The Seeker Read Free

you to ride hangin’ outside the train when we got off at Canal. You did it for ten seconds, then fell off and bloodied your nose on the platform. Later that night, we smoked up and you stole a record from Bleecker Bob’s. Then we came back home and crashed.
We
crashed, that is. You came back and studied all night for some stupid math quiz. You recall?”
    Max didn’t. There had been too many such days growing up. “I think, yes,” he said.
    “That’s what I tell these kids. Do what you gotta do to survive in this hell but go back each night and get your shit together. Piece by piece, build your motherfuckin’ empire,” he said. He leaned forward on his wheelchair. “You gonna be okay, Ace. On the real. You’re always hustlin’, always okay. And Ma’s suffered enough. She’d want to be at peace.”
    Max throttled the question that came to his lips. Is that what his mother was feeling? Andre would know, though he never talked about the day fifteen years ago when Max and he were caught in the crossfire between the Black Spades gang and some local toughs outside a bodega on Cypress Avenue. One moment, they were sucking ice pops. The next, three punks wearing gold chains with pistols in their hands stood in front of them. There’d been a blaze of yellow light and popping sounds. Max had dropped to the road, knocking out two front teeth. He was staring at bits of his bloody gum tissue splayed on the ground when Andre fell beside him, his cream shirt colored in red. “Pop, it hurts, pop,” he had shouted. The bullet had pierced his liver, tearing through his spleen, and lodged in his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down.
    A deep sadness rose up within Max.
    “Some world this is where you’re better off dead than alive,” said Max.
    Andre looked at him with soft, mellowed eyes. “Don’t hate, Ace. You always took my shit harder than me,” he said. He put the bong down and tossed Max a cushion. “Sleep for a bit?” His arms were thin as spindles and his body twisted from avoiding pressure sores from sitting in the wheelchair all day. Max’s stomach knotted in despair. He forced himself to get up.
    “No, man, I gotta be with Mom,” he said. “I just wanted to drop off the Cs.”
    “Can I see her today? I’ll get a ride into the city.”
    Max nodded. “She’ll like that.”
    Max walked out of the apartment. Instead of going to the subway station, he turned on Alexander Avenue. In the dim light of dawn, 141 st street looked like it had been bombed by a fighter jet. Overflowing trash cans, a vacant parking lot with heaps of tires, puddles of vomit outside a bar, thugs slumped against closed pawn shops with flashing neon lights. He stopped ahead of Willis Avenue and looked up at a blackened window in the corner-most building of the Mott Haven housing projects cluster. His mother, Sophia and he had spent most of their lives in an airless, one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of the building. The brown bricks hadn’t seen a single coat of paint in the ten years Max had been gone. With its furrows, cracks and chipped corners, the building looked like a body ravaged by cancer. Screams ripped intermittently through the quiet morning.
    “You best walk away, bitch.”
    “Maria, open the fuckin’ door.”
    “Whatchu think of yourself?”
    Sophia had hated these screams; the gunshots; the kids that called her names—“white bitch”, “snow bunny”, “nerd”, tore her overcoat, and messed up her hair when Max wasn’t around; and just about everything else about the projects. Max had swaggered and strutted, rapping, shooting hoops, shoplifting, getting into petty fights, anything it took to fit in. His mother had been different from both of them. She had developed a steely toughness, indifferent to the world crumbling around them. When the gangs started shooting at each other in the alley behind the building, she would clean their apartment vigorously. While Max and Sophia covered their ears