his walk home from Nephthys Kinwell’s lair, avoiding deep cracks in the sidewalk and the glass from broken bottles. He stepped over an exposed water main pipe jutting through the concrete. He heard the distant chimes of an ice cream truck, which told him that school had let out. Children seemed to come out of nowhere at the sound. A group of preschoolers appeared on someone’s porch, and together they began a happy chant. Some dropped their toys and ran inside to ask for money.
An ambulance siren screamed by and Dash sped his stride. He was about to cross the street when he saw Lulu, one of the girls who’d joined Roy Johnson in taunting him earlier.
“You crazy, boy!” she shouted from across the street.
Dash walked on, ignoring her.
“Hey, crazy boy! Crazy as hell like that witch bitch.”
Dash heard that word again. Crazy. And now the word bitch, referring to his mother. Boys weren’t supposed to hit girls, he’d been told. But he thought about slapping Lulu into the sidewalk if she kept on.
“Crazy boy! Crazy boy!” the girl chanted. She had learned very early from her big sister Rosetta that there were two kinds of people in Anacostia: hunter and prey. You be the hunter, not the prey, she’d told Lulu before she ran away across the bridge. But later on, when Lulu saw her prowling the streets or getting in and out of cars, she caught a glimpse of some frightened thing that seemed to have crept into her big sister’s eyes, so that she wondered if the hunter and the prey took turns being the other. “Witch bitch!” she shouted now with more fervor, until she crossed a woman sitting on her porch.
“What you say?” snarled the woman.
“Huh? Nothing.”
“What you say?” asked the woman again, louder. “Ain’t you Rosetta’s little sister? I know your mama, girl. And I’ma tell her about your damn filthy mouth.”
Lulu smirked, but she felt a chill inside. She wanted to tell the woman to kiss her ass, but she was not sure if what she’d said was true (about telling her mother). That could mean a whipping. She glared at Dash once more. “And plus … plus … your daddy was that crazy niggah from the war who used to be in your mama’s garden! My mother said so!” She stuck out her tongue and ran back the other way.
Dash watched Lulu run off. What was she talking about? She didn’t know his father. No one knew his father. But there were times when he looked at the picture of the blond-haired family in the unit chapters of his schoolbook (mother, father, little girl, little boy, golden retriever) and wondered who his father could be. He could think of him only as an idea or concept. Or a shadow coming down the hill. But his mother never spoke of him, not even his name. And no one ever asked how it was that Dash Kinwell came to be, since children born of Anacostia appeared and disappeared from one day to the next.
He walked on, passing an abandoned lot filled with weeds like tall wheat. He crossed the street and went by a row of boarded-up houses, the yards overgrown with an explosion of dandelions. Now he came to the hill that led to home and it was time to forget all he heard and saw on the street and empty his mind. He couldn’t worry about Roy Johnson or Nurse Higgins’s letter or Lulu’s wild talk. Because now he would need all his strength for his mother.
* * *
Dash arrived at the edge of the world, the brink of a steep hill that dropped to a small valley where a lonely house stood dwarfed in a vast tract of mud, which from that distance looked like a slow, heaving river. The blanket of clouds that hung always with varying thickness over the little valley coated everything below in cerulean, so that the long-faded and chipped paint on the house appeared all the bluer. He knew that his mother was somewhere under that roof and gathered his strength.
Because she hardly left home unless pressed by the greatest of need. When she did, she was met with odd reactions that Dash had only noticed as he got older. Shopkeepers and vendors refused to conduct any business while standing directly in front of her. They collected money for their wares from a special basket kept on the edge of the counter for her payments. All things were sold to her at discount and always in ample supply, lest she need to make a special order or request that required them to look her in the eye. Every bus ride was free. What was harvested from her garden was bought at the price she asked, without inspection or negotiation, the money placed neatly in an envelope and left for her retrieval. There was the old Polish postmaster who answered yes to anything she said to him when she came in once a month to handle the mail. A telephone had never been installed at the Kinwell house. No one from the electric company ever came down for service calls or to disconnect the power line. And even in the blackouts of midnight thunderstorms, the single bulb hanging from the porch roof burned like the North Star.
Dash sighed, preparing for his descent. Because it would all start again when he reached the bottom and went in—his mother acting like something was going to happen to him. And he knew it had something to do with the dream about him, this dream that breathed always on their necks and gripped them both in the quiet of the rooms. He could tell by the way she looked at him now. It was the same way she looked at the people she talked about in the Lottery. And sometimes when he was hostage to her mania (heavy sleeping, insomnia, questions, silence), he wondered, reluctantly, if the things people said about his mother were true.
He trekked down, landing in the mud at the bottom. There was a garden on the side of the house, and in the microclimate of the valley, the soil was as rich as it had been since the Paleozoic era. The garden exploded with the most feral of produce many times larger than the normal size. Massive collard and kale leaves spread in Jurassic splendor. Mammoth carrots and turnips shot from the ground. Huge tomatoes and watermelons proliferated in a burst of shapes like a colony of boulders. In the rear was a gigantic stand of cornstalks that rose to the second floor of the house, and fat yellow cobs yielded early, so heavy that they dropped to the ground like apples from a tree.
Dash walked by the jungle of vegetation and reached the wood-planked porch, slippery with sediment like the teak of an old ship, and it bobbed and buckled as if it had been long overtaken by flood. The rotting shingles around the single windowpane saluted him with the usual dreariness. And as the air drained from his lungs, his body tightened and compressed with each step closer to the door. He looked up to the top of the hill once more, a kind of last-rites habit. The edge where he’d stood just minutes before was now obscured by the cloud coverlet. He took one last deep breath and turned back to face the entrance.
Dash looked into the translucent glass of the doorframe. The realm behind it waited. He put his hand on the doorknob, cold and slick with moisture, and pushed the door open with a whoosh. He stepped in. There was the oppressive density of the interior, which rushed over him immediately; a colorless odorless tasteless substance that filled the house for as long as he could remember, something that seemed thicker and more difficult to breathe than air. He stood in the drift and listened. Nothing. But he knew his mother must be somewhere in the depths. He looked around and cocked his ear. “Mama?” He ran his hand along the dew-coated wall, walking from room to room. What filled the house muffled his steps so that his movement was nearly soundless. He listened again. Nothing. “Ma?”
“You’re back,” said a sudden voice.
The acoustics of the house let Dash know that his mother’s voice came from somewhere in the kitchen and he headed there. “Yes, Mama,” he called out. “I’m home.”
When he entered the kitchen, he saw a large cast-iron pot on the stove with bluish steam rising from beneath its heavy lid. On the table there were three enormous carrots that stretched across its top entirely, and a green pepper the size of a pumpkin squash. His mother was at the sink pulling the bones from a tray of rockfish with a pair of pliers. His heart skipped. Fish meant that she had gone shopping at the market—today of all days—and his stomach dropped. Did she see him creeping around town before school was out? Trying to stay calm, he reminded himself that he’d made it back in time to dodge suspicion. The visit to his great-aunt’s apartment didn’t delay him long enough to appear as if he was coming from anyplace else. His mother didn’t know about the letter from Nurse Higgins. And she didn’t sound upset with him.
Amber