Bang! (2 page)

I DON’T WANT TO go to school no more. But I go. And I put out the trash every Wednesday night, shovel the pavement when it snows, walk my mom to the corner store when it’s dark out, and clean up the house without nobody even asking. I started doing everything right once Jason died, ’cause my mom couldn’t take no more trouble. Only the closer it gets to his birthday, or the day he was shot, the more I can’t do like I promised her—make it so she never got a reason to cry over me too.

The only one who knows how I really feel about stuff is Kee-lee. We walk to school together. We tease Keisha, a girl Kee-lee likes, and get on our teachers’ nerves asking questions that don’t have nothing to do with the classes they’re teaching.

“I ain’t going,” Kee-lee says when I get to his house. He lives up the street from me. We supposed to be headed to school, like every morning. He takes a smoke from behind his ear and lights up. “I’m tired of school.”

I sit down on the new rocker his mother bought off a man driving a truck full of frozen chicken and steaks, gold chains, hats, and porch furniture. “You always saying that.”

Kee-lee can hold smoke in his mouth a long time, so it takes him a while to answer. “My mom says I can quit school if I want.” He walks past me with no shirt on and sits on the front steps in his horse-head pajama bottoms. “Hey, Keisha,” he says, calling to her across the street. “Want some of this?” He shows her his tongue.

Her middle finger goes up. “Brush your rotten teeth, stank mouth.” She goes back into her house. Kee-lee laughs and says he knows she likes him.

When Kee-lee smiles you see green sitting right next to yellow, and thick white clumps packed close to the gums like hard sugar. Girls don’t say hi when he walks up to them. They say, “Ill. Brush your teeth.” He brushes them now. But it’s too late. The stuff won’t come off. Him and me tried. We used a fingernail file once. It made his gums swell up and bleed.

We get back to talking about school, and Kee-lee says he’s dropping out for sure. That’s when the triplets—Mary, Martin, and Moses—come out the house. “Me too,” they say, lining up like they in school, opening the door up wide and going back inside. Kee-lee’s got seven brothers and sisters.

I wait for the triplets to come back out. They don’t. I tell Kee-lee he better make them go to school. “Or your mother’s gonna be mad.”

“Who’s gonna tell?”

I would never tell on Kee-lee, because he would never tell on me. And he knows stuff about me too. Like how on the day Jason died I ran to his place and cut my wrist with a knife. It was a little knife, but it drew blood. And one time I got so mad over Jason dying that I took rocks to the cocker spaniel in Mrs. Seymour’s yard. Almost killed it. Only Kee-lee knows that. And he ain’t telling.

Right when I get up to leave, Mary comes outside with a needle and thread. She hands ’em to Kee-lee, then sits in his lap, hugging him around the middle. He licks the thread. Sticks it through the needle hole. Knots it. Then sews up the square hole in the side of the shorts she handed him.

She jumps off his lap. “Thanks.”

He smacks her butt, yelling after her, “Y’all don’t make no mess in there.”

Kee-lee’s mom works in the factory way across town. She takes three buses and works double shifts sometimes. So even if he wanted, he couldn’t get to school every day nohow. Some days he stays home with a sick kid or washes and irons their clothes for school the next day. His mom dropped out in the ninth grade. So did his grandmother and grandfather. So when Kee-lee says he’s quitting, it’s not that big a deal, I guess.

“Listen. I gotta go.”

Kee-lee covers his mouth when he talks, so I don’t think I really hear what I’m hearing when he tells me that they killed Moo Moo last night. Moo Moo is his cousin, and like a brother to me.

“He was sitting in his friend’s ride, minding his own business.” Kee-lee’s got this funny look in his eye. “The guy next door told us first. He saw it on the eleven o’clock news.”

Bang!
The gun goes off in my head.

“I didn’t hear about it,” I tell him. “We don’t watch the news no more.”

Kee-lee and me say it at the same time. “We
is
the news.”

It’s a joke. Him and me used to say we were gonna be reporters. Take a camera through the neighborhood and show people what it’s really like living here, being us. We were gonna call it
We Is the News—Life in the ’Hood
. But then we didn’t have a camera. And anyhow, nobody would pay us for stuff they see every night on the TV for free.

“So I figure,” Kee-lee says, “if I’m gonna die, why I gotta waste the time I do got sitting in school learning stuff I won’t use?”

I need to get to school, but I don’t move. I’m hoping Kee-lee’s gonna say he was lying about Moo Moo. So I sit and remember how good he was to me. How him and me painted the porch up the block and made fifty bucks each. He would do stuff like that. Come and get me and Kee-lee. Take us on a job. Let us make some dough sweeping up or washing walls. He talked to me about my dad, too. He always said, “Mann. Give him time. It takes a while to get used to having a piece of you die.”

I stand up. Walk down the steps and turn back Kee-lee’s way. “Why’d he have to die?”

Moo Moo was twenty-eight. He wasn’t all good, but he wasn’t all bad neither. But around here, it don’t matter. People get killed, good or bad, big or little.

Kee-lee’s eyes tear up. I ask the question again, but I don’t expect no answer. “Why . . . Why’d
Moo Moo
have to die?”

“That’s just how it goes around here,” Kee-lee says. “You get killed. Just ’cause.”

I WALK UP THE street, past my house, heading for school. And even though I don’t look at my front porch, I hear gunshots anyhow.
Bang!
Jason’s gone.
Bang!
Kee-lee’s cousin’s gone.
Bang!
“You gonna be gone soon too,” I say, turning around and heading back to Kee-lee’s place.

Before I get to his house, my dad’s first cousin stops me. He’s a grown-up. His name is Semple, but we just call him Cousin. He lifts weights, so it’s like he’s always got his chest stuck out and his muscles tight. “Where you going, boy? School’s that-a-way.” He points.

I turn around. We stop in front of my house. I close my eyes because I know what’s coming: a hug. A big long hug, like I’m some girl he likes. “Hey, Cousin,” I say.

Cousin is always in a hurry. Talking and moving fast. Rushing even when he don’t have to. He puts one foot on the steps and asks how my mom and dad are. I back up.

“Listen, Mann. The family . . .”

They say I look like Cousin, high yellow and gray-eyed. Only I’m short. Cousin’s a big man with a big mouth. When he laughs, people turn around and look. When he talks, you wanna hold your ears. When you tell him a secret though, it stays secret. Like I told him about my dad being different since Jason died. And now Cousin comes by a couple times a month. “Just checking.”

I stay a minute and tell him about Moo Moo. He’s shaking his head, saying we’re picking one another off faster than hard scabs. I don’t know what that means. I don’t care. “I gotta go to school,” I lie.

He waves for me to come up the steps with him. I shake my head no. “Just this once,” he says, ringing the doorbell. He tells me I won’t ever get over Jason till I can walk on the porch. He pulls at the black bars, like he can rip ’em off with his bare hands. “Your father and these bars!” He shakes ’em. “This ain’t no house! It’s a prison! Before I’d live like this, I’d . . . I’d . . .”

My dad comes to the door and unlocks the iron gate. Cousin hugs him too. Then he gives him the book that’s in his hand. “This the one?”

My dad walks past him and stands next to me on the pavement. “Yeah, this is it.” He stares at the cover. There’s two African boys holding spears on it. Then he gives me this
How come you ain’t in school?
look, and I start walking.

The reason my father ain’t full-out crazy is because of his family. They talk to him. Take us out, fix us food, and make sure we getting by okay. They always saying what Cousin says—move from around here. But we ain’t got it as good as the rest. Most of them went to trade school or college. My dad went in the army and learned to fix tanks. Now he’s a guard at a downtown store. “I’ll move when I want to,” he tells them. “Not because somebody’s got a gun to my head.”

My father tells me to get my butt to school, then they both go inside and lock the door behind them. I head for Kee-lee’s.

* * *

Kee-lee is like me. He paints. He can take collard-green juice and make tree leaves or use tomato paste for blood.

“You do this?”

“Don’t touch. It’s wet.”

He’s got my front porch painted on his blue bedroom wall. Jason’s there too. I turn away from the blood running out the side of his mouth. I check out Kee-lee’s cousin instead. He’s an angel. He’s got on orange baggy jeans and see-through wings shaped like guitars. He’s sitting on the roof of his car, looking over at Jason and pointing up to the sky.

Kee-lee opens a paint set as big as my desk in school. There’s, like, thirty tubes of paint, chalk, charcoal, and a dozen brushes in it.

“Who stole it?”

He smiles. I figure it would be cool if he could paint his teeth white.

“I put it down my pants and walked out the store.”

I wet a paintbrush. Dip it in Brown Bronze. Touch up Jason’s skinny arms and legs. Dip the brush in paint and draw more charcoal-black naps on Moo Moo’s head.

“I stayed up all night painting it.”

The painting takes up half the wall. And it looks so real, I can’t stop staring. Kee-lee’s even got the Good Time bar that’s up the street from us on the wall. There’s trash on the ground and girls jumping rope, and Keisha braiding Kee-lee’s hair. Right next to Jason’s elementary school, there’s a hoop game going on, with me, Kee-lee, Moo Moo, and Jason— all grown up. My eyes water. My fingers touch Jason’s wet cheek. For a minute, I think about smearing his picture; wiping the whole wall clean. But even if I did, they’d still be dead. Still be gone for good. “You ever wanna hurt somebody, Kee-lee? Mess ’em up real bad?”

He smiles. His green teeth look gray.

“Ever get tired of doing what you supposed to do? Making everybody happy instead of you?”

He hands me a blunt. “You smoke, you no worry, Mann.”

Kee-lee’s been smoking up his allowance money ever since his boy Kelvin got killed last year walking out of school with his arm around somebody else’s girl. Moo Moo stayed on his back about smoking weed. But he did it anyhow. It’s gonna get worse now, I think.

I pick up another brush. “You know I don’t smoke.”

He finishes the rest, then gets down on the floor and starts eating sunflower seeds. “You need to smoke something, Mann. You can’t stay regular in a house like yours. Too many crazy people. Too much drama.”

I watch him shaking his leg like he does when he gets nervous or he’s got something on his mind.

“Moo Moo shoulda—” I say.

Shells fly by my head. The trash can gets kicked over and next thing I know I’m pulling Kee-lee off me. “Shut up about Moo Moo! Shut up about dead people and dead stuff!”

I keep quiet, but not ’cause I’m scared. I’m thinking. Remembering. Wondering who gonna die next.

AIN’T NO FUN playing hooky with a house full of little kids. So me and Kee-lee go to the horse stables. Dream-a-Lot Stables is twenty-eight blocks from my house, down in a valley. So even though it’s not far from where I live, you don’t just run into it. You gotta be looking for it. Otherwise, you’ll never find it.

The owner asks how come we ain’t in school, right when he’s handing us a broom. For a one-hour ride, we gotta clean two stalls. When we done, we wet with sweat, and almost too tired to go riding. But it’s been weeks since I rode Journey. So I get on her first. And soon as we’re out the owner’s sight, I smack her side, let the reins loose, and she takes off running.

Kee-lee’s holding on to me. “Slow down.”

I go faster, racing up the avenue between SUVs and hoopties. Passing boarded-up houses and burned-out stores. Forgetting about Jason and Moo Moo. Forgetting about the time somebody shot Journey too.

Kee-lee hollers in my ear. “Cops!”

I pull back on the reins and Journey slows up. The cop directing traffic eyeballs me. He knows we ain’t allowed to have a horse in the streets. But where we live, people do things all the time they ain’t supposed to. “Boy, shouldn’t you be in school?”

Kee-lee answers. “That’s where we headed, officer. This here horse is our show and tell.”

The cop’s whistle blows and his hand stops traffic. “Get down. Now.”

Kee-lee smacks Journey’s butt. Our light turns green. Cars fly up the street and so do we.

When our time’s up, and Journey’s back in her stall, we walk the neighborhood for a while, then take the bus over to Kee-lee’s aunt’s place. But as soon as she sees us, she’s mad. And the next thing we know she’s got us in the car and headed for school. She lies to the front-desk secretary. Says things got crazy at her place this morning with her husband’s sugar acting up and the ambulance being called, and so, “These boys is late. Sorry.”

I wish she hadn’t done that, because not coming is better than coming in the middle of the day. See, when you don’t show up, they call your house and say you didn’t come and you can lie to your parents and say the teacher must’ve missed checking off your name. But when you don’t come in on time and show up later, they call your house twice. Once to say you didn’t show, next to say exactly what time you did come. Then you need a double lie, and those are hard to pull off. So when I get home, my father is waiting with the strap. I make up a lie; then a different one. Then two more. But he hits me with the belt anyway, and makes me tell the truth. Which gets me beat some more. I am too old to get beat. One time I almost hit my father back. But I remembered what Moo Moo said: “When somebody dies, it make you different, crazy inside.” Moo Moo knew what was up, because his brother got shot dead in front of him ten years ago. It changed him. He started beating people up, stealing money, and smoking weed twenty-four/seven. “You get your right mind back, if folks give you time,” he told me last year. “If they remember how sad you really is deep down inside.”

My father is out of breath. He slaps his hand with the strap. “You learned your lesson, boy?”

I want to deck him. To beat him to the ground. Only Moo Moo woulda said,
Give him time, Mann
.

So that’s what I do.