Memphis: A Novel(61)
August propped herself up on her elbows and yawned wide. She reached for her kimono—the only damn thing her baby daddy ever gave her—and she was off to investigate who was playing her mother’s piano, the piano that hadn’t been touched in years.
The melody was hypnotizing. August walked through the house and wondered how everyone else could sleep through this. Each individual note sounded so light and yet carried so much weight. The song seemed to envelop the house within its melody because August’s footsteps on the hardwood creaked in time and in tune with the music coming from the parlor.
When she reached the parlor, she was momentarily blinded by all the light streaking in. The morning light hit the stained-glass windows, creating a million refractions of the ivy leaves unto the floor. Dust bunnies danced and floated through the air, somehow in sync with the music.
Bird sat at the piano. August saw his back sway gently with the classical tune. A trickle of smoke rose from a cigarette caught in his mouth. August saw his fingers move deftly over the keys. Then, with a slight awe, she noticed that his head was not bent forward. He wasn’t even looking at the keys. He knew the melody perfectly by heart.
Part of August didn’t want the song ever to end. She wanted to stand in that parlor illuminated by morning light and listen to this Black man beat away at a classical French ode on an old, untuned piano.
August waited until the song was over before she spoke. It broke her heart to ruin such a moment. “You looking rough,” she said.
Bird sat on a small stool and he spun it around quick to face August. He smiled.
To August, Bird was the damn-near clone of Jax. But there was something that she had always liked about Bird, ever since she saw him stride into her sister’s wedding reception, pistol-whipping white men and dancing with her all night. August looked him up and down and tried to figure how this small, dark man who badly needed an edge up and a shave ran most of Chicago’s South Side.
“Yeah? I could do with a cut.” Bird ran a hand down the back of his neck. “I heard your shop was famous.”
“That all you Yanks do? Lie?”
Bird’s smile never faded. “Don’t be like that, sis.” He drew from his cigarette.
“Ah, I forgot,” August said, crossing her arms, “y’all hit women, too.”
Bird had risen to discard his ashes in August’s white teacup turned ashtray, perched atop the mantel, but he stopped midstride.
“I’ve never—”
“Come on, then. Follow me. Can’t have no half kin of mine walking ’round looking like Kunta Kente. Let’s at least get you looking like the Ike Turner you is.”
He trailed her into the kitchen. “Hey now, didn’t your son kill some women?”
August froze. How did he—? She answered her own question mid-thought: Mya, the only one who talked to Jax anymore. She wondered briefly what Jax had thought when he heard, but she pushed the ugly thought out of her head and rounded on Bird, ready to attack, when it suddenly struck her what he hadn’t said. He was trying to give as good as he got, but he wasn’t aiming to kill—just to spar.
“Again, you lucky we kin,” she said.
Bird held up his hands as if August had aimed an actual gun at him instead of her eyes.
She let him wait for a minute, keeping up their play fight, letting him sit with the possibility that she might kill him right there in her kitchen. Then she opened the door to her shop and led Bird inside.
“Wow.” He whistled, then pointed to a framed All ’n All LP cover hanging on one wall. A large pyramid and a series of Egyptian pharaohs chiseled in gold were set against a pale blue sky. “I saw them niggas in Chicago, and when this had just come out. Whew, they could spit fire.” He began humming.
“Mm-hmm. Sit.” August pointed to a plush red barber’s chair.
Bird hesitated. “Déjà vu,” he said, slowly taking a seat.
“What’s that now?”
“This chair.” Bird settled himself into it. “It takes me back.”
“Back where?”
“Midnight on the corner of King Drive and Sixty-third.”
“That’s awfully specific like.” August laughed.
“Jax killed his first man that night.”
August’s laughter died quick. With a seasoned stylist’s flare, she threw a vinyl cape around Bird.
“Lost a man, too, goddamnit. Lost a good one.”
August reached into a drawer and pulled out her clippers. Bird’s hair was a nest of thick, coiled curls. She eyed it, placed her hands in it, selected a number five.
She wasn’t sure what it was about her chair, but it could bring out the innermost secrets of the most hardened individual God ever made. The Black women of Memphis confessed to her everything: their infidelities, the children they loved and the children they did not, their hallucinations in the morning, their prayers at night. August knew the favorite psalm and favorite sexual position of every woman worth a damn within a ten-mile radius. Stylists in the South were priests. And this was the only religion August felt she ever needed.
“Your hands in my hair feel damn good.” Bird’s back was to the large mirror, August facing him, so she knew he could see her eyebrows rise to an extreme point.
“Again, Bird. We kin,” August said stressing the last syllable.