Leaving: A Novel Page 12

  There were not hundreds of pictures of her, like an obsessed man might have. There weren’t any of her, really, except one where she was a baby in his arms and Ruby and Corbet stood by their fishing poles at the pier in San Leandro. There were not nude pictures or pictures with women’s faces crossed out. There was only one picture with a woman, a White woman, from a long time ago. Easton wore grease-covered blue overalls, and the woman was smiling, like he’d never said a mean word to her in his life.

  Lida put down the photo and stood. She looked around the room, at the bulbous red candleholder covered in a fishnet pattern, the poster of John Coltrane in lingering smoke, the wooden stereo speakers—looked for something else, for anything that revealed he might have done to another woman what he’d done to her; that it wasn’t because of her that he’d done it.

  But she saw nothing. Nothing out of place, nothing unusual.

  She stepped up onto the bed and stood in its sinking center. She bent her knees and began to bounce. She bounced up and down. She jumped harder and harder until she started to get a little air.

  “Rabbit,” she whispered. She had her arms out at her sides, and with every jump, she said the word louder, like she was calling for someone hidden in the room. “Rabbit. Rabbit. Rabbit!” she yelled and filled the whole house with her voice. She bent her legs all the way down like she was going to jump up to the ceiling, but instead, with a second thought, she absorbed all the downward momentum into her body and stopped completely, as if she heard something on the staircase. She waited, spooked, the hairs on her arms raised, like a frightened porcupine. But she heard nothing more. She sat down, got off the bed, and walked quietly out of the room.

  Downstairs, she put on her dress and jacket. She picked up the suitcase she had packed and left.

  SANTA RITA JAIL

  EVERY MAN AND woman needs respect—to feel valuable—and we learn how to get that feeling from our parents and our culture and our peers. When we were babies, if we did something “good,” we got a kiss or some food, some kind of safety. And when your friends come up to you and say, Man you are a tight rapper, or man you are smart, then you keep doing what you’re doing because you feel respected. We get that food or that kiss or that safety and we feel righteous, we feel like we’re getting what we deserve.

  Now, each culture’s got its own standards for respect, rules that kids learn from their parents and peers that get passed on down. If you do something that the family approves of, you feel good and you do it again. But the knowledge of what your culture thinks of as good can be eliminated.

  For fifteen generations your African culture was squeezed out of you; each slave child knew less about getting respect as a free man and learned more about the culture of the slave. During those four hundred years of slavery, there was only one lesson to learn: that we were inferior to the White race. Respect would come in the form of how strong you were, how much work you could do for him, how obedient you were, how much you could get at auction, how many children you could give the master, how attractive you could be to him, or how much you fought against him. It’s for him or against him, but it’s always about him. There’s no respect on our own terms.

  Today I read to you from American Negro Slavery:

  Those on the block often times praised their own strength and talents, for it was a matter of pride to fetch high prices. On the other hand if a slave should bear a grudge against his seller, or should hope to be bought by someone who would expect but light service, he might pretend a disability though he had it not.

  You don’t believe me. You say you never would have ingested that poison pill of White supremacy. But what if you were a child born into slavery, if you’d grown up as a slave, your father and your grandfather and your great-grandfather were slaves on this same plantation? And you knew the rules, and when you played by the rules, life was as good as it ever got, and when you broke them, it was bad. That was the lesson we were taught every day when we woke up in the morning, when we couldn’t speak “properly,” when our parents couldn’t read or write, when we didn’t get rich and didn’t wear fancy clothes, when our homes were run-down, and even the smallest White child could tell our parents to pee in their pants. And learning this one lesson helped us survive, helped us keep our fingers from getting chopped off, our backs lashed, and our minds from making us crazy. We couldn’t earn respect or sustenance by being educated or running a business or writing books, so we took to the ways of earning respect that were offered us if we wished to survive, the way a man will become a cannibal if there’s nothing else to eat.

  CHAPTER 8

  OCTOBER 1993 • RUBY 55, LOVE 14

  LOVE CAME FROM upstairs, where Li’l Pit was sleeping for the first time. Ruby drank from a blue ceramic cup of cranberry tea and sat in Corbet’s old rocker. She shook her head.

  “Near the end of the month, there ain’t nothin else coming in to give him.” She pulled a black crochet afghan with colored flowers over her knees, one that she’d made for Lida when she was a baby. “All we got is beans and rice as it is.”

  “I can get money,” Love said.

  “That’s what’s bothering me.”

  “I mean a job.”

  Ruby nodded her head and rocked slowly with her hands around the steaming cup of tea. “You got a job in mind?”

  “Mmm-hm.” Love opened up the denim notebook with the insects in it.

  “Now, if we was back in South Carolina, I’d just say, go on out and catch us some more fish.” She laughed. Love turned the plastic page and straightened the Apollo butterfly.

  “There was a red path road that went off to the Edisto River, where Ronal, your granpapa, use to take Love E. And you could catch enough fish for two weeks, that is before the pesticides kill everything. That’s what he say. That’s what Ronal print in the paper.” She stopped and looked into her tea. Love waited for her to continue, but when she began again, she seemed to have lost her train of thought.

  “When Love E was ’bout your age, he took a razor and cut off the tail of a dead rattler and he use to take that everywhere, say it’s his lucky rabbit’s foot. And it came true too. One day he was walkin home from town and there, layin straight across the path, sleepin, was another rattler. He could a gone ’round in the cornfield, I spose, but that wasn’t him. Ronal taught him there ain’t no way round a problem but straight head-on. So he take his lucky rattle out a his pocket and start rattlin it. Well, the snake wake up and start slippin toward him, least that’s how he tole it. It must a been a girl rattle he had, ’cause it start comin right toward him, but he kept on a-rattlin his rattle and the snake kept a-comin on to him. That stupid bline ole snake come right on up to Love E’s foot and blam, he kick it in its head, dead, like that. Least that’s how he tole it. Had himself two lucky rattles then.”

  She took a sip of her tea and smiled.

  “How much you think these bugs worth?” Love held up the whole folder.

  “You’re not to go sellin those bugs.”

  “They’re mine.”

  “I’ll find a way to feed that boy. Don’t go sellin those bugs. They yours. You just a chile, and it ain’t your burden. What you want me to make you two for Halloween?”

  “I’m too old for that shit now.” Last year at the home, he’d been a vampire.

  “Don’t you swear in this house, you hear?”

  The two front glass windowpanes exploded, pulling the curtains down with them. At first it wasn’t clear what had happened, only that they found themselves on the floor. Then a second gunshot cracked the air and scattered painted macaroni off the heart picture on the back wall above the kitchen entrance.

  “Ronal,” Ruby screamed. “No! Ronal!”

  Love lay flat, the denim notebook over his head, face-to-face with Ruby. She had spilled her tea on the rug. Her eyes were wide, but she didn’t seem to be looking at him.

  “ESO, Ace Trey!” came a shout from the street. Two more gunshots shattered the upstairs windows. Love cl
osed his eyes, his chest bone pressing hard into the floor with every breath. He knew how this worked. He’d seen it in the movies and on TV. Soon there would be other cars, and they’d enter the house, shoot them in the back of the head with Uzis, spray-paint the room with their tags. He waited for the footsteps on the porch. There was silence. Then the car peeled out and roared up Cranston.

  They waited on their stomachs for a moment. A few loose shards of glass fell to the floor. Ruby put her hand on Love’s shoulder, her eyes streaming with tears. She pulled herself up to her knees and looked at the shattered bay windows. She shook her head. The night air blew in, and they shivered.

  Li’l Pit walked softly down the stairs holding on to the wooden railing, his head shaved clean from the lice cure. He stopped halfway and stood there silently in his new white underwear.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, Love went to the liquor store on the corner. Freight spoke softly to him, putting an arm around his shoulders. “I’m not about hurting people.”

  They were at the back of the store, behind a row of tomato-sauce jars on perforated white particleboard shelves. The convex mirror on the ceiling showed their reflection to the store clerk up front, a thin, older man with a gray beard. He looked up into the mirror, caught Love’s eye, and quickly turned back to watching the World Series on the portable TV hanging by the cigarette rack.

  “You don’t have to kill no one,” Freight added.

  Curse in his wheelchair and stick boy hung around just outside the door of the white stucco building, both wearing the same black sweatshirt and blue jeans.

  “But you’ve got to understand, I can’t take any chances. You’ve got to earn our trust. Then we’re down for each other. First you got to tell me what’s up with these punks jackin up the ’hood.”

  Love shrugged.

  “Do you see my lips moving?” Freight backhanded Love in the chest and sent him stumbling a few steps. Then he ran over and caught him delicately like a dropped fruit. “Don’t do me like that, homie. That hurts my heart.” He put his arm back around Love’s shoulders. “You just have to show me that you trust me. I don’t want to see you hurt yourself. You want me to protect you, don’t you? Everyone needs to be taken care of.” He helped Love stand and brush off his pants. “Tell me who it was. I’ll let you pull the trigger.”

  Love didn’t answer, and Freight turned back to face him.

  “You’re hurting me, blood.” Freight pushed him with both hands into shelves of cereal. Love fell down to the floor and crushed a green box of Apple Jacks. “I don’t like what you’re making me do.”

  “Hey,” the clerk yelled, then looked down and talked more softly. “Come on, FT, that costs us.” Freight didn’t turn his head or answer the clerk. He was in a locked stare with Love. Curse wheeled himself inside, casually took a look, then wheeled out again.

  Love didn’t speak but he didn’t look away either.

  “You got dokyou,” Freight said to Love. “You don’t let no one push you around. That’s something to trust.” Freight reached his hand into his sweatshirt pocket and dug around. Love scanned the panel of utensils hanging to his right—can openers, plastic spaghetti strainers—but saw nothing sharp enough to defend himself with.

  Freight pulled out a screwdriver. He threw it on Love’s stomach.

  “I got an old Toyota in Berkeley near the flea market. Bring it back to me here. No one else will ever touch you again.”

  Love held the screwdriver in his hand, point up. He stood and kicked the cereal to the side.

  “What color is it?” he asked.

  “How do I know what fucking color it is? Any color you want.”

  Love waited for Freight to move out of his way. Instead, Freight made himself bigger, put his hands on his hips so the remaining space was filled by his elbows, boxing Love in by the cereal shelves. “What are you waiting for, blood?”

  Love didn’t say anything. He knew this game. He walked straight into Freight’s left arm, then came the slap on the back of his head. Love’s eyes teared up, but he continued to walk out the door without looking at Curse or the stick boy.

  He crossed Cranston and walked fast, breathing hard through his nose, his jaw clenched. He purposely walked in the path of every oncoming pedestrian. He stared straight forward and narrowed his eyes. Men and women in business suits and some kids coming home from school all walked around him without meeting his eyes. The only one who looked at him was a young man in a purple and blue tie-dye, his ponytail jumping from side to side. He smiled at Love and mumbled something about a nice day.

  “What the fuck you looking at, dog!” Love yelled and held the screwdriver up to the man’s face.

  “I just said hello. God.”

  “Bitch motherfucker! Fuck you.” Love turned and walked on.

  Ten minutes later he arrived at the West Oakland BART station. A BART policeman talked to the attendant in her booth. Love waited at a pay phone, picked it up, and listened to the dial tone until the guard left to go upstairs to the platforms. Another passenger got her dollar stuck in the ticket machine, and the attendant went around the corner to help her. Love put his hands on the stainless-steel ticket takers and leapt over the plastic barrier. This was enough to be sent back to Juvi if they caught him, but they’d probably just kick him out of the station.

  He pulled his white jeans below his hips, revealing a few more inches of his blue boxers. He took the escalator to the platform and sat on a bench from which he could look over the passengers. If someone was going to start something, it would happen on the platform because you could still get out. The BART train itself was a trap. Each stainless-steel car had doors that could lock. He’d seen a train pull into a station and the doors stay shut while cops hunted down their suspect. One time the cops cornered an older White drunk in a stained jacket playing harmonica and asking for change. The summer before Love left to Juvi, three kids in fur-lined hoods came into the train spitting on the floor. At the Fruitvail station, the cops came on, grabbed the kids, and had them spread-eagled, facedown on the cement platform outside with their hands cuffed behind their backs. Everyone stared at them as the train pulled away, like on the tram at the zoo.

  The Richmond-bound train arrived, and Love swaggered to the back, past a woman with two small children. One of the kids looked up at him and the mother pulled his face away and wiped the corner of his mouth. Love sat in the last seat against the wall so he could see anyone coming in before they saw him. This train had originated in San Francisco, picking up Gs from the Mission and downtown.

  Love pulled up the collar of Easton’s black leather jacket. Most guys didn’t fuck with you if you weren’t slippin, unless you had done something stupid like take their bikes. You were also fucked if you claimed a rival, but you’d only do that if you had something to prove or if you were being challenged. There were a number of people in the car: one wanna-be G in the last seat facing the other direction, a light-brown-skinned dude with round sunglasses and headphones, but he never looked up. Another brother wore a blue sweater and a blue cap with the gold letters CAL embroidered on the front and was hunched over reading a paperback. There were a few other people, Sunday tourists heading into Berkeley. The only person worth consideration was a Mexican guy in a white and maroon Mighty Ducks jacket, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, his black and white sneaker stuck into the aisle. He looked at Love, and Love turned to the window as if something had distracted him.

  He gazed over the houses in West Oakland to the docks and the giant metal structures shaped like white dogs that lifted cargo on and off the ships. The sky was blue all the way across the bay to San Francisco where a tidal wave of white fog rolled over the mountains toward the skyscrapers. But it was blue above the fog and the open space seemed to reach out forever. Then the train dove down into the underground tunnel. Love closed his eyes and let out a breath.

  When they pulled into the yellow lights of Ashby Station, he waited to get up until the train came to a
complete stop, so it wouldn’t make him stumble like a fool or let other people know where to get off if they wanted to follow him.

  He got out and took the escalator up with the rest of the commuters but went over by the bathroom alcove. He waited until all the people had exited and then went out the bike gate, wiping his hands on his pants, like he’d just been let in to use the bathroom.

  Outside in the fading sun, he faced the flea market, which took up the whole right half of the parking lot: lines of tents and carpets displaying incense holders, record players, irons, hand-me-down clothes, futons, shaving cream, old videos and books; and from somewhere in the center of the market, a pulsating beat of conga drums, clanking hubcaps and bottles. The left side of the lot was all parked cars, plenty of old Toyotas, but there was a police cruiser parked right on the curb out front.

  Love walked into the market and eyed the goods. Most people were packing up slowly now that it was getting dark. One old man with a rough, tortoise-skinned forehead sat in front of a blanket loaded with old books and a sporting almanac with a picture of a baseball player on the front.

  Love pulled a plastic box out of his jacket pocket and held it in front of his face. Inside was the Hercules Beetle.

  “How much you give me for this?”

  The man licked his chapped lips and shook his head. “I don’t buy bugs.”

  “It’s the longest beetle in the world. Give me fifty bucks.”

  “I can see what it is, but I don’t buy bugs.”

  “All right, dog.”

  The old man shook his head and Love put the box back into his pocket. He walked to the end of the aisle and climbed the ivy hillside out of the lot up onto the sidewalk. He crossed Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard toward a house covered entirely by pink shingles and turned down Prince Street, away from the traffic and the cops.