Erasure (46 page)

“Well, could you get me some ice water?” I ax.

She sigh real heavy and stomp them big feet off in the direction of the kitchen.

I sits down on the sofa and I see that the thing be new. I run my hand along the cushion beside me and I’m thinkin, shit, where this mutha come from. Brand new.

Cleona come back into the room with the glass of water and hand it to me and then just stand there.

“You got a new couch,” I say.

“So?”

“Where you and yo mama get the money for this here?”

“That ain’t none o’ yo business,” she say.

“I think it is,” I say. “If my baby’s mama gone out sellin her ass fo money to buy furniture, that be my business. Maybe you don’t need no money.”

“You s’posed to give me money every monf for Rexall.”

“S’posed to ain’t the same as got to,” I say. I looks around the room.
“Beep,
y’all got a lot of nice
Beep.”
I sips my water and it be warm. “I said ice, bitch.”

She just stare at me.

“I’m sorry, baby,” I say. “That just come out all wrong. C’mon here and sit down beside me.”

She still just lookin at me.

“Sit down,” I say again.

She plop her big ass down heavy next to me and I put my arm round her and she get all stiff.

“C’mon, Cleona, loosen up some. Ain’t nobody home.” I touch one of them big
Beep
with my finger and say, “That’s where my baby be havin dinner.”

Cleona don’t want to but she let out a giggle.

I touch her
Beep
some more. “That’s a big ol’
Beep,
“ I say. “I wanna taste what my baby be drinkin. You want me to taste what my baby taste?”

Her eyelids be flutterin closed now and I think she say yes and I pull her shirt and look at that big-ass bra she be wearin. I try to undo the mutha
Beep
in the back, but
Beep,
I cain’t get it loose and I say, “Hep me out, damnit.”

Cleona reach her hands back, one from over her head and through her collar and the other up the back of her shirt and she open it up. Those giant jugs just flop there like big pillows, like bags of sand. I grabs on to them and sucks ‘em real hard till she moans and I whispers a lil’ sumpin, I don’t even know what the
Beep
I be sayin, but I squeeze and suck and squeeze and suck. The clock cross the room says one o’clock and I remember that I’m s’posed to meet Yellow and Tito over at the pool hall, so I gotta pop it quick. I push her back and undoes her pants, all the while I’m suckin on them
Beep
and she’s moanin. It’s hard to get her pants over her big ass, but I do it and then I puts it in her, all of it. Wham! Just like that and she cry out and man I feel so powerful. I bang it, man, I bang it and she start cryin, openin her eyes and seein me and she be cryin, sayin for me to get off her. But I be hittin it now and I smile at her.

“God, I just love that,” Kenya says, shaking her head. “Now, I know some of you at home are thinking that some of the language is kinda rough, but let me tell you, it doesn’t get any more real than this. With this kinda talent, chile, don’t you think we ought to forgive our guest’s intense bashfulness?”

Audience applause, approval, endorsement, blessing.

I looked out from the house that was my disguise and saw Yul standing backstage. He applauded lightly, nodding to me, shrugging slightly, then he gave me a thumb-up that caused me to sink. I looked down at my feet, imagined my reflection in the leather of my shoes. Kenya Dunston was jabbering on the other side of the screen. What she was saying mattered none. I got up and walked away.

Hard luck Poppa standing in the rain

If the world was corn, he couldn’t buy grain,

Lord, Lord, got them Brown’s Ferry blues.

I returned to Washington defeated and feeling as near suicide as I had ever felt. I considered putting my head in the oven, but as Mother had always exercised a preference for electricity over gas, I could only hope to cook myself to death. I contemplated putting my father’s pistol to some use, but years of reading led me to understand that there were just too many not-quite-fatal places a piece of metal might lodge itself, leaving me where?
Just as I was.
And there was the nagging fear that upon waking from a three-year coma I would find the identification bracelet on my wrist reading
Stagg R. Leigh.
I shuddered at the notion and the woman beside me thought that I was responding to her offer of a mint. She was Australian, I believe, and she said, “You only need to say no, mate.”

I apologized. “I was somewhere else,” I said.

“I don’t like flying either,” she said. “You look low.”

I nodded, not wanting to chat, but I had already been rude once.

“Yeah, you look low, all right. You seem like you wanna put your head in a croc’s mouth.”

“Is that an efficient method?”

She laughed. “Clean off,” she said, then leaned back to regard me. “You’re all right, mate.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, I like you. Course if you go off and kill yourself, then I’ll say I liked you. Past tense, you know.”

“I know.”

“You should come to Australia,” she said. She was not a large woman, but she sounded big. “There are some places in the desert that you’d think are just hell. Then you could come back here and everything would be right as rain by comparison.”

“You think so?”

“My daddy used to say,
There isn’t anything so bad that seeing something worse won’t make better.”

“A poet, your father.”

“A bit of a bastard, he was. Made me love life though. Just by being there, if you catch my meaning.”

“I do.”

She again offered me a mint and this time I took it and thanked her. She said, “These are just god-awful,” as I put the thing in my mouth.

“Not so bad,” I said.

The phone discussions with the judges turned out to be disheartening, infuriating and stultifying. To a person, they had all fallen in love with Stagg Leigh’s
Fuck.

“The best novel by an African American in years.”

“A true, raw, gritty work.”

“So vivid, so life-like.”

“The energy and savagery of the common black is so refreshing in the story.”

“I believe it will be taught in schools, despite its rough language. It’s that strong.”

“An important book.”

Of all them black-faced crew

The finest man I knew

Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.

The house was cold. Mother was the same. Life was the same. I had a new book out, but no one, thank god, knew it was mine. And the damn thing was doing well, very well, enormously well. I read many books that I thought were fine, but my fellow judges would hear none of it. Because we had to, we came to five finalists.

They were:

(1)
Traditions,
by Zeena Lisner.

(2)
Monte Cristo,
by J. Thinman.

(3)
Exit the Moon,
by Jorge Jarretto.

(4)
Warrior’s Happiness,
by Chic Dong.

(5)
Fuck,
by Stagg R. Leigh.

We would sift through the finalists and shake out a winner at a final meeting right before the awards ceremony in New York in February.

Das Seitengewehr pflanzt auf!
The scream came to me in a dream, but as much as it frightened me, I did not wake, but instead continued dreaming, understanding in fact that I was dreaming. The idea that Nazi soldiers were after me was scary enough, but my fear was compounded by my knowledge that I was aware of it all being a dream and my inability to actually awake. I was hiding in dense brush at dusk. There was a French farmhouse in the distance, across a pasture, and beyond that was an orchard of some kind. The Germans were coming through the orchard, bayonets fixed as ordered. They burned the house and came across the meadow, poking their weapons into mounds of hay. A woman ran from the burning house, falling, crying. I could not see her face, but she was carrying a canvas. I could see the picture well in spite of the distance and the failing light. It was
Starry Night.
The soldiers took the painting from the woman and lanced it. I felt a sharp pain in my middle, grabbed my stomach and when I looked down at my hand I found it covered with blood. But I kept telling myself, “This is a dream. This is a dream.” Behind the soldiers a male chorus sang “The Horst Wessel Song.” Then the painting was aflame and the heat I felt made me scream out and the soldiers heard me, reckoned my position and came toward me. I then realized that I was sitting in a foxhole with a .50 calibre machine gun. I forgot my bleeding and my burns and started shooting, mowing down the soldiers like so many cans. One soldier, though shot, crawled bleeding all the way to my foxhole while “Horst Wessel” was replaced by “Stars Fell on Alabama.” The wounded man looked at me, at my own blood on my shirt, and said, “Wie heißen Sie?” And I didn’t know.