Globusz^® Publishing 

Big Ma had to work. Reggie had a job, too. So when the summer rolled around and kids danced in the spray of the fire hydrant on the corner, raced orange-crate scooters and rode their bikes to the field house and lagoon, your sister Janet and you sat inside reading World Book Encyclopedia.

Rather, you read World Book. She read How to Tell Your Child. Why was it that girls always seemed to know more than boys? You were twelve; she was eight. But she knew the answers to all the unasked questions springing unbounded in your mind. It was three years before you found out that book contained a detailed description of sex and childbirth. While she read about sperm cells, you read about dinosaurs. While she looked at pictures of pregnant women, you looked at pictures of ships with tall sails. While she dreamed about feeling the kicking, you dreamed about building your boat.

Boats were the craze that summer, boats carved from cast off two-by- fours. All the boys on the block made one. Percy, Marshall, Anthony, Lamont. Sugar Baby and Fat Boy had moved by then. Each boat was fashioned after each boy’s own personality.

Percy’s was painted bright yellow, the same color he eventually choose for his first car. It had huge white sails that caught the wind like pockets. He bragged that his boat was the slickest and fastest one on the block.

Everybody called Percy ol’ black Percy behind his back or when they were signifying on him. Most of you boys didn’t signify with Percy, though. He had a quick mind and a repertoire of rhymes that made him a formidable opponent.

Percy liked to think of himself as a pretty-boy. Always talked about pussy and the girls he’d fucked. More often, he talked about the girls he wouldn’t fuck, and you never saw him with a girlfriend. But he was thirteen, and to you, being thirteen was like being magic. In your heart, you couldn’t wait to be thirteen, because by then, you would be able to tell similar stories.

Marshall’s boat was big and crude and devoid of details. The bow was sawed at a blunt angle, and the rough surface of the wood, complete with splinters and jagged edges, was left unfinished and naked. The boys called Marshall aircraft carrier because he had a head as big as one. It was flat on top, and it even sloped in back and came to a point. Nobody ever called him that to his face, though, because Marshall was slow. He couldn’t signify, and he knew it. So if you called him out of his name or talked about his mother, he would simply punch you out.

Marshall was older than even Percy, fourteen. But he got put back in school, so he ran with a younger group.

Lamont and Anthony made their boat together. They were twins. Their boat was simple, even elegant. Lamont built it; Anthony decorated it. The finished product was long and sleek with short masts and wide sails. The idea, they explained, was to minimize the drag and maximize the pull. It was painted silver and the sails were blue.

You wanted your boat to be special. Whenever you were sent to the store, you would cut through alleys and vacant lots that were way out of the way looking for pieces of wood. Not too old, not too dirty, not too much paint. Not rotted. You knew the alley behind your house. Every can, every fence, every garage, every angle in the four to six inch wide crack that ran down the center of the concrete pavement. No point in checking back there. Molloy’s grocery was on the corner of 15th and Central Park, only a couple blocks away. But your wanderings took you sometimes half a mile out of the way.

Whenever Janet was along, you would have to threaten her to keep her from telling Big Ma where you had been.

"I’m telling Big Ma," she would say. "We ain’t got no business being way over here on Roosevelt Road.

"You tell and I’ll beat your booty tomorrow when she’s at work."

Then she would start to cry. "I don’t want to be in no trouble," she would say.

"Shut up," you would say. "I’m the one who’ll be in trouble, not you."

"I don’t want you to be in no trouble, either," she would say.

So you would walk faster pulling her along behind you while carefully scanning the way for wood.

After about two weeks, you found it. It was behind Gethsemane Garden Baptist Church where carpenters were building a couple of new rooms in the basement for Sunday School classes. It was new wood, eighteen inches long. You wondered if having been baptized there had made the difference.

"What you gon’ do with this ole smelly piece of wood?" Janet asked as you gave it to her to carry.

"Make a boat."

"They still ain’t gon’ like you."

"They’re my friends."

"They don’t like you ’cause you’re smart."

By now, Janet was a skinny little black girl with bamboo legs and ashy knees. Her face was the color of root beer, and her hair was parted into quarters and braided.

"That’s why they beat you up."

You began by sawing the bow to a keen angle. Next, you shaped the hull by planing the corners off one of the 4-by-eighteen inch sides. You carved a subtle angle to the plane sloping sternward, sculpted the final shape to the bow, and sanded the hull smooth. Three pencil-thin masts with red silk sails, red cotton thread for rigging, and three coats of clear varnish finished it off. The silk was from a slip given to Big Ma by some man who claimed he wanted to marry her, but who Big Ma said she couldn’t stand. You rescued the slip from the garbage after Big Ma threw it and the card that came with it away.

The boat was stunning. Slicker than Percy’s; sleeker than Anthony and Lamont’s. You named it the Sea Serpent. You tested it in the bathtub for hours to make sure it was seaworthy, that it didn’t lean to one side or the other. So when the day came to test them out in the lagoon, you were ready. The only problem was, you couldn’t go. The other boys wanted to meet at midday on a weekday. Big Ma was working and you had to stay home.

The boys gathered on your front porch. You could see their boats through the locked screen door. They didn’t know you had even made a boat. They assumed that you wouldn’t since you wouldn’t be able to come to the sail off.

"My boat’s gon’ kick ass," Percy said holding the Golden Bomb at arm’s length.

"It bet’ not touch mine," Marshall said.

"I know it ain’t gon’ touch mine," Lamont said.

"I made a boat, too."

Anthony and Lamont claimed to be twins, but they didn’t look any more alike than mere brothers. Lamont was tall, gangly, with a protruding Adam’s apple. Anthony-- he never liked being called Tony-- was more your height, and dumpy. He had that "good" hair, the kind with the soft loose curls, that black folks all envy. Lamont, on the other hand, had cuccabugs and naps like everybody else. They were both high yellow.

"What kind of boat you got?" Anthony demanded.

"Just a plain boat," you answered.

"Go get it," Percy said, turning his head to snicker at the thought that you had built a boat.

"It’s right here," you said. You lifted it up to the screen for them to see. It was complete with the name branded into the stern. You made the brands yourself from hairpins, and carefully heated each one in the blue flame of the stove until it glowed red. Then you seared the letters into the wood.

After a noticeable silence among them, Marshall said, "That is a bad motherfucker."

"Too bad you can’t come sail it," Percy quipped.

Of the four of them, you liked Marshall the best. He didn’t seem to mind that you had gotten a double promotion and were younger than the rest of them. Sometimes you felt sorry for him for being the oldest and slowest. Maybe he felt sorry for you for being the youngest and the smartest. Maybe that was your bond.

"Marshall can take mine and sail it with his," you said.

You watched them as they walked north towards the lagoon. Marshall lumbered along carrying two boats, one in each hand. He was bent forward as if under the weight of the responsibility. Percy, Anthony and Lamont swarmed around him like gnats, alternately soaring boats over their heads like airplanes. It was hot, ninety degrees, and the sun blazed down on their heads, and you wished you could go, too.

"You can kiss that boat good-bye," Janet said.

"Marshall will protect it."

"Marshall is too dumb to protect it."

You knew she was right.

Two hours passed before you could see them rounding the corner at 15th Street heading your way. They were subdued, even morose. Marshall lagged ten paces behind.

You hadn’t left the window since they left the front porch. You spent the entire time dreaming of how dazzled they would be by your boat, imagining your boat winning the race across the lagoon in record time and them coming back with a plaque crafted on the spot by the commissioner of parks who happened to be there that day looking for boys with sailboats whose pictures he could put in the paper.

They walked straight by. Percy harrumphed once, then cut his eyes in your direction. "Pussy mouth motherfucker," he said as he walked on. When he thought he was out of earshot, he said to Anthony, "Reggie told me he fucks that nigger every day." Anthony looked around at you in disgust. "And I’ll bet he likes it."

Marshall slowed down.

"You won," he said, then he looked away.

Janet walked in just in time to see him walk by. "I told you," she said.

"Shut up!" You snapped, fighting back the tears.

You never saw the boat again. Marshall was ashamed to ever tell you what happened to it, and the others had sworn a pact of secrecy.