“Is the old man homeless?” Mom asked.
“He says that nobody is homeless,” I said. “There are just some people away from their homes. But I guess he’s away from his. I don’t know if he has a regular place to live.”
“Does he drink?”
I looked over at Mom. She was cutting up tomatoes to go on the salad. She chopped fast, with both hands on the knife. “I don’t know if he ever drinks, but I never smell liquor on him.”
“Do you get close to him?”
“Close enough to hear him,” I said. “But he doesn’t bother me and Loren or touch us. I know what that means.”
“I didn’t say he touched you.” Mom put the knife down. “I was just wondering how you came to be friends.”
“We’re not really friends, but he’s interesting,” I said. “He knows things that I want to know about.”
“Sometimes knowing a lot isn’t that useful,” Mom said.
She went on talking about a girl she had gone to school with who had been very smart but got messed up because she fell in love with the wrong boy and they got into trouble together. It surprised me for her to say that. It surprised me because we were using the same words, how a person knew something, but we were meaning different things.
We finished making the hamburgers, and Mom asked me if I wanted to eat right away or wait to see if Ty and Reuben would be home. I said I would wait and we put the food in the refrigerator.
In my room I imagined the smart girl Mom had mentioned. Being smart like that wasn’t what I had meant, but I couldn’t come up with the right words. I thought Mr. Moses knew things, things that were so deep inside you that maybe you didn’t know them yourself, but he did. He knew about people and what was going on inside of them. I wondered: If I knew all that stuff, if I had been learning more and more about it and got old and stored it up, what would I do with it? Would it be something wonderful, or would it be heavy in my head all the time and wearing me down?
Loren called.
“I got grounded,” he said. “For calling Africa.”
“Africa?”
“I got the number of Sessi’s aunt,” Loren said. “So I called her to see if the cell phone could call that far. I told my mom, and she grounded me and the phone.”
“You tell her you saved Mr. Moses’ life?” I asked.
“No!” I could hear Loren running to tell his mom that he had saved Mr. Moses’ life with his cell phone.
We went to Harlem Hospital, on 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Each time the woman downstairs said he was okay. On Thursday, though, she said he had been discharged.
That was good, because I wanted to see him again. I wanted him to see Loren again so I could tell him it was Loren who called for the ambulance. I would tell him we could have gone downstairs and called from my house, but the way it happened was that Loren, my friend, made the phone call, and I was proud of that.
We went to the park on Friday and on Saturday, but Mr. Moses wasn’t there. We went down to Harlem Hospital Saturday afternoon after the Mets game and I asked if I could get his address, and the lady said a grown-up would have to make that request.
“And you’re a long way from being grown, young man,” she said.
“That’s true,” Loren said, “but I’m his father.”
I asked Ty to call and he said no. I said he was a turkey, except I didn’t say it out loud.
Monday morning. I could smell breakfast cooking and went out and saw that Mom and Ty were in the kitchen.
“You want something to eat?” Mom asked.
Mom looked calm, and so did Ty. Mom had on her Sunday dress, and I thought maybe they were going downtown. I sat down next to Ty, and Mom took two eggs out of the carton, cracked them one at a time into a bowl, and started scrambling them. I’m the only one in the house who likes scrambled eggs, so I knew they were for me.
“Where you going?”
“To take care of some business,” Mom said. She put on a smile and looked over to where Ty was sitting.
We all ate, and then Mom kissed me on the forehead, which I hate when she does, and she and Ty left. She asked me to stay home until they got back.
I figured it had something to do with Ty and it didn’t seem like Mom was upset, so I figured it was okay. There wasn’t much on television except some people selling machines to make your stomach smaller and some other people selling barbecue grills, and some cartoons. I started watching the cartoons.
I must have fallen asleep—I was tired a lot recently—and woke up when I heard Mom and Ty talking outside of my room. They had just come in, and Mom was saying to Ty that maybe he should be more careful in choosing his friends.
“They’re just a bunch of punks!” Ty said.
“Honey, let it go,” Mom said. “It’s settled.”
“It’s not going to happen again,” Ty said. “You can bank on that.”
“Four hundred dollars is a lot of money,” Mom said. “And it’s money we don’t have.”
I went out into the kitchen. Ty had on his wanna-be face, and Mom was getting uptight.
“Hi,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ty answered gruffly.
“Ty, you want to go down to Thirty-fourth Street with me? I need some towels and—”
“No,” Ty said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Your brother made some foolish bets,” Mom said. “And he couldn’t cover them.”
“Bets on what?” I asked, looking dead at my brother.
“Baseball games, basketball games, whatever,” Ty said. “I blew it, and Mom got the money together and paid it off. I’ll pay it back.”
It wasn’t true. None of what Ty said was true. Mom started cleaning the stove, putting spray cleaner on the porcelain sides and talking about how Ty had to choose his friends more carefully. Ty glared at me, and I glared right back. Mom needed to believe him. I didn’t.
“Even if you’re doing the right thing, you can be hurt by people who aren’t.” She took the plates off the table and put them into the hot, soapy dishwater.
“There are vipers out there, man. You just don’t know who they are,” Ty said.
“That’s true, son,” Mom replied.
But everything they were saying was wrong. They were making it up, but at the same time they weren’t making it up. They were hoping that it was real.
Ty said he was going to go to the library. He kissed Mom and thanked her for helping him out. He asked me if I wanted to go with him.
“No.”
When he had gone, Mom sat down. She still had the dishrag in her hands.
“Sometimes when you’re dealing with family,” she said, “you have to understand that family is more important than anything else you have. I sure hope you don’t ever get into any trouble, but if you do, all of us will be there for you, the same as we were there for Ty.”
“How do you know what he’s saying is true?” I asked. “You want it to be true and you make it easy for him to say it, but how do you know it’s true?”
“I know because I have faith in your brother!” Mom said. “The same as I have faith in you, David. Don’t you think I have faith in you?”
“Yes, I do.”
I knew that Mom wanted things to be different, and maybe Ty wanted things to be different, too. I thought they hadn’t talked it over or anything, they had come to an agreement about what they wanted to say was the truth.
Maybe it was okay for Ty, but I knew it was just going to hurt Mom more. I didn’t think Ty was gambling. I thought he was messing with drugs.
Mom asked me to go shopping with her. We went down to 125th Street and walked across town, stopping in a few stores. I asked her what we were going to buy.
“I’m looking for some nice material to make drapes for the living room,” she said.
“The sewing machine is fixed?”
“No, but if I buy the material, maybe that will inspire me to get it fixed,
” she said. “When I was a girl living with my parents on St. Nicholas Avenue, my mother would make something new every Christmas. Sometimes it would be new curtains, sometimes she’d make a tablecloth. It was her way of announcing that the season had arrived.”
We stopped in the Studio Museum store and looked around at the books, and Mom bought some note cards. When we came out, the sun was hot and nice against my skin.
“I don’t know if Tyrone is still in trouble or not,” Mom said.
“I thought you paid off the money he owed.”
“When people get into debt like that—when they owe money out and people threaten them about it—it’s usually more serious than just dollars changing hands.”
“So what do you think the problem is?” I asked. I remembered how hard she had been trying to believe Ty.
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “I hope I’m just an overly worried mother. What do you think?”
“Sometimes we want things to be all right,” I said.
“Good,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard what I had said. “But you keep your eyes open anyway. All right?”
“Sure.”
We walked all the way across 125th Street and looked in about ten stores without buying anything else. It was as if we were on a minivacation, and I didn’t say anything more about Ty.
We took the A train back up to 145th Street and walked down the hill to the house. On the way upstairs Mom said that Loren’s mom had called her just to talk. She didn’t say anything about me hitting Loren in the nose.
“I think she just wanted to chat,” Mom said.
“That’s just the way Loren is,” I said. “When something happens and he wants to get past it, he just talks about something else. He’s probably got a gene from his mother or something.”
Mom started saying something about how people learn things from their families as she opened the door. Soon as she got it open, she stopped talking and kind of gasped.
When I looked past her, I saw that the kitchen was all messed up. There were broken dishes on the table and on the floor, and the wall calendar was torn with part of it still hanging from the nail.
“Reuben?” Mom called softly.
“You want me to get the police?”
“Wait,” she said. “Reuben?” she called louder.
The door to Mom’s bedroom was closed, but we could hear noises coming from it. It sounded like the radio. I took a step toward the door and Mom stopped me. Then she took my hand. When we pushed the door open, we could hear the radio, and the crying. Reuben was lying on the bed. He was all curled up in a tight knot, and his hands were over his face. The blanket was lying across his legs.
Mom glanced around the room and then moved the blanket away to look under it. Then she pulled it over his shoulders.
“Reuben, is everything—Can I do anything?”
He didn’t answer, just kept crying. It was like he wasn’t crying out of himself but was crying into himself. That’s how soft it was. His body was shaking, too, and I began to shake a little bit and I could feel I was going to cry.
I followed Mom back out to the kitchen, and she sat down at the table and took two really deep breaths. There was cold water in the refrigerator, and I poured some into a glass and gave it to her.
“What do you think is wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes were already teary. “Just give me a minute to figure out what to do.”
We sat in the kitchen for a while. I thought about picking up all the broken glass, but I thought I would wait to see what Mom was going to do.
“Do you think we should bring his medicine to him?” I asked.
Mom shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.
I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. Reuben had been bad before, but this time it looked worse than ever. I had thought, up on the roof with Mr. Moses, that I was closer to Reuben. Or that he was closer to me and things might be going in the right direction. Maybe I had made that up, the way that Mom had made up solving Ty’s problems.
The clock on the wall ticked loudly, slowly. Outside somebody was passing by with a radio, and I could hear the music get louder and then softer as they passed.
When the knock on the door came, I jumped. Mom looked at me and then sat up straight in her chair like she was getting ready to face whoever was knocking. I thought it might be the police, that somebody had heard Reuben breaking up stuff and called them.
I opened the door. A young white woman with dark hair stood in the hallway.
“Is this the Curry household?” she asked.
“Honey, whatever you have, we don’t want any today,” Mom said over my shoulder.
“I’m an intern from the Amsterdam News.” The white girl spoke quickly. “And I just wanted to get your reaction to the settlement of the Matthew Henson Community Project.”
For three days Reuben didn’t get out of bed except to go to the bathroom. For three days Mom brought his food in to him and put it on the table next to the bed, but he didn’t eat it. When she said we had to watch him, I asked her why but I already knew the answer. She was afraid he was going to hurt himself. I was afraid too.
One morning I went into the bathroom and there were drops of blood on the sink. My heart started beating like crazy, and for a while I couldn’t catch my breath. But then I remembered I had seen blood drops on the sink before. I didn’t want to tell Mom. Not just yet, not until we saw what was going to happen with Reuben.
The bathroom door locked, and I figured that’s why Ty took his drugs in there. I wondered if he looked at himself in the mirror when he used the needle. I wondered if your own image could frighten you. Ty was asleep and snoring loudly when I returned to bed after seeing the blood. Lying in the darkness, I realized I felt better knowing that it was Ty hurting himself than Reuben. I had seen junkies on the street before, had even brushed by them in the hallway. It was something bad I knew about. Reuben was still far away from anything I could relate to.
The story about the Henson Project was in both of the papers I read. There was the picture of Mr. Kerlin, a big cigar sticking out of his mouth, saying how he had decided to make a major contribution to the community.
“What he’s done,” Mom said, “is make a lot of money by selling his building to the city. The Henson Project is going to lease it from the city instead of buying it.”
“And what’s going to happen to Reuben?” I asked.
Her mouth tightened up and she shook her head. “He dumped your father the same way he dumped the building,” she said after a while.
“That just stinks,” I said.
“It’s his right to do what he wants with his building,” Mom said. “He owned the building and he had the right to sell it. If I owned the building and could have made a lot of money on it, I don’t know if I would have done anything different.”
“I think you would have,” I said.
Mom watched Reuben at night. She got him to drink water and juice, but he still didn’t eat any regular food. He just kept lying in the bed, mostly with the lights out.
We took turns watching Reuben. Mom wanted one of us to be in the house all the time to look in on him. Ty said he didn’t want to watch Reuben because he was a cripple. He didn’t say it in front of Mom, but he spit the words out to me when we were in our room.
“I know you’re using,” I said. “I saw the blood from the needle on the sink.”
“You don’t know nothing, jerk!” he sneered.
“Tell me about how I’m a jerk, Ty,” I said to him. “Tell me how I’m a punk and Reuben’s a cripple and all the dudes on the street are punks.”
“Maybe if I kicked your butt you’d understand why you’re a jerk,” he answered, half standing.
“Yeah, maybe.” I stood and faced him.
He came over and pulled his fist back as if he was going to punch me, forced out a phony laugh, and grabbed his jacket. I knew he was headed for the streets.
Lo
ren said he would come over and help watch Reuben when it was my turn. “We can watch him together and play chess.”
“He’ll be okay,” I said. “I just got to watch him a little bit when Mom goes out shopping or down to the Social Security office.”
I didn’t want Loren to see Reuben lying on the bed. Loren was my best friend in the world, but it still made me feel bad for him to see how Reuben looked. When he was awake he would be very still, his eyes almost shut but not quite. If I came into the room, I wouldn’t know if he saw me or not. But when he was asleep it was worse. He would be twitching and moving his arms around as if something was coming at him. Sometimes he would make whimpering noises, like a child. I didn’t want Loren to see any of this, and I didn’t want him to talk about it either.
I didn’t think things could get worse, but they did. On Thursday night I woke up and heard Mom yelling. It was three minutes past four o’clock.
“Reuben, please!” Mom was yelling.
I got my pants on as fast as I could and ran into the kitchen. Mom was in her bathrobe, and Reuben had his clothes on and was tying up his shoes.
“Where can you go this time of night?” Mom asked. “Where can you go? Please!”
I ran back to my room and turned on the light. I shook Ty but I couldn’t get him up. He smelled bad, like he might have been drinking. My old sneakers were in front of the closet, and I got them on just as I heard the front door close.
“Don’t go after him,” Mom said, as she passed me. “I’ll get dressed and we’ll get a cab.”
“You know where he’s going?”
“No,” I heard her call.
There was no way we would find him if we waited for Mom to get dressed. I grabbed a shirt and went out the door and down the stairs.
When I got down to the stoop, I didn’t see him. It was rainy and cold and dark, and the streets were almost empty.
“Hey! Boy!”
Across the street there was a couple standing near the street lamp. The man was pointing toward the corner near the grocery store.
I looked and didn’t see anything, but I ran across the street anyway. My sneakers weren’t tied but they didn’t fall off. When I got to the corner, I looked down the street and saw Reuben walking and moving his hands like he was talking to somebody. I walked faster but stayed a little way behind him. When I got kind of close, I stopped and tied my sneakers.
The Dream Bearer Page 10