Trinity, p.12
Trinity, page 12
His nephew lay there, eyes half-open though he was asleep, lips cracked with dryness, whispering, “Mama, Mama?” in little whimpers as if he was helplessly watching something in his dreams that he could not prevent. Lenard could see it: B.J.’s spirit lifted up out of his heavy odorous body and hovering just above his bed, even though his body lay flailing in the covers.
Lenard could hardly catch his breath, couldn’t watch or be part of it anymore, and asked God, “Lord God, help?!” What did I do wrong?
His answer came in a memory of the promise he made Pastor Johnson, “I won’t try and make B.J. forget.” Lenard stood there in the heat of the dark room helpless, watching his nephew writhe, deep in a hell his kin had left him in.
He heard, “Get up!” Lenard went over to the bedside radio alarm clock and turned the staticky dial to the gospel music station. The choir was in the middle, the rising ether, their voices in harmony, “Nobody told me the road would be easy.” Inside his heart he said “hallelujah” for the message, wiped his eyes the way he did the morning that he woke to find Bennie had left him alone to till the soil and bear the whip. Wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and pulled the blankets off the window, turned on the window fan, and stood there for the one minute that remained before he would be late. Lenard prayed, “Father God in heaven, extend your love and safety around B.J. and keep him, heal him, walk with him. Help me to know how to help him. Amen.”
B.J. followed his uncle’s lead and went to the prayer meeting that evening, which turned into more of a speak-out on pain. He fidgeted in his seat, aware of the heft growing around his body like James’s heft. What was being said turned to sounds that agitated his cracked skull.
Sister Collier spoke to him, “Brotha Lee, do you want to share out?”
B.J. felt called away from the hovel in his own mind by her familiar voice.
He mumbled, “I’m not trying to be rude.”
“It’s okay, rude or not, God knows your heart. Anything on your mind is already in the room. Feel free to speak out, praise God.”
He looked around at the other men, like chewed plastic G.I. Joes with missing and twisted pieces. He spoke up, but it wasn’t filtered. “Y’all talk about not having no home, no country. We all broken and twisted up and are supposed to praise God? Don’t you think that’s some mean shit to put a nigga out on the battlefield till he’s crazy as hell with missing pieces of his body, then bring him home and say, ‘Praise God?’”
Sister Collier looked the same as she did when he was a little boy, a round light-skinned freckled sister, with a red, Afro-like halo around her questioning spirit. She was the only female deaconess and took pride in her efforts to help out returning veterans. Her baby-blue polyester pantsuit shushed with the movement of her arms and thighs. She pulled the jacket closed over her large breasts, covered in a striped polyester T-shirt. “Brotha Lee, we all dying. We all searching, trying to figure it out. The question ain’t who has it right—the question is, Are you trying?”
B.J. sat in the dipping plastic of the chair, conscious of his own thighs thicker in the past five months; the tiny circle of churchgoers felt small. He heard her words as saying, You aren’t doing anything to help yourself or anybody else. You don’t belong here with your bad attitude.
Then she said, “Your vision of the world might have changed, Brotha Lee, but God is the same God. You just have your faith challenged. That’s what believing in God is. When we are children, we believe because our parents tell us to, and later we believe because finally we grow up and have to grapple with death on our own.”
B.J. leaned forward, his jeans clean and dried by his uncle. They constricted when he moved. “Sister Collier, you don’t even know me. If God was gonna give me faith, he would have done it when I had to grapple with death as a child.” Part slap in the face, part last word, part Shame on you for not helping me when I was a boy.
He broke the circle and left Sister Collier and the three young Black vets whose eyes he refused to look in, one with a stumped arm, another with a missing foot, and one who looked as normal on the outside as B.J. did and guilty-eyed because of it. When he got to the door of the vestibule, he turned around and interrupted their bowed-head prayers and yelled it out again to them and to God: “You don’t know me!” He was gone, up the steps, out onto the street, resetting the worry that always resided in his family’s chest.
Sister Collier called Lenard, “Your nephew interrupted the prayer meet’n yelling and carrying on and walked out. You might wanna go find him.”
The alley was snug, an urban tunnel with no streetlights, just the occasional light from a house. It felt safe without being constricting. B.J. walked out the backyard of the church and into that tunnel where he could breathe, put his hands in his pockets, and disappear. He heard a warning in a voice he recognized: “Don’t go.” And the alley went dark, and he felt thirsty, felt the constriction of where his esophagus went into his stomach, felt his stomach contracting. “Don’t go.” He walked down the alley toward what felt like relief, like feeling rain just ahead when thirst constricted his mind. He heard in the darkness the congregation of the Baptist church of his childhood singing as one wave, “Yes, my soul says yes.” Slow and harmonic, and he wanted to satisfy that thirst. The “Yes,” became drawn out and high-pitched and brought with it streetlights, car lights. The “Yes” drew out, blaring, and went off-key as it pierced the shattered parts of his brain on the China Sea beach, “Yeeeeees.”
The blaring, off-pitch whirring of car horns screamed at him where he stood in the middle of Goodfellow Boulevard. Not knowing they were calling him to live, he answered them thirsty for death. He stood on the double yellow line with his mouth open to the sky, hoping his spirit would fly out and chase after Bennie’s and Rebecca’s and the unnamed girl-child’s spirit that screamed in long blaring calls of Cadillacs, Ford sedans, broken-down Chevy trucks, Black St. Louis folks steering around him, hollering for him to stay.
“Yo nephew standing in the damn street.” James got the call before Lenard.
At the VA Hospital, James stood beside B.J. Held him by the arm as though James was scared his matted-Afro nephew would bolt and run. At fifty-six years old, James’s knees were sore all the time from holding up his own body and holding back the grief of his life. The jukebox in his tavern, the circular wiping of the counter, the sound of liquor being poured into glasses were all a safe, productive smoke and mirrors that kept him from feeling what he felt. His life had been lived between the safe cave of the tavern and the safe sunshine of the church pew. Not enough movement. His knees hurt, and he leaned on the counter to hold himself up against the possible emotion of having to hold his nephew in this life. Lenard came to join them, walked through the door of the place that smelled like Band-Aids and pus with upright diligence.
With both of his uncles’ eyes on him, B.J. felt his chest tightening where he stood. His head floated, disconnected from his spine. The smell of a fragrant Vietnamese flower dominated his trance where he lay, relying on the guardianship of his fellow scouts to take their watch while he took his turn at the vulnerability of sleep. “Slippin’ into Darkness” played in his head, with jazz horns and cymbals whisked with drum brushes like eggs whisked in Rebecca’s frying pan. He blinked and steadied himself in Uncle James’s grip when the nurse pushed the clipboard of forms through the Plexiglas protection: “You have your ID?”
B.J. didn’t look at her but frowned and looked to the floor and pulled his dog tags from under his T-shirt. She turned up her volume as if he was deaf: “Do you have your ID?”—like, “Nigga, do you want some chopsticks or not?!” He recoiled against the suggestion that his mind had slipped and fallen away to some place where sane voices had to yell angry expletives to retrieve responses.
He shouldn’t have looked at her. “This ain’t fucking ID? What the fuck you want from me?!” The heads and eyes in the waiting room of turquoise plastic chairs straightened. All of these men had been where B.J. stood, had learned to tame themselves and erect walls, even if the walls were made of temporary field medic tarp. Walls between the heat of confusion in their heads and the real world that spoke in rhythm and measured tones.
Lenard stepped up in his trench coat, his hat pinched in his hand. “I’m his uncle, ma’am. I’ll help him fill out the forms.” He put his briefcase on the counter, unbuckled it, and pulled out the forms he had kept for B.J. since he was six years old: Social Security card and a copy of his birth certificate that Lenard fetched from the Fayetteville courthouse on the day in 1960 when he went to identify the bodies of his dead brother and anonymous sister-in-law-with-child at the county morgue.
Lenard on one side, James’s buttocks barely fitting in the seat on the other side of B.J., the two held him in place asking questions from the forms. “What would you say is the main reason you are seeing the doctor today?” B.J. just sat there, leering at the other patients in the waiting room and whispering, “What the fuck are they looking at?” Lenard’s knee bounced with his own questions.
B.J. learned to separate the difference between what he felt swirling around in his shrapneled head and what he saw reflected outside in the real world. For the next few visits, he sat in the chair at the VA Hospital, wanting to tell the psychiatrist that the yellow chairs were making him feel agitated. “I was little, I didn’t know myself as a man yet. I didn’t know Vietnam yet, didn’t know Uncle Lenard. I was in Fayetteville, and I stood in the middle of the street on that yellow line. I wasn’t thinking, I just did what I knew to do, to go with them. I’m calm when no one is bothering me. I don’t get confused. I got confused and was looking for my parents. I wasn’t trying to kill myself.” He knew not to speak about the voices that spoke to him, just speak about the facts of what happened and leave out the part that meant he might need to be hospitalized, strapped into this life.
“Um-hmm,” she said, scribbling on the curled-edged yellow pad. “Have you been back to Fayetteville?” When she asked the question, B.J. just sat there, suspended between the brackish water in his brain and the linear path that words take. He looked around the room at the posters, one of a man who was clearly supposed to be a vet in a wheelchair smoking a joint. The poster read, “Drugs are not the answer.” She asked again, “Ensign Lee,” insisting on calling him Ensign when he preferred not but hadn’t had the clarity to tell her that. “Have you been back to Fayetteville since you were six?”
B.J. managed through the distraction and the new sleepiness that came over him, “No, ma’am.”
That night he lumbered into the kitchen after his uncle had already had dinner and gone into his office to read. B.J. made himself a sandwich with cold cuts and stood in the darkness of the kitchen eating it. He considered walking into the shaft of light of Lenard’s office to ask about a ride to Fayetteville. The sandwich was all gone, and he drank a whole glass of tap water to calm the nerves that rose into his throat before walking to the office door. Lenard startled at the sight and sound of him.
“Uncle?” And they both remembered the day of “Uncle Lenard, the moon is 238,900 miles from the earth?”
The next morning was Saturday. B.J. did not lie in bed asleep waiting for his uncle to go out to cut the grass before making his way out into the house, and Lenard did not listen at the door of his nephew’s bedroom wondering if he should look in. B.J. turned on the shower in their green, marble-paneled bathroom, got the best green bath towel, the shaving cream, and the shaver. Lenard rifled through the clothes in the dryer for a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, underwear to set on the hamper in the bathroom.
The bed remained indented with the impression of B.J.’s cumbersome body. Risen from his own death, the smell of skin, hair remained in the tomb of his bed, while the smell of Dial soap, Old Spice deodorant, and shaving cream smoothed him down to new brown skin. The shower steam pulled the alcohol-diluted saline clean from his pores.
They got on I-40. B.J. sat in the passenger side of Lenard’s 98. The speed of images passed in his vision, and B.J. shut his eyes to avoid vertigo. He told himself to breathe the way the psychiatrist put it, “slow and drawn-out breaths,” but his heart was beating too loud for him to concentrate. Lenard could hear the muffled pounding. He looked in the rearview at the eighteen-wheeler behind them. He calculated pulling over, told himself not to let his heartbeat match his nephew’s heartbeat, as Lenard grew just as anxious at the thought of returning again to the other side of the Mississippi River, traveling east and south to retrieve some memory that might kill him but might save his nephew. Slow down, slow down. He was grateful for the green rectangle that meant he could exit. “No, no, no.” B.J. waved Lenard back toward the road. “I’m good. I just want to get there. Let’s just go.” B.J. sat up, and Lenard sat up straighter behind the wheel. The shadow of a thin cloud traveled above the car. Their breath and heartbeats slowed to match the thunk of the interstate beneath Lenard’s unevenly worn tires.
The psychiatrist suggested they operate out of trust, that B.J. let Lenard know if he felt like he was about to let go of life, and Lenard had to trust, leave his nephew, not as a boy but as a man, to have ritual and closure around his parents’ deaths. Lenard would have to trust that B.J. would not, like some last blackbird left in the migration, lift up off the ground and fly out after the others.
The two of them stood on the porch where Virginia creeper and honeysuckle vines clung and pulled at the weathered wood of the abandoned house, covering the windows and trailing overhead through the gutters to consume the house that neighbors would rather not remember as the house of too many murdered. They listened to B.J.’s heart pounding in his chest as sweat stains grew beneath the arms of his plain white T-shirt. Lenard blinked and told himself this is not that porch, as he felt his chest squeeze with grief from the days he was left on the porch of his Mississippi childhood, first by Lottie, then Bennie, then Old Deddy. Lenard broke the silence: “Here, I want you to have this.” He handed B.J. the leather Bible Lenard carried with him each day in his briefcase, carried it like a talisman that was going to keep him safe from the sorrows of his own past. He stood there in his white short-sleeved shirt, black slacks, nice shoes, always looking professional—“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”—and handed the Bible to B.J.
B.J. reached out for the book, put one hand on top of it, the other hand under it. “I remember we never used the front door, always came in from the backyard. So, I’m gonna say goodbye right here, Unc.” They both peered around the side of the house at the hip-high weeds that grew as tall as the tobacco stalks in the field next door.
Lenard spoke softly, “You take that Bible for sure if you’re going to cross through those weeds.”
They muffled their laughter in a hug, the first lighthearted sound that came from the two of them in years. They patted each other hard, as though beating on tight drumheads to awaken the heart. Lenard held on in revelation that this is how he would have sent the boy off to war had he been given the chance. “Alright!” B.J. said, anxious now to traverse the weeds and stand at the door of his childhood.
He stared at the screen door, still with the curly lightweight metal over mesh, an illusion of some memories that didn’t want to surface. He kept his muddy shoes on and entered the small kitchen.
Breathe, he reminded himself, and inhaled, then walked to the small hallway that was now so narrow around his body that he felt caught between the door of Rebecca and Bennie’s old bedroom and his own small bedroom. He put his hands on both sides of the walls to keep them from closing in, to steady himself against the dizziness that pulled him toward the splintered hardwood floors of the hallway. Breathe—but breathing brought the smell of mold, which itched in his throat.
With his hand still on one wall, he opened the door of Rebecca and Bennie’s room and could not brace against the falling that made his arm one with the doorframe, and then his arm chafed in the sand of the beach in Vietnam. His head hit the floor just near the foot of their bed. His head a clapper in the hard bell of his helmet. His head asleep on Rebecca’s chest where the two of them hoped the man they both loved would not come back that night out of his mind. B.J.’s mind skipped time, his body’s nerves took in all of the sensations that tangled in a net between past and present. The brain freeze of Popsicles eaten too fast pounded in his swollen head. The memory to breathe, to expand and contract, was gone, and he was groveling on the beach trying to get to cover.
In that moment, Lenard sat in the motel watching TV in order to keep his mind off his own southern traumas, which made him look out the motel window every time he heard a car motor. He focused his mind on B.J. and told himself that if his nephew needed him, the motel room phone would sound the alarm. But that was assuming B.J. had the presence of mind to go up to Ethel’s Walk-Up on Ramsey Street and use the pay phone. In the house on Colonial Drive, B.J. did not remember his promise. The same pull that drew him from the alley to the double yellow line in the middle of Goodfellow Boulevard muted reality.
B.J. struggled to get off the floor and pull himself up on to his parents’ bed. The beige mattress under the weight of his body folded into a cradle in the place where rats had removed batting for nests. He lay there for a while, calmed by the swaddling of the mattress, and breathed and waited for reality to return. The moon rose through the netting of vine in the window that used to frame the rising sun in spring.
Breathing steady now, the swelling in his brain subdued, he sat up, followed the moonlight to where it streamed in to Rebecca’s nightstand drawer. He pulled to open it, but the drawer jammed on the paper keepsakes Rebecca had stuffed in to hold them close to where she slept. B.J.’s heart steadied. And he remembered being little and sneaking into their room when he was left alone. He would take something, anything—a few quarters or those packets he didn’t understand as a child, a square pack like an Alka-Seltzer package but with something round and squishy beneath the crinkly wrapping. Anything to make him feel close to them.
