Sunday You Learn How to Box
Page 18
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Odessa called.” Mom waited until she’d turned on the hall light to finish, to make sure she could see me before she continued.
“Somebody saw the Robinson boy coming down Hicks Street. Police must’ve let him go. He must not’ve killed that other hoodlum like he was trying to.”
I ran downstairs and past her, outside.
“Don’t go back out there!” she shouted. “You want him to knock your head against some concrete?!”
When I got to the parking lot, I thought he must still be on Hicks Street, because I couldn’t see him yet. Miss Odessa wasn’t the only one who knew he was coming. There were already other kids standing at the edge of the lot looking up Hicks, yelling, “Here he comes! Here he comes!”
I stopped as though a wall suddenly dropped in front of me. I looked back toward the apartment where I knew my mother was still standing in the doorway. She wouldn’t go inside and pull down the shade, no matter what happened now. She was waiting like everybody else was and she’d want to see what my part would be this time.
When I turned toward Hicks Street again, he was there in the parking lot. In his undershirt, bare arms hanging, fists at his side still stained with blood. He wasn’t strutting this time. He was cold, for one. He had to be cold. His whole body looked as hard as his fists. No roundness. Just lines and angles. He walked as though he’d been gone for more than hours, more than days maybe. It was as if he’d come back after months of walking in the wind without a shirt or jacket and socks. Even his red hair seemed darker, muddied.
“Hey, Ray Anthony!” one of the younger boys called out. “They put you in jail?”
Ray Anthony looked up like he hadn’t noticed anybody was in the parking lot but him. He didn’t answer. But by this time, there were already more kids, keeping their distance like he was a dog they knew might attack without warning.
“You kill that boy?” one of them called to him.
Ray Anthony shook his head slowly from side to side. “Naw, I ain’t killed nobody.”
I pictured my mother again, still on the stoop outside our apartment.
I walked up close to Ray Anthony.
“Hi,” I said, softer than I wanted to. Neither one of us stopped moving.
“How you doin’?” he asked me in a voice that was almost as soft as my own, only lower and I thought, he’s afraid, he’s still afraid.
But as he spoke to me, his walk began to change. It was slower, easier. It was almost the walk my mother had seen from our living room window, the one I liked to watch before he knew I was watching.
There were more kids once we got into the projects. Quickly, I glanced out of the corner of my eye across the courtyard. Bubba Graves was there. And Rat. All of them, there to witness. In front of our apartment standing next to Miss Odessa, Mom was waiting. I clamped my teeth together. Ray Anthony reached into his back pocket, pulled out a chewed-up toothpick and slid it between his lips. Reaching into my own pocket, I felt his rabbit’s foot. I held it between my fingers, against my thigh, before I had to give it back.
I must have had my eyes closed, because I didn’t see what happened next. I felt it. I was thinking how when we got to 4B, Ray Anthony would go in alone. I’d run across the courtyard, past Bubba and Rat, past my mother and that imbecile Miss Odessa and back inside. My mother could do whatever she wanted, once I was home.
But it was when I was pulling the rabbit’s foot out of my pocket that I felt Ray Anthony’s hand on my shoulder. Not around it, but on it, as if he was using it to help him walk. Except he wasn’t. I could tell by the way it felt. It was only there for a second, but when he took it away there was no mistaking it had been there.
I looked up at him and he smiled. I could see just the edge of his chipped tooth and the cleft in his chin widen a little.
“You embarrass’ to be walkin’ with me?”
“No. No,” I said as quickly as I could. “Are you?”
“Hell no,” he told me, almost singing it, rolling the toothpick to the other side with his tongue. “Whatchu think?”
And I didn’t know what I thought, because for once I didn’t want to think at all. So I did what I’d wanted to do for a long time. I just walked. I walked across the Stratfield Projects courtyard with Ray Anthony Robinson in his purple pants and his patent leather shoes. And I remembered and knew. Remembered his hand on my shoulder. And knew it would be there again.
Can you feel the floor, Louis? Can you feel the floor?
Yes. I can feel the floor.
Of course, I can feel the floor. . . . Whatchu think?
How sweet, how sweet to save and be saved.
Bil Wright is an award-winning novelist and playwright. His novels include Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy (Lambda Literary Award and American Library Association Stonewall Book Award) and the highly acclaimed When the Black Girl Sings (Junior Library Guild selection). His plays include Bloodsummer Rituals, based on the life of poet Audre Lorde (Jerome Fellowship), and Leave Me a Message (San Diego Human Rights Festival premiere). He is the librettist for This One Girl’s Story (GLAAD nominee) and the winner of a LAMI (La Mama Playwriting Award). An associate professor of English at CUNY, Bil Wright lives in New York City. Visit him at bilwright.com.
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Also by Bil Wright
Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy
When the Black Girl Sings
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Bil Wright
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Jacket design by Chloë Foglia
Jacket illustration copyright © 2013 by Kenichi Hoshine
The text for this book is set in Class Garamond.
The Library of Congress has cataloged another hardcover edition as follows: Wright, Bil.
Sunday you learn how to box / Bil Wright.
ISBN 978-1-4424-7474-1 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4424-7476-5 (eBook)
1. Afro-Americans—Fiction. 2. Connecticut—Fiction. I. Title.
PS357.R4938S8 2000
813’.54—dc21
99041479