Twerp Read online

  I shook my head. “What you’re saying is you won’t do it, right?”

  That cracked him up, despite the situation. He laughed and nodded.

  I inhaled, then exhaled. “Fine, I’ve got it from here.”

  He let go of the cinder block, and I felt its full weight for the first time. I had to hold it tight to my body to keep from dropping it right there. It seemed to want to get out of my hands and fall to the ground, like I was keeping it from being where it was supposed to be.

  With the cinder block hugged to my waist, I trudged the last three steps, and then I stepped over the pigeon so that the cinder block was centered above its skull, and I said a prayer for the pigeon—not out loud, just to myself—and I asked God to take mercy on it, and to take mercy on me for what I was about to do, and then at last I looked down, and the pigeon looked up at me, but it didn’t make a move otherwise.

  Except I couldn’t do it.

  I stepped back and dropped the cinder block a foot from the pigeon, which didn’t flinch at the dull thud it made, the thud of concrete against concrete. Then I glanced back at Lonnie. He was standing with his hands on his hips, shaking his head.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  But then I had a thought. “I’ll take it home.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You can’t take that thing home.”

  “I’ll just take care of it until it heals up.”

  “Your mom will go nuts. Pigeons are filthy birds.”

  He had a point, but I’d made up my mind. I knelt down next to the pigeon, and I slid my right hand underneath its body. The bird didn’t like that one bit. It gave me a hard peck and fluttered out of reach. But I went after it. I knew the longer I chased it, the worse it would be. So I grabbed it with both hands before it could make another move. For a couple of seconds, nothing happened. I had it in my hands, and it didn’t seem to mind. But then it began pecking the daylights out of me. My fingers. My palms. My wrists. I held on to it. I could feel how mad it was. It was like a wadded-up ball of anger, except with flapping wings and a pecking beak.

  Finally, because I was afraid I would drop it, I held it to my chest and rolled it up inside my T-shirt. That calmed it right down. I could feel its heart beating against mine, and I glanced over at Lonnie, and he was rolling his eyes again like I’d gone nuts, which maybe I had, but I was going to do the right thing and heal up that pigeon.

  Lonnie gave me a rap on the back for luck, but then he headed home, still shaking his head.

  You can picture the expression on my mom’s face when I came through the door with the pigeon. I know I was picturing it as I walked up the two flights of stairs, past the Dongs. The Dongs are the old Chinese couple who own the two-story house I live in. We rent out the top floor from them. They’re good neighbors, quiet as can be, except Mrs. Dong cooks the foulest-smelling food you’d ever want to get your nose around. It doesn’t taste bad—at least that’s what my sister Amelia, who’s five years older than I am, tells me. I wouldn’t go near the stuff myself. But Amelia had dumplings and noodles with them once, and she lived to talk about it. Even so, when Mrs. Dong’s got that stove going, my advice is hold your breath and run up the stairs as fast as you can.

  I lucked out because Mrs. Dong wasn’t cooking when I came back with the pigeon. But I was dreading the look my mom was going to give me. She was in the kitchen, and she heard me come through the door and called out her usual, “Supper’s almost on the table, so wash up.”

  I could’ve gone straight to my room. But to get it over with, I walked into the kitchen, and I told her what I had rolled up in my shirt. That’s when the look came. Her eyes narrowed down to slits, and her face seemed to go tired, like, Oh, good grief! But the thing was, once I started telling her what had happened, she softened up. She took a quick look at the pigeon, and she asked me if I was sure it couldn’t fly, and I told her I was sure, and then she nodded and went into the hall closet and came out with a beat-up canvas suitcase. It was one she hadn’t used in years. She told me I could keep the pigeon in the old suitcase until it healed up, and then I could throw out the suitcase. “Just make sure that bird doesn’t wind up flying around the apartment,” she said, then went back to the kitchen.

  Sometimes when you brace yourself for a storm, you get a gentle breeze. The storm only comes when you’re braced for nothing whatsoever.

  I called out for Amelia, who was in her room at the far end of the apartment. I knew she’d lend a hand because she’s soft for animals, so even if she had no interest in helping me out, she would want to save the pigeon. I was right. She dragged the suitcase into my room, and then she dragged in a week’s worth of old newspapers my dad had piled up next to the couch. She tore up the papers and stuffed them in the suitcase so that the pigeon would have a nice feathery surface, and then I unrolled my shirt, and the pigeon plopped down and took a minute to collect itself—which is what you’d do too, if you’d been brained by a rock and then rolled up in a T-shirt. But after a minute, the pigeon began to look around and seemed to realize it was all right.

  Even though I didn’t know if it was a he or a she, I decided to call the pigeon George Sauer after my favorite football player—the split end for the New York Jets. That annoyed Amelia. “If you name it, you’re going to get attached,” she said. “Then you’re not going to want to set it free.”

  I told her she was wrong. I was only going to keep George Sauer until he healed up, and that was the end of it. “Once he can fly again, he’s going out the window.”

  But of course she was dead right. I never should’ve named that bird. Never should have started to think about “it” as “him.” You see, “it” isn’t personal. But “him” … I mean, the minute I named the pigeon George Sauer, I began to notice how the name kind of fit him, how the shape of his head looked like a football helmet.

  You’ve likely figured out the end of the story by now, so I won’t beat around the bush. George Sauer never made it out of that suitcase. I fed him bread crumbs, but he got tired of that fast, and then I went to the pet store and bought him proper bird food, but he didn’t take to that either. He couldn’t right himself. He kept me up with prrriiiilllrrrp sounds the two nights he was in the suitcase, but by the third morning he was in a bad way. I could tell because when I reached into the suitcase, he didn’t even bother to peck at me. So I picked him up, and I just held him for a minute. I stared into his eyes, as if he might forgive me for what I’d done to him. But I got nothing back. Not a thing. Just a look that seemed to be saying, I’m a pigeon, for God’s sake! I don’t do stuff like forgive people!

  When George Sauer died that afternoon, I bawled my eyes out.

  January 16, 1969

  Me and Shakespeare

  Selkirk got the biggest kick out of what I wrote so far. (Am I supposed to call you Mr. Selkirk whenever I write your name? Because, to be honest, that’s not how kids talk about their teachers.) He says that writing is my thing, and that nothing’s more important than doing your thing. So now he says that if I keep going with it, I can get out of the next few English assignments he’s got lined up, and maybe even more after that. Which suits me just fine, if for no other reason than because I know what he’s got lined up. Right there at the end, glaring up at me from the reading list he handed out after Christmas break, is Julius Caesar. I hate Shakespeare. I know that’s hard for English teachers to hear, but it’s the truth.

  I didn’t have a feeling about Shakespeare one way or the other until two years ago, in fourth grade, when Mrs. Graber assigned each kid in the class a Shakespeare speech to learn by heart. We had to stand up in the front of the room and say our speech—which was bad enough, except it also meant we had to listen to the rest of the speeches. I got so sick of the stuff by the end that I could have vomited. It took up two full days in English class. What did I get out of it? The only thing I remember is the first line of my speech: “What a piece of work is a man!” That’s it. I don’t remember what came next, and I still
don’t know what in the world he’s talking about.

  So when I say I hate Shakespeare, I mean it. Lots of guys say they hate him, and what they mean is they hate the stuff he writes. But I don’t only hate the stuff he writes. I hate Shakespeare for writing the stuff. I hate the guy, William Shakespeare. If I met him on the street, I’d just keep walking. Because you know, you just know, while he was writing the stuff he was writing, he was thinking how clever he was. He was sitting at his desk, writing the words, and he could’ve just said what he meant, but instead he prettied it up until it could mean everything or it could mean nothing or it could mean whatever the teacher says it means. That just drives me bananas. So if keeping this thing going gets me out of Julius Caesar, then count me in.

  Heck, I’ll write a whole book if it gets me out of Shakespeare.

  January 26, 1969

  Racing with Cars

  Well, I guess the joke’s on me. No sooner had I put that last sentence to paper, “Heck, I’ll write a whole book if it gets me out of Shakespeare,” than I ran smack into writer’s block. That’s what Selkirk called it. One minute I was writing like crazy, and then … pffffft. Nothing. I must have stared at those thirteen words for six hours—off and on, not six hours straight—and tried to come up with the next line, but it was as if my brain was spitting cotton. As if my skull was a movie theater and the audience was sitting there, waiting to watch the next movie, and I could hear the sound of crickets. It got to the point that I was about to throw in the towel, and I said so to Selkirk, but he told me about writer’s block and said to keep going, even if what I wrote didn’t make sense, or even if it wasn’t connected to what came before.

  So …

  Not to brag, but it’s a well-known fact that I’m the fastest kid in the sixth grade. Which means I’m the fastest kid in Public School 23, Queens, which only goes up to the sixth grade. That’s 997 students, and I can outrun every last one of them. I once outran Mike the Bike—on his bike! I raced him the entire length of Ponzini. It wasn’t even close. He said he eased up at the end because he was afraid of crashing into the side of the building. I told him I’d race him again, out on the street, and he said no. So that was that.

  What it reminded me of was that old John Henry cartoon, you know, the steel-driving man versus the steel-driving machine. Except I didn’t drop dead at the end. Yeah, I know. It’s a stupid cartoon. It’s also kind of prejudiced against Negroes, if you look at it in a certain way. Like when John Henry’s mother says, “Pleezed to know ya, son. I’ze your maw!” That’s just not right, the way it shows John Henry and his mom and his steel-driving friends speaking such bad English. But as stupid as the thing is, it makes me bawl like a baby. (It’s not that I cry a lot. The pigeon and the cartoon are just exceptional things, which is why I’m talking about them.) Even though I know what’s going to happen, even though I’ve got the entire ending memorized, when that preacher says, “John Henry didn’t die … no, he just stopped living in his mammy’s shack, and he started living in the hearts of men forever and a day,” that kills me every time. Even just writing about it chokes me up.

  Anyway, it doesn’t matter. My main point is that I’ve done worse things than the thing with Danley Dimmel, and one of those worse things was causing a car crash. I’ve never told this story before, not even to Lonnie. It happened a couple of years ago, so I figure enough time has passed. It also ties in with what I said before about outrunning Mike the Bike. That wasn’t a big deal to me, or at least not as big a deal as the kids around here made it out to be, because I’d been outrunning cars for years. No lie.

  Here’s what I’d do: I’d wait on the corner of Parsons Boulevard and Thirty-Third Avenue. There’s a traffic light there, so it was always a fair start. Then, when the light turned green and the car took off up Parsons, I’d take off on the sidewalk, and it was a race for the entire block to Thirty-Fourth Avenue.

  Parsons is chewed up pretty good around there, scattered with potholes, so the driver would have to be nuts to step too hard on the gas. What I’m saying is, I know I can’t beat a car on a level road. I’m not so stuck up as to think that. But with the potholes, I’d always pull ahead about two-thirds of the way up the block, and then we’d go neck and neck until I got to the corner at Thirty-Fourth Avenue, where there’s no traffic light … and that’s when I’d shoot out across Parsons, in front of the car. If the car had to slam its brakes, I counted that as a loss. But if it kept going without braking, I counted that as a win.

  Except there was this one time I was going up against a brown Ford LTD. The driver was a Negro guy with a huge Afro haircut, which I noticed but didn’t think too much about. I should’ve thought about it, though, because it meant he wasn’t from the neighborhood and likely didn’t know how chewed up the road was. So me and the LTD were going neck and neck the entire block, and I could hear him banging and skidding on the street next to me. When I shot across in front of him, he was so close that I could feel a gust of heat from his grill.

  The car screeched. I knew I was safe because the sound was trailing off behind me. But when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw the LTD spinning out. I stopped and looked back. It was careening sideways toward the sidewalk on the west side of Parsons Boulevard. I watched it in disbelief. As the LTD jumped the curb, the guy had let go of the wheel, and he was holding his hands over his face. He’d given up trying to control the car. He was bracing for the crash. It came a second later. He hit the fire hydrant on the corner. The sound was just hideous, a sudden pow—like a paper bag popping, except much worse, much louder. I saw the guy’s Afro jerking to the side, and then, a second later, he dropped out of sight.

  I know it was a stupid thing to do, because I could’ve gotten in trouble, but I ran across the street to make sure he was all right. When I got to the car, he was slumped across the front seat, holding the side of his head and moaning.

  “Hey,” I called in to him. “Are you all right?”

  He didn’t answer. He just kept moaning.

  “Hey … hey …,” I said.

  “I’m all right,” he mumbled, but he had a bad cut on his forehead. I could see the blood under his hand.

  “You should get out of there,” I told him.

  “No, man, I’ll be all right. Just let me be.”

  “But you’re hurt.”

  “Let me be, man.”

  I wasn’t listening to him. I started tugging on the driver’s-side door. Except it was jammed shut. I couldn’t budge it. The guy looked like he might have been able to kick the door out himself. He was young, maybe twenty years old, and the huge Afro made him look strong. Getting out of the car, though, seemed like the last thing on his mind. He was staring at his right hand, which was covered with blood, as if he was trying to figure out whose blood he was looking at.

  That was when I heard the first siren. It was a couple of blocks away, coming from the direction of Northern Boulevard.

  “Oh, man,” I heard him moan. He tried to straighten up, but it was no use.

  “Just keep still,” I told him. “The cops will get you out.”

  “Oh, man!”

  “They’ll be here in a minute,” I said. “But I’ve got to go.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m … I saw what happened.”

  “There was a kid who ran out in front of me.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t see that. I just saw the crash.”

  “It was the kid’s fault.”

  “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry.”

  He turned his head to face me. It took a lot of effort. I wanted to cheese it, but I felt like I should look him in the eye, like I owed it to him. There was blood gushing out of his forehead, clotting on his eyebrows and running down the bridge of his nose. As soon as he got a good look at me, he knew who I was. But he wasn’t even mad. He muttered under his breath, “Oh, man!”

  Then he just kind of smiled.

  “I have to go,” I said to him.

  “You’re a fast
little dude.”

  “I’m so sorry ….”

  “For a white boy, I mean.”

  “Really, I have to go.”

  “Do what you got to do.”

  As soon as he said that, I took off across Parsons Boulevard and ran as fast as I could up Thirty-Fourth Avenue. I wasn’t a half block away when I heard the first police car pull up. But I didn’t look back. It was like the story in the Bible, where the guy’s wife looks back at Sodom and Gomorrah, and God turns her into a pillar of salt. That was how I felt. Like if I looked back, the cops were going to figure out what happened and come after me. Which I guess doesn’t have much to do with the pillar of salt thing, now that I think about it, except it shows why you shouldn’t look back.

  But here’s the kicker. It turned out the car was stolen. The guy came out of the accident all right, but he wound up in jail. I found out from the cops themselves. Two of them showed up in a squad car the next morning, asking around for witnesses. I was feeling real guilty and thinking about telling the truth, but then one of them mentioned the stolen car, and at that point I decided to lie through my teeth. Probably, I should’ve told the truth. But what was the point? He wasn’t in trouble because he’d crashed the car. He was in trouble because he’d stolen the car. I had nothing to do with that. The crash was only the reason he got caught. Still, it’s not as if I felt good about it.

  That was the last time I raced a car up Parsons Boulevard.

  January 31, 1969

  Quentin’s Eyebrows

  You should’ve seen the look on Lonnie’s face when I told him I was getting out of doing a book report on Julius Caesar by writing stories about myself. He didn’t even believe me until I showed him what I had so far. He read the entire notebook, start to finish, and when he handed it back to me after school, he was real impressed. That made me feel good. Lonnie’s not the kind of guy who blows smoke. He tells you the truth, whether it’s going to hurt or not. Getting a thumbs-up from Lonnie meant more to me than getting an A on an English assignment, if that’s what you decide to give me, Mr. Selkirk. (Hint, hint.)