He showed Isaiah his defaced poetry book.
Eyes wide, Isaiah nodded.
Three of the pages were covered in disturbing drawings. Isaiah’s pencil had gouged the paper.
“You’re acting like you’re two instead of ten,” Memphis griped. “I know you’re mad at the whole world right now, Isaiah, but you can’t be doing this. You can’t ruin a man’s personal property.”
“I didn’t mean to. I was asleep,” Isaiah protested.
Memphis didn’t know whether to believe Isaiah or not. The way he’d acted lately, he could’ve done it out of spite. Now the poem he’d worked so hard on was a shambles. Memphis wasn’t even sure he could recover any of it.
“I was having another nightmare,” Isaiah said. “Those are the monsters in the subways.”
“Monsters. In the subways.” Memphis’s laugh was short and bitter. “They pay full fare?”
“I saw them!” Isaiah yelled. “She made them. They’re down there. They’re hungry.”
“Isaiah! I swear.” Memphis threw his hands in the air and let them fall to his sides again. He held up the book. “You owe me.”
“What’s all this fuss about?” Bill Johnson said, tapping into the room.
“Nothing, Mr. Johnson,” Memphis grumbled. He pointed a finger at Isaiah. The finger was a warning. “But I’m not leaving anything of mine around you anymore.”
Memphis tucked the book inside his coat.
Isaiah trudged alongside Blind Bill as they walked through St. Nicholas Park, his baseball glove under his arm, the ball cupped in his other hand, and a scowl on his face.
“Now, what you got to do next time,” Bill instructed, his blind man’s cane tapping out ahead of him on the path, “is you got to put a li’l spit in your palm—just a li’l bit, now. Not too much. That’ll make that old ball fly like it has an angel’s wings.”
Isaiah was quiet. Bill didn’t need to see the boy to know that he was angry. He could hear it in the way Isaiah kept kicking up dirt as he walked. Memphis was supposed to take his little brother to play ball, but he was so angry about Isaiah drawing in his book that he’d refused. Bill knew he was a poor substitute. Just like he knew Memphis Campbell had healed Noble Bishop and lied about it. It still made Bill furious to think about the healer using his gift on that old drunk and not doing a goddamn thing to help Bill. Seemed like he and Isaiah had something in common: They were both mad at Memphis.
“Little man!” Bill said brightly, hoping to cajole the boy out of his mood. “Why’nt you tell me one of your funny stories you got, ’bout frogs or what-have-you?”
“My mama and daddy used to tell me stories,” Isaiah said. “Memphis, too. Before he went and got a girl.”
“That so?” Bill could infer Isaiah’s shrug in the silence. “You want me to tell you a story, then? That it?”
Sniffling. Then: “Don’t care.”
“Mm-hmm. Tell you a story, tell you a story,” Bill said, nodding and thinking. “All right. There was this fella—”
“That ain’t the way you start a story!” Isaiah interrupted.
“Say, now! Who’s telling it?”
Isaiah missed stories. His mama used to tell good ones, all about a rabbit in Mr. McGregor’s garden and a warrior named François Mackandal who ran down from the hills to chase the bad men away. Sometimes, Isaiah would get the stories confused and François Mackandal would be a farmer chasing a rabbit down the hill. His daddy liked funny stories. And Memphis told the best stories of all. He missed when it was just the two of them together in the back room watching the night lights of the city climbing up the wall while they waited for sleep to come, back before all this nonsense with that girl, Theta. He missed the way it had been once upon a time. Isaiah felt like crying again. He turned it into anger at Bill for not knowing the right way to tell a proper story.
“You gotta start with ‘Once upon a time,’” Isaiah insisted.
“Well, well, well, all right, then,” Bill teased. “Once. Upon. A time. That better? You happy now? Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a race of proud people. Kings and queens. Like the pharaohs of old.”
“Is this a Bible story?”
“You never gonna know you keep running your mouth.”
Isaiah kept quiet.
“And the land these people lived in?” Bill continued. “It was something. Fulla magic, and the people was fulla magic. And there was lions and fruit trees and everything you could want.”