Jesus?
Jesus. T-Bone smiled again, less teeth this time. He read words in Hatch’s face. Jesus? Why Jesus? Ask yourself.
Hatch looked outside of himself, like a passenger in a car. Yes, he thought. Yes. Jesus. No one else. It made perfect sense.
I just thought you should know.
There, Hatch thought. There. He had it all, the hard lump of truth. He could feel T-Bone’s eyes on him like hands, shaking him, demanding response.
THE TRAIN SPENT THE GREATEST PART OF THE JOURNEY standing still. Stillness etherized the passengers. Jackals all of them. They floated now, on floods of bright talk. These jackals barely held together by cotton and steel, liquid and air. Their dens in weedy waste. Take a gun to all of them. Hatch waved off their shameful smell.
The black tunnel roared overhead. The train rocked over the clunking rail joints. Sped on, swaying to the curves. Hatch’s mind eased away from his spine. Floating, flying. A clear feeling. It made things plainer.
T-Bone had solved one riddle even as he presented another. Ah, that explained it. Yes, that explained it. John. Uncle John. So that was why he’d made himself scarce recently. A disappearance both gradual and sudden. Each day, an oxidizing of a single cell, a single organ, a single limb, until — no more John. Uncle John. But Lucifer? Why would Lucifer aid and abet? Lucifer and John, brothers in the skin, but no closeness.
Light pitched upward, ran away from Hatch, quicker the farther it went. Each shaking train window mirrored blackness. Drawn by the seat’s gravity, he was a body at rest. His mind signaled his body, Move, Act, but he could not. He ran his mind over T-Bone’s smooth black tale, shining with lacquered luminosity. Bird. Betrayal. Lucifer. John. Jesus.
THE FAMILY HADN’T SEEN OR HEARD FROM HIM since last year, Christmas. Nor did they want to. Forgiveness had wings, but Jesus had ridden it to death. His fury, like a powerful storm, had carried him to heights that had permanently separated him from the family. Now — still unknown to them — he had orbited back into their life like a red meteor.
Even before he could walk or talk, he had exercised his red will. He refused to allow anyone to feed him. He would turn his face away from the feeding hand and food like poison. Cry in anger. You had to wait for him to fall asleep, then sneak the food into his little mouth. And once, his innocent teeth had tasted Lula Mae’s big bare toe. She kicked (from reflex and fear)—I thought a rat was biting me—teeth and taste down his throat.
These events had come to Hatch’s ears through the living mouths of his family. But he had no reason to question their validity.
His eyes fell on Jesus’s long-fingered hands that balanced an old battered brown suitcase — Gracie’s? Uncle John’s? — across his high knees. Red, why didn’t you check your suitcase?
I ain’t want to, Jesus said. He turned to Hatch from the seat opposite, his face blurred and distant with sleep. They had been on the train for many hard hours. Jesus had refused to check the suitcase with his other baggage, refused to put it on the luggage rack above and kept it on his lap the whole time like a baby.
But ain’t you uncomfortable?
Jesus laughed, a deep laugh that echoed inside Hatch.
Hatch let it drop. Silence seemed to pin them in moving place.
Hatch, Junebug called, come here.
What? Hatch said. He approached. What you want? What you doing on my grandmamma’s grass?
You don’t like it?
Get off my grandmamma’s grass.
You make me get off.
You better get off.
Shut up, punk. Junebug smacked Hatch’s black face red.
Jesus cracked Junebug over the head with his milk-weighted baby bottle.
I’m gon tell yo granny, Junebug said. You crazy.
So what, Jesus said. Tell her. She ain’t my mamma.
The train checked speed, then jolted back. He knew what to expect, the pattern immediate, intuition, instinct. Lula Mae would greet them at the station — her white skin like light in the Memphis night — safe in something better and greater than herself. Two days later, her deepest heart would convert her warm smile into a permanent, burning frown. They were her prisoners for the summer, in her small, knowable world. Near summer’s close her heart would cool. Her cold tears would greet their departure home. Yall call me, Lula Mae would say. Write me.
The same thing next summer. Predictable. Why do we visit her every summer?
Red—
Don’t call me Red, Jesus said.
Hatch’s eyes collided with his reflection in the train window. Jesus’s face was so similar to his own. He sat up very straight and tried to smile.
Nasty granny nasty granny, Junebug said. Whitelady, Whitelady. Briar-patch legs.
Better not say that again, Jesus said.
Whitelady. Briar-patch legs.
Jesus’s fist exploded red.
He had the feeling that Jesus was dissolving, disappearing. Again he tried to smile. The feeling deepened, widened.
HATCH LISTENED TO THE SECRET WHISPER of Jesus’s sleeping blood. Even in the dark he could see the ever-present suitcase. One end of a thin length of cord knotted around the handle, the other looped around Jesus’s outstretched wrist that hung limply over the side of the bed. All day, he had refused to let the suitcase out of his sight, even carrying it to supper.
Lula Mae entered the room. With much racket — Jesus required the impenetrable sleep of the dead — she unlatched it (strangely, it was not locked), opened the lid, and revealed the shining secret, a pack of Kool mentholated cigarettes. Lula Mae woke Jesus with a resounding slap. She held up the pack. Boy, she said. You too young to smoke.
Jesus looked at her, her palm print clear and red in his cheek of fossilized stone. Bitch, he said, just like that, you ain’t my mamma.
The early years, Red was closer to Hatch than his own skin. Gracie and Sheila dressed them the same for Sam’s funeral (viewing?).
Sam stands with one pants leg rolled up, offering his prized wooden stump for all the world to see. The stump moves with effortless, hidden will when he walks, like a hinged puppet limb. Stationary beneath him now as he mixes shaving cream in his old army helmet.
Yall niggas get bigger every time I see you. Soon I’m gon need me a chain saw to barber yall big heads.
My mammy say don’t use no straight razor, Hatch says.
Is yo mammy here? … I’ll cut you first since you got the brave mouth. Now hold still.
Sam works his sparkling straight razor between his fingers like a potato peeler. Shaves Hatch clean. Cleans Red the same. Two slick-bean twins.
Why you use that sword on my head? Red says. You ain’t sposed to be usin no spear on nobody’s head.
Hatch signed both of their names—Hatch Jones, Jesus Jones in the same hand — in the Visitors’ Book that slanted on a lectern under a remembered light. Dearly departed. In the scripted program, Hatch saw his great-aunts Beulah, Big Judy, Koot, and his grandmother Lula Mae listed as Sam’s survivors. Had Sam beached these women from the drowning waters? Had this dead man carried them — floating them on the log of his wooden leg — but allowed life’s tides to drag him into the dark drifting deep? Long ago, the dead man had planted himself in Hatch’s and Red’s hearts and grew; now, both of their heads yearned for the shining contents of the casket. Two faces and two eyes, they both peered into the coffin—