Black Tickets (20 page)

When Callie was in the white room, his father’s face had been too wide and frightened him. Then he couldn’t pull the light on by himself and the woman with the cool hands picked him up to put him in the bed. Things were different before he went to the white room; a face sat on top of a face and blurred where they came together. There were angles of light and two prismed doors in the wall. There were two of everything. Nothing was ever by itself because everything faded its edges into something else. Callie was lonely when he saw that his mother had only one face. She had seemed to be all around him. Her arms legs hips breasts hands hair had been in his sight a milky atmosphere. Now he saw that everyone was separate.

Callie ate his soup. Their separate faces moved around him in the steam. They receded, each one behind a single veil. Their voices shimmered behind the colors and broke.

Callie’s mother broke eggs. She held one in the curve of her hand and clicked it against the bowl. She felt for the crack and she pulled it apart; there was a suck of air to break your heart.

No, Callie, she said. That’s cracks in the sidewalk, to break your back. But you can say it any way you want to, especially on your birthday.

She gave him an egg to break. It sat in his hand all round and full. No eyes no ears no arms, it was a poor thing. He wanted to keep it.

No, his mother said. It’s for your cake. But he ran away with it and put it in a box.

They had a party. They sang the birthday song and it had the same words over and over. They sang it again and again,
so slow to the burning candles. Callie blew them to sleep. He walked his fingers around them and made marks in the icing like tiny feet. There was a fire engine in the bag. It screamed when it ran. Callie hated it crying. His father did something to it and then it ran quietly, whispering its wheels. His mother gave him a small gold circle hung with slender pipes. She said they were chimes and they talked in the dark. She hung them in his window and brushed his eyes with her mouth.

Then it was night. They left him alone in his bed. From nowhere there was a sound that flew; the tiny pipes sang when they touched. The fire engine stayed very still. Callie held the egg in his hand. He moved it; he felt something twirl inside the shell.

Molly’s father said his own rhymes to Callie and her:

Somewhere, she thought, little men held seahorses in their arms like dogs; seahorses with bells inside them like the bells in the clock on the wall. In that place, the wind left all the hours growling in the grass, soft and scared like Sylvie’s repetitive laugh. Molly asked her father where the garden was. He said he would try to remember, but when you try to find some things, there is a snow comes down.

Once it snowed in Spenser. Callie was six but he never went to school. Their father carried him out to see the snow. Molly looked up and the air was falling apart. Callie couldn’t
see the flakes in the white sky. They melted in his face, in his wide eyes. Oh, he said. Their father took him back into the house.

Callie was so white in bed. Molly read him her arithmetic book and he learned to multiply. He didn’t wear his glasses anymore. The doctors said he could have them back in a year. When Callie bled, Molly ran and told. Her mother and father held ice wrapped in cloths to his nose. When they tried to lay him out flat, Callie screamed.

Molly, her mother said. Has it stopped?

No, Molly said.

And then they felt it, warm, all over them.

Don’t let my head touch down, Callie said. Don’t let my head touch down.

The last time they took him to the hospital, it was night. Callie was wrapped tight in a blanket. It was spring it was raining it was the ambulance almost pretty in the dark. A neighbor came and stayed the night. That poor little fella, she said, had no business at the movies with his eyes so weak.

He hasn’t been to the movies, Molly said. Not for a long time. He stays in bed. We only talk about the movies.

The neighbor said nothing. She stirred the hot chocolate but it burned. The scalding made a taste like dirt.

Molly’s father came back and woke her up. It was almost light. He was by the window, pressing his hands on the glass. He said Callie was mighty sick; something in his head kept bleeding. They were going to the park, then to the hospital to see him.

The park was empty. By the pond, the carousel was already rusting under its pink and yellow roof. There was one black horse with its hooves in the air and its wild tongue slathering out. Her father lifted her up and put a
quarter in the box. He sat on the bench. Every time Molly came around, his face was looking where she was. Her hands wouldn’t move. She was crying with no sound and finally the music stopped. Her father sat on the bench in the rain with his head tilted, looking with his luminous eyes.

S
HE WAS
my best friend, we slept together on weekends. She lived in town and I lay awake hearing her father hack in the bathroom, cars in the street passing lights on the wall. At Halloween we dressed like old men. She streaked my mouth with coal and laughed in her black teeth. Walking the south streets we hid our faces in hats and dragged one leg. Down alleys women with their hair in kerchiefs tied up garbage bags. They were only shadows against the light. We walked scratching soap on windows of the deserted bakery. I wrote those women’s names. Wilhelmina, Charlotte, Vera Mae. Safety pins in their skirts and mottled cheeks. I watched them lounge against record racks in Murphey’s, slanting their hard eyes at the girls in the lipstick ads.

It was cold now. Past the old bakery the houses got farther apart. Dogs howled, ran at us till chains clicked at their necks. Sudden sucked breath; they were always fooled. In a
house by woods a radio blared a gospel show. Bring down the Banner my sistuhs and brothuhs. Evry road leads back to Him. Make your request and Jesus in His sweet blindness hears. An old woman nodded like a sleeper in her chair. We stood watching her through the torn screen door. Her head swiveled and she saw us in our fathers’ hats.

Her eyes were hooded in their lids. She stood up slow, leaned on the table and the crackling radio. He is our consolation He is our light. Give us our Savior Give us our Lord. At the door she gripped the splintered frame. We held up paper bags. What? she said. What? She leaned out at us smelling cheesy as old sex. I saw we were standing in a mess on the porch. Dogs kill them rabbits, she muttered. Brings em here. Hands jerking in her hair, she faded back into the house. Her braid had come down she was twisting it her shawl dropped. In blue light she stood moving stick arms in her long dried hair. Let thou Holy hands lift up. Do not be Ashamed to hear. She forgot us. She felt for the table. He can quench the fire in your hearts He. She fumbled her hands into a bowl of butter, held them out smeared. Then calm she combed them through her hair. She tilted her head like a girl at a dance and waited to be asked. Do not doubt my sistuhs Rise. And Take the Lord in your arms. God is all over you.

I crouched by the window, drew my white X on the glass. Your soul is forged in His fire Yes He can satisfy. Inside, the old woman moaned like a wind at a door.

W
E WENT DOWN
there because she was easy. She was always easy, watching us later across the stubbled field, dried-out West Virginia winter and she stood by the window braiding that long swatch of hair that smelled of smoke and fruit, of burnt apples. Sixteen, she was sixteen, moving on you, rolling flat and hard against you like some aging waitress. Feeling that hard scissored grip, you smelled her mechanical musk; her mouth on your face opened and her soft sounds spilled out empty and sugared in that filthy room. Her sheets were gray with men’s dust, heavy black dust of the tunnels, and sweats mixed on her skin.

Shifts changed, that long empty whistle howling like a dog. Wizard dog, empty whirling dog. The light was flat, broken on the hills. We walked to the truck and burned up that dirt
road to her house. House so close the mine she heard that doggy moan and waiting for us on the porch, knife in her hand, she peeled potatoes around and around. Eyed skins dropping limp and curled on faded boards. She thin-legged in her man’s boots. Budded breasts and that dark, high-boned face. Mouth petulant but its hardness in it, behind it. Looking at that mouth you felt her teeth in you, hard white negroid teeth, and the town looked on the whole family as niggers. This in ’59, dark beauties taunted in schools. In that old brick school on dented river land, governor’s picture in the hall smelled of river sop and the dark tiger-eyed were taunted as they are, I guess, still, in those towns. She had that gaunt full-hipped Appalachian stance till she opened those lips and spoke, moving in flimsy cotton dresses, her voice singsong like she was sleeping. She moving smooth-bellied in fields, swell-thighed, and the harsh nettled grass gone bleached behind her.

He, Billy, found her first. Said she was down at the company store with her pap and a string of brats. Said she was standing sucking her scarf, them hauling those thirty-pound bags of staples to the truck. Flour filmed in her napped hair and he said he like to burn up looking at her. Billy and me came down from Youngstown when the mills closed. For months I watched Billy grind at pouty women in gritted Ohio bars, us working those hot mills too long, going lean in a nothing town. Him a city boy working steel and ships, tired of going back broke to married girl friends, Lower East Side sweat-handed girls afraid of their dock-worker husbands. Said he had an uncle, mine boss in the South, and when the mills laid off we came down in his truck, me having sold my junk car to get him out of jail. Drunken Billy ended his good-bye
bender smashing windows and the jaws of some fat Puerto Rican pimp. We rolled all night into no-man’s-land West Virginia, and gas pumps alone by the side of the road went gray. Winter then. Deserted early-morning towns dusted gauzy; wooden-eyed perpetual thirties and Mail Pouch barns. This ain’t the South, Billy muttered, hung over, his head in his arms on the steering wheel, This is the goddamn past. And passing, just passing through, rolls you like a smoke train. Those heaped mountains lower the sky and roll you like some slow-limbed heavenly whore. And she, Billy said, that day at the store, carried bags a man would feel. Her face was hard and passive, the sensual hard of those women. He looked at her, thinking
half-breed
and sexual tales. She knew it, seeing him look as men look.

Her pap worked the Century mine down at Hundred, worked the swing shift. Billy said he stood in the woods at the edge of their fifteen acres of farm, waited, watched him swing his pail and hat up the seat of that broken bed truck. Truck started up and her pap just sat there in the shaking cab, a brawny-armed man near fifty touching his sandy hair. Billy said he watched him there so long he forgot the girl in the house. Something about the way he only sat, fingers edging his face. They lived, she told us later, in Detroit a few years when he tried to leave the mines. Said he came home from the Chevy plant stretched tight those nights. She cooked whatever she could get for the kids, his woman having left him by then. The mines, he told her, has got that dust settled in you and the black in your gut down deep. You work in small light to tear the wall, chink it out, then suddenly comes the monster clack of the cars. And when they’re gone, coal-heavy, the picks make the same hard ticking
up and down the rails, ticking the muffled black. In Detroit that factory city oil smelled all night, motors on the assembly line going till there’s no rest from it. Nothing has a weight there on the line. Just smooth whir of motors in your head. He told her this, kneading his big hands, late nights drunk in their neon-windowed place. Touching her, saying, Them lines gets tight, thin cat gut lines like ties off bellies. Them workers in line by the belts got such nothing in their chests, after a while even the black coal dust, stealing air, is a relief. That way he could see, he said, his years leaving him—at least he could feel them going. He felt it mornings in his broken truck, listening. Hounds bayed the light and field smoke rose off the frost. The truck caught low and rumbled and he in the shaking cab touched his face. Like something pulled his hand and its laced black cuts to his face.

Her mother was mulatto but she was gone. The grandmother, sometimes crazy, turned circles in the floor. We heard her outside the bedroom door, chanting, or she walked through the house holding eggs in her hands. Old woman at the foot of the bed motioning us to come butta butta butta. She talked nonsense but all of them, seven kids and others drifted in from up and down the road, they watched her. Some days, boiling jimson in a pot, she hung wild dope in a shed they’d used to keep hogs. Shit walked to a powder on the warped floor. She walked sometimes all day back and forth. Billy laughed, called her Ole Lady Mindbender. Hey looka that, he said, his thin lips curled, and she traced eights in the air. Gnarled fingers jabbing close, she cackled. I kept seeing their faces together, the old woman and the girl. The old woman cackling and she, young, with her beige Negro
face, had those same gold-irised eyes, but paler against her dark skin.

Later she talked of her thin brown mother leaving those mines her pap worked, him a doghole miner then, so poor his wife took three of the kids and went to D.C. They rode buses, riding to bars where her mother sang for hamburgers and band’s donations. Finally she whored out of Baltimore hotels, the kids waiting outside on the stoop. Ten-dollar tricks and swarthy short-order cooks. Movie house janitors’ nicotined fingers and doughy thighs of the satin-haired dago cops. Most nights the kids slept below in alley porno shop, warmer there, and Baker, black faggot, kept mattresses in back. Baker, his moony bagged eyes, his old bottles in windows, gave them white gravy and bread at 3
A.M
. Alley feet stumbled by his grilled basement windows, size of tomato boxes. It was ’49 and he talked about the war, hiding his knobby hands. Sunk easy in a flushed barbiturate high, he gave the kids Japanese fans GIs had traded for pinups. Filmy cataracts liquid as spaniel’s eyes, he said he ‘got to move dis place up da street, up dere woan hafta burn dese lights all day.’ She and her brothers stole opiated cough syrup he heated in a pan. They stole tuna and steak from the grocery and they ate good some days, upstairs not so cold come spring. Then it was hot, so hot they breathed their own sweat. Their mother laughed, broad mouth stretched tight, eating on carton table in empty grime city rooms. Fans on full, she wore a bra and panties, fed them beer and fried meat. Brown woman, her black hair kerchiefed or pulled back in a knot. High-cheeked opal face, thick-browed, her smell raw in rooms. The heat that summer, and at the hotel there was backed-up plumbing, sad junkies on the roof, hotsummer
Baltimore hepatitis. Their mother taken from mattress on floor not talking. At the crowded hospital, they were separated, beds on different floors, white wards, and she, seven years old, thought it was because someone knew they had stolen the food. She and the brother left were sent back to the country, where their father had a woman, more sons.