Leaving: A Novel Read online

  In a burnt-out house across the street, two young men in black shirts and blue jeans hit the charred pilings with crowbars. One of them was in a wheelchair and had a snake over his shoulders, a thick brown snake like a muscular arm. The other one, with a long braid of hair down his back and a black bandanna in his back pocket, looked up and saw Love in the window.

  Love almost stepped back but caught himself. He looked down and squinted at the young man with the braid, who was maybe eighteen and had dark, swollen triceps. They stared at each other like two cats before a fight. Then the man turned and hit the charred stairs of the house again, breaking the top step right in the middle.

  Love walked back to his bed and dumped his clothes on the home-patched quilt. Sifting through his white shirts, he grabbed a faded black bandanna his mother had given him before he was taken to Juvi. He knew what to expect: they’d know the black rag, know that he was claiming to be down with them; they’d jump him in, beat him up, and then it would be over. He tried not to picture them hitting him or using the metal crowbars. He tucked the bandanna into his jeans and stuffed the rest of his clothes back in the bag.

  The stairs thumped and creaked loudly as he jogged down to the front door. Ruby came in from the kitchen. “Where you off to already?”

  “I got some business, dog.”

  “Don’t you call me dog. I’m not your pet. What sort of business you have already? You just got here. Why don’t you wash up and I’ll fix you somethin. I got some burger I could heat up.”

  “I got to go.” Love opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. He looked down the street toward the corner liquor store where the two young men had headed. Ruby followed him to the porch.

  “I got these here insects I was gonna give you, but if you just ‘got to go’ to your business, you go on ahead. I can give ’em to someone else.”

  Love looked back over his shoulder. Ruby walked inside and opened a drawer in the vanity. She pulled out a blue denim binder and took it into the living room.

  “What you mean, insects?”

  “Close the door and come sit here on the couch.” An orange-striped cat ran past him and into the kitchen. “That cat’s name’s Lion. You remember Lion?”

  Ruby sat on the couch, opened the book on her lap, and thumbed slowly through the first pages. “You probly never heard a these special names.” She put her finger under the name of a big orange butterfly and tried sounding it out slowly. “Dannaus…”

  “Dannaus plexippus,” Love said. “P-l-e-x-i-p-p-u-s. That’s just a monarch, but they have a heart poison in them so the birds don’t eat them.”

  “What’s that ugly creature?”

  Love came inside to see. He stood behind the couch and looked over her shoulder. Ruby pointed to a cricketlike bug pinned on its side.

  “They only ugly ’cause you’re not used to looking at them up close, and you ignorant about them. That’s a cicada. They the ones that make that high-pitch weeeeeee all night from this drum they got in their stomachs.” Love picked the binder out of Ruby’s lap. He turned the page to a beetle almost four inches long with a nose like an elephant. “That’s a Hercules. Where’d you get this from? They don’t even live around here.”

  “Keep them in that plastic. That man from your old school say to never take them out of that plastic.” Love looked into Ruby’s hazel eyes, swimming and red from years at the sewing machine.

  “No he didn’t. You went out and got these.”

  “He say to give these to you when I went in for a meeting. He say you been like a little brother.”

  Love looked back at the Hercules beetle. It was the longest beetle known to mankind, hidden in shiny black layers of armor.

  “But now you here with your real family to stay,” said Ruby. “You remember these folks, don’t you?” She got up and went to the photographs on the wall above the stacks of records: on the bottom, Lida with Marcus and Easton; Elise and Corbet on top.

  “I hope you don’t never put my picture up on that wall,” he said to his grandmother.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s like the Hall of Shame up there.”

  “Don’t you talk that way. Maybe we ain’t the Huxtables—”

  “No, we more like America’s Most Wanted.”

  “I know you talkin out of anger when you say that, but that kind of disrespect ain’t gonna be tolerated in here, you understand?”

  Love shrugged and went back to turning through the pages of pinned insects.

  “You understand?”

  “You gonna kick me out and I ain’t barely got here yet. I can see this ain’t gonna last long.”

  “It’s gonna last as long as you respect me and your family. So it’s up to you. Don’t blame it on anybody else, ’cause it’s all up to you. You can stay here as long as you please. You hear? As long as you please.”

  * * *

  TWO MONTHS LATER, Love ventured into East Oakland for the first time. It was four-thirty in the evening on East 14th near Fruitvale BART. The broad street was heavy with traffic, littered with French-fry containers, crushed golden malt-beer cans, cigarette butts, and yellowed newspapers. A black soot coated the sidewalk and the air was thick with bus exhaust.

  Love walked past a motorcycle shop, a lamp store, a check-cashing corner mart with lightbulbs around its blue sign. He pulled his white jeans halfway down around his boxers, drooped his eyelids, and stared straight ahead.

  There were a lot of Mexican families and shops in this area, but gang sets were not divided by race, not in Oakland; there were Blacks, Mexicans, Filipinos, Salvadorans, Chinese, and White kids on both sides of Lake Merritt. Sets were divided by territory, and ESO, East Side Oakland, was rival turf. If he was spotted by Ace Trey, 13th Street, they’d surely think he was slippin, coming across the lines from West Side to earn his props or to cap someone for revenge.

  At a bus stop, three young Latino men in black slacks and ties kicked an empty pack of cigarettes back and forth. On the bus bench sat an older woman wearing a scarf on her head and a beige overcoat. One of the young soccer players kicked the cigarette pack hard, and it went sailing past the woman’s shoulder toward Love. The man who went and fetched it clasped his hands in front of him as he passed the woman.

  “Lo siento,” he said. “They’re just learning.” The pack landed by Love. The young man in slacks picked it up without looking at him and went back to his game.

  Love read the white graffiti tag on the back of the bus bench as he passed. His heart beat quickly, but he swaggered his step with a slow rocking from side to side. He glanced left to the parking lot across the street. Two kids, younger teens in flannel shirts buttoned only at the top, sat on dirt bikes leaning against a silver catering truck. One ate something in a yellow wrapper and motioned toward Love with his chin. The other turned to look, but Love walked straight ahead. He did not slow down. He did not swallow. He heard the bikes swivel in the dirt lot, but he didn’t look.

  Thirty seconds later the bikes were riding alongside him, one behind the other in the gutter by the sidewalk.

  “Whas up?” said the first boy. He wore dark, curved sunglasses that wrapped around the sides of his light brown face. These situations were hopeless: to ignore meant a beating and to challenge meant a beating. The second boy was a pimply faced, pale kid with orange foam earphones hanging half off his head. Love saw a black knife handle in the first one’s waistband.

  They both jumped the curb and skidded to a stop in front of him. Love stared at them as the cars rushed by, the gawking passengers locked inside.

  “East Side,” the first boy yelled, calling his affiliation. He held up one hand and made an “E” with three fingers pointing horizontally, curling his ring finger down and holding it with his thumb. He looked at his own hand to see that he had gotten it right. When he was satisfied, he patted the sign against his chest like a hungry gorilla. “Give us your shoes, muthahfuckah, or we’ll cap your ass.” Love didn’t say anything.
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br />   “Hey, you Pit, huh?” the one with the headphones yelled to him. “You used to go to Prescott. You killed that kid Snapple, huh?” The first kid looked at his friend and then at Love again, now with less challenge in his eyes than fascination.

  “Where you claim now?”

  Love still didn’t move or speak. He just stared straight ahead.

  “Give us your shoes and we’ll let you go this time,” said the pale kid. “Your little brother’ll kick your ass anyway.”

  “Yeah. A free pass to Go. Don’t collect your two hundred dólares.” Both kids laughed and waited, as if they thought Love would laugh with them, or at least thank them in some way. But he didn’t. Love took off his shoes, the Air Jordans from Los Aspirantes. The pimply boy picked them up, tied the laces together, and slung them over his shoulder. The other one flashed his sign one more time, then they rode their bikes away into traffic, back toward the lot.

  Love walked in his socks without looking down at the pavement. He turned on High Street by Lucky’s market, and even though he saw his mother in the lot, he walked a block up and stopped at the pay phone on the corner.

  He watched through the tagged glass as Lida sat on one of the parking blocks. She wore a blue wool cap over her head, and her long breasts sagged into a black nylon shirt under her black and silver Raiders jacket. She glanced up and down the parking aisle and then along the sidewalk to the telephone booth. Love turned away quickly and then looked again. Lida was staring at him and smiling. He smiled back.

  She stood up, her hands in her jacket pockets, her thick thighs strangled into stretch pants. She walked toward Love, stumbled to the left on her heels, and then regained her balance. She smiled at him again.

  Love was not smiling now. He looked to both sides of the lot. A man with a six-pack glanced at him. Love glared back and the man got into his brown Honda Civic. Lida stood at the edge of the lot near the phone booth, one pointed heel up on the curb.

  “Hi darling.” His mother’s eyes blinked and darted around his face. “Long time no see.”

  “Hi.” Love stepped out from behind the glass. He looked toward East 14th, then up toward the freeway, then back at her. Her cheeks were sunken, her dark skin chapped and flaky. Her bangs spread out from under the front of her cap. He stuck his hands in his pockets as she came closer.

  “You lookin good,” she said. He could smell the beer on her breath.

  “Thanks.”

  She reached out and caressed his cheek with the back of her hand. He flinched. It had been four years.

  “Don’t be shy,” she said.

  “I ain’t shy.”

  She unzipped the bottom of her jacket completely and let it swing open, revealing dark crescents of sweat under her breasts.

  “What you like, then?” She smiled; her teeth were yellow with pieces of sunflower-seed shell caught between them.

  “What you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. What’s your pleasure?”

  Love backed away from her. “You know who I am?” he asked.

  “Sure, baby.”

  “Who am I?” he demanded.

  She looked away toward East 14th. “Listen, honey. Don’t play no games with me. You too young to be a cop. What you want? Or you got something for me?”

  Love looked at a rust streak that ran down her jacket along the zipper to where she nervously picked at her nails with her thin, burnt fingers. Her eyes darted around the street for danger.

  “Look at me,” Love said.

  “I am.”

  He fixed his eyes on hers. They were a dark hepatitis yellow. An airplane passed overhead and dampened all other sounds for a few seconds, as if they were standing in a private room. Neither of them spoke or moved. He begged her silently for recognition, but she continued to stare back at him vacantly. A car honked and drove past. Lida turned, then looked back to Love.

  “Now tell me what you want?” she asked.

  “I don’t want nothing,” Love said.

  “Well, you missin out.” She turned and walked away, a pear-shaped stain on the butt of her pants.

  She sat down on a parking block again. The brown Honda pulled out of its space and stopped in front of her. She stood and bent down to the window. The man inside cleared some papers from his passenger seat, and Lida went around and got in. The brake lights flickered and the car turned slowly onto East 14th.

  Just as the car began to accelerate, a young kid in a silver and blue Dallas Cowboys jacket stood up from behind the stacked shopping carts and tossed a large brown beer bottle at the car. The bottle broke by the back tire and the car stopped short. The kid did not run. Instead he began walking toward the car with another bottle in his hand, barking like a wild dog: “Rah, rahr, rah.”

  The car pulled off again.

  Love stepped over the curb into the parking lot toward his brother. He approached him quickly with his hands at his sides. The boy did not see Love until he was a car length away.

  “Li’l Pit,” Love yelled to him. His brother turned and raised the bottle. He barked at Love and bared his teeth: “Rah rahr rah, rah rahr rah.”

  “Damn, bro, you still slobbering all up on yourself.”

  “East Side Ace Trey!” Li’l Pit yelled.

  “Drop that shit. You ain’t all that.”

  Li’l Pit hurled the bottle in Love’s direction, missing by a foot.

  “Shit, dog.” Love stayed in his place, careful not to step on any of the shards in his socks.

  Now the little boy’s fists were clenched at his sides.

  “Take him down, blood,” came a yell from the street. At the edge of the lot were the two kids on their bikes.

  “East Side Ace Trey!” Li’l Pit yelled again, and glanced at his crew.

  “They ain’t your blood, dog,” Love said. “You got your props with me.”

  Love took a step toward him, and Li’l Pit didn’t step back. He stared him in the eye. He had a part shaved in his hair like a sickle.

  “Shit, I raised you hard,” Love said.

  “Go on, kick his ass, Li’l Pit,” the kid in the dark glasses yelled. Li’l Pit didn’t move. There was no breeze, and for a minute no one came or went from the market. Love watched Li’l Pit stare at the boys on the bikes as if hypnotized. And then the wind blew gently and the sun hit the windshield of a car entering the lot.

  “Why don’t you come kick my ass yourself, dog?” Love yelled back. The kid threw down his bike and it bounced off the pavement. He pulled his blade from his belt and walked quickly toward Love. His partner with the orange headphones followed. Love flashed the West Side sign even though he wasn’t affiliated with them—middle and ring fingers crossed, thumb down—a bluff for protection.

  As the East Side kids came across the lot, Li’l Pit also turned and faced them. They shed their flannels and strutted in their white tank tops. The boy with the sunglasses wore Love’s shoes. Love bent down and picked up the neck of the broken bottle beside him. He stepped toward the kid with the knife, looking him straight in the eye. The kid stopped, as if surprised this guy hadn’t run away yet.

  “I’m gonna fuck you up,” the boy said.

  Love took a step forward.

  “You gonna wish you stayed up wherever you been hiding,” said the kid with the headphones.

  “I’m gonna—” the first boy started to say, but Love ran at him, the bottle in his hand. The boy stepped aside and slashed at him with the knife, but Love didn’t slow down. He kept running past him, across the lot. The boy with the knife laughed, and his friend laughed with him.

  “That’s right, punk,” the boy yelled, and they laughed harder until they saw Love grab one of the dirt bikes. Then they ran after him, all three of them.

  Love threw his bottle and sped up High Street past the telephone booth. He rode standing in his socks. The air felt good on his face. He heard the pedaling of the other bike behind him, but he didn’t waste time to see how far back it was. He would keep riding until he sa
w the 580 and then turn; then they would be far enough away that it would only be one person to fight. He tried to remember what it was like to be in a full-on brawl without staff to break it up. How did you know when to stop? How did you keep from killing each other? He would go for the throat, choke him until he passed out so he didn’t have to keep fighting.

  Love got to the overpass, stopped, and turned. Li’l Pit came right at him, howling at the top of his lungs like a young coyote. But he didn’t slow down. He sped past Love, jumping the curb onto the sidewalk. Love mounted his bike again and followed, catching up to him just as they turned on to MacArthur, and they headed west together.

  SANTA RITA JAIL

  AND HE CAME to the front of the recreation room and stood on the table with a book in his hand:

  So we are brought ashore and we don’t know where our wives and sisters are. We have been unloaded separately, and when we call out to them, we are flogged. It is forbidden to speak in our languages. And even when we find a secret moment, the Africans around us are from different tribes and do not speak our language. That’s right, we have a tribe, we have a history and place of origin. That is why some of us are tall and thin, some of us are round and thick, and some in-between.

  Do you know your tribe, brothers? Have you ever thought of yourself as anything but the children of slaves, with no history but that of an inferior and victimized race? Are you Baul, the great musicians of Africa; Zulu, the master iron-smelting spear-makers whose soldiers could not marry until they were forty; Mandingo, Wolof, Serer, Fula, Fanti, or Ashanti. Are you from Dahomey with their awesome female warriors, or of their enemy, the Yoruba of Oyo, artisans secured behind the village walls, whose king had to commit suicide if he had a vote of no confidence—now that’s Power to the People!

  When we get off this ship, we still have our history within us, but we will not be allowed to tell it to our children. They will never know the accomplishments of our people. We will not be allowed to pass down the songs that teach of our tribes’ battles, the dances that tell of how the world began, or the sciences our ancestors discovered: how to make powder from the dried leaves of the baobab tree to cure dysentery; how to use the pyrethrum plant as an insecticide that doesn’t hurt animals and to which insects cannot develop immunity; how to use the leaves of the shea-butter for headaches. The Europeans would not have even been able to colonize Africa if they hadn’t learned from us that quinine from the cinchona bark could cure malaria. By losing the language, we lost the religion, the food, the crafts of building and farming, the art of our tribes’ baskets and healing.