When night’s closing down it shuts things in on themselves and that’s why you are on a ship with these other men thousands of miles from everywhere else, floating through darkness, and you can’t help sensing the isolation, the smallness because night cuts you off drastically as a knife. But since you can’t see clearly, you can’t really tell. Night expands some things. Trees explode silently, giant black puffs hovering like clouds against the sky. You know night’s different and you guess at why. Can’t help guessing, wondering, even though you understand you’ll never understand because night is about hiding things. About things changing. And Cudjoe knows it would make a good story. They’d all be in it. Would the players testify, help him tell his story as they cool out after the game?
The other fact about night—it doesn’t last. Night’s temporary. But you can’t really be sure about that, either.
My poor, aching wheels.
I can dig it, bro.
My mind’s right there. Tells me just what to do. But my legs ain’t with it. In their own world. I send the message and by the time they move, it’s too late.
Like the mayor.
That cat missing more than wheels.
You can say that again.
He’s not stepping down, is he? You watch. He’ll run again. Probably win again if the party’s behind him.
Why you think they wouldn’t be behind him? All he did was torch a few crazy niggers. That’s why he’s up in office in the first place. Keep youall ghetto bunnies in line. Sure, he goofed. But things so fucked in this city whoever’s in the mayor’s chair bound to fuck up. Mayor don’t run the city, city runs him. Them slick dudes own the mayor are grinning from ear to ear cause if it had been a white boy dropped the bomb, bloods would have took to the street and the whole city nothing but a cinder now.
Tell the truth.
Leave the mayor alone, youall. Cat’s doing his best. Hate to hear people bad-mouthing him. Specially black people. Finally voted in a black man, and now nothing he does good enough for you.
Ain’t about black.
Bull-shit. You think they’d let him burn down white people’s houses? Sheeit. He be hanging by his balls from some lamppost. Mayor’s not in office to whip on white folks. Nigger control. That’s what he’s about.
New houses they building up on Osage spozed to be pretty nice.
No stoops, man. How you spozed to have a neighborhood with no stoops?
Check it out. What’s up there mostly holes in the ground.
Where the people living lost their homes?
Not in City Hall. Not in the mayor’s neighborhood.
At least they’re living.
Don’t care what nobody says. It was murder, man. Murder one and some of those lying suckers ought to pay.
They appointed a commission.
Hey, bro. Commissioners all members of the same club. Thick as thieves. Downtown chumps all eating out the same bowl. They come in where I work. Smiling and grinning and falling over each other to pay when I bring the check. You think they going to hang one their own? Watch. Commission will claim some poor blood lit the match.
Papers been spreading that lie already. Like the brothers poured gasoline on the roof and locked theyselves in the basement and set fire to the house. Who’s spozed to believe that shit?
Have they found the little boy?
The one survived?
They say he survived. If he did, hope he’s a million miles away from here. They’ll fuck with him if they find him.
Blame him.
If he ain’t dead already. Papers say eleven dead. Means at least eleven. Lie about the numbers like they lie about everything else. If they admit eleven it means that’s how many bodies they caught red-handed with. Don’t know how many dead in those ashes in the basement. Papers say a boy escaped. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.
Anything left in that bottle, man?
Here, dude. You got the rest.
Cudjoe decides not to ask about the boy again. Cheating in a way when he asked the first time. This mood, this time belongs to nobody. Each man free as long as they relax here letting night close over them. If a city lurks beyond the borders of the park, it’s no more real than the ball games they play again as they talk. They are together in this. No agendas, interviews or interviewees. Are the streetlamps dimmer or has the city slipped into a deeper fold of night? Faces around him are masks. Would he recognize any of these guys if he saw them in clothes on the street tomorrow? Music doo-wops in thick pure phrases from the car on Forty-third behind the chain-link fence. Music reigns supreme and there is nothing not listening. Cudjoe holds his breath. Doesn’t need breath as a high sweet tenor and voices trilling behind it shine like silver, shine like gold.
Could you bring down a city with trumpets? Could a song lay waste skyscrapers? Scour the hills, cleanse the rivers, wipe the sky? Everything in creation had been listening to the music. Now sirens and jets and horns and trolleys, dogs howling, babies screaming had started up again. Thump of Cudjoe’s heart again. That shield of filth the city flings up at the sky in place again. Stars spatter against it like rain on a tin roof trying to get in. Hushed for a moment but now a river of noise again and the tune from a tape deck is a twig drifting along with everything else caught in the current. Waters above and waters below the firmament, and earth a wafer in those wet lips that are light-years thick. He tastes earth as he drains a can of beer. O.T. smoking a cigarette. Darnell sucking on a joint. Or was it the other way round? Too dark to tell. If the lips opened to sing, to kiss, to tell a story. If they opened, and the earth wafer slipped out. Wouldn’t there be a long time when nobody’d know what was happening? Centuries out of kilter, askew, but no one understanding the problem. Just this queasiness, this uneasiness. This tilt and slow falling. You are in a city. You look up and can’t see the stars and that doesn’t bother you as much as it should. You don’t know what’s wrong but maybe more’s wrong than you want to know.
* * *
Cudjoe doesn’t know why he piled into the car going to Papa Joe’s. Why he drank six more drafts with the fellas when the first one cooled him out. Doesn’t know why he’s decided to walk back to West Philly when his legs already wobbly and stupid. He’s at the top of many broad steps, near the entrance of the art museum, whose stones on a good day are golden in the sun. A neat ingot enthroned on a hill. He is sighting down a line of lighted fountains that guide his eye to City Hall. This is how the city was meant to be viewed. Broad avenues bright spokes of a wheel radiating from a glowing center. No buildings higher than Billy Penn’s hat atop City Hall. Scale and pattern fixed forever. Clarity, balance, a perfect understanding between the parts. Night air thick and bad but he’s standing where he should and the city hums this dream of itself into his ear and he doesn’t believe it for an instant but wonders how he managed to stay away so long.
I belong to you, the city says. This is what I was meant to be. You can grasp the pattern. Make sense of me. Connect the dots. I was constructed for you. like a field of stars I need you to bring me to life. My names, my gods poised on the tip of your tongue. All you have to do is speak and you reveal me, complete me.
The
