Hold Love Strong (11 page)

Traffic was heavy and I waited for it to break so I could cross the avenue. I looked across the street at where we lived, Ever Park. The two forty-two-floor redbrick buildings, tower A and tower B, were in an area of Queens where there was no commerce or train transportation, and all of the streets were named after dead presidents, New World discoverers, and trees that had never been seen in the neighborhood. Pine
Street, Locust Street, Maple and Dogwood Avenues. Willow Street intersected with Eisenhower. Elm Street and Oak Street ran parallel with Lewis and Clark. There were twelve apartments on each floor of Ever Park, six on one side, six on the other. Five hundred and four windows faced Columbus Avenue. From some windows, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Haitian, and Jamaican flags clung limply, tied to the child guard or the rusted fire escape, the summer heat strangling their wave. From some windows curtains hung and drooped like sad sails; from a few, air conditioners teetered. Between the towers was a concrete courtyard with concrete benches and a rusted jungle gym. Surrounding Ever like a moat, running between the buildings and the avenue, was a large parking lot with potholes, yellowed weeds bursting from cracks in the concrete, and a collection of cars, some working, some not; some to be proud of, some the dilapidated chariots of those who were just happy to have a ride.

From my left came a group of girls, ranging in age from a five-year-old to a thirteen-year-old with a woman's figure and the innocent disposition of a puppy. They weaved through the crowd and ran past me laughing and shouting, “Go!” “Run!” “Hurry!” Behind them, plodding, red faced and wheezing in failing hot pursuit, came Latricia Bowers, a heavyset girl too knock-kneed to ever catch even the smallest and slowest of the girls.

“Hey, Abraham,” she gasped, greeting me with a flaccid wave as she lumbered by.

“Hey,” I said, wondering what determination possessed her to keep running when she was so far behind.

Waiting for the bus and sucking on neon-colored Flavos, Arthur Winfield, Laurence Matthews, and Delonte Henry, three fourteen-year-olds who had played basketball with me earlier in the day, took turns dribbling a ball, its hollow thud lending the evening a heartbeat.

“Good playing today, A,” said Arthur, never quite sure of himself
yet always speaking with the calm grace his father demanded of him.

“Damn, look how fine Carmela is,” interrupted Delonte, taking his headphones from his ears, always weary eyed, always with shoulders held firmly back and straight, and always good for switching the topic of any conversation to the topic of a beautiful woman, be she thirty or ten.

Across the street, Hector Mendez, one my uncle's old friends, washed his white Toyota Camry, turquoise racing stripes on its sides, with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge while his wife, Carmela, cradled their newborn son and talked to Hector in half English and half Spanish, occasionally making him laugh and stop what he was doing to gaze adoringly at her, his wife carrying his son.

“Man, I'm telling you,” Delonte continued. “That's exactly how my lady is gonna be. Sexy as shit.”

“Nigga,” cracked Arthur, “You ain't even kissed a girl.”

“So what?” said Delonte. “Plus, I ain't talk'n about kissing.”

“Then what you saying?” said Laurence.

“I'm saying love,” said Delonte.

“Love?” laughed Arthur. “Nigga, what you know about love?”

“I know it's strong,” Delonte said. He was serious. He stared straight ahead, studied Carmela and Hector. He held the basketball and bounced it once.

“That's it?” said Arthur. “That's all you got to say?”

“What else is there?” said Delonte.

Traffic ceased. I crossed the street. Hector saw me coming, tipped his chin, smiled wider than he was already smiling, and pointed the sponge at me.

“You was practicing?” he asked.

“We played all day,” I said.

“That's good,” Hector said. “Keep you out of trouble. Stop you from being like me when I was your age.”

Hector laughed because shortly after my uncle got locked up Hector went upstate for forging a check to pay for his mother's medical bills, and he'd come home grateful for everything, for the fact that he hadn't had his gun on him when the cops picked him up so he only served three years; for his car and his beautiful Carmela; for his son Junior; for every morning, every night, and the chance to rectify his wrongs by offering advice and belief to young men like me. Hector worked as a youth counselor in an Alternatives to Incarceration program, and every evening he bought Carmela flowers on his way home. He plunged the sponge back into the bucket and began to wash the side of his car again. He was wearing a tank top and as his hand circled, the muscles in his arms and shoulders rolled beneath his skin.

“You know something?” he said. “One day you gonna make it all the way to the NBA and give me front row seats. I swear it. A star. I seen it in a dream.”

Hector stood tall and pointed his sponge at Carmela and his son. “I'll bring Junior,” he said. “And by then your uncle will be home and…”

“Conio!”
Carmela snapped. “What about me? You ain't gonna bring me to the game?”

Hector smiled, his left eye tilting, his right opening slightly wider, both shining a playfulness that indicated Carmela's scolding tickled him. He opened his arms wide and stepped to her. She sucked her teeth. He gently wrapped his arms around her waist. He kissed her neck, then the wisps of hair on the crown of Junior's head.

“Tranquilo,”
he said, soothing her in an easy, deep rumbling tone warmed and emanating from the base of his neck. “We all go.
Mi familia.
We take a family trip. Maybe we go see Abraham, then go to Paris. How 'bout that? Drink some of that good-ass white people wine. Anything you want. Anything for my wife and son.”

Holding towels and wearing shorts and bathing suits, Taquanna
James and Kaya King, both my age and best friends with mothers who were best friends too, walked toward us.

“Abraham,” Taquanna whined, stretching my name out and pointing at me just as she and Kaya reached us. “Why you got your shirt tied around your head?”

Taquanna was contentious, rail thin, with a mischievous grin and the disposition of a peeved middle-aged woman. She was always on the edge of something, be it finding out a secret or having sex with someone older than us. She talked with her hands, wagging them above heads and in faces, and when she laughed she clapped and stuck her tongue out and hollered about how she couldn't take it anymore.

“What, you think you got a good body?” she cracked. “Cause you don't.”

I glanced at Hector, hoping to convey the sense that he need not worry; I had the situation in control, which was, of course, not the truth. Then I looked back at Taquanna.

“Don't play yourself,” I said.

“Play myself?” Taquanna shot back. “Shit, you the nigga with a shirt on his head and the body of a piece of paper.”

“Just last week you said I was fine,” I countered because it was the truth, or at least that was what Titty told me.

“That was before I saw you with your shirt off.” She pointed at my belly button and went in for the kill. “Kaya,” she said. “Don't you think Abraham should get that thing cut off? It looks like he got a nose in the middle of his stomach!”

I had so hoped Taquanna wouldn't drag Kaya into the conversation that I'd blocked out the fact that she was there, as beautiful as she was the day before, the day to come, forever. I glanced at her. Then my eyes fell to the concrete. No matter if a girl was fat and ugly or so beautiful she was too beautiful, I was quiet around her. My grandma said it was because I was shy. But the truth is I was quiet around girls
for two reasons. First, I believed my uncle—both the man who had been in my life until I was nine and the even more fantastical version of him his absence and time built in my head—was the only way one could and should be a man and such a thing felt impossible for me. Second, I had witnessed the damage other men caused and I didn't want any part of being like the others, not their presence or absence. So it was not that I was shy and quiet around girls. Rather, I was insufficient and apologetic because I wished to be great but had come to a place in my life where I was sure that my mother would have found greatness and joy if it had not been for my father and what he begat. That is, me.

Yet, there was something different, something more about Kaya. So I was more than just quiet around her. I lost all sense of self. I became nothing but breath. Kaya was a diminutive brown girl with copper tones in her cheeks and forehead and with eyes so gentle they made even the loudest, most caustic man whisper. She was soft-spoken. She did well in school. She possessed a strength that was an inherent fact so it did not need to be demonstrated, bragged about, or manifested in defiance. If I'd had the courage I would've done what I imagined dozens of men had already done and asked Kaya to spend the rest of her life with me, right there and then, beginning that evening, or, at least, first thing the following morning. But I couldn't do that. And not just because I was twelve and unable to confront how I felt about her. Because I could. I just couldn't speak it, deal with it face to face. I could write it though. Lord, how I'd spent hours writing about Kaya. In my room, on the floor, on my bed, in the kitchen at the kitchen table, even in the bathroom while I sat on the toilet, writing. Of course, I didn't give her anything I wrote and my loving her didn't make me unique. Everyone either loved Kaya or planned to. So she was flooded with smiles and hellos, and men, ranging in age from eight to forty and riding fleeting surges of courage and testosterone, always stepped to her, telling her
not just that she was beautiful but so beautiful she was that thing they had to possess.

“Where you headed?” Kaya asked me, saving me from Taquanna's attack on my belly button as well as the potential heartbreak her own judgment could cause.

“Huh?” I said, so enamored and thankful, so in awe of her, and yet so soothed by the tone of her voice that all I could do was grunt.

“Ahh,” laughed Taquanna, pointing at me. “Look at you. Nigga can't even talk to Kaya!”

“He can speak,” said Hector, coming to my defense. “Go ahead, Abraham.
Vamos.
Tell the lady what you think.”

“Nothing,” burst Taquanna. “Nigga's got nothing to say.”

I focused my attention on Kaya's question. It was like a rite of passage, a test of my budding manhood.
Where was I headed?
she asked. I took a great big gulp of breath. Suddenly, two bleats from the siren of a police car shattered the air and a cruiser with two white cops in it stopped and flashed their lights. From the loudspeaker they addressed the young man doing chin-ups from the crosswalk sign affixed to the lamppost at the far corner of the street.

“Get down!” said the cop in the passenger seat. He held the microphone to his mouth with his left hand while his right arm hung out of the open window. “You!” he added. “Let go! Fall right now!”

It was Donnel.
Ah dear God,
I thought,
fuck Lord what the hell?
Donnel hung with his arms straight. Then he dropped to the sidewalk, his long, strong arms falling slack, his shoulders, neck, and face following, becoming so limp the only part of him that was not flaccid was the frail, pained expression in his eyes. He was sixteen going on disengaged and destitute. He looked down. Then he set his eyes on the police car and the two cops in it. He could have killed them. That thought, that want, the very antithesis of who he was, he put it on his face for them to see. I wanted to shout and run to him. I wanted to tell him about my day
playing basketball, the shots I made, the around-the-back pass I threw. But there was something too great between us: the police. I feared for him, for what the cops might do. How would they remind him not to look like he looked, not to do what he had done, that which was nothing until they had come? The back brake lights shone bright red and the police car came to a stop.

“Abraham,” Hector said. “Abraham, quick. Call your cousin.”

“D!” I shouted. “Yo, D!”

Donnel's eyes jumped across the street and landed on me. He read my face. He understood what I feared. Then the rancid glare he had fixed for the police softened.

“I'll be home in a minute,” he shouted. He pointed over his shoulder at the tiny corner store that rarely had eggs or gallons of milk that were good for more than just a few more days. “I got to get something for grandma.”

I knew Donnel was lying and that my grandma was at work, and I was so thankful he had been able to see the fear on my face. But I was also afraid that it wouldn't be enough, that the police had determined that Donnel needed to be taught. So I didn't smile or wave. I thought only about saving Donnel more.

“Can you get me some peanut butter?” I called out to him.

“Chunky, right?” he asked.

The back brake lights lost their red electric glow. Slowly the police car drove away. I watched it until it was just another car in the distance. Then I raised my arm, made my hand into an imaginary gun, and aimed my index finger down Columbus Avenue in the direction the police car went.

“Abraham,” scolded Hector. “Don't give them no reason to turn around.”

I heard Hector, glanced out of the corner of my eye at Kaya, and considered if I should drop my hand. I looked across the street to see
what Donnel wanted. But he wasn't there. I shifted my eyes to the corner store and saw that the door was just closing. I assumed Donnel had just walked in but I couldn't be sure. Every day Donnel was becoming more furtive, so much so that his disappearances approached being indistinguishable from the commonplace of the day. Donnel ran with one of the crews that sold crack not in Ever but on the other side of Queens. I couldn't say he was selling crack at the time. There seemed to be no additional money coming in. And he didn't have any new clothes or sneakers, and my grandma still complained about unpaid bills. But things happened so suddenly to men in Ever, be it how quickly death came, how fast a father vanished, or how swiftly a man was whisked off to prison I couldn't be sure. All I knew was Donnel carried himself with an intensity and distance meant to guard against such suddenness and the timeless nature of his life. A life in which there was no more attending school, no hobbies, no job or potential vocational pursuit, nowhere he had to be that might provide even the glimpse of a worthwhile opportunity. I worried about him. Slowly, I dropped my arm, unfurled my fingers, and let go of my imaginary gun.