The Voices of Martyrs Page 15

  “They are an insult,” Kwame said.

  “It’s Indiana. It gets cold.”

  “What does that matter to us? We haven’t seen the sun in a long time.”

  “You ought to be grateful you have any clothes at all.” There was no trap in Kwame’s words, except the one the volunteer not only created but fell into himself.

  “Grateful?” Kwame turned his dark, unwavering eyes to those gathered around them, directing his comments to the volunteer without deigning to meet his eyes. “I, for one, don’t want to be part of your feelgood effort. You clean out your garages, give from your excess, and call it charity. You are emptying your refuse on us. To truly give, you have to sacrifice.”

  “That’s enough, Kwame,” N’Kya whispered, though her tone carried the threat of thunder. “What do you want?”

  “More of the tribe have found us. We have need of your people’s services. Of you.”

  “To brand our people.”

  “To set us apart.”

  “Aren’t we set enough apart?” N’Kya asked.

  “This is not who we were meant to be.” Kwame held up the volunteer’s grandmother’s sweater, then tossed it in front of the wheel of N’Kya’s chair. The sweater crumpled on the floor, bear side down. “We must find our own place here. We must find our own way.”

  Kwame’s words touched a chord in the volunteer. Thinking back, he couldn’t remember the last time anyone or anything stirred his heart.

  “Come with us. You do not belong here.”

  The volunteer hoped Kwame had been talking to him.

  “We are of the tribe,” N’Kya said.

  “I am Asantehene of our people. I trace my line back to Okomfo Anokey himself. I need a Mamponghene. Come with me.”

  “And you wish me to play second to your first? I belong with my people, sweetie.” N’Kya wheeled away from him. “I’ll need time. And measurements.”

  Kwame turned up his nose. Waving his fingers, the woman in the cocktail dress produced a piece of paper. “Find us when you’re ready.”

  §

  The story of the immigrants were all too similar. One way or another the story was always about one story moving against another. When stories clashed, one had to be eliminated. That was the story of people. The government moved against the people. The military needed to take over a land or another resource because people only had limited value as a resource. The authorities burned down villages, separated families, forced them into labor or battle or sex. Men, women, children faced elimination so they ran away, ran away, ran away. Hiding and going, resting and going, going and going, until a refugee camp became home. Over and over the same story with different details.

  Indiana was one of the top settlement states. Who wouldn’t settle for Indiana over extermination? And it had corn. And room for different ethnic groups, even from the same people. And churches on nearly every corner. A church for everyone.

  “Kwame and his … followers. They are different from the others,” he said. “You’ll have to forgive Kwame. He’s gruff, but that’s his way. He is the shepherd of our people,” N’Kya said. The others look to her for guidance. Yet they also fear her. Maybe more than they did Kwame. Perhaps they had never heard her say her name. Their people had been lost, scared, and the future was a great unknown that yawned into the horizon and threatened to swallow them whole. N’Kya brought them back from the brink and gave them purpose. A circle of women sheared fabric into patterns. Another group hunched over sewing machines, delighting in the thrum of the stitch. In their work, they found self-confidence and worth. They found personhood. Freedom. A look of longing filled the volunteer’s eyes. “We rarely mingle with outsiders.”

  “You have no choice now.” The words sounded like a puffed-up chest.

  “You are so presumptuous, sweetie.”

  “I don’t mean to be.”

  “Americans rarely do. You believe your ways to be superior to everyone else’s. After all, the world turns to you for help, never the other way around.”

  There was another trap in her words. He wished he were smarter, more handsome, so that she could see him. He handed her a lunch tray. “The corn is fresh.”

  “We have our ways, our traditions, our stories. We’re still a people. With history. And secrets.” She turned up her nose at the food, then seemed to chide herself for seeming ungrateful for the gesture.

  “Tell me a secret,” he said.

  “I thought people would welcome us, maybe have some tea with us.”

  “I like tea.” He didn’t, but it was a good lie.

  She smiled. “You have a rare gift with the fabric. You have the eye, the heart, for the craft. And people. I could use your help.”

  “Anything.”

  “You should understand the cost before you choose, honey. I go through a lot of helpers.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Then let me have your hands.”

  §

  The news reported that a jogger went missing at Eagle Creek Park. A pretty girl, Elementary Education major. When she started her run that evening, she probably never suspected that she would end up as prey. She was the kind of college girl who would have stared past him as if he weren’t even there. He wasn’t mad. He knew that he was ordinary, and commonplace things were easily ignored. Every man.

  §

  He and N’Kya found a secluded workroom down the hall and around several corners from the sanctuary of The Underground. He wasn’t too certain the hallway actually connected to the room and hoped they’d be able to find their way back.

  Craning his head back as if caught up in a moment of writhing ecstasy, he presented his neck. He counted the cost. Closing his eyes, all he could picture was a cat revealing its belly so that it could be pet. A most delicate undertaking. A declaration of complete and utter vulnerability. So exposed, someone could do untold damage: tear though muscle and trachea; leave him gasping for breath, wet and throttled.

  The body that was broken for us.

  His decision. It wasn’t much of a decision. No one would remember his displaced life. He would disappear into the night and be unremembered. All that he was, all the mistakes he made, would be gone. Like moving to a new land. He wasn’t going to get any older, and that thought made him sad.

  He entrusted himself to N’Kya. The neck was a thick muscle, its veins throbbed against her hungry mouth. To have her tongue lap along the corded vessels of his throat like an antiseptic swab before an injection. To know both pain and delight in one piercing. Her hands—wrinkled though rough-hewn, like tree bark—scraped against the other side of his face. Her canine teeth were so pointed, he expected her to lisp when she spoke again. But she didn’t speak again. She ran her teeth along the thickness of his neck. Images flickered through his mind as his life drained. The last bits of an umbilical cord falling brittle and black. The plucked eye of a doll, its vacant gaze staring like black buttons. A backseat copulation, awkward and hurried, with the attendant spill of a virgin’s blood. The smoke of a crack pipe smoldering, like the remaining embers of hope.

  Baptized in the sweat of the suffering, they were joined: conceptual artist and the performance. He’d never felt anything so wondrous. Like a blissful, unscratched itch.

  The blood that was shed for us.

  He was chosen, and he accepted.

  A drop of crimson daubed his collar.

  §

  N’Kya hovered over him, always busy in that mysterious way cats were. He hunched over the bench under the column of light provided by the dim bulb dangling from the overhead fixture. A spider skittered across the pile of fabric. With a casual flick, he knocked it to the ground. He had nothing against spiders, but he knew N’Kya was terrified of them. Everyone was afraid of something. Still, he apologized to it before he reduced it to a black smear on the carpet.

  “Tell me a secret.” He rubbed his feet. The bones slowly ground into one another as the flesh tightened and morphed. He assumed it would be ove
r when he first transformed. But not being of the tribe, the transformation took days. He concentrated on the boots he would have to make for himself.

  “In our land, there are many people. The Ewe fear the creature known as the adze. They come to you as a firefly. In its ‘human’ form, it has a hunched back, sharp talons, and jet black skin. In an instant, it can kill you then drain you of your blood, then devour your heart and liver.”

  “Does your tribe fear anything?” he asked.

  “We have our own night monsters. And we bring them with us, for where the village goes, so goes our nightmares.”

  “What do they call their monsters?”

  “The sasabonsam.” N’Kya touched his hand. “It’s time.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Some are hunters. Others are caretakers. In the end, all gifts serve the tribe. Open your mind, sweetie. You have to prepare yourself for the task to come. Consider this the communion of the creator.”

  “When do I start?”

  “When the cloth speaks to you.”

  He had never been good with his hands before. Once, he labored with the act of folding paper to make an airplane for nearly an hour to get the folds correct. But when he described a pattern, the look of it, the interplay of fabrics, her words brought his hands to life.

  He thought of his father’s skin, having persevered, ready to be sloughed off before death, ready to be flensed from his bones.

  §

  Indianapolis was a crazy quilt of old and new, concrete and green. The concrete and metal spires of downtown gave way to dozens of incorporated concerns and communities which made up the city. On the northeast side of town, with its fashion malls and congested traffic, Allisonville had been swallowed up leaving only Allisonville Road to remember it by. On the west side, Speedway—home of the Indianapolis 500—was its own city within the city. A preserve for a people who were about their cars. On the northwest side was Eagle Creek Park. A nature preserve of 3,900 acres of land surrounding 1,400 acres of an eponymous reservoir.

  “It was a perfect place to hunt,” N’Kya said, when the fourth person went missing over there. “You must deliver the package there. Tell them you are ready to serve.”

  At night only an honor box attended the gate of the park. Few came at night fearing the predators within the woods. People were lost in Eagle Creek Park all the time. He believed the trees moved. Waiting beneath a stand of trees, the glow of the moon marked him. It whispered lonely things to him. He made it a point to ignore the moon. It was prone to lie. Night congealed, thick shadows surrounded him.

  Flanked by two other men, Kwame glared at him. He wore a double-breasted purple silk suit with a notched collar. The two men each wore single-breasted suits: one, a burgundy velvet suit with the same angled flap pockets and a shawl collar; the other, a red one with a notched collar under a bow tie. Their pants were wide in the leg, giving room to their black boots. Kwame snatched the package of new outfits from the volunteer. His mouth unfurled into a terrible grin. His teeth glistened, thick iron bands worked by his bulging jaw.

  Some friends mentioned that he tended to observe the people around him rather than interact with them. A writer’s posture. He couldn’t remember his friends’ names. N’Kya and Kwame were different kinds of old things. Tested and true, she endured. She persevered. She was holy. All personality, Kwame was a character. Not to be confused with having character. He was a long, beautiful hallway that went nowhere.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  “You mean, what are you now?” Kwame said. “The Sasabonsam. We endure. We persevere. We thrive. New shores. Old ways.”

  Kwame gestured to the surrounding trees. Three shadows in the trees undulated under the play of moonlight. Their forms, a cross between a woman’s and a bat’s. Short arms scratched at the night. They ringed the space, their wings unfurled like rooms of cloth spanning twenty feet. Mewling in chorus, their cries were wet and needy. “And we hunger.”

  “My place is to serve.”

  “By N’Kya’s side?”

  The volunteer nodded. Kwame cocked his head to the side as if giving serious thought to an ancient song. He appeared to be somewhat remorseful. Sad. He’s not especially good at it. He nodded to the man in the red suit. The air whistled as he leapt into the air, disappearing into the gloom of night. After a few moments, the man’s boots landed beside the volunteer. Hands snaked about him, and he was drawn into the air. The man in the red suit hung down like an empty sleeve and hoisted him until his inverted face met Kwame’s. He dangled as if he were a boneless cat toy, but his struggles ceased when he saw the man clutched to the overhanging branch by the hooks that formed his feet. Kwame licked him with his sharkskin tongue.

  “I have loved her for an eternity. But she has only ever looked at me with pity. She said that I’m not ready. So, I will love her for an eternity more. Or not. And our tribes will end one another.”

  “What will happen to me?” the volunteer asked.

  “She has chosen you over me. You will pass out of one story into the next,” Kwame said. “You have been set apart. And with us you have haven.”

  That didn’t sound too bad. It had been too long since he called a place home.

  Futures

  The Electric Spanking of the War Babies

  (with Kyle S. Johnson)

  Everything was inextricably tethered to the box in George’s closet. He stood on his tiptoes and let his fingers find the familiar edge of the old shoe box on the top shelf in his closet. He pulled it down carefully and carried it over to the bed where he laid it with quiet reverence. Though it had become a weekly routine, George never lost sight of how important the ceremony of dressing was to him. Clothes made the man.

  After a moment of silence, he popped open the lid and withdrew his most prized possessions: his well-worn-yet-still-fresh pair of robin’s egg blue quad skates adorned with rhinestones in geomantic formations. They were his talisman. His key.

  A Dr. J poster hung next to one of his namesake, George “The Iceman” Gervin, behind him. They were his childhood heroes. He had grown up wanting to ball just like them. The ritual, however, felt every bit as if he was turning his back on childish things. He was ready. His two-toned blue bell bottoms hugged him tight in all the right places. His sideburns trailed down to his chin. He tucked a pick into his sculpted Afro, leaving only the raised fist that was its handle visible. All that remained were his shoes. He slid the first one on, the familiar wave swept down over him. Before he lost himself, he paused and shouted toward the crack in his bedroom door.

  “Going out for a while, momma.”

  From behind a curtain of beads that separated the rooms down the hall came a muffled cough and then her voice, weak and half-asleep. “Oh, is it Thursday already? Where has this week gone?”

  “Yeah, it’s that time again.”

  “Be careful, baby. The war is almost here,” she whispered.

  “What you say, momma?”

  “You have fun now, okay? Don’t be out too late.”

  “Sure thing, momma.” George tried to ignore how tired she sounded. She’d been hustling all day to feed his brother and sisters. He couldn’t help but think they’d be better off with one less mouth around. George returned his attention to the second skate, sliding it on easily. Pulling the laces tight, he rose to his feet. The energy coursed through him. He felt blue electricity. He felt alive. He felt free. Looking himself over in the mirror, George tugged the wide collar of his polyester shirt and watched himself disappear into the person he became every Thursday night. He was no longer George Collins. The transformation was complete. He was Shakes Humphries, the baddest mofo on eight wheels.

  §

  The Sugar Shack was an oasis in the riot-torn city. No matter how angry folks got, burning buildings and tearing up their own stuff, they left the Sugar Shack alone. It was sacred ground, but it wasn’t a place for heroes. Everything was so dark and gritty in those days, one long shadow dri
fting into an endless night.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, a broken world filled with broken people who reveled in their brokenness. A world populated by anti-heroes, misunderstood villains, and heroes with feet, legs, and torsos of clay, where those who stood tallest fell first. Part of him remembered an echo of how things used to be, of a time where men and women were proud and bold, which confused him because this was all he ever knew. He put it down to a childhood dream, to something he’d read in a comic or seen on the television in his youth. Something he’d lost himself in, lying on his belly in the living room, while momma was at revival meeting.

  The street lights burned to life on either side of the street, guiding Shakes in like the open arms of a neon goddess. A few kids ran past him trying to make it home or risk getting the switch for being caught out too late. Though rough, the neighborhood was home. Whether he was George or Shakes, he stood as tall as the world would allow, had always done everything he could to help out his little brothers and sisters. He felt like the ’hood thanked him in its own way by keeping his momma and him safe. But from the moment his skates touched the asphalt, he knew he was being watched. He scanned the shadows, anxious but not wanting to betray his cool. Whatever stalked him waited.

  “They’re spying on us.” A man knocked over a trash can in the alley. “With their satellites and drones and eyes in the sky. We can’t hide from them.” Don’t look up. “That’s how they capture your face and run off with it to another world.” The man stumbled toward him. “Can I get a dollar, youngblood?”

  “What for?” Shakes knew his answer from the booze on the man’s breath.

  “Information about the revolution isn’t free. No one believes me, though. No one ever believes me. Belief is the key.”

  “Don’t look up. Got it.” Shakes handed the man a dollar. The old drunk stuffed it into his pocket and offered daps, an appreciative smile, and a slurred “Good looking out.”

  Shakes accepted his offerings. “Stay strong, brother.”