"I am sorry I do not speak the English well," she said.
"This the Noo Yawk subway," said Sugar Baby, the valedictorian.
"This aftah the rush hour, honkey," said Antwan.
"You not s'posed to be being hyeah," said Sugar Baby.
"I am sorry I do not speak English well," said the woman.
"Wha you got in that there bag?" said Sugar Baby.
"Old clothes which I mend," said the woman.
"You got bread?" asked Antwan. To her look of confusion, he explained: "Money?"
"I am a poor woman. I have just coins for my supper."
To this, Antwan took great umbrage and brought a flat smacking black hand across the woman's white face.
"Ah don't like liars. Ain't nobody tell you lying a sin?" asked Antwan.
"It shameful," said Sugar Baby and smacked her in the other direction.
"No. No. No. Do not hit," cried the woman as she tried to cover her head.
"Get yo' hand down," demanded Antwan, and he banged her a shot in the head. Then he tried his latest karate chop on her right shoulder, but a fist proved better. It knocked the babushka off and sent blood trickling from her right earlobe. Sugar Baby hoisted the old woman to her feet and rammed her head against the window behind the train seat while Antwan rummaged through her pockets. They got $1.17, so Sugar Baby hit her again for being so cheap.
They got off at the next stop, commenting on how they had made the subways once again free of whites after nightfall. It did not occur to them that they had also helped make the subway system of New York City equally free of blacks and Puerto Ricans after that hour. They watched the empty train roll by, headed for Mosholu Parkway, the last station on the D train with the next stop the open yards.
There was not much to do with $1.17, but they went upstairs to the street anyway. It was a white neighborhood, which meant the racist storeowners didn't have everything locked up or hidden away out of reach, as in the black neighborhoods. Antwan and Sugar Baby, free of this racist store-owner mentality, enjoyed themselves like free men in these stores and markets where goods were displayed openly for people to handle, inspect, and then decide upon purchasing. At the end of this small sojourn off the Grand Concourse, they had three cans of aerosol spray paint, three bottles of Coke, four Twinkies, eight candy bars, a nudie magazine, and a bar of Cashmere Bouquet soap. And they still had their $1.17 left.
"Wha you rip that soap off for?" demanded Sugar Baby.
"Maybe we can sell it," said Antwan.
"That stupid," said Sugar Baby. "Who gonna buy a bar of soap around our neighborhood?"
"We could use it, maybe?" said Antwan thoughtfully. He had seen a television show once where a woman ran water over soap and then rubbed the resulting foam onto her face.
"Wha fo?"
"With water and stuff," said Antwan.
"You dumb. That Uncle Tom stuff. You Uncle Tom," said Sugar Baby.
"Ah ain' no Tom," said Antwan. "Don' you call me no Tom."
"Then wah yo' doin' with soap?"
"Ah thought it was a candy bar, is all."
"Well, get rid of it."
Antwan threw it through the ground floor window of an apartment building and then they both ran, laughing. They had to run because, as everyone knew, racist cops would bust you for no reason at all.
There was a reason for the spray paint. Sugar Baby was one of the better artists at Martin Luther King. He had painted the ceiling of the gymnasium by hanging suspended by ropes one night with Antwan holding a flashlight from the floor below. And there it was for the big game against DeWitt Clinton. A masterpiece laid on a $30,000 acoustical ceiling. In red and green spray paint: SUGAR BABY.
"Beautiful," Antwan had said.
"Oh, no," the principal had said.
"Ah'm king lord over all de planet," Sugar Baby had said then, and now, running down a side street in the Bronx, he was going to do his masterwork. Instead of painting "Sugar Baby" on a ceiling or just one car of a subway train, he was going to invade the yards and put an entire train to his spray paint-if the cans lasted.
The yard stretched beside an elevated track, and in the darkness he could tell he would have his pick. He needed the right train, one which was without other's works, but it seemed impossible to find one free of "Chico," "RAM I," "WW," and "Joey 172."
Sugar Baby finally made the hard decision. He would paint over. To make the cans last, he decided to omit the usual border and substitute one long thin line in script. He was good at handwriting, making the best B's in the school, and a guidance counselor had told him his handwriting was good enough to make him the president of a college or at least of a corporation.
He was on the first loop of the S, a bright fluorescent green crescent, when a face popped out from between two cars. It was a white face. It was a man. Sugar Baby and Antwan started to run. Then they saw the man was alone. And he wasn't that big. Thin, in fact.
"Hi," said Remo.
"Who you, mother?" said Antwan.
"I'm looking for somebody," said Remo, and he hopped down off the car onto the cinders of the yard.
Neither Antwan nor Sugar Baby noticed that this man landed on the crunchy cinders with the silence of a balloon touching felt.
"You looking for a bruisin'," said Sugar Baby.
"You grin, you in, mother," said Antwan.
"I really don't have time to rap," said Remo, "and I don't think coaxing will work."
Antwan and Sugar Baby giggled. They spread apart so Antwan could come at the front and Sugar Baby at the back. The white man stood quietly. Sugar Baby tried his karate chop. The hand came down perfect on the white man's head. He imagined himself splitting a brick. He imagined the head opening. He imagined how he would tell how he killed a honkey with one blow. His imaginings were interrupted by a decided pain in his right wrist. The skin was there but the fingers would not move, as if the hand were connected to the forearm by a bag of jelly. Sugar Baby dropped the spray paint. Antwan saw this and put his feet to action, heading out of the yards. He got four steps. On the fifth, his hip failed to cooperate. He went skin-splitting burning across the gravel, crying for his mother, professing innocence, vowing cooperation, and generally expressing fond feelings for the world and a desire to live in peace with all mankind.
"Who is Joey 172?" Remo asked.
"Ah don' know, man. Hey, ah square wif you, baby. Ah love you, baby," moaned Antwan.
"Try again," said Remo.
And Antwan felt a sharp stabbing pain in his neck but he saw no knife in the white man's hands.
"Don" know, man. Ah knows a Chico and a Ramad 85. They south city men."
"Joey 172, ever hear of him?"