Clay watched me.
He watched but said nothing while I tried, as I’d often done lately, to somehow understand him. In looks, he and I were most alike, but I was still a good half foot taller. My hair was thicker, and my body too, but it was only the extra age. While I worked on hands and knees on carpet, floorboards, and concrete each day, Clay went to school and ran his miles. He survived his regime of sit-ups and push-ups; he was tense, and tight-looking—lean. I guess you could say we were different versions of the same thing, most notably in the eyes. Both of us had fire in our eyes, and it didn’t matter what color they were, because the fire in them was everything.
In the middle of it all, I smiled, but hurtly.
I shook my head.
The streetlights flickered off then.
I’d asked what had to be asked.
Now to say what needed to be said.
* * *
—
The sky widened, the house tightened.
I didn’t move close, or aim up, or intimidate.
All I said was “Clay.”
Later on, he told me that that was what unnerved him:
The peace of it.
In the midst of that strangely dulcet tone, something in him tolled. It lowered itself, steadily, from throat to sternum to lungs, and full morning hit the street. On the other side, the houses stood ragged and quiet, like a gang of violent mates, just waiting for my word. We knew I didn’t need them.
After a moment or two, I took my elbows off the rail and placed a look down on his shoulder. I could ask him about school. What about school? But both of us knew the answer. Who was I, of all the people, to tell him to stay in school? I’d left before the end myself.
“You can leave,” I said. “I can’t stop you, but—”
The rest was broken off.
A sentence as difficult as the job itself—and that, in the end, was the truth of it. There was leaving and coming back. There was crime, then facing punishment.
Returning and being let in:
Two very different things.
He could walk away from Archer Street, and trade his brothers for the man who left us—but coming home meant getting through me.
“Big decision,” I said, more directly, then, in his face and not by his shoulder. “And, I guess, one hell of a consequence.”
And Clay looked, first in my face, then away.
He recognized my toil-hardened wrists, my arms, my hands, the jugular in my neck. He noticed the reluctance in my knuckles, but the will to see it through. Most importantly, though, he saw that fire in each eye, pleading as they were:
Don’t leave us for him, Clay.
Don’t leave us.
But if you do.
* * *
—