Chain Gang All Stars

We take steps heavy with loss. Both sides of the Chain depleted by one in the BattleGround. The Eraser triplets reduced to twins, their third dispatched by the great Raven Ways. Ain’t have no chance. The brothers had been confined together in the womb, in the cell, and finally in this open world of the killing games. Now they’re separate for the first time. The two that are left wet the swastikas on their necks with tears. And their third killed by a Black man at that.

On our side we lost Eighty. A good man that done bad long time ago. Big jovial man somehow, despite the blood on everything. Not a bad fight, but it wasn’t a good one either. Eighty hesitated for just a moment and in that moment he found himself punctured, in a way that would never be patched.

Out on the Circuit, after the loss, Razor looks at me as we step through, crunching the evidence of spring’s relent on our feet. He asking for a song.

“I don’t got many remembrances memorized,” I say.

“What you mean?” Razor says. “All the shit you sing sound like memorial shit, so go ahead.”

I look to Bells, who walks head-up, crying and quiet.

“I’ll sing one if you ain’t got one. All this gah-damn singing this whole year and now Singer ain’t got a song in ’im. Imagine that. That’s fucked, bro. Gimme a tune at least. I’ll freestyle one time for my bro,” Razor says.

A tune to hum comes to me immediately. Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm. I go, “Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm.”

I see Razor taking it in, closing his eyes, gripping the hilt of his weapon. He calls it Sansupurittā. When he was here in the living, Eighty and Razor and Bells would rhyme the miles away, passing the bars back and forth between them. More than a few times they formed their rhymes around my songs. Today, Razor takes my sound in, breathes it through his body as we follow the Anchor down a river I’ll never know the name of.

Hmm, hmmm, hmmmm. Hmm, hmmm, hmmmm

I loved my boy a fat man

Right away Bells laughs. Another story of the name is, Eighty was first called Eight Hundred. But the way he thrust himself into working his body after barely winning his first two fights, the story is he lost two humans’ worth. Changed his name to fit his size. Eighty.

I loved him when he got thin

Hmm, hmmm, hmmm

I know he done some wrong, but, Lord, he gone

So please go on let him in.

Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm

Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm

And Bells take it from him to the same tune.

Reggie was a legend

Ride or die, sink or swim

He stood with me, and now he’s free

So please, God, let him in.

Hmm hmmm, hmmm hmmm

I feel it passing through me and I do not deny the spirit.

His mama named him a king’s name

’Cause she knew what he had within

His only sin, was too human

So please, God, let him in

So please, Lord, let him in

For the next several miles the story of Eighty is told in song and the floating eyes swirl the air capturing it. Good TV, somebody somewhere is thinking. And they right. Part of me hopes the kin Eighty keeps is watching. Part of me hopes they find the strength not to.

“They don’t call us Sing for nothing, you feel me, muthafuckers?” Razor says, looking straight up into the floating eye. “We earn that name on this side.” He laughs the last of his tears away.

The Eraser Twins don’t bother making a word. They listen silently through the March; surely their hearts sing songs in praise of the piece of themselves they’ve lost.

A faraway light in the brush greets us and so this sad March is coming to a close. I can feel that Bells and Razor aren’t quite ready to settle in, can tell from their gait, their eyes. The dark leaving nothing but the hurt clear.

The Anchor pulls us to its stopping place above the fire pit. As if to show its power it always rests above the fire. A witch that cannot be burned. And though the Anchor pulls constantly, we slow our walk. The killing games like this. When someone is lost to the grounds, often another is received.

Eighty and LouBob and Eraser was lost at the last arena. LouBob forgotten as is so many that go inside. I try to remember to hold him in my singing in the morning.

Though Sing-Attica-Sing lost three, a single man is standing at the campfire. We watch him. The Chain slows, forms a smile of bodies around him. There’s a chorus of insect life and wind. The crackle of fire is the sound of nothing if you’ve heard it long enough. This fire crackles different, its flames darker than what seems natural. The wrists in the Camp glow green and finally we stop. The lot of us stand not six feet from the new member of the Chain, who stands in front of the fire with a smile so huge it doesn’t feel right. His teeth are a dull tan and his body stands strong. It’s the kind of body that has carried itself up and down, up and down, many, many times. He is lean muscle; his skin looks tight on him. His linen pants are tucked into high-top sneakers and his shirt is elastic and compressed to his skin so that we can all see the shadows dancing up and down his muscles.

“Hello,” he says, smiling and waving. And as he does we all grip a little harder onto the hurt we keep, because on each of his hands is a long double blade that is strapped to just below the knuckle, so it looks as if the metal were a part of him. He has two gold blades on his right hand, and on his left, one gold and one obsidian.

Razor steps to him first.

“What up, bro? What they call you?”

We watch, and the unsilenced of the nature around us gets real loud and clear. Bells takes a step forward. “You good, bro? What they call you where you from?”

“My name is Simon J. Craft,” he says, and then he swipes his right-bladed hand at Razor’s neck.

Razor jumps back and Sansupurittā is up and flashing before anybody that ain’t seen the BattleGround a few times would have even had time to blink. Razor pulls the blade from the sheath and already Bells is running up to assist. Razor cuts through the low light at Mr. Craft’s head and Craft sways back at the waist.

“My name is Simon J. Craft,” he says as he twists in some impossible way to avoid Bells’s crashing machete. Then next I know Bells’s blood flooding the ground, she doesn’t even get to pull her blade back for a second go.^[*1] Razor screams and raises his sword forward as I move to tend to Bells.

“It’s Simon J.—” The blades clash. The sound of killing metal explodes as they swipe at each other. Then Razor’s razor on the ground and his body follows.^[*2] A slash across the neck so deep he isn’t on the ground a minute before his eyes close the last time.

I hold Bells. And she looks at me, disappointed, before her eyes flutter and she gurgles to her end. I see the blood on my hands and look up at the twins, who don’t know what to make of what they just seen.

Everybody in the Circuit seen some horror. But Razor and Bells famous worldwide. Razor and Bells some of the hardest in the games, both called Reapers, and both now still.

“You one of us, brother?” Eraser One says as he approaches, holding his whip in one hand, his other extended as if to shake. Hoping that the pinch of color in the man’s skin is the shadows, or a tan, anything but heritage.

Simon J. Craft walks with his own hand extended, suddenly calm. Docile and in agreement. A warmth passes over Eraser One’s face as he believes God has delivered him anew where he had taken. As though he’s been vindicated. But before they can shake, Eraser’s hand is on the ground, severed in another flash of violence.

“Fucking—” he gets out before Simon J. Craft slices his face and neck up good.

The last Eraser turns to run. Sprints pretty good, holding the hoe. Bells still warm in my arm. The brother once a triplet, then briefly a twin, runs and runs. I lay Bells down and because I don’t know how much time I have left myself, I quickly pull Razor’s body beside hers, put her hand in his so that at least if it’s my last moments I gave them something close to a rest they might tolerate. Finally, far off, Eraser hits the invisible thick made up of his own wrists’ pull to the Anchor. He struggles against it, running slower and slower, not because he tired but because the hold of the machine is stronger than his body ever could be. He doesn’t stop struggling. He’s still slowly clamoring when Simon J. Craft leaps into the air. They move together as if through sand. Movement sullied by their bondage. And even in those slow movements, hoe Eraser is stabbed, again and again, in the back. He dies with his face in the earth and blood pouring from his back. The triplets reunited sooner than they ever would have imagined.

And Simon J. Craft walks back slowly to me.

—

There is no song that comes to me, only the throb I feel in my long-gone hand. The feeling is more pronounced than any I felt when that hand was actually there.

I look at the dead beside me. The best friends I had left in life. And I wonder, Where is the fury? Where is the bloodlust? What part of me is gone now? If not now, when?

I sit on a log and watch the fire. Simon J. Craft returns, his shadow long behind him. I hold my spear up, its tip pointed to the sky. I feel my gone arm stretching toward this man, pulling to his neck as if to choke him, or maybe to his shoulder as if to try and coax him to peace. I feel it as if it were happening there in life before us.

“Simon J. Craft,” I say. “Stop this.”

And Simon J. Craft smiles as he says, “Yes, sir.”

*1 Georgina “Ring Ya Bells” Hickory. Seen a lot. Done a lot. Found a home in the hell. She never sold poison to kids, but the poison found the kids anyways, so what was the difference? If you don’t have a code you have nothing, and Bells had a code. You swing for your family, you hold your head high, you try to do right when you can. She didn’t think she was the love type. She was wrong about that. She found it in hell, a home with love and singing.

*2 Edgerrin “Razor” Boateng was bound to lose one. He hurt muthafuckers who tried him. He had a family, he was smart. But sometimes you have to do what you have to do. Blood asks for blood. He didn’t make the rules, they made him. But he counted his blessings; he was home again, in her. He’d gone all this way to find a peace he’d never felt before. Bells, he’d had her, she’d had him. He wished he could hold her forever.