The Dream Bearer (11 page)

For three days Reuben didn't get out of bed
except to go to the bathroom. For three days Mom brought his food in to him and put it on the table next to the bed, but he didn't eat it. When she said we had to watch him, I asked her why but I already knew the answer. She was afraid he was going to hurt himself. I was afraid too.

One morning I went into the bathroom and there were drops of blood on the sink. My heart started beating like crazy, and for a while I couldn't catch my breath. But then I remembered I had seen blood drops on the sink before. I didn't want to tell Mom. Not just yet, not until we saw what was going to happen with Reuben.

The bathroom door locked, and I figured that's why Ty took his drugs in there. I wondered if he looked at
himself in the mirror when he used the needle. I wondered if your own image could frighten you. Ty was asleep and snoring loudly when I returned to bed after seeing the blood. Lying in the darkness, I realized I felt better knowing that it was Ty hurting himself than Reuben. I had seen junkies on the street before, had even brushed by them in the hallway. It was something bad I knew about. Reuben was still far away from anything I could relate to.

The story about the Henson Project was in both of the papers I read. There was the picture of Mr. Kerlin, a big cigar sticking out of his mouth, saying how he had decided to make a major contribution to the community.

“What he's done,” Mom said, “is make a lot of money by selling his building to the city. The Henson Project is going to lease it from the city instead of buying it.”

“And what's going to happen to Reuben?” I asked.

Her mouth tightened up and she shook her head. “He dumped your father the same way he dumped the building,” she said after a while.

“That just stinks,” I said.

“It's his right to do what he wants with his building,” Mom said. “He owned the building and he had the right to sell it. If I owned the building and could have made a lot of money on it, I don't know if I would have done anything different.”

“I think you would have,” I said.

Mom watched Reuben at night. She got him to drink
water and juice, but he still didn't eat any regular food. He just kept lying in the bed, mostly with the lights out.

We took turns watching Reuben. Mom wanted one of us to be in the house all the time to look in on him. Ty said he didn't want to watch Reuben because he was a cripple. He didn't say it in front of Mom, but he spit the words out to me when we were in our room.

“I know you're using,” I said. “I saw the blood from the needle on the sink.”

“You don't know nothing, jerk!” he sneered.

“Tell me about how I'm a jerk, Ty,” I said to him. “Tell me how I'm a punk and Reuben's a cripple and all the dudes on the street are punks.”

“Maybe if I kicked your butt you'd understand why you're a jerk,” he answered, half standing.

“Yeah, maybe.” I stood and faced him.

He came over and pulled his fist back as if he was going to punch me, forced out a phony laugh, and grabbed his jacket. I knew he was headed for the streets.

Loren said he would come over and help watch Reuben when it was my turn. “We can watch him together and play chess.”

“He'll be okay,” I said. “I just got to watch him a little bit when Mom goes out shopping or down to the Social Security office.”

I didn't want Loren to see Reuben lying on the bed.
Loren was my best friend in the world, but it still made me feel bad for him to see how Reuben looked. When he was awake he would be very still, his eyes almost shut but not quite. If I came into the room, I wouldn't know if he saw me or not. But when he was asleep it was worse. He would be twitching and moving his arms around as if something was coming at him. Sometimes he would make whimpering noises, like a child. I didn't want Loren to see any of this, and I didn't want him to talk about it either.

I didn't think things could get worse, but they did. On Thursday night I woke up and heard Mom yelling. It was three minutes past four o'clock.

“Reuben,
please
!” Mom was yelling.

I got my pants on as fast as I could and ran into the kitchen. Mom was in her bathrobe, and Reuben had his clothes on and was tying up his shoes.

“Where can you go this time of night?” Mom asked. “Where can you go?
Please!
”

I ran back to my room and turned on the light. I shook Ty but I couldn't get him up. He smelled bad, like he might have been drinking. My old sneakers were in front of the closet, and I got them on just as I heard the front door close.

“Don't go after him,” Mom said, as she passed me. “I'll get dressed and we'll get a cab.”

“You know where he's going?”

“No,” I heard her call.

There was no way we would find him if we waited for Mom to get dressed. I grabbed a shirt and went out the door and down the stairs.

When I got down to the stoop, I didn't see him. It was rainy and cold and dark, and the streets were almost empty.

“Hey! Boy!”

Across the street there was a couple standing near the street lamp. The man was pointing toward the corner near the grocery store.

I looked and didn't see anything, but I ran across the street anyway. My sneakers weren't tied but they didn't fall off. When I got to the corner, I looked down the street and saw Reuben walking and moving his hands like he was talking to somebody. I walked faster but stayed a little way behind him. When I got kind of close, I stopped and tied my sneakers.

I thought about calling to him and asking him not to go, but I didn't know what to say. Mom had already asked him not to go. So we walked through the rain a
while, him in front about fifteen steps ahead of me. Sometimes I could hear him talking, but I didn't know what he was saying except I could hear the word “man.”

We were headed downtown and he was walking fast, but I didn't mind. I could keep up with him. When we reached the corner of 135
^th
Street, near the hospital, he looked back and saw me. He just stood on the corner for a minute looking at me. I didn't know what to do, so I lifted my chin, the way Loren does sometimes when he wants people to think he's not afraid.

Reuben turned away again and continued walking. The rain came down harder. The rain was warm but I was getting soaked and cold. We walked all the way down to 125
^th
Street, and then he started across town, heading west. I didn't think he knew where he was going, but I was glad it was a long way. The walking calmed me down a little even though I was still scared.

Reuben stopped when we reached St. Joseph's Church and turned toward me.

“What you want?” he asked. His voice came out like a growl.

I didn't say anything. I just stood and looked back at him. I couldn't get my chin up again but I kept looking at him.

As he went farther, he staggered a little. I knew he hadn't been drinking and thought he might be sick. We went past the George Bruce Library and the Cotton
Club, to where the streets are made of cobblestones, and a car almost hit him. The guy in the car yelled out the window, and Reuben went back and kicked the fender.

My heart was beating fast when the car backed up. I thought it was going to run into Reuben, but it just circled around him with the driver yelling and cursing as he went by.

Reuben kept walking, and I saw we were headed toward the river.

There wasn't anything pretty about the Hudson River off 125
^th
Street. The barges tied there were squat and ugly, but me and Loren still came down to watch the boats glide by and say what we would do if we owned any of them. We always came in the day, never at night.

The fence across the pier was in bad condition. In the darkness I could see its ragged silhouette against the neon lights. I had seen men fishing on the pier and had wanted to fish with Loren, but he said that his father told him there were rats all around the pier.

Reuben walked a little way out on the pier and sat down on a wooden piling.

I was so scared.
Oh God, please don't let my father jump in the water.
I was crying and trying to stop from crying at the same time. I was thinking that I should go call Mom or the police, but I was afraid that if I left, I wouldn't see him again. I didn't want to see him
go into the water, but I was afraid to leave and not see what he was going to do.

I was shaking and it was getting hard for me to breathe. The rain had stopped and it was getting colder. There was little light behind Reuben, and I could barely see his dark form. I wondered what Mom would do, and I thought she would call to him, or maybe go over to him.

He didn't move for a long time, and I finally stopped crying. I started thinking about Mr. Moses sitting in the church and looking at the man after the lynching. He said the man had not been the same after his friend had been lynched, had stopped being whole, and had died.

I thought the man had just become so sad that he just didn't want to live anymore. I thought that Reuben was that sad now. I could feel his sadness all in me and felt that my whole body was crying. I didn't want to lose him.

It was so cold on the pier.

I thought about the man in the church, and then I thought about him watching as they were about to hang his friend, and I wondered how he felt. Did he feel cold? Did he shake like I was shaking?

I got up and edged my way toward Reuben.

“Go home,” he said quietly.

I felt for a place to sit and sat next to him.

“Go home, boy,” he said again. This time his voice
was rough, but not mad like it had been before. It was a weary voice, as if he was really exhausted.

“I'm cold,” I said.

He didn't answer.

“You think there are rats under the pier?” I asked.

“You scared?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

“You a boy or a little girl?” he asked. “You scared of a rat?”

“I'm scared of what's happening,” I said. “I don't want to be sitting in the dark. I want to be home with you and Mom and Ty.”

“Go on home.”

“Come with me.”

“I ain't got no home,” he said. “Your mama pays the bills—it's her home, not mine.”

“Everybody got a home. Just sometimes we're not in them. You and me got a home,” I said. “We just need to get in it. We just need to make it okay. We can do that.”

“I don't need your advice.”

“Would you hold me?”

“Why?”

“I'm cold.”

“What you coming out here in the middle of the night for?” he asked. “Walking in the rain without a coat on or…”

Silence. Then the sound of the water slapping against
the pier. Cars humming along the highway. I slid closer and leaned against him. I could feel his warmth as I sat next to him. He put his arm around me, and we sat for a while and then I was crying again. At first he didn't say anything and then he asked me why I was crying, and I said I didn't know exactly. He said that was okay, not to know exactly.

The sky turned gray, then it streaked with light over the river, and the outlines of the buildings broke through. Then it was light and there was a new day starting. And it was Reuben standing up and pulling me to my feet, and us walking together.

“Look at us, two bums walking through Harlem. We don't have enough money between us to get a subway ride,” he said. “Ain't that a shame?”

“It's okay.”

“And what were you going to do if I fell in the river? You going to jump in and pull me out? I bet you don't even know how to swim. Do you?”

“I can swim a little,” I said.

“You can't swim good without lessons,” Reuben said. “You want to learn how to swim good?”

“Sure.”

We got to the block and there was a police car in front of the house. Reuben saw it and stopped.

“It's okay,” I said.

He told me to go upstairs and get some money out of his pants so we could go buy some breakfast. I asked
him if he was going to wait for me to come back.

“I'll be here,” he said.

I don't know why I had to whisper it, but I did. I tiptoed and whispered in his ear. “Daddy, don't leave.”

He said he wouldn't.

In my dream I was standing on a wooden balcony
in a small town, the kind you see in old cowboy movies. The houses were low and square with wooden shingles. All of them had balconies. There were people standing, as I was, or sitting with their legs dangling over the sides. It was bright out, not sunny, but still bright.

The wide street below the balconies was empty except for two men. One was tall with wide shoulders that sloped slightly to one side as he walked; the other man was smaller and had an orange-colored backpack. Then I heard a slight rumbling. It sounded like thunder and I looked up at the sky, but it was still clear. People on the balconies were shouting and closing their shutters. Some were pointing down the road. I looked to see what they were pointing at and saw
hundreds of tiny things coming toward the middle of town. Even without knowing what they were, I could sense that they were dangerous.

The smaller man began to run as the creatures—I could see that they were rats, but not ordinary rats; they had rat bodies and human faces—were drawing closer. I turned toward the two men and saw that the small man was not a man at all. It was Loren. I screamed for him to run. I watched Loren running toward one of the houses. He banged on a closed door with both fists. It opened for only a second and he rushed inside.

I turned to see what the other man was doing and saw that he had fallen. The rats were screaming as they attacked the man on the ground. They were all around him, biting at him, jumping toward his face and chest, and he was beating them back with his hands. It was my father!

Looking around for a way to get off the balcony to go help him, I saw that there weren't any doors or windows into the building. I tried to climb over the railing, but it just got higher and higher. There was nothing I could do but look down into the street and watch the rats attacking.

My father was still in the street below me, and I was shocked to see what he was doing. The rats were on him and he was fighting them off. It was the same motions he made when he was lying on the bed, except now I could see what he was fighting. And then, as suddenly as they had come, the rats began to speed off. They made an eerie, shrill noise that echoed against the old buildings. In the middle of the
road, fighting frantically as if the rats were still there, was my father.

Alone on the balcony, I knew I was dreaming, and at the same time I was watching the dream, and it was filling my head with meanings and feelings, and I knew I would wake up with it in my mind.

When I came out of the dream, I was sweating and breathing hard. It was still dark. In the glow of the light from the radio dial I looked at where Ty lay sleeping. The linoleum floor was cool against my feet as I went to my parents' bedroom and eased the door open slightly. Mom's steady breathing was good. I knew that Daddy was at work.

 

“I never have a dream,” Loren said. “I don't even remember going to bed. I get in bed and then—bang!—it's morning.”

“That's because you still have a baby brain,” I said. “Babies don't dream.”

I had told Loren about my dream, but not that I had that same dream, with the rats and my father in the street, over and over again. It came so many times that I didn't want to go to sleep. I wanted to tell my father about my dream, but I thought it wasn't time yet. He had found a job in a warehouse, loading groceries at night for morning deliveries. He slept in the daytime. When he slept, I could hear him talking in his sleep. If I opened his door, I could see his body jerk and move as if he was
moving away from something that was after him.

When school was first out and the city streets were taking on the sweaty excitement of summer, I had thought that growing up meant understanding everything. But now that I understood more things, yet couldn't change how people lived their lives or how they suffered as they fought their demons, I knew that understanding wasn't enough. I wanted to understand how people lived, and what they were feeling, and I thought I was smart enough, or maybe able to sense what was happening. I just didn't know what I could do with it all, or if I could hold all the feelings inside of me.

The last time I saw Mr. Moses was the day me and Loren and Sessi were sitting on the stoop and he came and said he just needed to say good-bye to us. He had a suitcase with him. It was old, with a strap around the middle, and one end was held together with heavy black tape.

“Why you going?” Loren asked.

“Well, son, old men fly away with their dreams, just disappear into the night,” Mr. Moses said. “And young men with vision take their place. It's time for me to take these old bones south where the weather is a lot warmer and a lot kinder.”

“Like the birds,” Sessi said.

Mr. Moses looked at Sessi and grinned. “Yeah, just like them birds heading home.”

I asked him if he was going to take the subway downtown to the train, and when he said yes, I told him I would carry his bag to the station.

“It makes me feel good to see such fine young men like you and Mr. Hart,” he said.

“I had a dream, but it wasn't a good one.”

Mr. Moses stopped and looked at me. He nodded, and then he started again toward Malcolm X Boulevard. We walked slowly, and I was thinking about telling him my dream. I didn't, but I had the feeling that he might know. I did ask him if he thought that I could change my dreams if I wanted.

“David, we build our dreams deep down in our souls. We use everything we ever knew and everything that's ever touched us,” Mr. Moses said. “You've got a strong heart and a strong mind. If this old world can be changed, it'll be because you've nudged it toward the dreams you build. I got faith in you, David. I got a real true faith in you.”

At the top of the stairs he took the bag and held out his hand.

“Take care of yourself,” I said as we shook hands.

“And you take care of yourself, Mr. David,” he answered.

He went down the stairs into the darkness of the station and blended into that darkness. I started to walk away and then stopped. I wanted to ask him how he had known for sure that he was a dream bearer. I ran down
the stairs, but a train was just pulling out of the station. I looked around to see if Mr. Moses was still on the platform, but he wasn't.

There were more things I wanted to say to him, and things I wanted to ask him, but he was gone. I was sure I would never see him again. A feeling of sadness washed over me but it didn't last. I knew he would be in my mind for as long as I lived.

Ty said he was going to get serious about his education, but I knew he wasn't sincere. All he wanted to do was to hang out with his friends and live in their little pretend world. His world wasn't any more real than his comic book characters, but somehow he was still believing in it. Mom said the streets could suck your brains out, and I thought that was true. I just wondered how much of Ty's brain would have to be sucked out before he got himself together.

I didn't call my father Reuben anymore after the night we were on the pier together. I realized that somewhere in his life he had lost part of himself and was searching for it. Even in his dreams he was searching for parts that would make him whole.

What I did think was that, for the first time, I was part of his dreaming too. Perhaps when he was alone with his eyes closed, he saw me. Or maybe I could help him build a new one, with the whole family in it with him.

Things had been difficult at the beginning of summer, and in many ways they still were. Nothing wonder
ful had come into my life to solve all the problems, or even to make them easier to deal with. What I remember most, besides the being scared and the wonder of how things could go so wrong, was the old man. When he had gone, I thought about him sitting on the park bench talking about his dreams. I couldn't touch him anymore, or hear his voice, but his dreams were still with me, were part of me. I had taken the dreams and made them part of who I was, and somehow, because the dreams were about events that happened so long ago, I felt older, stretched back to a different place and time. I still felt afraid when I thought about the man being hung, or about his friend who couldn't move. I know I will always carry those dreams with me. I know my father's dreams will be mine, too.

I think that what people dream, what they take into their minds to hold or worry about or, like Daddy, fight against, is what you have to know to really understand them. And once you know someone like that, once you understand what makes them dream, you can't ever let it go.

Sometimes, when I'm alone, I feel good about the dream I had about Daddy. I don't know everything about him, but I think I know more about what is happening inside of him when he is nervous, when he makes little grunting noises in his sleep and jerks around. When I hear him at night, still fighting in his sleep, I want to go into the room and sit by the bed and tell him that every
thing will be all right. But then, sometimes, I don't want to know what he is dreaming. It gets me really down thinking about his demons when I know I can't do anything about them. I think that's what Mr. Moses was talking about when he said he wanted to give his dreams to somebody else. He knew he couldn't, and now I knew it, too. Still, there's a part of me that wants to know everything about everybody, no matter how hard it gets.

I decided I didn't want to go all the way up to Riverdale, so me and Loren get to go to school together again. Mom was a little disappointed, but when I told her I didn't want to have to make a whole lot of changes in my life, she understood. I knew she would.

The weather got real hot, and it looked like everything on the block went into slow motion. The superintendent told Sessi that she had to take her house down, and she asked me and Loren to help her.

“My house wasn't bothering anyone,” Sessi complained.

The sides of Sessi's little house had turned brown and brittle, and they snapped as she and Loren were taking it down. They were putting the dried sticks and leaves into plastic bags to take downstairs for the garbage. From where I stood, I could see all the rooftops in the neighborhood and the crisscross of streets that stretched toward the hill. The cars and buses looked like toys and the people like tiny fairy-tale creatures scurrying about their business. I thought about Daddy looking down
from his roof when he was young, and having picnics with his family. I wondered what all those people down there were thinking about, and what they saw when they closed their eyes.