They brought Beth in so we could apologize to her, but it was clear she didn’t even want to look at us. I didn’t want to look at her either. When she left, Mr. Taylor and the vice-principal talked about calling our parents. Mr. Taylor sighed and said he’d better be the one to do it. “Eric’s had math with me for three years now. I know their folks pretty well. I’ll call this evening and break the news.”
I would get the worst beating of my life for this. I’d probably be on punishment for months. And the thought that Mr. Taylor would be the one to deliver this message made it even worse. On the walk home, Carlos kept glancing up at me. He took my hand when we crossed streets, but mine, shaking, stayed limp. Neither of us said anything until we got to our building. In the elevator, which, as usual, smelled of urine, Carlos said, “We’re gonna get pow-pow?” He hadn’t stopped calling it that.
He had calmed down some by the time anyone got home. We sat around looking sad and silently ate our dinner. When asked what was wrong, neither of us said anything. We wanted to delay our fate as long as possible. We kept expecting the phone to ring, waiting until evening turned into night. But Mr. Taylor didn’t call that evening or any other evening. At school on Monday, during homeroom, he gave me a curt nod. Nothing more was ever said about the incident. I don’t know why he didn’t call, or maybe I just don’t want to think about it. I was so grateful at the time—we, Carlos and I, both were—even though it wasn’t the right thing for him to do.
I notice how many times I’ve just used the word we in what I’ve just written, and I wonder if the frequency of that word somehow indicates the closeness that Carlos talked about that afternoon by Quantico Creek. I don’t know. What I do know is that the story I’ve just told isn’t the only story; it isn’t the real story that needs to be told. I try to imagine it. I’m trying to understand.
Around this time, before my brother and I got in trouble at school, our mother began taking the last of her evening classes. They were on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and on those days, Carlos’s father would get home from work, exhausted, and he’d go straight back to their bedroom. Carlos and I would have our homework done by then, and we’d play video games or watch television in the living room. After a while, Carlos’s father would call me, just me, and I’d go back to the bedroom.
The man would be lying supine on the bed in his underwear and he’d tell the boy to close the door. It would always start with his feet, the boy massaging them, the man correcting the boy. When the boy was doing it the way the man wanted, he’d tell him. That’s good, he’d say, like that. Your brother’s not strong enough yet, he’d say. So you have to take care of the family, you have to take care of your old dad. De quien tú eres? he’d ask. (Daddy, the boy would say.) The meaning of feet is work, he’d say. That’s why they’re like that. Hard. Use your nails, use your knuckles. Good, now higher. Be careful with the bones, the ankles and the shins. Be careful with the kneecaps. Rotate them, gently, gently. Good. Higher. The man would often fall asleep when the boy’s touch reached his thighs. Or the man, still awake, would tell the boy to come up to his face. Feel my face, boy, he’d say. Feel that? That’s the face of someone who’s been stepped on by life. The human head gets hit every day, he’d say, whether you realize it or not. Put your fingers at my temples and press. There, good. Now your thumbs, put them lightly, lightly, on my eyelids. Circles, make circles, he’d say. You feel my eyeballs underneath? Are they hot? That’s because of all the shit they see everyday. Make little circles, good. Very good. De quien tú eres? (Daddy.) You’d better believe it. God, do you feel the knot in my shoulder? Press down with your thumb. Yes, good. Your mother, she used to do this, but now she’s never home, he’d say. You might be stronger than her anyway, son. Let me see your muscles. That’s good. Okay, lower. Coño, be careful with the hair on my chest. That’s better. A man’s shoulders and chest are the things that say wimp or warrior. A man who can puff his chest out and draw his shoulders back will win half his fights before a single punch is thrown, he’d say. And you have to suck your belly in. Not as easy for me these days. Don’t worry, just grab a handful of that belly. It won’t hurt, don’t worry. Good, now grab another handful. Keep going. You’ll earn your belly in this life, and if you’re lucky you’ll have a woman who’s around to rub it for you. Good, that’s good. De quien tú eres? (Daddy.) Sometimes this was when the man fell asleep, mumbling words about the woman while the boy’s hands were kneading the fat of his belly. The man always talked about the woman, and it may have been that the boy’s trembling hands reminded him of the woman’s trembling. It may have been that the boy’s face reminded him of the woman’s face, and if the man were still awake and opened his eyes, he would see her questioning face in the boy’s, the constant why that seemed to churn the man’s guts. The man didn’t believe in why; he believed only in yes. The woman’s mouth used to ask why of her circumstances, but the man said things to the woman and saw to it that her mouth asked no more questions. Only her face asked now, and the boy’s face did too. When the man beat the boy, when he beat both boys, it may have been that he was beating them with the mother’s questions pounding in his head, churning his guts. But it seemed he couldn’t beat her questions out of the boy; they were on his face, in his eyes, and the man would feel the insistence of yes welling up inside of him. So on the evening when the man stayed awake and felt the boy’s trembling fingers on him and saw the boy’s questioning eyes and the sky dimming in the window, his guts churned and churned, and he kept saying higher and lower, the words edged with threat, and there was the restrained swelling and the unrestrained tears and then the spillage of yes.
I didn’t see much of Carlos or Sulay on the first full day of the conference. He seemed to be avoiding me since we’d returned from Quantico Creek, but it could have just been that there were so many people. We were also divided into groups according to level. I stayed in the classes for beginners, while he and Sulay were with the advanced students.
Up to that point, I had never been through a more strenuous exercise, and I had never taken a class with live music. There is always music in a capoeira class, but in Harlem we used CDs. The teachers here made us stay in a low defensive posture called negativa, holding our bodies just above the floor until our arms shook. We crouched and jumped up and down like frogs until our thighs burned. We did ginga, the base of capoeira, the shift, the dance, the sway, for what felt like forever. To make matters worse, at the same time we also had to sing along to the music, which throbbed at us from the bateria. I’d have to catch my breath, but the mestre who had been playing berimbau when we arrived at the camp would get in my face if I stopped moving or singing. “When you go to the disco,” he yelled in English, “you can dance all night, hm? You don’t get tired there. Dance! Listen to the music! Relax your body! Dance! Sing!”
By the end of our training that Friday morning, my shirt was completely soaked through and my limbs were noodles. I couldn’t imagine what Carlos and Sulay had done in the advanced class. I didn’t see them at lunch either. During that time, the students from the group hosting the conference held a meeting. After lunch there was a bate-papo, a chance for us to listen to the wisdom of the mestres. They kept bringing up the words of Mestre Pastinha, the father and patron saint of capoeira angola, our most important ancestor. The words were the same ones that my brother had said to me almost two years earlier: A capoeira é tudo que a boca come. I didn’t understand what the words meant, even after translating them into English. I still puzzle over them now.
After music class and the afternoon movement class, I was spent and sore. I lifted my fork slowly to my face at dinner, avoiding conversation with anyone, and then skipped that night’s roda, the capoeira circle, and went to sleep in my cabin. When I woke up Saturday morning, my body had stiffened and every one of my cells seemed lit by small, intense flames. I contemplated leaving the conference as I stood under the spray of the shower. At breakfast, I stared at my plate for a long time; it felt as tho
ugh someone would have to feed me. The room was buzzing with conversations in English and Portuguese. Near the end of the mealtime, Sulay set down her tray and sat across from me.
“Carlos is outside getting the instruments ready for morning classes,” she said. “If you’re looking for him.”
“Fuck these classes. I’m dead.”
“You were not at the roda last night.”
“Fuck the roda,” I said. “This place is a cult.”
“Come on,” she urged. “You come all the way here for the weekend. Mais forte, Eric. Stop being such a punk.”
I took a bite of melon and chewed it deliberately as she watched me.
“You come all the way here to see your brother, to play capoeira,” she said, singing in her accent. “One day and you give up?”
“I’ve got nothing to prove here,” I said, glaring at her.
Sulay squeaked, incredulous. “Wrong,” she said, dragging out the word. “You do have to prove it.”
I exhaled heavily. “Quit the nagging, okay? You’re getting on my damn nerves.”
Her mouth tightened. After a moment she said, “See that guy over there, in the red shirt? He’s from Chicago. He comes to see Carlos and to train, and sometimes we go there. We cook and eat together. We talk after we put our babies to sleep. The guy next to him is from Philadelphia. Same thing. They are his brothers. That guy there, in the yellow shirt? He’s from Baltimore. When Carlos was having his difficulties he would come in to watch the roda in DC. The door is open at our academia. That guy from Baltimore noticed him, went over and talked to him. He helped him. He taught Carlos his first ginga. He took him in, his irmão. He helped him. We helped him. This is capoeira. We took him in because we knew he was família, and look at him now.”
I glanced around the room as if my brother were there. “Sulay,” I said, and then fell silent. There were flecks of steel in her eyes. Carlos had had lots of trouble, at times nearly violent trouble, with women. He hadn’t treated them well. He hadn’t treated himself well. But he was with this woman now and he wasn’t the same person. “What the hell do you want me to do?” I said.
She rose with her tray even though she hadn’t eaten a single bite. “Be his brother. You have to prove, Eric. The cost is big.”
I have a memory of something our mother said that always gets mixed up in my mind. There are two possibilities of when she said it. One is from our time in the South Bronx, and the other is from when she called some fifteen years later to tell me Carlos was in DC, and that he was in trouble.
The night in the South Bronx, my mother and I sat at the kitchen table as Carlos slept. He had started causing problems at school. His teacher reported that he was being inappropriate with girls, hitting them and touching them. I thought my mother wanted to talk to me about that.
She had yet to separate from Carlos’s father, but he was visiting relatives in Puerto Rico, so that night it was just the three of us in the apartment. I’d been so angry lately, because of my stepfather, because of the awful things he did and made me do when he called me back to the bedroom. Earlier that day, I had argued with Carlos, who was twelve at the time. I told him he was going to grow up to be a fat, useless, perverted bastard, just like his father. He had already gained a lot of weight and was becoming self-conscious about it. My words seemed to hurt him even more than I had intended, and I had intended to hurt him a great deal.
My mother took off her glasses now and looked at me. She was tired, with dark patches under her eyes and unkempt hair. The pads of her glasses left indentations on both sides of her nose. “You can’t talk to family that way,” she said.
“He was bothering me,” I told her. “He’s always up my ass.”
“You watch your language, boy. And I don’t mean that curse word that just came out of your mouth. You can’t say things like that to your brother.”
“He’s not even my brother. He’s only my half-brother.”
She struck me in the mouth. I was used to being hit—beatings were happening more and more often recently—but this was the first time my mother had hit me since I was a small child. With her hand to her cheek, she stood and walked over to the window near the sink. Then she opened a kitchen drawer and took out a knife. She placed it on the table in front of me.
“Which half?” she said. “Take this and go into that bedroom and show me which half you claim.”
I wanted to laugh at her getting all Old Testament with me, but I didn’t. She had never looked at me so hard. I didn’t know whether she would hit me again or collapse into tears.
“Ain’t no half, Eric. Are you out of your mind? Half? You go on in this life fixed on half and you’ll end up with nothing.”
I stared at the blade of the knife until she started to speak again.
“I had a brother,” she said. “You know your aunties, but you don’t know about Junior. That’s what we called him. He was named after your grandfather, Henderson. When I was born he was already a teenager. Junior always did whatever he wanted to. No one in the family could tell him nothing. It seemed like he was always leaving. He left the house, left the town, and then left the country. He went off to Vietnam and it seemed to be that he never came back. He did though. He did come back, but we didn’t have any hands or eyes on him. We didn’t reach out. It wouldn’t have been easy to find him, but that’s an excuse. We didn’t look. We didn’t even call his name.” She shook her head. “Junior died almost a decade ago in Jacksonville, Florida. Didn’t find out until last year. My brother, dead and gone with no ceremony, in a place where I never even knew he’d been.”
Next in my memory come the words she may not have said until the later time, or it may have been that she said some version of them to me both times.
“Keep your eyes on your brother,” she said. “You might see terrible things—you will see terrible things—but you can’t look away. Stay close. He’s got to know that you’re watching out for him.”
But I didn’t stay close. I refused to. My mother wanted me to attend college in New York, and Carlos did too. She said I was a man now and that the family needed me, that my brother needed me, but I didn’t apply to even one school in the city. After all, I was “exceptional.” I had an opportunity to get out and there was no way I wasn’t going to take it. I applied to places in the South and on the West Coast, as far away as I could think to go. When schools in California started sending letters of admission, I was as good as gone. It didn’t matter which of them I went to. Every acceptance, every distant yes, confirmed my sense of my fate.
By then, my stepfather was at his worst. He was still calling me back to the bedroom when our mother wasn’t around, even more frequently, and he had begun calling Carlos back to the room too. I knew this, but I didn’t care. I was so ashamed and angry, so desperate to save myself, I didn’t think twice about leaving my mother and brother behind.
I left the dining hall not long after Sulay did, but I didn’t go to any classes that day. I returned to Quantico Creek and managed to find the exact spot where Carlos and I had talked two days earlier. From that rocky place I headed east along the water toward the Potomac. I walked about three miles toward the eastern edge of the park, and made it to the visitor center. I considered leaving the park entirely, hitching a ride with some strangers, but I just sat outside the center, for a very long time. When the sun started to go down, I began walking again. I got turned around a few times, but I found my way back to Happyland. It was a shock that I didn’t get lost forever.
By the time I arrived, all the classes were over and the bateria was playing for that night’s roda. I was exhausted from all the walking and sore from the previous day’s classes. My first impulse was to just go to bed, but I headed in the direction of the music. It was coming from the big cabin that served as our dining hall. I went inside and stood by the door. The tables had been cleared away to make room for the circle of people, and the sounds of the berimbaus leaped under the roof. A single voice was raised in so
ng:
Deus que me deu, Deus que me dá
Capoeira de angola pra nós vadiar
The chorus, everyone else in the circle, responded, “Deus que me deu, Deus que me dá,” and then the back and forth continued:
Tudo o que eu tenho é deus quem me da
Deus que me deu, Deus que me dá
Na roda da capoeria eu quero jogar
Deus que me deu, Deus que me dá
Carlos was playing, and from his clothes and his sweat it appeared he had been at it for a long while. I had never actually seen him play capoeira. Though he had a large, strong body, he was incredibly fluid and flexible. I remembered when he was a little boy and would dance to please me.
The man Carlos played with was overmatched. Everywhere he tried to go, my brother was there. He was telling the man, I know this place; I’ve already had that thought; no, there’s a better way. He showed the man all of his vulnerabilities, just with the placement of a foot, a beautifully timed sweep to put him gently on the floor, letting him know that it isn’t such a horrible thing to fall down. There was pure joy on my brother’s face, but I could also see that he was full of mischief and that he could be cruel—spinning slowly into an easily evaded kick, and then spinning immediately into the kick again with much greater speed, stopping his foot just short of the man’s stunned face. As the people in the circle murmured and whistled in admiration of the implied strike, he mouthed some words and seemed to be arguing with himself. It became obvious that he’d had a desire, just barely contained, to go ahead and hit the other man. Making full contact with that kick would have deeply gratified him in some way.
A Lucky Man Page 11