“No, that’s talking,” I said. “You said fighting, I’m gonna fight. I know a few wrestling moves. I’ve played some Tekken. I can turn anything into a weapon.”
“Stop,” Naomi said, annoyed. She was raising her eyebrows to accentuate her points. “You know that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m glad you don’t fight at school or pick on kids smaller than you, like some of those other guys, but you should want to fight on some level. That’s the problem. I’m not talking fists and feet; I’m talking about facing the world.”
“It’s the same thing!” I said. They both led to people getting hurt. “I don’t like it; it’s not me. I don’t like fighting, I don’t like arguing, I don’t like this!”
My parents had fought all the time—that’s what she made me think of. Lying in bed, listening to Dad yell and Mom scream, and as a kid I couldn’t think of why they were together aside from the fact that they were my parents so they were just kinda stuck there. And I fought with Mellie and sometimes I’d yell things I heard our parents say even though I had no clue what they meant.
“You don’t like this?” Naomi said. She was mad at me now. If she wasn’t before, she was definitely mad now. I’d seen her mad and did not want it directed at me. “You don’t like talking to me?”
“Of course I do. Naomi, look at everything going on around us,” I said. “No offense, but for all your talk about fighting, you can be a little unhinged. Frankly, it scares me.”
“If you can’t deal with me as I am—” Naomi pointed at me, her voice raised enough that I worried we’d wake up Kelly.
“Look at the comments online,” I interrupted, trying to keep my voice low. “Look at the bile people are posting there!”
“And you listen to that?” Naomi asked as if I were disturbed. She had an immediate retort to everything I said. I wasn’t even sure if she was listening to any of it. She was an argument robot, like one of those baseball pitching machines set to auto.
“I’m just saying the world is not a safe place,” I said. She slowly turned her head away from me. “It’s not some soft cushion you can go diving off of buildings and land on safely. You’re mouthing off to Lester freaking Dooley, for crying out loud. That kid thinks I’m talking about him now. Who do you think he’s going to come after? Me. And Jason? Your parents?” I asked. I got off the couch and started to pace. “You ever think all this fighting is just pushing everyone we know who should be in our corner really far away?”
“Lester’s harmless,” Naomi said, brushing aside everything else I’d said.
“Maybe you should be with Lester, then,” I said, and instantly wanted to take it back. I needed to get out of there, fast.
“You are ridiculous,” Naomi said, standing up herself now. “Relationships are hard. Sometimes there’re bad things, hard times. You really need to learn to deal with them.”
“How do you know what relationships are?” I asked. She didn’t have any more experience than I did.
“Well, how do you know?” she retorted. It was a good retort. I chuckled. “Don’t laugh. This isn’t funny. God, it’s only been, like, what, a month? Two months? And already we’re—”
“I should leave,” I said. I was in Naomi’s hyperconfrontational world, and I didn’t know which way was up here, or what wrong word was going to break us up.
“Walter, do not leave,” Naomi said, shaking her head and moving toward the door.
“I have to,” I said. “I have to because this is heading somewhere bad. I don’t know where, but it’s bad, and I want to go before we get there. I’m not ready for that.” I got my coat and faced the door, with Naomi in front of it, and waited.
“Fine,” Naomi said, as distant as I’d ever seen her. She turned away from me. “I’ll lock the door.”
Possibly a million different options at that second presented themselves: go, stay, talk, touch. But I felt I should follow through. I said I’d leave for a reason. I grabbed my stuff and fumbled my way down the mostly dark staircase and threw open the door as hard as I could. I still had that anxious, awful, angry energy tensed up in my body. The fast walk to Naomi’s seemed like miles heading back. I could see the occasional headlights, the dull round areas my flashlight pointed to, and some twinkling lights that were mostly behind me, all in the distance.
I didn’t want to go home. I wasn’t ready to face Dad, and without home and Naomi’s, the most I could do was wander and walk off some of the tension. Right through the war zone. Dad would flip. Truthfully, it was dead quiet out there save for a stray cat that I could barely make out.
My blood was pumping, head racing. Maybe that was how everyone else always felt, and why they fought so much. Admittedly, there was some life to it. It was natural, after all. The world was antagonistic by nature. Everything you did was a fight, every breath was a fight against death, every choice you made, every decision you made was a fight against another decision. We fought instincts, our better judgments—we fought nature. They say every story is broken down to a fight, man against man, man against nature, man against society. Everyone was against everyone, and it was tiring. Why couldn’t we just be for someone, or for something? Why couldn’t there be ideas we didn’t fight, because they were good ones? Why couldn’t we close our eyes and let nature guide us and pray everything turned out all right? But it was never that easy, and I was guided through the streets like I was drawn to a magnet; I realized I was chasing noise. There were other people out there.
The lights popped back on like a good idea well before I’d gotten home. Ahead of me in an apartment complex parking lot was a group of kids, Lester, Frankie, others I didn’t know, five or six in all. Beardsley was there. They were standing there smoking, first in the dark, then in the light, posed like they belonged there, and me walking alone like I belonged there, and we looked at each other like this was expected and unavoidable. I was as ready for my ass-kicking as I’d ever been. Honestly, as I got closer and saw that face, I didn’t care at all anymore.
“Wally Wilcox,” Lester said with his usual grin. “Alone, walking down Lincoln Street. Must be coming home from Naomi Mills. How is the princess?”
I didn’t answer. He was probably just testing to see if he could go pay her a visit.
“She isn’t still mad at me, is she?” Lester asked, and took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled. “I was out of line that time—I know I was. I blew it.”
“You didn’t blow it with Naomi,” I said. “You never had a chance with her to blow it.”
Lester laughed—the whole crew laughed. “All right, you got me. I had a big crush on her, man,” Lester said, walking closer to me. “I used to come over to the house, hang with Jason. She’d come out of the bathroom, hair all wet from her shower. Smelling like … What’s that stuff girls use?”
“Lilac?” Frankie said. Lester laughed and shook his head.
“Yeah, we’ll use that, lilac,” Lester said, then turned back to me. “Sucks to like a girl and know you’re never gonna see her naked.”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” I said. Lester laughed. He might have been a charmer or whatever, and he was your classic alpha male, but he was still a big, dumb, brainless, violent—
“I see how you look at me,” Lester said. “Like I’m some kind of animal—you can say it. You think I don’t get that all the time? But here’s the thing. I’m smarter than you. Surprised? Look at you, fists all clenched up, breathing heavy. Tell me, what do you think of this? You may be dating a black girl, but I still think you’re racist.”
That wasn’t fair. He can’t play the role of an animal and then accuse me of noticing it. I wasn’t racist for thinking he was a bully when he was being a bully. I might have thought he was an animal, but he backed it up with his actions. He was planting the images in my head.
“You’re picturing me heading up to Naomi’s right now, checking in on her, big, strong black man on a scary night. That just pisses you off, doesn’t it?” Lester taunted. His friends
were laughing. “You dogged your friend Jason. He doesn’t respect you, and neither do I. Your dad belongs here more than you. You don’t belong here. You don’t know poor. You definitely don’t know black. Get it? You don’t get to be with a black girl, and especially Naomi Mills. She’s too good for you.”
It was inevitable. I was weak. I wasn’t good enough for Naomi; she should end up with Lester.
He turned to his friends. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and put out his cigarette. He thought he was done with me, that the conversation was over, that the final line involved me crawling back into my hole and losing everything.
“Don’t turn around on me,” I said—I think I said. I wasn’t weak. No, I wasn’t going to roll over.
I’ve never fought anyone, not physically, but I ran right into Lester. He couldn’t have seen it coming, because it felt like moving a truck with surprising ease, and we hit a parked car behind him. I got two or three fists and forearm punches into Lester’s face before he tossed me back maybe five feet with one big shove. I ran back into him.
Rage and adrenaline really worked wonders because I had knocked Lester off his feet. Lester’s arm swung. I thought he hit me with his muscle. I grabbed a rock while I was on the ground, but before I could do anything stupid with it, the rest of them were on me again. I was yanked into the air like I weighed nothing. The things I remembered after that were like snapshots, brief little snippets or ideas, images mostly. I remembered Lester laughing and touching his face, an uneasiness that broke when I was hit by someone in the stomach. I remembered my ribs hurting. I remembered my knee hitting the ground and trying my best to stay on my feet so they’d only be using fists.
“Knock it off,” I remembered an older person yelling from a window somewhere. “Leave that boy alone!”
I also remembered someone on a doorstep talking on her phone.
I remembered swinging my arm, but I didn’t know if I was trying to hit someone, or who if I was. Eventually I did get hit in the face. My glasses fell off. I got put in a headlock and saw blood on the ground. I wondered if it was mine.
I didn’t remember the fight stopping, but I did remember the police car and the headlights streaming on me. Ricky asking me who did this and telling him “just some kids.” Ricky held up some fingers, but I couldn’t tell what he wanted me to do with them. Two fingers. Three. What did it matter now?
It would be a great story for Dad. Seventeen-year-old kid gets beat down on the night of a blackout, four on one, and get this: he started it. Maybe he had it coming. The kids all got away.
That energy still hadn’t burned off.
Chapter Fifteen
“No ambulance,” I said as Ricky moved my head around, taking a look at my injuries. “It’s my first fight. I’ll take it like a man.”
“Yeah, take it like a man, then,” Ricky said sarcastically. “Great idea, wake up with a real manly concussion you can brag to all your friends about.”
“I’m fine,” I said. I didn’t know if I was fine or not. Nothing actually hurt, I felt a little numb, but I had adrenaline rushing through me, too. People were out watching us. I saw my breath glow in the flashing lights of the police cruiser. Ricky reported something into his walkie-talkie.
“I’ll take you home, but I’m calling your dad first,” Ricky said. I groaned. There was nothing warm and inviting waiting for me back home. “I’m not letting him wake up tomorrow to find you like this, Walter. You know that. And if he wants you to go to the hospital tonight, that’s his call, okay?”
Dad was up waiting for me when I got home. Ricky came in for a minute to drop off the goods. Everything was somber. I put a cold press on my face and settled in for the lecture. At least we had power now. Sort of, anyway. There was one dim lamp on, and Dad was in his pajamas with a cup of coffee, waiting. It was shortly after midnight.
“You didn’t listen,” he said. I hadn’t seen my face yet, but it was sore enough that I imagined it might get me some empathy. That was not the case. Mom would have empathized. “I’m a cop, you think I don’t know what goes on in this city? You think I don’t know what I’m talking about? I’m your father, which is reason enough for you to shut up and take notice when I talk, but I’m also an officer of the law. And you were very stupid disobeying me.”
“Listen to yourself, you don’t know anything that happened, but you act like you know everything,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for this again. That same angry blood was coursing through me.
“You’re damn right I do. Compared to you, I do know everything,” Dad said, pointing at himself. He’d probably been rehearsing this since I left. “I’ve been a father nineteen years, a cop for more than that. I know every damn hoodlum and thief in this city. I know every crooked cop. I know girls, all right; I know how they get in your head. I know right from wrong. I know what’s important, and that’s your family, so you listen to me when I talk. You want to know what I know?” Dad nodded, confident. “I’ll tell you exactly what this is: it was black kids. This was revenge. This was a message for me.” He pointed at himself again, a smug smile. He hadn’t even asked me what had happened. Not only was this a lecture when my cheek felt like it had it’s own heartbeat, but it was a lecture filled with flat-out unhidden hate and unchecked ego.
“It wasn’t black kids,” I said. “It had nothing to do with you. They beat me up. This is my life, one you don’t know anything about. Some detective.” For an officer of the law, he didn’t put any faces to it, he didn’t apply any reasoning, and he didn’t acknowledge that these things happened all the time here. He took it all as an affront to him alone—that I was the method of delivery for this personal message. Hey, racist cop, leave our kind alone.
“I’m not a detective; I’m a cop, smart-ass,” Dad said. “I uphold the law, and there’s gonna be some laws in this house. For one, you are done with that girl. She’s bad news. How many times did I tell you? This isn’t about high school crushes—”
“I get it, I know. We’ve gone over this already,” I interrupted. We were spinning our wheels and going nowhere. “It’s not about me; it’s about you—I get it. I could do this whole lecture myself now: ‘I have friends of every color. I’m the best cop, Walter, best there is. Everyone’ll figure it out eventually.’ News flash, you’re not some ace detective; you’re not even a good cop. They don’t use you for anything. You’re a slob and paranoid, and that stuff is in me now. That’s your voice. I’ve heard it so much I have that paranoid voice running through my head. I’m scared of everyone and everything all the time. Why do I even listen to you? You lost your job, you lost Mom. I have to make an effort to think like a normal person. I’m embarrassed for you. I’m embarrassed for us both. I honestly don’t believe a word you say anymore.”
“That’s some performance, kid,” Dad said, clapping loudly and sarcastically. He was starting to sweat. “That how it’s gonna be? You get a piece of tail and suddenly you’re a big man?”
“Screw you,” I said.
“Go to bed,” Dad said, and pointed to my room.
“Go to hell,” I said, and went to my room anyway and slammed the door.
“I’ll put a lock on that door if I have to,” I heard Dad yell from the other room. Then I heard his door slam, too.
My face was swollen and cut up. I didn’t like to look at it. It hadn’t really hurt until right then when nothing else was going on, and then it hurt like hell. I felt like the ending scene of a Rocky movie. I looked at my phone. No message from Naomi since our fight. She didn’t check in with me. She was probably still mad. I checked Facebook in my room, and she did post something there. If you can’t fight me when I’m dating you, don’t fight me when I break up with you. Why would she post that there after all the trouble we’ve had on that site? I took a picture of my face with my cell phone and posted it to the East Bridge page Jason ran. Then I went to bed, lying on my back.
*
Sometime in the morning, I heard a loud thud. “Dad?” I go
t up and ran into the living room. Nothing there. “Dad?” I called again.
I looked in the kitchen, which was empty, but I saw Dad’s arm in the doorway to his room. I wasn’t ready for this. You didn’t die from eating hamburgers or having an argument. A hundred horrible thoughts filled my head at once. Would he kill himself? Was he suicidal—was this way worse than I even knew? Was he on drugs? Was he right all along—did someone come after him? I hadn’t heard any fight, though, or gunshot. I found him on his back on the floor of his room. His shirt was drenched with sweat, to the point where it puddled on the ground around him. His eyes were closed like he was asleep. He looked white as a ghost.
I didn’t rush to ask if he was okay or try to do anything except grab the landline phone and dial 9-1-1 for an ambulance. That was something we’d gone over in school, and I’d paid attention to it, never knowing I’d need it, let alone so soon. But when your dad acts like mine does, it’s something to know.
They let me ride in the ambulance since I didn’t have a car or anything. It was supposed to be me being taken to the hospital, probably sitting in the passenger seat of Dad’s cruiser, head against the window, quiet tension in the air. But my anger was swept away by a very real fear. My last conversation with my dad could have ended with “Go to hell.”
In the hospital, everyone ran off to help Dad, who was stretchered in, and I was left alone to sit and wait. There was a lot of waiting. I’d always been somewhat prepared for this. Whether it was his diabetes and his fear of doctors, or his job, which could put him here on any given day. It felt different sitting in that waiting area, though, to see if this was the time. And I didn’t have any answers as to what happened next.
My godfather was my uncle Joe, and I’d already decided I had no interest in living there. Maybe I was old enough to be on my own, but I had no money. College was right around the corner, in theory. I wished I had more of a plan. I’d make it on my own, I guessed. I was old enough now. I could get by. I was going to have to at some point. Dad was up to his neck in his own problems. Mom had her own life now. And Naomi …
Bright Lights, Dark Nights Page 19