The Dream Bearer

  “You ever go to his house to eat?” he said.

  “I don’t like what his mother makes,” I said.

  “You and him need to stay away from these bums on the street,” Reuben said. “You never know what they up to. They can have some kind of disease, they can be up to no good, you can’t tell.”

  “Who’s this?” Mom was putting olive oil in the sauce.

  “We met this man who says he’s three hundred years old,” I said. “He said he keeps dreams and carries them around with him for all that time.”

  “Stay away from him!” Reuben said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “I think he’s okay,” I said.

  “Stay away from him!”

  The tears came again and I just let them run down my face. Reuben was looking at me, and he was mad, and for the first time in my life I didn’t look away from him.

  I was sorry when Loren came over. Reuben sat with us at the dinner table, and nobody said anything as we ate. At first it could have been that nobody had anything to say, but then we all knew how quiet we were being, and it was like we were caught up in it.

  Mr. Moses’ dream came to mind, and I imagined him in the cotton field, in the hot sun, caught up in his dream. But he hadn’t told me why they had been picking the cotton so fast. That was a part of the dream that didn’t make any sense. Having a hard time swallowing spaghetti didn’t make sense, either.

  Mom got a letter from my school saying I had been recommended for a scholarship to a private school in Riverdale. She was happy about it and said I would love it.

  “I don’t want to go to a private school,” I said.

  “How do you know?” Mom asked. “They’re asking us to drop by this afternoon. We should at least go and listen to what the program has to offer.”

  I didn’t want to change schools. I liked Frederick Douglass Academy, my school, and, more than that, I liked my friends there.

  My school is only a few blocks from where I live, so we walked. On the way over Mom asked me about the man I had met in the park. I told her he was just an old man who had told me about his dreams.

  “He ever touch you?” she asked, putting a smile in her voice.

  “No,” I said. “He’s not weird.”

  “You understand why your father was concerned?”

  “I didn’t understand why he was so mad,” I said. “I don’t understand why he’s always mad.”

  “He’s got problems,” Mom said. “And sometimes his problems are hard to understand.”

  “You understand them?”

  “Not all the time,” she said.

  “Mr. Moses, that’s the old man, said that people get mad in layers, and then all the layers get mixed up and they act strange.”

  “Sometimes people…That might make sense, but because one thing makes sense doesn’t mean the man is all right. I don’t want to say he’s bad or anything, but I think we have to be careful.”

  There was a group of nuns standing on the sidewalk at 148th Street. They were wearing blue dresses and little white caps. I liked the way they looked, standing together on the corner waiting for the light to change. “I wonder if they would think he’s bad or good?”

  “They haven’t met him,” Mom said.

  “Neither have you.”

  “You’re very smart, young man,” Mom said, “but I know a little more about the ways of the world than you do.”

  “You understand Ty’s problems?”

  “Ty is a young man dealing with adolescence,” she answered. “He needs to move into manhood, and that involves a lot of decisions and a lot of soul-searching. He needs to discover who he really is and what he really wants to become.”

  “He owes some people four hundred dollars,” I said.

  Mom stopped walking. We were in front of the Chinese take-out place. “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “He told me. I think when he didn’t come home those days, he was hiding from them.”

  “Is he involved in drugs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” Her face got mad and she was yelling. “You see him every day! You sleep in the same room! You—you—”

  “I just don’t know!” I said.

  She was crying. She put her hand to her face and then took it away again.

  “Evelyn, how are you?” It was a woman from the church. A tall, thin woman, she had on a floppy white hat. She wore a big silver cross that hung on the outside of her dress. She looked at Mom and then at me. “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Mom said. “It’s just been one of those days. How’ve you been?”

  “Blessed!” the woman said. “Just remember, the Lord not only answers prayer but he’s always listening!”

  “I’ll remember that,” Mom said.

  The woman walked on down the block, and Mom took me by the hand and into the Chinese place. We sat down and Mom asked the girl cleaning tables for two sodas. The girl nodded and went behind the counter to get the sodas.

  “Sometimes people can get hurt over money,” Mom said. “And four hundred dollars is a lot of money for a seventeen-year-old to be owing. I can get the money if it’s necessary. I would love to know anything you know about it. Why do you think he was hiding from these people? Are they gang people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know he owes anybody money?” Mom asked.

  The girl brought the sodas over and put them down on the table. Mom didn’t say anything until she had left. Then she asked again how I knew Ty owed the $400.

  “I saw he was upset, and so I asked him,” I said.

  Mom was crying again, and I felt sorry for her. In a way I was sorry I had told her about the money. Maybe Ty was involved in drugs and maybe he wasn’t. He didn’t tell me everything. That’s the way Ty is mostly, keeping things to himself. I didn’t think he had anybody he would call a best friend.

  We drank the sodas, paid for them, and then went to the school. The guard opened the door, and we signed in and went up to the second floor where the offices were. Mrs. Finley, my English teacher, was there and said hello.

  While we waited for Mr. Weinstein, Mom asked me if Reuben knew about the $400, and I said that I didn’t think so.

  “We have to look at this as a family,” she said. “We’ll have to sit down with Ty, and with your father, and decide what to do.”

  “If Ty is scared, we’d better get the money,” I said.

  “I can’t do it without…” She stopped for a while. “Do you think we should tell your father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I thought about Reuben sitting at the kitchen table, with all his little bits of anger buzzing like flies around his head. There was no way I wanted to tell him that Ty owed somebody a lot of money, but I didn’t want Ty to be in trouble, either. Loren was my absolute best friend, but sometimes Ty did things that made me feel real good about him. Once I got a 90 on a paper and it was on the kitchen table, and he picked it up and looked at it while he was talking on the phone. When he finished talking, he took a pencil out, crossed out the 90, and put a 100 on it. That made me feel real good.

  When we got into Mr. Weinstein’s office, he told us how lucky I was to be recommended for the program. The conversation went on and on, but all I was thinking was that I didn’t want to be there and I knew Mom was thinking about Ty. We ended up telling Mr. Weinstein that we would think about it. I could see he was disappointed.

  When we got home, Ty wasn’t there and Reuben was asleep. There was an empty beer bottle on the table, and Mom put it in the garbage under the sink.

  “I’m going to tell Tyrone that we’ll get the money for him somehow,” Mom said. “If he tells you anything more about it, will you let me know?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “David, it’s not like telling on someone,” Mom said. “Sometimes it’s necessary to bring ever
ything into the open so that we can deal with the problems as a family. David, I need you to help me. Can you understand that?”

  I said yes, that I could understand it, but it wasn’t all that easy. It seemed that at the beginning of summer I just had to go from day to day, without a lot of things to think about. Everything had a place, and a shape, and a time to happen. In the mornings the sun came up, and when I looked out the window, I could see 145th Street stirring itself awake and listen to the morning sounds of cars and buses and kids playing. Then I would see Loren and maybe go to the park, and it would always be there. Mom would come into the kitchen smiling, and Ty would float through the house being Ty. Even Reuben, when he was acting strange, seemed to move in his own space, not touching the world me and Loren lived in. That wasn’t good, but I could just observe it, the way I thought I would observe China if I ever had the chance to see it, or some other foreign country with a landscape that was totally different from Harlem. But now the need to understand everything was creeping up on me. People who at one time were just around now needed to be fitted into a picture that kept changing as I tried to bring the pieces together.

  Ty got home late, and he woke me up. He asked me why I had told Mom that he owed somebody $400.

  “I just did,” I said.

  “You better keep your mouth out of my business,” he said.

  Ty saying that made me so mad, I felt like hitting him. As I listened to him undressing and opening the window to let some air into the room, I thought about me and him having a fight and me winning. I didn’t want to hurt him, just to let him know how mad I was. And then I thought of Reuben getting mad and hitting Ty, and I knew I didn’t want to fight Ty, or anyone.

  Saturday morning. I called Loren to see what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to go to the movies. One thing about Loren was that he could always get the money he needed to do something.

  “Hang around for a while,” I said. “Maybe I can get the money to go with you. You want to go to the Magic?”

  “Yep.”

  Magic Johnson’s theater is six dollars on Saturday morning. I had two dollars and thirty cents, which was pretty good, but I wasn’t sure if I should ask Mom or Reuben. Mom was happy about the school thing, but Reuben was mad about it because she opened the letter. She should have let him do it, but I wouldn’t have wanted him to if it was bad. You could never tell about Reuben.

  I e-mailed Loren and told him how much I had and asked him what was playing. Two minutes later his mom called and said that I needed three dollars and seventy cents more and she didn’t know what was playing. She said that she thought that Loren was with me. I don’t know how Mrs. Hart got Loren’s e-mail password. I sent him another e-mail on his superhero address. I was glad she didn’t know that one—at least she didn’t answer it.

  Ty was still in bed. I heard somebody in the kitchen and went out to see who it was. Reuben.

  He didn’t say anything, just sat and looked down as if he was looking into his coffee cup, but I knew he wasn’t seeing it. He was thinking about something. I wondered what his thinking was like. When I thought about something, it was like remembering things that had happened, or imagining things that might happen. Sometimes I could remember feelings. But when Reuben was thinking, when he was sitting at the table with the fingers of one hand over the other one, what he was thinking made the muscles in his arms move, and sometimes his shoulders would jerk forward. When I was there with him, when he thought I might have seen him, he would look up at me, and I would sit still and pretend I hadn’t seen it. But the two of us would be sitting there, not moving, me not even breathing hardly, and he would know he was in my mind.

  I had never been in the room with him when he sat alone in the darkness and called out. I was glad I was not in the darkness with him.

  The phone rang twice and I heard Mom answer it. She came out of the bedroom in her housecoat and slippers and said that Loren was on the phone. I picked up the receiver in the kitchen, already thinking about the movie.

  “Hey, Loren!”

  “Hey, David!” Loren answered. “Guess what happened?”

  “What?”

  “Me, Sessi, and Kimi found Mr. Moses laying out in the park,” Loren said. “I thought he was dead, but he was just sick.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The park man wasn’t there, so we went to Sessi’s house and told her mom and she made some food for him, and we took it to the park and gave it to him,” Loren said. “Man, he’s real sick.”

  “So what you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Loren answered. “Sessi said he should go to the hospital, but he don’t want to go.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “No, but he’s got that kind of bad smell old people get,” Loren said. “He’s still sitting out there on the park bench. You know, just a little way in from the front of the park where the water fountain is.”

  “You think he’s got any money for medicine?”

  “He probably doesn’t even use medicine,” Loren said. “He probably uses roots and stuff like that.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Home,” Loren said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m—I’m home because that’s where you called,” I said. “I’m going to go see if I can go out. Can you come out again?”

  “No.”

  “What did Sessi’s mom make for him?”

  “Some soup, I think,” Loren said. “It smelled like African food.”

  I told Loren I would call him later and hung up. Then I asked Mom if I could go out and see about Mr. Moses. She said maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. She glanced over at Reuben.

  He looked up at me. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me.

  “Loren called and said Mr. Moses was sick in the park,” I said. “I want to go and see if I can help him.”

  “That’s that old man?” His voice was calm.

  “Yes.”

  “No,” Reuben said.

  If I felt bad before, I felt even worse.

  “If somebody is sick and I just don’t care about it, I think that’s wrong,” I said.

  “David, why don’t you go to your room,” Mom said.

  “Who is this guy, anyway?” Reuben’s voice got loud. “How do I know who this man is?”

  “He’s just an old man,” I said.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He said he keeps dreams,” I said. “He said he’s got dreams that are, like, hundreds of years old. He remembers them and then one day he’s going to pass them on to somebody else. He asked me if I wanted to keep them.”

  “You need to stay away from strangers,” Reuben said. “Didn’t your mom ever tell you that?”

  “Will you help him?”

  Reuben twisted away hard. He turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder. He was breathing hard.

  “Sessi’s mother gave him some food and he ate it,” I said.

  “Go on to your room!” Reuben’s voice was getting louder. Mom came over and started pushing me out of the room.

  “We could make him some tea,” I said.

  Reuben jumped up and came toward me and I closed my eyes. Mom grabbed me and was yelling at Reuben not to hit me. She was yelling and hanging on to me, and I had my eyes closed as tight as I could get them and was waiting for him to hit me.

  I could hear him breathing and was hoping he had taken his pills. I thought about him hitting his hand against the wall one time until his knuckles were bleeding.

  “Get your coat on!” Reuben was saying. “I’ll go see him! I’ll go see him!”

  Mom told Reuben that he didn’t have to go, that the old man would be all right, but he was upset and I knew he wasn’t listening.

  I put my sweater on and we went downstairs together. All the time, he was talking, saying how he had to go to work and he didn’t have time to mess with no old crazy men.

  It had rained and there were puddles everywhere. I stepped in one and
splashed a little water on Reuben, but he didn’t say anything. He was walking fast. I almost had to run to keep up with him. We went up the hill to the park, and I saw Mr. Moses sitting on the bench. Reuben slowed down, then stopped a few feet away from Mr. Moses and started staring at him.

  Mr. Moses looked smaller than he had before, and his head was slumped down against his chest. His chest was rising and falling slowly, and I thought he was either asleep or real sick. I wanted to tell Reuben that we could go. Then he looked up and saw us. He raised his hand, like he was trying to wave to us. The nails on his hand were chipped and yellow against his dark skin. He nodded and spoke softly. Maybe he had said my name, but I couldn’t hear it clearly.

  I sat down next to him. “You okay?”

  “These old bones are like a great rock in a weary land,” Mr. Moses said. “But I keep rolling on.”

  “You need some medicine or something?” Reuben asked.

  Mr. Moses looked up. “I’m all right, son,” he said. “I thank you for coming out to see about me.”

  Reuben’s shoulders had been hunched up, and he relaxed them a little. Then he sat down on the other side of Mr. Moses.

  There were a few drops of rain and a little breeze, but it wasn’t too cold. Right on the walkway, where the path met the dirt, there was a worm. A sparrow was picking up crumbs not far off from it, and I was wondering if it was going to eat the worm.

  “You been to a doctor?” Reuben asked, looking down at the ground.

  “I’ll be okay,” Mr. Moses said. “Sometimes the tiredness just sneaks up on me and catches me with my back turned. I’ll be okay.”

  “I got a place you can stay if you need it.” Reuben leaned back against the park bench. “Ain’t nothing permanent, but you can sleep there for a few days if you don’t bother nothing.”

  “I got a place to stay,” Mr. Moses said, “but I appreciate what you’re saying. Appreciate it right along.”

  “It’s getting late.” Reuben started to stand. “If you don’t need nothing, I might as well get to work.”

  “The other night I dreamed about something that happened a long time ago,” Mr. Moses said, “down in Georgia, about a mile off where you turn to head toward Athens….”