“I ain’t comin’ with you.”
He held out his hand a little bit farther.
“Come on,” he said. “Come on, now. Please.” Without knowing why, I crossed to the cartop. I lay down beside him and we were very still. Beneath our shirts I could feel the engine rumble. I heard the voice of the usherette and the sound of money being peeled and counted. “Five, ten, and three is twenty.” The car started to move and I opened my eyes. Below us I could see the shapes of two people. One was a man and the other was a woman. They were not moving or talking and the radio wasn’t on. They were just sitting. As the car pulled into the Double D lot I looked at my brother. He was taking a long drink from his canteen and when he finished he closed his eyes and water flowed from them. We came to settle in the final row of automobiles, far separated from the other cars, and I lay on my side against the sunroof. It was very hot and my brother lay with his shirt up over his head. If I strained to listen, I could hear him whispering.
“She’s not a whore. She’s not a whore. She’s not a whore. She’s not.”
The movie began.
“Please.”
It woke me.
“Please.”
I didn’t know what it was.
“Please?”
I was dreaming.
“Please?”
I wasn’t dreaming.
I looked at my brother. He was dead to the world. I looked at James Dean. He was sitting on a ferris wheel. I looked at the cars. They were gray and silent. I didn’t know where the voice came from, then I heard it again.
“No! Please? I told you nice. Not here, not now. Please?”
I looked through the sunroof of the Cadillac. Two shapes moved. One was on top; I could see his back. The other was on bottom; she made the noise. She, the one on bottom, had her hands around the wheel; white in all the darkness, they were all my eyes could see. He, the one on top, arched steadily faster; curving like an instrument, he made a curious music: unkind, unnatural, a sad, forced thing. As his head bumped hard against the glass of the sunroof, I was surprised he didn’t wake my brother with all his crazy commotion; I was surprised she didn’t wake him too with her godawful moaning; and I admit I was tempted to wake him myself, just so he could have the opportunity to see them, but soon they slowed their rocking-horse rhythm and their bodies relaxed like a rundown toy. He curved upward and fell straight off of her, and her hands around the steering wheel unclenched from white to black. Silence passed while he sat shotgun, fiddling clumsily with the fly of his pants, and she lay beaten beneath the upright wheel, not talking, not moving, not seeming to breathe.
I put my head down. I felt spent and unclean. I looked at the cars on either side of me, then I stared again through the fogwet sunroof.
She had moved her hand to the part of the steering wheel where the horn was located, and her other hand had followed suit. Slowly and completely, like an oyster surrounding a single speck of sand, she closed her entire body about the wheel. The horn blared. The man took a fright and tried to pull her loose, but she clung to the wheel and shook her head, screaming, “No more! No more!”
My brother awoke. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!” He tumbled to the ground from the top of the car.
Headlights flickered on around the Double D lot and folks headed over to see what the excitement was about. I rolled off the top of the Cadillac and landed beside my brother. Together, we watched the people gather. They walked quickly, as if they were in danger, and behind them on the big screen James Dean was busy beating the absolute crap out of his brother; there were punching noises on the radio speaker and punching noises coming from the inside of the car. My brother’s eyes were blood-rimmed and centered somewhere far away. It seemed he was still sort of halfasleep somehow.
“What the hell did you do this time?” he asked. He asked it like someone sleeping asks something.
“Nothing!” I shouted.
“That’s even worse!”
His hands twitched at his sides and his voice was very panicky. He slurred many of his s-words.
“So you ain’t reshponshible?” he said.
“No,” I told him. “No, I ain’t responsible. I just watched.”
He studied me with a cocked eye, poked me in the chest.
“Watched what?” he asked. “Watched what!”
“Them,” I said. “The movie, I mean.” I turned my head away.
All the while the horn kept roaring, and the inside of the Cadillac came to look something like the contents of a coffee percolator. I could hear the man screaming for the woman to let go, and sure enough she did. For a good half minute the air hung silent. Then, in the frontseat of the Cadillac, the woman’s shadow bent over low and her arm, or what looked like it, bobbed up and down. When she had finished she closed herself around the wheel again, more slowly and thoroughly than before, and the horn wailed on. I could not see the shadow of the man anymore.
A kid dressed in a tan suit emerged from the crowd. The suit did nothing to hide the dirtiness of his skin. He had a flashlight in his hand and a nametag pinned to his breastpocket. On account of the horn he had to shout at me.
“Those your parents, boy!”
I didn’t get the chance to answer him.
“More or less!” my brother yelled. “What you want to know for?”
My brother stood and he told me to stand too. I did.
The kid in the tan suit walked over to my brother. They were the same age and the same size and the same dirty and the same mean.
“I work here!” the kid in the tan suit announced.
“Three cheers for you!” my brother replied.
The kid in the tan suit had red hair. He was ugly.
“You gonna tell them to stop?”
My brother hitched his thumb at the Cadillac.
“They get in fights like this all the time,” he said. “I’ve given up playing referee. You wanna tell ’em to cut it out, go right ahead. It all depends on whether you got the guts to face what comes afterwards!”
The kid in the tan suit’s face squinched up nasty.
“Listen!” he shouted. “Them’s your folks! And I don’t give one inch of a long shit whether they rip each other in half or not, you just tell them to lay off that godforsaken horn!”
My brother looked at him.
“Tell ’em yourself,” he said.
The kid in the tan suit glared at my brother. Then he swallowed some words and turned around and left. As he was walking off I noticed that his pants were crabbing, and when he was a good distance away he yelled, “I’m gonna get my manager and he’s gonna call the police!”
“You do that!” my brother hollered. “You go right ahead, tough man!” He nodded at me and we took off then, the noise of the horn falling less and less severe.
About a million people had gathered around the screaming Cadillac, and we had to push our way through them. Practically nobody was watching the movie anymore. I supposed the Cadillac made for a better show.
My brother led me beneath the straddled steel girders of the Double D screen. We began to climb them like monkey bars. Occasional tongues of redorange lightning licked at the topmost tip of the structure, and the steel beams grew as hot as the coils of a toaster. We were a good fifty feet in the air.
“What’re we doing?” I called to my brother.
He grabbed on to a bar, hung from one hand, and looked laughing down at me. His eyes were lit fuses.
“We’re gonna see Dean close up!” he sang.
He leapt onto a catwalk that bordered the big screen and did tightrope steps across it. The glare of the screen painted his skeleton. His ribs were like the bars of a cage.
I paused to catch my breath and looked down at the world below me. The people were so small I could have stepped on them.
Above me I heard the cry of my brother and I climbed up to check on him. The catwalk extended the length of the screen and was the width and thickness of two continuous two-by-fours. My brother was doing cartwheels on it
. I watched him, and after a while, when I couldn’t watch anymore, I turned my head away.
Down on the Double D parking lot the black Cadillac bellowed on. Another million people had gathered and they stood there dumb as trees as a huge man in striped overalls cut a pathway through them. He was the manager. He came to the Cadillac and pounded on the door, but the screaming of the horn did not cease. If anything, it screamed louder. When the manager realized his banging wasn’t doing any good, he sacrificed manners in favor of muscle. Gripping the door handle with two ham-sized fists, he bore down with all his weight in the opposite direction. The crowd cried aloud as the door snapped open, then it fell dead silent and took a united step forward.
The manager reached in and drew the body from behind the woman, drew it as calmly as a fisherman might draw the innards from a bellyslit fish. The man in the car had been stabbed several times, and blood covered the lap of his pants as well as the white V-neck of his workshirt. One of his eyes lay closed while the other stared open, and his arms hung behind his head in an attitude of stubborn surrender.
The woman was more difficult to remove. She clung to the wheel and it took no less than four men to remove her.
I looked at my brother. He was doing somersaults beneath James Dean’s nose. He caught the guardrail and steadied himself for a moment, then positioned himself upside down and did a perfectly postured walking handstand all the way over to me.
“I’m dizzy,” he said. “And I can’t seem to breathe.”
His skin was the color of technicolor; I could count all his bones.
Redclay swirled in clouds at our feet. We’d left the Double D the same way we came in. I explained to my brother that I wasn’t feeling well and he said what I needed was some real food in me, so we headed for the McDonald’s where Number One worked.
On the way there it began to rain. It didn’t rain hard and it didn’t rain long, but I took my shirt off and let it course down my back. I was so tired I wanted to fall down, and in the light of the oncoming traffic I could see the rainwater cutting hard red patterns in the earth.
My brother was unconcerned as to what went on back at the Double D. When he saw the ambulance and police cars surrounding the Cadillac, he made some comment about someone having had a heart attack. He’d completely forgotten that the Cadillac was what we’d snuck in on, that the Cadillac was the car whose stuck horn had interrupted his sleep. He seemed absolutely separated from the events of the evening, and he walked along with his head held high, staring down whatever pedestrians happened to cross his path.
We came to the South Pennymont Overpass and my brother ran skipping up the huge concrete slabs that supported the superhighway. He’d fly up one and dive on his stomach and tumble back down like a moonmad acrobatic. I knew I couldn’t keep pace with him, so I sat on the ground crosslegged and watched him. Once he rolled all the way down the cement incline and lay completely still in a puddle of rainwater. When I stood up to see if he was all right, he shot up dripping wet and laughed hysterically. He had a good laugh, like a jackal’s. I liked to listen to it.
He finished screwing around and I called to him and he ran to me.
I said his name.
“What?”
“Let’s go home now.”
He bent down and said, “We can’t.”
And we didn’t. And we were quiet after that.
______________
It must have been past ten o’clock as we walked down Asbury Avenue. The porchlights were lit and so were the televisions, and through the front windows the houses shone blue. You could hear the televisions talking and people talking behind them, and sometimes the televisions laughed and the people laughed too, and sometimes the televisions screamed against folks already screaming, and sometimes the televisions fell dead silent and all you could hear was the humming of an air conditioner, or the roar of two cars racing, or a siren, or an airplane, or the breath of your own breathing. And when you heard your own breathing you listened close to it because it wasn’t too often that you got to hear it.
Asbury was a sidestreet off Pennymont shaped like a wishbone. It curved into Caritas, which was where the McDonald’s was, and behind it in the distance the Pennymont Overpass arched against the sky like a rainbow done in dull acrylic gray. Asbury’s folks were every bit as well off as my brother and me, which meant they lived off the same things our family did—tuna fish and minimum wage and rent-to-own television. They weren’t as poor as they could’ve been, but they certainly were poor enough to regret it and boast about it.
All the houses on Asbury looked pretty much the same—small, three-bedroom single stories painted yellow or white or light brown. Lawns for the most part were well kept, and driveways were smirched by patches of motor oil, round slick leakspots covered with sand or clay or deodorized kitty litter. Boys my brother’s age worked on cars on blocks on the side of the road, and the cars weren’t theirs so much to drive or race as to tune-up and take apart and wash and wax and trade away. It seemed that in the course of ten years a kid could graduate from Hot Wheels and Big Wheels to streetbikes and streetmachines. The best car I’d ever seen was a gold Mustang with black pinstriping that went by too fast for me or anyone to envy. But that car was the exception. It ran so well and often it had to have come from another part of the city altogether, and the driver probably only drove down streets like Asbury to demonstrate the difference between his situation and everybody else’s.
At night there seemed to be twice as many kids out and about as there were in the daytime. They hid behind bushes and came whooping like Apaches from around the corners of houses. They played War and Butts Up and Smear the Queer and 500, and in the darkness their eyes were as bottomless as the eyes of cats, their shirtless bodies shiny with sweat and dirt and hosewater. We came across a crowd of kids dancing in a sprinkler beneath the white light of a streetlamp, and I wanted to join them as bad as my brother wanted to join all the guys he’d seen working on their machines. But we weren’t invited, and we had things to do, so we shoved our hands down deep into our pockets and walked along quiet and cool and unapproachable.
The storm had reassembled overhead and the clouds clotted black in a coal-colored sky. Lightning fell to the earth seconds before the thunder could warn you, and we passed several chinaberries, black, boughbent, and smoking. My brother had this thing about thunder and lightning and the mysteries of the weather, and at the sight of a smoking tree he’d go to it and take a sample of its charred bark, then roll it between his fingers or scatter some of it in the wind or taste some of it sometimes with the quick tip of his tongue. He was a real lightning bug, boy. At home, if he happened to awake to a thunderstorm or some such commotion in the middle of the night, he’d get out of bed and take off his socks and go to the kitchen and stand barefooted on the terrazzo, waiting for the antennae on our roof to get struck. “Go to bed immediately afterwards,” he swore, “and you’ll dream of heaven all night long.” So I tried it once and got the shit knocked out of me. I woke up numb the very next morning, facedown on the kitchen floor. I did dream of heaven, though. The angels had green eyes and long electric wings. God commanded lightning from a spinning weathervane.
We came to the curved end of Asbury and were greeted by a group of children doing a single-file dead march down the left-hand side of the road. They were arranged in order of height, from the littlest first to the tallest last, and a tiny girl with amber hair headed the congregation. She wore a pink Easter dress and patent-leather shoes, and she held a shoebox in one hand and a crucifix with Jesus Christ dying on it in the other. She was crying. Immediately behind her, a taller boy walked somberly along. His hands rested on the shoulders of the little girl, and a burning yellow candle sat collecting wax and wayward gnats in the pouch of his shirtpocket. He was crying as well and a candle lit his face pink. Behind him stood a boy slightly taller and considerably wider. He had chocolate eyes and a puffy Pillsbury face and a body shaped like the Liberty Bell, his beige-colored trou
sers providing the legendary crack. Every sixth or seventh step the boy would trip on a rock or kick himself maybe or stub his bare toe on a gutter crack, but needless to say he didn’t add much to the straightness of the procession. Who must have been his twin brother stood directly behind him, and despite a similar appearance the boy bore himself with far more dignity. Closing out the procession were three older girls, each roughly the age of my brother. When they saw him they straightened up and smiled available smiles, and the last and prettiest let her shoulder strap slip a little farther from her shoulder than the others’ straps had.
“I’ll be right back,” my brother told me.
He ran to the girl with the available strap and commenced to flirting horribly. She tried to remain straight in line but found herself veering rightward. Her two girlfriends gave her a vicious look, then shot an even meaner one at my brother. Nonetheless, the girl grabbed ahold of my brother’s hand and they both came running to me. No less than a minute had gone by.
“This is Lilian,” my brother said.
“Hello,” I said.
“We’re getting married.”
I looked at Lilian. She nodded.
“Lilian’s daddy is a preacher,” my brother continued. “He preaches at the First Baptist Church of Christ Jesus Our Lord Saviour and Most Holy Redeemer.”
“On Belcher,” Lilian added.
My brother blushed.
“On Belcher.”
I looked at them.
“When’d you two decide on this?”
They stared at each other.
“Just now.”
I glanced back at the procession as it disappeared around the corner of Asbury.
“What’s that all about?” I asked.
My brother prodded Lilian. She blushed so red I couldn’t see her eyes. She certainly was something else when she did that.
“It’s for my little sister Clara’s canary,” she said. “Daddy says Gabriel deserves a good Christian burial.”
My brother said, “Gabriel’s the name of her little sister’s canary.”
Life in the Land of the Living Page 4
