The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter

by Kia Corthron

  What’s that you got there? I ask.

  He look down at his ring finger. Yeah, he say, she’s a good woman. Four great kids. She got a sister in France, they all there, otherwise she surely be here today, and he turn looking the other direction drinking. Then a friend of Lyle’s Noah come up talking about the speeches. I remember Noah, how come I can’t remember Lyle’s name? We three talk, and after awhile Lyle nod, in tears he so moved. He say he wisht his wife could a been here, his wife’s his best friend. He say change is coming, maybe not in our lifetime but. And Noah and me quiet, nodding. Then Noah go to the restroom, and Lyle look at me. No, it’ll be our lifetime, I don’t want my children to grow old like this, I want my children to see it. New world! Didn’t you feel it today? Then Sonny Rollins, saxophone.

  Friend of Lyle’s (not Noah), his apartment. Lyle hit some tender spot, I don’t know. It might seem high and mighty to say about a one-night stand but we did not just fuck we made love. At one point I near cried, turn my face away so Lyle don’t see. Even in my ugliness I wasn’t never unfaithful to Keith, well who the hell in Humble and Lewis I got to be unfaithful with? And before. Two women before Keith when I was pretending to myself. And a few anonymous men but nothing that meant nothing, this Lyle, something important. I do not remember his name but I remember his smell. Cologne. I can’t describe it but when over the years I’ve catched a similiar whiff I always turn my head fast but it ain’t never been him. Still, it always bring me back to that day, which was a very very good day.

  I doze a couple hours, Lyle holding me. Lyle’s friend whose apartment it is starts work 2 a.m. and he offer give me a lift to where I can walk to my truck. I look one last time at Lyle, sleeping peaceful. He remind me of Sidney Poitier who I heard was at the march and who I always thought was a very beautiful man. Lyle and I did not exchange numbers.

  On the highway the city feel gradually go rural. Another scorcher. Deliberate I took my vacation this week so I ain’t got to be back to delivering mail today, not till Monday. Turn on the radio there’s highlights of the march, and I’m there again, joy again, hope, which I can still taste until two weeks later when four little Birmingham girls be blown to bits.

  I could tell Keith about Lyle and he would cry and then forgive me. But what I really need to tell him is goodbye. Set him free. He be a mess awhile, then he be over it. He been talking about moving out to San Francisco, us together. He said there’s friendly people out there, after they dishonorably discharged these World War II soldiers for homosexuality and they settled in part of the city there, he said we could have some peace there. I told him I can’t go nowhere long as my father’s living and I sure am wishing my father longevity. So when Keith pull hisself together he could head on out there on his own, his own self. New world.

  Hitting the mountains close to Humble, I think I might pick up some groceries. Sometime my poor daddy don’t got none in his house. I see that one place along the road, market and a little dining room for people to sit and have coffee except the sign say BLACK TO GO meaning we can’t sit inside though they happy take our money at the window send us on our way. Old white proprietor won’t never get no business from me, and even with my upbeat outlook after yesterday my blood boil just bypassing the damn place.

  I go to the new grocer, replaced D’Angelo’s. Opens early, 7 a.m. Come to think of it my own cupboards could use a little replenish so I end up with two bags full. I get to my daddy’s before 8.

  He’s happy to see me. Well, happy in the relative. His eyes always full these last three years, constant state of mourning. I visit him often and still can’t get used to my mother gone, every room I walk in empty, empty. I cook us sausage and eggs and fried potatoes and onions. We sit and eat and he asks about the march and I tell him every detail that don’t involve Lyle and he smiles.

  I had planned to drive straight back to Lewis. But I got to take Old Mill Road to get there, right by the trailer park. And what I got to say to him. Better get it overwith. Keith ought a be at the office supply store now, stocking and cashiering, but bet my life he took the day off, hoping I stop by. And when I pull in there he is, come running out to greet me.

  I saw it on TV! I cried! You was right. If you just wanted to be with other colored people you was right to have that.

  I look at him, his eyes shining, hopeful. On another day anything he said would a pissed me off. Blubbering. Trying to get back on my good side. But today. It ain’t even his words, I don’t half hear what he says. What I’m remembering’s what he done for Eliot right after our mama died, something I ain’t thought about in awhile.

  And all at once my confession just feels like more a my hard-heart, my evil side looking forward to letting him have it. But I’d tell myself it was for his own good telling him the truth, I’d get the guilt off of my chest, relief, then walk out forever, leaving him drowning in his sobs.

  I bought all this food. Just had breakfast with my daddy and funny, still got the appetite. I fry up some bacon, you whip up your old scrumptious biscuits? And he grin bright like he just hit the number.

  5

  The first Saturday since his Tuesday arrival, Rett emerges from his room around nine to find his uncle on the couch sketching, a mug of herbal tea on the coffee table.

  “Morning,” says the younger.

  Dwight looks up, closing the pad and smiling. “Well. That’s the first time we got to say that to each other. Fix ya some eggs? Juice?”

  “Maybe after my shower.” Rett sits on the couch, leaving a little space between himself and his uncle. “Can I look?”

  Dwight gestures for him to go ahead. Rett picks up the pad, studying each page. Smiles.

  “You were at the circus?”

  “Assembly at the school. These Chinese acrobats, I keep thinkin about em. You remember the time I took you to the circus?”

  Rett nods. “You bought me a candy apple. I’d never had one before.”

  “I forgot that.”

  Rett gets to the page Dwight had been working on minutes before. He stares.

  “You appreciate your likeness?” asks his uncle.

  Around 10:30 Dwight serves them eggs and toast and cantaloupe. He asks Rett if he’d still like to do an outing today.

  “Can we see Haight-Ashbury?”

  “You missed the hippies. Most of em.”

  “That’s okay. And the Mission?”

  “That’s a nice walk.” He butters his second slice of toast. “Somethin else I wanted to talk to you about. I got a vacation comin up. The Fourth falls on a Monday, so if I took the week prior we’d get the extra day. I was thinkin about doin it then, but really I can take it anytime. Your birthday the followin week, right?”

  “The 11th.”

  “So I’m flexible, but here’s the question. Do you get any time off.”

  Rett thinks. “I’ll have to ask.”

  “You drive?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We could take some nice little day excursions. Napa Valley, couple hours north. You could do the tastin while I mosey around. Bring a friend ya want. You makin friends at work?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, jus been three days. Also the redwoods, that we could do on a weekend. And if they do give ya a little time off. One idea: drive down the PCH. Pacific Coast Highway. You know of it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Goes all the way south to San Diego. We can peek in the cities along the way. Monterey. Santa Barbara. L.A. of course. Could keep goin over the border, Tijuana. Taste a Mexico.”

  Rett considers the offer.

  “Now. We decide to do that, longer trip, thing is.” Dwight takes a bite of the toast, chews. “The thing is I haven’t missed one a my meetins in two years. But. It’ll be okay, I’ll just be checkin in with my sponsor daily.”

  “Oh we don’t have to do that if you’d rather not, Unc
le Dwight.”

  “I done give the matter a lotta thought, and I wouldn’t be offerin if I didn’t wanna.” He smiles. “I haven’t seen ya since you were seven, don’t know when I’m gonna see ya again. I wanna make the most of it.”

  After Dwight’s meeting they take a bus to the Haight, and Rett smiles upon catching sight of the street signs marking its most famous intersection. He stops in the record stores, poster shops, booksellers, browsing each establishment for a few minutes without buying.

  “Where’s City Lights Bookstore?”

  “North Beach, near Fisherman’s Wharf, the other direction. That where you wanna go now?”

  “I can wait till the day we get over there.”

  They walk a few blocks and Rett recognizes another street.

  “This is the Castro?”

  “Uh-huh.” Every house seems to welcome, or ward off, passersby with its sounds. “You know this music?”

  “That’s Culture Club. That’s the Eurythmics,” Rett says drily. Then he turns to his uncle, a crooked smile. “I bet you spent some time here.”

  Dwight looks at him without smiling. “Some.”

  Rett is shaken. “No offense, Uncle Dwight.”

  “None taken.” Dwight remembers his days in the legendary gay district mainly as a blur of debauchery and white men and debauchery with white men. When he got sick of it, he headed out to Oakland.

  The music changes completely when they enter the Mission. Mariachi, rumba, popular Latin. They sit in a restaurant, a late lunch of tamales.

  “How’s your French comin?”

  Initially Rett is confused. “Oh. Okay. It’s hard. Irregular verbs. And remembering which noun’s which gender.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And any lessons you get, it’s France French. Tourist French, how to order in a French restaurant, oh that’ll be useful in a Togo rural village. Plus when I get there I’ll have to start from scratch. The dialect.”

  “You’ll catch on. Step ahead, you knowin some version a the tongue.”

  “Too bad Spain didn’t colonize more in Africa. I’m better at Spanish.”

  Dwight laughs. He knows his nephew is being ironic, and yet Rett’s face is contorted in a vaguely pained expression as if he wasn’t joking at all. He looks around the crowded restaurant before his eyes come back to settle on his uncle. “Why did you move out here?”

  “California?” Rett nods. “Well. My daddy had not been doin too well. After the bad days. He died sudden in ’64. Stroke.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Sixty-one.”

  “Your mother died suddenly too, right?”

  “Uh-huh. And my friend Keith had been wantin to come out for a long time.” He looks at Rett. “You know what I mean by my ‘friend.’”

  Rett nods. Then Dwight nods.

  “I’m a private person but I ain’t been in no closets since Humble. So.” He sprinkles Tabasco on his tamale. “Keith had been wantin to come out west, but. I always said I couldn’t leave because a my daddy, which I guess means I kinda promised I would after he passed on.”

  “You didn’t wanna come out?”

  “I did. The adventure. But it was always more Keith’s dream. So, couple months after your granddad died, we sold my truck and packed up Keith’s. Drove cross-country.”

  “Was that fun?”

  “Well.” Dwight chuckles softly. “It was tryin on a relationship that had already been tried. The year before we kept breakin up, gettin back together. Probably insane to do what we did with the two of us so rocky. But. He was a comfort when my daddy died. So I convinced myself to go.”

  “Were you sorry after you got here?”

  Dwight stares at the bottles of green and red hot sauce on the table. “I think Keith was. It had always been his idea and—” He sighs. “I guess I don’t really wanna talk about it.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “You better bite that tamale before it gets cold.”

  Rett does. Sirens. Everyone in the restaurant turns to look. Two police cars flashing by.

  “What were the Panthers like?”

  Dwight laughs. “You heard about that huh.”

  “If you don’t mind talking about it.”

  “I don’t mind talking about it. I joined in. Guess it was ’70. The Soledad Brothers. Free Angela. You know about all that?”

  Rett shakes his head. Dwight cuts off a piece of tamale with the side of his plastic fork, spears it with the utensil, places it in his mouth, and chews slowly.

  “Well. After too many times hassled by cops for driving while black, or for walkin while black in the wrong neighborhood. This was before the addiction, I was nothin but a law-abidin mailman those days. It was good havin a relationship with the U.S. Postal Service, snappin up a job soon’s I got out here. But them hills. Deliverin on the inclines a San Fran liketa kilt me.” He laughs gently. “So all that harassment, and tired a witnessin the police brutality to black, and. Well.” Dwight’s face lowers, squeezing his napkin. “I’d been thinkin about the Party for some time. You couldn’t get around it, livin in the Bay Area those days.

  “But what finally tipped me. George Jackson. Teen in trouble. Eighteen when he was convicted of armed robbery, holding up a gas station. Sentenced one year to life.”

  “One year to life?”

  “One year to life, now who in the hell gets such an arbitrary penalty? eighteen years old. Eleven years later, twenty-nine-year-old George still sittin in jail, no sense a when if ever he be released. Soledad Prison. Becomes a Panther, starts speakin out about penitentiary conditions along with a couple other prison Panthers, call themselves the Soledad Brothers. On the regular, white guards killin black inmates without cause, and in one particular ruckus a white corrections officer gets killed and here troublemaker George and company gets the blame, lookin at the gas chamber. So. Down the coast sits UCLA professor Angela Davis, somebody always on the last nerve a Governor Ronald Reagan. Angela believed the Soledad Brothers were framed, and befriends George and his seventeen-year-old brother Jonathan who loved George and who snapped. Apparently stole Angela’s shotgun—she was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted, accused a givin him the weapon—and armed Jonathan bursts into a courtroom, frees some prisoners, and kidnaps the judge and some jurors, demandin the release a the Soledad Brothers. They didn’t get far before police started shootin and in the end a coupla the prisoners, the judge, and Jonathan were dead. Soon after, big brother George Jackson instigates a prison rebellion, leadin to six more casualties: three guards, two white prisoners, and George himself. These were shots heard round the country, George’s death the spark spawned Attica.” A baby girl in a stroller starts bawling. She is quieted by a girl of about nine who coos to her little sister in Spanish. “I signed up, wore my Free Angela button. And twenty months after her arrest, indicted for the crimes Jonathan too dead to face, the all-white jury found no evidence of complicity: not guilty.”

  They’re quiet a while against the roar of the other diners’ chatter and the music.

  “But you stayed with the Panthers. You didn’t just quit after Angela was released.”

  “A time. Helped with the free medical clinics, the sickle cell testin. Drug rehab. This naturally before I found myself with the problem. The Free Breakfast for Children.”

  “Did you carry an assault rifle?”

  “While I was a member. I guess you don’t like that tamale the way you been nursin it.”

  “No, it’s good.” Rett takes a bite.

  “I missed the big actions. The march on the Sacramento statehouse, everyone carryin the firearms. That was ’67.” He shrugs. “The militancy was mostly just preparation. Drills. Not sayin there was no violence. But it was mostly later and mostly against ourselves, after the FBI infiltration made everyone paranoid.” A silent wistful sigh.

 
“Did you wear the beret? Leather jacket?”

  “That was the uniform.”

  “The drills. Like the army?”

  “I think a lotta the ones leadin the exercises was veterans.” He laughs. “Funny place for me to end up after considerin the military and rejectin it.”

  “You thought about enlisting?”

  Dwight nods. “My senior year. That February I turned eighteen and it hit home: What I’m gonna do with the resta my life? At the time the army seemed easy.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I been doin all the talkin. I think it’s your turn a while.”

  Rett looks at his uncle, then takes another bite, chewing very slowly, silent, thinking. Dwight waits. He is entirely uncertain whether his nephew is refusing to speak or if he honestly is trying to come up with any aspect of his existence worthy of the syllables it would take to convey it.

  “When they brought back draft registration,” the younger finally says, “I didn’t want to register, but I was afraid I’d lose my financial aid. So I just wondered what you thought about it all.”

  Dwight chuckles to himself. The boy is good, cleverly putting the conversation ball back in the uncle’s court. “Well.” Dwight sips his ginger ale. “Wars. They was especially ugly to black men. In the ole days blacks complained, not bein aloud to fight, jus servin the white soldiers, no chance for promotions. No worries now, they fill up the front lines with the colors.” He looks at Rett. “Your daddy. Only in the seventh grade then, but he always was a smart one. We was sittin at the dinner table that spring, and my father and me discussin the pros and cons a the various branches. He’d been too young durin the First World War so never served hisself, whatever pearls a wisdom he had for me come from what his older brothers told him. Uncle Leeroy had moved to Harlem, become parta the Harlem Hell Fighters. Famous soldiers and musicians, gimme a romantic view a the military and Eliot not sayin nothin, face in his plate like he ain’t even interested, he.” Dwight twirls his ice with his straw. “I guess we’d gone our separate ways a bit, he hadn’t taken much of an interest in any a my goins-on for a while. The next mornin happened to be the first lawn mowin day a the season. I finished the chore and come back in to wash up, go to my room and there on my bed’s this paper. Twelve-page term paper of your father’s, big fat red A as usual. I couldn’t imagine why Eliot woulda left his school paper for me to see.