The younger tried to snap out of it. “You’re such a big boy.”
“I’m not a boy,” said X in his lisp-growl. “I’m a Tyrannosaurus rex.”
“Oh my,” she said, summoning courage for her and her brood. The other Whites tittered nervously. The elder joined in.
“You must be Michael.”
X kept staring at the children as though they were tasty meat bits.
“I’m not Michael! I’m X!”
The younger pressed on.
“These are my boys, James and George.” The smaller of the two leaned his head forward and smiled.
“Hi.”
The Whites and Edith smiled, and then cooed in unison, “Oh.”
Edith leaned into X. “Michael, can you say hello?”
“I’m not Michael. I’m X.”
“Hello,” said the older child.
The bastard half-breed son of Milton and Minette was a schizophrenic. He married a Cherokee woman and they had two children. He disappeared, and she and her children were considered outcasts on the reservation. One day she left with them and headed east.
“I’m brown,” said X.
“No, you’re not,” said the older child. “You’re white.”
“I’m brown!” he growled. “I’m the tyrant lizard king!” He snorted at them. The boys took a step back. X widened his nostrils and sniffed at them in an exaggerated way. He opened his eyes wide so that they were almost circles and smiled, coolly, making sure to show his teeth. He leaned forward and sniffed again.
She met the traveling preacher-salesman Gabriel Lloyd, settled in central Virginia, and had one child with him. Then she and Lloyd died.
“I eat you.”
As she tells it, once an acquaintance of Claire’s who knew nothing of me had asked her upon seeing C for the first time, “How did you get such a brown baby?” Claire had shot back, “Brown man.” I went outside to find C. Like his younger brother, he can smell fear. It makes X attack. The same fear causes C to withdraw — to keep his distance. He was standing in the middle of the yard with his back to the window and his ball under one arm.
“Yo, C-dawg.” He turned and saw me, smiled weakly, walked over and took me by the hand. We turned toward the kitchen. The adults had entered and Edith and Claire were handing out drinks. My boy, big-eyed, vulnerable, brown, looked in at the white people. They looked out at him. The White boys ran into the room. The older one was crying. His father scooped him up and shushed him. The younger hid behind his mother. X came in, arms bent, mouth open. He was stomping instead of sprinting. He roared at everyone and stomped out.
“Do you have to go?”
“Yeah.”
He let go of my hand.
“He’s definitely a T. rex now.” C turned and punted the ball across the yard into a patch of hostas. He watched it for a while as though he expected the plants to protest. He turned back to me, squinting his eyes, I thought, to keep from crying.
3
In the midst of the ocean
there grows a green tree
and I will be true
to the girl who loves me
for I’ll eat when I’m hungry
and drink when I’m dry
and if nobody kills me
I’ll live ’til I die.
Claire’s grandfather wanted to sing that song at our wedding, but he’d stopped taking his Thorazine the week leading up to it and “flipped his gizzard.” So he’d sat quietly next to his nurse, cane between his legs, freshly dosed, staring into the void above the wedding party.
My father tried to assume the role of patriarch. In the clearing, between the woods and the sea, under the big tent, he’d stepped up on the bandstand. Hopped up on draft beer and with ill-fitting dentures, he’d taken the microphone. “May you and your love be evah-gween.” He’d been unable to roll the r’s. The drink and the teeth had undermined his once perfect diction. He raised his glass to tepid cheers.
Ray Charles is singing “America the Beautiful.” It’s a bad idea to put on music while trying to make a plan. It may be that I need to stop listening altogether. Dylan makes me feel alienated and old; hip-hop, militant. Otis Redding is too gritty and makes me think about dying young. Robert Johnson makes me feel like catching the next thing smoking and Satan. Marley makes me feel like Jesus. I thought for some reason that listening to Ray in the background would be good, or at least better than the others. He’s not. I’m confused. I never know what he’s singing about in his prelude. It makes no sense. A blind, black, R & B junkie gone country, singing an also-ran anthem — dragging it back through the tunnel of his experience, coloring it with his growl, his rough falsetto. The gospel organ pulse, the backing voices, not from Nashville, not from Harlem, Mississippi, or Chicago — they float somewhere in the mix, evoking pearly gates and elevators going to the mall’s upper mezzanine, “America, America. .” It falls apart. I remember back in my school when people used to co-opt philosophy. They’d say that they were going to deconstruct something. I thought, one can’t do that; one can only watch it happen. Only in America could someone try to make the musings of a whacked-out Frenchman utile. Anyway, the song falls apart. Perhaps even that’s incorrect; I hear it for its many parts. It’s not like a bad song, which disappears. In this, the multiplicity sings. “America. .” Democracy’s din made dulcet via the scratchy bark of a native son. “God shed his grace on thee. .” Things fall apart, coalesce, then fall apart again. Like at the beach — fish schools, light rays. It’s like being a drunk teen again, waiting for Gavin in the freight yard under the turnpike. The whistle blows. I see him appear from behind a car, bottle held aloft in the sunset. Things fall apart, come together, and sometimes I feel fortunate to bear witness. The timpanis boom. “Amen. .” I have to hear that song again.
I don’t. I turn it off. I go into the kiddie bedroom, turn the light off, and lie down in the kiddie bed. I need to make a plan, which means I need to make a list of the things I need to do. I need to get our security deposit back from our old landlady. I need to call the English Departments I’m still welcome in to see if there are any classes to be had. I need to call more contractors and foremen I know to see if there’s any construction work. I need to call the boys’ school to see if I can pay their tuition in installments. I need an installment. I try to make a complete list of things in my head. It doesn’t work. I open my eyes and try to picture it in the darkness. Claire has always been good at making lists — to do lists, grocery lists, gift lists, wish lists, packing lists. They have dashes and arrows to coordinate disparate tasks and do the work of synthesis — laundry to pasta, pasta to rent check, rent check to a flower or animal doodle in the margin, depicting perhaps the world that exists beyond the documented tasks or between them: of fish minds and baby talk and sibling-to-sibling, child-to-parent metalanguage or microcode; the green tree that grows in the middle of the ocean; the space in which the song exists.