by Sharon Flake
I look at Kareem, then at Llee, who is seven and a half. Just like me and Kareem, he can’t stay away from this store. “Where we gonna get candy now?” Kareem wants to know. Llee asks why they can’t get candy here. Kareem explains. I keep working, taking down the frame on the wall with the first dollar bill my grandfather ever made. I’ll put that in my room.
They eat and talk and try to change my mind. And then Llee says, “I know who killed Mr. Jenson.”
He’s said it before. I’m not falling for it again, especially after today. So I change the subject and bring up the Boy Scouts. I’m starting a troop for them this summer. A few minutes later, Llee and Kareem bring up the shooting again. It’s always on their minds. There’s something wrong with that, I think, little kids always talking about death.
Kareem starts talking about my grandfather’s shoes. “You think who killed him spent the money?” he asks.
Granddad wore penny loafers. There were nickels in them that my great-grandmother gave him when he was little. Those nickels were eighty-five years old. And he swore they were worth a thousand bucks each. That wasn’t true, my grandmother said the day of his funeral. But he told everybody that story. Someone believed him.
Otherwise we would have buried him in those shoes.
Llee sits on the floor, dumping candy between his legs, counting each piece twice. “I wasn’t listening, but I heard,” he says, chewing sticky candy, then scratching his front tooth like a lottery ticket, trying to get it off. “He said Pokei was mad at your grandfather because . . .”
“Who said?”
Llee’s sucking red Kool-Aid from a straw, pouring the rest in his hand, licking it until it’s gone. “Is my tongue red?”
“Who are you talking about, Llee?”
“Pokei.” He crosses his eyes and stares at his tongue.
“Who’s Pokei?” I change my mind. “Forget it, don’t tell me.”
“I don’t know. My uncle just said Pokei did it.”
I live in the suburbs, sixty miles from here. I only know the kids on this block, and a few a couple of blocks away. The older ones won’t tell me anything. They say I’m lame. Soft. And they’re not getting killed for me. So I listen to Llee and Kareem, even though I should know better.
Kareem wants to know what kind of gun killed my grandfather. I used to know, but I forget. “Nobody’s gonna shoot me,” he says, aiming his finger at me. “ ’Cause I’m gonna get ’em first.”
“Me too,” Llee says. He points at me. “I want a rifle when I get your age. That’s a big gun.”
I wanted a Game Boy when I was his age. Kareem walks over and stands beside me. “If you had a gun, would you shoot him?”
“Shoot who?”
“Him.” He’s looking at my granddad’s empty chair. “The man that took his shoes.”
“My grandfather hated guns. He wouldn’t want me doing something like that.” That’s what I’m saying, but that’s not the whole truth. Lately I’ve been thinking if I got my hands on one . . . if I found out who did it . . . then they’d know how it felt. I don’t ever let Llee and Kareem know what I’m really thinking, though, or how much I want to get even. “Let’s talk about the Boy Scouts.” I pull out my old belt, the one with over a hundred badges on it. “What’s the first badge we’re gonna work on? Let’s see . . . there’s cooking, sewing, babysitting.” They both start talking at once, asking if I think they are girls or something. I ask them what Boy Scouts do.
“Hike.”
“Help people.”
“Camp.”
They remember what I taught them.
“I been wanting to go camping since I was born,” Llee says.
I sit down. Kareem is practically in my lap. “I went hiking once,” he says. “But next time I wanna make a fire by myself, and eat marshmallows off a stick and tell scary stories.” Then he asks if I’m sure the Scouts will give me a troop.
“Sure they will,” I say, reminding myself to call and find out.
They chill out after a while, and help me pack bags. We even go outside and throw a few balls. But as soon as we get back inside, drinking orange soda and finishing off a bag of Hot Cheetos, Kareem whispers to Llee, “I know where Pokei lives.”
My mouth is dry. My fingers won’t stay away from my head, scratching my scalp so much you’d think I had lice. “Just finish filling up the bags.”
“Do you think he cried?”
I look over at Llee.
“Do you think Grandpop Jenson cried when he got shot?”
I don’t want to talk about this, so I ask them to leave. Only inside, way deep down inside, I hear a voice say, If you don’t find ’em, who will? If you don’t handle your grandfather’s business, who’s gonna?
They get quiet, and then Kareem asks me if I want him to take me to Pokei’s place. That just makes me mad. “We don’t even know if he even did it! And what if he did?” I say, taking a bag of good candy and dumping it in the trash can. “Who’s gonna say he did? Nobody. Because nobody tells on nobody around here, even when they kill a nice old man who gave candy away for free.”
Kareem knows when to back off, so he changes the subject. “What color uniform we gonna wear? Where we gonna meet?”
I’m thinking about Pokei now, not the Scouts. I go and sit down by Llee. “Is your uncle the only one saying Pokei did it, or did you hear it somewhere else too?”
He puts up two fingers like a Scout. I taught him that. “Everybody’s saying it.”
Kareem digs down to the bottom of the egg jar. “If Mr. Jenson had a gun, he wouldn’t be dead. Pokei would be dead. And the store wouldn’t be closing.”
“Bang. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pokei’s dead now, good.” Llee’s got one knee on the ground, and a finger aimed at Kareem, who stands up and fires back.
I slap his trigger finger. “Quit it,” I say, “and go home. I have to fix my grandmother lunch.” I don’t, but my stomach is a little queasy. That happens sometimes when I talk about this stuff too long. I’m wondering about Pokei, though. What if he is the one? What if he cashed in the nickel and still has the shoe?
“I can take you to his house,” Kareem says. “Right now if you wanna.”
Kareem isn’t always wrong. Llee either. Once my grandmother lost her purse and they took her to the house of the kid who found it. The money was gone, but not the credit cards. “You two need to leave,” I say, picking up two big bags. “Come on, Llee, you’re first.” I walk out the door. Llee’s right behind me. If I go to Pokei’s place, I’ll take something with me, I think. Gotta protect myself.
Llee and Kareem live on opposite ends of the block, and neither one of them has brothers, so I don’t mind looking out for them. Llee hugs me when I drop him off, and asks if I’ll take them to the basketball court later. “Sure,” I say, heading back to the store.
When I come back for Kareem, I ask for Pokei’s address, just in case. Then I pick up two bags and start walking him up the street. Kareem’s older sister, Sahara, answers the door and asks if I’m nuts, giving him so much junk food. “You know he hyper,” she says, telling him to put that candy away until their mom gets home.
I’m halfway up the street when I hear Kareem yelling my name. “Take this,” he says catching up to me. The brown paper bag is wrinkled and greasy. “My father work at a garage and people leave stuff. You can have it ’cause you gave me all that candy.”
“What is it?”
He sits on the curb, opening the bag like it’s lunch he’s not sure he wants to eat. Out comes bunches of old newspaper. Kareem tells me to look in the bag. He’s smiling. Proud of himself.
I’ve never seen a real gun before.
Kareem stares up at me. “One time Mr. Jenson bought me a coat. He said mine was too small. I still got it.”
He stares into the bag, reaching inside.
I stop him. “Don’t do that.”
Kareem is like Llee. He’ll do what I say. So he sits with his hands in his lap. “My father forgets about
it,” he says. “But sometime I go outside . . . and practice.” He unties a shoelace.
“You do what?”
He asks me not to tell, then says how sometimes he sneaks out while his parents are working and pretends to shoot the trees. “But one day I’m gonna do it for real.”
“Shoot trees?”
“Shoot something. Something . . . big.”
My fingers can’t tie his laces without shaking. “You have to put it back, Kareem.”
“But Pokei shot Mr. Jenson.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Maybe he ain’t do it. But I bet he knows who did.”
Since I came here last month I’ve been wanting whoever took out my grandfather to be dead too. Getting even, that’s what’s been on my mind; in my dreams. I can’t talk to my parents about it. They’d say nice boys don’t think that way. I can’t tell my grandmother because she’s got her own problems. My uncles are lawyers—two of them, anyhow. If I say something like this to them, they’ll tell me that the law gets even for people. Only Llee and Kareem know what I think. They know what I want, what we all want: for someone to do what the police can’t or won’t. I swallow. I tell myself that people like me don’t do stuff like this. But I ask for the bullets anyhow. “How do you put them in?”
He wants to show me. “Just tell me,” I say.
His father goes hunting, and takes him sometimes. He showed him how to load and unload last year. Kareem shot a possum, a raccoon, and three mice—nothing human, he tells me. But he’s ready to, he says.
I dig down deep until I feel metal. The barrel. The neck. The handle. Then I grab the bag and start running. Kareem follows, like usual.
We run up the street and into the store, locking the garage door behind us. The bag goes on the counter. We sit on stools, staring at it. It’s real, that gun. “And it kills,” I say, watching my fingers shake. I look inside. When I pick it up it feels like it’s mine already. I relax a little.
“You can do it,” Kareem whispers.
“Huh?”
“They do it all the time on TV; around here, too.” He’s got his fingers in the egg jar again. “I ain’t scared of nobody . . . nothing. So when I’m your age and somebody mess with me, they gone.” He pulls his dripping wet hand out of the jar and turns it into a gun. “Let me show you how to do it.” Pink water drips on the stool like blood.
“Do what? I say.
“Show you how to kill.”
I sit myself down—so I don’t fall down. Kareem keeps talking, asking if I think my grandfather’s in heaven.
Before I answer, he’s on to Llee. “I let him hold it once.”
I look at him.
“Llee’s afraid of guns. But he ain’t gonna be soon.”
Everything stops—the hum from the cooler, the water dripping from Kareem’s fingers, even the ant sneaking across the floor. I think about Llee and Kareem all by themselves with guns and nobody to stop ’em from shooting each other.
Kareem can’t keep quiet. He’s been thinking, he says, asking me to promise not to tell nobody what he’s about to tell me. But before I can promise, he’s talking. His father’s gun spent the night with Llee one time. “By accident. I forgot it. We play with it over there sometimes, but don’t nobody know. I’m the cowboy . . . ’cause it’s mine.”
All of a sudden, my bowels get so loose so fast I almost don’t make it to the bathroom. I’m in there so long; Kareem knocks on the door three times, asking what’s wrong.
By the time I finish and figure out what to do, Kareem is done eating half a box of donuts. I sit at the counter with him, telling him to wipe his mouth. I stare at the gun, and then at the frame with the dollar in it. I ask Kareem if he wants it. I don’t know why. Then I hand it to him. “He never hurt anyone, Kareem.”
“I know. That’s what I like about him. He was nice.”
I wrap the gun up in brown paper, like sausage, and put it in the bag. I do the same with the frame, making sure Kareem understands that he’s got to take care of it. “Let’s go,” I tell him.
He jumps down and follows me. He knows a shortcut to Pokei’s place, he says. But he thinks we should check out the jitney station first. “He be there day and night.”
I’m locking the door, looking at the stuff over by the curb. Yesterday somebody put new shoes there. “So you can walk all over heaven, Mr. J,” a note says.
We stop in front of Westina’s house. She worked at the store too. Then we pass the twins’ house. They’re in college. My grandfather would send them each twenty bucks a month. Llee’s house is next. Then Kareem’s. He passes it by, though, and doesn’t look back until he’s almost at the corner. By then I’m up his steps and ringing the bell.
“No!”
He runs back to the house, pulling at the bag while I lean on his doorbell again and again.
“Give me that.”
I hold it high over his head.
“I’ll put it back. Promise.”
He jumps up and down, grabbing for it. “Don’t get me in trouble.”
My feet get stepped on. My legs get pushed. I don’t budge.
Kareem is a little kid, and all little kids cry when they know they’re about to get in trouble. So does he. “I won’t do it no more,” he says, hanging on to my legs, begging.
I hand his dad the bag. “Kareem gave me this.”
I hear Kareem just as clear as I hear my grandfather sometimes tell me to take care of things while he’s gone. “Snitch,” he says.
His father opens the bag and looks at me. He stares at Kareem, pulling him inside with one hand. “Thanks,” he says to me. “His mother been sayin’ we need to get him some help. Guess we better.”
I head for the store. Summer won’t be the same now. Everything’s messed up. Kareem might not even want to join the Scouts. And Llee, what’ll he do if he’s not at the store, bugging me?
I open the store door, then close it right back. Before I know it I’m walking up the steps of my grandparents’ house. I sit on the swing, thinking of ways to get my grandmother to change her mind. People need this store—I do too—even if it’s not a real store; just a garage full of candy. Besides, can’t nobody fill my grandfather’s shoes but me. And can’t nobody talk to Kareem and Llee about getting over getting even but me, either. Otherwise we’ll all be trying to get even until the day we die. And Granddad would say that’s a stupid way to live.
When I’m president of the world,
I’ll move the White House to Harlem,
Outlaw guns—especially the ones they make to take out you and me.
When I’m president of the world,
Babies won’t ever go hungry,
Pampers and cable TV will be free,
And houses in the hood will look like the ones on HGTV.
I’ll fix the hole in the ozone,
Make it illegal to be grown and styling in the same clothes that your kids put on.
When I’m president of the world,
I will listen more than talk,
Walk
instead of ride.
That way I’ll see America through other people’s eyes.
When I am president of the world,
I will still come for dinner on Sundays.
But no chicken, please.
People might not understand.
IF YOUR AUNTIE WAKES YOU UP at four in the morning, telling you to get the heck on outta her crib now, you got the right to knock her upside the head—pow! Only I ain’t that kind of dude. I got respect. Even though this little voice in my head says to clock this broad, I turn around, face the wall, and shut my eyes. “Awright, Aunt Philomena,” I say, pulling blankets over my head. “Get on up outta here.”
She’s short, with legs as skinny as the branches on the artificial tree by the window in the basement. But she thinks she’s tough. So she don’t back down. She grabs the covers with both hands and pulls. I have to hold on to the window ledge not to get drug off, too.
Me kicking her arms slows her down, but it don’t stop her. She pulls my right arm. I snatch it back. She grabs my left foot. I use my other one to get her off me. Then I take back what’s mine—the Cleveland Browns blanket she bought for me last Christmas.
Out of breath, breathing hard like she needs that ventilator her friend uses when she comes visiting, Auntie leans against the wall. “God, God . . .”
She is always talking about God.
“God gave you ears, didn’t he? Then get up . . . get out of here,” she says, holding her chest.
I’m yelling too. “This is my room! You get out!” It’s hot underneath the covers; in the house, too. She’s sixty-three, with arthritis in her joints, so it’s always a thousand degrees in here. But I stay covered up anyhow, tucking my feet under the blanket and using my fists to hold down the other ends. “Stop pulling!” I curse at her. I have to.
“You cursing me, boy? You swearing . . . in my house?” Auntie pulls and my hammertoe feels air. But she ain’t no dude, I’m stronger than her, so after my head is free and I’m breathing in deep, I reach back and jerk the covers again. She flies into bed with me this time, smacking my forehead, then my lips—aiming for my head. “What I say? What did I say? Get out!”
I warn her for the last time. “Just because you my auntie don’t mean I won’t hit you,” I say, pulling back the covers.
“You did everything else that you could do to me. Hitting was probably next on the list anyhow.”
For one whole minute she and me just stare at each other, neither one of us blinking. Ain’t no hug coming from her this time. Ain’t no apology finding its way to my lips, like it sometimes do. It’s over, living here with her. No turning back now.
“Screw you.” I come out from underneath the covers. The sheets, too. Then I’m on my feet, heading for my dresser, showing her what I been trying not to show her all this time.
She stands up, her eyes squeezed closed. “Boy! I ain’t your mother—cover up.”
Auntie Philomena is the crazy one. The one everyone warned me about when my father kicked me out and told me to go live someplace else—anyplace as long as it wasn’t in his house, his city, his state. Auntie heard about that. She called me and asked if I wanted to come live with her. “Just you and me, baby.” Five bedrooms, two baths, and a pool. “What’ll say?” Of course I said yeah. Otherwise I’d be homeless. No one else wanted me. And I never had my own room or a pool to swim in before—which is what I’ve done every day since I came here a year ago. Now this nutcase is kicking me out, like she and me ain’t family. “Listen,” I say, pushing her so hard her head knocks against my bedroom door. “I didn’t ask to come here. You asked me.” I open and close drawers, throwing new shirts on the floor, stepping on them like they rags our dog, Malcolm, sleeps on sometimes.