“A police?”
“Yeah.”
“You gonna keep all us Negroes in line down here, huh?”
“What you talkin’ about?”
“Never mind.”
Dennis and Derek Strange sat on the front steps of their row house in the last hour of daylight. On the sidewalk, three girls were playing jump rope, and on the north side of Princeton a woman pushed a baby carriage down toward Georgia. The light from the dying sun was like honey dripping on the street. Derek thought of it as “golden time.”
“What about you?” said Derek. “What you gonna do?”
Dennis fingered the marijuana cigarette he had slipped into his pocket before leaving the house as he thought about the question. He didn’t mind answering, as long as it was Derek and not his parents who were asking. Not that he was thinking on his future all that much. Lately, all he looked forward to was getting high. This older cat on the next street over had introduced him to reefer a few months back, and Dennis had taken to it from the start.
“I don’t know. Continue on with the navy, I expect, when I get out of Roosevelt. Learn some kinda trade. Let the government put me through college, maybe. Knowledge is power, little brother, that’s what they say.”
“The navy. That means you got to go away?”
“What you think, man?”
“I don’t want you to,” said Derek, trying to keep the desperation that he felt out of his voice.
“It’s just natural that things gonna change around here, D. You’ll be missin’ me at first, but soon you’ll be lookin’ to get out yourself. Like them baby birds Mama’s always goin’ on about. They ain’t gonna be stayin’ in that nest forever, right?”
“I guess.”
“Go on, young man,” said Dennis, pushing on his kid brother’s head, hoping to lighten the sadness that had come into his eyes. “It’s gonna be all right.”
A Cadillac came up Princeton and pulled up behind Darius Strange’s Mercury. Though there was space behind him, the driver of the Caddy touched his bumper to the rear bumper of Darius’s car.
A man and a young man got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk. Derek had met the younger one, Kenneth, a friend of his brother’s from the reserves, and didn’t like him. He bragged on himself too much and talked all the time about what he had done or was going to do to girls. Kenneth Willis didn’t look like he was headed anyplace good.
The other man, the older, smaller one with the light skin, didn’t seem like someone Derek would care to hang with, either. He was dressed in black slacks and a thin purple shirt, looked like silk. He was what Derek’s father called a no-account, or a hustler, or sometimes just a pimp. You could tell by the way his father’s lip curled when he said it that he had no use for this kind of man.
Dennis rose from the steps as the two from the Cadillac came up the walk. Derek got up and stood beside his brother.
“Damn, Alvin,” said Dennis, “ya’ll ain’t had to hit my father’s car.” He said it with a smile, to let them know that he was not angry. It made Derek ashamed.
“That your old man’s Merc?” said the one called Alvin, who was the driver of the Cadillac. “Thought he
“He does.”
“Car look like a repop to me.”
So what if it is? thought Derek. Don’t mean you had to bump it.
Alvin Jones lit a cigarette from a pack he produced from a pocket in his slacks. He carelessly tossed the spent match on the weedy front yard as smoke dribbled from his mouth and nose.
These men, with their bloodshot, heavy eyes, looked like they were on something. Derek had heard about things some people used to make themselves crazy in the head. But as they stepped closer, he could smell the alcohol coming off them. He recognized that stench from a wino he often came in contact with in the neighborhood. These two were drunk.
“That your brother?” said Alvin, looking Derek over.
“His name’s Derek,” said Dennis.
“Where you hidin’ Dumbo at?” said Alvin Jones.
“What, all a y’all got names start with
“My father’s idea,” said Dennis, looking at his feet.
Don’t apologize to them for our father, thought Derek. Don’t you ever do that.
“Musta got little man all angry, talkin’ about his family,” said Willis. “Lookit, Alvin, he got his fists balled up.”
Derek relaxed his hands. He hadn’t realized he had formed them into fists.
“Damn,” said Jones, “we ain’t mean to
Derek felt Dennis’s arm come around his shoulder. He felt Dennis pull him in.
“He’s all right,” said Dennis, making a head motion toward the Cadillac. “C’mon, let’s go.”
“You bring that gage with you, man?” said Willis.
“Shut up, Kenneth,” said Dennis, losing the pleasant tone he had been trying to maintain. “Ain’t you got no sense?”
Jones and Willis laughed.
Dennis turned to Derek. “Go on, Young D.”
“Why you got to go with them?” said Derek, not caring if Willis and Jones could hear.
“I won’t be late. There go Lydell, lookin’ for you.”
Derek glanced up the block, where Lydell Blue was coming down the sidewalk from the direction of Park View Elementary, two cane poles resting on his shoulder. Derek walked north and met his friend. They shook hands, then tapped fists to their own chests.
“Us,” said Derek.
“Us,” said Lydell.
Lydell, stocky and muscled, with the beginnings of a mustache, handed Derek one of the poles. They were headed up to the Old Soldiers’ Home, where they would jump the fence that surrounded the property and fish the pond on the wooded grounds. They hardly ever got a bite, but no one bothered them there, and it was a nice place to sit and talk. Lydell was Derek’s boy going back to kindergarten. He had always been his tightest friend.
“You all right?” said Lydell, studying Derek’s troubled face as they walked up the street.
“What is gage, Ly?”
“That’s marijuana, man. Don’t you know nothin’?”
“I knew,” said Derek, feeling a drop in his chest. “I was just wonderin’ if
Derek turned his head, watched as his brother and the other two went toward the old Cadillac, watched Dennis put his hand to the handle of the back door.
Derek Strange heard doors open and slam shut, and then the ignition of an engine. He and Lydell Blue walked east through the last of golden time as dusk settled on the street.
