If you copy this story, please include this notice and this introductory material.
The Gospel of the Knife is a novel published by Tor Books. Technically, it is a sequel to Dogland, but it’s meant to work as an independent novel.
The following text is not the copyedited version (I don’t have a file of that), so don’t blame Tor for minor mistakes.
This is available under a Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported” license. For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ .
You can learn much too much about me, and also my wife, Emma Bull, at www.qwertyranch.com.
—Will Shetterly
* * *
Dedications by this book’s patrons
To Bridget K. Houlihan, whose romantic hope that every book she cracks open will be the best that the author has to offer has inspired me to make famous her love of literature, love of reading and passion for the arts. May you read this with the speed of a thousand thundering turtles!
—Tammy Green
To the men and women of Bravo Company, Tripler Army Medical Center, from whom I have learned much while they were supposed to be learning from me.
—Thomas A. Amoroso
To Sarah Kathleen McLaren, who was born while this was being written.
—Chris McLaren
And by its author
For Juan, Jelks, Kini, Jed, Ginnie, Kay, Marie, Liz, especially Barbara. And a special thanks to Stephen Borer and all the readers of my web log.
Table of Contents
A Coke bottle spins through the air. Thick green glass, curved like an Earth Momma statue, flicking the afternoon sunlight, as beautiful and strange as a space station or a hummingbird.
You’re pedaling home. You were thinking of drawing a cartoon about a girl who looks like Cindy Hurly. Would she be impressed? Would she think you’re pathetic?
Now a Coke bottle flies through the blue Florida sky.
Toward your head.
You stomp the brake. The rear hub squeals, but you keep moving forward. In the back basket, your books bang like a drunken drummer.
Is a Coke bottle the last thing you’ll see?
Beyond the bottle, a gray Chevy pickup is cruising by. In the cab are three boys, old enough for high school, maybe older. One boy’s arm sticks out of the cab. He has Brylcreemed hair, pale blue eyes, a pouting lip. Is he pointing at this bizarro thing, a Coke bottle hurtling through the air?
No. He threw it.
Your brake catches. You pitch off the seat and onto the crossbar. Putting your balls on an anvil and hitting them with a hammer would do more damage. It might not hurt more.
The bottle passes an inch from your nose. You barely notice. You drop your desert boots onto the sun-baked ground. You want to fall on your side and lie there gasping.
The bottle shatters in the ditch. That’s when you figure it out. The bottle had a target. You.
The pickup roars away. You stand by the side of the road, straddling your bike, curled over the handlebars, gulping air, staring at the truck as it climbs the hill. Its tailgate is thick with bumper stickers: “Support Our Boys in Vietnam.” “America, Love It Or Leave It.” The Confederate battle flag over the words “An Unregenerate Confederate.”
The Coke-thrower leans out the passenger window and shouts, “You one damn lucky hippie!”
You ram your middle finger at the sky and yell, “Kiss my rebel ass, redneck motherfuckers!” It would sound better if your voice didn’t crack, but he’s too far away to hear.
Thanks to your finger, he doesn’t need to.
His grin drops from his face. He yanks his head back in the cab. You lower your arm and smile. You’re a lone dog watching wolves run off. Maybe you only survived, but you feel like you won.
Then the pickup makes a U-turn.
You glance up and down the road. Semis, sedans, and station wagons roll in and out of Gainesville. None of them will worry about a long-haired kid on a bike until the rednecks have done whatever they want.
The pickup cuts across the highway and charges down the shoulder of the road. Gravel and dust stream from it like a cloak. In the cab, the Coke-thrower and two friends with pale crew cuts are laughing. If “Hit the Hippie” is a game, they want first prize.
You yank your handlebars and take the ditch. Your tires bounce on rocks and ruts and grass. Every jolt sends fire up your spine. A book leaps from the back basket. Your front wheel twists on a hubcap. You slide sideways, nearly dumping your bike, kicking the ground to stay up.
And you’re across the ditch. An animal track twists into the woods. You race for it. Weeds slow you. Your back feels as wide as a billboard. Maybe the three kids have shotguns or slingshots. You’ve heard about rednecks catching freaks to shave their heads with rusty razors, rob them, beat them, rape them, kill them.
The woods close around you. Branches slash and snag at your jeans. A truck door slams. Someone shouts, “Run like a nigger, boy! Ain’t nothing gonna save you!”
You’re pedaling your fastest. The track’s too bumpy and twisty to get up real speed. When you roll up against a fallen tree, you shoot a look back.
Leaves rattle and branches break. Someone falls loudly and yells “Shit!” Someone else screams, “I see the little piss-ant!” A pale crew cut bobs up over a clump of bushes.
You grab your bike, yank it over the fallen tree, and jump back on. You think, Keep going. Wear ‘em out. They’re looking for fun. Once they know you’re not it, they’ll give up. Just keep go—
The track ends at a pond. You brake hard.
The pond is about ten feet across and twenty feet long. You can’t guess its depth. It’s covered with green scum and stinks of rotting plants. Or worse. There could be bodies in it. Who would know?
You glance both ways: Bushes and trees, too thick for anything larger than a possum. If you take the brush, you’ll have to leave your bike. You won’t make any speed. You’ll have to break your own path. Making one for the rednecks, too.
You could hide. Burrow into a palmetto grove and hope no rattlers or coral snakes are nesting there. Scramble up a pine tree and force yourself into its branches. Lie on your back in the water and breathe through a straw if you can find or make one in time.
You study the pond. You’ve heard of kids diving into dark water to be caught in barbwire, poisoned by industrial waste dumped by cheap-ass businesses, bitten by cottonmouths, eaten by alligators.
And part of you expects monsters in murky waters, shark-faced mermen and giant octopi who grab your ankle and yank you under. You aren’t about to hide in that pond.
Someone shouts, “We got ‘im now!”
You look back. The trio comes walking easily, grinning as you whip your head from side to side, looking for any sign of salvation.
You can’t guess what they’ll do with you. You doubt they know yet. You wish you’d stayed by the highway. They would’ve gotten in a few punches and kicks, then sped off. Now they can have all the time they want with you.
Someone laughs across the water. You look. So do the boys. You think you have help. It’s only a crow high in a tree.
The boy with Brylcreemed hair laces his fingers and cracks his knuckles. He tells you, “Best say your prayers, boy.”
You stomp on the pedals and plunge into the pond. You don’t have a plan. All you have is panic, so you’re panicking.
Your wheels drop into the pond so fast your fear doubles. Not because of what might be under you. If you can’t get far enough from shore, the rednecks will pluck you out like cats at a goldfish bowl.
Your wheels hit something that bounces a little. Maybe that’s just the air in your tires. You shoot across the pond, hit the far bank with your front wheel, and fall forward into a tangle of grass and weeds.
You scramble to your feet. You’re no worse for the fall, but you’re scared worse. The woods are too thick for you to press on, even if you leave your bike.
The Brylcreemed boy reaches the pond first. He stops, looking for the best place to splash through. The others come charging behind him. At the rear, the biggest of the bunch wears a green John Deere T-shirt stretched tight across his belly. The third boy, with black square glasses like Clark Kent, charges past Brylcreem and leaps. Brylcreem sees him pass and leans forward to follow, with John Deere maybe six steps behind.
You step back. Branches scrape your back, butt, and thighs. You lift your hands in front of your face, maybe to block their blows, maybe to beg them not to hurt you, maybe to keep from seeing what’s coming.
The boy in black glasses splashes into the pond.
And keeps dropping.
He has enough time to open his mouth, but not enough time to scream. Dark water and green scum slap over his head, then settles.
Brylcreem brakes at the bank of the pond, throwing his arms back and windmilling, his mouth and eyes wide. John Deere comes up behind him, saying, “What happened?”
If you were drawing this, John Deere would bump Brylcreem, they both would fall in after Black Glasses, and your long-haired hero, the Kid, would laugh and pedal into the sunset while the wet rednecks waved their fists at him. But Brylcreem and John Deere don’t fall in, you don’t laugh, and Black Glasses stays underwater.
You don’t feel a thing as you watch Brylcreem catch his balance and John Deere look from him to the water to you. Something is wrong with the world. You rode across the pond, and Black Glasses disappeared in it. You feel like you’re puzzling out a riddle: if you consider the clues long enough, the answer will come.
Or it won’t. Instead of an answer, there’s a horrible rush in your guts. Someone is drowning in front of you, even if you can’t see him. Someone is thrashing in the darkness, knowing he’s about to die. Someone is so desperate for air that he’ll fill his lungs in a minute or three, and go unconscious, and die.
Brylcreem and John Deere look at you as if you have the answer or are it.
“Get a stick!” you yell. “Get him out!”
John Deere catches on first. He rips a long branch from a willow tree and pokes it in the stinking pond. The water still ripples where Black Glasses disappeared. It feels like you’ve been standing there all day. Maybe twenty seconds have passed.
John Deere stirs the pond, bumps something, and starts drawing the branch up. It jerks in his grasp. He yells, “Help me!”
Brylcreem grabs onto the branch to pull. You want to do something, but you don’t know what. If you try to cross the pond again, will you fall in like Black Glasses? If you make it across and Black Glasses drowns, what will his friends do?
Gripping the branch and streaming black water, two pale hands rise from the pond. A pale crew cut follows. The glasses are gone. The boy’s head whips around. He gulps air as his friends pull him near. They tug at his arms and T-shirt to help him, but they probably don’t make a difference. He scuttles like a lobster up the branch and onto the bank. Weeds are thick around his sneakers. One leg of his jeans is torn. There might be blood in his white socks, or it might just be mud.
He stands and looks across the pond at you. His eyes are light brown. The right is slightly bloodshot. His face is flecked with pond scum. You half expect him to start cursing you, half expect him to apologize for chasing you.
His eyes widen. He grimaces. Gasping, “Ohgod-ohgod-ohgod,” he bolts for the highway.
Brylcreem and John Deere try to grab him. His clothes are too slick with muck for them to get a hold.
“Wait up!” Brylcreem shouts. He and John Deere run after the boy. John Deere never looks back. Brylcreem glances over his shoulder, then runs on. You can’t describe his expression. If he had a gun, you wouldn’t be reading this.
And you’re alone by the pond as if no one else has been here.
You breathe heavily. Your balls drone with pain. Your ribs are cold with sweat. Your throat feels thick. You smell pine from the woods, sweet decay from the pond, the bitter tang from your armpits. You hear cars on the highway, a dog barking at the bottom of the hill, the redneck’s truck roaring away. You don’t know if you want to puke or cry.
You stand your bicycle up. Overhead, a crow laughs again. “Fuck off!” you yell. It shuts up.
The pond is smooth and still. A dragonfly speeds across it. Shouldn’t there be frogs jumping in it, minnows darting beneath its surface, waterbugs dashing over it?
You have to get away, and you have to know what happened. You put your bike on its kickstand and spot a long branch, dry and white like old bone, as thin as a finger. It would break if you snagged it on anything heavy. You like that. You need to know something’s in the pond, but you don’t want to drag anything out. You take a deep breath and poke the branch in.
It goes deep, touching nothing. You lean over the pond, pushing the branch deeper, then rock back, afraid to get too close. You drag the branch sideways. It hits something and you jerk back, making the sound boys call “squealing like a girl” and girls never call “squealing like a boy.” You expect the Creature from the Black Lagoon to appear.
The Creature stays put. You poke the branch back in.
Something solid is there, maybe a foot underwater on the far side of the pond and nine inches under by the bank where you stand. You trace it with the branch. It’s about a foot wide. Its top curves. It’s long and straight, running the width of the pond—
It’s a log or a post or a broken phone pole. You don’t need to reach into the pond to learn exactly what it is. It’s a pole. Your wheels landed on a pole, and you rode it across. No mystery there. An ordinary pole, hidden by scum and dark water. You’re lucky. That’s all. Very lucky. Very, very lucky—
You laugh. Not because it’s funny. It’s impossible, and you have to free the pressure in your chest. What are the odds there’d be a pole where you need one?
You take another breath. You can’t look away from the pond. How lucky were you? Enough to use up your luck for the rest of your life. You begin to shake. Sweat bursts out again on your skin. If there wasn’t a wall of trees around you, you would run anywhere that’s away.
Looking for a place to run calms you. It’s a pond, a pole, and a great whopping chunk of luck. You tell yourself you should be glad or grateful. But you hurt, you stink of fear, and someone nearly drowned in front of you.
You slap a mosquito, then another. Shade makes the woods cooler than the highway, but the air is hot and damp. Time to get moving.
You aren’t about to try your luck again with the underwater pole. You find the thinnest place in the bushes around the pond and back through, protecting your face while dragging your bike after you.
When you come to a track, you follow it to the path back to the road. At the fallen tree, you stop.
In the theater of your mind, you replay the last minutes: rednecks attack, the Kid runs away. Giving them the finger is dead time in the story. They attack; you run. Giving them the finger is worse than dead time. It’s an idiot move, a red flag waved at a bull by a matador without a sword.
You aren’t a saint turning the other cheek or a samurai refusing to fight inferiors or a smart kid keeping his clothes and bike safe by running away. You’re just a coward running away.
Your nose is wet. So is your lip. You dab the moisture with the sides of your fists, then realize where it’s from. You say, “Fuck.” You can’t say anything else. Something’s swelling in your chest and behind your eyes. If you make another sound, it’ll break free. Then you’ll be a coward who runs away and cries.
A gray squirrel the size of a chipmunk scurries around a tree, sees you, and freezes. You stare at each other. When he doesn’t run off, you wipe your fists on your jeans, hold out an open hand, and whisper, “Hey, li’l Reb. You sure make piss-poor moss.”
Reb sticks with the statue impersonation. You pat your pockets and find a wadded-up bag of cashews. You thought you’d eaten most of them, but the bag is half-full.
You toss a nut near Reb. He darts up to it, touches it with his nose, lifts it in his paws, then pops it in his mouth. You smile, toss him another, and pop one in your mouth.
If Reb minds the salt, he’s too polite to say. You throw more cashews until he stuffs his cheeks, wheels around, and runs into the brush.
The woods aren’t as hot as the highway, but the air is damp and still. Gnats swarm around you. Your bladder needs emptying. You unzip and check yourself: your left ball is red and sore. Otherwise everything seems normal. Meaning you wish everything was bigger and hairier, but knowing you should keep what you have is good. Your piss is yellow, untainted by blood. That must be a good sign.
You touch your left ball several times, trying to decide each time if it hurts any less. Then you imagine drawing this: The Kid crouches in the woods, his hand in his jeans fly, a cloud of thought balloons over his head: “Does it still hurt?” “Ow!” “Yes.” “Does it still hurt?” “Ow!” “Yes.” “Does it still hurt?”
Cindy Hurly might ask if the cartoon is a metaphor for the war. If she does, you’ll shrug as if she caught you being clever and never admit it’s just about being a boy afraid his balls are mashed.
Halloween hit your neighborhood like a storm. Mrs. Moody put a red lightbulb in a plastic skull hanging in a black hood and cape on her porch. The Thornton kids carved pumpkins, five lopsided grins and one scary scowl. The old guy with the noisy black Model A parked it in his yard with a sign: “Capone’s Mortuary. You stab ‘em, we slab ‘em.”
Homes here are small, single-story, cinder-block boxes. Most have carports. None have garages. Fences are chain-link. Driveways are cement or gravel stained with oil. Yards have grass that’s green when it’s rained and brown when it hasn’t. Gardens are a few flowers under a window or at a corner of the lawn. Lawns tend to have a pine tree or two. Several have a car or a truck on blocks.
Your house: long grass, two pine trees, no fence, no cars on blocks. The front door has a cardboard skeleton, legs and arms bent like it’s dancing. Three pumpkins sit on the step: Mom’s, Tish’s, and George’s. Dad thinks holidays are silly. You decided years ago that Halloween is for kids.
The house makes you think of work you hated doing and work you’ll hate having to do. You helped paint the walls pink, Mom’s second-favorite color. You helped turn the carport into the parents’ bedroom by walling it with plywood, then painting the outside brown, Dad’s favorite color, and the inside red, Mom’s favorite. Parked on the lawn next to the house is a big red Chevy van. You helped convert it from a bread van into a camper by building shelves and beds and chair platforms, then painting the inside and outside red, like a barn on wheels. You don’t know what project Dad will find for you next, but there will be one when you least expect or want it.
A pink bike with a chipped white wicker basket and a black bike with a silver banana seat and chopper handlebars lie in the yard—Tish and George are home. The racing bike and the station wagon are missing—Dad’s still at school and Mom’s still at work.
The grass needs mowing. If you start now, Mom and Dad will think good things about their industrious son. You look at the shed where Dad keeps a push mower. He says it’s the “four Es”: economical, environmental, and excellent exercise. That means he bought it at a yard sale for four dollars. Its wheels jam every eight feet, so you have to stop to yank grass out of the axle. It only cuts one blade out of four, so you have to go back and forth if you don’t want the lawn looking like a goat wandered through it.
As you yank open the screen door, Tish calls over the blare of the TV, “Better start mowing, Chris!”
She and George are on the old green sofa with a steel mixing bowl full of popcorn between them. Neither of them look away from the black-and-white screen where Quick Draw McGraw is transforming into his secret identity of El Kabong.
You want to tell Tish she had better start cleaning the living room, but the room looks as good as a place full of secondhand furniture can. This is George’s week to wash dishes and clean the kitchen, so you know it’s already done. George always does what he’s supposed to.
You say, “Better start minding your own business,” and head down the hall.
Tish calls, “Chris? Did you do something? In school?”
You stop and look back.
“A man came by.”
“We didn’t let him in,” George adds.
“He wanted to talk to you.”
You ask, “Why?”
George shrugs, raising his thin shoulders almost to his ears. Tish says, “He didn’t say.”
Two days ago, you skipped PE to get high with the Beastman. Would they send someone to your house because you skipped PE? If they knew you’d gotten high, wouldn’t they send a cop? “What’d he look like?”
“A man,” George says, then laughs at his cleverness and your scowl.
“A man in a suit,” Tish says. “He looked like a minister.”
You point at your neck. “With a—”
She shakes her head. “He just looked like a minister.”
George sings, “Man in black comes, comes to marry, comes to bury, man in black comes, better hide.”
Tish says, “He said he would try again after dinner.”
You say, “I didn’t do anything in school,” and keep walking.
Tish calls, “You better get mowing! Dad excused you yesterday!”
“And he can excuse me again today!” You grab your door, and as you slam it, you hear George say quietly, “Oh oh.”
You open the door, shout, “I’ve got homework! Don’t bug me!” and slam the door harder.
You toss your books on the bed and see the red and white portable record player Mom found at the Salvation Army, undoubtedly because its previous owner realized it was too heavy to be portable and too ugly to keep. The Easy Rider sound track is on the turntable. You click it on, twist the dial as high as it goes, set the needle on “Born to Be Wild,” throw your arms wide, and whirl around the room. You’re a rock and roll god, adored by women, envied by men. You’re a lone rebel biker, cruising crowded freeways and lonely country roads. You crank the bike’s throttle, you slam power chords on an electric guitar, you pound a bank of drums. You jump from the floor to your bed and back again. You could dance everywhere and anywhere without a care for what anyone thinks. You could fight armies of rednecks, cops, and soldiers. You could walk up to Cindy Hurly and ask her if she wanted to see a movie.
The song ends. You turn the player down and look at your schoolbooks. When you jumped on the bed, two bounced off. You bend down to get them. Under the bed, away from the door, as far from Tish and George as possible, is the cardboard box with your comics. You have a new Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. with amazing psychedelic art by Steranko that you’ve only read five or six times.
So you read it again. Maybe you can’t be a super-spy with a foxy girlfriend and a fast car who is always saving the world. You would happily spend your life drawing stories about one.
That reminds you of your notion for a drawing. You get out a sketchbook with a cover filled with doodles of peace signs and marijuana leaves. Most of the pages are full, but you accidentally skipped a few in the middle, so you flip there and start sketching the Kid on a motorcycle, flipping the bird to a dozen rednecks packed into a pickup like the Keystone Cops.
But when you add square-framed glasses to one redneck, you think of Black Glasses looking at you as he crawled from the pond.
You grimace, crumple the drawing up, throw it away, and start another. In this one, in a pool as dark as tar, a scared boy clings to a branch. His eyes and mouth are calm, as if he’ll accept anything that happens next. You can’t tell if he’s rising or sinking.
You stare at the drawing. It isn’t a redneck who fell in a pond. It’s a boy trapped by something he can’t understand. He doesn’t look like Black Glasses. He looks like someone you should recognize.
You hear a knock and Dad’s voice. “Christopher?”
You slam your sketchbook shut. “Come in.”
The door opens. Dad steps in, leaving a hand on the knob. “Tish says you’ve got homework.”
“Uh-huh. I’m doing it.”
He looks around the room, at your schoolbooks on the bed, the comics scattered beside them, the sketchbook on the desk. “It’s your turn to mow.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow. First thing.”
He looks at the turntable. The singer pleads soulfully, “Don’t bogart that joint, my friend, pass it over to me.”
Dad looks at you. “You said that yesterday.”
“I got busy.”
“You got busy the day before yesterday, too.”
You grin. “What can I say? I’m a busy guy.”
He doesn’t smile. “Your mother works hard so the rest of us can go to school.”
“I know.”
“When she comes home, she likes the place to look like humans live here.”
“I’ll come straight home tomorrow and do it.”
“Like you were going to today?”
“Uh-huh.” Since he doesn’t turn away, you add, “Something came up.”
“Uh-huh.”
If he would ask, you would tell him about the rednecks, but you can’t mention them as an excuse. Dad hates excuses. You say, “It’s not a big deal.”
“What your mother wants isn’t a big deal?”
Bad move. You try: “She won’t care if it’s one more day.”
“She shouldn’t have to decide if she cares.” Dad nods. You think he’s going to leave. The record ends. You want to get up and turn it over, but you and Dad have taken positions. Any movement now is weakness or a challenge.
He lets go of the door, looks at the hall, then looks back at you. “What’re you working on?”
“Reading, writing, ‘rithmetic.”
He walks over to you. The rubber soles of his engineer boots make no sound. He reaches for the sketchbook. His hand is big, square, shaded with black hair on brown leather skin, capable of crushing bricks. You think the only things you got from him are big hands. Your fingers are as long as his, but they’re thin, goofy, freckled, and pink with sunburn.
He flips open the sketchbook, riffles forward through blank pages, and stops at the last drawing. “What class is that for?”
He found a lovingly detailed pen-and-ink of a woman carried through the jungle by a gorilla while a man swings on a vine to her rescue. A tattered bit of her skirt and a shredded shirt sleeve are all that remain of her clothes; they don’t hide her breasts or butt. Her hair is black and shoulder-length, like Cindy Hurly’s. Her muscled rescuer wears a tiny tigerskin loincloth. His hair is as light and as long as yours.
You shake your head. Your face burns. You’re blushing, and you hate that.
“Go start mowing,” he says quietly.
You should’ve yanked the sketchbook away when he reached for it. “Now?”
“If it gets too dark, we’ll turn the porch light on.”
“But supper—”
“You eat when you’re done.”
“No.”
You thought you said it loudly, but he asks, “What?”
You stand. “I’m not your goddamn slave! I’ve got rights!” Your fists are tight at your side, like you learned in karate class, so tight you feel the pressure on your fingertips.
Dad looks at your hands. You let them open. You’re too close to him. He could grab you or hit you easily. But backing away would show weakness.
He nods. “That’s so.”
You keep staring. There must be a trick. Finally, you say, “Okay.”
“Rights come with responsibilities.”
“I know.”
“You don’t act like it.”
You walked into that one. You stay quiet.
“Come on.” Dad walks out without another glance at you. If you’re going to mow the lawn now that the day is cooling down, you ought to put on a work shirt or your jean jacket, but you won’t give him a reason to come back for you.
You hurry down the hall. Mom is putting her purse down on the kitchen table as she flips through the day’s mail. Tish lies on the living room floor with a notebook open, working through math problems. George is unwrapping a brick of yellow cheese food, which Mom and Dad say is as good as Velveeta and cheaper besides.
Mom says, “What’s going on?”
“I gotta mow,” you say.
“Now?
Dad, going out the front door, says, “The boy needs to learn some responsibility.”
Mom looks at you. “I’ll make you a sandwich when you’re done.”
You nod, following Dad.
George looks at you and shakes his head.
Tish says, “I told you—”
Mom is watching, so you can’t even scowl at the kids. You close the door with a little extra force, loud enough that anyone inside will know you’re angry, quietly enough that you could say you were just making sure the latch caught.
Dad goes to the garden shed. When he slides its doors wide, you expect him to pull out the push mower. Instead, he hands you a shovel.
You look at him, but he’s walking away. He stops just short of the pine tree at the back corner of the lawn. You walk over. He says, “Hand me the shovel.” You lift it by the shaft. As he takes it, his hand closing just under yours, you feel his strength. You could never yank it from his grip, no matter how hard you tried.
He puts the blade to the grass, rests a boot on it, and leans forward, as easy as stepping down. He lifts a scoop out of the ground, tosses it aside, takes a pace forward, takes another scoop and tosses it, turns and takes two more paces, scoops a third time and tosses it, then turns and takes another pace for the fourth scoop and toss. He jerks his head at the holes and says, “You don’t have to mow inside that.”
You know you don’t want to hear the answer, but you ask, “Why not?”
“Tomorrow, dig that down six feet. I’ll check the depth. Then you can fill it again.”
You stare at the holes. Connect them, and they make a long rectangle. You say, “Besides mowing?”
He nods. “You want to be treated like a man, you get a man’s punishment. In the army, if you wised off to an officer, you got put to digging pits. That one’s yours.”
You say, “Because I said ‘goddamn’?”
He smiles a little. “Because you’re too old to spank and too young to fight.”
“You say ‘goddamn” all the time.”
“One of the few privileges of being Dad. Not having my kids smart off at me is another.”
You look back at the rectangle.
Dad hands you the shovel. “Put that away and start mowing.”
The shovel is heavy. The rectangle is the size of a grave.
Dad says, “Don’t make me tell you again.”
You jerk the shovel up, bringing its blade between you and him. He steps back. “Fuck you!” you scream.
His eyes flick between the shovel blade and you. He’s waiting for you to attack, ready for it, maybe wanting it. You hurl the shovel aside. It hits the side of the house, loud enough to surprise you both. You scream, “Fuck you! Fuck your bullshit, you motherfucking fuckhead!”
He lunges forward with one hand out to grab you, but you’re already turning, already running through the Jacksons’ backyard, already crying while Dad yells, “Chris! Get back here! Get back here now!”
The Jacksons keep a German shepherd on a chain, a lean dog they call Buster, but all the kids in the neighborhood call Killer. He rises up barking. You cross the circle of his territory without veering and run on. Killer keeps barking behind you.
You don’t know if Dad is chasing you, but you know you’re faster on foot. The last time you raced was on a beach near Miami when you were ten, and you beat him.
The red camper fires up as you cross the Jacksons’ front lawn. You dart past their truck and down the dirt street. Three routes meet ahead of you: the street, the county road, and the highway. You take the road without thinking, running along the ditch. Snot pours from your nose, tears from your eyes. Between the tears and the twilight, it’s a miracle you don’t trip and fall, but all you’re thinking is, Run. Get away. Dad’ll kill you. Even if you escape, you’ve thrown your life away. Run. Everything’s fucked up. It’s all fucked up.
You parallel a wire fence, heading for where it ends and the path into the woods begins. You hear an engine coming up fast behind you. It could be a pickup, but you know it isn’t.
You cut across the ditch and scramble up the fence. The weather-browned wire forms big rectangles; the fence is meant to keep large animals from crossing it. For you, it’s a ladder.
At the top, you hear the camper brakes grind and gravel slide under the tires. Dad yells, “Chris, goddamn it, get down!” and slams the car door behind him. “Now!”
You leap. The fence sways under your feet as you launch out, throwing you forward and sideways. Your right foot twists as you land hard in a cluster of bushes. You fall, scratching and snagging yourself on branches. But Dad is on the fence and climbing. You lurch to your feet and run on.
“This is it!” Dad calls. Something in his voice makes you stop. He’s at the top of the fence, looking at you. “You come back now, or you don’t come back at all!”
“Eat shit and die!” you shout, and you run on. When you reach the trail, you wonder if Dad knows about it. He could be running down it now like a grizzly after a rabbit. He could drive to the far side and wait for you. He could call the cops and have them hunting you, everywhere you go, like The Fugitive. He could drive through the night in the big red camper, hunting without sleeping till he finds you.
Then you remember his last words. He could go home and tell everyone it’s goodbye and good riddance. Mom and Tish would cry, but not too hard or too long. They know there would be more peace in the house with you gone. George would laugh. He could move into your room, the second largest in the house, and say you’d sure done a bad job of planning for running off.
Which is too true. You shiver, rub your arms, and walk faster. When the trail forks, you turn on a path you rarely take. As you walk, you rub your nose on the back of your hand. You haven’t cried for years. Today you’re Captain Snot Rivers.
But you know you’ll stop crying soon. Your stomach has started whispering that you haven’t eaten since lunch at school, and then you skipped the lima beans and the red Jell-O with marshmallows.
You pull out your wallet. You have a dollar, enough for six comic books or two orders of burgers and fries at McDonald’s if you drink water. In your jeans’ coin pocket are a quarter, a dime, and two pennies. Make that nine comics or three McDonald’s meals. You poke through your wallet, checking every pocket, though you know you didn’t tuck twenty dollars away for an emergency. Your emergency money is where you can’t get it in an emergency, in a black plastic cube that, when you were nine, you were sure spies would use to hide atomic secrets.
But in the back of your wallet, in a pocket you never use, you find the Penney’s card that you were sure you had put in your desk. Mom insisted on getting it for you. You have ten dollars of credit there. You never used it because Penney’s is the only store in the universe that is less cool than Sears.
Cool is a luxury now. And who would look for you at Penney’s? So you hike to a county road that parallels the highway, then walk along it, sticking out your thumb for every headlight and praying that none of them are Dad’s.
As the sky turns red, a dark sedan slows as it approaches. You squint into its lights. It stops precisely beside you. You think about unmarked police cars. Should you take to the woods?
The passenger door opens. A dim overhead light shows the driver. He wears a dark suit, a white shirt, a dark tie, a dark hat. The hat puts his eyes in shadow, but when he smiles, you like him a little. He says, “I can take you to the crossroads.”
He seems a bit conservative to be picking up a long-haired kid, but he’ll save you two miles of walking. You say, “Thanks,” and slide in.
The overhead goes out when you pull the door shut. The car rolls back onto the road. The twilight seems very quiet. The car smells smokey, like pipe or cigar smoke, which makes you think of Dad and wish you had just mowed the damn lawn.
You don’t pass any other cars. The man’s engine is a well-tuned purr. He drives precisely at the speed limit; you can see his speedometer stay on the forty-five. Dad would approve.
Your hand starts shaking. You want to cry again, but you aren’t about to do that in front of anyone, especially not a stranger. You squeeze your fist.
You suddenly feel certain that someone’s in the backseat, maybe a lot of people, so you turn. The long backseat holds nothing but shadows.
You wish the radio was on, or the man would talk about something like sports that you could listen to and not care about. You say, “I appreciate the ride.”
He keeps his gaze on the road. You think he’ll ignore you. Then he says, “I spend a lot of time working. It’s nice to do something purely to help someone, no matter how small it is.”
“Yeah.” You wonder if that includes giving money to runaways, but you won’t beg until all you have is gone.
“Where’re you going?”
“To the mall.” If he volunteers to drive you there, you can accept that without feeling you had asked for favors.
“What’ll you do?”
You shrug. You want to pick oranges or hawk newspapers or shovel coal on freighters bound for the Suez Canal. If you discovered a diamond mine in the Andes, the whole family would be sorry they hadn’t treated you better. You say, “Hang out.”
The man nods. “I wish I could drive you there. I have an appointment nearby.”
“You’re not from around here?”
He shakes his head. “Business brings me here fairly often.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m in collections.” He’s obviously successful. You don’t recognize his sedan, but it’s new, clean, unblemished, big enough to carry Catholic families. His suit and hat are made of something soft that soaks up light. You think about asking if it’s cotton or wool, but you can’t think of a way to ask and sound manly.
You say, “Do you like it?” You can’t tell if his eyes flick from the road to you and back again, or whether he has heard at all. You add, “Collections. Is that good work?”
He makes a sound between a cough and a laugh. “People are rarely glad to see me.”
“That sucks.”
“It’s a job.”
“You think about quitting?”
“Often.”
“Dad says—” You pause, hearing what you’re saying, but you’ve already started the sentence, so you swallow and press on. “You should only do what you want or what needs doing, so long as you don’t hurt anyone.”
“That’s not as easy as it sounds.”
“Nope. The old man thinks it just applies to him, anyway.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Like mowing the lawn. It’s not fun, and no way it needs doing.”
The man’s head turns toward you. “Oh?”
“It’s grass. What’s it hurt to let things grow?”
He looks back at the road. “Weeds sprout up. Old growth strangles the new. The green shoots never see the sun.”
“You sound like a gardener.”
He smiles, more widely than before.
A traffic light is ahead, glowing yellow, at the first major intersection on the way into town. As the car slows, you say, “Thanks.”
“No. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For reminding me it’s good to do work that needs doing.”
Something swells in your chest. “That’s Dad, not me.”
“He passed it to you. You passed it to me. All you can do is thank those who give what you need.”
“I guess.” The car stops. You open the door, thinking you don’t want to hear any more about how wise your idiot father is.
“Let me give you something.”
You stop, halfway out of the door, and look back. If he offers money you haven’t asked for, can you take it and respect yourself?
His hands stay on the wheel. He says, “Enjoy it. Enjoy it all.”
You frown. Did he give you something and you didn’t notice? Then you understand. He’s just giving you advice to make himself feel good. You say, “That’s it?”
He nods. “Yes. Because it ends when you least expect it.”
“Uh-huh.” You look down the road. Headlights are coming, maybe your next ride.
The man waves. “See you later.”
“Sure.” You close his door, thinking how unlikely that is. You’re running away to New Orleans or Los Angeles or New York, Paris or Algiers or Amsterdam, Timbuktu or Fiji or Singapore. His job would have to take him pretty far for him to see you again.
The dark sedan rolls away quietly and turns south at the light. You wait to cross the intersection. An ambulance races by, siren screaming, red lights strobing, heading the same direction as the sedan.
You run across the highway and stick your thumb out, but the next car isn’t your ride. Nor the one after that, nor the one after that.
You stand at the intersection for half an hour, long enough for the sun to drop below the horizon, long enough to have walked from where the sedan picked you up, long enough for the ambulance to return, slow and quiet, lit only by its headlights. You wonder if you’ll be standing here until the dark sedan passes by again.
You hug yourself, rubbing your arms, thinking you’re a fool to run away. You’re fourteen and look it, or younger. You could hope to mow lawns, if you had a lawnmower. What else can a homeless kid do? If you’re lucky, you could hustle dope on the street. But who would front you the dope? All you have to sell is your small, pimply, graceless, unloved and unlovable self.
When headlights flash across your face, you try to smile like a teenager who happens to be jacketless on a cool night, who doesn’t need a ride but would happily accept one. Cars keep passing. You fight the urge to use the Beastman’s technique, lowering your thumb for each car that doesn’t stop and raising your middle finger.
You shiver and buff your arms. You wish you had a watch. An expensive one. You could pawn it in Las Vegas, get into a game with high-rollers, win a Texas oil field with a lucky hand, and turn over your virginity to a trio of keno girls.
Better yet, find a commune of hippies who’ll offer you food, drugs, and sex with all the women. You can give them your art, painting murals, drawing tattoos, designing T-shirts. You’ll all live by the sea and swim naked in the sun, then lie on the sand like seals. There’ll be music, books, and laughter. When straights see you and the hippies, in your wild clothes and wild hair and wild, wild joy, they’ll sneer in disgust to hide from themselves how completely they envy you.
That’s the best plan. It only calls for hitching three thousand miles to San Francisco and asking where a commune is.
Headlights come out of the dusk. They belong to a vehicle shaped like a bread box. Like the red camper.
You step back, then see this van’s smaller. Its corners are more rounded. It’s covered in blotches like an animal’s hide. It’s a Volkswagen painted in blues, yellows, and reds that swirl around peace symbols and stylized doves.
You thrust out your thumb. The brake lights come on. The van slows and pulls over. You run toward it, grinning because you were thinking about hippies and a freakmobile shows up.
The rear door slides open. Music blares, a tune from Revolver. Smoke smells so strong and sweet you know you would see it in daylight. A skinny albino with a huge Afro leans out. “Squeeze in, man!”
Grinning, you obey. The van holds nine people already, two in front, seven on a blue-striped mattress in back. There are three girls, six guys, all older than you, all dressed cool: faded denim, baggy bells, tie-dyed tees, long-sleeved paisley shirts, chambray work shirts, fringed leather vests. They must be a band with roadies and groupies, but where are their instruments?
A skinny redhead in a green and orange dashiki slides over, smiles widely, and pats the mattress between her and the albino. “Going far?” you shout hopefully over the Beatles.
“All the way,” says the driver, a young Pancho Villa with a ponytail. Everyone laughs, except for a dark-skinned girl in an army jacket. You laugh, too, and squeeze in beside the redhead. The albino slams the door, turning everyone into shadows.
“I’m gonna make the Frisco scene,” you offer.
“Far out,” says the redhead.
“We’re going all the way to the U.,” says the girl in the army jacket, with a glance at the driver that he misses. You can’t tell if she has no patience with you or him or the world.
You shrug. The university is four miles farther from home. “Every little bit helps.”
She looks at you, then faces forward as the van bumps back onto the street. Her Afro is smaller than the albino’s. Her army jacket makes you think of Black Panthers and Weathermen. Maybe this group blew up a draft center, and you’ll all be arrested, and you’ll get life in prison like the Birdman of Alcatraz. You’ll become a prison lawyer and free yourself, but not till you’re ninety years old. Everyone will say it’s a tragedy, which will show Dad.
The redhead says, “Do you believe in love?” You can’t glance away without being rude. Her eyes are pale green. She has a pimple above her left nostril. Does she mean free sex, a great idea in theory, but which you’d rather not try in the van in front of the others without some private practice? Or does she mean world peace, equally great in theory, but which people like Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon make you think is impossible? The right answer may get you stoned or laid. You nod hesitantly.
“I knew it!” She clutches your thigh just above the knee. “You have a beautiful soul. I can tell.”
Her touch tingles so strongly that you fight the urge to flinch. It’s not pain or pleasure. It’s just a tingle that’s almost too strong to bear. If you jerk away, everyone will know you’re a kid who never had a girl put her hand on his leg.
Army jacket girl says to the redhead, “You can tell everybody has a beautiful soul.”
The redhead doesn’t hear what’s under the girl’s words. Neither does the albino, who nods and says, “She’s special.”
“That’s sure true,” army jacket girl says.
The redhead smiles at the albino, then asks you, “What’s your name?”
You open your mouth to say “Chris.” You’ve always been Chris or Christopher or, when Dad or Mom were very mad, Mark Christopher Nix. But Dad never sounded mad when he mentioned Uncle Mark, and Mark Twain is famous, and you could use a link with greatness. “Mark,” you say, feeling like a liar.
“Hi, Mark. I’m Tina, and—” The redhead gestures around the van. “—that’s Juan, Dixon, Bodacious, Lee, Speedo, Sunshine, Nicky, and CC.”
You glance at them and nod. The driver’s Juan, the albino is Speedo, army jacket girl is CC, the one you might get lucky with is Tina.
You like riding with Tina’s thigh against yours. You wish the hippies were going farther than the U. You wonder if they have a place where you could crash. You smile at each of them. They smile back. “This is so cool,” you tell Tina, then worry she’ll think you’re uncool for saying it out loud. She smiles wider and squeezes your thigh. Your jeans are tighter than they were a moment ago.
At the rear of the van are wooden shelves with bungee cord stretched in front of them to keep things from sliding off, like 8-track tapes, collections of Pogo cartoons, and a wadded-up motorcycle jacket. The lowest shelf holds a row of dark books and a brass incense burner.
That must be to cover up the smell of burning weed. You hope they’ll light up soon. You bounce a bit on the mattress. The Beastman will go bug-eyed when you tell him about a stoned orgy in a hippie van.
The books by the incense burner are identical: shiny black covers, gold lettering. Maybe they’re college texts, and the van’s full of people taking the same class. The shape of the title looks familiar. Two words. Holy—
You’re Wile E. Coyote standing on air, afraid to look down at the canyon’s bottom. You’re not going to get laid. You’re going to get lectured.
Tina’s touch on your thigh has less meaning than a nurse’s. Her grip tightens as if she’s afraid you’ll dive out a window. She says, “It is cool. Because the coolest of all is Jesus.”
There should’ve been a warning on the van: Beware of the Jesus Freaks. No sex and drugs. Just tea and hugs. The mall is only a few blocks away. You say, “Hey, I should get out here. I gotta grab some things before I split.”
Tina says, “Mark. Don’t go. When Jesus knocks, you have to answer.”
You say, “Or he won’t come back?”
Light from a passing car flicks across CC. She’s far from pretty: round-faced, gap-toothed, wide-mouthed, small-chinned. But something touches the edge of her lips that’s almost a smile, and you like it.
“Oh, he’s coming back,” says Juan. “For those who don’t reject him.”
The van slows to turn toward the U. You point at the corner. “This is good.”
“Jesus loves you,” Tina says. “Don’t you want to be loved? You can crash with us, if you want. You can learn with us.”
The van pulls to a stop. The 8-track tape chunks to the next song, but Juan yanks the tape out before it can start. He says, “Just ask Jesus into your heart. He loves you.”
CC’s smile is different from the others. They want you to stay. She thinks this is funny. You say, “Why do I have to go first?”
“Huh?” asks Speedo.
“If Jesus loves me, why won’t he say it first?”
CC covers her mouth. Tina says, “He’s been saying it all your life. You just haven’t heard.”
“Maybe he should speak up.”
Juan’s smile fades. “Maybe you should listen up.”
You say, “I’m s’posed to believe without even a miracle?”
“Love is the miracle,” says Tina.
You shake her hand from your knee and slide open the door. “Thanks for the ride.”
Speedo says, “You’re running toward Satan. Turn back now.”
“I mocked, just like you,” says Juan.
“Mark,” Tina says. “Don’t you want to be saved?”
You shake your head. “Not by a God who hides, then damns people who can’t find him.”
You walk toward the intersection. The night is cold after the warmth of the van. Coldness suits you. The world is full of idiots and arrogant bastards, and you will never get laid.
Behind you, Speedo yells, “Hey, where’re you going?” The van door slams. You turn fast, expecting Jesus Freaks with baseball bats coming to pound you into the pavement for rejecting God’s love.
CC walks toward you, calling back over her shoulder, “Shopping!”
Speedo says sadly, “Thought you were coming to the revival.”
She spins to face him, her army coat swirling around her skinny legs, and keeps walking backward toward you. “Next time.”
Tina calls, “How’ll you get home?”
CC says, “I can catch a bus.”
Juan calls, “You’re always welcome at the Jesus Pad!”
“Cool!” CC lifts her hand over her shoulder and waggles it, a queen dismissing her subjects.
The van belches smoke as it pulls away. People shout, “So long!” and “See you!” to CC. No one shouts anything to you, not even “Fuck off!” which you would rather like.
CC, walking up to you, looks like a kid in her big brother’s coat. In the van, she seemed taller. You catch yourself staring and stalk off. Before you’ve taken two steps, she calls, “Hey! Wait up!”
She gives the first full smile you’ve seen from her. You say without thinking, “Cheshire Cat.”
She lifts an eyebrow.
You’re embarrassed. You can’t think of anything but the truth: “In this light, your smile’s about all I can see.”
The smile disappears.
Does she think you’re making fun of her skin? “It’s a good smile,” you say quickly.
“Good.” The smile returns and is gone like a firefly’s flicker.
Does she think you think she’s hot? You don’t. You liked a black girl in sixth grade as a friend, but the only blacks you think sexy are famous adults: Diana Ross of the Supremes, Peggy on Mannix, Uhura on Star Trek. You say, “Listen, catch your bus. You’re not going to convert me.”
“Did I try?” She walks past without a glance. She smells like cigarette smoke and patchouli.
Across the street is the mall, a gray block surrounded by an asphalt parking lot. A glowing orange pumpkin sits over the front door, a beacon for ghosts and witches lost on a foggy night.
Lining this side of the street are low houses made of brown brick or white wood. One yard is strung with cobwebs over wooden tombstones like a cow town’s boot hill: Kid Enyew, Daniel Booze, Mild Bill Hickup, the Two-Pun Kid. The house’s curtains are open. At a table, a man and a girl laugh as a woman wipes spaghetti sauce from a little boy’s chin. They’re in their shirt sleeves. Supper must be hot from the stove.
You shiver, stuff your hands into your jeans pockets, and follow CC, asking, “So what do you want?”
That gets you a glance. It’s not friendly. “There a law against shopping?”
“You just decided to shop?”
She shrugs. “My cousin’s birthday’s next week. I don’t have a present for him.”
“Oh.”
“And it gets me away from those fools.”
“You’re not a Jesus Freak?”
She flashes the big smile. “Gets me out of Auntie’s house. She don’t want me running around with no boys. But Christians going to hear Christian music, that’s different, even if the boys look like no-account hippies.”
“Uh-huh.” The light at the corner turns red. You both stop, side by side on the curb.
She says, “Why San Francisco?”
“Why not?” She looks at you like that’s a stupid answer. You add, “It’s cool. Gainesville sure isn’t.”
“I hear that.” The light changes, and she starts across.
You hesitate. If you let her go ahead, the two of you will naturally separate. When she heads for one mall entrance, you can take the other. That’d be the path of least resistance. You walk slowly. The distance between you increases, a few feet, then half the wide street. When “don’t walk” flashes, you run to get out of the intersection.
And find yourself stepping onto the far curb beside CC. She says, “I’d go to San Francisco if I could.” She keeps her eyes on the mall as she walks. “I’d go anywhere, if I could.”
Is she hinting for an invite? It’ll be tough enough for one kid to catch rides. Two would halve your chances. Especially if one was black. You duck that with a question: “Why don’t you?”
“Auntie’s not so bad. ‘Cept when she gets a mad on. Then you got to keep out of her way till she settles.” CC tugs up the sleeve of her army coat. The skin of her forearm is blotched like camouflage.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Uh-huh. Looks like nothing.”
CC shrugs. “She was boiling pigs feet, and I sassed her. Should’ve waited till I reached the hall.”
You touch one of the blotches. It’s scar tissue, harder and cooler than the surrounding skin. “Must’ve hurt—”
And someone says, “Huh. Is that a white boy and a nigger gal?”
Your hand jerks back from CC’s arm. If you were a cat, the hair on your back would point to the sky. You look up, less to see the danger than to find an escape.
About forty feet ahead, two men walk toward you. Their clothes are clean but speckled with paint or oil. One man’s potbelly bulges under a jacket with the “Standard Oil” logo. The other is lean and muscular, maybe a one-time high school sports hero. They could be the three rednecks’ favorite uncles.
Potbelly carries a gallon of paint. He says, “Or is it the other way ‘round?” If he swung the can into your head, he might crush your skull.
Sports Hero says, “Could be two girls. Hard to say.”
Ignore them, you think. They just want you to feel like you don’t even deserve to be called a— You can’t end the thought. What should you be called? What should you do? Running away and getting beat up are equally terrifying.
CC looks at the men, then takes your hand in hers. Her palm is softer and warmer than you expected, softer and warmer than any hand that has ever touched yours. You’re too surprised to shake it free.
Sports Hero says, “Think they’re lez-beans?”
Potbelly shrugs. “Might could be.”
CC tugs to start you walking. Her grip is soft, but strong. You could wrench your hand free and run away, but you don’t.
Potbelly says, “Might be they don’t know what they are.”
Sports Hero laughs and grins at you.
CC stares at the men as you draw near. Her head’s high and her chin’s raised. The part of your brain that isn’t trying to keep you from pissing your pants thinks, That statue. Cleopatra? Nefertiti? You look at the doors to the mall and make yourself breathe slowly. All your attention is on the men at the edge of your sight. You want to ask CC if she knows the risk that she’s running. Every story you know of mixed-race couples ends with the boy beaten, the girl raped, one or both dead.
Sports Hero says, “What is this country coming to?”
Your hand is sweating in CC’s grip. Your heart must be on a trampoline. CC says loudly, “How ‘bout splitting a milk shake at McDonald’s, sugar pie?”
The men keep coming without changing speed or direction. CC squeezes your hand and adds, “You fancy chocolate?”
You nod, then cough to clear your throat. “Yeah.” Your voice is painfully thin and scratchy in your ears. “I do.”
“Christ,” says Potbelly. The men turn toward you. Your whole body is a stretched cord. You tell yourself to jerk CC’s arm and run.
But the men keep turning, cross four feet in front of you, and get in a station wagon with wood grain paneling.
You and CC walk on. If you draw this, the Kid will tell a beautiful girl with an Afro four times as large as her head, “Chocolate and vanilla, my favorite combination!” And he’ll kiss her while twelve giant, milk-white men turn brick red and steam blows out of their ears.
A white woman leaves the mall, dragging a three-foot pirate by the hand. She scowls at you and walks faster. The pirate looks back over his shoulder as the woman hurries away. CC keeps holding your hand. You want her to let go, but you can’t be the one to pull free, no more than you could’ve run from the men.
At the entrance, CC steps ahead to hold the door for an old black man in a business suit who has two heavy Sears bags in his arms. He starts to nod at her, sees you and your hand in hers, shakes his head sadly, and walks out.
CC drags you down the long walk of stores. “Where you wanna go?”
Where no one will stare at me. The thought shames you. You’re afraid of your father, you’re afraid of bigots, you’re afraid of strangers thinking you’re strange for holding hands with a dark-skinned girl. You’re afraid of admitting you’re afraid. You say, “Penney’s.”
She nods and pulls you down the mall. Maybe she won’t let go first. You say, “What’ll you do if I have to go to the bathroom?”
She glances at your hands and smiles. “You got to go?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.”
And that, you think, is a draw. You smile, too. Smiling must be contagious, because two college-aged girls in bell-bottoms grin at you and CC. One raises her fingers in a V of peace. You flash the sign back. br />You would almost think that smiling could bring love to the world, if a security guard’s look didn’t say, “I know you’ve been shoplifting and I hate that I can’t prove it.”
CC pulls you on, past stores selling things no one needs. The music is an orchestra doing an old pop song that no one except you must be able to hear, because if anyone could hear it, no one would play it, right?
CC says, “Where you go to school?”
“George Washington Carver.”
“Jefferson Davis.”
You nod. Jefferson Davis is the east side junior high. She’s younger than you thought.
She says, “What grade?”
“Ninth.”
“Eighth.”
“Eighth?” She’s definitely younger than she looks.
She laughs. “Comes after seventh.”
“Thanks. Math’s my worst subject.”
“Don’t pay it no mind.”
“I thought you were older.”
“How old you want me to be?”
You shrug. You don’t care what she wants. She’s not just dark and skinny and big-eyed. If she’s a year younger than you, she’s only a kid.
Without looking at you, she adds, “I can call my auntie and say the concert’s gonna run late.”
Is she flirting? If she wants to make you uncomfortable, she keeps succeeding. Maybe she hates all whites and wants to see you squirm. You should ditch her when she goes to shop. You shrug. “Where you gonna look for your cousin’s present?”
“Penney’s.”
You glance at her.
She says, “Good a place as any.”
“What do you want to get him?”
“Something stupid. Auntie thinks he needs a new tie. He ain’t getting no new tie, I can tell you that.”
You laugh. “Yeah, you can tell me that.”
She lifts her head for a down-the-nose smile. “I can tell you all kinds of things, white boy. You wait.”
You stop in the middle of the mall. Shoppers have to walk around you. You don’t care. “Why do you call me that?”
“You’re not a white boy?”
“You’re messing with me.”
She nods without a smile.
“Should I call you ‘black girl’?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“How you say it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now, don’t get all moody. White boys are pretty.”
A blond woman with a stroller heads right for you and says pointedly, “Excuse me!” You step aside, pulling CC with you, and glare at her.
“What, you don’t like being pretty?” CC says. “Girls like pretty boys. You got it going with that long hair and them soulful eyes.” You keep staring. She nods, then adds, “Serious.”
“Don’t call me ‘white boy.’”
“Sure.” Her voice has no emotion. Her hand slips out of yours. The air on your moist palm is cool.
You say, “Black girl.”
She frowns, grins, and starts to slap you, just fast enough that you have to catch her wrist. You want to tickle her, but the security guard is walking by with a look that says one of you had better buy something soon.
You pull on CC’s hand. “C’mon. CC.”
“Sure thing,” she says. “Mark.”
And you head into Penney’s, drawing her through the perfumes and women’s shoes and kitchen appliances. The store, like the mall, has a typical number of typical families, mostly white, mostly looking like they learned to dress by watching TV shows about white families who looked like like they learned to dress by watching TV, etc. The clerks around the makeup counters are ghosts, witches, devils, and catwomen. Deeper in the store you spot a soldier, a baseball player, and a grotesque hippie in a shiny wig, a plastic necklace with a huge peace symbol, a polyester green shirt, and pink flares that look too stupid to be insulting to anyone except the woman wearing them.
Everyone in the store glances at you just a little longer than they would if you were alone. Then they look away. They don’t see two kids shopping. They see a long-haired freak and a black militant invading their territory. They fear you because you’re the future, and the future is always frightening.
“We’re the future,” you tell CC.
“You’re weird.”
“The future is weird.” You both grin.
She says, “I’m glad I told ‘em to stop for you.”
“You did?”
“Juan said the van had enough riders, but I had a feeling about you.”
“I thought you didn’t like me at first.”
“Meaning you think I like you now?”
“Well—”
She smiles. “Yeah, white boy. I like you.”
Do you like her? You think so, but you’re afraid to say it. You say, “Cool.” She grins like that’s an answer, and you realize it is.
“May I help you?” says a bride in an ancient gown. Her face is half-hidden by a veil. Plastic spiders cling to it. Her accent is as thick as CC’s. Under the veil, white wig, and thick white powder, she reminds you of your mother: short, fortyish, maybe twenty pounds over what she thinks is her perfect weight. But you would know what your mother was thinking the second you saw her face. The bride has a smile that wouldn’t falter if she shot you.
“Yes’m.” CC points at a clear acrylic and string device, five balls hanging next to each other in a frame. “Is that the stupidest thing you got?”
The bride studies CC, then looks fast to either side to see if anyone is near, pulls one ball out and lets it drop. It bangs into the others, and the far one shoots out, comes back, and hits the others, sending the first out again. As the balls clack back and forth, the bride says, “What you think?”
CC reaches over to stop the balls, then lifts two from each side and drops them. As they bounce outward and back, CC says, “It don’t get stupider.”
CC and the bride smile. CC says, “What’re you after, Mark?”
What you need is a jacket and a sleeping bag. You can’t get both for ten dollars. You ask the bride, “Do you have ponchos?”
She shakes her head. “Got to go to one of them hippie shops down by the university.”
A hippie shop would not take a Penney’s card. “How about a blanket?”
“Over here.” She leads you away from her counter. CC stays behind, testing bounce patterns with the acrylic balls.
“What were you wanting?”
You think, Something cool. You say, “An Indian print? Or Mexican?”
The bride looks at you. You know she’s thinking, Where does this boy think he’s shopping? She says, “We just got these.”
The blankets look like blankets from Penney’s: screamingly synthetic and too ugly to be forgettable. The only one under $10 is an acrylic baby blue bedspread. Why didn’t you ask for the uncoolest blanket in the universe? Then you would be pleasantly surprised. This is probably only the uncoolest blanket in Florida. “I’ll take that.”
She pulls it out of the shelf, then looks over at CC. “That girl—”
You brace yourself for a speech about God wanting the races to stay pure. You hear, “—she’s got more to lose than you. Think on that. You could hurt her bad, just ‘cause you want to have your fun.”
“I wouldn’t do that, ma’am.”
She keeps looking at you, then nods and heads back to her counter. “Cash or charge?”
You hand her the card. CC touches the toy of hanging balls, says, “I’ll take this,” and digs through the pockets of her jacket, finding a tightly folded dollar bill in each. She puts five on the counter and tells you as the bride hands back your Penney’s card, “Didn’t know I was out with a rich boy.”
“You’re not,” you say fast, thinking for the first time in days about Grandpa Abner, who died two years ago in northern Minnesota, and Grandma Letitia, who is dying in Sun City, Arizona. If Grandpa Abner was still living, you would hitchhike north and ask to stay with them. Grandpa Abner never wanted you to change a thing about yourself. But Grandma Letitia would make you cut your hair and never wear jeans or T-shirts or anything cool.
As you sign the sales receipt, CC says, “Then I best not ask if you got a couple pennies for the tax.”
One dollar, a quarter, a dime, and two pennies, you think. One pair of jeans, a T-shirt, underwear, socks, and desert boots. And Florida’s ugliest blanket. You’re not rich. You’re free. Freedom sure can suck.
You hand both pennies to the bride. She nods as if you’ve passed a test and rings up CC’s cousin’s present.
“Y’all come back now,” the bride calls as you and CC pick up your purchases in their paper bags.
CC takes your hand, saying, “Sure thing.” Having her hand in yours is beginning to feel as normal as everyone-is-staring-at-me-and-some-of-them-want-to-hurt-me-bad can possibly feel. The smart thing to do would be to drop CC’s hand. So you don’t.
Walking back through the mall, she says, “Who’s the blanket for?”
“Me.” She waits, so you add, “I need something to keep warm.”
“Thought you were just hot-blooded.”
You don’t know what to say, so you shrug.
“You’re going to sleep in that?”
“That’s how much credit I had on the card.”
“You going to catch a ride to California tonight?”
You think about hitching at night, unable to see the people who stop until you open the door and the overhead light shows their faces. You’re tired. As soon as you leave the mall, you’ll be cold. “I’ll crash somewhere and take off tomorrow.”
“Want to walk me home?”
“Have you got someplace to crash?”
She laughs hard. “Auntie, this white boy followed me home! Can I keep him?”
Her laugh makes you join her. Her lips are a dark rose, her teeth are pearl. Her lips are where her outside ends. Her tongue is her inside flirting. Would kissing her be different than kissing Cindy Hurly?
Her eyes are on yours. Is she thinking about kissing, too? Do you want your first kiss to be with a black girl? You feel bad for thinking about her skin, but the question doesn’t go away. You don’t know her. You’re in the middle of a mall. If Cindy Hurly threw herself into your arms in the middle of a mall and said, “Take me, you fool!” you would be too embarrassed to kiss her while anyone was looking.
You look away. The mall guard is fifty feet back, glaring at you. You’re grateful. His presence lets you tell CC, “We’re being watched.”
She looks away. “Want to give him something to look at?”
For an instant, you’re sure that’s an invitation to kiss her. And it would be funny to freak out the guard. But it wouldn’t be funny if he claimed he saw you stealing something. “We should get going.”
“Okay.”
Is she disappointed? You’re not sure. But kissing her would be a mistake. Leave Florida, go to California, forget you ever had a life here.
Her hand is still in yours. She’s definitely playing some game. You should let go. If she thinks that means you’re too racist or too straight, so what? In another minute, she’ll go home and you’ll go looking for a place to sleep.
The mall guard stops following when you go out. Past the parking lot lights, the sky is black. Only the number of cars on the street tells you that the night is early. A breeze rolls leaves under parked cars and across the asphalt. You stop by a trash can and release CC’s hand.
You pull the boring blanket out of its bag, stuff the bag in the trash, and shake the blanket out. CC waits. You say, “Do you get the bus here?”
“What do you mean?”
“You told the Jesus Freaks you could get the bus.”
“Oh.” She hefts her shopping bag. “That was before I found something for Isaac.”
“Ah.” You throw the blanket around your shoulders. The acrylic settles lightly, not like the wool Navajo blanket at home. You draw it tight around you. If you cut a hole in it for your head, would it unravel? You wish you could add a hood and a drawstring to make it a cloak. A cloak would be cool. You look like a kid who stole a blanket from a Holiday Inn.
“Well,” you say. “I’ll walk you home.
And her hand is back in yours so quickly you’re not sure how it happened.
Porch lights are going dark on University Avenue. The little trick-or-treaters have gone home. No one wants high school kids. You say, “Seems wrong. On Halloween, people should stay up till midnight.”
“There’s a party at the university. We could go.”
You stare at CC. “What about your aunt?”
“She goes to sleep early.”
“You could get out?”
CC laughs. “Oiled my window. I be gone like a cool breeze.”
“Wouldn’t we need costumes?”
“Hippies are too lazy to wear costumes.”
“They might kick us out ‘cause we’re kids.”
CC stops and studies you. “A pin would make your blanket into a cape. You can be Batman or the Sheik of Araby.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll find something.” She turns off University Avenue onto a quiet side street. It’s the city version of your neighborhood: cluttered yards, peeling paint, old American cars. Music comes too loudly from a nearby house: Motown, not rock. You stop walking.
“What?” CC says.
“Is it all right for me to be here?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“‘Cause, you know, I’m white.”
“Thought white folks figured they could go anywhere.”
“Stupid ones. I’m all for equal opportunity, but I haven’t been beaten up by blacks, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
She smiles. “I’ll protect you.”
“Much appreciated, ma’am.”
Fewer houses here are decorated for Halloween, but more of them still have porch lights on. From one comes Dracula and Frankenstein’s Bride. He wears a dark purple suit, white turtleneck, gold medallion, white gloves, and a dark cape with red lining. Her hair is as big as her head. The sides are streaked like lightning bolts. Instead of bandages, she wears a sleeveless gold jumpsuit, skintight to the knees where it flares into bell-bottoms. You stare without thinking because every detail is perfect. You wish you and CC were them.
As the couple pass by, Dracula raises his fist slightly in a salute and says in a low, quiet drawl, “Right on, bro.”
You stifle the grateful smile you want to give him and say, “What it is.”
Frankenstein’s Bride laughs, maybe at that, maybe at something else. You don’t care. As soon as you’re past them, you grin.
CC frowns. “‘What it is’?”
“Isn’t that right?”
“It’s better than ‘Howdy-doody.’”
You laugh. “I’ll try that on the next brother we meet.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Sure, I would.”
“You’d be scared.”
“Nah.”
“Yeah.”
You spot two teenagers across the street, talking near the street corner. One wears an orange polyester suit with a matching fedora. The other has a brown leather cowboy hat and a brown fringed suede jacket that you wish was yours. Taking a step toward them, you say, “Come on.”
CC keeps your right hand in her left and grabs you above the elbow with her right hand, yanking you back. “If you don’t want weed or a whore, keep walking.”
“Those aren’t pimp costumes?”
“Sure they are. With pimps in ‘em.”
“Oh.” You keep walking.
CC keeps your arm in her double grip. “You don’t have to prove a thing. Man who’ll thumb to California is plenty brave.”
“I haven’t even started.”
“Sure, you have.” She stops. “That’s my house.”
You glance ahead. She means a white brick house surrounded by chain-link. It has a row of bushes along its foundation. The lawn was recently mowed. The windows are dark, except for one, where a dim lamp glows.
CC takes a long-toothed comb from a coat pocket and starts combing down her Afro, parting her hair and giving herself bangs, “Auntie’s waiting up, but she’ll go to bed once I tell her how we praised Jesus.” CC tucks the comb away, opens her coat and takes a pair of glasses with pointed blue plastic frames from an inside pocket. “Don’t say nothing,” she warns as she puts them on. Under the jacket, she wears a bright yellow T-shirt with bright red printing: “Jesus loves me.”
She says, “Don’t stare. I ain’t me now.”
She could pass for twelve. A hopelessly square twelve-year-old.
“Who are you?”
She smiles and says in a perfect impersonation of white teenagers on television, “Eula Mae Carter.”
“What’s ‘CC’ stand for?”
She shakes her head. “I got to go in now.”
“Want me to wait here?”
She looks at the dealers laughing together. “Go through the alley and wait in back.” When you hesitate, she adds, “Ain’t no dogs or nothing. I’ll be out once Auntie’s sleeping.” She squeezes your hand and starts away.
And you start to doubt. Will she come out again? Did she lure you here so a gang could rob you? Do you really want to go to a University party that you probably won’t get into because you look like a kid?
She whirls and says in a soft, hopeful voice that must be Eula Mae, not CC, “You will be there?”
You could tell CC that California is calling, and she would wave goodbye with a grin. Eula Mae would probably wave, too, but the wave would be small and she wouldn’t grin.
“Sure,” you say, which gets you one of CC’s nods, not smiling, just certain, and your doubts are gone.
“You got to climb the fence. It’s easy.” She smiles suddenly, and before you can ask if this is the best plan, she hurries down the street.
You stop at the corner, a few feet down a side street, just outside the street lamp’s cone of light. CC walks to the chain-link gate, opens it, and goes up the sidewalk, never looking back. She seems tiny. The Beastman would think you’re crazy. A little black eighth-grader? You should leave. Why did you say you would stick around?
You know the answers. You don’t want to be the kind of guy who would do what you want to do. And a girl who will sneak out at night with a boy has got to know where that could go.
But is that somewhere you want to go with her?
What you know is no other girl wants you to wait in her backyard, and you’re going to leave Florida and never return. Maybe CC only wants someone to take her to a college Halloween dance. That could be fun. Maybe the wild hippie chick of your dreams will be there, and she’ll invite you to crash with her—
The screen door of the white house swings open before CC reaches the porch. The porch and the entryway stay dark. The house says, “Eula Mae! What time you think it is?”
CC says, “Oh, Aunt Ida, everyone was swept up in the spirit! It was like Jesus took us in his arms! If you’d only heard those angels singing!”
Your heart thumps hard. Someone in a dark house might be able to see you in the dark street.
You head farther down the side street. If anyone notices, you’re a shape in a blue blanket. It’s Halloween. They won’t think you’ve got the ugliest blanket in Florida. They’ll think you’ve got the ugliest costume.
You stop out of sight of the white house. Its voice carries in the night, loud and low, a saxophone or a tomtom. “I didn’t hear their van.”
CC’s answers are guitar riffs. “They knew it was late. I told ‘em to drop me at the corner and get the other girls home right away.”
“They left you at this time of night?”
“Just at the corner. I didn’t want the motor to wake you.”
“I could never sleep with you out.”
“Auntie! You know Jesus looks over me!”
“Just because he’s looking doesn’t mean bad things can’t happen. Specially on Satan’s night.”
CC says firmly, “That’s why we prayed extra hard. The devil might have most folks tonight, but he don’t have us.”
“Doesn’t,” says the white house. “You’re not Negro trash. Don’t talk like you are.”
“No, ma’am. I’ll pray to remember to talk proper. Lee.”
“Well. Weakness is all around us. Get in, girl. Going to be morning before we know it.”
CC’s steps on the porch are drumsticks on a wood block. Then the house adds, “I’m talking to that Juan about when you’re supposed to be home.”
CC begins, “I told him! He’ll just be embarrassed that he got caught up in the spirit. It won’t hap—”
Her riff ends with a closing door, not slammed, but pulled firmly, a blow of a beater against a bass drum.
You listen. Nothing escapes the white house.
You walk to the alley. It would be a perfect place for a gang to jump you. But what gang would hide in a dark alley waiting for someone stupid enough to walk down it? As you think that, you see silhouettes ahead: garages, sheds, garbage cans, cars. Thick clouds drift across the sky, but they don’t block the moonlight. Most houses have lights on in bedrooms or kitchens. Motown still plays far off. It sounds like “I Heard It through the Grapevine.” TV noise comes from nearby, excited voices and anxious music, not loud enough to tell you what show it is. If you knew that, you would know the time. Is it George and Tish’s bedtime yet? Is it yours? Your bed would be soft and warm.
You tighten the blanket around you and start down the alley. You can’t see your feet. You kick a sheet of newspaper, then step on something soft that you hope is a lost toy. A dog barks as it slams into a chain-link fence beside you, making you scramble to the far side of the alley. The dog is a big lean Doberman. It doesn’t stop barking until an old man shouts, “Boris! Hush yourself!”
You expect that finding the white house will be easy, but you walk past it and don’t turn back until you’re two-thirds down the alley. You’re sure the white house is in the middle of the block. So you walk back, looking closer at each lot.
It’s where you expected, but not what you expected. You expected to see a light on or going out. It’s dark. You expected to see a backyard as bare as the front, short grass surrounded by chain-link. There’s a garage and a vegetable garden and a neck-high white wooden fence.
It sits in darkness, halfway between the corner street lamps. The neighbors have lights on in the sides away from the white house, so light avoids it. You hesitate, then think that’s good. No one will see a white boy sneaking into a neighbor’s backyard.
You try the gate’s latch. It’s locked. Are you trespassing if you’ve been invited to climb into someone’s backyard? You remember the Beastman’s philosophy: “It’s only illegal when you’re caught.”
You push the wooden fence. It’s sturdy. You wrap your blanket around your shoulders like a giant scarf, grip the top of the fence, and leap up. The Kid would soar over the top, somersault, and land on his feet. You lock your arms to hang on the fence and study the darkness. Maybe Aunt Ida bought a German shepherd while CC was out. Maybe there’s a cactus right under you, or a rattlesnake pit.
You don’t see anything you couldn’t see from the alley. You throw a leg over the fence, feel the boards cut into your hands and thigh, throw the other leg over, and drop.
The ground is nearer than you thought. You stumble forward, then turn fast. No snakes, no cactus, no guard dog. No new lights in the white house or the neighbors. No doors banging open. No one screaming, “Lord almighty, there’s a white boy sneaking around the neighborhood!”
The back wall of the white house has two long, louvered windows separated by a small one. In the Kid’s cartoon, the windows are eyes and nose, and the cement walk circling it is a mouth. Its eyes must be bedrooms; its nose, a bath. Which bedroom is Aunt Ida’s? Is CC watching to see if you’ll really come? Is Aunt Ida staring from darkness into darkness? Is anyone else in the house that CC didn’t expect? Aunt Ida could have a big cousin who arrived unexpectedly with big friends who are Black Panthers, Black Muslims, or some other gang that would like having fun with a little white trespasser.
You realize what you’re thinking and smile. The Afro-American League for Beating Up White Kids Who Want to Be Cartoonists is not meeting in Aunt Ida’s house tonight. Two people are in there, an old woman who may already be asleep and a girl who wants to come to you.
You look around, thinking of Dad in the car saying, “Always be ready for things to go wrong, ‘cause they will. Brakes fail, tires blow, and people swerve into your lane because they’re drunk or they had heart attacks or they just want some company when they kill themselves. Keep both hands on the wheel so you’re ready to react. Know how to downshift and where your emergency brake is. Always watch what’s on every side of you, ‘cause you never know when you’ll have to head across someone’s lawn to save your ass.”
Two metal trash cans and a small bush are the only obstacles at the fence. You can scramble over it at any point. If you need to, you can trample the bush. The trash cans have lids. You can hop on one and leap the fence. Better not to plan on that. If a trash can topples with you on it, you’ll fall back into the yard.
Escaping on either side is riskier. To the left is the garage. To the right is the vegetable garden. You can’t see if there’s anything at the front of the garage. The neighbor on that side has a fence that’s lower than Aunt Ida’s, but even a low fence will slow you. The neighbor on the other side doesn’t have a fence, but that yard is cluttered with toys and lumber.
You look past the white house toward the street. The wooden fence joins the house, but the gate by the house is open. You could run through, go over the chain-link in the front yard, and race down the street toward University Avenue.
Staying low, you cross the backyard. There’s a gate on that side, too. It’s closed. You don’t think it’s smart to go up to the house to see if the gate’s locked. Leave it for a last resort.
The vegetable garden looks wild in the night, a place for land mines and bear traps. Don’t cross it unless you have to.
So there, Dad. You go back to the garage, where the shadows are deepest. You brush the ground with your feet, hope there aren’t ants or sand spurs, and sit. Dirt can’t make the blue blanket look worse.
What if CC chickens out? What if she falls asleep? You wish you had a cigarette. It would look cool to smoke while sitting crosslegged like a polyester Apache. A joint would be cooler. You glance up at the sky and think, The moon was a ghostly galleon—
A cigarette or a joint might reveal you to a watcher. When you were a kid, Dad would light his pipe and say, “Three on a match is bad luck. When the first gets a light, the enemy spots it, and when the second gets a light, the enemy aims, but when the third gets a light—” Then you and Tish and George would shout together, “Bang!” and Dad would tickle you all on the bed while Mom smiled.
You’re not a kid now. Wild men raid enemy camps to steal women. You snuck into a backyard to meet one.
CC’s not a kid, either. Mom says girls mature faster than boys, but you never saw any proof of that. Maybe CC’s the exception that proves the rule. “Proves the rule” means tests the rule. Mom read that in a newspaper. “Can’t have your cake and eat it, too,” means if you eat your cake, you won’t have it anymore. But what good is something you don’t use?
You shake yourself to stay awake. You would forgive the blue blanket for being ugly if it was warmer.
Tish and George must be asleep. They’ll be glad you’re gone. Will Tish get your room because she’s older, or will George because he’s a boy? Tish will. Dad sometimes gives her advantages because she’s a girl, but he never penalizes her. George will get her room. His room will give Mom an office that people aren’t always walking through. Everyone will have more space, and no one will have anyone to get mad at, and the whole family will tell people they’re sorry you ran off, but they’ll know it was best for everyone.
Except Mom. She’s probably crying, and Dad’s probably telling her not to get excited because you’re nearly an adult and pretty sensible for a fourteen-year-old. Mom always wants everyone to be together and happy, even though being together makes them miserable. You could call her and say you’re fine. But she wouldn’t believe it. She would beg you to come home, and you never can, so there’s no point in calling. If Dad picked up the phone, he would tell you to get your ass home now if you know what’s good for you. You decide to send Mom a postcard in the morning, so it’ll have a Gainesville postmark and not give any clues about how to find you.
Tish might be a little sad. Sometimes she makes peanut butter cookies for you. Peanut butter cookies warm from the oven would be good. You would gladly trade a cigarette or a joint for a warm cookie. You should’ve asked CC to bring some food, if she can. Was Mom going to make meatloaf tonight? She always leaves the tomato sauce off one end for you, and if anyone complains, she tells them they know how to use a ketchup bottle. Now she can put tomato sauce on the whole meatloaf the way the rest of the family like it.
George might be a little sad at first. He doesn’t like things that make trouble. But once he knows you’re gone and there’ll be no more trouble, he’ll be content. At least, you think he’ll be content. He doesn’t talk as much as the rest of the Nixes. He’ll get your stuff, but he doesn’t like comic books or rock records. He’ll sell them in a yard sale and buy a .22 rifle and never know you spent years putting together a collection that’s nearly perfect. He’ll just be glad you’re gone.
Dad will be mad. He’ll know that he looks like a failure because his son ran away. Who cares what Dad thinks? Fuck him, anyway.
You shiver and lie down. The ground is hard and cold, but it’s better than sitting up. This is what pioneers and cowboys do. You always liked sleeping outside in a sleeping bag with the family around a campfire. A campfire would be nice. Dad would tell you to make sure it was covered with dirt before you went to sleep, and he wouldn’t check on it because he trusted you.
Fuck him anyway.
Does Cindy Hurly know you’ve run away? Does she wish she’d known how cool you are? Is she sorry you’re not her boyfriend?
You’ve got to send postcards every week to the Beastman. Each one from a different place. Los Angeles and San Francisco and Honolulu and Timbuktu.
CC will come out soon.
It’s cold.
Closing your eyes for a little while is a good idea.
It’s okay if you fall asleep. You’ll sleep like a cat, awake in an instant, alert to danger before it comes near.
A sleeping bag would be nice.
Grass and dirt smell nice.
You’ll sleep like a cat.
Something yanks your shoulder. You jerk forward like you’re fighting out of quicksand. “Wha—” comes from your mouth, and something claps over your lips. You’re in darkness and cold. Your side is stiff. Silhouetted against the sky, a dark figure crouches over you, trapping you—
“Shh!” whispers CC, then: “You sleep like the dead!”
You draw back from her hand. She stays crouched beside you, so you prop one elbow on the ground. She wears a frayed and faded terrycloth bathrobe that might be pink. Beneath its hem is the skirt of an embroidered white nightgown. It looks old. Your grandmothers wore gowns like that when they were girls. CC’s ankles are bare. Her feet are in flipflops. You realize she must be cold an instant before she says, “It’s cold!”
She doesn’t stand, so you can’t. You say, “You want to start walking?”
“No.” She sounds like she expects you to figure something out. Bedclothes make a poor costume for a cold night. Unless she plans to dance a lot. It must be getting late, even for a party at the U. It’ll be colder walking back. You turn your face up to ask what she has in mind. She bobs down, mashing her lips against the corner of your mouth, surprising you. Her lips slide across yours, more gently now that she’s found her distance. You think, It’s a kiss. She’s kissing me. This is what a kiss is like.
You want to pull back. You don’t want her to know that you don’t know how to kiss on the mouth. Her lips are soft and moist and parted. You’ve heard about French kissing. Does she think that’s gross? Does she expect you to be a good at it?
CC draws her head back. “Never kissed a white boy.”
“Never kissed a black girl.”
“What you think?”
“Can I have another sample first?”
She smiles the big CC smile, not the little Eula Mae smile. “It’s cold.”
“Oh. You want to get going?”
She shakes her head.
It would be nice to be a complete idiot. Then you’d never feel stupid for figuring things out late. This time, it’s something you like figuring out. You lift the ugly blanket. The air is cool against your T-shirt. “Want in?”
Her smile is a little Eula Mae, a little CC, as she presses in. She’s thin and hard and cold. She shivers against you. The knot of her bathrobe belt digs into your stomach. Her weight is on your left arm, pinning it to the ground. Her hair against your cheek smells like soap. It’s the softest thing you’ve ever felt. You thought a black person’s hair would be bristly, but it’s like lamb’s wool or silk or something that is CC’s hair and not like anything else at all.
Her lips are on yours, and they’ve parted. You’re not supposed to slobber. What if you do? She must want Frenching. What if she bites your tongue? The idea of sticking your tongue into someone else’s mouth is weird. Holding hands and fucking make sense, but the stuff in-between is weird. She could give you a cold, if she has a cold.
But as your tongue slips between her lips, you know this would be worth getting a cold. Her tongue brushes yours. This is what nice girls do with people they love, bad girls do with anyone they want, and what’s CC?
Her hands rub your back. You’re supposed to do something. You rub her back. The tongue dance is like seals playing. How long are you supposed to French? You’re straining against your fly. The Beastman said he Frenched Mary Pitluck at a party and creamed his jeans. You’d thought he was lying, but maybe it was true.
You’re supposed to kiss girls’ necks and nibble their earlobes. That’s as weird as Frenching, but Frenching is nicer than you expected. A little sloppy and very strange, especially when her tongue slips into your mouth, and you don’t know if a girl is supposed to stick her tongue in a boy’s mouth, but if that’s what she wants, fair is fair. You’re not going to say anything to stop her.
You slide your right hand along the terrycloth bathrobe, over her ribs and across her stomach to the knot of her belt. She doesn’t stop you. She’s kissing you like girls kiss in movies, like the only thing they’re thinking about is kissing. Is that what it’s like for her? Is that how it’s supposed to be for you? Should you talk? They never talk in movies, unless it’s to say, “Yes!” or “I love you!” You don’t love CC and you don’t know what to say yes to. She doesn’t seem to have questions.
You finger her belt. You could slide your hand up, feel her breast through the robe, or slide your hand under the robe, then slip it up. Or down. What does she want? You can’t ask. Men should know.
The terrycloth is thick. Feeling a breast through terrycloth would hardly be like feeling anything at all. The only thing you know for sure is that when she wants you to stop, she’ll say so. You might be telling the Beastman that you got tit on your first date. Is that what this is? A date? Your first make-out session. You might get tit on your first make-out session.
Her belt knot comes undone with a tug. James Bond couldn’t do better. Her robe opens, and she presses harder against you. Which way are you supposed to slide your hand? The ground is hard under your hip, but it’s another thing not to care about.
There’s first base, then second. Up over her stomach and the edge of her rib cage. Slow down to see if she’ll stop you. Nibble an earlobe to distract her, then try for second.
You kiss across her jaw. Her breathing is faster. That’s good, right? You reach her earlobe. What’s the smell of her hair? Prell? Johnson’s Baby Shampoo? Something they sell in the section for black women with the hair straighteners? You take her earlobe between your teeth and press down—
“Ow!” She turns her head away.
“Sorry.”
“Shh!” And her lips are back on yours, but only for a moment. She’s nuzzling your neck. You try again with the earlobe, using lips and not teeth, moving your hand up her body. The top of your hand touches something soft. It’s the bottom of her breast. She doesn’t stop you. You keep sliding your palm up until you’re cupping a breast, a real girl’s real breast, a real girl’s real nipple pressing into your palm. It’s the most perfect feeling you’ve known. You’re so grateful to CC that you don’t know how to say it, and you’re a little shocked, too, because she’s not wearing a bra, and aren’t girls supposed to wear bras all the time if they’re not hippies?
You stroke her nipple. It gets harder, or CC rubs herself harder against you. Are you doing this right? Making out is easier for women, just hugging and kissing while men have to figure out what to do next.
She hasn’t said no. You must be doing all right.
Her hands are on your back, low on your back, pulling your hips into hers. That means something. Is this dry humping, or is it not dry humping unless her legs are wrapped around you? Why do they call it dry humping if the point isn’t to stay dry?
Your hand can’t go up much higher than her throat unless you’re going to pat her head. You start downward. Past the throat to her left breast. Across to the right, stroking them both by spreading your hand. You wish you could pull your left arm free to get a hand on each breast. Maybe that’s why she’s lying on your arm, so she she only has to worry about one of your hands.
You slide your hand to her belly. Dogs, cats, and girls trust you when they let you rub their bellies. CC will say no at any moment to let you know that this is all you’re going to get. You’re afraid of hearing her no, but it’ll be good to know the boundaries: first base and second.
She doesn’t speak as your hand slips over her navel. She doesn’t speak as your hand continues down. She must not think you’re thinking what you’re thinking. She must expect you to stroke her leg. You slide your hand over her pelvis and down. Her hip and thigh are astonishingly smooth. You should become a sculptor and sculpt that hip and thigh, not for people to see, but for them to stroke. Sight is wonderful, but touch is better.
Your left arm’s stiff, and you move it, and realize it can do more than pull CC into you. That hand can slide over terrycloth to her butt. You like her back and hate the terrycloth, and tug at it, hoisting it up, until your left hand has only the thin nightgown between it and her butt. She’s not wearing panties.
You stop your hand. But she’s not stopping you. You keep stroking. She must be wearing thin panties. Don’t girls wear panties at night? You wear underwear under your pajamas. It makes less mess if you have a wet dream. Do girls have wet dreams? She must be wearing very thin panties.
You slide both hands across her buttocks. You should sculpt her hip and thigh and butt. Would people be afraid to touch art like that in public? Or would they touch it and laugh? They shouldn’t. This isn’t funny. It’s wonderful.
What is getting both hands on someone’s butt? Not first or second, but not third. Something’s wrong with the scoring system, because a butt is nice, as nice as a breast. What if you’re supposed to touch her butt on your way between first and second. Are you doing this completely wrong?
If you are, she’s forgiven you. Her hands are on your butt, pulling your hips harder against hers. You’re tugging up her nightgown. She must be afraid of what could happen, so she’ll stop you soon, but touching her bare thigh would be nice. If you were sitting in a public place and she was wearing a miniskirt, you could brush your hand against her bare thigh and no one would think twice about it.
She must agree. Her nightgown is bunching higher and higher. Your hand is on her bare thigh. Her skin must be softer than her hair, but that’s impossible. A sculpture might tell how perfect her shape is, but it wouldn’t have her warmth or softness.
Shouldn’t she be saying no now? Are you supposed to go for third? She must’ve done this before, because it doesn’t scare her. That scares you more. The farther she lets you go, the worse it’ll be when you goof up.
But she’s not saying no. You can’t stop if she doesn’t say no. The front of her thigh is as nice as the flank. The inside of her thigh is softer than either. How can anything be that soft? Slide your hand higher. How can it keep getting softer? Are all girls that soft?
She should be twisting away. You’re not supposed to go to third until you’re going steady. Nice girls don’t go to second until they’re on a second or a third date, maybe. This isn’t a date. This is a make-out session. Men keep going until women say no. Where’s CC’s “no”? She keeps hugging and pressing and kissing and breathing fast, and that’s what you’re doing, except for the pressure in your jeans, so intense it hurts, but it’s a hurt you don’t want to stop.
Your finger touches hair. Your pubic hair is rough and matted. Hers is like fluff. She’s not stopping you. Keep exploring. Men are supposed to rub women until they’re slick, so you cup your hand between her legs. It’s already wet, slippier than you thought women could be, and she doesn’t say no. She’s slick for you, from your touch, because you didn’t screw up too badly except for biting her ear, and she must really like you because she’s as slick as you’re hard.
If you were older, you would fuck now. If you had a rubber, you would fuck now. But third is good. You slip your finger in, and she’s snapping open your jeans and sliding her hand into your pants, and her grip is harder than you like, as if she’s afraid your dick will escape if she doesn’t grab it hard, but the grip’s not so hard that you’re about to complain. You slip another finger in, and you remember something about a hymen, so maybe she’s not a virgin, and something about a clitoris, but you don’t have the slightest idea what that would feel like if you found it.
But she seems to be happy, so you pump your fingers, and she pulls harder on you, and she’s moaning, and will she be grossed out if you come in her hand, and is she not saying no because this is what she wants, or are you supposed to pull your fingers out and put your dick in, but how can you know what you’re supposed to do? Her moaning doesn’t tell you. What if she got pregnant or had a disease and your dick got covered with sores and had to be cut off? But that would be worth it, and you like her because she’s letting you do this, only she’s not just letting you. She likes it, and maybe you should take your fingers out and see what she says but she doesn’t seem to want you to stop so you keep on, knowing something will happen that’s never happened before and—
—something is hurtling down toward your head and—
—you roll sideways with CC as an iron rake with tines like dull daggers buries itself in the dirt where you were lying. It jerks up high as someone says roughly, almost calmly, “Jezebel. Whore of Babylon. Spawn of serpents.”
And the rake falls again.
The blanket is a trap. CC is wrapped against you. All you can do is keep rolling. The rake grazes your back, the blanket is jerked hard, you think you’re trapped, then you and CC spill onto the ground. You know who must hold the rake just before CC yells, “Aunt Ida! Don’t!”
The voice of the house says, “You brought the Devil home.” The rake rears upward again. You rock to your knees, shove CC away, and fall again. Your jeans are around your ankles. Tripping doesn’t endanger CC. The rake is for you.
Your fist drives upward and your arm twists outward and it’s not the kind of high block that would make your sensei proud, but it knocks the rake aside. The impact hurts, shivering through the bone. Your block bounces the rake high, into position for another strike.
“White devil. Abomination. Mark of Cain.”
You scoot back across the ground, yanking your jeans up, and roll away as the rake falls, just missing your hips, just missing your groin if you hadn’t rolled.
“Aunt Ida! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” CC throws herself at the shadow. The silhouettes, side by side, are the same height. Aunt Ida’s broader. She must be stronger, too. She turns fast, hitting CC with the shaft of the rake, knocking her down.
“Unclean!” the house calls, its voice growing shrill. “Child of filth! Child of the beast!”
The rake is aimed for CC. You throw yourself forward, arms wide, the right high to catch the rake, the left low to grab the darkness wielding it. The shaft of the rake is rough, the wood ancient, hard as stone. You smell lilacs, stronger than any lilacs could be, so sweet that the scent must be meant to hide something vile. Your left arm closes around flannel and a body as hard as the shaft of the rake.
“Stop it,” you’re saying, “Stop it!” You took the words from CC—
—but they’re a prayer on your lips, not a plea—
—because this is her aunt, and you can’t hurt a woman, and especially an old woman, but you can’t let her hurt CC, and you learned things in karate that would stop her, but the price could be breaking her bones or crushing her windpipe, and why won’t she stop struggling and let go of the rake and hear CC saying, “Stop it, we weren’t hurting no one, it was good!”
A light comes on in a nearby yard. Someone yells, “What’s going on? I called the police!”
You should push Aunt Ida away and run, but you can’t leave CC, and she’s crying as she screams, “I liked it and I like him and you don’t know nothing about me or what’s good or nothing at all!”
Dogs bark in the distance, and Aunt Ida in your arms is saying softly, “I know you, Devil. I’ll go to Jesus fighting you, praise his name!” She’s old, at least as old as Grandma Letitia when she broke her hip, and you can’t let go of her and you can’t keep holding her—
—and you say, “Aunt Ida, please listen, you’ve got to hear, you’ve got to see, she’s fine, I didn’t hurt her, I wouldn’t hurt her, you don’t have to be mad, you’ve got to know it’s all right!”
She collapses in your arms. Did she have a heart attack or a stroke? Your heart beats as if it could fail, too. Then you hear her crying softly.
You look at CC. You can’t read what’s on her face. You’re standing in the cold night with a frail old woman crying in your arms. You don’t know what to do. So you stay still while she cries, and she doesn’t stop, so you say, “It’s all right now,” and keep holding her.
CC keeps watching, or maybe it’s Eula Mae. She’s looking at you as if she wants to run screaming away. Then she steps forward, puts an arm around Aunt Ida, one arm around you, and she’s crying. And only then do you realize you’re crying, too.
When you hear a car coming, Aunt Ida says, “Police,” and steps away. CC’s arms drop. The three of you are points of a triangle. You’re cold, and you want the ugly blanket. CC smoothes her gown and closes her robe and belts it. You turn away from Aunt Ida, zip and snap your jeans, and turn back, saying, “I got to go.” That’s what drifters say.
Aunt Ida says, “Who are you?”
“Chris, ma’am. I mean, Mark. Mark Christopher Nix.”
Aunt Ida shakes her head. She makes you think of a crow, but you don’t know if it’s a real one or a cartoon one like Heckle and Jeckle. “No. Who are you?”
“I go to George Washington Carver. Ninth grade.”
She shakes her head again. “No. Who are you?”
To shut her up, you say, “I don’t know,” and she nods, satisfied.
You tell CC, “I’ll write.” You don’t know why you say that, but you can’t just go, even if that’s what drifters are supposed to do.
“You can’t.”
“Sure. What’s your address?”
“You can’t just run off.”
“I’ll be fine. I—” The car brakes in front of the house. You talked too long. You don’t have time to hug CC or kiss her. “I’ll write here. Is it Ida Carter in the phone book?”
The car doors swing open, loud and fast. CC is looking at you, like she knows you’ll do what’s right.
You say, “I’ll write care of Ida Carter!” and lope for the rear fence. But as you reach for the ugliest blanket in Florida, CC calls, “Mark! You got a home! Don’t run away from it!”
You pick up the blanket.
CC says, “Is something terrible driving you off?”
You pull the blanket around you. You couldn’t have bought it if Mom hadn’t gotten you a credit card, even if it was just a stupid Penney’s card.
CC says, “Is something good calling you?”
You turn around. In her big bathrobe and long nightgown, she’s younger than you, and older, and beautiful.
She says, “Don’t throw away things if you don’t know you don’t want them.”
You say, “All right.”
And the policemen walk into the backyard. They look like Florida policemen, white and short-haired. One’s tall, skinny, and young enough to be just out of the army. The other’s older, built like a barrel. They look at Aunt Ida and CC and you, then glance around, then squint just at you.
The Barrel turns to Aunt Ida. “Ma’am? We got a report there was trouble.”
You hope that’s a good sign, a white policeman calling a black woman “ma’am.” Aunt Ida smiles and says, “It was just these young ones. You know how it is at that age.”
The Barrel says, “Yes’m.”
The Beanpole scowls at you. “This hippie was making a disturbance?”
You should’ve gone over the fence. Can they put you in a cell before letting you call anyone? Can they shave your head and say you had lice? Can they put you in with big men who hate hippies or love boys or both?
Aunt Ida says, “No, sir,” to the Beanpole. “He was just calling on my niece.”
The Barrel looks at CC. “You know him?”
CC looks down and nods.
The Beanpole says, “What’s he got to do with you?” And he smiles like he knows the answer and knows it’ll embarrass everyone, CC especially.
You should answer, but you don’t go to the same school or live in the same neighborhood or have the same skin color. There’s no reason to be here that would satisfy the Beanpole.
The Barrel saves CC from answering by asking you, “How old are you, son?”
You say, “Fourteen.”
The Barrel nods. “Out kind of late.”
The Beanpole says, “We can take him in. Let juvie decide what to do in the morning.”
The Barrel tells the Beanpole, “It’s Halloween.” Then he tells you, “C’mon. We’ll run you home.”
“But—” You look at CC.
She nods to say you should go. It’s not a pretty face, but you like looking at it, and why didn’t you see the beauty of her eyes?
Aunt Ida tells you, “I expect your folks’re wondering where you got to.”
The Beanpole says, “Sounds like the hippie was trespassing—”
The Barrel says, “You hear anyone make a complaint?”
Aunt Ida looks at you and says, “I got no complaint.”
The Barrel nods to her. “You have a good evening, ma’am.” He nods to CC. “You don’t want to be entertaining boys without telling your aunt, missy.” He jerks his head at you to follow and starts walking away.
You could kiss CC goodbye, but Aunt Ida and the Beanpole are watching. The Beanpole says, “Come on, hippie. Can’t pass up a free ride provided by the government, can you?”
CC says, “You got to go home.”
“I’ll call.” You look at Aunt Ida. “You’re in the phone book?”
Aunt Ida glances from you to CC and back again, then nods without smiling.
“I’ll call!” You hurry after the policemen.
The Beanpole holds the back door of their car open. You look at the grate between front and back, then the absence of door handles inside. The Beanpole grins. “What, this your first time getting chauffeured by the city’s finest? We got us a hippie virgin here!”
The Barrel says, “Get in, son. It’s a long walk to 55th Terrace.”
You glance at him and realize what your face must look like when he smiles a little. “Your momma reported you. They want you home.”
The Beanpole adds, “You sure got a tolerant momma. Mine wouldn’t have me back till I got a haircut.”
You glance at the dark windows of the white house. Is anyone watching? You wave, just in case, then get in the patrol car. The Beanpole slams the door, takes the front passenger seat, and the Barrel drives away.
The car smells like cigarettes and ammonia. You’re in a cage. The people who ca