The Awkward Black Man

by Walter Mosley

  “What if they catch us?” Crash remembered his twin asking at the outset of one such outing.

  “It’s not illegal to camp in the park if it isn’t posted,” their father replied with a nonchalant shrug. “But if the park rangers or the police find us, they’ll probably check our IDs and send us home.”

  Crash knew that the eastern white pines of the grove gave great cover and so was not worried about being found. His backpack contained a camouflage pup tent, a thin down sleeping bag, a butane hotplate with enough fuel for a week’s worth of cooking, a pot and pan, a quart bottle of water, a battery-powered lantern, and six dried packets of onion and mushroom soup mix that came with a five-year guarantee of freshness. There were various other contents of the pack: three teabags, a tin cup, and a hunting knife designed, as his father said, for industry or defense.

  Crash put up the tent and sat next to it eating a PB&J on sourdough. As evening came on, he began to wonder what would be happening between his home and the school. The principal’s office would have called his parents, saying that they had to come in for a special disciplinary meeting. On the other hand, his parents would have called the administration office wondering what the school had done with their son. Sooner or later they would figure out that Crash had suspected why the principal called him to her office and, instead of facing the music, had run.

  Down in a clearing below a scrim of pines, Crash saw three deer illuminated by an early moon. He’d turned his lantern on low to read Demian, by Herman Hesse, a book that had been assigned in Mrs. Schrodinger’s World Literature class. Crash liked the book because it saw the world the way he did: not only good and evil but also light and dark mixing to make things so hard to understand. He liked the main character, Emil Sinclair, a lot. He was a misunderstood kid who couldn’t solve the simple problems of life.

  “Hey there, little brother.” The voice was both rough and soft.

  Crash peered in the direction from which the voice had come, but at first all he could see was darkness. He knew this was because of the blinding effect of the moon and electric light. He wasn’t afraid, because Brother called him “little brother” due to a half-inch deficit in height; Crash had been born seven minutes before Brother, and his jealous twin always tried to make Crash seem the junior.

  As Crash’s vision acclimated, there appeared before him a tall and lanky young black man wearing black trousers and maybe a red T-shirt. The dark-skinned lad smiled brightly and said, “What you doin’ out here readin’ a book in the woods, man?”

  “Reading,” Crash said, though he knew this was not a satisfactory answer to the question.

  “What’s your name?” the young man asked. He took a step forward and hunkered down in an easy movement, right forearm on the knee, the knuckles of his left hand grazing the grass.

  “My parents named me Percival, Percy, but everyone calls me Crash.”

  “Why Crash?”

  “What’s your name?” Crash asked.

  “Otis.” He said the word as if it were somehow a defeat. “Otis Zeal.”

  “That’s a cool name,” Crash said. It was the right thing to say.

  Otis grinned again and asked, “Why you out heah?”

  “They were going to expel me from school for helping about a dozen kids cheat on their homework and their tests.”

  “A dozen is twelve, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how much them other kids pay you to help ’em cheat?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nuthin’? You mean you helped them and didn’t even get paid?”

  “It was kind of like an experiment.”

  “Like a scientist, like on TV?”

  “Uh-huh. You see, I thought that maybe my friends weren’t learning because the teachers made the answers so much of a mystery. If they saw the question and then the answer, maybe that would help them know what they were learning about.”

  “You sound kinda crazy, Percy Crash.”

  “Why are you out here, Otis?”

  “I always come out to here when I get in trouble too. My uncle used to take me here when I was kid like you, and now if I think somebody’s after me I come here to hide.”

  “What are you hiding from?” Crash asked.

  Otis embarked upon a meandering tale that made only a little sense to the sophomore from Horatio Prep. The story started with a girl named Brenda Redman. She was real cute, with a fat butt, and she could dance. Otis was a good dancer, and so every time he and Brenda met at a party at somebody’s house in the Bronx, they danced to just about every other cut the DJ played. The problem was this guy named Lawrence. Lawrence liked Brenda, and she liked him some too, but he couldn’t dance like Otis, and Brenda needed to be dancing when she was at a party and the music was playing—especially if there was wine involved. It was the wine, Otis believed, that made Lawrence angry. Brenda wasn’t his steady girl or anything, but even still, Lawrence pushed Otis, and that made Otis mad.

  “You don’t wanna get me mad, little brother,” Otis said, in the middle of his story. “When I get mad there’s no tellin’ what I might do.”

  Anyway, Otis got mad and stabbed Lawrence, who was a much bigger man, in the shoulder with a little paring knife. Otis always carried an edge—that’s what he said.

  “Did you kill him?” Crash asked Otis.

  “I ’on’t think I did. You know, sometimes people die when you don’t hurt ’em much, but I don’t think he woulda died. It don’t matter though, because his cousin belongs to a gang, and they’ll be lookin’ for me for a long time.”

  There was a lull in the conversation for a while after that. Both young man and boy looked around, appreciating the relative silence of the city park. Then Otis began to shiver. The tremors started in his chest and radiated out toward the limbs. Crash crawled into the little pup tent and pulled out Brother’s afghan sweater.

  “Here,” Crash said, “put this on.”

  Otis reached out and pulled the woolen garment over his head. He nodded, grinned, and then shuddered once before plopping down into a half lotus.

  “That makes the difference,” Otis declared.

  Crash thought the words sounded like something a parent or some other elder had often said.

  “You want a PB&J?”

  “Wha’s that?”

  They talked about school because it was something they had in common. Otis had been kicked out so many times that they finally stopped expecting him to come back. Mostly these suspensions were because of his bad temper. Whenever Otis got angry he had to do something hard. He’d throw a glass against the wall, hit somebody, or something else like that. One time he pushed a girl named Theodora down some marble stairs.

  “I was already sorry before she stopped tumblin’,” he said. “But I didn’t say it, because I had no right to expect forgiveness. I always keep thinkin’ that maybe I could find a place where you nevah have to get mad, and then I’d be cool. My daddy told me before he died that that place was called Dead.”

  When it was Crash’s turn to talk, he said that he felt like an outcast in school. Horatio Prep was better than public school, but still everybody thought that he was tricking them with the way he learned things.

  “It’s like when I read a book,” Crash explained. “I turn the pages so fast that nobody believes I’m really readin’, or when people just say a math problem and I know the answer.”

  “You didn’t turn the pages fast when I saw you reading your book,” Otis pointed out.

  “That’s because, um, after I read a book a few times I go slower and slower, because my mind is making up all this other stuff about how the people really felt and what they looked like.”

  “Like it was a TV show, but you have to see it ovah and ovah until you understand how what happened happened?”

  “Yeah.” Crash felt that no one had eve
r put into words the feelings he got while he was learning.

  “Why don’t you read me a couple a’ pages?” Otis said.

  Crash read nearly a dozen pages out loud, marveling at how good it sounded. He didn’t trip and stumble over the words as he did when he read out loud in English class.

  Otis started yawning after a while, and Crash stopped reading.

  “Guess we should get some sleep,” Otis suggested.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Then Otis stood up on his knees and took three stump-like steps, bringing him very close to Crash. He leaned forward slowly and kissed Crash on the mouth. It was a wet kiss, not anything the sophomore had experienced before.

  Otis leaned back and asked, “Is there room in yo’ tent for me?”

  The youths gazed into each other’s eyes for a long moment before Crash said, “Uh-uh. It’s too small.”

  Taking a long time before he spoke again, Otis finally said, “OK. I’ll just curl up in this sweater next to it.”

  In his half-asleep state it came to Crash that Otis kissing him was the opposite of Otis getting mad. It made him happy that he was able to calm the angry young man down. He was smiling in the tent when somebody grabbed him by his shoulders and dragged him out.

  “Who are you?” a man’s voice shouted.

  The sun was up and shining and hurting Crash’s eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” another angry voice wanted to know.

  Crash held out his arms to show that he wasn’t resisting them, but the man still lifted him from the ground and pulled him so close that Crash could smell bacon on his breath.

  “Who are you?” Bacon Breath demanded.

  “Percival Martin.” He felt defeated because he used a name he no longer answered to.

  “Where’s some ID?”

  “In my, in my, in my . . .”

  “In your what?”

  “In my backpack.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Next to the tent.”

  Crash glanced at the side of the tent where Otis had been sleeping, but both the sometimes angry young man and the backpack were gone.

  When Crash realized that Otis was gone with all his belongings­—­money and food, cookware and butane hotplate—he was giddy with the knowledge that he had helped his friend.

  “You’re going to jail, Percival Martin,” one tall, treelike park man intoned.

  They were all sitting around the dining table that night—the entire Martin clan plus Bob. It wasn’t unusual for the family to gather over a meal, but this time there were no plates of food before them.

  “What did you do?” Reginald Jr. asked.

  Albertha was sitting next to her father. Crash imagined that his sister could hardly wait to get to her room, where she could tell everyone about her crazy autistic brother.

  “I figured out how to help all the kids I knew get good grades on their papers and tests.”

  The police had called Reginald and Mathilda. They’d come down to the Queens police station and taken their son home.

  “But why did you run away?” Mathilda asked.

  Brother was peering at Crash with a crestfallen look on his face. This expression presented itself like a simple equation to Crash. It said that Brother realized that he would never be as much fun as him.

  “I dreamed that . . . No, no, no. I saw that one of the kids would tell on me sooner or later. And then when I went to Mr. Schillio’s class and he told me to go to the principal’s office, I knew I was in trouble.”

  “The school didn’t say anything about you cheating,” Mathilda said.

  Bob was studying his cousin.

  “They didn’t?”

  “No,” Reginald Jr. replied. “They called to tell us that you were going to be valedictorian of the second years.”

  “Oh.”

  “You have to stop cheating,” the father continued. “Tell your friends that you can’t do it anymore.”

  “Are you OK?” Mathilda asked.

  Crash turned toward his mother but had no words to say.

  “That goes for all of you,” Reginald said to the other kids. “We never mention cheating again.”

  Years passed, but nothing happened that was as powerful or insightful or fulfilling as the day when Crash ran away. He’d kissed fourteen girls and a few boys, but nothing made an impression on him like Otis did amidst the pine trees and darkness, witnessed by lost deer and a few fireflies.

  It was on this true adventure Crash had learned that the mathematics of life were ever so much more complex than counting up things in his head.

  Albertha married her first boyfriend, Clyde Friarstone. She talked for both herself and her husband while Clyde smiled shyly at her side. Bob became a renowned artist and sometime opioid abuser. He still lied about his age.

  Brother worked construction for six years, then he enlisted and did three tours of duty in Afghanistan. During his period of service he avoided the members of his family, most of whom were against the wars. But a few weeks after his last tour, Brother showed up at Crash’s upper-Harlem apartment. Crash served his twin a glass of cabernet.

  “When do you graduate, little brother?” Brother asked.

  “Next year.”

  “You gonna work for the government?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe I’ll be a physics teacher at some small college upstate.”

  Crash thought that Brother didn’t like this answer, but instead of saying so he asked, “You ever talk to Mom?”

  “No,” Crash said in a hushed tone. “She sends cards every once in a while but . . .”

  “I throw ’em away,” Brother said. “She was a bitch leavin’ Dad. No explanation, just a note saying that it was over and she was gone.”

  “Why’d you join the army?” It was a question he’d always wanted to ask.

  “To serve my country. To save people who got stuck under the Taliban.”

  “Did it feel like you broke outta prison and at least just for a little while you were free?”

  Brother winced and said, “I got shrapnel in my chest. The doctors say that it’s better to leave it.”

  They drank more and talked about old times in the bedroom with cousin Bob.

  Crash didn’t tell Brother that Mathilda had sent him her e-mail address or that he’d contacted her a few times. But something about Brother’s visit made him decide to take the subway out to Queens. Her apartment was less than a mile from Forest Park.

  He knocked on the sixth-floor apartment door and waited, nervous for the first time since he believed he was about to get expelled. The door came open. A willowy man stood there. He looked familiar, very much so.

  “Matthew Sinn?” Crash asked.

  “Hi, Percy. How are you?”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “I would be if it wasn’t for your mother.”

  “It was really because of you, baby,” Mathilda said to Crash at dinner. She’d made chicken and dumplings with almandine French beans and peach cobbler.

  “Me?”

  “You were so brave.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your whole life you were different. Nobody understood you. Your teachers were angry because you didn’t need them. And then you ran away to the woods with a backpack and a book. You were only fifteen, and emotionally so much younger than that, but you took your life in your hands . . .”

  “The day after you came back, she took my hands in hers,” Sinn said. “She held on tight and told me I wasn’t going anywhere. Before that everyone came to see me just to say goodbye, but Mattie held on tight. After three months I was in remission. In three years my cure moved in with me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anybody?” Crash asked his mom.

  “I would have told the
m all,” she said, “but no one replied to my cards except you. Reginald phoned me once, but before I could explain he called me vile names and hung up. I would have liked to remain his wife and just . . . be close with Matthew. But Reggie hated me for breaking the cord of our discord.”

  The last five words were often used by Mathilda’s English professor father.

  “But you just said you were gone,” Crash argued.

  “I said that I needed space.”

  That night Crash got on the Internet and entered an algorithm created to search for the name Otis Zeal. In a way, Crash thought, Otis was the one person who understood him like he intuitively understood long division.

  The next morning Crash called his father. Minnie Saltworthy, Reginald Jr.’s live-in girlfriend, answered, “Martin residence.”

  “Hi, Minnie,” Crash said.

  “Hi, Percy. You want to talk to your father?”

  “Hello, son,” Reginald Jr. said. He’d retired from his sales job and now stayed home most of the time. He and Minnie, only fifteen years his junior, took vacations four times a year. They went on voyages and train treks, visited Mexico, and even went on a camping tour in the Italian Alps.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “You calling just to say hello?”

  “I wanted to say that I love you, Dad; that I miss the days when we were kids living in that apartment and going to school.”

  “You can come home anytime you want.”

  That night Brother died of a heart attack. Skipping the funeral, Crash went the next day to the grave site. Brother was interred beneath a temporary plaster marker, upon which was written his birth name—Constant Stevens Martin. Crash wondered why he never knew Brother’s real name. He wondered whether Brother had known it.

  Soon after Brother’s death, Crash dropped out of Columbia and started an online business that generated outlines for school papers and explained ways to take and take advantage of school tests. He made lots of money and often chatted, digitally, with his ever-changing cast of clients.