Paintings from the Cave (2 page)

They call him Blade because he used a knife on a boy one time—cut a notch in his tongue—marked him so everybody knows he talked back to Blade one too many times. But he doesn’t use a knife anymore. Not since he got a Glock Nine with a staggered clip, holds more bullets than God made.

They say he busted a cap in Fat Charlie’s gut just to see what would happen.

Made a big hole, that’s what happened.

They say Charlie didn’t do nothing but laugh at the wrong time, but I think there’s more to it than that. Doesn’t matter the reason, though, ’cause—bang—Charlie’s shot. They say Blade watched Charlie bleed, just stood there, watching, didn’t leave until he heard the sirens coming.

Blade stays clear of sirens because he’s in business.

Blade sells it all, highs and lows, weed and pills and
powder, sells guns, sells people if they don’t keep moving.

So I move left, right, in the dark, out of the light, moving.

I was moving away from Blade when I found the man with the iron heads.

B
lade’s boys are always on the street in front of the apartment building and hanging around the front door because Blade is in 1604 selling through a little hole in a steel door. His boys watch for the cops.

I watch for them. I watch for Blade’s boys every waking minute of every day. I open my eyes in the morning, I look for Blade’s boys. I close my eyes at night, last thing I look for is Blade’s boys.

When I see them run up the front stairs, where they trade Blade a wad of cash for what he sells, then I make my move.

Just inside the building, next to the old chipped back door, is the super’s door to the basement. But the super
doesn’t come around much anymore, not since Blade started running the building. And the super never goes in the basement, not since Blade got his Glock.

The lock to the basement door doesn’t work, even though the door sticks, so I lift the handle, kick the bottom, push the door open. Then I slip down the stairwell to the warm and dirty furnace room.

I hear rats as big as ponies moving in the far corners, but they run away as I creep the length of the basement to a window. Then I climb up and out into the empty lot in the back where it’s dark, no streetlights shine back there.

Forty steps and I’m at the basement window of the next building.

Empty now because they say they’re gonna do something called urban renewal. Never happens, though, and now the building stinks from the winos and the junkies. They’re no worry to me—they stay in the front of the building where the sun sometimes shines and warms them, because it’s January, ice everywhere. There are rats running around, hiding in the piles of garbage that were left behind when everyone moved out and left the building to fall apart, but I got a stick if they get too close. Big stick.

But the back of the building is where I’ve got my place to be when I’m too tired or cold to keep moving. I look out those back windows, or holes where the windows
were, and I can see into the building on the other side of the alley.

Clean.

Warm.

Light.

Bright.

New.

Rich.

Just ten steps away, the good life. No rats, no Glock Nines, no druggies shaking and crying and puking. Just ten steps away, but it might as well be a whole ’nother world.

Layla didn’t believe me when I first told her about this place. She could still get around then, back when she wasn’t so far along like she is now, so I brought her here.

She was fourteen, not quite fifteen, when one of Blade’s men caught her. Around here, like I said, you gotta keep moving.

But Layla didn’t keep moving.

We don’t talk about that, I probably wouldn’t have even known if she hadn’t started getting big.

A few months ago, when the construction noise ended and the tenants moved into the apartments, I brought her into this building to look across the alley at the new-old building.

“See?” I pointed.

Rich folks buy old buildings, fix them up, make
apartments they call lofts. Then they put up a fence to keep us out. Wire leans our way at the top, razor rippers so we can’t get over them.

We can see through the fence, though.

Layla and I could see the people through the windows. We watched a party in one apartment. Counted the people who came with packages, shiny paper on big-ass boxes. Saw the cake and the candles. Heard the singing.

No one ever sang to me or Layla.

I just brought Layla the one time because pretty soon she was too far along that she couldn’t get through the basement window anymore.

I still come because I’ve got to have my place to be and none of Blade’s boys think to come back here. No business, no reason for them to be here.

I sit in the basement and look out the windows. It’s freezing cold, not like the furnace room in my building, where it’s warm. That’s where I used to spend most days, but I couldn’t see anything in the furnace room ’cept rats and shadows. Here I can see into six apartments across the alley.

I see two men who live in the same apartment on the fourth floor yelling at each other. One of them throws a plate at the wall and the other one slams a door. Just like our side of the block. Only, later I see them laughing when they sweep up the broken plate together.

Fifth floor, a mother and her daughter, she looks
about Layla’s age. They hug a lot—hello, goodbye, good night—laugh, eat breakfast and supper together. It’s sweet. Things’d be different if Layla’s ma had time to treat her like that.

Then I see the man with the iron heads.

Middle right, over to the side, closest to where I watch, and he has four windows so I can see his loft the best. It’s smaller than the others. He wears old clothes and he seems young, too young to have a place like that, on his own even, but rich people are different. One window is the kitchen and he stands over the sink and eats fast out of a pot like he doesn’t care what he’s eating. He’s looking into the other room the whole time he eats.

I can see better if I move and so I go into the next room and look out the window into his other room.

I see heads.

Not real ones, but three, no four, made of something gray, like mud, placed on skinny little tall tables around the room.

He’s making heads.

W
hen I get cold, it’s time to go back up to Layla’s. I don’t like her to be on her own for too long these days. And I never want her to be alone when it gets dark and her ma’s working night shifts.

But I don’t move.

Not sure why. My knees are stiff with the cold and even my Eskimo coat with the fur around my face can’t keep me warm. Course, it’s got holes, from before I found it in the Dumpster.

My coat keeps me pretty warm even though it gets so cold that steam comes from the grates. When the steam comes up into the street, there could be bodies in the morning. The worst night, three dead winos were
froze so stiff the emergency guys couldn’t unbend them. They took the bodies away still crooked.

I should go, but I don’t.

There’s something about the heads.

They look alive.

The man sets the pot in the sink and moves into the room with the heads. As he starts working on one with his hands, pushing the mud this way and that, it looks even more alive.

He keeps looking back in a corner where I can’t see unless I go up a floor but that’s too far because I’d have to go toward the front of the building, then up, then back. The crackheads are there. It’s not so hard to get past them, but it takes time, and you never know, one of Blade’s people might be there so it’s not worth the risk.

But still, I don’t leave.

I can’t see what he’s looking at but I watch his hands and the way he keeps looking up and then back at the head. He’s frowning but somehow he’s happy, too. I don’t know how I know that, I just know.

Finally I can’t stand the cold and, just as I get up to go, he bumps one of the stands and a head falls to the floor.

Clunk
.

I can hear the sound through his closed window, ten feet across the alley, and through the broken window where I’m crouching.

That head isn’t made of mud, but of something metal.

He makes iron heads, he sits in his kitchen eating from a pot staring at heads he makes of mud and iron.

I’m so cold now my teeth are chattering. It’s late, too. If I don’t get back up to Layla’s apartment soon, I’ll run into Blade’s people. If they’re out and about, I’m in. Somewhere, anywhere, doesn’t matter, just so that I’m not where they can see me.

Still, it’s hard to leave and I lean closer to see a little more before I have to go.

The man sees me.

He turns, and there we are.

Eye to eye. Ten steps away.

And he smiles. Nods and smiles to say hi, so I raise my hand, kinda wave back at him.

Then I turn away to go tell Layla about the man with the iron heads.

We talk about everything together. Everything except how she got that big belly. And I know she’ll think I’m making this up. Sometimes I do make things up, to get her to laugh, so I gotta make sure I tell this straight so she understands, so she knows, so she can see what I see—a man across the alley making metal heads out of mud in his living room.

But first, I got to get to the other side of the basement, across the alley, through the other window, past the furnace, then wait, wait, wait …

Okay. Now up the back stairs that smell like pee so bad you can’t breathe. Fast. Quiet. Looking around the whole time. No one sees me. I don’t see no one. I like it that way.

Finally to Layla’s door on the twelfth floor. Door 1240.

I gotta keep moving.

’Cause you stop, you’re done.

A
man came to school once, back when I still went to school kind of regular. Now I hardly go at all. ’Cause I got to keep moving and they don’t go for that in school, they make you stay put.

So this guy, he wrote a book and he talked like we read books.

Like we
got
books.

He talked about chapters and what he did to tell the story and then he asked if there were any questions. What were
we
gonna ask
him
? Nobody stuck their hand up but me.

I put up my hand because I had two things I wanted to know about this man who wrote books and thought we should read them and talk with him about them.

“You ever been bitten by a rat?”

He got real quiet. I kept talking.

“Sharp teeth, rats. Alley rats run, but basement rats don’t always run. Sometimes they stand still and you can kill them with a stick or a brick. They got teeth like razors.”

I thought the man wasn’t gonna say anything. Finally he said no. “A dog bit me once, but it wasn’t bad, he bit me on the ankle and then ran away.”

Then I showed him marks on
my
ankle where the rats bit me and he looked like he was going to cry. From seeing rat marks. He should have seen the dead wino frozen to a grate, bits of his face left there when they dragged him off. So rat bites don’t mean anything.

I asked him the second question.

“They made us read that book you wrote and everybody in your book was happy, living in good houses, talking about their problems until the problems went away. Course, they didn’t have no one screaming on the street corner all night long, they didn’t have drunks asleep in their hallways in puddles of pee first thing in the morning, those people in your book. But anyway, in this book you wrote—there was a mother who cooked and cleaned and a father who went to work every day and came home every day and a big brother who didn’t smack anyone around—is that true?”