This Side of Brightness (20 page)

“You're asking for it, old man.”

Walker remembers rounding a corner, holding a flaming branch with the resin burning, seeing a huge sweep of white in the night air, a whole flock, and a solitary sentinel at the edge of the swamp, not moving.

“If you find out, you better tell us. It's for his own good.”

“Sure it is,” says Walker.

“Don't get smart with me, old man.”

A poisoned silence floats through the room.

“Where the hell is he?”

“I'd say he's probably done made his way to California. He was always talking about California. Ain't that right, Louisa?”

“That's right,” she says.

“Little town by the name of Mendicino, I believe. He was always talking about Mendicino. Don't know what it is attracted him there. But he was always yapping on about Mendicino. Sun and waves. He was partial to the idea of sun and waves.”

“Gonna get himself a suntan, was he?”

“I'm not rightly sure he needs a suntan.”

“California?”

“That's where he'll be.”

The cop moves toward the door. “I know you're lying.”

“Don't hurt him,” says Walker. “If you hurt him I'll hurt you back. That's a promise.”

“I'd say that's a threat.”

“Don't hurt him,” Walker says again. “Please don't hurt him.”

*   *   *

Three weeks after the cops' visit, Walker borrows fifty dollars from Rhubarb Vannucci and takes a train down to Atlanta, where the police have found Clarence.

Walker bends his big frame into the heat, finds himself sipping at a water fountain marked Colored. Trees are in blossom all over the city. Febrile grackles sing out loudly on the branches. Women in pastel hats shade their faces from car fumes. Just outside the train station, he sees a young boy shining shoes. The boy looks up at him and smiles. Walker tries hard to remember where he has seen the boy before, but can't.

He walks, swinging his shoulders solidly, unwilling to telegraph his grief.

Mosquitoes seem to gather in prayer outside the window of his hotel room. The heat is unbearable, and he opens the window. The insects swarm in, congregate around him. He squashes a few of the mosquitoes, and a little smudge of blood is left on his fingers. A welt swells up beneath his eye. Standing at the window, his sight is fuzzy: trees make shapes and a bar sign blurs. He leaves the hotel and goes across to the bar, orders a shot of whiskey. A sultry jazz singer looks at him from a stage, moves a pink tongue around her lips salaciously. Walker all of a sudden remembers the face of the boy shining shoes at the train station and realizes that he might have been looking at himself when young. He puts his face into the cups of his hands, knocks over the full whiskey, shoves his way out into the night.

Staggering across the street, he claps a flying moth. He flicks the remnants of dust off the palms of his hands. A threadlike antenna remains on his palm and he blows it off, remembering another moth in a different room months ago.

In the morning he wakes to birdsong and makes his way to the mortuary. Not even the hands of the morticians can disguise the beating Clarence must have received, his jaw slopped sideways, his cheekbones bloated blue with bruises, a new eye-patch over an even deeper wound in the socket. The police tell him that Clarence was shot dead while trying to escape through a junkyard on the outskirts of the city. Clarence, they say, robbed a liquor store at knifepoint and ran into the yard to take cover, was shot as he slipped on oil drums. The knife was recovered at the scene, and Clarence's pockets were stuffed with money.

“That's what happens to a cop killer,” they say.

Walker stares at his son's accusers.

“You know,” says one of the cops, “I got myself one of your kind in my family tree.” He gouges at his teeth with a toothpick. “Just a swinging away from the highest branch.”

Walker's eyes are misty with tears. He fights them back, bites his lip.

When he returns to his hotel room he falls on the dirty sheets, lets the evening's mosquitoes rave around him. He doesn't even flinch as they bite. He thinks for a moment about revisiting the Okefenokee of his boyhood but decides against it. When he boards the train to New York his face is puffy with red welts. A conductor shoves him toward the rear carriage. From the train window he watches the landscape of America flow by.

*   *   *

Back home, he sleeps in Clarence's bed. Then he moves across and arranges the pillows beside the ghost of his wife. All three of them lie down together. The pulse of Louis Armstrong sounds out from the record player, the notes moving tenderly through his torment.

*   *   *

On a pale weekday he buries Clarence, laying him beside Eleanor in a Bronx graveyard. His daughters and Louisa stand behind him.

Walker kneels at the stone but doesn't say any prayers. Prayers strike him as flaccid things now—useless supplications curling out only as far as the throats of men before falling back down into their stomachs. Spiritual regurgitation. He ignores the nearby gravediggers, who stand fat and complacent over the freshly dug hole. Walker takes a shovel, throws the first clodful over his son's coffin. He steps back and gathers his daughters in his arms, and they walk together to a waiting car.

He has hired the car to drive his family home. The girls clamber in, but Walker decides to go alone. Dull gray birds escort him as he walks through the Bronx all the way across the bridge to his street in Harlem—a five-hour walk—where he tells himself that he will strap his body to the sofa, elbow on the armrest, for the rest of his years. Even the idea of revenge strikes him as hollow.

Walker stares at the ceiling, his body a dark room of nothingness, empty, vacant. He recognizes the necessity of sorrow—if sorrow fades, so too does memory. He keeps the sorrow alive for the sake of memory, evoking Eleanor's movements, rehearsing them in his brain. His head spins through their gymnastics of love. Small shocks of remembered bliss. He aggregates the beauty of their lives together, weighs it in his fingers. Even the dullest moments over teacups are replayed in his mind. He does the same with the memory of Clarence, then combines them, wife and son standing together at the piano, where he talks to them.

“Eleanor,” he whispers, “you're looking good.”

“Hey, Clar, go get your momma her hairbrush.”

“I've never seen you look so fine, honey.”

“Thank you, son,” he says, reaching for a hairbrush that isn't there. “Give us a moment together, your momma and me.”

And, after a silence, “He's growing up like a flower, ain't he, El?”

The days go by with a vicious lethargy. Even light is slow to fade. The future feels postponed by an eternal present. Walker develops a horror of time. He turns the clock face against the wall. The only day he recognizes is Sunday, because of the sight of churchgoers out the window. He resents their white teeth, their joy, the comfortable tuck of Bibles under their arms. As they walk, the gospel music seems already to be rising in them, the way they move on the tips of their toes. They will go to church and lift their voices to some useless heaven. A unified song of self-deception. God only exists in happiness, he thinks, or at least in the promise of happiness.

Walker turns his Bible spine in against the wall, bricks it in with other books, unread. Let them go on down to their ridiculous churches. Let them sing to their ceilings. You won't find me beseeching no Jesus. I'm finished with all that.

He doesn't move to the record player, just lets himself sink down into the folds of the couch. Beside him, a spittoon grows full and brown with chewing tobacco. He spits out a decayed tooth one morning, thinks nothing of it. He shoves aside plates of food. His daughters and Louisa bring him cups of tea that grow cold at his elbow. The window is shut to the sounds of the street. Walker mutters invectively to himself. Over the weeks, he grows wasted and haggard, and huge bags develop under his eyes. The spittoon overflows and stains the armrest. He shoos the preacher away from the door and asks his daughters to tell Rhubarb Vannucci that he isn't home in case the Italian comes calling.

He hardly even looks at his grandson in the crib; the boy is just a meaningless blur of flesh.

At night, Louisa tries to get him to go down the hallway to the bath, to wash, but he becomes a brick in her hands and she gives up. He welcomes himself back to the sofa. “This is where I'll lie,” he says. He might let his body melt into the cushions and stay there forgotten, like one of his dropped coins. He might reach down for the decayed parts of himself and throw them out the window to the ghost of Clarence below on the stoop: bits of arms, legs, fingers, and an eyeball as a currency for the gone.

He notices that his daughters have begun to stay out late at night, but he says nothing. Louisa remains in the apartment with him, bottles of tequila in a ring around her. The alcohol lies heavy on her breath. She spends her time fashioning ancestral beads to sell at a market. Between them there is a contagion of hush.

She has decided to call the baby Clarence Nathan, after his father and grandfather. But Walker dismissed the name with a wave of his arm, glad of the pain it brings him. “Call him whatever the hell y'all want.”

Louisa works on a dream catcher, which she suspends above the boy's head. The dream catcher is made with twigs in the shape of a triangle, crisscrossed with yarn; a dogtooth and beads and a feather tied onto the threads.

“It'll catch his dreams,” she says.

“They'll go nowhere else,” says Walker.

“Don't be so bitter. I can't stand it.”

“I'll be bitter if I goddamn want to.”

“I'm leaving,” she says.

“Leave. Take your bottles. Grab y'alls beads and strings and thread and wrap 'em around your bottles and make a goddamn raft for yourself.”

She doesn't leave, and she watches him fade further into the couch. At times she cooks for him and works with great tenderness, even when she's drunk—baked chicken, rice and beans, cucumber sandwiches—yet she finds herself drinking more and more. She changes the size of the bottles she buys. They make a great bulge in the grocery bags where she tries to hide them. Sometimes she drops tequila in the food just so she can smell it as she leans over the stove.

And then one morning she emerges from the bathroom to hear Walker muttering to himself. She is surprised at the sound of his voice, clear and deep and lunatic.

“I bet he didn't even see them,” he says. “I bet he didn't even see them.”

“What's that?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“See what?”

“See goddamn anything!” he shouts. “They shot him in a junkyard! He didn't get to see all the things I told him about! A goddamn crane! He didn't even get a chance to see a crane! That's what I wanted for him! Ever since he was born! I wanted him to see a crane dance! Don't look at me that way! Fuck you if you think that's stupid! Fuck you! I wanted him to see a crane! That's what I wanted! I never got the chance to show him even that!”

There is a querulous rising and falling in his chest as he gasps for air. Louisa puts a hand on his shoulder and he slaps it away, letting a dribble of tobacco run down his chin.

She moves to the kitchen and leaves him in silence, but then she turns around and stares at him and says, “I saw twenty-seven of them once.”

Walker doesn't reply.

“Near the trailer house where my family lives in South Dakota.”

He rocks gently on the couch.

“It was on the edge of a lake,” she says. “One by one. And then the whole flock of them. On the edge of the mud. It was soft and they left their footprints. Then the sun came and baked them. The footprints were there for a whole season. I used to ride a bicycle in and out of them. I cried when the rain washed them away. My father slapped me because I wouldn't stop crying.”

Louisa removes the spittoon, sits on the edge of the couch.

“They came back again the next season,” she says, “but I thought I was too old for bicycles. Besides, my brother was using the tires for slingshots. There was no way I could ride it anymore even if I wanted to.”

“Y'all never married, did ya?”

“We never got the chance.”

“It means the baby's a bastard.”

“Never say that again. You hear me? Don't call my son that.”

“They beat Clarence to death,” says Walker.

“I don't want to think about it. There's certain things you don't have to remember.”

“And certain things ya do,” says Walker. “They murdered my son. They put their-all's gun barrels right down into his eye. They made a grave of his head.”

“Shut up!” she says. “Shut the hell up and listen! Twenty-seven cranes. It was the most beautiful thing in the world. Back and forth. Going up in the air, wings fully spread. Around and around and around.”

Neither of them stir, but after a moment Walker shifts on the couch and says to her, “Do it then.”

“What?”

“Show me.”

“You're crazy.”

“Please. Show me.”

“Don't go crazy on me, Nathan.”

“Go ahead,” he says. “If y'all remember it so well, go ahead and do it yourself.”

“Nathan.”

“Do it!” he shouts.

Louisa lowers her head and pours herself a large glass of tequila. She doesn't even wince as the alcohol hits the back of her throat. Looking at Walker, she hesitates for a moment. She closes her eyes momentarily. Then she smiles, almost derisively. She wipes her lips and puts one arm out and she chuckles and stops.

“Go on,” says Walker.

She starts to move: the high cheekbones, the threaded hair, the white white teeth, a gray dress, no shoes, her brown toes lyrical on the worn carpet. Walker, embarrassed, turns his head slightly, but then returns the gaze as Louisa dances, hands outstretched, arms in a whirl, feet back and forth, the most primitive of movements, dissolving the boundaries of her body. Walker feels a throbbing at his temples, a stirring of something primeval within him, a slow spread of joy rising, fanning out, warming him, supplying his flesh with goose bumps. From the couch, he continues to stare. He knows that there is alcohol coursing through Louisa, but he allows himself to forget that; he lets the movement surround him, breathe him, become him, ancestral and gorgeous. And when Louisa starts to lose her breath, Walker rises awkwardly from the couch, reaches to take her hand, and she stops dancing. He touches the side of her face. She drops her chin to her chest. They are silent for a long time, and then he whispers to her with a smile, “Ya know, ya looked ridiculous dancing like that.”