Eating Memories (19 page)

MAYDAY

MAYDAY

MAYDAY

“Eject,” Justin says as he turns around, expecting to see his RIO. Lieutenant Commander Harding is there instead.

“Eject?” the exec asks pleasantly.

“We were hit,” Justin says. Or were they? Or was that part of the test, too? He whirls around on his stool to stare out the plate glass window. Over the desert mountains streak the red dot-dash-dot of tracers. Chaff sparkles in the dark. From a desperate, evading plane, hot pink flares fall like garish beads from a broken necklace.

“Look into your coffee,” the exec says.

Justin looks. The inside of the cup is a green radar scope, and at twelve o’clock is a tight pattern of white blips. Fuzzy bogeys.

Woofers.

“What do you think they are?” the exec asks.

Justin is sweating now. In the back of his nostrils is the ghost of a stench, the smell of burning insulation. “I don’t know, sir. I just don’t know.”

“Look it up in your dictionary.”

Justin glances down. WEBSTER’ S COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY, the front of the book says. And below that is printed TOP SECRET.

It’s not the words which make him remember. It’s something else. Maybe the frigid blue of the executive officer’s gaze, maybe the wintry chatter in Justin’s own mind.

He remembers the numbers in the Heads-Up Display counting down below minimum controllable airspeed; the way the nose of the plane was struggling to dip.

Oh, he remembers. He remembers reaching down between his legs and pulling the loud handle; how the separation of the canopy unleashes a chaotic, battering wind.

He recalls the bone-jarring jerk, the way his speed jeans inflate against the G-forces. He remembers the fluttering sound of the deployed parachute above; the sight of the F-14 plummeting to the dark earth below.

And, almost peripherally, he notices that some sort of light is painting him blue. His parachute is blue. His palms are blue. He realizes that there is something cold at his shoulder.

Something very, very inquisitive.

“Oh, Jesus God!” Justin screams. He lurches up from the stool and runs to the window, where an F-14 is going down in flames and a woofer is snaring its slow-falling prey.

He launches his body through the window, shattering the paper-thin glass. There are shouts of alarm behind. Beyond the broken window, the air doesn’t have that scorched-metal smell of the central desert nor the sweat-sock, humid smell of the land near the Gulf. Instead, the atmosphere is blue and moist and January cool and suddenly Justin realizes beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond the blind faith of a fighter jock’s high confidence, that there are things he’s better off not knowing.

“Read me the book,” Harding says.

Justin looks down in his lap and gently strokes the balding head leaving imprints of his fingers in the skull. Clack, clack. Clack, clack. The interior of the bus is dim and the sound the carriage makes against the rails is soothing.

Smiling, Justin turns to the first page.

“Chapter One,” he reads.

With his other hand, Justin reaches into the executive officer’s unbuttoned blouse and runs his fingers along the ice castle of the breast, the hailstone of the nipple.

“Procedures on Encountering UFOs.”

The words are meaningless. Justin sees them and mouths them. The book seems to please Harding, though. The exec settles down and sighs with satisfaction.

On the seats around them sit the bus driver and the waitress and Ann, their eyes huge and dark with wonder, as though Justin is telling them the most interesting story.

Justin reads.

His mind is an albatross running over the snow, taking to the air on its clumsy, wide wings. The wind catches him and boosts him into the glowering clouds, where there are no hurtful missiles, no hot flak.

He looks up momentarily from his book to smile into the freezing rain of their gazes.

Author’s Note:
This was hubris
—
doing black male POV. I dared it for two reasons: Brazil rid me of many prejudices that white people in the U.S. normally possess; and working among many African Americans at the Dallas Morning News allowed me to see what I call “stupid white people tricks.” I was fortunate. Many of my Black friends were forthcoming about the scores of little hurts and unintentional insults they encounter day after day. They taught me lessons in race to which most whites are never privy.

I only hope that “Secret Language” is an honest look at racism Southern style and that I have not perpetuated one of those same tricks I disdain.

Because Robert had been raised up in the South he knew that if any little old white ladies existed within ten miles, they’d come over as soon as he moved in. They didn’t disappoint him. A day after he and Yuri were settled, the obligatory white ladies arrived, a pilgrimage of two spinster sisters with a pie. Robert liked them as soon as he saw them.

He admired the way they’d hid their surprise when he, and not a white man, had opened the door.

They hadn’t even glanced toward each other. Their smiles had flicked to high beam, and they had shone on him without flinching. To flinch would not have been ladylike.

They might have thought to themselves that it didn’t matter very much he was black. It wasn’t like he was a
real
neighbor.

Of course he invited them in, and Yuri, who wasn’t used to little old Southern white ladies, kept staring at them as if he wasn’t sure what they were doing there.

They came in like curious hounds, their noses pushed forward into all the nooks and crannies of the station. They smelled of lavender powder, and their conversation was as sweet and insubstantial as cotton candy.

“Isn’t
this
nice .
. .”

“So much like a real house . . .”

“’Course it wants for some curtains . . .”

“Oh, now, Ida. It’s a military installation. What would the Air Force be doing with chintz?”

And Robert fell in love.

It was his own past he’d fallen in love with, really. They were all the little old white Southern ladies he’d ever known.

And they were more. They were grass growing thick and summer green when he was eight years old, and Miss Sarah Riddles calling him from the mower to high tea of the iced sort. They were Mrs. Nelson fussing at his bare arms in the November chill and giving him a homemade chocolate chip cookie just to make him feel warm. All white Southern ladies thought little black boys were cute. For an intense, fleeting while they loved them the way they loved puppies and kittens.

Of course Robert was grown, and he wasn’t sure how elderly white ladies would feel about him now, except that he was certain they were a lot more comfortable knowing the Russian was in the room, too.

He straightened his tie, cleared his throat, and, careful not to slip into the accent of the black, poverty-stricken side of Alabama, asked them if they wouldn’t care to sit awhile.

* * *

God’s calling me. I wish he’d shut the fuck up. He’s got the voice of a complacent white man, the sort who puts mayonnaise on his hot dogs.

And just like a fat-assed white man, He sounds a little pissed that things aren’t going His way.

“Captain Strickland. I know you can hear me,” He keeps saying with that backyard-barbecue voice of His. God sounds like the kind of guy who you’d find on the porch, a long-handled fork in one hand, a beer in the other, and a plaid apron on that says HEAD COOK.

Only you look over on that divine gas grill and you’ll see all the steaks have little black fingers, little black toes.

Oh, Jesus, I’m scared.

* * *

When the sisters spoke, they leaned forward intimately, as if they were about to tell the most wonderful secret, and their hands made gentle patting motions in the air. The first time one of them touched Yuri on the arm, he seemed startled.

Robert noticed the Russian’s discomfort, and he was sure both the women had, too. At least the toucher, Miss Minnealetha, had to have seen it. She never missed a beat in her monologue, but she didn’t touch the Russian again.

Like all old white ladies, they talked a lot about cooking. Miss Ida allowed as how she might have put a smidgen too much sugar in the sweet potato pie.

“I’m sure it’s going to be tasty,” Robert said, speaking quickly so as to get a word in without interrupting one of them. Southerners, at least the ones who were raised right, never interrupted. “It looks too pretty to eat.”

The women sat down, but innate nosiness won out. Leaving Robert on the sofa as if he were the minor deity in charge of graciousness and the pie were a small tribute, they were on their feet again, peering blatantly at all the equipment.

“I think it came out a little lumpy,” Miss Minnealetha told him, eyeing the open blast door of the control room and the IBM computer console inside. When the old lady got close to the doorway, Robert noticed that Yuri shot nervously to his feet. The Russian was running the fingers of one hand through his crew-cut graying hair in an anxious grooming gesture more native to cats.

Miss Ida was staring out the window to the collector. “And it browned all uneven.”

Robert figured the way the women were bad-talking it, he had to be holding the best pie in the world.

“Is it on now?” Miss Ida wanted to know.

Robert put the pie on the table, straightened his tunic, and walked to the window. “Yes, ma’am. You can’t see anything, but you can sort of hear a low-level vibration. In fact, if you were using an electric oven, the energy that baked the pie came from this. We made the switch over yesterday.”

Miss Ida was giving him good, polite eye contact, but she had to lean back to do so. Her head was on a line with his shoulder. Her complexion was so perfect, so translucent, that it seemed artificial; and Robert figured that, if porcelain dolls could age, this is what they would look like.

“Minnealetha, come look,” Miss Ida said. “You can’t see a thing.”

Yuri had flung his squat body between Minnealetha and the door; but she’d apparently lost interest in that and was checking out the power gauges.

“The microwave energy the satellite sends is invisible,” Robert explained. “Just like your oven at home.” He liked the way the women were poking around the station. They studied it as a pair of pink-skinned white mice would study a new maze. And most of all he liked the polite way they looked at him while he explained things.

Miss Minnealetha finally came over and threw an uninterested glance out the window to the football-field-sized grid of cells. “Now, that’s a hundred-year-old recipe,” she told Robert as she turned away, “handed down by a Nigra cook who’d been with our family for forty years.”

In the time he’d lived up North, that word had slipped through gaps in his memory. Miss Minnealetha’s use of it made his throat constrict. But he was a Southerner by birth, so his eyes never narrowed, his smile never faltered. He thought his face would crack.

“You remember how Glory’s crust was so light it just came right apart on the fork?” Miss Minnealetha asked Miss Ida, her tone nostalgic.

“Glory made the best crust in all creation,” Miss Ida said as if that, indeed, were the last word on pie crust, and the highest and best compliment they could give a black woman.

“I wouldn’t ever consider using an electric oven,” the other sister said. “Or a microwave. Always used wood or gas. Nothing ever comes out right on electric.”

“Can’t control the heat,” Miss Ida explained.

Miss Minnealetha laid a trembling, fragile hand on his arm. “But then the electric lights are just fine and the television reception’s wonderful, isn’t it, Ida? I notice we can get Birmingham real clear, isn’t that right?”

Miss Ida’s social radar had picked up on the possible slight. She quickly agreed with her sister.

That’s when Robert was certain he was in their good graces. He’d always explained to his Northern friends that white Southerners were like big dogs: If they thought you fit in, they’d jump up and lick you; if they thought you didn’t fit in, they’d tear you apart.

He wasn’t certain just how the South had changed since he’d been away, but he was pretty sure he was going to get licked.

I’ve always liked the eccentricities of well-bred Southern white women; but all Southern white men are the same. I found that out when I was a short black kid living around pink giants who always spoke in code.

ISN’T IT TIME FOR YOU TO GO ON HOME, BOY? I HEAR YOUR MAMA CALLING.

YOU AIN’T ALLOWED TO PLAY AROUND HERE, SON. YOU GO ON, NOW.

GET YOUR HANDS OFF THEM JACKETS NOW, BOY. THERE’S SOME CLOTHES FOR YOU ON THAT OTHER SIDE OF THE STORE.

Codes, like I said. But when I translated it, the message was always the same: Fuck you.

“Robert? I know you’re awake. Open your eyes.”

It’s the HEAD COOK of Hell talking again. Satan may baste you, but it’s God who’ll light your fire. I know better than to open my eyes. God loves surprises. Open my eyes and He’ll get me, just like Moe used to get Curly, with two stiff fingers up the sockets.

* * *

Yuri was the U.N. Observer, an electrical engineer who was a child of the pre
-glasnost
era. He had never ended his love affair with paranoia. “They could be spies,” he said when the old ladies had left.

Robert laughed. “They’re not spies. They don’t even know that the collector can’t affect TV reception.” Then he felt badly about laughing at them and added, “poor old things.” He made himself a cup of coffee and cut himself a slice of pie. It was as good as he had imagined it to be.

The Russian watched Robert eat, apparently waiting for the poison to work its way through the American’s system. “She said ‘nigger.’”

The word shocked him so much that for a moment Robert froze, his mind and heart deciding all at once that he would take that word from a Southerner, but he’d never take it from the Russian. It wasn’t Yuri’s birthright. Then, he literally shook his anger off, and said, “No, Yuri. She said ‘Nigra.’ Southerners just can’t make themselves say that final ‘O’ sound. It’s a genetic problem.”

“It sounds like it to me,” Yuri told him. “I think they meant to insult you.”

Robert finished the first piece, considered his waistline briefly, and cut himself another. “Let me explain how things are down here. White people probably mean well, but they’re confused, so they talk about us in euphemisms. If old people want to be polite, it’s colored or Nigra; and they got some others if they don’t. They can’t use the names we’ve come up with ourselves. African-American’s too long and makes us sound uncomfortably exotic. And black’s a color proper for crepe de chine, not humans.”

They burn you on crosses and hang you.”

Robert laughed. He wished the Russian would shut up. He didn’t know him well enough to discuss color. To argue prejudice he’d have to know the Russian like a brother.

“The real bad stuff’s all over and done with.” What he didn’t say was that he knew that a lot of little bad stuff remained. “Besides, Southerners must have an instinctive respect for the military. The black part may make them think less of me, but the Air Force blue sort of evens things out.”

“They could be spies for the Chinese. I will let my superiors and the U.N. know that you leave the control room door open and that you allow civilians in the station.”

Robert shot Yuri an irritated glance. “Great. You call anybody you want. But remember that a few security-cleared civilians have permission to visit. Civilians weren’t allowed to go into the nuclear plants and look what happened to nuclear power.”

Yuri put on his supercilious look. Robert figured the Russian practiced it in front of the mirror. “If the Chinese learn this technology, it will come from you.”

“Just what do you have against the Chinese, anyway?”

“I don’t trust them.”

“Their slanty eyes and everything.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Their slanty eyes and their yellow skin.” Robert snatched his plate from the table and walked into the kitchen.

Yuri didn’t say a thing.

* * *

God’s walked away from me, talking to somebody. I open my eyes and what do I see?

Not a band of angels; a platoon.

God’s dressed as a general, of course. And there’s a broad in surgical greens.

“Can he hear us or not?” God asks.

Oh. What a disturbing question.

God knows everything in my mind, doesn’t He? I mean, that’s what I always learned when I was a kid, learned so hard that I was afraid to look up girl’s dresses, afraid that God was seeing just what I was seeing and not liking a bit of it.

When I was growing up they talked in church about the wrath of God, and, my, didn’t I know it. When I was growing up I was scared of God because I always knew in my heart He was a white man.