ROUND 1: Outdoor Basketball Court
“Hey, smartass!”
There were three of them and one of him on the dark, outdoor basketball court of J. E. Carter High School.
“I ain’t a ass,” Langston Jones said. “But I do got really big hands.” He held up his hands then knelt down, setting his scuffed basketball to one side. Tightening the laces on one basketball shoe, his big hands trembled with anger and excitement. “Poetry’s more powerful than bigotry or murder,” he breathed. Sort of like a mantra, only it wasn’t helping. The words made a cold cloud by his mouth.
He stood up at the free throw line. The three of them had lined up under the basket. The shortest one laughed, the tallest one said, “Gonna be FIGHT CLUB for boys.” The guy in-between didn’t say anything. With their hands stuffed in the pockets of their hooded sweatshirts and faces invisible in shadow, Langston figured they were probably a bunch of thugs sent by his ex-friend Thorn.
Picking up his basketball, Langston’s breath glowed in the headlights of a car driving past as he said, “More like a poetry slam.” The lights cut through the shadows hitting two black chins – the short one and the tall one – and a white chin in the middle. The fog of their breath looked like ghosts floating near their faces. When the car was gone, their faces disappeared while across the court and across the parking lot, near the school wall and mostly in shadow, a different shadow moved.
The middle boy said, “We’re here to kick your ass, white boy.”
Langston nodded. “I ain’t a ass and I ain’t white. I’m biracial.” He flashed a mouthful of perfect teeth. “My momma’s black and my daddy’s white, but I ain’t seen him since I was five.”
“Dumbass,” said the tallest boy, stepping once toward him.
“I thought you said I was a smartass?” Langston said then closed his mouth, offering a sick, toothless grin. He gripped the basketball fiercely with one hand and shoved the other hand in his pocket.
What did they want with him? He was wearing a thrift-store jacket, his basketball was scuffed and dirty, and he had nothing worth stealing. But he knew the answer was that Langston Jones had a big mouth, few friends and lived not quite in the poor part of town behind the hospital. Thorn – aka Stanley Conyers – had been his best friend since kindergarten. Even when Langston laid Thorn out over something Thorn said – that was the summer between seventh and eighth grade they pretty much stayed friends. But in ninth grade, a girl, a basketball team, and living on opposite sides of town suddenly split them.
Since that week, they’d hated each other, and Langston gave up the rest of the few friends he had so it would never happen again. Now he’d have to stop fighting altogether or he’d lose his future.
The middle one glanced at his friends then popped a white fist into a white hand. “Gonna kick your white ass,” he said.
“I don’t have a white ass,” Langston said. “It’s kinda dark ‘cause dad was white but Mom was black. I realized they were different races when I was little. When people’d say stuff, I’d get mad and fight. Dad would spank me but I never shut up about it no matter what he said. I do the same thing still, especially when people think they’re about to grind me into a pulp. You know, I ain’t never lost a fight, neither. Not since Ben Pequot beat me up when I was four, but that doesn’t exactly count...”
He couldn’t stop fighting today. He was still talking when they rushed him and didn’t stop talking. He didn’t do anything fancy like martial arts. He just hit ‘em and hurt ‘em any way he could and always in the worst places.
It didn’t take long.
It never did.
The short black guy went down first. Softly Langston sang, “Ashes, ashes, they all fall down!” and laid him out with a single punch to the face. He added, “I hate fighting, actually. I got these big hands, see, and they hurt afterward ‘cause your chin – it’s actually called the maxilla – is made up of two bones that are fused into one bone by the end of your first year.” The hood of the boy’s sweatshirt fell back and Langston saw a face. “It’s a helluvalot stronger than my finger bones, even when I make a fist.” Another car passed by. Langston saw the blood spattered on the boy’s forehead.
The shadow on the wall paced back and forth, back and forth. Someone was watching. Langston knew it without really noticing as he kept hitting the boys. Langston whispered, “He talks a great deal/and brags indeed-y/Of a muscular punch that's incredibly speed-y.”
The other boy laid still, moaning, beads of blood on his forehead. Then he started rolling back and forth like he couldn’t quite make it to his side.
The white guy was next. Langston swept his legs out from under him and shoved him backward at the same time. He was pretty sure the guy landed a punch, but Langston was too busy saying, “You know that old saying, the bigger they are, the harder they fall? It’s actually true.” The boy’s head bounced off the pavement and Langston drove his elbow into his gut. Langston kept talking, “Your head has farther to fall so it has more time to let gravity pull it down, increasing the acceleration. Your own personal head is moving faster when it hits the ground than your short friend’s head over there.” The white boy’s supper spewed from his mouth and Langston shoved him on his side so he wouldn’t choke to death on his own barf. Leaping from the ground, he raced after the tall, running black dude.
This dude was fast and better than the other two, but Langston was faster. Langston tried to tackle him, but he stiff-armed Langston like an offensive guard, swerving into the tennis court.
Langston followed, saying, “You know, if you was chasing me, I’d cut across the fields. I might think I could outrun you there and if I was really fast, you might not think it was worth chasing me very far. You’d have to hurt your hands beating me up. You might give up and let me go. But it’s stupid to go into this tennis court ‘cause,” Langston grabbed the boy’s sweatshirt, swung him around and slammed him into the pole holding up the cyclone fence. The dude staggered backwards. “You just caged yourself and it’s easier to take you down. You know, like Wolverine when he was in that cage match in the bar in Canada?”
The dude screamed obscenities and flailed, terrified, panicked. He connected a half dozen times, ringing Langston’s left ear. Once he connected with Langston’s nose and he started bleeding, too. The panicked boy tried four times to knee Langston in the nads, but hit him in the thigh instead. Langston said, “I’m gonna have a really nasty charley horse when we’re done.”
The dude screamed, grabbing Langston’s hair.
“Okay, enough of this,” Langston said, “I gotta get to the library before it closes.” He lifted the dude by the neck of his sweatshirt and then slammed him down on the asphalt, driving his elbow into the other’s chest. The dude’s hand sprang open and his hood fell back when Langston lifted him again. His eyes were wide. Langston slammed his head into the asphalt again. Again. The dude tried to squirm free, grabbing weakly at Langston’s hands.
Langston slammed his head against the ground one more time.
The dude stopped moving.
Panting, Langston stood up and looked around. For the first time he clearly saw a shadow against the orange bricks of the school as it moved back and forth, clearly, obviously pacing. Someone had watched the whole thing. He debated running after it but in the distance, he heard a siren. He wiped blood from his chin slowly, touching the split lip.
The boys he’d laid out first were gone. He shook out his hand. Hitting a guy in the face always screwed it up. He hated getting hurt, but fighting felt good. He’d like it if everyone just left him alone, but he’d hate not having the adrenaline rush. He liked the rage, he loved the thrill adrenaline gave. He hated the downward spiral back into routine. He’d once read, “We need to learn who we are, REALLY are, before we can truly make a try at self-improvement.” He only felt he was really himself when he was fighting or doing his one other, secret vice.
He took a deep breath, sprinted back to the basketball court and picked up his backpack and his ball. Looking up at the school, he heard the siren bouncing from the bricks and touched his lip again. Fingers steady, the fighting thrill that made them tremble faded back to peace.
Across the lawn, but with a voice as clear as if it were a meter away, a boy’s voice called from the shadows. It said, “Two core one two seven, L. I’m yours.” Then the shadow moved across the wall and disappeared around a corner.
Langston scowled, shaking his head, squinting and said, “What does that mean?”
The siren drew nearer and he imagined the squad car coming down 40th and taking a left onto Hematite. He ran through two baseball fields and vaulted the low fence at the edge of the school’s property, along Hematite. He crossed as the flashing lights of the squad car entered the intersection. He flew down the alley. It wasn’t a smelly city alley, rather an orderly suburban one; trash cans neatly closed and side-by-side, decent cars parked outside, a few of the garages even had flowers on the alley side. Clean. Tidy. Quiet.
He jogged up to Iolite, turned right for a half block, then left into the alley between 36th and 37th and three blocks to Lapis Lazuli where he took a right. Miner’s Park Library was an easy jog of five blocks. The maple, oak, ancient elms, and other, newer, stranger trees were in full leaf and street lights made wild shadows on the sidewalk.
Miner’s Park Library was a low rectangle of maroon brick that made a giant, square letter “O” and had ground-to-roof windows on three sides. The terrarium-like courtyard in the center had pine trees, benches, tulips and a rocky trail. Outside the rectangle, restored prairie and a pond embraced the library on three sides. The west side with no windows was where the main entrance and offices were, facing a parking lot edged with huge lilac bushes.
Langston liked seeing people at the tables, bright light pouring from the windows like molten gold cooling with the night.
He stopped at the turnstile door that led into the library and turned slowly around. Was someone watching him? He wasn’t paranoid. Thorn or his thugs or their Thugmobiles were always on him. He had no doubt the little fight tonight would connect back to Thorn somehow.
He just didn’t know exactly how. He dabbed his lip, winced, and went inside.
ROUND 2: Langston
I couldn’t go into the library bleeding. Fighters never hung out in libraries even though I did.
I wiped my face as best I could, shoved one hand in my pocket and backed into the revolving door. I wrapped my arm over my basketball and hid my hand so Phoebe, the assistant librarian, wouldn’t see my bloody knuckles. If she noticed, she’d ask questions. I didn’t want to lie to her, but I couldn’t exactly say, “Oh, I got bloody knuckles while I was beating the shit out of three guys who jumped me back at school.”
I didn’t cuss in the library. The Ven. Dr. K. Sri Dhammananda said, “Rudeness, yelling, anger and swearing are a weak man's imitation of strength.” I got three of the four mastered: I wasn’t rude most of the time, I didn’t yell, and usually the only person that heard me swear is me. Besides, if Mrs. Urthan, the head librarian, heard me cuss, she’d kick me out and wouldn’t let me back in for a month. With finals coming up, I needed the library to chill in. The anger thing is something I’d been trying to control for seven years. It’s my fourth job after homework, family, and school.
Phoebe helped a little kid find a book and wasn’t looking at the doors. I cut right and slipped into the bathroom. I locked the door, set down the ball and backpack, then went to the mirror.
“Ugh.” My lip was split all right, and it was puffed up, too. There was dried blood smeared on my cheek from my nose and a single spot on the neck of my orange Carter hooded sweatshirt. I chewed the inside of my cheek, then ran the water until it was as cold as it was gonna get. I couldn’t wash out blood with hot water ‘cause it cooked the proteins in the blood and left a permanent stain. I took a paper towel, soaked it, then soaked the spot.
A couple minutes later, I was cleaned up. I unlocked the bathroom door real quiet-like and peeked. Phoebe was still looking the other way, so I slipped out to the east side of the library. I took my usual desk, which was as close to the window as I could get. I stared.
For a while, all I could see was my reflection: a tall, skinny, biracial kid with hands that were way too big, cornrows, in an orange sweatshirt, with jeans and almost-new basketball shoes. After a few minutes, I could see past myself to the world outside.
I took the maroon notebook with a big gold M on it out of my backpack. My hands started to shake, just like they did before I got into a fight. I know it’s strange, but my hands always shook when I took care of my anger. Either punch someone or write. I could choose to redirect it.
Sometimes I wrote poems; not flowery poetry or stuff that talked about how depressed I was. I wrote about the thing I knew best – me. I wrote it ‘cause if I didn’t, the stupid anger that lived in me would force me to really, truly kill someone.
I opened the book and thumbed through the pages I’d already written on. There were all kinds of poems, in all kinds of forms. I never did the same form the same year. I tried different kinds because different forms could say different things at different times.
Did that make any sense?
Somebody belched real loud over by the computers. I looked up and a bunch of high school twits busted out laughing. I hadn’t noticed them when I came in. They were all from Carter.
Crap.
I loaded my stuff up again, ducked into the stacks and headed for the farthest corner. I stopped for a second and looked back. At the edge of the twits was a girl who stood by a kid in a wheelchair. I’d seen her before and I was pretty sure she was a senior. Wearing black pants, black T-shirt and black sequined tennis shoes, she bent over the wheelchair kid.
Sequins? Wasn’t that a bit flashy for a gothgirl?
She looked up suddenly and our eyes did burr and fastener – like Velcro® – and they stuck. We studied each other for a while and I wondered if I we’d met before. I fled back into the stacks of books and hid in the corner. She looked great. I didn’t have time for a girlfriend plus I didn’t want anybody to see me with a smacked up face.
I plopped down on the floor and looked at the numbers facing me. They were all 800 something. I picked one at random and pulled it out. The spine of the book read something like NATURE POETRY OF JAPAN: HAIKU.
The only thing I remembered about haiku from ninth
grade English was 5-7-5. We’d had a student teacher who’d grown up in Japan. She was crazy about the stuff. I didn’t care, then. I’d really been into free verse, sonnets, and odes. At least, that’s what was mostly in my journals.
I did haiku for two weeks solid because I had to. I hadn’t done it since.
Maybe it was time I did.
I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. Sitting next to a floor vent, warm air puffed up and past me. My fingers were cold by then, so the heat felt good.
In my imagination, I slid away from the world and the ache in my hand faded. The skin on my lip that had felt like it was stretched too tight eased into the rhythm of pumping blood. The world’s touch went away and pretty soon, all that was left was the thrill of the fight. The victory of fists smashing opponents swelled like my lip until it was all thought of.
I opened my eyes, took out the notebook, and turned to a blank page. I fingered the white rubber grip I added to all my cheap, round pens. I leaned forward, took a deep breath, then wrote:
victory of fists
deflecting words and laughter
like leaves, turn spring rain
I stared at it for a while, then frowned.
Something was wrong. I grabbed my lower lip with my left thumb and finger. I squeezed and teared up instantly. I’d forgotten my split lip. I raised my eyebrows. I hummed. Something...
I didn’t erase – I never erased. Grams told me I’d lose an important lesson if I pretended my mistakes never happened. I wrote it again with two changes:
victory of fists
deflecting words and laughter
as leaves turn spring rain
“Yep,” I said. That was what I wanted. I whispered it, and tested the words in the regular air instead of the air of my imagination. I still liked the way they hung. I stood up, grabbed the pack, went to the end of the row, and peeked around the corner. She was gone. So were most of the others. They must have talked to all their friends on rLife and got bored. I’d been the first person I knew who’d made the move from Facebook to rLife, and skipped the obnoxiously commercial sites everyone else leaped to after Facebook died. Now everybody was on and I didn’t have the time or energy for lots of friends.
Not that I had lots of friends. I didn’t.
I went out the other way, crossed the library away from the computers, and stopped at an empty table. I unzipped and rummaged around in my backpack to make sure I had what I needed.
“Crap,” I said, though I’d rather have said something else, but Phoebe was standing four meters away and she’d have heard me for sure. I’d forgotten my Precalc book at school and I had to have it to do the homework.
I needed to pass everything with flying colors so the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology couldn’t find any reason to revoke my tentative acceptance.
Did you know they could UNaccept you if you did a Senior Slide second semester rather than kept up your grades? I needed the final letter – the one that said I was in for sure. That wouldn’t happen for five more weeks, after Carter sent my final transcript. Until then, I was on self-probation. I had to be perfect. Grams’s voice was the one inside my head, and she always said, “Study hard. Get good grades. Go to college.” She was the reason I had to get there. I had to help save her life.
My own voice added, “Don’t get caught fighting. Don’t get caught fighting. Don’t get caught fighting.”
Should be easy.
With the pack slung over my shoulder, I waved to Phoebe and headed out the door.
It was cold and still, the brightest stars shone clear even through the city lights. Almost like fall. I took a deep breath, let it out, and coughed ‘cause of the cold air in warm lungs.
I slipped my free arm through the other strap, settled it on my back, and headed back to Carter. I ran a block north to 33rd then turned left, ran west for four blocks to Hematite and took it all the way to Carter – six blocks. I had to go to the back door, where the night janitors had their smoke break. I knew ‘em all: Josh, Mary, Eric, and Jody, the boss. They started at 3:00 right after we got out of school, then worked ‘til 11:30. It was only 9:30, so I caught them right at the end of their cigarettes – they’d probably be happy.
I jumped the fence and sprinted across the baseball diamonds and into the Community Gym parking lot. It was pretty much deserted. Josh, Mary, and Jody stood up high on the loading dock, around one of the dumpsters, and talked beneath a cloud of smoke.
I stopped at the bottom and looked up. I said, “Hey!” Nobody smiled and at first, I thought something had happened.
Then Jody busted into a grin and said, “Langston!” She frowned at me, “You forget your books again?”
I looked down at my feet, really embarrassed. Jody had a little name, but she was a big woman. She was everyone’s mama at Carter. What she said, everyone did. She’d done a bit in Iraq during the war as a Marine. Nobody messed with her. I looked up and said, “I’m sorry, Ma’am. It’s just...senioritis.”
She grunted, took a long drag, blew the smoke high and fast, and said, “Get in. Get out, or it’s my ass in a sling.” She crushed it and lit another one. So did everybody else. She was the boss and she’d just said that break wasn’t over yet.
I nodded, pulled myself up on the dock, and ran into the school. Nice thing about after school hours is that no one tells you to slow down. I sprinted to my locker, grabbed the book, and got back before they finished their cigarettes. “Thanks a lot! Mr. Welfare thanks you, too!” I called as I jumped off the loading dock.
She waved, stubbed out her cigarette, and turned to go back to work. Everybody else followed her and the big metal door banged shut on the night.
I ran over the fields, took a right on Hematite, and ran straight south. I counted the blocks as I snugged the pack tighter on my back, made it quit bouncing, and started counting streets. Hematite split around Sandfish Lake six blocks later and I took East Sandfish Lake Drive. Curving wide around the lake, it passed huge houses, recessed gold lights, and fantastic gardens that spilled spring flowers over sculpted rock walls like living waterfalls.
East joined with West Sandfish Lake Drive and made Hematite again. When I reached 28th, I turned left. One block to Jasper, I turned left again then right into my own, familiar alley between 29th and 28th. It was just another suburban alley that wasn’t as nice as the one a mile north. Four blocks to Nephrite and I was home.
Our little post-WWII one-and-a-half-story house was dark except for the deck window of the living room. I slowed down and walked around the yard for a while, and caught my breath. I was in good shape, but I’d just done a two-mile run from school.
Once I caught my breath, I went into the house through the deck door. Grams was watching TV and reading a book.
“Hey, Grams.” Grams was mom’s mom and black as midnight with hair blue-white as a snow on a clear, frozen day. She usually had a book in her lap and the TV on low, doing both like she always did. She wasn’t one of them old people who got lost in TV. Sure, she’d had a heart attack a couple years ago and she was diabetic, too. Doctors said the attack damaged her heart some, and then they found she had congestive heart failure. She took insulin pills to keep her blood sugars steady. She was almost a bionic grandma.
Someone would figure out how to cure Grams. Maybe that someone would be me. Biomechanics was what I’d be doing in college. I might be part of the team that figured out a way to repair CHF. Maybe we would make an electric pancreas. All I was sure of is that they’d do it faster when I was there. The doctors told us that Grams had had a small stroke, even though that hadn’t affected her reading at all. In fact, when Grams couldn’t get a book in large type, she made me or Jazzy get ‘em on CD.
Jasmine – we called her Jazzy – was my eight-year-old cousin. Mom’s sister gave her to us when she was three and she’d lived here ever since.
“How was your day, Langston?” Grams asked.
I stayed out of the light of her reading lamp. I didn’t want her to see the split lip I’d got in the fight, and I said as normal as possible, “Good. I gotta do a bunch of Precalc homework.”
She smiled and shook her head. “A math genius and a good boy to boot,” she sighed. “The good Lord’s blessed you beyond measure, Langston. Beyond measure.”
As I passed by, I gave her a peck of a kiss on her head and winced as the spray-stiff hairs pressed my split lip. I said, “G’night Grams.”
“Don’t you stay up all night! I can hear you creaking around up there when you don’t sleep! You’re graduating in thirty days, Langston. Study hard. Get good grades.”
I grinned then said, “Okay! Okay, Grams!” I took the steep, narrow steps up to my room two-by-two and hooked left which left my head level with the old, brown carpet. I kept three piles – one with dirty boxers and jeans, one with socks, and one with T-shirts and shirts. A pile of books was stacked by my bed, too. My bookshelves had mostly Clancy, Ludlum, Asimov, and Brin. One shelf was medical stuff: Gray’s Anatomy, Textbook of Human Physiology, STIFF (about life in a morgue – ha ha ha) plus other stuff I found at used bookstores and garage sales. I used to have poetry books. Then I found out the ones I used to have, came from my dad. I dumped them. I kept ten Dr. Seuss books from when I was little and five by Shel Silverstein: Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Giving Tree, The Missing Piece Meets the Big O, The Light in the Attic, and Falling Up. I scribbled out dad’s name inside those covers. I had a CD of Silverstein’s music I’d bought with my own money. I loved it even though Silverstein didn’t bother using punctuation when he wrote the title, The Best of Shel Silverstein: His Words His Songs His Friends.
I didn’t have posters. No women, no basketball, no football. I hated sports. They’re stupid. I played when I was a kid. I never watched. I tossed the backpack on my desk, turned on the desk light and turned off the ceiling light.
I guess I sorta lied: I had one poster. University of Minnesota, some basketball player I’d never heard of in gold A-top and shorts. I crouched down and slugged him in the face but laid my hand over the U of M logo. That was where I wanted to go more than anywhere else in the world. Institute of Technology, the Department of Biomedical Engineering is the program I applied for. I asked Mr. Lamprecht, my physics teacher, to write a recommendation for me ‘cause even though he’s crabby, he’d been around forever, and the U knew who he was. Except for him, me, and mom, nobody else knew that’s where I wanted to go. Not even Grams, and she’s the reason I want it.
I pulled off my sweatshirt, dropped it in a pile, and untied my basketball shoes while I hopped around on one foot. My backpack was already on my desk, so I sat down, opened it, and got to work.
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