Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

Don’t worry. John put his hand in the small of her back, drew her in close. She watched his brown eyes, dark, wide, bottomless, two thick high piles of leaves. Maybe we could—

But she already knew the answer before he had fully shaped the question. Maybe we could have another one. To make up for the one we lost, Jesus. She slipped her tongue in his mouth. His met hers, and they held one another, hands and tongues exploring.

He drew back. Come on, now. You know I could stay here all day. But I can’t. I gotta meet Lucifer. His brown eyes twinkled a warning, as they had done that morning more than thirty years ago — time is the seed — when she had answered his first knock on her door, when she had opened it — in those days you could open to a stranger without first looking through the cautious peephole, open without a second thought, as if the stranger had muttered magic words under his breath — and saw him standing there, the brim of his hat in the circle of his fingers, and his smooth thin girl-lips parting, blowing a bubble of words, Miss Gracie, I jus thought you might need some help.

Gracie, Lula Mae says, why take the package when you can have the man too?

Maybe all I want is his package, you say. Maybe I don’t want the man.

He’s a nice boy.

I don’t care. I don’t wanna —

Why you always gotta be so stubborn? Sheila says.

Who asked you? You my sister. You ain’t my mamma.

Well, Lula Mae says. I is yo mamma and I think you should —

Jus had to get in yo two cents. Your voice directed at Sheila. Gracie directs her. Next time, save it fo church.

Come on, now. I gotta meet Lucifer.

I heard you the first time.

John cut a smile, avoiding an argument. He’s at—

That figured. Before all the years and blood, he used to say, I gotta meet Dallas. His old running buddy, run off into a dust and dirt cloud of memory, his funky unwashed pea coat billowing out from his shoulder blades like a racing car’s parachute. John and Dallas: used to be hard to know where one began and the other left off. Why don’t you say what you mean?

What do I mean?

I have to meet Lucifer at Union Station cause I have to catch a train to Washington and march and check on the war.

Then to New York. John kept his grin.

New York?

Meet some old army buddies. You know. Spin. Spokesman.

New York.

The Big Apple.

Why they call it that?

The Big Apple? The early bird gets the worm. One hand on the banister’s polished oak globe, John broadened his grin. Didn’t even have to use his eyes. Kept them on a leash. Years ago, they had chased down her heart. He blew her a kiss, airborne, floating, light wings, landing, settling on her face. Be back Friday, he said. I’ll call you tonight. Lock up good while I’m gone.

Be careful, she said. She shut the door.

GRACIE LAY ALERT AS A DOG, every muscle live and attentive. She rubbed them, tingling. Narrow bars of sunlight fell across the bed— gray and yellow mix green —where, moments before, John had lain rolled into the sheets, motionless, face against the wall. His body fit easily into the worn groove of their mattress. Earlier, the stiff wetness of his penis inside her— Baby, yo pussy so tight; you got quicksand in there? — then it resting like a beached whale across his belly. A warm breeze troubled the curtain. Heat started in her face and worked down to her stomach and legs. She drifted.

The boat stopped and dawdled in the hot sun. She stood in the bow, knees bent and arms thrown back. Two pairs of red footprints walked off into the horizon.

Yes, I can swim. Water breathing in waves. Washing over skin. Wet fingers kneading the body’s clay. Moving out into depths, stabbing down into icy blackness. Then cutting up, breaking the surface, rivulets of sand brown-running from nostrils. Setting back to water, to wash clean. Yes, I can swim. The cutting machetes of my strokes. Slicing depths into icy blackness. Breaking away. Again.

Birds sang in full chorus. The mashed-in place on the pillow like the space inside a catcher’s mitt, and the hollow of his body pressed in the sheets. Though he was gone, was not in touching distance, she could still hear his breathing, feel it, nearer to her than her own. With the first rays of sunlight, he always left her. The first white light before breakfast. This had been their arrangement for the last ten years or more, since the day he tried to throw her out the bedroom window. Memory wouldn’t carry her that far back — Houston hanging like cobwebs in her mind, sun that seeds deep in famine soil, the shoving arms of the ‘Sippi — only the carrying storm of John’s words before the open window, Bitch, you wanna leave?

Hollow too in her chest where she expected pleasure, but she was determined not to let herself go back through the tunnel of years already passed, slip through mental cracks. Once, John had wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. Now. Still, it was the aloneness that filled her with love.

HER FINGERS SLID INTO THE HOLLOW created by his absent body. The year he went away to war, she immersed herself in the darkness behind her closed eyes. Her fingers rooted between the thin leaves of her Bible. She fingered him and he returned the favor, visited her in dreams, his hair loose and black and streaming to the floor like a black gown about his body. She folded herself small and got right down in the foxhole with him. But she couldn’t speak — had she left her mouth back home? — couldn’t jingle the key of her tongue.

Some of them niggas was crazy.

Yeah. Too crazy. Musta been born and raised in the jets.

They wax somebody, then flip that Ace of Spades on they fohead.

Like a black leaf.

See, those boys over there were babies.

Yeah, they called me old man. Imagine that.

But yo brother woulda done real good.

Yeah. R.L. woulda done real good.

His green eyes woulda hid him in the jungle real good.

Waiting, listening, a world in the moment, and then he was back with her, key turning in the door.

JOHN THREW HIS HEAD BACK, holding his liquor in his mouth. Shut his eyes. Worked the liquor around behind his shut teeth. Swallowed. Placed his glass quietly on the table. Removed his spectacles. Lifted them to his mouth and blew ancient dust. He cleaned the spectacles on the tablecloth, rubbing hard — the same way he rubbed his marbles as a boy, polishing them for hours, raising them glinting to his eyes, then polishing them some more with one of Pappa Simmons’s old rags — glancing up now and then at Lucifer. He fit the glasses firmly on his face.

Twin reflections of Lucifer’s face floated on the lenses. Lucifer leaned in slightly for a closer look. Had he shaved before leaving the house? He couldn’t remember. Each morning, he shaved off his red widow’s peak, and it grew back during the night. The sky flared through the tree leaves outside the window. Spilled bright light across the table’s polished surface. The wood glowed banked fire upon the lenses. Lucifer’s twin reflections dissolved into rainbows.

John’s drink threw a reflection on the tablecloth, a red-orange oval. He aimed the spectacles on a group of suits and ties who passed by the window — two magnifying glasses channeling sun heat to burn through the briefcases. Stormy Monday, he said, the lump of his Adam’s apple curling the words from his throat.

Yeah, Lucifer said. Another day, another dollar. The sun hovered high and hot above Circle Boulevard, an avenue really, one long street ending at Union Station. But it was one of the city’s busiest. A neat expanse of cement, two shoals of parked cars on either side of an open channel of moving traffic, with skirts and suits wading through — floating flesh, their shadows hopping behind them — to reach stores, restaurants, hair salons, expensive shops, the bus terminal, and here, the Club Car Lounge at Union Station. Dark circles of sweat under suitcase-weighted arms. A hot day out there, the middle of spring with temperatures in the nineties. Spring imitating summer. And a hard summer wind winter-whining, pushing the window, buckling the glass in waves. Lucifer saw his reflection in the glass. Water-clear light-brown skin condensing on the flesh beneath. Often, gazing into a mirror, he could not tell if he was inside the mirror or inside himself.