Livin’ it up before it’s time to die
No bargain either way
Different kinds of judgment days
A million ways they make you pay
Caught between infinity and life …
LAND’S END
Dash headed home from his first-time visit to his great-aunt’s apartment. It felt like he’d been there for days. He was energized now, proud of his excursion. He replayed the experience in his mind, remembering the strangers he approached in the hallways of the building, ignoring their startled looks when he asked where the “Car Lady” lived, as he heard people call her, for he didn’t know which floor or which door. And he was riveted by the possibility of his mother walking up behind him and catching him there.
A pungent odor had blown out into the hallway and seized him at once when his great-aunt opened the door. He’d been unprepared for her height. She was so tall up close, the tallest woman he’d ever seen, and when she glared down at him with that haunted look in her red-streaked eyes, he’d lost his boldness. She towered above, asking questions in that rocking, mesmerizing way she talked. He was amazed by the dark, cavern-like apartment, the floor filled with unknown things. And there was that curious piece of deep-blue cloth buried in the shoebox. She didn’t seem to like him touching it. But she was kinder than he thought she would be, and if there was so much candy readily available in a place like that, maybe the forbidden Nephthys Kinwell was not so bad. But most of all he thought about that half finger. He’d seen one like it before. On someone else.
Dash walked on. As he hurried down the street, he saw the ill-famed Plymouth parked nearby, a hulk of steel that people whispered about. From the weird distances that places like Ana costia can create, he’d seen his great-aunt many times in that car. His mother forbade him to speak to or approach this blood relative without ever explaining why, and in his ten short years of life he’d never been able to understand the bitterness between his mother and Nephthys. Others in the neighborhood seemed to know something about what it was, but it was like they were privy to some lurid conversation that had been going on without him. And there was something about the way folks said those people when they talked about the Kinwells, something that didn’t seem good. But those people were his people, and something about that inescapable fact made him call the Car Lady he visited in the apartment “Auntie.” Was that all right? He didn’t know.
He walked on, hastening his stride through the spectrum of positives and negatives that places like Anacostia wrought: mothers handing treats to toddlers in strollers; policemen roping off alleyways with yellow tape; men waving to friends in passing cars; SWAT vehicles parked in front of buildings. He passed by the corner store he sometimes snuck out of the house to get to, thinking about the nurse’s letter and having to read it. Reading came easy to him (a teacher once talked of skipping him a grade). But reading the letter aloud made him feel like he was on display. Why couldn’t Nephthys read the letter on her own later? After all, it was addressed to her. And the lengths Nurse Higgins seemed to be taking to get to the bottom of his behavior troubled him. But you and I know that things can happen to a boy … What did that mean? Did the nurse know about what he saw on the day he opened that door at the end of the school corridor? He pushed the image of it away as he had so many times before, for it was still too big to fit into his mind.
He passed some men talking on a stoop. “What’s up, shorty?” one of them said. Dash nodded to him and walked on.
There were other things that lingered in his thoughts about the letter. Like when he read “man’s hand.” People murmured that phrase when his mother insisted that he stand close to her on the rare times they came out together to run errands. He heard the men in the barbershop mumble it when she dropped him off every few months and waited outside. And he heard it again after the fight with Roy, when the principal was pointing his finger in his face, saying his mother needed to have him dealt with. He had always wondered if a man’s hand somehow referred to his father, and this bothered him for reasons that he could not explain. He walked on, tired of trying to understand the things that people said. That was why it felt so good to shut Roy Johnson up, to bust his mouth for breathing a word about the River Man. And for talking about his mother.
* * *
Just before the fight broke out, Dash had been eating his lunch alone on one of the school benches when he heard his name.
“Dash Kinwell is crazy!” Roy Johnson announced. He was strutting around the schoolyard as if it were a stage. He’d skipped school earlier that week and hung out down by the river, and by chance he’d witnessed one of Dash’s exchanges. He was so flabbergasted by the sheer luck of his discovery that he waited three days to share the juicy news. “Dash Kinwell is crazy!”
The schoolyard quieted as the other children grew silent. The Kinwells were long the subject of witchcraft and legend, and when they heard the Kinwell name they gathered as if warming themselves around a campfire.
Roy’s eyes lit up with the thrill of the spotlight. A scrawny boy with a big mouth inherited from his gossip-mongering mother, his small stature would have made him an easy target. But he was the principal’s nephew, and he took every opportunity to remind others of this fact. He relished pulling the ponytails of girls and throwing dirt on their dresses, sassing the teachers, and stealing coins from his classmates and then claiming that they were just jealous of his riches.
Roy waited for the other children to fully assemble and join him in the jeering. “That’s right. I caught him talking to himself at the river. Talking to the air!”
A hush came over the children, for that meant Dash was off.
“Oooh …” a little girl named Lulu said. “You crazy, boy.”
“And they gonna be bringing Dash up to St. Elizabeths soon,” said Roy. “Because I saw him steady talking and steady nodding and wasn’t nobody there.” He looked over the heads of the children at Dash on the bench, laughing and pointing. “Hey, Dash! Tell ’em! Tell ’em! Yeah, you was just talking and wasn’t nobody there. Jabbering and saying something to somebody. What you call him? The River Man, right? And who’s the River Man? Nobody. Because Dash Kinwell is as crazy as his witch mama!”
The children gasped at the revelation that confirmed the things they heard their parents say. How Amber Kinwell’s coiled hair turned to snakes with deadly venom when she got angry. How she had cephalopod ink coursing through her veins instead of blood. How her garden grew by the power of black magic. How she put roots on people she didn’t like and “worked the moon” on anyone who looked her in the eye.
Dash was listening as he sat on the bench, his face growing hot. There were many things about his life that he’d learned to tolerate, but someone calling his mother crazy was not one of them. He stood up from the bench and headed toward Roy.
“Crazy as your mama! Crazy as your mama!” Roy was jeering. He was about to back down when he saw the look on Dash’s face, but then he remembered that he was still the principal’s nephew. And he knew—as all children of Anacostia do—that to show fear was to show weakness. He looked at the children watching, electrified by the bloodlust he saw in their eyes, and continued: “Yeah, that’s why your mama got that head of snakes and your drunk-ass auntie drives that ghost car.”
“Take that back,” Dash hissed.
“And now you talkin’ to yourself.”
“Shut up!”
“The evil black Kinwells. Everybody knows all about that witch at the bottom of the hill and that drinking, demon-car-driving—”
“I said shut up, you little rat!”
“And a jive turkey who talks to himself by the river when ain’t … nobody … there. I ain’t see a soul but—”
That was as far as Roy Johnson got. Because by then Dash had picked up a rock and tackled him to the ground and was pummeling his face.