Hampton Heights, page 5
But then his grandfather disappeared, for a time that seemed like forever but Sigmone now supposed was about a year. At the mall that day, he understood his grandfather was trying to show him a good time, to make up for how long he’d been away. He bought Sigmone a bag of roasted peanuts at Buddy Squirrel and—a miracle—a Paul Pressey jersey at Fan Fair. “Merry Christmas,” his grandpa said, chuckling, as an excited Sigmone pulled it over his T-shirt and admired himself in the mirror.
The mall was decked out for the holidays, garlands and trees everywhere. Here and there gigantic foil-wrapped presents were piled in stacks, taller than his grandfather, as if the people walking the corridors were themselves gifts tucked under a tree. Screaming little kids lined up with their parents to see Santa Claus.
“You don’t need to see him, right?” his grandpa said, and Sigmone knew the right answer was “No way,” even though it did make him feel sad about not being little enough to do that anymore. When he’d been truly young enough to believe, his grandpa had been around all the time. They’d visit the Santa in Harambee every December. One year his grandpa had even been the Santa—had winked to Sigmone as he approached. Maybe his reappearance today meant that could happen again next Christmas.
They considered a movie, but nothing was playing that they really wanted to see. Sigmone remembered his grandfather joking about one of the titles on the marquee: “Out of Africa? I already know that story.” Anyway, there wasn’t time—they had to meet his mom soon. They walked to a back hallway where, to Sigmone’s amazement, there was an arcade full of brand-new games, way better ones than they had in his neighborhood. They waited in line for Pole Position and his grandpa sat next to him in the dual drivers’ seats. As they chose their cars, his grandpa pulled his sunglasses out of his breast pocket and slipped them on. It was corny but also cool. And then he smoked Sigmone in the race.
Looking for a game that no one else was lining up for, Sigmone found Paperboy. But Sigmone loved Paperboy. He’d played it on his friend Roman’s Atari on one of his infrequent visits to Roman’s house. There, he hardly got any time to play before his friend’s anxious Russian mom ushered them outside. But here—his grandpa, amused, watched him steer the bike with the game’s handlebars. “So really, all you’re doing is throwing those newspapers?” He couldn’t believe that was the game, but he slapped Sigmone’s back when he broke the windows in the creepy old houses and laughed when Sigmone smacked into a car. When the game was over, the final screen displayed a newspaper’s front page. AMAZING PAPERBOY DELIVERS! shouted the headline, with a picture of a freckled kid in a baseball hat. “Can I have another quarter?” Sigmone asked. His grandfather gave him two and went off to make a phone call.
Sigmone knew the game seemed silly to other kids. You weren’t boxing Piston Hurricane or shooting aliens with a gun. But something about the geometry of it was so satisfying. He got the same feeling cruising on that bike that he got cruising down the track during a meet—the feeling he was untouchable. He loved swerving around the skateboarders and old ladies, loved darting a rolled-up newspaper straight into a postbox.
His grandpa returned in time to see Sigmone type his initials into the number six space on the score list. “All right, man,” he said, and took Sigmone to the change machine, where he handed him a five-dollar bill. The landslide of quarters from the machine’s mouth was extravagant, obscene. He couldn’t believe he was allowed to take them all. He wished, now, that he’d been listening better to whatever it was his grandfather had said before he walked away, but he was so focused on the quarters weighing down the pockets of his jeans. Usually at the arcade, if you were crushing a game, you’d eventually draw a crowd, but not if the game was Paperboy. So no one saw him hit number five on the score list, then number three. He was right in the middle of his best run ever when his mom came running in crying and shouting and pulling him away from the game. She held him tight and, over her shoulder, he saw his paperboy slowly, slowly coast directly into the path of a car. He didn’t even get to type in his initials.
Maybe that was why he’d gotten the delivery job, Sigmone thought, as he and the obnoxious Joel walked up 57th toward the addresses on their clipboard. Some kind of under-the-surface shit about that game, and how he’d never seen his grandpa again after that day. Or maybe he just needed money to keep up with the kids at the school he took the bus to every morning, and it wasn’t like his mom and dad had a lot to spare. Whatever the reason, his experience was nothing like the towheaded kid in the video game. He didn’t ride a bike down a sunny street. He didn’t even have a bike. He delivered in the dark of morning, in the freezing cold, and mostly dropped the papers in the doors of local businesses: the hairdresser’s, the Chinese restaurant, his grandfather’s old store, now run by Luis, who’d managed to avoid getting tarred with the same brush. It was funny that the paperboy’s neighborhood, with its beautiful houses, was such a danger zone. He wondered how that kid would do if you dropped him in Sigmone’s part of town, where the traps and snares were less visible.
Joel was fretting about his boom box. Did Sigmone know this neighborhood? Was it safe to leave his boom box in the van? “I’ve never been in this neighborhood, either,” Sigmone finally said. “But no one’s gonna guess there’s an expensive radio in that piece-of-shit van.”
“Yeah, that’s a good point, man,” Joel said. Sigmone was already annoyed by him. He was a pain. But on the other hand, that boom box was deluxe, the nicest Sigmone had ever seen. He would love to crack it open and see how the CD player worked, watch the laser do its magic. Most of the kids at his school seemed sort of rich, but this kid was actually rich, mansion rich, and it wouldn’t hurt for Sigmone to be nice to him for a while and see what happened.
The first house was around the corner. Joel said, “Here, listen to this,” and then started beatboxing. Beatboxing! Sigmone looked around to make sure there was no one besides him witnessing this. “What are you doing?” he asked, but then the kid busted out rapping.
I walk through the jungle with my dick in my hand
I’m the mean motherfucker from another land!
I see a hundred naked ladies up against a wall
I bet you fifty dollars I can fuck ’em all!
Sigmone had stopped walking. Joel had a voice on him. It rang through the street. The last thing Sigmone needed was some neighbor hearing this crap and calling it in. Joel, too, had stopped walking, and was now grinning like the cat who got the canary, as Sigmone’s mom liked to say. Here came the punch line.
I fucked ninety-eight, ’til my balls turned blue
Then I took a shot of whiskey, and I fucked the other two!
“Cut that shit out,” Sigmone said.
“You don’t think that’s funny?” In a way Sigmone admired Joel’s courage, to try that with a black guy he just met. Or maybe it was plain stupidity.
“Is that some Beastie Boys or whatever?”
“No, I made it up.”
“You made that up.”
“Some of it,” Joel clarified. “The part about being a mean motherfucker. A mean motherfucker from a distant land—”
“Why’s it gotta be the jungle?”
“It’s like, Vietnam or whatever. You want to hear the rest?”
“There’s more?”
Joel beatboxed again, as if letting the spirit recapture him. He seemed entirely unselfconscious, having the time of his life doing this on a frigid street in the middle of the night. He wore, Sigmone saw, a Swatch. He rapped, “I went to the doctor and the doctor said”—he dropped his voice way down low—“‘I’m sorry, son, but your balls are dead.’”
Sigmone laughed. He couldn’t help it.
He knew Joel. At least knew of him. They went to the same school, though Joel was in eighth grade and Sigmone was in seventh. Joel’s mansion was in Whitefish Bay, right on the lake, and he probably got a ride to school in his dad’s Porsche or whatever. Sigmone, meanwhile, rushed through his paper route so he could catch the 15 bus, which took him up through Shorewood and right by the school. His dad never got tired of telling him what a golden opportunity he’d been given, and he supposed he was lucky, though it didn’t feel lucky to be one of three black kids in the entire class.
There were a lot of Joels at his school all of a sudden: white kids who’d just discovered rap. The variety show last spring had been a parade of Beasties, three different groups of boys in sideways Brewers hats lip-synching “Brass Monkey” or whatever. He could tell the teachers hated it and for once he agreed with them. The boys had started talking black with one another, and sometimes even tried it with Sigmone—for example when one of the groups, not the one Joel was in, asked him to join their act. It reminded him of how the kids who barely even looked at him in class got real interested once it was time to pick teams at recess.
He’d suggested to the variety show group that they should do LL Cool J instead. They said they didn’t know any of his songs. He spent a lot of his time in Whitefish Bay just shutting the hell up.
The porch light was on at the first house on their list. Joel propped the storm door open with his elbow and pushed the doorbell. A single eye peered out from behind the frilly curtains. Sigmone backed up behind Joel, holding the clipboard in front of his body. An old white lady with wispy hair opened the door, holding on to her housecoat, flowery and loose like his aunt liked to wear. She looked right at Joel and did her best not to notice Sigmone. Joel started a sales spiel which, to Sigmone’s relief, didn’t include anything weird at all.
While he talked, Sigmone noticed the porch light, which didn’t match the house. It was oversized and black, tricked out like it belonged on some fancy country club, not a little house way out here. But it was clearly cheap and plastic, and the bulb didn’t sit right in the fixture.
The woman politely declined Joel’s offer and started closing the door, but Sigmone stepped forward. “Hey, you need to get that porch light fixed,” he said.
“Excuse me?” the woman said. Joel gave him a look like, What are you doing? Sigmone wondered himself, but he couldn’t stand how bad that light was installed.
“You see how the bulb’s crooked?” He leaned his head right against the house and eyed the fixture from the side. The bulb shone bright, 200 watts, he thought. It nearly touched the front of the plastic cube encasing it. “The socket’s not installed right.”
“My son just put it in,” she said. “It’s new.”
“Yo, I’m sure her son knows what he’s doing,” Joel said. “Come on.”
Sigmone ignored the yo and pointed to the light. “The bulb’s heating that fixture up. Might cause a fire.”
“A fire?” Now he had her attention. The woman opened the storm door and squinted. “It does look a little off,” she admitted.
“You call your electrician,” Sigmone said. “I bet your son just made a tiny little mistake. It was nice of him to put that in for you.”
“I will,” she said. “Thank you, young man.”
“Yo, she should have bought a subscription, you basically saved her life,” Joel said as they returned to the sidewalk. “How did you know all that?”
“My dad takes me on jobs sometimes,” Sigmone said. “I’m good with electrical stuff.” In fact, his teacher had basically made him the person in charge of the AV cart whenever she wanted to show a filmstrip or video. It was him who made sure everything was connected; it was him who got to press the button advancing to the next slide, the job he’d always wanted in third grade but which made him faintly embarrassed now. It did keep him from zoning out, though. His reward, she’d told him, was that at the end of the year he could pick out a movie for the class to watch, though she’d given him a whole lecture about how it had to be “something everyone will enjoy.”
For his birthday his dad had given him a multimeter, which he’d used on every outlet in the house, and a book—the biography of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the Laker. Kareem had written it himself. “I thought you might want to see how another giant lives his life,” his dad said. Kareem reclined on the paperback’s cover, so tall his legs stretched around the spine and onto the back of the book.
Between his eleventh and twelfth birthdays Sigmone had grown almost a foot. People had always tried to get him to play basketball, but now everyone—classmates, teachers, the coach—begged him. He didn’t like it that much, though of course he played. He did like Kareem—liked how reserved he was, as if he was just doing a job out there on the court. Sometimes, when no one was around, Sigmone tried a skyhook. He almost always bricked it.
He wasn’t much for books and was a slow reader, but every night in bed he read a page or two. He skipped the parts about jazz, which he didn’t care about, and drugs, which scared him. He reread the parts about the girls Kareem made it with about ten times. And for the first time in his life, he grabbed a pen and underlined something in a book: what Kareem said about being tall and black. He’d felt a little thrill of disobedience making a mark in the book, even though he knew he was allowed—it was his. The line was something like, Kareem was big, but he never wanted to stand out, so he became an observer.
That was Sigmone to a T. If he went around acting all boisterous like Joel, other kids—hell, his teachers—would be scared of him. So in the past year or so he’d learned to watch. He watched the kids in his school. He watched his dad when he took him out in his truck, watched how he interacted with the neighborhood. He watched his own hands as he took apart and put back together the toaster, the coffeepot, the TV. And although he didn’t understand everything, he learned from what he saw.
Now he watched Joel as the white kid chattered his way down the street, a running commentary of rap lyrics, insults about Kevin, and dirty jokes. His monologue only ceased when they reached a house and they both waited to see who would answer. If the person was white, Joel took the lead. If the person was black, Sigmone did. They didn’t discuss this plan, just fell into it from the start. They didn’t sell any subscriptions to anybody.
The neighborhood reminded Sigmone of his own—the houses were smaller, but there was a similar feeling of the people who lived here just barely keeping the world at bay. A few of the houses had junk all over the lawn, old mowers and table saws and shit, and then the house next door would sport a tidy flower box, as if it were telling the junk house off.
Once they struck out at a house, Joel went right back to talking. “If you like electronics, you should see the recording studio in our basement,” he said. “Sometimes I help set up microphones and stuff.”
“Why do you have a recording studio in your house?”
Joel looked embarrassed. “My dad’s a musician.”
“I didn’t know they have rock stars in Milwaukee.”
They turned the corner. “He’s not a rock star,” Joel began, but then Sigmone threw out an arm and stopped him.
Just a few houses away, standing in the middle of the street, was the biggest dog Sigmone had ever seen. Bigger than that mean German shepherd that his neighbor let roam his yard, who barked at Sigmone every morning and left dog-shaped dents in the fence. The huge dog in the street trotted to the sidewalk, moved from a streetlight to a dark patch, and stopped. It turned in their direction.
“Don’t move,” Joel muttered.
Sigmone couldn’t move. The dog was staring right at him. All he could see from here was the glinting reflection in its eyes, but somehow he could feel those eyes lighting up his insides. The dog was a dark shape against dark shapes, but one that moved with intelligence and purpose. It was familiar to Sigmone, like a creature from his dreams. He heard Joel make a whimpering sound and felt the hairs on his arms and legs crackle.
Headlights silhouetted the dog’s form. It whipped its head toward the car and then loped into a backyard. “Jesus, shit,” Joel said, exhaling. “Was that a wolf?”
“He saw us,” Sigmone said. The car rolled past them, and the street was once again quiet.
“That was like something out of a horror movie,” Joel said. “Like, did you see Teen Wolf?”
“Do we have to go to that house? Where the dog went?”
“It’s on the list,” Joel said, perusing the clipboard. The house looked abandoned. An Oldsmobile, stripped for parts, sat up on blocks in the driveway, half covered by a tarp. “But I think we can skip it.”
Next door their knock was answered by a white guy with a mustache and a Miller Lite T-shirt. He only sort of listened to Joel’s spiel, but also seemed to be looking past them, up and down the block. Maybe he was searching for his giant-ass dog. “I already get the newspaper,” he finally said. “Comes every afternoon.”
“That’s the Journal,” Joel said. “We’re selling the Sentinel.”
“The morning paper,” said Sigmone.
The man was already closing the door. “I don’t need two papers.”
“Hey wait,” Sigmone said. “Does anyone live next door?”
“No,” the man said flatly. “You don’t want to go there.” He turned off his porch light, leaving the boys in darkness.
“Okay! Good decision, I guess,” said Joel.
On the way to the next house, Joel started recounting the plot of Teen Wolf, which sounded like some bullshit to Sigmone. “You really believe in that supernatural stuff?” he asked finally.
“Science cannot explain all that happens in the dark of night,” said Joel. Sigmone sang the Twilight Zone song.
At the next house, their unspoken delegation of tasks faltered when the door was opened by an interracial couple. “Uh, hey there,” Joel said.
