Jeffery Allen - Holding Pattern - Stories

You retarded — peeping up. You really are.

Cosmo smacked him again, short and sharp. He seemed to calm. And he leaned away from Hatch, slowly, and righted himself, his eyes minus their fierce light, and withdrew back into his empty fixed look. You shut up, or I’ll give you some trouble.

Hatch lowered his hands. And if you do—

Cosmo readied his hand. Look out now.

Hatch guarded his head. He breathed like someone who had been running. He remembered the water pistol. Maybe if he had it now …

Cosmo lowered his hand. Touched the cord of his robe. Let’s get this business outta the way.

Hatch could no longer feel the bear’s teeth in his neck, but he knew it was there, still found it hard to move his legs, impossible to take his feet.

Cosmo moved back to the other side of the room, slippers clapping, and leaning so far forward that he might have fallen flat on his face. He entered the cone of light, turned, and faced Hatch. Spread his arms wide. Welcome brother — speaking with his new impenetrable expression.

Hatch rolled his hands over his chest, searching, certain that the bear was tired out from all of the struggle and activity and had gone into hibernation.

Cosmo squatted on his haunches, the low position propelling more air up into his rising black cheek. He fingered the sheet. Come over here behind this sheet.

I see you, Hatch said. Don’t think I don’t. But the bear had settled into a deep slumber, and his brother watched him, a fading glow, even dull radiance, some unclaimed and impatient skin shape summoned by dim regret — a singular desire to look deed and aftermath stonily in the face and move on.

I

His mother’s name was Glory Hope Lincoln. His father had a wandering eye. On a bright summer day, she cut his daddy’s dick off and threw it out the window.

You dead, bitch, Daddy said.

The Lord giveth and he also taketh away, Glory said.

Daddy put his hands over his crotch and went searching for his member. Later, Glory and the cops found him slumped against a mailbox five blocks away.

The officers were all white men, Glory said, but they didn’t arrest me. They knew that it was the Lord himself who had guided my hand. Oh, Jesus is a mighty man!

Glory always told the story to him, her son, Lincoln Roosevelt Lincoln, in the kitchen, a large room, hot and bright inside with sunlight from the big window behind the sink. She sat stiff in her chair — akin in structure and appearance to an infant’s high chair, it was specially built to compensate for her height — her eyes closed, her head back, and her thick gray hair pulled tight into a ponytail, as if someone were trying to snatch her out the window. She was the darkest shade of black, and Lincoln wondered how she could be his mother, since he himself was so light that even a touch of sun made him tan. Her cheeks glowed red, two small furnaces — this woman round and fat from good living.

Lincoln sat in his own chair, tears hot on his cheeks.

Glory opened her eyes and looked him full in the face. Man, she said, don’t lose your head over a piece of tail!

Lincoln could no longer remember when she had first told him the story, but when he was eight, she said, Set your tail down over there, where I can see you. He sat down in his chair.

In her black dress suit, she was small and motionless. Sunlight draped a shawl over her shoulders. She had closed her eyes, eased her head back, and told the story. Concluded thus:

Men should sow their oats, she said.

Yes, ma’am.

Then marry at thirty.

Yes, ma’am.

But men are heathens.

Lincoln had thought for a moment, sincere. Jesus was a man, he said.

Glory shot her eyes open. Brought her head forward and looked at Lincoln for a full minute, her face as still as a rock. Then she slapped him, hard. Water cascaded from his eyes. (Until the day before his death, he never cried again, not even in jest.) Glory went over to the sink and washed her hands, as if she had been dealing with something unclean. You don’t fuck with Jesus.

Glory loved Jesus, the only man she ever cooked for, in a greasy ritual she performed once a year, on his birthday. Turkey and dressing, ham, fried gizzards, chitlins, hog head cheese, black-eyed peas, butter beans, neck bones, corn bread, buttermilk and side meats, candied yams, smothered chicken, collard greens, eggnog, and pecan pie. They would sit down to a table overgrown with a smoky jungle of plates.

Taste and see, Glory would say. Jesus is good.

They would eat their supper and afterward spend the evening before the fireplace in the living room, Glory singing: Come by here Lord, come by here.

Lincoln grew, so that by the time he was ten, Glory barely reached his shoulder. Whenever some thought thickened his mind, he would walk around the house wide-eyed like a baby. He could never do right for doing wrong, and Glory always found something suspicious in his look, so Lincoln began to develop the habit of beaming a golden smile at her, a ritual meant to comfort and ease but that over time altered the muscles in his face to such a degree that the corners of his mouth hurt. One day, as she sat tall in her high chair in the kitchen, and he in his chair, giving her his aching smile, he decided to question her about the central mystery in her life.

Mamma?

Yes?

Where my daddy?

I done told you a thousand times where your daddy at.

I know, but—

She jerked him up by the collar. You ain’t been listen?

No, ma’am. He looked down into her face but avoided her eyes.

You must just be hardheaded?

His heart tightened at the hard threat of her question. No, ma’am.

What yo problem, then?

He framed his words. Where is my daddy Jesus?

The fire in Glory’s cheeks cooled, but Lincoln could feel the heat from her smoldering eyes. Boy.

Yes, ma’am.

Listen carefully.

Yes, ma’am.

Jesus can see into the heart.

Yes, ma’am.

God gave me children as a token of his own suffering and love, and for my devotion to him.

Yes, ma’am.

His son saw into my heart.

Yes, ma’am.

Never close your heart to Jesus.

Yes, ma’am.

Glory was a woman of mean understanding. Burns covered her forearms, the blackest part of her body, and her fingernails were so black and her fingers so flat (old pone-pan hands, Lincoln called them in the full force of his anger) that she always wore gloves in public (and sometimes even when she ate) and long full dresses — even the sleeves long — that revealed no flesh. She walked slowly and carefully, like one just learning. Lincoln studied her through the keyhole of her bedroom door, observed that she slept with her eyes open, her body trembling at scenes of destruction and devastation, projected onto the ceiling and walls, that her eyes alone could see. Eyes that saw in clouds the shapes of disaster. Saw spirits wrestling in the sky and swift-winged angels zooming over the world. For her, ordinary language was an undecipherable hieroglyphics, and Lincoln had to sit before the warmth of the fireplace, where she knitted the same quilt she would finish only moments before her death, and read her the mail, or her favorite black newspaper, the Black Star , and magazine, Mirror of Liberty , or the printed labels on foodstuffs, tin cans, and cardboard boxes.

She would spend most of the day in the kitchen, reading the only written words she understood: those of the Bible. Then she would summon Lincoln to her company for conversation. Lincoln forever on hand at the pointed moment of memory and reflection, for how can progress be measured unless we reconstruct and reanimate the past? She said her say, Lincoln hearing but not always listening, until she circled back to the present, depleted, it would seem, from the telling. She would spend the remainder of the day knitting and humming before the fireplace.