Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (23 page)

“Tell me. Why am I a funny boy? What's funny about me?” She was silent. I said, “Maybe you better tell me later.”

Then—we fooled around. I worked with my lips and my tongue and my fingers, she wasn't working much yet, but she would; we fooled around. I can't say what was driving me. Perhaps I had to know—to know—
if
my body could be despised, how
much
it could be despised; perhaps I had to know how much was demanded of my body to make the shameful sentence valid; or to invalidate the sentence. I got her nearly naked on that sofa, shoes and stockings off, dress half on, half off, panties and bra on the floor. I was striding through a meadow, and it certainly felt like mine. She shook and whimpered and caressed me and I did not recognize her anymore. I wondered if she recognized me, if we mattered now at all to each other. A terrible bafflement began in me. The bafflement, causing a drop in my ferocity, raised the level of my need. I did not want to watch her anymore, I was afraid of what I would see; I was afraid of what I had wanted, and still wanted, to see. I did not want to watch myself anymore either. I wanted to be held and cleansed and emptied. I stroked her face and her body, I felt lost and I wanted to cry. And though she was still now, and I was in the dark, our touch had more meaning—at least,
our touch was more friendly. Then I opened my eyes and looked at her, her clothes half off, and all the white flesh waiting, and I wondered if she, while I had been trampling through a meadow, had been crawling through a jungle, dreading the hot breath and awaiting the great stroke of King Kong. She was nearly naked, but I was still dressed. I pulled my shirt over my head. She opened her eyes.

“Let's take off these clothes,” I said, “and go to bed—like civilized people.”

She smiled, “
Are
we civilized?”

“Hell, no. But come on and take me to your big brass bed.” I watched her. “And give me some head.”

She struggled up on one elbow. “Help me get this silly dress off.”

I undid some clips and buttons and she stood up and stepped out of her dress. Then she looked at me, quite helplessly, with a smile. I took her hand and led her to the bedroom. She pulled down the covers. I took off my jeans. She said, “Just a moment—I'll be right back.” I pulled her into my arms and kissed her. She pressed against me, then she pulled away. “Just a minute,” she said, pleading, and she went into the john. I fell into bed and lay on my back, frightened and evil, patiently waiting, immense and heavy and curdled with love.

I woke up suddenly, out of a sleep like drowning. In my sleep, I had traveled back to Harlem, and I was curled up against Caleb, in our narrow bed. Caleb's chest was hot and heavy, I was soaking with his sweat and choking with his odor. Our mother's voice rang over us like the thunder of a church bell:
Boy, do you know what
time it is?
I struggled against Caleb's weight. I turned and struggled, turned and struggled. I woke up.

I could not have been sleeping long, for there was no light in the sky. Madeleine's head was on my chest. She snored very lightly, and drooled a little bit. Her weight was intolerable, and I hated it. I was terribly, terribly afraid. I knew that something awful was going to happen. And there was nothing I could do and there was no place to run. Here I was, in this white cunt's bed; here I was, ready for the slaughter; here I was, I, Judas, with a stiffening prick and a windy heart, lost, doomed, terrified, alone. The air whispered, or I whispered, my brother's name. But nothing, now, forever, could rescue my brother, or me.

I moved from beneath Madeleine's weight as gently as I could, and went into the bathroom and took a piss, and then stepped under the shower. I turned on the water as hard as I could. The needles of the water hit me like Saint Sebastian's arrows. I wrapped myself up in one of Madeleine's enormous towels, found a cigarette and lit it, and recovered my stale drink and sat down before the kitchen window. Leo. You are more than nineteen years old. What the fuck do you think you're doing, with your
life?

I listened to the river; but I saw my mother's face. I sipped my drink. My abandoned mother. My abandoned father. Their lost sons. This was Saturday night. They would be asleep now on the top floor of the tenement, in their bedroom, which was their only room. The rest of their apartment was rented out. The room which would have been Caleb's was occupied by a junkie and his girl-friend. The room which would have been mine was filled with all that was left of an old elevator operator, he, too,
abandoned by all his kith and kin. They all shared the kitchen and the bathroom and the living room—and that was all there was to the apartment, which was like Miss Mildred's apartment, except that it was smaller. We moved there while Caleb was away. Caleb had never lived there; and I did not live there long.

My father would have been drunk, but quietly drunk; his rages were ended; he lived only to sleep. His lips were narrower, his face was thinner, the big eyes were dulled with the heat of his life, but all the fire was gone. My father was a porter in the garment center. My mother spent all day sewing in the same neighborhood, but not for the same firm. In any case, their hours were different. My mother left work before my father did, and hurried home to cook for him. To do this, she had, first, every day, to conquer the filth of the kitchen—for a kitchen used by strangers is always filthy—and do what she could to disguise the disorder of the other rooms. She was always weary, and her hair was almost always knotted on the top of her head. But, sometimes, on Saturday nights, she accompanied my father to a bar in the neighborhood and they laughed and gossiped with the people there. This was to prevent my father from becoming melancholy mad: he drowned in his sorrow when he drank alone. And when she went out with him, she always took care to look her best, and she wore her dangling earrings. But she was wondering, as he was wondering, Lord, where can my children be tonight? They were wondering how it had happened that their lives had come to a full stop so soon. They were close to death, and yet it was as though they had never lived.

“It would have been
better
if you'd never lived,” said Caleb, “because then I wouldn't be here, neither. I didn't
want this life, this hell, this
hell!
Why did you give it to me?”

He was just a little past twenty-one. I was just a little past fourteen. He had been home a week. We were all standing in the kitchen; and Caleb was very drunk. He and our father had got drunk together. But our father was not drunk now. We had all been, like a family, to a Saturday night function at the Renaissance, on Seventh Avenue. And Caleb and our father had spent more and more time at the bar, talking together. Caleb had begun to weep. And then we left.

He was thinner, much thinner, but harder and tougher. He was beautiful, with a very dangerous, cruel, and ruthless beauty. He had been home a week, but he and I had found it hard to talk—he did not want to tell me what his time away had been like. But I knew what it had been like from the way he flinched whenever my breath touched the open wound, from the distance between us, as though he were saying,
Don't come near me. I've got the plague.

“Caleb,” said our mother—she was still in her green evening gown; her earrings caught the light; there were combs in her splendid hair—“don't try to hurt your father. We did the best we could. We love you.”

“We didn't ask to come here, neither,” our father said.

“We hoped it would be better,” said our mother, “for you, than it was for us.”

“You were wrong,” said Caleb. “It's worse.” But then he relented; he had to relent; tears stood in his eyes. “I wasn't trying to hurt my father.” He looked down. “I love my father.”

“Then tell him so,” said our mother.

Caleb looked at our father. “I'm telling you so,” he said.

“Don't you love your mother, too?” she asked, smiling.

“Yes. I love my mother.”

“And your brother?”

He looked at me and his face changed. He smiled again, and he pulled me to him. “Yes. Oh, yes. I love my brother.” Then: “But I haven't been able to help him much.”

“I don't mind,” I said. “I'll love you all my life. And I'll help
you.
I swear it. You'll see.”

“Old man,” said Caleb, holding me by the neck, “let's have a drink—a loving cup.” He looked at our mother. “All right?” Then he looked down at me. “Give us a kiss,” he said.

I kissed him.

“That's better,” said our mother. “You all sit down and I'll pour the drinks.”

And she glittered, jangled, swept, out of the room. Caleb, our father, and I uneasily sat down. Caleb put his hand on my neck again. He said, “Daddy, I know it's not your fault. But you don't know what they do to you, baby, once they got you.”

“Man,” said our father, “they doing it to me.”

Caleb looked down at me. “And they doing it to little Leo. Ain't that the truth, Leo?” He stared at me. He turned away. He took his hand away. “Don't tell me. I know.”

“They're not,” I said, “doing anything to me that I can't take. So, don't worry about me.” Then I said, “I hate them. I hate them. I hate them.”

“Yeah,” said Caleb wearily, “they're doing it to you,
all right.” Then I was sorry I had spoken. But what I had said was true; and, anyway, whether or not I had said it, Caleb and my father already knew it. They saw, as I could not, of course, what time had done to me. Whatever they had wanted for me was now locked in the country of dreams. It was now never going to happen. No one knew what was going to happen, and no one could control it. In a way, it can be said that I was the ruin of all their hopes. They had not been able to save me—my life would be like theirs. The streets had claimed me because my challenges were there, and everything now depended on what I could learn in the school which was to prepare me for my life. I was very nearly lost because my elders, through no fault of their own, had betrayed me. Perhaps I loved my father, but I did not want to live his life. I did not want to become like him, he was the living example of defeat. He could not correct me. None of my elders could correct me because I was appalled by their lives. I was old enough to understand how their lives had happened, but rage and pity are not love, and the determination to outwit one's situation means that one has no models, only object lessons. I was no longer Caleb's little brother: I was part of Caleb's heavy load. And this was because he realized that he had become a part of mine, forever.

For even Caleb had become, for me, an object lesson. Furtively, I watched him. Covertly, against my will, God knows, I judged him. My brother. My brother. Big, black, beautiful, he should have been a king. But his girl, Dolores, had turned into a barmaid whore. Miss Mildred was bigger and more aimless than ever; the treacherous Arthur was always stoned. And now there was something in Caleb lonely and sad, shrinking and hysterical. It
broke my heart to watch him. He had been beaten too hard. I hated the people who had beaten him; by the time I was fourteen, I was certainly ready to kill; there was no reason not to kill—I mean, no moral reason. But there were too many—too many; they were everywhere one turned, the bland, white, happy, stupid faces. I walked the streets, I went to school, I watched them, and I loathed them. My brother. But it is also hard to love the beaten. It means accepting their condition; whereas, precisely, one is asking oneself,
What shall I do to be saved?

My encounters with Caleb when he came home the first time are blurred. Some moments are very sharply in focus, others are dim, very nearly advancing into the light, then receding into darkness. Other moments are irrecoverable, and I know it, and I have lately begun to know why. I do not subscribe to the superstition that one's understanding of an event alters the event. No, it is the event which does the altering, and the question one faces is how to live with time's brutal alterations.

This evening, however, when our mother reentered the room with the whiskey Caleb had stolen from the dance-hall bar, he endeavored to be cheerful, and we tried, too. After all, it was good to see him. It had been good to see him, before he and our father became lachrymose at the bar, dancing with the girls and jiving them and making them helpless before his grace and charm. But even the girls, I noticed, with that really awful increase of awareness which I owed entirely to Caleb, did not take him seriously: a boy with an unspeakable past was a man with an unendurable future. He was good to look at, good to dance with, probably good to sleep with: but he was no longer good for love. And certainly Caleb felt this, for in his dealings with the girls there was a note
of brutality which I had never felt in him before. He was not really teasing, charming, seducing them: he was taunting them. He was saying, I've got what you want, all right, but I'm not about to give it up to none of you black bitches.

Our mother returned and she poured the drinks. I wasn't really permitted to drink, and, luckily, in those days, I didn't like to drink; but this prohibition, like all of my parents' prohibitions, was rendered a dead letter by the fact that my parents knew very well that I did whatever I wished, outside. Now, my mother said, “I'm making yours real weak, Leo,” and handed me a glass of ginger ale only very faintly colored by whiskey. “That's just so you can feel part of the family,” she said, and handed drinks to my father and Caleb and sat down. Caleb and our father looked at each other, but neither of them smiled. I drank my ginger ale. I thought of a girl I knew. I tried to think of everything but the room I was in, and the people I was with.

“Little Leo sure ain't grown much,” Caleb said. “What you been feeding him?”

“Exactly what we fed you,” said our mother. “Red beans and rice and cornbread and pork chops and ham hocks and ribs and greens.”