Creatures Here Below, page 5
“Jesus, Mason,” Spider said. “We didn’t say you had to blow the man’s cock in order to get a bottle. What took you so long?”
Mason still fought to keep his composure. He’d been rattled bad. He didn’t answer, and allowed someone to snatch the bottle from his hand.
“Least he got the job done,” one of them said.
“Shh, shh, listen up, guys,” Rick said. “Mason and that brother were probably having a long talk, huh Mason? Do you know who he is?”
Mason wanted to go home. He shook his head.
The boys went to a cleared lot of gravel and weeds behind Gaines Funeral Parlor, the gate through which most blacks in town journeyed to heaven, and the last business on Lincoln Avenue before the residential section began. They sat in a circle on the ground and circulated the bottle. A yellow light near the parlor’s back doorway illuminated the dark faces in the circle, and Mason eyed each in turn as he received the wine and tilted the bottle up. Dancing moths harassed the yellow bulb at the door. In a fenced-in lot, long hearses reflected the moon in their gleaming sides.
Connie said, “I wonder if there is any dead people in there now. Waitin’ to go to hell or something.”
Mason sipped the wine; it burned the cut in his mouth. The next time it came around, he only pretended to drink, stopping the flow with his tongue.
The boys grew louder and sillier, more from imagination than alcohol.
“I went to a funeral once for this granduncle of mine,” Spider said. “He went to the hospital for some simple surgery to remove something from his throat.”
Jamal interrupted, “Is this a spooky story?” He looked nervous.
“Only if you get scared, spook,” Spider said. “Anyway he dies on the table and my aunt is suing the doctor ’cause that weren’t supposed to happen. They take him to Gaines here. And at the funeral she kisses him goodbye and his right eye just pops open. My aunt just sees that big eyeball just staring right up at her and she screams and falls down trying to get away.”
“Bullshit,” Rick said. The boys laughed, and Mason, now much calmer, allowed himself to laugh too.
“Anyway, she wouldn’t let them close the coffin until they closed his eye first. Everybody had to wait nearly an hour.” Spider looked around. “They say it happened because my uncle’s wishing he’d kept an eye on that doctor in the operating room.”
They laughed and snorted. Jamal threw the empty wine bottle against the funeral parlor wall. It shattered and everyone laughed at that too.
“Hey, guys, I got something funny too, dig this,” Rick said, “Mason, do you know who that dude was who bought our bottle?”
He studied Rick’s dark face and dark eyes and wide grin. At that moment, Mason knew positively who the man was. It came to him clearly and definitely, as irrefutable as courthouse evidence, as forceful as a Baptist sermon. He knew that had been the man his mother rarely ever mentioned—who, when asked, she described as a free spirit, not a man for settling down, who she reckoned still had growing of his own to do, who left town when Mason was hardly one year old. This was the man Mason had imagined to be a romantic drifter, a loner, larger than life, moving from city to city, even around the world. He knew that man was his daddy. But he said a nearly silent, “No.”
“My old man knows him,” Rick said, visibly struggling to contain himself, about to burst with his announcement. “He came back in town two weeks ago. That’s Willie Pony Reed, that’s your daddy!”
The howls of laughter were immediate.
“No, he ain’t!” Mason shouted and jumped to his feet.
The boys were rolling on the ground, holding their sides.
“Damn, Mason, you had a family reunion and didn’t even know it,” Spider said.
“He ain’t my daddy,” Mason said and kicked at Rick’s legs. But the older boy was laughing too hard to care.
One boy controlled his laughter long enough to say, “What’d he do, Mason? Leave your mama and take all his pictures with him too?”
“Fuck you guys, that ain’t funny,” but Mason knew he was about to cry and he ran away from them.
The taunts chased after him. “Nowy’all can go to father and son night at the PTA.” “Who’d your Mama say it was? The mailman?”
Mason ran the entire way home, nearly oblivious to the frowns of the people he brushed by or the blaring horns of the cars he darted past. When his eyes welled, he wiped them immediately, sucked in air, and blew it out forcefully. He heard his name coming at him when he arrived back on his block.
“Maa-sonn,” Mama was calling him in.
As he came down the street, moving inchworm slow now, he saw her leaning over the wooden railing at the end of the porch, which ran the width of the house. “Maa-sonn!”
His hurt turned to anger aimed at the woman calling his name. She had not warned him. She had not told him what Pony Reed was like. He should have been able to recognize his own father. She should have told him. Something. “Don’t let them see you been in a tussle,” the man, his father, had said. At the front gate, Mason took a deep breath. His hand rested on the cool metal gate latch. He exhaled slowly and again wiped his eyes. “Right here,” he said and repeated himself as he opened the gate.
Mama came to the edge of the front porch steps. Her fists poised on her hips; the right hand dangled a dishtowel. Her head eclipsed the porch light at the door and Mason could see all the hair on her back-lit head sprung wildly in every direction; she looked like the Moses of her stories having descended from the mountain and discovered the idolaters. “You’re going to make me have to go down to the schoolyard and yank you by the ear in front of your friends, aren’t you?” She was always threatening to embarrass him that way when he came home late. That night, he felt she already had.
Mason’s body trembled. He fought to contain the anger vibrating just beneath his skin. His anger strengthened him. He was not afraid of her. He climbed the first step and saw she had that tight-faced look; her eyes hardened to glass and her lips thinned out when she was frustrated with him.
“What happened to the side of your face? You’ve been fighting.”
The guys hadn’t noticed. She had noticed immediately.
“No, I ain’t.” He went up the steps, braced for the hit, and it came, a hard slap over his right ear.
“Don’t you start lying to me, boy. Don’t you carry a lie into this house.”
Mason did not wince at the slap, did not bring his hand up to touch his smarting earlobe. He denied his mother the satisfaction of knowing she’d hurt him. Her eyes showed surprise over his cool reaction. He liked that. “Don’t let them know …” his father had said. Mason discovered a new weapon.
He quietly said, “I ain’t been fighting.”
“Then what happened?” Mama asked. “Tell me.”
He tried to think of reasons why he shouldn’t tell her. She’d be mad that he’d gone up to Lincoln Avenue, but that didn’t matter now. He’d suddenly realized she could no longer hurt him. Not really. Neither spankings nor her quick hand would hurt anymore, because he wouldn’t let it show. “I met my daddy. I saw him. I met him.”
Mama’s mouth opened a bit. The tightness dropped from her face. Her eyes flicked back and forth, scanning his. She brought a hand up. Mason again braced himself, but she only gripped his shoulder. “Where?” she asked. “Did he do this to you? Did he hit you?”
“No. I fell.” he lied, just the first of the many lies he would tell for Pony Reed. “No, he didn’t hit me.” He emphasized “he,” but Mama seemed to miss the accusation.
Mama’s hand gently rubbed the right side of Mason’s head as if her tenderness could smooth away the slap. She did this absently as she looked down the front walk, expecting, Mason figured, to see her old boyfriend come strutting into the porch light’s glow. She did not look afraid, exactly, at that moment. If his mother was ever afraid, Mason could only guess what that would look like. Instead, she seemed wary, and alert. Her mind was sorting through the fact of Pony’s return at high speed. Mason could see this. She wondered what it meant. Would he come by here? What did he want? She asked, “What did he say to you, baby?”
Mason shrugged and pulled his head to the side to get away from her touch. “Nothing, he—”
“We’ve gotta watch him, baby,” she interrupted. “He’ll start coming around. He says things. He’ll start asking for whatever crumb you got.”
Mason could still feel the weight of the change in his pocket. Pony had given it to him. “You never told me about him.”
“I did.” Then she hesitated. “Never thought he’d show up again, sweetheart.” She was eyeing him hard now, bending over slightly to close the small difference in their heights. “I think, maybe, you found out something about him tonight. Hmm?”
Mason did not reply.
“Go wash your face good, hands too. Your plate is in the oven.”
He pulled the screen door halfway open and turned back to Mama. “He won’t be coming around,” he said. “He didn’t even know who I was.”
“Oh,” he thought he heard her say.
He went inside, closing only the screen door, and walked down the hall before glancing back at his mother standing on the porch, still in the same spot, both hands gripping the dishtowel.
At their next meeting, Pony insisted he’d known all along it was Mason he’d put up against the wall that night. “I just wanted to check you out before I told you I was your old man,” he maintained. “Besides, you said you was Rick, and I knew the Franklin boy already.”
While lying in the back seat of Kenny Gamble’s Oldsmobile, Mason wondered for the millionth time if that were true. And he asked himself, again, what the hell would it matter if it was. Pony was the master at making lies feel true, and making the truth ring like lies. Mason knew this all too well.
Too restless to try to sleep any longer, he sat up in the car. The sky lightened. He could distinguish the details of the Gambles’ backyard: the sagging stockade fence, old sycamores, and a crumbling brick fire pit, no longer lawful to use for open trash burning. Mama had one in her backyard too, near the alley. Tyler and he had used it as a hiding place. His watch read six-fifteen, still too early to wake Gamble. Mason propped his head against the rear passenger-side window, allowing his legs to stretch across the back seat. He said, “Everything takes too goddamn long.”
At seven o’clock, he knocked on Gamble’s back door, waited, then knocked again harder. He waited only a few seconds and then banged steadily on the screen door with a fist until the inner door opened a crack.
A bleary-eyed woman peeked through the screen. “Somebody’s house better be on fire,” she said.
“I’m here to see Kenny. We’re going—”
“You’re gonna pay him for the gas, right?”
“Half.” Mason asked, “Can I come in?”
The woman flipped the hook on the screen door and walked away yawning.
Mason stepped in, immediately crinkling his nose at the stale, spoiled-food smell of the kitchen.
The woman, in a thin pink gown that clung to the tires of fat around her waist, slipped barefoot across the floor. “Everybody is still sleeping. You just gonna have ta sit tight.”
“Just tell him I’m here, all right?” Mason said.
She did not answer, disappearing down a short hallway into what should have been the dining room, judging by the glass chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling, but which now passed as a bedroom. Mason could see her climb back into her bed. Light in that room made it brighter than the dark kitchen he stood in. He could see the woman cover herself with the sheet. Someone mumbled, and Mason realized she wasn’t alone in the bed. He thought he heard the woman answer, “Gamble’s rider.”
The kitchen was a mess. He could tell that even in the dark. Uncovered pots and leaning towers of plates blocked every inch of counter space. Mason saw something rather large with a sleek, polished body streak from a skillet to underneath a plate. And it was big enough to make the plate move just a bit. No chairs were in the kitchen, so Mason sat on the floor with his back against the refrigerator. The refrigerator steadily hummed in his ear.
Snoring came from the bedroom. The big woman had fallen back asleep and the other shifted restlessly. Mason could see the other sleeper was a woman too, when she turned onto her back and the sheet settled over her breasts. One smooth arm lay outside the sheets. This woman was light-complected or maybe even white.
He didn’t know who she could be, didn’t know anyone who lived here except Kenny Gamble. And Mason knew Gamble only well enough to know he didn’t like him. Gamble was loud and dumb, and masked his ignorance with an aggressiveness that made others uncomfortable around him. He might quickly strike out at you to see you flinch, and consider that funny. But today he was Mason’s cheapest ticket out of town.
The next moment, Mason forgot about his trip. The light-skinned girl swung her legs out of the bed. Just her toes touched the carpet at first. Mason could see one of her thighs all the way up to the hip bone. She sat up, then stretched to her full arm span. She wore only a large, sloppy T-shirt that read Nike. As she stretched, he could see her nipples thrust against the shirt. She had long, thick, dark hair that fell in crinkled waves past her shoulders. When she stood, he glimpsed her bikini panties before the T-shirt fell into place.
Mason smiled to himself and wondered again who she might be, and why she slept with the fat woman. But he’d visited a lot of households packed with family: big brothers who never seemed to move out, and single daughters who returned with a brood of their own so that every room in the house became a bedroom come nightfall. If the towers of dishes were any indication, this house was loaded wall to wall.
The woman yawned and padded directly toward Mason. He grinned but didn’t move. She scratched absently under one breast and came to stand directly over him. She had smooth, well-muscled legs. Mason liked that; he didn’t care for women who let their legs get fly-leg hairy.
He said, “Hi.”
“Whoa, shit!” She leapt straight up in the air, and then landed with a fly-swatter in her hand, snatched from the top of the refrigerator. She began dealing Mason loud, stinging blows.
Laughing all the while, he crawled away from her assault. “Ouch, ouch, what did I do?”
The attack ended when she turned on the kitchen light, though by now it wasn’t so dark anymore. “Who are you? Some lazy burglar who fell asleep on the job?”
Mason was still laughing. He was a little disappointed by the girl’s rather plain face. She showed traces of being pockmarked.
The last blow of the swatter came down on the arm he held up defensively.
“Hey, chill,” he said, “I’m Mason. I’m waiting on Kenny.”
“Yeah? Me too, really. What’re you doing here? How long you been sitting in here? You scared me, you goofy. I almost peed on you.”
“What’s all that screamin’ in there?” Mason heard the fat woman ask from the bed.
“Just me beating up some burglar, old woman.”
“Well, leave that boy alone. Come in here and give me some morning sugar.”
The light-skinned woman shook the fly-swatter at Mason as if to warn him against any further tricks, then darted back into the dining room/bedroom. This time a blanket fell across the doorway.
Still on the floor, Mason rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the concealing blanket.
Heavy thumping came down the stairs and in a moment Kenny Gamble appeared in the kitchen, scratching himself in a place that made Mason hope he wouldn’t offer to shake hands anytime soon. “Damn, Mason, was that you laughin’ and carryin’ on down here?” He cleared his throat. His heavy-lidded eyes blinked lazily. Mason noticed he’d shaven his head completely since last they’d talked. It made him look even more reckless. “What’s the time?”
“Nearly eight,” Mason answered.
Gamble opened the refrigerator and hung on its door. He seemed as if he was having trouble focusing his eyes. “God damn it! Who drank all my Diet Cokes?” He hollered so that the entire house would hear him. “Who drank all my fuckin’ diet Cokes! See why I’m leavin’, Mason? Bought a six-pack last night, just last night, and drank one. One. These niggers will clean you out.”
“We can pick some up on the road,” Mason said.
“You don’t see me drinkin’ their goddamned coffee.” He continued to look into the refrigerator, the light shining on his face. “Nothin’.” He slammed the door in disgust.
Mason stood with his arms crossed. He was tired of being in the filthy kitchen, and he felt as if his journey wouldn’t really begin until he left town. “It’ll be good if we got an early start. Less traffic and all.”
“Hell, Mase, you gonna let me take a bath first?” Gamble let a hand glide over his bald head; it looked like a giant malted milk ball. “You like my new look, Mase? I couldn’t find my comb yesterday, so I said, what the hell.”
Mason smiled.
“And we gotta wait for Gina anyway. She’s goin’ as far as Ohio or West Virginia or some hick place with us.”
“The high-yella woman with the thick hair?”
“Yep.”
Mason whispered now, stepping close to Gamble and deciding quickly he could wait for him to take a bath. “She’s the one who was screaming a moment ago. She uh, went in there to give that woman some, uh, morning sugar.”
Gamble’s disgusted look mirrored Mason’s. “Yeah? I knew it. I been tryin to crack on that ever since she got here. Some sick shit, ain’t it?”
Mason nodded, but he found it all amusing somehow.
Gamble started down the short hallway, then turned around. “Mason, you carryin’?”
Mason shook his head.
Gamble again sent a hand over his skull. “Well, it is gonna be a long drive …”
Mason agreed with that. He realized it was going to be a very long drive.
