“What will that do?”
“We real close, right?”
“Whether we like it or not,” Lorraine agreed. “I mean sometimes, like last night, I need you more than anything else. And every once in a while, I look at you and it’s like there’s a beast snarling in my heart.”
“I’m not that bad,” Ronnie said. “But I have strong feelings about you too. So I think we should see what it’s like if we go back into the lives we had before we got together.”
“So you’re going to go out mugging people?”
“Naw, no, not nuthin’ like that. But there’s some people I need to see, to tell them the things I couldn’t even think when I was under the shit. Maybe, maybe if we see what we’re like apart, we’ll know bettah what we could do together.”
“You’re a very smart man, aren’t you, Mr. Bottoms?”
“I’ont even know what smart is.”
Lorraine laughed, got out of her chair, and then threw herself into Ronnie’s lap. She kissed his forehead and then his lips.
“A girl could fall in love with a brute like you,” she said.
“You the brute,” he replied, and they both smiled.
* * *
RONNIE SHOWERED IN the guest bathroom. Under the broad pulsing showerhead, he was reminded of the living waterfall cascading from the impossibly tall boulder in the Silver Box’s retreat. This memory brought with it a conviction.
He met Lorraine in the living room. She was wearing a loose burlaplike dress cinched at the middle with a razor-thin red belt. Her green shoes were flat and her eyes wild.
“The first thing I’m going to do is run,” she said. “Really far. I’ll see my parents after that and then come back here.”
“I don’t need to know everything you doin’, girl.”
“You do need some more clothes.”
“I got to get a job first.”
“You already have a job,” she said.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Trying to save the world.” She uttered the words in fake-heroic TV-speak.
The paraphrase of the once-popular cartoon made Ronnie smile. “You used to watch that too?” he asked.
“Every afternoon.”
“Maybe, maybe we watched it at the same time sometime.”
Lorraine was surprised by the attempt at making the mundane connection between them. There was hope there that she felt needed protection.
“It’s too bad we didn’t know each other back then. We could have gone to my parents’ stables in Connecticut and ridden their horses.”
“You got horses?”
“We should go.”
* * *
AT THE FRONT desk Lorraine signed Ronnie in so that he could go back and forth with no difficulty. She also gave him a key to her condo and, four blocks away, she took eight hundred dollars out of an ATM.
“Take this and get whatever you want,” she said. “I know it’s not much, but it’s all they’ll let me take out on this card.”
Ronnie put the wad of twenties in his pocket and frowned.
“What’s wrong?” his soul mate asked.
“Do you think anybody could do this?”
“What?”
“One day wake up and decide that what they been doin’ is wrong and then just stop. I mean we got all these superpowers and shit, but we could be friends even without all that. We could just be tryin’ to do good, not save the world.”
“I do,” she said. “I do think that any person has that ability.”
It was time for them to separate and go their different ways, but they hesitated.
Lorraine reached out and grabbed two fingers of his left hand. “I don’t want to leave you,” she said. “Is that why you think we should?”
“I’ll be back here tonight. I got your cell number if I need it, so don’t worry.”
She made a quick nod, turned, and ran north on Fifth. She was moving fast and fleet, weaving through the crowd with a precision that kept her from colliding with anyone despite the throngs.
Ronnie smiled at his friend’s swiftness. He was, after all, in a way, a proud father.
TWENTY-FIVE
RONNIE FOLLOWED IN the wake of his Silver Box sister but at a much slower pace. After crossing Fifty-ninth Street, he ambled through the park, looking at the bicyclists, joggers, dog-walkers, and businessmen and -women commuting by foot. There were also young mothers pushing strollers; old folks and homeless people sitting on benches, watching the world pass them by; solitary individuals like Ronnie just out for a constitutional; and, of course, lovers walking in little bubbles where the rest of the world did not exist.
In many ways, this was a new experience for the repeat offender. He’d spent much of his adult life, when not incarcerated, roaming the park, looking for someone to mug. But now things were different.
Ronnie had money in his pocket, and he hadn’t eaten since the slice of pizza with Lorraine—but he wasn’t at all hungry.
He walked for quite a while, thinking about the living waterfall and the potential for people to change. Hours passed as he mused and made it slowly from the southern tip of the unsuspecting man-made forest.
“Who the fuck you think you is, niggah?” somebody said.
Ronnie had almost reached the northern border of the park.
The man was tall, broad, and very dark-skinned. He had stringy dreadlocks, a basketball-hard round gut, and a small mouth for such a big voice.
They called him Fast Freddie because when he was young, he was a track star at his Bronx high school. Now he had a big gut and a slight limp, but they still called him Fast because that’s the way he liked it.
Freddie was higher up the food chain than Ronnie, and so there was a certain protocol that the lesser thug must have violated while thinking about the potentials of freedom.
“… niggah think that just ’cause he got on some nice clothes that he don’t have to speak,” Fast Freddie was saying. “He done forgot how to ack around his betters.”
Freddie wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. There were people walking by, but they avoided eye contact with either man. Freddie was just blustering, getting ready to put Ronnie in his place.
Freddie was bigger and stronger and he had friends. Watching the big man in the gray sweatpants and khaki sergeant’s jacket, Ronnie was forced to remember the number of beatings and humiliations he’d experienced in a previous life that came to an end only a few days before.
“I’ll kick your mothahfuckin’ ass!” Fast Freddie shouted, underscoring Ronnie’s thinking.
Was this why he’d come up here, to have Freddie remind him of what his life had been?
Freddie reached out a big scarred hand to grab Ronnie by the shirt. But the younger man took a quick step backwards, evading Freddie’s grasp. Ronnie was faster than he had been, his instincts honed for fighting.
“I’m’a put the hurt to you, niggah!” Freddie yelled. He jumped and Ronnie braced himself, jutting the open flats of both his hands forward.
Freddie hit Ronnie’s battering palms with his chest. The impact sent him stumbling.
A few park denizens had come out—of nowhere, it seemed—to watch.
Freddie bellowed and ran at Ronnie. The bigger man threw a wild roundhouse right that the younger man ducked under while taking a graceful step to the side.
There were cheers for Ronnie. This made Fast Freddie mad.
The north park kingpin pulled an ugly, pitted, black-bladed knife from somewhere in his army jacket. When he smiled, Freddie showed where he was missing three teeth.
This reminded Ronnie that he was missing a tooth, or least he had been missing one before the Silver Box. He ran his tongue up under his lip, feeling for the gap … but it was gone.
The distraction nearly cost him his life because Freddie, calling up the memory of a bygone day, was rushing forward with his knife pointed at Ronnie’s chest.
When Ronnie became aware of the attack, the knifepoint was on
ly a few inches from his heart. He remembered Ma Lin’s unavoidable thrust. But Freddie wasn’t Ma Lin or his Laz master; he was a street thug with limited abilities.
Ronnie shifted to his left, then threw a backhanded fist at Freddie’s wrist. The blade went skittering away on the asphalt. Ronnie grabbed Freddie’s arm and flung the big man at an empty park bench. The ex–track star hit the bench so hard that the wood shattered, leaving Freddie on the grass amid huge splinters of wood.
Freddie was looking around with a stunned expression on his face. Ronnie saw the innocence and pain in the minor park boss’s countenance. They caused him to remember the many, many times he had felt like a victim.
Ronnie turned and walked away, aware that he was leaving his old life amid the shards and splinters of that park bench.
* * *
WALKING UP THROUGH the heart of Harlem, Ronnie was thinking that not only had he been transformed by his encounter with Lorraine Fell, but the new man he had become was who he had always been, and moreover, the man he had been lied to himself about who and what he was in the world he inhabited. This knotty, seemingly convoluted moment of self-realization tickled Ronnie.
“I didn’t know who I was,” he murmured as he walked, “but now that I ain’t him no mo’, I remember me better than I ever knew.”
He snorted and looked up, surprised to see the granite stairs leading to the green double doors of the public elementary school he’d attended for eight years. His heart skipped as it used to whenever he saw a police car come around a corner. Those green doors had been on his mind ever since he and Lorraine traveled that crazy yellow clay road out from the Silver Box into Central Park and up against Ma Lin.
Before he knew it, he was at the top of the stairs, stepping through the doorway.
“You got business here, brother?” a man said.
He was big like Fast Freddie and carried a truncheon in his left hand. He was no match for Ronnie. Four security guards couldn’t have stopped him. Four bears would have had trouble, but a fight was not what Ronnie wanted. A fight would have led him away from his goal.
“Hey, man,” he said, “can you tell me where I can find Miss Shona Peters?”
The fact that Ronnie remembered her first name was a surprise. His mind seemed to be obeying a new system of thinking. He could call out into the haze of his history and receive knowledge that resided there. How much, he wondered, had the Silver Box changed him? How much could a man change and still be the same man?
“What do you want with her?” the security guard asked.
“She my cousin,” Ronnie lied. He was happy that the Silver Box hadn’t taken away this one skill he relied upon the most. The truth was never of much use in the world he’d lived in.
“Yeah?” the security guard said doubtfully, “then what is her sister’s name?”
“Cynthia or Melda?” Ronnie lied without hesitation. “Which one?”
The big brown guard bit his lower lip. “You lyin’,” he said to Ronnie while lifting his club.
“Ronnie?” a woman, a young woman said.
She approached the school’s guard and Earth’s guardian with a rolling gait. Freya Levering was short and curvaceous, a better woman than the old Ronnie deserved.
“Hey, Frey,” Ronnie said, still luxuriating in his ability to fabricate. “I was just tellin’ my man here that I come to see my cousin Shona Peters.”
“It’s okay, Alfred,” Freya said. “I know ’im.”
“He don’t have no clearance, Miss Levering,” the guard argued.
“That’s okay. I’ll be with him.”
Alfred didn’t like Ronnie, didn’t want him in his school, but Freya seemed to have some kind of seniority and so he put the nightstick back in its holster and stood down.
“Come on with me, Ronnie Bottoms,” Freya said.
She scurried up a stone staircase to the second floor of the main building and then across an enclosed ramp to the larger building behind. There they climbed up two more floors to a hallway that had various offices of the administration of the school. At the end of the hall was a door smaller than any other they had passed. Ronnie tried to remember this floor but could not. He had thought when he was a child that he knew everything about these buildings, but now he realized that he really didn’t. This partial knowledge was fast becoming a recurring theme in his thoughts and life.
Freya took a thick blue card with no writing on it from the pocket of her sports jacket and held it against an onyx plate that took the place of a doorknob. There was a clicking noise and the door came ajar, opening inward. Freya pushed the portal the rest of the way open and ordered, “Get in there.”
* * *
IT WAS A small room dominated by a short green metal table surrounded by six chairs that had lime-colored metal frames with dark avocado padding for seats and backrests. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all green, as was the window frame. The pane in the window was painted lime. The institutional chamber reminded Ronnie of jail.
“What the fuck are you doin’ here, Ronnie Bottoms?” Freya said sharply. “And how the hell did you find me in the first place?”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but I wasn’t lookin’ for you, Frey,” Ronnie said. “It’s like I told your man Alfred, I’m here to see Miss Peters.”
“What happened to you?” Freya asked, not caring about or listening to what Ronnie had to say.
Her skin was dark like his, and her face pretty though its visage was petulant. She wore a loose-fitting coral-colored dress under a beige woman’s sports jacket—both of which served to mute the power of her childbearing figure.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Your body look different an’ them clothes,” she said, “an’ I don’t remember you havin’ no green eye.”
“I got this infection when I was up at Rikers. The doctor at the infirmary told me that it wouldn’t kill me or nuthin’, but it could do that to your eyes. And I guess I lost some weight.”
“And you look taller,” she said with some uncertainty.
“Yeah. I grew some too.”
“What you want with Miss Peters?”
She made love like that, changing the subject from one minute to the next, but Ronnie didn’t mind back then or now.
“When I got out, I started thinkin’ ’bout when I was in her class and how nice she was to me. It seems like everything good I remember comes from those two years I spent in the second grade. I feel like everything I know good I learned from her. She taught me about dinosaurs and myths and how the stars told stories.”
Freya was frowning at her one-night lover from three and a half years before. “I ain’t like I was no more,” she said. “I’m a teacher’s assistant, and I plan to get my degree.”
“I cain’t lie, Frey. I was gonna look you up too. But I’m happy you in school. If you don’t wanna get together, I could see that. I mean the last time you seen me, I was just a thug.”
“And now you got a green eye you different?”
Ronnie smiled and shook his head. “No, baby. That’s just a color. I am different, but you don’t have to believe it. No, ma’am. I know what I was and I know there ain’t no talkin’ gonna convince somebody otherwise.”
“You really didn’t come here to see me?” Freya asked.
Ronnie shook his head no.
“’Cause if the people here connect me up with a hoodlum like you, I’m bound to lose this job.”
“I’ll just tell ’em you knew my older sister, Tiffany. That way it’s like a family thing and you know you cain’t help who your family is.”
“If I leave you here, you won’t do nuthin’ to get me in trouble?”
“Are you gonna go get Miss Peters?”
“I’ll ask her if she wants to see you.”
“Then I will sit in that green chair over there and wait. That’s all.”
“And you know Miss Peters for real?”
“Tell her that it’s Ronnie Bottoms from her se
cond-grade class, the one that she kept in from recess and lunch period every day.”
TWENTY-SIX
ALONE IN THE green room, Ronnie relaxed. He had spent most of his life in detainment of one type or another; like when he was sent to the bedroom that he shared with his brother, Myron, when he was bad. Later he’d been sentenced to juvenile hall, jail, and even prison. When he went to school, he often had detention either in the vice principal’s office or in a room presided over by the dour Mr. Gorsh.
The calm he was experiencing came from a sense of arrival. He left the rich girl’s condo, defeated Fast Freddie, got around the security guard, and had finally reached the locked room where he was waiting with no food or water or any idea of what Freya was doing.
After a while he went to the opaque lime-colored window and tried to slide it open, but it was bolted and nailed shut.
When he turned back to the table, Used-to-be-Claude was sitting there shirtless and shoeless in a red suit. His legs were crossed comfortably and he smiled for Ronnie.
“I can’t stay here too long,” the husk of the dead wino said.
“Is any’a this real?” Ronnie asked as he took the seat next to the simulacrum.
Still smiling, Used-to-be-Claude said, “Even ideas and wishes have form and weight. It is impossible to have conception without a supplemental series of potential and actual realities. The problem starts when those realities are misperceived.”
“You know I don’t understand what you sayin’, right?”
“You came here to visit your teacher from long ago,” Used-to-be-Claude said. “Why?”
“I been thinkin’ about her.”
“You thought about her and now you are here.”
“But maybe I ain’t here,” Ronnie reasoned. “Maybe you made all this up and then made me think it was true.”
“Even if that were so,” Used-to-be-Claude said patiently, “who’s to say that some even greater power didn’t cause me to fool you?”
“Why you in a hurry?” Ronnie said, already tired of the pointless debate.
“I cannot let the Laz find me here.”
“I thought he couldn’t see you.”
“When I am close to you or Lorraine, I am rendered partially visible to him.”
Inside a Silver Box Page 12
