Hold Me Down

by Calvin Slater

  He wasn’t given any more time to analyze their strange relationship because in walked Noah.

  Xavier could already tell that the old man was on that foolish tip.

  “The race is not given to the strong or the weak but the one who walks with God,” Noah said as he stood over Xavier.

  Xavier had that Would you get to it? look on his face. He held up the novel. “I’m studying.”

  Noah was dressed in work blues and steel-toed boots.

  “My hours have been cut back at the pizza parlor. Satan is always busy. But all things work together for the good and the benefit of those who trust in the Lord according to His will for them,” he said.

  This didn’t make any sense. Xavier was under so much pressure he didn’t know how much more he could take. This man was impossible to talk to. And Doug was suggesting that Xavier spill his guts to Noah. For what? To get taken to the basement, tied down, have holy water splashed on him while Noah recited scriptures from the Bible, working the whole thing with a crucifix and trying to exorcise some demon out of his oldest son?

  With a finger Noah lifted the cover of the book in Xavier’s hands.

  “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, huh? Still not picking up the Bible, are we?”

  Xavier said in frustration, “I have a test on this stuff. No disrespect, but can you leave me alone so I can study?”

  “Anything outside of the King James and other godly approved materials—”

  Xavier cut him off. “Let me guess: It’s wasted time?! I mean, you say it all the time.”

  Noah stepped back, surprised by his son’s aggression. “I plead the blood of Jesus over you, Xavier. Are you forgetting who the parent is? That’s why you should take more time reading the Bible and less time reading Satan’s work.”

  “I’m reading this for my English class.” Xavier rubbed his temples, trying to massage away the frustration. “It’s been a long day and I’m not feeling well. Can you please leave?”

  Noah looked up at the ceiling like he was expecting Jesus Christ himself to come through to help him out with his wayward son. “You can’t have my child, Satan. No weapon formed against me shall prosper.”

  “And that’s just the reason why I can’t talk to you. Haven’t you paid attention to me? I haven’t called you Dad one time since you’ve been home. I don’t know who you are, you feel me?”

  Noah moved on Xavier. It was done so quick that Xavier didn’t have time to react.

  Noah grabbed his son around the neck with one arm and with the other he tried to rip the shirt right off of Xavier’s back. “I told you about wearing these clothes from the designer devils. If you won’t stop wearing them I’ll tear them off myself.”

  Xavier squirmed, dropping the book to the floor. It was almost all he could do because his father was much bigger and stronger. Noah had a good grip on Xavier’s navy blue Nautica T-shirt, stretching it at the neck and trying to rip it off.

  They tussled for a while until Xavier managed to wriggle free. His father was stronger, but Xavier was quicker. He fell to one knee as he sharply cut around the corner of his bedroom door and into the hallway. In a blur Xavier ran through the house toward the front door. With enough presence of mind to grab his jacket, he swung open the front door and ran out into the night.

  Xavier didn’t give a damn whose Ford Edge Heather was gripping. He just jumped in and told her to drive.

  “Heather, you got a license?”

  “I’m seventeen, and yes, I have my license.”

  That was all Xavier needed to know.

  As they drove through the night, his temper was on bump and he had to do something before nuttin’ up and losing his damn mind. But he wasn’t about to go jaw-jacking with Heather. There was no way Xavier could explain to her with a straight face that his father had tried to tear the clothing off of his body because the clothes were evil. He knew he couldn’t tell a far-fetched story like that and expect not to be met with an incredulous face.

  So he kept it to himself. Xavier was a pretty private person anyway. Even with his mother, Ne Ne, Xavier had always kept his family matters private. His business was his business and nobody else’s—bottom line.

  As Heather drove, Xavier remained silent. He couldn’t believe that the old man had put his hands on him. Xavier could see being physically disciplined by his father if he wasn’t hitting the books and getting the grades. But trying to rip his clothes off, stating that the designer labels were responsible for Xavier’s rebellious spirit, was the stuff of mental institutions.

  Xavier needed somebody to talk to about everything going on in his life. But for the life of him he couldn’t find one contact in his phone that could help him. He’d hollered at Billy a few days ago, but the old man was far too busy to lay that great wisdom on him. The old coot’s young girlfriend finally had her baby and Billy was in the process of moving in his new family. Billy had his own troubles.

  “Are you all right, Hunter?”

  Xavier just kept staring out of the window.

  Heather said, “I’m not just going to continue to drive you around and not know where we’re going.”

  Again, there was no answer. Xavier continued to stare out at the bright lights from the local businesses that lined both sides of 8 Mile Road.

  “Okay, I’ll just take you to where I go to work out my problems,” Heather announced.

  Xavier was silent. Not really caring one way or the other.

  Heather drove another ten minutes until she reached a crowded parking lot belonging to some rinky-dink, ghetto pool hall. It looked to be an extremely rough place that doubled as a hangout for biker gangs.

  Rack ’Em poolroom sat as a standalone building in Detroit on West 8 Mile near Lahser Road. Young men stood around in groups, smoking cigarettes and trying to be on the low by sipping on forty ounces wrapped in brown paper bags.

  Outside, in front of the building, six cats stood out. They were rocking red leather biker jackets trimmed in white.

  In a place like this it didn’t take a Cambridge scholar to realize that stepping out of line here could result in a severe beat-down.

  Xavier couldn’t quite understand why Heather would bring him to a place where saying “hi” the wrong way could potentially lead to gunplay and somebody being on the receiving end of violence.

  Xavier pointed to the place and simply asked, “You have to be kidding, right? You actually come here to think?”

  She parked and playfully laughed. “Hunter, you are so silly. Since you won’t tell me about your problem I decided to bring you to a place where I work out all of my issues.”

  Xavier pointed again. “Once again—here? You come here, to this place, to think out your problems? Let me see how I can say this and still be respectful: You are nuttier than a bag of trail mix.”

  Heather glanced around the parking lot.

  He said to her, “This is one of those places where murder investigations end. Missing fools are later found because somebody is pulled from in there and is interrogated by the police until the bodies are found.”

  She laughed. “Hunter, I just love your sense of humor.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not playing, and there’s no way I’m going in there.”

  Heather turned off the ignition. “You’re not afraid of a nice game of pool, are you?”

  “Aye, I got a lot on my plate and I damn sure don’t need any more to be worried about.”

  “Hunter”—she started the truck back up—“it’s okay if you’re afraid.”

  He popped his lips dismissively. “Miss me with your first-grade mind games. Too old and too tired for that. Now bounce me somewhere else.”

  Without word or warning, she yelled, “I want to play pool!”

  “So this is not about me. It’s all about you?”

  In the whiny voice of a little girl, Heather said, “I wanna play pool!”

  This girl was getting battier and battier. He figuratively kicked himself in the butt for
slippin’ on this heifer. The drama in his life had run him straight into the arms of somebody who should’ve been on heavy antidepressants.

  When the childish tantrum didn’t work she flipped the script. Heather opened the door and slid out of the truck with her backside to him and started twerking. It was ridiculous because the loose sweatpants she was wearing did little to conceal her jiggling booty, the junk in her trunk dribbling like it should’ve had Spalding written across it.

  She seductively looked over her shoulder at Xavier while her moneymaker was going crazy and said, “You play pool with me now because if you don’t”—she stopped shaking it and pulled the loose material tight to highlight her booty—“I won’t love you anymore.”

  Xavier had forgotten about the dudes out front until they started whistling their approval at Heather’s performance. The girl was setting him up for conflict but didn’t seem to care.

  Against his better judgment he got out of the car. Heather stopped her act and closed the driver’s-side door. Her smile resembled that of a six-year-old.

  “I knew I would get my way,” she said to Xavier. A click of the keyless entry sounded the horn—honk!—made the headlights flash, and locked the doors on the Ford Edge.

  She snuggled up to Xavier on their walk through the parking lot. The drama didn’t start until they stepped up on the biker guys in red leather jackets. Xavier tried to keep his cool as one of them removed a knot of money out of his pocket and threw a few dollars at Heather’s feet. She and Xavier kept it moving, right through a walkway where the group stood three on either side.

  The fool who’d thrown the loot was a brown-skinned guy—big head and shorter than Heather, but he had his boys with him, so he was down to act a fool.

  Xavier noticed that their club name, Boss Dog Biker Boyz, was written in cursive on the back of the dude’s jacket over a picture of an angry-looking bulldog riding a crotch rocket.

  “When a woman like that puts on a show like that,” Bighead said, “it gets a fool to thinking that she’s too much for one man to handle.” The rest of his guys let their disrespect for Xavier ring out in their laughter.

  Heather had a look on her face like she was eating up the attention.

  Xavier couldn’t give a damn about Heather. It pissed him off to be disrespected by the little big head chump with all the mouth. But he was no fool. There were six of them. Didn’t need a math major to calculate the outcome if Xavier stepped to them. He’d get curb-stomped.

  Xavier opened the door for Heather, letting the venom in his eyes stand as a warning that he couldn’t give a damn about their numbers if they came with that bull again.

  Inside, there were a total of thirty pool tables. The air smelled of stale cigarette smoke and mildew. The old Arabic man behind the counter looked like a grimy old pervert, the stump of an unlit cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth. He smelled bad too, like feet and Fritos. The floors looked like they hadn’t been swept in months and garbage cans were overflowing.

  Xavier and Heather quickly grabbed a table in the back. The felt was dirty with God only knew what on the material. Xavier was still pissed at his dad and paid none of that any mind. In silence he racked up the balls while waiting like a gentleman on Heather to go and come from the bathroom. If this place was this dirty, he reckoned the bathrooms had to be gross.

  He surveyed his surroundings. This place was a virtual refuge for ex-cons, drugged-out bikers, and murderers. What the hell was he doing here? The answer was simple. Heather’s love game had him crazy and was blindly leading him around by his zipper. He definitely wasn’t hanging around her because of her class. She’d shown absolutely zero in the parking lot.

  After she came back, they chilled and kicked it about everything. Laughing and joking mostly about school until those six Boss Dog Biker Boyz walked in the front door with menace on their minds.

  Xavier had already peeped game. The marijuana smell that rolled in on them let him know they were about to clown. Out of the corner of his eye he caught them approaching. Leaning over the table holding a pool cue, Heather was busy concentrating on her shot. She hadn’t yet seen them. Beef was about to jump off and there was nothing Xavier could do but prepare to get his scrap on. While Heather ran off at the mouth Xavier stood on the opposite side, tightening his grip around the pool stick.

  The boys were five tables from them when Xavier walked around and stood beside Heather, as she sank her ball in a corner pocket. He touched her.

  “Touching me while I’m shooting—that’s cheating,” Heather said to Xavier with a smile. It wasn’t until the boys were right up on her that she recognized the situation. “Oh look, Hunter, it’s the Boss Puppy Biker Girls.”

  Bighead said to Xavier, “Your chick has a lot of mouth, partna.”

  Heather sized Bighead up and pointed to the enormous beer gut bulging out of his open leather jacket. “I might have a lot of mouth, but you need to learn”—she pointed at his stomach—“how to back away from the dinner table, you fat slob.”

  Xavier was tripping on the balls possessed by this chick. Inciting these fools wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to do. Apparently the girl had some sort of death wish.

  The biggest one stood eye level to Xavier and probably had him by fifty pounds. When he spoke up his voice was so deep that it seemed like the earth shook. “Yo, Problematic,” he said to Bighead. “Let’s show this chick how we do with big-mouths.”

  Problematic, Xavier thought. Based on his name alone, it didn’t sound like he’d be easy to tangle with.

  Xavier wasn’t known for diplomacy in these types of situations. But he figured if he wanted to get out of this place in one piece he’d better try to defuse the mounting tension.

  He said to the guy named Problematic, “Listen, homeboy, we’re just here to play pool. Don’t want any trouble.”

  Problematic’s facial expression seemed to indicate that Xavier had gotten through to him. That was until Heather opened her big mouth again.

  She blazed Problematic. “I know you don’t want none of my man. That’s right, fall back, chumps.”

  Problematic laughed it off. He said to Xavier, “My man, you better do something before I get at this gutter rat.”

  Heather shot back at Problematic, “You see a gutter rat?” She looked the guy up and down. “Talking about getting at me, the first thing you better get is a ladder, with your short ass.”

  That was it. The red button had been pushed. Problematic reached up like a pimp and was about to give Heather his backhand when Xavier blocked him with the pool cue, splintering the stick. The move left him open and defenseless for what came next. Not able to quickly recover, Xavier was helpless as the biggest biker let his fist fly. The last thing Xavier saw was knuckles, lights, and then darkness.

  Xavier seemed to be floating, with the sound of music playing somewhere in the distance. The sound kept getting closer and closer. He couldn’t exactly make out the lyrics—that was probably due to the throbbing, excruciating pain and confusion going on inside of his head. He attempted to open his eyes and was met by blurriness. Then like an old television set the picture started to adjust. Blurriness, double vision, and then distorted shapes and sizes came into view, everything meshing together into one long, illuminated streak. Xavier didn’t quite know where he was. His head was spinning, swimming—his brain seemed to pulse with every thought. The more he tried to remember what had happened, the harder the pounding in his head—until his eyes began to slowly focus. The bright lights from the lampposts and numerous businesses on 8 Mile lit up the street like it was an airport runway.

  He was back in the passenger seat of the Ford Edge. Xavier looked over at Heather.

  “Wha-what happened?” he asked her in a voice strained by grogginess.

  No answer. Heather kept biting the nails of her non-driving hand and mumbling something that he couldn’t quite make out. The volume of the car stereo was also turned up.

  Xavier’s seat had been full
y reclined. Despite the pulsating pain inside of his head he made the seat adjustment so he could sit up. The time on the digital clock in the dash read 9:35.

  “I said, what happened?” Xavier asked again, but louder this time. He winced from the pain.

  It was like the chick was bugging out. Heather was rocking back and forth, mumbling gibberish and dining on the nails of her left hand like she had barbecue sauce on them.

  Bits and pieces of the confrontation started coming back. The last thing Xavier could remember was piecing ol’ boy up with the pool cue before he got his own ticket punched.

  The girl was still rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat. Xavier wanted to shake her but didn’t want to run the risk of Heather losing control of the wheel and plowing through the showroom window of the car dealership they were just passing. He hadn’t noticed before, but Heather looked like she’d been in a brawl. Her hair was all over her head. The neck of her blouse was stretched out of place and there was also a bruise underneath her right eye.

  “They tried to drag me in the bathroom and rape me,” she said out of nowhere.

  She answered his question before he could ask—

  “After you hit Problematic and knocked him unconscious, the biggest biker hit you from behind.”

  Well, that explains the stars and stripes I saw before blacking out, Xavier thought. It also explained why there was a knot coming out the side of his head almost the size of an Easter egg.

  He said, “Go on.”

  Heather started to cry.

  Through her tears she explained, “I hit the big one over the head with my stick. One of them hit me and I fell to the floor in front of everybody. They started trying to pull me into the men’s bathroom. I was kicking and screaming until the guy behind the counter scared them off.

  “He was gonna call the cops but I pleaded with him not to because I only have a driver’s permit and my mother doesn’t know I have her car. She’s been out of town for almost a week. The man behind the counter felt sorry for me and he had a guy help me drag you to the car.”