Christopher Paul Curtis (5 page)

The Sarge used to joke that when it came to getting slum housing up to close-to-livable conditions Darnell was the man.

Cable bill a little too high? Darnell Dixon can hook you up with a pay-one-time satellite that'll get you so many channels you could get last Thursday's high school volleyball scores from Uzbooboostan if you wanted to.

Electric rates more than what seems fair? Darnell Dixon's a magic man when it comes to making meters turn a whole lot slower.

Short on cash and got some insured property that's just sitting around? Darnell Dixon's started more fires than seven out of ten cigarette lighters.

Want to encourage some low-life tenants to move on? Who you gonna call? Darnell Dixon.

He probably could've been a tough investment banker, too, 'cause even though the Sarge only pays him minimum wage he buys a new one of those triple-white Rivy Dogs of Love every other year. And they want some big cash for those babies.

He's the Sarge's favorite employee, someone who she says “knows how to get results.” As part of her plan to leave me the business when she retires she kept sending us out together hoping that some of his tricks of the trade would rub off on me. But Darnell was smarter than that, he knew I was a hopeless case and gave up on me years ago. This is
part of the reason he hates my guts so much. He figures I have it made and don't appreciate it. He thinks I'm as soft as you can get. He's never said it to my face but every time he looks at me his eyes spell out P-U-N-K!

In the Sarge's eyes Darnell Dixon is also the lord of all painters, only because the brother can completely paint the inside of a two-story, four-bedroom house in five hours and forty-one minutes, closets, attic and basement included. Of course this doesn't leave much time for cleaning up or prep-ping or taping or cutting or moving anything out of the way, but oh well.

He's painted over dust balls the size of small watermelons, nails as thick as an elephant's leg and picture hooks big enough to snag and hold one of those nuclear submarines, but the Sarge is more worried about speed than anything else so Darnell is her man. And I'm honored to work with him.

I know that many thousands and thousands of years from now Darnell Dixon will be a true hero to archaeologists, anthropologists and anyone else interested in studying these times. They'll worship him because his painting has single-handedly trapped whole slews of twenty-first century Flint flora and fauna. If there was a magazine called
Archaeology Today
Darnell Dixon would be their Person of the Millennium.

When it comes to laying down the paint, this brother does not play. He's right up there with volcanic ash and the La Brea Tar Pits in the specimen preserving department. Amber and fossilization don't have a thing on him.

He's painted over dozens of species of roaches, spiders, centipedes, birds and even small mammals. It would break a lot of kids' hearts to know it, but half the missing pets in Flint are plastered to the walls of the Sarge's houses after dying horrible, suffocating deaths buried under layers of discontinued Dutch Boy paint just 'cause they weren't fast enough or strong enough to avoid Darnell Dixon and his Roller Brush of Death.

When Darnell finishes a room the walls might be a little lumpy, but you can bet every square inch is slathered with paint, and that's all that the Sarge and the renters seem to care about when I show them the houses.

If they ever start dropping the nukes or weapons of mass destruction I'm heading right over to one of the houses that he painted 'cause with all the paint that covers the walls there's no way in the world that radiation or anthrax could ever get through them.

I finished painting the living room while Darnell finished the kitchen. And the dining room. And three bedrooms. And two hallways.

After I cleaned everything up and changed back into my school clothes it was time for the ride-home inspection.

“Hands,” Darnell said as we stood on the front porch.

I showed him both hands, palms up and palms down.

“Shoes,” he said.

I leaned against the railing and showed him the bottom of each shoe.

“Turn.”

I slowly turned around twice while he made sure no
paint or nastiness was anywhere on me. I felt like I was doing the Hokey Pokey.

He pointed the remote trunk opener at the car, clicked the button and said, “All right, get the sheet.”

Darnell calls the sheet his anticootie protector. Anytime me or any other hard leg is going to ride in the car I have to get it out of the trunk. He'll spread and tuck it over the backseat and down into the place where you put your feet. The whole thing takes about five minutes 'cause he checks and double-checks to make sure no part of his Rivy Dog is exposed. After Darnell finishes covering those seats the greatest forensic scientist from the Cold Cases Network wouldn't be able to tell I'd ever been anywhere near the car.

Finally he nodded and I climbed in.

The first time he did this, about four or five years ago, I'd thought it was cool. I mean here I was a little kid and I was getting chauffeured from home to my chores in the backseat of a brand-new Riviera just like I was some kind of millionaire! It didn't take long before I figured out that this was just another way that sour, jealous old men use to humiliate you when you're young and virile.

One time I'd asked Darnell how come I had to ride in the back. He said, “Because you have the wrong anatomy to be sitting in the front seat of Darnell Dixon's Rivy Dog of Love.”

I didn't need any more details beyond that. Besides, if I was in the front seat I'd be that much closer to the lame, old-school R&B songs that Darnell always played, tired old folks like the Temptations, the Funkadelics, Marvin Gaye.
That stuff that was so old and played out they didn't even bother to make a video for it.

On the way back to the home I blocked Darnell's music out of my mind and kept wondering why I was getting this sign dealing with Madagascar.

Maybe it was sent to show me that I should keep hope alive, that someday I'd leave Flint and head back to the Motherland.

Maybe it was sent because there was some fine Madagascar sister waiting to help me free Chauncey, be fruitful and multiply.

Maybe the Madagascarinians were in a desperate search for a young king who could give a great shave.

Maybe I'd better quit dreaming and get to thinking about that science fair project. I had to get approval for what I was going to do in less than a month.

Darnell interrupted my thinking. “We gotta roll over onto Fourth Street, I'ma need about three gallons. You'd best make good and sure them lids are sealed tight before you put the paint in the trunk.”

Fourth Street is where the Sarge stored the two billion gallons of paint she bought real cheap a long time ago.

And just like that the sign revealed itself! The science fair project was sitting in my wallet sandwiched between Chauncey and my library card and it was shaped just like Madagascar! Madagascar wasn't what it was about, that was just a sign pointing me in the right direction!

What'd I tell you? Philosophical thinking had paid off again! Just that day in biology Mrs. Bohannon was talking about something that I could blow up into a project! I took
out my planner and started making one of my Luther T. Farrell patented lists. This was one idea that wasn't getting away.

Between school, homework, laundry, shopping, doing dishes, general watch duties, prepping and painting houses, hauling trash, running the clients to therapy, to classes, and to their doctors' appointments, getting them up, giving them their a.m. meds and shaving them in the morning and bathing them and giving them their p.m. meds and putting them to bed at night, it took every second of the next two weeks to knock out most of the research for my science fair project. All that was left to do now was write it and throw it all together. I could tell when that was finished the three-peat was most likely in the bag.

The only reason I was saying “most likely” was Shayla Patrick, not only the daughter of Flint's biggest undertaker, but also the curse, and the love, of my life.

Last year I had a close call with Shayla and the science fair and I wasn't about to let that happen again. Last year's fair had been full of surprises. When they made the announcements at the assembly the first had been that Bo Travis got third place. Bo is one of those super-quiet and laid-back brothers who never has nothing to say to no one. He works at Halo Burger after school and always wears this black pants and purple shirt uniform. He even wore it in his seventh-grade school pictures, he even wore it when he picked up his award. We all were surprised that he'd done so good. Usually you need some serious cash to put a top
project together and Bo was always at his J.O.B. but always seriously broke. Broke with a capital “B.”

The second surprise last year was when Shayla got second place and I got first. Even though I'd doubted myself for a little bit after I'd seen her project I guess the judges knew what was what.

She went so deep into hate-eration that she waited three whole days before she got up the nerve to walk up in my face and say, “You know and I know who really should've won first place. I don't know how you did it, but next year I refuse to be cheated out of my gold medal.”

Even though I'm in crazy love with the girl all I could say to her was “Is that right? Well, listen here, Morticia, why don't you take some of that dripping bitterness and raging jealousy that are chewing on your heart and have your old man bury them with the next stiff that he gets.”

I don't know why, but the only time my mind seems to work when I'm around her is when I'm dishing out disrespect. She showed her beautiful, perfect teeth, growled and stomped off.

If I was gonna win this year's science fair I was gonna have to bring it strong. Shayla Patrick didn't know it then, but her challenge from a year ago had inspired me to greatness and the project that I'd come up with was the bomb!

The next day I stopped by the Sarge's after school. I have to drop by her place every day to get briefed on what was happening with inspections, complaints, visitations and other junk. As soon as I pulled into the driveway I knew something messed up was about to jump off. The Rivy Dog of Love was there and the anticootie sheet was spread and tucked across the backseat. To make things worse, the Happy Neighbor Group Home pickup truck had been pulled out of the garage and was parked next to the Riviera.

Aw, no!

That could only mean that Darnell Dixon had given his main flunky, Little Chicago, a ride over here. And that could only mean that they were about to go and evict someone. And that could only mean that I was going to be doing a cleanup and making a dump run. And that could only mean pain.

This is one of the things that I hate the most about working for the Sarge. There's something that's straight-up terrible about throwing people out of their homes. I mean these rental places may be the Sarge's houses but they're also someone else's homes.

The begging and crying and wailing of freshly out-on-the-street people is always sad, and before you get used to it, it will cost you a bunch of sleep. What's just about as bad, though, is having to haul away what these people leave behind. These things always remind me of what's left over of a nightmare the next morning, all you've got is a bunch of scraps and flashes of memory that only give you a hint of how scared you'd been during the bad dream, and it's even worse because they
are
only scraps and flashes, they let your imagination fill in the blank spaces with a truckload of made-up horror and sadness.

In a cleanup it seems to me that what's left behind is what sticks with you longer than the evicted folks' tears.

There's no way to know what you'll find but it's never going to be something that's gonna pop into your mind later and leave you smiling.

Just a couple of weeks ago I had to go on a dump run and took Sparky with me. Darnell and Little Chicago had already gotten rid of the people and stacked all their stuff on the curb. All me and Sparky had to do was load the garbage in the pickup and take it away. There was so much junk that it looked like we'd have to make three trips to get rid of it all.

Sparky climbed into the bed of the pickup and said, “You hand the stuff up to me, I'll load the truck.”

If he hadn'ta come along I'd be doing this all by myself so I didn't see anything wrong with him automatically jumping up to do the easiest part of the work.

I started handing the cardboard boxes to Sparky. One of them seemed extra heavy. I hefted it onto my knee, then slid it onto the rear gate of the pickup. As soon as Sparky picked it up the bottom fell out.

Along with the bent forks and coverless books and ripped-in-half lottery tickets that spilled out was the biggest, baddest, ugliest, nastiest-looking rat that had ever walked the streets of Flint. It tumbled out of the box into the bed of the truck, landing with a smack that sounded like someone had dropped one of those great big Polish sausages on a tile floor.

The rat's tail was as thick as my thumb and as long as my forearm. He looked like he had either been in a fight and got bit or had been chewing at a sore on his back. There was a quarter-size bright pink bare spot there that was soaking wet and oozing neon-green pus along its edges.