<ai's "blue suede shoes: a fiction"> 2003-09-25.3:54 a.m. Blue Suede Shoes: A Fiction Ai 1 Heliotrope sprouts from your shoes, brother, their purplish color going Chianti at the beginning of evening, while you sit on the concrete step. You curse, stand up, and come toward me. In the lamplight, I see your eyes, the zigzags of bright red in them. "Bill's shot up," you say. "Remember how he walked on the balls of his feet like a dancer, him, a boxer and so graceful in his blue suede shoes? Jesus, he coulda stayed home, Joe, he coulda had the world by the guts, but he gets gunned, he gets strips of paper tumbling out of his pockets like confetti." Is Bea here? I say and start for the house. "No," you say. "This splits us, Joe. You got money, education, friends. You understand. I'm talking about family and you ain't it. The dock is my brother." Lou, I say and step closer, once I was fifteen, celestial. Mom and Pop called me sweetheart and I played the piano in the parlor on Sunday afternoons. There was ice cream. Your girl wore a braid down the center of her back The sun had a face and it was mine. You loved me, you sonofabitch, everybody did. In 1923, you could count the golden boys on your fingers and I was one of them. Me, Joe McCarthy. I gave up music for Justice, divorce, and small-time litigation. And you moved here to Cleveland-- baseball, hard work, beer halls, days fishing Lake Erie, more money than a man like you could ever earn on a farm and still not enough. Pop died in bed in his own house because of my money. Share, he always said, you share what you have with your family or you're nothing. You got nobody, boys. Will you cut me off now like you did when I could have helped my nephew, when you hated the way he hung on to me, the way he listened when I talked like I was a wise man? Wasn't I? I could already see a faint red haze on the horizon; a diamond-headed hammer slamming down on the White House; a sickle cutting through the legs of every man, woman, and child in America. You know what people tell me today, they say, You whistle the tune, Joe, and we'll dance. But my own brother sits it out. 2 A man gets bitter, Lou, he gets so bitter he could vomit himself up. It happened to Bill. He wasn't young anymore. He knew he'd had it that night last July lying on a canvas of his own blood. After a few months, he ran numbers and he was good at it, but he was scared. His last pickup he stood outside the colored church and heard voices and he started to shake. He thought he'd come all apart, that he couldn't muscle it anymore, and he skimmed cream for the first time-- $10s, $20s. You say you would have died in his place, but I don't believe it. You couldn't give up your whore on Thursdays and Bea the other nights of the week, the little extra that comes in off the dock. You know what I mean. The boys start ticking-- they put their hands in the right place and the mouse runs down the clock. It makes you hot, but I just itch and when I itch, I want to smash something. I want to condemn and condemn, to see people squirm, but other times, I just go off in a dream-- I hear the Mills Brothers singing in the background, Up a lazy river, then the fog clears and I'm standing at Stalin's grave and he's lying in an open box. I get down on top of him and stomp him, till I puncture him and this stink rises up. I nearly black out, but I keep stomping, till I can smell fried trout, coffee. And Truman's standing up above me with his hand out and I wake up always with the same thought: the Reds are my enemies. Every time I'm sitting at that big table in D.C. and so-and-so's taking the Fifth, or crying, or naming names, I'm stomping his soul. I can look inside you, Lou, just like I do those sonsofbitches. You got a hammer up your ass, a sickle in between your percale sheets? Threaten me, you red-hearted bastard. Come on. I'll bring you to heel. 3 Yesterday Bill comes by the hotel and he sits on the bed, but he can't relax. Uncle, he says, and points at his feet, all I ever wanted was this pair of blue suede shoes, and he takes out a pawn ticket, turns it over in his hand, then he gets up, and at the door holds it out to me and says, Yes keep it. Today I go down to the pawnshop and this is what I get back--a .38. Bill didn't even protect himself. You have to understand what happened to him, in a country like this, the chances he had. Remember Dorothy and the Yellow Brick Road? There's no pot of gold at the end, but we keep walking that road, red-white-and-blue ears of corn steaming in our minds: America, the only thing between us and the Red Tide. But some of us are straw-- we burn up like Bill in the dawn's early light. He didn't deserve to live. This morning, when I heard he was dead, I didn't feel anything. I stood looking out the window at the lake and I thought for a moment the whole Seventh Fleet was sailing away beneath me, flags waving, men on deck, shining like bars of gold, and there, on the bow of the last ship, Dorothy stood waving up at me. As she passed slowly under my window, I spit on her. She just stared at me, as if she didn't understand. But she did. She gave up the Emerald City for a memory. I'd never do that, never. I'm an American. I shall not want. There's nothing that doesn't belong to me. back /& forth /& frosting names are often sad