Brothers and Keepers

by John Edgar Wideman

  Pleaded with the cats but they had their minds made up. Wasn’t no moving em so I told em, If I don’t see you no more in this world, see you in the next. And don’t be late. That’s Jimi Hendrix. My favorite line from one his songs. That’s what I told them and I was sorry to see them go but no way I was going back. We come too far. Wasn’t no back.

  They leave me off at the bus station. I gets on the bus to L.A. Sit there with my eyes closed, crunched down in the seat. Getting sicker and sicker now. Don’t want to see nothing or hear nothing. It’s just me by myself and I’m trying to curl up so I’m halfway comfortable in the goddamn seat cause it’s still a long way to L.A. I got a day, maybe two or three to ride. All’s I know is I feel like shit and there’s like this heavy, heavy cloud and my head’s in the middle and it’s stinking and hard to breathe but I just want to sink down in it deeper and forget everything. So many thoughts running through my brain afterwhile it’s like everything gets all jammed together. I ain’t really thinking about nothing then. Just sinking deeper and getting sicker. The motor starts up. The bus be shaking like it does when the engine’s revving up. Then I hear the doors squeeze open and all this noise. Them fools changed their minds again. Here come Mike and Cecil flying on the bus. Ain’t had time to pack the suitcases. Clothes hanging out, falling all over the place. They throwing suitcases up on the rack and picking up clothes and stuffing clothes back in the bags. Sick as I was, I had to laugh. Cause the driver ain’t paying them fools no mind. They ain’t on the bus good yet and their stuff is still flying around everywhere but the driver got his bus pulling out the station and Mike and Cecil trying to hold on and hold still and bouncing round like pool balls in the aisle. Everybody on the bus looking. Wondering what is this? What these simple niggers up to? Must be running from something. Acted like I didn’t know them two. Stared at em scrambling around just like everybody else.

  No sooner than we got to the outskirts of Chicago Mike gets off again. His seat ain’t warm yet but he figures he better go back to the bus station and pick up his car and find someplace to park it. Left it at a meter. Talk about some lame shit. But he’s right about going back. If they tow it, they’ll check the license and registration. Might be hot by now. Don’t know what they know back in Pittsburgh, so Mike gets off to take care of his car. He says he’ll catch the next bus, meet us in L.A. Didn’t know it then, but I won’t see Mike again till after Christmas. Day after my birthday when he showed up in Johnny-Boy’s room in Ogden. Hotel clerk told Mike, your friends not here, but Johnny-Boy might know where he’s at. I screamed when I saw Mike. Like seeing a ghost. Like something magic bringing us together again. I’m thinking, where’d this nigger come from? Been six weeks since I seen him, then there he is sitting on Johnny-Boy’s bed. Like I sure didn’t know when he left he’d be gone that long. Didn’t know he’d be in jail and outa jail and cops hot on his ass and he’d be smoking back and forth cross the whole damn country two or three times before we hooked up again. Didn’t know I wouldn’t never get to L.A. Whole lot of things I didn’t know when Mike split to get his car. Just said, Take care man. Later, man. Catch you in L.A. So it’s just me and Cec. I’m glad for the company but it don’t make me feel no better. Righteous sick now. Takes a hit of wine Cecil brought on board and that just makes me sicker for a while but then it puts me to sleep.

  I lose track of time long about now. Sick as a dog. Nodding on and off. Don’t know how long I was sitting in the bus. Night when I woke up. Or kinda woke up. Days and nights start running together about then. Didn’t really get myself straight till I got to Ogden and copped. But first there’s still me and Cecil on the bus. It’s night and we’re in Iowa or some damn place. Cecil tells me he thinks it’s Iowa cause I don’t be knowing from nothing. Could of been West Hell or New Mexico or the Promised Land. It was by me, that’s for sure, cause my eyes wasn’t focusing and my head was bad. What it comes down to is, I didn’t give a fuck where I was. Cause I was nowhere. Nodding and drifting and sick. You know how hard it is to sleep on a bus anyway. The road keeps coming up through the wheels and jerking you awake. Well, when you sick it’s that much worse. Thought I was gon puke a couple times. What saved me was having nothing in my stomach to bring up. Cept a hit of wine and it knew better. So I wasn’t sleeping. Just kinda drifting. Rolling around and spinning and every now and then I’d snap wide awake. Like a flashbulb shot off in my brain and I could see something bright as day right in front my eyes. But it’d be gone in a second. Flashing just long enough to get me good and wake. Just enough to bust my sleep wide open. Then I’d try to nod off again. Feel the bus taking every bump on the road. Boom-boom-boom, like beating on a drum. So I wasn’t wake but couldn’t sleep neither. Kept having nasty little split-second dreams. Pictures of bad things, ugly things snatching at me, keeping me from really sleeping.

  Think it was the fact we was standing still finally woke me out my daze. Bus was empty. Cecil’s not in the seat cross the aisle where he been stretched out. I musta been talking to myself cause I heard voices and seemed like I was waiting for somebody to answer me. Dumb shit. Half wake and half sleep and having a conversation with myself. Where is we, man? But ain’t a soul on the bus to answer.

  Trying to get myself together. Sweating terrible inside my clothes but I’m cold, too. Flashed on one the dreams I been having. A nightmare really, cause everything in it turned around. Tanya was in it but she wasn’t Tanya. She was a goat. All kinds of nasty goings-on but all I can remember now is Tanya was a goat.

  Wherever we was, it was cold. Just a couple steps from the bus to the station but it was a different world outside. That cold air stone woke me up. Cleared my head right quick. Shivering by the time I got to the snack bar.

  I remember trying to drink a cup of coffee to warm up. Sitting shivering at the counter. Shaking so much I spilled most the coffee in the saucer. Then what make it so bad I dumped the saucer. Thought to myself what the fuck am I doing here a thousand miles from nowhere spilling coffee all over this man’s clean counter?

  Then I spots Cecil. On the phone again. Thought he was in the bathroom or something, but there he is on the goddamn phone again.

  I’m too miserable to say a word. Just stand there and stare at him.

  It’s gon be alright. My mom said they’ll go easy if I turn myself in.

  By now I’m disgusted. Just plain tired of this yo-yo back-and-forth shit. Tell him: If you got to go, you got to go. Cecil’s my man so I had to say one more time what I said in the first place about going back. Then I just shook my head and let it be. He’s a grown man. He got to make his own choice.

  Turned out we’s at a rest stop. Bus going in the opposite direction, headed for Pittsburgh, stopped there too. Cecil said one be through in the next couple hours and he was heading for home. My bus was ready to leave. Gave Cecil money to buy a ticket. It had started snowing. I got on my bus. Looked out the window and there was Cecil outside the station standing in the snow.

  Somewhere in all that riding I remember a sign saying Lincoln, Nebraska. Funny how some things strike home. Stay with you. Like Cecil standing in the snow. Like this lesson in fourth grade on states and capitals. For some damned reason states and capitals was something I dug. Couldn’t wait to get home so I could memorize them. Lincoln, Nebraska was special. Stuck in my mind. When I saw the sign saying Lincoln I remembered school and the lesson on states and capitals. Maybe it was something about Lincoln freeing the slaves. Maybe it was the funny way Nebraska sounded, Indian or something. Alls I know I got off on Lincoln. I was happy I seen that Lincoln sign. Seemed like my luck might turn.

  One place we stopped had a liquor store cross the street. Copped two half-pints of gin and a quart of wine.

  The bus pretty empty when I got on with my taste. Cecil was gone. Only one other black guy, an old dude sitting in the back. Loneliness starts to set in. My crew done split. I’m sick. In the worst trouble of my life. Thinking about the guy got killed. Just a young dude. Not much older than me. I d
on’t know nobody and nobody don’t know me. Out the window ain’t nothing but miles and miles of nowhere. Maybe I can find Poochie in L.A. Maybe not. Everything’s coming down on me. Thinking about home. Thinking about never seeing my people and my friends again. Feeling guilty. Feeling real sorry for myself. Know Ima get sicker before I get better. Just me and my gin. You know what I mean. The stone blues. Looking at myself and seeing how bad I done fucked up and how pitiful I was sitting on that damned bus going nowhere. About ready to cry, I was so sorry for myself.

  Needed some company. Wasn’t doing myself no good sitting there with all that heavy shit on my mind. The old dude looked like the type of guy be happy to crack a quart of wine with me. I goes back to where he’s at and we get it on. Pretty soon we kills the wine and passing the gin back and forth. The old dude been everywhere. He’s a storyteller. Every town we pass he knows somebody lives there or used to live there or heard about something crazy going on. He’s hip. Got a bunch of hustles keep him in dough. Welfare checks coming in six or seven places. Little shady jobs he does for people. A real together old dude. All I got to do is ask a question and he’s off on another story. Seems like he been traveling all his life. On the road. Half the time he just be bullshitting, making up lies. But he knows a lot. Don’t matter to me whether he’s lying or not cause the miles is going faster.

  Asks me tell him a little bout myself. He’s hip. He knows a guy like me, nice clothes, money in my pocket, a down rap, he knows I got to be running from something. So I tells him I’m Robin White. Big time pimp from New York. Had to leave the Apple fast. Stepped on some people’s toes. Big, bad people. Had to split. Leave most my shit behind. On my way to the Coast. Got connections out there. Start my business up again in L.A. My lady’s gon meet me. Yeah. Life’s a bitch, ain’t it? On top one day. Running the next. Had to leave all my pretty cars and pretty women behind. Yeah, I miss the good life but it’s just a matter of time. Be back on top again.

  We’s laughing and joking and having a good old lying time. Best of buddies by the time the bus stops in Ogden, Utah. What I see out the window reminds me of home. For the first time in I don’t know how long, it’s the stone ghetto. I ask the old guy about Ogden. Tell him I got that old-home sensation when I looked out the window and seen the ghetto.

  Oh, yeah. You got that right. It’s the stone ghetto. And sure. He knows lots of people in Ogden. Ogden ain’t a bad town. Yeah. Plenty black folk in Ogden. Been here for years. You find anything you want in Ogden. Niggers living everywhere out West. You just got to know where to find em. No trouble finding them in Ogden.

  He’s like a history book. Don’t know why I can’t remember his name. Maybe he never told me. Think he did but it won’t come to me now. Don’t matter. He’s Tom or Sam. Something like that. I’ll call him Pops. Old Pops. Well, Pops is steady rapping about Ogden. Seems like he lived there a long time. He’s going on and on about how nice a place it is till we get to Salt Lake City. Talks me into paying a visit to Ogden. Talks hisself into going back. We get off the bus in Salt Lake. Catch another bus back to Ogden.

  This Chinese lady in Ogden. She runs it, man. She owns a hotel and a restaurant, a store. She got the whole joint tied down. Collecting all the winos’ welfare checks. See, they be eating in her restaurant and staying in her hotel. Pops, he’s hipping me to what’s going down. Used to work for the old Chinese bitch sometimes. We in her little restaurant drinking coffee and Pops telling me all kinda stuff about Ogden. I ain’t never heard of Ogden before but the way he’s talking it sounds just like home. Like the set at home.

  Sitting drinking coffee. My jones down on me but it feels good being off that goddamn bus. Fulla gin and wine, I’m hurting but I’m feeling better cause Ogden be sounding like a place I can handle. You know. Get myself together. Looking round me and it’s sure nuff the ghetto. What’s different is it ain’t full of niggers. Chinese people and cowboy-looking dudes and bums, but ain’t no jitterbugs. Hey, Pops, man. Where’s the young bloods? Gotta be some young guys hanging round somewhere.

  Right when I’m asking Pops the question, Johnny-Boy bops by the window. Hip walk, process, Do Rag round his head. Trifling-looking dude in this trench coat trying to be with it but it’s so dirty you know the cat ain’t been nowhere and ain’t going nowhere but the street I’m thinking, Where’s the niggers, and here come this trifling dude and Pops knocks on the window. Johnny-Boy strolls inside, sits down.

  Johnny-Boy. How you doing, fella? This my man, Robin. He’s new in town.

  Pleased to meet you, man. You know where I can cop some reefer, man?

  Sure, blood. I can get anything in this town. Reefer, boogie. Johnny-Boy get anything in this town.

  The way he said “boogie,” I knew just what he meant. Johnny-Boy ain’t nothing but a street punk. I’m digging that from the front. Trifling little dude. But he would know where the boogie was. Got his slick head and high-water bell bottoms, he know he cool. Like something out the fifties. Like something the cat drug in. Typical hippy-dip ghetto brother. That was Johnny. Nothing to him. Strong wind get up under that raggedy trench coat and blow him away. But he’s cool. He’s hip. Yeah. Trying to get over. He knows where it’s at. But you got to be careful with a brother like that. Turn on you in a minute. A snake. A street rat. He be round the action but he’s trifling. Don’t want to have no more to do with a dude like that than you got to.

  Boogie. Reefer. Anything.

  Me and Pops at the table in this Chinese lady’s restaurant. It’s getting late in the afternoon and the stone ghetto walks in and sits down wit us. A thousand miles from home and I’m thinking, I ain’t been in town ten minutes and already I done found the action. Things is ready to start up again. Funny part about it is, we’s drinking our coffee in the Lincoln Hotel. That’s the name the place—Lincoln Hotel. Ain’t that a bitch? I’m thinking maybe my luck is changing. Maybe things gon get better. . . .

  II. SUMMER 1982

  One more time. Summer 1982. The weather in Pittsburgh is unbearably hot. Two weeks of high temperatures and high humidity. Nights not much better than the days. Nights too hot for sleeping, days sapping what’s left of the strength the sleepless nights don’t replenish. You get sopping wet climbing in or out of a car. Especially if your car’s little and not air-conditioned, like my mother’s Chevette. Nobody remembers the last time they felt a cool breeze, nobody remembers pulling on clothes and not sweating through them in five minutes. “Unbearable” is my mother’s word. She uses it often but never lightly. In her language it means the heat is something you can’t escape. The sticky heat’s a burden you wake up to every morning and carry till you’re too exhausted to toss and turn anymore in your wet sheets. Unbearable doesn’t mean a weight that gets things over with, that crushes you once and for all, but a burden that exerts relentless pressure. Whether you’re lifting a bag of groceries from a shopping cart into the furnace your car becomes after sitting closed for twenty minutes in the Giant Eagle parking lot, or celebrating the birth of a new baby in the family, the heat is there. A burden touching, flawing everything. Unbearable is not that which can’t be borne, but what must be endured forever.

  Of course the July dog days can’t last forever. Sooner or later they’ll end. Abruptly. Swept away by one of those violent lightning-and-thunder storms peculiar to Pittsburgh summers. The kind signaled by a sudden disappearance of air, air sucked away so quickly you feel you’re falling. Then nothing. A vast emptiness rubbing your skin. The air’s gone. You’re in a vacuum, a calm, still, vacated space waiting for the storm to rush in. You know the weather must turn, but part of the discomfort of being in the grip of a heat wave or any grave trouble is the fear that maybe it won’t end. Maybe things will stay as miserable as they are.

  Nothing changes. Nothing remains the same. One more visit to the prison, only this time, after I dropped my mother off at work, I tried a new route. The parkway had been undergoing repairs for two years. I’d used it anyway, in spite of detours and traffic jams.
But this time I tried a shortcut my buddy Scott Payne had suggested. Scott was right; his way was quicker and freer of hassles. I’d arrived at Western Penitentiary in record time. Yet something was wrong. The new route transported me to the gates but I wasn’t ready to pass through. Different streets, different buildings along the way hadn’t done the trick, didn’t have the power to take me where I needed to go because the journey to visit my brother in prison was not simply a matter of miles and minutes. Between Homewood and Woods Run, the flat, industrialized wasteland beside the river where the prison’s hidden, there is a vast, uncharted space, a no-man’s land where the traveler must begin to forget home and begin to remember the alien world inside “The Walls.” At some point an invisible line is crossed, the rules change. Visitors must take leave of the certainties underpinning their everyday lives.

  Using the parkway to reach Woods Run had become part of the ritual I depended upon to get me ready to see my brother. Huge green exit signs suspended over the highway, tires screaming on gouged patches of road surface, the darkness and claustrophobia of Squirrel Hill Tunnel, miles of abandoned steel-mill sheds, a mosque’s golden cupola, paddle-wheeled pleasure boats moored at the riverbank, the scenes and sensations I catalogue now as I write were stepping stones. They broke the journey into stages, into moments I could anticipate. Paying attention to the steps allowed me to push into the back of my mind their inevitable destination, the place where the slide show of images was leading me.