There You Are

by Morais, Mathea

  “God, I love this town,” he said.

  He stopped at the light on the corner where Talayna’s Pizza used to be. Talayna’s opened up just about the same time as Rahsaan’s, and back in the day, Bones used to pick up a pie at least three times a week. He never thought it would close. Now it was a coffee shop with Wi-Fi and wood tables made to look like trees.

  Bones pulled into the back lot of Rahsaan’s so early that Fred wasn’t even there yet. He chuckled as he unlocked the door. He could probably count on one hand the times he’d beat Fred to work.

  The darkness of the back of his store was like his own face. He didn’t need lights to see the wiry hair of his eyebrows, the heavy flesh of his cheeks, the stiffness of his beard. Likewise, he knew there was a rack of 45s to the left of the door, a long row of tapes to the right. Behind those were the boxes of rolled-up posters stacked like matchsticks. Still, something felt strange and made him flick the switch flooding the storeroom with light. In the corner, he saw a blue sleeping bag and inside it a sleeping body, neither of which were part of the original design.

  Whoever had trespassed so willfully on his storeroom floor was unmoved by the bright lights and continued to sleep peacefully. When Bones got closer he saw dark eye shadow smeared and stuck in the creases of his closed eyelids, painted mouth slack, a small circle of drool on his pillow. Adam. With his home pillow, Bones thought. Pillowcase with flowers on it and shit. Sleeping bag straight from sleep-away camp. Bones knew the boy should be getting up, getting ready for school. According to his mother, and his boyfriend Marcus who also worked at Rahsaan’s, Adam hadn’t been home in days.

  “Hey,” Bones said and gave Adam’s shoulder a nudge. “Hey, wake up.”

  Adam groaned at first, then his eyes flew wide.

  “Time for school,” Bones said.

  Adam sat up nervously. “Hey Bones.”

  “Umm-hmm. Now that I found you, you know you gotta go home,” Bones said.

  “Can’t,” Adam said.

  “What you can’t do is keep on sleeping on my floor and making folks who love you worry.”

  “She worries anyway.”

  “Shouldn’t she?”

  Adam slid his thin, bare legs out of the sleeping bag and picked up a pair of black leggings that were next to his pillow. That’s when Bones saw it. His Walther pistol. It had been underneath the leggings.

  “What the fuck are you doin’ with my gun?” Bones said.

  Adam didn’t answer.

  Bones rushed over and grabbed the gun. “What’re you doin’ with my gun, Adam? Plannin’ some crazy-ass white-boy school shooting?”

  “God, no,” Adam said.

  “What then? Going to kill yourself or somethin’?”

  In the quiet of the basement, Bones heard Adam swallow back a sob, saw his skinny shoulders start to shake. Bones’s mind was muddled.

  “Alright, alright,” he said. “You don’t gotta go to school. You can stay here one more day, but then you gotta go home.”

  Adam kept his face turned toward the wall and Bones remembered that commercial he’d seen. The one where celebrities told young gay kids that things get better and so he said, “It won’t always be this way. Take it from me, I know. You’ll be grown before you know it, be able to make your own decisions, do your own thing.”

  Adam turned around. Tears ran with his makeup down his pale cheeks. “I’m not crying because kids bully me at school, or because my mom doesn’t know I’m gay, Bones,” he said. “Shit, that I’ve been dealing with that my whole life. I’m crying because you’re closing the goddamn store.”

  “You tryna kill yourself over Rahsaan’s?”

  Adam took a deep, frustrated breath. “Bones, Rahsaan’s is the only place I can go where it doesn’t matter if I am straight, gay, boy, girl, black, white. And this is St. Louis. That shit matters everywhere. Especially at my shitty, white, all-boys private school.”

  “I know that’s right,” Bones said.

  “No, you don’t, Bones. You know how that kid got killed in Ferguson?”

  Bones nodded.

  “At my school, they call him the n-word, except they actually say it, and they say he deserved to be killed. They say that they hope other n-words get killed too. And I sit there, I sit there and I think about Mr. Nance, and I think about Marcus, who I love more than anything in this world, and I say nothing.” He was sobbing now, the words barely making it out beyond his throat.

  “Slow down, Adam,” Bones said. “Take a breath.”

  Adam blinked hard and swallowed. “And now, you’re taking Rahsaan’s away, making it about money, making it about you. It has never been about you, Bones. Rahsaan’s is about us. Don’t you fucking know that by now?”

  Bones waited until the echoes of Adam’s yelling stopped bouncing around the room. He swallowed down the bile that rose in his throat. “Rahsaan’s stopped being that place a long time ago,” he said.

  “No, it didn’t.” Adam stood up and walked around the room, his thin feet barely touching the cold cement floor. “If you weren’t so busy feeling sorry for yourself in your office, you’d know.”

  “Adam, can you stop pacing?” Bones said. “And put on some shoes? There’s broken shit in here.”

  Adam stopped and stared at Bones. “You think this is a joke, don’t you?”

  “I don’t think it’s a joke,” Bones said calmly. “I just think you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Adam was still staring at Bones. “Okay, how about this. If I promise not to do what I planned with that gun of yours, if I even promise to go back home, just like this—bad makeup and all, will you work the register for the whole day, like you say you used to? Watch who comes in the door. It won’t only be Mr. Nance, it’ll be Suzie, the girl from the Chinese grocery down at the end of Delmar who loves Coldplay even though her parents punish her for listening to any kind of American music.”

  “Coldplay is British,” Bones said.

  Adam ignored him and said, “Daron, from City Hall up the street, he’s gay but has been married to the same woman for thirty years. Daron loves 70s funk and soul. And Jenny, who goes to Fontbonne and has pink hair and a face full of piercings. We can’t keep a Cure record in here for longer than a day because of her.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “If you promise me you’ll work the register, so you can see that things are as bad as you think they are, then I’ll go home right now.”

  Now it was Bones’s turn to look away. He knew it wouldn’t matter. In front at the register or behind the closed door of his office, nothing was going to change the bottom line. But he gave the boy a crooked half-smile.

  “You got yourself a deal.”

  A wide grin filled Adam’s face and he thrust his small hand out to Bones. But Bones stood up and walked past the extended hand, gathered the boy up in a hug.

  “Go on home,” he said. “Go and see your mama.”

  Adam nodded and walked slowly toward the back door. When he got there, he stopped and said, “She may send me right back—you know, when she sees me like this.”

  “Well, you’ll know where to find me. Right behind the register.”

  Adam wiped his eyes one more time and closed the door quickly behind him.

  Bones sat back on the stool and turned the Walther over in his hands. He pictured Adam sprinting down Melville, his tiny black legginged-legs a blur beneath him, running up them steps to his mama and whatever she may think about him without his yarmulke, make-up smeared on his face, dirt under his fingernails from sleeping on the hard cement floor of the Rahsaan’s Records storeroom.

  He thought about what Adam said and wished it actually mattered. But he knew little Jenny from Fontbonne was not going to get him out of debt buying up his Cure records.

  The back door creaked open again and Bones looked up to see Fred. “Hey there, Dr. Long,” Bones said.

  “Morning, Jim,” Fred said. “Everything alright?”<
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  Bones saw how he must look—sitting alone in the storeroom with a gun in his lap, and he started to laugh, but then he started to cry. He held up his hand to Fred in hopes it might hold back the sobs that shook his whole body, but it was no use.

  Fred stayed frozen at the door and said, “Jimmy, take a deep breath and calm down now. It’s not that bad.”

  But Bones’s sobbing wouldn’t allow for any type of breathing except the kind that choked him.

  Fred walked slowly towards him and said, “How about you put the fucking gun on the floor, then, okay? You are not going out like this. Not with me watching anyway.”

  Bones gingerly lowered the gun to the floor and sat back up. He held his hands up in the air and managed to say, “I wasn’t going to shoot myself, Fred.”

  Fred picked up the gun and put it on the table. “Why the fuck are you sitting in here with it then?” he said.

  “God, it’s too much,” Bones said, wiping his eyes. “I can’t explain, there’s just too damn much.” Bones leaned his head back. He had stopped crying, but his chest continued to heave. “Freddy, man, what’s going to be left when Rahsaan’s is gone? I mean, do you think anyone will remember? Will it even matter that it was here to begin with?”

  Fred dragged another stool over so that the two of them sat face to face in the middle of the room. “I was going to wait, Jimmy,” he said, “but I guess now’s as good a time as any for me to say what I’ve got to say.”

  Bones got up and wiped his eyes, blew his nose in a paper towel, and sat back down on the stool. “Okay,” he said, “lay it on me. Can’t get any worse than shit is right now.”

  Fred hooked his feet on the rungs of the stool so that his long legs were folded into triangles and said, “I’ve been stealing from you, Bones.”

  “What?”

  “For twenty years, I’ve been stealing from you. All in all, I’ve got about $250,000.”

  Bones got up and walked to the other side of the room to put distance between himself and Fred. Then he walked back. “Are you telling me that you stole a quarter of a million dollars from me? How is that possible? I’ve never even made that kinda money.”

  “Well, I didn’t actually steal money,” Fred said slowly. “I stole records. You know, rare shit that sellers brought in, collections belonging to grandparents and dead uncles. Those estate sale boxes that get dropped at the door full of albums? I took ’em from you Bones. Took ’em and sold ’em on the Internet for a whole lotta money to buyers in England, New York, and Japan. Mostly in Japan.”

  “What the hell are you talkin’ about, the Internet? What do you mean Japan?”

  “Japanese cats, they love jazz, Bones,” said Fred. “And, believe it or not, old fucking hip hop. And, they’ll pay more than you’d ever dream for good vinyl.”

  Bones felt like there was a cold, ice-blue fluid revolving in a slow circle through his veins. “How could you do me like that, Fred?” he asked.

  Fred cleared his throat and said, “Bones, do you realize you haven’t given me a raise in fifteen years? My ass could make more money working across the street at Starbucks, except no one’s gonna hire me cause I’m too old. I’ve been working for you for forty years Bones. I’ve been here so long, I can’t work anywhere else. How could I do you like that? Gimme a fucking break, Jim.” Fred scratched his forehead and looked at Bones. “I bet you don’t even know what it is I do here,” he said. “I place the orders. I do the fucking payroll. You don’t do shit but stand around and be Bones. The fact that you didn’t go under twenty years ago is because of me. So I fucking stole records. Records you wouldn’t have even known what they were worth if I had shown ’em to you. Records that probably would still be on the shelf right now. I stole ’em and sold ’em. And now, I got a whole hell of a lot of money.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Bones said, “I’m going to have a fucking heart attack. I’m serious.”

  “No, you’re not, you goddamn drama queen,” said Fred. “You’re not going to have a heart attack, and you’re not going to close the store, either. You’re going to sell it to me.”

  “Sell it to you?”

  “Well, sixty percent of it. We’re going to be partners.”

  Bones stared hard at Fred and said, “You think you know a person, work with ’em for decades and then come to find out they stealing your shit, right out from under your nose.”

  “Did you hear a fucking word I said, Bonesie? You don’t have to close Rahsaan’s.”

  “I don’t understand how you could do it, Fred. I just don’t get it.”

  Fred looked up at the ceiling as if he needed help from God. He placed his hands on Bones’s big shoulders. “Bones,” he said, “I don’t have kids, I don’t have a wife. Shit, I don’t even have a mother anymore. I got Rahsaan’s, my measly damn near minimum wage and a quarter of a million fucking dollars. I’m going to pay off your goddamn debt, you’re going to make me a partner. You still get to walk around in here and be big man, be Bones, and I’m going to make this place profitable. Like it used to be. Like it’s supposed to be. Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”

  Bones was quiet for a moment. “This has been one hell of a morning,” he said. “You have no idea.”

  Fred took his hands from Bones’s shoulders and dropped them to his sides.

  “You mean to tell me, Freddy,” Bones said, “that you made a quarter million dollars selling vinyl on the Internet?”

  “I did.”

  Bones looked around the familiar storeroom that now seemed as if it were a brand-new place. “To Japanese cats?”

  “Japanese cats.”

  “They dig jazz like that?”

  “They do. And Big Daddy Kane.”

  A TEXT CAME THROUGH LATE night and lit up Octavian’s ceiling in Apple-blue light. Octavian rolled over and picked up his phone. Mina Rose. After days of texting, it still did something to him to see her name. Their texts had been measured and careful, allowing for significant spans of time between them. Life going on implied.

  Where do you live?

  She was in Boston.

  You’re in Maine?

  I go to Boston sometimes. I wonder if we ever passed each other on the street and didn’t know it.

  I think we would know, don’t you?

  Yeah.

  Octavian thought about how he could get into his car and see her in three hours. Something about that made his heart race differently. She was still real.

  She had daughters, two of them.

  He taught art. To troubled kids.

  She went on his website and bought three mugs. One sky blue and white, one black with a deep turquoise interior, one dark gray. We drink more coffee than we should, she wrote.

  How old?

  Fifteen and thirteen.

  How old were we?

  When?

  When we got together?

  Not too far from fifteen.

  Is she like us?

  He tasted the honesty of his thoughts on his tongue as if he’d actually said the word us out loud.

  She hides in her room, listens to music and reads comic books… just like us.

  What are you listening to right now?

  Odetta. You?

  About to put on this new Pharoahe Monch

  Soon Octavian was taking his phone out during class to tell her about his students. Like when Brian, a kid with such severe OCD that he wore a new pair of white gloves every day, learned to throw pots. How he wrapped his pristine fingers around the clay and laughed.

  She sent a picture of the cover of a children’s book that the company she worked for had published because she thought he’d like the cover art. But he didn’t look at the cover. He zoomed in on the blur of her fingers holding the sides. Her nails were no longer fake, but they weren’t bitten down either. It was all he’d seen of her since Houston Street and he stared as if he might somehow be able to make out the rest of her.

&n
bsp; Then there was the text that came through late at night that said that Bones was no longer closing the store and she asked if he would still go home. Outside the window next to his bed, the dark leaves that covered up the stars until the wind pushed them aside were beginning to fall. He liked the way his heart felt and liked her words on the phone screen, her address on his Ship To list.

  I’m still going home, he wrote.

  Me too.

  Octavian lay in the dark and tried to picture Mina. Was her hair starting to gray like his? He was wondering if he should ask her when she wrote: Remember that night at Sapphire Lounge, How you told me that the only real part of yourself you had left were your memories with me? I couldn’t admit it then, but that’s the way it’s been for me since I left STL. Is that crazy? Because that was more than twenty years ago.

  Octavian read the text three times and found himself wondering about her eyebrows. He wrote: Not as crazy as the fact that even though we haven’t talked this whole time, you are still the only person on earth who actually knows me.

  Has it always been like this with us, Tave?

  Ever since the 5th grade

  Octavian pressed the send button and put the phone on the bedside table. He lay back down and watched the stars appear and disappear through the leaves before he curled himself around his heart and smiled. He was excited to go home.

  THE STREETS OF FERGUSON were quiet. Octavian saw no signs of reporters or crowds, no signs of riot police or young boys with pants slung low. The voice of the GPS guided him past the somewhat new-looking one-story buildings, which were attached by a single long roof. Octavian wondered why urban planners didn’t at least try to vary the color of paint from one front door to the next, why they didn’t switch up the way the porches were set. Instead, the homes looked like they belonged on the planet Camazotz, from A Wrinkle in Time, where the people were programmed to think with the same external brain, and the children who bounced the ball differently from the others were sent away.