They Come in All Colors

by Malcolm Hansen

  Mom stood at the stove yapping to Dad about how he just needed rest. She suggested he put his head back down and try his hand at another catnap. Instead, he paced up and down the kitchen, eating straight out of the pie dish while complaining bitterly about how he was too tired to work and too restless to sleep, and how prices are going through the roof, and that thirteen dollars is a ridiculous amount to ask retail for a slow cooker, even if it is a Westinghouse.

  Dad was starting to drive me crazy. I helped myself to that second gingersnap and ducked out the back door. About a hundred yards out, a light flickered upstairs at the Orbachs’. I propped myself up by the banister and stood on my tippy-toes to see if Derrick’s bedroom light was on; maybe he knew what the heck was going on. It wasn’t. I plopped myself down on the stoop and gazed out over the saddest-looking peanut crop you ever did see, all the while wondering what to make of all the fuss.

  • • •

  THAT POOL WAS the only thing I had to look forward to for the entire month of July. It was practically the only time I got out of the house. Six days a week I’d drag my feet from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen and out onto our creaky back porch, where I’d work for most of the day. Then, come Saturday, you couldn’t find a happier kid on the planet, goofing off, making waves in that pool as I did. I kicked at the dirt and headed for the silhouette of the Orbachs’ house, the light still blinking in the distance.

  The Orbachs had a one-eared mutt named Pip. Derrick said they didn’t let her inside because she was a work dog. I’d never seen her work a stitch in her life, unless you count the way she ran up to me at the fence posts that separated our fields from theirs. Pip jumped up on me, wagging her tail and sniffing and licking me all over. She pranced alongside me all the way up to Derrick’s bedroom window. I told her to keep quiet and knelt down and combed my fingers through the dirt, looking for an acorn or a pebble—anything that would reach the second-floor window without breaking it. But Pip wouldn’t let up. Frustrated with me for not playing with her, she barked. Before I was able to muzzle her, the front door opened. Missus Orbach was standing in the doorway glaring at me.

  Damn you, Huey!

  I bolted. Missus Orbach was on top of me before I’d even made the line of fence posts. She grabbed me by the neck and I squawked so loud birds flushed and field mice scattered. She dragged me across the field, under the clothesline, and around the side of our house. She mounted the bottommost step and banged on the front door.

  Dad poked his head out.

  I found him creeping around!

  On account of the pool being closed, Pop! I swear it! Christ almighty, I gotta come up with something else to do on Saturdays now! Either that or get to the bottom of who did it so Mister Abrams can open it back up!

  What’d I tell you about poking your nose in other people’s business, Huey?

  If not me, then who? The police? The last case they cracked was. Well, Mister Nussbaum still hasn’t gotten his pig back.

  Dad told me to apologize.

  But my lessons! Don’t you get it? Danny packs up and goes back to college in four more weeks. No lifeguard, no swim lessons. It’s as simple as that. Mister Abrams is always saying that he doesn’t trust any of the other teenagers to look after us kids! So unless I get to the bottom of this, and quick, I may as well kiss that pool goodbye! Besides, you already paid for my damned lessons. Said so yourself. You don’t wanna lose that money, do you?

  Dad apologized to Missus Orbach. He walked her down the stoop and assured her that whatever was going on with me, he’d sort it out. Missus Orbach said that I sounded like a prairie dog scurrying around in her hedgerows and that I was lucky not to have been shot, then disappeared in the darkness.

  • • •

  AKERSBURG IS MORE of an administrative center for all the local farmers than an actual town. So I just assumed that it was like Dad had said: people just get riled up over the least little thing, just to have something to talk about. Gives them a sense of community. So I pretty much wrote off the matter concerning Mister Abrams’s pool, hoping that all the hubbub would blow over in a couple of days and that would be that. But after the fifth day, Mom and I were watching TV after supper when we heard a loud knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock at the front door.

  Mom didn’t take late appointments. She turned down the volume and went to see who it was.

  Mister Abrams gave an embarrassed grin in the milky light cast from above the front door. Mom opened it further and invited him in. I shot up in my seat, hoping that he’d come to announce that whatever the heck had been going on was all better now and us kids were welcome back. He took off his hat and told her that he’d just come by to have a quick word with Dad. Mom hung his hat up and led him into the kitchen. Dad was out back repairing stack poles with Toby. She went to get him.

  I slid down from Dad’s easy chair and followed Mister Abrams into the kitchen. When the storm door smacked shut behind Mom, he pulled from his overcoat what looked like a candied apple wrapped in fancy tissue paper. He wiped his fingers on his coat and unwrapped the paper, then held out a baseball. He told me to take it.

  I did.

  Mister Abrams said that it was a home-run ball. He told me what inning it had been hit and how warm the night.

  You know who Roger Maris is, right?

  I nodded.

  Mister Abrams went on about how Maris had been hopelessly out of position, even though it wouldn’t have mattered in the end, unless perhaps Maris had been sitting high up in the bleachers beside Mister Abrams himself. His knuckles went so white I could see the bone as he tightened his fists around an imaginary bat and mimicked the glorious swing of the man who had hit that ball so hard it shot from his bat like a rocket.

  A rocket, Huey, a rocket! Willie Mays made that mark, son. Will! Eee! Mays!

  Mister Abrams stood up straight and caught his breath. He wagged his hand at the ball in mine and said that he didn’t care what people said about the Babe. Everyone knew in their heart of hearts that Willie Mays was a god among men.

  Well. The ball did smell like a pinecone. And the scuff from where the bat had smacked it was beautiful. But I was suspicious. It was the first time I’d heard anyone talk as if it was possible to comment on a game with nothing in mind other than the game itself, and it stunned me. Because the old man slouching in front of me, with breath like camphor rub, had just spoken of a baseball player as a baseball player and nothing else. And just like that, a light clicked on.

  The back patio light. Mister Abrams mussed up my hair and told me that he wanted me to have the ball.

  Dad walked in with a paper plate in hand and asked Mister Abrams if he’d care for a cup of coffee. Mister Abrams wasn’t interested in coffee. He apologized about having been so testy the previous week, then glanced at Mom and said that surely she’d heard how the police were claiming two colored boys had swum in his pool.

  Mom made as if it was the first she’d heard of it.

  Dad, too. And all for a lousy dip. Christ, what’s the world coming to?

  There’s no place for colored folks to cool themselves is what the world’s coming to, dear.

  Mom was prone to exaggeration. They had the run of pretty much all of Lake Offal. Dad and I had even seen them there once, on our way out to Kolomoki Mounds State Park. We’d stopped to watch them for a minute; Dad wanted me to see that they could swim just fine.

  Dad kicked off each of his boots. I went over and stood beside him in the kitchen doorway, wondering why in the heck those people were always getting themselves into trouble. Mom was at the sink with her back to me and her hands in soapy dishwater. Her backside shimmied as she spoke over her shoulder while scrubbing.

  Well, did they catch them?

  Not yet.

  But they know who it was?

  Mister Abrams said that the sheriff was still tossing around names but that he had no proof. He wiped his forehead with the inside of his elbow, and the desperate expression on his
face softened.

  Listen, Buck. I’ve done every damned thing they’ve asked: had it drained and scrubbed, even had a newfangled chemical treatment applied that’s supposed to keep out mold, figuring, what the hell. Even if it costs me an arm and a leg. If doing it will make people happy then I may as well. But if Prinket thinks that being sheriff means that he needs to keep coming up with more things for me to do, then I got a mind to go into town and tell him that he can pay for it himself. Because there’s the day or two it’s gonna take for the water to warm back up to think about. Not to mention that all those chemicals are gonna take a few days for me to get just right. Now they’re saying that’s not enough. I don’t know what the hell they want me to do—put up razor wire? An electric fence? Hire out a night watchman? Build a watchtower? Maybe tear it up and start over? What? All I know is that if people don’t start coming back soon, my goose is cooked. And I gotta be honest—I thought that you, of all people, would understand.

  Dad’s face was deadpan. Well, we don’t.

  Mom turned around with a coffee cup in one hand and a soapy scrub brush in the other. Mister Abrams looked searchingly at her. When she didn’t say anything, he groped agitatedly through his pockets only to find that his car keys were already in his hand. He winked at me on his way out. As soon as the front door clapped shut behind him, Mom picked up the crinkly wrapping paper from the kitchen table and, folding it, said how it hadn’t even been a week yet and Mister Abrams was already acting like a ruined man.

  Dad tossed the paper plate into the trash and told her that this should be a lesson to her: greed was a shameful thing. And he wasn’t none too happy about Mister Abrams having gone off and put us in a bind.

  Not to mention the money he owes me. Shame on him. Of course we can’t go back there now. What’d he bring you, anyway?

  A baseball.

  A baseball? Christ. That old fool don’t even realize that being cheap is what got him into this mess. Go on and get yourself ready for bed.

  But it’s only seven.

  Then pick up your room.

  Dad just wanted to get rid of me, telling me to pick up my room when he knew perfectly well that I already had. I stopped at the front window on my way. Our driveway was a rutted gravel path covered with dead, rotten leaves from the previous fall and lined with garbage cans and a bunch of junk we never used. I blinked as Mister Abrams backed out his Pontiac. And then blinked some more. I couldn’t stop blinking.

  IV

  AS MUCH AS I WOULD have liked to tell Zukowski about all that had happened that summer, the truth is, I’d gone to great lengths to avoid talking about anything relating to Akersburg those first few years at Claremont. And I do mean anything. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m ashamed of where I’m from or anything like that, but I could only take so much of Bilmore and Hamilton busting my balls about the way I talked. So when they kept up their My Fair Lady routine all the way through Halloween—The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain—I started to feel that maybe I ought to just throw in the towel and hop on a Greyhound back home to Dad’s.

  Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. But I did forbid Mom from coming within ten blocks of school. I tried to explain to her how the parents of the other kids at Claremont don’t talk like we do: how the DuPont kid has this way of talking that makes everything he says sound smart, how Bilmore gets ferried back and forth from school in a black sedan, and how Hamilton lives in a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park. Not to be mean or anything, but just so she would know that these were high-class people she was sending me to school with. You’d think she’d have understood, based on the amount of time she spent with the Blumenthal twins, but honestly, she didn’t.

  She didn’t even have the sense to change out of that black-and-white maid’s outfit the Blumenthals make her wear when I met her on the day of The Nutcracker. Shortly after we took our seats, I leaned over and hush-whispered for her to at least have the good sense to keep her coat on until they dimmed the lights. Talk about embarrassing. It was starting to seem like she was doing it on purpose.

  • • •

  A FEW DAYS later, I was sitting in class humming Tchaikovsky’s “Russian Dance” when Mister Yamaguchi sent me to Mister McGovern’s office even though I instantly apologized and told him I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. It was just such a catchy number. You can imagine my surprise when I got there only to find Mom sitting in front of his desk wearing that same full length Windermere coat, nodding—a little too eagerly, if you ask me—as Mister McGovern gave his Sermon on the Mount about all that it means to be a Claremont boy.

  Mister McGovern stopped talking at the sight of me standing in the doorway. He pointed to a chair and told me to have a seat, then informed me that certain irregularities had been discovered on my last Japanese exam. Which—I’m not going to lie—troubled me immensely. Aside from Clyde, Mister McGovern was my biggest fan in the place. He held me up as a kind of modern day Horatio Alger.

  Now, of course, I’m not saying you did anything wrong. But just as a formality, would you mind telling me how you arrived at this answer here?

  Mister McGovern held out my exam.

  Mom elbowed me. Go ahead, cupcake. Tell him.

  Yes, Huey. Just walk me through your thought process.

  Thought process? I’d scribbled six different verb conjugations and their associated gerunds in little itty-bitty characters on the back of a grocery receipt on the train ride into school the morning of the exam. When I just sat there staring wide-eyed at the blue booklet in his hand, amazed that Mister McGovern even knew kanji and hiragana—who knew?—he turned to another page.

  Tell you what—how about we try another one instead?

  I cleared my throat. I had nothing—absolutely nothing.

  My God, Huey! Don’t tell me you cheated!

  I know, I know, I know. Cheating kind of defeats the purpose of going to a place like Claremont. But for crying out loud, everyone does it. Okay, maybe not everyone. But Zukowski doesn’t need to, and Lichenberger studies so damned much only because he’s paranoid he’s going to be written out of his grandfather’s will if he doesn’t. And to make matters worse, Mister McGovern had the nerve to come off like I was the only student in the history of the place to ever cheat.

  Mister McGovern sat back and frowned. You want people to think that’s the only way someone like you can get ahead in life? Is that what you want?

  V

  LISTEN, I WASN’T ALWAYS ASHAMED of Mom. It was just that she was the darkest white person I knew. I never thought twice about it in the context of Mister Abrams’s pool. Heck, what was the difference between her and Missus Burns, who was always slopping on the Coppertone, doing her damnedest to brown up every bit as much as Cleopatra? Which is why I always begged Mom to come along to Mister Abrams’s pool. Imagine: here it was, the closest thing we had to a country club, and she, the prettiest housewife in Akersburg, refused to step foot in the place. It didn’t matter that the rest of the moms all went—even Missus Orbach, whose one-piece made her look like a beach ball in sunglasses. Mom absolutely, positively, refused. After a while I stopped pleading with her. Then the pool closed, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore.

  A few days after Mister Abrams gave me that home-run ball, I was tossing it to myself out front when the door creaked open and Mom stepped out with an armful of laundry.

  Poor Stanley.

  Dad was sitting on the front stoop, showing me the proper way to sort through a pile of stack poles.

  Poor Stanley? Poor us. They got every white man in town complaining about how they’re being made to take a bath with those colored boys. They got no choice but to close the pool until they find out who did it.

  Close the pool? Don’t be ridiculous.

  Sorting through a pile of stack poles might seem like a piece of cake, but it isn’t. Never mind that the pile went all the way up to our roof and was home to all kinds of vermin—each pole was eight feet tall and stron
g enough to support five hundred pounds of peanut hay. We literally had thousands of them that we reused every year. When I realized that pitching in was the only way to get Dad to shut up about how important our work was, I squatted down and propped the end of the mangy-looking one I’d kicked down from atop the pile across my lap and tried to decide if it should go into the scrap heap or not. And as I looked it over for what Dad called “seams” or “beams” or “reams” or something—I hadn’t really been paying attention—I started to wonder how in the world it hadn’t been tossed on the junk heap years ago. The son of a bitch had to have been over a hundred years old for all the gouges, pits, and what looked like whip lashes covering it.

  I hesitated. Staring down at the gnarled and knobby end in my hand, I felt kinda bad. I mean, this thing looked like there wasn’t anything it hadn’t had heaped upon it over the years. Instead of taking it to the junk heap, I dragged it across the yard, over to the truck. I leaned it up against the rear bumper, then hopped up and into the truck bed and lifted it over the tailgate until it was in the truck bed with me. As I stood there looking down at it, sorta proud of myself for having spared it, everything around me was nice and quiet except for the chick chick chick chiiiiiiiiick of the field sprayer across the road and the squeaky sound of the rusty nails Dad and Toby were pulling from dry sweet gum.

  Mom came out with another basket of laundry. There’s a plate of peaches for you on the porch.

  Lord knows I was hot and sticky. The shade felt nice, and the peaches were cold and juicy. Mom was standing in the bright sunlight, wringing out a pair of Dad’s boxers like a dishrag. And as I sat there atop the stoop, slurping up slice after slice, she went on about how her grampa had picked peaches in the orchard surrounding the Camelot before there even was a Camelot. How, as a girl, she’d seen him walking down Cordele Road on his way home from work after having stopped off there for an “iced tea,” shortly after it had opened, back when it was called the CanTab.