There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  But for all the good she did with the faculty and staff, there was little she could do to keep me safe otherwise. For beneath the veneer of rules and regulations enforced by men and women, South Oak Cliff was a world ruled by the violence of boys. That’s what made the place so fun.

  In the freshman locker room, darkness might fall, suddenly, and you would hear a beat on a bench near the door, and a yell from a shadowy figure standing in the doorway—Yeah freshmen!—and another three or four shadows chanting—Draws! Draws! Draws! You knew, although you wished it were not so, that they had come to grab one of you, at random or with premeditation, and pin you down while another boy or two ripped your pants and underwear off, and another turned on the lights for all to see what you had or did not have.

  In the hallway after lunch, the lights might flicker and the shuffle of feet and slamming of lockers might be replaced by screams or utter silence aside from the sound of a boy’s head being bashed against the wall. In this same hallway one morning, I smelled Tank Jones walk by before I saw him, blood running down his dingy white shirt. Tank was the only true bully I knew of, with the bad odor and extra weight and low self-esteem that bullies always have. This particular morning Tank had attacked another boy across the street and, when the boy did not cower, had pulled out a pistol to assure the boy that he’d have a bullet in his ass if he did not do what Tank demanded. This boy must have had incredibly swift hands, because he grabbed Tank’s pistol and, as Tank tried to run away, shot him in the back. All that blood was spurting from the hole in Tank’s hide blubber, where the bullet was still lodged when he rushed by me to the nurse’s office. God is just, sometimes.

  These were simple skirmishes. Some days there might be war.

  In the first few weeks of school, on a hot August afternoon when the Texas sun sat right on your chest and blew fire in your nostrils, I walked outside and, through the nearly blinding light, saw a caravan of boys racing down Marsalis into the school’s gravel parking lot. Some were packed into an old-school Cutlass, others into a Chevy Caprice with spinning hubcaps, television screens behind the headrests, at least one subwoofer making the whole car tremble, Dirty South Rydaz playing inside and out. One boy was perched outside the passenger window as the Caprice turned in, hands signaling something for somebody. These were the boys from Highland Hills. They had come to end a conflict with their enemies from Beckley-Saner, another Oak Cliff neighborhood where boys had nothing but the pride of a few blocks they had inherited—blocks that, absent any other cause to believe in, were worth dying for, I suppose. They would find out this day.

  Walking out to meet the boys from Highland Hills—shirts off; fists their only weapons, unlike their enemies, who carried choppers in the trunk—were the boys from Beckley-Saner. They were led by SirJon “Juice” Harris, a sophomore and track star who was only an acquaintance at the time, since we shared a few classes, but would become, by the end of the spring season, something like a big brother.

  I can’t tell you what exactly went down once the two sides met. (BK made sure we took the back way to his house.) But I can tell you that nobody died and that Juice became untouchable because of the blood he shed that day to defend his turf. And for some reason, he lent this grace to me for the rest of our time together at South Oak Cliff. On other days of war, Juice told me where to go to stay safe. When he snuck a girl into our hotel room at the state track meet, Juice let me slip out without a sneer. And when a few senior boys tried to call me faggot, Juice laughed but said—Say, man, y’all leave that nigga alone. And they did.

  Maybe he protected me because I helped him with his homework a few times, or because he liked the way I struck people with words a bit like he struck them with his hands, or because I was his biggest fan during track season—yelling his name from the stands because he was an incredible runner, an even better show-off (he had his personal best 800-meter dash time cut into his hair), and never had any family there to cheer him on. But none of this would be enough to explain his care for me then, or why years later, when I graduated from Harvard, it was Juice, not my father, who called and said through tears that he was proud of me. Man, I saw you on that video and said gahlee, look at my little nigga Case J!

  The only way I start to understand it is by looking past the surface of the violence, into the packs of brawling gangsters, to see my friend and brother Juice, who was just like me in ways that we both recognized but could not articulate. We both knew he was smarter than he let on. We knew that he never complained about the nights he and his older brother slept in the park, nowhere else to go. And we knew—or I know now—that beneath the mask of viciousness, Juice was just a little boy. We were all just little boys, you know. Somebody must have forgotten that. Forgotten us. So we found each other.

  And even here, even here, in this forgotten world, there was joy. The joy that comes from freedom, a teenage thirst for life outside of rules, beyond reach, without the illusion of security at a time when many boys and girls across the land were learning that illusion was all security could be—when they saw those planes bring down the towers, when they watched the futile shock and awe, when they heard the lies passed off as evidence. I was lucky. I learned early.

  That year, I felt the joy of making life on my own terms in whatever way I could—stayed at so many houses that I can’t tell you where I slept most nights, bathed only when I could no longer bear my stench, drank from water hoses instead of faucets, lived on a diet of Zebra Cakes and Fanta and hot wings. Spent aimless hours, days, with my friends, who were often as free as I. We started to grow up or at least get older, we shared what little we had of food and money, we made football fields in the street and devastating jokes in the barbershop. And out of the naked crust of lost boys, we made something like a family.

  And as the school year ended and the summer opened, all this joy hung in the balance, because for the first time in my life, somebody kept a promise: My sister came back for me.

  chapter SIX

  What an ungrateful boy.

  I bet that’s what they said when my sister returned from New Orleans—leaving her degree and her dreams behind—and, upon seeing what a wild street urchin I had become, took me in to give me some love and instruction and a home. I knew I was supposed to be grateful, but I wasn’t.

  So many people I knew had either left college or never gone that I saw nothing wrong with Tashia ditching that nasty swamp, long before the levees broke. Her life, her freedom, her future—just leave me out of it. I’d always been able to pretend that something that was clearly happening was not happening at all, but beneath this skill was a raw hot panic when I got even the slightest suspicion that plans involving me were being made. I sensed that now. Jobs were acquired. Questions were asked—Where are you going? What time is the game this week? How much homework do you have?—the kinds of questions that suffocated me.

  And Tashia did not only want to ask questions. She wanted to grin and cackle and retell all the stories from our former life.

  Remember when that boy hit you in the head with that two-by-four and I came to the bathroom and your head had that hole in it and you said oooh Tashia I really did it this time?

  Yeah I remember, what’s it to you, what are you getting at?

  Oh, she was getting at plenty. Dallas County—through HUD and Franklin Roosevelt, who gave me so much before I was even born—had little vouchers you could use to rent a place to live if you didn’t have the money to pay for it yourself. And sure enough, this nineteen-year-old Judas was in cahoots with her father to secure one of those vouchers, and began browsing two-bedroom apartments in the Section 8 listings. Don’t tell me nothing about it, Tashia. I’m happy for you, you’ve really gotten on your feet in no time, you’re living Lyndon Johnson’s American Dream, with your job at the IRS making $35,000. I don’t know nobody making that kind of money, girl. Before long you’ll be rich you’ll be pulling in $100,000 a year. Got your gold Mitsubishi and
now your own roomy apartment. Cute. I’m gonna spend most of my time with Luke over Aunt Chandra’s house. She got the Internet and a big-screen television with cable and she buy bags of mozzarella sticks that I can eat whenever I want. And when I get sick of Luke’s house I’ll go across the street to hang with BK and Porodie and Antimox and we’ll play Monopoly for hours or Madden all night. But I’ll definitely come stay with you sometime. We can hang out when I’m free.

  I said all that in my head except for the very last part.

  Casey, I got a two-bedroom for you. You are not sleeping on the floor anymore, boy. You’re gonna live with me.

  You know, every time I see a stray dog on the side of the road I want to yell or whisper in its ear—Say man you better run for it before some crazy bastard comes and picks you up and gives you a bath and takes away your sperm and makes you sleep in a tiny dog house till you die. I mean, really, who the hell do these people think they are, just walking in our lives trying to save us?

  I was trapped. Tashia and I didn’t even have a conversation. We just collected all my few things from their various holding places and moved into our apartment, which had recently opened thanks to some deal the city had made with a developer whereby apartments were built for people who probably shouldn’t have been living on their own. And after I holed up in silence for a few hours or days, waiting to be lobotomized or hosed down with cold water, I looked around from my own room on the second floor of this little apartment, and realized I might just be in an episode of my absolute favorite book from first grade: The Boxcar Children.

  Aside from the circumstance that these were children who lived in a boxcar, I remember only the scene where, for the first time in many days, there is butter for dinner. “Oh butter!” cried Jessie, her eyes shining. Benny, the youngest at six, is old enough to spread his own butter, but since they’re orphans all they have is a spoon—which is a problem because at some point in his life Benny has been taught that he needs a knife to spread things like butter. Without one, the poor boy can’t spread a damn thing. Then his brother, Henry, at fourteen the eldest and the man of the non-house, comes to the rescue:

  “Now this spoon is a magic spoon,” says Henry. “Turn it around and use the handle, and it is a knife!”

  Holy shit.

  I never forgot this moment because it taught me that sometimes it doesn’t matter what you have. All that matters is what you’re trying to do—there’s always some way to do it. The Boxcar Children also helped me hold space in my mind for something other than the villains of the Bible and the racists of Black Like Me and the fruit balloon from James and the Giant Peach. These were the only books I had read by the time I was fifteen (aside from Left Behind), and they pretty accurately described most of the people in my life. But Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny pushed me to consider the possibility that things might just be okay. And I’m not sure that ever in the history of America, a nineteen-year-old girl and a fifteen-year-old boy had more fun making things okay than Tashia and I did.

  We moved in together in the fall of 2002, my sophomore year of high school, and the first thing I remember is Christmas. We had never had a real Christmas tree before, but we were making a home now, and on television people with homes had real Christmas trees. So without asking anybody for money or permission, we drove to the Christmas tree lot and bought a Christmas tree. It was that easy. Around March we finally took down that beautiful tree, which by then was turning brown and shedding pine needles that bloodied our feet. And we decided together that we would never have another real Christmas tree in our home. Not because we couldn’t—we just didn’t want to. It felt good to have choices.

  We also decided we would end the rationing of precious commodities like sugar. All our lives we’d been told how much sugar we could use—you don’t need that much sugar in that rice, boy!—but now we bought big bags of Domino sugar and I would pour and pour that fine white sugar until I decided the Kool-Aid was sweet enough. And all my sister said was Ooh boy that’s sweet! Never You used up all my sugar. It was our sugar now and we could get more.

  And the air-conditioning! It was always so goddamn hot outside, and sometimes Granny would keep the thermostat at almost eighty, or at least it felt that way. Or she would leave the air off in the car and roll down the windows and act like she didn’t see me drowning in a pool of my own sweat, talking about gas is high when it was only ninety-nine cents a gallon back then. No more no more. Tashia and I ran our air conditioner so much and so cold that the pipes froze and spewed ice all over the carpet and the maintenance man had to come fix it twice. But we laughed so hard each time and turned the air back up and agreed that we would never be hot unless we wanted to.

  Not everything went this well. Tashia, attempting to make hot-water cornbread, called Granny to get the recipe, but I guess since we did whatever we wanted now, she took a pretty loose approach to following Granny’s instructions. She decided that if you heated a large skillet of oil, added water, and dropped in balls of cornbread mix, then poof you’d have hot-water cornbread. All you actually had was a stove on fire.

  We had an endless supply of water, though, which lent itself to us to douse the flames and to take showers that lasted forever—long steamy showers that pruned our skin and opened our pores and even set off the smoke alarm, which hadn’t happened when we set the stove on fire. Sometimes I’d sit in the bathtub and let the water rain down on my satisfied body until I felt like I was taking a nap in the womb. The water never went cold and we only turned it off when we wanted to, not when somebody came and yelled at us for running up the water bill. It was our bill and we’d run it up and happily suffer the consequences.

  All this was ours—our fine white sugar, our freezing air-conditioning, our steamy water, our kitchen fire. And our laws. For who shall provide the law at the bottom of the world? What means shall justify which ends? When shall the score be settled, in this life or in the life to come? Now, I say. Now is the time and we must write the law ourselves, not draw it from on high. At least that’s what I figured when I took my mother’s money.

  It had been three years or so since Mama disappeared and left her things like she was coming right back. One night, going through this pile, I found checks—blank fresh checks connected to a bank account that I figured still contained money, since I reckoned she was dead by then and the dead don’t spend much. For years Mama had received US dollars, thanks again to FDR, who knew before my mother was born that she might be so ill that she could not work and, without money, would not be able to provide for me. So into her bank account came about seven hundred dollars a month on my behalf. And although she was gone, these checks continued to appear, like an apparition, like a connection to her in that other world, like the jackpot that I needed to hit. If I didn’t need to hit it, I wanted to hit it. And if you take your dead mother’s checkbook and turn it around, it’s an inheritance. My inheritance.

  After hours of practice, I got the signature right enough, and took the first of many checks to the bank. And after the paranoid suspense at the teller window, my sister and I finally had fresh monies to spend—enough to help pay rent and buy new clothes for school, and enough for Tashia to throw me a surprise sixteenth birthday party at Granny’s house, an event that I had explicitly requested not to happen because one of the only things I hated more than a birthday was a surprise. But Tashia was a sneaky bastard and conspired with the family without tipping me off to anything, so by the time I realized what was happening I had already been betrayed. I walked in to the shrieks of Surprise! and Bobby Blue Bland still requesting somebody’s love light, all these years later. And after my silent fury ran its course, everything seemed rather nice, especially when I saw that Tashia had ordered a buttercream cake from Sam’s Club. The cake even had my name spelled correctly, unlike the last cake somebody bought me when I turned thirteen, which read Happy Birthday Crunchy! That’s what it looked like to me. But I stood there before t
he five or six people who attended, and smiled that sincere fake smile I had perfected while they sang the birthday dirge, then told everybody Thank y’all really thank y’all so much when all I wanted to ask was why they couldn’t even spell one of the simplest names in the family.

  Tashia did not make those small mistakes that tip you off to a person’s lack of care, so I gave her and the gathered a considerably more sincere fake smile and longer hugs and added Aww! to the Thank y’all really thank y’all so much. I accepted a plate of enchiladas or fried catfish or chicken tetrazzini (those are the most likely options) and sat laughing and eating with the family for a little while before sneaking off to the bathroom. I turned on the faucet and leaned over the sink to look in the mirror that took up most of the pink wall. I let a batch of tears go down with the water. Where are you, Mama?

  Anyway, maybe I felt that she left the checks to commemorate my sixteenth year, or that taking them was my revenge, or maybe I simply felt like a clever criminal with nice school clothes for a change. All I know is that after three or four months I felt no guilt, no guilt at all. And if I had fallen into moral disrepair, there was yet much further down to fall. Not long after I turned sixteen, I finally met a boy.

  chapter SEVEN

  Stop.

  That is the only word that escaped. I whispered it in his ear. Mouthed it when he looked at me. Closed my eyes and said it to myself.

  Stop, Red. I have to go.

  His breath was a hot blanket on my lips. Nah, where you gotta go?

  I did not know so did not answer. I stepped back and he stood there. Watched me toddle right into the sink. He came closer.

  Stop, Red. Please.

  He laughed. Nobody ever touched you, huh?

  I smirked but did not answer this one, either. Just stared at him. There was not a single blemish on his face, odd for a boy—as odd as his lips, the likes of which I have seen only once more, in a movie, on a pale French boy on a frigid day. That boy’s lips were bruised; Red’s were simply large and dark and beautiful, as were his deep-set eyes. His nose had an almost imperceptible crook, and his body looked as if it could not break, so I didn’t try. I wrapped my arms around his neck and said stop but he must have known that this made no sense, that I was just a foolish boy, because he paid my words no mind. Too late. Much too late.