I can assure you, Huey, the Toby we knew broke no law. And if by some stretch of the imagination he did, it must have been some very unjust law indeed, because I will personally vouch to you right here that he was as upstanding a citizen as any in all of Early County. And that’s a fact. Lord knows he didn’t have much else in life. I’ll be damned if people aren’t dissatisfied until they’ve taken his dignity away from him, too.
Mom didn’t say anything else. She just kept snipping. My hair was starting to pile up in the tub, floating atop the water. Lots and lots of it just kept showering down in thin sheets. It was sticking to the back of my neck, the tops of my shoulders, and all over my arms. It even got in my ears. It was itching like crazy. I told her to stop for a second just so I could scratch. When I peeked in the mirror, I saw that my hair was so short that she may as well have been using a buzz cutter. Only I had wanted a flattop—the way Dad had it.
Hey. Watch it! You know that’s not how I like it! You’re taking off way way too much!
Mom’s hand was suddenly stiff and her clipping accelerated. One hand held the back of my head still, and the other clipped. I felt like I’d said something wrong.
Well, don’t get mad at me. I was just wondering.
The scissors went still.
No matter how different from us that Toby may have seemed to you, you must never forget that what matters most is that he was a family man whose only crime in life was that he happened to be a colored man who sought to protect and provide for the welfare of his loved ones—no different than any other man, white, black, brown, purple, or green. He was a hardworking, honest, decent family man. Just like the good pastor Meade said. No matter what others may say about him, you must never forget that. So please get it through that thick head of yours that there was only one Toby—the one we knew, loved, and trusted, and who was always better to us than he had reason to be. Why on earth is that so hard for you to believe?
I dunno.
Actually, I did. All the conflicting stories were playing tug-of-war in my head. What confused me was that I had her saying one thing, Derrick insisting on pretty much the opposite, and Dad saying something still altogether different. I was starting to wonder if maybe Toby was a mixture of all three, or none at all. What was it? Here I’d known him my whole life, and it turns out he was a stranger to me. I was starting to feel that I’d never known him at all. Love him? Hate him? Trust him? Suspect him? Did it even matter anymore? Who the hell knew which to believe? It was impossible to make heads or tails of anything anymore. The only thing I knew for sure was that he was dead—and even that I’d doubted for one panicky moment in front of S&W. And I only knew it for a fact because I had seen him lying there in that casket with my own two eyes. Truth be told, I wasn’t even sure of that. He was so messed up I couldn’t even recognize him. The corpse in front of me was roughly his height, so I just figured that it probably was him. Who else could it possibly have been?
Derrick had once claimed, Once a criminal, always a criminal. It was something about the criminal instinct—how once it got in you, there was no getting it out. There was no cure for it, no penicillin or anything you could take three times a day. You were infected for life. And like all things in life, some people were just more prone to it than others. There was nothing you could do about it, when and if you were one of the unlucky ones struck by it. Which sounded about right. Because there were diseases that I knew were just like that. Take polio, for example.
You see, petty disputes aside, what I liked most about Derrick was that he kept things simple. With him, I could always count on getting the raw, uncooked truth—not the one that had been boiled half to death and deep-fried in bacon fat to make it taste good. What I mean is, I wanted the world as it was, not as Mom desired me to see it. Her views on things required too much work for me to even begin to get my head around them. As much as I wanted to believe that Toby had done nothing wrong, the cold hard facts were starting to pile up like a bunch of thick, wavy black hair after an unwanted buzz cut. And it wasn’t just Derrick. It was practically everyone. Just you tell me how so many people can be wrong.
XXII
THAT NIGHT OF THE DINNER was a turning point in our relationship and marked a coming-out period for us both. I felt good about having let Zuk get close because he knew me so much better as a result. The gamble had paid off, and not just because Mom knew how to pour on her Southern charm. Zuk just turned out to be a decent person. He’d accepted the whole gamut of things he’d been confronted with with an open mind. He understood that being light enough to frequently be mistaken for a white person was something that I was sensitive about and did not go blabbing about it to everyone at school. In fact, it never came up again. Having lain bare the skeletons in my closet, there was nothing left for me to hide, and we were closer as a result. The frank and honest recognition of our differences only made our bond stronger. The fact that Zuk was willing to look past all my dirty little secrets nearly gave me faith in the basic goodness of everyone.
The brown baby Jesus came out of hiding, as did the mousetraps and roach motels and even Mom’s books—all of them except that autobiography that was so incendiary I thought the cover was made of flame retardant. The line about chickens having come home to roost was too much. The last thing someone like me needed was a race war. Otherwise, Zuk didn’t care. He knew the complete me. There were no more tests or examinations or inspections to perform. He’d seen the morass of who I was and seemed to approve—the result of which was that I experienced an inner peace I’d never known. With Zuk, I could listen to Johnny Cash or Jimi Hendrix. I could eat kidney beans or black-eyed peas. I could eat roast chicken or fried chicken. I could be attracted to white girls or colored girls. I could tan or burn. Everything was fair game, and none of it mattered. He never made me feel like a walking contradiction. He never expected me to conform to some fixed idea about how a given race is supposed to be. Consequently, I was free to be myself. It didn’t matter to him that I stuck out at Claremont like a cockatoo, or that there was no single box that I could easily be fit into. Zuk, as I came to call him, was a truly enlightened individual. A bona fide aesthete. A bon vivant. A free thinker, a gentleman scholar, a true philosopher in the Western liberal tradition, and as near to a free spirit as you can get in a place like Claremont. It was a breath of fresh air, like I could open my lungs and suck in all that they could hold. The stuff that I had been taught was supposed to happen actually happened. I suddenly understood what Mom had been saying all these years about me needing to get my head out of the sand and trust people. Looking back on it, it all seemed kind of silly. Quite frankly, I wasn’t sure what I’d been afraid of. It was through the blossoming of my friendship with Zuk that I at last felt that I had a place in this world. That one flowering bond was nothing short of magical. It seemed to validate my basic human connection to everyone.
Coming home alone after school and staying locked up by myself in the apartment, alone with my books and the TV, until Mom came home was a drag. It felt like the world outside had forgotten about me. But ever since Dinner at Peola’s, Zuk and I started taking the subway together after school. He’d get off at my stop because it was on his way home. We’d laugh and joke and horse around on our way past the broken-down cars parked in front of all the body shops, repair shops, and chop shops, with their iridescent pools of antifreeze shimmering over the buckled sidewalk out front, where axles to Cutlass Supremes, steering columns to Impalas, rear bumpers to Cadillacs, and tire after tire after tire lined my street and beside which some bum in an army jacket lay sprawled out cold.
We’d sidestep him on our way to the building that stood like a monolith in the foreground of the East River and Brooklyn in the distance. Jimmy would slap Zuk five and we’d talk baseball on our way up to the twenty-third floor, where we’d break out the soda we’d picked up on the way from our schoolbags. We’d sit around the kitchen table doing homework while listening to records. When we finished, we’d turn up the
volume, raid the fridge, and compare fantasies of St. Michael’s girls. The old lady downstairs would eventually bang on her ceiling for us to cut it out. I’d remove the record from the turntable and return it to its sleeve and we’d throw ourselves on the sofa, pooped. When all the food was gone, Zuk would pack up, and I’d walk him downstairs, out past the conga circle cluttering the courtyard, down the sidewalk past the tattered awning above which some old hag in a nightgown, with rollers in her hair, would lean out of a window with a cigarillo stub drooping from her mouth and say, Hey Ringo. Yeah, you. The dark Beatle. I know you. Get over here. Catch. It’s a quarter. Now run along and get me a cigarillo from El Paradiso’s. Yeah, just one. And if Eddie’s out, go across the street to Siempre Feliz. Go on. Hey! Where are you going? Not that way!
I’d drop Zuk off at the Delancey Street subway station and watch him disappear down the stairs, then savor the walk back home. After all these years, I finally had a friend and confidant.
XXIII
I WISH I COULD SAY that on the last night of summer I was super excited about the start of the coming school year. In a way, I was. It was just that it had been so crazy that I rarely had occasion to think about anything else. So when it finally wound down and I had a quiet moment to look back and reflect on it, all I could think to myself was, Wow. Summer was over, and all I had to show for it was a broken arm and the three impeccably sorted piles of stack poles out back. Somehow I felt like I’d been robbed.
Sweetheart, you’re probably just a little anxious because you’re starting the third grade. And about being cooped up in that classroom with Miss Mayapple all day, after having been free to roam outside all summer. That’s normal. All kids are a little apprehensive at first—and then you get in there and you get in the swing of things and all the jitters just sort of disappear and you plum forget about how nervous you were.
Mom drew the curtain, turned off the light, and told me not to worry; school was the perfect antidote for the kind of summer we’d had. I just needed to get my mind off all the crummy stuff that had been going on, was all. The classroom would be a welcome change of scenery. She sat down beside me and warned me not to listen to the things that people were likely to say about Toby. When I asked what I’d say if kids asked me how he’d gotten that way from falling off a ladder, because it seemed a little far-fetched, she fumbled for words.
Tell them the truth. Tell them he fell on the bricks Mister Buford stacks by his barn.
His head looked like it had been cobbled together with plaster of Paris and chicken wire, Mama. Please. It sagged to one side like melted wax. I didn’t recognize him. Nobody could have, except his dentist, and honestly, did he even have one?
As far as I was concerned, it could have been anyone in that coffin. No matter how much Mom had told me that I had to, I could not find it in myself to accept that the corpse I had seen was Toby. No matter how I rearranged the pieces in my head to try to fit them together, I couldn’t. I knew there were going to be lots of questions at school. And I wasn’t ready for any of them. So I gave her the same look that she was so fond of giving me.
There is no way on this earth for me to get from an ordinary, run-of-the-mill fall from a ladder to the corpse you made me look at. And you know it.
Mom’s eyes welled. She took my hand in hers and confessed that Irma had wanted to cremate Toby but had changed her mind at the last minute. I snatched my hand away.
Oh my God.
I agree.
That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard.
Sometimes the truth is gross.
Swear on the Bible?
I swear.
Put your hand on it and swear.
Mom kept a Bible on my end table. I barely ever cracked it; I had a half dozen or so comic books stacked on it. She looked up at it and hesitated, then reached over and moved the comic books aside and put her hand on it.
Cupcake, may the good Lord cast me off to eternal damnation as a blasphemer not worthy to follow in His footsteps. I swear on this holy Bible. So help me, Lord. This I do for love. This I do because deep down our world is a beautiful place and I refuse to believe otherwise. Oh Lord, please take me unto thee—unto Your bosom, body and mind, soul and spirit. And forgive me, for this I do because no matter how far we may fall, dear Father, I do require hope. And You are the great Provider of Hope. There. I said it. Satisfied?
Said what?
I wasn’t sure what she’d said—seemed to me that she’d thrown in a bunch of other stuff in the bargain. Anyway, her hand didn’t move. I had no choice but to take her at her word.
You mean after it had already started? Like they just had his head in the oven, then pulled it back out? Like you did with the roast the time you forgot to put cloves in it?
Yes.
Why’d she change her mind?
I don’t know. Maybe because sometimes sights seen are less forgotten.
She kissed me goodnight and made to leave my room.
I stopped her in the doorway. Say, another thing I don’t understand is—well—something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while now, actually. How’d Toby have time for his family when he was with us all the time? And where does Evan go to school? He does go to school, doesn’t he?
I don’t know.
Oh oh oh—and one more thing. That’s why you never went to Mister Abrams’s pool, right? Because of your hair, I mean? Just between you and me.
Mom sat back down on my bed and stroked my hair and told me how happy she was that God was looking out for me, then got up and flipped off the light. She paused in the open doorway, complimented me on the fact that the room didn’t stink as much as usual. Told me to keep up the good work, and then left.
Dad came in. He confirmed Mom’s story to be true when I asked. Which was a relief, because frankly I still only believed her ninety-nine point nine nine percent. Anyway, I complained to him how Mom had dragged me to the viewing and how I’d covered my eyes and looked away but she’d pulled my hands away and made me look anyway. She’d sworn up and down that I’d live to regret it if I didn’t take a good hard look. I asked Dad if that were true. Because Mom had said that supposedly, someday I was gonna be glad I had. But I wasn’t glad at all. It’d been almost a week, and I still couldn’t get out of my head the image of that skull, the way that it had appeared to have been burnt and beaten so bad that it seemed hollow, and the scalp that had come so undone and deformed it needed to be held in place with staples and wire ties. Christ. I’d seen pictures of ten-thousand-year-old mummies that were in better shape than him.
I told Dad that I thought it unfair that I should have had to do it when he didn’t have to. Then I asked him why he hadn’t said a last goodbye to Toby, the way the rest of us had. He didn’t say anything. When he leaned in and gave me a peck on the forehead, I grabbed him and hugged him and begged him to never leave. He pried himself from me and got up. Said I needed my ten hours and closed the door. I don’t think he understood. I wasn’t asking him to not leave my room. I was asking him not to leave me and Mom.
XXIV
NOT ONLY COULD ROY ROGERS croon like a nightingale but he was a great showman—and one heck of a gunslinger. They don’t make them like that anymore, Huey. Fact is, he provided a model of a sound Christian upbringing for us to emulate throughout life. Frankly, I wouldn’t be the man I am today if I didn’t have someone like him to look up to as a kid. Talk about the Lone Ranger all you want, but there was only one King of the Cowboys, and that was Roy Rogers.
Dad was looking over my shoulder with half a biscuit in his mouth. I glued the final puzzle piece in place, grabbed my coat, and headed for the door. Miss Della was on her way up the road. I bid her good morning. Dad strolled up beside me and raised his Thermos in her direction.
The trick in life is to always get back up, son. If there’s one thing you learn from me, let that be it.
Dad headed down the steps. Mom picked up the morning paper from the stoop with a wave down the road, then
climbed in the truck beside me. She had grocery shopping to do and was hitching a ride with us. It was field work for Dad and the first day of school for me. The front window was boarded up, and the house wore the hurricane shutters like a black eye. None of us said a word about the fact that we were the only ones with boarded-up windows. Dad ground the truck’s gears, and we lurched forward.
Mom opened the newspaper.
Let’s see. What do we have here? Oh yes. Here it is: “Social Unrest Follows ‘Freedom Riders’ into Akersburg; Jackson and Oxford Brace.”
Mom buried her head in the newspaper. I asked if they were talking about us, but she didn’t answer. The Thronateeska appeared through a stand of evergreens running alongside Cordele Road. Dad pulled into Nestor’s. Mom leaned over and fussed with my sling, straightened my shirt, and wiped some crumbs from my face. She wished me luck and gave me a peck on the cheek, then reminded me that we’d survived floods, droughts, and infestations, before heading off. I shouted out, Jesus Christ, Mama. It’s only the first day of school. I’ll be okay.
Nestor was sitting on his rocker in the shade beside the latched doors of the ice cabinet. He was resting his feet on a cement parking block, sleeping. Mom headed past him, up the stoop, and disappeared inside. The door squeaked shut behind her, and its bell jingled. Nestor’s eyes popped open at the sound of the bell. He ran over toward us.
We gotta talk.
Not now, Nestor.
Nestor shook the newspaper in his hand. For crying out loud, Buck. Those kids have been staying at the Camelot.
Dad glanced at it, then handed it back. Stanley’s got to make a living somehow, doesn’t he? Just like you and me.
Not funny, Buck. We’ve got a real possibility of fire here!
Gunfire?
Fire fire, Buck. They’re fixin’ to burn it down.
They Come in All Colors Page 24
