Team Seven

by Marcus Burke

  Papa Tanks grinned at me and turned his body to the side, flexing his biceps. His rubbery skin stretched tight, puffing out a maze of veins up and down his arms.

  The referee walked into the arena and stood on the red bouncy pad below the platforms. He slipped his whistle in the side of his mouth and looked up at Gemini and raised an arm in the air.

  “Gladiator, readaaay!!” Gemini rocked side to side, knees bent, slowly nodding yes.

  The referee raised his other arm up and looked up at Patrick.

  “Contender, readaaay!!”

  Patrick snapped his head side to side and gave a thumbs-up. The referee leaned back with his hands above his head and right as he went to blow the whistle the theme music came on and it cut to commercial. Papa Tanks went walking into the kitchen shaking his head as he flipped the plantain frying on the stove. We watch American Gladiators every morning and every morning he stands in the doorway keeping an eye on his breakfast cooking on the stove, and I sit on the couch in the front den eating my bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. Each day he tells me about a new person he remembers from back home in Limón, Costa Rica. He says he and the rest of the Jamaicans that came over to work the fields were built like oxen.

  He cooks breakfast for himself and Nana Tanks, because she’s got a cold in her knees and some mornings she can’t come into the kitchen because it hurts to stand up too long, so she stays in bed watching reruns of Bonanza. Papa Tanks always fries some ripe plantain and cuts up some hot dogs, onions, and tomatoes and makes an egg mix-up.

  “You think you could beat Gemini, Pa-Paw?” I called into the kitchen.

  He walked back over from the stove.

  “Champion, you mad or wha’? A’dat you know!” I like it when Papa Tanks talks about how tough he is and flexes his muscles. Sometimes he even does push-ups in the doorway as we watch. “Me a’give him one rattid box in’a him head. Mek him drop like bird out’a sky. From you see how dem size nah match up, you know dem a’bad mind the lickle red hair bump-face boy.”

  The show came back from commercial and the theme music played as the referee blew his whistle, and a blast of smoke blew up between Gemini and Patrick. When the smoke cleared, Patrick wagged his stick at his waist like he was rowing a boat. He leaned down pretty low and swung a few times at Gemini’s legs. Gemini’s eyes locked in on Patrick and he whacked him a few times until Patrick looked stunned and Gemini wound the jousting stick above his head like an ax.

  He chopped down and Patrick dodged the strike.

  Gemini lost his balance and swung the stick back trying to regain his footing, and Patrick jabbed his stick into Gemini’s ribs, and Gemini jerked to the side, dropping his jousting stick. Before he fell off the platform he turned and caught the side of Patrick’s next strike and bear-hugged the padded end of the stick and pulled them both to the ground. It was unreal. I’d never seen anyone beat Gemini. Gemini roared out as they fell to the pad. When his body hit first, before Patrick’s, I got a jolt in my knees. I didn’t think about it, I just jumped up out of my seat and roared like I was Gemini myself, but instead of me hitting a bouncy pad, milk and Honey Nut Cheerios splashed up in the air and flew everywhere.

  “Woi! Boychild, look how you bright up yourself, wha’ sweet you?”

  “I forgot that my bowl was on my lap, Pa-Paw, but Gemini lost.” I looked down at the Cheerios stuck to my legs and the milk at my feet. “I just jumped. I’m sorry, Pa-Paw.” I felt my face getting hot.

  “Mmm hhhmm.” He turned his head, gazed down at me sideways, folded his arms, and smirked.

  “I is da real champion—in’a these parts.” He flexed his arm at me and we laughed. I looked up at him and he smiled at me and his new dentures gleamed. “I know, Pa-Paw, I know.”

  He came over and put his hand on my shoulder. “You lucky Nana in’a she room this morning, eeh?” He rubbed the top of my head and patted my back a few times. “Come on, get a rag and clean up and pour a next bowl for yourself.”

  I shook my head. “There’s no more cereal, Pa-Paw, and I only had two bites before I dropped it.” I sniffled and looked away.

  “Ay, don’t cry, my yout’, you alright. We a’mek you some breakfast, eeh?”

  He clicked off the TV and we walked into the kitchen and I got a rag and started wiping up the milk. He took the plantain off the stove and walked the plate in to Nana Tanks.

  He came back into the kitchen with a footstool and set it down next to himself.

  “Boychild, come here.” I walked over to him and stepped up onto the stool next to him. On the counter in front of me, he put a bowl with two eggs in it and a plate with a short butter knife and a hot dog. He had the same setup in front of himself except he had small pieces of tomato and onion on his plate.

  “Hold your knife in your right hand and hold the hot dog steady with your left, and cut it into eight pieces.”

  I cut the hot dog down into eight little pink nuggets and looked over at Papa Tanks.

  “What now?”

  “Crack the eggs. Watch me.” He took an egg and knocked it on the counter until its shell cracked and he pulled it open and the egg dropped into the bowl. “Now you try,” he said.

  I picked up the egg and cracked it on the edge of the counter, pulled the shell and the egg fell in the bowl, but some of the clear part got on me and it felt nasty. I dropped my fork and stepped off the stool, wiped my hand on my shorts. I looked at Papa Tanks. “I don’t wanna cook, Pa-Paw, the egg juice got on my hands.” I looked up into the bluish-gray rims around his sagging brown eyes, and he scratched the bald spot on top of his head. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me and the wrinkles on his face hung smooth and I could tell he was about to tell me something serious.

  “You must learn to cook. Man is only to need a woman for love. If your wife run off and leave you, you na’ go’ dead. Champion, get ya backside back up here.”

  I could tell what he said was important, even though I didn’t understand what he was talking about exactly. I hopped back up on the stool and cracked my other egg into the bowl. Papa Tanks looked over and tipped my bowl toward him, and smiled. I watched Papa Tanks cracking eggs for Nana Tanks’s breakfast too, only he took the yellow parts out of the bowl with a spoon and tossed them in the sink.

  “Why’d you take the yellow parts out, Pa-Paw?”

  “Them is called the yolk. I take it out ’cause Nana has high salt and too much weight squeezing at she heart. She even take pills to equal herself out. Pick up the fork and pop the yolks.”

  I poked my fork into the yolk and watched the yellow ooze out. Papa Tanks splashed some milk into my bowl.

  “Now stir them up,” he said as he mixed the eggs in his bowl.

  Once the eggs were creamy yellow, Papa Tanks told me to hop down and he picked up the stool and walked it over to the stove and set it down next to himself. He turned on the fire and we sat at the kitchen table. I looked at the sales flyers for the supermarket and Papa Tanks read the newspaper until the oil heated up and I could see the air rippling over the frying pan.

  “Come on.” Papa Tanks turned back to the counter and got both our plates. He handed me my plate of hot dog bits. “Here, drop them in the pan.”

  I stepped up onto the stool and the oil swirled around in the frying pan. I forked the hot dogs into the oil. The oil splashed up and a haze of smoke started filling the kitchen. I jumped back off the stool again and almost fell, and Papa Tanks leaned back against the counter holding his sides trying not to laugh at me. I could tell he was laughing, so I crossed my arms and headed for the front den, but his big hand wrapped around my shoulder. “Where you running off to?”

  I thought he was mad but when I looked up he was smirking at me. “Lesson you a’go learn today. Step up, champion.”

  He held his hand out and I grabbed on and he helped me back up onto the stool as the hot dogs sizzled and the oil bubbled and the smoke died down. He handed me the bowl with the eggs in it.

  “Pour it in the pan
.”

  I poured the eggs into the pan and they sizzled.

  “Take this.” He handed me an oven mitt and a spatula. I put on the oven mitt and he said, “A man mustn’t fear the heat, boychild.”

  He walked behind me, leaned over my shoulder, and held my hand, gripping his hand over the oven mitt and spatula, and we stirred the eggs together. “You just have to know when to turn the gas down.” We kept stirring until the eggs got thicker and started to clump, his arm tracing over mine. He stepped back and loosed his grip. “Now keep stirring until the hot dogs get brown.”

  He walked to the cabinet and got me a plate. “Good job, boychild. Dem cook up nice, step down.”

  I hopped off the stool and he walked up to the stove and poured the egg mix-up into the plate and walked it over to the table, where he poured me a Dixie cup of coffee mixed with hot chocolate. He poured a cup for himself and opened a pink packet and poured it into his coffee.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s sugar for people who got high sugar, like me. I eat too many sweets when I was a young man and too much sweets nah good fi de blood.”

  I nodded okay, not really knowing what was in the packet or what he was talking about. I ate my plate as he cooked eggs for him and Nana Tanks. After he walked Nana Tanks’s plate into their room for her, he came to sit down next to me right when I was on my last bite. He put his plate down, poured us more coffee, and he ate as I sipped my coffee. We didn’t say anything to each other but we’d glance and nod our heads every now and again. I finished my third Dixie cup of coffee and stood up. Papa Tanks looked over his shoulder at me and chuckled a bit.

  “Eat and go ’way, huh?”

  I smiled at him. “Thanks for breakfast, Pa-Paw.”

  “You get enough to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  I flexed my arm muscles at him and he squinted and patted at the little bulge in my bicep.

  “You a grown man now, eeh?” I nodded and he rustled my hair and pulled me into his side and nuzzled his head against mine. He let go of me and said, “Not quite a man yet, but you getting close. You still need to grow some whiskers, soon enough though, my yout’.”

  I glanced at the clock in the den. Captain Planet was about to come on. Papa Tanks slapped his hand on the table and I flinched.

  “Ay, boy, you listening to me? You’ll never starve ’cause you know how to cook, I say.”

  He squinted at me, lowered his shoulders to my level from his chair, and poked me in the belly and tickled my sides, and we both laughed and I squirmed until he let me go.

  “Alright, now run along, go watch the TV.”

  “Okay, Pa-Paw,” I said and ran into the front den.

  I clicked on the TV just as the theme song was playing and I sang along, “Captain Planet, he’s a hero—”

  “Bobby-sock, I am the hero!” Papa Tanks called to me from the kitchen.

  He let out a big belly laugh and I laughed too.

  3

  Team Seven

  Ruby Battel

  It was Christmas Eve and we had just got back from Star Market. I sat down at the kitchen table to sort through the mail as the kids zoomed around the kitchen putting away the groceries all giddy and excited for the night I’d planned. We always do a fish fry and then make Christmas cookies. Eddy and I started doing that when we first got married and the tradition stuck around way longer than he did. A letter had come for Eddy from the Norfolk County Child Support Enforcement Bureau. A woman named Iris K. Patton was filing a grievance for unpaid child support for their son Eddy Battel, Jr. I read on. The letter said his extracurricular bastard child was nine years old too. That little out-of-wedlock thing is only one year younger than my baby Andre.

  The news lodged a hot piece of coal in my chest and wrapped me in a straitjacket. I couldn’t just take the kids and leave. Where would we go? We live in the apartment downstairs from my parents in their two-family house and we don’t hardly pay the rent on time. He didn’t come home last night. He’s like a cat, he comes and goes on his own terms. He left yesterday while I was at work and all he told Andre and Nina was that he’d be back with us tonight to bake cookies.

  “You ready, Ma?”

  I looked up from the letter. Nina was holding our big silver mixing bowl and a wooden spoon. The smile on her face melted a fake one into mine. Christmas was always about the kids. Every year we put on the Nat King Cole Christmas album and stay in the house together to bake sugar cookies as a family. At midnight we all go upstairs to my parents’ apartment, and Nina and Andre open up the presents from my parents. Then they go to sleep and wake up and unwrap what I got for them.

  The doorbell rings and I know it’s my younger sister Diamond with her new snap-turtle-looking boyfriend, Lex, with his bald water-baby head, and his no job. My eyes watered up and my insides started to twist. I wanted to run to the door and collapse. Drag Diamond by the arm into my room and just melt down. But no. This is my life, and Diamond, she never liked Eddy. I give her five minutes of milling around the apartment before she gets around to asking, “So how’s Eddy?” She’ll look concerned, put her hand across her mouth and follow me around the room with her eager eyes. Ever since she divorced her ex-husband Elroy and got him deported back to Jamaica, she thinks she’s better than somebody. She’d know Eddy’s truck wasn’t out front but she just liked to hear me say it. She gets a kick out of the whole exchange. So she could hold a deep stare over my shoulder and shake her head, searching and waiting, like I owed her an explanation.

  He’s a wayward bastard and that’s been established, but he is my husband and the father of my children. He at least makes it home for the holidays. I swallowed and tucked that letter in my back pocket along with all my good emotions. I opened the front door and told Diamond that Eddy was getting off of work late and that we could go ahead and start baking without him. The night rocked along slow. The kids were enjoying themselves but I was losing faith.

  Around ten thirty his Bronco rattled up outside. He blew inside, stumbling, and smelling like the bar he’d probably been slumped in all night. From the minute that man stepped his feet in the house he was all jumpy and twitching around like he had lightning in his veins, eyeing the clock like he was already trying to leave again. His jaw was chattering and I knew he was high on something. I just hoped I was the only one who noticed it ’cause tonight was not about him.

  I’ve always tried to live the way my mother says: “Never let your life show.” I stretch out my pockets so the kids can have a few things to show their friends when they get back to school after vacation. I supported Eddy when he began to struggle, same way he continues to struggle, all in the name of getting his reggae career off the ground. I even sign the kids’ presents: “From Mommy and Daddy.” All I asked is that he just be around to spend time with his kids. He checked out of our marriage in terms of a relationship a long while ago. But the papers aren’t signed yet. And I’m still the wife of Eddy “E-Bone” Battel.

  “Pop!”

  The kids screamed in unison and ran up the hallway, draping off of him like he was a walking coatrack. They almost knocked him over. We were making the frosting for the sugar cookies; Diamond snorted and flashed a look across the table at Lex. They both stood up and walked through the back door up to my parents’ apartment. I was slow simmering with that envelope in my back pocket, pretending like I wasn’t hurt. I couldn’t even look at him. He didn’t say a word to me either. He ain’t come home last night, he knew just what was on my mind. He knows I don’t like going through it in front of the kids, and with that stupid smirk on his face he thinks he is safe.

  As soon as Eddy took his coat off Andre was his shadow. Andre sat next to the head of the table with his father and Nina was down the other end with me. Every time Andre cut out a cookie he stared at Eddy and waited until he’d smile or nod. Nina just sat with me and smiled. She always liked when we were all together, but she’s shy. She’d just sit there and admire Eddy from afar.
Every five seconds Eddy was glancing at the clock or checking his pager. I knew he was looking for an out, and he sure pounced on it when it came.

  After we took the cookies out of the oven to cool, we all went into the living room to put more candy canes on the Christmas tree. I sent Andre into the kitchen to check if the cookies had cooled so we could frost them. The boy wasn’t in there more than a minute before it sounded like he’d turned over the whole tray of cookies. I was sitting down on the couch watching Eddy and Nina under the Christmas tree when Andre ran into the room, out of breath with frosting all over himself. Nina laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” Andre cried. “A mouse jumped out at me from under the stove and ran over my feet.”

  Eddy laughed and patted Andre on the head as he walked past him into the kitchen. “Goddamn it, Andre!” he roared into the room. I looked in the doorway and he was standing there with his leather coat in his hand. Andre had knocked over the whole bowl of frosting and it had spilled down the inside of Eddy’s leather jacket. He stood there and stared at Andre, then he took three big steps into the living room toward him, Andre’s eyes looked like two full moons, the boy didn’t even have any slippers on.

  “It ran up over my feet, Dad,” Andre said as Eddy shook out his coat. Andre was damn near hyperventilating. “I’m sorry,” he squeaked. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Be careful! Running from a god-blasted mouse!” Eddy yelled.

  Andre jumped and ran out of the room.

  I couldn’t deal with him anymore. “Jesus, Eddy!” I said, “You need to calm your black ass down. It’s a coat. That’s your son.”

  He ignored me, staring into the hallway like Andre was still there. Then Eddy slid his coat on and just like that he walked out. I heard our front door slam and it was on. I couldn’t even see straight. If I can’t leave, then neither can he. He walked out that door and I was five steps behind him.