Mat Johnson - Drop

Our driver’s face was red and covered with wrinkles, redundant and overlapping like the lines in an etching. He looked like the people outside. His name was Bill and he offered us donuts from a white bag on the dashboard. They were all powdered and small, and after I ate a couple the sugar clumped around my tongue. Bill stopped driving when we arrived at a parking lot of broken concrete and faded parking lines, pulling up to a small row of shops at the back of the lot.

‘I’m going to call in, tell them we’re here.’ When the door closed behind him Cindy expelled air like Houdini coming out of the water trap.

‘I don’t believe this shit!’

‘What’s your problem?’ I asked.

‘Grays Ferry? I didn’t know they wanted us to come down here. That bitch Hutton, she didn’t say nothing. Nothing.’

‘Where’d you think we were going? Society Hill?’

‘This is where that kid got killed.’

‘What kid?’

‘That kid, last summer. This is where those white people shot him.’

‘Why’d he get shot?’ I started lifting the blinds on the window, looking for bad people.

‘Are you sure you’re black? There was stuff about the fighting down here the whole summer. This is where the mayor came down. This is where Farrakhan was going to hold the rally.’

‘Word?’

‘Where the hell were you?’

‘I was out of the country.’

‘Where?’

‘Out of the country.’

‘You was upstate?’ Cindy asked.

‘No!’ I yelled. Cindy bust out laughing, her eyes growing wide as her head pulled back and her finger pointed me out to no one.

‘Nigger, you was upstate, you was on lock-down, don’t even lie.’

Bill came in and drove us towards the front of the parking lot by the street, next to the McDonald’s. We opened up the main door on the side of the vehicle, sat behind the desks, and waited for people to show up. It wasn’t even nine yet. Cold air came through the screen, carrying the smell of fried pork and melting cheese. Cindy started talking about how hungry she was and got Bill to go get food for her. If ten dirty pennies would have bought anything I would have gotten something, too. My paycheck was two days’ coming. ‘You want some of mine?’ Bill asked, and I said no. I couldn’t play myself, begging from a white dude, but I kept looking at Cindy’s food sitting next to me as it disappeared in a quick numb moment while she read a romance novel.

When she was done, Cindy shoved everything back in her bag, crushed it into a ball, and threw it in the trash on her way to the bathroom. When its door closed, I pulled her rubbish from the bin and took out her sandwich paper. Orange hunks of cheese sticking to the paper like melted plastic that I ripped off with my teeth. Buttered muffin crumbs I collected, balling them together in my fingertips into one caked salty mass.

The first people started coming an hour later. They poked their heads in and when they saw us sitting there they looked to Bill, who motioned back to them that it was okay to go to us. They were polite, though they often didn’t want help, just the application, which they stuck into their coats or pocketbooks or bags as if to say ‘You never saw me take this.’ At eleven a short, skinny, brown-haired woman sat across from me and told me in an educated, out-of-place voice about her brain tumor. She was taking an application in case she lived long enough for them to turn her electricity off. ‘Death brings odd comforts,’ she said. ‘All my life I worried about bills.’ I wanted to give her something, but all I had were blank applications and pencils. When she walked out the door I thought, Like Schroedinger’s cat, she’s dead now. She would see David before I would.

By one o’clock a line had formed outside. We had built up a rhythm and the day was going faster than when we were hooked up to the phone lines. I liked working with Cindy because she was rude and it made whoever I sat with nicer because they were happy they’d avoided her. She was also fast since she never explained anything twice or entertained rambling questions, so while I took my time talking with people, Cindy whittled down the line.

During a break between customers, Cindy complained that she needed a smoke. She wouldn’t go outside because she was afraid the white people would come out of their houses and hang her from the telephone lines like a pair of used Pumas. To torture her, I borrowed cigarettes from the carton Bill kept in the glove compartment. I stood by Cindy’s window, puffing up a fog and smiling within it as she gave me the finger. Sucking poison never felt so good. That kept me going until I saw some tattooed pink men in jeans and white undershirts coming down the road. Throwing my half-smoked cigarette down, I ran back on the bus and locked the door behind me as Cindy laughed at me.

The next day we went into West Philly. I tried to do the job right since it was my home, filled with my people. I walked to the meeting spot from my house, happy to get inside the bus before the dark clouds above could fulfill their promise. Out the window was: trash like nobody had invented cans; kids running and screaming while their book bags bounced on behind them; men without hope even at dawn waiting at day-labor lines trying to be asleep while standing in the cold; the smell of grease (food, hair, body); stores that had opened and closed and opened and closed until the titles on the marquees said nothing about the contents. Trolley tracks where there were no more trolleys, just broken and twisted metal embedded into the road. Occasional cobblestones appearing amid the asphalt as stone zits, sidewalks that buckled and cracked underneath the roots of dead trees, maroon broken-brick sand and the sharded glass of alcohol-escape sprinkled on the ground. Every surface covered in the fading graffiti of written screams. Wee-ha, my fucking home, my fucking people. Wee-ha, my fucking source, my own fucking kind. Everything I was, loved, and wanted to run away from.

I was polite but fast so we could help as many folks as possible, because by eight-thirty there was already a line. I wore a tie, hung from a shirt with a collar, so I let my accent shape my words so they would know I was one of them and not a part of the machine, so they would stop being so damn humble and polite to me, like I was an ofay. ‘Excuse me Mr Sir. Excuse me?’ No, fuck that, I’m here to help you. I am you. Spit on me as if I was yourself.

At ten I had my first voice-box in person. She had no teeth and she held the device to her neck like it was an electric razor and she was shaving her throat. I wanted to lift her onto my back and carry her somewhere. Her face was unwashed, and I could see the flaky white lines of tears and saliva on the midnight softness of her skin. So skinny, so small, and she listened, staring, to every word I said. Her face nodding between her wool hat and the faded scarves cloaking her neck and chin from the cold. Eyes that kept looking until they hurt, until it was, Mama, please turn away, Mama, please walk away and heal or die because whatever void is there I can’t hope to fill, whatever pain I am useless to erase.

There were three wheelchair customers that day. They knocked on the door and I went out to the street with the applications to explain it to them. The last one came when the rain had started and I hovered over her to cover her from the drops while she finished the forms. Done, I stood inside the shelter of the doorway as she wheeled herself back out. It was a long open parking lot filled with unpaved stretches that she maneuvered. I should have followed her, held something above her as she went. I should have gone home and cooked something for her to devour, a soup thick, salty, and green that made her fall asleep every time she ate it. Cindy yelled for me to come inside and close that damn door.