“Banes, is it true that these slouching people are all your children? Is that an exaggeration—perhaps it accounts for some of your misplaced sympathy? An inquiring mind must know!”
-Barrister Moreno
So did the younger and more intelligent of these two men discuss the charms of a certain lady of coco complexion as she emerged from the pool behind the fey of the two. Banes could hear the copious water pouring off the barely bathing-suited body behind him as his host looked over his shoulder askance, his eyes raised high, “Eesh, I like curves as much as the next man. But gallons of vertical retention—please, take her with you. I saw the way you and Mike looked at my mother’s nurse. I hired her specifically because I could not imagine fucking her unless I put her on the treadmill for a few months. You and Mike are animals—what is it?”
The older wan fellow began to answer. Then the young lady trying out for Mrs. Mareno’s strip club, which her husband was kind enough to manage, erased the emergent thought in the shanty mind with a hand on his shoulder, “Hey, Missah Jimmy, how you today?”
“Oh, well, Darlin’. You?”
“Juz workin’ on mah tan,” and off the woman walked to the dressing room, assured of an audience.
“Banes, this is unconscionable. I never thought I’d be ordering pizza for strippers! What ever happened to Lean Cuisine?”
The wizened little leprechaun drawled, “It’s all about da carpetbag, sir. I miss my old bike.”
“Really, its true. You weren’t making that up to impress O’Connell? The barmaid was terrified, you know.”
“I can’t make stuff up, man—I’m in lack of the imagination. I juzz recall more than most of our past, to the point of mismanaging my own present.”
“How, so,” quizzed, Moreno as the sound of blue grass cut in from the side stage, under the back patio canopy where the girls tried out. His eyes then squinted, “She’s dancing to that?”
Banes squinted with old tired eyes now over Moreno’s shoulder, hummed in approval, grinned and repaired within his mind’s eyes, leaning back in the patio chair and seeing somehow the past in the sky above. His voice drawled a languid slurry of marginally discernible gutter English up into the cool breeze, “Why I rented that room on White Avenue, oways kept the plastic pumpkin on the porch and the door wide open—‘cept the screen; thought they’d know, trusted to the equatorial instincts…”
…
2017
The garage had long ago held a car. Decades gone those days were. The rolling door of the free-standing block building was barely visible behind the screen of weeds that grew up in the cracks of the concrete driveway. The shattered concrete itself competed with the fallen peels of white lead paint to pave this horizontal memory of a place where a working man once parked his four door, family sedan, complete with door-handle ashtray, with lids, for he and his wife to daub the ashen end and snuff the butts of their cigarettes on the way to church.
Those folks were long gone from White Avenue. On guilt wings of subsidy the dark tide, up from the urban depths, outward swept. Across the street was mansion occupied by a government administrator. To the right of that was a hospice for crippled men. To the left was the house of the woman who kept her boyfriend crackhead in the basement, who only beat her when she failed to buy his dope. To the left of that was the large yellow house on the corner of Sefton, where seven youthful male parolees lived.
On the north side of the street, next to the garage, was the vacant house where the homeless men shat in the back yard on their way not home. To the right of the grand house of the beckoning plastic pumpkin, was another vacant, the white one that the absentee owner worked on in hopes of renting it to the kind of demi-scum that lived in the House of the Plastic Pumpkin. There Kat the cat, who lived in the House of the Plastic Pumpkin did hunt rats, casting them like a curse into the gutter, warning all not to trespass. Kat understood the nature of the strange man that lived in the attic loft and repaired to the garage each and every Sunday when the owner, the arrogant karate master, drove the only vehicle owned or operated by any of the five denizens of that old orchard house to Saint Dominic’s Church.
Then, as the two boys who scoured the back yards of this neighborhood did note, the evil, leprechaun cracker, would emerge from the back basement, through that covered cracker cave where the carny lived, with whom the evil cracker shared coffee. That wily old crumb would then skulk about the yard, pretending to weed and such, get to the old garage, roll up the door, then enter. As he entered one could see a bicycle, an old time bicycle like no college faɡɡot would ride, no hoodrat would covet for a messenger ride, and that this old cracker so weirdly hid. The boys observed this from under the porch of the guilty government man who let his wife cook them breakfast while they cased what the lesser crackers had for the heisting. There weren’t many white folks what had shit left in these hoods, so one had to go find it.
These two worthy fellows, were, of course, named by their husbandless mothers with close creative attention to the English language: Tyreece and Tyreese, or, as they called each other “C & S.” C came three letters before S in the alphabet, just as C had been born three days before S, with both of their mothers claiming the same father, “Big Ty” for Tyrone. So, despite their mothers hating each other and regularly throwing hands, C & S enjoyed a rare bond of brotherhood among their less fortunate fellows.
When that garage door did shut, weird lights could be see playing in the dark cracks of the door frame, lights that whispered more of wonders than of light to eat by. Finally, on Sunday, December 10, 2017, the old cracker began making his way to the garage after his landlord in the green pick-up pulled off. It was icy, and he fell, returning inside with a limp. No little hoodling in his right mind would approach such a haunted cracker jack box by night. And, the old crumb would stay with his weird old man bike in the garage until the man in the green truck was almost home.
Finally, after a year of Sunday mornings, it was on! C said to S, “Come on, yo!” and they rushed across the street and down the drive. Opening the garage door, C looked in and said to S, “Yo, look, a bag on da handlebars like it made of ole carpet?”
“Yo,” said S, “Dat shid look gay!”
Looking around, the boys noted that there was no light switch and that many antique things were on the walls, lady dresses, swords, a gun, tools, all really old shit, the guns almost looking like railing banisters or fancy lady pepper grinders.
“You think its magic, S?” asked C.
“I bet, but not in the light—that an old cracker ghost bike!”
“Okay, yo, me first,” said C.
“Nigga whad?” asked S.
“Just like da ole cracka do. You shut da door en I’ll mount up. Open it when da lights stop so as I don’t get burned.”
S was scandalized and worried, and superstitious, “So you gotz it all figured out? Like Ole Ty busted all da brain nut up into yo mamma?”
“Exactly!” exalted C.
“Okay—gotchyu in foaty-five,” resigned S.
…
S shut the door and heard C cheer, “Hells yes,” and a bike bell rang. The lights played in the cracks, blue, red, white, and he would swear, gray, if gay could be a light, and were gone. S walked away from the door and skulked around, pretending to weed, like the old crumb. Eventually, in 45 minutes, even 50, there was no sound, no light.
S opened the door and there was no bike!
Then the old crumb came a limping around, put his hands on his head, and shook that blue-eyed leprechaun spud, walked over with a tear in his eye, grabbed the door handle, looked at S and drawled, “Sorry ‘bout yet friend—s’pose you’ll miss him like I’ll miss my bike. Best go, Sensie’s almost home.”
The Old Crumb nor C was ever seen again.
…
Back at the pool, with Sinday-Dee hugging Missah Jimmy, Mister Moreno was aghast, “You mean that little hoodrat stole your bike? Your time machine yo used to go back and inseminate slave bitches?”
“It was the carpet bag, really, that mattered. Permitted me to visit old Tobias Stansbury’s Plantation every Sunday, when the master was at church. I’m afraid old Ben Prod, the Overseer put C to the whipping post and…”
The large woman, seemingly carved of coffee beans, rubbed those old weary shoulders and their owner drawled, “Mister Moreno, thanks for throwing me the life line, and apologies for any distortion of aesthetic scale.”
“You’re hired, Baby,” declared the overworked night club manager. “If you will excuse me—I must go watch Xanadu and Saturday Night Fever.”
