Leaving: A Novel (6 page)

She stood on her tiptoes and peered out the rectangular window. She could see only the side of the house next door and a cat in the garbage below.

“Mmmm-hmmm! You sure turned into a full-grown woman.” She spun around and saw him looking in at her from the back of the curtain, licking his tongue over his gold-capped tooth. “You out all night shakin that all over town, lettin those little boys stick they thangs up into you?” His eyes traveled up her body, stopping at the small stream of water running off her pubic hair..

She stared at the razor clenched in his hand. “Mama.” The word stuck in her throat.

“She ain’t never gonna believe you.”

“Mama!” she yelled.

“Shut your mouth.” He stuck the razor out at her, its straightedge covered with small hairs. She raised the shell of orange soap to throw at him and he laughed.

“Look at that.” He pointed his chin at her hard nipples. “You can’t hide how you really feel.”

She covered herself with her elbows.

He let go of the curtain, perhaps to come in from the other side and grab her, perhaps to take off his clothes. She heard the toilet seat lift, then the spatter of urine. She backed against the window and waited, the sour smell flooding her nose and sickening her. She breathed out for as long as she could. It wasn’t the smell of urine that most disgusted her, but that it was his urine, like his hand reaching out and touching her, getting inside her. When she couldn’t breathe out any longer, she faced the open window and sucked in the cold air.

He flushed the toilet, and for a moment she couldn’t hear anything else. She couldn’t tell what he was doing. The shower got cold, but she didn’t complain. Then she heard the cabinet close and the bathroom door open again. The hiss of the toilet died away slowly. The pipes rumbled. She stood in the back of the tub, listening, frozen in the silence. Finally she peeked around the corner of the curtain, crouching down low, where he wouldn’t expect to see her. The bathroom was empty, his razor and shaving cream gone from the sink, but he had left the door wide open.

CHAPTER 3C

AUGUST 1993   •   LOVE 14, RUBY 55

“YOU CAN STAY
in Love E’s ole room.” Ruby led Love up the same shiny wooden stairs she and her brother had first mounted more than thirty-four years ago. “You wasn’t never loud in here when you was a chile, but that time’s all over now. This here’s the biggest room. That’s his drawing pad and charcoals on the table. Jus done touch nothin what ain’t yours. My brother was fond of his pictures.”

Ruby went to a sketch on the wall beside the closet. “This here is John and Bobby Seale. Huey shot jus ’round the corner on Seventh. And that there John Coltrane. Your great-grandpa Corbet fond a Charlie Parker, but Love E always say he ole school.” Ruby laughed and looked down at the long wooden floorboards a moment.

Love tossed the garbage bag full of his belongings from Los Aspirantes onto the bed.

“I’ll let you alone to get yourself the feeling for a bit.” Ruby closed the door behind her.

Love looked around his new room, the single bed in the middle of the floor, the rolltop desk. Then he went to the window and looked onto Cranston Avenue. Many of the wooden Victorians were still standing, but the colorful paint had curled off, and every third house was boarded up. The houses that were still inhabitable looked as Ruby’s did—tall fences around the yards, black bars on the lower windows, and pieces of tar paper ripped off their roofs. The homes were each tilted in some way, collapsing in on themselves as if they’d been punched in their stomachs.

In a burnt-out house across the street, two young men in black shirts and blue jeans hit the charred pilings with crowbars. One of them was in a wheelchair and had a snake over his shoulders, a thick brown snake like a muscular arm. The other one, with a long braid of hair down his back and a black bandanna in his back pocket, looked up and saw Love in the window.

Love almost stepped back but caught himself. He looked down and squinted at the young man with the braid, who was maybe eighteen and had dark, swollen triceps. They stared at each other like two cats before a fight. Then the man turned and hit the charred stairs of the house again, breaking the top step right in the middle.

Love walked back to his bed and dumped his clothes on the home-patched quilt. Sifting through his white shirts, he grabbed a faded black bandanna his mother had given him before he was taken to Juvi. He knew what to expect: they’d know the black rag, know that he was claiming to be down with them; they’d jump him in, beat him up, and then it would be over. He tried not to picture them hitting him or using the metal crowbars. He tucked the bandanna into his jeans and stuffed the rest of his clothes back in the bag.

The stairs thumped and creaked loudly as he jogged down to the front door. Ruby came in from the kitchen. “Where you off to already?”

“I got some business, dog.”

“Don’t you call me dog. I’m not your pet. What sort of business you have already? You just got here. Why don’t you wash up and I’ll fix you somethin. I got some burger I could heat up.”

“I got to go.” Love opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. He looked down the street toward the corner liquor store where the two young men had headed. Ruby followed him to the porch.

“I got these here insects I was gonna give you, but if you just ‘got to go’ to your business, you go on ahead. I can give ’em to someone else.”

Love looked back over his shoulder. Ruby walked inside and opened a drawer in the vanity. She pulled out a blue denim binder and took it into the living room.

“What you mean, insects?”

“Close the door and come sit here on the couch.” An orange-striped cat ran past him and into the kitchen. “That cat’s name’s Lion. You remember Lion?”

Ruby sat on the couch, opened the book on her lap, and thumbed slowly through the first pages. “You probly never heard a these special names.” She put her finger under the name of a big orange butterfly and tried sounding it out slowly. “Dannaus…”

“Dannaus plexippus,” Love said. “P-l-e-x-i-p-p-u-s. That’s just a monarch, but they have a heart poison in them so the birds don’t eat them.”

“What’s that ugly creature?”

Love came inside to see. He stood behind the couch and looked over her shoulder. Ruby pointed to a cricketlike bug pinned on its side.

“They only ugly ’cause you’re not used to looking at them up close, and you ignorant about them. That’s a cicada. They the ones that make that high-pitch weeeeeee all night from this drum they got in their stomachs.” Love picked the binder out of Ruby’s lap. He turned the page to a beetle almost four inches long with a nose like an elephant. “That’s a Hercules. Where’d you get this from? They don’t even live around here.”

“Keep them in that plastic. That man from your old school say to never take them out of that plastic.” Love looked into Ruby’s hazel eyes, swimming and red from years at the sewing machine.

“No he didn’t. You went out and got these.”

“He say to give these to you when I went in for a meeting. He say you been like a little brother.”

Love looked back at the Hercules beetle. It was the longest beetle known to mankind, hidden in shiny black layers of armor.

“But now you here with your real family to stay,” said Ruby. “You remember these folks, don’t you?” She got up and went to the photographs on the wall above the stacks of records: on the bottom, Lida with Marcus and Easton; Elise and Corbet on top.

“I hope you don’t never put my picture up on that wall,” he said to his grandmother.

“Why not?”

“It’s like the Hall of Shame up there.”

“Don’t you talk that way. Maybe we ain’t the Huxtables—”

“No, we more like
America’s Most Wanted.
”

“I know you talkin out of anger when you say that, but that kind of disrespect ain’t gonna be tolerated in here, you understand?”

Love shrugged and went back to turning through the pages of pinned insects.

“You understand?”

“You gonna kick me out and I ain’t barely got here yet. I can see this ain’t gonna last long.”

“It’s gonna last as long as you respect me and your family. So it’s up to you. Don’t blame it on anybody else, ’cause it’s all up to you. You can stay here as long as you please. You hear? As long as you please.”

*   *   *

TWO MONTHS LATER,
Love ventured into East Oakland for the first time. It was four-thirty in the evening on East 14th near Fruitvale BART. The broad street was heavy with traffic, littered with French-fry containers, crushed golden malt-beer cans, cigarette butts, and yellowed newspapers. A black soot coated the sidewalk and the air was thick with bus exhaust.

Love walked past a motorcycle shop, a lamp store, a check-cashing corner mart with lightbulbs around its blue sign. He pulled his white jeans halfway down around his boxers, drooped his eyelids, and stared straight ahead.

There were a lot of Mexican families and shops in this area, but gang sets were not divided by race, not in Oakland; there were Blacks, Mexicans, Filipinos, Salvadorans, Chinese, and White kids on both sides of Lake Merritt. Sets were divided by territory, and ESO, East Side Oakland, was rival turf. If he was spotted by Ace Trey, 13th Street, they’d surely think he was slippin, coming across the lines from West Side to earn his props or to cap someone for revenge.

At a bus stop, three young Latino men in black slacks and ties kicked an empty pack of cigarettes back and forth. On the bus bench sat an older woman wearing a scarf on her head and a beige overcoat. One of the young soccer players kicked the cigarette pack hard, and it went sailing past the woman’s shoulder toward Love. The man who went and fetched it clasped his hands in front of him as he passed the woman.

“
Lo siento,
” he said. “They’re just learning.” The pack landed by Love. The young man in slacks picked it up without looking at him and went back to his game.

Love read the white graffiti tag on the back of the bus bench as he passed. His heart beat quickly, but he swaggered his step with a slow rocking from side to side. He glanced left to the parking lot across the street. Two kids, younger teens in flannel shirts buttoned only at the top, sat on dirt bikes leaning against a silver catering truck. One ate something in a yellow wrapper and motioned toward Love with his chin. The other turned to look, but Love walked straight ahead. He did not slow down. He did not swallow. He heard the bikes swivel in the dirt lot, but he didn’t look.

Thirty seconds later the bikes were riding alongside him, one behind the other in the gutter by the sidewalk.

“Whas up?” said the first boy. He wore dark, curved sunglasses that wrapped around the sides of his light brown face. These situations were hopeless: to ignore meant a beating and to challenge meant a beating. The second boy was a pimply faced, pale kid with orange foam earphones hanging half off his head. Love saw a black knife handle in the first one’s waistband.

They both jumped the curb and skidded to a stop in front of him. Love stared at them as the cars rushed by, the gawking passengers locked inside.

“East Side,” the first boy yelled, calling his affiliation. He held up one hand and made an “E” with three fingers pointing horizontally, curling his ring finger down and holding it with his thumb. He looked at his own hand to see that he had gotten it right. When he was satisfied, he patted the sign against his chest like a hungry gorilla. “Give us your shoes, muthahfuckah, or we’ll cap your ass.” Love didn’t say anything.

“Hey, you Pit, huh?” the one with the headphones yelled to him. “You used to go to Prescott. You killed that kid Snapple, huh?” The first kid looked at his friend and then at Love again, now with less challenge in his eyes than fascination.

“Where you claim now?”

Love still didn’t move or speak. He just stared straight ahead.

“Give us your shoes and we’ll let you go this time,” said the pale kid. “Your little brother’ll kick your ass anyway.”

“Yeah. A free pass to Go. Don’t collect your two hundred
dólares.
” Both kids laughed and waited, as if they thought Love would laugh with them, or at least thank them in some way. But he didn’t. Love took off his shoes, the Air Jordans from Los Aspirantes. The pimply boy picked them up, tied the laces together, and slung them over his shoulder. The other one flashed his sign one more time, then they rode their bikes away into traffic, back toward the lot.

Love walked in his socks without looking down at the pavement. He turned on High Street by Lucky’s market, and even though he saw his mother in the lot, he walked a block up and stopped at the pay phone on the corner.

He watched through the tagged glass as Lida sat on one of the parking blocks. She wore a blue wool cap over her head, and her long breasts sagged into a black nylon shirt under her black and silver Raiders jacket. She glanced up and down the parking aisle and then along the sidewalk to the telephone booth. Love turned away quickly and then looked again. Lida was staring at him and smiling. He smiled back.

She stood up, her hands in her jacket pockets, her thick thighs strangled into stretch pants. She walked toward Love, stumbled to the left on her heels, and then regained her balance. She smiled at him again.

Love was not smiling now. He looked to both sides of the lot. A man with a six-pack glanced at him. Love glared back and the man got into his brown Honda Civic. Lida stood at the edge of the lot near the phone booth, one pointed heel up on the curb.

“Hi darling.” His mother’s eyes blinked and darted around his face. “Long time no see.”

“Hi.” Love stepped out from behind the glass. He looked toward East 14th, then up toward the freeway, then back at her. Her cheeks were sunken, her dark skin chapped and flaky. Her bangs spread out from under the front of her cap. He stuck his hands in his pockets as she came closer.

“You lookin good,” she said. He could smell the beer on her breath.

“Thanks.”

She reached out and caressed his cheek with the back of her hand. He flinched. It had been four years.