She took his hand, which was warm and rough-feeling, and stood beside him.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Sarah.”
“Ah, yes, Sarah, that’s right,” he said, nodding. “Sarah, you sure you brave enough for this?”
“I aint brave at all. I don’t even know why I came up here. I must be out my mind.”
“Well,” he said. “In lieu of bravery, insanity will do.”
Everyone laughed, except Sarah. What in the world was she thinking, getting up here like this? All because her little sister had embarrassed her? She was thirty-two years old, for Christ’s sake; she wasn’t a child anymore.
“I changed my mind,” she said.
The fire-eating man grinned at her and whispered, “Don’t worry, pretty girl. I aint gone hurt you none.” Then he moved and stood beside her. Sarah watched as he picked up the flaming batons again. “Ladies and gents, sisters and brothers, friends and best friends, I give you Sarah, the Brave.”
Some people clapped.
The fire-eating man got close behind Sarah, very close, and whispered, “I need to get close to you as I can for this, but don’t worry, I don’t mean nothing untoward by it.”
She stood as still as she could and did not breath. She felt his chest press against her back, and he reached around her and extended his arms out on either side of her, so she could see his hands, in which he held three batons, all of them still on fire. He bent his elbows and Sarah could see the definition in his light-brown arms. Slowly, he began to juggle the flaming batons, not three feet from Sarah’s face. She watched them, wide-eyed, and at first she was afraid. But something about the warmth of the fire so close, and the heat of him, stole the fear from her. She stared at the flames, as they rose and fell and licked the summer air, and at his large hands as they caught the batons, over and over, until the movement, the rhythm of it, of him, seemed to fill her like a fire in a hearth and, without thinking, she leaned back into him. Her sudden movement caused him to drop one of the batons. It smacked against the ground at their feet. A collective sigh of surprise moved over the crowd.
“Oh,” Sarah said, looking down at the baton, which was still on fire. She turned her head and looked at him. “I’m so sorry. I moved.”
He grinned at her, the lines around his eyes deepening, and said, “It’s alright. It’s good to be moved sometimes.”
French Creek State Park was a couple of hours from Philadelphia and a welcome reprieve from the city. It was heavy with forest. Dense with oaks, hickories, maples, poplars, and beech trees, and here and there you could see mountain laurels and rhododendrons. Wetlands and pristine streams flowed through rich, damp creek valleys.
Paul and Helena parked Milky’s Datsun in a lot near a ranger station and, carrying a bag full of sandwiches they had bought at a store on their way up, and a blanket, they walked together up into the forests.
“It smells the same,” Helena said, breathing deeply.
Paul breathed in, too, and the green-smelling air filled his lungs. “It sure is better than car exhaust,” he said. He pointed to the lake in the distance. “Remember we went canoeing out there?”
She nodded. “I remember those orange life jackets, and seeing fish swimming around us.”
As children, they had come here a handful of times with their father, up until Paul was ten, when he had stopped coming around. They would put up an old tent that Paul was sure his father had found in a dumpster somewhere, because it smelled like old produce, and they would camp for two or three nights. Around the campfire, their father would tell them scary stories while they roasted marshmallows and ears of corn. Their father would always bring whiskey, and at some point he would pass out, and Paul and Helena would sit up looking at the stars, amazed at how many could be seen out there, and re-tell each other the same stories their father had just told, changing them so that the monster or serial killer died at the end, so they could get to sleep without fear of anything coming after them. In the mornings, they would fish and cook their catchings for breakfast over the campfire. Their father had a knack for open-fire cooking and those fish were still the best Paul had ever tasted.
They found a spot on the side of a hill overlooking the lake and put down the old blanket they had brought along. Helena lay on her back, with her fingers laced together behind her head, staring up into the clear sky. In the trees around them, birds called in high and low voices.
“I used to dream about this place sometimes,” Helena said, “when I was in Baltimore. It didn’t really look like this, you know, the way things don’t look like they really are in dreams, but I knew it was supposed to be this place. I’d just be wandering around out in these woods. I could hear you and Daddy in the distance, but I couldn’t get to you, as hard as I tried. I’d just go around in circles until I woke up.”
“I had a dream about that girl last night,” Paul said.
Helena looked over at him.
“I aint had one in a while,” he said. “Years.”
“Years?” she asked. “Lucky you. I’ve never gone that long without one.”
“What you dreaming about it for?” he asked. “You aint got nothing to feel bad about. You aint do nothing wrong. I’m the one killed her.”
“It was an accident.”
“The judge never bought that,” Paul said. “I don’t know if I ever did, either.”
“What do you mean? You meant to do it?”
“No. But calling it a accident don’t seem right, either. I was angry. I was so full of anger back then. I was gone hurt somebody, at some point. If it wasn’t her, it woulda been somebody else. I used to think about killing somebody. Some fool make me mad, I’d think about it. I thought about killing our daddy. If he’d ever showed up again, I might have.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “I don’t care what the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania says. You are not a killer, Paul.”
He sighed.
For several minutes, neither of them spoke. Paul continued to watch the lake, where a few small boats moved on the water, and waited. He knew Helena would ask him about juvie again and he decided maybe he could talk about it a little. The past few days with Ava had made him think that keeping the past all locked up inside you might just mean letting it eat you from the inside out, taking little bites over years, until, maybe, one day, you just went crazy.
“Was juvie as bad as I imagine it was?” Helena asked, finally.
Paul shook his head. “You can’t imagine it. However bad you think it was, it was worse. You might think I aint a killer, but some of them boys was killers for sure. Some of them was worse than killers.”
“Worse?” she asked. “What’s worse?”
“Worse is somebody that gets his kicks from hurting people. Not killing them, that’s too final. Nothing left to torture if somebody already dead.”
Helena fell silent again and Paul thought maybe she was afraid to go on asking questions, afraid of what the answers might be.
“It was this one gang of boys,” he went on, “called theyselves the Slammers. Went around beating on younger guys when the guards wasn’t paying attention, which was always. They busted me up the first night I was there. I wasn’t no little punk, either, I was a tough enough kid. But they was meaner than me by a lot. They liked to see people hurting. They liked it on their own, and being in there, they found other boys who liked it too, and then they really had fun with it, made it a team sport. They used to burn kids. Hold them down and stick a lit match to their nipple, or somewhere worse. Or they’d put you in a headlock and squeeze until you passed out. They did that to me a couple times. Once, they held me down on the floor and held my mouth shut, and poured water over my head, so I felt like I was drowning. I always fought them, though. I never stopped fighting them. I had black eyes and busted lips. A couple times I got taken to the infirmary with broke ribs.” He sighed. “The Slammers wasn’t the worst in there, though. They’d kick your ass, but they wouldn’t—” He stopped.
<
br /> Helena sat up on the blanket. “Wouldn’t what?”
Paul watched a broad-winged bird alight onto a thin branch above them.
“This one gang, the Rippers, was a bunch of boys from some projects in North Philly. They used to go into boy’s rooms at night and do things to them. All night long, any night, you could hear it. The moaning and the whimpering. One night they came for me. I tried to fight them, but they knew how to hold a boy down. I was lucky, ‘cause one of the guards came in and stopped them before they had really done anything. But after that, I knew I had to get in some kind of gang myself, or I was gone get fucked or killed, or both, real fast. I joined up with these boys from southwest. Remember Kareem? Used to live across the hall from us?”
Helena nodded. “With the one small ear?”
“Yeah, that his crazy mama burned half off. He was one of them, and he remembered me and got me in with them. Milky, the one whose car we drove up here, he was one, too. It was seven of us altogether. We called ourselves the Southwest Seven. We wasn’t that creative.”
“Were you safe then, with them?”
“It aint no such thing as safe in a place like that,” Paul said. “But I was less of a target. And that came for a price. I still had to fight. All the time. I had to fight for my boys, help protect them so they would help protect me. I still got beat and cut and damn near killed, but now somebody had my back, so the bruises and scars was divided between us. But none of us was safe.
“All I thought about while I was there, the whole three years, was getting out and getting home. And staying home. It wasn’t until I got out I realized home didn’t exist no more. Mama was gone. You was gone.”
“I wasn’t gone,” Helena said. “I was still there, living with Auntie and Uncle when you got out. I kept expecting you to show up. Expecting you to come find me.”
“I did,” he said.
“What?”
“I did come. First thing I did when I got out was go to Uncle’s house. I was so happy to see him when he opened the door, happy to see anybody that looked anything like family. I asked for you. He said you was at school. I asked if I could wait and he said no. He looked at me like I was dirt. I told him I was gone come back when you was home. You know what he told me? He said if I cared anything about you, I wouldn’t. That I couldn’t do nothing but ruin your life. That you was a good student, and a good girl, and you aint need no ex-con, killer for a brother, dragging you down.”
“Why did you listen to him? He was a fool if he said that.”
“You can’t understand. What being in a place like I was in can do to your mind. You spend every day getting told that you aint nothing. That you worse than the lowest nigger crawling the face of the earth. You ruined your life early and got it out the way, so you might as well just drink up, or smoke up, or shoot up, and wait to die. Aint no way nobody can love you anymore. You aint who you was. You aint that boy that your mama held. You a ex-con, a killer, a piece of nothing, and you a damn fool if you think different. I used to be Uncle’s favorite. Remember? But he looked at me like he didn’t know me. He couldn’t love me no more after what I did. I know he saw in my eyes what those years in there did to me, too, and he didn’t want it in his house. That made me know what I was told all those years was true. I wasn’t nothing. They was right. So, I left, and I aint come back.”
“Where did you go?” Helena asked him.
“Nowhere worth naming,” he said. “I just rolled with guys I knew inside who had got out, too, guys in my gang. We cheated people, and robbed them. Sold smack. Any old fucked up thing you can think of, I did it. I never got caught, though. I always thought that was funny. Getting sent in there for something I never meant to do, and then coming out and getting away with all sorts of shit I did on purpose. It was years before I got it together. I don’t even know how it happened. Just one day I got tired of feeling like the scum of the damn earth and decided not to be. By the time I got a real job and pulled some kind of life together for myself, and went back to find you, y’all was gone. And wouldn’t nobody tell me where.”
Helena was in tears and Paul had a hard lump in his throat. She moved closer to him on the blanket and put her arms around him. He swallowed the lump in his throat and took a deep breath, the fresh air soothing him. “It’s alright,” he said. “It don’t matter now. We here together now.”
They spent all morning and afternoon out there. They ate their lunches, huddled close, and talked about old times on the lake, fishing, and swimming, and building campfires. Late in the afternoon, Paul suggested they hike further up into the hills.
The terrain was steep and they both got out of breath within minutes. They looked at each other and laughed. “We old!” Paul said.
They walked further into a thick of high trees.
“You hear that?” Helena asked him.
Paul listened. It was the rush of a waterfall.
By the time they found it, having gone around in circles like Helena in her dreams, it was getting late, but they both wanted to sit a while and enjoy the sounds and sight of it. It was small, but lovely, the heavy white water rushing against dark rocks that jutted out of the side of a hill. Helena took her shoes off and dipped them in the cool stream at the base of the fall. Paul sat beside her, his shoulder leaned into hers.
“I told Ava,” he said.
Helena nodded. “I thought so. I guess she didn’t take it well.”
“For anybody else, I’d say she took it great. For Ava, she damn near threw me out on my ass.”
“She said you left.”
“I did,” he said. “But only so I could feel like I had some say in it.”
“You’re going back, then?”
He nodded. “Where else I’m gone go?”
Helena checked her watch. It was near six and it was already getting chilly. She put her shoes back on and they started walking back down through the trees. The downhill slope of the terrain was tricky to maneuver in some places and both of them slipped a few times. They were at the lake again, coming down a hill of lush mountain laurel, when Paul lost his footing and fell.
“Helena!”
She turned and saw that he had fallen and came back the few feet, kneeling beside him.
“Are you hurt?”
He grimaced. “My ankle. I twisted it.” He couldn’t walk on it easily. He tried, holding on to Helena, but after several feet, he said, “Stop, stop. It hurts. I need to sit a minute.”
She helped him down onto the ground, then stood and looked out past the lake. “Is that the ranger station? Maybe I can run down and get somebody.”
“Don’t run down,” he said. “You might end up like me.”
She frowned.
“Just come on and sit here with me a minute,” he said. “I’ll get it together.”
She sat beside him on the rocks and grass, folding her arms around herself in the chilly air. Paul put his arms around her and she rested her head on his shoulder.
“Do you think it’ll be alright?” Helena asked. “Between you and Ava?”
“I think so,” he said. “It might take some time, but I think we can get past it.”
“Good,” she said.
“You like her?” he asked.
She nodded. “I do like her, Paul.”
He smiled. “I’m glad.”
She put her arms around his waist.
After a few minutes, Paul said, “Alright, we better get the hell out of here ‘fore they find us froze to death on the side of this hill. Or eaten by a family of bears.”
His ankle hurt like hell. Every step was agony. But he gritted his teeth and, leaning on his sister, made it back to the ranger station. The ranger on duty asked him if he wanted an ambulance and Paul said no, so the ranger got his first aid kit and bandaged his ankle, noting that it looked more strained than sprained to him. They got back to Milky’s car and Helena drove them back to the city.
When Paul came home hopping on one foot, with his ankle bandaged, ev
eryone rushed to his side, looking concerned and asking questions about what had happened. Everyone except Ava, who hung back and watched from the doorway of the dining room, as George helped Helena get Paul situated on the sofa.
“What in the world happened to you?” Sarah asked.
“He hurt his ankle out at French Creek,” Helena told them.
“Lawd,” said Regina. She grabbed a couple of pillows from the other end of the sofa and propped them up under her son-in-law’s injured ankle.
“What was y’all doing up there, anyway?” George asked. “Climbing mountains?”
“Hardly,” Helena said.
“We wasn’t doing nothing but walking,” said Paul. “When we was kids, we used to run all up and down there and never got a scratch. Now I damn near kill myself walking. I guess I’m getting old.”
“Ava, what you doing over there?” George called to his daughter. “You don’t see your husband over here hurt?”
Ava came and stood beside the sofa and looked down at Paul’s ankle. “Is it bad?”
“Not too bad,” Paul said. “I just twisted it.”
“Well, good.”
“It coulda been a lot worse, though. If I’d sprained it, I might have got stuck up there and then who knows what. Right, Helena?” he asked, looking at his sister.
“I guess,” she said.
He looked at Ava again. “I might not be here for you to glare at right now.”
“I’m not glaring,” Ava said, though she was unsure whether she was glaring or not. She still felt angry and disgusted by what Paul had told her last night, about what he had done. Seeing him hurt, she felt some sympathy for him, and was glad his injury wasn’t worse, but she did not know what, exactly, she felt about his return.
“You don’t look worried, though,” he said, sounding agitated. “Matter fact, you looking at me like I’m some strange man who just wandered in here and put his feet up on your couch.”
“Y’all come on in the kitchen and let’s get dinner started,” Regina said, and Sarah, Helena, and even George, followed her out of the room.
The Summer We Got Free Page 19
