The Smoke Seen From Yankee Stadium
Lanai McAuley
“What did I tell you about lying to me!” Vivian’s voice booms along the peeling walls of their small discolored kitchen. A red flush spreads underneath her tawny, amber skin, eyebrows knitting into a familiar scowl. Her jade-colored eyes simmer with the same intensity of the Bronx’s evening summer heat. Carter winces at the ferocity of his mother’s tone, his right cheek beginning to throb a hot-red from the sting of her palm. “When I asked you before, you said you were taking those algebra lessons at the Boys Club. But when I called today, they said you hadn’t checked in since the 3rd. And now, I come home and find this!” Vivian frantically waves a one-way bus ticket in front of him, her fingers digging into the blue print of its destination—Raleigh, North Carolina.
Carter swallows hard, attempting to suppress the swell of bile growing in the back of his throat, threatening to spill out in excuses and apologies. He tries to recall the unfortunate misstep or wrong choice of words that prompted her initial suspicions. Despite Vivian’s long shifts at IBM and accustomed routine of disappearing into the more affluent part of the city during the weekends, she never failed to return home with the same prim attitude and inclination towards scrutinizing his disposition. Whether it was a hair out of place, a crease in his pant leg, or speaking like the “hoodlums” from 156th street, she had a sixth sense in pointing out the shortcomings she deemed unseemly.
Or maybe his hiding place wasn’t as secret as he thought. Carter had stashed the white slip underneath piles of Yankee baseball cards and quarter rolls in a beat-up Peanuts lunchbox and thermos set, a gift his father had given him for his 8th birthday. His mother had fussed over the juvenile design on the metal tin, preferring the mantra and nuances of the recently premiered “The Six Million Dollar Man” instead. When his father died 2 years later, the lunchbox was quickly tossed away in the back of his closet, for the carefree smiles of Charlie Brown and the rest of the Misfits reminded him too much of his father’s toothy grin.
Unsatisfied with his silence, Vivian continues her tirade. “So, you think you’re grown now? Because high school’s right around the corner, you think you can run off wherever now? What were you even planning to do down there, huh? Pump gas at some low-down pit stop for loose change? Hell, you might even get off on the wrong stop and end up a sharecropper on some moneyed man’s tobacco plant.” Vivian’s unrelenting questions drip with condescension and venom. “Boy! Are you listening to me?!”
Carter snaps out of his thoughts and nods his head. The dimming glare of the sun leaks through the small kitchen window into their 4-story walk-up apartment. It swelters in the air, scorching the umber-brown skin of his sore cheek. A small pool of sweat and grease begins to form on the coiled roots of his scalp, cascading down slowly onto his furrowed brow. Muck sweat seeps through his faded button-up shirt, gluing the fabric to his fevered body.
“I want to hear you say it. Are. You. Listening?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Carter swiftly states, his voice slightly faltering. Fighting the growing urge to avert his eyes to the floor, Carter maintains the strained contact between his onyx-colored eyes and Vivian’s jade ones.
Exhaling a sharp breath through her nose, Vivian presses on. “Do you even know how this makes me look, Carter? You’re going around buying bus tickets to run off to who-knows-where and I’m left looking like the bad mother who can’t raise her son right? After working day-in and day-out to keep a roof over your sorry ass, this is the thanks I get? In fact, why in the hell are you in such a rush to leave in the first place? Huh? I want to know the reason.” Vivian leans against the kitchen counter and crosses her arms. A light sheen adorns her flushed face, the red tint now spread to her neck and collarbone. The bus ticket is now crumpled in her hand, the ink undoubtedly smudged due to the combination of her perspiration and the apartment’s rising temperature.
“I-” Carter’s voice cracks, coming out a pitch higher than intended to. The fervor of the kitchen intensifies despite the sun’s gradual descent in the distance. It engulfs the entirety of his being, searing hot as it travels through his lungs and pools in his stomach in a gross mixture of trepidation and perpetual dread. Carter wants to tell her that the Bronx is burning right in front of their very eyes. Just south of Fordham Road, a threshold she berated him for crossing, once stood towers of brick and limestone, now reduced to plumes of smoke for the masses to ignore. He wants to tell her how he gags on the thick, putrid smell of burnt wood and stone whenever he passes through Morris Heights. How the fires spread block after block like dominoes, and how they fell like them too. How his friends on 156th street hang around in the abandoned buildings and rubble of their former homes. How he has seen boys carrying jerrycans at night, bundles of money protruding out the pockets of their unfitting hand-me-downs. That he dreams of flames swallowing their apartment whole. That if he stays in the Bronx, he’ll burn too.
Straightening himself out, Carter finally gathers his resolve and opens his mouth, but before he can get a word out, a familiar scent of scorched brick and mortar singes his nose. Vivian perks up, crinkling her nose, and moves towards the kitchen window. “What in the world is smelling like that?” she asks, before slamming it shut.
Lanai McAuley is a sophomore at Rutgers-New Brunswick. She is planning on studying History with a minor in English or Africana Studies. While writing had been one of her passions growing up, Lanai went through a massive writer’s block while battling the stressful workload of high school. Her creative zeal was re-ignited towards the end of high school due to the encouragement of a beloved teacher and fully relished in her first year of college.