The Planet of Junior Brown

by Virginia Hamilton

  “Maybe I will. I got to go.”

  “You going to wait for me downstairs in the morning?” Junior asked him.

  “If you want. Sure.” Buddy turned away from Junior, heading for the door.

  “I thought maybe you was mad at me,” Junior told him.

  “You took me fair and square, I’m not mad,” Buddy said, and added, “I know you can’t leave your mother like she is.”

  “Remember, on Friday,” Junior said.

  Buddy remembered. “Don’t you have enough to worry over without thinking about that Miss Peebs?”

  “You promised!”

  “Okay, okay.” Buddy’s head ached. He wished he’d never said he’d go with Junior to Miss Peebs’ house. This one night of people’s houses was enough worry to last him forever. “So tell your mother I’m sorry she got sick,” Buddy said. “Maybe you ought to get yourself some sleep, Junior.”

  Buddy went out, leaving Junior standing in the middle of his room. Once outside on the street Buddy looked up and he thought he could see Junior still standing there.

  The poor boy, he thought. He was feeling so old now. But the air was crisp and fresh. The night of sounds and lights brushed over him, cleansing him.

  Oh, man, it sure is good to be out.

  6

  JUNIOR WAS RED under his skin. Standing in the middle of his room, he rocked from one foot to the other, swinging his heavy frame from side to side. His fat careened and rolled around him. He kept his eyes tight shut in order to know blackness within which he was red.

  Junior’s swaying became rhythmic. He did a few turns of a dance, bobbing and flailing his arms. He performed an intricate routine with his feet, sliding them, then quickly stepping and turning. Junior had seen the slim black kids work their feet. He could do it just the way they did it, with his eyes shut, when he could be red.

  “A’m lookin’ forty mile,” he sang. “Shuh, b’lieve a’m fixin’ ta die …” Junior held his wrists close to his belly. His elbows pumped at his sides and his fat hips swiveled, rippling the flesh beneath his clothes:

  “Shuh. Shuh. I knew I was bound to die, Cluney,

  But I hate to leave my children cryin’ …”

  Junior could dance. Ah, he was a dancing fool. Cluney was his partner and she could dance real good. But Cluney had no weight on her. She was a black stick. She had black rod legs and arms; she had no red on her at all.

  “A’m a low-life clown, with ma head on upside down, Cluney-Cluney.

  Livin’ ain’t worth even the buyin’

  But I hate to leave my children cryin’ …”

  Baby sticks were sobbing all over the place, so Cluney took them and split.

  Junior opened his eyes to the soft light of the room.

  “If I went out for a little while Mama wouldn’t even know it.” Junior sat on the floor next to his desk, by the closet door.

  “But if she should almost die, I would be the cause.” Junior knew his mother would never really die. If she ever did, she wouldn’t be able to blame him.

  His room was all over silence, and filled with the odor of silent dancing. Some silent cotton curled in Junior’s hearing, making a hum in his ears. The cotton silence had taken over the sound of his electric clock on the desk. Junior looked at the clock. It told time but it made no sound, since its sound had been taken up.

  Junior thought, I’m tired of separating sound from things.

  For a moment he was one whole self. He knew he spent too much of his time taking out of things whatever substance could identify them. He could take meaning out of words so that words were left brittle and empty. He could take the ring from a phone; he could leave the phone dead and keep the ring buzzing, tickling his palm.

  Junior looked at his clock and wished he could leave things alone.

  How come Buddy was so free all the time? How come he could go to a movie or just walk around? Buddy had it all free and didn’t even see that the people out there belonged to Junior. Buddy had taken what had been free in Junior’s house when he went away. He had taken the noise and left Junior with the quiet room.

  Don’t do that, Junior thought. You are taking things apart again. Oh, why can’t there be somebody to talk to?

  He was certain that because he was so black and ugly, he was alone.

  I got the whole world of noise inside. I’m red inside.

  There was nothing for him to do but draw it. Junior opened the closet and took out his paint box and his roll of canvas. The roll was a five-foot width and just the length Junior needed. Spread out on the floor to its length, the roll fit between his bed and desk.

  Junior sat with his back to the closet, facing the entire room. The room was a rectangle, with the windows at the far end from him. The bed was to his left, his desk to his right and his piano next to his desk, to the left of the entrance.

  Junior reached inside his desk drawer and took out a child’s wooden hammer. The mallet end was covered with masking tape, which concealed a lead weight. Junior took the hammer and four upholstery tacks and hammered down the four corners of the canvas as quietly as he could. He put the hammer back in the drawer and closed the drawer. Only then did he relax back against the closet door. With his paint box in his lap he surveyed The Red Man.

  Junior had oil-painted a large figure of a man on the canvas. Outlined in black, the figure was seated with his arms behind his head and with one leg crossed over the other. The figure was completely red except for his feet. Junior had left his feet unpainted to show that the red color came from the man’s brain. In fact, the skull covering the brain was a throbbing blood-red, darker than the rest.

  Junior worked on the figure whenever his mother became ill and he was left to himself for the whole night. When he first began the painting, he had meant only to draw a rod like one of those he had worked with as a child learning math. The Cuisenaire Rods of his childhood were different lengths and colors in units of one through ten. Rods of the same color were the same length. The white rod was one and the orange rod was ten. Ten white rods were the length of the orange rod. Two white rods were the length of one red rod. Red was the unit two. Junior had drawn and painted a rod in red paint because the red rod of his childhood had been the only rod whose color he could always guess with his eyes closed, while holding a handful of rods behind his back.

  Gradually Junior’s painted red rod developed arms and legs, a head. It still had no facial features but it had become a man. One day Junior would fill his Red Man with people. All of the people would be an inch high, in colors and combination of colors that Junior could mix from his paint box. He had already started painting in people who lived in The Red Man in their apartment houses, on streets.

  Junior had The Red Man’s neck and one side of his chest filled with figures. From a distance these figures of people and the way they lived looked like the detailed pattern of muscles and veins found in medical books. Or they looked like fine tattooing, with the blue and red colors outstanding and the blacks and browns like pockets of darkness.

  Up close, it was clear that The Red Man housed inch-high people of all shapes and colors living their lives.

  With his paint box in hand Junior crawled up the canvas to The Red Man’s knees. He opened the box and took out a small bottle of turpentine, his flat, square piece of wood for mixing colors and the instrument he used for a paintbrush. Junior had not found a paintbrush small enough to make tiny people and yet stiff enough to outline them and reveal them in detail. He had finally hit upon the idea of using the calamus of a bird’s feather. The hornlike stem was hollow and would hold enough paint to etch two figures.

  The smell of turpentine and oil paint rode on the silence in Junior’s room. Junior opened both windows overlooking the street. He went to the bathroom. Later he looked in on his mother, whose room was next to his, before settling down on the canvas. His mother slept a drugged sleep. To Junior she didn’t look like much of anything, lying there, unable to order him. Junior had drawn her a
few times in The Red Man. He would draw her again, just the way she lay so fragile on the big bed.

  Junior worked with just the sound of his scratching calamus. The silence soon teemed with his ideas and poured out in an unbroken line from his hollow horn. Junior had thoughts and dreams, which he drew. He had pianos with splendid sound which he painted. He had the school and the planet of Junior Brown. He had the streets with Buddy Clark free and tough, knocking his way through them. He had everyone flowing free—Mr. Pool and his daddy and Buddy’s daddy and games and buses and old people and trees. Junior came to paint Miss Peebs and he had a time keeping his hand steady. He had a terrible time with her living room and her piano. That relative!

  Junior’s hand shook with a palsy but he drew in himself and then painted Buddy Clark between himself and the relative.

  No. He scratched out Buddy. He thought of blanking himself out with black paint. Junior did that. He painted himself out in black and he would have to wait for the black paint to dry. He worked on the other side of The Red Man, away from the scene he had nearly created. He worked on The Red Man’s left shoulder and forearm until he was too tired to move his hand, until his eyes stung from paint fumes and such close focusing.

  Junior cleaned his calamus with a soft cloth damp with turp. He put his equipment away. He took up the tacks holding the canvas down, then slid the canvas under the bed to hide it. He waited to see if the canvas would roll up, but from his hours of lying on it, it stayed flat.

  Junior was too tired to put on his pajamas so he stretched out on the floor with the light on, his arms covering his eyes. Junior let himself go loose. He fell asleep long after Buddy had visited his planet and had gone on to work for Doum Malach

  Not very much later Junior’s mother came into Junior’s room. She looked weak, yet rested. She grew alarmed as she stood there. First she thought Junior had rolled out of bed but then she saw he hadn’t even got out of his clothes. She smelled faint odors of paint; she saw that the windows were open and knew Junior had been painting sometime during the night. Junella shivered, for the room was cold. Softly she smiled at her sleeping son, convinced he had stayed up most of the night to watch over her. She left him to make his breakfast and was grateful when she found her kitchen cleansed of horror.

  On Thursday morning Mr. Pool got himself into trouble. Junior and Buddy saw it happen. They were lucky they got to the school when they did—just before the homeroom bell rang and after most of the kids and teachers were assembled in their homerooms. Mr. Pool and some man from the maintenance company which serviced the school were standing right outside of the basement door. With that man there, Junior and Buddy couldn’t take a chance cutting on out. There was nothing for them to do but go on up the steps and inside the school.

  The man and Mr. Pool were arguing. They heard the man say something about how he never could locate Mr. Pool when there was work to be done. The man said it hardly mattered that Mr. Pool made up the time in the evening. They needed a janitor during the day when things went wrong, and they never could find Mr. Pool when they needed him.

  “We are wide open and we’ve got to go in,” Buddy told Junior. “We sure can’t take a chance going down into the basement room.”

  “You mean, we’ve got to go to class?”

  “There’s no other way,” Buddy said. “You just keep yourself cool and do what I do.”

  “I don’t think so,” Junior had to say. “I can’t make it, not today.”

  Junior and Buddy had come up walking fast from Amsterdam. They had their books as they always did, like they planned to go to class. Buddy had been waiting for Junior when Junior came out of his building. Junior had looked the same as he did any other day except, when he came out, he hadn’t known what to do or where to go. He didn’t recognize Buddy until Buddy came over and took him by the arm.

  “How you doing this morning?” Buddy had said. “You feeling all right?”

  “Not so good,” Junior told him.

  Buddy hadn’t needed to ask. He’d known Junior must have stayed awake the whole night.

  “You cool it, then,” Buddy had told him. “We’ll go down to the basement until just before lunch. Then we’ll go on downtown to the library.”

  “I don’t think I can make it,” Junior had told him. He had been pinpoints of energy, nervous with the strain of his life, of being on the hook.

  “Just be cool,” Buddy had told him. “Once we’re in the room, you can sleep until it’s time to cut again.”

  But coming up the street they’d noticed nothing until they were almost to the basement door. Then they saw Mr. Pool up against the door. This man was chewing him out; Mr. Pool was taking it. When he saw Buddy and Junior, his eyes had been full of warning. Buddy and Junior walked briskly by. A teacher was holding open the door at the top of cement steps. She saw Junior and Buddy. They came on.

  “We got to go in,” Buddy had time to say.

  “I can’t,” Junior said. But he kept the pace next to Buddy as they climbed the steps.

  “We’ll go into class and you let me do the talking. Whatever happens, you wait for me to play it out,” Buddy told Junior.

  “Don’t make me sit in no class,” Junior said as they went inside.

  In the school Junior and Buddy were attacked by noise. Noise fell over them as they climbed the staircase. The stairs were enclosed with a prison mesh from one floor to the next to keep students from accidentally falling over their open sides. Noise spilled out of the mesh and rose to an unbelievable pitch.

  Junior was sweating.

  “I think I remember,” Buddy said. “We got one more floor to go. Man, I don’t recall it being this bad.”

  The school was a modern, well-kept building but overheated, holding body odors from day to day. Junior and Buddy had to climb through the smells and noise until they came to the right floor. They found their homeroom. They went in and took seats in the back. Some teacher, some woman they didn’t know, stood behind the desk looking over her attendance book and checking off students’ names. Every now and again she looked up. When she noticed Junior and Buddy, she hesitated in her checking and turned the pages back to sheets of previous months.

  Buddy jumped up, moving fast through one of the aisles. He didn’t know what he would do; he simply felt he ought to take command and do something. Why should he let her discover that he and Junior were on the hook? Better that he give the information to her. Somehow there was pride in that.

  “Hey, miss? Teacher, my friend can’t find his science book. Please, would you have an extra he could use?”

  The teacher eyed Buddy. She was a cool lady. She was black. There was warmth of humor deep down behind the dark of her eyes. However, she let the humor die away. Obviously she was as tough as Buddy, been around long enough to know all the games. Wise enough, she had come too far and had worked too hard trying to teach something to let one fast-talking kid put it over on her.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  “My friend back there is Junior Brown.” Innocently, Buddy stared at her.

  “I asked you your name,” she said, her mouth tightening ever so slightly.

  “I’m Buddy Clark.”

  “I’ve been here two months,” she said, “and I haven’t seen either one of you before. Take these passes to the office.” She wrote out paper slips for each of them and handed them to Buddy.

  “All we need is a science book,” Buddy said. He let himself make this quiet plea but he would not stoop to beg.

  The teacher said nothing in reply. She gave him one hard, unsmiling look. Buddy knew he and Junior had had it. He got Junior up and out of the room with all the kids looking at them. Some kids giggled; some just looked at them blankly. Buddy couldn’t remember the kids anymore. Slowly he recalled a few faces but they seemed different now. He had traveled so far from these kids in just a couple of months that they seemed tired and patient, like old folks, old people sitting in a clinic somewhere.

  Hall mo
nitors had taken positions on every floor of the building. Buddy and Junior had no chance to sneak away. Their passes were checked and they had to go on to the office. Inside, Buddy handed the passes to some secretary. She told Buddy and Junior to sit down and while they sat, she took the passes into another office.

  Buddy couldn’t believe how calm he was. Everything had happened so quickly, he hadn’t had time to get himself scared. What could they do to him, anyway? He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t committed any crime, he didn’t think. He had just been on the hook. Would they turn him over to Juvenile Court for that? He didn’t know.

  “I know one thing,” he said quietly to Junior. “Nobody’s going to make us stay in any class. And nobody’s going to put us away in no reformatory.”

  Junior was scared. “What are they going to make us do?” he said. “I have to get out—Buddy, why can’t we just go?”

  Buddy knew if they walked out, providing nobody got in their way, it would be Junior who would get caught. Buddy could disappear, hiding in a hundred different places; they would never even know where to start looking. But not Junior. Junior had just one place to go and they could always find him.

  Buddy had to laugh. Why was he pretending when he knew nobody cared whether he or Junior came or went?

  If Mr. Pool hadn’t got caught, we would be in the basement and nobody would never even miss us, Buddy thought. It’s just when you get in their way once that they see you and have to do something.

  “Listen,” Buddy told Junior. “Some assistant principal is going to look over our records and probably tell us we have to go to class every day, or we’ll be put on detention, if we haven’t been already. And maybe when you’ve been on detention long enough they do something bad to you. Anyhow, they’re going to say we got to go to class.”

  “What if they send a note to my mother?” Junior said.

  “Look, haven’t I taken care of the notes?” Buddy said. He had taken care to read and to destroy every note they gave Junior when he first went on the hook a few days at a time. Mr. Pool had taken care of all the office pink slips that went into the attendance officer’s box.