Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  21

  In my end is my beginning.

  —T. S. Eliot, “East Coker” V

  I think I was thirteen. I don’t remember the time of year, but it was mild—perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to place, a quick shot of atypical warmth in a cold season. I was coming home from some kind of practice, and my feet were wet and puckered from the sodden field.

  I came in to find both of my parents at the kitchen table sitting over coffee. They weren’t talking, but they weren’t ignoring each other. It seemed almost peaceful, actually, the two of them looking down at the table or into their cups with quiet faces, like shy kids on a date. My mother poured more coffee for herself. My father gestured for me to come in and sit down as if it was his house, too. I put my bags down, but I stood.

  “How are things?”

  I looked to my mother for some kind of prompt. She nodded slightly but kept her head down. It had been three years since I’d seen him. I hadn’t considered, until that moment, that perhaps they’d been in contact—talking about me. Things had been going well for Lila and me—as well as they ever had or would. We didn’t talk much, but I was bringing home good grades and staying out of trouble—fulfilling my promise, I suppose. Sometimes I’d catch her watching me strangely, as if she didn’t believe she was seeing what she saw. Other than that, she left me alone. She had found a decent job, and I’d gotten money together mowing lawns and such. She wasn’t drinking so much, and I’d yet to really start. The rent was current, and although she was three months behind on the electric, a debt she’d die with, we were well. I don’t know why she let him in the door.

  He sipped noisily at his coffee and tried again.

  “How are things?”

  I decided that being diffident would only make things drag, and I wanted him out of there.

  “Fine.”

  “How’s schoolwork?”

  “Fine.”

  “So I’ve heard. So I’ve heard. What, were you at practice?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Fine.”

  He started nodding his head and smiling.

  “Girls?”

  “What about them?”

  He wrinkled his brow and waved his hands in the air. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Too busy?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Too young . . . you’ve thought about them?”

  My mother got up and went to the sink. I watched her, trying to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at me. I thought about knocking out the rest of his wobbly teeth, but I leaned against the wall instead.

  “There aren’t any girls.”

  He leaned forward on his elbows and whispered with concern, “Boys?”

  “The girls at school are rich and white, Dad.”

  “And?”

  “I’m not.”

  He frowned at this and shot a cruel glance at the back of my mother’s head.

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “Is it?”

  “You’re angry.”

  “Am I?”

  He tried to show me something by slowly gesturing in front of his face with his hands: the size and shape of his idea. He looked into the space between them.

  “I believe . . . in a wider society . . . not whiter, a wider one.”

  He leaned back in the chair, looked over to the kitchenette, where my mother was pretending to be busy. I couldn’t watch him watch her, with a tender kind of intensity, as though she was broken and he wished he could fix her. I almost told him to stop, but he turned away, tapped a quick rhythm on the table with his fingers, and stared into my face in the same way.

  “My father was a very close-minded man. I suppose he can’t be blamed too much. His people, they were a strange bunch—proud, almost arrogant—free North Carolinians who’d been swindled out of their land and wandered, strangely enough, farther south to the swamps of north Florida. The next wave claimed they were Seminole—but really a mix of landless blacks and Apaches trained east from the desert.”

  He patted his chest, still staring at me, and found his cigarettes.

  “Smoke yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. Don’t. Anyway, he finally made it north, first to New York, then to Boston. He did odd jobs, put himself through school. And sometime when I was a boy, disappeared back into the swamps.”

  He dragged deeply and kept staring at me, through the smoke, as though he cared. My mother came back with a covered stew pot in one hand and three bowls in the other. She set them down on the table.

  My father opened the lid a crack. Steam rushed out. He held his head away until it passed, then he peeked in, sniffing. He lowered the lid and sat back, clasped his hands together, and then spread them apart.

  “A wider society.”

  * * *

  I wake up and feel so calm and quiet that I don’t think that I exist, so I take a few short, shallow breaths, and when I realize I haven’t disappeared, I slow them down and let them deepen. There’s a bump, and I remember where I am. The bus has cooled, and the sounds are comforting: the rumbling diesel and the big tires on the asphalt, the big broad shape through the wind. I sit up and look out the window. I can see across to the southbound side and the landscape beyond. The trees have pulled back from the highway. It’s a big road here—four lanes each way.

  I wonder where Lila and Thomas Strawberry are, and I shiver because I realize I left her urn by the river. Maybe it got taken out with the tide, too, taken home, or just became part of the broken beach. “It’s all right,” I kind of sing to myself and stretch out in my seat, remember my bag, and reach out for it: It’s still there. The woman across the aisle’s still there, too. There’s the empty candy wrapper on the seat beside her. She’s looking out her own window. There isn’t much for her to see: the cars below, the dark wall of trees, the occasional building, and the lights, of course—street lights along the highway. We’re almost there. She moves her mouth slowly—maybe singing—mouthing something. I watch, try to read her lips, even place her drawl and impose it on the silent song—“I feel like going on . . .” It’s what she seems to be saying—perhaps unconsciously. I know that song, at least in part.

  I take a sip of water and the lone interior light surges. And it seems to remind the user to turn it off. I taste my breath when I swallow—rank with ash and coffee. I quietly open my gum. She grunts and turns. Her eyes are closed. She wasn’t singing, just moving her jaws slowly as though she was still working on the peanuts from the candy. I see things about her that I hadn’t noticed before. Such a strange-looking woman—gray and violet hair, puffy eyes with growths on her lids and cheeks, blotchy skin, a great, round, solid body. She looks like she’s been on a lot of buses, up and down this highway and others. And I want to look at her a little more, but she grimaces, as though whatever it was that she’d been dreaming about suddenly turned on her.

  I look out my side at the rush of the opposite traffic. We must be speeding, either that or holding up traffic in the far left lane for a mile back. There are poles with doubled lights running between the roads, and they flash against my window like a slow, soft strobe. And after each flash, between the black landscape and the hazy, charcoal blue sky, I catch the last of the day—a softly bending narrowing pink band. It gets dark early so fast in late August. I lean against the window and sing, “I feel like going on . . .” I barely know the song, so I just repeat that line a few times, changing the phrasing a little with each pass. Then I feel her watching me. I turn. She is. Even from across the dark aisle I can see that her eyes are jaundiced and rheumy. We just watch each other and the passing scenery behind. She exhales, long, and I can tell that she’s had a taste of whiskey from a hidden nip. I expect the scent to jolt me toward either craving or revulsion, but there’s only a brief hit of sweet, then it’s gone.

  “What’s that you were singing?”

  “I Feel Like Going On.”
<
br />   “I don’t know that one. What is it, gospel?”

  “I think.”

  “I don’t know much about gospel, but I think I’ve always liked it when it’s sang. It sneaks up on you, you know—sadness, joy, and what else?” She closes her eyes and shifts heavily to face the other way, turns to the front, but can’t seem to get comfortable. She settles on a position not entirely to her liking and grimaces again.

  We turn hard, almost banking, to the east, following the highway’s twist north. I close my eyes: There are Lila and Thomas, the bridge and the harbor. They’re still floating. I feel myself smile and feel the bus follow shallow arcs left and right. No sail, but I exhale anyway to give them a push. But then I shudder: The burnt pyre is actually returning—this way—into the mouth of the river. It passes under the bridge, and I lose them. I crane my neck to peer under, but it’s too dark in there.

  I gag, pant, snap forward, and open my eyes. I take some shallow breaths to make sure that I’m not drowning, then look across the aisle. Her eyes are still closed. We turn again, west this time. The lights flash, the highway winds, and we follow. And though nothing seems to change—the evenly spaced turns and flashes—I know we’re moving forward. North. We track Polaris, roughly, adjusting east and west. And there aren’t any visible stars, just more electric spill, which keeps the road navigable, uniform—a safe, glowing haze—but it obscures the first order. I press my face against the cool glass and try to see forward. I can’t. Even on a clear night, turning east and west, it would be there out the window and then not. I sit back. It doesn’t matter; I know where it is: here. I see its trail: outside; that woman still moving somewhere and in: the makeshift, upriver skiff. And then, both—like a small wave that has caught light while folding over into darkness. I am that star, its beginning, an expanding, deepening ball of fire in the dark, and its end—the dark itself. And in that end is a beginning, its last breath, bright dust—interstellar drift, waiting to be informed by a larger hope and love, waiting to be reborn. My maker remembers me, remembers me well, and I move to that place I’m called. Listen: the prayer to me—Quick, I am here. And I swear I hear Lila’s voice folded into mine: I am coming—whole or broken—I am coming.

  We keep moving, tracking residue—trace elements floating in the void. So real, assumed, or imagined, it is still there—the latter, perhaps, most important because it burns more brightly there—and that, I know, is real, consuming, sacred—wholly different from the burn of shame. And it leads me to other things I can really touch: my few friends, here and gone, my children, and my wife. It’s what led her to me—she is that star, its end and its beginning. Its final breath, recollected, reformed. I can touch her face, trace its soft line, hold it in my hand and feel her pulse in her temples. And I don’t care what it represents. My Claire. And unsung or not, I made a promise that “I will be true . . .” I love my wife. What else can I do? There’s a break—no lights—then a bright flash from an overpass. Then it’s dark again. And the bus stays dark, rolling through the dark, but it remains, a small feeling, not desperate, not bold, but present in a place I pray I never lose. And it hasn’t anything to do with anyone other than me—here and now. I’m coming back, or closer, I’m coming. I’m coming because I’m in love. Now I see her: the dark horizon, like a long, crooked mouth and the last rosy glow from off in the west. There’s a flash of the highway lights across the bus, then another. The road ascends as we enter Providence.

  We pull off 95 and stop on the west side of the station. The old woman stays in her seat, gives me another hurting look, and closes her eyes. “Not yet for me,” she mumbles. I take my bag and limp and creak down the aisle and steps.

  The air outside seems warmer and muggy—strange for these parts to have more heat than New York City. I turn south—no Claire. I stand there a moment while the other passengers take their bags from the storage compartments underneath. I realize that this area’s only for buses, so I follow behind the others to the adjacent side, which faces the parking lot. Two get in waiting cabs, another in a car, and the last starts diagonally across the big lot. I think about him disappearing beyond the guardrail and cattails and the unlit road.

  I don’t see the Benz anywhere. It’s not like Claire to be late. I get hit with a wave of panic as soon as I think that and then a streak of dread in the form of a bilious razor on my liver. I shake it off and try to focus on where she might be along the road—not why—just how the car moves down the highway, wide and squat with those white-blue halogen beams leading it on. But I don’t get close enough to see inside or far enough away to be able to tell if it isn’t just the same short stretch of road again and again.

  Ten minutes pass, then more, with me standing there, watching the cars on the highway and access road, watching the headlights coming out of the black of the approach to the parking lot. Nothing. I put my bag down and feel my face with my hands, imagine her there, looking at me. And we both know what she sees. And I look for her again, this time in the night sky. I’ve heard that in the constellation of Orion smaller suns are sometimes moved by the enormous forces of a giant one, and that what looks like a tail of light to us is really the beginnings of new planets. This sun is all the way down. So I call to her, “Godspeed.” What else can I say?

  Headlights sweep off the road and semicircle around the outer loop of the lot with a dark form behind—like a comet moving backward. She pulls up to the curb, leaves the car running, and opens the big door slowly. She lifts herself out gracefully and leans against the car, not moving, just looking at me, blankly, her eyes only half open. Waiting. Finally, I step forward, and then she does, too. She opens her eyes wide and reaches for my face with both hands.

  “There’s my husband,” she whispers. My Claire, a long crooked nose now to match. She turns her head to the side and pushes it into my chest. I hold her. The world seems to rock around our stillness.

  My stomach rumbles. She puts her hands on my sides.

  “You’re skinny.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  “A little bit.”

  She kisses my chest, inhaling as she does. “You smell good.”

  “No,” I mumble.

  “Yes. To me.”

  I softly trace the line of her nose. She leans away.

  “No, I’m hideous.”

  I go to kiss it. She winces, but lets me.

  She turns to the idling car. “They were just dropping off.” I look in the window—the stillness. She leans back, lets go of my waist, lets her hands slip down my arms, and lets me catch her.

  “Can you drive?” she whispers.

  I nod. She squeezes my wrists, and we get in the car.

  I move the seat back as far as it will go and stretch. I lay my hands on my thighs: They throb into each other. I shake my head once quickly to make sure I’m awake and then nod—more like a forward pulse of my body—to assure myself that I can do this. Then I just stare out the windshield into the night.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  She puts her hand on mine. I turn to her, but she’s looking into the back. She whispers, “Someone’s happy to see you.” I turn. There’s my girl in her car seat pointing at me—softly bended arm.

  “Dada,” she whispers, honoring the silence. I blow her a kiss. She smiles, puckers, and those deep brown eyes are glowing—beyond me. I shut the heavy door as softly as I can, then look back at them again. They’re still there. Claire squeezes my hand. There’s strength in it. C sleep-talks something quietly, and X moves slightly as if to respond. There’s all their breath in the quiet, my wife’s hand on mine. I start to face forward, but I turn back, take one last look at my own: the boys, I hope, dreaming in their own hue and time and my girl in the fading light; the little, changing face of love.

  Acknowledgments

  There are many people, friends, and family I must thank:

  My patient agent, Eileen Cope.

  Everyone at Grove
/Atlantic, Inc., especially Deb Seager and the great and loyal Dara Hyde, (you were right about Youk), Michael Hornburg, and Morgan Entrekin.

  Elisabeth Schmitz, my editor: Thank you for your faith, your time, and grace.

  Al and Judy Maeda, Samareh Eskandaripour, Sarah Morse, Glen Mazara, George (Joga Bonito) Sanchez, Emily Stone, David Levinson, Britt Dean, Lindly, Al and Julie Boegehold, John Milkey, Daphne Klein, Cathy Fuerst, Craig Townsend, Rebecca and Michael Bruno, Gabe and Marty, Cecil, Elizabeth Gaffney, Brigid Hughes, Emily Frankovich, Sandy McLean, Keli Garrett, Martha Southgate, Robert Sullivan, Van Jordan, Jim Collier, Kim Wiley, Colin Erickson, Carol Wood, Charles and Dorthea Bowen, Jane Morse, The Newsome Family, The Nestor Family, Brooklyn Patriots FC.

  Thank you Caroline and Leslie Marshall and Clay Miller for your generosity.

  Uncle Russell and Aunt Pauline, Lisa and Russell Houston, all of the Fowlkes and Allens, Pauline Sweet, Seddon Ryan Wylde, John Wylde.

  Mentors: Frank Kirkland, Elizabeth Beaujour, Eleanor (my Virgil) Wilner, Chuck Wachtel, David Haynes, Peter Turchi, David Winn, Dexter Jeffries, Barbra Webb, Bill Root, George Willauer. Protégées: Eliana Kissner, Mohammed Saleem, Shokry Elady.

  Teri Rosen—of course you are a part. Jennifer McMahon, Eisa Ulen-Richardson, Stephen Wetta, Ira Elliott, Tony Mancus, Mark Bobrow, Thom Taylor, Margret Laino, and all the good folk in HW1238.

  Where are you?: Leslie Williams, Will Gardiner, Herbie Dade, Kieran Murphy, Hal Herring.