Nigga, you can’t piss fo shit.
Piss better than you.
Well, can you piss this high?
Higher.
And Gracie would feel some new feeling circling around her heart, circling and rising, while Lucifer and John held their faces tight, roping in their grins, until she snatched their ears, their hands panicking, trying to slip their worm-small penises into the sanctuary behind their pants zippers. The entire congregation knew they were being raised by the grandfather, Pappa Simmons, the squat nigga with a touch of Indian, or a dash, depending on who you asked — the roll of something wild in his yellow-red features; the gray of his eyes had crushed out the brown; Was he blind?; his words were so ancient they crumbled to the carpet before they reached your ear — and Georgiana, his white-looking wife, both worn down from sharecropping back home and hauling city sugar and mail sacks, their old flesh and down-home ways left in the dust by the quick city steps and ways of the boys. Yes, she had watched them grow from mannish boys in railroad caps, the skinny rails of their legs beneath baggy slacks, to teenagers, two young men in tweed or plaid golf caps and peg pants. How could she have known then that these two boys held men’s seeds, that these seeds would someday crack open and the newborn beings would accept the agreeable weight of manhood, would carry the silver rails of Sam’s coffin, help to bury the old seed. Yes, they grew, stretched out of their tweeds, their swelling heads shrinking their boy caps — they replaced them with man-holding Dobbs — Lucifer upwards and John sideways, til no britches could hold them, they going one way and restraint the other, Lucifer running errands, and John running the streets with Dallas and Ernie and Spider and the other bad niggas who kept up a heavy traffic between the clubs and lounges on Church Street. Couldn’t pass a corner without seeing John and Dallas pitching pennies, tossing the coins easy and graceful like life rafts.
How you, Miss Gracie?
Yeah, how you, Miss Gracie?
She could feel their eyes warm on her behind as she passed. Maybe not Dallas’s eyes, eyes that did not absorb a flicker of light. Frozen wells.
Then, who could have known that, years later, John would beat Dallas within an inch of his life, and still later, that he would strap her, Gracie, to the bed after she told him, You sleepin in sin, both asking and answering. She saw his belt raise but closed her eyes to its sting. She searched high and hellwater for her keys. Could find them nowhere. Believed John had robbed her of them, as he had first surprised her with the burning damage of his words. Why you think I be out there? Why you think? I like you but I don’t lust you. So surprised she still didn’t know what instrument he’d used to whip her, his belt or his tongue. He opened roads in her back and walked them. She sought her keys, found them in the space under the bed, locked the door on her way out of the apartment, and caught the first taxi. Trucks flew through the yellow-lighted streets. A yellow moon. The moon’s taking a piss, John said.
She explained to Inez and George — the man John would never call father, spit at the suggestion — what had happened, the story both heavy and formless from the water in the words. You thought George woulda whispered a word of it to Lucifer, Check on John. Go check on yo brother. George probably wanted to and maybe he did, though how could you tell cause Lucifer always watched you in flicking glances, as if you were more than vision could bear.
George took car keys out of the cookie jar. I’m gon kill that bastard.
George, Inez said, now wait. Junior didn’t—
Damn, Inez. Open your eyes.
But Gracie was the one paralyzed by a blinding fright.
George shook the car keys in Inez’s face. Damn, Inez. Open your eyes. Shook them again.
5
WALL-TO-WALL PEOPLE — crowded dots in an impressionist painting — load the car. Don’t be such a bitch, lady. What’s wrong? Didn’t you get what you needed last night? The hog is just ahead, shoving its way through the car. Damn, homey? Think you a football player? He slaps a grip on hog’s shoulder. Feels a burning sensation in his stomach. The hog has cork-screwed him with its tail.
The hog runs for the mouth of the tunnel, three-toed feet slipping on the tracks like a woman in high heels.
He surges and plunges, a windmill, all legs and arms, snatching his feet up almost before they touch the ground. The hog spins on one leg — the chubby shank, the monkey-wrench calf — brings the other high in a wide arc, and catches him on the side of the head — the temple, right? the church at both sides of your head — then, hollow pain, like someone knocking a pipe bowl against a table’s edge. The old roundhouse kick. Hog knows its licks and flicks.
He has to guard against the hands — paws? — the narrow fingers in-grown perfect for the old eye gouge.
He sees an opening. Drop-kicks the hog in the balls. (Know my flicks, too.) Son of a bitch, the hog says, hands over his balls, Adam holding the fig leaf.
They are tangled between the rails — which one is the third, the hot jolt of raw electricity? — rolling, two contestants in a mud-wrestling match. The hog stinks bad — pickle juice? — and is covered with scratchy, stubbly skin, three-day-old beard over the whole week of its body. It tickles. He locks his teeth onto the hog’s tonguelike ear. (Wait, raw pork is bad for you.) Hog considers returning the favor, but it is dignified, the low blow beneath him. These humans …
He brings the butcher knife — the knife, how could he have forgotten it? — into view. Hog-squeals. He drives the knife between the second and third chins, a clean blow. He can feel a weapon on the hog, just as he knows it has a navel. What makes it moo — grunt? — oink? So that’s why they called it—
A grind of gears—a lawn mower? a car? — started beneath the small high window above the bed filled with books stacked like sandbags. Hatch’s early-morning skin felt the old mattress — he slept in the same old iron bed he’d had all his life; each night, the coiled springs kept squeaking even after he lay still — but the contours and niches did not fit his bones. Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed. His feet dangled over the edge, awaiting the hangman’s ax. He swung his legs from beneath the covers, rooted his feet on the floor, pushed his torso up, and sat on the bed’s edge, leaning forward, chin resting on the pyramid of his fingers. His sleep muscles tightened trying to hold on to the heat and color of the dream. The shit that can crowd your sleep. Sleep slowly pulled its two black wings from over his face. Silver teased his vision. A dogtag bright-dangled from his neck. He squeezed its motion in his fist. It was perforated down the middle, like a salt cracker, so — Lucifer had explained when he gave it to him many years ago — that strong hands could snap it in two, half of the tag marking the body and the other half, the grave. He checked the bed for dampness. Early-morning voices and traffic sounds rolled over him. He had never been one to take all the nightmare images from the evening news into his sleep. Why now?
The previous night he’d had trouble sleeping. A jackal had thrashed its tail repeatedly against his chest. He had defended himself with a motion he remembered but his body couldn’t perform. Turned on the bulb beneath the hooded lamp. Sat on the bed edge, then moved over to the chair before the window, shade drawn. Small light teased the room, pale, from a streetlamp. And the darkness beyond, full of the city’s sounds. Then a tin-trickle of rain. He sat that way until a washed-out sky and a swollen sun drenched the windows with golden light. Fingers of dawn pulled him back into sleep, into dream.