145th Street: Short Stories by Walter Dean Myers

Author:Walter Dean Myers [Myers, Walter Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Short Stories, People & Places, United States, African American, Fiction
ISBN: 9780385729840
Google: KnTd7tL6hoMC
Amazon: B000QCTNH8
Publisher: Ember
Published: 2001-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

We hadn’t seen Monkeyman all day and rumors were that he had left town.

“Maybe he’ll show at the last minute with an Uzi and start blowing away all the Tigros,” LaToya said.

Nobody said anything when we headed up the hill to the park. I wondered if everybody else could hear their heart beating. I was wearing my sneakers, ready to run if I had to.

When we got to the park there were maybe twenty-five guys in their Tigros gear and ten girls.

My knees got real loose and I was having trouble swallowing.

“Where Monkeyman?” Clean asked. He was wearing a heavy jacket and had his hands in his pockets. “Where Monkeyman?”

“We thought he was here,” Fee said. I noticed Fee’s voice was kind of high.

We waited for another ten or fifteen minutes with all the Tigros posse calling us suckers and stuff like that. I was hoping they didn’t turn on us.

“Yo, here he come now!” A girl pointed toward the uptown side of the park “Who he got with him?”

I turned and I saw Monkeyman coming down the street. He had a man and a woman with him. The man looked old. Monkeyman brought them right over to where we were and I recognized his grandfather. I didn’t know the woman.

“Hey, this is my grandfather,” Monkeyman said. “His name is Mr. Nesbitt. And this is my godmother, Sister Smith.”

“What you bring them for?” Clean said, edging closer to Monkeyman.

“They came to see you mess me up!” Monkeyman said.

He took off his jacket as if he meant to fight Clean. For a moment I thought maybe it would be a fair fight. But then Monkeyman took off his shirt and just stood there in his bare skin and held his hands out and his head to one side.

Clean didn’t know what was happening. He looked around.

“Kick his butt!” one of the Tigros called out. “Waste him!”

Clean took his hands out of his pockets and started circling Monkeyman, but Monkeyman didn’t move. Clean hit him in the back of his head and he didn’t say nothing.

“Please don’t do that, boy,” Monkeyman’s grandfather said. “He made us promise not to help him, but please don’t do that.”

“We’ll kick your butt, too,” a girl said.

Everybody turned and looked at her and she held out her chin like she didn’t even care. But she didn’t say anything else.

Monkeyman’s godmother was praying.

It was dark but there was a moon out and the park lights were on. More people came into the park to see what was going on. What they saw was Monkeyman standing with his arms outstretched and Clean hitting him. He hit him in the face a couple of times and an old man asked, “What’s going on?”

“That’s the Tigros gang,” Fee said. “They’re beating up Monkeyman because he stopped one of their girls from slashing somebody in the face.”

“I ought to kill you!” Clean shouted.

“They just waiting for the police to come,” another Tigros guy said.

It grew quiet. There had to be fifty

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