the REAPPEARANCE
of
SAM WEBBER
Jonathon Scott Fuqua
Copyright 2010 by Jonathon Scott Fuqua
All rights reserved.
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All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Bancroft Press
“Books that enlighten”
800-637-7377
P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209
410-764-1967 (fax)
www.bancroftpress.com
LCCN: Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 98-74800
ISBN for hardcover: 1-890862-02-9
ISBN for paperback: 1-890862-03-7
To Julie and Calla. I love you both.
Contents
Missing Person
When Yer In the City, Hon
The Biggest Geek in History
Drowning
A Plane Could Fall
Wrestling With Everything
The Heimlich Maneuver
Everyone’s Scared, Some
Achy Feet
Forgetting
Fish Boy
The Measure of a Kid
The Place You Are At
The Softest Heart
The Way It Goes
Shadows
The Faded Light of Baltimore
About the Author
Acknowledgements
missing person
My father, a guy named Big Sam Webber, disappeared the summer I was eleven years old. No one knows what happened to him for sure—if he was murdered, kidnapped, forgot who he was, or just decided to run and never look back. When he was first gone, I hoped for murder or amnesia. I didn’t want to believe he would choose to leave. But the evidence always pointed to flight—that he gave up on my mom and me.
The police found his rusted old car at Dulles International Airport down near Washington, DC. It was in hourly parking, and it had rung up a giant bill over a two week period, an amount that would’ve left me and my mom broke if we’d had to pay it. Luckily, we didn’t. The police got it out, towed it somewhere, and blew dust all over it for fingerprints. Big Sam’s were the only ones found on the worn steering wheel and scratched door handle. Kidnapping wasn’t ruled out of the picture, mostly, I think, for my sake. He was what the police call a missing person, and he still is.
About a month after he disappeared, a pretty black police officer came by our house. She had a soothing smile and a gentle voice with words that whooshed out of her mouth like a scoop of sand. She asked me if Big Sam had ever mentioned leaving, if I’d ever gone to the track with him and seen him place a bet on some horse. Had I ever heard anyone threaten him, or did he sometimes seem lost?
I’d seen a little of all those things, but nothing big enough to grab her attention. The thing is, remembering normal times made me feel horrible. So when we were done, she took me in her funny-smelling arms and held me against her—my forehead scraped red and raw on her shiny silver badge.
“It’s going to be okay,” she promised me, as if she could see into the future.
Just a few months later, I found out she couldn’t.
When our savings were all used up, my mother sold the car. Then a couple of weeks after that, we started looking around for a cheaper place to live, somewhere closer to her job. We eyeballed a neighborhood called Charles Village, a few blocks off Baltimore’s main north-south drags, Charles and St. Paul Streets, near the most convenient bus routes in the city, and not too far from the Rotunda, a fancy shopping center with a Giant Supermarket crammed on the side.
Other not-so-okay things happened, too, like the way my name changed. Before my dad left, everyone, including my mother, called me Little Sam. Together, my father and I were Big and Little Sam Webber, like I was a small part of him, and he was a larger part of me.
But after he’d been gone for awhile, my mom suddenly started calling me Samuel. I think the name Little Sam reminded her a big one was out there somewhere, and remembering that turned her into a wreck. So I tried not to get too upset over the change, but it did bother me. The part of me I had always liked the best was suddenly the very worst part of all. Still, for my mom’s sake, I got used to it as fast as I could. Everyone calls me Samuel or Sam now. I wouldn’t know what to say if someone called me Little Sam again.
When my father was still around, he was a Baltimore Gas & Electric employee—one of those guys who looks for weird-smelling fumes. He’d drive a car back and forth across the city all day—a little, dusty-blue sedan, shoe-box shaped, with a bright BG&E logo painted on both front doors. It was a mess inside. It always had crushed coffee and soda cups rolling around under the seats, plus greasy yellow McDonald’s cheeseburger wrappers floating about. He loved that kind of food. My mom used to say that if he could have his way, he’d eat every meal at a fast food restaurant, which didn’t seem like such a bad idea to me.
Starting when I went into the first grade, my dad always tried to pick me up after school. No matter what his day was like, he’d swing by to get me in the afternoons and chauffeur me home. He worried that I was too shy and too small, and that bigger kids would pick on me if I was stuck taking the bus. In most ways, too, he was right. I was shy and practically a runt, and often times bigger guys tried to push me around. Even still, I knew I could do okay. But my dad never was convinced. See, he had been a huge kid. I’ve looked at pictures of him as a boy, and his arms bulged like rubbery car bumpers. Being that tough, he’d picked on runts like me when he was in school. He knew how cruel bullies could be, and he worried.
The truth is, at times my dad worried way more than normal. He suffered horrible headaches his doctor said were caused by grinding his long flat teeth together. He chewed his cuticles raw and cracked his knuckles about a thousand times a day.
His worrying wasn’t just for me, either. He worried about my mother, too. During the coldest months, he didn’t like her waiting in the dark for rickety cross-town buses. They didn’t come by nearly as frequently as the ones rolling up and down Charles or St. Paul Street, and he thought she was vulnerable to something bad when standing along the side of the road. So even though he was usually exhausted and sad in the winter, he picked her up at Junie’s Florist, drove her home, then went downtown to drop his work car off.
On the days when he was feeling good enough, I begged to go with him, because it was nearly a perfect trip. Shimmering McDonald’s cheeseburger wrappers swirled about us—bright, wrinkly birds—while colorful paper cups, stamped with flashy lettering, slipped and rolled beneath our feet. And together, amidst all that movement, we scampered into the magical city, its buildings lit, and Baltimore’s skyline sparkling like a forest of Christmas trees, helicopters and jetliners streaking above.
He also worried about money. He and my mother tried to talk softly so I wouldn’t hear, but I knew what was going on. Their paychecks only went from week to week. We couldn’t even afford to get a scruffy dog. When I asked about getting one, my dad usually asked me who was going to pay the veterinary bills. Because I’d been listening in, I figured my parents couldn’t, so I dropped the subject until I felt I’d explode without a sad little mutt around the house to hug and walk, to be friends with.
My mom says my dad lived with the knowledge that we should have lived in a less fancy neighborhood than Rodger’s Forge. The thing is, he didn’t want me to get stuck in one of the tougher inner-city schools. More than once, I heard him tell my mother I wouldn’t last two minutes in the schools he’d gone to. A kid like him would have pummeled me for sport.
The Gordons—Ditch and Junie—owned the flower shop my mother started working at when she first dropped out of college. They’d never had any kids, so they treated my parents, who were kind of alone in the world, like they were theirs. As a matter of fact, when the Gordons came over, they didn’t even knock on the door. They just opened it right up.
After my dad disappeared, not one thing seemed normal except for Ditch and Junie. They even helped my mom and me find a cheaper place to live. Junie spotted a few ads in The City Paper and went ahead and set up some appointments. The thing is, when we went to see the apartments, I thought she’d over estimated how bad off we were. I mean, to me, Those places were for poor people.
The apartment my mom chose took up the entire second floor of a two-story rowhouse, and even though that might sound like a lot, it wasn’t. Without any furniture, it was still cramped. A long skinny kitchen was in the back, crammed tight with a giant refrigerator and cabinets that, for a time, smelled like wilted lettuce. Hanging off the kitchen was a shabby bay window that somebody had added a few years before. It leaked like mad during storms.
The narrow room right beside the kitchen was mine. The thing is, the floors in it were scuffed a chalky brown, and the walls were so drippy with paint that seemed to be drooling. Just looking at them made me feel low.
Then there was the gloomy hallway, dark as a narrow cave, punctured by doors to a bathroom, a closet, the stairs, and the big front room, which was my mom’s. It overlooked the street, Abel Avenue, and the tar-drizzled front porch roof. It was the only place in the whole apartment that didn’t seem like it was getting smaller every time I took a breath. Unlike the kitchen, the front room had a pretty bay window that wasn’t popping and creaking and dangerous-seeming. The day we first visited, the brightest yellow beam of sunlight cut through it, and Junie, looking like she’d spotted an angel, told us that was a good sign. The place was meant for us. Bright light would make my mom feel better. I guess it was supposed to sizzle her sadness away. Thinking back, it sometimes did and it sometimes didn’t.
“Well, what do you think, hon?” Junie asked me as we stood out on the spongy front porch. My mom was inside, upstairs, discussing the lease with the lanky landlord, a guy who pulled his pants nearly up to his chest so that it looked like the middle portion of his body had been chopped away.
“It’s okay,” I said, even though I didn’t really think so.
“Yeah, it’s alright,” she agreed. “It’s as good a place to start as any. Your mom can’t afford that house you guys was renting in Rodger’s Forge. Hope you know that, Little Sam. She’d have stayed there if she could have.”
I squinted over at her for a second, sat down on the top step and watched a skinny white guy stagger by. He gave me the chills. He had these smoldering eyes—two holes tucked under the hard, pale bumps of his bony head. “My mom doesn’t call me Little Sam anymore,” I mumbled.
Big fat Junie, wearing white cotton shorts, the kind with an elastic waistband, sat down beside me. Pale flesh dangled beneath her arms like bread dough. “What’s she call you now, hon?”
“Samuel,” I informed her as I watched the man step behind a tree and start peeing. Somehow, we weren’t all that far from our old neighborhood, but it was a whole new world.
Junie followed my gaze. “Hey you! Git outta here!” she hollered when she spotted what the guy was doing. And, to my surprise, the man hustled off.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Before moving, we had a huge yard sale to get rid of extra furniture. While it was going on, I had a great time. To me, it seemed like a carnival, with people barking out prices and my mom accepting them or calling back another price. But that night, when the frenzy was over, a funny thing happened. When I realized that a lot of my father’s things were gone for good, I felt queasy. My stomach churned for about an hour before I eventually spewed into a toilet. My mom sat on the bathroom floor watching as I hovered over the slick white bowl, which was cold as an ice block. I could tell she was sad, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I was crippled by nausea. And that was just the beginning. For a time, my stomach got shifty and sore whenever I felt overwhelmed.
The next weekend, Junie and Ditch, who was tall and stretched-out and constantly puffing on a cigarette, helped us move. And even though we used their store’s delivery van to haul our stuff, it took us nearly six hours. We made three trips back and forth on Greenmount Avenue and York Road, and the whole time, my stomach gurgled. I hated the new place. It was so gloomy compared to our old home, dark as a crusty mayonnaise jar. As I staggered in and out of the crummy front door, it made me sad just to drop my stuff inside, to glance up at the seams of wallpaper on the ceiling, slathered with thick yellow paint.
After the last stick of furniture was plopped down in the cramped hallway, Junie and Ditch went to get some beer. When they got back, they had three new house plants with them. Each had a big gold ribbon, like a sunflower bloom, wrapped around the pot.
“Maxine, I knows you like the umbrella plants, hon, so I brought you two, and a nice geranium to brighten up your winda, ta make it feel like home.”
For some reason, my mother started crying, so Junie wrapped her lumpy arms around her and patted her spiny back. “Don’t cry, hon,” she whispered softly. “Don’t you cry, Maxine. You watch. Everything’s going to straighten out. Give it some time.”
My head suddenly got woozy, and I snuck off to sit on the bathroom floor.
Teary-eyed and sad, my mom knocked and came in. “You feeling sick again, sweetie?” She sniffled and shut the battered door behind her, then walked over and scratched my back gently with her sharp fingernails, just the way I always liked.
“I don’t know why,” I gasped, starting to cry because I felt so crummy about everything. My tears dripped onto the floor tiles. “Maybe I ate something bad,” I blubbered.
“Oh, Samuel, it’s alright to feel bad, you know. It’s natural. As natural as laughing, sometimes.”
But I didn’t say I was sad. I didn’t want her to think I disliked the apartment she’d gotten for us. I worried about her.
We sat there for awhile, hurt and weak in our hearts. Then we stumbled to our feet. My mom gave me a hug, and I washed up in the sink, which sat on two chrome poles and was attached to the wall with what looked like Elmer’s Glue. We left the bathroom and wove down the hall, around all the junk, and into the warm kitchen where Junie and Ditch were drinking beer.
Junie got up, cracked open a can for my mom, and gave it to her. Ditch smoked quietly at our enamel-topped table, crammed awkwardly into the bay window. He blew gray clouds through the red, rusty screen that reminded me of a piece of farm equipment. Though I’d known him forever, he’d always kind of made me nervous. To me, he was a little quiet, spooky. He looked at me. “Little Sam,” he said, “I could check with your neighbor downstairs, see if you could use the backyard. It don’t look like she does. It’s a mess. I could come over next week and we could clean it up if you want.” He took a sip of beer, cheeks draping inwards, then took a drag on his smoldering cigarette.
“I guess,” I mumbled, though I couldn’t see what I’d do in the tiny yard. It was nothing but a completely cluttered plot of dirt surrounded by a wavy, crimped, two-foot wire fence. Weeds grew in the few spots where there was exposed ground, but nothing else. I spied a dirty shirt, looking a bit like an old bandage. There were some cans and bottles and disintegrating boxes, plus a broken piece of furniture piled up in the space. And believe it or not, it struck me as sparkling clean compared to the garbage can area, just over the fence in the alley. All sorts of nasty things seemed stacked around the stained plastic bins.
“I’ll check in with her ’fore Junie and I go home, Little Sam,” Ditch told me.
I nodded nervously, waiting till my mom and Junie started talking. “Ditch,” I whispered, “I don’t go by Little Sam anymore. It makes my mom feel bad. She calls me Samuel now.”
He cast a glance over at my mother and drew his cracked lips against his wooden-looking teeth. Something bothered him, I could tell, but he didn’t speak up. “Okay,” he said, and took another drag on the smooshy filter of his Winston.
When they were gone, and my mom and I were alone in our new place, we went our separate ways and started opening up some boxes. In my room, I tried to organize a little, but it seemed nearly impossible. I pushed around furniture, but there was nowhere for it to go. After a few minutes, I gave up, sat on my cold metal desk, legs dangling, and started reading comic books. I was halfway through one when my mom came to the door, leaning against the scarred frame. She held a ceramic cookie jar that was shaped like a mama bear with a dress and checkered apron on. I couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been on the kitchen counter, though it’d never had cookies in it.
“There might not be enough room for her?” my mom said, raising her eyebrows so I knew she was asking a question.
“She doesn’t have to be out,” I said, sliding the shiny copy of the Thor I’d been reading back into a plastic bag. I imagined the narrow kitchen. “Maybe she’d fit on top of the refrigerator,” I offered.
“Hm. Maybe,” my mom said. She forced a smile. “I’ll help you get your room straight if you want.”
I looked around at the boxes and the furniture, gray and scratched in that rectangular cave. “Was this supposed to be the dining room?” I asked.
Her mouth moved back and forth as she thought about my question,. “I think it can be anything. It’s got a door on it, and that’s unusual for a dining room. Most dining rooms don’t have doors.” She leaned in and opened the shrunken little closet. “They don’t usually have closets, either.” I nodded and felt a little better. I hoped it really was a bedroom, that we weren’t so poor I was about to live in the wrong room. “It doesn’t matter, anyway, because you know what I’ve been thinking? Me and you should be creative in here since it’s just us.”
I stared at her.
She swept her long brown hair over a shoulder. “Speaking of closets, I’ve been thinking about the one in the hall. I bet...” she said, gears whirring as she spoke, “I bet it would make a cool television room.”
“It’s tiny,” I mumbled.
“Samuel,” she chided me, “you’re such a pessimist. Come on and look.” She placed the bear cookie jar on the floor, turned, stepped around a couple of boxes, and clomped down the hall. She opened the closet and looked in. “It’s perfect,” she declared.
“No it isn’t,” I said behind her. “You can’t put two chairs in there.”
“Not if you put them side by side. I was thinking about putting them in line, like a movie theater. We could fit three in here that way. We’d even have enough room left over to hang our coats. They’d keep nice and toasty in the winter.” She glanced over at me, her eyebrows forming two tiny arches. “Don’t be so negative, Samuel. It might be really neat.”
Looking the space over, I imagined watching a movie in the chair closest to the big black Magnavox television my dad had purchased a few years before to watch football on. I realized it could be just like going to a small movie theater if we ever bought a VCR or got cable. Then I remembered how Junie’d told me the president had a private theater in his basement. “It’s like the White House,” I declared, imagining myself eating popcorn and drinking a soda in the little space.
“You’ll see,” my mom said. “By the time we’re done with it, it’ll be your favorite place in the apartment.”
But that sunk my excitement, though she’d meant for it to do just the opposite. “Yeah,” I admitted after a minute, because I realized she was right, and I knew it shouldn’t be that way—that a closet shouldn’t be the best spot in a house. I turned away, lurching slowly down the hall and into my mom’s room. I wondered if she’d been standing in a sunbeam and that was why she was feeling better. I wondered if Junie was right about light being good for people who are sad. I looked out the window and made sure to place myself in the path of a bright ray. “Our street’s pretty ugly,” I mumbled, when I could tell my mom was behind me.
“No it isn’t,” she protested. “It’s got a nice, old-fashioned character.”
But I didn’t notice that sort of thing. “None of the trees have real limbs,” I notified her. “Someone cut ’em all off.” My arms fell to my sides. A knee unlocked.
“They’re growing back,” she said and roughed up my hair, then left a hand on my shoulder.
“The houses are terrible.” I pointed towards one with a set of brick front steps that were crumbling gently, the ground in front of them speckled with pretty red gravel. There was a disintegrating mattress tossed onto the scrubby hedge beside it. It reminded me of the body of a big animal, flopped onto a bumpy side. I wondered if it’d been there long.
“That’s the way it is in the city. You get mansions right beside places that need some care.”
The street reminded me of my father’s Baltimore Gas & Electric car, with its cups and hamburger wrappers everywhere. For some reason, the street’s condition bothered me. Rodger’s Forge had been spotless.
“Maybe you and I can clean the block up.”
Amazed, I looked over at her. “Why would we do that?” I asked.
“To make it look better,” she said.
“Shouldn’t someone else be doing it since we just moved in? I mean, it’s not our garbage.”
“But it’s our street,” my mother pointed out. “Don’t we want it to look nice?”
“Maybe,” I muttered. But already I was scheduled to clean the backyard with Ditch, and I didn’t want to be stuck doing that sort of thing all the time. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but it wasn’t that.
For dinner, we got a pizza around the block at Harry Little’s. That’s when I first noticed there was a Little Tavern on the corner of 32nd Street and Greenmount. I would have preferred getting a hamburger there, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted my mother to be stronger before I started nagging her.
Anyway, it was alright-smelling pizza, and it tasted pretty good. Maybe it would have been better if my stomach hadn’t been one giant knot, bubbling and burning.
It poured that night, and as we ate, water streamed down the inside of the sorry bay window in the kitchen, where our table was located.
It poured like a fountain. Occasionally, I put a pale, clammy finger up and redirected the little rivers, but mostly I just left them alone. Funny thing, the water didn’t pool on the linoleum floor—it drained right through. Actually, I kind of thought it was nice the way it worked so cleanly. But I could tell it bothered my mom. She didn’t eat but one slice of Harry Little’s greasy pizza. She spent her time staring at the water as it trickled by.
“I’m going to get them to fix this,” she declared, stood, and went to the big ancient refrigerator to locate one of the National Premium beers Junie and Ditch had left. She sat back down, turning away. She gulped from the can and leaned onto one of her knobby hands. “I hate this place,” she muttered.
I didn’t say anything—just stared out the dusty window, chewed Harry Little’s pizza, and worried what was going to happen to us.
when yer in the city, hon
Ditch and Junie came by the following Sunday. Ditch brought with him a brand new box of plastic lawn bags, a rake, clippers, bug-killer, and two pairs of old gloves. I tried to ignore the supplies at first, but I couldn’t get away with it. After he swilled some coffee, I followed him down the stairs and out the front door, where the sky was a gray-white, tinged with the strangest golden highlights, and the air was heavy and warm. We walked around the block, past some of the pretty little patches, and past some places that were nothing but dirt spots. Halfway down the alley, we stepped over the wire fence and stood surveying the backyard.
Like my room, I didn’t know where to begin. Ditch had worked at tough jobs all his life, though, so he knew how to start and struggle through projects. He organized the cleanup.
We started by bagging all the junk lying around—the bottles and cans, a filtration mask, a pair of glasses, an old transistor radio, an easy chair, a broken plate, a couple of old eight-track tapes, and the door to a microwave oven. Somehow, it had all existed in the tiny space that was the backyard. It made my stomach roll and reinforced the feeling that I didn’t want to be out there. I didn’t see any purpose to it. If I had to walk around the block to get into my own backyard, I knew it would never happen. Besides, the alley nearly scared me to death.
“Use the fire escape,” Ditch said. “It goes right up to yer bedroom winda.”
I looked at it. He was right. The black-iron pieces clung to the side of the rowhouse like the dried-out body of a cicada. There was a little platform just beneath my sill. It looked like the last tenant had also used it to get outside. On it was an ancient rag mop, its gray yarn hardened like flossy curls of thick ox hair. There was also a half-finished quart of beer, its label as faded as an ancient dollar bill, and a plastic ashtray. It would be easy to climb out onto the landing. The thing is, my window had a big iron grate over it, with a large padlock on the inside, and I didn’t know where the key was. I hadn’t seen one.
“You’ve got to have a key,” Ditch said. “What good’s a fire escape if you can’t get to it?”
I shrugged.
He lit a cigarette with a red Bic lighter, cupping a hard hand to shield the flame even though there wasn’t any wind. “I’ll find the key for you,” he assured me. “Your mom probably knows where it is.” His bony chest swelled as he sucked in a lung-full of smoke. The buttons on his shirt pulled against the thin fabric, and I thought they might tear off.
I wasn’t sure my mom did know where the key was. In the week since we’d moved in, she’d seemed more and more lost. A crummy key was such a minor thing that I was sure it had slipped her mind, fallen through her loose fingers, or gotten lost in some drawer or beneath a piece of furniture. Maybe it was under the mattress of my bed, which wasn’t up on its metal frame yet.
Ditch glanced up at the back of our apartment, appearing to examine the bricks. “Worried ’bout your mom?” he asked me.
I looked at him, mumbled something, probably not even real words. Ditch was so tall and thin and tough, like a hunk of frayed cable sticking out of a wall.
“Junie will get her up and around. She’s good at that kinda thing.”
I leaned over and picked a white bottle cap from the black dirt and dropped it into a garbage bag that sagged against one of my legs.
Ditch bent and grabbed the mushy easy chair at the top of its back and around the side, grunted, and lifted the waterlogged hunk of furniture. He stumbled towards the alley and placed the chair over the fence, by the bashed and gnawed garbage cans. A cushioned chair-arm drooped towards the ground, splintered and broken. Turning, Ditch swiped up the rake and started into a corner, cigarette pointing up, then down, locked between his lips as he panted.
I wended my way around the little yard, searching the grass and soil for foreign objects, and placing the smaller items in my bag. I picked up a stick and used it to dig things up—even played like it was a metal detector. The place wasn’t such a mess. The yard had looked bad from above, but it was okay, not half as shot as the back part of our rowhouse. My eyes locked on the back of the house, where I saw all sorts of things I didn’t want to see.
The mortar around the brick was stained and cracked. It looked as if one side of the building was going to fall away from the other. Above my head, the bay window where my mother and I ate appeared fragile, the wood beneath it unpainted and pale, with misplaced nails poking like spikes between ragged floorboards. Getting a peek at the guts bothered me. I was sure the house would come crashing down one day. The sides of it were all covered in gray, spongy shingles that didn’t match the brick. Also, there were thick black wires drilled into it haphazardly. They extended in a graceful arc out to the bristling brown telephone poles in the alley. A couple of scraggly pigeons sat on one pole. I studied them and listened to their swallowing noises.
Moving towards the steps, I realized that someone had recently painted them, though not very well. They’d slapped on a coat of purple paint, dripping it all over the concrete pad beneath, and getting some on the brick wall, too. Instead of scraping, they’d just painted right over the crusty old layer. Big flakes, the size of potato chips, were frozen in place by a hardened coat of purple. It looked like pictures I’d seen of the slums—dark-skinned kids munching on ancient wafers from around a windowsill or a doorframe.
Underneath the soft planks were two or three old paint cans, a dry stick pointing out of one. I squatted down and yanked the cans out. Spider webs made fiery crackles when they moved.
On my knees, scooping layers of leaves from below the steps towards me, I noticed the back door to our downstairs neighbor’s apartment. It was bright red, metal, and in good condition, except that someone had written the word “honkey” down the center of it with runny, silver spray paint. I shivered and looked over at Ditch, who was halfway across the backyard, about six feet from me. “Mr. Gordon?” I mumbled softly, scraping over my vocal chords like crunched gravel.
Ditch stopped raking and turned around. Perspiration came down his face in fat drips. I hesitated, gulped, and wished I hadn’t called him. “Um,” I said, “who do you think wrote this?” I pointed nervously up at the door.
Ditch took the drippy word in and looked back at me. “I guess some nigger,” he said. “Can’t imagine a white person doing it. It wouldn’t make sense, now would it?”
“Someone walked into the yard?” I stammered.
“Walked into the yard?” he asked, rubbing a hand up and down the smooth old rake handle.
“You know, someone trespassed or something?” I stood up so I wouldn’t feel so small.
He shrugged. “Guess someone just stepped over the fence and wrote it out of pure meanness or jealousy or something. Common ’round here, Little Sam. Lot of jealous people who wish they had what you got. They’re right over there.” With a long, tough, gloved finger, he pointed towards Greenmount Avenue, or at least that’s where he meant to point. By mistake, he aimed off towards green Roland Park, where if someone was jealous about something, it usually wasn’t money.
I nodded, though I figured he was wrong about people wanting what I had. I didn’t have anything—at least not anything worth wanting. I barely had a bedroom.
“Worried ’bout someone bothering you out here?”
I kicked at the cracked cement landing. “Guess,” I croaked, embarrassed.
Nodding, he dropped the rake, walked over, and sat on the rotten steps, keeping his runny eyes on me the whole time. Stripping off his gloves, he placed a giant, scarred paw on my shoulder. I looked at it and realized his fingernails were strange. They were wavy and stuck out above the last knuckle, like they’d been embedded into his bones with a hammer. I wondered if they hurt, because it looked like they would.
“I got funny nails,” he told me.
I couldn’t look at him, but he was so right.
“My dad had ’em, too.”
I couldn’t remember my father’s fingernails.
“Know what? No one’s going to hurt you ’round here if you just use yer head. See a mean-looking nigger in the alley, hop on up the fire escape and lock yer winda. Most of ’em will just be mindin’ their own business, though. They don’t want no trouble, usually. They just want what you got, even the stuff you throw ’way.” He looked over towards the garbage cans. “You’ll know what’s what soon enough. Don’t go hanging out here after dark, that sort of thing. That’s when they start trouble, if there’s gonna be any. After dark.” He reached into his pocket with his free hand and withdrew a half-full soft-pack of Winstons. He shook it to the side, and a filtered-tip stuck out of the top, like a white antenna. He stuck the cigarette on his bottom lip and dropped the soft-pack back into his shirt pocket.
“Want a Coke?” Ditch asked, sliding his heavy hand off my shoulder so he could cup his Bic lighter. The tip of his cigarette turned red as he sucked at it. “7-Eleven right ’round the corner,” he said, smoke snaking from his mouth.
I looked at the ground, then at Ditch’s torn-up work boots, with splats of white paint across the toes. “There’s a 7-Eleven near here?” I asked, excited.
“A 7-Eleven,” Ditch told me again.
“Sure,” I said softly.
“Well, alright,” Ditch replied as he stood up, unfolding like a horse getting its legs beneath it. He loomed over me the way trees loom in winter, leafless and bare.
Tired, I stepped over the fence and started down the asphalt-black alley after Ditch. We were going in the opposite direction from the way we’d entered that morning, and I looked into our other neighbors’ yards. Some were messes, others weren’t. Just like back in Rodger’s Forge, a few of them had Formstone garages with large wooden doors. That was normal. The thing I couldn’t believe was that they took up every inch of ground, from the backdoor of the house to the alley, and that a couple were in such rough shape. Windows, half-protected by big iron grates, were broken out. Graffiti and laundry-pen writing cluttered wood areas. There were holes close to the ground, in the Formstone or beneath rotting planks, where I imagined large rodents and insects wriggled around, waiting for night.
But then, like a cave opening to daylight, a whole string of homes near the end of the alley were spotless, filled with grass and flowering plants, and decorated with nice little items. The greenness, which lit up the air, glowed sweetly against the trimmed and tidy bricks. Little stone paths wended their way to the alley area, which just so happened to be clean, too. That gave me a glimmer of hope.
We turned down 32nd Street, passed by Harry Little’s Pizza, and started across a large empty parking lot, where plastic grocery bags were blowing like tumbleweeds and getting stuck on battered parking meters. I saw the 7-Eleven up on the corner, less than a block off Greenmount Avenue. After a minute, we tramped over a patch of brown grass and hopped off the curb, crossing this narrow street, where about a thousand Coke bottle tops melted into the tarred surface. I stopped and looked, amazed, before we clomped up a flight of cement steps. Turning sideways, Ditch and I slid between two parked cars and made our way towards the door, where a couple of rough, moon-faced teenagers stood talking. They glowered at us with their chins tilted up, and made me more and more nervous as we got closer to them.
“Hey, man, you got a quarter?” one of them said, and I nearly fell over Ditch’s heels to get away. I heard them laugh at me as the store door slowly closed behind us.
Inside, it was like every other 7-Eleven I’d ever been in, though maybe a little more worn. Ditch got a coffee, and he told me to go find myself a soda. Lost in the selection, I nearly bumped into this black lady shivering in front of the refrigerators, arms wrapped tightly across her. I tried not to stare at her. I focused, instead, on finding myself a Dr. Pepper.
“You likes Dr. Pepper, too?” she croaked when I got my hands on a slick bottle.
I glanced her way anxiously, wondering why she was so cold. It was almost as stuffy inside the store as it was outside of it. “It’s got a good flavor,” I whispered.
“It really do,” she grumbled softly, like she was in pain. “It really do.”
On my way to the counter, which was blocked off in a wall of thick plexiglass, I stopped by the comic book rack and gave it a quick scan. I didn’t have the new X-Men or The Fantastic Four, and I peered at their covers. The X-Men looked kind of boring. Cyclops and Storm were holding hands. But The Fantastic Four was a continuation of a story that hadn’t been finished the month before. They were still fighting Galactus for control of the universe. Even the Silver Surfer was helping out. I gawked at the scene on the cover. The Flame appeared near death, and a stretched-out Mr. Fantastic was screaming in Galactus’ giant hand. I swallowed, wishing I had brought some money with me.
Ditch walked up beside me. “Want a couple comic books?”
I felt like telling him I did, but I knew I shouldn’t. “No, thanks,” I mumbled half-heartedly.
“Yer sure?” he asked.
“I guess,” I told him.
“Look, I’ll let you pick two, and you can go by and take out the garbage for Junie or your mother at the store.”
I glanced up at him.
“Go on,” he grumbled at me.
Excited, I snatched up the two I’d been eyeing and followed him over to the counter, where he pulled out a sweaty five-dollar bill and paid.
Walking back outside, the same guy harassed me for a quarter, calling me something, though I wasn’t sure what. As we headed off, I was glad to put some distance between myself and the boy, with his weasel eyes, blotted red from something.
“You know, I’ve never asked ya if ya like playing any sports,” Ditch said as we turned down 32nd Street.
“I guess I do,” I rasped, embarrassed that I seemed so wimpy. My bag of comic books slapped against my leg as it moved back and forth. It made me feel good and calm.
“Bet yer too young ta remember how yer dad and me went ta every Colts game we could, even when they stunk. Ain’t been the same ’round here since they pulled outta town.” Ditch took a sip of his coffee, then a puff on his cigarette, and walked quietly a few steps. “You should get into organized sports,” he said softly. “Junior high ball. Help build yer confidence up.”
I nodded, but I didn’t want any more change. I’d already had too much of it.
Anyway, organized sports meant large groups of kids my age, and I’d always been quiet around kids my age. Plus, a screaming coach would have nearly killed me. I liked sports, but not under those circumstances.
“Who’s yer favorite player?” he asked.
I thought for a moment. “Eric Dickerson, I guess.”
Ditch nodded. “He’s alright. Kind of greedy, though.”
I didn’t say anything, ashamed I liked someone who was greedy.
“He’s okay,” Ditch said as we turned down the alley and ambled past those gleaming yards and homes. “Least ways he’s playing for the Colts. He’d be a big star ’round here.”
“That’s why I like him,” I said.
“Well, Sam, don’t like him for that. The Colts been gone for years, and they ain’t coming back.”
I nodded, feeling stupid, and we stumbled silently through the alley, stepping over the fence and into the backyard. There was a blazing orange bird twittering away on the fence next door, which made me feel light and floaty. Just staring at the little guy made me know that everything would get better, that Baltimore could open its arms and welcome people in.
I put my bag of comics and my Dr. Pepper on the purple steps and started working again, cleaning up that small yard that mean people trespassed into without a thought. Then the bird flew away, and I missed him. As I put yellow plastic twist ties on the lumpy bags I’d filled, I wondered if I’d ever have the guts to do anything in that plot of land, even if it was spanking clean. I didn’t tell Ditch, though. I kept it inside of me, like a pound of stones.
My mom was asleep in her room, as she had been for a few days. Junie had left for the store in the morning, and Ditch headed out when we were done in the back. Exhausted, I watched television in our closet. The tv was on the floor, and I rested peacefully on top of a chair and a pile of coats.
Bonanza was blaring at me. Hoss and Little Joe were taking nitroglycerin up a mountain to stop a fire. I had no idea how unpredictable the stuff was until then. One good bump or jolt and the Cartwright brothers were dust. Funny thing, too—my mom had told me once that Ditch took nitro for his heart, and I wondered if the medication and the explosive were the same thing. I couldn’t figure out how Ditch’s throat hadn’t burst, or his stomach blown-up. I figured that saliva defused it or something.
When Bonanza was over, I watched a little of The Big Valley with Lee Majors, who was also the Six Million Dollar Man, but I got bored with it pretty fast and cut the Western off halfway through. I climbed over the coats and the chairs and stood out in the dim hallway looking at my mom’s closed bedroom door, covered with a spray of thumb-tack holes. I walked into my room and stared out my grated window at the backyard. It was nice looking. It didn’t seem nearly as threatening as it had before Ditch and I had cleaned it up.
I even considered taking some GI Joes down there and playing. I didn’t, though, mostly because I would’ve had to walk around the block, and my legs already ached from work. Plus, I was still a little nervous. The alley didn’t look any better. Actually, it looked worse, stacked as it was with our bulky, green garbage bags and that slumping easy chair, with its floral pattern of soppy leaves.
I went into the kitchen and sat down at our breakfast table. I reached up and pushed my mother’s and Junie’s smelly beer cans out of the way and rested my head against the smooth enamel surface, shell-shocked that we’d sunk so low. I knew that was why my mother was sleeping all the time. My father was gone and we were completely poor.
Outside, angular shadows covered the houses across the alley, hiding their flaws—the rusty down-spouts, the tar-covered roofs, and the cracking paint. The way they were lit, the houses actually looked pretty. I heard a dog start barking somewhere.
I glanced down and searched around the gray garages, the bent wire Fences, and the small trees. There were a couple of men—a white guy with a cap on, and a black man with a beard—strolling along, bobbing on knees as springy as shock absorbers. They went from garbage can to garbage can, then stopped when they got to the pile of crud Ditch and I had stacked up. The window was open, and their voices were clear in the heavy air. They yanked out the sagging easy chair, one arm pointing at their shins. Then they tore open the plastic bags. I couldn’t believe it. Rusty cans, hunks of glass, fabric, sticks, and other stuff formed a carpet in the alley. They rooted through it, then gave up and began looking into other backyards and searching through everything. By 32nd Street, I saw them pick up a new, baby blue garbage can. They wrestled with it, and it wrestled back, chained as it was to a dented post. But eventually, something broke, and they carried it off like it was theirs all along.
My stomach churned. I got up and walked back to my disorganized room. I flopped onto my bed and looked at the mess around me—the boxes that were open but not unpacked, the gray clumps of dust, and the blob of sheets at the end of my bare mattress. I looked up at the square glass light shade above, at the cobwebs that hung from it like strings of crystals. It made me feel alone, like the last person in Baltimore.
I rolled onto my side and propped my head up with an arm, settled a few scraps of paper in front of me, and drew a small picture of Iron Man. When I finished, I drew one of Wolverine, then pulled over the bag of comic books that Ditch had bought me, and slid The Fantastic Four out and opened it. For a few seconds, I was feeling so sorry for myself that I stared at the first page without reading, without even seeing the art. Finally, I forced my eyes to focus on the amazing opening panel, with the Thing, the Silver Surfer, and the Invisible Girl dodging a meteor shower. It soothed my nerves just to see it. I breathed a sigh of relief a few pages in: The Human Torch was still alive. Excited, I shot through the story, and when I was done, I turned back to the first page and started all over again. But before I could finish a second time, I fell asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, there was a dull blade of light angling across my messy bedroom, dust swirling in it like tiny pale bugs. There were so many particles in the air I was scared I might start choking. I stood and looked out on the day. The sky was white, which deflated me because I’d been hoping it would be sunny for my mother. As I turned from the window, my shoes squeaked on the floor. Looking down, I realized I still had them on—also all my clothes from the day before. I tried to straighten my crumpled shirt out by rubbing my hands across it like a cold iron, but it was no use. I gave up and went into the kitchen to search for something to eat.
I was sitting at the table, crunching on Pringles chips, when I heard someone start up the creaky steps from downstairs. The footfalls stopped at the top and a set of keys jangled. One slid into the lock. I watched as the angular glass knob, like a big diamond, turned, and Junie’s plump fingers, worn green polish on each nail, wrapped around the door. As she entered, I noticed her creased pair of silver sandals, which glistened in the half-light. The rubber soles were worn low beneath both of her big toes. Under a flabby arm, she carried a bag of groceries. She smiled at me as she gently shut the door, and her yellow sundress, like an unstaked tent, fluttered.
I smiled back. Junie could look sweet in her own way.
She made her way into the kitchen and set the bag down on the small counter. Before saying anything, she removed the red can of Pringles from my hands and located its plastic top.
“Your mom ever get up last night, hon?” she whispered.
I shook my head.
She pursed her lips. Dull wrinkles spread across her saggy features. She placed her hands on her giant hips, looking me over. “You’re wearing the same thing you wore yesterday,” she observed. “Why, I bet you didn’t even wash your hands after working out back.”
I looked at my palms. The creases were filled with dirt.
“I’m ashamed Ditch let you go like this,” she said. “Go wash, hon. In fact, go take a shower. I’ll cook you up some breakfast.”
I just stared at her blankly, as if I didn’t understand.
She unloaded a gray carton of eggs, a sealed package of fatty bacon, and a cold tube of Pillsbury biscuits. She pulled out a can of V-8, punctured the top with a rusty opener, then located a dusty glass from out of the cupboard, filling it halfway. “Your mom’s getting up today. Don’t you worry.”
I smiled again but continued to look at her. For some reason, I didn’t feel like I had the strength to move. My butt felt like it weighed more than a sofa. My eyes stared out in the general direction of the cabinets.
Junie gently shooed me out of the chair and steered me into my room. She watched my progress as I unlaced my sneakers and stripped grimy socks from my feet. “Shampoo yer hair,” she instructed me, turned, and went down the hall to wake my mother. I could hear their voices as I shut the bathroom door.
Out of the shower, I brushed my teeth and parted my hair with my fingers. I couldn’t see into the foggy, cracked mirror because it was too high. Opening the door and creeping down the hall with a towel wrapped around me, I saw my mom slumped in the kitchen, drinking her V-8, and talking to Junie, who was frying bacon. In my room, my whole body pounded with happiness. I got dressed as fast as I could and rushed out to see her.
“Honey,” my mom said, forcing herself to smile. She was dressed in a faded t-shirt and shorts. Her skin looked gooey and soft, and her bare feet were practically skeletal. The wrinkles from her pillow had dented lines into one side of her face, so around her nose looked as if patches of pink material had been sewn together. Her eyes were deep and watery, the lids pouchy as blood blisters. “You got toothpaste on your chin,” she told me. She wiped it off with her shirt, then gently wrapped her chilly hands around me and dug her face into my hair.
My nose was buried near her underarms, and I couldn’t help noticing that she smelled bad, like sour onions. The odor made me feel kind of miserable. I mean, as far as I knew, she’d never stunk before.
She held me for a few minutes, then made a promise. “You watch. We’re going to be alright. We’re going to do fine.”
“Mom,” I mumbled, choked up.
“We’re going to have fun here. You’ll see. We’re gonna like it.” She pushed my stringy bangs away with her nose, kissed my head, and let me go. Turning her weepy eyes from me, she looked outside. “You and Ditch did a wonderful job out back. Stuck it all in the alley, huh?”
I looked over the table and down towards the back yard. “Two guys tore open the trash bags. That’s why it’s like that.”
Junie looked around, then poked at bacon strips with a fork. “That always happens ’round here. Ditch shouldda known.” She shook her head, speared a slab of bacon, and flopped it onto a plate with a paper towel draped over it.
“They stole a garbage can, too. I watched them do it.”
Junie sampled her cooking, munching on a cooled bacon strip. “That’s why you got to chain ’em down.”
“It was chained.”
She shrugged, chewing. “Must have been plastic. Am I right? Well, see, they say buy metal when yer in the city, hon.”
the biggest geek in history
The next day, a Monday, my mom, still looking frail and sleepy, took me to register at Robert Poole Middle School. Because we didn’t know any better, we took a boxy city bus up to the Rotunda, got off, and walked nearly a mile, which wouldn’t have been so bad except my mother had trouble keeping her balance that whole week. She staggered about, and it didn’t matter what kind of shoe she had on. It was terrible, because I knew it had to do with the way she felt inside. I’d never seen her so uncoordinated.
Also, Hampden, the neighborhood that Robert Poole Middle School is located in, is kind of a tough place. The people have been there so long that it’s kind of become a little community separate from the rest of Baltimore. It’s run down, angry, and suspicious. Once, my mom and I watched a Tom Cruise movie about a steel town, and the place reminded me of Hampden. Generally, they don’t like blacks there, and it’s normal for some of the guys to harass women, especially women who don’t look like they belong there.
So my mom must have made a perfect target, worn-out and off-balance like she was. As we turned the corner at Roland Avenue and 36th Street, these three young guys started taunting her. They followed us from Roland Avenue all the way past Falls Road, till we were less than a block from the school. It was horrible.
“I’ll help ya walk, baby.”
“Ya just need to stretch them legs of yers.”
“Look like ya just rolled outta the sack. Ya enjoy the sack?”
“Look at her. She ain’t listening to ya. She thinks she’s too good for ya.”
“No way.”
“Look at her.”
“That ain’t true, is it? Ten minutes, I’d show ya who’s too good. Don’t even know what good is, I bet.”
I just wanted them to leave us alone. I wished I could have pummeled them like Thor or The Hulk. I imagined doing it, turning, grabbing them by the front of their black t-shirts, and tossing them through a crummy brick wall. I felt like it was my job to protect my mom since my dad was gone, but I couldn’t do anything but hunch my shoulders, keep my head down, and walk faster. I couldn’t even help my mom walk, and she really needed the help.
At the corner of Falls Road, we had to wait for the light to turn. All sorts of cars whizzed by, and the three guys milled about a few feet behind us, beside a blue stone bench with “Baltimore, The City That Reads” painted on it in yellow letters. Desperate for the light to change, I searched down the hill and waited for a break in the traffic so we could bolt across.
That’s when I saw a BG&E sedan cruise off the Jones Falls Expressway. As it approached, a thrill leapt into my heart. I was positive my father had returned to save the day. I searched through the rowhouse reflections on the slanted windshield as the car got bigger. I imagined that my dad would get closer and closer, then whip the steering wheel to one side and plow the three guys over, just like that, without even blinking. I would have been so proud. As I waited for the maneuver, I kept thinking, “Do it!” But the car passed straight by. From the side, I caught sight of the driver, a man I’d never seen before in my life, a flat-nosed Asian guy. I almost fainted on the sidewalk, I was so let down. And the whole time the taunts continued.