What They Found (6 page)

“I was going to try to do it myself using a mirror,” she said, her Southern accent coming through strongly, “but I figured I’d probably just mess it up.”

I trimmed her hair. She said her name was Sue Ellen and chatted about a letter from her father in Alabama. He was warning her about the dangers of New York, she said, as if Alabama weren’t just as dangerous.

All the while Leon—now Burn—sat watching us. He had grown into a good-looking man, a little over six feet tall, and muscled. But the way he watched us, nothing moving except his eyes, he reminded me of a snake, and the whole world was potential prey. It was as if anything you said might set him off and he’d lash out. He wore a gold suit and a gold and black shirt open at the collar. He saw me looking at him in the mirror and smiled. I was embarrassed that he’d caught me checking him out and dropped my eyes to my work.

When I finished trimming her hair Sue Ellen paid me and gave me a twenty-dollar tip, which was more than the trim.

Abeni went to the window and gave a running account as they were leaving.

“He’s got a driver who opened the door for Burn and she opened the door for herself,” Abeni said, peering through the blinds. “And she made sure she showed some leg as she got in.”

* **

We talked about Burn and his lady friend for a while longer before going back to the day’s business. When the door opened two days later and I saw him standing there I was surprised. Mama and Abeni had gone downtown to buy supplies and I was checking the bills. I knew he wasn’t going to do anything to me, but I felt a sense of panic when he asked if we could go out sometime. That was when the conversation ended with me telling him about the boat trip.

I tried to put Burn out of my mind. I hadn’t encouraged him in any way and he was smart enough to see that I wasn’t the kind of girl he usually dealt with. At least I hoped he was.

Saturday morning. The late-August sun had burned off the mist from the night before by the time I arrived at the pier. The first cars and ambulettes had already arrived and the children were being escorted onto the boat by either the Center staff or the volunteers. The children were excited. I had been told that the youngest child would be nine and the oldest a young adult as old as twenty-one. Somehow they all looked younger.

The woman I was to work with asked me to help get the lunch baskets aboard.

“I always feel that this is like the push-off for the invasion of Europe,” she said, smiling.

A lot of the children had cerebral palsy and were
either mildly or severely limited in their movements. Some were in wheelchairs and others used crutches. They used them well, too, I thought, as I struggled up the walkway with a stack of lunches.

I was hoping that Burn wouldn’t show up. He would just be out of place and in the way. But on the way down the gangway I saw a gypsy cab pull up. He got out dressed remarkably sensibly for him, designer jeans and sneakers and a tight denim shirt that showed off his arms. I introduced him to some staff members as Mr. Burn and saw a smile flicker across his face.

He was all business helping the kids onto the boat and getting them settled. When the boat moved away from the pier he stood at the rail and watched as they waved goodbye to their parents and guardians.

We made sure that each of the children was comfortably positioned and gave them morning snacks and either juice or soft drinks. By the time the boat reached the George Washington Bridge I was already a little pooped.

“Why they so pale?” Burn asked, settling into the folding chair next to me. “I mean the white kids.” Three-quarters of the younger children were white and the rest black or Latino.

“Because many of them don’t get out all year,” I said. “The Center works with them while they are in rehab, but after that it’s up to other agencies to provide recreation. Sometimes their situations are really hard.”

“Yeah.”

Burn didn’t say another word for the next half hour. He watched intently as the kids ate or played some of the games that the staff led. Occasionally he let his eyes drift toward the shore or follow the flight of the gulls following the boat for scraps of food. I thought I should at least talk to him. He was helping out and had worked hard. But I wasn’t sure what to say to a guy everyone knew had been shot at least four times.

“I guess you decided that you wanted to be called Burn,” I said.

A beat. “You think people would call me something I didn’t want to be called?”

“I guess not,” I said, “but why Burn?”

“It tells you where I’m coming from.”

“Okay.”

“Noee’s a nice name,” he said. “It’s different.”

“It’s not really my name,” I said. “My real name is Carol. When I was a kid I found out that there were two ways of spelling my name. Some people had an ‘e’ on the end of Carol. For some reason I didn’t want them spelling my name wrong and that became more important than the name itself. So when people asked me my name—”

“You said no ‘e.’ ”

I nodded and he smiled. It was a good smile, broad and open-faced. Then it quickly died and the face was hard again, a stone with eyes.

Two women from the staff joined us and the conversation somehow changed to being about whether the basketball players who claimed to be seven feet tall were actually that tall. Mrs. Polucci, a woman in her early fifties with a pretty face and beautiful black hair she wore loose, said she didn’t believe they were.

“I think they just put out those numbers to impress people,” she said. “What do you think?” She turned to Burn.

“They’re that big.” His answer was flat, dry.

Mrs. Polucci nodded uncomfortably. She switched the conversation to how lucky we were to have such a beautiful day for the outing.

“And thank you both for volunteering,” she said a few moments later as she stood to leave. “We couldn’t pull off these cruises without volunteers.”

A thin Latino boy with a badge that read “Domingo” came over and asked Burn if he rapped.

“No, man.” Burn spoke seriously. “How about you? You rap?”

Domingo put his head down and shrugged his shoulders. Burn reached over and pulled a chair close to where the youngster stood and pointed to it. Domingo had to turn sideways and kind of aim his body at the chair to sit in it.

“Let’s hear you rhyme.”

“I’m not too good,” Domingo said.

“Yeah, but I’m not going to let you go until I hear it,” Burn said.

Domingo rocked back and forth a little to get his rhythm; then he started his rap. It wasn’t bad, or at least it made as much sense as most rap music made to me. Two other kids, a girl and a boy, came over and listened.

Burn’s face didn’t react to Domingo, but I felt he would have enough sense not to put him down.

“You’re okay,” he said. “You sound a little too much like Jay-Z used to, so you got to work on that. Maybe get you some new jams to listen to so you’ll come up with some new ideas. But you’re okay.”

Domingo smiled.

“He’s not a professional.” The girl was weighed down with braces.

Burn turned and acted surprised. He asked Domingo if it was true that he wasn’t a professional and Domingo sheepishly admitted that it was. Burn said that was all right, that he was still okay.

I was touched by the way he handled the kids and when they drifted off I told him that. No answer. No emotion on his face. He had turned back to stone, back to Burn.

“What do you do?” I asked him. “Just go around being hard all the time?”

He took a deep breath. A moment to think. “I work with what I got,” he said. “Same as you. You got a good
way of acting, you look good, you got a job. That’s what you got to work with and you work it, right?”

“I guess so.”

“So work with it,” he said.

“Do you find … talking to children easier than talking to adults?” I said.

He just looked at me with a gaze that was so cold it nearly made me shiver. I swallowed hard and tried to think of something else to say. Nothing came. I didn’t want to look away, to let him intimidate me, but I couldn’t keep my eyes on his.

The trip up the Hudson toward Bear Mountain took four hours, and by eleven-thirty we were slowly turning for the return trip. Some other kids, probably ones who had heard about Domingo rapping to Burn, came over. He was easier with them than he was with the Center staff, or with me. He talked to them softly, asking them what they did in their spare time, what teams they liked. And he listened. As he spoke to them I saw how they edged toward him. Some touched his shoulder or his arm. I wished I hadn’t made the remark about it being easier for him to talk to them than to adults.

I thought of the questions that Mama and Abeni would ask me about him when I got home. The truth was that I didn’t know anything about Burn and I thought he didn’t want me to know anything. All I understood was that I didn’t feel comfortable with him, not like the kids did. But that was who I was.

The older children organized a video game contest and asked me to keep score. I couldn’t believe how complicated their rules were and how fierce they were about sticking to them, but I did my best.

I found myself imagining that I was a child talking to Burn. Would he have kidded with me, made me feel comfortable as I vied for his attention?

Then I gave myself all the reasons I wouldn’t want to be around him. But even then I knew why some girls could go for him. The whole hard thing, the stare, the short, almost grunted statements he tried to pass off as conversation. It was a huge male stereotype. Even as I told myself that I didn’t need an ebony caveman in my life, I could see how it changed the whole man-woman thing. With Burn there was no give-and-take. He was the man and you had to figure out what that meant.

When the video games were over I found some shade and collapsed into a chair under an umbrella. The day had been more physical than I had expected, and the added tension of Burn had done a number on me. Mrs. Polucci and a perky young therapist from the Center brought over a pitcher of lemonade.

“I can judge the success of these outings from the amount of food consumed,” Mrs. Polucci said. “They’ve eaten enough for a small army of crusaders.”

“And we’ve only had one accident so far,” added the therapist, “and that was a good one. A girl’s legs folded under her and she couldn’t get up. Then a boy who’s
more handicapped than she is tried to help her up and he fell down with her. Then two more kids just came over and plopped down and they all started laughing.”

“What she isn’t telling you is that she plopped down with them!” Mrs. Polucci said. “We had a little pile of people on the foredeck. I was thinking of making them all walk the plank.”

“I spoke to your friend and asked him if he had enjoyed the trip,” the therapist said. “He gave me a hand gesture that could have been yes or could have been no, so I didn’t ask him anything more.”

“He’s being hard,” I said, in my deepest voice.

We started talking about dream cruises we would like to take and were just about in agreement that we all needed to take an all-expense-paid cruise around the world when the first signs of the city appeared.

A yacht passed and the people on board, looking very fit and wealthy, held their drinks up in greeting. The kids waved.

I saw Burn headed our way.

“Why some of the kids upset?” He knelt next to my chair.

“They’re not upset,” I said. “Some of them are probably tired, that’s all.”

“They ain’t tired,” he said firmly, “they’re upset.”

“Burn, you know, these kids have had a long day and everybody is not as strong as you,” I said.

“Mr. Burn, you’re probably right about them being upset,” Mrs. Polucci interjected. “For some of these children this is the one time in the entire year they get to be out like this. It’s very hard for their parents to take them around. Today they’re with friends, they’re in the open air, and they’re having a good time. When they see us returning to the city they realize … well, that their special day is over.”

Burn grunted, turned on his heel, and walked away. Mrs. Polucci began talking about a plan that the city once had to check on the handicapped people and make sure that their lives were as full as possible. “But those great ideas run into funding problems.”

There wasn’t anything to add to that.

The boat slowed as we neared the pier. The row of am-bulettes and buses lined up to take the children home looked like toys.

We started getting the children ready.

“We need to get your friend back here next year,” Mrs. Polucci said, nodding toward a group of kids.

Burn had a boy of about ten on his lap. The boy was crying and a girl was trying to console him. I went over and saw how the boy lay sobbing against Burn’s chest. Burn patted the boy’s head gently. His dark eyes glistened as he held back tears.

This was something Burn understood.

Quickly I walked over to help some volunteers line up
wheelchairs and hand out what was left of the box lunches. There was a storm in my chest, a flood of emotions caught up in what I thought I knew about Burn and, perhaps, what I didn’t know about myself.

“Can I? Can I?” A child in a wheelchair was looking up at me.

“Can you what?”

“Can I come again next year?”

“Yes, of course.” I gave him a hug, ignoring the sticky fingers on my blouse.

Getting the kids ashore was hectic. Each of us was responsible for our own list of kids, making sure that each was delivered safely to their guardians or to transportation. It took nearly forty minutes before the last child was strapped in and waving goodbye.

I waited on the shore for Burn to finish with the children. Mrs. Polucci met him first and shook his hand.

There were things I wanted to say to Burn, but I didn’t know what they were. On one hand I was so happy that he had been so good with the children, more sensitive to who they were and what they were going through than I was. He was not the simple person I had pictured him to be. On the other hand there was something about him that sent warning signals throughout my body. It was as if I had stumbled upon a rock and found that it had a heartbeat.