by LJ Alonge
“You’re not really gonna do it,” he says.
“Yes, I am.”
“I thought you were just saying you’d do it. For the cool points.”
“I guess you’ll have to see.”
“I wouldn’t even do it. That should tell you something.”
He says this plan is the dumbest thing he’s ever heard. He says he’d expect a kid as smart as me to see through it. Why would you want to impress dudes who don’t even like you? And why would anyone like you for throwing a brick through a window?
“What if,” Frank continues, “you just knock over a couple of the book stands. That sounds more like you.”
“That’s the problem,” I say. “I don’t want that to sound like me.”
Sometimes, when the guys at the park start busting my balls about things like my virginity, I walk over to the Q Mart and talk to Omar, the Nigerian owner. When he bought the store, he had big plans to rebuild it, but everywhere you look there’s a mess of electrical wires or a pool of water from the leaking fridges in the back. Most of his shelves are only half stocked with crap no one wants: anchovies in hot sauce, those tiny watch batteries, paperback romance novels.
“Let them talk!” he said once. He was eating a tin of anchovies; he’d made a “miscalculation of American taste preferences” and now had a storeroom full of them. “I wish I had a son like you! You don’t steal! You don’t talk back! In Nigeria there would be women banging down your door! You’re a good boy!”
“Maybe I don’t wanna be a ‘good boy,’” I whined.
He stopped chewing. “Why would you want to not be a good boy?”
But how could he understand? It’s not that Bushrod’s some special place for basketball. It’s not Rucker or anything. Usually no one comes to the park except the kids who live close by. The courts are outside this closed-down middle school. The concrete’s cracked, with little weeds shooting out of it. The lines are faint, and some of the backboards have been ripped off. Next to us is an overgrown grass field where a lot of older Mexican dudes play soccer. Sometimes white college kids will come down from Berkeley and play Frisbee there, too. Next to that is an abandoned baseball field, where stray dogs have litters in the dugouts.
No doubt there are better courts elsewhere, like the ones down by the lake or the new ones off Bancroft in the east. But there’s no park like the one in your neighborhood. Technically I could go to some off-brand park nearby, play a few games with kids I’ve never met and make some friends. But what’s the point of that? You want to be able to walk through your neighborhood with pride, with your head held high. You want to be able to go to the park and have people recognize you, call out your name. Otherwise, you’re just a sucker with no place to call your own. You’re invisible. And I’m tired of being invisible.
When we get to Bushrod, a few guys are sitting in a circle at half-court. Similac sits in the middle, trying to spin the ball on his finger. When the ball rolls off, one of the kids picks it up and hands it back to him like an offering. He’s shirtless; the muscles popping out of his shoulders look like they might break the skin at any moment. On the court he’s a terror, more brawler than basketball player. Many kids have walked away from a game with a busted lip or broken nose. It’s easy to picture Similac twenty years out, working as a bouncer at some club.
When he sees me, he smiles. He’s got small gray teeth that everyone thinks are actually his baby teeth. Not enough Similac as a baby, they whisper. His lip comes to rest in a relaxed snarl.
“Our hero returns,” he says. “Hey, Justin.”
Everyone gets a nickname around here: Similac, Fat Jimmy, Clorox, Bo Jenkins, Shimmy, and Stooge. Me? They just call me Justin—with that little bit of extra emphasis on it so that it sounds like a white boy’s name.
Frank takes his shirt off and throws it to the sideline. “Listen: Nobody’s throwing nothing through nothing,” he says. “Let’s just play.”
“Now Torta over here speaks for you?” Similac says.
Similac says everything as a question, so you feel like you’re always being tested. Frank’s looking at me, trying to bring me back to my senses. But he knows there’s no point. He shakes his head and starts walking to the back of the park, where there’s a swing set and a broken-down slide. He kicks a bunch of wood chips at some seagulls, and they glide up to the power lines above us. He won’t watch. I didn’t want him to anyway.
“You worried about him?” Similac asks.
“Me?” I force out a laugh. “Nah.”
“How tight was it when Clorox poured bleach in every washer at the Laundromat?”
“Yeah, that was tight.”
“How cool was it when Shimmy popped the tires on the ice-cream man’s truck?”
“Pretty cool.”
“That’s all it is, just little pranks, you know? You want to do something that dope?”
“Yes!” I say, a little too eagerly. But immediately I think of the time Omar gave me a bag of ice after Similac threw a ball at the back of my head. I think about how Omar might be one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, how he’s always letting me have the almost-expired food from his storeroom.
Then Similac puts a hand on my shoulder and gives me a nod. I can’t tell if it’s straight-up intimidation or if he’s saying that this is the beginning of a truly good and mutually beneficial friendship.
I walk over to the demolished church next to the Q Mart. They tore the church down a month after Omar bought the store, and he’s always considered it a bad omen. For one, he says, it drove his property value way down. For two, when you tear down God’s house, He reacts the same way you or I would: He gets mad. Omar says that’s how Mesopotamia ended—someone tore down a temple they weren’t supposed to.
Omar’s got his back to the street now. Since the summer started, he’s been closing earlier. At the end of every day, he turns around and counts every bottle of unopened alcohol, every pack of unopened cigarettes. Then he logs the results in his notebook. I’ve seen the pages before: The numbers never change, a bunch of zeroes cascading down his sales column. I look back at the park. Similac’s chewing on a stem of grass. He gives a thumbs-up. I step over the little barricade that separates the church from the street and look at the large pile of rubble, searching for an appropriate brick. An appropriate brick. Even my rebellion smacks of nerdery. What I want is a brick that’ll do the job with the least amount of damage. Too big of a brick and it might crush more than the window. Too little of a brick and it could bounce right off the glass. The sweet spot is half a brick, which I find after a little digging at the top of the pile.
I toss the brick back and forth between my hands, feeling its weight, watching the bits of sand and gravel fall between my fingers. I remind myself that it’s a dog-eat-dog world out here. I remind myself that technically Iron Man dabbled with the dark side during his Disassembled phase, if only to see what it was like. I remind myself that, all things considered, Omar’s not even from here—so what’s he really losing?
I walk around to the front of Omar’s store and aim for a bottom window panel so the brick will hit the stand of romance novels and stop before doing any more damage. I take comfort in the coward’s logic: If I can’t be a hero, at least I can be a less-evil villain.
I wind up, cocking the brick behind me. I grip it so hard, it feels like it’s pulsing. My body goes into autopilot: I set my feet and take a deep breath, and then another. I grit my teeth, and my arm slings forward on its own. When I let go, I grunt a little because my throw is so hard, it feels like my shoulder is coming out of its socket. I watch as the brick sails through one of the top window panels and directly into a lightbulb and a bunch of open wires dangling from the ceiling. Sparks fly like fireworks. Omar was busy counting the change in his register, but once he sees the flames, he leaps over the counter, takes off his shirt, and tries to jump up and snuff out the fire. H
e jumps up over and over again, the small paunch of his belly jiggling frantically. It’s pointless. Flames quickly swallow up his unused merchandise. I want to help, but everything in my body tells me to run.
I sprint until I’m tired, about a dozen blocks, to a street I’ve never been on, full of colorful front-yard gardens. The roses are yawning pinks and reds, and some of the bigger oranges hang down from their branches. I take big, desperate breaths.
I could live here, on this block. I could eat plums and oranges for breakfast every morning with a nice family. I could wake up to the sun on my face. On weekends I’d cut the grass, and at night we’d play Jenga together. And nothing bad would ever happen. Ever.
CHAPTER 4
PROOF THAT I AM NOT, IN FACT, PURE EVIL
I keep a list of summer goals under my mattress. I got the idea after reading a Popular Mechanics article about some kid in Iowa who made a wind turbine out of recycled book covers or something. Kids like that are supposed to be inspirational, but you end up hating them. They’ve got everything, and you, who have nothing, have to read about them. But I kept reading long enough to note that the kid said he wrote his goals down every day. Must be something to it, I thought, so I did the same. Here’s the unabridged list:
1. Figure out life plans
2. Find a girlfriend Get over that weird nauseous feeling you have when talking to girls
3. Earn respect of peers!
4. Make sure Frank stays out of trouble
5. Earn Zen Master rating in WoW!!
6. Read Don Quixote
7. Play a little basketball every day
8. Stop doing that thing where you slump so you don’t look as tall
9. Stop doing that thing where you hold on to your old clothes like you’ll ever fit in them again
10. Have better relationship with Dad Try to be nicer to Dad when you see him
As you can see, burning down Omar’s store is not on that list.
CHAPTER 5
THE FUGITIVE (STARRING JUSTIN SHAW)
I can already see the headlines:
“Idiot Kid Starts Fire, Kills Hardworking Immigrant”
“Young Thug on Trial for Arson”
“Simpleton Gives In to Peer Pressure, Ruins Life”
When I get home, I run to my room and pack a bag: underwear and socks, a couple pairs of jeans, my favorite Indiana Jones T-shirts. I pack a few comics—early-edition Star Wars stuff, crème de la crème—and then take them out. Extra weight can only slow you down when you’re on the run. According to crime novels, you wear dark clothes and pay for things in cash. That’s worst case. Preferably, you’re sticking to the woods and throwing the hounds off your tracks with cayenne pepper. Best case, you’re stealing a boat in some sleepy coastal town and sailing to a new life as a papaya grower in Panama.
Mom calls out from the kitchen, asking me to sit with her and tell her about my day. We live on West Street, close enough to see the fingers of smoke still coming from the Q Mart. It’s one of those narrow-frame houses first owned by the porters back in the day. As I walk down the hallway I keep clear of the windows, built to let the sunlight in. Now these windows seem too low, too transparent. The front door suddenly looks very easy to kick in. In the kitchen, Mr. Hunter stands over the stove frying some fish, while Mom sits at our tiny kitchen table giving him instructions.
“Egg, flour, crumbs,” Mom says.
“That’s what I’m doing,” Mr. Hunter says. “Watch your tone.”
“You watch your tone. There’s crumbs all in the egg.”
Mom frowns when she sees me. “Something’s wrong,” she says.
“The boy’s fine,” Mr. Hunter says. “Looks good to me.”
Mom says, “Since when did you become an expert in how my child is doing?”
“Actually, I like to think of him as my child, too.”
“Good! You should!”
Mom folds her arms and sits stiffly in her chair. Mr. Hunter turns back to the stove and scoops a blackened piece of fish onto a waiting paper towel.
“How was Bushrod?” Mom asks.
“Fine,” I say.
“Something happen? You look like something happened.”
“Nah, nothing happened.”
Mom’s a nurse at Highland Hospital and has the most finely tuned radar for bullshit you’ve ever seen. Lying to her involves maximum confidence and finesse. She’s quick with the belt or shoe or whatever else is lying around. The day after she kicked my dad out, she put all his shit in plastic bags and drove it to Goodwill. As she lifted the bags out of the trunk, she said it’s important to remember that you should never turn off your bullshit detector for anybody.
On the other hand, Mr. Hunter dresses boring, eats boring, talks boring. Even when he’s excited, his voice sounds like a fan blowing in an empty room. Since marrying my mom, he’s tried to mold me into an All-American boy. Boy Scouts, keyboard lessons, karate, youth brass band, youth choir, African drumming. It’s like he thinks I’m some kind of Make-A-Wish kid. He’s always signing me up for things he believes will enrich my mind and soul. When I get anything less than a B, he sits me down and tells me stories about the achievements of civil rights leaders.
These are the people whose lives I’ve just ruined, who will refer to me as the Child Who Shall Not Be Named while I rot in jail on an arson bid.
Mr. Hunter leaves the kitchen and then returns, holding his hands behind his back.
“Your mother and I have been thinking,” Mr. Hunter starts. He waits for Mom’s approval, and when she nods, he continues.
“I’ve been noticing how much you go to the park. And we’ve talked in the past about your growing interest in the game of basketball.”
Mr. Hunter is beaming, but all I can feel is dread. I’ve been lying about my basketball prowess at Bushrod, to try to keep me out of science camp this summer. For all my mom and Mr. Hunter know, I’m a demigod at Bushrod. I regale them with stories of my basketball glory, of hook shots that never happened and dunks that are pure fiction. I give them detailed recollections of games. I walk around the house sometimes practicing fadeaway jumpers and crossovers. The whole basketball thing has excited the hell out of them.
“Obviously,” Mr. Hunter says, “I’d rather have you do something more productive with your summer, like pre-algebra at Laney. Maybe some kind of volunteering.” Mr. Hunter pauses here with his eyebrows cocked, waiting for a reaction. “Okay, okay. There are other ways of improving yourself, that’s what I’m learning.”
With a final smile, he moves his hands from behind his back and passes me a black shoe box. I hesitate to take it, but Mr. Hunter gently shoves the box into my hands. It’s a new pair of Jordans. The 11s, all the rage this summer. These are the black patent leather joints with white uppers. Size fourteen. I mentioned them a few weeks ago as a part of the whole “Justin Shaw is the King of Bushrod” thing. I didn’t actually want them. I was just going for authenticity.
This is bad. Mom doesn’t have money for these. Mr. Hunter definitely doesn’t have money for these. Mr. Hunter owns a carpet-cleaning business, and from the conversations I overhear at night, business is not going well. I have no idea where this money came from. I imagine Mom going down to the pawn shop and selling one of Granddad’s war medals for half its value. I imagine Mr. Hunter begging for a heavier tip on one of his cleaning jobs.
“You don’t like ’em,” Mom says.
“I do,” I say. “They’re dope.”
I try them on, and my toes edge up against the front of the shoe. They’re perfect. I walk around the kitchen, taking a bunch of showy steps. I hop up and down a little. I do a little fadeaway jumper. Mr. Hunter watches me eagerly. If there was ever a time to feel bad about wearing a pair of two-hundred-dollar shoes, this is it.
I give Mom a hug and shake Mr. Hunter’s hand.
“Thank you,” I say. “These are really gonna take my game to the next level.”
“Whatever you need to do,” Mr. Hunter says, “we’re here for you.”
“I hope you know,” Mom says, “that you wouldn’t have those shoes or that shirt or those shorts if your father were around.”
For dinner we eat the fish and white bread. I’m so nauseous that even the smell of the fish is about to send me over the edge.
“Let’s pray,” Mr. Hunter says.
I’m not the praying type, but I play along. We take one another’s hands. Mr. Hunter asks for a lot of things. He asks for, amen, strength to be the leader of his home, to be the Moses of our tribe. He asks for, amen, plenty (of what, I don’t know). He asks for patience, amen. He asks that, yes, Lord, obedience fall over the house. He asks for the demons of selfishness and immaturity and violence to stay out of this house. He asks that we do the same things in darkness that we’d do in light. He asks that we find the courage to ask for forgiveness in a world that rewards cowards who keep their mouths shut.
“Amen,” Mr. Hunter says heavily.
“Amen,” Mom says.
“Amen,” I say, with more oomph than I expected.
CHAPTER 6
A PART OF MY LIFE YOU PROBABLY WON'T BELIEVE
The day before Pop got himself kicked out for the final time, he took me to Bushrod for our usual game of one-on-one. I was eight. We always played on Saturday mornings. Back then he was in and out all the time, leaving for a few days, coming back for a few. Mom put up with it for a while, would welcome him back and ask no questions about where he’d been, like nothing had happened. Instead, they’d talk about little things, like how the grass needed to be cut or some boards needed fixing. He would touch her on the small of her back, and she would exhale quietly. That’s how I knew she was getting fed up. At night she’d bolt the door, which meant that for a few weeks, Pop had to climb the fence and walk around to the back of the house to let himself in through my window.
