Chapter Forty-Seven
 

He started seeing things. They looked like monsters, felt like them too. But he couldn’t put that into words. Who would he tell? His mother who would be convinced he was going to hell or his father who believed in no such thing?

Douglas was tired.

His nights were spent fighting the dark, and during the day, he zombied his way through, at first still clowning on Antonne and Kelvin with his other Blood brothers, but then dropping off the scene entirely, opting for the minimal relief he found in his room or even a soft place on the couch next to his mother.

It was only a matter of time until they came after him.

“What’s on your mind, son?” It sounded like “waxon ya mine” because Dolores was enthralled with a preacher with hair as oily as his smile. She took the form of a mystic woman, long ago forgoing actual clothes for the ease and comfort of satin muumuus, the colors of which reminded Douglas of random splotches of vomit.

“Have you ever...” The words were starting to build, but he certainly didn’t trust them. What to say? Douglas had been trying to press them into place, errant Legos all over his brain that he couldn’t quite grasp. His father. He had been trying to talk to him for days now, building up the courage and the sentences that would mean something to a man who didn’t seem to lean too heavily on meaning. His father was a man who existed and enjoyed his existence. And that was frankly that.

But his mother knew better. Even after all these years with Douglas full-grown, thoroughly filling out each of his twenty years, she still had that sense about her that mothers do. Even the ones who birthed criminals.

“You’re worried about your cousin,” she said, her eyes still on the oily man who had a Bible in one hand and the hood of his Bentley under the other.

“Yeah,” Douglas said, even though shamefully, that wasn’t the full story. Douglas was worried about himself.

“You’re a good boy. That’s why. Don’t want to see nobody get hurt,” his mother said, strictly clinging to the narrative she’d written about Douglas from the day he was born. He marveled at that, the lie of it. The naïve need for it to be true. Douglas had never cared about anyone before in his life, and yet somehow, his mother had mistaken him for Mother Teresa all these years. He envied her blindness.

“What will happen to him?” Douglas said, knowing perfectly well what would happen. Travis would be convicted because he was a black kid, and heaven help him if that wasn’t a crime in and of itself. He’d get an unfair sentence, and an unfair number of years to his name, and by the time he got out, he’d either live life struggling to keep up or wisen up to the fact that nobody was going to hand him nothing.

That his God that Franklin had taught both of them about was sitting pretty up there somewhere, chuckling.

“Oh, he be fine, baby. I been giving and giving, and this good man be praying for us,” she said, nodding at the TV screen image of a man whose socks were most likely purchased from Dolores’s donations alone.

Douglas felt a pull in his stomach. It was like someone had lassoed his waist and was dragging him off the couch.

“Good now, go get me some of that sweet tea,” she said, referring to the strawberry Kool Aid she had made that morning. He nodded and went to pour her a glass and in the framed window above the sink where his eyes rested on the top of his father’s head.

“On the counter, Mama,” he absently said, the lasso stronger now, his legs following suit. He was outside before he even knew what to say.

His father was a creature, something to behold before breaking the silence hovering between them. Douglas had never known what to say to Edwin in any situation. He had always felt like whatever came tumbling out of his mouth was the wrong thing, not so wrong it received the back of his father’s hand, but wrong enough where it garnered the sort of look that sized up your worth. Douglas did the same now, sizing up who his father was, had always been to him. A man who flickered bravado off and on like a switch but who looked very small sitting down in the light of day.

“You still here?” Edwin asked. Douglas didn’t have enough time to startle. He realized his father’s hands were empty. No beer, no cigarettes, and the man was cautiously moving them like a conductor. Like he had no clue what else to do with them.

“Yeah,” Douglas said. He wanted to be bold and go sit down beside his father. What a natural thing to do for other people but what a monumental task for him. He remembered watching the ease between his Uncle Franklin and his cousin, Jamal, before he died and then to watch the way Travis and Franklin eased into each other, picking up where father and son had left off. Douglas hadn’t realized the hurt in his heart all these years wasn’t an abnormality. It was envy.

“You been morose.”

“What?”

“Morose. Depressed. Sad.” Edwin listed them like a dictionary. He wasn’t a man with an extensive vocabulary, so Douglas gathered he must have heard it on the radio or maybe that TV preacher Dolores wouldn’t stop watching.

“Oh.” Douglas thought about that. He hadn’t had the chance to define how he’d been just that he’d been it. He picked it apart, dry sheets of skin, to get to the pulsing underbelly. It felt like fear, like guilt. He could taste the “I’m sorry” but wasn’t sure he could even manage to say it.

“What’d you do, boy.” Edwin left off the question mark, so it wasn’t an ask, it was a conviction. It had teeth and tore through that soft underbelly, ripping and rippling through every ounce of Douglas. Morose. Sad. Depressed. These words seemed to barely touch the surface. Alone, Douglas thought, his knees buckling and his body taking refuge on the ground.

“Damn,” Edwin said, not even turning his head to look.