What They Found (9 page)

“I woke up and started talking to her and she didn’t answer. I just thought she was nodding out,” Donald said.

“Nodding?” I turned to look at my brother. “Are you guys … ?”

“Using?” He straightened up. “No, I’m not using drugs.”

Harlem Hospital was only a few blocks away. If you were stabbed, or shot, or going through an overdose, it was the place to go. They dealt with these emergencies 24-7.

The old men watched silently as Donald carried Barbara down the hall.

A light rain had started to fall as we hurried down the street. Donald was breathing heavily. Barbara didn’t weigh that much and I wondered if he was having trouble, too.

The guard at the hospital looked up from his newspaper and pointed to the admissions desk.

There was no sense of hurry, no sense of white-suited angels of mercy watching a clock on the wall or doctors barking orders the way you see on television. It was just another young black addict in trouble.

Routine.

They admitted Barbara with studied casualness.

“She’ll probably be okay.” A light-skinned nurse rubbed her nose with one finger. “If they’re stable when they come in they usually make it.”

“What are you going to do tonight?” I asked Donald as we crossed the street from the hospital.

“Maybe I’ll hang down here, in case she leaves the hospital tonight.”

“Donald …” The tears started again, tears that were once inside and now came rushing to the surface. “Donald, you’re killing us. I’m so torn up inside I don’t know what to do. There aren’t any answers, Donald. You got them damn drugs and they got you. They got Mama and your father and they got me. Don’t you see that? Don’t you see that?”

“Yo, Brenda, all that talk you’re laying down is the real deal,” Donald said. “But I ain’t got nothing to say. Sorry ain’t doing it. I know that. Promises ain’t doing it. I know that. But I’m not doing what I’m not doing. You can’t tell me nothing I don’t know, but you can’t tell me nothing that’s going to fix the situation.

“Yo, check it out. Daddy used to say to me I got to jump at the sun. You know, reach for that good life. Well, guess what, big sister? I’ve jumped, and I’m not getting nowhere.”

“Donald, you’re killing us along with yourself.”

“Brenda, what don’t I know?” Donald’s voice cracked. “What don’t I know?”

I had wanted to see him sorry, to see him feel the pain
he was spreading around the family, but when I heard the hurt in his voice it shook me. It shook me because he was my flesh and blood. And because I had so few prayers for him that I thought God would answer.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Maybe cop a hamburger, get some sleep,” he said. “I don’t know. You talking about saying something to Mama, but what am I going to say? You got something I don’t know about?”

“Is Barbara helping you more than we are?”

“Naw, she don’t help,” he said. “But when I look at her face, I don’t see the disappointment I see in yours.”

The rain had just about stopped and I shivered. Donald asked me if my jacket was warm enough. I said yes, even though it wasn’t.

“You want me to make you a hamburger?” I asked. “I can go over to the market and buy a few things. At least I can tell Mama you’re eating. You want cheese? Sure, you always liked cheese.”

He seemed embarrassed, and then nodded. “Maybe some fries?”

“And fries,” I said.

He was talking and making sense. Everything he was saying was weighed down with feeling sorry for himself, but at least he was thinking.

There should have been anger. I should have been so mad I could have torn him apart. But I was past being
mad. Past holding the fury in my heart. I told Donald what had happened in court. I asked him if he would turn himself in. He said he would think about it.

What I had to do, I thought as I crossed the street to the market, was to get him back to feeling that he was family again. He had to somehow understand that his feelings of frustration were what we all felt.

I bought hamburger, rolls, and onions. They didn’t have any decent cheese so I bought the packaged slices. On the checkout line I called Mr. Havens and was surprised to hear him answer the phone. I asked him what could be done, if there was a chance for Donald to avoid jail.

“If he turns himself in within the next day or so,” Mr. Havens said. “They’ve got so many cases on the calendar that they jump at a chance to clear one up. That’s his best hope.”

“And can my parents get their money back?”

“Something can probably be worked out,” he said. “They’ll be nasty about it, but something can be worked out. They’ll get some of it back if he turns himself in.”

So many cases, so many brothers. I found myself thinking like Donald. At first I tried to push the thoughts aside. Donald had been wrong in what he had done. That was his responsibility, not the rest of the world’s. But I knew, too, that in my heart there was a difference between the world and our family. I could bring my brain to know
what Donald should have done, but I couldn’t change my heart and pretend that he was not family, my brother. I knew that somewhere, Barbara had family, too.

“They got you running tonight.” The old man was alone at the checkerboard in the lobby.

“Sometimes it be’s that way,” I answered.

“Yeah, it do.”

The apartment door was open.

“Donald?” I called. No answer.

I looked in the bedroom and he wasn’t there. A moment of panic, and then I heard the toilet flush.

Back in the kitchen I washed my hands. Donald came into the kitchen. I had thought of a joke and decided to tell it to him. He had always liked jokes when we were kids. He would laugh at them even after I told them over and over again.

When I turned I saw him leaning against the wall. He had shot up.

“Yo, so you going to make a cheeseburger, huh?” His speech was slurred, his eyes were already half shut.

I didn’t want to see him. I wanted to turn away and not recognize the slack-jawed figure, his body angled to one side, that slid along the wall.

“Why don’t you go lay down,” I said. “I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

“ ’Member when we had that Christmas party and we
had burgers?” he asked. He wiped at his cheek, as if he were trying to get something off it.

“Donald, go lay down,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

Donald stumbled into the room and I imagined him falling across the bed. I sat at the kitchen table and let the tears come. They came in waves and in floods.

Donald was right. There was nothing to say, no logic to make things right. The drugs were his only logic, that and the pain he was dealing with. What was there to say when a person looked into his own soul and found it empty? What was there to do in the sad cubicle of Barbara’s kitchen but to accept that the stained sink would never be white again, the scraped linoleum flooring would never look good, that there would never be fine glasses to replace the jars they drank from?

What I knew was that Donald had reached bottom. He was using again. It would be just a matter of time before he would be lying in a pool of blood on some street, or dead from the stuff he was buying to fill his veins.

The clock on the wall over the refrigerator said twelve past nine. It was later than I thought. At home Mama would be worried about me, and about Donald. Daddy would be asking himself for the millionth time whether or not he had been a good father.

I put the hamburger and cheese into the refrigerator. I looked in the bathroom. There were spots of blood on the toilet seat and, instinctively, I wiped them off. In the
medicine cabinet were a hypodermic needle and two glassine envelopes. One was empty. I flushed the other one down the toilet.

I walked up to 135th and into the precinct. I gave the desk sergeant my name and told him that my brother was wanted by the police, and that he was at a friend’s house and was high.

“Why don’t you go get him and bring him down to the station?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

There were more questions as I stood in front of the desk, unsure of myself, my nose dripping, the tears still running down my face into the corners of my mouth. And then there were two officers, one white, one black, going with me down the street, and into the tiny elevator. I hadn’t realized how small it was.

They had me go in first. I sat on the bed at Donald’s feet. He was still asleep. The cops rolled him over and handcuffed him before they woke him. They pulled him to his feet and he began to thrash around. The black cop pinned him against the wall and they patted him down. They found the needle, but nothing else.

By the time they had taken Donald into the hallway he had realized what had happened. He was cursing me. The names were vile, evil, as if they were coming from someone possessed. The black cop told him to shut up and Donald started cursing him. As we went out into the
street all of my brother’s demons were loosed upon the world.

“Do you need a lift?” one of the cops asked. I did, but I heard myself saying no.

I wanted to take my time getting home. What would I tell my parents? That Donald was back on drugs? Would that make his not showing up in court any easier? Would I tell them about how he had cared for Barbara? Would that make him any more human? Would I tell them that I turned him in? That they might get their bail money back? Would that make the pain any more tolerable?

When I got home they were sitting at the kitchen table.

“You okay?” Daddy asked.

“I’m okay” I said. “Just tired.”

“We haven’t heard from Donald,” Mama said.

I went to her, kissed her lightly on the forehead, and said good night. Tomorrow would be time enough for mourning.

“G
ates!” John Carroll put down his newspaper. “Ain’t that Rudy just going past? Go bring him in!”

Gates got to the front door of the roti shop as soon as he could and called to Rudy. A moment later he was holding the door for the lanky dark-skinned youth.

“Hey what’s up?” Rudy touched his fist to his chest and held it up in a black power salute.

“Yo, man, I heard you got picked up by the police,” John said. “What happened?”

“I hate Arabs!” Rudy said. “They ain’t nothing but a bunch of—”

“Yo, Rudy, don’t bring no foul language in here over my food,” John said. “What Arabs you talking about?”

“You know down on the corner where they be selling Lucys?”

“Yeah, fifty cents for a loose cigarette ain’t correct,” Gates said. “You buying a Lucy they know you broke from jump street. They should give you a break.”

“Yeah, that’s the place I’m talking about,” Rudy said.

“So you were buying a loose cigarette and then what happened?” John asked.

“No, man, I wasn’t buying no cigarettes,” Rudy said, flopping down on a stool near the counter. “Let me have one of them meat pies.”

“I ain’t going to let you have none but you can buy one for a dollar,” John said.

Rudy sucked his teeth and fished through his pocket until he found a dollar. He unfolded it carefully and laid it on the counter.

John gave him a curried chicken pie and a napkin.

“So what happened?” Gates asked. “He accuse you of stealing something from that raggedy store?”

“No, man, it’s a long story,” Rudy said.

“I ain’t got no customers in here but you, so I got time to hear it,” John said.

“Okay, I threw a rock through his window,” Rudy said. He bit off one end of the pie and sniffed it before going on. “It didn’t break the whole thing, just cracked it in the corner. I wished it had broke the whole thing.”

“You must have been some kind of mad,” Gates said. “I bet he used the ‘N’ word. You know Arabs don’t consider themselves black.”

“Gates, will you let Rudy tell the story?” John said. “Why you throw the brick through his window?”

“I kind of had to,” Rudy said. “I had a problem.”

“What did the A-rab do?” Gates asked.

“He didn’t do nothing, but … okay, it’s a long story.”

“Rudy, you’re getting me mad, now,” John said.

“Okay, you know Angie White?” Rudy asked. “She lives in them houses near Marcus Garvey Park?” He set a dollar on the counter.

“Yeah, I know her,” John said, putting a paper plate on the counter with a meat pie and a napkin. “Got a little knotty-headed brother always blowing snot bubbles out his nose.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s her. Well, she was living with her moms and her stepdad,” Rudy said. “Hey, man, ain’t no meat in this pie, John.”

“There’s chicken in that pie, boy,” John said. “Don’t tell me how to run no restaurant!”

“Anyway, she didn’t get along with her stepdad so she moved out. Then she joined a gang because she didn’t want nobody messing with her. And she was supposed to get beat in.”

“Beat in?” John lifted one eyebrow.

“That’s when five people beat on you to see if you tough enough to get into the gang,” Gates said. “If you start crying and ask them to stop then you too weak to get in. So if it’s a girl gang, five girls beat on her until they get tired and then she’s in. Ain’t that right, Rudy?”

“Yeah, just about,” Rudy said. “But Angie is tough so she beat the heck out of the five girls. I was there, man. She was steady kicking butt. She hit like a mule. One girl’s nose was bleeding, one got a black eye, and one was just lying on the ground holding the side of her face.”

“Sure sounds like a lot of fun,” John said. “And y’all young people think that’s cool, huh?”

“That’s the way it goes if you want to get into a gang,” Gates said.

“Anyway, one of the girls she punched out pulled a knife from her sock,” Rudy said.

“That was wrong, right there,” Gates said. “You ain’t supposed to be doing that when you beating somebody into a gang.”

“And the fighting and the black eyes were right?” John asked. “Why don’t you young people just jump off a roof or something? Get it over quick?”

“I knew that wasn’t correct and I called out to Angie— ‘Look out!’ ” Rudy said. “Give me another one of them pies.”

“I thought they didn’t have enough meat in them for you?” John said.

“Yeah, yeah, they okay,” Rudy said, taking out another dollar and flattening it on the countertop. “Anyway, Angie told the girl that if she didn’t put the knife down she was gonna kick her butt again and cut her.