All the Right Stuff (7 page)

“She's cute,” I said. “What's wrong with her?”

“Asthma,” Keisha said. “Soon as she starts breathing funny, I take her to the hospital. My girlfriend's baby had an attack once and she didn't take her to the hospital. She waited until the next morning, and the baby died.”

“From
asthma
? You can die from asthma?”

“Yes, you can die from asthma.”

We went to the emergency room, and Keisha told the receptionist what was wrong. Then she sat down with me.

CeCe was big, with a perfectly round face and wide eyes that made her look like a doll. She wasn't coughing but making a whistling noise with her breath, and she seemed to be having a hard time.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Almost two,” Keisha said. “She developed asthma about six months ago. The doctor said she might outgrow it. A lot of kids do.”

The waiting room was full. One guy was in his undershirt, and a woman next to him had her arm around him. Another dude's face was all swollen on one side, and he had a cut over his eye. He looked as if he had been beaten up.

There were so many people in the waiting area that some people had to stand. What you did was wait until your name appeared on a board, and then you went into another room. I didn't know what they did in there.

A Latino guy was doubled over across from where me and Keisha sat, moaning and holding his stomach. Next to him was a skinny girl—she could have been a crackhead—with her head back and her mouth open. A teenage guy was with an older woman, and she was complaining about how long they had been waiting.

“If we were in a white neighborhood, they would see us right away,” she said. “His arm is probably broken and they just don't care.”

“How you hurt your arm?” Keisha asked the teenager.

“Playing touch football,” the boy said, smiling. “I caught the ball, though.”

The moaning guy stood up and started toward the door, but stopped and threw up before he made it out of the room.

“Damn!” An old man I hadn't noticed before called out. “Now we got to sit here and smell his puke!”

The guy who had thrown up gave the old man a dirty look and the finger and left the room. The receptionist made a phone call, and soon a janitor came in and cleaned up the mess.

“Can anybody come and see about my grandson?” the woman asked the receptionist.

“No, the doctors are all in the back playing poker,” the receptionist said.

“I believe you, too!” the old woman said.

Just then the door opened and a small crowd of people came in. The Latino man who had thrown up came in first and sat back down where he had been before. Then a pale woman came in, supported by a man who could have been her husband, and two cops, with a man in handcuffs.

“Gunshot wound!” the younger cop announced.

The receptionist got up, opened the frosted door to the next room, and the cops went through with the handcuffed man.

“Now we got to wait for the perp to get taken care of,” the old man said from the corner. “If the damned cops could shoot straight, they would have killed him and we wouldn't be delayed.”

Some of the people laughed at that, even the sick Latino.

CeCe started breathing hard, and Keisha patted her on her back and held her close.

I bet none of these people knew anything about Elijah's social contract. Maybe Sly was right, that it really wasn't meant for people like the ones in the emergency room. These people were sick, maybe even dying, and they had to wait to get seen and sit in the small room as if they somehow belonged together. And the old man was right—the smell of the puke and the disinfectant or whatever they had put on it was stinking up the joint.

“What are you thinking about so deep?” Keisha asked.

“About making soup and the social contract,” I said.

“You're a little girlish, aren't you?”

“Nah, I don't think so,” I said. “In the Soup Emporium—in the soup kitchen—I work in, the old man talks a lot about the social contract. Do you know what the social contract is?”

“No, and I don't want to know, either,” Keisha said.

I looked at her to see if she was kidding. She wasn't. “Why?” I asked. “You want to go to college and make something of yourself, so why don't you want to know what the social contract is?”

“Paul, and I don't particularly like your name, either,” Keisha said, “my life is simple. I either make it to the WNBA and make a bunch of money to take care of myself and CeCe, or I spend the rest of my life kissing tail and hoping for the best. I've watched you play ball. Your first step sucks because you don't
need
a first step. You got smarts backing you up, and probably a good family.”

“My father was killed this year,” I said. “When he was alive, he wasn't with us.”

“What did he have going on?”

“Not much,” I said. “In and out of the slam, mostly. Maybe he was trying to get himself together at the end, I don't know.”

“That's what's wrong in the hood,” Keisha said. “We're looking around for our fathers instead of looking up to them. I think you're okay, though. I'd like to marry somebody like you someday. But I really don't think it's going to happen. I don't.”

She turned away, and we sat there for an hour more waiting for her name to be called. Finally she went in, carrying CeCe on her hip. She said I didn't have to wait if I didn't want to.

Keisha's attitude was weird, but it was sounding enough like what Sly was saying to have some weight to it. He had been talking about people at the bottom of society having to stay there. And looking around the waiting room, I saw people who didn't look like they were ever going to be anyplace but where they were right then, lining up looking for some help.

I stood up and let some of the new people sit down. The guy the cops had brought had his side covered with a big bandage.

“They shot me and I didn't do nothing!” he called out to anyone who wanted to listen.

“Should have shot you in the head!” the old man in the corner shouted back. “Save the taxpayers some money!”

I waited for Keisha and CeCe and thought about what she had said about me not needing a first step. I wondered if she believed that, or was she just being Keisha-tough? She
had
called me to go to the hospital with her. It was strange how beat down the people in the waiting room looked—not just sick, or hurt, but beat down.

When she came out, she had a bag with two emergency inhalers for the baby.

“She going to be all right?”

“Yeah,” Keisha said. “Thanks for waiting.”

Keisha lived on 160th Street. She had the money for a cab and dropped me off on 145th. I felt bad for her and for CeCe, but when the little girl smiled at me, I felt better.

“So let's say that you and your friend
Sly live right next door to each other,” Elijah said. “And you have three million dollars in the bank, and he has three million dollars. You have a big house, and he's got a big house. You have a fancy car, and he's got a fancy car. And then one day, you leave your house to go downtown and forget about a bottle of soda on your patio table. Do you think that Sly is going to come over and steal your soda?”

“In the first place, he's not my friend,” I said. “I just see him around the hood. But if he's got three million dollars, I don't think he's going to come to my house and snatch a soda.”

“So what you're saying is that when everybody is rich and safe and has as much as they need, they don't think much about the social contract,” Elijah said. He was preparing carrots and lentils for his harira soup. “Most Americans don't think about the social contract, but we're all still dealing with it. We have a police force that's going to protect everybody, and an army, and rules and regulations. So even if they're not signing a formal agreement called the social contract, it's still there for them.”

“How did you get all up into thinking like this?” I asked.

“My grandfather lived in Littig, a small colored town in Texas. When he was growing up there, just about everybody in the town was black, and some of the older folks had been slaves. He said they had a few white people in town, and the whites and the coloreds got along just fine. In Littig, they had three kinds of food. They had pinch food, which you ate just to keep your stomach from pinching. That was mostly potatoes or rice, pan bread, greens, and whatever you could hunt up. He said you would go to somebody's house and find a mess of squirrel stew on the stove, or coon, or wild birds. If you could hunt, you could eat.

“Then there was step-up food. You were happy with your step-up food because you knew you were eating good. Beef was plentiful, but he didn't get much in the way of steaks and what have you. Mostly he had oxtails, shanks, and a little stew once in a while.”

“Hamburgers,” I said. “They're made of beef.”

“That's true,” Elijah said. “But you know I never had a hamburger until I came up north? Didn't know what the things were, and I know my grandfather didn't.”

“What was the other kind of food?” I asked.

“High life,” Elijah said, smiling. “That meant you were eating parts of animals that weren't that close to the ground. Instead of trotters, which is the pig's feet, you were eating pork shoulder and chops. Instead of eating chicken-feet soup—”

“Chicken-feet soup?”

“Boy, I've eaten more chicken feet in my life than I've eaten anything else,” Elijah said. “Boil 'em up for a few hours with some dumplings, cut up a potato or two in the pot, add a couple of tablespoons of flour and some salt and pepper, and you got the makings for a cold winter night.”

“I'm going to pass on the chicken feet,” I said.

“Well, I'm sure the chickens will appreciate that, Mr. DuPree,” Elijah said. “But as I moved on through life, I began to notice that some folks stayed on the chicken-feet level all their lives. Some moved up to chopsville, and some just seemed to do well all the time. They ate first-rate food, lived well, and didn't seem to have the troubles the chicken-feet people had. And I began wondering if there was a cause to that.”

“That's what Sly was saying,” I said. “Why are some people always on the bottom?”

“I wondered, same as he did, if there was something going on that I didn't know about. And what I figured out, sir, was that people find themselves part of a social order and don't understand what that order is or what they need to do to make it work for them,” Elijah said. “There are rules—sometimes they are laws and sometimes they are just the way things are done—that affect how we all live.”

“Sly was right on that,” I said.

“No, he thinks there's a plot out there to keep certain people down,” Elijah said. “What I'm saying is that there's a plot to help everybody in a certain way. And if you're not smart enough to figure out that way, then you are no better off than the crabs I told you about. I did tell you about the crabs, didn't I?”

“No, but I'm sure you will.”

“Once upon a time, there were three little crabs swimming off the eastern shore of Maryland. The three crabs were named Billy Joe, Billy Bob, and Billy Come-Along. All day long these three little crabs would swim in the water right behind their mother. The first crab, Billy Joe, held on to his mother with one claw. The second crab, Billy Bob, would be holding on to Billy Joe, and Billy Come-Along would be holding on to him. When the mother crab would find some sea grub or something like that, she would eat part of it and give the rest to her little babies.

“One day they were swimming near the pier when the mother crab saw a small trout caught in a trap. Well, she hadn't had any trout for a long time.

“She went over to where the trout was lying in the trap.
Kerblam!
” Elijah clapped his hands together. “That trap closed, and pretty soon it was being pulled out of the water. The three little crabs didn't much know what to do, and in truth, there wasn't much they could do. Their mama was gone. How were they going to get along all by themselves?”

“The first crab, Billy Joe, looked up and saw a bird flying in the air. He said that looked like something he would like to do, and he climbed out of the water, went up the biggest mountain he could find, and jumped. Killed him stone dead.

“The second crab, Billy Bob, saw a man walking his dog along the riverbank. Billy Bob thought that looked like a good thing to do, so he got out and walked along the riverbank, too. When the dog saw Billy Bob, he ran over and bit him in the back. Killed him stone dead.

“Now Billy Come-Along had seen all this and was a little nervous. At first he decided to stay right there in the water. But by this time, he was hungry. He swam over to the pier, and he saw a trout tied to another trap. He went over to get himself some trout while he thought things over, and
kerblam!
He was caught in that trap.