fiction: Amos Jasper Wright

Miscreant Populations and Their Effects on Jim Crow Methodologies of Street Paving in the Industrial South

 

Picture me now, my name is Jim Crow, as set down in this here report, in a orange yellow safety vest reflective of all lights and baggy blue jeans falling loose up around my waist, rake in hand. I am repaving your roads and streets, the highways and byways you career upon murderously. Do I write loud enough for you?

The paving crew calls me Crow because another paver’s named Jim and that’s one too many Jims per crew, Chief said. Chief said Chief’s word is law. I took the job because there was no other. Then the job became my life. Head to toe to head I am a dark road, dead end. Your dear Lord and Savior spent but forty days and nights in the desert, but I have eaten the stones all my life.

Jim alone is a plain enough name. Crow by its crowself is a fine name, but sandwich the two together on one man and you might as well have yourself a bank account fulled up with worthless confederate dollars. I was near licked within a centimeter of my life and kicked out of Alabama for a name like that. No one likes a walking reminder. Pa was the blackest jackwagon in Ensley, though I had an uncle wore Union blue every day of his life which was long and ended in a gully.

Asphalt is a slow crawling liquid, rather like boy time and life all ahead and beyond you. The roads we pave from nowhere to the middle of nowhere are not a solid or law abiding substance you can count on not to move while your back is turned. If the road was a man, I don’t doubt that it would knife me soon as he had the opportunity. But I’ve watched the asphalt hours at a time for its flux and it does flow.

Every Monday morn Sett, a grisly freak from Prichard, come to work for torment looking hangdog like he been stood up or out womaned both Friday and Saturday nights and got real extra drunk under it. Most of them probably plug ugly, barely women at all men returning from a hundred apocalyptic tours of Iraq wouldn’t take a hand job from, just gibbering mouths and legs wide enough to park a sport utility vehicle.

I am curator of a collection of female store mannequins in a weedy lot behind the house. Not what you might call a house, but four walls and a ceiling that keep nature out of my doings. Mostly a parts supply yard – an arm, a magnificent pale torso, entangled heaps of legs and a mountain of heads – the full bodies are fashioned with women’s underthings salvaged from dumpsters and the whorehouse sidewalks in East Lake. On Saturday, maybe Sett comes by, and we split a suitcase of cold ones and fire off some rounds at a female torso. Crudely arranged in positions, our harem of mannequins polaroided in blue jean cut-offs and skirts only a hardened whore would wear.

I reproduce these particulars of my privacy for the reading public so that they will know what kind of man lives among them. I am a product of your dropout factories, I’ve heard them called, but your lives ruined in comfort and air-conditioning will not amount to even a paragraph of this paper opinion piece.

God have mercy upon the fool who ever tried to separate Sett from his bottle of Wild Irish. It was a task for Sett to work through the week without murdering a crewman. Chief, who had the perpetual expression of a man adjusting himself in public, and had a drunk driving record longer than the State’s constitution, didn’t care if Sett paved the streets with gold drunk as a casino Indian long as he could lay down some asphalt, Chief’s black gold.

Paving season is in full swing. This morning I seen Sett frying his breakfast egg on the balls hot blacktop. Three for him, two for me. I think Sett learned English in the adult cinemas on first avenue east, and his cooking skills at a correctional facility in West Jefferson. Climax was impossible for Sett without Dueling Banjoes picking and twanging from a stolen stereo in a cockroach motel. I think me and Sett’s moms was spermed in one of them motels you drive by on first avenue east. I’ve paved it twice.

If a summer storm kicks up, we shelter under a big magnolia or in the cab of the dump truck where we have stashed bud light limes in a Styrofoam cooler.

Day before the day of which I speak we were on the milling crew grinding down the old roads, moon grey and alligator cracked with sun. The road upheaved and rutted, a wrinkly epidermis like an old woman’s. The downtown streets at least are straight and gridded. When we got the road good and chewed up, the ancient streetcar lines in the Ensley and Oxford brick remind me of my name.

Average road lasts about, I don’t know, six, seven years, depending on such influences as climate and weather, subgrade soil and truck axle loads. I am a methodist, not the religious kind, but a believer in methods to get the job done right the first time. There’s no other way, and I am the evangelist of that way.

Sett is a veteran paver, and has worked jobs repaving the banked racing surface out at Talladega and the runway tarmac at Fred Shuttlesworth International. Sett liked to haw much about horsepower and machinery. I heard it from Sett that the future’s got machines can do our work cheaper and faster than a crew of twenty. For a man with a horrible past, Sett talks much of the future. The driving public complains in angry calls to the traffic department and letters to the editor that we’re too slow and take too many breaks. Lunch breaks, smoke breaks, piss breaks, beer breaks, self-abuse breaks, jail breaks. Nothing else for the news to report on except a five-year roundtable on potholes.

But road making is tortoise work, not the running of the hare. You’re up against every kind of wind and the weeping August humidity of Alabama’s air. You pick up on things. A little bit of geology here, some politics there. I like rocks more than people.

In this heat we had well over an hour to work the asphalt, day of the day of which I speak. The road is the only space left to the public. The public buys himself a car to put on the road, to assure himself of his existence, his right to run you over. I’ve obviously been blowharding through life, but behind your perceptions is a me and Sett you cannot make out.

Now, I was fine with all this – the heat, the barking letters to the editor – until you asked me to pave over my ancestors.

This I couldn’t abide.

-You sissy boys ready to serve your country, the Chief rallied the troops as Sett and I were dining on the last of the eggs.

We were always pussies, sissies, or pansies to the Chief, who would’ve been a great little league coach if he could be trusted around small children, or perhaps a warden in one of our county’s many fine prisons, where most of my dropout buddies ended up without even a G.E.D.

Chief said we’d been contracted to asphalt a parking lot for a car dealer while we waited for the milling crew to catch up. This car lot was to be paved on top of the cemetery where my uncle was inearthed. Drunk before noon the day of the funeral, my family of fourteen and still growing shouldered the weightless coffin into a dark rectangle in the earth. But not me. I was sober as seven judges, knowing the coffin was empty. Now, the tombstones were hilled up against a fence, grass mowed down to a close crewcut.

-This ain’t a right thing to do, Sett said.

I didn’t know Sett owned or was deeded the awful burden of a conscience, but he had a speck of egg white on his chin.

-Sett, Chief said, -You got any idea how asphalt is spelled?

Sett considered. I saw muscles contorting in his forehead.

-A.s.s.f.a.u.l.t. Ass fault.

Any sensible member of our century could see that Crow wasn’t about to pave over his beloved forbears. One fine day I’m going to build something like The Great Wall of Japan around me and there ain’t no way I’m coming out dead or dead. Why not just bring back the ill forgotten name of Scratch Ankle for the nigger business district? Separate drinking fountains, the whole nine yards.

We had about two miles of road behind us rolled and cooling when Sett stopped cold and said Crow come looky here. Sett was critical of the odd roadway leavings we swept up in the layby and the road’s narrow shoulders. Sett’s walls were trophied with Botts’ dots and bollards, smashed guard rails and stuffed roadkill. He had a warm romantic attachment to an armadillo we found at a railroad crossing. In the carport was a smashed bicycle built for two, wheels bent, the riders relieved of duty.

I caught Sett hoarding shattered accident glass in his pockets. He was fond of circling the crew around a front bumper, a game in which we guessed manufacturer and model. I thought Sett might’ve found another roadside object of interest to add to his museum when he waved me over. If Sett had been white, he’d of been white trash, positively.

Sett stank of sun and tar mixed with locker room. We all did. Though I’m no longer a paver, I still smell that ripe stink even after three-hundred and sixty five showers. When the water runs. Then it mingles with strange deodorant whiffs of highway honeysuckle, and I’m good and bad happy.

Before us was no highway artifact, but a sinkhole deep as a man’s thoughts before he dies and big a round as an oil depot tank. Sett edged up to the sinkhole’s lip and looked down.

My uncle committed his soul to the powers that be when he was swallowed up by a sinkhole in the West End just fourteen years to the day after I was popped out of momma by daddy’s sister. Long after the Tuskegee syphilis experimentations, our family didn’t trust no doctors. I’ll go to Tuskegee one day, make the crew proud, a graduate of syphilis university.

Pavement makes us commute, work, commute, sleep. Follow the white and yellow dashed lines. I refused to be whorehoused into that life, coat-and-tied, diplomaed, licensed, napoleoned, inventoried or highrised. The roads I pave are flatter than piss on a plate.

-Sett, you come away from that thing, I hollered at his big back. I’d seen a sinkhole or three in the valley before. Sett’s sinkhole was perfectly circular and pitch dark down round the bottom. It looked almost painted. Sett unzipped his fly and handled his member out to take a long leak in the sinkhole mouth.

The sun brightened and stroked me. The sticky weather seemed in agreement with all that I felt inside my head. Light above, dark below. Sett might jump into the hole, he had tendencies. I hadn’t drunk water since the beginning of the shift. Then I felt a silver spoon in my eyes as if one of my plastic gals had bucketed Lysol in my face, blinded by a brilliant inner light without source.

I saw the roads of Birmingham paved with a skin of flailed human flesh. You start Saul and end up Paul, my uncle said to me. A blue schoolbus with the back end sawed off, the city streets chewed up and spat out, our paving work undid. Sett’s and my mannequin ladies on bicycles, their skirts breezing up their thighs. A tank rolled by and an old crony in a Klan getup turned circles in a wheelchair on streets paved with a pure white tar.

When I woke and saw Sett hovering above me I knew I wasn’t dead. They wouldn’t want Sett in hell. The sinkhole had closed up like an eye. Sett slapped my face harder than he should’ve, enjoyment rippling across his face.

-Where’s the crew? Where’s Chief? I asked him.

Chief was weighted with marriage fat and despite his constant sweating never dropped a pound. You couldn’t miss him in an angry mob of lookalikes.

-They done felled into the hole and the hole…

-The hole what, Sett?

-It done closed up on’em.

Sett looked shook.

-Horse shit, Sett.

-I never seen anything like it.

Our fair yellowhammer state is run by frat boys who become four star generals and dentists in their bass pro lodges and weaseling quarterback clubs. I suggested to Sett we dig up every negro in the cemetery and publicly display them so all could watch them spinning and spinning, rolling in their graves. A pure white tar I saw behind my lids.

I thought about my mannequin girls. They required names, their population tripling every few weeks, my lovely plastic candy girlies. Veronica, Juliet, Mary. We had in our sorority an entire race of black mannequins, but Sett and I favored the white ones. I was partial to miss Mary. My gentle squaw. I come home to her after a hard day’s paving. Sett, who had an extra sixth digit, never touched her. I thought about her milky skin, cold in the evenings before I warmed her up, and about how she would never die. Does plastic die?

I’ve seen some terrible things. My cousin who lived by some philosophy of muscle gunned by the police. A dropout amigo who died in the doors of Wal-Mart, another victim of highrise prosperity. I was phoned to identify the body, which I didn’t mind. Markus would’ve done the same for me. That’s him, I confirmed, in that basement morgue, glass stuck in his jellied face. Had there been a window, I might’ve looked out it. So, you might think, because of all that, I wouldn’t of done what I done, but I never claimed membership among the sensible of our century, cited above. But as a Dixie deathman mine is a new thinking.

This coal and iron valley is wrought all over with sinkholes and assholes. They’re common as fleas. There must be one pocked beneath the streets with my name on it: Jimmy Crow.

-We have to pave that parking lot, I turned to Sett whose safety vest flashed at me like an orange shot from a flare gun.

-But your uncle.

-He’d want me to do this, I said.

The amount of asphalt will be staggering, new numbers will be invented for it. This is my letter to the editor, a letter of resignation, and the things I saw are written herein so that those who follow after may not lose heart. When this cemetery lot’s paved under with your tax dollars at work, I’m not paving no more. But that don’t mean I’m a quitter. Remember my uncle, his name was Tom, may he rest in peace under your ass fault.

 

AMOS JASPER WRIGHT is native to the dirt of Birmingham, Alabama. He holds a graduate degree in English/creative writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is currently undertaking a second graduate degree in urban planning at Tufts University. His fiction and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Arcadia, Zouch, Salamander and Yes, Poetry. He is also co-editor of theWhite Whale Review, an electronic literary journal. His author website can be found at www.amosjasperwright.com.