Taking Aim

by Michael Cart

  Everybody looking. Everybody talking. Kids scattering in every direction moving away from Sanders in his glory. He has caught a kid shooting up.

  “First class! First class!” Pushing Ty down the hall. “Y’all heard the bell ring!”

  I don’t have to look at his face to know he is smiling. We are animals to him, insects.

  English. I am sitting in the back of the class. The teacher, Miss Lapides, is droning on about Christopher Marlowe, how he was killed in a bar in London and what a shame it all was.

  “Life wasn’t easy in Marlowe’s day, and there were bad neighborhoods in London as well as any other place,” she is saying.

  I tune her out and begin thinking about Ty. The good thing is that they won’t be able to charge him with selling. Selling brings a heavy bid and I am sure he had left his stuff in his backpack.

  “And Marlowe was only twenty-nine when he was killed! Can you imagine that!” Miss Lapides says.

  “He was old,” a girl says. “He should have been living in Harlem! He might not have lasted that long.”

  Only Miss Lapides wasn’t laughing.

  Miss Lapides is at her desk. She is reading from some play that Marlowe wrote. No one in the class is interested. Under the desk I am going through Ty’s bag. There is a plastic bag full of pill bottles, maybe seven or eight. There is a book—The Watsons Go to Birmingham—and a gun. It is small as I lay it in the palm of my hand.

  Bells ring. I am in the gym. There is a basketball practice and some guys from the school team are running five-on-four drills. They are quick, darting up and down the floor as the ball goes magically through them. They all look the same, dark and thin, with legs that move crazily across the polished wooden floor. The squeaking of their sneakers is background to the casual conversations of the non-ballplayers. I watch as a skinny arm reaches over the rim to stop a shot. Can real people do that?

  Then the door opens and three cops, one in plain clothes, come into the gym with Ty. I freak out for a moment because I think they are looking for the backpack I’m sitting on. But they just take Ty across the floor and out through the gym doors. His face is puffed and they force his head down as they half carry, half drag him through the gym and out of the doors. Some dudes look out the window and count that there are three squad cars waiting to take Ty away.

  “Why didn’t they take him out the front door?” a boy asks.

  Shrugs. I know they wanted us to see him. Look, we don’t respect him or any of you, they are saying. We all know that.

  I imagine myself being dragged out of the school or maybe just surrounded by the cops. A flicker of a movie runs through my head. They don’t draw their weapons even though I am holding Ty’s gun in my hand. Instead they pull out cans of roach spray. I push away the image. Into a corner of my mind. With the others.

  The buzz is about Ty, and lies about his being arrested bounce around the gym like a volleyball. One of the ballplayers calls Ty a chump and the others join in. What do they see when they see themselves? They run and jump so someone gives them a ball and calls them “athletes.” What does Ty do? He scurries in the darkness of his own soul, and someone gives him a needle and some dope and calls him a “junkie.” It is a roach circus with different props.

  I feel slightly nauseous.

  On the way home. I’m hating on the ballplayers and it feels good, but I can’t find a reason to hang on to the moment. It is just that they are wrong to dis Ty. They are wrong, thinking they are better than Ty, wrong to think their skills move them to a different level. We are all the same.

  Home. Lying on the bed. The backpack is on the floor in the corner, but I have taken the gun out and it is under the pillow. It comforts me. When my mother comes into the room, she stops at the foot of the bed, turns slightly, and gives me her over-the-shoulder look.

  “You didn’t go to school today?” she accuses me with the question.

  “I went.”

  She gives me a look that says she doesn’t believe me. I give her a look back as if I don’t give a shit if she believes me or not. She closes the door hard as she leaves.

  I stretch out across the bed, looking at nothing, trying not to think about anything, wondering if I should call Ty’s mom. She had to know what happened, that he had been arrested, taken out of school. If all they found were his works, maybe he could cop a plea and get a bench date or a couple of weeks in juvie.

  Corner of my eye. A movement. A roach on the dresser. I see it and then I don’t. Where has it gone? Does it think that this is its room? Its world?

  Gertie at the door. Tyrone is on her phone. She tosses it to me.

  “Yo, what’s up?” I ask as Gertie sits on the bed.

  “Hey, man, I’m calling from the slam,” Tyrone says. “You feeling me?”

  “Yeah.” I know the phone call would be monitored.

  “You got my stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, I need to get the snacks to Blue down at the Spot,” Tyrone says. In the background, I can hear somebody yelling in Spanish. “My bail is two benjamins, and that’s right on time, you got me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And hold on to everything else,” Ty goes on. “I’ll tighten you up when I’m back in the world. You gonna take care of business for me?”

  “No problem,” I say.

  “Peace out, bro.”

  “Peace out.”

  Ty hangs up. Gertie looks at me, wondering why Ty is in jail. I tell her he got busted in school for using dope.

  She doesn’t speak but her head is down and I know she is worried about me. I don’t want the conversation that is going through her head so I head it off by turning on the television.

  On the screen there are a man and a woman. He is white, she is either light-skinned black or Spanish, and they are making light jokes about the news. They are pretty, handsome, so far from anything I know that is real. I change the channel.

  There are two women looking at a vacuum cleaner they claim is really marvelous and picks up hidden dirt. The apartment they live in is spotless and only the vacuum cleaner can find that hidden dirt.

  Gertie reaches over and takes the remote from me. She turns off the television.

  She wears her innocence like a veil you can’t quite see through. When she wants, she can open me with a smile and make me show her everything I am thinking and feeling.

  “You got to be careful,” she says. “People can’t tell who is who. You get around dope people and all they see is . . .” She shrugs.

  “Yo, Gertie, I ain’t tripping into no dope,” I say. “I’m strong as the day is long.”

  She tilts her head back and to one side and nods slightly. She smiles. I smile back. She pats my hand gently before leaving. She is my salvation, my truth. But when she leaves, I check out the mirror again, and the mirror is dropping nothing but truth.

  You’re holding your looks together, but you know who you are.

  I am wounded bad and the tears come down my face. It’s how roaches bleed. I need to move, to get up and work on some geography before I get fixed to the bed.

  The Spot is all the way downtown: 126th Street and St. Nicholas. I don’t want to deal with Ty but I don’t want to leave him in the wind, either. If Ty is saying that he is looking for two benjamins, I know the stuff in the vial is either Girl or some jerky prescription stuff. It is something to do, get the money and give it to his mother so she can bail him out.

  Walk downtown. Just don’t cross 135th near the station because too many cops hang out there. They’ll stop and put you against the wall just to pass the time of day. I tuck the drugs around my laptop, and the gun in my jacket pocket. The gun makes me feel better, makes me feel less like something that can just be stepped on.

  Down St. Nicholas. People walking the street, they check me out and I see some of them turn away. What do they see?

  “Hey, Greg, what happened to your man today?” Two ballplayers from school.

  “You saw what hap
pened,” I say as one steps in front of me.

  “I heard he was selling weed in the bathroom,” Ballplayer says. He is smiling. From his height he looks down on me, even leans back a little to make sure I notice.

  I start to step around him and he puts his fingers on my chest. “He’s bringing the school down with his foul ass!” Ballplayer says.

  The words come out: He’s bringing the school down with his foul ass! But they mean something different: You and your boy ain’t nothing! You’re roaches we can step on!

  More words come to add to the pile. I think about the gun but his words stop. I move on.

  I think about the roach on my wall. If I had jumped with my shoe, I could have flattened it against my wall. It would have been so quick the roach wouldn’t have been able to distinguish between living and dying.

  But if the roach had had a gun . . . Stupid thought. It wouldn’t be a roach if it had a gun.

  “You have to ask yourself if it’s at all reasonable to imagine what is in your mind.”

  The Spot. Gray, plain, the bricks have been painted over dozens of times. On the left side of the door, someone has drawn a crude eye with three tears under it. Three dudes dead in the building. Not bad for a place like this. Four steps into the vestibule where two guys play chess on a wooden box. The bald one wears a Sacramento Kings T-shirt, and the other one has dirty-looking dreads over a wife beater. A radio on the floor spits some stupid rap as the two guys pretend not to notice me standing there.

  “I came to see Blue,” I say.

  “Who’s that?” Baldy says, not looking up. “I don’t know no Blue.”

  “Guy sent me here with his stuff,” I say.

  “Let me see it.”

  “Uh-uhn.”

  “Then you can’t get in.”

  “Okay, just tell him I was here,” I say, turning away.

  “Hey, second floor, apartment fourteen.”

  They look me up and down as I step past the narrow opening they give me. I see the machete leaning against the wall.

  Upstairs. The hall is dark and it takes me a while to see. Good. A roach would see in the dark and smell where the people are. I am not a roach. I find 14 and knock. The peephole clicks, lets a red light flash through for a second and closes. The door opens and I hear music. A girl is at the door, small, skinny, shiny eyes.

  “Hey, baby,” she slurs.

  “Where’s Blue?”

  She points to a room and I go toward it. On a couch in the hallway leading to the room there is a guy hunched over, his arms across his body, his head on his knees. I stop and watch for a second until I see him breathe. I take another step and look in. There are mattresses on the floor and people lying on them. They are either high or dead. This is the Spot, so I think high. In one corner of the room, there is a mound of black flesh sitting in a high-back chair. Blue. Everybody knows his ugly ass. He is big even when he is sitting. He’s holding a magazine up to the light creeping through the dirty blinds. There are other people in the room on the floor. In the red light, I can barely make out their forms. The stink pushes at me as I stand in the middle of the floor.

  “What you want?” he grunts. Uptown they say he killed his own brother over ten dollars. Roach talk.

  “You know Tyrone?”

  “Schoolboy, I know him.” He grunts his words. “What you want?”

  “He told me to bring you some stuff,” I say.

  “Turn the light on,” he says. “It’s near the door.”

  I find the light switch and flip it up. For a moment I think everyone will jump up and start running around. Nobody moves.

  “Let me see the stuff.” This from Blue.

  I take the stuff out of my pocket and show it to Blue. “Ty said two benjamins.”

  “Why he didn’t bring the shit himself?” Blue opens a plastic bottle and sniffs it.

  “He’s busy,” I say.

  “Fifty cents is all I can do,” Blue says. “This ain’t nothing but some watered-down crap.”

  “I’ll take it back,” I say. “He doesn’t need fifty cents, he needs—”

  “Don’t be telling me what you going to do.” Blue is on his feet. When he moves toward me, letting his bulk push me back, it is like we are doing theater. He is huge and I am small, and I am supposed to tremble and he is supposed to have his way with me, to step on what is left of Gregory, of who I had been or what Gertie called me. He is on me in a flash and can transform me from living to dead before I even know it, before I can scurry away to some dark hole.

  A fat hand around my neck, leaning against me so that his sweaty brow touches my face, sending signals of all the bad things he can do to me through my wavering antennae and down to my trembling heart. He is Blue and I am just another roach, like the ones lying on the floor around him, like the ones in the hallway, like Ty, like the ballplayers who think they are special.

  Blue is so sure of himself, so full of his power that he does not feel me pulling the gun from my pocket. Even when the gun goes off, when the sound, muffled by his rolls of fat, explodes with a loud poof into his body, he is still holding my neck. I pull the trigger again and again and he falls back.

  A frozen moment. Blue is standing three feet away from me, trying to figure out what has happened. He starts to sag and reaches up to grab some invisible bar, then sinks to the floor, slowly at first and then faster as his weight carries him backward.

  A girl, maybe the one who opened the door, rushes toward Blue. I think she is going to try to help him but she is reaching into his shirt. She pulls out a brown paper bag, tears it open, and money tumbles to the floor. She grabs as much as she can and heads toward the door.

  I think about Ty. I take some of the money, trying not to look at it, and then I start out of the room, flipping the light out as I leave. Behind me, someone is speaking. A crackhead trying to come out of his stupor, wondering what has happened.

  I am down the stairs. The chess players are on their feet looking down the street.

  “Something must have happened up there!” Dreads is saying as I push past him.

  There is no story in the papers. The streets whisper about Blue being killed at the Spot but they get it wrong. They say that Mookie Duke, a Jamaican player, killed him to get his turf. It doesn’t matter that it is all wrong. Mookie Duke is cruising down the Ave taking credit and showing his gold teeth. The street says that he even showed up at Blue’s funeral with his crew and laid a rose on Blue’s chest. Mookie Duke is the boss now, but who can tell the difference? When the lights come on, we all scurry for the darkness we know. There is no need to think about what has become instinctive.

  Ty is back in the world, bragging about his junior bid, and asks me what happened. I say I don’t know but that I have done him a solid by copping the two benjamins and want to keep the gun.

  “No problem,” he says, laughing. “What we got on this reservation is drugs and guns.”

  I laugh.

  I stop going to school and just hustle where I find a spot, sometimes working in the dry cleaners, sometimes sweeping sidewalks. Mom knows it but she doesn’t speak on it, which is cool, because she knows there’s nothing she can do about it. I don’t worry about Blue because he wasn’t worth the worrying, but I lay low. The gun makes me feel better. No one is going to jump up with a sneaker and splat my life out against some wall. A gun makes you feel less like a roach.

  Sometimes I don’t even go home, just find some other hole to lay up in, some shadow to call my spot from time to time. I come out when I’m hungry and there’s not too many people around. When I’m needing somebody to hold on to, when I’m needing to get in touch with the Gregory I used to be, I go to see Gertie. I look at her close and she is wondering what it is that I am looking at. I tell her how pretty she is and she is embarrassed. I want to say how human she is, but I don’t want to go there in case she doesn’t feel the same way about herself. No, I don’t want to go there.

  EMBRACED BY RAVEN ARMS

  Ti
m Wynne-Jones

  The vehicle was backed up to the front porch, the same way the FedEx guy did when he made a delivery. But this wasn’t any courier. The van was mud splashed and rusted out, the left bumper bashed in, the back doors wide open.

  Morley Bendix held his glasses in place with a finger on the bridge of his nose. They were broken again. The front door of the house opened and he watched their brand-new flat-screen television walk out and down the steps on a pair of bandy legs. Whoever was carrying that thing was so small his head didn’t appear above the set. Morley stepped quickly out of sight behind a big maple.

  The guy disappeared into the back of the van and was out again and up the steps in no time, tucking in the back of his T-shirt. He stopped at the front door and swiveled around at the waist as if he’d heard the low grunt of shock from thirty yards away. Morley leaned hard into the tree, held his breath, didn’t dare peek again until he heard the front door close.

  He knew what this was.

  It had happened to the Kirkwoods a few months earlier and several other families along lonely River Valley Road. They were sitting ducks out here. These guys just took the easy stuff—hit-and-run. In and out and gone.

  Morley knew what to do. He sloughed off his backpack and reached for the cell phone in his pocket, before remembering that his cell phone had disappeared today about the same time he was getting his glasses broken. The rage kicked in, compounded and swelling inside him, and wrapped up inside it—inside the rage—was an idea. It came over him like a wave, electrifying and nauseating in equal parts. Could he do this?

  Just don’t think, he told himself. Go!

  Shoving his glasses in his jacket pocket, he took off in long, quiet strides all the way to the garden shed, which he slipped behind just as the front door opened again. A different guy, this one long and gangly with ratty brown hair, carried Mom’s iMac. Someone called to him from inside the house. Morley only heard the reply.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be right there.”