Shadowbahn(10)

? ? ?

Silently he stews over territorial frontiers yet to be crossed. He stews over border guards yet to be answered to, and Rupture zones all over Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, where the siblings need to pick up Route 83 in the Panhandle past Amarillo and head almost due north for South Dakota—or as best as Parker can determine, anyway, given that he hasn’t any more forbearance for figuring out such things than anyone else born within the temporal radius of the twenty-first century. “Dad always said no one in this family has the slightest patience,” Parker muses, expecting nothing from Zema, who, notwithstanding the old playlists on the car stereo, rarely responds to mention of their father. So it’s a surprise when she mutters in return, “As though he did.”





mixtape nation


Parker was also surprised at the trip’s outset when Zema downloaded their father’s playlist onto the car stereo. This was after trying to find a radio station in the fourteen-year-old Camry with two hundred thousand miles on it that Parker inherited to no objection from Zema, who usually protested on sheer principle whenever her brother was favored for anything and any reason.

Shooting her a sideways look, he had said it as casually as possible, “Dad’s playlist.” When Zema didn’t answer, he pressed, “Remember he always wanted to upgrade the sound system in this thing? We were always on him about his boring mu—”

? ? ?

“I remember,” she had snapped. Now, as they cross Navajo and Acoma lands, a song from the playlist called “Little Sister” comes on the stereo. Parker turns it off. “Don’t need any songs about little sisters, thank you,” he tells his little sister.

“He’s not singing about his little sister,” she explains, “he’s singing about—”

“I know what he’s singing about,” says Parker, slightly stunned when Zema shoots back, “Dad loved this guy,” the first declamatory thing about their father that he can remember her saying in years.





song of Zema


Although he doesn’t want to discourage it, he can’t help answering, “You loved this guy.”

“What?”

“You loved this guy,” he is adamant.

“Uh, I . . .” but even Zema knows her dissent sounds hesitant.

“First it was Mr. English Spaceguy with the red hair who wore dresses,” Parker says, “then it was him,” pointing at the stereo. “Dad liked him, you loved him.”

? ? ?

Parker thinks it’s typical that the first conversation they’ve had about their father in as long as he can remember, they’re arguing about his music. “What Dad loved,” Parker continues, “was all that sixties shit that doesn’t make sense. The walrus one and—”

“Walrus?”

“The point is, Dad liked him well enough,” he says, gesturing once more at the singer on the stereo, “but you had him on your bedroom wall. You had the birthday party with all his songs. Out went the Jean Genies and in came the hound dogs. You were crushing on his cheekbones when you were seven, before you went all blackedy-black on us.”





EQ (frequency-specific)


Zema looks at him. “Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” he answers.

“Wait—”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Parker insists irritably, “forget it, I take it back. Fuck,” he mutters, “I was blacker than you were.” Neither can remember their ever having had a conversation like this, but then they haven’t ever had a real conversation about much of anything.

She does vaguely recall a poster on her wall when she was eight: the singer as a cowboy drawing a six-gun from his holster as though in a gunfight in a Western, no cowboy hat, long-sleeve buttoned shirt and boots and jeans double-belted. The image duplicated, looking not square into the camera but ever so slightly off right.

? ? ?

That was about the time when her sense of racial identity began to take hold. When she learned of black baseball players in the forties from biopics that their father took her to see, African-American ministers shot down. It was about the time she became more aware of herself as a black girl, their mother quizzing her as to who was singing on the radio. “This?”

“Billie Holiday,” Zema would answer.

“This?”

“Aretha.”





EQ (flat)


Soon, as Parker might put it, out went I’m all shook up and in came I break out in a cold sweat. As the cultural paradox of the times would have it, she did first learn her blackedy-black from her white hip-hop brother, remembering now something their father told Parker the time they were all stranded in London, one night when both father and son thought she was asleep. In the next room her father talked to her brother—younger then than Zema is now—like she had never heard, his voice taking on an uncommon urgency. “You can’t use that word,” he said, “it’s the worst word you can use. I’d rather you use the F-word, not that I want you to use that either. But better that. I know they use it in the music you listen to, but language exists in a context, and if they use that word among themselves, it means something different than if you use it, do you understand?”