Keeper of Dreams (59 page)

Mack didn’t cry for them, though. Because it wasn’t his dream.

Like the Johnsons, the ones whose daughter got brain-damaged when she half-drowned in their waterbed, Mack didn’t know if the dream he caught from their house was Mr. Johnson’s or Mrs. Johnson’s or maybe it was Tamika’s, a dream left over from back when she was a pretty girl who lived for swimming. In the dream she was diving and swimming in a pool of water in the jungle, with a waterfall, like in a movie. She kept diving deeper and deeper and then one time when she came up, there was a thick plastic barrier on the top of the water and she was scared for just a second, but then she saw that her daddy and mommy were lying on top of the plastic and she poked them and they woke right up and saw her and smiled at her and pulled open the plastic and lifted her out.

If Mack hadn’t known something about Tamika’s story—or at least the story Mr. Johnson told about how it happened, before they took him off to jail—he might have thought this was just another version of his own dream of being born. Maybe he would have thought, This is how birth dreams come to folks who weren’t aborted and left to die in the park under a bunch of leaves.

But instead he saw it as maybe Mr. Johnson’s dream of how he wished it had happened, instead of having Tamika trapped under the water all that time till cells in her brain started dying before he realized where she was and cut into the mattress and pulled her out. If only he’d found her right away, the first time she bumped into him from inside the waterbed.

Or maybe it was Mrs. Johnson’s dream, since she never felt her daughter inside the mattress at all. Maybe it’s how
she
wished it had
happened, both of them feeling her poking them so they believed it right away and got her out in time.

Or maybe it was Tamika’s dream. Maybe this was how she remembered it, in the confusion of her damaged brain. Diving and swimming, deeper and deeper, until she came up inside her parents’ waterbed and they did indeed pull her out and hug her and fuss over her and kiss her like in the dream. The hug and kiss of CPR, but to Tamika, maybe that’s what love felt like now.

The thing is, it was a good dream. Maybe when he woke up from it, Mr. Johnson cried—if he was the one who dreamed it. But it made Mack feel good. The diving and swimming were wonderful. And so was the opening of the plastic barrier and the mother and father waiting to hug the swimming girl.

After Mack talked to the therapist, even though he never told this dream, he tried to think of it the way the therapist did. This dream has a mother in it, and a father, so maybe it’s really my own dream about a mother and father, only I think it
isn’t
my dream because my real mother and father rejected me. So I had this deep dream about opening up a barrier and finding myself surrounded with loves and kisses, only on top of that dream, my brain supplied some of the details from the real story of how Tamika got half drowned in the waterbed. Maybe it’s all me, and I’m just sort of twisted up about who’s who inside my own head.

Around and around Mack went, thinking about how his brain worked—or didn’t work—and why he had these dreams, and how he might be getting dreams sent to him from other people.

Until the day when Yo Yo moved in to Baldwin Hills.

She wasn’t down in the flat, where Mack lived, and all his friends. She bought a house up in the hills, near the top of the winding road that led to the very place in the park where Mack had been found. She had doctors and lawyers and big-shot accountants and a movie agent and a semi-famous director living on her street. There was a lot of money there, and expensive cars, and fine tailored suits and evening gowns, and people with responsibilities.

But Yo Yo—or Yolanda White, as she was listed in the phone book—she wasn’t like them. She wasn’t trying to look respectable like those other folks, who, as Raymo said, were trying to “get everything white
folks had in the hopes that white folks won’t be able to tell the difference, which wasn’t
never
gone happen.” Yo Yo rode a motorcycle—a big old hog of a cycle, which made noise like a train as she spiraled up the winding roads at any hour of the day or night. Yo Yo didn’t wear those fine fashions, she was in jeans so tight around a body so sleek and lush it made teenage boys like Mack fantasize about the day the threads just gave way and those jeans just peeled open like a split banana skin and she’d wheel that bike on over and get off it all naked with the jeans spilling on down and she’d say, “Teenage boy with concupiscent eyes, I wonder if you’d like to take a ride with me.”

That wasn’t no
dream
, Mack knew, that was just him wishing. Yo Yo had that effect on a boy, and Mack wasn’t so strange he could get confused about the difference between his wishes and Yo Yo’s dream.

He knew Yo Yo’s dream when it came to him. In fact, he’d pretty much been waiting for it, since he was pretty familiar with all the regular dreams in his neighborhood, and the ones that turned up only at school. All the deep dreams that kept coming back the same. He noticed easy enough when the new dream came on a night when that motorcycle echoed through the neighborhood and somebody shouted out a string of ugly words that probably woke more babies than the motorcycle he was cussing about.

The new dream was a hero dream, and in it he was a girl—which was always a sure sign to him that it was
not
his own dream. He definitely wasn’t one of those girls-trapped-in-a-boy’s-body. But in the dream, this girl had on tight jeans and Mack sure liked how they felt on him. He liked how the horse felt between his legs when he rode—even though when he came out of the dream he knew that in the real world it was a motorcycle and not a horse.

In the dream, Yo Yo—because that’s who it had to be—rode a powerful horse through a prairie, with herds of cattle grazing in the shade of scattered trees, or drinking from shallow streams. But the sky wasn’t the shining blue of cowboy country, it was sick yellow and brown, like the worst day of smog all wrapped up in a dust storm.

And up in that smog, there was something flying, something ugly and awful, and Yo Yo knew that she had to fight that thing and kill it, or it was going to snatch up all the cattle, one by one or ten by ten, and carry them
away and eat them and spit out the bones. In the dream Mack saw that mountain of bones, and perched on top of it a creature like a banana slug, it was so filthy and slimy and thick, only after creeping and sliming around on top of the pile of bones it unfolded a huge pair of wings like a moth and took off up into the smoky sky in search of more because it was always hungry.

The thing is, through that whole dream, Yo Yo wasn’t alone. It drove Mack crazy because try as he might, he couldn’t bend the dream, couldn’t make the girl turn her head and see who it was riding with her. Sometimes Mack thought the other person was on the horse behind her, and sometimes he thought the other person was flying alongside, like a bird, or running like a dog. Whoever or whatever it was, however, it was always just out of sight.

And Mack couldn’t help but think: Maybe it’s me.

Maybe she needs me and that’s why I’m seeing this dream.

Because in the dream, when the girl rides up to the mountain of old bones, and the huge slug spreads its wings and flies, and it’s time to kill it or give up and let it devour the whole herd, the girl suddenly realizes that she doesn’t have a gun or a spear or even so much as a rock to throw. Somehow she lost her weapon—though in the dream Mack never notices her having a weapon in the first place. She’s unarmed, and the flying slug is spiraling down at her, and then suddenly the bird or dog or man who is with her, he—or it—leaps at the monster. Always it’s visible only out of the corner of her eye, so Mack can’t see who it is or whether the monster just kills it or whether it sinks its teeth or a beak or a knife into the beast. Because just at the moment when Yo Yo is turning to look, the dream stops.

Not like regular dreams, which fade into wakefulness. Nor was it like Mack’s other waking dreams, which he gradually felt slipping away until they were gone. No, this dream, when it ended, ended quick, as if he had suddenly been shoved out of a door into the real world. He’d blink his eyes, still turning his head to see . . . nothing. Except maybe some of his friends laughing and saying, “Mack’s back!”

For both these reasons—Mack’s fantasies of Yolanda on the motorcycle, Mack’s hope that somehow it might be him accompanying Yolanda on horseback to face the slug with her—he keyed in on her as the meaning of
his life. All this time, he wasn’t an abortion-gone-wrong, an accidental survivor. He was born to be here in the flat of Baldwin Hills as Yo Yo’s bike roared up the street and into the mountain. He was born to love her. He was born to serve her. He was born to die for her in the jaws of the giant slug, if that’s what she needed from him.

So Mack didn’t miss a single whisper as the adults began to work themselves up about the “problem” in the neighborhood. Somebody complained to the police about the noise, but then word got around that Yolanda’s bike had passed the noise test, which only got them angrier.

“If that machine isn’t loud enough to get confiscated, then why do we have noise pollution laws in the first place?” demanded Miz Smitcher.

“If we can’t get rid of the bike,” said Ceese’s mom, “then we have to get rid of the girl.”

“There’s no way she
owns
that house,” said old lady James. “Tart like that, how could she pay for it? Some man’s keeping her.”

“That’s the old Parson house,” said Miz Smitcher. “Mr. Parson was blind and deaf when they carted him off to the old folks’ home, and Mrs. Parson was out of there like a shot. You think
she’s
keeping that Yo Yo?”

The suggestions came thick and fast then. Maybe she’s squatting there, and the Parsons—or the new owners, if there are any—don’t even know she’s living in their house.

Maybe she really
is
a tart, but she makes so much money at it she actually bought the house cash. “And paid for it in quarters,” cackled old lady James, “like a true two-bit whore!”

Maybe she’s a niece of Mr. Parsons and they just weren’t able to say no to her.

Maybe she’s the girlfriend of a drug lord who bought the house to keep her in it. (“Drug lords can afford better-looking women than that!” sniped Ceese’s mom.)

But after all the speculation, the answer was simple enough. Hershey LeBlanc, a lawyer who lived four doors down from her and swore the koi in his pond went insane from the noise of her motorcycle, looked up the deed and found that the house did indeed belong to Yolanda White, who paid for the house with one big fat check. “But the house has a covenant,” LeBlanc announced triumphantly.

“A covenant?” asked Miz Smitcher.

“A restriction,” said LeBlanc. “Left over from years and years ago, when this was a white neighborhood.”

“Oh my lord,” said Ceese’s mom. “The deed says the house can never be sold to a black person, is that it?”

“Well, to be precise, it specified a ‘colored person,’ ” said LeBlanc.

“Those things don’t hold up in court anymore,” said Miz Smitcher. “Not for years.”

“Besides,” said old lady James. “Half the houses up there must have covenants like that, or used to.”

“And how hypocritical would we have to be to try to throw her out of her house on the basis of on account of she’s
colored
,” hooted Ceese’s mom. “I mean, this whole neighborhood is as black as God’s armpit, for crying out loud.”

“As black as God’s armpit!” cackled old lady James. “That is the most racist thing I ever heard.”

“If that’s the most racist thing you ever heard,” said Ceese’s mom, “then you went deaf a lot younger than I thought.”

“We won’t kick her out because she’s black,” said LeBlanc. “We’ll nullify the sale because the deed still had that covenant and she didn’t challenge it. We’ll sue her because she left the racist covenant in her deed, which is an offense to the whole neighborhood.”

“So she’ll just change the deed and strike out the covenant,” said Ceese’s mom.

“But by then she’ll know we want her out of here,” said LeBlanc. “Maybe she’ll just sell it.”

“To a white family, I’ll bet!” said Miz Smitcher. “After all, her deed forbids her to sell to a ‘colored family.’ ”

They all had a good, nasty laugh over that. But when he left, Hershey LeBlanc vowed that he’d find one legal pretext or another to get her out of the neighborhood—or at least stop the loud motorcycle noise at all hours.

That’s how it was that Mack found himself walking up the long winding avenue that spiraled into the mountain. He didn’t go up there much, once he had satisfied his curiosity about the spot where he had been found—not that he was sure where that spot was, since Raymo and Ceese couldn’t agree with each other about where it was, nor did either
of them pick the same place twice. And ever since he had become so fascinated with Yo Yo, he had made it a point
not
to go look at her house, because the last thing he wanted to be when he grew up was a stalker.

Today’s visit wouldn’t be stalking, though. He had heard her bike roar in at four a.m., so he imagined that about noon on a summer Wednesday should be just about right for a sixteen-year-old dream-ridden crazy boy from the flat of Baldwin Hills to go knocking on Yolanda White’s door.

Except there was a locked gate in the fence.

Ordinarily that sort of thing was no barrier to Mack. He and his friends weren’t even slowed down, let alone stopped, by little things like fences as they roamed the neighborhood. He could be over this simple white-painted wrought-iron fence in five seconds—less, if he had a running start.