Rocks, July 1994
The droplets of sweat tickle Dujuan on his arms and
legs. Those dribbling down his ribcage behind his shirt
too. Crouching, he flattens his palms onto the overpass
railing and peers over, chin on the hot steel. He loves
being here. He hates being here. Below in the glass and
multicolored river of metal flashing southbound along
the expressway and vibrating his eardrums like
firecrackers going off so close, he hopes for, among
other things, no blue Camaros, his favorite. Stinging is
the gray beam under his hands and the tender skin
between his jawbones. Still, he remains in place—knees
bent, heart shoving his chest wall. Maybe it’s good luck
to watch. Not even a yellow Camaro yet.
Beside him Tarrick yells something. Dujuan flinches, but
the taller boy’s words are indecipherable in all the
rising wind-whipped engine noise, so Dujuan
re-concentrates on the traffic until a bare elbow butts
his. He turns, knowing not to ignore Tarrick, whose
un-sleeved arms hang over the railing. They’ve done it.
Where Tarrick and James, eleven-years-old too, are
looking, Dujuan also must look and accompany their
concrete grenade all the way to impact—gray dust
spraying the whizzing tires and wheel wells of what he
is certain is either a Towncar or a Bonneville. They
missed. Dujuan is thankful.
From Tarrick: “Damn!
Weak-ass bitches!”
Dujuan lifts his chin off the beam and gives Tarrick his
eyes. His white muscle shirt reminds him of yesterday’s
backhand to his cheek. Dujuan hadn’t run fast enough
after their threesome torched a brownbag of Rottweiler
shit on someone’s stoop and beat the door three times.
Minutes later though Tarrick had his back by charging an
older boy from a different building in his public
housing complex when he stripped off Dujuan’s marine
blue Charlotte Hornets wristband on the playground
adjoining his rowhouse unit. A cousin down South had
mailed it to him for his birthday. The enemy kid bolted
but fumbled the wristband after spinning around for a
smirk only to ram a swing set pole. Other kids gawked at
him writhing on the littered ground. Tarrick said to let
him go. Don’t jump his ass.
The sun’s dazzle behind Tarrick outlines his
shaved-slick head and intimidating physique like a
mannequin’s. His shoulders shake, so Dujuan braces,
gathering his arms up near his chest as a shield.
Instead, Tarrick spins to James, slightly thicker and
stronger than Tarrick, on his opposite side, and
re-drapes himself on the railing.
With them, Dujuan stares down at the Dan Ryan Expressway
traffic. No wrecks. Just more tires ironing their
concrete splotch thinner and fainter over black asphalt.
Reappearing is the dash of stripe they’d hit, a
half-moon chipped off the white rectangle. Wind gusts
remind Dujuan of his hair’s proud willowy length as if a
small snake is driving its way through its five vertical
inches. For scoring his first B in math, his mother has
allowed him to skip haircuts since spring vacation.
School ended seven weeks ago. The sunned metal burns
again.
“Why you fuck it up!” Tarrick yells.
Dujuan looks. Tarrick though is facing James again, who
is motionless. Tarrick shouts more, the bill of his
backwards White Sox cap bobbing with his head, tapping
the base of his neck. Through his great-uncle on his
mother’s side, Dujuan knows that the team went throwback
several years ago to their minimalist black/white color
scheme from the 1950s when they last played in the World
Series. The black caps with a stylish white S are
top-sellers, even with people who can’t name a single
Sox player—people in his complex wearing them to signify
gang allegiances. He stays between Tarrick and James
because Tarrick is serious today. But Tarrick doesn’t
swing, so Dujuan paces off. Repositions himself at the
curb’s sandy edge. They’ve given him a job—scan for
police cruisers. Call out if you spot one. When uneasy
with their assignments, Dujuan can usually craft plan-B
and plan-C, like when he coaxed them out of flinging
inch-long nails onto Wentworth Avenue ahead of the
number 24 bus where it stops at 44th Street.
The drivers hide TEC-9 pistols under their seats, he
told them. This time he’s out of ideas.
His southward view of the Dan Ryan is a canal, bisected
by El train tracks. Clusters of CHA tenements. Dujuan
recognizes one. A dozen floors high are several adjacent
fire-charred empty window squares. His mother has
pointed out this building. He was born there. He
remembers their dark green front door and the steel mesh
barricade in their open-air hallway to avert death-falls
to the courtyard. That screen was so close that his
mother standing in their doorway could almost touch it.
Does his father still live there? For safety, his mother
had said, they were leaving whether Dujuan’s father was
coming or not. Anything with more than two stories was
no good because the more floors, the easier for
gangbangers to play war from the roofs. A different roof
could mean a different gang.
Something up there on his old roof moves, so Dujuan
steps forward. He wants to figure out what it is, but he
slips on the curb. Ankle bent against the pavement feels
like a blade embedding itself between heel and shin.
Dujuan yelps and sinks to the curb, extending his legs
into the street. He checks behind him.
The two squat along the short wall under the steel
columns under the railing. Hands dance over the row of
concrete chunks, scattered around their sneakers. Such
delicateness surprises Dujuan. Normally, they just grab
and drop. Dujuan stands and limps to them. Watching them
finger the chunks, he inspects his own hands. A cut from
assisting to collect these “rocks” still marks the end
of his right middle finger. He licks the torn skin. The
smudge of blood is sweet.
Tarrick hoists a concrete piece to waist-height. Dujuan
maneuvers between the boys and the railing and leans on
an elbow atop the steel to ease weight off his hurt
ankle. He also wants to block James’s view of Tarrick.
“Damn man!” Tarrick is half-crouched and cradling the
chunk, the length of an egg-shaped lunchbox.
Dujuan pretends not to hear:
“Help me get this shit up!” Instead he faces over
the railing north past two other tenement huddles
bordering the expressway to downtown and the symmetrical
coal-black rise of the Sears Tower marring blue sky.
Like white antennas, two mysterious rods stick up from
the roof but nothing there moves, so he follows the
giant rectangular stalk back down to its obscured base,
spitting out each vehicle soon to rush below them, as if
a massive subterranean parking garage is emptying.
A hand strikes his forearm and Dujuan forgets downtown
and the clerk job his mother once had there, the one
letting them buy discounted caramel corn at the walk-in
popcorn store along Michigan Avenue, mere spaces away
from cavernous Niketown. His father claimed to work
there, but the time they went, no employee had heard of
him.
Dujuan participates in assisting the concrete piece onto
the beam. As long as he doesn’t do everything they do,
Dujuan reminds himself, he isn’t guilty.
“No cars gonna be hit,” they say. “It just for fun.”
This rock exceeds the beam in width. Dujuan can’t take
watching the traffic, so he focuses on the jagged shade
patterns overlapping his crisscrossed sneaker laces.
He’d had to retie them while helping marshal this
cumbersome chunk to the overpass. They had loaded it and
smaller ones into an overturned Miller Genuine Draft
forty-ouncer carton, which Tarrick dragged by a top lip.
Dujuan pays attention to the beam again. A whack
probably coming if he doesn’t. He wants this finished.
His fingers tingle, including the bleeding one, where he
touches the teetering rock. A sound—synthetic stone
goring metal. The rock shifts and he synchronizes his
hands with theirs to balance it, flattening them against
the chunk whose surface is alternately cool and smooth,
warm and barbed. With it steadied, Dujuan looks at James
and Tarrick on each side of him and remembers his church
elders during last week’s laying-on-of-hands healing
service.
Shoulders rubbing his, their heads bowed, their four
hands quivering adjacent his, Tarrick and James seem as
resolved as those holy women and holy men,
like they too are about to exact something miraculous.
Something miraculous for this rock. Something miraculous
for themselves.
“Go man! Damn!” James yells. But Dujuan presses down and
pulls the rock toward the cavity of his concave chest,
hoping. Pricks of ridged concrete gouge the moist cut on
his finger when they rip his hands from the small
boulder. An even louder scraping sound.
Rock falls. Dujuan reels. Now it’s his fault too. He
must know what happens, so he lunges forward and clamps
down his hands, one on the railing, one on James’s
shoulder.
This asteroid shears off the driver side mirror of a tan
Hyundai, which swerves and slams a slanted embankment.
Front end crushes halfway to the windshield. Dujuan
lifts his head and checks Tarrick on his left and James
on his right.
Dujuan’s finger blood marks James’s gray shirt at the
shoulder. Their arms wave in front of their faces,
victoriously or not, Dujuan isn’t sure. They aren’t
facing him, as if Dujuan too has plunged and
disappeared. He looks out and down.
No more powdered concrete splotches on the asphalt. No
sign of their rock, only the crashed car. “Got us a
motherfucker!” Dujuan hears behind him but doesn’t push
up and back away with them. He waits. A vein of relief
shoots through him when something beneath the windshield
flinches, like a fish under the ice of a frozen sea.
* * *
Two days later, even the indoor air is warm and spongy,
smelling of minerals. James wants to play his new Sega
game scored in the Boys & Girls Club basketball free
throw contest. Too many people crowd around his family’s
television though. Dujuan agrees to head for Tarrick’s.
“Only my gramma home.” Dujuan follows but they deviate
when catching the expressway’s roar.
Only one chunk remains—a square-ish piece—part of the
cinder block that cut his fingertip. Angels, Dujuan
decides, must have been disposing the other chunks last
night until God dispatched them to more urgent tasks.
Maybe a lady and her little kids needed watch-over going
back to the projects from the corner store in the dark.
God done His part.
Now I gotta do
mine. He glances at the clouds, bunched up between
them and the sun, and then kneels with James and Tarrick.
With them he touches the rock, which is damp in the
clammy air.
Dujuan stands when they do and looks over the railing.
The Hyundai is gone. Nothing about the embankment seems
scraped and dented. Without the sun’s glare, Dujuan
distinguishes sports cars from sedans, candy apple red
from rusty brown, and even for one moment, he is sure,
gold rims from chrome. He scans again for a blue ’93
Camaro like in the magazine his father had unrolled from
a front pocket on his visit a month ago. Dujuan turns
when he hears, “Bitches, watch this!” James is holding
up a dime, leaning into the railing, an elbow at a right
angle. Between his thumb and index finger, juts half the
coin.
“What you gonna do?” Tarrick asks. “That ain’t gonna do
nothin!”
James’s fingers separate and Dujuan tracks the dime to
an eighteen-wheeler’s cab. A silver ricochet into the
embankment is silent.
From Tarrick, “Stupid man, you stupid!”
James turns. “Gimme a nickel or a quarter, Dog! Dimes
too thin.”
They undo their pockets. Dujuan has gum sticks. Tarrick
has a Sharpie.
James snatches the marker, yanks the cap, and sniffs the
velvety tip. When his head twitches, Dujuan leans over.
A chemical tang stabs his nasals like a laser into the
brain, nudging him into the railing. He waits for his
head to clear and then opens his eyes. Tarrick is gazing
over the city. James is next to him but squatting in
front of the chunk.
Dujuan moves behind James who with the Sharpie is adding
fuzzy asterisks onto the off-white, cratered surface.
James goes on with the pen while Tarrick slumps onto the
railing, arms swaying like loose live wires.
Okay so far.
Dujuan’s tender finger shows no more blood. Only a
twinge lingers in his ankle.
God taught me my
lesson. Any time he’s in trouble, his mother
requires him to repeat:
‘Everybody makes mistakes, but smart people don’t
repeat their mistakes.’ His shirt is dirtied at the
chest and stomach, dirtied such that he can’t brush it
off as usual, dirtied enough that Mom will notice.
He monitors them until Tarrick jolts off the railing.
The backlash from one leg whacks a Converse heel into
James’s forearm. Sharpie rakes craggy concrete.
“Fuck man! Watch the fuck out!” James responds, a black
line zigzagging over the chunk’s longest side before the
Sharpie lands near the wall.
Dujuan’s hand is halfway to the ground to grab the pen
and hand it to James until his tongue tip pinches
between his teeth because the top of James’s head has
slammed his chin. James is fully up now, squared off
with Tarrick.
Pain opens Dujuan’s mouth wider than he thought
possible. Below his ears, his jaw throbs. He wants to
scream at them. His mother also instructs him to count
to twenty-four if angry—a one-second pause for each hour
the incident needs to be forgotten and thus forgiven. So
he starts counting, counting also for these two people
who don’t know to count. “Talkin shit to me hoe ass
bitch!” Tarrick yells over Dujuan’s whispered ‘Five,’
his left foot twisting on the rock James had been
inscribing. Staggering, Dujuan can’t make out what James
is shouting back.
Sorry, J-Dog, Tarrick should reply because this is
an accident like Dujuan’s baby sister dropping her
pacifier is an accident. Tarrick used that very apology
last week when he made James waste his Big Mo’s
cheesy-beef on the sidewalk.
Instead James grasps his white t-shirt and skins it up
over his head. “Wanna box motherfucker!” Shirt slung
aside, James’s hands go to fists.
Dujuan jams a palm at each chest but one hand slips on
the sweat sheen on James’s chest. Tarrick swats away his
other wrist. Next are the swings.
Trying to keep them apart dizzies Dujuan like he is the
one being pummeled. He spots the concrete chunk between
his feet. Still, he trips. Knees and hands slap
pavement. Tiny stones and sand grit dig into Dujuan’s
palms and knees. He raises his head. Draws a knee off
the sidewalk. I
just gotta get back between them.
“Man what the fuck you all!” Dujuan pushes and grabs
until they collapse onto him. Pavement scores his bare
knees again. He yells nothing else. If he stops, maybe
they will too. Dujuan pictures a car smushing them as
they tumble into the street. If they survive, what
explanation can he attempt with his mother? Knees and
fists from one body thump him through the other body
until another moving vehicle, low and roaring, mutes
their grunts.
On his feet with them, Dujuan remembers:
Don’t run from the pigs. Run at the pigs. Fleeing
in front of a squad car leaves you in the cop’s sight
longer. Easier to catch. So Dujuan breaks out from their
place at the bridge’s midpoint and races toward their
neighborhood.
Tarrick and James chase him. The shock of thinking they
were caught rockets Dujuan on even after the green
compact car blur that isn’t police. “Damn dogs, that was
close,” Dujuan says. They ignore him, scooting by a
brick-walled factory, quaking and hissing every few
seconds like it might cave in.
* * *
On their next walk to church, Dujuan’s mother mentions a
radio report about a car crashing into an expressway
wall under a nearby overpass. The driver, a Taiwanese
graduate student with no family in the country, was
still in I.C.U. at Rush Presbyterian. She asks Dujuan
about his friends. “We just be playin around
everywhere.” Their preacher summons people from the pews
to act out a passage about sin and the knowledge of sin
generating more sin. “To him who knoweth to do right and
doeth it not, to him it is sin!” Dujuan squirms under
the swirling words. The unpainted wood of the pew aches
his tailbone. Bursts of congregational affirmation put
mild shocks into his shoulders. He brings his chin up
and down as his mother glances at him.
He claps when everyone else claps. When told to, he
closes his eyes.
Lunch after church is grilled cheese sandwiches while
his two-year-old sister sleeps. Dujuan sits with his
mother at their kitchen table.
“You know anything about these people throwin stuff off
the bridge at cars?” she asks while Dujuan is tearing a
crust from his sandwich’s mushy middle.
“No, I don’t know nothin. The bridge be closed a lot. We
don’t go there no more.”
The truth is that they have revisited the overpass
several times, but several times fewer than they would
have had Dujuan not subverted them with alternatives.
Shooting hoops into the trash barrel dragged around
front from behind their rowhouse row. Playing spades on
James’s living room floor. They’ve returned to the
overpass but always flee after a single drop. Dujuan
avoids touching the railing. Nothing bad has happened,
he believes, because his ankle twinge is gone. He hasn’t
reaped anything permanently bad for sowing bad seeds.
“So you ain’t never done anything like that?”
“Naw mamma. I ain’t do that.”
“And you don’t know anyone who did?”
“No.” Dujuan focuses on an empty corner of the table where an edge strip is peeling away. Then he must look up at her. If not, she will ask something else.
* * *
Their front door buzzes. Dujuan has helped scrub their
interior cinder block walls with bleach water. A mildewy
film had coated the white paint, etching itself into the
mortared creases between bricks. Dujuan quizzed his
mother about the funk. Why something was growing out of
nothing, she didn’t know, only that she’d been told long
ago to wash walls every few months. “Something in the
air makes it do this.”
Dujuan thumbs hotrod magazine pages at the table facing
the door. Something about the new Camaros that keeps the
’93 his favorite. His mother unlocks the door. A squad
car’s front end in the street behind the female officer
prods across their open doorway.
“Ma’am, does a boy about ten or eleven named Dewayne or
Dejohn live here?” A blonde streak in her flattened,
shiny hair dulls the noon sun.
Dujuan blinks when the officer’s profile is mostly
visible to his mother’s left.
“Dujuan, does, yeah. What’d he do?”
The officer steps up a stair. A hand plants on her
forward knee. “Someone said one of the boys who’s
throwin things off the Dan Ryan live here. Said he’s
about that old and has a little Mickey Mouse tattoo on
his leg about halfway up above his ankle.” The officer
is a little shorter than his mother.
“Yeah he’s here. But he don’t do nothing like that.”
On his last birthday, Dujuan had begged her to let his
father, who’d shown up unannounced, albeit with another
hotrod magazine, to ferry him in his just-acquired El
Camino to a parlor on 55th Street for the
quarter-sized cartoon character to be emblazoned onto
the outer side of his left calf. Dujuan slept that night
with his yet untouched left leg poking out of the
sheets. Gotta let
the ink dry.
His mother calls, using his name. The trousers that she
selected for Dujuan last week at a table set up on their
corner, since made into cut-offs, exposing Mickey Mouse,
feel lose, comfortable even.
On the stoop, the buttons of her tight blue shirt are
bright until the officer bends to his eye-level. When
her eyes hit his, he looks down. Her shoes are
thick-soled, almost like army boots. “Young man, I need
to ask you some questions. A few days ago an innocent
man got injured real bad by a rock dropped on his car.
Did you and your friends do that?”
Dujuan feels his mother’s hip against his elbow. He must
look up. “What you mean?”
“Dujuan, did you help drop something on a car?
He leans away from his mother into the thin railing
leading down their four concrete steps. The
paint-flecked surface scrapes his arm. “I was there but
I didn’t do it.” In the courtyard—a toddler in a pink
diaper is twirling a billowy plastic grocery bag. Dujuan
senses his mother right behind him now.
She has already grounded him when his court summons
arrives. School begins in three weeks. She threatens to
transfer Dujuan to the next closest campus, even if it
means riding a CTA bus with him every morning and
afternoon. He can’t use the phone either.
On the final Friday of summer Dujuan asks about K-Foods
because he needs a new pouch for erasers, pens, and
pencils. He can walk there without passing James’s or
Tarrick’s address. His hair is scalp-shorn—part of his
punishment. If she catches him with them, she’s shaving
his head every week. He’s dreading having to wear a
hoodie to hide what will be his nearly naked head and
knows teachers will make him pull it down once in their
classroom. He barges through the store’s scratched glass
door with his mother’s two dollars. The pencil-pouches
are on the usual school supplies folding table in the
back corner. The musty warmth of the single-cashier
store slicks his arms with perspiration. Moisture
collects on his bare scalp before he can wipe it off. He
finds a pouch and then the candy area. Then from behind
a corner is Tarrick, darting into Dujuan’s aisle.
“Hey, dog, why you don’t come out no more?” Tarrick has
been here before too. The store is even closer to his
building than to Dujuan’s.
“You get in trouble?” he asks Tarrick, whose white shirt
seems perfectly clean today.
“Yeah dog, but we gonna beat it. We ain’t catchin no
case.”
Tarrick sounds confident that the three of them did
nothing wrong and neither had Dujuan in giving their
names up to the officer. Tarrick and James will stick up
for him in front of the judge and confirm that Dujuan
never threw any of those rocks over the railing.
They got my back.
Dujuan looks to the racks on his right and picks up
lemon sours. The candies’ crystalline sugar coating
makes sandpapery sounds when he tilts the box until
Tarrick jerks the pencil-pouch from under his arm.
Dujuan almost drops the lemon sours.
“Here dog, do like this.” Tarrick opens the pouch, takes
the sours from Dujuan, and rams them between the
pocket’s zippered lips. From the rack behind the
candies, Tarrick plucks a thin package of cherry gum.
Into the pouch too.
Dujuan’s throat lurches as Tarrick slaps his smooth
head. The mild sting is less than what he expected.
Tarrick adds, “Let’s go dog. Pay for that shit and let’s
ride!”
Up front Dujuan hands over the two dollars and prays to
God that the cashier won’t pat his wrinkly hand on the
pouch’s middle. He may be the oldest man Dujuan has ever
seen, not the usual guy he knows by name. This man
doesn’t touch the pouch and gives Dujuan fourteen cents
in change. Dujuan can make this up to K-Foods and to God
and to Mom by bringing the old man a dollar from his
allowance and inviting Tarrick and James to Tuesday
night church.
Across the street, Dujuan hands Tarrick his gum. He’s so
close that Dujuan smells him. “Follow me, dog.”
Dujuan says he can’t.
“Man I gotta show you something at my house!”
It’s only his house.
His gramma will
be there.
Dujuan sets his pencil pouch on the TV at Tarrick’s. The
lemon sours go into a pocket of his jeans shorts.
Tarrick’s grandmother is nowhere.
Tarrick leaves the living room, which looks as before,
other than the rug between the couch and TV being gone,
showing shiny white linoleum.
Dujuan flinches in the window unit’s frigid air stream
and turns a palm over. Tiny bumps rise along his arm.
Were there a secret camera somewhere in the room
filming, his mom would know all of this. Dujuan had
expected her to cry that day after the officer left. She
didn’t, but for the day’s remainder, her sole words were
instructions.
Tarrick returns, holding his shirt bottom doubled up
against his stomach. At the table he lets his shirt go.
Clatter. Steel balls big as regular marbles roll over
the laminated wood. “Don’t let ‘em fall!” he squats and
plops his arms spread wide onto the table.
“Where you get these?” Dujuan bolts to the round table’s
other end and assumes Tarrick’s pose. In the table’s
middle, his hands meet Tarrick’s. His arms with his are
a diamond, trapping the smooth spheres, which gleam and
are cool,
cold-like, bumping into his inner arms. Tarrick grips
his fingers when he leans back. The squeezing pull of
Tarrick’s fingers and palms is warm, hot-like, wrapping
his hands, making Dujuan feel that he shouldn’t move,
can’t move, draped on the tabletop, recalling his own
invented games for their threesomes with James. Now it
is Tarrick’s turn as game-master. What could be next?
“They for a slingshot. My uncle use ‘em to kill rats,”
Tarrick whispers over the drift of bearings, each
slightly bigger than Dujuan’s thumb pads. Tarrick jumps
up. “Don’t let ‘em go!”
Dujuan encircles the bearings with his arms to keep them
on the table and listens to Tarrick behind him yanking
kitchen cabinets and drawers. He waves a brown paper
lunch bag and gives it to Dujuan to hold open below the
table’s edge. The steelies zip across the table when
Tarrick lays his belly there and middle-finger-flicks
them. Each one whirs, rolling toward the stiff paper.
The clinking ticks louder the more steel balls that
collect in the bag.
He being nice
again. Always
when he wanna show me something.
“Come on, let’s go outside. We gonna do a game.”
On Tarrick’s stoop, Dujuan has the bag and follows him.
The bearings jingle until they knock on James’s door.
“Naw, man, I can’t be goin there no more!” Dujuan
answers James’s exuberance about playing the bridge game
again.
Neither boy is looking at him.
They ain’t never
gonna learn. He darts off the stoop for home. He
will tell his mother that K-Foods was out of pencil
pouches and hope she tells him to just keep the two
dollars until he finds another place selling school
supplies.
Before Dujuan is off the front yard area of James’s
rowhouse unit, the two boys are grabbing at his neck and
upper arms. “We gotta have three people for the game!
You gotta come! We ain’t hittin no more cars! Don’t be
trippin!”
If he returns to his same school next month, Dujuan will
need them as usual, and especially now to not be made
fun of for newly very shortened hair. He can’t let them
keep being angry.
They probly already mad at me for giving they names to
the police.
The objective now, Tarrick explains, forearms on the
railing next to James staring down to the Dan Ryan, is
to not hit a
car. Too soft. James isn’t looking. Tarrick says he got
this game idea from his uncle taking him up on the roof
of their highrise. If a steelie hits level concrete
instead of gravel, the rebound caroms it all the way
back to roof height. You can catch it. Here above the
Dan Ryan:
Two points for every ball you catch. Minus-one for every
ball that disappears. If it hits a car but ricochets:
Z-row. Tarrick backs off the railing and snatches
the bag from Dujuan. He digs in a hand and then squeezes
a bearing into each of their hands. “Spread out on the
lines! We got three guys for the three lines!” He sets
the bag down and waves them off.
Dujuan paces away until the third dashed divider lane
line below seems between his feet.
Why it matter
having somebody on all three lanes? He grips his
bearing between his thumb and first two fingers so hard
that it slips. He juggles it, his trembling hands
feeling like they might fall off at the wrists but he
re-cradles the bearing with both hands. Glancing down,
Mickey Mouse peeks out from under his shorts that reach
almost halfway down his calf but not far enough. Like
usual, no one is up here. They could get in trouble
again though. That frizz-haired lady wrapped in garbage
bags always pushing an Aldi Foods cart with cans and
bottles and wadded towels might be the one who told on
them. He saw her once near the overpass. She must have
seen Mickey Mouse. The three of them are due in court
the day after Columbus Day.
Dujuan’s toes bump the overpass wall. He looks out, then
down. Their chipped traffic lane dash from a month ago
is one lane over, Tarrick’s lane. For good luck, Dujuan
could aim for that exact piece of paint, so he asks,
“Can we trade?”
Nothing from Tarrick. “Ready!” Dujuan turns. Tarrick’s
elbow is on the beam, bearing perched at his fingers’
end, the sack of bearings at his feet. “Hit in between
the cars! But not on the paint! It too soft! Then catch
yo’ ball when it come back up! Whoever catch the most
win!”
Dujuan watches James and Tarrick, their faces hovering
over the expressway’s blast, his own steelie rolling
around his palm. He stops it with his thumb. He should
be home by now.
Tarrick’s “Go!” makes Dujuan focus over the railing but
he holds his bearing. On either side of him, two silver
specks descend and disappear.
“That fucked up!”
Dujuan spins around to stare across the bridge behind
them, as if his steel ball too has vanished like
driftwood flung into a rushing stream. He whips back
around to the railing. Below, vehicles, those small and
those huge, chase each other undisturbed. Behind them,
still, luckily, no cars have whooshed past. No walkers
either on their sidewalk next to the railing.
From Tarrick, next to him now, “We doin this shit
again!” Rush of words fans Dujuan in the face. Tarrick
squats to the bag and fishes out three more bearings.
“Open your hand!”
Dujuan wraps his free hand around the fist with the
bearing and rests his arms on the railing as if
genuflecting at his church altar but without his praying
kneeling mother beside him.
“Take it dog!”
Dujuan squeezes one tingling hand with the other.
“That’s all right, you keep ‘em all.” Why does it matter
that he participate? Their jollies should be enough fun.
Tarrick grabs his clasped hands and fingers. James leans
in. Dujuan’s hands open.
“You ain’t never drop your first one!” James yells. A
smack to one of his forearms separates Dujuan’s hands.
The steelie falls, plinks the cement at their feet.
“Lemme just watch!” Sweat is oozing through his thin
brows into his eyes. Dujuan totters, trying to separate
himself from the railing but steps on the ball. His foot
goes sideways. Muscles in his legs stretch like they’re
tearing until James grips his forearm tighter and yanks
him back to the railing.
Dujuan blinks his stinging eyes and wants to swab them
with the heel of his free palm but they have him off the
ground and he can’t find his face with either hand.
Front-side first, he hits the railing. His right leg
swings through expressway airspace before he can coil
both arms around the dirtied joist. Someone has the cuff
ends of his jean shorts. Testicles aching. Eyes closed,
Dujuan double-arm wraps the railing and buries his face
on the non-traffic side. Groping for the overpass-side
sidewalk with his left foot, he feels his mother’s
fourteen cents—nickels and the pennies—slide out of his
right pocket forever. A hipbone pins his cheek against
the warm railing. He keeps his burning eyes shut against
the steel.
“Dog you scared! You scared!” A hand slaps his back and
shocks his eyes open. Another tightens on Dujuan’s upper
arm and then four hands extract his torso from the
railing. His face suspended a few inches above the beam,
the sidewalk and the expressway contrast. One moves. One
does not. Another shove. Chest-down into the metal
again, Dujuan bear hugs the beam. His chin hurts,
pressing it against the beam for leverage while
clutching at the vertical strut, but he loses grip when
they wrench him up by the shoulders. “You all play too
much! Lemme down!”
“You don’t be lyin to us!”
Elbow points burrowing into his shoulder lighten his
head like it no longer belongs to him. Hands and elbows
find his lower back and thighs.
Then rotated, Dujuan sees only traffic before closing
his eyes against the acidic auto exhaust aerating his
face like a steam bath, tickling his bare scalp. Elbows
dig into his backside now, mashing his groin into the
railing. Breath empties from his lungs. His arms fly out
in front of him without feeling them, numb like they’ve
gone to sleep.
“Look down dog! Look down!”
Dujuan does. He must. Cars again. The glittery, black
asphalt. No dashes for the lanes though. Between his
upper thigh and the railing, the box of lemon sours
crushes flat. Cracked and broken now are the candies
that he’d planned to offer his mother.
They push and pull, pull then push. He is the saw blade.
They are the lumberjacks. Dujuan’s shirt and arms and
face smear the railing’s soot—soot muddied already by
his tears and spit.
Then they push but don’t pull back. The beam compressing
Dujuan’s stomach folds him in two, hanging one half of
him over the expressway. More yelling. Hands holding his
legs below his shorts, hands no doubt touching Mickey
Mouse, and those fastened to his hipbones soon are a
single touching sensation. Touch hinting that the
pleasure derived by its givers is of such intensity that
the touchers can’t quit. A touch like his mother’s hands
on his shoulders after arranging the bedcovers near his
chin while talking him through any day’s mistakes. As if
flexing a bicep to feel in control and bluff that his
arms aren’t too heavy to lift to cover his face with his
hands, Dujuan clinches his sweaty, stinging eyes shut
against the streaking psychedelic noise below. His
closed eyes keep him in bed, his used-to-be-bushy hair
indenting the pillow, his mother near and coaching him
about his ‘way to know how to do what’s right.’ Seeing
her, hearing her, almost feeling her while feeling their
hands, arms, and elbows, lets Dujuan believe that
everything here on the overpass might still be okay.
Mark Dostert
volunteered as a counselor at Chicago’s 500-cell
juvenile jail and later became a full-time Children’s
Attendant (unarmed guard). He is the author of
Up in Here:
Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side, excerpted in
Salon and
featured at the
Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest. He teaches at
Writespace and holds a Master of Arts in English from
University of Houston. His nonfiction has appeared in
Ascent,
Cimarron Review,
Hayden’s Ferry
Review Online Content, and
Southern Indiana
Review, and been cited as Notable in
The Best American
Nonrequired Reading 2011,
The Best American
Essays 2011, and
The Best American
Essays 2013. Find him at
www.markdostert.com