He came and sat on the edge of the bed. The front of his head was all torn open where the bullet had come out of it. He said, “I had one more straight-out crack at Johnny, I could take him.”
I said, “I know, Pap,” though I didn’t know no such thing at all. And then he was gone. I wondered was I dreaming. But I felt wide awake. I got out of bed, went to breathe the air through the porch screen. It seemed like real air. The moths that were clinging to the screen wire seemed real. I pinched myself. I was awake all right.
I figured it was Pap come back from the grave, and not a dream. It was easy for me to believe that, because I had seen Conjure Man and what he could do, so it wasn’t much of a jump to think Pap had come on out from behind the veil to speak to me.
I waited for him to come back, but he didn’t never show.
• • •
When we finished up eating the catfish and all the sides we wanted, the men took to whiskey flasks, or pulled Jax Beer from a tub of ice, and everyone set about digesting. I hadn’t felt hungry at first, but the smell of that cooking fish had made my belly gnaw, and I had eaten my fill.
I noticed the men was starting to check their pocket watches. It had to be getting along time for Conjure Man and the bout. And sure enough, it wasn’t five minutes later that I heard Conjure Man’s old truck, its loose parts clanking along the road, its motor grumbling like a hungry lion. As the sound came nearer you could see the women was looking nervous and the men was trying not to. Only Uncle Johnny seemed solid, like that backbone of his, the one Pap had talked about, had latched in tight and was packed with fire.
Conjure Man’s old black truck come into view and along with it a cloud of red dust, and the dust crawled around that truck like a dusty snake. The truck drove on past the crowd and parked out by the table with all the gifts on it. The door creaked open and Conjure Man stepped out. Something inside the truck stirred but didn’t come out, even though the door was left open.
Conjure Man was tall and thin and his skin was night-sky black. He wore a black hat, black shirt, pants, and coat, and black cowboy boots. It was as if him and that old black truck had peeled themselves out of the dark.
He had a clay jar under his arm, and he come along to the tables smiling. Not like no other colored, the ones that knew they best act a certain way around whites, but in a way my Uncle Johnny said was uppity, but he didn’t never say that to Conjure Man.
Conjure Man seemed to float up close to the fire. He had a smell about him, sweet and sharp to the nose, like old flowers dying. Big bluebottle flies came with him and made a halo around his head. He set that clay jar on the table with the food, and without a word to nobody, got himself one of the metal plates, a fork and spoon, went along picking up a little of this and that, heaping it on his plate. Now and again he’d pick something up and bite into it, frown, and toss it over his shoulder. After he had done that a couple of times, a big black dog with a head the size of a well bucket and a slink to its walk come out of the shadows of the truck, out of the open door, and loped over and took to eating what Conjure Man had tossed.
No one said nothing, just watched. Conjure Man finally had his plate the way he wanted it, and he found him one of the wooden chairs and set down and enjoyed it, got up when the plate was nothing but greasy, heaped some great spoonfuls of banana pudding onto it, sat back down and ate with a lot of smacking and smiling. When he was done, he tossed the plate on the ground and burped louder than a bullfrog. He went over and got him a couple of the Jax out of the ice tub, used the bottle opener on them. He drank one down like it was water, sipped on the other. It was then that he looked up and seemed for the first time to see everyone there.
He went over to the table that was laid out for him, looked through the sacks and boxes at the gifts that had been brought, and said, “Load ’em up.”
That meant us kids was to take all the gifts and put them in the back of the truck. None of us wanted to do that, because we knew what lay in the bed of the truck, but we had to do it. It was the way things got started, and what was in the pickup bed wasn’t going to do us no harm, nor anyone else, least not yet.
We started doing that, and the dog went with us, making me nervous, on account of I figured he could rear up and grab my head in his teeth and pull it off. But all he did was get back in the truck and lay down. When we had all the gifts in the truck bed, laid out away from the thing in the middle that was covered in oilcloth, we went back to the others, and we didn’t waste no time doing it.
Conjure Man finished his beer and got the clay jar, walked over to the clearing, said, “So, you all ready there, Johnny Man?” Had any colored man other than Conjure Man called him anything but Mr. Johnny, or sir, he’d have killed him. But Conjure Man had what Uncle Johnny wanted, and he was afraid of him too. Conjure Man had the darkness on his side, and he had a voice like someone who had just chewed and swallowed a mason jar, and that was something that gave you pause; you couldn’t help but think that voice was coming from someplace way down deep, so deep it went all the way into the ground.
“I’m ready,” Uncle Johnny said. “I ate light and drank one, so I’m ready.”
That’s pretty much what he always said when Conjure Man asked him if he was ready.
I stood by Mama Mooney. She put her arm around my shoulders, and it made me feel good and warm in a way didn’t have nothing to do with the summer heat. It was the way I figured a child ought to feel when his mama was nearby, and that mama was worth something.
The clearing was wide and surrounded by the tables of food. In the center of the clearing the dirt was worn from the shuffling of feet, for people had been coming here for bouts for a long time, bouts between men, and then the kind of bouts that Uncle Johnny fought. Pap always said he ought not to be messing with such things ’cause it couldn’t have any good kind of ending. That was of course when Pap still tried to like his brother, even though he knew he wasn’t worth the powder it would take to blow his ass up.
Now, let me tell you something here, so you’ll know, as an old man down at the feed store says. Souls don’t go to heaven or hell. Whatever is inside of us just goes, and when it gets where it is, it’s just some place neither happy or unhappy. It’s just a place. Pap explained all of this to me once, ’cause Conjure Man explained it to him, way back, and how that talk between them come about I got no idea.
Pap said Conjure Man said all the souls that have ever lived and died are in this place between times and spaces, and someday our souls will be there too, just drifting and floating and mingling. It’s a good enough place, Pap was told. It ain’t got no strife or worry, and what you done in life is without reward or punishment.
As for them souls, well, Conjure Man could call them up with the right spells. They was kind of like ghosts, but if you had a place for them to go, a body they could slip into, they could come back. Conjure Man could control them to some extent, but they sure didn’t like being here on this earth, not after being nothing for a while. ’Cause when they come back they knew then the world was just a place where people was striving for this or that, or trying to get with this man or woman, or trying to take hold of some money, or get a new hat or drive a new car, always wanting this or that, and from their new point of view wasn’t none of that worth spit.
So what Conjure Man done is he made it so people that liked to box could get their chance to fight the greatest that ever lived. He’d find a dead body about the size of the boxer in question, say his stuff, and that soul would come whistling into that body with all its old skills. What had to be done then was to get the fighter in front of that dead man with the soul stuffed in him, and let them go at it. See who was the better man.
Uncle Johnny had fought them fighters in them dead bodies, and he had always won, though like I was saying about John L. Sullivan, he had his time with that one, and after the fight he was laid up for nearly six weeks. Back then I kind of thought a l
ittle more of Uncle Johnny, ’cause he wasn’t bothering Mama. But it was after that fight, after her seeing him fight, that she got the fixation. The need to breed, as I heard one man say when he saw Mama crossing the street and didn’t know I was listening.
The fights was private, but there was plenty knew about them, and bets were made on who would win. Lots voted for Uncle Johnny, but lots would vote tonight for the shade of Jack Johnson, who was said by many to be the best there ever was.
Out in the crowd was the general store owner, the banker, the owner of Little Beaumont’s Four Star Café, housewives and farmers, a preacher or two, a teacher, and a mayor. Except for Mama Mooney and Conjure Man, everyone was white.
So Conjure Man takes that clay pot, sets it on the ground, takes off the lid, picks up a stick, pokes it inside and stirs something around. Whatever it was, it had a smell like a ripe outhouse. The stink filled the air, made it heavy as lead.
Conjure Man bent his face toward the mouth of the jar and spat a long, sticky stream of tobacco into it, and put the lid on it, plugging the stink inside. He yelled out toward his truck, “Come on over, Dead On The Bones. Come on over and into the light. Walk from the grave and out of the night. Come on over, Dead On The Bones.”
Then it happened like it always did. The air turned chill and our breath puffed, and that didn’t make no sense, it being dead summer, but that’s how it was. I could feel Mama Mooney’s arm around my shoulders shake with the cool, and she made a noise in her throat that reminded me of a scared dog under a porch.
Conjure Man’s truck shook a little and then the oilcloth raised up as what was under it sat up. The cloth fell off it then, and there was the dead man. A big black man with shoulders wide as a milk truck, no shirt on.
Conjure Man called out again. “Come out of that shadow. Come out of that dead. Come out of that truck and into the light, you ole Dead On The Bones.”
The dead man stood up in the bed of the truck, swung over the side of it in a way that was pretty brisk for a fella that had recently been dug up. That was how it worked when there was a fight. There was always a body, one that was fresh with no meat falling off, and no questions were asked. That made me wonder if a grave was robbed or a man was made dead with a blow to the head or a sip of a poisoned drink.
But right then I was just thinking about what I was seeing. A dead man stumbling toward our camp, walking like he had one foot in a bucket and one made of lead. The hair on the back of my neck pricked up and chill bumps crawled up and down my arms like a nest of ants.
Dead On The Bones walked between the tables and into the firelight. He wasn’t wearing nothing but pants held to his waist by a rope for a belt. His bare feet kicked up dust as he came. When Dead On The Bones was in the clearing where the fights took place, Conjure Man said, “Stop them bones.”
Dead On The Bones stopped, weaving a little, like a drunk trying to make the world quit spinning and find which way was up and which way was down. The firelight licked over his black skin, made it glow like a wet chocolate bar, made his flat, dead eyes seem almost alive. He was a young man, but he had lived and died rough. His face was pocked and there was a dent in his forehead.
Conjure Man cackled, took the stick he had stirred in the jar, used it to make a scratch line in the dirt in front of Dead On The Bones, then he made one where Uncle Johnny would stand.
The crowd moved. We was standing still one moment and the next we was making a circle around Dead On The Bones. Uncle Johnny stripped off his shirt and stepped up to his scratch line and took a deep breath.
“You know who I want,” he said to Conjure Man.
“You want Jack Johnson. You want him in his prime. You want the man that might be the greatest boxer who ever lived. Him who beat a big white man like a circus monkey. Him that knocked out teeth and danced on his toes. Him that was quick as lies and strong as truth.”
“Get on with it,” Uncle Johnny said.
Conjure Man took Uncle Johnny’s words like piss in the face. He turned his head slowly, glared at Uncle Johnny. I saw a flicker in Uncle Johnny’s eyes. He had forgotten who he was speaking to. Conjure Man wasn’t no field hand. Conjure Man didn’t have any rules he had to live by, except his own. Conjure Man didn’t have to say Yes, sir, and Thank you kindly, and Uncle Johnny knew that.
“I’m ready,” Uncle Johnny said, and he was so polite for a moment I forgot who he was.
“All right, then,” Conjure Man said. “We gonna do it on my own time, when I get to it and say when. You understand them rules that are mine?”
“That’s fine,” Uncle Johnny said, then tagged it with: “Appreciated.”
Conjure Man relaxed. He was about his business, and I had seen his business before. Conjure Man would pick up the clay pot, take off the lid, and let that damn smell out. Then he’d lean forward and bathe his face in it. The wind would come from all its corners, come in cold and wet and through the trees, and howl like a wolf with its leg in a trap. Then Conjure Man would lean forward and call into that jar, call out the name of the one he wanted, and there would be a noise like all the world had done cracked open, and out of that jar would blow a mess of bluebottle flies, same as them that circled Conjure Man’s head like he was an old cow pie. With them flies would be a thick blue cloud. Flies and cloud would jump on the dead man’s head and sink right in. When Dead On The Bones lifted his chin he’d be Dead On The Bones no more, but a rotting body full of someone yanked on out from the big beyond.
I don’t really remember doing it, but somehow I eased around in that crowd and got closer to Conjure Man. Closer than anybody, ’cause wasn’t no one wanted to be that near him. He cocked his right eye toward me, and studied me. His eyes didn’t have no whites because they was red with blood, and his black eyes had what looked to be gold streak from top to bottom, like someone had cut them down the center and found light behind them.
That eye that was watching me flicked away. Conjure Man picked up the clay pot, took off the lid, and, like he always did, stuck his face right over the jar. Oh, Lordy, that stink come out of there strong enough to lift a Buick, came out and wrapped all around Conjure Man’s big old head. I felt the wind stirring. I could hear the branches creak and the leaves rustle. Then he spit the wad of tobacco he was chewing into the jar. I seen then that he was about to shout Jack Johnson’s name.
I don’t know I had a real idea I was going to do it before I did it, but I leaped forward, snatched the jar away from Conjure Man, stuck my face down into that stink, and yelled out my Pap’s name.
Well, now, that stink punched me in the face and knocked me backward. I dropped the jar and it broke. The wind stirred up where the jar fell, and then there was more wind that came whistling cold and full from all four corners of the earth. That wind from everywhere was full of the stink in that jar and it had with it that blue cloud and those big, fat flies. The force of them winds and all that came with them dove right down onto Dead On The Bones, hit him in the top of the head with a sound like a slaughterhouse hammer smacking a big hog’s head. Then there wasn’t no wind and there wasn’t no stink, no blue cloud and no fat flies.
All that business had gone inside him.
Dead On The Bones lifted his head and smiled.
• • •
Dead On The Bones looked at me and chuckled. I knew that chuckle. It was the kind Pap had when he caught a fish, or gave me a smile. He had done come on out of that place for souls, and he was right there in that dead man’s body, one toe on the scratch line. He looked then in the other direction, saw Mama standing there, holding a beer in her hand, and when he looked at her, she knew, ’cause she dropped that bottle of beer and it busted on the ground.
Pap chuckled again, looked straight ahead at Uncle Johnny.
“That can’t be you,” said Uncle Johnny.
Pap opened his Dead On The Bones mouth and tried to speak, but all he had was a gurgle.
“Do something,” Uncle Johnny said to Conjure Man. “Send him back. This ain’t the right man.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Conjure Man. “But he won’t go back until he’s good and done. So you better fight, or you better run.”
“I don’t run,” said Uncle Johnny. “I beat him before, and I’ll beat him again. Go on, let it rip.”
Dead On The Bones had his foot on the scratch line, ready to go. Uncle Johnny got set, and Conjure Man yelled, “Fight.”
They shuffled toward each other, gathering up dust beneath their feet.
It started out like a bout. Uncle Johnny came in like a bull, and Pap shot out a left and hit him on the nose, then hooked a right into his body. Uncle Johnny slammed his shots home, and the thing was, Pap could feel it. Dead On The Bones didn’t feel nothing, but Pap, his spirit, it felt it, and it made the dead body bend a little. Then Pap was back at it. He hit again and again, with lefts and rights, uppercuts and hooks, all kinds of combinations. At first Uncle Johnny did just fine, held his own. But then on came Pap, using that dead body like it was his, smashing and hitting, and finally there wasn’t no rules anymore, and it wasn’t a boxing match, it was a fight to the death.
They was slamming and jamming against one another, and though Pap’s borrowed body couldn’t bleed, you could see it was getting tired, same as a living man. Uncle Johnny was tired too. They clinched, and Uncle Johnny had his mouth close to Pap’s ear, and I could hear him say, “For me, when we did it, she sang like a bird.”
I heard that just as clear as a gunshot, and I reckon everyone else out there did too. I know when he said it Mama stepped back, crunching that broken beer bottle with her flat-heeled shoes.
“Your problem,” Uncle Johnny said, “is you ain’t got no backbone when it comes right down to it.”
Pap made a noise like a growl, butted his head into Uncle Johnny’s face, pushed him back with his left palm, and swung his right in a short, sweet arc. Uncle Johnny took it right on the nose. Blood sprayed and Uncle Johnny staggered. Then came a left uppercut to Uncle Johnny’s chin; it hit so hard Uncle Johnny’s head flew up and there was a snapping sound, like someone had broken a green limb over their knee.