Byzantium (4 page)

I hesitated. I felt as if I couldn’t move and before I knew what I was doing I called out, “Emperor.” He looked back—he had already stepped toward his door—and I held up my bared hand.

The stream purled beneath the silver briars. Above us the eyes of God stared, fixed in stone and gilded glass.

“Theodosios?” Heraclius asked, his face gone pale.

I nodded.

The emperor came to where I was kneeling. He grabbed me by the wrist and examined my hand. “So he was genuine,” he said. “That is unfortunate.”

I quaked. On the ship back, as my fascination with my hand settled into calm acceptance, doubts began to plague me. Surely I had committed a grievous crime. Now I was certain I would be tipped into the briars.

“I will tell you something,” the emperor said. “It is by far not the worst thing I have had done.” He pulled me close. I could see a narrowness in his gaze, the tired narrowness of one long hunted, of a bear in its final moments in the pit as the dogs close in. I thought of Theodosios’s vision, of the emperor as a frightened, blind beast, and waited for the shove, for the prick of the thorns. But before I could close my eyes the emperor let me go, pressed the carnelian berry, and sent me away.

RELEASED FROM THE CHALKE GATE, I picked my way through the Mese’s undulant, squabbling crowd of merchants. Dazed still from my meeting with Heraclius, I paid no attention to the clothier who thrust a wool mantle into my hands, to the tin seller who danced before me, his cups dangling from his arms. I was headed, at last, for home.

“Eusebios,” my mother said when I stepped into the courtyard. She stood there as if knocked still, whispered a veneration to the Holy Mother, then clutched me and wept into my shoulder. My heart—this surprised me—swelled, and for a moment I forgot all that I had done. Only when she pulled away did she see my hand.

“How?” she asked, seizing it and pulling it close to her eyes. I started on about a Grecian spring, but she scoffed. So I told her the truth, and in the telling I felt suddenly proud. What I had done was difficult. I had served the emperor. And mightn’t the hand be a sign that I had done right? But before I could finish, my mother let me go and backed away.

“That was you?” she said. Her flesh seemed to have turned ashen. “You have mocked God,” she pronounced. “That hand is a curse. He has shown you His power.” She looked at me, her face stricken with disappointment, then fled from the courtyard to her room, where she shut herself for the rest of the afternoon.

For several days after, she avoided me. Then one morning, a servant came to my bedchamber as I was dressing and presented me with a new glove. I didn’t need to ask who had sent it. I wanted to throw it across the room. I wanted to send it back torn. But I put it on. When I went down, my mother was waiting in the courtyard. With a brief flick of her eyes she confirmed the glove’s presence. After that, she never again mentioned my hand.

I WAS NOW A GREAT MAN. I rode through the city, shouting across the rabble to other young courtiers I had met, and involved myself in Hippodrome politics, supporting the Blues, as my father had, and standing feasts for the chariot racers. Heraclius had kept his promise of reward. It had been announced that at the Feast of Palms I would be granted an income and subpatrician rank, which, among other privileges, would allow me a title, the use of blue ink, and the right to be drawn in a carriage by four brown ponies.

A month after my return, I received perhaps my greatest honor: an invitation to dine at an imperial banquet in the Triclinium of the Nineteen Couches. I sent for the tailor and commissioned a new tunic, and when the evening came I daubed myself with scent. As I was leaving, I could hear my mother in her room, murmuring her constant prayers. I ignored them, and once I stepped into my litter I slipped off my glove and tossed it to a servant. At the dinner I was given a poor seat, far from Heraclius—a hundred men separated us—and near the twelve paupers. But I was there. I belonged. The musicians played airy tunes, the tableware glittered in the lamplight, and the emperor, I was certain, had looked at me with approval.

It was when the wine was being poured and I had begun talking to the youth on my right—the son of a Bithynian tax farmer—that one of the paupers, seated toward the middle of their table, leapt up and hissed at me. I had noticed him giving me twitchy glances and had hoped it would end there. His beard was matted, his skin burnt to leather, and after he hissed again he pointed at me with a pheasant bone and shouted, “Blood on his hand!” The entire room fell silent and stared. I sat as still as I could, and as my heart beat I felt each pulse’s tremble. Someone seemed to be squeezing my chest, denying me all but the tiniest spoonfuls of breath. The rumors of Theodosios’s gelding had grown more detailed in the recent days, and I feared that at last I had been caught out.

But then a soldier pulled the pauper from where he stood. The next dish, turtles cooked in their shells, was brought. Everyone returned to their conversations as if nothing had happened. They were all well-practiced courtiers. A madman, two or three said. The Bithynian began rattling on about some gossip he’d heard concerning the Greens’ new bearkeeper, and at the next table a general from the east assured his neighbors that the recent Saracen unrest, during which they’d proclaimed a prophet (such an idea raised laughter), would be put down by winter. And yet I couldn’t return so easily. Those latest rumors held that Theodosios had retreated farther into the desert, and since that night there had been no new miracles. As I reclined, I saw again his twisted face. I heard his cries, felt his bloody manhood in my palm, and thought of what my mother had said. A curse.

The musicians changed songs. A slave reached over my shoulder and pulled apart my turtle shell. I hid my hand under the table and forced my mouth into a smile. I had served an empire that would last forever, I had become the son my father died wanting. There could be no regret.

B
ACK FROM LUNCH, I stood in the early June sun pulling two-by-sixes for somebody else’s load when Mike, the yard manager, came out of the office and yelled, “All right, Brian, I’ve got an easy one for you and Jimmy.”

It took me half a moment to register what he was saying. My mind had nestled itself against the secret, moon-pale skin between the buttons of this shirt Angela sometimes wore at The Hangout, the church club over in the strip mall where the Safeway used to be. But as soon as I did I dropped the two-by-six midpull and said to Mike, “Let me kneel down before you. I swear I’ll get an idol with your face on it and give it flowers and pigeon blood every night.”

Mike colored at that, being Baptist. Forty something at least, with a groomed black beard and sunglasses hanging from his neck by a neon-green band, he was the Prime Mover of the yard’s universe, spinning us into motion with his order sheets. My prayers must have climbed their way through the spheres and gotten to his ear. Ever since morning the minutes had crawled, and all I could think of was getting to quitting time and driving to The Hangout so I could pitch my woo Angela-ward.

“Where’s Jimmy?” Mike said, clutching the order sheet to his chest. Jimmy popped up behind him, out of the main warehouse, where he must have been lazing in the door room. A great place for smoking, he told me once, but not for getting high, not with all those doors. Jimmy was a couple years older than me, taller, muscled, long hair straight and brown, with these little round spectacles like you see on timid townspeople in westerns. I’d been paired with him since I started at the lumberyard. After the tornado hit, they needed some extra people, and my dad was friends with a guy who went to Mike’s church. My first week, though, I managed to put a nail through my foot and drive over a stack of Sheetrock, and Jimmy was the only one willing to take me on. He was a general master of fuckuppery, but he’d worked at East Texas since he graduated from high school and he knew the yard. Those last were Mike’s exact words.

His exact words now were, “Don’t screw it up.” The job was a shingle drop for two tornado houses. “Silver Linings to Greenhills and Chestnuts to Oak Ranch,” Mike told us. Jimmy snatched the order sheet from him, looked it over like maybe it was a trick, then beamed at me and told me to get in the truck. Mike gave us an “All right” and headed back to his air-conditioned holy of holies. We didn’t get good deliveries too often. We were always getting lost, and one time we’d scattered half our load on MLK when one of our straps came loose. But all the other guys were swamped.

We parked on the cool cement floor of the shingle warehouse, and Arturo scooted over in his forklift, glanced at the order, and said, “Pinchay my asshole.” Jimmy sat there, grinning as he held his hair up in a ponytail and snapped a rubber band around it. Arturo was always shouting something obscene, and most of the guys laughed without even thinking about the translation.

“Two drops,” Jimmy said to me, relishing it. “Tornado houses. And one of them in Longview.”

I let myself sink into the truck’s plastic leather, listened idly as Arturo put our pallets together and shouted “Pinchay my asshole” some more. Shingles were already easy because we wouldn’t have to pull lumber for a load, and the Longview drop meant a good long time of getting paid for just riding around. I’d sail through the afternoon, almost nothing between me and quitting time, between me sitting here now and sitting next to Angela at The Hangout and offering to buy her a Mountain Dew.

JIMMY DROVE US THROUGH DOWNTOWN, all cracked sidewalks and empty buildings and that line of tall oil derricks they lit up for Christmas, then over to Stone Road to skirt the tornado zone and come up along its backside.

“You got any stops you want to make?” he asked after we passed the new car wash with its imported palm trees and inflated gorilla in an Uncle Sam hat. He’d said it was a right, on long deliveries, to work in some idling.

But I didn’t want the risk. I’d already measured the afternoon out in my head. Once we did our two drops and got back, it’d be four. That was a good hour to return from delivery, four. Too late to start a new job, we’d hang out eating Popsicles from the yard freezer, straightening boards and picking up scraps while the day’s last minutes wound down, no worrying about getting to The Hangout in time. When I shared my dream with Jimmy—leaving out any mention of Angela, since the last thing I wanted was his needling—he said, “I got to have my stops.”

“What about this. We don’t fucknut around, Mike might give us some more good deliveries.”

Jimmy leaned across the truck, let it glide between lanes as he reached his hand toward me. “Two stops. I’ll have us back by five. I swear.”

A telephone pole loomed. “Jesus, fine.” I gave his hand a quick shake. “Two stops, back by five.” It was the best I could do.

The thing is, the tornado had deus-ex-machinaed my life pretty well, and I was fighting to hold on to the improvements. First there was my job. The one I had before the lumberyard was at Whataburger, and I couldn’t go back there. The grease coated my skin like wax, and I’d been fired anyway for leaving some meat out. I’d sat around for months, taking classes part-time at the junior college, and my parents had given me an ultimatum. I had to be out by New Year’s and doing something useful, they said, so I’d decided to move to Dallas and go to the locksmith school there. My brain turned to fuzz whenever I thought too long about most things, but it’d be cool spending your day getting into other people’s houses and cars. Since the tornado came and I started at the lumberyard I’d saved up about a quarter of the money I needed.

And second there was Angela. In high school I’d had only one real girlfriend. She was Church of Christ, and she kissed me with her lips closed and dumped me after a month because I kept putting my hand on her stomach and she thought I was trying to edge it somewhere else (I was). But Angela I’d already felt up once. Two weeks earlier she sat in the folding chair next to mine at The Hangout. The guy who ran The Hangout didn’t charge anything—he went to Grace Church and said it was his mission for the area youth, to give us someplace to go that wasn’t a cowboy bar or a random field where we might get up to who knew what. On Thursdays and Fridays the same Christian band always played, and that one night two weeks back when Angela sat next to me I caught her flipping off the singer while he was leading everybody in prayer. “He’s an idiot,” she said when she saw me. “He made fun of people at school and peed on my friend’s car.” I held her Mountain Dew for her when she went to the bathroom, and when the band took a break she told me she’d gone to high school at Pine Tree and that last year was her first year at SFA. “It sucked I missed the tornado,” she said. I told her I was out there every day, delivering wood and stuff to the houses. A light turned on in her eyes. She pushed her flat brown hair behind her ears and told me she was majoring in biology, wanted to do something with frogs. I said, “Frogs are cool,” and she started talking about going on a frog hunt with her science club in Davy Crockett National Forest. It was as if she’d unwrapped this hidden part of herself and was holding it out to me. I asked if she was dating anybody, offhanded-like, and she said no. So when she said she had to get home I walked her to her car. She opened her door and turned to look at me and that’s when I kissed her. After we did that for about a minute I slipped my hand up her shirt and kept it there until one of the Grace volunteers watching the parking lot started beelining our way. Angela pulled back and said she had to go but that she’d see me again.

But the next night at The Hangout she ignored me and instead sat with this group of mission trippers from Jasper who’d come here to shovel in the tornado zone. A freckle-faced, lanky guy with gelled blond hair kept putting his arm around her, and she kept letting him. I couldn’t figure it out. When I got her by herself, she’d barely talked to me, and it was that way every time after until last night I spotted her alone at the cake and candy table. At first I froze but then I said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey.” She was holding her arm across the chest of her Scooby-Doo T-shirt, Scooby’s eyes blacked out with marker, as she scratched at the eczema on her other arm. I told her I liked what she had done to her shirt and she said, “He’s a dog, it’s stupid, the others could still be alive now but he’d be dead.” Then I said, “I haven’t talked to you in forever,” though it’d only been since last Friday, and she said, well, yeah, that sucked, and now she was headed back to Nacogdoches in two days for summer school. One of the Jasper mission trippers barked her name in this voice he did that made everyone laugh. She smiled at him and started leaning in that way people do when they want to leave you for somebody better. My jaw finally flopped open and “See you tomorrow?” tumbled out. She said, “Sure,” and stopped scratching long enough to hold her hand up in good-bye.

Tonight was my last chance. I had to get back to the yard by five so I could be at The Hangout by six, waiting for Angela, ready to show her I was the one she wanted. That way it’d be me walking her to the parking lot when the time came, sneaking my hand up her shirt again, and seeing what happened next.

“WELL, SHIT, I guess we’re late for our date,” Jimmy said when we got to the first drop, over on Greenhills. Roofers crowded the top of the pink-bricked ranch house like lizards on a rock. They were drinking Cokes and lying back, eyes hooded under ballcaps. We’d done a few shingle runs before, and the first time out Jimmy had told me about roofers. “Lowest of the low,” he’d said. “When a man can’t get a job doing anything else, he becomes a roofer.” Since then I’d always regarded roofers, and roofs, with a quiet disdain.

The head roofer came over to the truck. After we’d driven across the ruined chain-link fence and parked on the grass we’d found him sitting under a crab-apple tree, the only thing in the backyard left standing. His skin was leathered and red, and he wore a dirty denim shirt and a chewed-up Lone Star Feed hat.

“Twenty bucks and me and my partner’ll put these shingles on the roof,” Jimmy said, nodding at me when he said “partner.”

“Done,” the head roofer said, and passed Jimmy a twenty and got back under his tree. He took a Marlboro from the pack in his shirt pocket and lit up.

If the roofers didn’t give us the twenty bucks we unloaded the shingles on the ground, which sucked for them. They’d have to haul the bundles up one by one on a ladder. But with the truck backed just right we only had to lift them from the bed, which was already more than halfway up the side of your basic ranch house. After he pocketed the twenty and gave me a ten, Jimmy edged the truck against the house, and then we got out.

“Go on up,” Jimmy said once we’d both climbed onto the bed.

“You go up.” The few other times we’d done this I’d been the one stuck on the roof. If I wasn’t careful my foot could go through a soft spot, put me in a wheelchair for life if the roof was rotten enough. Mike had told me the stories himself.

“You going to sling these shingles?” Jimmy asked.

I couldn’t, of course—I was too weak. Each bundle was sixty pounds. Without a word I scrabbled up over the gutter, and once I was on the roof Jimmy started handing the shingles to me. He hoisted them like they were nothing while I waddled, bent-backed, as I carried them up and down the slope of the house and dropped them wherever the roofers pointed. They didn’t get up, just nodded and grunted. As I walked back to fetch the next bundle, my arms floated up in release and I’d look out at the mile-long tornado cut that ran through town, scabbed over here and there with fresh plywood and timber, dotted with trash piles and teams of volunteers in the neon-colored shirts donated by the TV station over in Tyler. Then I’d pick up the next bundle and forget about the tornado as I strained and breathed little breaths and prayed I wouldn’t make a fool of myself before I dumped the sucker. On the roof’s far slope, where the plywood hadn’t been replaced, it was harder to find the rafters, and my third trip over I missed one. My foot sank into the plywood—a soft spot, rotted to sponge. This was it. Thinking of Angela, the three minutes of her I’d had and all the minutes I wanted, I eased my weight to my other foot, still balanced on a rafter. The roofer watching me let out a guzzling laugh. I wobbled, then got myself clear, and once both feet were settled I tossed the shingles before the roofer could point. We only had a few bundles left and each trip back I eyed the divot and moved my feet in straight lines along the rafters I’d found. Soon we’d finished. The roofers began to cuss and rise. Before I got off the roof they already had the nail guns going, the bright new chestnut shingles spreading up from the eaves.

WHEN THE TORNADO HAD COME, back in April, I was at the junior college, on the top floor of Pfaff Hall waiting for my history class. The siren we always heard on the second Wednesday of every month blared, and at first I thought it was an idiot cop pulling a prank. But then an announcement echoed down the cinder-block halls: a tornado had touched down and we had to get to the bottom floor, away from glass. A sudden giddiness rattled the air. The juco profs stationed themselves at spaced points and waved us forward, as if they’d trained for it, and at the end of the hall Franciosa James, who I’d shared a table with in fourth-grade homeroom, shouted, “Gonna motherfucking storm up in here.” People near him laughed. “I ain’t making no joke.”

Franciosa’s words were the true signal. Low-grade panic kicked through me, and I fought my way toward the stairs, weaving around others. Just before the stairwell, though, I got blocked by three girls whose tank-topped, salon-toasted skin I’d contemplated all semester. They held each other as they walked, the one in the middle bawling. Temporarily forfeiting my panic, I reached out to put a hand on her. With everything upended, who knew what might happen? But a guy in a camo shirt elbowed himself between us. The bulk of his thick, broad body muffled what I’d started saying to the girl, about it being okay, and I had to listen to him show off. He said he’d walk right now over to the Show Room for a shot if he could get some company, and one of the girls chuckled. I gave up and downstairs I sat an extra length from the nearest person. Death, I meet thee alone, I said to myself, thinking it was from a poem in high school. I didn’t really believe I was going to die, I just liked the charge of it, like everyone else.