Darius & Twig (3 page)

Brian said he wouldn't have left if he had been our father.

“What would you do?” I asked.

He managed a shrug.

I met Twig on the corner and we walked up the hill to the A train on 145th. Twig had on his sweats and his practice running shoes.

“Don't tell me you kids are going to no school with a bicycle!” The clerk at the 145th Street station was short, squat, and mean looking. I think she was born that way, because I can't imagine her ever working up a smile.

“This is an after-school program at the Schomburg on 135th Street,” I said. “We have to be there.”

She turned her mean face into something even meaner and motioned toward the gate.

“It's getting too expensive to live in New York,” I said to Twig when we had gotten on the train. “I'm thinking of moving to Colorado.”

“Colorado?” Twig leaned back from me. “What are you going to do in Colorado? All they have there is a lot of snow, a lot of mountains, and the dumb-butt Broncos. You like the Broncos?”

“Not really,” I said. “But my mother said that in two years or so, New York will cost too much for people like us. Then maybe they'll have to move everybody out to Colorado.”

“If you get to be a famous writer or a poet, Colorado might be okay,” Twig said. “That's
if
they got black poets out there. I never heard of a black poet who lived in Colorado.”

“Twig, they have black people everywhere.”

“Then how come none of the blacks who play for the Broncos are from around there?” he asked. “They're all from Georgia and Arkansas and places like that.”

We got off at 59th Street and Central Park West and Twig started stretching.

“What time you going for?” I asked.

“Twenty-five minutes,” Twig said, bringing his right heel back to the top of his butt. “It's going to be hard if there are a lot of kids in the way, especially around 84th Street.”

“You saving your new shoes for official races?” I asked, noticing he had on his old Nikes.

“They got cleats for dirt tracks,” Twig said. He spread his legs slightly and touched both palms to the ground.

“What's that supposed to do?” I asked.

“I don't know, but it looks cool, right?”

Twig was running and I was riding behind him. I imagined him thinking about me, wondering how close, wondering what I was thinking. I was looking at my watch, trying to figure out times. This was an easy run for him, and he moved swiftly past the park benches and the black women pushing small white children along the park's edge. There was no wasted movement with Twig. His stride wasn't that long, and his thin arms barely moved as we went block after block. The people watching him knew that he was in training. I thought they were connected to him for a brief moment. As I was connected with him.

For a minute I felt a sense of disappointment. I knew Twig would run and become someone who would be at least a footnote to the history of our school. Some people will make a mark, a footnote, and others will disappear without a trace. Mr. Ramey's comments about my grades came to me again. He was talking about my chances of getting a scholarship, but we both knew it was also about my whole life. Maybe one day I'd disappear.

I thought of my father telling us how he used to go over to 126th Street in the mornings and stand on the corner, waiting for the trucks to come by that would pick up workers for the day. I knew they paid him whatever they wanted, and that he would pretend to be happy with it.

“You know, that's what being a man is all about,” he would say when he came home.

I didn't think that was what made a man. Or that a man needed to be made once he was born.

My mother says she doesn't think of her husband. Right. Like Twig doesn't think about Midnight.

The Writers' Workshop. Miss Carroll stood near the window, as nervous as usual. She put her thin white hand across her chest and touched her left shoulder. I knew she would do it twenty times and the class only lasted forty-five minutes.

“Great fiction demands that you allow your reader into the story as spectator and creator,” she said. “The reader wants this involvement, and the more you allow her in, the more rewarding the story will be.”

“But you're always saying be specific,” Essie said. “So if someone picks up ‘stuff' around a room, you're sticking little notes in the margins saying ‘What stuff?' Why not let the reader figure it out?”

“Because the ‘stuff' around the room is not what your story is about and doesn't give any flesh to the story,” Miss Carroll said. “That's why you skimmed over it in the first place.”

I like Miss Carroll, even if she is sometimes almost too jumpy to be around. There is something otherworldly about her, maybe even other-weirdly. She told the class once that when she was very young, she used to cut her arms. It was too much for us to hear, and too hard to deal with, so nobody in the class made a comment. But I like her because she says good things about my writing, although she said once that I often put my intellect between me and the reader. For her to actually
know
that, she would have to know much more about me than she does. Who am I except my intellect?

The story that came back from the
Delta Review
had a short note handwritten on a paper with their letterhead on it. It read:

Dear Darius Austin:

We liked “The Song of a Thousand Dolphins” very much and would like to reconsider it. What made it a near miss and not an acceptance is that we were not sure if the boy was trusting the dolphins or if he was actually waiting for them to fail and, thus, was taking his own life. If he was trusting the dolphins to keep him safe, we would like to make that clearer and would love to see the story again.

Lionel Dornich

The story was about a ten-year-old boy with a bad leg who lived in an orphanage near a beach. One day he swam out too far toward a small island and, nearly exhausted, was nudged back toward the shore by a dolphin. After that he would swim out great distances from the shore, pushing himself more and more until he was exhausted, and then would again be pushed back by one or more dolphins. I had ended the story with his last swim, leaving the possibility that he might actually reach the island, or he might perish if the dolphins didn't rescue him.

But in my mind I didn't know what was in the boy's thoughts. I didn't know if he was ready to give up or if he trusted the dolphins. I wanted to revise the story to get it published, but I wasn't sure if I could convince an editor if I wasn't sure myself.

I showed Miss Carroll the note but not the story.

She lifted the small sheet of paper and looked under it as if she were looking for the story.

“We're always too careful about revealing ourselves,” she said.

I wanted to show the story to Miss Carroll, but I knew that it was probably my most successful story and that I would be crushed if she didn't like it.

I feel a bond with her and what she knows about writing. She picks up a poem and it comes alive in her weak, quavering voice. She reads a play and talks about it in a way that lights the stage, that makes it so real you feel you have always known the characters, that you just haven't noticed them so close to you.

I think she is going to turn me into the writer I want to be, the one who Twig says I already am.

“So, who's rich?” I asked when I saw Brian sitting on the steps.

“Who?”

“Me.”

“You got your bookie money?” he guessed correctly.

“The reading money, yeah.”

“They shouldn't have that just for juniors,” my brother complained. “It's not fair.”

“It's not supposed to be fair,” I said. “It's an experiment. Juniors are responsible, so you can see what will happen. Eleven-year-olds are flaky.”

“If you gave me ten dollars a book, I'd read night and day!” Brian looked at me sideways. “You get to read a book a week and they pay you because you're a junior, and all it means is that you want some money.”

“In the first place there wouldn't be any reason for you to read night and day, because you can only get money for one book a week, so that's forty books a school year,” I reminded him. “And they tried it two years ago with grade school kids, and what happened?”

“I don't care what happened two years ago,” Brian said. “This is
this
year!”

“I'm thinking about buying some Chinese food,” I said. I walked past him into the building.

“I want shrimp fried rice,” he said, following me into the hallway. “And egg rolls.”

“What makes you think I'm getting anything for you?”

“Mama is not going to let you buy food for you and not get anything for me, and you know it, D-Boy.”

“She doesn't know I got the reading money.”

“No, but you're going to tell her like you always do, and she's going to smile and tell you how proud she is of you, and then you're going to play big-time and tell us what you're going to do with the money. Right?”

“Yep. And I'm glad it's not fair.”

The electric company came up with the idea of paying kids to read books. You could read one book a week from the school list, four books a month, then prove you really understood the books by taking a test at the end of the month. If you passed the test, you got ten dollars for each book you read. To me, it was a way of making a few extra dollars, and I liked most of the books on the list. During the past month, I had read Anne Frank's
The
Diary of a Young Girl
,
A Separate Peace
,
Dragonwings
, and
The Red Badge of Courage
.

“You think Mama is going to want Chinese food?” Brian asked.

“Probably,” I answered.

“Bet she wants beef with snow peas,” he said as we reached the door.

I unlocked the door and Brian pushed past me—I knew he would because that's the sort of immature kid he is—and announced that I had what he called my
bookie
money.

“Brian, go in the bathroom and get me a washcloth from under the sink,” Mama's voice came from somewhere.

“Where are you?” Brian asked.

“Under the sink in the kitchen!” she called. “Will you get me the washcloth, boy?”

Brian looked under the kitchen table toward the sink as I walked around it. Mama's legs were sticking out, and there were a screwdriver and a wrench next to her.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“The drain is stopped up,” she said. “I got the nut off the trap, but I can't get to whatever is in there.”

“You want me to try?”

“No.”

“Why don't you call the landlord?”

“Because I don't want to hear his mouth talking about when are we going to get the rent to him,” Mama answered. I could hear the strain in her voice, and I saw that the back of her hand was scraped and bleeding.

“I'll try to get it out,” I said.

She pulled herself from under the sink as Brian came in with the washcloth. Mama took it from him and held it against her scraped hand. She sat up, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.

“I've been trying to unstick it with a hanger,” she said. “If I can't get it with the hanger, maybe I'll buy a little snake at work. That's another ten dollars!”

“Why don't you let me try it?” I said.

“Change your clothes first,” she said. “No use messing up your school clothes.”

“Darius got his money for reading books,” Brian said.

“You've said that, Brian!”

“Yes, ma'am.” My brother glanced at me and turned away.

I went to my room and quickly changed into my jeans. I hung my shirt up on a nail in the closet and then came back.

“She got it open!” Brian announced.

“Who put paper in the damn sink?” she asked.

I figured it had to be either me or Brian, but neither of us said anything. When I saw that the paper was from a magazine, I knew it was my brother.

Mama had let the water run into a bucket, and I took it into the bathroom and emptied it down the toilet. The paper went into the toilet, too, and I reached in and grabbed it before it went down. When I got back into the kitchen, Mom was struggling with the wrench.

“I'll do that,” I said.

“It's tight enough,” she said. “Just check it once in a while to make sure it's not leaking.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

I helped her off the floor. She looked at her hands and arms, streaked with dirt, dark except where she had scraped away some skin, and started toward the bathroom.

“Darius, the gas didn't light and I used a magazine page to light it,” Brian whispered.

“One page?”

“Maybe a couple,” Brian said. “You think I should say something?”

“No, just tell yourself how stupid you are.”

Mama was in the bathroom awhile, and when she came out I could smell alcohol on her breath. I asked her if she was okay, and she nodded.

“There's leftover beef stew in the refrigerator,” she said. “You guys want that? I'm going to have to change and get out of here.”

“Yeah, that's fine,” I said. “How come the rent isn't paid?”

“Because I forgot it! Okay? I forgot it!” Mama's voice filled our small kitchen.

She sat, elbows on the table, her head forward in her hands. Neither Brian nor I wanted to say anything else, and we just sat there in the silence. The refrigerator hummed and clicked in the corner. From the alley behind the house, a dog's bark announced he was there.

“I didn't forget the rent,” she said after a while. “I forgot the electric bill, and then when I went to pay it, I saw that it was more than I thought it would be. They laid some people off at the job, and I thought the rest of us were going to get some overtime, but . . . it just didn't happen.”