Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [99]
Ramona clung tighter to Mae; she didn’t want to leave her. Donald Booker’s chest was swelled up like he was ready to do something to Mae, spit in her face or lift his foot to kick at her. But Mae gave Ramona a hard and soft shove. “Go on, lil darling,” she said, “just stand under that wide tree with the big arms; the arms will protect you till I get up there.”
Ramona started up the slope, reluctantly. She could hear Mae telling Donald Booker that he needed a lesson taught to him. By the time she got to the top of the hill and was standing under the tree she couldn’t hear anything they were saying, as if the woods around the bottom of the park were gobbling up their sounds. She could see Donald Booker’s mouth moving, his face getting redder and closer and closer to her mother’s face, his shoulders going back and forth like he was putting up his dukes. Then his hand stretched way back and came forward right toward Mae’s face. Ramona started running back down the slope, hollering, “You better not hit my mother, you better leave my mother alone.” She saw his hand stopped in midair by the bat, sent flying way over his shoulder. Then she saw his head go back too, just like his hand had. She was close enough to hear the crack of the bat against his head, and now she could hear Mae too. “Threaten me, will you, or any part of me, I’ll teach your no-good ass a lesson you’ll never forget. Get up, you grown, you gonna jump at me, get on up, and finish what you started.”
But Donald Booker didn’t get up. Even when Mae leaned down over him, and shook him, and slapped at his face, he didn’t get up. With Mae stooping over him as she was, all Ramona could see were his dirty canvas sneakers. Then Mae stood, and Ramona could see his head, how odd his head looked. Not just that it was swollen, but the way it was arched, as if he were getting ready to do a backward flip, as if his head and neck didn’t belong to the same body.
Ramona pulled her hands from the pocket of the soft green robe. She knitted and unknitted her fingers in quick movements that made her knuckles click, much the same way Mae clicked her knuckles that afternoon. Her drooping eye was just about shut tight, and her voice shook as she spoke. “Ramona,” she said, “this don’t look good, not good at all.” She picked up the handle of the bat and wiped it in the pleats of her belted sundress and let it fall down the hem of her dress into the grass. “Him being a white boy and all, Lord, no. This is serious, very, very serious.”
She reached for Ramona’s hand. “You and me gonna walk out of the park, and this never happened, you hear me.” Her voice shook less the more she talked.
“Huh?” Ramona asked.
“Don’t talk, just listen,” she said as she looked all around them. “We wasn’t at the park today. We took the long way home from your school because I had the taste for some fish from the fish store on Market Street. But we didn’t go into the fish store because once we got there I didn’t like the smell of the fish sitting on ice in the barrel outside, so we came on home. Now that’s all we did this afternoon. The rest never happened.”
“What never happened, Mommie?”
“Ramona, are you messing with me or what? Now, this is important. I’m trying to get you to understand that this afternoon never happened. We wasn’t at the park today, Ramona. You don’t see Donald Booker back there laying in the grass.”
Ramona was trying to understand what Mae was saying. She turned around to look back at Donald Booker. She gasped. “He’s not laying in the grass, Mommie. Look, he’s getting up. Now he’s walking like a drunk man further in the woods. He has his bat too, Mommie. Look.”
“I’m not looking back there. And don’t you either.” She yanked Ramona’s hand. “Might turn into a pillar of salt looking back there. Ain’t no way that boy got up.”
“Yes, he did, he got up, Mommie, honest he did. Just look and see for yourself.” Ramona felt Mae’s hand clap hard against her mouth in a way that Mae had never slapped