Authors: Kiese Laymon
I wasn’t as scared as you probably think I was. I just didn’t know what to do. Shay walked over to me and grabbed my hips. “Stand right there and just put your back against the tree.”
“I can’t,” I told her. “My grandma ain’t in the mood for me to come back smelling like outside. I ain’t lying.” Shay just stood in front of me with her hands on her hips.
“Alright, City. Stop talking. Just put your arms behind your back and hold your body off from the tree. Okay?”
It was weird. My fatness wouldn’t let me hold myself up like I wanted to. Plus, my lower back and arms started aching, too. All I was thinking about was if Shay was gonna think my belly button was deformed. I had a regular innie-style belly button that she’d never seen, but from what I’d seen, all the kids in Melahatchie had walnut-size belly buttons.
Shay told me to take my pants off but leave my underwear on. I did it and let my pants hang around my ankles.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her as she was looking at my stuff.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. Close your eyes.”
Sounded like a weird thing to say to someone, but I did it anyway.
“They closed?” she asked. “Don’t be peeking, boy. You a virgin?”
“I ain’t no virgin,” I told her with my eyes closed and my penis getting harder and harder. “I did it once with this girl named Octavia. We recorded it on her stepdaddy’s iPad. But look, I think we should probably get a condom from my Uncle Relle if we really trying to get nice. You feel me? You don’t want to be pregnant in high school and I don’t even know how child support works if I have a baby mama before I’m technically even allowed to work. Maybe we should think about this.”
“I can pay my own bills,” I heard Shay say before I heard the sound of a camera phone and…
Swinncrhuunch
.
The pain in my testicles moved through my lower body and into my chest and head. I couldn’t talk. I was on my hands and knees, just fiending for air. I looked up to see what happened. A blurry Shay had grabbed her broken-off piece of tree and recorded herself hitting me in my naked testicles.
I just crouched over the leaves damn near choking as Shay took pictures of me. She was dying laughing, too.
I got off my knees, grabbed Shay’s shoulders, threw her to the pine-needled ground, and jumped on her. Her phone fell out of her hands. I felt crazy being on top of her like that. I mean, I thought about how no one had probably ever had the nerve or the skills to push Shay down like that.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked her. “You can’t just go around hitting people in the sack whenever you get ready.” I was still all in her eyes. “You know how tender the testicles are? That stuff hurt.” I felt goofy saying “testicles” and “tender” to her.
“It’s called ‘skin-sacks,’” Shay told me. “And it’s all one word, with a hyphen.”
“Wait.” I started laughing. “What? That’s the dumbest thing I have heard in a long time. ‘Skin-sacks’? Who said it’s called ‘skin-sacks’ with a hyphen?”
“My brother, Alcee. He said it’s two sacks and it’s covered in skin so it’s skin-sacks.”
“But the skin is the sack,” I told her. “And there ain’t two sacks. There’s two nuts in one sack.”
“My brother said it’s called ‘skin-sacks’ so it’s called ‘skin-sacks.’”
“Well, first of all,” I told her, “Alcee Mayes is my Uncle Relle’s weed man and my uncle said he’s steady overcharging him for an ounce, so I don’t believe nothing Alcee Mayes says.”
While I had her down on the ground and was yelling at her, that was the first time I noticed that people have hair under their eyes, you know? Plus, Shay had on that little pea-green muscle shirt, so I could see the little hairs under her arms. I had negative hair under my arms, not even minor hair bumps. I was looking in her big eyes and squeezing on her shoulders softly, and I’ll be damned if my penis didn’t start getting harder and harder. It made me too embarrassed, so I gave her one more good push in the shoulders and I got off of her.
“My bad, City.”
“What?” I asked.
“My bad. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. Me and Baize made a bet about who could make a boy do that first. I won’t show the pictures to no one but her,” she said. “I promise.”
“Where you think she went? Baize, I’m talking about. The newspaper said they got a lead in the investigation.”
Shay picked up some pine needles and walked toward the road. “The paper don’t know shit,” she yelled and came back towards me.
“Maybe something else happened to her.”
“You met Baize before, City.” Shay looked me right in the face. “Whoever took Baize either hurt her or killed her before they took her. Or maybe they knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Never mind. You think that girl would let somebody just take her? We would’ve heard about it.”
“Wait,” I told her. The craziest thought in the world entered my head. “You think that white man knew whatever it is you’re talking about? You think he took her?”
“You mean the one in your grandma’s shed? Probably.”
“Ain’t no white man in my grandma’s shed,” I told her. She just looked at me with her arms folded.
“Folks say they saw her walk off in these woods one day a few weeks ago with a computer.”
“A computer?”
“That laptop computer she always was messing with.”
“Did anyone find the computer?”
“The white man in your shed,” Shay changed the subject. “Didn’t he kick you in your back yesterday, too?”
“Yeah, he did,” I told her. “But can we talk more about Baize?”
I was expecting a little more quality heartfelt sharing between us, but Shay walked off toward the bushes again. “Where you going?” I asked.
“Gunn told me that your grandma’s preacher, Reverend Cherry, got a carload of pictures of skanks from Waveland doing it.”
“So?”
“So, that’s where I’m going. He hid the pictures in his beat-up car, the one he always letting Deacon Big Shank drive,” Shay said.
I thought for a second about what would be the point of stealing naked pictures that belonged to my grandma’s preacher, especially with a girl who had just hit me in my skin-sacks with a stick.
Then it clicked.
If I stole the pictures and showed them to Grandma, there would be no way she’d let me get baptized by a preacher who kept that kind of nastiness in one of his cars.
“Can we take a picture of the pictures in the car with your phone?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said, and came back from around the bushes. “Don’t ask a whole lotta questions, though. You coming or not?”
Shay started texting someone as we walked toward Reverend Cherry’s house.
Reverend Cherry lived about three minutes from Grandma’s, on the other side of the woods. He lived right next to my friend Gunn.
“Hey, scown,” Gunn said to me as we walked in the yard. “What you doing?” Gunn was fourteen, but his voice was a good four or five years deeper than mine. “Heard you went crazy yesterday.”
“I did, kinda.”
“They say it’s on Worldstar and everything. Heard you had fools crying and calling you master.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I told him. “Sometimes you gotta let fools know, you feel me?”
Shay looked at me and shook her head. She was being strange and quiet but Gunn was steady nodding and chewing on a toothpick. The best thing about Gunn was that even if he heard you did something huge like embarrass yourself on national TV and the internet, he’d focus on the fighting you did instead. He loved saying the word “titties” and he loved anything that had to do with fighting. He’d been telling people he was going to be a professional UFC fighter ever since he was six. It was funny at first, but most folks in Melahatchie would be surprised if he didn’t end up fighting for money. He’d beaten almost every boy’s ass I knew in Melahatchie. Everybody he beat claimed that they lost ’cause they didn’t want to “get close to no real-life faggot.”
Gunn’s grandma put him in a kung fu class downtown for his twelfth birthday present. Coach Stroud taught that kung fu class for a while until parents complained that he was too touchy. Soon as Coach Stroud quit, Gunn quit too. He said he quit because he wanted to chop people in the
throat and throw ninja stars, but the new white teacher from Biloxi wanted folks to stretch their legs in yoga poses and work on soft punches to the solar plexus. Behind Gunn’s back, everyone said he quit because his boyfriend, Coach Stroud, didn’t want him learning from a new teacher.
Before he quit, though, Coach Stroud gave Gunn one of those white karate suits. And Gunn wore that suit with his own black leather belt at least three times a week during the summer.
“Y’all came to get them titties, scown?” Gunn asked, like he was ready for nakedness. “The car right over here.”
We walked about 20 yards down the road and we were right next to the car. Gunn was looking funny, like he was laughing or something.
“What you laughing at, Gunn?” I asked him.
“You know I always be laughing, scown,” Gunn said. “Go ahead and get them Waveland titties.”
“Y’all ain’t coming with me?” I asked them.
“Naw, that’s your preacher car, scown,” Gunn said. “Plus, it ain’t no room for three people up in there.”
I went up to the car and looked around to make sure that no one was coming down the road then. “Close the door behind you, scown,” I heard Gunn say.
Soon as I got in, I saw a picture hanging out of the glove compartment. Shay didn’t tell me that there were pictures in the glove compartment. I figured that if what was under the seat was anything like what I saw in the glove compartment, we were in for the freakiest naked pictures we’d ever seen.
Dangling there was a shiny slick picture with a creased breast down the middle of it. I unfolded it and saw this whole dark breast that was full and hanging. The picture cut the woman off at the neck and the waist but the breast hung just right, midway down her stomach, and the dark part around the nipple—I didn’t really know what that part was called—was damn near bigger than my cheeks. It was the first time I’d seen just breasts cut off from a woman’s face and even though the breasts were nice, it was wack to just see breasts and no face. But that was the first time I realized that seeing breasts of any kind was like eating pancakes. Even the nastiest pancake in the world was always better than the best stack of toast you could imagine.
Still, I hoped the woman who owned the breasts wanted her head cut off from the picture. If not, it was one of the meanest things I could imagine doing to someone.
“I see titties,” I yelled. “Waveland titties ain’t no joke.”
“Go ahead and bring them Waveland titties out then, scown,” Gunn yelled from way across the street. “Check the glove compartment and under all the seats too. Get all the titties you can.”
I reached under the seat to see if there were any other pictures under there. There were about five issues of
King
magazine.
“Shay,” I yelled and peeked over the dashboard. “Bring me your phone.”
“Oh. Shay said she gon’ be right back,” Gunn yelled from way across the street. “She gone! Go ahead and get all them titties, scown.”
“I told you I’m getting the titties, man. Damn,” I yelled back. “I don’t know why you faking like you love some titties anyway,” I said under my breath.
I was about to raise up when I heard a weird noise coming from the glove compartment. I hadn’t looked all the way in the compartment, but I hoped there would be at least ten more naked pictures up in there. I stretched out and pulled the compartment open with my right hand. All I saw was a map of Melahatchie. I pushed the map to the side to see what else was in there.
Wasps. Big wasps.
I jumped out the window of the passenger side of the car and the wasps stung me all upside the head.
Gunn was across the street just laughing his ass off, recording it on Shay’s cell phone.
I did it for y’all
, I thought as I ran home.
I did it all for y’all
.
When I made it home, Grandma wasn’t there. I was swelling from the stings, but I realized this was my chance to see if that white man was really in the work shed. Grandma kept the key to the shed on her key chain that was on the dresser under her old wigs. The key chain had a million keys on it. Plus, she had this heavy pocket blade connected to her keys. She never
let me hold the blade, but you could tell from just looking at it that it could slice many necks if need be.
I took the knife and Grandma’s keys and slowly made my way out to the work shed. The shed was covered in off-white vinyl siding and, like Grandma’s house, it was raised off the ground by cinder blocks. There were two words written on the shed but they had been scratched out with a black marker. Every kid who ever saw the shed said it looked like the color of a second-grade writing tablet. You couldn’t tell how much of the off-whiteness was bought and how much of it came from just being dirty. There were no windows, just four baseball-sized holes in the back, way up at the top. Every Tuesday, from sunup to sundown, my granddaddy used to sweat up a storm in that shed. Tuesdays and Sundays were my granddaddy’s only off days. Tuesdays, he’d make tables, chairs, and cabinets out of wood. Sundays, he’d drink until he couldn’t see straight enough to use anything he’d made. Grandma took all the saws out of the shed when my granddaddy drowned, but she left all the sawdust, wood chips, and cinder blocks on the floor. I liked to mess around in there, knowing I was walking on the same sawdust my granddaddy walked on.