On the fourth day a police cruiser turned the corner while he had the gun pointed at the stop sign at Twentieth Street.
He remembered the sound of it more than anything. Not a siren. Just the engine changing pitch, dropping, the tires crunching on the gravel at the edge of the asphalt as the car came to a stop at an angle across the street in front of him, and then the door opening, and a voice saying, very calmly, Put it down, son. Put it down right now.
He did not put it down. He did not understand. He stood astride his bike with the silver gun still in his hand, pointed now at nothing, at the ground, and looked at the officer, who was white and sunburned across the bridge of his nose and had his own hand on his hip, on the holster, on the black handle of the thing in the holster. Drop it, the officer said, louder now, and Marcus dropped it, and it clattered on the sidewalk and one of the caps went off from the impact, snap, and the officer’s whole body jerked.
Afterward Marcus would not be able to remember being moved. He remembered only being on the hood of the cruiser with his cheek against the metal, and the metal so hot from the sun that it burned, and a hand on the back of his neck holding him there, and the bike on its side on the sidewalk with the back wheel still turning. He remembered a woman’s voice from a porch somewhere saying, He’s a baby, that’s a baby, that’s Loretta’s boy, and the officer saying, Ma’am, go back in the house. He remembered the officer picking up the cap gun and turning it over in his hand and then setting it on the asphalt and putting his boot on it and leaning his weight down until the plastic cracked.
Then the hand came off his neck. The officer bent close to him. His breath smelled like coffee and spearmint gum. He said: Next time I might not know it’s a toy. You understand me? Next time I might not know.
And he got back in his car and drove away, and Marcus picked up his bike and rode it home, four blocks, with the burn on his cheek starting to sting, and he went into the house and into his room and closed the door and did not tell anyone. He was not crying. He would remember that later as a kind of accomplishment. He was ten years old and he had not cried.
But Miss Odessa Harris had seen it from her porch, and Miss Odessa called the hospital, and the hospital paged Loretta Reed off the floor of the step-down unit where she worked as a licensed practical nurse, and his mother came home two hours early, still in her white shoes, and went straight past him without a word to the bedroom she shared with his father and came back with his father’s belt.
It was a brown leather belt with a brass buckle, wide and old and soft at the holes, the belt Harold Reed wore to church on Sundays. Marcus had felt it before. Everybody he knew had felt something before, a belt or an extension cord or a switch from the forsythia bush. It was not unusual. It was simply the weather of childhood, a thing that came and went. But it had never been like this. His mother did not tell him to go to his room and wait. She did not tell him what he had done. She folded the belt double and took him by the arm right there in the living room, in front of the television, and she whipped him on the backs of his legs and across his back and on his arms when he put them up, and with every stroke she said a word, as if the words were being written onto him one at a time.
Do. You. Want. Them. To. Kill. You. Do. You. Want. Them. To. Kill. You.