Brother and the Dancer. Keenan Norris
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system. They cussed the greedy white man, the godless homos and the job-takin Messicans. They struggled, made do, developed skills outside the legitimate economy that controlled Monday through Friday and immersed themselves within the imperiling worlds of weekend work. They took three buses to take one job, played maid, braided hair, bootlegged anything popular enough to be bought twice. They provided the freaks from across town with their girl and boy and cheap pussy. They were raided by the police, got locked up, went away, came home, shot and cut each other in their front yards over drug money and other bullshit, defiled their community, messed-over their kin, passed along diseases like they did their last names.
As with every community, they were collectively close-minded, treating anything new as a trespassing cancer. This was an attitude that had less to do with people themselves, because their neighborhoods routinely housed the poor, the foreign, prostitutes, transvestites, drifters, than with the new spirit and ideas of troublemaking individuals: to say that there was no God, to submit that men who fucked men were still men, to decide out loud that the thugs in their midst were all damn Uncle Toms so worshipful of money that they thought nothing of selling their sisters and poisoning their people, was deemed not diagnosis but sickness itself, even as the community shut itself away and coughed up its lungs. Yet somehow within that closed-in space the natural goodness of folk always survived and walked on past the Devil: they bore each other’s children and raised youth that were not their own, prayed for one another, did for one another, did for the least among them, and actually practiced what politicians and professors fat-mouthed about from far away. They built the Central City Mission, their own small haven for the least fortunate among them. It was they who tore down the crack houses and ministered to the lost brothers and sisters that could still be saved from their ceaseless beasts. They laid hands upon and governed as best they could a world outsiders had long since condemned.
But their beliefs were set and immovable, as rigid as Italian ballet.
The seasons spiraled around and around and nothing changed. This inviolate world was such that Erycha hardly noticed as her body began to curve, forming a new outline, hips, breasts and female fullness. She had no idea that she was growing out of more than old clothes, that one day all she would have to do would be to walk down the street or open her mouth and raise a question to find herself spiritually exiled. Then she would have new names given to her. White girl. Educated bitch. But for now that was a long way off. For now she was still just eight and nine and ten turning eleven and eleven turning twelve and summer nights she laid her rounding body down and slept naked on her naked mattress, satisfied enough that she never had nightmares, never needed dreams.
By the time Touissant turned twelve, East Highland had evolved into a beautiful bedroom community. There were rows of palm trees columned like the slats in a shut gate across the length of its high hill. That hill, itself simple nature, had been made into a statement, dictating a separation between the East and West sides of the town, with the homes and the health food stores and the Buddhist temple along the hill’s long incline representing the city’s East, and the apartments and pawn shops and supermercados and community centers and small store-front churches in the flat lands the West. Not only the hill but a freeway separated the town’s two sides. Grandiose two- and three-story homes threw their block shadows down the length of Highland hill and onto the ghetto beyond the freeway, and when the smog would lift after afternoon, the biggest houses and prettiest palm trees stood in shadow, dark traces of a class statement.
The home a state university music professor (Touissant’s dad) and county hospital administrator (Touissant’s mom) could maintain stood toward the bottom of the hill. But the important thing was to be on the hill. Staring beyond the hill at the snowy mountain range that shone in the early sunlight like blue-white pyramids reaching for the sky, Touissant figured there must be some reason, some logic to it all. Not just the hill and how it divided his little town into the wealthy and the kinda-wealthy and the not wealthy at all, but everything else, too. Like the mountains. Why did they exist? And the snow? And the palm trees so close to the snow? And the desert so close to the snow? Why were there places so strange that they could bring winter and summer and mountain and desert, and life and death, all together along one plain of sight? Why were people born where they were born and why did they die where they died? Why and why and why?
Touissant gripped the event flyer tight in his sports-shirt pocket. His sisters had made a pastime out of leaving invitations to concerts and shows in random niches in the house. They were no longer content to drop the laminated flyers on the living room floor or on the bathroom sink, but had progressed to wedging the things in windowsills and dropping them into flower pots and placing them inside old books that would spark their interest for five or ten brittle pages before they moved on to the next unlikely excitement. Most of the flyers advertised events by foregrounding a half-naked girl posed seductively. Touissant knew that the guys who wanted the twins half-naked at their parties gave them the flyers and he knew how uninterested the twins usually were. He made mental note not to hand out raunchy flyers to pretty girls when he got old enough to do that sort of thing.
But one flyer caught his attention. It had been left in one of the violently large old war novels that Touissant’s gramps had passed down to his dad before he died. The Young Lions, the book was called. The flyer was sticking out from between pages 190 and 191, which was impressive in and of itself. Even if the advertisement had been as nondescript as all the booty-shaking flyers that found their way into the family library, he would still have remembered it for the amount of reading it implied. Either that or one of the girls had placed the flyer there just for the sake of it. The invitation itself was unique: a forum open to the public to address chronic violence in the neighborhoods of San Bernardino and West Highland. Touissant had never thought much about San Bernardino or West Highland. That area was off-limits for reasons he had never much considered. He understood vaguely that the area was blighted, recalled vaguely Dea and Kia’s offhand remarks about avoiding shows staged there, noticed still vaguely how much they seemed to know about places where they said no one should ever go. Now he wanted to know more. He hid the flyer in a place where no one would find it, and he committed the date, time and location of the event to memory.
On the bus to Seccombe Park, Touissant watched as a little girl and two little boys play-fought with each other. The kids were maybe nine, maybe ten years old. Both boys wore blue bandanas, which they flaunted like pretty scarves around their throats. Touissant knew from investigative news reports on television that these kids were Crips or playing at being Crips. He imagined a bunch of tiny children trying to do a cartoon drive-by: they would have on their blue bandanas but would be unable to see over the steering wheel or lift the gun out the window.
The bus was a block away from Seccombe when he heard a soft popping sound come from where the little kids were play-fighting.
The girl lay on the bus floor, playing dead. One of the boys stood over her, shooting her lustily with a cap gun, filling her body with imaginary bullets. After a minute, an adult on the bus yelled, “Hey! Stop!”
The kids looked up and stopped their play. The boy put the cap gun in his pocket and retook his seat on the bus. The girl stood up. The boy untied his blue flag and dusted her off with it, smoothed her hair where her artfully winged and braided cornrows had become tousled and loose.
When he reached his stop, Touissant looked around Seccombe Park for blue rags like the ones worn by the boys on the bus. The gang symbols were not hard to find and came in red as well. Tied around throats, wrapped around waists, knotted on wrists and worn round heads, it was obvious the gang members were as interested in advertisement as the event organizers. Touissant knew nothing about gangs except what journalists had told him. Those journalists had gone heavy on menace but light on real information: he had come to understand that gangs sold drugs and killed each other and killed innocent men, women and children on a regular basis. But there had been no news stories about gang members mingling at the lake, participating in anti-violence events. He wondered if the journalists had gotten it wrong, or if the organizers at Seccombe had made the mistake. He wondered whether it was a good or bad thing that formal security was nowhere visible.
There also weren’t any Mexicans there. Black people of many descriptions, from gangbangers to kids in school uniforms and folks in their work clothes, crowded the park, but there were no Mexican gangbangers,