Paramedics had rescued the hysterical pretty lady. Smelling salts. A squeeze, a hug, pats on her pretty back, comforting words to restore her as she tottered like an invalid in the blond arms of one of the men in green singlets with a name stenciled across the chest. They all looked like patients to J.B. Love at first sight. Love among the ruins. Paramedic and pretty lady would name their first-born after the dead guy. What was his name anyway? Was his identity embossed in the asphalt? A death mask Xeroxed there? Person or pizza under his blue hair? Would J.B. have recognized him if he’d landed face up? A fellow graduate of the University who like J.B. had picked a rather unconventional channel for employing the wisdom imbibed in those ivied halls? Who would believe that under that lumpy black rubber sheet slept a man capable of reciting French poetry and successfully calculating differential equations? To graduate the University during J.B.’s time the jumper would have also been required to pass his seven-lap swim test and a fine arts elective. Maybe he’d taken art history with J.B. J.B. had loved the darkened lecture hall, slide projector’s hum. When the lights went out the silver screen was a train window and the midnight express glided faster than thought past cities, villages, cathedrals, countryside, castles, mountains, oceans, intimate interiors with all the inhabitants frozen stiff as dolls, clouds of angels, daisy chains of fire-breathing demons. People and places J.B’d never dreamed of seeing, his Europe, his Greece and Rome and British Isles, rearranged every minute through the window as J.B. lay back in his retractable armchair, invisible, practicing the art of letting the wide world pass him by.
Perhaps the dead man sat next to him in Art History 105. In the dark all students the same. Devoured by transparencies flashing on the screen. Easy to tune out the instructor’s droning voice-over. Who the fuck cares what he named the picture? Pictures belonged to nobody. The paintings were just there, floating on beams of colored light. Nobody’s property. J.B. could make what he wished of them. He took some home. Pieced them together even now on this street corner, squeezed a scene into focus, fine-tuning his slide projector till an image freezes bright and precise on this screen. In the dead man’s fluids blotted on the asphalt were all the chemicals needed to paint Déjeuner sur L’Herbe, Venus on the Half Shell, vultures pecking the liver of Prometheus, Balthazar in his splendiferous robes, always the sharpest Wise Man. Colors of my mind. Whose song was that? Maybe J.B. sat behind the suicide when the dude’s blue hair hung down in a ponytail. Men were starting to wear shit like that in those days. Lots of far-out costumes and weirdo hairdos. Art history drew the oddballs, the counterculture. Colors of whose mind? Humpty-Dumpty’s shattered shell littering the mayor’s nice street. All the mayor’s horses and all his men can’t paste poor Humpty together again.
The clumsy chalk sketch could be anybody. Reusable, recyclable. It would do for J.B. when his time came. More or less. If a shoe’s not perfect, J.B.’d learned to wear it anyway. Shoes tougher to come by than feet. If the shoe don’t fit, it will soon enough.
The crowd had dispersed. J.B. doesn’t disperse anymore. He is always everywhere at once. Never a rush, a reason to leave here and go there. He inhabits many places, no place. Not really a difficult trick. No trick at all. The end of tricks and trickery because he is no one, no where. An accident had occurred and he hadn’t survived. Everyone agreed that’s what had happened. Unanswered questions about the tragedy remain, but nobody’s on the case.
Lost soul. If found, return to sender.
Too bad J.B. wasn’t first on the scene. Before anyone disturbed the dead man he would have pinned one of his hand-printed cards to the suicide’s back. Pinned it if he’d owned a pin.
I am a vet. Lost voice in war. Please help.
Shit like that not really funny. J.B. knows better. He’d been educated. Brought up right. Bad luck to laugh at another’s misfortune. What goes round comes round. But you had to laugh sometimes, didn’t you? I mean, doesn’t hurt the dead man, does it? Dead man pretty far past hearing anything. Or being insulted by it. Besides, the crowd had dispersed. J.B. the last hanger-on. Who’d care if J.B. laughed? Who’d notice? Nobody else giving a good goddamn now. Just faithful J.B. Even the bitch shedding goo-gobs of crocodile tears, where was she now? Probably popping little greenies or reds or yellows with her savior, whooping and bouncing while he cries giddyup, giddyup, slapping her trim thigh as he prongs her in the ass. Only J.B. mourns the shadow drawn by a man with a big stick.
Grim reapers and lady weepers. Mr. Peepers and high-wire leapers and on and on and on J.B. raps to himself. Make everything rhyme if you got the time, the time to rhyme, rhyme the time, time rhyme, rhyme time.
Meanwhile, much later, J.B., after a day of foraging, napping, marching, slouching, observing the city clean up after one of its suddenly dead, a day he’s spent delaying a full inspection of the briefcase and its contents, saving it for later, for that ugly time when nothing’s shaking, when he’s the only person left alive and must explain, account for the next breath he bites off, the space he occupies on the planet, even though no one’s listening, no one remains to care, J.B. heads towards Independence Square.
Savers save for rainy days. Saved because you could pretend there’ll be goodness in the last drop, even if every swallow so far had been bitter, bitter going down. In the courtyard of City Hall, near the door to the Mayor’s Office, where he’d parked himself a few fine minutes in the afternoon sunshine before a cop chased him away, J.B. had been tempted to peep inside the case. Just a little tease there in that toasty sunlight, a nip of what he was saving for later. In the courtyard people were puffed up like penguins with their own importance. They bustled and hustled because they wanted their fellow citizens to see them on their busy way somewhere. J.B. chose a spot where he could ignore them conspicuously, self-important as any of these chumps, absorbed by his business, part of which was paying them no mind. Let the chumps wonder. Let them dig. More to life than slaving in some office. More to life than dressing up pretty for the people. J.B. sneaked a peek inside the case but resisted temptation. Saved it for later.
Much later as things worked out. Saved it for that betwixt and between hour when J.B.’s habit is to sit in Independence Square, at Sixth and Market, contemplating his sins. Too late to be sorry enough for all he’s done and undone in a lifetime. Fuck it. Two words he usually settles for as he tries to reason why. Or why not. At least once a day he’s bullied into this familiar dialogue, forced to admit he has no life worth thinking about and forced to admit he’ll continue saying yes to it. On with it. Another breath, another step, not because a gun’s held to his head but because he can’t think of anything that’s better. No one to blame but himself. He’s the stubborn one who chooses to hang on to his collection of nasty habits. The worst habit hanging on when no reason to hang on. Except he’d managed to hang on yesterday. So here he is today. Hand full of gimme. Mouth full of much obliged. Swallowed one breath of air. Got to have more. Wakes up screaming because he dreams he’s a baby and a big white cat’s in his cradle, sitting on his face, sucking the breath out his body. Fur in his mouth and he’s hollering like he got something to lose.
Shit, grit, motherwit. Was he the baddest of the bad, freest of the free? Lone Ranger roaming the high plains where nobody else dared. Or was he scared? Chickenshit. Chickenheart. Tossing everything worth anything away so he’d have nothing to lose. No strings. No fear. Not quite. He was still a saver.
Saved the briefcase. Saved it till it’s quiet in the square. Everybody in Philadelphia asleep or dead and that unforgiving, god-awful voice starts to nag him and J.B. says, G’wan away from here. No time for you, motherfucker. Can’t you see I’m busy? Got this book I’ve been saving to read.
Looked like Frankenstein’s monster shuffling around with the briefcase stuffed under his clothes. Felt good to sit down and pull it out. Good to have company in the empty square.
The gun had worried him. Scared it would blow off his balls. The thing loaded no doubt. Big vicious bullets fat as thumb
s. A murder weapon. If the cops find it on him he’s in a world of trouble. They’d third-degree his ass till he admitted shooting a dozen people. Hit man for the black mafia.
He extracts the book gingerly, inch by inch so’s not to disturb the blue volcano of gun slumbering in the depths of the bag. Fifty times today he’d heard the weapon explode, the red rip as a bullet unzippered his scrotum. Like walking on eggs. How do you walk when a pistol’s pointed at your prick? Gently. Gently, Boss. One teensy, soft step at a time. Dynamite in his guts. Nitro. Stay away from crowds that jostle. Keep out of traffic that might force you to run to save your life. The briefcase had chafed his thighs, scratched his navel. Time to see if the damn thing worth the trouble.
He inches out the book. Sets it across his knees. Tries to remember the last book he’s read. Run. Spot, run. Look at Spot run. The case with the gun inside leans against his ankle. If it discharges now all he’ll lose is a toe, a foot. Ocular proof of disability. More pity, more profit when he flashes his card at strangers.
I am a vet. Lost voice and toe in war. Please help.
The book’s a kind of journal or diary. Handwriting squinchy small. J.B. holds it close, then at arm’s length, then pulls it toward him till it wavers into focus. Like art slides materializing from a dusty beam of light. Quiet in this quiet place. Night’s falling. He can’t tell if the city’s still out there, surrounding the empty square. Wind reams the narrow spaces between buildings. Fluorescent tubing crackles. J.B. maneuvers the book into the yellowish light.
The Tree of Life will nourish you. You need only learn how to serve its will. Its will is your best self speaking the truth to you. The seed of truth is planted in all of us. You only need to listen. Let it grow . . .
J.B. started reading somewhere in the middle. A few lines at the top of a page. A block of black writing cramped into a space not much larger than a postage stamp. Rest of the page untouched. Waste of paper, J.B. thinks.
He tries again. Lets the pages flutter. His finger leads him to this.
It’s time, my friends, to reap what’s been sown. The Children’s Hour now. The Kiddy Korner. What have they been up to all this time we’ve left them alone? Over in the shadows with Buffalo Bob. Mister Rogers. The Shadow knows. But do we? Are we ready to hear the children speak? Ready or not we shall be caught. We are pithed. Feel nothing. Children have learned to hate us as much as we hate them. I saw four boys yesterday steal an old man’s cane and beat him with it. He was a child, lying in his blood on the sidewalk. They were old, old men tottering away.
The handwriting’s too tiny. Light’s too poor. It’s been a long day and two or three attempts to decipher the manuscript are enough for J.B. He shuts the book. Shuts his mind. Nods off. Doesn’t awaken till he’s swimming in pee.
He smells something burning. Old rags. A shitty, oily stink singeing his nose, his lips. He gags, needs to throw up instantly. Then he hears the pitter patter ha ha ha ha of little ha-ha feet. A hot fist snatches his whole body. Icy cold talons dig in. He knows he’s on fire then, burning from his tennies to the nappy crown of his skull.
He is burning alive and he rolls over and over on the hard ground. Jerks to his feet and scoots as fast as he can fanning the flames as he goes helter-skelter arms flapping, legs kicking, a jiggedy-jig beeline toward the fountain at the center of the square, even though he knows as he pumps his legs and pumps his heart and pumps his scorched lungs and clutches with his fingers for white flutes of spray, by this time of night the water’s been turned off for hours.
When he’s exhausted and his strength returns, he washes his bloody hands and listens to the cool waterfall behind him. He’s seen it all before, or read about it or dreamed it or maybe he saw the movie in one of the all-nighters on Market, maybe it was somebody else’s dream in a book, maybe a book he, J.B., was writing. All were possibilities, possible worlds he was sure he was remembering, one or the other because here he was ha ha ha the pitter patter of little sneakers laughing, little white boys drenching him in kerosene and throwing a match ha ha ha laughing, running away pitta patta and he’s shaking his fist but they have the Book, the briefcase, running away, disappearing, are not there, never were there and then he’s thinking movie or TV show or in a book, this shit is funny but this ain’t one bit humorous ha ha ha my ass. Remembering the book that promised things would get better. Remembering kids scooting down green sheets of water. Squealing. Screaming. Remembers sun hot as fire under the asphalt cooking his bare toes. Lawd. Lawd. He jumps like the spirit got holt to him. Hopping on one leg. Then the other. Hippy-hop down the bunny trail. And then there is a commercial break. And then a tape of his own screaming he lip-syncs. The tape stops and it’s live broadcast time. He surveys the multitude. Begins to preach.
This is my story. This is my song.
The book he’s singing from snaps shut. Is smoke in his hands. Ashes. He beats down flames on the crackling pages.
When he reaches the fountain he trips over its raised lip, plunges, flailing into its dry center, a belly flop all the wind goes out of him when he hits he gushes like a man slammed across the stomach with a two-by-four, he’s prostrate, flat out, clenching his fists, kicking his toes raw against the cobbled bed of the fountain as wave after wave breaks over him and he riffles like a deck of cards being mixed, like a field of amber grain undulant in the breeze, a snake swallowing a frog, a flag rampant planted in the territory of somebody’s chest.
First they ordered the bad guys out of town, then they buried them in dungeons. Next they were transported in sailing ships to the other end of the known world. Convict societies clinging like lichen to barren rocks in a land upsidedownunder. The last act space travel launch motherfuckers Roman candle style to the stars, deep space warp drive ain’t never coming back never coming back shiny bullet-nosed buckets of blood and the bad guys inside baaa baaaing like black sheep crossing from Asia Minor to Greece just in time for Easter dinner. Goody-bye. Goody-bye. And if nothing else works, if evil’s still inside, not out there, not them, if stocks and blocks and locks and pox and rocks and flocks and docks don’t work, you can always light a match.
* * *
Less than an hour before the memorial service for the dead of Osage Avenue and Cudjoe is surprised to see the square’s nearly empty. For a second he populates it with ghosts. All of Philadelphia crammed into Independence Square. It’s 1805, a Fourth of July rally. In their customary place at the rear of the crowd, dressed in their Sunday best, toting picnic baskets and jugs for this annual day of feasting, speeches, fireworks and merrymaking, black Philadelphians, descendants of the 150 slaves who arrived in 1684, emigrants and migrants who’d been drawn by the Quaker promise of tolerance, are out in force to celebrate the nation’s liberation from British tyranny. It’s 1805 and before the party begins that year, blacks are hooted, shooed and beaten from the square. Cudjoe sees them haul-assing in their old-fashioned clothes, brass-buckled shoes, hoopskirts, bustles, aprons, bonnets, cutaway coats, tricornered hats, wigs, stockings, tripping over crackling good pieces of chicken they’d fried, straw-covered bottles of wine, panicked, fleeing, clutching the hands of their children who are dressed just like the adults. Mad rush and scramble out of the square into narrow cobblestone streets and twisting, dead-end alleys, pursued by their howling fellow countrymen, the thunder of thousands of feet, sticks and stones and curses like hail pelting their heads, like a storm spoiling their holiday outing. Yes. God speaking. Chasing them home. Where they’d better stay, if they know what’s good for them, behind locked doors till he speaks again. The square’s cleared, the platform festooned with bunting, banners, mikes, wires is empty. A few stragglers here and there whose presence is a sign of greater absence, the square more abandoned, more desolate because they wander purposelessly, as if lost, as if something must be wrong with them that keeps them in the deserted square when everybody else is someplace else.
The emptiness of the square means something has already happened that Cudjoe should know about,
but doesn’t. So here he is expecting lots of people to be gathered and instead of a crowd greeting him, hiding him, confirming his reason for arriving, here he is out in the open with a couple other fools. Something he doesn’t know about must have happened and it’s a big something cause everybody with good sense knows it happened and didn’t show up here. He doesn’t like being exposed, out of place, out of sync, like the few chumps milling around in the square. The Fourth of July mob had turned on its shadow. Swept it away. Sun-baked stones of the square had been purified. The owners will be back any second to claim them. Cudjoe slinks down into himself, his brown skin retracts under his clothes, his bare face, bare arms and hands that would betray him, disguise themselves as wood, as stone. Ghosts in funny outfits rush pell-mell past him as he freezes, wonders what the hell’s going on, retreats from the entrance to the square.
On Market Street he pulls the rolled program from his hip pocket and checks to make sure he’s got the right day, right time and place. Through observance, atonement, education, and cultural expression we aim to confront and move beyond the horrors of that terrible day, to contribute to healing the wounds of our city and its inhabitants, and to aid in the development of humane and peaceful methods of resolving our community’s problems. The flyer confirms everything he was already sure of. Yes, there’s a party. Problem is, looks like Philadelphia ain’t coming.
Philadelphia Fire Page 20
