Miracle's Boys (2 page)

“So just keep your stupid mouth closed,” Aaron said, “and maybe you'll live.”

“Lafayette,” I said. “My name ain't no Lala. It's Lafayette.”

I turned away from both of them and stared out the window. If you ever had a brother who didn't like you, then I don't have to explain it. Feels like being a stranger in your own house, like
everything
that used to mean something doesn't anymore. Even your own name. Newcharlie'd hated my guts since Mama died, and he wasn't shy about letting anybody listening know it. Most times when he and Aaron got to talking, I just stayed quiet. If I was real quiet, it was like I was invisible. And if I was invisible, Newcharlie couldn't hate me.

“What about white boys?” Aaron asked.

“White boys?! What you
think
about white boys?”

“Don't know, Cha. That's why I'm here asking you. You act like you know everything about Dominicans and Ricans and brothers, I figure—”

“ ‘Course I know about
white boys,”
Newcharlie said. “They not even worth mentioning. It's like if you have a totem pole of badness, right? You got the brothers at the top, then the Dominicans and the Puerto Ricans in gangs, then the Puerto Ricans not in gangs—and maybe some of those Chinese guys that's in gangs—”

“They know karate and stuff, too,” Aaron said. “Like Jackie Chan. Jackie Chan can mess some brothers up, yo.”

“Yeah, like if they know karate, then they probably go before the Puerto Ricans in gangs—”

“Except if the gangbangers got guns.” Aaron looked over at me. “Blow somebody's head off.”

I chewed on my bottom lip and didn't say anything. Once, before he went to Rahway, Charlie took me to see a Jackie Chan movie. When we came out of the movies, I started kicking and chopping and stuff, telling Charlie I wished I was Chinese so then I could know karate. Charlie put his hand on my shoulder and turned me toward him.

“Not all Chinese people know karate,” he said. “That's a stereotype.”

I didn't know what he was talking about, but his hand was hard on my shoulder, so I stopped chopping.

“Like when people say all black people are lazy or something,” Charlie said.

I shrugged. A few months later I saw another movie. Only it wasn't Jackie Chan and it wasn't about karate. It was about this couple and they had this land-lord who lived upstairs who was supposed to be Chinese or something. Only he wasn't really. He was some guy making believe. When people in the audience started laughing at the way the guy was talking, I felt weird, like it wasn't right.

“But if they know karate,” Newcharlie was saying, “then they can kick a gun out of a gangbanger's hand, right?”

“Yeah,” Aaron said. “You right. If they're fast enough. Don't a bullet travel at the speed of sound or something?”

“Depend on the gun, probably,” Newcharlie said.

I wanted to remind Newcharlie about that day at the Jackie Chan flick, about his hand on my shoulder and what he'd said. And I wanted to tell Newcharlie that he had the totem pole idea all screwed up. If brothers were at the top, that meant they were the least bad. Anybody who knew even the tiniest bit about totem poles knew that the most important was at the bottom. But I bit my bottom lip and didn't say anything.

“Then after every every every body else,” Newcharlie was saying,
“then
you got white boys.”

“What about that guy David?” Aaron asked. “The one from Rahway?”

I looked at Newcharlie in time to see him glance at me in the mirror, then cut his eyes back at Aaron. He wasn't allowed to talk about Rahway in front of me. Ty‘ree didn't allow it. But Ty'ree was at work, and Newcharlie took every chance he could get to do the opposite of what Ty'ree said. He turned toward Aaron and leaned back against our dresser. Then he dropped his voice real low.

“I saw him make a knife out a slipper spoon,” he said. “His moms had sent him one ‘cause he kept saying his shoes was getting too small, and since she couldn't afford to buy him a new pair of shoes, she sent him some Vaseline and one of those things make putting your shoes on easier—I know they got another name, but he called it a slipper spoon.” Newcharlie eyed me, daring me to give the right name for it. I looked up at the ceiling and didn't say anything. I loved stories about Rahway.

“Every night I'd hear something scraping and scraping—real soft against the floor, like you had to listen real hard to hear. Sounded like a shy cat against a screen door—just like a little whisper of a scrape, but I knew what it was, so it sounded real loud to me. Like a clock ticking away somebody's life.”

“How he gonna sharpen it on the floor, yo?”

Newcharlie rolled his eyes. “Floors in Rahway ain't regular floors. Everything there's made out of cement—walls, ceilings, floors—like you living inside a big gray rock. Winter you feel like you'll freeze to death inside that rock. Summer you think you gonna fry.”

He stared into the mirror. Only he wasn't looking at himself anymore. He was looking somewhere else. Someplace far away.

“Everywhere, everywhere cement,” he said, his voice dropping lower. “And all of us always marching in a line—to the bathroom, to grub hall, to yard time. No talking, just marching, marching. Say one word and the C.O.'s calling your last name and taking something away from you—no TV, no yard time, no rec hall....” He was still looking at that faroff place, but he was whispering now. “No you. No more.”

I pressed my back into the wall, the white white walls Mama had painted to make our room bright, and tried to imagine my brother inside that stone place. The place he'd gone back to after Mama's funeral. No Mama. No name.

“Who that guy kill, Cha?” Aaron said.

Newcharlie blinked and looked from me to Aaron like he wasn't sure who we were or why we were there.

“Who?”

“That guy David, yo. The one with the slipper spoon,” Aaron said. “What's wrong with you, man? You're like ‘beam me up' or something.”

“It's not deep, A. I'm just trying ... to remember ... all of it. Few days later David showed me the slipper spoon, only it wasn't a slipper spoon no more. He moved it real light across his finger and one drop of blood came out. Reddest blood I'd ever seen in my life. I mean, he like barely touched his finger and that drop of blood was there. His finger was real pale, and that blood just stood out on it. All thick and red. I looked at that blood and knew the next person come in contact with that slipper spoon was never gonna hear the words ‘happy birthday' again.”

“Who he kill?” Aaron asked again.

“Yeah,” Newcharlie said. “I'd have to put David higher on the totem pole than other white boys.”

Aaron grinned. “You ain't gonna say ‘cause of Lala?”

Newcharlie nodded.

“I know he didn't kill anybody,” I said. “I know the C.O. found that
shoehorn
under David's pillow one day while ya'll were out in the yard and David got sent off to another place—worse than Rahway.”

Newcharlie gave me a dirty look. “That's what you think, stupid. That's what Ty'ree says to tell you, but that ain't what happened. And since you think you know so much, I'm
really
not gonna say. I almost said, too. Then you had to go and open your fat mouth. That's what you get, you little ...” I waited for him to say it, but he didn't and I felt my stomach relax.

He turned back to the mirror. Newcharlie was wearing a plaid long-sleeved shirt and baggy jeans. He unbuttoned the top button, then buttoned it again and checked himself out one more time.

“You ready?” Newcharlie asked.

Aaron nodded.

“Then let's step.” He looked at me. “When Ty'ree gets home, you tell him we just left too, you hear me?”

I kept staring out the window.

“Your brother talking to you, man.” Aaron said.

“Yeah—I hear you.”

“Later, Milagro killer.”

“Oh shoot.” Aaron laughed. “That's cold, man.”

“It's true,”
Charlie said.

I swallowed and looked down at my hands so Newcharlie wouldn't see my eyes tearing up. I could hear the door slamming in the living room and him and Aaron running down the stairs, taking them two at a time the way they always did. A few minutes later I heard Newcharlie calling out to somebody. It was gray out. I stared at the sky and tried not to let his words sink in. I stared until the window blurred.

“I didn't kill her,” I whispered.

Then I lay back on my bed and prayed it would pour down rain.

OUR DADDY HAD BEEN A HERO. WHEN MAMA was still pregnant with me, our daddy was sitting in Central Park reading the paper. It was wintertime, but he liked to go over to the park and sit. He liked the quiet and the cold together. He liked the sound his newspaper made when he turned the pages in the wind. Ty‘ree says this woman had been jogging around the lake near where Daddy was. She was jogging with her dog when the dog decided to take off after a bird. The lake was frozen, so I guess the dog just figured it could run straight across. But right in the middle the ice started cracking away, and the dog went under. Daddy looked up to see the screaming lady running after the dog—saw the dog way out, bobbing in and out of the water. Ty'ree says Daddy pulled the lady out first, then the dog. The dog and the lady lived, but my daddy died of hypothermia.

“He went out stupid,” Newcharlie always says now. “Saving a dog and a white woman is a stupid way to die. Only thing in the world you need to save is your own self.”

“You used to want to save stray animals,” I remind Newcharlie. “You used to pray to St. Francis.”

How do I do it, Cha?
I'd asked that first night a long time ago, the night he told me about St. Francis.

Charlie sat up in his bed and put his hands together under his chin.
Like this. “Dear Lord and St. Francis of Assisi. Me and my brother know you both love animals as much as we do. We know how you saved that dog that was drowning in Central Park. You sent our daddy in there. We're not mad about it or anything. Not anymore. We don't have another daddy, but there's a lot of other animals need saving. So please don't let none get killed by starving or freezing to death in the cold. Don't let none get hit by cars or beat up by stupid kids. Just let them all have food and someplace warm. And if you could, could you please give dogs nine lives the same as cats?”

And turtles too,
I added.
Please.

Turtles too,
Charlie said.
Amen.

Amen,
I whispered.

Charlie unclasped his hands and lay back on the bed.
Now watch,
he said.
When you dream, it's gonna be full of happy animals.

He was right.

But that was a long long time ago. Back when we were a family. Back before Rahway and Mama dying. Back before ... before Charlie became somebody else.

“I never cared about no dogs,” Newcharlie says. But he doesn't look at me when he says it, because he knows I know he's lying.

All we got now is one other brother—Ty‘ree. Ty'ree's just the opposite of Newcharlie. He'll tell you in a minute he's got a soft spot for me and don't care what people say about it. Newcharlie would never call me Lala in front of Ty‘ree. He just knows better. People who knew Mama say if Ty'ree was a woman, he'd be her twin, even though two people made him, he's all Milagro's child. Milagro was my mama. Her name means “miracle” in Spanish, and maybe it was a miracle that she had a demon-seed son like Newcharlie.

Mama was born in Bayamón—that's in Puerto Rico—but her family came here when she was real little. I can only speak a little bit of Spanish, because Mama used to say it was better if we learned good English. But I'm taking Spanish now. Figure if I learn to speak Mama's language, I'll have a little bit more of her to hold on to.

My great-aunt Cecile's all the time saying dead don't have to mean dead and gone, and I like to believe that. I got two scratched-up pictures of Mama left. One of the pictures is of me and her outside on the stoop. Mama's sitting and I'm standing bending over her to show her something I got in my hand. Mama's wearing a light-blue dress and she has her hair out so that it's all curly around her shoulders. In the picture she's smiling at the thing I'm showing her like she's real proud. I look real close at that picture all the time, but I still can't remember what it was I was showing her. The other picture's of me and Charlie and Mama. We're all dressed up and smiling. Maybe it was Easter. Mama has her arms around me and Charlie's shoulders. We both look a little bit like her in that picture, but I'm much darker—like Mama said my daddy was. There used to be a lot of other pictures but they got burned. Newcharlie had a fit one Saturday and burned them all, but we're not allowed to talk about it.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to that lady and that dog my daddy saved. There's always stories about people getting saved and then giving the people who saved them money or people coming along years later and naming their kids after the people, but none of that ever happened to us. My daddy's name was Lafayette too, and I wonder if there's a little white kid somewhere named after him. Maybe the lady is still jogging around Central Park. Maybe she keeps her dog on a leash now though. And maybe once in a while she sees in her head my daddy running toward her on a half frozen lake. Or maybe she didn't have any kids and doesn't remember my daddy at all.

AFTER NEWCHARLIE AND AARON LEFT, I WENT into the living room and turned on the television. On Friday nights Ty‘ree let me watch it as much as I wanted as long as I took one weekend day for homework. I usually chose Sunday—usually starting in the late late afternoon or the minute Ty'ree started getting after me—whichever came first.