Jeffery Allen - Rails Under My Back

By day, you and Red would missile-pitch hot dogs — smothered with heat-seeking mustard — into stadium crowds. Now, that Satchel, Beulah said, he could make a ball walk, make it slow down to a crawl, and his curves were so smooth his fingers leaked oil. By night, catch sparkling lightning bugs. Fireflies you called them, for the fires glowed in the night with secret treasure. You would cut out the fuzzy sticky yellow lights from the thorax and store them shining in dull-glassed mason jars.

Once lived a nigga named Zoom, Red said. The fastest nigga on earth. So quick that he could beat his reflection in a mirror. Could catch his own farts in a bottle befo the poot escaped his butt and the air got funky. That’s the end of my tale. Ain’t no mo. Bang yo mamma til my dick get sore.

Who taught you that lie? you asked. Uncle John?

My secret to tell. Noah pissed and the water fell. The world ain’t flat. The world ain’t round. It’s just one strip up and down.

THE CHURCH ROCKED. Soul-saving song. You and Red dropped into a split, then rocked back into position and grabbed imaginary microphones.

Michael row the boat ashore. Hallelujah!

Michael don’t wet yo draws no more. Hallelujah!

Sister help to trim the sail. Hallelujah!

Sister don’t forget to cut yo toenails. Hallelujah!

Jordan River is deep and wide. Hallelujah!

Pussy and dick on the other side. Hallelujah!

Red spit into the collection plate and passed the plate to you.

The spit watched you like a silver eye.

Spit! Red whispered.

No, you said.

Chicken, Red said.

No I ain’t. Jus don’t want to that’s all. You tucked the collection plate under the wooden pew like a commode.

The choir sang dimensions. Cotton Rivers climbed the piano and Cleveland Sparrow mounted the organ. On wings of words, dead souls floated up above the podium, ascended, like sky divers. Tongue-tied angels flapped humming wings in the rafters. Two forks of sermon catapulted you from the hard wooden pew into the heavens. You saw God at work.

WHO WANTS TO GO inside the spaceship? Red said. He slapped the old refrigerator, earthbound and rusting in a glass-choked alley. A shock of red hair escaped beneath the visor of a red baseball cap jammed onto the back of his head. The visor pointed right at the sun.

Not me.

Not me.

Not me.

What’s wrong? Scared?

Damn straight.

Let a man do a man’s job.

It took three of them pulling on the handle to get the door open and expose the brown insides.

Uh. You gon go in there? Stinks. Somebody took a dump.

Shut up, stupid. That ain’t no dukey. Mildew. Don’t you know nothing?

Don’t care what you say. I stays away from dukey. Hey, Abu, yo mamma been in there?

Nawl, yo greasy grandmamma.

Ain’t nobody said nuthin bout yo mamma. I don’t play that shit.

Shut up. I’m gon inside. Hatch—

Yeah.

You shut the door behind me.

Okay.

Red climbed inside, forcing his long body into a ball, the red cap still on his head.

Okay, shut the door.

You couldn’t, so Abu and the other boys all leaned their weight into it. Door shut, they waited.

Red, you aw ight?

Yeah. Now open the door.

They tried.

Open the door.

They tried.

I said open the door.

They tried.

Quit fuckin around. Open the door.

They tried and tried. Much breathing and sweating.

Look, I ain’t playin. Open the door.

We can’t.

Open the door.

They tried.

Open the door.

They tried.

Open the door.

They tried. Then it came, the entire door breaking away like ice.

Red sat there, curled, not even trying to get out, the red cap wet with sweat. It would take you years to dilute the memory (never forget) of the tight twisted face under the baseball cap. The die was cast: this face Red would carry for the rest of his life.

JESUS’S CONICAL HEAD OF RED HAIR rose above the steering wheel of his car, sun on the evening horizon. Uncle John’s surprise. Jesus hadn’t asked for it since he would ask nothing of anybody, and Uncle John hadn’t promised it, all he said, Hatch, I’ll get you one too; he never did — a Frankenstein monster (a butchered white Volkswagen Rabbit) that Spokesman had pieced together with junk from Uncle John’s Funky Four Corners Auto Shop. The muffler tied up under the chassis like a broke-dick dog.

You got to park it on level ground, Uncle John said. He filled the tank the same way he’d filled Gracie with his raging wine. The emergency brake don’t work. Park it on level ground or it might roll away.

The two of you, you and Jesus, Hatch and Red, loved to take it white-smoking through the hollow roar of the interstate — heard above the cracking of desiccated leather — bumps on the highway shaking laughter out of him, out of you. Drive all the way to Decatur — black cows dotting the landscape, farm quiet wrapped around you — zooming past farm boys in muscle cars and state police armed with chain saws and ten-gallon Stetsons. And on into the white trash section of Kankakee. (But never to Beulah’s house itself. She pissed a fit whenever she saw Jesus.) Trailer homes propped up on concrete blocks. Rusted cars on deflated tires that had long forgotten motion. Look at them white motherfuckers! Can’t drive for shit! Slow down and flash nigga grins at old ladies.

HUSH, Sheila said. John, don’t start that stuff bout how you don’t celebrate Christmas.

Why not? Uncle John said.

Hush.

Why not? And, Hatch, I’m surprised at you. Sposed to be a man of the Book. Any fool who read the Bible know that Christ ain’t born today. Ain’t that right, Gracie?

Gracie showed no reaction, as if she hadn’t heard the question.

Pagan holiday, Uncle John said.

It’s only pagan if you pagan, you said.

What? Uncle John said.

Only if you believe in pagan things. Know that you are pagan.

What? Uncle John said. Hatch, thought you was smarter than that. He meant it; you gathered that from the look in his eyes. I expect more.

I know, you said.

Well, if you know, why you celebrate Christmas? Uncle John’s fire hadn’t cooled.

Tradition.

Tradition? You mean—

Nawl, that ain’t what I mean. You trembled at the sound of your own loud voice. Damn. I just shouted at Uncle John.

Why you yellin at folks? Porsha said.

Who asked you? you said.

Boy, Porsha said, respect your elders.

Who asked you?

Both of yall be quiet, Sheila said. This is sposed to be a family get-together.

The family talked family things. (Holidays always helped the family’s memory enlarge.) Time hung like leaden weights. Would Jesus appear? The family thinking it, not saying it, cause nothing is hardest which treads on somebody else’s toes. No one had seen him in almost a month, since Thanksgiving, the scorched form of his body imprinted on Gracie’s couch, her kitchen chair. His presence lay on Gracie’s house — yes Gracie’s house, the house that Uncle John had bought her, the home that he lost — thick and black. But his termite absence had eaten into the carved wooden armrests of her couch and chairs.

Black Christmas. Snowless. Nipping frost. You and Red to build snowmen (always two snowmen cause one never seemed enough) with pointed icicle dicks. Christmas Eve, Santa’s secret sled parked outside Gracie’s sleeping house. You and Red wait for the clock to strike midnight, kneel beneath the tall sparkling tree that smelled of pine and artificial frost and unwrap present after present.

Jesus would come. You knew it. Definite proof lived in the muscles, the secret blood.