Jeffery Allen - Holding Pattern - Stories

One day, she called Lincoln into the kitchen. Boy.

Yes, ma’am.

Yellow niggers darken with age.

Ma’am?

But she left him with that piece of fact-threat-advice and went to bed singing:

Jesus loves me

Yes I know

Cause the Bible

Tells me so.

The baby was hunched into a heap, legs crooked, head touching knees. It’s too damn hot in here, he thought. These days, you can’t find peace anywhere.

Lincoln always rose at dawn, had done so for as long as he could remember. So too this day. It was warm and black and close under the covers. He raised himself slowly out of bed, fingered his penis (limp), moved over to the black drapes fronting the windows, and drew them open to a flood of light. Blinking, he stood looking out onto the city’s skyline, a view he took pride in, his thirty-six-story-high penthouse perch scanning across the very heart of the city. Sunlight flamed about the roofs of buildings — tall brick and steel boxes blaring many-glassed reflections. He looked down onto the Eisenhower Expressway and saw cars moving on a sea of blacktop, wheels and engines silent. He could hear nothing of the outside. Somewhere behind him wood popped and hissed; he turned to see his bed, as high and thick as a mausoleum, glowing as if on fire, black sheets bright under the light, like the moonlit surface of water, spotted with two drops of semen, fallen stars on the rippling satin. His sight looped back to the window and skyline, and he gazed on in silence and kept looking, sunlight stroking his back in anxious anticipation. Blind fingers sought his penis and examined it. Erect.

Moving on, the next juncture of his morning routine required preparation of his bath — foam and bubbles, plenty of bubbles and foam. He lowered his body into the tub, enjoying the warm water and the clean soap smell. Some thirty minutes later — time formed and held in foam, time bouncing and echoing in every bubble — he stepped free of the tub and toweled his body dry, then made his way to the full-length mirror, leaving behind a soapy trail. He was tall, but of average build, since he never exercised. He believed that independence and hard work should be rewarded. If he sweated, he wanted to be paid.

Jesus fixed it so we won’t never have to work, Glory said.

Yes, ma’am.

You ain’t no slave.

Yes, ma’am.

Niggers shouldn’t work for the white man. She mailed out anonymous donations to black businesses and instructed Lincoln in the art of writing chain letters — words are dreams — (a dollar enclosed in the envelope), which read: Praise Jesus, you lucky so and so. Cast down your bucket where you are. Pass it on. Pass it on.

Lincoln back-combed his fine curly hair into one thick pomaded wave. Polished his teeth and took time to evaluate the possibilities of his appearance. His eyes were his best feature: large, wet, and full of — his women believed — the tears of a sensitive masculinity. Sensitive teeth, sensitive stomach, he made his way to the kitchen — cool air playing over his naked body — where he breakfasted on powdered foods, the stuff of astronauts, then slipped into a white linen shirt and slacks fitted with a thin black leather belt. He removed a photograph that he had received several weeks earlier, from an Emmanuel Lead, who had written a letter on the back of the photograph in thick-tipped lasting black marker, from the black file cabinet next to his bed.

Dear Sir ,

I entered the army because I come from a patriotic and Catholic family. Imagine, a black patriot and Catholic. Nevertheless, I wanted to be a career soldier. Reality changed many of my views, although I’m still a God-fearing Christian. Your work has helped me and many of the other brothers. We have hardened into one flame. We hold monthly discussions of your books and, in your honor, have started the General Black-Veteran Business Association. We also sell certificates of honorary African American citizenship to white soldiers. We’ve gotten some opposition from a few fire-eating racists who would put a black eye into our efforts. But we endure. After our release from active duty, we plan to start a guerrilla marketing firm. On behalf of the association, I thank you. Find here a picture of me and my beautiful wife, Frieda. It’s our wedding picture. My Frieda and I love your books. We have read every one cover to cover and more than once.

P.S. Keep writing.

Lincoln studied the photograph, a glossy print showing a happy couple in a tropical setting. Emmanuel Lead stood tall and proud in his uniform, his forehead vast over deep-set and smoldering eyes, his black hair back-combed into a thick pomaded wave, his wife calmly beside him, the crown of her head level with his shoulder. Her features were blurred under a hard core of sunshine, her raised white veil the perfect setting for a rare jewel of a face — but empty, revealing nothing. A woman of substantial flesh and skin — wide-hipped and round-busted, enticing him to seize the moment by the throat and wonder if she might fit smoothly into his Monday slot and complete his life: six women for the six days of the week. (Sunday was his day of rest.)

Monday. The first of his last two mornings on earth. (Countdown: four, three—) He read the Daily Observer. (He had a subscription.) The usual number of rapes, stabbings, and bodies bludgeoned beyond recognition. No other events caught his attention.

Tuesday. (—two, one. Change count.) And his thirtieth birthday. In the Daily Observer he read about a suicide of a former FBI informant who had infiltrated AAMM, the African American Men’s Movement, a black nationalist and quasi-paramilitary organization, at the bureau’s urging and with its support. He was survived by no one, and, though the article included no photograph, Lincoln had experienced nothing in his thirty years like the jolt he received from the man’s name. Lincoln Jefferson Lincoln. His twin brother.

But before that, on that first last morning, the elevator doors wrapped him in steel gray and swept him down to the granite lobby. He stepped out of the building into a noisy collision of speech, shouts, and whistles: the sounds of the city. The sky was clear, the sun hot. Nothing but people, concrete, and steel in every direction. The wind shoved his back as he walked, but his pace grew slower with every step, metal-heavy sun burning down on his head. He touched his face and felt hot rubber. Melting.

Glory’s stories and visions had spread like hot dirt over everything in his life. In his childhood, he would sit before the fireplace while Glory was in the kitchen, reading the Bible forward and backward through the red hate of his blood. She would enter the room and smile a broad glow of contentment. Seat herself before the fireplace. He would retire to his room, where he spent long hours of contemplation, jotting down ideas in a diary. Going there to know there, he started to write at length about everything that stabbed at him, recording every microscopic detail, for he wanted to expand the possible and unravel Glory’s mystery. Steal the sacred fire and see inside his own life.

He had spent his adult years trying to verify the facts of Glory’s crime but found no newspaper articles, no police reports, no witnesses. What was his father’s name? — his birth certificate listed J. Christ —and where was his twin, Lincoln Jefferson Lincoln? A nameless father and a brother who existed only in name. Death was the starting point, but dead niggers tell no tales.

The day after Glory killed Lincoln’s father, she discovered that she was several weeks pregnant with twins. She also learned that she had money in the bank, and plenty of it. (Insurance?) I was blessed with a triple miracle, she said. I wanted to share my good fortune with other colored folks. I put yo brother up for adoption. Then I moved from the third floor of that ole rundown building where we was living and into this good house in this good black neighborhood.