“They give you nightmares,” the man said.
“Hey!” Marcus said, his eyes opening wide. “Thas what my granny said.”
The train stopped again, and though it did not stop any more suddenly than before, Avis lost her balance and began to fall back. The man reached across and caught her arm, in a move that seemed almost as if it had been planned, as if he had known two stops or so back that the child would begin to fall at that moment. Marvella thought: If I see him tomorrow, it will be a good sign.
“Now see,” she said. “Both of you turn around, and I mean it.”
At the McPherson Square stop, Marvella and her children got off. Marcus and Avis told the man good-bye and he said that it was nice meeting them. It was raining when they came out of the subway. With the rain, it was hard going across 14th Street and through Franklin Square Park to 13th Street. Marvella carried Avis in one arm and held the umbrella with the other hand. She had Marcus carry her pocketbook and he and Marvin shared an umbrella. Up the street from K on 13th, they went through the wide alley leading to Thompson School on 12th Street, where she and Avis watched the boys run up the stairs and go inside. Her arms were tired and she put Avis down. She wrapped the strap of her pocketbook around her shoulder and held her daughter’s hand as they made their way two blocks up 12th Street to Horizon House, where Marvella’s mother lived. They took the elevator up to her mother’s apartment, and in a minute or so Marvella was heading back down 12th Street to the C&P Telephone Company, where she was a service representative.
It was about eight thirty in the morning. She saw her day as blocks of time. She entered the building at 12th and H, and the second block began.
They did see the man with the dreadlocks the next day, the Friday before Washington’s Birthday, but Marvella had forgotten that it was supposed to be a good sign. He sat across the aisle from the boys, and she and Avis shared the seat just in back of the one the boys were sharing. That morning, perhaps because of the holiday weekend, there were fewer people.
“You back, huh?” Marcus said to the man. “Still got the same hair, too.”
“Yep, it’s me,” the man said. “How’re you doing today?”
“Fine. No school tomorrow and we goin to the zoo if the weather good.”
Avis, interested, leaned across her mother’s lap. “You can’t come to the zoo with us.”
“Why not?” the man said.
“Cause my granny’s comin and she wants to give peanuts to the monkey-see, monkey-do.”
“My granny always says there ain’t no good men left in the world,” Marcus said.
“Marcus…” his mother said.
“Well, if that’s so,” the man said, “it wouldn’t be a good thing for the world.”
Marcus hunched his shoulders, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or another. “You goin to work?” Marcus said to the man.
“Yep,” the man said.
“They let you come to work with your hair like that?” Marcus said.
“Marcus,” his mother said.
The man said to her, “You have wonderful kids.” She told him thank you. Then to Marcus, the man said, “Yeah, I go to work like this. They have to let me. They have no choice. I’m the best they have.”
“If they don’t let you come to work, you gon beat em up?” Marcus said. Marvin had his head to the window, looking out into the darkness of the tunnel, his hands shading his eyes.
The train stopped and the subway woman announced that it was an orange line train to Ballston. Marvella and her children always got on at the Stadium-Armory stop in Southeast. It did not matter if they took the orange line, which ended at Ballston, or the blue line, which ended at National Airport, because both lines, traveling over the same tracks, went past their McPherson Square stop.
“No need to beat em up,” the dreadlock man said. “You go to school?” he said to Avis.
“I ain’t neva goin to school,” and she shook her head vigorously. “No way. No way. No way.”
“I go,” Marcus said. “It ain’t bad.” He leaned his head out into the aisle and moved it up and down as if he were watching a bouncing ball. When he looked back up at the man, he pointed at the hair and asked, “Whatcha call that kinda hair?”
“We call them dreadlocks.”
“You sure you whatn’t in that movie I saw? They had this man comin out of the ground and everything. He was dead but he was still alive and nobody could kill him.” He turned to his brother. “Marvin, don’t he look like that man in that movie we saw at Granny’s? You member?”
The train stopped again. Marvin turned from the window and considered the man for a long time. The man smiled, but Marvin did not seem impressed with him or his hair and the boy did not return the smile. “You ask people too many questions,” he said to his brother and turned back to the window.
My son the old man, his mother thought. The train had just passed the Smithsonian stop and, knowing that the trip was about to end, she found that she wanted the man to ask her something, anything, before they got off. She would have settled for something as inane as what was her sign, even though she hated such questions. And though she told the world that she did not believe in it all that much, she had nevertheless learned that she was not compatible with Capricorns and Libras. Her ex-husband was a Capricorn. If she had to guess, she would have said the man with the dreadlocks was an Aries. But the last man she had slept with, three months ago, had been an Aries, a man she had met at a club she and her sister went to. The man at the club had been full of shit and she was glad that her children had never met him. “They call me Slide,” the guy had introduced himself. “Short for Electric Slide.”
It occurred to her as she and the children were crossing Franklin Square that the dreadlock man’s finger touch the day before had been the first time a man had touched her — outside of handshakes with men at work — since the doofus she met at the club.
They did not see the man at all the next week, and she hated herself for having thought about him over the holiday weekend. Going home that Friday after not seeing him all that week, she began to think that maybe it had something to do with the fact that they had taken the blue line for at least three mornings that week. Maybe, she thought, he only went on the orange line.
The following week she managed to get the kids out the door and down to the subway platform at about the same time when she thought they had met the man the first week. On Monday and Tuesday she waited and looked about for him, then, because time was running out, she settled for a blue line.
“I thought you said it didn’t matter if we took a blue or an orange line,” Marvin said after they were seated.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” his mother said.
“Then why we wait while all those trains went by?”
My son the lawyer. “I don’t know,” she said. That was the only answer in life that ever seemed to shut him up.
“Hey, it’s that man with the snake hair,” Marcus said, spotting the man and waving to him. It was Wednesday and they were on the subway platform. The man came over and appeared genuinely glad to see them. She was happy to see him, but she was also upset that he had not been there on the other mornings. She had in her bag a slip of paper with her name and work and home telephone numbers in case he asked.
“Mornin,” the subway woman said after they entered the train. She sounded as if the last thing in the world she wanted to do was speak. “Orange line…Ballston…”
“Where’s Boston?” Avis asked the man, yawning. She was in her mother’s lap and the man sat beside them. The boys were in the seat ahead of them, and again Marcus was kneeling facing them.
“It’s Ballston,” the man enunciated. “The end of the line. It’s across the river. In a place called Virginia.”