Crooked by R.K.B.

Crooked | R.K.B.

Crooked fences line the street like broken teeth in a jagged smile.

Chipped brown paint flakes from white wood. Cars shoot by the narrow houses, one by one. The cars don’t stop or slow down. A red van pulls into her spot. Her—the woman that sits on the porch, the one who has always been there. She cusses into the street, a string of utterances and damnations pouring from her mouth like an opening salvo. The red van stays for some time, braces the steady fire of the woman’s voice; but even it pushes off after a few seconds.

The red van’s wheels screech against the roughness of the asphalt. The sound of those spinning tires rings off Uriel’s braces, makes him wince. His hands, small, grip the black straps of his bookbag, where they squeeze. The sky has darkened enough now that there is too little light to allow anyone to see his fingers quiver, like violin strings. He can hear a siren in the distance, the sound of it fighting the echo of a train somewhere attempting to push its way past the city.

Uriel stands in the street now, directly in what he thinks, what he knows to be, the center.

He does not move a muscle, save the quivering of those small delicate fingers. Frail cones of light from the streetlamps on either side stretch themselves to him, into the middle of the street. The streetlight’s reach falls short of where he stands. Gulfs of darkness, pitch black as tar in the street, look to swallow him.

The streetlights flicker, and with each stretch of spiked shadow Uriel’s dread grows alongside, dreading what will happen when it is dark enough that he has to go inside.

The sun falls lower and Uriel burns copper. Dead sunlight wraps him tight, a brief shield from what waits for him behind closed doors. That great panic in Uriel, ever present today, sits in his chest, molten ice, and he knows the red van will not slow down before the driver does. Uriel cannot move. He does not.

He shatters his legs in three places.

The impact knocks Uriel unconscious, and he is dreaming before his body flies up into the windshield.

His ears are deaf to the crunch of his small weight against the glass. The weight of his nine-year old body is not even enough to crack the windshield. When Uriel lands across the street— fifteen feet away—his eyes are shut.

The red van halts a few feet from him. Behind a few windows on either side of the street, curtains rustle. The silhouette of faces moves in shadow behind each. The red van drives away, slower than before, when the woman on the porch once again begins to yell. She curses both the driver and God. Neither listen.

When the ambulance arrives, urgency deafening in its song, Uriel is taken from the street. He wakes in the ambulance to the echo of the siren. The hospital the ambulance drives to is a brutal building, its low grey walls prison-like.

On the inside it is bright and too cheerful, like an apology. Uriel falls back asleep when he arrives. He dreams he has run away with Oscar, his little brother. They run from their house, and their school, but mostly from their mother. In the dream, true as to life, she hunts for them with unmotherly sharpness that makes the foggy pain, the diluted haze of it, a thing of kindness. The world melts like old chocolate in front of them, murky and rich.

The doctors have to saw his femur down to reattach it with titanium and wire. Uriel sleeps under their knife and doesn’t wake up till well after they are done.

The nurse assigned to Uriel is new. The sight of him, asleep, smiling in his narrow bed, breaks her down in a supply closet at the end of her shift.

Eight years later and the panic still walks with him as he leaves from the bus stop, and traces of ice still line the insides of his stomach. His panic these days curls around the shape of the key in his hand, rime of internal frost guarding one of Uriel’s only possessions that have meaning.

A day does not pass when the key in Uriel’s fist does not shake when it opens the door above him. Keys listen for the songs of invitation sung by their doors, hoping they do not go silent. It is all too easy for songs to change. His own mother has mastered a knack of changing the locks to their home, and he does not keep whatever key sings to her home with him whenever he leaves.

The steps in front of Mrs. Stuart’s house are always the hardest to climb. In front of Uriel, they look monolithic, daunting. One day, he hopes, they will look like just steps.

A month after the red van, his mother does not pick him up from the hospital. Mrs. Stuart calls his mother from Uriel’s room in the hospital. She asks first. Asks where the little boy’s mother is. When Mrs. Stuart’s questions receive feather hollow answers, the questions turn from questions into damnation. Only half awake in his little bed, he hears only some of what comes out of the old woman’s mouth as she clutches the stethoscope around her neck like a talisman that can do more than find the rhythm inside a chest. He half hears as Mr. Stuart paces in his little room, a congregation of other nurses circling the woman— their faces in something of awe and something of terror. She curses his mother in that hospital, cursing her skin and her bones, and her mother’s before her for raising someone so “wicked.” When the fires of her threats are exhausted, Mrs. Stuart takes him home instead. No one argues with her. He leans on the old woman, who climbs the steps steadily, something of righteousness threading through her frame as she lifts them both to the top of the steps. Now, the rusted white metal railing to the left of the stairs wobbles; it cannot take his weight.

He has tried before.

A year ago.

He winces with the memory. His left leg, shorter now than his right and the weaker of the two, had crumpled under him, sending him toppling down onto the sidewalk. A boy from school had been with him. Uriel had been distracted by attention that was not a practical joke and eyes that did not mock him. Uriel had liked the boy’s cloud green eyes, the bright violence of them set in the boy’s brown face. But the green-eyed boy had laughed when Uriel fell.

Behind him now a car speeds down the street, the hushed air whoosh of its movement loud and sudden.

The sky is an unscarred blue above his head. The cold bites into his threadbare clothes, though he’s layered his shirts as Mrs. Stuart has told him to. He breathes into his gloves and wriggles his fingers. As he makes his way up the stairs, he keeps his hands plastered to his side. He has to resist the urge, even after all these years, to find something to hold on to. At the top he walks the narrow distance across the covered porch. His boots crunch down on the stiff fibers of the old carpet along the wood deck. The storm door is broken and does not latch properly. When he opens it, he steps inside the small space and wipes his boots along the mat there.

Before he can knock, Mrs. Stuart’s voice yells through the door.

“Sop playing and get yourself out of that cold, before you freeze to death on my porch.”

He pushes open the door, mumbling, “Yes, Ma’am.”

The smell of rosewater and spices hits him as he crosses the threshold. He smiles a quiet smile, looking straight down as he does. The first floor of the house is only barely warmer than the outside. The heat has not yet been turned on. There are space heaters, small and black, in front of the radiator in the corner. The living room is occupied by an old L shaped couch, its deep and floral-patterned seats covered with blankets. Sweetly thick voices dripping with feeling tell their stories over the air as the radio sends soul music throughout the house. He walks through the living room, to the kitchen.

The cold recedes as he gets closer.

In the kitchen the oven is on. The light on the oven is broken, so Uriel cannot see what is inside. It smells like pie, and his stomach rumbles. The rumble is loud, a heavy growl hard to ignore. Uriel pretends not to notice. He is used to pretending.

At the sink, Mrs. Stuart kisses her teeth, a sound long and slow and fed up. Uriel’s mother makes the same sound whenever she is upset with him. But when she does it, it is a cruel thing, drawn out and twisted like the serrated blade of an old knife. Fists trail behind the sound, too many to avoid. In 17 years, he hasn’t found any way to avoid upsetting his mother except to vanish.

Mrs. Stuart shakes her head but doesn’t turn around. Uriel takes off his gloves and puts them in his pockets. For a moment the sound of his mother is in his ears, and his eyes, and his nose.

“I can help with the washing up…if you want?” he offers.

The dishes in the sink are mostly large pots and pans. They fill the small sink and spread out onto the counter. Mrs. Stuart wipes her hands and turns around.

The lines on her face are a roadmap of concern he does not know what to do with. A network of grooved skin bunches around her eyes and mouth.

“You eat breakfast today?”

Uriel does not think that is a question. No upward lilt softens her tone into anything other than an accusation. Uriel moves to the sink and pushes up his jacket sleeves. He knows Mrs. Stuart is angry with him, so he avoids looking at her. It bothers her that he has slept at his mother’s more often recently—twice this week, a dozen times in the past month.

“Nothing in the fridge back at her place,” he says.

It’s a lie. There were things in the fridge, but they weren’t for him. He had cereal at the school, catching the bus early to get to what the district called breakfast. He knows not to take what is not explicitly his, and the world has given him little.

He also knows by now that not talking cannot shutter the conversation. He scrubs the grime off a cast iron skillet. When he is done the surface of the pan is a dull tire-black.

He wonders if it is still there, hanging in the dining room like a curse.

“It’s why you still got that damn limp. Your knees should be better than mine. Just last week I was thinking that Oscar’s got bigger than you, and Lord knows that boy don’t got any more food than you. I feed you both the same. He at your momma’s house right now?” Somewhere in the last few years, he knows that Mrs. Stuart had got the idea that if she just fed the two boys enough, if enough rice and peas and festival fish were consumed, that his bones would grow stronger than they were, that broken pieces of him would unbreak.

“He’s with some friends,” he says. He spits these words out, almost guttural. The water runs and runs and runs, faultless as it falls from the faucet.

Mrs. Stuart stops drying the dishes. She puts her hands on her hips. “So she’s not home. Again.”

The old dress she wears has flour on it. The white stains the pastel orange fabric. It clumps in some places into dough. The coarse tan apron wrapped around her waist catches most of the food before it can hit the floor.

For Mother’s Day two years after the accident, he made her that apron in school: “Thank you” embroidered on the front lapel.

She tries to tell him he already has a mother. The old woman chews him out, eyes growing wet with each word, until she gives up. But then she ties the thing around her waist and hugs him close.

She wears it whenever she cooks, whether Uriel is present or not.

Uriel keeps washing, though there aren’t that many dishes left. He eyes up every item before he touches them, meticulous in his scrutiny. He goes as slow as he can. The curtains from the window above the sink come undone. He wipes his hands and re-ties them before they unloose completely and come falling into the water. He goes back to his process and doesn’t look up.

“I was gonna tell you.” he says. It is a lie and neither of them need to point at the fragility in the structure of it.

She kisses her teeth again, the air crushed between her molars a warning. She goes to the oven and opens it. A wave of heat rolls out across the floor, and up the backs of Uriel’s legs. He shifts his weight, pauses. The oven fills the room with the scent of pecans. 

“How was school?” she asks.

He almost shrugs, then stops himself. He doesn’t want to talk about his high school, crowded and hostile. There are no more boys with green eyes for him there. The students at Hartnell are of two types now, either bullies or overflowing with pity—both make him feel too seen and made more brittle for it. He purses his lips.

“I got a good grade on my project. The one for Bio that we worked on,” he says.

“That’s right. Now go on and set the table,” she says. She takes the pie out of the oven, leaves the door open. On the rack below, covered in aluminum foil, are two dishes.

The dining room is filled with echoes that Uriel tries his best to avoid. Uriel takes the placemats and puts them on the oval table in the dining room off the kitchen. It’s a short walk. He goes back for the plates she has left on the counter, then the silverware and cups. Pictures are framed across the dining room walls, row after row of photographs. The echoes are deafening.

On his way back to the kitchen to grab the napkins, he forgets to mask his limp. Mrs. Stuart lets out a small beaten sigh when she sees. Shame blossoms in his stomach, and its warmth inches its way up into his ribs.

“Call Oscar after you eat,” she says. “Tell him he’s got no business sleeping on the street when he knows that I got two rooms upstairs nobody uses but you two.” She slides the two foil wrapped trays across the counter for Uriel to take.

He takes the trays and makes his way to the table. He doesn’t limp this time, straining his left leg to match the gait of his right.

At his mother’s house, whenever she is drunk, his mother makes fun of the way he walks. There is always the shape of something mean folded into her voice. Not like Mrs. Stuart, his mother does not yell at him and the world for him to heal; she does not wish each night for something as small as Uriel’s comfort. In those moments, his mother’s house goes hurricane-still, and laughter is wrung from Oscar. His brother and he do not look at one another for days afterward.

Uriel has learned to hide the limp, along with the parts of himself that are truly broken.

He puts the plates down on the placemat in the center of the table. He pulls out Mrs. Stuart’s usual chair for her, the wood scraping across the boards. He cannot help but look at the wall now. The pictures are blatant, their trapped memories spilling down the wall and into his eyes, a cascade of images he cannot avoid.

In one picture frame, a black man throws a woman into the air. The motion is effortless, they smile broadly at each other, love resting in the corners of their eyes. The grey sky clears for her, and as she rises her head breaks through heaven. Uriel looks up. The air stings Uriel’s nose and threatens the corners of his eyes—not from cold that has found no home in Mrs. Stuart’s house, but from the sharpness of memory—metal and blood and a throb of remembered pain in his hips. In the corner, small and simply framed, is the now familiar picture of the same man, but older. Time has not overlooked him. The man crouches at the foot of a red van. The man grins at the person taking the picture. There is an openness to the grin and, to Uriel, the man stares directly at him through the frame.

That photo reappeared on Mrs. Stuart’s wall a year ago, filling the empty space its absence had made for almost a decade.

The grinning man is in prison now. Hit and run.

Uriel looks down at the table. He does not want Mrs. Stuart to know that he has noticed it.

He is always surprised to find the photo does not have a butcher’s knife sticking from the glass. On a call around the same time the picture went up, Uriel remembers Mrs. Stuart yelling at the grinning man who is her brother. “I hope you rot.” To her, the hatred she has for the grinning man is almost a duty of hers, God-given and blessed.

Uriel looks back into the kitchen.

“You don’t have to let us stay,” he says because it is true. He has no claim to this place, to this house, to this woman who hates her own brother for almost killing a 9-year-old that had no strong desire to live. He says this often enough that he knows that the phrase hurts Mrs. Stuart, and yet he has never been able to stop himself from repeating it, a bundle of words to guard against the possibility of not being able to return here.

She shakes her head and sits, muttering under her breath as she does. Uriel sits, and they are both afloat in no movement except the air pushed steadily to the ceiling by the pecan flavored heat of the oven. Uriel feels, as he sits, as though he has stolen the man in the picture’s place, a cuckoo at Mrs. Stuart’s table.

The food is distracting, the rice heaped onto his plate like steaming mountains. He goes for the pork chops first. Apart from the music that still plays, it is silent for a few minutes. The Temptations pray for rain in the background, backed up by a chorus in harmony. A cold draft encircles the table, and there is a stabbing pain in his legs. The rods in them seem to spring into needles when the weather changes. Uriel winces, and shivers.

Across from him Mrs. Stuart looks up from her food. A strange look takes her, and for a moment Uriel looks into the mirror of her eyes at himself. Her deep brown eyes turn themselves into wells and the crinkled skin around her eyes creases further. It’s not quite pity and so he accepts it. But when her lower lip trembles for a moment, a barely visible shudder, the shame inside bubbles from the cracked earth of him and its oily shape curls around his ribs and squeezes.

Mrs. Stuart reaches her hand out to the apron from where it hangs to her right. Then she looks down at the table and blinks more than a few times.

They eat, the scraping of their forks and knives against the ceramic the only sound between them. Between bites he wonders if Mrs. Stuart hates this street more than even he does.

He thinks she does. Though their hate is not the same.

“Where’s your schoolwork?” she asks. She stands and lifts the cover from the pie tray. She removes two pieces, sets them down in front of him.

Then she disappears for a moment. When she gets back, he’ll tell her it’s Friday and he didn’t get much to do anyway. He listens to the shuffle of her steps along the floor and waits.

He picks at the crust of one of the slices. A thin chip crumbles off, and he excavates the damage with his fork. Golden chips flake off and fall, making a small heap. When he’s done, the slices look lopsided and unwhole, broken things.

The house gives a slight hum, and a low buzz emanates from the walls. Dust, cobwebs, and the distinct smell of crayons competes for a moment with the smells of the house.

The radiator in the dining room rattles violently before it settles. It sounds like something small, terrified, and caged is killing itself against the bars of its prison. When Mrs. Stuart returns, the room is warm. He smiles down at his plate. She begins to clear the table, scraping all the leftover bones and bits onto one surface. She points to the foil covered trays and the pie still on the table.

“Now, I’m gonna leave this out here if you want more. So, make sure you leave enough for Oscar.”

“I can help pay for the heat this year,” he says instead. His voice is smooth, and it doesn’t warble. He has practiced saying this in the mirror, correcting the tone to one that sounds most mature. He does not know how much the heat costs but thinks that what he earns from the job he works part time at the bodega two blocks from his high school must be enough that he could afford at least some of it.

Her hand shoots out and raps him across the back of his head. She rests her hands on her waist. It is merely a warning, carefully soft. Still, it registers in his gut, and Uriel bites his lip.

The shame has wrapped itself around his lungs now, tightening with every breath. “You going to pay for part of the rent for the last eight years, too? Huh?”

She shakes her head at him. She starts piling large portions of food onto the one clean plate, muttering under her breath all the while. She looks at Uriel again.

“You know what? I’m going to make Oscar his plate now and just put it in the fridge. Make sure he sees it when he gets in.”

She takes the plate into the kitchen and doesn’t look back. But she’s loud— putting away things with abandon. Metal clatters against metal, ceramic clinks. The cabinets open and shut with a harshness. Even the Temptations can’t drown out the jagged quiet left behind.

An almost silence, like the one when he was seven, locked in the bathroom with Oscar and hiding from their mother who roamed their house with gin and anger and an extension cord.

He wants to tell Mrs. Stuart that he just wants to have a stake, a reason to know that the key in his pocket now will not become just another useless thing. He eats his slice of pie slowly, a careful destruction, carving it into crumbs. He stares up at the wall. The man beside the red van has a smile on his face now like Jesus, all knowing and impossibly kind.

When the noise of cabinets and footsteps in the kitchen quiets down, he sees Mrs. Stuart in the threshold of the two rooms. Her arms are folded against her chest. Behind her, he can see the apron, hanging on its own special rack.

“I’m sorry.” he tries. His eyes flicker back up to the picture. “Don’t start,” she says.

Then Mrs. Stuart follows Uriel’s eyes up to the corner where the crouching man smiles down at them. Her lips make a straight line, and she shakes her head. She swears under her breath for a long while, looking up at the photo. It almost looks like prayer.

Uriel nods, chews on the inside of his lips. He does not correct her anger. He does not tell her that were it not for the man with the smile like Jesus, he and Oscar would still be trapped with their mother and her anger. The shame curls up out of his mouth, up his throat. Left there, one day, it will choke him.

“Can… we stay?” he says, quiet. He does not know why these are the words that come instead of ‘thank you,’ or ‘I love you.’ Mrs. Stuart doesn’t answer him for a long while. She opens her mouth, then shuts it. Her eyes settle on the apron.

“Lord,” she says, shaking her head. This is the answer she always gives, half admonition and scorn, half promise. A promise that he will have a place.

He nods again. He cannot breathe.

Uriel’s tears startle them both. He has not cried in front of her in a long time. His tears are silent things, rivers without sound or end. Tears trace their paths down his face, making the leap to the floor when his chin becomes too full.

Exhaustion fills the home like a gas leak. Their eyes, held open by waiting, flutter to stay open.

They sit in silence, staring up at the photo, waiting until Oscar comes home.

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