When I was a kid he used to teach me things, and sometimes he would even let me go bowling with him and his friends. When Reuben started changing, I was so busy thinking about what was going on, I didn’t think much about Ty. Then, when I started looking at him, it was like he always had something else on his mind. Even when he talked to me, I thought he might be thinking about something else.
I didn’t want to ask Ty about Reuben. Reuben had said that Ty was “testing” him, was checking him out. Sometimes it seemed that way. And even though I didn’t want to ask Ty what he thought was going to happen with Reuben, I did.
“He’s going to get into somebody’s face that don’t care if he’s crazy,” Ty said, “and they’re going to bust a cap in his head.”
“Nobody’s going to shoot him,” I said.
“He go around people acting crazy and sooner or later either somebody from the street or the Man is going to blow him away,” Ty said. “And they won’t care if he’s crazy or not.”
Mom came back in the room and asked him if he wanted some pancakes. He said no, that he had to go somewhere.
“Where you going so early?” Mom asked Ty.
“Round the way,” he answered. He was checking out his hair in the small mirror on the cabinet door.
“And just where is ‘round the way’?” Mom asked.
Ty didn’t say anything, just gave Mom a look.
“Boy, you don’t live in my house, eat my food, and don’t answer me when I talk to you!” Mom had one hand on her hip and was shaking the other one at Ty.
“I’m going downtown,” Ty said. “I don’t need an investigation on the thing.”
We heard a key in the door and everybody got quiet in a hurry. We all went into the kitchen, where Mom had been making coffee. She cut off the flame, then put the pot on a back burner and turned it on just as Reuben came through the door.
“You must have smelled the coffee,” Mom said. “You hungry?”
“I was out working all night,” Reuben said, taking off his jacket. “Naturally I’m hungry. Where you going, Tyrone?”
“Downtown,” Ty said.
“Where downtown?” Reuben put his leg over the back of the chair and sat down.
“Just downtown,” Ty said.
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” Reuben said. “Where you going?”
“I got to see somebody about a job,” Ty said.
Reuben looked at Ty hard, but Ty didn’t look back.
I listened to see if he was going to slam the door. He didn’t.
“What you doing today, David?”
“Me?”
“Anybody else in here named David?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe hang out with Loren. Or with Sessi and Kimi.”
“David said that Sessi is building an African house on the roof,” Mom said as she poured coffee into a cup in front of Reuben.
“They’re living in the United States, they should be building an American house.” Reuben hunched his shoulders forward like he does sometimes. “You want to go to the Bronx with me this afternoon? I’m going to take a nap and then go up to the Bronx and get some locks.”
“Okay.”
Reuben had put sugar in his coffee and stirred just the top of it. Sometimes Mom told him to stir the bottom so the sugar would go through the coffee but this time she didn’t. The little lines in her forehead were there when she sat down.
“Did Mr. Kerlin ask you to bring David?”
Reuben looked at Mom from the side of his eyes and shook his head. “Why is Mr. Kerlin going to ask me to bring David?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “I just asked.”
“If the boy doesn’t want to come with me, he doesn’t have to come,” Reuben said. “Tyrone is the one who should be coming. How old is he? Seventeen? When I was seventeen I was in the army. Fort Dix, New Jersey. He needs a job. The boy’s got too much time on his hands. I guess you think he’s too good to be working for Mr. Kerlin.”
“I don’t think that anybody is too good to work for Mr. Kerlin,” Mom said. “I know it’s just a coincidence that you are working for Mr. Kerlin. I just wish he hadn’t decided to renovate that building after all this time.”
“What do you think you got a building for?” Reuben asked. “You think he’s supposed to let it sit up there empty?”
“Reuben, I don’t want to go into this again,” Mom said. I could hardly hear her. “I’m just disappointed, that’s all.”
“Disappointed in him or in me?”
“Reuben, please.”
Reuben got up, and I could see Mom get tense and hold her breath. “David, you go hang with your friends,” Reuben said. “I’ll go to the Bronx by myself.”
Reuben left the kitchen, and he did slam the door to his and Mom’s bedroom. I looked over at Mom and she was close to crying. I put my hand on hers and she got out a little smile. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was better than nothing.
“I’m going to be working at the beauty parlor today,” Mom said. “Do you and Loren have any plans?”
“Maybe we’ll just go downtown and take care of some business,” I said.
“You and Loren better not have any business you have to take care of downtown,” Mom said. “And you better find your way home as soon as Loren has to go home. I’ll call to check on you, too.”
I went downstairs with Mom and walked her to the subway. When I asked her if she was mad at Reuben, she just shook her head and put her finger on my lips. I knew she didn’t want to talk about it, but even if you didn’t talk about it you couldn’t help thinking about it.
I waited until Mom’s train came and then went to Loren’s house. Loren’s mother does yoga, which is cool. She can do things like stand on her head and put her legs behind her head. Loren can stand on his head, too. That’s the only thing he can do better than me.
Mrs. Hart, Loren’s mother, gave me some yogurt to eat. She usually has two kinds of yogurt. Some with fruit in it, that is pretty good, and some with nothing in it, which I don’t like. The kind she had was with fruit, and Loren and I both had a cup. Then she asked us to take a book downtown to the Countee Cullen Library on 136th Street.
“So what do you want to do today?” Loren asked when we were on the street.
“Since we’re going downtown, we can go to the YMCA and play some pool,” I said. “You got your Y card?”
“Yeah, but I got to be home early because my cousin is coming up from Philadelphia,” Loren said. “He’s grown, but my mother wants me to be there and act like we’re family and everything.”
“If he’s your cousin, you are family.”
“I know, but I don’t have to act like it if I don’t really know the dude,” Loren said. “He used to play baseball in the minor leagues. You want to come and meet him?”
“I think I have to be home early, too,” I said. “My dad asked me if I wanted to go to the Bronx with him. Then he said I didn’t have to go, but you know how he is.”
“That’s funny, man,” Loren said. “Because your mother is trying to get that building for the homeless people, and my mom says that your father is, like, her enemy.”
“He’s not the enemy,” I said. “He’s okay if he takes his pills.”
We took the book back to the library, checked out what new videos they had, and then went to the playground. When we got to the basketball court, Randy and Clyde Johnson were there and we challenged them to a two-on-two game. Randy didn’t want to play but Clyde did. Randy didn’t want to play because he knew they were going to lose. And he was right. Me and Loren beat Randy and Clyde three games in a row.
There were spots of blood in the sink this morning. I ran the water and washed them away. It scared me, seeing that blood, and for a moment I could hardly think. Then, for some reason, I began to think of just crazy words. Bink. Dink. Fink. Gink. Link. Mink. Pink. Rink.
I leaned against the wall until I calmed down, then went back to my room and g
ot dressed as fast as I could.
Reuben was asleep when I was leaving. He made noises as he slept, deep-breathing noises that weren’t a snore but sounded more like a person who was working hard at just breathing. I didn’t call Loren. I just went to his house and asked him if he wanted to go to the park. He said yes. He didn’t say anything but he knew I was upset. I wished he was my brother. Ty was all right, but he was growing away from me. Mom said that people grow away from each other. She said it like it was something natural, and I wanted to tell her that I thought I was growing toward her, but I didn’t.
We went over to the playground, checked out a ball, and shot around. We didn’t play one-on-one because I didn’t feel like getting hacked to death, which is what Loren does when he plays ball. We played two games of H-O-R-S-E and I won the first, but he won the second by pure luck. Loren was my best friend, but he couldn’t play ball. The only reason he won at all was because of this strange-looking dude who came and sat down on the park bench to watch us.
“I think that guy is a scout for the NBA,” Loren said. “Only he’s in disguise.”
“If he’s a scout, they must have a homeless team,” I said.
The man was dark, darker than Sessi. But while Sessi had dark hair, the man who watched us had white hair and a stubbly beard. He was dressed in a dirty brown overcoat, even though it was the middle of July and hot as anything. His pants, what I could see of them, were baggy and wrinkled. His shoes were black, but they didn’t look too bad.
“I’m going to say something to him,” Loren said.
“You better leave him alone,” I said. “In case he’s a mass murderer or something.”
“He couldn’t catch me,” Loren said.
“Okay, suppose he used to be a track star and then became a mass murderer.”
“He still couldn’t catch me,” Loren said. “Anyway, he probably just comes to the park to sleep.”
Me and Loren sat on the bench, and the man, who had walked around the edge of the court, sat at the other end. He looked over at us and nodded, and Loren nodded back.
“Ty said he knows a guy who has the first issue of Spider-Man comics,” I said. “He said it’s worth a thousand dollars. You think anybody would ever pay that much for a comic?”
“I would if Ty said it was worth a thousand dollars.”
“Suppose he’s wrong?”
“I’ll probably be a millionaire,” Loren said. “A thousand dollars is just chump change to a millionaire.”
“Ty’s wrong about a lot of things. He thinks my father’s crazy.”
Loren didn’t say anything, which was the wrong answer. I wondered what he thought, and what his parents were saying about Reuben. The sky was bright over the bridge in the distance, and gray over where me and Loren sat in the park.
“Here comes the scout,” Loren said. “Watch me go right from the sixth grade to the NBA.”
The old man had gotten up and was headed for us. He looked us up and down like we were looking him up and down.
“You guess how old I am, I’m going to give you five cents apiece,” he said.
I thought maybe I had seen him before, and maybe not. He didn’t have the kind of face you would remember, more of an old person’s face, with lines and gray hairs and eyes that squinched out at you. He looked liked he had always been old.
“You boys guess how old I am, and I’ll give you five cents each,” he repeated.
“You’re about fifty,” Loren said.
I would have guessed even older than that, because he looked like the pictures of the Ancient Mariner we had in our English book, only he was black. His eyes were funny too, as if he wasn’t looking at what was in front of him but at something far away. His beard was part white and part gray, and I had never seen the little cap he wore on anybody else.
“What you say?” He pointed a finger at me.
“I’ll say fifty-eight,” I said, more to be saying something than believing it.
“Old Moses is three hundred and three years old!” he said. “Can you believe that?”
“No,” Loren said.
“Well, I am,” the man said. He nodded to himself like he was thinking about being so old. “What names you boys got?”
“My name is Mr. Hart,” Loren said. “I’m a combination rap star and pro ballplayer. This guy here is Mr. Curry. He’s my agent.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hart, and pleased to meet you, Mr. Curry.” He bowed forward from the waist. “My name is Moses Littlejohn. You can call me Moses.”
“You want to play some one-on-one?” Loren asked.
“Leave him alone,” I said. “He’s probably crazy or something.”
“Crazy? What is crazy?” the old man asked. “What would crazy be for a black man?”
He looked up at the sky and kind of pulled at his chin.
“It means that you’re not wrapped too tight,” Loren said.
“I knew a man once who they called crazy,” the old man said. “He wasn’t crazy—he was just piling up his being mad. He’d get mad about this and he’d put it on the pile. Then he’d get mad about that and he’d pile that on the pile. And then he’d get mad at something else. You see how that goes. And after a while all that mad got to falling in on itself and collapsing until the point where you couldn’t tell what he was mad at and neither could he. Since it was too much trouble straightening it all out, people just decided to call him crazy. Here, let me see that basketball.”
Loren tossed the ball to the man and watched as he took it and bounced it a couple of times. You could see right away he had never been a ballplayer, because he couldn’t dribble. Then he kind of half walked, half shuffled out onto the court and threw the ball up toward the basket. I watched it as it hit the rim and bounced onto the court.
The old man laughed like that was the funniest thing in the world.
“You drink too much wine to make a basket,” Loren said.
“Wine?” The old man was suddenly serious. “You looking, boy, but you ain’t seeing. No, you ain’t seeing nothing at all.”
When Loren looked over at me he was still grinning, but I don’t like to laugh at old people. The man came back to the bench and sat down while Loren picked up the ball and shot it. He made two baskets in a row and looked over to see if I had seen him.
“Loren’s okay,” I said.
“You young people are all okay,” the man said as Loren came over and sat down next to me.
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“He don’t play basketball,” Loren said.
“Well, that’s true,” the old man said. “What I do is to carry these dreams of mine. You ever carry a dream?”
“How old did you say you were?” I asked him.
“Three hundred, maybe three hundred and nine,” he said. “I hope you don’t believe that. You don’t, do you?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you know I’m thankful for that. I thought you two looked too sensible to believe it,” he said. “You got to be careful what you believe these days.”
“If you were three hundred years old, you would have been dead a long time ago,” Loren said.
“If I was your ordinary man, I would have been dead,” Mr. Moses said. “But I was given the gift of bearing dreams when I was about—how old are you, young fellow?”
“Twelve,” Loren answered.
“Well, I can’t remember exactly when, but it must have been about your age,” Mr. Moses said. “I was sitting on the side of the road one day, when a fellow come up to me the same way I come up to you. He told me his name and claimed he was four hundred years old. I squinted up one eye and looked him over real carefully.”
Mr. Moses cocked his head to one side and was squinting one eye. “Then what happened?” I asked.
“He told me he was a dream bearer, that he had been carrying dreams for hundreds of years.” The old man stopped looking at me and Loren, and his vision seemed to drift away. The change in his face su
rprised me, because he had turned from just interesting to unbelievably sad. “He told me he was tired and needed to pass his dreams on to somebody new. Then he asked me if I wanted to take them.”
“And you said yeah,” Loren said.
“Now, how was I going to say that when I didn’t a bit more believe him than you believe me?” Mr. Moses said.
“Then how come you call yourself a dream bearer?” Loren asked.
“’Cause the more I listened to Aaron—that was his name—the more sense he made. It wasn’t just the words that made sense—it got to where I could feel what he was talking about. Feel it deep in my bones.”
“So how you get to be three hundred and three years old?” I asked.
“Did I say three hundred and three? It could be three hundred and eleven, maybe three hundred and twelve. I know I’m old.”
“I still don’t believe it,” Loren said.
“Phew-oo!” He took out a bright yellow handkerchief and wiped his brow. “I’m sure glad I’m not dealing with stupid people.”
“If you don’t want us to believe it, why are you telling us?” I asked.
Mr. Moses looked at me, wiped his brow again, then folded his handkerchief carefully and put it into his pocket. “You know, even a strong man gets tired,” he said. “And I am one tired man. I’ve been looking almost two years for someone to give my gift to, somebody young and strong. Like you young men.”
“I don’t dream,” Loren said. “I just go to bed, go to sleep, and then wake up in the morning.”
“You know what a dream is?” the old man asked.
“Sure,” Loren said. “It’s like you’re sleeping and you think something is going on, but it’s not, it’s only a dream.”
“And how do you know you’re not dreaming this life you’re leading?”
“If Loren was dreaming, he’d win against me one-on-one,” I said.
“You got your dreams in your pockets?” Loren asked.
“In here!” Mr. Moses tapped the side of his head. “If I had them in my pocket, I could take them out and put them down for a while. Then I wouldn’t be so tired. You carry dreams in your head and it just makes you tired. Just makes you tired.”