Part 68 (1/2)

The faces staring at each other in the heat.

Then the older face is gone. Become Daddy Malcolm again, same as before.

-Lou Jay! Renee!- Mr. Malcolm, shouting. -Y'all come on over here now.

The two of them running over, sweat-faced. Lou Jay not looking at Ricky.

-I know y'all gone get to the church on time. Mind, now.

With one sharp movement, Ricky turned away to face Renee. And she ain't even nowhere near ugly, he thought, I wish I could say I did like girl-p.u.s.s.y.

-I got to tell you something.- Looking her straight in the face.

His father raising the gun. Lou Jay's eyes opening wide.

-What, Ricky?- The birds gone from her eyes, now reflecting back only the stone certainties of the future.

Daddy Malcolm's gun pointed directly at his son's back. A click from the trigger.

Ricky turning. Gazing at his father.

-You really would, wouldn't you.

The face emerges once more, but by the time the skin has finished its s.h.i.+fting and melting the scream strangled in Ricky's throat has risen up into his head, to remain there.

-He would what?- Only Ricky's body preventing her from seeing where the gun is aimed.

-I would love to see my son get married tomorrow. Y'all know Ricky's my baby son. Seven boys, six married, tomorrow the last one. And it's gone happen, too. So nice to see young people loving each other, living a normal life. Lou Jay!

-Sir?- Lou Jay's voice thick through the cl.u.s.tered reeds in his chest. In that moment looking exactly like what he had never been known to be in that town: completely stupid.

-We will miss you, boy.- The gun lowered. The look on Ricky's face unchanged. Renee looking off into the distance with what none of them can yet know-a memory of dark birds from another country dying at her feet. Nice-looking girl, the older man reflects, and a shame, only seventeen in two months, she coulda saved it for a real man.

-Yes, sir. Thank you.- Backing away as the car slowly begins to move off. As it runs right over where he'd been standing.

-I'll be with your mama and daddy for a while, Renee. Y'all don't forget-later at the church.

-We won't! she screams, but the car has gone. -What's wrong, Ricky?

No answer. Trembling in spite of the intense heat, he turns to Lou Jay, says: -You coming?

Lou Jay also shaking. Hands stuck in pockets. The shoulders stiff.

-Nope. I need to get back. I got things to- -Wait a minute. Am I gone see you after the wedding?

-You gone see him later, Ricky! What you- -Don't say nothing, Renee, fore we get into a fuss. Am I gone see you after?

-Ricky, your daddy-you saw- -I asked you something.

-Well, sure, you gone see me. I live here, don't I?

-That's right.- Her voice still low. -And Lou Jay, if you- -Renee, shut up.- I'll knock you down in a second, he thinks, but only Lou Jay can see how she is staring now at the face none of them had ever glimpsed in the man who must soon be her husband.

-I asked you, am I gone see you? I mean see you.-Hands folded into tight purple fists.

-Ricky- -I got to see you, Lou Jay! You don't know- -Ricky, now- -Tell me!

-I got to go, y'all. I'll see y'all in the church.

-Lou Jay!

-Bye.

-Lou!

-Bye, Ricky.-Walking off quickly up the road in the direction from which they'd all walked earlier. The air becoming cooler as he mounted the hill-and strange, he would think later, because there wasn't hardly no shade up there, after all.

Feeling Ricky's stare burning into him all the way up the hill, until he rounded the curve near the higher meadow that bordered the farm-fields where there should have been a gentle breeze and wasn't. Recalling the horrible burn, like the feeling, he'd received only once in his young life, when he'd put the wrong finger at the wrong time into a beaker of hydrochloric acid in high school biology lab. The finger hadn't ever been the same, not really. One of the fingers he would need to write postcards from Birmingham, like those pasted on his bedroom wall, if he could find them on that campus seen only once. But Birmingham was far enough away . . .

When, just as he finished rounding the curve, he heard the screams far below and behind him, he ran all the way back to the part of the road where there was a view right down the steep slope into the Meadow valley. He saw Renee. Down in the dirt on the side of the road. And saw Ricky, pulling her hair and kicking her all around, especially in her stomach. Saw her bleeding, spitting up blood. Saw how she tried to get up, and how Ricky punched her hard, right in the mouth, then kicked her in the side of her head. Again. And again. Even from that distance, perhaps because of the day's still heat, the sounds seemed audible for miles. Soft, wet noises. Thinking, before his mind began to scream along with Renee, that to some people there was no better proof of love than that.

-Ricky! he screamed, running as fast as he could down the hill,-Ricky, stop! You want your daddy to kill me? You fittin' to get you and me killed! I got to go to college! You gone kill your own child, Ricky! You gone be a daddy! That's Renee you beating on! We all friends! Ricky! You hear me? You can't go beating up on no girl like that! Stop that now fore you kill Renee!-Then feeling his heart chugging up inside him in the way of the heart attack that had been predicted for him before he reached forty, just like his daddy. But still he couldn't stop, not even when one dark bird and then another and then still another flew out of nowhere right into his face and he fell flat on his behind in the road, tumbling over and over on those sharp little stones until he raised himself in the dust to see the blood and dirt on his hands and forearms as he tasted it in his mouth and felt it warm and sticky and dirt-smeared all over his face. Thinking that it was, yes, Mama, like he couldn't even taste or feel Ricky in that private place inside him anymore, Then take me now, Lord, or the water and the reeds, and wash me, Jesus, or the sand and the soft soft gra.s.ses, and O shall come on a cloud descending, but could only sense that big new bitter taste, that one, inside every part of him that he knew he shared with the one who knew it all and had been all up inside it and back around, cause thou art the light, cause I ain't never wanted n.o.body else not n.o.body but you, cause I feel a fire in me, Lord, when I see you riding up this way, but O your daddy learned you good and you ain't know til now how good did you, he thought, flying: knowing that it was that terror and all before it back to the time of the holy rider and his blazing flight unto the fiery angels and their swords and light that were lifting him now, exploding in sharp fragments inside him as he ran and felt the sun and the sweat on his back and the familiar blood on his face, as just then and for the rest of his descent a million dark birds released from dreams charged blindly up into the sky turned a deeper red with the heat of the day, as each eye of that face came out to look at them and score into them the curling marks once recognized in blistered skin-right there, where the prophets spoke in flaming tongues, the flier knew, and where the first words of their lasting flame were always, before anything anyone could call truth or love, just plain old hurting sorrow.

Black and Boo.

BY MICHAEL KAYODE.

Sandwiched between undulating and chaotic vehemence to his left, stiff machismo to his right and the swirl of voices off of the TV screen Black sat his mind churning.

Sergio was the vehemence. He'd an att.i.tude all day, refusing to share with anyone what was bothering him. He was funny like that sometimes, just let it things burn him up until a channel for release came along, like a tarantula still and observant waiting for the perfect prey. He'd spent the better part of the day wiping stains off of his brand new red and white Jordan's with his hand. A long plain white s.h.i.+rt exposed the contours of his gangly frame and blue jean shorts stopped at the base of his calf. They hung over three pairs of fresh slouch socks.

The stiff machismo was Sam. Sam was a twenty-two-year-old neighborhood dude. He was dark skinned and wore a plain black baseball cap over his closely tapered fade. He rarely smiled or showed any emotion for that matter. He always acted like he was being watched. Although his movements were sudden and mechanical, his hands always stayed in a defined position. Either one was clenched in a fist and sat in the palm of the other or it stroked his chin hairs as he supported his elbow in his palm.

d.i.n.k was the 4th member of the gang He & d.i.n.k had known each other for a long time but they just started hanging tough in the last couple of months.

They were pa.s.sing around a blunt, which d.i.n.k had taken into the kitchen with him. Although it was very hot outside, the temperature was cool in d.i.n.k's three-bedroom apartment at the bottom of Maryland Avenue. His building sat in a lowland about one hundred feet away from Langston Hughes golf course. Under the dim ceiling lights the television provided most of the rooms' illumination, as well as serving as the center of attention. The group had gravitated towards the black, hard plastic, twenty-five-inch monitor that was rounded on the corners, behaving like giant gnats with the TV as an equally large porch light. It sat like a monument to procrastination under a thick cloud of marijuana and boat smoke.

Earlier in the day they smoked a blunt of boat: mint leaves wet down with embalming fluid. Sitting sat around the kitchen table, the sun casting a bright rectangular ray on the flowery table cloth, d.i.n.k had asked Black if he'd ever smoked boat.

Black had looked across the table at the stony expression on Sam's face and unflinchingly told d.i.n.k a bold faced lie which he'd instantly regretted. He wasn't a liar. He might lie to his mother to avoid chastis.e.m.e.nt, but he didn't lie to his friends. Well, there was that one time a couple of years back before he lost his virginity when he told them he'd had s.e.x. This time he'd concluded it had either been an attempt to impress Sam or to have one up on Sergio. Sergio However, knew he hadn't smoked boat, unless he'd done so in the two weeks since their conversation where he said that he hadn't.

Regardless, Black had wrinkled his face and disdainfully spat, ”Yeah man, come on,” his voice morphing from his usual ba.s.s laden tone to a high pitched whine as he spoke.

d.i.n.k had looked in Black's eyes, inhaled what seemed like all of the oxygen in the room and said, ”Aiight,” then heavily exhaled.

He'd then exchanged a meaningful eye contact with Sam, who he sometimes referred to as Sam-Sam, and continued rolling the blunt. Sergio, facing the wall with his fingers interlocked and his forearms resting on the corner of the table, he nodded his head in a rhythmical motion to the sound of Tupac's ”Come with Me.” During the brief silence that followed d.i.n.k's statement, he'd restlessly squirmed in his seat, his feet unconsciously s.h.i.+fting towards the front door.