“Gonna get himself a suntan, was he?”
“I’m not rightly sure he needs a suntan.”
“California?”
“That’s where he’ll be.”
The cop moves toward the door. “I know you’re lying.”
“Don’t hurt him,” says Walker. “If you hurt him I’ll hurt you back. That’s a promise.”
“I’d say that’s a threat.”
“Don’t hurt him,” Walker says again. “Please don’t hurt him.”
* * *
Three weeks after the cops’ visit, Walker borrows fifty dollars from Rhubarb Vannucci and takes a train down to Atlanta, where the police have found Clarence.
Walker bends his big frame into the heat, finds himself sipping at a water fountain marked Colored. Trees are in blossom all over the city. Febrile grackles sing out loudly on the branches. Women in pastel hats shade their faces from car fumes. Just outside the train station, he sees a young boy shining shoes. The boy looks up at him and smiles. Walker tries hard to remember where he has seen the boy before, but can’t.
He walks, swinging his shoulders solidly, unwilling to telegraph his grief.
Mosquitoes seem to gather in prayer outside the window of his hotel room. The heat is unbearable, and he opens the window. The insects swarm in, congregate around him. He squashes a few of the mosquitoes, and a little smudge of blood is left on his fingers. A welt swells up beneath his eye. Standing at the window, his sight is fuzzy: trees make shapes and a bar sign blurs. He leaves the hotel and goes across to the bar, orders a shot of whiskey. A sultry jazz singer looks at him from a stage, moves a pink tongue around her lips salaciously. Walker all of a sudden remembers the face of the boy shining shoes at the train station and realizes that he might have been looking at himself when young. He puts his face into the cups of his hands, knocks over the full whiskey, shoves his way out into the night.
Staggering across the street, he claps a flying moth. He flicks the remnants of dust off the palms of his hands. A threadlike antenna remains on his palm and he blows it off, remembering another moth in a different room months ago.
In the morning he wakes to birdsong and makes his way to the mortuary. Not even the hands of the morticians can disguise the beating Clarence must have received, his jaw slopped sideways, his cheekbones bloated blue with bruises, a new eye-patch over an even deeper wound in the socket. The police tell him that Clarence was shot dead while trying to escape through a junkyard on the outskirts of the city. Clarence, they say, robbed a liquor store at knifepoint and ran into the yard to take cover, was shot as he slipped on oil drums. The knife was recovered at the scene, and Clarence’s pockets were stuffed with money.
“That’s what happens to a cop killer,” they say.
Walker stares at his son’s accusers.
“You know,” says one of the cops, “I got myself one of your kind in my family tree.” He gouges at his teeth with a toothpick. “Just a swinging away from the highest branch.”
Walker’s eyes are misty with tears. He fights them back, bites his lip.
When he returns to his hotel room he falls on the dirty sheets, lets the evening’s mosquitoes rave around him. He doesn’t even flinch as they bite. He thinks for a moment about revisiting the Okefenokee of his boyhood but decides against it. When he boards the train to New York his face is puffy with red welts. A conductor shoves him toward the rear carriage. From the train window he watches the landscape of America flow by.
* * *
Back home, he sleeps in Clarence’s bed. Then he moves across and arranges the pillows beside the ghost of his wife. All three of them lie down together. The pulse of Louis Armstrong sounds out from the record player, the notes moving tenderly through his torment.
* * *
On a pale weekday he buries Clarence, laying him beside Eleanor in a Bronx graveyard. His daughters and Louisa stand behind him.
Walker kneels at the stone but doesn’t say any prayers. Prayers strike him as flaccid things now — useless supplications curling out only as far as the throats of men before falling back down into their stomachs. Spiritual regurgitation. He ignores the nearby gravediggers, who stand fat and complacent over the freshly dug hole. Walker takes a shovel, throws the first clodful over his son’s coffin. He steps back and gathers his daughters in his arms, and they walk together to a waiting car.
He has hired the car to drive his family home. The girls clamber in, but Walker decides to go alone. Dull gray birds escort him as he walks through the Bronx all the way across the bridge to his street in Harlem — a five-hour walk — where he tells himself that he will strap his body to the sofa, elbow on the armrest, for the rest of his years. Even the idea of revenge strikes him as hollow.
Walker stares at the ceiling, his body a dark room of nothingness, empty, vacant. He recognizes the necessity of sorrow — if sorrow fades, so too does memory. He keeps the sorrow alive for the sake of memory, evoking Eleanor’s movements, rehearsing them in his brain. His head spins through their gymnastics of love. Small shocks of remembered bliss. He aggregates the beauty of their lives together, weighs it in his fingers. Even the dullest moments over teacups are replayed in his mind. He does the same with the memory of Clarence, then combines them, wife and son standing together at the piano, where he talks to them.
“Eleanor,” he whispers, “you’re looking good.”
“Hey, Clar, go get your momma her hairbrush.”
“I’ve never seen you look so fine, honey.”
“Thank you, son,” he says, reaching for a hairbrush that isn’t there. “Give us a moment together, your momma and me.”
And, after a silence, “He’s growing up like a flower, ain’t he, El?”
The days go by with a vicious lethargy. Even light is slow to fade. The future feels postponed by an eternal present. Walker develops a horror of time. He turns the clock face against the wall. The only day he recognizes is Sunday, because of the sight of churchgoers out the window. He resents their white teeth, their joy, the comfortable tuck of Bibles under their arms. As they walk, the gospel music seems already to be rising in them, the way they move on the tips of their toes. They will go to church and lift their voices to some useless heaven. A unified song of self-deception. God only exists in happiness, he thinks, or at least in the promise of happiness.
Walker turns his Bible spine in against the wall, bricks it in with other books, unread. Let them go on down to their ridiculous churches. Let them sing to their ceilings. You won’t find me beseeching no Jesus. I’m finished with all that.
He doesn’t move to the record player, just lets himself sink down into the folds of the couch. Beside him, a spittoon grows full and brown with chewing tobacco. He spits out a decayed tooth one morning, thinks nothing of it. He shoves aside plates of food. His daughters and Louisa bring him cups of tea that grow cold at his elbow. The window is shut to the sounds of the street. Walker mutters invectively to himself. Over the weeks, he grows wasted and haggard, and huge bags develop under his eyes. The spittoon overflows and stains the armrest. He shoos the preacher away from the door and asks his daughters to tell Rhubarb Vannucci that he isn’t home in case the Italian comes calling.
He hardly even looks at his grandson in the crib; the boy is just a meaningless blur of flesh.
At night, Louisa tries to get him to go down the hallway to the bath, to wash, but he becomes a brick in her hands and she gives up. He welcomes himself back to the sofa. “This is where I’ll lie,” he says. He might let his body melt into the cushions and stay there forgotten, like one of his dropped coins. He might reach down for the decayed parts of himself and throw them out the window to the ghost of Clarence below on the stoop: bits of arms, legs, fingers, and an eyeball as a currency for the gone.