The Last Thing That Was Mentioned

Heavy snow coming in off Lake Michigan in nasty flurries, a bitterly cold black Chicago night and his large, scarred hands were starting to freeze from holding together the battered guitar case. He scraped a sort of living as a calypso singer in the clubs on the South side in the evenings, more if the patrons were feeling generous. Which they usually weren’t, not even the brothers and sisters he hoped would have some fellow feeling for him. America had been through a depression and another world war, and what little money folks had was being gripped tight wherever you went in this land.

Need some gloves, he thought, as his fingers were beginning to go numb. This had been no land of milk and honey for him, not so far. He needed to find his feet, make a new life, get a real job. He knew it, and anyway this was his mother’s voice nagging him. He just wanted to make music and if the glory came then so be it. Everybody laugh when he told them he was leaving. They sucked their teeth and shook their heads, the older folks. The younger ones just laugh. Since coming to America there was a dream he’d kept close by like a locket, that he’d head back home to Jamaica one day just to show them all, like a returning king, guitar in hand, the palm trees singing in the breeze and the sand warming his bare feet, but the reality was now the chill piercing under his skin and crawling up his bones like claws of ice forming on the lake out there in the blackness.

There was still no sign of the bus, and the surrounding streets were echoing with emptiness. Across the road was a vacant lot, fenced off and glowing beneath the street lamps. Thick snowflakes flittered here and there in the light, then rushed off into the darkness beyond. He caught sight of a man a block away, folded over as he walked into the wind. Looking at the man walking like that seemed to make the cold cut deeper.

He stamped his feet, crisp against the snowfall, and bent to put his guitar case down. He slapped his hands together to encourage the warm blood to flow, but he still heard the gunshot. It was nearby, but he couldn’t tell where, and in this part of town it was nothing unusual. The man on the other block had stopped and was staring at him, then turned and took off at a sprint. He was a big man and could look after himself, but was surprised to feel the stirrings of fear in his bowels as the silence descended again.

 But he felt his spirits lift when the bus came into view at last, its headlamps a holy redeeming light, two haloes picking out the eddies of drifting, dancing snow. The gasp of the doors opening was like his own sigh of relief. The warmth of the bus embraced him immediately, and he slumped into a seat at the back, shivering from cold or shock or both.

The last thing that was mentioned when he was setting off from Kingston - Everybody have at least one angel, his mother said – You stay close to yours. He promised he would, and had meant it at the time. Had she seen it in his eyes as they held each other’s look on the quayside?

He hadn’t set off with much ambition blowing his sails. He wanted to get free and off the island, but it was the spirit of the drifter inside that pulled him. He had a wanderer’s heart, inherited from his mother’s restlessness. She couldn’t stay put too long before she had to walk. Anywhere. He was his mother’s son in this.

There was no romance in him. The dream of return had only come after the dispiriting cold and reality had set in. The poor and huddled masses were still poor and huddled, it seemed. And in abundance. He supposed there must be angels here, but it seemed like they were either in short supply or maybe they’d been unsettled by the same agitated spirit that kept him moving across the country, state by state.

His room was near the El. It was a poky rectangle with peeling walls, a hob and a bed that rattled with the passing trains and in the end Angel couldn’t stand it any longer. After a couple of months, once she realised he wasn’t going to do anything about it, was powerless to do anything about it, she up and left, getting another dancing job in another town he guessed. She hadn’t been in touch since and they hadn’t crossed paths in any of the clubs.  She talked about California, someplace with sunshine, beach and oranges. They had kept each other warm in the night, and he might have fallen in love with her one day, who knows, but she was no angel. Of that he was certain. An angel wouldn’t dare to yell and cuss like Angel did.

No, he had to admit, it wasn’t working out. Somehow he’d offended the Spirit and there was to be no help here.

It wasn’t until he got back to the apartment and took off his overcoat that the bullet fell to the floor. He fell to his knees, picked it up and put it on the small table by the window, then stripped naked. There had been no pain. As far as he could see there was no wound. He held his overcoat up to the lamp and a small circle of light pierced the fabric where the bullet had passed through it.

He heard the train coming, the sound gathering in the distance and then building into a rising wave that smashed past the window. The bullet shook and shivered on the table, and then the train was gone.

The slipstream followed like the passing wings of something enormous.