Axeman's Jazz

16

I’M SITTIN’G on the stoop when the Beamer appears at the curb. I’m not surprised he’s found me. He’s “connected.” “My crew is in effect elsewhere. Get in.”

Righting the balance, I think. Apparently, Rufus Bowen has offered me an opportunity. Rue Morgue can point me in other directions — pull me into the dark side, and not some yuppie version of it, either. It’s taken me over a dozen years to catch up with myself. Seems I’m faced with the choices, now, I would have stumbled across if Mama had left me where I was. Naturally, I can’t nab back lost time … but missed identities?

Of course Rue Morgue has found me. I cleared the trail for him.

As I get into the car, fear touches my spine, the way someone taps your shoulder to get your attention. But I’m not as afraid as I thought I would be. Things were different for Mama — she had no options, no outs. When she met my daddy, it hadn’t yet occurred to her that high yellow was a ticket to the Thicket and beyond; every encounter was good and real and rippled outward into every other part of her life. She was at the neighborhood’s heat-blasted mercy.

Not me. I can always return to my mayor (thanks to the lift Mama gave me). I can slip back inside the great white world. This is just a game. And no matter how tough this fast-talking do-rag is, I’m in charge. After all, he’s panting after me.

He’s wearing winter boots, a Kangor cap, and an L.A. Raiders jersey. “Looking fine this evening, Ann.”

“Thank you. You, too.”

He grins. “I’ma show you my ‘hood.”

“All right.”

“Get you home, safe as milk. ‘S all about respect, see.”

No, Player, it’s about what you can do for me. Take my mind off Reggie, for one thing. Distraction. A substitute. A rough confirmation: I must be no damn good to dream of my cousin’s man. You can show me exactly how low I am. How low was my poor, desperate mama? Was it just like this with her and Daddy? Prove to me, Rue, that the world’s as bad as I think it is.

We cruise past flat, moldy-green shacks nearly hidden beneath willow limbs. A bizarre parody of an upbeat city tour. “Kick-ass form of smack — brand-name ‘President’—X-ed three of my favorite junkies here back in ‘94. I used to give ‘em lessons how not to OD, but … over here, in that alley, see, I saved a strawberry from a wack headhunter one muddy night, liked to cut on folks …”

He seems to need the outside world’s approval, wants to show me a player with street cred works as hard as a mayor’s girl. A man of his people, like Reggie.

Past a soup kitchen serving slumped men in Levi’s beneath a white neon cross. “Little boy, Raymond Evers, beaten by his parents there. Couple of real juicers. Got me some base cars over here …”

I remember running through these streets as a girl. Some of my friends were so poor they ate laundry starch for supper; their lips glowed white beneath the flickering streetlamps. In the fall, we’d sell candy and raffle tickets over in the white neighborhoods to raise money for our school. After sunset, we’d come back here and hide in a vacant lot, eating most of the candy ourselves. My friends laughed about the ofays. “They look like cartoon pigs in storybooks!” I laughed too, but uneasily, knowing how much lighter I was than my pals.

“Hey, baby, I be hella good to you!” a young man yells at a pair of strolling women. They ignore him, and he shouts, “Say, bitch, wasn’t for your chunky boo-tay, you’d have no shape a’tall!”

Rue laughs. That’s it, put them in their place, eh, Player? After all, it’s the women who hold down the jobs, who are raising the kids, who are participating in the world, while you poor boys are locked out of the action. Right? It’s our fault. Fact is, sugar, you punked out on us on the plantation, way back when, when you should have gone to war for your kids and us, and you’ve never forgiven yourself, have you? Or at least you think that’s what we think. Bitter’s generation blamed whites. You blame black women — all women, who won their rights at your sorry expense. Isn’t that the story? Well, stick with me, baby. I know all about being no damn good.

While we’re sitting at a stop sign, I notice a couple of Mixtec girls, their hair in braids, tied by leather shoestrings, sitting on a curb, spooning orange Benadryl into their babies’ mouths and cooing, “Shh, shh.” Rue looks the girls over, without comment. He’s probably figuring angles: how can I corner the Benadryl market?

We pass a candy store, its windows barred, and I’m back in the lot again, eating toffee with my friends. We were poor, but I was part of something then. In the ‘burbs, where Mama meant to “better” me, shit, I became more aware than ever of my freaky lack-of-fit…

“Fuck-up folks,” Rue says, pointing at a crowd in front of a darkened happy shop. “Sketching away the hours. Say y’all,” he yells out the window, slowing, stopping. “Need some Sudafed? Efidac? Got some Ephedrine from Mexico.”

A kid — he can’t be more than twelve — sucks vapor from an emptied air-freshener tube. I glimpse embers glowing inside it. Others pull on hand-rolled cigarettes, spilling chalky grains on their shirts. No one answers Rue, and he peels around the corner.

We stop at a low-slung building behind a boarded-up Circle K. The plywood walls are held together by rusty nails driven through Pepsi bottle caps. When Rue gets out I don’t know whether to sit or follow. Finally, I unlatch my seatbelt. “Delivery,” he says at the door. It opens a crack; a thin man in dreads, wearing jeans but no shirt, squints out at us. Cans of Night Train clutter his wooden floor. Behind him, an alcohol rehab certificate is taped to the wall next to a “Free Mumia” poster. A Virgin of Guadalupe candle. A Land O’ Lakes tub filled with soggy cereal. Above a small TV, black bananas curl on a hook. The place smells strangely sweet, like the wax lips I bought as a kid for Halloween. A noisy swamp cooler hustles in a busted corner window. Rue holds out a rolled-up Baggie. The man pulls three bills from his pocket. No words. Hand-bump. Then we’re back on the street.

From a cooler in his trunk Rue has pulled two malt liquor cans. I take a sip. Everything will be all right, I think, if I play along with him. He’ll think he’s setting the rules. Rap grinds from his speakers, all about bitches and hos. I remember the days of Otis, Aretha. Try a little tenderness. Respect.

Rue tells me he’s begun supplying Strychly Speed to local cockers — “a new line of business I lucked-up into.” It’s a strychnine-laced drug designed to quicken the reflexes and ward off shock. Just as I’m trying to imagine the outré sex practices he means, we stop outside a corrugated steel warehouse. He leads me to a small wooden door beneath a cracked bulb; a series of coded knocks, soft and rapid, then we’re inside on a sawdust-covered floor reeking of dog shit and bug spray. Bloody feathers float through yellow light. “Ten on the red hat!” someone shouts. Another counters, “Thirty on the gray shirt!” A third man yells, “Ready, pit!” and men surge forward toward a wide dirt ring. Intense, blurry scrabbling. Rue nudges me ahead of him, closer to the action. Past T-shirted bellies and John Deere caps I glimpse a pair of roosters — green and white, yellow beaks. Steel strapped to their spurs. Their hackles stiffen. One bird rolls beneath the other, leaps up and spears his opponent’s lung with a razored foot. The injured rooster hunkers and refuses to budge, coughing up blood, wheezing — a sound like a broken door hinge. Tens and twenties circle the room.

Rue retreats into a dusty corner with a short man restraining two pit bulls on leashes. A leather bag, more bills. I loiter near a plywood booth where a Mexican man — red, roughened, fresh from the fields — sells cracked corn, maple peas, atole. He offers to polish the cockers’ gaffs on an electric whetstone. Two men pass me on their way to what one calls the drag pit, a small chalked area where another pair of birds prepares to battle. “Is he farm-walked?” one guy asks the other. “Yep. Real good game. Won six last month, back to back, over in Sunset.” They spit snuff into small plastic containers. One wears a rooster-spur earring.

A few women stand by a dented beer keg, chatting freely but eyeing each other suspiciously: after the roosters are done, these girls will be in a different kind of competition for the men’s attention. What was it Shirley once said to me? — “Black women raise their daughters, but they love their sons. It’s ingrained in us — even when we’re moms — to view younger women as a threat.”

I move close. “… he dogged her and dogged her, and she just gave it up.”

“Man’s gonna hit, he’ll hit, no matter how you play him. Then he’ll head on out.”

“That’s right. Have dick, will travel.”

They laugh.

“When you cut your hair, girl? Look like you just lathered up and took a straight razor to your sweet ol’ skull.”

“Got tired of fooling with those damn relaxers, you know?”

To my eye, they’re all too dark for the red and purple dresses they’re wearing. “Boy-thing” or no, I’ve got them all beat, I think. No wonder Rue came to me: only a fool would choose ground beef over filet mignon. I laugh at my own boldness, stand a little straighter. Move it or lose it, T. They look my way and frown.

Everyone at the drag pit — birds and men — looks beaten to a frazzle. Someone shouts, “Pit!” and the roosters go after one another, legs flailing, feathers drifting wildly like snow. The birds seem stuck together. Two handlers step in to separate them. “Roundhead’s hurt,” a man mutters. The birds are placed behind the score lines again; they glare and scratch the dirt. Released, they collide midair, then tumble to the ground. I can’t tell who has the advantage, but blood blackens the ring. The spectators press forward. They’re no longer yelling. Suddenly, we’re witnessing a funeral. One of the roosters droops and quivers in a puff of dust. His handler picks him up, blows on his beak, then sets him back down — a final sacrifice. The other bird slashes. Rue tugs my arm. “It’s over,” he says. “Let’s go.”

“Is that bird dead?”

“If he ain’t, he will be once they pull his head off.”

In the stairwell in my building, I continue to play along. To play the player. This is no one-way deal, no matter what he thinks. He kisses my neck. I let him take my hand.

Through an open door we hear a TV talking head insisting on ousting Saddam Hussein and making the world a safer place to live. “Zat so?” someone says to the screen. “Let me tell you, Mr. Pun-dit, white folks’ problems ain’t nothing but white folks’ problems. Ain’t our lookout.”

We pass a twenty-something girl on the second landing. She’s wearing a halter top and a short yellow skirt. In her right hand she holds a dead white moth, in her left, a compact mirror. She crushes the moth, grinds its wings between her fingers and, watching herself in the mirror, spreads the dust on her eyelids. “Beautiful, baby,” Rue tells her. “You gonna go far.” I tug his hand.

As we stand at my door, and I flick through the keys on my ring, he grins like he’s about to spring a trap. Poor, deluded boy. He’s in as much need of healing, education, and understanding as I am. I see this; he doesn’t. Things are so fucked up between black men and women — have been for so long — it’s hard to see anything clearly.

Inside, I kick the doll’s head over to a corner, out of the way. I remember Ariyeh as a girl changing her dolls, taking black Marks-A-Lot to their cheeks, trying to make them look like her. “They already look like you” she used to tell me. Rue watches me now, and I see he’s thinking something similar. He thinks he can do whatever he wants to me, the nice, polite dime piece. He doesn’t believe I have it in me to throw a niggerbitchfit and bring the whole building running. I don’t know if I have it in me, either, but I tell myself, You’re in charge. You’re in charge. Look at how he looks at you. The shut-in boy, all grown up. And he’s yours now. Yours.

He pulls me to him, more gently than I expected, and I imagine myself in Reggie’s embrace. That’s it, Player. Fill my fantasy then drain it. Take it all out of me. Whatever you say, whatever you want. I won’t think about the dangers. Or the pleasure. Absolution’s what I’m after.

As his mouth finds mine, I feel a familiar drift, the dropping of a mask … truth is, I never feel so white as when a black man wants me. It’s my difference he desires; he wants to tear me down, but this impulse feeds his passion. The fact that he can’t really reach me fuels it even more. That’s it, Player, that’s it. It’s all just a game and I’ve won it in advance — look how lost you are, grabbing, tugging, gasping …

He carries me to bed. For a moment he looks at me as if he’s asking forgiveness, not for what he’s about to do or for the street life that’s killing him, but as if he were every missing father in the neighborhood, as if we were every sad night ever spent by a man and a woman who want to please each other but never learned tenderness.

He holds me to the mattress. Lips brush my nipples. Considerate, slow. Skillful. That’s it, Player. I’m too self-conscious to come, but don’t you stop, all right, don’t let up. Slip me all your pain. Let me kiss it. Make it better. Show me what Mama felt the night she met my daddy. Mama, see, your story’s not over. You’re not really gone … you’ve got to come save me now, save me, see, my soul’s in trouble here.

I rise and rise, in spite of myself: spasms of joy. Rue collapses, his wet bald head on my chest. After awhile he strokes my hair. “You taste salty,” he says, smiling. I watch his face. The face all the boys wear. Spiteful. Proud. But just a bit uncertain. Pleading, even. Another mask, and not too good a fit.

Then he’s up, pulling on his pants — lest he or I mistake all this for intimacy. “Okay, then,” he says. Just another deal, more business, my part of the bargain. Right, Player. I see your hands trembling.

He clears his throat. “Welcome to the ‘hood. You official now.”

“Part of the life here?”

“Part of what I say you part of, aight?” But his gruffness is unconvincing now.

It costs me nothing to play to the end. I ask what he expects me to ask. “When will I see you again?”

“I be back for more. When I feel like it.”

“I just wait for the word?” Fat chance, Player.

“That’s the way, baby.” He leans over and kisses me softly. “That’s the way. Check you later, hm? You be saving your sweet ass for Rue.” The door whispers shut.

Silence settles so abruptly in the room, I lose my breath — I realize I’ve been close to holding it for an hour. This is who we are, I think, watching Rue from my window. This is how we act in our neighborhood. This is all you can know.

I lie down again, rub my eyes until they’re wild with sparks, June-teenth rockets in the air … through the bursting, spinning hues I float up, down, around … stroll through the door, see myself as Rue did, a woman stripped of all her masks, spread across the sheet. Her skin’s a pale no-color in the light reflected from outside. I’m a soldier, fighting it out on the streets, cockers and junkies my comrades, under fire, most of them badly wounded … and this lady from her privileged world, who wants a taste of the real… she’s smart enough to know there’s a battle on, and she doesn’t want to be shielded … hell, I’ll give her what she wants … whatever she thinks she’s missing … pump her till her fucking eyes sting … living and losing, that’s war, baby, who’s the good, good king…

But that’s not the way it happened. If it were, I could tell myself I wasn’t responsible, but right from the start tonight, I set the rules we played by.

Did I get what I wanted? I’m not sure.

I get up, pull on my panties and a shirt, fluff my quilt on the windowsill, and watch the freight yard below. Steel tracks shoot like arteries in every direction. Boys spray-paint empty train cars, seizing the moment even as the moment moves on, the paint fading a bit as it dries. The kids wear do-rags and denims, orange jumpsuits like the ones I saw in lockup. Fireflies lift toward the stars.

A dark shape wings past the trees. Once, when I was little, Bitter told me, “In childhood, if you hold a dying bird, your hands’ll tremble all the rest of your life.” I think of the drag pit cockers. When did they first hold a dying creature in their hands?

I think of Rue tonight.

“A child weaned when the birds migrate, well, she’ll always be restless.”

Right now, Bitter’s hoodoo makes an odd kind of sense to me. Or it makes as much sense as anything else. Who’s to say everything’s not connected? A painstaking pattern of omens and spells. Who’s to say my little dance with Rue — part of a loose chain from the shut-in boy to Troy to Dwayne, these beautiful young bastards — didn’t begin in this neighborhood some twenty years ago, when the birds headed south?

And I was taken north.

My eyes fill, wetting the quilt. Living and losing.

That’s the way, baby. That’s the way.

I try to sleep. The room is dark but for patches here and there touched by refracted blue moonlight. A hot breeze razors through the freight cars below. In my stepdaddy’s house I used to lie awake, nights, wondering what to do with who I am — except in north Dallas, breezes rustled overwatered oak trees, TV antennae. I can hear Dale’s voice barreling through the rooms, “Front door locked? Check. Windows latched? Affirmative,” like the soldier he’d once hoped to be (flat feet and poor eyesight kept him safe, but bitterly restless, at home). I know what he’d say to me now. “So you had to defy your poor mama, before she’s even settled in her grave, and go back to that hellish place she saved you from. And what have you found there? The usual assortment of wastrels. Does any of this surprise you? Does it aid you in any way? Strengthen you?”

I don’t doubt he’d speak out of love for me. Genuine concern. He took pride in his wedding photos, his annual Christmas cards with our strained family portraits, his wife’s driver’s license with its predictably bad picture, but one that — washed-out, blue — revealed none of the Houston in her.

Whiteness as a bureaucratic norm, the default mode, while I’m stuck in my own Middle Passage.

I remember the night I sat at the kitchen table, my senior year in high school, filling out Affirmative Action forms for college. Dale made his evening check of the house. “Front door? Roger.” Then he paused above me and said, “You know, race is always the least interesting thing about a person.” He knew how vexed this subject was for me. Mama, who’d been helping me negotiate the paperwork, looked up at him, and said, “Yes, hon, but it’s not negligible, either.”

Oh, to have that moment back! To grab her by the shoulders, as I failed to do — shyness? shock? embarrassment? — and shout, “Tell me more! What has your experience been? What am I hearing? Regret for the choices you’ve made? What about those quilts of yours, Mama? Those slave patterns you stitch? Just what do you think you’re doing? Just what in hell do you think you’re doing?

I’m not sure she could have told me, or herself, even if I’d known enough to ask.

My own piecework lies on the windowsill now, a rough brown square softened by the moon. Sirens in the distance. I wonder if Bitter is sleeping, if Reggie and Ariyeh are making love, if Rue is out caretaking. For nearly an hour, I sit and listen to the city I’ve carried so many years inside me. Moths tap the torn screen.