Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  X could pass. It was too soon to tell about his sister, but it was obvious that C could not. I sometimes see the arcs of each boy’s life based solely on the reactions from strangers, friends, and family—the reaction to their colors. They’ve already assigned my boys qualities: C is quiet and moody. X is eccentric. X, who from the age of two has believed he is a carnivorous dinosaur, who leaps, claws, and bites, who speaks to no one outside his immediate family, who regards interlopers with a cool, reptilian smirk, is charming. His blue eyes somehow signify a grace and virtue and respect that needn’t be earned—privilege—something that his brother will never possess, even if he puts down the paintbrush, the soccer ball, and smiles at people in the same impish way. But they are my boys. They both call me Daddy in the same soft way; C with his husky snarl, X with his baby lisp. What will it take to make them not brothers?

  X was poised on the table as though he was waiting in ambush. C had finished pumping and was testing the ball against one of the four-by-four wooden mullions for the picture window that looked out on the back lawn. Claire came in, holding the girl, and turned the music down.

  “Honey, get down, please.” X remained poised, unlistening, as though acknowledging that his mother would ruin his chance of making a successful kill.

  “He’s a raptor,” said his brother without looking up.

  “Get down.” She didn’t wait. She put down the girl, who shrieked in protest, grabbed X, who squawked like a bird, and put him down on the floor. He bolted as soon as his feet touched the ground and disappeared around the corner, growling as he ran.

  “They’ll be here soon,” said Claire. “Can everyone be ready?”

  “Who’ll be here?” mumbled C. His rasp made him sound like a junior bluesman.

  “The Whites.” His shot missed the post and smacked into the glass. Claire inhaled sharply.

  “Put that ball outside.”

  C looked at me. I pointed to the door. He ran out.

  “No,” Claire called after him. “Just the ball.” The girl screeched and pulled on her mother’s legs, begging to be picked up. Claire obliged, then looked to me.

  “‘Look what the new world hath wrought,’” I said.

  She looked at the table, the ring from my coffee cup, the slop in the bowl C had been mixing, and the gooey, discarded wand.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “To fight evil?”

  “Just go get him and get dressed. I’ll deal with the other two.”

  I put my cup down and stood up at attention. “The Whites are coming. The Whites are coming!” When we moved out of Boston to the near suburbs, my cousins had helped. I’d ridden in the back of their pickup with Frankie, who had just gotten out of Concord Correctional. We’d sat on a couch speeding through the new town, following the trail of white flight with Frankie shouting, “The niggers are coming! The niggers are coming!”

  I snapped off a salute. My girl, happy to be in her mother’s arms, giggled. I blew her a kiss. She reciprocated. I saluted again. The Whites were some long-lost Brahmin family friends of Edith’s. As a girl Claire had been paired with the daughter. They were of Boston and Newport but had gone west some time ago. They were coming to stay for the week. I was to go back to Brooklyn the next day and continue my search for a place to work and live. “The Whites are coming.” Claire wasn’t amused. She rolled her eyes like a teenager, flipped me the bird, and headed for the bedroom.

  I went outside. It was cool for July and gray, no good for the beach. We’d be stuck entertaining them in the house all day. C was under the branches of a ring of cedars. He was working on step-overs, foxing imaginary defenders in his homemade Ronaldo shirt. We’d made it the summer before—yellow dye, stenciled, green indelible marker. I’d done the letters, he’d done the number nine. It was a bit off center and tilted because we’d aligned the form a bit a-whack. It hadn’t been a problem at first because the shirt had been so baggy that you couldn’t detect the error, but he’d grown so much over the year, and filled it out, that it looked somewhat ridiculous.

  He passed the ball to me. I trapped it and looked up. He was standing about ten yards away, arms spread, palms turned up, and mouth agape.

  “Hello.”

  “The Whites are coming.”

  “So.”

  “So you need to change.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your mother said so.”

  “I haven’t even gotten to do anything.”

  “What is it that you need to do?”

  He scrunched up his face, making his big eyes slits. Then he raised one eyebrow, signaling that it was a stupid question. And with a voice like mine but two octaves higher said, “Pass the ball.” Slowly, as though he was speaking to a child. “Pass the ball.” As if he were flipping some lesson back at me. “Pass the ball.” Then he smiled, crooked and wide mouthed like his mother. He softened his voice—“Pass, Dad.”

  Almost everyone—friends, family, strangers—has at some time tried to place the origins of my children’s body parts—this person’s nose, that one’s legs. C is a split between Claire and me, so in a sense, he looks like no one—a compromise between the two lines. He has light brown skin, which in the summer turns copper. He has long wavy hair, which is a blend. Hers is laser straight. I have curls. C’s hair is red-brown, which makes one realize that Claire and I have the same color hair. “Look what the new world hath wrought.” A boy who looks like neither mommy nor daddy but has a face all his own. No schema or box for him to fit in.

  “Dad, pass.” I led him with the ball toward the trees, which served as goalposts. He struck it, one time, “Goooaaaal!” He ran in a slight arc away from the trees with his right index finger in the air as his hero would’ve. “Goal! Ronaldo! Gooooaaal!” He blew a kiss to the imaginary crowd.

  Claire knocked on the window. I turned. She was holding the naked girl in one arm. The other arm was extended, just as C’s had been. X came sprinting into the kitchen and leapt at her, legs and arms extended, toes and fingers spread like raptor claws. He crashed into his mother’s hip and wrapped his limbs around her waist all at once. She stumbled from the impact, then regained her balance. She peeled him off her waist and barked something at him. He stood looking up at her, his eyes melting down at the corners, his lip quivering, ready to cry. She bent down to his level, kissed him on his forehead, and said something that made him smile. He roared, spun, and bounded off. Her shoulders sagged. She turned back to me, shot a thumb over her shoulder, and mouthed, “Get ready!” She sat on the floor and laid the girl down on her back.

  C was still celebrating his goal—or perhaps a new one I’d missed. He was on his knees, appealing to the gray July morning sky.

  “Yo!” I yelled to him, breaking his trance. “Inside.”

  “In a minute.”

  “Cecil, now!” He snapped his head around and stood up like a little soldier. C had been named Cecil, but when he was four, he asked us to call him C. He, in some ways, had always been an easy child. As a toddler you could trust him to be alone in a room. We could give him markers and paper, and he would take care of himself. He was difficult, though, in that he’s always been such a private boy who so rarely asks for anything that we’ve always given him what he wants. “I want you to call me C.” Cecil had been Claire’s father’s and grandfather’s name, but she swallowed her disappointment and coughed out an okay. I’d shrugged my shoulders. It had been a given that our first child would be named after them.

  I thought, when he was born, that his eyes would be closed. I didn’t know if he’d be sleeping or screaming, but that his eyes would be closed. They weren’t. They were big, almond shaped, and copper—almost like mine. He stared at me. I gave him a knuckle and he gummed it—still staring. He saw everything about me: the chicken pox scar on my forehead, the keloid scar beside it, the absent-minded boozy cigarette burn my father had given me on my stomach. Insults and epithets that had been thrown like bricks out of car windows or spat like poison darts from junior h
igh locker rows. Words and threats, which at the time they’d been uttered, hadn’t seemed to cause me any injury because they’d not been strong enough or because they’d simply missed. But holding him, the long skinny boy with the shock of dark hair and the dusky newborn skin, I realized that I had been hit by all of them and that they still hurt. My boy was silent, but I shushed him anyway—long and soft—and I promised him that I would never let them do to him what had been done to me. He would be safe with me.

  Claire was still on the floor wrestling the girl into a diaper. She turned just in time to see X leave his feet. His forehead smashed into her nose, flattening it, sending her down. C shot past me and ran into the house, past the accident scene and around the corner. The girl sat up and X, unsure of what it was that he’d done, smiled nervously. He looked down at his mother, who was lying motionless on the floor, staring blankly at the ceiling. Then her eyes closed. Then the blood came. It ran from her nostrils as though something inside her head had suddenly burst. Claire has a very long mouth and what she calls a bird lip. The top and bottom come together in the middle in a point, slightly off center—crooked—creating a deep valley between her mouth and her long, Anglican nose. So the blood flowed down her cheeks, over and into her ears, into her hair, down the sides of her neck, and onto the white granite floor.

  C came running back in with the first aid kit and a washcloth. He opened it, got out the rubbing alcohol, and soaked the washcloth. He stood above his mother, looking at her stained face, the stained floor, contemplating where to begin. He knelt beside her and started wiping her cheeks. The smell of the alcohol brought her back, and she pushed his hand from her face. C backed away. She raised her arm into the air and began waving, as though she was offering up her surrender.

  I came inside. I took the kit from C, dampened a gauze pad with saline, and began to clean her up. She still hadn’t said anything, but she began weeping. Our children stood around us in silence.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I told them. “It looks a lot worse than it is.” X began to cry. C tried to hug him, but he wriggled loose and started backing out of the kitchen.

  “It’s okay, buddy.” He stopped crying, wanting to believe me. “It’s not your fault.” I activated the chemical ice pack and gently placed it on her nose.

  “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. Her lips barely moved. I wondered, if it hadn’t yet lapsed, if our insurance covered reconstructive surgery. Her chest started heaving.

  “Hey, guys. Take your sister in the back and put on a video.” They wouldn’t budge. “C,” I pointed in the direction of the TV room. “Go on.” Claire was about to burst. “Go.”

  They left and Claire let out a low, wounded moan, stopped, took a quick breath and moaned again. Then she let out a high whine that was the same pitch as the noise from something electrical somewhere in the house. My wife is white, I thought, as though I hadn’t considered it before. Her blood contrasted against the granite as it did on her face. I married a white woman. She stopped her whine, looked at me, and tried to manage a smile.

  “Look what the new world hath wrought.”

  Her face went blank; then she stared at me as though she hadn’t heard what I said, or hadn’t believed what I said. I should’ve said something soothing to make her nose stop throbbing or to halt the darkening purple rings that were forming under her eyes. I shifted the ice pack. Her nose was already twice its normal size. She closed her eyes. I slid my arms under her neck and knees and lifted.

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “Leave me.”

  “I’m going to put you to bed.”

  “Leave me.”

  “I’m not going to leave you.”

  Although she’d been through three cesarean sections, Claire can’t take much pain. She was still crying, but only tears and the occasional snuffle. Her nose was clogged with blood. She wasn’t going to be able to get up. Claire has always been athletic. She has muscular legs and injury-free joints. It seemed ridiculous that I should need to carry her—my brown arm wrapped around her white legs—I knew there was a lynch mob forming somewhere. I laid her down on the bed. She turned on her side away from me. There was little light in the room. The air was as cool and gray inside as it was out. I left her alone.

  C was waiting for me outside the door. He was shirtless, trying to ready himself to face the Whites.

  “Dad, is Mom gonna be okay?”

  “She’ll be fine.” He didn’t believe me. He tried another tack.

  “Is it broken?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “She’ll be fine.” I patted his head and left my hand there. C has never been an openly affectionate boy, but he does like to be touched. I’d forgotten that until he rolled his eyes up and, against his wishes, smiled. I steered him by his head into the bathroom and began to prepare for a shower and shave.

  “Have I ever broken my nose?” he asked, fiddling with the shaving cream.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever broken your nose?”

  “Yes.”

  He put the can down, stroked the imaginary whiskers on his chin, and looked at my face. I have a thick beard—red and brown and blond and gray. It makes no sense. The rest of my body is hairless. I could see him trying to connect the hair, the scars, the nose.

  “Did you cry?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Did you break your nose more than once?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you never cried?”

  “Never.”

  “What happened?” I had taken off my shirt and shorts, and he was scanning what he could see of my body, an athlete’s body, not like the bodies of other men my age he’d seen on the beach. He looked at my underwear, perhaps wondering why I’d stopped at them.

  He grinned. “You’re naked.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said sternly.

  He tried mimicking my tone. “Yes, you are.”

  “What are these?” I gestured to my boxers.

  “The emperor has no clothes,” he sang.

  “I’m not the emperor.”

  C stopped grinning, sensing he shouldn’t take it any further.

  “What happened?”

  “When?”

  “When you broke your nose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did you break your nose all those times?”

  “Sports and stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Sports.”

  He squinted at me and curled his lips in. He fingered the shaving cream can again. His face went blank, as it always seemed to when he questioned and got no answer. I hid things from him. I always had. Perhaps I was a coward. C already seemed to know what was going to happen to him. Just as I had been watching him, he’d been watching me, making the calculations, extrapolating, charting the map of the territory that lay between us—little brown boy to big brown man.

  He was already sick of it. He was sick of his extended family. He was sick of his private-school mates. He seemed world weary before the age of seven. His little friends had already made it clear to him that he was brown like poop or brown like dirt and that his father was ugly because he was brown. He was only four the first time he’d heard it and he kept silent as long as he could, but his mother had found him alone weeping. He’d begged us not to say anything to his teachers or the other children’s parents—they were his friends, he’d said. Claire wanted blood spilt. There were meetings and protests and petitions and apologies. People had gotten angry at the kids who’d ganged up on the little brown boy. One mother had dragged her wailing son to me, demanding that he apologize, and seemed perplexed when I noogied his head and told him it was okay. Other parents were even more perplexed when I refused to sign the petitions that would broaden the curriculum. Claire had been surprised.

  “Why don’t you want to sign?”

  “What good would i
t do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No institutional legislation can change the hearts of bigots and chickenshits.”

  Bigots and chickenshits, my boy was surrounded by them, and no one would come clean and say it, not even me. They would all betray him at some point, some because they actually were the sons and daughters of bigots and would become so themselves, some because they would never stand by his side—unswervable. Which little chickenshit would stand up for him when they chanted, “Brown like poop, brown like dirt”? They would all be afraid to be his friend. Even at this age they knew what it was to go down with him—my little brown boy.

  The Whites were coming. I had to be ready.

  “Get ready,” I said. I sent my little brown boy out and took a shower.

  As soon as I finished, C knocked on the door. It was as if he’d been waiting right outside.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Wait.”

  Noah had appeared naked before his son Ham, and Ham’s line was cursed forever. I didn’t want to start that mess again. I dressed quickly. I opened the door. My three children stood there: the brown boy, the white boy, and the girl of indeterminate race. They wore the confused look of children who’d just finished watching TV.

  “She’s got a poop,” C said, pointing at his sister’s bottom, holding his nose.

  “Yeah, poop,” said X.

  “No poopoo,” said the girl. I scooped her up and smelled, then I peeked into her diaper.

  “No poop.”

  I got them dressed and presentable and lined up near the front door. I could hear Claire in the bathroom, fiddling with her mother’s makeup. She seldom wore anything besides lipstick. We heard the car pull onto the gravel driveway. C leaned toward the kitchen.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Wait until you’ve said hello.” Claire emerged from the bathroom. It looked as though the kids had shoved a golf ball up her nose and then set upon her sinus area with dark magic markers. Her children looked at her in horror, as though their mother had been replaced by some well-mannered pug.