Down

by Norah McClintock

  So now it’s the weekend. I have money in my pocket. I still need a new pair of sneakers, so I head out to get some—not at a mall, for sure not downtown, but out a ways, at a place James told me about that sells brand-name stuff for prices you wouldn’t believe. I score a new pair of really good sneakers for not much more than my mother gave me in the first place, which means that I have enough cash left over to make it through another week without having to ask my mother for anything.

  The next day, Saturday, I go down to the courts to see if James and the rest of them are there. They are. We shoot hoops, but it’s brutally hot out there and, if you ask me, they’re not really into it. James is always looking out beyond the chain-link fence, like he’s expecting someone. If he is, he keeps getting disappointed. Finally he says, “Let’s get out of here. You want to rent a movie or something?”

  We head for the video store. James and Stephen end up in a big argument over what to rent. Me, I don’t care. I haven’t seen many movies lately, so anything is fine with me, especially since we’re going to watch it in James’s basement, and James’s house has central air.

  So while they’re arguing, I’m looking out the video store window. That’s when I see her again.

  Asia.

  She’s standing outside. She’s looking at something and she’s smiling. My heart stops. I remember when she used to look at me like that. When she used to smile at me like that. And, boy, I wish I’d never stopped writing to her.

  Down deep I know it’s a bad idea, but I head for the door of the video store anyway. I step out onto the sidewalk. My eyes are filled with Asia and her hot-chocolate eyes and her warm pink smile. My heart is filled with longing. My memory is filled with the feel of her, warm and soft. My ears are filled with her laughter. Asia loves to laugh. She loves to be happy.

  I see that she is happy now. She is smiling, but not at me. No. She’s smiling at someone else. Her eyes sparkle as she looks at him. She drinks in his eyes, which are the same deep chocolate color as hers, not blue like mine. His skin is the same as hers too, not pale like mine. I can hardly breathe.

  I see her hand, the good one, in his.

  I see her smiling at him and only him.

  Then he turns around, and I recognize him.

  When Asia sees me, she keeps right on smiling, like she’s actually happy to see me. She says, “Remy, this is Marcus.”

  Marcus and I look at each other. I can’t tell if he remembers me. My brain isn’t working right anyway. All I can think is, After what I did, after why I did it, look at what happened. I think, too, that maybe I was crazy in there, because the whole time I wasn’t answering her letters, the whole time I wasn’t even reading them, the whole time I was feeling sorry for myself for even being in there, the whole time, I would close my eyes and I would see Asia’s face and Asia’s smile. And when I dreamed at night, I would feel Asia’s warm, soft skin. And look what happened.

  “Marcus,” Asia says. “This is Remy, who I told you about.”

  Boy, I don’t know what she said to Marcus about me, but I’ll tell you what— Marcus does not look happy to see me. He doesn’t smile at me. I think that might be because he recognizes me, but I’m not sure. Instead of holding Asia’s hand, he slips his arm around her waist and pulls her close to him. She doesn’t resist. But she does look me in the eye, and I can tell she wishes he wasn’t doing it, not while I’m standing right there. Marcus just looks at me like, yeah, he’s heard all about me, and the big conclusion he’s drawn is that I’m a loser. Well, why not? I lost Asia to him, didn’t I?

  He still has his arm around her waist when they walk away. Asia turns her head like maybe she’s going to look over her shoulder at me. But his lips catch her cheek instead and he kisses her. I turn away.

  “Hey,” James says. He’s coming out of the video store with the rest of them, and I see he has two DVDS, not one—a compromise. “Hey, isn’t that one of those guys from the courts?”

  “Yeah,” Stephen says. “And wasn’t that Asia?”

  Chapter Five

  The next week all I do is work. It’s a patio this time, and a lady who likes to stand in her glassed-in solarium at the back of her house and watch every move I make. She never once offers me a glass of water, even though she can see how much I’m sweating. She just stands there, sipping coffee from a big mug and watching me. It’s like she’s afraid I’m going to steal something or break something. I hear her central air conditioner hum and see that she’s wearing a sweater in there, she keeps the house that cold. I sweat and sweat and sweat.

  By the end of the day I’m thinking up ways the woman could die—horrible, painful ways. By the end of the week the job is finished and the contractor pays me, again in cash under the table. I see him inside the solarium, chatting with the woman. I see the woman smile at him, even though I did all of the work. She doesn’t even thank me when I leave.

  But I’ve got more money in my pocket, and the contractor tells me he has more work for me if I want it. He tells me I’m a hard worker, and then he says, “I took a chance hiring you, Remy. But you were honest with me.” He meant that I told him where I had been the past nine months. “I respect that,” he says.

  I don’t know what to say. I guess I’m glad he said what he did. But on the other hand, he does most of his jobs under the table so he doesn’t have to pay taxes. In case you don’t know it, that’s illegal. So who is he to tell me what he respects?

  It’s Friday afternoon and I’ve just been paid and I’m heading home. I’m walking down one of the main streets in my neighborhood and I see a bunch of kids, maybe a dozen of them, hanging around on the sidewalk outside a place that sells Jamaican food. Something is going on. I can’t tell what it’s about, and anyway, I don’t care. I don’t know those kids. At least, I don’t think I do. But then I hear a familiar voice. It’s Asia. I’m sure of it.

  I approach the kids, but cautiously, because they don’t know me and I don’t know them, well, except for Asia.

  I can see her now. She’s standing near the middle of the group. Her body is rigid. She looks angry. She says, “Weapons are stupid. Knives are stupid.” The person she’s saying it to is Marcus, who had his arm around her the last time I saw them together. Now he’s standing facing her, and he has something in his hand. It’s a knife. He must have been showing it to everyone. Now he flips it shut.

  He says, “My business is my business, not your business.” He looks around and I think maybe he’s one of those guys who doesn’t like to be called out in front of his friends, especially when the person doing the calling out is a girl.

  “You think I’m going to be with someone who’s stupid enough to carry a knife?” Asia says. And I admit it, I feel this zing, because I know Asia when she’s talking like that. Suddenly I don’t care if I know those guys or not. I move in a little closer.

  “Well?” Asia says. She’s beautiful. A lot of people think someone that beautiful is just like a picture, something nice to look at, that’s all. But Asia is smart too. And she isn’t afraid of anyone. She’s sure not afraid of Marcus. No, she turns and walks away from him, keeping her head high.

  Marcus calls her name. He looks angry when she doesn’t turn around, when she acts like she doesn’t even hear him. He calls her again, louder this time. Asia keeps walking. Marcus takes a step in her direction, but one of the guys he’s with says something and he stops. He watches her go. Then he turns away and he and his friends all go inside the Jamaican place. I follow Asia.

  I stay behind her for a couple of blocks. She doesn’t turn around even once. When I finally catch up with her, I startle her. Then she surprises me. She bursts into tears.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  “It’s Marcus,” she says. “He’s going to do something stupid, I just know it.”

  Tears are dribbling down her cheeks. I wish I had a tissue to give her, but I don’t. She wipes at the tears with the palms of her hands. Some girls look ugly when they cry. Their fa
ces get all red and puffy. But not Asia. She looks sad, but she’s still beautiful. I wonder if she ever cried over me. I want to take her in my arms and hold her. I want her to want me to hold her.

  Then she says, “Why can’t people just get along? Why do they always have to fight?”

  Asia doesn’t like fighting. She doesn’t like violence. When Asia was little—I mean really little—someone tried to kill her. It wasn’t even personal. It was what was happening in her country—some people there went around killing other people. Mostly they used machetes. Asia and her parents were lucky. They survived. But Asia lost her left hand. She thinks about that hand a lot.

  At first when she asks why people are always fighting, I think that’s what she’s talking about—how she lost her hand. But then I see the look on her face, and I can’t help feeling that what she just said is directed at me, too. Like, why did I have to beat up on that guy? Like, if I hadn’t, they wouldn’t have sent me away. Like maybe she still cares and that’s why she smiles when she sees me. And I feel a little hope.

  Then she says, “I don’t want anything to happen to him, Remy.” She says, “I love him.”

  I remember the look on Marcus’s face when she walked away from him. I wonder if she would love him if she had seen that look.

  “It’s the guys he hangs around with,” she says. “They’re always acting like they have something to prove.”

  I don’t say anything, even though I know exactly what she means.

  “They’ve been hassled by the cops,” she says. “By this one cop in particular.”

  Maybe Marcus deserved to be hassled. But maybe he didn’t. Cops have given me a hard time sometimes when I didn’t deserve it.

  “They can be like that,” I say. “Sometimes when they see kids, they think trouble.”

  “Yeah,” Asia says. “But there’s this one cop. I heard people say he shouldn’t even be on the street. His partner was killed. He was knifed. I heard people say he was affected, you know what I mean, Remy? And Marcus...” She hesitates. She looks at me with those brown eyes, and I remember all the times when those eyes were focused on me—only me.

  “What?” I say. “You can tell me.”

  “He’s a good guy, Remy.”

  I wonder, Did she ever say that about me? Did she ever tell her parents, Remy is a good guy?

  “What happened?” I ask.

  And there she is, biting the lip I used to bite. Asia always tasted good. I wish I could taste her again.

  “They were just fooling around,” she says. “You know how guys are.”

  Yeah, I know.

  “Down in the park,” she says. “You know, the one where the trains go by.”

  I know.

  “They weren’t hurting anyone. They weren’t doing anything illegal. They were just fooling around. I guess someone must have complained.”

  There was a row of houses facing the park. Expensive houses. The kind of houses that are owned by people who like to complain when everything isn’t perfect.

  “So the cops showed up,” Asia says. “There were two of them, including this one guy who I heard was just back at work after, you know.”

  “After his partner was killed?” I say. “After that?”

  Asia nods. “And the cop tells Marcus and his friends that there’s been a complaint, that they have to get out of the park right away. And Marcus...” She shakes her head. “He lives in Eastdale,” she says. “But he’s really smart. So is his brother. His brother is so smart he got a full scholarship to law school. He’s a lawyer now. Marcus says he wants to be a lawyer too. He knows a lot, Remy. So he tells the cops that they weren’t doing anything wrong. He tells them that it’s a public park and it isn’t even late at night. He says that they’ll be quiet if that’s the problem, but that the cops can’t legally throw them out of the park.”

  Maybe Marcus is smart some of the time, I think, but it’s hardly ever a good idea to tell cops what they can and can’t do.

  “The cop, the one who was just back at work, he didn’t like that. He told Marcus either he had to clear out of the park or he could go down to the police station on a charge of failure to obey a police officer. He grabbed Marcus by the arm. Marcus reached for his cell phone. It was in his back pocket.”

  The way she’s telling it, it’s like she saw what happened. “You were there?” I say.

  She nods. “That’s how I know he was reaching for his cell phone. He was going to call his brother. His brother always tells him, ‘The cops hassle you, you call me as soon as you can.’ That’s all Marcus was doing. He was going to get his phone out and tell them that his brother is a lawyer and that he was calling him. But that cop, he went crazy. He hit Marcus. It was a big deal. Marcus complained. There was an investigation, but the cop got off. But he’s still around and he knows Marcus, and sometimes I’m afraid of what could happen, especially because of the guys Marcus hangs around with. And now Marcus has a knife.” Her eyes are hard on me now. “Talk to him, Remy,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Talk to him. Tell him what happens when you do something without thinking.”

  She means, when you do what I did. But what she doesn’t know is that I didn’t do it without thinking. No way. I did it after I had thought it over and decided that, yes, the guy had it coming to him. The guy deserved it. But I don’t tell Asia that. Instead I say, “Why would he even listen to me?”

  She knows I have a point, but I can see that she doesn’t want to let go of the idea. And that makes me feel bad because it shows me how desperate she is to help the guy she loves. And that guy isn’t me.

  Asia steps in close to me, so now I can smell her skin and the soap she uses and the stuff she sprays on herself after a shower.

  “He knows about you,” she says. “I told him.”

  I wonder what she could possibly have told him. Not the whole story. She doesn’t know the whole story. No, all she could have told him was, My ex-boyfriend beat a guy so bad he almost died, and because of that he got sent away for nine months. She could also have told him, Don’t let that happen to you.

  “Please, Remy,” she says.

  I can’t help myself. I tell her yes. But I can’t imagine actually talking to Marcus, doing some kind of scared straight thing with him. And I sure can’t imagine him listening.

  Then it hits me. Marcus’s run-in with Dunlop happened just after he returned to work. I know when that was. I read about it in the paper. Marcus got hassled right after Dunlop went back to work, and Asia was there with him when it happened. I imagine a calendar in my head, and that calendar tells me that what she’s described happened after I was gone for maybe three months. It happened when she was still writing me letters, but by then I had stopped reading them. I wonder now what was in those letters. I wonder why she stopped writing. Maybe it wasn’t why I thought.

  Chapter Six

  I go home and shower and change. I pass my mother a couple of times, in the kitchen, in the living room, in the hall. But she doesn’t say a word to me until supper is on the table—some kind of casserole with hamburger meat and tomatoes and macaroni, and a tub of coleslaw, plus some bread and butter. My mother serves my sister first. She always does. Then she serves me. She waits until I take my plate from her before she says, “Now that you’re working, you should be contributing to the expenses around here.”

  I look across the table at my sister, who, since I went away, has had a part-time job as a cashier at a fast-food place. I know for a fact that she keeps all the money she makes and spends it on clothes and makeup and movies and music. My sister gives me a blank look, like I’m a stranger sitting there or a boarder she and my mother have been forced to take in.

  Then I look at my mother, who is watching for my reaction. I’m convinced she wants me to get mad, to tell her, No way, I’m outta here, I’m taking my hard-earned money and I’m leaving for good. The thought has crossed my mind. But my so-called job isn’t a real, full-time job. There’s no g
uarantee the contractor will keep calling me back. So I meet my mother’s eyes and I say, “Sure.” I reach into my pocket and I pull out the money that the guy gave me just this afternoon. I peel off half of it—half!

  I want to throw it at her.

  I want to stuff it down her throat.

  I want to watch her choke on it.

  But instead I hand it to her, nice and calm and civilized. And then I sit there, still nice and calm and civilized, and I eat my macaroni casserole and my coleslaw. When I’m finished, I rinse my plate, put it in the dishwasher and head for the door. My mother calls out, “Where are you going?” I don’t answer. Why should I?

  I go to the basketball court, thinking I’ll find James and Stephen and John there. And I do. They’re all there, the whole gang. They’ve staked out the court and they’re playing and kidding around. Someone brings some cans of soda. Someone else has some weed. One guy has some music, which is pulsing, pulsing, pulsing, like a heartbeat, magnified and amplified, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. I smoke some weed, and you know what? For the first time in a long time—for the first time in over nine months—I feel fine. I feel more than fine. I feel happy.

  There are girls there too. None of them are as pretty as Asia. Some of them are attached to some of the guys. The rest of them are just hanging out. You can tell they want to be hooked up—well, most of them do. One of them, a dyed blond named Lindsay, starts talking to me, mostly about dumb stuff, like, did I see this movie or do I like this group. She’s still at it later, when the game has wound down and someone has gone to 7-Eleven for chips and cakes, and we’re eating those and drinking more soda. I smoke some more weed, and before long Lindsay starts to look pretty good. Nowhere as good as Asia, of course, but Asia isn’t there.