Darius & Twig

  “Brian, go in the bathroom and get me a washcloth from under the sink,” Mama’s voice came from somewhere.

  “Where are you?” Brian asked.

  “Under the sink in the kitchen!” she called. “Will you get me the washcloth, boy?”

  Brian looked under the kitchen table toward the sink as I walked around it. Mama’s legs were sticking out, and there were a screwdriver and a wrench next to her.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “The drain is stopped up,” she said. “I got the nut off the trap, but I can’t get to whatever is in there.”

  “You want me to try?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you call the landlord?”

  “Because I don’t want to hear his mouth talking about when are we going to get the rent to him,” Mama answered. I could hear the strain in her voice, and I saw that the back of her hand was scraped and bleeding.

  “I’ll try to get it out,” I said.

  She pulled herself from under the sink as Brian came in with the washcloth. Mama took it from him and held it against her scraped hand. She sat up, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.

  “I’ve been trying to unstick it with a hanger,” she said. “If I can’t get it with the hanger, maybe I’ll buy a little snake at work. That’s another ten dollars!”

  “Why don’t you let me try it?” I said.

  “Change your clothes first,” she said. “No use messing up your school clothes.”

  “Darius got his money for reading books,” Brian said.

  “You’ve said that, Brian!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” My brother glanced at me and turned away.

  I went to my room and quickly changed into my jeans. I hung my shirt up on a nail in the closet and then came back.

  “She got it open!” Brian announced.

  “Who put paper in the damn sink?” she asked.

  I figured it had to be either me or Brian, but neither of us said anything. When I saw that the paper was from a magazine, I knew it was my brother.

  Mama had let the water run into a bucket, and I took it into the bathroom and emptied it down the toilet. The paper went into the toilet, too, and I reached in and grabbed it before it went down. When I got back into the kitchen, Mom was struggling with the wrench.

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  “It’s tight enough,” she said. “Just check it once in a while to make sure it’s not leaking.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I helped her off the floor. She looked at her hands and arms, streaked with dirt, dark except where she had scraped away some skin, and started toward the bathroom.

  “Darius, the gas didn’t light and I used a magazine page to light it,” Brian whispered.

  “One page?”

  “Maybe a couple,” Brian said. “You think I should say something?”

  “No, just tell yourself how stupid you are.”

  Mama was in the bathroom awhile, and when she came out I could smell alcohol on her breath. I asked her if she was okay, and she nodded.

  “There’s leftover beef stew in the refrigerator,” she said. “You guys want that? I’m going to have to change and get out of here.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” I said. “How come the rent isn’t paid?”

  “Because I forgot it! Okay? I forgot it!” Mama’s voice filled our small kitchen.

  She sat, elbows on the table, her head forward in her hands. Neither Brian nor I wanted to say anything else, and we just sat there in the silence. The refrigerator hummed and clicked in the corner. From the alley behind the house, a dog’s bark announced he was there.

  “I didn’t forget the rent,” she said after a while. “I forgot the electric bill, and then when I went to pay it, I saw that it was more than I thought it would be. They laid some people off at the job, and I thought the rest of us were going to get some overtime, but . . . it just didn’t happen.”

  “I got forty dollars,” I said.

  “We’ll be straight by the end of the month,” Mama said. “There’s just an extra week or something in this month.”

  She smiled.

  I put the beef stew on when Mama had left for her job at Home Depot. It had been good the night before and it would be all right again.

  “I messed up, right?” Brian said.

  “No, you’re straight. She’s just upset because they cut a day out of her job,” I said. “She was working four days and now she’s working three. That’s what’s messed up. That’s like twenty-five percent of your income gone. We were just sliding by before that.”

  I don’t remember us ever doing all that great. Maybe we were at one time, but I can’t remember it. Mama has told Brian and me stories about when she and my father first married.

  “We were married at the Church of the Master on Morningside Avenue,” she said. “When we left the church, the limousine took us right to my mother’s house and waited for us to change clothes. Then we went to the airport and flew to Bermuda for our honeymoon. It was as if we were in a magazine or something.”

  She told us how they struggled with two small kids and how my father joined the National Guard for the extra money. Then he went to Iraq.

  “When he came back, he was missing something,” she told us, holding his picture in his desert camouflage uniform. “He lost a lot of weight and was always off in a fog. I knew he was messing with drugs, but I thought we could work our way through it. He drifted further and further away, and then one day, he said he had to leave before he killed somebody.”

  “And he left?”

  “Yeah, he just left,” she said. “But he keeps us in whatever piece of mind he still has. I know that.”

  I don’t know it.

  chapter seven

  Van Cortlandt Park was filled with brown, black, and white people moving along the paths, their bright colors looking even more brilliant in the sharp autumn sunlight. A group of kids were making swishing noises through the piled leaves beneath the trees. Some Latina women sat on the benches across from the handball courts. And there were little kids everywhere. When our track team got off the bus, some of the kids stopped for a moment to watch them.

  The whole team went through their fifteen minutes of stretching, then fifteen minutes of warm-up exercises, and then broke off into their individual training. The middle- and long-distance runners were to do a thirty-minute run through the park, walk for five minutes, and then do another thirty-minute run.

  After the first thirty-minute run, when the distance runners were walking, Mr. Day came up to me.

  “You need to keep an eye on your boy Fernandez,” he said, sitting on the bench next to me. “Sometimes guys with South American and Mexican backgrounds don’t like to train. They see they’re on the team and all they want to do is show off their uniforms to las chicas.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. Bullshit, I thought.

  The sprinters were the stars of the track team, and they got all the attention. Some of the sprinters would go on to college and be on track teams there; others were football players or baseball players who just used track to keep in shape for their other sports. I knew Twig didn’t think the cross-country guys got enough training, so he worked out on his own as much as he could.

  “You got to help me train,” he had said. “When we have a meet and some guy thinks he’s just going to run away with everything, I want to ease on by him at the start of the last half mile and just leave him in the dust.”

  I had thought I knew Twig when he ran earlier, but after I laid out a plan for him, he really got serious with it. We had found an article about how this older runner, a guy named Ted Corbitt, had trained by running seven miles to work every morning and then running home at night. Twig said he wanted to run twenty-five miles a week, and I made up a schedule for him.

  Practice was over in three hours and Twig and I got our backpacks from the bus. He said he wanted to do some sprints.

  “Why?”
br />   “Say the race is between me and some dude and we’re running right next to each other at the top of the home stretch. We both see it’s like sixty-five yards to go, which is like a heartbeat. He wants to win and I want to win, so it’s tear up the friggin’ track and whoever gets across the line first wins it! I know if I practice sprints and he doesn’t, then it’s going to be me.”

  “Is that what you’re thinking when you’re running?” I asked.

  “No, man, that’s what I’m thinking when I’m figuring out how a race might go.” Twig had his legs straight in front of him and crossed at the ankle. “When I’m racing, I know it’s going to start hurting somewhere along the line. My legs are going to hurt and my lungs are going to be burning. But that’s when I know I have to keep pushing it. I can’t give in. When I’m practicing, I know it’s not what’s really going down because you don’t practice that hard. At least we don’t. But I have to get myself mentally ready for when it gets hard, when it hurts.”

  “You don’t think about just beating somebody?”

  “My grandmother says that there’s only one person to beat,” Twig said. “That’s yourself. If you don’t beat yourself, it’s going to be hard for anybody else to beat you.”

  “Your grandmother is into racing?”

  “No, she’s into me, man.” Twig smiled.

  Twig walked out onto the track and lined up at the hundred-yard marker. My watch had a second hand and I tried to keep an eye on it and on Twig at the same time. When he took off, he stumbled a bit but still got the hundred in under eleven seconds.

  The next two times, he got almost exactly eleven.

  The last two were a little over twelve. If he could do that in a race at the end of a 3K, he would be hard to beat.

  Twig went to the men’s room and then put his sweats over his practice track suit. We walked out of the park and got the bus downtown to Harlem. There were some Latina girls on the bus, and two of them started looking toward us and giggling. Two Muslim girls, also in Catholic school uniforms but wearing hijabs, came on and sat across from us.

  “Do you know why those girls like me?” Twig asked.

  “They’re looking at me,” I said. “Girls always go for good-looking guys.”

  “No, man, they see me and they know I’m Dominican and all Dominicans can dance!”

  “You can dance?”

  “I’m not great,” Twig said. “But I can dance.”

  “You get on the floor and wait for the pain to come?” I asked. “And then you dance through it?”

  “Darius, that is funny! If my mind was as fast as yours, you know, if I could think of funny things to say like that . . . I’d have to get pepper spray to beat the girls off!”

  When the guys in the hoodies first got on, I thought it was Tall Boy and another kid from our school. It wasn’t. Just two guys with their pants hanging down, being stupid. They sat diagonally from the two girls in hijabs and started pointing and laughing at them. The two girls were embarrassed. Both of them put their heads down.

  An older man, a white guy with white hair over his temples and a red, splotched forehead, spoke up. “These are good young girls,” he said. “Why don’t you leave them alone!”

  Both of the hoodies laughed as if it were the funniest thing they had ever heard.

  “Keep it down back there.” This from the bus driver.

  “Why don’t you go and die, old man?” From one of the hoodies.

  “We’ll all die one day,” the old man, his face turning redder, said. “Might as well live decently in the meanwhile.”

  The bus came to a stop and the hoodies got up to leave. One stood in the doorway and held it open while the other one confronted the white man.

  “Guess what, punk!” The hoodie leaned over the old man, his face inches from him. “I don’t give a fuck!”

  He drew back a fist and then broke out into a high laugh when the man flinched.

  After the two hoodies got off the bus, there was a moment of silence. We were all relieved.

  “I feel stupid for not saying something,” Twig said as we got off the bus at 145th Street. “I should have said something to those guys.”

  “And get beat up?” I asked. “Stabbed or something?”

  “You didn’t feel like that?”

  “Yeah, I did. They took something from everyone on the friggin’ bus,” I said. “It’s like they had all the power and we didn’t have anything. People like that I would like to—”

  Twig put his fingertips in front of my mouth. “Darius, don’t go dark on me,” he said. “I think you’re going dark.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean if you think about doing things to people like that, if you think about it too much, it gets all up in you and you can’t control it after a while. Then they really got you.”

  “Whatever.”

  “No, really, man. Really.”

  I thought about the falcon, his gray body almost invisible as he watched the streets from his nest just below the rooftop. His mind wasn’t dark. He knew what he had to do, what he was about.

  chapter eight

  Fury sits on my wrist, and I can feel the power of his talons as he grips the thick leather glove. I am breathing hard but he barely moves, only rocking slightly as he anticipates the hunt. I reach for the string that covers his mask, and taking the other string in my teeth, I loosen it. He turns his head quickly and sees it is me.

  We are not friends. He is not my pet. We are hunters. I loosen the cord around his feet and feel the tension easing and tightening on my hand as he waits for the signal. I lift my wrist slightly, feeling his power as he shifts position. He flaps his wings but does not move from my arm.

  Then I raise my wrist and arm again. It is his signal, and he lifts off in a great flurry of motion and climbs incredibly high in seconds. Now he is a dark silhouette against the blue-gray sky. Now, as he turns, the sun catches the brown ruffled feathers of his chest.

  Below him, in the high grass swaying in the October breeze, a hoodie cackles and chases a squirrel, putting himself between the furry creature and the tree that is its home. The hoodie cackles again as the squirrel’s small body shakes with fear.

  Above, Fury glides in a huge circle, turns his body at a forty-five-degree angle, and begins his dive.

  Twig is wrong, I’m not going dark. Sometimes I know my thoughts push in on me, and I want to push the pain out of my head. At times, I feel my anger rising—no, not my anger, my frustration. It rises like the stink from a sewer, useless, filling me with disgust for who I am.

  There are moments when my thoughts just fill my head, like the white peanuts they use for packing boxes, and there’s no room for anything besides the competition between what I hope will be my reality and the picture that people like Midnight and Tall Boy keep pushing into my consciousness.

  If I told Twig what I saw in my future, he might understand, but he might not. And if he didn’t understand, I’d be devastated.

  “Twig,” I would say, “I will be a famous writer one day. People on boats and subways and planes will read my books, and their heads, filled with my words, will be transported to other, very special places.”

  “I can dig it,” he would answer.

  “But what if Midnight is right about me?”

  “No,” Twig would protest. “He’s nothing! Get him out of your mind, Darius.”

  But I know I won’t be able to get Midnight out of my mind. What I know is that Midnight, stupid damn Midnight, has done all the math, checked the odds against me, fed them into his computer, and come up with a conclusion. In the talk show of my mind, I am telling myself that I can be anything I want to be, but my voice sounds whiny, hollow. I want to believe in the mantra that being poor doesn’t matter and being black doesn’t matter, but there are reminders that both matter very much.

  The stairway. Between social studies and math, third and fourth period. Me going up, Midnight and Tall Boy coming down.

  ??
?Yo, Darius, I heard you joined the Latin Kings.” This from Tall Boy.

  “I didn’t join anything,” I said.

  He shoved me toward the wall and put his knee against my hip. It was an awkward position, and I thought I could get him away from me and down the stairs. But my heart was beating fast and my mouth went dry. I was afraid.

  “Why don’t you loan me one of those dollars you got in your pocket?” Tall Boy said.

  “He’s probably got a welfare food card, too,” Midnight said, smirking.

  I tried to slide past and Tall Boy leaned on me, pinning me against the wall. Again he lifted his knee and tried to dig it into my chest. Bending my knees, I grabbed his other leg and lifted it, and suddenly he was scrambling to keep his balance.

  I could have thrown him down the stairs, let him know I wasn’t afraid of him, that I was strong. Instead I put his knee down and twisted away.

  Midnight punched at me, hitting me in the shoulder, and I swung back as hard as I could. The blow landed high on his head, and for a moment, the two of them were in a scramble to get their footing as I went past them and up the stairs. Then Tall Boy was after me. He caught me on the landing and swung his fist from behind. I felt the punches but they didn’t hurt. Tall Boy clamped his arm around my neck and shoved his hand into my pocket.

  “What’s going on?” A woman’s voice.

  “He tried to steal my money,” I heard Tall Boy saying. “But I got it!”

  Midnight and Tall Boy started down the stairs again.

  “Why are you boys always fighting?” The teacher’s voice.

  I looked up and saw Miss Carroll. She knows better. We all do.

  There are reminders.

  Mom and Brian and me are at the rental office, seated on the light wooden benches with their green-and-yellow cushions that pretend to be artistic. Mom is sitting next to me, the anxiety scribbled across her face. Brian, feeling on display, fidgets by her other side. All I can think of is what happened today in school.

  “The key, Mrs. Austin, is financial stability. That’s the new buzzword in the rental and sale aspects of housing. Quite frankly, we don’t know where the market is going. . . .”