All-Bright Court (21 page)

“That would be neato,” the boy said. “My uncle said in ten years men will go to Mars. I want to go.”

“Me too,” Mikey said.

“Hey, Mikey,” Scott said. “I bet your dad doesn't think man even went to the moon.”

“No,” Scott's friend said. “He thinks monkeys went.” Scott and his friend laughed.

Mikey laughed too. He did not respond to what the boys said. While he sat slicing his chicken, he thought he was betraying his father, and he knew he had to hide this betrayal. At home he would be silent. He would never mention this conversation. It would be as if it never took place.

As Mikey went back and forth between the two worlds, he knew he had to hide the ignorance he brought from home, the truth he brought from school. He collected these truths and lies one by one, beginning with monkeys and Darwin and astronauts, and swallowed them. As they began gathering, filling him, he began pulling silences from his mouth.

He had not had to do much. As his education progressed, it took on a voice of its own that ran interference in his conversations. His father rarely questioned him about his work. Once Mikey had reached the sixth grade, Samuel understood little of what Mikey was doing, but his mother would ask to see his papers or spelling lists. She came across words she had never seen before—connotation, divination, torpor, mensuration, alchemy, codify, zygote.

“What's this ‘zygote'?” his mother asked him one day when he was in the seventh grade.

“Well, it's sort of—what it is, is a cell that represents the union of two gametes,” Mikey said.

“Oh,” his mother said. She had no idea what her son had just said. Though she had been pregnant many times, she never knew a zygote was inside her. She would have been angry if she knew someone accused her of carrying around something that had such an ugly name.

“Oh,” his mother said again. “You better get ready to take your papers. I folded them already.”

She never asked about “mensuration.” “Do mensuration problems,” he had written in his notebook. She only wondered why they were teaching him about a woman's monthly.

Mikey was watchful about what he brought to school from home. Once he unpacked his backpack in front of his locker and a roach crawled out. Mikey could only stand there. He was too afraid to move. If anyone noticed, he would surely know it came from him. Mikey wanted to run after it, to smash it before someone saw it. But no one saw it, and Mikey watched the roach disappear through a crack.

From that day on, Mikey shook out his backpack before he left home. He shook out his books, and if he was wearing a coat, he shook that out too. And he started a bathing ritual.

Every Sunday night he sat in the bathtub for an hour. He washed his hair, and soaped his body twice, and scrubbed it with a rough cloth. He wouldn't have any odor coming from under his arms, no hint of musk from between his legs, no smell of rancid grease in his hair.

He went to school like the two older black boys, with his hair cut short and severely brushed and ashy. Even when the other boys in All-Bright Court were getting blowouts, and wearing their hair in a bush, Mikey kept his short. He did not care that the other boys called him a square and a Tom, an Oreo, a faggot, a sissy, a fool.

“What you think you going to be?” the boys in All-Bright Court teased him. Mikey would never answer.

“He think he going to be the President when he grow up,” they would say. “Well, you ain't. You ain't going to be no more than the white man going let you be. You just like us. You ain't no better than us.”

Once Mikey's father heard the teasing, and he took up for Mikey.

“You damn right,” his father shouted out the front door. “He going to be the goddamn President of the goddamn United States if that's what he wants to be. What ya'll going to be?” he asked, breaking into a fit of coughing.

But the boys would not answer.

“You got to stick up for yourself. Ain't nothing wrong with having dreams,” his father told him, catching his breath.

“I don't know if I have dreams. All I want to do is get out of here,” Mikey said.

“That ain't much of a dream. There worser places than this. You got a chance I never had, a chance ain't hardly no black man ever had. You take this education you getting, and you make something out of it. Don't be afraid to dream, son. Them boys out there afraid to dream. Even rabbits dream. Even when they living 'round a whole lot of foxes. They still go to sleep and dream how to stay ahead of the foxes, and when they wake up, they try. That's all I'm asking you to do. I want you to try. And when you get your ass run ragged, I want you to get some rest, and get on up and try again.”

“All I want to do is get out of here,” Mikey said. “We're living in a cage here.”

Mikey did have a chance to get out, to move away little by little. He would be invited for sleep-overs. He would go to Williamsville, Amherst, Tonawanda, Cheektowaga, West Seneca.

His parents didn't want him to go to the white neighborhoods. The first time he was invited to Cheektowaga his father said, “What you want to go out to some white-boy house for? Don't they have black boys at that school?”

“I've told you there are, but Scott invited me to his house. I've been at Essex for almost four years, and this is the first time I have been asked to sleep over. Dorene said she'll take my papers on Friday,” Mikey said.

“It ain't the papers, son,” his mother said. “Those white people don't want black people out there. You know that. Why can't your friend come here?”

“Because it's not just me. He invited some other boys also. I've been
invited
, Mama. All the boys in the eighth grade do it.”

“You ain't ‘all the boys,' son,” his father said. “Sometime I think you forget that. Sometime I think you forget you black.”

Mikey said, “Well, sometimes I want to forget. I don't have any friends around here. Now you want to tell me you don't want me to have friends at school. You want me to dream, and you want me to know my place. That doesn't make sense. It's a contradiction.”

“That's the world, son. I don't make no sense, but I didn't make the rules. You ain't got to believe what I say. You go on out there to Cheektowaga,” his father said. “I'm through.”

Mikey did go. And he was glad Scott did not come to his house. When he saw Scott's family's house, he knew why he could never have Scott or any of the other boys come to All-Bright Court.

Scott lived in a home, not a house. There was a den, a pool out back. There was a family room, a living room, and two and a half baths. And there was a shower in the full bath that Mikey used. They had only bathtubs in All-Bright Court.

It was the first time Mikey ever took a shower. At school there were showers in the locker room, but only the boys on the sports teams could use them. As he stood in the shower, the water danced on him, tickling him, and he laughed out loud.

When he got out, Scott asked, “We heard all that laughing. What were you doing in there?”

“Nothing,” Mikey said.

“You're a strange bird,” one of the boys said.

But Mikey did not care. He couldn't let them know that was his first time in a shower. He would never live it down.

And Mikey went ice skating. It was his first time on skates, and he spent most of his time crawling around on the ice while the other boys whizzed by him. But by the end of the session, he was slowly gliding around the rink. After skating they walked to a pizza parlor, and later that night they went to a movie theater.

On Sunday afternoon when Mikey returned home, there was a sullenness in him. His father did not say anything to him. He knew what was wrong. He knew Mikey found out not everyone lived as they did.

He had been
invited
, and he had been treated well. That's what was important, Mikey thought. And he was invited again, to other boys' houses, and on ski trips and campouts. But sometimes he was not treated well.

Once when he was roller-skating in Hamburg, near Buffalo, a boy from town tripped him. And in Amherst he had been called a nigger while he and his friends were standing on line outside the Dairy Queen. His friends consoled him, saying, “Don't pay any attention to that.”

How can I not pay attention? Mikey thought. But he covered up, and popped a smooth silence from his mouth. “Sticks and stones,” he said.

But the name-calling did hurt, and he heard it almost everywhere he went. It did not happen every time, but just as he was relaxing, just when it seemed he was one of the boys, someone would call him a nigger, or call his friends nigger lovers, or tell him to go home, to go back where he came from.

Mikey never told his parents any of this. He told them what a great time they had at Kissing Bridge, and never told them that after skiing, while his friends talked to girls, he played pinball or sat before the fire in the lodge. He didn't tell them he had been dunked at the town pool in Williamsville, that two white boys had held him under until he thought he would drown. He didn't tell them that he'd told the lifeguard, who said, “That's what you get for coming to where you don't belong.”

If Mikey told his parents any of this, they would have stopped him from going. He just knew they would. They might even take him out of Essex.

His parents were baffled by his new life. Mary Kate said, “Mikey say Scott father going to teach him to curl. What's that, Sam?”

They were lying in the darkness of their bedroom. “You seen it on TV, on the Canadian channel. That's when they be sliding them rocks down the ice—”

“And they got them handles on them, and then a man run down the ice and sweep it fast with a little broom,” Mikey's mother said. “That's stupid. He already ice skate and ski. It seem like he only want to do what the white boys do.”

“The boys 'round here don't do much of nothing,” Samuel said. “That what you want him to do, nothing? Grow up and work in the plant, if he lucky. 'Cause they still cutting back every day, you know that, and there ain't no telling what the new contract going to bring.”

“I just worry.”

“Well, you the one wanted to send him to that school,” Samuel said.

“Me? Me?” Mary Kate said, the pitch of her voice rising. “You wanted him to go too. I was the one worried.”

“Don't get flighty on me now. It was both of us. What was we going to do, hold him back? We had to let him go.”

“Yeah, I know that, but I don't know if we done the right thing,” Mary Kate said.

For a while Samuel was silent. “I don't know if we done right either. They is giving him a good education, and he going to go to college,” he said, and he began coughing.

“It seem like he changing too much. All he want to do is be 'round them white boys from that school. It seem he turning into a white boy. The only thing black about him is his color,” Mary Kate said.

“Sometime it seem that way,” Samuel said quietly. “But, he ain't getting all that education to come back to the projects, nohow . . . Part of that D.O.V.E. program is to get black kids mixing with white kids. You can't get black and white mixing as grown folks and think things going to work out. There's truth in that, Kate. How many white friends we got?”

“Why you ask a question like that when you know the answer?”

“None, that's how many,” Samuel said.

“That don't prove nothing. What, we got to have white friends to be happy?” Her voice was defensive.

“Here you getting ready to argue with me. Kate, don't argue with me, hear? All I'm trying to say is, the boy got his own life. I be scared to let him sleep at them white boys' house, just like you. Me and no white boys was ever friends, never could be, and you wasn't friends to no white girl.”

Mary Kate was silent.

“This ain't the world we growed up in. Sometime I don't know what to tell Mikey 'cause I don't know the world he living in.” Samuel started coughing again.

“You need to see a doctor,” Mary Kate said. “Your cough don't sound like it's getting no better.”

When he stopped, he said, “What a doctor going to tell me that I don't know? I'm a be all right. Mikey the one I'm worried about. You know, the boy told me he don't got no dreams. All he want to do is get out of here, get as far away as the wind can carry him. What can we do?”

22

N
O ONE KNEW
how long she had been there alone, swimming through the blue silence of the house. She made no effort to leave the space that confined her.

Mikey was the first to know she was there. For three days, when he had gone to deliver the paper to 79, he saw the paper from the previous day. On the first day he paid little notice, but on the third day, when he opened the screened front door the other papers fluttered and blew apart at his feet. How rude it was, he thought, for Zena to go away and not tell him to stop delivery.

Mikey had come to expect little from these people. There was a customer who lived on the last row, in the very last house, whom he had had to cut off. The man would not pay on time. When Mikey went to deliver, the man was always there, and always said, “You late, boy.”

“I'm sorry,” he would answer.

“Don't be sorry, be on time,” the man would say.

Zena was a good customer, though. She always paid her bill. She had gone away before, but on those occasions she had told Mikey or left a note for him.

The day Mikey found the papers was a Thursday. He did not return until Sunday, collection day. When he knocked on the door and no one answered, he turned to leave. But before he could step off the porch, the door opened. He turned to see the colorless girl.

She stood in the door, looking up at him, her blue eyes moving rapidly from side to side, trying to get a fix on him. He so rarely saw her when he delivered or collected that he had nearly forgotten about her. She would be lost so deeply in the blueness of the house that it seemed as if she had wandered through a wall and was living her life as a ghost.