NANCY’S SHIFT WAS over two hours before Ronnie’s, so she was already gone when he put away his heavy apron and gloves.
He was thinking about her kisses and that circular hallway as he walked back toward the high-rise condo on Fifth. His arm was throbbing again and the threat of Nontee loomed at the back of his mind but still he was wondering about the close breathing experienced between him and Nancy Nefratiti Daws. It was love between them but not like in books and movies, on TV and in magazines. The love they felt was the passion of being human and knowing that being as a state of grace. That hallway was the prison that she lived in just like jail had been for him. He realized that he had been incarcerated even when he was at liberty; like the people in the parole office.
While he walked, Ronnie wondered if he could explain any of this to Nancy. How could he make her understand that he grasped these notions through her kisses?
* * *
WHEN RONNIE RETURNED to the condo, he found Lorraine sitting there with a hefty black man. He was lifting a coffee cup to his lips and she was just putting down a crystal goblet of red wine.
The man looked familiar. When he stood up, Ronnie saw that he was quite tall.
“Ronnie,” the big man said.
When he smiled, Ronnie recognized him as Jimmy Bywater Burkett, a sometimes suitor of Elsie Bottoms—Ronnie’s mom. It was an odd déjà vu (though that phrase was not in Ronnie’s mind). He had been thinking of Jimmy when Lorraine was partly healing his alien wound. Jimmy was the only person other than Mrs. Bottoms and Miss Peters who seemed to have a continued interest in the angry child’s life. He hadn’t been around very often but whenever he was there child-Ronnie found himself wishing that this traveling bluesman, JB Burkett, was his father.
By the time all these thoughts went through his head, Jimmy had come up and embraced the young man. It was a big soft fat man’s embrace, and for a moment Ronnie was lost in the feeling. This reminded him of Nancy’s kisses but he didn’t allow himself to be distracted.
“Do you remember me?” Jimmy asked when he released the young man.
“I was tryin’ to remember your name just lately, but when I seen you I remembered, Mr. Burkett. How did you know to come here?”
“I had to go ask your brother Myron,” Lorraine said.
She had joined them.
Ronnie didn’t need to ask how she knew about his brother. She and Ronnie were closer to each other than most people were to themselves. When they had bonded in the healing process, they were completely open to one another. There he gleaned her part of the plan that would destroy the potential destroyers of Earth.
“You’re my son, Ronnie,” tall, black, and fat Jimmy said.
“You don’t smell like whiskey no mo’,” Ronnie commented.
“The last time I almost died, I climbed up on the wagon; stayed on it too.”
“I always wished that you didn’t drink,” Ronnie found himself remembering aloud. “I thought you was funny, but then Mama would kick you out the house.”
“I never did right by either one’a you.”
“You still play blues?”
“Now I play electric guitar for a minister’s services on Sundays and Wednesday nights.”
“Why don’t we go sit down?” Lorraine suggested.
* * *
“YEAH, YEAH,” JIMMY Burkett said, sitting between his son and Lorraine. “Your mother would tell me I couldn’t have no son if I was gonna be a drunk and then the bottle would tell me, ‘To hell with her.’ The bottle was wrong but I didn’t know it until it was too late. Has one’a your eyes always been green, Ronnie?”
“I got sick and it turned like that.”
“Your girlfriend here got two different-color eyes too.”
“That’s how we met,” Ronnie said. “We had the same disease.”
“And you knew that because’a your eyes?” Ronnie’s newly minted father asked.
“How come Myron knew where you lived at?” the young man asked, not wishing to prolong the lie.
“He come to a Wednesday service with this girl he was seein’. He told me you was in jail and I aksed him to tell me when you was out but he said he didn’t know when that would be because he only ever heard about you but you two never talked.”
“So you’re my father?” Ronnie said, the words feeling like a blessing from his mother’s lips.
“I am.”
“That’s good.”
“You’re lookin’ fit and strong, Ronnie,” Jimmy said. “A little bit different than I remembah, but you look healthy.”
“My arm hurts some but other than that, I think I’m okay.”
“What happened to your arm?”
“Dog in a junkyard bit me.”
“You go to a doctor? You know it mighta had rabies.”
“He saw a physician, Mr. Burkett,” Lorraine said. “How does it feel, Ronnie?”
“Like it’s talkin’ in tongues.”
* * *
RONNIE AND LORRAINE saw Jimmy Burkett off at 10:27 that evening. They promised to come to the Sunday sermon at the Pentecostal Revival in Jesus Christ Church.
Ronnie kissed his father good-bye for the first time in his life.
Both Alton and Freya called during the evening. Ronnie and Lorraine made plans to see them in a couple of days.
“If we’re still alive,” Lorraine said to Ronnie after he got off the line with Freya.
“If the world is still here,” Ronnie replied.
* * *
“HOW DO YOU know that Silver Box understood what you were sayin’?” Ronnie asked.
Lorraine looked up at the wall clock, saw that it was a few minutes past eleven and said, “I don’t know how I know, but I do.”
* * *
IT WAS JUST after midnight when Ronnie said, “He’s coming.”
“You feel it in your arm?”
Nodding Ronnie added, “He’ll be here soon.”
“How long?”
“A hour, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Is it just one?” Lorraine asked.
Ronnie nodded.
She jammed both her hands deep under the skin and into the muscle of Ronnie’s forearm. The was no puncture, tear, or blood, just a merging of two beings that were, on some level, one.
The trembling vibration moved evenly between both of them. Ronnie gritted his teeth and Lorraine laughed out loud.
“Is your dick hard, Ronnie Bottoms?”
“Like a goddamned sledgehammer.”
“It feels good to heal.”
“Like the Pentecostals must feel when the spirit get in ’em.”
After that there were no more words, only images and emotions that passed between them like gravities calling from distant stars.
Twenty-three minutes later, when Ronnie and Lorraine fell away from each other, they were both exhausted and exhilarated.
“You better be goin’, Lore,” Ronnie said after another minute or so.
“What if he kills you?”
“Then I’ll be dead.”
“You don’t care if you die?”
“Not really.”
“But you have so much to live for.”
“Did you see when I kissed that girl today?” he asked.
“Nancy, right?”
“I never felt nuthin’ like that before. And you know I been wantin’ to know if Jimmy was my real father my whole life. I got more now than I ever hoped for. So if I got to die to have got that, then I’m all right with it. I’ll take what comes, but you know Nontee ain’t gonna kill me.”
“No?”
“The only reason he tried before is ’cause you made him mad. That’s why you got to go, so him and me can have some conversation.”
“I love you, Ronnie Bottoms.”
“You are my heart, Lorraine Fell.”