Eddie McCormick was all-world and everybody knew it. While most of the guys on the block played basketball, Mack, which was what everybody called him, played baseball. He played left field for the Ralph Bunche Academy and when they played there would be more scouts in the stands than fans. He was big, a hundred and eighty pounds and six feet one. During the winter he ran track and the track coach thought he could make the Olympics if he stuck with sprinting. The coach kept him on the team even when he wasn’t running, just in case he might show up at a meet. But baseball was Mack’s joint and that was where he figured to be headed. He was eighteen and one newspaper article about him said that he could be in the major leagues by the time he was nineteen. That’s how good he was. Naturally the baseball coach loved him. That was the thing about Mack, the people who liked him usually liked him because he was a star. Mack had an attitude problem. He thought he could just show up and everybody was supposed to fall down and go crazy or something.
He was pretty smart, too, but he made this big show of not caring about grades. He slid into his senior year with a C-minus average.
“If they gave him what he really deserved,” Dottie Lynch said, “he would be getting all P’s. That’s P as in pitiful.”
Well, Dottie had a big mouth but that’s what people thought about Mack. Some of the kids thought that Dottie was sweating Mack and was just mad because he didn’t give her a play. On the other hand everybody thought he was stuck on himself. But during the first week of his senior year everything changed. That’s when he met Kitty.
Kitty was the granddaughter of Duke Wilson, who owned the barbershop on 145th across from Grace Tabernacle Church. Now, anybody who knew Mr. Wilson would expect his granddaughter to be smart, but Kitty was outrageous. Just the way that Mack dealt with baseball and had all the scouts looking at him, Kitty could deal with the books. What’s more, everybody liked Kitty because she had one of those bubbling kind of personalities that soon as you met her you knew she was your flavor. Plus, the girl was fine. Not just kind of fine, not just take another look fine, but, like, take the batteries out of the smoke alarms when she came by fine. Yeah, that’s right. So she’s smart, she’s fine, she’s only sixteen and a senior.
Okay, the first week of school Mrs. Henry, our English teacher, said we had to write poems in the style of some famous poet. And you had to write the poem to a particular person.
“It can be someone you admire,” Mrs. Henry said. “Someone you’re in love with, or even someone to whom you just want to send a message.”
The boys all treated the assignment like it was a big goof and most of the girls weren’t too excited about it, either. On the day the poems were read in class it was mostly funny stuff or poems about how they loved their mothers. Three people wrote poems about Martin Luther King, Jr. Half the class just listened to the poems and hoped they wouldn’t be called on to read theirs out loud. But when it was time for Kitty to read her poem, she said, “I’m going to read my poem to Mack.”
Everybody paid attention.
Mack leaned back in his seat and got this look on his face like he was too cool to breathe. Okay, Kitty went and stood right in front of Mack and started reciting her poem real slow. She was just glancing at the paper it was written on but most of the time she was looking dead into Mack’s eyes.
“How do I love thee, you sweet black thing
Why do I love thee, is this some fling
That my wildly beating heart has chanced
Upon or has my light and joyous soul danced
With yours in some other life or taken wing
And flown with yours, you sweet black thing.”
The class was quiet and Mrs. Henry put her book down and sat behind her desk. Kitty went on with her poem.
“How do I love thee, my sweet black prince
For surely I have loved thee ever since
My eyes first met your fierce but tender gaze
And your gentle touch did expand my days
As poets’ songs fulfill the singing verse
And sweet love fulfills the universe.
“I haven’t finished it yet,” Kitty said. “It’s going to be a sonnet.”
She hadn’t finished the sonnet but she had finished Mack. From that minute on he was stupid in love. What she did was to flat-out change the brother. She had reached inside him and took out his attitude. Peewee put it best.
“What Mack was doing was dealing wrong but dealing so strong you couldn’t do nothing about it,” he said. “But how strong can you be when some girl can make you roll over and play dead any time she wants to? She can make that dude fetch like a cocker spaniel if she wanted.”
That was true, because Mack would be in the cafeteria or walking down the hallway and all of a sudden this silly grin would come over his face and either Kitty would be someplace near or he would be thinking about her. Mack was so much in love that it made people feel good just to be around him. He was talking about going right to the major leagues and playing pro ball while Kitty went to school.
They went out steady for a while and after a few weeks Kitty naturally wanted to know how Mack felt about her. She hinted around for a while, then she came right out and asked him.
“You’re okay,” he said.
“Don’t give me no okay,” Kitty said. “I want to know if you love me.”
“Something like that,” Mack said.
That’s what he said to Kitty, but to everybody else he was planning his whole life.
“It’ll take her six or seven years to get her law degree,” he said. “Then I’ll play ball for another eight or nine years and then we’ll open a little business.”
Kitty lived with her parents above her grandfather’s shop. That’s where Mack was coming from the day before Christmas. Kitty had been up at Brown University in Rhode Island on a visit to see if she wanted to go to that school and Mack had met her at the train station. It was a cold night and a light snow was falling. Down on the corner some guys were selling Christmas trees and had started a fire in a garbage can to keep warm.
All of a sudden two guys come running down the street. They were hoofing heavy and looking back over their shoulders. When they ran across Powell Avenue they almost got hit by a gypsy cab. The cab swerved just in time and one brother was slipping on the snow and almost fell in the path of a delivery truck. He was so close to being hit that he steadied himself on the fender of the truck. The car that came across the intersection was an old Mustang painted black. The two guys were running on the uptown side of the street but the Mustang came over, facing the wrong way in traffic, and a dude leaned out the back window.
“Drive-by!” a kid screamed.
People were hitting the ground, or running, or ducking behind cars. Most of them didn’t know where the shooting was coming from. A window broke, sending glass across the sidewalk. People screamed. Tires squealed. The two guys they were shooting at turned the corner and ran up the avenue. The car sped away toward the bridge that leads to the Bronx. In a minute it was out of sight.
“That’s a shame!” an old West Indian woman was saying.
“Those gang people don’t care two cents for your life!” the woman with her said.
“The day before Christmas, too,” the first woman went on, shaking her head. “They don’t have a thing to do but to—is that somebody laying on the ground over there?”
It was Mack. A man called the police and in minutes the street was full of police cars and emergency vehicles.
“He’s moving,” a long-headed boy with a scarf around his face said. “He’s okay.”
They took Mack downtown to Harlem Hospital. Pookie, who came along after the shooting and saw that it was Mack, went and told his folks.
It was Christmas day when the news got back to the block. Mack was going to live, but two bullets had torn into his right ankle and just about taken his foot off. Doctors had worked on his foot for seven hours, but finally they gave up. It had to be amputated.
W
hen he came out of the hospital Mack was different. It wasn’t like he just acted a little strange; he was a different person. At first when some of the guys went around to see him they said he didn’t talk much, but then after a while he wouldn’t even come out of his room. Then Peewee found out that he hadn’t seen Kitty.
“She didn’t even go to the hospital?” Eddie, who was in Mack’s math class, asked.
“She went to the hospital,” Peewee said. “But since he’s been home he hasn’t seen her. He told his mother not to let her in and he won’t answer the phone.”
“You can’t turn your back on people like that,” Eddie answered.
But the truth was that Mack could turn his back on people, because he really had turned his back on himself. Kitty called him every day at the same time so he would know it was her, but he wouldn’t answer.
Mack’s father worked in a restaurant just down from Sylvia’s. It wasn’t as high-class a restaurant as Sylvia’s but it was nice. He went to work at one in the afternoon and Mack would keep his door closed, not even come out of his room, until after his father had left.
The next thing that Kitty did was to organize a little get-together with Peewee and some of the guys on the baseball team. Peewee told me about it and for the first time he didn’t make a lot of jokes about it.
“He was sitting on his bed and he had his leg out from under the cover,” Peewee said. “You know, we just sat there and tried not to look at his leg. Mack kept laughing at his leg and pointing to it. Man, it was terrible. Dottie was there and she held Kitty’s hand.”
“She was tore up,” Dottie said. “You loving somebody like she loves that fool and you hate to see them looking so pitiful.”
“Nobody else could get it up to say anything,” Peewee continued. “People started drifting out one by one. I know those guys aren’t going back there. That scene was too rough.”
No one saw Mack for a long time after that. There were reports that he had lost a lot of weight, and that maybe he was losing his mind. The worst time was when Mack’s father called the cops because he wouldn’t come down from the roof. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning in late January. A cold rain slanted down onto the tar paper and onto the lone figure sitting on the ledge overlooking the empty street below. A policeman tried to talk him away from the edge but Mack didn’t respond.
“Why, son, why?” his father pleaded with him. “You’re young and still got your whole thing going on in front of you. I know it’s not like it was but you’re still young.”
“Who?” Mack spoke without moving.
At first his father just looked at him, not knowing what his son was getting at. “What you mean who?” his father asked.
Excerpt copyright © 2014 by Walter Dean Myers. Published by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
“She just stopped singing.” Ernesto, María’s husband, was a thin, yellowish man with a wisp of a mustache. He wiped at his face as we sat in the back of his old Ford. “That’s what she liked to do best,” he went on, talking to himself as much as to the rest of us, “singing and sometimes dancing even when there wasn’t any music.”
María Esteban was only thirty-eight when she died. When she stopped singing. She was my cousin and had taken care of me after my mother died. Once we had been close. She let me do her hair sometimes and laughed when I messed it up. Then we had grown apart, or maybe had both began to withdraw into ourselves, the way poor people seemed to do more and more. I remembered her singing as we walked down Fox Street to our little house. I didn’t remember her stopping her songs.
The pickup truck and the three cars that made up the small funeral procession moved slowly down Mosholu Parkway toward Van Cortlandt Park.
“She always used to sing. I should have known,” Ernesto said, more to himself than to anyone else. “I should have known.”
It was getting harder to tell when people were going to die. There weren’t many warning signs. Sometimes a slight cough into a handkerchief, perhaps a distant look in the eyes, but mostly it was just a turning inward. They had simply given up on life. They had forgotten their songs. When I saw someone giving up, I wondered if, one day, I would give up, too.
The casket was on the back of the pickup truck. It looked like metal, but I knew it was corrugated cardboard. Around it were a few sad flowers, pictures cut out from religious calendars and framed, and candles. Yes, and signs printed out in Magic Marker that read “Rest in Peace,” or “We Love You, María.”
Old people said that Van Cortlandt Park had been a happy place once. There had been picnics and children playing and families everywhere. I couldn’t imagine it. Now it was just a dreary place, a place where we went to dispose of the dead.
Our little convoy stopped and two men—I thought they were probably from St. Athanasius, María’s church—took the casket from the truck and placed it on the concrete platform in front of the old band shell. Even before the priest got to the front of it, the two men had begun to pour water into the openings at the foot and the head of the casket. Biocremation took only twenty minutes if everything went right. Oxygen-infused potassium hydroxide lined the casket, the water was poured in, and in seconds, the body would begin to decompose. We wanted to honor María Esteban, but no one wanted to be away from our neighborhood for too long. It wasn’t safe.
I had read historical accounts of bodies cremated by burning. It would have been better, I thought. We could have seen the flames rising to the heavens. We could have pretended the body was going to someplace called Heaven.
A priest was praying in Spanish for María’s soul while another man—short, square, baggy pants—held a shotgun as he nervously looked around for any favelos, roaming gangs who might be in the area.
Then the priest’s prayer was over, and the dead woman’s neighbors were getting into their cars. The city would send their crews to clean up the final remains of my cousin. I watched as tiny birds made black silhouettes against the steel-gray sky.
“Dahlia, it’s time to go.” Alfredo, the owner of the bodega on my corner, spoke softly.
“I’m not going back,” I said impulsively.
“You don’t have any other place to go,” Alfredo answered. He smelled of garlic and tobacco. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned away. “Try not to stay out too late. In any case, we’ll wait up for you.”
As the cars rolled away, I saw their faces against the glass windows. I knew they would understand how I felt. They would think about me and María as they drove the six miles back to our own little section of el barrio. And I knew they would save my place.
María had been a cousin and a friend. She knew how to touch me, and when to put her arm around my waist and smile at me even when her own life was not going well. More than that. More than that, she knew how not to dig too deep for the truth when the truth wasn’t worth a damn, which was most of the time.
Years ago I had read Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth. Good shit, mostly. We, me, María, everybody in the Bronx, we were the wretched of the earth, wandering through our lives like sheep in a storm, struggling to make sense of what was not sensible. I was feeling sorry for myself.
Good. I liked feeling sorry for myself.
I began to walk without any thought to where I was going. Through my tears, the late-summer light broke up into shards of color that made everything seem unreal. It was almost beautiful. Almost as if that was the way to look at life in 2035.
I felt sorry for María, and for myself. For a wild moment I imagined myself in my own corrugated casket, engulfed in flames. Then I stopped and got mad at myself for going there. I got mad at María, too. She needed to be stronger. She knew that.
I was cold and pulled my sweater tighter across my chest. Looking around, I began to feel fear. Back in my own community, I was frustrated and lonely. Away from those crumbling tenements, I was open to attack. What
would I do if I encountered a group of favelos wandering through the park? Or Sturmers?
The Sturmers, as they called themselves, were mercenaries who sold themselves to the highest bidder. They dressed and acted like Nazi storm troopers and even used Sturmer, a German term for some of their troops. They managed to hate everything and everybody, but they were cruel enough to negotiate through the screwed-up world that the C-8 companies had created.
I turned and headed out of the park, the way the cars from the funeral had gone. I walked quickly. I was cold. It began to rain.
It was dark when I reached Fox Street. The streets were shiny from the rain, and the neon lights reflecting off the black pavement were almost festive. The guards at the gate waved me through. I knew I didn’t have anything at home to eat except wild rice, but all I needed was tea. I walked up the two flights in semidarkness, opened my door, went in quickly, and locked the door behind me.
Hello, yellow walls. Hello, green curtains flapping against the window. Hello, roaches.
I touched my computer screen, navigated to a puzzle, memorized it quickly, and then put the water on for tea. Chai and ginger. It would chase away the cold.
And then I was crying again, and being mad at myself for crying, and glad for the relief it brought me. There was nothing else to do and be sane. I lay across the narrow bed and closed my eyes, waiting for the sound of the kettle to comfort me.
I was so friggin’ down. My narrow bed seemed even smaller than usual, and there was no position that felt comfortable. The streets outside were quiet except for an occasional truck that rumbled past. I started counting again. I hated the counting, but I did it almost every night. One bed, one dresser, one built-in closet, one chair, one lamp, a table where my computer sat, winking at me, one basin, one sink, one small microwave oven. In the tiny bathroom there was another sink, a john, a medicine cabinet where I kept my toothbrush, baking soda, soap, and flash drives.
Think of something else. I closed my eyes and imagined that I was in the back of the pickup truck. It was slowing, and soon they were lifting me onto the concrete slab where I would be disintegrated. I was glad to have it over with, to move to some other plane. I was glad, but in the stillness of my room, I was crying.