Cudjoe watches entranced. Cassandra will be dead in nine months, a fiery crash in Mexico. The van she’s riding in with her lover careens off a cliff, burns beside the ocean. He’s spying on her because there’s not much time, never enough time. He must learn her secrets, save her. Sam should understand. He’d be here at the window sucking up his daughter’s beauty, every ounce from every angle, a sad feast always because never enough, she’ll be gone tomorrow, he’ll follow her a year later. So Cudjoe tells himself! Drink her in. Make love to her any way you know that won’t hurt her or rob her precious time. If Sam had known how little time they could look forward to, together, alive, wouldn’t Sam have been there, beside him, greedily taking it all in? His heart in his throat like Cudjoe’s. His old pecker nudging his shorts like Cudjoe’s.
No. Not that way. Cudjoe’s getting confused, his stories mixed up. The striped van spins through the air, preternaturally slow, bands of color distinct as they turn, you can read the peace sign on the door, then it’s gone, then the lumpish shape rotates again and you read again, Peace. Spinning through thin, hot air so slowly you can focus beyond the van, note the scenery, rugged jut of golden mountains shaded with midnight blue. Sharp peaks with crystal blue of sky as backdrop. You marvel. Range succeeds range, a breathtaking panorama spread across the horizon. Lower, there are buttes, desert plateaus, painted in delicate pastels, a patchwork of pinks, turquoises, rose, magenta, aquamarine. The colors inside a vagina. You’re able to observe this while the van falls toward the dark maw of sea. No sound. No hint of horrendous impact, buckling metal, pulverized glass, the crackle of a gasoline-fueled inferno incinerating the vehicle when it lands, rendering it into a blackened skeleton on a rocky ledge thirty yards from the foaming surf. The story is Cassy first, then Sam. The story is, Cudjoe knew nothing of their imminent deaths that night in the little room in Sam’s house when he’d watched Cassy showering. The story is, Cassy’s with her lover in a van Cudjoe cannot picture because he’s never heard it described. Never had the heart to ask for one more detail than he’d been given by her dumbstruck parents. This out-of-sync van that plummets forever against a tourist-bureau poster of mountainous Mexican scenery would be full of hippies, boiling, squealing like gulls.
Cassy naked in the moonlight on his first trip to the island. She’s gone second time around. He’s remembering correctly now because on his second visit, alone, two summers later, he’d imagined telling Sam about that night, what he’d seen. A crazy urge to confess, share his vision, as if the story might have pleased Sam, as if it would be a consolation to hear firsthand Cudjoe’s witness to the sexual power of his daughter, how perfectly she’d grown into a woman’s flesh, how she’d treated it, enjoyed the fullness thereof, dancing, gilded. A foolish idea. Sam was dead the second time Cudjoe visited the island. And if alive old Sam would have been outraged. Probably try to kick Cudjoe’s ass. Old liver-spotted fists flailing. Battering Cudjoe’s hard brown skin. Wings of an angry butterfly till Cudjoe seizes the bony wrists, pins them under one of his hands and talks Sam down from his anger, soothes him like he would a child, patting the bald crown of his head. No harm, old buddy. No harm done. No evil intent. You would have done just what I did if you were there. If you’d found yourself in my shoes. My bare feet, really. Because up on your second floor where you’d stashed us, I tiptoed naked away from my wife and bed. Sleepwalking sort of, and the rest just happened. Believe me. You couldn’t have turned away either. You’d have watched and been better for it. That dream of Cassy filed away with the rest. That much more of her inside you, to console you. Haunting you, killing you, sustaining you, for the little time you had left.
Did it for you, my friend. Cudjoe’s lying again. He had returned to bed, masturbated, careful not to wake Caroline, his back inches from hers, miles from her in a place with different weather, his face turned up to drink warm rain.
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Pretty soppy stuff but Cudjoe had recited it and wept on the anniversary of Sam’s death, that cloudy day Rachel had cast Sam’s ashes into the wind. Sam retained a soft spot for Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, those melancholy English decadents, their tears-in-a-teapot version of the blues. Sam the tough new critical priest of the text speaking for itself knew everything about the lives of the late Victorian Romantics and found them simpatico he said, boon coons later when he’d grown comfortable with that phrase he’d pinched from Cudjoe’s writing. A gray mottled sky, heavy as iron. Rolling hills, profiles thinly one dimensional, dominoes stretched one behind the other till the last one collapses, melding into the bluish haze of distance. They are not long. The survivors drifted away after the ceremony. No one spoke. After Rachel had sprinkled his ashes where Sam had instructed and the sprightly wind, gray as the sky, had lifted them and threshed them, a final separation bit from bit, speaking into that silence would have been like farting in public. The mourners moved off to be alone, to be with one or two others. Cudjoe had observed in their strained, somber faces the panicked helplessness of a person stuck in a crowd needing to pee with no bathroom in sight.
Rachel took him by the hand, led him to the barn. Jesus Christ. They’re all gone now. The whole family. Cassy. Sam. Rachel. The whole family. Wiped out. Invisible. As if they never existed. He hasn’t thought of any of them for years. He wasn’t really thinking of them now. He’s dealing with the presence of Caroline this morning. Remembering how he lost her. Remembering a trip to Sam’s island when they were together, when their lives had begun to unravel. Cudjoe is exploring the connection. Missing his wife and now he finds himself missing the others. Sam and Rachel and Cassy. Our path emerging for a while. Crying for them. Spying on them. Waiting for the lights of the city to come on.
Rachel led him by the hand up to a ladder at one end of the barn. She mounted first. Tail of her pleated skirt bobs as she climbs. Rachel’s short legged. She’s wearing no stockings. Sturdy calf muscles jump like animals foraging under her skin. A spidery delta of blue veins on the back of one thigh. He looks away as he climbs after her. She wants to show him a picture she’s painted of the island. A surprise intended for Sam, her way of saying thank you for the gift of island he’d presented to her. After thirty years of homes and separations, this house on the island their last stand. Sam sold or mortgaged everything then borrowed more to build a place where they could retire. Though he’d dropped his memoirs, a play, books he’d taken on as editor emeritus, Sam had exhausted himself completing the house project. My grand obsession. Sam’s Folly, he called it. And after Cassy was killed, it seemed he had nothing left. Pharaoh content to be buried in the monument he’d constructed because that’s what he’d settled into doing, dying by inches. He mopes around all day in his robe and slippers. Won’t dress. Barely eats no matter what I cook for him. It’s driving me crazy. I lost Cassy and now I’m losing him. Rachel fought back, patient, giving as she’d been all through the marriage, and as Sam gradually returned to her, she’d started painting again. She was hoping to finish her portrait of the island and surprise him with it on the anniversary of their new beginning.
Cudjoe has no trouble recalling the barn’s smell in his funky bathroom this morning. An astringent, ammoniac odor of urine dominates here. A lake of aging piss percolating somewhere under the apartment house, seeping up through the toilet neck. Sam and Rachel’s barn also a cave of smells. Piss, shit, sweat. Cows and horses long gone but the scent of them was rubbed into the barn wood, their dung stamped into the earthen floor, air weighted with their steamy breath. Sounds of animals rustling in their stalls, chewing cud, pawing the ground had left their echo in the air, turned it brown and warm. The barn was an animal, old, lopsided, walleyed. It swallowed them both as Cudjoe followed Rachel up the ladder to the loft. A bereaved animal, its innards the color Rachel must have been inside as she let Sam go one last time. Ashes. Ashes in the wind.
Swaybacked floorboards buckle under Cu
djoe’s steps. If Caroline thumped across the loft, she’d punch right through. He didn’t have that to worry about. No more. Not here. Not anywhere. Between Cudjoe’s visits to the island she’d left him. The book that was to be dedicated to her, his payback for what it cost them both, had been, like Rachel’s painting, orphaned. Time was and time wasn’t. Cudjoe a big boy now, but still a city boy, with a city boy’s fears. The gloomy interior of the barn, its smells, ghostly animals ruminating, bumping around below the loft bothered him. Large, moist-breathed beasts had inhabited this space. Their blood was on his hands, in his belly. Their presence like a hood settling over him. He could feel the texture of their rough hides. He was wearing them. He was inside the steady churning of their guts. He tasted liver, heart, lungs, the sour, salty mash they’d brew into piss.
Between trips to the island Caroline had said she’d had it. Called his bluff. Cashed in her chips. His sons were growing up like exotic plants on a faraway island he’d never visited. He knew them not at all. They spoke another language. They had another father, a man who was finding it easy or difficult to live with their mother, a man who felt better or worse than Cudjoe between her legs.
He’d removed himself absolutely from their lives. All or nothing is how he explained it to himself, to her. Left it on her to explain to the kids. A bastard. He proved himself a cold fish of a bastard. She said she’d known it all along. She said she’d never understand why she tried to hold on. When she knew all along the kind of cold bastard he was. It proved you got what you deserved, she said. Got what you asked for. She knew she was asking for trouble, wanting him. She hated him for the lies, the betrayals. He’d disgraced them both. That’s what he couldn’t face. The mirror in her eyes. The hurt. The truth. Run. Run. Never look back. A cry from the deepest recess of him, the part nurtured in forest gloom when he dangled from a tree by a three-toed claw. An adrenaline rush as the command formed in his gut. Run. From the nighthawk, the bear, the slithering lizard, the coiled snake. Run. Run. Run.
Not that he ever really escaped. Rachel leaves him and strides to the opposite end of the loft. Tugging on a length of hairy rope depending from the rafters she opens a sliding window set in the steeply pitched upper story of the bam. Light floods the platform. Easels, canvases in various stages of finish, mounted, propped, lying flat, sucked, suddenly pop into view. Cudjoe expected to see Caroline revealed, eyeing him disapprovingly from a corner where the rapid thump thump of her steps had stranded her. No. Nothing. She was ancient history, like the lives of the animals who’d inhabited this bam. Cow dooky, horse dooky, a woman’s footsteps exploding old wood, light blazing through slits in the boards, the mewling, murmuring ocean of brown bodies he’d drown in if this rickety floor collapsed. A woman’s bare flank flashing through the saffron square of a window, the creaking arrangement, groaning like a swing in its chains, sea in its bowl, of pulley, tackle and rope draws open the loft window, horse dooky, cow dooky, smell of moon trapped in her blood once a month.
Finished now, I think. I need to show someone. You’re the first.
Smoky light shivers in the rectangular opening. They used to pitch hay through there to store for winter. Standing on top of a wagon on top of a hay pile you could reach the opening without breaking your back. Heave ho. Light splashes into the loft like a giant pitchforkful of hay.
Do you think Sam would have liked it?
I’m sure he would.
Do you really think so?
The island’s in your painting. I can see it. Sam would see more. Much more. Of course he’d love it. It’s beautiful.
Thank you. It was important to finish it. Even after. The island started me painting again. Living again.
It’s wonderful.
I’m so sorry about you and Caroline. You’ll try again, won’t you? Such lovely boys.
He could almost reach up and touch the rafters. Shadows up there not so deep now. Not so forbidding. Another world. Cobwebs, dust, filaments strung by spiders. Crawling things, gnawing things up there where the sloping sides of the bam roof joined in a point. The narrow end of a funnel. Tiny creatures in the shadows that are complement and terror of giant beasts below.
Yes. He’d thought that. Not in those exact words. Perhaps it’s better to say he felt it. Order. Chaos. Felt himself suddenly exposed by light smoldering in the hay door. A superfluous creature. Not heavy like a cow, no wings or skittering banks of needle legs so he can scurry light and fast. In between. Alone beside another like him, but both alone, marked by aloneness as other creatures are known by their flavor, their bite. She grieved for her lost ones. He grieved for his. Grief was mooing, hooves shuffling aimlessly in a stew of dung, dried grass and pee. No room in the stall for another creature and therefore, no need, no point yearning for one. Grief was being confounded by darting, whirring licks from things that have no bodies, airy impossible things even when you catch one and squash it under your thumb. He’s feeling miserable and exposed because he’s neither of earth nor of air. He’s smoke nodding at this canvas she’s tried to fashion into earth, light, wind, water.
I’ll come see you again. (He won’t.)
Let’s keep in touch. (They are already out of touch.)
Your painting is beautiful. (So it is and it changes nothing. He’ll hear of the cancer and be afraid to call. He’ll forget then be reminded when he hears the cancer has removed her. To the other side. From one place to the other. Out of the goddamned middle.)
She’s up and busy. Flitting from room to room, naked as the day she was born. He listens across thirty yards for the thud of heels registering like drumbeats upon whatever it is that covers the floor of her apartment.
He surprises himself and turns away after a thick, choked-up minute. She is who she is and he is who he is. He crossed oceans to find a boy named Lion. He’d like to think finding him is his fate. He slides back the shower curtain. Daffodils, daisies, grimy yellows and greens. If not fate, then duty. A job. Finding him. He examines scratches on the back of his hand, checks for a bump on his sore shin where a knee had slammed him. He’ll survive to play another day. His stomach is hard but bulges if he doesn’t stand up straight, pull his shoulders back. Body pride. The little volleyball on his tummy will deflate if he plays regularly. A better Cudjoe inside this whipped flesh. Lean, fierce, a fighter, someone who could help the lost boy.
With the pointed end of one of the metal loops that hold the shower curtain on the rod, and squeeze open like safety pins, he pokes holes in the plastic. He’s tired of a sopping floor every time he showers. Daffodils, daisies, yellows, greens. He threads curtain through three loops and refastens them. Three new holes, three new connections hike the curtain so it barely hangs past the tub’s lip. Plastic’s stiff with age. Scratches Cudjoe’s skin as he brushes it aside, steps into the tub.
Trick is to finish washing before hot water runs out, or if the hot water’s flowing free and strong, to finish before bilgy scum crawls past his ankles. Water pressure problems. Drainage trouble. You get fucked coming and going when you share ancient, inefficient plumbing with four floors of tenants. Cudjoe imagines showering in the condo he imagines Timbo owns. Timbo had class, if class means expensive tastes, the cunning and luck to satisfy them, Timbo surely one class dude. Cultural attaché to the mayor. Did the mayor know how to spell attaché? Was the accent over the final e acute or grave? When did Timbo learn to spell it, when had any of them learned the foreign words and foreign ways, how to pronounce, to spell, to feign an easy familiarity with places where such words were spoken? Mayor a country boy, he’d been told. Mississippi mud. Timbo too, born on a farm a long ways inland from the New Orleans he liked to claim when questions about a birthplace were really questions about family, about pedigree and pretensions to civilization. Who the fuck are you? And who’s your mama? Your daddy? Timbo had a rap for that species of question just as he possessed answers, slick and convincing, to questions most folks meeting him didn’t know they intended to ask, till Timbo drills them with the a
nswers.
Would Tims be different now? How would he have changed? Spray on Cudjoe’s back boiled an instant then cooled lower than body temp. He cringed and scooted away from the scalding he was about to receive, skidding, regaining his balance just in time for a rush of chill needles on his backside. Too early in the morning for hot water to be gone. Sky not cracked yet. Still a solid sheet of slate. Who else in his building is up and about showering at dawn? Pipes must be busted again. Somebody’s ceiling leaking, plaster bulging, dropping in wet lumps on somebody’s kitchen table. He hoped the landlord would at least warn his tenants before he torched this block of decaying flats. Upkeep rising past what rents produce, what else is a good businessman spozed to do, either stuff in more families, a physical impossibility in this case, or burn down the building and collect fire insurance. Water sputters, teasingly hot then cold then a little of each. Cudjoe wipes away the last gobs of soap from his body with a washcloth, steering clear of the spray, cursing it and the landlord’s mammy.
Timbo, you son of a bitch. I bet you’re soaking your black ass in a Jacuzzi. Sauna and steam bath and geishas massaging your rusty legs every morning before the limo fetches you. A shower in your office. So you can go home to your old lady smelling sweet after a hard day humping your secretary on that buttery Corinthian leather couch beside your desk.
G’wan, man. This is serious bizness. Your man Timbo gots righteous responsibilities. Spons-bilities. Yeah. You like that. G’wan smile, nigger. You know you just as crazy as me. And just as sponsible.
Philadelphia Fire Page 8
