Twin roses burst to life on her cheeks.
“Do you write it with a ‘u’? Or, like, a ‘u-h’?”
“I … um—”
“I saw sometimes when white writers write Black people they use the hard R. Make it sound like we call each other niggers all the time. Like we say it the same way white people do.” He paused. “I saw this one time, someone wrote nigga with a ‘a’ then a ‘h.’ What the fuck? I couldn’t stop laughing. Please tell me that’s not how you spell it.”
She took up her position opposite him, her back against the closed stall door, and he grew quiet. A horse’s head swayed over her shoulder. Its coat had whitened with the drop in temperature. It was almost the same color as her, which turned the whole sight of them into something ominous.
“Bugs didn’t go anywhere. It’s too easy. Heaven, Hell, whatever, none of that exists. Do you want to know why? Dying is too easy. Nigga spent the last minute of his life coughing blood onto my sneakers, and niggas is gonna cry and be upset for a week, then we’re all gonna move on. That’s just how it go. But you wanna fuck it all up by making his life look bigger than it was. You couldn’t just leave us alone. You told them about us.” He put his chin on his fists, then shook his head from side to side. “But this is what yah do.” Then he was up on his feet. He had the bucket in his hand, not sure what to do with it, but knowing he needed something for his fingers to do. “Yah find people who aren’t you, livin’ they lives, and you gotta come and fuck it all up.”
She pushed off the stall door to go after him, but he was already through the front threshold and away from the space heaters, hemispheres that lined the floor at regular intervals.
You told them about us thundered accusation in her head, and she wanted to rebut him, to catch him from behind and stop him in his tracks and convince him of her goodness, her native-ness, but she saw where he was heading. She saw the crew of young white settlers with blankets or thick woolen sweaters draped over their shoulders, leaning on the fence like they were getting ready to climb over. And she saw Linc waving them away like a man several decades older and shouting that the stables were closed for the season, even though the mayor had been talking about a series of spring events and excited murmurs had galloped through the city about this new thing blooming in the park. She saw Linc waving that bucket at those white kids, barking at them, maybe seeing among them the two white boys who got Bugs killed, and she knew then that there was nothing she could say to Linc to convince him she was on their side.
“It’s not my fault,” she said in a white cloud of breath.
You told them about us.
Crashes filled the reporter’s home, banging, hammering, the tearing-apart of things. He left her office and walked into an apartment unit that had played host to a hurricane. He felt no joy in this. He couldn’t speak for Jayceon or the younger kids—younger than Bugs would’ve been—who’d heard about this trip and figured it for the easy score it pretty much was. He didn’t tell the others anything, just stepped over the broken glass and shattered furniture and obliterated keepsakes, and walked out the door.
SOMETIMES, Linc forgot the hammer in his hands and the radioactive dust coating his lungs and the cold that cut through the holes and the loose sole of his left boot, and he would let himself get encased in the sunlight that shot through church windows and cast the pews and the aisles in trapezoids of gilt. So many of those gilt-framed memories were like that, like his whole childhood was caught in the frozen, time-stamped impact of a bomb’s explosion, and hands, older hands lined with wisdom, would hold his and pass him forward, helping him walk. And the voices of his mother and her friends would wash over his passage, and they would giggle, and Linc knew words back then but couldn’t say them. So he would shuffle forward and babble and they would coo and he would shriek with joy at being loved.
When the world returned to him, when the memory ended and he stood again amid the pile of broken bricks, the sky, red with poison, was always a darker thing. The burn pinned in the tendons between his deltoid and bicep was sharpened. The numbing ache in his fingers whose tips had long since worked their way through worn gloves, that ache throbbed with greater viciousness. And he resumed his posture in the world with a cough, that signal that he had passed from the past into the present where the aureate carried poison and where people laughed or giggled instead at someone’s infirmity, at someone’s impairment, at a junkie’s stutter or an epithet bellowed in a howl upon the errant striking of a thumb with one’s hammer.
Linc delivered that day’s skids to the local transporter and found himself on Ella T Grasso Boulevard where it hit Whalley Avenue. Barriers had been put up and though a straight path was cut to the Ivy Quarter from the working grounds, Ella T was now off-limits. It was a long time in Linc’s mind since white folk or anyone carrying their sensibilities would have wanted to live there, constantly having to change bedding if one didn’t have the right plastic because the radiation would copper-dot all your white mattresses within a week. Or checking to see if the piping had been re-coated by the last tenant and, if not, then having to deal with water that sometimes carried iridescent flakes; or having to depend on the checks for your local food runs where the price of bottled water and proper milk and cereal had risen higher and higher.
Stackers and their families or their running buddies or the people they were willing to tolerate had camped out there, though. Made it a home or something like it. But now even that had been taken. Slowly, they were being pushed out and Linc knew it wasn’t for their own safety. Because if the folks who decided whether or not to kick a man and his family out on the street cared for that man’s safety, he wouldn’t’a had to live on that block to begin with.
What was happening in Westville, in West Rock, in Beaver Hills, was also going to happen here. If Linc blinked, it’d all be over.
Linc was a long time staring at that duplex before he turned around and walked back the other way down the boulevard, hammerhead dragging a sighed screech behind him. His path circled back so that he passed by the ruins of the old medical school. Dilapidation had swallowed that too, but the forbidden majesty of the place, or at least some remnant of it, still towered over him. It was the sense that Linc would have never been allowed in a building like that, even if he were sick and needed treatment. And there stood a barrier, not one he could see or vault over, one higher than that, invisible, that would rise to block him no matter how high he jumped and would plow into the earth to cut him off no matter how deep he dug, that kept him out.
He wanted to spit, but the air had dried his mouth.
Linc thought he imagined the thudding when he found himself on a street corner half an hour’s slow walk down from Whalley. A big block of a building, short and stocky, stared at him from the opposite corner. Gold lettering had peeled away, revealing the faded black silhouettes of “R_ng On_”. The percussion reminded him of the djent music Jake always tried to get Linc to listen to when Linc was little, guys who played guitar like it was a drum, polyrhythmic drummers that made you work to find the logic in a song. The door creaked when Linc nudged it in with his hammer. Slowly, so that the rusted hinges didn’t give out completely.
Flakes and dust glowed in the still air. Linc walked through the soft clouds of fluorescent detritus to find, in a shadowed portion of a second space, a guy with sweat drenching his sleeveless. Giving a shine to muscles that rippled with each impact. Makeshift gloves with duct tape on ’em, pounding against what Linc discovered was a heavy bag. The chain from which the bag hung groaned every time the thing swung, and the roof moaned in tandem. Wyatt, dancing around the bag, didn’t seem to hear it. Or didn’t seem to care.
Wyatt hadn’t heard the door open either because when Linc stood on the threshold between the first room that held the sagging canvas of the boxing ring and the ropes that hung in tatters along its side and the dumbbell weights rusted to dust and the elliptical that hadn’t been touched in decades and the second room where Wyatt boxed in front of a corroded mirror, Wyatt didn’t look up.
Linc leaned on his hammer, chin on his hands, back unhealthily but comfortably bent, ass out, and watched.
Wyatt’s face staticked between a smile and a frown, twitching one way, then the other, so that Linc could not tell whether the fellow stacker was trying to grin or trying not to. He bounced more than he slid. He tucked his chin into his chest. His hammer lay propped against a far wall, most of the handle obscured by shadow, the head glowing red in the light that shone through the broken rafters. The rhythm thwarted Linc’s attempts to follow it, but he noticed that when Wyatt’s left foot slid back after a straight right, there would be a left uppercut. More often than not, the bag would cave from the right hook that followed. Jabs concussed the duct-taped leather before Wyatt would slide in and riddle the thing with a flurry of uppercuts. When he did pause, he wiped his forearm across his forehead. Sometimes he pressed his forehead to the bag and whispered a benediction. Sometimes he wandered in a loose amoebic meridian, blinking long, restorative blinks against the sweat that must have burned his eyes.
Disappointment pinched Linc’s chest when he saw Wyatt take off his gloves and pick up a jump rope, though, in the movement, he became a gleaming, mythical thing, Linc paying witness to some divine manifestation. When Wyatt finished, he dropped the rope and moved over to the mirror-wall and sat down before it, chest heaving, staring directly at Linc.
“Used to take me forever to figure out how to do that.”
“Jump rope?” Linc asked.
“Not surprised though, ’cause it was always Timeica and the little girls on the block doin’ the Double Dutch. I dunno. You gotta swing your own rope, that’s different.”
“Not workin’ today?”
“Don’t have to,” Wyatt said and grinned.
“Don’t have to?”
“Who’m I tryna spend money on?”
Linc chuckled. He pushed off his hammer and dragged it over to where Wyatt sat, sat down beside him.
“Your shit’s gonna fall off, you don’t take care of it.”
“That what you doin’ here?”
“Hah-hah. See what you did there, clever motherfucker.” Wyatt looked at his hands when he said this, flexed them and unflexed them, turned them over in the light.
Linc waited in the quiet, reverent and sacrosanct. “Looked like you were stacking.”
Wyatt nodded softly to that. Moved his jaw like he was trying to crack something.
“You not like it when people watch you box?”
Wyatt turned his head. “Why you say that?” His knuckles glinted, the grooves in his skin ablaze.
“I dunno. Looked like you didn’t wanna be disturbed is all.”
