Bang!

by Sharon Flake

  Me and Kee-lee didn’t go to the funeral they had for Moo Moo a couple of weeks back. We got dressed. We rode in the family car to the funeral. We lined up with the family and walked up the church steps. But right when we got to the door, and seen the silver casket all the way up front, him and me both stepped out of line at the same time. Kee-lee’s mother looked mad. My dad grabbed me by the arm and said for me to come inside. But me and Kee-lee stayed put—right outside the church doors. In the rain. Waiting for it to all be over.

  My mother walks in the kitchen and kisses me on the lips. “What color is sad?” she asks.

  My father shakes his head and leaves the room. Since me and Jason was born, my mother always asked us nutty questions like that. “Black,” I say.

  She turns on the heat under the teapot and puts a mug on the table. “I think if sad were a color, it would be pink.” She puts coffee in her cup and kisses me again before she sits down. “Or maybe it would be powder blue, like the sky on the prettiest day you ever seen.”

  My mom used to be a library aide, that’s why she talks like that. But when Jason got shot, she couldn’t work no more. All the quiet and all the kids just made her think about Jason too much.

  The teakettle whistles. My mother tells me that sad has got to be a pretty color because pretty makes the heart hurt more than ugly does. “A smashed-up worm doesn’t make you sad, but a round-eyed baby with a high fever do.”

  I think about all my paints. “Sad is yellow,” I tell her, “like the sun first thing in the morning.”

  She puts sugar in her cup. “Like the sun,” she says. “Like my son.”

  I let her know I gotta go, even though it’s too early to leave for school. She says we’ll all be better when Jason’s birthday passes in six weeks. She looks at the funeral parlor calendar hanging on the wall over the sink. Today is May second. June twelfth is circled in red. A birthday sticker of cakes and candles covers the first day of this month. She puts one on every day, right up till his birthday. “That boy had me in labor sixteen hours. Then he came out long and red-faced with a head full of hair.” She covers today’s date with a pink cake.

  I’m backing out the kitchen. Trying not to look at my mother, who used to be fat, and only weighs a hundred and ten pounds now. “Eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she says, like usual.

  I walk over and hand her my hard toast. I break it in half, then in quarters. I put it to her lips. Her mouth won’t open though. She starts talking about what kind of cake she’s gonna make. Last year she made Jason’s favorite—yellow cake with chocolate icing. This year she says she’s making a pound cake and buying butter-pecan ice cream.

  “I just want . . .” I keep my mouth shut. I unlock the doors and I leave, because I don’t wanna say what I’m thinking—that I just want a regular mom, and I just want to be a regular kid who don’t have to worry about ducking bullets or people dying around me like soldiers in a war.

  Chapter 9

  YOU CAN’T GO to school when your mother’s in the kitchen baking a cake for your dead brother. So I go to Kee-lee’s house. As soon as I get inside, I take a smoke from behind his ear and light up.

  “When you start smoking?”

  “Just now,” I say, sucking in smoke. After it’s half done, and I’m hot and dizzy, I put it out and take off my shirt. Kee-lee says that’s how things go when you first start smoking. “Next time it won’t be so bad.”

  We’re up in his room with the dresser at the door to keep his brothers and sisters out. He’s got this here idea. Paint pictures of all the dead kids from our neighborhood. Put ’em on little cards and sell ’em.

  “Let’s not sell ’em,” I tell him. “Just give ’em away.”

  Kee-lee’s rolling up weed. Smoking it more and more now that Moo Moo’s gone. Last week he lit up at school. The teacher almost busted him. “I ain’t giving nothing away. I’m getting paid for my skills,” he says, setting the bag of weed on the floor. “You know how many cats died around here this year?”

  My stomach hurts.

  “Twenty-five.” He lights up. “I keep count, ’cause you never know,” he says, taking a drag, “when you gonna be number twenty-six, or twenty-seven.”

  Nobody knows why, but for the last four years people been getting shot like crazy around here. It’s not just gangs doing it. It’s regular people too. Some-one wants your ride and they shoot you for it. Somebody robs your mom, or was drinking with a friend and got mad ’cause his buddy tried to hit on his woman and he pulls out a gun. A lot of times kids get killed—even the cops seem to be gunning for us. It’s like we’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time; only all the time seems like the wrong time around here.

  Kee-lee keeps telling me we can make some real dough drawing pictures of Jason and them. “People can collect ’em like baseball cards.”

  I was thinking about Jason when I hit Kee-lee. Was thinking about him on a postcard with stuff on the back. Jason Adler. Seven years old. First-grade student at Henry Ellen Elementary School. Played baseball. Liked to wrestle, play soldiers, and ride around the house on his father’s back.

  Kee-lee touches the blood on his bottom lip, right before he swings a plastic baseball bat my way. “Hit me again and I’ll smash your head in.”

  I tell him again that we ain’t putting Jason on no cards. He’s not listening. He wants to charge ten bucks apiece for the cards. And to start with Jason because he’s little and people will feel so bad about him they’ll want the others too.

  He lights up a blunt and hands it to me. I take it this time, because my head won’t stay off Jason, Moo Moo, my mother, and the cake. I suck smoke in and cough. Take another hit, and hold it in till my head spins. Next thing I know I’m lying on the floor, laughing. “Fruit trees.” I take another puff. “Banana trees.”

  Kee-lee laughs. “What?”

  “Killing round here would stop if we had more trees. “Apples trees. Pear trees . . . you know.”

  “What you talking about?”

  “You ever hear of people getting shot on farms?”

  “Huh?”

  “You live on a farm around cows, and chickens, and trees, and ain’t nobody gunning for you.”

  He laughs. “How ’bout trees with rice? I like rice.”

  “Rice don’t grow on trees,” I say. “It grows in water.”

  We laugh.

  “No more weed for you,” he says, walking over to the wall with Jason on it. He puts paint on a brush and touches up Jason’s sneaker. “If he was my brother, I’d want him on a baseball card. I’d want everybody in the whole world to have his card, to not forget who he was.”

  I don’t want Jason on no cards that people drop in the rain or use to light stoves when their pilot light goes out. Kee-lee still wants me to go along with it. But he knows better than to keep bugging me, so he changes the subject.

  “California’s got lots of fruit trees and people get shot there.”

  I think on that awhile. “Do they get shot on farms too, Kee-lee?”

  He says he don’t know. “I ain’t never been on no farm.” He spits sunflower-seed shells on the floor. “Maybe it’s just the chickens that get shot. And the cows.”

  I sit straight up. “Who’s gonna shoot a cow? They don’t do nothing bad.”

  Kee-lee don’t answer for a while. “Who’s gonna shoot a little boy?” he says. “They don’t do nothing bad neither.”

  Chapter 10

  IT WAS KEE-LEE’S idea. Sneak out tonight and get Moo Moo’s car. Ride it around town. Come daylight, take it to the park and wash it. That way Moo Moo would know we ain’t forget about him.

  Moo Moo always kept his keys in the glove compartment. And he never locked his ride. So when we get to his car at two o’clock in the morning, it’s sitting there just like always—unlocked, waiting to hit the streets again.

  Kee-lee’s mom’s got more sisters than I got fingers. Most of ’em live around our way so we ain’t have to go f
ar to get to his Aunt Jessie’s place. Soon as we there, we see the tree they planted in Moo Moo’s name. It’s skinny, but there’s plenty of white flowers covering it. And right at the roots, there’s a bronze plaque with a picture of Moo Moo sketched on it. He’s got his arms folded and one foot on his car fender. Kee-lee did the picture. It looks just like him.

  I’m reading the plaque. Kee-lee’s in the car, gassing the engine. Moo Moo woulda been mad at him for doing that. “Shirlee’s my sweet thang,” he used to say. “Can’t be rushing her, getting her all hot and bothered.”

  Kee-lee guns the engine again. I open the passenger door and tell him to quiet down. He smoked a little something on the way over, so he ain’t in his right mind. “I’m doing this for my cuz,” he says, too loud for this time of night.

  “Shhh.”

  He puts the car in park, steps out and shouts, “Moo Moo!”

  “Get back in, Kee-lee.”

  He slaps his chest. “Moo Moo!”

  The upstairs light in the house comes on.

  “I ain’t forget about you, man!” He lays his face on the roof of the car. For a minute, I think he’s gonna cry. “Never gonna forget you, bro.”

  The window goes up. “Who that?” A woman in a purple scarf’s got her head stuck out the second-floor window. It’s Aunt Jessie, Moo Moo’s mom.

  We get in the car.

  “Get out! That’s my baby’s car!”

  The car’s backing up and headed for the tree. “Turn! Turn the wheel!”

  Kee-lee can’t drive. He’s only been behind the wheel a few times when Moo Moo was giving us lessons. The car jumps off the curb. The back wheels are in the street, and the front wheels are in the grass, kicking up dirt. Kee-lee shifts gears without putting on the brakes. My chest bangs into the dashboard. He puts the car in reverse, right when his aunt runs up to the car and points to him through the window. “Kee-lee. I’m gonna kill you, boy!”

  He guns the engine. Black smoke comes out the tailpipe. The car flies across the street backward, heading for a blue SUV. Kee-lee stops the car cold, and him and me almost go out the back window. His aunt’s following us, saying for him to get out the car. I’m staring out the other window, hoping she don’t recognize me. Kee-lee shifts gears. His aunt curses. I hold on to the seat. The car jerks forward; speeds backward. Stops. Kee-lee shifts gears again, driving up the street with his aunt banging on the trunk, running behind us, begging us to stop.

  When we get to the park, Kee-lee gets out from behind the wheel, shaking. I’m thinking it’s because all the driving made him nervous. But he says it’s because he’s still high. “And my hands won’t do what my head tells ’em to.” We step out the car and sit in the dark under a broken streetlight. “You lucky you ain’t dead, Mann.”

  “It was fun,” I tell him.

  He’s lying on the ground, looking like he’s gonna be sick. “I ain’t doing that no more.”

  I lean on Moo Moo’s ride and wonder what he’s doing right now.

  Kee-lee and me remember a lot of things about Moo Moo. Like the time we played football with him and his college friends. Or the time he took us to some girl’s place and her friends kissed us on the lips and let us see their underwear drawer. It was never nothing big that Moo Moo did with us. It was a lotta small things; nothing that cost money or took up too much time. It was just being round Moo Moo. Him rubbing my head and telling me I needed a haircut. Him dropping by school and driving us home. Or him sitting by me at Jason’s funeral saying, “You still got a brother, Mann. Me.”

  Kee-lee interrupts my thoughts. “Who’s gonna look out for me, Mann?”

  I don’t move when Kee-lee says that. ’Cause I don’t have no answer for him.

  “I mean, your father dropped me after Jason passed. But Moo Moo, he was always around. Always checking in on my mom and us; driving past the house and . . . well.”

  Kee-lee’s standing up and patting himself down, feeling around for a blunt. Pulling out a match. Striking it. I watch his fingers shake in the night. “He was my godfather.”

  “I know.”

  “We ain’t tell too many people. Didn’t want them to think we was punks.”

  “I know.”

  Smoke blows my way.

  “They shoulda shot me instead of him.”

  I don’t move. Not one muscle.

  “I mean . . . they shoulda just shot me dead and got it over with, instead of taking people from me one by one.”

  Kee-lee don’t have to explain nothing to me. I know what he’s talking about. It ain’t just his boys that keep getting killed; his daddy took a bullet too. That was long ago, when Kee-lee was seven; two years after his dad moved out.

  Kee-lee walks over to me and slams his fist into my chest. “What you gonna do? Cry?” He jumps back, toting that blunt, his eyes closed and his head rocking side to side. “Don’t do no crying out here, you baby, sissy girl,” he says, sounding like my father. “You do, and you gonna get hurt.”

  I throw a punch. He ducks. He aims for my head and misses. We boxing and talking about Moo Moo, how he taught us to fight. We laughing about the time he let us watch him make the moves on some girl. Kee-lee hands me the blunt. I take it. Smoke it. I’m glad when it clouds up my head and makes me forget about all the bad stuff that’s come my way lately. In a little while, everything’s okay. Kee-lee’s happy. I’m happy. And having Jason and Moo Moo gone don’t make us all that sad, for now anyhow.

  I go to the trunk for the buckets and lamb’s-wool rags Moo Moo always kept there, and we walk over to the water spigot, fill up the bucket and head back to the car. We take our time washing Shirlee’s tires and hood, rubbing dust off her doors and dirt from underneath her belly. Then we rub her dry. Wax her till she shines. And when he thinks I ain’t watching, I see Kee-lee kiss her, right where Moo Moo always did— on the hood of the car, right on the driver’s side.

  Chapter 11

  MY FATHER found out about us stealing Moo Moo’s car. He made me stand in the corner for two hours with one leg up. My mother got mad at him. Said he was being ridiculous and she wasn’t gonna put up with him being cruel to me. They argued about it for a long time. He did what she said, though, and let me go to my room. They agreed that I wouldn’t be allowed to watch TV or go over Keelee’s place for a month. But when she went to the store after supper, he took me on a little ride.

  Kee-lee asks me sometimes why I don’t just clock my dad and get it over with. It’s coming, too. I know it. So I let my dad slide. Give him more rope than I should—for now.

  My dad’s truck is packed with shovels, trash bags, and brooms. He don’t explain why he’s got all those things. But when we get to the corner of Seymour and Lincoln, I know why. There’s an empty lot there where people dump garbage and trash, couches and dead cats, bricks and bottles too.

  He opens his door. Walks around and opens mine. “All right,” he says. “Get out. Get busy.”

  I look at the lot. I look at him. “No.”

  This ain’t no little lot. A four-story house used to be on it. And people do all kinds of things in it. Shoot up. Throw up. Pee it up. Junk it up. There’s rats in there. Cockroaches too, I bet.

  Ain’t no expression on my dad’s face, so you can’t tell if he’s sad, glad, or mad. “You think you a man, huh?” He pulls my arm. My feet spread and press to the floor like I’m on a roller coaster headed down. I wrap my arms around the back of my seat. He yanks me by the arms like the chain on a stopper in a drain. I fly out my seat. Fall out the car. Stare up at him from the ground. Then I jump up swinging.

  A punch heads for my stomach—but it don’t land on me. Fists go to my head, my chest, and my face, but they all pass by me. That pisses me off, ’cause I know what my dad is trying to say: Anytime I want, I can take you outta here.

  He looks at me. “Pick a spot. Any spot.”

  I got one picked out right on the side of his mouth where his bad tooth acts up sometimes. “Don’t think I won’t hit you.” I
swing and miss. Back up. Bounce on my toes like he taught me. I bob, swing, and hit him in the side of his head as hard as I can. “Yeah!”

  A left hook, and I’m down on the ground and can’t get up. A few minutes later, I’m doing what he told me in the first place, and he’s headed for the truck. “Dopeheads live in this kind of filth all the time,” he says, throwing a box of trash bags at my head. “You wanna do dope, might as well start now living like they do.”

  I look at him and try to figure out how he knows I been smoking weed. He gets in the jeep. Tells me to stop being soft and clean up the lot. “Otherwise you gonna be here all night long.”

  My dad is super hard on me because he thinks he was too soft on me and Jason before. He says that most boys in our neighborhood are used to life being hard. When trouble comes, they knock it out the way. “Or at least run from it.” Jason just stood there— wetting himself. “Too many hugs,” my father says now. “Not enough butt-kickings.” My mother says that ain’t so. My father disagrees. “The hard knots don’t die. They kill and survive. The ones that have been hugged and kissed and loved too much—they being picked off like cotton from a pod. They soft. Momma’s boys,” he says. “And ain’t no more momma’s boys coming out my house.”

  People watch. They shake their heads and say it’s a shame what my father’s doing. But nobody calls the police or gives me a drink or says for him to stop. And four hours later—after I worked two whole hours in the dark—my dad says I can quit. There’s ten garbage bags on the ground. “Load ’em,” he says, sitting in the truck, eating chips, and holding on to the book Cousin gave him.

  I pick up the bags and dump them into the back of the truck. My dad says I stink, so he don’t let me ride up front. I’m sitting in back with the trash, holding on tight with one hand, dropping bags in the street with the other. When we get to the dump, I unload the rest of the bags. My father listens to the radio. When we get home, I’m too tired to climb out the truck.