Keeper of Dreams (58 page)

“Bag of weed your mama’s black ass,” said the smaller boy. “I bet they rolled up broccoli or something anyway, they ain’t gone give
us
nothing.”

“Don’t you go talking about my mama’s ass, Ceese.”

Which might have led to an argument, seeing how they were both on edge and a little pissed off at each other, but Ceese picked up the baby and it wiggled and mewed and he thought, Just like a baby kitten, and then he remembered how Raymo once took a baby kitten and stepped on its head just to see it squish. Ceese decided not to stick around, even though the thing with the kitten was a couple of years ago and Raymo had puked his guts out and threw the brain-covered shoe away and got a licking for “losing” it. You just never knew what Raymo was going to do. As his mama often told him at the top of her voice, he wasn’t the kind of guy who ever seemed to “learn his lesson.”

So Ceese took off with the aborted baby and ran all the way home and when he showed it to
his
mama she screamed and ran next door and woke up Miz Smitcher, who was a night shift nurse, and Miz Smitcher called the emergency room to alert them, and then put Ceese, still holding the baby, in the back seat of her Civic, belted him in, and drove like a crazy woman all the way to the hospital, cussing the whole time about how people ought to have a license to own a uterus.

“People so crazy they won’t let them buy a gun can go right out and make a baby without asking anybody’s permission, and when they
get
a baby they just throw it away.”

Then Miz Smitcher had a sudden ugly thought and leaned over the seat to glare at Ceese. “That ain’t
your
baby, is it, boy?”

“Watch the road, dammit!” yelled Ceese, seeing how the big truck in front of them had come to a stop and Miz Smitcher hadn’t.

Miz Smitcher slammed on the brake so fast that Ceese got flung forward till his chin smacked against the seat, and of course the baby had already flown out of his hands, bounced off the back of the front seat, and dropped like a rock onto the floor.

“It’s dead!” screamed Ceese.

“Pick it up, you coprocephalic!” shouted Miz Smitcher.

Ceese leaned over and picked up the baby.

“Is it all right?” said Miz Smitcher.

“Ain’t you gone ask if
I’m
all right?” demanded Ceese.

“I
know
you all right, cause you giving me sass and acting stupid! Now what about that baby!”

“He’s breathing,” said Ceese. “You got so many McDonald’s wrappers on the floor, I guess he didn’t hit all that hard.”

“That baby plain determined not to die,” said Miz Smitcher. She flipped off the people behind her, who were honking their brains out. Then she turned on her blinkers like she thought that would make her car an ambulance, caught up with the truck, whipped around it, and kept on going at top speed till she lurched to a stop in the turnaround at the emergency entrance.

Which is how Mack Street happened not to die under a pile of leaves in Baldwin Park, and instead got fostered out to Ceese’s neighborhood.

Well, technically, he was fostered to Miz Smitcher, who took to calling him her little miracle, though more likely she felt guilty about jamming the brakes and throwing him onto the floor and she wanted to make sure if there was some brain damage or something, she’d be able to make it up to him.

But Miz Smitcher worked nights and slept days, and baby Mack slept nights and yelled his lungs out while she was trying to sleep, so it turned out he was sort of fostered to whatever mother was home and willing to take him. Not a one of them took him to heart the way Miz Smitcher did, so mostly he just lay around until somebody remembered to feed him or wipe his butt, except when somebody’s kid decided he’d be a great baby doll or a cool squirmy football and incorporated him into a game.

Some folks said that that was why Miz Smitcher gave him the last name Street—because he was raised by most every family on the block. Wasn’t a soul asked, and so not a soul was told, that Street was Miz Smitcher’s last name before she got married and divorced, and Mack was the nickname of her favorite uncle. Mack didn’t find it out till after she died and he went through her things. She just wasn’t much of a talker or a self-explainer. If she loved you, you’d have to guess it from her cooking and buying clothes for you, cause you’d never know it from a word or a touch.

Still, despite the lack of affection in Mack’s life, he certainly didn’t lack for stimulation. Being fed mud pies or flying through the air as a forward pass is bound to keep a baby somewhat alert. By the time he started school he was pretty much fearless. He’d take any dare, seeing as how there was nothing he could be asked to eat or do that he hadn’t already eaten or done worse. “There’s an angel watching over that boy,” said Miz Smitcher, when somebody told her of another of the crazy things Mack did.

Dare-taking was what he did to win a place, however strange it was, among the kids at school. It wasn’t where he lived.

For Mack, the real excitement in his life came in dreams. It wasn’t till he was seven years old that he first found out that other people only dreamed when they were asleep. For Mack, dreams had a way of popping up day or night. It was the reason the other kids sometimes saw him slow down in the middle of a game and go sort of slack-jawed, staring off into space. When that happened, kids would just say, “Mack’s gone,” and go off and continue their game without him.

Most dreams he could shrug off and pay no heed to—they weren’t worth missing out on recess time or getting barked at by grumpy teachers in school, the kind who actually expected their lessons to be listened to.

But some dreams captivated him, even though he didn’t understand them.

There was one in particular, it started when Mack was ten. He was in a vehicle—he wasn’t sure it was a car, because a car shouldn’t be able to drive on roads like this. It started out on a dirt road, with ragged-looked trees around, kind of a dry California kind of woods. The road began to sink down while the ground stayed level on both sides, till they were dirt
walls or steep hills, and sometimes buttes. And the road began to get rocky, only the rocks were all the size of cobblestones, rounded like river rocks, and they hurtled along—Mack and whoever else was in the vehicle—as if the rocks were pavement.

The rocks glistened black in the sunlight, like they’d been wet recently. The cobbly road started to go up again, steeper and steeper, and then it narrowed suddenly and they were almost jammed in between high cliffs with a thin trickly waterfall coming from the crease where the cliffs joined together.

So they backed out—and here was where Mack knew it wasn’t him driving, because he didn’t know how to back a car. If it was a car.

Backed out and headed down until the canyon was wide enough that they could turn around, and then they rushed along until they found the place where they had gone wrong. When the road reached the lowest point, there was a narrow passage off to the left leading farther down, and now Mack realized that this wasn’t no road, this was a river that just happened to be dry. And the second he thought of that, he heard distant thunder and he knew it was raining up in the high hills and that little trickle of a waterfall was about to become a torrent, and there’d be water coming down the other branch of the river, too, and here they were trapped in this narrow canyon barely wide enough for their vehicle, it was going to fill up with water and throw them down the canyon, bashing against the cliffs, rounding them off just like one of the river rocks.

Sure enough here comes the water, and it’s just as bad as he thought, spinning head over heels, getting slammed this way and that, and out the windows all he can see is roiling water and stones and then the dead bodies of the other people in the vehicle as they got washed out and crushed and broken against the canyon walls and suddenly . . .

The vehicle shoots out into open space, and there’s no cliffs anymore, just air on every side and a lake below him and the vehicle plunges into the lake and sinks lower and lower and Mack thinks, I got to get out of here, but he can’t find a way to open it, not a door, not a window. Deeper and deeper until the vehicle comes to rest on the bottom of the lake with fish swimming up and bumping into the windows and then a naked woman comes up, not sexy or anything, just naked because she never heard of clothes, she swims up and looks at him and smiles and when she
touches the window, it breaks and the water slowly oozes in and surrounds him and he swims out and she kisses his cheek and says, Welcome home, I missed you so much.

Mack didn’t have to take a psychology class to guess what this dream was about. It was about getting born way too soon. It was about getting to the lowest point, completely alone, and then he’d find his mother, she’d come to him and open the door and let him come back into her life.

He believed his dream so much that he was sure he knew now what his mother looked like, skin so black it was almost blue, but with a thinnish nose, like those men and women of Sudan in the
African Peoples
book at school. Maybe I
am
African, he thought. Not African-American, like the other black kids in his class, but truly African without a drop of white in him.

But then why would his mother have thrown him away?

Maybe it wasn’t his mother. Maybe she was drugged and the baby was taken out of her and carried off and hidden and she doesn’t even know he was ever alive, but Mack knew he would find her someday, because the dream was so real it had to be true.

Later he told the dream to a therapist—the one they sent him to about his “seizures,” as they called those trances when he stopped to watch a dream. The therapist listened and nodded wisely and then explained to him, “Mack, dreams come from deep inside you, some chain of meaning so deep it has no words or pictures, so your brain dresses it up in pictures that it already knows. So from deep inside there’s this idea of going down a passage that’s both a river and a road, so your brain makes it into a canyon and when it starts to push you and push you, your brain puts water in the dream, forcing you out, and when the deep inner story says that you plunge out into air, then you see it as a plunge out of a canyon, and then who comes and saves you? Your mother.”

“So you’re saying this is the way my brain makes sense of my memory of being born,” said Mack.

“That’s one possible interpretation.”

“There’s another?”

“I haven’t thought of it yet, but there might be.”

“But it’s my mother, anyway, like I always thought.”

“I believe that in dreams, if it looks like your mother and you think it’s your mother, it’s your mother.”

“Cool,” said Mack. All he cared about was that he knew what his mother looked like. Mack was as black as they come, but his mother was even blacker, and that was cool. But if she was under water, then that wasn’t so cool. He hoped that his dream didn’t mean that she was drowned. Maybe it just meant she swam a lot.

Or maybe it didn’t mean a damn thing.

That was the only one of his strong dreams in which he felt like himself, though, and the therapist didn’t have any explanation for that. “What do you mean, you don’t feel like yourself?”

“I mean that in the dreams, I’m not me. Except that one about the road that turns out to be a river.”

“Well, who are you then?”

“Somebody different every time.”

“Tell me about those dreams,” the therapist said.

“I can’t,” said Mack. “That wouldn’t be right.”

“What do you mean? You can tell me anything.”

“I can tell you
my
dreams,” said Mack. “But these ones ain’t mine.”

The therapist thought that was totally crazy reasoning. “They’re in your head, Mack. That makes them yours!”

And Mack couldn’t explain why he knew that the therapist was wrong, and they weren’t his own.

He just knew that when he dreamed about finding himself as a baby, about his hands reaching down and picking up this infant, it wasn’t his dream, it was Ceese’s. Ceese still lived in the neighborhood, but he didn’t have much to do with Mack—it was Raymo who told the story all the time about how he and Ceese found Mack. The way Raymo told it, Ceese wanted to leave the baby and smoke weed, but Raymo insisted that they take the baby back and save its life, making out how he was the hero. But in the dream that came into Mack’s mind, he saw the real story, how Ceese was the one who did the saving, and Raymo wanted to leave the baby there in the leaves.

But Mack didn’t talk to anybody about his dream of the true story, because they’d think he was crazy. Not that they didn’t already, but Mack knew that if they got to thinking he was
really
crazy, they’d lock him away somewhere. And the worst part of
that
idea was, what kind of dreams would they stick in his head there in the crazy house?

Cause Mack knew it was other people putting these dreams into his mind. Most of the time he didn’t know whose dream he was having, though some of them, he knew they had to come from a teacher, and others, he had a pretty good guess who in the neighborhood was having this dream.

The thing was, he didn’t know if they actually had the same dream, at least not exactly the way he saw it. Because the dreams he saw, they were always so sad, that if other people really knew they had such dreams inside them, how could they get through a single day without crying?