The Salt Eaters (34 page)

Might have bled to death in the Coke machine area because Emergency was full up and the head nurse was making it crystal clear that coloreds weren’t serviced there. Trailing blood through the ambulance yard, her bundled slip pressed against her head that’d been slam slam slammed hard against the concrete floor when a junky going nuts had been tossed in the cell with the women demonstrators while someone in front counted out the money for the fine very slowly.

But always there was a tug to come on, get up, move out nudging her back toward life. Even standing by the open drawer in the kitchen forgetting all she knew, even climbing into the oven forgetting who she was was tugged, was claimed. “Move out”—

And the assistants lifted her on the litter and carried her out of doors to the straw mat in the courtyard where well-wishers could pass by and give advice, read signs, interpret, hand her medicants fresh chopped from the bush to chew, fresh brought from the market to burn and inhale, fresh purchased from the
apothecary to drink or swallow. And the ground rumbling as if a stone were being rolled away and someone reading that too. Velma, some lives ago, on the mat, on her back with feathers and bird bones and a sheet of painted bark spread over her.

Voices droning. Readings. A crab had attacked a fisherman and held on or dropped off into the sand meaning. A fig unripe had dropped from a tree and burst open, mud oozing smelling like stink fish meaning. A mushroom cap toppling like a severed head meaning. A wheel falling off its axis face down meaning. And ole Baron Sam clinking by looking for an invitation to sup. But the walkabout marabout coming sooner and sending the dancers/readers about their task, to dance, to leap about. They act the fish, then fly and are the birds, tail in the air and fingers hunched under arms they go monkey, dancing and loud, acting the medicine people who leap the healing circle and wait for what we run from troubled. They act the sun. Head, arms, hearts rich with recitation and the word. They send a child to fetch Velma from her swoon and fetch a strong rope to bind the wind, to circle the world while they swell the sea with song. She is the child they sent. She is the song.

“Be calm,” Minnie Ransom crooned, her words going out over Velma’s hunched shoulder and into the room like warm hands caressing, staying, thunder shaking the room. And it was Pony, Daniel’s twin Poindexter, who took up the song, mouth wide open now and notes cutting through the gloom. Velma tried to hear it, couldn’t hear it but felt it press against her skin, pushing her back into the cocoon of the shawl where she died again.

The gas lines, six blocks of enraged drivers lined up at the pumps and a well-wired time bomb, zombie-ized in the prison treatment center, turned into the streets running amuck. Or run down and trampled in the storming of the utility companies,
or the taking of the food sheds or the Pentagon.

Dying in uniform when everyone not white, male and of wealth is drafted to fight on foreign turf but not for oil or diamonds or labor or markets, but for burial grounds. The bodies piled high near the borders of warring nations, bodies that cannot be cremated because of the smoke and the wind and the rain, and can’t be buried because missiles would be heated up by the contamination and there is no room anymore underground, space taken up by equipment and uniforms. Bodies that can’t be launched into space anymore because NASA has long since gotten a reply, and beings out there are sick of Howdy Doody and spinning satellites and telstars and intrusive rocket probes and have made the terms clear. And can’t be shipped for burial to Antarctica because the cemeteries heating up there have already melted the icecaps and tidal waves have inundated half the earth.

Might have been killed for the prize of her gum boots, mask and bubble suit in the raid. The unrecognizable children who run the streets taking over abandoned social service agencies and subways and concert halls and armories finally taking her over too. Offspring of the children who roamed in vacant lots and city dumps years before when old smoke detectors leached americium into the dirt, their clothes, their genes. Kids who dug up for fun the contaminated uniforms and instruments, the abandoned uniforms of workers hunted by the angry mob awakened too late and misdirected in their hatred. Those kids grown up twisted and wasted giving birth to the ones shunned, turned out, driven off who found each other and ran in packs and found her on the street, beat her down and snatched her protection which would bring a high price on the open market.

Lying there on her back, smaller than she’d been in years, lighter, feeling free, shoulders no longer bowed from the weight of the suit, nostrils stinging, breathing air strongly
chemical, detergent, chlorine, and something faintly remembered from the generator in chem lab when she was a student many long years ago. And the stockaded compound too far to drag herself to even though she was feeling this light. A pain in the center and she jackknifes, waiting for the convulsions to begin. She cries out but the children are moving off swiftly, the sucking sound of their spongy feet the only thing she hears. They leave gelatinous smears on the pavement and gluey smells where they’d stood beating her down onto the ground that threatens to suck her under where she lies and twists.

Her last glimpse is of something familiar, something from the old days when she was young, a slingshot in the pocket of one of the stompers. A forked stick jutting out like a willow switch that a water witch of old would use divining water, scanning the ground, dipping and nodding and finding what no geologist can find as quickly. A slingshot with which to shoot the five smooth stones against the forehead and penetrate the middle eye and pierce the veil. She is smiling, on her back staring at what used to be called sky.

She had asked a simple enough question of her teacher: Why is God called the alpha and omega? And that triggered the alphabet lesson, one symbol a week. M’Dear taught the alphabet in a way that made Mama Mae leave the room and shut the door. She couldn’t remember Y, the forked glyph whose vibe was holy to seekers. All Y had meant to her was the wishbone she and Palma tussled over, which always broke to no one’s satisfaction.

But lying there on her back she was upright in the wet street, a Babel of paths before her, but her choice made long ago. The fork in the road. The wishbone. The switch. The water witch wand. The slingshot. Y’Bird. It was all the same, somehow.

She did not regret the attack of the children. She regretted only as she lay on the straw mat, lay on the ground, pressed
between the sacred rocks, lying on her back under the initiation knife at an age when the female element is circumcised from the boys and the male excised from the girls, regretted only as she moved the knife aside and the shiver ran from spine to crown and she bled and the elder packed cobwebs and mud that would not dam the gush and she bled on as she’d dreamt she would. Regretted, lying between the rocks and staring up at the clouds surrounding the moon, clouds so like the cauliflowers Mama Mae filled her lunch pail with, clouds like wispy cotton snatched from dentists’ dispensers, regretted that she would not get promoted to the next class to learn about the nature of life on earth and the human and spiritual purpose because the planet was plunging into darkness as she was twisting around toward the last of the light, her tongue probing her mouth for signs of breath, slapping around out of control and ripping open on the serrated teeth till she was bleeding from everywhere.

“I’m getting a message.” Minnie yanking frantically at Old Wife’s dress and grabbing air, her guide gone off to chapel at the critical moment. Minnie moving quickly, pressing her tongue down hard away from her back molars. It was coming to her like a siren, not at all like instructions. A frequency not used before, more shrill than the signal from Saturn’s rings, less timbre than the telling from the Ring of Wisdom, more static than the CB’s or traffic waves. A wiry, shrill siren that spun in her head like a gyroscope. She was holding her jaws and heading toward the path, moving swiftly through the woods not cloistered now at the crest by the sheltering branches but thrown open, clear. Gliding over the lemon grass damp against her legs, her shoes squishy like never before. She pauses merely to check the rainbow. It is not there, its colors absorbed by needy people, its vibes spiritualizing, soaked up, left faint and
toneless. She pulls down quickly the branch to finger the moist leaf, to drink from it and chew the leaf, trying to give herself pause to think, be calm, breathe in her surroundings. Old Wife running up.

“Pentagon.”

“Say which? You mean like that thing you draw in the dirt with five points?”

“Pentagon.”

“Where’s it at?” Old Wife turning and casting suspicious glances.

“Lower left bicuspid. Loud and clear. Red alert.”

“That right?”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Is this it?”

“Whatcha mean ‘it’?”

“Oh hell, why am I wasting time with you,” Minnie says, turning, wondering if there is time to race back, to appeal to the loa who can short-circuit, engulf, misdirect an electric charge jumping from cloud to cloud even as she stands there looking up at what should have been the rainbow. Why hadn’t she given the sacred jugs and pots a really good sweetening with some baking soda and prepared something extra special for the loa’s festival? It was nothing to them to jump the clouds or swallow up the flash in a cloak for the asking.

“And what makes you think it ain’t them haints messing about with the electricity?”

“Not now, fool. Not now.”

“You ain’t got the sense you were born with, Minnie Ransom. Everything’s all right. I’m with you.”

“Oh my lawd,” Cora Rider moaned before Anna Banks could say it. They clutched each other and grabbed at strangers too and there was nothing soothing now about the singing. It was like
The Phantom of the Opera
and every other spooky
movie she had ever seen. She wished the Daniels would quit.

“That one was enough to shift the needle on the university’s seismograph,” Doc said, the heh-heh smothered in his throat constricted with fear. The room was shaking, and Claybourne was nobody’s California.

Nadeen held a chair and steadied herself. The baby, rushing from the front of her, had slammed into her back, turned and was now shifting around trying to distribute its weight. She closed her eyes and panted one two, one two.

“That was the kind of thunderbolt that knocked Saul off his steed and turned him into Paul,” Cora said, releasing her friend to move toward the young girl and brace her. This was no time to be fainting or going into labor, not when the good woman Ransom was so close to bringing her patient around. She walked the girl to a chair carefully. But for all her caring and concern, Cora was busy checking calendar and clock, trying to calculate a three-digit number she could box for the morrow. Years hence she would remember that the beginning was not the payoff, not the beautician finally coming across with the money she had won, but was the moment Pony Daniels of the circle raised his voice and sang about the time his dungeon shook and his chains fell off.

Velma would remember it as the moment she started back toward life, the moment when the healer’s hand had touched some vital spot and she was still trying to resist, still trying to think what good did wild do you, since there was always some low-life gruesome gang bang raping lawless careless pesty last straw nasty thing ready to pounce, put your total shit under arrest and crack your back—but couldn’t. And years hence she would laugh remembering she’d thought
that
was an ordeal. She didn’t know the half of it. Of what awaited her in years to come.

Fred Holt would remember that something happened to him, happened inside, something he knew no words for and would not attempt to describe until six years later when his son was finally able to trace him to the Resettlement Center. He would remember the first part easily—He was in the chair having his blood pressure taken for a final check and thinking about going to the concert at the Regal, was thinking about the dude with the prison mouth, was grinding his teeth cursing a certain dentist’s soul, when lightning flashed and he found himself hunching down in the chair, bending to tie his laces though they didn’t need it. But he noticed the nurse was right down there with him and they both laughed. And settling back in his seat, waiting to hear whether they wanted a urine sample or not, he thought he saw from the side-street window Porter strolling out of Mount Shiloh Baptist Church, nonchalant about the rain, nonchalant about the fact that he was supposed to be dead. And he tried to fling open the window and shout while at the same time explaining to the nurse returning with his folder and the appointment card that he had to go that very instant. Then racing to the door that led down the stairs to the side street. He took them two at a time and then he fell, falling in wet leaves that felt like dog shit underfoot. The picture of himself on his behind stayed in his mind for a long time. Falling and trying to get up and trying to run to the opening in the hedge to see as he’d seen from the room and to shout across the street but when he got to the sidewalk there was nothing, no one there.