The Salt Eaters (31 page)

It was raining a furiously relentless rain as if it meant to go on forever. Ruby abandoned her trampled hat, watched it slide away under the railing. Rain drumming on the tables, tiles, awning, answered by the sucking thud of people running by, the squish of cars and trucks and car horns getting stuck. A woman’s voice, high-pitched and hysterical, called out from somewhere “Fredieeeee?” and sent chills up the collective spine. The hanging pots were swinging, overflowing, dollops of mud on the tile, some falling at last and banging, the contents oozing away in a slide.

Ruby pulled the turtleneck up that was a hood and hugged her friend closely. Both thought the same thoughts but could not speak, simply hugged each other tightly, trying to think of something funny to break the mood, break the other’s hold.

Jan was flexing her hands against Ruby’s back as if arthritis threatened or honey was bonding her fingers. A muscular response to some dimly heard instruction in her mind to loosen her grip now on all notions of the seemingly complete world, release her hold on notions that might lock her to the old.

There was a second flash of lightning and that gesture of the spread-open hand, that thought unfinished but intuited got fixed and would hold its shape for decades to come. “I hope it’s not …” spoken into the teapot marking Jan’s beginning.

Suddenly, it was quiet but for the rain. The waiters were passing out napkins like medicos with bandages at the front. And in a while joviality would ease back into the company and erase the terror. But in too short a while the very threat of rain would revive the terror, be more terrible than anything experienced by anyone in that rehearsal moment. Rain that would cancel out the possibility of any joviality and make a napkin wipe-off a ludicrous memory not to be repeated by any sane person.

Nilda, her hat blown off, her hair barely held down at the side by the barrette, barely secured in back by the leather strap, was still sitting with her eyes closed and her arms folded in her lap. Cecile had shouted when they moved to shove the table closer to the wall, cutting off the waiter’s exit and possibly his circulation. Though Campbell had been stunned still with no thought of movement that might jar the idea taking shape, so simple a connection, he’d known it for years but had failed to appreciate it. Of course everything was everything. Hadn’t Mustafa taught him that? And he’d written it down on the back of the pad. Damballah, he wrote, represents, he wrote, and scratched that out, Damballah is similar to, he wrote, and scratched that out, Damballah is the first law of thermodynamics and is the Biblical wisdom and is the law of time and is, Campbell wrote, everything that is now has been before and will be again in a new way, in a changed form, in a timeless time.

Neither Cecile nor any of the others called to Nilda sitting there three feet from the awning, an island unto herself. It was clear she was not asleep and was not concerned with the rain’s pelting of her velvet shirt, darkening now to blue-black ink. Nilda was in the hills with the
peyotero
, listening to the tongue of the sacred cactus where Our Elder Brother, the Deer of the Sun, resides. In the hills, becoming available to the spirits summoned to regenerate the life of the world.

        Dom tete teke dom diir

One side of the Hill calling to the other.

        Bateke teke bembe wahh

The call and response, drums on the move, a gathering summoned.

        Rada rada boom tete Wa

Echoed from the park.

        Rada rede tum vida omm

Feedback and contagion.

Slashed tree pitch ooze chopped down hollowed out rum burnt tree drums green black mottled-gold thumped. Velma can feel them in the walls as she races down corridors. A corn-meal-marked trail. Pollen veves on the walls blurred as she runs through passageways in search of a particular chamber that might not be sealed off if she hurries and doesn’t think too much on limitations. “I can’t read drums, so how do I know
they’re saying ‘barrier dropping’?” She regrets the thought. The corn meal is slippery now, no traction, off direction, the drums pushing the walls out of shape and a draft of air in her face and she could lose her breath once and for all. Reed flutes blowing fuah diah in her hair, her nose, her lungs. Tripping over notes and thoughts and falling up the attic stairs, a tonic breeze pushing through the cracks in the floorboards, she is face down now pressed between the slats. And breath returns.

“Sweetheart?”

She pulls up and sits like a cat, one paw resting lightly on a Christmas bulb. She is imitating a sphinx, playing distraction: M’Dear wants to talk of Christ; she prefers charades. She is sphinx now and watches child and godmother pack away the tree ornaments in tin boxes of excelsior.

“No more room in that box, M’Dear.”

“In the heart? Room in the heart, Vee?”

“You mean like no room in the inn?”

“There was no room in the heart, Vee. And you?”

Understanding now, still and watching like a sphinx, poised, centered, music coming at her through cracks in the walls, floors, window frames. A wind in the rib cage, a tremor in the lungs rustling the package straw in the floor of the heart.

“She’s off again. Take care, Min, you don’t lose her.”

“Time to hit the yellow-brick road, is it? Stay close, Old Wife.”

A brass band coming, shiny sounds making the passageway slippery. The barrier down as promised and she can skip along now. Cymbals crashing by her ear and the leaves shuddering as the procession passes. She waits in the branches of Philo 101, time streaming along below her in the tree. Dogs caught in the shower shiver, growl and bite the curbstones. Cats with their ears laid back hiss, seeing what the marchers will not train themselves to see.

“So what do I do now? Iz you iz or iz you ain’t my spirit guide?”

“Loan her some of yo stuff, Min. And don’t be stingy.”

“I’m bout worn out.”

A grand piñata suspended festive from the branch. The hitting stick once a stake in young Min’s yard, once a stake in a robber baron’s heart way before that. The children shrieking and jumping strike down bits of grace. And Velma jumps out of the tree and is on the path going asphalt, running backward now the way Nilda had once prophesied.

Hoo Doo Man looks at her with maroon eyes and leaps out of the LaSalle Street projects at her snarling, feathered bonnet tossing, beads and tiny mirrors flashing in the yards of maribou trailing and twisting behind him as he bounds, all manner of wanga clanking on his breastbone. She is caught in the crush of neighbors streaming out of doors now, the child sent out to call up the sun, having given the signal to begin. They’re heading for the first watering hole of the day, the package store, with rattles, tambourines, zimbi gourds and paper cups. The rada tambours in the suede hands of the young brown boys and dark old men trotting alongside the procession chanting praise songs to their chief, who waits on the balcony overhanging the Regal marquee. Cups of wine passing overhead to keep the praises coming on smooth. And she is trying to back out, to run the other way.

“That’s Velma Henry for you,” one on-the-side-liner remarks. “Always going against the grain.”

“Always was contrary.”

She is trotting backward down Gaylord Hill with no brakes on, skidding into bus posts, colliding into flower-smothered floats where folks pin on notes, prayers and dollar bills. Musician men tie scarfs around their hips and hand her one. Red scarfs, red war, red wound, red Ogun, who can endow the gift
of prophecy and cure, protector of warriors and travelers too. She ties her sash, her red hips darkening in the rain.

Rope sashes holding up croker pants and burlap tunics drenched and tightening. Metal collars on necks wet, the chain passing through loops linking row on row of elders, younguns, men and women fastened to the side panels of the truck padlocked and rain-spattered. Someone hoists her up by the wrists and there’s no pain. She is jammed between bodies barely rocking as the truck, like a rag-and-bones cart, trundles along the cobblestone street.

She looks for Obie. Head shaven, tattoo burnt in left forearm, he is there. He sees her. She sees him; she sees too the guns wrapped in cloth, the bombs of two-inch pipes buried in the sawdust pile the children sit on. This is not his way. Who talked him into going along with this? She stares the question at him. There are so many between them now, there can be no privacy.

“Do what I tell you,” he says. “Get away. Be safe. This once.”

She shakes her head, stubborn.

“Why won’t you give me this one thing?”

“If I start giving, Obie, I’ll give everything,” she does not say. She backs out of the truck and it thunders past.

There are chains on the doors of the Regal theatre. To lock gate-crashers out, explain the security guards. But folks break through the line to rap on the glass doors—“I gotta use the bathroom,” “Emergency, lemme use the phone,” “My kid’s in there,” “But I’ve already got my ticket,” when a guard juts his chin toward the closed-down box office. Chains on the door and folks inside for the concert and the short-wave speaking of things getting out of control all over town. And what would the audience do if they knew the Regal had been opened without a proper fire inspection and was now locked up by a bunch of
Keystone Kops who might be able to find the key if trouble started, but then again might not?

It’s raining harder now and the line disperses. Folks free now to leave. Free to run elaborately off at the mouth about their ingenious and fearless plans for getting into the Regal, for breaking kin and neighbor out of the Regal if only it hadn’t gone and rained. And knowing all the while—which makes the telling all the more extravagant—that the moment to do whatever there was to do had come when they were being driven out, had come when they were being told to line up, had come when the doors were being closed in their faces, had come when the bar bolts were being thrown, had come when the chains appeared.

She’s inside. The audience deliberately mistaking the thunder for a backstage drum roll. Last time a demonstration was threatened at Transchemical, all power was cut off in the district and blamed on the storm most folks remembered as a drizzle merely. So they hear drums.

She would sit still and remember not to kick at the seat in front or Mama Mae would slap her knees. And she kept her eyes off the cave in the wall. She liked looking at the giant Blackamoors against the side, bulging chests and balloon pants, looming straight past the box seats and up toward the sky, the chipped noses and scaly turbans hardly visible in the dark. Their huge fans that Mama Mae called “bald chins” waving in the navy blue heavens with the clouds and stars. She liked them, might ask to be taken to the bathroom if she could escape for a chance to run her hands over the vests that looked like gold. But the curve in the wall that her unruly eyes always tried to slide around for a glimpse of the rubied swords hanging in the cave, hanging in space like a magic trick, she would not look there. The swords had disappeared when she was seven. This disappearing act was magical enough but the pictures that
started coming in the cave—the mud mothers with enormous teeth painting themselves with long hair brushes, painting pictures on the walls of the cave—that was too much. She would lean way back in the seat and stare at the phony sky and wait for the movie to end. Just as she leaned back in church in the wooden pews and waited for the sermon to end, determined not to look in the dark hollow behind the statues standing in the walls around the congregation.

In the attic they came in the mirror once. Ten or more women with mud hair, storing yams in gourds and pebbles in cracked calabash. And tucking babies in hairy hides. They came like a Polaroid. Stepping out of the mouth of the cave, they tried to climb out of the speckled glass, talk to her, tell her what must be done all over again, all over again, all over again. But she hung an old velvet drape over the mirror and smothered them. They were not going to run her off her own place. Not the attic.

Mothballs drop from sweaters, from plastic sacks hung near the window. Mothballs roll from boxes where the squirrels have been gnawing before repelled. Mothballs roll across the attic floor till inertia holds them near her feet. She leans from the eaves as from a branch and misses nothing.

The marchers, trudging alongside the truck, are soaked. Wetbacks, she smiles. Something to tell Inez if the sisters come for lunch. There is much movement in the truck. Someone unwrapping guns, distributing armloads of weapons, tearing open boxes of ammunition? What for? She can’t remember. Children, unseated, scoot between legs and jump from the truck to join friends on the sidelines. Some race across the street, taking chances in the traffic that’s not been closed off.

Even from her perch it is clear the chains are made of cardboard, a patina of black, greasy paint glistening in the rain, running like make-up, like mud, like mind, like time. Velma
shivers and then relaxes. Something silky cool but body warm is being pressed against her.

Grownups on the sidelines are cheering artificial chains and actors, the floats, the costumes, the whole idea of festival, rushing the procession on toward the park, toward the sizzling food, the steamy pushcarts, the incense-fragrant booths, the drums and the dancing.

There’s cheering in the park, then jeering, wine bottles being hurled from cars speeding by, cars not of the district. Bottles, cans, rocks, jeers like the rock-concert night, that time she talked Obie, Palma and Marcus into going, not for the music but because they needed to know so much more about Claybourne’s finest, about riot-control techniques. And the lead singer spotted straights in the front row with flash cameras blinding as at the zoo and sang FUCK! in their faces. And the cops rushed the stage as the chant Pig! Pig! went up and bottles too, cans, rocks went up from the audience and came down from the trees where the troublemakers waited. And Marcus said, “Later for this.” And Obie, grabbing the sisters by the hand. And no one said “I told you so” or “You and your damn research” because it had been an instructive evening.