Show and Prove (27 page)

“Could you spell that, please?”

“Can you pretend you're going to check the mail and come downstairs?”

Beep!

“The supermarket?”

Beep!

“The Laundromat?”

Beep!

“Not even camp?”

Beep!

Please deposit ten cents for an additional five minutes.

“Aw, man, Sara! I just got scammed by this stupid pay phone. You think you can call me at home? Please!”

She hesitates, then says, “Oh, sir, I don't think my father would be at all interested in that.”

“Damn, let me think.”

Please deposit ten cents for an additional five minutes.

“I just did, yo!” I jiggle the hook. “This phone tryin' to rip me off!”

Please deposit ten cents for an additional five minutes.

“Sara, just go to your window, OK?”

“I will. Thank you. Good-bye.” Then she hangs up.

I walk out of that wack phone booth into the worst downpour of the summer. No matter. This could be acid rain. I'm on a mission. When I get back to Sara's building, she is standing in the window like I asked. Permission.

The ladder to the fire escape hovers about six feet above my head. With a good running start, I can make it. Walking backward, I count off three squares of concrete, the emerald suede of my soaked Pumas now a forest green that stains my white tube socks. I race forward, then leap for the ladder. Not even close, but before I hit the pavement, I still know I can do it. The second I land on the ground, I leap back farther, and try again. This time my fingers graze the cold, wet metal of the last rung. I land hard on the concrete. My legs vibrate from the shock, and it takes me a minute to recoup. That has never happened to me, even when I danced.

As I walk back six full squares, I rub my hands on the front of my damp hoodie, my drenched sneakers clomping through the puddles on the concrete. I look up at Sara's window and wait for the light to flicker as if signaling
Go.
After the flash, I burst forward, take flight, and finally clutch the wet rung. No sooner do I wrap my fingers around it than my weight rattles the ladder toward the ground. I grasp for the rung with my other hand and hold on. The ladder clangs to a hard stop, leaving me dangling several feet off the ground. For a few seconds I twist in the rain, and I'm hanging there laughing because, once again, it pays to be a b-boy.

Hauling myself up the wet ladder is no piece of cake, though. Just as I manage to plant one foot on the bottom rung, my other sneaker, heavy and bloated with rain, slips off and lands in a puddle. For a moment, I think about jumping off the ladder to go get it, then I feel the rubber of my other sneaker slide against the wet rung. I kick it off, and it drops to the ground and bounces into the gutter. Some poor kid who's braving the rain to run an errand for his mama will probably find them and take them home, hoping all they need is a tumble in the dryer. They were slippery and slowing me down. No matter. There are more important things than kicks.

I ease my way up the ladder, fighting the urge to look down. When I reach the first landing, I feel a little better
. If I take my time, I should be all right,
I'm thinking. But then I start worrying that someone's going to see me and call the police.

And that's when Sara opens her window and sticks her head out. “Willie!” She says my name, and I like to fly up this last set of steps. “Be careful, please.”

I get to her window, and Sara steps back so I can climb into her bedroom. Once my wet socks hit her hardwood floor, I look at her. Her dark eyes are red and watery, and she wipes her runny nose with the back of her hand. Sara flails her arms toward the room. “Home, sweet home.” And then she starts to cry. She lets me take her into my arms, and while Sara cries on my shoulder, I look around her room. It's the same size as mine, with three twin beds, which is two too many. A large crucifix hangs on the wall against the same red-and-white scarf that Arabs wear. A small black-and-white TV sits on a dresser, and right above it hangs a flag that looks both strange and familiar. It looks kind of like a Puerto Rican flag, except it has only three stripes and no star. The triangle is red instead of blue, and the three stripes are black, white, and green. On the TV, the tail end of a jingle for Double Stuf Oreos gives way to an afternoon newsbreak.

French paratroopers and Italian soldiers have joined the United States Marine Corps in Beirut, forming a multinational effort to assist the Lebanese army in maintaining order as the Palestine Liberation Organization evacuates the nation's capital, Beirut.

Sara pulls away from me, taking a pillow off the bed and kneeling onto the rug in front of the TV. She hugs the pillow to her chest as the newscast continues.
Although a cease-fire was arranged, Israeli troops remain in southern Lebanon while Syrian troops and PLO forces hold fast to the north and east of Beirut.
Then the same flag as on Sara's wall quickly flashes on the TV screen.
Israel has agreed to withdraw its forces from Lebanon on condition that Syria and the PLO retreat as well, but PLO leader Yasser Arafat instead has called for renewed warfare against Israel.

When she hears this, Sara buries her face into the pillow, sobbing as if she wants to flood the room with her tears. I lower myself beside her, shivering more from the truth than the wet cold. I have the urge to put my arm around her and pull her to me, but I don't want to push myself on her. “Sara.” Even if I knew what else to say, I can't imagine it would help. First time I truly care about a girl, and I have no lines to make her feel good. “Sara, what can I do?”

“What do you care?” she snaps at me. “You're getting what you wanted. Bomb all the Arabs off the map, right?”

“C'mon, Sara, Cookie done warned you,” I joke. “I'm ignorant, remember?”

“Then you should shut the hell up.”

At least this isn't new. Usually when I see a girl angry, it's me who's done pissed her off. If my jokes don't work, I snap back right at her. At first, the girl will go toe to toe with me, but eventually I get her wondering if maybe she is at fault. That's when I try to break out so she'll come running after me. This won't work with Sara, and not just because I have God knows how many years of history against me. I don't even want to try to play her like that. “OK.”

“You
are
ignorant.”

“I know.”

“If you had half a brain, Willie Vega, you'd be dangerous. All the money you spend on your expensive sneakers and name-brand jeans couldn't buy you the first clue.”

“Word.”

“Stop patronizing me!”

“I'm not, I swear. I don't want to fight with you anymore, that's all,” I say. “I'm sorry for all those things I said, and I admit I don't know nothing about no world affairs.”

“Then how can you have such strong opinions?”

I just shrug. I'm glad Sara's asking me questions, even if I have no good answers. It beats her furious name-calling. “Even if something is hard to understand,” I say, gesturing toward the television, “it's not hard to figure out how you're supposed to feel about it.”

I expect Sara to tell me how stupid that is and why don't I think for myself and blasé, blasé, but she doesn't. She just nods and drops the pillow into her lap. “Right.”

I reach over and take her hand. “Maybe you can explain it to me.”

“If you truly want to understand what's going on,” she says, “turn off your stupid boom box and read the newspaper for a change.”

And I just stay shut up because not only does Sara have a point, she's still holding my hand.

“M
an, you're moving like an old man,” I say. I dig a stick into the hillside and plant my foot on a flat rock. “I thought I'd be the one dragging up this mountain.”

“Don't try me,” mutters Nike. “You know I ain't get no sleep last night.” Like Barb predicted, Sara won't be returning to camp, but at bedtime she sneaks the phone under her covers and whispers to Nike until all hours of the night. Homeboy's lucky the rent on the phone isn't tied to the minutes he's on it.

“How is she?” After Nike told me what happened, I did some research to make better sense of it. When the Israeli military took over the land and forced them out of their homes in Beirut, Sara's family scattered all over the globe. Some fled to other parts of the Middle East and she came to the United States, but most wound up in refugee camps. And now that Lebanon is in the midst of a civil war, with one side wanting to fight the Israelis to get their land back and the others siding with the Israeli agenda for continuing to expand into Palestine, refugee camps have become prime targets. The night we were all supposed to go to the Roxy with Nike, they decimated the refugee camp Mar Elias in Sara's hometown. No one can verify the number of people massacred. One side says it was a few hundred. The other insists on thousands.

The only thing we know for sure is that several of Sara's relatives who were living in that refugee camp—including two cousins no older than the Champs—were slaughtered.

“Not good.” Nike shakes his head. “No wonder she was so afraid of fireworks. Can you imagine living in a war zone like that?”

I bite my tongue. You would never think only three weeks ago a man died on his knees here or that every other night we hear gunshots in the distance and thank God we're blocks away. Poor Sara only traded one kind of war zone for another.

As I wait for him to catch up to me, I check on Stevie and Pedro ahead of us. “Y'all need to slow down now!” I yell. Shorty thinks he's Indiana Jones, the way he's running up this mountain. “Yo, I said—”

“I ain't wanna come up here anyways,” Stevie says. “I wanted to go to the lake.”

Nike says, “If I told you once, I done told you a thousand times. No lake. Quit bellyachin' about it.” With the rash of drownings at city pools, Big Lou decided that the lake was off-limits.

Even Pedro tells Stevie in Spanish to chill out. Then he sits down to rest. “Yeah, good idea,” I say. “Vamos a descansar un poquito.”

I find a patch of dirt free of rocks and take a seat. “Land is important the world over, B. Look at these gangs shooting up the block trying to get control of turf. It's why Qusay had to rent the storefront and why families save to buy their own homes. Control the ground beneath your feet, control your destiny. And maybe that of everyone else living on it, too.”

Nike finally reaches me and plops down beside me. “I thought Sara's situation had to do with religion or race or whatever.”

“It does. People usually use something like race or religion to justify why they have a so-called right to take over some land. Remember learning about Manifest Destiny?”

He shakes his head and holds up his palm like he can't take anymore. That is so Nike. Dude can only stomach reality in doses. It makes him charming and pathetic at the same time. “Yo, why you ain't tell me about Sara? Shoe on the other foot, I would've told you.”

“I know.” But for some reason, I can't bring myself to apologize to him. I wouldn't have done anything differently. “You really should've heard the truth from Sara, and I promised Cookie a chance to convince her to tell you herself.” I give it some more thought, then add, “I do feel bad that it didn't go down that way and messed up your birthday. But you have to admit, B, you be illin' sometimes with the things that come out your mouth. You be tryin' it.”

Nike snickers and grabs a twig. He starts scraping it across the dirt. “Yeah, I know.”

“So what really went down at the Roxy?”

He shrugs. “Nothing. Hardly nobody was there. Breakin's going out of style.”

Even though I'm not a b-boy, I don't want to believe that. I love my nana, but she has to be wrong on this one. A few years back, she walked in on Nike and me tripping over the “Rapture” video on MTV. She took one look at the Man from Mars and Blondie and said,
By this time next year, this rap nonsense will have gone the way of beehive hairdos and lava lamps.
Nike always had faith, but at the time, I believed Nana. It put me in a funk, thinking that something that made me so happy could just disappear one day. It's one thing to outgrow my Saturday-morning cartoons or my Aurora racetrack. It's another to have something taken from me just because some dudes in a conference room flip over an hourglass. Now that Mama is gone, what would Pop do if he couldn't break out his 45s and listen to the Four Tops and Sam Cooke? Pop had them, Nana had Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, and now I have Grandmaster Flash and Michael Jackson. Come to think of it, I have them all. Still, it's cool to have something that's only mine, and that's hip-hop.

When I saw that Dawkins kids bought Sugarhill records and went to the Roxy, I began to have faith that hip-hop—the music, the dance, the language, the clothes—was here to stay. It could change. After all, Run-D.M.C. sounds nothing like the Furious Five, but it feels good to think that I'm a part of something that is going to last and connects me to all kinds of people.

Malcolm went to Mecca and thought Islam was the answer to racism. But maybe it's hip-hop. When I create a program of my own, it's going to be one of the things I teach. Even in the worst-case scenario that hip-hop doesn't last, it will always matter like rock or jazz. Despite Reaganomics, crack, AIDS, and all the other things that should have knocked us down for the count, we stood our ground and created something so, so def. That's something that should never be forgotten.

“So does that mean you're no longer going to Hollywood?”

Nike laughs. “I don't know. I mean, maybe. Not to dance, though.”

“How about college?” I ask. He snorts, and I elbow him. “Nike, there are all different types of colleges. Bound to be one that'll take a sucker like you.”

“You so funny I forgot to laugh.”

“Major in dance.”

“Ha! Can you see the diploma? Instead of Gothic letters and that hear-ye Old English, it be printed in bubble letters.” He frames his fingers in the air as if to hold up his degree. “To Guillermo Vega Jr., bachelor of arts in dance with a concentration in breakin'. I mean, if people can major in history…” He laughs again, then drops his hands and goes back to his twig. “And where you going? Harvard, right?”

“Nah, B. I'm going to a Black college. Howard or Morehouse or someplace like that.” I'm ready to defend my decision, but Nike nods like he already understands and accepts it. It hits me that this is probably our last summer together, and we're not going to have the
Grease
ending at Coney Island next Friday. Funny thing is that as different as we are, that's probably something Nike and I both wanted.

“Yo, it's too quiet out here,” interrupts Nike. He looks over his shoulder up at the mountain. “Oh, shit!” He scrambles to his feet. “Where'd Shorty and Pedro go?”

I jump up, too, shielding my eyes as I look toward the top. “Don't trip. They're up there somewhere.” I scale the mountain. “Pedro!”

“Yo, Shor-tay!”

“Stevie!”

They don't answer, and when we reach the top, not a soul. I look around and spot other hikers in the distance, but no sign of Pedro or Stevie.

“Aw, man,” say Nike. “Smiles, we done lost our kids.”