Back

by Norah McClintock

  The first thing that happens is that Ardell comes off his porch and crosses the street.

  “My brother is in the hospital in a coma from defending you from that piece of garbage,” he says to Shana. “If my brother hadn’t helped you, that piece of garbage would have hurt you, and that baby might noteven have been born. That piece of garbage isn’t fit to be anyone’s father.”

  Jojo just looks at him.

  “But he is someone’s father,” Shana says.

  Then Shana’s father appears. I’m not sure how or even where he comes from because I’ve been looking over at Jojo’s mother’s house. But there he is, grabbing the stroller with the baby still in it and trying to turn it around. Shana puts her hands on the stroller’s handles to stop him, but he pushes her away.

  Jojo steps forward just like that, like it’s an automatic thing, like he isn’t even thinking about it. Shana’s father, who has gray hair and deep wrinkles on his forehead, looks evenly at Jojo and says, “You going to put me in a coma too?”

  Jojo throws his hands up in a gesture of surrender. He steps back a pace. I look up and down the street and see surprise on every face.

  Every face except Ardell’s. Ardell’s eyes are filled with hate.

  Shana bends down again, and this time she undoes the harness that’s holdingBenjamin in. She picks him up and holds him out to Jojo. Jojo looks at Shana’s father. He looks at Ardell. Then he looks at Benjamin. The boy smiles at Jojo. Jojo stretches out his arms, and the next thing you know, the most notorious person on my street seems amazed to find himself holding a chubby little boy. His very own son. He smiles at the child. His son smiles back. Then, looking embarrassed, Jojo hands him back to Shana. She buckles the boy back into the stroller.

  “How’s your mother?” she says when she straightens up again.

  Jojo just shrugs.

  Shana looks at her father, all sharp-faced and angry. She says to Jojo, “Tell her I’ll come by next week.”

  Jojo nods.

  Shana takes control of the stroller. She pushes it past Ardell, who says, “My brother is in a coma, and for what? For what?”

  Shana’s father puts a protective arm around Shana. He looks like he’s as angry with Ardell as he is with Jojo. I hear him tell Shana, “You should stay away from here for a while.”

  Shana doesn’t answer. She pushes the stroller down the sidewalk toward the house where she grew up. Jojo watches her. Then he goes back inside, leaving Ardell alone on the sidewalk.

  Ardell glowers up at Jojo’s mother’s house. He wants to get even with Jojo. I can see it. Everyone can see it.

  Chapter Five

  Ardell goes three times a week most weeks to see his brother in the hospital. Ardell’s mother goes four times a week most weeks, on the days Ardell doesn’t go. Sometimes the two of them go together.

  Ardell’s father, who moved out of the house over a year ago, never goes. He told Ardell’s mother, “What’s the point? You heard what they said. He’s never going to change.” He told her, “We should lethim go.” That’s when Ardell’s mother decided to let Ardell’s father go instead.

  A week after Jojo gets out and comes back to live in his mother’s house, the word on the street is this: Ardell’s father has talked to Eden’s doctor. Everybody already knows that Eden has irreversible brain damage. Everyone already knows that Eden probably won’t come out of his coma. Now Ardell’s father has talked to the doctor about turning off all the machines and letting Eden go.

  This makes Ardell furious. He curses his father up and down the street.

  “Let him go?” he says. “He means kill him. He means pull the plug. He calls himself a father. He says he just has Eden’s best interests at heart. But he never goes to see him. Eden is already dead to him, and now he wants to make it official. He wants to kill him.”

  People talk about it all up and down the street.

  People say, “If it’s true what the doctors say, if he’s never going to wake up, isn’t it better to just let him go?”

  Other people say, “He’s alive. He’s been alive for two years. You never know what medical science will be able to do a year or two or even five years from now. What if they pull the plug and then six months from now they come up with something that could have helped him? What then?”

  Still other people say, “Jojo Benn should have been locked up for the rest of his life for what he did. He as good as killed that boy. An eye for an eye, that’s what the Bible says. An eye for an eye.”

  Ardell never comes out and says it, but everyone knows that he’s an eye-for-aneye kind of person, at least where Jojo is concerned. He wants his brother to live. He wants his brother to wake up. But more than anything, he wants Jojo to pay for what he did. Instead Jojo is living right across the street in his mother’s house. Every morning, Ardell is there to see Jojo come out, pick up the newspaper off the porch and carry it back inside to his mother. Every day, Ardell sees Jojo walk down to the store to buy food for his mother.

  And then something happens.

  Ardell’s father arrives in his dusty old car. He parks it at the curb and starts up the walk to the porch. Ardell is out on the porch watching Jojo’s mother’s house. He blocks his father’s way. Everyone on the street can hear him clearly as he says to his father, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Ardell’s father talks more quietly than Ardell. I only know what he said because one of Ardell’s next-door neighbors told me. Ardell’s father says, “I’m here to see your mother.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Ardell says.

  “It’s important,” his father says. “It’s about your brother.”

  “He’s still alive, if that’s what you want to know,” Ardell says.

  Ardell’s father shakes his head. He tries to get around Ardell, but Ardell is like a star basketball player. He keeps blocking his father.

  Then the door to Jojo’s mother’s house opens, and Jojo steps out onto the porch.He’s carrying a big cotton shopping bag that his mother always takes with her when she goes shopping. Jojo’s mother doesn’t like to bring things home in plastic shopping bags. She says she doesn’t believe in that.

  At the same time, my mother comes to the door and says to me, “We’re out of milk. Be an angel—go to the store and get me some.” She hands me some money and goes back inside. She doesn’t even notice what’s going on on the other side of the street.

  Ardell’s father has seen Jojo. He has turned around one hundred and eighty degrees, as if he’s completely forgotten that he has been trying to get into the house to see his wife. Instead, he’s staring at Jojo. His jaw hangs open. Without taking his eyes off Jojo, he says to Ardell, “What’s he doing here? What’s that murderer doing back here?”

  Ardell turns on his father the same hate-filled eyes he uses on Jojo. Ardell’s neighbor, who saw the whole thing up close, said that you could tell Ardell was conflicted. On the one hand, he hated his father for calling Jojo a murderer because the person his father meantas the murder victim was Eden, and Eden wasn’t dead. Ardell was fighting alongside his mother to keep Eden alive. But, on the other hand, somewhere deep inside, it looked like maybe Ardell knew his father was right, that Eden might never wake up, because he put a hand on his father’s shoulder, and instead of arguing with him, he said, “He’s here, but he’s not staying.” The neighbor who heard this isn’t shy about repeating it all up and down the street.

  Meanwhile, Jojo comes down his front walk with his mother’s shopping bag. I decide to follow him. After all, my mom wants me to go to the store for milk.

  I clomp down the sidewalk behind Jojo, moving slowly because of my walking cast. Jojo keeps his eyes straight ahead. If he knows I’m behind him, he doesn’t let on. He goes to the small grocery store on the corner. It happens to be the same store I’m going to. It’s not one of those chain grocery stores, but it sells everything we ever need, and my mother says the prices are fair.

  Jojo goes into the st
ore. Mr. Brisebois,who owns the store and who you always see first thing up there at the cash, turns to look at him. As soon as he sees Jojo, he beckons to one of his daughters, who all work at the store. She comes and replaces him at the cash. Mr. Brisebois makes his way out from behind the counter and trails Jojo up and down the aisles. He does it right out in the open. He doesn’t even try to pretend that he isn’t following Jojo. I guess I can’t blame him.

  Mr. Brisebois is like a lot of the store owners in my neighborhood. He knows a lot of stores can’t be bothered to set up here because people don’t have a lot of money. He also knows that a lot of people don’t have cars and that it’s a pain to take the bus to go grocery shopping. So he knows he can make a good living here. But he’s also wary. He knows that there are a lot of good, honest people in the neighborhood. But there are also people who aren’t so good or honest. Some of them, like Jojo back before he sent Eden Withrow to the hospital, have given Mr. Brisebois a hard time. So Mr. Brisebois isn’t shy. When people like Jojo come into his store, he follows them tomake sure that they don’t steal anything. Or he makes them so uncomfortable that they go somewhere else where maybe they can get away with stealing.

  Jojo reaches for some cans of tomatoes. That’s when he sees Mr. Brisebois standing behind him. Jojo straightens up. He turns and looks at Mr. Brisebois. Jojo is taller and bulkier than Mr. Brisebois. He’s younger and in better shape. People are actually afraid of Jojo. No one is afraid of Mr. Brisebois, other than being afraid he might call the cops.

  Mr. Brisebois stands his ground. He looks Jojo in the eye. He’s not giving an inch, but he has one hand behind his back, and I can see that it’s shaking.

  Jojo looks at Mr. Brisebois. Then he walks a little farther down the aisle and pulls a package of dried spaghetti off the shelf. Mr. Brisebois is right with him. He follows Jojo to the cheese aisle, where Jojo picks up a can of shake-on Parmesan cheese. Then to the bread aisle, where Jojo picks up a loaf of crusty bread. Then to the produce aisle, where he picks up tomatoes, lettuce, a greenpepper, some green onions and some garlic. Jojo carries it all to the cash, where Mr. Brisebois’s daughter rings it through. The whole time, Mr. Brisebois watches her, and Jojo acts like Mr. Brisebois isn’t there. He packs all the groceries in his mother’s cloth shopping bag. He pays. He leaves the store.

  Mr. Brisebois puts a hand on the counter and watches Jojo go through the door. He uses that hand to steady himself. He is perspiring a lot. He says to his daughter, “That one is no good. I wish he would shop somewhere else.”

  Mr. Brisebois’s daughter says, “Why don’t you tell him that?”

  Mr. Brisebois goes back behind the cash to ring up my container of milk. His hands are shaking as he makes change from the bill my mother gave me.

  “That one is no good,” he says again. “Now that he’s back, they’ll all be back. Things will change.”

  Chapter Six

  Things do change. But they don’t change the way Mr. Brisebois thinks.

  Back before Jojo was sent away, he used to hang out with guys who were just like him. They were big and smart-assed and into stuff they shouldn’t have been. They had swagger and muscle and liked to use them both. They acted like they were in charge, like they were better than everyone else. They took what they wanted, and they dared you to do something about it.

  Some people did do something. They called the cops for stuff like shoplifting. Something bad usually happened to people who ratted on Jojo. Their windows got broken or a fire broke out in their back alleys or someone dragged a nail up and down the sides of their cars. No one ever saw those things happen. The cops asked questions, but they never made an arrest because they were never able to prove anything. So after a while, if Jojo or one of his friends wanted a pack of smokes, they got it, free. If they wanted an ice cream from the ice-cream truck, they got it, until the guy who owned the ice-cream truck stopped coming around the neighborhood. The people who gave them free stuff called it insurance—you pay to insure that nothing bad is going to happen. Nothing bad that you can’t prove and that the cops can’t do anything about, but that leaves you out of produce or with expensive repairs to do and that scares you or your wife or kids.

  Before I know it, Jojo has been back for a week, and apart from that one day,his friends don’t come around. Jojo mostly stays at home. The weather stays nice, so he takes meals out to his mother, who sits out back under the big umbrella, sleeping. I hear kitchen sounds—pots and dishes—through the open window. I smell cooking smells. And still Jojo’s mother is outside under that umbrella, which means that Jojo is doing the cooking. I hear the vacuum run in Jojo’s house and see his mother outside under that umbrella, which means that Jojo is doing the cleaning. I have to think that over—Jojo doing all the housework. It makes me wonder what it must have been like where he has been. It makes me wonder what might have happened to him in there.

  A few more days go by, and still Jojo’s friends don’t show up.

  But Ardell’s friends do.

  Ardell has a lot of friends, and they have all grown in the time since Jojo was sent away. They are big and strong, but people don’t see them as troublemakers. Mr. Brisebois doesn’t follow any of them around his store. People never watch them and wonder what they aregoing to do. At least not until one morning two weeks after Jojo has been back.

  That day Jojo comes out of the house. Ardell is across the street on his porch, as usual, except that the porch is crowded with Ardell’s friends. They all come down off the porch behind Ardell. I count them—there are nine of them in addition to Ardell. They fall into line behind Jojo.

  That gets people’s attention up and down the street. It gets my attention too. I start to follow them. A lot of other people do too. Some of them follow directly behind Ardell and his friends. Others follow on the other side of the street, like me. But we all end up in the same place. We all end up on the sidewalk outside Mr. Brisebois’s grocery store.

  This time Ardell doesn’t stay behind Jojo. Instead, he hurries around him and blocks his way into the store. His friends stand in a circle around Jojo.

  All of Ardell’s friends are tensed up. So is Ardell. Everyone is watching, even Mr. Brisebois, through the window of his store. Jojo just stands there. For a coupleof moments he looks at Ardell. Then, very slowly, he turns around, the full three hundred and sixty degrees, looking at all nine of Ardell’s friends one by one, until finally he is looking at Ardell again. For the first time since he has come back, Jojo says something in public.

  “I don’t want trouble,” he says. “I just came to get some groceries.”

  Ardell doesn’t move. He looks hard at Jojo. “You’re not welcome here,” he says.

  Jojo looks over his right shoulder, and the guys who are standing on that side of him tense up, like they are afraid Jojo is going to lash out at them. Jojo looks over his left shoulder, and the guys who are standing on that side tense up. Then he looks at Ardell.

  “If you want groceries,” Ardell says, “you’re going to have to go somewhere else to get them.”

  Behind Ardell, Mr. Brisebois moves from the window to the door of his store. He turns the lock and flips over the OPEN sign so that now it says CLOSED, please call again. Ardell smiles when he seesthat. Mr. Brisebois moves back, away from the door.

  “Looks like there are no groceries in there for you,” Ardell says.

  He pushes Jojo. The palms of both hands slam into Jojo’s chest. Jojo stumbles backward. Someone sticks out a foot. Jojo trips on it and lands on his butt on the pavement. All the guys with Ardell laugh. Then Ardell kicks Jojo, hard. Someone else moves in and swings back a leg, but Jojo scrambles to his feet and darts between two of Ardell’s friends so that now he’s on the outside of the circle instead of on the inside. Ardell and his friends turn to go after him.

  Then a double miracle happens. The first part of the miracle: a cop car slides around the corner with two cops in it, both of them with their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, but you kn
ow they are taking note of everything. The cops who ride through my neighborhood are always on the lookout for things that don’t look right. A bunch of big muscle guys moving down the street after just one guy doesn’t look right.

  The second part of the miracle: the cop car doesn’t mean trouble for Jojo. This time, maybe for the first time, the cops actually save Jojo. Ardell hangs back. Ardell’s friends hang back. Jojo stumbles down the street to his mother’s house. After the cop car disappears, people start to jeer, but by then Jojo is safe inside.

  Chapter Seven

  After the day when Ardell and his friends made a circle around Jojo, it seems that no one has anything better to do than be out there on the street to see what will happen next. Will Jojo call up his old friends? Will they come over and back him up the way they used to before he went away? Will it come down to Ardell on one side of the street and Jojo on the other, each with his own gang of friends? Will it come down to a real battle—and if it does, who will win? And then what will happen?

  The next day Jojo doesn’t come out of the house at all. I go out back at my house and look over the fence. Jojo’s mother doesn’t come out either, even though it’s one of those nice days, warm but not too hot, not sticky either, with a nice breeze to cool you down.

  The day after that, late in the afternoon, after everyone has seen Ardell and his mother walk down to the bus together, Jojo shows his face. He walks down the street to where the stores are. People drift down the street after him, as if they are curious about something. But what? Ardell isn’t there. Nothing can happen. But people follow, which makes me curious. So I follow the people who are following Jojo.

  Jojo walks directly to Mr. Brisebois’s grocery store. Just as he gets to the door, Mr. Brisebois turns the lock and flips the sign in the door to CLOSED. Jojo looks through the glass at him. Then he looks down the block to the convenience store. He starts to walk toward it. Before he gets there, a CLOSED sign appears in the window. Three blocks down, there’s a small fruit and vegetablestore. It’s always open, even on holidays when Mr. Brisebois’s store is closed. But by the time Jojo gets to it, it’s closed. Jojo hammers on the door. No one answers.