Odyssey (16 page)

“No. I guess not.”

“If a man leaves his wife and she finds another man, she can’t blame herself if her first husband gets mad, can she?”

“Not if he the one that left.”

“Then it’s not your fault that Lemuel can’t think right when it’s time for him to do so.”

“But I brought him up there.”

“Yes … and that was wrong, but you didn’t expect him to attack me, or for me to be there at all—did you?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll forget about it and look to the future.”

“But I let him take one a’ your watches and I was gonna … fuck him up in your bed.”

“I don’t care about any of that, Miss Loam. I can see again and this time it was because of your shouting to save me. I saw you reaching out to pull Lemuel back. I saw the sun coming in.…”

In the following lull in the conversation Sovereign noticed a small beetle walking along the windowsill. It was a seasonal wood beetle that lived in the floors of the apartment building. He usually crushed these bugs whenever he saw them, but this time, a self-ordained deity, he just watched in a minor stupor of amazement.

He asked if Toni’s mother was okay and she told a long and convoluted story, at the end of which her mother ended up in East St. Louis for a few weeks visiting Auntie G’s sister.

“Why you do that to Lemuel?” she asked in his ear.

The bug moved along like a rude cottage, given life and legs, that was now lumbering away from a lifelong servitude to civilization.

“I don’t know,” Sovereign James said.

“You got to know. You ran after him. You chased him down and beat him like a dog.”

Sovereign tried to remember the fight, but everything that happened after he left the apartment was hazy. There was a roar in his ears and a damnable squeaking in the distance. There was a heart beating and the back of somebody he was trying to catch up with but never could.

“I can only say that I probably hated him, but I can’t remember feeling or doing anything.”

“But you almost killed him,” she insisted. “You put him in a coma.”

Sovereign could tell that she was hurt. He wanted to explain but could not. He wanted to make her feel better the way he wished someone had done for him when Eagle had died.

Sovereign now had a full erection.

“He made me mad,” the employment officer said.

“What?”

“He made me mad,” Sovereign said again, voicing an emotion that he could not remember but that he was certain of. “How dare he come into my house and steal from me and expect to have sex in my bed with a woman that I …”

“That you what?”

“A woman under my protection.”

“What does that mean?”

Sovereign took the erection in his left hand.

“I’m not sure,” he lied. “I feel very close to you, and when I saw him push you I got angry.”

“Like you were jealous?” Toni Loam asked in a voice that was new to Sovereign.

He squeezed the hard prick and winced.

“You saved me,” he said instead of really answering. “You … you were the only face that I saw in three months.”

“And so, like, you had a crush on me or sumpin’?”

Blindness, Sovereign thought, was a boon if it didn’t last forever. He could see through a finely developed mind’s eye that Toni’s words offered a door. He
couldn’t tell if this portal was an entrance or exit. He dawdled in front of this gateway, feeling … feeling … free.

“Yes,” he said at last.

“Yes, you had a crush on me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What?”

“I said yes.”

“Say it,” she said, and Sovereign had the feeling that the woman he spoke to had transformed in an instant like a larva into something beautiful, winged, and maybe deadly.

“I love you,” he said, not considering the words.

“What? I thought you said you had a crush on me.”

“That’s what you said. You said it, not me.”

The beetle was gone. The room down below, where the woman had been running, was empty, as was the kitchen where the husband and children had eaten and talked. The man in the baby-blue suit was probably at work by now, and the fire that the sirens sang for was no doubt extinguished.

“You love me?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Did you mean it?”

“I think so.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I’m in my fiftieth year and you’re in your twenty-second. Because I was blind and stupid and because I’ve always been alone in one room or another. Because you’re young and beautiful and I’m an old toad.”

“I’m not beautiful,” she said, and he laughed. “Why you laughin’?”

“Because I am a fool and there’s nothing I can do about it. Or … better still—I am a fool and I haven’t been able to do anything about it until I jumped on your boyfriend, and I don’t even remember doing that.”

“And you did it because you love me?”

“I’m not jealous,” he assured her. “It’s just that I haven’t been able to feel much for so long, and now that I have you, or had you, in my life I feel like I can go outside.”

“I don’t know what that means, Mr. James.”

“It’s like I was blind before I was blind, and losing my sight brought me ’round to a place that I had never seen even though I was sighted,” he said, realizing that his comprehension was mostly gibberish.

“But what’s that got to do with Lemuel and you sayin’ that you love me?”

“Everything for me has always been a secret,” he said, feeling that these words were somehow bedrock. “My father’s father couldn’t make a woman pregnant but his wife had my father anyway. I never told anybody that. The people who I employ are part of a one-man conspiracy to take over the white business world one hire at a time. I want to be with a woman and so I give her a job taking me around just so I can sit next to her in a movie theater and listen to her laugh.

“The only straightforward thing I’ve done in a very long time is beat on Lemuel. Even though I don’t remember it, that came from the heart.”

“Don’t you feel guilty?”

“I am guilty,” he said, “so I don’t have to feel anything at all.”

“You want me to come ovah there, Mr. James?”

“More than anything I ever wanted, Miss Loam.”

The phone rang late that night. Toni Loam was half out of the covers, her butt partly revealed. The room smelled of sex, and Sovereign felt the stirrings of an erection as he looked down on the young woman’s strong right leg.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hail King James,” a man’s voice intoned. There was the hint of an unidentifiable accent in the otherwise American voice.

“Eddie?”

“They been callin’ me Jinx for the last twenty-five years or so.”

Toni was sound asleep. The digital alarm clock next to the bed read four-oh-seven. There were four used condoms under the green glow of the clock, strewn on the night table. Sovereign got up with the cordless phone and walked out of the bedroom to the high counter that separated the living room from the open kitchen. All across Lower Manhattan electric lights glimmered and winked from ten thousand office windows set in a hundred and more skyscrapers. The New Jersey skyline rivaled Manhattan’s.

“Eddie?” he said again.

“Fit as a fiddle and tight as a drum.” It was something their father used to say when he wasn’t disciplining the boy.

“How’d you get my number?”

“I call Mama once a year,” he said. “That anniversary happened to be yesterday, and she said that Lurlene Twyst said that you went blind.”

“It was a psychological condition. I got better.”

“That’s good. I thought I might have to pony up for a Seein’ Eye dog. You know, the kind that carry a keg of brandy ’round their necks.”

“You talk to Mama every year?”

“Ever since Daddy died.”

“FBI still after you?”

“Statute of limitations is up on that.”

“Where are you, Eddie?”

“You okay, Jimmy James?” Drum had half a dozen nicknames for his brother.

“A guy attacked me and I got mad. I beat him pretty bad … at least, that’s what they tell me.”

“Wow, Jimmy J, you gonna be a bigger gangster than me.”

“You didn’t say where you were, Eddie.”

“Down around São Paulo, man. Down around there.”

“Brazil?”

“Portuguese and Carnival.”

“So Mom has known where you were all this time?”

“I didn’t want her to worry more than she had to after Pops died, and I wanted
to know if she needed anything.”

“She sure kept your secret. Does Zenith know?”

“She been talkin’ to Mama, man.”

During the long span of silence Sovereign studied the muted colors in the dim rooms: reluctant blues, hesitant red, and yellow remembering light gray in its sleep.

“You need any help, JJ?”

“I’d like to see you, Drum.”

“Come on down. I promise if you get here I will show you the best time you ever had.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“No wife and kids, huh?”

“No … not yet anyway. You?”

“Consuelo’s my bride. Pedro, Sistene, and Sovereign the kids.”

“Oh.”

“Catch you later, brother. Don’t give ’em an inch and they can’t drag you down.”

The phone disengaged but Sovereign stood there with the receiver pressed to his ear, the caress almost unconscious. He had missed his brother from the day he’d gone.

“Sovereign?”

Her standing there next to him was almost a crime; that was the first thought he had seeing the naked girl. She kissed his lower lip and bit it lightly. He touched her shoulder and she bent her head to caress the sore knuckles.

“Who was that?”

“My brother.”

“What he want?”

“He heard that I was blind and was worried.”

She took his hand in hers.

“I never knew you liked me that much,” she said.

“Maybe I didn’t either.”

“Why didn’t you say sumpin’?”

“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know that I wanted to say anything.”

“You gettin’ hard again.”

“Maybe we should calm down a little,” Sovereign said, feeling that he was both pleading and lying in the same statement.

“Is he comin’ ovah?”

“Who?”

“Your brother.”

“Let’s go to bed.”

Lounging on her back in the bed, Toni had her head on his thigh.

“I thought you said that your brother robbed a bank and disappeared thirty years ago.”

The sun was a crack of silver and scarlet at the far end of the horizon. Sovereign once more had a full erection, due partly to Toni Loam running her thumb up one side and down the other. The motion was an idle one and this excited the older man all the more.

“That’s right.”

“How he even know your number?”

“Drum-Eddie can find anything he sets his mind to,” Sovereign said, experiencing jealousy and desire, despair and satisfaction.

“That’s a funny name.”

“He called me out of the blue. For all I knew he was dead.… No, that’s not true. I never really thought he was dead.”

“Are you going to see him?”

“I shouldn’t be seeing you,” Sovereign said.

“Why not? You like me, right?”

“Our ages, our needs make us different enough. Too much.”

“Felt to me that you needed exactly what I did,” she said. “Feels like it right now.”

“Then there’s Lemuel.”

She moved her thumb away.

“If the court sees us as lovers they’ll believe we set him up,” Sovereign added.

“But we didn’t, and they gonna have to believe that.”

“Just because we say it’s true doesn’t mean that they will believe us,” Sovereign said, thinking that the way Drum-Eddie and Toni spoke was similar.

“That don’t mattah … not if you really love me.”

“How can we know something like that, Toni? I mean, I only said those words on the phone yesterday.”

“I always liked you,” she said. “I just thought that you was too fancy and the only reason you had me around was to keep you company until you could see again.”

“You thought that I’d regain my sight?”

“You wasn’t evah blind, not really. I mean, if a bird went by the windah or a fly flew past you’d always flinch. You didn’t seem to know it but you did. It’s just that you didn’t want to see anything.”