White People

by Allan Gurganus

  “Yeah?” whined a bony kid hoisting Bradley’s left wrist even higher. “You and who else’s army?”

  “Hey, Leo,” Otis snapped, “un-lax your mouth, why don’t you?” The whole group, still in their odd pose, now shuffled around to get a better view of me. They rotated Bradley who did a little jig because of pain. Otis turned, his freckled cheeks tensed fat, half smile, half not. He aimed the pigeon headfirst at me, as if he held a flashlight or a ray gun beaming sickness. They all looked me over. I wished I were carrying a basketball. Actually these reading glasses should be in my pocket probably.

  Across the pigeon’s amber eyes, a bluish film eased up in tugs, then lowered, shuddering. Even healthy white pigeons can look quite sickly. This bird’s bill seemed polished, a cheerful red, waxy as red licorice, but in the nostril dents, each breath rattled two small crescents of foam, then sucked these back.

  “Know what we got here? This here’s what you call a dead duck,” Otis told me as I studied it, my sadness undisguised. “It’s going to croak in about one minute. Might as well get some use out of it now, right?” Grinning evenly at me, he lifted the bird, pinched its head between two yellow fingers and, using the steadied beak, scratched one side of his close-cropped scalp. A sound like coarse sandpaper’s I glared at Bradley, my signal for him to run. I’d told him not to play with this pack of kids. I’d told him.

  Brother’s face observed me; his neck had relaxed, but the chest, I saw, still heaved in a striped shirt I’d outgrown. Cars passed, other pigeons flapped in gutters overhead. Then Bradley jerked free. The two kids reached for him, but Otis waved them back. Instead of running home, brother took a single step toward me. Otis, interested, put hands on hips, one fist bunched around white feathers that kept rustling in spasms.

  Bradley’s eyes showed me the clear familiar blue of mine, but his seemed brighter, set inside a better tan. Now everybody glumly faced me. Things had somehow switched around. How? Bradley lifted both his hands and placed these on my shoulders, fingertips and just the weight of wrists. It felt odd, like some Indian greeting from the movies. Otis squinted. The other two, knowing we were brothers, seemed embarrassed, witnessing this peculiar embrace.

  “Hey,” I asked my brother, “you all right?” But, looking down at him, I couldn’t quite remember why I’d interrupted. And, for an instant, it seemed that Bradley had stepped in, was saving me.

  One strong simple shove, no harder than necessary. It knocked me straight back. My glasses dropped into my lap, books skidded through dust. After a moment of just sky, green copper gutters, I sat, eyes lifted toward his. The others stooped, eager to see us fight, their fists raised automatically. They stared from him to me, but mostly now at Bradley, and with new regard. I sat aimed at brother’s plump brown face, the fringe of ringlets. His chubby fingers balled to fists. We’d hardly ever looked so squarely at each other. Usually before, it was side by side, his curly hair and shoulders lower than me, or I’d been peering out ahead for small dangers in our way. Now, unwilling to cry or ask questions, I stayed where he had pushed me. They were standing. I was here, down here.

  “Okay,” Otis said, “let’s us go someplace else, guys.”

  He turned. They all did. Bradley, too. Over one shoulder, Otis tossed the pigeon. It scrambled in a crazy arc, then thudded, landing on its breast, left wing fanned out complicatedly, right pinned underneath. The crew shambled away, and one of his tormentors now gave Bradley’s upper arm a playful jab, and murmured, “I’d of done that harder but I’d of done that.”

  “Shut your trap, Leo,” Otis told him, then glanced back at me, a look too casual to even show contempt. I crouched and started gathering my books, not wanting to seem dazed. Then I stood and brushed myself off. No harm done, happens all the time. But they’d passed toward the jungle gym, beyond the school.

  I squatted now, stacked the books, evening their lower edges with a few jaunty taps on my knee. I’m not hurt. And Bradley’s not hurt. So everything’s all right. I noticed my summer shorts, the bare legs. They didn’t seem mine, just shapes in the corner of a picture. I sat back down. The bird, with one exerted twist, righted itself and hobbled, zigzagging into the building’s shadow. Its white turned a strong blue. The pigeon listed, shuddering, but its arched iridescent head pulled along the body, and with this pathetic dignity. It tipped into a dry cement drainage trench beside the wall and scuttled over debris till, finally settling, it tilted against mossy bricks. I watched the bird’s back fill and shrink, quick croupy breaths.

  One side in shadow, one side out, my own sunny half was warm. Dust clung softly to the under edge of both my legs. I felt groggy, troubled but relieved. It seemed I’d been hurrying past this spot, bound on a vague urgent errand, aware as in a dream of some crucial appointment or deadline. I’d been moving briskly, pompous with a compliment the librarian had paid, thinking about African heroics; and now, my unstated mission felt abruptly canceled or accomplished. I could sit here as long as I wanted. I could read all these books right here, or sleep, anything.

  The Art of Japanese Gardening

  How to Increase Your Word Power

  Gunnar, A Boy of the Frozen Lap Tundra

  I lifted my new glasses from the dust, wiped these on my shirt, slipped them into my pocket, patted it. I did feel tired.

  Let him take care of his own self. Or maybe one of those Southside river rats would do it for him. Let them stuff dying birds down his throat for all I cared. Or force those fat hands into jars of wasps, even scorpions. Let earthquakes, Mack trucks, jungle fever, let anything that wants him have him. Good riddance. Sleepily and out loud, I said, “Okay, Bradley.”

  To walk five blocks home seemed an ordeal just now. I needed time to think what I’d do next. Evening was here, a chill. Shadows had wheeled around and over me already. I neatly piled the books, then lay down for a minute, my head resting on them, dusty legs pulled neatly up against my chest.

  ILLEGALLY, a car drove onto the school yard. Its lights shone just above me. A huge shape bent down now, wouldn’t stop this shaking, my head wobbling side to side. Someone leapt from the front seat, came flapping over, and I was down among their legs, a grove of adult legs cutting through the light, throwing vertical shadows long as walls.

  “What has happened, baby? What has actually happened, here, darling?”

  He stopped shaking me so I could answer her. “I fell asleep, I think. I got so sleepy.” And I tried to stand, but he didn’t believe I could and he picked me up, off the ground, for the first time in years. His voice: “Are those your books, Bryan?” I nodded, “The library’s,” and I put my arms around his solid neck. The car’s back door flipped open and a short person got out and walked around and stood in front between the headlights, hands on hips, all silhouette. Who’s that? Mother got the books and she came running alongside. “Are you sick, darling? Here, let me feel,” and her hand tried resting on my forehead, but I kept bouncing toward the car in Father’s arms, and her warm fingers clamped over my eyes, my mouth. She wrapped me in the itchy tartan football blanket. She propped me on the backseat and climbed in front, but leaned over, her beautiful hands so good at needlework and bridge. Father gunned the engine; then that squatty other person crawled through the back door, slammed it, sat right across from me. Father drove slowly and Mother spoke in bursts, “We didn’t know. The sun had set. I called the library. I even phoned poor Harriet Whipple at home. She loves you. Oh, Bryan mine, we were so unbelievably worried.”

  Over there in one corner. Back pressed to the door. Some little man. His arms crossed. Looking over here at me. Some midget in a striped shirt. Face all shadowed. Mother still yammering. I knew her. I knew Father. But who was this one watching me? Father almost stopped when, purely terrified, I dove over the seat and nestled between their sides, keeping low to hide from that one in back, a little man, a little midget gangster, midget monster midget.

  “Richard, see how he’s shaking? Poor thing is scared to death. Bryan, sit up. Bryan mi
ne, now listen to me. You can tell us. Tell Mother, did some grown-up try to do something to you? Did some man do something to you, Bry?”

  I sobbed and sobbed. “Oh my God,” she said, “a man.” They carried me to bed. Father did. He bent over and said to keep that extra blanket, anything I wanted, and to sleep, just sleep. That would mend me fine. He gave me two kisses, one over each eye, and a big one in the middle of my forehead. Sleep, he said. He propped the door half open using my desk chair. He left. Then I heard it. Odd noises. Someone opening and closing drawers. Some stranger in the next room moving all the furniture around. I lay listening, too frightened to call for help, but trying very hard to. Call. For. That. With all my strength, I wished for sleep.

  Morning, and my room looked the same as ever, collections nicely organized, but I got up feeling bruised, timid, humiliated. I leaned into the hall, saw into the bathroom. The little man stood brushing his own teeth. But it was not a real man. Nothing to be scared of, just Bradley more or less. At breakfast, they fought to be polite. They didn’t mention what had happened but took turns watching me, like at any moment I might drop out of the breakfast nook, fall to the linoleum, me kicking, hissing, in some wild blind lavish fit.

  I PLANNED IT like a bank robbery. To the minute. I’d been waiting. Only today might I get away with it. Jimmy Otis was moving out of town. His dad worked at the Du Pont plant and they’d transferred him to Memphis. For the last three months, Bradley and Jimmy had been best friends. Our parents disapproved. So did I. They were pleased to see the friendship broken up so easily. So was I. Mother said, “He is just the grubbiest little red-headed thing.”

  “He can’t help it, Momma,” Bradley told her. “He’s poor.”

  “Listen, young man, anybody can afford soap and water.”

  One afternoon, I looked into Bradley’s room and saw Otis, visiting. He reached up and with grimy fingers tapped a suspended model plane. It spun in circles. “Are these that hard to make?” he asked, almost shy.

  “Not too,” Bradley said. “Haven’t you ever done a model?”

  “Unh-unh. It always seemed like kind of a waste. Who painted the camouflage on it?”

  “I did. I do all my own paint jobs. That’s the important part.”

  I sat on my bike, just across the street from the Otises’ stucco house. I sat studying the van, the moving men. A rusted De Soto was parked in the yard. Lampshades were stacked on its backseat. Everything seemed ready to roll. Jimmy came down the front stairs carrying a vinyl footstool. He saw me. I pushed off and, feeling elated, waved back over my shoulder without looking, good-bye Idiot, good-bye School Bully and Bradley’s Best Friend. Good riddance.

  On the way home, I biked near Bradley’s Little League game and heard some competitive shouts and whistling. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, steep and brassy. Nobody at home but Ardelia, humming hymns and some of Mother’s show tunes as she ironed. I went up to my room to collect the supplies. A cardboard box, and in it a pair of scissors borrowed from Mother’s needlepoint basket, a can of charcoal lighter fluid from the garage, and matches out of Father’s pipe rack.

  Wearing the hiking boots Bradley’s made such fun of, I padded quietly across the hall, closed his door behind me, locked it. I took the scissors, stepped up onto his desk chair and, feeling some stage fright but no regret, cut down the first suspended model plane, tossed it into the box on his bed. I could have just yanked them down, tack and thread and all … but somehow it appealed to me, leaving a fringe of long colorless strings bearding the whole ceiling. My movement stirred the dangling plane just like Daddy’s war one. That went too. Me, up here among them, snipping. Cut threads, relieved of weight, curled and looped or spun in lazy twists. I stripped his room of every single model: seventeen big ones and twenty smaller designs. I stacked ships and airplanes, crisscrossed in an apple crate, sweet-smelling, rotten-smelling. On my way down the back stairs, I heard Ardelia talking church gossip by phone to her best friend over the steam iron’s slosh and whisper.

  I cut across the weedy field behind our house and broke into a run. Plastic jiggled, brittle in the big box. I breathed funny, knowing I was up to something really mean and downright wrong and very hurtful. Bullies must feel like this, day-in day-out. How could their hearts stand it?

  At our camp, I stopped. We’d dug this hole together. We called it the Cave. It had once seemed very deep and private but I’d grown, and now it was just an oversized puddle at the wood’s edge. I stood on the brink, panting, quick shallow breaths. I dumped all Bradley’s models into the hollow. My palms sweated as I fumbled with the lighter fluid’s complicated cap. Printed along the red plastic nozzle: CHILD-RESISTANT. I felt personally affronted till I recalled how Father himself had cursed it a few nights earlier. The spout snapped up. I looked guiltily around. I squirted out half the can. The whole heap down there looked varnished. The flagship Santa Maria was carefully rigged with tiny sails Bradley had stitched himself, while Mother advised. The dye already spread, bleeding as fabric soaked up fluid. With his small jars of candy-bright enamels, Bradley had worked on these for hours: all the wing-tip stars, insignias, and camouflage. I pressed the can’s flat sides until its spout wheezed, gasping.

  In an hour, he would wander home from his game, wearing that natty pin-striped uniform, the green felt cap, number 17. A real plane buzzed overhead. I felt almost sad, striking this match, tossing it into the crater. Flames leapt even higher than I’d hoped. I jumped back, then touched my bangs, singed a little. I brushed away scorched hairs, then hunkered down to watch the damage. The fronts of my legs warmed as things below began to snap, like delicate bones popping in quick series. Jet wings merged with the bulbous undersides of boats. Blue-black smoke, stinky curling stuff, trailed out over the high weeds. On the tilted flight deck of the Enterprise, planes no bigger than bees softened to tear-shaped blobs and slid downward, hissing. Plastic rudders and propellers whined, frying to one leaden shape. I found a branch and prodded the debris. Pockets of air snapped loud in toxic farts. When most flames stopped, I shoved the stick into the soft center and lifted the whole solidified mass up out of the hole. I stood supporting this at arm’s length. It smoldered, still creaking, complaining; strings of plastic looped across hulls and blubbery fuselages, all crusted with sand and drooped around my stick like lava. It stunk and clicked like something newly dead, something accidentally deformed in a horror picture: “The Manta Ray from Hiroshima.” Something you could pity.

  HE AMBLED in from Little League, forty-five minutes late. I’d been seated for an hour at the kitchen table, drawing, Ardelia as my witness. I’d brought one of my better finished crayon drawings downstairs so it would seem I’d been here longer. Now he was tardy and I’d ruined it. I sat recoloring a dark sky for the fourth time. He sauntered past, pounding the palm of his orange pitcher’s glove. “You all win?” Ardelia asked, half-interested at best.

  “Sure did. That First Presbyterian is a bunch of nothings. I struck out three of those guys in a row.”

  He strode past this table without speaking. Just as he pushed through the dining room’s swinging door, I said, “Oh, Jimmy Otis came over to say good-bye. I thought you were home. I told him you’d probably be in your room.”

  “He was supposed to move this afternoon. I already said good-bye.”

  “Well …” I shrugged, going back to coloring. “He was up there looking for you.”

  I listened to his every step. Turning down the hall. Hopping up two stairs at a time. I wished Ardelia would hum less loudly. It took about a minute. I heard him coming back down. Not hurrying. His sneakers on the staircase carpeting. I pressed my damp palms to the waxy drawing and leaned over it so he couldn’t see my face. He sat at the opposite end of the table, Father’s usual spot. I counted to sixty two times. Finally, I risked it. I glanced up. Bradley’s taken his cap off, his yellow curls were matted on the sides. His face totally blank, drained of character and color, all that pug-nosed male-animal confidence vanished. “
My models are gone.”

  I slowly chose a new color from the shoe boxful. “Wha?”

  “All my models … somebody’s stole all my models.”

  I looked down the tabletop at him. Notice this, I told myself. One minute ago he was bragging about pulverizing sissies. Look at him now. But the sight gave me no pleasure at all; it distressed me. I even considered confessing, then got dizzy at the thought and decided I would never admit to this. Ever. How could I have done it, anyway, and why?

  “Otis knew I was at Little League. He came over here and took every one, then he goddamn moved to Tennessee.” Bradley hurried to the wall phone, dialed a number. I kept my crayon moving, but felt blind, lightheadedness. The longer he stood there gripping the receiver, saying nothing, the more deeply I could breathe. “They’re gone already. Ardelia, this is important. Did you see a red-headed—well, you know who Jimmy Otis is—did you see him carrying my models out of here? All my models?”

  “Ain’t nobody been here this afternoon but us chickens. Just me. And Bryan.”

  Bradley’s head snapped my way.

  This crayon sliding back and forth, I managed to say quietly, “Otis came to the back door. He wouldn’t leave through here.”

  Bradley studied me, his jaw working. I saw him considering, then his face relaxed to its original frown. He came over, sat again. Some Perry Mason!

  “And I gave him a good-bye present. I gave him a model to make. That rat. I’m calling the police right now.” My brother stood.

  “Ain’t nobody calling no police till your momma gets back from clothes shopping. And don’t you be saying no ‘goddamn’ around me, neither.”

  “That Otis was so jealous of me,” Bradley mumbled. “He was even jealous of you, said you were probably smart underneath—Otis, you’d have to be a pretty rotten kid to do something like this.”

  For the first time in years, Bradley was about to cry. I watched, mesmerized. He still can, I thought; he’s really going to. Brother kept shaking his head side to side. “Boy,” he said breathily. “Boy.”