Maybe that was what Twig needed to do, to fight through the pain of being in the big sports world. It was something I envied about Twig. There was a competition, a “my strength against your strength” kind of thing that he had going on. Jameson and Twig were runners and they had run head to head. That was good. That was the way it should be, I thought. But if you were smart, it never happened that way. Midnight wasn’t going to come up to me and challenge me to an IQ test. No way—he would just come up and punch me in the face. And if that didn’t work, maybe he would cut me, or shoot me.
I remembered a book I had read—The Gay Genius—about a Chinese poet named Su Tungpo. He had taken tests to be a civil servant as well as a poet and had been successful. That was what I wanted. I would face down Tall Boy in a poetry slam and leave him bleeding and whimpering in front of a dead mike. A todas cool!
Twig jogged back and said it felt good. “I noticed at the end that I was feeling it a little,” he said. “I don’t know how fat people carry the extra weight around.”
“You going to keep carrying the weights when you run?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
“It could mess up your rhythm,” I said. “Why not just carry them around when you’re not running? That should build you up, too.”
Twig gave me a look, then sat down next to me. “That’s really a smart idea,” he said. “Coach never comes up with anything like that. You know, I think you’ve got two brains. One sits on top of the other one.”
“Twig, that’s so stupid, man.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking out over the park, “I know.”
chapter eighteen
“So we have three different kinds of birds here.” The tall, thin speaker was all angles and nervousness as she spoke. Her English accent seemed just perfect in the light rain. “Each bird has certain advantages for the handler, but it must be remembered that, essentially, they are wild creatures that cooperate with humans only because they see us as hunting partners. These are not ‘friendly’ birds by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Do you actually hunt with a hawk?” an older man asked.
“I’ve been hunting with hawks and falcons for over twenty years,” the woman answered. “My grandfather had quite a reputation as a hunter and trainer of birds.”
“How much do they cost?” Twig asked. It was Saturday morning, and me and Twig were at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to hear the lecture about hunting birds.
“To buy a sound bird in England could cost anywhere from fifty to four hundred pounds, depending on where you made your purchase,” the woman answered. “But the real costs come later in the upkeep and care of the bird. A bird that is poorly handled is most often a bird that will simply fly away or, even more likely, die.”
“How about the equipment?” Twig asked. “Is that expensive?”
“Are you thinking of buying a bird?” the woman asked. “Because if you are, I would very much advise against it. New York has several wild falcons that do very nicely on their own, but it would be a mistake to think that a person of your age would have the time, the incredible amount of patience, or the facilities to care for a bird for even a week.”
Another man asked if falcons had ever been used in war, and the woman said she didn’t believe so. “There was some talk about the Germans using them in France to intercept messages sent by pigeons,” she said. “I haven’t read anything that verifies that. And might I add, I’m always disappointed when someone asks me about using these birds in war or to fight. The relationship with a raptor is one of cooperation between the bird and its handler, and best achieved when the handler respects the bird.”
We were shown all the equipment that hunters used with the birds—the hoods to cover their eyes and keep them calm, the different kinds of gloves people wore to protect their hands and wrists from the talons, and even the kinds of cord used when the birds were first training.
The lecture lasted an hour and a half and stretched into two with all of the questions people were asking. When it was over and Twig and I were watching the lady put her birds back into their cages, I asked her if she thought people would start raising birds in the United States.
“There are clubs in Colorado, California, and other states,” she said. “On the East Coast and in the Northwest. And of course, there are clubs all over South America. But I don’t like to see birds abused.”
“Why do you think we would abuse them?” I asked.
“Americans have the money to buy what they want” was the quick answer. “But often not the patience to learn what to do with it. I do hope you don’t consider buying birds here in Brooklyn.”
No matter what she said, I was thinking about it. Looking at the falcon, so different from how I could ever be on the outside, but seeming so wise, so fierce in its gaze, thrilled me. It was how I wanted to be. Sure. Detached. Knowing I was master of everything I saw beneath me.
chapter nineteen
“You guys want spaghetti tonight?” Mom asked.
I tried to be enthusiastic about the spaghetti, but I know I didn’t come off too well, because Mom touched my knee the way she did sometimes when she wanted to let me know she understood how I felt.
When we got to the house, we saw Twig sitting on the stoop. He was playing checkers against Sammy from the barbershop.
“Yo, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Your boy here is teaching me how to play checkers,” Sammy said. “So far he’s got me learning how to win gracefully.”
“I think he’s cheating,” Twig said. Broad smile, open. “I’m trying to explain to him that he’s only supposed to think one move ahead, but he’s sneaking in some extra thinking. I can tell because his ears are wiggling.”
“Twig, that is so stupid.”
“Yeah, I know,” Twig answered.
“How come trouble always comes in bunches?” Sammy asked. He was looking down the street.
It was a group of guys, taking over the sidewalk as they came our way.
“Ignore them if they say anything to us,” Sammy said. “They out looking for trouble and I’m not in a mood to volunteer.”
There were five of them. I recognized Midnight and Tall Boy and I thought one of the others was Diablo Thompson, a stocky kid who was always in jail.
Sammy was a full-grown man, and nobody wanted to mess with him too tough. He had worked in the barbershop on Frederick Douglass Boulevard for years and had finally bought it. But he was right. There wasn’t any use in looking for trouble, and we all looked at the checkerboard as Midnight and his friends got near us.
“Hey, ain’t you the dude that runs?” Diablo spotted Twig.
“Yeah.”
“Congratulations, and all that shit,” Diablo said. “I saw your picture in the paper. They said you could fly!”
“He ain’t that fast,” Midnight said, stepping closer to Twig.
“He can beat your ass,” Diablo said. “I’ve never seen your picture in no paper. No, no, yeah I did. Didn’t they get you once for stealing newspapers, but then they noticed you couldn’t read and had to let you go?”
Laughter. Midnight tensed up, but he didn’t want to mess with Diablo.
“I can run faster than this faggot right now,” Midnight said. “And I don’t need to be in no newspaper to prove it.”
“Let’s see y’all race from the corner we just come from to this stoop,” one of the other guys said. “First one gets here is the winner and the last one is the chump.”
“Yeah, we can watch Midnight get his butt kicked.” Diablo clapped his hands together. “Jerry, start them off!”
Twig shrugged.
He started walking with Midnight down to the corner. It had to be nearly sixty yards, maybe even seventy. Midnight was walking close to Twig and I knew he was talking to him, trying to intimidate him. Twig got to the corner and turned around.
At first Midnight got down into a sprint starting position, then straightened up when he saw that Twig wa
s standing up.
Mrs. Odums and Mrs. Liburd crossed the street and stopped to see what was going on.
“They’re going to race,” Diablo said. “First one gets here is the winner.”
“Oh, the boys always used to run in Jamaica,” Mrs. Liburd said. “Anytime you saw two or more boys, they had to rip and run up the road to see who was the faster.”
“Boys like to run,” Mrs. Odums said. For some reason she liked that and nodded her head in approval.
Down the street, the boy Diablo had called Jerry lifted his hand up, and I could see he was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it. Then he brought his hand down and Midnight took off. Twig started second but caught up to Midnight within a few yards. They ran halfway and Midnight was beginning to fade. At the end of the race, it was Twig reaching us first and Midnight standing fifteen yards away, bent over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.
“Dude ate you up and he didn’t even break a sweat!” Diablo said. “You couldn’t’ve caught him if you were on the A train. Slow-assed punk! You need to go home and borrow your mama’s sneakers!”
Laughter.
“He’s so fast!” Mrs. Odums pointed at Twig. “He needs to be on a racing team. Do they have racing teams?”
Midnight came over to Twig and put out his left hand. When Twig went to take it, Midnight swung and hit him in the face.
I jumped up and Tall Boy stepped quickly in front of me and tried to punch me. I ducked down and he grabbed the back of my head and tried to push me down. He brought one leg up, and I felt it on my back. I grabbed his other leg and used my legs to lift him off the ground.
He grunted as he tried to grab me for balance. Straight up, I felt him falling and let myself fall on him.
Whoosh! He released his grip on me as the air came out of him.
Scrambling to my feet, I looked for Twig and saw him against the stoop post, dodging blows from Midnight. I dropped my shoulder and ran into Midnight’s side.
Someone came on my left side, and I turned to see Mrs. Odums trying to get between me and Midnight. Midnight reached across me and punched her face.
That was when Sammy got into it. He got to Midnight, put his arms around his waist, and threw him away.
“Whoa! Whoa! Break it up! Break it up!” This from Diablo. “We don’t be fighting old people, man!”
Just as quickly as it started, it was over. Tall Boy was still trying to get up, Midnight was breathing hard, and Diablo and his other boys were taking charge of the sidewalk. Sammy looked Midnight up and down as if he wanted to start the fight again. Then he went and put his arms around Mrs. Odums.
“You okay?” he asked.
“They shouldn’t fight,” she said. “What happened to the running?”
“What y’all hitting an old woman for?” Jerry was up in Midnight’s face. Midnight shook his head as he took a step back.
“Hey, Tall Boy, here’s something for you, too,” Diablo said.
Tall Boy looked up just in time to see Diablo’s foot swinging toward his face. He got his hands up late, and his head jerked back.
Bullies beating up bullies.
Diablo snapped his fingers, and he and the two others started walking away down the street. Midnight looked over at Sammy, then skulked off. Tall Boy was last. He got up holding his face and limped as he went after Midnight.
Somebody must have called Mom. She came out wearing an apron and carrying a little hammer she used to flatten meat. I went to her and put my arms around her.
There was a smear of blood across Twig’s cheek and we took him upstairs. Mrs. Odums came with us. Twig’s shoulders were shaking as the little dark woman wiped his face with the cold cloth Mom had given her.
“You going to be okay, honey,” she said. “You’re going to be just fine.”
Mom made Twig drink some orange juice. I don’t know how that was supposed to help, but it seemed to. Mom asked him to stay for dinner, and he said he had to go home.
“I’ll go with him,” I said.
Mom put her hand on my arm. “Darius . . . ?”
“I’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”
We went out into the hall, and I asked Twig if he wanted to talk. “We could go up on the roof,” I said.
Twig said he wanted to go home.
The day had been hot, but it was cooling off a bit. I walked Twig to his house and tried to talk to him a few times, but he didn’t answer. I had never seen him so down. But I understood.
I said good-bye at his front door, then turned and walked slowly back to my house. When I got to the house, Sammy was sitting on the stoop again.
“You all right?” he asked me.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about what happened.”
“Wasn’t your fault,” Sammy said. “Some people just can’t live a decent life. They got their heads messed up, and instead of changing their heads, they want to turn the world around so what’s going on in their heads looks right to them. You can’t mess with thinking like that. But you guys held your own. You did all right.”
“Thanks.”
I knew Mom would be full of good advice and I didn’t want to hear any of it. Sammy was right. It didn’t matter how you wanted to live if somebody else, somebody like Midnight or Tall Boy, or Diablo, wanted to mess it up. And I was thinking that Twig might have been right, too. Maybe they wouldn’t let him run. Maybe they didn’t want anyone to get out of the little crappy sewer lives they were in. If they harassed him enough, and filled his mind with enough negative crap, he would give it up. And I would give up trying to be a writer, or trying to do well in school, and just spend my life either running away, looking for a different place to live, or pretending I was dumb so I wouldn’t stand out. It was a shitty way to live.
I went past my floor and up onto the roof. The smells from suppers being made in the apartments below drifted by, and a radio tuned to a Caribbean station sent up an old ska tune I used to like. A slight breeze lifted bits of paper from the gray asphalt matting that covered the roof. Two pigeons walked around the paper, and one jumped as the breeze swept the paper suddenly toward it.
The problem was that I didn’t have any answers. I could come up with something for me to do, or Twig, but it wouldn’t mean anything if I couldn’t stop people from just punching the crap out of us. Sammy had said we had done all right. But he hadn’t seen what was going on clearly enough. He saw that Twig could make Midnight miss him most of the time, and that I had got Tall Boy down on the ground. But what was going on inside us hadn’t been nearly as good.
Twig had beaten Midnight, had done well, as anybody would have known he would, and that was why Midnight had hit him. Because he was good at something. And Tall Boy had jumped on me only because he thought I would be easy and he could get away with it. I hadn’t done anything to him, hadn’t even spoken to him.
And then Diablo had kicked Tall Boy for the same reason. He thought he could get away with it. There wouldn’t be any price to pay that he would have to deal with. Tall Boy was on the ground, and even if he had gotten up, he wouldn’t have fought Diablo.
Then I started thinking about my story again. Maybe the boy did have faith in the dolphins. Maybe he had just lost faith in everything else.
chapter twenty
I liked being on the roof as night fell.
Don’t go dark on me, Darius.
It was as if I were invisible, and alone in my invisibleness. Looking down at the street, not being seen by the kids or the old-timers taking their places for the night, I felt untouchable. The way I felt Fury would be untouchable.
Day sounds, buses honking, children screaming, slowly gave way to the night sounds of blaring radios. The voices rising from the darkness became harsher, more strident. Words meant as curses and arrows lifted quickly. Across the street, the blue neon lights of Victory Tabernacle, House of Prayer, came on. I could see the abstractions, the angles and colors of a poet’s eye.
Did you know that kestrels can s
ee ultraviolet light? And that a peregrine falcon can see three times better than a human?
Twig pushed into my mind again. I imagined him running with a weight around his waist. Three pounds, then four, then five. I wondered if it would help his racing.
A light caught my eye. On a building across the street, over the Pioneer food market, there were shadowed figures. The night was warm and I thought they might have been crackheads paying the five dollars to sleep on someone’s roof for the night. From where I sat, I could see four, perhaps five people. They weren’t much more than shadows, and I moved against a chimney, into my own dark space. There was another, smaller glow, which I thought was probably a flashlight. Then I heard a shot.
It is Harlem. It is night. No big deal.
I looked over at the figures on the roof across the avenue. Had someone been murdered? Nobody was running. The bodies still seemed posed in casual attitudes. Then I remembered it was where Mr. Watson had said someone kept guns. They looked as if they were passing something around.
I watched them.
Movement on the roof. Silhouettes drinking from paper bags. Shadows smoking. One of them, it could have been Diablo, began to take something from the brick chimney. At first I couldn’t see what it was, but then I saw a shiny object. They were hiding the guns behind loose bricks on the roof. That was why no one had found them.
More weight.
“You don’t look good,” I said. “You look like you’ve been up all night. What’s up, Twig?”
“I decided to run in Delaware,” Twig said. “Coach called me this morning and asked me. He called me at freaking seven a.m.”
“Why are you upset?”
“You know what I feel?” Twig sounded shaky. “I feel like it’s over for me. I’m going to go down to Delaware and run one last time and then forget about it. Coach was running his mouth about how this was going to be some bitching opportunity. How I could be a standout. I don’t want to be a standout kind of guy. You know what I mean? If I’m standing out, then my family has to worry about some guy starting a fight with me or cutting me.”