Bang!

by Sharon Flake

  I stand up. Walk down the steps and turn back Kee-lee’s way. “Why’d he have to die?”

  Moo Moo was twenty-eight. He wasn’t all good, but he wasn’t all bad neither. But around here, it don’t matter. People get killed, good or bad, big or little.

  Kee-lee’s eyes tear up. I ask the question again, but I don’t expect no answer. “Why . . . Why’d Moo Moo have to die?”

  “That’s just how it goes around here,” Kee-lee says. “You get killed. Just ’cause.”

  Chapter 4

  I WALK UP THE street, past my house, heading for school. And even though I don’t look at my front porch, I hear gunshots anyhow. Bang! Jason’s gone. Bang! Kee-lee’s cousin’s gone. Bang! “You gonna be gone soon too,” I say, turning around and heading back to Kee-lee’s place.

  Before I get to his house, my dad’s first cousin stops me. He’s a grown-up. His name is Semple, but we just call him Cousin. He lifts weights, so it’s like he’s always got his chest stuck out and his muscles tight. “Where you going, boy? School’s that-a-way.” He points.

  I turn around. We stop in front of my house. I close my eyes because I know what’s coming: a hug. A big long hug, like I’m some girl he likes. “Hey, Cousin,” I say.

  Cousin is always in a hurry. Talking and moving fast. Rushing even when he don’t have to. He puts one foot on the steps and asks how my mom and dad are. I back up.

  “Listen, Mann. The family . . .”

  They say I look like Cousin, high yellow and gray-eyed. Only I’m short. Cousin’s a big man with a big mouth. When he laughs, people turn around and look. When he talks, you wanna hold your ears. When you tell him a secret though, it stays secret. Like I told him about my dad being different since Jason died. And now Cousin comes by a couple times a month. “Just checking.”

  I stay a minute and tell him about Moo Moo. He’s shaking his head, saying we’re picking one another off faster than hard scabs. I don’t know what that means. I don’t care. “I gotta go to school,” I lie.

  He waves for me to come up the steps with him. I shake my head no. “Just this once,” he says, ringing the doorbell. He tells me I won’t ever get over Jason till I can walk on the porch. He pulls at the black bars, like he can rip ’em off with his bare hands. “Your father and these bars!” He shakes ’em. “This ain’t no house! It’s a prison! Before I’d live like this, I’d . . . I’d . . .”

  My dad comes to the door and unlocks the iron gate. Cousin hugs him too. Then he gives him the book that’s in his hand. “This the one?”

  My dad walks past him and stands next to me on the pavement. “Yeah, this is it.” He stares at the cover. There’s two African boys holding spears on it. Then he gives me this How come you ain’t in school? look, and I start walking.

  The reason my father ain’t full-out crazy is because of his family. They talk to him. Take us out, fix us food, and make sure we getting by okay. They always saying what Cousin says—move from around here. But we ain’t got it as good as the rest. Most of them went to trade school or college. My dad went in the army and learned to fix tanks. Now he’s a guard at a downtown store. “I’ll move when I want to,” he tells them. “Not because somebody’s got a gun to my head.”

  My father tells me to get my butt to school, then they both go inside and lock the door behind them. I head for Kee-lee’s.

  * * *

  Kee-lee is like me. He paints. He can take collard-green juice and make tree leaves or use tomato paste for blood.

  “You do this?”

  “Don’t touch. It’s wet.”

  He’s got my front porch painted on his blue bedroom wall. Jason’s there too. I turn away from the blood running out the side of his mouth. I check out Kee-lee’s cousin instead. He’s an angel. He’s got on orange baggy jeans and see-through wings shaped like guitars. He’s sitting on the roof of his car, looking over at Jason and pointing up to the sky.

  Kee-lee opens a paint set as big as my desk in school. There’s, like, thirty tubes of paint, chalk, charcoal, and a dozen brushes in it.

  “Who stole it?”

  He smiles. I figure it would be cool if he could paint his teeth white.

  “I put it down my pants and walked out the store.”

  I wet a paintbrush. Dip it in Brown Bronze. Touch up Jason’s skinny arms and legs. Dip the brush in paint and draw more charcoal-black naps on Moo Moo’s head.

  “I stayed up all night painting it.”

  The painting takes up half the wall. And it looks so real, I can’t stop staring. Kee-lee’s even got the Good Time bar that’s up the street from us on the wall. There’s trash on the ground and girls jumping rope, and Keisha braiding Kee-lee’s hair. Right next to Jason’s elementary school, there’s a hoop game going on, with me, Kee-lee, Moo Moo, and Jason— all grown up. My eyes water. My fingers touch Jason’s wet cheek. For a minute, I think about smearing his picture; wiping the whole wall clean. But even if I did, they’d still be dead. Still be gone for good. “You ever wanna hurt somebody, Kee-lee? Mess ’em up real bad?”

  He smiles. His green teeth look gray.

  “Ever get tired of doing what you supposed to do? Making everybody happy instead of you?”

  He hands me a blunt. “You smoke, you no worry, Mann.”

  Kee-lee’s been smoking up his allowance money ever since his boy Kelvin got killed last year walking out of school with his arm around somebody else’s girl. Moo Moo stayed on his back about smoking weed. But he did it anyhow. It’s gonna get worse now, I think.

  I pick up another brush. “You know I don’t smoke.”

  He finishes the rest, then gets down on the floor and starts eating sunflower seeds. “You need to smoke something, Mann. You can’t stay regular in a house like yours. Too many crazy people. Too much drama.”

  I watch him shaking his leg like he does when he gets nervous or he’s got something on his mind.

  “Moo Moo shoulda—” I say.

  Shells fly by my head. The trash can gets kicked over and next thing I know I’m pulling Kee-lee off me. “Shut up about Moo Moo! Shut up about dead people and dead stuff!”

  I keep quiet, but not ’cause I’m scared. I’m thinking. Remembering. Wondering who gonna die next.

  Chapter 5

  AIN’T NO FUN playing hooky with a house full of little kids. So me and Kee-lee go to the horse stables. Dream-a-Lot Stables is twenty-eight blocks from my house, down in a valley. So even though it’s not far from where I live, you don’t just run into it. You gotta be looking for it. Otherwise, you’ll never find it.

  The owner asks how come we ain’t in school, right when he’s handing us a broom. For a one-hour ride, we gotta clean two stalls. When we done, we wet with sweat, and almost too tired to go riding. But it’s been weeks since I rode Journey. So I get on her first. And soon as we’re out the owner’s sight, I smack her side, let the reins loose, and she takes off running.

  Kee-lee’s holding on to me. “Slow down.”

  I go faster, racing up the avenue between SUVs and hoopties. Passing boarded-up houses and burned-out stores. Forgetting about Jason and Moo Moo. Forgetting about the time somebody shot Journey too.

  Kee-lee hollers in my ear. “Cops!”

  I pull back on the reins and Journey slows up. The cop directing traffic eyeballs me. He knows we ain’t allowed to have a horse in the streets. But where we live, people do things all the time they ain’t supposed to. “Boy, shouldn’t you be in school?”

  Kee-lee answers. “That’s where we headed, officer. This here horse is our show and tell.”

  The cop’s whistle blows and his hand stops traffic. “Get down. Now.”

  Kee-lee smacks Journey’s butt. Our light turns green. Cars fly up the street and so do we.

  When our time’s up, and Journey’s back in her stall, we walk the neighborhood for a while, then take the bus over to Kee-lee’s aunt’s place. But as soon as she sees us, she’s mad. And the next thing we know she’s got us in the car and hea
ded for school. She lies to the front-desk secretary. Says things got crazy at her place this morning with her husband’s sugar acting up and the ambulance being called, and so, “These boys is late. Sorry.”

  I wish she hadn’t done that, because not coming is better than coming in the middle of the day. See, when you don’t show up, they call your house and say you didn’t come and you can lie to your parents and say the teacher must’ve missed checking off your name. But when you don’t come in on time and show up later, they call your house twice. Once to say you didn’t show, next to say exactly what time you did come. Then you need a double lie, and those are hard to pull off. So when I get home, my father is waiting with the strap. I make up a lie; then a different one. Then two more. But he hits me with the belt anyway, and makes me tell the truth. Which gets me beat some more. I am too old to get beat. One time I almost hit my father back. But I remembered what Moo Moo said: “When somebody dies, it make you different, crazy inside.” Moo Moo knew what was up, because his brother got shot dead in front of him ten years ago. It changed him. He started beating people up, stealing money, and smoking weed twenty-four/seven. “You get your right mind back, if folks give you time,” he told me last year. “If they remember how sad you really is deep down inside.”

  My father is out of breath. He slaps his hand with the strap. “You learned your lesson, boy?”

  I want to deck him. To beat him to the ground. Only Moo Moo woulda said, Give him time, Mann.

  So that’s what I do.

  Chapter 6

  WHEN COUSIN knocked on our door at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, my father got mad. We was all sleeping real good. “So?” Cousin said, when my dad let him in. “You can sleep anytime.”

  My mother walked by my room. She stopped, came inside and kissed me on the forehead. She asked me what I wanted to eat. Cousin yelled up the steps. He told her to come make him some banana pancakes and sausages. He said we’d better all get ready quick, because the family was coming in an hour to take us to the amusement park. I thought my dad would say he wasn’t going. But he didn’t. He ate two helpings of food and played chess with Cousin while my mother got dressed.

  By the time my mom came back downstairs, the living room was full of people.

  Aunts were sitting on chairs or leaning on walls eating French toast and bacon off paper plates, and telling kids to behave. My three uncles were standing up, watching basketball, drinking beer, and telling kids to stop blocking the TV. My mother was laughing. My father was showing off his new work boots. We were having a good time, just like regular people.

  “Get over here, boy,” my grandmother said, pulling me by the back of my pants.

  I hugged her. “Yes, Ma Dear.”

  “You gonna ride with me? Go way up high in one of them rollie coasters?”

  “You better not—”

  Ma Dear told my father to mind his own business. “I’m your mother. And I’m seventy-four. I ought to know what I can handle.”

  Ma Dear and me always ride the roller coaster. Not the biggest ones, but the old wooden one that takes too long getting to the top, then only got two little hills on the way down. “I’ll ride with you, Ma Dear.”

  She patted my hand. Asked me if I liked her fingernails. They’re fake. “I ain’t no old lady, you know.” She stood up and headed for the kitchen. “You coming, child?”

  I followed her. She stopped in front of Jason’s room. I looked the other way. “No crying today.” She took my hand and walked me into the kitchen. My mother was there, sitting by herself. Staring out the window. Ma Dear walked over to the yellow radio and turned it up loud. She clapped her hands and shook her big butt. “Dance with me.” She moved side to side, singing with the music. “Grace. Can’t you hear? Dance with me.”

  My mother couldn’t help but laugh. My aunts and uncles stood in the doorway, shaking their heads and laughing too. “Shake it now.”

  I picked up my little cousin Ellen and swung her around. “Again,” she said, leaning back and closing her eyes. “Faster.”

  My mother’s head was bobbing. Her hands clapped, and next thing I knew somebody pushed my father into the kitchen and laughed when he started dancing like a man with two broken feet.

  The whole house was shaking because people in the living room had the stereo on too. Little kids were jumping like somebody was turning rope. Grown-ups were doing the Slide and pushing furniture aside. Ma Dear was pulling out money, saying she was gonna pay two dollars to the best dancer. For a whole hour, all we did was act up, dance and sing, tell corny jokes, and talk about people’s bald heads, bad feet, and beer bellies. I couldn’t stop laughing. My father couldn’t stop talking. And my mother was dancing so hard she was sweating out her hair.

  Chapter 7

  WHEN MA DEAR and ’em come by, things round our house are good for a while. My father don’t just go to work and come home mad. My mother stops crying and does the things she used to do—knit, visit the old woman up the street, cook, and sit on my bed and talk to me at night.

  “What’s shaking?” my father says, trying to be cool.

  I’m in the basement, drawing. “Nothing.”

  He looks over my shoulder. Points to the charcoal drawing I’m making of Journey. She’s not in her stall.

  She’s in an open field with ten other jet-black horses with fire-red eyes. Free. My dad sits down on the stool beside me. “Nice.” He sets his coffee cup down. “Looks like the horses I used to have, except for the eyes.”

  My mom and dad are from Kentucky. His family lived on a farm. It wasn’t theirs. It belonged to a white family. Ma Dear and them worked for the family, picking tobacco. My father was good with animals, so he got to ride the horses. He brushed them good and taught them stuff. “When I was your age,” he says, touching Journey’s tail, “I thought I would grow up and have a farm full of horses—dozens.”

  I put clouds in the sky. “Jason . . .”

  My dad jumps up. “Wash up. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  I forget sometimes not to say Jason’s name. “I was just gonna say—”

  My dad’s halfway up the steps. “We had a good time, huh?”

  Jason liked to draw, just like me. That’s all I was gonna say.

  My father bends over to tie his shoes. “At the park . . . last week.”

  I laugh. “Ma Dear better stay off them ‘rollie coasters.’”

  He backs down the steps. “The sign says, if you have a bad heart, don’t get on.” He sits down next to me. Tells me that every time she gets on a roller coaster he prays she’ll make it off okay. Nobody will stop her from getting on, though, because she does what she likes. “Keeps her young,” he says. “And strong.”

  I push my drawing in front of him. “Gonna get a A on this one.”

  “Better get an A. You been slipping since . . .” He doesn’t finish saying what he’s thinking.

  I pack up my stuff. Change the subject. Try to keep things light. Then the phone rings. It’s Kee-lee. He wants to come eat at our place. “To get away from all them bad kids.”

  My dad likes Kee-lee. When Jason was still alive, he took Kee-lee with us wherever we went. He taught all three of us to draw and ride horses. Now he don’t hardly have nothing to do with Kee-lee. “I don’t know.”

  “How come he can’t never come over?”

  He cracks his knuckles then breathes out loud. “Tell the boy to come. But don’t be eating up all my food.”

  Dinner is just like that day we went to the amusement park. Everybody’s laughing. Everybody’s happy.

  All Kee-lee does is make jokes, eat, and excuse himself when he goes to the bathroom to fart. “You got garlic in them potatoes, Ms. Grace. And garlic don’t like me much.”

  When dinner’s done, me and Kee-lee hang out in the basement. It’s finished, with a new rug, video games, and a giant-size TV. Every now and then my father comes down and watches the game with us. He sits on the couch. Tells us why they need to trade number forty-fi
ve and number twenty-seven, then he goes back upstairs.

  Kee-lee doesn’t leave until the game ends at midnight. My father stands on the porch and watches him walk home. My mother sits on the couch next to me, saying she don’t know the last time she made a meal that tasted so good. I’m sleepy. Tired. But I don’t go to bed when they do. I stay up until three in the morning, painting. I don’t paint nothing special, just me and my boy Kee-lee, standing on the corner playing hoops and talking trash.

  Chapter 8

  WHEN SOMEBODY dies, do you ever get him out of your head?

  I wanted to ask my mother that. But her eyes were extra red this morning, so I knew her and me was both dreaming about Jason last night. And I couldn’t ask my father nothing like that, because he acts like Jason was never born. So I just sit at the kitchen table all by myself, eating hard grits and cold toast.

  My father walks in after a while. “So where you headed this morning?”

  “School.”

  “To school is right. Skip out again and see what happens to you.”

  It’s been a week since Kee-lee ate here, and things are just like always. Only I ain’t the same. I skipped school again the other day. I went to Moo Moo’s grave and had a good talk with him. Told him I was trying to hold on, to do right, but I keep having dreams about Jason, and getting headaches and feeling like being good ain’t worth all the trouble. I mean, why should you go to school, get good grades, and listen to your parents when you gonna get shot anyhow? Why don’t you just do like you wanna since you know you’re gonna die before your time?

  When my dad found out I cut, I told him where I went. Then I ducked. He ain’t do nothing though. Just said I better not skip no more. And when I was almost out the room he said he was sorry for what happened to Moo Moo. That was the first time he said that.