A couple blocks away from the Christamestas’, this full-grown man walking the other way on the other side of the street looked at us and nodded. It’s a small thing to do but it meant a lot. It meant we were feared. My lungs tickled at the sight of it. I got this tightness down the center of my body, like during a core-strength workout. Or trying to first-kiss someone and you can’t remember where to put your hands. Even thinking about it, I get this feeling. This stranger, nodding at you from all the way across the street.
It was late in the afternoon by then, and tropical hot, but overcast with small black clouds. And the wind — it was flapping the branches. Wing-shaped seedpods rattled over the pavement and the clouds blew across the sun so fast the sky was blinking. It opened my nose up. The street got narrow compared to me. The cars looked like Hot Wheels. And in my head, my first thing was that I felt sorry for this guy who nods. It’s like a salute, this kind of nod.
But then my second thing is: you better salute me, Clyde. And I get this picture of holding his ears while I slowly push his face into his brains with my forehead. I got massive neck muscles. I got this grill like a chimney and an ugly thing inside me to match it. I feel sorry for a person, it makes me want to hurt him. Cojo’s the same way as me, but crueler-looking. It’s mostly because of the way we’re built. We’re each around a buck-seventy, but I barrel in the trunk. Joe’s lean and even, like a long Bruce Lee. He comes to all kinds of points. And plus his eyes. They’re a pair of slits in shadow. I got comic-strip eyes, a couple black dimes. My eyes should be looking in opposite directions.
I ran my hands back over my skull. It’s a ritual from grade school, when we used to do battle royales at the pool with our friends. We got it from a cartoon I can’t remember, or a video game. You do a special gesture to flip your switch; for me it’s I run my hands back over my skull and, when I get to the bottom, I tap my thumb-knuckles, once, on the highest-up button of my spine. You flip your switch and you’ve got a code name. We were supposed to keep our code names secret, so no one could deplete their power by speaking them, but me and Cojo told each other. Cojo’s special gesture was wiping his mouth crosswise, from his elbow to the backs of his fingertips. Almost all the other special gestures had saliva in them. This one kid Winthrop would spit in his palms and fling it with karate chops. Voitek Moitek chewed grape gum, and he’d hock a sticky puddle in his elbow crooks, then flex and relax till the spit strung out between his forearms and biceps. Nick Rataczeck licked the middle of his shirt and moaned like a deaf person. I can’t remember the gestures of the rest of the battle royale guys. By high school, we stopped socializing with those guys, and after we dropped out we hardly ever saw them. I don’t know if they told each other their code names. They didn’t tell me.
Cojo’s was “War,” though. Mine was “Smith.” It’s embarrassing.
I coughed the tickle from my lungs and Joe stopped walking, performed his gesture, and was War.
He said to the guy, “What,” and the guy shuddered a little. The guy was swinging a net sack filled with grapefruits and I hated how it bounced against his knee. I hated that he had them. It made everything complicated. My thoughts were too far in the background to figure out why. Something about peeling them or slicing them in halves or eighths and what someone else might prefer to do. I always liked mine in halves. A little sugar. And that jagged spoon. It’s so specific.
The guy kept moving forward, like he didn’t know Joe was talking to him, but he was walking slower than before. It was just like the nod. The slowness meant the exact opposite of what it looked like it meant. I’m scared of something? I don’t look at it. I think: If I don’t see it, it won’t see me. Like how a little kid thinks. You smack its head while it’s hiding in a peek-a-boo and now it believes in God, not your hand. But everyone thinks like that sometimes. I’m scared my mom’s gonna die from smoking, the way her lungs whistle when she breathes fast, but if I don’t think about it, I think, cancer won’t think about her. It’s stupid. I know this. Stilclass="underline" me, everyone. Joe says “What” to a guy who’s scared of him, the guy pretends Joe’s not talking to him. The guy pretends so hard he slows down when what he wants is to get as far the hell away from us and as fast as he can.
Joe says, “I said, ‘What.’”
“I’m sorry,” the guy says.
“Sorry for what?” Joe says, and now he’s crossing the street and I’m following him.
I say, “Easy, Cojo,” and this is when I learn something new about how to intimidate people. Because even though I say “Easy, Cojo,” I’m not telling Cojo to take it easy. I’m not even talking to Cojo. I’m talking to the guy. When I say “Easy, Cojo,” I’m telling the guy he’s right to be scared of my friend. And I’m also telling him that I got influence with my friend, and that means the guy should be scared of me, too. What’s peculiar is when I open my mouth to say “Easy, Cojo,” I think I’m about to talk to Cojo, and then it turns out I’m not. And so I have to wonder how many times I’ve done things like that without noticing. Like when I told my mom I’d kill her and waved the empty thing at her, I wasn’t really threatening her, it was more like I was saying, “Look, I’ll say a stupid thing that makes me look stupid if you’ll help me out.” But that was different from this, too, because my mom knew what I meant when I said I’d kill her, but this guy here doesn’t know what I mean when I say “Easy, Cojo.” He gets even more scared of Joe and me, but he gets that way because he thinks I really am talking to Joe.
I say it again. I say, “Easy, Cojo.”
And Cojo says, “Easy what?”
And now the guy’s stopped walking. He’s standing there. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Cause why?” Cojo says. “Why’re you sorry? Are you sorry you nodded at me like I was your son? Like I was your boy to nod at like that? I don’t know you.”
“I’m sorry,” the guy says. The guy’s smiling like the situation is all lighthearted, but it’s like yawning after tapping gloves on your way back to the corner. A lie you tell yourself. And I’m thinking there’s nothing that’s itself. I’m thinking everything is like something else that’s like other something elses and it’s all because I said “Easy, Cojo” and didn’t mean it, or because this guy nodded.
I think like this too long, I get a headache and pissed off.
I put my arm around Cojo. I say, “Easy, Cojo.”
“Fuck easy,” Cojo says to me. And when Cojo says that, it’s like the same thing as when I said “Easy, Cojo.” I know Cojo isn’t really saying “Fuck easy” to me. He wouldn’t say that to me. He’s saying “Fear us” to the guy. But I don’t know if Cojo knows that that’s what he’s doing with “Fuck easy.” That’s the problem with everything.
“Give us your fruit,” I tell the guy.
“My—”
“What did you say?” Joe says.
“Easy, Cojo,” I tell him.
Then the guy hands his grapefruits to me.
I say to him, “Yawn.”
He can’t. Cojo yawns, though. And then I do.
Then I tell the guy to get out of my sight and he does it because he’s been intimidated.
Nancy Christamesta is no whore at all. And I’m no Jesus, but still I want to wash her feet. Nancy’s so beautiful, my mind doesn’t think about fucking her unless I’m drunk, and even then it’s just an idea: I don’t run the movie through my head. Usually I imagine her saying “Yes” in my ear. That’s all it takes. Maybe we’re on a rooftop, or in the Hancock Building Signature Room, the sixty-ninth-floor one, looking at the city lights, but the “Yes” part’s what counts. It’s a little hammy. I’ve known her since grade school, but I’ve only had it for her since she was fourteen. It happened suddenly, and that’s hammy too. I was eighteen, and it started at the beach — sunny day and ice cream and everything. Our families went to swim at Oak Street on a church outing and I saw her sneak away to smoke a cigarette in the tunnel under the Drive. There’s hypes and winos who live in there, so I followed her, but I didn’t let her know. I waited at the mouth, where I could hear if anything happened, and when she came back through, she was hugging herself around the middle for warmth. A couple steps out of the tunnel, her left shoulder-strap fell down, and when she moved to put it back a bone-chill shot her posture straight and a sound came from her throat that sounded like “Hi.” I didn’t know if it was “Hi” or just a pretty noise her throat made after a bone-chill. I didn’t think it was “Hi,” because I was behind her and I didn’t think she’d seen me. I wanted it to be “Hi,” though. I stood there a minute after she walked away, thinking it wasn’t “Hi” and wishing it was. That was that. That’s how I knew what I felt.