“Why didn’t you tell anybody?” Crash asked his mom.
“I would have told them all,” she said, “but no one replied to my cards except you. Reginald phoned me once, but before I could explain he called me vile names and hung up. I would have liked to remain his wife and just... be close with Matthew. But Reggie hated me for breaking the cord of our discord.”
The last five words were often used by Mathilda’s English professor father.
“But you just said you were gone,” Crash argued.
“I said that I needed space.”
That night Crash got on the Internet and entered an algorithm created to search for the name Otis Zeal. In a way, Crash thought, Otis was the one person who understood him like he intuitively understood long division.
The next morning Crash called his father. Minnie Saltworthy, Reginald Jr.’s live-in girlfriend, answered, “Martin residence.”
“Hi, Minnie,” Crash said.
“Hi, Percy. You want to talk to your father?”
“Hello, son,” Reginald Jr. said. He’d retired from his sales job and now stayed home most of the time. He and Minnie, only fifteen years his junior, took vacations four times a year. They went on voyages and train treks, visited Mexico, and even went on a camping tour in the Italian Alps.
“Hi, Dad.”
“You calling just to say hello?”
“I wanted to say that I love you, Dad; that I miss the days when we were kids living in that apartment and going to school.”
“You can come home anytime you want.”
That night Brother died of a heart attack. Skipping the funeral, Crash went the next day to the grave site. Brother was interred beneath a temporary plaster marker, upon which was written his birth name — Constant Stevens Martin. Crash wondered why he never knew Brother’s real name. He wondered whether Brother had known it.
Soon after Brother’s death, Crash dropped out of Columbia and started an online business that generated outlines for school papers and explained ways to take and take advantage of school tests. He made lots of money and often chatted, digitally, with his ever-changing cast of clients.
And then one night, while writing an e-mail to hornyowl297, he received a message from the Otis Zeal algorithm. He’d already read dozens of little reports of Otis being arrested, tried, and sometimes convicted. The not-so-young delinquent popped up all over the boroughs. He’d married Brenda Redman, but five months later she’d filed for, and been granted, a restraining order against him. Their divorce came soon after that.
But that evening, while trying to explain to the postgraduate hornyowl297 that all math existed before human understanding, he received the notice of Otis’s death.
At a small graveyard called simply Final Rest, on the border of Queens and Brooklyn, the funeral and burial of Otis Zeal was held. The ceremony was scheduled for 7:15 a.m. Crash arrived at 6:27. The small chapel was empty, and so he took a seat at the back, in the third-to-last row. There he remembered the night he met Otis. There was the hello, the confession, and the kiss. It was a moment that happened outside of his head but was as important as the eternal resolution of pi.
“Who you, sugah?” a woman asked.
Crash looked up to see a dark-skinned woman wearing a black dress suit with a pale pink blouse underneath. There was a deep purple iris pinned to her lapel and a smile that Crash believed would never be far from her lips.
“Crash.”
“Not Percy Crash?”
“Uh-huh. That’s what Otis called me.”
“I’m Zenobia Zeal,” the woman said, taking Crash by the sleeve of his blue blazer. “You come up with me to the first row. I know that’s what my son woulda wanted.”
She dragged the shy professional cheater to the front of the first row of pews. The coffin had come while Crash was remembering.
“You know who I am?” the young man asked.
“Otis nevah stopped talkin’ ’bout you. He said that you gave him all this stuff and read to him from a book called Demon and that he told you just about everything and you didn’t laugh once.”
“Really?” Crash asked. He’d thought that the older boy had probably forgotten him.
“I’ll prove it.” Saying this, Zenobia Zeal pulled Crash from the front row to the side of the open coffin.
Otis looked very much the way he had when Crash last saw him. Only now he sported a thick mustache. He wore blue jeans and a pullover afghan sweater.
“That there sweater was the onliest wrap he never lost,” the ever-smiling mother said. “He told everybody that you was his best friend and that sometimes he’d come to see you on Horatio Street where you went to school. Nobody believed him though. We all thought he stole that sweater. But now here you are, his oldest friend, come to say goodbye to him.”
Tears glittered in the older woman’s eyes.
“How did my friend die?” Crash asked.
“Fightin’.”
“Over what?”
“You never knew with Otis. He was just so sensitive. He always thought that people was laughin’ at him or takin’ advantage. He always said that you were the only one to treat him like a human being. Why is that?”
Crash stared into the dark woman’s inquiring eyes and wondered about the question. He realized that she wanted him to share something intimate about her son, something uplifting.
“There’s something different about my brain,” Crash said, for the first time ever.
“Oh.” A flash of concern moved across Zenobia’s face.
“Not a disease or a condition,” Crash interjected. “It’s just that I think differently, and, in a way, Otis did too.”
Zenobia nodded sagely.
“And so when we talked,” Crash went on, “it felt like we understood each other. All the people in the world didn’t understand us, but there we were, like brothers really. I knew him better than I did my own brother.”
Zenobia took Crash’s hand in hers, making him think about his mother and the life she saved and about Otis and his heartfelt kiss.
Showdown on the Hudson
How the whole thing started is a mystery to most people, even the police. But those of us who were around 145th Street and Broadway, up in Harlem, knew something new was happening the day Billy Consigas came to town. His mother had moved to New York from southern Texas to escape an abusive husband. “A roustabout name of Henry Ryder,” Billy told us.
And so Billy (who was fifteen at the time) was forced to leave his beloved Texas for Harlem. He didn’t like New York at first, said that there was no place to stretch your legs or keep a horse. Some of us used to make fun of him, but that never amounted to much because Billy was an honest-to-God, one-hundred-percent bona fide black Texas cowboy. He wore a felt Stetson hat that was almost pure white. From the band of his hat hung a tassel of multicolored triple-string beads that he said was a gift from his Choctaw girlfriend when he had to leave Texas, to come north. He wore fancy bright shirts with snap buttons made from garnet, topaz, and quartz. His jeans were always well worn and rough as sandpaper. And he boasted that he had cowboy boots for every occasion — from weddings to funerals.
He got in good with the girls because, before long, he had a job for the NYPD training their horses in a special area of Central Park. He’d take young ladies up there in the early hours of the morning and teach them how to ride. Nesta Brown told me that if a man takes a girl riding that morning, he will most likely be riding her that night.
She actually said most likely with a dreamy look in her eyes and a kiss on her lips.
Girls our age flocked around Billy, and I never heard one of them call him a dog.