They Come in All Colors

by Malcolm Hansen

  Grampa Frank!

  What in the world happened to your arm, boy? Last I knew, you had two!

  Dad’s mother emerged from the Rexall holding a stapled prescription bag. She walked up beside Dad, glanced down at my cast, then continued to their truck without a word.

  Grampa Frank mussed up my hair and told me not to take it personally. I didn’t bother telling him that there wasn’t any risk of that, me and Dad having hashed that one out every time a holiday came and went and I never saw her. Grampa Frank always made a point to drop by for my birthday, but not her. Dad warned me that his mother wasn’t a very nice person pretty much every chance he got—called her a human icicle. The human icicle. The upshot was that she never gave herself the chance to be anything to me but a question mark who I only ever knew as Connie.

  Dad brought me in close and positioned me between his legs and asked Grampa Frank what was going on down the street. Albeit worse for wear, that bus was parked in the same spot that it had been the morning I’d run into the sheriff’s squad car—the Morning of Infamy, otherwise known as the Battle of Broken Arm.

  There was lots more activity going on around it now than there was then. Grampa Frank cautioned us not to pay it any mind, then changed the subject, only to have Dad hem and haw his way through an explanation of all that had happened to my arm and how we were getting along without Toby, then work his way around to asking for money.

  What for?

  Peola says Irma’s as big as a watermelon.

  You haven’t paid Toby yet?

  Paid him? Damn it, I haven’t paid myself.

  Good Lord! Go to the bank!

  Dad nodded like he understood and wouldn’t press. I studied Connie in the truck, the way she took off that fancy cream-colored pillbox-style hat of hers and delicately scratched at the crease in her hair. I couldn’t figure out what she had against Dad. It was no secret that they didn’t like each other, Akersburg being as small as it is and we still somehow managed to hardly ever see her. All I knew was that you had to be one hell of a stick-in-the-mud for your own son to call you by your first name.

  Dad and Grampa Frank appeared to have a lot of catching up to do. I wandered over to the curb and looked down the street. A small crowd was gathered under S&W’s awning, seven blocks down. Directly in front of them was the bus. It appeared to be leaning off-kilter.

  Grampa Frank headed off in his truck, and I tugged Dad down the street, toward the crowd of onlookers. He tried to ward me off, but it was no use. The air was absolutely electric. Something big was about to happen. I just knew it.

  Dad warned me to stay on the far curb, said he didn’t want trouble. I led him through the gawking crowd, just close enough to the bus to get a good look at the gash in the left front tire and three busted-out windows just behind where the driver sits. White people were gathered on our side of the street, coloreds were gathered on the other.

  I clasped Dad’s hand tight. I had so many questions. I didn’t know where to start.

  What the heck are they doing?

  Protesting.

  What’s that?

  Same thing you do all the time. Especially come bedtime.

  What are they protesting?

  Everything, son. Chevrolets, baseball, apple pie. You name it. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it wasn’t so damned un-American.

  They weren’t doing anything besides hanging out on the sidewalk. But seeing colored people gathered in a coordinated fashion in town like that fascinated me. Even if—truth be told—their khakis, button-downs, and loafers weren’t all that different from the kinds we wore, there was still something exotic about them. They weren’t just from out of town. They were from the North—that other world. It almost seemed like another universe to me. Actual flesh and blood northerners! They were, to me at least, the stuff of a great and often exasperating folklore. Hell, Dad cherished his Margaret Mitchell just as much as the next person.

  All the people I knew either were born in Akersburg, dreamed of getting out of Akersburg, or were passing through Akersburg. The farthest me or anyone I knew ever went was to Blakely, which sounded like another country but was just up the road twenty miles. I’d never heard of anyone coming to Akersburg except maybe for the open-tent revival meeting, the annual Seed and Feed Expo, or Mister Buford’s haunted house, which, small though it was, was practically world famous. Rumor had it that someone from Rowena had gotten scared so bad he’d crapped himself. Word spread like wildfire after that, so that by the time the last week of October rolled around, the line of people waiting to get in spanned half a mile down Bancroft Road. It’s been that way ever since.

  On top of that, those coloreds were doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. Dad had whispered in my ear that they were persona non grata. When I asked what the heck that was, he said unwelcome visitors who were up to no good—which held its own special kind of allure. So yes, I was riveted.

  Look!

  Christ almighty.

  Christ almighty was right. Long live the Republic, and sweet terra incognita. Toby was like some kind of circus-grade Whac-a-Mole. You got rid of him in one place, and he just popped up somewhere else. He stuck out like a sore thumb, standing as he was in overalls and rain boots in the middle of that well-heeled crowd, barking out orders to the other troublemakers, who seemed to be hanging on his every word. A newspaper man shoved his way up close and pressed a microphone into his handsome face. My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it. How’d he get famous so quick? What was I, chopped liver? Hell, I’d practically been his boss. If anybody deserved to be listened to, it was me.

  I picked at my wedgie and ran my tongue over the soft, gummy spot where my eyetooth had been. All I could think to myself as I stood there admiring the ease with which he dealt with all those people vying for his attention was that he was gone and was never coming back. So envious was I of his natural charisma that I plum forgot how mad I was at him for having left us in the first place. I’d even go so far as to say that I admired him—albeit for only a brief moment. And only in direct proportion to my want of courage to walk up to him in the midst of all that commotion and say, Hey, Toby. It’s me.

  What’s he doing?

  Organizing.

  Organizing what?

  Dad was suddenly in a hurry to get somewhere. Where, I don’t know. Oh yeah—the truck. What we’d come for. I almost forgot. He jerked at my arm like a leash and dragged me down the sidewalk back toward Nestor’s, weaving me through the crowd of upset white people still gawking at the circus across the street. Halfway down the block, I rubbernecked just enough to glimpse Toby mount a milk crate. His words boomed out: BOSS IS NOT YOUR CREATOR! HE IS NOT EVEN YOUR FACILITATOR! Dad stopped as if in a panic.

  • • •

  THAT SON OF a bitch Nestor had ordered the wrong year’s voltage regulator. When Dad asked how that was even possible, Nestor gave his suspenders a tug and explained that his service manual was missing a page. He’d had no choice but to take the part number from a ’54 Ford, which was supposed to be pretty much the same as our ’53 except for the exhaust system and the lever on the tailgate latch. There might have been a few other differences, but those supposedly related to the drivetrain.

  Nestor pulled out the service manual, spread it out over the front fender of our truck, and showed us all the pages that were missing. He then pulled a cup of water from his cooler, handed it to Dad, and explained that on top of that, postal service to Akersburg was suspended until further notice. It usually arrived on the twelve o’clock Trailways, which was being rerouted to Albany via Rowena. The bus company feared for their fleet. After all that had been done to the one up the street, who could blame them? I stood there tugging on Dad’s sleeve, wondering what this all meant for Mister Abrams’s replacement filter. I tried to ask him, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

  I left Nestor’s that afternoon with the distinct impression that Akersburg was, ipso facto, under siege. In my mind, we were only one ca
nister of tear gas away from martial law, armed checkpoints, curfews, full-body searches, air raids, and who knew what else. Maybe even bread lines. Make no mistake—we were at war, albeit with ourselves.

  • • •

  A BRIDGE HOUSE, having appeared up the road, stood lookout to a covered bridge. For those who have never been to Akersburg—the great majority of you, I am sure—a covered bridge is just a run-of-the-mill wooden bridge with a roof overhead. It’s basically a rectangular tunnel structure that spans a body of water—in this case, the Thronateeska River. It had a fancy name, but I can’t remember it at the moment. Walter F. George Memorial Bridge—something like that. Anyway, a pair of granaries loomed high over both, bridge house and bridge, from across the river. Dad and I walked across. We didn’t talk about all we’d seen in town. There was no reason to. I’d been there, and he’d been there, and we’d both seen it. What was there to talk about? Then, as we exited the covered bridge, Dad muttered something to himself about hoping to dear God, if there was a God, that they’d clear out by sunup.

  From the outskirts of town to our house is little more than a forty-minute walk down Cordele Road, across that covered bridge, past several dozen colored people’s homes, and on through a corridor of farmland, mostly orchards. The homes that we passed along the way were ramshackle clapboard houses, what Dad called shotgun houses, sharecropper shacks, or just plain shacks. He called them shotgun houses because they were so small I could fire a pea shooter clear through an open front door and reach the backyard. We plied our way past one after the next of these shacks, their sagging front stoops and balding patches of grass. The sky crackled, then opened up.

  Mister Goolsbee’s shop was so close I could smell the freshly cut rock dust pouring out of his open front door. The rain was coming down hard, and Goolsbee’s boy was standing under the eaves, wearing an oversized black brick cutter’s apron draped from his neck. He was sticking his hand out to catch the long needles of rain coming down.

  I ran ahead and joined him. Goolsbee’s boy pulled his hand in and put some distance between us. He kept to one side of the overhang, and I kept to the other—which was fine with me. I put my hands over my ears because of the shrieking noise of an electric saw coming from inside. Dad joined us a minute later. He came over and stood by me, and the three of us just stood there atop the shrunken floor boards, happy to be out of the rain. I had my head angled skyward, anxious for the dark clouds to pass.

  It was the happiest I’d seen Dad since the morning Toby had fixed a backed-up sewage pipe that wasn’t draining properly. Our house had smelled like a cesspool for weeks until he did. Anyway, I must have said something about hoping that the rain would let up soon because I was hungry and wanted to get home while supper was still warm. Dad looked at me like he didn’t know who I was.

  Stop? Goddamnit, boy, have I not taught you anything? You better hope for our sake that it rains so much pigs drown.

  A truck splashed through the long puddles out front and pulled up beside a stack of cut granite and a wheelbarrow half-filled with bricks. Two men got out of it and ran through the rain toward us. They were drenched by the time they reached the top of the steps. They banged the storm door open and disappeared inside. A minute later, the electric saw stopped buzzing, and another truck pulled up. Dad always said that when it rained, it poured, so I figured they were customers, too.

  Someone called out for an Evan! I figured it was Mister Goolsbee calling out for his boy to fetch something for one of the customers. When I looked around for the boy, he was gone.

  A man appeared in the doorway. He looked both ways and asked, Where’s Evan?

  That was only the second time I’d ever heard that boy’s name spoken in my life. He’d never been anything to me but Goolsbee’s boy, on account of having been a fixture around that place for as long as I could remember. I had my sneaker off, and my sock was in my hand. I squeezed it, trying to get the water out. Experience told me that Mister Goolsbee only serviced the colored cemetery down the road. That was the only place I’d ever seen his boy hauling stone slabs along with a shovel in that wheelbarrow out front. Why a white man would be buying a headstone from a colored man was beyond me.

  I shrugged. When the man disappeared back inside, Dad dragged me down from the porch and ran off with me in tow. It was the second time that day that Dad had dragged me off like that, without the least bit of explanation, and I didn’t appreciate it. I was screaming and hollering out, demanding to know what I’d done now.

  I hated it when he used his size against me willy-nilly like that. Drove me crazy. It was bad enough being four and a half feet tall and weighing sixty-five pounds without the Jolly Green Giant making me feel more feeble and helpless than I already was. He was running just as fast as he could, dragging me along with him through the mud puddles and into the wood—twice as fast as he had at the Battle of Broken Arm. And me hobbling along after him barefoot through grass and mud puddles just as fast as I could, struggling to keep up, with my shoes and socks in hand. I hollered at him to at least let me get my shoes all the way back on. But he wasn’t having it—wasn’t even listening to me. I tripped through mud and over stumps and branches and twigs, convinced he’d finally gone off the deep end.

  We covered half a football field in the time it’d take Ernie Davis with one point down, two seconds on the clock, and three defensive ends hot on his tail. It wasn’t until we were hidden deep inside the wood’s thick underbrush that Dad stopped. He was doubled over, clutching his gut, wheezing. His hair was soaked, and water was dripping down his chin, and his shirt was stuck to his chest. I was out of breath, too. My cast felt like it weighed a good twenty pounds. Dad pressed his hand over my mouth. His face was red and munched and he was peering back the way we’d just come.

  A loud voice came from Goolsbee’s place. Goddamned if I didn’t get the heebie-jeebies. I recognized it. The cloud cover was thick, and it was going on dusk. The light was low and there were too many trees in the way for me to see much. Dad pulled back a handful of branches, and a backlit silhouette appeared in the distance. Someone was being dragged out onto the back porch. I murmured under my breath, Oh Christ. It was Mister Goolsbee.

  Mister Goolsbee was pleading in the open doorway. He went down on his knees, and his hands were tied behind his back. It looked to me like one of the men was holding a pistol to his head. Rain was pummeling the ground and eaves and soaking the backyard, and it took several seconds of Mister Goolsbee going on in a desperate way before it occurred to me that he wasn’t pleading for his own life but for someone else’s—his boy’s. He was begging for the men not to hurt him. He was explaining that he was just a boy, and that he had no idea where he’d run off to, but that if he’d done something wrong or something he wasn’t supposed to have done it was only because he didn’t know better.

  I looked up at Dad for answers. He cupped a rain-soaked hand over my eyes and said, Hush. When the pitch of Mister Goolsbee’s pleading increased, Dad grabbed my hand, and we continued farther into the wood, splashing through long puddles, and didn’t stop until those horrific sounds were gone.

  • • •

  DAD DIDN’T MENTION anything to Mom about what we’d seen at Mister Goolsbee’s that afternoon. When I asked, he just said that it was important to pay your bills on time. Of course, everyone was in debt up to his ears, not just Mister Goolsbee. I knew that. Debt was practically all Dad talked about. He had so much of it I just figured he loved the stuff. Anyway, he said it was probably just some unscrupulous loan shark. Who knew what gambling debts the old coot had. When I brought it up again at bedtime, Dad told me to hush and explained that it was best kept between us.

  I had an unsettling dream that night, so I sneaked in and climbed into Mom and Dad’s bed. I couldn’t have been lying there for more than an hour, trying to fall back asleep to the sounds of water dripping from the eaves and an owl hooting outside, when the telephone rang. Dad picked it up and asked who in the hell was calling so lat
e. It was Nestor. Dad whispered his surprise that the truck was ready so soon.

  I rolled over. I could hear Nestor’s voice coming from the handset. He sounded panicky. He was explaining that he’d had no choice but to get the voltage regulator from Lesley, who apparently kept a mountain of spare parts in his backyard. Said it was important that Dad pick the truck up as soon as possible. Dad sat up in bed with the telephone droning in his hand. His face was an outline in the moonlight. He looked more concerned than he had been after he’d run into Mister Orbach and Mister Schaefer at Buskin Brothers back in May and they’d laughed him out of the store for having planted so doggone late. Mom appeared in the doorway. She’d come in from the living room, where she’d been sleeping. She took the phone from him and hung it up.

  Dad told me to go back to my room. When I refused, he told me to at least go back to sleep. When I told him that I couldn’t sleep, he told me to count sheep. I put my head down on the pillow and imagined Nestor as a covert operative driving his tow truck through a land mine–riddled countryside, with our voltage regulator shimmying around on the passenger’s seat. I told Dad that it wasn’t all bad. Even if we lacked Toby, we had gotten plenty of rain and would soon have our truck, too. With any luck, we’d have our peanuts all dug up and up on stack poles in no time. Dad got out of bed and left to put on a pot of coffee. Mom draped her bathrobe over her shoulders and followed after him, complaining about Nestor doing a rush job just to get our truck out of his garage when it had been sitting there for almost a week now.

  • • •

  MY CAST HURT in a strange new way in the morning. I must have slept funny. I got up to check the thermometer out back just to confirm what my body already knew: it was swim weather. Dad was in the kitchen, scarfing down his breakfast. He told me to hurry up, said that he wanted to get in town early, before things got out of hand. I took one bite of toast, and he pulled out my chair. Told me not to worry about finishing my breakfast. He grabbed me by the hand and led me out the door.