The Dream Bearer

“So why are you building a house
up here on the roof?”

“To show I can do it,” Sessi said. “This is the way my ancestors in Kenya built their houses.”

Loren and I watched as Sessi folded strips of dried palm leaves and wove them through the sticks she had made into a four-foot wall. She did look like she knew what she was doing.

“How many people can you get into one of these little houses?” Loren asked.

“This is just a model, silly,” Sessi said. “If I were in my country, all of my family would help build the house and it would be ten times this big.”

“They don't have to pay rent, right?” I asked.

“If you live on somebody else's lands, then you have
to pay rent,” Sessi said.

“If I was in your little country, I would probably be a king or something,” Loren said. “At least the mayor.”

Sessi, on her knees, turned her head sideways and looked up at Loren. “Tarzan told you that?”

“He didn't have to,” Loren said. “I just know it.”

“I'm thinking of going to Africa when I get old enough,” I said. “Just to check it out.”

“Me and David are American.” Loren nudged me with his elbow. “But we're part African.”

“Who are you? Ibo? Edo?” Sessi asked. “All you guys are is American. I am Kikuyu.”

“Yo, David, when she finishes making her house, you want to come up here and tear it down?” Loren put one hand on the house and pushed it gently.

“That's what Americans do,” Sessi said, turning back to her model house. “You tear things down.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Loren said.

Sessi made a little noise with her throat and shook her head. That was the thing with Sessi—sometimes she would make little noises that sounded almost like words or move her hands in a way that was almost like talking. She was pretty, with a smile that started with her mouth and spread across her face in a way that always made me smile when I saw it.

Loren was the same age as me, twelve, and lived in my building. Sessi lived in the building next to mine.
When the weather wasn't too bad, we sometimes went over the rooftops to get to each other's houses. Sessi wasn't like most girls I knew—she never put anybody down or got into arguments. Maybe it was because she was African, I didn't know.

“We could use your model house for our clubhouse,” I said to Sessi. “You know what a clubhouse is?”

“I've been in this country for four years and I'm only one year younger than you are, Mr. David Curry,” Sessi said. When she stood up she was an inch taller than me even though she was younger. “
Whatever
you boys know, I know.”

“Oh, yeah? Why did the moron throw an alarm clock out the window?” Loren asked.

“Don't ask me silly things,” Sessi said, rolling her eyes in Loren's general direction. “Do I look like a silly person to you?”

“Because he wanted to see time fly!” Loren said. “Get it? He wanted to see time fly!”

“Loren, that is so stupid!” Sessi went back to building her model house.

“The only reason you're smart is because your mother makes you study and stuff,” Loren said. “If me and David studied all the time, we'd be twice as smart as you. Ain't that right, David?”

“I don't know,” I answered.

“I'd think we'd be twice as smart as anybody if
we tried,” Loren said.

“What do you think of us using it as a clubhouse?” I asked again.

“I'll have to ask my father,” Sessi said. “I don't think he'll mind, but he'll have to be asked.”

“When are you going to ask him?”

“When he gets home from work.” Sessi smoothed the side of her house with the palm of her hand. “Maybe after supper.”

“What's your dumb brother Kimi doing?” Loren asked.

“Reading to my mother,” Sessi answered. “He's helping her with the citizenship test. She can read well, but it helps her to hear the words read aloud.”

“You know you can't become a citizen without my permission,” Loren said.

“Loren Hart, shut up!” Sessi spoke with finality.

“I don't know anybody with a real clubhouse,” I said. “You think your father's going to say we can use it?”

“Tell him he'd better say yes or I might have to come to your house and deal with him!” Loren said.

“You're going to deal with my father?” Sessi held up her thumb and put it on the end of Loren's nose. “I don't think so!”

Loren gave her a look, but he didn't say anything and I knew he wasn't sure if he could beat Sessi or not. He had told me before that he thought Africans were tougher than they looked.

“I got to go home.” Loren wiped his hands on the front of his jeans. “You want to come to my house and watch television?”

“I can't stay out too long,” I said. “Mom's going to some kind of meeting, and she wants me home when she leaves.”

“David's a good boy,” Sessi said. “He listens to his parents.”

“I think you want to marry him,” Loren said. “If I go downstairs right now, I'll bet you'll be giving him a kiss before I get to the third floor.”

“
Child
,” Sessi said to Loren. “You're a mere child.”

“I'll come over for a while,” I said.

“Why don't you check with your mother first?” Sessi looked up at me. “Then if you go you'll have an easy mind.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Loren pretended he was going to push Sessi's house down again and grinned as she balled up her fist and shook it at him.

We said good-bye to Sessi, went to our roof, and started through the door that led from the roof to the stairwell.

On the stairs Loren said he thought the little building on the roof was too small to be a clubhouse, that we wouldn't be able to do anything in it.

“It'll just be a place to hang out,” I said. “A place to
go sometime if we don't feel like going downstairs.”

“As long as Sessi doesn't want to be there all the time,” Loren said.

“Sessi's okay,” I said.

“Would you have her for a girlfriend?” Loren asked.

“I guess. You?”

“I guess.”

 

I got home and found out that the meeting wasn't until eight. Mom said it would be okay for me to go to Loren's house for a while.

“Make sure you're home for supper,” she said. “And don't you and Loren give Mrs. Hart a hard time.”

“Is he home?” I asked, lowering my voice.

“You mean your brother?” Mom asked, knowing I didn't mean Tyrone. I meant Reuben.

“No.”

“He's working,” she said, glancing at the clock over the oven. “Why don't you go on before he comes home.”

“Okay.”

“Have fun with Loren,” she added.

Loren Hart has been my best friend for as long as I can remember. I don't even remember how we became best friends. We just started hanging out when we were in the third grade and kept on doing it. He's smart, but he likes to act dumb and say dumb things. I like him to do that too, because sometimes he's really funny. He's light-skinned—I guess because his mother is white—
and kind of nice-looking. A girl in our old school said that he was too pretty to be a boy.

The thing I like about Loren most is that if you do something good or do something bad, it doesn't make a difference to him, he's always the same. Also he told me once, when we were coming home from a movie, that I was the best friend he had ever had. That meant a lot to me.

When I got to his house, Loren was watching cartoons. We watched them for almost an hour, but I was already thinking about Reuben.

I woke up in the middle of the night
and heard the angry voices through the door. I got up on one elbow and listened to see if I could figure out what was going on. Mom's voice was high, and she was talking in quick bunches of words. In between the tumble of words I could hear her breathing hard. I could hear my father, too. His voice was low, almost growling. He sounded as if he had been drinking.

“Ty!” I called to Tyrone and heard him stir in his sleep. “Ty!”

“What?”

“They're arguing again,” I said.

“What you waking me for?” Ty asked. I heard the rustle of the sheets as Ty slid back under the covers.

I looked at the digital numbers glowing on the dresser. It was 2:33 in the morning. I sat up, switched on the lamp near my bed, and looked around for my pants.

“Reuben, can you just tell me why?” Mom's voice was closer to the door. “The boys need their sleep!”

I got my pants up just as the door opened. For a moment I could see Reuben's shadow in the door frame. Then there was a click and the room was filled with light.

“Come on downstairs and help me to bring some stuff up,” Reuben said. He was trying not to sound like he had been drinking, but I could see his eyes were red and I could smell his breath even from across the room.

I didn't say anything, just started pulling on my sneakers.

“You want something to eat?” Mom had changed her voice, made it softer.

Reuben shook his head and brushed past her as he left the room. She followed him.

It was 2:34. I heard the kitchen door open and shut and knew that Reuben had gone out.

I was still pulling on my shirt when I got out to the kitchen. There were two five-gallon cans of floor polish sitting by the kitchen table. Mom was sitting at the table, her head down. There was a cup on the table, and I could see it was half filled with coffee. She must have been up all night.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mom said, turning her face away.

“He nervous?” I let the words float toward Mom, waited for an answer, and when none came I knew that Reuben had missed taking his pills again.

“Put on a jacket,” Mom said. “It looks like rain.”

“I'm okay. You going to wake up Ty?”

Mom nodded. “I'll wake him,” she said. “If it's raining, come back and put on your jacket.”

The summer heat was trapped in the stairwell, and the whole hall was heavy and smelly. I held my breath as I ran down the two flights to the street.

There were still a few people on the stoops. Somebody had a radio going, and a Spanish song bounced off the wall of the supermarket across the street. Down the block I saw Earl just closing up his used-furniture shop, pulling down the heavy steel gates.

I stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching Reuben unloading cans from a small, light-colored pickup truck. He was working quickly, the way he does when he's nervous, stiffly swinging the cans from the back of the truck onto the sidewalk. I knew the sweat would be dripping from his forehead and that there would be small drops of perspiration around his mouth.

“Start taking this stuff upstairs,” he called to me. “Where's your brother?”

“Ty's coming,” I answered.

He put down a can real hard and it made a clunking noise. Down the street a dog barked.

The cans were heavy. I took two, holding them by the
wire handles, and had to turn sideways as I went back into the hallway. Behind me I heard Reuben calling to me to get Ty downstairs to help. I mumbled that I would under my breath.

I stopped on the second floor to rest for a few seconds and shake my hands because they were getting numb. I heard somebody coming down the stairs. Tyrone.

“What's up?” Ty asked.

“He brought some stuff home in a truck,” I answered.

“Where he get it from?”

“How do I know?”

Ty was older than me, but not that much taller. He jerked his shoulders as he went past me down the stairs.

It took four trips by me and four by Ty to get all of the cans into the apartment. After the last one, Ty and me stood on the sidewalk as Reuben tried to start the truck. It was getting cold. A light breeze picked up papers from the street and danced them down the block. A bus hissed its way across town toward Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

We were still on the stoop when the truck finally started and jerked away from the curb.

“How come Mom's crying?” Ty asked. “He hit her again?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “He brought the stuff home in Mr. Kerlin's truck. Maybe it was about that.”

“He's just jive,” Ty said.

“I don't know.”

“Yeah, you know.”

In the apartment Mom looked up from the table to see who was coming in. She asked if Reuben was coming.

“He went off with the truck,” Ty said. “If he's got any more stuff to bring up, you can tell him to bring it up by himself.”

Mom started to say something, then stopped and picked up the cold coffee.

“Are you okay?” I asked her again when Ty went back to the bedroom.

“I'm okay, baby,” she said.

I had thought the crying was over when Reuben first came home from the hospital. He had been away for nearly three months, and Mom had cried herself to sleep each night. It was the second time he had been in the hospital.

When he came home, I had asked Ty what was wrong with him.

“He's just messed up,” Ty had answered. “Like a whole bunch of other guys walking round the hood talking to themselves. No big deal.”

“He's our father,” I said.

“No, man, he's Reuben,” Ty said. “You forgot that?”

There had been a time when we called him Daddy. But when he started to act strange, he told me and Ty to call him by his name, Reuben. He said that we weren't his children, that he didn't have any children. Ty got mad but Mom and me cried. She was sad, and
I was sad and scared.

The first time I knew Reuben had a problem was once when we came home and he was scrubbing down the walls. He had cleaned a square as big as the door and then carefully drawn a line around it with a Magic Marker. Mom asked him what he was doing, and he had said that he was “taking care of business.” He spent the rest of the day scrubbing the walls and marking off where he had cleaned. That was the first time I saw the sweating, too. He looked like a crack head but I didn't think he used crack.

Mom said not to worry about it, that he was just nervous, but I worried about it a lot. At first I tried to just ignore it, like it was no big thing, but then one day he started throwing dishes out the window, saying that they had a layer of poison on them. The neighbors called the police, and they arrested him. Then he was taken to the hospital.

At the hospital they had given him pills so he wouldn't be so nervous, but he didn't like to take them. We knew when he wasn't taking them, because he would start working real hard around the house. The working would become frenzied, and he would get more and more upset. Sometimes he would argue with Mom. Sometimes he threatened to hit her. Just thinking he might hit her was as bad as his doing it, or at least it was for me.

Most of the time he didn't have a regular job, just day work here and there, but he always had some kind of job
to do. Mom thought he might get better if he had a steady job, but she hadn't expected Mr. Kerlin to hire him. Mom had been working with the Matthew Henson Community Project to build a neighborhood homeless shelter. It was supposed to be a place that people in the neighborhood would run, feeding the hungry and making a temporary shelter for the homeless. The only person in the neighborhood against the shelter was Mr. Kerlin. He owned the building the committee wanted to buy. Then he hired Reuben, which was weird and hard to think about.

“He's as clever as a snake in a silk suit,” Mom said.

I liked that.

Sometimes I was afraid of Reuben, afraid that when he looked at me, he was seeing somebody he didn't like.

 

Morning. Mom came to the door and turned on the light. She called Ty's name softly, and he woke up.

“There's somebody on the phone for you,” Mom said. “He won't give his name.”

Ty got up and started to the phone in his underwear. Mom took a piece of lint from Ty's hair as he passed her.

“You sleep okay?” Mom asked me.

“I don't know,” I answered. “I was asleep.”

“You know, I was as young and stupid as you were once,” she said, smiling. “You in the mood for buttermilk pancakes this morning?”

“Do I have to go to the store and get the stuff to make it?”

“You know, David, when I was your age, I used to love to go to the store for my mother.”

“That's because you were a girl,” I said.

“You get regular pancakes,” Mom said as she left the room.

Tyrone came back to the room. He started getting dressed.

“What's up?” I asked him.

“That was Neil,” he said. “He said a guy down the street has the first Spider-Man comic.”

“How do you know it's the first one?”

“It's listed in the books,” Ty said, lacing up his sneaks. “On the bottom it says ‘The Chameleon Strikes!' and it has 1 March on it.”

“How much is it worth?”

“Depends on the condition. If it's halfway decent it could be over a thousand dollars, but the guy in the store might not know that. That's why I'm going over there.”

Collecting comic books was the only thing that Ty did that was like a kid. He was seventeen but he acted like he was twenty or more. He looked more like Reuben than I did, and sometimes when he got mad, he looked even more like our father. He thought he looked like Malcolm X, and he did a little, but only when he wore sunglasses.

When I was a kid he used to teach me things, and
sometimes he would even let me go bowling with him and his friends. When Reuben started changing, I was so busy thinking about what was going on, I didn't think much about Ty. Then, when I started looking at him, it was like he always had something else on his mind. Even when he talked to me, I thought he might be thinking about something else.

I didn't want to ask Ty about Reuben. Reuben had said that Ty was “testing” him, was checking him out. Sometimes it seemed that way. And even though I didn't want to ask Ty what he thought was going to happen with Reuben, I did.

“He's going to get into somebody's face that don't care if he's crazy,” Ty said, “and they're going to bust a cap in his head.”

“Nobody's going to shoot him,” I said.

“He go around people acting crazy and sooner or later either somebody from the street or the Man is going to blow him away,” Ty said. “And they won't care if he's crazy or not.”

Mom came back in the room and asked him if he wanted some pancakes. He said no, that he had to go somewhere.

“Where you going so early?” Mom asked Ty.

“Round the way,” he answered. He was checking out his hair in the small mirror on the cabinet door.

“And just where is ‘round the way'?” Mom asked.

Ty didn't say anything, just gave Mom a look.

“Boy, you don't live in my house, eat my food, and don't answer me when I talk to you!” Mom had one hand on her hip and was shaking the other one at Ty.

“I'm going downtown,” Ty said. “I don't need an investigation on the thing.”

We heard a key in the door and everybody got quiet in a hurry. We all went into the kitchen, where Mom had been making coffee. She cut off the flame, then put the pot on a back burner and turned it on just as Reuben came through the door.

“You must have smelled the coffee,” Mom said. “You hungry?”

“I was out working all night,” Reuben said, taking off his jacket. “Naturally I'm hungry. Where you going, Tyrone?”

“Downtown,” Ty said.

“Where downtown?” Reuben put his leg over the back of the chair and sat down.

“Just downtown,” Ty said.

“I'm going to ask you one more time,” Reuben said. “Where you going?”

“I got to see somebody about a job,” Ty said.

Reuben looked at Ty hard, but Ty didn't look back.

I listened to see if he was going to slam the door. He didn't.

“What you doing today, David?”

“Me?”

“Anybody else in here named David?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe hang out with Loren. Or with Sessi and Kimi.”

“David said that Sessi is building an African house on the roof,” Mom said as she poured coffee into a cup in front of Reuben.

“They're living in the United States, they should be building an American house.” Reuben hunched his shoulders forward like he does sometimes. “You want to go to the Bronx with me this afternoon? I'm going to take a nap and then go up to the Bronx and get some locks.”

“Okay.”

Reuben had put sugar in his coffee and stirred just the top of it. Sometimes Mom told him to stir the bottom so the sugar would go through the coffee but this time she didn't. The little lines in her forehead were there when she sat down.

“Did Mr. Kerlin ask you to bring David?”

Reuben looked at Mom from the side of his eyes and shook his head. “Why is Mr. Kerlin going to ask me to bring David?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Mom said. “I just asked.”

“If the boy doesn't want to come with me, he doesn't have to come,” Reuben said. “Tyrone is the one who should be coming. How old is he? Seventeen? When I was seventeen I was in the army. Fort Dix, New Jersey. He needs a job. The boy's got too much time on his hands. I guess you think he's too good to be working for Mr. Kerlin.”

“I don't think that anybody is too good to work for Mr. Kerlin,” Mom said. “I know it's just a coincidence that you are working for Mr. Kerlin. I just wish he hadn't decided to renovate that building after all this time.”