The Stars Beneath Our Feet

by David Barclay Moore

  I watched Vega kneel there on the floor beside his bed, staring at his Glock. His face had got limp now all of a sudden. Like he felt hazy, lost in a dream.

  Vega said, “We’d just have to let them find us again. Like they do. It’d be easy. That’s what Frito said.”

  It’d be easy.

  That’s what Jermaine had said too.

  Rockit thought he knew what Jermaine had wanted for me. A better life.

  What did stupid Rockit know anyway?

  Him saying Jermaine wanted me to study and go to college…Rockit didn’t know. Nobody knew nothing.

  “I think it was my fault, Vega,” I mumbled.

  “No!” Vega yelled. “Harp and Gully mess with everybody. They don’t care—”

  “No, man. I’m talking about Jermaine.”

  Vega’s eyes grew wide. I slid from his bed down to the carpet.

  “Just before Jermaine got shot up,” I started, “me and him hadn’t been speaking at all—at least, not for that whole week before he died. We had had a argument. A big one that had got him real upset with me. I had wanted to talk to Jermaine after that, but he hadn’t really wanted to associate with me.”

  “Why was you two beefin’?” Vega asked.

  I remembered back to just before Halloween. The same argument that Mr. Ali had been trying to get me to speak about during our talks. I had never told it to anybody.

  Not even my best friend.

  “Vega, for days Jermaine had been trying to convince me to join his crew. The stuff they used to do down at the barbershop?”

  Vega nodded.

  I went on. “Jermaine said he could get me on there, so I could have some money in my pocket and him and me could work together. He said it’d be easy, what they would have me doing—just little stuff like running packages from one spot to another, dropping off money from one place to another. Easy stuff. But I didn’t wanna do it. Because of what Ma would say and how she might think of me.”

  My eyes were getting wet. I stared Vega in his eyes now.

  “Years ago, when I was little,” I said, “he had made me promise that I would never do it. That I’d stay away from his barbershop. And not let nobody talk me into doing any of that….But before he died, Jermaine had stopped talking to me because he said he had gone out of his way to try to bring me on there and me refusing was making him look weak. Foolish.”

  “Lolly,” Vega said. “Man…”

  I shook my head. “I let Jermaine down. I let him down, Vega.” I leaned forward onto my knees. “I should’a been there.”

  “Maybe he was right, Loll,” I heard Vega whisper. He ran his hand over the gun’s barrel. “Things were different when we was little. Nobody’d mess with us. We ain’t little no more. It ain’t safe.”

  We sat quiet for a minute.

  “You really think we should do that?” I asked.

  “We need to man up, Loll.”

  We both stared at the gun, lost in it. Lips moving, Vega seemed to be reading something written on it: words that weren’t there, but he could see them just as plain.

  I knew whose names he saw there.

  I could almost read them too.

  “Lolly!”

  “What!”

  “Get out here!” Ma called. “You got company!”

  Company?

  I sat up on my bed. It couldn’t be Vega; he wouldn’t leave his bedroom and his Glock—his new best friend.

  Ever since yesterday, when Vega had showed me the gun that Frito had got for him, I had noticed that everything was pissing me off. All of a sudden it seemed like everybody and their cousin had started to irritate me.

  I wasn’t feeling right.

  In the past day, I didn’t know how many times I had planned out what was going to happen to Harp and Gully. Just thinking about this made me different, feel how I used to feel.

  I shuffled through the living room and heard voices in the kitchen. One was my mother’s voice. The other one was a girl’s voice. Not Rose’s, but…

  I turned the corner into the kitchen and saw Ma and Sunnshyne Dixon-Knight sitting there at the small table. I gulped and folded my arms over my chest. Though I was wearing a superhero T-shirt and pajama bottoms, I suddenly felt like I was undressed.

  Sunny looked at me and smiled. She was still wearing her arm in her sling.

  “Hey, Lolly!” she said.

  Ma stood up and gave me a strange look. The same kind of look she had gave me when she first met Rose in our apartment.

  “Little Sunnshyne brought you something,” Ma said, walking out the kitchen. Before Ma left, she stopped and told me, “You two stay out here, you hear me?” She gave me that look again, then turned back toward Sunny. “Baby, I don’t want you back in his bedroom. It’s so filthy in there, you might catch something.”

  Ma laughed at this in one big chirp and left us alone. I stayed there in the doorway, pinching the side of my neck.

  “They still ain’t caught Harper and Marq Gully,” Sunny said. She shook her head and played with the foil covering an aluminum baking pan. “Thugs.”

  “What’s that?” I asked her about the pan.

  Sunny had brought it over filled with these pastelles she had made. She told me she had baked them for me during this week off from school. With Butteray Jones’s help.

  Her cooking coach, I guess.

  I nibbled one of her pastelles. It wasn’t very good. In fact, it was nasty, but I didn’t say nothing. I just swallowed and fought back regurgitating.

  Sunny looked at me, all anxious. I smiled at her and grabbed a can of seltzer water from the refrigerator.

  It was weird eating pastelles in April. We only ever had them around Christmas. But Sunny wouldn’t know that. Her family wasn’t from the Caribbean. They weren’t coconuts like me and Ma.

  “You like it?” Sunny asked.

  I nodded, glugging down water. “Butteray taught you how to make ’em, huh?”

  She nodded and smiled at the floor. “He’s not my boyfriend, you know. He likes dudes.”

  “I figured,” I said, swallowing more seltzer, trying to get that taste out of my mouth.

  “Oh, he’s cool. I like him. Mama works at Aunt Cushie’s. Ray learned to cook real good from his parents. They’re both chefs.”

  I swallowed the last of my water.

  Sunny went on, “At first, I didn’t like him—Butteray. We fought a lot, like you and me used to. But now Ray and I are friends. Just like me and you. I gotta go.” She stood up fast. “I told Mama I’d drop these off and come right back home.” Sunny started to leave.

  “How’d you hurt your arm?” I asked her at our front door. “Butteray?”

  “Oh no! Ray’d never do that! He’s nice.”

  “You sure? He acts weird….”

  She looked embarrassed and opened the door. “I think, for some reason, Ray was scared that I liked him. You know. Ain’t that dumb? Why would I like a boy who likes boys? I don’t know how he got that dumb idea.”

  Sunny was lying, I could tell. She had liked Butteray. I bet she didn’t know about him and now she felt stupid about it.

  I could’a told her he was one of the children. That was Ma’s slang for gay people. Growing up around them, I could sometimes spook who was who. By “spook,” I mean recognize.

  “Stupid April E. did this to my elbow,” Sunny said. “Well, not on purpose. We were trying to rescue a coyote—”

  “That one in St. Nicholas Park?”

  “Yeah! You saw him too? His name is Nicky. April and I spotted him in the park one day and we had been trying to catch him before the police did. We were afraid they’d shoot him, or something.”

  “Me too!” This girl was something else, I thought.

  Sunny checked her phone for the time, walked across the hall and pressed the elevator down button. She walked back over to me, standing in my doorway.

  “I think he’s still out there,” Sunny whispered. “In the park. I haven’t seen him in a w
hile, but I know they didn’t catch him. It’d be on the news if they had. April and I had been trying to tempt Nicky out with chicken runts. April’s cousin at Eastside Poultry gave them to us.”

  “That’s where you two were coming from the night we got jumped?”

  “Yeah. But way after that we were chasing down one of those dumb birds and I fell backward on my butt and my arm got twisted between April’s big fat thighs.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Dislocated elbow. Not that serious. She needs to lose weight.”

  “What were you gonna do with the coyote—Nicky?” I asked. “If you caught him.”

  She shrugged. Her black braids swung up into the air with her shoulders. I heard the elevator ding behind her.

  I asked her again, “But didn’t you guys think about what might happen?”

  “Sometimes, Wallace,” she started, “you just do what you know is right, even if it seems dumb at the time.”

  Sunny pecked me quick on the knot above my eye and disappeared into the elevator.

  Ding!

  I watched her smile vanish between the closing doors. Where her lips had touched me felt hot.

  Spring break was almost over.

  I wasn’t looking forward to going back to school and after-school. I just didn’t feel like it. And I knew Ali would be bothering me again about us talking.

  I was done talking with him.

  Stepping off my bike, I peered into St. Nicholas Park for any signs, but didn’t see none. I stood there at the edge for a minute, looking into all the green there.

  Was Nicky the coyote really still here?

  Sunny sure thought so.

  I thought about its glowing eyes and shivered and remembered how scared the coyote had made us that night.

  I reached into my backpack. Sunny’s pastelles were there, wrapped in aluminum foil. I placed them on a nearby wooden park bench, painted green and flaking.

  I backed away and hopped back onto my bike. I wondered if coyotes with glowing yellow eyes liked pastelles as much as they liked French fries. Before I left, I took another peek through the trees and into the park.

  Our coyote was nowhere.

  Disappeared.

  Like everything else does sooner or later. Nicky was gone. Like Harmonee. Like Jermaine.

  I was getting angry again and couldn’t help it.

  Vega and his gun had really infected me.

  My chest had gotten heavier.

  Just like before.

  Ma had fried chicken for our dinner. With that, we also had some carrots and peas, which I usually liked a lot. I sipped from another bottle of Snapple Apple, but wasn’t eating nothing.

  I didn’t feel like it.

  All I could think about was Jermaine and about Vega’s gun and what we were gonna do with it. I still felt guilty about saying no to what my brother had asked.

  I knew I had let him down. Vega was right. We weren’t safe. Any time we could go out just like my brother.

  “Funny boy, you gonna eat that food,” Ma said to me. She took a bite of a drumstick and then used a paper towel to squash a roach that had crawled out hoping to get at some of her dinner.

  They got strong noses, roaches, I heard.

  “Food is hard enough to come by, without you wasting what I cook,” she said. “If I brought Moses in here from off the street, I bet he’d love this chicken.”

  What did that old bum Moses have to do with anything?

  I scooped some peas and carrots into my mouth to shut her up.

  “I wonder where’s Yvonne?” Ma asked nobody, really.

  We had waited a whole hour for Yvonne to drop by after work like she usually did on Tuesdays. But even after that, she still hadn’t showed, so Ma decided for us to go on and eat without her. Yvonne wasn’t answering her phone either.

  “Not like Yvonne to miss my chicken,” Ma told her plate. “She loves my chicken.”

  “Yeah,” I said with a sigh. It was strange, though.

  “Peculiar,” Ma said.

  In my mind I was running over and over again the scene of me and Vega walking down 125th Street. In my dream it was late at night. On a Friday. It was just me and Vega walking all slow and then Harp and Gully jump out from behind the statue of Adam Clayton Powell.

  You know, the statue with his coat fluttering behind him like a cape?

  Yeah, so in my mind, Harp and Gully jump out at us. But this agitates neither me or Vega. We hard.

  “You two little punks better be skeered,” one of them goes. Probably Harp.

  Then Vega yanks out his violin. But his violin is made all out of Legos.

  Harp and Gully laugh, teasing about how weak Vega is for playing a Lego violin. And they just stand there laughing while Vega plays this real beautiful, sad song on Lego ’Ye. Just like the song he was playing the other day in his bedroom.

  This song is so beautiful that it makes Harp and Gully weep over how beautiful it is. They straight-up start to sob.

  And then, just when Vega is playing the most beautiful part of his song, he points ’Ye at both of them and plucks one last note.

  Bang!

  His violin shoots out a black bullet straight into Harp’s forehead and the bullet keeps flying straight into Gully’s forehead, right behind Harp!

  They both drop to the pavement dead. And their bodies break all apart into little blocks.

  They were made of Legos!

  Me and Vega keep on down 125th. He starts playing a new song. Both of us is, like, “What!”

  I chuckled, sitting at the kitchen table.

  “What’s amusing?” Ma asked.

  Her phone, sitting beside her on the table, started to buzz. From where I sat, I could see Yvonne’s upside-down selfie grinning on the front of the phone. She was finally calling to say why she was so late. This ought to be entertaining.

  “Where you at, Mohawk?” Ma said, answering her phone. I could tell she was about to get into Yvonne.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Ma said into the phone. She sucked her teeth, shaking her head. “Well, don’t bother coming over here tonight. Lolly and me ate up all the supper. We finally caught that ghetto chicken that’s been running around here.” She winked at me and smiled. “Of course I’m joking, girl,” Ma said into her phone.

  My mind floated loose.

  The only thing that I could concentrate on now was getting Harp and Gully. I had just started to daydream again about another scene with me and Vega going after them when Ma shouted out so loud it made me jump.

  “What!” she yelled into her phone. “Arrested?” Ma went on. Now I was paying attention. “Yvonne,” she said, “what did you do?”

  Ma listened to her for a minute.

  Then she frowned.

  And frowned some more.

  “Lolly?” she said into her phone.

  Ma’s eyes met mine and I suddenly felt guilty though I didn’t even know why. I suddenly felt like she knew exactly what I’d been daydreaming about just then.

  Revenge.

  Sitting across from her at the table, I wondered if she knew what Vega and me had been considering to do with our gun. Like maybe they had even found it in his shoebox upstairs.

  I knew that was crazy, but by the way my mother stared at me with her mouth hanging open, I could tell whatever this news was, it was gonna be hostile.

  It was bad.

  Really bad.

  And the evilest part was, I was sure the police would come to arrest me next. And they would arrest Ma too. Like we was all in it together. I figured we were all at risk of getting locked up.

  We were already at the police station. The one down at 123rd and St. Nick Av’. Ma and me had been sitting in the waiting room at the Twenty-Eighth Precinct cop station in Harlem.

  This was where they had taken Yvonne.

  The cops had her back there in lockup right now with me and Ma waiting in this room out front. Right when you entered the station, there was this room with a des
k where a cop sat behind. There were all these hard-as-hell chairs for the public to sit.

  And wait.

  Every now and then cops came in and out. Nobody ever looked at me and Ma sitting here. Like they didn’t see us.

  I had never been in here before. But when I was little, me and my friends used to think this police station looked like a moon base. As little kids we used to pretend that.

  From the outside it was shaped funny, like something that should’a been on another planet.

  When I got older, I grew to know what it really was.

  Me and Ma had been waiting the longest time—it was after midnight now—watching the police start to haul in all these other types they had busted.

  I was hoping those two cops that gave me and Vega a ride home wouldn’t show their faces.

  Ma was wrecked.

  The most messed-up thing she told me was that she remembered coming to this same police station to pick up Jermaine after he had got arrested years ago. She said she had felt like she’d failed him.

  “Like I wasn’t a good mother,” she told me. Ma scrunched her face and sat up straight in her chair. These seats were cramped. “That night I picked your brother up from here, he said for me not to worry about him.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  She sighed. “I told him then that I never wanted to be back at this place again. And that I was trusting in him. What I was also thinking, and hoping too, was that I never wanted to be in here with you, Lolly.” She shook her head. “Never. Not sitting in here.”

  “At no time will you bail me out, Ma. I promise.”

  She gazed at me, heartbroken. But it wasn’t just sad. I could tell in her face that she was also kinda deciding if she would believe me.

  Ma’s face.

  Waiting on Yvonne at this cop shop. Her afraid this would be me one day. That really did it.

  I could feel it.

  Later that night, closer to one in the morning, I had fell asleep, leaning my head on Ma’s big shoulder. We both were still sitting in those hard plastic chairs when there was a big crash. I shook awake and Ma jumped to her feet.

  The cops had been lifting some young dude through the front doors and he had fell, I guess. Making a big racket.