Christopher Paul Curtis (14 page)

I said, “Sparky, I'm serious, what if the Sarge comes up here and wants to see what you've got under that tablecloth? You gotta get that outta here.”

He said, “That's cool, but I'm not leaving till you help me.”

“Help you how?”

“It's like this, Luther, I tried to let that rat bite me, but every time I stuck my hand in the cage and he'd charge at me I just couldn't hold still. Something kept making me pull my hand out at the last second.”

I said, “It was probably the last brain cell you got that's still working.”

He said, “Go ahead and hate, but I just couldn't do it. So what I need is for you to blindfold me and hold my arm still when I put my hand in the cage.”

He stuck his hand in his back pocket and pulled out an old do-rag and reached it toward me.

I laughed again.

He said, “Go ahead and laugh, but I'm not leaving till you do it. Womb to tomb, baby, birth to earth.”

I saw the serious look in his eyes and knew he meant it. I thought about it for a second. What are friends for if they can't help you make your dream come true?

I snatched the do-rag away and said, “Take it in the backyard.”

He smiled and said, “I knew I could count on you, bruh!”

Holding your blindfolded best friend's hand in a cage so he can get bit by a diseased rat isn't as easy to do as it sounds.

Sparky washed his hand real good with antibacterial soap and we tried three times to hold it still enough for the rat to get at it. But every time Sparky heard the rat scrambling across the cage to bite him he got strength like Superman on 'roids and yelled and jerked away.

Sparky took the do-rag off his eyes and looked real discouraged.

The only thing I could think of saying to help was “Why don't I go in the house and get some cotton balls? We can stick them in your ears and that way when the rat comes busting across the cage to bite you you won't be able to hear him, and if you can't hear him you won't know when to pull your hand away.”

Sparky thought for a second, then said, “You know what, Luther? I'ma have to do a reality check on my life. If the only way to get out of Flint is by me getting bit by a rat with lurvy something ain't right. Something's missing.”

I said, “How come you always wanting to get out of Flint so bad? You're doing better here than a whole lot of folks.”

Sparky said, “Look who's talking, Mr. I'm Gonna Move and Go to Harvard One Day. You know just like I do, Flint's nothing but the
Titanic
, Luther. And the last life preservers
they handed out were jobs in the factories back in 1976. Nowadays if you don't go to college you might as well start practicing saying ‘Would you like to Jumbo-Size that Chuckie meal?’ Back in the day my uncle said even if you didn't finish high school you could still get a job on the line in the factory and make enough cash to buy a new Buick every four years or buy a house or buy some clothes from Hudson's or afford cable TV or a legal satellite. You can't do that now, you can't do nothing with
two
minimum-wage jobs now. Seems like the only way to get paid is being a stickup kid, booming weed or suing someone.”

He said, “That's how come I can't see why you keep knocking your hookup with the Sarge. Ninety-nine percent of the fools in Flint would kill to be set up like that.”

I said, “Well, that's exactly what they'd be, fools.”

It was like I said before, you don't know what someone else's life is like until you live it. Here me and Sparky were thinking that each other had it made in the shade, me because his momma didn't put any kind of pressure on anything he wanted to do, and him because he thought the Sarge and her cash was where it was at.

Sparky sighed and said, “Could you take me back over to Rankin Street? I think the best thing I can do is give this rat a ride back to his house, let him go and think of something else to do.”

To cheer Sparky up I thought of a couple of other ways for the rat to bite him but his mind was made up, it was like something had died in him. My boy was seeing things in a different way.

She did it again.

Right in the middle of fifth period Shayla “I See Dead People” Patrick and Eloise Exum started whispering back and forth and I know they were talking about me. Shayla looked so beautiful it made me want to cry. She was leaning in toward Eloise and looking deep into her eyes and smiling and nodding her head, the same way I imagined her doing it with me. They were having a great time.

Finally I had enough, I just wanted to get into their conversation somehow so I whispered to Eloise, nice as anything, “Why don't you two shut up?”

Eloise laughed and, right after she rolled them, Shayla's beautiful brown eyes filled with disgust.

I kept thinking about that tired old song that Darnell plays in his Rivy Dog all the time, “It's a thin line between love and hate.”

But what really got me was that Shayla completely ignored me after that.

By the time I picked up my crew at the rehab center later that day and got them to the home I was totally depressed.

I took out my spiral notebook, opened it to the back and started musing.

Who knows why we remember what we remember and forget what we forget? You'd think certain things would be so important that you'd remember every little detail of what happened for the rest of your life, and other things would be so trifling that you'd have to fight to remember what they were a couple of seconds after you saw them.

But nope, your brain is on a mission of its own, it picks and chooses what it thinks is important. It doesn't care what you or the world or anyone else thinks, it's got a plan of what it's going to keep and what it's going to let go of and once your brain has decided to follow that plan, all the concentrating in the world won't make you remember something and all the wishing and hoping and praying in the world won't make you forget something else.

Take that pain, Shayla Patrick, for example. My brain has decided our first meeting is something that I'll be sitting in an old folks' home thinking about when I'm forty or fifty years old.

It was the first day of kindergarten and the Sarge had taken me to school. I remember being scared as soon as she opened the classroom door. The room was stinking from panic and was filled with a bunch of kids my age, crying their souls out and hanging on to their parents' legs.

One kid was screaming, “Momma, please let me come home, I'll be good. Please! Please! Please!”

Another kid was whispering, “Goodbye, Mommy. Am I being brave? You are gonna come get me, aren't you? OK? Is this being brave?”

But the scariest of them all was the little boy whose mother had already left. This kid was standing by himself in the middle of the floor with his eyes rolled back in his head and his teeth chattering and his knees actually banging together. If this was on the Cartoon Network his knees would've been making that funny, hollow clop-clop-clop sound, but in real life the noise that was coming from him was more of a squish-squish-squish sound, all because brother-man had gone and peed his pants.

I can look back now and understand that it wasn't weakness or softness that had me being scared, now I know there was some good, sound science behind my fear. We just learned about minnows and largemouth bass in Mrs. Bohannon's science class. She told us that if a bass grabs a minnow and takes a bite out of it some kind of special red-alert chemical is released from the hurt minnow. You can't see it and I don't think even chemistry geniuses have figured out what it is, but it lets any other minnows within four or five miles know that one of their partners just had a bunch of violence perpetrated on him.

All the minnows in the lake would suddenly start screaming and shaking and looking nervous while they headed for the nearest rock or lily pad or whatever to hide under. The bluegills and the salmon and the perch and the carp would go about their business like nothing had
happened, but in the minnow community it was like the Department of Homeland Security had jacked the alert level all the way up to Tabasco-sauce red.

That was what my six-year-old mind was picking up in that kindergarten class. Sure, the adults were calm and smiling but why wouldn't they be? They were like the perch and everything else in the pond that wasn't a minnow, everything was cool as far as they could see. But us kids were the minnows, we knew what the real deal was: somewhere in that school one of our own peeps had psychologically spilled blood and was chemically letting the rest of us know to get on up and get on out. We didn't know anything about hiding under a rock, but we had the screaming and shaking and looking nervous part down pat.

I remember reaching up to grab the Sarge's hand.

She yanked me toward where the teacher sat.

“Hello, young man, and what might your name be?”

Panic was rising up in me quicker than the interest rates on one of the Sarge's Friendly Neighbor Loans.

The Sarge did the finger curl on me and brought me back to reality.

The teacher said, “Don't be afraid, honey, what's your name?”

“Luther T. Farrell, ma'am.”

The teacher looked down on a list and said, “Good, I'll talk to your mother and you can go over to the sandbox.”

I gripped the Sarge's hand harder until her left eyebrow arched. I knew what I had to do, I mean sure, the air might be filled with chemicals warning me about some invisible danger, but the Sarge was real and visible and there right
then and apt to strike without giving
any
kind of a warning. I let go of her hand as quick as I could.

I looked over to where the teacher was pointing. In the corner of the room there was a plastic shell-shaped swimming pool filled with sand and toys but my eyes slid right over them because standing right in the middle of the pool was something that took my kindergarten-baby breath away.

Your memory can play such dirty tricks on you. I know it's not possible, but I'd swear on a stack of Bibles that there were flowers floating in the air all around the little girl who was standing there in the shell. And a couple of angels blowing wind at her out of their mouths making her long, thick black hair dance away from her face.

But my lying memory didn't let it go at that, I can remember there was one of those banners or ribbon things like what beauty pageant women wear around the little girl, but instead of saying Miss Flint or Miss Personality this one had a message that I knew came direct from heaven. It wrapped around her like a snake and had written on it, “Finally! After all these years of practice, I got it perfect!”

I remember thinking it was like the sweetest butter and the brownest brown sugar and the darkest chocolate in the world had melted together, then had had life breathed into them by a kind and loving God.

There's that old philosophical story about how billions and billions of years ago there weren't any individual people, how each person was actually two souls that had been stuck together. And how someone had done something to seriously piss off a god or head honcho or whoever was in
charge and how as a punishment that god had divided everybody's souls in half and scattered them all over the world.

In this story you can only know real, true, slam-dunk love when you hook up with that other half of your soul, that's the only time and way you can ever be really whole. It almost never happens but when it does it's supposed to be something you instantly know and deeply feel. That was what was happening with me and the little girl in the shell.

I hate to tie everything to the shows I watch in the day-room but if it fits, what the hey? This longing to get whole again is like what I saw a little while back on the Animal Channel. It was a show about a professor who was doing some kind of research with chimpanzees at a school. She'd raised this one chimp named Mikey for five years before she got a promotion and had to move across the country to her new job. She felt really bad about leaving this little monkey 'cause they'd got real close to each other. She said she thought about Mikey lots of times over the next years.

Fifteen years after she last saw Mikey she got another job back at her old school. When she got there she asked if anyone remembered a chimp named Mikey and what had happened to him. They told her that him and some of the other chimps had been “retired” and were living in a special place at the school. Sort of like a chimpanzee old folks' home.

She said she felt really funny about going to see him. She said she didn't know if he'd even remember her, fifteen human years is about a thousand chimp years. She went anyway.

As soon as she walked into the Old Chimps' Home there was a horrifying shriek like they'd accidentally slammed someone's fingers in a door. Then one of the old gray chimps came tearing across the grass screaming like he was on fire.

He threw himself into the scientist's arms, almost knocking her down. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, buried his face in her neck and screamed and screamed. The woman just held him, opened her mouth, blinked a couple of times, then cried. It was the saddest thing I'd ever seen. It was even sadder because the woman hadn't known until that second that Mikey had spent his whole life grieving for her.