“What did you do? Run up the stairs to get to the phone?” I asked.
“No, man, I just wanted to let you know what Calvin said,” C.J. said. “I think I’ve seen at least two of those dudes from the Heights on television. They’re violent as anything. Calvin said they’d shoot you and make bets on how you going to fall.”
“Rise told me that, but it doesn’t have anything to do with us,” I said, checking myself out in my dresser mirror.
“It does if Rise is still a Count,” C.J. said. “But I’m telling you this. If the police start rounding up all the Counts, I’m going to rat you out for a lighter sentence.”
“Thanks, buddy, but I haven’t done anything yet,” I said.
“Police don’t know that, so I’m still ratting you out,” C.J. said.
“Yo, C.J., I thought you and me were tight.”
“Yeah, but I need to get a light sentence, and you’re the only Count I have a chance of beating.”
“C.J., you couldn’t beat me if I was an egg and you were a Mixmaster or something,” I said. “You might have a chance against Little Man, but there’s no way you’re going to stand up against Jesse the Magnificent.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you something. Check this out.” C.J. lowered his voice. “You remember when somebody was saying that there was this kid around with a gun? They said his name was Brittle or something like that? Well, the story now is that it was Little Man. He’s carrying.”
“You got a job with the Amsterdam News,”I asked. “How come you know everything?”
“People come to me with news,” C.J. said. “They count on me for leadership.”
“C.J., you still have some of your baby teeth,” I said. “You’re no leader. Take it from an older man, okay?”
“Well, check this out,” C.J. said. “I’m bringing the news to you—you’re not bringing it to me.”
“Hey, C.J., how did Calvin get all this information?”
“He told me that he saw Rise in the drugstore on Seventh Avenue and he told him.”
“That’s funny, because he told me the same thing and told me not to be spreading it around.”
“So what’s going on?”
“I don’t know, C.J., I don’t know.”
Mom was calling, so I told C.J. I had to split for dinner.
At dinner Dad still had his foot propped up from when he had hurt it. Mom had made crab cakes, his favorite dish, and was being all nice to him as if he had done something wonderful by hurting his foot.
“Whatever you’re thinking about, it must be amusing,” Mom said as she laid the portobello mushrooms on my plate. “Sitting there smiling to yourself like a Chessy cat.”
“You know what I was thinking?” Dad interrupted with his usual prelecture question. “I was thinking that if you were lying dead someplace, and a hungry chicken or a hungry pig came up on you, they would eat you faster than you could say lickety split.”
I knew where he was going. “Well, that’s them, and I’m me,” I said.
“Archie, do we need that tonight?” Mom asked.
“I’m not saying anything about the boy,” Dad answered. “I was just noticing a simple fact. Jesse doesn’t eat meat, but some of the meat he don’t eat would eat him! Now, is it wrong for me to notice a simple fact in life? Is that wrong?”
“No, dear, it’s not wrong.” Mom had answered in her you-know-that’s-wrong voice, and Dad shut up.
It didn’t bother me that Dad made fun of me not eating meat. He didn’t really make that big a deal of it, so it wasn’t a bother. But he was pouting and the dinner grew quiet.
I thought of Rise some more. He told me he didn’t want me to repeat what he had said, but then he went ahead and told Calvin the same thing he had told me. When Calvin ran it back at me, it sounded more like everyday news, and that was a big thing. I was living in a hood with a lot of drugs and shootings, but I didn’t want it to be everyday news. I figured me and my peeps all had something else going on that kept us out of that “everyday news” category. Now Rise looked like he was anxious to get into it.
I hated drugs. Almost everything that was going down wrong in the hood was based on people dealing. In school we were reading Dante’s Inferno,which I did not like at all except for the parts about going down to hell and seeing the different kinds of people there. What I thought was that sometimes, in the morning when the druggies were just reaching the streets and looking for the money to get their first hit of the day, it had to be like some kind of hell.
When crack was boss, the heads were jumpy and sometimes glassy-eyed as they tried to hunt down their rocks. That was a bad scene. But now that Boy was boss, and the hardest heads were mainlining the heroin, it was worse. They looked so foul—bent-over guys nodding out on the corner, women leaning against a building like they were half asleep, and dudes on crutches who were druggies and messed up with AIDS. Sometimes the corner of 149th Street looked like an ad for some desperate Third World country. All you had to do was put a sign over the street saying “Give to UNICEF” or something. And walking among them all, like vultures waiting for the dying to fall, were the dealers hustling the misery.
It scared me. The same way that seeing a dead kid lying in a coffin scared me. Seeing dead kids scared me because it made me know I could die. And seeing Rise on the deal made me feel the same way.
I tried to get my mind off of it and asked Mom if she needed help with the dishes. She asked me why I assumed she was going to be doing the dishes at all.
“I know Bigfoot’s not going to do them,” I said.
“What you say?” Dad raised his voice.
“I’m sorry, Dad, it just came out funny,” I said.
“Your mama’s not going to say anything about you showing me disrespect,” he said. “But just let me state something to you that’s an absolute fact, and she’s on my case before the words get out.”
Dad humphed him a few humphs! and turned sideways in his chair to let the world know he had been mistreated.
Mom signaled me to leave and I sneaked off quietly. As I left she was giving him the poor-baby treatment. I knew he would pretend to ignore her even though he liked it.
I was feeling really down and got out my drawing pad to cheer myself up. What I thought I would do with Rise’s autobiography was to put me in it as me and also as my favorite character, Spodi Roti.
In the first panel, I had a picture of a man slipping on a banana peel. In the second panel I had a woman tripping over her dog’s leash. In the third panel I had a kid falling off a skateboard. Next, Spodi Roti and Wise are walking, and Spodi is saying “People are too careless, mon. They don’t look where they going and always falling and killing themselves.”
Wise says, “Naw, mon, they’re okay. ‘Cause seein’ ain’t the only thing to do and standin’ up ain’t the only thing that’s true.”
The thing was that me and Rise were blood brothers, but sometimes I really didn’t know him. I remembered a time when he and I were sitting on the stoop when Drew came and sat down with us.
“What’s going on?” Rise said.
“Nothing going on,” Drew said. “I been sitting on this stoop for twenty years waiting for something to be going on. Things go by. Sometimes things don’t make it by, but ain’t nothing going on for Drew.”
“Man, why don’t you shut up with that garbage,” Rise said.
At the time Drew was at least thirty and Rise wasn’t more than fifteen. There was no way he could have beaten Drew, so I didn’t know why he was running his mouth like that. Neither did Drew.
“Don’t let your lip carry you no place your hip can’t get you out of, boy.” That’s what Drew said.
When Rise jumped up and squared off like he was ready to throw down, I was surprised, and so was Drew. Drew stood up real slow, reached behind him, and pulled out a straight razor. He flipped it open and just laid it alongside his leg. Rise looked at that razor, spit on the ground, and started off down the street. I got up and fol
lowed him.
I caught Rise on the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and 147th Street. I asked him what was the matter.
“I hate dudes like that,” he said. “Waste all their lives sitting on the stoop and still got to run their mouths.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. Drew wasn’t a superhero or anything, but he was like most of the people on the block, no special place to go and no special time to get there. It wasn’t what I wanted for my life, and I understood that Rise wasn’t wanting to go that way, either. I could get next to all that, but what I didn’t get next to was why Rise was so upset that he had to step to a hard dude like Drew.
When I thought back to that, I wondered if maybe I didn’t know Rise the way I thought I did.
I lay across the bed and did some more sketches of Spodi Roti even though I had promised myself fifty leben times I would stop drawing while I was lying on my back.
Chapter 13
That’s what the headline read. The paper was reporting the funeral of the Diablo who had been wounded. He had died, and they were having his funeral at a storefront church in the Bronx where his grandmother lived. There was the usual picture, kind of fuzzy, of the kid standing with some friends in front of his house.
“He was a good boy.” His grandmother was quoted in the paper right under his picture. “He is looking down from heaven now.”
Farther down in the article it said the mayor was going to get tough on street crime.
On the stoop Gun said we all had to be careful because the Diablos might try to get revenge. “Especially since the story made the white papers,” Gun was saying as he spun his basketball in his hands. I hadn’t noticed before how long his fingers were, or how close to the color of the ball they were.
“My father said he sure wasn’t looking down from heaven,” White Clara said. “Because black people don’t get to heaven.”
“Your father is a wack head!” Gun said. “That’s almost as bad as a crackhead except you don’t have to pay for your high—it just comes natural with your empty head.”
“Gun, did your mama have any children that lived?” White Clara asked.
“It don’t matter if he’s looking down from heaven or not,” C.J. said. “No matter how you look at it, he’s dead. Like the paper said—another teen, another funeral.”
“His grandmother is just trying to make him look good,” Gun said. “You can’t blame her for that. I bet if he knew he was in the white papers, he’d be happy with it himself.”
“How you going to be happy when you wake up and find yourself dead?” C.J. asked. “That’s stupid, man.”
“No, that’s not stupid,” White Clara said. “If you’re dead and you’re waking up, now that’s stupid!”
Calvin came up and gave everybody except White Clara, who he didn’t get along with, a high five. Gun asked him if he had seen the piece in the paper. Calvin said no and sat down and read it.
“I heard the Diablos are running scared, man,” Calvin said. “Benny’s cousin went to the funeral, and she said there were more reporters than people who came to see the dude off. You know those dudes who did him are bad. You’re not messing with no wannabes and no junior varsity bangers. They’re some stone-cold killers. They kill you and hand out their business cards at your funeral.”
“This stuff is making me nervous,” I said. “It’s like things are going down—”
“—and we’re like all up in it.” Calvin finished my sentence. “I’m just thinking maybe we ought to stay off the block for a while. When they do their drive-bys, they know where to come looking.”
“Everybody’s getting nervous.” Gun stretched his legs out in front of him. “My folks were talking it up big-time last night.”
“What you thinking about Rise?” I asked. “You thinking he’s getting in too deep?”
“You got to watch who you talking in front of,” Calvin said. “Clara ain’t nothing but mouth.”
“I’m going on home.” Clara stood up and pulled the bottom of her top down over her stomach. “All you guys are wannabes if you ask me.”
“I didn’t hear nobody asking you,” Calvin said.
Clara had this little thing she does, turning her back and flipping up her dress at people. She did it and walked on down the block.
Calvin didn’t say anything for a while, and I was wondering if I should ask him again about Rise, but I wasn’t sure.
“Yo, here comes the Man!” C.J. said as a car pulled up real fast in front of the house.
Calvin jumped up and started running down the street, and I spun around and half crawled and half leaped into the vestibule. I banged my knee and stumbled as something brushed past me. I got to the stairs and felt my arm being grabbed. I tried to twist around and get my leg up when I felt the barrel of the gun against my cheek.
“Don’t move, punk!” The white dude with his knee in my chest and his gun in my face pulled his badge from inside his shirt. “What’s going on?”
“I thought you were a drive-by or something,” I said. “What you pulling up like that for?”
He told me to shut up and started patting me down. He didn’t find any weapons, so he let me stand up. Another cop found Gun hiding under the stairs and pulled him out. C.J. and Calvin were outside in handcuffs when we got out to the stoop.
“I told you it was the cops,” C.J. said. “What you run for?”
“You didn’t say cops—you said the Man,” Calvin said. “How I know what man your butt was talking about?”
After the cops figured out why we were running, they started laughing like it was some big joke. I didn’t think it was funny. They asked us if we dug drive-bys, and we said no. At least me and C.J. and Gun said no; Calvin was mad and didn’t say anything. “You guys know anything about the guy who was killed?” the cop who had put his gun in my face asked. We told him we didn’t know anything, and he acted as if he didn’t believe us. He asked us if we would call him if we got any information, and C.J. said we would call Sidney.
“Keeping it among the brothers, huh?”
“Whatever,” Calvin said.
They ran down a thing about how one of these days it’s going to be a real drive-by and one of us would be lying in a pool of blood crying for his mama.
We didn’t answer him.
“You know what I do when some brother gets shot and is lying on the ground waiting for an ambulance that is probably going to get to the scene too late?” he asked. “Usually I have coffee. I know all the coffee spots around here. All I have to do is to walk into a place and say that I have a bleeder, and they know I have to wait at least five or ten minutes before I get back in the car, so I get my coffee free. That’s one of the perks of the job. Cool, huh?”
The cops handed each one of us a card, and we made a big thing about throwing them away. It was a big thing because I was sitting on the stoop, copping an attitude that was chill to the world while inside I was, like, shaking. My heart was pumping hard and my knees felt like rubber. And while all this was going on, me trying to look like I was ready to throw my hands in the air like I just didn’t care while things were falling apart inside, I was checking myself out. It was like I was there, living in the moment, but I was also there digging myself and how I was pretending not to be terrified.
The truth was when the cop grabbed me in the hallway, I thought he was a Diablo and my life was over. For a few seconds the fear I had felt had just filled me up, had flared up into every part of me. My hands were stiff with fear, my heart was racing, my gut was turning, I was sweating.
When I went upstairs, nobody was home. I locked the door, went to my room, and lay across the bed. I was exhausted. And the thing was that it didn’t make any difference that it wasn’t me who shot the dead Diablo. The thing was that the dead dude and me were caught up in the same sink with the stopper out, and the two of us swirling around toward the drain. He had gone down the dark hole, already disappearing from view, and I was going round and round, faster an
d faster, toward the same place.
Chapter 14
I didn’t remember falling asleep, and was surprised when I felt Mom shaking my shoulder and rubbing the tip of my nose with her finger to wake me.
“It’s Sidney Rock calling,” she said. “I think he’s got baseball tickets.” There was a smile in her voice.
It was nearly five thirty. I stumbled to the phone and listened as Sidney apologized about our run-in with the white cops.
“They’re okay,” he said. “Things are just too clearly defined for them sometimes. Not enough grays in their thinking.”
“No big deal,” I said.
“I was just wondering,” Sidney said. “I don’t know if I’ve told you this, but I can always get baseball tickets. Nosebleed seats, usually, but they’re free. If you ever want them, just let me know.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“How’s your piece about Rise coming?”
The question caught me off guard. I asked him how he knew I was doing Rise’s life, and he said a guy uptown he knew told him about it.
“It’s okay,” I said.
He reminded me about the tickets again before he hung up.
I knew what he was doing. He was telling me that Rise was hanging with a dangerous crew and he knew about it. These weren’t regular people, the kind who took the buses early in the morning to work, or who worked hard all day downtown; these were the kind who wore expensive clothing and flashy gold chains around their necks and looked at you with slitty eyes.
“So you going to the ball game with Sidney?” Mom asked.
“Now how can I go to the ball game with a cop?” I asked. “Suppose I’m sitting in the stands with this dude and find out he’s overly programmed. Some ballplayer takes off from first and slides into second and the scoreboard starts flashing SB-SB-SB. He turns to me and asks me what that means and I say stolen base.”
Autobiography of My Dead Brother Page 7
