Curtis hadn’t expected the drinks to be so expensive, so only six dollars remained in his pocket. His dignity would have been one reason to tell Lena no. Andre was another, but he was a reason to say yes too. Getting mixed up in her night wasn’t the best way to get closer to the boy, but it might be the only way. “I spent all the money I had on me,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Lena said. “I got it.”
Their motel was called the Galaxy Inn. A strange smell hung in the air of their room, which was nearly as small as his cell had been. A coat of silver paint had been recently applied to the walls, but there was something else, an organic pungency. Little effort had been made to mask the presence of former occupants. There were useless dials on the walls, mysterious blinking lights. Curtis felt trapped in some television show from the 1960s, a science fiction program he watched in syndication as a child.
Lena lay next to Curtis with her back to him. She was abruptly calm, abruptly still. He couldn’t even hear the sound of her breathing. He’d been surprised by her wildness, which exceeded his. The rough sheet covered her to the waist, displaying her long neck and the slick coins of her spine. Curtis felt the urge to yank the spine out of her, to scatter those coins all over the bed and catch a true glimpse of her inner workings under the room’s dimmed bulbs of winey light.
“I should go soon,” Lena said. “See about my son.”
“Tell me about him.”
She sat up. “Andre?”
“That boy’s asleep. You got time.”
She studied his face. “What’s in that head of yours?”
Curtis shrugged and made himself hold her hand. “Come on, tell me a little something.”
Lena began hesitantly, but her initial vague description of her son eventually turned into a long complaint about her challenges with him, how easily she seemed to make him upset. He was a good child, she said, but their relationship was worsening and it was difficult to manage things on her own. “It’s not just that he’s a teenager,” she said. “It’s more than that.”
“He’s probably just girl-crazy,” he said.
“Uh-uh, I don’t think so,” she said, and went on, speaking with more kindness about him now.
When she was done, Curtis insisted on giving his view of things. The question of obedience was on his mind, but nothing he said was profound. Still, Lena listened to everything he said and seemed thoughtful when he fell silent again.
“You know,” she told him, “if it was my boy you were interested in, there were easier ways than sniffing after my behind. You could’ve just walked up to him on the street and told him who you were.”
Curtis straightened against the headboard. To him that sounded like the most difficult thing in the world. “I was just looking out for Marvin’s people, that’s all.” He felt embarrassed, a little angry. “I know it’s not the usual way,” he added.
Lena shook her head. “Look at you,” she said. “I know you been gone, but you not invisible. People talk. I got eyes.”
“How long have you known?”
“Long enough to think plenty on whether to do anything about it.”
Curtis gestured at the blinking walls of the room, a tired old version of the future. He gestured down at the bed. “This what you decided to do about it?”
“Well, you were there, sniffing as usual,” Lena said. “I had my notions, and you just happened to be the one. I knew you were safe. And I figured you’d go along with it.”
He yanked off the sheet and exposed the full nakedness of his body. He sprang from the bed and glared down at her.
“I’m all done with that,” she told him, “so you can put it away now.”
“I’m not somebody you know,” Curtis said. “I never was.”
She rubbed the edge of the sheet between her fingers. “Look, I’m gonna go. You can stay the rest of the night if you want, if you don’t want to sleep at your mama’s house.” She rose from the bed and watched him for a few moments, frowning. “You don’t know me either,” she said, and began to dress.
Curtis left not long after Lena did. No need to stay and stare at a dead end. Night was starting to drain from the edges of the sky, but he didn’t go directly to his mother’s house. Walking restored him when he was upset, helped him regain his focus, even before he went to prison, and now he savored it much more, despite the times he was harassed by cops. As adolescents he and Marvin would often stay out late, sometimes until dawn, romping all over Brooklyn. Marvin preferred walking or taking the bus to the half-blind underground careening of the subway. He liked taking different routes, preferring the slightest deviations or even dangerous blocks or neighborhoods to what he would have called the “same old, same old.” But he did like the promenade.
When the two boys went there together and gazed out at the protruding jaw of the city, they spoke most openly of their desires. Marvin spoke as if the days and years to come were nothing but a cycle of restoration. “I’m gonna get my mother a house,” he’d always say. This was his favorite thing. Not only would he pay off her considerable debts, he would do this too. The house he imagined buying for her was like a place he’d already been in, stepping past furniture bought from her catalogs and out to the little vegetable garden she’d keep. Looking up with her past the white slats to the blue roof where the birds would be rebuilding their nest. “She wouldn’t want the birds there,” he said once. “But I do. They do all the things I like.”
Marvin spoke of girls as if he weren’t a virgin, as if he knew a thing about the frightening business of female nudity and of sex, which Curtis understood was animal and floraclass="underline" the odd nosing around, the smells and the sap, the near-violence of fingernails and coarse hair, the peeling back of language to a hard core, like the spiked stones of peaches the boys used to throw at stray dogs.
Then, for reasons Curtis never understood, Marvin got stuck on the idea of Lena Johnson. He talked about her constantly, and soon the boys’ wanderings through the borough began to circle her old neighborhood, not far from where Curtis was walking now. There was the basketball court—still there, Curtis knew—where Marvin kept insisting they go, despite the busted rims.
One spring day they saw her there. She came from across the street and began to stroll the sidewalk along the length of the court, lifting her hand to take languid pulls from a cigarette. Marvin raced over with an odd look on his face, his hands in loose fists. He was carrying little rocks swelled and blanched by the sun, as though he wanted to roll them at her like gifts through the openings in the chain-link fence. Curtis followed, smelling the opportunity for mischief. The boys caught up and then kept pace with Lena on their side, daylight flickering in their faces, blinking madly through the diamonds of the fence. The flashing light did not transfigure Lena’s appearance. She was still just a skinny girl with pointy elbows and spooky eyes, whose shirts and sweaters were always linted-up, whose flat ass made a pair of jeans droop and frown.
When Marvin greeted her, she blew out the smoke that had been held in her lungs. She was inhaling from a joint, they realized, not one of her usual cigarettes. At school she was made fun of for having stale breath. Curtis laughed at these jokes, and Marvin used to laugh too.