At-Risk (3 page)

His grandfather and Miss Charlotte bowed their heads.

“Lord, I don't have much, but I thank you for what I have been given. Please bless this meal and all who come under this roof. Bless us all with a nourishing meal and a good night's sleep.”

Jason refused to look up when his grandfather mentioned sleep. He waited until his grandfather began to eat, then he followed suit. After some time, his grandfather spoke again.

“You play any sports, boy?”

“Nah, not really.”

“Watch any?”

“Just basketball,” he said.

“Who do you like? Bird? Johnson? Thomas?”

Jason thought of Michael Jordan's Gatorade commercial with everyone singing “I wanna be like Mike.” What he wouldn't give to be like Michael Jordan, have Michael Jordan's money, his skill, his arrogance and confidence, his nobody-can-touch-me bravado. What he wouldn't give to linger in the air like he was free from all restraints, switch hands middunk, and keep everyone constantly guessing, constantly watching, waiting for his next move, hanging on him, all eyes reflecting his image so that he saw himself wherever he went. What else was there for him if he didn't want to be like Mike? All of his friends wanted to ball or rap. No one believed in school anymore. It was just a free version of day care. Just a place to contain society's knuckleheads and keep them off the streets for a few hours. In school, he was expected only to pass the tests that would move him into the next grade. He was supposed to memorize, regurgitate, and repeat. He was not supposed to think. All of the students who could think had been weeded out and parceled into magnet schools, gotten scholarships or vouchers to private and boarding schools, or tested into Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, or Stuyvesant. He and his friends were leftovers.

He said only, “I like Jordan. He's nice on the court.”

“I always wanted to be Satchel Paige myself. Or Jackie Robinson.”

The boy looked confused.

“Baseball,” his grandfather said. “Don't look at me all cross-eyed like that. Don't stay up too late. We get up early around here. No exceptions.”

“What are we gonna do? Milk the cows? Go fishing or something?”

“Boy, you've been watching too much
TV
.”

He dreamed the first night. He was back in Brooklyn, back on his stoop. Howie, Smalls, Dawud, and Justice weren't there, but Kiki and Stephen were. They were sitting at the top of the stoop, and Stephen was holding a forty. Stephen and Kiki rose and gave him a pound when they saw him. Kiki took the bottle from Stephen and twisted the cap off. He tipped the bottle and poured the first few drops onto the concrete stoop. Kiki said, “This is for you, son,” and Jason woke up covered in sweat.

By night, Jason dreamed, unless he could manage to stay awake. By day, he avoided his grandfather, spending the bulk of his time holed up in his room, listening to music and trying hard not to fall asleep. Sometimes he wandered outside, looking for something to do. He wore his headphones throughout the house, listening to his music. When his batteries ran down and he had to recharge them, he watched television. Music videos and stand-up comedy if he had the living room to himself. He pretended that he lived alone, maneuvering around Miss Charlotte and his grandfather as if they were furniture. There was nothing to do in his grandfather's house. Nowhere to go and nothing to see. Watching
TV
wasn't the same when there was no reason to turn the volume all the way up. His grandfather's street was quiet. There were no noises to silence and
ignore. There was just him and his grandfather, a man he didn't know at all.

So it went.

His grandfather gave him chores the first week he was there, saying, “It's time you started doing something to earn your keep. This here is not one of Koch's welfare hotels.”

“Ain't this what you got Miss Charlotte for?” Jason asked, balking at being used for manual labor, especially when a home attendant was present.

“She's a home attendant, not a housekeeper. She just helps me do the things I need to do for my daily survival. She helps me bathe, prepares my meals, and does the food shopping. Everything else is extra. If I want the mirrors polished, the tables dusted, I have to do that myself. She's not my personal slave, you know?” his grandfather said. “Huh. I wish she was a harem girl. Then maybe me and her could have us some fun.”

Jason was to polish the old man's shoes every day, even though his grandfather went out only every other day to the doctor's. His grandfather wore his good shoes all day long in the house, even though Miss Charlotte kept a pair of brand new slippers by the side of his bed. Jason had to scrub the bathtub if he was the last one to use it. And he had to sweep the long hallway and sweep the living room. He had to bring in the newspaper and wash the dishes after Miss Charlotte cooked. There was no fried food anywhere in the house. Everything was steamed, boiled, baked, or broiled. And he was responsible for dinner. Miss Charlotte cooked their breakfast and lunch and left instructions for dinner. There were certain things his grandfather could eat and certain things he couldn't. A diagram with cartoon drawings of mustard, salt, red meat, soda, ketchup, and many other foods crossed out with big black Xs was fastened to the refrigerator with a magnet. The diagram had been drawn to be cutesy. The forbidden foods all wore diabolical grins and raised eyebrows.

He also had to make both his and his grandfather's bed every day and tidy his grandfather's bedroom, which included dusting down a dresser that was never dusty. He came to hate that chore. Standing in front of that dresser, he was forced to see himself in the big wide mirror, forced to lift each item and wipe the wood beneath it to make it gleam. First the Bible, then the heavy brush with no handle, then the bottle of cologne. He always sniffed it although he meant not to. His grandfather would wheel in and check on him to make sure that he had really cleaned the dresser and Jason had to stand there with the reflection of his grandfather's head and torso next to him in the mirror, reminding him each time of whom he looked like and who he was.

The dreams were vivid but not nightmarish. He saw no bloodstained bodies. His boys had not turned into effigies or zombies. They appeared in his dreams as they had appeared in life. Kiki full of bravado and clad in the newest fashions, Stephen slightly shy and hanging back. They always met him on the stoop in front of his house. He'd never been alone with just the two of them in real life. Howie and Dawud or someone else from their crew had always been there. In Jason's dreams, Kiki held out a forty to him and Jason tipped it back and drank without thinking. Kiki and Stephen watched him, and when he wiped his mouth and handed it back, Stephen said, “You're next,” and pushed him. As Jason stumbled backward off the steps, Kiki always said, “Better you than me,” and Jason would wake up with his body leaning halfway out of the bed and one palm flat on the floor.

The boy and the man lived near each other but not together. His grandfather demanded his presence at meals; other than that they kept apart. Jason pretended not to notice the physical therapy sessions, where it took all of his grandfather's strength to squeeze a
small red ball, where the therapist laid his grandfather's hand palm up and exercised each finger. All the therapist did was massage and rub each finger separately, then try to bend it at the joints, but his grandfather made faces as if the woman were cutting his hand off at the wrists. When it was time for the therapy, Miss Charlotte stood at his grandfather's side with her hands on his shoulders. Jason tried not to walk by the kitchen when the therapist was there. His grandfather had caught his eyes once and held him there until he felt something like guilt pouring through him. In that arrested moment in the kitchen, Jason could guess at the things his grandfather must have had to go through in his life to get him to that point in the kitchen where he could sit and quietly endure the pain, which was clearly excruciating, with a quiet acceptance that this, too, like everything else, would pass. Jason was no great student and had gotten much of the history that he learned in school mixed up. He wasn't sure how old his grandfather was; he didn't know if he had lived long enough to have fought in any of the major wars, but he guessed that just the plain simple living of getting from one day to the next might have been something like war for the old man.

He didn't like to think of the old man, but he did anyway. He wondered what his grandfather had done before he arrived, if he was intruding, if his grandfather liked being alone. He had never really thought about what it meant to be by one's self. He knew that, in coming here, he had left his mother alone for the first time, and he wondered if she was missing him, if she was lonely without him. He tried not to think about his boys at all and he barely spared Chanelle more than a passing thought. By the time he got back, she would be with somebody else, and she'd cut him with her eyes and act like she didn't even know him.

But he did think of Kiki and Stephen.

Stephen's body had worn a black suit with a tie. He'd looked as if he were dressed for graduation or picture day at school. He had
looked alive. Jason hadn't wanted to get close but his mother dug her nails into his arm and made him. “Take a good look,” she'd said. “Any day now, that's you.”

Her prediction terrified him. She had not said “This could be you” or “See what can happen to you?” She had spoken without subjunctives and conditionals, without mercy. Her unrelenting words made him see that when it came down to it, really came down to it, there was no difference between him and the boys in his crew, even though he had tried to cultivate one. It
was
him in the casket. Any day now, it was him. He'd looked at the corpse then. No longer Stephen Townsend, his boy, his friend, his ace. Now, a black body, a black boy, a statistic, a number, as in “one less on the street,” a corpse, a cadaver, an absence.

They had taken the bodies to Merritt Green. There had been no trees near the twin plots, just the hot June sun shining straight on everyone. The heat left damp circles in the armpits of his suit. He and his friends served as the pallbearers. They'd slipped on the white gloves and lifted the coffins. As they'd marched, Jason remembered things Stephen had told him about his family. He remembered Miss Townsend's own mother had passed two years earlier and now, without Stephen, she was all alone. At the funeral, she'd looked gaunt and brittle as if a strong wind could knock her over. She'd sat there so still, hands folded and head bent, that Jason wondered if she was really there or if she had just left the shell of herself. Seated in the pew behind the immediate family, Jason remarked to his mother that Miss Townsend didn't cry, and his mother said, “Maybe she's done with crying. Maybe she cried for him all the while he was living and doesn't have any tears left now that he's dead.”

When it was her turn to view the body, Miss Townsend fell out on the casket, crying without sound. She cried and her eyes were terrible and her mouth opened and closed around words as if she were talking, but not a single sound came out. It had felt like a trick,
like watching a favorite
TV
show with the sound turned all the way down. Try as he might, Jason couldn't forget that.

The day his mother told him she was sending him to see his grandfather, he'd asked how she could afford it and she told him about the savings bonds she'd been holding for him since he was a baby. “I was saving them for you to go to college,” she'd said. “But if I don't get you out of here and away from them, you might never live to see the day.”

The dream was different this time.

Kiki looked at him as he approached the stoop and asked, “Yo, where did you get those kicks, son?”

“I got them downtown at Dr. Jay's.”

“For real? I ain't even see those the last time I was in there.”

“They're brand new.”

“How come I ain't see them then?”

“You were dead by the time they came out,” Jason said.

Kiki and Stephen backed away as if Jason were holding a gun on them. Stephen said, “I gotta get back to my grandmother.” Then he was gone, but Jason didn't see him leave.

Kiki wound his arms around the stoop's railing and pulled himself up to sit on the top rail. He motioned for Jason to join him. “At least I ain't go out like no punk. At least I went out like a man.” But he hardly looked like a man at that moment with his feet hooked around the bottom railing to keep him steady.

“But you're a boy,” Jason said. Then Kiki leaned backward over the railing, falling and pulling Jason with him.

Jason struggled against the arms around him that kept tightening like bands, squeezing him so that he couldn't breathe. It was like someone was pushing him into a coffin and trying to force the lid down. He couldn't see anything, only darkness. There was
only a thick blinding shroud of darkness and the suffocating feel of arms.

He was being shaken. He was covered in sweat. His body felt as if it had been dipped in water. He kept hearing a voice saying, “You all right. You all right.” A calm thread of sanity and assurance thrown out to him like a lifeline. He could follow the steady sound of the phrase and the voice and let them pull him back to shore, realizing that the arms were an anchor, not a snag.

He could breathe again. He felt as if he had been submerged underwater and now had to learn to breathe in the open air again. He opened his eyes and found himself half-sitting in bed, the covers pooled at his waist, his chest sweaty, his grandfather holding his shoulders and shaking him slightly. “You all right, you all right, boy,” the old man continued to say, long after Jason had opened his eyes and left the dream behind.

“Do you ever stay over, Miss Charlotte?” Jason asked the next day when he found her in the kitchen and she showed no signs of leaving. She had set up the ironing board and was pressing creases into a pair of slacks.