Shadow's Ride Home

 

It was a Thursday, and that late September kind of hot that distinctly bears the scent of the cold months to come. The men sitting on the benches round the fountain let their eyes caress each young woman’s passing lightly as if grasping for with their eyes what they might be gasping for with their lungs — Summer and the extra lilts of hair, swishes of skirts that it brings with it. An ex-debutante passed, in her late-fifties now and getting some late-season mileage out of her white pantsuit and oversized pearls.

The pragmatism of those passing through the circle and, perhaps, the romanticism of those bathing in the sun’s last long rays danced a barely touching dance of turns and dips, a tango. Sometimes the bathing romantics would turn marching pragmatists and the opposite until the circle’s population gave way to the vagrants that made nighttime seem like nighttime in the city’s public spaces. The shadows' having crept clear across the circle at only six o’clock served the most compelling notice that the pragmatism of hurried walks would soon enough be the order of transportation for the hang-eyed man who sat just to the left of the south facing entrance.

His thoughts were not on future commutes but on those that passed in front of him with the regularity of the rush-hour Metro schedule, and the one commute that did not feel hurried, but had nothing to do with the weather, his own. At the other end of the Metro, he knew, waited the family he could not adequately provide for in high-step with his own provision. He knew that he would like to do right by the woman he might have loved had he only given himself the chance. That he probably would end up doing wrong by her, as he had before, and worse. He knew now that his life at seventeen years had felt like a roller coaster run over an oil slick—fast fun and smooth in the way that gut-wrenching ups and downs can be sometimes—and that seventeen felt as far away as those people whose hurried walks zipped just past his comprehension. He also knew that he had nowhere to go, and was going nowhere; that he was getting older and letting real life take its toll.

Maybe that was why his smile was bright and sharp like a blade crossed the desert sun at the moments when his gin-and-something-red set fire to that part of his brain that could still feel seventeen. Contemplating dusk like the tea leaves of an adolescence turned timid adulthood, his pupils pierced career-men and women alike with longing sorrow.

*          *          *

It had been a week after graduation when she had told him. He had grown up in a place where graduation meant from one place, the soon-to-be-condemned brick building in Southeast DC that had doomed the careers of many better than himself. It was somewhere between there and home where the, “you’ve made it to seventeen,” speech flowed with as much pride as the, “you’ve made it to 18” speech and so on until, before twenty-five, court ordered child support mandates had replaced the kinder words of aunts whose wide hips would squeeze through narrow spaces onto extra folding seats at Thanksgiving. It was a Summer Saturday after an afternoon of hoops in that building’s sweaty gymnasium that he would think of as the end of his childhood.

Fatherhood would come crashing down on him like those Summer storms he loved, and the first premeditating crackle would come the day after graduation Summer’s own opening deluge, the Basketball Party. He hadn’t been good enough to make the varsity until his senior year, so the party held a special significance this time around. Basketball was, for guys his height and taller, a form of currency, and, besides, he was too handsome not to hang out at basketball gathering places. His height, a modest six-foot-three and looks were enough to garner him entrée into the female company that his lack of skills could not guarantee alone.

Maybe Jane had been his shorty but still not quite wifey then. And maybe she had asked him if he loved her a few times. His smile, that all-knowing smile of tall handsome young men whose gold herringbones bounce on their necks during playground basketball games, would be his only answer. She would teach herself that it meant yes in the same way that she had learned the multiplication table, by slow repetition. That repetition would one day turn sinister as if the cycle followed the circular pattern of a drill—round and around and yet chafing, boring until what was left was a hole, or many of them. It was not like the repetition of the seasons, refreshing, cleansing, purifying. And some day his holes and impurity would suffocate her even after the lips of his all-knowing smile would mold the shapes of “I love you” into the hanging blue notes of the songs they would sing – wrong, false, and obvious, yet an institution all the same.

As was the custom in their neighborhood, she would also teach herself that he would come to love her through their child (if he did not already), after she had finally set down the white plastic pregnancy test she had just peed on and wiped away her tears.

There was a half 50 gallon oil drum that served barbeque all night, and the traffic between it and the table that served potato salad and fried chicken had been heavy. A DJ had been paid and Christmas lights had been strung up in announcing the festiveness of the night. Graduation parties, and the Basketball Party in particular, were events to be marked on the social calendar months in advance. The graduating and the never-graduated alike, young mothers and the few going to college would be there. Family too, and, probably, that lecherous uncle who was never invited, yet managed to attend every social event of significance.

Our man, let’s call him Shadow because all comic book villains and heroes have descriptive names, stood with a cup of kool-aid and gin, his one cube of ice teetering on the edge of its certain demise. The music pumped out from the tower-mounted speakers in round fuzzy curves. Shadow’s gaze sliced through the idle laughter of his over six foot cohort scanning the crowd for the gazelle who would become the Summer’s first treat. Eventually all of their eyes would do this. And, eventually, there would be many lions fed that night.

Tradition dictated that the Basketball Party stand above other similar affairs in the Summer. Besides preachers and drug dealers, ball players were the neighborhood’s proudest export; their wailing dunks and chest thumps more often rose above the din of the city than did those of mothers crying and their sons dying. So when orange extension cables were run into different parts of the Wilson’s home just so enough power could be drawn to light the lamps and spin the records, the effects would be felt hours later by a tall Shadow—ironically light skinned—at the premature prime of his life staring now at a Janice flirting with the edges of the nascent dance floor crowd. Power! Enough to melt an ice cube.

It was a hi like any other, and a dance, and a drink, and later an exit.

The members of the basketball team would routinely congregate in small tall circles, laugh and look. Ex ball players would be there too, though usually only briefly, and on the edges. Shadow and his teammates would swallow the “live it up now’s” with all the solemnity of a “great-game” and the alumni would rush themselves into the background quickly not wanting to steal any of the light shining on the graduating players, but maybe to stand on the sidelines and bask in its glow.

The mothers would know the names of all the players and, for the night, would smile at the girlfriends and shortys too. Shadow’s mother had known all the names of the players before once, seventeen years earlier. She had had her Shadow and that had been enough. Fortunately for her, it would have to be, for Shadow’s father had had enough by the time the next year’s Basketball Party had rolled around.

*          *          *

At twenty-seven years old now, Shadow felt that he had a firm grasp on everything he would need to know. And, as a mumbling homeless man sloughed across the waning rush-hour foot traffic in Dupont Circle, Shadow smiled to himself briefly at the thought that at seventeen he had felt the same way too. His thoughts quickly shifted to the quiet afternoon in Jane’s basement the day after the party.

 

He had been proud of the fact that he had a shorty named Jane, and a new shorty named Janice, that the latter knew about the former, and that the former would let him fuck without a condom. Janice hadn’t let him go that far, but she would come around, he thought, as he circled Jane’s house and approached the basement entrance. The sweat was still drying on him from the Summer’s first ball game, and he knew that in the three hours he had before he was due at the kiosk in the mall where he sold pagers, he could convince Jane to cook for him while he showered and let him inside of her before a quick nap.

The basement was cozy in the way of a small apartment, and would make a fine place to start raising a child, Jane thought. Shadow remembered that the space was surprisingly well-lit in spite of the dark wood paneling and high windows. He remembered that Jane, who usually made him shower before touching him, had put her palms flat on his chest, and that her palms were especially warm as she walked backwards but somehow pulled him with their warmth. He remembered being confused, but knowing enough to keep his mouth shut, and thinking that the whole world would soon open up to him the way Jane’s bed did that afternoon.

It was wrapped in the soft caress of fresh sheets, Jane’s warm palms, sleep’s dreamy overture, and the tinkling orange warmth of the late afternoon sun that she told him, “Shadow, I’m pregnant.”

It was his body that went cold first, his heart would follow. A minute later he would ask, “Is it mine?” knowing the answer.

Jane, who knew the answer as well as Shadow did, knew that to answer the question would be another win for Shadow (‘great game’) and knew that she had better hold on tighter to the cold man that she loved who was lying next to her if she expected for him to ever warm up again. She told herself that she would not cry, and ten minutes later she could not tell if the salty taste on her lips was from the solitary tear that had wound down her cheek or the sweat on Shadow’s chest, rising up and down now. He was asleep.

If Shadow didn’t have the heart to love Jane, he didn’t have the heart to do what Caesar did either. Caesar was the captain of the basketball team, and had accused his shorty of cheating on him in spite of the fact that the child was born with the same droopy expression on his face as his father. When Shadow woke up, he told Jane that he would marry her, showered, dressed, and went to work.

 

On the Metro now, Shadow stared into the vague void that one can permissibly stare into without making eye contact. He had never expected for ten years to cleave that same sort of void within him. He had written a check to Jane earlier that afternoon, and could feel it in his breast pocket when he breathed deeply – cutting into his chest just slightly. It was the last Thursday of the month, after all. And for Shadow, there remained yet, the longer portion of the evening commute.

 

[Washington, DC 2004]