“You want to get into Sessi’s house?” Loren asked.
“No.”
“What do you think we should do about Mr. Moses if he’s still sick?”
“You just want to talk,” I said. “That’s what you always do. You say something that makes somebody feel bad, and then you want to bug out by talking about some off-the-wall thing.”
“First he said that first guy got hung,” Loren went on, “then he said the next guy got weak. Maybe if you can’t take care of your friends, you get weak.”
The door opened and Reuben came out onto the roof. He looked around and at us and then came over. “Where’s your mom?” he asked me.
“Down at Sessi’s house,” I said. “Sessi is a permanent resident now, and they’re having tea and cookies. Ty was there, too. He went downstairs.”
“Yeah, I saw him.” Reuben leaned against the little wall that separated the roofs. “You know, when I was a kid, my family used to have picnics on the roof.”
“Really!” Loren said, like he was really surprised or something.
“We’d bring a couple of folding card tables up here,” Reuben said. “We’d put the food on one of them and play cards on the other one. On holidays you could see people having picnics all over the neighborhood, up on the roofs. Then sometimes my best friend and I would come up on the roof and make model planes. We’d make them out of balsa wood, paint them up and everything. Or maybe we would just sit up on the roof and catch the breeze and talk like you guys are doing.”
“We’re talking about Mr. Moses’ dreams,” Loren said.
I wished he hadn’t said it.
Reuben looked away across the street. For a moment I thought he might be seeing a picnic going on, and I turned and looked, but I didn’t see any.
“I’m thinking of going downstairs for supper,” Loren said.
That made me smile, because I knew that Loren was sorry he had said anything about Mr. Moses’ dreams in front of Reuben. He said he would e-mail me later.
“You gave your mother your password?” I asked.
“No!”
“She’s got it,” I said. “She answered the e-mail I sent you.”
“She got it?” Loren got on his mad look and then went downstairs.
“You going downstairs?” I asked Reuben.
“What is he, some kind of father figure to you?” Reuben asked. “I’m talking about the old man.”
“No, he’s just interesting,” I said.
“What were you and Loren talking about?”
“Just about this and that,” I said. “Nothing special.”
“You guys talking man talk?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”
“You feel like a man?”
“I don’t know how a man is supposed to feel,” I said.
“How a man is supposed to feel?” He repeated what I had said. “Well, you got a space around you, right?”
“Yeah?”
“It could be a small space, just where you standing, or a big space, like your house or the block you live on. If you’re a man, you control your space. You don’t have any control, you got to wonder if you’re a man. You control your space?”
I thought about it for a while, and I didn’t think I really controlled any space and said so. Reuben told me not to worry about it, he would control my space until I could handle it for myself.
HEN$ON CRI$I$
The Matthew Henson Community Project has reached crunch time. Deputy Mayor Alex Hund announced today that the appellate court has sent the case back to the state supreme court to deal with the claim of Robert Kerlin, the owner of the building, as to his right to sell or develop the building as he chooses or, minimally, to determine the fair market value of the property. A member of the Henson Project committee suggested that if Kerlin set the price, it would be without a doubt beyond the finances of the committee unless the City of New York assumed a great deal of the financial burden.
“Of course, that would stop it from being a community project,” said the committee member, who asked not to be identified.
As soon as the paper came out, the phone started ringing. Mom kept telling people she wasn’t involved anymore, but I could tell she was emotionally still in it.
I told her about Mr. Moses needing someone to take care of him and that the Henson Project would have been perfect for him. She told me not to make too much of it in front of Reuben.
Reuben was working in Mr. Kerlin’s building every day and sometimes at night, too. That was all he seemed to think about. Even when Mom told him that Ty was thinking about not going back to school, he didn’t say anything about it. I thought about telling him that I was thinking about dropping out too, just to see what he would say. I knew I wasn’t going to drop out and didn’t have the nerve to make a joke with Reuben.
A disaster happened. I had been thinking a lot about controlling my space. When I told Loren what Reuben had said about that, he said he always controlled his space. I told him he couldn’t control his nose, let alone his space. He said he could control me and jumped toward me just as I got my hands up. He got a little punch on the nose and it started bleeding immediately. We were on the stoop, and I took him across the street to the church and a woman put some ice in a towel and put it on his nose. Then I had to take him back across the street to the stoop, with him walking with his head way back and the ice cubes on his nose. The disaster came when we got back to the stoop and his mother, who was just coming in from work, saw him with his head back and blood on the towel.
She started screaming and stuff and asking what happened. Loren said that I hit him when he wasn’t looking, and Mrs. Hart really started screaming at me and saying that she had to move away from this terrible neighborhood. She tried to pick Loren up to carry him upstairs, but he’s too big and so he had to walk.
“Hoodlum!” That’s what she yelled at me over her shoulder.
And old stupid Loren was just going to let her make a big fuss over him because he likes when she does that.
Then Sessi came downstairs and asked me why I had punched Loren in the nose. I started to explain and she said she didn’t want to hear my explanation.
“I might have to go back to Kenya to get away from so much of violence,” she said, with a big smile on her face.
Loren can make me feel worse than anybody in the whole world. I went upstairs and told Mom what had happened, and about Loren’s mother calling me a hoodlum. Mom told me I should apologize to Loren even if it was an accident.
“Friends learn to be kind to each other,” she said.
I decided to e-mail Loren on his superhero line. Soon as I got online, I saw that I had a message from him. It said that we should take Mr. Moses up to the roof to see Sessi’s house, that if he didn’t have anyplace else to go, he could live there. That was a good idea and I was mad that Loren had it instead of me. I e-mailed him that I would think about it.
I called Sessi and she said that Loren had already called her and told her about the idea.
“He’s very bright,” she said.
He was also very fast.
Loren got a cell phone. Mrs. Hart bought it for him after I hit him in the nose.
“I told her I was thinking of knocking you out, and she said that I had to be careful so I wouldn’t get a juvenile record,” Loren said.
“You couldn’t knock me out if you had a baseball bat,” I said. We were on the park bench because I had got tired of beating Loren one-on-one. We had also played some two-on-two with two guys from 143rd Street, and they were better than we were but we still beat them because they tried to get too fancy. Loren had brought some bread crumbs for the birds, but he also had a piece of chocolate in his pocket and most of the crumbs stuck to that.
“Here he comes!” Loren said.
It was Mr. Moses. He was walking slow, more like he was doing it on purpose than being tired or anything. He came toward us and he smiled a little when he got right near us.
r /> “You boys are always together,” Mr. Moses said. “I like to see that in young men. Friends are more important than gold and silver.”
“I’m his bodyguard,” Loren said.
“Well, that’s good, too,” Mr. Moses said.
“You want to go see a real African house?” Loren asked. “We got one right up on the roof. We’ll take you to see it if you want.”
Mr. Moses looked at Loren and then he looked at me.
“It’s not that much,” I said. “Our friend Sessi Mutu made it. She’s African. That’s her name, Sessi Mutu.”
“She built this house up on our roof out of grass and sticks and string,” Loren said. “It’s not big or anything, but it looks like a real African house, or at least probably does. Sessi was born in Africa.”
“Well, if you want me to go see it, I will,” Mr. Moses said.
Soon as Loren started talking, I changed my mind about taking Mr. Moses up all those stairs. Sessi’s house was okay for us, but it wasn’t all that much for a grown-up.
“Can I ask you something about your dreams?” I asked him.
“Yes, yes.” He nodded slowly. Then he turned and sat down. Loren moved over and gave him some room.
“When that guy made you the dream bearer, did he give you the dreams, too?”
“I thought he did,” Mr. Moses said. “For a long time I thought he was giving me the heavy dreams he had. Then one day I saw that I had forgotten his dreams and had my own.”
“You ever have any funny dreams?” Loren asked.
“One dream makes me smile sometimes,” Mr. Moses said. “When it don’t make me sad. And sometimes it makes me sad, when it don’t make me smile.”
“What’s the dream?” Loren took his chocolate bar out, brushed off a few crumbs, and bit off the end of it.
“I once heard about a blind man who could beat anybody in the county playing checkers,” Mr. Moses said. “He was born blind but he learned all the moves of checkers and got to be an expert. People came from far away as Tupelo to play against him. But the first thing he’d do was to ask whoever he was set to play what color they was. He said he had to play black people different from white people. When I dream about him, I picture him peering through his darkness looking for something he ain’t never seen. And sometimes I think I see it and it makes me laugh, and sometimes I think I see it and it fills my cup with tears.”
“If he’s blind, he can’t see anything,” Loren said.
“We see,” Mr. Moses said. “Eyes or not, we see. And sometimes what we see when we’re not using our eyes is the only thing what’s real. Now you boys going to show me that house on the roof?”
I told Mr. Moses that if he didn’t want to go up the stairs it was okay.
He said he would go and we started to the house. He was walking so slow, I figured he wasn’t going to make it. I wanted to say I changed my mind and he shouldn’t come, but the more I didn’t say it and the more he walked, the worse I felt about not saying it when I first thought about it. We got to my stoop and Loren went ahead and I followed.
When Loren went up the stairs he kind of hopped from one side of the stairs to the other. Mr. Moses went after Loren, and he was pulling himself up by the banister and leaning on it when he made the turn. I thought we would never get to the roof. By the time we got to the top floor, I could hear Mr. Moses’ breathing. When he breathed, he made two little sucking noises and then one noise that sounded like a sigh. I knew me and Loren shouldn’t have had him come up so many stairs, and I was feeling ashamed.
It had rained earlier and it was a cloudy day, but when we got to the roof, the sun had come out and the sky had brightened. I looked over at Sessi’s little house and saw that the rain had washed it down and it looked better than I had ever seen it looking.
“Whoa! Look at that!” Mr. Moses said. “Now that’s a beautiful house. It’s beautiful to behold.”
“You ever seen anything like that before?” Loren asked.
“I might have,” Mr. Moses said. “Things ain’t as clear to me as they used to be. But when I stand here and look at this house, I think I’ve seen it before. Maybe it was a hundred years ago, or maybe longer than that. You know how memory hides behind doors and jumps out at you or slips by in the dark.”
“You look inside if you want,” Loren said, like Sessi’s house belonged to him.
Mr. Moses moved aside the door that Sessi had made and looked inside. Then he started to walk around the house. When he did that, I looked inside the house too. You couldn’t see much in there except where the light came down through a hole she had put in the roof. The light coming down through the grass made a round pattern on the floor, which was really the roof. I started thinking that we should get a rug or some mats and make a regular floor.
Then Mr. Moses started coughing. It wasn’t a big cough, but he kept on doing it. I looked at Loren and he looked back at me, like we do sometimes when we don’t know what else to do.
When Mr. Moses sat down on the roof, leaning against the little wall that separated one roof from the next, I got scared. He was coughing and I could see he couldn’t control it. It was a little after two o’clock and Loren’s parents were working. I thought that Reuben was downstairs, but I didn’t want to tell him what had happened.
Mr. Moses kept coughing and Loren got to looking real sad. I looked him right in the face and he was making words with his mouth like I was supposed to read his lips or something, but I couldn’t read them at all. I knew what I was thinking, that Mr. Moses might get sick and die.
“I’m going downstairs for a minute.” I knelt down in front of Mr. Moses and spoke right at his face. He looked terrible. “You want some water or something?”
He didn’t say anything, but he was tipping over to one side.
“Stay with him!” I told Loren.
Loren looked scared but I didn’t care. I ran down the stairs two at a time with a jump at the end of each section and went to my house. I was hoping that Reuben would be up but he wasn’t.
I shook Reuben’s shoulder, and he jumped up and knocked my hands away.
“What you want?! What you want?!” he yelled, and was looking around.
“We took Mr. Moses up on the roof and I think he’s sick up there,” I said.
“He touch you?” Reuben’s eyes were big and mad looking.
“No, I just think he’s dying,” I said.
“Let him die!”
“No!” I backed away and bumped into the closet. “We can’t let somebody die.”
“How he get up on the roof?”
“Me and Loren took him to show him Sessi’s house,” I said. “You saw Sessi’s house.”
“He wanted to go up there?” His voice wasn’t so mad anymore.
“We asked him to go,” I said. “Can you help him? We can bring him some water.”
Mom had made some iced tea that was in a jar in the refrigerator, and Reuben got that and told me to wet a towel with cold water, and I did that while he put some ice cubes in a bowl. I didn’t know why he got the ice cubes but I was glad he was doing it.
We went up to the roof. Loren was standing at the side of Sessi’s house with his eyes closed.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
Mr. Moses wasn’t dead, but he was really sick. Reuben put his fingers on his neck and then gave him some iced tea. He put the towel on his neck and told me to go downstairs and call 911.
“I got a cell phone!” Loren said.
Loren called 911 and told them we had a really sick old man on the roof. We waited for fifteen minutes before we heard an ambulance siren in the street below. I waved to them from the edge of the roof and motioned for them to come up. It seemed a long time, but finally two firemen and some emergency medical technicians showed up.
They put Mr. Moses on a stretcher and carried him down the stairs.
Ambulances and police cars are always running up and down 145th Street, so them taking away Mr. Moses was no big deal. Loren’
s mom came home, and she ran up to him and started hugging him and asking him if he was all right. He pushed away from her, but I know he liked it.
“Thanks,” I said to Reuben.
“No big thing,” he said.
He meant that. I had never seen him do anything for anybody before, but he could just fit it in so easy when he wanted. For me it was exciting, and scary. To Reuben it was no big thing. I think even Loren was surprised.
When they took Mr. Moses to the hospital, I felt terrible. It was the same feeling I had when Reuben hit Ty and knocked him down. My stomach started cramping and my mouth was really dry. What I thought was that he was going to die. Mr. Moses wasn’t really a friend of mine, and I didn’t know that much about him, but I was comfortable with him, the way I’m comfortable with Mom and Loren and, once in a while, Ty. Reuben got real quiet. Even when I asked him if he thought Mr. Moses was going to be all right, he didn’t answer.
When I got home, I got a call from Loren. He was calling me on his cell phone. He said that maybe we shouldn’t have asked Mr. Moses to come up to the roof.
“They took him to Harlem Hospital,” he said. “You want to go down there tomorrow?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I can go if you want to. Your mother is going to let you go with me?”
“I don’t need her permission,” Loren said.
“Yes you do,” I said. “Because if she says no and you go, and she tells your father, he’s going to tear your butt up.”
“You think I might have to knock him out?”
“Yeah. Right,” I said. “Anyway, we can go in the morning. They won’t let us go upstairs to see him, but we can ask about him.”
“We can buy a card and leave it for him.”
That was another good idea, and I was mad again because I didn’t think of it. “Yeah, okay.”
When Mom got home, she brought ground meat and asked me if I wanted to help make supper. Reuben had already gone to work, so I didn’t mind helping Mom. I chopped up a big onion and cooked it in butter and curry sauce. Then I mixed it in the hamburger like Mom taught me while she made potato salad.