by Jaym Gates
Maybe some kids woulda never. But I was a big comics reader, which is why I understood immediately I was invulnerable. I knew I’d have to hide my superpowers, maybe create a secret identity to fight crime under. Pick a catchy name, put together some kind of costume — I wasn’t too clear on each little detail there because at the moment I really only cared how I was sore and hungry and thirsty and dirty and dressed in rags. And missing my mama and my papa and sisters and brother.
I felt a little like a baby about that — what would Peter Parker say? But I wasn’t too proud to cry. While I was crying, though, I limped my way out of that yard to where they’d started making a path down the middle of the street through the burnt-up ruins of what had used to be a nice, quiet, respectable neighborhood.
I made it the couple blocks to Cobbs Creek Park without being stopped. That early the city seemed deserted. Went down in the bushes and drank big gulps of creek water, peed and washed up and took a look at my bullet wounds; they were pretty much healed over. Cause I was super. Thought about that more. Wondered what happened to Birdie and the other kids while I was dead. Had they and the adult Africas escaped somehow and left me behind when I accidentally died a while? Was I in trouble for being in their house? How could I survive without anybody finding out where I’d been and how my secret powers saved me?
Soreness had worn off a bit and I’d cleaned myself and satisfied my thirst, but I was starving worse and worse every minute! I’d heard about eating wild berries but naturally there were none of those that time of year. I thought maybe if I went up to a stranger and asked them for food they’d help without asking too many questions. Maybe. So I put on my shorts and tied what was left of my shirt over them so the bullet holes and bloodstains didn’t show. I had lost one of my shoes; I pulled off the other and put it in my pocket. Why I don’t know.
Coming up out of the bushes the first people I saw were the police. I ignored them and hoped they’d return the favor. No such luck. One of them shouted at me to come here and I ran, forgetting all I’d been taught. He shot me in the hand. Scared me, but I kept running and turned a quick right on Delancey, headed to my school, Hamilton — not smart, but not stupid, either, because there oughta be other kids there. Without a shirt or shoes and with blood dripping off my new wound I was gonna have a hard time blending in, though.
Still a long while before the first scheduled class, but the door I pounded up to came open when I pulled hard on the handle. This was the big kids’ end of the school, with steel lockers along the hall’s either side. A few down from the door I hit the jackpot: a padlock hanging askew, dark insides showing where it wasn’t quite shut. On the little shelf stood a half-eaten jar of peanut butter; gym shorts and a tank top funky with dried sweat hung from hooks beneath. And sneakers on the bottom! Too large for my feet; I was about to take them anyway when the door outside rattled loud and began to open. I just knew it was that cop chasing me. I pulled the locker shut and huddled under those smelly gym clothes and prayed he wouldn’t look in there and see me.
Even after I thought I heard the police leave I stayed in there, licking out that jar. First bell rang and since it all sounded normal and empty outside I grabbed those nasty clothes and hurried to the john. The shoes worked OK with pieces torn off my shirt stuffed in the toes.
School was closed that day. Took me till second period to get why no one except teachers — only a few of them, even — was there. I dodged getting seen, retrieved my notebook from my own locker and hid in the gym, under the bleachers, drawing costume ideas till noon. Ignorant. Ignorant and young.
Hunger drove me out. I found some change under the bleachers and decided to use it at the corner candy shop. Of course that was shut up too. Whole neighborhood was like a ghost town, if you didn’t count the cops. Walking homewards I started to clog up in my throat a little, but it didn’t really hit me how I was all alone till I got to 61st. Sawhorses and tape and police cars everywhere by then. Couldn’t get near my house. I circled around and didn’t see neither one of my parents — no one I even knew except for mean Mr. Miller, the only white in the neighborhood. He hated us kids, always accused us of teasing his German shepherd, so I wasn’t about to ask him where my family went.
My hand had a pink pucker where the cop’s bullet went through it that morning. My other wounds were less noticeable scars than that.
One of the policemen didn’t look so scary. Long sideburns like Uncle Buck’s. If I told him what happened, could be he’d help me, I thought. I went up and pulled the elbow of his sleeve. He shook me off, barely looked down. Told me beat it before I got arrested. For what?
That’s when I finally got mad. Not when the whites come shooting and killing and burning the place down. When that policeman just plain ignored me.
Where was Birdie? Where were Mama and Papa?
Turned out if I wanted to see my family I shoulda let that damn cop arrest me after all ‘cause they were in jail.
See, the whole mess had to be the fault of us black folks somehow. When Mama and Papa tried to get in past the police’s barricades — looking for me — that triggered some notion they were behind the weapons build-up, the confrontation. Even though neither of them was named Africa.
Mama died that same week. Not in prison; in the hospital they took her to from there. According to the cops she went kinda crazy.
It was my cousin Jimmy Lee told me most of this. Not about Mama dying; that hadn’t happened yet. About the arrest. I called him on a pay phone. My parents had made me memorize Uncle Buck’s phone number, and Jimmy Lee answered. He used to save his comics for me and share Uncle Buck’s Playboys he stole. I looked up to him, 16, almost a man. He offered to come meet me at the candy store, but when he told me about Mama and Papa I didn’t want to wait for him. Had to move.
Uncle Buck and Aunt Lurena and them lived over on the edge of Powelton Village, the corner of Saunders and Hamilton. Took me an hour to walk there. They were still at work when I reached their back porch. My little brother was in a nap. My sisters had gone with Aunt Lurena to her job at the hairdressers.
Jimmy Lee loaned me his old too-small jeans and brought out a pan of leftover cornbread from Aunt Lurena’s kitchen. And butter and some of her homemade strawberry jam. And a bowl of pot liquor. And some stewed oxtails.
That was one of the first things I figured out, necessarily, was why I needed so much to eat. And later I did some hard thinking about how fast I always used to heal up when I would bang my knees falling off slides and so on. How I had never needed a Band-Aid by the time I got home.
Talking that afternoon to Jimmy Lee, though, my mind was full of disguises and weapons and secret powers and ways to make those dirty coppers pay. It was my cousin, older and therefore a tad more practical, who came up with the idea of applying for multiple security cards, or Social Security as we called it back then. He helped me make a bunch of names up — yeah, you can tell by the spelling we made this one up too, so tracing me back is not gonna work real well without you got my cooperation. Back, forwards, or sideways.
He taught me plenty tricks. How to spy. How to keep Uncle Buck and Aunt Lurena and Papa and my sisters Mavis and Terry — all them are fake names too — from noticing I never got any physically older than twenty-five. How to date several girls at once without them catching on. How to stay in touch with him when I moved here to New York, and there to Atlanta, and all the places I picked to live after I decided how to get back at the ones responsible for Mama dying.
We were eating supper when the call came. Maybe if she was white they would have sent somebody in person. Uncle Buck took the phone from Aunt Lurena, listened a moment to the squawky parrot voice coming out of it, said “Yes, sir,” and “Hold on a minute please,” and set it down. Went and leaned on the edge of the sink a minute, then left the room. I heard the screen door to the porch slap shut behind him.
After a while Aunt Lurena must have realized he wasn’t coming back in. She picked up the phone but the person on
the other end had got tired of waiting. The line was dead. She went out to talk with her husband. Mama was his baby sister. When Aunt Lurena came back in I was scraping the dishes in the garbage and Mavis was running soapy water in the sink. She gave all us kids squeezes on our shoulders and sat us down to tell us the news.
It was Jimmy Lee convinced me not to go killing anybody on Mama’s account. He said living well was the best revenge, and I determined to do that. Well and long. And let them die naturally.
You could call this what I told you so far my origin story. Never built my secret fortress or wore a costume, though. In fact, most times I was barely able to save myself, let alone take down evil masterminds. Jimmy Lee had this idea to keep track of our whole family tree and see could he find anyone else like me. Genealogy. And he married my sister Mavis, but it really wasn’t a single thing special about their four kids, and he died himself fifteen years ago.
He’s the only one knew about every single one of mine. I wish —
#
Myra strokes the palm’s pause. “There’s more,” Polly objects.
“You’ve heard it.” Myra’s thready voice sounds tired. Full days do that to her now. “Anything you can’t summarize?” The older sister shakes her head no.
“What’s he want for his sample?”
“Not money. He made some good investments.” Polly bites her lip and shakes her head again, continues. “He claims to have the genes we need. He knows about you, though he had this idea we were married.”
Myra snorts. “The still from Brentwood?”
“Right. It’s up on my wall. But what’s that got to do with telomeres, and why’s he so sure we’re interested in how he reproduces his?”
“It’s not like there’s some big secret. Grafts—you told him that much about me, I assume? — have aging issues similar to clones. Because, well, we sort of are clones. Because even with adding both Mom’s and Dad’s genes —”
“Yeah.” Polly cuts her off. She hates the way Myra obsesses over morbid details, how she constantly wonders aloud which of her characteristics besides skin color are linked to DNA that hadn’t been completely stripped from the donor’s ovum. “Yeah, easy enough to uncover that sort of stuff if you look for it. What I’m asking is, how did he know to look? He had us figured out ahead of time — he may have even set up how he and I met.”
Polly wants to sit down. She can’t; Myra’s in the lab’s only chair, a tall thing, armless and spindle-backed. It swivels left, right, beneath Myra’s heavy behind. Obesity is a graft problem too.
“What’s the difference?” the younger woman asks. “Capturing the sequences underlying his abilities will let us make sure no graft has to wind up aging as fast as me ever again. You say he wants something besides money in return — can we give it to him?”
“Access to our database. And I don’t mean read-only.”
That makes Myra worry a bit. “The crypto one? How did he —”
“Exactly.” Polly leans with her forearms pressed down on the black fake granite of the counter top. “It’s more than a little spooky.”
“Should we not do this then?”
Polly slumps to rest her forehead between her flattened hands. “I don’t know.”
“Sorry. I couldn’t hear you.”
She lifts her face. “I said I don’t know!”
“What kind of answer is that? You need more time to think? You want me to talk to him myself?”
“Why? You assume you’ll make a better connection with him since you’re both black?”
Myra waits a moment to answer, picking filters from a dispenser box. “Maybe. I mean, I’m as white as you in most ways —”
“Except for appearances.”
“Except for appearances,” Myra agrees. “But it could be an advantage. You told me yourself he’s been killed twelve times in forty years.”
“Not every time by white people.”
“Most times, though.” Myra lowers her head to her sister’s level, gazes curiously into her hazel eyes. “Is there a reason we don’t want him to have access?”
Polly is reluctant to admit it. “No.”
Myra sits back up. “If you need something else to do with the money, I have a list of charities —”
“That’s not —”
“Then what? Polly, I’m through.” She picks up the box of filters and slams it back down. Swack! “Through! I have four semesters of work left in me — five or six if I pace myself. Not twenty. Not even ten. I have to finish this research now, come up with a solution now!
“And there are going to be more and more trophy births like me. More women like Mom holding off having kids till they find the right man, the right situation, the right career. Till they stop producing viable eggs and have to get a graft, no matter what weird side effects their offspring suffer.”
“Weird side effects.” Turning her head just slightly, Polly snatches a glance at her sister. Not every graft ages so quickly and catastrophically. She looks away before her look can be noticed. Myra hates being fussed over, as she calls Polly’s careful monitoring of her deteriorating condition. “See, that’s what I’m having trouble with. We’re potentially subjecting a bunch of unborn strangers to even more, maybe worse —”
“Tell me this is the first time you’ve thought that.”
Polly straightens up from the counter. “No.”
“So are you going to get him to provide us with —”
“I already did. Flask is in my knapsack.”
“What?! All this time we’ve been arguing about payment the sample was sitting around at room temperature?” Myra slides off the chair, totters a little as her joints adjust to the weight.
Polly puts out a supporting hand. “Of course not. It’s in a cooler. It’s fine.”
“You said —”
“The cooler’s in my knapsack. The flask’s in the cooler. See?” She pulls wide the sack’s khaki-colored sphincter to reveal a matte black box, lifts the box’s lid to display a frosted stainless steel cylinder gleaming with promise.
#
Every year on his birthday, Scotty Scofield got a card in the mail from his father with a two-dollar bill tucked inside. Cash money. Funny, yet still fungible. When he was old enough not to lose them — eight, but mature for his age (he’d skipped ahead to fifth grade) — his mom Estrella gave him all the twos that came while he was little. She went to the bank kiosk and helped him open an account in the same branch where she collected child support payments. They had to accept them. Legal tender.
Tempting as it was to dip into the bank account to pay for new game releases, Scotty resisted the urge. Instead he babysat and modeled at the art school, auto-depositing his earnings till he had enough for a set of clubs. He’d wanted his own since he saw his first tournament.
That was 2042, the 130th anniversary of the Metropolitan Golf Association’s Junior Championship Tournament. He’d been seven and a half. Now fifteen, tall, thin, his wide, thick-lashed brown eyes flashing with the light of the sun setting over its vast parking lot, he entered the Valley Stream SellMart.
The store had run out of his clubs.
Scotty grabbed the Customer Service counter hard with both hands, holding back his temper. “Your site says they’re here,” he protested.
“Site’s wrong, obviously,” replied the SellMart associate, not even looking up from his old palm.
Scotty swore — softly, as if his mother might overhear — and slapped the counter’s glass lightly with his long fingers. He’d have to convert the cash in his account and buy online out of the store’s warehouse. He turned away and examined a display of bags, picking one with a matching string visor. A cute girl with glittery earlobes blinked an address request at him and he stored it in temporary with the others received that day.
On his way to the register he accidentally bumped into a man blocking the aisle. “Sorry, I —”
The man pushed him. Scotty fell back, knocking over shelves full of st
ars-and-stripes-printed towels. He tried to get up. The man shouted angrily and pushed him down again and ran. More yelling — Scotty heard it dimly. He’d hurt his head. He made it to his knees and then looked up, for the first time, but surely not the last, into the gaping mouth of a gun.
Seeking Truth
Elsa Sjunneson Henry
The first time I was in an interrogation room with Adam Green, I smelled his dangerous attitude before I took half a breath. The scent rolling off him was like steel and mold mixed together. The smell of old bullets long chambered in an ancient gun.
That was four years ago. He’d been brought in on charges relating to a woman’s body which had been dumped in the Delaware, but no evidence could be found to keep him.
Two years ago, another scentless government facility, another phone call in the middle of the night asking me to come and serve my country with my abilities. Another dead girl with no evidence of his crimes except knowledge and hearsay. That was the first time I held his large, almost beastlike, hands. They were covered in scars and felt as though a killer’s hands ought to — and I hold them on a regular basis. Not all of them feel that way.
He still eluded me. His silence was infuriating. Without words all I could do was monitor his responses as I asked questions. His hands did not twitch. His heart rate stayed normal.
A year ago I was in a Starbucks when I felt Darius’ hackles rise up underneath my left fingertips. I sniffed the air, and there he was. Adam Green. Right in front of me. That was the first time I heard him speak. Ordering a white chocolate mocha in a voice as smooth as a snake’s belly. He must have spotted me because, before we could catch him, he’d run back down whatever hole he came out of. I assume he didn’t want me to ask him any more questions.