Man Gone Down (28 page)

How had I missed it? I had been waiting right there. If it's not too far on down the line, then—
stop that train
—
my promise is leaving me now.
My promise. I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence, and therefore as the future leader of my people I was given the light for me to keep—not to let shine but to hold on to in the darkness like a star shrouded by night's sky cloak until I was ready to reveal it. But it's a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment: promethean metaphors; this school and that school; this test and that test; Moses and Jesus and Martin and Malcolm; Socrates to Baldwin; Shakespeare to Dylan; Jeremiah and community; community centers; marches, church basements, and city hall stairs; and the good white schools with the good white people—and I was like Daniel. I was supposed to have been someone. I was full of light—full of promise. I punched that white boy in his face, and all promises and contracts were cancelled. They ran me out, and then Lila beat me pretty good, or bad. She drew blood. O, the many uses of an extension cord. But I didn't cry. I looked at her as I had looked at the headmaster, like I did Mrs. Kline—just as my mother had taught me—with the fish-eye, the dead-eye, the mask of dignity; and it scared her. It stoked her rage. She went for me again, kicked over a box of plates. She hit harder. Then she
stopped, dropped the whip, covered her eyes with her hands, and let out a high, long, broken whistle whine, shaking her head slowly. She cried for what seemed to be a very long time. And when she stopped, she peeked out from behind her hands as if to see if I had gone. I didn't show it, but I was scared to see what would be on her face when she saw me still standing there. She smiled. And the places on my body where she'd whipped buzzed and seemed to rise with heat. It didn't hurt. And I knew from her face, the crazy, random face gone soft and quiet that there was, shot through the both of us and through the air, love. There was light in that little room. It moved through me, warmer than my blood. It was in her. It was all around us—the sink, the table, the counter. Her face seemed to glow from a place I couldn't discern. Love. And it wasn't so particular as her love for me or mine for her; it seemed to have always been there, and through our rawness we both felt it—balm on wounds. Everything would be all right.

“You are the light of the world . . .” She shook her head, “But you can't let anyone know—not yet.”

“Why not?” I asked. I flinched too—just a hair—but enough for her to see, because you didn't question Lila, especially when she was like that, all grave and steely, set to tell you true. But my flinch hurt her and she dropped her head in shame. “I won't ever hit you anymore.” She sighed and looked at me as though asking my forgiveness. She started gathering the pieces of plate, trying to cobble together one out of the broken many.

“I'd been living in Richmond, but I came up and found your grandfather in Baltimore,” she said. “He had a wife and a girl. And I got a little job, and I started spending some time with him.
He was my father.”
She looked at me as though she'd seen something of him flash in my face and then disappear—something she wanted to come back.

“After a little while, his wife didn't like it—told him to tell me to stop.” She pawed at the plated fragments. “So I stopped. I came here.” She finished repiecing the plate, brushed away the dust and hopeless fragments.

“You're a good boy.”

*  *  *

Lila had said there was light, and therefore, love. And Claire had said she loved me—on street corners, in rental cars, on stairways. Claire didn't get it—perhaps still doesn't. Standing before me at the altar, in her vows she'd said she loved me, but she hadn't seen—the line of Ham, the line of Brown. I must have appeared to her to have been divorced from time and context—just a man, nothing but a man. Or, perhaps, a
formless creature.
I thought it was the wilderness that we were both about to step into—faithless, ruthless, perhaps even loveless. If love was the light and the light revealed all—how couldn't she see me? If she had, would she still say she loved—some postmodern Desdemona—in spite of the shroud that enveloped my alleged light, my love.

Edith doesn't love me. That's obvious. She's always thought that I was crazy—impractical. I've always made her nervous—talking about ridiculous things like art and freedom. But I'd done the bootstrap jig, bused tables, torn down walls, learned a trade, became—by some accounts—skilled at it. I'd sobered up and gone back to school, where some people believed I still had promise and made new promises to and for me. But Claire, her friends thought about sex—our sex—my biceps and balls. And after a while I came to think that that was where she was at. But she stuck around too long for that. I was too difficult for that. There was always some happy jigaboo she could've found for that. Sullen McBastard, Gavin had told her to call me, or Stoic Mombassa. But she wouldn't. She just blushed. He made her nervous in the same way I did Edith. No, Claire wanted to stay for the long haul. Silly girl.

I'm glad my mother is dead. She would be angry, with Claire, with me on the scaffold sanding scum off metal.
“You are the light of this world
. . .” I'm glad she never found out she was wrong.

The drums come back—the drums and KC.

“That's looking good, man.”

I nod a thanks, abbreviated somewhat because I really don't want to take credit for it. KC and I used to get along well—trade off buying coffee and such. I wonder if he still has the nail gun he borrowed. I don't care. It has been a while, which makes me think that there would be, even between two fairly stoic men, some nod to friendship. And true, we hadn't kept in touch since that time, but aren't friendships like that? KC seems to be feeling me out all over again, as though I'd hurt him before. Maybe he's high. I thought he wasn't into that—at least not on the job.
“Hey, man, what's up?”
as though I'd just seen him the day before. Maybe he had recognized the past—things were still cool and seeing me was no big deal. “Take it easy,” he says as he backs away, wiping at the frame. He looks down at his shoes and I think I catch it coming off him—shame. KC feels sorry for me. I turn back to the window, back to the rasping, the polyrhythm, with the drums. More screaming wood on the saw. I look beyond the stops—outside. They've got the countertop on. The white man runs his fingertips along the top. I follow the exterior wall down. Two women moving in the street catch my eye. They disappear into the jeans joint. Because of the double-height storefront, I can see over the first racks of pants and shirts, which bear the company logo. Beyond them are racks with belts and shelves with sweaters—all monochrome but rich hued. They look, on this gray day, juxtaposed to my still-damp clothes, to be warm and comfortable. Claire would like these things. I wonder what she'd say if I were to show up with a pair of Lucky Jeans and a monochrome sweater.
“How did you do that?”
But she wouldn't be angry. She wouldn't be suspicious. I think she would be happy. She needs new clothes—nice casual clothes. And a guy, even a broke one, needs to be able to buy his girl a nice little something every once in a while. It's good for the both of them. Young girls shouldn't get weary. Tenderness would be expressed in the fact that somehow, someway, you came up with the dough. You went through whatever it was you went through to get it, and in the end you were still thinking about her. I find it somewhat amazing, ridiculous, that I've never thought of a present as a symbol. Love manifested in the material, or
better yet, the thought behind the material:
These jeans mean I'm thinking of you, baby.

I have one small patch left to clean and I realize that I don't know what I'm being paid—if I'm being paid at all. How many passes over engraved dirty daisies equals one pair of designer jeans. Finally, the jackass on the saw stops ruining wood.

Everyone begins drifting—shifting around their stations.

“Break,” says KC, sneaking up from behind. He clangs his putty knife against one of the Baker's verticals. I drop my piece of sandpaper.

I climb down. Now everyone is mulling and going into their pockets for money. Chris waves me over. Now that the first stage of morning gruntiness is over, he seems a bit warmer. I join the gathering. Chris beckons me closer with a head nod.

“Yo, man, what's up?” He doesn't wait for an answer. “Got a pencil?”

I produce one and he passes me a small piece of cardboard. I take it and try to decipher it. I'm puzzled—lost for a moment in its blankness.

“Regular coffee. Buttered roll. Thanks.” He says it all without looking at me, only at the cardboard, waiting for me to do something. I don't know what.

“You get that?” He gives me an eyeball—quick and lewd—like he's an impatient flasher and his eyelids are overcoats. I connect the blank slate with the pencil:
Write.
I write. I'm taking orders. I do it somehow: coffee, tea, biscuits, cigarettes. I do it. Somehow. Then I pretend to segregate the money they give me—discreet folds, mental notes. They each come in turn, Magi-like in their solemnity, as though each is making an offering. “Banana, too . . . ,” sings the Dubliner. He's not a bad chap, I suppose, but now, of course, I despise him. He slips me his prefolded dollars. “Thank you,” he says. Now Bing Bing. “J'wan caffee—b'yan butta, na de toata—a'heet?” And there's apology in his voice, too, but what he should be sorry for is the brutality of the sameness and disparity between Kingston and Dublin. Shake's maternal grandfather was an Anglo-Irish missionary to Antigua. He
found a wife there and then brought her to Jamaica. They had a daughter, who living on that island of
“rough people”
with all her island haughtiness married herself a rough Jamaican countryman. Shake was fucked from jump—split in two at least—but he tried to create some bastard language that pointed at where he'd been, where he liked to think he was going. These two bastards refused to even be American—to assimilate.

I go to the elevator and think about the elevator woman, elevator girl. What should I call her? I look at her door. What is she doing in there? Had she left for the day? Her elevator jerks up and then starts down—clanking. I sniff for her, but only for a second, then I'm ashamed—disgusted. I get out and go outside. It's stopped raining. The air doesn't feel like August. It's more like October—cool and sharp in the nostrils. A leaf falls from somewhere onto my shoulder.
Summer's gone.
It blew right through here, and I seem unable to recollect what happened. I don't remember heat. I don't remember long days or soft evenings. Soon the mornings will all be dark.

Across the street the jeans joint is jumping. People need pants, I suppose. I'd like to go in, but I don't. I have a job to do, and as I walk west on Broome, I wonder if it's more honorable to be a good lackey or a bad one. If anything can be claimed—any victory at all—in the fact that you've failed. Would a genius fail an errand for a fool? I have money. I have a list. But I have nowhere to go. I haven't spent time in this neighborhood in years. Something tells me to walk away from SoHo and the absurdly priced muffin shops. I'd like for the elevator lady to appear, but what would I ask her:
Excuse me, do you know where I could find an inexpensive muffin?
There's no reason it should, but the question sounds ridiculous in my head, and I push on. There must be a deli somewhere. It is after all New York City, where there seems to be one for every resident.

I turn south on West Broadway and stop at Canal. Nothing. I turn to face the east. The street is full of vendors and shoppers—
carnival-like—the neon of the stereo stores, foam rubber stores, barkers with counterfeit Gucci and Prada and Chanel. The sidewalks are thick with people and carts, and the street is full of honking and lurching vehicles in perpetual and eternal gridlock. Potholes, sinkholes, tar patches, steel plates, and a traffic cop who stands just off the sidewalk at the corner of Church—white gloved, futile, full of bad faith. Nothing good can be had down that way.

I keep heading west—outpacing the tunnel-bound traffic. Every car seems to be honking. Traffic jams have always made me nervous, whether I'm in a car or not. I'm troubled by the origin of the stoppage or slow down. There's a blockage somewhere, an accident perhaps, because of which, someone is dead or near death. And there are the obvious associations that come with blockage and death and the too close proximity of people and cars and carbon monoxide. My heart is about to explode. At the same time—and perhaps less reasonable—everything is too heavy. There's too much weight. You can see it—the potholes, the sinkholes. Manhole covers under which there are tunnels, tubes, grooves for pipe and wire, sewers, and of course, subways. You can hear it in the hollow boom of the steel plates covering the faults. And this isn't a strident judgment—not some puritanical metaphor. The city is, and I say it without humor, hollow at its core. There aren't any insides. I count the cars, the trucks, the squat and the tall stone and steel buildings; it's a wonder that it all doesn't implode.

Get coffee!
I scan west. There can't be anything that way on Canal. I cross West Broadway and decide to look north up Hudson—nothing there, either. I stop and re-collect my thoughts—not that I've really been thinking about anything other than the tarmac folding in on itself and everyone and everything tumbling into the void. Not an apocalyptic vision, only an exercise in layman engineering.

A garbage truck bellows, and then I smell it—the stink—rotten chicken and ass. It goes right to my stomach and I gag, almost lose it right there. I hear a voice in my head say,
“Claire, oh, Claire.”
But she'd actually puked. She'd waded into traffic like she always did, and
I, as always, had asked in the accusing and arrogant way appropriate for a rhetorical question,
“What are you doing?”
She'd stepped back onto the curb, made eye contact with the driver, and then retched into the gutter—shameless—like an old drunk. People watching had sidestepped her breakfast in disgust and the driver had looked down from his cab with the straight-faced Anglican disdain and horror reserved for use by her people. She apologized to me, but I was used to the puke of drunks and she was my wife. Within fifteen minutes we were home watching the dark blue line appear on the pregnancy test. She shrieked like someone who'd just seen a ghost or a rat and then realized that the haunt, the vermin would be back soon. And this was someone who'd believed she wanted children—an oddity, really, for her generation—her one ambition, becoming a comfortable housewife. And I don't think that it was in reaction to her mother, who was of course, ambitious. Who at the time of her husband's death, although already wealthy, started, then grew and sold her own business. She hadn't been a bad mother. Claire had never accused her mother of not loving her. But she wasn't, as Claire puts it, the nurturing kind.