Rails Under My Back (32 page)

Hang-tailed, Les Payne came crawling back.
Say, baby. Could you see your way clean?
Wouldn’t leave her alone. Plead for hours on the phone.
His mouth peeled off in pages.
Send her cards. She gave him another chance. Her trust regained, the hang-tailed hound sneaked off for a bone.

It was time for a change, time to dust the broom, but she couldn’t drop him. He had put his flame in her. She sought Mamma’s advice. Between pauses of her raised teacup and the clink of its return to the saucer Mamma told her how to get rid of a boyfriend.

Daughter, write his name on an egg and toss it into the sea.

The sea? Ain’t no sea round here.

A river then. The waves will carry him away.

She drove—not the 280ZX but her first car, the spanking green Camaro bought with her new modeling dollars—to the Kankakee River. She tossed three eggs for insurance.

LOOKING BACK, she could see all the lovers from her life, singular yet source-same, like the pages of a book.

She rises on the pyramid of Uncle John’s back. The afternoon air dances under the trees. She can touch the leaves.

A lot of dogs get run over chasing after that stuff.

What stuff, Uncle John?

You know what stuff.

Sugar Smallhouse, the exception. Central Vocational High School, eleven, twelve, thirteen years ago. Like the school’s coolest dudes, Sugar liked to bop. Intricate steps, shuffling feet, twirls, twists and splits performed by two male partners, dressed in self-named zoot suits. Broad-brimmed Dobbs. Long-lapeled blazers. Bright silk ties against blinding white shirts. Diamond stickpin and matching cuff links. Baggy pants with high waists, held up by red suspenders. Two-toned patent-leather shoes. Hair slicked with Never Nap cream. Shiny conks with warp waves flowing back like ridges on a seashell. Sugar Smallhouse was the best dancer, could dance his head off—maybe it was the way he ended a step by removing his hat, then shaking it like a tambourine—and the cutest too.
Jus a sucka for them light-skinned mens. I always been.
Their first date, they danced so close that she could feel his heart heaving and crashing against her breasts. He said next to nothing. His rarity of words would last the length of their three-year relationship. She had messed with—kissing (
bustin slob
they called it), touching (
feeling on
), grinding—a few boys, but he was the first she would let completely inside her. Pinch her nipples tightly erect. Finger her deep inside. Tug at her panties. Slide them over the curvature of her hips. Part her legs with cool hands, then something wet and cold on her burning pussy. She raised her head slightly, looking down, seeing his closed eyes, his tongue lapping like a dog, then pushing into her and her head falling back. He refused to believe he was the first.
Where the blood?
But she felt the pain of his slow, dry entry. He was forever grateful for her bodily gifts. If he had a penny, half of it was hers. Wise in love, he could never catch on with his studies, no matter how much she drilled him, and he graduated—
remember the prom, Sugar in his black tux and you in your royal-blue taffeta dress, walking slowly and carefully, holding it up around your waist
—only after falling to his knees before the principal, begging and crying. Please, sir. Please.

Get up, son. You’ll ruin your suit.

Off he went to the navy (radar training?)—and she to Freeport University—rather than work full-time in his father’s clothing store. They exchanged a few letters the first months.

You datin now?

Got to sometime, Uncle John.

Any of those niggas act a fool, you come see your Uncle John.

Yes, Uncle John.

You come see me. I’ll set them straight right and quick.

Deathrow was the closest she had come to Sugar Smallhouse—though he was darker, a quarter after midnight—to matching that
feeling.
Sugar was inside him, a secret astronaut directing his life, directing him back to the love she’d lost. If you dug deep enough beneath his hard exterior, you found many a kind bone. His life extended into hers, clusters of lines reaching out.

The night before she was to move into her new loft at Hundred Gates, he phoned her.

Meet me at the apartment.

The apartment? Why?

Let me bless it.

Bless it?

You know,
bless
it.

They blessed the apartment, naked floors and walls echoing flesh and sweat.

Hatch and his best friend Abu arrived early the next morning at the South Shore apartment to help her move. She looked forward to a new apartment and a new neighborhood. Her body needed its sleep; sanitation trucks blew garbage odor through the bedroom window; to the siren of the truck and the call of the odor she awoke every morning; besides, it was time for a move; she had lived in South Shore ever since her return to the city from Freeport.

How come your cousin ain’t helping us move? Deathrow said.

My cousin?

Jesus.

She had never uttered Jesus’s name in Deathrow’s presence. Her embarrassing secret.

Where’s Uncle John? Hatch said.

I ain’t heard from him.

He ain’t called? Porsha saw the concern in Hatch’s eyes. Hatch was fashioned in John’s image. A shadow of John’s face in his, an echo of John’s voice in his.

No.

Damn, Abu said. He was Hatch’s twin, only shorter, darker, fatter. His chimpanzee ears twitched. He promised.

I know, Porsha said. He told Lucifer he was coming. After Les Payne, she had come to trust Uncle John’s gut feelings about a man. She would introduce a man to Uncle John on the first date. I know what men want, Uncle John said. She was anxious to hear his evaluation of Deathrow.

Don’t worry, Deathrow said. I can drive the truck.

Deathrow put his mouth and muscle to good use. He instructed the others as to what objects to remove from the apartment first. (Days before, he had shown Porsha how to pack and seal her boxes properly.) He loaded up the truck with each object exactly positioned. Shackled the furniture so that it couldn’t move. Drove the truck. Once at Hundred Gates—yes, she would love it here; live leaves ran green lines up the building and curtain-shimmered in the wind—he directed the unloading. It took eleven or twelve hours to load and unload several tons of items: her Bible, her globe, her wrought-iron bed with the white ship sail-canopy (she had attached chimes to it, sonorous seashells strung from a straw net, like a second miniature canopy), dresser, chest of drawers, tables, chairs, couches, love seats, sleeper sofas, refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer, and stacks and stacks of boxes: her South Shore apartment had been stocked like a museum, full of objects—dolls, dresses, coin banks (scared-eyed niggas with hollow grins and watermelon lips), old cloth for quilts, browned newspapers, perfumes that had lost their scent, doll-sized wooden Indians, a clay nigga foot (
Nigga toe,
Lula Mae called it), crystal knickknacks—from Lula Mae’s lil house, the trailer propped up on four corners of bricks in Lula Mae’s backyard, which you reached by stepping down three cement back-door steps and walking across two long, splintery wood planks to its metal door. The loft had been a dance space, then a gallery, then a radio studio, then a television studio. Perfect for her. Huge, an entire floor. A church-high ceiling. Two walls were solid windows. She could look down onto the web of a great tree. Sunlight smeared one wall of windows in the kitchen and dining room, and the small series of picture-frame windows in the bedroom. Through the fractured blind slats, she could watch a bird wing past. Moonlight made the floorboards silver. In the bare room—she had yet to hang draperies—voices moved like shadows on the walls and shadows danced across the ceiling. The windows were long, bright, shadeless rectangles of light. Without warning—light and dark, equal halves of a slowly spinning ball—they shaped to lengthening shadows.

The room steamed with hot silences. The purple glow of the tropical aquarium, the whisper of currents, gurgling bubbles, and fish rippling in bright streaks. Deathrow bobbed over to the aquarium, his footfalls echoing against the hard wooden floors. Tried to scare the fish with ugly faces. Fish unscathed, he rapped on the glass with his knuckles, hard.

So you from South Lincoln? Hatch said.

Yeah. Red Hook.

Red Hook?

Yeah.

Really?

Straight up.

You know T-Bone? Abu asked, eye cocked to catch deceit.

Hell yeah. Crippled motherfucka. Ridin that wheelchair like a Beamer. But he straight.

Man,
he
from Red Hook, Abu said to Hatch.

What?

He
from Red Hook.

Man.

A moment of silence. A feeling silence.

So, Hatch said. So, well, what’s it like?

Deathrow grinned his grin. When a man in the house, he said, all the bullshit stops. He slapped Hatch on the back.

Damn.

Damn.

You ever heard of the Blue Demons?

You mean that basketball team?

Yeah.

I seen them play a few times.

My Uncle John ref for them.

The same Uncle John who was sposed to drive the truck tonight?

Hatch nodded.

Deathrow thought about it. You know, I think I know yo uncle. A short guy, right?

Hatch nodded.

Look something like you?

Yeah.

Damn. Small world.

Sis,
he
from Red Hook.

He
from Red Hook.

I know.

Sis, you know you don’t owe me nothing for helpin you move.

That’s right, baby. Deathrow kissed her.

Buy us some brew, Abu said.

Nigga, you know you can’t hold yo liquor.

Yo, money. What you drink?

Be pissin all night.

Watch yo mouth in my house.

I don’t drink no beer, Deathrow said.

What?

Man, how can yall drink that shit? Taste like piss.

Stop talkin low-life.

That’s because beer and piss got the same ingredient.

What?

Pee.

So it went. Hatch, Abu, and Deathrow: their forms and talk awakened memories. Shades of blue pasts. Hatch, Abu, and Jesus as rusty-butt boys, the three sitting before her monkeylike while she greased their naps.

She gave them money for liquor.

Deathrow kissed her before he stepped out the door with the other two.

Be back soon.

You better.

Awaiting their return, she kept her hands busy, arranging, rearranging, unpacking boxes, dusting, sweeping, mopping, cleaning.

She felt very small and tight inside. Her mind wandered. Imagined the worst. She sat and tried to settle. Time flowed.

Hours later, the three of them came back, drunk and stinking, speech thick. A night with devil in the wind, beating, pounding evil against the windows, and a handful of stars.

What took yall so long?

We were talkin.

What?

Jus talkin.

Yeah. They were tellin me all about Jesus.

Jesus?

Yeah.

And Uncle John.

A measure of silence—Porsha expected Deathrow to lean in for a kiss; he didn’t—then torrential tears. Hatch first. Abu followed. So too Deathrow. Tears distorted their faces. Sobs came wet and deep. The three babbled words from some unknown dictionary. Then their heads fell back like heavy stones, their bodies sinking into the floor, in the hollow created by a ring of boxes.

DEATHROW HAD YET to turn the final corner of maturity. Porsha moved in the world with complete faith that he would in the fullness of time. She devised ways to speed up his growth. Last Christmas, she had bought him a black trunk full of new clothes, a Bible at the bottom, leatherbound and smelling like new shoes.

That’s your passport to heaven, she said. She braced herself for some sarcastic reply.

He ran his hand over the worked leather. Thanks, he said.

Perhaps her very look had drawn out of him the answer she wanted. She went further. It is the traveler’s map, the pilgrim’s staff, the pilot’s compass, and the soldier’s sword.

I don’t know bout all that. He grinned. But it sho is some nice leather. I never knew you were
this
religious.

I am, but I ain’t no fanatic. What about you?

I believe.

Since then, she had chanced on him reading the Bible once or twice. And he had promised to attend the Great Awakening with her on Sunday to fellowship with the New Cotton Rivers, the fourteen-year-old evangelist who steered the souls of his congregation, the New Riverside Multimedia Church. The Great Awakening would be the evangelist’s first live appearance in four years. The Full Gospel Assembly, seven hundred and seventy-seven golden-throated singers, would accompany him.

Okay. I’ll let some fat fried chicken-eatin preacher take my money.

Every preacher ain’t like that. This one’s good. Builds houses for the homeless.

Need money to build houses. Most church folk ain’t got nothin but chitlins in they purses.

Well, he got money.

What’s his name?

The New Cotton Rivers.

That nigga on TV?

Yes.

Who be wearin them gym shoes and that joggin suit?

How else can you keep up with the Lord?

Right. He way younger than me.

Age got nothing to do with knowing Christ.

And he—

Will you go?

I don’t know.

It would mean a lot to me. She put her cool hand to his hot chest.

Okay. If you insist. Maybe he’ll do some—

She didn’t waste a minute. She called and reserved two tickets for the Sunday appearance.

Nothing like a good show, he said. I wanna see that preacher turn silver to gold and cotton to silk.

His promise, his tentative steps toward Christ, were good signs. No man had ever gone that far for her. But she wanted him to go further, touching distance, and accept God in his life, accept the voice resounding in her skull.
These are candied kisses from God. God is the author of healing. I pray for sweet mending.
I’ll put no man before my God.