Bang! (13 page)

I BEEN HERE OVER a week, and here’s what I figured out: they don’t never sleep at the number house. People ring the bell all night long. They knock on the door and ring the phone and come and go and don’t never sit still, it seems. When they ain’t putting in numbers, they’re playing cards. When they ain’t playing cards, they’re sitting around, talking, drinking, and eating.

Kee-lee and me don’t do all that much. We eat, we sleep, we get high off weed we buy up the street with money Kee-lee steals out his aunt’s purse, and we drink all the liquor we want. It’s fun. But it ain’t what my father had in mind.

“Y’all come here,” Aunt Mary said this morning.

Him and me both came at the same time.

“You stink. Get yourselves some clean towels and take a bath.”

I smell my underarms.

She tells us that when we done she wants us to do something for her. “Make a run.”

Aunt Mary’s house is next to a crack house, which is next to another crack house, which is next to three vacant houses with the insides gutted out. It’s nighttime, and she’s wanting us to go pick up some money for her, to walk past them houses and up the street, where dogs look too scared to walk at night.

I twist my lips to the side and whisper to Kee-lee, “Tell her no.”

He says we have to go ’cause we owe her. I’m figuring I don’t owe her nothing because she stole all my dough. Kee-lee don’t like me harping on that fact. “You gotta pay to live someplace.” He steps outside onto the porch. “So you gotta pay to stay here.”

Aunt Mary follows us. Says for us not to smoke nothing, because she don’t want no potheads handling her money. Kee-lee and me ain’t listening.

Soon as we get off the block, we light one up. It’s a fat blunt, thick as my thumb. It’s nighttime, but we smoking in plain sight, laughing, just hoping somebody’s stupid enough to tell us to stop.

When we get to the corner of Chase and Graham we stop and light another one up. We check out the sights, get hungry, and go get something good to eat.

Kee-lee laughs. “Now, what we supposed to be doing?”

I’m sitting on the curb with my head leaning on the light pole and my eyes closed. “I don’t know.”

Some guys are across the street talking loud. Pushing and punching each other. They, like, twenty-three, twenty-five years old. “Yo, punk!” Kee-lee shouts.

They say we better chill.

I yell over at them next. “Hey. What you girls doing over there?”

Kee-lee asks me again what his aunt told us to do. “I can’t remember.” He reaches down, picks up an empty soda bottle, and throws it across the street. “They baby, sissy girls,” he says, laughing.

Weed makes you think you’re tougher than you are. So I throw another bottle across the street and laugh.

We should run. I know that. But it’s like my mind is saying go, but my feet are saying,
What we wanna do that for?
So I stay where I am. Kee-lee lights up another blunt, and before he even gets his first puff they coming for us. Double punching me in the ribs. Kicking us in the back when we fall to the ground and cover up the best we can.

Be a man,
I hear my father say. So I’m kicking back, feeling around for a brick or a bottle to hit them with. Thinking about the whupping them white men put on me. Jumping up. Fighting back. Telling myself ain’t
nobody
never gonna beat me like that no more.

Only these guys are bigger, stronger, and meaner than me, so what I do don’t matter much.

I throw a punch. I duck. “Kee-lee!” I yell. “They gonna kill us!”

Kee-lee ain’t talking. He’s curled up in a ball, covering his head and his stomach.

Brown boots kick me in the knees. “Cops!” the guy wearing the boots says.

I hear the sirens.

He slams my head into the ground and steps on me.

“And because you got a big mouth,” a dude says to Kee-lee, “I’m taking these.” He pulls off the $130 sneakers Aunt Mary just bought him.

The guy beating on me stops. “I don’t wear cheap shoes,” he says, kicking my foot and taking off.

I’m holding my stomach. Holding my head. Listening to the blood in my ears roar. I get to my feet. “Cops.” I’m limping, dragging my right leg and running to hide behind an empty shoe repair shop.

Aunt Mary throws me up against the wall. “Don’t tell me nothing about how you got beat up. Just tell me you picked up my money.”

My bottom lip is swollen. My eye’s got a cut over it, and my body hurts all over. “We ain’t get there ’cause—”

She pushes me out the front door. “Go get my stuff.”

Kee-lee’s explaining. “They jumped us.”

She smacks him upside the head. Her nails leave a long red line behind. “You let ’em beat you?” She goes to stomp his bare feet, but he jumps back. “And take my new sneakers?”

Kee-lee’s holding his cheek. “It was six of ’em.”

My head feels like I got hit with a pot.

Aunt Mary takes an empty beer can and slams it into Kee-lee’s head. I duck when her friend reaches for me. Two big steps and he’s got me by the neck though—lifting me up, watching my legs kick, and dropping me to the floor.

“Don’t you ever come back here beat down.” Aunt Mary’s fingers cross her throat. “Cut ’em, if you have to. Shoot ’em, if it comes to that.”

My tongue wipes blood out the corner of my mouth.

“But don’t never come back here telling me you got beat!”

It’s midnight when we go back out again. I ain’t wanna go. I was scared and my face looked bad. Kee-lee and me both was limping, but his aunt said we had to have some more of the dog that bit us. So we did like she said. On the way over, I kept wondering what I did wrong to end up living like this. I brought it up to Kee-lee. He said for me to stop being a sissy. “So what if you get beat, long as you get back up and don’t let it happen no more.”

I’m thinking about the white men. Thinking about the guys from tonight. “That was two times in a row,” I say.

Kee-lee means it when he says there won’t be no third time. When we get to where we’re going, he doesn’t waste no time taking care of business.

He knocks on the door. “Aunt Mary says to pay up.”

The woman is smiling. Almost laughing at us standing there all beat up. She points to my black eye. “Who done that?” She stares at Kee-lee’s teeth.

Kee-lee tells her to pay up or he is gonna pimp-slap her. She laughs and tries to shut the door. I kick it wide open. I tell her to pay up or else. “Or else what?” She is holding a butcher knife.

We step back.
Cut ’em. Shoot ’em,
I hear Aunt Mary say. Only we ain’t have no knife or gun. “Kee-lee,” I say. “We better go.”

“Sure better,” she says.

“My aunt wants her dough.”

The woman swings the knife. We jump back. “I ain’t got it. I’ll give it to her when I do.” She waves the knife again. “She knows I’m good for it. Tell her I’ll pay on the first of the month.”

She tries to shut the door. Kee-lee’s foot stops it though. “We ain’t going back with nothing.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“I ain’t . . .”

You don’t hit women. My father taught me that. Only Kee-lee ain’t got no father at home, so he don’t know that, I guess. So he hits her. Punches her in the mouth like she’s a dude. I try to make him stop. It’s like he’s getting her back for what them guys did to us. “Give me the money,” he says, kicking her legs. “Now!”

His fingers go around her throat. The knife she’s got in her hands falls to the floor. I’m pulling him off her. “Let her go, Kee-lee.”

Kee-lee says he ain’t letting no one hit him no more. He tells me to go inside and look around for the money. I do what he says, excusing myself for walking in front of the television the kids are watching. I bring out a tan straw pocketbook. Ten bucks is in it.

He turns her loose. She’s breathing like she ain’t got but one more breath left.

“Let’s go,” I say.

He walks in the kitchen, dumping out flour cans and sugar bowls. Digging in her freezer and emptying out cereal boxes.

The woman’s got herself together now. “Boy, if you don’t . . .”

Kee-lee shouts so loud he drowns out the TV. “I ain’t no boy!” He runs into her bedroom and comes out with a dresser drawer. “Thought you ain’t have no money? Thought you was broke?” He takes out the money and throws the drawer at the TV.

I’m looking at Kee-lee because he’s smiling, liking what he’s doing—knocking cereal bowls out the kids’ hands and stepping on their toys. I’m listening to their mother tell them to call the cops.

He laughs. “Call ’em. They just might get here next week.”

On the way home, Kee-lee’s making up raps about stealing money and smashing knees. “Next time,” he says, “I might just really hurt somebody.”

WE WAS BORED, so Kee-lee called Keisha again. He told her about the money he’s making, and how he can smoke all the weed he wants. Then he asked her, just about begged her, to let him come visit. “I don’t care if I get in trouble neither,” he said to her. No. Keisha always says no. Only it’s taking her longer and longer to get to no— fifteen minutes the first time. A whole hour the last time they spoke. “I keep telling that girl,” Kee-lee said, “she gonna be my wife.”

Yesterday he snuck off to meet Keisha someplace. He came back and didn’t talk to me the rest of the day. I figured she didn’t show up. She did. Then I figured she wouldn’t talk to him, or kiss him like he wanted. She did that too. It turned out that Kee-lee was just mad: mad at his mom, at my dad, at everybody. “She likes me now, and I can’t go back home and see her like I want.”

I told Kee-lee he should just go, forget about his mother and just go. “Why don’t
you
go then?” he said.

I went outside and lit up a blunt. I called home. It was the first time I called home since coming here weeks ago. I didn’t want to talk to my father. I wanted to talk to my mom. She didn’t answer. He did. But he knew it was me. “Mann. I been thinking.”

I don’t care nothing about what he thinks anymore. So I hung up and tried to forget that I had a stupid father, a crazy mother, and no place to live anymore.

It’s September. School started three weeks ago. I think about what the kids at school are doing. What they’re eating for lunch and stuff. I don’t tell Kee-lee. He never did like school. But getting high and doing nothing all day ain’t much fun neither. “Kee-lee,” I say, “I wanna paint something.”

He tells me to go back to sleep. Me and him sleep on the floor, on the second floor right by his aunt’s room. The wallpaper is brown and peeling off like burned skin. “I ain’t painted since we got here four weeks ago. I need to though.”

He turns over. I get up and go downstairs. It’s five in the morning and his aunt’s still up. There’s a whole table full of people eating breakfast and playing cards. “What you want, Mann?’

“Paint.”

“Huh?”

“I wanna paint something.”

“Whole house needs painting,” someone says, laughing.

“Don’t need no paint. Need a bomb. Boom!” her boyfriend says, shaking the table with his hands. “Maybe that way the roaches’ll die and the stink of this place will go away.”

His aunt splashes her drink in his face. He gets up, mad. “Woman, I’ll . . .”

“You wanna get cut?” she says, reaching under her blouse. “I ain’t cut nobody in a while. Needles needs a little blood,” she says, pressing the blade to her lips.

There’s paint in the basement. Buckets of old paint with thick skins on top. I pull back the skins and stir up the watery paint. “You’ll do,” I say, pouring some in an empty egg carton. I got yellow, dark blue, green, orange, and purple. I take the paints upstairs. On the wall, I make the brightest sun I ever seen. Then there’s tiny pear trees and grass, and cars and trucks rolling up a highway. I mix purple and yellow and make brown for Jason’s face and arms. “Run,” I say, drawing his legs, making him run in the grass. “Run,” I say, thinking about what I shoulda said the day that man came on our porch and shot him dead. “Run,” I tell Jason. But he just does what he did that day—nothing.

Aunt Mary says she don’t want me painting no dead boys on her walls. “It’s bad luck.” So she makes me paint over Jason’s picture. “And since you ain’t got nothing better to do with your time,” she says, waving her arms, “paint the whole room.” She wants it green. “No blue. Make the woodwork green.”

The room’s got walls as tall as trees. It’s gonna take me and Kee-lee two, three days to finish it. Aunt Mary don’t care. She says we living here for free. “Eating up my food and drinking my good liquor.” When she’s almost out the room, Kee-lee says she might as well make us paint the whole house. He’s being smart. But she don’t care. She says that’s what she wants done. “I’ll get more paint. Gonna have a new place when you two finish.”

“I am not Kunta Kinte,” I tell Kee-lee.

He laughs and goes to the basement with me for brushes and more paint.

That’s the first time we thought about running away from Aunt Mary. Only we couldn’t think of where to go, so we did like we was told. We painted her house. Only we did more than we was supposed to. We drew little brown angels in the corners of the ceilings in the living room. I never told her one of ’em had Jason’s face. And we drew corner boys on the wall in the dining room. One was kneeling down shooting craps. Three more was smoking weed and another one was singing to the moon.

“You boys did that?” a woman said one day. “Do mine. I’ll pay.”

Kee-lee and me are good painters. We get every corner. We don’t drip paint on the rugs or the woodwork. We do better than some adults, and all we get for painting six big rooms and two extra-long hallways is a hundred bucks. Kee-lee’s aunt said we shoulda named our price up front. She pulled out a stack of bills. “Here,” she says, handing us a little extra. “Go rest up. I got more friends who want work done.” She says we don’t have to collect money for her no more. “I’m starting a new business—painting houses.” She’ll handle all the money and give us seventy-five percent. “That seems fair, since y’all doing all the work.”

It seems fair. But I know it isn’t gonna be fair. Kee-lee’s aunt likes to cheat people. And she likes money a whole lot more than she likes me and Kee-lee.