Just Above My Head Read online

  I couldn’t see his face in the rearview mirror because he was leaning too far back, on one side. I glanced at Arthur’s face, which wore a cryptic smile.

  Peanut gave me that chuckle again.

  “Then, maybe as a step in the right direction, we made a couple of shoeshine boxes and started shining shoes, after school, and in the summertime. A whole lot of time we didn’t go to school and I got my butt whipped a whole lot more often than Red did. You see, he could forge his mother’s name on the note to the teacher, but he couldn’t do nothing with my grandma’s signature, my grandma could hardly write. So I’d get the whipping and Red would look all sympathetic and virtuous, like he didn’t know why I couldn’t be more like him. Man, sometimes I wanted to kill him.”

  “But you never told on him,” Arthur said.

  Peanut laughed. “You know I didn’t. That was all between us.”

  He was silent for a while. I watched the road, and the road signs, pass: we were going in the right direction, anyway. The Peanut we were hearing was not exactly new, yet we—or, at least, I—had never heard him like this before. He had always been very private—not distant, but not close, either. Now he spoke as though he were looking at something for the very first, and, also, for the very last time: as though he were saying good-bye to Red.

  Now he leaned up, and I saw his face for a moment, as he lit a cigarette. Then he leaned back.

  “And everything we discovered, we shared. But, I guess it might be truer to say that he was the one who made most of the discoveries, and everything he discovered he used to kind of tyrannize me. I didn’t think of it that way though, then, though, and I guess I didn’t mind it. Like, for example, one time Red was going to be a boxer, and I was his sparring partner. Then he was going to be a tap dancer, and he got me to go out and steal records for him to dance to. I can still see him dancing around the room, just grinning, those teeth shining, waving his hands like they do in the movies, and he was always smiling in those days, couldn’t nothing get him down. Well, you remember, Arthur, he was always like that.”

  “I remember,” Arthur said. But neither of us turned back to look at Peanut. That may or may not be strange. We sensed that, though he was, in a sense, uncovering himself, he did not wish to be seen. He was in that car with us, but he was also somewhere else.

  He sat up, and lit another cigarette. This time, he remained seated, his hands between his legs, looking down at the floor. Both Arthur and I now dared to glance at him from time to time, in the rearview mirror. Neither of us ever forgot his face that day. I can only say that it was noble with grief. He was in that car with us, but he was far away, wrestling with an anguish he was articulating for the first time.

  “Red was skinny when he got back here, but so was everybody. And he was a little strange, but so was everybody else.”

  I dared, “You can say that again.”

  Arthur said wryly, “Amen.”

  “It seemed to me that Red wasn’t altogether as happy to see me as I was to see him. But I figured there could be all kinds of reasons for that—maybe he’d left a girl, or a baby, over there, I mean I could see that there could be a whole lot of things he might not want to talk about right away, it didn’t necessarily have anything to do with me. And I noticed, anyway, that he was like that with everybody—-with his mama, and my grandma, with Arthur—with all of us—edgy, like he was trying to get away, like he had something to hide. And that wasn’t like Red, he’d never tried to hide anything.

  “And he didn’t seem to want to do anything, and I got the feeling, more and more, that he didn’t really want to see me. I’d go over to see him, and he’d be lying on the couch, looking at TV, not saying anything—acting bored, man, like you was intruding on him—or he suddenly had someplace to go, and he was already late, and he’d see me later. And I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to make him behave like that with me. But then, too, I had the feeling, deep inside, that he didn’t really want to behave like that—it was in his eyes, sometimes, a terrible pain, it cut me to pieces to see it—but—I didn’t know how to reach him. And so I tried to say, Well, fuck it, but I couldn’t: I got more and more worried. Something was wrong, somewhere, that was what I felt, and he didn’t want nobody to know what it was. Also, I couldn’t figure out where the hell he went when he went because none of us ever saw him, none of our friends, none of the people we used to hang out with, I could see his mama getting more and more worried, but she didn’t say anything, she didn’t know what to say, any more than me. And that was another reason I couldn’t just say, Fuck it, because she had been like a mama to me, I couldn’t just turn my back.

  “And Red said that he was looking for work, but you can kind of tell when somebody’s looking for work. They look worried, they look eager, they look drugged, but they don’t come on like Red was coming on. Red would come in the house, his mama told me, around five or six in the morning and fall in bed till evening, sometimes I’d come in the evening to see him and find him fast asleep, just farting and drooling, and that wasn’t like Red, at six o’clock in the evening? Shit.

  “And he began to look worse and worse. You know, like most of the guys seemed to be shaping up, more or less, rough as it was, but Red just seemed to go down and down. And he didn’t laugh no more, he was mean. He didn’t have nothing good to say about nobody.

  “I was there one night, when his mother asked him how his job prospects looked—perfectly simple, ordinary question, I mean she wasn’t nagging him, or anything. And he jumped up, scared the shit out of me, and he yelled, ‘You want me to peddle my ass to them Jew crackers? That’s why black people is where they is today! Always sucking around the fucking Jew! Them bastards had my ass in a vise one time and they can’t have it no more! You hear me? I’m going to make me some money!’ and he slammed out the door. And his mama, she sat there and she cried, and if I could have got my hands on Red that night, I’d have cracked his skull.

  “I didn’t go back there for a few days, because there didn’t seem to be anything I could do. There was a heavy weight on my heart. We all know how it is out here, but Red hadn’t never talked that way—all that black people-Jew bullshit. Red knew better than that. Shit, I wish it was that simple. And, you know, I was living pretty much as I am now, between Washington and New York, and I was doing all right, I had a nice apartment, and a real nice little girl, we was even thinking that maybe we’d tie that knot, but now, all this shit was really beginning to fuck with my mind.

  “But, like I said, there was that look in Red’s eyes that hurt me, hurt me more and more. It was like a scared, wounded dog. Oh, it hurt me. That’s why I was so blind. If it hadn’t been Red, had it been some other dude carrying on like that, I’d have realized right away what was going down. But it was Red. He lived in a special place, in my mind, in my heart, and what I saw happening to other people all around us wasn’t supposed to happen to Red. Later on, people would ask me, ‘Didn’t you know?’ And I had to say, ‘No, I didn’t know.’ And then they would say, ‘Well, you just didn’t want to know, then.’ Well, of course, I didn’t want to know. But I’m not lying when I say, I didn’t know.

  “But then, his mama told me that she was afraid that Red had stolen the rent money. And then she asked me if I thought he might have a habit. Then, I knew. The moment she asked me that, I knew. A light went on in my brain, so hard it gave me a headache, and I sat down.

  “So, I asked Red—just like that. When I asked him, he looked at me as though he was going to kill me, and he turned his back to me. That made me mad, and I went over and turned him around to face me. And then—I’ll never forget it—he fell into my arms, crying like a baby, and he showed me his arms. His tracks. I held him tight, like I had sometimes—before—and I said, ‘Baby, let me help you. I will do anything, anything, anything, to help you.’ I held him and held him, I sat him down and held him till he stopped crying.

  “He told me he got hooked in Korea, and I told him I understood that. I thought
I understood that. He told me how much he hated white people and Jews and all, and I told him I understood that, but that was beside the point. It didn’t give him the right to steal. It didn’t give him the right to hurt the people who loved him. It didn’t give him the right to destroy himself. And we talked until morning came. I told him I’d take him somewhere and lock myself in with him till he was straight. He said he didn’t want to put me through that, he’d turn himself in for treatment. And he asked me to trust him, and I said I did, I would, and he was as good as his word, he went away and when he came back, he was all right, for a while.”

  He was silent for a long time, as the trees flew past. Nothing broke the silence. There was only the sound of the tires on the road, the sound of the wind. Arthur’s face was very solemn, his eyes very bright: he was in the car with us, but he, too, was someplace else.

  “But. Then. His mama’s TV set disappeared. An old watch of my grandma’s disappeared. He came to see me once, in Washington, and my stereo, and all my clothes disappeared.”

  His voice was thick with tears, but he was not crying. He lit a cigarette, and leaned back, out of sight.

  “That night I spent talking to him, when he asked me to trust him, made my mind go back to a night a long time ago, when he was still being a tap dancer and a boxer and all that, when he was still making all those discoveries, and coming to me with them.”

  He took a deep drag on his cigarette.

  “I was sitting on the roof one night, because that was like our meeting place. If one couldn’t find the other no place, we’d look up on the roof, and he came up and found me. I was just lying on my back, with my hands behind my head, looking up at the sky. And he came up and he poked me in the belly button, like we always used to do to each other. I remember it was a summer night, and I was feeling strange and lonely—sad, like you can be at that age, without knowing exactly why. So I poked him back. Usually, then, we started wrestling, but I didn’t want us to wrestle on the roof, I was afraid we’d roll off. But he didn’t move. He was kneeling next to me, I remember he was wearing a black sweat shirt and dirty white pants. He was grinning, I still see his teeth. He said, ‘Hey, I’m nervous. You want to help me relax? I know a great way to relax.’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘I’ll show you how to do it first.’ He was still grinning. ‘I’ll do it for you first, okay? And then you do it for me.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I always said okay to Red.

  “He lay down on his side next to me, and took my dick out. At first, I was scared, because I had just started doing this by myself, and he grinned again, and said, ‘Relax, just let it feel good to you, you know I ain’t going to hurt you. And then you going to do it for me, I need it, I need it bad.’ Then—I thought about doing it for him, and, all of a sudden, I realized that I wanted to. I had never thought about it. So all the time he was working on me, I was thinking about working on him, and it made what he was doing to me more exciting than it had ever been when I did it by myself. He asked me how it felt, and I told him, and I guess I sort of moaned because he picked up speed, I was watching the sky and then I closed my eyes. It was strange to feel so helpless, like there was nothing in the world but his hand on me, and then I shot heavier than I ever had before, it was like straight up in the sky and over my shirt and his hand.

  “ ‘My turn,’ he said.

  “I put one arm around his shoulder and held him tight, and I took his dick out with the other hand, and I started to work on him. He asked me to do it real slow, because he was so hot already. I loved him so much that night, because, in a way, he’d just taught me something new that I could do for him, that we could do for each other. I started working on him very slow, like he asked me to, watching his dick swell, but what I most remember is his breath next to my ear and his shoulder against mine, and his breathing. And his smell, and the smell of that shirt. He was as trusting as a baby, and I watched the way his legs moved, like all of him was new that night, and that thing got thicker and thicker in my hand until I was almost afraid I couldn’t hold it, I had never before realized how it leaps, like an animal, and then I could tell by his breathing that it was time to pump faster and harder, as hard as I could, and so I did, and held him tighter around the shoulder. He started making drowning sounds and he started shaking from top to toe, he turned his whole face into my shoulder, and I held him tighter, as tight as I could, and I watched as his dick shot and shot, against the darkness, against the sky, and I was very happy.”

  He sat up, and I could see his face in the rearview mirror. His face was wet: again, he lit a cigarette from the coal of the old one.

  “You can buy some more clothes, by and by, and another stereo and all that. That’s all right. That’s not the worst. The worst thing is that you slowly begin to hate, to despise this person, this person that you loved. You hate him because he hates himself. And that’s horrible, I swear, to feel your love drip out of you, drop by drop, until you empty of it and there’s just a big, hurting hole where that love used to be. And I don’t know if anything can ever really fill that hole. It’s terrible, but you wish your friend had died. That way, you could have wept for him and put him away and by and by it would be all right, everything would be clean. You wouldn’t have that filthy taste of contempt and hatred on your tongue, and you wouldn’t have that hurting, empty hole. That hole I got in me right now, that hole which sends burning water and ice-cold water all up and down my spine, every time I think of Red.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “My heart.”

  He leaned back on the seat again, dropping out of sight again, and we drove in silence for a long while.

  The lunch in Charlotte was somewhat elaborate, Peanut’s cousins having taken Arthur’s “celebrity” status more seriously than Peanut had imagined that they would have. They had even invited another couple to be present, to eat with us, and gawk at Arthur. This took some of the weight off Peanut, at least, who was somewhat subdued, and Arthur played the role of the young, boyish, rising celebrity to a smashing fare-thee-well. As for me, I remained steadfastly in the background, the somewhat dull, but watchful and devoted older brother. “No, ma’am,” I said to one of the matrons. “I only sing at Christmastime, and in large crowds. That way, my brother doesn’t feel threatened.”

  The matron laughed, rating me, perhaps, as not so dull, after all. And, actually, they were all very nice, they meant to be nice: they were so nice, in fact, that we started out for Atlanta a little later than we should have, Peanut at the wheel.

  We filled the tank in Charlotte, and we prayed as we hit the road. Now we were heading for the Deep South: everything, until now, had been a rehearsal.

  “Thanks, you guys, for listening to me this morning,” Peanut said. “Sometimes, you have to find a way to let it out; don’t, you’ll explode.”

  “I’m hip,” Arthur said.

  Arthur sat next to Peanut. I was in the backseat. I leaned forward and touched Peanut on the cheek, leaned back.

  “Where’s Red now?” Arthur asked.

  “We don’t really know. He sees his mama from time to time, but—that’s it.”

  He switched on the radio. This was the time when the country was all upset about Cuba, which, they had discovered, was only ninety miles from Florida, and which was, probably, underhandedly, plotting to inch closer. This was either before or after the missile crisis, I don’t remember, but I remember feeling that going to Cuba was a far more attractive idea than descending into the Deep South. One doesn’t always prefer the murderous monotony of the devil one knows. However, we were now on our way to Atlanta, traveling, oddly enough, under Mr. Reed’s protection: we knew we were expected, and our description had been phoned ahead to certain people in Atlanta. If anything went wrong, and we could not call out, we knew that someone would be calling in. This had a strange effect: it reassured us, and this reassurance, at the same time, made the danger real.

  We got to Atlanta late, long after the sun went down, but Mr. Reed’s map was clear, and we
had no trouble finding his friends—who immediately telephoned the Reeds. We laughed a lot and ate and drank and slept. No one had to sleep on the sofa, because the fresh paint in the freshly painted bedroom had dried.

  And we got through Birmingham without a bit of trouble, and, weary and lighthearted, arrived in Atlanta in the late afternoon, with a few hours to spare before Arthur’s last engagement on this tour.

  The city did not want “incidents”: this was absolutely true. It was also true that the citizens bitterly resented that some of the more vivid results of their folkways had come to be regarded as “incidents.” They felt that they were being unfairly singled out, were no worse than others, no worse than the interfering North, or the condescending world: and, as to this, if one cannot say they were right, one certainly cannot say that they were wrong. They had missed the point, which was, simply, that they were being made to feel uncomfortable concerning what they took to be reality. This discomfort could, in principle, have afforded them the immense opportunity to reexamine what they took to be reality, and begun to liberate them from their strangling and castrating fears. But, in this, they were thwarted, not only by that lethargy which is produced by panic, but by the obvious truth that neither the spirit nor the perception of the Republic had changed. It was brute circumstance, merely, which had placed them in the foreground of this latest version of the national travesty. The rules of the game had been established during Reconstruction: the blacks would make, or would appear to make, certain gains: then the South and the North would unite to drive them back from the territory gained, or to render the territory worthless. The whites would make, or would appear to make, major concessions—school desegregation, for example, could be considered a major concession. But then, it would prove impossible to implement this concession—the Word would not become flesh, to dwell among us—or the concession would be bypassed, and thus, revealed as worthless. All deliberate speed, for example, can, now, twenty-four years later, be taken as referring to the time needed to outwit, contain—and demoralize—the niggers.