Rails Under My Back (30 page)

You want to take the car? She reached into her purse for the keys.

Nawl, baby. That’s alright.

Really, you can take it. She always let him drive when they went out on the town. Now, she was offering something more.

I can’t park no car like that around Red Hook. I’d have to drive it all the way back here.

Well, can’t you ride with me on the train?

I would but I gotta pick up my wares first.

I thought you said—she dropped it. Studied his sharp face. It did not hide his knowledge to know. With unsure fingers, she touched his baby-smooth cheek. Okay, she said. Be careful, she said.

He kissed her fingers. Smiled his confident smile. I will.

I love you, she said.

I love you too. He let her fingers fall to her side. He walked off with long, wide, muscular strides, undulating, stepping over oceans, continents.

See you tonight.

He spoke without turning around. Okay.

She said a prayer for him, uttered loud the Lord’s speechless name.

DEATHROW CAME FROM SOME FAR-OFF LINE OF THE HORIZON where sea touches sky, carrying his only cargo. The wide expanse of his body. The waves of his muscles. And it was this force—the crushing pressure that lay beneath his skin—that he showed to the world. But he showed her another face. That sticky child face when they ate bubble-gum ice cream, her favorite, tongues sharing their rainbow-covered fingertips. And he gave her his every free moment, riding the train all the way from Red Hook in South Lincoln, dragging his wares along, to her apartment in Hundred Gates (North Shore), an hour trip, or more.

Hmmm. You’re so young but so independent.

You gotta be. I’m trying to save enough money to start my own business in the Loop. A cafeteria. A coffee shop. Something like that.

I could help you, Porsha says. How much you need?

Thanks. I really appreciate it, but I gotta do this thing.

A typical evening, Deathrow kicks off his shoes the moment he steps through the door. Lies his untroubled flesh on her bed. Grabs her butt with his great rawboned wrists and hands and pulls her to him. Runs his fingers over her face, using them to draw her new features. Rubs wave after wave of exhausting caresses. The warmth eats its way deeper and deeper inside her. She slips a movie in the VCR, wondering how long it will be before he slips his hand down her panties—his sweaty palm cool against her hot butt—and tickles her asshole.
They rarely made it through a movie.
How long before his body raised away from himself to hers. At the moment he prepares to enter her, she slips into the bathroom, using the excuse, I got to pee. She rubs two dabs of aloe vera into her pussy, a trick she’d learned from Mamma. Aloe tightened an orifice. After fucking—his spent penis a beached whale—he takes great delight in the two small holes in each of her earlobes—four holes in all. (He has a single hole in his left ear that many took as the troubling sign of a thug.) Ever see
Rosemary’s Baby?

You know I have, she replies. Horror movies are her favorite.

Now, one hole meant you worshipped the devil. You got four holes. What that mean?

She gets a damp washcloth, puts it over her forehead, a migraine shield. They lie sweating, skin to skin, beneath a heavy odor of flesh. Bone to bone, their ribs fit like a boat.
She has learned his body by heart.
Deathrow encircles the pillow with a sigh. Sinks into sleep with the speed of a stone in water. A storm breaks in his breathing. He wrestles and bucks, with jerky, electrical motions.

Her heart tightens. She thinks, still agitated, for his stormy breathing tosses her, leaves her on a shore of unrest. How to anchor herself? Take a sledgehammer to his stone heart? Wake him?

Once, she tried to wake him. A scream scratched its way through his teeth and he sat up swinging. One blow caught her full on the forehead. She retaliated, beat him senseless with the heel of her shoe.

The rise and fall of his sleeping chest calms her.

A rib cage bleached white in the desert, bones curving toward the sky, frantic ants moving in the hollow in between, taking him into the colony beneath, for he has a full cutaway, revealing the canals that snake for miles beneath the sand, torpedo-shaped larvae in the queen’s nest, and a worker transporting a beetle ten times its size back to the sand’s surface. The sun has hardly moved.
Off in the distance, the square figurations of a ranch. A ball of tumbleweed rolls him closer until the ranch is a fixed block in his consciousness. Several horses escape the corral and run toward him at full speed, all thunder and fury, black manes streaming out behind them, but the pounding of their hooves upsets the image, unsteadies it, blurring the black and white patches on their bodies. Four cowboys give chase, catching at the bridles, lassos of blood spurting from their headless necks. Then bones
—

Morning. The ridges of Deathrow’s shoulder blades form two humps under the sheet. He snaps upright in bed. Mornings give him an
attitude,
as if the new light has failed to wash away the old dreams, fails and floods him with renewed poison.

He sits with his face bowed in his hands, waiting for his head to clear.

Baby, what’s wrong? Her hand feels out the shape of his back.

Nothing. I get these headaches sometimes. Kickin like a motherfucka. Bars of sunlight edge through the blinds and section the bed. He kicks his feet from beneath the sheets, lifts himself from the bed, and staggers over to the window. He peeps through the blind slats, tinkling like chimes. She watches: The vault of his butt and legs. The wings of his back and sides. And his squarely trimmed hair, a designer trim—not her preference but better than many she’d seen: that soup-bowl shave like the Chinamen in old railroad photos, or the pool-table cut with nappy pool balls and braided sticks—the city’s skyline etched into the back of his head—a round sun miles above skyscrapers and Tar Lake—that mirrors in miniature the view beyond the closed blinds.

What you looking for?

He faces her. His abdominal muscles cobblestones. Yo mamma. He was born in Red Hook. They don’t pull punches. And lately, every word came torn raw and bleeding from his throat.

I don’t play that Mamma stuff.

Alright then. Yo daddy.

Maybe we should stop seeing each other. Never get a boy to do a man’s job.

Who you callin boy?

Yo mamma.

Aw ight.

THEY’D MET, LAST SUMMER, on the bus en route to an assignment. She was looking good that day in her bright green dress that revealed her exact shape—hips flaring out the skirts—and matching pumps, the wide pirate’s belt tightening her already slim waist and sunlight washing her smooth unstockinged legs. She caught many thirsty eyes drinking in every detail of her. The wind blew high, snatching at the dress. Cars pulled over to the curb and drivers signaled or honked their horns. She boarded the bus and found a seat. Across the aisle, her eye-slide caught a fine nigger, smooth, dark, light eyes, good build—every muscle straining to tear through his skin. He saw her watching him. Grinned. Blew her a kiss. Just like that.

Yo, baby. I’m Deathrow and you fly.

Not the best line but better than many she’d heard.
Baby, you makin me cry wit that onion between yo thighs … Yo, sugar. Make me a diabetic … I’m the plumber of love, wreckin homes with a foot of pipe … Let’s get butt naked and fuck.
But a sin-sweet voice.

No, I’m not fly. My name is Porsha.

Well, Porsha, you got a phone numba?

Maybe. You old enough to count? He was young, but what was that thing about men reaching their sexual peak at nineteen?
I’ve been to the mountaintop!
(Later, she would discover that he was twenty, older than she had first thought. I always have been bad at math.)

Baby, I can count. Do lotta other things too.

She took him at his word. His eyes were hooded with secrets. Hmmm. I better give it to you then. She produced her business card.

He read it. Body-part model?

Um huh.

What’s that?

I’ll tell you about it.

He put the card in his shirt pocket. Stood and walked into the aisle. She observed his wishbone legs. (Later, whenever he made her angry, she would look at his legs and fuck with him. Hey, cowboy. Forget yo horse?) He stooped over his seat, hauled up a heavy cloth sack, his wares—incense, batteries, socks, scarves, jump ropes, umbrellas, telephone cords, body oils—sticking out the top. Santa Claus, she thought. He faced her. Extended his big hand. Pleasure to meet you.

She took the big hand in her own. A terrible excitement shook her. An old feeling. Ancient. Uncle John would pour popcorn into her girl-small hand—
I’m scared, Uncle John
—and the pigeons would swoop down and peck and feed.
It feel funny, Uncle John.
The same, she said.

Deathrow exited the bus, rolling his tight butt.

A PYRAMID OF LIGHT filtered from the projection room, specks of dust dancing in its blinding whiteness, to a wide screen that hemmed in the horizon. Your empty eyes filled up with white moving. Empty ears vesseled words and sounds of black surprise. Deathrow’s face tinged blue and orange by the bright images shifting over it. A perfect first night out. A good-looking man and a low-budget horror movie. Grainy shots of two sisters, a castle, hooded rituals and Latin chants, and a frothing red-fanged witch who drags her victims, pleading, screaming, kicking, and bleeding, into the dark world behind the waxy plane of an oval mirror. Jump to 1940. A woman drives a knife again and again into a second woman prone beneath her on the bed. The mirror watches. Jump to the present. A third woman purchases the mirror at an antique shop. Once home, the mirror menstruates. Masturbates. Moans. Metamorphoses into a cavernous vagina that swallows the pet poodle. A psychic warns the woman not to fuck in front of the mirror. She does so anyway. The mirror swallows her lover. She seeks the psychic’s help. The mirror swallows the psychic. She seeks the help of her best friend.
Don’t white folks know when to leave? Jus leave the damn house.
The mirror possesses the woman’s best friend, turns her into the red-fanged witch. You worked the popcorn out of your teeth with your tongue. A struggle ensues. The images come together. Form a magical whole. Everything moves. Everything immobile inside you moves. Frame after frame, you watch what your eyes cannot see. The screen gathers in your own image. You feel the electric rush of heat when Deathrow sticks his tongue in the socket of your ear.

THEY HELD HANDS in the late summer light and strolled through Circle Park, forested with a full and secret view of the harbor crowded with visions of amateur sailors and jewel-named ships.
Esperanza. María Concepción. Helena Nataría.
She walked very close to him, occasionally bumping her hip against his. The sun sank low, from glowing white to dull red, without rays and without heat. They sat close on the grass, Buddha-fashion, beneath low-hanging leaves, sharing bottle after bottle of wine—zinfandel, her favorite, neither sweet nor dry—which they chilled in the river where the last flames of sunlight glided like snakes. She felt the warm wine break a hot path through her stomach, growing hotter and sharper as it moved. Then the sky died down to the color of smoke. Points of light flicked rhythm from the lighthouse. Her breathing reached deep, where no air had ever come.

Damn, I gotta pee, he said. He pushed to his feet, legs heavy with water.

Need some help?

He did not hesitate. Yes.

She stood straight up, managing the wine better than him. Unzipped his pants and took his dick in her hands. What with one thing and another, before she knew it—

IN THE FIRST WEEKS, she discovered his secretive feet. He would keep his socks on during sex; and he would never allow her to see his bare feet.
One of life’s greatest pleasures is charting the fine lines on the soles of the feet.
She pondered and planned. One day, she asked him to take a bath with her. (She loved baths, would sit in the tub an hour at a time.) They both disrobed. He raised a socked foot, ready to stick it in the water.

Uh oh. Take off your socks.

What?

Who heard of anybody taking a bath with they socks on?

With slow fingers, he removed his socks. And there
they
were, feet, like badly carved canoes, the sides scarred and rough, the skin mildew brown.

What happened?

Birthmark.

A birthmark?

Yeah. And he never said any more.

AFTER THE FIRST WEEKS, he stopped opening doors for her. Never pulled out a chair to seat her. Walked on the side of the sidewalk farthest away from the street.
The man should be near the street. Pappa Simmons had told her that this custom dated back to the days of horse and buggies and unpaved roads. If the wooden wheels of a buggy should spray an angle of mud onto the sidewalk, the gentleman’s body would shield his lady.

Woman, you said. Say woman. Lady signify.

Pappa Simmons blinked.

Lady like callin an Asian Oriental. A black person Negro.

Once, they met for dinner outside Davy’s Garden, her favorite restaurant, where fig-leafed and sandaled waiters and G-stringed and pastied waitresses served the tasty low-calorie semi-vegetarian dishes that she needed. To start, he was late—he was often late, as if there were two worlds, he a member of the one lagging slightly behind ours—but he offered no apologies, and she didn’t get angry, let it slide, put her tongue deep in his mouth. He played his palm over her ass.

Stop. You embarrassing me.

He gave her ass a firm slap.

Later, she said.

He opened the door and went inside. She waited outside. A minute later he came back.

What’s wrong? he said.

Be a gentleman. Open the door for me.

What?

Open the door for me.

His eyes widened. You ain’t handicapped.

Niggas ain’t shit.

So what does that make a bitch?

Yo mamma the bitch.