Bang! (10 page)

I BET IT’S A hundred degrees today. The sun is white as milk, and you can’t look into it without your eyes watering. There’s a ripped-up T-shirt covering Kee-lee’s big head. And he’s got his thumb sticking out, trying to hitch a ride. I keep walking, squeezing water out of a plastic bottle over my head and down my throat.

By lunchtime, all our water’s gone. So are half a box of marshmallow crunch cereal and four apples. The sleeping bags are half a mile back. They got too heavy. Anyhow, we figure it won’t be a long time before somebody picks us up and we get home.

Ain’t nothing out here to take your mind off things; just trees and a dusty road—South White Rock Road—that don’t nobody hardly drive up. I look back at the extra clothes I left in the middle of the road. “My father might still come for us.”

Kee-lee gets mad. “Your dad’s gone. He left us, same as mine.”

I remind Kee-lee that his dad got shot. He reminds me that he took off long before the bullet found him.

Something musta happened to my dad. He wouldn’t just take off, I think.

Kee-lee sits his backpack down in the middle of the road. “He planned it all along.”

I drop my things too.

“Figured he ain’t want no children at all. So he left you—and your mother too.”

The road is hot. You can feel the heat up through your sneakers. “Take it back.” I’m talking to Kee-lee and looking around at signs. SOUTH JENSON COUNTY ROUTE 46 N. HOTELS 20 MILES.

He swings at me and misses. “He dumped ya. That’s what they all do.”

My first punch lands right where I want—upside Kee-lee’s big block head. His hands go up. I double punch him in the stomach, hoping his guts bust open and spill out all over the road like chitlins. When I’m done with the next punch, Kee-lee’s got a bloody nose and a headache too I bet. But he ain’t no quitter. So he wipes blood away with the rag on his head, holds his arms out straight as a row of corn and knocks his fists into the sides of my head. I fall to my knees.

“What you gotta say now?”

I’m down awhile. Opening and closing my eyes, trying to see straight. Grabbing him by the knees, bringing him down too. Rolling around, punching him. Ducking when he swings. Trying not to holler when he shoves my chin back so hard it feels like my head’s gonna pop off.

“Ouch!”

He flips me over. Sits on my back and holds my face down. The tar feels like scalding-hot coffee. My head comes up. He pushes it back down. “I’m gonna kill you!” Kee-lee flips me, then he stands with his big foot on my stomach and smiles right before he stomps me.

Beep. Beep. Beeep.

A truck’s coming. I don’t see it because it’s behind me. But I know it’s a truck because my uncle drives one and he lets me pull the horn when I want.

“You gonna get run over,” Kee-lee says, holding me down with his foot.

I twist his leg and try to take him down. His foot presses down on me. I’m kicking the air and punching the ground, listening to the truck roll closer. “Let me up!”

He wants me to say I’m sorry. To say my father left me like his father left him. But boys round my way never say they sorry.

Beeep! Beeep!

I look over my shoulder. The truck is so close I can see the driver. He can see us too. But he ain’t slowing down.

Beeep!

Kee-lee screams. “Say it!”

The truck’s an eighteen-wheeler. It’s red with a slamming silver grill and smoking pipes.

Beeep!

“Say it!”

Stones on the ground jump like popcorn in a popper.

I look at Kee-lee looking at the truck.

“Just say it. Say . . .” He jumps off me and takes off running.

“Kee-lee!”

“Run, Mann! Run!”

The side of the road seems like it’s ten blocks away. But we both get to it at the same time, jumping over the guardrail and into weeds tall as Jason.

Beep! Beep! Beeeep!
The driver gives us the finger when he flies by.

We give it right back to him.

“HE WAS GONNA kill us,” Keelee says. “Run us over.”

I wipe my sweaty forehead with the back of my arm. “And I thought people in the country were supposed to be nice.” I climb over the guardrail behind Kee-lee and back on to the road.

We’re trying to figure out where we’re at. The road is long and winding. There’s signs pointing the way to gas stations and restaurants, but we don’t see no houses or buildings nearby, just trees and grass.

Kee-lee rips his T-shirt again and hands me a piece. We tie our heads up. “Maybe we should get off the road,” he says. “Walk in the woods for a while.”

But we don’t do nothing different. We keep walking along the road. We throw rocks and figure we’ll be home by the time it’s dark. When it’s time to rest, we sit by a creek filled with pebbles and just enough water to cover our hot feet. It runs along the side of the road. Dry weeds and hundreds of purple flowers make it so you can’t hardly see it. We wet ourselves down, fill our water bottles, and sit for a while.

We on our way again, sweating like usual, throwing stones at each other. Eating warm jelly sandwiches and licking the last of the melted chocolate M&M’s from the bags. Then a blond-haired girl in a red convertible stops and asks if we’re okay. She’s driving a Mercedes-Benz sports coupe, wearing diamond earrings and a thick gold necklace.

“We all right,” I say, still walking.

“No we ain’t.”

The girl’s name is Amy. She’s a college student at Brown and her dad runs the bank in town. “I don’t live that far from here. You can get a bite to eat and call your folks.”

Kee-lee’s in the car already, messing up her white rugs with his dirty sneakers.

“No thanks, ma’am,” I say again. “But you got a cell phone we can use?”

She pulls to the side of the road and hands me a phone. Kee-lee asks if she got a spare bedroom where we can sleep tonight. My father answers the phone. He says that Kee-lee and me ain’t that far from home. That we can make it back on foot in a couple of weeks. I hold out the phone and stare at it like it’s his face I’m seeing. “What?” I put it to my ear. “Y’all come and get us!”

“Boy,” he says, “you’re all right. Kee-lee too.” He ain’t asking me if I’m okay, he’s telling me.

“It’s steaming hot and we’re hungry. And it’s gonna be dark soon.”

I tell my father to put my mother on the phone. He won’t. Can’t. “She’s gone, remember? To Kentucky.” He had it planned all along. He was gonna take us to the campground and leave us. Then we’d have to find our way back. “Like African boys do.”

“Like Africans? We ain’t no Africans!”

“Who African?” Kee-lee’s drinking Perrier water and rubbing suntan lotion on his arms.

My father says he got the idea from a television show he saw on African boys. That’s when he asked Cousin to bring him books on the subject. “In some African villages, they leave boys alone in the forest for months so they will learn to be men.”

“Months?”

“Months. Years. Whatever it takes.”

“You ain’t coming to get us? Never?”

“Never?” Kee-lee says, jumping outta the car and snatching the phone from me. “My mother’s gonna kill you.”

Kee-lee puts my dad on speaker phone. My father says that his mother knows all about it. That him and her agreed that if we stayed in the neighborhood, we’d get shot dead.

“But we gonna get killed out here too,” Kee-lee says, pointing up the road. “A truck almost done us in. Lightning almost hit me in the head,” he lies.

Amy keeps asking what the problem is and how come our parents won’t come and get us. I don’t answer because I’m listening to my dad. “I put a cell phone in the brown bag. You can use that when you need to get in touch.”

“We ain’t got the brown bag. I left it,” I say, walking a few steps, then back, then up again. I whisper. “There was a gun in that bag.”

My dad tells me that his grandfather was sixteen when he took an eighteen-hour train ride from Georgia up north all by hisself. I tell him that this ain’t the olden days.

“He didn’t have enough money for the trip at first, so he had to earn it. Pick cotton. Slop hogs. Husk corn.”

“Come and get me!”

“Yeah,” Kee-lee says into the phone.

My dad says if I do this, I’ll never be scared again. I’m quiet. Thinking. “You scared . . . all the time now.

“You walk a hard enough road, and it’ll make you a bitter man—I mean, a better man,” my dad says.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Just something I read once.”

I’m sitting down. Watching Kee-lee slide into the front seat next to Amy. Listening to the radio go from country, to opera, to rap. “How far are we from home?”

“Two weeks by foot,” my father says. “You can do this.”

“Little boy,” Amy says, “I have to go.”

“We ain’t got no way to contact you,” I say. “We ain’t got the bag.”

Kee-lee pulls out the bag. He takes out the gun. “Nice, huh?” he says to the girl.

She starts the car up. “Get out! Now! And give me my phone!”

Kee-lee’s laughing. Thinking it’s funny. Pointing it her way. “We ain’t gonna hurt you, girl.”

Amy’s screaming. My father’s asking me what’s going on. “Nothing. We gotta go. We’ll call later.”

I throw the phone at her.

She’s fingering the numbers. “I’m calling the police.”

Kee-lee grabs the brown bag, then reaches down and knocks the phone out Amy’s hand. I grab the backpack and take off running. “Don’t call the police! Please don’t call!” I say, running into the middle of the road, almost getting run over by a truck full of cows.

“WHAT’S THAT!?” Kee-lee’s almost sitting in my lap. “And that?” He’s holding tight to the brown bag. “I can’t see nothing. Light a match! Start a fire!”

I’m feeling round inside my backpack, blinking my eyes. Striking a match. Watching it go right out.

Hoo . . . hoo . . . hoo . . .
Owls have big eyes. Big mouths too.
Hoo . . . hoo . . . hoo . . .

Bang!

The gun is so close to my ear I can’t hear nothing for a few minutes. “Kee-lee!”

Bang!

Kee-lee’s shot the owl. He’s shot something that ran past our feet too. I think it was a possum. Its insides have busted and spilled out like sloppy joes made with too much sauce. Smoke from the gun floats like steam. My whole body’s shaking, like it did that time I had a fever and my mother made me sit in a tub of ice.

“Call my mother,” Kee-lee says. “Call my mother now!” He’s got the gun pointing at me. His finger’s on the trigger.

I hand him the cell. He don’t take it. He says for me to dial his mom. He’s almost in tears when I put the phone up to his ear. “It’s dark. And we ain’t got a bed, or tent, or nothing.”

I turn the flashlight on. Walk over to a tree bent down low. I break off branches and pull off flowers and make a tiny teepee with them. Kee-lee’s mother’s saying what my father said, I guess; because he’s trying to get her to understand that this ain’t right. That they don’t know what it’s like being out here alone. I pile leaves in the middle of the teepee and light a match.

Kee-lee’s screaming at his mom. “How we gonna call you? The cell phone’s almost dead.”

He’s threatening her. Holding the gun in the air and waving it. “I’m going to the police then,” he says, walking back and forth. “Telling them how y’all treating us.”

His mom hangs up on him. I call Cousin. His line is busy. I call my dad again. I ask him to come get us in the morning. I forget the name of the road we’re on, but we can get someone to tell us. At first I think he’s coming, because he asks if I left a trail on the way in. If I saw any guideposts. Then he says what he said before, what Kee-lee’s mother said: “You gonna be all right.”

Kee-lee and me keep seeing things: short fat things running deeper into the woods like they being chased. Big things—wolves, deer, a baby bear even, at least that’s what we think. “Something’s gonna eat us out here.”

My father laughs. “Where you from, boy?”

Before I can answer he’s asking another question. “Where are you at?”

I look around. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah you do.”

I try to give him the answer he wants. Before I do, he’s asking more questions.

“Would I do anything to hurt you?”

I ain’t sure.

Kee-lee sits by the fire, pointing the gun at a deer stopped across the road.

“Don’t . . .”

Bang!

When Jason got shot, his eyes got big, just like that deer’s.

“What the . . .”

My father wants to know what happened. I tell him that Kee-lee shot at a deer and missed. He says for me to put Kee-lee on the phone. When he’s done, Kee-lee puts the gun in the bag, the bag inside two T-shirts, and the T-shirts in the bottom of his backpack.

“You’re on an adventure, boy,” my father tells me.

I whisper so Kee-lee don’t hear. “I’m lost. Scared.”

“When you were here, you were lost . . . a boy who was gonna die a boy.”

“I do all this,” I shout, “and get back home and still they might just kill me.” I remind my dad that stuff like that happens all the time. Somebody joins the army. They get out, come home, and get shot for sneakers or a jacket or a dime the crook found in the corner of their pocket.

“Yeah,” he says. “Stuff like that can happen. But—”

I push the power button. I take the phone and throw it as far as I can.

Kee-lee takes off after it. “Why you do that? Now we can’t get nobody to come get us.” He don’t go far. He’s too scared.

I throw more sticks in the fire. “It don’t matter. Nobody’s coming for us nohow.”

NOBODY’S GONNA pick up two black boys hitchhiking with tall sticks in their hands. Only we need the sticks to help us climb the hills. And ain’t nothing we can do about being black, or about the fact that we got baggy, red eyes from not hardly sleeping three nights in a row. This here’s farm country, so it ain’t our fault either that people slam doors in our faces soon as they open them and see what we look like. Only maybe it is a little bit Kee-lee’s fault. When we got to the second farm, instead of saying hello when the door opened, he said, “You got any food, lady? Any money?” The woman slammed the door. So did the next lady. So we still out here— ducking from police cars. Hungry. Not in no real bad mood though, ’cause when it’s daylight, it’s not that bad. We wrestle. We race each other up the road, or beat rows of corn with sticks and pretend it’s my dad’s head we’re whupping. But we stay hungry even though one lady does fix us a sandwich, though she makes sure we ain’t eat it on her property.

We’re by the shoulder of the road, kicking gravel and trying to get truckers to blow their horns. “I’ll race you,” Kee-lee says. “Ready. Set . . .”

“Go!” we both say, balling up our fists, straightening our backs and running up the road like somebody’s handing out free sneakers.

Kee-lee’s in front at first. Then it’s me, sticking my legs way out, throwing my elbows back and smiling when the trucker yells, “Take ’im. Take ’im. You know you can take ’im.”

Kee-lee gives the guy the finger. And just when I’m set to pass him, he gets ahead of me, pushing me into the middle of the road right when a beat-down black pickup truck goes by. The driver swerves. He almost rolls over my foot. I fall to the ground. Kee-lee comes to check on me. I jump up and take off running fast as I can. Laughing. Smelling something sweet like apples or peaches even. That’s when I see the sign. FINNEGAN’S APPLE ORCHARD. I don’t tell Kee-lee nothing. I fly across the road, looking to my left at rows and rows of short, leafy green trees with fruit hanging from them. Ignoring Kee-lee. Licking my lips. Rubbing sweat off my neck and arms. Thinking about all that fruit. “So that’s what a real apple tree looks like, huh, Kee-lee?” I slow up.

“I . . . I . . .” Kee-lee can’t hardly breathe.

We’re sitting on the guardrail, fanning car smoke out our faces, staring at trees. “I bet. I bet they taste good.”

He looks at the trees. There’re rows and rows of them. “Real good.”

I look at Kee-lee. “It ain’t chicken.”

He laughs. “Gonna taste like chicken to me.”

We both step over the railing at the same time, dropping our stuff and running through hard brown grass that crunches under our feet like dry macaroni. Kee-lee bites into an apple and drops it to the ground. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.” He snatches another one off the tree. I’m doing the same thing: grabbing, biting, dropping, and swallowing sweet, juicy chunks so big they stick in my throat. It ain’t chicken, but it sure is good.