Odyssey

by Walter Mosley

  “About her and the boyfriend?”

  “No. I don’t care about that; I just know it. What I’m trying to say is that either I wasted my life or I left it behind. It’s like I wake up every day without the slightest idea what will happen. It might be a war or the Garden of Eden out there.”

  “I could promise you both,” Drum-Eddie said. “Come on down to South America with me, Sovereign. Learn Spanish and Portuguese and we could go into business together.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Import, export, and services rendered.”

  “Legal?”

  “Whatever you do, it’s legal one place and a death sentence in another. You know that, Sovy.”

  “Why are you here, Eddie?”

  “Mama asked me to come.”

  “Mama?”

  “Yeah, man. I hope you don’t think that Lurlene Twyst is checkin’ up on you because you were her favorite cousin. It’s because Mama is her favorite aunt. Mama don’t care that you turned your back on her. She will not do that to you.”

  “I haven’t called for one birthday,” Sovereign said.

  “She’s had seventy-seven birthdays, Sovereign. She don’t need no reminders.”

  “I can’t go,” Sovereign said.

  “Why not? You want to give the district attorney the chance to put you in jail ’cause a man broke into your house?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “So? If you get in the ring with a man can’t punch, that don’t mean you don’t put up your gloves. Survival is practice. That’s an exercise you got to do every day.”

  “Granddad told me that another man fathered Pops.”

  Drum-Eddie was good-looking but not extremely so; that was what Sovereign was thinking. The potency of Drum was the way he talked and how he paid attention. Just seeing him you knew that this was someone you had to take seriously.

  “Who?” Eddie asked.

  “Grandpa Eagle didn’t know,” Sovereign said, and then added all the rest that he knew.

  “But you never told me?” Eddie said.

  “I wasn’t supposed to,” Sovereign said, feeling like a little boy again. “Maybe … maybe if I had you wouldn’t have ever robbed that bank.”

  “That’s what you think? You think that it was your fault that I did what I did? You got that on your shoulders too?”

  “You and Pops were always fighting, Eddie. I think that if he knew better, if he knew the kind of love that Granddad had for him, then maybe he would have tried harder with you.”

  “Damn,” Drum-Eddie James said. His grin seemed to fill the room. “Sovy, there you were, quiet as a mouse, thinkin’ that everything was your problem and your fault.”

  “I knew about Eagle’s pistol,” Sovereign said.

  “So did I,” Eddie replied. “So did Zenith. All the kids knew, man. And me an’ Pops fought because I’ve always been what I am. You know I was born to live my life, brother. Born to it.”

  “But you were just a kid.”

  “Not really, Sovy, not really at all. By the time I was thirteen I’d had sex with half a dozen girls. At fifteen I’d already stole a car with Porky Kidd. We sold it to a chop shop that Porky’s brother knew about in L.A. and took the bus home.

  “No, Sovy. I wasn’t a kid long enough to talk about, and I’m grateful for the life I got.”

  “So if that’s true,” Sovereign James said to his long-lost and now found brother, “it means that I was born to my life and I should be grateful for what I got.”

  Eddie smiled and held up his hands.

  “That’s your problem right there, JJ,” he said. “You think that life is an argument. There you are, thinkin’ that if you could just say the right words then you could make everything make sense. But you know that ain’t so, brother. It’s not some game you playin’ that you just count up the points at the end of the night and go to bed havin’ played your best. People wanna bring you down, Jimmy J. And even if you got the high score at the end, they’ll just say you cheated and throw you in jail anyways.”

  Sovereign understood the wisdom of his brother’s words. He appreciated the fact the Drum-Eddie had risked his own liberty to give that speech eye-to-eye.

  “You’re right, Eddie,” Sovereign said. “I know you are. I knew before you got here, but hearing it makes me know even better. You got to understand, man; you got to understand that I’m not like you are. I don’t know how to pick up and run. I’m like a tree, rooted in the ground. For me there’s only here where I am and that’s it. There’s no there. There’s no elsewhere. There’s only right here where I am.”

  “So you not comin’ down to Brazil?”

  “I can’t.”

  “What if you went to sleep tonight and then when you woke up you found yourself in a cottage on the shores of Bahia? What if you didn’t have to move but somebody dug up your roots and replanted you on a beach somewhere?”

  “You could do that?”

  “Man, the government and the television got people thinkin’ that they ain’t free, not really. They make you believe that the only way to get to the end of the road is to follow the street. But the street is a lie, man. The street is a lie. You got alleys and buildings and shortcuts. You got the long way ’round and you don’t even have to go where they say you wanna go. They don’t own you. They don’t own the street. They don’t own a mothahfuckin’ thing. All they got is you agreein’ that they know and they own and they control. But all you got to do is say no and that’s all she wrote for them.”

  Sovereign realized that his uneducated brother had encapsulated his entire graduate career in those few words.

  “I want to wake up in my own bed, Eddie. I know I’m small-minded and a slave to the system of my mind. I know too that the thoughts in my head don’t belong to me, that what I see isn’t necessarily what’s there. I live a life informed by corporations, ancient religious belief systems, and governments that care more for their own maintenance than the people who comprise them. I used to think that it was racism that blinded us, but now I know that all of us, except for the special few like you, are tied by our necks to an unstable anchor—that that weight can pull any or all of us down at any time.

  “It’s like living at the base of an active volcano or volunteering for the army while there’s a war raging. There’s nothing wrong with giving up, brother, not while there’s people like you out there keeping the truth alive and refusing to accept the lies.”

  “You talk pretty, Sovereign. They teach you that in school?”

  “What else do you want, Eddie?”

  “Let’s go to the airport in Hartford.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “I thought I just told you that I don’t like surprises.”

  “Trust me, JJ.”

  In the private wing of the small public airport, Eddie and Sovereign were led to a largish hangar where a midsize private jet was housed. The pilot wore reflective sunglasses and had a walnut mustache that was shot through with gray.

  “Mr. Jinx,” the pilot said.

  “You ready, Fydor?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve got clearance. You and your guest can board anytime.”

  The pilot climbed in and Drum-Eddie put a foot on the first step. His brother held back.

  “I told you that I’m not going to Brazil, Eddie.”

  “I hope you don’t think this little plane can go that far,” the bank robber said. “We just takin’ a day trip, JJ. You will be back in time for your next court date.”

  The copilot was a broad-faced, middle-aged white woman who was already seated in the cockpit.

  The body of the jet had twelve seats, six on each side. The first two rows faced each other. Eddie sat with his back to the cockpit and Sovereign opposite him.

  “Is this your plane, Drum?”

  “No. A guy named Ryan Herkle owns it.”

  “And how did you get him to let you use it?”

  “Ryan has a
son named Lloyd. Lloyd killed a guy in a fight on a yacht off of the Florida Keys. When the boy was out on a million dollars’ bail I was engaged to smuggle him down to a little Chilean village. Ryan gives the town one hundred thousand dollars a year and they look after the kid. Because I’m the go-between he does me favors when he can. I make sure never to lean on him too hard.”

  “Where we going?”

  “An airstrip outside of Riletteville.”

  “South Carolina?”

  “Mama wants to see you, JJ. If I can’t save you at least I can give her something.”

  The flight was smooth and exceptionally silent. Sovereign decided that the inside of the plane must have had extra soundproofing so that the usual roar of flight was reduced to a mild hum.

  Eddie spent his time reading documents on an electronic tablet, while Sovereign found a book in the netting behind one of the chairs—a very old paperback entitled Hothouse by Brian Aldiss.

  It was a slender text about a far-flung future where mammals, reptiles, insects, and fish had been mostly supplanted by aggressive, all-encompassing plant life. One of the few nonplant forms of life that had survived were minuscule green humans who had barely held on in the billion years of plant evolution. These beings were tiny and primitive, matriarchal in their social structure, and existential inasmuch as their lives were immediate and their sense of a future nonexistent.

  “Good book?” Eddie asked as the plane began its descent.

  “Yeah. Yeah. It makes you think that maybe life has a sense to it even if you can’t see it when you’re living it.”

  “Philosophy?”

  “Science fiction.”

  “Pretty much the same thing, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Have you gone to college, Eddie?”

  “I once helped a guy move a nuclear bomb out of the Balkans and return it to some dudes in uniform in Moscow,” he said. “Yeah, man. I been to school.”

  Not long after Eddie made that admission, the wheels touched down and they disembarked from the plane.

  “We got a call while in flight, Mr. Jinx,” Fydor the pilot said to Sovereign’s brother. “We can’t wait for you. But Mr. Herkle has made reservations for you on the flight back to New York day after tomorrow. You have to pay for them but your seats will be held.”

  A driver picked the brothers up at the dark airstrip and drove them, in a teal Cadillac, to a motel on a highway that had no other buildings in sight.

  In the parking lot the driver, an elderly black man named Theodore, gave them keys with little yellow tags that identified their room numbers.

  “You can get us tomorrow morning at seven, Theodore,” Eddie said.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Drum.”

  The rooms to the single-story motel, the El Dorado, all faced the asphalt lot. Eddie went to his door at the far corner, while Sovereign was assigned to a center room.

  Sovereign’s room was a simple boxlike space with pitted green linoleum floors and small frames containing photographs of paintings of flowers hanging on the faded salmon-colored walls. The digital alarm clock was chained to the night table, and there sat an automatic coffeemaker on a ledge opposite the queen-size bed.

  Sovereign took out his cell phone and saw that he’d received a series of calls from Toni. He pressed a button, wondering at his ability to see her call.

  “Where are you?” were her first words.

  “Down South.”

  “Are you running?”

  “No. I’m down here visiting my mother. She’s been worried about the trial and wants to see me.”

  For a long moment there was silence.

  “Are you leaving me, Sovereign?”

  “Never. I’m down here for one day. I’ll probably have dinner with her tomorrow night and fly back in the morning.”

  “We have a meeting with the judge on Monday morning.”

  “I’ll be back way before then.”

  “Okay.”

  “You sound mad, Miss Loam.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were goin’?”

  “It came up all of a sudden. You know I really should do this. I haven’t even called my mother for over twenty years.”

  “Why not?”

  “If I knew the answer to that, baby, I’d be living in my own skin, laughing at people who thought they knew me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I love you, Toni Loam.”

  “I got to go, Sovereign. I’ll come by your place day after tomorrow.”

  In the morning Theodore took Eddie and Sovereign twenty-seven miles to a small hamlet nestled in a pine-and-dogwood forest in the middle of a sweltering plain of swamps and tobacco farms.

  On the solitary main street there were quite a few two-story buildings, the bottoms of which were stores and businesses, with the upper floors either for storage or apartments. Up a rickety set of unpainted wood stairs, over a store called Capman’s Dry Goods, was a large apartment.

  When Eddie threw the door open he yelled, “Mama!”

  They were standing in a nondescript room that might have been called an entrance hall but it seemed unfinished. There was a sod-encrusted shovel leaning in a far corner and a red rocking chair by a door in the wall opposite the entrance.

  An old woman came through this door. She was very thin and wore a loose dress that was once bright blue but now well on its way to turning gray. The hem went almost all the way down to her bony ankles, and her bristly hair was white.

  “Mama?” Sovereign said.

  It wasn’t until she smiled that he actually recognized her.

  “Baby.” Her steps were slow and considered, but it was clear that she didn’t want help.

  Zenith appeared at the door behind her in a pink dress suit, the cost of which would have probably paid his mother’s rent for a year.

  Winifred James approached her middle child and put her arms around his neck as Toni often did. She rested her forehead against his jaw and he embraced her, ever so gently.

  The hug was so tender as to feel insubstantial. Sovereign had the impression that he had gathered in his arms a parcel of smoke that had once been his mother: a fleeting moment before an expected ending.

  “I missed you, baby,” she whispered. “I missed you.”

  “Mama,” he said, unable to put together any other thought or concept.

  “Come on, Mama,” Zenith said after a couple of minutes of this sober, sorrowful embrace. “Let’s bring Sovereign in and let him sit down.”

  “Oh, yes,” Winifred James said. But she didn’t let go. “Yes, we should give him some a’ that hard lemonade you made.”

  Sovereign stood there with his frail mother in his arms. It was an odd feeling, a solitary incident that was out of the range of any experience he had known.

  “Mama,” Eddie said, and she raised her head from Sovy’s jaw. “Mama, come on in the dining room and we’ll all sit down and talk.”

  While saying these words Drum-Eddie took his mother by the hand, disentangled her from Sovereign, and led her from the unfinished room into the interior of the apartment.

  “Sit down and talk,” she said, repeating the words gratefully.

  The dining room was a shock.

  It was a comparable size to the dining room they had in the cylindrical San Diego home. It was laid out with the same furniture, and even the carpet looked similar to the one Sovereign and Drum rolled on as children.

  “Mama took everything from the old house and brought it out here,” Eddie said in answer to the bewilderment on Sovereign’s face. “She wanted to be back home in South Carolina, but she didn’t want to leave our San Diego place either.”

  Zenith, now older, even more stern-looking than she had been as a precocious child, helped Eddie settle Winifred in the chair she had sat in at every meal that Sovereign could remember.

  “Go on to your seat, Sovy—I mean Sovereign,” Zenith said.

  The children seated themselves around their mother, leaving a chair empty fo
r Solar James, who had been dead for sixteen years. There was also an empty place for Eagle James’s wheelchair, and a guest seat that was rarely used.

  With everyone seated a pall of early-morning silence fell over the long-lost family. It dawned on Sovereign that for the first time in many days the expectation of state retribution for his brutal attack on Lemuel Johnson had fallen away—completely. The people he had known best and longest were seated around him in a space displaced by thousands of miles.

  An amber-colored woman of middle age strode into the room just before Sovereign was about to ask why they were sitting so passively. She was a chubby woman who looked to be strong. Her garrulous smile showed off one gold-capped tooth.

  “Hello, Mr. Sovereign,” the short bundle of strength and ebullience exclaimed. “I’m Mary Klay and I work for your mother when she needs it.”

  “Are we related?” Sovereign asked as the woman stopped maybe a foot from his chair.

  “Heavens, no, my love. The Handlys are the oldest family around here. They have people working for them.”

  While Sovereign tried to tease out the logic of deep roots and wealth, Mary Klay asked the assembled family, “Pancakes or hash scramble for breakfast?”

  “Can we have both, Aunt Mary?” Eddie said.

  “Of course you can, Mr. Drum-Eddie. Of course you can.”

  A jagged twitch of energy crossed the inside of Sovereign’s chest. He understood that this was jealousy, that his family had gone on without him, eating off the same table and bringing new members into the fold.

  What had he been doing all those years when Christmases and Thanksgivings were celebrated and he was in the apartment plotting revolution like a child playing with tiny dark green plastic soldiers?

  “Sovereign?” Winifred Handly-James said.

  “Yes, Mama?”

  “Are you in trouble, son?”

  “I am,” he said. “I mean, I am, but maybe not in the way people are saying.”

  The old woman’s face was doll-size but not rigid. Her eyes seemed to change with each idea he espoused.

  “I mean, there’s a man I beat terribly. I went blind there for a couple of months.”