Everyday People (3 page)

“Pump it up,” Little Nene calls from the back, but Crest waits. Someone has a box of Better Cheddars—another father working day shift at Nabisco—and they break it out, pass it around, people filling their laps. The commercials are louder, and when
Voyager
comes on he adjusts it. They go right into the show, no credits, no nothing, and there's B'Elanna Torres with her old rhinoceros-looking head, and googly old white boy Tom Paris, phasers out, in some cave made of fake rocks; it's your basic away-team thing. Better believe someone's going to get fucked up.

This spirit thing appears, green and see-through, kind of a ghost, but the music lets you know it isn't. It circles around them like it's interested. The two of them don't move; it's like a
Star Trek
rule: Just stand there.

“Run!” Janelle French calls.

“Where they gonna run?” Cardell says.

“I don't know,” Janelle says, “just run!”

“I'm not picking up any readings,” B'Elanna says, and then—
whoosh
—the thing shoots into Tom Paris. His face changes like he ate something he's not too sure of, like he's going to throw up. The music gets loud, then goes soft, then ends. All of a sudden Tom's better.

“Tom!” B'Elanna calls, and runs over to him. She goes to touch him but doesn't. Everyone knows they're gonna make it one of these shows, girl just doesn't know what she wants. Crest always thinks it's like him and Vanessa, you know, just meant to be, no sense denying it. But V needs a
man. She never says, but Crest understands. The doctor says it makes no sense, he should retain full feeling—that's the way he says it too, all official, like Crest can't do this. Fuck, he wanted to say, and make it plain: it doesn't fucking work.
He
doesn't fucking work. Vanessa tried twice. She cried the first time; the second time she just let go and looked at him all cold, like it was his fault.

“Are you okay?” B'Elanna asks.

“I think so,” Tom Paris says, rubbing his head and looking googly as ever, like he doesn't even know the thing's in him. B'Elanna calls Captain Janeway to beam them up, and as they're being transported, you can see the green shape inside Tom's body.

“Aw,
man!
” Little Nene says. “Cuz is in for some serious shit.”

“Thing went right down his mouth,” Cardell says, and the two of them act it out, clowning, the girls laughing at them.

Crest has already seen this episode, it's a repeat. The new season doesn't start till next week, but no one complains, it's still fun. This might be the last nice night, and school's kicking in, homework, part-time jobs. Pretty soon he'll be back in his room, just him and Brother Sony. But not yet, not yet.

The green thing is the last of its species and won't leave Tom. The Prime Directive kicks in and The Doctor has to figure something out. Crest sits there watching, laughing when everyone else does, going quiet when The Doctor opens Tom's lips wide with this steel thing and shines a light. And then, of course, a commercial.

All day he's been waiting to be with someone, just lying in bed while the buses and rush hour went by, watching talk shows, then getting up and eating lunch with the noon news. Drive-by on The Hill, Pirates still three-and-a-half behind the Astros. All afternoon he let the set charge, listening as the school buses dropped the little kids off, and then the music of cartoons from the other apartments. Moms came home long enough to make supper, then left before Pops and U drove up, both of them too tired to give a shit. They ate at the table but it was just chowing down, pass this, pass that. No one asks, “What did you do today?”

I laid up in my crib and boomed the new Wu Tang, same jam over and over.

I drank all the red Kool-Aid and then emptied out my bag cause it was getting full.

I watched TV.

No one wants to hear that shit. Fuck, Crest thinks,
I
don't want to hear that shit.

“Going to your meeting?” Pops asked like every night, and like every night, U said, “If that's all right.”

“It's fine with me.”

“Me too,” Crest said.

“You oughta come. You'd be surprised, some of the people you meet.”

“z'at right?”

“'member Pooh Bear? He comes.”

“That roly-poly bitch? I thought he got shot.”

“He did. Now he's a deacon over St. James in Highland Park.”

“Get on.”

“Remember Guy Collins?”

“Now I know you frontin'. Guy Collins's name is Malik. I know cause his cousin Anthony told me.”

“That's when he was inside. When he came out he changed back. He's married to that gal Florence now, they come twice a week. I'm telling you, you'd be surprised; it's not like Sister Payne's old-biddy prayer circle. It might be just what you need.” He was really selling it, his eyes shining, his ham just lying there in its juice. “We got a ramp and everything.”

“That's all right,” Crest said.

“Door's always open.” He said it like Reverend Skinner, like he owned the whole place, and all Crest could think of was the day U brought home Brother Sony, still in the box. He and Fats and Big Nene had busted into a truck over behind Sears. Used to be like that all the time—full of surprises.

After U went to put on his suit, Pops leaned across and said not to take it personal. “He's just a little excited right now. Remember, he was away a long time.”

“I know,” Crest said, thinking: What about me, how long was I gone?

Now The Doctor leans over Tom Paris's mouth again, this time with a steel test-tube thing, and one of the girls squeals, “Don't be doing that, fool!”

There's a blast of green light—“Here we go,” Cardell says—and when the picture comes back, The Doctor's still looking, Tom's still got his mouth open.

The Doctor straightens up, stiff like always. “I think we've succeeded.” He holds up the test tube, all smug. Inside it, a green light shines.

They're going to try to clone it, see if they can get it to reproduce so it won't go extinct.

“Now that's just a plain mistake,” Janelle French says, shaking her head.

But then, in his quarters, Tom Paris gets this headache. It's killing him. He goes to the mirror, holding his head with both hands, and his eyes are completely green.

“Aw yeah,” Little Nene says. “That's what happens you fuck with that green shit.”

“Show you right,” Crest says, punching the mute button.

A car cruises by, slides right through the stop sign, and they all watch it hard, thinking it might be B-Mo's crew from Brushton looking for some payback on Nene and his fellas, but it's just some old nutty-professor-looking white dude in a raggedy Oldsmobile, his windows rolled up. Must be lost—or on the pipe, looking to cop some rock. As he passes, Cardell walks out into Spofford to let him know he's being scoped, then comes back.

“Any those Cheddars left?”

In the middle of the next scene, Little Nene's beeper goes off, and he and Cardell gotta jet. “Later, C.” Crest watches them down the block, thinking how tight he and Bean were. Boy always had his back, didn't matter if it was Morningside or North Braddock, Oakland or the North Side, and just like he didn't want to happen, he sees Bean on the bridge, going over, and he reaches for him and catches his sleeve and then both of them go, the hard white bed of the busway flying up at them like a blank page, a wall of snow. It was only twenty feet, that's the part he'll never understand.

No one knows Tom Paris is the alien. He spreads the DNA like a vampire, biting people in the corridors. When his eyes turn green, the test tube glows. Half the ship is walking around like zombies, and now Crest can't remember how it ends—something with the Holodeck, or maybe a special drug The Doctor cooks up. It doesn't matter; Bean is here again, and the minutes Crest spent waking up in the hospital, the light above the table, the operating room cold and smelling like ammonia. When the doctor bent down he could see a drop of blood caught in her blond eyebrow. Well hello Miss Ann. There was a saw making the same screaming it did in shop. Wait, he wanted to say, hold up, but her face came down, the drop of blood like a bug, a roach hidden in spaghetti. He tried to talk but the air was sweet, even sugary, a licorice musk of rubber, and then there was nothing but space, floating, no stars, just a dark, bottomless night. Welcome to the Delta Quadrant.

“Mute it,” someone says, and Crest does. He's already taken his pills; maybe that's it. This doesn't happen every night, just some. He always looks for reasons but never finds any, like he's being controlled by some alien force, like googly old Tom Paris. Fuck.

It's just Bean.

The commercials go on too long, so they know it's the end. When it comes back on, Crest remembers. It's not The Doctor, it's B'Elanna who saves everyone. She kisses Tom and his true personality comes back and kicks the alien's ass right out of his mouth. The Doctor makes up some fancy explanation that the other ones need Tom to keep living, so they all get better, all at once. The green ghosts join up in a
blob and go out into space. The special effects are weak, and everyone laughs. Crest is wondering about Vanessa, if a kiss from her would make everything all right. Before, he would have said more than a kiss, but now he thinks: yes. He should call her tomorrow.

Some of the girls stick around for a preview of next week, the new season, then everyone leaves during the credits. It's a school night, but still he's disappointed. Janelle French waves. “Keep ya head up, baby.”

The ten o'clock news comes on, the drive-by the top story. He knows the place, Aliquippa Terrace. There was a dance there years ago, in the spring. It's another Bean and me story, a fight over a stolen coat, and Crest doesn't even get into it, just squashes that mad stuff, shoves it back where it belongs. What the fuck. Even if he had someone to talk to he wouldn't say anything. What's there to say? In the paper they said he was the fourth teenager to die in East Liberty that week, like it was some drug shit. It made it sound like it was Bean's fault. And then nothing, just a little thing in the obituaries. Crest didn't even get to go to the funeral. Still hasn't been to see the stone Miss Fisk bought him. Hasn't even talked with Miss Fisk, said he's sorry. Soon. Got to, you know?

The door swings open, almost hitting him.

“Ay,” U says, in some old street clothes, corduroy slippers.

“S'up.”

“Where's all your little girlfriends?”

“Show's over,” Crest says. “Pops go to bed yet?”

“He's out on the couch.”

They sit there, Crest in his chair, U on the wall, watching the news. Pirates won; Kevin Young plants one in the stands.

“Go 'head, K.Y.,” U says, and Crest smiles with him. He's so clean it's hard to believe. Quit everything, not even beer anymore. Back in the day they'd sit here and pound down Iron Citys. Had a fly rap with the ladies, decked-out Impala he used to cruise Highland in, stylin threads. That's all gone, and what's in its place is something Crest doesn't understand. And Crest in his chair; it's the same, he thinks. They've changed. Where they've been no one can go. It's like they've come back from different planets and they've got nothing to say to each other, or maybe they're speaking a completely different language. Maybe they're both fucked up. Maybe Bean got off easy. (No, that's cold.)

“U, man.”

“Hunh?”

“What's up with Moms and Pops?”

“They're just fighting.”

“Naw, man, it's different this time.”

“You think so? Well, I'm praying for them anyway. I pray for you too, Chris. Every day.”

“Thanks,” Crest says, because there's nothing else to say.

“I pray for Bean too, you know? For all of us.”

“A'ight, man,” Crest says, and they shake, and it's almost like it used to be. But it's not. It's fine for U to pretend none of this shit happened, but Crest can't do that. Wouldn't want to neither.

The weather chick is on, and he looks at U—at this new Eugene—and thinks of Tom Paris, how no one could tell the alien was inside him. And he thinks it's like the real
Star Trek,
when there are two Captain Kirks, and one of them's good and one of them's evil. They look exactly the same, they talk exactly the same, they're even wearing the same clothes, just one of them's evil. You know they've got to fight it out, the two of them, and Spock has always got to choose which one is which. And every time—Crest is amazed by this—every single time he made the right choice. But what if, Crest thinks, what if one time Spock made the wrong choice? What if one time by mistake he picked the evil one? How would anyone ever know?

WHEN SISTER MARITA PAYNE
hurt after listening to someone's troubles, it was a good sign. If, alone in her apartment, she broke into tears while feeding Nickels, or if on the bus to work she had to crush her hankie to her face, she knew she'd done some good.

They came to her about their husbands, their children, their money troubles. They came about their infidelities, their terrors, their failures, and in the basement of the East Liberty A.M.E. Zion, in the empty Sunday school room after choir practice, Sister Marita held their hands and listened, nodding in sympathy, trying not to interrupt.

“I'm not sure about Harold anymore,” her cousin Jackie said, and though Sister Marita had never married, she knew precisely what Jackie was going through. How many countless husbands had strayed before him? And Harold, who'd always been quiet, a gentle man; she felt bad for him. She wouldn't have expected it from him, he seemed so steady, such a good provider. But their younger boy,
Chris, had had that accident, and now he was in a wheelchair. A young man, it was a shame. And Eugene just out of jail. Sister Marita knew what a burden that could be on a father. How much hope folks had in their children.