14
JESÚS WAS a black man with nappy hair. Around his eyes there was a hint of something. Around his tiny black eyes, somewhere in the curve of his brow, were the lies of white men. Inside his eyes, lost somewhere in the well of their blackness, were the promises made to an Indian woman. All the blacks called him Jesus, just like it was meant to be.
They could not figure out Puerto Ricans anyway. They didn’t know what category to put them in. They were not quite black and not quite white, but exactly what they were was not clear. But Jesús ruined things. It was clear that he was black, even if around his eyes there were whispers of other worlds. Around many of the blacks’ eyes the same thing whispered.
You could knock on almost any door in All-Bright Court and find someone to repeat it. “Yeah, my grandma was a Crow.” “My great-grandaddy was Cherokee.” True or not, it was something to brag on, a place to locate the wave in someone’s hair, a place that held the origin of the blush of redness in one’s skin, a place to touch the hardness and highness of a cheekbone. Even if it was a white man they saw in the flame of their faces, even if it was the whisper of a lie some white man had breathed into their grandmother’s breasts, still caught up in the tangles of their hair, it was easier to believe they were seeing an Indian. It was exotic, untraceable, a way of putting down roots, of pushing their toes right through the slabs of stone under their feet and staking claim to an entire continent. They were the doubly dispossessed.
But the Puerto Ricans could also lay claim to dispossession. Their wealth amounted to no more than a handful of dried beans. If their lives had meant more to white men, if the copper in their skin could have been spun into gold, they would not have been living in All-Bright Court.
Jesús’s family was like the other families coming from Puerto Rico, only he was different. He was nothing like his brother César or his sister Gloria or his parents.
Mrs. Taylor had said to her neighbor Billie Hines, “Maybe Jesús the milkman son.”
“Naw. They ain’t got no coloreds down there. You seen any of them that was colored?” Billie asked.
“No,” Mrs. Taylor said. “But girl, they some good-looking people, got that pretty hair and smooth skin. There more and more of them. Every time you turn around, another bunch of them moving in.”
Billie said, “I tell you this. I don’t like them. How can you stand a whole family living in back of you?”
“They don’t bother nobody. Isaac be over there in that house.”
“That figure, though, that he would be with them. Them people stink. They loud and nasty, they do nothing but bring roaches. And they taking away jobs in the plant, jobs from our men,” Billie said.
“They just trying to live,” Mrs. Taylor said.
“And the names they give they kids. There a girl in my child class name Conception, and look at them boys behind you, Jesus and Caesar. What the hell kind of names them?”
Mrs. Taylor said, “Yeah, it seem like they would know that Jesus and Caesar was enemies.”
“That boy so black because God done cursed him for his mama throwing His child name on him.”
When Jesús’s family had moved in, they had two skinny chickens that walked around in a small circle of wire. Sometimes, when it was quiet late at night, Mikey would wake up because he was too hot, or too cold, or he needed a drink of water, and he would hear the chickens out there, the beating of their wings. He would get up and watch them pecking at each other and rising in the air.
But before anyone could call the rent office about the chickens, they disappeared. It was said that Greene took them. “It must of been her,” it was said. “There was a full moon last night.”
Isaac and his friend Rick could be seen passing through this dusty yard where the chickens once were. Isaac had met César during Isaac’s last year in O.E. When César came home from school, Rick and Isaac would go over to his house and sit in the living room. They drank Iroquois beer and waited for Gloria to walk through on her way to get ice water, or on her way to the store, or on her way to nowhere, just walking through, her pants a second skin, her short hair a raven’s wings. She was always on her way to somewhere else, but she had winked at Rick. For months she had been in flight, and someday she would land. Rick wanted to fly away with her, to be a blackbird flying over All-Bright Court. He was leaving anyway. He had joined the army.
“I’m going before they come for me. I got the feeling my number coming up. You lucky you went to O.E.,” Rick said to Isaac. “You lucky too, Caesar. Uncle Sam don’t bother with O.E. people.”
“I don’t want to go noway,” Isaac said. “Them gooks ain’t playing games. Look at Halloween. Looking at him some scary shit. Let them gooks and white boys fight the Commies. If they come over here, I’ll get my daddy’s piece and ice a few. You should go to Canada, Rick. Shit, you could walk there from here.”
“I would fight,” César said. “Go to war for me country.”
“This ain’t none of your goddamn country,” Rick said. “You crazy if you think this your country. White people care less about ya’ll than they do about us.”
“This is me country, but I would no fight for white people. I would fight for democracy,” César said.
“Fuck democracy,” Rick said. “I’m going in Uncle Sam’s army ’cause I ain’t got nowhere else to go. And what’s a nigger going to do in Canada?”
“Same thing a nigger do here,” Isaac said. “Go on up there and get a job in a plant. They got steel plants up there too.”
“We live across the street from a steel plant here. That don’t mean I got a job,” Rick said. “I been laid off almost a year. I’m telling you, Canada for white boys. You got to have money, know somebody, blend in. I ain’t got no money, don’t know nobody, and where a nigger going to hide in Canada?”
The one thing Rick had to look forward to was Gloria. He kept hoping she would stop and wink at him again, and one day she did stop. She called to him from the kitchen. “Ricky,” she said. “Ven acá.”
Rick did not move.
“¡Mira! Come here. Ven acá.”
The beer lifted him from the sofa and carried him into the kitchen.
“Dance with me,” Gloria said, and she grabbed his two hands, big and useless, and held them in hers.
He danced an awkward salsa with her, to a song playing on the radio. To him the beat was foreign.
“Tú bailas bien,” Gloria said, and Rick smiled. In the sallowness of the kitchen, the pace of his life changed. As Gloria began to cha-cha, Rick could not keep up with her, and she let go of his hands.
Her feet moved faster. One, two, one two three. One two one two three. Onetwoonetwothree. Onetwoonetwothree-onetwoonetwothree. Gloria spun around the chairs as if they were couples on a dance floor, and when she flashed around the table Rick saw her, just for an instant, rise off the linoleum and fly toward him.
He reached for her, reached out for dear life, and he grabbed her by the waist as his lips sought the heat of her neck.
It was just then that Jesús appeared at the back door and leaned on the doorjamb. The wells of his eyes were bottomless. He began spitting out words in Spanish, and so did Gloria, and around Rick’s head spun a room of o’s and a’s, spinning and singing like big and angry tops.
César jumped up as Jesús was pushing Gloria toward the living room, but before he could get there, Rick had jumped on Jesús’s back and had ridden him to the floor. That was all Rick could do. Jesús flipped him over his head and dragged him into the back yard. Gloria, César, and Isaac ran out after them.
“Peleá,” Jesús yelled, and he circled Rick, his two fists knotty rocks.
“¡Levantate!” Jesús said, and a crowd was beginning to form. The less brave stood on their porches, inside their back doors, or peeked from behind curtains.
Mikey watched from his back door, eating a Fluffernutter on Wonder bread, but when the braver spectators came and made themselves a circle, he ran upstairs and watched from his bedroom window.
The crowd closed the circle in the yard at 50 All-Bright Court, leaving only Rick and Jesús in the center, and the only way Rick could get out was to fight.
Rick stood up. He began circling, looking for a way out, for a way to drop Jesús and just get away, but his head was humming from the beer. While he listened to the hum, Jesús dropped him with a right.
“Get ’em. Get ’em,” Mikey said, jumping up and down. He dropped his sandwich and began throwing punches before the window.
Rick lay on the ground, blood dripping from his nose.
“¡Levantate!” Jesús taunted.
“¡Basta!” Gloria screamed. “¡Basta, Jesús!”
“Did you hear that?” someone said. “She calling her brother a bastard. Did you hear that? She calling her brother a bastard in the yard.”
“I always thought he was,” someone else whispered.
“That’s a shame, telling all they business in the street. But you know them people.”
Rick did not get up, and Jesús strutted around him, kicking his feet through the dirt and puffing out his chest. “Negro,” he spat at Rick, and he grabbed Gloria by the arm and pulled her into the house. The crowd parted before him. In a moment only César and Isaac remained in the clearing yard.
César was left to explain Jesús, to pull some reasons out of the cloud of dust he had kicked up. But it was hard to find even one. Whatever reason there was seemed to be dissipating, settling back down in the earth, and as César knelt over Rick, all he could say was, “He alway want to be the boss. He don’t boss nobody. Don’t pay no attention to him.”
Jesús’s actions only helped confirm what people suspected. He was not his father’s son. He was not the son of the man who spoke English, broken and hard like pieces of brick, a man who, like Gloria, and César too, had the hair of a raven, a man who had a gold tooth in the front of his mouth, a man who sold shaved ice from his back door in summer, and in the winter sold “ron o vino” from under the counter of his cousin’s store, a man who held the breasts of the blackest of women in his eyes. Jesús was not the son of the man who had been seen leaving Greene’s house singing Spanish songs to the night winds.
Jesús surrounded himself with every Puerto Rican he could find, and spoke Spanish loudly. Rick was the first black person Jesús had ever talked to, and he used his words as weapons, sprayed Spanish into Rick’s face, shot it into his back. Jesús made it clear he was not one of them.
That night Rick and Isaac stood in front of the Red Store pitching pennies under a street lamp. It was after nine, and the store was closed. The warmth that had been held in its bricks was gone.
The wind, the Hawk from the lakefront, was blowing. Somehow it managed to get by the plant, to climb around the monster. Once the sun went down, the Hawk seemed to seek out the land, to come looking for something it had lost, something that it could never find in the darkness. Instead, it punished all it found there. It swooped and rose and turned corners on a wing.
As Rick and Isaac stood there in the night wind, it cut them to the bone. Isaac said, “Let’s split, Rick. It’s cold as hell out here.”
“You just saying that ’cause you losing. I ain’t going in. I’m waiting for Jesús,” Rick said.
“Forget about it, man. Caesar cool. He hip.”
“I’m not talking about Caesar. I’m talking about his brother. The nappy-head Puerto Rican bean-eating crazy-ass black nigger. Who he think he is? Calling me a Negro. Who he think he is?”
Isaac did not know what to say. He looked into Rick’s eyes, searching for what he should say. “I don’t know who he thinks he is.”
“I’ll tell you who he is. He ain’t nothing. He ain’t shit. I’m going to show him that. I saw him heading up Ridge Road way earlier. He be back. He got to come back,” Rick said.
“You going to basic next week. Let it slide,” Isaac said.
“No. He ain’t have to act that way. It was just a dance.”
“Well, you better jump him. That’s all I’m saying. Jump his ass—and carry something. You know he packing. You want me to get you something?”
“Don’t worry about that. I got me a blade. I’ll use it if I have to.”
“It’s cold,” Isaac said. Rick did not respond. “It’s going to be plenty hot where you going. You going be wishing you had some of this cold. They say it get to be two hundred degrees over there.”
Rick cut his eyes at Isaac. “Sometimes I know why they sent you to O.E. What kind of stupid shit is that? Two hundred degrees.”
Isaac bent down and began picking up the pennies from the game. He did not want to look at Rick. He was looking at the ground when he said, “That’s just what I heard.”
“And you’ll never know,” Rick said. Isaac looked at him, looked into his eyes for what he should say, but he could find nothing.
It was not until after eleven that Jesús appeared. Rick saw him walking down Steelawanna, his head bowed against the wind, his hands in his pockets. “I think that’s him,” Isaac said.
“I got your back,” Isaac said.
Rick and Isaac stood against the cold wall, hidden in the enormous shadow the store cast. Invisible and formless and black. They let Jesús pass them, let him get a big lead before they struck out after him. He was already halfway across the field when they caught sight of him again. They were slowed because they went single file down the path, trying not to rustle the dried weeds. Rick led the way, and Isaac walked quickly behind him, shaking.
Rick caught up to Jesús as he reached his block. Rick had the chance to turn back, and he almost did when he saw the yard at 50, but he moved on. He ran up behind Jesús, closed his arms around his neck, and rode him to the ground.
Upstairs in his bed, Mikey awoke. He was cold, too cold to get up and close his window. He heard a sound coming from outside, like the beating of wings. He left his bed and went to the window despite the cold. He saw two figures on the ground right in his back yard, rolling in the grass, and there was a third figure standing in the shadow, or was it a shadow? Mikey seemed to be the only witness to the fight, and he would have a story to tell. He stood quietly, punching the air, urging them on. “Get ’em, get ’em,” he whispered, wishing he could see better, wishing he could hear. But there was nothing to hear except the beating of wings, until someone shouted, “Isaac.” The suddenness of the sound scared Mikey. It echoed off the buildings, and there it was again, “Isaac.” Mikey looked for Isaac, looked toward the shadow, but the shadow was gone. He stopped cheering and shrunk down, peeking over the window sill.
Squares of yellow appeared. And then a rectangle of light, long and wide, opened up in the blackness of the yard. César came out of it. Mikey could see Jesús there on top of someone, sitting on someone’s chest, and he could see the blade of a knife arching through the air. Mikey heard screaming, but it wasn’t the voice that had called for Isaac. César pulled his brother off of the figure on the ground. César was yelling, and as he and Jesús ran toward their house, they set tops spinning through the air. Their words spun and spun and ran off into the night.
Mikey could see the man on the ground was Rick. There was blood on his neck, on his hands, on his jacket. He was still, lying on his back as though he were looking up at the sky, counting the stars. The rectangle closed over him.
Mikey ran to his bed. He closed his eyes and pulled the covers over his head. He could hear screaming. Doors were opening, and there was more screaming, and voices below, under his window. He heard his parents get up, first his father, then his mother. They ran downstairs and the back door opened. His mother shrieked. The door closed. There were sirens. His parents’ footsteps were on the stairs.
Sleep, sleep, sleep, he thought. Be sleep. He turned his head to the wall. The footsteps entered his room and the light came on. He held his breath.
“He sleep,” his mother said. Her voice was shaky. His window was closed. “He lucky. Kids can sleep through anything.”
His father said, “No point in no ambulance coming. That boy dead.”
“I want to leave here. We got to move,” his mother said. She was crying.
“Move? To where? White people want us right here,” his father said.
Mikey held his breath. His heart hurt like he had been running in some great race. His mother was crying. The light went out and the door closed. The footsteps left. Mikey breathed out.
In the morning Mikey awoke, surprised to find he had even slept. He could hear his father up, walking around, getting dressed for work. Martin, the new baby, was crying, and his mother was moving through the kitchen below. He was afraid to lift his head from under the covers, afraid to get up and look out the window. He thought he would see Rick there.
But Rick was gone. He was gone like he had never been there. And Jesús was gone too. He had flown away.