All the Right Stuff Read online

  ALL

  THE

  RIGHT

  STUFF

  by

  WALTER DEAN MYERS

  Dedication

  My thanks to Peter Minowitz,

  professor of political science, Santa Clara University,

  for his careful reading and valuable insights

  Epigraphs

  To live is not merely to breathe: It is to act;

  it is to make use of our organs, senses,

  faculties—of all those parts of ourselves

  which give us the feeling of existence.

  —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  There are two kinds of equality; that which

  consists in dividing the same advantages

  indiscriminately among all the citizens, and

  that which consists in distributing them to

  each according to his deserts.

  —Isocrates

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  Back Ad

  About the Publisher

  1

  “Police!”

  I cursed under my breath and felt around in the darkness for my table lamp, found it, and checked the small travel clock on the end table. Three o’clock. Nothing good ever happens at three o’clock in the friggin’ morning.

  “Paul, don’t get near the door!”

  Mommy wisdom. Just before Christmas, somebody had shot through a door on the floor above us. I stood to one side, pulling on my jeans.

  “What you want?” I called, trying to sound older than sixteen.

  “Richard DuPree live here?”

  “No.”

  “He’s been hurt.”

  I looked through the peephole. Two cops. I opened the door.

  The officers filled the narrow space between my apartment and my next-door neighbor’s. Down the hallway, I saw Mrs. Rivers poke her head out for a second, then quickly disappear.

  “We come in for a moment?” The officer’s voice was calm.

  Mom gestured with one hand and held her robe tight with the other. On the kitchen table, a half bottle of Red Devil hot sauce stood next to a plate I had forgotten to wash.

  “What happened?” Mom asked.

  “There was a fight—I don’t think he was directly involved in it—”

  “So what happened?”

  “What’s your relationship with him?”

  “My father, but … he doesn’t live with us,” I answered.

  “Your name?”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul, I’m really sorry, but—”

  Mom burst into tears before he could finish.

  There were questions. Did my father have any disagreements with anyone? Was he a street person? How long had he lived away from home?

  I just wanted them to leave. We didn’t have the answers they needed. We didn’t want to give them the answers we had.

  My dad had never really lived with us. It was more precise to say that he came around when he wasn’t doing a bid. He had been out of jail nearly two years this time and was actually working. At least when I saw him, he wasn’t doping himself up. He lived three blocks away in a little kitchenette that he liked to say was “just big enough to change your mind in.”

  The cops weren’t in a hurry. They sat and talked for a half hour, telling us where we could go to get details later from the police, where my father’s body was; and they gave us the number of an organization that helped crime victims. When they left, Mom went into the bathroom and threw up.

  I didn’t love my father. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Sometimes I didn’t even like him. He hadn’t been a guy you could really get next to, because in a way he was never where you thought he was. If I ran into him on the street, he would try to halfway get himself together by brushing off his clothes or trying to say something he thought would make him sound smart. Nothing wrong with that except that you could see it coming and it never worked. Or maybe I just wanted something more from him?

  He and Mom had had something going once, but as soon as she had gotten pregnant with me, he got scarce. I thought he might have loved Mom, but from what I could see, he never seemed to have enough of whatever it took to have a real relationship. Since he had been out the last time, he had been coming around more often. Mom was talking about how he was “settling,” as she called it, and I thought they were thinking about trying to get something started again. I wasn’t for it, but I wasn’t against it, either. I wasn’t sure if Mom actually cared for him or just needed somebody bad enough to take him back.

  The funeral was held in a small private chapel on Lenox Avenue. It was hot outside, and the fans stirred the heat around the small room. I didn’t recognize half of the people there. My father was dressed neatly, looking better in his coffin than he had looked walking around. Two women I recognized as his aunts—their makeup, a flat beige, looking as pale as the makeup they had put on my father’s face—were making noises as if they had really been close to him. It was a struggle for Mom to even listen to them.

  “Ebony, I know how you must feel, girl.”

  Mom was too overcome with emotion to say much of anything. I just felt kind of cheated. I should have felt sad, but somewhere deep inside, I knew I had wanted so much more from the man who lay in the front of the room. I remembered how, when I was a kid, I would think about being in danger and having him come to rescue me. In my dreams, he would come bursting through a door and I would leap up and cheer as he knocked out the bad guys. In real life, he never came.

  They got the guy who shot him. A twenty-year-old dude had been arguing with a clerk in the bodega on the corner about the price of loose cigarettes. He shot through the store window to “teach the clerk some respect.” Instead of hitting the window, he had hit forty-two-year-old Richard DuPree, underemployed ex-felon, ex-drug addict, father of one.

  Mom cried every day. Sometimes, when she wasn’t telling me that I was all she had, she was blaming herself for my father’s being killed. It wasn’t a thought-out thing, where she had added up the pieces and had come to a conclusion. She hadn’t caused him to use drugs or steal to pay for them. It was just Mom’s feeling that she could have done more for him. It saddened me to see the hurt in her come to the surface like that. I had always known somehow that she was holding on to the hurt about her and my father not being together. I didn’t have any answers for her, but I promised myself that I would somehow be more than he had been. I would get myself ready to burst through doors for her. To be the hero he had never been.

  My school had been notified about four community jobs at ten dollars an hour over the summer. Fifty kids applied, and four of us actually got one of them. Three were at Harlem Hospital on 135th and Lenox, and one was in a soup kitchen for senior citizens. I got the soup kitchen.

  “You’re lucky,” Mrs. Brown, my guidance counselor at Frederick Douglass Academy, said, smiling. “You work four days in the soup kitchen and then you get to mentor for three hours on Fridays. But you get paid for the entire day.”

  “Who am I mentoring?” I asked.

  “I don’t know who,” Mrs. Brown said. “I kn
ow where. At the Harlem School of the Arts. Nine o’clock Friday mornings. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was cool. I really wanted to work in an office or something like that, but a soup kitchen was okay, and it was in the hood. So was the Harlem School of the Arts. So I could walk to work and save carfare.

  I was late for my first day at the soup kitchen because I couldn’t find the place. It wasn’t marked SOUP KITCHEN or anything like that. It was on the basement floor of a brownstone on 144th Street, and there was a small sign over the bell that read ELIJAH JONES’S SOUP EMPORIUM.

  I rang the bell and a small, bright-eyed man with gray hair answered. He looked old.

  “My name is Paul DuPree,” I said. “And I’m supposed to be working here four days a week.”

  “Welcome, Mr. Paul DuPree,” he said. “I’m Elijah Jones. Please come in.”

  I followed him in, through a room with six long tables set up and into a large, airy kitchen. The sunlight shone through the back windows and lit up the place nicely. Mr. Jones sat himself down at one end of the table in the kitchen and gestured toward the other stool. I sat down.

  “Hand me one of those vidalias over there, please.” He pointed in my direction, then started cutting up vegetables for the soup we were making.

  I looked over to where he was pointing and didn’t see what he was talking about. The only things sitting on the bench were some onions.

  “Some what?” I asked him.

  He put down the knife he was chopping carrots with and turned toward me. “Give me your particulars again?”

  “Paul DuPree,” I said. “Sixteen years old and just finished eleventh grade.”

  “Did you want to add anything in there about not knowing what a vidalia was?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, a vidalia is a sweet onion,” Elijah said. “I reckon most people would know that. What do you know about onions, anyway?”

  “I know I don’t eat them,” I said.

  “I guess that’s what the world is coming to today,” he said, turning back to his cutting board. “We got wars going on all over the world, we got people robbing and shooting each other, and we got young people like you don’t even know what a vidalia is. You thinking this might be the end of the world creeping up on us?”

  “No, sir, it’s more about you dealing with onions and your vegetables, Mr. Jones,” I said. “And if it was the end of the world, I don’t think your onions would help too much.”

  “You’ll call me Elijah,” he said. “And I rather resent your opinion of the power of onions.”

  “Sorry… Elijah,” I said.

  “How about the soup? You think the soup would save the world?”

  My man had a soup emporium, so I figured he was definitely into soup. “If you say so,” I said.

  “You never heard of anybody doing anything really bad while they were having a bowl of soup,” he said. “At least I haven’t. You ever hear the newscaster come on and say, ‘Man robs bank while eating a bowl of chicken noodle soup?’ Nope. You ever see a headline that said CRAZED KILLER SHOOTS FIVE PEOPLE WHILE EATING A BOWL OF MOCK TURTLE SOUP? Nope, you have not.”

  Elijah told me he was eighty-four, but he didn’t look like what I thought a man that old would. He was dark, maybe five six or seven, and thin but not really skinny. He stood straight as an arrow and moved around his kitchen almost as if he was dancing.

  “So you’re saving the world with your soup?” I asked.

  “I hear the smile in your voice, Mr. DuPree,” Elijah said. “And I’ll let you know I’m not about saving all of it, just my little corner here in Harlem. The way my mind works is that if we could get everybody to save their own little piece of this planet, then eventually we’d get the whole thing in pretty good shape.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If I’m part of this summer grant program next year, I’m going to ask them to send me a young man who at least knows something about onions,” Elijah said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I watched Elijah make the soup of the day and get some vegetables ready for the next day’s soup. At twelve o’clock, the first people started drifting in, and he had me serve them.

  The thing was that all the people knew Elijah, and they were enjoying themselves, eating the soup and talking to each other. It seemed that they weren’t all that hungry so much as they were just people who liked to be together. Elijah didn’t say a lot to me. Once in a while he would point to something, like a spot on a tablecloth, and I had to figure out that he meant for me to clean it up. I got the feeling that he was looking me over and seeing what I was going to bring. The day went fast in the morning, and slower in the afternoon.

  For most of the afternoon, I cleaned anything that could be cleaned. Some of the things didn’t even look dirty to me. This included the stove and the table and the floors. When everything was cleaned up, Elijah sat down at his cutting board, which was his favorite spot, and rolled an onion—okay, it was a vidalia—over to me.

  “It’s about time for you to be going now, but I want you to stop past the butcher’s shop on your way here tomorrow—talk to Vinnie over there—and pick me up ten pounds of veal bones. You think you can remember that?”

  “Ten pounds of veal bones,” I repeated. “You going to make bone soup?”

  “The best soups start with a good liquid base,” Elijah said. “The bones are to give some body to that base. People like soup made from a good stock.”

  “People like any soup that’s free,” I said. “You’re making soup and giving it away for nothing. Naturally they like it.”

  “I’m not just making soup,” Elijah said. “I’m making good soup for the senior citizens on this block. They can come here in the afternoon if they have a mind to, sit down, and have a nice bowl of soup. It’s the little pleasures in life that make it all worthwhile.”

  “If your soup is so good, you should charge for it,” I said. “You go downtown and they have places you can buy cups of soup and they charge four or five dollars for them.”

  “Number one, I am not downtown,” Elijah said, taking out the little purse he kept his money in. “I am Elijah I. Jones, and I am here in Harlem. If I were looking to make money, I would be charging for my soup. What I am looking to do is to bring something to the people. I have added that to my contract.”

  “What contract?” I asked. “You getting money from the city?”

  “The social contract,” Elijah said. “I know that you understand what I’m talking about so you can see how the soup fits in.”

  “This is supposed to be a social club?” I asked.

  “Don’t pay more than five dollars for those bones,” Elijah said. “And don’t forget them because I’m running out of stock. And remember, the first thing I need you to do when you get here tomorrow is to stir the beans in the pot. I’m making black bean soup. Those vidalias are going into that soup.”

  “So what’s this contract?” I said. “Who you working for?”

  “The social contract?” Elijah pushed his head forward and squinted at me. “You don’t know what the social contract is all about? I guess if you can’t tell the difference between a vidalia onion and a regular onion, you just don’t know much, do you?”

  “I guess not,” I said, trying not to smile.

  “Just about everybody in the world is involved in some kind of social contract,” Elijah said. “And that’s true whether they know it or not. People think you know it, the government thinks you know it, and everybody is ready to punish you if you don’t know it. Now how about that?”

  “If you say so.”

  “If I say so?” Elijah put down the jar of cumin seeds he was holding and looked over at me. “Suppose I told you that if you walked down a certain street in New York, you would find hundred-dollar bills just lying on the sidewalk, ready for you to pick up. Would that interest you?”

  “Sure it would.”

  “And suppose I told you the
re was another street, in the same neighborhood, where if you put one foot on the street, you would be shot on sight,” Elijah said. “Now, would that interest your sixteen-year-old butt?”

  “Yeah, that would interest me, too,” I said. “But I never heard of either of those streets, and I know they don’t exist because if they did, everybody would be talking about them.”

  “I can’t fool you, can I?”

  “Not hardly,” I said.

  “Mr. DuPree, the social contract is like those two streets,” Elijah said. “There are rules in the contract that say you’re supposed to act in a certain way and receive a certain benefit. And if you don’t act the way you’re supposed to, you’re going to be left out of those benefits. Now, if you’ve already been on this planet some sixteen years and you don’t know about these rules, or if you’re not clear about them, you have a problem.”

  “I guess I have a problem,” I said.

  “But you don’t really believe that you have a problem because you haven’t heard of the social contract and I’m just an old man making soup for other old people, right?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I answered.

  “Well, Mr. DuPree, you think about it tonight and let me know what you got figured out when you get here in the morning,” Elijah said.

  “And take that onion with you so you two can get acquainted.”

  The job seemed really easy. Elijah’s Soup Emporium, as he liked to call it, was just the bottom floor of a brownstone that Elijah had made into a private dining hall. There wasn’t a huge sign on the place, and if you didn’t see some of the seniors coming in around noon, you wouldn’t know it even existed. Just inside the door, there was a coat rack, and then there was a dining room with long tables with chairs that people ate at. The kitchen was off to one side. The stove was big and modern looking with six burners. There was a large refrigerator, a freezer, a microwave, and more pots and pans than I could imagine anybody ever needing.