The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  The Mighty BNK is what Baby and his boys do when they’re bored. And for fame. Like the time they went berserk-boarding through the Catholic church by the house where Turtle’s foster family lives. Baby videoed the others zipping across the checkerboard floors and leaping from the altar. Touché spray-painted “MBNK” on the wooden doors during their escape. On their way out, Baby noticed the statues of old men in the gallery above. They wore flowing pink sheets, one statue dangling a key, the other a sword. They looked like they wanted to kick his ass. He gave them the finger, as the Mighty BNK got away clean. Touché posted the video, which went viral on the web.

  If he were being totally honest, Baby would admit he joined the Mighty BNK for the same reason as the others: to get laid. They hide their faces on camera with white stockings, but everybody at school knows who they are. It’s worked out great for the rest of the Mighty BNK. It hasn’t worked at all for Baby.

  He doesn’t have the swagger of Touché or the brains of Turtle or the wicked determination of Chaney. Baby’s fourteen, but looks closer to nine since he’s two heads shorter than the others and has no stubble on his chin and chest, and no pubes. When the girls at school call him Baby, they mean it.

  Baby doesn’t know the first, second, or third thing about girls, but takes notes and listens to the rest of the Mighty BNK talk about doin’ it. Baby fears he’ll die without doing it. He wonders if dying without doing it means he winds up in heaven as a kid for all eternity. Or in hell for a kid that wanted it.

  Touché sniggers in the corner of the rusty cargo container, having gone first. His arms are tight against his chest. Baby knows this pose means to leave him be. Baby and the Mighty BNK jacked the nitrous oxide from Sanchez because they were tired of sniffing airplane glue and Freon, which burned the ever-loving b’jesus out of their noses.

  Turtle fills a blue balloon from the nitrous oxide canister and hands it to Baby. Baby’s careful not to let any gas escape. He glances at Touché, whose face is wet. He always cries when they fly.

  Turtle tokes weed in a crouch. He offers to Baby, but Baby shakes his head. Baby takes a draw from the balloon, nearly as much as his lungs will hold. Then he sucks a bit of straight air on top to hold the gas steady. The nitrous is sweet on his tongue. Sweet and steady like he’s just licked a birthday cake, like his birthday was yesterday, is today, and will be tomorrow. Seated and holding his breath, Baby clutches the tips of his Chuck Taylors. A tingling rips up his spine like electric spiders on parade. The spiders are angry this time. They rummage through Baby’s innards for flies, bad ideas, and mildew, but don’t find enough to keep them alive.

  Baby shoves the gas from his lungs. He feels like propeller blades are chopping him into finer and finer pieces. Every time he feels this, Baby wonders what it would be like to choose how he puts himself back together. Bigger and stronger this time. Taller and darker this time. This time hung like a mutant ox. Maybe this time feared by men and loved like a widow’s diamond. Baby clutches his hair and falls onto his back, shivering.

  They were good until the alarm in Sanchez’s garage went off. Baby saw the flash of Sanchez’s gun, and Chaney’s eyes open as full moons on his way to the ground. After Touché and Turtle ran away, the police found Baby frozen in place, his sneakers covered in vomit, the only member of the Mighty BNK to ever be captured alive.

  Touché finishes the weed before Baby gets a second tug at the balloon. Touché is tapping the side of the cargo container with the thick tree limb he sometimes uses as a walking stick.

  “They running a terror campaign on all the Blacks in our ’hood.” Touché flicks the spent bud away.

  The gas has different effects on each member of the Mighty BNK. It makes Touché paranoid. Well, more paranoid than normal, Baby thinks.

  “Them rednecks can’t just shoot any brother they feel like,” Touché says.

  “That’s dumb,” Turtle says. “Sanchez ain’t no kind of redneck.” The gas brings out Turtle’s argumentative side. Sober, he would let Touché carry on until he got tired of hearing himself. “Old Sanchez’s Hispanic.”

  “I don’t care if he Jesus on the cross,” says Touché. “His people coming over the borders taking our space, our girls.”

  Baby knows Sanchez didn’t come over any border. Sanchez’s son went to the same school as Baby’s mama.

  “And what about you?” Touché asks Baby.

  Baby toys with his ankle bracelet. It’s a hunk of plastic in the shape of a watch, a handless, faceless watch that refuses to let him know what time it is. Baby wonders what will happen after they get Sanchez. Maybe Sanchez didn’t mean to kill Chaney, and it’s not like a smackdown will bring him back. Baby raises his eyebrows as if to say, “What about me?”

  “You so fake.” Touché spits. “You need to man up.”

  “I ain’t stomping some old dude,” Turtle says.

  “He shot our boy. He got Baby with a tracking band on his leg. But he gets to walk around scot-free. This is our neighborhood. Shit, this is our country.” Touché started saying this after Chaney died. “We about to get a Black president. People can’t screw with us like this anymore.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to take his stuff,” Turtle says.

  * * *

  —

  Baby skates past a one-way sign on Claiborne Avenue, his hair bouncing in the wind. A police car with its sirens going nearly sideswipes him. He salutes it, but trips to his knees in the process. That’s what the gas does to Baby. It kills his balance. Baby looks around to make sure no one saw him and picks up his board. He hurries past an abandoned double the Latinos tagged with graffiti. He can’t accept that his own neighborhood isn’t safe anymore.

  It’s almost dark, and Baby’s mama will start her checkup on him, calling from her night job scrubbing hospital sheets. She’ll expect him to tell her he’s safe and sound in their box of old people’s feet.

  Baby thought Touché and Turtle might fight over getting Sanchez. Touché kept pushing it, but Baby skated off. Touché called Baby a pussy.

  Touché is in Baby’s head as he skateboards home. Touché thinks Baby doesn’t want to get payback for what happened to Chaney. But if Baby isn’t willing to get Sanchez, what is he? Maybe Touché’s right. A Latino man in overalls is perched on a ladder, applying stucco to the side of a two-story house. The lawn is littered with empty stucco bags. Baby hums a stone at the man, but misses. The man waves at Baby. Baby searches for another good rock, but the world disappears. His head is covered by a bag and he can’t breathe. Something hard whacks him senseless, and even though he’s defenseless, whoever’s on top of him is having too much fun to let up. He kicks Baby in the stomach, and twice in the face. When Baby comes to, he pulls the bag off his head, but the attacker is gone. He wipes his mouth and finds blood and tooth fragments.

  When Baby gets home, the Pie Man is asleep on the side steps, using a paint can for a pillow. Baby goes inside and looks in his mama’s hand mirror. He’s glad she’s not around to see his nose is smashed or that he’s missing half an eyetooth. Blood coats his chin, and the dust from the stucco bag makes him look like a ghost. He’s afraid to wash the dust off, worried the water will activate the stucco mix and turn his head to stone.

  Even his mama would agree somebody has to pay for this. If the Mighty BNK let this go on, pretty soon Baby, Touché, and every other kid in the neighborhood will be swinging from trees. Baby fingers the van keys from the snoring Pie Man’s pocket. Every color in the rainbow is on the Pie Man’s grungy jacket. Baby runs outside and hops into the Pie Man’s van and cranks the ignition. The pedals are so far from the seat, making it hard to drive, but it’s only a couple of blocks to Touché’s.

  “They rolled you like a blunt.” Touché purses his lips in a mock whistle after he climbs into the passenger seat.

  He almost seems to be enjoying this. Baby rubs his mouth, but the
sharp pain stops him.

  Although the bleeding has slowed, his jaw clicks when he moves it.

  “Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you before,” Touché says. “It’s get or get got out here.”

  They stop at a gas station in Gert Town. There’s a darkened church on the next lot. One of the neon cross arms is out, so it looks like a machine gun turned on its nose. Touché leaps out and disappears into the station. The lights are painfully bright to Baby.

  Touché sprints from the gas station, toting a bottle. He hands it to Baby. It’s a bottle of Goose.

  “Should we go get Turtle?” Baby says.

  “We don’t need no pussies in the way. We mad dogs tonight.”

  Baby doesn’t let the vodka bottle touch his sore lips when he drinks. Tilting his head back makes him woozy, but his insides swelter. He tastes ash and rust, and pours some onto the van floor.

  “Why’d you do that for?” Touché says.

  “That’s for Sanchez,” Baby says. “He’s going to need it.”

  Touché chuckles and takes the bottle. “Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about.”

  They drive to Sanchez’s garage, and Touché and Baby slip white stockings over their heads. Baby’s hair makes the stocking pooch out so that he looks like a lightbulb. It mashes the swollen parts of Baby’s face, immediately making him want to take it off, and sandpapers the sweat-moistened stucco coating his skin.

  It’s still early enough that Sanchez is bent under a hood like he’s praying to the engine.

  Water tings as it circulates in the van radiator.

  “Yo, old man Sanchez! What’s up, amigo?” Touché calls out before they enter the wooden fence. Touché says “amigo” wrong. Hi-meego, he says.

  “Qué pasa, ’migo?” says Sanchez, stuffing a rag into his overalls. He stops in place when Touché and Baby step into view. Baby figures Sanchez will take off running or go for a gun in his toolbox, but he doesn’t. He rakes a hand through his thin, white hair. Baby thinks maybe the Pie Man will show up and slap Touché on the back and say they’ve had enough fun for one night. Instead, they stand in silence broken only by nature: crickets and toads rioting in the bushes.

  Touché and Baby move forward, but Sanchez stands where he is. He’s short. Not Baby short, but not much taller. “Move.” Touché shoves Sanchez toward the van.

  “You’re Reverend Goodman’s son?” Sanchez says to Touché. The stocking mask flattens out Touché’s cheekbones and tweaks his nose downward, but he’s still recognizable.

  “You don’t know me, niño,” Touché says.

  “Ian?” Sanchez says to Baby, calling him by the name Baby’s mama only uses when she’s about to lay down the law. “Why are you here?” Sanchez says just before Touché cracks Sanchez in the back of the head with the shaft of his stick. Sanchez falls, out cold. Baby smells copper, blood, and looks down at Sanchez’s slumped body.

  “It’s on now.” Touché laughs.

  Baby thinks it’s over, that they’ll drive off and put this behind them, but Touché stoops and wraps twine around Sanchez’s wrists and ankles. Touché tells Baby to help lift him to the floor of the van. Within minutes, they’re speeding toward the levee on the back side of City Park. When they reach the muddy access road that shadows the levee, Touché nearly rolls the van. Sanchez clutches his knees on the bay floor. A dark landscape whizzes by as Baby grips the metal handles in the van bay. Baby’s ankle bracelet vibrates. He forgot it was there. He grabs the bracelet, but it keeps vibrating.

  The van pitches when they scale the levee, causing a box of nails to fall on Sanchez. He yelps. Baby tries to catch the next box, but misses it. He feels like he’s on a conveyer belt, heading toward an open furnace. Touché stops near the concrete floodwall, which sits atop the levee. He takes Sanchez’s ankles, Baby grabs him by the armpits, and they haul him from the van. Sanchez is heavier than he looks. They drop him in the moist grass at the foot of the wall.

  “Maybe we can just leave him,” Baby says. His head is still fuzzy from what he drank and inhaled earlier, and from the beating. Touché remains silent and switches on his video camera. The van’s headlight floods the scene so there’s no color. Sanchez prays into his bound hands.

  “You first.” Touché hands his walking stick to Baby.

  Baby steps toward Sanchez and water snakes in through the seams of his Chuck Taylors, sending a jolt up his spine. Sanchez looks up at him. The stick is covered with spikes. Touché added nails to it, Baby realizes.

  “Take your shot, little man.”

  Crooked nails glisten like fingers in the moonlight. Baby brings the stick up high above Sanchez’s head. Some of the nails are angled at the van. Other nails slant toward Touché, Sanchez, and the night sky. One points straight at Baby.

  The Places I Couldn’t Go

  My good girl and me was happy as goldfish till she got pregnant. She would handle it. We agreed. She was in two-year college, and we was both busted. Who could pay for formula? Wipes? A car seat? I caught the bus to work.

  But she switched up outside the clinic. I tried to talk reason, but she wasn’t having it. Her cheeks were red as welts, but she wasn’t crying.

  “I thought you were better than this,” I said. She left me outside the clinic.

  I tried to get us back to the way things used to be. We always made out on her mama’s couch. We did that one more time—I brought weed and nacho chips over—but the next time I stopped by her mama said she was gone and that I shouldn’t come round no more.

  I saw her years later. I worked a gas station register by an off-ramp. She still had those baby-fat cheeks. I bet she changed her hair a million times since last I touched her, but her hair was the same again as it was before.

  She had a boy hanging round. He wore cleats and knee socks. There was a grass stain on his jersey.

  I kept eyeing her, but she wouldn’t look at me. She circled the racks and went to the automatic doors. They whooshed open, then closed, then open. She pulled that boy by the arm.

  “Don’t stare at that man,” she said. “We don’t know him.”

  Outside, a man pumped gas into their car, a convertible, and they all rode off together. I went to the window. They crossed the intersection and disappeared.

  Spinning

  One.

  After my dad died, I bore his body from room to room. The cancer had flayed his

  flesh.

  I was shocked by his heaviness, his body

  pulled the cords of my back

  to their conclusions.

  He put a violin in my hands when I was small, and once I turned the peg as a note rose

  higher and higher

  until the E snapped against my arm, a caterpillar-shaped welt rising.

  Two.

  I refuse my father once:

  he asks me to gift him a pack of

  cigarettes.

  Grandmother has a heart attack alone in the night,

  arteries hardened by Philip Morris.

  A surgeon slices

  my mother’s

  breast

  to save her from cells gone to riot, chewing their way

  out of her

  body.

  I say, “Father, I’ll do this for you but

  once.” Love is.

  Three.

  Mama cries for years after his death. His leaving ends our circling. “Don’t you miss him, son?”

  The green wedge of a Salem’s pack winks from

  her lap.

  After I filled my car’s tank, the needle rises from E

  to F.

  Every cell of Mama’s body balloon-filled with

  heavy water.

  In my daydreams, she inhales—smoke nettles her

  lungs—

 
then calls his true name.

  Zero.

  1982. I’m four. Dad takes the wheel of a pickup truck he borrowed from work without permission, reaches over to clip me into the passenger seat, throws the transmission into drive, lights off down the ice black rock road of Veterans Highway, watches my laughter at the witch’s cackle of wind flowing through the cabin, misses his turn at Lafreniere Park, turns too fast, spins us at the intersection, two infants on the back of a mermaid, the fishtail whipping in the drizzle-made ponds, he—reaching over to pin me in place as I think

  this will always be.

  Fast Hands, Fast Feet

  Nothing for me to get by on here. Bubble gum wrappers on the seat cushion. Can’t use. Empty jugs strewn across the back seat. Can’t use. Cassette tapes in the pocket on the door. Can’t use. Who even still on cassettes, anyway? What year they think this is, 1980? A stash of brown nickels in the armrest. My stomach hum. I just might eat tonight, me.

  I’m leant across the front seat of this hoopty. Windows fogged up from cold. A cat hiss on the hurricane fence in back of the house. This a quiet hood. A good place for checking car doors quick to see if they locked or alarmed. If they locked, move on. If they alarmed, move on triple time. If they ain’t locked or alarmed, well, here I is.

  I stuff change in my pocket, carve a middle finger in the dashboard, and lookie here. Someone left me a bedroll on the floor behind the seat. My arm shiver. Too much good luck a bad sign. It’s time to run, but then I see a dude in a camo jacket at the end of the driveway watching me, trapping me. He big enough to knock down a tree with a ah-choo.

  “Ain’t got to run from me none, girl.” He put one hand out like calm down, everything gonna aight, but his other hand still at his hip. Just like a police do when he bout to shoot.