“Stop picking at that food,” Uncle Bull said.
Isaac let go of the foil lid on the tray and turned from the fridge. He straightened his back to meet Bull’s glare. I’d crept into the hall ’cause the worn mattress had shifted when my cousin had gotten out of bed.
“You ain’t pay for this,” Isaac said, nodding toward the tray.
Bull had a mean face, shaped by a long knife’s edge of days whittling away at him. He tilted his head this way and that, trying to crack his neck.
“The fuck you know about bills? You don’t keep the lights on in this house,” Bull said. He was trying to remain calm.
“Yeah? Then stop taking us to work with your sorry ass,” Isaac said.
Bull was across the kitchen in an instant. The fridge door slammed shut on Isaac’s hand and he called out more in surprise than in pain. He fell on his ass, caught himself quick, and scrambled to his feet. I heard a noise behind me—Abraham and Israel, my other cousins, shuffled out of our bedroom sleepy-eyed. Their steps were heavy even on the carpeting. Isaac and Bull spun toward the sound and, seeing us all there, tried to shake off the tension. Auntie Connie came from the bedroom on the other side of the kitchen, in her head wrap and nightgown, squinting as her eyes adjusted.
“What was that noise?” She studied our faces.“What’s going on?” she asked.
Bull looked at Isaac. “I slipped, Momma,” Isaac said.
Abraham and Israel walked into the weak, sterile fluorescence of the stove light, Abraham filling a glass of water, Iz just cooling out by his brother. Abe was sixteen, Iz thirteen—only six months older than me, but still damn near two hundred pounds—and Isaac, barely fifteen, was smack in the middle. Bull felt the pack measuring him, his wife’s sons from another life. He popped the freezer open, grabbed a few cubes from the ice tray, then turned to the sink and filled a reusable cup from Mickey D’s, one of the King-size joints with pictures of burgers and fries printed on the side. It took a while and no one spoke. Then, as if all was well in the world, he walked by the boys and kissed Connie on the forehead.
“I gotta get some sleep,” he said. “It’s only Lonnie and me cleaning the Edward Jones offices tomorrow.” He walked into the dark, followed by the sound of their bedroom door swinging closed. Hearing Bull say “Lonnie” was weird. Connie called her baby brother Li’l Big Head. He was Pops to me. I tried to imagine what he was doing right then that had me staying at my cousins’ instead of with him for the brief month we spent together each summer, most summers—at least summers when my moms could find him.
Connie took us all in with a glance, then narrowed her eyes. Abraham, Iz, and I got the message and turned toward the bedroom. Isaac went back to the fridge.
“Baby, stay outta that church food,” Connie said.
Isaac flashed his smile that’d sell Raid to a roach. “O.K., Momma.”
•
Bull, your whole life played out like one long sacrifice. You ate what this country fed you, marched in step, and wrapped yourself in the colors of a good patriot. Still, they had no place for you. Do their bidding, and they’ll let you live out your days wandering their deserts. That ain’t for me. I’ma look into the red and blue of their eyes when my time comes, ’cause I know they built those cages up in Monroe for our people, but they’ll use a bullet just the same.
•
Isaac stood apart from his brothers. Their names had all climbed off pages of the Good Book—Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Auntie Connie’s boys. But it was Isaac who smiled and laughed as the world bucked in his hands.
Landing in Washington State to visit my pops in the summer felt like landing in a different country for an East Coast kid like me—evergreens tall as city buildings and summer hailstorms that’d blow through, leaving perfect marble-size balls of ice in the street for us to pick up and whip at one another. My cousins took me in like a little brother when we played two-on-two at the park or chicken at the Tanglewilde pool.
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Connie’s kitchen always smelled like food. True, she almost never had time to clean it and there were trails of ants a football field long, but everyone was glad that she spent the few free hours she had throwing down instead of cleaning up.
My cousins took their God in heaping portions, just like their momma, and they ate the same way. Auntie Connie’d make pork chops some special Sundays, breaded, fried, then smothered in gravy. She was a Baptist with Southern roots, so pork might as well have been the Eucharist, and though Bull was a Seventh-day Adventist, he had let his faith lapse a long while back and was always the first one over the baking dish choosing his cut.
Bull was wild skinny. My pops was not. Bull looked like he had two creams in him—the lightest in a family that stretched across the spectrum. He had a chestnut face, and a frame longer and leaner than those starved dogs you see on the please-donate ads. He worked the darkest part of the night cleaning offices where he couldn’t get hired, polishing the tiles and mirrors with a care he never showed to his own things. My uncle worked hard and that’s all I knew. His boys knew it, too, and no one but Isaac ever said anything about it. Our family left a lot in silence.
•
The morning after Bull and Isaac tussled over the church food, Bull slept through his chance at atonement. Isaac, though, was ready in his Sunday best before the rest of us had even woke up. He had been hollering at the pastor’s daughter every Sunday since I’d arrived, and the closer the two of them got the more religious Isaac became.
The three of us lumbered into the kitchen, half dressed for service, to find Isaac pouring four glasses of orange juice. Abraham took two ramen packs out of the cupboard and crunched them up. He ripped open the seasoning packets and dumped them into the bags of dried noodles, and we sat eating the chunks like potato chips, licking the MSG off our lips, and listening to Connie hum “Nothing but the Blood” in the other room.
Real quick on Auntie Connie: everything about her was big and her strength matched her size. She had a voice that flowed deep and clear as the Chattooga, a voice that moved things inside you. She always ate apples and left the cores on the dashboard of her green ’92 Dodge Caravan till the end of the day. She said eating apples was the only way to keep your voice sharp. The boys all sang well, but not like Connie. Abraham sang high and right, and Israel hit the notes with a blocked nose. Isaac’s voice had that warm hoarseness to it—a hushed secret, with a rasp and crackle, like everything he sang was on vinyl and what he had to say was only for you, no one else.
That Sunday, he finally pulled the pastor’s daughter with his voice. Sonya Mitchell was Nia Long “Boyz n the Hood” bad. She could’ve turned Pontius Pilate Christian. I followed them outside because I wasn’t a Baptist and the three-hour services were two and a half hours too long for me. I heard Isaac’s hushed voice and poked my head around the corner of the building to see. He had one hand on the bricks of the church above Sonya’s shoulder and was grinning in that camera-ready way he had. “There’s plenty a sermon left.”
She looked at his face, stumbling on his handsomeness. “Why can’t we wait till the cookout?”
“ ’Cause everyone’s gonna be at the cookout.”
“We could go downstairs,” she said.
“We could go downstairs now.”
“My dad’ll see us. You can see the door from the pulpit.”
“No, he won’t. We’ll be quiet as the Holy Ghost.” He kissed her on the cheek and smiled again, wide with no slickness in it—which was what made it slick.
She turned to look at the side entrance of the church and I tucked myself back behind the corner. I can still see the snapshot image of Sonya, the sun catching the red undertones in her hair, like her kin had some Irish in them long generations back.
“What if he sees?”
“Then he sees. You think he’s gonna stop the sermon?”
“What you mean, then he sees? You crazy? I gotta deal with him later. Not you.”
Isaac laughed. “There’s two hundred people in there. He’s not gonna notice.” He wrapped his hand around her waist and brought her in. “I promise,” he said, pulling her to the side door, but she stopped, peeked through the small window in the door, and then took two steps back, breaking the spell.
“Next week—” she started, and Isaac’s face dropped six stories. “There’s a guest pastor coming and my dad will be running around overtime trying to be host of the year. It’ll be perfect.” Then Sonya whispered something in my cousin’s ear and his face picked back up those six stories, plus some.
•
By the following Saturday, Isaac looked like he was about to levitate. We were all in the bedroom, cooling, nothing doing, and for once Connie hadn’t put us to work around the house or forced us outside so she could enjoy a little peace. Isaac couldn’t stop talking about Sonya. “She needs that Jodeci ‘Freek’n You’ loving, feel me? Sonya’s true, Bible Christian good. I mean real hands-clasped-in-the-front-of-youth-ministry-class, dress-past-the-knees, dark-stockings good,” he said. As he riffed about her, his voice was low and steady.
Iz shook his head and flipped a page of his “Venom” comic book.
“So why you scheming on her then?” Abe said, not looking up from a watch he was putting back together.
“ ’Cause you can’t live all locked up by what they think of you. Shit’s unhealthy.” Isaac lightened his tone. “You try to lock all that up, you probably gonna catch cancer or bust a blood vessel or some shit.” He hopped onto the bed, resting his back against the wall next to me. He leaned in and said, “So tomorrow it’s almost like I’m saving her life, feel me?” Abraham rolled his eyes at his brother and Isaac stared at him a beat, dead-ass, then he started to sing, “Every freek’n night, and every freek’n day,” while he pretended to be slow-stroking an imaginary girl, thrusting his hips up. “I wanna freek you baby in every freek’n way.” We were all laughing when Bull came in the room, ready to leave for work again. The laughter stopped.
“Boys, Lonnie and I need you tonight,” he said.
I looked to Iz, who tented his face with the comic book and pretended to sob.
Isaac paused. “What time we gonna get home?”
“We’ll get back when we get back,” Bull said as he left. Isaac was lost in thought for a minute, then popped up and went to the dresser for his scrub clothes. His brothers got up, too, and joined him. I leaned off the bed and dug in my bag for my own beat clothes. I didn’t mind working when my pops worked, too. He could make pigs in the slaughterhouse line get loose.
After Isaac got his shirt off, he poked out his chest and strutted around looking like a fool. “I’m the damned king of this mop,” he said. “Pharaoh of these motherfuckin’ vacuums.”
We all laughed at Isaac’s act, but he didn’t stop.
“I be playin’ mind control on these white folks,” he started in, imitating Tucker in “Friday.” “When they come around—I ain’t be talkin’. But when they leave—I be talkin’ again.” Iz’s “Looney Tunes” laugh lifted us all. I swear he tried to watch that movie every weekend. “Work me like a dog, too.” Isaac was getting louder. “And, yeah, it’s the grave shift and they won’t shake my hand when they see me, but I be throwin’ they recycling in the wrong dumpster, you can believe that!” Isaac laughed alone then, mean-edged and resounding.
•
Bull’s company, King Cleaners, had never really gotten off the ground. His employees were flakes or addicts—often both. He undercut more established companies to get contracts and then hardly had enough money to pay a staff when those contracts actually came through. Connie believed in him, though, deep trust. She used her mortgage as collateral on a loan to help him through his initial deficit, the hole he never climbed out of.
All this meant that the nights when he couldn’t find enough workers, or pay them enough, he’d take us. Abraham got to sit up front in the cab of Bull’s truck, stuffed between Unc and my pops, ’cause he was the oldest. Me, Israel, and Isaac packed close together in the bed of the Dodge and wrapped ourselves in an old green tarp, hole-ridden from Bull shovelling mulch and gravel off it at his previous job. Iz was a human heater, though, and a big one at that, so we were O.K. He’d sweat even on cold nights—the nights when the wind whipped the tarp till it felt like we were stuck in a blender. Bull tried to hit the larger offices first so that he could drop us back home afterward and finish the smaller ones with just my pops.
Early in the night, we kept the mood above zero. Iz and I were a pair, Abe and Isaac always paired up, and Pops went with Bull, to speed things like sweeping and mopping, scrubbing and rinsing.
“You fat nigga.” Bull’s voice echoed through the air vents. Iz stopped mopping the floor of the women’s bathroom and I stopped scrubbing the sink. Bull never used that word around us, out of respect for Connie, I think.
“C’mon, Bull, it’s kinda funny,” my pops said.
“How’s you clogging the toilet with a shit-covered rag funny?” Bull’s voice sounded far away and Iz and I both stood, concentrating on every word.
“What? You want me to tuck it back in my pocket like a shit handkerchief?” my pops said.
“Nah, Lonnie, I want you to not be so fat that you can’t wait to grab some toilet paper before you start shittin’ like a buffalo,” Bull said. I could hear my pops trying to stifle his laugh. “Shut up,” Bull yelled. “I can’t lose this contract.”
“Lose the contract for what? Using the sacred whites-only bathroom?”
“Yeah, you a real soul brother, cleaning mirrors and scrubbing sinks,” Bull said.
I waited to hear my pops clown Bull, but there was silence. My fingers hurt from clenching the scrub brush so tight, and the rubber gloves twisted up on my palms; Bull’s gloves were almost too small for me already. Iz and I drifted into the hall so we could hear better, knowing it wasn’t over yet.
Through the sliver between the doorstop and the door, I caught a glimpse of Bull forcing the metal snake down the toilet. He stopped, yanked it out, and threw it toward the door, skidding and scraping the tiles, feet from where we stood just out of sight. Then he kicked an empty garbage can. “Fix it!” he said. “I’m going to dump the trash.”
The rhythmic sound of Pops’s scrubbing stopped. “Make sure you thank massa for their holy garbage,” he said. “Yessuh, I’m so honored, suh. To collect yo’ snot rags and Band-Aids, suh, and and—”
“Fuck you,” Bull said.
Before we could scramble back into the other bathroom, he stormed into the hall, trying to tie the trash bags. He glared at us. “What?” Bull said. “You done with the bathroom?”
Iz shook his head.
“Then stop sticking your nose in grown-men business and fuckin’ finish it,” Bull snapped. He looked back into the men’s room and saw my pops staring at him with no laughter left on his face. Bull glanced at us one more time, then resumed trying to tie the garbage bags. His hands shook bad since he’d quit smoking.
•
The night wore on. Bull never recovered. Usually, you could hear Pops and Bull talking shit about sports, movies, even the news, if they exhausted the other two, but that night they were dead quiet up in the cab. Every time I looked through the window, Abe sat stiffer than marble in the middle seat, eyes fixed ahead.
We rode in the back of that shitty truck so long my legs went completely numb. After we finished each office, Isaac studied the sky from the truck bed as we drove, praying for the light not to come yet.
As we pulled into the Ticor Title parking lot, my pops reached through the cab window and squeezed Iz’s shoulder, gentle, to wake him. “Last building for the night,” he said. Bull parked and we all paused to watch the top of Mt. Rainier catch the first rays of Sunday and glow blood-orange. Bull banged his fist on the side of the truck. “Let’s go,” he said. I don’t know how I got my feet to move, but Iz and I managed to stumble out, tired and hungry. Isaac stayed.
“Let’s go!” Bull said again.
Isaac stood up in the bed of the truck and cocked his head, looking down at Bull. “I ain’t missing church,” he said.
“Then you better hurry up.”
Isaac judged the light in the sky. “It’s about to be dawn. You need to take us home.” His voice was loud enough to echo in the empty parking lot. My cousins and I stopped in our tracks. My pops doubled back toward the coming storm.
“Get your ass outta the truck,” Bull snapped.
“Nah.” Isaac levelled his eyes without flinching.
Bull banged both fists on the side of the truck. “Boy, I swear to God—”
“You swear to God, what?”
Bull lunged forward, reaching up for Isaac, who took a step back so Bull missed. Unc lost it, jumping again, pulling himself up by the elbows, then hands, but before he could scramble fully into the bed my pops grabbed both of his shoulders and pulled him back onto his feet.
“Easy, Bull,” Pops said. “We all tired.”
“Fuck that.” Bull glanced from Isaac back to Pops. “I be damned if I’ma let an ungrateful little boy disrespect me.”
Isaac said nothing, stared down at Bull like he was a stranger stumbling and sipping out a brown paper bag instead of his step-pops.
My cousins and I had moved with my pops to stand between them.
Bull kept looking up past us, his face reddening.
“Fuck you, Lonnie. You work for me. You forget that?”
Pops didn’t take the bait. Bull made a weak move to get around us, but Pops placed a large hand on his chest. “I ain’t gon’ let you beat up on my sister’s kid.”
Bull had stopped trying to look through Isaac and turned his glare up at my pops. The situation would’ve been funny—like Shaq holding off that little white kid in “Kazaam”—if they hadn’t been the men in our lives, putting us up on the wrong kind of game and fissuring along all the fault lines they’d been failing to patch since they were kids themselves.
“You gonna tell me how to be a father?” Bull fixed the sleeves of his coat. “You see your son one month out the whole damned year.”
“Psst, and your feeble ass probably can’t even have kids,” Isaac shot back from the truck.
Bull let out a harsh laugh. “One thing’s for damn sure, your old man was a lot smarter than me—that’s why he left your asses.”
Abe and Isaac were able to keep a straight face, but I could see it’d punched a soft spot in Iz. His face pinched with pain. In that moment, his age broke through his grownup front and his size just made it sadder.
Bull patted his pocket and found the custodial keys. He took my cousins’ silence as a victory—smirked, pivoted, and headed for the building, spinning the key ring around his pointer finger, over and over, like a man possessed.
•
Watching you smile spinning your jailhouse keys was pitiful. You liked to talk to us about honest work, but what you never understood, Bull, is there ain’t no such thing in a dishonest system. There would have been easier ways for you to lay down, to go on your knees. Instead, you made it tough on everyone. A man don’t drag his kin out in the desert to perish with him.
•
We heard the door to the office building swing open, then rattle closed.
Pops turned to Isaac. “You better learn not to kick a man while he’s struggling.”
Isaac studied my pops, then nodded. The rest of us started for the door while Isaac stayed behind a minute, eyes to the brightening sky as if he could will the sun to rise slower.
•
As you sweat in the halls of that last building, scouring the white man’s refuse from his corporate temple, was it already on your mind? Or was it later when you believed my momma heaped one more indignity upon you and you broke? No, it was always on your mind. It wasn’t always gonna be me offered to restore your wounded manhood, but accepting next to nothing from those white folks for long enough got you to the point where something had to be sacrificed. Boy, did they ever fuck you up, Bull, Black man—ain’t got no notion of self, no notion of blood or birthright. You’re not the first of us that’s lost himself and you damn sure won’t be the last. They’ve been dragging us deeper into the desert for four hundred years.
•
Even though the morning grayed over, we managed to work up a sweat in a couple hours. Israel swept. I mopped. Abraham swept and Isaac mopped. We started on different floors, then finished the third floor together.
“Hey, Iz, you need to move your fat ass faster than that. I ain’t try’na order off the breakfast menu,” Abraham said. He looked at his knockoff Tag Heuer sport watch, all dramatic.
“Jack in the Box serves everything all the time,” Israel said. “And stop lookin’ at your fake-ass watch. We all know the hands don’t move. What time it say? Quarter past the flea market?” Even Abe had to laugh at that one. He tried hard to teach his brothers and me about the different movements that powered watches, taking them apart himself to look at the inner workings. He wanted to make them one day, have his own line. Said he’d build his watches like Pagani built their supercars, each watch a solitary release, a one of one.
“Less talking, more working,” Isaac said. “I’m try’na take a bath before service.”
“Fresh and clean for Sonya?” I said.
Iz and I were both Outkast stans. He caught my eye, then remixed some lyrics on the spot. “Ain’t my brother whipped on Sonya, Lemon Pledge fresh and clean?” he sang.
“Lemon Pledge clean, clean,” I came in with the backup vocals, and Iz and I shared some nerd laughs.
Isaac put on a straight face. “I go to church to bask in the glory of God and nothing else,” he said. Then, slow, he started gyrating and singing again. “Every freek’n day and every freek’n night . . .”
We all laughed then, delirious from work with no sleep. Isaac leaned in close to the window to catch what little of his reflection he could see.
“Damn, even this mop can’t make a nigga look bad. How much you think they pay models in a janitors’ catalogue?” he said.
Abraham laughed his high laugh and it ricochetted off the emptiness.
“You been huffing that Mop & Glo? You ain’t that pretty,” Iz said.
Bull pushed the cart with all the sprays and disinfectants around the corner, headed for the bathroom.
“Janitors’ catalogue?” Abe said. “When the hell you ever seen a janitors’ catalogue?”
Isaac spoke louder. “I’m serious. Sometimes I just wish Bull had some of my natural beauty, nah mean? Maybe he wouldn’t be so damn angry. Shit, I’d be pissed, too, if I had to look in the mirror every day and see his mug.”
Israel shot a glance at his step-pops, then back to his brother. Each pretending the other wasn’t there. Bull propped the bathroom door open with the cart, and I headed over to grab some rags to wipe down the desks.
•
We both know the anger is merely a symptom. We both know beauty is a fallacy. Bull, you could’ve been the most handsome man to ever live and this country would’ve disavowed you of that. Still, I wish your momma gave you even a little of what mine gave me—soul before flesh / fear not of men because men must die. But they got you out here so far, you think yourself soulless. That’s why you will drag me up the mountain. They want you to do this—break my spirit so their work is easier down the line. They’ve had us tearing each other down for centuries now, ’cause sustenance is scarce in the desert. But, even as you prepare to walk me up the mountain, I still got faith in you—time to cross on over the River Jordan and come on home.
•
Israel almost cried when the truck came to a stop in the driveway. We had all fallen asleep, so Bull didn’t bother picking up food. Something about dollar eggrolls at Crack in the Box made long nights a little easier. One time we hit K.F.C. so late Pops talked them into giving us all the biscuits they had left on the rack, ’cause they were going to go stale anyway. He could be a sweet talker like that sometimes. We smothered those things in so much butter and honey they stuck to every part of us on the way down. Isaac nicknamed my pops Uncle Love Biscuits that night and we all laughed with the doughy biscuits still glued to the roofs of our mouths.
Now we just sat in the driveway with no food. Connie came rushing out the house and down the concrete steps where the weeds grew up through the cracks into the gray morning, which was getting darker instead of lighter. It was late even for that type of night.
“Terrance, how you gonna keep the boys out till 7 a.m. on a Sunday? You know church starts in a few hours. They ain’t gonna be able to sleep at all,” she said.
Bull just slammed the truck door and glared at Isaac, who threw it right back.
“Terr—” Connie started, but Bull walked right by her without even a look. Abe, delirious-quiet, kissed his momma and then dragged his feet into the house after Bull.
“Lonnie, what happened?” she said. “Y’all fight?”
“Apples, you know ain’t no one fighting. The boys are just tired,” Pops said and hugged her. “Everything’ll be fine after they get some rest.” He grinned. “And some spare ribs. Abe and Bull mentioned spare ribs specific. Said the ones from last week clogging up the fridge.” A slight smile broke through Auntie’s stern face.
“Clogged fridge with four boys in the house,” Auntie said.
“O.K.—” Pops made like he was gonna sprint into the house. “I’ma just go clean the fridge for you,” he said.
Connie’s shoulders relaxed and she broke completely, playfully shaking her head with a full smile on her face. “The hell you will. You’re gonna sit at the table and I’ll heat you up what I can find.”
“Don’t even bother. Cold is perfect,” Pops said.
Israel came over and threw his arms round his momma, too. “There enough for me?” he asked.
Connie kissed his forehead, and we all walked up the steps into the house.
“There’s always enough for you, baby,” she said.
Israel ate all my food. I fell asleep at the table with my head in my arms, and not even my Kool-Aid survived. My pops didn’t save me any, either. He was licking barbecue sauce off his fingers by the time he nudged me, my plastic cup empty past the backwash. He woke me up to tell me to go and lie down. Abraham was already in bed and Isaac sat across from his momma trying to fight sleep.
“Momma, can I please take a shower?” he pleaded, the vulnerability in his raspy voice as natural and easy as the tough talk earlier. Hanging around Isaac could learn you that—how to own each and every bit of self. Years later, at my pops’s funeral, Isaac would get up and say that his Uncle Love Biscuits taught him that he could be a stand-up man and still crawl into bed with his momma early on a Sunday morning, ’cause even grown men call for their mommas when all else fails. Lonnie Lion Campbell, my pops, taught him that. He never taught me any of it.
Connie pursed her lips at her middle child.
“Momma, please,” he said. “A bath’ll take too long.”
Bull came out of the other bedroom, already in his sweats and an old Tacoma Dome T-Shirt. Even at home, comfortable, he moved like a cocked hammer on a single-action revolver.
“We don’t waste water in this house,” Connie said. “So unless you plannin’ to take one of your brothers in there with you—bath.”
Bull made himself a plate from the fridge. He eyed the three pecan pies on the counter as he filled another Mickey D’s cup with water.
Connie caught him looking. “I’ll bring home whatever pie’s left,” she said.
“You cook more for the church than you do for this damned house,” Bull said.
The room was silent. Connie ignored Bull and turned to her bedraggled youngest son—sweat and dirt on his face, my juice staining his peach-fuzz mustache, lint in his short hair. She picked out some of the lint. “Now you desperately need a bath,” she said.
Isaac was still scheming on a shower, and Pops read his mind. “You know that li’l Mitchell girl don’t care if you shower,” Pops said. “She’d sniff your jockstrap after football practice.”
“Lonnie!” Connie glared at her brother. “That’s vile. Don’t bring that talk in my house.”
Bull took the hot sauce out of the cabinet, slammed it shut, and carried his food into the living room. Sinking into the couch, he kicked his feet up on the coffee table and turned the TV on, “SportsCenter” playing loud. He doused his plate with Louisiana, then put the sauce bottle on the coffee table without a top.
Connie couldn’t let that go. “At least put the top on, Terrance,” she said. Bull screwed the top on the hot sauce without looking over.
“Thank you,” Connie said. “And, baby, could you please turn that down.”
Apparently, that was too much. Bull turned the TV off and threw the remote onto the couch, then carried his plate into their bedroom and slammed the door.
Connie turned to my pops. “O.K. What happened at work?” she asked.
Isaac slapped me light on the back of the head as he stood up and I got up and started to leave with him. Iz rose, bleary-eyed, and followed us. As I passed my pops, he reached over the back of his chair and put me in a headlock over his shoulder, nuzzling me like a cub. “You right, Apples,” Pops said to Connie. “I forgot to tell you—we caught young Simba at the offices.” I thought I was too old for his play tousling, but when his two-day beard tickled my ear and neck I laughed so hard my tired body floated in it.
•
Even though the morning was charcoal-dark behind the brown curtains in the bedroom, we started to bake and sweat as soon as we lay down. Abe had the portable Sony sitting on the closed toilet lid in the bathroom next door. He kept the sound down low and hummed along soft, but I could still hear Donnie McClurkin’s ranging voice, lifted by the female choir like wind to a wing. Lying in bed, I focussed all that was left of my attention on those voices while Isaac’s breathing turned steady and rhythmic next to me. The green numbers on the digital clock between the beds glowed 8:57. I reminded myself to wake Isaac up for his bath in a few minutes and rolled onto my side, facing the curtains. Iz’s soft snoring rose from the other bed and joined the chorus.
Abe shook me awake. He was wearing his matte, light-purple shirt with a darker purple-and-beige Argyle tie. My auntie thought it was flashy, but she let her boys go all out for church. “The clothes make them feel powerful and powerful grows up to be pride, if you raise it right,” she used to say.
“You gotta get dressed quick,” Abe said.
I looked from him to Isaac, who was knocked out hard, catching flies, mouth-breathing. I leaned over to shake him awake.
“Nah, let him sleep,” Abe said.
“What you mean?” I said as I slipped my church khakis on in the semi-dark.
Connie popped her head into the room. “Hurry up, baby,” she said in a loud whisper.
I turned to catch her, ask about Isaac, but she was already onto the next thing.
There was no backup to be found. Iz wasn’t in the room and Abe acted like he was busy trying to pick one of his fake watches to wear to church, even though he wore the same one every Sunday—his knockoff Breitling, the brown leather band and simple jewelless face a nod to Connie’s sense of modesty, though he’d never admit it. When he wouldn’t even look at me, I figured he was already stewing in guilt. Connie peeked back in the door.
“What about Isaac?” I asked.
“Bull told me he was running a fever last night,” she said. “So I’ma let him sleep.”
Again I looked to Abe, but he was now messing with the crown on his watch, pretending to fix something.
“My dad out there?” I nodded toward the family room, hoping he wouldn’t just let this slide.
“Baby, you’re testing my patience now,” my aunt said. “He had to run home to change. Church starts in thirty minutes and from where I’m standing all your fingers and all your toes are still attached to your body, so whatever you gotta say to him can wait thirty minutes.” Connie looked back into the kitchen. “Israel!” she snapped. “Those juice boxes are for the food drive.”
“Auntie,” I said. She turned. “Bull and—” I started, but Abe was now staring straight at me, nostrils flaring a little from his heavy breaths. Isaac rolled over toward us, on his stomach now, his eyelids twitching in a dream.
“What about your uncle?” Connie asked.
“He’s staying, too?” I asked, unable to say what I meant.
“You know your uncle don’t go to church. Hurry up and get your butt dressed,” she said, and she was gone.
Abe put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t stress,” he said. “Everybody gets the belt now and again.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked.
Abe cocked his head to the side like I was bugging. “If I ratted to Momma, Bull’d whup Isaac twice as bad,” he said. “Your shoes by the door?” I nodded. “Let’s go then. If we’re late to church, Bull’ll pass the belt right to Momma for Iz and me when we get home.”
•
What took you so long after the family left that morning? You watched them go from Momma’s bedroom window. You went down into the garage, took a beer from the small fridge there, ’cause Momma wouldn’t let you keep liquor in the house. Even then I prayed for you. You finished the beer and opened another. The irony of numbing ourselves to move through their system is that they want us numb, Bull. We’re of no use to them conscious. Halfway through the second beer, you took the long coils of extension cord from the workbench. You opened the plastic tub full of rigging rope and grabbed one off the top. You were moving fast by then. You finished the second beer. You left it alone at two, ’cause the idea of liquid courage always seemed bitch-made to you—you ain’t need it. Outside, you laid those coils in the back of your truck on top of the trash bags from the night before. That was the most methodical I’d ever seen you—so overworked and overtired that you could’ve laid yourself down in that truck bed and slept till Monday.
Of course the neighbors would attest to something different, said you were “hyper.” A woman who worked at the Catholic school across the street used the word “menacing” in her statement.
Even when you snatched me out my bed and bound my hands—I prayed for you. Of course I fought back, too, but I prayed, ’cause you were thirty years my senior and forty pounds heavier and so, so very sick. And I knew then you’d probably die in that desert. Too many of us die lost out there.
•
The car ride back to Connie’s after service was tomb-silent. My pops sat shotgun and wrapped his hand around his sister’s on the center armrest. My cousins and I couldn’t look at one another.
As we turned onto their street, red, blue, and white lights flashed everywhere—pulsing on the faces of the neighbors who had gathered in the dark-gray day. Bystanders were giving their statements to a cop as the lights kept flashing, soundless, reflecting off the black granite school sign on the other side of the road. Even after the neighbors and strangers had given their testimonies and filled up on our grief, the extension cord still lay, bright orange, among the weeds and overgrown grass, snaking all the way from the tree where Isaac had been tied up to Bull’s truck, heaped with trash.
Bull was in the back of a cruiser, but the door was open. Nobody was running from this. Isaac leaned on his momma to keep from stumbling as they walked toward the house. Connie sat on the cracked steps and cradled his head in her large arms. Pops came out the house and handed his sister some ice wrapped in a washcloth. She pressed it gently all over Isaac’s busted-up face. Then she hummed. The edges of her voice spread out to us where we stood—Abraham, Israel, and I, gazing into the solid block of dark sky. As the jakes grouped together, talking about whatever jakes talk about, Bull looked back at those boys with ancient names.
The head jake went over to where Connie and Isaac were. “You want us to call paramedics?” he asked. Isaac’s right eye was swollen shut and blood seeped from his jaw onto the beige washcloth his momma kept cleaning his face with. She shook her head.
Isaac sat up and stared across the lawn to the street where Bull sat in the back of the cruiser. The red and blue lights made the day like a flag behind him. ♦
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