Bucking the Sarge

  Me and Sparky and Shayla and Eloise had been on the playground at school when Eloise, just out of the blue, upped and said to me, “My momma said that your momma loans money to people at exorbitant interest rates.”

  What kind of third grader used words like “interest rates”? Who could ever understand what Eloise was saying half the time? But I could tell from the way she said it that this wasn’t something that you’d wanna have your momma called.

  I said, “Why are you telling me that? If you wanna borrow some money you’ve gotta go ask my mother.”

  She snorted and said, “I don’t think so. My momma said the Bible says, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’”

  My boy had my back. Sparky said, “Who cares what your momma says?”

  Eloise said, “It’s obvious that a little gangster wannabe like you wouldn’t care, Dewey!”

  Uh-oh.

  I wouldn’t’ve minded watching a good fight but I wanted to see where Eloise was going with this money-borrowing stuff so before Sparky had a chance to go off on her I said, “So what? I know my momma tries to help people out when they’re broke. That’s why she gives them those Friendly Neighbor Loans.”

  Eloise laughed right in my face.

  Maybe there was going to be a good fight after all. When it came to keeping your respect it didn’t matter if Eloise was the toughest fighter in the school, no one laughed in the face of Luther T. Farrell.

  Before I fired on her I said, “Why don’t you say what you got to say, Eloise?”

  She said, “OK, but when you’re sitting at home crying your eyes out like a baby later on remember you’re the one who asked me to tell you. Friendly Neighbor Loans my foot. My momma says your momma is nothing but a loan shark, and that that hoodlum, Darnell Dixon, shakes people down when they can’t pay her back!”

  Then, like I was stupid or something, she spelled it out, “L-O-A-N S-H-A-R-K.”

  It would’ve been a lot more helpful if instead of spelling it she would’ve defined it, but whatever this “loan shark” stuff was I knew it wasn’t a compliment.

  I said, “She is not!”

  Eloise said, “She is so!”

  “Is not!”

  “Is so.”

  “Uh-uh!”

  “Uh-huh!”

  I had to get loud on her. I said, “Uh-uh!”

  She went, “Uh-huh!”

  I said, “You don’t know nothing.”

  She said, “I know how to speak proper English, and I know a couple of morons when I see them!”

  It was a close argument but when me and Sparky were walking home after school he told me I’d won it. He also said if me and her had started fighting he’da pulled her off before she got to whipping me too bad.

  We gave each other some dap.

  I asked him, “What’s a loan shark?”

  He said, “I don’t know, Luther. But me and Jerome seen this movie called Jaws about this thing called a great white shark. You do the math, my brother, sounds to me like she’s trying to say your momma is a great big white woman.”

  “Uh-uh!”

  “Uh-huh!”

  I couldn’t let Eloise get away with saying that, but that was back in the days when I’d still check with the Sarge if I had any questions. If I was going to fight Eloise Exum I wanted to be sure it was gonna be for a good reason. I mean why get beat up for something that wasn’t all that bad? From watching the Undersea Life Channel I knew that sharks were at the top of the food chain, so maybe me and Sparky were wrong, maybe Eloise was giving the Sarge a compliment.

  Back then the Sarge only had two pieces of rental property and was still working at the Buick, so I had to wait for her shift to be over before I could ask her to translate what Eloise Exum had been talking about.

  I knew I had to catch her before she went to take her shower and headed off to the U of M—Flint for her classes so at exactly 4:35 I was at the front door waiting.

  Before she even had a chance to put her books and her lunch box and her tools down I said, “Momma, what’s a loan shark?”

  She sat on the bench by the door and pulled her boots off. They always smelled like the factory.

  She slid her socks off and started rubbing her feet. The smell of the oil from the shop had even leaked down into her socks. It was such a strong smell that it seemed like when she got to work she might’ve been taking her boots off and walking around in her stocking feet. I turned my head away, not so much because of the smell, but because I never liked looking at the Sarge’s feet, back in the days before her weekly pedicures they always used to be swole up real bad and had knobs and knots and humps and bumps on the toes.

  She finally arched her left eyebrow and said, “Why do you want to know about loan sharks?”

  I told her, “Someone at school was talking about them.”

  She said, “Who?”

  Luther T. Farrell has never been a snitch. I lied, “I don’t know.”

  She kept rubbing her left foot.

  “So,” she said, “I’m assuming my name came into the conversation you had with Mr. I Don’t Know, correct?”

  “Kind of.”

  “And what did you say when this anonymous person called me a loan shark?”

  “I told her you weren’t one.”

  The Sarge said, “And you were right.”

  She put her socks inside her boots and sighed. “Actually what I do is supply an infusion of capital into a segment of society that is shut out from standard, traditional forms of credit.”

  So much for translation. They talked so much alike that some of the time I wondered if Eloise Exum wasn’t the Sarge’s long-lost daughter.

  The Sarge had given me that fake smile thing and said, “OK, maybe I’d agree with Ms. I Don’t Know if she said I was a loan barracuda, but ‘loan shark’ paints much too aggressive and violent a picture for my little enterprise.”

  I said, “So what are interest rates?”

  She stopped rubbing her feet and said, “Eloise Exum.”

  Before I could even think I said, “How’d you know?”

  “She and that little Patrick girl are the only two of your contemporaries intelligent enough to talk about such things, and the Patrick girl has had enough home training to know better than to say something so rude.”

  “So what are interest rates?”

  “Interest rates are the cost of borrowing money, it’s what the lender gets for making the loan.”

  I said, “She used another word talking about the interest rates, ex-something.”

  The Sarge stood up, stretched and said, “Exorbitant.” She laughed. “That’s a relative term meaning too high. But the way I look at it no one’s putting a gun to anybody’s head to make them borrow my money and they know the rates going in, so caveat emptor.”

  French. Ever since she started taking it at the U of M the Sarge liked showing off by dropping one or two French words into her conversation.

  I said, “And what if someone borrows the money but can’t pay the loan back, what does Darnell Dixon do?”

  The Sarge said, “Look, you tell Ms. Exum if she’s got anything to say about my business she should call on me, otherwise tell her I’d appreciate it if she’d quit confusing you.

  “All you need to know is that you’re going to be taken care of in the future. Beyond that everything is a bunch of rah-rah.”

  A bunch of rah-rah. As I drove back after giving Bo the papers I thought about that long-ago conversation and I knew that that’s what the Sarge would call me stressing out over a second grader’s junk.

  Moods are funny things. One second I was feeling good knowing that KeeKee was about to get her papers back, and before I could even drive home I’d started thinking about the Sarge and was depressed.

  I parked in the driveway, popped in a Busta Rhymes CD and just sat musing.

  She just didn’t understand me. She just didn’t want to understand me.

  It wasn’t even a month ago that I got up enoug
h nerve to tell her that I was thinking about quitting working at the home and was probably gonna get a job at Mickey D’s. That would give me a lot more time to nail this science fair project and get her off my back. I wasn’t sure how she was going to react so I told her in my room in front of Chester X. He was all null and void but at least he was some kind of witness.

  She said, “You’d think I’d remember, I just made another deposit last week, but what’s your education fund up to now? I think the balance was somewhere around ninety thousand dollars.”

  I said, “Ninety-two thousand, five hundred and ninety dollars since last week.”

  She went, “Hmm, do you think McDonald’s is going to allow you to salt away that kind of funding? You’re willing to scuttle your plans for university to work for a clown?”

  “Well, it’s a start…”

  She smiled and said, “Exactly. It’s a start down the sucker path. Those are distractions and pitfalls specifically made to snare the unenlightened, the uninformed, the unimaginative. Follow that way if you must, but I think your genetic makeup is probably leading you in a different direction.

  “I know what so many of your peers’ parents tell them, I know the company line where all African American parents are supposed to sit our sons and daughters on our knees, look them deep in the eye and say, ‘Life is unfair, you’re a young black person, life is going to be especially unfair to you. For you to do half as well as a white child you’ll have to be twice as good.’ Right? Have you ever heard any such words cross my lips?”

  She’d told me a lot, but never anything like that.

  “And the reason you haven’t is because I can’t think of a more hateful or hurtful thing to tell a child. How’s that supposed to prepare anybody for life? The way I look at it, that’s the equivalent of me being your coach and telling you at the beginning of a race, ‘All right, champ, here’s the strategy: you train three times as hard as all the other runners, then run four times as fast and if you’re really, really lucky and the judges are feeling particularly generous that day they might give you fourth place.’”

  Sometimes it’s not even worth arguing something, especially when you were hearing it for the thousandth time.

  She was like that battery bunny on TV, she was gonna keep going on and on and on….

  She said, “How’s that supposed to be anything but an incentive to fail? What human being, I don’t care how old you are, can’t see that there’s no way you can win that race? What human being, I don’t care how old, can’t see that that is a race you have no business even running? That is something you’ve lost even before you began. That, my boy, is the path set aside for the sucker.”

  I wanted to argue with her but what was the point?

  She said, “I see either a look of disbelief or befuddlement in your eyes, so let me explain it to you again for the hundredth time.”

  I knew what was coming, the sad and touching story of a young girl trying to find herself in the big city.

  The Sarge said, “Before you were born, right after I got my degree in teaching, I got a job in New York City at this chichi all-girls’ school right in Manhattan. The people were paying twenty-five thousand dollars a year to send their kids to this school, not for room and board, mind you, twenty-five Gs for the tuition alone. Way more than my salary. Mostly the little brats were the kids of Fortune 500 execs, actors, politicians.

  “So I’m interning under a teacher and she’s doing an art appreciation class and starts to talk about Pablo Picasso and it turns out that two of the little girls in the class have genuine Picassos hanging on the walls at home. One had two Rembrandts. Not copies. Originals. The real deal.

  “I went home that day to my fifth-floor cold-water walk-up, looked at what I had hanging on my wall, a black velvet painting of Martin Luther King and John Fitzgerald Kennedy walking hand in hand with Jesus, and I asked myself, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ And I wasn’t referring to the rather obvious deficiencies in my taste at the time.

  “I asked myself how many generations down the line it would be before any relative of mine would have anything anywhere near fine, original art hanging from the walls of their home. I asked myself how many years it would take me to amass enough wealth so that a school I could afford to send my future kids to would have Jessye Norman sing at their eighth-grade graduation. On a teacher’s salary I knew it would take me five or six lifetimes to get enough cash to afford a school where we could get James Brown to come in and scream ‘I Feel Good’ one time.”

  She kept going and I kept pretending I was listening.

  “I asked myself what these little Fortune 500 kids had done to deserve so much when my future kids were obviously going to be starting with so little.

  “Were they unusually talented or intelligent?

  “If so, it was only because any modicum of talent or intelligence they’d shown at an early age had been nurtured and cultivated with the best tutoring and training that money could buy.

  “I asked myself if they’d been blessed or preordained to be where they were.

  “I realized the only reason it seemed as though they were was because they’d been taught to fervently believe that that was the case. And like I’ve told you many times before, believing in yourself is half the battle. And like I’ve told you even more times than that, the other half of the battle is money.

  “So during my year at that school my dreams of changing the world through teaching began falling apart just as inexorably and just as irreversibly as the paint on JFK’s face began flaking away off that black velvet painting.

  “I asked myself what I’d have to do to be able to send my child, or make it possible for my child to send his child, to a school like that one. I knew none of those kids’ parents had started right out of school teaching, or working at Wal-Mart, or working in the Buick. Most of them had their money left to them or they’d lucked up and had hit it big with their own businesses where someone had greased the skids for them. They knew that daily nine-to-five action is purely for the sucker.

  “And since I knew no one was going to give me anything, the best way I could get a little start-up capital was to come back to Flint, get hired in skilled trades at the Buick, work double shifts and any other overtime I could pick up and start saving money. I knew the only way my pocket was ever going to have any real weight was to set up my own business, to make the system work for me and follow the same rules they follow.”

  I knew we were getting near the halfway point of the Sarge’s speech.

  “And believe me, young man, they do follow a whole different set of rules. They milk the system for everything it’s worth, and I’m trying my best to do the same thing. I’m milking any- and everything that moves. If it’s got nipples, I’m going to milk it.”

  What kid wants to hear their mother talking about nipples?

  She started in with the soulfully deep stare. “Look, I know that may seem harsh, but if you want to learn by experience, go ahead. If you want to go work somewhere other than here you keep in mind that a fast-food worker is three times more likely to be injured on the job than a construction worker and four times more likely to be killed on the job than a cop. Sounds like pure sucker path action to me.

  “In the end know that the only thing that’s going to earn you the kind of cash, the kind of respect and the kind of life that you can leave to your kids is this business. So when it comes to you working at McDonald’s, you tell old Ronald he’s going to have to find some other young black child to grind up in his McJob. That’s not for you.

  “You’re too young to remember, but I promised you, right after your father died, that I wasn’t falling for the okeydoke anymore, I promised you and myself that just like every big-time exec out there I was going to take care of me and mine first. That’s the way of the world, young man, and the quicker you learn it the better off you’ll be.”

  She was wrong. And I was going to prove it to her.

  “Hello?”
br />   “What’s up, Luther?”

  “Sparky! Where you been? I was starting to think you’d crawled off somewhere and died.”

  “Naw, man, everything’s tight. I just been off by myself thinking.”

  I asked, “You still getting those mystery headaches?”

  “Naw, man, they went away right after the doc took them stitches out. Peep this, even though hanging with you has been the death of my social life it has done one good thing, it’s got me thinking philosophically.”

  “Oh yeah? How’s that?”

  “Well, you know how you keep saying that everything happens for a reason and that some of the time it seems like life is trying to send a message to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I been getting that feeling too, it seems like life or something’s trying real hard to get a message through to me.”

  “Yeah, it’s probably a lawyer from Taco Bell trying to tell you to stay off their property. But that’s not the kind of message I’ve been talking about.”

  “See? See what I mean? That’s one of the main reasons no one can’t stand you. I’m being real here, bruh. I really think I need to check out all these signs I been getting.”

  “OK, so who’re these signs from and what’re they telling you?”

  “On Saturday morning I was waiting for the eight-fifteen bus to go to the fire station and it was right on time!”

  “It probably wasn’t, that was probably the seven-thirty bus being forty-five minutes late.”

  “Are you gonna let me finish?”

  “Sorry. Go ‘head.”

  “Like I said, the bus was on time and whose face do you think was all over the side of it?”

  “Whose?”

  “My boy, Dontay Gaddy!”

  “So?”

  “Hold on. Then I’m sitting on the bus and got my headphones on listening to 93.7 and who you think the first commercial I hear is from?”

  “Let me guess, Mr. 1-800-SUE-EM-ALL.”

  “You know it, the big D.O.G. hisself. Then to top it off, when I get to the fire station I’m fixing to cut the lawn but Sergeant Forde calls me back in to play one more game of Ping-Pong. So I’m schooling the old man and talking and he starts telling me about his cousin’s best friend’s auntie that sued Bishop Airport for depressurizing her cat on a flight to Cleveland, and guess who her lawyer was?”