The Salt Eaters (22 page)

It seemed quite reasonable and friendly and useable sitting there with things occurring to her rather than tracking her, haunting her, terrorizing her, catching her up, taking her over till she thought she was losing her mind. Which was nothing compared to the thought that she might become a permanent cripple, of no serviceable use to any one anymore. So, to maintain order she tried forming some other words gleaned from this visit, this calm. Something she could tell herself when the crowding began. When the pictures began. When the mud
mothers called out to her. Something she could remember to be wide open with so she wouldn’t have to invest all of herself staying intensely occupied, eyes, ears, mind riveted on the task at hand, the work ahead, lest she be taken over.

She found no words. Nor a brief passage of music. Nothing stayed fixed and available for later.

Tightening the shawl about her, vaguely listening to the music, feeling the healer’s hands on her arms, she remembered that that marsh visit had failed to inform her days and her nights, it had failed to inform her mind, the minute she got up from the tree. Whatever had occurred, stayed behind. And home again, the terrors crouched behind chairs and bookcases. Velma shuddered and sank deeply into the music.

The dumm tete tete tak tat diir tik piercing the wall between the dance studio and the one skinny roominghouse left on the Hill, jammed between the Regal and the Patterson Professional Building. Campbell roused himself from the chair, his arms asleep, his nose clogged, prickles in his legs, needles in his feet, hot and dusty under the rag rug he’d thrown over himself for a quick nap, shorts soupy and shirt salt-stiff after a jog through the Heights pumping up neuro-adrenaline, the only antidepressant he trusted now. He stretched and jumped free of the chair as if taking off a lead coat.

Duummmm dah dah dum tete tete dii irrr. He checked his watch, springing into the shower. Three hours at the café, the writers’ workshop at the Academy, the late class with the widow woman Heywood. He tried a scissor kick in the shower and the rubber mat did not fail him.

“Give me an S, spiral breath,” rubbing himself briskly with the towel.

“Give me an O, rolling in dough,” climbing into his pants.

“Give me a good Ph, for health, sis boom mama.”

“Give me an—” he took the bannister down to the first landing.

“Mr. Campbell.” His landlady was in her doorway tut-tutting and stuffing clumps of gray up under a bright white wig advertised no doubt as platinum. He smiled and buttoned his shirt. He recognized a hopeful from Central Casting when he saw one. “About the rent …”

The classic script. He could’ve written it himself, except he abhorred the cliché. “Not only do I have the rent,” he said, pulling his pockets inside out and flinging gold coins, drachmas, pesos, yen all over the hallway, money she chose to ignore in favor of the usual check backed by equally imaginary currency, “but I’m going to mention you in my very next article, a feature piece on the Spring Festival. Covering it exclusive for the dailies and the weekly. None of them have sense enough to send out one of their own reporters. It’s the big time, Mrs. Terry.”

The landlady backed into her doorway, tut-tutting while the crazy man Gene Kelly-ed down the front steps, racing behind the paper boy, doing throaty sounds like the sports car she’d just bought for her nephew. She did not close her door though. She waited till he was well on his way before she tiptoed out and looked up the stairwell. She wanted another peek into that telescope he had up there. Though what could possibly be going on over at the Academy that could be so interesting, she hadn’t a clue.

The bike waffled for a minute till Lil James, called Jabari now, stood up on the pedals, found a graded curb and could get away from the jerk growling at him. Campbell stood, arms akimbo, watching the kid strain up the hill, the cords standing out in his neck, shoulders, his arms bulging. He tipped his hat
he wasn’t wearing to acknowledge effort like that. It looked as though any minute the boy’s jeans would tear, his shirt rip, his clothes pop off and fly up like the kites the kids were writing notes to God on and releasing on the day before festival.

Meadows would have preferred a walk in the woods. Stumbling about aimlessly amidst trees and squirrels on the hunt for the essential selves of the patient and the healer would not have been nearly so alarming as fumbling along the pavement, crossing streets for no reason, attracting attention to his foreignness, attracting danger. To walk in the woods, one needed a gun, just a prop to guise the meandering. In these unknown streets, who knew what was needed? All he had was the blue notebook from the orientation packet. And it wouldn’t stay put. He was sure he had worn his pocket lining thin sliding his fist in and out to readjust his grip. It occurred to him to roll the thing and jam it into his belt. He even considered carrying it in his mouth like a bone. Passing an old lard can rolling around on the curb, he toyed with the idea of pitching his notebook in it and catching a plane back home. But he’d taken such careful notes. And he felt … drawn was the word, to the place.

“Supper. Suppah.” He mouthed it as the old man with the
gold tooth at the bus stop might. He pictured himself safely tucked under a hefty table leaf, a threadbare but clean tablecloth covering his lap, chipped bowls overladen with food hemming him in, and friendly boarders passing platters, easy with each other, easy with him. He found himself daydreaming on a family he’d never had: a mother who ran a boardinghouse and who treated the roomers as kin, a father who told the women hands off and taught the boy how to handle a hammer, a gun, a carving knife at Thanksgiving time. So he walked the streets at loose ends making up things to keep himself company. “Suppah.” It sounded so homey, frugal but homey.

“Triflin. Man, you so triflin.” He said it the way he imagined the woman from the café might. Not contemptuous, but affectionately surly.

He smiled and turned a corner without a clue as to what to do with himself now. It had been years since he’d had more than two unscheduled hours on his hands. His dawns to dusks to dawns for so long crammed full with the hospital, the Guild, pacemaker executives and their barbiturized wives and traumatized offspring, meetings, seminars, insurance agents, pharmaceutical salesmen, burglar-alarm specialists, head nurses vying with him for jurisdiction over patients, his partners dumping troublesome cases on his desk and keeping the Medicaid and Medicare gold mines for themselves.

He’d been walking the streets for what seemed like hours, sweaty and hungry one minute, exhilarated and greedy to see more the next. Some blocks back he’d passed a park where kids, youths, adult men and women, elders, all in bright T-shirts with “7 Arts” stenciled across the back had been setting up as if for a fair. Tables, tents, awnings, rides, fortunetellers, candy booths, gymnasts with mats, nets, trampolines, oil drums from the islands, congos from who knew where, flat trucks, platforms, pushcarts and stalls of leather crafts, carved cooking
spoons, jewelry and the like. He had meant to stop and pick up their literature but it would have meant crossing a boulevard with no traffic lights or pedestrian markings. Now he couldn’t remember how to double back.

Where he walked was quiet and vacant. Lots, closed stores with fly-speckled windows, a bank where a man looking like that Doc Serge should be standing, a watch chain across his vest. But there was no one and nothing much to look at.

He felt in Claybourne like a late arrival to one of those obligatory cocktail parties, hanging by the bookcase or leaning against the baby grand trying to catch the party’s beat. Always exhausting his repertoire after two encounters he finally became the three-toed sloth he’s always known himself to be, counting the blacks and whites of the party and then of the keyboard, tracing the pattern in the rug with one spit-shined loafer, oblivious that the other was planted mercilessly on his hostess’ crepe de Chine slipper.

“Putty-colored three-toed sloth,” he said aloud in the empty street, and having run out of sidewalk, crossed over to turn still another corner.

“Putty-colored three-toed sloth,” his stepfather’s idea of a nickname, was usually his signal to go home, to finger another soggy sandwich, drain his cup or glass if he had one and leave. But he wasn’t going home now. He was going to stay. There was something drawing him, tugging at him to be recalled. Greensboro, Montgomery, Port Gibson, Little Rock, Hattiesburg, Lowndes County, Cairo, Illinois, Claybourne. He’d sent a check. He knew that much. He could recall the check, the broad strokes he’d made with a flat-point pen, the yellow check with his old phone number on it. But the rest of it would not come clear.

“Happy Mardi Gras!”

Like a shot ringing out. The quiet of the woods disturbed.
An explosion by his ear and birds breaking from cover. Dressed in women’s evening wear, the exaggerated shoulders and opulent sheen from Hollywood’s white-telephone period, three young Black men came prancing toward him, streamers curling down floppy from their wigs, balloons bulging through the clothes. One held a toy trumpet to his lips and puffed and blew, though the mouthpiece never came in contact with the sloppily applied lipstick. His décolletage was bumpily hairy.

“We’re thstarting in early,” the blond wig said. “Come thoin usth.”

Meadows stood frozen on the spot.

“Wait a minute. Can’t go anywhere looking like that.” The third one with green balloon bosom and a pillow for buttocks had plopped his tote bag down on Meadows’ toes and was fussily pulling out a pink satin gown, yards and yards of it like a magician’s length of scarfs.

“Don’t worry.” He did not alter his voice as the others did, nor was he wearing heels. Just the wig, his own mustache, a striped taffeta jacket pulled in at the waist over Jean Harlow lounging pajamas, mix-match socks and tennis shoes.

“Just put it on and the role will play itself.”

He stared at the gown. Were they serious? They didn’t seem like queers for all their carrying on. He looked them over thoroughly, since they made it clear it was expected of him. They were more his age than not. Maybe post office clerks or bus drivers. The man at his feet wore a wedding band and what looked like a marine ring. Blondie had a gash across his left brow, the bunched-up scar tissue giving him a querulous look. The bloodshot eyes said alcoholic, though he didn’t seem to be tipsy, just confusing for Meadows. The trumpeteer carried a beaded evening bag that looked antique. He might be somebody’s father. Meadows had never been to a Mardi Gras, maybe this was how one dressed for it. The mannish mix-matched
socks, though, relieved him. Surely this was a joke.

“Carnival’s getting so stuffy around here.”

“And tacky.”

“But yeth, Trixthy my love, tack ack ee.” Blondie was helping to spread the pink gown out. “We thought we’d get a head start and thet a whole new tone, give carnival thum classth. Know what I mean, thweetie?”

“Are you all transvestites or what?”

He could not believe his ears. Could not believe what he was hearing had come out of his mouth. He stared at the most reasonable-looking one, noticing for the first time that in addition to the ballons he was fleshy around the breasts and lumpy all on his own around the hips. And the mustache was clearly crepe he realized now. A hermaphrodite perhaps. Then this scenario had more to do with … Black men didn’t mince about in the streets for a joke. Still.

“You’re a sca-reeeeeam, thweetie. Say thomthin elseth. You talk so cute.”

“Speak. Speak.”

“You want this lovely number or not?”

Meadows found himself bending to help stuff the satin and lace back into the bag. They were cracking up at him one minute, then dancing by him single file the next, Blondie sassily flipping Meadows’ tie up at the last minute. The chorus line looked more like a chain gang shuffling into meals, Meadows was thinking. Or prisoners filing past him for a squirt of pesticide from the spray gun. He’d never have to do that kind of work again, he was telling himself, glad to have something to tell himself as they whipped around the corner shouting, “Have a carnal carnival, dearie!”

A moment later it was like none of it had ever happened. The street was quiet, empty. No dogs even, no moving cars. Just a piece of purple streamer on his shoe.

“What was that all about?”

He headed for what looked like a shopping center up ahead. Carnival did strange things to people evidently. No Black man he had ever known goofed on himself like that. He shrugged.

Just a year before he’d been asked to participate in a Bicentennial pageant, a benefit given by the Guild for a school for deaf children. That was the closest he’d gotten to a carnival. Crispus Attucks, a good part he’d thought. He had been flattered, had gotten a number of history books and acting primers out of the library, was ready to do it till he overhead at a Guild meeting that the role was to be played in blackface.

On folding chairs directly in front of him it was being discussed. Two of the so-called radical contingent who were forever disrupting the meetings calling for a caucus though they never did attract more than one or two Taiwanese or Pakistanis, who invariably left them to join either the main group or the Third World caucus Meadows hadn’t yet talked himself into joining.

“You’re kidding. Burnt cork in 1976. How droll.”

“Seems the spade they asked to reenact the dying for liberty”—and here the teller slumped over the chair in a mock swan dive, his hands wagging Al Jolson-style over his head. And it would not have been an effort at all, no effort at all, he could feel his foot rising, no effort at all to slip a loafer into the seat and shove the cocksucker onto his head—“is too light to convey the message across the footlights.”

“Blackface? Far fucking out. The Third World group’ll slaughter him.”

“Lynch him.”

“Tar and feather him first. How gross.”

They’d giggled and he’d left. And for three nights running he’d rehearsed his speech, the arch of the eyebrow, the curl of the lip, the sneer gilding his well-modulated voice. But no one
ever contacted him further about it to give him the chance to decline.