The Comedown

  The story of his mom and the ofay never got easier to believe. The ofay claimed Reggie Marshall had wanted him to check up on his family. As if Reggie Marshall would even bother fucking with a guy like that, let alone making him a godfather with his dying breath.

  He wanted to respect his mother. He really wanted to. He knew she’d been smart, and when she was young she’d wanted to teach college, and because she’d fallen in love with his father her parents didn’t talk to her. Now she worked shit jobs and they got food stamps and they lived in an apartment that, she told him over and over, was nothing like the one he’d been born in. He sometimes saw her still trying to read after a shift at work. She had lots of books and notebooks and an old typewriter that had been a gift from grandpa way back when. Aaron read what she wrote after she went to sleep: “Capitalism is the motivating force behind Bartleby’s death wish.” He had no idea what she was talking about, and the word “Bartleby” sounded so stupid it got him mad: why the fuck should she be doing this instead of finding a better job? But he respected her for trying, he guessed, and he respected her for being with his father, who he saw in pictures had been the kind of guy who ruled a city like a combination of Michael and Vito Corleone, young but hard, never green a day in his life. That was until the ofay and his lies muddied everything up. He knew his father was still alive somewhere, hiding out to keep them safe. He knew it better than he’d known anything in his life. But he still hated it, because it was worse to grow up without a living father than with a dead one. Why had he done this to them? Why had he faked his death without even sending a letter? A small part of his heart bucked and strained against his ribs: I’m alone! I’m all alone!

  He finished the cigarette and put it out in the Coke can next to his bed.

  “Cee,” he said. Caleb didn’t move. “Cee. Caleb.”

  Caleb turned on his back and made a little snore that sounded like Andre’s dad’s cat. Aaron went over and poked him in the stomach. His eyes blinked open, wide like a baby’s, and then narrowed when he saw who it was.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Wake the fuck up, man,” Aaron said.

  Caleb closed his eyes and sighed. “It’s not even a school day.” He grabbed his dumbass digital alarm clock off the shelf, looked at it, put it back. “It’s not even ten a.m.”

  “I have to tell you something,” Aaron said.

  “Tell me it in two hours.”

  Aaron pulled the covers off Caleb. “Get your ass out of bed.”

  Still sleep-fuzzy, Caleb stood and grabbed the covers out of his hand, then threw himself back on the bed. “Who the fuck are you? Moms?” he asked. “Go smoke your cancer sticks outside or something, smells too much like your ugly ass in here.”

  Aaron went outside, slamming the door a little—not that it would wake anyone up. He sometimes thought about how if they were still cave people he’d be the only one alive in the family, or if he was generous they’d only be alive because of him: he was always awake and he could spend all his time guarding them and fighting off predators while they slept their long, lazy hours, dreaming nonsense dreams they’d probably wasted whole weeks of awake time trying to describe to him. He’d never had a dream in his life. Every time he slept (and it was usually brief), he just got plunged into darkness like a man buried alive, pounding at the ceiling of his coffin until he could wake up again. He hated sleep, hated staying still, hated anything that left him defenseless. If he could, he’d spend his entire life awake. But being in a body was some fragile bullshit he’d have to tolerate forever: being in a body that could get broken, with a mind that could get hurt, with a face that got spat on and talked down to.

  The living room was empty, as he’d expected. The TV was still on, playing a Western, so he turned it off. He thought about cleaning the room and then realized that he wasn’t going fast enough: he had places to be, and he wasn’t trying to spend his whole day pretending like his mom wasn’t constantly betraying him. Caleb still called her Moms but Aaron gave up calling her anything. It had always been something about her, the way she treated him. She liked Caleb more because they could talk about math and books and whatever else Caleb gave a shit about in school. Every time she found a cigarette in the house, or weed, it was always Aaron’s fault right away—even the times it was Caleb’s. And since Aaron had grown this past year, she always walked at a little distance from him when they went out. She hugged him softer and looser, too, and there was a weird, stiff way she moved whenever she’d had to lift him when he was little, like she was lifting something too heavy for her to carry. Plus the things she did didn’t make any sense. She had a big, wide forehead and bright, always open eyes, and when they were really little she smiled a lot and told them to believe that everything in the world was going to work out fine for them. Who believed that? She would tell Caleb when he got another A or found ten dollars on the ground outside their building or got kissed by a girl at school that he got lucky and there was a pattern to everything and he was being watched out for. Not God, she always said, we don’t believe in that religious nonsense. We’re not like other people. But weren’t they just like other people if they replaced “God” with “something watching out for you”? And that something clearly hated Aaron from the start, because the only people who had his back were Andre and a few other guys, maybe Meeches if she liked the tapes he gave her.

  Then Aaron remembered the watch. He went back into their bedroom, where Caleb was already snoring again. Caleb had wanted to get her something nice for her birthday for once instead of the usual Bisquick-for-breakfast-handmade-card thing he (and Aaron, sort of) did every year. He’d wanted to get her a Casio, which Aaron thought was ridiculous. But Caleb was obsessed with it, was tearing out the pages of a bunch of nerd magazines and storing them under his bed. He even went into the store in Tower City and the guy there told him he was only allowed to use one coupon per purchase. So Aaron, because he guessed he was actually an idiot, started feeling bad for Caleb. He got a bagful of shake and old oregano from Andre’s house and sold it to a bunch of white college kids for fifteen dollars. Between that and all the money Caleb had saved up in his sad little piggy bank (Aaron used to have an identical one but he’d smashed it years ago trying to get five dollars out for candy), Caleb got to buy the fancy Casio and look like the perfect son. “I’ll say it’s from both of us,” he said, but Aaron didn’t really care.

  Now he got the watch box out from under the bed and started messing around with the instructions, which were printed almost too small for him to read and were numbered and boring. He found the part for setting an alarm and set it for when he’d get back from where he was going. Then he got dressed the rest of the way, slid into his knockoff Nikes, and looked at his face in the mirror. The edges around his ears were busted. The watch said it was ten twenty-three. He had time to go to Smitty’s if he wanted a haircut.

  Then he was on his bike wearing his best clothes and he felt a little dumb but he knew it was worth it for Meeches. There were three girls on the corner of Central and Fifty-Fifth as he rode by, all of them had honey hair but were talking in Mexican accents, and the one with the big thighs called out to Aaron, “Where you going?” and the rest of them laughed like it’d been a dare. He imagined her thighs in shorts, then in panties, then he felt bad about it for some reason because he was going to talk to Meeches about the tapes and he was already blowing this shit in his head. He biked east, toward Hough. A few guys were walking across the street arguing, trying to sound gully, and one of them watched Aaron pass on his bike like just biking there was wrong. He biked over a package of Funyuns and a box of crushed Parliaments. He biked over a losing lotto ticket and almost lost his balance running over a baby shoe. It was the morning, he reminded himself, and a Saturday, which meant that Daevon was probably working, had probably been sculpting old men’s hair for the past three hours already.

  Aaron liked Daevon because Daevon used to be friends with Cookie Johnson, a little round-f
aced guy who was Aaron’s dad’s best friend back when they were all kids in the sixties. Daevon wasn’t like other old folks, who were constantly reminding Aaron that “Cleveland’s changed” and that “a lot of people put in a hell of a lot of work just to make this place somewhere you can live.” He was a little old—probably the same age as Aaron’s mom—but he looked young, and he acted young even though he always had a mustache and a beard and an outdated Afro. He called Aaron “Big Fry,” which Aaron wouldn’t let anyone else call him. He cut Aaron’s hair in exchange for a nugget of weed every now and then, which he said he just couldn’t give up. He had a little daughter named Priscilla who lived with him half the time and in Glenville with her mom the other half. She was six or seven, and whenever she came to visit the barbershop Aaron always got a deck of cards off the shelf to play Go Fish with her. She was smart for her age and told him all about how she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. Aaron had always wanted a little sister he could protect, a smart kid who’d wake up at the same time he did and make the same kind of friends and stay loyal to them until she died. He could say which boyfriends were good boyfriends for her to have, could tell her how to not fuck around with people who wasted her time, could make her promise when she got rich to let Caleb’s useless ass borrow her money. He had a feeling that Priscilla wanted to get rich as much as he did, and that both of them would be the kind of rich people who’d come back to Cleveland and build schools for all the kids there. Or open a really nice office doing whatever they were doing and hire all their friends so nobody was working at the dollar store or the gas station or the high school cafeteria. Once he got rich, he was going to get himself a penthouse in New York City and marry a girl who, if she wasn’t Meeches, at least looked as good as she did, and then he was going to come back and give everyone else the money they’d been trying to get their whole lives. Priscilla had similar dreams. She told him she was going to be the first girl doctor to invent a fake heart that worked just as well as a real one.

  “I’m gonna get richer than my daddy is right now,” she’d always tell Aaron over cards. And Daevon would smile and laugh and say that wouldn’t be too hard.

  Aaron biked faster, liking the idea of getting to spend more than an hour at Smitty’s, liking the fact that there was a smart little sister there waiting for him. Cars were whipping past him now, faster than usual, it felt like. A cop car followed at his back, its siren whining, then passed him. For once they had something better to do than stop him and ask him to empty out his pockets. There were more girls on the sidewalk, walking with boys: none of the pairs were touching except one couple, the girl hanging off the boy’s arm and the boy kicking a rock along the sidewalk really hard, so they had to take lots of steps to catch up with it. He was focused as hell on kicking that rock. Aaron wouldn’t care about some dumbass rock if he had that girl hanging off his arm all the time. The girl had her hair wrapped up in two buns on her head. She was wearing shorts even though it was kind of cold, and they were short enough that the hoodie she was wearing almost hung over them.

  A little red building with a little red sign: SMITTY’S SEAWAY BARBERSHOP. He never asked why it was called that. There was no sea, there was definitely no way to the sea, and fuck if he knew who Smitty was. He locked his bike up out front and watched through the window as Daevon bobbed and wove around the head of a customer. When he walked in, Daevon looked up, then back at the gumby he was sculpting. “Big Fry,” he said. “You got a date?”

  It was like Daevon knew everything. “I dunno,” Aaron said. He slunk into the room, trying not to make eye contact with the guy getting the gumby. Priscilla was nowhere in sight.

  “Sure acting like you do. I remember how your daddy acted when he first met your momma.”

  Now Aaron was interested. He took a chair and Daevon got one of the other guys to take over the gumby. He cleaned out the electric razor. “You want moisturizer, Big Fry?”

  Aaron shook his head. “Places to be.”

  “Ay!” Daevon laughed. “Called it.”

  “What about my daddy?”

  “What you mean, what about your daddy?”

  “You were saying he acted some type of way when he met Moms.” He felt fake letting it slip out like that, but he couldn’t help himself.

  “Oh yeah.” Daevon took the razor to Aaron’s edges, describing how his daddy used to look: tall and thin with a beard that he could grow before any of the rest of them could, wearing the old blue button-downs he stole from the post office even after they fired him, driving the Caddy he and Cookie souped up in Cookie’s friend’s garage. Back before he was a powerful man with powerful connections, when he was still another broke kid hustling to get out of the neighborhood, he was obsessed with Natasha Harrison, who had the meanest parents in Cleveland. They wouldn’t let her eat or sleep or anything without their permission, according to Aaron’s daddy. They had him over for dinner once, decided he was a “delinquent,” and kept her trapped in the house until she ran away.

  “But before that,” Aaron said. “What did he do before she ran away?”

  What didn’t he do? He snuck over to her house at midnight and threw little pebbles at her window and she leaned out to talk to him. He worked every odd job there was to scrape money together so he could get her a pair of shoes, a necklace, a coat. He couldn’t get hired anywhere “legitimate” so he stopped trying. He didn’t spend any money on himself. He brought gifts to her at her college—Daevon had to drive him there a few times when the Caddy broke down. He sold whatever he could get his hands on so they could get an apartment together. He flipped cars, herb, LPs, hats, liquor. Until he met Sunny, that is.

  Aaron loved this part of the story. “How did he meet Sunny?”

  Daevon hadn’t been there, just heard the story from Cookie. According to Cookie’s memory, he and Aaron’s daddy had been working the block when some white guy drives up in a DeVille and asks for a half gram of smack. Which they don’t have, because neither of them fucks with that stuff. The white guy—he’s little, he looks kind of like a doll with heavy eyebrows and a big forehead—gets out of the car and shoves a gun in Aaron’s daddy’s side. He tells him to get in. Cookie does something he’ll always regret: he runs away, back to his place, where he sits and cries for an hour, thinking his friend just got shot. When that’s over, Aaron’s daddy’s banging on the door and Cookie opens it and Aaron’s daddy wants to know what the fuck is up. He also says the guy ended up being decent, had even hired him. A salaried position. Cookie has no idea what to say—“congratulations” didn’t exactly seem right—so he asks him what the work will be. Aaron’s daddy just grins and says, “More of the same.” Cookie can’t believe it. He’s just happy to see his best friend alive.

  “I would be, too,” Aaron said, totally unable to help himself. “What happened after that?”

  If Aaron was smart, he should know what happened after that: Aaron’s daddy started making real money, he got the girl he always wanted, he rented her a nice apartment in a nice part of town. And the girl gave birth to twin sons.

  “She gave birth in the apartment, not the hospital,” Aaron said. “Me and Cee were coming so fast she didn’t have any time to get to a hospital.”

  “You know your own history better than I do, Big Fry,” Daevon said.

  “But you know stuff I don’t know.” He hated how desperate he sounded. “You know stuff about, maybe like what my daddy was doing when I was really little?”

  Daevon bit down on his lower lip and shook his head. “Your daddy wasn’t around for long when you were really little.”

  “I mean—I mean before then. Like when I was a baby.”

  The door to the back room opened and out bolted Priscilla, carrying a GI Joe in each hand. She wrapped her skinny arms around Aaron, who tried to hug her back without shifting too much under the razor.

  “Momma got me these,” she said to Aaron.

  “Where’d you put the other guy’s shoes?” Daevon asked. Priscilla
shrugged, then hunched closer to Aaron.

  “Daddy, I’m showing my friend,” she hissed, which made Daevon laugh.

  Aaron didn’t hear them; he was thinking about his dad. He’d had time with his dad and he’d been too small and stupid to be aware of it. He’d been held by his dad, burped by his dad, but he’d never actually said a real word to him. The idea was making him sick.

  When he looked up again, Priscilla’s face was in his. “What you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re lying.”

  He looked at her face, her eyes big and dumb and young.

  “I’m not lying,” Aaron hissed. “Go play over there.”

  Daevon stopped the razor. “I’m not giving you a haircut with you talking that way to my daughter,” he said, his voice suddenly stern, and for a moment Aaron felt alone the way he imagined Caleb did when he had to find a place to sit in the cafeteria.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, but it was to Priscilla’s back: she’d already gone across the room and was making up some story about how the GI Joes had to escape out the window.

  They finished out the haircut in silence. Aaron looked in the mirror and he didn’t even look like his dad: he had his mom’s forehead and eyes, her nose, her lips. He didn’t have her hands (she always said she had “long alien fingers,” but he didn’t know if he had his hands: they were slender and short, something he’d always been self-conscious of). His hair was looking good, but that was Daevon.