Man Gone Down (7 page)

“He considers this for a second.
‘Nah.'
He traces his swollen cheek with a fingertip.
‘Fuck 'em.'
He passes me the rum. I drink and hand it back. ‘We gotta make this quick and messy.' He gives me a snort, then takes it back.
‘Fuck,'
he says again, but more like a bark. He sings,
‘What's a boy to do? What's a boy to do?'
The back door opens again. We hear boys' voices. Angry. Moblike. I thumb back at the boys who are approaching us. I tell him that the jig's up. He smirks.
‘C'mon, man.'
He finishes the pint and smirks again. He throws the bottle into the hedges.

“
‘Where'd you get the drinks, Gav?'
He opens another beer. Most of the party has emptied out into the yard. We're surrounded by angry boys. They look up at both of us, but they yell at Gavin.
‘Where's the beer?'
He doesn't answer. He sips at his new tall boy.
‘Asshole!'
one from behind shouts. They have us outnumbered thirty to two, but they're tentative. Gavin finishes the beer and drops the empty in their midst.
‘Look, Gav,'
one tries to appear reasonable.
‘Just give the beer back.'
Gavin touches his chest and whimpers in mock distress. He
raises his voice an octave.
‘Gentlemen. Are you accusing me of stealing?'
He pulls out another beer. A roar goes up in the crowd. They pull him down from behind. He lands on his back. Everyone goes silent. They back off, scared of their violence. In classes we've taken with them, they've read Emerson and Thoreau. Some of their parents have told me stories about marching with King, campaigning for Bobby Kennedy, going to jail. The children of the latest enlightenment watch as Gavin comes to.”

“
'You shouldn't have taken the beer.'
Some nod in agreement. Gavin stands slowly. He holds his hand up to me to assure me he's okay. One kid tries to implicate me. Asking,
‘What were you doing?'
They all ponder the question, but they don't press it. They knew better than to attack a black kid, not because of what might happen to me, but what would happen to them. And they haven't completely reconciled the gap between black man myth and reality.

“Gavin fakes a punch and the whole mob flinches. He laughs. He looks at me and gestures at them with his thumb. He winks. They're angry again. But suddenly he's gone—pushing his way through the crowd. They grab him. Thirty boys hoist him over their heads. He's still laughing as they take him inside. I break through the hedges and make my way to the sloping front lawn. They're gonna kill him for stealing their beer. They've got him on the porch. His coat's gone. They throw him down ten stairs and he rolls into the gutter. I run down the lawn. I see him, skinny, freckled, semiconscious on Heartbreak Hill. I see the arc that's brought him to that moment: the boat that brought his grandfather from Cavan, the docks where he welded and riveted the hulls of the great mercantile ships. I see his father, a young man, running up the hill and Gavin, a young boy, watching him fail. Then today, his father's fist in his freckled face. Gavin has always been my best friend. The mob descends the stairs.

“I try to get him up and he pukes on himself. I turn to face the mob, ten feet above me on the mansion's porch. The children of doctors and lawyers, liberal WASPs and Jews, well-educated teens preparing to go to Harvard and Stanford. They want to kill the poor Irish
boy because he stole their beer. Gavin is my best friend. We rescue each other from our screaming harridan single moms. We steal liquor together and hide in parks, looking at the stars, sharing stories and drink. I square up and raise my fists.
‘Move!'
someone yells.
‘Don't be a fucking loser!'
I don't move. Sally's on the porch, too. I look up at her—try to catch her eyes. I do. She rolls them and looks off across the street far above my head. Gavin stirs behind me. He spits. ‘Dude.' I stay in my stance.
‘What?'
I don't look, but I can tell he's trying to get up.
‘Run, dude. You're gonna lose.'
I hear him go down again.
‘You're going to lose terribly.'”

The waiter drops off the check. I take it, and before he can leave I put down my twenty.

“Change?”

“No thanks.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you,” she says. “We should really get together when everyone is back.” I nod while sliding to the edge of the banquette. “Here.” She pushes a card across the table. I pick it up. It's heavy stock—linen. In pale blue it says:

Delilah Trent-Usher
Fine Artist

Delilah.
I think I only think it. But I suppose, at least, my lips move. She reaches for my arm, smiling, as though she can barely contain a laugh. One eye
is
much larger than the other when she opens them wide like this.

“You're not finished.”

“With what?”

“What happened?” I don't say anything. “Thirty against one. Your lone friend down and out—what happened?”

The waiter counts his few tips at the bar while yapping at the bartender, who's washing something in a low sink. On the monitor, migrant
farmers and sharecroppers are on parade. Porkpie's leading them, strumming hard, singing, “Yeah, yeah.”

“The cops came.”

“They broke it up?”

“I kicked the car. They took us in.”

She smiles. She shakes her head, slowly, sucks her teeth, like some sex and maternal hybrid.

“So you were a bad boy, huh.”

Gavin's mom had told me earlier that year not to bring him home drunk anymore. Even the cops had heckled him.
“Your buddy stinks, Sammy.”
I wonder where Gavin is now—where he'd been calling from.

She knocks on the table. “Are you there?”

“No. We weren't bad.”

She pats the table as if to say, “Sure.” She's figured me out again. She picks up the swizzle stick. Her hand looks like a pincer. She holds the stirrer as though she's about to tack me to the seat back. The singer walks off a porch full of damaged people and heads back to the crossroads. His voice howls. Something sounds wrong. He hits the note, and it seems to be a lament, but it's a lament without sorrow.

“I'm getting tired,” she says.

Outside the traffic on Smith Street is thinner.

“Well, I guess I'll be seeing you.”

“I'll walk you home.”

“Thank you.” She does a mock curtsy. “Such a gentleman.” She winks. Perhaps her way of inviting me to do ungentlemanly things to her. She stretches her tiny two-martini body and rubs her back against the wall of the old factory.

We walk deeper into Brooklyn, down under the Ninth Street El, under the BQE, where phantomlike shapes push shopping carts filled with debris or hide in the shadows of the steel and concrete columns, toward the old warehouses that line the waterfront. She's
quiet. Perhaps it's the booze. Perhaps she's taking in the shapes and shadows along the way, giving them sharper form, animating them with purpose—a future sketch or painting. Perhaps she has nothing to say. We turn west before the projects and into the bright light of the Battery Tunnel. The opening wriggles in the wave of heat and exhaust.

Brooklyn is not the Brooklyn I imagined while in Boston, or Manhattan, or even Brooklyn. I've seen the supertankers coming in and out of the harbor through the Verrazano Straits, but I don't remember them ever docking. I've seen the cranes from Atlantic Avenue, idle, and followed their line south, here, to Red Hook, where the dead warehouses sit. And then somehow without machines or hands, the containers get lined up in the shipyards. It's as if the ports are still thriving and the longshoremen are busy with their hooks. A ship a quarter mile long passes an island with a scraggly sapling, its roots thirsty in the sand or bare upon granite piles.

Her street is cobbled. It's like a residential oasis in a desert of dead trade. The oaks and birches are thick with leaves. An air conditioner hums and rattles somewhere behind them. An older man sits on his stoop. She stops in front of a narrow townhouse.

“This is it.”

She starts to the stoop and turns. She closes her eyes and tilts back her head—waiting for a summer breeze. It doesn't come. She waves. “Bye.” She comes back to me. She wants a kiss goodnight. I bend for her and give her my cheek. She rubs her cheek against mine and says bye again, too loudly in my ear. I step back. She ascends the stairs, finds her keys, unlocks the door, and disappears.

There are ghosts on the street tonight. There's a giant moon in the eastern sky, low and orange. It throws light on the asphalt, light and shadows of tree leaves and telephone wires. My father ran out on us when he was the age I am now, but he didn't have the heart to just go. First he went to the couch, then to the Ramada, and only after a
decade of coming in and out of my life did he finally allow himself to completely disappear. Then he returned—again—for my wedding and stood with me and the minister and Gavin behind what was left of an old farmhouse, the stone foundation wall. I hadn't seen him in six years and in that time he'd lost his hair, his teeth, and I thought any claim to me as a son.

I gave Claire my mother's ring, a white gold band with the world's smallest diamond. And her face fell like I'd just broken her heart, but then the smile came—long, trembling. I remember being quiet, staying quiet, waiting for her to speak, but she didn't. She kept looking from her ringed finger to me—back and forth.

She wore ivory. It took place at Edith's in a clearing, just before the rosehips and the dunes. It was five thirty and an August storm was rolling north up the coast. I could hear thunder booming from Rhode Island. Edith gave her daughter away. Claire's veil whipped about her head in the wind. Above us seabirds squawked and flew inland as the clouds rolled out—charcoal and billowy. I looked out at the congregation, my family on one side, hers on the other. We read our vows and we kissed and the clouds burst. After the rain, a double rainbow appeared with one foot in the little guery pond and the other out in Buzzards Bay. In the receiving line people commented—as though their observations were original—on the auspicious beginnings of our union. We shook hands with people. We hugged people. And Claire seemed to be truly happy—raindrops or tears on the end of her swooping nose, unblinking green eyes. Her cheeks were like two suns at magic hour—what the day was fading into. Double rainbows: double rosy suns. Her grandfather was the only one who shot straight.

“I think I gave you silver.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Twelve or sixteen settings. You'll see soon enough.”

“Thank you, grandpa.”

“You know, he'd said, taking in her cheeks or the rainbows behind. It's going to be an awfully rough road to hoe.”

Claire read when he died. “Little Gidding”—the fifth movement. She'd announced in the pulpit of the old barn church, and the congregation had smiled and nodded in approval, “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from . . .” She read it with lock-jawed precision. I had typed it out for her the night before on bond paper and left it sitting beside her coffee and grapefruit that morning. “Every poem an epitaph. And any action / Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat / Or to an illegible stone: and this is where we start.” When we sang “Jerusalem,” I couldn't help but think we were each the last of our lines.

Smith Street is empty except for the ghosts and the moon and one woman who walks toward me unaware, phone to her ear, talking loudly. She's buzzed and mocking someone on the other end about her choice in men. Ten feet away she finally sees me. She readjusts the phone. She smiles. “Hey,” she says, as though we know each other. “Nothing,” she says into the phone. “Just someone outside here. I'm walking home.”

A car passes and Marley floats from the open windows—
“No, woman, no cry”
—more ghosts. I scroll through things in my head. Memories. Images out of sync with song. “We die with the dying: / See, they depart, and we go with them. / We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them.” My father, not dead, but toothless and struggling for language. Struggling, perhaps, even for the force, the feeling, the idea, that drives the word. When her grandfather lay in bed in the ICU dying so far from England, so far from anything that was familiar to him, the last thing he saw was my face. His breaths were slowing. He looked at me. He closed his eyes and clutched the gurney rail as though summoning the strength to battle the guardians of memory. He sang: “In the middle of the ocean there grows a green tree . . .” He cried one tear—spare and poignant and easy to miss. He inhaled sharply—a whooshing vortex sound marking
his emersion into history—drawing him in as though his words went first, then thought, then memory. The ninety-year stoic, how had he managed to hold on to even that much—weeping—lost nobility or nobility revealed? He died without exhaling.

I remember my mother, not dying, but always—her fear. I remember how lost her up-south drawl sounded. I remember her slaps, ice cubes and liquor, her stories: the orphaned children in Virginia—the half- and quarter-breeds—the unrecognizable human mélange: the line of Ham; the line of Brown. I was the one who'd given Claire the poem, because she didn't know what to say.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

And so in blessings, and so in song, and so in bottles and beatings. And so in absence and death, they pass themselves on to me, like they were torches ablaze but now seemingly without heat, without light—perhaps only a history of fire—a symbol of that which was once warm and bright and useful. My mother, ashes in the urn waiting to be spread.