Hold Love Strong (10 page)

A
sodden soiled flag.

“Abraham! Abraham! Mister Man! Don't get on that bus!”

It was my mother. It was the winter and it was raining and it was early in the morning so the sky was a hue between black and blue with an undertone of pallid light. She was outside in her powder blue house slippers, an oversized red T-shirt, and a pair of dirty white leggings. I was waiting for the city bus to go to school with two dozen young brothers and sisters from Ever. My mother waved her hands over her head and ran through the parking lot. She was braless and her breasts bounced. She lifted her knees too high for the pace she was going. I was embarrassed, ashamed. What was she doing? What did she want? I glanced down the street. The bus was coming.

“Abraham!” she hollered. “Abraham! Wait!”

She came to the edge of the sidewalk across the street and stopped short, her momentum causing her to rise up on her toes as if every
thing but her feet wanted to leap into the street, the oncoming traffic. Between the fingers of her right hand was a cigarette. She jammed it between her lips, yanked it out, and jammed it in again. She looked left and right, threw the cigarette down, and wrapped her arms around her chest. The bus was almost there. She glared at me. She shivered. A car passed. She looked right again, saw the bus, and looked back at me with angry, begging eyes. She was frantic, but her franctiness was stuck beneath her skin, as if a great desperation was burning and pounding to get out of her body.

The bus pulled up, its steel body a wall between my mother and me. Brothers and sisters from Ever climbed onto the bus. One by one, they glanced back at me. I wondered what I should do. I wanted to get on the bus. I wanted to leave her, disappear from sight. It was January and I was in a foul mood. Things I loved, gifts I'd been given for Christmas and my birthdays were suddenly missing, lost, gone forever no matter how I scoured our apartment, no matter how many times I told on Donnel and Eric, no matter how I claimed they had taken my most precious possessions and ordered that they give them back. Although Donnel and Eric swore they didn't have them, although they even helped me look for my missing things, I called them liars and fought them. I criticized the way they looked, how they smelled, and I predicted what they were going to be, dumb niggas, criminals, fat, anything and everything that might damage them. I called them retarded, queer, and white. Someone stole my stuff. Like my Discman my grandma bought for me. And like my gold chain with my name on it that had gone missing the previous Friday, incredibly vanishing from my neck sometime between when I feel asleep on the couch and when I stood in the shower the next morning.

“Abraham!” my mother screamed. “Abraham!”

My friends watched me out of the bus windows. They waved and shook their heads and pointed at me. They laughed. They were sure
I'd done something wrong. The bus driver, a dark-skinned heavyset brother who wore leather driving gloves, leaned over his steering wheel and looked out of the door at me.

“Hey,” he said. “You getting on or what?”

There was a jagged rock lodged in my throat, balanced on a precarious ledge. I closed my eyes, squeezed them tight, saw red, and then I swallowed, opened my eyes, and said, “Go. I'll get the next one,” because if I didn't I would have climbed on the bus and looked at my mother out of the window and the rock in my throat would have plummeted, ripped a wound all the way to the soles of my feet instead of stopping in my stomach.

So the bus pulled away and it was just she and I, my mother and me. Only the width of the street separated us. She stepped off the sidewalk. A car was coming. It jammed on its brakes and honked and the driver angrily threw up his hands. My mother paid him no mind. I was sure she was going to get hit, if not by one car then by another. But my mother walked without fear. She crossed the street as if no cars were coming, her eyes fixed on me, like a ghost, like she was indestructible and made of gas. She wasn't working anymore. She didn't quit her job at McDonald's. She didn't get fired. She just stopped going, gave up waking herself. And when she did wake herself, she might disappear for days or sit on the couch, staring at the television, an emotional, combustible wreck who'd come after me with anything she could grab, shoes, plates, utensils, Donnel's bricks, Nice's trophies when I crossed her, when I asked her a question like where had she been or if she'd seen something, whatever thing of mine that had recently disappeared. But there was more, something else. My mother had lost weight and she did crazy things, like coming outside as she was, not caring what she looked like to the world, dressed as if it were an early Sunday summer morning and the only people outside were crackheads, men and women who worked early Sunday morn
ing shifts, and those who needed one item, that milk, those eggs, that roll of toilet paper so they hastily made their way to the corner store dressed in what they'd slept in, as thrown together and disheveled as she was.

“Abraham,” my mother said, stopping just short of me, standing on the street, the cold billows of breath tumbling from her mouth. “Where's that money Momma gave you?”

“What money?” I asked.

“Don't play with me,” she scolded. “The money Momma gave you for lunch.”

“The dollar?” I asked.

She screwed her eyes. “Is that all it was?”

“That's all it ever is.”

She thrust her hand into the air between us and left it there, lying flat, collecting rain. “Give it to me.”

“But it's for me to get something to eat.”

“I don't care what it's for. I need it. Now give it here.”

One dollar, that's all she wanted; all she was desperate for. I stared at her hand for a moment and then I lifted my eyes, put them even with hers. Her eyes were brown but her pupils were so large I could see my reflection in each black disc. I didn't have an umbrella. My coat was soaked. Water dripped down my face.

“Abraham,” my mother screamed. “Stop looking at me like that! Give me that dollar!”

I hadn't been looking at her. That is, I was looking at a woman who used to be her, a woman who was so absent all that was left was the rain soaking a shirt and making it cling and stick to the sodden sacks that were her breasts. Her nipples were hard. She didn't even have the wherewithal to hide them, to fold her arms across her chest, to know she was cold. I was dumbed, numbed. I jammed my wet hand into my wet jeans and pulled out the dollar bill.

She snatched it from my fingers. “What about change?” she asked. “You got change from yesterday or the day before?”

Who was she? Who was this woman glaring at me? I stared at her, searched her face for the slightest intimation. Her lips were chapped. Her eyebrows were unkempt, misshapen. When was the last time she had plucked them? I never knew she had sprigs of hair between her eyes. And her fingers? Her nails were gnawed to nubs and her cuticles were dry. Some were even bloody. Mom? Mother? Ma? Ms. Singleton? Sister of Roosevelt and Rhonda? Aunt of Donnel and Eric? Daughter of Gloria? Hey? You? Angela? Jelly? Mother of Abraham? Lady from apartment 4C?

A surging hatred pulsed in her face, made the black bags beneath her eyes sink deeper, darker. Her nostrils flared. Suddenly she coughed, hacking three times with such force that her torso twisted and her chin slammed against her chest. I thought she was going to fall down. I was sure she would buckle and crumble. And then she stopped. She cleared her throat with a rumbling gargle and spit a wad of dark green phlegm on the wet black street. Then she lifted her eyes to me. What did she see? Who was I to her? She looked hungry, starved.

She rushed at me, grabbed me, and slammed her hands in my coat pockets. She wrenched out lint and threw it over her shoulder. She dug with her fingers and found a pen cap, a paperclip, a candy wrapper and threw them down on the wet street. She smashed her hands in the front pockets of my jeans, rooted around and yanked them out. Then she stepped back and smiled a smile that was sick because she was my mother and I was her son and her smile was selfish and insincere.

“I knew you was lying,” she said. She laughed. She held a quarter and two pennies up for me to see. “What's this? Huh? Abraham? What's this? Nothing?”

My mother clenched her fist around the change and swung around. Cars were coming, passing left and right. She hesitated. She started,
then stopped, then she walked like walking was something new to her, crossing the street in a spastic, teetering rush, oncoming cars slowing, stopping. She held her hand up, thanking them. She wobbled across the yellow lines. A car passed. She zigged, then zagged, then walked straight to the other sidewalk, and stepped up onto it. I could not believe what had happened. Then she stopped, turned around.

“Abraham,” she shouted. “Get your ass to school! Go ahead. Get! You hear me? And do your work. I don't want to hear nothing from none of your teachers.”

T
he middle of May, not yet the beginning of summer, and already it was as hot as the very pit of hell, the type of hot that makes the street steam, the type of day one can't get out from under. In fact, it was so hot not even Lindbergh was moving. He sat beneath the lean-to he built by fastening cardboard and an old bedsheet to the fence at the baseline of the basketball court. He was shirtless and without shoes and socks on his feet, which were so dry his toes looked like crumbled concrete. He drank a sixteen-ounce can of Budweiser and ate a battered, almost rotten orange, peeling its skin with his dirty fingers and mumbling something to himself each time he spat a seed onto the court. I had on jeans because Eric took my shorts before I woke up. All day long, I played basketball with friends. We sprinted and leapt and wrestled for rebounds with our shirts off and only took breaks to laugh, argue a foul call, or speculate about Lindbergh. Who was that crazy old nigga talking to? What made him suddenly burst with laughter
then cease laughing even more suddenly? What did he find so funny? Who cared?

We were indefatigable, the type of burgeoning young men who weren't fazed by heatstroke, dehydration, the violence and sufferings in Ever Park or the hallucinations each ailment caused. There was Tony Carter, “Kitchen” is what we called him, with a stocky build and a premature moustache and a lisp that made every word he said begin and end with an
s.
And bigheaded, grey-eyed, perpetually bubble gum chewing Yusef Lincoln, who never believed anything anyone ever said and shouted all declarations and hypotheses down with wild, rambling decrees that bored, exhausted, or confused you into agreeing with him. There was Jefferson Waters and his identical twin brother Cleveland, who, despite having witnessed the murder of their mother and grandmother, laughed as if they were mountains with lungs and throats of thunder. Precious Hayes was six inches taller than everyone our age and as gentle as a dove, and Ishmael Arthur, aka Titty, was forty pounds overweight, twenty pounds of which was equally divided between his breasts. Andre Grant loved to dance and would just break out dancing in the middle of a game. Leroy Madison needed glasses so bad he squinted to read his watch, and Xamir Clinton, a half-Dominican brother with skin that glowed like patent leather, was the Don Juan of brothers our age, a go-getter lover who made out with any girl, anytime, anyplace, and then made out with her sisters, her cousins, and her best friends. And there were others. And then there was me, the skinniest of us all, the quiet one with the long eyelashes and the gap between his front teeth; the one who did the homework not because I wanted to but so everyone could copy it; the one who devised master plans so we could all cheat and pass our tests, like the time I wrote the answers on a Post-It and stuck it to my back so Titty, who sat directly behind me, could get a hundred on a history exam.

Halfway through our last game, just before the older teenagers and fully matured men gathered on the sidelines and kicked us off the court
so they could play, a butterfly fluttered over the court. We acted like it was an attack. Jefferson was dribbling the ball and he stopped and ducked and swatted and threw the ball at the butterfly, shouting:
Get it! Kill it! Get it!
Cleveland ran and leapt and tried to snatch the butterfly out of the sky. Precious pointed at it and announced:
We studied that shit in school! Watch out! It's a bat! Shit will eat a nigga alive!

“It is not,” Yusef called out, waving his hands above his head. “It's a butterfly! Let it be! I seen them on TV!”

Leroy squinted. “I don't see it. Where?” he said. “Where?”

I stood in the middle of the court with Xamir and Titty because Titty only ran for basketball and food, Xamir was too pretty to chase and shout about a beautiful thing, and I was more a watcher, a spectator of life, than an active participant. I absorbed my surroundings. I soaked.

The butterfly was black and orange and fazed by nothing, by no shout, no swat, and no great attempt to tear it from its flight. It flew like a plastic bag in the wind, sort of tumbling, sort of circling, sort of progressing indifferently on its way. It wandered toward Lindbergh. It stumbled down an invisible staircase. Lindbergh looked up from his orange. His battered leather-bag face became shiny and youthful. The butterfly rose and landed on the rim near where Lindbergh sat. We tiptoed across the court and stood beneath it, awed as it slowly opened and closed its wings. Lindbergh stood up, stepped out from beneath his lean-to, and joined us in watching the butterfly. He ate his orange, tearing sections from the whole, jamming them in his mouth, gumming them to pulp, and spitting the seeds out. He didn't take his eyes off of the butterfly. He tilted his head to the side as if he were holding one ear to whispered instructions.

“Fuck,” whispered Jefferson, his face dappled with acne and wet with sweat.

“Damn,” added Cleveland.

“It's tired,” said Titty.

“It's not tired,” Yusef whispered. He took the standard deep breath that preceded all of his infamous lectures. Then he continued. “Butterflies ain't never tired. They always flying. That's it. That's what they do. Like how fish is always swimming and trees is always growing. Things in nature ain't never tired. They always doing what they do.”

“How you know?” said Xamir, his mother's Spanish accent always coming out when he asked a question.

“Cause that's how nature is,” said Yusef. “It goes. Like your heart. Living don't stop.”

“Abraham,” said Leroy, squinting harder than he'd ever squinted before and standing on his tiptoes as if the few inches he rose actually gave him the chance to see. “What you think?”

Because I helped them cheat on tests, and my friends knew I wrote my grandma's letters to Roosevelt, and because Yusef had me write love letters to Beany's sister Cecily and Xamir relied on me for what to say when breaking up or wooing a new girl, I was considered the genius of our crew. Of course, I didn't believe in my intelligence. The ease with which I retained information and presented it was no more or less defining a characteristic than my outie belly button. I looked at the butterfly. I understood it was what Leroy was asking me about. But I could not help thinking about Lindbergh. I wondered what he thought, wished to say, or might mumble to himself about the butterfly later. In the years since he had come back to Ever, in the years since I first understood who and what he was, Lindbergh had descended further into degradation and madness. He was so thin his body appeared to be haphazardly pounded out of rusty tin. No rhyme or reason remained in his mind. And no longer were only his hands and feet calloused; his elbows were calloused and hard too. His cheeks were sunken. His ears were full of coarse hair. He no longer wore fatigues or had the mental stability to work for anyone else but himself. So he collected cans. Occasionally
he built a helicopter here and there. But the helicopters he built were more desperate than they were previously, more ramshackle so not just without the chance, but also without a hope of flying. Lindbergh wore stained jeans many sizes too big for him that he cinched tight with a woman's lavender belt he must have found in some bag or pile of trash. The jeans hung low, revealing the crack of his ass. He pulled them up and cinched the belt tighter as if the act enhanced his hygiene and appearance. He watched the butterfly with all of his might and faculties. What did he see? What did I think? I thought many things, all of them a swirl in my head, each thought a wing, a fluttering body. I had never seen a butterfly before. I had never heard someone else say they saw a butterfly in Ever. I wanted to touch it, hold it. What did it smell like? What did it feel like to be so, to fly so free?

But before I spoke, the butterfly rose from the rim and flew away. We shielded our eyes from the sun and watched it become a black speck in the sky. Then Lindbergh reached his hand up, waved, and shrieked like one of the seagulls that picked through the Dumpsters behind Ever.

“Cawww! Caww!” he called out. He waved more vigorously. “Caww! Caww!”

First, they were stunned. Then my friends burst with laughter.

“Nigga's crazy!” howled Titty, holding his stomach. “I'm gonna piss. I swear this nigga is gonna make me shit myself!”

“Oh my god!” Kitchen exploded, twisting and turning with laughter and then grabbing on to both Cleveland and Jefferson so he wouldn't fall down. “Oh my god! Nigga thinks he can communicate with it!”

As if he were deaf, Lindbergh calmly returned to sitting beneath his lean-to.

“That's a butterfly!” Yusef shouted at him. “They don't speak bird!”

Truth be told I broke up with laughter too. But it wasn't just Lindbergh that made me laugh or the fact that the deep, wholehearted laughter of my friends was inescapably contagious. It was the whole
scene and scenario. It was the previous impossibility of it. I would have never guessed. I would have never supposed. Not even in my wildest fantasy. What a relief, a butterfly had come and gone from Ever.

Of course, because we were still children, because we could be momentarily affected and then disaffected, we played basketball again as if nothing had happened. We banged and bumped. We chased and ran. The sound of the ball, its bounce and bump off the backboard and around the netless rim was our wind. It lifted us. It carried us away.

At four, the heat began to ease and young men began to gather on the sidelines. Then when there were ten, they kicked us off the court so they could play a full-court game. My friends and I hung around and watched them play for a while, marveling at the way Julius, a young dark-skinned man with veins rippling his calves and shins, handled the basketball like it was a yo-yo he threw around and between his legs and all over the place in front of himself; and the way Malik, his dreadlocks bundled in an old stocking and a tattoo of a horse across the span of his fan-shaped back, snatched rebounds from a foot above the rim. Eventually, one by one, and in small groups, my friends went home until I, the one who was never satisfied, the one who craved more as if there might not be another day, was the only one left.

I had nowhere to go and there was no set time I had to be in. My grandma was working the overnight shift and I was of the age and at a time in my life when I thought as long as I came home alive, my mother was satisfied. I sat against the fence on the side of the court and watched the game. I studied every move so later I could practice what I saw. Lindbergh broke down his lean-to, packed it into his shopping cart, and putting on his battered, mismatched shoes, he pushed his cart away. Then he stopped, looked up, and pointing at the sky, he scratched his face and mumbled something that made him look down and shake his head in disbelief. Then he started walking away again, the wheels of his shopping cart rattling and squeaking.

I grew hungry. Rather, my stomach realized I was no longer running and jumping and it began to churn and groan. I had not eaten since the pack of cookies I had for breakfast. I tied my shirt around my head like a turban, a style I was convinced looked good, and I rose to my feet. My left leg, from my hamstring to the tip of my big toe, was asleep, so I held on to the fence and waited for the feeling to come back to it.

“What's wrong with you?” said Alton Johnson, standing on the side of the court with the steadily increasing gathering of men, some of whom had been my uncle's friends.

“My leg's asleep,” I said.

“Shit.” Alton laughed, looking at the men standing to his right to make sure he had their attention. “That's cause you jerk off too much.” He pointed at Elijah Treadwell, who was just about to light a cigarette. “Tell 'em, E., tell this little nigga how jerk'n off makes you addicted to cigarettes. Tell him to leave that shit alone. Just say no. Go get some young pussy or something.”

“Jerk'n off don't make you addicted to cigarettes,” Elijah countered, blowing the smoke of his first inhale into the air through the hole where a front tooth used to be. “It makes your hands hairy.”

“Abraham,” Alton said, swinging his eyes back to me. “Come here. Let me see your hands. Come on. Hold 'em out!”

The men laughed and continued to tell jokes about masturbating and me, but I didn't move or speak. Some men came to the court to play. Others came to laugh and tease. And some came because they wanted to disappear, to forget adulthood, to rekindle that carefree camaraderie they had when they were teenagers, to forget their job or lack of one, to avoid the nagging of their mothers if they still lived with their mothers, the ailments of their grandmothers if they still lived with their grandmothers, and the inherent responsibilities related to having a wife, a girlfriend, and kids. As for Alton, he had a daughter my age named Virginia who fucked twenty-year-olds and stripped for me and
my friends just two days before for ten dollars. Of course, I knew better than to say anything about it. I'd seen Alton angry and the sight was violent enough to let me know Alton was not the type of brother who would deal well with his daughter's truths. Once, I'd seen him snatch a revolver out of the back of his pants, cock its hammer, and jam its barrel through a man's clenched teeth. I didn't want to die. And I sort of liked my smile. So, without so much as blinking, I stood there and took Alton's jokes, thinking,
Nigga, your daughter has got nice tits, nipples the size of dimes, and a constellation of freckles she must have inherited from you on her ass
, until my leg came around and I started walking.

“You better wrap your shit,” Alton called out from behind me. “Use a condom. Shit, the last thing I need to see is another nigga catch AIDS and walk around Ever dying.”

I dribbled my basketball along Columbus Avenue. It was crowded. But its crowd wasn't a crowd because it was a crowd I knew the moment I opened my eyes on the world. So everyone on the sidewalk; everyone talking in groups of twos, fews, and half dozens; everyone holding hands of little ones and leaning on walkers; everyone listening to headphones, sipping straws from beers in paper bags, and smoking cigarettes; those kissing; those reading books; the children drawing chalk rainbows between the litter and broken glass on the sidewalk; every man and woman and child was first and foremost my intimate environment. Some were just getting home from work. Children were just getting out of summer camp. Some had the stains of their lunch on their faces and shirts.