the Other Wes Moore (2010) (6 page)

Wes was playing defense, guarding one of the kids from the neighborhood who was playing wide receiver. The boy ran his pattern with Wes closely guarding him, pushing him slightly to throw him off-balance. Wes didn't believe in taking it easy. If he was going to play, he was going to play to win. That was his style. The boy told Wes to stop pushing him. Wes pushed the boy harder.

Wes was bigger and stronger than the other boy, a fact pointedly reinforced every time their bodies collided. The boy finally had enough and, after the final play of a drive, stood toe-to-toe with Wes, bumping his chest against the bigger boy. His nose brushed up against Wes's chin.

"Didn't I tell you stop touching me?" the boy yelled in Wes's face.

"Make me, bitch!"

The boy pushed Wes in the chest, creating a short distance between the two, then cocked his right arm and punched Wes square in his face. Wes stepped back and threw his hands up, not just to protect himself from another blow but to make sure his face wasn't damaged. Wes had never been punched before, not like that. And he never expected this little dude to swing on him. The boy stared at Wes, seemingly as shocked as he was.

Woody stepped in front of Wes and urged him not to retaliate. The boy who punched Wes was still trying to maintain his strut but seemed to realize that he might have made a mistake by punching the bigger guy. Wes was stunned. Then he tasted the unmistakable bitterness of blood on his tongue. He stuck his lip out slightly and felt the skin splitting open. Blood flowed, staining his white Northwood jersey.

The sight and taste of his own blood set Wes off. He clenched his fists and forced his way past Woody. Everyone waited for the next punch to be thrown. Instead, Wes broke into a sprint, running right past the kid. His focus was elsewhere. He left the kid standing there confused, hands still up, preparing for a fight. Wes was running home.

The commotion caused a stir, and neighbors began to look out their windows to see what was going on. Many of them were already frustrated with the boys playing football in the street--lost in their game, the players would curse, run through flower gardens, and scatter their quarter-water bottles across the sidewalks. It was not unusual for the owner of a beautifully decorated and well-kept yard to wake up in the morning and see an empty bag of Lay's potato chips or Cheez Doodles drifting through. Woody and White Boy looked up at the neighbors' windows and saw unhappy eyes staring back at them.

Woody ran after Wes to see what was going on, while White Boy ran back to his house to avoid getting in trouble. Woody cut through the back door of Wes's house. As he entered, he looked into the kitchen to see Wes slamming a drawer closed. With his left hand, Wes held a wet paper towel to his lip, trying to stop the steady flow of blood. The lip had begun to swell, and his anger grew along with it. This was a pride issue for Wes. He had just allowed himself to be punched dead in the face, in front of his friends, by a smaller guy. He could have walked away. He could have fought back on the spot and settled it. But when Wes had looked into the other boy's eyes, he knew that he had to send a message.

Tony flashed through Wes's mind. Tony wanted the best for Wes, but he still felt that part of his mission as a big brother was to toughen him up for the battles Tony knew Wes would have to fight as he got older. Some days, Tony would have Wes and Woody meet him at the Murphy Homes, where he would assemble a group of Murphy Homes boys. The boys would circle up like they were getting ready to watch a gladiator fight. Tony would order Wes and Woody into the center of the ring. Then he would call out the names of a few of the Murphy Homes boys. At Tony's command, Wes, Woody, and the boys from the projects would start wrestling and punching one another, first tentatively but then with increasing viciousness until Tony jumped into the circle and grabbed the backs of their collars, separating them like pit bulls in a dogfight. If he ever slackened, Tony would pull an exhausted Wes to the side, get within inches of his face, and say, "Rule number one: If someone disrespects you, you send a message so fierce that they won't have the chance to do it again." It was Murphy Homes law and Wes took it to heart.

As Woody got closer, his attention was diverted from Wes's left hand to his right, where he held a long-bladed knife. Woody carefully approached Wes and said, "Don't do it, man. Dude is not worth this," but Wes moved toward the back door, which led to the alley that connected the homes on each block. The alleys were narrow, barely wide enough for a car to pass through.

Woody sensed where Wes was headed and ran to block the back door. Woody held on to Wes's arms and tried to talk sense to him, but Wes's rage blocked out every word his friend said. Wes tried to wriggle free, to no avail. He knew he couldn't overpower Woody, so he told him that he needed to change the paper towel stanching his wound. The moist towel that Wes held to his lip was almost solid red and beginning to drip blood on the living room carpet. As he walked back to the kitchen, Wes kept an eye on Woody.

Woody turned his head away to see if the boys outside had moved from the front yard to the back alley. To no surprise, they had. What did surprise Woody was that they weren't alone.

One of the neighbors must have called the police, because two cruisers had pulled up, flashing their red and blue lights. They blocked off the alley. The boys who were running from the front of the house to the back alley stopped, following orders from the police car that pulled up behind them. Woody began to think it was a good thing that he and Wes had come inside.

The slamming front door brought Woody's attention back to the kitchen. Wes was gone. Before Woody could tell Wes that the police were out back, Wes was on the other side of the front door, knife in hand, hurrying to settle the score with the boy who had busted his lip.

Wes was now in a full sprint, clearing the five steps of his front porch in one leap and then running around to the alley, figuring that's where the boys were. His pace slowed as he turned the corner. Right in front of him was the boy who'd split his lip. The anger he'd felt minutes before rushed back. He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. His eyes started to stream with tears of anger, confusion, and fear. He began to scream. His vision tunneled till the only thing he saw was the boy who'd punched him. Nothing else was on Wes's mind or in his sights, not even the policeman who had just stepped out of his cruiser.

The policeman left his car just in time to see the other kids clearing out of the alley and sprinting away. Wes was still preparing to take this fight to the next level. He took a few quick steps toward the boy who'd punched him, holding the knife to his side. The police officer yelled at Wes: "Put down the knife." Wes didn't hear him. Wes continued to move toward the boy. His grip on the knife handle tightened. His forearms flexed.

Send a message
.

After repeating the order one more time, and watching Wes ignore him again, one of the officers stepped forward. He lifted all eighty pounds of Wes off the ground, slamming him facefirst on the trunk of the police cruiser. Wes's chest collapsed against the trunk of the car, sending pain throughout his entire body. His hand loosened. The knife fell to the asphalt. The officer pinned Wes's body to the car with a forearm hard against the back of Wes's neck while he used his other hand to pull the handcuffs from the right side of his belt holster. Wes was incapacitated, the side of his head pressed against the cruiser, but he still had the boy who'd punched him in his sights. Wes wondered how it was that he was the one being arrested. He tried to plead his case to the police officer as he closed the second cuff on Wes's eight-year-old wrists.

Woody went through the back door. He saw Wes lying on the back of the police car in handcuffs. "Why y'all got my man in handcuffs? What did he do?"

Woody's screams were largely ignored by the two police officers. They were busy placing Wes in the back of one of the cruisers and told the other boys to go home. They ignored Woody until he shouted out, "If y'all don't let him go, I'm gonna have to kill somebody!"

Moments later, Woody was in handcuffs too.

Woody was taken to his house in one of the police cars while Wes was brought down to district booking. Wes sat there, pondering his next step. He didn't want his mother to know he'd been arrested. She would probably ground him at least. It was summer, and that was the last thing he wanted. He used his one phone call to call his brother in Murphy Homes. Tony agreed to ask his father to pick Wes up. Three hours later, Wes was released under the care of Tony's father, and he was back at his house before his mother got home from her job.

It was years before Wes's mom found out her son had been arrested that day. By the time she did, she had bigger things to worry about.

The extreme heat in my poorly ventilated room woke me in the middle of the night. I was dying of thirst. I crept slowly out of my room, careful not to wake Shani. Each stair let off an irritating squeak. As I reached the bottom of the alcove, I saw my mother half lying down, half sitting up on the couch, staring at me with wide eyes. It was obvious she had been sleeping just a few moments prior, but the sound of the stairs woke her. She asked what I needed, and after I explained that I just wanted some water, she insisted on getting it for me. I didn't need her help, but I didn't say anything as she rose from the couch to get a glass from the kitchen.

Since my father's death, my mother had made the tattered brown leather couch in the living room her bed. Our neighborhood was getting more and more dangerous; there had been a rash of break-ins in the houses around us. My mother slept in the living room to stand guard, she said. She didn't want me and my sisters to be the first people a trespasser ran into if they entered the house. She was determined to protect us. The fact that sleeping in the living room also allowed her to avoid the haunted bedroom she'd once shared with my father was never mentioned.

My mother still tortured herself with what-ifs concerning my father's death. Did she ask all the right questions? Should she have pushed the doctors harder for a clearer diagnosis? Could her CPR have worked better had she learned how to do it properly when she had the chance? Her protective vigilance for her surviving family had overtaken rationality. For the past two years, she'd slept on the couch listening, waiting, protecting.

The death of my father had created a major stir in the journalistic community. He was young, talented, and admired. My mother, concerned about the effects on her children of a drawn-out legal affair, opted to settle out of court, despite believing she had a larger wrongful death case. Intent to make some sense of the tragedy, she used the money to create a fund that would provide equipment and training to paramedics on a new procedure for dealing with respiratory or cardiac arrest, a technique that could have saved my father's life. At the time of my father's death, none of the first responders were trained in the technique. My mother hoped her gift would prevent other families from having to go through what we'd suffered. But her act of kindness could do nothing to ease our feelings of loss.

She rubbed her knees and grimaced as they straightened out. She had started to gain weight, and what had once been a sprightly step had begun to slow. Perpetual bags hung under her eyes. I watched her as she walked by me, looking worn, almost defeated.

After kissing me good night for the second time, she sent me up to my room and sat on the couch. With a glance back, I saw her rub her eyes again and rest her head in her hands. People around us didn't think she was coping well with her husband's death. They thought she needed help, not just in raising the kids but in raising her spirits. Although we were surrounded by her longtime friends from college and my uncles and aunts from both sides of the family, it wasn't enough. She was losing her grip. She needed help only her parents could provide.

A few mornings later, Mom woke up, made breakfast for us, and got Nikki and me off to school. Then she called her mother up in New York. Her mother had let her know that there would always be an open door for her in the Bronx if she needed it. But my mother had been determined to stick it out in the home she'd bought with her husband. Until now.

"Mom, if it's still all right, I think we need to move up there. I can't do this alone anymore."

My grandmother was thrilled. Before she even answered my mother, she called out to my grandfather, "Joy and the kids are moving up to New York!"

Three weeks later, Nikki, Shani, and I all stood outside our car, staring with something like disbelief at our now empty home. This was it. We were actually leaving Maryland.

"All right, guys, load up," my mother cheerily yelled as she threw in one final bag and slammed shut the trunk of our lime green Ford Maverick. Nikki helped me get my seat belt done while my mother secured Shani in the car seat. Even as a kid, I could tell my mother's aggressive good cheer was for our benefit. Before we took off, she paused to take one final look at our house, the house she'd lived in for six years. It already felt like a past life.