The Boy in the Black Suit

by Jason Reynolds

  I knew Dad would be upset about it, but I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “We really keeping these?” I asked, snatching a petal off. Dad kept reading through the cards. “Dad? We might as well just get rid of them. It’s not like Mom’s gonna care. Shoot, they’re gonna die anyway.”

  He paused for a second. Then, like I hadn’t said a word, he continued with the corny poems with lines like “back on your feet” and “love is the best medicine.”

  I left the flowers alone.

  Eventually, I dozed off at the table and woke up again and he was still reading. I got up and headed to bed, kissing him on his head. When I got halfway up the steps, I finally heard the liquor pouring. Then my father hissing as he swallowed the first shot. Then, pouring again.

  Hours later, when the phone rang, I didn’t hear anything my dad said. But as soon as I’d heard it ring, I knew. A few minutes after the call I heard him slowly coming up the steps. Then, there was a knock at my door.

  “Come in,” I mumbled.

  When he opened it, I was already dressed. And from what I could tell, we were both already numb.

  “So what’s been going on?” Chris asked about a millisecond before stuffing almost half of his sandwich in his mouth. Strings of shredded lettuce hung from his lips; he pushed the stragglers in with his thumb.

  “Not much, man, just came from work.”

  “Work? You working? Where?” Chris sounded surprised.

  “Took a gig after school at Ray’s, just helping out with little stuff, y’know? For work study, and for some extra cash for the house and stuff,” I explained. “Can’t put it all on Dad,” I added, still unwrapping my sandwich.

  “Ray’s, like the funeral place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh,” Chris said, while cramming the other half of the sandwich into his face. Watching him eat, all I could think about is how my mother would always get on him about inhaling his food like this. “It ain’t gonna run away from you, Christopher,” she’d tease while plucking the back of his head. I thought about plucking him myself.

  “You gotta touch dead people?” he said. I could tell this was something he really wanted to know, but after he said it, he instantly got weird because he’d said “dead people,” and now my mom was one. But it didn’t bother me. “I mean, I mean,” he fumbled, “you have to, uh, uh . . .” It was like he was choking on air.

  “Yep. Gotta touch dead people,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder and squeezing a little.

  “Come on, man!” he shouted, bits of food flying from his mouth.

  I laughed. “I’m just playing, man. I ain’t touch no dead people, and Mr. Ray told me I don’t have to. I just help out with setting up chairs and stuff like that.”

  “Oh.” He balled up his sandwich paper and shot it like a basketball at the trash cans sitting in front of my house. Way off.

  I could tell he was itching to get his hands on my sandwich paper to try again, but I took my time eating mine. I told him how I felt about school now, and how everybody had been treating me weird—James Skinner, and even some of the teachers. He explained that a lot of people wanted to say something to me, or act like everything was cool, but they were scared because they didn’t want to make me upset. Everybody thought they were going to say the wrong thing. I told him that I was fine, even though I really wasn’t. And I told him that out of everybody, I needed him to hold me down and treat me normal just because we had so much history.

  “Treat you normal?” he asked, just to make sure he heard me correctly.

  “Yep.”

  “Like usual?”

  “Yep. Like usual.”

  “Oh, okay.” He smiled in a sneaky way, flashing his crooked bottom row. “If that’s the case, then who that other sandwich for?” he said, eyeballing the paper bag. “Matter fact, how ’bout you whip up some of that Matt Miller magic sauce to go with it. What’s the special ingredient again?”

  “Garlic powder.”

  The sauce Chris was talking about was something my mother taught me to make a long time ago. It was in the notebook but it didn’t really have a cool title. She said I had to name it myself, so in the book it just says BLANK SAUCE. It’s a sauce that pretty much goes with everything. Burgers, chicken, and even bodega sandwiches. It’s just ketchup, mustard, honey, brown sugar, and garlic powder, which really kicks up the flavor of anything you’re making in the kitchen. I was going to try to get Cluck Bucket to pick it up if I would’ve taken a job there. Maybe give it some kind of catchy, corny name like All Sauce. That could work.

  “Yeah, garlic powder.” Chris nodded, anticipating my answer.

  “No.”

  “Come on, man. I thought you said we were going to be normal?”

  “We are, but I ain’t in the mood to cook nothing.”

  “Ain’t nobody ask you to cook. Just make sauce!” Chris pressed. Then, realizing that I was annoyed, he chilled out. “Okay, okay. Squash the sauce. Just let me have the sandwich.”

  I laughed and shoved Chris in the shoulder. I guess it would be normal for him to eat his food and mine. The boy was a machine when it came to food.

  “No! It’s for my dad, man.”

  “Man, he don’t want it,” Chris argued.

  I laughed again, thinking at first this was more trying-to-get-the-sandwich business. But something in his voice caught my attention.

  “Because I just seen your father right before I stopped in the bodega. He’s over on Albany, standing outside the liquor store with that fool Cork.”

  Cork was the youngest Ray brother. He was the brother who they let help out whenever he was around, which was almost never, mainly because he was always staggering up and down the street with a wet spot in the front of his pants. To say it plainly, dude was a straight-up drunk. I don’t know what his real name is, but everybody calls him Cork because he drinks a whole lot of wine, and because his face looks like a cork with all the holes in it, which my mother said comes from too much liquor. I knew that if my father was hanging out with him, nothing good was happening.

  “Well, I’m still gonna save it for him,” I said, now a little mad.

  We sat for a while longer watching ladies push carts filled with groceries and laundry, and kids bopping down the sidewalk talking loud, kicking whatever wasn’t nailed down, until suddenly the streetlights started to buzz and flicker.

  “Man, I’m gonna go ’head home,” Chris said. “You know I don’t play with the night.”

  Chris almost never stayed out past dark. Even though he was old enough to hang out later, he still went in when the streetlights came on, just like when we were kids. Not because he had to, but because when it got dark, the stoop in front of his building became a base for those dudes I talked about before, who loved to give anyone and everyone a hard time. Just like those losers in Cluck Bucket—looking for a target, somebody to mess with.

  There was this time when me and Chris were like seven, and my folks were trying to have some alone time for Valentine’s Day. Chris’s mother said she’d babysit me. My dad walked me down there, and when we got to the building, all the guys stood out front, purposely blocking the door.

  “Excuse me,” my father said to the one standing directly in the way.

  No response. Just flat out ignored him.

  “Excuse me!” This time my father said it louder and got real close to the guy—the dude was just a teenager, but when you’re seven, teens seem way older and much bigger. The kid had no choice but to move or my father was going to, as he put it, “bring Baltimore out on his ass.”

  Though everyone was always afraid of what was happening outside of Chris’s building, that night me and Chris learned that maybe we oughta be scared of what goes on inside, too. That was also the night, by the way, that Chris and I went from good friends to best friends. Here’s what happened. Chris and I were
lying in the bed laughing like crazy. We were lying head to foot, like we always did, but that night Chris’s feet smelled like he’d been soaking them in toilet water. They were so bad we couldn’t stop laughing about it, fake gagging and pretending we were going to puke up his mom’s way-too-tomatoey spaghetti. (Now that I think about it, it just needed some garlic powder.)

  Despite covering my face to protect it from Chris’s toxic toes, and laughing like a maniac, I heard something—a bunch of noise suddenly coming from outside. But not outside the building, just outside Chris’s apartment door. In the hallway. A couple was arguing. The man was doing most of the yelling, even though we couldn’t really make out anything he was saying.

  Chris and I stopped joking and lay still, listening through the walls. I really wanted to get up and peek out the front door to see if I could hear better or even see something. I don’t know why. I guess I was just nosy, especially since this kind of drama never really went on in my house, where nobody lived but me and my parents. But in Chris’s building there were tons of families, and most he didn’t even know. He knew the lady across the hall, Ms. Rogers; the old man next door, on the left, with the barking dog and the weed habit, Mr. Staton; and the girl on the right, Nicole, who at the time was probably twenty-two or twenty-three, and was me and Chris’s first fake wife. But those are the only people he really knew, for the most part, in the whole building.

  The shouting went on, and I couldn’t stop myself. I sat up.

  “What you doin’?” Chris whispered.

  “Goin’ to see what’s happening.”

  Chris’s eyes went wide. “Are you crazy? My mother will kill us. You know her rules.”

  I did know the rules. Ms. Hayes ran them down to me every time I came over.

  Rule 1: All empty food containers, like Chinese food, or even empty McDonald’s bags, have to be put either in the microwave or in the refrigerator until we take the trash out in the morning. Do NOT put it in the trash, because even if it’s just crumbs left, mice will get in there.

  Rule 2: We can’t both wash up at night. One of us has to wash up at night, and one of us has to wash up in the morning, to make sure she gets to have some hot water too. I didn’t really understand this one, but I guess there was only enough hot water for two people in the apartment, not three. Chris and I would do rock-paper-scissors to see who got to wash up at night. He was easy to beat because he was one of those people who always picked rock. But I should’ve let him win that night, so his feet wouldn’t have smelled so bad.

  And Rule 3: If you hear any noises outside of the apartment, whether in the hallway or on the street, do NOT try to see what it is. Just pretend like you don’t hear anything.

  “Come on, man. She ’sleep,” I now said. “We’ll just take a peek and then we’ll come right back in here. We’ll just crack the door.”

  Chris took a deep breath. I could tell he was mad about me even trying to get him to break his mom’s rules, but I really wanted to see what the fuss was about.

  Finally, he huffed, “Man, you gonna get us in so much trouble.” And he was right. If we got in trouble, we were definitely going to be punished for it. My mother gave Ms. Hayes the green light to pop me if she needed to, and Ms. Hayes was the kind of woman who would do it. “Let’s just make it quick,” he said, sliding out of bed.

  We tiptoed out into the hallway. Chris put his ear to his mother’s door. Snoring. I knew she was ’sleep. We crept into the living room trying our best to avoid every creak in the floor. Ms. Hayes kept their house super clean, so we didn’t have to worry about tripping over nothing. We could hear the voices much clearer in the living room. The man was saying something about how he loved her and how could she have done this to him. All of his words were long, like he was halfway singing, so we knew he was drunk. And the lady was pretty much screaming, “It’s over! It’s over!” and kept telling him to go home. I couldn’t really tell, but it seemed like maybe the man came to wish her Happy Valentine’s Day, but they were already broken up and she had a date with someone else. That was the scenario I made up in my head, at least.

  Chris turned the bolt lock slowly, making sure it didn’t click loud. Then, he turned the knob. My heart started pounding, mainly because I didn’t want us to open the door and have his mom wake up from all the hollering.

  But it was too late. Chris was opening the door, and as soon as a thin strip of light from the hall came shining through the opening, the loudest sound I had ever heard in my entire life came rushing toward us, making both of us shout out and slam the door. Then came the screams of the woman, and the drunk man in the hallway now mumbling something about him being sorry and that he didn’t mean it. Chris’s face seemed like it had turned blue. Mine felt like it looked the same way.

  “What the hell?” Ms. Hayes came rushing from her bedroom, her hair pinned and wrapped in a blue scarf with flowers on it. Somehow I remember that. She flipped on every light in the apartment in what seemed like two seconds.

  I knew we were about to get a whole lot of the “rough side of a belt,” as my mother always said, but I couldn’t even worry about that.

  Ms. Hayes looked upset, but then she took one look at our faces and came rushing over. She wrapped us in her arms, her pink robe like a cocoon for us to feel safe in.

  “What happened?” she asked. But neither of us could answer.

  Ms. Hayes was now on her knees, breathing hard, and the sleep on her breath stung my nostrils.

  “What happened?” she asked again.

  “The . . . the . . . the . . . ,” Chris tried to explain, tears rising in his eyes. “The man, the man outside . . .” he stuttered. That’s all he could get out. His mother cracked the door, peeked out, then slammed it shut, quickly. She cussed to herself.

  “You boys get on away from the door,” she said, pushing us back. “Matter fact, go back to your room and stay there, you hear me? Stay there!” she added in a shout. No problem, I thought. I wouldn’t have minded if we had to stay in that room for the rest of our lives, the way I was feeling.

  We got back in the bed. Head to foot. I didn’t care about Chris’s stinky feet anymore, and our friendship was pretty much sealed, forever. We just laid there wide awake, listening to the neighbors in the hallway, the police officers and their fuzzy walkie-talkies asking questions (but nobody saw nothing), the ambulance sirens, the screams of what sounded like a little girl, and Mr. Staton’s dog, barking all night long.

  Chapter 3

  THE BLACK SUIT

  “DEAR MAMA.” THAT WAS MY bedtime song after my Mom died. It was like Tupac was singing—well, rapping—some kind of ghetto lullaby to me. I laid on my back with my earbuds in and that song on repeat, staring up into the darkness, imagining there was no ceiling, or roof, or clouds, until there really was no ceiling or walls, and I was no longer in my small bedroom, but instead in some strange dream. The kind where you swear it’s real because everything looks real, and feels real, and you don’t even remember ever falling asleep.

  In the dream I was at a church, the same church my mom’s funeral was in, except this time the air conditioner was cranking. The same people were there. The greasy preacher. Ms. Wallace, my mom’s co-worker. The same usher women with their ashy-looking stockings and white shoes. But my mother wasn’t in the casket. Instead she was sitting on my left, with her arm around me and her face smushed against mine. In the dream, even though the casket was empty, everyone was crying. The preacher was crying. The family friends and neighborhood folks were crying. Everybody. And I’m not talking a little whimper. I’m talking an ugly, snotty, loud sob. A painful cry, like the one I had. And while all the weeping was going on, my mother and I just sat in the pew smiling, until everything faded to black, and sleep faded back into awake.

  I laid there for a second confused and a little pissed that the dream was a dream. It seemed so real that I could even feel the AC blowing in the chur
ch. At least I thought I could. I rolled over to see what time it was. Four in the morning. Tupac had probably said Mama made miracles every Thanksgiving at least a hundred times, and my father was just getting home.

  Normally, I wouldn’t have heard him come in over the music, but he didn’t tiptoe up the steps and slip into his bedroom like I would’ve done if I stayed out way later than usual. Nope. Dad made it clear he was home by making a whole bunch of noise.

  A loud thump. Then, the sound of glass breaking followed by my father howling like a sad dog.

  “Dad?” I called from the top of the steps.

  “Matt,” he said, surprised. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

  His words were slurring. I ran down the steps to find him on one knee, holding on to the kitchen counter, trying to pull himself up. His face looked like he was terrified, as if he were gripping the edge of a cliff or something. On the kitchen floor was a soggy paper bag, soaked with what was obviously cognac. The bottle had broken and glass had torn through the bag and cut his hand. Liquor and blood, everywhere. It was all on the doors of the cabinets and was dripping in the sink as my father struggled to get back on his feet.

  “Dad!” I shouted. “What happened?”

  In my mind, I already knew what happened. After Chris told me he saw him hanging with Cork, at first I wanted to jump down his throat and tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about. But that wouldn’t have been right. Chris wasn’t no liar. Even if he wanted to lie, he couldn’t. Plus, I had a feeling it was true. My dad had definitely been drinking more and more since the night my mother died. But hanging with Cork? That was definitely a move in the wrong direction. I knew where he was. I knew what was going on, but I still asked anyway. Maybe I was hoping I was wrong.