Nightcrawling(6)

I walk up the slight hill to her and when I am close enough, I toss her the black sweater. It lands at her feet. Alé picks it up, that small smile morphing into a dance across her cheeks and this is funeral day, when we are free to own all the dead things, all the sweaters that were resigned to ghosthood revived.

“It was Sonny Rollins. On a loop,” she says, and the smile is a familiar reflection of my own face. We always listen to what music they play during the wake, not because it says anything about the lost life, but because it says something about the people who were left behind.

“What song?” I ask her, wanting to hear it in my eardrums, the whine of the saxophone, the grainy sound of my daddy’s stereo deep inside a memory with no edges, still pure.

“God Bless the Child.” She shakes one of her knees a little as she tells me, the plate tipping slightly.

I sit down on the swing next to Alé’s and she moves the plate of food from her knees to my lap. There’s cheese and chips and celery that she has covered in peanut butter because she knows it’s my favorite. We begin to stuff ourselves, shoveling food, crunching, jaws and tongues and swallows creating a chorus to Sonny’s jazz tap that plays on repeat in my head as it must have in the funeral chapel. Alé and I both believe that funerals either have the most ingenious DJs or act as soundtracks for some hollow unwinding, a catalyst to sobs and suicide notes.

“Vernon’s selling the Regal-Hi,” I say, crunching on my last chip.

Alé’s eyes are on me, waiting.

“They raising rent over double.” I don’t know how to look at her when I say it, feels like confronting myself. Like it might just be too real.

“Shit.”

“Yeah.” I look up into the sky. “That’s why Marcus needs to get a job.”

Alé reaches out for my hand and touches it lightly, at the wrist. I wonder if she can feel my pulse, if she’s searching for it. “What you gonna do?”

“I don’t know. But if we don’t figure something out, we on the streets.”

I begin to move my legs back and forth off-tempo, staying low to the ground. Alé pulls papers and a small jar with clumps of weed out of her pocket. I like watching her roll, the meditation of it and the smell when it’s sweet and unassuming, kind of like if cinnamon was mixed with a redwood tree. I never figured out how to do it right, how to make sure the joint was tight enough to not unravel, but loose enough to breathe. Watching Alé is better, reminds me of the way my mama used to fold her clothes, so determined to make the crease just right.

She pauses to look over at me. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”

She sprinkles weed from the jar onto a paper and I catch a hint of lavender. She calls the lavender-infused weed her Sunday Shoes and it don’t even gotta make sense because when I suck it in, blow it out, I imagine my feet cased in something lavender calm and holy. She finishes, holding it up to inspect it, small smile, her lips almost pouting in their pride.

She pulls a lighter out and I cup my hand around the joint, a barrier from the wind. Alé’s thumb presses on the lighter until it sparks and the base of the flame is the same shade of blue our pool was before all the shit. She guides the flame to the tip of the joint until it finally catches.

We pass the joint back and forth until it’s too small to fit between our lips without crumbling. I’ve never really liked weed, but it makes me feel closer to Alé, so I light up with her and try to sink so deep into the high that it’s all I feel.

Alé begins to swing her legs, me following her lead, going skyward. At the top, I think I might just enter one of those clouds. I look down, see a tent behind the basketball courts and an old man pissing by a tree, not bothering to look around and see who is watching. I aspire to be so reckless, so unassuming that I could take a piss in San Antonio Park at noon on a Thursday and not even look up.

“You know what I been thinking?” Alé asks me.

We’re on opposite ends of the sky, swinging toward each other and missing, and for the first time all day I’m not thinking about the paper taped to our door, about Marcus’s sleeping face, about how wide Dee’s mouth opens.

“What you been thinking?”

“Don’t nobody ever fix none of these damn roads.”

She says it and I immediately begin to laugh, thinking she was about to tell me some philosophical wondering about the world.

“You don’t even got a car, what you worried about?” I yell back to her, across the wind and the space between our swings.

Even as I say it, looking out at the streets that extend from the park like the legs of a spider, I see what she means. Chunks of road sit beside holes they left behind, where wheels of broken-down Volkswagens dip in and for a second I don’t know if they’re gonna pull back out until they do, the only remnant of distress left in the slight rattle of the bumper. All the holes in Oakland never seem to leave nobody stuck for long, an illusion of brokenness. Or maybe that’s just for the cars.

“Don’t you ever think about how none of the streets ’round here been redone for decades?” Alé, a skater to the core, spends more time dipping in and out of potholes than I ever have.

“Why it gotta matter? The roads ain’t hurting nobody.”

“Don’t matter. I’m just saying it ain’t like this nowhere else, you know? Why Broadway not this torn up? Or S.F.? ’Cause they putting their money in the city just like they putting their money into downtown. Don’t you got a problem with that?” Alé’s whole body has risen from its slouch and we’re both slowing down now, returning from our sky.