I'm Down Read online

  If you don’t mind,

  ’Cause your feet smell like

  A cow’s behind.

  Then the whole group did the chorus.

  I’m in a cappin’ mood (clap, clap)

  I’m in a cappin’ mood (clap)

  My turn. I felt my stomach turn into knots as I stepped in front of the row of kids trying to keep the beat with my rhythmless body, while I delivered my cap.

  You’re so poor.

  It’s really sad.

  I was at the junkyard.

  And I bought your dad.

  I got a laugh and it felt like coming home.

  Through the rest of the performance I joined in on the chorus and watched the rest of the caps, thinking that they didn’t quite measure up to the caliber of mine. And when we were all finished, the parents seemed truly impressed. But I was most excited for Dad to see how down I was, and how many sister friends I had made. And when I left the stage he smiled and said good job. Then he walked me over to meet Jamal’s mom, who had huge breasts and very red lips—both of which Dad liked. Jamal’s mom proceeded to tell me how great I was—and she was right.

  Dad agreed with her, but then added, “Yeah, but I’ll tell you one thing. You cap on me . . . you better not cap on me, ’cause I’ll go upside your ass.” But then he laughed at his own joke, so I knew it was just something he said so that I didn’t get too big for my britches.

  “Well, call me sometime,” Jamal’s mom said, writing something on a piece of paper and handing it to Dad. Dad wrote something on the other side of the same piece of paper and handed it back to her, “No, you call me.”

  And as we walked away, my dad said smiling, “She don’t gotta know that the phone’s off .” We had missed a phone bill and gotten disconnected, meaning incoming calls only. I smiled back. The night just couldn’t get any cooler.

  As we drove home, Anora was bouncing in her seat and Dad was humming the chorus to, “I’m in a Cappin’ Mood.” And when we rolled onto our street, I saw the kids on the corner—Jason, Nay-Nay, and Latifa. And something had changed in the way they looked. Like somehow they seemed less intimidating, and much less cool to me. If I were to jump out of the car at that moment, I wouldn’t be scared—I would be doing them a favor. And there was a new freedom in the air. In fact, I knew that I would never be afraid of them again—because I had the power of the cap!

  Two

  TEN-FOOT DROP

  “GET DRESSED, we have people coming over,” Dad said.

  “Who?” I asked without looking up from the TV. I was still in my pajamas at eleven o’clock and had every intention of remaining that way until after my stories. GSCC had ended, but we still had a month left of summer vacation before school, which meant I had just enough time to catch up on Days of Our Lives and Another World. And by catch up, I meant on the outfits, not the story. I only watched soap operas for the style.

  “What about breakfast?” Anora asked. She was sitting next to me, holding my old stuffed Snoopy doll.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dad said. “It’s almost lunch.”

  “I want breakfast!” Anora said, getting upset. “Then we can have lunch!”

  “Shhh,” I said, rubbing my sister’s arm to earn my allowance. She calmed down a little bit.

  “Who’s coming over?” I asked.

  “Big Lyman and his kids,” Dad replied.

  “Big Lyman has kids?” Anora asked.

  “That’s what I said,” Dad said, walking up to the TV and turning it off—right as Kaylah, of Days fame, walked onscreen wearing the most amazing pink rayon overall-dress with shoulder pads.

  “Why is Big Lyman coming?”

  “We are gonna remodel! He’s gonna watch over shit ’cause he’s an engineer.” I didn’t know that word and rather than ask, I tried to decipher what that meant. Remodel: to model again. Yes, that sounded right.

  “I’m hungry!” Anora said.

  “Shhh,” I said, feeling hungry myself. “We’ll get some food in a little bit. . . . Right, Dad?”

  “Yeah!” he said. “Don’t you always get fed sooner or later?” Later was the answer to that one.

  “Were they Big Lyman’s kids before?” my sister asked.

  “Yes,” Dad said. “They was always Big Lyman’s kids.”

  “But how come we never met them?” I asked. “Where were they before?”

  And Dad said, as though it explained everything, “Texas.”

  An hour later Big Lyman arrived. His hair had its usual Don King vibe and his tawny skin had summer freckles as he ushered his two kids, Little Lyman and Zwena, into our kitchen. That’s when he explained to Dad that they had been living with their mom, but with the event of his marriage to a woman named Lordess, Big Lyman wanted them all to be a family.

  Big Lyman stood at the counter, talking loudly while absentmindedly tapping a Newport from his pack, unaware that every time he moved, his five-year-old son, Little Lyman, who was hiding behind his leg, had to reposition himself. From what I could see of him, he was much darker than his father and, when he wasn’t hiding, his huge eyes were trained on Anora.

  Meanwhile Big Lyman’s daughter, Zwena, fearlessly struck up a conversation with me. Zwena was three years older than me and was light-skinned like her father but without freckles. She wore plastic glasses that slid down her nose and she seemed to have some sort of nasal problem that manifested itself in a runny nose, a nasally voice, and a hand I didn’t want to shake. Because of that, she was a mouth breather, and watching her I noticed there was a crust in the corners of her mouth that she didn’t seem too concerned with removing. She was also the unfortunate combination of sickly and energetic, which meant she would get so excited with whatever she was talking about, that she would run out of energy and have to take a second or two to recharge before she could finish her thought.

  “We were on an airplane,” she said, buddying up to me by starting a story in the doorway to the kitchen. “And it got a little bumpy, and there are these ladies that come out and serve you drinks that were running around, but the plane was really moving”—Zwena looked like she was gonna pop—“and the one lady fell on the other lady . . . and you know what the one lady said?” At this point Zwena ran out of air and started breathing in a way that begged the question: Why doesn’t this girl have an inhaler?

  It took Zwena about a minute to spit it out, and finally she whispered, breathing heavily through laughter, “Heifer.”

  “What’s a heifer?” I asked. And she just threw her arms up, frustrated. But next to Zwena I actually looked cool, so I liked her right away. And Little Lyman was the same age as Anora, who was quickly able to coax him out from behind his father’s leg by asking him, “Why you so scared of me?”

  Within minutes of them arriving, the four of us had ditched the grown-ups and were outside sitting on Big Lyman’s Ranchero. Zwena helped break the ice by asking us, “What if you won a million dollars?” And it was agreed that if we all were millionaires, we’d be spending a lot of time at McDonald’s. Then Dad and Big Lyman came outside and stood in the front yard looking at the house. As Dad pointed out various things around the yard, Big Lyman nodded and took the occasional drag off the Newport hanging from his long-nailed fingers.

  I asked Zwena, “Does your dad ever cut his fingernails?”

  “My dad cuts our fingernails,” Anora said, whining. “It hurts.”

  I shared a look with Zwena—the “being a big sister is a tough job” look. And at that moment I hoped she would never leave our house and that she liked me as much as I liked her.

  “I wonder what they’re talking about,” Zwena said, looking at Dad and Big Lyman above us in the yard. Then Zwena dared me to go see what they were talking about. Little Lyman reminded her that she had dared him to eat a rock, but I had never heard of daring.

  “It’s like, I bet you that you won’t,” Zwena explained.

  Which surprisingly really made me want to do it. I ran up the front
steps to where Dad and Lyman were in the raised yard.

  “Dad?” I asked. “What are you guys talking about . . . modeling?”

  “Can’t you see we’re in the middle of things?” he asked. “What’s wrong with you?” He looked irate, and I wished I hadn’t gotten all caught up in daring.

  But Big Lyman got me off the hook by saying, “Hey, why don’t you all go over to our house. I think Lordess is there, and we have a Slip ’n Slide.”

  We trekked the eight blocks from our place over to Big Lyman and Lordess’s house—Zwena taking the lead. And the rest of the day was spent sliding on a sheet of clear plastic tarp that we wet with a hose. It worked just like a regular Slip ’n Slide but without the padding and a lot more bruising. But you could get a faster slide going and at the end of the day, that seemed more important than functioning hips.

  While Zwena, Little Lyman, Anora, and I careened down the lawn toward the cement driveway, two kids from next door, Tre and Janella, watched us through the fence for a while, before changing into swimsuits and climbing over to join us. Tre and I instantly hit it off, because he was my age and we both liked candy. While Janella was so pushy that Zwena had to say, “Janella, you’re not the boss of the Slip ’n Slide.”

  When the thrill of sliding wore off we all took turns prying the hose from each other and spraying everyone else while they ran screaming. There were so many fun things you could do with water. And when Little Lyman put the hose between his legs and said, “Look, I’m peeing!” I said he should be a comedian.

  But when it was my turn with the hose, I sprayed Janella, and she freaked out. “Don’t wet my hair!” she screamed, acting injured.

  “But,” I said, shaken, “we are playing with the hose. That’s what you do.”

  I guessed that was the wrong thing to say, because Janella raised her voice instead of lowering it. “I just got my hair pressed this morning!” I nodded, but I thought pressing was something you did to a shirt. “So you best keep that hose away from my hair!”

  I looked at Zwena, who said, “She did say she just got her hair pressed.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I’ll be more careful.” And dropped the hose, not wanting the awesome responsibility anymore. But the hose just jumped off the ground, spraying Zwena, Little Lyman, and Janella, who screamed like she was dying. I instinctively moved toward the other side of the yard.

  “You best walk away, bitch!” Janella screamed.

  “Ooooh,” Anora said.

  It sounded a lot like a cap. And being flanked by Zwena and Little Lyman emboldened me. I knew what I had to do.

  I turned back to Janella and yelled, “You’re so ugly, you saw yourself in the mirror and started barking!” Not very original, but I heard laughter coming from Zwena.

  “Oh, burn,” Zwena said, making Janella stomp her foot and pull on her little brother’s arm saying, “Come on, Tre! Let’s get away from this mixed-up, mixed-nuts group of white, black, yellow . . . who knows?” Then she climbed back over the fence to her house. Tre knew that being a little brother meant that he should follow after her, but he very politely came over and said good-bye to everyone and thanked them for the sliding, as though we had just finished a polo match.

  That’s when we realized how hungry we all were. Anora was still whining about breakfast even though it was four.

  “Okay!” Zwena said. “We’re funna go to the store.”

  “Cool,” I said. “But, did you just say ‘funna’?”

  “Yeah,” Zwena said. “It’s like we’re fixing to, but we’re gonna. We’re funna.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re funna go with you.”

  Zwena showed us how to look through all the sofa cushions and pants pockets to find loose change, explaining that it wasn’t stealing so much as it was cleaning. We found enough money to hit the corner store and pick up some bologna and a box of Jiffy corn bread mix. Then Zwena amazed me by putting a batch of corn bread in the oven and then going to work frying some bologna. I couldn’t believe she knew how to cook. She was only ten, but she put a pan on the stove, threw down the bologna in the pan, where it would puff up like a balloon. And she knew exactly when to flip it. She was like Julia Child for the food stamp set.

  I headed home with Anora. I was full and still thinking about how great Zwena was, when we turned the corner onto our street and noticed there was something going on in front of our house. A crowd of people had gathered, and orange cones blocked traffic. As I got closer I could see what all the commotion was about. Lyman, Reggie Dee, and Eldridge were watching Dad behind the wheel of the huge orange backhoe tearing our front yard out and putting it in a dump truck parked nearby. The rock garden my mother had worked on, the front steps—it was all being torn off and hauled away. I had no idea what he thought he was doing, but I had to stop him. I ran up to the backhoe and practically threw myself in front of it.

  “Dad!” I screamed, but he couldn’t hear me and just kept dumping dirt in the truck. He brought the claw back around, and that’s when he saw me in front of what was left of the rock garden. He motioned for me to get out of the way, but I wasn’t going anywhere. Finally he cut the engine.

  “Get the hell out of the way!” he screamed.

  “What are you doing to our house?” I asked.

  “Remodeling!” he said, and then realizing I didn’t understand, “I’m making it look better.” There was dirt everywhere and a ten-foot drop from the front door.

  “It doesn’t look better!” I said.

  “It’s not finished!” he yelled. “Now, get out of the way!”

  But I couldn’t let him keep going. It looked like our front yard had been bombed. I sat down in the dirt, not completely unsure he wouldn’t scoop me up with his next clawload.

  Dad stood up and cut the engine and said, “Everyone take a little break.” Then he climbed down the backhoe to stand next to me.

  “Mishna. You gotta understand there’s a project gonna happen here.”

  I folded my arms.

  He bent down and explained, “We are building a second floor underneath.” He pointed to the front door. “You see up there is where the deck will be, with stairs down to the street level.” And he pointed to a corner area. “And over there is where your new room will be. It’ll be done by the time you finish third grade.”

  “But,” I said, “I liked the way the house looked before.”

  “Yes,” Dad said. “But you don’t know how good it’s gonna look. Just wait and see.” Then Dad bent over and dried my eyes.

  “Can we have flowers again?” I asked. “Like the ones Mom planted?

  “Pfft,” he said, dissing her flowers. “Better flowers. Now, can I finish what I was doing?”

  Then I watched him climb up the steps into the backhoe to continue fucking up our house.

  The rest of the summer, I spent every day with Zwena, Little Lyman, and Anora. We were inseparable, and we almost never saw Big Lyman, Lordess, or Dad. We’d browse in Chubby and Tubby, the hardware store, till they kicked us out. Or sit on the overpass over Martin Luther King taunting passing motorists with rocks and middle fingers. We ate at Zwena’s step-grandparents and we climbed fences to get everywhere, so I knew what everyone’s backyard looked like and who had a pit bull. And on the days when I came home, our house had the same Fall-of-Berlin look it had the week before, just with new building materials in the yard. Once the cement was poured and Dad built some wooden steps up to the back door, nothing else really happened and all the materials just sat in the yard. And the front door remained where it was, suspended ten feet in the air.

  When I brought Zwena and Little Lyman over, Zwena said, “How do you get into your house?” And when I showed Zwena the back steps she laughed, “Dang, your daddy ain’t never gonna finish your house!”

  “That’s not true!” I said defensively. “He’s making a new room for me that will be done by next year. He’s probably working on it right now!”

  Then I led them into the ho
use where Dad and Big Lyman were sitting at the dining room table in front of three bottles of hot sauce. They each had a beer and Big Lyman was laughing hysterically as Dad cried and blew his nose.

  “What are you guys doing?” I asked.

  But Dad couldn’t answer. He was bent over and his face was flushed red as tears rolled down his cheeks. Lyman said excitedly, “We’re doing a hot sauce tasting. Went to Chinatown today and bought some crazy shit.”

  I looked at the cryptic Asian labels on the jars and bottles sitting in front of them. My father was still blowing his nose as Lyman prepared a little hot bomb for himself.

  “Is that stuff hot?” Anora asked.

  Lyman said, “Let me put it this way . . . When was the last time you saw your daddy cry?”

  Dad regained his composure and his breath and said, “What are you girls doing inside anyway?”

  “I just wanted to show Zwena where my new room is gonna be,” I said.

  “Nah, nah . . . It’s not safe.” This was from the guy that had introduced me to bottle rockets. But I needed him to show Zwena that the house was gonna be good.

  “Can you just show us?” I pleaded. “We won’t go in, we’ll just look.”

  “Not right now,” Dad said. “We’re busy.”

  He didn’t look busy. He looked like he was giving himself diarrhea.

  “Why don’t you go to Zwena’s and Slip ’n stuff . . . Slide or whatever,” he said.

  I never should have gotten out of the way of that backhoe.

  I was feeling bummed until Zwena suggested grits and hunger took over. She led the way back to her house, walking ahead while I lagged behind looking for lucky money on the sidewalk. Coming up the rear were Anora and Little Lyman—ten feet back holding hands. I looked up from what I thought might be a dime but turned out to be a wadded-up gum wrapper, and spied Janella in front of her house with two other girls. And the way the three of them looked at me gave me a bad feeling. But I passed them without incident and wrote off my bad feeling. Until they started whispering to each other, and that’s when I got a really bad feeling. You know, the feeling you get when you realize you should have listened to that bad feeling. And I followed their stares to Tre running toward me from the side of their house at full speed.