Slave Day

by Rob Thomas

  “Keene, you’re not saying that Mr. Twilley is kicking her out because she’s black—,” says Mr. Warren.

  “Look, all I know is that every honors teacher here is white, and each year they decide who can stay in the program. Every year there’s fewer and fewer—”

  Then Charity interrupts me.

  “Mr. Twilley said Tamika was cheating? Who’s smart enough that Tamika would want to cheat off him? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “They’re saying she cheated off Trevor Wilson,” I announce.

  I know that it was really the other way around, but telling it like this causes a bunch of murmuring around the classroom. No one believes for a second that Tamika would cheat off Trevor. As I look around, I can almost see doubt creep across the faces of the white students. Eron speaks for the blacks in class.

  “That’s messed up,” he says.

  Mr. Warren looks at me and kind of tilts his head like he’s trying to figure me out. I wonder if he remembers teaching us about spin doctors, about how they’re able to make slices of truth work for their cause. I remember the lesson pretty well.

  JENNY

  12:33 P.M. Fourth period, English

  I sit across the room from Clint. Mrs. Carney splits up couples as soon as she figures out who’s together. She waits for the first time the two of you so much as look at each other, then boom, you’re six rows apart. She’s one of those teachers who you can tell never had a boyfriend when she was in school, so she doesn’t want anyone else to have one. Mrs. Carney doesn’t seem to mind that Tina MacQuarie sits right behind me and yaks up a storm. Tina’s a bud, but she’s been going with a guy from the county’s “other” school, Hays(eed) High—where ag is the only elective—for two years now, so English is the only time we speak anymore. I know exactly what she’s going to ask about today. Tina never lets me down.

  “What was up with Damien Collier this morning?!” she says so loud I’m afraid Clint will hear her.

  “Oh, you know how guys are.” I’m not sure this makes any sense, but it’s the sort of answer that will intimidate most girls. I mean, who wants to admit they don’t know “how guys are”?

  “Yeah,” she says.

  See?

  “But think about it,” Tina continues. “What if Clint wouldn’t have had the cash on hand to outbid Damien? You would have been stuck all day with that freak.” She looks a bit embarrassed, but she picks right back up. “I’m sorry. I know he’s, like, Clint’s best bud and all, but he wears used clothes. He’s got one of those Moe haircuts, and have you seen his car?” (I have. It’s a 1970s station wagon with fake wood paneling on the doors.) “I would let my parents drive me to school before I showed up in that. Look at you, girl, you’ve got it made. Clint’s one of the sweetest guys in school—and believe me, there aren’t many of those here. The boy is hot. Plus, that’s one tough-looking Jeep he drives.”

  Do I ever sound this shallow? I don’t ever say things like this out loud, but is this the way I think? You know, at football games, when I’m sitting with the dance team and they call out Clint’s name for making a tackle, I get some sort of weird sense of pride out of it. And I know in my heart of hearts that it’s not me being proud of him—it’s me being proud of me. I want all the girls around me to notice. Isn’t that demented?

  “Damien’s a sweet guy. He just didn’t want Clint to get away with bidding only five dollars on me,” I say.

  “Aaah,” Tina purrs. “That is sweet.”

  TIFFANY

  12:51 P.M. Fourth period, the University of Texas at Austin

  Sixty thousand students crammed onto a forty-acre campus—no wonder there’s no parking. Thank God for handicapped spots, or we might still be orbiting.

  We walk along the Drag—the coffee shop, book, and record store–lined street that runs beside the UT campus. Some guys in UT physical plant jumpsuits are using a water blaster to try to get rid of graffiti on the sidewalks. Brendan stops walking and stares at the huge water compressor. Yep, he’s got a Y chromosome.

  “Brian, I’ll buy you the Big Machines and Monster Trucks video if you’ll keep up.”

  “Brendan,” he stammers.

  Mad Dog’s is packed, but Ian’s not hard to spot. He’s the one with the palest skin, the grimiest clothes, the stringiest hair, and the Film Threat promotional baseball cap. Funny, at the party he looked a lot more like Ethan Hawke. It must have been really dark—that, or I was really smashed. He waves to me. God …

  There’s only one chair, so I send Brian to get me some onion rings.

  “Is that a friend of yours?” Ian asks, his eyes following my servant. I recognize the unspoken question. Men—transparent at any age.

  “My lover. I’m a dominatrix,” I say.

  Ian laughs, but it sounds forced. One to nothing, Tiffany. Ian hands me a script and says to take a look at it. I start flipping pages. He’s tells me how he guinea-pigged at a drug testing center for the “tidy sum” it took to bankroll the project. I nod and say uh-huh every twenty seconds or so, but I’m more interested in the script than in what he’s saying. It has its good points: Lou Ann gets lots of lines, she packs heat, her clothes stay on. And its bad points: Most of her lines have exclamation points after them (AAAAAAAHHHHHGGGGG!); she doesn’t blow anyone away; and she dresses like some inbred moonshiner’s wet dream—butt-revealing cutoffs and tablecloth-strip halters.

  Brian returns with the rings, then stands behind me. If only he had a palm frond to fan me.

  “So why me?” I ask.

  Ian sips his cappuccino reflectively before responding. “You have the right, uhm, uh, the right …” His eyes venture from my eyes to my mouth. They inspect my chin, canvass my neck, contemplate my chest. If he doesn’t answer soon, he’ll be performing a gynecological examination. “The right look,” he finishes. Has this “So you want to be in movies” routine ever worked for Mr. Director, here? I swear, sometimes it seems like the only thing college guys have over high school guys is that they don’t expect you to wear their letter jacket.

  “That good-hearted look?” I say, my eyes wide with naïveté.

  “Yeah,” says Ian. “Good-hearted but worldly wise. Hey, maybe you could come up to my flat …” (Flat? My God! He lives in England.) “… and we could rehearse?”

  Why doesn’t he just ask whether I’m interested in seeing his ceiling? “Oh I’m sorry, Babe”—I reach over and pinch his pasty cheek just below the carefully cultivated black bags under his eyes—“but Brian here has to get back to boot camp. He’s AWOL right now. Gotta bolt.”

  This confuses my wanna-be director. Again he forces a laugh, but he gets up and walks us out of Mad Dog’s. I wonder if he’s got another appointment set with some other “good-hearted” leading lady. Better luck next time, pal.

  Ian squints at the sun once we move outside. Maybe it’s the first time he’s seen it.

  “You’ve got my number. Give me a call. We can talk more about the part,” he says.

  “What are these?” Brian asks, picking the perfect time to interrupt. I look down to where he’s pointing. I realize I’m standing on the graffiti the UT workers are trying to water-blast out of existence. Disturbingly, I’m camped out over the outline of a body, the kind that you see in television crime scenes. Ian looks put out, but he answers.

  “Thirty years ago, this psychopath—Whitman, I think his name was—took a bunch of rifles up to the top of the tower”—he points up to the twenty-two-story UT tower, which looms over the campus—“and he just started blowing people away. He killed twenty-something people before they took him out.”

  “And these are left over from then?” Brian asks. Doubtfully, thank God.

  Ian laughs this superior laugh. Maybe I ought to set him up with Rainy.

  “No, no, no. There was a big controversy over whether the UT board of regents should put up a memorial for the victims in conjunction with the anniversary and all. They decided against it, so someone decided to spray-paint their own me
morial. All of these are supposedly painted exactly where the people were killed.”

  Brian reaches down and touches the outline. What a freak.

  “Personally, I wouldn’t have used neon colors for the job,” blathers Ian. “I think the starkness of black on white would have provided a more chilling image.”

  “Deep,” I say.

  MR. TWILLEY

  12:57 P.M. Lunch, auto shop

  When I arrive in auto shop to pick up young Mr. Parks, I find him in the backseat of my car. I suppose that means he’s expecting a ride to lunch. I’m not even buckled up before he barks an order.

  “Follow that car!” he says.

  “What car?” I say.

  “They’re getting away with the diamonds!”

  That’s when I realize he’s pulling my leg. I start the car and pull out of the garage.

  “Go through the student parking lot,” says Parks.

  “The faculty parking lot is the more direct route,” I say.

  “Well, la-di-da,” he says, so I obey his request and take the long way.

  “What is our destination?” I ask.

  “Lotta Taco, Smithers. And make it snappy.”

  Parks rolls down both back windows, and as we slowly make our way out of the lot, he waves to passing students with such an air of dignity that I feel as if I am a Secret Service agent charged with guarding the president. It’s evident that this is the effect for which Mr. Parks is hoping as well.

  “If they get too close—shoot them,” he tells me.

  I exit through the gates in front of the school and head toward the highway. While the upscale Mexican food restaurants are near the central campus, Lotta Taco sits on the I-35 frontage road. It’s a converted Tastee-Freeze that has been catering to the locals for the past decade. Back when it was still Tastee-Freeze, I would bring the Quiz Bowl team here for cones. As I exit the highway, I realize that I haven’t heard a sound from the backseat. I adjust my rearview mirror so that I can see Parks’s face. I discover he’s dozed off. How can one go from full speed to out cold in a matter of seconds? As I stop the car, Parks awakens and hands me two crumpled dollar bills from his pocket.

  “Five bean-and-cheeses,” he says, “and a water. Can you float me three cents?”

  “Of course,” I say, amazed that $2.03 can purchase five tacos. “We’re not going in?”

  “Can’t. Got to rehearse,” he says, shutting his eyes and resting his head back against my seat. I’m reminded of the seemingly infinite number of times I was forced to drop books next to Thomas’s desk in order to wake him up. When I return to the car, I see Parks has spread out across the length of my backseat, but he pops up as soon as I open the door. I hand him the weighty bag of food.

  “Gracias, señor,” he says more ethnically than any of the members of Los Reyes del Camino, the local low-riding club. Then he proceeds to insert half of the fat, soft taco in his mouth. Refried beans bleed out at the corners. There has been some discussion among the teachers in the lounge concerning Mr. Parks’s personal hygiene, and I’m vaguely aware of a strange odor. I had originally written it off as the after-stench of industrial cleansers, but on second thought, it smells more like a can of deodorant has been used to fog the car.

  “You got kids?” Parks says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Little Twilleys.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s a personal question, Thomas.”

  “If you say so.” He wolfs down another taco, then forces out words. “Just seems funny. That’s all.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Being a teacher and all. Most teachers have kids.” Then he resumes the inhalation of his food. I’m left to consider my lack of posterity. Esther and I tried. Well into my forties, we tried. In 1975 a doctor told us that we could be one of the first couples to give birth to a baby fertilized in a laboratory, a test-tube baby, but I decided against it. It just didn’t seem right to me, a baby conceived in a vial. Plus, we were getting up there in years. The doctor said Esther was healthy enough, but who knows with that sort of thing?

  If we had gone ahead with it, I’d be a father now. And maybe I’d still be a husband.

  CLINT

  1:06 P.M. Lunch, Bonanza

  Taped to the glass of the front door, right as you walk into the restaurant, there’s an eight-by-ten glossy of Humphrey Brown on Bonanza’s WE SUPPORT THE REBS! poster. Forty-two guys on the team, and we all have our own posters. They’re hung up at all the local businesses in town that buy ads in the football program. ’Course, most of the merchants who buy ads suited up in the Red, Blue, and Gray at one time or ’nother. I know, ’cuz every time I walk in one of these places, the owner wants to tell me ’bout some pass he caught or some tackle he made.

  Now, some people will try to tell you—and you shouldn’t believe these people for a second—that the posters are distributed randomly to the businesses. That’s a loada BS. The coolest places get the best players. Bonanza is where most of the team eats during the week. On Thursdays it’s packed with guys eating two or three chicken-fried steaks. Jody Anderson set the team record with seven at one sitting last year. Over the years Bonanza has had the Tyke Milton, Warren Stewart, Fred McCabe, and DeWayne Haynes posters. All of ’em went on to play major college ball. Last year my poster was up at Margaret’s Unisex Salon. I caught so much hell, but sophomores are always in the shit places. This year I’m at Whataburger, which is pretty cool. It’s open twenty-four hours and everyone goes there after Taco Cabaña and Dairy Queen close. Next year, though, I better see me when I’m comin’ in here for my Thursday meal.

  I guess Jen’s over whatever was buggin’ her. She actually stuck her hand in my back pocket on the way out to my Jeep. Then, once we got here, she jumped up on me. Right now she’s ridin’ piggyback.

  “Duck,” I say as we pass through the doorway.

  “Pig,” she says. Then she jabs a finger in my ribs and tickles me.

  “Oh, you are sooo funny.”

  Everybody’s here. The dining room’s already filling up with football players. Jenny’s still on my back as I cruise around, lookin’ for a table. It doesn’t look like we’re gonna get one of our own. I’m hopin’ to spot Alex, but before I can find him, Annabella Guzaldo calls me. This is weird; I’ve never met the girl in real life.

  “Why don’t y’all sit with us?” she says.

  Now that I’m payin’ attention, I can tell she was really talkin’ to Jen. They’re both Rebelettes, but I didn’t know they were friends.

  “Yeah, let’s sit with them,” Jen says.

  I give Trim “Is this cool?” eyebrows. He shrugs, so what the hell.

  I let Jenny down, and we both step t’ward Madonna’s side o’ the booth. She wants me to sit next to Trim? I’d look queer. I mean, it’s one thing if there are four guys at a booth. Then it’s fine to sit next to another guy, but when there are two guys and two girls? Get conscious. Sometimes girls just don’t think. I sit next to Madonna, and Jen sits across from me. Right then a waitress is at our booth. Trim and I order the chicken-fried steak special with iced tea, the girls order the salad bar. Jen gets a Diet Coke. Madonna gets a regular Coke.

  “So how’re things workin’ out with your slave? She treatin’ you all right?” Trim says.

  Honestly, I keep forgettin’ it’s Slave Day. Guess that’s what happens when you buy your own girlfriend. An answer like that sounds lame, though.

  “She’s been a bit uppity. Too much spirit. You know how it goes.”

  “Those are the worst kind,” Trim says. “You gotta get ’em trained right off the bat.” Trim takes a gulp of his water. “Annabella?”

  “Your Highness?”

  “I’ve got some water on my lip.”

  So Madonna pulls a napkin out of the dispenser, leans across the table, and wipes Trim’s mouth off. As she leans forward I fight my desire to stare at her body.

  “Cool,” I say. Then I have
a thought. “Say, Jen, get me the lemon from that table for my tea.” I point to a table where Bonanza owner Walter Braintree is sittin’.

  Jenny reaches across our table, picks up the bowl of sliced lemons, and sets ’em in front o’ me.

  “I don’t want these lemons,” I say. “I want those lemons.”

  Trim sticks up his hand. High fiveage.

  JENNY

  1:12 P.M. Lunch, Bonanza

  There was something in the way Annabella asked us to sit with them that made me say yes, even if it did mean sharing a table with Timm Trimble. She was practically begging for company. Now I wish we hadn’t joined them. First of all Clint makes me sit right next to Timm, and now he’s showing off, trying to be King Stud.

  I look over my shoulder at the table where Clint wants me to get the lemons. There’s just one man there, and it doesn’t look like he’s eating. He’s just reading a newspaper. I recognize him. He’s at all the football games and booster club meetings. This shouldn’t be too bad. Sighing, I get up from the booth and walk over to the man’s table.

  “Excuse me. Sir?” I say while I stare at the man’s tie clip, which is in the shape of a little football. “Would you mind if I borrowed your lemons?”

  “You don’t have any lemons on your table?”

  He sounds concerned about the lemons, which strikes me as really funky.

  “We have lemons, all right. It’s just that these lemons are better than our lemons.” I know I’m still staring at his tie clip, but I try smiling.

  He looks over at our table, grins, then glances up. “So who am I talking to?” he asks. And it dawns on me who this guy is. He owns this place. He’s maybe the biggest Rebel-backer in town.

  “I’m Clint DeFreisz’s girlfriend,” I say, motioning with my head back toward our table.

  “Do you have a name of your own?”

  “Uh, yeah. It’s Jenny … Jenny Robinson.” Then there’s this silence that makes me fidget. “My dad’s Tanner Robinson. He’s the athletic director up at Central.”