Fire Shut Up in My Bones (28 page)

Frank wasn’t in yet, so I couldn’t ask him what to do. I followed my gut instinct and went to the scene. When I arrived, there was a stillness in the air. I immediately recognized it as the familiar quiet that hangs over a house after someone dies in it. The house was roped off and the police were milling about. I talked to one of the officers to find out what had happened: the electricity to the house had been cut off, so the father put a generator in the crawl space under the house to power the air conditioners while the family slept that hot summer night. The exhaust fumes seeped up through the floorboards and killed them all. The bodies, except for those of the small children, were found not in the beds but on the bedroom floors and in the hallway. The family members, weakened by the gas, had probably collapsed there in their attempt to escape.

I knew this story would be best told with a diagram of the house and the generator in the crawl space and where the bodies were found. But the officers wouldn’t let me enter to get the layout. I did my best to peer through the windows to figure it out, but that wasn’t good enough. Then I noticed that all the houses on the street looked alike. Presumably the layout of one was the layout of all.

I knocked at the house next door and asked the owner if she had ever been in the house where the people had died and if the layout was the same as her house: yes and yes. So I asked if she would give me a tour of her house so that I could sketch the floor plan, and she agreed. I then took the diagram to one of the officers and had him indicate where each of the bodies had been found. I got the name and model of the generator and went around to every sporting goods and hardware store until I found someone who sold the same model. I made a diagram of it, and had the salesman talk me through how it worked.

I rushed back to the newsroom, built my diagram on the computer, and added my captions. The paper used it on the front page. I knew then that I could be what was coming to be known as a visual journalist. It wasn’t as high an ambition as being governor, but I was good at it, and I liked it.

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

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
offered 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.