Nightcrawling(33)

“What you doing here? Been a minute.”

I nod.

“On my way to Bottle Caps and thought you might wanna walk with me?”

She looks at the floor, smiling, then back up at me. “Yeah, okay.” She begins to nod, glancing around the room and flagging down one of her aunts to tell them she’s heading out. “Lemme grab my board,” she says to me, squeezing my arm.

Alé comes racing back down the stairs a couple minutes later, her forehead glowing and damp. “Let’s go,” she says, following me out.

Alé loops her arm around my shoulders and pulls me in, lifting her skateboard into the air and sighing. “Ain’t it beautiful?” she shouts into the open air, and I twist my head around to take it all in. The construction still lines the alley, bang-banging wood into more wood, and I swear it’s like the city is spiraling around us, skyline popping up a glorious portrait of windows and wheels that don’t gotta be as large as they are. Alé’s arm around me makes me wanna skip, lift my knees to the sky, the way we sway together.

Oakland doesn’t operate on a grid. We wind here. The streets pulling us closer to the bay, to where salt melts with street, and bikes turn to trucks that moan and thrust forward at every light. Then they push us back toward the buildings, where shouts line the perimeter of the sidewalks and, with Alé here, I don’t bother trying to decipher what they’re saying or who they’re saying it to. Just let the noises scatter, like chunks of asphalt out the road. I find my favorite murals, new swirls added to the backgrounds, bordered in tags.

“I been missing you,” Alé says.

“Yeah, me too. Been busy.”

She looks at me and I can see the worry welling up, but she doesn’t push. She never pushes.

“While you work, I’m gonna skate for a minute,” Alé says, gripping her skateboard to the other side of her body, but still holding on to my shoulders as we approach the corner of MacArthur and Eighty-Eighth, right around Castlemont High. Bottle Caps is painted bright orange like a life jacket or the way the sun looks in a dream.

Alé releases me from her arm and waves to me, heading off to the skate park the Castlemont kids use across the street. Alé graduated from Castlemont. That brought us this far east when the rest of us were up at Skyline for school. Marcus took me to the skate park a couple times when he was in middle school and the minute I saw Alé, this girl whipping in and out of slopes and then taking my brother in for a handshake and a pat on the back, I wanted to know her, know her real deep.

Back when I was still in high school, we all used to come out to Bottle Caps after school, gather around in front of the store after buying a pack of sodas or some chips. We’d bring a speaker and start the music going, and Ruth wouldn’t mind having us out there ’cause we never did nothing wrong. We was just living. Ruth even gave us discounts sometimes and, one time, when Lacy’s younger sister fell and split her chin open on the concrete, Ruth closed down Bottle Caps to take her to the hospital so her mama wouldn’t have to pay for the ambulance bill.

I open the door to Bottle Caps and I’m met with that familiar ding-dong beep that every liquor store makes upon entry. I head straight for the counter, where this man is looking up at the mini-television hanging on the wall. Cartoons are on, South Park, I think, and the man is laughing so hard his locs are bouncing.

“Hey,” I say, calling his attention to me.

He seems irritated to pull his eyes away from the screen. “You buyin’ something?”

“I’m looking for Ruth,” I tell him, and the moment I say her name, I know something ain’t right. His lips separate but no sound comes out.

“Um,” he starts. “She ain’t around no more.”

“What you mean?”

“Ruth died last week.”

It’s not that I didn’t know the moment his face pulled downward, but hearing it always hits a little different, digs a little pit somewhere in the body to bury her in. “What she die of?” I ask.

“Does it matter?”

He turns the volume up on the TV, but I don’t move.

“You gonna buy something or not?” He clearly wants me to get the fuck out, but all I can seem to think is How the hell am I gonna pay the bills? Maybe that’s a shitty thing to be thinking when this woman who gave me a steady gig when I had nothing else is suddenly gone, but it’s the truth.

“I used to work here,” I tell him, and he raises his eyebrows like he doesn’t believe me or maybe just like he don’t give a shit. “Ruth been giving me a shift when I need one.”

“Well, Ruth don’t own the place no more. And we can’t afford to be paying no one extra. Sorry.” He turns the volume up so it’s blasting so loud I don’t think he’d be able to hear me even if he tried. I pat the counter with my palm and retreat back out the door, back into the light.

Feels like I’m flushed with memories, like every cell in my body switched on and won’t stop moving. Trevor bouncing that ball. Our swimming pool. Mornings sitting at the counter shoveling cereal into our faces. Breathing. All of it so temporary that it feels like I’m edging closer to some future nowhere place, where I don’t even exist in this body. Without Bottle Caps, without cops, without Marcus, what choices do I have? I wander toward the skate park, but my body doesn’t even seem to be following where I tell it to go. My feet sway, zigzag toward the sound of wheels to concrete.