Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [10]
Not my mom. Instead, after Micah told his story, she rose from the table and left the room for a few minutes. When she returned, she was carrying an old Roy Rogers lunchbox; rusty and dented, it had been her younger brother’s years before. “We’ll put your lunch in this tomorrow, instead of a brown bag,” she said, “and if they try to take your money, just wind up and hit ’em with it. Like this . . .”
Cocking her arm like a lion tamer, she began swinging the lunchbox in wide arcs, demonstrating while my brother sat at the table watching.
The next day, my six-year-old brother marched off to school with his hand-me-down lunchbox. And just as they’d threatened, the girls surrounded him when he wouldn’t give them his nickel. When the first one charged, he did exactly as my mom had told him.
In our bedroom that night, Micah related to me what happened.
“I swung with everything I had,” he said.
“Weren’t you scared?”
With his lips pressed together, he nodded. “But I kept swinging and hitting them until they ran away crying.”
The girls, I might add, never bothered him again.
In 1971, we moved again, this time to Playa del Rey—another section of Los Angeles. For obvious reasons (the nightly gunshots began sounding awfully close) our parents believed it was safer for us than Inglewood.
I’d started kindergarten by then, but given the year separating us and the fact that Los Angeles continued to bus my brother, Micah and I found ourselves in different schools. While the students in my class resembled students that might be found in an Iowa suburb, Micah was bused to one of the schools in the inner city, and was the only white child in his class.
Still, in the afternoons, we were together, and we spent our time as we had in Inglewood, a couple of little kids with no fear of the world. We’d leave our apartment complex and spend hours going anywhere we wanted—we’d walk a couple miles down to the marina where we’d look at the boats docked in their slips or climb up the underside of highway bridges or utility poles looking for bird eggs, or explore vacant, decaying, or burned-out homes in search of something interesting that might have been left behind. Other times, we’d head behind our apartment complex, cross a few avenues, and hop a few fences to visit the high school. In the late afternoons, it was usually empty, and we used to love the wide-open fields, which were much larger than the ones at our elementary schools. We’d race or hide, or simply walk the hallways, looking into the classrooms. One day, we spotted a raven in the trees, and were instantly captivated. We began following it as it moved from tree to tree. After that, whenever we went to the school, we’d look for the raven, and suprisingly, we’d almost always find it. After calling to it for a while, we’d head off to do something else. Yet, soon enough, we’d see the raven again, in one of the trees near where we were playing. Pretty soon, we weren’t able to go anywhere near the school without seeing the raven. It was always around. The raven, we soon realized, was following us.
We began to feed it. We’d toss some bread on the ground; the raven would swoop down and eat it, then fly away. Gradually, it stayed long enough for us to approach. From there, we moved to feeding it plums, and the raven grew more comfortable with us. We got to the point where we could hold the plum outstretched on the ground and the raven wouldn’t hesitate to fly close and begin to eat. It struck us that it was becoming something of a pet, and we began to refer to it that way. Borrowing the camera from mom, we were even able to take up-close pictures of it, and we proudly showed them off when the photos were developed. We named the raven Blackie. Blackie was great. Blackie was cool. Blackie, we eventually discovered, was a monster.
As interested as we were in the bird, we found out that the bird had become far more interested in us. Particularly our hair. Because we were blond, our hair gleamed in the sunlight, and ravens, we