Jump into the Sky Read Free Page B

entertained at home.”
    Most of the time, I couldn’t decide what to believe.
    Fortunately, I’d opened the mail the day he sent the scorpion—if it’d been Aunt Odella, she woulda had a holy flying fit. The scorpion had been pasted inside a folded piece of paper with the words
Don’t show to Odella. Happy Birthday!
written on the front.
    For a couple of days, I was like Moses parting the Red Sea as I strolled down the hallways at school with that thing in my pocket. Everybody moved aside to let me and Archie pass by. All I had to do was wave the scorpion of death in the air and we could get anything we wanted to eat for lunch. Deviled eggs. A cheese sandwich. Some homemade ginger cookies. Wave it around again and the line for the school washroom would shrink down to nothing. Me and Archie were kings. It was one of those birthday presents you never grow up and forget.
    Besides the old scorpion, there were a couple of other things I slipped past my aunt’s X-ray eyes while I was packing up mysuitcase. Took all my father’s letters and his army picture—although I don’t think she woulda complained about me bringing them along. And I couldn’t help throwing in a handful of buckeyes from the nice collection I kept under my bed.
    It was a crazy habit I had, collecting those buckeyes. Even being thirteen and being too old for dumb collections, I couldn’t seem to stop myself from picking them up. Under my bed, there were boxes and boxes crammed full of the smooth mahogany-colored seeds—some as large as the palm of your hand—from the shady buckeye trees in our neighborhood. I could imagine Aunt Odella’s shocked expression when she stuck a broom under the bed and found the rest of them. Buckeyes rolling all over creation.
    Gotta admit the scene made me smile.
    Walking beside me, my aunt glanced over as if she wondered what in the world was going through my thirteen-year-old brain. “You still doing all right with that suitcase, Levi?”
    My shoulder was pounding like the devil, but I didn’t admit weakness to anybody. Especially not Aunt Odella. I nodded, hefting the suitcase a little higher. “Yes ma’am.”
    Right after that, she took a sharp left and headed down another block—a direction that surprised me because I figured we were going to one of the main streets where you could catch a downtown bus. Instead, she started walking through another familiar neighborhood of crowdedapartments where me and Archie had shot loadies dozens of times. We were the best around at sending our greased bottle caps flying down those street gutters. Archie had a Dr Pepper bottle cap that had never been beat. I’d blown out the knees of a lot of my pants, kneeling in those gutters and seeing how far I could whip those bottle caps down the metal grooves.
    As we passed by more places I knew, I had to keep shaking my head and trying to ignore the sorry-tasting lump that was rising in my throat. Heck, I wasn’t ready to leave Chicago. Who would tell Archie and everybody else that I’d left town? And what was Archie gonna do without Goliath? And who would spit on the apartment steps and pick up all the perfect buckeyes from the streets? There was a lot I was gonna miss.

4. Peace on Earth
    A unt Odella didn’t stop for breath until we got to my great-uncle Otis’s barbershop on the corner of Forty-eighth Street. Uncle Otis was a legend in south Chicago. You couldn’t miss the big white-lettered sign painted on his store window: WE CUT HEADS HERE . When anybody asked why his sign said
heads
and not
hair
, he’d say, “One hair cut? What kinda fool would pay for that? You come here, I promise you we’ll cut your whole head.” If you heard him say it once, you heard it a hundred times.
    Great-uncle Otis was also the only person in our family—even counting distant half-white cousins—who was rich enough to own an automobile and buy the gasoline to run it during the war. Didn’t take me long to realize Aunt Odella