“Sir?”
“For your actions day before yesterday morning during the assembly.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I just hope you’re not thinking that set this all in motion.”
I sit watching him. He means it. Just to be sure…“Set what in motion?”
“You know,” he says. “Had Roger and his friends been on the football field, they wouldn’t have been at the lake and this awful accident would never have happened. They’d been suspended from the team. I thought you knew that.”
“Yes, sir, I did know that, I just never thought to blame myself. Look, I just feel bad and I’m going home.”
The Bean stiffens. “You mean you’re here to ask permission.”
“No, I’m leaving. I’ll bring an excuse from home.” I walk out.
In my mind I’m staring at a stone tablet. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL. Man, give me any one of those commandments and I’ll give you a godly reason to break it. I’d kill to stop loved ones from being killed, or probably in a righteous war. I’d bear false witness in a second if it would keep someone I cared about out of harm’s way. And on and on. I’m on private property and I’m about to break and enter, and I’ll bet you I come out with some truth. See, that’s what Jesus would do: go for truth.
I circle the house twice, finally get the courage to knock. I’ve got three Hershey bars with me, and if Mr. Marshall answers I’ll try to sell them to him for a school fundraiser. I can guarantee he won’t buy them, but I’ll know whether or not he’s at home.
No answer. Rang the bell twice and knocked once, hard. Unless he’s in an upstairs bedroom with a rifle pointed at my temple, I’m pretty sure he’s not here.
I circle the barn. The double front doors are locked by padlock, but I can see what I’m looking for through the crack between them. Several windows are broken and boarded over on the side of the barn that sports the Confederate flag, probably so the continuity of the image isn’t broken up. Those Marshalls are picky when it comes to the images of their bigotry. I think I can knock a couple of boards loose to get in. I don’t like being exposed to the road while committing my crime, but if I’m quick, no one will see me.
Inside, I see a rusty sign leaning against the far wall. NIGGER DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOUR ASS IN CUTTER. Nice. I move quickly to the boat, and on the floor just under the outboard motor, I find what I came for.
“Mr. Miller. I thought you went home for the day.”
“I did, sir, but I’m suddenly feeling better.”
Mr. Simet looks at his watch. “Might that have something to do with the fact that the school day has ended?”
He’s pretty funny. So am I. “Actually I’m known as an eager student who values his education and knowledge in general. Wanna come out to my car and see what I found home-schooling myself today?”
“Love to.”
At the car, I open the trunk.
“What is it?”
“The flag Marcus had around his waist in the water.”
“Where did you get this?”
“Roger Marshall’s boat. That’s why Strickland’s hair was wet. He had to get in and take the flag off Marcus. That’s a cold-blooded son of a bitch.”
He stares hard. “How did you get it?”
“I had to break a commandment; two, if you consider Marshall my neighbor. I coveted it, and I stole it.”
He turns it over in his hands. “How do we prove it was there?”
“I took a picture on my cell phone. It has a time marker, which proves I took it before I brought it to you.
He says, “Let’s go.”
“I’d like to talk to whoever is investigating the Marcus James death,” Mr. Simet says at the front desk.
“The black boy run over by the boat?”
You can see Mr. Simet’s irritation. “Yeah, the black boy run over by the boat.”
“I don’t believe anyone’s investigating it,” the sergeant says. “There’s no investigating an accident.”
“What if there were evidence to the contrary?” Mr. Simet says.
“Depending on what it was, we’d take it under advisement. What do you have?”
“Pretty good evidence that the kids that hit him were lying about his visibility.” Mr. Simet holds up the broken remains of the flag, with the piece of belt still attached. The sergeant reaches for it, and Mr. Simet hands it over. “Marcus wore it around his waist when he swam alone,” I say, “so people could see him. The guys in the boat said Marcus wasn’t wearing it when they hit him, that he was almost invisible. I was at the lake when they said it. They said it to an officer named Randy.”
“Randy Mix,” the sergeant says.
“That’s him,” Mr. Simet says.
“Randy’s on duty right now. I’ll give him a call on the radio. If he’s busy I’ll show it to him when he gets in. Let me mark it.” The sergeant disappears down a hallway. In several minutes he returns, gets our names, addresses, and numbers. “We’ll be in touch soon,” he says. “Thank you both.”
Mr. S
Man, how do I teach civics in Cutter High School? How do I talk to my students about justice and due process when I know damned good and well that a police officer destroyed evidence, lied to his superior’s faces, and is out on patrol as I speak? How do I tell them a prosecutor gave Matt Miller and me twenty minutes before deciding he didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute with nothing but a couple of blurry pictures from a cell phone of a flag in the bottom of a boat; a flag, he said, that could have been planted? He’d heard of the bad blood between Matt and the boys in the boat. It would all come down to he said, they said.
Matt, bless his heart, listened to the prosecutor, stood up, and said, “There’s plenty here, sir, and you know it. But I see your heart plain as day, and I know I don’t have a chance. So I’m leaving before I get any of you on me.”
The prosecutor stood, red faced. “You smart-mouthed little prick. Don’t you ever accuse me of shirking my duties. This case is unwinnable.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Matt said. “The law requires you to stand up for the truth whether you can win or not. But I know you won’t. Good day.”
I walked with Matt to the door, felt his forearm trembling beneath his long sleeve. He turned at the door and pointed a finger at the prosecutor. “When you go to bed tonight, ask yourself this, sir. Ask yourself, when you’re standing at the gates of Heaven, would you rather be there as the hater or the hated? There are just two sides to this. This shit gets paid.” We walked to my car in silence, my hand in the middle of his back, knowing I was touching a young man who will approach greatness. When I let him off in the school parking lot, he walked to his car, started to unlock the door, and dropped to his knees, sobbing.
Tuesday afternoon, early November. Marcus hasn’t been gone a week. I drive to Wallace James’s place, park on the dirt road in front, and gather the courage to go in. A bluish light from the TV screen flickers. The rest of the house is dark. I knock, to no answer. Again. I try the door. Unlocked. I have to go in. I have to.
Wallace sits on his worn couch, staring at the television set, a half-full scotch glass sitting on the side table.
“Come on in, teacher man,” he says. “Watch this with me.”
Things have been so crazy around here I forgot what day this is, though I did make it to the polls. On the screen, a tall, young, handsome black man strides onto a stage with his family, a beautiful, confident wife and two smiling, waving kids. American flags stand like a fence line behind him. Tears stream down the faces of many of the tens of thousands of people in the park where he is about to accept his mandate as president of the United States.
I look over at Wallace; tears stream down his face, also. His watery eyes are glued to the small TV set. “Think if this woulda happened ten years ago, my boy would be alive?”
I watch the screen, and my heart swells with Wallace’s. I’d rather be here with him than on the grass in that park in Chicago. Here, I
can feel it personally. But…“Probably not, Wallace. The Marshalls are likely watching this over at their house right now, calling our new president a nigger.”
“It’s a start though,” he says. “Maybe twenty years from now a kid like Marcus will live because someone steps up.”
“A whole bunch of kids like Marcus will live, Wallace. You’re right.”
He gets up and walks to the kitchen, pours himself another scotch, and one for me, and we sit and watch the news for maybe an hour. There is triumph in the air, but far less triumph in this room. “Hell,” Wallace says as he eases himself back onto the couch, “I don’t even know what they got him for, ’cause he was black or ’cause he was gay. Been sittin’ here wonderin’ which way the hate was comin’ from.” He nods toward the TV. “Look at California. They was gonna let gay folks be married. Now they’re gonna kill it. Word has it my people are helpin’ to kill it.” He shakes his head sadly. “I hope that’s not true; it would mean a whole people, been kicked around all our lives, are votin’ so another group gets kicked. Lordy.”
“I think that’s a rumor, Wallace,” I say. “It isn’t your people who are making that happen; it’s just all those folks who can’t stand to let people be different.”
He stands. “You know, teacher man, bein’ homosexual isn’t somethin’ my boy chose. He just was. Somebody’s readin’ the good book all wrong. You ask me, God creates it, God loves it. Simple as that. We got a ways to go.”
They’re replaying some of the new president’s remarks. “Yeah, Wallace, but we just came a ways, too; right here tonight.”
“What about that wrestler boy, he gonna be okay?”
“Yeah, I think so. He’s not a wrestler boy anymore, though. When Coach Steensland said he wouldn’t coach football if he had to take Marshall and his buddies back on the team, and the administration said he had to, he quit. Matt said he wouldn’t wrestle for a school that celebrates murder.”
“He’s a gutsy kid. Wish he’d have known Marcus better.”
“He knows him better now.”
“I guess. I’m puttin’ the place up, you know.”
“For sale?”
“Yeah, I can’t stand it. Can’t walk from room to room ’spectin’ to see him around the corner. Pretty sour on this town, too. I should be able to get enough for it to last out.”
“Where’ll you go?”
“Think I’ll just go.”
“Hey, Matt. How’s it going?”
“Got some more offers to wrestle,” he says, dropping three letters from major NCAA colleges on my desk. “Guess one state championship was enough. Screw The Bean. When I said I was hanging it up, he told me I was ruining my future. Man, I can hardly wait to get out of here.”
“It has been a little toxic,” I say.
“Yeah, toxic enough I’m losing my faith.”
“Your religious faith?”
“I can’t find a way to forgive those guys, Mr. Simet. That’s one big test of a true Christian, the way I read it. I’ve said before, it’s easy to forgive an accident, a lot harder to forgive malice. All I feel is hate. Right situation came up, I could kill those guys. I walk the halls hoping one of them will say the wrong thing. It’s eating me up. I don’t even know what forgiveness would feel like.”
I’m afraid I can’t help. I had those guys transferred out of my class because I couldn’t stand to look at them either. But…“You know, before he left, Wallace told me something about forgiveness that’s been haunting me; said he’s been leaning on it.”
“What.”
“It’s just a saying, really. Mark Twain. His wife used to say it before she died. Wallace’s wife, not Mark’s.”
“What was it?”
“He said, ‘Forgiveness is the scent the violet leaves on the heel that crushes it.’”
Matt runs that over in his head. “Whoa.”
“Yeah. He said forgiveness was probably too big for most humans, that maybe we have to leave it to something bigger. Wallace was being eaten alive, just like you. He had some big-name lawyers ready to bring civil charges against the families of all three kids. I mean big-name lawyers.”
“Why didn’t he do it?”
“He said he didn’t have the stomach to stay here and feel the way he feels,” I tell him. “He said we all grow up thinking how our people taught us to think. That’s Marshall’s problem. But Wallace also said he was still mortified that when he first discovered Marcus was gay, he told him to leave; flew into a rage. Then he read about Matthew Shepard crucified on a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, and he realized people get lynched because of hate, not just skin color. He said something else you would have liked. He said, ‘I still got a little faith, teacher man. Those boys gonna live their lives however they live ’em, but when they get to the gates of Heaven, s’all gonna come out.’”
Matt smiles. “Yeah. Wouldn’t matter to those guys whether or not I forgave them. Those fuckers are too mean to care. It’s for me, but maybe Mr. Wallace is right. Maybe it’s too big.”
“Right. I’m not familiar with your specific beliefs, Matt, but I don’t think humans are wired to forgive right away. In fact, for some things I don’t know if they ever can. And I don’t know that they should. That never made much sense to me. Twain may have had it right. It’s the scent of the violet, the good that the wronged leave on their way out. The good the bad guys can’t stomp out.”
“May be.”
“So finish your year. Get the grades, stay in shape. Go put all this to use.”
Matt stands and hugs me, and I feel in the power of his arms why he wins on the mat. He waves with his back to me as he walks out the door.
Matt Miller
Meet me at the gates, Marcus James. You can walk me through.
NAK
Anger. All those stories. All that rage.
Anger drives a drunken man to push his beautiful three-year-old daughter’s face against a hot wood stove, force her to live looking at life through the prism, and the prison, of those scars. Then, to a great extent, anger drives that burned, broken girl to fly.
Anger burrows deep into the soul to become hate and a promising young gay black man floats dead in a lake, his dreams finished. Done. Then it drives another young, talented man forward to tell the truth at any cost.
A girl and her father yell their angry words at each other so loud they forget they love each other.
Nak closes the door behind him, sits, kicks his feet up on the desktop, intertwines his fingers behind his head. For every story of angry destruction there is one of angry elevation. “Circles right around like a rattlesnake chasin’ its tale,” he murmurs. He thinks back to Hudge, the young impaired boy from all those years ago; the victim of anger so mean it defied reason. “Wish I coulda stuck a little anger into ol’ Hudge’s gut,” he says again to the empty room. “Powerful bit of rage mighta kept that boy alive.”
It feels so good to be back with the young ones, he thinks. Watchin’ them on the front end of things, with a chance to manage it all. “Not a good chance, maybe. But a chance.”
All those stories.
About the Author
Chris Crutcher has written nine critically acclaimed novels, an autobiography, and one other collection of short stories. He has won three lifetime achievement awards for the body of his work: the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults, the ALAN Award for a Significant Contribution to Adolescent Literature, and the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award. He has been a child and family therapist with the Spokane Community Mental Health Center and is currently chairperson for the Spokane Child Protection Team. Chris Crutcher lives in Spokane, Washington.
www.chriscrutcher.com
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Credits
Cover photograph (boy) by Tim Hale/Workbook Stock/Jupiterimages
Photograph by i love images/Jupiterimages Cardiogram photograph c
opyright © 2009 by Olga Gabay
Jacket design by Sylvie Le Floc’h
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ANGRY MANAGEMENT. Copyright © 2009 by Chris Crutcher. Lyrics from “A Friend of Mine Is Going Blind” copyright © 1975 by John Dawson Read. Reproduced by permission of the author. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-196833-4
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