Odyssey (27 page)

Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Booker T. Washington, LeRoi Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, and a hundred other black literary lights filled out the library. Sovereign had rarely, if ever, asked his father about these books. But now, in the displaced San Diego library, he realized that his entire life had been governed by the content and impact of books that he’d never read.

“No, baby,” Winifred said. “I mean, I guess that was my intention at first, but after a while I just started to love ’em.”

“What?”

“The hogs. Clyde, Mr. North Hampton, and Earl. They rely on me even though I had at one time planned to kill ’em.”

“Are you all right, Mama?”

“Eddie says that he wants to take you down South America. I think you should go with him.”

“What about you?” Sovereign asked.

“It’s too hot down there for me,” she said, casting a casual gaze at the window. “And Spanish makes my head hurt. I mean, it’s a beautiful language but I don’t know it.”

“Portuguese.”

“What?”

“That’s what they speak in Brazil.”

“You’re young enough that you could learn, baby.”

“What do you think about Eagle and Dad?”

“
Father
is just a word, baby. We all related when you come right down to it—the sharks and dogwoods, snails and men.”

“And sea anemone,” Sovereign the Second uttered.

“Say what?”

“It’s an animal that acts like a plant,” he said. “It anchors itself to a rock or crevice and then waits for food to come by.”

Winifred pried her gaze from whatever she’d seen outside. Her eyes were pale brown, maybe, Sovereign thought, a little occluded. But they saw him well enough.

“The only problem is the air,” she said after the long, noncompetitive test of wills.

“What about it?”

“It’s heavy with moisture. Solar can’t be here because the air is wrong. But I can still remember him. Sometimes I forget but then I’ll be standing in one a’ his old rooms and it hits me. I see him passin’ by a door or hear him clearing his throat somewhere in the house. That’s always a little second of happiness for me. That’s how I am—jumpin’ from one little spot of happiness to the other and raisin’ my hogs.”

“It’s time to go, JJ.”

Drum-Eddie was standing at the door to Solar’s displaced den.

“Oh,” Winifred said.

“Yes, it is,” Sovereign said.

He leaned over to kiss his mother. She pulled away at first and then stayed in place long enough for her son to plant an awkward kiss along her jawline.

She put a hand on his knee and said, “You’ll come back to see me now and then, won’t you, son?”

“Yes, Mama. I just gotta get this court thing settled.”

“Do what Eddie tells you, baby. He knows about the law.”

Zenith was waiting outside the front door. She carried a brown paper bag and a nine-by-twelve-inch folder of black leather. Drum-Eddie and his brother approached their older sister. Behind her was Theodore, standing at the side of his teal Caddy.

“Mom made you some pork sandwiches and banana bread,” she said, handing the bag to Drum. “And I put together this little album of pictures, Sovy. It’s the boys mostly—over the years, growing up.”

She handed the folder to Sovereign and moved forward, toward the front door. In this way she handed him the book and went past at the same time, not giving him a chance to even thank her.

She was going into the house as he was turning.

Sovereign searched for the words to stop his sister, the incantation to make her into someone who might someday love him. But the spell eluded him.

“Z got a whole lotta problems, JJ. It ain’t you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Excuse me, sirs,” Theodore said, “but if we want to make your flight we will have to go.”

In the backseat Sovereign stared out the windows until the little town his mother had colonized was out of sight. He settled back down, looking at his hands in his lap.

Seeing his hands was part of the recurring revelation of sight. It was a touchstone of awareness of the blessing (yes, he thought, the blessing) of the magic of vision. This moment of grace—when it happened, sporadically after he’d tried to murder Lemuel Johnson—usually opened a door to some other miracle or near-miracle.

At that moment it was his mother and her replication of a life with a man who’d died thousands of miles away. Through Winifred he felt a sense of history that changed with the moments and years that passed. This history, Sovereign felt while gazing at the creases in his pinkish-brown palms, was like the ocean: undeniable and yet never the same.

“You can’t take it personally,” Drum-Eddie said, breaking into the reverie.

“What?”

Sovereign looked up at his brother then. He noticed that even though Eddie wore an elegant lightweight tan suit and a dark blue linen shirt, his belt was two lengths of rough hemp rope knotted together at the front.

“I don’t know what it’s like for other families, Jimmy J, but we, all of us James kids, got one thing in common.”

“What’s that?”

“Kinda like that movie I liked so much when I was a kid.”

“
The Wizard of Oz
?”

“That’s it. Here you got a scarecrow, robot man, and a lion, and all of ’em wantin’ sumpin’ they ain’t got. Every one of ’em all magic and shit but they still out there searchin’ for stuff don’t mean a thing.”

“What’s Z missing?”

“Love.”

“You mean she doesn’t know how?”

“That might be true, but no, that’s not what she after. Z come an’ see Mama six times a year, but all Mama want is to see you and me—and Pops too, even though he’s dead. Mama think Z’s there for the men. And Daddy took Zenith for granted. Just ’cause she did everything he said, he didn’t really seem to care about her.”

“But she has her own family.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed. “Maybe it’s different there, but when she comes here
everything looks the same.”

“And me? What am I missing?”

“You? That’s easy. You always lookin’ for that perfect spin. You know, like when someone skim rocks on the water and wanna make that flat stone jump really far and then bounce ten or twelve times—that’s what you always been after. Like when you would only say a few words instead of a whole sentence. You did that, on and off, for six months. It was like you was lookin’ for the one word that would say everything. And because you don’t have that one answer it’s like you don’t have anything.”

“And you, Eddie?” Sovereign asked. “You don’t seem to be missing a thing.”

“I’m the worst one, Sovy—the worst. I don’t have an anchor, man. I was born so free that I could leave my family behind on a whim. I robbed that bank with those two fools and thirty-six hours later I was laid up with a
mamacita
learnin’ Spanish and drinkin’ mescal. I left my whole country behind and didn’t even give it a second thought.

“No, Sovy, you, me, and Z been on that Yellow Brick Road for our whole lives—singin’ and dancin’ and worried ’bout that Wicked Witch.”

“But you and Z got families, man. You got kids.”

“You somebody’s kid, JJ. You got a brother and sister and a mother that you don’t never see.”

Sovereign looked out the front window, past the elderly chauffeur. He wondered if maybe all that had gone wrong in his life wasn’t his fault—not exactly. He wondered if the decisions he’d made were just extensions of paths laid out well before he was born. Maybe there was some gene from the father of his father, the man whom no one knew. Maybe it was the death of his grandmother delivering Solar to an impotent father.

But all of that had changed with his blindness. The loss of sight had erased the world and now what he saw was not the same. Blindness had reclaimed his family, as much as possible. Blindness had brought love and passion into his life.

“You grinnin’, Jimmy J,” Drum-Eddie said.

“I guess even the psyche has an immune system,” Sovereign replied.

They drove for hours, finally reaching the airport at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Sovereign paid for their tickets with a debit card and they went to the gate to wait for the plane to LaGuardia.

Somewhere in the middle of the drive the brothers went silent. They sat next to each other, enjoying a physical closeness they hadn’t known since their teens. At the airport they maintained this fraternal quiet.

Eddie found a Spanish-language newspaper on an empty chair and Sovereign perused the folder that Zenith had given him. Thomas Thomas was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Berliner whom Zenith had met at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The boys, Gerhard and Zeus, were a year apart and as different from each other as two brothers could be—at least physically. One was tall and copper colored while the other, Zeus, was short, the hue of French roast coffee. There
were eighty-one photos of the boys, separate and together, mostly laughing, in places all over the world. Often their father was standing with them, looking proud in some distant way.

There was only one photograph of Zenith. In it she was sitting with Zeus on her lap. The boy was maybe eight and quite drowsy. Zenith was looking off into space—distracted, tired. You got the feeling that if she saw the camera she would have turned away or stopped the picture from being taken.

Sovereign wondered why she included this snapshot in the collection. Then he realized that the sheet with the picture of Zenith had five photos affixed to it—all the other sheets had four. He wondered if Tom Tom, or maybe one of the boys, had secretly inserted this picture to give Sovereign a glimpse of his sister’s life.

The more he thought about the uniquely placed photo, the more it seemed as if his suspicion was right. It was Zenith’s intention to show her life without exposing herself, but the flesh and blood behind the images betrayed her, showing her life for what it was—the product of a melancholy kind of love.

Feeling satisfied with his prognosis, Sovereign smiled. At the same moment Drum-Eddie’s phone made the cry of an amplified whale song.

“Hello?” Eddie said into the tiny cell. “Yeah, yeah … Sure thing … Uh-huh … Bye now.”

“Who was that?”

“Bureaucrat.”

“What does that mean?”

“When’s the plane due in?” Eddie replied.

“Not for another hour.”

“I’m’a go to the toilet. I’ll be right back.”