Of Beetles and Angels (6 page)

But even we had rules. Rules forged by the limping refugee woman, by our own flight, by our mother’s homesickness, by “African boodie-scratcher,” by all the many harsh things we had known.

Our rules demanded that we would never add hurt to the hurting.

The old woman could not catch us, but she threw her words at us. We heard them and we trembled. For we had always been taught, and we earnestly believed, that the heartfelt curses of the elderly and the weak are heard by Him above, and that they always come true — if not in this world, then in the next.

As much as our run-in with the old woman shook us up, it didn’t cure us of mischief. We still plundered many baskets and looted many trays.

It took something else, something completely unrelated to Halloween, to make us consider changing our ways. It took the parking meter.

It all started when basketball dethroned soccer as our favorite sport. Growing up in Michael Jordan’s backyard, we started to play hoops religiously.

During the height of our basketball fever, all of Wheaton’s teenage greats converged on one outdoor court: Triangle Park, just over the railroad tracks from where we lived.

We went to watch and play almost every day, each time crossing the railroad tracks illegally. We had heard that there was a fifty-dollar fine if you got caught, but we didn’t care. We refused to walk all the way around, more than a quarter mile extra, just to use the crosswalk.

One day we crossed the tracks, walked through the trees, and came out on the other side, across the street from the grassy rectangle that was misnamed Triangle Park. Close to forty Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, Wheaton College students, and Route 38 brothers milled about the court.

We knew that we would have to wait at least an hour to get a game. We stood on our side of the street, adding our figures to the long line of parking meters that guarded the tracks behind us.

Tewolde. Myself. A giant, light-skinned, Nigerian-American brother named Bo. And a dark-skinned brother with an impressive ‘fro, even bigger than the ones that Americans had sported in the ‘70s. This was the kind of ‘fro that Eritrean and Ethiopian
tegadalies,
or guerilla fighters, grew out in the wilderness.

Guerilla-afro brother leaned against the parking meter, and it moved. Not much, but just enough.

Glancing at the sand-speckled dirt next to the meter, and then at each other, each of us considered the same question: How many quarters did that double-headed parking meter hold?

“I bet it holds at least five dollars! Maybe even ten!”

“I bet it holds even more. The meter man probably comes to collect the money every two weeks, and with its two heads, the meter probably collects at least two dollars a day. There’s gotta be at least thirty dollars in there.”

Thirty divided by four equals seven dollars and fifty cents. Tewolde and I grinned at each other — this could double our annual budget!

Each time we went to Triangle Park, we shook our giant piggy bank just a little more. Each time, we heard our money jingle a little louder.

One day Big Bo became impatient and bull-rushed the meter, knocking it flat on its feet.

Pedestrians and cars passed by, commuters coming home after a long day’s work in the city. If they saw four brothers standing next to the fallen meter, they would suspect something. If they saw four brothers carrying it down the street, they would call the police.

But we refused to leave our parking meter. We had worked too hard for it. And we wanted our $7.50.

We picked it up. One parking meter, four teenage guys — no problem, we figured.

But the city had weighed down the bottom of the meter with more than one hundred pounds of cement, making it almost impossible to balance.

We didn’t care. It could have been three hundred pounds. Nothing was going to keep us from our money.

We dragged our prize to the secret tunnel next to the railroad tracks. Tewolde and I had discovered the tunnel long ago, when we were out hunting with our Cambodian brother. Slinging homemade bows and arrows, we had patrolled the trees that border the tracks, looking for rabbits and squirrels. One time, we hit a rabbit and it led us to the tunnel.

The tunnel was a great underground hideaway. Usually, though, we avoided it because overgrown plants guarded the entrance and darkness reigned inside. Besides, the tunnel was only three feet high.

We crept in slowly, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the dark. We kept dragging the meter until we were sure that no one could see it from the outside.

Then we encountered our first major problem: We had no way to get the money out. The meter’s money pouch had no screws near it. I guess the city had prepared for punks like us.

We returned the next morning with hammers, screwdrivers, and nails, vowing to find a way into the money pouch. We saw metal tent pegs lying next to the tracks; they would help us pop open the meter head.

One hour elapsed, and still we labored. To keep our spirits up, we shook the meter head and listened to the clang of our quarters. Laughing, we considered ourselves the boldest adventurers. Who could stop us?

At some point, I heard a noise. But I thought it was one of the others. As the static of the walkie-talkie grew louder, though, I knew. I knew even before I saw the flashlight and the metal star and the white policeman’s unbelieving face gazing in at us. I saw felony at age eleven flash before my eyes, and I saw it mirrored in my brother’s eyes, too.

Even worse, we both thought of my father and a story he always told us:

M
Y CHILDREN.
T
HERE WAS A POOR WIDOW WHO LIVED IN THE COUNTRYSIDE.
S
HE HAD NEITHER LIVESTOCK NOR GARDEN AND LIVED EACH DAY WITHOUT KNOWING HOW SHE WOULD EAT THE NEXT DAY.
S
HE HAD ONLY ONE THING IN THE WORLD, HER YOUNG SON.

O
NE DAY THE WIDOW’S SON, WHO HAD GROWN OLD ENOUGH TO PLAY OUTSIDE WITH HIS FRIENDS, BROUGHT HOME AN EGG.
A
TINY EGGSMALL, LIKE THE DUST.
T
HE WIDOW DID NOT ASK WHERE THE TINY EGG HAD COME FROM.
S
HE BOILED IT AND THEY ATE IT TOGETHER.

T
HE NEXT DAY THE SON BROUGHT A BIGGER EGG.
S
OON AFTER, TWO EGGS.
T
HEN TEN EGGS.
F
INALLY, HE BROUGHT THE WHOLE CHICKEN.
T
HE WIDOW STILL SAID NOTHING.
S
HE KEPT COOKING THE FOOD AND FEEDING HERSELF AND HER SON.

M
ANY CHICKENS, GOATS, AND SHEEP LATER, THE SON FINALLY HIT THE JACKPOT:
H
E BROUGHT HOME A WHOLE COW.
H
IS MOTHER SAID NOTHING, AND THEY MILKED THE COW AND DRANK THE MILK TOGETHER.

A
S THEY SAT FINISHING THE MILK, THE MAGISTRATE CAME WITH THE POLICE AND ARRESTED THE SON FOR STEALING THE COW.
D
ECLARING THAT THE SON WOULD HAVE TO DIE FOR HIS CRIME, THE MAGISTRATE ORDERED THE POLICE TO TAKE HIM TO THE HOUSE OF IMPRISONMENT.

T
HE DISTRAUGHT WIDOW HUMBLED HERSELF AND THREW HERSELF AT THE MAGISTRATE’S FEET AND BEGGED FOR HER SON’S FREEDOM.
“P
LEASE, SIR,
I
BEG YOU, HE IS MY ONLY SON AND ALL THAT
I
HAVE.
P
LEASE SHOW MERCY ON HIM.”

B
UT BEFORE THE MAGISTRATE COULD SPEAK, THE SON REPLIED TO HIS MOTHER:
“N
O, MOTHER, IF YOU REALLY CARED ABOUT ME, YOU SHOULD HAVE STOPPED ME WHEN IT WAS ONLY A TINY EGG.
N
OW IT’S TOO LATE.”

I
T STARTS SMALL, WITH A TINY EGG.
B
UT BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, THE EGG BECOMES A CHICKEN AND THE CHICKEN, A COW.
T
HEN YOU FIND YOURSELF IN THE HOUSE OF IMPRISONMENT OR WORSE.

S
O I AM TELLING YOU NOWDON’T SAY THAT YOUR FATHER DID NOT WARN YOU.
I
F
I
EVER CATCH YOU STEALING THE SMALLEST THING, IF
I
HEAR THAT YOU HAVE EVEN BEEN THINKING ABOUT STEALING ANYTHING, FEAR FOR YOUR LIVES.

I
WILL MAKE YOU LOST.

Having attended church fifty Sundays out of the year and studied the Bible as a family each Saturday and Sunday night, having grown up with our culture’s morals implanted in our conscience, and of course, having heard our father’s “it starts with an egg” fable, we should have feared to steal anything, let alone government property.

But we had not learned our lesson, and we found ourselves staring at a policeman. Had he seen us looking for the tent pegs out on the tracks? Had a passerby heard the clanging and told him about the noise? Had he discovered the missing parking meter and decided to snoop around?

We didn’t know. We just knew that it was time to run.

My brother and I had been chased by a huge dog one summer, chased for two blocks. We had run then.

We had exploded fireworks near a bully’s foot one Fourth of July, and he had chased us for almost half a mile. We had run then.

But never in our lives had we run like we ran from that cop. Keeping our heads low, hoping that the policeman was too tall to fit in the tunnel, praying that another policeman did not wait at the other end, we blazed out of the tunnel, as if a time bomb ticked behind us.

We sprinted all the way home, flew into our rooms, and changed our clothes.
Put on a hat! Pat down your hair! Try to look different! Hide in the basement!

And pray that they don’t come.

Running with my best friend, my brother Tewolde. I’m to the left.

E
ven as we were vandalizing parking meters and terrorizing Halloween baskets, my brother and I were still what many Americans would call “good kids.” We listened to our parents, we did our best in school, and God knows, we tried to respect our peers.

It hurt my brother and me to see our parents struggle, and we wanted, more than anything, to be able to help them some day. So we worked hard at school, and after several years, we graduated from the ESL (English as a Second Language) program at Longfellow Elementary and entered regular classes full-time.

We were extremely fortunate to be in School District 200, where we were blessed with outstanding teachers. We recognized our good luck and took advantage of it.

Over the next ten years, my older brother and I missed fewer than ten days of school combined.

During that time, we thought more and more about how we could help our family. That’s when Tewolde really started to change.

Around age thirteen, he started to go through a special transformation, an emotional maturity that my people call
libee migbar,
or developing a heart.

Before long, Tewolde would teach us all what it truly meant to develop a heart.

Growing up, Tewolde and I often visited Wheaton Public Library. There are two particular visits that I’ll never forget.

The first one came in January 1989. We went with sandwiches, thick, poor-man’s ham from Aldi’s supermarket, slapped onto wheat bread and slathered with a thin film of mayonnaise. We approached the library’s entrance and saw a dark-haired white brother shivering under the awning, where kids usually wait for their parents.

But he was no kid, and no one was coming for him. That’s why he was sitting outside in the dead of winter.

We watched his reddish cheeks quiver; we couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or from something else. We went to him and asked him if he was hungry, and he said, “I lost my job and never got another one, and I don’t think I’ll ever get one again. I’m done.”

We couldn’t tell if he was the address-book brother from long ago, but we knew in our hearts that it did not matter. Maybe every stranger was an address-book brother, sent to test the goodness in our hearts.

Whatever the answer, Tewolde’s heart spoke: “We should give him our sandwiches.” I nodded my head and took the sandwiches out of my backpack. I offered them to the man. “I hope you like Aldi ham, bro.”

I went inside then, but Tewolde stayed outside and braved the cold with our friend. A few minutes later, Tewolde and I left.

I forgot about the man for about a year, and I thought that Tewolde had, too. It turned out that he hadn’t.

By the time my brother reached junior high, he had mastered the art of getting things for free. Even though we had an annual budget of less than forty dollars, he still finagled Nintendos, Segas, and other rich-boy treasures from his friends and other sources.

We wanted to lift weights when we entered high school, so he set out looking for a bench and some weights. He found both at our free mall, the Dumpsters of Wheaton College.

In the past, the Dumpsters had given us everything from bikes, desks, and school supplies to couches and even TVs. Why go shopping? It was graduation time, and our free mall was stocked, as the middle- and upper-class students threw away most of their belongings.

A year later, a friend gave Tewolde another bench and more weights. We had more than we needed. So Tewolde asked me to help him: “I have a friend who needs these weights,” he told me. “He’s trying to get in shape but cannot afford workout equipment.”