Philadelphia Fire

by John Edgar Wideman

  Cudjoe did his bit. Hit a lay-up and a couple jumpers from the wing. Fed the free man. Dealt the ball away from the dribble-happy dude. His legs gave out in game three. Downhill from there. A question of holding his own then, not being a liability, not making dumb mistakes, playing tough D.

  No wheels. Knew what I wanted to do but my wheels just wouldn’t turn.

  His team retired undefeated. Only one serious challenge all evening. A squad had loaded up for them. The best of the rest and Dribble King had decided it was show time, doing his roadrunner act, and they were down three hoops, 6–9, in the twelve-basket game. Finally O.T. glared at Mr. Pat-Pat and brought him back to reality. The little guy sulked but stayed out the way long enough for the others to get it done. Pulling that game out was the best moment. Many high fives and a good, deep-down sense of pushing to the limit and bringing something back. After the winning basket they gathered under the hoop still shuddering from Sky’s humongous dunk. Their eyes met, their fists met for a second in the core of a circle, then just as quickly broke apart, each going his own way.

  If you keep playing, the failing light is no problem. Your eyes adjust and the streetlamps come on and they help some. People pass by think you’re crazy playing basketball in the dark, but if you stay in the game you can see enough. Ball springs at you quicker from the shadows. Pill surprises you and zips by you unless you know it’s coming. Part of being in the game is anticipating, knowing who’s on the court with you and what they’re likely to do. It’s darker. Not everything works now that works in daylight. Trick is knowing what does. And staying within that range. You could be blind and play if the game’s being played right so you stay out past the point people really seeing. You just know what’s supposed to be happening. Dark changes things but you can manage much better than anyone not in the game would believe. Still there comes a point you’ll get hurt if you don’t give it up. Not the other team you’re fighting then, but the dark, and it always wins, you know it’s going to win so what you’re doing doesn’t make sense, it’s silly and you persist in the silliness a minute or two, a pass pops you in your chest, a ball rises and comes down in the middle of three players and nobody even close to catching it. You laugh and go with the silliness. Can’t see a damn thing anymore. Whether a shot’s in or out. Hey, O.T., man. Show some teeth so I can see you, motherfucker. Somebody trudges off the court. Youall can have it. I can’t see shit. The rest laugh and give it up, too. You fade to the sidelines. It’s been dark a long time at the court’s edges. People’s faces gloomed in deep shadow. A cigarette glows. Night sure enough now. Cross a line and on the other side it’s been dark for days.

  Mellow reggae thumps from the open door of a car. A light crowd of hangers-on in groups by the curb, against the chain-link fence, around a bench on the court, huddled at another bench farther away where the hollow drops off from the path. Riffs of reefer, wine, beer. You smell yourself if you’ve been playing. Cudjoe’s in the cluster of men lounging around the bench in the middle of the court’s open side. Night dries his skin. He feels darker, the color of a deep, purple bruise. He won’t be able to walk tomorrow. Mostly players around the bench, men who’ve just finished the last game of the evening, each one relaxing in his own funk, cooling out, talking the game, beginning to turn it into stories. Cudjoe knows the action will flash back later, game films on an invisible screen above his bed. All those years of playing and it still happens. While his stiff muscles unknot, too tired to sleep, the game movie will play in his head whether he wants to watch or not.

  If he told his story to the other men, if he wasn’t a newcomer content to listen to the others, if he wasn’t too tired and beat to say his own name three times in a row, his story would be about night dropping on the city, how deep and how quietly it settles over the park. Nothing the same now. Trick about night is it changes things but you can’t see exactly how. You know the park is different, you feel it in your bones. Night air cools your skin, contours of the ground rise and fall in unfamiliar rhythms, spaces open which haven’t been there before, the hollow loses its bottom, a black lap you’d sink into forever. Night can shrink things. The players beside him are smaller, parts of them lost, stolen by shadow, their voices husky, pitched to the night’s quiet, movements slowed as if night’s a medium like water and they must conspire with its flow. When night’s closing down it shuts things in on themselves and that’s why you are on a ship with these other men thousands of miles from everywhere else, floating through darkness, and you can’t help sensing the isolation, the smallness because night cuts you off drastically as a knife. But since you can’t see clearly, you can’t really tell. Night expands some things. Trees explode silently, giant black puffs hovering like clouds against the sky. You know night’s different and you guess at why. Can’t help guessing, wondering, even though you understand you’ll never understand because night is about hiding things. About things changing. And Cudjoe knows it would make a good story. They’d all be in it. Would the players testify, help him tell his story as they cool out after the game?

  The other fact about night—it doesn’t last. Night’s temporary. But you can’t really be sure about that, either.

  My poor, aching wheels.

  I can dig it, bro.

  My mind’s right there. Tells me just what to do. But my legs ain’t with it. In their own world. I send the message and by the time they move, it’s too late.

  Like the mayor.

  That cat missing more than wheels.

  You can say that again.

  He’s not stepping down, is he? You watch. He’ll run again. Probably win again if the party’s behind him.

  Why you think they wouldn’t be behind him? All he did was torch a few crazy niggers. That’s why he’s up in office in the first place. Keep youall ghetto bunnies in line. Sure, he goofed. But things so fucked in this city whoever’s in the mayor’s chair bound to fuck up. Mayor don’t run the city, city runs him. Them slick dudes own the mayor are grinning from ear to ear cause if it had been a white boy dropped the bomb, bloods would have took to the street and the whole city nothing but a cinder now.

  Tell the truth.

  Leave the mayor alone, youall. Cat’s doing his best. Hate to hear people bad-mouthing him. Specially black people. Finally voted in a black man, and now nothing he does good enough for you.

  Ain’t about black.

  Bull-shit. You think they’d let him burn down white people’s houses? Sheeit. He be hanging by his balls from some lamppost. Mayor’s not in office to whip on white folks. Nigger control. That’s what he’s about.

  New houses they building up on Osage spozed to be pretty nice.

  No stoops, man. How you spozed to have a neighborhood with no stoops?

  Check it out. What’s up there mostly holes in the ground.

  Where the people living lost their homes?

  Not in City Hall. Not in the mayor’s neighborhood.

  At least they’re living.

  Don’t care what nobody says. It was murder, man. Murder one and some of those lying suckers ought to pay.

  They appointed a commission.

  Hey, bro. Commissioners all members of the same club. Thick as thieves. Downtown chumps all eating out the same bowl. They come in where I work. Smiling and grinning and falling over each other to pay when I bring the check. You think they going to hang one their own? Watch. Commission will claim some poor blood lit the match.

  Papers been spreading that lie already. Like the brothers poured gasoline on the roof and locked theyselves in the basement and set fire to the house. Who’s spozed to believe that shit?

  Have they found the little boy?

  The one survived?

  They say he survived. If he did, hope he’s a million miles away from here. They’ll fuck with him if they find him.

  Blame him.

  If he ain’t dead already. Papers say eleven dead. Means at least eleven. Lie about the numbers like they lie about everything else. If they admit ele
ven it means that’s how many bodies they caught red-handed with. Don’t know how many dead in those ashes in the basement. Papers say a boy escaped. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.

  Anything left in that bottle, man?

  Here, dude. You got the rest.

  Cudjoe decides not to ask about the boy again. Cheating in a way when he asked the first time. This mood, this time belongs to nobody. Each man free as long as they relax here letting night close over them. If a city lurks beyond the borders of the park, it’s no more real than the ball games they play again as they talk. They are together in this. No agendas, interviews or interviewees. Are the streetlamps dimmer or has the city slipped into a deeper fold of night? Faces around him are masks. Would he recognize any of these guys if he saw them in clothes on the street tomorrow? Music doo-wops in thick pure phrases from the car on Forty-third behind the chain-link fence. Music reigns supreme and there is nothing not listening. Cudjoe holds his breath. Doesn’t need breath as a high sweet tenor and voices trilling behind it shine like silver, shine like gold.

  Could you bring down a city with trumpets? Could a song lay waste skyscrapers? Scour the hills, cleanse the rivers, wipe the sky? Everything in creation had been listening to the music. Now sirens and jets and horns and trolleys, dogs howling, babies screaming had started up again. Thump of Cudjoe’s heart again. That shield of filth the city flings up at the sky in place again. Stars spatter against it like rain on a tin roof trying to get in. Hushed for a moment but now a river of noise again and the tune from a tape deck is a twig drifting along with everything else caught in the current. Waters above and waters below the firmament, and earth a wafer in those wet lips that are light-years thick. He tastes earth as he drains a can of beer. O.T. smoking a cigarette. Darnell sucking on a joint. Or was it the other way round? Too dark to tell. If the lips opened to sing, to kiss, to tell a story. If they opened, and the earth wafer slipped out. Wouldn’t there be a long time when nobody’d know what was happening? Centuries out of kilter, askew, but no one understanding the problem. Just this queasiness, this uneasiness. This tilt and slow falling. You are in a city. You look up and can’t see the stars and that doesn’t bother you as much as it should. You don’t know what’s wrong but maybe more’s wrong than you want to know.

  * * *

  Cudjoe doesn’t know why he piled into the car going to Papa Joe’s. Why he drank six more drafts with the fellas when the first one cooled him out. Doesn’t know why he’s decided to walk back to West Philly when his legs already wobbly and stupid. He’s at the top of many broad steps, near the entrance of the art museum, whose stones on a good day are golden in the sun. A neat ingot enthroned on a hill. He is sighting down a line of lighted fountains that guide his eye to City Hall. This is how the city was meant to be viewed. Broad avenues bright spokes of a wheel radiating from a glowing center. No buildings higher than Billy Penn’s hat atop City Hall. Scale and pattern fixed forever. Clarity, balance, a perfect understanding between the parts. Night air thick and bad but he’s standing where he should and the city hums this dream of itself into his ear and he doesn’t believe it for an instant but wonders how he managed to stay away so long.

  I belong to you, the city says. This is what I was meant to be. You can grasp the pattern. Make sense of me. Connect the dots. I was constructed for you. like a field of stars I need you to bring me to life. My names, my gods poised on the tip of your tongue. All you have to do is speak and you reveal me, complete me.

  The city could fool you easy. And he wonders if that’s why he is back. To be caught up in the old trick bag again. Love you. Love you not. Who’s zooming who? Is someone in charge? From this vantage point in the museum’s deep shadow in the greater darkness of night it seems an iron will has imposed itself on the shape of the city. If you could climb high enough, higher than the hill on which the museum perches, would you believe in the magic pinwheel of lights, straight lines, exact proportions, symmetry of spheres within spheres, gears meshing, turning, spinning to the perpetual music of their motion? Cudjoe fine-tunes for a moment the possibility that someone, somehow, had conceived the city that way. A miraculous design. A prodigy that was comprehensible. He can see a hand drawing the city. An architect’s tilted drafting board, instruments for measuring, for inscribing right angles, arcs, circles. The city is a faint tracery of blue, barely visible blood lines in a newborn’s skull. No one has used the city yet. No one has pushed a button to start the heart pumping.

  He can tell thought had gone into the design. And a person must have stood here, on this hill, imagining this perspective. Dreaming the vast emptiness into the shape of a city. In the beginning it hadn’t just happened, pell-mell. People had planned to live and prosper here. Wear the city like robe and crown.

  The founders were dead now. Buried in their wigs, waistcoats, swallowtail coats, silk hose clinging to their plump calves. A foolish old man flying a kite in a storm.

  Cudjoe decides he will think of himself as a reporter covering a story in a foreign country. Stay on his toes, take nothing for granted. Not the customs nor the language. What he sees is not what the natives see. The movie has been running for years, long before he was born, and will sputter on about its business long after he is dead and gone. At best he can write the story of someone in his shoes passing through.

  He is not alone. At this late hour museum busy as an anthill. Steady traffic of cars up and down driveways curving around its flanks. If you swept the night visitors together they’d form a crowd, but the museum’s spacious grounds—terraced, grottoed, thickly planted with trees and shrubs—offer privacy to anyone who wishes it. Most of the young people wish it, play hide-and-seek in couples or small groups. Here comes some fool bounding up the hundred stairs from Logan Circle. Rocky Balboa, arms raised in triumph, claiming the city.

  Patrol cars take leisurely passes up and down the circular drive. No one pays attention. The mood is mellow, cops and kids ignoring each other. As long as everybody follows the rules, there wouldn’t seem to be any rules. Music and dope in moderation. Little tidbits of sound, of hashish smoke reach Cudjoe. These white kids had been granted a zone. Everybody had zones. Addicts, prostitutes, porn merchants, derelicts. Even people who were black and poor had a zone. Everybody granted the right to lie in the bed they’d made for themselves. As long as they didn’t contaminate good citizens who disapproved. As long as the beds available to good citizens who wished to profit or climb in occasionally. As long as everybody knew they had to give up their zone, scurry down off this hill, no questions asked, when the cops blow the whistle.

  Maybe this is a detective story, Cudjoe says to himself. Out there the fabled city of hard knocks and exciting possibilities. You could get wasted out there and lots did. His job sleaze control. Bright lights, beautiful people, intrigue, romance. The city couldn’t offer those rushes without toilets, sewers, head busters and garbage dumps. Needed folks on the other side of the fast track and needed a tough cookie to keep them scared and keep them where they belong. The fast movers would pay well for that service. Let you sample the goodies once in a while. Just enough to spoil you. Not enough to dull the edge you required to do their spadework, to get down where it was down and dirty.

  Limousines out there. And sleek women in dresses slit up to their assholes. Everything bought and sold. You could buy day or buy night. This circus of lights enticing him could be turned off or on at someone’s command.

  He remembers waterfalls framing the broad museum stairs. At night the pumps rested but during summer days twin stair-stepped cascades of water turned the wells at the end of each landing into swimming holes. City kids in their underwear played in the pools. Colonies of little brown monkeys splashing and squealing and sliding down green sheets of water. Beating the heat. Shirts and shorts discarded where they were peeled off sweaty bodies. Shoes were what got to him. Piles of sneakers all colors, shapes, low-rent versions of adult styles, beat to shit the way kids’ shoes always are, but these, scattered around on t
he wet steps, these were worse, gaping holes in the bottoms, shredded uppers, laces missing, shoes taped, patched, lined with cardboard. Cheapest concoctions of glue and foam and canvas that money could buy.

  Cudjoe constructs a room to match the shoes, fills it with sleeping bodies, many funky pairs of sneakers set out overnight to dry. Constructs a row house to hold the room, matches it with house after house till there is a street, then a neighborhood matching the sorry-assed shoes he’s ready to lace now and thinks of miles of streets he must negotiate to reach the fountain, how pebbles and grains of glass punch through the thin soles, how after a while with his brothers and sisters in tow, it’s like walking barefoot on burning coals, you don’t stop and wait for a light to change, you charge through intersections, daring cars to hit you. Constructs a city to hold the neighborhood, to match the rags on their feet, broad boulevards to carry traffic to the art museum, monumental buildings to hold treasure. As the boy probes inside his shoe, rubbing lumps, loose fibers, fingering holes that caused yesterday’s calluses and blisters, Cudjoe hollers, Stop. Don’t stick that rotten thing back on your foot. Hollering as if the boy could hear him, as if the boy could fling down the shoe and everything would be different, as if the shoe isn’t already here on the stone steps, the boy’s fresh cuts bleeding somewhere in sheets of green water.

  Kids played rough and loud in the pools below the fountain. No adults in sight. Kind of place Cudjoe had only seen from a distance when he was growing up. Not nice. Not safe. White bodies rare. Lines were drawn in his family. Poor as his family was, certain distinctions were important, clarified early. He wasn’t allowed to play in fountains, in roachy public pools because he wasn’t like those children running loose who did. Not a matter of pretending he was a white child, just that he wasn’t that kind of black one. Scraped from the streets. Rag-muffin from God-knows-where, infected with God-knows-what, and you’d catch it no doubt about it playing in the water they play in. Nobody’s children trekking here for a few hot summer days, then gone, back to wherever they came from, wherever they’re going. You stay right here in your own backyard, boy. Be grateful somebody’s keeping an eye on you.