Darius & Twig (12 page)

“Grandmothers are always cool, Twig,” I said.

“Yeah, that's true,” Twig said. “You know, you're getting to think like a real Dominican. Maybe next year you'll learn how to dance.”

Mom warned me again about being so high on Twig winning. She reminded me that my friend, and not me, had won the race. But in a way, I felt that I had won it, too. Twig had done something from way inside himself and had been successful. But even more, he had shown it could be done.

Mom was strutting the edge. She was right and she knew it, but it wasn't working for me. She had to know that, too. She was dealing with me as if I was a kid and she was the wise old owl. Yo, Mom, I can think for myself! I'm not a kid anymore! What she didn't know was just how far away from being a kid I was. Being a kid wasn't how old you were, it was what you were dealing with in your life. I was dealing with Twig calling me and saying it wasn't him that was so happy, it was another Twig, but it was almost the same. I didn't get my head around it all at once, but it was like right on the edge of my thinking. As if all I needed was some light, or to squint my eyes, and I would see it.

I kept running the race through my head. It always came out the same way, with Twig catching the lead guy at the end and running past, so I let myself go through it over and over. But then I kind of figured it out and I called Twig. He was eating supper and I told him I'd call him later.

“No, I can talk,” he said. “What's up?”

“You remember saying how you were happy but not happy at the same time?” I asked.

“I remember.”

“The Twig who ran, who worked for that race, that's the happy Twig,” I said. “That's your best Twig. The other Twig, the one who has to deal with Midnight and Tall Boy—”

“And my uncle.”

“Right, that Twig's a different person,” I said. “That's like your history and your neighborhood and shit, and you can't change that part of you. But the part you could change, the getting into condition and finding the heart to take the pain, that's got to be wonderful.”

“That could be, Darius,” Twig said. “I'm going to have to run it around the track a little bit, but that could be. Now I got to go eat. Shall I eat for two Twigs?”

“Twig, that is so stupid.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. I could imagine his smile.

In school some of the freshman girls started a thing, pointing at Twig. It was cool—they would just stop where they were in the hallways when they saw him, hold out their arms, shoulder high, and point at him. Soon all the girls in the school were doing it and some of the guys, too.

Some of the black girls started pointing at Willie, but all of the girls pointed at Twig. He was a little embarrassed at first, but he was liking it at the same time.

“That dude Herb called me,” Twig said. We were drifting toward the media center to see a flick on insects that eat other insects. “He said I shouldn't talk to anybody who calls me who says they heard about me winning in Delaware. He says it's illegal.”

“But he can call you?”

Twig grinned. “I guess.”

“How you like being a star?”

“The star part”—Twig shook his head—“it's not me, but I like it.”

I saw Tall Boy and Midnight in the hallway and wondered how they would react. I thought they would screw up, and I was right. Midnight brushed by Twig, pushed him into the wall, and kept walking as if he hadn't noticed him. He had noticed him, all right.

Twig didn't let it get him down, but it messed with me. There were people who didn't want any of us to get away from the crappy little universes they had created for themselves. I wanted to say something to Twig about Midnight and Tall Boy, but I didn't want to stay with it any longer than I had to. Meanwhile, Twig kept saying that his winning the race wasn't all that much, but he couldn't stop talking about it. That made me feel good.

“So he's tapping his head with his finger,” Twig said. Him, me, and Brian were walking past the bank toward the valley on 145th. “Like this.” He made a squinchy face and touched the side of his head very slowly.

“Your uncle?”

“Yeah, and he's telling me the only reason he didn't want me to run before was that I wasn't thinking,” Twig went on. “But now I'm thinking so he's behind me.”

“You've got to be kidding me.”

“But meanwhile, my grandmother is behind him making the same face and tapping her head the same way he's doing it, and I'm trying not to crack up because she's so funny! And she can imitate anybody! So I'm looking at him and trying to keep a straight face, but it's okay because he don't see anybody except himself anyway.”

“I bet one day he's going to want to race you,” Brian said.

“He can't run,” Twig said. “He smokes so much, he can't even walk up a flight of stairs without wheezing and stopping to catch his breath.”

There was a small knot of people in front of the entrance to the park, and I nudged Brian and pointed across the street. “Let's cross,” I said.

“Isn't that Midnight?” Brian asked.

I didn't want to look, but I had to. We were less than twenty feet away from where Midnight was standing against the black iron bars. There was an older man standing in front of him. The guy was heavy, with a gut that hung over his belt.

“You said you were going to give her the money for the rent!” Midnight's voice was high, pleading.

“What you in my face for?” The man's voice was husky, slurred. “Why don't you get a damn job?”

“Why did you say you were going to give her the money if you weren't?” Midnight said.

“Go on home, kid,” another man said. “Let it go! Let it go!”

“What you want me to tell Mama?”

The punch came fast and hard. It caught Midnight square in the face. I felt Twig's hand on my arm.

“Let's go,” he said.

“Johnny, let it go, man.” The man who had told Midnight to leave was trying to calm the older man down. “Let it go, man!”

The second blow came, and the third, in quick succession. Midnight tried to twist away, but the man kept punching him in the head and the back of his neck.

“Yo, that's your kid, Johnny,” the peacekeeper said. “Let it go before you hurt him.”

A police siren sounded, and a black-and-white slowed down. The small crowd that had gathered began to disperse quickly. I watched Midnight slide along the fence and then begin to go down the hill. The man who had been trying to prevent the incident put his arms around Midnight's father and turned him away from his son.

The black-and-white sounded its siren again, waited until the crowd had broken up more, and then began to roll slowly up the hill.

“Today we are going to discuss how Shakespeare created characters to symbolize different aspects of his themes but also reflected his time and culture. In particular, we are going to examine the symbols represented in
The Tempest
by two different characters, Antonio and Caliban. Mr. Elliot, assuming that you have read the assigned text, will you begin our discussion?”

“Yeah, Prospero forgave his brother, Antonio, even though the dude messed him over and really tried to murder him. I think he forgave his brother because he wanted to get back to Europe and get into the good life again,” Jimmy said. “He didn't forgive Caliban because he was still mad at him because he was trying to do the nasty with his daughter. So the symbolism is if you're white, you're all right, but if you're black, you
got
to stay back.”

“I don't see why you have to bring race into everything,” Sara said. “Shakespeare didn't care about race. He was making a point about how people could change. Antonio changed because Prospero gave him his duke position back, but Prospero said Caliban couldn't change. Remember that line about his nurture couldn't affect his nature? Something like that? He couldn't forgive Caliban because Caliban was always going to be who he was.”

“What do you think, Darius?” Miss Carroll asked.

“The fact that Shakespeare didn't care about race—if that really is a fact—doesn't mean that he didn't have attitudes about people based on race,” I said. “So what's the difference?”

“Well, I don't think Shakespeare was a racist,” Miss Carroll said. “But can we get away from name-calling and get to the text we're supposed to be studying?”

“Yo, Teach, if you're going to fight with Darius, can I be the new suck-up?” Jimmy asked.

“Jimmy, that is so pathetic,” Miss Carroll said, shaking her head. “Darius has a right to think what he wants. What he needs to do in this class is to organize his thoughts coherently so that they become clear in the context of our studies.”

“Hey, Darius, you got that?” Sara asked.

What did I think? I thought about Caliban in the forest of the ghetto, teaching Prospero how to survive, how to hold his child up to the new moon and give her a name.

Call her Miranda, call her love.

What did I think of Prospero looking at Caliban's dark form and thinking him only half human?

“You said you were going to give her the money for the rent!”

Even if the money had been forthcoming, it was too little, too late, to touch the nature of Caliban.

“They arrested DaSheen!” Heavy-hipped Wanda was sitting on the stoop, yelling into her cell phone. “They caught him with that man's phone and picked him up this morning. Yeah. Yeah. Um-hmm. He's saying he bought it from somebody. They had cops all over the place this morning. They even snatched some guys from the barbershop. You don't be stealing a phone from no white man when they can track it down.”

The “white man” was a young Chinese doctor who worked down at Harlem Hospital. He had been confronted by “three hoodies” and stabbed twice in the leg and arm when he tried to resist being robbed. That had been Thursday afternoon. On Friday morning, they arrested DaSheen.

DaSheen Willis was all right. He was nineteen and hung out on the corner most of the time. Sometimes he worked for the Latino furniture store on East 125th Street, delivering furniture, and sometimes he hustled weed, but generally he seemed like a nice guy. I was surprised that he was the one arrested with the phone, and even more shocked when he was released late Friday night.

On Saturday morning, he was shot and killed on his front steps.

The police, in full attack gear, flooded the neighborhood. All the rituals of death started immediately. Mrs. Willis, DaSheen's mother, wailed on the street corner with his aunt, like a two-person Greek chorus. People who hardly knew DaSheen had begun building little memorials to him. Someone had an old picture of him, which was propped against a streetlamp and surrounded with cards and squat colored candles. Signs reading
R.I.P.
and
DASHEEN, WE LOVE YOU
were carelessly put against the base of the light so that they looked like a crudely made quilt. A news team showed up, and several of the young people pointed out DaSheen's family, but the camera people weren't interested in the family. They were still pursuing the robbery of the doctor.

“The only story they're going to do is something about how ‘gentrification' might not work in Harlem,” Sammy said, still wearing his barbershop whites. “When you see it on the news, just remember you heard it here first.”

“You don't think he had anything to do with that doctor being stabbed?” I asked.

“It don't hardly matter what he did or didn't do,” Sammy answered. “Sometimes it seems to me that all you young folks are taking numbers and getting on line to march yourself down to the graveyard. You're either killing each other or getting killed. It gets discouraging after a while. It does.”

“And we're all in the same shadow, and we all smell the same,” I said.

“I think I know where you're going with that, Darius,” Sammy said. “But just seeing it don't make a difference. We all see it, but we're still marching. Ain't we?”

A truck marked
ATHOS FLORIST
pulled up, and for a moment, I thought someone had sent flowers for DaSheen's memorial. Then the door opened and I saw it was full of more police in SWAT gear. People started clearing the streets as the cops got out and formed a skirmish line. Two other police cars showed up on the corners and blocked off the street.

“Get off the street, Darius,” Sammy said, wiping his hands on his legs. “Just in case these fools get gun-happy.”

The police were in front of my house, so I walked as casually as I could across the street into another building. I wanted to see what was going to happen next, but I didn't want to be too close.

It was an old walk-up, a woman from our church lived in it, and I was surprised at how clean it was. The tin was coming off some of the steps, but the halls, although dim, were swept and smelled of cleaning fluid.

The door to the roof was shut, but I saw that a piece of cardboard, folded, had been put at the top of the door to keep it closed. I pushed it open carefully. When I saw there was no one on the roof, I stepped out, put the cardboard back on top of the door, and closed it behind me.

The wind swirled around the roof and I felt goose bumps rise on my arms. Edging my way to the front of the roof, I looked down on the street below.

Fury looks down at the earth from where he flies in slow, lazy circles. He sees each movement below and interprets its meaning. The police are lining up in front of a house they plan to enter. Sharpshooters are crouched behind a police car and the florist van. They must have the name of their prey
.

But they could be prey as well
.

I watched as the police went cautiously into the apartment building. Then I saw more cops on the roofs across the street from where I watched.