They Come in All Colors

by Malcolm Hansen

  A street sign down the road was pocked with bullet holes. I stopped and marveled at how the sun glinted off the peeled-back metal where the bullets had torn through. Some colored boys walked up. They said that I looked to be a few feet shy of the deep end and laughed.

  I snatched off my dive mask. I didn’t realize that I still had it on. Dad had warned me against bringing it—said it made me look like a goofball. I told him I couldn’t see a thing without it because the thresher spewed so much crap everywhere I had to cover my eyes just to get within ten feet of the thing. All that grime and soot floating in the air made me tear up. That’s what clinched it. Dad had practically put it on me himself—couldn’t stand the sight of tears. Still, I felt like an idiot.

  The boys continued down the road without me. I wondered, as if for the first time, if being a loner was such a bad thing. I gave the faceplate a spit shine and put it back on. I decided that it wasn’t.

  A narrow band of road stretched out in front of me for as far as I could see. Telephone poles lined the roadside, and drooping wire hung from pole to pole. I headed down the road and thought about how the one picture I had of me and Mom had been taken by Toby when he was a teenager. Mom would always tell me about how she had set me atop the roof of our truck in nothing but diapers and told me to hold still. I’d banged my heels on the windshield, crying my eyes out, because it was hot. Mom told Toby to snap it anyway. It didn’t matter that the truck didn’t have an engine or that I was pouty. She was proud of us both.

  I followed Donner Road all the way up to Frontage Road, past my school. Crows were feeding in the adjacent field. Mister Daley rumbled past on one of Mister Orbach’s tractors, with two trailers in tow piled high with peanut pods sifting down in thin drifts. Mister Daley didn’t see me, so I chased after him and shouted, hoping to catch a lift. He disappeared around the bend going so fast his left side lifted. I tossed a clump of the dirt he’d trailed at the crows and wondered what the heck he was in such a hurry for.

  The muddy brown water of the Thronateeska threaded in and out of view behind each slowly passing alfalfa crop. After I’d walked half an hour along Oglethorpe, a cathedral of pine trees converged high overhead. Inside, gauzy bands of light shone through the branches and between the papery trunks of the birch trees lining the side of the road. I hesitated at the sight of a fingerpost leaning out.

  EATO TON COL RED SCHO L

  It had been fashioned from an oar. Much of the paint had faded, but most of the letters were legible. It fell over on my way past. Fifty yards in, I pulled down a slumping fence and cut through tall stalks of grass. Exposed cinder blocks and tattered beige shingles peeked out from the thinning foliage up ahead. I headed around a derelict clapboard building, not at all convinced that it was the school that the sign had indicated.

  I brushed back cobwebs and peeked into a dark window. The interior was completely gutted. I clapped the dirt and flakes of paint from my hands. The building opened onto a glade around back. Two colored boys were stooped over in the middle of a grassy field, with their backs to me. They caught me off guard—I thought I was alone. They looked no different than any of the other hundred or so colored boys who lived in Akersburg—or was it a thousand? I couldn’t really say. All I knew was that I didn’t have much to do with any of them. Neither did Dad. But Mom was different.

  Around them a sea of lush grass and clover bent gently under the breeze. They were combing through the grass, looking for something. I walked up to them and just stood there. They raked their fingers through the grass, and every now and again, one of them plucked a little purple flower hidden under the clover or between thin blades of grass and laid it gently into the ball cap sitting between them.

  Whatcha doing?

  Neither answered.

  Hey, you’re Goolsbee’s boy—Evan, right?

  The boy shook his head no and continued raking his fingers through the grass.

  Yes, you are. I saw you walking with him just this morning. Dontcha remember me? I was at Goolsbee’s shop when those men came.

  He ignored me. I stood up, exasperated. I knew it was him.

  Fine. But there’s a flower shop in town, you know—Missus Henniger’s. She’s got much nicer ones than these. I knocked my sneaker against the ball cap. Evan picked out another flower from the grass and gently laid it inside. When he didn’t look up, I pulled out my dollar bill and held it out to him.

  You can buy a lot of tulips and roses with one of these. What’s wrong? Dontcha want something bigger and brighter than these? I got plenty more where this came from. I don’t even want it. Honestly, I prefer the crisp, new ones. Go on. Take it. Listen, goddamnit. I’m only trying to save you the trouble of having to dig around on your hands and knees in the dirt for some little piece-of-shit flowers. Hell, I know old Goolsbee ain’t paying you nothing anymore. So you may as well take it, because it’ll probably be a while before you see another. You’d better take it before I change my mind. Lord knows I’m only doing it out of the goodness of my heart—

  Evan stood up and took a swing at me.

  Christ! Whaddya think you’re doin’? Can’t you see I’m only trying to help? Besides, I got a cast on, you idiot! You come one step closer and I’m knocking you to smithereens! I’m warning you! One blow from this and you’re out like a light!

  Evan yanked me to the ground. I was swinging my cast wildly, trying to knock him in the head with it, but he somehow managed to wrestle himself on top of me. His friend was pulling on him from behind.

  Get off him, Evan! Goddamnit, he knows your face! Now he’s gonna tell his daddy, and everyone in town is gonna come after us, just like they did your daddy! You hear me? You let go of him right now!

  You know how many times I seen him and that goofy white boy with the glasses walking past old man Goolsbee’s on their way back from swimming? You know how many years I’ve wanted to catch this here little fucker alone? And now I got him! And I ain’t letting go, so help me God, until I’ve broken his arm in two!

  Evan slammed my cast against the ground.

  You’re a crazy fool, Evan! A crazy fool! He ain’t moving anymore. Check his pulse! I think you killed him! Christ, Evan! He’s dead! Cantcha see the boy’s dead? I ain’t gonna be here when they come for you, Evan!

  I must have passed out from the pain and then come to. I was vaguely aware of Evan’s friend’s voice. He hollered something, then turned tail and ran. I could hear the padding sound of his sneakers over the grass. Evan let go of my arm and squeezed my neck just above my Adam’s apple. My eyes popped open. I was choking.

  Say mercy!

  It’s hard to talk when you can’t breathe.

  Mmmmmrie!

  I had only been able to say the first letter; the rest had come out as a wheezing sound. He rolled off me, then got up and stood there looking down at me, heaving. He leaned over and picked up the ball cap, then stepped on my dive mask as he walked off.

  • • •

  I LIMPED ALONG the train tracks running alongside east Oglethorpe, feeling around for my teeth. My cast had split at the elbow, and the plaster was unraveling around my thumb. The skin around it was pink, and my arm was completely numb. I tried to imagine myself crawling through a tangle of crabgrass with a broken neck on the slim chance that if I made it to the roadside someone might see me lying there. That must have been what it was like for Toby. It wasn’t until I was standing in the middle of the railroad bridge that it hit me who all those purple flowers were for. Mister Barnsdale was farther down toward the Baker County side, sitting in the sun with his feet propped up on the iron railing, jiggling his fishing pole. I leaned over one of the crossbeams and gazed down at the slow-moving river below. I sat down, pooped.

  I shook the dirt out of my hair and slipped my dive mask back on. I didn’t give a damn that it was completely busted and now lacked a faceplate. It helped me think. Besides, it was fixable. Everything was fixable. That was the first tenet of my life—right alongside its companion tenets
, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” and “Try harder.” My thoughts were as muddy as the Thronateeska, thinking about Evan: how all these years we hadn’t spoken two words between us and still he hated me to bits. How I’d always seen him standing in Goolsbee’s doorway wearing that crummy old Dodgers cap low over his eyes, with that heavy black stone cutter’s apron draped from his neck and all that putrid dust from the cut stones settling on him like a layer of silt. God only knows how he put up with it.

  And then the fear that his friend had of me telling on them. Tell on them? Christ, I was still trying to figure out how I was gonna explain my messed-up arm to Dad. I wondered if maybe Evan had broke it again because my fingers were fat and blue. I tried to wiggle them, but they just sort of hung there, limp and lifeless. They hurt too much for me to even scrape out the dirt crammed under my fingernails. I knew that if I said the slightest thing about that to Dad, he’d probably just think that I was trying to get out of doing work and say, Of course it hurts. It’s broke. It’s supposed to hurt. Not to mention that no one that I knew had ever got his ass whupped by a colored boy. It just didn’t happen.

  Then there was that bit Evan tossed out about me and Derrick strolling past on our way back from Mister Abrams’s pool with our towels slung over our necks and our hair still wet, taunting him. Which, of course, was true. Except that it was always Derrick who laughed and yelled out that there was plenty of water for him to cool himself by under the river bridge. I was the one flipping him the bird—at which point Evan’s eyes would darken, and he’d disappear inside the doorway amid the shriek of Mister Goolsbee’s power saw.

  A fire engine bellowed down Cordele Road behind me. It must have come all the way from Blakely because we didn’t have our own. Wherever it was going, it was in an awful hurry to get there. I checked the sky for any sign of smoke, wondering what had burnt down now. There was none. Mister Barnsdale had a bottle propped between his legs, and he was reeling something in. He looked at me blankly, as if he didn’t know what to make of the wailing siren trailing off in the direction of town, either. He propped up his fishing rod and left that poor little fish dangling there on the end of the line as he stood up, unzipped his fly, and pissed in a long arc. He hiccuped and said, Captain Nemo, am I right?

  Mister Barnsdale had a big grin on his face. He shook his head, shrugged off the noise echoing out from the fire engine, and sat back down. Not me. I ran after it—or at least I attempted to. My legs were so stiff I slipped between the railroad ties and damn near fell into the river. Mister Barnsdale seemed to enjoy that immensely. He laughed, held his bottle out to me, and declared that it was a little early for Halloween.

  I limped past and told him that if Mama ever saw him pissing in that spot it’d be the last time he pissed in anything. I headed up the slippery embankment and hobbled down the adjacent road just as fast as my legs could carry me. A hundred yards down my arm started to throb so bad my eyes teared up. A bus whooshed past. I stopped. Another one just like it was barreling down the road behind it. I jumped up and down and waved, trying to flag it down, but it blew past me, too.

  So there I was, standing on the side of the road, covered in dried sweat and bits of sticky grass, with both of my pockets stuffed with shards of glass from my busted-up dive mask that I’d rescued from the dirt. My cast was covered in dirt and jangled around my arm like a bangle that I could rotate halfway around in both directions. A column of wild flowers like the ones Evan and his friend had been picking were poking out from the rock bed between railroad ties running alongside the road. I picked one and looked it over. Damned thing wasn’t even that pretty.

  I limped down the middle of Cordele Road, past chunks of dried tractor mud lying on the pavement, praying for another car to come so I could hitch a ride. I passed the charred ruins of Mister Goolsbee’s—still no car. The Camelot looked abandoned. Still no car. I was so hungry I plucked a dandelion and chewed on its stem to tide me over till home, only to discover that the milky gunk inside made the inside of my cheeks raw, and no matter how much I spit, I couldn’t get the acrid taste out of my mouth. I rounded the bend where Cordele turns into Main Street and stopped. Missus Foley was a mild-mannered white woman who wore glasses and kept her hair in a tidy bob. She was a calm, pleasant woman who was always very nice to me whenever I saw her at the pool. She was running up the road at full speed, heading in my direction, with her baby carriage bobbling in front of her.

  A hundred yards behind her, a patrol car sat parked with its lights flashing. It had pulled over the two buses that had passed me back at the railroad bridge. The deputy was nowhere in sight, but Mister Buford seemed to have things under control. He was manhandling a colored man who’d stepped off one of the buses. A group of white men were gathered around in a semicircle, cheering him on. The colored man was banging on the door, trying to get back on the bus, but he couldn’t. The driver had shut it and wouldn’t open it back up for him. He jerked the bus into gear and pulled away. The colored man grabbed a hold of the sideview mirror. One of Mister Buford’s cronies took him by the legs and tried to yank him down. The bus lunged forward and carried the colored man off with it; the man holding on to his legs let go. The bus stopped twenty yards down, and the door popped open. The colored man leaped in with the help of several others inside. Mister Buford and his cronies were hurling rocks and yelled out for it never to return.

  I had advanced a hundred yards and was now standing very near to the northernmost edge of downtown Akersburg, the town where I was raised—the one that I knew more than any other and loved with all my heart. I must stress this point, because I feel that it deserves emphasizing. It was the last block of storefronts on Main Street before town tapered off into the quaint countryside filled with rolling hills and orchards from which I’d emerged. A crowd of townspeople were lined up along the two blocks that mark the picturesque entrance to town, not far from a sign that read:

  WELCOME TO AKERSBURG

  POP. 3,708

  They were shouting and yelling for the second bus to turn around and go home, too. Only there was nowhere for it to go. It was stuck in the mud on the side of the road, rocking back and forth, trying to free itself from a ditch. I took an impulsive step back and bumped into Mister Pendleton. He was Darla’s dad. I think he was a lawyer or judge or something, but it could just have been that he wore bifocals and smoked a pipe. Anyway, Darla was nowhere in sight, and her dad, who had bought boiled peanuts from me once or twice, rested a hand on my shoulder and wrinkled his face at the sight of the bus. He said something that I couldn’t make out over all the shouting going on and the cry of the bus’s grinding gears. I only heard Missus Thomas, standing beside me holding a half-filled grocery bag, say Really?

  Next thing I knew, ten other grown-ups were standing around me. We were all waiting to see what that bus was going to do next, because people were throwing stuff at it—anything they could find, really. Mister Pendleton was explaining to Missus Thomas that it had gotten stuck trying to make a U-turn on the narrow, two-lane road. Of course it was. Anyone could see that. It was blocking half of the road, just sitting there like a beached whale. He pointed and said that it had pulled too far forward, and the front tire had gotten stuck in the drainage ditch running alongside Cordele. The road was much too narrow for it to swing all the way around in a U-turn without backing up halfway through the maneuver. He was explaining everything to Missus Thompson like she was a complete idiot.

  The bus’s gears crunched, and the engine was hissing and moaning and making all sorts of strained noises, but the driver didn’t appear to be getting anywhere. People were starting to trickle in from Main Street. They were lining up alongside the bus, and some were coaxing others into rocking it sideways, even as its engine roared and its wheels spun free. Others didn’t need convincing. They jubilantly joined in. I had the strange sensation that they weren’t going to be happy until they’d tipped that bus like it was a cow. I could tell that things weren’t going to end well for th
e people on the bus, and I didn’t want to be around to see it.

  Having started toward Main Street, I was heading upstream, against the kind of influx of people I’d seen during Buskin Brothers’s annual limited-time-only end-of-year everything-must-go we-will-not-be-undersold closeout sale. When I got there, I was shocked to discover even more of an uproar than the one I had just fled. Cars were lined up in both directions. Some were pulling in from side streets. Others were parked at odd angles. Some sat with their doors flung open, abandoned. People were swarming among them on their way down the street. I knew I had to get out of there but wasn’t sure where to go. That’s when I saw the patrol car. It was parked in front of the Laundromat. I ran up to it, but the sheriff wasn’t inside and the radio handset was sitting on the bench seat, squawking, with a voice on the other end hollering out, Mayday! Mayday! Alpha One, do you copy?

  The car behind me was getting its windows bashed in. Someone jumped on the patrol car’s roof, directly above me. A crowbar suddenly appeared right before my eyes. It had smashed through the windshield like a pickax. I backed out and hopped atop the rear bumper of a neighboring car. It was one of those long turquoise sedans with a spacious trunk. I grabbed a hold of it by the tail fin. Main Street is as flat as a pancake and cars were lined up, bumper to bumper, as far as I could see. A man was climbing the streetlamp on the sidewalk beside me, and several others were standing on the rooftops across the street. Two men were shouting out to them from atop the Paramount theater’s marquee. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and I had no idea what they were doing, until I realized that they were all looking in the same direction. One of them was even pointing, like a barrelman who, having spotted land from high up in a galleon’s crow’s nest, leans out into the breeze, pointing at it. The red light of the patrol car swept over a crowd of people concentrated beneath the Coca-Cola sign hanging from a beam-and-cable line. I caught sight of something in the front window of S&W for a split second but quickly lost it amid all the waving placards. There were too many in the way to be sure what it was. I was sure that I hadn’t seen right. But it looked like—well, I figured it was probably just Tyler.