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Soon enough we’re kissing in the parking lot, down the block from the place I’m staying. I want to take her up for the night, but she’s thinking about calling it time to go home. Luckily her pad is close by, so I start to walk her, but I’ve still got my moves going, because the night’s not over till it’s over.

I lean her against a railing, in front of somebody’s brownstone stairs. “How much farther?”

Turns out it’s her place we’re in front of. That would be as good as mine, so I start walking her up the stairs.

Jean takes my hand. “Billie was amazing tonight, don’t you think?”

“Sure, sure.” But my mind is on the feel of Jean, soft and right up against me.

“The way she walked off, in the dark.”

It’s not happening tonight. So I push her away. “You’re home, right?” I tell her. “And you’re not asking me up?” My tone is sandpaper rough. All this time, trying to get away from the heaviness. The song. The picture. She wants to bring me back. I ain’t going back.

“Aww, Red,” she whines. “You know I’m not like that.”

She tries to kiss at me again, but there’s only so much that a guy can take. “Catch you later,” I say. Jog down the steps. Light a reefer for the walk back to the rooming house. I suck down the smoke, skip on faster, like I can outrun it. Knowing that the road behind me is littered with strange fruit. In the trees. By the harbor. On the tracks.

There’s some little voice in my head.
Just buzz it off, man. Just buzz it off.

I turn up my collar and scoot along as fast as I can.

I carry that high as long as I can, through the night and into the morning, till the voices and the image and the music fade to a dull buzz in the background. I show up to work maybe more buzzed than I’ve ever been. This slave’s easy. I can do it in my sleep.

We’re halfway back up to Boston. I stand out on the tailgate at the back of the train during my ten-minute break, grabbing a bit of fresh air to clear my head and keep awake.

“Do I smell marijuana?” the train steward says when I come back in.

I usually have a reefer in my pocket, but I don’t make a habit of lighting up on the job. It must just be wafting off me from earlier.

The steward sniffs the air. “Have you been smoking, Red?” Looks me close in the eye. “Are you high?”

“I’m fine,” I tell him. But there’s no fooling him. Not anymore.

“I can’t keep you on if it’s going to be like this,” he says. “You’re shirking. Have been for a while now.”

“Really, I’m fine.” Little stabs of terror. Without the train, I’d be stuck in Boston again. No trips to Harlem.

“You’re fired, Red,” the steward says.

“I don’t need this slave,” I snap, to cover the sting. I lie down in the back of the commissary — I figure they aren’t going to pay me for the end of this shift, anyway — and grab some shut-eye.

When the train rolls up in Boston and I have to get off for the last time, that’s when it really starts to hit me. No train. No Harlem. No Braddock, no Small’s, no Cotton Club, no Savoy. None of it.

I head home to Shorty’s place. Maybe if we can go someplace together, it’ll be like old times. Maybe he can shake things up and remind me how much fun Roxbury can be. But when I get to the house, Shorty’s already out.

I smoke and I smoke, and I dial Sophia. Her phone rings without an answer, and I wonder if she’s out dancing with some other Negro.

I don’t want to stay here; I want to pack up. Hit the road. If I skip a day playing numbers — or maybe a zoot payment or two — I can scrape up a train fare. Harlem’s where it’s at, for sure. I can find a new gig there. No problem.

I flip through my small pile of mail. Open the most recent letter from Philbert. I squint through the smoke haze to catch every word. Then I hold it to my chest as if I can pull it into me. As if maybe it can fill this gaping space I feel. The last line stands out to me like a directive.

Get on a bus, Malcolm. Come home.

Lansing, December 1942

The bus rolls onto Lansing soil, and I don’t feel the tug I was expecting. No measure of longing, no hint that this is a place I’ve been, a place I could’ve stayed, a place that might have missed me. It’s just a road.

The bus shudders to a stop, and I take up my bag and look out at the car, where my brother and sister stand waving. I have a vision of the day I left, all of us hugging awkwardly, not able to imagine being apart for more than days.

I almost laugh aloud. So much has changed.

I jump off the bus and rush straight toward them. They won’t know me to come running, I figure. My conk. My zoot. The hip new cat that is me.

“Malcolm?” Hilda says. She fingers my hair right off. I’d sent them a picture right away, after my conk, posing in the zoot. But it still must be a surprise to see it in person. “What have you done to yourself?” When her face furrows in disapproval, she really looks like Mom.

Philbert claps me on the shoulder. His expression, too, is a study in unrecognition. “Long time,” he says, and draws me into a hug.

They haven’t changed, but everything else is smaller. The bus station. The houses we go by. The whole of downtown Lansing passes in a moment. How had this place ever felt big enough?

Philbert takes me up to see Mom in Kalamazoo. It’s still a long ride — it feels even longer than the bus to Boston. It’s like we’re on a slow-motion train or one that’s moving backward, into fog, against track warnings.

“When did you learn to drive?” I ask Philbert.

“When did you buy that getup?” he answers, glancing at my sharkskin zoot.

“Soon as it hit the rack,” I declare, feeling proud. “And I still got credit to spare.”

Philbert sucks in his breath like I just said a curse word, which I actually have been somewhat careful not to do in front of him. I don’t need a lecture. For a second it feels like he’s going to launch into one. But he only sighs.

After a minute’s silence, he goes, “I don’t know when I learned to drive. Sometime.” He taps the wheel. “It’s fun. Want me to teach you?”

Underneath it I hear him saying more. Something about how we would have learned together if I was here. Something about how even though we’re driving on the same road now, it isn’t enough.

“Naw,” I say. “I know how.” Bald-faced lie. It just rises up and comes out. Unexpected. I’m the city guy. My country brother’s not supposed to have to school me. In anything.

“You still boxing?” I ask. I know from the letters that he is. That’s his thing. Talking about it makes me feel better about putting him off on the driving thing. Didn’t matter how good he got; he never could teach me boxing. None of his skills ever rubbed off. Why would he be able to teach me to drive?

Philbert parks out front of the hospital. We go in to see Mom. I catch sight of her down the hall as we’re walking in.

She looks so different from how I see her in my mind. How I remember her. So very, very small. I can’t help the gasp. It comes out loud.

“She’s fragile,” Philbert tells me. “Just know that.”

I can’t quite wrap my head around that. After everything, what I know is how strong Mom is.

She hugs me, but there’s nothing there. No sense of Mom as she should be. Instead of holding me tight and safe, her arms are porous. Like a drain, swirling me. Sucking me dry.

She pets my skin like it’s foreign to her. “How are you?” I ask, but she doesn’t give an answer.

We sit with her and talk awhile. I tell her about Boston and Harlem, making my exploits out to sound like I’ve taken the whole eastern seaboard by storm. Mom nods along and smiles, but she seems to me only partly there. I can’t believe how much her time in this place has diminished her.

As we go, I kiss her cheek, realizing how brought down by this I really am. Don’t want to sit here and think about the warm way she used to smell, or how soft the arms were that used to hold me. Don’t like how my tongue starts longing for chicken and gravy the way she used to cook it in the old days. The homemade biscuits she’d make from scratch, while telling us great stories of when we were kings and queens ruling the lands, running free. I downright hate the bland green flavor of dandelion broth, the taste of which rises in my mouth without warning.

I especially don’t like how faded she seems, even outside of the pushed-back corner of my mind where she resides. She’s not in my mind now — she’s right in front of me, and yet I miss her more than ever.

The Swerlins’ house looks the same as always. Not a thing changed, as far as I can see.

I knock, and Mrs. Swerlin answers the door. I’m a surprise guest. She looks just as I remember her. Her big arms sway, loose, and her mouth pokes out into a small O.

“Hi, Mrs. Swerlin.”

“Malcolm Little?” she says. “I barely recognize you.”

“I got a new look,” I tell her, brushing my collar and turning sharp.

She’s nervous. Not really glad to see me. Why did I even come here? I don’t know. I’m visiting the old haunts, making the circuit, and she’s part of it. The only place I didn’t try to go was the old house. Wilfred’s away at school now, and Hilda’s taking care of the rest of our family. I didn’t suppose there would be anything to see there.

Mrs. Swerlin invites me inside. She looks at me like I’m a foreign object, which strikes me as both the same and different from how it used to be.

I remember how I used to walk from room to room in that house, people talking about me like they couldn’t see I was there. Like I didn’t matter. I remember coming in to dinner the first night and hearing one of the other boys say, “Neat. We’ve got a nigger now.” It wasn’t a mean voice, just blandly matter-of-fact. Like I was a mascot or some kind of prize. I sat down at the table that night feeling practically invisible.

It’s a far cry from how I am now. Zoot suit bagging around my limbs. Loud street jargon flying. With my slick-top conk in her face. She’s seeing me now.

I stand on the streetcar tracks, looking up and down to make sure nothing’s coming. Maybe this is the very spot where it happened. I don’t know. No one ever told me the specifics. I look at the tracks and the pavement and the way they go together, and it sinks in deeper than it ever has before.

No one falls in front of a streetcar. Especially not Papa, so sure on his feet. Why would anyone ever believe it was an accident?

Sophia would call this morbid thinking. She knows about Papa now. Sometimes, when I’m high, things slip out. Usually right when I’m feeling high enough not to have to think or to remember.

It’s a cold world
, she says.
That’s why we have to keep each other warm.

I don’t want to be away from her. I don’t know why I’ve come back here. Everything I want is ahead of me. No sense holding on to what’s behind.

The streetcar’s coming now. I kneel in the space between the tracks and press my hand against the ground. Feel the rumble in the road. Hear the bells ringing. Think:
Anyone who had fallen would move right about now.
Think:
Anyone even close enough to the tracks to fall on them would move right about now.
Think:
His last sensation.
Think:
I’ve tried so hard not to touch this.

But here I am.

I step out of the way with time to spare. Plenty of time. Keep on walking. Don’t look back.

The farther I get, the harder it is to hear him. The less my fingers vibrate, the quieter my heart.

I never rode the streetcars in Lansing again after Papa died. I’m not about to start now. But that rumble is familiar. Working my train slave this past year, I felt that rumble all the time. Maybe it was never destined to work out. I should have realized that no train slave would suit me long term. Trains run on tracks, too.

There’s a good bar near where Philbert works. He agreed to meet me there, though he didn’t like the idea. They have pool in the back, which I’m not in the mood for. I just wait there for him, taking down shots of whiskey and whatever they offer me that’s cheap. They’ve got something called a pocket-friendly pint, and so in between the shots, I sip this dark, bitter brew.

It’s good enough. I try to pretend I’m in the South Side Tavern or someplace down in Harlem. They’re pumping a bit of jazz from time to time, which helps.

Philbert arrives, takes stock of my table of glasses. “How long have you been here?” he says.

“Not long.” I motion for another round. Point to my brother to include him in the mix. I can buy him a drink or two and feel like a big spender, since everything’s a little bit less around here. It’s no different from scoring a bottle at the corner store or some reefer from the street. One night’s high, on Red. ’Cause that’s what brothers do.

Philbert takes a seat at the bar stool across from me. “What are you doing?”

“Feeling good.”

He toys with the edge of an empty glass. “You know, you could hang around here in Lansing for a while.” It feels like a sharp change of subject.

“Not likely,” I tell him.

“Why not?”

I snort into the pint of beer. “In this hick town? Please.” I offer some of my beer to him.

My brother says, “I don’t drink.”

More drinks for me. I guzzle it down. It’s too hard to be here. Too hard to look back. It feels like looking in a mirror and not liking what you see. A cracked mirror, to boot.