I followed him to Bunny’s house, but Bunny wasn’t there. We doubled back to the Boulevard towards Mr. Johnson’s grocery store and sure enough, on the other side of the Boulevard, coming outta Mr. Johnson’s store, come Bunny. He was holding a bunch of candy. Spending that money from them pictures he sold, I guess.
Dex crossed the Boulevard and went up to him. I was afraid he was gonna throw a punch and rock Bunny right there on the Boulevard, which wouldn’t have been good. Bunny was bigger, plus he was a lefty. Lefties throw punches cockeyed. And Bunny can scrap. But Dex didn’t throw. He didn’t even look mad no more. He just held up the pictures in his hand that he got back from The Sixes and said, “You got about an hour to put that box back before my daddy gets home from work.”
“What box?” Bunny said, for he didn’t have the picture box on him. He had hid it someplace.
Dex said, “Tell you what, Bunny. Gimme the box back now and I won’t say nothing to my daddy about it.”
Bunny said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I gave it to Ray-Ray.”
“No, he didn’t,” Ray-Ray said.
“He just can’t remember,” Bunny said. “You know how Ray-Ray is.”
Dex stood there and blowed out his cheeks and waited a minute, thinking it over. He knew Ray-Ray don’t lie. I lost a lot of respect for Bunny around that time. Then Bunny stepped to Ray-Ray and said, “Ray-Ray, you just don’t remember. I gave it back to you, remember?” Ray-Ray looked mixed up. He shook his head and shifted from one foot to the other, while Bunny was sticking to his lie. Dex stood there a long time while Ray-Ray shifted from one foot to the other, nervous, looking at the sky. Dex weren’t no punk, everybody knowed it, but Bunny was the leader of our group and fighting him was like treason almost. He directed everything. He had the best house. The most money. The best parents. His father had a good job wearing a suit and tie working in the downtown. Bunny was mighty big on our block. He was the roughest. Goat was bigger and faster, but Goat don’t fight. Goat wouldn’t hurt a fly. Bunny, on the other hand, when he was mad, he was dangerous.
Dex stood there for a moment thinking about it, then he said, “Okay,” and he turned to Ray-Ray and said, “Let’s go home,” and they went back home, and I followed ’em along.
I don’t know what all Bunny did later in life, for he left The Bottom when he turned seventeen and joined the Army and I never saw him no more. But that first mistake messed him up. He was never the same. All over a box of pictures. You never thought pictures of girls humping and sucking would make so much trouble.
• • •
THAT EVENING The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band rehearsed over Mr. Woo’s like we done every night with Hate Whistle outside dancing and the customers from Mr. Woo’s hollering, “Cut that crap!” like they always did. Bunny didn’t come and neither did Dex or Ray-Ray or Pig who used to come with his sax but don’t hardly come no more so we threw him out, so we didn’t have no guitars or sax. It was just me, Goat, and Beanie—piano, drums, and bass—but we didn’t hardly need no drums, for when Mr. Ernest stomped up them stairs with his concrete construction boots like two drum sets put together, the room got quiet. He come into the room with Dex and Ray-Ray behind him, both of them looking like maybe he whupped on ’em. By then Goat and Beanie knowed about the pictures and everybody else in The Bottom did too, for Bunny had sold a bunch of them and the word had got around. Goat was closest to the door when Mr. Ernest walked in, and when he did, Mr. Ernest didn’t have to say a word. He looked at Goat, who said: “I don’t know nothing about no pictures, Mr. Ernest.” Goat pointed at me. “Butter was there when Bunny took ’em to the Cool Out Spot.”
Mr. Ernest turned to me, and I punked out right off. “Bunny done it on his own, Mr. Ernest,” I choked out. “I was keeping an eye on Ray-Ray.”
“Where is this Cool Out place?” Mr. Ernest asked.
“Not far,” I said. “Just off the Boulevard.”
“Show me.”
I wanted to say Dex and Ray-Ray could show him, but there weren’t no arguing with him. There wasn’t nothing to do but take him there. Me, him, Dex, and Ray-Ray walked to the Cool Out Spot. While it wasn’t but a few blocks, it seemed like the longest, worst walk in the world. Mr. Ernest didn’t say a word to none of us. He didn’t look mad, but he didn’t look like Martin Luther King neither.
As we crossed the Boulevard, I was wondering what my ma was gonna do to me when she found out about me being around them pictures. I was more afraid of her than Mr. Ernest.
By the time we got to the Cool Out Spot it was almost night. The population around there always changed at night. That’s when I noticed The Bottom was getting worse, by the way, when the Cool Out Spot started getting bad at night. In the old days, when I was eight and nine, it was just us and The Six and maybe one or two Black Spades, and we all come around and tell stories and trade candy and have fistfights about our baseball games and cut out. Then we got thirteen and fourteen and sometimes a few of us drunk beer to be cool, not a lot, just acting like we was drinking. But as we got to fifteen and sixteen, the badder kids from The Bottom had started coming around. Some of those was real gangs, with knives and karate nunchucks and even one or two who was supposed to have guns. The Black Spades, The Seven Crowns, even a few Five Percenters, them types was older and rough. And they come around at night.
Most of The Six squad was gone except Toy Boy, Amuneek, and Bo. They was drinking beer with a few rough types I never seen. A lot of them setting there probably hadn’t even seen Ray-Ray’s picture box, now that I think on it, unless Toy Boy told ’em, of course. But they was a rough crew setting there, dressed all cool with dungaree jackets and clean white sneakers; a couple even had gangster drawings on their jean jackets. When Mr. Ernest walked up to ’em in his work shirt and construction boots, all dusty and dirtied up from his construction job, he looked bad. He looked like Hate Whistle, who was a drunk. He was just out of place.
He walked right up to ’em and said, “Good evening, fellers. Some outlaw here done took something that belong to me. And I want it back.”
Well, he sounded like an old country bum when he said that, and a couple of them boys in their new jeans and clean white tennis shoes snickered when they heard him talking in his old down-south twang.
“We don’t know nothing about it,” one of ’em said.
“All right,” he said. “I ain’t gonna disrespect nobody here. Maybe y’all don’t know nothing about it. But spread the word: I want it back. When I come home from work tomorrow, I want what’s mine back in my house. Every single one of what was took. So whoever took it, put it back, and I won’t trouble nobody further on it.”
Well, standing there in them dirty work clothes, he looked like an old country bum talking to them young gangsters. Nobody said nothing, so he said, “All right then,” and turned to leave.
Then Toy Boy piped up, “That box ain’t ’round here nowhere.” He showed his knucklehead side right then and there. Toy Boy’s a dummy. If his older brother Tito had been there, he probably wouldn’t have said nothing. But Tito wasn’t there, and Toy Boy, well, he opened his big mouth wrong that day.
Mr. Ernest had already turned to go but when Toy spoke them words, Mr. Ernest turned around and said, “Who said it was a box?”
Well, that tied Toy Boy up, because nobody hadn’t said nothing about no kind of box.
“Whatever it is,” Toy Boy said, “I don’t know nothing about it.”
“How you know it was a box, boy?”
“Man, I don’t know nothing ’bout some old pussy pictures!”
Toy was sitting on an old rail fence there when he said that. It was like an old ranch fence that you see in the western movies, except it was all tore up because of us sitting on it. Quick as you can tell it, Mr. Ernest stooped down, pulled a bottom rail off the fence, and rose up and swung it hard across Toy Boy’s face in one motion. H
e hit him so hard the wood railing broke in half. One half flew in the street, the other half still lived in Mr. Ernest’s hand.
Toy Boy dropped off the bench like a sack of flour, moaning and groaning and holding his head.
Them boys scattered like flies, everyone to the last except Amuneek and Bo, for they was The Six and stayed with their boy Toy till the end. They didn’t move. Mr. Ernest walked up on Toy laying on the ground moaning in pain and stood over him with that piece of plank in his hand and I thought for a minute he might lean over and run the jagged end of that wooden stake right through him. You could see the wide shoulders and the muscles in his back. He wasn’t screaming-hollering-mad, nothing like that. He looked just like he did in his driveway that time he slapped Dex about ten times across the face. He didn’t look mad that day neither. Just downright dangerous. He stood over Toy and looked about to bust Toy’s face apart. Then Ray-Ray called out: “Please, Daddy! I’m sorry! Please, Daddy! It’s all my fault,” like that, and Ray-Ray started crying.
That broke Mr. Ernest. He was standing over Toy with his back to Ray-Ray, and whatever fury come over him just hissed out his back like a balloon. He loosed the plank and let it drop to the ground. He turned away from Toy and said, “C’mon.” He took Ray-Ray’s hand and them two walked home, and me and Dex followed.
On the way home, me and Dex walked far behind them, and as we was walking, Dex leaned over to me and said, “I tried to tell Bunny.”
“Maybe we can tell him tomorrow,” I said.
“It’s too late now,” he said. “The train done left the station.”
• • •
BUT IT WASN’T TOO LATE.
The next day Bunny got busy. He spent the whole day running around The Bottom, hustling around, buying back every single picture that he sold. He collected fourteen altogether. He had to pay triple for some of ’em, because some of them had heard about Mr. Ernest and knew Bunny was in a spot, so they got tough about the whole deal. Bo from The Six had bought two pictures and still had one that he hadn’t given back to Tito, and he charged Bunny $1.50 for a picture he only paid twenty-five cents for. Another boy from The Seven Crowns gang lived up in Falls Point, and Bunny had to go all the way up there and pay him back nine dollars for a single picture, ’cause The Seven Crowns boy had paid a Black Spade kid two dollars for it, and he had bought it from Bunny for a quarter.
I don’t know where Bunny got all that money from, probably from his daddy, but he paid ’em all. He got that done—bought back every single picture—and he gave Ray-Ray the picture box plus five dollars to put that box back in his house and tell Mr. Ernest he was sorry. Ray-Ray said he would, but Dex was standing there and he piped up, “You got to apologize your own self,” he said. “Don’t leave that to Ray-Ray.”
“I want to say I’m sorry,” Bunny said, “but I’m scared.”
“I understand,” Dex said, “but you got to leave Ray-Ray out of it.”
Mr. Ernest got his box back and Bunny got off clean and never did apologize. Mr. Ernest never spoke to Bunny once about it neither, but the news about Mr. Ernest’s nasty picture box traveled fast. That picture box was hot news in The Bottom, even among adults. It put a bad cloud on Dex and his family. Folks started muttering about him and his daddy, and his momma who nobody knew, and how neither Mr. Ernest nor his boys never went to church, and how Dex probably was a bad egg like his daddy. None of that was true, of course. Dex wasn’t bad. Dex was different. Dex didn’t like baseball or basketball like most of us. He liked ice hockey. He didn’t like soul music like most of us. He liked rock and roll. He saved his money to see a white band called Edgar Winter’s White Trash. He even played their records for me once and they was pretty good. Dex had his own thing. But that outburst with them pictures put a space between Dex’s family and The Bottom. It caused a rift in the band, too. Bunny and Dex was never close after that, and Dex quit when he was fifteen, and then Mr. Ernest moved all of them over to Falls Point.
Falls Point ain’t far, it’s still part of The Bottom, so I’d see Dex in school or sometimes coming through. He had to walk past my part of The Bottom to get to the bus stop on the Boulevard, and one Saturday morning I saw him standing at the bus stop changing into a white shirt and tie and putting on a cop jacket that said “Security.” I guess he didn’t want nobody to see him wearing cop clothes. I went over and said, “What you guarding, Dex?”
“I got a job at an ice cream factory. Don’t say nothing to nobody, Butter.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I wish I had a job guarding ice cream.”
Dex looked kind of sheepish. “I ain’t guarding no ice cream,” he said. “I guard the place where they make the cones.”
“That’s even better. I bet Ray-Ray likes that. How’s he doing? I ain’t seen him in a while.”
“He ain’t good. He’s sick.”
“In the hospital?”
“Naw. He’s home.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Don’t know. Got something wrong with his head. The doctor says something’s growing up there.”
“Like what? A brain?”
“Very funny, Butter. They got to operate when he gets older, to get it out, whatever it is.”
That made me feel bad, joking like that, so a couple of days later I walked over to Dex’s house in Falls Point and gave Dex my forty-five record of Sly and the Family Stone, which he’s crazy about. He liked that, and give me a whole row of ice cream cones in a paper bag. Then he said, “You wanna see Ray-Ray? He’s upstairs.”
We went upstairs, and they had Ray-Ray in the bed, and when I seen him, I was surprised. I almost didn’t recognize him. I hadn’t seen him in like a year, and in that time he growed to nearly six feet. He used to be a skinny boy but now he was a tall teenager. He was sleeping under the covers when we come in, and when Dex tapped him he shook awake and seen me and said, “Butter!” He was happy to see me. So I reached in my bag and showed him all them cones Dex had gived me. I said, “You want one?”
“Naw,” he said. “I eat ’em all the time.” Then he looked at Dex. He looked a little fuzzy, squinting his eyes at Dex. He said, “There’s a roaring in my ears, Dex. Just a roaring.”
“That’s the ocean, Ray-Ray.”
“It’s so loud, I can’t stand it, Dex. Can you hear it?”
“Naw.”
“Come closer, Dex. You can hear it. Lissen. It’s roaring loud, Dex. Lissen to the ocean.”
Ray-Ray reached up his arm, which I noticed was thin and weak looking, and he pulled Dex close to his ear. He put Dex’s ear right on his ear. Like maybe he was hoping Dex could hear it, too.
“Can you hear it, Dex? Can you hear it?”
“Naw, Ray-Ray, I don’t hear nothing.”
Dex stayed like that, with his ear close to Ray-Ray’s ear, right up on it, with Ray-Ray talking at him.
“Can you hear it, Dex? Can you hear it?”
3
BLUB
Blub is a mumbler. There’s lots of folks in The Bottom who mumble bad, but Blub is the champion mumbler of The Bottom. He sounds like a bubble machine when he talks, “blub blub . . .” That’s how he got his name.
Blub’s a big boy for his age. He’s two years younger than me—I’m fourteen and he’s only twelve—but he looks older, being that he’s tall and big. Blub don’t have no brothers and sisters, and since he only live two doors from me, I used to translate for him when we was little, walking around The Bottom, taking care of our business and such. It was a good deal back in the day, because Blub would split his goods with me. We’d go into Mr. Johnson’s grocery store and Blub would say, “Blub blub blub . . .”
Mr. Johnson would say, “What’s Blub want?”
“He wants two Sugar Daddies and a pack of Now and Laters.”
“All right, Blub.”
We rolled like that for years, me and Blub
. But when I started The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band with Goat and Dex and them, Blub couldn’t play nothing, so I couldn’t translate for him no more. He was on his own. But he still come around my house, mostly on account of my little sister Sissie. He was crazy about her.
One morning he come banging on my front door looking like somebody shot him. He was mumbling so fast I had to make him stop and start all over again three times before I understood him. Then I finally got it: “Thursday is dead!” he said. “Thursday died!”
Thursday is Sissie’s cat.
“You lyin’,” I said.
“Sho nuff.”
“Show me,” I said.
I followed him out to the Boulevard. When he got to the bus stop, he stopped there and pointed across the road, and sure enough old Thursday was dead on the other side of the road, cars and trucks rolling right over him. He was smashed flat, his black and white fur mashed like a checkerboard.
“You see it happen?”
“Naw. I was standing here at the bus stop waiting for Sissie to get off the bus from school, and I seen him.”
Sissie was ten then, and she was animal crazy. She adopted every kind of animal that ever wandered around The Bottom: raccoons, possums, mice, birds, dogs. She even pulled a lizard with red spots and two brown frogs from the canal that runs through The Bottom, and that canal is so dirty even Wooden Joe stopped fishing in it. They say Wooden Joe is Dome’s father—Dome’s a boy, by the way—and Wooden Joe would fish in a toilet bowl if he thought there was catfish in it.
“We got to move him before Sissie gets here,” Blub said. “Her bus’ll be here any minute.”
I seen Thursday there, and he was gone, was my thoughts. I didn’t feel too bad. Thursday didn’t go far to die. He lived in the street and died in the street. He was a bum, really, perfect for The Bottom. He come ’round when he felt like it, then disappeared for weeks. He was about as popular as a can of tomatoes in The Bottom. Nobody liked him, not even other cats. Come to think of it, Thursday didn’t have no friends in The Bottom except Sissie.