The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

by Chanelle Benz

“Son. What happened to your face?”

  “I got in a fight.”

  “At school?” He sounded surprised. “Ain’t they supposed to be teaching you to turn the other cheek?”

  “This kid, this big kid, he—”

  “Nigga”—Nahala smacked my shoulder—“I ain’t drove your ass down here for you to lie.”

  The phone line went silent/aggrieved.

  “You know why you named James?” he asked.

  “No,” I sulked into my T-shirt, then mumbled, “after you.”

  “And I’m named after my father, your granddaddy. Now that man? That man was born evil and done stayed that way. But because he was named James, I got named James, and your grandmomma said you got to be named James that way at the end of the day you got his hard and my heart. You James the third.”

  “Dad, to be honest—”

  “Finally,” said Nahala.

  “I came here to tell you I need to move back to Philly. Can I move in with Aunt Bernice? Say yes.”

  “What’s wrong with living with your mother?” he asked.

  “I hate that bitch.”

  “Yo! Who you talking to with that mouth? That’s not being how I taught you to be.”

  Even Nahala looked at me with big NO eyes.

  “You know what that fight did to you?” he said. “It put fear back in your heart. Last thing you need is move back to Philly. Now what’s your name?”

  “Dad.” I thumped my fist on the counter.

  “Boy, I want to hear that name out yo mouth.”

  “James Marcus King the third.”

  “Amen,” said Nahala.

  “At least those rich kids ain’t packing nine millimeters,” he said.

  I folded my arms over my chest. “All I want is to live in Philly with Aunt Bernice, is that so much to ask?”

  “Why? Why do you want that so bad?”

  I said nothing, listening to the beat of my heart. Even though it was November, the AC was blowing morgue breath down my neck, and this time I knew who the duppy was hunting.

  “Now I realize you probably think because I’m in here I can’t help you, right?”

  “It’s not that. It’s . . .” I wished I could see his eyes properly.

  “What? Ain’t nothing you can’t tell me.”

  “Okay.” I took a breath. “At school, they tell us violence is a short-term satisfaction, and I know that’s right, the right thing, but what about defending someone you love? I mean, you’re not supposed to do anything? You’re just supposed to stand by and watch them get killed?”

  “Who’s getting killed?”

  “It’s hypothetical, Dad.”

  “Your mother? What you really talking about is revenge, son. You want to hurt them for the hurt they just did, but even if you f—muff them up, that don’t heal the first hurt. That’s done. That’s past. Now you just like them: somebody who hurts people.”

  I felt like he wasn’t really getting me. “But if someone was hurting me wouldn’t you—”

  “What? Wouldn’t I what?” he asked all wild.

  “If someone was trying to kill me, Dad . . . wouldn’t you?” But I couldn’t say it. How could I—being there—say it?

  He was holding the phone with both hands. “If something was ever to go down, to happen to my son? Man, I just couldn’t be in this world . . .” he trailed/choked.

  “Dad?” I gripped the phone tight.

  “I just hate seeing you like this, man. Bad enough I can’t hug you or even shake yo hand, but now I got to see you all busted up and I can’t do nothing? You know I live for my kid.” He covered his face.

  “Uncle James?” asked Nahala.

  “Dad?” His head was down. “It’s just my nose! I mean, I’m alive, I’m okay. Right? Dad?”

  “Oh you gon be okay.” He looked up, wiping his face. “We is making sho of that. Now you tell me exactly what happened.”

  “James,” said Nahala. “James,” said my dad.

  But when I opened my mouth there was a God-robbing crack in my chest and I knew that my life was not ever gonna come correct. So I put my head down on the counter so no prison dudes would see and cried like a nine-year-old into the phone to my dad.

  Yesterday I was at home with my dresser against the door, Petrarch on my lap, and Mom downstairs in Where Were You Bitch? (featuring Karl). I was listening, trying to figure out if the crashing was bodies or furniture, and at the same time read the Rime Sparse.

  I went into the hall. Why? Cuz my little half brother was crying and I didn’t want Karl to come up. Even though it was November in Bala Cynwyd, I was sweating in the house’s sunless heat debating whether or not to call the police. In his room, Jacquon was in his crib, snuffling on his fuzzy red back, gumming the corner of a soft plastic book.

  I went in his room. “What’s good, little man?”

  He stopped chewing and rolled toward me, blinking at me through the wooden bars.

  “Hi,” I whispered and picked him up, his big ol head still wobbly so I cradled him in my arms.

  A door slammed and Mom, high on Prosecco, was shouting.

  “How’s life in the crib?” I set him back down to pick his pacifier up off the rug and rubbed the carpet fuzz off with my sleeve, wishing Mom and Karl would die/vanish and then Jacquon and me could live with Aunt Bernice until I was eighteen and we moved into my place. Downstairs, furniture began to slide and Jacquon’s gold eyes went all portentous. “You okay,” I said and rubbed his little back and wound his mobile of fluffy baby birds so they sang and spun, but then Mom screamed and we screamed too.

  Then I was standing in the middle of their bedroom holding the phone. But it felt like a toy cause Mom’s crying was louder than any dial tone. Soon my hands were pushing through Karl’s magazines until they found his gun, black and shining at the bottom of his nightstand drawer. As I skidded down the hall, I passed by Jacquon, sitting up in his crib and as our eyes met, I glanced/transmitted: Look, I’m sorry I’m about to shoot your dad but I’m doing it before he kills our mom. A lot of that might of got lost in translation (him being before language as he was), but I swear we had an agreement.

  At the top of the stairs, I was still in the place of where I might not do it. But as I walked down, the gun behind my back, I saw Karl’s big square head over my mom as he choked her on our hand-knotted New Zealand wool door mat. All I could do was point the gun and close my eyes, wishing as I pulled that we all died and reappeared somewhere easy.

  There was a metal roar and I opened my eyes. Karl was standing up, his mouth dropped, looking at a bullet buried in the wall to his right. “What the fuck?” he shouted.

  Both of them were looking at me, alive and angry.

  “James?” Mom coughed, crawling against the foyer wall. I tripped down the stairs, gun out, coming at Karl until it poked his chest.

  “Calm down, man.” Karl tried to back away.

  “James!” Mom was up and her hand was out. “You give me that gun!”

  But I lifted it to Karl’s head. I just wanted him to go away forever. I didn’t care how—just away.

  “Listen to your mother, man,” he said. “You’re a—a good kid.”

  “James!” My mom tried to get my attention. “I don’t want anybody getting hurt.”

  I looked over at the charms which had pierced so many: the Curtises, the Rashans, the Calvins, the Rays and Derays. But that hair coppered, those breasts immoveable, thus a body to make any video vixen anxious, meant nothing to me. “She is your mother,” Dad had said when they were taking him off to prison. “She is your diamond. You take care of her for me. You’re the James of the house now—” and he had smiled to show me that he believed I could do it. I looked at my mother, saw the left side of her mouth cut red and her cheek swelling elastic, and I told her, “But Mom, you’re hurt.”

  As I was looking at her, Karl punched me in the face. My glasses bit under my eye and my nose cracked. Without thinking, I hit him with the gun as he was coming a
t me, smashing whatever I could until he went away, then I dropped back, cupping my screaming nose.

  When I wiped my stinging eyes, I could make out Mom bending over him, seeing if he was okay, begging, “Karl? Karl?”

  He shoved her off, cradling his head as he sank to his knees.

  “Mom?” I called to her from where I was on the floor.

  She stumbled over and lifted my chin, her gold necklace penduluming into the blue silk of her shirt. “Oh baby—” She hesitated to touch the swelling between my eyes. “Your nose.”

  I took her hand. “Let’s get Jacquon and go.”

  She snatched it back. “We got to get you some ice.” She tried to wipe the blood from my nose with the bottom of her shirt.

  “Ow! Stop!”

  She cringed. “Does it hurt?”

  “No it feels amazing!”

  “Boy, this is no time for attitude,” she snapped, then stood wringing her hands. “Shit, shit! What am I gonna do?”

  “Let’s go!”

  “I can’t.” She covered her face then straightened. “I’ll get you some ice. Stay here.”

  “Can’t you at least call the police?” I yelled at her as she rushed toward the kitchen.

  Karl tried to get up without falling. There was a trickle of blood coming from a dent on his forehead.

  “Mom?” I was on my feet. The room tilted and I remembered the gun. “Mom?” I called again, frantically looking around the foyer. Nothing on the hardwood but the rug and my broken glasses.

  “What?” Mom hurried back in. “What’s wrong?” She eyed Karl and grabbed my arm. “Come in the kitchen with me, c’mon!”

  “You’re dead, man,” moaned Karl.

  Mom changed direction, pulling me with her. “This way.”

  “Stop,” I hissed as she tried to wrestle me to the front door. She angled it open. I dug my fingers into the doorframe. “The gun!”

  “I have it—” She pushed me out the door and I spilled onto the front step, my hands slapping the chilled concrete, the door slamming behind me. I lay there in my blood/defeat, listening to dogs bark somewhere in our cul-de-sac.

  And when Jacquon’s cries appeared, they were little paper airplanes over my head, and like the ones at school, somehow they always find me. I forgot about Mom—she was an adult, she could take care of herself—all I wanted was to go back in for my little brother so I got up and beat on the door until I heard Karl scream, “That’s him! Motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you!”

  My legs went seasick, blood stopped going to my brain, and my stomach started signaling a loss of control in my bowels, cuz the duppy was there behind that door, ready to drag me toward death where I would forget my name.

  What happened, Dad? I left. Because the body betrays, forgets us—who we are, who we love—saves itself and what we think the world is melts like crayons that leave no mark but a mess. I didn’t faint; didn’t pee my pants; I ran. My legs pumped and the blood rushed up from my stomach to my head.

  Of course I thought of them as I ran, thought of calling the cops, of going back, but instead I told myself that they’d be okay cuz at the end of the day Mom said she had the gun.

  We left the prison and hours later I was cutting across our yard in Nahala’s too-small flip-flops, lifting the pouting stone cherub on the porch for the spare key. A neighbor two houses down was backing out of his driveway and seeing me, braked. I stood there, staring through the gnats playing over the flattop hedges, waiting for his window but he just rolled out with a screech down the cul-de-sac. I went to the doorstep where Wallace and Nahala stood in the rude chatter of birds. An SUV was in the driveway.

  “This is a bad idea,” said Nahala, done pounding on the door. “I don’t think she’s home. Imma call your mom again.”

  “I got the key. It’s all good,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?” she asked. “Then why we got him here?”

  Wallace looked down at her from his almost impressive height. “For protection,” he said.

  “How much you getting?” she asked.

  “Fifty.”

  “Fifty?” She laughed.

  “Nahala! That’s all I have,” I told Wallace. “I’m broke y’all, broke.”

  “J, let’s just go. Wait till your dad speaks with your mom.”

  “When’s that gonna happen? He can’t call her, she has to call him. She won’t do it.”

  “Look, you can stay at my house forever—I don’t care.”

  “He want to make sure his mom’s okay. Girl,” Wallace said, “you ain’t got to worry when I’m around.”

  “Whatever.” Nahala rolled her eyes.

  I put the key in the lock. Maybe I was thinking if I could just get into bed and go to sleep, I would wake up and nothing bad would have happened. But when I got upstairs Jacquon’s crib was empty, his little striped dog lying on its side. My room was how I’d left it: Petrarch’s sonnets facedown on the bed. Downstairs, I heard Nahala calling Hello?

  “This some Quaker shit?” Wallace appeared behind me and picked up the book.

  “No. I was supposed to be writing a paper about courtly love. But it was due today so . . .”

  “Too late,” he said.

  Nahala came running up the stairs. “No one. Let’s go. It’s freezing in here. Jacquon at day care?”

  I wondered if I’d ever see my little brother again. “Probably,” I said, coasting down the hall like I was sitting in a hovering armchair. I wandered toward the cracked door of Mom and Karl’s bedroom.

  “Go on,” said Nahala, “Open it.”

  My stomach somersaulted and landed wrong on its back. “You do it,” I told Wallace.

  “It’s your house,” he said.

  “Ain’t I paying you?”

  “Y’all chicken.” Nahala put a hand on the door, then paused. “J, maybe you should close your eyes.”

  “Why?” asked Wallace, uncomfortable.

  “Yeah why, Nahala? I can’t even see.”

  “Cuz you just a kid.”

  We all stared at her hand, shrinking back from the door as it opened like tourists at a zoo with no cages. But there was nothing inside except bedsheets feeding a pile of clothes on the floor.

  “See! Nothing,” said Nahala.

  “I’m gonna see if my glasses are downstairs,” I announced, heading down the hall.

  Wallace followed. “Ain’t they smashed?”

  “Maybe I can tape them.”

  Nahala grabbed my elbow. “I’m ready to leave.”

  “Why?” I asked/taunted, letting Wallace step in front of me.

  “Because it feels like a haunted house up in here.” She took my hand going down the stairs. “I don’t even like scary movies.”

  In the foyer, Wallace moved a coat off the entryway bench so he could sit down. “Y’all hungry? Ey.” Wallace pulled my broken glasses from underneath him. “These yours?” He held the one good lens to my eye and I had a moment of clarity. “Can you see?”

  “Yeah.” Seeing our foyer, I felt all of the heat shut out of my body and a cold weight pour in.

  “Y’all check the kitchen?” Wallace let his arm drop and my vision went.

  “They would have heard me calling,” said Nahala. “You two do what you want, I’m gonna wait in the car.”

  But I had to make certain. I left Wallace and Nahala and walked, a kid displaced, into the deserted rooms I’d once inhabited through a house that felt visited by the plague. I went into the living room and through the dining room where Jacquon’s high chair stood, its white tray flipped up, cereal alphabets glued to the bottom by old milk, but I never made it to the kitchen cuz there was a bloodstain burning the beige carpet before the linoleum.

  I screamed.

  “Is it wet?” Wallace whispered from somewhere behind me.

  “I ain’t touching it,” hissed Nahala.

  “You hear that?” I asked but could not turn my body.

  “Sirens,” Nahala murmured.

  Wallace walked in
front of me, squatting over the stain.

  “Are they coming closer?” I asked, the siren’s bullying wail like a bubble rising.

  “They not for us,” I heard Wallace say as the edges of my world curled/burned gray.

  “Hey.” Nahala pulled at me. “James.”

  “/”

  “James!”

  “/”

  “James?”

  “/?”

  “It ain’t blood,” she said.

  And I dropped into her arms, the living having gone out of my boy’s legs.

  “It’s coffee,” she told me as they helped me escape. “You okay, little man,” Wallace said, carrying me out, “we got you—you okay.”

  But it wasn’t me who wouldn’t be okay, it was them, him, the little brother I was leaving behind.

  Snake Doctors

  Almost four years ago in February of 1999, my mother called to tell me that my grandfather had died. Such an announcement is not an unprecedented occurrence in the life of a thirty-two-year-old man, but what makes it remarkable is that I had not known he was alive. My grandfather, Robert Sibley, had gone to prison in 1938, leaving his wife, my grandmother, Lorene, three months pregnant with their first and only child. It had always been my understanding that he’d died in prison.

  Ever since her last divorce, my mother calls me whenever she is upset. I am much more amenable to conversation than my brother, who is somewhat of a hermit in West Texas and considering jettisoning his phone. After an inquiry into my health (I am severely diabetic), she told me that she had received a letter from my grandfather’s lawyer containing a strange document, which she described as a joint confession by Robert and his twin sister, Izabel. But one extraordinary observation I wish to make here, is that my great-aunt, Izabel, died in the hospital at the age of seven in 1925 from a severe bout of polio. With my mother’s permission, I have reprinted the original unedited manuscript here in its entirety. I welcome readers, especially those familiar with my family’s colorful history, to write in.

  Saul R. Sibley, January 2003

  ROBERT

  This is how it went: my sister curled across the backseat of my Chevrolet, her tiny, twisted feet dangling above the floorboard. My new wife, Lorene, sitting up front, digging her body against me as I drove. When we had left Texas in the dark morning heat, my sister had been asleep, and now as the sun stewed in the Arkansas sky, she still slept.