Run North

by Robin Throne

Nick Haupt

Simon would have been pleased the way they had cordoned off his body as if it were some important Harlem crime scene when in fact he had simply and finally had his moment where he imbibed more juice and junk than his poor body would allow.

Thanks to weevil.

His friends knew Simon blamed it all on weevil as he openly, and widely, reported the gratitude toward the homely beetle for getting him out.

Out and away from a south he detested more than his mother.

He never looked back.

Sea-island cotton was on its way out and he had tried oystering and seasonal gigs in Savannah and even Charleston, but none of it stuck, or he never stuck to it as Cypress would say, and he joined a band of minstrels leaving from the juke joint one night with some other brothers and sisters from different mothers and headed with them to Harlem.

At Lenox and Seventh he had found a new place where he fit, mostly, and hung there till Helena found him and tried to own him, sounding just a bit too much like she had a Cypress tongue, and he steered clear of her. She stuck around long enough to be carrying Jolene, but decided to head back to her mama in Weeksville, and not let this baby be born here among people she hardly knew.

Or really cared to try anymore for that matter.

Oh, but Simon knew them. In fact, he knew nearly all of them. If not them, he knew their mama or grandpap or niece or cousin or baby bro and aunt sis’.

Every last one of them had come from the island to settle in here in concrete dank like him, fed up with failed fibers and unfed desire.

Run north.

On this corner, he knew every street crooner and banjo man and sun-guarded hussy draping the streets at dawn.

He syncopated the moments between dusk and sunrise and called it “my bang” like he alone owned the night and the street it settled on.

In some ways, he truly did and it was only when Simon realized these brothers and sisters would pay for just about anything to escape their too-long-day-to-day, the money began rolling in and he began rolling it up, and Simon finally found his need.

Up and up and up.

Higher was never enough for Simon.

More.

He had felt low as the scum on a flat bottom marsh slider, the kind of gunk that would embed and never come off, stuck on for dear life to a south in his bones that creeped in at the strangest moments. He would forget all that here now in a pure urban haze of jazz and solid laughin’ and screamin’ till four a.m. or until he passed out, and most nights now it was the latter.

Yes, Simon owned the night and would eventually be owned by it.

Really, same as Jinn’s shadows, but different here somehow.

His time.

His weak spot.

A need, really.

Cypress always said if a man actually found what he loved, he should work it.

Live it.

Breathe it.

So that’s what he did — make mama proud — he would laugh off the shakes as he reached for his peaks till they killed him one night in a cold dark room in that second floor row house as far north of the island as he had run.

Cordoned off.

Never see his baby girl now, they would look in and say it gently amongst themselves.

Simon finally run up and run out.

*

Robin Throne was a 2016 writer-in-residence at Wolff Cottage and recipient of the fourth David R. Collins literary achievement award from the Midwest Writing Center, the third fiction chapbook prize from Gambling the Aisle, and a literary fiction award from the Writer’s Well for her debut novel, Her Kind. Her work has appeared in The New Poet Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Gypsy Cab, Mankato Poetry Review, North Coast Review, Split Lip Magazine and Crab Fat Literary Magazine among others.