Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  Rue tells me he’s begun supplying Strychly Speed to local cockers—“a new line of business I lucked-up into.” It’s a strychnine-laced drug designed to quicken the reflexes and ward off shock. Just as I’m trying to imagine the outré sex practices he means, we stop outside a corrugated steel warehouse. He leads me to a small wooden door beneath a cracked bulb; a series of coded knocks, soft and rapid, then we’re inside on a sawdust-covered floor reeking of dog shit and bug spray. Bloody feathers float through yellow light. “Ten on the red hat!” someone shouts. Another counters, “Thirty on the gray shirt!” A third man yells, “Ready, pit!” and men surge forward toward a wide dirt ring. Intense, blurry scrabbling. Rue nudges me ahead of him, closer to the action. Past T-shirted bellies and John Deere caps I glimpse a pair of roosters—green and white, yellow beaks. Steel strapped to their spurs. Their hackles stiffen. One bird rolls beneath the other, leaps up and spears his opponent’s lung with a razored foot. The injured rooster hunkers and refuses to budge, coughing up blood, wheezing—a sound like a broken door hinge. Tens and twenties circle the room.

  Rue retreats into a dusty corner with a short man restraining two pit bulls on leashes. A leather bag, more bills. I loiter near a plywood booth where a Mexican man—red, roughened, fresh from the fields—sells cracked corn, maple peas, atole. He offers to polish the cockers’ gaffs on an electric whetstone. Two men pass me on their way to what one calls the drag pit, a small chalked area where another pair of birds prepares to battle. “Is he farm-walked?” one guy asks the other. “Yep. Real good game. Won six last month, back to back, over in Sunset.” They spit snuff into small plastic containers. One wears a rooster-spur earring.

  A few women stand by a dented beer keg, chatting freely but eyeing each other suspiciously: after the roosters are done, these girls will be in a different kind of competition for the men’s attention. What was it Shirley once said to me?—“Black women raise their daughters, but they love their sons. It’s ingrained in us—even when we’re moms—to view younger women as a threat.”

  I move close. “… he dogged her and dogged her, and she just gave it up.”

  “Man’s gonna hit, he’ll hit, no matter how you play him. Then he’ll head on out.”

  “That’s right. Have dick, will travel.”

  They laugh.

  “When you cut your hair, girl? Look like you just lathered up and took a straight razor to your sweet ol’ skull.”

  “Got tired of fooling with those damn relaxers, you know?”

  To my eye, they’re all too dark for the red and purple dresses they’re wearing. “Boy-thing” or no, I’ve got them all beat, I think. No wonder Rue came to me: only a fool would choose ground beef over filet mignon. I laugh at my own boldness, stand a little straighter. Move it or lose it, T. They look my way and frown.

  Everyone at the drag pit—birds and men—looks beaten to a frazzle. Someone shouts, “Pit!” and the roosters go after one another, legs flailing, feathers drifting wildly like snow. The birds seem stuck together. Two handlers step in to separate them. “Roundhead’s hurt,” a man mutters. The birds are placed behind the score lines again; they glare and scratch the dirt. Released, they collide midair, then tumble to the ground. I can’t tell who has the advantage, but blood blackens the ring. The spectators press forward. They’re no longer yelling. Suddenly, we’re witnessing a funeral. One of the roosters droops and quivers in a puff of dust. His handler picks him up, blows on his beak, then sets him back down—a final sacrifice. The other bird slashes. Rue tugs my arm. “It’s over,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  “Is that bird dead?”

  “If he ain’t, he will be once they pull his head off.”

  In the stairwell in my building, I continue to play along. To play the player. This is no one-way deal, no matter what he thinks. He kisses my neck. I let him take my hand.

  Through an open door we hear a TV talking head insisting on ousting Saddam Hussein and making the world a safer place to live. “Zat so?” someone says to the screen. “Let me tell you, Mr. Pun-dit, white folks’ problems ain’t nothing but white folks’ problems. Ain’t our lookout.”

  We pass a twenty-something girl on the second landing. She’s wearing a halter top and a short yellow skirt. In her right hand she holds a dead white moth, in her left, a compact mirror. She crushes the moth, grinds its wings between her fingers and, watching herself in the mirror, spreads the dust on her eyelids. “Beautiful, baby,” Rue tells her. “You gonna go far.” I tug his hand.

  As we stand at my door, and I flick through the keys on my ring, he grins like he’s about to spring a trap. Poor, deluded boy. He’s in as much need of healing, education, and understanding as I am. I see this; he doesn’t. Things are so fucked up between black men and women—have been for so long—it’s hard to see anything clearly.

  Inside, I kick the doll’s head over to a corner, out of the way. I remember Ariyeh as a girl changing her dolls, taking black Marks-A-Lot to their cheeks, trying to make them look like her. “They already look like you” she used to tell me. Rue watches me now, and I see he’s thinking something similar. He thinks he can do whatever he wants to me, the nice, polite dime piece. He doesn’t believe I have it in me to throw a niggerbitchfit and bring the whole building running. I don’t know if I have it in me, either, but I tell myself, You’re in charge. You’re in charge. Look at how he looks at you. The shut-in boy, all grown up. And he’s yours now. Yours.

  He pulls me to him, more gently than I expected, and I imagine myself in Reggie’s embrace. That’s it, Player. Fill my fantasy then drain it. Take it all out of me. Whatever you say, whatever you want. I won’t think about the dangers. Or the pleasure. Absolution’s what I’m after.

  As his mouth finds mine, I feel a familiar drift, the dropping of a mask … truth is, I never feel so white as when a black man wants me. It’s my difference he desires; he wants to tear me down, but this impulse feeds his passion. The fact that he can’t really reach me fuels it even more. That’s it, Player, that’s it. It’s all just a game and I’ve won it in advance—look how lost you are, grabbing, tugging, gasping …

  He carries me to bed. For a moment he looks at me as if he’s asking forgiveness, not for what he’s about to do or for the street life that’s killing him, but as if he were every missing father in the neighborhood, as if we were every sad night ever spent by a man and a woman who want to please each other but never learned tenderness.

  He holds me to the mattress. Lips brush my nipples. Considerate, slow. Skillful. That’s it, Player. I’m too self-conscious to come, but don’t you stop, all right, don’t let up. Slip me all your pain. Let me kiss it. Make it better. Show me what Mama felt the night she met my daddy. Mama, see, your story’s not over. You’re not really gone … you’ve got to come save me now, save me, see, my soul’s in trouble here.

  I rise and rise, in spite of myself: spasms of joy. Rue collapses, his wet bald head on my chest. After awhile he strokes my hair. “You taste salty,” he says, smiling. I watch his face. The face all the boys wear. Spiteful. Proud. But just a bit uncertain. Pleading, even. Another mask, and not too good a fit.

  Then he’s up, pulling on his pants—lest he or I mistake all this for intimacy. “Okay, then,” he says. Just another deal, more business, my part of the bargain. Right, Player. I see your hands trembling.

  He clears his throat. “Welcome to the ‘hood. You official now.”

  “Part of the life here?”

  “Part of what I say you part of, aight?” But his gruffness is unconvincing now.

  It costs me nothing to play to the end. I ask what he expects me to ask. “When will I see you again?”

  “I be back for more. When I feel like it.”

  “I just wait for the word?” Fat chance, Player.

  “That’s the way, baby.” He leans over and kisses me softly. “That’s the way. Check you later, hm? You be saving your sweet ass for Rue.” The door whispers shut.

  Silenc
e settles so abruptly in the room, I lose my breath—I realize I’ve been close to holding it for an hour. This is who we are, I think, watching Rue from my window. This is how we act in our neighborhood. This is all you can know.

  I lie down again, rub my eyes until they’re wild with sparks, June-teenth rockets in the air … through the bursting, spinning hues I float up, down, around … stroll through the door, see myself as Rue did, a woman stripped of all her masks, spread across the sheet. Her skin’s a pale no-color in the light reflected from outside. I’m a soldier, fighting it out on the streets, cockers and junkies my comrades, under fire, most of them badly wounded … and this lady from her privileged world, who wants a taste of the real… she’s smart enough to know there’s a battle on, and she doesn’t want to be shielded … hell, I’ll give her what she wants … whatever she thinks she’s missing … pump her till her fucking eyes sting … living and losing, that’s war, baby, who’s the good, good king…

  But that’s not the way it happened. If it were, I could tell myself I wasn’t responsible, but right from the start tonight, I set the rules we played by.

  Did I get what I wanted? I’m not sure.

  I get up, pull on my panties and a shirt, fluff my quilt on the windowsill, and watch the freight yard below. Steel tracks shoot like arteries in every direction. Boys spray-paint empty train cars, seizing the moment even as the moment moves on, the paint fading a bit as it dries. The kids wear do-rags and denims, orange jumpsuits like the ones I saw in lockup. Fireflies lift toward the stars.

  A dark shape wings past the trees. Once, when I was little, Bitter told me, “In childhood, if you hold a dying bird, your hands’ll tremble all the rest of your life.” I think of the drag pit cockers. When did they first hold a dying creature in their hands?

  I think of Rue tonight.

  “A child weaned when the birds migrate, well, she’ll always be restless.”

  Right now, Bitter’s hoodoo makes an odd kind of sense to me. Or it makes as much sense as anything else. Who’s to say everything’s not connected? A painstaking pattern of omens and spells. Who’s to say my little dance with Rue—part of a loose chain from the shut-in boy to Troy to Dwayne, these beautiful young bastards—didn’t begin in this neighborhood some twenty years ago, when the birds headed south?

  And I was taken north.

  My eyes fill, wetting the quilt. Living and losing.

  That’s the way, baby. That’s the way.

  I try to sleep. The room is dark but for patches here and there touched by refracted blue moonlight. A hot breeze razors through the freight cars below. In my stepdaddy’s house I used to lie awake, nights, wondering what to do with who I am—except in north Dallas, breezes rustled overwatered oak trees, TV antennae. I can hear Dale’s voice barreling through the rooms, “Front door locked? Check. Windows latched? Affirmative,” like the soldier he’d once hoped to be (flat feet and poor eyesight kept him safe, but bitterly restless, at home). I know what he’d say to me now. “So you had to defy your poor mama, before she’s even settled in her grave, and go back to that hellish place she saved you from. And what have you found there? The usual assortment of wastrels. Does any of this surprise you? Does it aid you in any way? Strengthen you?”

  I don’t doubt he’d speak out of love for me. Genuine concern. He took pride in his wedding photos, his annual Christmas cards with our strained family portraits, his wife’s driver’s license with its predictably bad picture, but one that—washed-out, blue—revealed none of the Houston in her.

  Whiteness as a bureaucratic norm, the default mode, while I’m stuck in my own Middle Passage.

  I remember the night I sat at the kitchen table, my senior year in high school, filling out Affirmative Action forms for college. Dale made his evening check of the house. “Front door? Roger.” Then he paused above me and said, “You know, race is always the least interesting thing about a person.” He knew how vexed this subject was for me. Mama, who’d been helping me negotiate the paperwork, looked up at him, and said, “Yes, hon, but it’s not negligible, either.”

  Oh, to have that moment back! To grab her by the shoulders, as I failed to do—shyness? shock? embarrassment?—and shout, “Tell me more! What has your experience been? What am I hearing? Regret for the choices you’ve made? What about those quilts of yours, Mama? Those slave patterns you stitch? Just what do you think you’re doing? Just what in hell do you think you’re doing?

  I’m not sure she could have told me, or herself, even if I’d known enough to ask.

  My own piecework lies on the windowsill now, a rough brown square softened by the moon. Sirens in the distance. I wonder if Bitter is sleeping, if Reggie and Ariyeh are making love, if Rue is out caretaking. For nearly an hour, I sit and listen to the city I’ve carried so many years inside me. Moths tap the torn screen.

  17

  I DON’T KNOW all of Montrose, though this is the neighborhood Ariyeh lives in. As I check the rough map I made based on Bowen’s directions over the phone, I think, wryly, how similar this process is to following Mama’s guidance—left here, honey, no right—when she was so addled by anger, denial, hurt, God knows what else, she couldn’t see two feet in front of her. No, not fair. She left you your name, didn’t she? Her quilts? She wasn’t like the mayor, who can erase whole subdivisions, canceling their tax bases with one mighty slash of a pen or by ordering his speechwriters to delete a phrase or two. Mama left a few things behind. The Crisis. C’s letter to Sarah Morgan. Maybe she wanted me to return here, after all. More likely, it occurs to me, she knew I’d come back, anyway, and she didn’t want to be entirely silent when I did.

  I make a left at a corner showing growth pangs—a brand-new multistory bank on one side of the street; on the other, a dilapidated house with a bail bondsman’s sign out front, in English and Spanish. A young Mixteca stands on the bail bondsman’s lawn, glancing frantically up and down the block. She yells a couple of names.

  On a call-in show on my radio, an angry right-winger blames poverty in America on unwed black mothers. Wonderful. Don’t these guys ever change? My bathtub is smarter than they are. I punch buttons until I find Me’Shell NdegeOcello singing “Soul on Ice.” The song adds to my cheer. I’ve surprised myself: I’m riding pretty high today. No nasty side effects from my one-on-one with Rue. I matched him move for move—because I was determined to—and the sucker probably knows it. As a purely practical matter, the sex has relaxed me a little, as I hoped it would.

  Another left, and I’m at the wine bar Bowen suggested, the Resplendent Grape. He’s sitting at a shaded table on the walk out front, his suit coat off, collar and thin red tie loosened just a notch. A wrinkle-free cream shirt. He stands and pulls out a wrought-iron chair for me. I lock my car. “The house merlot here is fabulous,” he tells me. “I took the liberty of ordering you one.” He hands me a tall, wide glass.

  “Thank you,” I say, and sit. Sunlight sparkles through the trees, dappling the tabletop, Bowen’s biscuit-colored arms and rolled-up sleeves.

  “I’m really glad you called,” he tells me. “I’ve been sitting by the fax machine. So. Do you have a résumé for me?”

  “Before you pitch me again … I saw the sign.”

  “What sign?”

  “In the cemetery across from my uncle’s house. Future Home of Such-and-Such … what is it? Apartments? Condos?”

  He smiles. “I explained before—”

  “I don’t know all of Houston’s ins and outs, but I know, Mr. Bowen, just from looking at the site, that you’ll probably have to secure a density modification before you can make a move, and you’ll need to hold a public hearing, which means official notification of the neighborhood, which I know for a fact the neighborhood hasn’t received yet.”

  He eyes me appreciatively.

  “It’s an old trick, right? Slap the sign up, make it look like a done deal, take the wind out of the neighbors’ sails before they even know what’s happening, before they realize there’s s
till time to stop it… especially if you’re dealing with a poor, uninformed populace. But I know the trick, all right? And I’m watching.”

  Still smiling, he says, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but through our friends at City Hall, we got an expedited process.”

  I glare at him.

  “It’s all legal and aboveboard, I assure you. Now. Résumé?”

  I clutch my purse to my belly.

  He sighs, leans across the table. “Nothing’s etched in stone, Telisha. May I call you Telisha? The sign represents the wishes of some of my partners, but we’re still exploring options. One of the scenarios I’m floating, and there’s some interest in it as a PR move, is to renovate not just the graveyard but some of the surrounding houses. Okay?”

  I don’t believe him, but want to keep my own options kicking. I reach into my purse and produce my résumé. He takes it from me as gingerly as a man fingering a satin bra. While he looks it over, I glance around: yuppies and buppies from Vinson & Elkins. Brooks Brothers breaking brie with Goldman Sachs. These folks run whatever show they’re part of, or they couldn’t afford to sit here of a late afternoon.

  I overhear an elegant black man telling a wavy blonde—a fairy-tale Rapunzel—“White culture is dying in America, baby. Elvis has left the building.”

  “Is your planning office in Dallas pro-business?” Bowen says. “No-growthets? Which way do they lean?”

  “A healthy mix of both. Slow and measured growth is our mantra, though reality has outrun our plans.”

  “Dallas is a mess.”

  I agree.

  He sets aside my pages, sips his wine, studies me. “Are you used to working with white liberals? Because that’s an animal you’ll encounter often in our circle. ‘Economic conservative, social liberal’—that’s how they like to present themselves, at least to me.”

  “Sure.”

  “In my experience, white liberals are geniuses at telling us what we need but morons at actually listening to what we want.”