Still in the muddle of it, I walk back up the hill thinking of Homer. The Greek poet, yes, in this unlikely place. The Homer who could easily have imagined the grim and gratified young men who provoke death, though they could not have imagined him. I’m trying to remember details, but I suspect Karen has been on the phone already with that circle of women who manage things late at night when the knock comes, the dark man on the front porch with a flashlight. And she’ll be quietly waiting for whatever words I can put. She’ll ask me what happened, meaning something entirely different from the words. And I will say all those young men, Karen. All those young men, who stab each other at the ships, will come back tomorrow with different names and precisely the same quarrels—you disrespected me, took my woman, walked upon my turf. You touched my golden chain, struck my child. You prey upon my waking thoughts and steal my sleep. I don’t even think they want the monster dead. They want a poet rapping ancient lines, another someone who will translate for them. But right now, as I walk up the long slope, they step out of the early evening fog and into the place where I imagine them, the dark, moist dreamland where they are
churning around that ship, Achaeans and Trojans,
hacking each other at close range. No more war at a distance,
waiting to take the long flights of spears and arrows—
they stood there man-to-man and matched their fury,
killing each other now with hatchets, battle-axes,
big swords, two-edged spears, and many a blade,
magnificent, heavy-hilted and thonged in black
lay strewn on the ground—some dropped from hands,
some fell as the fighters’ shoulder straps were cut—
and the earth ran black with blood.
Something I could have taught them.
So finally I sag into a kitchen chair, and she reaches out across the table to take my hands in hers before drawing away for coffee. Then slides a steaming cup beneath my face. And I inhale. It’s like incense wafting across the face of some hollow idol.
“What happened?” is all she can think to say.
“What happened? They don’t even know themselves.”
“A drive-by?”
“It doesn’t make any difference. Next year it’ll be someone else,” I tell her. “That baby you held this afternoon will kill somebody trying to become a man. Fast or slow, it doesn’t make any difference. In fact I believe my friend Lonell might have come out a winner considering that he never had a chance.”
“He had a choice.”
“White people have a choice. Lonell had the world he lived in. So why don’t you ask me what the rest of them really want to know—where was the boy’s father? Where was some thick-muscled man to knock him back from the edge? Where do they all go?”
She looks at me the way she does when we are strangers—it happens from time to time—though in seventeen years we’ve never fought, not once. Never a hateful word between us. People are amazed. We just draw back. She on her side of the track, me on mine, until one of us figures a way across. It’s where we are now. She’s sipping her own coffee, stirring with a cinnamon stick and thinking. Combing her hair back with her fingers. Twirling the ring on her finger. Until finally, “I’ve never seen you this down before. You must have known him, known his family.” Her face a perfect oval of concern.
I say to her, “Did you know I grew up in this town? Played in this very house when I was a boy because it belonged to my grandmother Miss Ginny who built it before there was a track. Whose money sent me up north to school and brought me back here to … whatever it is. It’s almost beyond comprehension. Did you know my real name was Quinthony? Not Quentin. But Quinthony. Quinthony Hodges Deagan. It’s one of those black names, like Lakeesha or Gonorrhea Jones.”
“Stop it.”
My face falls down into my hands, and some low moaning sound comes forth. “We need to quit pretending. You and I. We need to quit pretending that we’re horrified by these stories. I mean we can at least be honest, right? That’s what we have instead of hope.”
Then she is there at my shoulders, the hair and the scent of her. Kneading the muscles the way she takes up clay and reaches into the being of it before throwing it on the wheel. “I’ll see you in hell first,” she whispers in my ear. “I’ll drag you back a hundred times. You have no idea how far I’ll go. Now tell me—what really happened?”
And since there are only two of us in a house fit for a family, and since she is strong, I say, “Let me ask you a question.”
Suppose you can’t sleep because you have the same dream every night—that it’s been raining and that there are puddles and rivulets, diamonds and toys scattered about, and the Angel Malachi waiting for you at the end of a long walk. And that he is tall and patient. Thin as a mantis and hungry for souls. But you don’t want to see him. You say to yourself this is a dream, and I am an educated man, and that is just some old fellow who hands out Bibles. One of those homeless who stand outside the gates of the college thrusting little green testaments at anyone who passes, while cars go hissing past even though his trench coat, shiny wet and chitinous, stretched tight against his wings, glistens with liquid light. His hands hooked over a Bible and eyes, yes, burning like brimstone.
Until you have to remind yourself that what you’re seeing is not real.
But in this particular dream the Angel Malachi will be examining several versions of you because he has eyes like a dragonfly and because one version of you goes blundering through a maze like a blind man. And so he puts himself at a place where your paths converge and says, “This really isn’t very complicated.”
Though of course you misunderstand. You go as stiff as a corpse and say, “Good God Almighty! Jesus, mister, you shouldn’t come up on a man like that.” As the angel closes his eyes. Waits. And you stammer on a step or two hoping to leave him behind by saying, “Look, pal, I don’t have anything on me. I left my wallet back at the … I don’t have a nickel.”
And the angel says, “It’s not that kind of hunger.”
Which provokes some cheap fear from you like, “What do you want? Just tell me what you want.”
And the Angel Malachi says, “What do we always want?”
So that’s what I’m asking you.
If you don’t believe in the Walt Disney of it, Karen, then what does he want? If you can’t stomach the fried chicken of it, if you can’t stand in front of them shouting, “Thank you, Jesus,” for crabgrass and aluminum siding, then what the hell does he want? Because I can’t go back to Bible stories. Not after Lonell and the rest of them.
On the patio she finds me after two days with that hanging question, and I’m feeding the books into the fire because I’ve finally made the decision they wanted me to make. I’ll give them three weeks. And they’ll probably take everything that I own. I believe that’s the usual deal.
The fireplace huffs and bellows when the wind whirls, drawing the ashes up like dark confetti, the end of a long process of decomposition. And I’ve noticed this. That first a sheet of paper will crumple in upon itself as if crushed by an invisible hand; and then it will quiver and fall apart, not like rich pine that sizzles in its own juice and then explodes, but like a mummy under eager examination, though of course sometimes it simply smolders, has to be prodded into flames with the poker; and then there is a rush of fire, thick runnels of red and orange that lick halfway up the chimney. Then something like snowflakes, huge three-inch floaters that can be caught in the palm and read. It’s unbelievable but true. The words are not gone at all. You can still read them.
So I burn Bradbury first, that old standby. Then Light in August. Then Tolstoy. Then Milton and Melville together, pages curling up like people in pain. It’s surprising really, how much heat there is in old books. I have to wait a moment until I can add Huckleberry Finn. Mary Shelley. Leaves going red and blue at the margins, yellow-orange at the center like the flames themselves. Some of the steel print engravings send up a green leafy
blaze, from the chemicals I suppose. And pale loose pages fly upward, scattering like quail until they burst into a brilliance I’ve never seen in the classroom, then spiral down on wings of fire. There’s no denying it’s beautiful. No matter what you feel, there’s no denying the beauty of it. I’m seeing what the Nazis saw. And tomorrow I’ll feel what I feel. That’s tomorrow. But right now … There’s much more heat than we realize. I have to lift my hand momentarily and back away. Then stir the ashes. Then add a thin one, a bright blue one by Anne Frank.
The weight of it is almost too much to bear.
Then I sense her beside me, Karen, looking into my mirrored eyes and crying, “Oh my God! Oh Jesus no! Quinn, what are you doing?!”
And I have to calm her of course. I say, “Don’t worry. It runs in my family. We always destroy the evidence. We’ve done it for generations. My great-grandfather. My grandmother Miss Ginny. She once burned an entire house and then built a new one, then married a custodian who worked at the college for over …”
“Quinn, please don’t, please.”
“It’s all right,” I say. “It’s all right. They can’t imagine it, our neighbors. They can’t even imagine me. They think we’re burning trash.”
With her arms around me now. Trying to squeeze the life back into me, work the same silly miracle that they want to work when they lift their sons’ shoulders off the sidewalk and feel the warm blood beneath. Birth-fluid seeping into the soil while they become oblivious to every other need of the universe. That kind of woman. Who’ll fight right up to the gates of hell. Telling me, and the world, with all her strength.
That love is God.
I don’t hate the books. I know them as intimately as I know the angry-frightened woman clutching the shawl, who refuses to be warmed by abstractions. “Listen to me,” she is saying. “You’re not anything until I love you. I don’t understand this, Quinn. You’re brilliant. You’re successful. You’re kind and generous. You and I—right now—are where the world wants to be in fifty years, or a hundred. I’m not going to let that go.”
“So why can’t I just be content?”
“No. Why can’t you realize you’re not responsible for every broken child?”
It takes a while, but finally I tell her, shove aside the cardboard box and sit cradling Ralph Ellison in my hands.
“Because I could have saved him. Once upon a time.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I knew his mother, Silvia, before I knew you. He must have been five or six when I first met her, a bit older when we drifted apart.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Anyhow, I remember one night, just after there was you, sitting out on that porch and jamming with some of the folks from down the way. It seemed so natural then, simply spreading out over the porch and busting some old tunes. Beer in a tub of ice, mosquitoes getting blown back by all that sweet sound, just letting the music take us wherever it would. Must have been six or eight of us with old pawned-up instruments we’d pulled out of the closet. Maybe one or two fellows with some real talent, but it didn’t make any difference. Just some old men with some old songs. James Teague, you know him, sitting on the edge of a rocker blowing trumpet. Some guy named Perry on bass. Harmonica man on the steps, me with that old Gibson thinking I was B. B. King. They had even rolled the piano over into the doorway, and I was thinking, man, this is the way it ought to be.
“I don’t want to make it out to be something wild. It wasn’t. There was plenty of quiet talk in between the notes, joking and carrying on. One or two couples standing in the yard. Maybe somebody dancing, but nothing rowdy enough that you’d notice from the street, or even remember. Just folks unwinding from the day, trying to ease on into tomorrow. That’s all. But it must have looked like a mob to a nine-year-old.
“When the train rumbled by, we didn’t try to compete; we just laid back and let it roll; and I remember letting my eyes drift down the walk to this boy who’d been standing at the outermost edge of the light. Dressed in a white shirt and Sunday pants like somebody’d told him it was a church night. Then walking toward me during the rattle and clang of the train. I knew he was Silvia’s boy. And I knew it must have taken everything he had. Waiting for the train to pass, then whispering into the sudden silence, in that accusatory tone they use when there’s still hope, ‘Somebody said you was my daddy.’
“‘Whoa-ha!’ says the bass man. ‘Here it come!’
“But there was nothing else, just some quiet laughter and this boy. And, for a long time, me. The funny thing is that I didn’t even have to lie. I just said, ‘Son, I’m not your father. Somebody told you wrong.’ Which was the thing that subtracted him down to tears.”
She waits for me to finish, but there isn’t anymore. I love this house. The books. The woman. I’m just trying to make room. That’s the only story I have to tell.
When he was little, Lonell played basketball in my driveway, a loose-packed gravel ramp to nowhere that made it a pass and shoot game. Back then it looked like a sharecropper’s field. Your feet went pounding through ruts, crackle and pop, with the ball taking wild crazy bounces that made little white boys want to cry. They all said it, over and over and over. No blood, no foul. You had to bump and go. You had to turn and shoot into the sun. That’s what they learned from the age of nine. You had to earn that smooth level blacktop down at the schoolyard. You had to be recruited to play on the playground. And that’s why I remember his face. Pain and joy twisted into one fierce effort that made it obvious where he wanted to go.
Pulp Life
At the final hearing, the one where the sentence was set, my judge said he wanted to find justice. That is the phrase he used. And, of course, my parents wanted me at home. That is what the parents always want, although I am convinced that they would have said anything to keep me there. They answered eagerly as the distracted judge, looking for misplaced justice, set forth the provisions. But I do not know what Mrs. Anders wanted. Perhaps her son back. She was a dark and quiet woman who had spent the entirety of her life on a farm just outside our town. Her son had been her only accomplishment; and when it came time for her to hand over the photograph, she walked it to the bench as if she were carrying a wounded bird.
Years later, in the front bedroom of what used to be my parents’ house, this same judge said to me that there is never justice in cases like mine. That it’s never found. The sentence is at best a ragged fiction. “You simply try to ruin as few lives as possible,” he mused. But on the day of that final hearing he went searching for justice, shuffling through papers until he seemed to find it in a moment of inspiration. The only other people in the courtroom on that day were the reporter who wrote the story, an assistant district attorney named Harris, a court recorder, and my own lawyer, who, you might have thought, would have said something. Or maybe she was just thinking what my parents were thinking. That I had just got lucky.
First, however, before my judge went searching among his papers and patting the folds of his robe, he asked me what I remembered. And I said that I did not remember the accident itself because I had been drinking and that I did not remember the hospital because I had been unconscious. Perhaps I did realize at some level that I had been driving and that Jackie and Andrea were both there with me because I could still recall their voices over the deep bass of the music. That night when time stopped. But I did not remember the road or the lights. It was all just a splash of color and pain.
“At least you’re honest,” he said. “What about today, Miss Meyer, do you expect you’ll remember that?” He called me Miss Meyer, I think, because I was seventeen or maybe because he wanted to make a point, since he called my attorney Ms. McBryde and he called Mrs. Anders Mrs. Anders. Those are the details that I remember now, not the actual sentencing but the very beginning of that afternoon when he said to me, “What about today, Miss Meyer, do you think you’ll remember that?” And I did: the numbness in my fingers, the dry, shallow breathing, and the
chill along my legs, all as if he had found what he had been looking for on the far planes of an arctic desert.
I cried back to everyone, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I can do or what I can say,” finally breaking down, not realizing that my body could shake that hard. Ms. McBryde holding me up with one arm. And when my father reached for me, the judge told him to sit down. So I don’t know how long it was before I could hear again. Sometimes I think it’s still going on, that moment, right now. In the future.
“… me ask you about the victim. Do you remember him at all?”
“I didn’t see him. I didn’t even see his truck,” I said. “I didn’t realize there was an intersection until my arms broke, that’s the other thing I can remember, and I’m so sorry and I just want Mrs. Anders to know that….”
“Address the court, Miss Meyer. Don’t speak to anyone else but your attorney.”
“I just wanted her to know.”
“She already knows, Miss Meyer. It doesn’t help.”
“I’m so sorry. I just …”
“Okay, let’s wind this up. Ms. McBryde, do you have anything else?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Harris?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Okay. Okay, that’ll do it. Let’s get this … Where’s that other form? No, the plea agreement, the one before that other one. It’s already gone down? Okay, let me see the one for this one. Okay. Okay, good, that’s what I need. Let’s get this one in the hopper. Get this one—where’s my pen?—in the hopper. All right. Miss Meyer, there are two types of felony DWI in this state, the habitual offender statute and death by motor vehicle while intoxicated. You’ve been charged and you have pled guilty to violation of the second of these statutes, and the court has heard statements from your attorney, from Mr. Harris, and from the family of the deceased. In considering your sentence the court has taken note that you are a minor child, living at home, with no previous convictions and thus with prospects of a long, useful, and even rewarding life. But the court has also taken note that the victim, Mr. Anders, was planning to be married and did himself look forward to a full and happy life as breadwinner, husband, and father. It is this latter prospect that you have taken away. Your reckless disregard has reached far beyond one life, Miss Meyer, and in dealing with an adult offender I would ordinarily offer a sentence of seven to twenty years confinement. In this case, however, I see nothing but senseless waste and pain associated with every aspect. I’ve taken into consideration your admission of guilt, your obvious remorse, and the very gracious and compassionate statement by the Anders family. In accord with all those things, I hereby sentence you to fourteen years supervised probation, permanent revocation of your driver’s license, participation in an alcohol treatment program to be approved by your supervisor, and this additional provision—that from this day until the end of your stated probation, with no exception, appeal, or extenuation, you be required to carry upon your person a photograph of the deceased as a perpetual reminder of the consequences of your actions. If at any time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, your probation supervisor finds that you are not in physical possession of this photograph, he or she will report so to this court, and an immediate sentence of five to seven years confinement in the state penal system will be ordered. Do you understand the provisions of this sentence?”
The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Page 17
