Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

I heard a lot about you.

All of it is true.

There it is.

They had loaded their baggage into Spin’s BMW — the license plate read FNG, short for Fucking New Guy, Spin’s band — and rushed to the demonstration, changing out of their civilian clothes into their neatly kept uniforms.

So this is Chocolate City, John said.

Yeah, Spin said. Niggas melting in the sun.

Spokesman met them there. He was as Lucifer remembered him from the old days, face-wise at least. Doofus-lookin motherfucker. Dark and fat like a church deacon. His well-paying job at Symmes Electronics had put some flesh on him. His eyes — large and black — lent the illusion of size. And his teeth sharpened the illusion. Two front teeth, a black gap of space between them, like walrus tusks, crooked, jagged. And he was still wearing those heavy brown shoes of brokerage, the kind where the heels never wear out.

Lucifer’s feelings filled with light. He was part. John, Spokesman, and Spin were famous bloods once. (Perhaps they are famous still.) The Hairtrigger Boys. Drawn to trouble as much as to the trigger. Sharpshooters who ran night missions. Twenty-five years ago when Lucifer was in the shit, word wafted that the Hairtrigger Boys had returned to their base, mission-worn, and requested water, buckets and buckets of it. Jim, we was ready to swim. The lifers flew in three choppers that dropped three pails, trailing from three parachutes white in the night. With his buckknife, Spin opened the first pail. John and Spokesman — using his buckteeth — opened the others. White eyes, cold and paint-thick, watched them from the pails. Steaming vanilla ice cream! Son of a bitch. Spin removed his jungle-logged boots. Fuck those lifers! Spokesman and John removed theirs. Motherfuck them lifers! Spin hailed a starting distance. Spokesman and John followed suit. The three set off like javelins. Sailed through the night, straight, precise, arching high, then falling, falling, dead center. Swish! The Hairtrigger Boys stabbed and jabbed their boots in the ice-cream pails, stomping around, marching in place, cold-swishing. Singing. I don’t know but I been told. Artic pussy mighty cold. There it is.

And here he, Lucifer, was, with the three of them, the Hairtrigger Boys. He was part.

Uncle Sam led the demonstration, a poster replica — Day-Glo makeup, red lipstick, Pinocchio nose — who rose above the crowd on oak stilts, tooting a party bugle that sounded with the thick power of a foghorn. The vets followed Uncle Sam, all armed with serious frowns and heavy flags hard to keep steady in the wind. Spin walked point— he always did, if you believed John’s stories — his solid body swaying side to side, his voice carrying— If shit did not exist, man would invent it — and holding in the air like an extended tree limb.

Pulled by the full gravity of Spin’s presence and decorations, Lucifer displayed his most spirited parade step. Stiff flags snapped a rainbow of shadows. A spell of keen witness. Lucifer squinted against the day. The sun dropped yellow grenades, small sharp cones that exploded in pricking yellow heat and light. Spin’s head swam high in the air. Lucifer fell into space and floated. They marched, touching shoulders until the last. Medals and all, they made a tinkling circle around Washington.

When physicists locate a new particle, they start by giving it a new name, which helps them—

Lucifer was hardly listening. He could say the words just as easily as Spokesman, for Spokesman had left his dirty fingers on Lucifer’s memory.

— identify its properties more reliably and leads more easily to the identification of still newer particles.

Spokesman spoke in a light voice with fast words running together. No waits in his voice. Tryin to science you to death. He drove the mind into dislocation, a broken angle where it couldn’t hang on. The T Street Church Street Sixty-third Street days. Lil Bit’s Give and Take Pool Hall and Barbershop. Spokesman sat slouched down in the hard wooden chair, one leg folded over the other, scribbling something in his spiral notebook. Same way you saw him in the barber chair, pumped inches above the floor, head arched back and face working — cause Lil Bit allowed nobody to read or write while under his razor and clippers — brain calculating the volume of the room, how many shaved hair clumps it would take to fill this volume. Look, Spokesman liked to say, there a science to everything. He put science on the pool balls. Leaned over the table, working the cue stick between the crook of two fingers. Shutting one eye, then the other. Calculating angles and trajectories. Pulling his slide rule from his back pocket and measuring the green felt. Eight ball in the corner pocket. Crack! Rack em up, chump.

You’d see him talking to some fine lady on the corner, then scribbling something in his spiral notebook.

Nigga, what you doin? you’d ask.

I’m tryin to discover the simplest path between dick and pussy.

Naming is how science enlarges itself. Let’s get up early tomorrow and shoot some hoop.

You don’t wanna shoot no hoop wit me. You get hurt.

Nawl, you get hurt.

I’m gon play Nazi, you gon play Jew.

You feel that way, let’s play fo some sparklin stakes.

I don’t wanna bankrupt you.

The day’s last dregs mixed with the D.C. streetlights. Lucifer had never seen so many bums. Here, in the city, you see them in the bus stations, the train stations — in the old days, they used to sleep near the rusting tracks, get drunk and rest they heads on the rails — a hand stretched out on a downtown corner, unlike the beggars in New York, beggars who are choosers, who will watch you cold and blank, or wear a sign saying something like Sick and Not Saved: Give. They had entire camps, tents made from green plastic garbage bags. Cities within cities. Recall the one, maybe the city’s first, on the edge of Eddyland, only blocks from where John lived. Will our city shed the old image for a new one? Perhaps these green cities are rotten teeth waiting for us to fall asleep one night, then slip clean and quiet under our starched pillows. He saw a man wrapped up in greasy rags, crouched in the doorway of a building leaning like a worn heel. Another man in the next building, only curled, and one in the building after that, pacing back and forth against the cold. He gave them all the last of his change.

A cluster of lights hazed in the distance ahead of them.

Let’s go there, gentlemen.

John you can sniff out a bar from fifty kilometers.

A billow of distant music. Sure enough, a beer sign blinked, signaling their faces.

And I can hear the ringing of a register too.

Flash and cash.

And stash.

Well, good gentlemen, let’s get hammered.

They entered the bar, tramped in single file. A round table in the bar’s darkest corner looped them in. Spokesman bent down and moved his chair out twelve inches — he measured them with his eyes — in a spirit of gentle, uninterrupted abstraction.

Four of your best, sir. The good stuff.

So I been thinkin about startin my own business.

Spoke, what you know bout business?

More than you.

Spoke, John a businessman.

That I doubt.

Why?

You a businessman?

I understand the ignoble proclivities of the marketplace.

Hot damn.

He speakin cash.

Well, join me. Both of yall. Gon be plenty of money to spread around, money for everybody.

What kind of business?

Extermination.

What?

Killing—

Yeah, I’m gon call it the Black Widow Exterminating Company.

Lucifer felt he was inside an igloo. The frosted windows white-showed the world outside the bar. Alcohol-light voices lifted above the hum of outside traffic.