I get brief glimpses of scenery — the sun at the west end of 125th Street, the warehouses of the South Bronx, the thick stream of cars going past my window. We make the expressway, but the bus stops and starts like we’re still on the city streets. I have a quick hunger pang and remember the candy bars. I take one out, start to open it, and feel the old woman watching me. I turn. Her eyes look sunken, and her breathing’s rapid and shallow. She fidgets with her hat. I lean over to her.
“I’m sorry, are you okay?”
She nods weakly, not bothering to raise her head from the seat.
“Are you sure?”
She nods again and leans to me. “It’s okay, baby,” she says slowly with a thick drawl. “I just have a touch of the sugars.”
I slide over to the aisle seat and offer her the Snickers. She looks at it, closes her eyes, and shakes her head slightly. I put it on the seat beside her.
“Sweetheart,” her voice brightens, but she keeps her head down. “I can’t take this.”
“It’s okay,” I point at my bag. “I have another.” Then I whisper, “I’m not really hungry — just trying to pass the time.”
“Thank you,” she exhales but still doesn’t move. I must look worried because she nods and says, “Oh, I’ll be fine now.”
I must doze off because when I look out the window again, there aren’t any more buildings, only trees going by. We’re moving quickly — no traffic, no city — now a break and a shore and the beginning of a bridge. We mount and I look west, up the twist of water. It must be a sharp bend up there, because even though we rise and cross, I can’t see beyond the turn. So I forget about it and concentrate instead on the straight I can see — just beyond the obstructing bridge. I wonder what it was like one hundred, two hundred years ago. Who fished? Who drowned? What was it like to settle on these banks without the concrete and steel? Then, perhaps because of how the late light has cast the top of the dark water silver, I think of Pincus and his mustache—the river as mustache. I think the banks are moving inward, narrowing the water, but it’s blackness on the border of my vision — a darkening, contracting scope. And I’m gone.
21
In my end is my beginning.
I think I was thirteen. I don’t remember the time of year, but it was mild — perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to place, a quick shot of atypical warmth in a cold season. I was coming home from some kind of practice, and my feet were wet and puckered from the sodden field.
I came in to find both of my parents at the kitchen table sitting over coffee. They weren’t talking, but they weren’t ignoring each other. It seemed almost peaceful, actually, the two of them looking down at the table or into their cups with quiet faces, like shy kids on a date. My mother poured more coffee for herself. My father gestured for me to come in and sit down as if it was his house, too. I put my bags down, but I stood.
“How are things?”
I looked to my mother for some kind of prompt. She nodded slightly but kept her head down. It had been three years since I’d seen him. I hadn’t considered, until that moment, that perhaps they’d been in contact — talking about me. Things had been going well for Lila and me — as well as they ever had or would. We didn’t talk much, but I was bringing home good grades and staying out of trouble — fulfilling my promise, I suppose. Sometimes I’d catch her watching me strangely, as if she didn’t believe she was seeing what she saw. Other than that, she left me alone. She had found a decent job, and I’d gotten money together mowing lawns and such. She wasn’t drinking so much, and I’d yet to really start. The rent was current, and although she was three months behind on the electric, a debt she’d die with, we were well. I don’t know why she let him in the door.
He sipped noisily at his coffee and tried again.
“How are things?”
I decided that being diffident would only make things drag, and I wanted him out of there.
“Fine.”
“How’s schoolwork?”
“Fine.”
“So I’ve heard. So I’ve heard. What, were you at practice?”
“Yes.”
“How’s that going?”
“Fine.”
He started nodding his head and smiling.
“Girls?”
“What about them?”
He wrinkled his brow and waved his hands in the air. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Too busy?”
“Perhaps.”
“Too young. . you’ve thought about them?”
My mother got up and went to the sink. I watched her, trying to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at me. I thought about knocking out the rest of his wobbly teeth, but I leaned against the wall instead.
“There aren’t any girls.”
He leaned forward on his elbows and whispered with concern, “Boys?”
“The girls at school are rich and white, Dad.”
“And?”
“I’m not.”
He frowned at this and shot a cruel glance at the back of my mother’s head.
“That’s unfortunate.”
“Is it?”
“You’re angry.”
“Am I?”
He tried to show me something by slowly gesturing in front of his face with his hands: the size and shape of his idea. He looked into the space between them.
“I believe. . in a wider society. . not whiter, a wider one.”
He leaned back in the chair, looked over to the kitchenette, where my mother was pretending to be busy. I couldn’t watch him watch her, with a tender kind of intensity, as though she was broken and he wished he could fix her. I almost told him to stop, but he turned away, tapped a quick rhythm on the table with his fingers, and stared into my face in the same way.
“My father was a very close-minded man. I suppose he can’t be blamed too much. His people, they were a strange bunch — proud, almost arrogant — free North Carolinians who’d been swindled out of their land and wandered, strangely enough, farther south to the swamps of north Florida. The next wave claimed they were Seminole — but really a mix of landless blacks and Apaches trained east from the desert.”
He patted his chest, still staring at me, and found his cigarettes.
“Smoke yet?”
I shook my head.
“Good. Don’t. Anyway, he finally made it north, first to New York, then to Boston. He did odd jobs, put himself through school. And sometime when I was a boy, disappeared back into the swamps.”
He dragged deeply and kept staring at me, through the smoke, as though he cared. My mother came back with a covered stew pot in one hand and three bowls in the other. She set them down on the table.
My father opened the lid a crack. Steam rushed out. He held his head away until it passed, then he peeked in, sniffing. He lowered the lid and sat back, clasped his hands together, and then spread them apart.