Lucy looked into the bucket. The water rippled.
She could hear Jack swimming swiftly across the Pearl River, his strong, young arms cutting through the current like blades. Go! She could hear his legs thrashing through the water lily and rattlesnake master and bounding across the pecan groves. Run! He was striding on past the state line. He was running on the wind. Away from the noose. Away from her.
Lucy looked into the bucket. The water rippled.
She could see Jack running up the black silhouettes of hills and through greenish blue pastures. She could hear him bounding and panting, his footfalls pounding the earth. And when the hot, swampy air around her dissipated to a cool northern breeze, she knew her grandbaby was safe at last.
Lucy looked into the bucket. The water was still.
But now Lucy knew something else. The ending of everything was now laid out before her in a neat row: her buried children, her murdered husband, her missing grandson. The wind blew across her cheeks. “No more leapin’,” she whispered, since it was clear that everyone she loved had decided not to come back again. And she was too tired to consider what the rest of the days on the porch might be like alone. Lucy sat in her chair until the long shadows of late afternoon vanished into the night, until the moon rose and fell, until the flies came to cool themselves on her cold body, a refuge from the blazing sun of the new day.
Scratch Line
Jack Thompson ran. He did not know where he might end up. He didn’t have the time to think about what he did when he was running for his life through the flesh-cutting high grass, the path that his grandmother Lucy made for him in the water of the spirits. His reasons for running were clear. How it would change the course of his life was not. But he never, even for a second, thought about letting Judd Baker live (had he done it just for Delia or for his grandfather Nathan too?). And he knew—even as he stole food and hid under bridges at the Virginia border, even when he skirted the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument in the dark and joined the other cargo and stowaways on the ferry from New Jersey, he knew he would make the scratch. He would make the line, no matter what he met when he made it. He arrived in New York City in the fall of 1940. Busted but sure of himself nonetheless.
Scratch, as old Bad Man Hank used to call it, was when it came time to determine if a pit bull dog was brave enough, if he was willing to fight in spite of everything, if he could rise from the blood and the dust and the shouts like the champion he was born to be. “If he don’t make the scratch, he’s a damned cur,” Hank would say. “Don’t ever be a cur in nothing, boy,” he would tell Jack. And it was from Hank that young Jack Thompson learned that there were worlds beneath the one in which they were forced to live. There were rules of governance that they themselves could decide. “A man’s will can’t go but one way,” Hank would tell him. “Let it be of your own choosin’.”
Back in 1934, young Jack was the only one allowed to stand next to Bad Man Hank. The “Bad” stood for the gun-running and moonshine businesses he conducted. Like the other men whom people discussed in hushed voices, Hank insisted on being his own man in his own way. Infamous Hank, dark as coffee, with his opulent three-button suits and hats bought with money from mysterious sources. “I’ma train you up,” Hank told Jack. “Cuz you got that red fire in your eyes. I likes that. Don’t ever lose it, boy. It’ll help you see some thangs that you didn’t know was there.”
The pit bull dog was Hank’s love. During important events like dog fights, Jack stood next to Hank, to the envy of men twice his age. Rich in several things, Hank owned many dogs, but his favorite was a dog named Toby, a buckskin-colored canine with a shiny, stout nose. He came to matches with much pageantry to watch his dog do battle. Many men placed their bets on Toby. One hot summer evening, when Jack was thirteen, when the insects in the air were louder than the humans, he stood with Hank and the other gentlemen dog fighters in the dirt round. There were old white men descended from old money. There were refined black bootleggers and gun-runners. They were all businessmen, and this was business. But they were also curators, protectors, and preservers of lines of canine aristocracy brought over from the gray cliffs and kelly-green pastures of Ireland. They were the keepers of the Colby, Heinzel, and Corvino blood lines that coursed through the veins of these dogs of the New World.
If a dog turned away, hesitated, or sat during a pit fight, a scratch was called by the referee. It was the great moment of truth. Each spectator held his breath. For this was the final test. This was the instant when the dog who showed any weakness had to make his choice. He had to answer a question. This was the moment the dog who tore into his challenger, splitting skin, crushing bone with his teeth, and blinking in the blood spatter, got to see if his opponent had the courage to continue the challenge.
And at such dog events, silence rolled in like a fog, and all were tense, eyeing the two dogs in the ring and their dog handlers down in the pit, one for each warrior. And the men knew that for the dogs, the scratch line in the center of the pit was the equator of the earth. Each dog was brought to the opposite side by its handler, panting and drooling, preparing for the moment from its point on the axis. Each looked at the other from the miles across the scratch line drawn down the middle. Each looked into the other’s eyes as if to ask the only question that mattered: “Will you quit?”
Hank and young Jack watched Toby with apprehension that day. Toby had been the most injured in the pit fight, and Hank and Jack struggled to control their trepidation, to brace themselves against the bite holes in Toby’s neck and the piece of his ear flapping in the breeze. They had seen this sort of carnage before but never grew immune to its gravity. The other dog, his fur white all over, with splotches of black here and there, bit into Toby’s leg early in the match.
Jack heard the crack crack crack over the banter around him. He heard the sound of Toby’s femur breaking. Toby shifted his weight under the stronger dog, trying to free himself from his vise grip. But Toby’s opponent seemed to understand his strategy right away and pressed Toby to the ground, dislocating his shoulder. But Toby quickly shifted beneath him, and the other dog lost his bite hold. Toby struggled to his feet, staggering. But suddenly, Toby turned away, unexpected and so impossible. Hank’s jaw dropped, and young Jack gasped, and the men around the pit chattered nervously.
“Scratch!” shouted the referee.
All of the men were motionless and thunderstruck. From the opposite side of the ring, the other dog stood still, as if daring Toby to challenge his throne again. Then, trembling with excitement, Toby lunged forward. In the hush of the pit round, it seemed that only wind and heartbeats could be heard. He pushed forward again and again, shaking his head as if to clear his vision. Toby hauled himself to the very edge of the scratch line, the dust trampled down by blood and spit and foam and urine under his body. The two inches across might have been like two miles, and the other dog was waiting for Toby still, daring him. Toby towed himself like a boat through a swamp, his broken limbs dragging behind him until he neared his destination, the towering, powerful leg of his opponent. And with the last bit of strength in all his body, Toby bit into the other dog’s leg before collapsing in front of them all.
It took a few seconds for the men to emerge from their trances. Hank was the first. “That’s enough,” he said, climbing into the pit.
The owner of the winning dog, a tall red-headed man, looked on respectfully, reverently, at this ritual. And after a long silence, he said, “By God, what a warrior, Hank. He’ll always be game. That’s for sure.” He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief as the other men nodded somberly in agreement, and there was talk around the ring:
“Never seen one go down like this.”
“Gotta have some pups off this one.”
“Hard as nails and dying harder.”
But Bad Man Hank couldn’t hear them, and he quietly held Toby, for he was not sure if the dog would survive this time. And no one knew the love Hank felt for him and the kindred sen
se he had; for like himself, the dog had many times looked death and destruction in the eye, as he himself had done in many business meetings, when the guns sat on one side of the table and the money on the other, and the men standing behind each pile dared the other to make a move. “The great pit bull got the heart of a lion,” Hank said at last. Then, turning to young Jack, his eyes burning, he said, “Keep that fire you got, Jack, like my Toby.” Neither of them knew that soon after that day, Hank would die in a gun shootout, and the blood in Jack’s eyes would seal his fate.
And all of these things burned deeper into Jack Thompson’s mind when he arrived in New York and walked the streets, stumbling in his worn shoes, his legs rubbery with fatigue. There was Lenox Avenue and Mount Olivet Baptist Church. There were little boys chasing each other around, loud and dirty. There were twin little girls, their chocolate faces like dolls cradled by their frilly yellow bonnets. They smiled at him, and he smiled back. He walked through mazes of drugstores, chop suey places, barbershops, and endless rows of tenement buildings with laundry hanging out of the windows, a great net that webbed the city. He passed a theater, and there was a poster of Daisy Richardson’s legendary brown legs. Cab Calloway boo-wah boo-wah-ed in his ears. There were children, their eyes clogged with mucus, the toes poking out of their shoes, begging for money. There were women with ruined eyes and painted faces like those he saw in Louisiana juke joints and feeble men with the empty eyes of the fallen. So much was different and so much the same. And it was then that the seed of his desire to seek out something else of his own choosing, to change something around him, took root in his mind and grew.
Jack walked on. There were vendors and street hawkers, all of them bold and brash and smiling. As he walked by, one of them shouted, “Buy Eternity Tonic and live forever!” And he thought of his own mortality and what taking the life of someone else might mean, what his own death would have meant in the ring of time. And he had the thought (which came to him from a realm beyond understanding) that if he’d been killed, had Judd Baker’s father or brothers caught him and hanged him as they planned, he could always come back. He could be killed and then return. Lives were like that. Spirits were like that. He knew this with great certainty when he saw his grandfather Nathan in the doorway once when he was sneaking home from Hank’s place at dawn. The lamp on the table in the window illuminated his grandfather’s face, so much like his own and yet so different in the way it shimmered like water. Nathan Thompson stood in the doorway holding his gun, as he had when the Klan tried to come for him, as he had on all the nights he protected his wife, Lucy, after his death. In the slow seconds, Jack opened his mouth to speak to the apparition, but in the moment he blinked and tried to ready his tongue, to ask his grandfather what it was like in the dimension in which he dwelled, he was gone.
All of that coursed through Jack Thompson’s mind as he made his exodus from Bed, Louisiana, as he crossed the scratch line of 125th Street in New York City in 1940. The early part of what was being called World War II consumed the city’s attention. But in the back alleys and bars and velvet-curtained rooms, people wondered and whispered, asking, “What world? Whose world?” Jack heard this back in Louisiana, too, when worn brown men talked about another war on the stoop of the town store, folding their newspapers and shaking their heads. “What world? Whose world?” they asked. One old man, who in 1919 played trumpets from the deck of the U.S.S. Philippines in the 803rd Pioneer Infantry Band in Brest, France, during the first World War, answered, “Don’t nobody know, but it sho wasn’t ours. Still ain’t.”
And standing near the door of a club on a trash-littered street, Jack again listened to the old black men wonder what all the fuss was about as the jazz poured out like a hot liquid over everything. He walked on, all the way to the edges of the city, where the Hudson River rippled in dark majesty, ebbing and flowing in brackish currents. There he cried for Delia (what would become of her now that he could never return, now that what happened to her had made her someone else?) and for his grandmother Lucy, who he felt in his blood was gone, for he could no longer hear her whisper in his ears or feel her hand pat his shoulder. And that was when he put it all away in a box in his mind: the memory of his grandfather Nathan’s face, the look in Judd Baker’s eyes when he shot him, the love of his grandmother Lucy, what once was his sweet Delia, and the father Bad Man Hank had been. Staring into the Hudson, he closed the box and dropped it into the river for eternal safekeeping.
Then Jack Thompson turned to face the city and breathe its ferociousness. He let the smoke-charged air fill him with the promise of another life, one he would craft out of concrete and steel. He listened to the city sing. The blues swirled with the sapphire sky, and Ethel Waters’s voice floated through the air. He listened to the city cry, the creak and clank of empty ice boxes and plates, and the bitter grumblings of tired women. He looked at the waiting buildings. They loomed high above, shoving against one another in the crowded skyline, daring Jack Thompson to enter their company. He turned back to the Hudson River, in awe as he looked out beyond the currents reflected in the last rays of the vermillion sun and beyond that to the horizon.
Years later, as he died on the concrete of a basketball court in Harlem watching the clouds move across the sky, he would have that same feeling of wonder, possibility, and love for his wife, Maria, for his boys, Manden and Horus, for all that was and all that might have been. He would come to know the secret of all things dormant, of all things risen.
Red Folder
As the water source beneath the surface slowly shrank and the vegetation soured, the locusts began to feel the pull of time . . .
In the early morning, Warden Stotsky arrived at his office and found a red folder on his desk. He knew a red folder meant that a prisoner, either through formal medical examination or random HIV blood check, had contracted something fatal, something that came to claim his wasted life. On the lip of the folder was a white label with the number 02763 printed in small letters.
Stotsky stared at the folder but did not open it. There were no second chances, only existing conditions. Rehabilitation had never been part of the equation. It was not his business to care whether his prisoners lived or died, only how, and the state of mind they came to hold at the end. For how else was he to measure the success of Black Plains—the measure of his own success—long aligned with life inside the prison? It was will against dominion.
He stood up and went to the cabinet that held all of the prisoner files and extracted the one belonging to Horus Thompson. Stotsky read a list of family members: Brenda Thompson (former wife), Manden Thompson (brother), Maria Thompson (deceased mother), Jack Thompson (deceased father). There were no children listed. There was an old police report from the 28th Precinct in New York, that read, “Jack Thompson: 45-year-old black male shot and killed at political rally. 197 Chester Avenue. Harlem. July 21, 1966.”
The report went on for several pages. The inciting event was an escalating protest rally. Police moved in. A riot ensued. Jack Thompson was shot in the fray. There were no suspects, and no one had been arrested. There was an FBI report detail attached to a photograph of Jack Thompson that listed previous residencies, places of employment, locations frequented, speaking engagements. Under “Special Family History,” it read, “Anti-American activities; Jack Thompson (father) affiliation with Communist groups, militant organizations, and inflammatory statements against the government in New York beginning approximately 1945.”
Stotsky turned back to the front of the paper stack and stared at the mug shot of Horus Thompson. The piercing eyes, the whites looking as if made of alabaster, the pupils of the blackest coal, stared back at him. He had graduated from high school. Following that, he went into security work in the employment of the same company for more than ten years. He lived in a small apartment on Hawaii Avenue in Washington, D.C. There was a copy of a property deed that listed his name and Brenda Thompson. He had no prior police record. Not until he kidnapped and killed a retired
police officer, Sam Teak.
So there in print was one life in one file. Now Stotsky felt ready to read about the rest of it. He reached for the red folder and opened it. His eyes raked over a medical report and settled on the summary: “Horus Thompson. Age 34. Male. Black. Diagnosis: Possible Advanced Multiple Myeloma, cancer of the blood plasma cells. Aggressive stages. Hypercalcemia detected. Abnormal levels of monoclonal (M) proteins found in blood and urine. High levels of beta-2 microglobulin and lower levels of albumin suggest poor prognosis. Possible accumulation of tumor cells beneath the skin. Location: Scalp/back of the head. Possible widespread malignancy in the bone marrow. Suggested test: Full pathology with bone-marrow aspiration and biopsy to establish extent of malignancy. Suggested treatments: Autologous stem-cell transplants and chemotherapy maintenance thereafter.”
Stotsky closed the folder and leaned back in his chair. There would be no medical assistance or treatment, of course. Nor would 02763 be notified of his condition. He was already a dead man. That much had been certain—had been promised—since the day he entered Black Plains. There was no need to punctuate that knowledge with the contents of the red folder, Stotsky decided, as he had done before with other files, other lives. Horus Thompson’s death would not sway the institution one way or another. In any case, there would be more Horus Thompsons, millions more.
But the warden sank deeper in his chair, trying to stem a growing agitation. Because to admit that he was troubled by Horus Thompson’s medical report, that it bothered him that death could enable him to escape before he was finished with him, was a disconcerting sensation. He looked around his elegant office and wondered what he was really doing. He was not collecting debts to God, the devil, or society. He was only keeping inventory of the dying and the dead. He was merely the ferryman, trapped on an enormous barge of cement and monitors and steel and fear, floating without end from one current to the next. Each folder in his filing cabinet held a story, each inmate with different beginnings, variant middles, but all with the same end. Sometimes he thought about the finality of this and wondered if he, too, was lost, adrift on the raft. A pain streaked the warden’s chest as he stared at the red folder on his desk. And that familiar nameless quandary showed its face to him, as it always did on such occasions as this, when he looked from the windows of his castle and cursed the rule of time.
Time of the Locust Page 21
