Blue World (13 page)

Wanda is what they called the new boys at the Brickyard. At least right then. The name changed every few weeks, always some girl’s name.

“You a big, bad Wanda, aint you?” he asked, just standing there and grinnin like a black ole fool. He was blacker than me, that African black that’s so black you can see blue through the skin. And his eyes were pale amber behind a little pair of wire glasses and he had a tight cap of white hair done in cornrows. His face looked like the bottom of a dried-up mud pond, and I swear there wasnt enough room for another wrinkle. I mean, he was old! Maybe like sixty-five or something, I figured. But he was skinny like me, just walkin bones, and those hospital duds hung on him like a tent.

“Go way and leave me alone,” I remember sayin to him. My head was aching fit to bust, I couldnt see straight, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

“Wanda says go way. Think we ought to?” Talkin to somebody else, only there wasnt nobody in the beds around.

“Crazy as hell,” I say, and he smile and say, “Yellachile, look at a prime cut of fool.”

Well, he holds up somethin out of them gray tent folds and

I saw what it was: a little yella bird. A canary, I guessed it was. My Aunt Mondy had a canary in a cage that she called Sweet Thang and a cat thought it was sweet too cause it gulped it down and didnt leave a feather. He holds it in one hand and its wings are flappin like its fixin to fly and I figured bird shit on my head was about all I needed. I say, “Get that thing outta here!” and he say, “Yes’m, Wanda. Just for you.” He put his other hand over it to keep it from flyin off, and back it went into the folds.

And then he leans over real close, and I saw his teeth were as yella as that bird, and he say soft like, “Wanda, you gone be in here for a long time. Cut a brother’s throat, didnt you?”

“He tried to cut me first,” I said. Didnt bother me that he knew. Aint no privacy in a prison.

“They all sing the same tune. Goes like this: tweet, tweet I didnt do it tweet tweet no sir not me tweet tweet…”

“Didnt say I didnt do it,” I told him. “Just say I didnt pull the knife first.”

“Yeah, and you stuck it in first too. Well, reckon the Brickyard’s better than the boneyard, aint it?” He laughed; it was a little chuckle, but it brought a cough out of him and that made another cough come up and another one and then his eyes were full of hurt and he was hackin his lungs out.

“Your sick,” I say when he stop that coughin.

“If I was well I wouldnt be in here with the likes of you, would I?” He wheezed a few times, and then whatever it was passed but he had a deep sickness in him. I could tell that right off. The whites of his eyes looked like cups of pus. “Come on, Yellachile,” he said to the canary, “let’s get on away from Wanda and let her get that beauty sleep she’s gone need.”

He didnt go too far, just to a bed across the aisle. He laid down on coarse linen like the King of Africa on a gold throne, and the sun was shining in through the bars hot and proper and somebody else was moppin the floor. I sits up and I saw that canary flying round and round over the African’s bed, and all of a suddens he reached up and caught that bird and he pulls it to his cheek. Started whistlin to it, makin love sounds to a bird. I knows he’s a number-one fool now! But after a while I got to enjoyin the sounds, and it seemed to me that him and the bird were talking back and forth in a language that was older than anythin Id ever heard. I laid my head back on a pillow and slept, and I dreamed of Aunt Mondy’s canary flyin in its cage and a catface lookin in.

Well, time passes even in here. You get a routine, and thats how you live. They put me on the garbage detail, which is bout the lowest you can get and not be belly-crawlin, cause a prison’s garbage sure aint perfumy. Lot of fellers wanted to fight me cause they heard I figured myself to be bad and suchlike, and plenty of times I got struck out but I hit me a few home runs too and that was all right. You dont fight back in prison, you might as well be sewing a gravesuit. The trick is not to hurt nobody too bad and cause a grudge. Grudges get you killed real quick. Anyway, I got me some friends and a new name. “Wanda” turned into “Wand,” cause I’m so skinny, and by that time we were callin new meat “Lucys.”

Every cellblock has a different schedool for time in the excercize yard. I was in Block D, and we went out at two-thirty. One day we were out there rappin and shooting some baskets and when we were resting we start talkin bout our first day in. Well, I told em about that old man and the canary, and Brightboy Stubbins say, “Lord, Wand! You done met Whitey and Yellachile!”

“Yellachile’s that bird’s name, I guess,” I said, “but that old man sure aint a whitey!”

“Shush up, boy!” Stretch say. “You dont wanna be disrespectful to Whitey, no sir!”

“Aint being disrespectful,” I say. “Aint being nothin. How come the hallboys let that old man keep a bird?” I remembered the Cap’n readin the rules in a roar that quaked my bones. “Aint supposed to be such a thing in here.”

“Whitey’s special,” McCook say. “The hallboys leave him alone.”

“Yeah, and you know why.” Brightboy leans his head down, like hes talkin to his shadow. “Whitey’s a voodoo man, thass why. Lord, yes! He speaks the conjure tongue!”

I laughed. “Hell, the conjure tongue didnt keep him out of this place, did it?”

They all looked at me like I was a roach on two legs. Stretch put his hand on my shoulder, and Stretch has got a mighty big hand. “You listen up,” he says, and the way his eyes were glintin I didnt think we were gonna be friends anymore. “Whitey Latrope is a mighty important feller around here. Dont matter if you dont believe in the power of the conjure tongue. He dont care. But dont you never show disrespect to Whitey, or you gone have to deal with ol‘ Stretch. Okay?”

I said okay real quick. Wouldnt want to knock heads with Stretch, no sir!

“Whitey Latrope’s a voodoo man,” Stretch said in that low quiet voice hes got, “and Yellachile aint just a bird. Yellachile knows things, and speaks em to Whitey.”

“What things?” I was brave enough to ask.

“Yellachile flies out of his cage at night,” Brightboy said, and it was funny to hear such a big man whisper. He looked past me, the sun slamming down on his moon-pie face. I saw he was staring at the tall fence topped with barbed wire, and the fence beyond that, and the gray stone wall that eight men had died tryin to get over, and the brown dusty hills and limp-limbed woods that surrounded the Brickyard for too many miles. “Yellachile flies,” he say. His shadow lay across the tight fence mesh. “Out of his cage, through a winder, out of Block A, and gone.”

“Gone?” I say. “Gone where?”

“Over the fence. Over the wall. To freedom and back again to his cage before the sun comes up and the whistle blows. And Yellachile tells Whitey where he’s flown, and what he’s seen out there. Tells him about the towns and the houses all full of light, and the people laughin‘ in the jukejoints and the music rollin out in the street like silver coins.” Brightboy smiled just thinkin about such things, and I saw them in my head and I kind of smiled too. “Oh, that Yellachile goes to some wondrous towns,” he said. “Places you never knowed about, but you always dreamed were there.”

It was a nice spell, but it didnt hold me too long. “How do you know?” I asked him. “If Whitey’s in Block A, how do you know?” There wasnt any mixing between the men in different blocks, see.

“Everybody knows,” Stretch answered, and the way he said it let me know I was the big fool. “Besides, they rotate you around here every six months. That’s to break up the doodle-dangers and the gangs. I was in Block E with him two years ago. Three cells down from mine.”

“Well, I was right crost from him in ‘81,” McCook say. “Block B. Yessir, I could look over there and see that bird flyin round like a little piece of sun every day!”

“Just hold on.” Somethin peculiar had come to me, and I ought to say it. “How long’s Whitey been in here?”

Stretch said goin on forty years. McCook said thirty-five. Brightboy believed it was between those numbers.

I say, “How long does a bird live? Cant no canary live forty years!”

“Yellachile’s always been there,” Stretch told me. “Always. Cant die. Whitey’s a voodoo man, and Yellachile’s his spirit.”

That shut me up, but I sure was talkin in myself while we went back to basketball.

I got promoted. Left the garbage cans and got a mop and broom. I had the machine shop, and Lordy there was a lot to sweep up in there! I never could figure out what the machine shop was for. Just men workin on little engines and cogs and gears with plenty of time on their hands. Guess some of them did electrical work round the Brickyard, stuff like that. But one day the rain was pourin down the barred winders and I was sweepin and all of a suddens Pell Donner he say, “Wand! Come on, boy! Whitey’s in the shop!”

I followed him, and there he was: the black African with white cornrow hair. Except he looked even skinnier in his prison duds. Looked like his face had grown more wrinkles, and his shirt and trousers hung on him, but I bet there wasnt no size smaller in the laundry. He was standin there with bout ten or eleven men round him, and he had his hands cupped together but I could see Yellachile in the cage of his fingers, every so often flappin his wings and tryin to peek out.

You never seen men with faces like children before if you werent there. And quiet--Lord yes. Even Roughhouse Clayton was quiet, and you couldnt shut him up if you knocked the mouth off his face. Whitey was talkin, and as he talked he kept liftin his hands and blowin little puffs of air in at Yellachile. But somethin was wrong with Whitey’s lungs. They gurgled like backed-up drains, and he was havin trouble breathin. I figured cancer, or somethin else wicked.

“Yellachile done some flyin last night,” Whitey said, raspy-soft, and his eyes shone behind those glasses like ghost lamps. “Yessir, done some fast and far flyin. Didnt ya?” He looked in at Yellachile, and the little bird cocked its head at him. “Where’d he go, I wonder?”

“Florida. Where it don’t rain every night for two months,” Billy Davis say.

“Flew to a big city,” Junior Murdock say, his voice like a muted New Orleans trumpet. “Where the lights stay on all night long and them ladies parade the streets.”

“The country.” That was a new man I didnt know. “Over a farm where you can smell the green.“

I said it. Dont know why. “Flew to Masonville.”

He looked up from Yellachile. The canary’s wings fluttered, and Whitey drew the bird against his sunken chest. “Masonville?” he ask. “Who say that?”

Junior Murdock motioned to me with a big black thumb. Somebody else moved aside, and another somebody else, and then I was lookin straight at Whitey and him at me. He nodded, smiled a little bit. “I know you,” he say. “You aint a Wanda no more, are you?”

“They call me Wand now.”

“I see why. Dont you eat?” he asked.

“Im still growin,” I say, and he laugh a coughy laugh and said, “Well, aint we all!”

Then he gets up close in my face, those eyes bright and burnin, and

I want to step back from them flames but I dont and all the machines are so quiet I can hear my heart beat. And he says, “Yessir, I do believe Yellachile flew to Masonville last night. Flew right over the heart of town. Lemme check.” He lifted the bird to his mouth and gave a few gasping whistles, and then he put the bird to his ear and Yellachile’s head cocked but I couldnt hear no song. “Yessir,” he say, cupping the canary close again. “Yellachile sure did go to Masonville, and let me tell you what he say: Masonville’s a town with two streets, one goin in and one goin out. Masonville’s got a park in it, aint a big park, but there are lanterns in it that shed a golden light. Got park benches, and Yellachile he saw lovers on them benches in the golden light. Handsome men and women, they were, talkin of love. And round that park is the town, and in the dark all their lights were on too, so theres never a real dark, and people come and go as they please. The stars shone over Masonville last night, and the moon came up. Such a moon as can only be seen in Masonville. Aint no other place in the world to see it, cause it just bout fills up the sky its so big. Its a warm moon, and Yellachile looked at it from the branch of a pine tree there in that park. Yellachile brought the smell of pine needles on a warm night back with him. There it is.” He inhaled. Everybody else did too. “Fresh pine needles,” he say. “Bright moon. Handsome men and women in the golden light, under a sky full of stars. That’s what Yellachile saw in Masonville. You see it too?”

He was asking me. I said, “Yes sir,” and it was the truth.

Whitey smiled. “That makes Yellachile real happy.” He stroked the canary with one finger, and the bird lay there content. “Tonight he might fly to Florida. Or over the country, where the land smells green. Never can tell where he’ll fly.” And then Whitey moved on, and it wasn’t until a minute or so had passed that I started smellin machine oil and seein the stone walls again. Overhead was not stars and moon but a tangle of pipes. But just for a few minutes I had been back in Masonville, a long long way from here.

The hallboys came over and broke us up, and we got back to work. Real funny how a simple thing can stay with you. I kept seein Masonville, only after a while I kind of figured out it wasnt the Masonville I knew. No, the real Masonville had a factory in it that went day and night, and the smoke out of its chimneys didnt let you see the stars.

But Whitey had taken me out of the Brickyard for just a few minutes. I was there with Yellachile in the quiet park. No such park in Masonville. Did it matter? I was there. The Masonville in my head was better than the real one. From that moment on I knew the power of voodoo, and why Whitey was so special. He could melt the Brickyard’s walls.

I couldnt figure the canary, though. How could a bird live for forty years?

Whitey came through the machine shop a lot of times. Always stopped. The hallboys let him talk, cause they seemed to enjoy it too. One night Yellachile went to Florida, and flew over Miami Beach. That was five hundred miles south, but Yellachile was a spirit and could go anywhere. I closed my eyes and saw all those big hotels and that ocean, and I aint never seen an ocean before cept on TV. Yellachile flew low over the waves, and I could smell the salt air. And one night Yellachile flew to the north and skimmed a field of snow where the tracks of deer led in all directions and the moon shone clear and so cold it made your teeth rattle. Over farms and orchards, deserts, big cities, rivers where barges hooted and tugged, woods lit by no gleam but starlight, islands where the water sounded like music and the air smelled like coconut and cinnamon. All those places and more. One night Yellachile flew through a window into a strip-tease club in New Orleans. Into a boxin arena, where two men battled to the roar of the crowd and the smell of cheap cigars and sweat hung at the roof. To a baseball game on a July night, and Lord I could taste the salted peanut that Yellachile stole from a white man’s hand.