Shackling Water Read online

  Did you see that? Latif asked Mona softly. She nodded and tightened the loop of their arms. I thought he was gonna go back. He twisted to glance at the receding couple.

  She would never let him, said Mona quietly, as if she knew what the woman was thinking, and they walked on. She was right, Latif thought.

  I don't want them staring like that at us, he said.

  Let them stare. She moved her fingernails against his arm. I don't give a shit.

  I do.

  Everybody else is staring at us anyway, said Mona. Hadn't you noticed?

  Latif frowned. He'd been enjoying himself so much with Mona that he had forgotten what they were.

  You know what else I noticed? Mona asked. I do it too. I don't mean anything by it but I do. We're just more interesting to look at than other couples.

  She eyecorner checked him, wondering if she'd spoken something wrong. They were partway through construction of a hothouse in which the relationship could grow strong enough to weather storms, and thus views were teased out cautiously, with a perfect eye toward understanding and agreement.

  Latif said Maybe so. Mona seemed not to mind the stares. Perhaps she liked people to see him with her, or maybe she was simply used to the attention; eyes followed a beautiful woman everywhere. Eyes pretended not to see her and watched her on the sly, the same way eyes followed him, yet altogether different. Maybe knowing what men were thinking was like knowing what white people were thinking: a survival skill that made you want to kill yourself.

  The day had tuned them to the same pitch, and that night Latif and Mona lay in bed and traded snippets of their pasts: Latif's father for Mona's mother, fire-escape spiderwebs for worn security blanket edges, half-forgotten dreams for misbegotten eavesdroppings. They trickled slowly into each other, word by word and story for story, and Latif found himself remembering things which fit he knew not where into the jigsaw puzzle of his mind but which came back when he spoke of them and asserted the importance of their having happened. He didn't know why he thought of them or what made him tell Mona. The memories were raw and grainy; they were not the kind that became glossy and took on storyform from constant recollection.

  He remembered the first fight he'd seen in full, from taunts to blood. He and Shane had watched together from his window, hours after Leda had told them go to bed. It was summer and the older crew was barbecuing on the corner, lounging in their fathers' lawnchairs with a cooler full of brew. A dude in a black jeep pumping EPMD's “You Gots to Chill” pulled up across the street to pick up Vanessa, the sixteen-year-old neighborhood heartbreaker, and from the minute the cat parked his ride the whole block watched his every move. They didn't like the idea of Vanessa dating a stranger and they especially didn't like to see some punk disappearing with the princess of the block as they sat helpless on the corner like their fathers. Vanessa and the dude drove off to catcalls and wide-armed threats, and when they returned after some hours it was late enough for everybody to be drunk and bored and sick of fucking with each other.

  Shane woke Latif and they hunched by the window and watched the crew surround the car and try to coax the cat onto the street. Vanessa sat in the frontseat, crying and pleading with her man not to get out; Latif could read her lips across the block. She grabbed his rigid arm, his fist still wrapped around the steering wheel, and Latif silently hoped that he would do what was intelligent and drive away. Stay in the car, Latif whispered, sweating for this cat now, but part of him thirsted to watch what would happen if he didn't. Shane, sitting beside Latif, was philosophical: Man, if this nigga dumb enough to get out he deserves to get his ass beat.

  I always wondered what made him do it, Latif told Mona as she kneaded his palm, pinching the skin between his fingers so hard that he twitched. Mona gave, liked, and expected harder massages than he. Eight cats, drunk, holding bottles, won't let him leave, on some We just wanna talk shit. And he's on their block, with their girl, pushing a whip no one in the neighborhood can pay even the insurance on. Latif paused self-consciously, until the curiosity in Mona's fingers pushed him on. After it was over, I snuck out and helped Vanessa get the guy inside. He was a mess. They stomped the shit out of him, ripped the soft top off his Jeep. Shane tried to stop me, said if anybody saw me helping this guy I was gonna have all sorts of problems. But I didn't feel right just sitting in my window, watching Vanessa try to get him up.

  So we haul him in, and as I'm walking back home, Vanessa says Wait! runs outside and grabs a paper bag out of the Jeep and gives it to me. Latif chuckled. I went home and opened it. Half a cheeseburger. Her doggie bag. Me and Shane looked at each other like, What?

  There was a patch of thinking silence. Latif inhaled the warm, intimate quiet and thought of what Wess said about white space and the haze around a candle's flame: Whatever you don't play, you play around. Mona turned and lay on her stomach and Latif traced a hand lightly along the naked curve of her back. She smelled of lavender; he smelled of her. Latif watched the dance of his dark fingertips on Mona's skin, entranced, and Mona shut her eyes and pulled up artifacts heavy with sadness—artifacts which although huge seemed buried shallow. Latif listened intently, feeling guilty that she was sharing more with him than he was with her. He should at least, he thought, try to absorb her life as hungrily as she did his.

  My father was so sad when Mom died that he barely left bed for a month, said Mona, distant with memory. We didn't know what to do. Finally, my older sister Anna put on one of Mom's dresses, stood next to his bed and said Bill, get up. The girls need you. And he got up. Latif kept quiet, rubbing Mona's back with slow openpalmed circles, wondering if she wanted him to speak and hoping he didn't have to because all he could think to say was Damn, that's some weird shit.

  But Mona continued on her own. I guess the simplest way to say it is that Anna started acting more and more like Mom—like a mother to me and a wife to Dad. I don't mean they started fucking, but they might as well have. It was sick. I felt totally abandoned, confused and embarrassed and fucked up. When I was twelve I started planning to get out of there, and the older I got, the worse they treated me. It made them feel more normal, I think. I just went into my shell: barely spoke, did my own thing. Cried. Moved out when I was seventeen, got a job and went to night school. She craned her neck to look back at Latif. Anna's thirty-four now. She still lives with him.

  Dig it, Latif said idiotically. It was one of those super-hip old school musician things Murray Higgins said, and he'd been making a concerted effort to draft it into his vocabulary. He had no idea why it popped out now. Mona looked at him oddly and Latif felt he had to reciprocate the story best he could. He seldom talked about his father, and when he did he always said the same things, told anecdotes he'd repeated enough to be unmoved by, became one of those lames who played the same solo every time instead of trusting themselves to the moment.

  When my father left, all I remember is that we started going to church all the time, he said. Every night. My mother said Lord help your father, son. But I was like Fuck that. I knew he'd hurt her too much to be praying for his ass. I'd sit there and think of ways to torture him instead—stuff from movies and my book of Greek myths, like Prometheus getting his liver torn out by eagles every day—until I was sure Jesus was gonna come down off that cross and smoke my ass. Eventually, though, I decided God would look the other way if I ever ran into the cat.

  Latif reached across Mona and took the last cigarette from the nightstand. He lay on his back and crossed his hands behind his head. Mona threw her leg over his leg and wrapped her arm around his waist. Latif held the cigarette to her lips, then to his own. He didn't feel a thing but he hoped he looked pensive.

  I didn't miss him at all, Latif said. There was barely anything to miss. His father was a ghost: a scratchy face hunched over the breakfast table silent, a bathrobed figure who made occasional pancakes and was seldom seen even before he left. A pair of arms that retucked Latif into his bedding late at night, after his mother had put him properly to
sleep. The whiskey and sandalwood smell of a raincoat in the closet. All Latif really remembered of his father was the sense of tension he brought with him, the staccato nervousness with which Leda moved when her husband was around. When he disappeared so did all reminders of him; there were no old pictures, no wristwatch left behind.

  The only thing Leda kept was his name, or so Latif had thought until two years ago. Cleaning out the hall closet for his mother, he'd unearthed a cardboard box of LPs: Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, Van Horn, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi Band, Black Heat, Gil Scott-Heron, Cymande, The Last Poets, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy. He carted the collection, sixty-five albums in all, to his room and never told Leda. The song titles underlined in ballpoint were always the baddest tunes, and Latif listened and imagined his pops digging these records right as they came out, he and his boys passing a joint and picking their Afros and saying shit like Man don't Trane just blow your mind?

  It was only a week later that an old neighbor, meeting Latif in the hallway, told him Boy, you your daddy's spitting image. Leda shook her head no when Latif risked upsetting her to ask if it was true, but he didn't believe her: started to wonder what his mother saw when she looked at her son.

  Mona stubbed the cigarette and blew a final smoke ring. Latif reached up and poked his finger through it. You don't like to talk about him, do you?

  What's there to say? That nigga left. I'm still here.

  You could say how you feel.

  He shrugged. I could. Latif sat up and Mona tumbled off him, annoyed that he never told her he was getting up, just displaced her like she was a cat. He walked across the room naked and picked up his horn. You wanna hear something?

  Her eyes darted to the ceiling. Isn't it a little late?

  Nah. He slid the strap over his head and clipped the horn to it, then wet and attached the reed. He'd never played naked before, and the bottom of the horn rubbed cold against his dick, exciting him a little. He decided to blow a little “Volunteer Slavery” for her. Rashaan Roland Kirk's moody soulful meditation was the underlined selection on the first album Latif had pulled from his inheritance. He'd taught himself to play it right away, entranced by the way Kirk wove a modern worksong out of baleful chants and horn lines, evoking generations of oppression physical and mental, enforced and self-inflicted.

  Latif could imagine it sung in the cottonfields or the Cotton Club, and he had closed his eyes and mourned and marched and danced next to Rashaan, and just when he was zoning hard that brother flipped the script and “Volunteer Slavery” turned into “Hey, Jude” without you even noticing at first. Latif opened his eyes confused, wondering what had happened and what Kirk was trying to do: Indict pop culture or shake hands with the Fab Four. Rashaan was as proto-b-boy as Monk, dropping that Beatles shit in there and challenging you to figure out the meaning of the sample, whether homage, dis, or joke. Everything the blind three-simultaneous-horn-playing motherfucker did was crazy hip hop, from writing new lyrics to dead men's songs to pioneering unheard-of instruments, blowing notes on the manzello and the strich.

  Latif unpressed the sax from his body and played the opening notes true to the record: Oh vol-un-teer slaa-vry, has go-ot me on the run, has go-ot me on the run, flicked eyes at Mona and turned the phrase around, chopping and switching intonations: run on me, oh me run on run on. The milky way starswirl of edginess blinked away and Latif's brain was a starless night, dark with confidence. He heard his own first sounds and knew that he was showing Mona who he really was. Latif's skin twitched with sensitivity and he bounced sonar notes around the room, responding to everything without tearing the fine parchment of the tune: A fluttering wall shadow became a butterfly of sound which rose and shed its form and disappeared into a floating scarlet cloud. Latif felt both honest and bad as hell, close to himself and Mona, and the cloud grew full and heavy and Latif stood under it and closed his eyes and felt the raindrops on his scalp, hands, shoulders, soaking him in freedom. He played slaa-vry backward, vry-slaa, a chopped note then a long sweet one, all the time in the world, played it again sounding like oh-yeaaah, oh-yeaaah, which reminded him in turn of the bridge to a Joe Henderson tune.

  He's not playing for me anymore, thought Mona when his eyes closed. Sometimes the same realization hit her midfuck: He's by himself; I'm just here too, and she felt lonely with him, abandoned in a sad familiar way, and hoped he would return and quickly lost patience with hope and yanked him back where he belonged—touched him, moved, or spoke.

  She had no right to do any of those things now, Mona knew, nor did she want to. Watching him was beautiful even from the outside, made her feel many things at once: pride in him and in herself for knowing from jumpstreet that he was no bullshit motherfucker but a real musician, sheer joy at the fun he was having, pleasure at his sounds. A touch of melancholy, even minute jealousy, because she knew deep down that there was nothing she did so well or with so much passion.

  Latif was wide open, breeze against his body cooling him as he swayed to what was jerking out his horn bell. With every note the path before him branched in five and six directions, and Latif walked with chessmaster precognition, making choices that would pay off ten moves down the line. Outside a fire truck went by, siren whining, and Latif reached out and stabbed the sound like a spearfisherman, threw it wriggling on the table, chopped it up—internalized the interruption by breaking his own phrases with the sharp wail every few notes. Mona clapped her hands, delighted, and laughter rose up from the street.

  A handcupped shout from down there: “St. Thomas”! Teef smiled around his reed and banged out the tune's head fast. Aight! came the response. Encore!

  Come on, Latif grinned, let's go down there. He found a pair of pants, shrugged on a shirt and tossed Mona another. She buttoned it while shuffling down the stairs behind him.

  Spliff was standing on the stoop with two of his boys. Ahh, he said, dapping Latif with a wideswinging hand the man, the man. He introduced Latif and Mona to his boys Donald and Equality, and everybody traded handshakes and greetings, Latif acknowledging the compliments on his playing with a headnodding Good lookin out.

  So whassup man? He sidled up to Spliff. I still ain heard you rhyme.

  Some cats took twenty minutes to prod into performing, but Spliff wasn't one of them. He grinned and dipped a shoulder at the ground. Well, if I can get a beat from my man here, tapping Donald's shoulder, and a little suhmn suhmn from my other man here on the sax, I might be able to kick a lil bit.

  Donald raised his eyebrows at Latif, who readied his horn and told him Set it off. The cat amplified himself, both hands arched to form a tunnel between his mouth and the world, and started to beatbox. His cheeks emptied of air as he pushed sharp kickdrums out from his throat, and he refilled them with percussive inhalations, the in-breath marking time like a hi-hat. He clicked his tongue against one side of his mouth like a snare drum, and filled the rest of the measure with tone-drops, verbal cutting, whitespace, occasional double kicks or snares. Hip hop drumbeats had a dynamics all their own, Latif thought. Every hip hopper who'd ever banged a beat onto a lunchroom table or walked down the street making music with his mouth understood them; it was just the overstudied so-called musicians coming at hip hop from outside who couldn't make it swing, played too fast or too thick, left the rapper no space.

  Mona, Latif, Spliff, Donald, and Equality tightened instinctually into a cipher circle, heads bobbing synchronized. Latif knew his job was to get in where he fit in, so he played low and rhythmic: fit the underwhelming head to Coltrane's “Syeeda's Song Flute,” a line that was almost metronomical, over Donald's crackling mouthsnare.

  Donald threw down an old-school scratch pattern, an obvious cue, and Spliff came in on time, voice clear and strident. Latif could tell the verse was written, not freestyled, by both its complexity and the way Spliff looked while spitting it, catching Latif's eyes like a showman rather than a seeker. Latif had been hoping to hear some freestyle shit, always enjoyed
comparing rappers' improvisational techniques with his own, but no big deal. A lotta cats wanted to kick written shit first to impress you, and hell, it was working. Latif had expected some generic serve-fiends-to-survive rhymes, considering Spliff's occupation, but instead his neighbor hit him with

  Manchild in the promised land/I'm sitting in with the hottest band/my name known, plus I got it sewn like a monogram/in this modern land, I search the world's womb like a sonogram—Donald, listening, suspended the beat and kicked a medical beep beep behind the line—hold a torch for an honest man/til it makes me wanna holla man—Latif played the melody of the Marvin Gaye song Spliff was referencing, a little late but still nice—but like Solomon, a scholar can/take a solemn stand, like a column and/I'm modellin', myself on Assata and/Bambaattaa, Flannery O'Connor and my grandfather/—Damn, thought Mona, did he just say Flannery O'Connor?—a rare honor, cats who dare bother/on my bookshelf martyrs find rare harbor/I tune out the world and at they words stare harder . . .

  His verse was over but Spliff was getting heated, so he kept going. Uh, yeah, on some freestyle shit/my name is Spliff, got my man Donald on the beatbox/I'm too hot, rhyme even when the beat drops—Donald and Latif, obedient, cut out, and Spliff dropped money lines in the clipped silence, as the rules of dopeness dictated he had to—I'm hip hop like Willie Shak, with the milli mac/peelin Phillies back/battle any cat for they skelly cap/if they belly fat slash bellies/adventure with steel like Flash and Melle—Donald kicked two bars of the Furious Five song Spliff was referencing, and Equality broke into laughing applause; Latif responded with the chorus of the group's megahit “The Message” and the cat nearly lost his mind—get open like young minds before they lock shut/hip hop makes Dom from rotgut/gourmet from potluck/peace to all my peoples locked up/and all the rappers who got bucked/leavin legacies of young seeds and hot cuts—Spliff's whole vibe was different when he freestyled: face taut, hands chopping and molding the air, fingers splayed—in due time, police state gon turn rap to moonshine/replace these one-ninety-proof rhymes with weak theses/when the prohibition hits, sip my words in speakeasies/and drink up, everything the kid think up—