The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (21 page)

“How come you don’t just make up a story?” says the same boy.

“Listen,” I say. “There’s something happening.”

“Quinn …,” now she’s trying to sound like my wife. “Do you think you ought to go?”

And I give her the same glare that the kid gave me.

“I just thought you might go look. I mean, if the police … Maybe you could talk to someone.”

“I’m not the mayor of Coloredtown,” I tell her. “I just live here, same as you. And besides, whatever it is, they don’t want me in the middle of it.”

Which is more than enough to send her inside with little Lamont and two of the girls, saying thin-lipped the way she does, “Come along now,” like she thinks I can do something about every drunk who smacks his wife on the weekend. Seventeen years and she still doesn’t realize I have a history with these people. That I wear cardigan sweaters for God’s sake and steel-rimmed glasses. That I teach literature, Karen, the first black man at Baxter College who doesn’t push or pull something. And so of course they don’t trust me. I don’t even speak their language. I’ve grown used to the money. I sit on committees. How can she live with me for seventeen years and not realize?

But here I am, aren’t I, on the damp sidewalk looking back at my empty porch. The children have scattered like biddies, and here I am looking back at a wide, smiling veranda that makes my house look like a plantation house. Rattan chairs big enough for kings. And ferns on either side of the door set like African headdresses on white fern stands. And a brick walkway that leads up to gray porch steps. So we say out loud that it’s a porch, but we’ve made it, after all these years, into the one untroubled crossroads of our town where once, long ago, I sat jamming with a group of musical men who laughed and played half the night. That’s what I’m mad about. She can slam the damn door all she wants.

Because who you are determines where you live in Baxter. And I mean where you sit and stand. Professors in one part of town, businesspeople in another. Black folks over here on the hill. Which is how
I’ve come to be walking down toward my neighbors who are gathering around the echoes of gunshots and the sound of a distant siren and now, suddenly, another. Because something has happened again. At first it doesn’t seem real to me without television commercials and the cool, flat flickering images. But here I am walking down my own street beneath the bare dripping limbs of willow oaks, wiping my glasses with a handkerchief and muttering to myself like a tourist lost in some insane, chattering marketplace. Even though I live in a hundred-year-old house. As close to the campus as you can get without crossing tracks.

So I walk, and it’s like descending into a dream. The Jamaican lawn ornaments, the painted doorways. Like she sent her voice to follow me into dreamland, only an octave higher; and I know before I look. It’s that boy who can’t keep himself from beneath my feet or shut his mouth long enough to breathe. Saying, “How come you don’t be the new preacher?” Just out of reach and as insistent as a mosquito. “You could preach, couldn’t you? Ain’t that what you already do?”

“I try not to.”

“Why not?”

“Why don’t you tell me what your name is.”

“I stay with my aunt sometimes, Lamont’s mama.” The inflection rising as if this were a question. “I watch him till supper time most days.”

“That’s not what I asked you, is it?”

“James Lee Kenrick. What you do for money?”

“I teach at the college, James Lee Kenrick. And besides … you don’t just wander in off the street and start preaching. Whether there’s a vacancy or not.”

“Sometimes you do. I seen it happen.”

But I walk ahead of him, down the hill, beneath cathedral-columned oaks and into the ruin of our neighborhood where two streets cross.

When we reach the edge of the crowd, we stay there, on the margin of a tragedy that’s been gathering for days. I think I can guess, but it takes
Silvia to confirm it. She is Lonell’s mother. More police arrive and then an ambulance, and I’m taken into the swirl of bodies as the crowd gets jostled to one side and then another while yellow crime-scene tape goes up around the tree. Over the ditch. Across the car. Down to the hedge and back over the driveway. Then a black cop and a white cop are working together to push the crowd back. Nightsticks out and up, like this, pushing the people back into the street. But it’s Silvia that I see with electric clarity, not the building chaos around me. Silvia with wild hair and frantic flying hands. Two women who are trying to hold her up, but she keeps throwing herself to the ground, tearing at the grass, her clothes, and shrieking louder than sirens. Because it’s Lonell in the ditch, under the blue blanket; and several men have come out of the crowd to help her. While I’m thinking, God, what have we done now? But of course I already know.

I can see them behind me and to my right, three teenagers in warm-ups, as dignified as old men. Practicing their nonchalance, but managing nevertheless to lurch like vultures until one of them finally breaks a smile. “They put that mug under a blue blanket, man.
Blue
!” Like it was the final insult. “Gonna
bury
that mu’fucker in it. Serve him right!” One of them snickering. One of them staring cold hate.

And on the ground beside the tactful blanket is a policeman and another policeman straddling his chest, pumping with desperate jolts that shake his jowls. A pistol in the grass. Someone’s shoe. And more sirens in the distance. More flashing lights as paramedics arrive for the wounded cop and lift him into the first ambulance without a glance at the crumpled blanket and then try to drive away. Lonell motionless all this time, the fingers of one hand dug into the dirt as if at the moment of death his greatest fear had been falling away from the earth. While some people in the crowd have begun shouting at the outsiders, blocking the path of the ambulance because official Baxter has left behind another black boy, like garbage. Two state patrol cars now, both troopers grim and gray, moving the people out of the street and into adjoining yards. A fat teenage girl shrieking, “I hate white people!”

But of course white people didn’t kill Lonell Burns. And when I turn and look for James Lee Kenrick I see that he too is gone, lost somewhere in the crowd.

It’s a story that’s over before I arrive. A distant horrifying fantasy. Now someone will have to write about it, explain it, translate it. And it’s at this moment that I go sick and drop myself onto Baity’s white brick wall and pansies, because I know who will take it up and what she will say long before she knows herself. One of those reporters, one of those stick-thin girls graduated from the college, maybe one I’ve taught myself, as white as desert sand and as breathless and sincere as Jane Austen, and about as prepared for the cough-cough of a Glock 9 mm. Who, sometime this evening, will begin writing about life among the lowly, death in a ditch, for tomorrow’s newspaper. Poor Jane, she will be, who will let seep between her words an unconscious amazement that we are human beings. As though we were put on this planet to be discovered. And poor us, who will read and watch the television reports not recognizing anyone, least of all ourselves, as the story trickles out.

So some will rant like the fat girl. And some will scratch our heads. Because the newspaper will say a normally peaceful neighborhood. The tranquility of early evening shattered by gunfire. A troubled teen. The irony that Lonell’s own family called the police, trying to prevent bloodshed. That Officer McLane himself would be the first to die.

Then on the day after irony there will appear a second story with numbers, this one written by a feature writer from the city paper twenty-five miles away who will not add an ounce of understanding. It will say three sisters, one cousin, five rooms, and three generations in a modest dwelling on Mott Street. Ten years of schooling, eight suspensions, and several incidents. A total of twelve grams stolen from the dealer earlier in the week, three gold necklaces, and a 9 mm. And taken from Lonell in retaliation: one girlfriend, one child. Then six days between incidents. Three shots fired at Lonell in the
drive-by. But no injuries. Seven minutes before Lonell can get his cousin to safety and return home for the gun. Five people who try to restrain him. Two policemen who respond to the call. One can of Mace. One scuffle on the ground. One gathering crowd. One person to reach out of the crowd and pull McLane’s arm away. And a horrible, ironic twist to the plot: three shots by Lonell striking McLane in the neck and face. Then two shots by the second cop from point-blank range. For a grand total of ninety-seven.

It’s how they see the world.

Then I will pass the first one on the street, the girl with the sincere pencil, and she will want some words from me, the symbolic spokesman for the tongue-tied class. Because she will think I am safe and sadly white. And she will fumble for her notebook as I take down my glasses, draw out a handkerchief, and squint. Holding the lenses up to the sun like a boy burning ants, thinking furiously. How can I hate this girl who is true to her way of knowing and not hate myself, who could have told a lie nine years ago and prevented myself from observing, “It’s a tragedy.” As I examine her through the one smudged lens and fit the frames back over deaf ears. And hear myself say, “A painful moment for us all.”

Still in the muddle of it, I walk back up the hill thinking of Homer. The Greek poet, yes, in this unlikely place. The Homer who could easily have imagined the grim and gratified young men who provoke death, though they could not have imagined him. I’m trying to remember details, but I suspect Karen has been on the phone already with that circle of women who manage things late at night when the knock comes, the dark man on the front porch with a flashlight. And she’ll be quietly waiting for whatever words I can put. She’ll ask me what happened, meaning something entirely different from the words. And I will say all those young men, Karen. All those young men, who stab each other at the ships, will come back tomorrow with different names and precisely the same quarrels—you disrespected me, took my
woman, walked upon my turf. You touched my golden chain, struck my child. You prey upon my waking thoughts and steal my sleep. I don’t even think they want the monster dead. They want a poet rapping ancient lines, another someone who will translate for them. But right now, as I walk up the long slope, they step out of the early evening fog and into the place where I imagine them, the dark, moist dreamland where they are

churning around that ship, Achaeans and Trojans,

hacking each other at close range. No more war at a distance,

waiting to take the long flights of spears and arrows—

they stood there man-to-man and matched their fury,

killing each other now with hatchets, battle-axes,

big swords, two-edged spears, and many a blade,

magnificent, heavy-hilted and thonged in black

lay strewn on the ground—some dropped from hands,

some fell as the fighters’ shoulder straps were cut—

and the earth ran black with blood.

Something I could have taught them.

So finally I sag into a kitchen chair, and she reaches out across the table to take my hands in hers before drawing away for coffee. Then slides a steaming cup beneath my face. And I inhale. It’s like incense wafting across the face of some hollow idol.

“What happened?” is all she can think to say.

“What happened? They don’t even know themselves.”

“A drive-by?”

“It doesn’t make any difference. Next year it’ll be someone else,” I tell her. “That baby you held this afternoon will kill somebody trying to become a man. Fast or slow, it doesn’t make any difference. In fact I believe my friend Lonell might have come out a winner considering that he never had a chance.”

“He had a choice.”

“White people have a choice. Lonell had the world he lived in. So why don’t you ask me what the rest of them really want to know—where was the boy’s father? Where was some thick-muscled man to knock him back from the edge? Where do they all go?”

She looks at me the way she does when we are strangers—it happens from time to time—though in seventeen years we’ve never fought, not once. Never a hateful word between us. People are amazed. We just draw back. She on her side of the track, me on mine, until one of us figures a way across. It’s where we are now. She’s sipping her own coffee, stirring with a cinnamon stick and thinking. Combing her hair back with her fingers. Twirling the ring on her finger. Until finally, “I’ve never seen you this down before. You must have known him, known his family.” Her face a perfect oval of concern.

I say to her, “Did you know I grew up in this town? Played in this very house when I was a boy because it belonged to my grandmother Miss Ginny who built it before there was a track. Whose money sent me up north to school and brought me back here to … whatever it is. It’s almost beyond comprehension. Did you know my real name was
Quinthony
? Not Quentin. But Quinthony. Quinthony Hodges Deagan. It’s one of those black names, like Lakeesha or Gonorrhea Jones.”

“Stop it.”

My face falls down into my hands, and some low moaning sound comes forth. “We need to quit pretending. You and I. We need to quit pretending that we’re horrified by these stories. I mean we can at least be honest, right? That’s what we have instead of hope.”

Then she is there at my shoulders, the hair and the scent of her. Kneading the muscles the way she takes up clay and reaches into the being of it before throwing it on the wheel. “I’ll see you in hell first,” she whispers in my ear. “I’ll drag you back a hundred times. You have no idea how far I’ll go. Now tell me—what really happened?”

And since there are only two of us in a house fit for a family, and since she is strong, I say, “Let me ask you a question.”

Suppose you can’t sleep because you have the same dream every night—that it’s been raining and that there are puddles and rivulets, diamonds and toys scattered about, and the Angel Malachi waiting for you at the end of a long walk. And that he is tall and patient. Thin as a mantis and hungry for souls. But you don’t want to see him. You say to yourself this is a dream, and I am an educated man, and that is just some old fellow who hands out Bibles. One of those homeless who stand outside the gates of the college thrusting little green testaments at anyone who passes, while cars go hissing past even though his trench coat, shiny wet and chitinous, stretched tight against his wings, glistens with liquid light. His hands hooked over a Bible and eyes, yes, burning like brimstone.