Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (3 page)

“Alabama?” I snorted in disgust.

“Texas, then.”

I was torn between pride at being a Texan and reluctance to admit he had guessed correctly. “Fort Worth,” I countered.

“And Bingo was his name-o!” M declared with a quick pirouette of triumph and a short siren wail of laughter that was suddenly cut off. “Come on,” he said, grabbing my arm and dragging me away from the fence.

“Where are we going?”

“You gots to meet Mama.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, everybody gots to meet Mama.”

I looked back at the fence, catching a glimpse of the moving van above the vines. From a second-story window, Hannah peered out through the film of grime on the glass like the ghost in a Gothic novel. I attempted a shrug, which was difficult while being dragged across M’s backyard. I waved as we mounted the back steps, but it probably looked more like a kid reaching back toward the house in distress. Then we disappeared through a screen door.

We maneuvered through a dank laundry room and emerged into an amalgam of potent odors. A very tall, slightly plump and very black woman stood in front of a stove. She was wearing an apron over a nice dress. Without turning around she said, “Go back an’ wipe your feet. I jus’ mopped this floor.” I looked down. The linoleum was a dull yellow, cracked and curling, but clean. I was dragged back through the laundry room to the doormat, where M and I wiped our feet and returned to the kitchen.

“Mama, it’s Mark from Texas, but with a k, as in Mark Twain.” He shoved me forward, and I stumbled to a stop at the foothills of the black mountain towering above me. She turned around, ladle in hand, and smiled down at me with large teeth. “Hello, Mark from Texas.” She held out a hand, the pink palm enveloping my puny white hand. “Did you move in back there?” She pointed the ladle toward our house.

I nodded.

“Well thas jus’ fine. Careful you don’t let M talk your ears off.”

I nodded, again.

“Are youse guys hungry?” she asked. I looked apprehensively at the steam rising from the pots on the stove. I had no idea what was in them, but the deep odors didn’t call to the deep of my appetite. The aroma verged between a slaughterhouse and a laundry.

M leapt as if he’d been stabbed in the flank with a hat pin. “Yes!” he cried, producing two plates seemingly from thin air. He placed them on the green Formica tabletop. Before I had a chance to say “Pepto-Bismol,” I was seated in front of a plate of limp, slimy green leaves and some unidentified meat in a watery brown sauce.

“You comin’ from Texas, I’m sure you been havin’ some chitlins and collard greens lots of times,” Mrs. Marshall said.

“Not that I recall,” I replied. I assumed the green stuff was the greens, so the other must be the chitlins.

M looked at me in disbelief, and his mother said, “Well, then, you is in for a real treat!”

I was now on center stage, the audience waiting for my next move. My fork wavered over the plate like a divining rod. I went for the meat. Two sets of eyes followed my fork to my mouth. I chewed quickly and swallowed, and waited for the taste to catch up. Not bad. Pretty good, actually. I enthusiastically went for another bite and made a devoted friend. Mrs. Marshall nodded and turned back to the stove. And not a moment too soon because the greens were another story entirely. I was able to finish them with generous portions of chitlins.

As I was forcing down the last bit of greens, I heard a knock on the back door. Mrs. Marshall disappeared into the laundry room. A familiar voice said, “Good afternoon. I’m Matthew Cloud, just moving in across the way. I was checking up on my son, who I understand might be bothering you folks over here.”

Mrs. Marshall laughed. “Oh no, Mr. Cloud, he ain’t no trouble. He jus’ finishin’ up a plate of chitlins and collard greens right now. That boy needs some fattenin’ up!”

Dad walked in to see me with a forkful of chitlins suspended between plate and mouth. Hannah, evidently the messenger who had alerted Dad to my abduction, peeked her blond head around the door like a sideways Kilroy.

“Well, I suspect you’re right about that point,” Dad chuckled, apparently amused at the sight of me tossing down the chitlins like one of the family. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to borrow him back. It’s a little matter of a dozen boxes in his room he was supposed to unpack before he took off.”

The Amazon clicked her tongue disapprovingly, and I suddenly felt guilty. I gulped down the chitlins and jumped up.

“Thanks.” I looked at M. “I guess I have to go back now.”

Mrs. Marshall nodded at me. “You’re welcome, Mark. And I hope you come back when you done your chores.”

I looked at Dad. “Sure, if it’s not too late.”

Unpacking took until after dark, but Sunday after church I returned. M took me on a tour, starting with a basement much more interesting than mine. Poor lighting, unfinished walls, and exposed rafters gave it the ambiance of a cave. M grabbed a hammer and pounded furiously at a sixteen-penny nail jutting from one of the studs.

“When Papa hits a nail, there’s sparks fly,” he said with respect, and swung the hammer again. “Hey, I think I saw a spark. Here, you try it, man.” I declined, but M wouldn’t rest until I had taken a few ineffectual swings at the nail. No sparks.

The rest of the house wasn’t much different from mine, albeit in a more advanced stage of disintegration. M’s attic view faced the opposite street, so I was able to see how the other half lived as we sat on an old trunk and squinted through the grime. More roofs and trees in their final stages of abandonment.

“That’s the school over there.” M pointed at a square roof several blocks away. “What grade are you in, man? I bet it’s fifth.”

“Fifth.”

“And Bingo was his name-o!” he cried and attempted a pirouette, but the cramped quarters of the attic made it impossible. He settled for a jig and a chuckle. “Me too. Which class? I bet it’s Ma Barker’s.” He stood poised for another victory dance.

“I haven’t been yet.”

“Oh, yeah.” He sat back down on the trunk. “What’s it like in Texas?”

“I don’t know. Like here, only no basements. And hotter.”

“One day I’ll go see. I’m gonna go see everything, like Marcus Garvey.”

“Like who?”

“The Right Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey.” He waited, but I had nothing to say. “Never met the guy,” seemed flippant.

“Malcom X?”

I shook my head.

“Thurgood Marshall?”

I shook my head.

M looked at me for a long while with an impassive stare I couldn’t interpret, as if he were trying to make up his mind. He suddenly stood up and walked down the attic stairs; I followed him to his room. He pulled a thin paperback book from a cardboard box next to his bed and shoved it at me. I looked at the title:
The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King Talk with Kenneth B. Clark
. I looked back up at M, but he just walked past me and down the stairs. We walked through the kitchen to the back door. “I’ll see you tomorrow, man,” he said and closed the door behind me.

CHAPTER THREE
I was indeed in Ma Barker’s class, who turned out to be Mrs. Barker, a middle-aged white woman and not, as far as I could tell, the matriarch of a bloodthirsty outlaw gang. But you have to admit, being a fifth-grade teacher would have been a great cover.

After school I found M waiting at the back fence.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s Meesha and Keesha’s birthday.”

“Meesha and Keesha?”

“The twins.”

“I would have never guessed. What twins?”

“Harriet’s twins. Just come on and you’ll see.”

In the living room a sheet was spread out on the worn wooden floor. In the middle a cake slathered in white icing was graced with a single candle flickering in the drafty room. Two identically dressed babies sat on either side, looking up at the looming adults with that complacent apprehension one sometimes finds in babies.

A girl I took to be Harriet towered over them, and me. She was wearing a purple paisley tube of some kind of stretchy material with a black patent-leather belt. Her large hands and feet left no doubt as to whose daughter she was. She wasn’t quite as dark as M, except around her elbows and knees. She hovered over the twins in a half-crouch, her knees together. “Blow out the candle,” she said in baby talk. The twins just looked at her.

“Make a wish,” Mrs. Marshall said, also in baby talk and also towering. The twins blinked in unison, realigned their sights on her, and picked up where they had left off, doing their best imitation of confused one-year-old babies.

Across the room an older man with close-cropped gray hair sat in a frowzy armchair, a newspaper open in his lap. He watched the babies dispassionately, but I thought I detected a hint of amusement.

M strode forward. “They don’t know how to blow out a candle. They’re only one!” He leaned over and blew the candle out.

“Now have some cake,” Harriet said.

“Yes, eat your birthday cake,” Mrs. Marshall said. “It’s chocolate. Everybody like chocolate cake.”

M looked from his sister to his mother with exasperation, leaned over, scooped icing off the cake with his finger, and shoved some in each baby’s mouth. Their expressions changed instantly, and they converged on the cake. Before Mrs. Marshall had time to cut us slices from the other cake set aside in the kitchen, there were three lumpy masses of icing and cake in the middle of the sheet, like an accident scene of a collision with a zebra, a penguin, and a nun. Two of them moved. M and I disappeared into the basement before we were recruited for cleanup duty.

M dug up two claw hammers, turned off the light, and we took turns banging on a nail, trying to make sparks. We labored in shadow, silhouetted by the light from the little rectangular basement window high above us.

I began singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” but stopped when M threatened to switch his attentions from the nail head to my head.

“Did you read that book I gave you, man?” M asked between strokes.

“Hey, that was only two days ago.”

“Do you know who John Brown was?”

I began singing again. “John Brown’s body lies a molderin’ in the grave . . .” but the silhouette of M’s hammer hung over me in the gloom and I quit.

“Why was his body molderin’ in a grave?”

“He was dead.” That was an easy one!

“Why did he die?”

That was a little tougher. “Uh, chicken pox?”

M rolled his eyes, which was about all I could see of him, and resumed his hammering. “Do you know who George Washington was?”

“Of course.”

“George Washington Carver?”

“Yes.”

M stopped. “Really?”

“Of course. He invented the peanut.” I held the hammer aloft and spun around. “And Bingo was his name-o!”

M didn’t laugh. “OK, man, how about W. B. DuBois?”

I stopped and peered at him in the dimness. “Uh, can you spell it?”

“Marcus Garvey?”

“That’s the guy you’re named after, right?”

“One of them.”

“What did he do?”

“Read the book.” He slammed the hammer down. “Look, sparks!”

As the weeks passed, M and I eventually bored of banging on nails in the basement and hanging from rafters in the attic. My house offered even less excitement. We had already squeezed the neighborhood dry of every last drop of entertainment. We started making regular Saturday trips to the library, ten blocks downtown.

Sometimes we took detours, exploring sections of downtown. One of our favorite spots was next to the theater, which was in the middle of the block. The parking lot was in the back by the alley, but the entrance was in the front on the street. A long corridor through the building provided a shortcut. It was paved in small, white ceramic tiles, the floor undulating in gentle waves. The sides jutted in and out at sharp angles, with columns against the walls at regular intervals along the way. It was enclosed with a glass door at each end.

The corridor provided a great setting for reenacting episodes of
I Spy
, the old spy show with Robert Culp and Bill Cosby. M thought it was amusing and appropriate that Cosby was the intelligent one in the show. I didn’t concur.

We would traverse the corridor, running and ducking behind columns, shooting at imaginary villains or, sometimes, at each other, an inexplicable plot development for which the scriptwriters had not provided. Before long our territory for spying extended down the alley and out several blocks, past the back doors of cleaners, diners, barbershops, and five-and-dimes.

Late one Saturday afternoon, as the shadows were stretching to the horizon, I was eluding M, who stalked me down the corridor. In a bold move I rushed the alley door, almost colliding with a couple on their way to see
Fantastic Voyage
. Their confusion delayed M, allowing me to round the corner before he could see which way I went. I had a plan. I sprinted down a dead-end alley, thinking he would never expect me to trap myself. At the end, I climbed some trash cans and dropped over a dilapidated wooden fence into a neglected area behind an auto shop.

It was the perfect refuge, one I had discovered the week before when I was the hunter instead of the hunted. I planned to crouch along the back fence, watching for M’s approach. For cover, I had my choice of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum or a large cardboard box that had once held a washing machine. It lay on its side, old rags spilling out onto the ground. I chose the oil drum, from which I could peek through a knothole in the fence. I checked my surroundings. The asphalt faded a few feet from the shop into dry, cracked, packed dirt broken up with weeds and littered with rusted transmissions, wheels, mufflers, and other detritus. A metal door padlocked on the outside broke the brick wall of the shop, which had been painted white a long time ago. The only other access to this area was a two-foot gap between the shop and the liquor store that ran the length from the alley to the street.

I watched for M’s shadow on the bricks of the alley, the rags in the box rustling in the wind. Then I realized there was no wind. I jerked away from the fence and looked at the rags. From the shadow of the box a raspy voice asked, “What’s yer name, boy?”

I couldn’t have been more startled if the oil drum had started to spontaneously play “Wipe Out.” I was poised to jump and run when a face materialized among the rags and shadows. A woman’s face. Green eyes burned from sunken wells of eye sockets. A wealth of nascent wrinkles was evident on the leathery skin, skin that had seen many a day in the open sun and more than one night under the stars. Short brown hair, matted and tangled, disappeared into the tattered brown blanket draped around the woman. But what held my eye captive was the large purple-red birthmark that ran from her left eyebrow to her cheek in a meandering splotch.

“Yer name. What’s yer name?”

I said, as if in a trance, “Mark.”

“Ah, the Mark. The Mark. It’s got the Mark.” An emaciated hand fluttered to her left temple and dropped down like a bird frozen and falling from a branch.

“Well, Mark, do you have anythin’ so much as a fiver on yer?” I shook my head slowly. “I could use a bite to eat, yer know. How ’bout some change?” Her eyes burned even brighter. “I got a powerful thirst.” She looked at my pants pocket, the one with the dollar in it, as if she could see it through the fabric. Her hand twitched.

As if on its own, my hand dug down and produced the dollar. I held it out, fluttering from my shaking hand in the stillness. Her hand shot out like a cobra and snagged the bill, eyes flaring up and returning to the burning green.

“Thank ye, thank ye. Mighty white of ye, Mark.” A low, raspy chortle emerged from the depths of her throat. She unfolded from beneath the blanket like a moth shedding a chrysalis. A worn and dirty cotton print dress flapped a few inches above her ankles and the worn brown brogans on her feet as she shuffled to the gap and disappeared.

I blinked and felt as if I had suddenly awakened. Had I dreamed it? I reached into my pocket. The dollar was gone. I climbed the oil drum and vaulted the fence into the alley, ready to be found by M.

I didn’t tell anyone about the Creature, but I couldn’t erase her image from my mind. I dreamed about her Saturday night. Her face of creases and splotches haunted me during the Sunday school lesson of the woman at the well. In church I formulated a plan. When the offering plate went by, I held an empty hand low over the plate and thumped the bottom with the other thumb as it passed in front of me, my money still safe in my pocket.

At home that afternoon I hopped the back fence in pretense of visiting M, but passed his house. Downtown I walked through the tile corridor, turned into the blind alley, climbed gingerly over the fence, and dropped quietly to the ground.

The Creature was in the box, but she didn’t acknowledge my presence. I crept closer, alert for any movement. As I approached, I heard a steady raspy sound from beneath the bedraggled blanket. Something clinked on the ground—my foot had hit a clear flask. I kicked it over and looked at the label. Gin. I looked at her a little longer, then threaded my way through the gap to the street.

It took me awhile, but I finally found a place I could buy a sandwich and a bottle of Coke with the offering money. I returned to the box, set the food on the ground, and sat down on a wheel in the shade of the fence. After awhile I got tired of waiting and started throwing pebbles at the box. Three minutes and twenty pebbles later, I was rewarded.

The Creature stirred, saw the food, and looked suspiciously out of the box. The purple splotch was dark against the pale skin on the left side of her face. “It’s the Mark,” she croaked. She crawled out of the box, snatched the food, and sat on the edge of a transmission housing several yards away, her feet straddling a dirty red stream of transmission fluid.

She positioned herself so she was facing the gap in the wall, but could see me from the corner of her right eye. I watched in silence while she devoured the sandwich like a wild animal, eating some of the paper wrapping in her haste. Once the sandwich was gone, she picked up the Coke and drank the entire bottle slowly in one long draught, looking at me obliquely with leaden green eyes like the Atlantic on a cloudy day. She closed her eyes and let out a belch that reverberated through the courtyard.