The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (2 page)

Pop's boots thundered overhead as they dragged him down the steps. I heard him keen like a dray horse. He was a beast bred for strength and compliance who now strained at the bridle. I looked back to see a woman haul I Murder's body out with a hook. He was the ham in the omelet, precisely that significant and exactly that dead.

The gas ring was relit. The valve resumed its pattern, opening and closing like a heart. It could release a thousand servings of egg every hour. Somewhere, early the next morning, a jet would skim under the Night Glass, beneath our fading stars. A passenger would gaze out the window without admiring the view. Stars are flaws in the globe of the sky. He would know this to be true and would only pity the night for its imperfections. “Yes,” he would say, in answer to the flight attendant, “the eggs are just fine, thanks. But I could use another sugar for my tea.”

In all the confusion nobody took notice of me and Faron. My brother grabbed the rum and back to the dorms we walked all alone. It was understood that he would break the news to Umma. Understood because I could not stop shaking to speak. Pop would spend the night in a holding cell down in Georgietown. Next morning they would chain his legs to the rail of a gunboat and float him back to the Cuba Pens. So began our sorrow.

*   *   *

Now, ten years on, I am left with the solitude. This evening First Light came to the Paranal Observatory. The only remaining telescope on Earth opened her single mirrored eye, and after three blind centuries she found the stars unmoved by human history.

At last the old light from distant galaxies drips down the eight-meter barrel, scarcely enough to feed the glow of a computer screen and illuminate the salvaged legal pad on which I write this story, this explanation and apology, to you, dear daughter.

One day, Little Sylvia, when you are older, you will resent me for what I have taken from you. When you were a baby I carried you by train and by bus, away from the broken world up north so that you might hide here on a mountaintop in the Chilly desert—far from anywhere but close to the stars. Little Sylvia, when you are old enough, I hope you will read this and I hope you will understand why your father did what he did.

As you sweat and breathe in a sleepsack on the couch behind me, I write this down so that you will know: I gave you solitude, sweet daughter, so that you will never be lonely.

No one should be as lonely as Umma was after they took Pop away.

 

2.

For killing I Murder, Pop received a long stretch in the Cuba Pens, but only if he behaved himself. If he promised to be quiet and polite, he could labor in the sugarcane fields till malaria, heat, tube poisoning, or some better thug laid him out.

Though he had been taken far away from us, my mother believed in the propagating nature of love. Love as a particle and a wave. She was descended from Jesus Lovers and carried with her many of their magical ideas. Love, she said, bridged distances the human eye could not, which sounds like nonsense until you need it to be true. But even love had its limits, so she moved us as close to the Cuba Pens as was legally possible.

The Gables is a township up the Dixie Hiway from Old Miamy. To the north is Hiya City, a geriatric stronghold. Directly south are the Miamy Ruins, which were a big tourist draw and a Bosom Industries asset. The Gables was the farthest south a free person could live, the bottom of the unincarcerated world, and approximately three hundred miles north of Pop's prison cell.

The night we moved into Residential Tower C, Umma stood by the south-facing window while me and Faron unpacked our duffel bags. She remained there till it went dark, head cocked like she was listening. After a while her body went rigid. Those drumstick shoulders hitched up in their puff sleeves, and she made a noise I had never heard her make before. I believe my mother was moaning, and not from grief. Faron asked did she need a glass of water. I asked did she need a tissue. Umma told us be quiet; she was feeling him.

Pop's love was not a vibration or a breeze or a glow, she said. It was like ordnance. With a blast radius as wide as the Caribeen. From his cell down in the Cuba Pens, she could feel him go
thud, thud, thud.
Umma called that love, but I know now that Pop was punching the walls of his cell.

The Gables was a step up from sharecropper tents and factory dorms. I hear it's all faveler now, but in my boyhood the tower blocks were respectable living. Our junior-plus one-bedroom was on the top floor. Us boys thought it was a penthouse. Galvanized steel door, en suite kitchen, sit-down toilet right across the hall. The carpets were soft and beige, beige walls and beige window treatments—the décor blended so seamlessly with the Floriday summer sky that our home seemed to expand out into the greater world. Our bunks were hinged to the living room wall. I called top on account of my claustrophobia, but I usually woke up on the couch beside Umma.

The only drawback to tower living was the eleven flights we had to climb up and down each day. If you had pocket change you could afford the elevator. The steps cost you more anyway. The Stairdwellers shook you down hard, and if your pockets were empty they made sure teeth fell out instead. I wouldn't risk it without Faron. He was my muscle.

Umma was my warmth. I would like to say love, but mostly she saved that for Pop. She was a wiry woman but hot, like the coils of an electric stove. In those days after our father went to Cuba, Umma did not embrace us; she coiled around us until our skin began to burn.

She meant to make a better life for me and Faron so she enrolled at the Old Miamy School for Drugs and Doctors. She'd always been crack at sewing up Faron's playground wounds. She could read decent well, and the clinics were so hard up for physicians they would take anyone. I believe there was also a measure of pity in their decision to accept her, though no serious person would admit to such an outmoded sentiment. Umma chose obeegy, making babies.

When she did her rounds at the babying clinic, Umma wore a calico dress some nurse had left behind in the lockers. It was a few sizes too large, and the gathered front pockets were always weighed down with stray objects she'd collected throughout the day. This was her idea of housekeeping. When she went to sleep I would go through them looking for my books, pencils, or underpants.

One night, when we'd been living in the Gables about four or five months, I dug through her pockets in search of Pop's wallet. Instead, I found a canvas bundle the size of a grande burrito. The inside was carefully stitched with little flaps that contained what appeared to be medical supplies—syringes, needles, brown tinctures in plastic bags. A small square of paper fell out and I picked it up. In a cautious, cramped hand—not my mother's—someone had written:

YOU DONT HAVE TO.

I have always been good at waiting. I was born to keep vigil. Umma's shifts at the clinic ran till midnight six days a week. When the red digits of the oven clock showed twelve I would climb onto my bunk and survey the elevated stretch of Dixie Hiway. It ran so close to our tenement that you could leap across from a stairwell window on the third floor. And it was so empty, I had no trouble picking out my mother's frail shadow as she walked the hiway home. Good Samaritans made bonfires of cottonwood and scrub pine to scare away coyotes and light the way. If you stayed clear of the median you were safe enough, but still I worried.

It was always much past midnight when Umma's calico dress finally appeared on the firelit roadway. She would look up and wave before vanishing around the side of our building. Faron always met her in the lobby to keep her safe from the Stairdwellers. They were a special sort of edgy after midnight, but so was Faron. He got himself stabbed in the arm once with a coat hanger.

Sometimes Umma liked to stop at the bonfires to comfort herself with her fellow commuters, and that comfort might stretch on for hours. Some nights I'd nod off before she made it home. My eyes would swim out over the Dixie Hiway and the shadows that pressed in around its bonfires, over the ruins of Old Miamy all pink and lit up for the nighttime tourists. I'd wake up smelling wood smoke and know our mother had come home. She would bind me up in the hot wires of her arms. I would burn in the folds of her calico and fall asleep.

*   *   *

Me and Faron did our Vocationals in Mining. Your uncle took to the dirt like a regulation earthworm. He could crawl on his belly down seepholes with no clue where he might emerge. The earth would close around him, he said, like a big mineral hug. It made him feel like a part of something.

Me, I felt like dinner down there. Stepping into a mineshaft was like feeding myself to a giant. Tight spaces, thin air, total darkness: what separated mining from the grave was a paycheck, and you earned almost as much dead.

As the months wore on and I missed Pop more and more, I started playing hooky from Vocationals to ride the tour bus through the Old Miamy Ruins. I liked the sun and wind and the smell of lotion. The tour was gratis because the Bosom Chiefs considered those ruins a history lesson. I learned by heart the haunting names of Old Miamy's landmarks. Civil Center, Bass, Arse, Jungle Island. Before long I could parrot back the whole boilerplate script.

Whenever a tourist asked me to take her picture in front of the Four Seasons, I felt it my duty to oblige. Hundreds of people had contributed to that shell of a building; thousands had enjoyed its ice machines, imported bedclothes, and heated lap pool. I owed it to them to tell their story. Their dissolution held promise for us as a society. It is a comfort to know how swiftly and thoroughly a civilization can crumble when nobody wants it anymore.

The highlight of every Miamy tour was Pork & Beans. This was a gated housing compound built by the famed Commie Gunt called Roserfelt. He was a Chief in his own way, stinky rich and hitched up to the finest families, but old Roserfelt had a deviant attachment to the poor. It may have been sexual. He wanted to see them pampered and put up like sultans, so he gave them Pork & Beans. He gave them police and water at no extra charge. Men addicted to drugs and women hooked on pregnancy got free sirloin and sedans and potable water. Swimming pools, in-unit toilets, a doctor that made house calls in a hi-tech van: Pork & Beans was paradise for do-nothings. I paid special attention to getting this part of the tour just right and would practice it every chance I got.

Pop had always been one to encourage my hobbies; he would have listened patiently to my Pork & Beans speech, clapped me on the back, and narrowed his earnest eyes. “You will amount to something, boy.”

But in Pop's absence Faron was in charge. That we were twins and should have been equals made no difference. (Umma told us after Faron was born it took me a full hour to work my way out of her tubes.) My brother decided I should not entertain any dreams as lofty as Old Miamy tour guide. He said mining was a safe bet for both of us.

One morning in late summer, after Umma went to the clinic and before we were to report for Vocationals, I made the mistake of practicing Pork & Beans on Faron. He stood behind the kitchen bar making steam patterns on the laminate with his toast. I hung my legs over the edge of the top bunk and started in.

As I laid bare the terrible history of the Pork & Beans housing complex, I could sense my brother's rising irritation. He ground his toast to dust on the counter. When I reached the end of my speech—“The tower blocks were painted a cheery pink to match the flamingo, a narcissistic bird that eats garbage”—he leaned forward and blew a cloud of crumbs across the living room.

He stalked over and kicked his lower bunk flush against the wall. Though I didn't get it at the time, the implication was that I needed to be crushed a little myself. Faron always meant well. He was my protector, especially when it came to disappointment.

“You want to be a tour guide so bad?” he said. “Get down.”

I followed him into the stairwell, awed by his tone. He was our man of action and I loved him dearly, even when he went too far. Only one Stairdweller dared to give us trouble. She was a ropy gal in a handcrafted shirt made out of Fatty Meats takeout bags. She wagged a sharpened prybar and told us to open our rucksacks. I offered her a sandwich but before she could take it Faron punched her in the neck. The girl hacked so hard I thought she might die, but then she coughed up something and spat at me.

The next landing was where the Stairdwellers kept rabbits. As I often did, I stopped to poke a finger in the hutch, but it wasn't a bunny that sniffed me. It was a boy. Dry blood colored his mouth. The surviving rabbits huddled in a back corner, ears down. Their eyes were asking for help, same as the boy that had eaten one of their kin. “Don't dwell on it,” said Faron, advice he gave me often, though it never stuck.

At the third floor we hopped over the windowsill and onto the overpass. We took the Dixie Hiway till we reached the deco gate of the Ruins. A fat boy with cornrows tried to shake us down for five hundred dollars each, but he didn't force the issue. Soon as Faron touched his shoulder, we were let inside free of charge.

While we waited at the bus kiosk, my brother's attitude softened. He sprung for sno-cones. I got grape and though the syrup tasted like a tin spoon, I sucked the ice till it turned brittle and white.

The bus, when it came, was done up like an old-time trolley. The paint job was flamingo pink. Said
FLAMINGO FLYER
on both sides.

“Goddamn 'mingos,” said Faron. He was racist about birds. Meaning his contempt for birds was disordered and based on ignorance. I thought there were good species and bad. Even turkey vultures have their virtues if you are looking for a dead body.

I recognized the bus driver. Ross Carnation was one of my favorite guides. He was a star because he put a little music in his voice, like he was singing quietly to the passengers. He sang about arrogance, about collapse and decay, without cruelty. Ross lived a few floors below us in Tower C, and was a revival dancer of some note. Saturday nights he'd gather in the courtyard with a bunch of guys to dance to trad music like Miamy bass and salser. Sometimes they put on a floor show for the whole Gables, which was a pleasure to attend. I always thought Pop would have liked to sit in with his Roland AX and make them dance to some of those gloomy sweet songs from his Texas forebear, but he never got the chance.