The furrows, p.18
The Furrows, page 18
OK. Wait. Lemme say somethin.
You gotta understand, I was what? Fourteen-fifteen years old? I weren’t a bad kid. I weren’t no criminal out there breakin the law and shit. I was just a boy. I was mad all the time, sure, but in that regular teenage way. My foster mom Kima used to call me Feisty for Nothin. As hard as growin up in the hood was, I aint never really seen this kinda shit live before, feel me? Not up close. I saw some shit go down in the homes and I got in scraps at school and I did favors for my cousins, a lil trade—just kid stuff, though, weed, loosies, that kinda thing. OK, so maybe I had broke the law, but I still aint never really seen nothin like what was on that tape, except maybe in the movies and shit.
So, after the young Gs spit, shit gets heated. And this one nigga—you could see the fire rise up his back and across his shoulders. His fist pulls back. Blam. Right in the gut. Other nigga hits the wall. Too late to square up now. First one sets on him with the fury, and they’re on the ground. Blam-blam-blam, gets him in the face. Other nigga’s head is straight-up bouncin off the concrete. And just like that, it’s over. Twenty seconds max. Champ’s done. He’s won. He stands and looks up, like he’s takin his glory from the leaves of the trees, from the streetlights, from the whole gotdamn sky.
And then he lifts his foot. You know, casual-like, like he’s about to walk up some stairs. He’s not even lookin down at the kid on the ground. And he slams his Timb down on that nigga’s face. There was no sound on that tape but you could still hear it.
Coach hit pause. I remember my head was turned, and I was like peekin at the screen from the side. You wouldn’t think it but that kinda shit turns my guts. Coach hit rewind then pause again, right before the stomp, right when Champ looked up at the sky. The screen was kinda jerkin from the freeze but you could see the streetlight on his face. I leaned in—and man, it was like my blood turned to ice. Couldn’t catch my breath, knees locked. Couldn’t hear nothin, my ears blocked like I just came out the water. Black starts creepin in from the edges of my eyes.
You already know what I’m bout to say. The face on the screen? It was mine.
Thoughts start goin off in my head like gunshots. This kid shows up at school with my name my face my walk my voice my threads my flow, but it’s just a game, right? We just kids, right? But now? Nah nah nah this shit don’t make no sense. Coach opens the curtain. I’m shakin. Jabberin, like, that aint me that aint me Coach that’s that kid, but when I say the name—not me, I say, the other one—Coach looks at me like I’ve lost my damn mind. Thing is, and I don’t even know how to explain this now: It coulda been me. It just wasn’t.
I stopped yappin. Closed my eyes. Tried to breathe. Then Coach put his hand on my shoulder. I’ll never forget that. The feelin of a hand that’s not beatin on you or strokin you or pattin you down. Just…there. When he spoke, it was slow and quiet.
I’ve got no choice in this, son. You understand that, right?
He took me down to the precinct. They called my foster mom but she was workin her shift, so I was hours in the holding cell. One toilet, no seat. I was up in there with five-six grown-ass niggas, half of em in withdrawal, the other half ready to pop you in the face if you so much as sneeze. The officers finally pulled me out, cuffed me to a table, and asked me a whole lotta questions I couldn’t answer. I just kept tellin them to find the other Will.
It took a week, but my foster mom scraped together enough for bail. We ended up with state counsel and my arraignment was like a drive-through, man—in and out. Public defender came in all hassled-lookin—white lady lookin like she half-scared of me. Nothin she could really do about that video, though. That nigga on the ground? His face got fucked up and he was in a wheelchair for a minute. But he aint die. So I just got sent to juvie.
* * *
I done enough since then that I can see how maybe I belonged there. But not for the reason they put me there, feel me? And that makes you feel a certain kinda way. I was in juvie for two years, fifteen to seventeen. Dropped my name for good, got a crew, got a tag. It aint worth the spit to tell you the shit we got into in there. We aint sneak past the rules or even bend the rules, really—we just took em and turned em right around, on our terms. Crime, punishment. Big fish, little fish. In the end, everybody drinks the same poison in juvie. Outside, maybe you trip and fall into the system. But once you get inside, you swimmin in it, tryin not to drown. You aint even got time to see what it is.
I was a week from eighteen, about to get a sentence hearing, when I saw him again. Will. My boy J, we was from the same hood, and he had brewed up some pruno and the guards turned an eye for us. So, we was in J’s room, actin up, gettin messy, that vomitty kinda drunk. And at the bottom of the night, right before dawn, I went to the john. I don’t remember all that much about juvie but I remember the john cuz you had to watch your back. That night, I remember gray light, bars on the windows throwing shadow stripes on the floor, the hiss of my piss in the urinal. I was shakin off when I felt it. There was somebody in there with me.
Now, I aint see or hear nobody come in. It was nothin but shadows and the smell of piss and shit in there. But it was like this…heaviness came in. Like one of those shadows was creepin up and leanin over my shoulder, breathin on the back of my neck. I zipped up and was bout to turn and square up when I heard it. Felt it in my gut, almost. That gravelly-ass whisper. All up in my ear. Sayin my name.
That voice—and like I said, I never use my real name if I can help it. I even had the guards in juvie callin me by my tag by then. It was him. I always knew I could take him—we were the same size, welterweight. But middle of the john, middle of the night, this nigga all up my back with my name in his mouth? That kinda shit crushes somethin in your chest. Makes you a kid again. I froze up. And that’s how he got me in a chokehold. I heard that raspy breath in my ear, like a bull before they let him in the ring. Then everything went black.
I woke up back in my bunk. Bruised, burnt—I got smashed into a radiator. See how this line on my ink kinda warps right here? That’s a burn mark. Now get this: They said it aint happen. Nothin on the security tape. I’m like Do you not see this fuckin third-degree burn on my arm? And you know what they said? They said I did it! Now why the fuck would I do this to myself? I aint even have a lighter! I don’t even smoke! But I had been drinking that weird-ass pruno that J always made so I thought OK, maybe you passed out, maybe you trippin.
Day of my hearing, like clockwork, guard comes in my room, says warden wants to see me. Man, I tell you, the minute I stepped in that office, my head was shakin like nah nah nah, cuz the warden had my kit and it was open, my toothbrush and washcloth on his desk and a baggie sittin right next to em. I was like Nope. Will planted it. It was him. I know it was him. But nobody knew who I was talkin bout! Will who? Will you? Not J, not the guards, not even the office manager I used to flirt with who registered everybody that came in there.
I was like Who the fuck is this nigga? I couldn’t pin it down. How’d he find me? What’d he want from me? I asked the other boys in there from around the hood. Member that grandpa-talkin nigga from middle school, look just like me? Most of em aint even know who I was talkin bout. But J said Will had left the school and gone out to Cali right around when I got sent to juvie, I don’t know what city—I aint never been out there. J said it was cuz Will’s foster mom had got fired for sellin pills from her job. But that felt like another mix-up or another setup, cuz that was what had happened to my foster mom Jackie.
You see it, right? I’m this close to gettin out? And that’s when this shit happens? Cuz when my sentence hearing came up, you best believe I got a promotion—felony narcotics possession. Three more years. You get a rap like that, eighteen years old? In Baltimore? It’s a wrap. Straight up. It’s like you dead, and now you gotta spend the rest of your days as a ghost to the life you was sposed to be livin. When I got out, what was I sposed to do? Move back in with Jackie or Alicia or Kima—after all the shit they been through? All the shit I done put them through? Or what—get me an apartment and a job? Aint nobody hirin an ex-con. Nah, man. Truth is, there aint no life but The Life once you done a nickel.
7
I head down to the Financial District, to the address for Charlotte Williams that I got from Quentin. Stony skyscrapers shadow the streets, their sunlit windows tossing gold in the air. I walk the black and bright streets, roaming in knights’ moves. Mo told me once that whenever they dig up the ground around here, they find the ruins of ships from the Gold Rush—not wrecks from the sea, but the ships they dragged to shore to make hotels and brothels. Now, whenever I walk around here, I see the buildings as big old ships, ready to sail off if the landfill crumbles or the earth opens up. I buy a baseball cap and a pair of shades and swap a few coins for a Street Spirit. Then I lean against a wall across from Charlotte’s building and skim it, peeking over the paper’s edge now and then. As the afternoon passes, time starts to fold under its own weight like honey.
That sounds like something Mo would say. He talked about time a lot, mostly when we were playing chess. When we made that Magic Dollar, he got a printout of a board laminated too, and it stayed with us over our years together, though over time, one corner got chewed and the other three curled up. We used a hodgepodge of pieces from different sets. I remember one white bishop was markered black like a bad spy. Mo always gloated his way to victory, knees moving like window wipers as he hounded me across the board just like he had across the city, fingers delicate as he picked up each piece and dropped it in place with a
“Check. Check. Check. Check.”
Like a slow tap dance toward the inevitable.
“Mate.” Mo dropped the word soft as cotton and immediately started scooping the pieces into a baggie.
“Fuck,” I groaned. “That’s the fourth time. It’s not a fair fight! It’s like you already know what I’m gonna do.”
“I don’t know what you’re gonna do. I just contemplate the possibilities, son.”
“But how do you always know which one to choose?”
“I see ’em. The threads of possibility. The choosin’ happens on its own, like a riff in a song. That’s why we call it playin’. Lemme show you something, son.”
Mo took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and smoothed it out on the now-empty chessboard. Then he took out a pin-striped Bic pen and sketched two vertical lines in parallel.
“See this? This is time.”
“Aw man, not this shit again. Breakfast time is what it is. Can we go eat?”
“This right here? This is time,” Mo repeated, staring me down.
I sighed. “Okay. What’s time today?” I looked at the picture. “Some kinda tube?”
“Nooo. It’s a rope. And what’s a rope made of?”
“I don’t know, string?”
“String. And what’s string got? Threads.” Mo sketched diagonal lines inside the tube to give it the twist of a rope. “So, this is what time looks like to us. A rope, a line pulled tight. But that’s just the past, the things that already happened, one after the other, in a line. But the future?” Mo drew a fan of lines at the top end of the rope, like it was unraveling. “Threads of possibility. Infinite threads. But you see, when time goes on, they get twisted together into the rope. The coulda-woulda-shouldas get twisted inside of what we did.”
And I actually saw it: a fist moving slowly up the frayed rope, threads squeezing tight in its clutch. I leaned over the picture, frowning.
“So what twists the uh…future threads into the past rope?”
“God. The Law. Don’t matter.”
“And we’re right here?” I pointed to where the tight rope met the spray of threads.
Mo was already rattling off more notions: “…like the future threads are just waitin’ for us to tie ’em or pluck ’em or use ’em to make people do things, like puppets, like in the space war Reagan started before the future could even get to us. It was at the convention when they set up the board, I’m not talkin’ ’bout nineteen eighty-seven, I’m talkin’ ’bout seventeen eighty-seven, and we know they set it up, with Madison on the inside, castling, makin’ the early moves so they’d never line up in our favor, see, no matter how much the devils at General Electric sell you at the current rate, you’ll never find a way to buy no sandwich, no land, no conscience, which is…”
He was falling down his rabbit hole. This happened more and more toward the end of our time together. It was like watching an old black-and-white movie—ladies weeping, staring out windows—and then a Looney Tunes cartoon would bust through, bright and wild. And like a cartoon, it would have a kind of logic to it: Tom chasing Jerry, Coyote chasing Road Runner. But the rules of the world would be just a little off-kilter. Rules like gravity and speed and pain. I could generally only wake him up by interrupting him.
“Looks like a mop to me,” I said this time, my voice loud enough to stop him.
“…but that’s a fallacy of…What?”
“Time, man.” I pointed at the page. “Looks like a fuckin’ mop.”
And Mo fell out laughing, his big hands cupping his cheeks. But Time is a mop just joined all his other crazy theories. Watching the facade of Charlotte’s building change shade as the sky does, I try to remember them all. Time is a hinge. Time is a heap. Time’s got grooves in it. Time is the juggling of coins, the rise and fall of change: a penny for the sunrise, a gold dollar for the day, a spinning dime for the moon.
* * *
I don’t know how much real time passes before I see someone I recognize come out of the building and it’s not Charlotte Williams. It’s her daughter. I wonder if I’ll feel some kind of vibration, see some kind of aura. But no, C’s like everybody else around here, decked out in white and gray, strutting the ruts of a lucrative life. She looks up at the percolating clouds, down at her phone, then heads east. I put my shades on, tug my cap down, and follow.
At the top of the escalator at Montgomery BART, she turns up her white collar and glances over her shoulder, like she senses me. Then she glides forward and down and vanishes. After a few seconds, I look over the edge and see her step off the escalator toward the ticket machines. I wait a beat, then race down, gritting my teeth at the jolts to my spine—I’m still tender from where the kangaroo beat me down. The machines are deserted but for a tourist family, all in hats. The dad pokes a screen, filling the air with chimes. I dip my hand in the reservoir of the machine to his right and peek at the receipts. No clues there.
I roll up perv-close behind a woman as she passes through the orange jaws of the turnstile, then run around her and race down the second escalator. The lady robot announces a train departing for Fremont in seven minutes; the gentleman robot cuts her off to say the train for SFO is now arriving. I march beside the train coming in, scanning the platform as the doors open and people step on. I don’t see her but the doors are about to close so I leap in, catching my shoulder on the edge of one before they shudder shut. I sneak a peek around.
C’s not on this car. Is she even on this train? There’s an old dude ranting about the Vietcong and a group of deaf kids signing to each other, their hands beautiful, like versions of water—quick and icicle-sharp, loose and lazy, stream-twisty. At Powell, I stick my head out the open train doors and scan the throng on the platform for C. No sign. I duck back in. What if I miss her? I’m still kicking myself for letting her out of my sight when the train reaches Civic Center. I look out between the doors and catch the back of her white jacket moving up the escalator. I go to get off the train but the closing doors hesitate around me with a clunk, which makes me hesitate too. By the time I’m out, she’s gone.
I take the stairs three at a time, my legs bouncy with the hunt. I burst out of the exit into daylight that seems nuclear bright after the subway. There she is, her white jacket like a dove in the forest of people on the sidewalk. I catch my breath and trail her down Market, keeping my distance until she turns up Hyde. As we pass the UN Plaza, I wonder why she didn’t cut through it. She doesn’t seem to know where she’s going but after all, she’s not from around here. She walks slowly, looking up at the buildings like a tourist.
Past the law school, the Tenderloin starts to swarm with its calls and barks: What you need? How you doin’? Where you goin’? She ducks the hyenas but stupidly turns right on Turk, deeper into the hive. Dodging a woman squatting to piss on the sidewalk, I speed up, trailing C a little closer but keeping to the shade under the store awnings. At the liquor store on Turk and Taylor—a cluster of men outside brown-bagging it, batting shouts around—C turns in a circle, her hand on her hair. She looks to the left: two kids carrying guitar cases, running down the street from a crackhead who’s shouting Yo, let me play that! She looks to the right: an old man in a wheelchair wearing a grimy but dapper suit, a cat on his lap, a red hankie flapping from his breast pocket like a tongue. C chooses left, up Taylor.
After two blocks, she makes a right on Ellis. But just as I turn the corner, I see that she’s spun around and is heading straight for me. I duck into a corner store. Through the sticker-covered door, I see her profile tip back to look up. She turns and goes back down Taylor. I come out of the store and we retrace the path we just took, together but apart, tin cans on a string. At the corner, she makes a left on Eddy. She’s going in circles.
