Team Seven

by Marcus Burke

  Pop stood up huffing and puffing. As I rested my weight on my knees looking up at him, Ma screamed out, “Stop it, you two! Please,” and the dryness in her voice was enough to break my heart.

  I can only describe the feeling that crackled up my spine as Pop hugged me with his man strength as something close to getting your eyeball crushed inside an eagle talon. He stepped toward me and I threw my fist up, ready to swing, but he could tell I wasn’t really ready to throw hands with him. But I was sure pissed enough to try. He stood there looking at me, smiling and winded, and I kept my fists up and backed away, eyeing him the whole way back into my room until I closed my door.

  He called out, “Ah, Andre, come on!” Like it was a joke and he can laugh all he wants. Shit ain’t no movie, he was lucky Nina and Ma were around or I’d have pulled my shank on him—see how bad he was then. It’s all good, though, it ain’t over. In every direction I turn, it seems like there’s a new person popping up who’s got an issue with me, and at this point he can just add his name to the list. If he tries to come at me on some rah-rah billy-bad-ass shit again, he’ll get his issue.

  Since Pop works the day shift for Mr. Watson, Ma set it up so that he takes me to AAU practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays at this fancy-ass private school called Baxter out in Weston. It’s about an hour away or forty-five minutes if the highway’s clear and there’s no construction on Route 9. The ride is always awkward, and I listen to my headphones and act like I’m asleep until we get to the gym. We don’t say much more than “hi” and “bye” to each other and around the house we stay out of each other’s way. He mostly hangs out in the basement, listening to old records and drinking Heineken. With all that’s gone down, you’d think we’d have something to say to each other, right? Sometimes as we ride to practice I can feel him electric-eyeing me all deep like he wants to talk, but I don’t play his game.

  He drops me off at the gym around seven thirty and peels rubber out of the parking lot, knowing he has two hours to be back to pick me up. He never stays to watch me play like all the other fathers sitting up in the bleachers, holding cups of coffee or straight stealing swigs from a flask. Sometimes he fucks up and comes back too early and comes inside to pee and gets caught up talking to Mr. Watson or some of my other teammates’ fathers. The white fathers—businessmen types—seem to like him. I can see their inner laughter under them fake smiles. But Pop hates white people all the same, and I could see the bullshit dripping off him too.

  I hated seeing him up there acting like he really had something to do with me, fronting for all the other fathers up in the stands with the sleeves of their dry-cleaner starch-creased white oxfords rolled up, their Brooks Brothers ties hanging slack around their necks. Pop’s no angel, but I can’t blame him for the way shit is right now. I did it all to myself. I fucked up the money and he ate a charge for me. I know. I remember. But karma and bitch-ass niggas will get you in the same way.

  When Ma’s not around, all the silence and tension in the house make it feel like being at the library, everybody quietly studying each other, doing their best not to talk unless it’s absolutely necessary. Since I clapped Nina we don’t hardly speak and when we do she’s talking shit. I feel bad for smacking her, but now she’s made me a bit nervous ever since, it always seems like she’s up to something. She knows if she comes out on the back porch, after Ma’s in bed, I’ll let her blaze with me, but that don’t mean I trust her, ’cause I don’t. Right about now I don’t trust anybody other than Reggie. Nina’s too tricky. Other than the fact that she’s sleeping with the enemy, or whatever she terms what she’s doing with Smoke, she also be trying to hang around Pop, being all friendly and shit, acting like his spells of doing the right thing ever last. She can call me an asshole all she wants, but I’m not buying it, Pop will never change, he just gets better at hiding the shady bullshit about himself. Just the other day Nina told me she really thinks Pop reformed when he was away and that I should give him another chance. Then again, this is the same girl who believes that every bitch who tells her Smoke is creeping around is a hater. Ma and Smoke’s mother, Miss Myra, are friends, and I guess they’re trying to be supportive or just ignoring it, in hopes that it’ll be a phase and they’ll fizzle out. Nina’s eighteen, they can’t stop them and neither can I, but all I know is I’m sticking to my guns.

  Even though Pop and I ride to and from practice together, the closest thing to quality time we share are the nights we’re both in back of the house smoking in our separate slices of darkness. Him, sitting down in the backyard on a lawn chair smoking a joint, and me looking down on him from above on the second-story back porch, smoking too. And just like when I used to spy on him and Uncle Elroy, when I was younger, he has no clue I’m up there watching.

  Tonight as I sat out on the back porch, midsmoke, Nina swung the back door open all slow so the hinges could squeak, just for effect, and I had the biggest urge to punch her in the nose. She tiptoed out onto the back porch, scaring me half to death, not answering when I called out, “Who’s there?” She came outside smirking at me like an asshole and sat down on the recycling bin on the other side of the porch. I told her she plays too much and she snatched the blunt from me and we smoked for a short while.

  It was all good until she started laughing and talking ’bout how I better pay Smoke his money before he catches me slipping around the way and airs my shit out. She enjoys fucking up my high. Like I don’t know that I’ve been ducking him like a lil’ bitch for the last however long it’s been now, and it’s been a while. She took a few more drags from the blunt and as she got up to go back inside, out came Pop into the backyard with a six-pack of Guinness, a joint tucked behind each ear, and one in his mouth. Nina walked over to the railing of the porch and squinted at him as he sat down in his lawn chair and sparked up. She looked back at me and whispered, “Ain’t that nigga on probation? What’s he doing?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I dunno, being a changed man.” I laughed and hit the blunt.

  “But don’t he get drug-tested?”

  “You wanna know so bad? Go ask him.” I was being sarcastic but she turned around and said, “I will,” and walked inside.

  I heard her get halfway down the basement steps before she turned back and went into our apartment. I figured she’d lost the nerve to actually go out there, but I knew she wasn’t about to let it go that easily. I don’t know what she wants from him, but she refuses to accept that Pop’s like a steel vault, and trying to get a straight answer out of him was a waste of time. But Nina’s always the one to start some bullshit, drawing unnecessary attention to herself, making shit hot. I’d seen him out there smoking plenty of times but what was I supposed to say to him? I wondered about him getting drug-tested too, but I had no legs to stand on, considering it was my weed that got him on probation in the first place. So I’d just let it be, finished smoking, and went in the house.

  The next night I went outside to smoke around eleven. Pop was already on beer number three by the time I got out there. Nina wasn’t home yet, it was Friday. Plus she and all her girls graduate soon, so they ride around stuffed inside Smoke’s car, smoking, drinking, and generally raising hell around town. The cops let them do it, it’s a town tradition for the seniors to race around blaring off their horns, toilet-papering houses, and silly-stringing the sidewalks.

  As I sat down to light my blunt, I heard the loud vibration of the subwoofers in Smoke’s car, and I knew Nina was home. Pop didn’t pay any mind to all the commotion out front until Nina stumbled down the hill into the backyard, giggling with a bottle of Alizé in her hand. I could tell from the sway in her walk that she was drunk. I couldn’t even begin to predict what was about to come out of her mouth.

  Pop stood up when he heard someone coming, and sat back down when he recognized it was Nina. Before Pop could get a word out, she started snapping.

  “Look at you! Smoking like you ain’t on probation and shit. If you go back to jail, what the fuck you think is gonn
a become of us, huh?”

  Pop opened another beer and sat slouched back in his chair, looking off into the next yard like she wasn’t there. She continued anyway.

  “Maybe if you wasn’t so busy trying not to hear me, I’da told you what your son’s been up to lately.”

  She took a big gulp of Alizé and crossed her arms at her chest, gripping the bottle by the neck. Pop didn’t look fazed. He sighed through his nose and looked up at Nina, standing in front of him. “You’re a pest, you know that?” He took out a joint and lit it. “Y’all live in Milton, not Mattapan—the real hood. Look around you, it’s quiet and safe. What are you so mad about?”

  I walked over to the railing so I could hear them better.

  “So what? You come and go from this place like a cousin from out of town, not our father. That’s why I’m mad!”

  She paused and took a swig from the bottle.

  Nina’s good at flipping the script. She can go from one to ten in the snap of a finger.

  “What do you think knowing the truth about my life will do for you and your life anyway, Nina?” Pop asked.

  Nina laughed, but there was nothing funny.

  “What happened to you, Daddy? I at least deserve a straight answer.”

  She grabbed the lawn chair leaning against the side of the house and sat down in front of him. Pop took a couple drags from his joint, and I saw a burst of light in front of Nina’s face as she sparked a blunt of her own, all comfortable like they’d been smoking together for years.

  “Ain’t no right or wrong answer, really, I just wanna know why the fuck it’s so hard for your slippery ass to tell the truth about yourself, coward!”

  Pop sat gazing downward and away from Nina, sort of like a little kid being yelled at, though when she said the word “coward” his whole body twitched. He turned in his seat and pointed at her as she exhaled smoke and tossed her head back, taking another big gulp from the bottle. I stood looking down on the two of them, amazed at how fast liquor removes the filter between your brain and your mouth. Before Nina could continue, Pop clapped his hands together and sat up.

  “Listen, I can’t save you, same way couldn’t nobody save me from myself. I just hope whatever it is that’s got you burning up gets out of your system with you still in one piece. Look at you, smoking and drinking. You think you’re grown? Let’s talk like adults then.”

  He reached down and grabbed another beer and bit the top off and lit another joint. The anger in his voice seemed to soften Nina. She sat quietly waiting for him to speak.

  “Doesn’t matter what I do in the streets when I’m gone, it’s simple. Humans are creatures of habit. A drug addict does drugs, an alcoholic drinks, simply so they can know who they are. Fingers point and pass judgment, always saying, ‘Look over there, and over here,’ but never in the mirror. What makes you think your life’s so tragic?”

  Nina leaned toward him and blew a stream of smoke in his face. I almost laughed, I thought he was going to smack her but he didn’t. As she sat there smoking her blunt and sipping her bottle, a part of me felt jealous that I wasn’t sitting in that chair. All the nights we’d both smoked out there in silence, and she just stumbled down there drunk and got him to give up the goods.

  Pop raised his voice, “I may be ignorant, selfish, hardheaded even, but I’m no fool. I’ve just always been sort of bored with life. I never claimed to be a good or great father. No one forced me to do anything. I’ve done plenty of bogus things and I’ve paid dearly for them all.”

  I don’t know what set Nina off about what he’d said but she took the last swig from her bottle of Alizé and smashed it on the ground.

  “Fuck that!” She stood up. “Enough jive talkin’ like an old-timer. Thought we was gon’ talk like adults?”

  Nina picked up the broken neck of the bottle and sat back down. Pop looked a bit shocked now, as Nina went on, “You don’t see what this shit’s doing to Ma. She’s pretty much a vegetable after she gets off work, sitting alone in the living room eating burnt popcorn, watching old videotapes of Creflo Dollar, T. D. Jakes, or any other sweaty black man jumping around on BET in the morning selling hope, promising change gon’ come.”

  She tossed the piece of bottle she was holding.

  “Dammit, Daddy! Why don’t you care?”

  Pop looked at her with no emotion in his face and said, “Save me the hysterics, okay? Just know that when the shit hits the fan, and trust me it will, everyone scatters and the trouble is all yours to deal with, and I carry mine! I see you riding in the car with that boy, acting like you’re one of them kinda girls.”

  “What the hell does that mean, ‘them kinda girls’?”

  “It means, it ain’t that hard to cop a habit or make a kid. Now shut the hell up and listen! Clearly we don’t know each other very well.”

  For the first time, I heard something genuine in his voice. I took the last drag of my blunt and ashed it on the railing. He cleared his throat and began, “I was fourteen years old when I showed up in Boston from Jamaica, it was 1974, and Boston was a very different kind of place then. No one thought my accent was cool, people were impatient with me, and I was always fighting because of it. That fall, they desegregated the schools and the busing thing fucked up the city even more. Boston felt like it was going to explode. Shit got out of hand, quick. All the blacks started to band together because groups of white boys from South Boston had been riding around, jumping any brother in sight. Some nights me and your uncles would get loaded drinking Thunderbird and take out our father’s car, doing the same thing, jumping out on any white boys in sight. I was one of the most dangerous things on the streets back then, a brother with not a thing in this world to lose.”

  Nina interrupted him. “Sort of like Andre?”

  He laughed, waved his hand, brushing her off, and kept talking, “That kid’s nothing like me.”

  I almost stood up and yelled, “Fuck you,” but remember they didn’t know I could hear them so I held my tongue and listened, I don’t want to be like that nigga anyway.

  “I’d do anything in those days and not think twice. Mind you, this was also around the time crack flooded the streets. It came through like daylight, wasn’t a place it didn’t touch. So there, you want an explanation? Crack, Nina, crack is a major part of what happened to me. When crack touched down, either you were selling it, using it, or doing both. Me and your uncles got real caught up with that stuff.”

  He paused and opened another beer and lit a cigarette, Nina sat quietly waiting for him to continue.

  “Another thing that happened, your Uncle Edgerin, well, he didn’t really die in the war like we told you he did. He overdosed on a good batch of that hard Baltimore rock. It was hardly even stepped on. It was his twenty-first birthday and I’d brought it over to his girl Gladys’s spot to celebrate. I took the first hit of the night, and I’d never had a batch of rock that pure. It made my heart start kicking at my chest and I felt thumping in my earlobes. The veins in my eyes pulsed, I remember hearing a low ringing and my whole body got hot. Really, I thought I was having a heart attack, but then it all stops, and it’s over. Smoking that rock with your uncle that night was one of the best and worst nights of my life. As soon as I came down, I wanted it again, but I was scared because I already loved it too much. Your uncle was already in way too deep with the stuff and he hit it extra hard that night. We all took one last blast before I went home for the night, and I guess none of us ever quite knew when enough was enough. After Edgerin took that last hit, he dropped the pipe on his chest and slouched over to the side. Me and his lady thought he’d nodded off into a dope nap, but nope, he’d expired right there in front of us and we were too happy being high to realize it in the moment.”

  He lowered his voice and leaned toward Nina and said, “Do you have any idea how it feels to hand your brother the rock he’ll use to end his life with? Around that time I thought I’d reached the bottom, but I still had some falling to do. The morning he died, I qu
it cold turkey. I just stopped. It all hit too close to home. I got all righteous and shit, said I wouldn’t give my life to a pipe.” He finished his beer and laughed. “I was young. I started going to service on Sundays, and that’s when I really started getting into music. I played the drums at church, that’s where I met your mother. I was at my best then. She sang in the choir, and with her I got the rare feeling of being at home. But we married young, too young really, and I’ll never marry again unless I meet a woman who can keep me in the house, truthfully. I was clean up until a little bit after you were born. I’d passed the postal exam and started working at the post office. This is when your mother still believed in my ability to overcome, but she had no idea how bad it could get with me. Somehow I confused her into believing I could beat the odds and blow the Boston reggae scene wide open, but I fell short. Me and your uncle Duval had a band and we built up enough steam to put together a little local circuit tour down in Florida. It was supposed to be our big break, but life never happens how you want it to. I asked for two weeks off from work but they laughed me out of the human resources department. So I said fuck it, told your mother the time off was approved, and me and the boys packed up the van and hopped on 93 south, heading toward Florida. And right in the back of that smelly old van, I broke. Duval had some rocks and we smoked ’em, and just like that I was sucked right back into the life. Never say never, protect yourself. It was an impulse, a disappointing impulse too. Smoking rock wasn’t as great as I’d remembered. But I smoked it and I was back. I didn’t like being that out of control, but I was. Once you take that blast, crack is the boss, and you do as it says. That second voice in your head starts talking to you, and you’re now under its control, you’re no longer yourself anymore. When you wake up, it’s the first thing you think about and sometimes you hear that voice in your dreams. The voice calls for devotion and undivided attention. It’s a shitty relationship, you wish you didn’t love the motherfucker so much or else you’d leave it alone and never come back. And every time you find yourself back exactly where you don’t want to be, you hate yourself a little more and trust yourself a little less. We only played three shows before we ran out of money and started squatting at this groupie chick’s trailer. Even though I knew I was fucked, I kept telling myself it was just a treat and that I’d get back straight tomorrow, or the next day. I kept telling myself, ‘Today I’m going back home,’ but when you get strung out the days pass like minutes and months pass like weeks and all that voice is screaming at you is ‘More! More! More!’ and like I said, you listen.”