The Planet of Junior Brown

by Virginia Hamilton

  So far Buddy had acted his part to perfection. People noticed him—ticket agents, travelers—with that momentary interest people in cities reserve for one another. In one sidelong glance, they had discerned that Buddy was going someplace. He was black. He looked to be maybe eighteen or nineteen but maybe he was younger. He wore tennis shoes. He had a paper, he was smoking and he was sober. No trouble. Just a black kid going home after working in some kitchen somewhere.

  I am harmless, Buddy thought. I am nothing at all.

  Near the restroom Buddy found the locker where he kept his soap and washcloth. He lifted out the brightly woven knapsack in which he kept all his belongings. Any other time Buddy would have taken longer, the way he liked to. He would have touched the knapsack gently, feeling the bright threads with the tips of his fingers, the way some folks handle old photographs which represent the best of their lives. But tonight he had to hurry. The time was nearly midnight. The morning newspapers were thrown from the delivery trucks by two o’clock. Soon after he would have to be at work.

  One moment Buddy was standing in front of the locker, shoving his knapsack back in it, and the next moment he was gone. He might have melted into the stream of people heading for the subway or he might have gone to line up for a bus. So adept was he at taking on the mood and pace of any group of people, it was hard to tell where he had disappeared to. But he had cleared his mind of everything save the object of his intention. He made no mistakes because he allowed himself no anticipation of trouble. Even when Buddy was in the pay shower, he concentrated solely on the hot water beating down on him and the cleansing aroma of Fels Naphtha soap.

  Afterward Buddy changed into clean underwear, socks and a clean shirt, which he had taken from his knapsack. He rolled up the soiled clothing in the shirt he’d worn before the shower and stuffed it inside his jacket. The whole time he thought how good it was to be by himself. He was lucky he was strong, with no sickness anywhere in him.

  Outside of the Port Authority, Buddy dropped the new pack of long cigarettes at the feet of one of the old drifters and was gone before the man could mumble a thanks.

  Buddy strode eastward, allowing his tiredness to slow him down just a little. He was chilled now after the shower. The weather was quite cold this night and he would have to see about getting himself a warmer jacket, maybe a plaid job with a pile lining. Buddy grinned. He could almost feel the fake fur encasing his arms in warmth.

  Oh, man, that would feel so good!

  Buddy was glad that the night before this one, there had been nobody but himself on his planet in the abandoned building. He had gone to bed about ten and had slept until it was time to go to work. Tonight he would get no sleep.

  Between 59th Street and 102nd Street, Buddy dropped his clothing off at an all-night laundry and stopped at two more planets. Each of the planets had a full house but both Tomorrow Billys were broke. Buddy listened to the story of the second Tomorrow Billy, alert to the Billy’s calm sincerity.

  “The work is drying up,” the young man was saying. “I can’t even pick up a bus boy job anymore. Students are moving in on us, man. I got to feed these kids so I guess I’m going to have to lift more food than I usually do.”

  There was danger in stealing too much, Buddy knew. “How are you for sweaters and stuff?” Buddy asked the Billy.

  “I got nothing left, man, but some long-sleeved polo shirts,” the Billy said. “They not going to keep nobody warm, either. I been thinking about making capes out of the sleeping bags but then I figure the kids would stand out wearing something like that.”

  “All I got is ten bucks,” Buddy told him. “I already give ten tonight to another planet—wait.” Buddy reached inside his jacket, remembering he had concealed the wallet there. For a moment Buddy was afraid he had lost it, but no, he had it. He pulled out the wallet and telling the story about it in one long stream of words, he gave the Tomorrow Billy the whole sixty dollars.

  “Let me write the cat a note,” the Billy said.

  “Yea?” Buddy said. The two stared at one another, their thoughts working over the idea.

  The Billy produced a pen. He took Buddy’s piece of paper and wrote on it:

  We sorry about the bills but we need im ta feed the kittis. So, be cool. You a real dude. We not touch you credit cars. So dig. Thanks.

  A member of the planet.

  Buddy and the Tomorrow Billy studied the note for a long time. It looked fine. There was nothing in it that could give them away. The Billy had an envelope. Buddy addressed it and sealed it, giving it back to the Billy to mail.

  “You got a crowd over where you are?” the Billy asked Buddy. He was a dark-complexioned, tall and thin fellow with soft, happy eyes.

  “Just only two,” Buddy told him. “I got finished with a group of them about a week ago but it took them all that time to figure out how I wasn’t coming back. But they cleared out, finally.”

  Buddy spoke softly. This planet thrived in the busy meat-packing area isolated from the huge industry farther downtown. Refrigerated trucks could be heard all around them. They were in a small, dank warehouse room virtually sealed off from the rest of the enormous building by the use of plasterboard, paint and movable wallboards fixed over the door. Still, the planet wasn’t as safe as it could have been. Buddy and the Tomorrow Billy talked of this for a moment.

  “I already studied it,” the Billy said. “There’s a place down near the Brooklyn Bridge I found out about. We going to make it over there by late Tuesday night.”

  “How will I find you?” Buddy said. He liked this Billy. He wished he could ask him about the things he did on his planet.

  “I can send somebody over about Friday to bring you down,” the Billy said. “I maybe will send you two or three boys besides, if you can take them in.”

  “I can take them in,” Buddy told him. “You do that.” But that was all. His nagging notion that he should be doing more on his own planet he kept to himself.

  “Later,” Buddy said. He was gone, melting from the dark room into the hall. Outside he skirted the trucks. Staying in shadow, he was a black movement under cover of night. Buddy slipped away. By three o’clock he was uptown.

  Buddy stopped once for a cup of coffee at 102nd Street. The coffee tasted foul and left Buddy moody and jumpy. He had walked the rest of the way to his job, reaching the newsstand long after his legs had begun to ache. The stand was a lean-to built on the side of a corner apartment house. There was a food shop and a men’s wear store on the ground floor of the building facing Broadway. The lean-to took up the space against the building around the corner from Broadway, on the cross street. It had a rectangular opening on the side street, like a peepshow, with magazines, pamphlets and digests hanging on all sides and neat stacks of daily papers on its counter.

  With his last strength Buddy heaved bundles of morning newspapers thrown from delivery trucks onto the sidewalk through the side door of the stand. With cold, stiff fingers he knelt down to unwind the wire which held the bundles tight. Buddy felt pleasure in having hands whose strength could untie metal knots.

  The man sitting behind the counter of the newsstand facing the street didn’t turn around. He was Doum Malach, Buddy’s boss. Doum was twenty-four years old and out of college. He had inherited the stand from his father, who had retired. Doum wore his usual long, army surplus coat and a black velvet beret. The outfit looked like the military uniform of some exotic country and gave Doum Malach a look of distinction As far as Buddy knew, Doum belonged to no organization and he made a fair living off the newsstand.

  “If you had some sense, you’d use a wire cutter,” Doum told Buddy. He still did not turn around. “Go on, tear up your hands, they’re good for nothing no how. Hurt your own self, go ahead. Leave a whole town full of crazies with nothing to bleed.”

  Buddy grinned at the back of Doum’s head. “Good morning, Mr. Malach,” he said. “I see you woke up feeling good this morning.”

  “Don’t call me mister, I t
old you. And furtherwise, I haven’t been to bed, clown.”

  “Hey, Doum, you got any coffee?”

  Doum Malach swung around in his swivel highchair. “You got the price of fifty cents a cup?”

  “Come on, man! I haven’t done nothing to you!” Buddy told him, “I had a lousy cup on the way up here and I can’t get the taste out of my mouth.”

  “Up here from where?” Doum said quickly. He stared at Buddy with interest. In the months the kid had worked for him, he could never figure out where he lived or from which direction the kid arrived. Buddy was simply there one minute and gone the next, never giving up a clue.

  “Up from seeing a stick down on 95th Street,” Buddy said evenly. He reached up to get the wire cutter from a tin can on the counter, then dropped to his knees again.

  “You’re a liar,” Doum said. “You’re a secret Olympic swimmer. You a test pilot for the glider corps. Maybe you’re a rock and roll singer that’s lost his voice. Who are you, anyway, clown?”

  “I’m a lost, secret, rock and roll test pilot—hey, come on, Doum,” Buddy said, “gimme some coffee.”

  “Gimme some coffee, gimme, gimme, that’s all you’ve got to say. It’s all anybody’s got to say, just gimme, with nary a thank you or never mind. Didn’t anyone ever tell you, ol’ Buddy, that Don’t Care Don’t Have No Home?”

  Doum fixed Buddy’s coffee in a heavy cut-glass goblet. He made it black, with plenty of sugar, just the way Buddy liked it. The coffee aroma filled the space between them, so much so that Buddy couldn’t tell anymore whether it was Doum he cared about like a brother, or whether he loved most the good coffee Doum fixed for him each early morning.

  “My mother always said that,” Doum told Buddy, handing him the steaming goblet. “She say, ‘Go on, disgrace your poor mother, Mister Doum. And if I never tell you nothing else, I can tell you this, fool, Don’t Care Don’t Have No Home.’”

  Doum threw back his head and laughed. Buddy watched him, sipping his coffee.

  “She throw you out before they give you the grant of money to go to college?” Buddy asked him.

  “Long before that, man,” Doum said. And then he stopped talking. In the light of the street, his face was suddenly veiled. “Why should I tell you something?” he said. “You don’t tell me nothing.”

  “I got nothing to tell,” Buddy said. He could feel himself reaching out, wanting to open up with Doum, but he didn’t dare. What could happen if he told Doum about the planets? Doum wouldn’t know where they were. Even if he found out, he would know to keep his mouth shut.

  You never can tell, Buddy thought. A cat can seem one thing just like I do and be something altogether else.

  Buddy stood to put his goblet down on the side of the counter, right behind the place where Doum kept his gun. He was careful not to touch the weapon; and never questioning the need for it, he wondered again if Doum ever used it.

  Buddy put morning papers in neat piles on the apron outside the counter. He placed new magazines on clips hanging above the counter. He pasted the most startling magazine covers to the sides of the stand, arranging them with all of the calculation of a designer. When he had finished, Buddy stepped back to survey his work.

  Doum sat leaning out on the counter, noting that it had taken Buddy close to forty minutes to arrange the covers. He knew Buddy took his job seriously and he never teased him about the time it took him. “How’s it look this Saturday morning?” Doum said.

  “Looking all right, I guess,” Buddy said. “But somehow, they all are using dark shades for their covers, the browns and greens and stuff and it all comes out kind of gray.”

  “We have us here a period of unrest,” Doum told him, “a time of caution and camouflage.”

  Buddy came back inside and sat on a cushion on the floor to one side of Doum. In that position he could see Doum’s profile. Doum could talk to him without turning away from the street.

  Buddy fixed himself another cup of coffee. “What’s good to read?” he said. He didn’t like to leave the stand before six o’clock. He had himself plenty of time.

  Doum handed him a cheap-looking blue pamphlet with red lettering at the top. The letters spelled the words, Free America, which was a quarterly and high-priced at fifty cents.

  “Shoot,” Buddy said, “give me something with some pictures. I don’t feel like no close reading.”

  “Read the poem on the back,” Doum told him.

  Buddy turned the pamphlet over. He saw an ink drawing under the poem. This black figure was sitting hunched over, a scraggly bird picking at its scalp.

  Buddy read the poem but he didn’t care for it. It was about turning in guns you might own to the cops and the cops wouldn’t ask you any questions about where you got the guns in the first place. Buddy recalled that sometimes the library would let you bring in books you’d swiped or forgotten about and never asked you to pay for them.

  The poem ended in a way Buddy didn’t understand. He questioned Doum about it.

  “Maybe it’s over your head,” Doum said. “You see, it’s caution and camouflage masquerading as irony—you know what is irony?”

  “No,” Buddy said.

  “Well, it’s to say just the opposite of what you mean. Like, the man takes everything you own and you say, ‘thank you very much.’”

  “So what about the poem?” Buddy said.

  Doum explained, “The poet says, go ahead, turn in your guns but come the fight and you don’t have a gun, you going to be dead.”

  “Is that what’s known as propaganda too, sometimes?” Buddy asked him.

  Startled, Doum stared at Buddy. “It’s irony,” he said flatly. “We are all human beings. All men are created equal—that’s propaganda.” Doum grimly smiled and flung about six glossy picture magazines down at Buddy, then turned back to the street.

  Buddy picked a magazine and read it slowly, savoring every clear, colorful picture. He’d love to one day make the kind of photographs you found in magazines. Buddy read and read, paying no mind to Doum, who had started his endless argument with the street.

  Slowly the town turned into the city of light. The street with Doum’s newsstand was beginning to look tired and ragged but not at all dangerous. Often people got off buses and stopped at the stand for their morning paper. Or they came up from the subway off their night work and bought the News. After they’d gone, Doum told them off. “You can’t read, anyway. You wasting your pennies, clown. Tell you anything, you believe sand is brown sugar if it said so in a headline. Mellonhead, nothing but pulp and water for a brain …”

  Buddy was so used to Doum’s fussing talk he could close it out without thinking about it. After a couple of hours of reading, Buddy slipped away. Doum didn’t hear him go. He had been quietly reciting a play he had memorized, acting aloud all the lead roles while saying the minor parts to himself. As the sun rode low over Broadway, Doum was well into the second act, his voice purring words and his hand making delicate drum taps on the butt of his revolver.

  With sunup, Buddy’s night-being seemed to rise out of him. He had climbed into a crosstown bus before he realized he had begun a second life. Buddy found himself on his way to Junior Brown’s house and he gladly gave up his knowledge of darkness for adventure.

  Junior Brown! Man, we can spend maybe two or three hours up in Inwood Park and then cut back to 42nd Street and the library.

  By the time Buddy had planned their day, he was off the bus and on Junior’s street. He recalled how Junior had been late getting home after his piano lesson.

  “Hope he didn’t get into too much trouble,” he said softly.

  Across the street from Junior’s house Buddy rested his back up against a building. He looked questioningly over to the other side of the street and up three stories to the windows of Junior’s apartment. He stayed in that position for nearly two hours. Ever so slowly, excitement left him. His face fell in resignation as he realized Junior wasn’t going to come down. It was then Buddy remembered Ju
nior had told him his father would be home way early in the morning this Saturday instead of Saturday evening, which was the usual time he came home.

  Buddy stayed for a few minutes more; then he turned around, going back the way he had come. This time he walked the long city blocks, stopping to rest when he had to but always continuing on. He didn’t go to Inwood Park, nor did he go to the public library. Half dragging himself, he went to the basement room of the school. The basement hallways were still as tombs as he passed silently along them. In the secret room Buddy didn’t bother to turn on the power of the planets. He stretched out on the floor under them, comforted by them and the steam heat of the room, which warmed the dark. Instantly Buddy’s eyes closed. He dreamed nothing. He slept the whole day.

  On Saturday morning Walter Brown didn’t stand there at the threshold of Junior’s room. Half asleep, Junior knew his father wasn’t there.

  “Daddy,” he said, because he wanted to.

  His father might have come in the room wearing his robe and slippers and freshly creased slacks. He always did come in to Junior in a warm, respectful manner, as if Junior’s room were the chapel he had known all his life. Usually Mr. Brown entered Junior’s room at night. This morning might have been different. They could have had the whole day before them.

  “Daddy,” Junior said again. His voice was husky with feeling. “I haven’t seen you on a Saturday morning in forever.”

  Junior reached up and rubbed his hair. There was a breeze up there, it felt like, blowing through his scalp and lifting up the top of his head like a lid. At once he had a huge and terrible hunger. Then his mother came swooping in on him, pulling at him. Opening drawers, she found his clothing for him. Straightening chairs, his mother bothered the room into near human retreat and suffering.

  “Junior,” she said, “you and I will just have to share the day between ourselves.”