Bang!

by Sharon Flake

  “To come get us.”

  “What if he don’t come?”

  I slide my last quarters in the slot. “He’s gonna.”

  I’m facing away from the men, but I can feel their eyes staring through my back, hear ’em saying stuff too.

  “Dad,” I say, turning their way. “Come . . .”

  My father hangs up the phone.

  I keep talking because I don’t want Kee-lee to know. “We wanna come home.”

  The men have lots of food: french fries and burgers, drinks big as buckets, mashed potatoes with gravy, and pie.

  “We don’t have any more money, and we’re hungry,” I say into the phone.

  Kee-lee’s licking his lips. Next thing I know he’s got the phone. “Ain’t nobody on this!” he yells.

  That’s when one of the men asks what we’re up to.

  Kee-lee steps back and asks him why he needs to know.

  I speak up. “We’re just talking to our dad.”

  The man with the long black hair and the gray beard sits his napkin down. “You hungry?”

  Kee-lee tells him yes. He tells us to sit down and give the waitress our order. We run to his table. The man’s fingernails are black and he smells. But he’s got money to pay for supper, so that’s all we care about.

  Kee-lee starts ordering fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, ice cream, apple pie, and fish. The man says we can have what we want. I order chicken, fries, juice, grits and gravy, only the food never comes. For a whole half hour we just watch him eat. The men at the other tables laugh and ask the guy at our table about black spots and nappy hair. He looks at us and laughs too.

  This man eats real slow: one fry at a time. One bite of sandwich and he sets it down. One sip of soda and it’s back on the table. When forty-five minutes have gone by, I ask how come the waitress keeps going to the kitchen and not bringing out our food.

  Kee-lee looks over my shoulders. “She’s just reading the paper.” He shouts, “Where’s our food?”

  Someone says it’s in the trash out back. The man across from me smiles. His teeth are yellow and broken, with one gold tooth on the side. “I’d say you could have some of mine, but ain’t none left.” He pushes a plate full of nothing our way.

  We get up to leave, but someone says we have to pay for the food we ordered. Otherwise, they’re calling the sheriff. “Go ahead and call,” Kee-lee says, “so we can tell ’em how you treating us.”

  A trucker walks over to him. “What’s your name, boy? What you got in that bag, boy?”

  Kee-lee never could hold his tongue. “A gun. That’s what I got in this bag. Gonna use it too.”

  We’re going to jail. That’s what I’m thinking. And my father ain’t gonna know where we are and they gonna do us like they did Martin Luther King Jr. and not tell nobody for days we here and maybe even kill us. I tell him that Kee-lee’s drawers are in the bag. That he wets hisself so that’s how come he’s not wearing ’em.

  Knuckles press against my chin. “You lying to me, boy?”

  Kee-lee knows this guy means business, so he plays along. “Ever since my brother got shot I can’t hold myself.”

  The man sniffs. “You do smell.”

  Kee-lee farts. He used to do it all the time in school when people got on his nerves.

  The guy from our table stands. “Oh, man. You people just nasty, ain’t ya?” He kicks Kee-lee’s foot. “Lazy. Dirty. Nasty.” He shakes his head. “Walking round with underwear that got . . .”

  Another fart smells up the room. It whistles on the way out. The waitress points to the door. “Get out, you black, nasty . . .”

  Kee-lee’s on his feet pulling his backpack off. Only he’s so mad or scared, he can’t get to the straps like he wants. I get up and start dragging him over to the door. His lips are shaking. “They gonna pay for what they did.”

  Before we can get out, another man steps in front of us. “You got something to say, boy?” He’s big and tall. He looks like he could whip us with his bottom lip.

  I’m trying to push past him. “No, sir.”

  His arm blocks me. He wants to know if we’re hungry. My answer is no, but Kee-lee says, “What you think? We still ain’t ate.”

  The whole place gets quiet. Then the door opens wide. The man drags Kee-lee out the restaurant by the neck and the top of his jeans.

  I got a sugar bowl in my hand and I’m ready to throw it. “Let him go.” The bowl flies by the guy’s forehead. He ducks. The dish hits the door.

  Kee-lee’s yelling how he ain’t scared of them. How his dad’s gonna come blow them away. A man bends my arm behind my back and drags me out the place. Another man pins Kee-lee’s arms and pushes him into the parking lot. Their friend opens the Dumpster and reaches inside, holding his wet, drippy finger in Kee-lee’s face. “Eat it.”

  “I ain’t eating garbage.”

  “You stink like garbage. So you must be garbage.” The man’s smashing rotten food into his mouth.

  “Kee-lee!”

  “Shut up.”

  “Kee-lee!”

  “If you don’t shut up . . . ouch!”

  I stick my fingers in his eyes. Take my elbow and shove it hard as I can into another man’s chin.

  “You black . . .”

  Kee-lee’s on the ground with some guy’s knees pushed in his back, stuffing food in his mouth. Two men stand over him. One is holding a baseball bat. The other’s got his fist pulled back. Every time Keelee says he ain’t gonna eat none, he punches him. I hear the punches. They sound like a broom knocking dust out a rug hung up on a line.

  “You like garbage, don’t you?”

  Kee-lee says no.

  Boof! They punch him in the back.

  “You garbage, ain’t you, maggot boy?”

  “No.”

  Boof. Boof. Boof. Fists hit Kee-lee on his side, legs, and ribs.

  Another man picks up a handful of dirt swept in a pile on the ground. “You dirt, right?” He throws it in Kee-lee’s face.

  Kee-lee’s on his hands and knees now, like a dog. They got his head pulled back and his face pointing up to the streetlight. “Eat it.” They kick him in the butt.

  His hands crawl up to his mouth. His lips shake open, and black, drippy food goes down his throat.

  “Good, ain’t it?”

  Kee-lee blinks back tears.

  “You want some more, don’t you?”’

  If Kee-lee’s eyes were guns, nobody would be alive right now.

  “Taste like your momma’s cooking, don’t it?”

  It takes a while, but then his head goes up and down. His lips open wide, and in a few minutes the garbage dripping from that man’s fingers is all gone.

  “Spit it out, Kee-lee!”

  A foot stomps down on my foot. Someone drags me over to Kee-lee. “You like garbage too, don’t you, boy?”

  Kee-lee’s got tomato sauce on his eyebrows and mustard in his hair. His mouth opens wide and he tells them men if they don’t leave us alone, he’ll kill ’em. They laugh, and somehow Kee-lee gets up and pulls the backpack off. He tells them he’s gonna shoot them. They still laughing. “Don’t do it.” I run over to him and whisper, “They’ll shoot us with it.”

  My legs get kicked out from under me, and a man standing over me smashes cold eggs and oatmeal into my mouth. I spit it out. He holds my neck way back and squirts spicy-hot ketchup down my throat. I cough. Choke. Burn down inside. The waitress is the one who makes ’em stop. She says the sheriff’s coming by to pick up an order. “He sees them here, and y’all headed for jail.”

  They laugh. But they do like she says. Only they don’t leave us in the back on the ground. They drag us over to a truck.

  “What y’all gonna do to them boys?” she says. “Mind your business.” “Don’t kill ’em. You do that and I gotta tell.” The man laughs. “We ain’t killing nobody. Just gonna do what you do to garbage, Ernestine.”

  Chapter 35

  ALL THAT NEXT day, Kee-lee and me
ain’t talking to each other. We take cardboard that we find in the city dump they dropped us in and scrape food off our clothes and from underneath our fingernails. We walk back to where the apple trees are. Flies won’t leave us alone though. They buzz in our ears and sit down to eat stuff off our faces and socks. Beetles come too. So do other things that we can’t name. I pull off my shirt first. Then my pants. Kee-lee throws his sneakers, like a football, halfway across the field. It’s really hot. We are really hungry and ain’t nobody around to help us. So we eat more apples. And we poop till blood comes out. But we ain’t talking to each other the whole time. We just eat, poop, and wipe. Then we lie down and go to sleep. Kee-lee will say I’m lying, but he is crying. I hear him. I don’t blame him none though. We ain’t got nobody but us.

  The following day when we wake up, Kee-lee says we’re getting home today, one way or another. I don’t see how nobody will pick us up smelling like we do, but I figure we ain’t got nothing to lose. So I follow him.

  Kee-lee has his thumb out before I’m up to the road. Trucks and cars keep going. The ground shakes. Dirt flies into my mouth and eyes. I put my thumb out too. We stay right there for a while. Then we start walking up the road, too tired to hold our arms out the whole time. A couple hours later, when we’re sitting on the side of the road, we see a police car heading our way.

  “Run!” Kee-lee says, ducking into some trees; rolling down a hill with me right behind him. We keep running and looking back till the road is way behind us. “I wanna go home!” he screams. Then he has a fit. He beats a tree with his fists. Kicks the air and punches leaves from a weeping willow. I think he’s gonna come after me too—only I tell him if he does, he’ll be sorry.

  Three hours later, when it’s pitch-black, me and Kee-lee hit the road again. He doesn’t say nothing. Me neither. But we is both thinking the same thing. Tonight, somehow, some way, we getting outta here.

  We aren’t on the road five more minutes before a car stops, and a man and his wife ask where we’re going. We tell them, and just like that, we’re headed home.

  Chapter 36

  THE FIRST THING I did that day when I got inside was call my mom. Our front door was wide open, even the security door. My dad was in the backyard laying bricks, so I walked right up the steps and went inside the house. My mother always keeps her mother’s phone number by the phone, so I called her at my grandmother’s house in Kentucky and told her what happened. She said she’d take the train home tonight. She wanted me to call Ma Dear and tell her and Cousin what my father did, and then go and stay with them until she got back.

  “Get away from him, Mann,” she said, talking about my dad. She was crying. Saying how sorry she was that she wasn’t there for me. “I lost one son, trying to keep another son alive in the grave.” She got quiet for a while. “I let you down. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t call Ma Dear, not right away anyhow. That was a mistake. I was tired and funky so I sat on my bed and took off my clothes so I could shower. Only I fell asleep and my dad found me the next morning. “Glad you home,” he said, patting me awake. “Glad you safe.” He pulled back the covers and rubbed my head. He walked out the room. I pretended I was asleep when he got back. He took a warm wet washcloth and moved it between my fingers, up my arms, and over my face. He talked low. Asked how I was. Said for me to tell him everything that happened from the time he left me. So I did.

  “I didn’t mean for it to go that hard for you,” he said. He rubbed his head. He walked the floor. “But there’s lions and tigers everywhere.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. And I didn’t care. I sat up. I told him again about the men and the garbage. He looked hurt. I told him that he was wrong for leaving me and almost getting me and Kee-lee killed. He stood there, staring at the wet cement on his shoes. I couldn’t keep quiet. I got out of bed. I got in his face. I told him I didn’t wanna ever live with him again. He walked over and squeezed my wrists and legs, my arms and ankles, just like doctors do. “Ain’t nothing broken. Get dressed.”

  “You . . .” I walked over to the dresser, bent down and picked up a little metal doorstop shaped like an iron. “We thought we was gonna die!” I kept thinking, Hit him. Hurt him for what he did to you. “We didn’t have nothing to eat! We slept on the hard ground and them men made us eat slop!” I never used to look my father in the eyes. Now I stared at him and didn’t blink. “You don’t do people like that.” I dropped the iron. His foot moved just in time.

  I put on some clean jeans and told him Mom was coming home and she wanted me to go to Ma Dear’s till she got back. “But I ain’t leaving!” I kicked my pajamas in the corner. “’Cause I live here too, and I ain’t letting nobody chase me off.”

  I was waiting for my dad to deck me. Or strangle me, even. He smiled. Shook his head a little and asked if I wanted something to eat. I didn’t move.

  “Gumption,” he said, patting my back. “Being out there gave you gumption.”

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Nerve. Balls, boy,” he said, walking to the steps. “Get dressed. Come eat. I’ll cook anything you want. Anything!”

  Sometimes I wonder if my dad is missing a few marbles. He throws me out. He won’t let me come home. Then when I sneak in the house and tell him off, he’s happy about it.

  At breakfast, him and me talked like nothing ever happened. He set my plate. He made my eggs and bacon and put honey on my biscuits. He poured my milk and sat too close to me. He didn’t know, or care, that I was still mad. That I couldn’t stand his rotten, no-good butt. I wanted to tell him. Show him the mark on my side where those men kicked me out the truck and I fell on rocks big as basketballs and sharp as kitchen knives. But I didn’t. I kept checking him out, jumping when he got too close to me.

  “It worked, you know.”

  I downed my milk.

  “You doing what a boy should. Toughening up. Walking toward manhood.” He pulled out the book on African boys. He said, when they go into the forest, they take spears or knives, nothing else. “But they come back stronger, able to protect themselves and their families.”

  “Some come back dead too I bet.”

  My dad likes to tell stories. So he told me about his father, who taught him to shoot and hunt, to make tables and chairs. I can do some of those things. My dad said he didn’t know it then, but his father was laying a road for him to follow. He took a deep breath. It seemed like he wasn’t never gonna let it out. “But table-making hands ain’t strong enough to keep you safe around here.” He went to the fridge. “Hands that fix cars and shovel dirt ain’t nothing compared to the ones that shoot pistols and dig knives in people’s bellies.”

  He didn’t talk to me again till I was done eating. Then he pulled out lunch meat and bread, brown bags, and juice packs. I watched him. He got six slices of white bread lined up in a row. “Mayo. Lettuce. You like that, right?”

  He whistled, breaking open plastic bags of red apples and black grapes. He asked hisself where he put a hundred and twenty bucks and how come he coundn’t find the bandages and alcohol. He’s putting me out again, I thought. But like a dummy I just sat there, watching. When he was done, he walked upstairs and came back down with my sneakers, socks, two shirts, and the money.

  “It’s time.”

  I let him know I wasn’t leaving. He said it again. “It’s time.” He walked to the front of the house and opened the door.

  “You made me breakfast.” I walked to the door. “And you . . . Mom said . . .” I stopped and told him I wasn’t leaving.

  He handed me the bag. “Don’t go to Ma Dear’s either.”

  I threw it at him. “Why you hate me?”

  His voice shook. “How many boys of mine you think I’m gonna let ’em kill?”

  “I’m gonna get killed out here by somebody!” Kee-lee would be mad if he heard me begging. “Don’t make me go. Please!”

  I shouldn’t have let him hug me, because I didn’t even like him no more. But I was
tired. My feet hurt and I was hungry all over again. So when my dad hugged me tight, I hugged him right back. He whispered in my ear, “You figure out the kind of man you wanna be, and let your feet take you there.”

  What kind of man are you? I thought.

  He squeezed me too tight; talked too close to my ear. “You wanna be a pimp—well, there’s a road that’ll lead you there. Wanna be a thief, sell crack and live high and die hard—well, that road’s waiting for you too.”

  Who was talking about crack and pimps?

  He pushed me away. He told me to go now, ’cause he didn’t wanna be hard on me and pick me up and throw me out the front door.

  “Why?”

  He just looked at me. “’Cause you soft,” he whispered. “I made you too soft. Made you and Jason way too soft.”

  The phone rang. Nobody answered it.

  “You don’t toughen up, they’ll kill you for sure. Mann,” my father said as I was just about to step onto the porch, “Men . . .”

  Men leave their children, I thought, like Kee-lee’s dad did. No. They kick ’em out and don’t care what happens to ’em, like mine. I turned my back on my father. “Boys ain’t men, yet,” I told him, walking onto the porch.

  My dad didn’t try to stop me. I stopped myself. I didn’t wanna do like he said and go back to the camp. I wanted to go to Ma Dear’s and wait for my mom. Only I was thinking, Maybe he’s right. Maybe I am too soft, ’cause otherwise, how he gonna force me to go?

  So I turned around. A man does have to take the hard road sometimes, I thought. But he don’t have to take the one his dad picks for him. He can pick his own: good or bad, right or wrong. So I went to Keelee’s place. His mom had spoken to my dad. So Keelee had to leave his house too. She almost let him stay home though, ’cause she needed help with the kids. But my father got a way of making wrong look right, and now Kee-lee’s back on the streets too. Only him and me figured, since we’re on our own, since we men now, we gonna do what men do: anything we want. And if anybody try to stop us, they just gonna get hurt.