Holding Pattern

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  Jesus fixed it so we won’t never have to work, Glory said.

  Yes, ma’am.

  You ain’t no slave.

  Yes, ma’am.

  Niggers shouldn’t work for the white man. She mailed out anonymous donations to black businesses and instructed Lincoln in the art of writing chain letters—words are dreams—(a dollar enclosed in the envelope), which read: Praise Jesus, you lucky so and so. Cast down your bucket where you are. Pass it on. Pass it on.

  Lincoln back-combed his fine curly hair into one thick pomaded wave. Polished his teeth and took time to evaluate the possibilities of his appearance. His eyes were his best feature: large, wet, and full of—his women believed—the tears of a sensitive masculinity. Sensitive teeth, sensitive stomach, he made his way to the kitchen—cool air playing over his naked body—where he breakfasted on powdered foods, the stuff of astronauts, then slipped into a white linen shirt and slacks fitted with a thin black leather belt. He removed a photograph that he had received several weeks earlier, from an Emmanuel Lead, who had written a letter on the back of the photograph in thick-tipped lasting black marker, from the black file cabinet next to his bed.

  Dear Sir,

  I entered the army because I come from a patriotic and Catholic family. Imagine, a black patriot and Catholic. Nevertheless, I wanted to be a career soldier. Reality changed many of my views, although I’m still a God-fearing Christian. Your work has helped me and many of the other brothers. We have hardened into one flame. We hold monthly discussions of your books and, in your honor, have started the General Black-Veteran Business Association. We also sell certificates of honorary African American citizenship to white soldiers. We’ve gotten some opposition from a few fire-eating racists who would put a black eye into our efforts. But we endure. After our release from active duty, we plan to start a guerrilla marketing firm. On behalf of the association, I thank you. Find here a picture of me and my beautiful wife, Frieda. It’s our wedding picture. My Frieda and I love your books. We have read every one cover to cover and more than once.

  P.S. Keep writing.

  Lincoln studied the photograph, a glossy print showing a happy couple in a tropical setting. Emmanuel Lead stood tall and proud in his uniform, his forehead vast over deep-set and smoldering eyes, his black hair back-combed into a thick pomaded wave, his wife calmly beside him, the crown of her head level with his shoulder. Her features were blurred under a hard core of sunshine, her raised white veil the perfect setting for a rare jewel of a face—but empty, revealing nothing. A woman of substantial flesh and skin—wide-hipped and round-busted, enticing him to seize the moment by the throat and wonder if she might fit smoothly into his Monday slot and complete his life: six women for the six days of the week. (Sunday was his day of rest.)

  Monday. The first of his last two mornings on earth. (Countdown: four, three—) He read the Daily Observer. (He had a subscription.) The usual number of rapes, stabbings, and bodies bludgeoned beyond recognition. No other events caught his attention.

  Tuesday. (—two, one. Change count.) And his thirtieth birthday. In the Daily Observer he read about a suicide of a former FBI informant who had infiltrated AAMM, the African American Men’s Movement, a black nationalist and quasi-paramilitary organization, at the bureau’s urging and with its support. He was survived by no one, and, though the article included no photograph, Lincoln had experienced nothing in his thirty years like the jolt he received from the man’s name. Lincoln Jefferson Lincoln. His twin brother.

  But before that, on that first last morning, the elevator doors wrapped him in steel gray and swept him down to the granite lobby. He stepped out of the building into a noisy collision of speech, shouts, and whistles: the sounds of the city. The sky was clear, the sun hot. Nothing but people, concrete, and steel in every direction. The wind shoved his back as he walked, but his pace grew slower with every step, metal-heavy sun burning down on his head. He touched his face and felt hot rubber. Melting.

  Glory’s stories and visions had spread like hot dirt over everything in his life. In his childhood, he would sit before the fireplace while Glory was in the kitchen, reading the Bible forward and backward through the red hate of his blood. She would enter the room and smile a broad glow of contentment. Seat herself before the fireplace. He would retire to his room, where he spent long hours of contemplation, jotting down ideas in a diary. Going there to know there, he started to write at length about everything that stabbed at him, recording every microscopic detail, for he wanted to expand the possible and unravel Glory’s mystery. Steal the sacred fire and see inside his own life.

  He had spent his adult years trying to verify the facts of Glory’s crime but found no newspaper articles, no police reports, no witnesses. What was his father’s name?—his birth certificate listed J. Christ—and where was his twin, Lincoln Jefferson Lincoln? A nameless father and a brother who existed only in name. Death was the starting point, but dead niggers tell no tales.

  The day after Glory killed Lincoln’s father, she discovered that she was several weeks pregnant with twins. She also learned that she had money in the bank, and plenty of it. (Insurance?) I was blessed with a triple miracle, she said. I wanted to share my good fortune with other colored folks. I put yo brother up for adoption. Then I moved from the third floor of that ole rundown building where we was living and into this good house in this good black neighborhood.

  Glory was clean and neat and kept her low brick house and even concrete walkway clean and neat. Trees stretched their branches over a grassy lawn. Lincoln would walk in the yard, wind whipping the branches, and touch rough bark or the dry twigs of a hedge. He mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes. This fine yard was fronted by a tall black wrought-iron fence. Here, Lincoln never allowed the images of the world to reach his heart. Forever vexed by questions he held in the full lens of his mind, burning, a clarifying hate swelling inside him that fueled new ideas and questions.

  Though he hoped to shape his twenty-year diary of ponderings and reflections into a memoir, The Autobiography of Black Life, the last nine years had seen him produce nine novels about Henry “Hard Rock” Henson, the H-Man, a renegade black grunt in Vietnam. Hard Rock, Hard for short, lived a creed of illimitable ferocity. Hard knew the jungle like a private estate he had drafted and constructed. He would kill an officer (usually white) just as quickly as he would a gook. He greased his bullets with spit and spit with bullet force.

  Though Lincoln had never seen the war, he had read dozens of books and articles about Vietnam. He wrote under the nom de plume the General, and his publishers marketed and promoted the novels as the fictionalized memoirs of a former high-ranking officer of the war who had to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons, offering in place of an author’s dust-jacket portrait a stylized print showing a military uniform sprawled upon and crumpled across a bed like cast-off skin. Controversial and sure to sell in these times. And sell it did, the fire of Lincoln’s words spreading throughout all of the major book clubs and finding an equally broad audience with servicemen and servicewomen in all branches of the military, who saw the General as a soldier’s Ann Landers, Oprah Winfrey, or Miss Lonelyhearts. They wrote him volumes of letters about their most intimate problems. Once a week, Lincoln’s publishers would forward him a sack or two of mail, and he would read each letter slowly and carefully, notepad and pen at the ready, logging important names, details, and events, compiling rap sheets and packets of data for future reference.

  The previous week, Lincoln had received an anonymous letter informing him of Emmanuel’s death. According to the letter, several white MPs had not taken kindly to the honorary certificates and demanded a stop. Emmanuel told them to kiss where the sun don’t shine. The following day, the association found him floating in the swimming pool. His eyes had popped out of their sockets, but someone had bleached them clean of blood and tried to force them back in.

  Lincoln had penned two chapters of his tenth novel, but a deep feeling told him that he would neve
r complete it. He had in the back of his head a sense of impending punishment. Lately, he sensed something coming together in strangeness, something that only increased the hopeless gulf he felt between his past and his future. There was a stone on his chest and an even heavier stone deep inside him, weighing him down. And now, as he walked, he could hear the stones knock, could feel himself sinking, despite his strong body. Tomorrow he would be thirty, but his power to save himself had already faded from his muscles.

  Reaching the corner, Lincoln looked at his watch. Eight thirty a.m. Unbeknownst to him, at that very moment another man, from the apartment complex five blocks south, committed suicide when he ran onto the Eisenhower Expressway and was struck by a Cleaning Magic diaper-service truck—a pilot without a flight plan, riding a rainbow’s arc fifty feet above the expressway—in virtually the same spot where Lincoln would be struck the following morning. Second morning, second truck. The two men were strangers to one another, but the same womb had borne them both. It was only at the moment of his death that Lincoln Roosevelt Lincoln realized the conspiracy against him. Two men unaware, moving toward the same fate, in the same city. A spider retracting two threads into the center of its web.

  Lincoln observed a traffic cop directing two phalanxes of moving steel, one northbound, the other southbound. Even from where he stood, Lincoln could tell that the cop’s skin was rough, like a stone worn away by water. His uniform shone a navy blue and he held his head high, a cap on top. Lincoln moved closer, saw the cop’s tiny buckshot eyes, heard a voice loud enough to wake the dead. The cop closed his eyes with every shout, carried away by deep emotion. Keep moving. Open. Keep moving. Shut. That’s green, not greens. Don’t stop to eat. That yellow ain’t no chicken. That red ain’t no wine, so don’t you whine. So lucky God didn’t make me a cabdriver.

  At the next corner Lincoln saw a boy as tall as him, only leaner. Shoe shine, brother? the boy asked.

  Lincoln accepted the offer.

  The boy put black polish on the edges of his fingers, then moved his hands over Lincoln’s cordovans, the pointed toes like weapons. Soon, the boy was slapping and rubbing a rag against them.

  Brother, you know those white men are devils. He popped the rag.

  Lincoln didn’t say anything.

  Bent over at the waist, the boy kept his legs locked straight, careful not to get any polish on his short-sleeve white dress shirt. He wore a black tie—snake-tongue thin—jeans, and Nike gym shoes. He had wonderfully clear skin, but his nose was pushed back into his face as if recoiling from some foul odor. So that no one might miss it, his body emitted the peculiar sweet and powdered smell of a baby.

  Lincoln was about to enter the yard, when Glory called him.

  See my hands? She removed her gloves.

  Yes, ma’am.

  I got frostbitten when I was a baby.

  Yes, ma’am.

  See these arms? She rolled up her sleeves.

  Yes, ma’am.

  I got burned when I was a baby.

  Yes, ma’am. Lincoln pressed back into the squeezing dark of the hall, smiling to himself.

  I may be short and fat, but I knows my wings gon fit me well.

  Yes, ma’am.

  He got a white robe for me.

  Yes, ma’am.

  He got me a seat up in the kingdom.

  Yes, ma’am.

  He got me a bed in the upper room.

  Yes, ma’am.

  I will walk on golden clouds, hand in hand with my Jesus. O flesh of my flesh!

  Nothing but devils. The boy lifted his head and looked up into Lincoln’s face, eyes bright with the memory of some deed.

  They were standing on the corner of Congress Avenue, Lincoln facing the street, the steel wall of the Garden Tower Apartments behind him. He loved corners. Here, the world was going on, and he was there to perceive it.

  What do you think of the white man?

  The only white man Lincoln gave a damn about was Jesus, the Holy Redeemer, the man who had appeared to Glory in a dream. Chop off that nigger’s dirty dick, Jesus said, and to thee all things shall be added.

  Was Jesus a white man? Lincoln asked.

  Yes, Glory said. Unless he’s passing.

  Glory hated white folks. God is black, she said. She sought out TV shows that featured white people being maimed or killed. She cheered every death, every gunshot. And whenever she watched news broadcasts and saw that a white person had died in a car accident or a plane crash or by falling glass, she would bow her head and say, Thank you, Jesus. Thank you. We are surely God’s chosen people. At night, Lincoln heard her pray for God to put ground glass or spiders in every white person’s buttermilk. He never discovered the actual source of her hatred, and at the time of her death, Jesus remained the only white man she liked.

  Brother, what do you think about the white man?

  I don’t know, Lincoln said.

  What? The boy scrunched up his face in disbelief. What?

  Lincoln was tired of black folks blaming the white man for everything. Tired of them (us) marching and demonstrating and singing and shouting our lives away. White man this, white man that. Spilled milk, spoiled milk, injustices both real and imagined nothing more than specks of events and facts in the larger canvas of history. But why reveal his true feelings to this insignificant boy? Expression (communication) involves the monumental task of encounter.

  I don’t know, he said.

  Cars zoomed past, coming and going, waves of noise and exhaust like an accumulation of ghostly presences heard and felt but unseen. People bunched together at the pedestrian crossing like herds of cattle. Others rushed about in all directions as if hurrying out of the rain. But the day was bright and the sun was high and Lincoln felt sun crawling on his face and arms, felt sun transforming him into some being of light and heat. The boy’s nostrils cocked up at him, wide and deep, so much so that Lincoln imagined himself falling tragically inside them, lost forever.

  As far as he knew, Glory was never sick a day in her life. The morning she gave up her spirit, she called him into her room. Her green shutters were thrown open to the world, sunlight pouring through the window and splattering the wall behind her bed, where she lay, her small head resting on a pillow, her magical quilt drawn up to her chin, as hot as it was, with only her two black hands and face outside it. Lincoln moved close to her side and saw wrinkles radiating out from the center of her nose, making her face look like a broken plate that had been pieced back together. A dim fire lit her cheeks.

  I am bounding toward my God and my reward, she said.

  Yes, ma’am.

  Jesus will be calling you too someday.

  Yes, ma’am.

  She reminded him of the mason jars in the cellar, filled with quarters and half-dollars, the jewelry in the cookie jars under her bed, and the drawer with her burial policy, savings bonds, will, and lawyer’s name and phone number.

  You better mind your p’s and q’s, she said.

  Yes, ma’am.

  She looked at the ceiling. Lord, open up the gate. She closed her eyes, the fire in her cheeks simmering down then extinguishing. The room became a chamber of silence.

  Free at last! Lincoln said, under his breath. He was nineteen and ready to see the other side of the shining coin.

  That very morning, he tried to have her body cremated. This postmortem arrangement the will forbade—see the stipulation printed in the next-to-the-last clause—so, without the usual ritual and ceremony, he stuck her in the ground. Sold the house to the first buyer. Sold her magical quilt. For one dollar. Cash.

  A swirl of violent life. Lincoln’s face went hot and heavy. He leaned back against the wall, thrown, unmoored.

  You all right, brother? Under the sun’s glare, the boy squinted up at Lincoln, who rode waves of light and shadow, saw the boy moving in and out of focus, the crowd swaying this way and that. His lungs needed room to breathe, the street a cage of running motors and rushing feet. He felt hollow, something trembling dee
p in his stomach, so he shut his eyes and took a deep breath, but the air was thick and bitter in his mouth, and he could hear cars in the distance and smell their fumes. He coughed.

  Hey, the boy said.

  Lincoln heard the brush fall to the ground.

  Don’t cough on me.

  Lincoln couldn’t move or speak.

  Damn!

  But Lincoln was hollow. Body eaten by flames.

  Coughing on people and shit.

  The boy’s voice came to Lincoln from a distance. Though his eyes were closed, Lincoln felt that everything about him was radiating, sun constricting his face and chest.

  Germs. I might catch something. Shit.

  Lincoln drew another deep breath, a sanitizing breeze that moved through his body and beat back the sickness. The free oxygen gave him enough strength to raise himself upright. He opened his eyes, looked at the boy from head to foot, slowly and deliberately.

  The boy’s face fell a little. Didn’t mean no harm, he said.

  Lincoln increased his look to full intensity.

  You know I didn’t mean no harm. It’s just that white folks—Man, that’s why we got all these problems. Anger shook the boy’s thin frame. Motherfuck the white man!

  Lincoln found himself looking into a face that had hardened into leather, a mouth now set in lines of hatred. The boy’s pose did nothing to lessen his anger. He spoke through clenched teeth. How much do I owe you? He extended a five-dollar bill.

  The boy looked at the bill. Five dollars, he said. He snatched the bill. That green counts. He was dead serious.

  Lincoln had money in the bank and plenty to spread around. The profits from his books had surpassed his inheritance. No small achievement, for Glory had had substantial property—the house alone was a heap of bread—had had shares in everything from Standard Oil to Rough Rider Saddles.