by Timmy Reed
The floor inside Dunkin' Donuts is dirtier than the sidewalk. I can feel the dust on my toes. It feels soft. We get one dozen assorted and a box of Munchkins. Coconut and jelly are my favorites. Katie pays the Indian fellow at the counter and we leave the store.
On our way out of the store, I notice the gang of boys still lurking on the other side of the street. Waiting for us. I turn away from them and guide my sisters past the Rite Aid and Corky's Liquors, where I used to get all my lame beer promos.
From behind me I hear someone call out, “Hey Blondie!” Which quickly turns into “Bitch! Gimme a donut!”
The girls are nervous and whisper to keep moving, walk faster, don't turn around, just ignore them. But I do turn around. Instinctively, I guess. Whatever. I turn.
It would be easy to describe them as a group of black boys, except that two of them are definitely white. Between the five boys, all about my age, there are two bikes being wheeled across the street in our direction—a BMX job with only one peg and a small girl's bike covered in Dora the Explorer decals. The boys are smiling like they'd just found a treasure chest left out on somebody's stoop.
I could feel the blood starting to heat up in my veins.
“Why you scared of us, shorty?” the second tallest boy asks me as they get a little closer. Apparently he is the leader. The twins are pulling at my arms, trying to get me to leave. There are plenty of people around, walking past us on the sidewalk, but no one seems to be doing anything. Can't anyone see the way these guys are looking at my sisters?
“Yo looks like a puppy dog with that spot on his face,” one of the white boys hisses through a pair of thin lips and a slimy dirt-stache. “He be shitting himself like one too, yo.”
Their whole crew is laughing at me.
“He look like Snoopy, yo.”
Kelly is yelling at me to leave, run away, and Katie is starting to offer these guys our donuts if they will leave us alone and they probably would leave us alone but I'm not sure if I've even said anything to them yet, I'm just standing there with a tingling sensation racing up and down my skin, boiling inside. When one of the boys pushes me aside so he can get closer to my sisters and the donuts, black spots appear in my vision. I slam my fist into his temple. CRACK. I've definitely busted my fingers, I'm telling myself as a bike tire is jammed into my crotch. I fall forward and grab a chubby boy for support, but ultimately bring him down with me. I start clawing at him, trying to poke out his eyes. But I can't see anything. I'm shoving my fingers up his nose and into his cheeks, slamming his head into the pavement, all the while being pummeled on both sides and now in my head with a barrage of heel kicks and wild punches. There are chunks of donuts and blood and powdered sugar everywhere. People are crying. My sisters are crying and the chubby boy beneath me is crying and there is crying somewhere else, somewhere extremely close by, but I can't exactly tell where . . .
The last thing I think of as the boys smother me beneath their weight and a shitload of jabs to the face is that I would gladly sacrifice my body, my skin, my bones and cartilage for a good solid crack at someone's nose. I want to feel a nose break against my hand and hear it squish up into a brain, see the blood, feel it wet on my skin. Basically, I want to kill somebody. Anybody. But, as it is, I keep getting rocked by these punches . . .
My sisters have long run off when the old woman helps me up. She is old, but very large and has no problem lifting me up off the street. I am a little bit dazed. I lean against her fat tit for a second, probably getting her dress all gross and bloody in the process. She wants to take me to the hospital but I'm all right, I don't want to go, she can't make me, I live just down the street . . . I ask her about my sisters.
“The two tiny blonde white girls?”
“They're twins,” I cough.
“I seen them take off into Homeland, sugar. Them boys you was fighting took off in the other direction.”
“Thank you,” I pant. I'm very out of breath.
“You sure you don't want to go to no hospital?”
I shake my head and spit a stream of blood out onto the sidewalk. One of my molars is cracked. A piece of it comes out in my spit. “I'm fine,” I say, trying to restore my balance against the brick wall.
“Whatever you say, baby.”
I nod and she walks away, shaking her head in disbelief. My sisters probably hate me right now, I think. I was only trying to help them. But I fuck everything up.
I'm about to limp off myself when something shiny and red catches my eye on the sidewalk. Something gleaming bright red in the heat, like a ruby. A bloodstone. I bend over to examine it. Half a jelly donut broken on the concrete and bleeding out its side.
I pick it up. It's soggy.
I put it in my mouth.
I stumble toward home.
~
After breaking into my mom's empty house and writing in my journal, I headed over to Mister Reese's place to get high and be comforted. I didn't want to see my sisters. I was feeling alone and I was all smashed up and bloody. I sat on the kitchen tiles and scribbled in my composition book, so the old man seemed like my only option.
Mister Reese was out on a walk when I got there, but Diamontay came to the door with Tickles and let me inside. Tickles the snake looked almost as bad as I felt. He was frozen solid around Diamontay's neck, just staring off into space like he was already dead.
“What happened to your body, little man?” Diamontay asked me over her shoulder, already hurrying off to unpack her first-aid gear. “I know those wounds didn't come off a skateboard.”
She took Tickles upstairs. She led me to a stool in the kitchen. She was already dabbing peroxide on my knuckles where all the skin had come off. It stung like a motherfucker but I tried to not let on.
She made me pull my shirt over my head so she could see the bruises on my ribs.
“Somebody enjoyed theyself on this job,” she said. “More like a few somebodies enjoyed you.”
“I got in a fight with some Govans boys over on York Road. They were fucking with my little sisters, trying to steal our donuts.”
“Your sisters are one thing, but you know you don't need to be fighting over something like donuts. Fuck a donut. Look at you now.”
She held up a compact for me to see my face in. I was looking pretty rough. My face was all bruised and my lip was split open again, right where I had been stitched up earlier this summer. “For a donut. Now, don't you feel stupid?”
I nodded, looked down at my shoe.
Diamontay was shaking her head. She leaned in to smooth my hair and kiss me on the forehead, which was pretty scratched up but not nearly as bruised as the rest of my face. Her lips were big and soft and covered in Vaseline. I smiled at her and she smiled back. She patted me on the head again and whispered, “Don't you feel too bad, Miles. Everybody gets beat down one way or another sometime. It makes you a better person when you've had to survive a little abuse. Otherwise how would you know what to compare the good things to?”
“Thank you,” I said. “For helping me. You and the old man are good friends to me.”
“Good friends are the only friends you need, bud. A good friend is just about the best thing in the world a person can be,” she said. “The old man is the best. But never tell him that.”
“Thanks again,” I said as she applied a Band-Aid to my cheekbone. “Sincerely.”
And I really meant it. And I knew she could tell I meant it. And that was nice.
Then she kissed me on the forehead again.
That was nice too.
~
Secret: Sometimes I sit on the edge of my bed to get dressed so
I can pretend I'm special for putting on my pants two legs at a time. I don't see myself continuing this practice any longer. I'm not sure why I wanted so bad to be special, but I don't think it was working.
~
&nb
sp; Tickles the snake is very sick. He is suffering from paralysis and chronic regurgitation. Mister Reese and Diamontay are all messed up over it. I suggested the animal hospital where Robby works, but Diamontay already has a snake specialist out in western Maryland. I wish there was some way I could help . . . As it is, school is starting next week and I haven't even touched my reading list . . .
~
The Yankees came to town with all their stupid fans, so my father took off work and we went to the ball game. We were right behind the home team dugout and the O's were getting crushed.
My dad had been a little upset when he first saw the condition my face was in. He was sorry I would have to start out at a new school with a face full of cuts and bruises. I told him I didn't mind. He asked me if I was nervous about starting high school and I told him, “No.” Then I changed my mind and said, “A little bit.”
“You'll do fine,” he said. He wrapped his big arm around my shoulder and squeezed me tight. He was hurting a deep purple bruise on my back, but I didn't want to let on. “I know you will,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
“Just remember, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And at your age, with so much going on and so much ahead of you, that whatever can work like steroids. Mark my words, you'll make it out alive. And stronger than an ox.”
We hadn't spoken like this in a while. I started to thank him, but the Oriole bird got in the way, grabbing me by the brim of my hat and shaking his crotch in my face.
When the O-bird was finished with me, my father was laughing hysterically. He pointed up at the big screen, where my face was glowing enormous, grinning and beaten all to shit. The bird was pointing at me. I couldn't help but laugh.
~
The inside of the house is spotless and empty. The ghost shapes of the old furniture hiding beneath their oilcloth covers are missing. Every last personal knickknack has been packed up and moved into storage. The floor is shiny. Even the painters' things are gone. Outside, the house has been stripped bare as well. There are huge sacks of ivy sitting out by the trash. I'm on the roof outside my old window, smoking cigarettes and watching the clouds move across a patch of blue sky above me. They move slowly east, fluffy white giants plodding toward the sea. The world is huge. I feel tiny. I can feel the sun on my mashed-up face, inside the wounds. I hear a car pull into the driveway.
I climb up and stand by the chimney to get a better look at my visitor. A middle-aged woman with medium-length brown hair wrapped in a flowery shawl-thing. She hops out of her Kia and sits a wicker basket on the hood. She faces the house and takes a humongous breath into her lungs. Exhales. She holds her arms out toward the house, like she is going to give it a hug. I can't tell if she sees me or not. That air-hug might have been some form of greeting. Maybe she's a foreigner. So I step away from the chimney. I wave down to her as the cars zoom past on Charles.
And I scare the living shit out of her in the process.
I call to her. She shakes her head. I cup my hands over my mouth and try again. What is she, deaf? I scramble down off the broken slate roof, in through the window, downstairs, and out the front door to where the woman is standing in my front yard.
Turns out that she is. Deaf. For real deaf, but she reads lips so I soon get the story, albeit in a retarded kind of accent—which it turns out I find sort of pretty. The effort she puts into speaking, the dull sound at the edges of her voice . . . I find the whole thing charming. I've never met a deaf person before, I don't think. She is nice . . . her name is Melinda . . . I invite her inside.
She tells me she's one of the six children raised in the house before we lived there, four of whom were deaf. I already know the story of course. Her father had built the place all by himself with a construction crew consisting mostly of family. Having six deaf children in the house accounts for all the first floor bedrooms apparently, which we used to use as things like workout rooms or offices. See, Melinda's family had to live on the same floor to communicate since they couldn't hear each other. They couldn't shout upstairs like most families.
Melinda says she saw the house in The Baltimore Sun's real estate listings while looking for a place of her own. She is a newlywed. I wonder if her husband is also deaf, but I decide not to ask.
The ad brought back memories, she tells me in her weird but nice voice. Before she knew it she had grabbed her basket in a fit of nostalgia and hopped in her car to make the drive all the way from Kingsville. She was on a mission to see the old house and collect a basketful of the brainy green Osage oranges to use as a centerpiece for her dining room table, just like her mom used to do when she was a little girl. It really is a beautiful story, especially in that pretty deaf voice.
We take a tour of the house and she shows me all these landmarks from her family's life: where her brother split his head open on the corner of a table, where her father and mother renewed their vows on their golden anniversary, where the kids used to measure themselves against the wall, where she got her period for chrissakes . . . For a deaf woman this lady sure can talk! And fast too! She's like a radio commercial, but I don't mind. It's cool learning about the past life of a place I always called home.
It's weird though.
Even though I was aware of the former tenants, I had always sort've seen this place as being my own.
And now it wasn't like that anymore.
It was just a place.
It belonged to the people who lived there, whenever they did.
“So why is your family selling?” Melinda asks me on our way outside to gather the pus-filled fruits.
“Div . . . orce,” I say with an exaggerated shrug.
I can't think of a lie. Why bother?
“I'm sorry,” she tells me.
“It is okay,” I tell her. I've been enunciating super carefully to make sure she can read my lips. “You can . . . not . . . stay in . . . one place . . . for . . . ev . . . er . . . I . . . sup . . . pose.” But Melinda is bent over sifting through these stinky old fruits and she can't even see my lips to read them. I feel stupid. “No one can quit moving forward without crashing, or stopping at least,” I say to the birds and the trees.
“Ooooooooh!” Melinda gasps, turns to face me. Her grin gets wide and she reaches out to me with both hands. She is cupping a mammoth Osage orange the color of glowing ooze. “Look!” she chirps, dead serious in her beautiful little retarded voice. “I found a good one!”
And for no reason at all we both start giggling like baffled infants and everything in the world feels safe for a second and I try to make that second last, but the next one comes instead.
~
Tickles the snake has been put to rest. It turns out he was suffering from something called Inclusion Body Disease, which has apparently grown increasingly common among certain species of domestic pythons and boas. The disease was rendering him blind and paralyzed. His nervous system was covered in lesions and he was suffering from something called “mouth-rot.” Atrophy was taking over his spleen. He was going to die soon anyway. At least that's what the vet told us. He allowed us to bury Tickles ourselves, in the far corner of a pet cemetery near Gaithersburg.
Diamontay tried to hold back her tears when the doctor told her, but I could tell she was just being tough. Mister Reese held her hand in the waiting room. I didn't know what to do, I wasn't sure what purpose I could serve, but I felt like I was supposed to be there. I wanted to be a good friend to these people because they had been good to me this summer. Tickles, too.
The hole was about the size of a human's grave, only narrower. Behind it there was a dogwood tree and a patch of black-eyed Susans. There was a layer of clouds between us and the sun. It lit the scene like a black-and-white movie. The three of us stood together in a clump, holding the snake in a long, thin canvas bag shaped like one of those long cold cuts they serve at parties. We stood silent, lo
oking down into the grave. I saw tiny worms playing in the dirt.
The three of us said a silent prayer and Diamontay started crying. Mister Reese held her tight against his tiny chest and started to get a little choked up himself. I was starting to feel it too, but I didn't want to think about death. I tried to imagine all the little worms and insects living in the dirt below us. Probably moles too, I thought, somewhere around here. Animals and dirt and then more dirt and rocks and then more rocks all the way down to a pit of molten rock and fire. And here I was living out my life on top of all that stuff, like a fly crawling across the skin of a melon. It seemed so . . . unlikely. Ridiculous too. It felt like all of life, everything we did, was only because we didn't know what else to do. And now a snake had died and we were burying him in the ground. I reached over and squeezed Diamontay's arm. I could tell she needed it.
We each dropped a shovelful of dirt on the body. Mister Reese and I crossed ourselves, but Diamontay only wrung her hands and cried. I don't think Diamontay is Catholic. After the snake was buried, I picked three black-eyed Susans and we put them on top of the mound. The tombstone, a little bronze plaque, was being ordered and would be there next week. But Diamontay wasn't sure that she would come back to see it. “Gotta keep on keepin' on,” she said, trying not to cry. “The only direction we can move is forward. Water off a duck's back, right? And I'm a duck. Let's all be ducks.”
On the way home, we tried not to talk about Tickles. Change the subject. Mister Reese asked me if I was nervous about starting school. I told him I was still worried about writing my personal essay. I mean, what on earth do I know about anything, particularly myself? How could I possibly teach anyone else about my life, which I had so much trouble understanding? Much less keep them interested. Of course, Mister Reese had an answer.