Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

See yo belly.

I seen it befo.

Don’t be a fool. He the father of yo child. And he ask fo yo hand in marriage.

I don’t care if he ask fo my feet.

But that first time. Eyes flicking with sleep, she woke that morning, nightgown a twisted rope around her waist, to a blood-red sun in white sky, the marriage sheet on display. Them hilly-billies in Decatur hang theirs, Beulah said. Birds sharp as naked blades, flicking light. Yes, dog days summer in mid-June. The sun burning red then yellow then red, alternating waves. At that very moment, she knew, a baby baked in her stomach — she could feel it twist and tumble against the oven walls — while, now, these others were trying to crowd back in. Babies. Pushing their greedy faces in windows, belly-fat faces, these blood-hungry urchins. Babies. Line by line, waiting to snatch her out of the briefcased and Sunday-dressed crowd. Babies. Trying to crowd into her belly where they don’t belong.

Her first day in the city, she saw a beggar in the tunnel between Dearborn and State. He was unlike the other beggars she would come to meet, blind men who yellow-shoved their pencils in your face, musicians who snared you with the cheap strings of a blues guitar, and fresh-tongued men. Sistah, could you spare some lovin? No, he was different. He sat on a mouth-down (water outspilled) metal pail, the stump of his leg pointing like a cigar in her direction, tambourine-rattling his tin can — like those snuff cans down home — and said nothing. She kept her distance in case the brown coins should splatter. Going to work and returning from work each day, she saw him, the metal voice of his can a continual presence for months then years.

One day, he was gone. She boarded the train.

How much they payin you? Sheila asked.

Ten.

Ask for more. I get fifteen, twenty sometimes … Gracie?

Jus stay outa my business.

It black-shoved through the tunnel, shaking, rattling. Then rain clicked against the window. Tap dancing. She turned her face to the window. A baby watched her with a fist-tight face, the train trying to shake him loose, and him holding on with one iron-gripped claw, the other pounding against the glass. The train’s metal voice screamed, Halt! the steel wheels (so many mouths) slitting the rail’s throat. Dry blood pasted on the glass.

Once, John and Gracie drove down to Decatur to see Beulah. A baby stuck his face bright in the windshield (a cop’s flashlight) and nearly scared the wheel out of John’s hand. The car swerved off the road and into the bushes, branches whipping against the windows and doors, thudding rain. John squeezed all life out of the brakes, squealing. The car — red Eldorado? Cadillac? Park Avenue? Yellow cab? memory refused to speak — rocked to a halt. The world fell silent.

My Lord, John said. Gracie took his head into her arms. My Lord. What was that? Gracie could hold back no longer. She began. Told him all to tell.

THE RED ELDORADO was their private place. Away from the world, squeezed into the back seat. How you like my bed? John said. Theirs except when Dallas, Sam, Dave, and Lucifer (and Spokesman perhaps) invaded, took it over with a steamy blanket of talk.

Man those slopes over there was something else.

Prospectin for gold.

Buildin railroads.

Least they din’t finger none of yall gravy.

Yeah. They didn’t finger none of yall gravy.

The Hairtrigger Boys.

Cause we could shoot the golden hairs from the devil’s head.

Coulda been a sharpshooter myself.

Yeah. We coulda been snipers.

Sniper? Ha! That nigga wasn’t no sniper. Them lifers had him searchin fo gold.

But she knew how to look at John, a certain lowering of the head, and lifting of the eye. And John would shout, Yall niggas beat it! They stole feels and kisses from each other’s body and breath. Her breath rose and fell. At least three times a day, she spread the sails of her thighs for him. She kicked his tongue down from the roof of his mouth and made it learn every crevice of her body, from her nostrils, to her eardrums, from the indention at the back of her neck, to — and only his tongue could speak her secrets.

John screwed with his eyes open, perhaps afraid he’d miss something. She didn’t moan or wiggle around cause that made him come faster. And it might be another moon before he got hard again. Cause I don’t lust you, John said. That’s why it take me so long to get hard again. I want you. But I don’t lust you. Those first years, he always spilled his seed on her belly — that barren desert where nothing unwanted could grow — cause he could afford no chances, taking many already, giving up the well-paying window washer job in downtown Central (the Loop) and setting out on his first business venture, he and Dallas opening John’s Recovery Room. That’s some chump change they payin, he said.

Yeah, Dallas said, some chump change.

I’m gon get me a real piece of money.

ONE SUNDAY AFTER church, John and Lucifer — surely by then they had stopped attending service, had become the service, running missions with Reverend Tower to the dens of sin on Church Street, his bodyguards, Lucifer pulls down the pimps’ gold draws for the hard paddle of the reverend’s Bible, and John heaves them back up —decided to take Gracie and Sheila to visit their parents, Inez and George. The sisters understood the importance of the invitation, for such an invitation precedes proposition. Imagine Gracie’s surprise, Sheila waiting beside her on the trimmed lawn in front of the church and them chatting, small talk about the sermons and the new generation of young devils in Bible class, and John and Lucifer pulling up in the red Eldorado, then the gravity lifting from Sheila’s face, her mouth brightening, and Gracie thinking it was because Sheila felt she had Gracie in a trap, the woman had backslid right into Sheila’s righteous arms, then Sheila opening the back door of the car (Lucifer never was much on manners, chivalry) and getting in, Gracie thinking that Sheila would chaperon her, put her Beulah-like nose where it didn’t belong into Gracie’s dirty business jus because she had made that one mistake when she first came to the city, the Jack mistake, the Cookie mistake, made it cause she was young and naive and country — there’s always someone to point the finger of blame, old folks say; Never let yo right hand know what yo left hand is doing — Gracie thinking this, but seeing different, and finally knowing different, awakened at the sound of their noisy kiss.

Look at them two lovebirds, John said. He motioned to Lucifer and Sheila, brown eyes delighted. Gracie, come on here.

Gracie’s feet wouldn’t move.

Kiss done, Sheila kept her face turned, forward, staring directly out the windshield as if she could steer the car with her gaze alone. Gracie slid onto the front seat beside John. He clicked the engine and aimed the long nose of the car into the street. The car whirred along. Gracie spied on Sheila in the rearview mirror, hoping to catch some indication of emotion. Sheila’s face was expressionless, smooth stone. The entire trip, no one said anything, a curtain of silence falling before each of their faces, a block of silence— cause you felt it —heavy inside the car.

They parked in the shadows of the trees in Morgan Park, and walked over the dusty cobblestones that horse-hooved the sound of their clicking heels. John used his key to enter the house through the patio. George sat bent over the table before the Daily Chronicle —he never read the Defender, the black newspaper; its numerous spelling errors were an embarrassment to intelligent black readers and a boon to white — magnifying glass to eye. He looked up at her, eyes two marvelous globes, red-flecked and weakened by all the places he (and Inez) had traveled. (Travel is seeing, sharpness of notice.) They’d had a good life together. He was a retired blueprint worker for the Evanston Railroad, who had started out as a railroad dick right after the war. Nothing serious, he said, jus chasing turnstile jumpers, kicking off drunk white men from the suburbs, nothing serious like these cutthroat hoodlums today who slice you open just to see if your blood will run.