Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  The stripper is an amber translucent gel, which becomes more viscous as I whisk the brush around in it. The vapors penetrate the mask and shoot up my nose like cold fire and I’m instantly high and stupid. I lean away from the bucket until part of me returns—enough at least to begin.

  By the time I’ve covered all the metal of this window, it’s ready to come off. I wipe the tin down with the rags, and the crud comes off easily. What’s left behind is gleaming tin and the clear image of etched daisies. It takes less than an hour to knock off one window.

  I notice the radio again—horns and “. . . ooo ooo oooo!” Then static. I hear myself call out.

  “Hey!”

  Chris replies, “What’s up?”

  “Turn that back.”

  “Oh, shit. My bad.” He listens for a moment. He calls back, “Who this?”

  “Mayfield—The Impressions.”

  “Sweet. This is sweet.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right.” He glides back to the kitchen area. Snaps twice on the beat and disappears. The saws stay off. Now there’s only the intermittent drill-whine, hammer-bang, or KC’s scraping from the bathroom. “This is my country . . .” We have our anthem for the day—community and soul. I’ve always found Curtis’s voice enchanting. He could’ve sung just about anything in that falsetto, and I would’ve obeyed. The afternoon unwinds and the hits keep coming. Not all of the songs match the message, the elegance, but they all have the same effect—lulling this crew to joy. And this isn’t the roughest bunch, but I know they’ve all seen and done questionable things between here and Dublin or Kingston or Miami or Brooklyn, but there’s something tender even in the rogue at worship of his work and his song. Even up on the Baker with my stained toxic rags I rock internally to our collective groove. I make sure to keep the glass clean—work the rags into the joints. Progress. I’m well into the second window before I notice I’m being watched.

  She’s been in the middle of the room for some time. I can tell by how she stands, anchored, on her heels. She’s wearing a large-brimmed hat that hides her face from me. Her long white and gray wavy hair tumbles out of it onto her back, mimicking the watermarks on her green overcoat. She looks from side to side and then heads for the kitchen. As soon as she disappears, Chris sings out over the music. He rushes to turn it down.

  They speak in low tones—mostly him, but I can tell from his tone that he’s answering her questions. They come back to the living area. Her heels sound odd—cutting through the dust, sounding out against the subfloor. Chris leads her to the middle of the loft and leaves her there. The two-dollar chicken repeats on me—comes up from the depths with such force I can’t hold it back. It rushes out silently—not even a hiss—hits the mask and spreads in the air gap between it and my face, then reregisters itself as taste. Dog food is the first thing that comes to mind—salty chicken like dog food—but isn’t dog food described on the commercials and on the can as being remarkably succulent? The makers never refer to it as gamey or raw, but only in terms a hungry dog probably couldn’t care less about. Outside the window the red label from an Alpo can flashes for an instant and I know I’ve poisoned myself with the fumes and the food, and I wonder why this mask won’t allow toxic vapors to pass out but only in.

  She heads for the bathroom, where KC and Bing Bing are, and they call out to her much in the same way Chris had, excited, an octave higher than they should. They murmur in the same way, but their voices echo off the tiles, the pipes, and the porcelain. Then KC escorts her out, back to her original spot. She’s looking up now, not at me but at the windows—studying them closely. She has a deep tan, like the one on Edith’s supple leather face. Now she looks at me, not my face but my tool belt and the big framing hammer hanging uselessly at my side. She speaks.

  “Those look lovely.”

  I suppose that “thank you” is the proper response, but I can’t bring myself to say it, not to her, not for this. I’m dizzy. I feel the need to hold on to one of the vertical poles. And the moment seems to call for me to utter from this height a benediction, curse, or even a spell, but what comes to mind are the mutated greetings the men had cooed to her. She stays there, still looking up at me. Occasionally her eyes flit nervously away to the tin. KC finally saves the day for both of us.

  “Yeah, Ms. Crane, we’ve been working on those a bit. They all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” she answers. She hesitates in turning to him, but manners compel her to finally do so. KC grins broadly. He wipes his knife with a clean rag. They look around the loft together. He follows her lead, as though he hadn’t noticed some aspect of the job until she’s discovered it.

  “Oh, look, flowers—daisies.”

  “Yeah, I just started noticin’ them today. I was wondering if you was gonna like them.”

  “Yes, I do.” And then—softer, “Is he new?”

  “Here, yes.”

  Then up to me, “I appreciate your thoroughness.”

  I press the rag into the metal, focus hard on the task at hand. She gives up, says something pleasant to KC, and goes. KC stays where he is. He watches her leave, smiling at her back, then her absence. When he hears the elevator doors close, he loses his grin, puts his hands on his hips, and looks up at me.

  “That was the client—Ms. Crane.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  He hisses through his teeth and shakes his head a few times. He gives up, too, and goes back to the bathroom. I start to go back to my work, but I just spin the rag like a propeller, looking for a clock. She crosses Greene, takes a quick look at the jeans store, and turns east up Broome. I whip the window with the rag, but there’s no crack to it. I ball it up and let it drop down to the dust. I notice the fumes again. I taste them this time, all the way down in my belly. My shoulders and neck start tingling but not much more than skin deep, like some sympathetic reaction to the arid bird I ate, the bird’s revenge, or both—the story in which the ghost fowl doesn’t accept my apology. Then I see chicken tracks on the windowpanes—random chicken tracks—hopping the stops, disappearing into the frame, and reappearing on another sheet of glass.

  I hang the bucket on the old gas nipple, sit down on the board, push off from the wall, and ride the Baker away from the window. Before I take the mask off I burp again: salty chicken like dog food. Breath like Grendel. Was it Grendel—the Midgaard? I don’t remember—too many toxins to the brain—a taluine concussion. I remember forgetting many things. It feels as if I’ve forgotten entire languages, philosophical tracts, volumes of myth and story—“Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age to set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense . . .” That is the conspiracy: to move a warrior to where he no longer remembers his rage, confused to the point of indecision, sword sheathed, wondering, Am I the fiend?

  I stay away from the fumes until it’s time to go. No one lingers. They move quickly, putting things away, going to wash in the slop sink. Chris points out a broom and gestures at the floor. The poison taste and the tingling are gone, but I’m still woozy, out of sync. The broom handle feels wrong and the floor farther away than it actually is. When I finish, I pack up and meet the others at the elevator. Chris frowns at my bag.

  “I left the gang box open for you.”

  I don’t understand him.

  “You comin’ back tomorrow?”

  I nod.

  “Then put that shit away—lock it up!”

  I nod again, cross the room to the box, but I don’t put my bag in. I close the lid and try to lock it. My fingers feel dull and jointless. I fumble with the padlocks.

  “You all right in there?”

  I get it locked and walk back to the elevator, where the crew waits, Chris leaning in the doorway. I step in and he closes the gate. He looks at my bag again—shakes his head.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Outside everyone says good-bye with quick, silent waves. KC looks back one time to see what I’m doing, then Bing Bing turns to see wh
y. They both turn again and accelerate north up the block.

  I drift across the street and find myself at the doorway of Lucky Jeans. An angry-looking man in a suit comes out carrying two large shopping bags. Music trails him, “Got My Mojo Workin’.” He strides past me without a look. He smells like lavender. I try to picture myself in there buying jeans and a sweater, being predisposed to conceive of, pursue, and achieve one end: If you’re horny, buy her a present. If you’re full of guilt and shame . . . I used to be good at problem solving. Claire always admired how unflappable I was in a crisis. I don’t know what makes me do it, but I jingle the change I pinched from Marco while staring at the door. Perhaps some unconscious aesthetic sensibility in me demands a particular tableau: I stand on the corner in the drizzle and put off going underground.

  9

  More free coffee. The Sox are on a streak—so the newspaper says. It’s silly, the Times doing a puff piece on the Olde Towne Team. The columnist has tried to spin it a few ways: detached interest, low-brow sarcasm masquerading as irony. He writes, without knowledge or history or context, the reasons this year’s team is different. Gone are the days of twenty-five cabs for twenty-five players—which, of course, would indict a century of baseball with the characteristics of one group of players: New York trying to spin Boston via the story of a group of millionaire athletes as a folksy, blue-collar town.

  They’ve cut the Yankee lead in half—three games with twenty-two left to play. They’ll be in town this weekend to play four. Solid, fundamental baseball. No heroics. Good pitching and defense combined with timely hitting. It’s insulting reading it, really, hurtful, like overhearing an acquaintance telling people at a party about the girl who broke your heart. Sally being watched by some bug-eyed teen jackass who thinks he knows her just because they share a locker row. It’s ridiculous to be afflicted by some freckly moon-eyed girl still, but every good haunt must transcend its origin—grow and deform as time passes. Like addiction. Last time I checked, I had a drinking problem. Right now it seems worse than ever—having grown, deformed. I hear Sally married her college boyfriend and they’ve got one kid, living in L.A., rich off TV scripts and jingles. I knock back the end of my coffee and it just doesn’t taste right. Not that it’s tepid or bitter—it isn’t a beer. I see the can I bought the junkie, empty by now but so what. I close my eyes and try to picture it: red and blue on white, the baroque lettering—the testament to quality. The pop-hiss when I pull the tab—“. . . and the wilderness coalesced . . .”

  A girl of about sixteen walks by the window and I feel as though I might implode with grief. I don’t know why. Over the speakers Miles bleeds through his horn, introducing the idea of an entirely different kind of judgment day—junk and funk, Big Muddy and Harlem. The gaps he leaves in the notes sound like distant wails—wailing souls from long ago. Perhaps it isn’t that way. Perhaps it’s the dead that allow room for the music to come through. Armageddon—sweet and cool and mellow. The girl, who is lovely, is joined by a black boy. They somehow manage to show their teeth through tight-lipped smiles. Their eyes close to slits. On most other people their expressions would seem hideous, sinister, but they’re young and they don’t know and they truly believe they care—for one another, for everyone else.

  I know what day it is, but I look at the corner of the paper anyway: August twenty-second. One day after my birthday, six days before our anniversary and the march on Washington. We planned it that way. We asked everyone to hold hands—the bridal party, the congregation—a ridiculous mélange of the American gene pool. Together. Windswept. Marriage, for almost any couple, must be a rough road to hoe. And now, as well as then, I can name the reasons we shouldn’t have tried. There hasn’t been any progress made in closing the gap between black and white, rich and poor, insider and outsider, the damaged and the well. Claire still, up to at least the last time she saw me, looks at me in two ways: one that says she knows me and one that says she doesn’t. And in the time we’ve been together I’ve never been able to span that gap—not with touch, not with words—for her or for me. That gap is a world unto itself in which there are battles over the validity of a cucumber and watercress sandwich, what box to check on some form you fill out for your children. Who is right? We both can’t be. “. . . when the fire and the rose are one.” She believes, and I suppose most believe, her to be the rose. But I, to her, to them, am not the fire. I don’t figure in.

  It’s a strange thing indeed to attempt to fit the forgotten social experiment into the equation. There are white models of morality, rich models of morality, and enfranchised models of it, as well. Nobody wants mine, this I am sure of—this one thing. What was it her aunt had said to me after the cellist had packed her things up, but I still heard her—Bach. Still saw Claire—my Claire behind her veil, which was pressed close to her face by the squalwind. Her cheeks, bright through the pale. My Claire. My love. My bride. She seemed to glide across the lawn to me like some ivory spirit, both angelic and terrible. Angelic, not because of the white, but because she was beautiful. And the August trimmed lawn and the periwinkle sky. Seabirds. But if there are angels, they are not innocent. They have seen too much: fallen brethren, fallen man. Terrible. Claire was gliding into awareness—into the wake of the slaughter. Coming to me. And the congregation said, “Amen,” on the historic day. And they “reckoned that she would sivilize me.” She stood beside me in the span of the fieldstone wall as though she was whole, and now I would be, too, and “all will be well and all manner of thing will be well.” And we said, “I do. I do.” The red-haired girl played her cello and the rain came. And in the receiving line people blessed us. And her aunt, whoever she was, took her by the hand, smiling, but speaking with a gravity reserved for funerals, said, “Beautiful just beautiful. The day, the music.” Then to me, “Congratulations. Welcome to the family.” Then back to Claire, “We’ll teach him about classical music now.” And then she was gone. And Claire looked at me with two eyes: one as though I had an open head wound, the other as though I had just stepped onto the line. And that was the eye she chose, dispelling the first. The band set up under the big tent and, as I had instructed, played Miles—“Yer Blues.” And as man and wife we walked into the chatter and cocktailing. And the people—both lines—clapped. But they didn’t know. Outside came the rain’s end—the double rainbow and the rosy sky. Champagne, cigarettes, and levity. Inside I heard the muted horn of judgment day.

  The Cubs are on a winning streak, too, which is troubling because it’s easy to drift to October: Game seven, Fenway Park, tie score, two outs, bottom of the ninth, full count. There’s the pitch, then a flash of light and the world ends—without a bang or a whimper but without any satisfying resolution. “And all manner of thing shall be well.” The black boy and the white girl are waiting for their fancy coffee drinks. He has dared to hold her hand and she has dared to like it. And now she dares to press her hip into him. Miles bends a note, blue, and I scroll through twenty-odd years of white girls. The Black Studies units of history and English classes. The privileged children of the Bay Colony talking Jim Crow, learning about lynching. Learning and looking at me, as the white teacher lectured, with pity and sex on the brain. They, later, much later, away from home, away from Mommy and Daddy and peers, during their phase of social rebellion and sexual experimentation, in the privacy of a dorm room, or the relative squalor of an off-campus parent-paid apartment, could fuck and cry some poor nigger’s blues away, or they, at least, could try, try and fail—but at least they tried. They could claim the effort, like some holy ticket to get them on the train, in the gates. Keep dreaming, blondie. And it occurs to me not to ask about the dream deferred, because almost everyone knows what it is, on some level, to fail. But what happens to a dream, and yes, a dream, not a desire or hankering or an impulse or a want, but a dream, realized? And yes, I say it again: It is a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment—to learn Latin and Greek and the assassination dates of the martyrs; to toggle between Christ
and Keynes, King and Turner, Robinson, Robeson, Ali, Frazier, Foreman; to have a rumbling in the jungle of your black folk soul while a rough coon, its number come up at last, shuffles up from New Orleans to be free. “And all shall be well” when champagne sprays around the home clubhouse in the Olde Towne, character the only currency. Love won. Kingdom Come.

  They leave and I fold the paper and go, too. I want to follow them. They do happen to be going my way, to the Heights, where the school office is. I don’t know where it is exactly that I’m to go, and the idea of wandering the hallways seems stupid. I haven’t called. I’m dirty. It’s almost time to go home. The school office hours may not have anything to do with regular business hours. I remember being a student. Even worse, I remember teaching. There seemed to be, regardless of the institution, a casual regard for time. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was merely an environment in which I could indulge my casual regard for time.

  I look up and the kids are gone. I remember nothing from school—a nonrestrictive clause is . . . ? Whatever the answer, it seems without application on this street under the elms and now a juniper. The carefully sculpted masonry: sidewalk, stoop, brick-point, lintel. It’s too cold for August. I should send the boys to vocational school or have them apprentice with a topflight artisan. They can learn their sums and letters at home. Especially X, who just seems to be able to pick information out of the air—harvest it from the ether. He’s three. He can read. He can write. He can add and subtract. Nobody taught him. It seemed as though the slate in his skull had already been written on when he arrived in this world and he recognized the symbols, understood and felt the weight of them. It scared Claire, and I must admit, it scared me, too. I would look at that man-boy face, the elfin imp eyes, and he would look back and somehow, smiling, wink without blinking.

  X was named Michael until one of those Sunday mornings when there seemed to be nothing to do, nowhere to go—and that was good. Ella Fitzgerald was singing—“Rockin’ in Rhythm.” I had remembered to turn on the radio, tuned to one of those alternative stations at the top of the dial where the white boys play old black music, reciting play lists and band rosters in their quasi-cool voices—tidbits of this session with Miles or that one with Bird—but it’s all right because they play the music they love and no one can say shit. They just play the music they love, which makes that music, by default, theirs.