Young Junius, page 3
part #4 of Jack Palms Series
“Shit,” Junius said. He didn’t want to go back out into the cold and find another place to hide for the night, but if Elf was right, then that’s what they’d have to do.
“I—” Terrence tried again.
“You stupid.” Elf clapped his brother on the side of the head, almost knocking him out of his chair. “Come on, J. We out.” He tilted his neck at Junius and headed for the stairs.
8
Marlene looked out at the roofs of the other two towers: the additional one she held and the one Rock’s boys controlled. In both she could see flames burning in the windows, the occasional lighter brought up to a pipe filled with what they’d started calling crack.
Crack: solid cocaine rolled into a ball and mixed with shit, cutter, ammonia. Smoked. The fastest high, the worst down, the most people fucked up she’d ever seen this fast. Marlene wasn’t selling rocks to people in her towers, not supplying her own with the white death that went for less than weed, fucked you up ten times worse, and left you begging for another blast.
No, she wouldn’t work that way; she wouldn’t take her own people to that place and make them beg. But Rock would, and now she needed to clear him out. Her people were already walking over to 412 and buying from his crew.
She ran a fingertip across her upper lip. In her hand, she clutched the remote for the lighting and shades. She’d made her penthouse by breaking out a wall and joining two of the public housing units together, and she could call it that all she wanted, but looking out the windows into North Cambridge, into a town of two-family separated houses, she knew there was more than what she had here.
She slid the blinds closed with a button. With another button, she brought the lights up, just enough to add visibility to the ambience she’d set up with her row of candles on the mantle and the two on stanchions above either end of the couch. Laid out across the tan suede, Anthony snored lightly, the candlelight shimmering in the sweat across his chest.
He looked good and she knew it, the way his chest thinned to two narrow hips and fine legs. She’d be able to get him up again, awake and aroused, and that would distract her from Rock for another half hour, maybe more, but it wouldn’t solve anything. Seeing those pipes blazing in her windows, knowing that poison instead of basic, simple weed was going into the lungs of her people, sent a shiver through her. All out of simple greed.
“Fuck,” she said. “This can’t stand.”
They called her Oracle because things she said came true. These days, in most cases they did because she made them, controlled the manpower and violence to get her wishes accomplished, her plans realized. But even before all this, she had something people believed in.
Once, as a girl, she won an AM radio at a street fair by picking the right paper bag off a table filled with a hundred. People asked her for the rest of the day to do their picking. Each time she did they wound up with something they wanted—not the rubber bounce balls, or the other cheap toys from the supermarket machines, but fancy brushes and nice mirrors, little remote control cars on wires. The good stuff.
After that, at age eight, she started having dreams. When she dreamt that her uncle, her mother’s brother, would be killed, she did not say a thing. Then, a week later, he was taken by a truck while driving home.
Drunk driver, the police said, but the white man behind the wheel never went to jail. Nothing happened to him.
Her mother cried for weeks.
For close to a month, she would not leave the apartment; she’d stay in her room, come out and drink coffee, an occasional beer. When she ate, it was cereal. She sent Marlene’s older brother to the store for groceries, and he’d come back with real food—eggs, cheese, macaroni, even hamburgers—but her mother wouldn’t eat. These things sat in the refrigerator getting old until Marlene took pans out from under the counters, put things into them, and did her best to follow the instructions on the boxes, to make do when they called for ingredients she didn’t have (two sticks of butter?), or guess at how to cook things that came without instructions at all, like hamburgers.
Her brother laughed at the table, quietly so their mother wouldn’t hear, and told Marlene they were the worst meals he had ever eaten, even as he wolfed down whatever she put out. He’d be careful at first, slow to fork into the crisp pieces of meat she scraped onto his plate, but still he ate them, every one.
For the whole time her mother cried, Marlene blamed herself for not telling her family about the dream.
Then a year later, the dreams came back. This time they featured her brother.
Malik had always been a basketball player, one of the best in the towers. He regularly stayed out late holding court up at Corcoran Park.
In her dream he played basketball for a school with uniforms and a crowd. His team was losing. They were only down a few points, and Malik had done something good, something she didn’t see because the crowd stood above her, cheering. And then they groaned loudly as a group, and a woman screamed. She heard someone shout Malik’s name.
That was how the dream ended. She had it twice on successive nights, and this was enough to make her frightened. Even with the dream of her uncle, she hadn’t seen anything twice.
She told her brother, begged him not to play for the school team that year, but he’d committed himself to trying out for varsity at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, the school where Patrick Ewing had played and Rumeal Robinson was a star. So what if Malik was an inconsistent student his first two years; he’d decided to try out and had been going to class. His mind couldn’t be changed.
Then the tragedy began.
Malik made the team and played more and more as the season progressed. By his senior year he was averaging fifteen points a game. He was asked to play for UMass Boston. The problems started when he left Cambridge, moved out to play for Salem State.
At home was where things changed. With Malik gone, nothing remained behind but the resentment. No one liked somebody from the towers to make it, even if Malik’s success was anything but guaranteed. Just that he had an option was enough for people he’d come up with—the other players and runners and even those who dropped out of school before Malik went back to class—to turn on him.
So when he did finally get hurt—in a game for Salem State when he went up for a dunk over a crowd and severed his ACL on the landing, basically fell from the rim to the floor in a terrible position and destroyed his knee—he returned to find the towers gone sour around him. People were secretly happy at his failure. Over time, when he didn’t play basketball again, he grew welcomed. They accepted him as one of their own, a loser to the world but a lifelong member of the Rindge Towers; as long as he had not actually made it free, the fact that he came close was a cause for respect.
This was his tragedy, as well as his greatest success.
From his return, he started taking over the drug game in his own tower, 410, and when he achieved that, he took over 411, installed Marlene and their mother in the double unit at the top to rule its game. To their mother, this was the second tragedy of her life, the one that pushed her into the misery from which she never returned.
Seeing her son turn back to the towers and become a part of the game was more than she could handle. She retreated again to her room, crying, refusing to eat but once a day. She started to wither into a frail old woman. Her social security checks piled up on the kitchen table—she wouldn’t use them, and neither Malik nor Marlene needed or wanted the money.
That was when Marlene had another dream. In this one she pictured her mother in a field, the sun on her face and flowers in her hair, the wind blowing around her. She was smiling. Marlene heard a voice in the background, a woman calling to her mother from a house.
The second time she had the dream, she knew the voice was her aunt—her father’s younger sister, still living in Mississippi—though they hadn’t spoken to or heard from her in nearly twenty years.
When she woke up, she knew what they had to do. Her mother needed to go south, back to the state where she grew up, where she’d lived before her ambitious husband moved them north to try his luck in Boston, where he wound up driving a bus for the MBTA.
When the cheerful postcards started arriving from Mississippi and they knew their mother was happy, Marlene became even more important. Malik recognized her as special, possessing more knowledge than she could be explained to possess.
He had started them calling her the Oracle, and she became a big part of his new hold on the game.
Without their mother to worry, Malik grew ruthless, his hold on the towers increasing until the last two with power were Rock and himself.
Rock had 412, and Malik controlled 410 and 411 with the power of Marlene’s visions and his iron fist.
9
Elf led Junius up his block into Somerville, further from the projects, toward the neighborhoods that were nothing but houses where white people lived. They passed the big hall for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Junius heard music inside and thought he saw people dancing.
Elf pulled him on.
“Fuck. What happen when Rock’s crew or someone from Willie show up at my house? They gonna fuck with Terrence. And if my mom answers—” Elf didn’t finish the thought. Instead, he just said, “Fuck,” which covered it.
Junius snapped out of whatever haze he’d entered. If Elf’s mom had to deal with boys from Willie or Rock’s crew, then things were bad for Elf as far as going home again. His mom had already put him on a probation.
“Where we going?”
“Shit if I know.” Elf cut onto a side street and stopped by a brick wall. “I was thinking we could break into a house. Find one where no one’s home and break in through the basement.”
“Yeah? Or maybe we go to my mom’s.”
“You don’t think they be waiting? Watching your moms to see everything she does?”
Junius felt the cold whip through his jeans and wrap around his legs. He knew it was too cold for them to stay out much longer. “How about we break in though my basement? Go around through the back way?”
“What if Rock’s boys waiting up in there for us?”
Junius shook his head, trying to force the thought out of his mind. “Then that’s where we going. I don’t want my moms bothered by no fools.” He got up and started for his house: up the cross street it wasn’t more than a handful of blocks over and a few streets up.
“Come on,” he said.
They crossed the bottom of Junius’s block as quiet as they could. He pulled his hood up and walked quickly, looking for people in parked cars—a lit cigarette, a head, any sign of someone—but didn’t see anything. He agreed with Elf that they worked better individually, so he crossed the street again and headed up Thompkins—one block over and in the direction of his house.
As a kid, he’d jumped yards too many times to remember, trying to outrun another crew, lose someone he’d robbed, or even get away from the police. Hopping the fence at the back of his mother’s small yard was an old trick. The only wrinkle this time was he’d have to break in through the back door instead of going around to the front and using his key.
He scanned the cars on Thompkins. Nothing. At the right house, number 334, he waited beside a parked Cadillac.
In five minutes, longer than the amount of time they’d agreed on, he saw Elf coming up the block.
Junius’s legs were cold enough now to be itchy. Even inside the pockets of his thick jacket, his hands felt like blocks. He could see his breath cloud in front of him, like steam from a pipe.
Then Elf was beside him. “That the house, right?” Elf pointed his chin at 334.
“Yeah. You see anything by my mom’s?”
“Nobody. But that don’t mean they not there.”
“Yeah.”
Junius wanted to appear calm and in control. It was, after all, his idea to come here. If something was wrong inside, if some of Rock’s boys were waiting, he owed it to his mother to fix that, to keep her safe.
He hunched over as he walked. Beyond the garbage cans, to the side of 334, was an unlocked gate. Like the rest of the neighborhood, the people who lived here knew a locked gate wouldn’t stop anyone. Junius opened it and passed inside.
Walking along the side of the house was technically the point where he started trespassing, but Junius didn’t care. Elf came right behind. Light shining through the windows settled on the side of 332, less than five feet from where Junius slid along the base of 334 toward its yard.
There, he took one look around, knowing where he’d see the light on the back of the house with its automatic sensor. He knew it would come on as soon as he crossed the yard, but hoped no one was watching. If they noticed the light, maybe they would think it was a raccoon or somebody’s dog.
Junius tried to stay away from the house as he crossed the backyard, but when the light came on, he broke into a run across the grass. He vaulted over the fence to the frozen space behind his mother’s.
10
Gail Ponds-Posey sat on the couch in the dark when the knocking started. It seemed strange to her that someone would knock, but with this old house the bell couldn’t always be trusted.
She sighed.
Less than twenty minutes ago, the last of her mourners had left. These were the other women from the neighborhood who cared enough and knew how she felt. It seemed there were too many of them—women like her, in their forties, already dealing with too much loss. She knew those her age who were grandmothers raising grandkids in place of sons or daughters who’d gone off, not ready for the responsibility, or come up dead.
Now she’d lost one of her own boys in addition to her husband, a man not so unlike these kids today. He’d never been ready to raise a child, let alone two boys. Aldo had steadily drunk himself further and further into a stupor, lost too many jobs to keep track of. Finally she asked him to leave. Two boys was enough of a burden; a third, grown and old enough to know better, just couldn’t be abided.
And so she did what she had to: joined the other women in being alone in this world with her children. Whether the fathers had gone to jail, run off, or gotten themselves killed, the result was the same for the women: the job of raising the children became theirs alone. They helped one another as much as they could, pitched in with small favors, remembering to call each other before making a trip to the supermarket, but they all were tired. Too tired. The nights and days of working, the lines and endless fights for state support wore them down all the same. Too many of the boys’ needs either happened too fast to ask for help with or just caught her blindsided when she got off a shift and came home to a mess.
The knocks came again, louder this time. She wondered if they would decide she wasn’t home, if the lights being off would help them realize she’d gone to sleep, didn’t want any, or just needed to mourn on her own. She decided to wait for that realization to come to whomever it was outside, but the knocks continued.
That she did the best she could was no consolation. Seeing Temple laid out in a coffin, her firstborn son in his only suit—still too short at the sleeves and tight around his chest—and her husband showing up halfway through the wake, drunk, hardly able to stand, taking a swing at another man before being forcibly removed, all of it amounted to the worst day of her life, the lowest she’d felt in as long as she could remember.
She knew God worked in mysterious ways, that anything he gave her was more a challenge and a path to her fate than anything she caused, but still she couldn’t help feeling the fault was hers, as if she could have done something better along the way.
She should have left the neighborhood, taken the boys to New York to make a go with her sister. But she knew better. With her one son left, the one who was a man too soon, she wouldn’t do different.
Taking Junius to New York City now would help her lose him; he would leave her to come back to these streets—the only world he knew.
The knock came again, and she heard her name called by a voice she couldn’t recognize. A voice that said he knew she was inside. It was a man’s voice, sure enough. Someone, she could tell already, who meant no good.
She rose off the couch and heard her knees creak. “Please,” she said under her breath, “let this man leave me alone.”
She crossed the small living room into the short hall, turned, and saw the silhouette of two heads through the window of her front door.
“You inside there? Gail, these men know you at home.” She closed her eyes, cursed at the sound of her ex-husband’s voice. He almost sounded sober, a detail she knew couldn’t mean anything good.
11
Junius stood at the back door with Elf right behind him. He tried the knob, knowing it would be locked.
This would be the hard part: breaking in without waking his mother or being heard by anyone else. If the key to the back door was the same as the front, things would be too easy. Of course it had to be hard. Cold as it was, things would continue to be hard.
No one had a key to the back door. As far as Junius knew, one had never existed.
On the other side of the thin wooden door was his mother’s back staircase, which led down to her basement and its warmth.
“Let me try.”
Junius stood out of the way for Elf. He shook the door, tried to turn the knob, and then took a card out of his pocket and jammed it into the crack between the door and the frame.
“Nah,” Junius said. “Shit opens the other way. You can’t do it like that.”
He looked up at the fire escape to the upper floors. Going in through a window, then coming down the back stairs to the basement meant going in through someone else’s rooms, running into a neighbor in the middle of the night, or waking someone up. That route would definitely not work.
“Fuck this,” Junius said.
He pushed Elf out of the way and threw his shoulder into the door. The sound wasn’t as loud as he thought; it worked like he’d hoped. On his second try, he heard a small cracking in the frame, and with his fourth try, holding the knob in his hand and thrusting his whole side into the door, he broke the lock through the frame and the door came open. Four tries, four sounds he hoped would be muffled enough by the house, the hall, his jacket, and the noise of his neighborhood at night.
“I—” Terrence tried again.
“You stupid.” Elf clapped his brother on the side of the head, almost knocking him out of his chair. “Come on, J. We out.” He tilted his neck at Junius and headed for the stairs.
8
Marlene looked out at the roofs of the other two towers: the additional one she held and the one Rock’s boys controlled. In both she could see flames burning in the windows, the occasional lighter brought up to a pipe filled with what they’d started calling crack.
Crack: solid cocaine rolled into a ball and mixed with shit, cutter, ammonia. Smoked. The fastest high, the worst down, the most people fucked up she’d ever seen this fast. Marlene wasn’t selling rocks to people in her towers, not supplying her own with the white death that went for less than weed, fucked you up ten times worse, and left you begging for another blast.
No, she wouldn’t work that way; she wouldn’t take her own people to that place and make them beg. But Rock would, and now she needed to clear him out. Her people were already walking over to 412 and buying from his crew.
She ran a fingertip across her upper lip. In her hand, she clutched the remote for the lighting and shades. She’d made her penthouse by breaking out a wall and joining two of the public housing units together, and she could call it that all she wanted, but looking out the windows into North Cambridge, into a town of two-family separated houses, she knew there was more than what she had here.
She slid the blinds closed with a button. With another button, she brought the lights up, just enough to add visibility to the ambience she’d set up with her row of candles on the mantle and the two on stanchions above either end of the couch. Laid out across the tan suede, Anthony snored lightly, the candlelight shimmering in the sweat across his chest.
He looked good and she knew it, the way his chest thinned to two narrow hips and fine legs. She’d be able to get him up again, awake and aroused, and that would distract her from Rock for another half hour, maybe more, but it wouldn’t solve anything. Seeing those pipes blazing in her windows, knowing that poison instead of basic, simple weed was going into the lungs of her people, sent a shiver through her. All out of simple greed.
“Fuck,” she said. “This can’t stand.”
They called her Oracle because things she said came true. These days, in most cases they did because she made them, controlled the manpower and violence to get her wishes accomplished, her plans realized. But even before all this, she had something people believed in.
Once, as a girl, she won an AM radio at a street fair by picking the right paper bag off a table filled with a hundred. People asked her for the rest of the day to do their picking. Each time she did they wound up with something they wanted—not the rubber bounce balls, or the other cheap toys from the supermarket machines, but fancy brushes and nice mirrors, little remote control cars on wires. The good stuff.
After that, at age eight, she started having dreams. When she dreamt that her uncle, her mother’s brother, would be killed, she did not say a thing. Then, a week later, he was taken by a truck while driving home.
Drunk driver, the police said, but the white man behind the wheel never went to jail. Nothing happened to him.
Her mother cried for weeks.
For close to a month, she would not leave the apartment; she’d stay in her room, come out and drink coffee, an occasional beer. When she ate, it was cereal. She sent Marlene’s older brother to the store for groceries, and he’d come back with real food—eggs, cheese, macaroni, even hamburgers—but her mother wouldn’t eat. These things sat in the refrigerator getting old until Marlene took pans out from under the counters, put things into them, and did her best to follow the instructions on the boxes, to make do when they called for ingredients she didn’t have (two sticks of butter?), or guess at how to cook things that came without instructions at all, like hamburgers.
Her brother laughed at the table, quietly so their mother wouldn’t hear, and told Marlene they were the worst meals he had ever eaten, even as he wolfed down whatever she put out. He’d be careful at first, slow to fork into the crisp pieces of meat she scraped onto his plate, but still he ate them, every one.
For the whole time her mother cried, Marlene blamed herself for not telling her family about the dream.
Then a year later, the dreams came back. This time they featured her brother.
Malik had always been a basketball player, one of the best in the towers. He regularly stayed out late holding court up at Corcoran Park.
In her dream he played basketball for a school with uniforms and a crowd. His team was losing. They were only down a few points, and Malik had done something good, something she didn’t see because the crowd stood above her, cheering. And then they groaned loudly as a group, and a woman screamed. She heard someone shout Malik’s name.
That was how the dream ended. She had it twice on successive nights, and this was enough to make her frightened. Even with the dream of her uncle, she hadn’t seen anything twice.
She told her brother, begged him not to play for the school team that year, but he’d committed himself to trying out for varsity at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, the school where Patrick Ewing had played and Rumeal Robinson was a star. So what if Malik was an inconsistent student his first two years; he’d decided to try out and had been going to class. His mind couldn’t be changed.
Then the tragedy began.
Malik made the team and played more and more as the season progressed. By his senior year he was averaging fifteen points a game. He was asked to play for UMass Boston. The problems started when he left Cambridge, moved out to play for Salem State.
At home was where things changed. With Malik gone, nothing remained behind but the resentment. No one liked somebody from the towers to make it, even if Malik’s success was anything but guaranteed. Just that he had an option was enough for people he’d come up with—the other players and runners and even those who dropped out of school before Malik went back to class—to turn on him.
So when he did finally get hurt—in a game for Salem State when he went up for a dunk over a crowd and severed his ACL on the landing, basically fell from the rim to the floor in a terrible position and destroyed his knee—he returned to find the towers gone sour around him. People were secretly happy at his failure. Over time, when he didn’t play basketball again, he grew welcomed. They accepted him as one of their own, a loser to the world but a lifelong member of the Rindge Towers; as long as he had not actually made it free, the fact that he came close was a cause for respect.
This was his tragedy, as well as his greatest success.
From his return, he started taking over the drug game in his own tower, 410, and when he achieved that, he took over 411, installed Marlene and their mother in the double unit at the top to rule its game. To their mother, this was the second tragedy of her life, the one that pushed her into the misery from which she never returned.
Seeing her son turn back to the towers and become a part of the game was more than she could handle. She retreated again to her room, crying, refusing to eat but once a day. She started to wither into a frail old woman. Her social security checks piled up on the kitchen table—she wouldn’t use them, and neither Malik nor Marlene needed or wanted the money.
That was when Marlene had another dream. In this one she pictured her mother in a field, the sun on her face and flowers in her hair, the wind blowing around her. She was smiling. Marlene heard a voice in the background, a woman calling to her mother from a house.
The second time she had the dream, she knew the voice was her aunt—her father’s younger sister, still living in Mississippi—though they hadn’t spoken to or heard from her in nearly twenty years.
When she woke up, she knew what they had to do. Her mother needed to go south, back to the state where she grew up, where she’d lived before her ambitious husband moved them north to try his luck in Boston, where he wound up driving a bus for the MBTA.
When the cheerful postcards started arriving from Mississippi and they knew their mother was happy, Marlene became even more important. Malik recognized her as special, possessing more knowledge than she could be explained to possess.
He had started them calling her the Oracle, and she became a big part of his new hold on the game.
Without their mother to worry, Malik grew ruthless, his hold on the towers increasing until the last two with power were Rock and himself.
Rock had 412, and Malik controlled 410 and 411 with the power of Marlene’s visions and his iron fist.
9
Elf led Junius up his block into Somerville, further from the projects, toward the neighborhoods that were nothing but houses where white people lived. They passed the big hall for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Junius heard music inside and thought he saw people dancing.
Elf pulled him on.
“Fuck. What happen when Rock’s crew or someone from Willie show up at my house? They gonna fuck with Terrence. And if my mom answers—” Elf didn’t finish the thought. Instead, he just said, “Fuck,” which covered it.
Junius snapped out of whatever haze he’d entered. If Elf’s mom had to deal with boys from Willie or Rock’s crew, then things were bad for Elf as far as going home again. His mom had already put him on a probation.
“Where we going?”
“Shit if I know.” Elf cut onto a side street and stopped by a brick wall. “I was thinking we could break into a house. Find one where no one’s home and break in through the basement.”
“Yeah? Or maybe we go to my mom’s.”
“You don’t think they be waiting? Watching your moms to see everything she does?”
Junius felt the cold whip through his jeans and wrap around his legs. He knew it was too cold for them to stay out much longer. “How about we break in though my basement? Go around through the back way?”
“What if Rock’s boys waiting up in there for us?”
Junius shook his head, trying to force the thought out of his mind. “Then that’s where we going. I don’t want my moms bothered by no fools.” He got up and started for his house: up the cross street it wasn’t more than a handful of blocks over and a few streets up.
“Come on,” he said.
They crossed the bottom of Junius’s block as quiet as they could. He pulled his hood up and walked quickly, looking for people in parked cars—a lit cigarette, a head, any sign of someone—but didn’t see anything. He agreed with Elf that they worked better individually, so he crossed the street again and headed up Thompkins—one block over and in the direction of his house.
As a kid, he’d jumped yards too many times to remember, trying to outrun another crew, lose someone he’d robbed, or even get away from the police. Hopping the fence at the back of his mother’s small yard was an old trick. The only wrinkle this time was he’d have to break in through the back door instead of going around to the front and using his key.
He scanned the cars on Thompkins. Nothing. At the right house, number 334, he waited beside a parked Cadillac.
In five minutes, longer than the amount of time they’d agreed on, he saw Elf coming up the block.
Junius’s legs were cold enough now to be itchy. Even inside the pockets of his thick jacket, his hands felt like blocks. He could see his breath cloud in front of him, like steam from a pipe.
Then Elf was beside him. “That the house, right?” Elf pointed his chin at 334.
“Yeah. You see anything by my mom’s?”
“Nobody. But that don’t mean they not there.”
“Yeah.”
Junius wanted to appear calm and in control. It was, after all, his idea to come here. If something was wrong inside, if some of Rock’s boys were waiting, he owed it to his mother to fix that, to keep her safe.
He hunched over as he walked. Beyond the garbage cans, to the side of 334, was an unlocked gate. Like the rest of the neighborhood, the people who lived here knew a locked gate wouldn’t stop anyone. Junius opened it and passed inside.
Walking along the side of the house was technically the point where he started trespassing, but Junius didn’t care. Elf came right behind. Light shining through the windows settled on the side of 332, less than five feet from where Junius slid along the base of 334 toward its yard.
There, he took one look around, knowing where he’d see the light on the back of the house with its automatic sensor. He knew it would come on as soon as he crossed the yard, but hoped no one was watching. If they noticed the light, maybe they would think it was a raccoon or somebody’s dog.
Junius tried to stay away from the house as he crossed the backyard, but when the light came on, he broke into a run across the grass. He vaulted over the fence to the frozen space behind his mother’s.
10
Gail Ponds-Posey sat on the couch in the dark when the knocking started. It seemed strange to her that someone would knock, but with this old house the bell couldn’t always be trusted.
She sighed.
Less than twenty minutes ago, the last of her mourners had left. These were the other women from the neighborhood who cared enough and knew how she felt. It seemed there were too many of them—women like her, in their forties, already dealing with too much loss. She knew those her age who were grandmothers raising grandkids in place of sons or daughters who’d gone off, not ready for the responsibility, or come up dead.
Now she’d lost one of her own boys in addition to her husband, a man not so unlike these kids today. He’d never been ready to raise a child, let alone two boys. Aldo had steadily drunk himself further and further into a stupor, lost too many jobs to keep track of. Finally she asked him to leave. Two boys was enough of a burden; a third, grown and old enough to know better, just couldn’t be abided.
And so she did what she had to: joined the other women in being alone in this world with her children. Whether the fathers had gone to jail, run off, or gotten themselves killed, the result was the same for the women: the job of raising the children became theirs alone. They helped one another as much as they could, pitched in with small favors, remembering to call each other before making a trip to the supermarket, but they all were tired. Too tired. The nights and days of working, the lines and endless fights for state support wore them down all the same. Too many of the boys’ needs either happened too fast to ask for help with or just caught her blindsided when she got off a shift and came home to a mess.
The knocks came again, louder this time. She wondered if they would decide she wasn’t home, if the lights being off would help them realize she’d gone to sleep, didn’t want any, or just needed to mourn on her own. She decided to wait for that realization to come to whomever it was outside, but the knocks continued.
That she did the best she could was no consolation. Seeing Temple laid out in a coffin, her firstborn son in his only suit—still too short at the sleeves and tight around his chest—and her husband showing up halfway through the wake, drunk, hardly able to stand, taking a swing at another man before being forcibly removed, all of it amounted to the worst day of her life, the lowest she’d felt in as long as she could remember.
She knew God worked in mysterious ways, that anything he gave her was more a challenge and a path to her fate than anything she caused, but still she couldn’t help feeling the fault was hers, as if she could have done something better along the way.
She should have left the neighborhood, taken the boys to New York to make a go with her sister. But she knew better. With her one son left, the one who was a man too soon, she wouldn’t do different.
Taking Junius to New York City now would help her lose him; he would leave her to come back to these streets—the only world he knew.
The knock came again, and she heard her name called by a voice she couldn’t recognize. A voice that said he knew she was inside. It was a man’s voice, sure enough. Someone, she could tell already, who meant no good.
She rose off the couch and heard her knees creak. “Please,” she said under her breath, “let this man leave me alone.”
She crossed the small living room into the short hall, turned, and saw the silhouette of two heads through the window of her front door.
“You inside there? Gail, these men know you at home.” She closed her eyes, cursed at the sound of her ex-husband’s voice. He almost sounded sober, a detail she knew couldn’t mean anything good.
11
Junius stood at the back door with Elf right behind him. He tried the knob, knowing it would be locked.
This would be the hard part: breaking in without waking his mother or being heard by anyone else. If the key to the back door was the same as the front, things would be too easy. Of course it had to be hard. Cold as it was, things would continue to be hard.
No one had a key to the back door. As far as Junius knew, one had never existed.
On the other side of the thin wooden door was his mother’s back staircase, which led down to her basement and its warmth.
“Let me try.”
Junius stood out of the way for Elf. He shook the door, tried to turn the knob, and then took a card out of his pocket and jammed it into the crack between the door and the frame.
“Nah,” Junius said. “Shit opens the other way. You can’t do it like that.”
He looked up at the fire escape to the upper floors. Going in through a window, then coming down the back stairs to the basement meant going in through someone else’s rooms, running into a neighbor in the middle of the night, or waking someone up. That route would definitely not work.
“Fuck this,” Junius said.
He pushed Elf out of the way and threw his shoulder into the door. The sound wasn’t as loud as he thought; it worked like he’d hoped. On his second try, he heard a small cracking in the frame, and with his fourth try, holding the knob in his hand and thrusting his whole side into the door, he broke the lock through the frame and the door came open. Four tries, four sounds he hoped would be muffled enough by the house, the hall, his jacket, and the noise of his neighborhood at night.
