Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  “What’s up, sugar?”

  Jesus. “How are you, Dwayne?”

  “You know. Free-styling, whiling it all away. You? You’re—where? Houston?”

  “That’s right.” So she couldn’t resist his snake oil. Did he whisk her away to the Strictly Tabu? Pull his dark side shit?

  “Shirl’s in the shower. We’ve got Rangers tickets. Afternoon game.”

  “Tell her I called, will you? Checking on my pets.”

  “Will do. Listen, when you’re back to town, T, what say we have us a reunion? Some dancing, a drink or two? I kinda feel we parted on a sour note, and I’d like to make it up to you.”

  “I smell a dead cat on the line.”

  He laughs.

  “Tell Shirl I’ll try her again.”

  “She may be busy for a while. My girl do not play, see.”

  “Good-bye, Dwayne.” The receiver feels hot. I place it in its cradle and slump against the booth.

  Back inside the building, the stairs seem nearly insurmountable. My knees are Silly Putty. Food sizzles behind closed doors. Korean or Vietnamese. Heavy garlic. Rice. My bed jiggles when I throw myself on it. Weary, dizzy with heat, I’m out soon, dreaming of buttons, fingers, tongues.

  When I wake, I get up, splash water on my face. The faucet-stream is yellow. I undo my blouse and open a window. A roach slithers from under the sill and out through a rip in the screen.

  Homesick for Mama. Is that it?

  Or is this about sex?

  Buck up, T. Stay focused. Remember why you came: searching for the men. Cletus, Daddy. Bullshit. They’re far too distant—always were—for me to really reach. I’ve found they answer nothing.

  And hell, I don’t want to think about sex right now, the smell of gin, the messy wetness, a cold, hard hand on my breast… the breath of the heat, the pull of the dark bayou swelter … somewhere, the whoo-ing of owls … the leer of the shut-in boy, Dwayne’s cocky assurance that he knew what I wanted, Reggie’s charming grin … his skin against my neck, arms, wrists.

  Pillow tight between my legs. Stop this. Think of Ariyeh. Call him an asshole. Go ahead. “You’re a fucking asshole, Reggie!” I shout at the walls. “You’d be like all the rest!” But the cottony pillow feels fine against my chest, soft, giving, warm … no. Get off this. What else? What else?

  Mama’s quilts? The patterns Barbara showed me?

  Yes, all right. I sit up, set out thread, shirt collars, scraps, and cuffs. Barbara gave them to me once we got back from Huntsville. “A running stitch is simple,” she told me. “You work the needle in and out”—in and out, baby, in and—damn it, girl, concentrate!—“so each stitch is divided from the next by a little space. The smaller the stitches, the more you’ll make what looks like an unbroken line, but that kind of humbuggery ain’t important. Nothing wrong with a big of stitch—‘Toenail Catchers,’ we call ‘em. Anyways, to sort of limber up your fingers, hon, maybe it’s best you start with a straightforward diagonal.”

  Seamstress? Well. Let’s see about that.

  I thread the needle. Soon, linked strips emerge, the color of milk chocolate. “Don’t worry ‘bout right and wrong,” Barbara had cautioned me. “Improvisation is the key to lively work. Taking the familiar and jazzing on it—repetition, revision—losing yourself even as you’re discovering what you can do.”

  As I work, a noisy kiddo scurries down the hall. Did my great-grandmother or my grandma Jean make quilts in the late afternoons in Texas City, while Mama flew through the building with her dolls, lamb stew bubbled on the stoves, and men made their way home from flaming refineries?

  I close my eyes. Do I have a feel for the needle, the way Sarah Morgan did? Stitch in, stitch out … forward, back … now and then … awful pains, labored breath … yes, the building is haunted … or I am … I slip into a rhythmic trance, slip out of myself, a brittle, spinning leaf, blown back through the years … oh my Lord, oh my hands, the knuckles ache, my spine’s bent, but I tug and tighten the dyed cotton thread the way I have for decades, taking patterns now from the Negroes who’ve sheltered me in my shame. Bearing a black man’s child: my sin, my exit from the garden.

  And why did I do it? Passion? Spite? Curiosity? Are the motives any clearer to me than they are to anyone else, or was I merely responding to life, its bawdy surgings, borne in my small, white frame? Wasn’t I using my fundamental privilege as an American, the will to freedom, to snatch any identity I wanted—or believed I required? Repetition, revision. Improvisation. White hands toggling, tying, wrapping, winding, pulling forth from dusty castoffs old Negro patterns, liberty maps, the chance to start anew.

  But the price, the price is far too steep. Awful pains. Cletus, lost now in a nondescript meadow. Me, wasting my last days in exile, in a city that stinks of oil. Jean, the child Cletus gave me, heeds no pattern in her life. What freedoms can she choose? Drudge work for others and the forceful attentions of men. Born into my exile, my limitations, she has only a meager scrap pile from which to piece her way.

  A thumping on the stairs down the hall. The little girl, Helen, Jean’s child. For her, the garden is just a rumor, a myth of vanished generations; no map, no matter how lovingly stitched, can lead her back to Paradise. I’m patient with her each night after supper, training her to thread the needle, to cut the flour sacks for batting. I show her flying geese and the drunkard’s path—it’s all right if it’s crooked, child; Evil travels in straight lines. She does well sometimes. But afternoons, she whips up and down the stairs, desperate for escape. Well. God knows this is no place for a child, especially a girl with skin as fair as hers, who can see, even at this tender age, the cruelties of difference and disparity. Already her future is beyond my poor imagining. What do I hope for her? What did I hope for myself? What can I give her and her children but a legacy of rootless confusion, a fissure between two worlds? Ah, what have I done, what have I done? I open my eyes. I’ve pricked my thumb with the needle; a fat blood drop wets the cloth.

  The hallway is silent now. The couple next door quiet. The garlic smell has lessened. Through my window I hear, from the church down the block, foot stomping, a ratchety organ. I set the cloth aside, with its impure stain. Walk to the window. Cats prowl the freight yard below. Birdshit paints the phone booth. Dazed, still—caught between Sarah’s time and my own—I sit on the sill, listening to Praise Jesus. Dirt rings the windowframe. Houston’s skin. Barbara would lap it up. Thinking of her, I run my finger through the grime, lift it to my lips.

  Three A.M. I get up to pee. The smudge around my mouth is like the margarita salt I remember feeling with my tongue, the night of my date with Dwayne. Dirt from the windowsill. I’m going nuts. The heat. No sex.

  Don’t start, T. Besides, I was already restless. I felt this way right after Dwayne, after Mama died, before driving here to Freedmen’s Town—as if a lock on a box had been broken and I couldn’t keep the lid on any longer, holding myself inside. Who I was kept drifting away, like smoke from dry ice, and others kept floating into the space, filling the box with their presences. Is this what intimacy is like? Am I simply not used to it? The fear I felt with Dwayne—is that what it means to really give to a man? Mama’s sickness and death … if you love, you’ll grieve. No avoiding it.

  I wash my face. As my hands rub my lips, I drift once more, and for a moment I’m a girl again in Bitter’s house, bent above a rusty-drained sink. Mama’s hands flit behind my ears, across my eyes and nose, dribbling warm water down the bones of my neck and into my filthy shirt-front. “Child, child, you have such gorgeous skin.” Through the open bathroom window, trilling frogs. “Why do you want to cover it up with all this nasty bayou dirt?”

  The plumbing shudders. I shut off the water. Mama’s words were often harsh, admonishing me to straighten up, behave a certain way, be careful … but her touch was gentle. Early on, in Houston, she was a lovely, conscientious caretaker. After we moved to Dallas, I don’t remember her ever touching me: another reason, I realize now, I’v
e longed for the bayou heat. It was inseparable for me from the warmth of Mama’s arms, the safety of her nearness.

  When my turn came, I made a poor caretaker, working late, spending little time in the house (am I doing this again, now, with Bitter?) … but in part, it’s because Mama kept me distant. Dale, so upbeat all the time despite her loss of strength, Mama stoic, silent. She gave herself over to the cancer as easily and completely as she’d surrendered to the ‘burbs. I’d drop by after dark, find her asleep on the bed we’d set up in the living room so she could watch TV. Dale would be upstairs, showering, humming to himself. He always left a little supper for me, warming in the oven. A lamb chop. Roast beef. In the television’s gray-blue light, Mama’s face looked as gaunt as a prisoner of war’s. Studying her each night in her final days—when she was more removed from me than ever—I thought of the stories I’d read in history classes about captured soldiers or kidnap victims: how utterly dependent they were on their captors, how the guards were forced to become caretakers. Sometimes, a prisoner would be so overwhelmed by the bitter nature of this relationship, he’d take on his captor’s behaviors and beliefs: Patty Hearst robbing banks. One of my books said, The recognition of complete dependency on an unreliable caretaker is too terrible to bear.

  And what if that caretaker is your neighborhood, your country, everything you see and hear? For the folks here in Freedmen’s Town, Houston is an unpredictable benefactor, ready to turn on you any minute. The price of the slightest misstep, the mildest error, is high. So what do you do? Assume your caretaker’s skin, if you can. Mama ran to where no one knew her and turned herself over to—turned herself into—the enemy.

  But those nights in the makeshift bed, in front of the TV talk shows, she showed her true self to me as I gnoshed my lukewarm supper … only, till just this moment, I didn’t quite put it all together. Her mask fell away, eaten by her illness, and the prisoner emerged, barely breathing … the dry husk of a woman who once sewed the old slave patterns, who’d named her girl Telisha. At some point, before the trauma of uncertainty split her, she celebrated where she’d come from. This was the mother I never knew, but she was there, somewhere, buried deep inside the plush white suburb that whispered and hissed each night with the sound of automatic sprinklers.

  Funny. I remember a recurring dream I had in my teens, as my curtains rustled and the sprinklers sighed at night: I was crawling through Dale’s house, among splintered tables and chairs. Whenever I told her about this, Mama just pursed her lips. She wouldn’t answer when I asked, “What do you think it means?”

  I’ve never put much stock in dreams, but lately, hearing her voice in my sleep, imagining her fears, I think: naturally, trauma resists neat forms. It defies being packaged as a story. The pain is so huge, we want to lock our splinters away in a box. But sometimes the heat of memory sets off a spark, and the box starts to burst.

  Mama—without a story from you, how was I supposed to contain my imagination? What else would it clutch at but the crumbles of your mask? With only broken bits and no list for piecing them back together, what could I make of my life?

  I stand at the window now, looking out on the Bayou City, listening to the frogs. Why did I come here? Because Mama didn’t want me back in Freedmen’s Town. She didn’t want her trauma passed to me (but, of course, her trauma was all she had to give; every stitch of her energy went into fighting it, denying it, and day in, day out I absorbed her intensity). She didn’t want me to find the cause of her splintering. What was it? Lack of money? Shit jobs? My daddy? What tool did he split her with—as if I didn’t know? The cocky world of men (I’m a caretaker, know’m say’n)?. Well, here I am, Mama, right where you didn’t want me to be. You want me out? Come and get me, then. You’ll have to come and get me.

  15

  MENTALLY, I check my questions for Ariyeh. Forget my reasons for returning to Houston. What would you do now, if you were me? Ignore the impulse to ditch Dallas and settle here now that I’ve found you and Bitter again? Ignore my “family” ties—and my concerns for Bitter’s health—and resume my safe and steady job? Or burn it all down, start fresh somewhere else?

  We’ve got to deal with Bitter, and soon. Since Grady’s death he’s moped around, frailer than ever—and just as stubborn about his gris-gris.

  She suggested I meet her at school. She’d only have forty minutes for lunch. When I arrive, children are running through the courtyard, tossing gooey pizza into trash cans. Teachers herd them into the building. Two cops in creaking leather coats stand outside the office speaking softly to a group of women. I find Ariyeh inside in a classroom whose floor tiles have peeled and curled in the heat. The fluorescent light hums like a kazoo. In a corner, a gerbil snuffles among pine shavings in a wire cage; the room smells of its flat, bleachy urine, of Kool-Aid and bologna.

  Ariyeh tells me two students, nine-year-old boys, were discovered dead this morning in a Dumpster a block away from school. On an anonymous tip, police arrested a black man seen running from the site just after dawn. “They’re saying it’s Johnson.”

  “The janitor?”

  Ariyeh nods. “We’re hearing rumors that he confessed to murdering the other missing kids. He’s leading cops, one by one, to the bodies. I don’t believe it.”

  All the teachers are angry. Johnson’s a good man, they say. He wouldn’t commit these atrocities. Why would he snuff so much healthy black promise? I remember him at the flagpole, swinging his broom at a little boy’s butt. Classes have been canceled, arrangements made to send the children home safely.

  I stand out of the way while Ariyeh phones parenrs, bundles homework into backpacks, soothes a few weeping girls. Near me, two boys, apparently unruffled by the commotion, pore over a thin purple book. “What’s that?” one says, tapping the page.

  “That’s is, is what it is.”

  “Iz-iz?”

  “Is. ‘He is happy.’”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Finally, Ariyeh says to me, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where can I take you?”

  “Reggie.”

  At the Row Houses, things are nearly as hectic. Reggie is sitting in his office, holding Sasha, Natalie’s baby girl, on his knees, while surfing the Net on a laptop—compliments of Rufus Bowen. Michael and three other boys are helping Reggie reorganize his files. They’ve scattered papers and folders all over the floor. Michael looks cool toward Reggie. “Hey, it’s the ‘bout it ‘bout it chick.” He winks at me. Sasha’s crying. Natalie’s at work, Reggie explains. He starts to tell us about a news site he’s found on the Web that claims America’s tobacco giants colluded with the old apartheid government of South Africa. “Blood money, blood money, all of it. You were right,” he says to me—when Ariyeh interrupts him to tell him what’s happened. “Oh, sweetie,” he says. He hands Sasha to me then pulls Ariyeh into his arms. The child squirms against my chest. I’m reminded again of Sarah Morgan and the baby that changed her life.

  “Got a quiet corner?” Ariyeh asks.

  Reggie suggests the last Row House on the block. “Go on down,” he says. “I’ll be there soon’s I log off and give these boys their next set of instructions.”

  She nods and steps out the door. I pace the office, trying to calm the baby. “What’s with Michael?” I whisper. Playfully, Sasha pulls my hair.

  He sighs. “You heard me the other day, dissing rap. On top of that, now he’s upset with me for letting his mom work for Rufus. I guess I’m with him on that one. Turns out, between school and this new job, we hardly ever see her anymore, and when we do, she’s beat.”

  “But you got your computers?”

  He clicks the mouse. “Yeah, but she seems so unhappy. And Michael … well, I used to be his hero.” A pained smile. “Maybe it takes too many compromises to keep a place like this running.”

  “You’ve done much more good than harm.” The baby burrows into my shoulder.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.” He tells the
boys to separate pink and green pages. Michael just sneers. I wonder if Rue Morgue has been mentoring him. I wonder what “mentoring” means.

  Sasha has spent herself and is hovering now near sleep. Holding her, I follow Reggie to the sharecropper house. It’s cool, dim as evening inside. Ariyeh’s sitting on a butter churn. Reggie walks over and slips his arms around her. They whisper together. He kisses her cheek. My limbs grow weak, and I tighten my grip on Sasha. “Shhh, shhh,” Reggie goes, his mouth in Ariyeh’s hair.

  The baby is limp in my arms. Light, moist, the color of angel food cake. I lean against a saddle on a wall. A kerosene lantern sits on a barrel; across the room, a pair of high-topped leather shoes. I imagine plucking a rooster in the corner, washing it for supper, calling my children, hearing shouts of alarm in the street… what’s that? what are they saying? a riot in the white part of town?… oh Lord, oh Lord, this can’t be good.

  Hold me … I squeeze Sasha tight …

  “Oh shit,” Reggie says, pulling away from Ariyeh. He checks his watch. “I have to pick up Natalie. She’s got afternoon classes. The buses have been running late all week, so I promised her—”

  “I’ll go,” I say right away, watching his hands on Ariyeh. “Stay with her.” Hurriedly, I hand Ariyeh the kid. I’m too aware of my skin, my longing for touch. It’ll be a relief to step into the sun. Motion. Distraction. Escape.

  Reggie gives me directions. I kiss Ariyeh’s cheek, then leave the little house.

  In the car I rub my arms until my skin begins to sting. I don’t want to want. Need. Be. I’d like to wipe myself clean. Sexless. Skinless. Free. “You’re an asshole,” I whisper. “Right? I’m not attracted to you. Not in the least. I’m not attracted to anyone.” I slip on my shades.

  E-Future Systems is on Kirby Street, in a two-story glass building near a couple of barbecue chains and a Tex-Mex place advertising “Heaven-on-Earth Cabrito.” The receptionist, behind a glass-and-marble counter, tells me to take a seat in the red-tiled lobby. The chairs resemble mousetraps ready to spring. The backs are low; my legs ride high. A fake fern spills from a pot beneath granite stairs. The receptionist speaks into a phone stem attached to her head. It looks like a carrot just out of her reach. She’s a pretty honey color.