Rutting Season

by Mandeliene Smith

  “So,” she said, her voice lighter, “if you could get into any college you wanted, where would you go?”

  “Casey’s not going to college, man.” It was Sylvie. She had turned around in her seat and was grinning back at us. “Casey’s going to the college of life. Right, Case? That’s the real deal. The college of fuckin’ life.”

  Sherri stared, her bottom lip hanging down in disgust. I looked at Sylvie, at the frayed jeans jacket and unbrushed hair, the happy, self-satisfied smile, and a steely anger flashed in me.

  “No,” I said sharply, “I’m going to college.”

  It wasn’t a decision, really—I didn’t even know if I meant it—but I met Sylvie’s eyes with a flat stare of defiance. A small shock seemed to register in her pupils, then a hardness came over them, and she turned back around in her seat. I didn’t care. I was suddenly sick of her deciding everything.

  * * *

  She and Robert must have taken off as soon as we stopped because I never even saw them come into the auditorium. When we filed back onto the bus a few hours later, they were already there, sitting against the window in the very last seat, her blond head resting against his dark one. They looked lit up, set apart, like they were famous or beautiful, something the rest of us weren’t.

  I sat in front with one of the Brainiac girls; I knew better than to go back there.

  I was sorry then, of course. I was sorry all weekend, watching TV alone in the den. No one called, not even James. Still, by Sunday night I had formed a wild hope that I could patch things up with Sylvie. Maybe she’d seek me out at school, act as though nothing had happened. And why not? It wasn’t as though we’d had an actual fight. But when she came into homeroom the next day, she gave her late pass to Mrs. Handy and sat down at one of the other tables without even glancing at me. Then the full weight of what I’d lost came home to me, and I hunched over the blurry type of my book, stricken.

  “I’m just lookin’!” It was a boy at Sylvie’s table, the only boy; he was holding one of the pattern books up in the air. The girl next to him giggled and lunged for it. “Damn, girl!” he said, jerking his arm away. “Can’t I just look?”

  The girl sat back down, smiling. “Daryl gonna do him some sewing,” she said to her girlfriend. “You gonna make me a dress, Daryl?”

  I watched them, just to distract myself from the childish knot in my throat. Daryl’s close-cropped hair had a linty, unwashed look, but the girls were both dressed with the usual unerring neatness: pressed shirts, matching shoes, the big, fake-gold alphabet jewelry that was in style. Sylvie sat across from them, staring at a spot on the table, her eyes puffy and red. Still getting stoned on my pot, I thought bitterly.

  “Now that’s some nice hair,” Daryl was saying, peering into the pattern book. “All smooth and shit? Damn.”

  “Lemme see,” the girl said.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Daryl said, holding up the book. He pointed at the picture, a blond woman with a French twist. “Nice hair,” he said.

  I glanced at the black girl’s hair. It had been straightened across her scalp and curled in large, neat rolls.

  “Like her all’s hair,” Daryl said, pointing at Sylvie. “Smooth, you know? Not all black and nappy and shit.”

  The girl’s face froze. I saw Sylvie drag her red eyes from the boy to the girl and then back again, slowly registering. She was going to get herself into trouble, I could see it. Watching her beautiful, unreachable face, I felt an ugly thrill of excitement.

  She pushed her hair back and turned to the boy. “Nah, man,” she said, smiling, “her hair’s cool. It’s all cool, man.”

  * * *

  They caught up with Sylvie at the end of first period, the girl from homeroom, her sister, and three others. Robert stopped me in the hall to tell me as I was leaving to buy my weekly supply. They’d been unusually rough, he said—scratched her face up, got her down against the wall, where they could kick her.

  “I think she might have broken a couple of ribs,” he said. He leaned in and dropped his voice a little. “And she had, you know, an accident.”

  I looked back at him blankly.

  “You know, lost control of her bladder?” He said it like a doctor might have, like my father. There was no trace now of whatever had lit his face on the bus.

  I backed away, sickened. “Okay,” I said, “thanks.” Then I turned around and started walking blindly for the side door.

  I don’t know what I was thinking; I guess I wasn’t thinking. I was just trying to get out of there, get someplace I could clear my head. I was already halfway down the stairs before I noticed the boys standing in the doorway.

  “That’s right, come on down, baby,” the big one said, grabbing at his crotch. “I got something for you right here.” The others burst out laughing and reached over to slap him five.

  I froze, midstep. And then, as I looked down at their gleeful faces, something snapped inside me. Who were they to push us around? To tell us what we could or couldn’t say or wear or do, rough us up just because they felt like it? What gave them the right? Rage surged up in me, hot and true, and suddenly I felt strong; I felt more powerful than any of them.

  I ran down the last flight of steps and went right at them. I saw their hands come out, grabbing, but I didn’t care. I stopped in front of the big one and jabbed my finger in his chest. “It’s just because I’m white!” I yelled. “That’s the only fuckin’ reason: ’cause I’m white!”

  Like magic, the hands fell away. Their faces had gone slack. “That’s the only reason,” I shouted. “And you know what?” They stared back at me, mute as cows, and I felt a vicious joy soar inside me. “I’m fuckin’ sick of it!”

  Then I stepped right past them into the safe, bright air. After a moment I could hear them yelling things of their own, but I didn’t bother to listen. I suddenly understood they weren’t going to leave that doorway.

  In the park, I stopped and sat down on one of the swings to catch my breath. I shoved my foot into the newly dead leaves and pushed the swing in a crooked arc. I’d finally done it: I’d won. I thought that to myself a few times as I swung back and forth, the leftover adrenaline still sparking in my limbs: I won, I won. I was waiting to feel proud, or whatever it was you got to feel when you weren’t the loser, when you were the one who walked away with your head held high.

  But I didn’t feel proud. I didn’t even feel good. What I felt like was a cheat.

  I put my other foot down and stopped the swing. Why should I feel bad? They were the ones who’d been picking on me. All I’d done was to tell the truth. I thought this and then, like an answer, I saw the face of the basketball player in homeroom that morning when Mrs. Handy let Sylvie and me get away with being late.

  Like an Escher drawing, the world flipped into its opposite. My cheeks burned.

  It wasn’t true what I’d shouted at those boys. Or it was, but it was only a part of the truth, and saying it like that made it a kind of lie. It was one more wrong in a mess of wrongs that had started before we were even born—a mess that was ours now, whether we wanted it or not.

  I leaned my hot face against the swing chain. Suddenly, I knew that I would go to college; maybe I’d always known. I would go to college and afterward I would move someplace where no one even thought about kicking my ass, much less tried it. That was the path my parents had laid out for me and I would take it; I would leave those black kids behind. What Sherri was afraid of, what I’d tried to talk her out of, was real.

  Already, I could sense the relief it would be to give in, go along. But I sat there for a while before I started for home, feeling the cold weight of the air pressing down on me and Sylvie and Sherri and those boys and every other thing in that broken, screwed-up place, like a punishment we should have known was coming.

  SIEGE

  Randall wasn’t their father, or even their stepfather, and they couldn’t have given a rat’s ass about his problems with the police or anyone else, but i
t just so happened that Danny and Amber were both at the house when the SUV from the sheriff’s office drove up, and by the time they realized there was going to be trouble, Randall had already bolted the door and taken out a gun.

  Now they were stuck, sitting on the floor with their backs against the half circle of sagging, dog-stinking furniture: Danny, Amber, Jason, the pit bulls Axl and Rose, and over by the window with the gun and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, Randall, their mother’s last boyfriend.

  Family friggin’ reunion, thought Amber. The loudspeaker and the phone had both gone quiet. So Jason could negotiate, she guessed. But Jason wasn’t negotiating; he was staring at her. In one of his moods—she could tell from the way his jaw was shoved forward. He’d been like that ever since he got out of the sheriff’s SUV and barged across the lawn to the door, something she was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to do, given the way the cop with the speaker thing had yelled at him. They’d brought him in so he could convince Randall to let them go—that’s what Jason said, anyway—but it was hard to see how that was going to happen, now that he was trapped, too.

  “We got plans and we got the ordnance to carry ’em out,” Randall said for what must have been the tenth time. “I got my militia buddies out there right now.”

  “Militia my ass,” Danny said, but not too loud. They all knew how Randall could get when he drank, and the JD was already half gone. Also there was the gun to consider—not the sort of rifle a hunter would carry but something you’d see in a war movie, with the jutting handle of a machine gun and one of those things to look through on top. How an unemployed guy with a record had gotten hold of that was something Amber couldn’t understand. Maybe there was some sort of group.

  She ran her hand along the spiky fur between Axl’s eyes. The dog swallowed happily and pressed his jawbone a little deeper into her leg. She could feel Jason looking at her, but she didn’t care; she wasn’t going to let him get to her. She had changed in the year she’d been away: turned sixteen, grown into a C-cup, gotten a new look. In her high school in Springfield, she actually had friends; she even had a boyfriend. She was in a band, too, a grunge-type thing that her boyfriend, Julian, and his buddies had started, as backup singer—or she would be, when Julian got the songs figured out.

  Julian. She loved his name. It seemed to embody everything unique about him—his shoulder-length hair; his clear, hazel eyes; the way his long, artistic fingers strummed the guitar; even the huge, high space of his mother’s kitchen, which she’d seen once when his parents were away. Like a church, it had looked, with the sun shining down through a big window cut into the ceiling.

  Randall fixed them with his watery blue eyes. “I got twenty, thirty guys out there,” he said, “just waitin’ on nightfall.” When no one answered, he took a sloppy gulp of the JD and turned back to the window.

  “So what’re we gonna do?” Danny said to Jason in a low voice.

  But Jason was still staring at Amber. “Your hair looks like shit,” he said. “What are you supposed to be, some kind of punk?”

  “Shut up, Jason,” Amber said.

  “Shut up, Jason,” he mimicked.

  He was as small as ever, at least five inches shorter than Danny, and thin, too. He didn’t have the big Plaski bones like she and Danny did, or the wide, shield-shaped face. He was more like a weasel or a ferret, narrow and quick.

  Danny swiped at the sweat on his forehead. “Jason, you gonna negotiate or what?” he said.

  “Randall,” Jason called over his shoulder, “you gonna let us go or what?”

  “What’re you, nuts? You’re my friggin’ hostages.”

  “There’s your answer.” Jason shrugged. He narrowed his eyes on Amber. “Is that purple in your hair? That sure as hell better not be purple.”

  “What’s it to you?” Amber said.

  “Purple’s a dyke color. What are you now, a dyke?”

  Amber concentrated on her hand, smoothing down the dog’s fur. In the old days, she would have tried to defend herself and he would have taken everything she said and twisted it into something else he could rag on her for. And then of course she would have cried; she was always crying back then. Amboo-hoo they had called her. Now she knew better.

  “Gotta have hostages,” Randall said.

  He had the gun jammed up against his cheek so he could look through the sight thing on top. Concentrating—Amber could tell by the dorky way his tongue was sticking out. Randall always had been sort of a dork, but he wasn’t so bad, really. He’d had a couple feel-her-ups with her but it wasn’t anything new, one of her mother’s other boyfriends had been there before and a childhood friend of Danny’s, too. She had just held her breath and thought about something else until she saw a chance to get away. And Randall did work sometimes. He’d help out with a roofing job once in a while, and one time he’d worked for a landscaper for a couple of weeks. Mostly, though, he just hung around the house drinking and coming up with ways to get rich. He would sit at the kitchen table and write his plans on paper plates. Golf balls was one idea—collecting them outside of golf courses and then reselling them. Japanese car parts was another. And there was some long, involved scheme about playing blackjack at the Indian casino in Connecticut, although Amber had never understood how it was supposed to work. He’d get all jazzed and go on and on about whatever it was, but after a couple of days he’d stop talking about it and if you ever brought it up, he’d snort and say, “What’re you, nuts?”

  The trouble came when he got skunked. Usually he just drank beer or, when her mother was still alive, the vodka and orange juice she’d always favored. But every so often, a dark, suspicious mood would come over him and he’d start in with the whiskey. It was on one of those nights that he’d broken Danny’s jaw—just suddenly hauled his arm back and started slugging him in the face, and then, when their mother tried to stop him, thrown her against the wall so hard she blacked out. Jason called the cops on him that time and there was a big hoopla with a restraining order and court hearings and all that, although nothing ever came of it. Their mother stopped answering the legal advocate’s calls, and a few weeks later Randall was back at the house like always. By the end, when the drinking was finally killing her, he’d pretty much kept to himself anyway.

  Their mother had been nice in those last few months. Weird to look at—her arms and legs were like sticks and her belly was as big as a pregnant woman’s—but sweet in a way she’d never been before. One night near the end she had sat with Amber on the porch and watched the fireflies flashing above the overgrown scruff of the backyard. It was the kind of thing she never did, and looking at her, sitting there so quietly, Amber had suddenly felt afraid.

  “They’re cool, you know? The fireflies?” Amber blurted. “And you can’t never tell where they’re gonna be. First over here, then over there—” She stopped herself; she was running at the mouth.

  “That’s true,” her mother said in a faraway voice.

  Then there was a noise behind them and Amber turned around to see Danny standing in the doorway. Only he didn’t make fun of her or tell them to shut up or anything, and the three of them just stayed there, not speaking, while the fireflies flashed on and off in the dark.

  A few days later her mother started pissing blue and Randall took her to the hospital. The funeral was a cheap, quick affair with a plain wooden coffin that looked too short to even fit her and a couple bunches of frayed carnations. Not that they had any right to complain. The church had paid for it, and who was there to impress anyway? It was just the four of them and Mrs. White, their nosy neighbor from up the road. Randall said he’d take care of the headstone later, but somehow it never happened and they all went their separate ways—Jason to college, Danny to his girlfriend’s, Amber to the foster home in Springfield. They wouldn’t have been back either, if Amber hadn’t asked Danny to drive her out to pick up her summer clothes. It was Randall’s house now; at least he was the one who lived in it.

  Randall put down th
e gun and rubbed the sweat away from his eyes. “Whew! Wish I had one of my guys here right now to spell me.”

  “It’s not like an attack or anything,” Danny said wearily. “They just want to talk to you.”

  “You bet your ass it’s an attack,” Randall said. “They’re trying to take the house.” He picked up the bottle of JD and waved it at them. “They’ll take it all, we don’t fight back—our houses, our guns, everything. If you numbnuts knew what’s what, you’d be fightin’ with me.” He took a swig and put the bottle down on its edge. It wobbled and fell over. “Whoopsie,” he said, grabbing for it.

  “Great,” Danny muttered.

  Amber giggled.

  “What’s so funny, lesbo?” Jason said.

  She made herself look him straight in the eye. “I’ve got a boyfriend, asshole.”

  “A boyfriend! Wow! Ambo’s got a boyfriend.”

  Randall stopped trying to get the bottle to stand up and took another drink. “You think the Zionist government ain’t gonna take away your rights? Man! I got news for you.”

  “So this boyfriend,” Jason said to Amber. “How much does he pay you?”

  Danny barked out a laugh. “Harsh!” he said, reaching over to slap Jason five.

  Amber felt herself go red. She had thought, somehow, that Danny would stick up for her.

  “No, wait,” Jason said, “let me guess. Ten bucks? No, too much. Five? Is it five?”

  She bent her face over the dog. Why did she always do that—blab out the very thing they could attack her with? That was her problem: She couldn’t keep her mouth closed. “Would you shut up already?” Julian had said to her last week in front of the band. And she did it, too—shut up and sat down while they talked the song over without her. They’d made it up afterward, though. In the doorway of the Jehovah’s Witness church, with her back against the ridges of the paneled wooden door. For the hundredth time, she summoned the feeling of his fingers inching up her shirt, the sweet-sharp pain of him pushing into her.