Hold Love Strong (4 page)

“It means that Momma ain't got to know to know,” my mother an
swered. “She been around long enough to know birds in a cage was bound to happen.”

“How can you tell one from the other?” I asked no one in particular. “You ain't supposed to,” said Donnel, his cheek brushing against the side of my face with each word he spoke.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Cause they birds,” he said. “They meant to fly, not be here with us.”

The birds stayed close together on the perch and although they looked fragile there was a fierceness to their unity, an inseparable inseparability. Donnel squeezed his finger through the bars of the cage to see how close he could come to touching the birds. The birds chirped. Then they flew back and forth in the cage, from one side of the bars to the other, stopping to hold on to each wall of bars before flying again, flapping until they came to rest together on the bars at the back of the cage. Donnel whistled to the birds. And I watched the birds pause, tilt their heads, and consider his song. I glanced over my shoulder at my mother. She smiled at me. I don't recall what I was thinking, but it was clear that whatever it was she understood so her empathy made me feel good. I turned my eyes back to the birds, then shifted them just enough to see Donnel purse his lips and whistle more. I couldn't whistle, both because I didn't know how and because my teeth were missing. But then, that didn't stop me from trying. I watched Donnel's lips for a moment more and listened to his airy tune. Then I turned my face to the birds again, took a deep breath, pursed my lips as best as I could, and breathed a gentle wind that joined Donnel's song as it crossed through the bars and ruffled the birds' feathers on the other side of the cage.

A
s a child, I was obsessed with flight. Sometimes, before I went to sleep, I'd lie beneath the sheets and pretend I was a bird, a cloud, an astronaut, a superhero with the super power of not speeding or soaring, but floating, drifting according to the whim of wind. When a plane passed over Ever, I'd stop whatever I was doing, stop playing, stop teasing, stop walking, stop talking, and look up. Later, when I became a teenager and I began to develop a sense of the world and where I was in it, and when I was feeling awry and no one was around to say
Nigga? What're you doing?
I threw things at planes that passed overhead. I threw anything that was near, anything I could snatch and heave: rocks and basketballs; bricks and books, chewing gum, pens, pencils, glass bottles; even spit; and when there was no object to be found, when I stood amidst nothing, I hurled fistfuls of emptiness, sometimes one after the other, sometimes at the same time.

I wasn't the only Icarus in Ever. Far from it. Percival, a dark-skinned
brother whose angry disposition was lost the moment he spoke about his son Shakeem, taught Shakeem how to fold perfect paper airplanes, and together they spent Sunday mornings throwing their planes from their window and watching how far they sailed before landing on the concrete that surrounded Ever, the concrete courtyard—the cracked concrete parking lot, the concrete sidewalk that shrank in the winter, then swelled, heaved, and fractured more and more each summer. And Mr. Lucas, an old, gangly flutist from the fourth floor who had once lived in France, had a parrot named Charlie Parker that he never placed in a cage, so it flew, shat, and shelled peanuts wherever it wanted. And Tariq Abdullah, a stout, muscular, reckless blasphemer who'd become Muslim and grounded during his stay in Franklin Correctional Facility, fed the pigeons on the roof with saltines while pacing and reading aloud from the Qur'an. On the basketball court, brothers argued over who jumped higher, who had the greatest hang time; who flew. The best-looking women were fly. Everyone wanted Air Jordans. Crackheads got high. You smoked dope and got lifted. When I was sixteen, Anthony Roberson, an effeminate, bespectacled fifteen-year-old with a chipped front tooth and the best dance moves anyone in Ever had ever seen, spread his lithe arms like wings, ran as fast as he could, then hopped, skipped, pirouetted, and leapt from the roof of my building and screamed all the way down.

Then there was Tyrone Jackson, the Vietnam veteran who was first mocked, then, eventually, reverentially dubbed Lindbergh. A helicopter mechanic, Lindbergh served two tours fighting for democracy and freedom. Some said he had been the most handsome man in all of Queens before America dropped him in Da Nang and Lindbergh, a toothless loon with half a head of short, dry dreadlocks and a shopping cart full of miscellany, replaced him. Lindbergh collected cans and scrap metal and anything else he could sell to make an honest living. Seven days a week, rain or shine, oppressively humid, fiercely hot, and in the unbear
ably cold, he wore fatigues, a field jacket, and a black beret as he pushed his cart and scrounged through Dumpsters and garbage cans so much his hands were as hard as hooves and his fingers were talons. Everyone said Lindbergh was crazy. Some said he was lost. Some said he needed Jesus. Jehovah's Witnesses chased Lindbergh down and handed him flyers. Sometimes one of Ever's scratch-ticket addicts or Lotto fiends bought him a cup of coffee from the corner store and stood outside drinking coffee with him, sipping and saying this or that, trying to get Lindbergh to open up. Occasionally, someone offered Lindbergh a day's pay doing backbreaking labor, shoveling rubble, demolishing a decrepit building in the neighborhood with a crowbar, and occasionally he'd do it, hammering and shoveling all day without taking a moment's break. Some people said Lindbergh was a drunk, that his body pumped Night Train, not blood. Some said he was a junkie, that he jammed this or that into his arms and lungs. Some said he was broken. Most agreed that his soul had been stolen.

But none of it was true. Because before Lindbergh was anything—in fact, before Lindbergh was a soldier—he was an artist. He was a creator, an innovator, silently but radically forthright with regards to what he wished, what he deemed necessary for himself, his environment, and us, we, the people of Ever Park. The trash and miscellany Lindbergh couldn't sell, he bent, twisted, affixed, and built into helicopters. Hundreds of them. The size of small cars, the size of infants, small enough to rest in the palm of your hand. Helicopters from cans too crushed to be redeemable. Helicopters from plastic forks, bottle caps, and the spokes from bicycle wheels. Lindbergh built helicopters wherever the spirit moved him, in stairwells, in the park, perched on the backs of benches where pigeons sat impervious to the earthbound concoctions. Sometimes, I'd wake up and walk out of my building in the morning and there one would be, smack in the middle of the sidewalk, a four-foot psychedelic chopper with a working propeller made of mattress
springs and detergent containers. Lindbergh's helicopters would sit there, randomly placed around Ever, until someone took them, children played with them until they broke, or the weather, the elements of the world, tore them apart.

Once Lindbergh gave a helicopter to my mother. It was built out of potato chip bags, sip-box straws, and garbage ties. I was six. She was nineteen. It was winter and we were waiting for the bus. We were on our way to the emergency room at the hospital because I had whooping cough and it kept me gasping and coughing up thick green phlegm all night. My coat was zipped to my chin. A knit hat was pulled over my eyebrows, and a thick red wool scarf was looped around my neck. I coughed, gagged, and gasped and everyone standing at the bus stop except my mother stepped away from me.

“Abraham,” she scolded. “Cover your mouth. The whole world don't want what you got.”

I coughed again and a wad of phlegm jumped from my lungs into my mouth.

“Spit,” my mother demanded, peeling the plastic lid off of a paper coffee cup and holding it in front of my mouth.

I spit in the cup that was already half full of mucus and my mother put the plastic lid back on.

“They gonna see now,” she huffed, simultaneously talking to herself and anyone who would listen. “Take my baby to the doctor and the man says he just got a little cold.”

My mother stepped from the curb and stood in the middle of the street. She jammed her hands on her hips, glared down the empty road, the distance that was to produce the bus.

“Where's this motherfucker?” she shouted. “Fucking bus. Got my baby standing out in the cold!”

I coughed and hacked more and my mother looked for the bus three more times, each time getting angrier and more impatient, each time
cursing the bus, the bus driver, the bus company, the doctor at the clinic.

“Shit,” she said. “I bet you if we was in Africa, there'd be a motherfucking bus! It might have no wheels and be pulled by some elephant, but there'd be a bus for us, that's for damn sure!”

My mother stepped back onto the curb. She snatched my hand. Then Lindbergh was suddenly at the bus stop, one hand gripping the front of his shopping cart as if he feared it might roll away, his other hand extended, offering a small helicopter to my mother as if it were a flower.

At first, my mother ignored him. She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. She pushed a dismissive sigh out of her mouth. She looked at the brothers and sisters waiting for the bus with us. Then, when Lindbergh didn't leave and his hand holding the helicopter didn't drop, she gave in and took the gift from him.

“Thank you,” she said.

Lindbergh was silent, emotionless. He left his empty hand extended as if he wanted something soft and simple back. I stood at my mother's side and looked at her. She studied the helicopter. Its propeller worked. Its doors opened. A miniature man made from a plastic spoon sat in the cockpit. Like my mother, I couldn't believe it. I wondered what would happen if my mother tossed the helicopter into the air. Would it fly or crash to the ground?

I looked at Lindbergh for an answer. He was a broken brother. His lips were chapped and their splits were caked with dry blood. His eyebrows were as knotted and mangy as his hair. And the whites of his eyes were not white nor even a pallid yellow or grey. They were a few shades lighter than the brown of his eyes so no matter the day's weather or temperature he always looked sodden, muddy. He looked back at me and we studied each other. He rolled his lips in and out of his mouth, over his toothless gums, and a couple of the cracks began to bleed a bit, fill with electric bright blood. In the name of human liberties and
democracy, in the name of an equality he, we, and brothers throughout history were never provided, Lindbergh had killed and witnessed the killing of innocent people and it crushed him. His teeth rotted from it. His skin dried and flaked. Something precious had been ripped from his chest and all he had left was the paranoid guarding of the hole.

Just as suddenly as Lindbergh had arrived, the bus pulled up. My mother gave my hand a tug to let me know it was time for us to go. But before I moved, Lindbergh dropped his hand until it rested flat on my head. Then he squatted until our eyes were level.

“Semper fi,”
he whispered, his voice a rusted metal chain dragged through a rusted metal slot.
“Semper fi.”

Then with a groan and the creaking and cracking of his prematurely arthritic knees, Lindbergh stood, made eye contact with my mother for a moment, and apologetically backpedaled two steps. He walked away, pulling his rattling, squeaking shopping cart behind. I had no idea what
semper fi
meant. Although my mother knew it had something to do with the military, with being a soldier, neither did she. But the definition of the phrase didn't matter. Not to me, not then. What mattered then was when we sat down on the bus, my mother gave me the helicopter, and I played with it. I held it up to the bus window. I tapped its propeller with my finger to make it spin. I imagined I was a pilot, a soldier who, with every flick of finger against propeller, flew farther away from coughing and the grating, burning in my chest.

N
ight. The snow lay so flat and clean it seemed no one ever dreamed about what the world was. Beneath the pallid glow of streetlights and the spotlights that highlighted Ever, no trails marked where people walked. No laughter; no arguments, no one preached over the cacophony of a heated group debate; no young brother explained his superstitions and routine before rolling dice against the base of my building. No sounds from passing cars, no rumble of buses; no police sirens devouring the breath of everyone in Ever. Snow balanced on branches, telephone wires, along the rims of garbage drums, and flakes as big and drifting as feathers floated and spun in the whip of wind as they fell from the black sky.

I was eight years old, but I stared out of the window in our living room as if I were fifty and doing time for fifty more. I wore my PAL basketball jersey over a white T-shirt and my favorite black Adidas sweatpants with the three red stripes running along the outside of my
legs. With my elbows on the windowsill, my cheeks pressed between the heels of my hands, I watched the path of a white flake until the flake was lost amidst the others, the swirling whiteness, and I had to choose another. I suffered from the stillness, the whiteness that had been forced upon Ever, that suppressed my youth, my joy, my ability to run about. This was death. Every flake killed me over again. The schedule I'd Scotch-taped on the refrigerator three months earlier said there was a championship basketball game at 6:00 p.m. and my team had made the championship. Now, because of the snow, it was cancelled.
Shit,
I thought,
damn this snow.

All of the bruises I'd collected, the floor burns, all of the trash my friends and I had talked that week in school were for nothing. Didn't the world, didn't the sky, didn't God know how seriously we took this game; how much freedom it provided? I thought it couldn't be. I wouldn't let it be. I stared out of the window and hoped for heat, for a sudden fiery wind. I considered what I could do to reverse the state of the world. How could I excise the snow? How many matches would I need? How many lighters? If only I could wish a fire. I took no comfort in the fact that the game would be rescheduled. I took basketball, we took it, too seriously to have any game let alone our championship suspended. So I prayed against it. I hoped. But my hope did nothing. It was true. Inarguable. Ever was adorned, silenced, ravaged by white.

Behind me, lying head to foot and parallel on the couch, my mother and my Aunt Rhonda painted red nail polish on each other's toes.

“Abraham, no matter how bad you want it, that snow ain't gonna stop,” my mother sighed.

“Shit,” added my Aunt Rhonda. “It's supposed to be the worst snowstorm in history. A whiteout! That's what the news said.”

“Well whatever the news say, I still got to go to work,” my grandma shouted from the kitchen.

My grandma was already dressed for work. White pants, a white shirt, white shoes: she was a night orderly at Queens Hospital, a job she fought, prayed, and begged for for two years before they promoted her from the hospital's laundry room and gave her the chance, a job she loved, the calling she said she found after that night she helped my mother deliver me. She stood in front of the stove frying chopped meat and boiling spaghetti for dinner. She was nearing forty, so her grace was neither new nor negotiable, nor was it something she would deny, and it was not some banner she held or waved triumphantly. Rather, it was a buttress, like riggings of a ship, the cables and trusses of a suspension bridge. Adaptable, responsive, my grandma gave off an air of absorbency, a manner that indicated that weathering and holding everything was simply how she lived.

“I remember,” she continued, pausing to make sure she had our attention. “One time it snowed so bad the news showed white folks skiing from Midtown all the way to Wall Street.”

We were in a box, hemmed and penned in, ants in frozen milk. The walls of our living room were white. The ceiling was white. Above the window, where the ceiling and the top of the wall met, was the coffee-colored stain we sometimes claimed to look like things, as if it were a cloud in the sky. All around us, above our heads, in the walls, in the bathroom, and in the kitchen, pipes knocked and leaked. The belly of the electric heater we used to keep the apartment warm sparked and burned red. Just in front of it on the floor, Donnel and Eric played War with an old deck of cards. Eric threw down a jack. Donnel dropped an ace.

“I win,” said Eric.

He reached for the cards. Donnel slapped his hand away.

“Nigga,” he scolded. “How many times I got to tell you an ace beats everything?”

Outside in the snow a man jogged into the pale, yellow ring made
by a streetlight. He stayed in the glow. He danced, fluttered, moved in circles. He dipped one shoulder then the other. He punched, jabbing and hooking then ducking as if punches were thrown back at him. He held his fists beneath his chin. He bobbed his head.

“It's Mr. Goines!” I shouted, turning to look at my cousins and my mother and aunt on the couch.

Mr. Goines was shadowboxing, sparring an invisible opponent who must have been twice his size and ten times as quick. He dodged. He dipped. He weaved. He pretended he was slugged in the face, pounded in the ribs. He wobbled, then backpedaled, then rope-a-doped off the invisible ropes that marked the perimeter of the pallid ring and punched back.

Donnel and Eric joined me at the window. Then, hurrying across the room on their heels so the fresh polish on their toes wouldn't smudge, my mother and my Aunt Rhonda arrived.

“Look at him,” said my mother, pressing her face against the window above my head. “He's beating up the snow!”

“Ma,” shouted my Aunt Rhonda, her voice an amalgamation of glee and mockery. “You got to see this! Hurry! Come look!”

“He's boxing!” added Donnel.

“I don't need to see that fool to know he's crazy,” my grandma said, still standing at the stove.

But a moment later she amended her declaration. She huffed a breath of annoyance, turned the stove down, and came to the window. She watched Mr. Goines. And waiting for her opinion, I watched her. So I saw how the face she first brought to the window changed, and her eyes softened, bending from a cold, hard stare to an engrossed yet somewhat perplexed gaze, as if she was seeing a sight she appreciated but didn't trust.

“That man is touched,” she decided. Then, as if she could no longer stand to watch, she ordered us to move, unlatched the window lock, and threw open the window.

“You a damn fool!” she shouted, leaning her head outside. “You know that, Lyndon Goines? You gonna catch pneumonia and die!”

Mr. Goines stopped punching and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Then he turned around, looked up to our window, and his hands fell to his sides.

“Gloria!” he called out, his shining smile introduced by the tumble of breath that carried my grandma's name. “How my birds doing?”

“They fine,” said my grandma.

Then, as if suddenly recalling that Mr. Goines believed even the slightest interaction between them was flirtation, and he loved it, loved talking about it, telling anyone in Ever who would listen, my grandma slammed the window closed, spun around, and strode back into the kitchen.

“Pay that man no mind,” she scolded. “And get away from that window. Don't give him no audience to act stupid in front of.”

Standing in the snow and still looking up at our window, Mr. Goines's smile did the impossible, growing wider and gleaming more than it had just been glowing. Slowly he resumed bouncing on the balls of his feet. He made his hands fists and raised them above his head. He backpedaled a handful of steps and shadowboxed for a few moments, dipping and weaving and throwing a half-dozen stiff jabs. Then he turned and jogged out of the ring of pale light, disappearing into the darkness of Columbus Avenue and the falling snow.

My cousins returned to playing cards. My Aunt Rhonda and my mother returned to the couch and resumed painting each other's toenails.

Wondering where Mr. Goines went, and thinking he might soon and suddenly return, I stared out of the window. Then I went into the kitchen, planted my elbows on the counter, planted my chin in my hands, and watched the lovebirds in their cage. Their names were Lady and Man and only my grandma could tell them apart. It was too cold
for them so they were puffed up, and their beaks were tucked into the feathers of their chests. I was bored, ornery, and looking for a place to aim the frustration gnawing on me, so I took a deep breath and blew it as hard as I could at Lady and Man, ruffling their feathers.

“Abraham, why you messing with those birds?” my grandma asked.

“Why do they got to stay in the cage?” I answered.

“Cause that's where they live.”

“What happens if they want to get out?”

My grandma laughed. “Where they gonna go?”

“Wherever they want.”

My grandma stirred the chopped meat in the pan. Steam rose around her hands. “They probably afraid anyway,” she decided.

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

“You and your questions,” she said. “Lady and Man ain't never been out of that cage. And besides, they lovebirds. All they need is each other.”

“They need to be free,” I decided.

My grandma stopped stirring the chopped meat and turned around to look at me.

“Abraham,” she said in the gentle scolding tone she employed when she found something, an act, accusation, or statement, curious, “you saying my birds ain't free?”

Keys rattled at the door. The locks clacked, clicked. Then the door swung open and my Uncle Roosevelt and his girlfriend walked into the apartment. They were covered in snow. Their noses were running. Their eyes were watering from the cold. And their hands and arms were full of grocery bags of nonperishable items; boxes of sugary cereal, Cup-a-Soups, bags of potato chips, cheese puffs, pretzels, cans of fruit and vegetables, and a ten-pound bag of bird food.

“It's bad as all hell out there,” my Uncle Roosevelt said, crossing the room toward the kitchen.

“Take off them shoes,” ordered my grandma. “And your coats. You
all is dropping snow all over the place. Now, you want something hot? How 'bout some hot chocolate?”

Like a brown version of Michelangelo's statue of David, my Uncle Roosevelt had bloomed into a holy statue of a man. He was tall, strong, and good-looking; symmetrical; the type of man who didn't have to wink, lick his lips, wear cologne, speak, or move around to be enticing. I idolized him. No. It was more. I wanted nothing else but to be him. And I wasn't alone with this wish. In Ever Park, every brother with a heartbeat and a last breath wanted to be him. He was our Michael Jordan, our Ever Park king. He was seventeen years old, six foot four inches tall, body made solely of bones and lean muscle. Everyone called him Nice. And so I called my uncle Nice too. But he didn't just epitomize the nickname. He expanded its definition. That is, the word
nice
only described what my Uncle Roosevelt did on the basketball court when he wasn't moving, when he paused, held the ball on his hip, and contemplated the game and the world around him. In Ever, no one had, ever could, or bothered dreaming about stopping my uncle on the basketball court. He scored with his left hand. He scored with his right. He scored with his eyes open, his eyes closed; in sneakers and boots, jeans and shorts; and sometimes, after he'd given in to my grandmother and gone with her to church or had to attend the funeral of another young brother, I'd seen him score in shoes, dress pants, a white shirt, and a tie. He was as ambidextrous as a left-handed man with two left hands, a right-handed man with two rights. The only time I ever saw my uncle stopped on the basketball court was when he stopped himself. Half of the time it was because he was bored with the game, and the other half of the time he called it quits so he could be with his girl, she who stood beside him in our apartment, tall and shapely, terra-cotta skin and rose lips, and with hips and shoulders that made it clear the sky was weightless upon her. Her given name was Tiffany, but Nice called her Luscious, so
everyone in Ever called her Luscious too. When Luscious came to the court to watch Nice play, he celebrated her presence by dunking with his right hand, with his left hand, and with both hands every time he touched the ball. They loved each other; in fact, they loved each other so deeply that I never once saw them standing in the same place and not touching each other in some delicate manner, holding hands, linking pinkies, leaning on each other. Even when they were talking with different people and facing opposite directions they reached back, laid their hands on the small of each other's backs, dipped their fingers into each other's back pockets. Every time I saw them kiss, I stared. Every time I saw them embrace, I wondered what it felt like to disappear and be fortified at the same time.

Nice put down the grocery bags he carried. Then he took the bags from Luscious's arms, put them down, and gently plucked her gloves from her hands. He unwrapped the white scarf from around her neck, kissed the tip of her nose, and helped her out of her coat.

“You all need to stop that shit,” said my Aunt Rhonda.

“Stop what?” asked Nice.

“That kissing in public shit.”

“I kissed her nose.”

“Yeah, well who knows what you'll start kissing next.”

I walked out of the kitchen. “Ma,” I said. “Can I go down to the park?”

My mother didn't acknowledge me, Nice and Luscious, Donnel and Eric, or what Rhonda said. She focused on painting the red polish on Rhonda's big toe as if there were nothing else in the world but her and that toe. She wanted what Luscious had: a man's love. But if she couldn't have such a thing then she wasn't going to fight it like Rhonda. But she would not witness it either. She would not recognize how absent it was.

Nice contemplated my eagerness and an empathatic smile eased
across his face. “A, what you fall and bump your head?” he asked. “Shit, Lindbergh ain't even out in this weather.”