The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  The Pie Man

  The Pie Man tells Baby that a man has got to grab his own future for his own self. The City of New Orleans pays good to work disaster cleanup, and Baby would do well to cash in before all the money gets carted off. A lot more sensible, the Pie Man says, than running around punching on Spanish dudes. The Pie Man walks across the living room in his chef’s jacket. He plops down on the couch, making himself at home. The walls have been stripped naked to the studs. Baby doesn’t know which way his future is, but he’s damn sure it’s got nothing to do with scooping mold out of some abandoned school.

  Baby sits at the plastic folding table in white briefs and a tank top, fingering the dry skin around his bulky plastic ankle bracelet. He plucks a Vienna sausage from its tin and tosses the wiener in his mouth. Baby eyes the Pie Man. The Pie Man doesn’t seem to get that he has no claim on this place or anyone in it. Baby may be only fourteen, but this is his house. He’s the man here.

  The Pie Man’s eyes are red. He kneads his face with both hands and looks around like he doesn’t remember why he’s there. Sauced out of his mind before noon. Probably spent the night with the winos back in Gert Town.

  Baby’s mama doesn’t notice because she’s too busy flapping around the room. As she gathers her things for the daycare center, she keeps clucking at him about making the right choices in life.

  She’s on Baby because a Latino day-jobber got jumped outside the package liquor last night, the latest in a string of Black on Brown beatdowns in retaliation for what happened to Baby’s boy, Chaney. Baby’s mama thinks Baby is part of the jump squad. He’s not. Yet. He doesn’t tell her this. If she and everyone else think he’s in on the attacks, it beats the alternative.

  Baby’s mama checks her hair in a handheld mirror before placing the mirror on the table he’s sitting at. It doubles as her dresser, like the couch doubles as her bed. Baby sleeps on the floor in his fleece blanket, wrapped up tight as a papoose. A portable stovetop makes the bathroom their kitchen. All their real stuff was destroyed in the flood from the levee breach after Hurricane Katrina passed nearly three years ago. They live in the front half of the house since the back is sealed off with blue tarp to keep the fungus odor out. It doesn’t work. Everything smells like old people’s feet to Baby.

  Sanchez, the carpenter Baby used to gopher for, shot Chaney in cold blood, but the police called it self-defense—as if Chaney’s back had a chance against Sanchez’s .38. Sanchez and the rest of the Latinos are afraid to work in Baby’s neighborhood. If they do work in his neighborhood, they bring their guns, and sometimes use them. Baby’s mama still needed work done after Sanchez stopped coming around. She called the Pie Man, who worked sometimes with Baby and Sanchez, in to odd-job their Marengo Street home three months ago because she can’t afford a contractor with papers or real tools.

  One day when Baby came home from school, he found the Pie Man’s duffel of clothes on the rental sofa in the living room. The Pie Man been around for days, sizing up what house repairs needed to be done. But Baby spotted shaving cream in the bag, which was too much.

  “What’s this?” Baby asked, rubbing his own chin.

  “He’s going to help us get this place back together,” Baby’s mama said.

  “No. I mean we can’t just have some strange dude sleeping here.”

  “You know he’s not a stranger.”

  “He’s lounging in my spot. That’s where I lay my head.”

  “He sleeps in his van. Besides, you know he’s your father.” Baby’s mama had said this before. She told Baby versions of her and the Pie Man’s time in high school together. They were senior superlatives, Cutest Couple. But Baby tuned out whenever she started talking about his dad, which he thought was something you proved not said.

  “If he my daddy, where he been at all this time?”

  “He’s always been in your life, boy. Some people are more around than others. Who do you think paid for those sneakers you’re wearing?”

  Baby didn’t like the idea of the drunk lurking around putting his fingers wherever he wanted. He chose to be outside of Baby’s life. That was where he belonged. Baby pulled off his sneakers and threw them at the front door.

  “Pick them up,” Baby’s mama said.

  “Tell him to pick them up!” Baby said.

  * * *

  —

  Chin on the table, eyes clamped shut, Baby realizes the Pie Man and his mama have been jabbering at him the whole time. He doesn’t care and instead wonders what they were like when they met each other. During the time of Public Enemy and parachute pants. Back when the Pie Man’s uneven flat-top fade was still in style.

  They have a similar way of phoning in their rants. No commitment. They talk at him like they’re being watched. As if they’ll get in big trouble for failing to pay the right amount of lip service.

  The Pie Man tells Baby he ought to respect his mama, man, because that’s the least she deserves for bringing him into this unbalanced world, and if Baby’s going to keep driving her every which way like he’s been doing, then Baby ain’t no kind of man. The whole issue could be that Baby’s not thinking, says the Pie Man, but he can start anytime now. He tells Baby to sit up and pay attention. Because he doesn’t know the Pie Man well, Baby does as he’s told. The Pie Man could be crazy or something, like Baby’s friend Touché.

  “What, am I supposed to call you Pops or something?” Baby nudges his skateboard under the table with his bare foot.

  The Pie Man’s slacks, shoes, and neckerchief match his jacket, dingy white from head to toe. He mismatched the cloth buttons so that his collar is higher on one side than the other. To Baby the Pie Man looks like a homeless, dark-skinned Chef Boyardee. There’s no trace of the freckles Baby got from his redheaded mama. The ones he catches hell for at school. The ones he tried to scrub off after reading the Dred Scott decision in American History the year before. But he know that even if his freckles won’t come off, he could still hold it down for his people like Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur, or Lil Wayne.

  Baby scratches the oval scab on his shin, thinking it’s going to leave a mark when it heals. Maybe he’ll cover it with a black fist tattoo when Mama’s not looking. Touché wants everyone in the Mighty Black Ninja Krew to get black fist tattoos after they find and stomp Sanchez today. Baby’s heard through the grapevine that Sanchez feels bad about what he did to Chaney, shot dead when the Mighty BNK—what Baby and his friends call themselves—tried to loot Sanchez’s garage. It might be true that Sanchez felt guilt. Sanchez never held back telling Baby when he’d screwed up, but he was quick to give Baby props for good work, and he always gave Baby a can of cold drink at the end of the day.

  Baby gets up to leave. But his mama yells at him and makes him sit his rear back in that chair right this instant. He’s a target, she says, and Baby knows she’s right. The Latinos have been dishing out hardcore payback. Curtis Thompson, the running back at Baby’s school, got whacked in the knee with a galvanized steel pipe the other day. Curtis is out for the season, and with him any shot at the state championship. He said he never saw the guys that did it, but that they had Spanish accents. Nobody’s safe, thinks Baby.

  Baby’s mama thinks she can help protect him by sending him to the barber. His hair makes him look like a maniac, she says. But Baby’s afro is a matter of pride for him. It’s a fuzzy crown that radiates out six inches going from black at the scalp to reddish brown at the tips. Like a halo made of rabbit’s fur. Most of his friends think it’s pretty cool. It counteracts the freckles.

  One thing at a time, says the Pie Man to Baby’s mama. Baby follows the Pie Man’s lips. The way they form words. Inner tube round one second, then flat like the pair of rotten bananas in front of him. The Pie Man says he knows Baby doesn’t want to go back on full house arrest. He looks at Baby as if expecting a response, which Baby doesn’t give. Baby stares at those bananas. The Pie
Man tells Baby to get up because it’s time to get to work. Baby looks out the window. Orange traffic barrels flank a DO NOT ENTER sign at the end of the block.

  “Nope,” Baby says. “I ain’t doing your slave work. If that means I’m stuck inside, then so what.”

  Baby’s mama sprays air freshener at Baby. She tells him she’ll turn him in herself if he doesn’t get that haircut with the Pie Man. And he better be home before the streetlights come on. If he’s more than a half inch from the front door by then, the SWAT team will come after him, she reminds him for the umpteenth and a half time. She kisses him on the forehead and leaves.

  The Pie Man says he’ll bring Baby to the barber now before they go to work, but doesn’t get up from the couch.

  He continues to stare at the empty space behind Baby. Baby rides his skateboard to the bathroom, where he straps on his Chuck Taylors and a pair of brown plaid shorts before climbing out the window.

  * * *

  • • •

  The outside of Lawrence D. Crocker Elementary isn’t much different from how Baby remembers. Lots of brick walls and stucco pillars. Plenty of rectangles. Gravel lot. The narrow plexiglass windows were faded opaque even before Baby and his friends went here, but the interior is totally different since Hurricane Katrina turned it out. Dried gunk coats the tile and baseboards. Green paint curdles from the floodwater pox. Rivulets of rust and mold syrup drool down the walls. Waterlogged books, tiny chairs coated in sludge, poster boards covered in blue-black fungus. The dump smells like anchovies pickled in urine.

  Baby hasn’t cut his hair but figures the worst that will happen is he’ll get talked at more. He does skateboarding tricks on the retaining wall outside of the school, knowing it will be some time before the Pie Man puts his brain on and figures out where he is. But the van appears at the street corner within minutes. The clunker has one headlight and Nobody Starves When the Pie Man’s Around scrawled in faded orange letters across the side. Ever since the Pie Man decided he’s Baby’s pops again, he’s begun following Baby around in that death trap even when they’re not working.

  The Pie Man used to sell gumbo ya-ya, greens, and bread pudding at barbershops and car washes. Sometimes he makes pies—pecan, apple, and sweet potato—all with his own two hands. Baby can tell the Pie Man had been real proud of his business selling mouse balls to the citizenry. Baby chuckled when he remembered the web video he’d seen of a stupid toothless cat doing its best to gum a mouse to death. The mouse kept plopping out—pissed—but pretty much okay. Now, two-by-fours and tangled wires choke the van’s bay. The Pie Man must have had breakfast, thinks Baby. He managed to button his jacket right and comb his flattop so that his head looks like an eraser, the way he likes. He must be sober.

  “Why can’t they just bulldoze this hole and start from scratch?” Baby says as he hauls a sledgehammer into the lobby outside of the cafeteria. Sanchez’s tools were still at the jobsite. Baby thinks about how Sanchez’s tools were for assembling things, not destroying them. Baby learned, to his own amazement, how to hang a door. It was harder than it looked, Sanchez told Baby, because you had to make many little decisions to get the right fit. Baby wonders what decisions Sanchez made before he shot Chaney. He lifts his sledgehammer and imagines swinging at Sanchez’s head, watching his head soar into an outfield.

  The Pie Man shrugs and tosses his jacket on a wheelbarrow. He has ink on his bicep. An eagle, perched above an earth and anchor, flaps its wings whenever the Pie Man flexes.

  “You ever shot somebody?” Baby says.

  The Pie Man slings a wide shovel onto his shoulder and says he shot two people.

  “Did they die?”

  The Pie Man shrugs and says, “They both died.”

  They work their way into the library, where red wall pennants form a frieze near the ceiling. Bookcases lean at odd angles, having dominoed during the flooding. All the books are on the floor, mush. As little boys, Baby and Chaney filed these books for the librarian as punishment after starting a food fight. The books now look like the food they threw, Cream of Wheat.

  The Pie Man says he’s not entirely sure about whether he killed the second dude. The second dude he shot was an insurgent with his finger on a trip wire. The whole convoy unloaded on him and any one of them might have gotten the kill shot, he says. Or, he tells Baby, maybe the hajji died of fear.

  “What about the first one?” Baby asks.

  The Pie Man shovels books into the wheelbarrow on top of his jacket. He says the first guy was his friend Freddie, the first person he met when he enlisted. He murdered Freddie dead. He tells Baby he’s not sure if either situation matters because at war it’s legit to kill, but if you kill one of your own you’d better have your reasons clean as a fresh latrine, which is what the Pie Man had. Freddie had flipped the fuck out and tried to mow down the boys in the mess with a fifty cal. The Pie Man capped him from behind with his M240, which took Freddie’s arm clean off above the elbow.

  The Pie Man says Baby and his boys shouldn’t be so ready to go settle scores with that Spanish guy. Baby can go any way he wants, but that doesn’t mean he has to. The Pie Man says Baby should just sit on his hands. Baby notices a corroded picture of Nat Turner clipped to one of the wall pennants.

  “People will roll you, if you let them,” says Baby as he points a finger from the Pie Man to himself. “I ain’t trying to get rolled, you heard me?” Baby straightens to his full height. “We getting him tonight.”

  The Pie Man pops a pill and says he can’t argue with that much. He says he can’t argue with much of anything except that the VA could stop screwing around and send him better medication. The Pie Man’s face is scrunched up again like he’s confused. He says he ain’t slept right since Kirkuk.

  “Why you even join the Marines?” Baby asks.

  The Pie Man says it seemed like a good way to go. They needed a chef, and he needed a job for the future he had mapped out. A fair exchange he thought at the time. But he never baked a single pie in the military. When he came home, he’d forgotten how to. Whether you get Sanchez or he gets you, the Pie Man tells Baby, you end up in the same place.

  The Pie Man and Baby put on respirator masks. Baby thinks the Pie Man looks like a futuristic rat. Baby grabs the sledgehammer and zeros in on the face of Guy Bluford, the first brother launched into outer space. He swings and before long the walls are coming down all around him.

  * * *

  —

  It’s an hour to sundown, and the Pie Man left Baby once they finished work for the day. Touché and Turtle skate up the driveway in front of the school.

  Touché does a 360 from a ramp angled over a mound of bricks and stops near Baby. “Welcome back to Genitalia.” Touché’s got a fauxhawk, and his striped hoodie makes it look like he’s still spinning. General Taylor and Peniston are the streets closest to Crocker facing downtown. They’ve called the streets Genitalia and Peniston since the sixth grade. Dry-ass Street runs perpendicular to them both, a few blocks closer to the streetcar line. “You still got your Oreo ’fro, little man?”

  “Man, my mama can’t make a brother cut off his trademark,” says Baby, trying to ignore Touché’s comment. Baby hates it when Touché makes fun of his size almost as much as he hates when he makes fun of the fact he’s practically half White. It isn’t Baby’s fault his mama’s pops wasn’t Black like everyone else. Touché seems to know where everyone’s buttons are. He’s like a video game champ who’s got all the codes memorized. X to kick you in the gizzards. Z plus turbo to take out your knees and dump you in Lake Pontchartrain. Sometimes you don’t even know it was Touché who got you.

  “Yeah, I asked your mama for a haircut. She gave me a blow job instead.” Baby pokes his tongue against his cheek and pumps his fist. “The bitch still don’t understand English.”

  “Your mama so fat,” says Touché, “I pushed that ho in the Mississippi
River and rode her to the other side.”

  “I heard in Sunday school,” Baby says, “your mama so old she was Jesus’s nanny.”

  “Your mama so fat she went to an all-you-can-eat buffet and ate the Chinese waitress,” says Turtle. “She be using Ethiopians as toothpicks.”

  “Your mama—” says Touché, but he stops and punches Turtle in the shoulder. No one makes fun of Turtle’s real mama. Not even Touché. Not since the last time they saw her, dry-skinned and strung out, begging for change on Canal Street. She wore a tank top and jeans so small they could have fit a ten-year-old, but loose enough to reveal her soiled lace underwear. “We need to get that Sanchez and pop him. Whap.” Touché clutches his board and brings it down on Sanchez’s imaginary head. “Or drag him across town by a rope.”

  “Kill that noise,” says Turtle, fixing his thick glasses on his nose. “We ain’t getting nobody.” Turtle grabs Baby’s shoulder. “I saw the Pie Man’s van earlier.”

  Baby always thinks he’s staring at him from another world through those binoculars. A scarier world.

  “He playing camp counselor again?” Turtle asks. Baby nods.

  “Come on.” Turtle skates off with his glasses in hand. He doesn’t need them to get where they’re going.

  All three boys glide to the lot behind the school. Scraggly grass forms a crescent along the edges of the fractured concrete. It reminds Baby of the Pie Man’s receding hairline. They enter a rusting cargo container where the Mighty Black Ninja Krew keeps gas canisters.