Bang!

by Sharon Flake

  She pinched my nose. “But I still know how to make y’all laugh, don’t I?”

  We laughed when Cousin Semple burned the hot dogs. Laughed some more when Ma Dear and Cousin’s girlfriend started arguing. “Your dress is too short,” Ma Dear told her. “Don’t get mad at me for saying what everyone’s thinking.” We laughed when my father took a nap on the couch and my little cousin put orange lip gloss on his lips and painted his fingernails pink.

  When Ma Dear and them come, it’s like somebody breathing air into a person who almost drowned. The whole house comes alive. Curtains blow when there ain’t even no wind. The sun shines off water glasses and warms up cold tea. People sing and dance and pee themselves for laughing so hard. It ain’t right, I think sometimes, that the good times leave when they do. So when everybody’s still laughing and drinking and having fun, I sneak up to my room and come down with charcoal and my drawing pad.

  “It’s a gift,” Cousin says, standing over me.

  My father says it’s not a gift. “It’s a present, from me. I taught him to paint, you know.”

  Itah pulls at her skirt. “Them hands gonna make you famous one day. Watch and see.”

  I tell them to go away. I can’t draw if everybody’s behind me. Ma Dear says it’s kitchen time. That means everybody’s gotta grab something, wash something, and put away something. I stay put. Draw the little ones walking like ants into the kitchen with ketchup and mustard and beans. Draw Ma Dear with my dad’s arms around her, tying her apron. And I put my mother in the kitchen laughing, even though she’s really by Jason’s bedroom door looking sad.

  “That’s for me, right?” Ma Dear says, coming into the living room with wet hands. “Gonna frame it and put it up over my couch.”

  Ma Dear’s living room is full of family pictures and drawings by me. “You can have it.”

  She leans over and sticks her cheek out for a kiss. “You ain’t spent the night since Jason passed. Time you did that, don’t you think?”

  I don’t spend the night nowhere no more. My mother would worry if I did.

  Ma Dear knows that. “She don’t blame you. Nobody blames you.”

  I look at my dad. She takes my hand and we go into the kitchen. “He don’t blame you either.” She takes off her apron and opens the oven to check on the pineapple upside-down cake she’s making. “You know you can always come and live with me, if the road’s too hard here.”

  I stick my fingers in the icing for the blueberry muffins she made earlier. “I’m all right.”

  She sits the hot pan on the counter. Takes a knife and cuts me a big slice of cake. “One day everything’s gonna be regular again.”

  How’s it gonna be regular, I think, if Jason’s never coming home?

  Chapter 16

  THEY KEEP KILLING people for no real reason. A boy walks out his house and goes to the store for milk and Bang! He’s dead. A little girl, Jason’s age, is jumping double Dutch on her front porch and Bang! She’s gone too. The grown-ups do what they always do; nothing. Last week the preachers held hands with the politicians and walked around the corner seven times. Nothing changed. Two people was still dead. Everybody else is just plain scared.

  We talk about the killings in history class. Our teacher says they’re random: done for no real reason.

  I raise my hand. I tell her that when I was little, I would bury pennies in the dirt. Ain’t have no real reason. I just did it because I could, I guess. “Good analogy,” she says.

  Then Rock, a kid sitting across the room from me, says maybe some of the dead people got what they deserved. “People do stuff,” he says, standing up even though the teacher ain’t tell him to. “They step on your new sneakers or touch your four-hundred dollar jacket.” He’s rubbing his arm like he can feel the leather.

  Mrs. Seigner says he’s being ridiculous.

  “Naw. Naw!” he says, jumping around. “You be riding in a car and they cut you off.” He punches his hand. “Somebody might have to die for that one.”

  Cheryl Keller don’t raise her hand. She just starts talking. “Little kids been getting killed too.”

  “So?” Rock says. Everybody stares at me. “They mighta did something.” He smiles. “You know how bad little kids is these days.”

  My little brother Jason had a hundred little green soldiers. Every day he sat on the porch and played with them. That’s what he was doing when the bullets found him.

  Mrs. Seigner keeps cutting her big blue eyes at me.

  “Sit down,” she tells Rock. But he’s got more to say.

  “Mrs. Seigner, you don’t know, because you don’t live around here. Everybody’s got guns.” He crosses his arms and leans against the wall. “And everybody knows they gonna die young.”

  Mrs. Seigner is white, with long blond hair and too much jewelry for a neighborhood like this. She stops, and the big gold cross around her neck keeps moving. “That’s ridiculous.” She goes to the front of the class and tells us to take out our notebooks.

  Rock ignores her. “I’m just saying, what it matter if you die at seventeen or seven? You dead regardless.”

  I ain’t notice I was rocking till I hit my spine on the back of my seat. Ain’t notice I was cracking my fingers and stomping my right foot on the floor neither.

  Mrs. Seigner looks back at me. “Mann, are you all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, class. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Seven-year-olds can’t do nothing to make you kill them,” I say.

  She tells us again to drop the subject.

  I’m walking over to Rock, knocking on every desk I pass. I push him. “Tell me. What a little boy do to get shot?”

  Rock jumps up and pushes me back. Good, because now I got a reason to knock his head off.

  The teacher steps in between us. “Break it up.”

  “Maybe your brother wouldn’t shut up or something. Like you,” Rock says, pushing so I stumble.

  I pick up Britney Allen’s history book, but the teacher takes it from me. Rock’s on his tiptoes, reaching past her, trying to get to me. “After class,” he says, knowing full well he’s gonna try to take me soon as he can.

  Everybody’s on their feet. Saying who they think’s gonna win the fight.

  I go to my seat. Let him know I’m ready for him. When everybody’s seated, and Mrs. Seigner’s at the blackboard, Rock tells the boy next to him, “He probably got his own brother shot with that big mouth of his.”

  Mrs. Seigner shoulda moved when I asked. That way I wouldn’a had to knock her down. But I wasn’t gonna let him say nothing like that. So I wasn’t sorry when I took my boot and kicked him in the leg till I heard something crack. Wasn’t sorry one little bit for busting his lip, biting his finger till it turned deep purple, and knocking out three of his teeth.

  The guards at school tried to catch me. But I am faster than any kid at school, so I can outrun two fat guards with uniforms so tight their pants fit like sausage skins.

  My father’s home when I get there. And as soon as he sees me he knows something’s wrong. Not just because of how I look, but because I walk in through the front door.

  “They gonna lock me up.” I try to catch my breath. “For killing somebody.”

  My mother walks out of the kitchen. “Oh my God!”

  My father is heading for his desk drawer. Pulling out his gun. Loading it. “Who’s gonna kill you?” He pulls the string and the blinds shut. He locks the front door and tells me and Momma to get down on the floor.

  My mother is screaming, saying she can’t lose another son. I’m trying to tell them what happened. But they ain’t listening. They peeking out the window for somebody who ain’t even coming.

  “Listen!” I sit down on the couch. “Listen to me.” I tell them what I did.

  My mother’s hand covers her mouth the whole time. My father’s gun lies in his lap. “Let’s go,” he says, standing up.

  “Where?”

  He goes to his desk.
Puts the gun in the drawer. Locks it. And rubs his head and cheeks with his fingertips. “To school. To the police.”

  I’m waiting for him to hit me. To yell or maybe take the gun or knife out and use it on me. But he walks into the kitchen, dips a dry towel in the boiling water my mother’s got on for coffee, and washes blood off my fingers, from around my lips and neck. “Get him a new shirt. Some pants, too.”

  My mother walks up the steps, shaking her head. My dad pats me on the back. “You got him ’fore he got you, Mann. Good.”

  I’m thinking he’s trying to trick me or something. So I apologize for what I did.

  “You ain’t in trouble with me,” he says, reaching in his pants pocket and pulling out a twenty. “That’s the kind of boy that’ll shoot you dead if he gets the chance. So you gotta set ’em straight first. Let ’em know you a man, not some boy people can push around.”

  My mother hears what he says. Walking back down, she asks if he’s lost his mind. He says he wishes he’d taught Jason to use his fists. “Or a gun even.”

  She screams. “Fists don’t stop bullets! And guns don’t stop trouble from landing on your front porch!” She pulls me over to her. Whispers in my ear. “One day we gonna live where people don’t fight and shoot so much.”

  My father pulls me over to him. “Boy. I’m gonna teach you some things you gonna need to know to stay safe around here.”

  My mother twists my left arm. “You in trouble right now for—”

  “You don’t know if he’s gonna be in trouble,” my dad says, “if it’s self-defense.”

  “He thinks he bit somebody’s finger off! That’s self-defense?” She gets up in my father’s face. “That’s what a man’s supposed to do? Hurt other men? Other boys?”

  My dad tells my mother to keep quiet and let him handle things. Then he puts his arm around my shoulder, and we walk out the front door. Together.

  Chapter 17

  THEY KICKED ME out of school. Said I can’t ever come to a public school in this city again because I’m too violent. They put me in juvey for four weeks—till my trial came. But the judge let me out on probation. He read the psychologist’s report. “Mann is a smart, nonviolent youth who suffers from severe depression as a result of his brother’s murder,” it said. “Confinement would make matters worse. Advise weekly, long-term counseling.”

  It wasn’t right for me to hurt somebody, but it’s like hurting Rock changed things for me. It got me to talking about things. Like how I feel it’s my fault Jason got killed. And why I can’t sleep through the night like regular people. It got my parents talking too.

  For a while, we was all different. My dad went around the house whistling. And he made it so me being stuck in the house—just in case Rock wanted revenge—wasn’t so bad. Every day after work he brought cupcakes and doughnut holes home for dessert. He kept the windows opened wide so the sun and plenty of air got in. And me and him played b-ball in the yard and finished sanding and refinishing them two cabinets my mother’s been wanting done.

  My mother stopped talking so much about Jason. And she wasn’t cleaning his room as much as before. Maybe that’s because she was getting ready for Kentucky. She wasn’t gonna go once I got in trouble. But my father said she should. “That fight made Mann and me closer. With just us in the house, maybe we can get back to how we used to be.”

  “That’s crazy, Mann.” Kee-lee comes over every day now. “You eat somebody’s finger and your parent’s act like you got straight A’s on your report card.” He walks by my bed and picks up my paints. “You got these at Harold’s? I been wanting to steal these.” He sticks a brush in water and then in paint.

  “Security’s tight. Can’t take nothing out that store.”

  He lies on the floor. Slides underneath a table I use for a desk and starts painting underneath it. We do that sometimes, when we don’t want nobody to see the girls we drawing. “Your father acts like he’s happy you messed Rock up.”

  I lie down by Kee-lee and draw a girl I saw a few days back. Only I make her hair down to her knees and give her a chest as big as plates, big purple lips, and a tongue that sticks out the side of her mouth like a sucker.

  “Make her high yella. I like ’em like that,” Keelee says.

  I make her the color of my mom, brown like burned gravy. Kee-lee elbows me. I check out his girl. Her shorts look like Pampers. “Nice,” I say, eyeing her thick legs, wondering how he makes ’em look so fine you wanna feel ’em up. I can’t make legs like that. Mine come out like fat sticks. Kee-lee shows me what I’m doing wrong. Next thing I know my girl’s got tight shorts on too and video-girl legs.

  We got pieces of girls drawn under the desk: butts, lips, tits. Feet too. Kee-lee likes feet—long, skinny ones with polished toenails. I put an ankle bracelet on one foot, then blend orange and brown and make one of the butts wider. We don’t talk for a while. We draw the kind of girls we see in magazines and wonder when we gonna get girls that look like them. Then we get out from under the desk and sit on opposite sides of the room and draw some more. My window’s open. I see houses across the street and more houses up the hill. So I draw what I see, red bricks and burned chimneys; a man lying on a swing with a tan hat covering his face, and a woman reading the paper with her shoes off. I sketch leaning trees, speeding cars, broken screens hanging off doors, and a door being held open for a woman who’s walking up the steps carrying groceries.

  We ain’t high; don’t even try to smoke nothing. We don’t eat; ain’t even hungry after drawing two hours straight. We happy just showing each other how to get the right color gray sky or make steps that look like real people could walk right up ’em.

  “Mann,” Kee-lee says, holding his picture up to the light. “When we get our own studio, we gonna make a lotta dough.” He holds my picture up next to his. “’Cause we good. We are so good.”

  He’s right. We got skills, and one day the whole world’s gonna know it.

  Chapter 18

  MY FATHER and me went fishing. He still wants me to stay close to home these days, so he didn’t take me to the park to catch them. He brought the fish to me. He took a bucket and got hisself eight catfish out the pond in the park and dumped ’em in our tub. He tied a string to a stick. Put two stools in the bathroom and sat next to me for an hour and a half, talking and trying to get fish to eat stale corn curls dipped in bacon fat.

  My mother’s downstairs baking pies. Since I got out of juvey a month ago, she’s been doing better. Every night she cooks supper and she and my dad clear the table together like they used to.

  The psychologist’s been asking me how things are at home. It’s hard to explain. Kee-lee’s kind of right though. My dad is happy about what I did to Rock. My psychologist says that’s disturbing. Yeah. No. I don’t think he’s glad I hurt Rock. I think he’s glad that I won’t let nobody try to get over on me.

  “How does that make you feel?” she asked me the other day.

  “Huh?”

  “How does it make you feel knowing that your dad gets happy when you hurt people?”

  Her office is for little kids, with jacks and checkers and playing cards the size of my hand. “It don’t make me feel like nothing.”

  I lied when I said that, ’cause since I bit Rock, I sleep better. Kee-lee says it don’t have nothing to do with Rock. “It’s got to do with your dad. He ain’t all wigged out now, so it makes things better for you.”

  I like my dad now. Sitting here fishing with him is the most fun thing we’ve done together since Jason died. There’s pop in a cooler full of ice, and chips and tuna sandwiches sitting on plates on top of the toilet tank. “Don’t let him get away!” My father’s standing up, pulling back the stick; dangling the fish over the tub water. “Twenty bucks if you pick up a fish with your bare hands.”

  I’m broke. So I don’t waste time reaching into the water with my hands and picking a fish up by the tail. “Forty bucks and I’ll pick up five.”

  My dad’s sticking his f
ish in the sink, pulling the hook out its mouth. “Make it six.”

  The tub is almost filled to the top. I get down on my knees and stick my arms in, spilling water all over the floor. I throw a fish at my dad. “Catch.”

  He laughs and ducks.

  More fish are coming his way. “This one too.” I’m pulling fish up by their tails and throwing them at him. They’re hitting his chest and landing on the floor, sliding into the toilet. He’s hopping around like a girl. Yelling for me to quit.

  “Naw! I want my money!”

  My shirt is soaked. My hands are slimy and the bathroom smells. I get up, then I slip and fall down next to a fish.

  “What the . . . ?” My mother’s at the door, shaking her head and laughing. Three more fish are flopping around the wet floor. My dad’s holding one to his chest like a baby, saying I’d better watch out, ’cause he’s gonna get me back for this. “You’re not gonna know when or where.” He laughs. “Maybe you gonna find a fish in your bed.” He sets the fish in the tub water. “Maybe you gonna find a snake or a squirrel in your shorts.” He grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me over to him. “You like squirrels, Mann? Pigeons walking on your head?” His arm goes around my neck and he gives my head a noogie.

  I think about the psychologist. Tell myself to tell her how my dad used to play tricks on us; used to be our best friend.

  He wipes his hands on my mom’s apron, sits on the toilet, and pinches her butt. “How many fish you eating tonight, Grace?”

  She’s out the bathroom, standing in the hall. “Not a one. Better call Cousin and Ma Dear.”

  My father nods his head toward the door. I run and get the phone. Water rolls down my legs and soaks my sneakers. “Ma Dear,” I say, when she answers. “We gonna have a fish fry.”

  Chapter 19

  BOYS WILL DO anything if they think a girl is looking. That’s how come I let Kee-lee talk me into doing this. If we hadn’t done such a nice job, my mom woulda been sad and my father woulda been mad. But it was cool, what we did. And Keisha and her cousin who lives across the street liked us more because of it.