Leaving: A Novel (42 page)

As to the struggle for living space, a section of the report directed toward the white members of the public reiterated the statement that Negroes were entitled to live anywhere in the city. It pointed out several neighborhoods where they had lived harmoniously with white neighbors for years, insisted that property depreciation in Negro areas was often due to factors other than Negro occupancy, condemned arbitrary advance of rents, and designated the amount and quality of housing as “an all important factor in Chicago’s race problem.” The final verdict was that “this situation will be made worse by methods tending toward forcible segregation or exclusion of Negroes.”

Not all of the Commission’s advice and criticism was directed at public agencies and white persons, however. The Negro workers who had so recently become industrialized were admonished to “abandon the practices of seeking petty advance payments on wages and the practice of laying off work without good cause.” There was an implied criticism of the colored community, too, in a statement urging Negroes “to contribute more freely of their money and personal effort to the social agencies developed by the public-spirited members of their group; also to contribute to the general social agencies of the community.” Negroes were also asked to protest “vigorously and continuously … against the presence in their residence areas of any vicious resort” and to assist in the prevention of vice and crime.…

In addition to the specific recommendations of the type referred to above, the report proposed a long-range educational program grounded in the belief that “no one, white or Negro, is wholly free from an inheritance of prejudice in feeling and thinking.… Mutual understanding and sympathy … can come completely only after the disappearance of prejudice. Thus the remedy is necessarily slow.”

The long, slow river of leaving.

CHAPTER 2

AUGUST 1983   •   RUBY 45, LIDA 23, LOVE 4

FOR ALMOST THREE
years, Lida didn’t hear from Marcus. Love could walk up the stairs on his own now, holding the rungs under the handrail. Ruby had given up on her new line of clothing after the majority of it was returned to her as remainder from the department stores. She’d applied for the civil-service exam but could not read and write well enough to pass it. She took the first jobs offered to her: at the age of forty-five, Ruby worked as a crossing guard for Prescott Elementary from two to four every day and then went to the Calison Calculator Company on San Pablo to clean the offices from six to eleven. This allowed her to spend mornings with Love.

In the afternoons, Love stayed home by himself until Lida got back from Sears. He watched TV most of that time. The TV was set right in front of the living room window, and he sat on an oval rug two feet away. Lida left pretzels for him to eat, and he sat for most of the afternoon with a pretzel in his mouth, his tongue jutting in and around it, licking off the salt.

Some days he watched the raindrops on the windows, the tapping all around him. He’d kneel on a chair and put his finger against the pane, touching the drops from the inside, following them as they slid to the bottom. The first time there was thunder, it rattled the glass and he ran to the couch and put the pillows over his head until he fell asleep.

A million little events transpired every day that he never found the words to talk about with anyone else. In the middle of the afternoon, during
Electric Company,
the mailman walked up the stairs to the porch, and then the mail dropped through onto the floor. One time, a truck pulled up outside. A man carried a package to the door and knocked. Love stood in front of the door and waited for the package to come through the door. When the man stopped knocking, Love looked through the metal slot and saw the truck drive away.

Every day after
Spiderman,
kids walked down the block coming home from school. Some waved at him through the window, most ignored him, and a few others stuck their tongues out at him. He liked these kids the best because they paid him the most attention: if he stuck his tongue out at them, they’d point their middle fingers up in the air. He looked up to where they were pointing but never saw anything except the clouds and some seagulls.

One time a man came and peed by the steps and left a gold can. Love begged Lida to give him the can when she got home, but she just crumpled it up and threw it away. Another time two cars crashed, and the men got out and yelled at each other. Then one of the men went to his car, came back, shot the other man, and sped off. The ambulance came, and two men lifted the shot man off the street. Then the police came and started talking to the people who gathered around the accident. They came and knocked on his door, but went away when nobody answered.

One day Love ran out of pretzels and went to get more from the kitchen. He knew where his mother kept them, in a bag in the cupboard over the counter. He climbed up on a chair that got him to the top of the stove and walked across the cold burners onto the counter. His head reached to just below the bottom of the wooden cupboard doors. He reached up and pulled on the brass handle. Inside were shelves of cans and then, above that, a shelf of jars with metal clasps. Each jar contained a different-color food—red beans, white beans, yellow twisty pasta swirls. And behind the jars was the blue bag of pretzels.

He reached up above him blindly, stretching on his tiptoes, pushing aside the jars. His fingers grasped the foil pretzel bag, and when he’d pinched it a little, he pulled it out quickly. As his toes and ankles gave out on him, the bag pulled down the big jar of white beans. He watched it, his mouth open and the bag of pretzels clutched to his chest. The jar fell from the cupboard, down in front of his face, onto the counter, rolled a few inches to the metal stripping, and fell off the counter. It smashed on the floor, beans and glass everywhere. Love stayed still a moment, holding his breath, hoping that it might pull itself together and fly back up to the cupboard. But nothing moved.

He knew he would have to clean it up before his mother came home; some days when he’d messed up, she’d come home and scream at him, which was okay because later she would apologize and hug him and give him a dollar; but other times she would see whatever he’d done—broken plate, spilled juice, pee on the couch, knocked-over lamp—and she’d go straight upstairs and lie on her bed and wouldn’t talk the rest of the night. This was how it was most times now, so he had to clean it up.

He crouched down on the counter and, facing the cupboards, lowered one leg down over the edge and then the other. When he got to his stomach, his arms could no longer support his weight, and he simply slid onto the floor, his foot landing on a shard of glass.

He screamed and hopped out into the living room. The blood dripped from his heel and he collapsed on the floor, holding his foot in the air. He began to cry but then looked around the empty house and stopped. The glass was a single triangle that he could grip at the end. He pulled it out and looked at the long tip that had been inside him. He then looked at all the bloodstains on the carpet and knew he was in big trouble. So he stood and slowly hopped upstairs and hid in his mother’s closet. He sat down behind her dresses and her pants in the dark and squeezed his foot, the smell of his own blood mixing with the perfume of his mother’s clothes.

Lida came home that night and found blood all around the living room and the glass on the kitchen floor. She yelled for Love, but he didn’t answer. She followed the trail of blood upstairs into her room but didn’t see him in the dark closet.

“Ronald!” she screamed as loud as she could. He could hear her crying. She sounded as if she had been injured herself.

“Mama,” he said, “I didn’t mean to.”

LIDA CALLED DAVID
to drive them to the hospital. He showed up and carried Love to the car. David waited with them for the three hours it took for the doctors to give Love a shot and stitch him up. Afterward Lida asked David if they could stay with him for the night.

Gina had left David and taken their child when she found out he was dealing again, so he let Lida and Love sleep in the bed with him. That night he rubbed his hand along her back until she fell asleep.

She wouldn’t get up for work the next morning and stayed home all day, so it seemed to Love that things had worked out for the best after all. But she didn’t talk much or want to play. She stayed in bed that day and the rest of the week without making a sound, except once every few hours she would call for Love in a desperate voice and wouldn’t stop until he came and held her hand. She stayed at David’s a week, then returned home and went back to work, but she put a padlock on the kitchen door so that Love would not hurt himself in there again.

*   *   *

ONE RAINY AFTERNOON
while Love was home alone watching TV, he heard Lion meowing and scratching to come in. Love spent ten minutes trying to pull the front door open; the knob was just above his head, but the door was locked. As he pulled, the knob turned on its own. Love stepped back and the door opened. Marcus stood in front of him, soaking wet, holding a small paper bag in one hand. He smiled, and Love hopped away from him on his healthy foot.

He tried to make it up the stairs but slipped on the edge of a step, and his bandage came loose. He looked up at the strange man to see what he would do.

Marcus put down the paper bag on the vanity, then went to his son and picked him up under the arms. “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you watch your step?”

Love turned away from the sour-beer breath and the wet hair that dripped on his face. Marcus looked up the stairs to the second floor. “Hello?” he yelled, and then he turned back to Love when no one answered. “Your mother gonna blame me for this for sure.”

He put Love down and went to the kitchen, his feet leaving large wet prints on the floor. “Hello?” he called again into the house. “Ain’t nobody home?”

He tugged at the kitchen door and then saw the lock. “Shit. What they want me to do, starve to death? How am I gonna get me something to eat?” He turned back to Love, who sat on the stairs, pressing himself in between the rungs of the railing.

“Hey,” Marcus said. “Let’s you and me walk down to the store and get some food.” Love didn’t say anything.

“Naw,” Marcus said. “I guess it’s too wet out. What’d you do to your foot? Come on in the bathroom and let me take a look at that.” Love shook his head. “Come on, it looks like it’s bleeding. We got to get you fixed up.” He took Love by the arm and pulled him to the downstairs bathroom. He wet a hand towel with cold water and squeezed it out.

“This will keep it cold. Just squeeze it around there.” Marcus put the towel on Love’s foot. He then pulled open the mirrored cabinet and looked inside. He took out a bottle of prescription painkiller, read the label, and then stuffed it in his pocket. He found a Band-Aid and peeled it open across Love’s stitches.

“What’d you do to yourself?”

Love scratched his nose.

“Don’t you talk yet or nothin?” Marcus asked. “How old are you?”

Love didn’t reply.

“Don’t you know who I am?”

Love nodded.

“Who am I?” Marcus smiled. “Tell me who I am.”

“Lion.”

“Lion? That mangy old cat?” Marcus laughed. “Naw, I ain’t Lion. I’m your daddy, Marcus. M-a-r-c-u-s. Spell my name. M-a-r-c-u-s. Marcus. Can’t you spell yet?”

Love shook his head.

“Don’t you remember me?”

Love hesitated and then nodded, but he didn’t recognize this man whose wet hair stuck flat onto his face.

“I know I been away for a long time, but that wasn’t my fault. They locked me up, and I couldn’t come back to see you. But believe me, I wanted to. You’re a mighty big boy now. I bet you could play a guitar already. Soon as I pick me up a new one, I’m gonna teach you some chords. All right?”

Love was staring at the Band-Aid, which had fallen to the floor. Marcus shook him. “All right?”

Love nodded.

“Let’s you and me get dried off and then get some rest.”

Marcus dried himself off with a towel and then walked back into the living room. He lay on the couch, put his feet up on the armrest and a pillow under his head. He watched the cartoons until his eyes closed.

After a few minutes, Love quietly walked out of the bathroom. He stood by the couch and watched Marcus until he was sure that he was asleep. Then he sat down on the floor and watched TV.

*   *   *

THIS WAS HOW
Lida found them when she came home with wet bags of groceries in her arms. Love hardly looked up at her, just enough to make sure it wasn’t some new stranger.

Her first impulse was to yell at Marcus to get the fuck out of the house. But she stopped herself, seeing him there asleep. She would still yell, but first she wanted a minute to look at him again. As she watched him sleep, she wished she could lie down there next to him and have them wake up together like nothing had ever happened.

She shook her head and went to the kitchen door. She quietly opened the padlock and placed the bags on the counter without looking back out toward the living room. One item at a time, she unpacked the groceries; opened the refrigerator door, put the butter in the drawer, closed the drawer, walked back to the bag, took out the cheese, went back to the refrigerator, and opened the drawer again. She repeated this mechanically and, without deciding to, went and got the butcher’s knife from the counter.

She walked into the living room with the knife held behind her.

“Ronald,” she said sternly, loudly enough to wake Marcus, “go on up to your room.” Love looked at Marcus, then did as he was told.

Marcus sat up on the couch and watched Love disappear up the stairs, then smiled at Lida. She brought the knife out for him to see.

“What are you doin with that?”

“Don’t ask me any questions. Don’t
you
ask
me
any fucking questions. I’m gonna gut your belly right here on the couch is what I’m gonna do.” She walked toward him, and he scrambled over the top of the couch, laughing at her.