Déjà vu

       Jonathan Bohr Heinen

 

 

 

 

     Light bled in and brought Louis back to life. For a moment, everything was bright as gasoline fire, bright as the night in Greenwood when the sky was stained orange and cinders drifted through the air like moths, but the shine died out. Just a flash of lightning, Louis thought. He shifted in his La-Z-Boy and felt the threadbare fabric under his thighs, the wood frame of the recliner fighting through the padding under his elbows, and he knew that he was not in Greenwood. As far as anybody knew, he never had been.

     The only light now was the dull blue glow of the walnut console television. He figured they must have laid him out in the living room after they got him home from the hospital. On the other side of the room, his daughter, Martha, lay asleep on the loveseat, and his grandson, Henry, eight years old and happy to be up late into the night, sat cross-legged on the floor within arms’ reach of the dials to television, both of them there for the deathwatch.

     How long had it been? Three days, maybe four since his heart had betrayed him? The sweat formed a film on his forehead that morning, and he pinned it on the heat and wiped it away. But soon drops dripped from his chin and his chest seized up. His wife, Joanne, fed him an aspirin and called for an ambulance. The paramedics would have strapped him to a stretcher and taken him to the emergency room right away, but he wore only a tattered pair of pajama bottoms and a V-neck T-shirt, the underarms stained yellow. He wouldn’t be seen that way, he said. Despite all the punks and greaseballs in the world, appearances still meant something to him. They had to. He insisted on getting dressed.

     He was halfway into a starched white button-up when Joanne came into their bedroom. She straightened his collar and began slipping the buttons through their slots, working her way up from the bottom.

     “Louis,” she said, finishing with the second to last button below his neck, “The ambulance just pulled up. If you don’t get in right now—“

     “—you’ll kill me,” he said and began to laugh. But his laughter quickly faded and he fought to catch his breath.

     She glared at him. He stepped into a pair of slacks, and she pulled them up to his waist, stuffing the shirt in as neatly as she could. He fastened and zipped them on his own. She took a pair of brown tasseled loafers from under the bed and dropped them at his feet.      “Bury me in my nice suit,” Louis said, slipping his feet into the loafers. He plucked the lapels of his jacket. “Not this.”

     “For God’s sake, Louis,” she said. “Hurry it up.”

     At the hospital, they shocked him back into rhythm, x-rayed his chest, and sieved tube after tube of blood from his veins for testing. A severe myocardial infarction, they called it, and kept him in the hospital for monitoring.

     The window shades in his hospital room were thick, blotting out the sunlight, kept drawn so he could rest. Time slipped away from him there. He would wake up and find Joanne asleep in the chair beside his bed, and he couldn’t tell if she was taking an afternoon nap or had turned in for the night. The doctor would come in, check his file, ask him how he felt, and tell him they would check in on him later. When was later? he wondered.

     The doctor came into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed.

     “How long have I been here?” Louis asked.

     “Long enough,” the doctor said. “We’re sending you home.”

     “I’m better?” Louis asked.

     “No,” the doctor said, “there just isn’t anything else we can do but monitor you.”

     “How long do I have?”

     “It’s impossible to predict what your heart will do from here. It could last days, months, even years, if you’re lucky. That being the case, we figured you’d prefer the comfort of your own home.”

     Joanne called Martha to pick them up and helped Louis out of his gown and into the clothes he’d worn to the hospital. The nurse brought a wheelchair for Louis. She rolled him through the hallway, into the elevator, and out the front door. When he got outside, the sun was nesting on the horizon, and it felt like it had only been a single sustained day since he’d been admitted.

     When Martha pulled up in her station wagon, he told her he wanted to drive, but she wouldn’t even entertain the idea. He figured she worried he’d kick the bucket behind the wheel, lose control of the car, and take them all with him. Joanne sat in the backseat with Henry and Louis settled for shotgun. Martha turned the key in the ignition, and they pulled away from the hospital.

     On the drive home, they passed so many things that Louis hadn’t remembered being there. There was a furniture store that was once a movie theater, a vacant lot where there used to be an IGA. On another vacant lot, an apartment complex sprouted from the concrete foundation, only the skeletal bones of the frame in place. Laundromats had become liquor stores, and liquor stores had become Laundromats. The red and white striped pole of the barbershop had been taken down and replaced by a flashing neon “Open” sign of the adult video arcade housed there now. All of it seemed to pass in a blur, these shifting spaces becoming whatever they had to be.

     Martha said, “We’ll be home soon,” and sped through yellow stoplight on its way to red.

     In the distance, he saw a fire glowing on the horizon, burning hostile and unrestrained, turning the edge of the world to kindling. Its luminance fought against the approach of night, and swells of smoke unfurled above it. They drove along, and the fire began to gutter, just the flicker of embers, like there was nothing left to burn, and soon Louis understood that it was not a fire at all, but the sun, sinking below the horizon, the last of its light dripping away, leaving a low ceiling of clouds that turned pink in the dusk.

     By the light of the television, everything in the living room—his daughter and grandson, the wood paneled walls, the brick fireplace with the family photos in frames on its mantle, his grandfather clock in one corner, Joanne’s curio cabinet in the other—seemed only a shadow of itself. He figured the same was true of the television. On either side of the screen were woodlatticed, cloth-covered speakers, and the screen itself had lost some of its phosphorous coating and clusters of dead pixels erased little parts of every transmission.

     Louis clapped down the footrest, and the recliner plainly creaked as he rocked forward. “Did I miss anything?” he asked.

     “Johnny Carson told some jokes about Ronald Reagan going back to Hollywood after his term ends, a bunch of reruns after that. Nothing to write home about.” Henry said.

     The only low-priced ad time was left. Louis watched a man wearing a checkered sport coat offer rock bottom prices for every car on the lot. Because of the dead pixels, the images on the screen were always missing something—in one frame, the fender of an AMC Pacer was wiped away; in the next, the headlights of a Chrysler Cordoba were snuffed out of existence— leaving only the naked grey tube itself.

     Outside, the limbs of the cottonwood swung fitfully in the wind. The leaves it had shed, caught in eddies of wind, rustled like crumpled newspaper. The air grew heavy. Thunder broke.

     “There’s a storm coming,” Louis said.

     Henry turned away from the television to face him.

     “Maybe,” he said, sliding his glasses up the sharp slope of his nose. “I’ve been timing it. One hundred and three seconds since the lightning.”

     “Then it’s—”

     “—About twenty-one miles away.” Henry said, turning back to the screen of the television.

     Louis knew how fast thunderstorms in Oklahoma traveled, the seconds between lightning and thunder contracting. And then it would be as if they were happening simultaneously, flash and crash coming within the same moment. “It’ll hit us within an hour,” Louis said.

     “Maybe,” Henry said.

     “What do you mean ‘maybe’?” Louis asked.

     “It depends on which direction it’s traveling in. Even if it gets close, it could break off in another direction, split into a couple of systems, or disappear altogether. There’s no telling.”

     The lightning flashed through the windows, and Henry looked down at his wristwatch, his glasses sliding to the tip of his nose, to mark the time.

     “You’re sitting too close to the TV,” Louis said. “You want to go blind?”

     “That’s just a superstition,” Henry said. “The eye doctor told me so.”

     The boy was smart; Louis had to admit that. Where he got it from, his mother or father, Louis wasn’t sure. But the things that came out of his mouth and those glasses, the thick, magnifying lenses, made him seem older than he was. Sometimes, his eagerness and curiosity put Louis ill at ease. Last summer, he’d come into the living room and found Henry with a screwdriver in hand. Their new VCR was in pieces, a small pile of screws on the carpet, the metal housing removed and set to the side. The guts of the machine, ridged wheel drivers, tape heads, all those tiny secret parts, were exposed. He lifted Henry by the arm and gave him a few swats before Joanne stopped him. “That’s not how it’s done these days,” she said.

     “What’s the kid doing here, anyway?” Louis asked. “Take him home to his mother.” He left the house and walked around the block a few times to burn off some steam. When he got back, Joanne and Henry were gone, but the VCR had been reassembled, reconnected to the television, and plugged into the wall. He powered it on, took the only tape they had, their old Super 8 family movies transferred to videocassette, slid it into the mouth of the VCR, and pressed play.

     There was nothing but snow on the screen, and he figured Henry had broken the machine. Then he saw his daughter, in her senior year of high school, waving to the camera from the homecoming float; his son-in-law, Gerald, returning to their hometown from Vietnam; birthday parties and Christmases; Martha cradling Henry. The boy had dismantled the machine and put every piece back in place.

     That was the difference between them. Louis never questioned what went on in a camera, radio, record player, television, tape deck, or VCR. They just did what they did, and he appreciated them for that. But Henry wanted to know not only what these things could do; he wanted to know how they did them. How were sounds and images trapped in vinyl grooves or on tape? How were radio and television programs broadcast through the air and received? These were the boy’s questions. Whenever they were in the car together, Henry would fiddle with the radio tuner. Hitting the patches of static between stations, he would ask where the static came from, why was it there.

     “Because,” Louis would answer.
     “Because why?” Henry would ask.

     “Because that’s just the way it is.”
     “That’s your answer to everything,” Henry would say.
     The used-car salesman said they would beat any price. A banner with the address and phone number of his dealership flashed underneath him. Soon, there would be only the colored bars of the test screen, the high-pitched moan of dead air. Louis killed the television with the remote. The light of the screen contracted to a glowing white dot. Static popped on the surface of the tube. Breaths of wind pushed against the house, and everything was dark, save the faint light of the moon. Thunder rent the sky.
     Henry scooted away from the television and took a seat on the couch next to Louis’s LaZ-Boy. “Eighty-one seconds,” he said.                “That’s what, sixteen miles?” Louis asked.
     “Give or take,” Henry said.

      It seemed like only seconds ago, he’d been a boy Henry’s age. After his mother was put in the sanatorium, he rode across Oklahoma in a pickup truck with his father, lungs full of fresh air, ready to begin a new life in Tulsa. They moved into a small house north of the Frisco railroad tracks, right at the boundary of Greenwood, a neighborhood in Tulsa peopled with prosperous blacks. The whites called it Black Wall Street.

      Out of the dark came Henry’s voice, soft and hesitant. “My dad said you were going to buy a farm.”
     “Did he?” Louis asked. For as smart as the boy was, some things were lost on him. Louis rocked forward in the recliner, his elbows resting on his knees like a run-down boxer. “Listen,” he said, “I need you to do something.” He stared into the dark. He’s told so many stories over the years, some true, many false, creating who he was and who he wanted to be with each breath, because there are some things that you can’t admit, some things that can be made different.

     He didn’t know how to begin. He had never talked about what happened in Greenwood: the first shot fired; the blacks and whites in Tulsa turning guns against each other; his father and he holed-up in the house they’d left, Springfield rifle aimed at the door, waiting for the riot to end.

     “You know the roll-top desk in my office?” he asked. He knew the boy was familiar with the desk. The same summer he’d swatted Henry for taking apart the VCR, he’d also caught the boy trying to jimmy the lock on the desk with the slim blade of a letter opener. “The key is on top of the grandfather clock; you’ll probably need a chair to get to it.”

     The rioting went on into the night. Then a cry came across the sky. A plane droned overhead, a trail of fire falling from its wake. From his window, Louis saw Greenwood burn, shining bright as a copper penny, the sour smell of gasoline and smoke stuck in his nose, dripped down the back of his throat. He watched black men and women run from the flames only to be shot, their bodies straightening like knives before they fell to the ground.

     By morning, the fires were finished and ashes fell like flakes of snow. The buildings that hadn’t burned down looked like mouths of broken teeth—windows shattered, doors loose from their hinges. He watched his father go from one body to the next, fishing through pockets. On the ground, Louis found a handkerchief, neatly folded and still in its box, one of the only things that seemed to have survived the riot, and he stuffed it into his pocket.

     Trucks rolled into Black Wall Street. Who had sent them and why there were there he could only speculate, but he and his father helped load the dead. They hoisted the bodies onto the trucks, piled them atop one another. Limbs tangled in knots. Arms and legs slipped through the slats on either side of the truck bed.

     They rode along with the others. A man handed out shovels, and they scratched at the ground, which was so dry that every chunk they dug out blew away like dust. They dug deep, into the clay that rested beneath the hardpan. They rolled the dead into the hole. Bodies piled up past the lip, and some of the men cut away at them with the blades of their shovels, trying to pack them in tighter. Louis took the handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face clean.

     “In the desk, there’s an old handkerchief. You’ll know it when you see it,” he said. “When I’m gone, get rid of it.”

     “Why?” Henry asked.

     “I shouldn’t have taken it to begin with,” was all he could bring himself to say. Sometimes he would tell himself that he was just a kid, that he couldn’t have done anything to stop it. Maybe that was true. He didn’t talk about Greenwood, nobody did, and he’d tried to get rid of the handkerchief before but couldn’t ever bring himself to do it.

     Henry asked, “What’s it called when you feel like you’ve heard something before?”

     “Déjà vu,” he said. “I feel like that’s what’s happening now.”

     “It isn’t,” Louis said. He couldn’t explain the fires that turned night to day and cleared Black Wall Street, or all those bodies, seared and smeared in ash, left to rot in a single grave. And he couldn’t explain the decades of silence following. Sometimes it seemed like none of it had happened at all, but it had, and he said, “I was there when they died.”
     “Granddad?” Henry asked. “What are you talking about?”

     “Nothing,” Louis said.

     The thunder and lightning were gone or far away from them. He pulled the lever on the side of the La-Z-Boy and raised the footrest. He leaned back, the joints of the recliner creaking, and shut his eyes.

     When he woke the next morning, the first thing he saw was his own mouth. Henry had taken a compact from his mother’s purse and was holding it in front of Louis’s face. The boy pulled the compact away and ran his finger through the fog Louis’s warm breath had left. “He’s still alive,” he yelled. Then he scurried across the living room, climbed a chair he’d pushed next to the grandfather clock, and put the key to the desk back in its hiding place.
     Louis heard his son-in-law come in. “I just came to see how everyone is holding up,” he said, and he came into the living room and sat down on the couch next to Louis’s La-Z-Boy. “How are you feeling, Dad?” he asked.
     “Still haven’t bought that farm,” he said.
     “Kids,” he said. “You have to be careful what you say around them. They’ll repeat anything,” he said, and he stood from the couch and walked out of the living room.
     Had Louis known he wouldn’t die that night, or even shortly thereafter, he wouldn’t have said anything about Greenwood. He would have kept his mouth shut, the handkerchief locked in his desk. But he’d given himself up, even if only in a small way, even if only to Henry. His heart never held a steady beat, but he recovered. Joanne called it a miracle. Henry wasn’t sure what to call it.
     It wasn’t until Henry grew from an unnervingly precocious child and into an awkward and acned teenager, that Louis felt any different about the night that he thought he would die.
     Through the bay window in the kitchen, he watched Henry pass by, pushing the lawnmower, cutting the grass in a cross pattern. Since the heart attack, Joanne wouldn’t let him do the yard work, and the boy came over on Saturdays to mow.
     An ice cream truck rolled down the street, “Pop Goes the Weasle” chiming from its speakers. Henry let the mower idle and ran to the curb. He took out his wallet and bought an ice cream bar. He ran inside, stowed it in the freezer, and went back to finish the lawn.

     After he’d bagged up the grass and put the mower back in the garage, he took off his shoes and dumped out the clippings that had collected there. He washed his face and hands at the sink in the kitchen. He got his ice cream bar from the freezer and had already unwrapped it by the time he sat down at the kitchen table. Louis was sitting across from him, his hand wrapped around a mug of coffee that had gone cold.

     “What you got there?” he asked, pointing to the ice cream bar.

     “Pink Panther,” Henry said. He looked at the ice cream bar, a cartoon character’s head impaled on a tongue depressor, and bit off one of the ears. He finished it quickly, biting away chunks of the face until there was nothing left but the stick and two gumball eyes he’d spit out. These he folded into the wrapper and dumped into the trash.

     “See you later,” Henry said.
     Louis raised his coffee cup. He was surprised by how much the boy had changed, no more questions, no more digging around. His curiosity seemed to have faded. Still, though he hadn’t given up much about what happened in Greenwood, he wondered if the boy had been able to put anything together.

     He took a last sip of coffee, and when he got up to put his mug in the sink, he saw Henry’s nylon wallet sitting on the table. He set down his mug and picked up the wallet. He held it for a second, and then he undid the Velcro flap. Inside were a few bills, some coins zipped in a pouch, and stowed in one of the pockets was a folded piece of paper. Louis plucked it out, and began to unfold it.
     The piece was heavily creased and one of the edges was rough. At first, there were only words on a page, but when Louis flipped it over, he saw what Henry had been hiding: a black and white picture of a naked woman, neck strung with pearls, sitting on a steamer trunk, her legs spread apart. He figured the boy had ripped it hastily from a photo book at the library. It wasn’t as racy as the centerfolds Louis had seen in men’s magazines over the years; still, he knew what the boy was using it for. He folded the picture, this time the images facing out, and put it back into the wallet.
     He dialed the phone. Henry picked up on the other end of the line.
     “You left your wallet here,” Louis said, and he set the phone back in its cradle before the boy could respond.
     It wasn’t a big deal. Boys had always been like this, tearing out underwear advertisements from JC Penny catalogues, stealing their friends’ dads’ magazines. All the same, he laid the wallet in plain view on the table, the Velcro flap left undone. Louis was sitting at the kitchen table when Henry got there. The boy was breathing heavy, red-faced, his shirt was stained with sweat. He looked around the kitchen, and then saw the wallet sitting on the table.
     Louis tapped the wallet with his finger. “You should be more careful where you leave this,” he said, and he slid the wallet toward Henry. Henry undid the flap.
     “It’s all there,” Louis said.
     When Henry slid the folded piece of paper out of its pocket, though, he saw that it had been refolded, partial nipple, curve of breast, and roll of hip facing out. He quickly slid it back into its hiding place.
     Louis tapped his fingers on the table and looked out the window. “You did a good job on the lawn,” he said. “It looks like a golf course.”

     “Are you going to tell anyone?” Henry asked.

     “There’s nothing to tell,” Louis said, and he dragged an imaginary zipper across his lips, turned a lock, and flicked away the key. The boy had to understand: if they never said anything, it didn’t exist.

     “Thanks,” Henry said. He stuffed the wallet into his back pocket and quickly made his way out the door.

     He watched the boy pedal down the street. The sun was out, perched in a calm blue sky full of clouds, but as much as he wanted to, Louis couldn’t see it like that. He saw the bright orange fire that fell on Black Wall Street, the smoke that hung above a burned up corner of the city where hundreds lay dead, and even if he never said another word about it, there was no escaping that it had happened and that he’d been there.