Made in the U.S.A. (18 page)

The boy on the hood jumped up and down again, making the same explosive sound that had awakened Fate.

He was so startled by the noise, he yelled, “Stop that!”— appropriate under other circumstances, perhaps, but certainly not this one. Three boys—almost men—threatening a scared child who was in no position to issue orders, a child about to wet his pants.

“He want you to stop, Carp. Can’t really blame him, nice vehicle like this.”

“Hell, we couldn’t get twenty dollars for this heap of metal even if Zee Dee high on ugly dust. Now, we played with this white boy long enough.”

As one boy forced opened the back door, Fate slid to the other side of the car, just as the door on that side opened. When hands grabbed him by the back of his neck, he struggled with his feet and fists to stay in the car but was no match for the force of the boy, who dragged him out and stuck a gun in his face.

“Now, you little bastard, empty them pockets. And don’t give me no shit. Say one word, it’ll be your last.”

“Okay,” Fate said as he pulled change from one pocket, then reached for the other, which was empty.

Then something happened so fast that Fate wouldn’t be able to recall all of it until later.

“Cops!” yelled the boy on the hood as he jumped off the car and ran toward the tree line.

The boy with the gun tucked it into the waist of his jeans, then headed toward an office building in the distance. The third ran toward the Strip as a police car with sirens blasting and lights flashing pulled into the library parking lot.

The policeman in the passenger seat jumped out and went after the boy with the gun, while his partner pulled out to follow the one running toward the Strip.

Within thirty seconds, all the noise and action had moved on, leaving Fate alone, his heart pounding, sweat spilling into his eyes.

He could think of only two scenarios: The police would come back to question him, or the gang would return and kill him. He wasn’t crazy about either outcome, so he did what most eleven-year-olds would do. He hid.

He found a spot behind a thick hedge that ran along the front of the library, where he worked to bend his body into the smallest shape he could, then pulled loose a couple of branches of greenery to give himself a vantage point so he could see the car.

All he could pray for was that Lutie would beat the police and gang to the car. And this time, God said yes.

When Fate saw her turn the corner heading toward the library, he left his hiding spot, yelling at her.

“Run, Lutie! Run! We have to get out of here fast.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“Come on! We’ve got to go. I’ll tell you why later.”

Hearing something new in his voice, something Lutie had never heard before, she started running. They reached the car at the same time.

“A gang tried to rob me, one of them stuck a gun in my face and . . .”

Lutie started the car.

“Then the police came and—”

“The police?! What’d you tell them, Fate? What’d you say about us?”

“They didn’t ask me anything, they just took off after those guys, but they’ll be back, Lutie. Trust me, the police will be back to ask us—”

Lutie had heard enough to know they had to get the hell away from the library. She gunned the car, squealing around corners, running stop signs, working her way into heavier traffic. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but she knew for sure she would never again let her little brother spend another night sleeping in a car all by himself. Never again.

“Where are we going, Lutie?”

“He actually pointed a gun in your face? A real gun?”

“Yeah.”

Lutie didn’t want him to know that she felt as though her heart were in her throat, didn’t want him to know how much she wanted to stop the car and cradle him in her arms.

“So, do you know where we’re going?” he asked again.

“No, dick-head. I don’t have a clue.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
HE MOTEL LUTIE
moved them into was called the Gold Digger Inn, the cheapest place she could find: $19.95 per night or $10.00 for three hours. The Digger, as the locals called it, was most popular with long-distance truckers. They could park their rigs on the huge lot behind the motel for no charge, gamble in the Digger Casino, have a meal of all-you-can-eat pancakes any time of the day or night for ninety-nine cents, or take their plea-sure with the prostitutes who roamed the premises 24/7.

The girls and women plied their trade in the Digger for the johns willing to pay not only for their services, but also for the cost of a three-hour room, or they performed their work in the truck’s cab, usually on the sleeping berth behind the driver’s seat.

Lutie and Fate’s room held no surprises, but for the price, they hadn’t expected any. They had shelter. A door with two locks, a window air conditioner that actually worked, two beds—real beds with pillows and covers—clean towels, a toilet, a tub, and a TV. After the way they had been living, they no longer took such amenities for granted.

Unfortunately, there was almost always the noise of a bed headboard bouncing against the walls on either side of their room or the one above them. Occasionally, they were awakened by a crash of glass from the parking lot, and on their second night there, they heard three gunshots nearby.

The biggest disappointment of all, though, was that living at the Digger removed Fate from the Paradise school zone. But he didn’t say a word about his letdown. He knew Lutie was doing what she could to keep him safe at night while she was working at Denny’s. Besides, now that they were paying twenty dollars a night for the motel room, they couldn’t possibly put together the six or seven hundred dollars they figured they’d need to rent an apartment in the Paradise zone.

Fate spent the first week of living at the Digger trying to work his way into a job. The library where Lutie had parked Floy’s car had been within walking distance of the two golf courses where Fate had made money selling golf balls. But here, on the east side of the city, there were no golf clubs, public or private, so he had to depend on collecting cans, and the nearest recycling station was miles away. As a result, Lutie drove him there every few days, the backseat and the trunk filled with boxes and plastic sacks of aluminum cans.

Sometimes, he actually lost money because of the driving distance and the rising cost of gas. But he didn’t mention that to Lutie. Truth is, they had talked only when necessary since the day she quit working at the Desert Palms. Sometimes she took two or three showers a day, and he occasionally heard her groaning in her sleep. Odd and sad behavior for her, but when he’d asked her to tell him what was wrong, he never got an answer.

In his walks looking for cans, he located three elementary schools within a mile or two of the Digger. And though he tried to avoid comparing them with the Paradise, his effort was useless.

One was a brick building constructed in 1940, according to a plaque near the door, but time had dealt with it harshly. Several trailers and one prefab formed a disjointed square at the back of the school. One of the trailer doors had been ripped from its hinges; Fate peeked inside just long enough to see that it was being used as a crack house during the summer recess.

Another, Martin Luther King Elementary, was a three-story concrete-block structure, but all the windows on the first floor were covered with bars. He wondered if the bars had been added to keep students in or to keep intruders out.

The third school was long and lean, one story decorated with graffiti. By looking through grimy windows, he located the library, a room about twice the size of his and Lutie’s room at the Digger. The shelves lining three walls were only half-filled with books. A world map pinned to a bulletin board had been torn in two, the floor was covered with stained carpet, and the chalkboard contained a message that said, “liberiuns wo’nt give head.”

Suddenly, the face of a black man appeared on the other side of the windowpane; a second later, the window flew up.

“Whatcha want here?” the man asked. “Whatcha lookin’ for?”

“Nothing, really. But I might be going to school here this year, so I was curious about the library. I like to read.”

“You going to come to school
here
? Why?”

“Well, my sister and I live in the Gold Digger Inn, and it’s not so far from here.”

“No, it ain’t far at all. Just the first stop along the line.”

“The line of what?”

“You stay there and watch me, let me show you the line.” The man, with salt-and-pepper hair—more salt than pepper—stood a broom he was holding in the corner, then erased the comment from the board. He drew a star on one end and said, “This is the Gold Digger where you livin’. Right?”

“Yes, sir.”

The man then made a star a couple of feet beyond the first one. “There the school where we standin’ this minute.” He put down a third star past the center of the chalkboard. “This is the jail. County jail ’bout five mile from here.” Finally, he drew the fourth star at the far end of the board, put down the chalk, and turned to face Fate. “That”—he tapped the final star—“the prison.”

He paused, waiting for his lesson to sink in. “That the line, boy. You come to this school, it only be the second stop on the line. You hear what I’m sayin’?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

Three days later, on Fate’s fourth visit to the school, Joshua Washington, the only janitor at James Baldwin Elementary, gave Fate a job—a secret job, in case any of the teachers or staff showed up and asked about the boy. Should that happen, Joshua said he’d tell them Fate was his grandson, another secret between the man and the boy.

Fate had to take care of all the jobs that involved bending, as Joshua had arthritis in his spine. And there were plenty of jobs that required bending: holding the dustpan while Joshua swept debris into it; pulling up all the rubber mats used in the gym for floor exercises, then taking them outside to be hosed down; lugging boxes of textbooks to the rooms where they would be used. Joshua was happy to pay Fate three dollars a day from his own pocket and share the lunch his wife sent with him every day. Though this was the time of the year when Joshua’s job was most demanding, it would provide work for Fate only until school started.

But there was a catch. In addition to Fate’s help for six hours a day, he had an assignment to read many of James Baldwin’s books, a grand assignment for a book lover who had never read any of Baldwin’s work. Not so for Joshua, who had read them all, some several times over. For instance, he’d read
Notes of a Native Son
seven times and
Go Tell It on the Mountain
four times.

He told Fate that at home he had all of Baldwin’s books, which he kept on a special shelf with a framed autographed picture of Baldwin dated 1975, when he spoke and signed his new book,
Just Above My Head,
in a bookstore in Harlem while Joshua was there visiting his sister.

Each time Fate finished one of Baldwin’s books, he and Joshua would discuss it for days. Once, following a brief rainstorm, Joshua reclaimed one of Baldwin’s lines:
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”

Fate sometimes thought that God was looking out for him and Lutie. The notes left for them, and the food they found on the hood of the car and in the library. All of that came from someone. And if it didn’t come from God, then maybe Fate’s mother was watching over them or maybe even Floy. But he felt pretty certain that it wasn’t his daddy because he didn’t figure Jim McFee had the status of an angel.

Anyway, whether it was a guardian angel or fate or just plain luck, he had traded the Clark County Library several miles away for the Gold Digger Inn, the James Baldwin Elementary School, and Joshua, a new and badly needed friend.

Joshua told him about the teachers he’d be with in most of his sixth-grade classes, talked about the ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t even try to hide their bigotry, told him about the big, tough-talking gym teacher who was the sweetest, most caring, most accepting of all, gave him a heads-up on those teachers who hated their jobs and those who loved teaching.

Joshua also told him about the students who’d be in his classes, told him the ones to steer clear of—the “hotheads,” he called them—boys who fought with their fists, boys most likely to have a knife, and the ones who managed to get guns into the school despite the metal detectors. Joshua had found a half dozen or so hidden around the building—taped to the backs of toilet tanks or on the tallest shelves in the supply room. Once he even found one wired to the bottom of a teacher’s chair. Said he’d found Rugers, Colts, Smith & Wessons, and even a TEC-9, “the cop-killer gun,” Joshua called it.

“Some of these boys is just plain crazy, few of the girls, too. Me and my wife, Doreen, raised three girls. No boys. Each time Doreen got pregnant, I was wishing and praying for a boy, but the Lord knew what was best, ’cause our girls turned out fine. Two of them finished high school, and both of them went off to college.”

“What about the other one?” Fate asked. “Your third girl? Is she still in school?”

“Bea. Honey Bea, I called her. She died. Fifteen years old and she died.”

“Was she sick?”

“Drive-by shooting. One crazy boy in a car full of crazy boys just driving around to find someone to shoot. My Honey Bea walking with a bunch of kids going to the mall. And the boy who shot her? Didn’t even know her. Didn’t even know her name.”

Joshua turned away, picked up a bucket of soapy water and a mop, then headed down the hall. “This school got a lot of them crazy boys. You best to steer clear of them hotheads, Fate.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll try. I’ll sure enough try.”

Lutie was barely holding on to her job at Denny’s. But if she knew it, she didn’t show it.
Most
of the time she came in to work her shift, and usually she wasn’t more than an hour or so late. But since she didn’t have a phone, and probably wouldn’t have thought to call if she did, her coming in for work was a crapshoot.

And though her body might have been there, her mind wasn’t. She always seemed to find herself reliving that day at the Desert Palms.