by Tim Hennessy
“Cool. Let’s take these shots, fam. And you better not get caught up with Destiny. I bet you still be trying to hit that on the low.”
“Don’t worry about my business. Wasn’t you just saying that when I walked in this bitch?”
“Whatever. When you come back, we have to talk about a trip for everybody to come down to the dirty and see me. You gone love it. And the women down there just different. Bourbon street. You have never seen nothing like it. Not Chicago. Not our downtown when it’s cracking. Nothing.”
“Okay, cool. Let’s talk about it when I come back.”
Terrell begrudgingly slammed the shot and headed toward the door without saying bye to anyone upstairs. He didn’t want the shot but had become accustomed to consuming things he didn’t want. Walking outside, he didn’t see his mother’s car in the driveway. They were probably at his aunt’s. Most Sundays they congregated there after church for brunch and mimosas and more fellowship that would sometimes last into the night. He pulled out his phone and noticed two unread text messages: a reminder from his mama to take out the chicken, and a reminder from Destiny to call.
The normally busy street was empty, and he crossed with ease. Terrell opened the front door and dropped all his weight on the living room couch. That second shot made the room spin a bit. He leaned back, pulled out his phone, and responded to each message. He told his mama he’d take the chicken out and Destiny he’d give her a call. He wondered about last night’s riots, what they meant and what kind of change they might bring for black people in Milwaukee. This was history, and it was happening in his backyard. Up to this point, he’d never done a single brave thing. There was the time in third grade when a boy punched him in the stomach, and all he could do was drop to his knees and lick the tears around his mouth. And the time he and Theresa had been in her basement alone, pretending to play pool, but waiting to see who would move first. Terrell froze each time Theresa smiled at him, inviting him to come close to her, to do something brave.
Terrell walked into the kitchen and did what he promised his mother he’d do. When he opened the refrigerator, the smell of old collard greens caused him to gag slightly. Then the doorbell rang, and he cautiously walked toward the front door. He had the slightest idea who it might be but then thought it shouldn’t be his mama and her boyfriend already. When he got near the door and peeked through the blinds, he saw it was Destiny. She was standing there in a white tank and fitted blue jean shorts, her head slightly tilted, a phone in her hand. Most often, she only stood that way when she wasn’t happy with him. Terrell opened the door.
“So you’re not going to invite me in?” she asked, accusatory, as if she knew something.
“Yeah, you can come in, but how come you didn’t call first?”
“Because I knew you probably wouldn’t answer your phone, Negro.”
The two walked into the living room and sat down on the couch. Normally, Terrell would’ve said or done something flirtatious, but his attention was someplace else. He thought of his friends across the street and became slightly annoyed that none of them protested the night before. He had known them all his life and for the most part felt that they shared a brotherhood. To him, this meant that if one of the brothers protested, then all the brothers protested.
“How come none of them dudes went to the protest?” he asked Destiny.
“None of who dudes?”
“Country, Rico, my boys. How come none of them muhfuckas protested?” he responded, his speech becoming a bit slurred.
“Have you been drinking?”
“Oh, here you go with this shit. You always trying to mom me and shit.”
“You have been drinking, because I can smell it,” Destiny replied, now standing up. “And let me guess, you went across the street to that bum-ass trap house, didn’t you?”
Terrell stayed seated and silent. He wasn’t in the mood to lie but didn’t want to argue either.
“Since you don’t have anything to say, I guess I’ll let myself out.” She walked toward the front door. “I hope one day you figure out who the fuck you are and stop moving wherever the wind blows you.”
He never motioned to stop her or even looked in her direction. He simply stared at the black television screen. His buzz had started to subside once again, and his midday hangover had returned. He was hungry for a meal, but another hunger swelled within.
Terrell walked down the hallway toward his mama’s room. He remembered her boyfriend often saying when he was drunk, “Let a motherfucker bust up in here tonight. I got something in one of them drawers that’ll have that motherfucker wishing he picked the house next door.” He sometimes added, “And if them pigs ever try pulling me over thinking they about to kill me and get away with it, I got something for them too.”
Terrell glanced around, bewildered, knowing he didn’t belong in there. Mama’s room had been off limits for quite some time, but being in there brought back nostalgic feelings. Momentarily, he felt protected. Like when he was young, and he and Mama would lie in her bed sometimes for a whole weekend. He looked across the room and stared at the dresser. He eased toward it, and without hesitation opened the upper left-hand drawer. There it was—there was the gun. He’d found it on the first try. If he wasn’t brave, he figured maybe he was lucky. Like that time sophomore year when they all played spin the bottle, and his first spin landed on Destiny. He reached down and for the first time felt the cold weight of steel. At that moment, he heard Country’s voice: No plan, no nothing. He didn’t know how to check to see if it was loaded but pointed it at the mirror. Then he raised it in the air and then pointed it back at the mirror. He heard Destiny’s voice ringing in his head: Stop moving wherever the wind blows you.
Terrell remembered leaving the riots last night moments after a shot rang out. People ran in all directions. As he hustled home with a plastic water bottle containing a half-empty beer, he thought of his father’s face that night. How blood decorated the frozen snow on the car’s hood. It was the first time he’d seen his father bleed. It was the first time he’d seen his father at someone else’s mercy. Terrell remembered waiting in a cold seat until another squad car arrived, praying they’d let them go. That night, he rode shotgun in a police car and waited at the station for his mama. Once she arrived, the two of them drove home without saying a word. He thought of all the chances he’d had that night to save his father. If only he could’ve said something to prevent them from yanking his father out of that car. Maybe he could’ve told the officers to handle his father with care because the family needed him, that slamming his father’s head into a car would change everything.
Terrell lowered the gun into the waistband of his jeans and started to walk toward the front door. He wanted to shoot something, anything. As he walked, he felt the return of third grade tears. He wanted to shoot the boy who punched him in the stomach. He wanted to shoot his father for moving to Atlanta. He wanted to shoot a police officer, any officer. He wanted to do something brave. With his forearm, he brushed the tears from his face and opened the front door. Riots of sunlight enveloped him as he stepped onto the porch. He looked where the riots had been in the distance and, for the first time since he could remember, he felt free. Terrell inhaled deep and exhaled even deeper. He thought of pointing the gun in the direction of the riots but figured a neighbor might see him. He again heard Country’s voice: No plan, no nothing. The sun was starting to go down, and Center Street seemed to be on fire. Last night, he had walked east on Center until he got to Sherman Boulevard. A few blocks north on Sherman Boulevard had landed him in the eye of the riots, on Burleigh.
Today, he figured he’d be more inconspicuous. Isn’t that how a person carrying a gun should be, he thought to himself, dark, hidden, and inconspicuous? He decided he would take Center east until he got to 44th Street. Then he would head north on 44th until he got to Burleigh. This would allow him to be within eyeshot of the melee but give the appearance he was just some spectator. Terrell started his trek
with a howling stomach. He wanted a cigarette but had no money for another pack. The more he walked, the louder the sirens pierced. He could also hear voices that roared louder and louder with each step. The voices momentarily startled him. While he knew people would be protesting and rioting, he assumed most would wait until later, until night. Terrell walked carefully, so as not to disrupt the shifting metal in his waistband. The thunderous roar of outrage rang throughout his ears and head, and a nervousness rattled about him like it would before he got on a roller coaster as a kid.
Terrell made it to Burleigh and looked in the direction of where the riots had been. The police had placed barricades at the intersection of Burleigh and Sherman, a block away from him. While staring at the crowds in the distance, he started reimagining the incident that started this. He knew it had occurred just blocks from where he stood. He closed his eyes trying to envision the exchange. Two officers pulled over two black men for suspicious activity. The two black men exited the car and fled on foot. Terrell squeezed his eyes tighter. One of the men fleeing was armed with a gun, and as he ran, a cop shot and killed him.
Terrell opened his tear-filled eyes to a blurry scene of sirens and protesters in the near distance. The charred gas station on Sherman provided a threatening reminder of the night before. He hadn’t even noticed people had been shuffling past him the entire time he stood there in his apparent daze. “Say his name,” Terrell whispered to himself, and uttered the name of the young victim. He then thought of all the young black men who’d recently been murdered by cops and began whispering their names too. “Say his name,” Terrell repeated, and whispered his father’s name. And suddenly, in an odd moment of clarity, a final shift transpired inside him. Despite what everyone thought about him, he was brave.
Terrell reached into his waistband and grabbed the handle of the gun. It still felt cold. He then pulled the bottom of his white T-shirt over his hand like he’d seen people do who wanted to hide a gun. His feet felt light as he started toward the charred gas station, toward the protesting and squad cars, the loud chants and bullhorns, the fallen buildings and storefronts, the outraged faces, the blue uniforms and holstered guns, the armored police trucks and fire engines, the picket signs and young spectators. Terrell started toward all of these things that beckoned him in the near distance, toward all the riots and riots of immaculate light that would follow.
’MOCKING SEASON
by Christi Clancy
Whitefish Bay
Back when there were still trees in Whitefish Bay, the boys started sleeping in the hammocks they hung from them. At first their parents thought that ’mocking, as the boys called it, was a great idea. It was as if, at seventeen, the young men were finally experiencing real boyhoods outdoors, although these modern-day Huck Finns weren’t exactly roughing it in their backyards, not with the accessories their mothers bought for them, from polyester taffeta tarps to dense insect screens that, when gazed at from a distance, made their boys appear to be encased in giant pods of milkweed.
The mothers met early each morning for pep-step walks through the village, their ponytails bobbing in unison. Oh, those boys and their hammocks! they said with hints of self-congratulation, even though the idea to give up their beds was not their own. Of course it was Leif’s.
Leif initiated all the youthful trends that swept like brush fire through Whitefish Bay. He even started the trend of manhood back when he was the new kid, when he and his mother Erin moved to the village from some small town in rural Wisconsin. Marinette? Mukwonago? Merrimac? Leif had been in eighth grade then, and his early plunge into puberty, along with his midyear arrival from nowheresville, disrupted the natural cycles of transition everyone in “The Bay” valued so dearly. As soon as the first leaf fell, the mothers set plastic skeletons that appeared to crawl out of their graves in their front yards, and when the snow melted they hung lavender and spring blossom wreaths from their front doors.
Leif already stood over six feet tall back in those days, with lamb-chop sideburns, knees like tree knots, and an Adam’s apple as big as a fingerling potato. Soon after his arrival, all the boys started weightlifting, and they took razors to their faces in hopes that their peach fuzz would grow back thicker and more robust, like Leif’s.
Erin and Leif’s home was one of the oldest in the village, a beer baron’s former summer cottage built back in the days before the neat grid system had been imposed on the burgeoning community. Instead of fronting the road like all the other houses, Erin’s home was tucked like a secret in a thicket of woods at the end of a short, private drive off Day Avenue, perched on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. If the residents didn’t make it their business to know about everything village-related, they might not have been aware that the house was even there. It didn’t seem right to live where you couldn’t be seen. All those trees made it impossible to sneak a peek inside when they walked their labradoodles at night.
The mothers waited almost a year to introduce themselves to Erin. One afternoon, they walked up her long, spooky drive bearing housewarming gifts of wicker baskets stuffed with artisanal cheeses, potter’s crackers, wine and jam made from Door County cherries. They were shocked by the hedges, already so overgrown that they threatened to poke their eyes out. They might as well have because it hurt to see what awaited them: gangly juniper bushes and ostrich ferns that were almost tall enough to hide the Green Party sign.
Maureen’s face was pinched from distaste. “Her yard,” she said, “it looks so . . . so woolly.”
A carpet of ivy choked the stucco walls of the once-grand mansion, and moss grew on the chipped clay roof tiles. Erin emerged from somewhere in the woods like an elf and greeted them. She was tall, blond, and busty. Her hair was feathered, and she wore plastic drugstore flip-flops. She seemed happy to see the women and invited them inside, where the air smelled like eucalyptus. That’s when they saw Leif standing in front of an enormous instrument plopped smack dab in the middle of her living room like a casket set out for an old-fashioned wake.
“My, that sure is a big xylophone,” Kitty said.
Leif took offense. “It’s a marimba.”
“What’s the difference?” asked Maureen.
Judging from Leif’s reaction, she might as well have asked about the difference between the Israelis and Palestinians. “The marimba has a much broader range. It’s lush and resonant.” Leif’s voice was low and gravelly. He spoke about the marimba the way the women might have described a bottle of fine wine that doesn’t pair well with food. “It has a gentle, personal sound that’s best for soloists because it can’t cut through the group.” He ran his fingertips along the tone plates with a tenderness that made the ladies uncomfortable.
“We moved here so Leif could play with the youth symphony,” said Erin. “Hey, do you want a beer?” She held up the can of Old Milwaukee she was drinking, and the mothers looked at it as if she were holding a wild animal she’d just caught with her own hands.
That was the first and only time the mothers went inside Erin and Leif’s house, although their sons considered it a second home all through high school. The boys were drawn to Leif’s marimba as if to the sound of the Pied Piper’s flute. Soon, Whitefish Bay filled up with incessant banging on rosewood keys, a sound that carried across the open water of Lake Michigan and echoed mournfully off the bluff. To the women, it was like the atonal soundtrack to a bad horror flick on permanent loop.
No matter how much they practiced, the boys would never play as well as Leif, and they knew it, which only elevated him in their eyes. They tried to be him, although they could never imitate his style, no matter how many trips they took to the Goodwill in Milwaukee. He wore chunky turquoise rings on his fingers and a thick silver chain necklace with an Aztec mask pendant that floated atop his chest hair. His Cuban cigar shirts stunk like mothballs and patchouli. He never took off the Caterpillar work boots that he laced up over thick rag socks; nobody had ever seen him in tennis shoes—not in gym class, and not even
in his hammock. His photochromatic eyeglasses didn’t change with the light; they were always tinted dark. Leif christened the boys with nicknames that made them sound like 1950s greasers, like The Deuce or Skeech. To get a nickname from Leif was to be someone in Whitefish Bay.
Leif’s hammock was a remnant from his canceled service trip to Guatemala (where, he told the boys, the marimba is the official instrument). All the parents were crushed to learn that Leif would stay home that summer because Erin of all people was worried about some mosquito virus. Leif’s continued presence interfered with their plans to deprogram the boys in his absence. The husbands wanted to get them back into real sports like the soccer their boys had grown up with, sports that could earn them college scholarships (Leif played handball and boomerang, and he’d started a curling club that winter). The mothers fantasized about hauling their sons’ smelly old vintage crap to the Rescue Mission and dressing them in J.Crew. They fantasized about snipping the hair the boys had started to grow long because they wanted to wear a single fishtail braid down their backs, like Leif’s, because Leif said he was part Cree Indian. This was a claim the mothers doubted, even though Leif walked quietly in his big boots, with one foot right in front of the other, which is how they’d heard Native Americans walked.
It would be so nice, they thought, for their boys to be more like the normal kids in neighboring Fox Point and Mequon, who played Grand Theft Auto instead of that creepy instrument, and listened to obscure rap music they found on SoundCloud instead of marimba virtuoso Pius Cheung, who could play Bach’s Goldberg Variations with four mallets.
But Leif stuck around, as persistent and ubiquitous as the no-see-ums that wiggled through their screens even after they’d set off bug bomb after bug bomb. The minute Jack “Tripster” McCarthy saw Leif lounging in his hammock in his jungle of a backyard, all the boys decided they had to have a hammock too. That was when ’mocking season started.
