I’m the man walked seven seas. Done drank an ocean of sand. I can change a gray sky blue, but I can’t get next to you.
What do you want from me?
Jus some kindness. Some lovin kindness.
Gracie thought about the passage that had directed her life. Let each of us keep seeking, not his own advantage, but all that of the other person.
For all his crude ways, John carried his giving heart hot in his hand. After his first visit, Gracie saw him as a young man no longer. He began to shine. There was a blinding light inside him, a blinding light that lit from his stomach to his head. Outside the inside light, she could not watch him directly, but she knew the motion of his heart. Whether a skullcapped November night or a bareheaded July evening, John could not get enough of her. He gave her wings to escape the gravity of the church and nest in its rafters. He flung her into the wilderness of sudden discovery and made her a citizen of another world. He filled her life, filled the whole world of feeling for her. She could hear his seed’s approaching call. Bells of jubilation. She heard them peal in her sleep, a distant rhythm. She desperately awaited the night he would rip the veil of her virginity.
She did not wait long. Memory, hope, and reality meshed and clicked.
He massaged her with soft words. Tell me more and then some. Whisper on to Doomsday. And she embraced him, dived into his veins—you go to my head — splashed in the brown ponds of his eyes, her own shut eyes opening the black lens of her imagination. His teeth — he carried a toothbrush and baking soda balled up in tinfoil and white-brushed his teeth six times a day — gripped on to the black whirlpools of her areolae — and hers consumed his flesh — though she resisted its call, closed her hearing skin — because they had gone no further than innocent hugs and wet kisses, though she wanted it and got it, their flesh making loud slapping noises. Yes, he stuck it right inside her, a red-hot poker, and hot blood poured lava-like down her thighs, filling up the room, ready to set the bed aflame and afloat. The next morning, she examined her thighs. Two black streaks on the inside, like burned rubber. The smell of singed flesh. Through nights of muscular love, he forged her a new self. Afterward, she lay on the bed, moon and stars curled between her toes, him hard-breathing beside her.
See yo belly.
I seen it befo.
Don’t be a fool. He the father of yo child. And he ask fo yo hand in marriage.
I don’t care if he ask fo my feet.
But that first time. Eyes flicking with sleep, she woke that morning, nightgown a twisted rope around her waist, to a blood-red sun in white sky, the marriage sheet on display. Them hilly-billies in Decatur hang theirs, Beulah said. Birds sharp as naked blades, flicking light. Yes, dog days summer in mid-June. The sun burning red then yellow then red, alternating waves. At that very moment, she knew, a baby baked in her stomach — she could feel it twist and tumble against the oven walls — while, now, these others were trying to crowd back in. Babies. Pushing their greedy faces in windows, belly-fat faces, these blood-hungry urchins. Babies. Line by line, waiting to snatch her out of the briefcased and Sunday-dressed crowd. Babies. Trying to crowd into her belly where they don’t belong.
Her first day in the city, she saw a beggar in the tunnel between Dearborn and State. He was unlike the other beggars she would come to meet, blind men who yellow-shoved their pencils in your face, musicians who snared you with the cheap strings of a blues guitar, and fresh-tongued men. Sistah, could you spare some lovin? No, he was different. He sat on a mouth-down (water outspilled) metal pail, the stump of his leg pointing like a cigar in her direction, tambourine-rattling his tin can — like those snuff cans down home — and said nothing. She kept her distance in case the brown coins should splatter. Going to work and returning from work each day, she saw him, the metal voice of his can a continual presence for months then years.
One day, he was gone. She boarded the train.
How much they payin you? Sheila asked.
Ten.
Ask for more. I get fifteen, twenty sometimes … Gracie?
Jus stay outa my business.
It black-shoved through the tunnel, shaking, rattling. Then rain clicked against the window. Tap dancing. She turned her face to the window. A baby watched her with a fist-tight face, the train trying to shake him loose, and him holding on with one iron-gripped claw, the other pounding against the glass. The train’s metal voice screamed, Halt! the steel wheels (so many mouths) slitting the rail’s throat. Dry blood pasted on the glass.
Once, John and Gracie drove down to Decatur to see Beulah. A baby stuck his face bright in the windshield (a cop’s flashlight) and nearly scared the wheel out of John’s hand. The car swerved off the road and into the bushes, branches whipping against the windows and doors, thudding rain. John squeezed all life out of the brakes, squealing. The car — red Eldorado? Cadillac? Park Avenue? Yellow cab? memory refused to speak — rocked to a halt. The world fell silent.
My Lord, John said. Gracie took his head into her arms. My Lord. What was that? Gracie could hold back no longer. She began. Told him all to tell.
THE RED ELDORADO was their private place. Away from the world, squeezed into the back seat. How you like my bed? John said. Theirs except when Dallas, Sam, Dave, and Lucifer (and Spokesman perhaps) invaded, took it over with a steamy blanket of talk.
Man those slopes over there was something else.
Prospectin for gold.
Buildin railroads.
Least they din’t finger none of yall gravy.
Yeah. They didn’t finger none of yall gravy.
The Hairtrigger Boys.
Cause we could shoot the golden hairs from the devil’s head.
Coulda been a sharpshooter myself.
Yeah. We coulda been snipers.
Sniper? Ha! That nigga wasn’t no sniper. Them lifers had him searchin fo gold.
But she knew how to look at John, a certain lowering of the head, and lifting of the eye. And John would shout, Yall niggas beat it! They stole feels and kisses from each other’s body and breath. Her breath rose and fell. At least three times a day, she spread the sails of her thighs for him. She kicked his tongue down from the roof of his mouth and made it learn every crevice of her body, from her nostrils, to her eardrums, from the indention at the back of her neck, to — and only his tongue could speak her secrets.
John screwed with his eyes open, perhaps afraid he’d miss something. She didn’t moan or wiggle around cause that made him come faster. And it might be another moon before he got hard again. Cause I don’t lust you, John said. That’s why it take me so long to get hard again. I want you. But I don’t lust you. Those first years, he always spilled his seed on her belly — that barren desert where nothing unwanted could grow — cause he could afford no chances, taking many already, giving up the well-paying window washer job in downtown Central (the Loop) and setting out on his first business venture, he and Dallas opening John’s Recovery Room. That’s some chump change they payin, he said.