Man Gone Down (32 page)

The Cubs are on a winning streak, too, which is troubling because it's easy to drift to October: Game seven, Fenway Park, tie score, two outs, bottom of the ninth, full count. There's the pitch, then a flash of light and the world ends—without a bang or a whimper but without any satisfying resolution.
“And all manner of thing shall be well.”
The black boy and the white girl are waiting for their fancy coffee drinks. He has dared to hold her hand and she has dared to like it. And now she dares to press her hip into him. Miles bends a note, blue, and I scroll through twenty-odd years of white girls. The Black Studies units of history and English classes. The privileged children of the Bay Colony talking Jim Crow, learning about lynching. Learning and looking at me, as the white teacher lectured, with pity and sex on the brain. They, later, much later, away from home, away from Mommy and Daddy and peers, during their phase of social rebellion and sexual experimentation, in the privacy of a dorm room, or the relative squalor of an off-campus parent-paid apartment, could fuck and cry some poor nigger's blues away, or they, at least, could try, try and fail—
but at least they tried.
They could claim the effort, like some holy ticket to get them on the train, in the gates. Keep dreaming, blondie. And it occurs to me not to ask about the dream deferred, because almost everyone knows what it is, on some level, to fail. But what happens to a dream, and yes, a dream, not a desire or hankering or an impulse or a want, but a dream, realized? And yes, I say it again: It is a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment—to learn Latin and Greek and the assassination dates of the martyrs; to toggle between Christ and Keynes, King and Turner, Robinson, Robeson, Ali, Frazier, Foreman; to have a rumbling in the jungle of your black folk soul while a rough coon, its number come up at last, shuffles up from New Orleans to be free.
“And all shall be well”
when champagne sprays around the home clubhouse in the Olde Towne, character the only currency. Love won. Kingdom Come.

They leave and I fold the paper and go, too. I want to follow them. They do happen to be going my way, to the Heights, where the school office is. I don't know where it is exactly that I'm to go, and the idea of wandering the hallways seems stupid. I haven't called. I'm dirty. It's almost time to go home. The school office hours may not have anything to do with regular business hours. I remember being a student. Even worse, I remember teaching. There seemed to be, regardless of the institution, a casual regard for time. Perhaps not. Perhaps
it was merely an environment in which I could indulge my casual regard for time.

I look up and the kids are gone. I remember nothing from school—
a nonrestrictive clause is . . . ?
Whatever the answer, it seems without application on this street under the elms and now a juniper. The carefully sculpted masonry: sidewalk, stoop, brick-point, lintel. It's too cold for August. I should send the boys to vocational school or have them apprentice with a topflight artisan. They can learn their sums and letters at home. Especially X, who just seems to be able to pick information out of the air—harvest it from the ether. He's three. He can read. He can write. He can add and subtract. Nobody taught him. It seemed as though the slate in his skull had already been written on when he arrived in this world and he recognized the symbols, understood and felt the weight of them. It scared Claire, and I must admit, it scared me, too. I would look at that man-boy face, the elfin imp eyes, and he would look back and somehow, smiling, wink without blinking.

X was named Michael until one of those Sunday mornings when there seemed to be nothing to do, nowhere to go—and that was good. Ella Fitzgerald was singing—“Rockin' in Rhythm.” I had remembered to turn on the radio, tuned to one of those alternative stations at the top of the dial where the white boys play old black music, reciting play lists and band rosters in their quasi-cool voices—tidbits of this session with Miles or that one with Bird—but it's all right because they play the music they love and no one can say shit. They just play the music they love, which makes that music, by default, theirs.

I was on the couch thumbing through the
Times. “Ella singing a classic by Duke.”
Every once in a while I'd put down the paper and pick up the guitar. What a guitar that was—a cherry red Gibson 335. I got it used, flipped the bridge and nut around, restrung it. Usually, when you flip a guitar, the intonation gets thrown off and it won't stay in tune. It just sounds odd. Not this one. I kept it on a stand next to the couch, and both boys were good about not touching it—keeping the markers and the greasy, sticky paws away.

I was playing unplugged, and C was drawing a hallucination, some kind of dragon ritual, on a giant piece of vellum. X was lying on the floor. Strange child—naked, stretched out on his side, playing with his plastic dinosaurs. When he isn't stalking, smashing, or reciting facts about the ancient animal world, he's in a torpor—the only signs alerting us to his being awake, alive, the slight growls animating his toys.

Claire came through the door with bagels and coffee. Maybe I sensed the hidden doughnuts. I was viscerally reminded of why I married her. She was pregnant and wore the new season on her. The October breeze had buffed her cheeks, long hair in a wind tangle, auburn, foreshadowing the leaves' turn. Green eyes like pale leaves. The boys hadn't looked up. I remember that made me happy. Selfish, yes, but it was a statement that said they were comfortable without their mother. She was being released. They were finally off her tit. The three of them had entangled in the sweet sorrow of psychological weaning. It could get hideous at times, her longing for them to grow up but then regressing; them longing for her to realize that they were both confident and scared. But sometimes, like that day, it was right, and we were all at peace.

“Michael, do you want some juice?”

He didn't look up. He just kept on growling softly—not ignoring his mother, just seemingly unaware of her presence.

“Michael?”

She lay down on the floor next to him and got in his face.

“Michael.”

He snapped up, wide-eyed, smiling, as though some mystery hand had flicked his power on.

“Michael,”
she said, relieved. Then he yelled, not yet two years old, his most coherent statement to date.

“I'm not Michael. I'm Duke!”

Duke became X because Cecil became C and X was the only letter Duke could write—fist clenched around a Crayola. C rolling his eyes. Claire and I thrilled and worried—our boy, three years old, well over three feet tall, doing pull-ups, a vertical leap half his height—the crayon, a potential weapon. Blue eyes, just this side of scary.

Michael. I'd picked Moses first, then Miles, and Claire had winced at both. Troubled by their implications.

“They're so loaded. That's too much to put on a kid.”

“And Michael isn't?”

She didn't respond. But what is in a name? In between the two boys we lost a child. C had come too early. We were too young, too broke. X and the girl were
“accidents.”
But the one we lost had been planned. We were ready. It was May and it was windy and raining hard. A tree had fallen against the building and Claire called me. I was in the adjunct office grading papers. She said that she was scared. C was scared, too. I hadn't been very sympathetic because I was in the center office—windowless—and hadn't any sense of the weather. I teased her about lightning bolts and phone lines and she hung up, grumpy that I hadn't indulged her. Then she went to bed. I remember wondering if the student whose paper I was reading realized that I was the one who'd supplied him with the quote that he had plagiarized. The phone rang again. I sighed, shook my head, and answered.

“I'm bleeding.

I took too long to respond. She wailed.

“I'm bleeding!”

When I got home, Claire was in an almost unreachable panic bunker. There it was, on the bedsheets, small stains on the bathroom floor whose pattern made me think that something had dropped and shattered there. I had to lie to her. I told her everything was going to be all right. She had to believe it. What else could we do—accept that our baby was dead?

But it was dead. They vacuumed it from her the next day while I held C on my lap in the waiting room and lied to him. And looking out the taxi window on the way home we knew that New York City was too brutal for us. Edith was away, so I got a car, sped us north through rain, got to her house at night and broke in. C was asleep, but Claire wouldn't let me carry him in. He was almost too long for her to carry, but she wrapped his legs around her, pressed him to her chest, and buried her face in his crazy wave of hair.

She didn't say anything, just got in bed and closed her eyes. The room was dark, cold, and haunted. In the darkness her sorrow, which was darker still, hovered around her like a deep, vague shadow cut loose from its tether. Inside it she seemed safe. Outside it, in the other rooms, ghosts of all different attitudes spoke. So I went out. I turned on every light in the house to dispel them, send them out to the woods, to the beach, the ocean, or the lonely country road. It didn't work. I went back into the dark room, sat on the edge of the bed—C and his mother in a weepy, sleep embrace. And in the mess of sound, all the ghost voices, the clicking of forceps, the whoosh of the vacuum hose, and the footsteps of rain on the roof—I listened for my dead child's voice.

“Did you want this baby?”
Edith had asked me in a private moment when she returned from her trip and found us there. I knew she was trying to be kind. But it was then that I gave myself full permission to hate her: because she was white; because she always had money; because she seemed incapable of mourning—becoming damaged or recognizing that there are some people who truly are and will always be
“out in the wind.”

It was six months before Claire would undress in front of me and six more until I could look at her naked, and then, immediately, she was pregnant. And it happened again. She bled at night. She called me. We stayed up, this time, mourning. We went to the doctor, but everything was fine. X was the miracle baby, the fetus who had bled from her but somehow reconstituted himself in her. Instantaneous resurrection. So when he came out, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and oversized—two pounds heavier and two inches longer than any educated guess—we were both awed and terrified. Claire went into emergency surgery to repair her torn uterus, and they wanted to take him—put him under the lamps because they thought he looked a bit
“jaundiced.”
No one got the joke. I said no and kept my little ether baby with me.

As much as I fear for C, I believe that X will be all right. I don't drill him like C, don't obsess about his safety, his toughness, his manners. I haven't tried to teach him five different sports, read him dense poems or scrutinized the quality of his draftsmanship. Some
say that it's because C is the firstborn, my parental training began with him. Claire thinks it's because X is almost unreachable—the boy does what he wants, hears what he wants, seems nearly immune to any threat of discipline or punishment, and none of it seems willful; he seems built that way. I think it's because he's white. There are the other factors, but I know that when I look at the boy who looks exactly like me, I don't know who or what it is I'm seeing. There's no history or experience within me to project onto him. He's a complete mystery to me. I can neither demand anything of him nor predict anything for him. This doesn't mean I don't love my boy.
He's my boy
—I know that. But just as he moves so strangely in my mind, he moves, will move in the world outside me—freely. I can extrapolate, I can theorize, cite examples—my best friend is white; I know what has happened to him, I know his story, and although in parks and train yards he has told me true—his story, bruises, tears, laughter—I still do not know his mind. All I have are reports, euphonic and cacophonic, from the interior. My boy is only three. I can't see him as a man. His doctor swears he'll be at least six-foot-six. I can't see it. What does that mean? Somehow I helped produce an Aryan-looking giant—a testosterone-filled encyclopedia I will never understand. So what do you do?—Say he'll be just fine.

The school is being renovated—the main building, at least. They've had a scaffolding up for the last several years—since before we had kids, though no work seems to be getting done. I go inside and at once see one of C's old teachers. She smiles and waves by bending her fingers in unison. She scurries off. It'll supposedly be a new building for him—a big building. First grade—serious stuff. I wait for a while in the foyer and remember dropping him off and picking him up in the midst of the other parents and brown and black nannies. More eyeballing. If you're brown and in a place you're not expected to be, you'd better have public documented credentials regarding why you can be there.

“May I help you?”

“I'm here to see Jean Ray.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No, I'm sorry, I don't.”

She picks up her phone and dials the extension.

“What's this about?”

“Tuition.”

As soon as I say it, I become conscious of my filth. It does matter, if not to her, then to me. She looks me over, trying and failing to be covert. Perhaps the rumpled, addled look is the one to sport here. Me in a suit, me in something clean and casual might not be believable. I'd look like a con or, worse still, a fool. Better to be a bum who's trying. I speak again.

“Tuition for my sons.”

“Your sons are enrolled for September?”

“Yes.”

“What grades?”

“First and preschool—threes.” She keeps holding the receiver, looking me over as though she needs more information. “Am I in the right place?”