Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

It did not take him long to find a bar. He entered to a red carpet stained in places. The bar was filled with a fashionable crowd who blew opaque smoke and white laughter into mustard-colored walls. He found a table before two narrow windows overlooking the square. Hot-looking brilliant clouds swelled beyond the glass. He winked. A waitress watched him with eyes of shocking blue. She smiled with blood-smeared lips.

What can I get you?

He told her. She got it.

He could hear the clear ringing sound of wheels drawn close to the curb. He turned his glass around in his hand. Bubbles rose from its depths. He sunk back with collapsed shoulders. He had spent the entire afternoon searching for the right gift for Sheila. Far beneath feeling, it rested like a sunken treasure at the bottom of his pocket. Painly obtained, easily forgotten.

He emptied his glass at a gulp. Waitress, another.

He looked out into the fading sun and saw two reflections of the waitress going from table to table, drink to drink. Outside shade and inside light made mirrors of the windows. It was getting late. He reached for his glass. Brown, round, and empty: a bird’s nest. Ah, he had forgotten. The liquor had flown out of the glass and into his belly. And hatched. He could feel young life moving through his body. He rose. His shadow remained seated. He gave his shadow a moment to get it together. His vision contracted the two waitresses in one. My check, please. The waitress scratched on a pad with a beak-sharp pencil. He paid his bill. Slipped a tip into the waitress’s flapping soiled apron. He smiled his best smile. She had attended him with the soft and careful movements of a nurse.

Thank you, sir.

You are quite welcome.

Have a pleasant evening.

The same.

With that, he turned to the door. The knob reached out to shake his hand. Come again.

I will. Holding the knob in his hand, he turned once more to the waitress. Then he went out, the sun dropping behind him. A belt of shade gradually began to rein in the day. The ark of his head rocked unsteadily on the mountain of his neck. He took his breath backwards. He directed his steps back to Union Station, his shadow crawling along beside him. The streets looked unfamiliar, though he had walked them dozens of times. The sidewalk thick with people in evening colors hurrying in all directions. Rush hour. He looked at every couple as they passed. Watched every moving figure for some gesture, some form, some trace of Sheila. Seeing him, pedestrians turned to look at each other. Cars hissed on the wet street. (Had it rained?) Their movement made him aware of his own. Thoughts of Sheila walked in the open beside him. He found himself in front of the bar.

He tried again. He entered the station of Sheila’s body on this street, at that corner, through this facade, and under that grate.

THE SQUARE QUIETENED, the stores emptied one by one. The light from the streetlamps managed to create a dim, fragmentary illusion. He turned a corner. The sidewalk glimmered like powdered light. Sparse traffic washed past. Taillights red-danced up ahead. The bar blinked in again.

He turned another quiet corner.

WHEN SHEILA MADE IT HOME, Lucifer was waiting for her, his eyes in the exact same spot where she last saw them that morning.

I gotta meet John at the train station. He’s going to Washington.

About the war?

Yes.

Short notice.

Well, they jus told John and he jus told me.

You gon skip work today?

I already called in. A sick day.

Jus like that?

Well — He thought about it. It’s no big deal. It really isn’t. I jus want to see John off.

I hope you’re not going.

He looked at her.

Twice he’d left her. First, to run off to the war. He was one of the first niggers over there. But they didn’t make him go. John went and he followed. Yes, he was carried to Asia on the foolish winds of John’s draft. He might follow that fool John anywhere. Brothers are brothers. And years later, he returned to the war — four trips to New York or Washington, four that seemed like one, beads strung together, a necklace of the big city’s bright lights — searching for what he had lost. Might he leave again? She cut off this possibility, snapped the beads, ground them to powder. That’s why, each day, she mixed Go and Stay Powders in his morning coffee.

Where’s Hatch? she asked.

Upstairs in his room.

Hatch!

No, don’t call him.

He’s sposed to be out with Elsa.

Don’t call him. Lucifer took a half-step forward, as if he had trouble recognizing her. He smeared a light kiss on her cheek. I bought you a lil something. He held a small box out to her. I bought it at the Underground.

The Underground?

Yes.

How can you even shop there? Sheila had lost herself the one time she shopped there. Ugly black walls that — rumor had it — were one-way glass and that concealed surveillance cameras and robotic eyes. Each shopper’s voice roared a seashell’s echo. Yes, it was the deepness that bothered her. Like being inside a big well. The elevators glass buckets drawing up lakes of people. Every floor (“level”) a marble square of tiles awash with people, merging into eddies and disengaging into new thick paths, varied schools of colorful fish. Babies sucked on the Aqua-Lungs of their pacifiers. Sucked the air thin. The world rushed and swam. She elbowed her way into an elevator. Pushed the up button. The elevator went down in one long rumbling roar. She burst from the open doors, a bull into the ring. Took five flights of escalators, riding their light free-running whine. Rode up into sunlight and oxygen.

I went there for you.

She took the box. Unwrapped it with all the enthusiasm her fingers could muster. A yellow bird rested in a nest of white cotton.

You like it?

Is it my birthstone?

I don’t know. But the man said that it’s a precious stone.

A Jew will say anything.

You don’t like it?

She said nothing.

They had these gems on sale. Emerald. The deeper the green, the better the stone. Brazilian. Don’t you like it? Lucifer did not move. Stood there watching her, waiting for an answer, breathing. The moist air of his breathing carried her. John, Lucifer, and Dallas heavy-hauled Beulah’s black steamer trunks — seventeen trunks, yes, recall them, seventeen — down two flights of stairs, loading two trunks at a time into John’s red Eldorado, one in the red open trunk mouth (trunk for trunk) and the other canoe-fashion on the roof. Seven trips to Union Station, and another seven trips to carry Beulah’s twenty-seven boxes (how could the small T Street apartment have held so much? where had Beulah hidden it all?), the Eldorado stuffed so full that only John could squeeze inside it, the stacked boxes causing the red roof to sag above his head, the car to creak along. (Christ, Beulah. You gon wreck my ride.) Beulah’s departure left a free space which John and Lucifer quickly filled, and the four of them, the two sisters and the two brothers, transformed the closet-small apartment into nuptial chambers. Gracie and John would spend time in the red Eldorado, while Lucifer would touch Sheila behind the hanging white sheet.

Looking up, she caught his eyes in the light of her own. It had taken him what, seven, eight years to save up enough money to buy her a wedding ring, seven, eight years to replace the gold wedding band as he had vowed shortly after they married. Of course I do. Help me put it on.

He took the necklace. It hung between his admirable fingers, the bird gold-swinging. Navigational fingers which steered her heart. He always touched her with cool fingers — maybe he soaked them in ice water — that went hot. He touched her now, as he had in the one long-ago instant.