Banana Boy

Banana Boy, Black Boy, bright like the day, and as settled as nighttime on an old forgotten road. Always on that sill, never leaving, never sleeping, never anything but passed by. Cause who’s gone bother with a vase, when they don’t know what it holds. They only look for flowers. He looks out the window at the wide, flat, shade giving leaves. He looks at the sky, eyes half closed, while it weeps. He doesn’t mind that his leg’s all wet, the one outside, resting flat against the wall. Even as his pants hang heavy, water-soaked and dripping with the rains fall.

Banana Boy, what are you looking for, gazing out there all the time? The clouds ask every day as they drift along.

“I’m looking for the reason.” He replies. “And that’s it, and that’s all.” Banana Boy knows what they say behind his back, so he keeps it to the windowsill, his body half facing them and half facing the trees. Cause if he didn’t, the bananas’d be gone. Cause one wrong move, and he’d be gone too. So he looks up at the crying sky, with sleep heavy eyes, and he listens to the chatter, and he watches his trees, and he tells the sun it’ll be alright, and he stays like this all day and all night, cause he’s never been naive.

“The flowers must of died.” Two Cumulus say, one rainy, sunny afternoon.

“There’s never been no flowers here, you’re looking all wrong.” Banana Boy answers clouded ears as they shuffle past sun shower skies.

“Yeah, those flowers have long since died.” They double down, high and coaxing-like, as if he were some dumb, stubborn, bull-headed dog.

Banana boy lets his eyes wander back to the plants down below. It should be about springtime now, so light green should sometime soon, be starting to show. But no flowers, never flowers, not on his trees at least. “No they aint.” He mumbles as the water starts seeping through to the sheltered side of his jeans. He twists the fabric, bunching and tugging with rough, gentle hands.

“Banana Boy, how do you keep your bananas so good, with no flowers on those trees? A passing nimbus asks on its way to the store.

Banana Boy recognizes him as the man who owns the fields next door. They don’t look near as good as Banana Boy’s do, but they still won last year for the prettiest in The Grove.

“Rain, work, and knowing,” He answers anyway.

“Yeah, ok,” Nimbus thunders. “Hold on, Banana Boy, who’d you say it was that you knew?”

“The sun, I said, and the sky and the ground.” Banana Boy answers as his body slumps forward in his make-shift’d seat. He rests his elbows on the sill to prop up his shoulders, and twists a little, readjusting his long skinny legs and his weather-cracked feet.

“And how’d you say you met them again?” He barks out a laugh, “You know my memory.”

“I was born with their numbers on the insides of my wrists. When I call, they pick up, and what I need, they have.” He answers as he always does, and Nimbus shakes his thunderous head.

“How do I get to know them then?” He tries something new. And as he stares into his face, he can see the twitch of his eye, the ball of his lips, the shake of his shoulders, the tightening of his fist, and Banana boy realizes Nimbus thinks he’s the butt of a joke. But Banana boy never laughs around the clouds, even as they poke and prod and cackle at him.

“By watching me, as you always do.” He says, looking right at him from his spot on the wall just as Nimbus begins to get puffy, his color shifting from white to dark gray.

“Now you're making up stories, I was born with it too, haven't I said that before. I’ve known them my whole life. Nobody wants what you have, Banana Boy.”

Banana boy wonders at what point did Nimbus’s trees start to grow, when were they planted, and what seeds lay under his prize heavy fields. Deep in the ground, around the corner from his own. I’m not sharing anything else with Nimbus, or whoever asks next, they’ve already gotten enough from me. He thinks, heavy as a sigh.

“Let me know if they have anything good at the store.” He turns back to his trees.

As the days pass over and the sun takes many hues, Banana Boy stays on that windowsill. His pant’s never fully soaked nor dry, cause as soon as it looks like they might make it all the way there, the sky opens up once more, coming down harder than the last time. Bad for Banana Boy but good for his plants. He never complains, just shifts the seam of his pants, so wet stays outside and dry stays under the roof.

One day, he notices, in the middle of a clear night, something moving in the distance. Just past Nimbus’s land, closer to the river and the edges of town. The next time he looks over that way, he sees a small Banana tree. And as the days and nights turn over and over, more of them begin to show. And soon that tiny one, and then all of them, begin to truly rise, and this year, he knows that neither Nimbus nor himself will win the prettiest in The Grove. Cause these trees stretch almost as close to the sun as his own do, and they’re wider than any house he’s ever seen, the leaves shine dark, glossy, and patterned like the shells of Yellowbelly Sliders, and the bananas are plump,and starry-gold expertly shaped, as if God’s own hand made each and every one.

But on them, there isn’t a single banana flower.

On a morning where Banana Boy’s pants are close to being dry, the sun beats down especially hot for early February. He watches the usual clouds pass by his patch of plants, Cumulus and Nimbus and Cirrus and Stratus, he gives a nod to each, and they give an eye back. So Banana boy goes about his usual routine. He watches his trees, eats one or two of their fruits, and holds his eyes open as they threaten to shut, until a woman he doesn’t recognize comes striding past, knocking the sleep clean out the corners and energy back into his rest-less frame.

She walks the path right close to his house with a sure step and a smooth hand shielding her face from the beaming sun. She’s looking not in front of her, but up at the clear indigo sky. He guesses, to check the forecast, or perhaps just on a whim, but as he plays this little game of spot it, he realizes her eyes have spotted him up in his rickety wooden throne, and she’s turned course to make her way over with that sure, close-to-familiar walk.

“Hey.” She steps just under the sill, hand still a visor above pretty brown skin.

“You’re the one with the trees.” Banana Boy acknowledges kindly, even if inside it’s more of a question, but he figures there’s no harm in acting secure.

“Aren’t we all.” She answers in turn. He takes her in for a moment; there’s a new look to her, something you don’t see in The Grove much at all. Her hair's braided back into rows that remind him of one of the Cumulus’s lemongrass fields just a few streets down. Neat and full. Her eyes, big and hickory brown, stare into him like there’s something she’s trying to understand, but from what he can tell, she’s not put off by not knowing up front. Her skin is a few shades darker than his own, like those candy bars that say 70% cacao up in the top left corner. He wonders if she smiles, would it tell him she’s only 30% sweet? He doesn’t think so. His guess would be something closer to 70 or maybe 85.

“If they're the ones I'm thinking about, they look awfully nice. I’d have come over sooner, but I have my own to keep from dying, I’ve got six and a half I watch over, all day and all night, not much time, so I apologize for my less than neighborly welcome.” He explains shifting till both his legs hang over the side of the window so he’s facing her completely.

“A half?” She asks, glancing over at the seven trees making up his plot of land.

“Yeah, the one in the corner over there, can’t ever seem to stay alive more than a month or two, but it always comes back, so I don’t feel right counting it out.” He explains. He doesn’t mention that he's pretty sure somebody’s messing with it, cause he can’t prove it, so he decides not to say it at all, and it’s not really a first conversation, conversation anyway.

“Oh,” She laughs, a boisterous, 95% sound. “Well, if these ones are yours, I see why you watch them so hard.” She acknowledges his couple of trees with an admiring look, and he wonders, what’s there to admire with hers being how they are, and his surely unable to contend.

“So what do you do to get them to look like that?” He asks, wincing at how similar he sounds to Nimbus and the others. But he has no ill intention, he’s only curious, is all. And maybe, just maybe, he wants to keep her talking, perhaps he’s sat by this window too long, and the lack of sleep’s getting to his head.

“I talk to them, and they listen. That’s all you have to do.” and it doesn’t sound so much like a secret as it does an invitation, he looks to his own with a pensive gaze, but shakes it away as quickly as the idea crowds his head.

“I wouldn’t tell nobody else that,” He says after a while. “They like to borrow around here.” He says, then rushes to add, “But don’t worry, I don’t borrow. It's yours, so it’s yours, and I’ll keep doing mine how I’ve been.” She laughs again. He wonders what he said that could have spurred it on, but he finds that he doesn’t mind, not when it cracks her face into a smile like that. He’s pretty sure it’s contagious because he finds himself biting his own lip to keep from smiling in turn. Not that it’s a sickness, he thinks he’d mind.

“They couldn’t do it; it has to come through your bones, and their bones don’t work like ours do. So don’t worry so much about stealing. It might do a little something, but they can’t take it very far. What’s ours is ours, what’s theirs is yours, but whatever they have, could never be mine.” She says, and he nods like he understands, even as understanding flies past his head. He’s sure it’ll come back to him when he’s ready for it to. He swings a leg to the side to settle a sudden antsiness that comes over him and finds that the familiar damp pull of fabric against skin never happens. Just a smooth sliding of two separate textures against each other. He stops a minute to look back up at the sky; the sun’s hotter than it usually is around this part of the year. His gaze drops down to his pants’ leg, and he realizes he can’t tell the difference between the dry and the wet, because both look the same in a way they haven’t in some time.

“So what’s your name?” He realizes he forgot to ask the woman earlier. He hopes she doesn’t hold it against him, not that she seems like she would, but she does seem the type to remember the little things, good and bad and neutral alike.

“Here, they’ve been calling me Banana girl, but my Mama thought it was Ayana,” She says, sarcasm rooting itself through the words. “And you?” She asks after a second. She must be some kind of magic, he realizes after a moment of being too caught up in knowing eyes, and the deja vu of brown skin, as they trick him into remembering who he used to be. Before people stopped asking his name and came up with their own, that gets spit out twisted mouths like a poker and a brand. He wonders when he stopped correcting folks. The sky cracks loudly, but no thunder nor rain comes pouring out, as only the sun’s rays follow, beating down hard. It’s a better feeling than most hot Florida days, especially as his trees sway forward, the leaves shading what they can reach. With a start, he realizes that he remembers now.

He’s the boy with the Banana Trees that reach towards heaven higher than all the rest. He’s a man with deep skin that shines every day, slick with sweat and tanned by the watching sun. His mind's bright, and his spirit’s settled. And his jeans aren’t wet anymore.

“my name,” has always been, as my Mama said it, and my Daddy thought up one day before they left me behind to cry down from Heaven at their son who himself has forgotten. “My name,” as was changed by the clouds as they stole and picked and depleted me day in and day out, so they could rise from my smoking ashes. “My name,” as I remember now, after years of it not mattering whether it was said or left in my throat to die and decompose, to decay until in its place grew a new one with thorns and nasty inflections. “My name,” I say “is Cane.”