The Salt Eaters (13 page)

I need to get out of here. Are you going to come through for me, brother man?

Obie bent to roll his other sock down. He was feeling dizzy, nauseous, but not like those mornings in the beginning when they thought the baby was on the way. Sour now. Sweet then, until they learned they had lost their child. They were running a bookstore then, rolling the paperback racks to the wall to make room for the Che Lumumba Club on Monday nights and the local Panthers on Tuesday nights and the Young Lords on Wednesday nights, and Sophie Heywood’s Study Group on Thursday nights. Everyone seemed to be pulling in the same direction then. But that of course was selective memory, a chump way to excuse the self from the chaos of the moment, longing for a past or for a future as if there were no continuum, and no real thread that energized and carried one, as if timepieces ticked away in separate lockers he could open, close, lock up, climb into or fall out of.
I’m your brother, man, come through for me. You do it for everybody else, I’m blood
. Obie tossed the daybook into the locker and kicked it closed.

The gym smelled funky. When Velma and the sisters had been taking karate, the maintenance crew had made a point of cleaning regularly. Now it was necessary to keep the windows open to give the place an airing. Obie stood at the window stretching, stretching out to the wind to feel its purpose. Arms wide, legs apart, in an open body position, he was sure there was a plan, a pattern that would reveal itself if he’d but stay available to it. He sensed a plan of growth for himself, for him and Velma, for the Academy, for the national community, for the planet, felt it too strongly, too often, too thoroughly to despair. And so he stretched and breathed deeply, trying to pay attention to what he saw and heard and felt around him and inside.

Outside in the yard that doubled as parking lot and general hangout, the motorcycle club was gathering. Leather pants, jackets, silver studs spelling out names and threats, crushed hats or helmets, gloves, men straddling bikes or standing around profiling, the women seated waiting. Obie eyed the women sitting with their backs to the window, their asses splayed out on the black leather seats or leopard-skin seat covers, or held from spreading by thick denim or tight leather; their backs arched as they held on to fenders behind them; their backs bent as they leaned forward grabbing at the ape-hangers. Women. Women talking in bits and pieces, mostly waiting, mostly impatient waiting, waiting for the men to straddle the machines and turn on the power and take them somewhere.

In the beginning, Velma had asked about the women, did he still see any of them, were they at least friends? And he had shrugged, what was there to say? He’d thought himself deeply in love each time. And they’d loved him, at least they’d each said they did. But they kept killing his babies. Junk food addicts, toxemic pregnancies, miscarriages. Excited mothers-to-be, suddenly sullen and unreachable, terror-stricken, abortions. Pills and foams and curses and shouts and long harangues about you must be kidding you think I’m some fool you sweet talking no dealing or double dealing jive ass drop your seed any ole where and keep stepping and what am I supposed to do kiss my ass and later for all the fucked-up nigger man shit. The pattern is clear. And the new pattern of growth unfolded itself the minute Velma had winced and held him round, “What kind of poor, abused sistuh would want to kill your baby, James?”

The plan had unfolded, the plan of work and development. Partially at least. But now he was stumped. Where to take the Academy? And where was his partnership going? What was he to do about Roland, about Velma, about anybody? He was
halfway out of the window, his chest swelled, his arms out as if measuring his wing span, his nostrils burning from too big an intake of air, his lungs stuttering as he tried to expell it all before he burst. The men and women in leather were saluting him, yelling hello up at him, waving at him, shine glinting off black goggles and dark shades and something in him lifting an arm to wave back. And then two women bent, leaned their heads in together, tipped the bikes to whisper. He could see their lips in the side mirror that angled away from the handlebars. Whispering and looking back at him.

Crackpot. Someone a few days ago had actually called Velma a crackpot. How fitting, though, when he thought about it. Something was definitely percolating with a fury, bubbling up and running over the sides. She eyed him these days from within a crusty depression; huddled in the Chesterfield, picking at herself as at a sore. She might catch fire any minute, break the vessel, and all he knew of her drain off, become ignited, burn away. Obie held on to the window jamb and tried to exhale his chest and stomach flat.

Nadeen saw it happen, saw something drop away from Mrs. Henry’s face. Nadeen had not wanted to move closer, but was glad Buster had moved her off the spot. Cause if she’d gone on standing there, she would’ve run screaming into the halls. And if she’d gone on standing there, she would’ve found some way to get on top of a table and clog away in them shoes Mrs. Heywood had gotten on her about. If she’d gone on standing there, she would’ve had to make some kind of move and some kind of noise. She still wanted to make some noise, wanted something loud going on, something louder than just the scratchy sound of Buster’s mustache against her face, louder than the new whispery way he’d been talking lately in her ear, louder than the swish of his corduroy pants as he left her.

She could never go down into the cellar without noise, without grabbing the old muffin tin off the hook and scraping it along the wall, scraping her knuckles sometimes but she didn’t care, cause the main thing was to not hear the mice or
the rats or the squirrels or whoever they were scurrying around down there when she went for the maternity clothes in her aunt’s trunk. Or home alone or babysitting by herself, she’d have the radio, the stereo and the TV all going full blast and calling anybody, Cynthia even, to talk and laugh with to get the spooky dark to stop in the hall and no fair creeping past the line of the door, she’d pray, when she turned for a second to bite the sides of her thumbs.

She didn’t know what she saw fall or what she saw once, whatever it was, that fell, fell away from Mrs. Henry. But the whole thing was scary, at least at first it was, and she kept trying to put the brakes on, but Buster kept on inching them closer. And then it wasn’t scary at all. Felt okay. She felt a straightening. What she caught a bit of at the falling away did something to her spine, made her stretch up like they were always telling her to do at the clinic, only not a real reaching like into high cupboards or the top shelf of the linen closet. Just to think up and stretch the spine. So she’d made up a game in the past three weeks of hanging pecan pies up in the air, of hanging up cans of root beer and sometimes bundles of dollar bills that she could have only if the top of her hair knocked them down from the make-believe strings and she could catch them.

Minnie, too, was feeling up, was clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth and humming. Velma’s frequency was lowering as she danced away from the humming toward music of an earlier moment, the radio by the bed. Velma’s growling a groan now swirling round the concentric circles in the roof of her mouth in search of a seam, a break in the curvature, a way to get out and away from the sour-sweet taste of sex coating her tongue, Obie whispering hoarsely in her ear about the moist coils of her tunnel drawing him in deeper. And she wanting to deny him herself, to hold back, to deny herself, to withdraw into the sheets tangled under her knees. Her groaning
spiraling up to break through the roof of her mouth and thunder up to her brain. Velma’s frequency sharper as she drifted back toward Minnie’s humming. And they met somewhere in the air near the window, Minnie and Velma, pulling against each other and then together, then holding each other up out of the fall, holding each other stable on stools.

“You’ll have to choose, sweetheart. Choose your own cure.”

“Choose?” Sleepriding and sleeptalking, not sure where she was, Velma felt herself sinking.

The passengers in the bus incident were not so sure where they were either, or why they should be sinking into the marshes, their spirits yawning upward, their eyes throwing up images on the walls of the mind. The bus rocking, slipping down for a tour of the caverns. Nilda Wyandot looking at Cecile’s straw hat, the goldweights from the motherland hanging from the brim, the whittled figures and palmetto charms from home dangling from the inside of the wide brim. Cecile Satterfield looking at Nilda’s hat, a black felt Andes affair with a straight-as-the-crow-flies feather stuck in the band as was customary for a traveler away from home. Seeing each other as in a dream only just now recalled. Recognizing each other as sister-friend for life, they fly up out of the roof of that bus and are back on the road in another.

Fred Holt at the bottom of the marshes with the steering wheel off and in his hands, trying to comprehend the new situation by apprehending it like an amoeba, swarming around it, surrounding it, absorbing it. Then Porter appearing in hip boots like he’d been fishing on a Sunday morning, hailing him, “How you faring, brotherman?” And him saying right back, “Fair to muddling. Fair to muddling. And you?” And Porter looking up through the green and grinning, “The toss was boss, but the pitch was a bitch. A sunken bus! Can a nigger live?”
The two of them talking rapidly, adjusting fast to underwater muscles, not sure what else they might be called upon to adjust to in the next few minutes, so talking fast about firsts, since firsts are appropriate at new beginnings—the first big fight, Porter dreaming of the Golden Gloves, remembering the climb into the ring all right, but the next memory the sting of smelling salts in the nostrils; the first car, Fred’s 1937 green Pontiac and the best damn chariot ever made; the first woman, or at least the first time they got their pants creamed and their hands sticky.

And when Nadeen got over being scared and finished with stretching her spine, she felt still another thing about seeing Mrs. Henry’s face lift off and a prettier woman appear. She felt special, felt smart like she’d never felt at home or at school. Something important was happening and she was part of it. Something bigger than the two-plus-two way everybody else lived from day to day was going on and she was right there and part of it. Whatever it was that had fallen away was showing her another way to be in the world.

“There’s nothing that stands between you and perfect health, sweetheart. Can you hold that thought?”

“Nothing can hold me from my good,” Velma drawled, reciting a remembered Sunday school lesson, “neither famine, nor evil, nor …”

A barrier falling away between adulthood and child. Like the barrier that dropped away for the passengers on the highway silent and still in the hum of the wheels over asphalt, silent and still in the sonic boom echoing back from a blasting event to occur several years hence, and to occur with so powerful an impact, its aftereffect ripples backward and spreads over their moment now, giving them a glimpse of their scripts which they
can acknowledge and use, or ignore and have to reexperience as new. Always the choice. But with attention able to change directions as sharply and as matter-of-factly as the birds winging toward Claybourne.

And then a fourth thing. Nadeen felt a kinship with the woman she did not even know, had never met, had only heard about from Buster who lived on her block or from Mrs. Heywood who considered both her and the woman her goddaughters. She’d seen the covers fall, knew the feeling, the nakedness of it. Graduating from the shelter of closed-in desks wide enough to hide behind with fingernail polish and love notes and a stick of gum thrumbled up small and tight for popping right into the mouth behind the desk lid—then suddenly the wide open, one-armed chairs of high school and everything out, the drooping socks, the ashy legs, the banged-up knees, the too-short hand-me-down clothes stretched over her swelling belly.

But Mrs. Henry didn’t grab herself up small and tight on the stool or try to duck her head down and hide or anything. She wasn’t even trying to fix herself up in front of all the people. Didn’t even check to see if the hospital gown was open, which it was, and if her behind was out, which it wasn’t cause she had on panties, but still. So Nadeen didn’t feel like clenching her thighs tight anymore or putting the brakes on with her shoes anymore. She moved closer all on her own, Buster not even there. Because it was all right now. And this was the real thing. And she was about to know or maybe already knew something her smart-ass friend Cynthia, for all her knowing, would probably never know. Nadeen knew she was not the stupid girl her teachers thought she was, or the silly child the nurses thought she was. “Babies having babies,” her neighbors had sighed.

She could argue now with folks at the clinic. How come she was old enough to sign the papers giving consent for the baby
to be taken care of when it came, but wasn’t old enough to sign for herself, had to have her aunt and the social worker give consent? It was always the same—too old to do this, too young to do that. No more. Nadeen moved closer and would have moved right up to the two stools to join hands with the healer and the woman, if the prayer group weren’t there around the two like a gate. She was a woman. Or at least, she wrinkled her nose to herself at too big a jump, she was womanish.

“Can you afford to be whole?” Minnie was singsonging it, the words, the notes ricocheting around the room. Mr. Daniels picked out one note and matched it, then dug under it, then climbed over it. His brother from the opposite side of the circle glided into harmony with him while the rest of the group continued working to pry Velma Henry loose from the gripping power of the disease and free her totally into Minnie Ransom’s hand, certain of total cure there.

“Can you afford it, is what I’m asking you, sweetheart,” Minnie persisted, ignoring the sighs of impatience that issued from the visiting doctors, nurses and technicians.

Several checked their watches, amazed that only five minutes of silence had ensued. It had seemed so much longer, that quiet moment broken by one of their members reciting the Hippocratic oath then exiting. Five minutes or not, there was still the lecture to be worked in before they reassembled in the lounge to pick up their conference kits and jackets and compare notes. The slide show and talk the administrator, Dr. Serge, would present that would answer all the questions put on hold at the morning session about the history of the Infirmary, about the fusion of Western medicine and the traditional arts, about the drug rehab acupuncture clinic, about this healing business, and about the controversial liaison with agencies such as the Academy of the 7 Arts—that was bound to take
more than an hour. And it was no short stretch of leg to the corner where the driver Fred Holt would be waiting, but not too long he had made clear, for departure. Several shifted their weight from one leg to the other, trying to get the group’s attention, trying to get a consensus about leaving.