The Salt Eaters (33 page)

And she standing now in the wet streets as if there were a choice available now that she’d been rescued from the scissors and the oven’s gas. Saynday in ancient moccasins passing by her, outrunning them all as spoken of in Nilda’s poems, as woven in the wampum belts, as drawn in the sand, as beamed from the Horus eye, from the feathered-serpent’s eye, as sung about when the Seven Sisters took the stage. And she’d have to travel the streets in six-eighth time cause Dizzy said righteous experience could not be rendered in three-quarter time. But this was Y’Bird not Dizzy and she was holding fast the rim of the stool lest she fall off and lose the beat altogether and be lost.

“Let her go, Min. Dancing is her way to learn now. Let her go.”

“And what about my legs? My legs. We might lose her. Give her your legs, Old Wife.”

She could dance right off the stool, right off the edge of the world and collide with comets scheduled for a splashdown on her fiftieth birthday and not miss a thing, dance off into space with snakes in her hair and tusks sprouting from her gums and her head thrown back and singing, cheering, celebrating all those giants she had worshiped in their terrible musicalness. Giant teachers teaching through tone and courage and inventiveness but scorned, rebuked, beleaguered, trivialized, commercialized, copied, plundered, goofed on by half-upright pianos and droopy-drawers drums and horns too long in hock and spittin up rust and blood, tormented by sleazy bookers and takers, tone-deaf amateurs and saboteurs, underpaid and overworked and sideswiped by sidesaddle-riding groupies till they didn’t know, didn’t trust, wouldn’t move on the wonderful gift given and were mute, crazy and beat-up. But standing up in their genius anyhow ready to speak the unpronounceable. On the stand with no luggage and no maps and ready to go anywhere in the universe together on just sheer holy boldness.

Boldness and design, M’Dear would say, always said on the subject of Black anything and why hadn’t she listened? Dispossessed, landless, this and that-less and free, therefore, to go anywhere and say anything and be everything if we’d only know it once and for all. Simply slip into the power, into the powerful power hanging unrecognized in the back-hall closet.

Velma felt her knees falling away at right angles, felt the curtain going up on a drama of none other than her own pantied stuff center stage. And so what? She didn’t have time to care, to pull the hospital gown down cause she was in the streets and in a tunnel on her hands and knees and burrowing under the quilts in M’Dear’s bed, mutton suet and sassafras oil warming her chest and cared for, cared for, and being fed
tincture of something wonderful and awful from a spoon, washed down with chicken soup, while M’Dear told her that long tale of hers in a tongue not known then like Nowalemme dow ta slip Apraydelawd, not being real words till later. Speaking a special tale in a special voice and she up under the quilts sucking on a chicken bone, eager to crack the bone and crack the code, suck at the secret marrow of the thing. And M’Dear droning on: “Back in the days when the Earth was steady and the ground reliable under foot, we made our covenant with our Maker and were given our instructions …” And leading her on, into, down past familiar, drawing her from the known words and always ending talking about the power, the power available if we’d only look in that back-hall closet.

And damn if she didn’t want to get right up from between the healer’s hands, get up and quit being some “funnytime sandwich” as Mama Mae would say, and go ask her godmother about them things told at night fluffing up the pillow for her and smoothing down the sheet over the quilt to kiss her goodnight. All the talk that had begun the day Palma’d led her back by the hand from the marshes and M’Dear had said it was only proper to do one’s seeking on one’s knees, which shut Palma up and Mama Mae too. Get up and go seeking again, knock on all the doors in Claybourne and quick too before the procession began for real. Knock and be welcomed in and free to roam the back hall on the hunt for that particular closet with the particular hanging robe, coat, mantle, veil or whatever it was. And get into it. Sport it. Parade around the district in it so folks would remember themselves. Would hunt for their lost selves.

And hadn’t Nilda and Inez told her about hunting? Hadn’t Maazda explained what it was to stalk, to take over the hunted, but not with arrows or bullets but with the eye of the mind? And hadn’t she observed the difference, watched the different
brands of hunting? The pulling of the bow, the pulling of the truck alongside the prey and mowing it down, taking it over. The cars pulling up alongside a woman or a kid ready to sell the self for a Twinkie. Bringing down a bird or a woman or a man stalked at a dance. Taking over a life. That was not hunting as the sisters explained it, sang it, acted it out. To have dominion was not to knock out, downpress, bruise, but to understand, to love, make at home. The keeping in the sights the animal, or child, man or woman, tracking it in order to learn their way of being in the world. To be at home in the knowing. The hunt for balance and kinship was the thing. A mutual courtesy. She would run to the park and hunt for self. Would be wild. Would look.

And up under the brass of horn and cymbals was the sister still singing faintly, “Wiiiillld women doan worrreeeee.” But it was hard to concentrate cause something was happening, she was about to surrender it up whatever it was. Well hell, she’d always been wild. And probably looked the perfect Halloween scare thing there on the stool with her matted hair and ashy legs and mouth crusty like something heaved up from the marshes.

“I might have died,” she said aloud and shuddered. And it was totally unbelievable that she might be anywhere but there. She tried to look around, to take in the healer, the people circling her, the onlookers behind. But there were so many other things to look at closer at hand. The silvery tendrils that fluttered between her fingers, extending out like tiny webs of invisible thread. The strands that flowed from her to Minnie Ransom to faintly outlined witnesses by the windows.

Doc Serge was studying the patient, watching the draping action of the rough white gown. He could do something with goods like that if he took hold of her right. She was studying the webbing, not certain she was fully conscious. How like the
women in his stable years ago this woman was, women who studied themselves for some tangible measure of their allure, their specialness, but never quite knowing what it was. Money was the tangible evidence he offered of their attractiveness and his, their power and his, till they would do anything to keep his attention and his answers. He gave Obie’s wife his full attention and hugged himself. Someone would have to work with Obie now. He would work with this one. He chuckled and waited for Minnie to be done, to bring the woman through this first phase, to release her, to hand her over.

He’d have to handle it carefully and keep ole Faro well leashed and under control. It would be like grabbing for the rails and in grabbing you had to be careful. If you caught the rail wrong, you couldn’t get a foothold and you might wind up with a bunch of hot cinders down your neck from the stacks. A bad grip and a small bump over the old bridge would dump you right in the drink. An abutment coming up, racing into view as the train turned the bend, the slats of the fence merely brushing your ass if you were lucky, crushing if you weren’t. You could at least lose your hat.

They used to toast him back of the barbershop, were really toasting his hat. They called it the magic stetson, the kind of gray fedora Stagolee had killed Billy over. He’d been wise to get rid of it. Gone, there was nothing for his well-wishers to fasten on to in their need for legend and fable, nothing but what he hawked. “And that one cross the street?” And the men would press in the doorway. “Got jaws on her pussy that’d make a dead man come.” The need for magic, for legend, for the extraordinary so big, the courage to pursue so small, they would crowd him and leave him no space to turn around in and change.

Doc released his hold on himself and ran his hands over his hair. Later for hats, he chuckled to himself. There was work
to do. What was Minnie fooling around about? The woman had come through already it seemed.

Doc plunged into a tomato handed him by one of the young nurses who always packed a lunch for these sessions. He smiled at her, at Minnie, at himself, widely showing all his wisdom teeth, the only thing displayed not purchased but well earned. Smiling because probing with his tongue the juicy flesh of the fruit and watching Obie’s wife come alive in a new way and ready for training, he could do nothing else.

Suddenly there was a rumbling which, though slight, captured most of the people’s attention because just at that moment the door to the hall opened. They expected to see a medicine cart being rolled in, or a laundry basket on the old-fashioned coasters, or a food truck loaded down with trays, its weight amplifying the wheel’s trundle. Fred Holt walked in, mouth open and one finger up, ready to ask how come the odd numbers on that side of the hall ran out at 31. But when he stepped into the room and spotted the gangster fella who was calling himself Doc Serge these days, and then, scanning the room, recognized the visitors who were looking at him in turn, checking their watches, frowning and turning away, he began to step back out. He’d expected a small office, a little desk, and a tidy nurse who would quietly direct him to Room 37 for a checkup. His eyes weren’t prepared for the expanse of the room or the crowd. And then it got dark and he got worried. But it was only that he had bumped into the light panel on the wall, trying to exit. It took a minute to get it together. What with the storm-blackened world outside and the sudden loss of light, it was quite dark but for the glint of metal and the sheen of cloth. And it took another minute for him to notice that the object of everyone’s attention was the pair of women near the window giving off all the light. One done up like a mummy in a shine-in-the dark shawl, it looked like. The other a feather-weight
with fifty pounds of bracelets on. What the hell was going on? A séance or a jam session? What was going on? A couple of the doctors were trying to catch his eye with just that question. Prompt was one thing but this bus driver was two hours early.

He picked up his pace. It took one more minute to, one, flash the card the receptionist had given him, by way of saying he was there on his own business; two, to regret having done that, for who wants to know that the driver about to take you on the highway at fifty-five miles per hour is a sick man?; three, to figure out where he was and who was who. So this was the mojo lady he’d heard about. Kind of frisky-looking, he thought. Seemed like she should have some old-looking clothes on, beat-up slippers, and look like a frog.

He was working his way toward the front to take a good look, when Doc Serge started toward him. Fred thought he was about to be thrown out of the room, but the Doc fella was simply heading for the window to look out. Fistfuls of grit were being hurled against the panes. Schoolkids horsing around in the yard, he figured. But something about the way Doc was looking out of the window told Fred it wasn’t kids fooling around, but nature herself. Okay by him. It made more sense to get his checkup, grab a bite in the cafeteria if they had one, and hang around the place, maybe meet this healing lady and kill a half-hour or so until it was time to board the bus—than to try to stick to his original plan and get caught in a downpour.

He noticed there was another door. It probably led to a hallway where he would find the rest of the odd numbers, at least Room 37. Meanwhile, it felt okay to just be there. The longer he looked at the two women, especially the classy old broad, the better he felt. He glanced around the room, recognized a few familiar faces—riders, a neighbor, the boys from the barbershop. There was no one who looked like agitators or
troublemakers to him. Porter had probably gotten that all wrong. It was beginning to raise sand out there, and Fred wondered if he’d closed the windows on the charter bus. If there was anything he could do without, it was a gritty seat and leaves down among the pedals. After he saw a doctor, maybe he would stroll down that way and check things out. A brown-skin girl in a green uniform, he noticed finally, was looking over his shoulder at the card he carried, Then she pointed toward the door at the other end of the room. So, he was being thrown out after all.

She might have died. Might have been struck by lightning where she sat. But then she might have died an infant gasping, but for M’Dear Sophie’s holding hands. Might have drowned in her baptism gown. Or legs wrapped round some strange man’s head, too strange for repetition ever, holding on to his ears lest he make a sudden move, balancing more than weight on the pin of her spine and thinking her heart would give out any minute and not because the fucking and sucking was all that
petite mort
good, but because this weirdo she’d picked up in the library of all places kept lifting his head every other stroke, his breath reeking up at her over her trembling belly, to tell her what he was going to do to her, crazy things he was going to do with broom handle and vacuum hose, as soon as he finished doing what he was doing to her. And how to pull away and get away and not be hurt? Who could tell what mad thing he was capable of? And of all things to be taking up precious space in her head, where strategies needed to be laid out and studied, but some odd piece of lesson overheard in M’Dear’s class about the master brain being in the uterus, where all ideas sprung from and were nurtured and released to the lesser brain in the head. And damned if it didn’t seem to be the case.

She might have fried in that SRO hotel that terrible summer on the road when some two-timed bitter wife sloshed gasoline under the door. Not her door but the door of a woman met on a march who wouldn’t hear of Velma and the kids sitting up all night in the bus station or taking a chance in the churchyard with blankets, but gave Velma a key to her room and gave her too the nightmare wife cursing through the door and flinging a book of matches in the puddle. And no phone in the room and the fire escape rickety and the kids, no matter how they yanked and shoved and screamed, moving like they were under water. And she was descending a rusty ladder that turned Lil James and Palma’s girls red, wondering what sort of lesson this would turn out to be when her lungs cleared and her head cleared and the anger, smoke, rage and soot gave her space to think and feel it through?