At work things were going great, but at home Paul was going crazy.
My mother’s night classes had earned her a master’s degree and several certifications. And she sometimes taught GED classes after school and on weekends. This all raised her meager income to the point that she was able to build a new house in the field where Papa Joe had raised the hogs.
As it turned out, Papa Joe’s house had not been Papa Joe’s at all, but Big Mama’s. The original house had burned down, and Big Mama had rebuilt it with the insurance money she got when her second husband died. At any rate, my mother needed something to call her own to fully come into her own.
The new house was brick, with aluminum-framed windows that held in the heat and kept out the drafts. It had two bathrooms—two!—and both had pipes built into the wall, and there were no gaps between the floor and the walls where you could see out and the world could come in. And there were locks on the doors.
When Paul went crazy, my mother took to sleeping with her door locked: “I don’t want Paul to come in here on me.” Crazy men were dangerous men. We knew this well. They were men like cousin Jack, who would come to my high school basketball games. Jack was a cousin by marriage, not by blood. One of my father’s brothers had married his mother after his real daddy was killed one night trying to cross the interstate on foot to get to a juke joint.
Jack was a short, high-strung, wild-haired man who talked faster than you could listen, like a scratched LP record played at the speed of a 45, always repeating things. “That my cousin, that my cousin, anybody mess wit’ ’im, anybody mess wit’ ’im, I’ll cut ya, I’ll cut ya,” he’d say, drawing his finger across his throat, tracing his own chin-strap scar where someone had slit his throat, but he had lived. Then Jack would laugh, not a deep laugh but the kind that forms just behind the teeth, more a nervous impulse to fill a space between thoughts than a natural reflex to something funny. “Hehehehehe.”
Others laughed too, cautiously, to keep from being frozen by fear. Jack was possessed of a mercurial nature, his mood was known to suddenly shift from silly to deadly serious. His mental state was severe enough that he was on disability—getting a “crazy check,” folks called it. I knew that Jack walked with a blade. I knew that he meant what he said: that if anyone bothered me, he’d gut him like a fish. This knowledge made me feel both safe and nervous around him, but luckily Jack never cut anyone for me.
Then there was the quiet boy with the kind eyes who lived across the interstate and who had graduated from high school around the same time as my brother Nathan. He slowly slipped into insanity and one day killed both his parents. When the authorities arrived, folks said, the boy was sitting on the front steps of his house like nothing had happened. When they asked him why he had done such a thing, he responded with no empathy or irony: “Why don’t you go in dere and ask ’em?” My mother didn’t want Uncle Paul to send anyone in to ask her dead body any questions.
We stared at Uncle Paul. He stared at nothing, with the blank, wide-eyed look of the wounded deer that we had tried to keep in the House of the Drowned Children—desperate, anxious, and confused, wanting to run away but not able to.
He waded out into the weeds behind the house, the ones he had compulsively cut and burned before, the ones he no longer cut now that the rheumatism had stiffened his joints, so much so that he had to walk with a stick. He’d make his way to the same spot every day, where he would stand motionless, like a pointing dog on the scent of game, looking up at something in the sky, something that we couldn’t see.
His mind was looping back on itself, conjuring images his eyes had not seen, listening to voices his ears had not heard. He was still Paul, but not Paul. There was now a stranger in the house, out of his mind.
Paul’s insanity made my depression seem inconsequential, so I tried to keep myself busy and my mind off it.
On the weekends I started hanging out at the Starlite Lounge, a particle-board juke joint at the Gibsland exit just off the interstate. This was a dangerous place. I once saw a man get chased out and into the woods across the street, where he was beaten and some say stabbed. But you could dance there and get a cheap drink and a cheap date.
One night I saw Roseanne’s brother, Arthur, at the Starlite. In high school we played on the basketball team and rode motorcycles together. My bike was a Honda 150. My father had bought it, used, when I turned fifteen. It was the only thing he ever bought for me, the first time he didn’t say “You jus’ blew it” and did in fact follow through on his promise. I had heard that Arthur had a bad motorcycle accident. He was wearing a coat that hot August Louisiana evening inside the Starlite. I thought that odd, so I nodded at the coat and asked, “What’s up?,” wondering about his health and wanting an explanation. “I’m using the bathroom,” he responded. Then he pulled back the coat to reveal his urostomy bag filling with piss. I never rode my motorcycle again.
Another night at the Starlite I ran into a girl who had been a cheerleader at a neighboring school when I had been the captain of our basketball team. She had the kind of face that said the “Indian” wasn’t far back in her family—flat, with high, pushed-back cheekbones, leading with the chin. And her skin wasn’t like other black folks’ skin. It was stretched tight like there was nothing between it and the bone.
She smiled and flirted and told me that she had always liked me but had never had the nerve to tell me so. We talked and danced that night and arranged to go to the movies.
It was the beginning of a summer of midnight romps, just the diversion I needed from my depression.
One night when I picked her up for a date, she instructed me to drive out of town along a seldom-traveled road. On the way we made idle chatter and listened to music. Within minutes, the amber glow from the windows of sporadically spaced houses had completely vanished from the horizon. This stretch of the road was uninhabited for miles, except for the cows sleeping in the fields and the bugs that smashed into the car’s grille. I drove slowly, reaching my hand over between her legs, massaging the inside of her thigh. We came to the top of a hill between two vast pastures.
“Stop here,” she said.
I stopped in the middle of the one-lane road. She got out, took off her top, and turned to me, summoning me. She wanted to make love in the open air. I was game.
The moon was big and full and low in the cloudless sky, bathing the hilltop in functional light, like that of a cracked door on a dark room—enough to make out shapes but not colors.
We tore off all our clothes and began having loud sex all over the hood, which was nearly hot enough to burn the skin. We slipped and slid our way up the windshield, excited by the feel of the night air on our moist naked bodies and by the possibility of being caught.
When we were done, I collapsed between her thighs in a postorgasmic paralysis, ass bare and face flushed, with nothing but the sky draped over my shoulders. I was motionless save my heaving chest, pressed into her breasts. Her delicate hands were moving slowly over my back, her fingernails tracing figure eights as she whispered sweet nothings in my ear.
I could see in that moment how wrong this was. It was the tenderness in her touch that told me that our romps meant more to her than they would ever mean to me. She was falling in love. I was just falling.
I feared that I was moving into a moral desert where the balm of attention and the thrill of passion were becoming temporary highs for a boy bereft of real connection. Mine was a heart succumbing to coldness in search of a body to remind it of warmth. I understood that I was being selfish, so I stopped our midnight meetings.
12
The Just-in-Case Gun
By the end of that summer of death and clouded minds and cheap desire, I was desperate to leave Gibsland. But back at school, the fraternity that had commanded my loyalty was being undone. The girl I loved had left me. The political career I had envisioned seemed out of reach. All I had left was my new job as a journalist. I had done well as an intern, so the Shreveport Times offere
d me a part-time job—a full eight-hour shift three days a week—and I poured all my energy into it.
My shift started at one p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so I arranged to have my last classes end at noon on those days. That gave me sixty minutes to drive the sixty miles from school to work, west on I-20, passing Gibsland on the way. When my shift was over I’d often stop by my mother’s house to get a plate of home cooking before continuing my drive back to school, to do homework into the middle of the night. This schedule kept me busy, and busy was what I needed.
Then, one day at the paper, the business editor dropped by my desk. He was a small black man who laughed more than other men, had buckteeth—the kind children get from sucking their thumb past the time they should outgrow it—and spoke with a lisp. He told me that the New York Times was sponsoring a job fair in Atlanta that weekend and that I “had to go.” I told him that I couldn’t, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I knew that the girlfriend of one of my line brothers had graduated and moved to Atlanta, so I made a deal: I would drive my line brother to Atlanta to visit her if they would let me sleep on her sofa when I got back from the job fair.
On the ride to Atlanta, we laughed and joked and talked in that deeper-than-normal way that the confines of a car make possible. A little over halfway there, somewhere in Alabama, we stopped for gas. My friend pumped it while I went to the bathroom. Among the graffiti on the wall was a sentence that jumped out at me: “Black pussy is good, but it smell funny.”
There was something about it, the way the sentence was scrawled in barely legible penmanship, the way the s was missing from the word “smells.” This was not a smart boy, I thought, not the kind Mrs. Collins would have smiled at. I had no idea who had written this, but I assumed that he wasn’t black. He had presumed to objectify and ridicule a whole race of women, like those who had raised and loved me.
It was a strangely severe reaction for me to have to the scribbling, given how pervasive female objectification was in my world. The only difference here was that it overlapped with race. Race had not seemed a factor when the old men beneath the shade trees mumbled under their breath about girls they suspected of sleeping with “everything walking and half of what’s standing still,” or when the vile boys down the street crowded around the Sparrow girl’s bed, not giving her time to “thank.” Misogyny just seemed to hang on men like the rancid smell of rotting meat.
Still, there was something about this, about the racial part, that made it feel different. Not more or less wrong, but different. And it evoked my worst assumptions about that place: that it was one of the places between places, not a part of the world where racial hatchets had been buried and racial truces drawn, not a place like Gibsland where blacks and whites had an understanding, not a place like Kiblah where Big Mama’s and the Beales’ respectful behavior disguised their financial arrangements. I imagined that this was one of the places where black women could still be simultaneously desired and despised, where lusts and fears produced dangerous interactions, where harsh stares tracked brown-bodied men from the slits of squinted eyes, where trees had not so long before been morbidly adorned with “strange fruit.” I imagined that this was the kind of place the white boy who had yelled “Nigger!” and salted the ground between us must have been coming from or going to. This was Alabama, the state folks told me my great-grandfather had fled, running from the white tops one dark night, following a river and leaving his family.
The graffiti snapped the laughter out of me, and I drew up my shoulders. It made me realize that although the South was home, it was also hostile. I needed to get away, for a while at least, to see what my world looked like from the outside. It made me realize what the stakes really were for the job fair I was going to.
In Atlanta, my friend dropped me off at the job fair. At the door, a man told me that I couldn’t enter because I hadn’t applied beforehand, a process that included writing a sample essay and paying a fee. I asked for an application, found a corner, filled it out, wrote an essay, and gave the man the fee. He let me through.
I started on one side of the room, going to every booth for an interview. I explained to each of the newspaper recruiters my vision of combining traditional reporting with visual explanation, and got more than polite interest at almost every booth.
The New York Times representatives, however, had bad news for me. They said that I needed to have preregistered to be interviewed by them, and that all of their slots were filled. I politely said, “Oh, I understand. But, if you don’t mind, I’m going to sit right here until someone doesn’t show up.” I took a seat to the side, picked up one of the free newspapers they were giving away, and began to read it.
I was well aware that my little stunt had caught the Times people off guard, and that they were watching me out of the corner of their eye. So I was careful to mind my manners and my posture, sitting up tall, managing a smile and a nod at the other students as they came and went. I sat there for nearly six hours. At the end of the day, the Times staff began to pack up. I still had the newspaper open in front of me, by then having read the same articles over and over.
One of the women relented: “Okay, okay, we’ll interview you.” “Oh, thank you,” I said. I had watched dozens of other students be interviewed and overheard what the recruiters said when they left—what had impressed them and what had not—self-effacing cleverness and institutional reverence engaged them; boasting and deficient literary curiosity turned them off. It was invaluable opposition research that I wouldn’t otherwise have gotten. Now that it was my turn, I showed them my work and told them about my then somewhat novel notion of combining visuals and journalism. When I was finished giving my pitch, the recruiter smiled a kind smile and told me that I was “very impressive” but that the Times just didn’t have a graphics internship. I thanked her for her time and left for the evening. The fact that the New York Times thought a boy from Gibsland was “very impressive” was enough.
The next day, I went back to the job fair to visit some of the papers I’d missed because I had spent all my time sitting at the Times’s booth. But then I heard that the people from the Times were looking for me. So I went back to their booth. When I got there, the woman who’d interviewed me told me that although they didn’t have a graphics internship, they were so impressed by me that they had called New York the night before and got the okay to create one.
I was going to New York in the summer to be the first graphics intern the Times had ever had.
I figured if I stayed busy for the rest of school and in my job in Shreveport, I could keep the depression—as I now knew to call it—at bay, and it worked. This would be a frame for much of the rest of my life: hard, focused, obsessive work to distract from a muddled private life. But still I had to go home and I had to sleep, and it was in that quiet time that the depression crept in on the backs of the male apparitions.
It was on one of those nights that the call came—Chester on the other end of the line, at my mother’s house, him saying, “What’s going on, boy?” like nothing had ever happened. That was the night the ball of pain in the pit of my stomach exploded in an uncontrollable conflagration, coming out not just in thoughts or words but with the ache of emotion and a flood of tears. That was the night I jumped in the car, grabbed the gun from under the car seat where I had kept it since my mother gave it to me because I refused to allow it in my house, and raced down Interstate 20 to kill Chester.
I had fired a gun only once before, on the Thanksgiving that Grandpa Bill took us deep into the woods to try his new pistol, the same day my mother and I raced down this same road, Interstate 20, trying to catch a woman who had slyly called on the phone and driven slowly by our house.
I thought then that I would never be able to shoot at a person, but now I knew that it was not only possible, but inevitable. This killing would be justifiable, in spirit if not in law.
I was about to kill Chester.
As I sped down the inter
state toward my mother’s house, the heat of my anguish being released into the winter air, I reviewed my simple plan—I would calmly walk into the house, find Chester, and shoot him in the head as many times as possible. No arguing. No explanations. Done.
By the time I reached the Grambling exit, I was bawling. I thought about all the emotional energy I had spent bracing myself against Chester’s full-throated assaults and offhand insults. About all the times I had blamed myself for his betrayal. About who I was now, and who I could be. Seeing him lying in a pool of his own blood might finally liberate me from my past, but it would also destroy my future.
I had to make a choice: drive forward on the broad road toward the unspeakable or take the narrow highway exit. I don’t know which chose, my head or my hand, but I exited and drove through the campus, thinking about all that I had accomplished. Me. With my own mind and grit. I had reinvented and improved myself. I was a man—a man with a future. I couldn’t continue to live my life through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy.
I returned to my apartment and called a friend—not one of the Brothers but a girl from rural Arkansas whom I had befriended the semester before. We all called her Weezy because she looked so much like Isabel Sanford, who played Louise on The Jeffersons. She was big and brassy, sweet as pie but tough as nails. If I had a sister, I was sure that she would have acted like Weezy.
“Talk, Weezy. I don’t care what you say. Just talk,” I said.
She didn’t ask questions. She just talked, as was her wont, for hours. I called her for that reason, and because I knew I wouldn’t have to explain. The Brothers would have asked questions. That night, her ramblings helped save the life of a man she didn’t even know.
Fire Shut Up in My Bones Page 22
