Team Seven (3 page)

I thought he was mad but when I looked up he was smirking at me. “Lesson you a’go learn today. Step up, champion.”

He held his hand out and I grabbed on and he helped me back up onto the stool as the hot dogs sizzled and the oil bubbled and the smoke died down. He handed me the bowl with the eggs in it.

“Pour it in the pan.”

I poured the eggs into the pan and they sizzled.

“Take this.” He handed me an oven mitt and a spatula. I put on the oven mitt and he said, “A man mustn’t fear the heat, boychild.”

He walked behind me, leaned over my shoulder, and held my hand, gripping his hand over the oven mitt and spatula, and we stirred the eggs together. “You just have to know when to turn the gas down.” We kept stirring until the eggs got thicker and started to clump, his arm tracing over mine. He stepped back and loosed his grip. “Now keep stirring until the hot dogs get brown.”

He walked to the cabinet and got me a plate. “Good job, boychild. Dem cook up nice, step down.”

I hopped off the stool and he walked up to the stove and poured the egg mix-up into the plate and walked it over to the table, where he poured me a Dixie cup of coffee mixed with hot chocolate. He poured a cup for himself and opened a pink packet and poured it into his coffee.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s sugar for people who got high sugar, like me. I eat too many sweets when I was a young man and too much sweets nah good fi de blood.”

I nodded okay, not really knowing what was in the packet or what he was talking about. I ate my plate as he cooked eggs for him and Nana Tanks. After he walked Nana Tanks’s plate into their room for her, he came to sit down next to me right when I was on my last bite. He put his plate down, poured us
more coffee, and he ate as I sipped my coffee. We didn’t say anything to each other but we’d glance and nod our heads every now and again. I finished my third Dixie cup of coffee and stood up. Papa Tanks looked over his shoulder at me and chuckled a bit.

“Eat and go ’way, huh?”

I smiled at him. “Thanks for breakfast, Pa-Paw.”

“You get enough to eat?”

“Yes.”

I flexed my arm muscles at him and he squinted and patted at the little bulge in my bicep.

“You a grown man now, eeh?” I nodded and he rustled my hair and pulled me into his side and nuzzled his head against mine. He let go of me and said, “Not quite a man yet, but you getting close. You still need to grow some whiskers, soon enough though, my yout’.”

I glanced at the clock in the den.
Captain Planet
was about to come on. Papa Tanks slapped his hand on the table and I flinched.

“Ay, boy, you listening to me? You’ll never starve ’cause you know how to cook, I say.”

He squinted at me, lowered his shoulders to my level from his chair, and poked me in the belly and tickled my sides, and we both laughed and I squirmed until he let me go.

“Alright, now run along, go watch the TV.”

“Okay, Pa-Paw,” I said and ran into the front den.

I clicked on the TV just as the theme song was playing and I sang along, “Captain Planet, he’s a hero—”

“Bobby-sock, I am the hero!” Papa Tanks called to me from the kitchen.

He let out a big belly laugh and I laughed too.

It was Christmas Eve and we had just got back from Star Market. I sat down at the kitchen table to sort through the mail as the kids zoomed around the kitchen putting away the groceries all giddy and excited for the night I’d planned. We always do a fish fry and then make Christmas cookies. Eddy and I started doing that when we first got married and the tradition stuck around way longer than he did. A letter had come for Eddy from the Norfolk County Child Support Enforcement Bureau. A woman named Iris K. Patton was filing a grievance for unpaid child support for their son Eddy Battel, Jr. I read on. The letter said his extracurricular bastard child was nine years old too. That little out-of-wedlock thing is only one year younger than my baby Andre.

The news lodged a hot piece of coal in my chest and wrapped me in a straitjacket. I couldn’t just take the kids and leave. Where would we go? We live in the apartment downstairs from my parents in their two-family house and we don’t hardly pay the rent on time. He didn’t come home last night. He’s like a cat, he comes and goes on his own terms. He left yesterday while I was at work and all he told Andre and Nina was that he’d be back with us tonight to bake cookies.

“You ready, Ma?”

I looked up from the letter. Nina was holding our big silver
mixing bowl and a wooden spoon. The smile on her face melted a fake one into mine. Christmas was always about the kids. Every year we put on the Nat King Cole Christmas album and stay in the house together to bake sugar cookies as a family. At midnight we all go upstairs to my parents’ apartment, and Nina and Andre open up the presents from my parents. Then they go to sleep and wake up and unwrap what I got for them.

The doorbell rings and I know it’s my younger sister Diamond with her new snap-turtle-looking boyfriend, Lex, with his bald water-baby head, and his no job. My eyes watered up and my insides started to twist. I wanted to run to the door and collapse. Drag Diamond by the arm into my room and just melt down. But no. This is my life, and Diamond, she never liked Eddy. I give her five minutes of milling around the apartment before she gets around to asking, “So how’s Eddy?” She’ll look concerned, put her hand across her mouth and follow me around the room with her eager eyes. Ever since she divorced her ex-husband Elroy and got him deported back to Jamaica, she thinks she’s better than somebody. She’d know Eddy’s truck wasn’t out front but she just liked to hear me say it. She gets a kick out of the whole exchange. So she could hold a deep stare over my shoulder and shake her head, searching and waiting, like I owed her an explanation.

He’s a wayward bastard and that’s been established, but he is my husband and the father of my children. He at least makes it home for the holidays. I swallowed and tucked that letter in my back pocket along with all my good emotions. I opened the front door and told Diamond that Eddy was getting off of work late and that we could go ahead and start baking without him. The night rocked along slow. The kids were enjoying themselves but I was losing faith.

Around ten thirty his Bronco rattled up outside. He blew inside, stumbling, and smelling like the bar he’d probably been slumped in all night. From the minute that man stepped his feet in the house he was all jumpy and twitching around like he had lightning in his veins, eyeing the clock like he was already trying to leave again. His jaw was chattering and I knew he was high on something. I just hoped I was the only one who noticed it ’cause tonight was not about him.

I’ve always tried to live the way my mother says: “Never let your life show.” I stretch out my pockets so the kids can have a few things to show their friends when they get back to school after vacation. I supported Eddy when he began to struggle, same way he continues to struggle, all in the name of getting his reggae career off the ground. I even sign the kids’ presents: “From Mommy and Daddy.” All I asked is that he just be around to spend time with his kids. He checked out of our marriage in terms of a relationship a long while ago. But the papers aren’t signed yet. And I’m still the wife of Eddy “E-Bone” Battel.

“Pop!”

The kids screamed in unison and ran up the hallway, draping off of him like he was a walking coatrack. They almost knocked him over. We were making the frosting for the sugar cookies; Diamond snorted and flashed a look across the table at Lex. They both stood up and walked through the back door up to my parents’ apartment. I was slow simmering with that envelope in my back pocket, pretending like I wasn’t hurt. I couldn’t even look at him. He didn’t say a word to me either. He ain’t come home last night, he knew just what was on my mind. He knows I don’t like going through it in front of the kids, and with that stupid smirk on his face he thinks he is safe.

As soon as Eddy took his coat off Andre was his shadow. Andre sat next to the head of the table with his father and Nina was down the other end with me. Every time Andre cut out a cookie he stared at Eddy and waited until he’d smile or nod. Nina just sat with me and smiled. She always liked when we were all together, but she’s shy. She’d just sit there and admire Eddy from afar. Every five seconds Eddy was glancing at the clock or checking his pager. I knew he was looking for an out, and he sure pounced on it when it came.

After we took the cookies out of the oven to cool, we all went into the living room to put more candy canes on the Christmas tree. I sent Andre into the kitchen to check if the cookies had cooled so we could frost them. The boy wasn’t in there more than a minute before it sounded like he’d turned over the whole tray of cookies. I was sitting down on the couch watching Eddy and Nina under the Christmas tree when Andre ran into the room, out of breath with frosting all over himself. Nina laughed.

“It’s not funny,” Andre cried. “A mouse jumped out at me from under the stove and ran over my feet.”

Eddy laughed and patted Andre on the head as he walked past him into the kitchen. “Goddamn it, Andre!” he roared into the room. I looked in the doorway and he was standing there with his leather coat in his hand. Andre had knocked over the whole bowl of frosting and it had spilled down the inside of Eddy’s leather jacket. He stood there and stared at Andre, then he took three big steps into the living room toward him, Andre’s eyes looked like two full moons, the boy didn’t even have any slippers on.

“It ran up over my feet, Dad,” Andre said as Eddy shook out his coat. Andre was damn near hyperventilating. “I’m sorry,” he squeaked. “I didn’t mean it.”

“Don’t be sorry. Be careful! Running from a god-blasted mouse!” Eddy yelled.

Andre jumped and ran out of the room.

I couldn’t deal with him anymore. “Jesus, Eddy!” I said, “You need to calm your black ass down. It’s a coat. That’s your son.”

He ignored me, staring into the hallway like Andre was still there. Then Eddy slid his coat on and just like that he walked out. I heard our front door slam and it was on. I couldn’t even see straight. If I can’t leave, then neither can he. He walked out that door and I was five steps behind him.

Christmas Eve the Squad Six way. All of us—me, D-roc, Buggy, Sticks, Claude, and my cousin Tony—huddled up on the corner of Lothrop, hugging the block to stay warm. Sipping Hennessy and Alizé posting up on the wall in front of Sticks’s crib, getting them bags off. It was our version of spreading the Christmas cheer ’cause that’s what us Squad Six boys do: we get money. It wasn’t too late night, something like eleven o’clock, when E-Bone Battel exploded out his crib spittin’ flames. No more than two steps behind him was Miss Ruby. She was tight too. Eddy got right about to his truck when Miss Ruby jumped in front of the driver’s-side door of his beat-ass blue Bronco.

We couldn’t call it, but they were blowing hella hard. Then Miss Ruby stopped yelling. She just stood there in front of the truck with her hand fixed high on her hip, dangling a piece of paper in his face. He bucked up and snatched it out of her hand. She stood there, arms folded. He paced back and forth in front of her, still snapping. I couldn’t make out all the
bullshit he was popping off, but I caught this much through his bootleg Jamaican accent, “You think me and you are of size, huh? Woman, keep on tonight and see what takes place in these streets!”

We’d played our position from the sideline long enough, but talking all silly like that wasn’t about to work out for nobody. We broke toward them before someone hit up the jakes and we all got in hot water.

“Ayo, E-Bone, why don’t you just be out fam?” my right-hand homie Sticks yelled up the street as we strolled toward them. Buggy and his twin brother D-roc raced out a few steps ahead of the rest of us. Them two wild-ass Dominicans live across the street from me and Tony on Verndale Road, there’s no kill switch between the two of them, once one of them bucks ain’t no point in trying to stop them. But E-Bone’s a loyal customer. When he’s around the way he come to me for his bud, sometimes a little soft white, never gives me any trouble and I wasn’t really trying to fuck that up, but he was so caught up beef’n he didn’t even respond.

When we got over to their driveway I flexed up and stepped between them. E-Bone looked me in the eyes like he wanted to box. He knew better. I’da beat the brakes off his punk ass right then and there. From the yellowish-red tint in his eyes I could tell he’d been fucked up sniffing the white girl and some other shit. He stared at Miss Ruby and crumpled up the paper, then said, “Cool,” and for a second they both lowered their voices. I looked at the boys and with a few nods of the head it seemed like our business was settled. I didn’t like that look E-Bone had in his eye, but we began to roll back over to our corner anyway. We turned and I heard a loud crunch and a dense thud and I knew what was poppin’. In the corner of my eye, I saw Miss Ruby’s long brown extensions fly up in the
air under the streetlights. By the time I turned fully, E-Bone was on his tippy toes with Miss Ruby yoked up on his truck. We all doubled back. Before we could get there, he landed a big-boy combo on her jaw.

“Fuck is wrong with you, nigga!” D-roc growled and then speared him from the side onto the wet concrete. “So what happens when everyone gets bagged ’cause you on some hotboy bullshit!”

Buggy spat in his face and then slid a hook across his jaw. Them two could have handled him but we all pummeled. We were really total-packaging the fool too, until I started to hear the slow rattle of wind chimes and the squeaky swings of screen doors opening. I stopped and looked around to see the neighborhood slowly waking up. By the time we composed ourselves and wrestled him away from Miss Ruby, I could already hear the howl of the jakes racing up Blue Hills Parkway. We dipped up the block and stashed off all the product. By the time we made it back, the neighborhood was already buzzing with gossip as the blue and red lights strobed around the block.