Bang! (12 page)

ALL THAT NEXT day, Kee-lee and me ain’t talking to each other. We take cardboard that we find in the city dump they dropped us in and scrape food off our clothes and from underneath our fingernails. We walk back to where the apple trees are. Flies won’t leave us alone though. They buzz in our ears and sit down to eat stuff off our faces and socks. Beetles come too. So do other things that we can’t name. I pull off my shirt first. Then my pants. Kee-lee throws his sneakers, like a football, halfway across the field. It’s really hot. We are really hungry and ain’t nobody around to help us. So we eat more apples. And we poop till blood comes out. But we ain’t talking to each other the whole time. We just eat, poop, and wipe. Then we lie down and go to sleep. Kee-lee will say I’m lying, but he is crying. I hear him. I don’t blame him none though. We ain’t got nobody but us.

The following day when we wake up, Kee-lee says we’re getting home today, one way or another. I don’t see how nobody will pick us up smelling like we do, but I figure we ain’t got nothing to lose. So I follow him.

Kee-lee has his thumb out before I’m up to the road. Trucks and cars keep going. The ground shakes. Dirt flies into my mouth and eyes. I put my thumb out too. We stay right there for a while. Then we start walking up the road, too tired to hold our arms out the whole time. A couple hours later, when we’re sitting on the side of the road, we see a police car heading our way.

“Run!” Kee-lee says, ducking into some trees; rolling down a hill with me right behind him. We keep running and looking back till the road is way behind us. “I wanna go home!” he screams. Then he has a fit. He beats a tree with his fists. Kicks the air and punches leaves from a weeping willow. I think he’s gonna come after me too—only I tell him if he does, he’ll be sorry.

Three hours later, when it’s pitch-black, me and Kee-lee hit the road again. He doesn’t say nothing. Me neither. But we is both thinking the same thing. Tonight, somehow, some way, we getting outta here.

We aren’t on the road five more minutes before a car stops, and a man and his wife ask where we’re going. We tell them, and just like that, we’re headed home.

THE FIRST THING I did that day when I got inside was call my mom. Our front door was wide open, even the security door. My dad was in the backyard laying bricks, so I walked right up the steps and went inside the house. My mother always keeps her mother’s phone number by the phone, so I called her at my grandmother’s house in Kentucky and told her what happened. She said she’d take the train home tonight. She wanted me to call Ma Dear and tell her and Cousin what my father did, and then go and stay with them until she got back.

“Get away from him, Mann,” she said, talking about my dad. She was crying. Saying how sorry she was that she wasn’t there for me. “I lost one son, trying to keep another son alive in the grave.” She got quiet for a while. “I let you down. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t call Ma Dear, not right away anyhow. That was a mistake. I was tired and funky so I sat on my bed and took off my clothes so I could shower. Only I fell asleep and my dad found me the next morning. “Glad you home,” he said, patting me awake. “Glad you safe.” He pulled back the covers and rubbed my head. He walked out the room. I pretended I was asleep when he got back. He took a warm wet washcloth and moved it between my fingers, up my arms, and over my face. He talked low. Asked how I was. Said for me to tell him everything that happened from the time he left me. So I did.

“I didn’t mean for it to go that hard for you,” he said. He rubbed his head. He walked the floor. “But there’s lions and tigers everywhere.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. And I didn’t care. I sat up. I told him again about the men and the garbage. He looked hurt. I told him that he was wrong for leaving me and almost getting me and Kee-lee killed. He stood there, staring at the wet cement on his shoes. I couldn’t keep quiet. I got out of bed. I got in his face. I told him I didn’t wanna ever live with him again. He walked over and squeezed my wrists and legs, my arms and ankles, just like doctors do. “Ain’t nothing broken. Get dressed.”

“You . . .” I walked over to the dresser, bent down and picked up a little metal doorstop shaped like an iron. “We thought we was gonna die!” I kept thinking, Hit him. Hurt him for what he did to you. “We didn’t have nothing to eat! We slept on the hard ground and them men made us eat slop!” I never used to look my father in the eyes. Now I stared at him and didn’t blink. “You don’t do people like that.” I dropped the iron. His foot moved just in time.

I put on some clean jeans and told him Mom was coming home and she wanted me to go to Ma Dear’s till she got back. “But I ain’t leaving!” I kicked my pajamas in the corner. “’Cause I live here too, and I ain’t letting
nobody
chase me off.”

I was waiting for my dad to deck me. Or strangle me, even. He smiled. Shook his head a little and asked if I wanted something to eat. I didn’t move.

“Gumption,” he said, patting my back. “Being out there gave you gumption.”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“Nerve. Balls, boy,” he said, walking to the steps. “Get dressed. Come eat. I’ll cook anything you want. Anything!”

Sometimes I wonder if my dad is missing a few marbles. He throws me out. He won’t let me come home. Then when I sneak in the house and tell him off, he’s happy about it.

At breakfast, him and me talked like nothing ever happened. He set my plate. He made my eggs and bacon and put honey on my biscuits. He poured my milk and sat too close to me. He didn’t know, or care, that I was still mad. That I couldn’t stand his rotten, no-good butt. I wanted to tell him. Show him the mark on my side where those men kicked me out the truck and I fell on rocks big as basketballs and sharp as kitchen knives. But I didn’t. I kept checking him out, jumping when he got too close to me.

“It worked, you know.”

I downed my milk.

“You doing what a boy should. Toughening up. Walking toward manhood.” He pulled out the book on African boys. He said, when they go into the forest, they take spears or knives, nothing else. “But they come back stronger, able to protect themselves and their families.”

“Some come back dead too I bet.”

My dad likes to tell stories. So he told me about his father, who taught him to shoot and hunt, to make tables and chairs. I can do some of those things. My dad said he didn’t know it then, but his father was laying a road for him to follow. He took a deep breath. It seemed like he wasn’t never gonna let it out. “But table-making hands ain’t strong enough to keep you safe around here.” He went to the fridge. “Hands that fix cars and shovel dirt ain’t nothing compared to the ones that shoot pistols and dig knives in people’s bellies.”

He didn’t talk to me again till I was done eating. Then he pulled out lunch meat and bread, brown bags, and juice packs. I watched him. He got six slices of white bread lined up in a row. “Mayo. Lettuce. You like that, right?”

He whistled, breaking open plastic bags of red apples and black grapes. He asked hisself where he put a hundred and twenty bucks and how come he coundn’t find the bandages and alcohol. He’s putting me out again, I thought. But like a dummy I just sat there, watching. When he was done, he walked upstairs and came back down with my sneakers, socks, two shirts, and the money.

“It’s time.”

I let him know I wasn’t leaving. He said it again. “It’s time.” He walked to the front of the house and opened the door.

“You made me breakfast.” I walked to the door. “And you . . . Mom said . . .” I stopped and told him I wasn’t leaving.

He handed me the bag. “Don’t go to Ma Dear’s either.”

I threw it at him. “Why you hate me?”

His voice shook. “How many boys of mine you think I’m gonna let ’em kill?”

“I’m gonna get killed out here by somebody!” Kee-lee would be mad if he heard me begging. “Don’t make me go. Please!”

I shouldn’t have let him hug me, because I didn’t even like him no more. But I was tired. My feet hurt and I was hungry all over again. So when my dad hugged me tight, I hugged him right back. He whispered in my ear, “You figure out the kind of man you wanna be, and let your feet take you there.”

What kind of man are you? I thought.

He squeezed me too tight; talked too close to my ear. “You wanna be a pimp—well, there’s a road that’ll lead you there. Wanna be a thief, sell crack and live high and die hard—well, that road’s waiting for you too.”

Who was talking about crack and pimps?

He pushed me away. He told me to go now, ’cause he didn’t wanna be hard on me and pick me up and throw me out the front door.

“Why?”

He just looked at me. “’Cause you soft,” he whispered. “I made you too soft. Made you and Jason way too soft.”

The phone rang. Nobody answered it.

“You don’t toughen up, they’ll kill you for sure. Mann,” my father said as I was just about to step onto the porch, “Men . . .”

Men leave their children, I thought, like Kee-lee’s dad did. No. They kick ’em out and don’t care what happens to ’em, like mine. I turned my back on my father. “Boys ain’t men, yet,” I told him, walking onto the porch.

My dad didn’t try to stop me. I stopped myself. I didn’t wanna do like he said and go back to the camp. I wanted to go to Ma Dear’s and wait for my mom. Only I was thinking, Maybe he’s right. Maybe I am too soft, ’cause otherwise, how he gonna force me to go?

So I turned around. A man does have to take the hard road sometimes, I thought. But he don’t have to take the one his dad picks for him. He can pick his own: good or bad, right or wrong. So I went to Keelee’s place. His mom had spoken to my dad. So Keelee had to leave his house too. She almost let him stay home though, ’cause she needed help with the kids. But my father got a way of making wrong look right, and now Kee-lee’s back on the streets too. Only him and me figured, since we’re on our own, since we men now, we gonna do what men do: anything we want. And if anybody try to stop us, they just gonna get hurt.

WHEN YOU GOT stupid parents, you don’t got to listen to them. That’s what me and Kee-lee figure. So we take our money and our clothes and we go where we want—to his aunt’s place.

Kee-lee’s Aunt Mary’s the one the rest of his family talks about. She runs a number house. She dresses like a man, acts like a man, and drinks like a man—that’s what Kee-lee says anyhow. She lives on the other side of town, and his other aunts like it that way. Kee-lee said they gave up trying to make her do right a long time ago. So now, they just pray for her and send her Christmas cards every year.

When we get to her place, I’m thinking to myself that it ain’t so bad. Only that thought don’t stay in my head too long.

Soon as you walk in, there are old ladies knitting by the corner window. They got a big pink-green-and-yellow afghan sitting in front of them, and little flowered cups sitting on saucers. Kee-lee says they drinking rotgut, not tea.

I look at him.

“Bootleg liquor. My aunt makes it.”

Men my father’s age are lined up at a row of telephones, placing bets. Every few minutes one of them hangs up, and the phone rings. “That’s the bookie, double checking the bet,” Kee-lee tells me. Then he sneaks over to a phone and calls Keisha, but he doesn’t tell her where we are.

The place looks big, since furniture you’d have in your house—coffee tables, living-room furniture, and couches—ain’t here. There’s just bunches of mismatched chairs, card tables, and phones. Women and men, young and old, are playing cards and laughing, and arguing over poker and gin.

“All kinds of people come here,” Kee-lee says, setting his bag down at the door. “People be in church on Sunday and here on Monday.”

I walk by one lady knitting a purple scarf. She asks the guy standing near me if he’s got a good number. “My luck’s turning,” she says, laying down her yellow knitting needles. “I almost hit last night.”

Three other women are quilting a blanket. I ask Kee-lee why they here. “They waiting on the number to come out. Same as all the rest.”

Music’s playing. People are laughing, talking, standing, walking. There’s a man by the phones who looks like he’d cut your throat though. He’s the bouncer. “He weighs four-fifty. Don’t nobody mess with him.” Kee-lee takes out some weed and lights up.

Aunt Mary’s hand comes out of nowhere and smacks it out his mouth. “You planning on staying, you better act like you know.”

She don’t look like no man to me. She’s got on a red dress down to her knees and skinny heels tall as cigarettes. You can tell she’s tough though; got a cut over her left eye and another on her right cheek to prove it. She puts her hand out to me. “Heard you wanna stay here awhile. It’s gonna cost ya.”

When I go in my back pocket to get money, it all falls on the floor. A man standing by her with a cigarette in his mouth picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Kee-lee’s aunt winks, and walks away.

“That’s mine.”

He’s following every move she makes with his eyes. “And?”

He’s a shrimp. Short, with a big, bald head. I’m thinking I can take him if I have to. He’s thinking what I’m thinking, I guess. A switchblade comes out. “Go ahead. Try it.”

I’m backing up, trying not to trip. “That’s all I got. She wants me to pay to stay and I still gotta eat and . . .”

Aunt Mary takes the money out his pocket and walks off. “Thanks, baby.”

I been away from home two hours and already my money’s gone. I tell Kee-lee his aunt’s a thief. He says she do steal a little, but she can cook real good. I follow him to the kitchen. There’s a stove full of big blue pots boiling and smelling up the house something good. He picks up a lid. “She sells food too.” He takes a top off another pot. “Collard greens. My favorite.”

I check out the next pot. “Pigs’ feet.” I lick my lips, break off a toe, and suck the bone clean.

Kee-lee tells me to watch the door. Then he gets two plates, puts a fat, juicy pig’s feet on each one, scoops up some greens and more corn bread than we can eat, and him and me go out back and clean our plates.

“Here,” his aunt says when we go back inside. “Try this.”

Kee-lee drinks his first. “Taste like a Red Lion.”

I sip my drink, then I set the glass down.

The man that always follows Aunt Mary asks if I’m a girl or something.

I punch my chest. “No, sir.”

He laughs. “Sir?” He looks around the room. “The police here or something?”

“I don’t drink, sir.”

He slaps my back so hard I belch. “Ain’t no sirs here. Just plain folk. So drink up. Be a man, Mann.”

Kee-lee opens his mouth wide and pours his drink down fast. Right off I can see what it’s doing to him. His words come out crooked. And he laughs about nothing.

I tell them I don’t want nothing to drink. But his aunt’s friend tells me ain’t no boys welcome here. And if I don’t drink, I can’t stay. “’Cause if you can’t handle your liquor, you can’t handle the rest of the stuff going on round here.”

I look at the old ladies, at the men lined up at the phones, and the guy jumping up from a card table yelling for folks to pay him his money ’fore he shoot somebody. I watch the bouncer, wide as a poker table, go over and settle him down. And I think about my dad. How he said for me to
be a man
. Then I close my eyes. Open my mouth so wide it hurts, and pour that stuff down my throat, even though it burns and tastes as bad as the bug spray I sucked out a can like juice when I was seven.