Hold Love Strong

by Matthew Aaron Goodman

  “Where’s this motherfucker?” she shouted. “Fucking bus. Got my baby standing out in the cold!”

  I coughed and hacked more and my mother looked for the bus three more times, each time getting angrier and more impatient, each time cursing the bus, the bus driver, the bus company, the doctor at the clinic.

  “Shit,” she said. “I bet you if we was in Africa, there’d be a motherfucking bus! It might have no wheels and be pulled by some elephant, but there’d be a bus for us, that’s for damn sure!”

  My mother stepped back onto the curb. She snatched my hand. Then Lindbergh was suddenly at the bus stop, one hand gripping the front of his shopping cart as if he feared it might roll away, his other hand extended, offering a small helicopter to my mother as if it were a flower.

  At first, my mother ignored him. She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. She pushed a dismissive sigh out of her mouth. She looked at the brothers and sisters waiting for the bus with us. Then, when Lindbergh didn’t leave and his hand holding the helicopter didn’t drop, she gave in and took the gift from him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Lindbergh was silent, emotionless. He left his empty hand extended as if he wanted something soft and simple back. I stood at my mother’s side and looked at her. She studied the helicopter. Its propeller worked. Its doors opened. A miniature man made from a plastic spoon sat in the cockpit. Like my mother, I couldn’t believe it. I wondered what would happen if my mother tossed the helicopter into the air. Would it fly or crash to the ground?

  I looked at Lindbergh for an answer. He was a broken brother. His lips were chapped and their splits were caked with dry blood. His eyebrows were as knotted and mangy as his hair. And the whites of his eyes were not white nor even a pallid yellow or grey. They were a few shades lighter than the brown of his eyes so no matter the day’s weather or temperature he always looked sodden, muddy. He looked back at me and we studied each other. He rolled his lips in and out of his mouth, over his toothless gums, and a couple of the cracks began to bleed a bit, fill with electric bright blood. In the name of human liberties and democracy, in the name of an equality he, we, and brothers throughout history were never provided, Lindbergh had killed and witnessed the killing of innocent people and it crushed him. His teeth rotted from it. His skin dried and flaked. Something precious had been ripped from his chest and all he had left was the paranoid guarding of the hole.

  Just as suddenly as Lindbergh had arrived, the bus pulled up. My mother gave my hand a tug to let me know it was time for us to go. But before I moved, Lindbergh dropped his hand until it rested flat on my head. Then he squatted until our eyes were level.

  “Semper fi,” he whispered, his voice a rusted metal chain dragged through a rusted metal slot. “Semper fi.”

  Then with a groan and the creaking and cracking of his prematurely arthritic knees, Lindbergh stood, made eye contact with my mother for a moment, and apologetically backpedaled two steps. He walked away, pulling his rattling, squeaking shopping cart behind. I had no idea what semper fi meant. Although my mother knew it had something to do with the military, with being a soldier, neither did she. But the definition of the phrase didn’t matter. Not to me, not then. What mattered then was when we sat down on the bus, my mother gave me the helicopter, and I played with it. I held it up to the bus window. I tapped its propeller with my finger to make it spin. I imagined I was a pilot, a soldier who, with every flick of finger against propeller, flew farther away from coughing and the grating, burning in my chest.

  III

  Night. The snow lay so flat and clean it seemed no one ever dreamed about what the world was. Beneath the pallid glow of streetlights and the spotlights that highlighted Ever, no trails marked where people walked. No laughter; no arguments, no one preached over the cacophony of a heated group debate; no young brother explained his superstitions and routine before rolling dice against the base of my building. No sounds from passing cars, no rumble of buses; no police sirens devouring the breath of everyone in Ever. Snow balanced on branches, telephone wires, along the rims of garbage drums, and flakes as big and drifting as feathers floated and spun in the whip of wind as they fell from the black sky.

  I was eight years old, but I stared out of the window in our living room as if I were fifty and doing time for fifty more. I wore my PAL basketball jersey over a white T-shirt and my favorite black Adidas sweatpants with the three red stripes running along the outside of my legs. With my elbows on the windowsill, my cheeks pressed between the heels of my hands, I watched the path of a white flake until the flake was lost amidst the others, the swirling whiteness, and I had to choose another. I suffered from the stillness, the whiteness that had been forced upon Ever, that suppressed my youth, my joy, my ability to run about. This was death. Every flake killed me over again. The schedule I’d Scotch-taped on the refrigerator three months earlier said there was a championship basketball game at 6:00 p.m. and my team had made the championship. Now, because of the snow, it was cancelled. Shit, I thought, damn this snow.

  All of the bruises I’d collected, the floor burns, all of the trash my friends and I had talked that week in school were for nothing. Didn’t the world, didn’t the sky, didn’t God know how seriously we took this game; how much freedom it provided? I thought it couldn’t be. I wouldn’t let it be. I stared out of the window and hoped for heat, for a sudden fiery wind. I considered what I could do to reverse the state of the world. How could I excise the snow? How many matches would I need? How many lighters? If only I could wish a fire. I took no comfort in the fact that the game would be rescheduled. I took basketball, we took it, too seriously to have any game let alone our championship suspended. So I prayed against it. I hoped. But my hope did nothing. It was true. Inarguable. Ever was adorned, silenced, ravaged by white.

  Behind me, lying head to foot and parallel on the couch, my mother and my Aunt Rhonda painted red nail polish on each other’s toes.

  “Abraham, no matter how bad you want it, that snow ain’t gonna stop,” my mother sighed.

  “Shit,” added my Aunt Rhonda. “It’s supposed to be the worst snowstorm in history. A whiteout! That’s what the news said.”

  “Well whatever the news say, I still got to go to work,” my grandma shouted from the kitchen.

  My grandma was already dressed for work. White pants, a white shirt, white shoes: she was a night orderly at Queens Hospital, a job she fought, prayed, and begged for for two years before they promoted her from the hospital’s laundry room and gave her the chance, a job she loved, the calling she said she found after that night she helped my mother deliver me. She stood in front of the stove frying chopped meat and boiling spaghetti for dinner. She was nearing forty, so her grace was neither new nor negotiable, nor was it something she would deny, and it was not some banner she held or waved triumphantly. Rather, it was a buttress, like riggings of a ship, the cables and trusses of a suspension bridge. Adaptable, responsive, my grandma gave off an air of absorbency, a manner that indicated that weathering and holding everything was simply how she lived.

  “I remember,” she continued, pausing to make sure she had our attention. “One time it snowed so bad the news showed white folks skiing from Midtown all the way to Wall Street.”

  We were in a box, hemmed and penned in, ants in frozen milk. The walls of our living room were white. The ceiling was white. Above the window, where the ceiling and the top of the wall met, was the coffee-colored stain we sometimes claimed to look like things, as if it were a cloud in the sky. All around us, above our heads, in the walls, in the bathroom, and in the kitchen, pipes knocked and leaked. The belly of the electric heater we used to keep the apartment warm sparked and burned red. Just in front of it on the floor, Donnel and Eric played War with an old deck of cards. Eric threw down a jack. Donnel dropped an ace.

  “I win,” said Eric.

  He reached for the cards. Donnel slapped his hand away.

  “Nigga,” he scolded. “How many ti
mes I got to tell you an ace beats everything?”

  Outside in the snow a man jogged into the pale, yellow ring made by a streetlight. He stayed in the glow. He danced, fluttered, moved in circles. He dipped one shoulder then the other. He punched, jabbing and hooking then ducking as if punches were thrown back at him. He held his fists beneath his chin. He bobbed his head.

  “It’s Mr. Goines!” I shouted, turning to look at my cousins and my mother and aunt on the couch.

  Mr. Goines was shadowboxing, sparring an invisible opponent who must have been twice his size and ten times as quick. He dodged. He dipped. He weaved. He pretended he was slugged in the face, pounded in the ribs. He wobbled, then backpedaled, then rope-a-doped off the invisible ropes that marked the perimeter of the pallid ring and punched back.

  Donnel and Eric joined me at the window. Then, hurrying across the room on their heels so the fresh polish on their toes wouldn’t smudge, my mother and my Aunt Rhonda arrived.

  “Look at him,” said my mother, pressing her face against the window above my head. “He’s beating up the snow!”

  “Ma,” shouted my Aunt Rhonda, her voice an amalgamation of glee and mockery. “You got to see this! Hurry! Come look!”

  “He’s boxing!” added Donnel.

  “I don’t need to see that fool to know he’s crazy,” my grandma said, still standing at the stove.

  But a moment later she amended her declaration. She huffed a breath of annoyance, turned the stove down, and came to the window. She watched Mr. Goines. And waiting for her opinion, I watched her. So I saw how the face she first brought to the window changed, and her eyes softened, bending from a cold, hard stare to an engrossed yet somewhat perplexed gaze, as if she was seeing a sight she appreciated but didn’t trust.

  “That man is touched,” she decided. Then, as if she could no longer stand to watch, she ordered us to move, unlatched the window lock, and threw open the window.

  “You a damn fool!” she shouted, leaning her head outside. “You know that, Lyndon Goines? You gonna catch pneumonia and die!”

  Mr. Goines stopped punching and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Then he turned around, looked up to our window, and his hands fell to his sides.

  “Gloria!” he called out, his shining smile introduced by the tumble of breath that carried my grandma’s name. “How my birds doing?”

  “They fine,” said my grandma.

  Then, as if suddenly recalling that Mr. Goines believed even the slightest interaction between them was flirtation, and he loved it, loved talking about it, telling anyone in Ever who would listen, my grandma slammed the window closed, spun around, and strode back into the kitchen.

  “Pay that man no mind,” she scolded. “And get away from that window. Don’t give him no audience to act stupid in front of.”

  Standing in the snow and still looking up at our window, Mr. Goines’s smile did the impossible, growing wider and gleaming more than it had just been glowing. Slowly he resumed bouncing on the balls of his feet. He made his hands fists and raised them above his head. He backpedaled a handful of steps and shadowboxed for a few moments, dipping and weaving and throwing a half-dozen stiff jabs. Then he turned and jogged out of the ring of pale light, disappearing into the darkness of Columbus Avenue and the falling snow.

  My cousins returned to playing cards. My Aunt Rhonda and my mother returned to the couch and resumed painting each other’s toenails.

  Wondering where Mr. Goines went, and thinking he might soon and suddenly return, I stared out of the window. Then I went into the kitchen, planted my elbows on the counter, planted my chin in my hands, and watched the lovebirds in their cage. Their names were Lady and Man and only my grandma could tell them apart. It was too cold for them so they were puffed up, and their beaks were tucked into the feathers of their chests. I was bored, ornery, and looking for a place to aim the frustration gnawing on me, so I took a deep breath and blew it as hard as I could at Lady and Man, ruffling their feathers.

  “Abraham, why you messing with those birds?” my grandma asked.

  “Why do they got to stay in the cage?” I answered.

  “Cause that’s where they live.”

  “What happens if they want to get out?”

  My grandma laughed. “Where they gonna go?”

  “Wherever they want.”

  My grandma stirred the chopped meat in the pan. Steam rose around her hands. “They probably afraid anyway,” she decided.

  “Afraid of what?” I asked.

  “You and your questions,” she said. “Lady and Man ain’t never been out of that cage. And besides, they lovebirds. All they need is each other.”

  “They need to be free,” I decided.

  My grandma stopped stirring the chopped meat and turned around to look at me.

  “Abraham,” she said in the gentle scolding tone she employed when she found something, an act, accusation, or statement, curious, “you saying my birds ain’t free?”

  Keys rattled at the door. The locks clacked, clicked. Then the door swung open and my Uncle Roosevelt and his girlfriend walked into the apartment. They were covered in snow. Their noses were running. Their eyes were watering from the cold. And their hands and arms were full of grocery bags of nonperishable items; boxes of sugary cereal, Cup-a-Soups, bags of potato chips, cheese puffs, pretzels, cans of fruit and vegetables, and a ten-pound bag of bird food.

  “It’s bad as all hell out there,” my Uncle Roosevelt said, crossing the room toward the kitchen.

  “Take off them shoes,” ordered my grandma. “And your coats. You all is dropping snow all over the place. Now, you want something hot? How ’bout some hot chocolate?”

  Like a brown version of Michelangelo’s statue of David, my Uncle Roosevelt had bloomed into a holy statue of a man. He was tall, strong, and good-looking; symmetrical; the type of man who didn’t have to wink, lick his lips, wear cologne, speak, or move around to be enticing. I idolized him. No. It was more. I wanted nothing else but to be him. And I wasn’t alone with this wish. In Ever Park, every brother with a heartbeat and a last breath wanted to be him. He was our Michael Jordan, our Ever Park king. He was seventeen years old, six foot four inches tall, body made solely of bones and lean muscle. Everyone called him Nice. And so I called my uncle Nice too. But he didn’t just epitomize the nickname. He expanded its definition. That is, the word nice only described what my Uncle Roosevelt did on the basketball court when he wasn’t moving, when he paused, held the ball on his hip, and contemplated the game and the world around him. In Ever, no one had, ever could, or bothered dreaming about stopping my uncle on the basketball court. He scored with his left hand. He scored with his right. He scored with his eyes open, his eyes closed; in sneakers and boots, jeans and shorts; and sometimes, after he’d given in to my grandmother and gone with her to church or had to attend the funeral of another young brother, I’d seen him score in shoes, dress pants, a white shirt, and a tie. He was as ambidextrous as a left-handed man with two left hands, a right-handed man with two rights. The only time I ever saw my uncle stopped on the basketball court was when he stopped himself. Half of the time it was because he was bored with the game, and the other half of the time he called it quits so he could be with his girl, she who stood beside him in our apartment, tall and shapely, terra-cotta skin and rose lips, and with hips and shoulders that made it clear the sky was weightless upon her. Her given name was Tiffany, but Nice called her Luscious, so everyone in Ever called her Luscious too. When Luscious came to the court to watch Nice play, he celebrated her presence by dunking with his right hand, with his left hand, and with both hands every time he touched the ball. They loved each other; in fact, they loved each other so deeply that I never once saw them standing in the same place and not touching each other in some delicate manner, holding hands, linking pinkies, leaning on each other. Even when they were talking with different people and facing opposite directions they reached back, laid their hands on the small of each other’s backs, dip
ped their fingers into each other’s back pockets. Every time I saw them kiss, I stared. Every time I saw them embrace, I wondered what it felt like to disappear and be fortified at the same time.

  Nice put down the grocery bags he carried. Then he took the bags from Luscious’s arms, put them down, and gently plucked her gloves from her hands. He unwrapped the white scarf from around her neck, kissed the tip of her nose, and helped her out of her coat.

  “You all need to stop that shit,” said my Aunt Rhonda.

  “Stop what?” asked Nice.

  “That kissing in public shit.”

  “I kissed her nose.”

  “Yeah, well who knows what you’ll start kissing next.”

  I walked out of the kitchen. “Ma,” I said. “Can I go down to the park?”

  My mother didn’t acknowledge me, Nice and Luscious, Donnel and Eric, or what Rhonda said. She focused on painting the red polish on Rhonda’s big toe as if there were nothing else in the world but her and that toe. She wanted what Luscious had: a man’s love. But if she couldn’t have such a thing then she wasn’t going to fight it like Rhonda. But she would not witness it either. She would not recognize how absent it was.

  Nice contemplated my eagerness and an empathatic smile eased across his face. “A, what you fall and bump your head?” he asked. “Shit, Lindbergh ain’t even out in this weather.”

  “You went out,” I snapped. “And we just saw Mr. Goines.”

  “That’s cause I had to get groceries and make sure Luscious got here safely.” Nice looked at my mother and aunt on the couch. “Goines is outside?”

  “That nigga is crazy,” decided my Aunt Rhonda. “He thinks cause Buster Douglas beat Tyson the other night he got a chance at being something. And don’t be lying to the boy!”

  “Who?” Nice asked.

  “You,” accused Rhonda. “Luscious lives on the second floor. She don’t need you to pick her up. She could have walked her ass up here all alone.”