Miracle's Boys (9 page)

“I ain't steal that car, Ty'ree,” Newcharlie said.

Maybe Ty'ree couldn't see it but I could. There was something real sad about Newcharlie right then. It was that same look he'd had that day the vet told him that dog had died. The same look he had the day we buried Mama. He looked ... broken.

“You ain't a nobody, Cha,” I said, but I don't think either of them heard me.

Ty'ree cursed again. He was madder than I'd seen him in a long time. “What the hell were you doing in it? And what were you doing fighting in the street?” He took a quick step and grabbed Newcharlie by the shoulder and swung him around. Newcharlie tried to frown, but his lips were trembling. “You don't give a damn about anybody but yourself, do you? You mess up, Lafayette goes to Cecile and you go to jail. Is that what you want, man?”

Newcharlie shook his head. He was crying full out now. “I didn't know anything. Aaron and me—we went to this party. Only it wasn't a party, it was—it was an initiation.”

Ty'ree pushed him, hard. “What are—”

“Stop, T.” I tried to shout, but my voice was soft and high, like a scared little kid's. I looked around, nervous. But there was nobody else on the street.

Ty'ree stopped pushing him and glared at me.

“What're you talking about, Charlie? You better talk to me, 'cause I don't have a lot of patience for your junk tonight. I'm about ready to send both of you packing.”

“For the Fordhams,” Newcharlie said.

“The what?”

“It's a gang, T,” I said.

Ty'ree looked like he didn't know if he wanted to smack me or Newcharlie first.

“What—?”

“I just thought it was a party,” Newcharlie said. “I didn't know Aaron was in no gang. I thought he was lying. Then he showed me his colors. You had to fight somebody. I didn't want to do it, but—” He started choking. After a long time he had enough breath to talk again. “It makes you
somebody.
Aaron got all these other homeboys around him now. He don't really need me—” Newcharlie started gulping again. He put his head in both his hands like he was trying to hide inside them. “It makes you somebody. It gives you people.”

“How'd you get in the car?” Ty'ree asked.

“I—I was—scared, T. This guy, this older guy, said he'd take me home. Aaron got in this other car, and he said I'd be all right. I thought it was cool. I just—I just wanted to go home.... Aaron said they'd just drive around a little bit. Said I didn't have to fight. But the guy—the guy in the car, he said I needed a couple of punches, toughen me up.” Charlie swallowed, and opened and closed his mouth a couple of times like he was trying to drink the air. “I just wanted to go home,” he whispered.

Ty'ree shook his head and looked off down the block. “Damn,” he whispered.

“You in a gang now, Newcharlie?”

Ty'ree glared at me but I didn't care. If Newcharlie was in a gang now, he'd be the next one in our family to die. Gang members were always dying. I felt my bottom lip starting to tremble. I didn't know what I'd do if I lost somebody else.

But Newcharlie shook his head. “I ain't never going back.”

“What happened to Aaron?” I asked.

Newcharlie shook his head again. “I don't know. I thought the cops got him, too, but they didn't.” He pressed the cut on his swollen hand against his mouth and sucked it hard. There was a tiny cut on his cheek that I hadn't noticed before. I wondered what other bruises he had.

“I don't want to see Aaron nowhere near our place,” Ty'ree said. “You hear me?”

Newcharlie nodded and wiped rain off of his face. “I didn't want to fight nobody,” he kept whispering.

Ty‘ree put his arm around Newcharlie's shoulder. His other hand was still clenching in and out of a fist. “C'mon,” he said. “Let's get on out of this rain.”

MAMA READ ALL THE TIME. WHEN SHE WASN'T reading to me, she was reading to herself. She'd always have one or two books in her bag 'cause she liked to read on the train going to work. We used to play a game where every day I'd ask her to name a book and then tell me the name of the person who wrote it. If it was one she'd said already, she'd have to give me a dollar. I earned one dollar in all of me and Mama's years of playing that game.

She liked to read this writer named Toni Morrison. Once she read me something Toni Morrison had written.

Listen to this, Lafayette,
Mama said.

I was sitting across from her at the dining-room table, flipping through the pages of a comic book. I was probably eight or nine, and it was dark outside. Too dark for me to be out but not for Ty'ree and Charlie. So I was sitting there being a little bit mad, sitting right near her but not really caring about what she had to say.

“The function of freedom,”
Mama read,
“is to free someone else.”

I shrugged and went back to my comic book.

You ever thought about that, Laf?
Mama asked me.
That being free means you help somebody else get free?

I shook my head.

She put her book down.

Mama looked at me and frowned.

Well, I'm not,
I said.
If I was free, then I'd be able to go outside like Ty'ree and Charlie.

Then Mama laughed. But I didn't see what was so funny about the truth.

THE PHONE RANG IN THE LATE AFTERNOON. Ty‘ree and Newcharlie were still asleep, but I'd been lying in bed talking to Mama, telling her about the precinct and how she didn't have to worry 'cause it was a place I never wanted to see the inside of again. She was sitting at the foot of my bed, rubbing my feet the way she would some nights when I couldn't fall asleep.
The way the lights were, Mama? It made you feel real sad inside. Like your life was over. Mama? Is Newcharlie's life over?

“Somebody answer that!” Ty‘ree yelled from his room, his voice sounding sleepy and muffled like it was coming from underneath his pillow. Newcharlie groaned and turned over. His face was still swollen, even though Ty'ree had made him ice it when we got home.

Mama's hands faded from my feet; then her face was gone too. I stared at Newcharlie for a moment, my question hanging in the air over his bed. The phone rang two more times, and I got out of bed to get it.

“Yo, Lafayette? It's Smitty. What took you so long to answer, man?”

“Nothing. We still sleeping.” I sat down at the dining-room table and squinted against the sun coming in through the windows. “What's up?”

“Why so late?”

“What's up?” I asked again, ignoring his question. I didn't want to give him anything to ask questions about.

“You feel like playing ball or something?” Smitty asked.

“I thought you was at your cousin's house for the weekend.”

“Nah, man. My aunt said she was taking us all to church this afternoon, and me and PJ said we had to get home and catch up on schoolwork.” Smitty laughed. “She's taking my cousin to church every weekend now, and he's like‘C'mon Smitty, it'll be fun.' I was out of there ...”

I yawned and sat there in my underwear listening to Smitty go on for a while.

“You feel like going to the park?”

I pushed some leaves from one of Newcharlie's plants out of the way and looked out the window. “Yeah. I'll meet you downstairs in a few.”

“Don't be taking a long time, Laf.”

“I just gotta get dressed, man. Give me like twenty minutes.”

“You said a few—”

“Okay, then forget about it—”

“Okay, okay. Twenty minutes. Jeez, man. Go back to bed and wake up on a better side.”

He hung up, and I wrote a note for Ty'ree telling him where I was going, ate four pieces of bread with peanut butter, then went back into my room and pulled my pants on over my shorts. I sniffed under my arms, then thought better of it and went and took a quick shower. By the time I came back into the room, Newcharlie was sitting up in bed, touching his lip and frowning.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“Hang with Smitty and PJ—probably play ball.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I pulled my pants back on slowly, wishing I knew what to say. Wishing I knew how to free him.

Newcharlie looked at me for a moment like he was gonna say he was coming with us, but then he lay back down and turned toward the wall. I stood staring at his back, wishing he'd turn around and say he'd come.

He didn't, and I didn't know how to ask him.

SMITTY AND PJ WERE SITTING ON MY STOOP rolling a basketball back and forth between them. PJ is two years younger than me and Smitty, small and quiet. Everyone called Smitty the pretty one on account of his dimples and straight teeth. Which I guess made PJ the ugly one, since he wore braces and didn't have dimples. I didn't think Smitty was all that easy to look at—not like the way grown people made a fuss over him.

Smitty stood up and brushed something off his overalls. They were new and stiff-looking. His aunt was rich and always buying them new stuff. PJ had on a new pair of sneakers. It wasn't that I was jealous that they had rich relatives, I just didn't think Smitty needed to be flashing his new stuff every minute. I was wearing a pair of pants that used to be Newcharlie's and the green shirt Ty'ree had given me a long time ago.

“Yo,” Smitty said. “I hear they got Charlie last night. He going back to Rahway?”

I took the ball from them and bounced it a couple of times, dribbling it back and forth between my legs.

“Might want to go on upstairs and ask him about that,” I said, knowing full well that Smitty was scared of Newcharlie. Once Newcharlie'd caught him asking me questions about my daddy dying. He'd let Smitty know right off it wasn't any of his business. Not in a nice way, either.

Smitty glanced up at our window. “Nah,” he said. “That's okay.”

“Who'd you hear that from?” I tried to sound like I didn't care. I hated how fast news traveled around this neighborhood.

“Aaron told my cousin and my cousin told me. They really got Charlie?”

“Aaron should keep his mouth closed if he don't know what he's talking about. Charlie ain't going back to Rahway. He's right upstairs sleeping. You here to play ball or give me the third degree?”

“I feel like playing some ball,” PJ said, jumping off the stoop and trying to grab the ball from me. He was wearing the kind of sneakers Ty'ree'd said he was going to buy me soon's he could. When he saw me staring at them, PJ looked kind of embarrassed. That's what I liked about PJ—he wasn't a show-off.

 

 

THE PARK'S ONLY A FEW BLOCKS DOWN AND wasn't too crowded. Most of the hoops had bigger guys around them, but we found one at the edge of the park where a group of guys were leaving. I didn't realize until I got close that one of them was Aaron. He was patting a tall skinny guy on his back and laughing. I swallowed. There wasn't a single scratch on his face. He looked like he'd spent the night having a good time, not getting his butt kicked, then waiting up in some dark precinct until his brothers came to his rescue. When Aaron saw me, he stopped laughing. He was wearing a red-and-blue scarf tied around his head. Gang colors. I thought of yesterday. It seemed like forever ago that him and Newcharlie were sitting up in our room talking about who was the baddest. And all the times I got home from school to find him and Newcharlie hanging out. Like they were the two best friends in the world. Like they were brothers.

“What's up, Lala?” Aaron said to me. Some of the guys he was with kept walking. A couple turned around, I guess to see who this Lala person was.

“Nothing's up, A. What's up with you?” I felt myself starting to shake, inside where nobody but God could see it. I saw Newcharlie's surprised broken-up face and I hated Aaron. Deep.

“No thing. No thing at all. What's up with Charlie?” Some of the guys whc had been walking away stopped then and turned, all of them looking at me and waiting for an answer.

PJ came up beside me. I took the ball from him and dribbled it a couple times, hoping it would hide my shaking.

“Charlie's all right,” The sound of the ball was familiar. Comforting. “Say he don't need no colors to be bad. Say he got his badness inside of him.”

PJ looked at me, his eyes wide. I almost smiled. I wasn't scared. Not now. Not anymore.

“What are you saying?” Aaron asked, frowning.

“Just what I'm saying.”

Aaron took a step toward me, and one of the guys pulled him back. “He's just a kid,” the guy said. “He don't know.”

Aaron glared at me. I looked back at him. Not frowning but not smiling either. Just looking. It seemed a long time ago I wanted him to like me, to be my friend. But it didn't matter anymore. I didn't need him. Charlie didn't need him either.

The other guys started heading out of the park.

“You better watch yourself, Lala,” Aaron said. “You don't know me, little boy.”

He turned and caught up with the other guys. He was right. I didn't.

Me and Smitty and PJ headed over to the empty hoop. We played some one-on-one, then just shot the ball around until it was almost dark. We didn't say much to each other.

I shot the ball through the hoop again and again, trying hard not to think about Newcharlie, about his broke-looking face and that dog he'd found that time. The one that didn't make it.