The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  But candlelight eliminates clutter. Two tongues wiggle and wriggle as one.

  Later, Carl hits Muriel with a slug of whiskey. She sips. She asks him what he wants. He lies. “You.”

  (He admits Truth silently: I don’t want a wife; I want a non-stop parade of belly dancers.)

  Now, Carl walks Muriel home, seven blocks south, sauntering from North to Cornwallis. Their trek is quiet: She holds his arm. Lovers getting their breaths back. Then, she poses a test.

  “Carl, why doncha take me to a flick tomorrow night?”

  Carl is pleased to deny her: “I’m taking Marina to the movies.”

  “Why her and not me?”

  “I have feelings for Mar.”

  Muriel retracts her arm, strikes a buffalo stance: “Don’t mess up your prayer sessions with the Sunday school teacher!”

  “I’ll try not to let that happen.”

  Now, Muriel asks, pitiably, “Carl, we have something serious, don’t we?”

  Carl delivers false hope: “I’ve never said that I don’t like you.”

  “Okay, then, take Miss White out. But don’t have too good a time.”

  “Don’t worry yourself.”

  The pair parts inhospitably, with callousness from him and Calumny from her. Muriel feels despoiled and discarded. Uncle Tom, Tricky Dick, and Dirty Harry seem awful pleased to plough her sex and ply her sheets, but that’s all.

  When she sees Carl stride away from her, not even proffering a good-night kiss, Muriel suspects it’d be better to see the backs of all men—from a distance. Tears spring up, but she be the daughter of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, a woman born to blues: she can be bruised, but never broken. Her own mother died scrubbing the toilet of a rich white man (likely her father, maybe Dr. Fullerton). Still, she got born.

  Back home, Carl thinks he likes Muriel because he likes taking her from Bajan Dent and—also—from the Yankee Tars. He loves Marina: but she half teases, while Muriel pleases all the way. Carl opens a sailor-left-behind-copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (Oh, to be Henry! To have June Miller on her back and Anaïs Nin on her knees!)

  Forget such analyses—or diagnoses. Carl can’t spurn Muriel. He can have her—lots—but Marina is nearly as remote as a glass-encased trophy. Laura is flighty: she flits into town, then flits out. She might call; she might not. She counts as a conquest, but she’s out of sight, out of mind. Mississippi’s Avril Beauchamps is still just-for-fun, really great fun. Muriel is, paradoxically, equally frustrating and dependable.

  For her part, Muriel despises Carl’s instability, his immaturity, but she likes Liz II. The bike brings heat. It melts thighs open. The machine’s more trustworthy and more thrilling than is Carl. She loves having the wind comb through her hair: it is as enlivening as liquor after a day of washing white people’s linen, clothes, dishes, cutlery, pots, pans, glasses, and bodies. She feels fresh clean again after the sordid looks or filthy words or actually dirtying hands that she fends off all day. Astraddle Carl’s seat, she feels she sweeps through the streets or down highways as if she’s a movie camera, taking panning shots along the way.

  Carl cares little, of course, for her feelings. He is oblivious to his treasons of Love (which are heartfelt) and his treacheries toward women. Betrayal is the natural outcome, he wagers, of Betrothal. He exhibits a puritanical scowl, but it is not up to him to represent Virtue in a community where it is—as it is everywhere—always more theoretical than fact.

  Carl presumes that lovemaking is superior to romancing, and a whole lot more honest—as well as rapid—without the necessity for continuous entanglement. He’s a Coloured man trying to negotiate a white world that wants him to be a safe, smiling servant, and black women who want him to be a respectable husband and a responsible father, raising clean children in a paid-off house. But what if he wants to be an artist? To escape the railway? To live more like Picasso and less like a preacher? What if he doesn’t want to be merely middle class, married, monogamous, and mortgaged?

  Sunday, July 19

  Muriel telephones Carl, asking him to visit. He hesitates, for the suspense. Then he says, “By all means, I’ll drop by. In a jiffy.” Then he gripes, “I haven’t heard from you for almost a week. Is Freddy already back in port?”

  Muriel pleases Carl: “Fred’s been trying to get me back. But I don’t want him. I’m calling you.”

  He conjures their previous pleasure. Carl tells Muriel, “I’ll bring a nightcap.”

  “Please bring rum or wine. I think I’ve the flu.”

  Her statement shocks Carl. He fears the ailment is code for a Coloured woman who is in trouble. If so, who’s the culprit?

  “Lemme drop some rum by you; you can make a grog. No socializing till you’re shipshape.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “I’ll be by. Ciao.”

  Carl runs the rum over, plus honey. He bounds up the dark steps to her door, but he don’t stay: not to be compromised . . . In the harbour, darkling ships fade in and out of fog.

  Friday, July 24

  Carl’s phone jangles like a banshee: “Muriel’s fainted and lost pints of blood.”

  Carl guns Liz II over to Cornwallis. He clatters up the pepper-steeped, boiled-cabbage-reeking stairs. Lola unhinges the door, yells, “You did Muriel a fucking wrong!”

  “Shut your foul mouth! You’re not helping matters!”

  “Black men are shoe-squashed shit, worth less than tripe is to dogs.”

  Carl regards Muriel, my darling, on the floor, a white tea towel reddening between her legs. Unconscious now, she’d been moaning for help. The oozing stain exhibits an oxblood dullness.

  Carl opens her blouse and sets a pillow under her head. She awakes. She’s so weak, so woozy, she can’t even groan. He snaps open the fridge, takes out milk, sets it to her lips to sip. Some of the milk dribbles white down her dark chin; the blood—twixt her licorice-tint legs—trickles red. He figures—worriedly—that Muriel’s suffered a miscarriage.

  (But whose once-upon-a-time child is—was—it? His or Fred’s or another’s?)

  Carl dials an ambulance—the first thing weeping, useless Lola should’ve done. O whirs and clicks; the operator answers. (Carl almost expects to hear his mother.)

  The cherry-topped, uncheering but screeching, vehicle speeds. White men in white uniforms—resembling soda jerks—leap out and slide the white-sheeted Muriel within. Carl rides with Muriel—my girl—in the back. (Her complexion’s a pastel purple, and she complains of headaches. The medics mask her: oxygen intoxicates, like ether.) At the Victoria General Hospital, Muriel is admitted, and Carl tells her to “Get well soon.”

  (Is it relevant to say, “I love you”? He does. It’s true for that moment.)

  Back across the garrison peninsula, this saltwater, Atlantic outcrop, Carl lopes. The sky has an odour of yellow and a colour of rain. Appalling clouds smoke. Afternoon sobs. Was Muriel’s bleeding the extinction of his lineage? Another human starting—and ending—as slime?

  Outside Muriel’s rooming house, adjacent to the Schwartz spice warehouse, neighbours stand under biting mist, trading news about Miss Dixon’s “accident.” Carl feels as self-conscious as a headline. Sorrow racks his ribs. He weeps as if wounded—sharply—in his heart. He hopes he weeps also for Muriel, and their presumptive child, his stymied Fatherhood.

  Carl smells the salt and tears and pepper in the Atlantic-born breeze: the calculated aroma of Grief.

  Back at his place, he hammers rum. Alcoholism proves a subtle Catholicism: he gets drunk, but he don’t give a damn.

  Life is as harrowing as a miscarriage. Carl’s learned this mantra by mishap.

  Recall January 1959: A woman in Arles, France, suckling her infant, loses her head when she leans out from her train and into the path of an oncoming train. Her infant, instantly an orphan, still nursing contentedly, sucks in heedless mama’s milk with headless mama’s blood.

  The last the London, England, optician sees: the robber’s scissors
penetrating slickly, simultaneously, his eye sockets.

  Closer to home, fire incinerates the Dalhousie University Theatre. Also up in flames goes a papier-mâché miniature Venice. No fireman can play Othello (not even in blackface) and save the representative republic. No, they play Nero: their equipment can’t wash out this inferno.

  Life is as harrowing as a miscarriage. In June this year, a Hollywood stunt pilot’s body is chipped from a California glacier. He likely crashed in 1932, while filming the aerial finale of King Kong. Since then, scattered biplane parts have surfaced, but only now have mountain climbers found a goggled and helmeted head, disgorged from the ice. The man’s whole body, well-preserved, is now being exhumed from the thousand-year-old glacier, where it’s been encased for twenty-seven years.

  Pursued by RCMP in Alberta, two thieves dive into a pile of horse manure—fertilizer—and suffocate. When they decay, no one is able to separate their stench from that of the animal waste, and so their bones are spread over the fields, along with cigarette lighters, eyeglasses, dentures, belts, boots, and bits of rags.

  A century-old Coloured man in Mississippi, born into slavery, shocks everyone by awakening in his own coffin, and sitting up calmly, a bit stiff, and asking his “mourners” for “a whiskey and a woman.” Emerson Dickinson was at his own wake, for, having been found cold and limp some days before, his death had been pronounced. A widower for some decades, the “deceased” fathered his youngest child at age seventy-five with a woman aged thirty-five. He’s known to love his moonshine. When he sits up in the coffin, Dickinson startles a forty-year-old cousin, who drops dead instantly, thanks to a massive heart attack.

  After Muriel’s miscarriage—that subtraction—Carl feels a deep, sharp crisis because Life that he could have sponsored—or overseen—is gone, and he sees that he faces again a treadmill of pursuing quarrelling woman after quarrelling woman; some dismissive, others disagreeable. What’s the value of his testicles? Just two hanging bags of dirt?

  Smoking is a waste of breath, but smokers leave behind, at least, ashtrays full of cigarette butts. What of Fornication? Aren’t offspring the proof—the catch, the capture—of Pleasure? Carl looks at himself hard: nothin to show for all his fornicatin . . .

  Feeling still nervously culpable for Muriel’s loss, Carl rides to Cornwallis Street African Baptist Church for the first time in months. Where Grampy Waters once held forth. The occasion is a funeral sermon, one that might rekindle his own Faith and also help him mourn the passing of Muriel’s, and maybe his, “child”—tissue half-animal and half-syrup. (Carl never names the failed being a “fetus”: too clinical a term. Whoever this other was.)

  Rev. Ignatius Map’s sermon re: dead Edward Dawson is hot enough to raise up Hell. Maestro doesn’t praise or defame Dawson. The unpainted cadaver, already entered into Eternity, exudes a sallow majesty—a sand-drab modesty.

  Dawson is dead because he tripped and struck his head on the sidewalk outside 160 Harvard Street. The talk goes, “Eddy tried to jump over his own feet, but crossed em up. He crash down like rotten timber. His forehead got a big gouge in it; his nose got mash flat. Ed’s big head look all dents and holes. Blood gush out all over the place—from more than one place.”

  His face vertically scarred by a razor-blade fight in a Bermuda divinity school (over the yes-or-no issue of Circumcision), the bulbous-nosed preacher lets his elegy hover overhead, dusting off the deceased’s life, polishing the gleaming bits. But Map also admits that “Br’er Dawson” had flailed within Satan’s grasp, “torn by the crooked talon of Bacchus and ripped by the painted talon of Jezebel.” Frankly, “when ya die, censorship dies too. Then, Truth blazes as bright as God’s love or Hell’s flames.

  “But Eddy wasn’t hopelessly lost in drink—nor was he morbidly trapped by perfumes. In the beginning, and at the end, Christ was there; His salving Mercy was there—never ineffective and always on time . . .

  “All of Dawson’s herein before-mentioned sins, whatever their number (some known to us, but all known to God), are hereby erased, reduced to zero, because his name is in that sweet Book of Our Lord, He who holds the pen and checks off the names of His Believers. He has whited out the tally of Ed Dawson’s sins.

  “If we can count his sins now, it’s because there’ll be no more. What about you? Your sins are still countless—and there may be yet innumerable others before your uncountable breaths reach their end . . . Count on it!

  “You need to consider your own predicament, your own prospects for Heaven—or for that Other Place . . . Sainthood gotta be your striving!

  “The laws of man are full of spite and bile, but the grace of God is a salve and a sweet. The Law spit on our Lord and hammered Him to a cross. But the Love of God brought Him striding out His tomb. Don’t you want—and need—that Love and that Mercy too?”

  The congregation moans, weeps, hollers, screeches: “Lord, have mercy! Mercy!” Yells: “Pity, Lord Jesus, pity!” The black-garbed choir sways; folks swoon.

  “Our brother, our blood, is ours no more. His body is—like all of ours—a mess of dust; it will be a womb of worms. But his soul is happy to be alive with Christ Jesus!”

  Rev. Map is so intense, he is sweating and spitting as he orates and illustrates. Th’assembly gasps, shouts, claps, hoots, and just gets excited, ecstatic, or cries out, at the most pitiful or most poignant moments in his catalogue of saints and sinners (almost naming names), and striking fear into some hearts (and loins and bowels), and arousing desire for salvation (if it’s not too late) in those of others—the monotonously sinful.

  Map’s words assail the church. He be all pep and pepper and smarting pounce and bite: “That sugar-face, big-foot, fast-talkin Deceiver, yessiree, Master Devil, Mr. Justice Satan, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Laws, and Doctor of Divinity, got some of you bamboozled. You think you’re livin well: but you’re already in Hell. You think you’re goin to Heaven, but you’re already sixty thousand feet under: that sky you think you’re seein is only buried turquoise.

  “Some of you think sin is just a little itch, a touch of a fever, a small cough, but nothing to cloud over your life, your career, of . . . glitter! I’m commissioned to tell you, that little bug you have, that pain in your backside, that ache in your belly, well, brothers, sisters, that there’s your Mortality. And after your precious, proud flesh is finished, I say, after the doctors are finished, after the morticians are finished, after the lawyers have read out the will and the tax collector gets his cut, and after your loved ones stop grievin and start partying again [shouts and amens from the assembly], why, then, you face the Judgment. Are you ready?

  “Listen up, brethren and sistren, you’re followin the Devil, all delighted, and drunk, deceitful, dulterous . . . Oh, yes, I know! You livin high up on the low-life, or gobblin high up on the low-down hog. It won’t be a pretty vista to see you get flung down, screamin, into the abyss of flames, while Satan just grins and tee-hees.

  “In Hell, blood lights up everything. Each corpse is ooze and pus and rotting flesh. Your pearls are maggots and your halo is flies. Down there, you’ll become nostalgic for freezing wind and Arctic snow. You’ll miss January a lot!

  “The Devil is the Deceiver. Don’t you know that? His ugliness is precise and his treachery is clear. When he is right, when the Devil is right, he is self-righteously erroneous. When he is wrong, he does wrong religiously. He’s an artful hypocrite, quotin scripture left, right, and sideways, to trap you into Destruction.

  “He take a woman, and he use her til she be useless, brother! He take your lust tools, man, and smash and mash em up with disease.

  “People, good people, pay attention! Satan is a chameleonic zebra: black with blacks, white with whites, a Tory with Tories, and a Grit with Grits. He tries to hide and dissemble—just like a rat or a roach. But you know the righteous saints stand out bright as day from ye evildoers.

  “Let’s hear some music to drive the Devil out and beckon Christ on in.” A berserk organ pipes
up. “It’s a grave, grim error not to fear the Lord.

  “With the Redeemer at your side, you can cakewalk through the catacombs; you can lindy-hop into Heaven. Otherwise, Paradise disappears.

  “Brethren! Sistren! God has given you this very day to set down your burdens and take up The Cross, to mend what is broken, to repair what is ill, to displace night with shining sunlight, and to cease your vain yearnings. Take it! Do not confuse Jerusalem with Gomorrah.”

  A fanatical crooner—a soprano—lets loose spontaneously, and every note is pitched high, piercing head and heart. She seems bent on lifting heavenward the congregation by the power of her lungs alone. The ravenous drumming of hands on knees and of shoes on wood backs this instant, ingenious spiritual.

  Carl thinks: Humanity is created by Lust and motivated by Greed. The desire to fuck and the desire to feast outweigh the fear of Disease and the fear of Despair.

  At the close of Map’s fire-breathing sermon, sixteen white-robed black saints are baptized. Surprisingly, the water doesn’t boil when a few of the suspect candidates are dunked in the pool behind the pulpit.

  If he has lost—in Muriel—a son or daughter, Carl wonders where that tiny spirit has winged, based on the putative parents’ sins, up to God or down to the other place. He wishes he could know.

  Friday, July 31

  Eager to view the parades and cannonades gracing the Royal Visit, Carl works only a half-shift, from four to six p.m., at the CNR station. Just laundry and luggage toting. He’ll join thousands saluting the Queen and Il Principe (Philip) today. He’s added a pint of oil to the machinery of Liz II. (She was awful low.) The bike contraltos beautifully. The wheels and engine growl wolves’ vowels: lope, run down, track, wheel, lunge . . .

  Although she didn’t spend the Depression consuming Carl’s brand of bread and jam (two slices of bread jammed together), Carl favours the Queen: she resembles another desirable brunette—Darlene (Darlin) Naas—who’d romped with Pete Paris in that stinking Italy Cross cod shack, years ago. Easy for Carl to compare Naas and Her Majesty and to note the alliance of their perfections: sugar complexion, black crepe hair, and cherry-cool, kissable lips. Too, the Queen’s only nine years Carl’s senior. Once he was old enough to understand that Elizabeth was the Dominion’s Very Special Own Princess, Carl had to admire her pluck in the Anti-Fascist War, which he canvassed in the papers he dropped at Haligonian stoops. Princess Elizabeth could’ve been a Sadean heroine—tart and taut, likely ferocious at horsewhipping captured Nazis. Certainly, the monarch is more to Carl’s elitist liking than is the brunette pin-up beauty Bettie Page. Nor does Carl ever forget Aunt Pretty’s Royal Command Performance for the royal couple, and so Carl knows he’s but two degrees of separation from the monarch. For reasons of persistent, long-distance Affection (crossing vast oceans of Religion, Class, and Race), also ineffably sexual, Carl has christened his machine after the monarch, thus connecting the German roots of the House of Windsor back to the makers of his motorcycle. The mischievous poetry of the nomenclature also supports his sense that he be “ridin the Queen”—metaphysically, at least. His steady dream is to jump up and down on Liz II, to tread down and throttle this palimpsest queen (quean), and slick swift outta any trap—Economic, Racial, Romantic, i.e., the clutches of Error.