I TOLD MYSELF THAT I wasn’t gonna steal no more, but Journey needs horse food. Not dog food. So I go back to doing what I did before— begging.
“You got any money, mister?”
Standing on the corner for three hours makes you cranky. I know I got to chill—be nice—but it’s hard. It’s like thirty-five degrees out. My coat is still damp and my fingers don’t have gloves on them. Besides, I only make five bucks. I’m thinking I should just take what I want; to do like I did the other times and snatch a purse or hit somebody. But I don’t. I try to look sadder; more tired and hungry. It works. I get eight more bucks in half an hour. Then things slow up again. By five o’clock, I only got eleven bucks, enough for a couple of bags of carrots, celery, and rolled oats; but not enough for me to eat too.
When I pass a pharmacy store window, I scare myself. My hair’s a giant bush, full of lint. My face is dirty and my teeth look yellow. A woman passes by with her pocketbook hanging off her shoulder. She snaps it shut and walks faster. I chase down another woman going in the opposite direction. She cops an attitude. “Why are you walking up on me? What do you want? Money?”
“I . . . I . . .”
She’s in her green purse, digging around. Saying how she hates beggars. Hates lazy people who won’t work for what they want. I got my hand out, but it’s like I’m waiting for her to put rotten meat in it, or spit on it. Maybe that’s why I ask if she wants her picture drawn. I always got colored pencils or charcoal sticks on me now, so I pull them out my back pocket. I tell her I don’t want nothing for free. I’ll draw whatever she wants, and she can pay me whatever she likes.
“I don’t have time.”
I look on the ground for paper, or the back of a flyer I can use. “I’m quick.” I reach in a trash can for a blue flyer sitting on top. She makes a face. Tells me she’s not paying for trash. Then she goes in her purse and pulls out a folded-up piece of paper. “Hurry up. Do something.” She’s got five dollars in her hand and keeps looking at her Mickey Mouse watch. “I work, you know.” She points to a tall silver building. “Over there.”
The paper’s the size of a letter. I sit on the cold ground and sketch her pocketbook wide open, with her office building shooting out of it like a rocket. I got the wind blowing dollar bills out of her purse and up to the sky. It’s done in charcoal gray. “Well, I’ll be,” she says, twisting her finger around her red dreadlocks. “That’s good; real good.” She pulls out an extra two bucks and gives them to me. “What are you going to do with it?”
For a minute, I don’t know what she’s talking about. Then I get it.
She’s smiling. “Ooh, so now you get it.” She closes her purse. “You got skills,” she says, patting my head. “That’s what my baby brother would say, anyhow.”
I watch her walk up the street. I’m thinking about what she said. Wondering how much I could make drawing pictures for people. Thinking about how much food I could buy Journey and Maiden Lucy, and how I could buy me some blankets and maybe a kerosene stove too. Right when I’m trying to figure out what to do, somebody calls my name.
“Mann!”
I take off.
“Wait!”
I run in between people, ducking, jumping over things. Not looking back, so he won’t know for sure that it’s me.
“Wa-ait!”
I’ve got extra energy, even though I haven’t eaten all day. I turn the corner and hide in a store. “Sweet . . . sweet potatoes, carrots . . . three pounds, and dog food, please.”
I try not to think about it, but Jason says his name for me anyhow.
Daddy.
THE DOG FOOD is making them stronger. One morning after they eat, I see that their eyes are clear and bright for the first time. And Journey gets to her feet for a long while. I walk her in the stall, turn her in a few circles. I sweep up her place. Put new straw down, and wonder how long it will be before she’s outdoors running.
All morning I been working, trying to keep busy. Thinking maybe that would keep my mind clear. But seeing my dad made me mad. Got me wondering if he was out there grocery shopping, or buying a new pair of pants—living life like usual when I gotta live like I ain’t got a real life.
Jason’s always got something to say.
You shoulda waited.
“I wasn’t thinking.”
He ain’t gonna be mad.
I’m giving Maiden Lucy more hay and food. “Hay’s running out.” I sit on the stool. “He’s gonna be mad all right.”
Jason’s running off at the mouth again. I stop him.
He’s gonna say, I sent you out to be a man and look at you—mommying two half-dead horses.
It snowed last night. Not a lot, just a little. It started while I was back on the other side of town, drawing pictures for ten dollars apiece. I wanted to charge more, but people started complaining about paying even that much. I was sitting in front of the art store, the one where the guy gave me paints, freezing. He came outside. Checked out my stuff, and went back in. Next thing I knew he’s giving me a stool to sit on and hot chocolate. Then he said, “You’re charging too much, little brother.” He pointed. “And you need something better than trash to draw on.” He handed me a pad of drawing paper and a cup full of colored pencils. “I’m expecting you to pay me back, outta your profits.”
I looked at the change in my cup. I was thinking about all my responsibilities. “I need this money for . . .”
He put up his fist. I tapped his fist with mine. “I didn’t say pay me back today or tomorrow. But you have to pay me back, ain’t nothing free.”
I made thirty dollars. I gave him back three. He told me to look around. Get myself a book. “Why?”
“Because art ain’t just a way to keep your fingers busy, it’s a chance to grow your mind and set your spirit free.”
I had to go, so I picked up the first book I saw. I was on the bus by the time I saw that it was about Leonardo da Vinci: Kee-lee’s boy. I started reading it, then gave up on it. I looked at the pictures. One made me start talking to myself right on the bus. “That’s it. That’s the one!” I said, hitting the page with my finger, looking at the painting Kee-lee would want me to do, so nobody would ever forget about him.
I HEAR THE NOISE and drop my book. I don’t move.
It’s raining out and I ain’t seen the horses since yesterday. The noise is coming from the stables. It sounds like Journey or Maiden Lucy got stabbed. If they were people, they’d be screaming.
Go
, I tell myself, grabbing the flashlight; stuffing a hammer down my pants, wiping rain off my lips and out my eyes.
The first thing I see is the blood. It’s running outta Journey’s butt, dripping on the straw.
I run over to Maiden Lucy. Same thing. When I’m back with Journey, I pull off my T-shirt to dry up the blood. I’m slipping, sliding in the wet straw. Going from stall to stall. Trying to figure out why they’re bleeding, wanting to cover my ears to keep their squeals out. I stand there holding bloody rags. Shaking my head. Thinking they gonna die too.
“Mann!”
Jason says his name, not me.
Daddy.
I don’t turn around because I know what he would say.
Why you crying, you baby, sissy girl?
He steps in front of me. “Mann.”
His arms are straight out, like he’s coming to hug my mom. “I been looking all over for you, boy.”
I step back. “Don’t touch me.”
The wind blows and the barn creeks. My father’s breath smokes. Journey neighs. “What’s wrong, girl?” He walks over to her.
I block his way. “Don’t touch her neither. She don’t need you.
I
don’t need you.” I pat her face. “Nobody needs you now.”
“Words are bullets sometimes,” my mother used to say. I know what she means. I can see how shot up my father is right now.
“You wanted me to be a man,” I say, walking over and opening the door wider. “I’m a man.
Don’t need no father now, that’s for sure.”
Journey makes a noise so scary, me and my dad freeze. He runs over to her, opening her mouth even though she’s snapping at him. He’s feeling her puffed-up stomach and pressing around the outside of her butt hole. “What you been feeding her?”
The words in my head stay there awhile. He asks me two more times what she ate. Finally, I’m talking, walking, and letting him know how I found her half dead and starving. I let him know how dirty the stall was and how every morning I bring ’em hay and carrots. He wipes his face, smearing blood across it like paint. “Good, son.”
We go to Maiden Lucy’s stall. He checks her out too. “What else you feed them?”
I’m scared to tell.
“Mann.” My father takes me by the arm. “I just need to know so I can figure things out.”
“Dog food.”
His face drops.
“Not the cheap kind. The kind that costs a buck-fifty a can.”
He reaches for a box of plastic gloves, then walks over to Maiden Lucy, stands with his feet braced against each wall, and sticks his whole hand up her butt.
She squeals.
“She’s impacted; filled to busting.”
Farts fly when he throws out the first handful of poop. “You know that horses are herbivores. They can’t handle meat.”
I know. “I’m sorry . . . I was just trying to . . .”
His hand goes up inside her again. Maiden Lucy lets out a long one. Her eyes look like mine after I let a good one loose in the bathroom.
My dad’s jeans are wet and bloody. His shoes too. “Come here, boy.”
I walk over to him. He tells me to rub her belly. Massage her legs. Do anything it takes to soothe her. He walks over to Journey’s stall. She’s got it worse, I guess. He can see it in her face. He waves me over, gets me to change places with him. Stands behind me and shows me how to get my hand up in her. He wiggles his fingers. “My hand is too big. But yours . . .”
I’m picking it out at first, pulling warm, rock-hard balls out of Journey. Throwing ’em on the floor, against the stable walls. She moans, rolls her head and kicks her legs. I hold my breath. Try not to look at my fingers after my glove tears.
When I’m done, I’m bloody, wet, cold, and covered in manure. I’m ready to head for the office to wash up. My dad says not yet. We gotta stick around. “Maybe more’s up there and it’s gonna get stuck coming down too.” We step outside the barn. He pours cold water over his hands, then bleach from a bottle he found on a shelf. “Or maybe what we did won’t matter at all. And they—”
“They can’t die. It ain’t time for them to die!”
He closes the barn door and falls down in the straw. “Mann,” he says, yawning. “I’m sorry. I’m real sorry.”
WHEN I WAKE up my father is sitting next to Journey, rubbing her belly. Holding hay up to her lips and feeding her. She moans. She likes him spoiling her.
He says we’ll have to spend the day massaging their legs, trying to get them to stand up. When he lays his face against hers and feels her lips, her mouth opens and he massages her black gums. “How could anyone just leave a helpless animal to fend for itself?” he asks.
He shouldn’t have said that, ’cause I was all right until he did. “She’s a stupid horse,” I say, kicking the stall wall. “I’m your son, and you left me.” I get up and sit on a stool in the corner. “You kick a kid out—”
“Mann—”
I jump up with my fist raised. “Don’t talk to me!” I lower my voice. “I mean . . . you shoulda . . .”
He stands up and touches my shoulder. I push his hand away. “If it’s wrong to leave a horse by itself, then what that say about what you did to me and Kee-lee?” I’m saying stuff now that should stay in my head. Telling him about the little boy who almost got shot and how I bought a gun. His face looks the way it does when he watches sad movies but don’t want nobody to know it’s getting to him. He can’t look me in the eyes, just stares at the floor, kicking straw.
I figure I didn’t have nothing to lose, so why shut up now? “I woulda come back for Journey, if I knew she was here. I wouldn’a left her here knowing she couldn’t take good care of herself.”
His hands go in his pockets. He starts talking about African boys. I step up to him. “I don’t need you no more.” I’ve been holding myself back all this time, when I shoulda knocked him out, whupped him long ago, and made him pay for all he done to me. I put up my fist, till I see the pitchfork overhead.
I grab it. Head for him with it raised high over my head like a knife.
My dad rarely cries. But his eyes water up and tears come like they won’t ever stop. “I threw you to the wolves.” He don’t even wipe them off his face and neck. “I took my son, mine,” he says, hitting his chest, “and I left him in the world to get eaten up like raw meat in a shark tank.”
I don’t feel sorry for him. He didn’t feel sorry for me.
“When you done with the horses, leave.” That’s what I say, right before I drop the pitchfork and walk out on him.
FOR THE NEXT three days my dad works with the horses. I watch. I hand him files for their hooves and take hay and food in to them, but I don’t talk to him. He goes to a vet and gets vitamins and medicine for worms. He brings more food and gets books on making horses stronger. He pats Journey and Maiden Lucy. Walks them more and more each day. Brushes them and whispers in their ears. He hoses ’em down and feeds ’em carrots and tries to make conversation with me. But I won’t talk, not to him. Not ever.
My dad sleeps on the cold floor. He makes breakfast for us on a grill he bought, and takes long walks by hisself. He doesn’t shave, so he’s got a beard. And we don’t wash every day, so it smells around here.
It’s been twelve days since he came. I wonder if he’s told my mother that he found me. I wonder if he feels bad about what he did to me. “Mann,” he says. “We gotta talk.”
I can’t talk to him about nothing. I go in the back room and lock the door. I’m drawing a picture, one like Da Vinci did. It’s being done in pencil. I’ll paint it later on.
My father wants to know where I spend my days. I don’t tell him. But I go to the art store. I dust the shelves and empty the trash and Ryan, the store owner, lets me sit inside and make a few bucks drawing. He’s showing me how to do some things the right way, like making different expressions on people’s faces. I tell him about the painting I’m doing. “I’m impressed. Let me see it when you’re done.” I tell him about Jason and Kee-lee one day, too. Then I talk to him about my father, not everything he’s done to me, but enough. “If I lost one of my babies, I think I’d lose my mind too,” he says.
But he knows what my dad did to me wasn’t right. “Even still,” he says, “what’s between a father and son can’t be broken.” He grabs me by the shoulder and says maybe I ought to try and work things out with my dad.
That night, I go home and me and my dad have supper together.