Memphis: A Novel(63)
“Red spit on the floor. ‘I don’t do business with niggas I don’t know.’
“That’s when Holmes went in. Said, ‘The Wanika tribe of East Africa eat their king when the old man dies. Take his bones and boil them in a broth they all sip for days, lamenting with hands and cries and drums. Red, which one of us niggas here you think will suck on your bones, old man, before this night is through?’
“Let me tell you something. That nigga had it coming. While Holmes was making his speech about niggas eating each other, Jax signaled ‘quiet’ at me. Red was creeping his fingers up the trigger of that rifle. He may have seen my nine-mil in my holster, but he didn’t see Jax’s thirty-six come out the inside lining of his new winter coat. Before Red could do anything, Jax shot that nigga twice in the heart. Pop. Pop.
“We rolled out after. Cut the Shelby’s engine in front of an abandoned cathedral on the corner of Dobson and Seventy-eighth. We partied all night. It was something. The nave of the cathedral was all mahogany and elm and pine that extended one hundred and fifty feet above and mounted to an invisible point somewhere in the darkness. The ceiling shone with gold. Every buttress and arch and stained-glass setting was painted in gold fleck. The gold paint within reach had all been chipped away: Addicts had stood on pews and altars excavating the gold, had left bits of fingernail lodged in the wood. There were fires in the holy water. The urns that had once held the promise of redemption were now makeshift hearths filled with red fire. And moving in the halo of the burning red glow, bodies huddled for warmth. There were bodies everywhere, August. Bodies strewn across pews with still faces of half orgasm, the settled look of the high. Humans huddled around the holy water fires warming brown, bandaged hands. It was the Sistine Chapel in reverse: skinny Black bodies crawling, clambering on the ground, searching this hard earth for a savior and coming up short. It stank of piss.
“Sugar ran it. Big redbone who Holmes was sweet on. Had been for years. Sugar was a big woman. Built like Cleopatra must have looked sitting atop her gilded chariot crossing the Nile; she was six feet tall and the color of a saddle. She let us in muttering to herself that it was always her curse to trust Black men, that they’d be the death of her, that Holmes was her favorite Achilles’ heel. She took Holmes’s hand and led him behind a heavy crimson curtain that half-hid a long line of confessional boxes.
“I don’t remember much after that. Must have fell asleep in a pew. High out of my mind. But I do remember waking up to screaming. Jax was just hollering. Calling out, ‘Holmes! Holmes!’ over and over.
“Holmes was sitting upright in a pew, but something about the angle of his body didn’t look right. His head was hanging all the way back on the top of the pew, as if he had thrown eyes to heaven and asked God directly what it was that He wanted. A trail of white spit dribbled from his open mouth to his cheek, then farther to his ear. His glasses—just like Malcolm X’s, too—lay crooked in his lap.
“Jax loosened the leather belt that was still tied and twisted around Holmes’s left bicep, all the while talking to him in lovely, choked, cooing whispers in the same tone of encouragement kind adults bestow on children lost in a store: It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be just fine. His hands were shaking.
“I had to drag my brother out of that hell screaming and crying, snot everywhere, kicking at the air itself and cursing God. A week later, I held the gas can as Jax shot his pistol into the dome of the cathedral, exclaiming that if these niggas wanted to see another day, they would all file out, and they did—filed out into the snow tweaking and scratching their faces.
“We set the damn thing on fire. You say what you want about the South. But I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life—that wretched church first in flames and then, later, crusted over in frost and icicles from the fire station hoses. That house of God morphing into an igloo of death. Damn.
“That same week, Jax enlisted. Figured he couldn’t take it. Riding around Chi in that Shelby without Holmes. He pulled that car into the nearest Marine Corps depot he could find, and I was the one drove him to the bus station early one morning.”
August put the finishing touches on Bird’s fade. She sprayed his hair with leave-in conditioner and wiped away the stray hairs with a large, soft kabuki brush. A less seasoned stylist might have thought Bird’s story was over, but she knew by the way his eyes were unfocused, by the way he seemed not to notice she was done, that if she stayed quiet, he’d say more. And she was right, of course.
“The first person Jax loved more than me on this earth was Miriam,” Bird said. “Then when Joanie came, then My—he’d call to tell me about their eyelashes, their little fat bellies, the way it sounded when they giggled. How he was pushing himself hard in the Corps, so those little girls would never see the stuff we did growing up. He called me crying once, when he’d gotten home late and found the girls sleeping together nose to nose, looking like two wolf cubs nestled together.” Bird blinked and stole a quick glance at August. “I’ve never heard him more in love,” he said. It sounded like a plea.
August stood back and observed her art. She had made him look handsome. His hair now faded into the soft milk chocolate of him. She was proud of herself, thankful she’d gotten out of bed and followed that sound of music.
Bird beheld himself in the mirror. “Your reputation precedes you, ma’am.” He threw out a hand from underneath his cape, but August slapped it away.