The Kind Earth

When the train pulled into Lassador at Union Station it is around two in the morning, and coming out onto the platform, arriving in the fluorescent lit station, it had been a long time since either one of them had taken a train into the city and Jay was fascinated by the wide space of the station lobby, the high rounded ceiling, though he thought it was a shame that all the vendors were closed.

“We should have come earlier.”

Michael looked around suspiciously. He thought that Jay was a little too open eyed about things. Weren’t Black people supposed ot be careful or cagey about shit like this? Street smart? Hands in his pockets, walking casually, Michael looked around at the homeless people in their sleeping bags and on benches or on the great circular seats around the potted plants in the middle of the station. He wasn’t afraid of them, because they were asleep, and he wasn’t afraid of the dirty and the crazed milling about, talking to themselves, but he feared that where they could be seen there was also, in the shadows, the guy with the knife who might be here at this time of night. Michael, like the few other people who had gotten off the train in Lassador, was moving as quickly as he could toward one ot the main doors. Jay, though he looked about, eyes wide open, did not slow him down. On his way through the great glass doors into the night, Michael looked back and felt a little sorry for the people who had to stay in the station waiting for another train. He had had his doubts about parking downtown, but was glad that they had.

“We could take the bus back home,” he had suggested to Jay when they left town for their brief trip.

“When’s the last time you took the bus?” Jay asked him, raising the eyebrow which reminded Michael that, while Jay might seem to take life easy and pay little attention to things, he was no stranger to the ways of the city.

“We’d have to catch at least two different buses to get back to the North,” Jay said, “and for some reason half the buses stop running after five o clock anyway.”

“Or a cab—”

“A cab from the station to our home would cost as much as a train ticket back to Indiana and really, I’m, not sure we could easily find one downtown anyway.”

Michael squeezed his keys and the car merrily whooped at him. They trod across the parking lot, walking a little slow, tempting muggers to come out, insisting in their stride that they were unafraid. To their right was the abandoned Radisson Hotel, and ahead of them was Birmingham Street with its little diner and the brick façade of the old newspaper building complex.

They climbed in the car, and Michael looked around, then pulled out and headed toward the gate while Jay appreciated the arched roof of the old station and the many sub buildings coming off of it like spider legs in the night. The car turned and they headed onto Birmingham, driving through the night downtown and heading toward Dorr Street and the expanse of the Dorr Street bridge that would take them over black water into the north and, eventually, home.

He wished it was day so he could have seen downtown better instead of what he had seen which was an impression of tall buildings beside tallish buildings, the occasional fountain, a viaduct or two they passed under and all too many people wandering around in rags or sleeping in the streets. As they passed Priory Street they saw a burning sofa in the midst of rawboned people, and Jay repressed the urge to tell Michael to stop so they could observe a little better. Before they reached the intersection of Dorr and Birmingham where Birmingham would become more residential and give way to old apartment buildings, they passed the abandoned Castile Theatre and, camped out in front of it like people who were lining up to buy tickets when it would never open again, were the blue tents that marked the homeless.

Was it a relief to cross the river and come to nicer areas with townhouses and restaurants overlooking the river, and the quaint old shops of Old Town? Yes. And then here was Saint Ignatius, their old high school, next the Presbyterian church that looked like a courthouse. Now they were passing Burnett’s Grocery Store, and now the carillon of the main building for the University. A few minutes later they were driving through Orchard Slope and then past Ontario Hills, and by the time they were in Carlisle, it was almost impossible to believe in downtown. Living in the Carlisle District, which had its strip malls and its own shops, and which was twenty minutes from Rawlston, twenty five minutes from Ballard and fifteen from Jacinth, you never really had to bother with downtown. And, Michael thought, that was part of the problem.

When they parked outside of the apartment building, the first thing Michael said was, “We need to go back there.”

“Huh?”

“We need to go back there and actually see what that looks like. Every time we have a day away, every time we see how beautiful the world is, the reality of things intrudes. I don’t mean to be like some gloomy teenager. Life is beautiful and we are fortunate, and strong, and not strong because we made ourselves that way. I looked out the window while we drove and I saw all of these people that I could have ended up like, if I wasn’t safe, if I didn’t have things. If I wasn’t loved, if I didn’t have you.”

Michael stood outside of the car because in Carlisle you could stand outside of a car and listen to cicadas chirp in the black summer night.

That night they hear, on the repeat of the late night news that riots have broken out on Stickney.

“Rahim Martin was shot,” Jay said.

“Rahim Martin isn’t the guy from this winter?”

“No,” Jay said with a sigh. “Rahim Martin is new, and ordinarily he would have been just another Negro with a gun, but he didn’t have a gun, and it was a white cop who did it. I thought things would have calmed down. But… no.”

Jay saw someone run out into the street and hurtle a smoking canister at, yes, a small crowd of white people with bats and some with… guns.

“Part of me hopes it doesn’t calm down,” Jay said. “I hope it gets louder and louder.”

Michael remembered coming back into town after Christmas, the swastika painted under the viaduct that he had ignored as a fluke rather than an ensign.

He confessed, “I thought we more or less didn’t have that problem here.”

Jay had thought the far west end was universally trashy regardless of color. He couldn’t imagine most of the white people who lived there turning against their black neighbors.

“Glendale, though,” Michael said.

“Never been to Glendale.”

“Almost the country. Almost the clan. Pretty resentful about being compared to white trash and ghetto people. Those good hearted white folks you see scrapping are from Glendale.”

A plump white boy who reminded Jay more of a donut than a Klansman was unlocking his gun and declaring, “I’m not gon let anyone threaten my rights or my property. I refuse to be afraid…”

“Why the fuck are we watching this,” Jay said in irritation.

“I just want to be aware of what’s going on in the world. See if there’s anything we can do.”

“I wonder,” Jay said, “is watching doing anything?”

“That is the most cheerful knock on the door I’ve ever heard,”Jay said from bed where he lay deep under the comforter while the air conditioning blew into the room.

“I bet it’s Nelson,” Michael yawned.

“Who else would it be?” Jay said. “But I’m not getting out of bed, and he should know better.”

Michael grunted and climbed from under the comforter, scratching his head, and he said, “Should I send him away?”

“Of course you shouldn’t,” Jay said as Michael was heading out of the room.

It was a few moments later that Rulon Nelson, tall, taller than Michael, thin and sturdy in shorts and tee shirt, his big feet in red sneakers, his long hands grasping a hand rolled cigarette, came into the bedroom, sat down on the bed as if Jay was not asleep, and declared, “I thought you guys would never get back.”

“Were we gone that long?”

“You were gone two weeks.”

“So we were,” Jay said, making no attempt to take his head from under the covers. “A few days back at Clouds. Some in Chicago and a daytrip to a wretched beach in Indiana.”

“The beach wasn’t wretched,” Michael said.

“True,” said Jay. “But the town was.”

Nelson stretched and Jay saw his flat stomach. As he let down his arms, his tee shirt fell over his belly again.

“I didn’t get back from the plant until about five this morning. I saw your car in the driveway and I thought: I’ll let them get some sleep and come over when I wake up.”

“And then you just decided to come over at…. What time is it?”

“Um…” Nelson squinted. He had a flat face and tilted eyes that spoke of some distant steppe country ancestry, “almost eleven.”

Michael came back into the room, rubbing his hair and yawning and he said, “I put coffee on. Jay, do you want me to get rid of this loser?”

“Awww, no fair!” Nelson said.

“No,” Jay said. “He’s like the German Shepherd I never had. Everyone needs a frisky Nelson to leap up on their bed at eleven in the morning.”

“You know what we need to do?” Nelson began.

“I need to roll over and just let you talk while I keep sleeping,” Jay answered, doing just that.

“We need to do shrooms. Jay, is it true you still haven’t done that yet?”

Jay’s head popped out of the pillows.

“You have shrooms?”

“I do.”

Jay looked at Michael.

“I think it’s worth it,” Michael said, judiciously. “It’s not like acid. You can’t take too much. It won’t dehydrate you. You’re not going to wish the trip was over four hours before it is.”

“And cocaine!” Nelson said, excitedly, clapping his hands.

Jay raised an eyebrow.

“You have cocaine?”

“No,” Nelson said, truthfully. “But I think I can get us some. It’s not like something you’d want every day, though. Coke is more like…”

“A treat?” Michael supplied.

“Exactly,” Nelson snapped his fingers jubilantly. “A treat.”