Marie. My mom, her bus showed up either just ahead of schedule or just behind it, depending on your perspective. It was never on time. She never said anything like, “Home right after school.” She knew I’d be there. Homework done. Learning more from television than I ever did at school. She kissed me on my face the same way her mother used to kiss me and her. Then she whispered, “My little fish.” I pretended I didn’t hear it. Told her, “Goodbye. Be good.”
I was supposed to walk to school, get there five or ten minutes before the first bell. But I was going to see Amp’s people. His uncle Shag would want to know what I knew. Or I should say, if Shag heard I knew anything, I should see him before he sent someone to find me. Everybody said he was kind of crazy. He didn’t sell drugs or anything, but he’d been in jail a few years for something. Nobody fucked with him.
I wanted to tell Shag what I knew, but first I went back to the alley where, the night before, I’d seen Amp running with the white men right behind him. There was a big old dumpster there. I let my hand rest for a moment on its lid before I opened it and looked inside. The smell crawled over my face. Black garbage bags, white garbage bags, little tiny plastic bags, muddy liquid rot, an old sneaker, a lawn chair—it was all sour. But there was no corpse. No dog, no tat-covered body. Amp had tattoos all along his neck and arms. On the back of each of his hands was his dad’s name and R.I.P. in block letters. As if the man had died twice. Or as if Amp might forget him in the time it took him to look from one hand to the other. I heard he got Star’s name tattooed over his heart as soon as she got pregnant, but I don’t think that shit was true.
When I got to Amp’s house nobody was there. I guess they could have been at the morgue. People said they’d seen the ambulance, the body bag. Everybody noticed when an ambulance or police cars blazed through the neighborhood. I pulled out my phone and looked down the block. New houses were being built along the streets I had passed walking to Amp’s. They stood out like new cars in a junkyard next to the dumps around them. They were big odd-colored places. Light green, light blue, light red wood siding. They looked like empty dollhouses, even the one or two that actually had white people living inside. The FOR SALE signs called them Historic District houses and had prices with six digits. Like whoever was selling them wanted us to know we could never afford them. More old houses were being leveled and more new “historic” houses were being built on top of them. Construction workers, real estate agents, young families, white people were coming and going through the neighborhood’s side streets. It wasn’t a big deal. Nobody was scary or threatening or anything. Sometimes we’d wave when they passed us on the street.
And anyway, most of the guys I knew were truly minor criminals. Burglarizing the cars and backyards of Highland Park for chump change. No one who was really hardcore lasted long. Not because they got killed in a drive-by or something you see in a movie, though that happened occasionally, but because they usually got snatched by the police before they could do anything that was truly gangster. Everyone was happy when Chuck Ferry was off the streets, for example. He was just too dangerous for anybody’s good. The streets were left more often than not to a mix of loiterers, dudes like Amp, and tired old men and boys who did little more than strut along the corners and back alleys. But when I passed them the morning after Amp was killed, everybody seemed nervous. I could feel it. Everybody was anxious to have the villains off the street so the neighborhood could be returned to itself.
“Heard ya boy got got,” a dude said when he saw me sitting on Amp’s steps. He was a few years older than me. I knew he was looking for some little bit of gossip he could take with him on down the road.
“Wasn’t my boy,” I said without looking him in the eye.
“Damn. That’s some cold shit to say, youngblood.” The dude stared until I looked at him. Then walked off with something like mild disgust flickering across on his face.
I’ve never been in a fight. I’ve never even broke up a fight. I’m the quiet dude that’s always watching from the edge of the clash. Dude like me, always the first one people ask what happened. “You saw that shit, Demario? Who threw the first punch?” Usually I know, but I don’t say. The conversations go faster that way. I got no problem with bystanding. One time Star sort of hinted that was my problem. I didn’t think it was a put down at first.
Star. She is without a doubt the blackest person I know. Which is funny because she is also yellow as a brown banana. She didn’t wear dashikis and all that Back-to-Africa shit, but she wore these white shells in her braids. And she knew everything there was to know about Malcolm X, M.L.K., W.E.B. Them famous Negroes whose names were initials. She still had an OBAMA ’08 sign propped up in her bedroom window. I could see it whenever I stood across the street looking at her house. I never got, you know, to run my hands over her body and all that, but I know she had a little tattoo shaped like Africa somewhere under her clothes. She never showed it to me.
“What you doing?” I said with a flatness I meant to sound cool when I phoned her. I knew she wouldn’t be at school. She was like eight months pregnant. She’d have the baby in a couple of weeks and be back to finish the last two months of our junior year at Peabody.
“I can’t talk to you right now, Mario.”
“Yeah, I know. I heard what happened to Amp.”
She was quiet. Like she was holding her breath. I knew she’d been crying. After a long minute, she said, “I just don’t know why this is happening.” Damn. Then we were quiet a little while longer.
“I saw the dudes.”
“Who? You saw the dudes that did it?”
“Don’t worry, I’m gonna take care of it for you.”
“Who’d you see?”
Amp wasn’t dead yet when I saw him, I almost told her. I thought of how they had him pinned to a dumpster in an alley off Black Street. Two wiry, scruffy men. The dog, Strayhorn, was snapping at the pant leg of one of them. The guy gave the dog a frantic kick and then kicked at Amp in the same frantic way. They sort of snatched and poked at him. Amp’s shirt had been ripped. He was bleeding. I could hear him saying, “I ain’t got your shit. I ain’t got your shit.” Declaring it, really. Like he wasn’t afraid. Like he was in charge even if they were the ones grabbing and shoving and delivering awkward blows. They could barely handle him. I knew they weren’t gangsters. But I still did nothing.
“I’m gonna take care of this shit,” I said to Star, half talking up my nerve. I didn’t really know what I was saying.
“Don’t go trying to be a hero, Mario.”
“No, it ain’t like that.”
“Just go to the police.”
“Police?”
“Or go by his house— Wait a minute,” she said, putting me on hold.
I rubbed my brow. I thought for the first time that calling the police wasn’t such a bad idea. I won’t say I had plans to take care of Star, exactly. All the money I made working at the Eagle went to Marie. We lived in this little-ass apartment. My mother had been strange since her mother died. She was working long, lonely hours. She was my priority. And then Amp’s death last night, well, I told you she kissed me like her mother used to: a peck on each cheek then on my nose. Shit was embarrassing. I jerked back just a bit, but then I relaxed. I knew she was sad.