by Jabari Asim
Flukey and Shom came out the door with a swagger.
“Nothing to it,” Flukey said. He tugged his cap over his brow, grabbed his crotch, and spat a neat stream through the gap in his teeth. Cool.
Shom shaded his eyes with his hand, which disturbed me. I wanted to get a good look at them, make sure they were the real McCoy. “Yeah, man,” he said. “Yeah.”
Flukey was about to get on a fast-talking roll. I could tell.
“Shit, man. That dude was all gray and shit. I wondered what did him in. My uncle just got back from Vietnam. He saw stuff like that all the time. Wait till I tell him. Shit, man. That dude was real real dead, wasn’t he? I could not be like Burk, man. I could not do that stuff all day. That shit’s got to make you strange. I bet that’s why his woman left. And the way it smells in there? Man, a dead body, dude. Square business dead. Maybe he was murdered, wouldn’t that be wild? Just whacked, man, bumped off, killed, electrocuted or something.”
He spat again. “Man oh man. Dude was dead sho nuff.”
Shom said nothing through all of this. He didn’t even gloat or call me a punk. We turned off on our street, and Flukey headed up to Labadie Ave., where he lived. Shom stopped me before we mounted the steps. “Don’t tell anybody where we’ve been,” he warned.
I snorted. “You mean where you’ve been. I haven’t been anywhere.”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
He was quiet all evening. He hardly ate anything at dinner. At one point he looked up from his plate and glared at me. “What are you looking at?”
I hadn’t been thinking about him at all. “Huh?” I said. “You must be losing your marbles.”
“Shut up!” Shom shouted. “Always running your mouth! You should just shut up sometime!”
Pop was as confused as I was. “What’s with you, Superstar?”
Mom came to Shom’s rescue, like she always did. “You all leave him alone,” she said. “He’s obviously not feeling well.”
Mom was right. Shom took a long bath, although that wasn’t unusual. Sometimes he bathed two or three times a day, until the hot water ran out. He stayed in so long, however, that I was beginning to suspect he had drowned. Immediately I regretted that my last words to him had been mean ones. I was relieved when he finally emerged, looking thoroughly scrubbed and vaguely troubled in his red plaid robe. He went to bed early, leaving his oatmeal cookies untouched. They stayed on the kitchen table all night, still in the brown paper bag he brought them home in.
While it was strange for Shom to turn in early, I was always in a hurry to get to sleep because I got revenge in my dreams. I undid the day’s disasters and rewrote them to suit my most fervent desires. I had control. Everyone listened to me, and there was no end to my handsomeness. I had a smile that broke girls’ hearts and an effortless style that every boy wished was his own. I had glorious hair and a strong throwing arm and I wasn’t allergic to grass and I never ever had a runny nose. I had contracts to endorse all my favorite snack foods, and every day a truck pulled up outside my mansion to deliver a fresh supply of Bub’s Daddy bubble gum and Fiesta corn chips and Tahitian Treat in frosty glass bottles.
That night I had just slugged a game-winning round-tripper for the home team. I circled the bases to the roar of the adoring crowd. I slapped five with all my teammates and took a congratulatory call from the president, and still the fans stood and applauded. I stepped out from the dugout and tipped my cap to the yelling crowd. I was smiling and blowing kisses and the crowd was yelling and yelling and—
Shom was sitting up in bed and yelling his head off. I rolled over and rubbed my eyes, then clenched them tightly as light flooded the room. Shom was still shouting when Pop came rushing in, followed by Mom. Pop said, “What in the Sam Hill?”
Pop tried to shake him awake, but Shom fought him off. He panicked and struggled until Pop gradually rocked him into something close to serenity. “Hush, boy,” he said gently. “Hush. Hush.”
It should have been my moment. My bed, usually soaked by now, was nice and dry, and Shom’s face was wet with tears. I was cool and collected while he was a mess, his beloved curls tousled and damp, his chest heaving and breathless from all his screaming like a girl. I should have snickered in his face, but I couldn’t because I knew where he had been during that terrible interval, what he’d gone through while I was circling the bases and thrilling my fans. I knew that he’d made his way back to Burk’s, past the round man and down the dark hall to the gray body on the table. Somehow I also knew there’d been an endless row of tables, and an endless row of bodies, that the gray men had gotten up and gone for his eyes.
“I saw zombies,” Shom said softly. “Zombies everywhere.” I should have said, “You’re a punk, you know that?” Instead I moved to his bed, took his hand, and placed it firmly in both of mine. And for once I said nothing at all.
The Genius
“teeth,” she said.
Crispus stepped forward for inspection. He pulled his lips back in an exaggerated grimace, exposing his teeth and gums.
“Aah,” the Grandmother commanded.
“Aah”
“You need to pay better attention to those back ones, young man.”
“I will.”
Placing her palm on the back of Crispus’s head and pulling him close, she sniffed his neck. Detecting no odor, she seemed satisfied.
The Grandmother reached out to touch his hair but reconsidered. “Did Pristine brush and comb that before you left?”
“Yes.”
His mother had in fact groomed the recalcitrant fuzz atop his head, bristling and beating each strand until it joined its fellows in precise, straight-backed majesty. But they seemed to wilt beneath the Grandmother’s relentless gaze, shrinking into cowering corkscrews of impenetrable kink. The Grandmother was not impressed.
“Hmph. You sure can’t tell by looking at it.”
Saturdays went like this: Crispus went to D & E Fine Foods for the Grandmother while his brother Schomburg feasted on Big Mama’s largesse. “Sweets for my sweet, sugar for my honey,” the Grandmother would sing as she spooned a mountain of chocolate ripple ice cream into Schomburg’s bowl. While Shom flexed his dimples and dug in, Crispus marched into the immaculate living room to endure his weekly ritual of humiliation, standing still and aahing on command. No matter how diligently he scrubbed and polished—sometimes until his gums bled—those molars never passed muster. It had to be some cruel trick of the genes. Schomburg could gargle mud and still blind you with his gleaming fangs.
Crispus could hear Shom in the kitchen, the dramatic sigh of satisfaction that followed each slurp, the clink of his spoon against the edge of the bowl. He summoned his courage.
“May I have some ice cream too?”
“You know as well as I do that ice cream’s loaded with sugar. Sugar’s bad for kids with cavities. Start brushing those back ones like you have some sense and we’ll see about getting you some ice cream. Now here’s my list,” the Grandmother said.
Down the block from the house where Crispus lived, Pristine’s brother Orville shared half of a two-family flat with Big Mama. Uncle Frank and his family occupied the upstairs half. Orville had been tutoring Roderick Bates on Saturdays. Their sessions had come about at Big Mama’s suggestion, although Orville had laughed when the idea was first presented to him.
“Tutor the Genius? Big Mama, there’s nothing I can teach that boy—sorry, young man.”
The word boy was forbidden in Big Mama’s house.
Big Mama snorted. “You’re no slouch yourself. Roderick’s teachers all tell him he’s their best student since Orville Warford. Besides, he could benefit from your company. He needs some intelligent conversation.”
Orville grinned. He was long and tall, with the same kind mouth as his sister, Pristine. He had been the best chemist at Tuskegee since Carver himself, graduated at the top of his class. Inexplicably, he came home and took a job teaching high school chemistry.
�
��I like Roderick a lot, you know that. But he’s a phenomenon, a prodigy. You show him a concept one time and you never have to mention it again. He’s a steel trap.”
“Then show him some different concepts, ones that he’s not getting in school. Put all you’ve learned to meaningful use.”
Orville sighed. He’d known that was coming. “Big Mama, I teach kids five days a week. I’d say that’s pretty meaningful.”
“They’re not our kids.”
Orville taught at a white school way out in the suburbs. It was highly unusual—perhaps unprecedented—for a black teacher to find work there, but Orville’s reputation was so outstanding that the white folks had pulled strings to get him. Orville couldn’t resist the state-of-the-art lab and limitless supplies. Students at the high school around the corner had been waiting for new Bunsen burners for two years. The black weekly had recently complained about the tardy equipment. “Thirteen years after Brown,” the editorial said, “and Gateway City’s schools are still separate and still unequal.”
Big Mama had thrown a queen-size fit when Orville told her where he’d be working.
“What about your people?” she had demanded.
“What about science?”
For once, Big Mama had relented. Folks in the family were surprised that she hadn’t given Orville more grief for coming home in the first place. She’d had high hopes for the golden one, as Frank was fond of calling him. Medical school, a doctorate in chemistry, the Nobel Prize—to hear Big Mama tell it, nothing was out of reach. But instead of blazing up into ever-glorious heights, Orville gathered up his awards, citations, and acceptance letters from countless graduate schools and headed back to Sullivan Avenue. He commuted daily from the same bedroom where he’d spent his exemplary youth. Big Mama told nosy neighbors that Orville was unsettled, that he had something to get straight before resuming his extraordinary ascent. More than a decade had passed and Orville was still settling, and that elusive something remained a mystery.
Orville’s prize pupil was not to be found among the privileged young snots of suburbia but a mere two houses away. He had his own theories regarding the riddle of Orville’s stagnation.
Roderick Bates, thirteen, was usually called the Genius, Brains, Professor, or Dilton Doiley, after the lab coat–wearing nerd from Archie comics. For all his legendary skill with solving equations, conjugating verbs, or computing faster than the cash register at Tom-Boy, he had no knowledge of his own origin. He didn’t know who his father was, and his mother had made it clear that she had no interest in discussing the matter. Recently, though, he’d come across an old photo. It showed his mother beaming at her high school prom, in the bloom of beauty. Her date, tall, handsome, and devoted, was none other than Orville Warford. Accustomed to effortlessly juggling limitless columns of figures, young Roderick simply put two and two together. Over weekend discussions of quadratic equations and electrolytic solutions, Roderick watched his tutor and waited. At the end of a demonstration, Orville invariably smiled and asked, “Any questions?”
“Yeah, I got one, should be real easy for you. Are you my father?”
Every Saturday, Roderick imagined springing that one on Orville, but each week he held his tongue. He’d gladly give up everything—his intelligence, his health—to hear a man call him Son. It surprised him how much he wanted it. He was thirteen, too old for primary-grade fantasies. His mom’s love, eccentric and troubled as it was, should have been enough, and he’d been blessed with greater gifts than any other kid he knew. It seemed greedy or ungrateful to want more, but there it was.
He might have gleaned some vicarious warmth from his friends’ dads, but as a natural loner Roderick had few friends to claim. His peers in the neighborhood respected him for the most part, despite his solitary nature. Even the bullies—like Ira and L.B., the twin terrors of Clay Avenue—chose to issue him a free pass. Each had his own reason for going easy on the rumpled wizard in their midst. The twins, for example, had lost their mother to cancer and nourished the fantasy that the Genius would someday discover a cure. The vulgar exception to neighborhood custom was the Decatur clan, whose many dysfunctional members harbored an outsize resentment toward Roderick.
There were eight Decaturs, each meaner than the next. Even La-La, the one girl, loved to mix it up. She was the toughest kid in Crispus’s fourth-grade class, a title she’d claimed by taking on Keith Wiggins. He’d given her a hard shove, which was usually enough to get kids to back down from Keith, a lanky southpaw and a charter member of the PeeWee boxing squad at Herbert Hoover Boys’ Club. La-La was different, as he soon found out. She just grinned and launched a windmill-style offensive that left Keith out cold. The Decaturs had ruled the neighborhood ever since they moved onto Hebert Street about a year ago. Clever kids moved off the sidewalk and hustled to the other side of the street when they saw them coming.
But no one had warned Roderick about the Decaturs. He attended a school for gifted students in a distant community and rarely spent much time in the streets. When he finally did run into them, he was on his way home from the library, lugging a stack of books on ancient Egypt. A misunderstanding of comic proportions resulted. The bottom line, Roderick later told Crispus, is don’t use mummify in a sentence when talking to Bumpy Decatur. He’ll think you’re saying something bad about his mother. The next day, when Roderick’s bus pulled up to his stop at the corner of Prairie and Sullivan, the Decaturs were waiting.
Crispus had been one of a group of gawkers who watched the confrontation from the safety of Randy Pressley’s backyard across the street. They peered through the knotholes in the Pressleys’ privacy fence as the Decaturs stopped Roderick just a few feet beyond the front door of D & E, calmly ripped open his satchel, and began thumbing through his books and papers. Roderick took it all in stride until they came upon what looked like a diary. He broke free from Koo-Koo’s grasp and lunged for it. Darwin, the second oldest Decatur, slapped Roderick with the book, so hard that he fell to the ground. La-La stepped forward and put her foot on Roderick’s chest. Darwin opened the book and made a big show of preparing to read from it. What he saw enraged him. The other Decaturs looked at the exposed pages and had the same reaction. They made Roderick eat a few crumpled sheets, then ripped out the others and tossed them to the wind.
The beating was too ugly to watch. The Decaturs left nearsighted Roderick crawling blindly along the curb, the remains of his glasses crushed and scattered on the sidewalk. He muttered under his breath while trying to scoop stray diary pages from the wet trash floating in the gutter.
When he was sure that the Decaturs were long gone, Crispus crept out from Randy’s yard and helped the Genius struggle to his feet. Roderick leaned against the brick exterior of D & E, huffing and puffing while Crispus dashed along Prairie, grabbing as many of the Genius’s papers as he could. He couldn’t help glancing at a diary entry, and found that he couldn’t make out a single word.
“Tout a été réalisé,” it read, “à l’exception de la façon de vivre.”
“I appreciate the help,” Roderick said. He had two black eyes. Crispus dragged the heavy satchel while the Genius limped home.
“What’s in this satchel, bricks?”
“I’m surprised there’s anything now. Those Decaturs were thorough.”
“See,” Crispus said. “That’s something you should think about doing different.”
“To what are you referring?”
“There you go again. ‘Thorough.’ ‘Referring.’ There must be easier ways to say what you mean. Go on using those big words all the time and you’re just begging for someone to beat you up. It’s like wearing a sign on your back.”
“So I’m supposed to take advice from an eight-year-old?”
“Nine. And look at me. I’m still standing, right?”
“Touché,” the Genius replied.
“Come again?”
“I mean, right on.”
“Now you’re talking…. Your papers? I couldn’t rea
d any of the words.”
Roderick nodded as if it hurt to nod. “They’re French—this week. It’s as good as a code.”
“So that no one can tell what you’re writing.”
Roderick smiled as if it hurt to smile. “Maybe they should call you the Genius.”
“I guess that’s what made Darwin so mad.”
“I guess so.”
The two youngsters reached Roderick’s front stoop. Almost immediately, his porch light winked on. Crispus knew that the Genius’s mysterious mom was watching from somewhere within. Roderick’s back was to his house, so she couldn’t have seen his two shiners.
“Thanks again,” Roderick said. He tried to smile but gave up about halfway through the effort.
“Tell me something, Gen——I mean Roderick. What does it mean? Towta eety realize—something.”
Roderick frowned. “Oh, you mean ‘Tout a été réalisé, à l’exception de la façon de vivre.’”
“Yeah. What does it mean?”
Roderick reached down and took his satchel from Crispus’s outstretched hands.
“It means ‘Everything has been figured out, except how to live.’”
After word of Roderick’s pummeling had wound its way through all the houses on Sullivan Avenue, the Grandmother decided that the Genius would have permanent access to the various homesteads of the Warford clan. From here on, she instructed Ed, Schomburg, Crispus, Lorenzo, and Cassandra (Uncle Frank’s kids), they were to embrace Roderick like a long-lost brother.
“Behold,” Crispus’s father proclaimed when he heard the edict. “The matriarch has spoken.”
“Behold,” said Crispus’s mother, “a man who evidently plans to sleep on the couch.”
Privately, Crispus was thrilled. He sensed a kindred spirit lurking beneath the brilliant misfit’s disheveled exterior.
Big Mama had a talk with Roderick’s mother, Gloria Bates. In all the years of Roderick’s life, Big Mama was one of the few people known to meet face-to-face with Gloria. Crispus occasionally saw Gloria at the window of the house she shared with her only child, or standing just inside the front door clutching her housecoat with her thin fingers as Roderick rambled down the walk. But he couldn’t remember ever seeing her set foot on the front porch.