Rails Under My Back (73 page)

He follows at a run, accelerating down a sloping corridor. Unsure that he can find his way out if he were to turn back.

Light finally. Light but no bulbs Jesus can see. A maze of plumbing, windowless walls, bright trash remains. Puddles where rats swim like fish. The farther they walk, the deeper, the thinner the air becomes. Ten miles high and rising. The thin air carries with it something else, something that cuts through all of what is tight inside. On they walk, the light forever changing. Light and air thread through him. Weave wish and weariness. He is actually enjoying it now, this journey, pleasure in each step. Adventure. He could stay here forever, wandering, opening doors.

Now another turn, another hall. A double row of runway-like lights leading to a white square up ahead. Closer now, he sees that the square is actually a room, lighted space.

In here, Lady T says.

He complies before the words are fully out of her mouth. Bright light comes slamming in out of the darkness. Holds his eyes hostage. He shades them with both hands. Stands waiting, white waves. Rinse open. The room spangles aflame. He feels he is at the bottom of a new steel pot. Circular steel. Walls so smooth that they show twin reflections of him and Lady T.

This is it, she says, twin voices of her, echoes.

Damn, he says. Hearing himself say it again.

The floor shines slick, clean, and bare. The walls flare and change colors like great curtains. His eyes slowly follow the walls up, the ceiling high above and almost lost in shadow. Stars blink in and out.

Look, Lady T says. Her pointed finger directs him.

Damn, he says.

Directly in the center of one wall, a circular cluster of TV screens, like a large eye pieced together with dozens of smaller eyes. Intimate images of people sleeping, eating, kissing, killing, getting juiced, pissing, shitting, fucking.

Is it
real
? Jesus says.

I guess so.

Now each screen starts flickering images so quickly that vision blurs. It actually hurts to watch. Burns. Visual torture. Jesus turns his eyes away.

Damn!

It does that …

A maze of levers, buttons, gauges, meters, dials, switchboards, keyboards, runs the length of the room. Amazed, Jesus walks over for a closer look.

Don’t touch anything, Lady T says.

I won’t. He pulls back, hands out, under-arrest fashion.

What does it do?

I don’t know. I ruined yo suit.

Jesus examines his suit. Oh, that’s okay. He dusts off his sleeves and pant legs—yes, it is ruined—turns and notices that Lady T shows no sign of travel: no dirt, no sweat, no rubbing of tired muscles. Why you know bout this place?

I found it a long time ago. Playin down here. When I was little.

Why don’t they keep it locked up or something?

Lady T says nothing.

Sunlight comes in through small holes above, an iron grating in the rectangular shape of a window. Jesus can see shadows pass by. In the corner of his vision, he catches a flutter of red. He turns. It is gone.

Lady T holds out a steaming pipe. Jesus can read patterns in the fire. He takes the hot pipe, pulls smoke into his lungs, holds it in, feels it travel through his body, then he blows it out, a dragon. This is the bomb, he says.

I told you.

The bomb. He passes her the steaming pipe. She takes it slowly, making sure that their fingers touch. Sucks light into it. They share it back and forth, weave a braid of black-red smoke between them. With each hit of the hot pipe, the world melts away.

So is all that stuff true?

What stuff?

That No Face said.

Well, what do you think? Ask yourself. You know me now.

Do I?

Don’t you?

Their voices arc through silence and solitude.

You should.

Yeah. I should …

Smoke carries their voices up into darkness. Jesus’s bright reflection in the walls blinds him with color. Brightness bounces up and down once or twice before it settles in. Jesus realizes that he has experienced this before. Deep steel space. The captured German submarine at the Museum of Science and Industry from his childhood. Black torpedoes cut through ocean like great fish. Depth charges explode in silent water and crush hollow metal.

What about you? Lady T says. Is all that stuff about you true?

Who told you?

Everybody.

What did they tell you? No, don’t tell me. You can believe it if you want.

Light in Lady T’s hair like black doves. You want me to?

Yeah.

They walk and talk, enjoying the cycling of light and heat. Bounce into their own echoes. Light comes in from above and below at the same time so that they have two shadows. It is not clear if the light beneath his feet is true light or only reflected light from above.

You ain’t scared of me no mo?

No, Jesus says.

When you first came to the apartment. I mean the second time, when you came back.

You could tell?

Lady T tightens up her body in imitation of Jesus. They share a good, long laugh.

He cranes his neck and sees a rainbow high above on the edge of darkness.

BIRDLEG RIP WE REMEMBER

You’re easy to talk to, Lady T says.

Oh yeah?

Yeah.

So you enjoy my company?

Yes.

Good. Good. He stares into the colorful blackness above, feels the emptiness surrounding him, touching him with gentle, careful strokes. He feels his body expand, swell, the same feeling he felt when his dizzy form bumped from wall to wall, reached for a doorknob that was not there, fell into hard space, and crawled out of his mother’s front door never to return, belled hope inside, free to begin again, to create himself.

Tell me something, Lady T says, almost laughing the words.

Tell you what?

Tell me something good.

Rainbow blinks color into Jesus’s eyes. Rainy, vision washes in and out. I’ll tell you about Birdleg. Images tumble downward through his head.

Birdleg?

Jesus nods. His finger points a straight line to the rainbow tattooed in steel flesh.

Birdleg?

He’s inside of me, Jesus says. Right here. He rolls up his red sleeve and holds out his forearm as if for an injection, allowing her to witness rail-like scars, running, waiting.

Ugh.

Yeah, I know. Nasty-lookin, ain’t it?

She does not answer.

Birdleg. He shuts his eyes. (So he loves the world, in darkness.) Calls all within.
We remember.
Red images flicker on his blind lids.

FAST-CLICKING TRACKS. Air rushing in at steady rhythm. The glare of passing stations. Metal walls closing in, squeezed in somebody’s fist. The train curves through subway, tossing light then shadow. Explodes through the black tunnel, a fist shoved into a dark glove. Now, high above the expressway, zooming cars small beneath you. Spit you into light.

Wells Street. Next to the river. (One of the city’s twelve.) Burned-out buildings and collapsing porches, rubble of ship frames and rusted pieces of rigging. An old black streetcar like a lost lump of coal, the streetcar that Birdleg said once ran the old trolley lines, then was converted into a restaurant, then a barbershop, then a health-food store, then
this
—junk. Hang a right. Brown water pooled before a red fire hydrant. Brown mud flowing from white diapers dumped in green grass. Seven sets of yellow brick buildings (grouped three to a set) rise like missiles above the horizon—
nuclear bombs stored in the basements, Birdleg said. That’s why the jets look like filing cabinets. Cause they got nuclear bombs filed away in em
—each set opening onto a concrete park, steel swings, monkey bars, and metal slides like great silver tongues, and a basketball rig or two like skeletal robots guarding over a court. Stonewall. The jets. Sun behind a blue curtain of sky, drawing this world in a net of light. Building A. Birdleg’s building.
Birdleg formed an A by curling his index finger into the base of his thumb, an A missing one leg. We the Stonewall Aces, he said.
Leaning on the corner of Wells Street, ready to fall like a drunk into the river. Let your sight curve with the river. Let it find Red Hook two miles or so upstream (downstream?). Stonewall’s red metal twin. Stonewall. Red Hook. The jets. End of the road, end of the road, end of the road for nigga trash.

A swan-white sun floated radiant feathers down to the basketball court. You drove the ball to the hoop, only to let some nigga half yo size steal it from you, yes, snatch the pill from your hand and rob the pharmacy. This short nigga, guarding you, like white on a maggot, eating up the ball, forcing you to take shots. Flapping the wings of his arms, beating up a white blur of motion. Game point came before you knew it.

The swan flapped its wings, rippling wind. The short nigga rode white wind. Dropped the ball like an egg in the basket.

Damn, see the thread on that ball?

Yeah. Nigga must think that’s his mamma’s sewin basket.

Good game, homey, the short nigga said.

Thanks, Hatch said.

Thanks, Abu said, his fat titties bouncing better than he could bounce the ball.

Right, Jesus said.

Yo.

Jesus saw a belly, pushing at and poking through spaces of the shimmering chain-link fence which divided the court and the sidewalk.

Yo. Come here.

Jesus headed straight for the belly.

Jesus stopped before the fence and looked into the boy’s chalk eyes. He looked something like a Halloween pumpkin. Though he wasn’t orange enough. Sure, yellow, like the candlelight that illuminated pumpkin skin. A banana-colored nigga.
Dark skin is not darkness. Nor is fair skin illumination.
No, skin the color of Gracie’s weak Chinese tea. Speckled brown like a butterfly’s wing. Shiny as wax fruit. Knife-slit eyes. Hard and white like the river stones down South. Softened by sweat.
Nigga must have a water fountain hidden beneath his bald head.

Yo. Try putting a flick in yo wrist, the round-bellied boy said. You know, like a fag. The boy demonstrated, raised hand curled, a praying mantis. And shoot in an arc. Like this. You’ll never miss a free throw. Guaranteed.

Chirped words blew straight at the nests of Jesus’s ears. He wanted to speak, but his own words stuck on his tongue.

And why you run around like somebody short?

What?

Learn to use your height.

Jesus felt the stabbing sunlight. Held up the basketball and watched his reflection, rippling, in shiny leather.
One of those rare things that happen two or three times a summer. The ball gets stuck between the rim and the backboard and somebody has to unstick it. Get Jesus, cause he can jump up and punch and blacken both the moon’s eyes before he comes back down.
Who you?

Birdleg.

Birdleg? I ain’t never seen you round here befo.

I ain’t from round here.

Where you from?

Stonewall.

Nigga, stop frontin.

Do it look like I’m frontin?

It didn’t. Birdleg’s eyes were chalk-white, and his words were whiter, scrawling themselves across Jesus’s chest.
Learn to use your height.
Stonewall.
Jesus knew, Birdleg might know a thing or two about basketball since Stonewall was but blocks from the Stadium, where His Highness, Flight Lesson,
the
basketball king, flew and ruled. How you get here?

I walked.

Walked? Sounded crazy to Jesus, but anything was possible: Birdleg came from Stonewall.

Stupid—

The white ice of the word put a cold pick in Jesus’s heart.

—walked. I gotta go.

Wait. I wanna go.

Birdleg began walking, wide-legged and slow, like a pregnant woman. Jesus watched him through the cone spaces of the fence.

Hey—he shouted at Hatch and Abu. Come on.

Where we going?

Stonewall.

Nigga, stop lyin.

Yeah, Abu echoed, nigga, stop lyin.

Come on.

Hatch and Abu dragged their tired kicks from the court and followed.
Birdleg’s kicks never touched a court. His white eyes watched from the sidelines. Walking was as physical as he ever got.

You walked.

If Birdleg stood still too long, his string-bean legs might root in the ground. He liked to walk.
Once Abu saw him sprout wings and fly home, and Hatch saw him gallop off into the horizon on a pit bull’s back.
His toes cut through his kicks and tracked claw prints in grass, mud, dirt, snow.

We the Stonewall Aces, Birdleg said.

The what? Hatch said.

Yeah, Abu echoed, the what?

The Stonewall Aces.

I ain’t no Ace, Hatch said. I’m a spade.

I’m an Ace, Jesus said.

Yeah, Abu said. A red one. An ace of hearts.

Yo mamma like it.

You walked. Birdleg pointed to white smoke lifting from a manhole. That’s smoke from the underground city.

From where?

Ain’t yall never heard of the underground city?

Sure.

You walked.

Birdleg, what’s that? You pointed at a blue-black bird with red bandannas around the wings.

Stupid. That’s a redwing.

You walked.

Birdleg proudly carried his round belly, a real potbelly, steel, iron, cause you could hear the metal ringing when he walked. He smelled like food, like sugar, though he ate scabs candy-quick, scabs saved in an old M&M’s box—plain, not peanuts;
I never eat peanuts, specially peanut butter, cause just look at it. It ain’t nothing but shit, just like I never eat scrambled eggs, cause just look at it. It ain’t nothing but somebody’s brains.
All that food and belly and smell balanced on two stick legs. Two string-bean legs filled with pus.

You walked. Followed Birdleg through Central. Birds perched on spiked steeples and steel window ledges. Streets awash with people, merging into eddies and disengaging other paths, and the boys like slits in the swaying mob.

You walked. A lot bright with red dirt. That’s the old negro cemetery. Yall heard of negroes?

Sure, Hatch said. My great-granddaddy was a negro.

Mine too, Abu said.