The Summer We Got Free (18 page)

Ellen, Kenny,
and Geo managed to pull Sondra off of Ava, and Ava scrambled up off the ground.
Geo grabbed his sister’s arm. “Come on, Ava, let’s go home,” he said, pulling
her away, towards their house. Ellen, Kenny, and their other friends followed.

Once they were inside, Ava jerked out of Geo’s grip.
“Why you pull me away? I aint scared of that girl.”

“She twice as
big as you,” Geo said.

Ellen shook her
head. “Three times.”

“So, what? I got—”

“Right on your side?” Geo asked.

She nodded.

“I hope right
got a good left hook,” Kenny said, and Ava laughed.

Geo was
relieved. It was the second time in a week that Lamar and Sondra had started
something with Ava, and he didn’t like it.

Ellen put her hand in Ava’s and said, “Y’all want to
listen to records?” and since the twins had recently gotten Little Richard’s
Rip It Up
, they all decided that was a
good way to spend the afternoon.

1976

T
hough she
tried, Sarah could not stop looking at the clock. From the moment she sat down
behind her teller window at exactly nine that morning, she turned her head to
glance up at the clock above the bank’s front entrance every three or four
minutes. By ten o’clock, she was already getting a crick in her neck. She
rubbed it, gingerly, and deposited two fifteen-dollar checks for a customer who
had a large piece of spinach between her teeth. When the spinach-toothed woman
was gone, Sarah glanced again at the clock. Her pre-occupation with the time
was so obvious that her co-worker, Mildred, a white girl who sat behind the window
next to Sarah’s, leaned over and whispered, “You got a long time to go before
closing. You got a hot date or something?”

Sarah wasn’t
actually waiting for four o’clock. She never waited for four o’clock. She liked
her job and most of her customers and liked the view out the front windows of
the bank, where all day she could see Center City life taking place: meter
maids writing tickets to delivery men who sneered or gave them the finger; the
lines of sophisticated-looking, business-suited men and women, waiting for hot
dogs from street vendors. Usually, when four o’clock came, she felt a little
bit sorry.

She was waiting for noon. Lunchtime. It came later
than usual. She was sure of it. When she stepped out into the August sunshine,
she immediately turned and looked down the street to see if the bus was coming.
It wasn’t. She frowned. How in the world was she going to make it all the way
down to Old City, find the fire-eating man, and be back at work in an hour? She
could take a cab, but that would mean spending money she really didn’t want to
spend. She could walk, except that it was fifteen blocks down, and fifteen back.
She checked her watch, which was always five minutes fast. It read twelve-ten,
so she knew it was really only five minutes past. She decided to just start
walking, and when the bus caught up to her she could take it the rest of the
way.

Center City was
always crowded during the day, especially around lunchtime. She moved quickly,
passing the shiny, square, silver food vendor boxes that lined the streets and
made the air smell like grease and coffee and fried onions. She walked as fast
as she could in the shoes she was wearing. Her heels weren’t high, but nor were
they made for speed. She had gone four blocks when she saw the bus approaching
from behind, and she got on it, and sat in the front seat so she could get
right off at her stop. It seemed to take forever. When the bus got to Penn’s
Landing, she was the last passenger. She stepped down and the bus pulled away
with a grunt of heavy, dark gray smoke.

She hadn’t been down here in years, but it all looked
the same. On one side, facing the Delaware River, there were the same little
stores that had

been
there in sixty-five, including a tailor and a couple
of antique shops. On the other side, near the water, there were huge warehouses
and, in the water, the huge ships that lined the piers. Large brick and cement
staircases linked Penn’s Landing to Market and Walnut streets. From where she
was standing, at Front and Market, she could see out over the river, to the Ben
Franklin Bridge, and beyond, to New Jersey. She walked south, towards the spot
where she remembered the fire-eating man had performed years ago.

She had decided,
while lying in bed the night before, that the only way to erase the humiliation
of being called a liar by Ava, right in front of Helena, was to turn that lie
into the God’s honest truth. She would find the fire-eating man and talk to
him, just like she’d told Helena she had done.

When she saw him,
in the same spot where he had been eleven years earlier, she was surprised. He
was standing in the same place he had been in the lie she’d told Helena, but
she realized now how unlikely it was to find him still there, and she was
surprised Helena had believed it.
If she had.
Maybe
she had known it was a lie all along and was just humoring Sarah. That thought
made her even more determined and she went and joined the small crowd of people
standing around the performer.

He looked different than she remembered.
Shorter, for one thing.
For another thing, the scruffy,
alley-cat
look he once had was gone, his hair and beard much
shorter and well-groomed. The sweet face she remembered was harder around the
edges, though, and lined around the eyes with eleven more years of life. He
didn’t notice her, just as she knew he wouldn’t, and she stood there wondering
how in the world she was going to get him by himself so she could talk to him.
The lie had not only been that she had seen him again, but that they had
talked. And, also, that he had remembered her and asked her to come back again.
She had no idea how she was going to make those last two lies into the truth,
but she could at least talk to him. She hoped. She checked her watch. It was
twenty after twelve already.

His act had
changed since she had last seen it. He had added some dancing and also some
flips. No matter what else he was doing, though, it was the flaming batons that
held all eyes as he juggled them high in the air. Sarah enjoyed the movement of
the flames, felt almost hypnotized by it, and she remembered why she had come
here every day for a whole year. He was wonderful to watch.

He did another
flip and the crowd applauded. When he was upright again, he smiled at them all
and said, “Thank you, friends, thank you very much.” His voice was still light
and young, happy-sounding, and he had an accent that she hadn’t remembered that
made him sound a little like a Kennedy. Considering how he looked and what he
did for a living, it was a strange thought, and she laughed to herself.

The show went on
for several more minutes and ended with the fire-eating man eating the fire
from the tip of each baton. The audience applauded again, and the air filled
with the sound of coins tinkling against each other as they were dropped into
his hat. As the crowd thinned, the fire-eating man turned and bent down over a
black case, arranging the now-fireless batons inside it. Sarah watched the back
of him, standing a few feet away, and willed
herself
to say something. He was packing his things quickly, almost throwing the batons
into the case, and dumping the change from the hat in with them, without even
counting it, and Sarah decided he must be in a hurry. She shouldn’t bother him
now. She checked her watch and saw that it was twelve-forty. She needed to get
back to work. But she stood there, staring at his back and trying to think of
something, anything to say. He closed the case and put the empty hat onto his
head and, without even turning
around,
he walked in
the other direction, away from her. She started to call out to him, but no
sound came. Instead, she watched him walk away and, when he turned the corner
at Market and was out of sight, she turned and walked back to the bus stop.

When George clocked out of work at five and exited the
city building through a side door, which let him out on Market, he was sure he
saw Chuck Ellis standing across the street, right out front of the post office,
looking at him. But when a mail truck pulled up it blocked his view, and when
it pulled away a few seconds later, no one was there. He lit a cigarette and
walked down the street in the other direction, towards the el station, feeling
uneasy. When he got to the el station, he ran to catch the westbound train but
missed it, the doors sliding closed just as he reached the platform. He cursed,
feeling more annoyed than he should be, considering the trains ran every five
minutes or so at this time of day. He sat down on a bench and took a long drag
off his cigarette. A woman in a nurse’s uniform smiled at him and he smiled
back with exaggerated interest, then rested his elbows on his knees and lowered
his head, staring down at the platform floor beneath his feet. He was tired.
He’d worked
a long
day collecting Philadelphia’s
garbage and his shoulders and neck ached. His body couldn’t handle hard work
the way it used to. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and sighed.

He felt someone
watching him and thought it was the pretty nurse who had smiled at him, and he
looked up grinning, ready to give her the earnest, but ultimately empty,
attention he always gave to women who flirted with him. It wasn’t the nurse
looking at him, though. It was Chuck. He was standing by the stairs that led up
to the street surface and he was watching George, whose grin faded.

The el pulled
into the station and George stepped up to the doors of one car just as Chuck
approached the adjoining car. Once inside the train, George could see Chuck
through the windowed doors separating the compartments. Chuck wasn’t watching
him anymore. George took a forward-facing seat, putting his back to Chuck and
the adjoining car. When he got off at Sixtieth Street, he did not see Chuck as
he walked towards the stairs and down to the street.

When he got to
his front door, he was just putting his key in the lock when he heard footsteps
behind him and, startled, he turned, and saw Chuck standing behind him.

“I think you got
the wrong house,” George said. “The
devil’s
in here.”

Chuck frowned.
“I aint never been a part of all that.”

“You aint never
stopped nobody else from being part of all that, either.”

“George, I need to confess something.”

“Sounds to me
like you need a priest. You thinking about converting?”

“I’d like to
come in a minute, if I could,” Chuck said.

“Nigger, you
must be crazy.”

Chuck swallowed
hard and said, “I aint got a right to ask you for nothing. But I’m asking
anyway. Just for a minute. Please. And then, if you want, I’ll go and never
come back here again.”

“So, if I say
no, you gone keep coming back?”

“I aint trying
to harass you or nothing. I just need to say a few words to you, and that’s
all. Please.”

George didn’t
know what to do. He didn’t want to hear a few words. But he also didn’t want
Chuck coming back. He opened the front door and listened. The house was quiet. “Alright,”
he said, unsure. “For a minute. And then you got to go.”

They stood on
opposite sides of the living room. Chuck kept wiping his palms on his pant
legs. When he spoke, his voice was shaky. “I wasn’t honest with you, George. That
time at the Christmas party. You know what I’m talking about?”

George didn’t
answer.

“When I said I
wasn’t like that. It wasn’t true. Well, I mean…I guess I didn’t know what I was
like. Or I didn’t want to know.
Do that
make sense?”
He shifted his weight to his other leg, wiped his palms again,
cleared
his throat. “What I’m saying is, I felt things I
didn’t want to feel. I was scared of those feelings. But I couldn’t make them
stop. So, I tried to ignore them. Every time you came to prayer service, I’d be
so happy to see you, but terrified, too. When I’d go home, I’d look at my wife
and wonder why I didn’t get that excited seeing her.” He looked pained, his eyebrows
drawn tight together, remembering. “Then that night when you tried to…well, I
couldn’t handle it.
I mean, I wanted it.
I felt it.
But when it started to happen, I got scared. I knew it meant something.
Thinking about it was one thing. Doing it was something else.”

George looked
away from him, down at the floor.

 
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you, George. But I
know I did.”

George could
feel Chuck’s eyes on his face, but he didn’t want to look at him. He didn’t
want Chuck to see the pain inside him, the pain that was always there, eating
him up from the inside out, the pain of knowing he wasn’t good enough, not for
a woman or a man, not for his mother or his father, not for his children. The
pain of being this other thing, this strange being that belonged nowhere, least
of all in the company of God. He felt Chuck move closer to him, felt his hand
come up and touch his back, between his shoulder blades, and then move up to
his shoulders, massaging his tense muscles with strong fingers. George closed
his eyes. He tried to think only of Chuck, of this man he had once felt so
close to, this gentle, kind man with his soft voice and delicate-looking-but-strong
hands, this man he had wanted so much and still wanted.

Chuck’s hand
moved from George’s shoulder to his head, his fingers in George’s hair, and in
one moment he turned George’s head so that they faced each other, and pulled
him close, and pressed his open mouth against George’s. George felt the heat
and wetness of Chuck’s tongue against his lips, and he opened his mouth and let
it slide in, at the same time feeling a pressure in his crotch as his
excitement strained against his zipper.

There were
footsteps, and George moved away from Chuck, just as Helena appeared in the
doorway. She looked from George to Chuck and didn’t say anything. A moment
later, Ava appeared at her side.

“Oh. Daddy. When
did you come in?”

“Couple minutes
ago,” George said, willing his voice to sound normal. Begging it to. “I didn’t
know nobody was home.”

“We were in the
backyard,” Ava said.

“Oh. Well, you
remember Deacon Ellis?” George asked, now standing several feet away from
Chuck.

Ava nodded.
“Hello.”

“Hello, Ava. It’s
nice to see you.”

“This is my
sister-in-law, Helena.”

While Chuck and
Helena exchanged hellos, George searched Helena’s eyes for some sign of what
she might have seen, what she might be thinking.

“Well, I have to be going,” Chuck said.

Ava and Helena said goodbye and then went into the
kitchen.

“Meet me at the church tomorrow tonight. After prayer
service,” Chuck whispered to George. “At the back door.”

“Alright.”

At the front
door, Chuck peered out into the street and, seeing no one, slipped quietly out
of the house.