“You’re fine,” I told him. “You don’t need nobody. All you are is blood, and no matter how much there is of it you don’t stop moving none. You ain’t hurt any, so far as I can see. You probably went fishing and cleaned a fish with that knife. You didn’t kill no drunk, and you didn’t hurt yourself. Even if you did, how would I know? You’re made out of blood. It’s all you are. You’re bloody all the goddamn time.”
When I finished talking he started to bluster, cursing me to high heaven and telling me to go back home to my daddy if I wanted to. He worked himself up into a regular lather, and at last he made a run at me with his knife. He caught me too, and sat straddled over me with the knife in between his chest and mine. He was crying, hard.
“I did too kill a man!” he shouted, sobbing. “I did too kill him! Please believe me? Please?”
Slowly, then, the knife fell from my brother’s hand. His whole body seemed to give, and he rolled off of me, crying. I stood from where I’d been, covered in the blood of my brother like I’d been hours before, and I stared at him curled up and moaning on the grass. When he’d recovered and we were walking again, I asked him if he wanted me to carry the can of gasoline he’d taken from the tool shed.
“No,” he said. “I got it. I got it.”
He really had killed a man. It was true, every bit of it.
______________
There was nothing either of us could do now except wait and see what the death of the night brought.
I looked at my brother. He seemed to have the vision of a tom. He kept his head fixed straight ahead of him, eyelids flinching and neck muscles twitching with the rush of every passing car. We must have made a gory pair, and I wondered what the folks on Pennymont thought of us. Were it Halloween, they might have thought the dead were walking the earth. Maybe it didn’t have to be Halloween for them to think that.
“So you saw Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“Did you talk to him?”
He nodded.
In my brother’s condition making conversation was like pulling teeth, so I settled myself with the silence of the darkness and kept my eyes on him in case he strayed into the road. He was walking awfully funny, almost like he’d forgotten how. He’d take one step with his right foot, then maybe two and a half with his left. He didn’t fall over or anything, though I wondered how he kept his balance. I thought at first he was just being funny. I even laughed at him. But when he kept doing it, not even looking down to see whether his feet were for or against him, I didn’t laugh no more. As rigs rolled by he had the tendency to drift nearer and nearer the road, and I had to walk behind him, punching him now and then at the base of his spine to keep him from drifting head on into traffic. Had I not been there, he wouldn’t have either. He needed me more than even he knew.
We walked by the West Rail and I couldn’t see any sign of Wilson anywhere. It was for the best, I supposed. If he’d seen the both of us in our condition he might have gotten a bit suspicious. The gasoline can in my brother’s hand was enough, I thought, to pique Wilson’s curiosity. But wherever he was we were out of his sight.
My brother took advantage of the situation and ran half-stumbling into Wilson’s office. He emerged without being seen, his canteen jostling with brand new medicine, and tossed me a couple candy bars. In his hand he held a box of matches, and I knew why he hadn’t been smoking the pack of cigarettes I’d stolen for him earlier. There’d been nothing to light them with.
He handed me the can of gasoline and fumbled around in his pockets for the cigarettes. Finding them, he tore the red seal and drew one out. Though his hands were shaking he managed to get one of the matches in the matchbox lit, and he stared at the flame for a couple of seconds before putting it to the tip of his cigarette. Having a smoke seemed to clear his head. His walking perked up as we rounded the corner that led to the backlot of the West Rail, and the sound of Wilson’s sleepless laughter hit us as we reached the fence.
“You there! Up here! That’s right, on the roof!”
A yellow wooden ladder stood leaning against the back wall of the filling station, and on the very top rung I saw Wilson’s feet dangling. The pantlegs of his white cotton trousers were cuffed up, revealing his knobby ankles, and a pair of binoculars hung down in front of his crotch. The rest of Wilson was invisible in the darkness, but his loony laughter and kicking legs were enough to hold our attention.
“You!” he hollered. “You two! Don’t act like you can’t see me! I’m right where you think I am! If you’d just get your duffs off that ground down there, you could come up here and see the most incredible show! Comets, an eclipse, meteor showers! I even got binoculars so you can see the action close up!” He jiggled the binoculars to show he meant business. “In an hour or two it’s going to be daylight, and all the miracles of the night’ll be gone! So come on, now! I’m not going to beg you no longer! You’ll see it all better from up here anyhow! It’s darker!”
My brother began to climb the fence. I followed. Wilson kept haranguing us about all the meteors and miracles we were missing, and my brother took the cigarette out of his mouth, held it in his fist, and shook it at Wilson. “You be quiet up there!” he shouted. “I already seen the comet, and all them other things too! So hush up your laughing and leave us be!”
Wilson was quiet then, and his legs disappeared from the top of the ladder. I reached the highest point of the fence and stared up at the sky. It was dull, and black, and overhung by clouds that looked like the dirty skirts of women, and I couldn’t see any of the things that Wilson was jawing about. Maybe he was right, maybe you did need binoculars; maybe you did need to be on higher ground. Either way my brother and I were out of luck. We didn’t have any binoculars nor the time to go crawling up on any more roofs. The comets and meteors and total eclipses would have to content themselves with looking at us.
I leapt from the fence and turned to hear a mighty crash. The ladder to the roof of the West Rail had collapsed and splintered on the backlot. Wilson would be trapped until the morning, unless he had the humility to call to one of his customers for help.
I took to the side alley of the Vale of Tears and came upon my brother staring in the same window I’d stared in before. The Spanish women were busy at work, telling one another stories and singing “la luna, la luna.” My brother asked me what they were doing. “Salting somebody down,” I said.
He looked at me in horror.
“No.”
I nodded.
“Yes they are. It’s the truth.”
I hopped on the orange crate I’d left there before, and my brother blew smoke through the open window. The Spanish women caught wind of it and turned their heads to look at us. The larger one made a spoiled-milk face and shook her finger at us, as if to say, “This isn’t the type of place for boys like you to be hanging around.” The other one folded her arms across her chest and made a “tsk tsk tsk” noise with her mouth. It was clear that they wanted the both of us to leave, but my brother wouldn’t, so neither would I.
“What are ya doing?” he asked them.
They looked at each other and shook their heads. “Hey, senoritas, what’s that you’re doing? Who’s ’at on the metal slab there?”
The larger woman leaned over and whispered something in her companion’s ear. The companion took a step back and looked at her larger friend and jiggled with laughter and patted the woman naughtily on the cheek. She reached into her makeup bag and took out a tube of lipstick and turned it until a red point showed. Then she asked my brother and me something neither of us could understand because we didn’t speak Spanish. Nevertheless, whatever the question was, my brother answered yes.
“Si, senorita,” he told the women, grinning like a goat. He stubbed out his cigarette on the ledge of the windowsill. “Sí, senorita. Sí, sí, sí.”
Slowly, without an inch of expression on her face, the smaller woman stepped toward us. The tube of lipstick hung at her side. When she reached the open window sh
e took my brother’s head in her hands, made a small red “x” on his forehead, and kissed him on the mouth. It was like a ceremony.
My brother said, “Do him too.” He pointed at me. “Do him too.”
Unwilling, the smaller woman called her larger friend, but she waved her hands and refused to come over. The smaller woman looked back at us and shrugged and turned and walked away, but my brother’s eyes would not leave her. She remained out of sight for a good long minute, then returned at last and walked over to us and drew a heavy curtain between us and the slabroom. Soon, from inside, a wicked roar of laughter came, and my brother touched the red mark on his forehead. He rubbed it between his fingers.
“Did you see that?” he whispered. “Did you see it? Did you?”
Now we were heading back down Dellray to where my mother lived with Bohannon. Nothing was said about our going there or what we were going to do once we arrived, but we headed in that direction nonetheless. I kept trying to make talk with my brother—he was in such a deadfaced mood—but he wouldn’t have none of it, so after a while I gave up. I could’ve told him Lucifer was behind him with a red-hot poker and he wouldn’t’ve listened, and it scared me to be around anybody who’d given up so completely on talk.
All the while we walked I stayed a good bit behind him, maybe four or five feet, to keep him from hurting himself like before. There were more cars now as the morning came on, but Dellray took a lot of traffic no matter what the time of night. As cars passed by, my brother reached for the eyes of the drivers, reached for them with his eyes, which were bloodless and tired and cold. Sometimes he’d reach a driver’s eyes so good the cars would drift suddenly in our direction. My brother was like a hypnotist—though if I were driving and saw some kid in my brother’s shape, covered in guts, haggard, stumbling like a flesh-and-blood mannequin in the early morning darkness on a dirty city sideroad, I might have lost control too.
My brother was some sight. With a cigarette in one hand and a rusty can of gasoline in the other, his canteen bulging from his bloody army jacket, he nearly took the kick out of your heart. But I was used to him, used to him like you might get used to a guy with one arm or a crying dog or an old man that coughs and spits in good company. There was no need to worry because there wasn’t any way to change his circumstances, and though I could’ve turned tail and walked away, that wouldn’t have dried the blood on his skin, or cleared the curious odor from his tongue, or filled up that look of the dead in his eyes.
Summer was closing shop that time of the year, and the mornings carried a sharpness to them. It might have been the air that made my brother shiver, but as we came toward the last four blocks of Dellray, I remembered the other times my brother and I’d attempted to check out the house where my mama was staying, how he’d get sick halfway there. His body would bend and he’d breathe quick and sweat would rise up on his skin like dew. He’d have to hug his stomach and clamp his mouth shut to keep from chucking up, and we’d always turn around and head back from where we came. So it was amazing that we’d gotten as far as we had, and I wasn’t surprised at the way he stopped dead when I pointed to our mama’s house and told him it was hers.
“That one right there?”
“That’s right.”
He drew out his canteen and put it to his lips and tipped it up. I watched his Adam’s apple seesaw and knew he’d drunk the whole thing down. When he’d finished he didn’t put the canteen back in his jacket; he let it fall to the road with a hollow clang. I went to it and picked it up for him, but he grabbed it out of my hand and took a running start and cursed and punted it like a football. As he swung back around to face me his eyes swelled up with a helpless look as if the floor of the earth had given out from underneath him. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground, looking like a man on a brittle float of ice, and the mouth of the night gaped black like a whirlpool, determined and bent on swallowing him whole. I watched him curled up and shaking from a distance. I watched him without comment while the cars passed by.
My brother had this thing about dying. It was a thing everybody had, but I supposed he had it more than others.
When we were little our daddy would leave us in the house with the front and backdoors bolted from outside. He also left food around, so we could eat. It happened when our mama went up north for a whole winter to visit her kin in Panama City. We’d had a lady to stay with us, but Daddy drove her off. Instead of hiring another woman or taking us to the Boy’s Club or some nursery, he’d do the way he did. It wasn’t all that bad. Sometimes it got cold or the television wouldn’t work or the food might spoil, but my brother and I had each other, so for the most part we were all right.
One week our daddy got drunk and locked us in the house without providing well-enough. After a couple of days without Daddy, the cupboards got thin and we started to worry. We lived off honey and mustard and peanut butter, and we ate all the cookies and crackers we could find. But after a while it just wasn’t enough.
Our daddy’d usually never left us for more than a day, but there we were, going on a week, with nothing to do but stare at the television or watch the darkness cover over the day through the window. My brother said there were all kinds of ways we could escape: climb through a window, break down a door, phone the neighbors for help. But it was kind of an adventure trying not to starve to death, so we held out for Daddy.
One day I was particularly stir crazy and running a fever, supposedly. I went to my brother out of my head and told him if I died he could eat me to live on. It was something I’d seen on TV. He said it was the very least I could do, seeing that I’d eaten most of his food anyway, and that if I died he wouldn’t hesitate to take me up on the offer. But after a long night of neardeath I got better and he took to my sickness. He lay curled up on the living room rug, ribs like bikespokes poking through his undershirt, a bottle of medicine tucked beneath his body and a tattered quilttop keeping out the cold. Because I was sure he was a goner, I asked him if I could eat him if he died. He said I could, but he’d barely make a morsel. He said he tasted like liver and onions; he doubted I could get him down without gagging any.
It was about the middle of the seventh day our daddy’d left us that my brother started to spit up blood. I brought him pillows and turned down the television and sat beside him. Outside we heard kids playing in the street and airplanes overhead and slamming doors; it wasn’t so lonesome hearing folks move about. After some time I asked my brother if I could do anything, but he didn’t answer. I could see then that he wasn’t breathing, and I took a dining room chair and threw it through the sliding glass door and ran to the neighbors for help. They called an ambulance, and the lady of the house, a skinny black woman who smelled like creamed corn, cleaned me up and fixed me food and gave me a nice bed to sleep in. I thought my brother’d died, and I didn’t see him again for a while.
My Daddy came back home after two weeks’ absence, and the neighbors told him where I was. He came shouting at the black lady, who locked her door and called the police and had her two brothers help take Daddy in. He stayed in jail for about a month, and when he returned home he had my brother with him. Both were thin and desperate looking, whereas I was altogether cornfed. I asked my brother where he’d been.
“First,” he said, “after I died, I went to the hospital, intensive care unit. When I got well they put me in a state house and I messed around with the kids there. Then Daddy come and got me.”
I was sort of sad-feeling when I said goodbye to the black lady—she’d treated me so white and everything—but the first night back with our daddy made the homecoming worthwhile. He bought us pizza and Coca-Cola, and told us not to tell Mama what had happened when she came home for Christmas, and promised us he’d never leave us alone so long again. After he’d gone to sleep that night my brother roused me from bed and took me to the spot on the living room floor where he’d said he’d died—and I didn’t doubt him any because I was the one who’d seen him not breathing. I’d been there
for the whole blood-spitting thing.
“You want to know what death’s like?”
I told him I did.
“Good. Because if you know what it’s like, then you can’t be scared of it. You are scared of it, aren’t you?”
I told him I supposed I was, but how could anyone be scared of anything if they didn’t have any idea what it was like?
“That’s the whole dilemma,” my brother said. “People got to see something to be afraid of it. Well, I’ve seen it. And I’m telling you there ain’t nothing to be scared of.”
But I told him that still didn’t make any sense—he could describe a sasquatch or a pitbull to me, and I’d be pretty awful scared if I hadn’t known what one was before.
He just looked at me. “You want to know what death is like or not?”
I told him I did.
“All right.”
He sat on the floor, Seminole-style. I could tell it was going to be a lot of baloney, but I owed it to him to give it a listen.
“Death,” he began, “has a million hands. Each holds something. Up comes the darkness and you see a cup of blood. Down comes the darkness and you see a stretch of street. You’re lying awake, right? You feel your blood ebb. And the light draws from you and your heart folds over and on comes the darkness and then you see the hands. They’re something, really. Words can’t tell how many. But one holds a baby and the other holds a dying man; one holds your mother and the other holds your father; and some you kiss and some you spit on, and some you bite and some you hold; and some try to grab you, but you tear yourself away, and some open up and you feel yourself fall through. But I’ve seen them all, and each holds something. One shit, another dirt; one water, another food. We could sit here forever, couldn’t number them all. We could separate all of the things in the world—wouldn’t never have enough to fill up the hands of death.”
Life in the Land of the Living Page 13
