renewed at the same time. And she leaned down to lift the needle, to yank the arm away, to pull apart the machinery in favor of her own voice. She would sing. Minnie would spin and she would sing and it would be silk. But when she opened her
mouth out came fire. And she was a dragon hovering over the room, flicking her golden smoking tail against the attic walls, the outstretched wings scaly and iridescent, the crimson eyes, the open jaws of blue smoke and orange flame, clawing at the planks of the floor, plunging through loose fill and plaster and wood and air and carpet and wood and loose fill and cement and clay and dirt and down down into a drum.

She had gone to the marshes once. It hadn’t been a decision or even a thought. In retrospect, hugging herself inside the shawl, it hadn’t even been an act. One minute she was arguing with her prayer partner, Jamahl, whose so-called solutions to the so-called problem always lay in somebody else’s culture: Tai Chi, TM, Reichian therapy, yoga. She argued that the truth was in one’s own people and the key was to be centered in the best of one’s own traditions. She could have gone on all night. But then she felt it again, surrounded, flashes of pictures, scatterings of sounds. As though she had the stereo headset on ears and eyes and was thoroughly into the whatever it was. The next minute she was at the marshes.

There’d been a man there at first in gum boots with a basket, she assumed, of frogs. He’d touched his cap and moved off as though he’d known she wouldn’t get her mouth working in time. And there’d been a dog with a nasty gash on the back of its neck. That had stopped her, fixed her on the spot. That was the moment she formed the words: “I’ve come to the marshes. I’ve just seen a man in gum boots. I’m looking at a wounded dog who is looking back at me.” As if it had waited for her to catch up, to find the place in the script, the dog paused and then dropped down of a sudden and wallowed in the mud close to the shallows. And she’d been humbled watching it. A nondescript dog, wounded, come to the place to heal itself in the earth.

There was a fallen tree by the patch of swamp punk. It
seemed to be there for sitting. She sat. She knew she was waiting because she was no longer watching. She was aware of the dog’s being there nearby, its paws in the air, its torso twisting. But she wasn’t watching, she was waiting. She wasn’t sure for what, for her clothes to feel like moss, for a tuning of strings, for a wind in the reeds, for her breathing to synch with the pulse of sap around her, for the trunk to sink, splinter, rot and become humus for new growth? Since confrontation was her style, she formed the words to establish some order: “I am waiting to confront it.”

She waited. And it was no different from the waiting most people she knew did, waiting for a word from within, from above, from world events, from a shift in the power configurations of the globe, waiting for a new pattern to assemble and reveal itself, or a new word to be uttered from the rally podium, from a pamphlet picked up at the neighborhood bookstore. A breakthrough, a sign. Waiting. Ready. She waited as though for battle. Or for a lover. Or for some steamy creature to arise dripping and unbelievable from the marshes. She waited for panic.

Panic. Pan. Pan-Africanism. All of us. Every. God. Pan. All nature. Pan. Everywhere. She was grinning, as she always grinned when she was able to dig below the barriers organized religion erected in its push toward a bogus civilization. “I’d welcome panic,” she said aloud, certain of it. That said, that done, and nothing forthcoming, she was waiting no longer. She was drifting, her gaze skimming the grasses, sliding to the far side of the marshes, its borders outlined by the salt froth on the inside, the crusty short grass and salt-stiff calamus on the outside. Traveling past was a cluster of gnats dancing in the air lit at intervals by fireflies. Then up toward the hills on the far side of the spindly woods she used to play in as a child. The upcoast was showing her its bones in a straight selvage of blue-black
rock. The river not visible at all from where she sat, sunk deep between the far woods and the dark rock hills, having long ago carved out its path, then turned, turned away its waters toward the Savannah, its preference the merging of the waters. But it let slip a minor current that would not make the turn, that went underground through the salt beds then surfaced, miles later, in front of her, a marsh.

It was the perfect place for it to happen, whatever there was to happen. On the site of metamorphosis. River, rain, underground spring, marsh. She felt ready. Not tired and fed up, not beaten down and resigned, but ready. But maybe it didn’t happen like that. Still, if it was going to happen, this was the place. The first place she had run to as a child fleeing the house.

Things were active around her. What she’d thought was lichen coating the tree trunk with mottled green and white, or what she thought were fungus ledges that grew straight out from the bark in beige shelves were colonies of bugs moving very fast. And for a moment, she thought she felt the headphone clamped on, sounds surround her and a pulling down. It occurred to her that if they slowed down, they would look, at a glance, like what they were—bugs. And if they speeded up, they’d be not visible bugs looking like lichen, but the idea of bugs resonating in her brain. Time. Time not speeding up but opening up to take her inside.