Autobiography of My Dead Brother

by Walter Dean Myers

  “No, not you,” Sidney said. “I’ve already asked Rise and now I’m asking my man Jesse here. You don’t mind, do you, Jesse?”

  I heard my mouth saying “No, I don’t mind.” I hate when my mouth surprises me like that.

  Chapter 6

  Sidney called my folks and had a talk with them to make sure it was all right for me to go. They said it would be all right, and late Monday night Rise and I were waiting for Sidney to pick us up on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. It was raining, and the slight wind was enough to blow the cheap umbrellas inside out.

  “How come we had to meet him down here?” I asked, pulling the collar of my jacket shut.

  “Can’t have people seeing me dealing with the Man,” Rise said, slightly slurring his words. I knew he was fronting cool.

  “My dad said there used to be a big clock on a jewelry store across the street,” I said, getting away from Rise’s Gollywood act.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Rise looked up and down the street as if he was afraid somebody was watching us. It got me a little ticked, because I didn’t want to deal with his attitude. I couldn’t use his act so I just jammed my hands into my pockets and let it go.

  For some reason I thought Sidney was going to ride up in a police car, but it was a private car. I sat in front and Rise slid in the backseat. Sidney asked if we needed anything to eat, and Rise said no before I had a chance to say anything.

  We drove over the Triborough Bridge, and Sidney asked me how often I went to Queens.

  “I go to Shea Stadium sometimes,” I said. “When they give out free tickets down at the YMCA.”

  “Yeah, that Y is okay,” Sidney said. “Back in the day they used to have political meetings there and everything. That’s where I got recruited for the police department. I was only nineteen.”

  That made sense, because the police were right down the street from the Y. I didn’t know how old Sidney was, but I figured he was twenty-something because he looked young.

  The streets of Queens are darker than the ones in Manhattan and we couldn’t see much. Sidney told us we weren’t actually going to Rikers, which was a jail, but to a place the city ran so that some nonviolent inmates could serve part of their sentence as close to the World as possible.

  “So that’s where Mason is doing his gig?” Rise asked.

  “No, that’s just where the meeting is going to be held.” Sidney glanced up at Rise in the rearview mirror. “Armed robbery is not about nonviolence.”

  We drove in silence for a while, and then Sidney pulled the car over in front of a small brick building. It looked more like a factory than where somebody lived. He cut the engine and then turned halfway around in his seat so he could see both of us.

  “You guys are friends of Mason’s,” he said. “I thought you might talk to him about the difference between armed robbery and homicide. You know what the difference is?”

  “Armed robbery is when you stick somebody up,” I said. “And homicide is when you kill somebody.”

  “What you think, Rise?”

  “I think Jesse got it,” Rise said, still being cool.

  “The thing is,” Sidney said, “that it’s not so different on the ‘doing’ side. You walk in with a gun and you’re thinking about armed robbery and the getaway. Then something happens—your buzz gets freaky or the guy you’re trying to take off gets jumpy—and you move your finger a half inch and somebody’s dead. Not much difference there. A half inch, a second one way or the other, a twitch.

  “But on the other side, the results side, there’s a big difference. All of a sudden there’s somebody lying on the ground with his life oozing away. And when you get caught, you’re facing twenty-five years to life in New York. That means you’re gone for twenty years if you behave yourself. And guess what—you don’t recover those years. You don’t come back and start all over. You’re twenty years behind the rest of the world, and the world’s not going to let you forget it.”

  “If you get caught,” Rise said.

  “Like Mason.” Sidney smiled. “Like Mason. So maybe you can tell him the difference so he can pull back from doing anything more to that bodega owner.”

  “You think he was the one who got the place firebombed?” I asked.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Sidney said. “But I do know that seven to ten for armed robbery gives you a chance. You get twenty years and the plate’s empty. You know what I mean?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  Sidney didn’t wait for Rise to answer. We got out of the car, and he rang the bell in front of the house. The man who answered the door was heavy, with a big, sad-looking face that almost smiled when Sidney introduced us as his friends.

  We were taken to a room that had a couch against one wall and two overstuffed chairs on the side walls. There were lamps on the end tables near the couch. On the far wall, next to a door, was a television. The wire was on top of it. There was one window. It was slightly open, and the light-green curtains moved away from the bars when the wind blew. Sidney told us to have a seat and relax.

  “All that talk was supposed to be for us,” Rise said when Sidney had left. “We were supposed to be like all impressed and everything about how scary the slam was and how everybody was going to get caught. He looks like a brother and tries to sound like one, but he’s still the Man. You can put in my book that when the Man was dealing lies, I was real-a-lizing what he was trying to put down. You got that?”

  “Yeah, I got it.” I thought Sidney was okay, but I didn’t want to deal with Rise.

  We sat there for a while and I was getting a little nervous. Maybe Rise was right, that if the guys on the block knew me and him were dealing with Sidney, it could be a problem that they wouldn’t trust us anymore. One of the things about the hood was that there was this anxious bit with the cops. Everybody knew we had to have cops around so the thugees wouldn’t rule, but we had to be all like “don’t be in my face with it” at the same time.

  But Rise’s play had got to me. He was like slipping into this whole role thing and I didn’t know how to handle it. Sidney was trying to do Mason a solid, and Rise was dealing as if it was all some kind of trick bag. It came to me that maybe what Rise was doing was putting marks in the air, the way I did on paper, trying to do a self-portrait that I would believe and copy. What I was thinking, not deep but bubbling along the surface of my mind, was that when I put my marks down on paper, lines and shades and figures, I was looking for what was the truth behind the real thought he was keeping. That’s what I was thinking at the same time I was thinking that writing and drawing was what I did and I wanted to get to it even if it was on the back of Rise’s wagon. At least that’s what I was thinking until the door opened and Mason came in.

  Chapter 7

  Mason was limping as he came through the door. He went quickly to one of the single chairs, barely glancing at Rise and me. He picked up a magazine on the arm of the chair and started thumbing through it, pretending to ignore us. Rise plugged in the television and clicked it on with the remote.

  It was late Monday, and the sports channel Rise had turned on was going over the day’s baseball games. There was a clock on the wall over the set, and I could see the sweep hand move over the face of the clock in slow motion. I hadn’t been nervous before Mason came in, but as soon as he sat down I started having trouble breathing.

  He was in street clothes and perped down, with his pants hanging low on his hips and his sneakers open.

  “So I see you keepin’ on,” Rise said, pulling at his crotch.

  “See you and Jesse out here pimping for the Man,” Mason said. “What he tell you to say? Because I know that’s all you got in your heads.”

  “Nobody tells me what to say.” Rise rolled his eyes toward Mason and hunched his shoulders forward. “Nobody tells me nothing!”

  “Yeah, Calvin said you trying to bark like a big dog.” Mason closed the magazine. “But you still come in here with your tail between your leg
s and sniffing on that cop’s hind parts.”

  “You hear about the bodega being firebombed?” I asked. I heard my voice shoot up and gulped while I tried to calm it down. “It was really messed up.”

  “Yeah, I heard it. That’s why they bring you in here? To see if I ordered it?”

  “What you going to order from Iron City?” Rise asked. “Somebody did you a favor and you don’t even appreciate it. That’s what I think.”

  “That’s all you supposed to think, chump.”

  “Chump? You the one eating boiled hot dogs and scrambled eggs. I’m the one going home tonight,” Rise said.

  “You got a lawyer?” I asked.

  “Kelly. Black dude acting like he wish he was white.”

  Mason picked up the magazine again. “I ought to represent myself.”

  “So you could just walk out now?” I asked.

  “Naw, man. They got dogs and locks on everything. You ain’t walking from here. That’s what they want me to do. You know, cop a sprint so they come after me and light me up. They ain’t letting me out. I’m too dangerous, man. They get me on the street, they don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the whole thing right there. They want some chumps they can control.”

  The Red Sox were on the screen, and there was a fight after the pitcher hit some guy with a pitch in the back of his legs. We watched the fight awhile and I began to realize I was freaking out a little. I didn’t like being in the room.

  “S-S-Sidney said—” I was stuttering. “Sidney said that if you did order the firebombing you ought to cool it, because if somebody died you would get homicide.”

  “They can give you anything they want to give you,” Mason said. He hunched forward, and his shoulders shook a little before he went on. “They got everything on their side. They want to plant some evidence on you, they do it. They got the power in here, and they jacking up people on the street.”

  “You got your manhood and that’s all you need.” Rise stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankles.

  “What you know about anything?” Mason asked. “All you know is what you heard. I’m out here in the war. You see this place? This ain’t about what you seen on TV. This is the Big Keep.”

  “Still doesn’t make any sense bombing the bodega and risking twenty years in jail,” I said, trying to calm things down.

  “Not when the dudes who are supposed to be watching my back are running with the Man,” Mason said. “I sent out a message for the Counts to talk to the bodega dude, and all I got back is static. What’s that about?”

  “You in the slam and we’re in the World,” Rise said. “You don’t send out no messages, you send out requests. You know what a request is?”

  “Yeah, I’m hip to what you’re saying.” Mason stood up, and Rise stood up to face him. “What you saying is that you’re Superman. Ain’t that right? Faster than a speeding bullet. Leaping tall buildings and whatnot. Ain’t that right? Ain’t your black butt faster than a speeding bullet, Rise?”

  “I take care of myself,” Rise said. His voice sounded less sure.

  Mason took a step toward him and then another until they were no more than inches apart. I could see Rise’s chest move as he breathed. It seemed right to say something, but my throat was dry.

  Mason leaned close so that his mouth was next to Rise’s ear. When he spoke it was like a whisper, raspy and low. And scary.

  “I ain’t got nothing to lose, man. They got me in here, and anything they want to do with me, they can swing it. Anything they want to pin on me, they can do that, too,” he said. “But the Counts are my peeps, and if you think you stepping into my shoes, you wrong. You just think about what you’re hearing tonight. When you thinking about standing up against me, just remember that the only one of us that got something to lose is you because I don’t care about a thing. Life don’t mean nothing to me.”

  Mason turned slow and walked to the door he came in. He didn’t say “so long” or anything, just left.

  Rise said something. The last part of the sentence was “out of here” and he started to leave. My legs felt weak, and I sat down and took a deep breath. I asked him to wait a minute and he did.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  When we were going past the police sitting at desks in the next room, I noticed that Rise was shaky too.

  In the car headed back to Harlem, we were all quiet. Sidney said he knew a place where we could get some burgers and drinks, but me and Rise both said no.

  “We could eat them in the car if you don’t want to be seen with the Man,” Sidney said, smiling.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  Rise didn’t say anything.

  We dropped Rise off on 125th Street, and I said okay when Sidney asked if I wanted him to take me up to my block.

  “What do you think of Mason?” Sidney asked me as he parked the car.

  “He’s different,” I said. “He’s like a different kind of guy.”

  Sidney looked at me. “That’s maybe the best description I’ve heard of people like him,” he said. “He is a different kind of person. It’s as if there’s a line out there someplace, and people like him cross it, and we don’t know them anymore.”

  “I guess.”

  I went upstairs and my mom was on the phone. Sidney had called on his cell phone and told her I was coming up. I said I was tired and going to bed, and she asked me if I had had a good evening.

  “It was okay,” I said.

  Rise called before I fell asleep.

  “I might get you to make me a cape,” he said. “Maybe I am Superman. Might as well be, huh?”

  I said I guessed so, just to get him off the phone. I lay in bed for a long time thinking about seeing Mason and watching him and Rise push up on each other. What I realized was that I didn’t know what was going on with them.

  Chapter 8

  I spent three afternoons drawing on some old comic-book paper I had bought on Canal Street. The paper was a little curled on the edges, but I taped it to my drawing board and put in the boxes that I wanted. The thing to do was to put the boxes in and then draw the comics so that they came out of the boxes whenever I wanted them to look more dynamic.

  I did them all in pencil and then inked a few of them just to show Rise what they would look like. They came out really good, and I was glad I had done three complete pages before taking them over to him.

  “What’s this scene?” he asked.

  His grandmother was sitting at the head of the table, smiling. She didn’t remember who I was anymore, and I felt sorry for her, but she spooked me out a little with her smile.

  “You remember that birthday party you had and somebody hung up a piñata?” I asked. “And your father came over?”

  “Yeah, and he picked you up and he didn’t pick me up,” Rise said.

  “What?”

  “I remember that party. That was, like, my first real party. I was all excited and everything because Pops came over. I see you didn’t put him in,” Rise said. “That’s good, because that’s the way I felt, too. No, maybe I didn’t feel that way then, but later … you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said, not really knowing what he was talking about. “Then here was where we used to go downtown to Morningside Park. You remember that?”

  “Now that you got it all drawn up I do.” Rise straightened the paper. “All that stuff is somewhere in my head, but I can’t bring it up the way you do. How you remember all this stuff, man?”

  “So I think I’ll clean the living room,” his grandmother said.

  “No, that’s all right, Grandma.” Rise patted his grandmother’s folded hands. “It looks good from when you cleaned it this morning.”

  “Dr. Craft loves a clean living room,” she said, still smiling.

  She got up and took the bottle of dishwashing liquid off the sink and headed toward the living room. Rise went to the door and called his grandfather. He said that his grandmoth
er was cleaning the living room again. Then he came back to the kitchen and started looking over my drawings again.

  “You got to put in us becoming blood brothers,” he said. “But make the knife real big.”

  “Dramatic.”

  “Yeah, yeah. This is all tight. You got that art thing going on good.”

  “Your grandmother going to be okay?”

  “I guess so,” Rise said. “I’m going to be looking for my own place soon. Then when I move they can set up a little place for her to sit in the daytime. She’s always talking about fixing up a regular parlor or something.”

  “You got the money to pay rent?”

  “Money ain’t no big thing.” Rise inhaled deeply through his nose. “I been talking to some people about some business. Maybe even get the Counts in on the action. I haven’t got it all figured out yet.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “I don’t want to lay it out cold,” Rise said, still looking at the drawings. “You going to finish these? Put color on them and whatnot?”

  “First, I’m going to do them over in pencil, then decide which ones I want to keep,” I said. “Then when I finish the whole layout—”

  “Then you tighten it up with color and shading.”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah, I can dig that. That’s me and you playing in front of your house and that’s Moms—what’s she doing?—calling me—no! That’s when that dude was driving backward down the street!”

  “I knew you would remember that,” I said.

  “And Moms was standing there screaming and you and me almost got wasted. If that dude hadn’t hit that light pole, he would have messed up about eight or nine of us.”

  “At least,” I said.

  “This means a lot to me,” Rise said, “these pictures.”

  He said he was moving on, sliding up the scale, and having some ink on his days was hip. “It’s like the Man said, if you ain’t in the book, you come and you go and you ain’t never been.”