The Violent Child Page 4

  I stop in front of them.

  “Move your butt, Bernice,” says Claudell, the larger of the boys. He flips a finger and stings the back of the girl’s ear. “Ain’t your mamma never give you no bringin’ up?”

  “Don’t you be hit me, fucker!” she says. She rubs her ear and turns to Claudell, pointing her finger. “Don’t you ever, Claudell!”

  The snow has gone, but the night is clear and cold. There is no wind, and, under the streetlight and stars, our breath whitens on the air. Claudell makes a fist and pretends to hit Bernice in the face.

  “Pop,” he says, bobbing his head like a fighter. “Pop-pop.” He smiles. His teeth are wide and yellow. “I got business, girl. Don’t be fuckin’ wit’ a man come time for business.”

  “I’ll slap you, boy,” Bernice answers. She turns and begins to walk away. “Slap you like a stepchild.” The other girls follow her, bundling in their coats and scarves.

  Bernice calls over her shoulder. “I’ll slap you stupid, boy!”

  The boys laugh but do not smile. “Shut up, Bernice,” the second boy yells.

  “Fuck you, nigger!” she says, and the three girls run down the street, jeering, scarves flying. They stop in the middle of the block, in the middle of the street. Bernice puts her hands on her hips and thrusts her pelvis in our direction.

  “And, piss on your white man, Claudell!”

  The girls laugh, clap, and walk away, slowly rolling their hips.

  Claudell looks at me, shaking his head. He draws on the marijuana, then offers it to me. I decline by waving my hand. He smiles and gives it to the boy next to him.

  “Bitches,” Claudell says, coughing. He makes a winding motion with his finger. “They all be crazy. All the time be comin’ ‘round for one thing or ‘nother. Little a this …” he grabs himself between the legs. “Little a that …” He makes a motion as if counting money.

  “Ain’t that right, Home?” he asks. “Bitches all the time comin’ ‘round for one thing or ‘nother?”

  Claudell looks full into my face. He wants an answer. An answer by which he will measure me. He wipes his nose on the cuff of his jacket, never taking his eyes from my face.

  I see Claudell as clearly as I have seen anyone in my life. In his hightops and oversized team jacket, black leather gloves, black sock hat pulled down over his ears, his nose running on his upper lip, his breath frosting in the cold. For a wordless instant, though he would laugh to hear it, Claudell is my brother—as if my most deeply rooted face stares back at me out of his. As if I am visited by a younger, more ruthless version of myself. Claudell pushes me back to a time when people looked at me the way that I look at him now: cornered, a wounded dog.

  “Hell if I know,” I say. “Never had much luck with the ladies.” I reach for my wallet.

  With this unexpected move to my hip, Claudell jams one of his hands into his jacket pocket. He glares, suddenly distancing himself, posing as if he holds something hidden, something with which he might kill me.

  I slow my movement and produce the wallet, holding it gingerly between my thumb and index finger so he may get an unobstructed view of its harmlessness.

  “I believe we said ‘five’,” I say.

  Claudell leaves his hand in his coat, but his shoulders lower two inches.

  “Yeah, man.” Pointing to his companion and then himself, “We say five and five.”

  “Anybody cruising the truck?” I hand him two fives. He passes one to the boy beside him.

  “Man, ain’t nobody fuck with your ride you got Mojo Six Project behind you. Ain’t that right, Home?” He turns to the other boy, and they clash fists.

  “We be jammin’,” the other boy says.

  “That’s cool,” I say.

  The boys laugh. “‘Cool’, he say! Teddie-boy say ‘cool’!” They laugh again.

  “Lorraine’s a little under the weather tonight. Think I’ll stay for another hour or so. You guys want to go for another five?”

  “Sorry about your mamma,” Claudell says. “But another hour gonna be ten in this shit.” He flaps his arms against his sides to emphasize the cold.

  “Ten? Ten’s okay.”

  “Freezin’ our nuts out here, man. Be ten and ten for another hour.”

  “Okay.”

  “Get it up front, Teddie-boy. Need somethin’ to keep our butts warm.”

  “Ten now, the rest when I come out.”

  “Okay, man, give it up.” Claudell holds out his hand. I hand him the bills, and he folds them between his thumb and finger. They disappear into his pocket.

  “Heard your mamma wasn’t doin’ so good,” he says.

  “Lungs are shot.”

  “Ever’body know your mamma. Bad-ass old white woman.”

  Claudell smiles. “Gimme doughnuts when I was a kid,” he laughs. “Never had me no live doughnut ‘til your mamma. You know, doughnut from the baker shop, not out a the box. Me and Robert use to hang in her kitchen like two little nigger boys—layin’ dead to kick up some doughnut work.”

  He digs the other boy in the ribs.

  “Ain’t that right, Robert? We was layin’ dead for some doughnut work!”

  “Yeah,” Robert says. He is dressed identically to Claudell, but his eyes are glazed, and he is sullen, withdrawn. His hands are stuffed deep into his jacket and he looks away. “Bad-ass old white woman.”

  “Don’t make them like her anymore,” I say.

  Claudell nods.

  “My sister do her hair. Last time I’m hangin’ at my sister’s, she doin’ your mamma’s hair. Man! Place stink like a dead man for two days!”

  We laugh.

  Claudell looks at the ground and shakes his head. When he looks up, his face is empty. He looks into my eyes.

  “Ain’t nobody mess with your mamma,” he says.

  I am used to such negotiations with Claudell, and I have come prepared with a number of five dollar bills. I give him another five to show my trust and appreciation, then run back across the street. I stand in the alcove of Lorraine’s building, watching Claudell count his money, then hand some bills to Robert. Robert tucks them beneath his cap and heads in the direction the girls have gone. Claudell, alone under the light, turns up the music. He slides off the fender, lights a cigarette, and begins to stamp his feet and clap his hands. He whirls under the light, kicking and punching imaginary truck thieves. Finally, he holds his fists high over his head, twirling them in the air as if gloating over a fallen opponent. He makes noises like a baying dog.

  I enter the building and return to Lorraine.

  Lorraine is resting, breathing easier, and I walk quietly to the kitchen and put the trash can beneath the sink. I bring another half-pint into the living room and crack the seal on the way to the couch. Lorraine opens her eyes at the sound, points to the closet by the door.

  “Take off your coat and stay awhile.”

  She seems stronger after resting.

  I slip out of my coat, open the closet door, slide the coat onto a hanger.

  “Check my bulb, Teddie.”

  A few years ago, for Christmas, I hung a full-length mirror inside her closet door and installed an overhead light on the closet ceiling; there is a switch that turns on the light each time the door opens, shuts it off when it closes. Lorraine was suspicious for months, complaining she would never know if the light was truly off when the door closed. I reassured her that it was just like the oven light, just like the refrigerator. But she was afraid of fire and the waste of electricity. If Leo had put in the light, she would have never questioned its function. But I am still a boy to her, her son, and she is unsure of my ability to “play with electricity.” Owing to the fact that her apartment has not burned down in the years the light has been operational, and because there has been no discernible increase in her electric bill, she has come to accept it. Now, she will show it off to her neighbors, though she tells them she still “keeps an eye on it.” She trusts only me to change the bulb when it burns out.
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  I stand for a moment before the open closet door. I prop it with my boot and regard the man who stares out from the mirror. He is dressed in the way of his grandfather: bib overalls, thick plaid shirt, work boots. His hair is like his grandfather’s—grey and cropped short, but the body is tall, legs thin, shoulders rounded like his father’s, hands strong, fingers long like his father’s. He has his grandmother’s craggy teeth, but the whole of his face, sharp-boned and narrow, is the face of his mother.

  I want a drink and a cigarette, but I stand with my hands in my pockets, mesmerized by the eyes peering out at me over the top of my wire-rimmed bifocals. This man stares as though I should know him, yet I am unable to decipher the nature of our relationship. If I should be distressed by my inability to identify him, I am not. For, as the years pass, it is liberating to feel less and less like anyone in particular. Especially, like anyone from the past. As I witness Lorraine’s life moving toward its conclusion, as the powers of her vigorous personality decline, I find that it is pleasant to be shed of such things as an endemic sense of self.

  Lorraine calls from the living room. “Power bill. Money don’t grow on trees.”

  “Okay,” I say and shut the closet door. I pour us fresh drinks, sit on the couch, and light a cigarette.

  “Truck okay?” she asks.

  “Fine.”

  “Who’s watching?”

  “Claudell.”

  “Claudell Johnson?”

  “Girl that fixes your hair? Her little brother.”

  Lorraine grunts. “That little shit? Somebody knock him over the head and drive that truck to Timbuctoo.”

  “Claudell will do fine.”

  I envision Claudell whirl and punch and smile. Hear the snap of his fist on the crisp night air. I know Claudell. We have a deal: money has changed hands. Robert will return with booze or drugs, perhaps one or two of the girls. They will turn up the music and party. I have left the truck unlocked for their convenience, and the boys will work the girls into the cab.

  Claudell will wait until hell freezes over for the rest of his money. If I am late by so much as a single minute, we must negotiate the overtime. I trust Claudell, because I am familiar with his agenda. Though he would not believe it, we are merely translations of time and culture.

  “Timbuctoo and Kalamazoo,” Lorraine says.

  “Truck’ll be fine,” I say.

  As I consider Claudell and his situation, there is a thing I would have him understand. But in the unspeaking way of men, I will say nothing. For Claudell is young, and, in his eyes, I am old, white, and so unempowered I must pay to keep my truck from being stripped down to the drive train. Claudell is caught in that place where he still revels in the sweet adrenalines he believes are the true and enduring character of masculinity. He believes that if he binds himself to violence, if he defines his manhood in the context of aggression, that the world will no longer be able to wound him. That the answer to pain and fear is power and control. He believes that if he never reveals the least token of vulnerability, if he meets each of life’s inflictions with an assault, violence will keep him safe.

  I would tell Claudell that the world will never lose its power to wound him. That not even love, much less violence, will keep him safe. I would tell him that I speak from personal experience, and, then, Claudell would look at me as if I were some boozed-out old white man … and laugh until he choked.

  “Hey,” Lorraine says, “quit thinking so hard. I can hear your head winding up clear over here.”

  “I was just thinking about Claudell. What a shame it is he doesn’t have anyone to …”

  “You know,” Lorraine says, “when that kid was little he used to do for me. Never saw a kid so doughnut crazy. Don’t come around no more. Sister says he got law trouble.”

  “So much more trouble out there now,” I answer. “So few Juniors and Leos to show a kid like Claudell how to …”

  “People ain’t close like they used to be. People used to do for each other.”

  “It’s a different world. Your generation had the war, the depression. People have hard times now, they just aren’t the kind of hard times that bring people together.”

  Lorraine snorts. “What do you kids know about hard times? Wouldn’t know hard times if they jumped up and bit you on the butt.”

  “Drink to that,” I say and raise my glass.

  Lorraine’s drink disappears in a swallow.

  “I went through living hell with that dad of yours. Done everything for the man. All he did was shit on me.”

  “I know.”

  “Then rubbed my nose in it.”

  “I was there,” I say.

  “Hocked myself to the eyeballs to pay his booze bills and bail. Sheriff come around—even my work a couple of times—wanting to know where the hell Ted was. Hell, I knew where he was. The Horizon or Marge’s or that whore’s place. I could of turned him in. But I told that deputy he could kiss my royal red butt. And me and you scrapin’ for every nickel. Hadn’t been for Trudy backing me, I don’t know what the hell’d come of us.”

  “Trudy was always good to me,” I say.

  “You always knew where you stood with Trudy.”

  “Like Leo used to say, Trudy could ‘fight, fuck, wrastle, and hold the light’.”

  “God damn it, Teddie, you know I hate that word! And don’t you down-talk Trudy. That girl was good to you.”

  “I have never, ever, said a bad word about Trudy. God help the poor s.o.b. who ever said anything in front of me.”

  “She loved you, Teddie.”

  FOUR

  I take our ashtrays to the kitchen and empty them into the can under the sink. I make a sandwich, then return to the living room to make us another drink—Lorraine’s stronger than mine, the way she likes it, with a dash of melted ice from the bottom of the bowl. I place it, along with her ashtray, on the TV tray next to her chair. Hunching over the coffee table, I begin to eat. Lorraine shakes her head.

  “There’s onion in there,” she says.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Tomato.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Cut yourself a dill, for Christ’s sake.”

  “No thanks.”

  “How can you eat ‘em like that? Nothing on ‘em. Enough to gag a maggot.”

  “Lots of mayo. Tons of mayo.”

  “Miracle Whip. Don’t never buy may’naise.”

  “I know.”

  “Kraft,” she says, and stubs out her cigarette. She stubs it for a long while, tamping the middle, then around the edge, and back to the middle again.

  “Got your teachin’ in the mornin’?” she asks.

  “Afternoon,” I say.

  “Damn good job. State job.”

  “I know.”

  “Good bennies.”

  “Yep.”

  “Seniority.”

  I wipe my mouth on the towel. “Seventeen years in June.”

  “You always was a good worker.”

  I nod.

  “Got that from your mother,” she says.

  I hold the empty paper plate under the edge of the coffee table and scrape off the crumbs. I return the plate to the table and pick up my glass. “Drink to that,” I say.

  Lorraine takes a long swallow and lights another cigarette.

  “Ate the heels off my Wonder Bread, didn’t you.”

  “Yep.”

  “Both of ‘em?”

  I nod and shake a cigarette from the pack.

  “Little shit.” Smiling, she shakes her head.

  Lorraine gave me my first paying job. It was the spring she became pregnant with my sister, the last, gentle days of showers and light before the onset of summer’s suffocating heat. Lorraine wanted to dig flower beds in front of the windows looking out on the vacant lot next to our building. When she went to the windows, she wanted to see color, something living, something other than piles of simmering rubble.

  “My mom always had petunias and moss rose. Bot
h sides of the stairs by the front door. Great big beds mixed together thicker’n thieves. Like carpet. Neighbors’d ask her how she done it in that piss-poor ground. She’d laugh and tell ‘em magic rabbits. ‘Magic bunny rabbits’, she’d say and laugh like hell.” Her brother had rabbits over in the next county. Every spring he’d sneak her over a couple of buckets of manure. “You’d have loved her, Teddie,” she said. “Ever’body loved my mom. They come for miles when she died.”

  Lorraine and I dug for a week in the rocky clay next to our building. She wanted to line the beds with bricks, so she sent me scavenging the debris left from the gutted building that had burned the previous winter. The bricks were crusted with mortar, and she gave me a claw hammer and a screw driver, and showed me how to chip away the mortar without breaking the bricks. She read to me while I worked. She read from Tom Sawyer and said that, even though the word was in the book, it was wrong to say ‘nigger’.

  “It hurts their feelings.”

  She paid five cents a day, payable each evening at bedtime. When I finished work, she would put me in the tub to play for awhile, then go outside to the bricks that I had done and finish them to her satisfaction. We cut a hole in the top of an empty oatmeal box and wrote BANK across the chin of the smiling Quaker. We put the box on top of her dresser and made a bargain never to count the money. But we could take it down to feel its growing heaviness or shake it to hear the jingle.

  “No peeking,” she said. “You don’t peek, and them nickels’ll stay right where they’re suppose to. Don’t mess with ’em, they’ll have little babies. Little brown penny babies.”

  Marge brought us a hose and nozzle, and Lorraine showed me how to water with a fine spray so not to disturb the seeds.

  Ted came one night when the moss rose was a few inches high and had green buds on the tips the size of peas. The petunias were taller, thicker, but showed no signs of flowering. Ted was drunk. He had been in a fight.