Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

He would drive her home every weekend, two hours away. He’s a real showpiece, Mamma would whisper.

Is that all you can ever say? Porsha said.

Okay, I’ll tell you what Beulah always told me. Don’t throw away dirty water until you have clean.

Porsha prepared dinner. Les Payne snapped his napkin taut and folded it across his knees. Cut and ate his food, knife and fork machine-clean and precise. Uncle John trained his loaded eyes on Les Payne’s face. (Porsha had made sure to invite him.) He never touched his fork.

Mamma talked.

I had the easiest time with Porsha. During the pregnancy, I mean. Lucifer got morning sickness. And he standin there in the delivery room, lookin like he bout to pass out. Doctor gave me a cesarian. But with Hatch? Mornin sickness. And he was always kicking. Seemed like with spiked heels. All the pain. I thought it was because I was old. But Beulah said, Sheila, it’s a boy. Yes. It was, too. Ten pounds, twenty-three inches. I thought I was gon die. And the doctor didn want to give me a cesarian. To this day I don’t know why. I thought I was gon die. Lucifer and John stayed in the waitin room. I told em, You better not pass out, tired as I am. And I told the doctor, yes I told him, Sew me up and leave a hole for my husband.

Uncle John raised his fork. Poked words into Les’s face: Them pretty boys got sugar in they blood.

THE CAMPUS PHOTOGRAPHER, Les used his lens like his mouth, an instrument of sweet talk. Baby, let me jus take one more shot of you. God, this lens don’t do no justice to your beauty. Can’t capture all that body. Stroked her breasts, her legs, her butt. You got a bad-ass body. Smokin. Man, wish I had a body like that. He showed some of her photographs (probably in boast) to a professional friend who called her in for a shoot. The photographer put a paper bag over her head— you could weather the insult for the two hundred in cash he’d paid you —and shot her in evening wear— ah, you flushed red with embarrassment, a glowing coal; you sat and the crinoline broke like cinders —short dresses, miniskirts, bikinis, and lingerie. The photographer lined up jobs for her, fashion layouts for black magazines and ads for local newspapers and catalogues. Les Payne had given her a career.

The career made her accept all of Les Payne’s excuses, the many hours he spent at the frat house — or so he claimed — with his frat brothers. Baby, it’s about unity. Togetherness. Brothers trying to get something in this world — batting his eyes the whole time. After all, he had branded the fraternity sign — Delta Sigma Pi — greasy and black on his biceps. Or had he carved it? What troubled her: He had acquired a name for prowess among the women at the university. Couldn’t go nowhere for him winkin at some woman or some coed grinning his name. She took all she could. She asked him, Who squeezin yo lemon?

What?

You heard me.

Baby, that was all in the past. I’m a new man now.

Where the old man you left behind?

He kissed her. Baby, I’m straight. The words rolled out of his mouth like smoke.

That night, she prepared for her weekend trip home. Gave him her apartment keys. He would stay and study, needed book time away from his frat brothers. She loaded up her bags and hit the road. Rode the bus as far as the city line, rolling columns of streetlamps. She exited the bus and caught the next one back to the university. Opened the door and caught Les Payne on a downstroke, doing it in her bed, the moonlight so bright that the two bodies shone yellow against the sheets.

She quit college after her freshman year. Moved back to the city. Found an apartment on South Shore Drive with a generous view of Tar Lake. Signed on with an agency. Things were looking up.

Hang-tailed, Les Payne came crawling back. Say, baby. Could you see your way clean? Wouldn’t leave her alone. Plead for hours on the phone. His mouth peeled off in pages. Send her cards. She gave him another chance. Her trust regained, the hang-tailed hound sneaked off for a bone.

It was time for a change, time to dust the broom, but she couldn’t drop him. He had put his flame in her. She sought Mamma’s advice. Between pauses of her raised teacup and the clink of its return to the saucer Mamma told her how to get rid of a boyfriend.

Daughter, write his name on an egg and toss it into the sea.

The sea? Ain’t no sea round here.

A river then. The waves will carry him away.

She drove — not the 280ZX but her first car, the spanking green Camaro bought with her new modeling dollars — to the Kankakee River. She tossed three eggs for insurance.

LOOKING BACK, she could see all the lovers from her life, singular yet source-same, like the pages of a book.

She rises on the pyramid of Uncle John’s back. The afternoon air dances under the trees. She can touch the leaves.

A lot of dogs get run over chasing after that stuff.

What stuff, Uncle John?

You know what stuff.

Sugar Smallhouse, the exception. Central Vocational High School, eleven, twelve, thirteen years ago. Like the school’s coolest dudes, Sugar liked to bop. Intricate steps, shuffling feet, twirls, twists and splits performed by two male partners, dressed in self-named zoot suits. Broad-brimmed Dobbs. Long-lapeled blazers. Bright silk ties against blinding white shirts. Diamond stickpin and matching cuff links. Baggy pants with high waists, held up by red suspenders. Two-toned patent-leather shoes. Hair slicked with Never Nap cream. Shiny conks with warp waves flowing back like ridges on a seashell. Sugar Smallhouse was the best dancer, could dance his head off — maybe it was the way he ended a step by removing his hat, then shaking it like a tambourine — and the cutest too. Jus a sucka for them light-skinned mens. I always been. Their first date, they danced so close that she could feel his heart heaving and crashing against her breasts. He said next to nothing. His rarity of words would last the length of their three-year relationship. She had messed with — kissing ( bustin slob they called it), touching ( feeling on ), grinding — a few boys, but he was the first she would let completely inside her. Pinch her nipples tightly erect. Finger her deep inside. Tug at her panties. Slide them over the curvature of her hips. Part her legs with cool hands, then something wet and cold on her burning pussy. She raised her head slightly, looking down, seeing his closed eyes, his tongue lapping like a dog, then pushing into her and her head falling back. He refused to believe he was the first. Where the blood? But she felt the pain of his slow, dry entry. He was forever grateful for her bodily gifts. If he had a penny, half of it was hers. Wise in love, he could never catch on with his studies, no matter how much she drilled him, and he graduated— remember the prom, Sugar in his black tux and you in your royal-blue taffeta dress, walking slowly and carefully, holding it up around your waist —only after falling to his knees before the principal, begging and crying. Please, sir. Please.

Get up, son. You’ll ruin your suit.

Off he went to the navy (radar training?) — and she to Freeport University — rather than work full-time in his father’s clothing store. They exchanged a few letters the first months.

You datin now?

Got to sometime, Uncle John.

Any of those niggas act a fool, you come see your Uncle John.

Yes, Uncle John.

You come see me. I’ll set them straight right and quick.

Deathrow was the closest she had come to Sugar Smallhouse — though he was darker, a quarter after midnight — to matching that feeling. Sugar was inside him, a secret astronaut directing his life, directing him back to the love she’d lost. If you dug deep enough beneath his hard exterior, you found many a kind bone. His life extended into hers, clusters of lines reaching out.