Shadowbahn(7)

? ? ?

“You could never sing like that,” the woman in a plain poor robe bitterly insists, suddenly standing before him. Her hair is pulled back, parted slightly on the left side—the way she often wore it, he recalls now. Her face is more handsome than lovely; his father’s features actually were finer. The dirty ripped robe hangs open from her naked body and her thighs are awash with blood. She cradles something in one arm that he can’t make out. In Jesse’s dream so real, among the desks and cubicles surrounding where she stands, she appears to him in what he knows is a younger self, twenty-two years old (constantly shaving years off her age for the sake of her husband four years her junior), so young he barely can believe she ever was a mother at all, let alone his.





the unwanted song


She says, “Only he could sing like that,” holding on to one of the desks to prop herself up, “and you ain’t nothing but the shadow-born that did precede him”—and with a horrified start, watching the carnage run down her thighs, making inventory of the bloody bundle she holds in the other arm, he realizes that this is the moment just after she’s given birth.

“Mama?”

“You was supposed to take care of him, Jesse. You was supposed to take care of your baby brother,” she says, summoning what bristling calm she can. “You was first. You was the oldest.”

“Mama,” he pleads, “by only half an hour!”

“In for half an hour, in for a lifetime,” she says, and he has no idea what that can possibly mean.

? ? ?

“Only just had been born myself,” he begs, “a newbie no more or less than him ’ceptin’ all of thirty-some minutes—how could I have helped? How could I help him out of a womb I just left my own self?”

“If anyone should have lived,” she seethes, “it was him. If you had watched out for him like a real big brother, it would have been him. Do you think all them out there”—letting go of the desk and teetering where she stands long enough to point behind her at the thousands of glittering torchlights beyond the window, stretched so far in the distant night that at the darkest and most unseen horizon the fires give way to stars—“was waiting for you? Oh sure, you look like him.” She pulls together both arms to secure the bloody thing she’s holding. “I suppose when you talk, yes it’s his voice. I suppose there’s a manner or two of his you have. But though you have his same look, you don’t have his same beauty, that beauty that’s more than a face . . . you don’t have the same angel-snarl. Though you have his voice, you don’t have his song. You are your father’s son, but he was mine, and I’m sorry but it weren’t intended to be you who made it, no”—she raises the stillborn twin she’s holding—“it was supposed to be him.”





the undreamed song


He cries, “Oh, Mama, don’t,” clasping his ears and closing his eyes, the vision of his mother unleashing a flood of waking memories. The move to Memphis. The year his daddy went to jail for altering a paycheck. The small public-housing unit like a palace compared to the two-room shack with no plumbing where he was born, his stillborn twin lying in the shoe box on the kitchen table, his mother crying all night that it couldn’t have been Jesse she lost instead. His twin brother’s shabby little grave back in Tupelo at Priceville Cemetery, where Jesse watched his piss soak the sheltering earth and imagined it staining the infant bones.

? ? ?

He remembers the Sunday mornings when his mother tried to drag him to church, Jesse rejecting any part of it. The times when he took God’s name in vain to offend not only her but the memory of him, as though to profane into nothingness whatever sacred memory anyone could have of him. Humes High in Memphis, where, king stud of the corridors, Jesse cut his sexual swath through the school’s female population to show what they would have missed had they squandered on him their moans and swoons. Where, as his father’s son, he wrought terror on every mama’s boy he could grab from every classroom and hallway and roadside up to Poplar Avenue.





the unforgiven song


Down at the paint plant on the afternoon he was expelled from school, young Jesse told his father, “No one wants me here,” expecting his daddy would, as usual, answer nothing.

“I know,” said Vernon. “Exceptin’ me.”

“All of them,” said Jesse, turning to look at the shadow the sun cast behind him that wasn’t his, “are going to make me pay for not being him.”

His father answers, “I know, boy. They gonna make you pay forever . . .” and Jesse wakes himself, wondering how he could deserve such a nightmare.

? ? ?

Up he staggers from the conference table to where she stood in his “dream.” On the carpet, he finds blood’s unmistakable sign, wonders if the stain was there all along and if his vision of her grew from it. But he knows better when the singing starts again. I was the one who taught her to cry when she wants you under her spell, and Jesse nearly takes a letter opener from one of the desks and plunges it through his ear into his brain to cut the sound out. Hurling himself headlong into the window, he hopes to shatter it, if not himself. But he’s not a United flight 175 en route from Boston to Los Angeles; bounced off the window, Jesse crumples into a heap in the corner.