Ghost Children
D. Winston Brown

I remember that his elbow was huge compared to the rest of his arm, like a tennis ball skewered on a mop handle. I remember we rode slowly through the night as if on the prowl. I remember the heat remained just shy of 99 degrees that night, and I fell in love with how the chill of beer on the back of my throat felt like time stopping, for a moment, before a slow drag of warm air delivered a thaw. I remember we were at a red stoplight—it had been yellow when I stopped—and Spoon slid his thin arm forward again, low, barely above the gearshift, until I found myself transfixed by the gleam of a silver handgun, .38-caliber, which sat softly in the cushion of his palm.

I had seen guns before but never in my car.

This was not a year; this was a time. People were wearing Guess jeans with leather pocket-flaps or Levi’s 501 Blues. Polo was destroying Izod, and hip-hop was just beginning to strip the veneer from the unconscious ease of life. And guns—guns were not yet a fashion statement. So when skinny Spoon, a kid I let cheat off me in algebra so he would share his weed before school, reached his arm forward with his hand cradling the silver weapon, I possessed no preconstructed, cool response; no learned reaction designed to maintain my coolness.

“Shit, Spoon. What the hell is that?”

“Watch the road,” Garrett said. I’d begun to inch into the intersection.

“It’s a gun,” Spoon said.

“I know it’s a gun,” I said.“ But what the fu—”

“Chill out,” Spoon said. “I thought we could use it to scare—”

“Spoon,” I said, “I ain’t down for using no gun on a girl.If she don’t want to—”

“Chill,”Spoon said again.“I don’t have to force any girls to do anything.” He leaned his long head forward between the seats. “I thought we could get, I mean, scare them niggers who came by the school last week.”

The last week Spoon spoke of had consisted of a fight: Garrett and me versus three boys who’d come to our school as it was letting out. Garrett had walked out the door with his arm around the girlfriend of one of the boys. He had told her a joke that I’d told him, and they were laughing as they emerged from the school. I was maybe seven yards behind them when I saw the boys approach from the right. They were man-boys compared to us. Their blue jeans were creased and starched. Gold hung from their necks: herringbones wide as Band-Aids and rope chains weighed down by crosses the size of those pocket Bibles that evangelicals are fond of giving away. With each step, their faces curled into hardened scowls.

They shoved Garrett from behind. I dropped my books and ran toward them. From there, it progressed like most any fight, a slow-motion blur of fists and cuss words and falling and kicking. We, surprisingly, held our own. I hit someone on the jaw. Someone hit me in the gut. A girl yelled, then another. These things I remember as occurring all at once,like some theatrical production. It slammed to a halt, all of the jumbled confusion, when one of the boys pulled out a gun. It looked old and dull and more like a prop from a John Wayne movie than a weapon, but there was no denying it was a gun. He held his arm straight, the gun sideways, and he placed the barrel inches away from my head. What he said I don’t remember. I fixated on the gold-nugget rings he wore on three of his fingers. I remember thinking as long as I could see the shine of those rings I was still alive. I heard someone cry, “No.” I heard someone’s sneakers squeak in the doorway behind me. Down the block, a car’s engine revved. The moment flooded with isolated sounds: squeaks, gasps, jangled keys, running feet. I struggled to hear what I didn’t want to hear—the crack of the gun when it fired.

It never came.