There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  Maybe that’s why nobody understands what you’re saying.

  You ask for directions to Science Hill. They laugh and say Signs Heal?? What’s that? You yell out a play at practice and the upperclassmen have to take off their helmets and call a timeout, they are so overcome with laughter. Gerald! What the fuck are you saying, man? We gotta get a translator out here, Coach. You laugh, too. Guess your voice does make you sound dumb. Fix it. Try to sound like them. Just try. Keep trying, it’s only been a week. Your jaw hurts? Damn. Okay. Take a break.

  Maybe you can’t change how you talk yet, but do you have to dress like that?

  Why are all your clothes so big? Double extra large? You’re a medium, wet. And why do all the clothes match each other? Aww, and you have matching earmuffs, too? It’s October! Why do you even have on earmuffs? That’s cute. Are you a Yankees fan? No? Well why do you wear those Yankees caps? Do you need boxes for all those shoes? Air Jordans, huh. Doesn’t matter, they’re just shoes, man.

  You would get new clothes if you didn’t like these so much. You would get new clothes if you had money. You would buy a coat if you had money. You would buy a plane ticket home if you had money. No you wouldn’t. You can’t go back home like that. Remember what those teachers at SOC said before you left?

  There’s no way that boy’s gonna graduate from Yale. He’s a crack baby. He’ll be home before the end of the first semester.

  I know, I know. You technically were not a crack baby. You were very fat and very healthy, from what I hear. And you will be home before the end of the first semester, but not to stay. Just for a holiday. Just to tell your people how great life is at Yale. Just to laugh when they say you sound white now. Just to laugh when Granny says your 98 in Italian class is just two points from 100, but you’ll get there next time. Just to laugh when your aunties say they want a Yale sweater when you come back home. You would bring them one if you had money. You would bring them one if you didn’t need all the Yale sweaters yourself.

  You wear the Yale sweater everywhere you go. You wear a Yale shirt under it. You wear Yale sweats if you don’t need real pants on. You wear Yale shorts when it’s warm outside. You wear a Yale lanyard around your neck at all times. You put your keys on a Yale keychain that hangs from the lanyard. You put your Yale ID next to your keys. You show your Yale ID to the police instead of your driver’s license. You show your Yale ID to the dining hall worker who knows you don’t live in Branford College, where the sustainable macaroni and cheese is served. You show your Yale ID to the Yale student who doesn’t believe you go to Yale. You wear a blue fitted cap with a big Yale Y on it to let everybody know you go to Yale.

  You stand on the corner of Tower Parkway and Dixwell Avenue, wearing your Yale cap and Yale sweater. The New Haven Police Department paddy wagon pulls up to the red light in front of you. There are people in the paddy wagon. Prisoners. Watching you. Laughing. One yells at you:

  Nigga, you ain’t going to Yale! Yo’ ass going to jail, nigga!

  It’s the first time somebody has said nigga to you since you arrived. Might be the first time somebody told the truth, too. You appreciate it, in a way. Maybe this is jail. You should act like it.

  You go to football practice and start a fight with two big boys from some hick town in Massachusetts. The Downing twins, Willy and Tommy. They’re prize recruits. Look like they’re on steroids. Fuck ’em. Fight ’em. You try to fight Willy. Tommy joins in. They double-team you. Bitches. The fight’s a draw but you won some respect. If not respect, then something close. Fear. That kid is crazy, they say.

  You go to the only class you do well in, English. The teacher, Professor Ehrgood, is strange, gerbilian. Every time he’s about to speak, he stares at the ceiling and rubs his fingers together and taps his lips like he’s tasting rich wine or the flesh of a child. He likes you. Well, he may not like you, since you laughed out loud in class when another student said the word philosophize. He thought you were being disrespectful. You thought the other student was being funny. You didn’t know philosophize was a word. You make up for this mistake with your own words.

  You really can write, Casey. Overwrite sometimes, but we’ll work on that.

  You write about the person you’ve been writing about since Ms. Davis’s class: Martin Luther King, Jr. You’re also supposed to write about Malcolm X and Socrates and what they all have to do with one another. But Malcolm X is a Muslim and Socrates is a white man and you’ve never written about either of those, so you stick with what you know. You write about Martin and his letter from jail. It inspires you to write your own letter. On Facebook, of course.

  10 Things I Hate about Yale and New Haven

  You forget most of the things but you remember one that warned I’ll scream if I meet another fake-ass whack-ass black person and another that said something to the effect of I’d rather be a dead rotting cow in a ditch in Oklahoma than to have to live in Connecticut. The letter works. Almost everybody hears about it. Even fewer people talk to you now. One of the few, Daniel, is a lot like you, except that he’s from Gary, Indiana, and his parents are lawyers, and his sister went to Yale. But he sounds like a version of you that could be from Gary, Indiana. And he plays football. And he thought the BSAY meeting was a waste of time, too. And he lives across the hall. He comes to discuss your letter.

  Casey, you should chill out, man. Maybe if you talked to people, you wouldn’t have so many problems.

  Fuck you, Daniel.

  You don’t talk to Daniel anymore. In part, because it’s spring and he is pledging a fraternity: Omega Psi Phi, like his brother and father, and like the coaches at SOC. Everybody on the football team—everybody you know—is pledging a fraternity, either Delta Kappa Epsilon or Zeta Psi. You’ve never heard of either. Thank God you know one upperclassman who is a brother of Kappa Alpha Psi, a Nupe, like lots of boys where you’re from. You don’t know this boy is about to drop out of Yale, so you listen to his advice. You go to an interest meeting. You meet the other brothers. There’s one who is tall and cute and crazy-looking. Wouldn’t be bad to spend some time with him. Ev—that’s his name. Hey, Ev.

  Ev tells you to show up at a certain house on a certain day at a certain time. You do what Ev says. Two other boys are there to pledge with you. They go to University of Bridgeport. Nice boys. A little slow, it seems. But they’ll be your brothers soon.

  Ev blindfolds you. You let him. Ev tells you to eat what he puts in your mouth. You do it. It’s an onion. Ev insults you. You take it. End of set. Come back tomorrow.

  Tomorrow: Ev makes you stand with your back against a wall. You stand there. Ev blindfolds you again. Ev tells you to hold your arms out straight. Ev tells the boy from Bridgeport to spell a word. He can’t. Ev strikes your chest with the palms of his hands. Ev tells the boy to spell something else. He spells it wrong. Ev strikes you again. Ev asks the boy a question. The boy doesn’t know the answer. Ev strikes you again. Again. Again. Ev sees a few tears fall from your eyes, beneath the blindfold. Ev asks you if you can’t handle it. If you don’t want it. You tell Ev that you do want it and you can handle it. The Bridgeport boy can’t spell to save your life. Your chest is swelling. Taking the shape of Ev’s palms. He stops. Tells you that you did a good job. Drives you home. You realize that you could handle it and you did want it, but if you’re going to let Ev break you, he’s got to give you a lot more than some Greek letters and a brother who can’t spell. You quit the next day.

  You’ve got to stop this stuff. Stop letting Ev hit you for somebody else’s mistake. Stop laughing at things you don’t understand. Stop talking so fast and get that mush out your mouth. Stop buying those snacks you’re about to run out of money. Stop eating the snacks in your dorm room alone. Stop wearing your hat when you meet Penny Laurans.

  First of all, Casey, take your hat off. Thank you.

  You’ve made it to the last month of school, and Coach Reno has sent you to a new
academic advisor—the best one, the university president’s chief aide, the wife of a US poet laureate, the holder of three Harvard degrees, the wearer of a crisp brunette bob and a Yale football necklace. Penny Laurans. Don’t call her Penny. Call her Dean or Master. She’s not here to be your friend, so take off your fitted when you walk in her office.

  Do you wear those things around campus?

  Yes, ma’am.

  Oh, no, Casey. It’s just so . . . stereotypical, you know? You’re at Yale now. You don’t have to do that anymore.

  You want to snatch her bob off. You want to tell her she’s a racist. You want to cry. You want to go home and stay there. But you can’t do that. This is jail—act like it. Change. At least she gave you some instruction. At least your words still work and Professor Ehrgood gave you an A in English. At least Coach Reno gave you a shot at a starting spot on the varsity in the fall. At least Yale gave you money to fly home for the summer. Hurry up and go. Rest. You have three more years to survive.

  chapter TWELVE

  Time’s up. You have one night to survive.

  Was it a summer night? I believe so. Fall seems too early, since if it had been Thanksgiving break of my freshman year, I would not have dreaded going back to Yale as much as I did or been as eager to come back home as I was. It could not have been winter, if only because I don’t see a Christmas tree when I recall that night and I know how much those trees meant to my sister. To us both. And since I have told the story of this night many times as being a winter night, then I also have to accept that I have not told the truth. This does not surprise me. I wonder, though, whether I lied because I did not remember or because it was convenient to do so. I don’t know. All I know is that it happened.

  I know that it happened at night, after winter 2005 but before fall 2006 (we lived in a different house by then), and that my niece, born July 2005, was old enough to sit up on her own but not old enough to walk. So she sat there—or she sits there in my memory—on the carpet, a few feet away from her mother and my mother and me. She was the only one not tied up. Who would tie up a baby, anyway? Especially in the summer.

  She was so sleepy. Maybe that’s why they didn’t tie her up, because she was still half-asleep or more. She had been fully asleep just a few minutes earlier. Her mother had been asleep next to her in bed. My mother had been asleep in a room on the other end of the short hallway. I had been awake, sitting at the kitchen table, writing a speech that I was to give the next day. Then I heard a knock at the front door.

  It wasn’t a knock, really, although I’ve always opened the story with a knock at the door. It’s just that I can’t describe the sound, since I felt it more than I heard it. It felt like that instant when lightning cracks the trunk of a tree and splits it in two and leaves all that smoke behind. Never seen that? Neither have I. And I had never heard whatever sound that was at the door, and hope you never hear it, either, because if you do, somebody is likely about to try to kill you.

  I felt it again. Stood up from the table, almost as a reflex. I wanted to get away from the sound. I wanted to sneak across the living room, past the sound at the front door, and into my room, where I was going to hide. The walk couldn’t have been more than thirty feet—maybe twelve feet from the kitchen table to the front door, then about eighteen more from the front door to my room—but it seemed like a long walk. A long hard walk because I felt real heavy all of a sudden, like a few thousand screams were trapped in my belly, bursting out one after the other. The screams were so loud that I was completely silent as I tried to make that thirty-foot walk, starting with a twelve-foot tiptoe past the front door, if the door would do me a big favor and hold on.

  The door didn’t hold. I was tiptoeing past the door when it gave up, right when I needed it most, gave up like a man falling backward off a cliff. Then I saw them—the two men, more like two big orbs of darkness, coming over the place where the door had stood, coming after me, with their arms pointed at me, with something in their hands, death in their hands, trying to catch me, trying to give death to me. If you joined me in my dreams, you could see them much better. They’re still there. Still chasing me there. They catch me sometimes.

  I ran like I knew how to run, to my room, and slammed the door behind me, and stood with my back against the door, silent, hiding, thinking, hoping, fooling myself that if I was quiet they would leave me alone. There were two women and one infant in the house, asleep, and I did not try to save them. It did not occur to me to save them, or to alert them, or to think about them at all. My gut instinct was to run and hide and save myself. Some people have the instincts of heroes. They fight back. They save others. They protect the women and children. They die. Some people have the instincts of cowards. They run. They hide. They stay silent. They also die. Some people are asleep and don’t have the luxury of instincts or choices. They die, too. There is no moral.

  Come the fuck out before I shoot your bitch ass.

  That’s what the man said to me from the other side of my bedroom door. Did he push the door or did I move voluntarily? I don’t know. And I don’t know what he looked like because I clenched my eyes shut and showed him my clenched eyes so that he would know that I had not seen him, so that he might show the blind coward some mercy. He pushed me to the floor anyway. Pushed my head against the carpet and made the skin come off my cheek. That was unnecessary. I was going down willingly. He put his knee to my back, I think. I know that my back felt heavy and I couldn’t move, so I figure it was his knee, which was also unnecessary because I was not trying to run away. Then I heard that tape. It was so loud, must have been duct tape, and he pulled my arms behind my back and wrapped all that wide thick tape around my wrists. I felt that this, too, was unnecessary, because my arms had been limp and I hadn’t been moving my hands and that tape hurt. Right below the crown of my head, close to my right ear, since my left was against the floor, I felt a heavy metal something—his gun, I guess, since I couldn’t see it myself and now it’s been so long that I can’t be sure he held his gun to my head at all.

  Where’s the fucking money?!? his colleague kept yelling.

  I could hear my mother next to me—What?—biting off her ts like always. I could hear my sister—What are you talking about? I could hear the baby crying softly—Mama—or maybe that’s just what I would have said if I had been her. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t cry. I just lay there silent, all those screams trapped in my belly, running away like a paraplegic. I opened my eyes and scanned the room for the final time. I saw my mother there, tied up. And the baby, old enough to sit alone but not to walk away. And my sister. I rested my gaze on her.

  I closed my eyes to pray. It had been a good while since I’d talked to God. For most of my life I had not really talked to him but beseeched him, begged him for stuff, blamed him for stuff, tried to make him explain everything to me. But for the first time, I didn’t go to God desperately. Didn’t have my hat in my hand. We had our first honest chat, me and God, two old friends sitting on the porch on a summer afternoon sipping some lemonade before they take a ride. You ready to go? Yep, I’m ready. That was the gist of our conversation. I meant it. It’s so strange how we spend so much of our lives running from death, turning into heroes and cowards because of it, giving death grand dimensions with the stories we tell about it. But death comes and it has no real meaning and, even still, it feels simple and right. Feels so much better than most of life. At least, it did that night.

  I wanted to smile. Or I think, now, that I should have smiled. There was something so beautiful about it all. Something silly about being tied up like a hog on the floor, something just about the baby seeing death so early, and my mother seeing what it’s like to lose somebody, and my sister seeing her little brother’s murder, since she was the one who caused it. Yes, I should have flashed a big grin at my sister, to remember me by.

  She could remember me when she thought of her child, of her child’s father, whom
she loved despite his illegal line of work (for which he’s already paid his debt to society, to the extent that he owed society anything), loved enough to hide his money, enough to let those men kill us all before she told them where the money was, enough to offer her baby brother as a sacrifice. And maybe I owed her that much. She had given up so much of life for me that perhaps she deserved mine in return. I don’t believe that at all, though it’s possible.

  But then she didn’t take it.

  The man holding me down suddenly yelled to his colleague—C’mon, nigga!—and removed his knee from my back, and his colleague dropped whatever he was looking under, and they both ran out of the house. I don’t know if they found the money.

  I lay there, still tied up, unable or unwilling to move. Mama scooted across the floor and untaped my wrists and helped me up. She was standing closest to the space where the door once stood, when two police officers came through. I figure someone in the neighborhood phoned them. In my memory, it seems that the officers tossed a lot of questions in the air and just waited to see if somebody would catch them. Nobody did, so they left without offering much help.

  And once they left, my mother did the lecturing, if you can believe it.

  Natashia! What?! Why would you do this? You need to get it together, girl!

  And just like the good old days, I took my mother’s side.

  Leave her alone, Mama! If she wanna get killed behind some nigga, let her!

  We picked the door up off the floor and put it back in its space. My sister and mother and the baby went back to bed. I sat back down at the kitchen table to finish the speech I had been writing—not exactly like nothing ever happened, but close enough for my sister to never say I’m sorry, for me to never ask why?, for us to never even talk about it with each other, ever.