Myers - Darius & Twig

High above the city, above the black tar rooftops, the dark brick chimneys spewing angry wisps of burnt fuel, there is a black speck making circles against the gray patchwork of Harlem sky. From the park below it looks like a small bird. No, it doesnt look like a small bird, but what else could it be?

At the end of a bench, a young man holds up a running shoe.

It doesnt weigh anything.

Thats the thing, Twig said. Theres going to be nothing keeping me back except gravity. When I hit the track in these babies, Im going to be flying!

The heel is flat. Why doesnt it have a heel? I asked.

Because this shoe doesnt want my heels touching the ground, Twig said, smiling. This shoe doesnt play. This is eighty-five dollars worth of kick-ass running, my man.

You paid eighty-five dollars for these shoes?

Coach Day got them for me because Im on the team.

Looks good, I guess, I said, handing the track shoe back to Twig.

Hey, Darius, my grandmother said you should come by this weekend, Twig said. I told her that you were really Dominican but didnt want to admit it.

Why did you tell her that? I asked. Im not Dominican.

Right, but she thinks shes a detective, Twig said. When you come over, shes going to break out into some Spanish in her Dominican accent and see how you answer. She thinks youre going to come back in Spanish, and then shes got you!

Why do you do stuff like that?

Because its fun, Twig said.

Its stupid, I said.

A little, Twig said, smiling. But its fun, too. You saw Mr. Ramey today? You said you were going to talk to him about a scholarship.

I saw him, I said.

Didnt go too good? The corners of Twigs mouth tightened.

I ran into the numbers, I said. He asked me what my grade-point average was, as if he didnt already have it. I told him it was about three point two, and he just shrugged and said it was closer to three even.

You show him the letter from Miss Carroll?

Yeah, she already spoke to him about me, I said. The thing I couldnt get around was that she was saying Im smart

You are, man!

Okay, but what hes saying is that when you send a transcript to a college, they want to see the numbers written down that say youre smart. Two point five isnt going to make anybody jump up and down unless youre six nine or can run a ten-second hundred yards wearing football cleats.

Man, you got too much on the ball not to get a scholarship to some school, Twig said. You tell him about the letter you got from that magazine?

How if I revise my story they might publish it?

Yeah.

I showed it to him so he could see it was real, I said. He got right to the bottom line. He said that right now I wasnt scholarship material. If the Delta Review actually published the story, I should come back to him and hed call a few colleges. I dont think he thought I had a chance. The Delta Review is a college quarterly, Twig. Its got a lot of prestige, and everybody whos a serious writer is shooting for it.

Hes a cold dude, Darius, Twig said.

No, man, its a cold-ass world. When you open the refrigerator and you get cold coming out, you should expect it.

Thats all he had to say?

No, he said that maybe I should drop out and do my junior year over again. He said he wasnt recommending it but that I should maybe think about it.

You going to do that?

No. I could run into the same thing I ran into this year and then just not finish high school, I said. This way at least Im on the track to graduating.

You tell him why your grades were messed up?

I started to get at it, but he didnt want to hear it, I said. He wasnt bitchy about it or anything like that, but he laid it out straight. He said that what I needed, a full scholarship in a school away from Harlem, just wasnt going to happen.

So what you going to do?

Hope I can fix up the story so that theyll publish it, I said.

You can do it, bro, Twig said. I know you can do it!

He called up Miss Carroll when I was sitting there, I said. He asked her point friggin blank if I had a chance to get published. She said I had a chance, but the way she said it

He had her on speakerphone?

Yes. The way she said it was like... she didnt much believe in it, I said. She told him that they probably had hundreds of submissions and mine had to be one of the better ones if they were even considering it. She was pushing for me, but she was being realistic.

What did Ramey have to say about that?

He said that the colleges wanted to know what happened, not what could have happened.

I watched as Twig laced on his new running shoes and tried them out on the track. He looked happy as he ran. I was watching him, but in my head I was replaying the conversation between me and Mr. Ramey, the schools guidance counselor. He had said a lot of things about how well I had tested when I entered the school, and how much promise I had. Then he went on about my chances for a scholarship. That was the short part of the conversation. I had figured it would be.

The thing was that I needed a scholarship that would get me out of my house, away from my mom, away from the hood, and most of all, away from the crap that was going on in my head every day. Mr. Ramey was right. It didnt do any good being smart. If you were smart and if the world had been right side up, then you would be rewarded for being smart. But the way the world really worked, the way it went down especially when it came to dudes like me, was that you had to walk a path to show you were smart, and it didnt have anything to do with what you had in your head or in your heart. It had to do with what you scored on tests, the grades you got, and what grades they could send to a college.

It was a struggle for me to stay in high school. My dad was living somewhere on the Lower East Side, drugging himself to death, and Mom was struggling with a string of cheap jobs that never paid enough to get by on. She was depressed and about a heartbeat from giving up. I had seen her like that previously. Before my father steppedback when he was really reaching out to hershe had withdrawn inside and hidden away from the world. My father couldnt take it and moved out one Friday evening. Mom had cried herself to sleep for the next few days and then went even deeper into her shell. She had even talked about killing herself.

Up until then, I had done well in school. When crap came my way, I just pushed back and got by it somehow. It got harder. I had to look out for my brother, and for Mom as well. Then I just wanted to be away from the whole set.

At first I began to think of myself as a bird, flying high over the rooftops, or even a plane just passing from LaGuardia Airport on its way to Europe or Africa. But then, as the anger rose in me, I started thinking of things I would like to do to people who messed life up, who could take an ordinary day and turn it into something nasty and screwed up. That was when I began to think of birds of prey.

Twig didnt know it, but he kept me sane. In my darkest moments, when I was feeling really, really shitty, I could think about him and his running and feel better about life. It was always good to see him smiling and trying to win his races. He had talent, so winning was possible. And if winning was possible for him, I felt I might cap a break, too.

There is a slithering in the grass. The movements of the shadowed patterns are almost invisible in the small patch of bush, except from where I hover far above the earth. On the other side of the patch, a small brown animal moves away from the green carpet and along the winding edge of a stream. It is a paca. The paca stops near the base of a tree and lifts its head to sniff the heavy, humid air. Suddenly it stops, frozen in the moment, listening to whatever is moving through the dewy grass. The paca feels a sense of doom, knowing that whatever it is that moves so silently will surely kill it