Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

We were goin to see Beulah, John said.

Lucifer couldn’t recall ever taking the train to see Beulah. No. We were going to Washington.

Washington?

For the demonstration.

Right. Right.

Why you takin the train? Lucifer said. Ain’t you a plane man?

What’s wrong, can’t this old cocksman learn some new tricks, some new shakes of the dick?

They both laughed. The vibrations bounced off John’s spectacles, red balls. Lucifer felt a shocking surge and fall of blood. The red tail of some animal — like something that was always around, a live vine spiraling around a dead tree — curved hidden around the next corner.

Shit, man we should open us a church.

Yeah. You know them reverends gettin them some.

Cash money.

Nappy pussy.

Sure you don’t wanna go?

Lucifer thought about five years ago. Let’s find us some cooze, John said. Lucifer could hear the gin sloshing in his brother’s beer-barrel chest. He looked at John’s suitcase. Tulip-shaped locks. Wish I could. If I had—

John answered before Lucifer could finish. Sorry you can’t.

Well.

Happy trails.

Lucifer and John embraced in a tight knot. John didn’t seem to want to let go.

A GREEN BREEZE slipped beneath the curtain. On a green day like this word had arrived (Lula Mae speaking through a clipped Western Union letter because the T Street apartment had no phone) that R.L. — he was my only brother, as Sheila is my only sister — had died in a car crash in California. Beulah stood brushing her hair before the open window— Pappa Simmons loved to comb his black, Indian hair before a full-length mirror, feeling slices of wind push through the comb’s teeth, saying, By God, you’re a handsome son of a bitch —while Sheila guarded bubbling pots on the stove — she never could cook for shit — and Gracie enjoyed a passage from her Bible (the specific verse memory also hid), when the message arrived. Beulah read the letter to herself, her lips working silently, then stuffed it in her bosom.

Gracie opened her album to two photographs — she could never connect them, the R.L. in the photos separate from the R.L. in her memory and the hearsay that had become part of her memory of R.L. The first showed him sitting at a round table in a smoky room, playing cards with a group of other jacketed men. He gazes directly into the camera, expressionless, with the confidence of one who doesn’t need to strut his good looks. The black-and-white photo couldn’t capture his green eyes. And the second photo, so cracked and faded that the colors had started to bleed, R.L. standing in broad winging daylight, riding boots with spurs like sparkling stars. Well, they used to sparkle when the photo was new, free of the grease of hands and age. Chaps. Denim shirt and leather vest. A lasso looped around one shoulder. A Stetson, white and creased like a dumpling. And white gloves.

What kind of cowboy is that? Hatch asked. The toddler pushed his fingertips over the white gloves as if to rub away the color.

A real cowboy, Gracie said. I can testify to that.

Yeah, Sheila said. You remember back home in Houston how he was always sneakin Daddy Larry’s broken-down horse out of the barn and ridin it to town, causin all that devilment.

Gnawed steps leading up to the barn where Daddy Larry kept his one bright horse, skinny as he was, a long room with hooks and hanging collars and traces and hames and plowlines and ranked shelves where Daddy Larry stored kerosene and where his wife Ivory Beach — don’t call her my mother, never that, step or otherwise — kept her mason jars filled with applesauce and preserves and molasses. And if she had her way, these same jars would keep the murdered flesh of her husband’s three children — Sheila, me, and R.L. — pickled and brined, until she served his cherished seed with his Sunday supper.

What kind of horse he ride? Hatch asked. I don’t see no horse. Where his horse at?

He wasn’t no devil, Gracie said.

Sheila looked at her. I didn’t say he was. Did anybody hear me call him a devil? She searched the other faces in the room for support.

I heard you, Gracie said.

You know Sam and Dave and Nap was always puttin him up to something.

Gracie considered the truth of her sister’s statement. Sam was the oldest of the bunch, uncle to his three nephews, who were first cousins. Dave the oldest nephew and close to his uncle in age, Nap next in line, and R.L. the youngest, wet behind the ears and eager to prove himself to his older kin.

They didn’t have a bit of sense, Sheila said. She shook her cloudy drink.

Gracie considered it. Never thought he’d die. Die like that. On some highway in California.

R.L.’s death refused to yield to her powers. He never visited her in dreams, only spied on her through the keyhole from the other dimension. So she never knew what killed him. But her first kiss with John — the shock of his lips — carried her back, her first kiss in the shadows of John’s new car, a red Edsel or Eldorado — what did she know about cars? — a replica of the instrument of R.L.’s death.

I don’t see why he wanna go out there in the first place, Beulah says. What business a nigga got being there.

R.L. made it his business, Gracie says.

Why don’t yall hush, Sheila says. Hush.

You know they don’t want us down there.

Who cares what they want.

Those crackers out there lynched him. Probably was waitin for him at the bus station.

Hush, Beulah. Hush.

No one could afford the train ticket West to attend R.L.’s funeral. R.L.’s wife sent a single letter (translated through Robert Lee Junior, their seven-year-old son) which said he’d been buried in … Beulah had stuffed that letter in her bosom too.

It was too much fo them white folks, Beulah said. A black cowboy with some white-lookin Indian woman from Brazil.

Hush, Sheila said. You know that R.L. was killed in a car accident. You know he liked to drive wild.

That’s what those white folks said. Can’t no cracka stand to see a black man wit no white woman. And that black man speakin Latin too.

Portuguese, Porsha said. The girl blinked. People in Brazil speak Portuguese.

Beulah, you don’t know what you talkin bout. Gracie shoved the words in Beulah’s face. R.L. died in California. He weren’t in no South.

Anything south of Canada is the—

That’s not right, Porsha said. Geography is my best subject.

Anyway, Gracie put down her plate of pig’s feet, how R.L. even know bout Brazil?

I don’t know, Lula Mae said. He sent me jus that one letter. Them cowboy friends in California told him bout it.

California? Porsha said. California on the other coast. West. The Pacific, not the—

Where the letter?

Beulah said nothing.

See, they gots lots of cowboys down there in the pampers.

Pampas? You mean—

That’s what I said.

Aunt Beulah, Porsha said. Beg yo pardon. Ain’t no pampas in Brazil. Daughter, close yo mouth, Sheila said. What I tell you bout talkin grown?

Yeah. Go geography somebody else.

Hush, Sheila said. You know ain’t nobody killed nobody.

And I bet they didn’t kill Nap either?

Hush.

Down there in that Houston jail.

Hush. I don’t want to argue with you.

Shit, Dave said. You know how white folks is. Jealous.

You said that right.

R.L. famous all over California.

Yeah. Rodeo man.

Say he could rassle a steer by his balls.

And ride a horse —

What you know bout it? Who tellin it?