August and Then Some (18 page)

Nokey turned left onto Central Avenue and stopped at the first light right next to a cop. I tried to look everywhere except at him—at Danielle in the back seat, straight ahead to the road, at the glove compartment, and at Noke. I was wanting to be invisible, and Nokey turned the radio louder. I was like, “What the fuck is your story, man?” And he shushed me. I hoped that that night of all nights he wouldn't live up to his Potato Head nickname.

We idled at the light as misty rain beaded on the windshield. The long line of red traffic lights turned green down the main thoroughfare like a lit fuse, but neither us or the cop car moved. “Go,” I said to Noke. He shook his head. “Not yet.” Finally the cop pulled out ahead of us, and my heart slammed against my ribs. “I fuckin told you to stay on the back roads.”

“What difference does it make?” he said.

“Three teenagers cruising after 1 a.m. on a Tuesday sticks out.”

“Calm the fuck down. There's no more cops on Central than on a back road, and even—”

“Can you at least lower the radio?”

Nokey laughed at me. “Why?”

“Because it's not calming me the fuck down.”

“Jesus, fuck. Sor-
ry
.”

So I turned it down.

I still thought his whole idea was a good one. Sometimes all people have to do to get their brains going is tap into their inner vendetta. But I was also wondering hard if we were really gonna pull the job off.

“What?” Nokey asked.

I thought I was wondering out loud. “What, what?”

“You say something?”

“No.”

He knew I was freaked. “JT, this is gonna be over in less than twenty-four hours.”

I nodded my head.

“So stay with me, man,” and he smiled something vindictive.

I checked behind me. Dani was looking small—swimming in that back seat like a toddler in her brother's college sweatshirt. I was scared and she knew it. She smiled at me and her puffy dark eyes almost disappeared. The chipped red nail polish on her stubby fingernails could have fooled people, but she collected guts like dogs collected years. Looking at her made me so friggin sad, and hungry again to make the whole thing work.

I said, “I'm with you, man,” then reached over and turned the radio up again. Noke bopped his head, hung a right, and we headed for the Bronx River Parkway, which would lead us to my father's house.

I walk up the stairs of my apartment in a numb delirium, my legs burning with a lack of sleep that feels like a hangover. When I get to my floor I see Stephanie sitting with her back against my door, crying. “Stephanie, what the hell?”

“Nelson left,” she says.

“What happened?”

“He left. That's what happened.” Now she's talking about how her kid's not gonna have a father, and what the fuck's she gonna do, she can't fit at her uncle's, where she gonna live? And money? She's breaking my heart right in the hallway. I figured she'd still be hating me for cursing her out and running out of the apartment, but all that seems to be taking a back seat to this highly fucked reality. I go to put my hand on her head like I did that first night I saw her on the stoop, but now she flinches away from me. “No really, you can't touch me right now,” she says. So I lay off, and stand here not knowing what to do.

“Do you want to come in?” She shakes her head. So I just stay and watch her.

After a while I sit on the floor too, like right next to her. She kind of calms down a bit and I see her do this weird thing she
always seems to be doing—grabbing the back of her ponytail and yanking it. This gets her all pissed off and she stands up and makes for the stairs, wiping her nose on her hands, so I follow her.

We go out of the building, down our street and across Tompkins Square Park where everyone except dogs tries not to stare at her.

She goes all the way to First Avenue and hangs a right. I'm walking with her, but feel more like I'm following. We don't say much—cause what can you say? Not like I got any philosophies that are gonna turn this whole thing around for her. Next thing I know we're passing the United Nations on 45th Street. I'm guessing a walk is the thing she needs.

We pass all these neighborhoods on the East Side, the Queensboro Bridge, Sutton Place, the Tram. Then she cuts left and we go down 65th Street all the way to the Central Park Zoo. There's a guy outside juggling bowling pins and when we walk by he says, “Hey, you going to the Zoo?” Which is a lousy way to gather a crowd. Stephanie doesn't even notice him.

We walk north through the park and come out on 110th Street and Lennox, pass kids playing hoop in Marcus Garvey Park. I say to Stephanie, “Just so you know I have to stop before we get to Yonkers.” No response.

At 129th and Lennox she stops in front of a building. “That's where he lived.”

“Your father?”

“Uh huh.”

She stares at the building like it's gonna change color. She's looking pretty cried out. I can barely see her eyes through all the puffiness. She keeps staring up to the third-floor window. “You ever want to see him?” I ask.

“Why?”

“I don't know. Try to smooth things?”

“Why I wanna do that?”

 

At 135th Street we pass a hospital and Stephanie tells me she thinks she was born there. She looks in the window of a small storefront on 141st Street. Steam shoots from the trays lining the counter and she says this is the best ropa vieja in Harlem. We keep walking, and hang a left down 145th Street then a right on Saint Nicholas Avenue. I say, “Hey, Saint Nicholas Avenue. That's like Santa Claus Lane, huh?”

She looks at me, deadpan. “Ain't no fat white bitches in red suits around here.”

I make a note to myself: Don't joke with Stephanie about
shit
right now.

On 152nd Street Stephanie shoots up a staircase that feels like it leads into an alley. I grab her by the back of her shirt because, you know, who the fuck knows what's going on in this alley. We get to the top of the stairs, I'm still holding her shirt, but she's not struggling. She just very calmly says, “What the fuck you doing?” And now I see no one is pushing anything, nobody is nodding out, no box shelters set up, no garbage has been dumped, there's not even graffiti on the walls. This alley is not really an alley.

This is a goddamn cobblestone street lined with houses. Not apartments. Houses. I ain't kidding. They look like they've been here since the Pilgrims. Definitely before cameras, because the only time I've seen buildings like this they were sketched in our history textbooks. Wooden staircases, with curling handrails. Big doors with iron knockers shaped like lions' heads. Shutters around each window. Ancient oak poking through chipped paint. Glass lanterns hang outside the front doors. I expect a white horse to come hauling around the corner, the rider done up in a
long blue coat with brass buttons and a three-pointed hat, right? Tying his horse to the streetlamp that burns oil. And now I got two questions: What the hell is this place? And is it real?

Stephanie says, “Why don't you let go my shirt, yo.”

I do, but can't move anything else.

She's not floored by this place like I am. She walks up the street looking like she belongs, like someone in one of the houses is expecting her to show up with dessert.

After a few steps she turns to me, raises her arm and waves her hand like she's saying
follow me.
Her gesture sends a stiff chill through me. That wave did not just come from her. It belongs to a person of another century, not an orphaned high-school girl of present time, but a girl with ruffles on her sleeves, who knows how to wear a corset and carry a parasol. Stephanie waved herself out of the present and into the body of a woman, and somehow all the women in the past few hundred years that have walked down this cobblestone street carrying children, parents, or men on their backs.

She makes the same gesture again, this time firmer, like I'm being dense, and becomes herself again. I follow her up the street and this whole thing gets even weirder.

The cobblestones lead up a hill. On top of this hill is a black iron fence—ten feet tall, arrow-spikes on top of every post—that covers a three-block square and surrounds a mansion. Yes. Right the fuck here in East Harlem. A mansion looking even older than the houses we just passed. Four floors high with octagonal balconies held up by thick white columns. Green grass all around it. In the front yard is a cannon. A Revolutionary War fucking cannon on wheels. Past this house is a cliff that reaches down to the East River. Commuter boats, the Bronx skyline, bridges, traffic, Yankee Stadium … The mansion looks down at all this, like it's been standing guard over everything that has come and gone for centuries.

I spin on my heels, and try to take in the whole scene. “What the fuck? Stephanie, what is this place?”

“It's a house,” she tells me.

“Whose house?”

“It's the oldest house in Manhattan.”

“How do you know?”

She points to a sign on the gate. “Says it right there.”

“Damn. How'd you know about this place?”

“That day, the day I tried to visit my father and he wasn't there, I just went walking. I came outta his building and it was like I could have screamed loud as possible and no one would have even looked at me. And I couldn't go home, back into my mom's place and feel even more invisible. I just wanted to go somewhere I never been to before, so I walked and walked and I got here. I went inside, too.”

“They let you in?”

“They let all the people in. It's a museum.”

“How come it's not open now?”

“I don't know. You got to pay to get in, but that day I was here, for whatever, it didn't matter. I went to the door and told the woman inside I didn't have any money, but that I had to come in. I don't even know why I said that, but I did. After a few seconds she said I could. I guess she seen I was young and whatever else I was. So she put a pin on me and that was that. It's spooky in there. George Washington lived here.”

“George Wa—As in the first president of the United States?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess it would suck if it was a George Washington who wasn't.”

“And some people from France even older than him lived here. And I'll tell you something—you can feel people moving in there. They dead, but if you get quiet, like if you don't breathe too loud, you can feel em in there.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“Maybe you can feel them cause all their rooms is the way they left em.”

“Their stuff is still in there?”

“Uh huh. Chairs and beds and glasses. Forks, knives. Even their shoes is still there. But you can't go in the rooms, you can only look inside from the hallways. They put these signs up that says you can't touch nothing. The rooms ain't been touched since like hundreds of years ago. No one touches anything.”

Now me and Stephanie are real quiet. Like we're sharing a moment of silence for her too-short childhood.

“I feel like I fucked up for real,” she says.

“No, you didn't.” I can feel guilt coming off her.

“Hey, Stephanie. I'm sorry.”

“What for?”

“The other day I called you little. You're not. No Nana. You're bigger than most people I know.” She nods. “And I think you might have been right about those things you said.” She nods again. “You know a lot of things. Beyond your years.”

“Yeah. I know what it's like to be invisible.”

“I'm sorry you do. But you're not, you know.”

No reaction.

“You know?” I ask again.

“Sometimes I know it.”

“And all that shit your parents did. It's not your fault.”

She wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “Thanks for following me here.”

There's plenty more silence.

She leans against the gate. The bars make an impression on each of her cheeks. She says, “I wanna put a sign outside me, says the same thing. Says:
Hands off
. For like a hundred years, hands off. Keep everyone out in the hallway outta my room. Cause I got stuff no one should be touching, too.”

“Like what?”

“It's not like something you can say. It's something you just know.”

I search my insides for something that can't be touched or spoken about. I'm half expecting an ancestor or Danielle to come out from behind one of those columns and tell me what my thing is. But all I see is a barge getting towed downriver and cars riding both directions on the highway.

We hit a stretch of the parkway that runs parallel to our river and the smell of it muscled through the open windows—fresh water mixed with goose shit and wet grass, and that or something else made me say, “Stop.”

Noke turned the radio down a couple notches. “What?”

“I said stop, pull over.”

“What the hell for?”

“Just do it.”

“Whuddaya gotta pee, Sally?”

“Pull the goddamn car over. Now.”

“Where the fuck am I gonna pull over, we got hardly a shoulder here. Forget it.”

I reached over, grabbed the wheel and yanked it to the right. Noke slapped my hand off it hard, and pulled the wheel back to the left. The car jerked our bodies around.

“Cut the shit, douche bag.” I grabbed for the wheel again, and again he slapped me out of the way. Harder. “OK, I'm pulling over, Tinker Bell.”

“Good.”

“It's like dealing with a fucking six-year-old,” he mumbled.

He slowed down, easing to the right; the passenger-side tires crunched over the gravel of the shoulder and bounced on the grass next to it. We got knocked up and down like wet noodles then came to a stop. Noke said, “You wanna tell me what the hell?”

I opened my door, got out, slammed it behind me, stepped toward the river through the light rain, and took a deep breath. The smell. Of all things, the smell was fucking with my thinking. I heard Noke's door open and shut. He came up behind me.

“Excuse me, but I thought you were with us on this.”

“What the fuck are we doing?” I asked.

“Don't even. You know exactly what we're doing.”

“Remind me.”

“We're killing our dragons, man. We been wantin to do this since we were midgets putting quarters on train tracks. You need me to remind you who's sitting in the back seat?”

I said nothing.

“You better get your fucking game face on, because it's too late.” He turned, walked back to the car, and said, “No more shit. Let's go.”

I tried to blow the smell out of my nose. I looked at the river. In the dark it seemed like it didn't move. I didn't make up my mind about anything. I just got back in the car and said, “All right, I'm here. I'm here.”

Dani reached forward and gave me a little slap in the back of my head. I said, “All right, forget those last few minutes. I'm here.”

We pulled out and I rolled up my window trying to keep the smell from going through my nose to my brain. I did my best to keep my eyes off the river so I stuck them on Nokey's dashboard lights. Numbers and dials the color of burning red leaves. They were the same lights on the same dashboard of the same '91 Volkswagen GTI they'd always been. I'd seen them from the
driver's seat, the passenger's seat and the back. I'd seen them stoned out of my gourd at three-thirty in the morning on the way to the diner. Their night job is to tell you how fast you're going, what temperature you're riding at, and what radio station you're listening to. Only right then, for some unknown reason, they brought me a vague feeling of peace. It was how I used to feel—before Dani was born—riding home in the back of my dad's car at night. The weight of his cool hand on the wheel, flicking the blinker with his pinky, easing the car from lane to lane, me knowing I'd wake up over his shoulder with his arm wrapped around my legs, while he climbed our front stairs.

If you've ever been undone by some weird shit like the sound of your dishwasher, a dog barking down the street, a train whine, then you know what I'm talking about. You want the feeling to last so badly, but you know as soon as you twitch a muscle or hear the second hand on your watch, it'll be gone. I stared at those lights until the feeling fizzled out, until the dashboard looked like your average speedometer and gas gage, and I felt my rage again. Peace never lasts. Ever.