The Get Over (2 page)

We see a darkened screen slowly grow light, and the outline of tenements is evident. The camera PANS to the sky, and we see the sun moving across the screen, denoting the passage of time. CUT TO: Interior of STEVE HARMON's house. We are in his room, where he is doing his math homework. Things are back to normal.

CLOSE-UP: A newspaper on STEVE's desk. We see the date and two weeks have passed. The headline talks about how crime has been reduced in Harlem.

Sirens. Police cars zooming down the boulevard and turning up toward Jackie Robinson Park.

“It's probably a gang fight, with that many police running up there,” said Dreana Winfield, who lived down the hall from me. “There could be some shooting going on!”

People were looking out of their windows, and some were standing on the stoop waiting to find out what happened. Nobody was walking up the hill.

Ambulances joined the police cars going toward the park. Dreana said she thought it was terrorists now.

It took a full thirty minutes for the police cars to start leaving. Some people were coming down the hill, and I saw my friend Jamie.

“Anybody know what happened up there?” I asked.

“You know that guy with the big shoulders?” Jamie asked. “Arnold something?”

“I don't know him, but I've seen him around,” I said.

“He tried to hold up an armored truck!”

“What?”

“The guard shot him about three times, and the dude he was with . . .”

“JT?”

“Oh, you heard?”

“Somebody was saying he was involved,” I managed to squeeze out of my throat.

“He was there and tried to run away and got hit by a gypsy cab,” Jamie said. “A woman said he was hurt bad but still tried to run. He ran across the street to the store where they sell wigs and stuff and down into the basement across from the bank. The cops got him in that basement. They shot him about ninety-leven times.”

“He dead?”

“Yeah, he dead,” Jamie said. “When the ambulance came, the guy said they didn't need no ambulance, just bring the chalk.”

“That's cold,” I said.

“Yo, man, I heard he lived in that building on the corner, too,” Jamie said. “Not the good one with the bank in it but the one he died in.”

“Oh.”

LONG SHOT. ARNOLD pulls his gun and the GUARD turns slowly. Everything is in slow motion as we see the fire from the gun. We see ARNOLD's body twist. We move in toward his face as he twists, his mouth open, with one last movement before he fades away.

Then we are in a gypsy cab. The DRIVER is Haitian and is talking on his cell as suddenly a figure hurtles in front of the moving car. There is a thump and the sound of screeching tires. Then: We see a figure get up from the street. He is limping badly as he runs across the street to a building. For a moment we lose him, but then the camera PANS down to a blood trail. We follow the blood trail until we reach a basement. We hear a voice.

VOICE

Drop that gun!

We hear the sound of gunfire. The shots build to a cascade of sound. Then: As the sounds of the gunshots lessen, we hear the heartbeat that we heard before. The screen is gray and blurry, and there is a circular pattern spinning rapidly. The spinning slows as the heartbeat continues. The gray slowly changes to colors that are indistinct, then become lit candles reminding us that the basement where JT died was where he lived. We move closer to the memorial candles. The screen goes black. The heartbeat stops.

The talk on the stoop was about how stupid Arnold and JT had been. That they had tried the holdup at the wrong time of day, and that they should have shot the guard first.

“You going for big money, you got to be ruthless,” Little Willie said.

There was a chorus of agreement, and then the conversation switched to baseball.

The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help. That way even if you sniffle a little they won't hear you. If anybody knows that you are crying, they'll start talking about it and soon it'll be your turn to get beat up when the lights go out
.

There is a mirror over the steel sink in my cell. It's six inches high, and scratched with the names of some guys who were here before me. When I look into the small rectangle, I see a face looking back at me but I don't recognize it. It doesn't look like me. I couldn't have changed that much in a few months. I wonder if I will look like myself when the trial is over
.

This morning at breakfast a guy got hit in the face with a tray. Somebody said some little thing and somebody else got mad. There was blood all over the place
.

When the guards came over, they made us line up against the wall. The guy who was hit they made sit at the table while they waited for another guard to bring them rubber gloves
.

When the gloves came, the guards put them on, handcuffed the guy, and then took him to the dispensary. He was still bleeding pretty bad
.

They say you get used to being in jail, but I don't see how. Every morning I wake up and I am surprised to be here. If your life outside was real, then everything in here is just the opposite. We sleep with strangers, wake up with strangers, and go to the bathroom in front of strangers. They're strangers but they still find reasons to hurt each other
.

Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. It is a strange movie with no plot and no beginning. The movie is in black and white, and grainy. Sometimes the camera moves in so close that you can't tell what is going on and you just listen to the sounds and guess
.

I have seen movies of prisons but never one like this. This is not a movie about bars and locked doors. It is about being alone when you are not really alone and about being scared all the time
.

I think to get used to this I will have to give up what I think is real and take up something else. I wish I could make sense of it
.

Maybe I could make my own movie. I could write it out and play it in my head. I could block out the scenes like we did in school. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll write it down in the notebook they let me keep. I'll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me
.

High above the city, above the black tar rooftops, the dark brick chimneys spewing angry wisps of burnt fuel, there is a black speck making circles against the gray patchwork of Harlem sky. From the park below it looks like a small bird. No, it doesn't look like a small bird, but what else could it be?

At the end of a bench, a young man holds up a running shoe.

“It doesn't weigh anything.”

“That's the thing,” Twig said. “There's going to be nothing keeping me back except gravity. When I hit the track in these babies, I'm going to be flying!”

“The heel is flat. Why doesn't it have a heel?” I asked.

“Because this shoe doesn't want my heels touching the ground,” Twig said, smiling. “This shoe doesn't play. This is eighty-five dollars' worth of kick-ass running, my man.”

“You paid eighty-five dollars for these shoes?”

“Coach Day got them for me because I'm on the team.”

“Looks good, I guess,” I said, handing the track shoe back to Twig.

“Hey, Darius, my grandmother said you should come by this weekend,” Twig said. “I told her that you were really Dominican but didn't want to admit it.”

“Why did you tell her that?” I asked. “I'm not Dominican.”

“Right, but she thinks she's a detective,” Twig said. “When you come over, she's going to break out into some Spanish in her Dominican accent and see how you answer. She thinks you're going to come back in Spanish, and then she's got you!”

“Why do you do stuff like that?”

“Because it's fun,” Twig said.

“It's stupid,” I said.

“A little,” Twig said, smiling. “But it's fun, too. You saw Mr. Ramey today? You said you were going to talk to him about a scholarship.”

“I saw him,” I said.

“Didn't go too good?” The corners of Twig's mouth tightened.

“I ran into the numbers,” I said. “He asked me what my grade-point average was, as if he didn't already have it. I told him it was about three point two, and he just shrugged and said it was closer to three even.”

“You show him the letter from Miss Carroll?”

“Yeah, she already spoke to him about me,” I said. “The thing I couldn't get around was that she was saying I'm smart—”

“You are, man!”

“Okay, but what he's saying is that when you send a transcript to a college, they want to see the numbers written down that say you're smart. Two point five isn't going to make anybody jump up and down unless you're six nine or can run a ten-second hundred yards wearing football cleats.”

“Man, you got too much on the ball not to get a scholarship to some school,” Twig said. “You tell him about the letter you got from that magazine?”

“How if I revise my story they might publish it?”

“Yeah.”

“I showed it to him so he could see it was real,” I said. “He got right to the bottom line. He said that right now I wasn't scholarship material. If the
Delta Review
actually published the story, I should come back to him and he'd call a few colleges. I don't think he thought I had a chance. The
Delta Review
is a college quarterly, Twig. It's got a lot of prestige, and everybody who's a serious writer is shooting for it.”

“He's a cold dude, Darius,” Twig said.

“No, man, it's a cold-ass world. When you open the refrigerator and you get cold coming out, you should expect it.”

“That's all he had to say?”

“No, he said that maybe I should drop out and do my junior year over again. He said he wasn't recommending it but that I should maybe think about it.”

“You going to do that?”

“No. I could run into the same thing I ran into this year and then just not finish high school,” I said. “This way at least I'm on the track to graduating.”

“You tell him why your grades were messed up?”

“I started to get at it, but he didn't want to hear it,” I said. “He wasn't bitchy about it or anything like that, but he laid it out straight. He said that what I needed, a full scholarship in a school away from Harlem, just wasn't going to happen.”

“So what you going to do?”

“Hope I can fix up the story so that they'll publish it,” I said.

“You can do it, bro,” Twig said. “I know you can do it!”

“He called up Miss Carroll when I was sitting there,” I said. “He asked her point friggin' blank if I had a chance to get published. She said I had a chance, but the way she said it—”