Baby’s mom didn’t confirm the Pie Man was his pops until old man Sanchez quit. Baby told his mom and the Pie Man that it didn’t make any difference that the drunk was his father. The Pie Man has no business making any claims after all this time. Either way, Baby sometimes finds himself staring into the Pie Man’s face, wondering what life might have been like if the man had always been around.
Chin on the table, eyes clamped shut, Baby realizes the Pie Man and his mom have been jabbering at him the whole time. Who knew? He wonders what they were like when they met each other back in the Stone Age. During the time of Public Enemy and parachute pants. Back when the Pie Man’s uneven flattop fade was in style. Back before they became voices in the wall.
They have a similar way of phoning in their rants. No commitment. They talk at him like they’re being watched. As if they’ll get in big trouble for failing to pay the right amount of lip service.
The Pie Man tells Baby he ought to respect his mom, man, because that’s the least she deserves for bringing him into this unbalanced world, and if Baby’s going to keep driving her every which way like he’s been doing, then Baby ain’t no kind of man. The whole issue could be that Baby’s not thinking, says the Pie Man, but he can start anytime now. He tells Baby to sit up and pay attention. Because he doesn’t know the Pie Man well, Baby does as he’s told. The Pie Man could be crazy or something, like Baby’s friend Touché.
“What, am I supposed to call you Daddy or something?” Baby nudges the skateboard under the table with his bare foot.
The Pie Man’s slacks, shoes, and neckerchief match his jacket, dingy white from head to toe. He mismatched the cloth buttons so that his collar is higher on one side than the other. To Baby the Pie Man looks like a homeless chocolate Chef Boyardee. There’s no trace of the freckles Baby got from his redheaded mom. The ones he catches hell for at school. The ones he tried to scrub off after reading the Dred Scott decision in American history the year before. Yet even though Baby’s freckles won’t come off, that doesn’t mean he can’t become the next great civil rights leader like Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur, or Lil’ Wayne. Holding it down for the people. Real niggas.
Baby scratches the oval scab on his shin, thinking it’s going to leave a mark when it heals. If it heals. Maybe he’ll cover it with a black fist tattoo when Mom’s not looking. The tattoo is Touché’s idea. Touché wants everyone in the Mighty Black Ninja Krew to get black fist tattoos after they find and stomp Sanchez today. Baby’s heard through the grapevine that Sanchez feels bad about what he did to Chaney, and it might be true. Sanchez never held back telling Baby when he’d screwed up, but he was quick to give Baby props for good work, and he always gave Baby a cold can of soda at the end of the day.
Baby gets up to leave. But his mom yells at him and makes him sit his rear back in that chair right this instant. He’s a target, she says, and Baby feels she’s right. The Latinos have been dishing out hard-core payback. Curtis Thompson, the running back at Baby’s school, got whacked in the knee with a galvanized-steel pipe the other day. Curtis is out for the season, and with him any shot at the state championship. They say he never saw the guys who did it, but they had Spanish accents. Nobody’s safe, thinks Baby. Baby’s mom thinks she can protect him by sending him to the barber. His hair makes him look like a maniac, she says.
But Baby’s Afro is a matter of pride for him. It’s a fuzzy crown that radiates out six inches, going from black at the scalp to reddish brown at the tips. Like a halo made of rabbit’s fur. Most of his friends think it’s pretty cool. It counteracts the freckles.
One thing at a time, says the Pie Man to Baby’s mom. Baby follows the Pie Man’s lips. The way they form words. Inner-tube round one second, then flat like a pair of rotten bananas. The Pie Man says he knows Baby doesn’t want to go back on full house arrest. The Pie Man says Baby’s free lawyer, Mr. Bates, already told them Baby was out of chances. The Pie Man looks at Baby as if expecting a response, which Baby doesn’t give. Baby stares at those bananas.
The Pie Man tells Baby to get up because it’s time to go to work.
Baby looks out the window. Orange traffic barrels flank a Do Not Enter sign at the end of the block.
“Nope,” Baby says. “I ain’t doing your slave work. If that means I’m stuck inside, then so what?”
Baby’s mom sprays air freshener at him. She tells him she’ll turn him in herself if he doesn’t get that haircut. And he better be home before the streetlights come on. If he’s more than a half-inch from the front door by then, the SWAT team will come after him, she reminds him for the umpteenth-and-a-half time. She kisses him on the forehead and leaves.
The Pie Man says he’ll bring Baby to the barber now but doesn’t get up from the couch. He continues to stare at the empty space behind Baby.
“I’ll get ready.” Baby rides his skateboard to the bathroom where he straps on his Chuck Taylors and a pair of brown plaid shorts before climbing out the window.
The outside of Lawrence D. Crocker Elementary isn’t much different from how Baby remembers it growing up. Lots of brick walls and stucco pillars. Plenty of rectangles. Gravel lot. The narrow Plexiglass windows were faded opaque even before Baby and his friends went here, but the interior is totally different since Hurricane Katrina turned it out. Dried gack coats the tile and baseboards. Green paint curdles from the floodwater pox. Rivulets of rust and mold syrup drool down the walls. Waterlogged books, tiny chairs coated in sludge, poster boards covered in blue-black fungus. The dump smells like anchovies pickled in urine.
Baby hasn’t cut his hair but figures skipping the job would be going too far. He does skateboarding tricks on the retaining wall outside of the school, knowing it will be some time before the Pie Man puts his brain on and figures out to come. But the van appears at the street corner within minutes. The clunker has one headlight and Nobody Starves When the Pie Man’s Around scrawled in faded orange letters across the side. Ever since the Pie Man decided he’s Baby’s pops again, he’s begun following Baby around in that death trap even when they’re not working.
The Pie Man used to sell gumbo ya-ya, greens, and bread pudding at barbershops and car washes. Sometimes he makes pies — pecan, apple, and sweet potato — all with his own two hands. Baby can tell the Pie Man had been real proud of his business selling catballs to the citizenry. Baby chuckled when he remembered the web video he’d seen of a stupid toothless cat doing its best to gum a mouse to death. The mouse kept plopping out — pissed, but pretty much okay. The Pie Man said he got shut down when the health inspector caught him selling reconstituted meat. Baby asked him, reconstituted from what? Meat mostly, said the Pie Man.
Now two-by-fours and tangled wires choke the van’s bay. The Pie Man must have had breakfast, thinks Baby, because he looks sober. He managed to button his jacket right and comb his flattop so that his head looks like an eraser.
“Why can’t they just bulldoze this hole and start from scratch?” Baby skates toward the Pie Man, who is unloading sledgehammers in the lobby outside of the cafeteria. Sanchez’s tools were used for assembling things. Baby learned, to his own amazement, how to hang a door. It was harder than it looked, Sanchez told Baby, because you had to make many little decisions to get the right fit. Baby imagines swinging one of those sledgehammers at Sanchez’s head, watching it roll across the ground like an eight ball after contact.