Breaking the Cycle (10 page)

T
HE
GRINDSTONE

N
ANE
Q
UARTAY

I knew there was something desperate in the night, when I saw the brightness of the sparks that shot off the blade of the machete. And so… that night, I ran.

I ran down Upwards Alley, over to Front Street, and up the hill to my house. I only lived two long blocks up on the top of Front Street, but the street was so deep that I was catching my breath in heaving gasps by the time I made it to our front door. All out of breath and shit!

My youngest sister, Tammy, was sitting out front on a bench that sat alongside the house, watching my two-year-old brother toddling around on the ground. She barely gave me a glance as I stood there, breathing hard but trying not to show it. My oldest sister, Toby, came riding up on her bicycle, hopped off, and went inside the front door. I waited until I heard her footsteps fade away up the stairs and then I began to plot on her bike, laying there where she had let it fall. Toby’s bicycle was one of those girl’s bikes; no metal bar for me to fall on and hurt my undeveloped manhood. I was so small that I couldn’t reach the pedals while I was sitting on the seat, so the absence of that metal bar was crucial. The missing tube created a gap that allowed me to pedal the bike while I was standing up and I triumphantly rode around and around in circles on the sidewalk. Boy! I can’t wait till I’m big enough to ride a boy’s bike! This delicious thought pedaled around in my head as I rode and turned on the bicycle.

The sound of breaking glass messed up my flow. I looked up in time to see my lucky horseshoe, the one I had won at school, come flying out of the window. It landed right in the middle of the street. The next thing I heard was my father’s voice. He was drunk. Know how I know? He was always drunk!

“How you bring a bastard up in my house!”

It was a statement. My statement. My stepfather’s description of me. When he was drunk, it was his only description of me. I wouldn’t say that I hate him. There has got to be a better word for my feelings than “hate.” Yet, he found his hatred of me became intensified when it was mixed with vodka. He was a big man… compared to me. He was a smart man… compared to me. He was a man… compared to me. To me, he was the evil that turned off every emotion I ever had, every feeling, the devil who endangered my very sanity and killed the childhood part of my life. He rampaged on my teenage years, that time of life when relationships develop, some in the most intimate of ways, where bits and pieces of yourself are defined by the company you keep, the friends that you make. The years when life is sweet and carefree… not just painful day-to-day hell. My father did that. My daddy.

He wasn’t my real daddy, though. He was only my stepfather but what’s the difference… especially if you don’t know who your real daddy is anyway.

I fucking hate him. Yeah. That fits better.

I remember the first time he hit me. He tried to punch me with a manpunch, a hard man-punch, straight to my face. I was way too small to take that blow and I could see that shit comin’. I ducked away enough, but not all the way enough, and his knuckle caught me right in the eye. Shit! That shit hurt! My eye was all swollen and shit.

Maaannnn! I can’t wait till I get big!

I had gone back to turning circles on the sidewalk, losing myself in the endless ‘O’s when I heard his voice again. “Woman! I will fuck you up!”

“WHY?!” my mother screamed.

“Stupid shit! You better—”

“So, why then?! Why you hit me?!”

“’Cause, Woman…”

For a long second, there was silence, and then the unmistakable sound of a hard, solid fist hitting soft, pliable flesh. Plappp! I paused to look up for an instant—knowing my black-ass stepfather was beatin’ on my mother again. But I messed up when I took my eyes off the sidewalk. The bike swerved and I veered off the curb. To this day, I still don’t know how it all happened. Next thing I know, I’m rolling down Front Street, down the steepest hill I had ever seen in my life. I didn’t panic; not in my recollection. I really don’t remember panicking. I remember looking down toward the bottom of that hill and seeing the houses come rushing by me. I remember seeing there weren’t any cars in my lane, but I do recall a few cars coming toward me in the opposite lane. The bike began to gather speed and I felt soon I would be flying… and I didn’t have wings! There was no way I was going to be able to stop that bike without fucking myself up. A random thought occurred to me. There ain’t no way this is gonna end right!

In a desperate flash, Upwards Alley appeared on my right-hand side and my mind pictured the steepness of that sloping hill. If I could make that turn into the alley, I would be able to let gravity stop my momentum so I could fall off safely to the side and bring the bike back on home.

Yeah! I could do that shit! Shit?

I remember turning the handlebars to make the turn, but it was the first time I ever tried to make a real-time turn on a bicycle and I didn’t quite make it. My front wheel hit the curb right in front of Donnell Shunt’s house and I flipped. Well, actually the bike and I flipped through the air and I landed upside-down and totally! fucked! Up! My shoe had somehow come off in mid-air and my toe was smashed on the concrete. It was a pulpy, bloody mess. I felt the pain shooting up my leg so intensely, I was able to ignore the throbbing flare of the giant, knot swelling over my left ear. My head felt like someone had shoved a steel cue ball inside my head and left it there for me to grow on. I could feel it… expanding. I felt blood leaking through the cuts and scrapes on my body; my forearm had a deep gash that left a wicked-looking scar I carry to this day. My vision was colored by pain… but I was alive!

Donnell Shunt’s grandfather was sitting on the front porch, smiling. He seemed kinda far away from me, his bony body a mish-mash of angles and sticks. Now that I look back on it, he seemed like, somehow like… distant. The porch was only three steps high but his voice always seems to come out of a tunnel in my memory.

He said, “You gonna get up from there, Boy?”

Famous last words.

There was a sharp, piercing scream, a war-chant, as his wife, Jessie Mae, came sprinting up behind the old man with the machete held high. It was held back, like Thor’s hammer, and I can still see lightning in the reflection of the sharpened edge… and I can still remember when she swung it. I saw it mechanically… I saw the finer points of a perfect home run swing, the way a baseball coach would teach it. The swing started at shoulder height and went forward. Her hips opened up, building on the momentum generated… as the blade went forward. She pushed off with the speed gathered from her running start and stopped on a perfect dime, pivot and swing. It was power. Perfect execution. Pure power when the long blade of the machete sliced through the old man’s neck… flesh, blood and bone… and cut his head clean off. It just lopped off from the initial “pop” of his blood, his life force, before it bounced off the ground, like, maybe twice, and rolled a little down the street. His body… his body fell out of the chair. Plop. Dead. The old lady stood there for what seemed like a silent forever, entranced by the scene splayed out before her eyes, hypnotized as reality started to materialize to her conscious mind. She saw his spurting blood.

And she screamed. And screamed. And screamed some more. “Willie Bobo, head off, mothafucka! Willie Bobo, head off!”

I remember struggling to my feet. The pain from my injuries became a mere background hum of an ache. I remember standing there. Watching. I don’t remember any thought patterns. No fear. No disgust. No abject terror. I just stood there. My vision would register sensory images and send them to my brain, but there was no verbalization of ideas. I saw what was going on but, no, I can’t say a single thought entered my mind. I guess life can be so random sometimes, huh?

But the old lady. Jessie Mae! The old lady lost it. She screamed like a banshee until the police arrived. When they got there, she dove, threw her body, face first into her husband’s pouring blood. There was plenty of it, flowing down the sidewalk. His life’s essence paying the cost of inflicting pain on another life—with man-punches to the face. Counting the cost that life is sweet, every life, and that a soul cries out to be free… no matter the cost.

It was the ending of the cycle. There would be no more pain.

The old man’s body lay there, of course, but it looked like all of his blood and guts were rushing toward the opening where his head used to be. It looked like wormy guts and thick blood were pulsing, desperately straining to get loose, but only rivulets of brackish liquid oozed out. I stayed there, transfixed, until the firemen washed all the red fluid down the street. I looked down at my smashed and bloody toe. It didn’t hurt anymore.

The front wheel of the bike was bent so I limped, walking the bike back up the hill, dumped it out front, and went inside our house. My mother looked at me.

“What happened to you?” she asked, mildly interested.

“I flipped my bike.” I exhaled as I flopped on the couch.

“And tore your head up?”

I nodded my head in reply.

“That’s what you get! Good for your ass, then,” she intoned. “Didn’t I tell you about that shit? You always doin’ shit. You need to learn to sit ya ass down somewhere.”

My insides were hollow as I told my mother what Donnell Shunt’s grandmother had done to her husband’s head. I had an image stuck in my mind. A picture of his guts straining to escape from his headless neck.

“She did that with a knife?” My mother looked me in the eyes.

“A machete, you know, those long knives,” I answered.

“Musta been sharp, then.”

“Ma, she swung that knife like she was a home run king! It was like… like… flop and crunchy when his head came off. It went… like thump and crunch all at the same time. Nasty.”

I told her how I had seen Jessie Mae sharpening the blade on the grindstone earlier that day, shortly before she took her husband’s head off.

I knew there was something desperate in the night, when I saw the brightness of the sparks that shot off the blade of the machete. Once again, I felt utterly alone. The flashes of light drew me like a magnet, so I crept over and watched the woman through the slats of the wooden fence. Her face was set in a mad glare as she worked the grindstone, turned the wheel, and aimed for the razor’s edge, moving the blade back and forth, watching intently as a sharp point began to materialize. An old lady. New in town. She was Donnell Shunt’s grandma. Her husband had recently moved with her to our small town of Hudson from somewhere down South—Louisiana, I think.

I had seen her husband sitting on the front porch a few times. He was a rail-thin old man, rather fragile-looking, now that I think back on it, and he liked to sit outside and watch the people of the small town go strolling by. He would sit there with a grin on his face, smiling and waving at folks—at strangers that he didn’t even know. He seemed like a nice enough guy.

I wondered why his wife was in the backyard sharpening a knife. She was a little sturdier than her husband. Her arms had little coils of muscle that were formed with strength developed from years of labor in kitchens, laundry rooms, and other roles of servitude. Yeah, she looked quite comfortable, familiar with the feel and handle of a sharp blade. I noticed the way she held it like a hammer. No, not a hammer; more like Mjolnir, the God of Thunder’s hammer… with a two-handed grip. It meant something to her.

She paused and straightened up, wiping her brow with the back of her hand as she looked cautiously around the yard. I crouched down behind the slat of the fence as best I could when she looked in my direction. Their house stood on the corner of Front Street and Upwards Alley, a full, two-family home with a small-sized yard that stretched out behind it. I stood on the Upwards Alley side, a spot that was at the dead bottom end of the hill which stretched up, high toward the sky. Upwards was our getaway alley. We used to roll car tires down the curve of that hillside and watch them as they banged real hard into the doors of passing cars. The angry driver would emerge from his damaged car and spot us at the top of the hill before we would take off running. They would never catch us. It was too steep to sprint Upwards!

“Jessie Mae! Get in here, Woman!”

The old woman froze in place.

“Jessie Mae! Don’t make me come out there, Bitch! ’Cause if I do, I’ll have to run yo’ slut ass in that river down there! Get in here!”

The old woman turned, flung the back door open, and hurried inside. I could see them through the opened door as she ran over to her husband.

“What you want, Baby?” she stated in desperation when she stopped in front of him. He responded with a savage, straight right hand, a man-punch, to her face. She collapsed to the floor like a sack of meat. I heard her cry of pain from where I stood and then I watched him kick her in the ribs.

“What you doin’ back there? Huh?”

She coughed in pain before she groaned her reply, “Nuthin’.”

“How the fuck you gonna be outside doin’ nuthin’! Stupid bitch.”

He knelt down in front of her and crawled between her legs. He wedged his crotch in between her thighs and began a hard, dominant grind. I saw her body buck from the contact as he invaded her, and I could hear his animal grunts as he bucked up into her. His hips dipped and thrust into her with solid contact that pushed her legs further and further apart. She lay beneath him, unmoving until he pushed himself to his knees and slowly leaned back before barking out a command to her.

“Take it out!”

The old lady, tentatively, reached up and unbuckled his pants. She pulled his swollen dick free.

“Kiss it!” he barked. “Hurry up! Kiss it! Kiss it good!”

I saw the old lady’s head moving around in circular motions.

“That’s it, Baby.” His voice was gruff. “Give me head. Let me feel some suction.” His hands reached up and snaked around the back of her head. He pulled her head forcefully toward his pelvis, his hardness stabbing the back of her throat, gagging her. “Kiss it and then suck it! Head! Head!” His body bucked a few times and he gripped her head and pulled it one last time and held it there while he groaned with release.