Penguin.com (usa)

they made me a killer

I killed a man when I was seven years old.

Killed a man who was trying to murder my mother.

He was choking her to death.

And I shot that man with his own gun.

Without hesitation I shot him in the head with a .22.

My mother was a whore. That man was one of her customers.

We were in North Carolina then.

We left his body on the floor of our apartment and fled to the Greyhound bust station.

We left Charlotte and traveled north. Ran like we were wanted by the FBI.

I remember that day like it was this morning. I remember the smells.

We sat in the back of the bus with the rest of the poor, the scent of old people, poverty, and greasy fried chicken in the air. Everyone was eating. Everyone but us. My mother looked at me, heard my stomach growling, then humbled herself, went and asked some old people if she could have some chicken. For me. She asked them to please give her some for me.

Those old people gave her half a bucket of homemade chicken. Biscuits. Corn on the cob. I ate that cold and greasy food like I had never had a meal before in my life.

Day turned into night turned into day.

We rode buses north and didn't stop running until we made it to the bilingual and bicultural land of the festivals. Jazz. Comedy. Reggae. We ran until we got to Canada.

Montreal was a pothole-filled city that had four seasons: winter, still-winter, construction season, and almost-winter. We'd fled Charlotte and stopped running on an island that some said was shaped like a bikini, but to me it was shaped like the bottom part of a woman, from her waist to knees. Montreal was shaped like a woman on her back with her legs wide-open.

We had stopped running near the crack of that Frenchwoman's ass.

The crack of that Canadian ass was right off Autoroute 720.

We had missed still-winter and landed there during the construction season, hid out in a province that enforced Bill 101 to ensure signs were in French, and if somebody dared post a sign using both French and English, the French part had to be twice the size of the English.

I was scared.

Not because I had killed a man.

I'd never been away from Charlotte.

I was scared because we were in a place I'd never seen before. A place I'd never heard of.

And the money was running low. We'd eaten the lat of our fried chicken yesterday.

We were homeless. And hungry. Had given up everything. Because I had killed a man.

Because I had killed the evil man who was trying to choke my mother to death.

Now we were strangers in a foreign country, walking the streets with the damned.

Montreal was bizarre for me. The music. The language. The people.

Not to my mother.

People spoke French to her and she talked back to them in French. Sometimes she spoke English while they spoke French, or she spoke French while the spoke English.

But when she spoke French, her mannerisms and accent became the same as theirs.

Her accent had never fit in the South. People always said she had never sounded like the natives of Charlotte. Some made fun of her exotic tongue. She was my mother. To me she had always sounded smarter, more refined, like she was a queen who had traveled the world.

While we ate stale bread, cold meat, and wilted vegetables, we overheard the homeless people that slept in the parks and doorways on Sainte-Catherine East laughing about those important Bill 101 issues; issues that infuriated the rich and powerful. Rich people lived at the other end, Sainte-Catherine West, where the shops were nice and clean, and the sex shops looked more respectable. Compared to the east side, Sainte-Catherine West was heaven.

We were homeless and living in a piss-smelling hell for a few days. I was terrified, afraid of the new language, afraid to talk to people, so that left me friendless too. Despite living in the parks and resting on McGill's lawn, despite all the peep shows and sex shops that lined the area, I pretended we were camping. Camping with that .22 tucked in my belongings.

I asked, "Why did we come here?"

 
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