wrung out the rag, wiped his hands.
“I’m a touch thirsty. Any way you might be able to help me out with that?”
Harrison nodded.
“Yeah, I might be able to connect you to a six-pack between here and where you need to take me.”
“Alright, gimme a minute to get my cigarettes.”
There were times in life when you took such an immediate dislike to another human that you would swear it was as clear as a smell. By the time Jonathan got back and started the van, the impression hadn’t shifted.
After they stopped off at the convenience store for a pack of Bud, Harrison talked him through the directions he’d written on a scrap of paper. In ten minutes they pulled up to a trailer park overgrown with milkweed and whorls of encroaching kudzu. He got out and told Jonathan to wait while he made sure they had the right place. Before he’d crossed the yard, a shirtless man no bigger around than a light pole came out holding a can of Steel Reserve in one hand while the other clutched at the droopy waist of a pair of cutoff camouflage fatigues.
“You the one I talked to about the Taurus?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Alright then. Step around back here then, why don’t you?”
He went and looked at the car. Radio didn’t work. One electric window wouldn’t go down, but hell, it seemed to run well enough. And the man was willing to part with it without any paperwork. He went back to Jonathan’s van, picked up the envelope of cash and told him to head on back, that he was good to go on his own.
“That it, huh? All slick on the side, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Tell Gavin I’ll be back in a while.”
“I’m not your errand boy.”
Jonathan backed out, cut across a corner of the lot jumbled with a few road-cast empties that had lain uncollected and bleached by the sun. One can popped and flattened as he drove over it.
Harrison went up to the trailer, gave the seller the envelope of money and declined when he offered him a beer.
“Just the keys. I’ve got some places to be.”
HARRISON HAD been wanting to see Emmanuel since he’d gotten out of prison, but one thing or another had conspired to get in the way. Emmanuel had written for the entirety of the time Harrison had been locked up, done his best to keep him in the world. Harrison did not always write back because sometimes he did not hold onto enough of himself to feel he was able to write down words that matched his mind. Still, the steady diet of letters sustained him there, gave him something that pushed through the steady wash of time, provided something distinct, something with contour.
He drove down 81 and then headed west on I-40 on the way to Knoxville, got off at the Asheville Highway exit and drove past the middle-class stone and brick homes that transitioned to Magnolia Avenue and the depressed commercial zone with its weeded lots, drive through liquor store, Little Caesars, title loan lenders, and AME Zion Tabernacle. There was a motel and some public housing perched along the strip where men draped from porches and stoops and leaned against electric poles while their women pushed thrift-store strollers up and down the sidewalks. Many were African immigrants with their dark skin and bright headdresses. But there were native blacks and poor whites too. Many simply sat there in the afternoon sun and stared at the passing traffic as if it were some repetitive television drama. They smoked cigarettes and toed the edge of the curb, waited for something that never seemed to arrive.
He turned at the corner Chinese restaurant and went back a couple of blocks. The houses were small and shabby, though some were meticulously kept. It had been nearly seven years since he’d been back here, but so little had changed. How many times had he sat out here on Emmanuel’s porch and eaten Kung Pao and egg rolls, counting the sparrows and chickadees that had come in the evenings to the bird feeder while they talked and smoked weed? He saw the bungalow now, there at the end of the row, a joyous purple that he would always associate with Emmanuel, like some hue mixed and bettered from anything you might see in a flower bed. Instead, it was its own kind of achievement, something discovered through the electric possibility of art.
He parked behind Emmanuel’s old Cutlass, got out and went up the steps to the front door. He knocked and looked in but could see no signs of anyone inside. He knew he should have called to make sure he was in, that he hadn’t been out with some of his queer friends, but there hadn’t been time, and a part of him didn’t want to face the possibility that Emmanuel would take their company over his. Not after all that had happened.
It occurred to him then to check around back. He went to the gate and pushed around where it dragged from its bad angle to the ground and saw him there among the rows of tomato plants and whatever else he was trying to grow. He wore a green kimono and slippers. He hummed something that sounded like a lullaby.
“Well this is a hell of a welcome home,” Harrison called.
Emmanuel turned, brightened.
“Oh my God, honey. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
That smile of his that was such a freely given gift. He left his things where they were, embraced Harrison and held to his shoulders.
“Are you still alive in there?” he asked.
“Parts of me,” Harrison said.
“Well, we can work with that. I’ll make us up a special cocktail, love. Just you wait. Come on into the house.”
He fell in step at Emmanuel’s side and they went in the back and through the kitchen, out to the living room with its Buddha head and the sting of incense. In the corner the easel stood with a paint-speckled sheet thrown over some work in progress. Many of Emmanuel’s finished pieces crowded the walls. Some abstract and some of figures but all distinguished by their shocks of unreal color. Harrison had felt better whenever he was around any of his friend’s paintings.
Emmanuel came in from the kitchen island with a pair of plated joints and matches. He set the plate on the coffee table and dropped into a recliner directly across from the couch where Harrison sat, kicked one leg over the other and posed himself there like a woman in a tight cocktail dress, the kimono drawn open well up his thigh.
“I see you’ve added a few pictures since the last time I saw you,” Harrison said to him. “You haven’t lost the touch.”
Emmanuel grinned, said, “That would be about as hard as forgetting how to draw a breath, I’m afraid. Either way, not breathing or not painting, it would end up with the same result for dear little Emmanuel. But that’s not what we’re going to sit here and do, talk about how your poor nigger love is pining his time away. We’re going to talk about big ole Jay Harrison and how his body and soul is mending. But first, first, we have to get all of our equipment in working order.”
He leaned forward, took one of the joints and struck a match. Once the weed was going, he took a big hit and motioned for Harrison to do the same. Harrison picked up the joint and did what made him feel right. That was what he was after anyhow. That was why he’d come.
“This is some of my finer accomplishments, if you can forgive my bragging. I call it Black Lace. That’s a pretty good sense of it, don’t you think?”
“It
