“GOT A QUARTER, mister?”
It’s been a week since I read about Kee-lee. I’m on the corner, trying to make me some dough. The man with the briefcase and the brown crocodile shoes steps to the side. “No.”
I walk up to a woman in a pink suit with a purse big as a gym bag. “Lady, I ain’t ate in a while.” I say the words real nasty, like it’s her fault. She steps to the right. So do I. She moves to the left. Me too. I put my fist out at first. Then I open it wide and smile. Her high heels scratch the ground. Her fingers unsnap her purse. “It’s against the law to accost people for money.” She throws a dollar at me.
I pick it off the ground and keep on begging.
I call my mom. When she picks up the phone, I hang up. I call right back. She talks real fast. Says she wants to know where I am. “He’s out the house now. And I’m gonna press charges for what he did to you.”
She keeps on talking. Telling me that Kee-lee’s funeral was real nice. Everybody came, even kids from our class. He wore white, just like Jason. And his mother put a paintbrush, paints, and a notepad in the casket with him. “Seeing that just broke you right up.
“Mann,” she says. “It’s gonna be all right. Just come home. Please.”
I only ask her one thing: “Was Keisha there?”
“Oh, her? Yeah,” my mother says. “She put something in his casket. I didn’t know what at first. But later his mother told me it was a picture—the one he drew of her that day on our block.”
Then Kee-lee’s happy, I think.
My mother repeats herself. “Come home, Mann. It’s gonna be all right.”
I slam the phone down. How’s everything gonna be all right? My best friend’s gone. My dad’s gone.
And when they find him, they might just lock him up. And me right along with him.
I go back to my corner and hustle up more money. The next man I hit up is wearing a gray suit. He hands me a buck. I ask if he’s got more. He spits at my feet. I look around, pick up a brick and chase him up the street with it. “Who you think you playing with? Huh? Huh?”
If that brick wasn’t so heavy, it woulda been upside his head. But I couldn’t hold it like I wanted. So when I threw it, it didn’t go far. “What you looking at?” I say to a woman holding her purse like I want it. Before she answers, I snatch it and take off running. Kee-lee giggles in my head like a girl. And I hear Aunt Mary saying,
’Bout time you started acting like a man.
I had a dream about Kee-lee. The whole time he had his back to me. I kept telling him I was sorry for what happened. He sat in the corner of his room and painted a picture of his own self. He put big red wings on his back and painted a violin in his hand with a paintbrush for a bow. I told him I would make it up to him. He turned to me with this big tear rolling down his cheek. But he never said nothing. I told him I was gonna be like him from now on— not scared of nothing. The next morning I stole another purse. Three days after that, I stuck a screwdriver in some guy’s back and told him I’d dig a hole in his lungs if he ain’t give me his wallet. I got a hundred twenty bucks now. But that don’t stop me from hustling on corners for more. From waiting till dark and grabbing pocketbooks or putting screwdrivers or broken glass in people’s backs and making ’em give me what they got. My father would be disappointed in me. I know he would. But then I hear Kee-lee say,
You ain’t got no father.
And I keep doing more and more stuff; and liking it, too.
I had to start getting money from someplace else. Cops started parking around where I was. I think business owners were complaining. Or maybe folks just got tired of getting their pocketbooks taken.
On this side of town, people wear suits to work too, but they ain’t got as much dough. I can tell by their clothes, by the kind of purses the women carry. Even by the money they throw in my cup—quarters mostly, not hardly ever no bills.
It’s late October. It’s getting cool and turning dark sooner. I got me a jacket the other day and found a nice park bench to sleep on. It’s under a streetlight and there’s some other people sleeping round there. But I don’t trust them, don’t trust nobody but me now.
For three days I try to do right and beg for what I get. But all the time I’m out there, I only make twenty bucks. I still got some of what I made from before. But food costs money, and I won’t be eating soon if I have a lotta days like this.
“Excuse me, miss.”
“What you want?”
I don’t like how she’s talking to me. But I try to be nice, and smile. “I’m homeless and . . .”
Her gray eyes go from my feet to my face. “Little boy.” She sounds like she feels sorry for me now. “How come you’re not home?”
I shake my cup. “All I need is two dollars for food.”
Her fingers move red lipstick and pink paper around in her purse. “Where’s your mother? She knows where you’re at?”
I lie. I tell her my folks are dead and my foster parents don’t care about me. She hands me five bucks. “In a few months, it’s gonna be snowing out. What you gonna do then?”
She don’t want an answer from me. She’s walking up the street. But she gives me an idea. So everybody I go to now for money, I tell a different story. I’m homeless. I’m in foster care and they threw me out. My folks got ten kids and they laid off so I need to help bring in money. It works. The quarters turn into dollars. People are nicer and talk to me longer. But it don’t seem to matter. Even while I’m seeing sorry in their eyes, I’m wanting to hit them, or take something off them. I can’t even explain it myself, but something in me just wanna hurt somebody real bad.
IT’S NOT SUPPOSED to be warm in October. But it’s sixty-eight degrees out, too warm for a coat. All day long people have been mean to me when they should be nice since the weather’s just right. No matter what story I tell them, they don’t wanna hear it. They just about run when they see me coming. They push my cup away or just come right out and say for me to leave them alone before they call the cops. That kind of stuff makes me mad, so I shove the next guy I see and tell him to give me some dough. A security guard sees what I do and comes after me. I take off, and spend the rest of the day hiding in back a building near a Dumpster.
It’s late, like two in the morning. I sleep on the porch of a vacant house. It’s right around the corner from a store that stays open all night. You can buy all kinds of stuff there. Weed, liquor, guns. I pay a drunk to buy me a forty, then sit on the curb and drink the whole thing, pouring the last drop out for Kee-lee. “’Cause I ain’t never gonna stop missing you.”
My head’s spinning. I can’t walk straight. But it’s warm out, Indian summer I guess, and I’m still thirsty so I get the man to get me some more. He looks at me funny when I pull out my money and some falls in the street. But he picks it up and gives it to me anyhow. Then he goes inside and gets two more cans— one for me and one for him.
He don’t talk much, so while we’re downing beer, I tell him about Kee-lee and my dad. I thought I was making sense. I mean, the words sounded right to me. But he keeps saying, “Huh? What you saying, boy?” Next thing I know he’s telling me to go home. Standing me up, letting me lean on his shoulder. Telling me he’s got a son too, about my age.
“He live with you?”
“Sure do.”
“You wouldn’t leave him in the street, would ya? For bad things to happen to him?”
He walks me over to the alley. “Naw. Not me,” he says. He tells me to stick my fingers down my throat and let some of that mess up outta me. He asks what I’m doing out so late. I don’t answer. He pats my pockets. Finds the money. Holds it in the air and says, “I oughta take it. Every dime.”
I sober up then.
He hands me my dough. “Go home, little boy.”
I’m stuffing money in my pocket, hurrying after him. Letting him know I ain’t nobody’s boy. “I’m a man.” I punch my chest the way Kee-lee used to punch his. Some guys standing on the corner rapping, stare. “I’m a man! Here that, punks! A man!”
The old guy laughs. “A man ain’t going in no alley with a pocket full of cash with somebody he don’t know.” He’s tall and straight-backed. “I was gonna take it.” He rubs his red eyes. “But you . . . you look like my boy. I told you that. Got ways just like him.”
When we’re by the store again, he picks a cigarette butt up off the ground and lights it. “Get home ’fore something happens to you.” He speaks to a woman coming out the store. Grabs her bags and heads up the street with her.
I get somebody else to buy me beer. I down another can and buy a blunt for three dollars. I can’t hardly see straight. Walk straight either. “Spot me five?” a guy says after I’ve smoked most of my weed.
I stand up, arms so heavy I can’t keep his hands out my pockets, or stop his boys from dragging me over to the alley. But when they’re done, I’m sober. Broke and sober. A few days later, after I’ve hustled up enough money, I’m back on that same corner asking everybody I see to buy me some beer and blunts. Those same guys roll me
again
.
The next week, I buy a piece.
I steal the money. Snatch it right off a woman late at night walking away from an ATM machine. For one hundred fifty bucks, I get me a nine-millimeter gun. And I’m gonna do what Kee-lee would do with it: get the guys that got me.
I think about Kee-lee, Jason, and Moo Moo a lot. Can’t keep ’em out my head unless I’m high. So I drink as much as I can and smoke even more. It’s making me meaner though. Making me want to get even with somebody, anybody, everybody. All week long I’m walking and waiting, hoping to see the guys who robbed me. Come Saturday, I just wanna shoot somebody, anybody. That’s when I see one of them, or somebody who looks like him anyhow. “Hey, you.” I call him out. I walk up to him, quick. Ask him if he remembers robbing me. It feels good, pulling the gun out and pointing it at him. I like that everybody can see what I’m about to do. That I can show ’em, how I ain’t no punk.
Bang!
Me and him both stare up the street to see where the shots are coming from.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
I fire back.
Bang!
The gun gets real hot, like a glass of milk heated in the microwave. That’s when I figure something’s wrong with the gun. More shots are fired. People take off, crawling under cars, ducking in doorways, running into the store or up the street. I run, but don’t know where to hide. I’m looking up and down the street, watching. Two men with their guns pulled out are shooting at each other half a block apart. They’re dressed in suits that match their ties, and wearing the kind of hats that get put in boxes when they ain’t on somebody’s head.
Bang!
I slide under a silver-blue BMW.
Bang!
I close my eyes.
“Die you—”
“I don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna die.”
I open my eyes when I hear that, because the words ain’t coming from a grown man. They’re coming from a little boy. He’s like five years old, standing in front of the store chewing on his thumb.
The men are walking toward each other, shooting, just like they do in cowboy movies. The boy’s in the middle. Standing with his eyes closed, like Jason. “Ma-a-a!”
I cover my ears.
“Ma-a-a!”
The men keep shooting, ducking, and talking crap. The boy gets on his hands and knees. He crawls.
They shoot.
He cries.
They shoot.
Go, dog. Go.
I shake my head no.
Jason says it again.
Go, dog. Go.
I tell him no. “I don’t wanna die.”
Go,
he says. Only this time he sounds sad and scared, like he’s the one being shot at.
I’m watching the little boy. Listening to him cry. Jason didn’t have time to cry. They shot him and he died right off.
Go . . .
I look up and down the street.
Go . . .
I slide out from underneath the car, lying in the street by the curb. Squatting. Looking both ways. Running; low and fast. Watching bullets fly over my head. Listening . . . to ’em whistle by, low and sad, like they sorry for what they about to do.
“Ma-a-a!”
I cover his body with mine. Tell him what I wished I’d told Jason. “Don’t worry. I won’t let nothing bad happen to you.”
I RAN WHEN THE squad cars came that night. I left the little boy balled up on the pavement. And I hoped that all those cops with all those guns wouldn’t come after me too.
The rest of the night, while I was trying to find a place to sleep, I kept thinking that this wasn’t no way to live. So that’s how I ended up here, at Ma Dear’s place, looking through her back window, listening. Ma Dear always keeps the kitchen and living-room windows open—summer or winter. She says it lets good luck blow in and bad luck rush out.
“There was a shootout on West Forty-Seventh,” Ma Dear says, setting biscuits on the table.
Cousin sits down. “Only blessing is that Mann wasn’t nowhere around.” He picks up sugar and sprinkles it on his grits. “That’s all we’d need. Him involved in some more mess.”
Ma Dear is a looker. Her hair’s dyed light brown and styled like the young girls’. Her nails are always polished and she never wears housedresses—just pantsuits. “Well, I want my grandbaby found.” She sits down across from Cousin, pouring milk in her coffee. “Enough time’s been wasted.”
Cousin reaches for the phone and calls my mother. “She’s not answering her cell.”
Cell? I think. My mother never had a cell.
The door opens and my mom walks into the kitchen. Her hair and clothes look nice, but her skin looks dry and her eyes look worse than when Jason died. Ma Dear pats her cheek. “This whole mess is gonna be over soon.”
For a long while they sit around talking about things. How they have friends and family walking the streets looking for me. How they are working with the police to make sure that when I’m found they don’t hurt me. How they plan to make my father pay for what he did.
It’s Cousin and my mother talking about revenge.
Ma Dear listens. Then says she understands why he did what he did. “He was desperate. Lost one baby and was desperate not to lose no more.”
My mother is so angry she’s screaming. “He didn’t have a right to turn my child loose on the streets!” She’s leaning on the counter, shaking her head. Saying my father took a good boy and turned him bad. “I’m gonna make sure he pays for that too.”
I keep waiting for them to say where my dad is. Cousin says he saw him a few weeks back. Uptown. Renting a room. “Says he’s gonna find his son.”
My mother is shaking, telling them she’ll never let my father see me again. Ma Dear holds her hands. She explains to her that my father loves me too. My mother pulls away. “I will find my own son. I will raise him by myself. He will turn out to be a good man.” She’s walking out the kitchen. “A better man than his father woulda made of him.”
She walks to the front door, then comes back to the kitchen. She lets them know that she has enrolled me in school, an alternative one. She’s hired a lawyer too, who met with the judge and let him know I didn’t leave home on my own, or break the court order because I wanted to, but because my father forced me into it. I guess she didn’t tell them that she knew about me leaving with Dad that first time. And she didn’t say if my father was gonna get into trouble with the judge or not, but I could see that Cousin was hoping he would.
My mother walks into the living room again, staring at the wall Ma Dear has filled with my paintings. “I wouldn’t wanna come home either,” she says, opening the front door and walking out. “Ain’t nothing there but bad memories.”
Ma Dear asks for water and baking soda. “My stomach’s upset.” She stirs the white powder in and drinks up. “Semple.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Find my baby.”
Cousin wipes his mouth with a napkin and stands up. “Ma Dear. Nobody knows where Mann is.”
She belches. “Not Mann. William. Find William.”
Cousin makes a face.
“He’s hurting too. Gotta be.” She stands and Cousin pulls back her chair. “A man who—”
He throws his napkin on the floor. “He ain’t coming in this house. He ruined that child; destroyed his future.”
“You do the best you can.”
Cousin shakes his head. “If that’s the best a man can do, then God help us.”
His face gets red, like he just thought of another reason to be mad at my dad. “How you give a good boy up to the streets?”
Ma Dear is up rubbing his back, explaining that there’s no way to explain none of this. But she tries to anyhow. “In a garden, insects will sometimes eat, kill everything in sight. You work hard to grow your stuff. Now you watching it die right in front of you. You think, I gotta do something—anything. So you spray. You pray. You spray some more; too much maybe. And the whole thing dies.” She sits back down. “You had a problem. You tried to fix it. Fixing just made it worse.” She’s wiping the table and shaking her head. “That’s what William did; fixed it till it just broke altogether.”
Cousin hugs her and leaves. After he’s gone, I take off. At the corner store, I ask for paper and a pencil. I buy an envelope with a stamp on it.
To Everybody:
I’m all right. Stop looking for me.
Mann
On the way to the mailbox, it hits me. I’m gonna die on these streets. And if I go home, I’m gonna die there too: inside, where nobody will see. It takes me a while, hours really, to figure out what to do. To stop being scared and walking up and down this one street like I’m casing a joint. But then it comes to me. Something I shoulda remembered long ago. I do got a place to go—and I’m going there. Now.