All-Bright Court (15 page)

“
Peleá,
” Jesús yelled, and he circled Rick, his two fists knotty rocks.

“
¡Levantate!
” Jesús said, and a crowd was beginning to form. The less brave stood on their porches, inside their back doors, or peeked from behind curtains.

Mikey watched from his back door, eating a Fluffernutter on Wonder bread, but when the braver spectators came and made themselves a circle, he ran upstairs and watched from his bedroom window.

The crowd closed the circle in the yard at 50 All-Bright Court, leaving only Rick and Jesús in the center, and the only way Rick could get out was to fight.

Rick stood up. He began circling, looking for a way out, for a way to drop Jesús and just get away, but his head was humming from the beer. While he listened to the hum, Jesús dropped him with a right.

“Get 'em. Get 'em,” Mikey said, jumping up and down. He dropped his sandwich and began throwing punches before the window.

Rick lay on the ground, blood dripping from his nose.

“
¡Levantate!
” Jesús taunted.

“
¡Basta!
” Gloria screamed. “
¡Basta, Jesús!
”

“Did you hear that?” someone said. “She calling her brother a bastard. Did you hear that? She calling her brother a bastard in the yard.”

“I always thought he was,” someone else whispered.

“That's a shame, telling all they business in the street. But you know them people.”

Rick did not get up, and Jesús strutted around him, kicking his feet through the dirt and puffing out his chest. “
Negro
,” he spat at Rick, and he grabbed Gloria by the arm and pulled her into the house. The crowd parted before him. In a moment only César and Isaac remained in the clearing yard.

César was left to explain Jesús, to pull some reasons out of the cloud of dust he had kicked up. But it was hard to find even one. Whatever reason there was seemed to be dissipating, settling back down in the earth, and as César knelt over Rick, all he could say was, “He alway want to be the boss. He don't boss nobody. Don't pay no attention to him.”

Jesús's actions only helped confirm what people suspected. He was not his father's son. He was not the son of the man who spoke English, broken and hard like pieces of brick, a man who, like Gloria, and César too, had the hair of a raven, a man who had a gold tooth in the front of his mouth, a man who sold shaved ice from his back door in summer, and in the winter sold “
ron o vino
” from under the counter of his cousin's store, a man who held the breasts of the blackest of women in his eyes. Jesús was not the son of the man who had been seen leaving Greene's house singing Spanish songs to the night winds.

Jesús surrounded himself with every Puerto Rican he could find, and spoke Spanish loudly. Rick was the first black person Jesús had ever talked to, and he used his words as weapons, sprayed Spanish into Rick's face, shot it into his back. Jesús made it clear he was not one of them.

That night Rick and Isaac stood in front of the Red Store pitching pennies under a street lamp. It was after nine, and the store was closed. The warmth that had been held in its bricks was gone.

The wind, the Hawk from the lakefront, was blowing. Somehow it managed to get by the plant, to climb around the monster. Once the sun went down, the Hawk seemed to seek out the land, to come looking for something it had lost, something that it could never find in the darkness. Instead, it punished all it found there. It swooped and rose and turned corners on a wing.

As Rick and Isaac stood there in the night wind, it cut them to the bone. Isaac said, “Let's split, Rick. It's cold as hell out here.”

“You just saying that 'cause you losing. I ain't going in. I'm waiting for Jesús,” Rick said.

“Forget about it, man. Caesar cool. He hip.”

“I'm not talking about Caesar. I'm talking about his brother. The nappy-head Puerto Rican bean-eating crazy-ass black nigger. Who he think he is? Calling me a Negro. Who
he
think he is?”

Isaac did not know what to say. He looked into Rick's eyes, searching for what he should say. “I don't know who he thinks he is.”

“I'll tell you who he is. He ain't nothing. He ain't shit. I'm going to show him that. I saw him heading up Ridge Road way earlier. He be back. He got to come back,” Rick said.

“You going to basic next week. Let it slide,” Isaac said.

“No. He ain't have to act that way. It was just a dance.”

“Well, you better jump him. That's all I'm saying. Jump his ass—and carry something. You know he packing. You want me to get you something?”

“Don't worry about that. I got me a blade. I'll use it if I have to.”

“It's cold,” Isaac said. Rick did not respond. “It's going to be plenty hot where you going. You going be wishing you had some of this cold. They say it get to be two hundred degrees over there.”

Rick cut his eyes at Isaac. “Sometimes I know why they sent you to O.E. What kind of stupid shit is that? Two hundred degrees.”

Isaac bent down and began picking up the pennies from the game. He did not want to look at Rick. He was looking at the ground when he said, “That's just what I heard.”

“And you'll never know,” Rick said. Isaac looked at him, looked into his eyes for what he should say, but he could find nothing.

 

It was not until after eleven that Jesús appeared. Rick saw him walking down Steelawanna, his head bowed against the wind, his hands in his pockets. “I think that's him,” Isaac said.

“I see him,” Rick said.

“I got your back,” Isaac said.

Rick and Isaac stood against the cold wall, hidden in the enormous shadow the store cast. Invisible and formless and black. They let Jesús pass them, let him get a big lead before they struck out after him. He was already halfway across the field when they caught sight of him again. They were slowed because they went single file down the path, trying not to rustle the dried weeds. Rick led the way, and Isaac walked quickly behind him, shaking.

Rick caught up to Jesús as he reached his block. Rick had the chance to turn back, and he almost did when he saw the yard at 50, but he moved on. He ran up behind Jesús, closed his arms around his neck, and rode him to the ground.

Upstairs in his bed, Mikey awoke. He was cold, too cold to get up and close his window. He heard a sound coming from outside, like the beating of wings. He left his bed and went to the window despite the cold. He saw two figures on the ground right in his back yard, rolling in the grass, and there was a third figure standing in the shadow, or was it a shadow? Mikey seemed to be the only witness to the fight, and he would have a story to tell. He stood quietly, punching the air, urging them on. “Get 'em, get 'em,” he whispered, wishing he could see better, wishing he could hear. But there was nothing to hear except the beating of wings, until someone shouted, “Isaac.” The suddenness of the sound scared Mikey. It echoed off the buildings, and there it was again, “Isaac.” Mikey looked for Isaac, looked toward the shadow, but the shadow was gone. He stopped cheering and shrunk down, peeking over the window sill.

Squares of yellow appeared. And then a rectangle of light, long and wide, opened up in the blackness of the yard. César came out of it. Mikey could see Jesús there on top of someone, sitting on someone's chest, and he could see the blade of a knife arching through the air. Mikey heard screaming, but it wasn't the voice that had called for Isaac. César pulled his brother off of the figure on the ground. César was yelling, and as he and Jesús ran toward their house, they set tops spinning through the air. Their words spun and spun and ran off into the night.

Mikey could see the man on the ground was Rick. There was blood on his neck, on his hands, on his jacket. He was still, lying on his back as though he were looking up at the sky, counting the stars. The rectangle closed over him.

Mikey ran to his bed. He closed his eyes and pulled the covers over his head. He could hear screaming. Doors were opening, and there was more screaming, and voices below, under his window. He heard his parents get up, first his father, then his mother. They ran downstairs and the back door opened. His mother shrieked. The door closed. There were sirens. His parents' footsteps were on the stairs.

Sleep, sleep, sleep, he thought. Be sleep. He turned his head to the wall. The footsteps entered his room and the light came on. He held his breath.

“He sleep,” his mother said. Her voice was shaky. His window was closed. “He lucky. Kids can sleep through anything.”

His father said, “No point in no ambulance coming. That boy dead.”

“I want to leave here. We got to move,” his mother said. She was crying.

“Move? To where? White people want us right here,” his father said.

Mikey held his breath. His heart hurt like he had been running in some great race. His mother was crying. The light went out and the door closed. The footsteps left. Mikey breathed out.

Be sleep. Be sleep.

In the morning Mikey awoke, surprised to find he had even slept. He could hear his father up, walking around, getting dressed for work. Martin, the new baby, was crying, and his mother was moving through the kitchen below. He was afraid to lift his head from under the covers, afraid to get up and look out the window. He thought he would see Rick there.

But Rick was gone. He was gone like he had never been there. And Jesús was gone too. He had flown away.

15

T
HE PEOPLE
of All-Bright Court expected to see new stores rise from the ashes of Ridge Road, as if rain and sun would start a new cycle, buildings would come pushing through the blackness, incipient and translucent shafts of green. They had the notion they were part of the civilized world. Surely no one could expect them to live in a war zone. But the people came to know they were living in another world, a dying planet that was spinning away from what they had come to know. They had pulled civilization down around them.

Not one of the burned buildings was reopened. The charred remains were left as they were, a testament. Over on the other side of the bridge in Capital Heights, the world kept right on spinning, full of life and services. Life continued, even in their dying world.

Men filed in and out of the plant. Clouds of orange scudded overhead. Silver fell from the sky. Beneath the roar of the stacks, parents went about figuring out how to raise their children among the ruins. In every city that had gone up in flames, in every other project and run-down house, black and brown parents were trying to figure out the same thing. What they wanted was a way out, if not for them, then at least for their children. At the end of the summer when a man walked on the moon, a chance came for Mikey.

The previous spring he had taken an achievement test and had done well, well enough to be considered “gifted.”

Mikey nearly missed taking the test. He had a cold and a slight fever on the day of the test, but his mother sent him anyway. She had received a note from his teacher, Mrs. Brezenski, stating that there would be a morning of testing. All of the children had to attend.

With ringing ears, a headache, and a dripping nose, Mikey had sat and answered the questions. He held his head in one hand and wrote with the other. He carefully filled in the ovals with his number 2 pencil, wiping his nose with his father's big, soft handkerchief. It was completely wet after the first half hour. All Mikey wanted to do was go home. His mother had promised he could stay home for the afternoon when he came back for lunch. She would make him tea with honey, and instead of watching her soap operas, she would let him watch cartoons. He finished the test and went home and slept the afternoon away on the couch. Neither he nor his parents thought more of the matter.

Mikey and his classmates had taken tests like these before, filled in ovals or rectangles with number 2 pencils issued by their teachers. The only students who ever heard any results were the ones who were pronounced “slow” or “problem learners.” Their parents would receive a letter from the school requesting a meeting. There the parents would be assaulted with numbers that told them why their child had to go to the O.E. school. Even Puerto Rican parents, some of whom could grasp only a few words of what they were being told, patiently nodded their heads, acquiescing to the truth. Numbers typed neatly on clean white paper told a truth so absolute they dared not question it. Quietly, year by year, students vanished. Though the slow and the problem learners were identified, no one noticed the aberrations at the other end of the scale. Just as the slow were conjured out of the numbers, so were the gifted. But their names were locked in a gray file cabinet in the principal's office.

After the urban wars their names were released. The country was filled with anger, guilt, fear. These feelings, just as much as a true sense of altruism, led to the formation of groups like D.O.V.E.

D.O.V.E. was a nonprofit organization formed in Chicago to help inner-city students—those students Deserving Of a Viable Education. It was the organization's mission to find gifted inner-city students and place them in the best schools, the best being the New England prep schools. Exeter, Andover, Milton, Concord, Groton. D.O.V.E. placed younger children, those not old enough to board, in schools near them. Mikey's name came to the organization through Mrs. Brezenski.

She had not told Mikey's parents she had sent his name in, because she did not want to raise their hopes. D.O.V.E. had his name released from the file cabinet, but no one contacted Mrs. Brezenski until the week before school was to start in the fall. A place had been found for Mikey in a private school.

Mrs. Brezenski called his parents to the school. “Your son did very well on the achievements we gave last spring. He did so well, in fact,” she said, handing a brochure to Mrs. Taylor, “that these people have procured a scholarship for him to a private school in Buffalo. Classes have not begun yet. The admissions officer says he can start this year. Next week.”