Rutting Season

by Mandeliene Smith

  “Oh, hey there!” Ray called out. “Good morning!”

  There was something in his voice—a softness or even a pleading—that made Carl glance up. With a little shock of pleasure, he recognized Lisa’s dark head.

  “Keepin’ busy, huh?” Ray said.

  “Yep,” Lisa said, not bothering to look at him.

  “What is it, crunch time for the annual?”

  Carl could still see Lisa; she was just a few feet beyond Ray. It wasn’t possible that she hadn’t heard his question. And yet she kept walking, she turned the corner into the copy room with the end of her ponytail bouncing against her slender back.

  Ray stared after her. “Annual appeal,” he said. “Lot of pressure on those girls.”

  But nothing he said could cover for it: Carl had seen how she had treated him. The Ray who turned back toward him now, the Ray who stood in the doorway, his hand on the sill, was a different Ray—a blunted, weakened Ray. Carl let his eyes drop back to the rug.

  “Anyway, here you go,” Ray said, holding the cup out again. “Light, no sugar, right?”

  It came to Carl that he could just reach out and take it. He could let go of the gun and take the coffee, and all the ordinariness, the familiar nothingness of the rug, would remain as it was. He would not have to kill anyone, he would not have to run. He would not have to hunt Lisa down in the fundraising department.

  In the doorway, Ray felt his eyes snap with irritation. The tension in his jaw was coming back. He forced himself to try again. “What, that’s not how you take it?” he said.

  Carl scanned the muddle of gray and brown nubs, hesitating. He was forgetting something, something important. A pull like that of a still-warm bed, a promise—of sex or skin; a warm, naked tangling. He blinked, unable to remember. A fantasy, it must have been, or a dream; something that had no place in the cold fluorescent light of the office. Slowly, as though he were waking from a trance, Carl raised his eyes. “No. No, I mean—yeah. That’s how I take it. Light. No sugar.” He pulled his large hand out of his coat and took the cup.

  “Okay, good,” Ray said. He let his breath out, inexplicably relieved. “Good,” he said again, as he stepped backward into the hall.

  Carl held the cup with both hands. He could smell it now: the bitter coffee, the faint underlying sweetness of the cream. Ray’s head reappeared in the doorway. “Hey, ahh, don’t forget we’ve got that meeting on the new database at eleven. Should be a real ballbuster.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Carl said. “Thanks,” he added, but Ray was already gone.

  * * *

  Walking back down the hallway with her copies, Lisa caught a glimpse of Carl through the open door, his head bent. He seemed to be cradling something in his hands. She froze in midstep, alarmed. She had the odd impression it was something alive—a bird maybe, or a mouse. But when she glanced back, she spotted the familiar pink and orange logo between his fingers. It was only a cup of coffee; he was just trying to wake up, the poor slob.

  WHAT IT TAKES

  Sylvie was a new friend that fall, a rarity in the static world of our neighborhood, where most of us had known each other since kindergarten. She wasn’t the kind of person we normally hung out with. She loved the Grateful Dead, a band we prided ourselves on despising, and she dressed in ratty jeans and crinkled skirts, like a hippie from the sixties. The way she talked was straight out of the sixties, too. Everything was “cool” or “groovy” or “wild,” words I associated with the aging burnouts who hung around on the Green downtown.

  For some reason, I overlooked all that. We all did—even Robert, with his fanatical devotion to New Wave. With Sylvie, those kinds of social distinctions seemed narrow-minded and petty. It was like she was above all that, like the long, mysterious trail of her experience had given her a wisdom we could only guess at. She’d done everything: hitchhiked to California, smoked heroin, run away to follow the Dead. She was only in our high school that fall because she’d been kicked out of boarding school again, the second in three years.

  I had begun to feel, that year, that the sameness of everything was choking me to death: the suffocating familiarity of my mother’s house; the constant sense of menace at school; the city of New Haven itself, with its shuttered factories and listless, dated stores.

  Sylvie seemed like the perfect antidote. “You gotta do your own thing,” she’d say. Or, “You’re alive today, man.” Or her favorite: “It’s all cool.” She made it seem like you didn’t have to do the same stuff everyone else did. Like you could make up your own rules, invent something better, and anyone who said you couldn’t was just a loser and a drag.

  * * *

  In the afternoons, when we were free, Sylvie and James and Robert and I would walk downtown to Clark’s Dairy. The food wasn’t very good, but there was something comforting about cramming into a booth together after the long, fraught hours at school.

  One day, as we were sharing a single order of fries in the back, Robert announced, “So these guys at school tried to jump me.”

  I glanced over to gauge Sylvie’s reaction. I never told anyone when I got harassed at school, especially not Sylvie, but her face was expressionless behind the coiling smoke of her cigarette.

  “Big guys,” Robert went on, “with those stockings on their heads, you know? For when they put that stuff in their hair? What’s it called?”

  “Jheri curl,” I said.

  “Right, Jheri curl.” Robert picked up a few fries and brushed their limp ends through the puddle of ketchup.

  “So . . . ?” James made a wheel motion with his hand, like “get on with it.”

  “Well, actually, that was highly relevant,” Robert said. “I mean, how seriously can you take a guy with a nude knee-high on his head?”

  Sylvie snorted.

  It had started in the usual way: He was walking down the hall, minding his own business, when suddenly the stocking-head guys stepped out of the crowd and pushed him into an alcove. They trash-talked him for a minute and then they shoved him against the wall—the typical prelude. This time, though, Robert had an inspiration: He curled up his lip and started to growl.

  He leaned over the green Formica table to show us how he’d done it: growl, lunge, bark, growl—basically an imitation of the performance his dog Pepe put on for the mailman every afternoon. The growling made the two guys hesitate. What stopped them, though, was the drool, a long string of it that Robert let stretch down from the corner of his mouth.

  “You should have seen them back up,” he crowed. He mimicked the high-pitched tone the black kids in our school used for emphasis, “ ‘I ain’t touching that rabies shit! I ain’t touching that rabies shit!’ ”

  James hooted, slapping the table with his hands. Even Sylvie was smiling. I bent my head to hide the sour expression I could feel on my face. Robert was our nerdy version of cool: brainy, black-clad, always up on the latest records from the Gang of Four and the Talking Heads and other bands I’d never even heard of. But I was cool, too, cooler than him in some ways, if you factored in that I was a girl. When he bought pot, he bought it from me. So why couldn’t I get the better of those kids? Why couldn’t I win for once?

  “Rabies shit,” Sylvie said, shaking her head, the trace of a smile still bending her lips.

  She took a drag on her cigarette and my eyes followed the fine, curved edge of her jaw. Sylvie was a perfect harmony of colors: blue-blue eyes, summer blond hair, even the startling pink of her mouth was just right. But all that was like a landscape seen through a chain-link fence because nothing about the way she moved or talked was beautiful. Her walk was a boy’s walk, slouch-shouldered and bouncy, and she held her cigarettes overhand, like the Marlboro Man. I watched her stub out the butt in the leftover ketchup, a familiar anxiety stealing over me.

  The waitress came up and stood at the end of our booth, her arms folded beneath the mound of her chest. “Gonna need the table,” she said. It was a lie, nearly all the tables were empty, but we knew there wa
s no point in arguing.

  James winked at me. “Okay, people,” he said, flipping his long bangs off his forehead, “let’s get the woman some cold, hard cash.” He reached into his pocket and dumped a handful of change on the table.

  I dug around the roll of bills I had from dealing and pulled up some quarters to add to the pile. James counted the coins beneath the waitress’s reddening face. Then, with little flourishes of his fingers, he began to stack them by denomination: quarters, nickels, dimes.

  “Oh, for chrissake,” the waitress muttered, lunging forward to rake the money off the table. “You think it’s all fun and games, don’t you? One big joke.” She glared around the table at us. “You wait. You just wait.”

  We watched her waddle off on her thick, crooked feet. Adults were always saying stuff like that to us: You wait. You’ll see, like they already knew how things were going to turn out. Even the nice ones, the ones who took the trouble to ask us what we were interested in or where we wanted to go to college, seemed secretly doubtful. “Oh, interesting!” they’d say, a little too brightly, their eyes carefully vacant, like shoppers who’d already decided not to buy.

  I walked to the bus stop with Sylvie, kicking at whatever loose stuff lay in my path. Robert’s little triumph had left me feeling bad in the way I often did—worried and dissatisfied and wanting. I felt like the world was closed to me; like in some secret, irrevocable way, I didn’t have what it took.

  Sylvie shook out another cigarette. “Wild about Robert, huh?”

  “I guess,” I said, kicking at a bottle cap. It skittered a few short inches and stuck in a crack.

  “Acting like a crazy man.” She meant it as a compliment, I could tell.

  * * *

  The situation at our high school came down to a few basic stats: (1) Eighty percent of the students were black; (2) nearly half of the student body—over seven hundred kids—would drop out before graduation; (3) only a handful would go on to college; (4) the vast majority of that handful would be us.

  We were the children of the city’s doctors and lawyers and Yale professors, and we lived in a pretty, tree-lined area near East Rock Park. The school was located a few blocks away, between our neighborhood and the small, worn homes where the other white kids lived. Most of the black kids lived in a blighted area on the other side of Prospect Hill. To get to school, they had to walk nearly a mile: up the hill and then down again, past our tranquil lawns and large, well-kept houses.

  Naturally, they got their revenge. They took our backpacks, they shoved us against the lockers, they slapped us and slugged us and called out threats and insults through the school’s grime-streaked, fifties-era windows. We were “Freaks” or “Brainiacs,” “stuck up” or “sorry”; we were whatever they said we were, and then we had to pay for it.

  The black boys were tough and they went for the sexual thing right away, like that was all we were good for anyway, but it was the girls we really feared. They would come after us for anything: for accidentally stepping on their shoes or answering back or failing to answer back or just for walking down the hall with an expression on our faces. They went from indifference to rage in a flash, and they fought without rules—kicking and scratching and flailing their arms. Once, in the courtyard, I’d seen one girl rip another’s earring right through her lobe.

  None of this was a mystery. We had liberal parents, we knew about civil rights and slavery and segregated lunch counters. That was part of why they’d sent us to public school: to show how now, in the enlightened 1980s, we finally knew better. Fine, whatever. To me, ideas like that had nothing to do with the experience of being in that school. That was just about being hated, and being hated is just about you: your fear, your humiliation, the cowardly stink of yourself and your own pathetic desire to survive.

  I wanted to fight back; I didn’t want to pretend I didn’t hear their insults or stand there and let them work me over like the Brainiac girls did. But there was a fierceness in them, a merciless fury that completely outmatched anything I could summon up. I didn’t hit them back; I didn’t even run. I stood there and let them do whatever they felt like doing.

  Fight! Fight! A nigger and a white! Everyone said it, the black kids and the white kids both. Chanting it together as they crowded in to watch, like it was the one thing they could all agree on.

  * * *

  I liked selling pot. I liked the money, and the status it gave me, and the weirdly satisfying process of weighing and bagging and rolling joints. And I’d gotten used to the constant, low-grade worry about being caught, or selling to the wrong person, or having my mom find my stash. That September, though, dealing started to cause me trouble at school. For some dickhead reason of his own, the guy I bought from suddenly decided that he’d only sell to me on Mondays, between 11:30 and 12:00. That was fourth period, Phys Ed. It didn’t matter if I missed it; the problem was getting in and out of the school. One of the teachers had been fatally shot near the lunchroom the year before and now all the doors were either locked or manned by security guards. There was only one exception that I knew of, a side door across from the park that had a broken lock. I came up with a new routine: slip out the broken door at the fourth-period bell, run across the park to the dealer’s house to buy my quarter, dash home and hide it in my room. Then, if I had time, I’d make a quick sandwich (like that’s why I was home) before I snuck back through the door for fifth-period Trig.

  After a couple of weeks, I had it down to a drill. Then one Monday, as I rounded the stair landing, I saw that the side door was already open. A knot of black faces turned and looked up at me from the bottom of the stairwell. They were guys I’d never seen before, from Voc Ed maybe; five of them—four smallish, one big. I felt my heart double-clutch.

  They watched me walk down the last flight of stairs—watching but that was all. No one moved or said anything, and it crossed my mind that it could be okay, it could be one of those unexpected little moments of truce when they laughed or said, “What’s up?” or just moved out of the way. Three steps from the door, two steps from the door—I had my hand against the sill and was stepping outside when one of the small ones reached for my chest. A halfhearted grab, like he was just trying it out, but a bolt of fear shot through me.

  “Get off!” I squeaked, twisting out of the way.

  The boy’s mocking, half-curious expression hardened into hostility. He moved toward me, eyes narrowed. “What you say, girl?”

  They were all bunched up together in the doorway, their faces set with anger. I thought they were going to come after me—I was already out on the sidewalk by then—and for a second my knees seemed on the verge of dissolving.

  One of them spat on the step. “She think she too good,” he said. Then the others started in: “You think you too good?” “Huh?” “You a dog anyway.”

  I turned away and walked across the street, my legs shaking.

  The next week they were there again and it was hey baby hey baby and the rest of that crap. It had turned into the thing it always turned into: the stupid, get-something-off-a-white-girl thing.

  So big deal, right? I knew they probably wouldn’t hurt me, at least not in any serious, physical way. It was the feeling of it that got to me; it was coming down those stairs every Monday and having that cliff of fear rear up in my chest, and knowing I wouldn’t have the guts to fight back. Afterward, walking across the park, I would be filled with a suffocating anger and if my mother came downstairs to say hello while I was making lunch, I was venomous to her.

  * * *

  “Casey, you doing this college shit?” Sylvie asked one morning, as we sat on the swings before school.

  I looked into her eyes—a shock of blue—and ducked my head over the joint I was rolling. I knew why she said it that way. Already the Brainiacs were in a frenzy about their college applications: who was applying to Harvard; who was applying to Yale; who had scored what on their SATs. I had a stack of applications in the drawer of my desk at home, but that was a
s far as I’d gotten. The idea of college was a blank to me.

  I licked the rolling paper and smoothed the seam down with my thumbs. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. You?”

  “Me,” she said belligerently. She leaned back on the swing and let her hair drag in the dirty hollow everyone’s feet had dug. “Me, me, me.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, so I lit the joint and took a toke, thinking briefly, as always, of the inside of my grandmother’s hope chest—that woodsy smell; the hollow, rectangular feeling of my straining lungs.

  Sylvie sat up and took the joint from my outstretched hand. “It’s just such fuckin’ bullshit,” she said. “You know?”

  I stubbed my Doc Martens in the dirt and waited. I was often afflicted by such silences with Sylvie. The tangle of possible wrong moves would grow so thick in me I couldn’t think.

  “I mean, we already did that shit,” she said.

  “No shit,” I said.

  She took another hit and held the joint away like a cigarette. She had a tendency to bogart that I would never have tolerated in my other friends. “Life’s the real teacher, you know?” she said. “I mean, think of all the amazing shit there is to do in the world.”

  What amazing shit? I didn’t have a clue, but the idea went glinting through my brain. Looking at the cracked and netless tennis courts, I flashed on my mother, the Wellesley graduate, drinking her days away in the gloom of her bedroom. Maybe Sylvie was right. Maybe going to college wasn’t the answer. Maybe it was better to do something totally different, something your parents hadn’t even dreamed of.

  It was October by then and Sylvie and I were spending nearly all our waking hours together. When school let out, we’d go to Clark’s with James and Robert, or take off by ourselves to smoke pot in Brewster Park. Most nights she was over at my house, eating Stouffer’s frozen dinners with me and my mom. Afterward, we’d hang out in my bedroom listening to Court and Spark and John Barleycorn Must Die and talking about Sylvie’s trip cross-country—what she was going to do instead of college. After a while, she started saying “we”: When we go cross-country. When we get to California.