Bang! (3 page)

WHEN COUSIN knocked on our door at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, my father got mad. We was all sleeping real good. “So?” Cousin said, when my dad let him in. “You can sleep anytime.”

My mother walked by my room. She stopped, came inside and kissed me on the forehead. She asked me what I wanted to eat. Cousin yelled up the steps. He told her to come make him some banana pancakes and sausages. He said we’d better all get ready quick, because the family was coming in an hour to take us to the amusement park. I thought my dad would say he wasn’t going. But he didn’t. He ate two helpings of food and played chess with Cousin while my mother got dressed.

By the time my mom came back downstairs, the living room was full of people.

Aunts were sitting on chairs or leaning on walls eating French toast and bacon off paper plates, and telling kids to behave. My three uncles were standing up, watching basketball, drinking beer, and telling kids to stop blocking the TV. My mother was laughing. My father was showing off his new work boots. We were having a good time, just like regular people.

“Get over here, boy,” my grandmother said, pulling me by the back of my pants.

I hugged her. “Yes, Ma Dear.”

“You gonna ride with me? Go way up high in one of them rollie coasters?”

“You better not—”

Ma Dear told my father to mind his own business. “I’m your mother. And I’m seventy-four. I ought to know what I can handle.”

Ma Dear and me always ride the roller coaster. Not the biggest ones, but the old wooden one that takes too long getting to the top, then only got two little hills on the way down. “I’ll ride with you, Ma Dear.”

She patted my hand. Asked me if I liked her fingernails. They’re fake. “I ain’t no old lady, you know.” She stood up and headed for the kitchen. “You coming, child?”

I followed her. She stopped in front of Jason’s room. I looked the other way. “No crying today.” She took my hand and walked me into the kitchen. My mother was there, sitting by herself. Staring out the window. Ma Dear walked over to the yellow radio and turned it up loud. She clapped her hands and shook her big butt. “Dance with me.” She moved side to side, singing with the music. “Grace. Can’t you hear? Dance with me.”

My mother couldn’t help but laugh. My aunts and uncles stood in the doorway, shaking their heads and laughing too. “Shake it now.”

I picked up my little cousin Ellen and swung her around. “Again,” she said, leaning back and closing her eyes. “Faster.”

My mother’s head was bobbing. Her hands clapped, and next thing I knew somebody pushed my father into the kitchen and laughed when he started dancing like a man with two broken feet.

The whole house was shaking because people in the living room had the stereo on too. Little kids were jumping like somebody was turning rope. Grown-ups were doing the Slide and pushing furniture aside. Ma Dear was pulling out money, saying she was gonna pay two dollars to the best dancer. For a whole hour, all we did was act up, dance and sing, tell corny jokes, and talk about people’s bald heads, bad feet, and beer bellies. I couldn’t stop laughing. My father couldn’t stop talking. And my mother was dancing so hard she was sweating out her hair.

WHEN MA DEAR and ’em come by, things round our house are good for a while. My father don’t just go to work and come home mad. My mother stops crying and does the things she used to do—knit, visit the old woman up the street, cook, and sit on my bed and talk to me at night.

“What’s shaking?” my father says, trying to be cool.

I’m in the basement, drawing. “Nothing.”

He looks over my shoulder. Points to the charcoal drawing I’m making of Journey. She’s not in her stall.

She’s in an open field with ten other jet-black horses with fire-red eyes. Free. My dad sits down on the stool beside me. “Nice.” He sets his coffee cup down. “Looks like the horses I used to have, except for the eyes.”

My mom and dad are from Kentucky. His family lived on a farm. It wasn’t theirs. It belonged to a white family. Ma Dear and them worked for the family, picking tobacco. My father was good with animals, so he got to ride the horses. He brushed them good and taught them stuff. “When I was your age,” he says, touching Journey’s tail, “I thought I would grow up and have a farm full of horses—dozens.”

I put clouds in the sky. “Jason . . .”

My dad jumps up. “Wash up. Dinner’s almost ready.”

I forget sometimes not to say Jason’s name. “I was just gonna say—”

My dad’s halfway up the steps. “We had a good time, huh?”

Jason liked to draw, just like me. That’s all I was gonna say.

My father bends over to tie his shoes. “At the park . . . last week.”

I laugh. “Ma Dear better stay off them ‘rollie coasters.’”

He backs down the steps. “The sign says, if you have a bad heart, don’t get on.” He sits down next to me. Tells me that every time she gets on a roller coaster he prays she’ll make it off okay. Nobody will stop her from getting on, though, because she does what she likes. “Keeps her young,” he says. “And strong.”

I push my drawing in front of him. “Gonna get a A on this one.”

“
Better
get an A. You been slipping since . . .” He doesn’t finish saying what he’s thinking.

I pack up my stuff. Change the subject. Try to keep things light. Then the phone rings. It’s Kee-lee. He wants to come eat at our place. “To get away from all them bad kids.”

My dad likes Kee-lee. When Jason was still alive, he took Kee-lee with us wherever we went. He taught all three of us to draw and ride horses. Now he don’t hardly have nothing to do with Kee-lee. “I don’t know.”

“How come he can’t never come over?”

He cracks his knuckles then breathes out loud. “Tell the boy to come. But don’t be eating up all my food.”

Dinner is just like that day we went to the amusement park. Everybody’s laughing. Everybody’s happy.

All Kee-lee does is make jokes, eat, and excuse himself when he goes to the bathroom to fart. “You got garlic in them potatoes, Ms. Grace. And garlic don’t like me much.”

When dinner’s done, me and Kee-lee hang out in the basement. It’s finished, with a new rug, video games, and a giant-size TV. Every now and then my father comes down and watches the game with us. He sits on the couch. Tells us why they need to trade number forty-five and number twenty-seven, then he goes back upstairs.

Kee-lee doesn’t leave until the game ends at midnight. My father stands on the porch and watches him walk home. My mother sits on the couch next to me, saying she don’t know the last time she made a meal that tasted so good. I’m sleepy. Tired. But I don’t go to bed when they do. I stay up until three in the morning, painting. I don’t paint nothing special, just me and my boy Kee-lee, standing on the corner playing hoops and talking trash.

WHEN SOMEBODY dies, do you ever get him out of your head?

I wanted to ask my mother that. But her eyes were extra red this morning, so I knew her and me was both dreaming about Jason last night. And I couldn’t ask my father nothing like that, because he acts like Jason was never born. So I just sit at the kitchen table all by myself, eating hard grits and cold toast.

My father walks in after a while. “So where you headed this morning?”

“School.”

“To school is right. Skip out again and see what happens to you.”

It’s been a week since Kee-lee ate here, and things are just like always. Only I ain’t the same. I skipped school again the other day. I went to Moo Moo’s grave and had a good talk with him. Told him I was trying to hold on, to do right, but I keep having dreams about Jason, and getting headaches and feeling like being good ain’t worth all the trouble. I mean, why should you go to school, get good grades, and listen to your parents when you gonna get shot anyhow? Why don’t you just do like you wanna since you know you’re gonna die before your time?

When my dad found out I cut, I told him where I went. Then I ducked. He ain’t do nothing though. Just said I better not skip no more. And when I was almost out the room he said he was sorry for what happened to Moo Moo. That was the first time he said that.

Me and Kee-lee didn’t go to the funeral they had for Moo Moo a couple of weeks back. We got dressed. We rode in the family car to the funeral. We lined up with the family and walked up the church steps. But right when we got to the door, and seen the silver casket all the way up front, him and me both stepped out of line at the same time. Kee-lee’s mother looked mad. My dad grabbed me by the arm and said for me to come inside. But me and Kee-lee stayed put—right outside the church doors. In the rain. Waiting for it to all be over.

My mother walks in the kitchen and kisses me on the lips. “What color is sad?” she asks.

My father shakes his head and leaves the room. Since me and Jason was born, my mother always asked us nutty questions like that. “Black,” I say.

She turns on the heat under the teapot and puts a mug on the table. “I think if sad were a color, it would be pink.” She puts coffee in her cup and kisses me again before she sits down. “Or maybe it would be powder blue, like the sky on the prettiest day you ever seen.”

My mom used to be a library aide, that’s why she talks like that. But when Jason got shot, she couldn’t work no more. All the quiet and all the kids just made her think about Jason too much.

The teakettle whistles. My mother tells me that sad has got to be a pretty color because pretty makes the heart hurt more than ugly does. “A smashed-up worm doesn’t make you sad, but a round-eyed baby with a high fever do.”

I think about all my paints. “Sad is yellow,” I tell her, “like the sun first thing in the morning.”

She puts sugar in her cup. “Like the sun,” she says. “Like
my
son.”

I let her know I gotta go, even though it’s too early to leave for school. She says we’ll all be better when Jason’s birthday passes in six weeks. She looks at the funeral parlor calendar hanging on the wall over the sink. Today is May second. June twelfth is circled in red. A birthday sticker of cakes and candles covers the first day of this month. She puts one on every day, right up till his birthday. “That boy had me in labor sixteen hours. Then he came out long and red-faced with a head full of hair.” She covers today’s date with a pink cake.

I’m backing out the kitchen. Trying not to look at my mother, who used to be fat, and only weighs a hundred and ten pounds now. “Eat something.”

“I’m not hungry,” she says, like usual.

I walk over and hand her my hard toast. I break it in half, then in quarters. I put it to her lips. Her mouth won’t open though. She starts talking about what kind of cake she’s gonna make. Last year she made Jason’s favorite—yellow cake with chocolate icing. This year she says she’s making a pound cake and buying butter-pecan ice cream.

“I just want . . .” I keep my mouth shut. I unlock the doors and I leave, because I don’t wanna say what I’m thinking—that I just want a regular mom, and I just want to be a regular kid who don’t have to worry about ducking bullets or people dying around me like soldiers in a war.

YOU CAN’T GO to school when your mother’s in the kitchen baking a cake for your dead brother. So I go to Kee-lee’s house. As soon as I get inside, I take a smoke from behind his ear and light up.

“When you start smoking?”

“Just now,” I say, sucking in smoke. After it’s half done, and I’m hot and dizzy, I put it out and take off my shirt. Kee-lee says that’s how things go when you first start smoking. “Next time it won’t be so bad.”

We’re up in his room with the dresser at the door to keep his brothers and sisters out. He’s got this here idea. Paint pictures of all the dead kids from our neighborhood. Put ’em on little cards and sell ’em.

“Let’s not sell ’em,” I tell him. “Just give ’em away.”

Kee-lee’s rolling up weed. Smoking it more and more now that Moo Moo’s gone. Last week he lit up at school. The teacher almost busted him. “I ain’t giving nothing away. I’m getting paid for my skills,” he says, setting the bag of weed on the floor. “You know how many cats died around here this year?”

My stomach hurts.

“Twenty-five.” He lights up. “I keep count, ’cause you never know,” he says, taking a drag, “when you gonna be number twenty-six, or twenty-seven.”

Nobody knows why, but for the last four years people been getting shot like crazy around here. It’s not just gangs doing it. It’s regular people too. Some-one wants your ride and they shoot you for it. Somebody robs your mom, or was drinking with a friend and got mad ’cause his buddy tried to hit on his woman and he pulls out a gun. A lot of times kids get killed—even the cops seem to be gunning for us. It’s like we’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time; only all the time seems like the wrong time around here.

Kee-lee keeps telling me we can make some real dough drawing pictures of Jason and them. “People can collect ’em like baseball cards.”

I was thinking about Jason when I hit Kee-lee. Was thinking about him on a postcard with stuff on the back.
Jason Adler. Seven years old. First-grade student at Henry Ellen Elementary School. Played baseball. Liked to wrestle, play soldiers, and ride around the house on his father’s back.

Kee-lee touches the blood on his bottom lip, right before he swings a plastic baseball bat my way. “Hit me again and I’ll smash your head in.”

I tell him again that we ain’t putting Jason on no cards. He’s not listening. He wants to charge ten bucks apiece for the cards. And to start with Jason because he’s little and people will feel so bad about him they’ll want the others too.

He lights up a blunt and hands it to me. I take it this time, because my head won’t stay off Jason, Moo Moo, my mother, and the cake. I suck smoke in and cough. Take another hit, and hold it in till my head spins. Next thing I know I’m lying on the floor, laughing. “Fruit trees.” I take another puff. “Banana trees.”

Kee-lee laughs. “What?”

“Killing round here would stop if we had more trees. “Apples trees. Pear trees . . . you know.”

“What you talking about?”

“You ever hear of people getting shot on farms?”

“Huh?”

“You live on a farm around cows, and chickens, and trees, and ain’t nobody gunning for you.”

He laughs. “How ’bout trees with rice? I like rice.”

“Rice don’t grow on trees,” I say. “It grows in water.”

We laugh.

“No more weed for you,” he says, walking over to the wall with Jason on it. He puts paint on a brush and touches up Jason’s sneaker. “If he was my brother, I’d want him on a baseball card. I’d want everybody in the whole world to have his card, to not forget who he was.”

I don’t want Jason on no cards that people drop in the rain or use to light stoves when their pilot light goes out. Kee-lee still wants me to go along with it. But he knows better than to keep bugging me, so he changes the subject.

“California’s got lots of fruit trees and people get shot there.”

I think on that awhile. “Do they get shot on farms too, Kee-lee?”

He says he don’t know. “I ain’t never been on no farm.” He spits sunflower-seed shells on the floor. “Maybe it’s just the chickens that get shot. And the cows.”

I sit straight up. “Who’s gonna shoot a cow? They don’t do nothing bad.”

Kee-lee don’t answer for a while. “Who’s gonna shoot a little boy?” he says. “They don’t do nothing bad neither.”