NATE
by Stokley Barlow
The sun rises on a southern morning and long shadows appear suddenly in the places where dark, humid dawn rested. Dawn flees quickly before the king of the south sending the shadows edging for cover. But it is the time of year that no shadow crosses main street. The recessed doorway of the laundromat brightens with the ebb of night. The bricks warm. Steam from the storm gutter vanishes and with it the heavy, nauseating smells of the filth that, like human history, accumulates with the years. Heavy black lids roll up enough to reveal old, yellow orbs tinged with the redness of sleep, age and blues. Under half-lids they behold the giver-of-life and chaser-of-blues rise above the tree tops on the hill opposite Old Town where main street climbs out of Asylum Creek. Nate stirs in his doorway boudoir. A low rumble in his throat begins as a tune and turns into a cough, a hack, a spit.
"Sittin' in the morning' sun," comes out in a soft but scratchy basso profundo. "I'll be sittin' when the evenin' comes," Nate sings. He has paid his dues, so he sings. What began in Baptist churches of 1940's New Orleans and peaked in 1950's Chicago clubs had tumbled back to 1960's hometown washateria and gas station.
"Watchin' the tide roll in . . ." His voice booms. It has a soothing power. It is equivalent to that which rumbles through the heavens in a distant summer storm, or imagine Saint Peter at the gate, a voice of commanding musical authority, the under girding rock of the heavenly choir. ". . . an’ I watch it roll away again."
But Nate looks nothing the part of an angel. The patchy, black and gray stubble on the carbon black, droopy skin of his neck and chin appears permanently fixed at its present length for rarely is it ever seen shaven or any longer or less patchy. His eyes bulge through the overly weighty lids. The muscles of those ponderous eyelids have nearly conceded the battle with gravity. Not even laughter can raise them to full staff. A fine, thin upper lip could be a model for a master sculptor or painter but for the distraction of a protruding, mismatched lower lip that should belong to a man four times Nate's size.
The superstitious think Nate touched, which could mean any of a number of things. Indeed, there are those that say Nate looks as if he had crawled up from the lowest pit of hell. They say the devil has used him up completely. There is nothing left to torment. No sin to sin. Nothing. No bad, no good. And that's why people tolerate him, or rather pity him. There is good in him though. There is that good voice. A voice that can still be heard on older gospel and jazz labels. It is a voice without a name, though, because one will not find Nate's name anywhere on the jacket covers.
Nate stirs to break the arthritic ice that settled into his shoulders and back during the damp night. He thinks the pain will drive him to seek night's repose at his sister's home, at least until drier weather comes. But dry air is a rarity deep in Louisiana, and Nate sleeps wherever his body gives out, be it at his sister's, or with an old uncle who still loves him, at Mallory's Garage, or a doorway and a sidewalk.
The song ends as a twinge in his hip draws his breath up short. Leaning against the wall, halfway to his feet, the dull grit of old brick eats through the thin threads of his Dickies. It grinds deep into his soul and brings a damn from that bottomless pit of a bass. He feels the pain of a life lived too fast, of rash decisions made in ignorance, of the slavery of the soul when one man cheats another.
The sun is warmer. Nate steps into its rays to drive off the morning chill. Lawson Greeves will be along any minute to open the washateria. Nate sweeps it every morning.
A companion of the previous evening has left an empty friend on the window ledge in front of the cracked and bolted plate window flanking the washateria doorway. Nate removes it from its crinkled paper sack and notes that his companion has cheap taste in whiskey.
A green and white Chevy truck passes and honks. "Get up, truck!" Nate laughs and waves the empty bottle at young Jim Knight headed for work at Mallory's. That's right, he thinks, they think I'm just a drunk nigga. He slams the bottle into an empty fifty-five-gallon oil drum, the repository for used up laundromat paraphernalia. He is angry for only a second, and then he smiles. "A distant moanin' of a train seems to play a sad refrain . . . to the night." There is solace in the song. Contrary to appearances, Nate hasn't been drunk in years. His disease is just one more cheat.
The laundromat chores are finished, and Nate heads for Mallory's Garage. The sun is higher, brighter and hotter. A pair of dark shades soothe his sensitive eyes. Nate does not walk when he travels; instead he slinks along in a kind of doowop shuffle.
The small population of Old Town is trickling to life. "Hey, Mr. Samuel," Nate yells in a high hoarseness across the street to the elderly man unlocking the town hall. The pressed khakis and white hair under the Coors cap waves.
The low hum in Nate's throat becomes a string of words telling a Motown ballad of a last train to Georgia. "I'd rather live in . . . ." He jumps back to the curb from the side street he was starting to cross. "Shit!" he says, smiling, before a little electric motor reels down the driver's window on the white Olds pulling up to the curb.
"Rock of ages, brother deacon," Nate says to the man in the Olds.
"Missed you in church yesterday, brother Nate." Deacon Dunn has a voice to match his lean frailness. Nate counts the wrinkles on the deacon's bald, brown forehead and wonders if, like the old wives' tale about the number of rattles on a snake's tail, they tell his age.
"Was out'a town, brother deacon. Got back late." Which is no lie considering the creek on the west side of town is out of town and he was there cat fishing. Nate grew up around men like Deacon Dunn. Was well on the way to becoming like him until a sort of fame touched his soul.
"Need a ride, brother Nate?"
"No, brother deacon. Just goin' up the street to Mallory's." Men like Deacon Dunn now make Nate nervous. He wishes the world had evolved without men like Deacon Dunn. But for all his pain and suffering, Nate's fear of death vastly outweighs his fear of living. He hates men like Deacon Dunn because they are fear mongers. He had walked within that circle once and knew their power, and it is power.
"No problem for me to drop you by there, brother Nate."
"Oh no, brother deacon. Not unless," he pulls his shirt cuff over the heel of his hand and wipes bird doo off the Olds' fender, "you thinks she needs a wash job. No need to go out'a your way."
The deacon's expression grows grim. "Another day, brother Nate." The little electric motor jacks the window up on the deacon's air-conditioned condition. Nate is smiling. Bird doo! He laughs and the deacon drives away.
Mallory's gas station and garage is an old, but well maintained building. In 1929, it and Nate were both brand new. However, after forty-two years, it with its white stucco walls, double plate windows surrounding twelve-pane, double wood doors with swing-set green trim has aged more gracefully than Nate.
"Looking rough this mornin', Nate," the middle-aged garage owner tells him from the open doors. Nate thinks Mike Mallory is solid and square, not only in build of body, but also in intellect of mind, in a word, dense throughout. A practical white man living his daddy's dream and thinking that it is his. "Must have been out late."
"I was wid my girl friend, Mr. Mike."
"Did she have a long thin neck, wide bottom and have Gallo printed across her middle?"
"Tha's her!" Nate's snicker is as stale as the joke.
"Dave Samuel left you a tractor tire this morning."
"I'm on it wid bot' feet." Nate passes through the front showroom that showed off its last new model Dodge in 1959, and is now filled with racks of new tires, goes through the mechanic's bay and out the bay doors. Against the outside wall he finds a synthetic rubber monster, as tall as he is, with a round steel core. "Flat as a flitter," he says.
"Georgia, . . . Georgia," . . . "Hey, Jim!" he calls, "Jimmy boy!"
"What?" comes the reply from some dark recess of the inner sanctum of automotive worship.
"Help me roll this tire around to get the water out."
Silence. Then, the irate sound of an empty metal can bouncing off a concrete floor tells Nate that Jim Knight has dropped what he is doing to come help.
"Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind . . ."
"What'cha want, Nate?" the seventeen-year-old with sandy-brown hair asks as he comes through the bay doors.
"Just want to roll her around so's the stem is down."
Together they hug the monster's sides, and with grunt and strain, walk it slowly away from the wall, roll it half a turn, then walk it back to the wall. Nate is winded in the struggle. For a moment he sees a flicker of concern in Jim's face.
"Feeling bad, Nate?"
"Old age, Jimbo. Old age. Tha's all."
"Nate."
"Yeah?"
"Uh, . . . holler when you get ready to break it down, and I'll give you a hand."
"Sure will, Jimmy. Sure will." Nate likes Jim Knight, but resents his condescendence. Jim is respectful and polite, more so than what most feel toward Nate. He credits Lyman and Mary Knight for instilling such manners into their son. They had been children of the Depression, also, and like Nate, were raised up with a fear of the consequences of ill manners. Nate understands that Jim feels only his father's concern for a fellow human being and none of his own. He understands, also, that Jim realizes it not. Jim only knows segregated, middle-class white, while the soul of good white trash is unknown to him.
Jim is a child, Nate knows, and has not lived long enough to make the kind of mistakes that teaches one about one's self; and about others. Nate knows about mistakes, and Nate has learned a lot about Nate. Yes, he thinks, life can be one long mistake after another.
Like the one he is making now. He thinks he removed he valve core from the tire stem, and is pressuring up the monster to pressure out the water that gives the big, airy thing more weight; airing it up so the water will quickly flow out the hollow valve stem that isn't hollow because Nate forgot to remove the valve core. And he's watching the faulty automatic gauge on the air hose, thinking the tube must be ripped because the pressure is not coming up.
"Just and old sweet song . . . ."
The exploding monster is heard from the elementary school four blocks away. Members of the volunteer fire department in the vicinity instinctively converge on the fire station next to the washateria. Mike, Jim, the mechanic, and a customer wrestle with the monster covering Nate. When the monster's airy innards gushed out its back side they knocked boards out of the wall and propelled its iron skeleton onto Nate.
Nate can not move. His insides feel like jelly. There was an old sweet song and now there is a pointed rock boring a hole into the back of his skull. "Don't pull the rock out or my brains will come out!" There is no breath to sound the words. No one hears him.
"God! Nate!"
"Damn! This thing's heavy!"
The red wall in front of Nate's eyes slowly vanishes and he sees blood dripping from the mechanic's forehead. A fifth pair of hands appear. Slowly the devouring monster is brought to heel and lifted from Nate. Nate hears voices, but can't distinguish between them.
"Call the rescue unit, Jim!" . . . "Nate?" . . . "Nate?"
"Is he still breathing?"
"Don't! Let's not move him."
"Damn it! Is he breathing?"
Pause. Someone checks. The red wall appears before Nate's wide-open eyes. Black cracks form in the wall, zigzagging and widening.
"No, he's not! He's going . . . " The black cracks cover the red wall leaving Nate with no sense of time or reality. Nothingness.
#
His eyes can focus now, forcing the blackness to recede into many small holes in a white background. A face intrudes between his and the ceiling, a young female face, black, with a shapely body in a white uniform. She says something about visitors in the room.
"Crank me up, sister."
"Better not," the nurse says. "Here." She tries to fluff his pillow to raise his head and shoulders a little. There is fire in his side as she does so. Nate barely remembers a doctor with a gray beard telling him, "Two broken ribs, but no internal injuries, . . . very lucky man."
Over the horizon of the bed's footboard the faces of his sister and aged uncle come into view. "Nate, you gave us a scare." There is love as well as scolding in his sister's voice.
Hell, he wants to say, you don't know what scared is, but he does not say it.
The nurse leaves. Mike Mallory enters a minute later. "You gonna live, Nate?" Mallory asks.
"Take mor'n a tire to do me in, Mr. Mike." No, no quick death for me. How unfortunate, he thinks. He will live, live to die the slow death of living every day; that gnawing, eating, insanity-driving death that enters a man's soul when he realizes that his youth has ended and the better part of his life is over.
Deacon Dunn shows up for another of many last rites he has and will serve to Nate as the slow death takes him. The chitchat is killing him. The small conversations of the room murder Nate. But he smiles sarcastically and his sarcasm is not perceived by the others who cling desperately to the life thrust upon him. His shades are on the night stand. He puts them on. He rocks his head gently on the hard, hospital pillow, still smiling, even through the pain it causes. A rumble in weak lungs comes out soft, quiet and shaky, but still deep with his soul's power. "Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind, . . . Georgia on my mind . . ."
Once again Nate has a captive audience.
END