Family Thang

Ida shook her head. Leonard sensed her annoyance with the conversation.

“Shane,” she said, “grabbed Kenny G and ran away. Robert Earl tried to catch him. Shane’s ten times faster than Robert Earl.” She said this with a mixture of pride and admiration. Her emotionally challenged grandson could outrun her mentally challenged son. Any matriarch would be proud.

“Mother, when did all this happen?”

“I’m tired, son. I’ll rest better with Shane here. He’s out there all alone and he hasn’t a friend in the world. When he was just a baby, Ruth Ann brought him here and dropped him off. Just left him. That was wrong. Wrong! Your daddy understood him, and he loved your daddy. He’s hurting, out there alone, all by himself.”

He has Kenny G and a crossbow. What more does a boy need?

“Get some rest, Mother. I’ll go get him first thing in the morning. Promise. You just concentrate on getting some rest.”

She rested her head on the back of the couch, eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

Entering his mother’s bedroom, Leonard wondered how she would react when he lied Shane couldn’t be found. Of course she would be upset.

Yet he’d be even more upset traipsing in the woods in search of a mentally challenged boy with a crossbow. Two funerals in one week, the last his, in a special designed coffin to accommodate the arrow sticking out of his chest.

The bedroom hadn’t changed since the last time he’d seen it, a decade ago. Same queen-size bed, covered with a purple quilt and two pink pillows. Same faded picture of Martin Luther King Jr. above the headboard. Same rust-colored shag rug on the floor, the only room in the house with carpet.

Same small black-and-white television sitting atop a rustic black trunk at the foot of the bed. Same oak chiffonier near the door that blocked the light switch. He squeezed his hand between it and the wall and flipped on the light.

So many memories here and most of them unpleasant. The large dent in the far wall occurred when Shirley, seventeen-years-old, threw an iron at him, twelve-years-old, and missed. The black file cabinet next to the bed contained his father’s extensive porno magazine collection.

Leonard remembered the day his father called him, at the tender age of nine, to this very room.

“Close the door, boy!” his father had said. Leonard had hesitated, not liking the look on his father’s face, the stench of Bacardi Rum in the air. “I wanna show you something.”

His father had frightened him, had always frightened him, with his deep voice and piercing stares; and there Leonard stood in his father’s bedroom, his father attired only in boxer shorts, his skin oily with rum. Everyone else had gone to the movies.

“Sit down, boy! You act like you scared of me. You scared of me?”

“No, sir.”

“Yes, you are. Look at ya, trembling like a pecker in the projects. Ain’t no reason to be scared—I ain’t gonna hurt you. You my son… my son! No son of mine should be hanging with women folk all the time.” He moved to the file cabinet and took out a magazine. “Look at this here, boy, and tell me what you see.”

Leonard had seen nude women in magazines before; pornography wasn’t what rendered him speechless, made his underarms itch. What caused apoplexy was the way his father, the man who had never once called him by name, never called him to his room, was acting, as if his life depended on his son’s ability to identify a vagina in a magazine.

He pressed the magazine into Leonard’s face. “What you see, boy? Huh? Ain’t it the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen?”

Leonard started crying. Tears dripped down his face and one landed on the magazine, a wet spot on the woman’s breast.

His father turned angry. “Look at ya, you… you sissy!” He rolled up the magazine and whacked Leonard over the head with it. “Get out of here! Get the fuck outta here!”

Leonard shook his head, remembering he had tried to flee his father but couldn’t get the door open fast enough, and his father had kicked him and whacked him over the head with the magazine several times.

Leonard sat on the bed, packing his father’s belongings now a laborious task he lacked the strength.

Another contradiction, he thought, I hate him and I love him. He stared at the faded poster of Marcus Garvey in full regalia on the closet door. His father had admired Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr., one of the few men he regarded favorably, and the only man whose full name he remembered.

He wouldn’t call me by my first name if you paid him.

The closet door was halfway open. Leonard saw his father’s well-worn Stacy Adams shoes in the shadows. Next to those was what looked to him a yellow cereal box.

Doesn’t make sense. Cereal in the closet?

He got up, turned on the closet light… and stopped. The word Poison embossed in bold, black letters atop the box, next to a skull and crossbones. Leonard, fingers trembling, picked it up and read the front label.

Juggernaut Gopher Bait.

Chapter 12

Out the bedroom window Ruth Ann could see her Ford Expedition in the driveway. The note on that big boy was over five hundred dollars a month; she didn’t know the exact amount because she didn’t pay it. Lester did.

He also paid the mortgage, thirteen hundred plus a month. And the utility bills, and the grocery bill and her weekly allowance, ninety-five dollars, the one expenditure she knew the exact amount.

If Eric told Lester about their affair, Lester might walk. She could live alone, she thought as she lay in bed, but couldn’t live with Lester taking anything away from her house, not even a single piece of furniture.

The thought of losing this house, her house, a two-story Spanish Colonial, was too painful to contemplate.

Regardless what Lester might claim in divorce court, she was the one who searched day and night for this plot of land, she who assisted the architect with the design, she who picked out the furniture, selecting only the best, and she who kept every room clean and orderly.

Even if the judge granted me everything, Lester would have to continue paying the bills.

She grabbed Teddy, a white teddy bear with blue eyes, and curled up in a fetal position. She imagined Lester taking the witness stand, the corners of his mouth turned down… and that would be all she wrote. One look at Lester’s mouth and the judge would grant him the whole shebang.

“This is terrible,” she whispered to Teddy. “Terrible!”

The bedroom door opened and Lester entered, wearing his work clothes, tan cotton shirt and pants.

At a distance Lester was a handsome man. Trim. Dark chocolate-colored skin. A small afro kept neatly trimmed. Up close… well, by no means could Lester be considered ugly, especially if the focus centered on his nose and eyes.

Who can do that? Ruth Ann wondered. Who can look in a person’s face and not look at the mouth?

“Ruthie, honey,” Lester said, “is everything okay?”

Ruth Ann studied his mouth as he spoke. Perfect in size and shape, but a pinkish-white circle covered it. At least he has the sense to forego a moustache.

She looked away. “I’m fine,” though feeling the urge to cry.

He came closer and she could smell the Polo cologne he favored. “I’m here for you, Ruthie. I’ll always be here for you.” He sat on the bed. She hugged Teddy tighter. He leaned over and buried his face in her hair. “Forever.”

This made her want to cry even more. “I know you will.”

“I love you, Ruthie,” the words tickling her neck.

She knew she should say I love you, too, but couldn’t force herself to utter the words. In fact, she hadn’t told