“Before I begin talking about our expectations for the new year,” Mrs. Nixon, our principal, started, “I would like Mr. Day, our athletic director, to say a few words.”
Mr. Day was about fifty, balding, and walked with his shoulders hunched. He was supposed to be half black and half white, but he just talked and acted like a black dude. He came out and started talking about how good the Frederick Douglass Academy teams were and everybody started booing. Frederick Douglass Academy, or FDA, was our biggest rival in just about everything. The fact was, they had got some kind of athletic grant from the city and thought they were special. Anyway, after the booing died down, Mr. Day spoke.
“We’ve always done well against FDA in track and field,” he said. “We were always neck and neck with them in total point scores, but in the years we were edged out, it was always in the distance races. This year, we are adding a very good young distance runner to our squad, Manuel Fernandez. Manuel, please stand up.”
Twig stood up and almost everybody gave him a hand. Everybody but Midnight and Tall Boy. Both of them put their hands over their mouths and laughed.
Why does laughing replace so much for some people? If something wasn’t funny, why were they laughing? It was as if they could somehow make things less important, or people less important, by just laughing at them. Could I write a poem about Tall Boy? How would I avoid the clichés? How would I avoid such adjectives as stupid and gross? What could I say on Tall Boy’s level that he would understand?
When Twig sat down, Midnight started kicking the back of his chair again. It really made me mad, but I knew I couldn’t beat Midnight in a fight. Neither could Twig.
Mrs. Nixon’s talk was all right—how she expected each of us to do our best and how she knew how good our best was. I was just happy with Mr. Day for having Twig stand up.
If you knew Twig, you would like him. Even if you just met him, you would think he was okay. He looks like an average kid until he smiles, and then his whole face lights up and you just want to smile with him. Twig is two inches shorter than me. He’s five eight and a half and I’m five ten and a half. He’s thin, with light tan skin, dark hair and eyes, and a wide smile that makes him seem always pleased with something. My mom says he would have made a pretty girl. He told me that when he was born, he was premature.
“My mom said she was expecting me in October and I came along in August,” he said. “I guess I couldn’t wait.”
“You didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said. “It’s like . . . nature or something.”
“Too many people are born in October, anyway,” Twig said. “You don’t hear about a lot of people being born in August.”
“I saw Midnight and Tall Boy kicking your chair in assembly,” I said.
“They don’t bother me.” Twig’s voice was low as he looked away.
“They bother me,” I said.
“Yeah, they’re like a blister on your foot,” he said. “Even if they don’t hurt when you start a race, you know that sooner or later they’re going to show up.”
chapter three
Peregrines hunt live birds, diving from great heights to strike prey with their talons. Sometimes the peregrine bites the neck of its victim to ensure death. Although usually found in the wild, many peregrines now live in cities.
“So what we need to do,” Twig said, “is get Midnight and Tall Boy outside in the playground and have a shootout. We’ll be space invaders or something, and we’ll challenge them to a duel.”
“I’ll shoot Midnight first,” I said. “And then Tall Boy will panic and start moving away.”
“Right,” Twig said, “and then I’ll shoot Tall Boy in his knees and he’ll fall to the ground. But first you see his shadow kind of folding up, and then you see him reaching for his knees as he falls.”
“Yeah, he’s in a lot of pain, but he thinks he’s going to make it,” I said. “He’s figuring out how to make a comeback, but then, way up on the top of a tree, Fury sees him.
“That’s the name I’m going to give my peregrine falcon,” I said. “I like that name. There’s a lot of emotion in it.”
“Fury with cold eyes and talons of steel!” Twig said.
“With no mercy in his heart!” I said.
“He swoops down and snatches out Midnight’s eyeballs in one pass!”
“Midnight’s blind and reaching around for something to hold on to, but he finds nothing,” I said.
“Did you see he pushed something down the back of my collar today?” Twig asked.
“What?”
Twig took a small piece of paper from his pocket and showed it to me. It had one word on it: Faggot!
chapter four
The falcon rests.
“Aunt Dotty was over.” My eleven-year-old brother, Brian, was lying on his stomach across the bed, moving checkers on the board on the floor.
“What did she want?”
“To see me,” he said. “She had some money to give me.”
“She gave you some money?”
“That’s private information.” He pushed a checker across the board with his forefinger.
“If she gave you money, then she must have left some for me, too,” I said. “She doesn’t just give one of us money.”
“What you need money for?”
I went over to the bed and sat on him.
“Get up, Darius.” Brian started trying to push me off. “You could kill me like this!”
“How?” I asked, bouncing.
“You could bust my heart, man!”
“How much did Aunt Dot give you?” I asked.
“Ten dollars, fool—now get off of me!”
“So I’m supposed to get five, right?”
“You were, but I spent it.” Brian rolled over, holding his chest. “I needed some oil sticks.”
“And you spent the whole ten dollars on your art supplies?”
“No, I only spent five, but then I noticed it was your five.”
I jumped on him again and started bouncing on his back.
The thing with Brian is that he likes to wrestle around but sometimes he gets too much into it and then he starts to cry and Mama gets mad at me. She knows I probably didn’t hurt the tadpole, but she just gets upset if one of us cries.
I finally got my brother to rescue my five dollars from his closet and hand it over. Then I wondered if there had been more money.
“If Aunt Dot left more than five for me, I will personally snatch your heart out of your chubby brown body and beat it with a hammer.”
“You want to go to Mickey D’s?” Brian asked.
“No, I’m going downtown with Twig,” I said. “He’s going to run all the way from 59th to 110th Street.”
“I can do that,” he said. “If I didn’t have to wait for Mama to get home, I’d go with you guys and beat both of you uptown.”
“You couldn’t beat your shadow if you were running toward the sun,” I said.
“What’s that mean?” he asked.
“Figure it out,” I answered.
I took my bike out of the corner of the kitchen, where my uncle Jimmy had put up a hook that kept it off the floor. “Tell Mama I won’t be late,” I said.
“She said she was going to be late,” Brian said. He was looking under the cushions on the sofa, probably for the remote. “Home Depot is having an inventory night. Or maybe it was an inventory sale—I don’t know, something. Tell Twig I said hello and that I could beat him any day of the week.”
I hoped she wasn’t going to lose another job.
As I locked the door, I thought about Brian racing Twig. Brian couldn’t beat anybody running. My brother is just barely five foot five without shoes, with short little legs and toes that point out when he walks. I even started calling him the Penguin for a while, but Mama said it made him feel bad. There are a lot of things in our family that I think could make him feel bad, especially her drinking and crying jags, but I don’t say anything to her about it. He spends too
much time by himself playing video games, I know.
Brian said he wouldn’t have left if he had been our father.
“What would you do?” I asked.
He managed a shrug.
I met Twig on the corner and we walked up the hill to the A train on 145th. Twig had on his sweats and his practice running shoes.
“Don’t tell me you kids are going to no school with a bicycle!” The clerk at the 145th Street station was short, squat, and mean looking. I think she was born that way, because I can’t imagine her ever working up a smile.
“This is an after-school program at the Schomburg on 135th Street,” I said. “We have to be there.”
She turned her mean face into something even meaner and motioned toward the gate.
“It’s getting too expensive to live in New York,” I said to Twig when we had gotten on the train. “I’m thinking of moving to Colorado.”
“Colorado?” Twig leaned back from me. “What are you going to do in Colorado? All they have there is a lot of snow, a lot of mountains, and the dumb-butt Broncos. You like the Broncos?”
“Not really,” I said. “But my mother said that in two years or so, New York will cost too much for people like us. Then maybe they’ll have to move everybody out to Colorado.”
“If you get to be a famous writer or a poet, Colorado might be okay,” Twig said. “That’s if they got black poets out there. I never heard of a black poet who lived in Colorado.”
“Twig, they have black people everywhere.”
“Then how come none of the blacks who play for the Broncos are from around there?” he asked. “They’re all from Georgia and Arkansas and places like that.”
We got off at 59th Street and Central Park West and Twig started stretching.
“What time you going for?” I asked.
“Twenty-five minutes,” Twig said, bringing his right heel back to the top of his butt. “It’s going to be hard if there are a lot of kids in the way, especially around 84th Street.”
“You saving your new shoes for official races?” I asked, noticing he had on his old Nikes.
“They got cleats for dirt tracks,” Twig said. He spread his legs slightly and touched both palms to the ground.
“What’s that supposed to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but it looks cool, right?”
Twig was running and I was riding behind him. I imagined him thinking about me, wondering how close, wondering what I was thinking. I was looking at my watch, trying to figure out times. This was an easy run for him, and he moved swiftly past the park benches and the black women pushing small white children along the park’s edge. There was no wasted movement with Twig. His stride wasn’t that long, and his thin arms barely moved as we went block after block. The people watching him knew that he was in training. I thought they were connected to him for a brief moment. As I was connected with him.
For a minute I felt a sense of disappointment. I knew Twig would run and become someone who would be at least a footnote to the history of our school. Some people will make a mark, a footnote, and others will disappear without a trace. Mr. Ramey’s comments about my grades came to me again. He was talking about my chances of getting a scholarship, but we both knew it was also about my whole life. Maybe one day I’d disappear.
I thought of my father telling us how he used to go over to 126th Street in the mornings and stand on the corner, waiting for the trucks to come by that would pick up workers for the day. I knew they paid him whatever they wanted, and that he would pretend to be happy with it.
“You know, that’s what being a man is all about,” he would say when he came home.
I didn’t think that was what made a man. Or that a man needed to be made once he was born.
My mother says she doesn’t think of her husband. Right. Like Twig doesn’t think about Midnight.
chapter five
The Writers’ Workshop. Miss Carroll stood near the window, as nervous as usual. She put her thin white hand across her chest and touched her left shoulder. I knew she would do it twenty times and the class only lasted forty-five minutes.
“Great fiction demands that you allow your reader into the story as spectator and creator,” she said. “The reader wants this involvement, and the more you allow her in, the more rewarding the story will be.”
“But you’re always saying be specific,” Essie said. “So if someone picks up ‘stuff’ around a room, you’re sticking little notes in the margins saying ‘What stuff?’ Why not let the reader figure it out?”
“Because the ‘stuff’ around the room is not what your story is about and doesn’t give any flesh to the story,” Miss Carroll said. “That’s why you skimmed over it in the first place.”
I like Miss Carroll, even if she is sometimes almost too jumpy to be around. There is something otherworldly about her, maybe even other-weirdly. She told the class once that when she was very young, she used to cut her arms. It was too much for us to hear, and too hard to deal with, so nobody in the class made a comment. But I like her because she says good things about my writing, although she said once that I often put my intellect between me and the reader. For her to actually know that, she would have to know much more about me than she does. Who am I except my intellect?
The story that came back from the Delta Review had a short note handwritten on a paper with their letterhead on it. It read:
Dear Darius Austin:
We liked “The Song of a Thousand Dolphins” very much and would like to reconsider it. What made it a near miss and not an acceptance is that we were not sure if the boy was trusting the dolphins or if he was actually waiting for them to fail and, thus, was taking his own life. If he was trusting the dolphins to keep him safe, we would like to make that clearer and would love to see the story again.
Lionel Dornich
The story was about a ten-year-old boy with a bad leg who lived in an orphanage near a beach. One day he swam out too far toward a small island and, nearly exhausted, was nudged back toward the shore by a dolphin. After that he would swim out great distances from the shore, pushing himself more and more until he was exhausted, and then would again be pushed back by one or more dolphins. I had ended the story with his last swim, leaving the possibility that he might actually reach the island, or he might perish if the dolphins didn’t rescue him.
But in my mind I didn’t know what was in the boy’s thoughts. I didn’t know if he was ready to give up or if he trusted the dolphins. I wanted to revise the story to get it published, but I wasn’t sure if I could convince an editor if I wasn’t sure myself.
I showed Miss Carroll the note but not the story.
She lifted the small sheet of paper and looked under it as if she were looking for the story.
“We’re always too careful about revealing ourselves,” she said.
I wanted to show the story to Miss Carroll, but I knew that it was probably my most successful story and that I would be crushed if she didn’t like it.
I feel a bond with her and what she knows about writing. She picks up a poem and it comes alive in her weak, quavering voice. She reads a play and talks about it in a way that lights the stage, that makes it so real you feel you have always known the characters, that you just haven’t noticed them so close to you.
I think she is going to turn me into the writer I want to be, the one who Twig says I already am.
chapter six
“So, who’s rich?” I asked when I saw Brian sitting on the steps.
“Who?”
“Me.”
“You got your bookie money?” he guessed correctly.
“The reading money, yeah.”
“They shouldn’t have that just for juniors,” my brother complained. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s not supposed to be fair,” I said. “It’s an experiment. Juniors are responsible, so you can see what will happen. Eleven-year-olds are flaky.”
“If you gave me ten dollars a book, I’d read nig
ht and day!” Brian looked at me sideways. “You get to read a book a week and they pay you because you’re a junior, and all it means is that you want some money.”
“In the first place there wouldn’t be any reason for you to read night and day, because you can only get money for one book a week, so that’s forty books a school year,” I reminded him. “And they tried it two years ago with grade school kids, and what happened?”
“I don’t care what happened two years ago,” Brian said. “This is this year!”
“I’m thinking about buying some Chinese food,” I said. I walked past him into the building.
“I want shrimp fried rice,” he said, following me into the hallway. “And egg rolls.”
“What makes you think I’m getting anything for you?”
“Mama is not going to let you buy food for you and not get anything for me, and you know it, D-Boy.”
“She doesn’t know I got the reading money.”
“No, but you’re going to tell her like you always do, and she’s going to smile and tell you how proud she is of you, and then you’re going to play big-time and tell us what you’re going to do with the money. Right?”
“Yep. And I’m glad it’s not fair.”
The electric company came up with the idea of paying kids to read books. You could read one book a week from the school list, four books a month, then prove you really understood the books by taking a test at the end of the month. If you passed the test, you got ten dollars for each book you read. To me, it was a way of making a few extra dollars, and I liked most of the books on the list. During the past month, I had read Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, A Separate Peace, Dragonwings, and The Red Badge of Courage.
“You think Mama is going to want Chinese food?” Brian asked.
“Probably,” I answered.
“Bet she wants beef with snow peas,” he said as we reached the door.
I unlocked the door and Brian pushed past me—I knew he would because that’s the sort of immature kid he is—and announced that I had what he called my bookie money.