Can’t say I feel nothing much as I watch Hector shiver and bleed out the top his skull, ‘cept maybe tired and dirty, just want to finish and go clean off this dirt. So I lean down and grab my shovel up out of the pit, and just when I straighten up — BAM — this explosion slams the inside of my head — and everything goes queer and too slow — and then I’m coming out of this blackness and I find myself looking up from inside that pit, Hector underneath me trying to shake even with my weight on top of him.
After I don’t know how long, I’m coming out of another darkness and I see Eddie Mac and Katrina looking down at me. Eddie Mac holds a nine with a silencer on it. Then things go black again.
Next time I come back from the dark, I’m half covered with dirt. I can’t hardly see cuz dirt’s on part of my face and some in my mouth and I can’t lift my head to shake it off. I try to call out to Katrina, but can’t make no words. I try to get up but my body don’t care what I try, it won’t budge.
With my one eye that can see, I see that Eddie Mac’s busy shoving dirt down from the pile, working at the end where my feet are. I can hear him pant cuz the old guy’s working hard. I can move my left arm and I try to bring it up and take the dirt off my face. On the way up my stomach, I feel my strap under the coverall, hanging just under my arm. Real slow, inch at a time, I crawl my hand in and slip my nine out. They don’t see me move cuz... well, I don’t know why, I guess it’s too dark or they think I’m already dead.
I ain’t thinking about what happened or why. It don’t matter to me now if Katrina done me dirty this way, or Eddie, or even Blue, though all of them must have, I’m sure now. It plain this is where I’m gonna be for, like, ever. I don’t even give that much of a damn, really. Never know how you gonna end up. Or when and where. Or why, for that matter. You just know you will. Somehow, somewhere, sometime. That, and how’d you use your time? Those all some things to think about. Now, anyway. My line of work, I always figured I have something like this shit coming.
I coulda finished high school, coulda fixed cars. I could say I shoulda done all that. But this is what I want, so this is what I do, and this is what I get, no big deal.
They say before you leave the world you see your life flash before your eyes like some kind of big movie, which amounts to making some kind of sense of things. Nothing big and grand like that happening for me right here and now, probably cuz my life never make much sense anyway.
So I can’t even say why I’m looking up with my one free eye, lifting my nine out from under the dirt and pointing it at Eddie Mac. I can’t exactly say why it makes sense for me to put two quick slugs in him and then turn my wrist and put another two in Katrina. But as soon as I do, it feels okay.
Eddie Mac, he falls on top of that dirt pile and I can see his legs shaking bad as they stick down over the edge of the grave. More and more dirt slips in and I know it’s only a matter of time till his body slides down here.
Meantime, sweet Katrina, she down to her knees on the other edge, gurgling and gasping as she holds herself, red spreading across that blouse, down onto that cute little mini. She look so beautiful to me. And so sad. She cries a little bit, but I guess the pain cuts into that, and then she loses her balance and she fall right in on top of me.
Time short now. I can’t see nothing. I guess that’s Katrina’s blood making my face wet. I like the warm feeling. I like it’s her blood, not some stranger. She making it hard for me to breathe, which is just as well, I don’t mind. The kind of guy I am.
Just before the dark closes in on me again, I’m laughing on the inside, cuz we all four ended up in this pit here, all four headed underground no matter what other plans they had. And I’m also laughing cuz when anybody, Blue maybe, come looking to find one uncle, one ghost, and two gangstas, all they gonna find themselves is four ghosts, surprise surprise. Like to see them try to figure this one out.
Still can’t form no words, but in my mind I’m saying, Don’t you worry, Blue, you be in here soon enough.
And now that I finish thinking all these last thoughts, weak as I ever been in my whole idiot life, heading into the darkness again, all I can think to add is four more silent little words in my grave in the big, bad Southside, not one mile from the place where I was born: Goodnight, Chicago, and amen.
The gospel of moral ends
by Bayo Ojikutu
77th & Jeffery
Swear I’m trying to keep up with Reverend this morning. Ain’t so easy, not with the black angels crooning at his back, alleluia, and these amens rising in flocks from the Mount’s bloody red carpet and gleaming pews, and the Payless heels square stomping up above my head until Calvary’s balcony rocks in rhythm with the charcoal drum sergeant’s skins. Seems the flock understands his sermon mighty fine, else why would they make all such noise in Mount Calvary? It’s me then. I am the lost.
“Today is a good day, Church. Ain’t it, Church? Always a good day for fellowshipping in the community of the Lord God, ain’t it?”
The woman leaning on her walking stick across the aisle echoes loud as the speaker box boom.
“Amen!”
“We come in here on this good day looking for the righteous way to serve Him to bring manifest — y’all like that word, Church, that’s a good word — let me say it again. We come in here to bring man-i-fest His glory in a world gone wicked, Church. We got this here fine church built on a mount — and we call it Calvary, like that hilltop where the Lord God sent His One Son to hang from a cross for us and save us from sin, deliver us from black death, Church. Make me so happy when I talk bout how the Savior came to this world to sacrifice His life for us, so happy, Church, all so we could come back here to the hilltop and build up a palace that’d shine bright in His city, so all would know. But all still ain’t here celebrating the Good News, Church — no matter how loud I speak it, y’all sing it, and no matter the blazing beauty of this here Mount Calvary. City’s wicked, Church, so wicked; we got folk look like us, talk like us, breath like us out here. But them folk is confused, Church, lost out in concrete Gomorrah. Y’all know too much about that place already. That’s right, the wicked place right outside the oak doors to our Mount Calvary. Right down there on 79th Street, where sin whirls among folk blind to the Good News.”
Maybe my trouble understanding Reverend Jack comes from these tiny ears, a quarter of the space the Good Lord carved on either side of my head for hearing. Or maybe confusion comes from eyes gone pus-yellow driving Sunday sunrise fares out to the good places north, south, and west; far, far from the wicked, whirling city and never back into concrete Gomorrah a moment before 7 o’clock the following Saturday night.
Or maybe I’m carrying the soul of a Black Jew up inside me. Not like the one-eyed Candy Man, or the musty shysters on the corner of State and Madison, their nappy heads hid underneath unraveling crochet hats. Sammy Davis was a happy half-monkey/half-rat, and the zero corner hustlers call themselves “Ethiopian Hebrews,” selling their stinky incense sticks. I know I ain’t no chimp dancing on a music box or no rat running into corners, or no shyster either. Ain’t looking to get down with no big-boned Swedish honeys or start no funky sweet revolution. Just getting hold of this preacher’s babble before salvation passes me by, trying to — Black Jews, you see, don’t sing or dance God or shout alleluia in the temple. We read holy script in quiet. That way, we understand what the rabbi’s spewing. We Black Jews get to know what the sermon means, Church.