Joshua: A Brooklyn Tale (5 page)

CHAPTER 5
 

Joshua was barely twelve when he first noticed Celeste as something more than his best friend’s younger sister. She was eleven. Among the five black girls in her class at school, there were two with whom she was close friends. For years the three of them were inseparable, but recently she had taken to hanging out with Jerome and Joshua. Joshua didn’t object.

Jerome felt otherwise. He sensed her attraction to Joshua and didn’t know how to handle it. He didn’t want her hanging around boys, especially his best friend.

“What’s that you got there on your lips?” Jerome exclaimed one day as Celeste came out of her bedroom. It was the first time she’d worn lipstick. “If Mama saw you look like that, she’d make your lips so fat, you’d need a ton of that stuff to cover ’em.”

“Well, she don’t see me, and you ain’t gonna tell her!” Celeste responded, while throwing a devilish smile Joshua’s way.

Joshua responded with a nod and a wink. She looked good, he thought, she
always
looked good. And the lipstick was just the touch needed for her high cheek bones and large chestnut eyes. It made her perfect.

It was the middle of July. The three of them had been spending most summer days together, watching TV, playing handball in the park, and doing nothing. Just a few months earlier she was in pigtails. Now, her full wavy hair fell down below her nicely developing breasts, and skimpy shorts revealed her shapely long legs. Joshua was stricken.

He’d known Celeste and Jerome for three years now. In that time, he’d managed to stay out of trouble. Jerome had also come into his own. Since that fight with the Irish kids, no one messed with him.

Another change that had taken place was the influx of more black families into the neighborhood. Three more had moved into their building alone. Even Dubrow’s Cafeteria, formerly an exclusively white establishment on the corner of Utica and Eastern Parkway, was showing more color at its tables. And black teenagers were now regularly seen strutting their stuff on the basketball courts in Lincoln Terrace Park.

“You boys wanna go out to the park now?” Celeste asked, again throwing Joshua a cutesy grin.

“We ain’t gonna go nowhere till you take that there shit off your face!” Jerome said. His heavy body shook when he was angry.

“Well I guess I’m gonna go alone,” she replied.

“I said… you ain’t going nowhere!”

“Yea, well what you gonna do, beat me?”

He was wordless and stunned. She had mentioned the one thing he would never, could never, do. Not to her.

“Well, are
you
coming?” she asked Joshua as she walked out the door.

“She shouldn’t go alone,” Joshua said defensively, holding his palms up as he followed after her.

Jerome didn’t move.

Celeste and Joshua left the building and were about to cross the street toward the park. It was the end of July, a hot and sticky Brooklyn summer day. Joshua stepped off the sidewalk and Celeste grabbed his hand to hold him back. He looked at her, bewildered.

“I don’t really feel like another boring day in that stupid park,” she said.

Joshua didn’t reply; he suspected something was up.

“How ’bout we go someplace else?”

“Like where?” There was an underpinning of sarcasm in his tone. He was not in an adventurous mood.

“I say we go take a look at your old neighborhood. I ain’t never been there.”

“And you ain’t never gonna be, neither!”

“You know you sound like my big fat brother and mean old father when you talk that way. I know you’re not like them, but you sure are tryin’ to be. So why don’t you be the nice boy I know you can be, and take me where I wanna go.”

“Why
there
?”

“See where you came from. I hear you talking all the time, how different it is from around these parts, and I wanna see what all your fussing’s about.”

“And you just gotta do
something
you know you ain’t supposed to be doing.”

“And what if I do?” she asked.

“First the lipstick, then this. What’s next?”

“I don’t know. I’ll just have to think of something, won’t I, now?” She took his hand and led him in the direction of Eastern Parkway.

“Now, wait just a minute!” he said, resisting her tug. “It’s dangerous over there. I ain’t going!”

They stopped and stared at each other for a moment.

“I’m surprised to see you’re chicken,” she said. “I thought you were more man than that,” she said as she released his hand and started walking away.

“Wait!” He caught up to her. “This ain’t right, but if you’re going, I’m going,” he said, his reluctance still apparent.

She took his hand again. He would have gone anywhere so long as she did that. “It just ain’t right,” he repeated as they went.

“That’s why it’s so much fun.”

They walked to Eastern Parkway, then west one block to Utica Avenue. When they came to Utica, they crossed the Parkway and continued north. The north side of Eastern Parkway was much blacker than where they lived. Most of the shops along Utica Avenue, between St. Marks Place and Pacific Street, had black proprietors, and most of the people on the street spoke with island accents. At one point, Celeste started mimicking some of them under her breath. Joshua hit her lightly on the arm, and said, “You better stop that before someone hears you!”

“And what’re they gonna do if they hear me?”

He looked at her the same way Jerome had in the house.

It was a few more blocks to Atlantic Avenue. “You still wanna do this?” he asked, hoping for a change of heart. He pointed to the other side of the Avenue. “You see, over there’s a whole different breed of people. Not like these here polite island types. The folks over there are
bad
, through and through, mean and crazy.”

“But you ain’t mean and crazy, and you’re from there,” she pointed out.

“Just tell me one thing,” he asked as they were about to cross. “Why you have to do this? You know if your daddy finds out, he’s gonna beat me worse than he beats you.”

“I ain’t afraid of him. He don’t scare me! He’s gonna beat me no matter what I do, so what difference does it make? Now I wanna do this, and I wanna to do it with
you
.” She knew that last part was all she needed to say to turn him into putty, and strangely enough, he knew it too.

They crossed the avenue, continued one block to Fulton Street, and another block west to Stuyvesant Avenue. Then they walked up Stuyvesant, deeper into his old neighborhood. The buildings began to look like tenements: broken windows, dilapidated fire escapes, and graffiti filled walls. Celeste seemed astonished.

“I think people are looking at us,” she observed.

Joshua had noticed the same thing a few blocks earlier. It was obvious that they didn’t belong. He was confident that no one had recognized him yet, but it was only a matter of time. Something bad was bound to happen; he just knew it. He had to take care of her and protect her, and he was starting to realize that this was probably something he would always have to do.

They had approached the intersection of Stuyvesant and Monroe Street when Joshua recognized someone standing on the corner. It was Bones, one of Big Bob’s henchmen. He had earned his name from being so thin, his skeleton practically protruded through his flesh. But he wasn’t brittle; on the contrary, he was a mean, tall creature, easily more than six feet, with a square face and long sideburns covering most of an old scar from a childhood knife-fight. He stood there alone, as if waiting for someone, dressed in one of his usual outfits—white linen suit, straw hat, and alligator boots.

Joshua quickly turned his face to the window of a grocery store, thinking that if Bones was here, Big Bob wouldn’t be far. He tried to hide his fear from Celeste.

“What’re you looking at?” she asked.

“Nothing really, just this store here.”

From the corner of his eye he noticed a woman in a tight black dress and dirty blond wig approach Bones. The woman moved clumsily. Her dress was scanty, revealing plenty of cleavage and leg, and hung from one shoulder.

Joshua signaled Celeste to be quiet. She sensed something was wrong and stood still. He took her hand, and held it tight as he watched the woman hand something to Bones. Bones, in turn, placed something in the woman’s hand, and looked around to make sure no one was watching.

Joshua understood that the woman was one of Big Bob’s working girls, a drug addicted hooker delivering money to her pimp and supplier. It was hard for him to imagine that he had once, not so long ago, been a part of all this. He stood frozen, afraid to move, grasping Celeste’s hand. He needed to think quickly, and the only idea he could come up with seemed a bad one.

The woman walked off, but it wasn’t a few seconds before another woman approached. A similar transaction. Bones was having a profitable day.

“I’m real thirsty,” Joshua said softly. It was the truth. He and Celeste had walked over a mile, and the heat was unbearable. He was also trying to get her into the store, figuring that once inside, they would have some time to come up with a plan. The only problem was that the store had its own dangers.

The man behind the counter was attending to another customer and didn’t notice them. It was a small store with only three aisles of goods and a cooler in the back. Joshua led Celeste down the last aisle to the cooler.

“You been in here before?” she asked.

“I’ve been lots of places.”

“I bet you have. I bet you been places and done things I ain’t never dreamed of.”

“Here,” he said, handing her a Pepsi. He took another for himself. “Come on, lets go,” he continued, gesturing towards the counter in the front of the store. He was desperately trying to devise a plan to get them home.

Celeste followed him to the counter as the front door to the store opened and Bones walked in. Joshua could have kicked himself a thousand times. He knew it was a bad idea to have entered the store to begin with; at least on the street there were places to run. And how could he have been so stupid, choosing one of Big Bob’s fronts as a place to hide? He grabbed Celeste, turned around, and hid his face as Bones sauntered in their direction. Celeste stood stiffly by his side. Bones came closer, and passed by, ignoring them, continuing on toward a metal door in the rear of the store. He pressed a buzzer, and a slot opened in the top of the door. A pair of eyes appeared, and a voice asked, “That you Bones?”

“No, it’s the fucking tooth fairy,” Bones replied, his voice deep and raspy. The door opened just enough to let him slip in, then closed behind him.

“What was that all about?” Celeste whispered.

“Nothing you wanna know,” Joshua said. They needed to get outside and make a run for it, but there was still one more obstacle: the old man behind the counter. Joshua’s only hope was that the old man, who had a famously feeble mind, wouldn’t remember him.

The old man was alone. He looked at Joshua and Celeste as they approached. A smile came to his face.

“Well, well, well,” the old man roared, “look what we have here.” His eyes fixed on Joshua. “It’s been a long time, Peanut. A lo—ng time.”

“Yes, Mr. Powell, it has,” Joshua responded, his voice trembling. He knew about the buzzer under the counter, but the old man’s hands were still in sight.

Powell was tall, well built, and had a full head of frizzy gray hair. Bloodshot eyes. Slurred speech. And a twitch on the left side of his face. The way Joshua had heard it, he was in a drunken brawl over some woman back in the forties and had gotten hit in the head one time too many. Now, he managed this store, and served as a look-out for the boys in the back.

“Where you been hiding?” Powell asked as Joshua handed him a quarter for the sodas.

“Here and there,” Joshua answered, trying to appear undaunted. Powell was always a little slow, and Joshua was banking on that.

“Big Bob know you back?”

“Big Bob knows everything that goes on, don’t he?”

“He know what folks tell him.” Doubting.

“Well then, I guess someone best tell him. I suppose maybe that someone’s gonna be you.” Powell’s hands were still visible. “If you give me a pen and paper, I’ll write down where Big Bob can find me, in case he’s gotta job for me.” Joshua was hoping to distract Powell into looking for something to write with, so Celeste and he could dash out. It worked. The instant Powell turned around to find a pad, Joshua grabbed Celeste and bolted out the door.

They ran just about all the way home. Celeste, surprisingly, followed without uttering a word, until they crossed Eastern Parkway and finally stopped to rest.

“What was that about?” she asked, catching her breath between words.

“It’s a long story.”

“I like long stories.”

He looked at her, and decided to tell her. She listened attentively, mesmerized, her eyes aglow with interest as he shared it all, the sordid details of his past, the five hundred dollars now hidden behind the mirror in his room, everything. He went on for more than a half hour, and she was wordless the entire time. It became apparent to her how much he’d risked by taking her there, and that the only reason he’d done it was because she had wanted it. She took his hand, pulled him closer to her, and embraced him. She kissed him softly on the cheek. He felt a bit embarrassed, standing there, on an open street corner, that way. But he didn’t mind.