Damian nudged Marcus and told him to get ready. It was the second time the maroon-colored Buick with tinted windows and original hubcaps had rounded the corner. Damian didn’t have any customers with that particular Detroit make and model and, being who he was and where he was sitting, he reached behind him, gripping a pistol wedged between his blue jeans and skin.

Marcus did the same. But Marcus was fourteen. He wasn’t smooth in how he armed himself, owning a pair of eyes that were two inches wide and unblinking with fear.

They watched from the bottom step as the Buick cruised over potholes and uneven pavement as if it were stalking something. Three years back, James Bell was given shriveled legs and incontinence when he caught a bullet in a drive by. James showed himself enough in the neighborhood to be a reminder about that dark poetry.

When the Buick came to a stop directly out in front of their stoop, Damian defiantly raised his chin. He bowed up, stepped closer, and yelled, “What the fuck do you want? What?”

The Buick inched a little further into an empty parking space. With the engine shut off, an old white man emerged from the car just as slowly as how he’d been driving it.

Damian let go of his pistol.

Marcus boldly dropped off the stoop and said, “I do believe this cracker has lost his way.”

The old man was long in the tooth and bore the resemblance of a grandfather who was still in possession of a pocket watch. Wearing brown slacks from the seventies and a white pin-striped collared shirt, he held the ownership papers to a large head that made him hunch over. Despite the ravages of time, he still had a full set of hair upon his scalp, but it was very white and thin, and his pale skin was speckled along his cheeks with liver spots. Standing several inches shy of six feet, the old man shuffled over and was careful to balance over the curb.

“Listen here young men,” the old man said, pointing with his crooked finger toward the house they sat in front of. “I was wondering if you live here?”

Damian smacked his lips, shifted like he was bored and said, “You see me sitting here, don’t you?”

“You know,” continued the old man like he had the rest of the day to chitchat, “I used to do the same thing, sit right there on that very stoop.”

Marcus settled against the house genuinely interested. “You used to live here?”

“I surely did. Nineteen hundred and forty-two. Lived here for ten years, maybe more. Played stickball right on these streets. My dad worked that way,” pointing toward the river, “over at the docks. He was a good father, hard, but fair. Used to treat me and my brothers and my sister Chloe to a Snoball once a week.” A glint sparked hard and nostalgic through the old man’s eyes. The soft icy flavors of the Snoball massaged more memory out of him, telling them about his mother baking bread, rolling pasta, growing fresh herbs in the backyard garden. He fondly spoke of the kitchen smells seeping outside from all of these houses around here.

“It was like a blanket thrown over the whole block,” the old white man explained. “The heavy spice would get trapped in the humidity and linger till morning.”

The old man paused as if he were waiting for something, then stepped toward Marcus, shook the youngster’s hand, told him he was Jacob Farley, and then extended his hand toward Damian.

Damian ignored the gesture. He looked down the block. After a minute, he casually brought his attention back to the withered white hand extended his way.

“It’s nice and all,” Damian absently said. “It really is something hearing about yesteryear. All those good ole days you white people yammer on about. But those days are gone. This is our neighborhood. This is my stoop now. And having you standing here, it makes some people around here nervous. Marcus is nervous, ain’t that right?”

“I am nervous,” Marcus parroted.

“See,” Damian declared. I tell you what, why don’t you and your stories climb back in your ugly ass Buick—”

Marcus laughed. “It is ugly.”

“Yes, it is,” Damian confirmed. “A white man’s ugliness. Hell, I should charge you a restocking fee for having to put Marcus’s nerves back in place. Creeping in on our street like you just did, getting out and telling us old timey stories.”

A black cat, one of a dozen who claimed this territory, slithered around the corner of the house and meowed. In and out of Damian’s legs the feline purred, and without looking, Damian tenderly stroked the cat’s head as he watched Mr. Farley bringing out his wallet.

“Keep your money old man, it was a joke. I ain’t gonna to charge you. Just get in your car and leave.”

“Oh,” Mr. Farley said and nodded at his wallet, “but here’s the money anyway, I want to pay you for your time.”

“My time?”

“If you don’t mind, I would love to walk through the old place,” motioning toward the house. “Memories and all.”

Marcus pushed off the side of the house and looked in the open wallet. Damian did the same, seeing Mr. Farley beginning to pluck a twenty from a wad of other twenties a quarter-inch thick.

Damian shooed the cat away and looked down the block at a thin woman, a very thin woman, wearing a cotton spaghetti strap top, pink hair rollers, a thigh-high skirt and flip flops. She anxiously stood there near the stop sign rubbing her anemic-looking arms, shuffling in place, all the while sending glances Damian’s way.

Ignoring Mr. Farley and his wallet, Damian motioned for Marcus to go and tend to her needs.

“But hey…bro, wait!” Damian instructed. “Tell that bitch those favors she hands out with her mouth ain’t good anymore. Make her pay. After that, go to the gas station and get me a Slurpee.”

“What flavor?”

“Coke is the only one to get.” Damian watched as Marcus causally moved on down the street, then turned back to this Mr. Farley and his wallet and said, “Make it forty old man, and I’ll personally give you the grand tour.”

Without a word, another twenty was handed over. The extra money made Damian feel generous. He held the screen door open and offered up his arm to the old man for balance.

Mr. Farley trailed into the near empty living room, and like a blind man, painted a mental picture by raising his hands. The old man restored the previous furniture from thin air, talking about the sofa and chair or where a hutch had been. He brought back the China dishes, landscape paintings, doilies, a coffee table with rugs and all the other horseshit luggage white people have.

But Damian couldn’t see any of what Mr. Farley restored. Damian only saw a broken couch, Xbox controllers tossed to the threadbare cushions beside a toppled Popeyes’ chicken box. A flat screen TV hung from the opposite wall, and in the corner, a fold-out card table precariously balanced poker chips. The floor was the original pine and wore the brunt of hard living in the gouges and scuffmarks riddled across the surface, as well as the hard living up on the walls and ceiling where the paint chipped and the stucco cracked.

Mr. Farley went through the kitchen. It was just as stripped down and bare as the room before, having only the necessities of a microwave and refrigerator. But Mr. Farley was quick to point at things that weren’t there: his mother in an apron, and his father reading a newspaper at the table as he smoked on a cigarette.

Going up to the second floor, Damian slowly trailed behind, and when Mr. Farley wandered into the first bedroom, Damian leaned against the doorframe. The place was as neglected as the rooms below, housing nothing but a lone mattress on the floor and a blanket.

“You know,” Damian dispassionately said, smacking his lips, “I was thinking about that fee you gave me on the way up the stairs, and what I’m thinking now is, I believe a better payment plan would be in both our interest.”

Mr. Farley had circled out in the middle of the bedroom, hunting for his ghosts that lived there. But hearing what Damian broached, he faced Damian and said nothing, just stared.

“I guess what I’m trying to say,” Damian continued, “seeing how much you’re enjoying bringing the past into the present, it’s only fair you donate a little more to your emotional cause.”

Mr. Farley squared himself as if ready to accept the consequences. “This was my sister’s room,” he said, searching the space around him.

“I don’t give one shit about what bedroom was which, or about what piece of furniture went where—this ain’t your place. Not anymore. So yeah, that’s how it’s gonna go down for you, old man,” and motioned with only a few fingers for Mr. Farley to bring out his wallet.

“So, this is a shake down?”

“I don’t know what that means.” Damian puckered his lips and sucked in a breath. “I call it more of a redistribution of wealth. That’s how I see it. That’s what’s happening over here on my side of the room. How can it be stealing? It ain’t stealing. All’s I’m doing is getting back what people like you stole from people like me in the first place.”

“You mean white people?”

“Yeah, white people, black people, you don’t see another fucking skin color here! Do you?” Impatient with the rhetoric, Damian flung his arm out toward Mr. Farley and told him he was tired of playing around, “Just pull the rest of your stolen money out and hand it over.”

“Or what?”

“What did you say?” and he quickly straightened and came away from the doorframe.

“What if I don’t hand over the money,” Mr. Farley innocently asked, “what then?”

The question fleshed out those consequences Damian knew all too well. It was those same tumbling moments that roosted on the shoulders of James Bell before the bullet and wheelchair paid him a visit. It was that dark poetry, short and long all at the same time.

Damian quickly extracted the pistol. Damian dealt drugs. That’s what he did. He didn’t shoot seventy-year-old men in his grandmother’s house. But he was made to come here as if every lynching, for the past three hundred years, had sent out an invitation.

“You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?” Damian said, pushing the gun’s barrel closer to the old man’s face until Mr. Farley bumped his head against the back wall. “From the start, you saw me as some no good loudmouth nigga. So here I am! Just like you made me. Your Boogie Man has arrived.”

Mr. Farley had an awkward expression tittering between hope and fear, but instead of shooting him, Damian popped the old man across the face.

The punch drew blood. A thin red stream dripped from Mr. Farley’s nose like a broken faucet, leaking across his lips and splattering on his shirt.

Stowing the pistol back between his blue jeans and skin, Damian pressed his forearm against Mr. Farley chest as he searched for his wallet. Finding nothing in the back pockets, he probed the front ones. Coming up empty, Damian pushed the old man into the wall.

“What are you, some sort of magic man?” Damian asked. “What did you do with your wallet?”

“I hid it when you weren’t looking.”

“You hid it?”

Damian smirked and paced the room. He told the old man he was gonna beat the location out of him. But Mr. Farley told Damian he didn’t have to beat him, “I’ll tell you where the wallet is, and even give you the keys to the Buick, but I need you do me a favor first.”

“A favor.”

“You have to promise me you’ll do it.”

Damian shuffled. “What do I got to do?”

“I want you use that pistol you’ve been threatening me with and finish the job.”

It was as if Mr. Farley had been clinging to something the whole time, and now Damian could see the release. The old man suddenly looked exhausted. His eyes were lifeless gullets, and his skin was almost transparent. Gravity came with a vengeance, making Mr. Farley slide down the wall to the floor.

It hadn’t been a week since Damian’s grandmother passed in this very room. She was in her queen size bed, surrounded by all the furniture she had collected in a lifetime, and then like vultures picking clean any meat off a bone, she and her keepsakes were taken by sisters and brothers, leaving Damian—for a limited time—with a broken-down empty house.

Damian flung the pistol on the bed and told Mr. Farley to do it himself.

“But I can’t. I just can’t do that.”

“So, you figure you would come over here and let a nigga do the dirty work. For what, a handful of twenties and an ugly-ass Buick?” Damian shook his head. “Nothing’s changed, old man. You’s white and I’m black and each know their places. ‘Yes-em master, I’ll clean up your mess, shor-eh-nough. I’ll take that weight off of you. I’ll go to prison for the rest of my life so you can get some peace.’”

Tears streamed in those hardened grooves on the old man. Mr. Farley looked like the smallest creature he had ever seen. Damian backed out of the room, then returned with a wad of toilet paper and knelt beside him. He wiped away the blood on the old man’s cheek.

“Why you want to die?” Damian whispered.

“No one’s left,” Mr. Farley blurted, and his voice cracked under the stress of being forgotten. “No one to see me off when the cancer finally takes hold?”

Damian nodded at what he heard. He stared down at his own hands and then at those of Mr. Farley. How many of his kin, stretching back three hundred years, have also been forgotten. So many of the nameless hanging like fruit from a tree; so many robbed of land. That’s where the dark poetry was read.

“Where did you hide your wallet and keys?” Damian asked.

Mr. Farley laboriously shook his head. “Will you do it for me?”

“Where’s your fucking wallet?”

“On the refrigerator.”

Damian went downstairs and returned minutes later. He again knelt in front of Mr. Farley, grabbed under the old man’s armpits and helped him to his feet. The wallet was returned to Mr. Farley’s back right pocket, and the keys were slipped into the front of his trousers. Then Damian put a small pistol—a different one then his own—into Mr. Farley’s wrinkled hands.

“This is for you, Mr. Farley.”

“I told you I—”

“Shh, listen to me, you got yourself a pistol without bullets,” Damian said. “You want someone to do this for you, I know of some people who will do it for free.”

Damian leaned back on his haunches and called 911. He stared straight at the old man. He looked past the blue eyes and white skin and into his privileged life Damian could only imagine. And when he told the 911 operator about a man with a gun threatening people, he didn’t feel any regret.

At the front door, Damian explained the way to raise the gun. “Not like this,” Damian solemnly instructed, and showed Mr. Farley how he shouldn’t point it toward the sky but straight out. “Point it right back at them like you have something to say.”

Staring out the window, Damian watched Mr. Farley standing on the sidewalk; the pistol he’d given him was still in his hand. Damian knew what was coming. They would roll up in here with their lights on and their sirens blaring. Maybe they would send two cars, maybe more, and would converge from different sides with doors opened and pistols leveled. They might say to put down the weapon, then again, they might not. It all depended on what the old man did. Then again, it might not depend on anything at all. They might decide to empty their clips into the old man for good measure, or they might exercise a little restraint. Who could know? Policies varied.

And it was that varied policy Damian worried about most. It was a policy he’d only heard about and didn’t want to see. He could take the blood spilt on the sidewalk—he’d seen enough dead brothers in the neighborhood to stomach the old man’s body sent through the meatgrinder—but he didn’t know if he could bearto witness how those same cops, who wouldn’t hesitate to take a nigga down, would see the white skin on the old man and do nothing.

Damian checked the time on his phone. Mr. Farley had been out there for thirty minutes. “Shit, they might not even show,” Damian whispered.

He looked behind him at his grandmother’s house stripped of everything. He didn’t know how much longer he had here before the house was sold out from under him. And like Mr. Farley, he too attempted to see those things that had once been here, those good things when he was small: how his grandmother watched him, cooked for him, told him stories. But Damian’s nostalgia was interrupted with a gunshot.

Damian jumped and quickly ran to the window, then rushed outside on the steps. Smoke rose from the barrel end of Marcus’ gun. Awkwardly laid out with one arm stretched over his head and the other one twisted backward underneath, Mr. Farley didn’t move. From around the old man’s white scalp blood pooled.

“Marcus! You dumb nigg—”

“He…he raised his gun right at me,” Marcus pleaded. His voice was shaky as his limp hand still clutched to the pistol. “Shit! What did I do? What was I supposed to do?”

From streets over the sirens rose up like wolves on a hunt. Marcus had those eyes again, two inches wide and unblinking. Damian could tell how the fourteen-year old’s heart raced in his chest because Damian’s beat the same way. It was that thumping that must’ve always drummed in their people’s chests just before their feet stepped off the plantation, or even now when those same feet stumbled into a white neighborhood.

From many directions, the sirens descended. Damian looked at the frightened boy. A whole window on their history was in that one look. Marcus told the boy what he had to do, what they’ve always done.

“Run nigga! Run!”

And never look back.

Also by Stan Kempton >>

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