Chapter 3
The boys Marcus grew up with were named Leroy and Fitzroy and Dwayne and a boy everyone called Skippy whose real name nobody used anymore, They were between five and eight years old and they moved through the neighborhood in a loose pack, governed by no particular rules except the rules of childhood older kids had authority, faster runners got first pick, loyalty was everything and everything was loyalty.
They played football in the small patch of packed earth between two buildings on the main road, using stones as goalposts and settling disputes with the furious but short-lived arguments of boys who know they have to play together again tomorrow, They caught lizards and released them they climbed walls they ran from dogs they made up elaborate games whose rules existed only inside their shared imagination and shifted constantly according to whoever was winning.
Marcus was fast he had discovered this about himself at around age five, in the way children discover their own capacities by accident, in competition he had raced Dwayne to the corner and arrived before he had even decided to run hard, Speed felt to him like something that had always been there, waiting, like finding a room in a house you had lived in your whole life.
But what he liked more than racing was watching, He was the boy who stood at the edge of a game and catalogued everything who was tired, who was angry, who was secretly playing for something beyond the game itself he noticed things, He didn't always talk about what he noticed, but he stored it.
Leroy was his closest friend Leroy was a big boy, wide-shouldered even at seven with a laugh that came from somewhere deep in his chest and a loyalty that was total and uncomplicated, He had decided early that Marcus was his person and this decision was absolute he would fight anyone for Marcus without asking questions first.
"You too quiet," Leroy said once, lying in the dust beside the mango tree while Marcus sat in its branches above him , A quiet man can't protect himself.
"I'm not quiet," Marcus said. "I just don't talk unless I have something to say."
Leroy considered this with great seriousness. What's the difference?
"Quiet is scared, I'm not scared, I just think first."
Leroy made a sound that suggested he found this distinction questionable but was willing to let it pass, "Miss Diane make rice and peas today?"
"Yeah."
"Can I come eat?"
"You always come eat."
Because your mother cook good, Don't get big-headed about it.
Marcus laughed up in the mango tree, looking down at his friend lying in the dust, he felt a kind of happiness so ordinary it was almost invisible. The specific happiness of being exactly where you were supposed to be, surrounded by what you knew.
He would think about this moment later from very far away, and understand it in a way he could not from inside it.