Fire Shut Up in My Bones (12 page)

There was a trail through those chairs that was barely big enough to fit a body, a trail that led to a stash of the shopkeeper’s dirty magazines in the back. Large upholstery needles arched like talons into a piece of foam used as a pincushion. Bolts of fabric leaned against the wall like the trunks of cut trees.

The shop was like a church for chairs—full of brokenness and resurrection, piercing things and uncomfortable realities.

Maybe that’s why Lawrence felt at ease coming to the shop and saying things there that he didn’t say elsewhere, the air always pregnant with a “maybe.” Maybe he was flirting. Maybe not. If he went too far, maybe that would be okay. Maybe he was being mocked. Maybe he was being entertaining. Maybe, just maybe. He knew the things he was saying were dangerous, because just being himself was dangerous. He was operating outside the rules.

It wasn’t the fact as much as the flaunting that raised folks’ hackles. There had always been dandies, men folks snickered about, men whose wives they pitied. But at least those men put forth an effort to bring their behavior in line with their anatomy, no matter the damage repression did to their soul.

But not Lawrence. He wouldn’t pretend. He wouldn’t hide. And that is what people found repulsive. It was what they saw as his surrender to a lurid impulse, his embrace of an ignoble identity. The scent of a demon on his breath. Dangerous.

At my age, even I was confused by him. Even I, who now occasionally wrestled with hints of feelings he seemed to embrace. In my mind, I was a mile apart from him. Lawrence seemed to want to abdicate masculinity, slough it off like a feather from a molting chicken. I wanted to accrue it. He had given up on girls. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

For me, attractions were fluid, not set like they were for other people, not like they were for Lawrence. In me, alternating impulses came in waves—not short, rapid waves like water sloshing about in a bucket, but in great oceanic waves in which one dominated during the day and drowned out the other, which sometimes came at night, the way the betrayal had come.

It’s not that I didn’t also think about girls and women at night. I did, compulsively. They were girls from school and women from the dirty magazines, smiling and naked, full of praise and empty of judgment. It’s just that the male images sometimes came in their stead, but not in the same way. They were a presence. A wistfulness. Yearning spirits lingering near the place where a life was once lost. They were faceless and without form, no one I knew and not naked like the women, but definitely male. They were not aggressive, but rather an amalgamation of all the men who had ever been nice to me, soothing, antidotes to the boy who had tried to take advantage of me. The nighttime images embodied the opposite of the feeling I had about what Chester had done.

To me, in my ignorance, Lawrence represented the full gender deviance of which boys are taught to want no part—kind feeding on kind. My mind was so caught between Bible verses and vicious boys—prey and predator, right and wrong, large and small, life and death—that I was incapable of seeing love or tenderness or caring in what Lawrence felt.

The thing that came to me in whispers and waves seemed to come to Lawrence with the force of whitewater rapids—churning, irrepressible, able to push you over and drag you under. Everything about him hinted at sex—coquettish manner, agreeable glances, a door that would swing wide open with the slightest push. Lawrence couldn’t
not
flirt. Rivers must move. He could be still for only so long, danger or no.

The shop was the only place besides church where I saw Lawrence talk to a man. Most men steered clear of him lest folks grow suspicious that they were drawing pleasure from exchanging pleasantries. “How you doing?” That was it. Move on. Barely wait long enough to receive the answer. But there among the dead chairs, Lawrence came alive. There he didn’t shrink; he blossomed.

As far as I could tell, the cousin who kept the upholstery shop was completely uninterested in Lawrence, although entertained by him. The “maybe” Lawrence floated in the air the shopkeeper gently but firmly brought back to earth with a solid “no.” It just seemed to me that, as a man who had seen the cruelty of war up close, he had no desire to be cruel to a man who posed no threat.

I would be grown before I recognized how much courage it must have taken for Lawrence to live as he did, outside the rules and ahead of his time in such a small place.

But not every man was like the shopkeeper. One day—more than a decade later—the danger of Lawrence’s life would catch up to him. He would be found murdered in a neighboring town, tied to a bed. Although I didn’t know anyone in Gibsland who had ever seen him with a man, not in a romantic way, many folks assumed that some of the men who scoffed at him by day played around with him at night.

The gossip was that it was one of those men who killed Lawrence, but no one knew who did it and few other than his family, particularly Aunt Trudy, really seemed to want to know. His death reduced her bark to a whimper and shook her faith: “I don’t know why God let that happen to Lawrence. I just can’t pray right no mo’.” My heart hurt for her. How could this have happened to Lawrence, the most harmless and most isolated of men? And why weren’t more people upset and unsettled?

People whispered, but no one protested. The sense of scandal seemed to outweigh the sense of outrage. Yet everyone went to the funeral, many no doubt to see if a strange man turned up who looked too hurt or cried too hard—a distraught lover or a guilty one.

The unspoken message this sent was horrible and unmistakable: black men who lived their lives as Lawrence had lived his would not be fully valued in life or in death. The world that judged Lawrence’s honest life as dishonorable would in fact conduct itself dishonorably in his death. A few people were questioned in Lawrence’s murder, but no one was arrested, and soon the whole thing faded away.

Five years after Lawrence was tied to the bed and killed, Matthew Shepard, a young, white, openly gay man, was tied to a fence and killed in a small Wyoming city. While Lawrence’s death hardly made the local papers, Matthew’s provoked an international outcry. That discrepancy would haunt me.

My friend Shane was not like Lawrence. He didn’t talk slick. Nothing he said sounded like flirting. There was no “maybe” in the air when he spoke. But he still upset the prevailing ethos: that boys from the sticks were hard like stones. What hung on Shane was a thick sense of eccentricity and erudition.

The suspicion surrounding him was not about what he said, but what he didn’t say—sins of omission. He never spoke of girls, ever. Other boys talked about the pretty one or the ugly one, the fine ones or the fat ones. But Shane never did. He liked to play word games and talk trivia, which he could do for hours, and few could match wits with him. But I knew that this, too, was dangerous. It was words and reading that had made me quiet, and being quiet had made me a mark. Quiet was fine for old folks on porches, but not for young boys.

Sometimes we played basketball, and Shane was one of the best basketball players I knew. But the way he played was different from other boys. He was somehow able to use his oddly distributed weight to his advantage, contorting his body—moving loose and squirmy through the air when he jumped, the way a cat does when it falls—and taking unorthodox shots that somehow seemed to fall into the basket. He could prove his superiority, both intellectual and athletic, as often as it was challenged.

But perhaps the most inspiring thing about Shane was that he seemed able to insulate his sense of identity. He knew the things that people said about him, but he appeared not to care. He had found a way to hold himself safe and apart—looking down on the cruel ignorance of the world around him, laughing at the idea that others thought they could look down on him.

This was interesting, for a while. I needed the break. But while Shane may have grown accustomed to his isolation, I could not. Soon Shane moved away, and I moved on.

The only other person I knew with Shane’s fortitude was a girl who arrived in the neighborhood a few months after Shane moved out, a girl with a strange name, Nevaeh—heaven spelled backward.

Nevaeh’s family moved into a house less than a hundred feet from where Shane had lived, and they rented out the vacant municipal building across the street. The father, a missionary of sorts, started preaching and having “church” there for a strange new religion called Nation of Yahweh. This was unheard of in our town, a blasphemy. People whispered, and drove by slowly, looking in at the nearly empty services through the open door.

Nevaeh was a clever, imaginative girl and was covered head to toe in eczema. She was an outsider, not so pretty, and, the way folks told it, her parents were headed straight to hell, but I didn’t care. I was instantly, magnetically drawn to her. The other kids mocked and teased her. But, like Shane, she was resilient, standing like a flower at the edge of a cesspool. The insults she didn’t ignore she volleyed with a quick wit. I was drawn to anyone who didn’t buckle in the face of ridicule. It was a skill I needed to acquire.

We’d sit for hours on her porch swing, moving just enough to hear the chains creak, talking about imagination and clouds and if-I-hads, everything and nothing—beautiful thoughts flowing effortlessly from her scarred body.

One day she took me into the municipal building, where her father was preparing for his next sermon. Unbeknownst to me, she was delivering me for conversion. Strange charts and illustrations hung everywhere. Her father asked me if I knew who Yahweh was. I knew that the God of the Old Testament was called Yahweh, but this seemed different. Was he talking about my Yahweh or his? I was overthinking it. I said no.

He launched into a bizarre speech about a black messiah, true Jews, and the lost tribes of Israel. He talked about how the
Y
’s formed by the splitting of branches and the veins of leaves were subtle manifestations of Yahweh. He had me spread my fingers like his fingers, two on either side, like the Vulcan greeting on
Star Trek.

“See that? That’s a
Y
for Yahweh.” I thought, No, that’s a
V.
But I said nothing.

He seemed like a pleasant man, but his logic was laughable to me, trivial, especially in light of the fire-and-brimstone, blood-and-sacrifice, help-us-please-Savior message that had been drilled into me since I was a sprout. I knew who Jesus was, I thought. He was a white man with stringy yellow hair and blue eyes, notwithstanding the Bible’s hair-of-wool, feet-of-bronze description.

I told my mother about where I’d been that day and the strange things that the strange man had said. She directed me, in no uncertain terms, to “stay away from down there!” My mother was right. Years later, the cult’s founder and leader, Yahweh ben Yahweh, would be convicted in Miami of conspiring to murder white folks as part of an initiation rite.

Within months, the strange man and his daughter, unable to find willing converts or a warm reception, moved away, like Shane’s family.

Having spent so much time with a girl, and before that a boy who folks thought acted too much like a girl, I was now feeling the need to rejoin the fray of the other boys.

If Shane and Nevaeh were at one end of the spectrum, the Sparrow children were at the other. They lived down the block where the street met the highway, near the upholstery shop where Lawrence came to talk slick before someone tied him to a bed and took his life. There were three of them—two boys with a girl in between. They lived in an aging trailer where my father, after he and my mother split, often spent all evening getting drunk.

The Sparrows were an unruly bunch. The older boy would hold his sister down and kiss her in response to the slightest dare. I got the sense that her protests had lost their force, that she had resigned herself to a trapped life with nowhere to run. In fact, she was the star—or victim—of the first sex tape I experienced. It was a cassette audiotape of several neighborhood boys crowding around a bed about to have sex with her.

The boys taunted and prodded her.

“Gul, take dem big-ass pannies off.”

She pleaded for time to consider the act.

“Wait a minit! Wait a minit! Let me thank! Let me thank!”

The tape stopped before the action started, but start it did. The boys couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen at the time, and she was even younger.

Sometimes I played with the Sparrow children, in part because there were only a handful of families on our street with children. We stayed in their yard while their folks and company talked, gambled, and drank inside, the air always charged with a hint of danger and the possibility of disaster. One evening, a well-liquored woman with shaky footing stumbled out of the house. She folded herself into her car and turned the ignition, and the car lurched forward. It sped through the yard, across the highway, and into a ditch, then slammed into a railroad embankment.

The train tracks, which ran through town along its northern edge and on to the interchange at the center of town, had turned 1890s Gibsland into a booming shipping center. Paradoxically, Interstate 20, opened in the early 1960s less than a mile north of the tracks, now threatened to choke the town to death by diverting through traffic. The tracks themselves had become a nuisance and a hazard, taking a life or two every few years from those who snaked around the crossing arms—at the one level crossing that had them—assuming that they’d malfunctioned, as they often did, or from those who failed to heed them.

But this was the first time I knew the tracks to threaten a life without the help of the train, and the only time I’d seen it happen in front of me.

The adults ran screaming to rescue the woman in the ditch as we ran behind them.

“Git some candy! Git some candy! She got da suga’!” They searched, but no candy could be found, at least not in time. She’d had a diabetic seizure and died in the ditch.

It was all too much for me. I never played at the Sparrow house again.