Feathers (2 page)

I gave Samantha a look but she wouldn’t give me a look back.

Everybody at our school got lunch for free except Maribel Tanks—but my mama said that was just Maribel’s mama putting on airs. Maribel’s mama owned Tanks Groceries, but we didn’t shop there because the prices were way too high. Even for things like eggs, which should have cost regular everywhere—at Tanks they cost twenty cents more and Mama said that’s twenty cents more than what she was gonna pay for them. She said those high prices were just more Tanks putting on airs. Mama said one day the Tanks were gonna go put on so many airs they’d just up and float away. I don’t know about all that, but when Mama got to talking about people, I liked to listen. My grandmother always said Mama had the gift of gab and that I inherited it. I didn’t know about all that either. I though of myself as more of a listener than a talker. Except with stuff like math and science and geography. Then I’m a starer-out-the-window kind of person.

Maribel took another loud sip and turned to look at the boy. He was sitting by himself at the end of a table, just looking down at his tray as he stuffed food into his mouth. The sadness tried to creep back up in me, so I started talking real fast to push it down again.

“You’d think they’d assign him a partner or something,” I said.

“Like who,” Maribel said.
“You?”

“No! Like another boy or something. That doesn’t even make sense, him sitting by himself like that. All new and everything.”

Samantha nodded.

“Then go sit with him,” Maribel said. “Go be a Good Samaritan. We collected coats at the store for poor kids—that’s my good deed for the year.” She looked over at the boy again. “That coat he’s wearing looks like one of the ones we gave out too. Don’t know why he’s wearing it in this hot lunchroom, though.”

“Oh, hush the hole in your head already.” I took another bite of burger and glared at her while I chewed.

“Well, at least I only got
one
hole in my head,” she said. Samantha smiled at that even though it wasn’t even a tiny bit funny.

“He came into the store yesterday,” Maribel said. “By himself. Maybe he likes it that way. And he bought a ham and cheese hero with extra mayo, some cupcakes and a soda, that’s all. And then when he paid for it, he used mostly pennies. That made my mama so mad!”

“What’s wrong with pennies,” I said, taking another big bite before even swallowing all of the last one. “Pennies are money like anything else.”

Maribel sighed—one of those trying-to-sound-like-a-grown-up sounds. “Oh Frannie.”

That’s all. Just
Oh Frannie.
With all that air around it.

“ ‘Oh Frannie’ nothing. Pennies are money. Oh Maribel Tanks.”

Maribel just rolled her eyes at me, then let them slide back over to the boy.

“Pennies
are
money,” Samantha said. “You got a hundred, you got a dollar.”

“Yeah,” Maribel said. “Try counting out
two hundred and ten
of them. And have your hands stinking with that old sweaty penny smell.” She made a face, wiping her hand against her shirt like the smell was still on it. “Anyway, it’s strange—you don’t see white boys at this school. Much as I hate to say it, Trevor’s right—that boy belongs across the highway with the other white people.”

“It’s the nineteen seventies,” I said. “Not the fifties. There’s no more segregation, remember?”

“Try telling that to the people on the other side of the highway,” Maribel said. “Or the people on this side. It’s strange. Strange that he’s coming to this side where he doesn’t belong.”

It
was
strange, but I wasn’t going to agree with Maribel about it.

“Who belongs anywhere?” Samantha said. She unfolded a tissue to blow her nose. When she blew it, she leaned down and away from the table like I wouldn’t have thought of doing. She even excused herself afterward. “I mean,” she said, sitting back up and tucking the tissue all delicate-like into her bag, “he belongs where he belongs. If he ended up here, then that’s where he belongs.”

Maribel rolled her eyes again. “Well, if he comes into my store with those pennies again, I’m not taking them. He better go find some
dollars
somewhere.” Maribel’s hair was straightened and curled under, hanging down her back and over her shoulders. She ran her fingers through it while she stared at the boy, her eyebrows bent all out of shape.

Maribel was Rayray’s cousin on his daddy’s side, but the only resemblance between them was they both had really smooth brown skin. My own skin was dark brown too, but it wasn’t all smooth and pretty like Rayray’s and Maribel’s. It was just regular. Like my hair. Mama had tried to put some heat to it to straighten out the kink just once. When I looked in the mirror after she’d done it, I felt like a stranger to myself. After that, I just let my hair do what it wanted to do and mostly kept it in braids. Once in a while, I’d pick it out into an Afro like the teenagers wore, but if Mama saw it that way, she snatched it right back into a braid, telling me if I wanted to wear my hair like a teenager, I needed to
be
a teenager. Sometimes she didn’t make the least bit of sense. The Afro pick had a red, black and green Black Power fist on it. Mostly I just kept it in my back pocket with the fist sticking out. That was the way a lot of kids carried their Afro picks. Mama frowned when she saw it.

“It’s not
your
store,” I said. “It’s your mama’s.”

“It’s
my
inheritance.”

I guess that’s better than inheriting a gab gift, but I didn’t say anything. After that, we ate mostly without doing a whole lot of talking about the boy.

Samantha ate her food delicately, all ladylike. Every way that she was ladylike, I wasn’t. I looked down at my turtleneck—it was light blue, but a big drop of greasy ketchup had spilled on it. I took a deep breath. Sometimes, I wished Samantha and me could trade places and I could see what it felt like to be like her, to be all delicate and careful and sure like that.

I moved a little bit closer to her, pulled my napkin off my tray and wiped at the stain. It just smeared to a light brown. Maribel looked at the spot, made a face and looked away.

Later on, when we were all out in the school yard, me and Samantha split a chocolate cupcake. Just as we were finishing up, standing there licking the frosting off of our fingers, Rayray, Trevor, Chris and some other guys went over to the boy. He was sitting on the ground with his arms wrapped around his knees, not even caring that the ground was all wet. He had on dark brown boots and was kicking his heel into the snow, just minding his own business.

“What’s your name anyway,” Rayray said.

And the boy looked at him—kind of squinty-eyed—like a million things were going on inside his own head that were miles and miles away from all of us. When I was a baby, Mama said old people would look at me and say, “Oh Lord, this child’s got an old spirit. She’s been here before.”
It was the way you looked at everyone and everything,
Mama said.
Like you were taking every little bit and piece of it in.
I’d never really understood what they were talking about until now.

“My
boy
Rayray asked you your name,” Trevor said. “You deaf or something?” Rayray started hitting at his own ears and making strange mumbling sounds.

I flinched a little bit. It was no good when people said things like
you deaf or something.
My brother was deaf and deaf
was
something.

I leaned against the school yard fence with Samantha, both of us watching but neither of us saying anything. Samantha took a napkin from her bag and rubbed the last of the frosting from her fingers. She offered it to me but I just held out my hand, showing her how clean I’d licked it.

Most days, I broke away from the fence and went and jumped rope or played handball with other kids. But Samantha was always by the fence when I returned. Sometimes, she was bent over her tiny Bible. I could see Maribel out in the school yard, doing “Down, Down Baby” with three other girls.

Down, down baby

Down by the rollercoaster

Sweet, sweet baby I will never let you go,

Jimmy, jimmy coco-pop. Jimmy jimmy pow!

I know a lady . . .

Maribel’s hand went the wrong way and she was out. I couldn’t help smiling. When I looked back, Trevor was still talking junk.

The sign for
believe
flashed into my head—the way Sean signed it—his pointer finger against the side of his head like he’s saying “think,” then his hands coming together—like the sign for
marry.
I stood there thinking, for the first time, about how perfect that word was—to have a thought in your head and then to marry it, to take it into your heart forever . . .

“I can’t believe Trevor’s still messing with that boy,” I whispered, hoping I hadn’t just made the sign. Sometimes I did that, talked to myself in sign language.

Rayray made some stupid fake signs with his hands, then grunted. “I guess we gotta talk to him like a deaf guy, huh?” he said. The other boys laughed. But when Rayray looked over and saw me watching, he stopped, put his hands in his pockets and got quiet.

The boy just looked up at all of them. Then he did something amazing. He took his hands out of his pocket and signed,
No, I’m not deaf.
Then he looked over at me and smiled—like he’d known all along I was standing over by the fence, watching him. I looked away real fast, hoping he hadn’t seen the surprise on my face.

“Are those real signs?” Samantha asked me. “Or is he just being jive and faking it?”

“It’s real,” I said. “He’s saying he’s not deaf, that’s all.”

“Well, how does he know that?”

“How am I supposed to know? I don’t know that boy!”

Maribel had come back over to the fence and was standing on the other side of Samantha. “It’s not like you have to be a
genius
or something to know some signs,” she said.

But Samantha looked at the boy like she was seeing something new and magical in him.

“You look like Jesus,” Trevor said. Then he kicked the boy’s boot and said, “You better learn how to answer a soul brother when they be talking to you, Jesus Boy.”

“He
does
look like Jesus,” Samantha said slowly.

“Kind of, I guess,” Maribel said. “There used to be this boy at the Casey School who looked like Michael Jackson. But he couldn’t even dance.”

I rolled my eyes. “Maribel Tanks. If you didn’t have a neck, your head would just float away.”

Samantha smiled but she didn’t take her eyes off the Jesus Boy.

He was looking down at the ground. After a few minutes, he lifted his head a little bit and stared calmly past everything and everybody—his lips pressed together, his hair lifting up in the wind. I tried to see all the things he was seeing. But all I saw was the highway out past the school yard. A tiny dot of an airplane. The sun slipping back behind some clouds. And miles and miles of wet, gray sky.

3

Imagine,
my brother signed.
Imagine if somebody built a bridge right outside our window and we could just walk across the highway and be on the other side.

We were sitting together on the window seat, staring out at the wet snow, the gray sky and the cars moving along the highway—tiny and slow in the distance. I was thinking about the Jesus Boy. There weren’t white people on this side of the highway. You didn’t notice until one appeared. And then you saw all the brown and light brown everywhere. And then you started to wonder. The first time I asked Mama about it, she said,
They don’t want to live over here.
And the way she said it made me wonder what was so wrong with
our
side of the highway.

Why would we want to cross the highway, anyway?
I asked Sean.
What would we want to see?

What wouldn’t you want to see?
Sean said.

I wish I could explain the sign for
what.
With sign language, there are different ways of moving your face and hands for the same word. Like there’s
what
that means “Shut up, kid, you’re bothering me.” And there’s
what
that’s “really interested in what somebody wants to say to you.” You do sort of the same thing with your hands, but your face does other stuff.

I like this side,
I said.

Sean kept staring out the window.

Maybe if you were standing somewhere else and looking over here, you’d think the houses weren’t real special. The way some of them could use new windows or some new paint. The way the doors hung off of some and other ones had some cardboard sometimes where a window should be.

Or maybe you’d see our apartment building and wonder about the names written on it or the way, just outside the fifth floor, someone’s laundry had frozen on the line.

It was snowing hard again. I lifted the window a bit and stuck my hand out, caught some flakes in it and licked them off. Sean shivered and pulled the window closed.

You’re crazy,
he said.

What’s wrong with walking down to the overpass?

If you wanted to cross the highway from where we lived, you had to pray first. Then you had to run real fast. Or you could walk a half mile down and then there’s an overpass that takes you to that other side. Either way, it was a lot of trouble.

It’s different,
Sean said.
I mean, like imagine if there was a bridge from every single window in the world to some whole new place. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it? It would mean we could all just step out of our worlds into these whole new ones.

I shook my head.
It’s fine here. It’s beautiful.

It
was
beautiful. Somebody had written some names on our building, and even though all the grown-ups complained about it and tried to wash them off, I secretly loved the bright colors of the spray paint—the way the names looked super-big written out like that—like some giant had come along with giant markers. And when I looked at the windows that had pieces of cardboard trying to fill in the places where the glass should be, I thought about the way the sun had to climb over and through the spaces where the cardboard wasn’t to sneak into that house. And when the sun found its way through, I figured it left these beautiful bright yellow lines over everything inside.