Now that I had my money and a purpose with mines, I moved quick, if not smart. I had my stuff together by the time Daddy expected me home to help him procrastinate his purpose some more. He put me on detail like usual, eating up all my hours till well after dark. Still, I slept light that night, and as soon as the sun shone, I got down to business. I knew I couldn’t use up all Daddy’s solution on some charitable, unprofitable shit like neighborhood sanitation. Him and Momma was trying to get up outta Rockwood, not beautify it.
I went and bought four one-liter water bottles as well as a couple other accelerants to the process. I emptied the water bottles out and filled them suckers up with the solution, which was beginning to smell like a car engine, not that that bothered me much. According to Daddy, Mr. Motherfuckin’ MacDonald would use pesticides to spray and burn away the mold from his properties that he was fittin’ to put up for a sell. Meanwhile, the peckerwood ain’t do shit for us. So, with two and two coming together in my thirteen-year-old head, ’fore you knew it (’fore I knew it), I was walking the perimeter of the courtyard at the hour that kids is supposed to be heading off to school, grown folks is gettin’ ready for work, day laborers is biding they time on boulevards, and hustlers and hoes is hitting that snooze button, and in my arms hugged up against my chest like several footballs I carried the bottles of the solution, which I now had it in my head was my brilliant black disinfectant.
A lady skinny enough to squeeze thru a shut door, totin’ a cloth sack slung over her shoulder, approached me. The sack clattered with its contents, a bunch of aluminum cans. Every couple minutes she’d cough so hard I thought a lung was ’bout to jump out her throat. This woman looked and sounded straight out the homeless camp; that, or the ER. I was not lookin’ to catch no new flu bug, but somethin’ about her made me pause and hang around.
“You’re staring like you know me from somewhere, youngster,” she said, clearing a hurricane out her throat. “What you got there?”
I didn’t say anything. I wadn’t tryna have my mission stopped ’fore it started.
“Is you ’bout to plant a garden? What’s that smell? Are we related?” Her questions came at me quick as a tweaker. “I’m related to half of Oakland. Are you a Montgomery?”
“I’m a Cane,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Ah, shit.” She sat her sack down and then stood to her full height. I could see the tat that ran down her throat: P E A C E. The letters fell almost unreadable within her sagging skin from right below her jaw down to her collarbone. I recognized her now: the lady who choked the shit out my teacher’s neck five years back. “In AA, I’m supposed to apologize to you, make amends and whatnot. I slapped the bright out your eyes.”
I remembered the back of her hand flying at me. The hand was thinner now and didn’t seem attached to the same woman. If she hit me now, the only thing I would catch would be a backhand full of bones, which might hurt even worse. I drifted over to where the dumpsters stood, reeking, off in a corner of the complex. She picked up her sack and followed me.
“I’m so sorry, blood! I’m not like that anymore. I don’t make a habit of snuffin’ people. What’s your name, baby boy?”
“Cope,” I said, tossing some of the solution on the moldy ce-ment that surrounded the dumpsters.
“Cope’s your government name?”
“Copeland,” I said, moving on from the dumpsters.
“Sounds like an old plantation name.” She laughed up a lung. “I’m Vista—you know what that means?”
“What’s a vista?” I asked. I stopped tryna flee her.
“It’s, like, a vista is where you stand and look out and you see everything. A lotta people never had that experience cuz they mind is on lockdown. It’s so much in the world to see, but we never get to see most of it.” She paused and snorted like a cokehead. “Blood, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way cuz you seem like a good child and I did slap fire out you, but either you or what you’re carryin’ don’t smell too good.”
Every time the wind would break across the space between us, it would carry the scent of the solution up into my nostrils. My nose hairs would begin to burn and my peach fuzz mustache would tingle. As for its smell, I had got used to it. I ain’t really smell it no more. I stared at her, slow to whatever it was she sayin’.
“I don’t know what you’re up to, baby boy, but you might wanna rethink it.” She eyed my possessions. “Am I gonna see you again, blood?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. It was a strange question. How was I supposed to know what was to be or not to be?
“You can always decide to be here tomorrow, baby boy,” Vista said. “I learnt that.”
I nodded and I was about to say somethin’ about the solution, about how certain problems cain’t wait for tomorrow, when she snorted louder’n I could speak, silencing me. Then she scooted off toward the Rockwood gates. I watched her go. She was scooting with a quickness, the sack of cans rattling on her shoulder while she shooed somethin’ out the air with a wave of her free hand. I imagined her backhanding a bug like she backhanded me.
That was when I knew for sure that the solution was onto somethin’. Wadn’t no bug she was shooing away. She felt some type of way about this solution. This solution could run off the woman who had whipped my ass. It was powerful enough to singe me each time a droplet jumped with the wind to my skin. It was everything the old man claimed it to be and even stronger still. This thing was fit to clean Rockwood all the way up. I watched old girl go her way and I went mines. I made my way thru the courtyard, dousing anything and everything even a little bit moldy, from walls to walkways and even trees. I imagined the pollution dying as soon as the solution hit it, but in reality I was moving too fast to study its effects. I just kept going, cleaning everything that looked questionable. I forgot about my friends, who wadn’t fittin’ to follow me; I forgot about the grown folks ready to head to work in the clear blue morning; I forgot about the day laborers and the sleeping prostitutes and shoestring pimps. Call it psychosis or some wild shit down from my daddy, but I started tellin’ the onlookers, who had flocked up around me all of a sudden— all eyes were on me all of a sudden—to get away from the mold, the mold was about to be clean gone. I ain’t pay the slightest mind to the way the solution sizzled on contact and the pop and crackle sounds that sprang up soon after. Maybe I’d just seen so many homeless cats light fires in garbage cans to warm theyselves on cold city nights that I figured that I, too, could perform a controlled burn—either that or I just ain’t know exactly what it was Daddy’s solution was made of or the consequences and repercussions that would come from high concentrations of that mug applied to wood. It was one thing, I now realize, to test it out on small metal objects, another thing to start bombing it everywhere like the pesticide I by now simply assumed that it was.
It’s all a blur after that—the way the low sizzle turnt to a high buzz and then to a snap, crackle, and smoke that started trailing me and then catching up to me and floating alongside me like fog rolling in from the bay. Keisha and Free and Miguel and the other kids was all running up to me hootin’ and hollerin’ like we used to do when a fight would break out at school, except now I was the only fighter. The adults I barely remember, but I know from the po-lice report that frantic calls for 911 were made. People started yellin’ about “Where are this nigga’s parents? Yo, blood is a pyro!” And just plain “Jesus Christ! Hey-seuss Christo!” and a gang of saints I never heard of before but might get to know soon enough.
I remember wondering why they had to go and start acting like I was burning down the Oakland redwoods—I wadn’t no arsonist, I was an environmentalist. This was the solution to our mold problem. I was no fan of fire, hated it when Momma left the stove burners on to warm the apartment because she couldn’t tolerate the heating bill, hated it more when the dead smoke stench of Oakland’s summer fires floated down from the hills and fitted a noose wove of oil and ash around our necks down in the flats. But I hate
d the mold even more, or maybe the idea behind the mold—I hated how we deeply complected complainers simply sat around and posted up and talked shit while Mother Mr. Fuckin’ MacDonald poisoned us on the daily. And we never fought back. Nobody never took no action. Sure, if I could splash enough of this solution, which was seeming more and more unlikely with all the distracting shouting about 911 and “Why come yo’ parents never gave you the ass-whoopin’ the po-lice ’bout to?” A crosswind fled thru the courtyard and the morning marine layer descended upon the Rock, saturating the solution. Daddy’s pesticide stood no chance, not because it didn’t work but because folks and the weather wouldn’t give it a chance. Even Daddy hisself never gave his product a chance to right the wrongs of Rockwood. A po-lice siren sounded, distant, then screamed closer and much louder. Most folks run when the cops come, but I had nowhere to run to and nothin’ I should have to run from. I tossed a gang of the solution, one whole water bottle’s worth of it, on a nearby tree that might not have even been moldy. The frustration was building in me. The weather and the people and the po-lice assembled against me. I would be branded crazy, out my rabbit-ass mind, sent to juvie, forced to do homework and Daddy’s bidding for a thousand years. But what was the use of our freedom if we never did nothin’ with it—
**✦
The only story they have on me comes from some juvenile record, which is supposed to remain sealed, first of all, don’t know how they can call theyself protecting law and order while they disrespect my rights, but anyway, ain’t no record that can tell you who I am. Hella factual errors in what they allege, no receipts, they cain’t even get right what went wrong. Wadn’t no citizens arrested me. That simply ain’t true. They think the whole world is in them documents when all that’s there is them talking to theyselves, confirming they own conclusions, so they can close shop early and say I was bad from the beginning.
After the fire (which ain’t even get lit), everything got tangled for me. Since I had no priors, I was classified a nondetained minor and released on informal supervision, terms pending, which sounds good if you don’t know shit, which my dumb ass didn’t.
First of all, them terms ain’t pend too long. We received a slim little notice in the mail. I remember standing in the kitchen in nothin’ but my boxers and reading it out loud to my folks. The exact words don’t matter. It said that on account of the arrest, they was transferring me out the regular school and into the day school on Treasure Island. I would serve out the balance of the semester. This Treasure Island school seemed like a little prison: you got put out the regular school and they put you in this mug, where they had you locked down from the moment you came to campus in the morning till the time you left the island in the afternoon. It was only one step away from being locked up 24/7 for real. But that wadn’t the half.
“Treasure Island?” Momma said, the name cracklin’ evil on her tongue.
Daddy shot up from his chair at the kitchen table and took the letter from me. I remember him scanning it, reading it more’n once. I remember how he slowed down and held it in his thin hands, how the veins was standing out over the bones of his fingers and I thought I seen his grasp tremble a little. He was very quiet. He sat down.
“Promise me you won’t drink the water,” Momma said.
“Why cain’t I drink the water?” I asked.
*
If you never been a juvenile offender, a Section 8 applicant, or a Job Corps participant, you won’t know about the Bay’s most infamous island, so let me tell you how the authorities do us: Treasure Island sounds like paradise or somethin’ from a fantasy, heroes and pirates and beautiful maidens and all that—but that mug is anything but a fairy tale. Yes, it’s sitting pretty in the waters between San Francisco and Oakland, but ain’t hardly anything there but everyone that no one wants. Don’t that strike you as suspicious? You don’t gotta be a genius to know somethin’ about that motherfucker just is not right.
“If it don’t come out a bottle, don’t let it even touch yo’ lips,” Daddy said, breaking his silence, slap-pounding the table. “Stuff out there is not natural. If you disregard what I’m tellin’ you, boy, you’a be in a world of hurt, I can promise you that.”
Here’s the history, according to the old man: Treasure Island is an artificial island, man-made, straight-up landfill stacked and packed together from the bottom of the bay all the way up to sea level. As if it being trash literally wadn’t enough, it gets dirtier, way back with World War II, when the government created the island. The government is God, my old man explained. Invent an island, flood the earth, or feed all its people for a hundred years, it can do whatever it wants. After World War II, them was the days, Daddy said, when the government was really being God. Them jokers was going to outer space and trying to take the world into nuclear winter at the same damn time. The purpose of the island, as far as he could figure, was to store hella nuclear materials and then liberally test them shits without repercussion.
I guess they musta did hella tests, judging by all the problems that’s come to pass, but back in the day it all was swept under the island when the scientists out in Manhattan beat them to the invention of the atom bomb. Not only did they invent the thing, they went and used it twice. While the mushroom clouds was rising over Japan, back on Treasure Island the soldiers got busy puttin’ the leftover nuclear waste in big steel drums and tossing all that mess into the bay.
Sometime later—Daddy didn’t know exactly how long later, but he said it coulda been months, coulda been years, who knew, not like the authorities put none of this in no book—anyway, researchers eventually concluded that the drums had leaked into the land. How you like that for a treasure hunt? It’s every cancer known to man on that motherfucker and a few new ones you might just discover for your own self.
If you need proof for these claims, Jacqueline, look at the yellow tape that surrounds so much of the island, like a whole hood just been shot up. The tape says in big black letters:
CAUTION. PRECAUCIÓN.
RADIOLOGICALLY CONTROLLED AREA.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
FOR ENTRY CONTACT…
And the real truth of it, according to the old man, is the whole island is polluted. “Ain’t none of it fit for humans,” he told me. “Watch ya’self now.”
**
I couldn’t run to Treasure Island like I could run to regular school. The BART don’t run there. It’s only one bus that goes there, and it picks up at 5:45, 6:45, 7:45, and so on every weekday morning. Folks who work on the island take the early buses, day school students like yours truly get on the 7:45, and all the trips after that is a mystery to me cuz who would come to such a place if they ain’t have to be there to begin with? In the afternoon the buses fill up again with everybody headed back home. I know it’s people who actually live on that mug permanently, and as hard as it is to find housing in the Bay, I ain’t hating. Look, it’s even a long list of wannabe Donald Trumps who’ve went and built penthouses on the highest hill on the island. I seen the skeletons of them shits every day of my semester served there, old empty bones just holding up the air.
Couldn’t catch me sayin’ nothin’ but “yes, sir,”
“yes, ma’am,”
“hello,” and “goodbye” while I was on that island. Spent half my time just trying not to get thirsty. If it wadn’t a perfectly wrapped Snickers, I did not put it in my mouth. If it wadn’t on a test, I didn’t pay it no mind. Not that it was exactly easy to get in trouble even if I had had a mind to: armed guards manned the hallways and building exits. Even our teachers was retired law enforcement, hired to keep us compliant, not to teach us nothin’. And the curriculum they administered and the tests they wrote up was so remedial, designed for illiterate kids and compulsive criminals, that I was usually left with all day to twiddle my thumbs and dream about all the elsewheres open for escape. No wonder Keisha and Free and them had started to play me distant on the Rock soon as I got put out the regular school and sent to the day schoo
l. Back then I figured they was judging me cuz of the situation with the solution, but now I know it was all about that island. Even if they couldn’t say it, they knew and I knew somethin’ about that muthafucka just was not right.
One day I finished my test so fast the teacher took pity on my literacy and let me leave class early. I followed the rules, was courteous, was late a lot but never disruptive, so she told the guards to let me roam the grounds. I was bored with nothin’ to occupy my mind, and you know what they say ’bout idle hands, feet, and other body parts. I wandered into the two-foot-high jungle of weeds and standing water, muddier’n a mug. I was just beyond school grounds. In amongst the low weeds that ran all the way to the water, I peeped everything from broken bongs to shattered pipes, an old shoe someone left behind, its logo ate off by acids, an ancient flip phone bleached winter white by whatever’s in that landfill foundation. I kept going, following the low jungle, watching my step, looking for anything but a weed that was alive. I wondered what but a human and a weed could survive. Wadn’t even no birds flying above. It’s the deadest place I’ve ever been, the other side of the moon is that island. I thought that maybe some rats got scooped up out the trash when they created the island and the rats mighta got buried underground inside the island and maybe they survived and maybe they descendants was right there, making they home right beneath my feet. Maybe gettin’ kidnapped and took across the water and dumped with the trash to make the island had made them super strong. Maybe they was the smartest, toughest, meanest, roughest rats of all and wouldn’t nobody ever know it. Back at home in Rockwood it was a rare thing for me to be idle long enough to daydream. I decided that this was one thing, probably the only thing, that was any good about the island.
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 5