They all had a good, nasty laugh over that. But when he left, Hershey LeBlanc vowed that he’d find one legal pretext or another to get her out of the neighborhood—or at least stop the loud motorcycle noise at all hours.

  That’s how it was that Mack found himself walking up the long winding avenue that spiraled into the mountain. He didn’t go up there much, once he had satisfied his curiosity about the spot where he had been found—not that he was sure where that spot was, since Raymo and Ceese couldn’t agree with each other about where it was, nor did either of them pick the same place twice. And ever since he had become so fascinated with Yo Yo, he had made it a point not to go look at her house, because the last thing he wanted to be when he grew up was a stalker.

  Today’s visit wouldn’t be stalking, though. He had heard her bike roar in at four a.m., so he imagined that about noon on a summer Wednesday should be just about right for a sixteen-year-old dream-ridden crazy boy from the flat of Baldwin Hills to go knocking on Yolanda White’s door.

  Except there was a locked gate in the fence.

  Ordinarily that sort of thing was no barrier to Mack. He and his friends weren’t even slowed down, let alone stopped, by little things like fences as they roamed the neighborhood. He could be over this simple white-painted wrought-iron fence in five seconds—less, if he had a running start.

  But it wouldn’t be such a good start to the conversation if she came to the door and demanded to know how he got into her yard.

  So Mack walked right on past the house—eyeing it surreptitiously, but seeing not a sign of life—and kept on up the avenue till he reached the edge of the park. He stood there looking down into the basin where rainwater collected. When it rained heavily, all the runoff from this high valley would pour down into the basin, and there was a tall standing drainpipe which, when the basin got deep enough, would carry away the water through a big pipe that ran under the street. That’s what kept the whole street from becoming a river in every rainstorm.

  And that pipe was the place that Mack thought of as his birthplace. Not that he really believed that his mother had been lying there when some abortionist pulled him out of her. But whenever he saw that pipe, he felt something powerful flowing out of it, like the blood rushing through his body, and he knew that whatever it was that made him Mack Street was still connected to this basin, to that pipe. It was because of whatever flowed from that pipe that he hadn’t died up there, buried in leaves. That’s what he believed, because it made more sense than believing that his whole life was just a dumb accident.

  He was contemplating that pipe, that basin, the underbrush and the leaves that collected there, when he heard the unmistakable sound of a motorcycle engine revving up.

  He had waited too long.

  He whirled around and raced down the road—even though he had clear memories of running down a hill when he was three and falling and skinning his knees and hands so bad that Miz Smitcher actually cried when she saw the injury. He threw himself onto the mercy of gravity, forcing his legs to stay ahead of his body so he didn’t fall over and skid sixty yards. The automatic gate in the driveway was opening when he reached it and hurled himself against it like a bug on a windshield.

  Yo Yo was just easing the bike down the driveway when Mack suddenly appeared clinging to her gate. She stopped and looked at him and he must have seemed pretty pathetic or something, because she busted out laughing and killed the motor.

  The silence was louder than the engine had been.

  “Well?” said Yo Yo. “Did you want to say something, or are you just hoping they make bashing-your-face-into-a-moving-gate an Olympic event?”

  “I wanted to talk to you,” said Mack. “I got to warn you.”

  “What, somebody sent their crazy teenage boy to tell me to stop riding my bike?”

  Mack was astonished. “How did you know I was crazy?”

  She just broke up laughing. Practically fell off the bike. “Peel yourself off my gate and come in here,” she said. “I been looking for a crazy boy, and I guess I just found him.”

  Two minutes later, there he was inside her house, sitting on her floor because there really wasn’t a stick of furniture in the living room apart from the thronelike chair on which she sat and the lamp beside it—not even a TV or boombox or anything, just a chair, a lamp, and a stack of books.

  He blurted out everything he’d heard them saying about her, excepting only the remark about the quarters. How the covenant excluded black people so she couldn’t live there, or maybe she couldn’t live there because she didn’t change the deed, but anyway it was all about the bike and they were really mad and she’d better do something or they’d cause her a lot of trouble.

  “Why you telling me this, boy?”

  Well, now, that had him stumped. Not that he didn’t know the reason, but he couldn’t say, Because I love you. It would hurt too much when she laughed at him for loving a grown woman like her.

  “I like your bike,” he said.

  She laughed anyway. “Want to ride it?”

  “Don’t got a license.”

  “Yeah, but that would only matter if I cared.” She got up and left the room and came back with two helmets. “Either one of these fit onto that huge head of yours?”

  Mack didn’t even mind her saying that, since it was true—he always had to set the plastic tab on the back of a baseball cap to the last notch, and even then it would perch on his head like an egg.

  But one of the helmets fit him, or at least he could force it on past his ears, and in no time he was sitting on the bike as she showed him the controls, how to clutch and shift gears, how to speed up, how to brake. “Miz White,” he said, “I can’t make my hands and feet do four different things at the same time.”

  “In the first place,” she said, “Miz White is my mama, I’m Yolanda. Yo Yo if I feel like letting you call me that to my face. In the second place, look how stupid most motorcycle riders look. I can promise you, they really are that dumb, and if they can ride, so can you. So let’s go through it again and you show me that you know what your hands and feet are good for.”

  Five minutes later, after a few pathetic false starts, Mack found himself riding Yo Yo’s motorcycle down the driveway and out the gate, with Yo Yo herself sitting behind him with her arms around his waist and her breasts pressing into his back and the bike vibrating so much he couldn’t hardly see. He drove slow, and when he came out of the driveway he turned right, uphill, toward the basin.

  He drove fast enough that the bike kept its balance, but not a bit faster. And when he got to the top, he slowed down and stopped.

  Yolanda reached around him and turned the key and the engine shut off.

  “Now that was about the saddest excuse for a bike ride I’ve ever had,” she said. “A man gets on a bike, he’s supposed to feel the power of it, he’s supposed to pour on the speed.”

  Ashamed, all he could say was “Sorry.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t want to go fast.”

  “Course I did,” said Mack.

  “I’ve heard about you, crazy boy. I’ve heard you take any dare anybody ever gives you and you’re not afraid of a damn thing.”

  Mack nodded, wondering how his school reputation ever reached a grownup, especially this one that all the other grownups hated. It occurred to him that he might not be the first kid to be on her bike when her body pressed up close, and that made him angry and sad and foolish-feeling.

  “So how come you were scared to go fast on this bike? It’s made for speed, Sneed!”

  “ ’Cause if I crashed the bike,” said Mack, “you might get hurt.”

  She just sat there for a second, then got off the bike and came around the front of it and stood there leaning on the handle and looking in his eyes. “Is that some line you use or something?”

  Mack didn’t know what she meant by that.

  “Because if it isn’t, it should be. It’s the first line I’ve heard from a man in a long time that didn’t make me want to puke. In fact, it made me want to kiss you.”

  And being Yo Yo, she reached right out and peeled the helmet off his head, which wasn’t easy, and for a second or two he thought he might lose an ear in the process, but the helmet came off eventually, and his ears stayed where they belonged, and she reached out and took his head between her hands to kiss him right on the lips and then . . .

  She stopped.

  The expression on her face changed.

  The hands holding his head slackened and then pulled away.

  “Lord Jesus be my Savior,” she whispered. “It can’t be you.”

  Mack didn’t know what she meant by that, but for one brilliant, wonderful, terrible second he thought: She’s my mother. She must have been about thirteen when she had me aborted, that’s something I never thought about, that maybe she was just a child. But she never knew I was alive till she put her hands on my head and then she somehow knew, maybe she felt the dream inside me, she knew I was her baby.

  But right along with that thought came another one: I got all hot and hard for my own mama and that makes me about the sickest bastard in Baldwin Hills.

  And he tried to get off the cycle to get away from her, but then realized that if he was standing up instead of sitting down she’d see just what had been on his mind when he thought she was going to kiss him, so he sat back down, and then she said, “No, baby, no. I’m not your mama. Whoever that poor woman was, she ain’t me.”

  Was she reading his mind?

  “No, I don’t read minds,” she said. “I just know men so well I can read their faces.”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “OK,” she said. “I read minds sometimes. Or more like I read souls. And when I put my hands on your head, I saw something inside your mind.”

  “What did you see?” asked Mack.

  “I saw that you’re filled with love.”

  With love or something, thought Mack.

  “I saw that this spot is holy ground to you,” she said.

  And he trembled that she could have seen such a thing, just by touching him. Or did she have the story from Ceese or Raymo?

  “And I saw that you’re the one who found my lost dream.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “My dream,” she said. “When I was a little girl, when it was still horses I wanted to ride, back when I didn’t know black girls didn’t grow up to ride horses. I dreamed a dream of riding, but then I got older and I stopped having that dream. It was so long lost that I’d forgotten I even had it, though now I can see that my riding this bike must have been like a distant echo of it. Only when I put my hands on your head, after I heard the love crying out from your heart, and after I felt the holiness of this place inside you, then I saw a dream, and it was my dream, and you been dreaming it for me, keeping it for me all these years.”

  “No, ma’am,” said Mack. “I only started dreaming it once you moved here.”

  “Well, now, that’s sweet,” she said. “I guess it was inside me all along, only lost. But either way, it’s you that found it, and you that brought it back to me, and that makes you my friend for life, Mack Avenue.”

  “Mack Street,” said Mack.

  “I always give my friends a new name,” she said.

  “I’d rather you gave me that kiss.”

  She laughed, and she kissed him right on the mouth, and it wasn’t no auntie kiss, and it wasn’t quick. But even so, it also wasn’t the kiss she would have given him before she found her dream inside his head, and he knew it, and he was just a little disappointed.

  “I’m a minister, you know,” she said.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, nobody else does, either,” she said. “Because I haven’t found the God I want to preach about. But I’m wondering right here if maybe I ain’t some kind of John the Baptist, looking around for Jesus. Because you, Mack Avenue, you’re the Keeper of Lost Dreams, and that’s a God that’s been needed in this world for a long time.”

  “But it’s a bad dream,” said Mack.

  “No it’s not,” she said. “It’s the best dream of my whole life. It’s the dream I love best.”

  “But there’s that monster. That slug with wings.”

  “And I’ve got to kill it,” she said, “and I don’t have any weapons. I know all that. It’s my dream, you know.”

  “But doesn’t that scare you?”

  “No sir,” said Yo Yo. “Why do you have to ask? In my dream, have you ever felt me be afraid?”

  He realized, when she asked, that he’d never felt a speck of fear in her.

  A car screeched to a halt. Slowly Mack brought himself out of his gazing into Yo Yo’s eyes and turned to see Miz Smitcher slamming the door of the car and stalking toward Yo Yo with murder in her eyes.

  “Who do you think you are, getting my boy up on that monster and letting him drive it! He got no driver’s license, you crazy bitch!”

  “Watch who you calling a crazy bitch,” said Yolanda mildly. “If I really was a crazy bitch, you wouldn’t have the balls to call me that.”

  Miz Smitcher turned to Mack. “You get off that bike, Mack Street, and get in that car.”

  Mack turned to Yolanda. What should I do, he wanted to ask her.

  She grinned at him. “I’ll see you later, Mack Avenue.”

  “No you won’t!” screeched Miz Smitcher. “You come within twenty yards of him and I’ll have you in jail for corrupting a minor! You hear me? There’s laws protecting young boys from predatory women like you!”

  “Mama bird,” said Yolanda, “I got no plans to steal away your little chick.”

  “I’ll have you out of this neighborhood, you and that bike! Now I see you using that thing to lure young boys into your den of depredation!”

  Yolanda laughed out loud. “A woman with tits like mine, why would I ever need a bike to lure boys!”

  That was so outrageous that even Miz Smitcher couldn’t think of a thing to say, and Miz Smitcher never couldn’t think of something to say. Instead she grabbed Mack by the wrist as he was getting off the bike and nearly made him lose his balance as she dragged him to the car and shoved him in through the driver’s side with a push so hard he smacked the top of his head on the glass on the other side. And in no time she had that car turned around and headed down the hill, but Mack could still hear Yo Yo’s laughter behind him.

  “She’s a minister,” he said.

  “You shut up,” said Miz Smitcher. “You ain’t thinking straight and you won’t be thinking straight for about two hours after having that woman’s arms around you and her kissing you.”

  Mack was outraged. “You mean somebody called you?”

  “Well I didn’t have no psychic vision if that’s what you’re thinking!”

  “She’s a minister, Miz Smitcher, it was a . . . a Christian kiss.”

  “Well, there’s a billion Christians in this world, and most of them got started with a kiss like that. So you’re not to go near her again, you hear me? I’ll get her out of this neighborhood if I have to buy a gun and shoot that bike.”

  “All right,” said Mack.

  “You agreeing with me, just like that?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Well, now I know you’re lying. A boy your age doesn’t just say yes ma’am about staying away from a woman like that.”

  Mack was thinking like crazy, trying to find a way to get Miz Smitcher out of this rage she was in. And then he got it. “Miz Smitcher, I just thought maybe she was my mama. Maybe she come back here to look and see what become of her baby.”

  That was it. That was the answer. Because all of a sudden Miz Smitcher’s eyes got all teary and she pulled the car over in front of the neighbor’s house and just hugged him to her and said, “Oh, you poor baby, of course you’d think she was your mama, her looking like she does. Exactly the kind of woman who’d have an abortion and leave the baby in the weeds.”

  That wasn’t exactly what Mack had meant, but it would do.

  “So you didn’t have the hots for her, you thought she was your mama!” Miz Smitcher began to laugh. She put the car back in gear and drove the thirty yards to the curb in front of her house and by the time she got the car parked she was laughing so hard tears were coming down her face.

  Two things stuck with Mack from that car ride with Miz Smitcher. First one was, that was the first time he could ever remember her hugging him. Second thing was, You tell somebody something they want to hear, and they’ll believe it even if it’s the biggest old lie you ever made up.

  He promised her everything she asked him to promise—that he’d never ride that bike again, that he’d never go to That Woman’s house again, that he’d never talk to her again, that he’d never even think of her again. The only true thing he said to her was when she made him say, “I know she could not possibly be my mama.”

  That night he halfway hoped he’d dream Yolanda’s dream, but he didn’t. He picked up half a dozen other dreams, including one that he thought might be Miz Smitcher’s, and which he never watched all the way through. Yolanda’s dream never came, but in the morning he realized, Well of course I didn’t dream her dream and I never will again, because I gave it back to her and now it’s for her again.

  But I still got my own dream, he thought. Nothing yesterday was really much like that dream of roads and rocks and cliffs and floods, except I was running down the street like hurtling along the canyon, and at the end of it, a woman reached out and held my head and kissed me and she tasted sweet as love.

  2005

  Homeless in Hell

  If you don’t get into heaven, you go to hell, right? That’s what I’d always been taught. Heaven is Harvard, and hell a county technical college. If you finished high school, they’ve got to take you. Except that with hell, dying is the only diploma you’re supposed to need.

  I read those near-death-experience books, where they talked about how “the light” was full of warmth and love. Well, it was nice, but it sort of sets you up for disappointment, because when you’re really dead and not just straying in there by accident, you get past that feel-good stage and suddenly you’re at the light, and either it sucks you in or it shunts you away, like a magnet, and it all depends on how you’re polarized.