Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  “They’re going to fix you up, Daddy.”

  “Know they are. That’s why I want to go.”

  His roommate gets up to piss.

  “Niagara Falls,” Ariyeh mutters.

  “Lord, if my peter shot an arrow like that,” Bitter says, “I’d water the city till all the sewers bloomed.”

  Later, Ariyeh naps in a corner chair. Herr Horse-Piddle snores into his pillow. Bitter calls me to his bedside. “Got a hoo-raw for you, Seam. Sit down.”

  I help him sip water through a pink plastic straw.

  “‘Member I told you your daddy run off ‘bout the time my wife did?”

  “Yes. What about it?”

  “Well. What I didn’t say is, they snuck off together.”

  “Uncle!”

  “Didn’t know that at first. But a month or so pass, Cass writes me from Oklahoma City asking for money, lets on she’s with Jim. He’s up there trying to scratch out a living loading furniture, roaming the southside clubs at night. Didn’t make no sense to me ‘cause she never could abide him—or so I thought. Said he’s just a bum. Guess there’s more passion in her hatred than she ever felt for me, and maybe it flipped one day into something like love. Hell if I know. Anyways, never saw either of them again. Heard, about five years later, Cass had died in Kilgore—she’d hooked up with some oil man there. Drank herself to death. Jim, I’m not sure. Far’s I know, he vanished up near Tulsa somewheres.”

  “Heading for the Territory.”

  He looks at me, puzzled.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Wasn’t trying to keep nothing from you, Seam. It’s just hard for me to recount. Cass weren’t worth much, I guess. But I miss her, still.”

  “Uncle …”

  “Anyways, you didn’t ‘member her, so I figgered the details didn’t matter to you. However you look at it, your daddy’s gone and I don’t know where. I honestly thought Elias could give you more of a picture of him than I could.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Hell it don’t.”

  “No,” I say. “What matters is, I’ve got you back.”

  He laughs ruefully, wheezing.

  “I mean it. You’re going to be fine. Remember when Ariyeh and I were kids—we brought horned toads to you in a shoebox, and you said you absorbed their spirits through your skin? Do that now, okay? Soak up all the energy you can. Mine. Ariyeh’s. This old poot-butt beside you.”

  “Careful. You sound like a hoodoo queen.”

  “Queen Seam.”

  “Queen of My Dreams.”

  “I love you, Uncle.

  “Love you, Seam. I think I’ma sleep now, okay?”

  “Good.”

  “Is that all right?”

  “It’s good.

  “Don’t let the Nazis get me.”

  “Abracadabra. They’re gone.”

  19

  I’M gonna tell God all my troubles

  when I get home …

  I’m gonna tell Him the road was rocky

  when I get home.

  I ain’t got long to stay here.

  Wade in the water, children.

  Wade in the water.

  Wade in the water, children.

  God’s a gonna trouble the waves.

  20

  LONG NIGHT, no sleep. Restless mind … drifting, spinning, falling … one perspective to another.

  A prison basement, cracks whorling through its dark green walls. A white-sheeted table with leather straps. Tubes, purring machines. I hover near the ceiling next to a bare, guttering bulb, my senses out-of-kilter, out-of-focus, out-of-body.

  I gaze at myself lying prone. Splayed arms, still feet. Study the needles in my soft inner elbows. A man in an off-white coat leans close to inspect me, lifting my eyelids, resting his fingers on my jaw. “Mr. Woods,” he says. He repeats my name. Then he calls, “Time!” Pity washes through me. Not for me—for him. He has a tough job. Another man, one in shadows, who I can’t see clearly, states flatly, “Elias Woods was pronounced dead at 12:05 A.M., Monday, August—”

  Cold. Getting colder. Mud. Dead grass. Steaming earth. I’m still floating, awaiting another execution. “Andale! Andale!’ “Get those niggers covered up and let’s get the hell out of here!” Drifting, drifting … but now I’m outside somewhere, twisting through a misty, leaning oak. My neck burns—but I have no neck—and I’m weeping, in the highest limbs, over my lifeless body. Always, I’ve taken pride in my cleanliness, polishing my buttons and boots. But I must have pissed myself when the rope broke my windpipe, and now a scrawny Mexican boy pitches dirt onto my coffin. If I had arms I’d break the lid and snatch the goddam shovel out of his hands. “Move!” I shout at myself from above. “Cletus, get up! Smooth your uniform!” But my body lies still in a pine box, in soft, red clay. Already I feel it stiffen, grow more distant from me, elemental. Now I’m rising, a final breath through flittering leaves—

  Cold. Colder. “Okay. Stop the heart.”

  My eyes are closed. The room is warm. But this morning, as Frederick Douglass rolled Bitter away on a gurney, Doctor Buhler walked Ariyeh and me through each step of a double bypass. So now, while Ariyeh paces and chews her nails, and I sit in the waiting room, I see it all unfold. Mentally, I place myself in the cold OR, hovering in an unlighted corner. I give myself a clear perspective.

  Today’s the day they do Elias down in Huntsville. I tell myself I don’t care. Still, I hold his last letter in my purse; punishments scissor my thoughts. Cletus. Elias. The Axeman’s blade. But I steady myself and witness the heart’s stopping—this killing of the man to save his life.

  Cold. Getting colder.

  “They gonna resurreck me?” Bitter had said this morning while the nurses shaved and prepped him.

  “That’s right, Daddy,” Ariyeh had whispered, wiping her eyes.

  “I be like the rabbit bounding out of the briarpatch?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I be Jack the Bear.”

  “Pump on?” Buhler says.

  “Yes sir.”

  Bitter’s chest yawns like a trunk in an attic, full of mysteries. Pliable, shiny trinkets. A stiff, steel frame pins back his ribs. Stark, curving bones, like African drumsticks. Glistening tissue. A bag, ripped apart, full of roots and leaves and animal tails: mighty gris-gris. His heart, the size of two fists, a dense no-color—a shade without a name—pitches and rolls until the pump kicks in. Then it twitches. Once, twice, the ear of an agitated cat.

  Quits.

  An assisting surgeon steps forward, pours a pitcher of ice water into the chest cavity. Cold. Getting colder. Around the stilled, bubbling heart, steam gushes, morning mist.

  “T core?”

  30.6.

  Buhler cradles Bitter’s heart in his yellow-gloved palm. He lifts it out of the chest. Near the top, he snips a tiny hole in an artery. A vein, harvested from Bittet’s leg, has been lying on a sheet like a piece of pasta scraped from the bottom of a bowl. Buhler takes the vein, inserts it into the artery, sews them together. A flat line streaks across the monitor. Suction. Ice water.

  “Okay. Calcium.”

  “T core?”

  “34.5. 35.7 …”

  A faint scribble on the EKG machine.

  “Ventricular fib.”

  “Paddles!”

  “Okay. Stand clear. Good. Good …”

  “Got him?”

  “He’s back.”

  And the rabbit bounds up and away, across the field.

  Bitter lies in ICU, tubes taped to his mouth, IV lines snaking from his arms, and a long yellow hose winding from his belly just below his ribs. A machine breathes for him, sighing steadily—the surgeons collapsed his lungs to get a better shot at his heart—and he waggles in and out of consciousness.

  I’ve been with him for three hours while Ariyeh was at school. Now she and Reggie arrive to spell me. “How is he?” she asks. Reggie holds her hand. The room smells stale.

&nbs
p; “Resting well.”

  “Go get some shut-eye.”

  “Thanks, Telisha,” Reggie whispers and kisses my cheek.

  I hug them both. Machines burble and beep. My night with Rue is wearing off: Reggie’s touch makes me tingle.

  In a bathroom, I wash my face with cold water. In the mirror I see the same dragged-down look I noticed on Dale Licht’s face the last few days of Mama’s life, despite his constant smile, his pretense that everything was going to be fine. The man really did love her, I think. Does he miss me now?

  On my way to find a couch, I pass a row of pay phones. Still thinking of Dale, I hesitate, then dig through my purse for his number. I find Rufus’s business card, make a mental note to call him again in the next few days.

  Five rings, six. Then a windy voice.

  Words catch in my throat, as awkward as the tubes in Bitter’s mouth.

  “Hello?” Dale repeats. The voice of the ‘burbs, the law firm, the plush white living room carpet—a world I luxuriated in while disdaining it. A world I never belonged to—but which shaped me profoundly, just the same.

  “Hello?”

  A young mother drags a boy and a girl past me on her way to the bathroom. The kids wail. They smell of bubble gum and poop.

  “Hello?”

  A world I don’t know how to reenter.

  A world that ends with a click.

  I dream of snuggling into Mama’s lap, reading a book. She points at a colorful picture: a kitten in a ballet dress. “Listen,” she says, “and the book will talk to you.” She begins to read, and though the words emerge in her voice, they aren’t her words, they’re the words of the page. It’s sounding through her to me.

  A talking book.

  Mama pulls a quilt up over my legs. Wagon wheels. Flying geese.

  The whole world is speaking to you. Listen.

  Did Mama say that or did I? Or was it the book? The quilt? I burrow into her lap, close my eyes. When I open them, I’m scrunched into a hospital chair, and the overhead light is bright.

  Bitter has been moved to a yellow room overlooking spindly elms. They stand in high grass, among patches of partridge peas and marigolds, and look like rolled-up maps. I sit by the double-paned window, reading a paper. It’s a week old, so nothing on Elias—but there is a list of last suppers requested by Texas’s death row inmates:

  Ronald O’Brien (executed 3/3/84): T-bone steak

  (medium to well-done), French fries and catsup,

  Boston cream pie, and rolls.

  Ruben Cantu (executed 8/24/93): Barbecued chicken,

  refried beans, brown rice, sweet tea, and

  bubble gum (gum prohibited by Texas

  Department of Criminal Justice policy).

  David Allen Castillo (executed 9/23/98):

  Twenty-four soft tacos, six enchiladas, one

  chocolate shake, and one quart of milk.

  Jonathan Nobles (executed 10/7/98):

  Eucharist, sacrament.

  Well. When you get there, say hello to my daddy, Elias. And to the laughing old Axeman.

  Bitter stirs but doesn’t wake. I watch the gentle pumping of the breathing machine. Above the bed, a steady green pulse zigs across a monitor.

  Ariyeh slips into the room carrying two Styrofoam cups of coffee. She hands me one, tells me Reggie had to return to the Row Houses to help Kwako install his new sculpture. It’s a six-foot pair of hands, carved in black oak, she says, pressed together as if praying or applauding. Faith and Celebration, Kwako calls it.

  We sip our coffee, listening to the hungry-bird cheep of the heart machine. Exhaustion pools in Ariyeh’s eyes.

  “I kind of miss Mussolini,” I say.

  She laughs.

  “Maybe you should take a nap.”

  “I’m fine. Beat, but I don’t think I can sleep.” She taps her cup. “Last night?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Reggie asked me to marry him.”

  “Ariyeh!” I try to keep my voice down.

  She smiles. “I think Daddy’s ordeal prompted him some. What’s important. You know.”

  “I’m thrilled for you.” Really, I think. Really I am. “He’s a good man.”

  “We haven’t set a date. But when we do … I’d like you to be my maid of honor.”

  I cross the room and kiss her cheek. She smells of sugar and cream. “Of course.”

  “How’s that going to work with your job? I mean, what are your plans?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “E-Future?”

  I scan her face. “What do you know?”

  “Bowen’s been asking Reggie about you. Thought you might be looking for options.”

  “Maybe. I was wary of him at first, you know. But after talking to him … he seems okay.” My cheeks burn.

  “And the other night? You looked like yesterday’s leftovers.”

  I pluck at Bitter’s sheet, start to say something, then shake my head. I’ll need a drink or two before I can dish on Rufus and Rue. “I’ll talk to you about it sometime. No, I will. Promise. Anyway, before I decide anything for sure, I’ll have to go back, take care of my business—”

  “I’ve missed you, T. It’s been lovely having you home.”

  “For me, too. But—”

  She anticipates me. “The old neighborhood … it’s changing for everyone, Telisha. We’re all just making things up as we go.” She leans close. “You belong here.”

  A car backfires in the parking lot below. Bitter’s eyes flutter. Ariyeh and I move to either side of his bed. She holds one of his hands; I squeeze the other. He looks at us, eyes steady and firm, as if we were kids again and he’s the adult in charge, urging us to settle down, now, settle down here in my lap—are you comfy, girls?—let me spin you out a hoo-raw, a tale of Old and New.

  Early evening. Ariyeh has gone to meet Reggie at the Ragin’ Cajun. I’ve just finished some cold macaroni from the cafeteria downstairs, and I’m sitting by Uncle’s bed. Buhler has finally removed the tubes from Bitter’s mouth. He’s breathing on his own now. Pill vials clutter the room like bottles in the Flower Man’s tree, warding off ghosts—or the soda containers buried with Cletus and the others, filled with their names.

  I’m flipping through television channels with the sound off. I’m shocked to see my boss on a local community affairs show. He looks tired, obviously at the end of a junket. I inch the volume up. He appears to be debating an activist here in Houston, a black man I don’t recognize. “The breakdown in our society relates to morality,” the mayor says—an old saw of his. “Kids stealing possessional sorts of things. Now, in recent polls in my city, only four percent said race is a real concern—”

  “Be that as it may, Mr. Mayor, when you have thirty percent dropping out of yout schools—”

  “It’s not thirty percent. That’s absurd. It’s twenty-three percent.”

  “Facts are facts.”

  “Your facts are incorrect. It’s twenty-three percent.”

  “Well, I mean, I think, listen—”

  “And among those twenty-three percent, Latinos make up eighteen percent of that twenty-three percent—”

  “—make a point here—”

  “—and if you count as not dropping out those students who stay in school at least six years, then the dropout rate is only twenty-one percent.

  Hasn’t lost a step. I wish Reggie could have a go at him. Ariyeh’s Reggie. He’d put the mayor in his place. Breaking ranks? Abandoning ship? That’s war, Mr. Mayor.

  “All I’m saying is, life is not lived behind a closed door. All right? That’s all I’m saying.”

  “The point is, we’re missing the point—”

  Bitter stirs. “Seam?”

  “Uncle.” I click the remote and pick up his hand. “Uncle, you made it,” I say.

  He coughs. “Spared for now, but next time and tomorrow—”

  “Easy. Easy.”

  “You ain’t going nowhere, are you? Seam?”

 
“No.” I smile. “I’m staying right here.”

  “Take me home soon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Seam?”

  “Yes, Uncle, what is it?”

  But he only nods and closes his eyes.

  21

  IN FREEDMEN’S Town’s pharmacies, steel bars block the windows. Cigarette and malt liquor ads plaster the walls—cute young black couples, laughing, smoking, drinking on lovely beaches. I know damn well these pristine resorts are still informally “Whites Only” in the world beyond the posters.

  So far this afternoon I’ve tried three places; none carries the Lipitor Uncle needs. In fact, their drug supplies seem maddeningly depleted. Finally, one clerk admits to me, “Truth is, we don’t stock many meds in this neighborhood. The people who really need them can’t afford them, you know, and we’re afraid gangbangers’ll break in here and steal the crap.” He shrugs. “It ain’t no profit in us carrying pharmaceuticals. Sorry.”

  I consider asking Rue if he can scare me up some heart pills on the street. In the end, I get the stuff at a Kroger’s on Montrose, where wasted queens line up to refill their AZT.

  The man in front of me reads an old book as he waits for the pharmacist. A colorful cartoon on the cover. I’m guessing it’s a book he’s owned since he was a boy. The spine’s ancient glue flakes as he turns the pages, and he has trouble holding the volume together.

  I step up and order the magic we hope will keep Bitter alive.

  I swing by the Row Houses where Kwako, Barbara, and Reggie are dedicating the new sculpture. Its wooden fingers are as tall as I am, brown as bayou water. They point at Heaven as well as the street: supplication to God, a gentle prodding of the locals. The base is a graceful collage of basketball netting, sneakers, television consoles. I recall a Ralph Ellison phrase: A junkman I know, a man of vision …

  Reggie hands me an overnight bag with a change of clothes for Ariyeh. She had called and asked him to prepare a care package for her, for me to take back to the hospital. I kiss his cheek. “I’m so happy for you.”

  He grins. “You’re going to be with us, right? The flower girl—”