Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  “You really are looking good,” I tell her.

  “You too. For a white girl.” She chuckles. She knows she can needle me and get away with it. Already, like the marshy lands here resettling after long winter rains, we’ve reestablished our balance. I tremble with anger at Mama, denying me this lovely friendship all those years.

  “I’ll tell you who I’m worried about, and that’s your father,” I say, setting the cruise control. “He’s having chest pains.”

  She blanches. “Again? I caught him a few months back, feeling poorly, but he swore to me the trouble had gone away.”

  “Is he afraid of doctors? Does he have insurance?”

  “He’s covered on my policy, through the school.” She chews her lower lip. “But you’re right. Getting him to a clinic will be like jump-starting a mule.”

  Bluebonnet fields, past blooming, blaze green all around us. The bluebonnet is the Lone Star State’s official flower; every Sunday painter in Texas has whipped out acres of bad landscapes. It’s a hackneyed sight by now, but the blossoms are beautiful, little mirrors of the sky, and I’m grateful to be reminded of them.

  I seem to have depressed Ariyeh, talking about Bitter. She’s spent more years than I have, trying to find cracks in his mask—if it’s a mask. “Reggie’s energy is astonishing,” I say. “It’s a wonderful thing he’s doing with the Row Houses.”

  “It is. It’s hard for me to get him to slow down. But he’s such a relief after all the frogs I dated before. Lot of lazy black men in the city. I don’t know if you know that.”

  I laugh.

  “What about you?” she asks. “Any men?”

  “Not any good ones.” I tell her about Dwayne—it feels natural to confess to her, the way we did as girls, gossiping and laughing all night.

  “Jesus, T. Did you report him?”

  “Not to the cops. I knew he’d claim the sex was consensual … and I wasn’t sure it wasn’t, up to a point—”

  “Oh, don’t do that to yourself. Guilt-tripping and stuff. The man raped you, honey. And because of your skin. Sick son of a bitch. I hope you got him fired, at least.”

  “Transferred to another city office. I told him I couldn’t work with him anymore.”

  “He escaped lightly. And you’ve been feeling guilty about it ever since, hm?”

  “Mama took a turn for the worse soon after that, so I didn’t have much time to dwell on him.”

  In fact, the week of Mama’s funeral, going through her things, I found Sarah Morgan’s letter from C and began to piece together what really might have happened between my great-grandfolks. I thought the night with Dwayne, a fresh chill in my mind, would help me clarify—or at least vividly imagine—the relationship. The attraction/repulsion of forbidden skin. The fine line, sometimes, between violence and mutual passion. Surely, because of what had happened to me, I could see Cletus a little clearer, from Sarah Morgan’s perspective? But really, the opposite occurred. I felt a swell of panic whenever I considered Cletus and Sarah’s rendezvous. I knew my alarm was more about Dwayne and me than family history, but knowing this didn’t help. I couldn’t calm my anxiety, and it’s part of what set me on the run, I suspect, back to what Bitter could tell me. How do black couples behave toward one another? And why?

  “So what got this bee under your bonnet, to find your family?” Ariyeh asks. “Your mama’s passing?”

  “Partly. Though I’d been curious for a long time. Sounds funny, I suppose, but I got tired of being white. Tired of the ‘burbs. The thing is, I remembered Houston, you know, though Mama had tried to erase it from me. I missed you and Bitter. You were like old songs I’d hear on the radio, tugging on me from far away.”

  “I remember your mama crying in a back bedroom, in the dark, all by herself. It’s one of my strongest childhood memories. I don’t know why. She used to scare me, she was sad so much.”

  “I wish I could cry for her. I mean, I know she had a hard life, I know she moved us to give me opportunities she never had … but I feel such rage at her, now, for orchestrating my life.”

  Ariyeh reaches over, takes my hand, and holds it on the seat between us. We pass a pair of hitchhikers, a long-haired couple with bedrolls and a cardboard sign saying ALBUQUERQUE. I’m still thinking of Mama, and the hitchhikers remind me of the one time I had to bum a ride—on the day she died. I’d stayed upset with Dwayne, with everything that had happened the night of our date. I kept hearing in my head, “The dark side. The dark side.” One Monday, on my lunch break, I decided to exorcise this voice, to cancel Dwayne’s challenge to me and tackle what he so clearly felt I wasn’t facing.

  But that wasn’t all. I was running from Mama, too, that day—not so much her sickness and the duties it required … refilling prescriptions, bathing her, reading to her. I was happy to do those things. It was the pretense. The get well cards from friends. By now, we all knew she wasn’t going to get well. The flowers. The move back home from the hospital, as though nothing had ever happened. The bedsheets her husband washed every damn day, as though she lay in a fancy hotel suite rather than a sickbed (she didn’t sweat and barely moved enough to soil the linens). Dale told me he was doing everything he knew to “make her feel comfortable.” But it seemed to me that he and Mama did everything they could to deny what was happening, the way Mama had disavowed our past. Just another whitewash. I wanted no part of it. I didn’t mean to be cruel. But I did want to grieve—openly, and with Mama. Apparently, that wasn’t allowed in Dale Licht’s subdivision.

  So one Monday—though I knew Mama had worsened, and I should stick by a phone—I headed for Deep Ellum. I hoped it would be a dark and dreary place, that it would remind me of Houston, that it would confirm for me that my beginnings were as awful as I thought (that day) they were … as wretched as my Dwayne-and-Dale-infected mood.

  Rain and wind buffeted the trees, made the streets hard to negotiate. I checked a map and soon found myself crossing railroad tracks, bumping along old brick roads. Since the night with Dwayne, I’d been reading about Deep Ellum—the history buff in me—and had come across a description of the neighborhood in an old black weekly, on microfilm in the public library: “Down on ‘Deep Ellum’ in Dallas, where Central Avenue empties onto Elm Street, is where Ethiopia stretches forth her hands. It is the one spot in the city that needs no daylight savings time because there is no bedtime, and working hours have no limits. The only place recorded on earth where business, religion, hoodooism, gambling and stealing go on at the same time without friction.”

  I saw an empty train caboose, a streetcar shell, and several soft brick buildings, many of them burned, with faded signs on what remained of their walls: TOOL SHOP AND LOANS,INDIAN HERB EMPORIUM, SHOWS NIGHTLY. But mostly I saw slick new department stores, fern bars, antique shops. The neighborhood was rapidly redeveloping—the city didn’t want to face its dark past, either. Whatever secret places Dwayne knew, holdovers from the old days, I wouldn’t be able to find on my own in this driving rain. Discouraged, angry, still aching between my legs (more psychological now than physical), I turned around, tears in my eyes, to head back to work, and the car began to sputter. The “oil” light came on. I chugged another block or two before the engine died altogether. I didn’t have an umbrella, so as I walked, looking for a gas station or a pay phone, I sought shelter in doorways, under awnings. Inadvertently, I’d looped back onto one of the undeveloped blocks. Broken glass, metal strips torn from dead buildings curled across the walks. Drunks huddled on porches or under boarded-up windows, begging change. The nasty. This is what I’d come to find—to degrade myself out of spite, out of anger at Mama, Dwayne, Dale—but it didn’t make me feel any better. I heard a saxophone stutter somewhere inside an echoey room. Steam coiled from rusty grates in the concrete.

  I was shivering and soaked when an old Ford Fairlane, dented and red, pulled up beside me, splashing my feet. It was as scratched and weathered as an old horse. A young black woman on the passenger side rolled down her w
indow. “Need a lift?” I got in back, wary but grateful, and asked to be dropped at the nearest service station. Behind the wheel, a big, gruff man, bearded and with an afro the size of a bowling ball. The car smelled of French fries and talcum powder. We drove for several blocks, none of us speaking. Finally, at a stoplight, the guy turned to me. “I want you to know, I don’t normally stop for white folks,” he said. “It’s only on account of my old lady here that I’m giving you this ride.” I nodded and croaked, “Thank you.” He let me off at a Shell station. I had the car towed and wound up back at work around four. I called to check on Mama, and Dale, weeping, told me she’d passed away unexpectedly an hour ago (who wasn’t expecting it, you poor, pathetic …).

  I sat at my desk, gripping the phone till my hand hurt. I’d been playing in the dark while my mama died. And the dark wasn’t really there anymore. Everything was a lousy, stupid joke. This is what I’d thought I wanted to happen—for the truth to burst through the laundered veneer of our lives, but no, it wasn’t what I wanted at all, not at all. What I really wanted, I knew now, was to return from Deep Ellum with the “dark side” all over my skin—inside-out, upside down—enough to shock Mama out of her sickbed stupor and force her to tell me everything, everything, right from the start. But now she was gone. How much of me, I wondered, went with her? I tried to weep, then and for several days afterward, but by now I was well-trained. Whatever’s inside, I’d learned, you keep back, like an old dollar bill in a mint tin.

  By coincidence I see a Shell station and pull off the highway to fill up. Ariyeh has been quiet for several miles. As the young attendant wipes my windshield, she turns to me and says softly “I’ve just been thinking. Trying to decide whether I’m making this up or not, and I don’t think so. I believe I remember your daddy coming to the house one day.”

  I sit up straight. The smell of gas through my open window dizzies me. The car shivers in the breeze of passing trucks.

  “We would have been … oh, I don’t know, five or six? Can that be right? I’m not sure where you were. Off with your mama somewhere. I remember my own mama, Cass, was yelling and screaming about money or some-such, giving Daddy hell over something, and I’m just trying to stay out of the way, you know, when this strange man walks up on the porch, real slim, puffing a cigarette, and asks Daddy can he borrow a sawbuck or two? This is the part that seems like I’m making it up, ‘cause for all her yelling, Cass was never really violent … but it’s also the part that catches in my mind like an actual memory, it was so unusual. Cass rears back and hurls an open honey jar at the screen door, right where the man is standing, shaking sort of, like he’s sick, and she shouts at him, ‘Ain’t a dime in this house, and if’n there was, you’d never see it!’ I see him slouching there on the porch, spattered with gold, shaking his head and mumbling—I can’t believe I remember this now—’Heads or tails, either way you lose.’ I asked Daddy about him later, and something he said made me think he was your dad.”

  I try to picture the man. “You never told me.”

  “Eighteen bucks even, ma’am,” the attendant says, startling me. I give him a twenty. My hand shakes.

  “Didn’t I? Then maybe … I don’t know … maybe I’m dreaming—”

  “Oh hell, it doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s just an old ghost to me.”

  “A ghost who won’t leave you in peace.”

  I admit to her I put a call in to Huntsville, requesting a visit with Elias Woods. The official I reached said he’d get back to me. He was afraid I was a journalist. “No more death row interviews, all right? You goddam liberal writers always make us out to be monsters. We’re only doing our jobs.”

  The attendant returns with my change, and we’re off again, through pecan groves and scrub oak, dewberry fields, gnarled old magnolias, moss-covered, leaves applauding in the wind. The air smells of mint. Just off the highway a drive-in movie screen looms in a field, an immense sheet hung out to dry. Bitter took me and Ariyeh to a drive-in once when we were little; I remember thinking, “Bitter’s the only dad I have”; remember popcorn and Cokes spilling over our dresses; remember Bitter sighing. I even remember the movie because I saw it again years later, this time in a suburban Dallas theater, a second-run place, with an all-white, upper-class audience. The film was Pinky, about a poor mulatta who decides not to “violate her race” by marrying a white man and inheriting a wealthy plantation; instead, she chooses to remain a Negro and opens a school for dark-skinned kids. The drive-in audience, mostly young, mostly black, howled with derision at the melodramatic, sentimental plot and at the woman’s stupidity, passing up the good life. Years later, the white audience in Dallas wept at the young woman’s selflessness. I recall glancing at Mama, who sat impassively beside me as Dale and her new white friends dabbed their eyes, careful not to topple soft drinks into their laps. (What was she thinking? Was the movie a surprise to her? Would she have gone if she’d known what it was about?) And I recalled the low, dark chortles in the night from long ago, the smells of sweat and food and sex (though I didn’t know that’s what it was, then) rising from the cars, the smell of the nearby bayou, rotty and dank, frog chirps competing with actors’ voices from the scratchy drive-in speakers, and I wanted to return to the noise and the stink and the mess, to real life (my lost daddy’s home), which seemed to me buried now under Mama’s department store catalogs, bedspreads, and furnishings. Her scented toilet paper.

  “Yeah, I remember that drive-in,” Ariyeh says now. “It’s the first place I saw people fucking, though I thought they were hurting each other or something. I think Daddy wanted us to see it. Sex education.”

  “Right.” I laugh. “When I was twelve, Mama took me to a series of films at the YWCA. Each week, cartoon cutaways of uteruses, penises, gumdrop sperm. No one said a word, all these mothers and daughters sitting stiffly in cold folding chairs. And in the car, on the way home, she kept her eyes pinned to the road. When I asked her what in the world we’d just been watching, she’d say, ‘Why don’t we get some ice cream?’ Or she’d stop and buy me comic books—Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, these boys’ books, you know, that I didn’t have the slightest interest in, though they weren’t any more outlandish than the sex-toons—and I’d wind up gorging myself at Baskin-Robbins. To this day, I associate conception with the taste of chocolate-chocolate chip.”

  Ariyeh cracks up, and we recall all the places we sneaked off to as girls to talk about boys. The mud-dauber shack. A spot along the bayou, where someone had tossed an old stove and it lay rusting in the mud, tangled in poison ivy and tree roots. And of course, our favorite, the Flower Man’s house. Sometimes we’d see him nailing up a new treasure—a child’s tutu, a clay butterfly, a G.I. Joe doll—on the outer walls of his home.

  “Is he crazy, the Flower Man?” I ask.

  “Who knows? Maybe he’s just got a genius for junk. Like I do for lunch. Can we stop soon?” She smiles, embarrassed. She was always the first to get hungry.

  I pull off near a billboard advertising mysterious ancient caves. A cow watches us unwrap our sandwiches. We sit on the hood of the car. “A developer’s dream,” I say, gazing at the fields. “I try to remember what it was like to enjoy nature’s beauty. Surely, at one time, I could just soak it up. Now, I can’t look at any place without imagining feasibility studies, cost estimates …”

  “Do you like your job?” Ariyeh asks.

  Sparrows gossip in the trees. Diesel smoke in the wind.

  “I’m good at it. Is that the same as liking?”

  “I don’t think so, sweetie.”

  “I have an aquarium at home. The catfish always stays at the bottom, cleaning up the others’ leftovers. They’re darting around at the top, picking food off the water’s surface. He’s catching whatever falls between the cracks. I call him Hoover.”

  “You feel like him, is that it?”

  I waggle my head, neither yes or no.

  “Sounds like he works too hard. Like he’s trying to hide.”
/>   I open the potato chip bag. “You?”

  “Jesus. Me? I’m a Band-Aid stretched across an open chest.” A rueful laugh. “We don’t have enough resources to give these kids a first-rate education. Or even a third-rate one. They’re going to wind up on the streets, killing each other, most of them. We all know it. The kids know it, too, so they don’t even try.”

  “Are there any whites in your school?”

  “Only a handful. Busing’s been repealed.”

  “You’re very brave. You and Reggie both. I told him that.”

  She nibbles her bread. “Daddy thinks we’re crazy, trying so hard to improve things. We fight about it all the time, and he and Reggie can hardly speak to each other. He says he’s lived long enough to see most ideals wither and die. ‘Pie in the sky don’t do black folk no good,’ he tells me. You know the way he talks. I admit, sometimes I think he’s right. I get so tired.”

  I hug her. She sags, and I realize how tense she is most of the time.

  “Well. We’d best get to this gloomy old field of yours,” she says, falsely bright.

  “You sure?” I say, rubbing her back.

  She nods, narrows her eyes. “I’m sure. It’s Saturday, for God’s sakes. What am I doing worrying about work?”

  She’s done talking now. I won’t push her. I learned a long time ago not to do that. “Okay. Let’s see what we can see.” But I’ll watch her closely the rest of the day.

  Just east of San Antonio I take a cutoff onto a narrow gravel road. My directions are makeshift, a slew of landmarks and locations from various historical sources, all incomplete, testifying to the fact that nothing remains to distinguish the hanging field from other meadows. In all likelihood, I won’t even know it if I see it. We bump over ruts and rocks. Billboards for foot powder, insecticide, Yankee Motor Oil. Hillocks of hay. Jutting stone. To the west, a line of pines, stiff but somewhat crooked: sloppy troops at parade rest. Behind them, sloping down the barest suggestion of a hill, mesquite trees tangled in dewberry vines. “This is it,” I say uncertainly. My face goes hot. “I think this is it.”