There Will Be No Miracles Here Read online

  Many things transpired in the next decade. Four I can prove: in May 1982 Roderic married Debra West, who as a little girl had also visited his preacher father to be baptized and thereafter to hear him preach. In September 1982, almost too many months early, the newlyweds brought a daughter, Natashia, into the world. In January 1987, on Epiphany, I was born. In March of that same year, Woody Hayes died. Before he passed on, Mr. Hayes had convinced his quarterback to return to Columbus and finish the degree that, for reasons we will understand soon enough, had been aborted.

  I also know that Rod Gerald earned his diploma in 1989, if only because I’ve looked at the graduation photo many times, if only because I’m in it. And I know that sometime between then and the aforementioned day in ’91 or ’92, Rod Gerald became a local legend once again: coach of the Dublin High basketball team, coach of the Mifflin High football team, code enforcement officer for the city of Columbus. The same Rod Gerald that you might recognize at the Horseshoe on game day, who might be the answer to your Buckeye trivia question, whose name might be on your Ohio State throwback jersey—and for these reasons, the same Rod Gerald who was, by 1993 or ’94, a real pain in my ass.

  You see, a great man is an inconvenience as a father, in part because every boy wants to be a man (until it happens), his own man, and that is hard enough to do without everybody calling you the son of somebody. I envied, in a way, the boys I’d come to know who had been told so often by so many, Your daddy ain’t shit . . . because for all the things that I could and did and will say about mine, I could not say that he wasn’t shit. He was the greatest man that I had ever known, and his daddy, whom we’ll get to, was the greatest man that he had ever known and this was, most likely, the root of all the evil inside each of us. It was also the reason I threatened to kill myself one night in 1994, I’m almost sure. You’d think I would remember the exact date and motive, but all I have left is a clear memory of the method, strangulation, and my final words: I guess I’ll have to kill myself to get some freedom around here!

  I ran through the den to my bedroom, past the only memento displayed in our apartment, a scarlet felt banner with gray script that read Rod Gerald 1977 Orange Bowl MVP, and began to wrap the long black cord of my Sega Genesis controller around my little neck as fast as I could, though not fast enough, because Daddy caught me before I got my freedom and commenced to give me, instead, his long black belt.

  He won that skirmish and almost every other, as he was Rod Gerald, a winner. And when he wasn’t forcing me to stay alive and I wasn’t trying to overthrow him, which only happened once or twice, he seemed to have all the patience in the world for me. Showed me, for example, how to make the bunny ears with my shoelaces and how, instead of tripping a boy in peewee football practice, to put my helmet in the boy’s chest and wrap my arms around his waist and drive my legs until his back was on the ground. Knock his dick in the dirt, Scooter. Such was the kind of wisdom my second-grade teacher hoped Rod Gerald would offer to her class for Buckeye Day 1994.

  On Buckeye Day, kids at Prairie Norton Elementary School, and no doubt kids all the way up in Cleveland and down in Cincinnati, learned to consecrate themselves to Ohio State. We wore necklaces made of buckeye nuts and Buckeye T-shirts, and the lesson plan was adjusted to teach Ohio State football instead of cursive or whatever else they taught in elementary school in those days. An actual Buckeye’s presence would be divine. I asked Daddy when he got home from work and he said what he often said about things he was going to say no to: We’ll see, Scooter. We saw.

  He instead sent one of the VHS tapes of Ohio State football that were stacked under the television in our living room—only one of which I had seen, and only then for a few short seconds because when I pressed play I was met with the grainy image of a long-haired, bare-shouldered woman violently sucking what I was almost sure was a penis, except that it was far too large to be real. Mama, from the kitchen, had cried out with that noise she made that sounded like a muffler backfiring—ugh, Roderic!—and rushed over to switch off the TV. I hurried into my room without asking any questions. Let her off the hook. I figure that’s why she didn’t fuss when I was caught with the back massager in my underwear a few months later.

  We had that kind of understanding, my mother and me, even though I did not understand so many things about her. Didn’t understand, for example, why she went to a beauty convention for a whole year, and why she and Daddy sent me and Tashia to Dallas that year instead of bringing us along to cheer her on or just hang out. You hardly ever understand the most important things until it’s too late for the understanding to do anybody any good. Since I was only five at that time, I reasoned that my mother was beautiful enough to need a year or more to convene re: her beauty and that was okay as long as it didn’t take forever, which it didn’t. Tashia and I went right back to Columbus and Mama was still beautiful and I didn’t ask any questions then, either, because I was six and then seven and had other things to think about—and besides, my mother never made any sense to me and that’s what I liked about her.

  Every other adult seemed desperately committed to making sense. They were all headed somewhere in a hurry, and on their way they always had to tell me that I didn’t have my shirt on right or that I needed to lotion my ashy knees, that I was talking too much, too loud, or not correctly, that I had better stay out of their high heels, that I needed to put on deodorant, that I had to either come inside or go outside but choose because I was wasting the air-conditioning and running up the electric bill.

  Mama was the only person I knew who didn’t do any of the stupid stuff grown people were doing all the time. She didn’t wear clothes around the house if she didn’t want to (in part because she stood before the bathroom mirror for hours each day), and she didn’t eat her vegetables, and she didn’t laugh at jokes if she didn’t understand them, but sometimes laughed when no joke had been told. She gave me bologna for breakfast, and melted cheese and sugar on my toast instead of spreading jelly, and told me Take some Tylenol, baby! when I said I had a stomachache. And when I split my eyebrow open flipping in the bed she didn’t scold me, just laid my bleeding head in her lap to feed me peanut butter on our way to the hospital. And when I almost drove her car into the front door of the Drug Emporium, she yelled at the security guards instead of me. And when Daddy said I could not listen to Boyz II Men, she went and bought the tape herself. I’m not saying she was perfect, just that I sure benefited from her imperfections. Maybe that’s what magic is: a useful mistake. Otherwise it’s just a bad decision, which is what I thought my daddy made with the tape he sent for Buckeye Day.

  I was sitting in Ms. Baughman’s dark room in pure bliss, swinging my little legs—not because I was finally witnessing Ohio State football but because the greatest days of primary school involved a metal cart with a TV on top and a VCR on the shelf below—when Ms. Baughman stopped the tape and turned on the lights. Man, what if somebody dubbed over the football game with that woman?

  It wasn’t that. Ms. Baughman had stopped the tape early because the footage Daddy had chosen to send was of the 1978 Gator Bowl match between Ohio State and Clemson, which had also ended prematurely. Seconds after Ohio State’s quarterback (the one who replaced Rod Gerald) threw a ball directly into the arms of a Clemson linebacker to seal a Buckeye defeat, Woody Hayes retaliated by punching said linebacker in the throat as he ran to the Ohio State sideline. You SOB, I just lost my job! Woody was reported to have yelled at that poor boy from Clemson, who for all the money in the world would not have bet that his place in college football history would be secured by taking a sucker punch from an old man. Woody’s career was, in fact, over. So was Buckeye Day.

  Ms. Baughman tried to wrap the fiasco in a noble message nobody was listening to:

  See, kids, we have to keep our tempers under control, right?

  Yes, Ms. Baughman! as we swung our feet or dug in our noses or searched for some residue of Fruit Roll-Ups in our book bags
.

  I could do all types of psychoanalysis to try to figure out why Daddy sent that tape instead of coming to my class. Maybe he couldn’t leave work. Maybe it seemed a clever way to get back at Woody, who had cost him his job as starting quarterback. Maybe he was simply tired of being Rod Gerald. He’d already attempted to offload the name to me, and would have succeeded had my sister not already been, at four, the wisest person in the family.

  Daddy’s idea was that I become Roderic Alan Gerald, Jr. My mother protested, since she wanted me to carry her name instead: Debra Ann would become De’Brian, in keeping with the 1980s trend of naming kids with no thought to the price they would later pay in school, job searches, or self-esteem. At a stalemate, they turned to Tashia, who offered: Call him Casey. She borrowed the name from a soap opera character, Dr. Casey, a woman. I don’t know what she was trying to say.

  Tashia got her wish and rightly so. I had been her baby as much as Mama’s and Daddy’s, my aunties told me. When I asked what was wrong with Tashia’s back, why she had a brace that she was supposed to wear but didn’t, they reminded me it was my fault. I had been so big—chile, you were so BIG—that Tashia, still in pigtails, newly robbed of two front teeth, had to lean—chile, she was almost leaning on the floor!—just to keep me balanced on her hip. My jowls were fat and my eyes drooped, but my grip was firm like I’d been holding on to my sister since before I even existed. In the pre-thoughts of our mother’s womb I had known her, had found her message left behind for me: Don’t worry, I’ll be waiting for you. I don’t mean to say she was born just to serve my needs—I really am working to be a good feminist, which is very serious business—but that if she had not been born I would not have my name and she might not have those rods in her back to keep her spine from breaking and we would not have learned so soon to hold on to what we had even if it was too heavy.

  By Buckeye Day 1994, Tashia seemed eager to let me go or at least not speak to me too much, even though we lived under the same roof and shared first a let-out couch and then a waterbed and then, finally, a room with twin beds that Daddy came to sit on every night and pat us to sleep. And so I had to imagine what she was like through other people. Some days I thought she was Brandy Norwood—a wholesome girl with skin the color of the chunks in Blue Bell buttered pecan ice cream, sitting in a swing in the park with dookie braids singing to a boy:

  I want to be down

  I want to be down with you

  Other days I thought she was Lauryn Hill in Sister Act 2—same skin, same braids, same voice in sometime-service to God, same funky attitude with the authorities, even her father, her favorite person in the world. She was his favorite, too, except for one weekend morning when, lying on Daddy’s chest to read his daily planner, I watched him take out a ballpoint pen, put a tiny blue star next to the date, and write, mouthing the words just so I could hear: Casey will be more successful than his sister, because he listens.

  She must have really pissed him off that day. But a day often comes when a girl stops taking shit from anybody, and I’m glad hers had arrived. Otherwise I would have been sitting up dead at the hands of my neighbor-friend’s younger brother, who was the only white person to ever call me nigger to my face, or the American Indian boy a few doors down whose fingernails were almost as long as his hair, which I tried to pull once, before he slashed me. Would have been, in other words, a casualty of the Thumbleweed Drive Race Wars of 1994.

  These battles broke out every few months. I’d be leaning against the back of Daddy’s black Ford Probe, scratching the paint off, or walking from Ms. Wonderlich’s apartment across the way with a stale sprinkled sugar cookie in my hand, or digging for a rock that had some gold inside, and I’d hear the cry:

  Race war!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  The fleck of paint flits away, the sugar cookie is crushed under a shoe, the empty rock is folded into my fist, and I call for Tashia, just like the Indian boy calls for his sister, and the white boy calls for his big brother, and we run, all of us, to a spot that the universe has preordained as the place of bloodletting, where we will pay for the sins of our fathers and forget that we are friends and ignore the fact—if only for a short moment of suspense in that time of day when you no longer have to shield your eyes to watch the sun—that, aside from Tashia and the little Indian, nobody knew how to fight.

  Tashia knew it all: what my name should be, how to fight, how to sing, that I liked her best friend’s sister without me even saying a word. And I assumed she knew why, one day in 1995, Daddy packed up all the family’s stuff and said that we were going back to Dallas. Going home.

  chapter TWO

  I remember rain.

  I can see it: Kentucky rain, the rocks cry out on us as we pass through. Hosanna, hosanna, rain. The procession home, the road, the Via Dolorosa. Tennessee: the crooked ways still bent, the valley not exalted, the road will wind and give us rain. Hallelujah! A song of rain and blindness: we’re coming home.

  Can the whole sky be water and the hills hide us in the mist and all you hear is the march of rain up the hood and down the window and under the wheel and on the world behind. I don’t know home, but I know rain.

  Daddy, I can’t see.

  Me either, Scooter. Nobody can see in this rain. But all you have to do is keep your eye on that white line. Look.

  There is a world that exists, maybe in another time or on another star, but I know it’s there, and I’m holding the back of the driver’s seat so I can see the white line guide our tires through the rain. I would put this pen down. I would close my bank account and give my monies to the poor. I would ask the Lord to still my voice so I never say another word if I could only sit there in the storm and watch that line again, forever.

  Instead I watched Daddy drive across the Trinity River—though it’s also possible I was asleep in the car. Whatever the case, I have seen a great deal of America since, and have learned that you can’t understand a place if you don’t understand its water. Dallas ain’t any different, which is why some people simply say he’s from the other side of the Trinity River and thus explain my whole existence or so they think but are, in part, quite right. Most cities have railroad tracks to separate poor colored people from other citizens. In Dallas, there’s a whole goddamn river between us. Nothing moves in the Trinity River, aside from toxic waste. Very few things or people move across it for long: folks south of the river cross it via freeways that usher them to work or a nice shopping mall. Those north of the river cross it to get out of town—to Waco or San Antone or hell maybe all the way to Mexico. Anywhere but Oak Cliff, our destination. I bet Daddy would have kept on driving to Mexico, too, if he had known what plans Oak Cliff had for him. But either he did not know or he had strange priorities and so he drove into the driveway that would come to be The Driveway of my life in many ways, the crumbling concrete driveway of my mother’s mother’s house.

  The house had been her husband Cleo’s house, since he was the man and he had the money, thanks to Ross Perot, who might have been the 42nd president of the United States if he hadn’t told the truth so much. Mr. Perot had hired Cleo, long before I was born, to train the Perot horses and landscape the Perot properties—which Cleo did so well that he was later able to open his own landscaping company and build his own horse barn about a five-minute drive or twenty-minute horse ride away from the house he bought on the south side of the Trinity River before it was a sad thing to do, a house he last saw hours before his death in 1991 (sixty-two years old; massive heart attack), by which time the landscaping company was bankrupt, the horse barn was rotting, and his widow was working as a domestic on the north side of the Trinity River to supplement the social security check that would come each month in lieu of an inheritance.

  Still, Dorothy carried on Cleo’s legacy: kept that small two-bedroom house clean, kept the ivy trestles pruned and the hedges trimmed, kept hope alive for the garage door until it fell off the hinges. She continued hosting pa
rties—get-togethers—as the couple had been doing since the sixties, when Cleo and his brother opened The Atmosphere, one of the hottest nightclubs in Dallas for a short while, but long enough for Bobby Blue Bland to make a brief appearance, which ended when Cleo saw Bobby try to dance with Dorothy. Perhaps since Cleo was no longer around, Bobby Blue Bland was still the star of Dorothy’s get-togethers, still calling for somebody, maybe her, to

  Shine on your love light

  Let it shine on me

  Which didn’t have nothing to do with God, as far as I could tell—all those old men and old women howling at each other like they were still down in the country, jigging in the living room, bumping into each other in the short hallway, stepping out onto the back porch for a smoke, spilling their toddies on the little children, smushing the faces of the little children in their big old bosoms.