Nightcrawling(4)

Alé and I walk up to MacArthur Boulevard, where we catch the NL, hopping on with Clipper cards we stole from some elementary school lost and found. The bus is almost empty because we are young and foolish while everybody else is sitting at a desk in some tech building, staring at a screen and wishing they could taste the air when it is fresh and tranquil. We don’t got nowhere to be and we like it like that.

Alé is one of the lucky ones. Her family’s restaurant is a neighborhood staple, and even though they can’t afford more than the one bedroom above the shop, she’s never been hungry a day in her life. It’s all degrees of being alive out here and every time I hug her or watch her skate down the sidewalk, I can feel how strong her heartbeat is. It doesn’t matter how lucky you are, though, because you still gotta work day in and day out trying to stay alive while someone else falls through the cracks, ashes scattered in the bay.

Thursdays and Sundays are the only days Alé will come crawling around town with me. She normally stays to help her mom run the restaurant, standing over a stove or waitressing. When I’m lonely, I come watch her do this, observing the way she can sweat nonstop for hours without even moving.

I stare at Alé as she looks out her window, the bus shaking us into each other and away. We’re at a red light when she nudges me.

“They really tryna replace Obama with that woman.” She nods her head toward the poster pasted in some hardware store window with Hillary Clinton’s face creased and smiling. We’re more than a year away from the election, but it’s already started, all the rumors and talk coinciding with rallies and protests and black men shot down. I shake my head, the bus moving again, before settling my eyes back on Alé.

“You not even wearing black, girl, what you doing?” I ask.

She’s still in her white shirt and shorts.

“You ain’t either.”

When she says this, I look down at my own gray shirt and black jeans. “I’m halfway there.”

Alé lets out a small laugh. “This a hood funeral, anyway. Nobody gonna question what we’re wearing.”

And suddenly we’re both giggling because she’s right and we must have known this, since we’ve never shown up to a funeral in anything but jeans and stained T-shirts, except for when Alé’s abuelo died two years ago and we wore his shirts, ones that had yellowed from age and smelled only of cigarettes and clay from the deepest, most fertile part of the ground. No mortician ever interrogated the mourner’s apparel just like they don’t stop and ask about no stab wounds. I showed up to my own daddy’s funeral in a neon-pink tank top and nobody said a word.

Mama blamed the prison for Daddy’s death, which meant she blamed the people who made it possible for Daddy to have ended up there in the first place—which meant she blamed the streets. Daddy wasn’t a hustler or a dealer and I only ever saw him high once, smoking a bowl while he sat by the shit pool with Uncle Ty. It didn’t matter though, because Mama could only see the day Daddy got picked up, his friends’ twitching mouths when the cops appeared and slammed them to the plaster walls. It didn’t matter what they did or didn’t do because Mama needed to blame someone, something, and her skin was too soft, too tender to handle blaming the world itself, the click of the handcuffs, the ease with which the cops slid them onto his wrists.

Daddy got sick when he was in San Quentin, started pissing blood and begged to see the doctor for weeks, the burn getting more persistent, until they finally let him. The doctor told him it was probably just the food, that sometimes it does that to you. He gave Daddy some painkillers and pills called alpha blockers to help him piss easier. It took the worst parts of it away, but I think Daddy still found blood in the toilet for years after he came home and never said nothing. Three years after he was released, his back started hurting so bad that he could barely walk to and from the 7-Eleven he worked at.

We took him to the doctor when his legs started swelling and they told us it was his prostate. The cancer was far enough along that there was really no shot at improvement, so Daddy refused when Mama begged him to do the chemo and the radiation therapy. He said he wasn’t gonna leave her in no debt from his medical bills.

It was a quick death that felt slow. Marcus disappeared for most of it, off with Uncle Ty. I don’t blame him for not wanting to watch. Mama and I witnessed the whole thing, spent hours every night wiping down his body with a cool rag and singing to him. It was a relief when it finally ended, four years after he was released from San Quentin, and we could stop waking up in the middle of the night thinking his body had gone cold. By the time the funeral came around, I was too exhausted to give a shit about wearing black and part of me wished I had stayed away like Marcus. Death is easier to live through unseen.

The bus rolls to a stop on Seminary and spits us out like the bay spits out salt. We hop from the bus to the curb and wait those few moments to watch it stand back up and continue on its path. The left tires fall into a series of potholes, coming back out again with a cough.

Alé puts her arm around me, pulling me close, and I remember how cold I’ve been without my jacket or her chest. My lips ache and I think they must be purple, nearing blue, but I pass a window of a liquor store and my reflection tells me they’re still pink, the same color as Marcus’s mouth was this morning, sucking in air and snoring. Alé and I walk together out of sync. She moves kinda like the Hulk with giant steps and each half of her body striding, leaving the other part behind, while I take small steps beside her. I lean on her and it don’t matter how unbelievably mismatched we are because we are still moving.