by Bil Wright
“Where were you?” he rasped.
“I didn’t feel well. I was dizzy and I had a headache. I thought I was gonna faint. I had to leave to get some air.”
I dared to look into his eyes and was ashamed at what I could see him thinking. liarsneakliar. He walked past me and I followed. We hadn’t taken three steps when he turned back to me.
“You know this isn’t the time for no mess, boy. Jeanette’s in a hard place. She’s got responsibilities, she’s got your younger sister. You should be there with her. You can’t be actin’ crazy or gettin’ lost nowhere or startin’ some damn foolishness crap. You should go back and do what you can. You hear me?”
“Yes sir.” I said it quickly, like I didn’t have to think about it, as if I knew exactly what he meant which of course I did. It was strange how he sounded like he knew everything I might be thinking now when he’d never seemed to know anything about me before. We walked toward the apartment in silence, climbed six flights and all I could hear was the sound of our footsteps and his sigh each time he got to a landing.
While he was locking us in, I hung up my jacket quickly and went to the front room, to the couch. I sat as still as possible, the closest I could get to being invisible.
“You come here, Louis.”
So he waited, I thought. He waited until we got here to beat me. He was in the kitchen. I went to him telling myself nobody’s beating lasted forever. Grandaddy had never hit me before. He hardly ever touched me at all.
“Yes sir?” I looked at him like I was used to looking at Mom, the same as I’d looked at Ben every Sunday before the boxing matches. I told him with my eyes, you don’t have to do this, you know. It’s not really necessary. You just think it is now. Later, you’ll regret it.
Grandaddy was sitting next to the stove, still in his coat. His cap was in his hands, dripping snow onto the kitchen floor. When I stood in front of him, we were face to face, close enough to kiss. I could see my mother in his mouth and eyes. When he spoke I heard her voice in his, especially the way it had sounded years before when I was very young.
“It’s not good now. But it’s not good for anybody. Everybody’s sittin’ at the same end of the table.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You got to go back. She needs you to be there with her. You don’t know she needs you?”
“Yes, sir, I know.”
“Tomorrow. You all should be together for Christmas, you’re a family. Jeanette’s gotta be upset outta her mind to send you here right before Christmas. She’s not thinking clear. That’s what it is.” He stood and I backed out of his way. The only other thing we said to each other was when I got on the train the next day to go home. I said, “Good-bye, Grandaddy. Merry Christmas.” He said, “Remember.”
• • •
I don’t know if he called her before I got to Stratfield and if he did, how much he told her. But she was waiting at the station with Lorelle. Jumping in front of the conductor, she pulled me off the train and squeezed the breath out of me. She held my head down into her coat like it was a football she was going to make a run down the platform with to score a touchdown.
“Mom?” I called into her chest. Her wedding band was cutting my ear. It was no use. Mom never let you out of a hug until she was ready.
The next morning, Christmas Eve, I was on my knees scrubbing the bathroom floor when she came in behind me. I waited, thinking she was inspecting my work and would either leave in a minute, which meant the floor would pass or tell me to scrub harder, which was what usually happened. Instead, she stood over me slowly tugging on her fingers like she was pulling off a pair of gloves that were too small.
“I asked forgiveness while you were gone. I don’t want to ever have anything to do with you getting hurt again. I want you here. Safe.”
Why didn’t she ask my forgiveness? I thought. Wasn’t I the one she should ask? After she left, while I rinsed the tiles to make sure they weren’t gritty from the cleanser, I figured what she’d told me was her way of apologizing. I’d rather she’d just come out and say she was sorry, but I knew what she’d said was as close as it was going to get.
• • •
While I was in New York, people from the church had brought Mom a Christmas tree and groceries. There were three presents under the tree, one for each of us with a card signed “Merry Christmas, from your friends at Stratfield Methodist.” I knew Mom had more hidden away. If she’d put up the tree at all, it was because she had her own gifts for Lorelle and me like always. No matter who’d died, a present apiece from strangers wasn’t her style.
The presents I’d bought had been under my bed for almost a month. The night before I went to New York when I thought I might not be coming back, I considered giving Mom hers and Lorelle’s, but I was still too upset about her sending me away at Christmas. I pictured her finding my wrapped packages covered in dust and cobwebs maybe in April or July and wishing she had a prayer of thanking me in person.
I’d bought a bottle of her favorite perfume, Blue Gardenia, as part of a Bloomingdale’s Blue Gardenia Christmas special. It came with a smaller bottle of Blue Gardenia lotion, two bars of Blue Gardenia soap and a blue antique soap dish with glass legs and the initials BG on them. I already knew Mom wouldn’t like the soap dish because she didn’t buy things with other people’s initials or names on them. She said they looked as though they were either inherited or stolen.
I got a knitted hat and scarf for Lorelle and a Carl the Crocodile puppet like the one she watched every day on television. Carl the Crocodile was huge with bumpy greenish gray skin, big plastic teeth and eyes that rolled around in its head. Mom said not to bother with the puppet because it was too expensive to be so ugly and she didn’t care if Lorelle liked it or not, she didn’t want to have to look at it. What Mom didn’t know was that I’d bought Carl before I told her about it and he was nonrefundable, so I’d gotten the hat and scarf set as a backup. There was also a bottle of Bay Rum aftershave that would have been for Ben.
Mom always gave me money and told me to make sure I got Ben a gift. I always told her not to worry. I wouldn’t have given a present to her and Lorelle and not given one to him. Even though I knew he didn’t buy any of the things with tags Scotch-taped to them that said “Love to Louis, from Mom and Daddy Ben.”
Mom, Lorelle and I were all in my bed Christmas morning. Lorelle woke up at four and asked every half hour when we were going to get up to open presents. Mom got up around six, but she told Lorelle she couldn’t go downstairs until at least seven and left me responsible for making sure she didn’t. When the two of us went down an hour later, Mom was sitting on the couch with only the tree lights on.
“Is it alright to start Christmas now?” Lorelle asked her, wanting to make sure she hadn’t done anything wrong.
“Sure it is.” Mom said it so softly, I didn’t want to look at her yet. “Sure it is.”
26
I kept watch at the window to see if Ray Anthony was back from New York. Maybe he was staying straight through New Year’s, it was only a couple of days away.
Thursday afternoon, I was in the kitchen setting the table for dinner when I heard Mom say, “You’d think somebody’d be too cold to strut around with their behind out like that in the middle of winter.” I ran in to the living room and stood next to her at the window. Hallelujah! Amen! The very behind she was talking about was the same behind I’d been waiting for days to see.
“He thinks he’s cute, parading around like that in those pimp pants,” Mom said. “He thinks somebody wants to look at all that.”
Well, if that’s what he thought, he was right. Somebody did want to look at all that. Even so, as badly as I wanted to, at that moment it was impossible for me to run out of the apartment to see him any closer. The good news was that Ray Anthony was back home for sure. And so was I.
I watched from the living room window most of Thursday night and didn’t see him again. After we were all in bed and I hoped Mom was asleep, I
got up and sneaked downstairs to the phone. My plan was to let it ring long enough to see if he answered, just to let me know if he was there across the courtyard. But I’d hang up without telling him it was me calling. I got almost to the bottom of the stairs when Mom switched the hallway light on and yelled down, “What are you sneaking around for? All I need is for you to fall down a damn flight of stairs and break your neck. That’s all I need.”
I knew then she’d be listening to hear what I was doing, so I went to the kitchen, poured a glass of ice water and dumped it into the sink. So much for the phone call.
Friday morning, I decided I could save some time by not eating breakfast. Cleaned the bathroom, mopped the staircase, dusted the furniture and vacuumed, watching the courtyard the whole time. When Ray Anthony hadn’t come out by noon, I thought about skipping lunch because I couldn’t see the courtyard from the kitchen, but I was too hungry. I made a sandwich and ate it standing up at the sink, running back and forth into the living room to keep watch. The third time the door swung open to his apartment building, I threw my sandwich into the garbage, thinking it had to be him finally coming out.
Mom came to the kitchen door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Louis?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” I mumbled, immediately digging back into the aluminum pail for the brown bread and salami.
“Don’t be a smart ass, Louis.”
She came over and stared at me. “You’ve been acting like you’re about to jump out of your skin all morning. Something wrong with you?” She searched my face for an answer.
“No, ma’am.”
“You need to take all that energy outside. You think there’s too much snow to take the bike out?”
“Probly. But I could go out anyway.”
Now she really looked surprised. She knew how much I hated going outside just to be outside. It was like being a magnet for whatever maniac in the projects who hadn’t knocked the crap out of me yet to get his chance. But today, I was willing to risk it.
“I’ll just sit on the stoop for a while and read.”
“It’s too cold for you to be sitting out there in one place for long, but I’ll let you find that out. Don’t get yourself sick, though. You can sit right upstairs in your room and read.”
I ran up, got dressed, and grabbed a book I’d taken out of the library, Ivanhoe. It was a big, boring mistake, but it was the only thing I’d brought home for Christmas vacation besides my algebra book. I got out of the apartment as quickly as possible, before she changed her mind and found something she’d rather have me do inside.
After about a half hour on the stoop, my butt hurt and my fingers burned. I sat on Ivanhoe and blew into my palms, but I was pretty sure I’d have to give up and go back in soon. Mom came to the door and said through the screen, “You haven’t budged from this stoop. And you’re not reading either. I hope you have enough to sense to come in before you get frostbite.”
I turned back to her with a big, fake grin and felt my bottom lip split. “I’m fine, Ma.”
“Suit yourself.” As she said it, I heard the door open across the courtyard. I jumped up as though Ivanhoe had suddenly caught fire. Mom frowned.
“Really, Ma. I’m fine,” I told her twice as loudly as the first time.
“I heard you.” But she wasn’t looking at me. She was glaring at Ray Anthony Robinson, who was moving fast and not even looking our way. Mom stepped back into the room and shut the door in my face.
I knew she was probably watching from the window, but I didn’t care. I ran to catch up with him. He’d already made it to the parking lot. Running up to him from behind, I thought about what Mom had said and laughed. She was right. Ray Anthony did walk like he was proud of the perfectly round butt that seemed to be moving in the opposite direction he was. He didn’t walk like she said I did sometimes. She told me, “That walk of yours is gonna get you killed.” I knew I didn’t walk like her imitations of me, but it wasn’t anything like Ray Anthony’s walk either. His walk didn’t look especially to me like a man’s or a woman’s. It was more like watching a horse from behind. He had everything but the tail.
“Ray Anthony!”
He turned to look at me without stopping. Today it was the toothpick. If it wasn’t a cigarette, it was a toothpick. Once I’d seen him with a toothpick, a cigarette, and chewing gum.
I was right beside him, out of breath. Not because I couldn’t keep up with him, but because I always got a little out of breath when I saw him. He walked fast, and his legs were longer, but I could definitely keep up. I was used to walking fast. Like Mom said, I’d grown up running, it was one of the things I did best.
“You’re back.” I looked for the cleft, but the collar of his jacket was pulled up and I couldn’t see his chin at all.
“Uh-huh.”
“I thought maybe you were still in New York. At your relatives’.” He didn’t say anything. Our feet crunching across the snow in the parking lot made us sound like we knew where we were going, like we had a purpose, the same purpose.
“I ain’t got no people in New York.”
I didn’t know if I should keep walking and not try to talk or find some topic of conversation he might be interested in.
“So you back too, huh?”
Thank God. A sign.
“Yeah, I been back for a few days. I was thinking about calling you, but I didn’t know . . . you never said how long you’d be away.”
He smiled, straight ahead. “That’s why people call. Ta see.”
“You’re right. I should’ve called to see.”
“Don’t matter. My moms said I should stop givin’ out her number cause it drives her crazy answerin’ it all the time and it’s always for me.”
I wanted to tell him she certainly wasn’t hiding from the caller how annoyed she was, but I thought better of it. “Oh,” I responded, as if what he was saying hadn’t ever occurred to me.
We’d made it out of the projects and down the street. I wished I’d left Ivanhoe on the stoop because now it felt like I was stuck with it and I needed to be free to go wherever Ray Anthony was going. Having Ivanhoe with me made me feel like I was still connected to the stoop, as though it had the power to propel me back there without warning. Sure, it was superstitious, but I made up stuff like that all the time.
The next thing I asked him I knew could ruin everything, but I took a chance.
“Can I walk wherever you’re walking?” I got a glimpse of his chin. He hadn’t shaved and the cleft was almost covered by beard. I wanted to tell him he should shave regularly so that his cleft didn’t get covered up.
He snorted, making me think how wrong it had been to ask him. What was it that made him so friendly one minute and act as though he’d never seen me before, the next? Had he completely forgotten he’d said he’d drive through a building if I asked him to? Well, whatever it was and as aggravating as it was, I wouldn’t press it, as Dr. Davis would say. And I wouldn’t let it stop me. I just slowed down. Now he had a choice. He could either slow down with me or speed up and leave me behind. Or he could answer my question.
He didn’t speed up, but he didn’t answer either. Not at first. It wasn’t until he got so far I almost couldn’t hear him that he turned his head and said over his shoulder, “Do what you want.”
As it turned out, he wasn’t going far. Two streets away, he stopped on the corner at Big Lou’s Cigarettes and Candy. It was the store everybody in the projects went to even though they all complained about how high Big Lou’s prices were. Mom didn’t shop there herself, but she sent me every morning before school to buy her Salems and a Daily News. I almost never went later in the day and I was surprised to see kids actually hanging out in front of it. I didn’t know any of them. There were two girls and two boys. Actually, they were too old looking to be called kids. They were sixteen or seventeen, maybe eighteen even, definitely too old to be standing around shivering in the cold outside a candy store like they were waiting for someone to c
ome by and take them home. The only one who looked like she had any purpose in being there was one of the girls. She seemed to be concentrating hard, writing in the snow on the hood of the car with a stick. She frowned as though she was struggling with an important message.
I figured they were probably from the other projects, Creighton Heights. It was farther over on the south side and had a reputation for being rougher than where we lived. Mom said to Ben once during an argument, “If it were up to you, we’d be over in Creighton Heights dodging bullets.”
It didn’t occur to me that Ray Anthony might know these people. When he got closer, one of the guys, a wide, lightskinned giant with a tiny head, yelled out, “Here come the man! Ray Anthony! Ray-Ray, whatcha say?!”
From where I was behind him, I could tell that Ray Anthony’s walk changed. It didn’t have as much music in it as before. He seemed to pull his butt in and spread his legs out more as if his back had suddenly gone stiff.
“That’s a baaad jacket, my man! You pick that up in the city?”
Maybe Ray Anthony never answered anybody right away. He stopped, took the toothpick out of his mouth. He tapped the snow from his toes on the curb, as though it made sense to wear patent leather shoes in the snow and think that tapping could do much to protect them.
“Naw,” he said. “I been had this.”
I could hardly hear him from where I was standing. His voice was lower, huskier than I’d heard it before. I stood to the side of the street, behind a parked car at the other end of the block, trying to hide while I watched him, this new Ray Anthony.
“We waitin’ on you, man. We got our buggy right here, we ready to ride!” The giant with the tiny head pointed to the car with the girl writing on the hood. Even under the snow the car looked tired, beat up, a dull black except for one shiny blue door on the driver’s side. The blue door didn’t look real, as if it wasn’t actually attached to the rest of the car. It looked as if it might fall off at any minute.