On a Clear Day

by Walter Dean Myers

  Another blast. I put my forehead down and felt it hit the black bricks of the street. I wanted to puke as I pushed myself up to sit.

  I saw a figure running across the road. It looked like a man, or a boy, maybe even a dog. Behind it there were the flaming hulks of two of the vehicles. Suddenly the silhouetted figure burst into flames. The figure still ran—I could make out the motion of sprinting legs, flailing arms. It was burning, but it still ran. Then it stopped.

  More people, I pictured children, appeared from the brilliance of the flames. They ran a few steps and then, from where I sat, flat on my ass and hurting, I could see them falling. Their arms always seeming to reach up to the sky before they hit the ground.

  They had attacked, without a doubt on the strength of Sayeed’s words, his promises that they would be all right. Now they were being slaughtered on the streets. I thought of how far away some of them were from home.

  “Dahlia! Are you okay?” Anja’s voice.

  I turned and saw her running toward me. Then I saw one of her legs jerk up as she twisted, even as I was filled with a searing pain. Something tearing into my shoulder.

  I was lying on the ground, Anja no more than inches away from me. She was moaning. Were we going to die here? God, how can you do this shit?

  Hands picking me up. I was being carried. My shoulder hurt so bad. I was peeing all over myself.

  I saw the van, and soon I was in the dark. I was lying on something, maybe a bench. Then there was light again and something was being laid beside me. I turned and saw it was Anja.

  My shoulder was burning and I wanted to hit it, to put out the flames. I tried to look around, but there was nothing to see. I was trying to think of a prayer.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou … “Oooh.”

  A moment went past. Two moments, maybe a thousand. I looked for Anja and saw her a few feet from me. She had gritted her teeth. They were small and white, and her lips were flat against her face.

  There were guys shouting around me. The sounds of the fighting went on, but in the darkness of the van, they seemed ever more faraway.

  Someone next to me. A Latino snipped away at my shirtsleeve.

  “Not bad,” he said. “A scratch. Nothing vital.”

  He was spraying me with something unbelievably cold, and the pain went away. I heard him saying something about how it was going to swell, but that I’d be all right. It’d be more painful tomorrow, he reassured my hurt ass.

  “Anja?”

  I twisted up and saw that they had taken Anja’s pants off. Her legs were white, and I saw she had an angry red crescent on her thigh. A kid with a roundish face sprayed her leg. Put his nose almost on the wound, sniffing. Then he took a paper square from a shelf, undid it, and put it on her wound.

  “This will stop the bleeding,” he said.

  I looked at Anja’s face, and she looked miserable. She saw me and forced a smile.

  “I love you, Anja!” I called to her.

  “We’ll be okay,” she said. It was what I needed to hear.

  I was lying in what I recognized as the back of a medical van. On the wall, there was an illuminated strip. There were numerals on it. 4P2, 10 Mod 7, 3!, the square root of 81. A clock. I felt better. I didn’t think I was going to die.

  I saw Anja getting up, pulling herself together, pulling on her pants, and I swung my legs over the side of the platform I was lying on and got to my feet. Anja winced as she slipped back into her pants. The technician taped over the spot he had cut them.

  I steeled myself, ready to go outside again.

  Outside. The sun was brilliant. The shadows on the ground were autumn-dark. There were few sounds except for the horrendous whooshing noise of our side’s heavy weapons. The guys around me seemed relaxed. They looked at me and quickly looked away as I realized I was standing there in my bra. I banged on the door, and a guy opened it. He had my shirt in his hand, and I took it and put it on. As I twisted my shoulder, it hurt like hell.

  Down the road where the attack started, the tracked vehicles were still burning. I wondered if there were still bodies in them. In the far distance, heat vapors rose toward the sky. The stench of the fighting—the fires, the gases from the guns—hung in the air.

  To our left, across from the park, doors were opening. Slowly, people were coming out of their houses to see whatever they could. They were black and brown. They looked at us from across the grass and concrete field that separated us, and we kept a careful eye on them.

  “Dahlia! Are you okay? How’s the arm?” Michael. His hair was matted to his head, making a dark hieroglyphic over his forehead.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Tristan has Sayeed,” Michael said. “I think he’s going to kill him.”

  “He’s captured him?”

  Michael nodded.

  “That’s not right—the right thing to do,” I said.

  “Everybody thinks it is,” Michael said, stepping closer to me. “He’s caused the death of at least eight, maybe more kids out here today.”

  “It’s not the right thing to do!” I said emphatically. “We don’t need to cross that line. What is it, revenge? We’re writing history with us as the good guys, so everything we do is cool?”

  He looked at me, his eyes widening; then he got on his phone. I could hear him calling Tristan. He turned away from me as he spoke into the phone. Then he turned back. “He hasn’t killed him yet,” he said. “If he doesn’t kill him, then what?”

  Think, Dahlia. What’s the endgame? I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life explaining to myself why I could be part of the street fighting and part of the bloodshed and still think I was a decent human being.

  “Let the Sturmers take him,” I said. “If the police want him, they can negotiate with those animals. They’re all on the same side, really.”

  Michael let his arms drop to his side.

  “Give Sayeed to the Sturmers,” I said, this time more slowly.

  Michael was on the phone as I walked away.

  24

  MIAMI HERALD

  TURF WAR ERUPTS ON FRINGE OF “LITTLE HAITI.” OVER A DOZEN KILLED, INCLUDING AFRICAN DRUG LORD AND INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN TERROIST SAYEED IBN ZAYAD, WHO FELL AFTER A DESPERATE FIGHT WITH THE STURMERS. FBI DENOUNCES EFFORTS TO TIE AMERICAN DRUGGIES WITH FOREIGNERS.

  LONDON EVENING NEWS

  Americans answer violence the way they usually do, greater violence that carries the day! Should we be thankful?

  PHOEBE’S SCREAM MACHINE

  When Natural Farming placed its company logo between two shining moons, they wanted to tell the world that they were the truth and the light. But a bunch of teenagers, including one heavy rocker and one South Chicago gangbanger (not known if Crips or Bloods), showed that it was just the Big Company with its pants down!

  El Bronx. Four-thirty in the morning. A hazy moon hung over the dark silhouettes of the warehouses. Below, the all-night restaurante y bodega was still open, the yellow-orange light from its window lying like a stain on the sidewalk. The smell of pulled pork and plantains was only a memory, but it still made me hungry. An old man came out of the store carrying a plastic bag, and I imagined it held what was left of the day’s roti.

  There was a light rain; it was only slightly cold. It started and stopped every few minutes. My mother used to call this kind of rain “angel piss.”

  Across from me I saw a woman looking out from the window. Half hidden by the curtain—her hair, straight, and long, and silver gave her away. How many things had she seen on this street? I retreated from the window, took a pillow from my bed, and put it on the windowsill. Then I put my arms on it and leaned out to see the street more clearly. I didn’t look at the woman.

  Michael had asked me to stay with him and the others in Morristown, but I needed to get away. None of my numbers added up to anything I could call truth. They just led me to other equations, other problems, other what-ifs. And even as I saw why my numbers
didn’t arrive at any great and clear truth, I could also see how C-8 could add their numbers and think they had a holy friggin’ grail. They were looking for profits, and more was always there for them, always available. The answers they looked for were just a damned lot easier than mine.

  I wondered if I would ever come up with one true answer that would tie everything together. Could be, but right now I didn’t have it. Later, I would go with my gut, but for now I still wanted to go with my brain. I would analyze everything carefully and try not to lie to myself, even though I knew that there were lies waiting to comfort me.

  “Don’t give in to them, girl,” I told myself. That made me smile. Here I was in my tiny apartment in the South Bronx talking to myself.

  I thought about our little band.

  Tristan was simple. For him everything was either right or wrong. There was nothing in between. I envied him. I was nothing if not my in-betweens. He was good-looking, with a detachment about him that reminded you of a Scottish moor or an angry, moody sea. That was his charm, really. The aloofness. You wanted to cross to get where he was, to be near him, but he wouldn’t let that happen. Even his arrogance worked for him.

  Drego didn’t fool anyone. He was all street and all mean smart. He sensed moves, like a boxer or a dancer. I thought he fought against his feelings. I wondered, when he was alone, maybe sitting on the john or lying awake at three in the morning, if he thought about the woman he had hit in Miami, or the people he had dealt with down there. I knew he looked at the kids who had been killed as just that—kids who had been killed. I knew they ate at his soul.

  Javier. Smart, hurting. He held a memory of Ellen, of the life that could have been. How hard must that shit have been? To never have had that slice of life that you thought would have been fulfilling, and be doomed to forever long for it. Ellen was as much a part of Javier as the Bronx was part of me. I relied on the Bronx, pretended that I didn’t love it, but I kept coming back. I kept coming back.

  Anja was so cool. She found people out. We were all naked to her. When she looked at me, I thought she saw deeper than anyone I had ever met. She knew who I was, where I lived, where all my flaws are hidden, and how my juices flowed. Yes, I sweated, and I peed, and I cried, and she knew all of it, all about me. Her knowing made me glad. It was good to have someone who knew you without having to climb over the mountain of what you had to say, or the disguises you put on or the dances you did. She saw people for what they were, naked and alone, and needing each other. I thought she was a good person. Maybe a saint. Maybe just her knowing so much about me, where the truth lay in me, let me love her.

  Mei-Mei. She had invented herself, had given herself all kinds of crazy skills, and knew everything. It was so stupid for me to say that I would like to fight her, but I kept thinking about it. Just one punch to that cute little face would have done me so much good.

  She was also bitchy, which was the only part of her I liked.

  Michael. Brought us into his magical world and stepped back so that we could each bring our own melodies and rhythms to the jam. We each saw the illusions on the wall and made our own interpretations, but in the end we pulled it together, learned to respect each other, and stopped the great beasts of almighty profit from devouring more of us. At least we had done it for the moment, at least for this time, and for the few places in which the shadows had been made brighter.

  In a perfect world, a boy-meets-girl kind of world where there were blushing and sneaky looks across the room and body parts coming together in hot moments, I could have sweated Michael big-time. There was something about him that called my name even if I was half scared to answer him. If I had gone off with him to climb the mountain, I don’t know what I would have told Mrs. Rosario when I got back.

  Michael, Drego, Tristan, Javier, Anja, Mei-Mei, and me, we were a good team. Together, we’d learned what we could do. C-8 had backed off from acquiring another company. For now. We had won. But I thought we might have learned not to question what we had won.

  Some of the medical people from CTI were finally speaking out. And there was a three-page blog out of Johns Hopkins about how more research was needed to verify the prostaglandin findings.

  I wondered if I was still young enough, still hopeful and innocent enough, to think about going to medical school.

  And then there was Lydia, who was smart. The way she looked at me and Anja, reaching out to us intellectually, wanting to have faith in her intelligence, it meant a lot to me. Little girls need to grow up to be smart, involved women. Little boys, too. One day, if Lydia found out all that we did, it would be worth it to me.

  But we did some bad shit, too. How bad? Bad enough for me to run back to the Bronx and sit in my little den and boo the fucking hoo all over the place and wonder who I was again.

  We killed. Stop. Don’t fancy the shit up. We killed, left bodies lying in the streets in the name of peace. The fact that I could still find my soul in the middle of all my doubts didn’t help for more than a few minutes at a time.

  In the end, I hoped we were better, that we were more righteous than the drug dealers and the money lords and all the fools running around allowing themselves the luxury of ignorance. How much is two and two? Can you really not know?

  Maybe the Gaters were the real enemy. People who closed their eyes to what was happening, who allowed themselves to unknow what they damn well knew, who allowed their petty comforts to come at a price that thousands—that millions of people—had to pay. The real enemy was their indifference.

  Maybe. Who knows?

  Hey, and what would I do? Go back to my math, to my numbers, to my equations, trying to make sense of it all. If Michael called me today, or tomorrow, I would probably go back to him. I’d use my skills and hope I was on the right side. It’d be a chance to be, to live, to stake out my humanity. Maybe Michael would look at me and see something—someone—Dahlia—as being very special. Maybe he’d fall in love with me so hard, his nose would bleed and he’d come begging at my feet. I could use some of that.

  The sky was becoming lighter. A broad beam of light promised sunshine. I could see the clouds now, and they were breaking up. Perhaps it’d be a clear day.

  In the window opposite me, the woman disappeared, and then she reappeared with a pillow. She put it on the windowsill and put her arms on it.

  I waved to her. My arm was still hurting.

  She waved back.

  About the Author

  WALTER DEAN MYERS is the New York Times bestselling author of the first Michael L. Printz Award winner, Monster, and served as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature from 2012 to 2013. He is also the author of 145th Street and Hoops. He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, with his family. You can visit Walter online at walterdeanmyers.net.