Hold Love Strong (6 page)

Nice let go of the fence, stepped back, and blew on his hands. Then he dribbled an invisible basketball. He paused and put it on his hip. I knew what he was doing: his free-throw routine. I'd seen him do it and I'd imitated it thousands of times. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and I watched the air billow from his mouth.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, speaking as if he were an announcer. “Here we are. No time left on the clock. Score is tied. Good guys versus bad guys. Nice versus all the snow in the world. We need this to win.”

Nice dribbled his invisible basketball again, twice with his right hand, twice with his left. Then he stopped and measured the rim through the rusted fence.

“Listen to the crowd try to distract him! Listen how loud they are, how much they're booing and shouting!” he announced.

He took a deep breath, in through his nose, out through his mouth. He bent his knees, brought the invisible ball to his waist, then slowly raised it above his head and shot, flicking his wrist, pushing the ball toward the rim with the tips of his fingers. And I watched it, the invisible ball soaring over the fence, floating through the falling snow, drifting across the fifty feet that separated us from the rim.

“It go in?” he asked me.

I looked through the fence at the rim. Everything was silent. I was just beginning to learn such silence could exist between two people, that despite proximity, people could be distant in their thoughts.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Thank God,” Nice said. “I ain't trying to go home with no milk again.”

So we trudged through the snow, toward the only open corner store ten blocks away, engulfed in a world of white, obligated and determined to get what my grandma demanded. All the way there, inside the store, and all the way back, Nice told me about basketball, about him playing in college and the NBA and him having a big house where we all could live and cars and money and I felt the earth moving. I felt it spinning on its axis, slowly revolving around the sun.

“Between you and me,” Nice said when we got back to our apartment and he unlocked the locks. “In a few years, we won't need to be getting no milk from the store. I'll buy a plane and a cow farm and some white farmer niggas milk those motherfuckers whenever we're thirsty.”

T
he heat in our building was broken, or rather deeply confused. Hot, dry air blasted into our apartment. And the phone was out. And the electricity was cut off too. So our apartment was dark. My grandmother had been let go from her job at Queens Hospital. They were making cutbacks. Layoffs. “Restructuring” is what my grandma said the hospital's administration called it. They started from the bottom. Everyone who needed the money most, everyone whose education and skill set made finding a good job a difficult test, everyone who was simultaneously just getting by and trying to provide their children a better opportunity than they had were fired first, the orderlies, the porters, and the security guards. Trickle-down economics.

My mother and I were in the kitchen, sitting at the table. She was slouched in a folding metal chair to my left and her bare feet rested across my thighs. I was doing my homework. It was June, the last weeks of school, and it was after midnight. Our only light came from the
dozen prayer candles huddled in the middle of the table that my grandmother bought at the dollar store and kept in the closet for just this sort of thing. There was Our Lady of Guadalupe, Saint Michael and Saint Lazarus, Saint Anthony and Saint Joseph, Saint Clare and a few Saint Judes, the patron saint of difficult cases. There was even a candle for the pope and another for Mother Teresa, although being that they were alive no one in my family knew why. I was small and skinny, so wispy the thin gold chain with my name on it that my grandma bought me for my seventh birthday hung like a stone around my neck and tapped the top of the table when I leaned forward over my homework and wrote my answers. I wore shorts and a tank top. I multiplied single digits and wrote spelling words five times each. My mother wore shorts and a red bathing-suit top. A wet dishtowel was draped across the back of her neck. She had headphones on and she alternated between watching me and staring at the floor as she listened to the same song, Marvin Gaye's “Distant Lover,” over and over again. Each time the song ended, she hit the stop button, the rewind button, and the play button on her Walkman. Then she settled into the song again, slouching deeper into the chair, disappearing in the four-minute sanctuary of the what and who of this distant love.

I focused intensely on my work, aiming to please her, aiming to make good on the promise I repeated so often it was not a promise but, quite simply, a fact. I would do well in school. A film of sweat covered every inch of my body and caused the underside of my legs to stick to the chair, my arms to stick to the table, and my hand to stick to my homework paper. My grandma was asleep in the bedroom she shared with my Aunt Rhonda and my mother and the ebb and flow of her snoring dragged my thoughts to her. Just like the previous night, and just like the night two weeks before when our electricity was first cut off, she had gone to sleep early. She had been out of work for four months. She had no prospects for a job. My Aunt Rhonda and my mother were
looking for jobs, they met with their welfare case managers, and they were enrolled in a GED class, but the class was so overcrowded and so egregiously organized their progress was so slow they decided there was no sense in going. David Dinkins was the first black mayor of New York.
Ask your teachers what that means,
my grandma said before she went to sleep.
Ask them why folks is worse off now than we was before.

All of the windows in the apartment were open so the sounds of the street, of traffic and music and the occasional laughter and shouting leapt into our apartment from below and bounced like rubber balls off the walls. Taking advantage of the darkness, my Aunt Rhonda lay on the couch in the living room, giggling and whispering things of an erotic nature in a coy tone to her new boyfriend, Beany, a diminutive twenty-year-old with the gentle, unassuming face of a boy who believed all he'd heard in church. Beany lived three doors down the hall with his mother, father, little sister, and their two cats, Geronimo and Sam. His mother and father were hardworking church people. His sister, Cecily, was a straight-A student. In fact, Beany had been a straight A student too, but in his mid-teens his aspirations changed and Beany became bent on being the baddest motherfucker in Queens. Fuck you was his disposition. From his vantage point, everyone was out to get him. But because Beany was small and because he didn't have the personal history or family structure to prove his courage or translate it into rage, and because his father was very much the master of his home, Beany, more than anything else, was bluster. I heard my Aunt Rhonda giggle and Beany beg please. Then I heard her say stop and it's too hot, then slap him and giggle again.

Our apartment door opened, and a pale river of light rolled into our apartment. Then the door closed and the darkness returned. Donnel was home. He mumbled a hello to my Aunt Rhonda then walked into the kitchen, a red brick in each hand.

“Where you been?” I asked.

“Stairs,” he said, short of breath. “Up and down, from the basement to the roof.”

Donnel wore grey sweatpants and a grey sweatshirt and although the kitchen was no brighter than dim, I could see that his collar was soaked with sweat. He was twelve. His body carried the must of a man who should be wearing deodorant and he was so lean the veins on the back of his hands looked like noodles hidden just beneath the surface of his cherrywood skin. He hated seeing my Aunt Rhonda with a man because he knew what the product of such a coupling was. Sooner or later, she'd be crying. Sooner or later, she'd be whirling in a fitful rage. Then she would be silent, lost, alone.

Donnel planted the bricks on the table and surveyed the kitchen, the bouquet of flowers Mr. Goines delivered the previous day that we'd pushed to the back of the table, the dishes in the sink, and the birdcage on the far corner of the counter, a moat of discarded seeds surrounding it. Inside the cage, the birds perched beside each other and tried to sleep through the heat, their beaks burrowed in their green chests. Donnel crossed the room, stuck his finger through the bars of the birdcage, and whistled a few high notes.

“How many times?” I asked.

“Twenty,” he said.

“You crazy?” I said.

Proudly, he looked at me over his shoulder. “Why?”

“Cause it's hot.”

“Nigga,” he scolded. “Heat can't stop me.”

That spring Donnel had been beat real bad. Jumped after school, a crew of young brothers split his lip, split his head, black-and-blued, and broke blood vessels in both of his eyes. He fought back though, and his hands were so swollen and battered they looked like he'd spent hours grating them against a rock wall. He couldn't grip or squeeze so he had to open bottles, bags, and cans of soda with his teeth for a week. Don
nel must have thrown as many punches as he'd been dealt. Him against what I imagined to be hundreds, not one of whom he named. He refused to; refused to say why, refused tell anyone where it happened, when it happened, if he was alone or with friends. It didn't matter how many times we asked, or how many times I begged him to tell just me as we lay head to foot in bed at night.

The one thing he did say, the one thing he swore his life away on, is that it would never happen again. Never, he said. And it wouldn't happen to Eric or me. Never, he swore. Not once. No one would so much as think of breathing on us. He'd kill if he had to. With his bare hands. Bet on it, he said. He made up a workout program and followed it religiously to ready himself. He did push-ups and sit-ups, seemingly thousands at a time. He did pull-ups from crossing signs every time we came to a corner and the sign glowed
Don't walk.
He leaned our mattress against the wall and boxed it, pounding and pounding it until he was soaked in sweat. And he ran with the bricks; ran around the block, ran up and down the stairs.

Donnel came to the table and looked down at my schoolwork. He was in the seventh grade. Maybe he was passing his classes. Maybe he was failing. He didn't care, and although she swore she cared, although she asked him when she was going to see him doing homework and where his report cards were, my Aunt Rhonda was too concerned with what she wanted to truly care either. As far as she was concerned, Donnel was a man; what he wanted, if he really wanted it, he'd figure out how to get. The thing Donnel most wanted was for my Aunt Rhonda to be free from her desperate need for a man, and going to school had nothing to do with it. So Donnel either didn't go to school or went to school with a level of contentiousness that made teachers demand that he tell them who he thought he was.

“What you doing?” he asked, picking up my math homework and holding it so he could see it in the candlelight.

“Multiplication,” I said. “I finished that already.”

He studied my answers for a moment. Then he put the page down in front of me.

“What's six times six?” he asked.

I thought for a moment. “Thirty-six,” I said.

He pointed at one of my answers. “You got thirty-two,” he said. “Fix it.”

I looked at the problem Donnel had identified. He was right. I erased the answer, blew the pieces of rubber eraser from the paper, and wrote thirty-six.

My mother pressed the stop button on her Walkman and took her headphones from her ears. “Donnel, let Abraham be,” she scolded. “He's got schoolwork to finish.”

Donnel ignored her. He tapped my shoulder. “Want to go swimming?” he asked.

“Swimming?” I said.

“In the pool,” Donnel said.

“The city closes the pool when the sun goes down,” snapped my mother. “You know that.” She smacked my cheek with the back of her fingers to get my attention. “Can't you see he's fuck'n with you?” She tapped her hand on my homework. “C'mon, finish. I ain't got all night.”

If there was one thing Donnel wasn't, it was a liar. He hated even the insinuation that he might be. He planted his hand on my homework and looked at my mother, his face and body taut, his eyes shining, black steel in the candlelight.

“Someone put a kid pool on the roof,” he insisted.

My mother looked Donnel dead in the eyes and considered what he said. She was twenty-two, lonely, hot, and always willing to embrace an escape from life.

“The elevator working?” she asked.

“I heard it going up and down when I was in the stairs,” Donnel said.

“You sure?” said my mother. “Cause I ain't try'n to get stuck.”

“Who?” Donnel teased.

“Me,” my mother said. “What? You gonna tell me I can't come?”

Donnel knew he'd won. He took his hand from my homework.

“And the water's clean?” my mother asked.

Donnel shrugged. “Looked clean to me.”

My mother thought for a brief moment and I wondered what she considered. Maybe she reflected on the facts of her life, that she was without a job; that my grandma was out of work too; that my Uncle Roosevelt was out somewhere who knows where doing who knows what with Luscious; that my Aunt Rhonda was on the couch with Beany, cuddling and entertaining fantasies; that my grandma and Eric were asleep, deep in safe, dark worlds of dreams; and that there she was, in Ever, sitting in the almost dark, sweating in a kitchen as her son spelled simple words and solved simple math equations that didn't solve any of our problems.

She swung her legs off my lap, leaned forward, and tapped her hand on the table. “Abraham,” she said. “Hurry up. Finish what you got.”

My mother took a candle from the table and quickly disappeared into the bedroom she shared with my grandma and my Aunt Rhonda. Donnel took a candle and went into our room to change into shorts. I wrote the last spelling words as quickly as I could. Then Donnel came back into the kitchen for me.

“You ready?” he asked.

I finished writing. I put my pencil down. Then I stood in a rush.

“Put your shit away,” Donnel ordered. “Put it in your bag. Don't be leaving it all out.”

Hurrying, I put my homework into my school folder and stuffed it into my backpack. Then I took a candle and followed Donnel into the dark living room.

“Where you all going?” asked my Aunt Rhonda.

“To the roof,” said Donnel, not even slightly shifting in the direction of his mother and Beany.

“How long you gonna be gone?” my Aunt Rhonda asked.

Donnel didn't answer. He unlocked the door and opened it as wide as he could. The room flooded with the pale glow of the hallway's light and Donnel swung around and looked at my Aunt Rhonda and Beany as if he might catch them committing a crime. My Aunt Rhonda was slouched against Beany and her hand disappeared somewhere in his lap. Quickly, she pulled it free and covered her eyes as if the light was not pallid but blinding.

“Donnel, damn!” she complained. “What're you doing?”

“Go on!” said Beany. He pulled away from my Aunt Rhonda. “Nigga, stop being stupid. Get out of here!”

Donnel held the candle just beneath his chin, his eyes on Beany. “Who you talking to?” he asked, his voice molten anger.

“
You
,” said Beany.

“Nigga,” Donnel began, but my Aunt Rhonda interrupted him.

“D,” she said, “take your little angry ass wherever.”

“Before you get hurt,” Beany added.

Hurt? Donnel glared at Beany for a long, dangerous moment. I feared what he might say and its repercussions. Donnel had a tongue as sharp and wicked as arbitrary hate and raining razor blades. I'd seen him slice and dice and fillet brothers, name all of their deepest secrets, and then chastise them for bothering to keep them. He shifted his eyes to me. And although I was afraid, I tried to use my eyes to let him know that whatever happened, whatever he said and however Beany reacted, I had his back, that if Beany leapt from the couch and tried to kill him, I'd be there killing Beany more. Donnel swallowed then moved his eyes from me back to my Aunt Rhonda and Beany. I assumed he would speak, say something vicious. But
he said nothing. Whatever my Aunt Rhonda wanted, whatever she believed she needed, Donnel always, somehow, found a way to rationalize and give in to. He blew out his candle, put it on the floor, and called for my mother.