Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

WHERE EVERY SOLDIER tugged home a thick, brick-heavy album of snapshots proof positive that he and his buddies were true swinging dicks, John brought back only a few photos, all black-and-whites touched up for color, like the posters of jazz singers fronting the nightclubs on Church Street. Lucifer’s favorite, the one he held now in his hand, previously angled in the corner of his bedroom mirror, where it so angered his wife: John arcing for a dive into an ocean, arms thrown back birdlike (winged flight) in peculiar light — light full of years — suspended for an infinity.

Lucifer returned the photograph to his wallet, a secret deposit that only John could clarify and claim. He gazed steadily at a patch of night in the train window — earth and sky folded in darkness — until the darkness revealed a long line of trees like dancers at John’s Recovery Room, and a scatter of swift-flying swallows in the sky, their wings folded in the moonlight. He followed them as they swirled then flushed into Tar Lake. He watched the city blink and drift and wink and glitter and sink away. He longed for sleep but his mind was like the train, a rocking blue-steel cradle.

John ain’t called.

What?

As the Lord is my witness, John done a lot of evil things but he never once missed a call.

Yesterday, he had been convinced that John’s blood had cooled. Now it had flared up again. His disappointment mounted to anger against himself. Watch him, Pappa Simmons said. Watch yo brother. Be his keeper. He startin to ramble. And he can get inside of anything, even if it has a fence around it. He had arrived at a splendidly clear understanding of the problem that engaged him.

Lucifer had packed light, a single bag. ( Travel light, Pappa Simmons liked to say. Travel-bound, Pappa Simmons and Georgiana never needed more than what their tackle box could hold.) Dodged Sheila’s point-blank questions.

How are you gonna help John? You know as well as I do, whether it be God or the devil, his spirit ain’t never seen no rest.

He’s my brother.

John. John’s just an excuse.

An excuse for what?

And stole away. With a firm and sure step, he took the path that led to Union Station — the great concourse of steel and stones, the soaring arches, train whistles arching and echoing — twice in as many days. Many years ago, he had followed John to war and now he was following John again, destination New York. Perhaps further.

HE SQUEEZED THE WHITE LETTER in his shocked hand and carried word to Pappa Simmons and Inez. John been drafted.

Pappa Simmons stood with his hat in his hands trying to catch the words. Inez ran from the room, her yellow face wet with failure.

John slapped Lucifer on the back. Let’s go get drunk. Celebrate.

The high wind that carried you flylike into the shit began at Fort Dix, the downstate holding station only minutes away from Miss Beulah’s Decatur. There, you yellow-waited and waded through cornfields, pondering the steel-blue actuality of war.

Mister Buster Brown Mister Buster Brown

Don’t let nobody turn you around.

Then they sent you eight hundred miles away for basic and airborne training to Fort Campbell, set on a forest-covered and brick-shadowed hill — great sweeps of pine poked the skies; Christmas, you chopped down a tree and shipped it to Sheila by train — surrounded by thick underbrush and swamps, huge water oaks with gnarled roots reaching for the salt shore. (You felt and tasted salt, but you didn’t recognize this water as ocean.) By day, you learned to ride wheezing wind, your body breathing easy. And fireflies blinked points of light in the night-darkened forest — a firefight, only quiet, noiseless. Then they boarded you on a train — black earth sprawled outside the window, place folded into place, the train a continuous loop of image and motion — headed for California. From your angle at the window, seeing inward, tree-covered and snowcapped, and later another state, clouds like frozen smoke above brown-skinned mountains. Each ridge a fist, running knuckles and joints. Blood began moving inside you. These mountains were made by the Lord. They showed his hand, every brown finger and thick knuckle of it. Foothills rolled with scattered balls of bushes. Bushes pale green, almost silver. Later, the flare-lit ridges of more mountains. Then the mountains themselves, still and white. A second ridge of gray-veiled mountains, the afterimage, the negative. Night also revealed the first palm tree you ever witnessed, dark-wrapped. So this must be California. Houses shoulder to shoulder. Out the left train window, skeletal frames of new houses under construction, desalination plants. And out the right train window, a million lights flickering through a rolling valley in the shadow of a brown stone monster. Fresh morning brought fresh light. Fresh red-colored sun. Green tufts on brown-bodied mountains. Green cemeteries. Palm trees with trunks thick as elephant legs, swaying slightly, their bladed leaves scraping the air. High streets like vertical statues. And a streetcar, a slow movement of color going up a hill. You spent one night in Port Chicago — you saw ocean (fish billowed in slow motion beneath the water) but never got to touch it — then they shipped you off by early dawn drizzle. You pushed off for shores of another world.

THE WAVE CURLS and throws you down with a dash on green beach like a trash heap before miter-shaped mountains. Ground that is terra firma one minute, dirt, mud, or water the next. Jungles slow and green as turtles. Manhigh elephant grass — rolling patterns of water that shift and never settle — corralled off by half-submerged bamboo fences. Brown grass lined with the delicate shadows of barbed wire. Motionless heat, the sun falls, lead rain.

Here, everyone is vulnerable to blood. Flies smell through the flak down to the flesh. Sir Charles knows his shit. A ready-made nightmare in black pajamas. Sneaky too. Contaminate your C rations with black leeches. Or crawl up your unaware asshole — this Oriental suppository — a confirmed cholera kill. And beware of Mamma-san, her clit curled like a scorpion’s tail.

Here, distances change, thanks to the trickery of mountains and plains. Faraway things seem close and what’s close seems faraway. Time dense and real. Once you are short, you begin to see yourself as from a distance, like standing at the depot and waving at yourself on the train; you think in blocks of time no longer than a day, enter its passage on the improvised calendar scratched into the side of your helmet.

It hit you like that. You step from your bunker, all sense of time having left. Or you hear a mortar round whistling in. You jump up, snatch your rifle, dash into your flak jacket. You run for the bunker and jump. Sarge taps you on the shoulder. Go back to sleep, he says.

HUMPING. The legs doomed to muscular habit, carried by gravity and the sheer weight of sameness, for a body in motion tends to stay in motion, your lungs range wastes of air, and you move with erect urgency, on your way to meet a woman, your eye on the sparrow, the hairs of your body arched, wired to the landscape, running hot messages to the legs, advance a moment, only to wheel back in the shadows, your light quick bones, your eyes swollen to the world, both watcher and watched, body thrusting blindly through the jungle greens, and as the winds veer, you do also, running like a night-bound bird from beneath the sun’s touch, heat adding fifty pounds to your back, so you drive on like sharp steel, holding to life and breath, wet earth sinking beneath your rhythmic boots, a musical shuttle, your hungry stomach, a bellying canvas, echoing emptiness, hollow pools of mud, but the jungle unfurls new shades of green, the rustling tissue of the leaves, fluttering with a distinct texture, sweat darkens your skins, salt fragrance, the wait-a-minute vines fasten your ankles, the waist-high bush ever-ready to deal a low blow, limbs scratch your face and neck, but your skin soaks in the blood and sweat, staying your powers, this wet heat, your sweat cold and singing on your skin, don’t fall asleep now, put your back into it, haul a heap of memories, smothered chicken, sweet potato pie, a brew, your queen-sized bed, all the sweet pussy you had there, creepy sweat, making the helmet crawl on your head, white light changing, the horizon sharpens, the jungle again, shade out of sunshine, and you roll the great hull of your chest, oscillating your body like a gull, smooth sailing, steady motionless wings, the mountains now, flapping up there in the wind, ever-shifting movements of the whole body, twisting, wringing out blood that stinks like brass, barbed wire veins aching in a knot, but the legs are king, untouched in the eye of the storm, relaxed in silence, they smell the jump ahead, keep them in motion or freeze up mannequin-like, so your breathing speeds, your pulse quickens, pulled like a tide through the day, and in the white wake, a force stretches inside the marrow of your bones, a new sweat breaks over you like a crashing wave, emptying your mind, the drift of it everything, heat and image fade, drawing the fatigue out, peeling away dead flesh, old skin, bringing the second wind, you burn clean, blow skin, all of your muscles filling out, accomplishing the last few feet, your body feeling the dark set, fixed past motion, past color. Enough for today.