Man Gone Down (38 page)

“No allies?”

“Well you can count me in, for whatever that's worth.”

“I will.”

“I will.”
He mocks. “G'wan claat! How goes the rest of the crew?”

“Gav's back in.”

He winces, as though the news physically hurts him.

“That boy never met a fight he didn't want. By the way, that was Gladys—yesterday.” He jerks his head back as though she's behind him. He shoots the imagined woman down with a sharp, quick stare. “She ain't mine”—he leans in as though this is a secret he needs to keep from her. “I'm just looking out for her, till she gets on her feet.” He cracks his knuckles. “Where'd you get that suit you were wearing?”

“Had it awhile.”

“You a banker now, too?”

“No.”

He shakes his head again, closes his eyes, frustrated, as though he's trying to remember something he had to tell me. “Looking at you helps me remember. Sometimes that's not so good, you know.” He springs forward, catching me with that old quickness, and hugs me. He rocks us back and forth. I smell sweat and pharmaceuticals—rubbing alcohol. He lets me go.

“What's up, man?” I sigh.

He smiles, gently puts a hand on my shoulder. “Hey baby, gut me then haruspicate: Extrapolate from my viscera.” He bends, covers his mouth, and laughs to himself. He straightens but still smiles. “I can tell you what's going to happen. I just can't tell you how. I don't know. Not a living ass can. Hell, the dead can't probably either. I've been outside a long time now—way outside—but when I see you, I think of things I saw when I was in. I think it might be worse, being in, looking for something, seeing all the faces, the places that you're locked out of, while they demand that you behave like they're going to let you in. But I praise my psychophar-macologist: I haven't spun completely out. I take my pills, try not to bust anyone in the head, and wait for my inheritance of the earth. Now that's a plan. Hope to see you there.”

“What about now?”

“What about now?”

“What are you going to do?”

“What, you got a plan? You want to raise an army and take the capital—shit—nothing but mercenaries out there anyway. And how you gonna trust them?” He looks at his wrist, but he doesn't have a watch. He lowers his arm, looks down, and goes back to the Thorazine shuffle. For a moment I wish I had the switch to shut him off. He looks up and jumps back, breaking the prescribed pattern. I can see the fight in him, trying to make his movements fluid, resisting being locked into a new box step.

He tries to shake his head, the effort to keep it slow requires him to turn his body in tandem as if it were all one piece. He whispers.

“I gotta go.”

I nod. We both exhale together. He spreads his arms, palms up, and waves them slowly, up and down.

“This collective consciousness ain't big enough for the two of us—remember?” He stops his arms in midair. “That's your fight—so I'm off.” He turns, wades into the street, and starts across.

“Donovan?”

He cuts me off—a hand raised into the air. He doesn't turn, so I can't see his mouth move but it sounds like his voice.

“Not fare well, but fare forward.”

And he's off into the night.

Marco's asleep on the couch again—having tried again and failed to make it to the end of
Cool Hand Luke.
He rouses at my presence and looks up blankly from the depths. I leave him alone, go upstairs, sit on the bed, and stare at a blank sheet of paper.

“Hey.” He's snuck up on me again.

“How are you?”

“Wiped. Hey, I have a question.” He lets it hang out there for a while, but not long enough for me to begin asking myself what it is. “Are you around on Friday?”

“I'm not sure. Why?”

“Are those your clubs in the basement?”

“Yeah.”

“Feel like playing?”

“I can't.”

“Come on. Take a day off.”

“I can't.” I must have bent the last refusal—blue. He gets it. He loses the playfulness, puts on a face I haven't seen before.

“You're pretty good.”

I shrug.

“Listen, it might be worth taking a day off for this.” This time he lets it hang long enough for me to grab.

“I can't.”

“Friday morning. First thing. Think about it.”

Marco leaves. Thomas bloops, demanding a song I can't give him. It's quiet time in the house of Andolini, time for all good lawyers to sleep. Tomorrow I will scrape more paint and row that much closer to failure. Donovan once said that our action is our choice, our fate made by our own hands.
I choose not to be me.
I choose not to be afflicted,
not to bear witness. Not to be wed to notions of transcendence—
as if they were real.
I choose not to be a postmodern loser—a fool. Real. I choose to be real, whole and solid—deaf to the wail of the haunt, mute for all future incantation. Dead to the wind. I call:

“Seawrack and seatangle.”

But I am not transformed.

I seen the morning light
I seen the morning light
It's not because I'm an early riser
I didn't go to sleep last night

I am desperate for all the wrong reasons. It occurs to me now, sitting on the bed in the dim room with a legal pad on my lap, that this has always been so. Claire thinks I'm desperate to receive a six-figure book deal. Over the years she's woken up late at night and found me churning out pages and she's smiled. Even C has been afflicted by the notion that a finished manuscript means a contract and a contract means a new silver minivan. So my words, in a sense, are written to that automobile, calling for it to show itself to me.

I don't remember all of my desperations: desperate to publish before this author died; desperate to record before that singer passed—either to have them validate me or for me to tell them that they were wrong. I don't know when everything got so turned around. I once was desperate to have writing do things, to contain transformative powers, but writing has never done anything for me. It has never been cathartic or therapeutic. It names things, locates them, or at least when I'm writing, I can pretend to be involved in some kind of management of my netherworlds. I start with a feeling, perhaps even more substantial—an image attached to that feeling. I write something, even finish. Sometimes I think it is good. But the feeling is still there, unchanged, but now with a name and a reason for being, legitimized and calling for a permanent place in me. I can't do this. I am desperate
because I know rage is still rage, sorrow still sorrow, and the only actions that can give them the voice each demands is to destroy and to wail. I am desperate because I write to the minivan and all that lies between it and me. I push a pen across a page, gesturing at symbol, metaphor—pasting a collage of willfully mute and deaf images beside each other within some self-conscious vehicle that masquerades as story. But I get sidetracked in the production, ambushed in my own head. I trick myself for a moment, believe the words arranged just so will metamorphose into a balm. Part of me doesn't believe. It tries to conceive the minds of unknown agents, faceless editors, and book review consumers. But part of me goes with it, chasing the words that follow the image as it moves up like braiding smoke offerings of ritualistic purification. It will never sell. I scribble a line across the page beneath the last jumble of words to signal I am done.

When I leave, I wear the grim face—the face of a man who wants to get this done, who'll brook no nonsense, not from conductors, commuters, or silly leaves that have fallen too early and lie drowning in gutter pools. It seems as though August is waging a war against the oncoming season. Since it can't be hot, it rains. Not the great near-tropical cloudbursts. This is constant, cold, and unspectacular. I leave earlier this morning and take the A-train—the brown people's train—to Canal Street and walk north from there, but I wait around the corner from the entrance until someone from the crew shows up. I want a cigarette for the waiting. They are good for marking time. They are good when you are enraged; you can drag hard on them and throw them into the street—quickly light another.

Chris approaches from the west. He's wearing headphones, nodding to some private beat. He nears me, as though he doesn't see, then a few strides away, without breaking step he looks up.

“S'up, dude?”

He walks past me. I turn and follow. He unlocks the door, calls for the elevator. It clangs open. We get in. Chris is handsome, but
he's lost his boyishness, as though since I saw him last he witnessed something that has aged him internally, some premonition—twenty years down the road and still banging nails. He'd fancied himself a poet, now it looks as though he won't ever write again—perhaps even forgot that he once had.

We get upstairs. He utters his obligatory curse to the darkness, heads for the circuit breaker. After he turns the lights on he goes to his sill and produces his breakfast.

The others straggle in, as distant with me as they were yesterday. I wait for the others to eat and drink and change before I start gathering my things. I roll the scaffold to where I left off. KC drifts by.

Chris reenters the room and issues a proclamation.

“Feeney and Johnny are gonna be here later so keep your shit together 'cause I don't want to hear none of their shit. All right?”

The crew collectively moans. Chris goes to his spot.

KC glides up to me quietly like he has a secret.

“Hey, mon, na more dat fuckin' stuff.”

“Excuse me?”

“The smell, man—the smell. There ain't enough air in here for that.” He points at the metal. “Use the sandpaper like I showed you, the sandpaper and the oil. It's faster anyway.”

“Actually, KC, I think stripping is quicker.”

“Yeah, but it give me a headache. Dat shit rot yer brains, too. Don't you need your brains?”

“Apparently not.”

“You still funny, mon. Yer still funny.”

“I am?”

“Yeah, mon. Dat's why I was glad ta hear you comin' back. Not for you—'cause when you gotta leave ya gotta leave and you probably didn't want ta come back. But it's good for me.”

“How's that?”

“Look at these motherfuckers here, mon. They don't know nothing.”

I get up on the Baker with sandpaper and oil, in part for KC, in part for me. I don't know what my next task will be—it could be
worse, more tedious—the outside of the windows perhaps. This job isn't about productivity, it's about being here, gesturing at competence and effort. There really isn't any incentive to be good.

The pace of work seems to pick up just before break. Somehow the crew has sensed it. Nancyboy comes in with a big ex-marine-looking lug in tow. I suppose this is Feeney. They stop in the middle of the room and don't pay me any mind. I pretend to work and watch them from the scaffold. He's ruddy faced and sports a nose that looks like part of it might have gotten lopped off awhile back. His eyes are pleasant, though, and even though he only seems to grunt short answers back at Johnny, they twinkle each time.

Nancyboy waves at the entire space as though he's grandly concluding something. He's ready to go, but Feeney lingers around the Baker. He steps forward, picks at the clean metal, rubs his fingers, and seems satisfied. I suppose I should stop and wait for his approval, some sort of wink or nod, but anyone who's partnered with Johnny probably doesn't know what he's doing. I can tell that my continuing to sand annoys him, but he slaps Johnny on the arm and points to the back.

“Lemme see the kitchen.”

They walk off. I sneak a look at KC. He's been watching it all. He shoots me a quick grin and starts shaking his head to signify that he thinks I'm crazy.

The saw cuts out and frames Feeney's voice in the near darkness.

“Who's the big nig on the Baker?”

It's not anything he wanted anyone to hear, but now it's out there, for all of us, undeniable what he's asked and undeniable who he asks after. Johnny gestures to Chris, spinning his index fingers in the air. Chris bellows out, “That's break!”

No one responds immediately. They drift around their stations as though in a time warp. Feeney begins to move away from everyone else, but then he thinks better of it and steps forward with energy. He twists his boots in the sawdust and gypsum and watches the little cloud form, rise, and dissipate. He lifts his head suddenly and brightly, smiling broadly as though he's just thought of something wonderfully funny.
He shakes it, mumbles something to himself. Chris crosses in front of him on his way to the bathroom. The two other carpenters do, too, though without his directness. KC and Bing Bing wait by the doorway, alternating glares between Feeney, Johnny, and myself.

I climb down and walk toward the bathroom. KC and Bing Bing start on a course to intercept me before I get there like they're about to do a hit. Bing Bing takes me by the elbow. He doesn't say anything, but he squeezes it, imploring me to stop. I do and turn to him. He doesn't meet my face. He looks past me, over to where Feeney was standing. He sucks his teeth and shakes his head once violently.

“G'wan!”

He lets go my elbow and uses that hand to gesture to where he's looking. KC, grave faced, walks to us slowly. He looks down shaking his head but comes up smiling. Then it disappears. He goes rigid in his stance.

“You all right wit dat, mon?”

“With what?”

“Boy, don g'wan play dumb wit me. You g'wan let that go?”

“What would you have me do?”

“Mon, if I was a big boy like you, I wouldn't fear no man. No man couldn't say nothing to me.”

Both of their faces are dark and hot. KC leans into me.

“What you g'wan do—huh?”