Ride Around Shining (26 page)

“Any of those your peoples?” Calyph asked. I think he was getting impatient for the appearance of something that fit my forgeries.

I shook my head. “I might've caddied for some of them,” I ventured. “They're probably dead now.”

He looked into an open garage as we passed, as though expecting to see the body of an old man laid out on the oil-stained concrete.

What he had or hadn't done with Odette that far-off morning had become, by that point, a sort of permanent uncertainty. I was less certain of his guilt than I'd been when I put the spear to his chest. It's not like I thought him above adultery, but looking down at the cloud floor somewhere over the Dakotas, it occurred to me that if he was innocent, he'd be incapable of telling me so. For Odette to be in his house at all in that thin, gray hour was such a breach of his every code, such a counter to the arrogant uprightness of his every projection of himself, that he'd be every bit as guilty about just having her there as he would about the act itself. Sometimes I thought: She came to call, and he let her come, but when she came, he changed his mind. I imagined her calling him up, on some pretext that in five seconds gave way to the news that the Pharaoh would not marry her. She needed an ear, she would say, or a shoulder, and he knew he would have to supply too that third thing she need not mention—but how could he not let her come?

The slip would have made him seem so small to himself that it'd be preferable to pretend to have gone through with the infidelity and have his measure of guilty fuckery, because to have come so low without the stained trophy of sex to show for it would have been worse yet. I mean, maybe they did, surely they did; the Pharaoh sure thought he had something to avenge. My heart flops around for a way to justify the man, for any sloppy rationalization at all. Still, if they had, I tell myself it must have been long before I arrived, or in some other corner of the house, because I remembered the smell of Shida's room, and the room I found Calyph sleeping in, it did not smell that way; it was pristine.

A little while after we passed the lakeshore houses we came finally into Walworth. We were halfway through before we were there at all. When I guided him onto our street, I saw our mythical fall come to life for Calyph in the rusted frames and sagging bumpers of every old Buick on the block. In the yard of a house with a different Packers flag in each of its basement windows, a mastiff was butting a Hot Wheels around in circles in the driveway as a kid sat watching primly from a still trike.

My aunt's house is at the end of a gravel lane, with an old orchard on one side, and its thin trees looked just gnarled and ghostly enough that it might've still been possible for Calyph to believe that some resplendent ruin awaited us. But it was just a clean little brown house, and the only object in decay was the basketball hoop.

Calyph turned the engine off and we sat for a bit in silence.

“So this is how some fallen-ass white people live?” he asked finally.

“Don't ask them about that,” I said. “They won't know what you're talking about.”

He looked at me warily, but that was the best explanation I could give him, and I opened my door and stepped out onto the drive. My aunt came around the side of the house, wearing a kerchief and a loud fall jacket.

“I was just doing some raking,” she said brusquely, extending Calyph a small, work-softened hand. “I'm Rose Lauren.” When he gave his name she nodded shortly, and repeated it back to him without a hitch. Then she hugged me for exactly as long as it took her to tighten her arms one time. We went inside, and she held the door for Calyph with barely a glance. She took him so much in stride I wondered if she was paying attention.

My aunt's is a small-roomed house, brown inside and out, and of course I was looking at it through Calyph's eyes. The kitchen used to smell like dry cat food, but that was gone now, though the cats still remained, lazing on chairs and warming the place. We went from room to room and had a little tour. In the living room Calyph bent to look at the framed picture of my uncle with Robin Yount, and one of the cats leapt across the room to collapse on his foot. He lifted the little thing with one hand and set it backward over his shoulder with an abstracted air. When we went into my old room and I saw my aunt had returned it to its childhood condition, old basketball posters and all, I could only stare into the cat's depthless eyes in mortification.

“J. R. Rider, huh? Wassup, Sheed,” Calyph said to the wall.

“You shouldn't have, Rose,” I said, and she and Calyph turned to one another and laughed.

“Have you lived here long?” he asked her.

“I've lived here all my life,” she said.

In the funeral parlor
I was disappointed that my family snuck so few looks at Calyph. But, then, I hadn't accounted for how proud we were, and I'd forgotten how in the presence of death petty curiosities seem to have a spiritual penalty. For his part, he did what he could to blend in, wearing a suit so austere he'd have had to actually scuff it up to make its fineness any less apparent. If people did look, their gazes seemed to settle without great change in expression on me. I'd been away awhile.

When I approached the casket and saw the still, wax face of my grandmother, and the crushed-paper look of her throat, I had an unbidden memory of her sitting at a glass table, peeling clementines and cussing out the ones with obstinate rinds. Returning to the parlor from this memory, I didn't know what to do with my hands at all, and longed for a ritual, any ritual. I knelt and made the sign of the cross and felt my paralysis loosen under the rote dignity of these formal gestures. I didn't believe in them, but with my hands on the rail I thought of all the proud, old, and corrupted cultures that ritualized their grief fervently and often, and how weak all the rest of us were next to them.

As we stood outside, preparing to make the processional, the first breaks in the family formality appeared. People shook hands in a relieved way, and I felt that mingled sense of warmth and danger at being among those who might be reverting to their natural selves. My uncle Ron, who is not an uncle at all, was the first to come over. He'd been among the pallbearers, and seemed enlivened by the task.

“Honored to have you,” he said, shaking both our hands. He asked where I'd been living, and repeated “all the way from Orry-gone” twice in an impressed voice.

“Have I seen you before, sir?” he asked Calyph. “Did you go to Carolina?”

“I did.”

“I thought so. I'm a Badger man, and you gave it to us pretty good in the tournament a few years back.”

“I guess we did,” Calyph said.

“Even Krakkenhofer couldn't guard you. Devin Harris, though—what a player he was! Did you know he's in the NBA now?”

“Is he.”

“New Jersey Nets! What are you doing these days?” Uncle Ron's face shone with the relish of this questioning, and he put his hand on the crown of his houndstooth hat as though to protect it from a stray gust.

“Just trying to get my knee right.”

“Well, you'll always have the college days,” my uncle said loudly. Tamping down his hat in a sort of bow, he turned suddenly away.

By the time we settled around the grave site, my family looked familiar at last. With their dark suits and restrained, formalized manners, they could have been almost anyone—even who I'd said they were. But it was a cold day, and the topcoats had got buried beneath parkas, and the severe coiffure beneath ragged knit hats. One of my great-uncles shivered defiantly in his funeral wear until he was taken aside and induced to pull an ancient Bucks headband out of his pocket with trembling hands. When he put it on he looked a fitting patriarch, and though I could read nothing in Calyph's face, I think it was clear we'd never been heirs to anything but spirit and dirt.

Then I looked up and saw a man coming toward us from the middle of the yard. His gray face was weathered, but I could not say his age. A watch chain descended glimmering from his pocket, and his shoes, muddied already at their edges from the earth between the graves, shone at their tops as though they'd just been released from the rag. His face was proud and stern, and he was coming forward in long strides, staring ahead of him all the time.

I thought he might blow right through us, all our huddled circle, and go right to grave's edge. He moved with that kind of scorn, but as he reached the first mourners he stopped abruptly. He was directly across the circle from me and it was impossible to say if he was staring at me or just looking out with strange intensity at all he saw. I would've liked to look away. His was not a calm, wise face; it was not full of easy wisdom nor august wryness nor good humor; it was like no face of age I'd seen. It was full of challenge and vitality. He looked like he wanted to seize something and drink it and throw down the glass. Sometimes I have seen old men, men who have made a standard for what a full life means and achieved it, and even if their standards are laughable and their lives are all wrong, their eyes are yet full of hot, intolerable light. Smug, limited men, driving terrible cars, checking their gaudy watches, commanding steak for lunch and eating it like they would jam their knife into the very eye of death, the fulfillment pours off them anyhow, like liquid gold. This man, he looked like those men, and yet he was still not satisfied. He had a look of hunger, of wishing even now for more life, and of barely suppressed rage at having to do with less. As he looked at me—and he must have been looking at me, I felt them all around me then, all the family I had made—I felt the familiar, scouring feeling of being looked at by someone at once younger and older than myself. That feeling is pure humility, and I'd been given it by Calyph and Antonia and all the betters whose memories tease me even now with casual recollections of a dry, ageless laugh or an immaculate hand flash, filling me with the white exultant jealousy I love so well it feels like love itself. Then the man pulled the watch from his pocket and flipped it open, and the bittersweet look on his face intensified, as though he were delighting in something seen in the dial, and at the same time cursing, how late, how late, and then he stepped to the side and was gone and I was alone again with my real family, who were here and there bashfully holding hands in their mittens and gloves, and I put my hands into my empty pockets, wishing I had brought something ratty of my own to wear.

After the funeral
we went back to my aunt's for a meal. There was a honey ham and there were meatballs with grape jelly and brandy old-fashioneds, and since the meal was eaten in the afternoon it felt like a holiday, an informal one where the uncles were allowed to bring a can of beer to the table. Afterward there were even presents. It was the birthday of a thin, black-haired boy who must have been a distant cousin and who liked to lift up his shirt and suck in his stomach until his ribs bulged out.

“Not at the table, Travis—my God!” his mother said.

“I'm from the Sudan,” the boy said proudly. He was just young enough not to be punished for this in public and probably he knew it.

“Travis is six today,” his mother said, directing a shamed look halfway down the spread, near Calyph's plate. “He doesn't know better.”

“I'm seven,” Travis said.

“He's six,” his mother repeated desperately. “If he was seven we'd have to shoot him.”

Then the presents were over, and people were slipping away. As the grid of cars filling the drive loosened, we heard a light rhythmic thudding from outside, interspersed every few seconds with a heavier sound.

The noise brought Travis's head up from where he'd been dragging the edges of his plate for cake frosting. “I want to play,” he said, to no one in particular, and then his empty chair was rocking slightly side-to-side and his mother was calling without confidence for him to come back.

Outside, a couple of neighborhood boys were shooting at the rim with an old ball. Travis was hounding them and chasing the rebounds. When Calyph followed me out, they all just stopped. Even the birthday boy stood awed. It was as though Calyph had only now become a six-nine black man who wore a gravely resplendent suit and whose hands moved too quickly even when he was doing something so minute as reaching for his napkin.

One of the boys shot a self-conscious air ball and they all ran after it ravenously. Someone else snatched it up and passed it to Calyph. He turned the ball in his hands, feeling the worn grain, then passed it softly back.

Immediately it came back to him.

“Can you dunk?” one of the boys asked.

“Look at his leg,” his friend whispered loudly. “It's messed up.”

“Shoot,” Travis urged. “Shoot.”

Calyph looked down at the ball. Time had smoothed it and drained it of its color, and the leather was peeling a little in places. It was the kind of ball that looked like it ought to have been held by a man in spectacles and tiny shorts in an old photograph.

He lifted the ball for a second, and gave a grimace of a smile. Then he put it down on his hip. The hoop was maybe twenty feet away. The kids were staring at him, waiting. We all waited, to see if he would shoot. I looked into his face and saw that his eyes were narrow and inward-seeing. What if he missed? I think we all considered the ball's spinning, soundless drop through the tattered net an inevitable conclusion. But he was injured, and though his new contract was still good, he could have been traded any day to a team that might have tried to get him to retire for cap relief; at any time his place could have been taken by younger men who smiled benignly for the fans and made no trouble, who might in a single game have declared a talent that rendered his own second-rate and expendable. And if he did miss, who knew the judgment that would come from my skeletal cousin from the Sudan?

Finally he lifted the ball. Then he put his other arm over his face, covering his eyes with the crook of his elbow. Careless and blind, he heaved the thing like a baseball toward the backboard. It hit with a tremendous crash, slipped through the net on the carom, and hit my cousin on the side of the head. Instantly he began to cry.