Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  Rufus Bowen enters the room, laughing into a cell phone. “Dude, what’s your burn rate?” He’s wearing a sleek gray Armani suit, the kind most of the Dallas mayor’s boys wear. He punches off the phone, leans over the counter and exchanges a few words with stem-lady. Then he turns to me. “Miss Washington. Good to see you again. Natalie will be ready in a few minutes. She’s with one of our clients right now.”

  I picture her straddling a guy in a big leather chair. I have no idea what her job is.

  “Would you like some coffee or tea?”

  “No, thanks.” Crazy: I feel the baby’s warmth, again, in my arms.

  He spreads his hands. A casual gesture of power, the kind Rue Morgue might make. “What do you think of our little operation here?”

  “Very impressive. I’m not sure what you do, exactly.”

  “You’ve heard of the Nielsons? The TV ratings system?”

  “Yes.”

  “We provide a similar service for Interner users. We rank the most popular sites, keeping tabs on them so investors can judge where to put their money. It’s been quite lucrative. Just last month, we made our first public stock offering.”

  “Congratulations.”

  He sits next to me and actually manages to look comfortable in one of these chairs. “I hoped we’d get another chance to talk sometime. I was fascinated by what you said that night in the gallery. ‘Human scale,’ was it?”

  “Right.”

  “Does our building qualify?”

  “Well, two stories, no problem,” I say. “Anything over four is getting out of hand.”

  He laughs. His breath is warm and smells of chocolate.

  “I’m serious.” I watch him. He seems to want a serious answer. “Bedrooms, kitchens—the rooms we actually inhabit, for our private comfort—are built to human specifications. What makes us think public buildings—community spaces—should be any different?”

  “Yes, but the population is so large”—is he humoring me? flirting?—“we need to accommodate—”

  “Size isn’t the answer.” I’ve made this point time and again in planning sessions—usually to no avail. “We build multilane superhighways to ease traffic congestion, right? But they entice even more people to abandon mass transit, so the new highways become glutted. Local circumstances. Hand, foot, eye. Always the best measure.”

  “So you’d tear down all the skyscrapers?”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh. I lean away from him. “Why not? They’re made to intimidate the individual, aren’t they? Make him feel small in the great institutional shadow.”

  “My my. You’re certainly the innovator.”

  “I don’t know whether you’re flattering or insulting me.”

  “No ‘or.’ Pure flattery.” He smiles. “Actually, I’m looking for an innovator to work with us. Someone who knows the ins and outs of public relations, who’s comfortable in that gray zone between business, politics, citizens …”

  “City planning is hardly PR.”

  “Still, it’s a public service. Clearly, you understand the value of image, of selling ideas.”

  “And what ideas do you need to sell?”

  “Myself. The idea that a company run by a black man can be integral to the city’s health.” He sits forward. “You know what it’s like, right? I’m one of the few black CEOs in this town. That means I’ve got to be twice as prepared as my white counterparts. I’ve got to be smoother, better-dressed, better-behaved. Hell, I’ve had to learn to play golf He laughs. “Control my temper—slightest irritation, I’ll get tagged as the ‘angry black man,’ and that’s the end of my business.”

  “I imagine a lot of folks are extra careful around you, too.”

  “Oh, absolutely! You do understand! Some of these fellows, man, they get so self-conscious … I never figured politeness would make me cringe.” He folds his hands on his knee. “I founded this company, gave it direction … when I started, my friends assured me, ‘Green is the only color business looks at.’ But when it came to raising the scratch, I learned early to send white representatives to our potential investors. You’re with that, right?”

  “I am.”

  “So.”

  “Is this a job interview?”

  “When can you get me your résumé?”

  I laugh, but he’s not kidding.

  “I trust my instincts,” he says. “Move quickly, lock my key personnel into place. That’s why E-Future has grown so fast.”

  “Can I ask you … what were you doing in the cemetery the other day?”

  He smiles and smoothes his tie. “We need some tax shelters. We’re thinking of acquiring land, developing new sites.”

  “Disturbing those graves?”

  “We were just looking.”

  “For the sake of argument. If I came to work for you, that’s the first thing I’d try to talk you out of. It’s a historic neighborhood. It needs to be left alone.”

  “It’s crime-ridden and poor. It’s going to be developed sooner or later. That’s inevitable. Isn’t it better if a black man has an interest in it?”

  “Is it?”

  “I’d like a chance to convince you.”

  “If you’re serious about this,” I say, slow, measured, “you need to know …”

  “Yes?”

  “Things are up in the air for me right now.”

  He nods. “I hope you don’t mind. I’ve talked to Reggie. I know a little about your situation. I was going to call you.”

  I feel my face go hot.

  “Your uncle, your ties to this place … it got me thinking. I figured you might be interested in a position in town.”

  “I don’t know.”

  His earring catches the sun. “What do you want? Humanly?”

  Our eyes meet, then Natalie appears in a doorway behind the receptionist’s desk, wearing a long red dress.

  “Think about it,” he tells me, rising. “We’re a solid, honest, black-owned company, still on the ground floor but growing. And I’m committed to investing in our local community.”

  Another caretaker. These men. Goddam.

  Natalie tells Rufus good-bye. He smiles at us both, hands me a card with his fax number on it and the sctibbled instruction, “Résumé.”

  “You can just drop me off at home, and I’ll walk to class from there,” Natalie says. For several blocks we sit stiffly in the car. It’s hard for me to concentrate on anything but Bowen’s offer. I ask, “How’s Michael these days?”

  “Hanging.”

  “And you? The job’s working out?” I brake too hard, jostling us.

  “Takes a lot of time away from my kids—and half my pay goes for child-care. I’ll probably have to quit school soon.”

  “Oh, I hope not. That would be a shame.”

  “The hardest part would be telling Reggie. Hell, school’s not gonna bring me anything better’n this.”

  “Anyway. I’m glad things are nice for you,” I say. Nice?

  She snorts. “A year ago I was nearly dead on the street. Anything’s nicer than that.” She points to a shack on the edge of Freedmen’s Town, next to a burnt store and an abandoned car. Someone has spray-painted on a cinder-block fence, “Five-dollar whores in two-dollar gowns at the funeral of Hope and Love.”

  “Old freak room in there,” Natalie says. “We’d cook the rocks, I’d smoke that sweet stuff and, man, I didn’t care how many fellas asked me to give ‘em brains. I’d suck ‘em all night, long’s they kept the goods coming. Living high in the Rock Resort! I have to say, I miss it sometimes.”

  “Well. I hope you find a way to stay in school.” She’s too tired to listen. Maybe it’s just as well. Join a sorority? Look at Goya? Where would that get her?

  She steps out by the Row Houses, thanks me again. Behind her, Michael sails through the air with a ball. Angry. Innocent? Golden.

  Editorials appear in the Chronicle decrying America’s “declining values” and the “pathology” of African American communi
ties. The child-murder suspect—the paper doesn’t name him; is it Johnson?—was “apparently delusional”: a blurry bio of a blurry existence on the edge of booming Houston. No word yet on whether all the bodies have been found.

  Reggie has been exceedingly attentive to Ariyeh; I’ve seen little of them both. He’s commissioned a new sculpture from Kwako for the Row Houses, and she’s been helping them clear a space next to one of the porches.

  Bitter is still wearing nutmegs, feeling chest pains. “You’re sleep-walking right into trouble,” I told him last night.

  “You know what they say, Seam. Never wake a sleepwalker. Let him go where he wants, cause he just might head for hidden treasure.”

  He no longer seemed mad at me for leaving his house; resigned, maybe. She’s her mama’s child, all right. He asked about my “accommodations” and the possibility of my fixing him some okra one night. “Of course,” I said.

  “This come for you.” He handed me a letter. A second apology from Elias Woods: “I just want everything to be right before I go. Please forgive me.”

  When I left, Bitter was sitting on his porch singing,

  Papa, li couri la riviere,

  Maman, li couri peche crab.

  Fe dodo, mo fils, crab dans calalou.

  Coming home, Lord, coming home. Wade in the water, children, wade in the water. Wade in the water, children. God’s a-gonna trouble the waves. Walk together, children. Don’t you get weary. Don’t you get weary, there’s a great meeting in the Promised Land. Ya-a-as, Lord, I’m trying to make Heaven my home.

  Ariyeh weeps softly beside me. The dead kids’ parents huddle in the front pew. Crespi stands by the door, clasping his hands. Photos of the children, enlarged to the size of standard house windows, have been affixed to posterboards and mounted on thin wooden easels behind the altar.

  A gap-toothed grin. Merry eyes.

  The choir sings, I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms, lay this body down. Lord, I’m-a coming on home.

  Reggie holds Ariyeh’s hand. Before the service, he told me he didn’t trust the cops’ version of the murders (apparently, few of the victims’ bodies have been retrieved). Johnson is in custody. No public details. No talk of a trial. No story, Reggie insists: “They’re setting this one up to just go away.” He has pals who work for the city; they’ve heard that Johnson thought it was better to kill black boys than to let them be raised in a blighted environment, where they were bound to go bad. In his foul logic, he was doing them, and the community, a favor. “Doesn’t wash,” Reggie said. “Crazy shit. I don’t like the smell of it.”

  In the meantime, the victims’ parents wanted to go ahead and commemorate their children, as a healing gesture.

  The missing boys’ smiles, caught by the camera, remind me of curved boats rocking in a current, drifting me back to my own Bayou City childhood, which has also vanished; to sitting in church with Mama, who’s gone missing too. Soon I’ll be done with the troubles of the world. Going home to live with God.

  Flowers and wreaths spice the room with an earthy sweetness, reminiscent of Dale Licht’s aftershave (he always overdid it). I imagine him at Mama’s memorial service, weeping for a woman he probably knew better than I did. For a moment I miss him, his genuine love for Mama, his exasperated tolerance of me. I miss the love of others. Do I have the love of others? My not-family, Bitter, Ariyeh?

  Coming home, Lord, coming home.

  A man drops to his knees in front of the altar, asking God’s mercy. It sounds like a curse. Ariyeh wilts; I slip my arm around her.

  Don’t know why I want to stay. This ol’ world ain’t been no friend to me.

  16

  I’M SITTIN’G on the stoop when the Beamer appears at the curb. I’m not surprised he’s found me. He’s “connected.” “My crew is in effect elsewhere. Get in.”

  Righting the balance, I think. Apparently, Rufus Bowen has offered me an opportunity. Rue Morgue can point me in other directions—pull me into the dark side, and not some yuppie version of it, either. It’s taken me over a dozen years to catch up with myself. Seems I’m faced with the choices, now, I would have stumbled across if Mama had left me where I was. Naturally, I can’t nab back lost time … but missed identities?

  Of course Rue Morgue has found me. I cleared the trail for him.

  As I get into the car, fear touches my spine, the way someone taps your shoulder to get your attention. But I’m not as afraid as I thought I would be. Things were different for Mama—she had no options, no outs. When she met my daddy, it hadn’t yet occurred to her that high yellow was a ticket to the Thicket and beyond; every encounter was good and real and rippled outward into every other part of her life. She was at the neighborhood’s heat-blasted mercy.

  Not me. I can always return to my mayor (thanks to the lift Mama gave me). I can slip back inside the great white world. This is just a game. And no matter how tough this fast-talking do-rag is, I’m in charge. After all, he’s panting after me.

  He’s wearing winter boots, a Kangor cap, and an L.A. Raiders jersey. “Looking fine this evening, Ann.”

  “Thank you. You, too.”

  He grins. “I’ma show you my ‘hood.”

  “All right.”

  “Get you home, safe as milk. ‘S all about respect, see.”

  No, Player, it’s about what you can do for me. Take my mind off Reggie, for one thing. Distraction. A substitute. A rough confirmation: I must be no damn good to dream of my cousin’s man. You can show me exactly how low I am. How low was my poor, desperate mama? Was it just like this with her and Daddy? Prove to me, Rue, that the world’s as bad as I think it is.

  We cruise past flat, moldy-green shacks nearly hidden beneath willow limbs. A bizarre parody of an upbeat city tour. “Kick-ass form of smack—brand-name ‘President’—X-ed three of my favorite junkies here back in ‘94. I used to give ‘em lessons how not to OD, but … over here, in that alley, see, I saved a strawberry from a wack headhunter one muddy night, liked to cut on folks …”

  He seems to need the outside world’s approval, wants to show me a player with street cred works as hard as a mayor’s girl. A man of his people, like Reggie.

  Past a soup kitchen serving slumped men in Levi’s beneath a white neon cross. “Little boy, Raymond Evers, beaten by his parents there. Couple of real juicers. Got me some base cars over here …”

  I remember running through these streets as a girl. Some of my friends were so poor they ate laundry starch for supper; their lips glowed white beneath the flickering streetlamps. In the fall, we’d sell candy and raffle tickets over in the white neighborhoods to raise money for our school. After sunset, we’d come back here and hide in a vacant lot, eating most of the candy ourselves. My friends laughed about the ofays. “They look like cartoon pigs in storybooks!” I laughed too, but uneasily, knowing how much lighter I was than my pals.

  “Hey, baby, I be hella good to you!” a young man yells at a pair of strolling women. They ignore him, and he shouts, “Say, bitch, wasn’t for your chunky boo-tay, you’d have no shape a’tall!”

  Rue laughs. That’s it, put them in their place, eh, Player? After all, it’s the women who hold down the jobs, who are raising the kids, who are participating in the world, while you poor boys are locked out of the action. Right? It’s our fault. Fact is, sugar, you punked out on us on the plantation, way back when, when you should have gone to war for your kids and us, and you’ve never forgiven yourself, have you? Or at least you think that’s what we think. Bitter’s generation blamed whites. You blame black women—all women, who won their rights at your sorry expense. Isn’t that the story? Well, stick with me, baby. I know all about being no damn good.

  While we’re sitting at a stop sign, I notice a couple of Mixtec girls, their hair in braids, tied by leather shoestrings, sitting on a curb, spooning orange Benadryl into their babies’ mouths and cooing, “Shh, shh.” Rue looks the girls over, without comment. He’s probably figuring angles: how can I corn
er the Benadryl market?

  We pass a candy store, its windows barred, and I’m back in the lot again, eating toffee with my friends. We were poor, but I was part of something then. In the ‘burbs, where Mama meant to “better” me, shit, I became more aware than ever of my freaky lack-of-fit…

  “Fuck-up folks,” Rue says, pointing at a crowd in front of a darkened happy shop. “Sketching away the hours. Say y’all,” he yells out the window, slowing, stopping. “Need some Sudafed? Efidac? Got some Ephedrine from Mexico.”

  A kid—he can’t be more than twelve—sucks vapor from an emptied air-freshener tube. I glimpse embers glowing inside it. Others pull on hand-rolled cigarettes, spilling chalky grains on their shirts. No one answers Rue, and he peels around the corner.

  We stop at a low-slung building behind a boarded-up Circle K. The plywood walls are held together by rusty nails driven through Pepsi bottle caps. When Rue gets out I don’t know whether to sit or follow. Finally, I unlatch my seatbelt. “Delivery,” he says at the door. It opens a crack; a thin man in dreads, wearing jeans but no shirt, squints out at us. Cans of Night Train clutter his wooden floor. Behind him, an alcohol rehab certificate is taped to the wall next to a “Free Mumia” poster. A Virgin of Guadalupe candle. A Land O’ Lakes tub filled with soggy cereal. Above a small TV, black bananas curl on a hook. The place smells strangely sweet, like the wax lips I bought as a kid for Halloween. A noisy swamp cooler hustles in a busted corner window. Rue holds out a rolled-up Baggie. The man pulls three bills from his pocket. No words. Hand-bump. Then we’re back on the street.

  From a cooler in his trunk Rue has pulled two malt liquor cans. I take a sip. Everything will be all right, I think, if I play along with him. He’ll think he’s setting the rules. Rap grinds from his speakers, all about bitches and hos. I remember the days of Otis, Aretha. Try a little tenderness. Respect.