Man Gone Down (57 page)

I get brief glimpses of scenery—the sun at the west end of 125th Street, the warehouses of the South Bronx, the thick stream of cars going past my window. We make the expressway, but the bus stops and starts like we're still on the city streets. I have a quick hunger
pang and remember the candy bars. I take one out, start to open it, and feel the old woman watching me. I turn. Her eyes look sunken, and her breathing's rapid and shallow. She fidgets with her hat. I lean over to her.

“I'm sorry, are you okay?”

She nods weakly, not bothering to raise her head from the seat.

“Are you sure?”

She nods again and leans to me. “It's okay, baby,” she says slowly with a thick drawl. “I just have a touch of the sugars.”

I slide over to the aisle seat and offer her the Snickers. She looks at it, closes her eyes, and shakes her head slightly. I put it on the seat beside her.

“Sweetheart,” her voice brightens, but she keeps her head down. “I can't take this.”

“It's okay,” I point at my bag. “I have another.” Then I whisper, “I'm not really hungry—just trying to pass the time.”

“Thank you,” she exhales but still doesn't move. I must look worried because she nods and says, “Oh, I'll be fine now.”

I must doze off because when I look out the window again, there aren't any more buildings, only trees going by. We're moving quickly—no traffic, no city—now a break and a shore and the beginning of a bridge. We mount and I look west, up the twist of water. It must be a sharp bend up there, because even though we rise and cross, I can't see beyond the turn. So I forget about it and concentrate instead on the straight I can see—just beyond the obstructing bridge. I wonder what it was like one hundred, two hundred years ago. Who fished? Who drowned? What was it like to settle on these banks without the concrete and steel? Then, perhaps because of how the late light has cast the top of the dark water silver, I think of Pincus and his mustache—
the river as mustache.
I think the banks are moving inward, narrowing the water, but it's blackness on the border of my vision—a darkening, contracting scope. And I'm gone.

In my end is my beginning.
—
T. S. Eliot, “East Coker” V

I think I was thirteen. I don't remember the time of year, but it was mild—perhaps that's why it's so hard to place, a quick shot of atypical warmth in a cold season. I was coming home from some kind of practice, and my feet were wet and puckered from the sodden field.

I came in to find both of my parents at the kitchen table sitting over coffee. They weren't talking, but they weren't ignoring each other. It seemed almost peaceful, actually, the two of them looking down at the table or into their cups with quiet faces, like shy kids on a date. My mother poured more coffee for herself. My father gestured for me to come in and sit down as if it was his house, too. I put my bags down, but I stood.

“How are things?”

I looked to my mother for some kind of prompt. She nodded slightly but kept her head down. It had been three years since I'd seen him. I hadn't considered, until that moment, that perhaps they'd been in contact—talking about me. Things had been going well for Lila and me—as well as they ever had or would. We didn't talk much, but I was bringing home good grades and staying out of trouble—fulfilling my promise, I suppose. Sometimes I'd catch her watching me strangely, as if she didn't believe she was seeing what she saw. Other than that, she left me alone. She had found a decent job, and I'd gotten money together mowing lawns and such. She wasn't drinking
so much, and I'd yet to really start. The rent was current, and although she was three months behind on the electric, a debt she'd die with, we were well. I don't know why she let him in the door.

He sipped noisily at his coffee and tried again.

“How are things?”

I decided that being diffident would only make things drag, and I wanted him out of there.

“Fine.”

“How's schoolwork?”

“Fine.”

“So I've heard. So I've heard. What, were you at practice?”

“Yes.”

“How's that going?”

“Fine.”

He started nodding his head and smiling.

“Girls?”

“What about them?”

He wrinkled his brow and waved his hands in the air. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Too busy?”

“Perhaps.”

“Too young . . . you've thought about them?”

My mother got up and went to the sink. I watched her, trying to catch her eye, but she wouldn't look at me. I thought about knocking out the rest of his wobbly teeth, but I leaned against the wall instead.

“There aren't any girls.”

He leaned forward on his elbows and whispered with concern, “Boys?”

“The girls at school are rich and white, Dad.”

“And?”

“I'm not.”

He frowned at this and shot a cruel glance at the back of my mother's head.

“That's unfortunate.”

“Is it?”

“You're angry.”

“Am I?”

He tried to show me something by slowly gesturing in front of his face with his hands: the size and shape of his idea. He looked into the space between them.

“I believe . . . in a wider society . . . not
whiter,
a
wider
one.”

He leaned back in the chair, looked over to the kitchenette, where my mother was pretending to be busy. I couldn't watch him watch her, with a tender kind of intensity, as though she was broken and he wished he could fix her. I almost told him to stop, but he turned away, tapped a quick rhythm on the table with his fingers, and stared into my face in the same way.

“My father was a very close-minded man. I suppose he can't be blamed too much. His people, they were a strange bunch—proud, almost arrogant—free North Carolinians who'd been swindled out of their land and wandered, strangely enough, farther south to the swamps of north Florida. The next wave claimed they were Seminole—but really a mix of landless blacks and Apaches trained east from the desert.”

He patted his chest, still staring at me, and found his cigarettes.

“Smoke yet?”

I shook my head.

“Good. Don't. Anyway, he finally made it north, first to New York, then to Boston. He did odd jobs, put himself through school. And sometime when I was a boy, disappeared back into the swamps.”

He dragged deeply and kept staring at me, through the smoke, as though he cared. My mother came back with a covered stew pot in one hand and three bowls in the other. She set them down on the table.

My father opened the lid a crack. Steam rushed out. He held his head away until it passed, then he peeked in, sniffing. He lowered the lid and sat back, clasped his hands together, and then spread them apart.

“A
wider
society.”

*  *  *

I wake up and feel so calm and quiet that I don't think that I exist, so I take a few short, shallow breaths, and when I realize I haven't disappeared, I slow them down and let them deepen. There's a bump, and I remember where I am. The bus has cooled, and the sounds are comforting: the rumbling diesel and the big tires on the asphalt, the big broad shape through the wind. I sit up and look out the window. I can see across to the southbound side and the landscape beyond. The trees have pulled back from the highway. It's a big road here—four lanes each way.

I wonder where Lila and Thomas Strawberry are, and I shiver because I realize I left her urn by the river. Maybe it got taken out with the tide, too, taken home, or just became part of the broken beach.
“It's all right,”
I kind of sing to myself and stretch out in my seat, remember my bag, and reach out for it: It's still there. The woman across the aisle's still there, too. There's the empty candy wrapper on the seat beside her. She's looking out her own window. There isn't much for her to see: the cars below, the dark wall of trees, the occasional building, and the lights, of course—street lights along the highway. We're almost there. She moves her mouth slowly—maybe singing—mouthing something. I watch, try to read her lips, even place her drawl and impose it on the silent song—
“I feel like going on . . .”
It's what she seems to be saying—perhaps unconsciously. I know that song, at least in part.

I take a sip of water and the lone interior light surges. And it seems to remind the user to turn it off. I taste my breath when I swallow—rank with ash and coffee. I quietly open my gum. She grunts and turns. Her eyes are closed. She wasn't singing, just moving her jaws slowly as though she was still working on the peanuts from the candy. I see things about her that I hadn't noticed before. Such a strange-looking woman—gray and violet hair, puffy eyes with growths on her lids and cheeks, blotchy skin, a great, round, solid body. She looks like she's been on a lot of buses, up and down this highway and others. And I want to look at her a little more, but she grimaces, as though whatever it was that she'd been dreaming about suddenly turned on her.

I look out my side at the rush of the opposite traffic. We must be speeding, either that or holding up traffic in the far left lane for a mile back. There are poles with doubled lights running between the roads, and they flash against my window like a slow, soft strobe. And after each flash, between the black landscape and the hazy, charcoal blue sky, I catch the last of the day—a softly bending narrowing pink band. It gets dark early so fast in late August. I lean against the window and sing,
“I feel like going on . . .”
I barely know the song, so I just repeat that line a few times, changing the phrasing a little with each pass. Then I feel her watching me. I turn. She is. Even from across the dark aisle I can see that her eyes are jaundiced and rheumy. We just watch each other and the passing scenery behind. She exhales, long, and I can tell that she's had a taste of whiskey from a hidden nip. I expect the scent to jolt me toward either craving or revulsion, but there's only a brief hit of sweet, then it's gone.

“What's that you were singing?”

“I Feel Like Going On.”

“I don't know that one. What is it, gospel?”

“I think.”

“I don't know much about gospel, but I think I've always liked it when it's sang. It sneaks up on you, you know—sadness, joy, and what else?” She closes her eyes and shifts heavily to face the other way, turns to the front, but can't seem to get comfortable. She settles on a position not entirely to her liking and grimaces again.

We turn hard, almost banking, to the east, following the highway's twist north. I close my eyes: There are Lila and Thomas, the bridge and the harbor. They're still floating. I feel myself smile and feel the bus follow shallow arcs left and right. No sail, but I exhale anyway to give them a push. But then I shudder: The burnt pyre is actually returning—this way—into the mouth of the river. It passes under the bridge, and I lose them. I crane my neck to peer under, but it's too dark in there.

I gag, pant, snap forward, and open my eyes. I take some shallow breaths to make sure that I'm not drowning, then look across the aisle.
Her eyes are still closed. We turn again, west this time. The lights flash, the highway winds, and we follow. And though nothing seems to change—the evenly spaced turns and flashes—I know we're moving forward. North. We track Polaris, roughly, adjusting east and west. And there aren't any visible stars, just more electric spill, which keeps the road navigable, uniform—a safe, glowing haze—but it obscures the first order. I press my face against the cool glass and try to see forward. I can't. Even on a clear night, turning east and west, it would be there out the window and then not. I sit back. It doesn't matter; I know where it is: here. I see its trail: outside; that woman still moving somewhere and in: the makeshift, upriver skiff. And then, both—like a small wave that has caught light while folding over into darkness. I am that star, its beginning, an expanding, deepening ball of fire in the dark, and its end—the dark itself. And in that end is a beginning, its last breath, bright dust—interstellar drift, waiting to be informed by a larger hope and love, waiting to be reborn. My maker remembers me, remembers me well, and I move to that place I'm called.
Listen:
the prayer to me—
Quick, I am here.
And I swear I hear Lila's voice folded into mine:
I am coming
—whole or broken—I
am coming.

We keep moving, tracking residue—trace elements floating in the void. So real, assumed, or imagined, it is still there—the latter, perhaps, most important because it burns more brightly there—and that, I know, is real, consuming, sacred—wholly different from the burn of shame. And it leads me to other things I can really touch: my few friends, here and gone, my children, and my wife. It's what led her to me—she is that star, its end and its beginning. Its final breath, recollected, reformed. I can touch her face, trace its soft line, hold it in my hand and feel her pulse in her temples. And I don't care what it represents.
My Claire.
And unsung or not, I made a promise that
“I will be true
. . .” I love my wife. What else can I do? There's a break—no lights—then a bright flash from an overpass. Then it's dark again. And the bus stays dark, rolling through the dark, but it remains, a small feeling, not desperate, not bold, but present in a place I pray I never lose. And it hasn't anything to do with anyone other than me—here
and now. I'm coming back, or closer, I'm coming. I'm coming because I'm in love. Now I see her: the dark horizon, like a long, crooked mouth and the last rosy glow from off in the west. There's a flash of the highway lights across the bus, then another. The road ascends as we enter Providence.

We pull off 95 and stop on the west side of the station. The old woman stays in her seat, gives me another hurting look, and closes her eyes.
“Not yet for me,”
she mumbles. I take my bag and limp and creak down the aisle and steps.