The Salt Eaters (35 page)

The wind dumped its cargo of paper bags, candy wrappers and bus transfers gritty and limp at the edge of the bus kiosk he ran toward finally when the downpour came. He stood there not hearing the buzz and flutter of paper up against the plastic
panes. Porter in his last days had acted just like that, blasé blasé, nonchalant, less and less concerned about the things so hard won—the day shift, his apartment lease, his grooming habits, his own ideas even. It was as if Porter were detaching himself from his job, his surroundings and from Fred too. As if preparing himself for a new life. Fred Holt shot his eyes around him and whispered quietly, “Porter, you there?”

A young couple in paper streamers dying red and green on their necks and arms ran into the shelter and smiled his way as they tried to dry each other off with tissues and damp hands. “Kiosk,” he muttered to himself for something to fix on, fingering a pencil in his left pants pocket, humming a song lest the couple think he was talking to himself. They were paying him no mind, were glancing up and down the block and then taking a deep breath before dashing across the street to cut through the Infirmary yard, moving with a determination he would recall many years later when people raced across the borders to new frontiers.

Campbell stood flattened against the service-counter wall looking first toward the round table where several men with rain-plastered hair tried to comb the whorls into some order, then looking toward the other big table where Jan and her stubby friend sat with the media women, passing around napkins and using the tablecloth to dry each other’s faces. He wondered what effect the storm would have on the Brotherhood’s pageant, on the Academy’s procession, on the police’s program, on the vigilantes’ plans, and on his future. Something more than storm was up, he figured, rejecting the idea that ordinary lightning, thunder and rain could elicit so profound a response from everyone. They were doing a good job of playacting: Just a storm. None of the conversations around him yielded anything he could use. But years ahead at blue-ribbon panels and organized seminars, he would have occasion to say
that the beginning was ushered in by an unusual storm. He wondered if the portable radio in the kitchen might inform him of similar storms in other parts of the country, in other parts of the world. He occupied himself by totaling checks and testing his memory. Was a comet due to appear anytime soon? Had a colliding asteroid been predicted? Was some country test-blasting?

Dr. Julius Meadows would say that it began on the stoop listening to M1 and Thurston and their buddies talk about conditions at the plant. He would say that partway through the discussion when the first rumble of thunder had been detected, listened to, called an explosion at the plant and then discounted as weather merely, he’d taken time out to vow to give the Hippocratic oath some political meaning in his life. He would describe at length the tavern they took him to, five grown men running through the streets, splashing in puddles like schoolboys whooping and hollering, ducking into the place loud and raucous and being greeted by equally boisterous men, the rusty, ashy, scar-faced denizens of the neighborhood bar where it was certain one was wont to part another’s hair with a chair on the slightest provocation. Would describe how he helped to pass out flyers about the rally. Would get up to show how the woman from the kitchen shook out the flyer he handed her as if to check for roaches, then smoothed the flyer against her breasts pressing out the damp creases and then took her time reading it as he ran the spiel as Thurston had. Would get sober and dignified explaining that at that moment he understood that, talking about the health hazards at the plant, the woman leaning away from him as if to get a better view of the hole in his head or as if to avoid contagion, understood that industrial arrogance and heedless technology was first and foremost a medical issue, a health issue, his domain.

By the fall of ’83 he would have taught himself that the reason they went to the Tip In Tavern was not to pass out
leaflets or to scout up tickets to the Regal concert but to set the scene for his conversion. By the winter of ’83/’84, while twisting around in his dentist’s chair, pushing the metal arm away from his jaw and arguing that a second x-ray was not only not called for but dangerous, Meadows would have earned a reputation among his colleagues for being a stickler about certain “regulations,” “measures,” “obligations” to the public. By the spring of ’84, doing his taxes and checking the nuclear exemption clause in his insurance policy, he would have already queried administrator B. Talifero Serge about a position at the Southwest Infirmary and sent an angry letter to the local TV station and gone on the air to say that the TB mobile units in the Black community had screens that were longer than any others’, long enough to cover the genitalia of youths coaxed into the trucks by lollipops, comic books, and free passes to the local discos. But none of it would really come together as a coherent and focused narrative until the summer of ’84 when he lunched with Mrs. Sophie Heywood and Mrs. Janice Campbell and the man he’d come to call Doc and heard the younger woman hold forth on what to expect now that Pluto had moved into Scorpio for a long spell.

“A planet of immense power. Annihilation and transformation. The planet of complete and total change.”

And the older woman would ask him, flipping open the Bible, whether he understood the significance of certain tamperings with the script.

“The expressions about the second coming and Armageddon, for example?” And he would shake his head no; it had been years since he’d had occasion to even look at a Bible, except to move it from the phone table in the hotels to a drawer.

“Should be translated ‘presence of Christ’ and ‘new age,’
not …” And Doc would catch his eye and wink, two men humoring the women.

It was the first crack of lightning and thunder that made Palma duck into the shelter of Marcus Hampden. And he held her and held too the weight for her, her dread, annoyance, and now alarm. Standing by the flat truck watching for a minute the young Academy boys serious and efficient with the unloading of chairs and tables, they then straightened and began combing the park with their eyes. A few people were scurrying for cover under the trees, older folks snapping out their newspapers in preparation for tent hats, but most of the early arrivers to the park simply strolled about, hailing friends, groups of brothers eying the sisters, groups of sisters eying the brothers, children fussing at kites that would not get up off the ground. There were a lot of people, considering the early hour.

Young men bopping by, yards of leather strung across back and over shoulders to hold tool-worked cases so small that keys and cigarette packs peeped out. Magenta, lime, copper-colored shirts unbuttoned to the belt, thin gold chains at the throat and a buddy cracking, “Maaan, why don’t you comb that nappy chest?” and folks falling out. Sisters with beaded braids swinging as they sashayed toward the bandshell where the food booths were setting up, moving over pebbles and scraggly grass on pencil-thin heels or clumpy wedgies. Vendors unpacking sacks and boxes of flashlights, candles, Darth Vadar laser sticks, maracas, eight-track tapes, film, banners, straw hats, fans. Folks walking along with trays strapped around their necks selling bags of peanuts, leaning in closely to this or that one selling bags of pot. Incense bundles in tinfoil, coke in tinfoil packets. The balloon man. A fat youth in clown white juggling baseballs. An old man with a risqué talking dummy on his knee drawing a crowd toward the benches. Portable radios, TV’s,
phonographs with Ashford and Simpson “Don’t Cost You Nothing” vying with Peaches and Herb, Roberta and Donny, kiddie shows, news reports. Two Bloods in skinny black clothes, derbies and bright-yellow suspenders, skate dancing on a patch of cement near the bandshell, the crowd predicting how hip the Olympics’ll be once Black folks take over the ice competitions and then introduce the art of roller-skate dancing to the world. Drummers in dreads and knitted caps, beards, sandals, with cowbells and chekeres, working out on the hill. Women slumming from the Heights jiggling about, twitching to take their clothes off, settling for a veronica or two of their disco skirts mistaking the parkees ducking past to clear the trees for playmates.

The wino couple from Palma’s old neighborhood holding each other up, eggshell stepping with their cups and brown paper sacks, managing to make it to the flat truck to sit down, smoothing down each other’s clothes, each other’s stringy, grease-waved hair, the kind of hair Palma and Velma had called “good hair” until Mama Mae explained the alcohol source of the waves. Looking up and answering bleary-eyed and incoherent that no they hadn’t seen Velma, and didn’t have a clue as to who Palma could possibly be.

“Should we wait here?” Marcus was looking for a way for them to sit down comfortably.

It seemed a sensible enough suggestion to her. Eventually everyone came to the drums, and cars and trucks were arriving already with the master drummers and dancers from the back districts. No matter where Velma was, she’d hear the drums and come to the park. Palma had her mouth open to say “Yes” when the rumble of thunder took hold of the park, arrested everybody in their tracks, Marcus staring down at the ground as if waiting for it to crack wide open. And still the lightning had not finished, was still blinking, stuttering, as though it
meant to stay on forever once it took hold. And they would have occasion soon, and then way into the future too, to decode the look that passed between them the moment Marcus lifted his eyes and his mouth fell open and Palma dropped her eyes from the sky and moaned.

Obie had been bobbing around in the whirlpool when the thunder struck, shaking the building. Bobbing around in the swirling waters, breathing along with the water’s pulse, with the pumping jets that throbbed against the back of his shoulders and the soles of his feet. Trying to maintain equilibrium, trying to find a balance between the longing for clarity and the dread of finding too great a challenge of reunion. His body too far down in the hot water one minute, and slippery as he was from the massage oil, slippery as his elbows were hooked on the rim of the pool, he could go under. His torso buoying up the next minute, the front of his body out of the water, not getting the benefit of heat and the forced currents. He’d been thinking of blueprints, the blue waxy kind with scraped white lines, trying to coax his subconcious to surrender the plan, to surface, take over, and reveal something he knew he must know to pull it all together. But dodging it too.

Legs and feet floating gently to surface, his hands flat against the water’s green, the plan floating up to the threshold of consciousness and the knotty problem coming loose in his muscles, his joints, his brain. Then the building shook and he opened his eyes in a daze, staring at the lumpish green and gray on his right ankle—the elastic with the locker key on it. But still not awake, not even with pandemonium breaking around him, yearning and premonition still washing through him as his pool mates hustled themselves out of the water, some heaving themselves over the sides of the pool sending waves against him. And he watched as in a dream or dozing in the movies.
Some pulling up on the hooped rails of the steps, kicking spray in his face. Others leaping clean out of the water, as flying fish, as if ejected by the waters’ jets.

“Hey, Obie. Somebody wants you.”

A wonderful message or not in his ears, at the back of his head, swarming through him. Velma wanted him. The folks wanted him. His brother Roland wanted him. And oh did the cops want him. Thunder rumbling up from the bottom, trembling the water, shooting through him and showers blasting full force then shut off abruptly, doors banging and brothers dripping and stumbling about in clouds of fog and steam, talking loud and flamboyant in defiance of whatever the interruption in their ablutions meant.

He didn’t realize how close he was to believing it dream, to falling back to sleep in the water’s heat, till he felt a hand on his arm. And he came more fully awake to the white toweled figures moving along the black rubber mat walkway in a pile-up, brothers streaming out of the sauna, the steam room, the alcove where the mirrors and hair dryers and shavers were, exchanging notes and extravagant bravado and flat facts about the dimming or flickering of lights in various parts of the spa.

“Phone call, Obo.”

He was disoriented still, trying to turn in the water to take in the moon face looming over him. Ahiro down on his haunches, blue kimono sleeves dipping into the puddles beyond the rim of the pool. Obie was breathing along with the flickering lights, stuttering, stuttering. Longing and fear like the ebb and flow of the water, the intake and outtake of breath, the doo ahh dooahh of a group of singers huddled in the alcove door to sing down the thunder, the ripple of green to and fro across the forehead of the masseur, his friend, the messenger of strange tidings.

“Phone call.” A smooth brown leg with bunched calves
stretching out for balance and an arm extended to pull him up. And now he was turning over and over in the pool, his elbows digging into the tiles, scraped raw and bleeding. Phone call. Was someone calling to say Roland was dead? Had escaped? Had a hostage by the throat demanding to see him?

“Said to come to the Infirmary. Sounded important.” Lifting out like a weightless fish, his scales, his flesh oozing away from his bones, dropping down into the waters, releasing him. “You okay, Obo?”

He padded across the tiles tucking his towel, squeezing his hair, popping water from his ears, fighting to come awake. Velma. Ahiro trotting along beside him on the rubber mat, his zoris squishing splat-splat, so Obie breathed along with that, as good a rhythm as any.

“You okay now?”

Nodding, going through the doorway to the locker room, a shift in climate, a drop in temperature, a sudden quiet; the brothers had bypassed the clothes locker in favor of the lounge, where phones and light and vending machines and other signs of civilization assured them.

He was still damp inside his clothes, his shirt smack against his back, when he hit the stoop and met the wind and the downpour. Motorcycles were skidding down the Hill, shredding kites and flyers and brown paper bag masks. Panel trucks were pausing in the traffic while young boys climbed out of the cabs to get to the back, flinging jackets and newspapers over the drums and horns. Trees were littered with leaflets. A young girl in dazzling orange harness directing schoolchildren at the crossing. An old man caught in the middle of traffic, looking for a break to make a dash. Obie was rocking on the top step, dread welling up as the curbs overflowed. Velma. The rain’s music more insistent than the drumming sounding from across the way.