jukebox, with the electric guitar hungfrom her shoulder? Fishy situation? To refocus, he peeped Florence. She didn't look like, uh, a little hard-back thing with four short legs and a tiny head jutting out. The hamburger was one of Uncle Billy's old boots from his days as a brigadier general in the Civil War. Fake mustard didn't help. He knew he shoulda been a wheelchair racer—life would've been simpler. (Had they reached Pennsylvania yet? Ohio? or could this truck-stop be on some highway up north of, say, Wisconsin?) Florence crunched on her onion rings. He tasted one: making a forced connection between the crispness of the crust and the mushiness of the lily-cute ring ripped from its bulb. Tasted the lard too. ‘Phew! Good!’ Florence spoke: “I'm still curious about, well, your past: tell me more: confession is good for . . . she laughed; shook her noble head. ‘How far—back?’ ‘First thing you remember?’ ‘ . . . first thing so deep now, like fruit on my mother's table: or the certain way chickens stand on one leg. The shock of seeing the dead chicken about to go into the pot. Death, too, in sparrows. Remember their closed eyes. Hardness of the body: death provides us with life. Playing cowboy, too: death there: guns: defined by grandmother as evil! movies, too, were evil. I remember moments, things, The Impostor and that other guy [meaning me ] can't touch: a tall neat sky full of sliding birds, for example; I was not exactly a May son, see. I was out of breath, thought. The city stank. I wanted to crash at Roosevelt Road and change my identity: go to Paris, start another life. But I was stuck in wet, dark afternoons full of gas fumes and forced connections. Early on they told me: Don't lose any important papers: gave me a social security card, a draft card. If they couldn't trace you to papers, well . . . Officials discovered not only did I not have the proper papers, I had no arms, no head, no legs. Soldiers waiting to corner black kids dancing in the streets as rioters, laughed at the holes in my Broncusi-head. I was a weird example of Art. Didn't matter. I'd learned that so much depends on four butterflies waiting quietly on a stem, waving their wings slowly. I wanted wings. Sunlight in those days was hazy and if you wanted to feel good you had to make a forced connection between fairweather and the unfair climate, between traffic, sky, birds in formation. I was leery of old men in suspenders: they smoked cigars and listened to Lawrence Welk. I wanted my wings. Wings of dead chickens didn't cut the mustard! I was also impressed by good writing. I learned from it, imitated poets, wrote things like: forgive me dear, I ate the five women you left at the kitchen table. Their clothes were bright. I knew . . . but they were so cool and tasty. Place had no specific meaning. We'd always moved. Nomads, we were. You name the place and we lived there: at least briefly. It was nothing to see somebody shot down in the park and the Peter Pan green grass turning Santa Claus red. Mostly I was running; and reading. Wingless, though I had my muse in my corner, I moved as a plumed serpent—though not accepting Lawrence's snake-definition of dark people—across a landscape of hardhats, hobby-horse-riders, serious writers, sluggish traffic, forced —. They compared me to Trout Fishing in America and Invisible Man: running, wingless, not flying. Nobody knew what would happen next. The white fence was the border between the ghetto and the rest of the world. A broken red wheelbarrow rested against it. I watched a movie of a woman taking a shower: one arm raised above her head: she washed under the raised one. Such big hands she had. No figleaf covered her pubic V. I liked her. She was not one of those dainty ladies in flimsy dresses coming down Robert Penn Warren-steps. They tended to come down too gracefully, heads erect, wearing flat white hats with tiny knots of flowers stuck to their sides. Or am I
Similar Books
