All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  “It’s not so easy to hurt you,” he said.

  “Nope.”

  “You would make a good Jew.”

  “How would you know?” I said, real sharp, “You’re not Jewish.”

  “No, that’s right,” he said, smiling a little more, and then he leaned down and whispered, “I’m the man from Mars.”

  T-BONE AND ELISE

  He heard her coming up the back-porch stairs out of the rain, and then her laughter as she stepped in her open-toed spectator heels along the dimly lit hall of the small house he rented not far from the lakefront rail lines. Holding her coat close, she came into the kitchen, heavy-breasted, a sauntering woman who had gone out for a few minutes to enjoy the freshness of the early morning rain.

  “It’s more like a mist now but it’s still coming down,” Elise said.

  “Who was you laughing with out there?” T-bone asked.

  “Myself,” she said. “Me and Philomena. We had a good laugh.”

  Her camel-hair coat fell open.

  She had got out of bed naked, put on her coat, and gone out onto the porch, carrying Philomena, the rabbit puppet, under her arm. T-bone was seated at the kitchen table. He was in his shorts, wearing a Blue Jays T-shirt and a nylon stocking cap on his head, trying to keep the previous night’s conk in his hair.

  “I know it’s none of my business an’ I only know you since last night,” she said, “but I don’t like you doing what you’re doing to your head like that.”

  “I do what a black man got to do, girl. I gotta keep my wig-hat on.”

  She opened a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that was on the table and poured herself two fingers of drink, neat.

  “You go to kick-starting on the bottle like that,” he said, “and you gonna end up with a lifetime home in the ground.”

  “I bet you’re no slouch with the demon yourself,” she said.

  He had a clouded whiteness in his left eye but with his good eye he fixed a stern look on her. She sat in silence with the rabbit, Philomena, and she let him stare at her until he broke the stillness by saying, “Yes, you is okay,” pouring himself a drink. “I’m gonna fry us up some T-bones. A T-bone and onions beats all for breakfast.”

  “You some kinda dude in the morning,” Philomena said. She was sitting up straight on Elise’s fist.

  “I be the morning man,” T-bone said, leaning up close to the rabbit, “an’ you is one smart-mouth mothafucka.”

  “I come from a whole family of motherfuckers,” the rabbit said. “Elise, here, she got the gift of tongues, man. She got hat boxes full of the likes of me.”

  They had met at two in the morning on the outskirts of town. At that hour, after playing a gig, T-bone often went for a drive alone in his van, “to slow down the bloods and come to some easement of mind.” He’d stopped to fill up at the AC-DC Gas Bar and Groceteria, where the fourteen trucking lanes of the 401 cross with the overnight commuter highway, 427. He was standing at pump Number Nine of the eleven cement Self-Serve islands, each island a pond of halogen light in the dark, and he was staring at island eight where a woman – as she pumped gas into her red Passat – wore on her left hand, hanging head-first down, a puppet glove, a floppy-eared rabbit. He saw the rabbit’s upside-down mouth flap and heard a voice by his right shoulder ask, “What’s happening, man?” He called across the cement island, “Be cool,” and when the woman, still holding the gas nozzle to her tank, turned to look at him, he said, “You one of them ventriloquists, like on TV?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You wanta do some personal damage?”

  He racked his nozzle.

  “He’s one of them nighttime crazies,” the rabbit called out.

  “Not me,” T-bone said, coming across the island. “Ain’t nothing crazy ’bout me.”

  “I foresaw you, I foresaw who you were, coming on at me like you just done,” she said.

  “You saw me?”

  “Right. Ain’t nothing secret about your style.”

  “What’s my name then?”

  “T-bone, T-bone Duflet,” she said triumphantly.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Check out your wheels, man.”

  He turned to face T-bone Duflet & His Blues Band in gold-on-black letters on the side of his van.

  “There I be,” he said, laughing. “Goddamn, there I be, big as lightning.”

  He shifted his black iron-ware pan on the gas burner fire as he fell to telling her about his home farm and his father and how he loved his father and how he had watched his father die slowly, the dying being so slow it was like studying rain. “There be all kind of rains,” he said. “Rain in your heart, and there’s rain that comes out of the woods in sheets and in the springtime they look like ghosts, long tall ghosts, and that’s what white people was like, too,” he said, “ghosts,” and he winked at her, “long and tall.” He started telling her about his Uncle Lazarus. “I was a Lazarus by name, too, until people took to calling me T-bone at the piano. But meanwhile,” he said, “my uncle was a man who had himself an alligator mouth and because of his mouth he’d got his own self in trouble with a good-looking, fine as wine white woman. A lot like you she was,” he said, “except way back then the sheriff, he lit out after Lazarus, his dogs whooping. When they finally did corner old Lazarus’s hummingbird ass, the sheriff he hollers, ‘You’re a dead man, Lazarus,’ and Lazarus come up into the open from between two trees and calls, ‘I been betwixt and between before.’ The sheriff shoots him but he comes back one more once from between two other trees like he’s never been shot. ‘You’re a dead man, Lazarus,’ and the sheriff shoots him again but Lazarus with a moaning cry keeps coming up while they say he’s running farther away, coming back, and running away in the rain till they never did find him or find his ghost.” Pleased with his own storytelling, pleased with a look of curiosity close to dazzlement that he saw in her eyes, T-bone said, “Lazarus, he keeps coming up every springtime, he be one of those long tall moaning ghosts of rain,” and then he whispered song words to her,

  …consumption killing me by degrees

  I can study rain

  In the low lamplight of his bedroom they had undressed, unhurried, at three in the morning. The bed had newel posts. She had looked around for a place to rest Philomena, and then had sat the puppet straight up, alert, like a sleeve over one of the posts. In that shadow light on the bed she had lain back and drawn her knees to her shoulders, trying to take him deeper, and he had cried, “You mine, baby, you is all mine,” but she had thought, the pain of his deepness giving her pleasure, No, this is mine, and she had rolled him over, surprising him with her unexpected strength. Sitting on top of him she said, “Mine, mine all the time,” arching in release, falling forward over him, kissing his neck, saying, “Turn up the light, baby, I wanta see you. I’ve never been in bed with a black man before.”

  “You is here with a lady killer,” he said, laughing.

  “Don’t you worry yourself,” he heard Philomena say from down off the post. “She’s so quick you won’t know she was here til she’s gone.”

  As he reached for the light, she eased off his body, sliding down between his feet, to sit beside Philomena.

  “Here I am down at the deep end,” she said, surprised to see that half the width of the wall beside the bed was a mirror.

  In a fuller light, with his eyes accustomed to the light, he said, “Mercy! Jesus, Lord,” leaning forward to look at her more closely.

  Below the glitter of a single rhinestone set in her navel, he saw that she had shaved all her body hair, she was bald at the cunt except for a razor-thin line of black hair. “It’s called the California cut,” she said.

  He drew his finger along the line of hair. “Ain’t life a bitch,” and he rolled her over onto her stomach, buckled her knees, and hoisted her hips and entered her, saying, “Gonna get me some more trim,” not with the lunge of the earlier hour, but slowly, and then he heard from behind her shoulder, the rabbit, “You
sure she wants to do this this way?”

  “Lord Jesus,” he said and collapsed on her back, and she burst out laughing and he laughed, too, saying, “Next time, the rabbit stays in the next room.”

  She took over and took him into her arms. “Sorry about that. It’s just my way of talking. Can’t help it, it’s me. It’s how I do.”

  With her cheek against his neck as they lay together, she felt a moaning song inside his throat. When she asked what was the matter, he said, “Never you mind, girl, it be raining…” She didn’t know what to say, so she said, “Not telling’s unfair.” He had hauled back out of her arms at being told he was unfair, but he laughed as if by laughing he was putting something protective between them, a protection being necessary because they didn’t know each other at all. Then, with a sudden bitterness of tone that took her aback and made her wary, he said, “Ain’t nothing more foolish looking than a black man with his head on a white woman’s shoulder.”

  They sat up together on the edge of the bed, facing the mirror, her legs bent open, the rhinestone in her navel a point of light in the mirror.

  “I got no axe to grind. I don’t need to take nothing from you, T-bone,” she said, “’cause I got nothing to give more than what I already gave.”

  “Fair ’nough. But maybe I oughta check you out with the rabbit!”

  Elise laughed and took both of his hands in hers and put them to her lips.

  “What you do with these hands of yours, the way you play, is beautiful. Beautiful, man.”

  “How you know?”

  “I’ve heard you play before. I didn’t just say hello out by the pumps for no reason.”

  “Your rabbit said hello.”

  “My rabbit does what she’s told or she better watch out.”

  Still facing the mirror, she said, “I hate mirrors. My mother, she used to look in the mirror after she’d had a drink and she’d say like she was real angry that she was looking for the child she’d lost, my twin sister who’d died beside me being stillborn. Sometimes she’d see my sister in the mirror and talk to her all night just like we’re talking now, trying to get her to come out from hiding behind the glass. And if my mother was drunk enough she’d call her out by her name, Lisa, and then she’d call her a coward for staying back behind the mirror. She’d put her arms around me and hold me and call on Lisa to quit acting like some kind of ghost, but by then Mother had got so altogether confused in the circles of her own mind she’d hold me and call me Lisa instead of Elise, like she was holding a dead girl who had come back to life in her arms.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t holding no dead girl,” T-bone said as he brushed her blond hair away from her eyes and then laid her back on the bed. “No dead girl be rattling on my bones.” Taking her in his arms, he entered the cradle of darkness, hearing her say, “Oh Lord.”

  With the morning rain a chill had taken hold in the kitchen.

  T-bone turned on the stove’s gas burners, put slices of black bread in the toaster and two steaks and onions in the big pan, and got himself warm by wearing his tuxedo suitcoat – the same coat he wore every night while playing at the Black Swan Blues Bar – a coat that was one size too big for him, the sleeves hanging down to his knuckles. He’d worn the old coat for years and he told her he thought it had once belonged to an undertaker because of the broad black silk band sewn around the left sleeve. “Unless maybe it was a suit for a one-armed man and when he died that’s how they sewed the sleeve back together.”

  He did a little shuffle dance of delight at his own wit in front of the stove.

  “We’re some pair in the morning,” she said. “I drink an’ now you dancing.”

  “We’s the best, girl. All I wants from life is some whisky, loose shoes and some dancing bootie.”

  “I got two left feet,” she said, laughing. “I caught the heel of my shoe out there on the porch. Thought I snapped it off. They say if you break the heel off your shoe in the morning you’re gonna meet the love of your life by night. But I didn’t break my heel.”

  “You breaking my heart anyway, woman.”

  “Wasn’t looking to break nothing last night. I was only looking to gas up and go home.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He shook lemon pepper onto the two T-bones and onions, set them down on a platter between two plates and poured two glasses of bourbon, but instead of sitting down he shied away and started to poke about the kitchen as if he were looking for something that he had forgotten, his shoulders slumped inside his coat.

  She let him turn in a circle and turn in a circle again and then she said, “What are you looking for? What you lose?”

  “Captain Hook,” he said. “I’m looking for somebody I lost when I was a kid. I’m looking for when I believed back then that I was this dangerous mothafucker who had seen Captain Hook on TV on a Saturday morning and I had killed Captain Hook with one blow of my fist to his eye-patch. And when I went looking under his eye-patch I find that this small snake is nesting right there in his eye socket and that snake snatches out, bites me on my cheek and I got me a small scar.” T-bone touched his cheek. “Right here that I tell people is a birthmark but I’m telling you that it is the mark of the snake’s tongue.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “You believe what you believe, like some days you dream what you gotta dream. You got no choice.”

  Elise reached out and took hold of him by the sleeve that had the black silk arm band. “The night before yesterday,” she said, “I was sound asleep but I dreamed my bed was gone. I was asleep in mid-air, that’s what I dreamed.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. You study rain an’ I study the way some things sometimes show up wanting to be something else – like a girl sitting on a bench who is trying to be real by thinking she’s a violin. I dreamed that once. But I try not to dream.”

  He hit the table with the heel of the knife, making her flinch and draw back. “Try staying alive.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I deal with. Day by day. All that other shit’s too much for me.”

  “What shit?”

  “Shit for brains.”

  “I think you been drinking too much of that morning whisky.”

  “Don’t whisky me, man.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “So, tell me this. When Philomena is talking,” he asked as he cut into his T-bone, “is she talking to you or is that you talking to yourself?”

  “Sometimes she talks,” she said, “and I don’t know what she’s saying til she says it. Sometimes I have to whack her on her head.”

  “Sometimes, sometimes…”

  “Sometimes I’m happy,” she tried singing, “sometimes I’m blue…”

  “Yes, you are,” Philomena said.

  “I think I have to go and get my clothes on.”

  “Sometimes,” T-bone said, “I close my eyes and I see that you and me, we aren’t nowhere to be found. Like my daddy say when he want me outa the house, ‘Make yourself scarce, boy.’ And what I found out in life is that being scarce is being free.”

  “You playing scarce with me?”

  “Girl, you is fine, one fine woman this morning.”

  “I ain’t nobody’s woman. Not yours, not my momma’s, not nobody’s.”

  “You keep going on like that an’ you gonna get rain in your heart.”

  Elise had left her skirt, her sweater, her panties on the floor at the base of the mirror. She slid her hand inside her coat and touched her breast, thinking she and T-bone should leave off all the talk and get together again in bed, but she was afraid that if she went to the bedroom she would find Lisa and her mother sitting in the mirror waiting for her, so she knew there was going to be no more tussling in his bed. She wanted to get dressed, fast. She felt she was getting a chill.

  “My time ain’t most people’s time,” T-bone said. “The nighttime be the right time for me. The rest of the time is day, an
d they’s different people that live in a different city in the day time. Some peoples feel ’fraid at night, Sweet Jesus,” he said, clapping his hands, staring at her out of his clouded eye as she sat with the rabbit puppet in her lap. “Even so…”

  “Even so what?”

  “Like I just said, I woke up thinking about my daddy.”

  “You think your daddy would like me?”

  “The deal is, can you remember my daddy?”

  “How could I?”

  “’Course you can’t, that’s the point. The whole of his life was the nighttime. My ghosts don’t talk to your ghosts. You got daytime ghosts.”

  “I got Philomena,” she said.

  He began to laugh, and laugh loudly, so loud he could hardly talk for laughing. She started to laugh, too. She had no idea what he was laughing at but she laughed along with him.

  “Maybe we should go back to bed so I can T-bone you one more once.”

  “No time,” the rabbit said, rising up from her lap.

  “Shut your mouth,” she said, rising up, too, and she smacked Philomena on the head. Philomena fell forward, whining, saying to Elise, “It’s morning, you got to go. You got a performance this afternoon.”

  “A performance?” T-bone asked.

  “Yes,” Elise said. “I do kids shows. Birthdays in the garden, that kind of stuff. Love it. The kids love it. They talk to Quack Quack the Duck and Mister Magoo…whatever glove I’ve got on my fist, whatever face. It’s hilarious. Those kids want to know some mean things about life…what’s going on…”

  “An’ you tell them…”

  “I explain the whole world, man. Or at least, Quack Quack the Duck does… It’s easy.”

  “All that politics and shit?”

  “They don’t think life’s shit, they think it’s funny, in a serious kind of way, the way kids are.”