by Jason Mott
And, now, here I am face-to-face with another kid about to turn mad.
It gives my stomach knots. The whole of an indigestible lifetime bubbles up inside of me like some sort of Vesuvian existential crisis. It’s amazing how much you can get used to the intolerable, right up until the moment when you realize you have to pass it on to some pair of bright eyes that have no choice but to be dimmed by it. And now, here I am, breaking this kid’s world just like mine got broken.
The irony is enough to fill me to the gills and beyond. So my stomach does all it can: it vomits up all of the chocolate, all the Twizzlers, all the lynched dreams, the redlined hopes, the color-blind promises that got Stopped-and-Frisked, the brutal, melanin-driven epigenetically inherited Americana that nobody—not even me—wants to talk about . . . it all comes erupting out of me faster than the red glare of those famous rockets bursting in air.
And all the while, the poor Kid watches, powerless to do anything about it. It’s all he can do not to get covered in my bile.
* * *
—
Not long after the vomiting, after The Kid has gone—in the wake of what I just told him before the heaving started, I can’t blame him for wandering off—but before I’ve had a chance to brush my teeth and settle my stomach, I get a phone call from Sharon.
“How’s the next book coming?”
“Fine,” I say. The easiest lie I’ve told today.
“Good,” she says. “The publisher is going to need it soon.”
“I’m sure.”
“So do you know why I’m calling you?”
“I have no idea.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Why would I be kidding about not knowing why you’re calling me?”
“I’m calling you about the dead boy.”
“Somehow, I’m not surprised. That kid has been clouding up my world more and more lately. You’d think that I could get away from him, but he’s tenacious and so is his death. Which is rather rude, if you ask me.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Okay, so you’re calling about the dead boy. The one who got shot so many times the wind can whistle through him.”
“That’s horrible.”
“The world’s horrible.”
“The point is, I’m sending you to the town.”
“To what town?”
“To the town where it happened. Where the kid was shot.”
My stomach falls to the floor. “Jesus Christ! Why the hell would you do that?” My hands are shaking all of a sudden. I’m sweating. My tongue feels like a flounder stuck in my mouth.
“Because you need to be there. You need to be a part of this.” From the sound of her voice, Sharon is standing in her office and yelling at her phone. I can’t be sure of it, but I know that’s how I would picture it in my head. Her voice is strong and hard, slamming into the receiver and smacking the satellite, breaking through the cell tower and crashing into my ear. “We can’t just keep pretending that this shit isn’t happening.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I manage to find a little credulity. I’m always suspicious of group pronouns.
“You. Me. All of us.”
“But that shooting was a race topic. I distinctly remember you and Media Trainer Jack telling me to stay away from being Black. I mean, that’s a real thing that happened, right?” I want to be right, but I can never be sure of my memory. But, in this case, I’m mostly sure, which is the best I can ever hope for.
“To hell with that,” Sharon says. “Did you see the photos of that boy’s body?”
“No,” I say, and The Kid’s bullet-ridden body flashes before my eyes like lightning striking a dove: all awe and horror. “I don’t need to see the photos.”
“Then you understand. And, plus, there’s that thing with the mother. Why haven’t you said anything about that yet?”
“What thing with the mother? Whose mother?”
“The boy’s mother!” Sharon barks. “My God! She’s been going on TV saying that she wants to contact you.”
“Contact who? Me?”
“Yes!” Sharon sighs. I feel like I’ve disappointed God Herself. “She did an interview the other day saying that she wanted to talk with the man who wrote Hell of a Book. I’ve been trying to contact you since then but you don’t answer your phone anymore.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know?”
“Answer your phone!”
“. . . Touché.”
“So I’m setting it up to have you meet with her in Denver. That’ll make the Denver interview even bigger than it’s already going to be. So first you’re going to go to a couple of events and, if everything goes to plan, meet with the mother of the boy who was killed.”
I’m sweating like a pig being led to market. “But why? I mean, why me? I don’t do well with mothers.”
“I don’t know exactly what she wants. But she definitely wants to see you. I thought you might know her or something.”
“How the hell would I know her?”
“Because she’s from your hometown. The Kid too,” Sharon adds. “The shooting, all of it happened there. It happened in your damn hometown. How the hell do you not know this?”
“Wait. She’s from my hometown but we’re going to meet in Denver?”
“That’s right,” Sharon says.
“Why?”
“Dramatic tension.”
“Excuse me?”
“Never go small when you can go climactic,” Sharon continues. “Why have two big events when you can fold them together into one? You, her, your little hometown, they’re famous right now. And we’re going to swing through there to drum up a bit more interest in your book and then take the whole damned thing to Denver and really make history! When you get up on that stage in Denver you’ll talk about your book first, and before people can even finish impulse buying it from Amazon you’ll be there taking questions from the mother of this poor kid. And by that time anybody that didn’t impulse buy in the first wave will be clicking like blue jays fighting over acorns.”
I’m about ready to fall over at this point. Too much going on too fast. All this talk of Denver and dead kids and mothers and my hometown and birds that click.
My phone falls to the ground. I can’t believe any of this anymore. Or I won’t believe it. It’s clear that I’m having another break. Too much daydreaming. This conversation can’t be real. I can’t be real. I don’t want to go back to that town. I left there for a reason all those years ago. Bolton was never good for my mental condition. My therapist said that whatever trauma I might have suffered must have happened there. I don’t believe that, but I know, for a fact, that I don’t want to go home. And that’s the only thing that matters. That’s the only thing I really need to know.
I won’t go back there. I won’t. I don’t care if The Kid’s from from there. I don’t care. I won’t care.
I just know that I can’t go home again. Too many thoughts there. Too many memories. Too much reality. Too much fiction. Too many blurred lines and not enough alcohol in this whole world to set them straight.
No.
Like I said: I can’t go home again.
There are things you are going to have to learn,” the mother said, “and sometimes I will have to be the one to teach you. I’m sorry.”
She stood in the doorway holding the old leather belt in her hand like a limp snake. She sighed.
Soot was not afraid of his mother, but he feared his mother’s discipline. He feared the snap of the leather belt and the sting of the switch. He feared the gentle “whip-whip-whip” sound they made as they cut through the air and connected with his flesh.
But he never feared his mother.
Just now, Soot couldn’t remember exactly why he had been compelled to steal the other boy’s comic book. It was a simple thing
that he thought the other boy wouldn’t notice. He’d had a whole stack of them: Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk. But it was the Silver Surfer issue that caught Soot’s attention. The Silver Surfer was always his favorite superhero on account of the fact that his skin was neither black nor white but something other. A raw, beautiful silver. He existed outside of all of the things that Soot hated about himself. His skin shined while Soot’s only seemed to consume light. The Silver Surfer could also fly away whenever he wanted to. He spent most of his time away from people, out among the stars, in a place not unlike The Unseen that Soot knew and loved.
How could he not love the character?
And when he saw the comic book mixed in with the rest that Shane carried, impulse got the better of him.
He almost got away with it. Almost.
When the whipping was over, Soot sat on the edge of his bed in tears and his mother sat beside him, and she reached into her pocket and took out a cigarette and lit it between shaking fingers and took a drag and exhaled and said, “God, I’m tired.”
Then the two of them sat in silence for a long time.
“Thank you for not doing it,” Soot’s mother said eventually.
“Doing what?”
“Hiding from me. You could have done it. But you didn’t. So thank you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Soot replied.
“This will get worse as you get older,” Soot’s mother said. “Or maybe it won’t,” she added. “I hope to God it doesn’t. My father, he beat me and my brother too. But he did it differently. Harder. Belts and switches were just the beginning. He’d swing at me with anything he could get his hands on when he got mad at Paul.” She sighed. “We were both terrified of him from the time we were born until the day we moved out. And, honestly, even then I was scared of him. I’d be out somewhere and I’d be worried that I’d come around a corner and find him there, waiting for me, and I’d have done something wrong. I’m not sure what I would have done wrong, but I know it would have been something and he would have been all over me for it just like he did when I was a kid.”
“Why did he beat you like that?” Soot asked.
“Because he loved us,” his mother replied.
And then she looked down at him.
“We don’t beat the people we love,” she said. “But this world isn’t safe for us. That’s why your daddy and I taught you to be unseen. That’s why we worked so hard to give it to you. He didn’t have that when he was a kid. Neither did I. I think that terrified my father.”
“Why did it scare him?”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly that he was scared. It was everything that not being able to disappear like you can leave you open to. And I think he felt guilty about the fact that he could never give it to me and Paul. I saw that in a lot of parents back then and I still see it in them. Our parents beat us and now we beat our kids, all because we’re terrified. All you really want is for the people around you to be safe. And there’s nobody in this world that you want safety for more than your children. So when you can’t give that to them, it swells up around your life. It swallows you up. You get afraid to let them leave the house because the monster of the world might come along and swallow them up. And the thing is that, eventually, that’s exactly what happens. Every child like you in this country has been swallowed up by the monster since before they were even born. And every Black parent in the history of this country has tried to stop that monster from swallowing them up and has failed at it. And every day they live with that.”
“How does that make them beat their children?”
“Because even though you’re going to lose them and you know you’re going to lose them, a part of you would rather be the one to give them that pain because then you can control it. You can put a limit on it. You can build a wall around how much hurt they’re going to feel and if you build that wall high enough—with whippings, and spankings, and beatings—maybe you can keep them safe for just a little bit longer. Maybe you even go so far as to believe that you can actually keep them completely safe. That’s a lie, of course, but when the truth is bad enough, you’ll buy into any lie that you can. You’ll even go so far as to make the lie your own.”
Soot’s mother finished her cigarette by letting it burn down to her fingers. “But that won’t happen to you,” she said. “Your daddy and I saw to that. You’ll always have this gift. You’ll always be able to be safe. We succeeded where everybody else failed. We did it. We saved our boy.”
“Then why do I still get beatings?” Soot asked.
His mother thought for a moment. She reached for another cigarette and found none. “I guess just because it’s always been done that way. And because I love you. And because you still need to know that . . .”
“Need to know what?” Soot asked.
His mother hung there, on the edge of telling him all the things she did not want to tell him. She teetered on the edge of changing who her son was, how he saw the world, all by telling him the truth about how the world saw him. It was a leap she always knew she would have to take. And now, with the moment finally before her, she didn’t have the heart for it. She didn’t have the heart to break her son.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just . . . just ignore me. Just be a child. Just be who you are, son, for a little while longer.”
Too much alcohol finally makes me sleep on a plane. I wake up in terror as the airplane’s tires slam into the runway tarmac and again I feel like the whole world is crashing. But, this time, I know where I am. Maybe that’s why I can feel everything falling apart.
The humidity hits me in the face as I step out onto the jet bridge and I know for sure that I’m back in North Carolina. I know all the smells: humidity, pine trees, thinly veiled racism. It’s what home feels like for me.
Down in this part of the world, we got it all: fifty-foot Confederate flags planted along the interstate, statues put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy, plantations where you can have wedding pictures taken of the way things used to be; we got lynchings, riots, bombings, shrimp and grits, and even muscadine grapes.
Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. But the thing is, if you’re born into a meat grinder, you grow up around the gears, so eventually you don’t even see them anymore. You just see the beauty of the sausage. Maybe that’s why, in spite of everything I know about it, I’ve always loved the South. Was born and raised in a small southern town called Bolton. Chances are you’ve never heard of it, and if that’s the case, don’t you go worrying about that or feeling bad. The fact of the matter is that there’s no reason for anybody to have ever heard of Bolton. Which is to say, it’s a hick town in the middle of a hick county in the lower leg of a hick state, so not knowing about it is probably a sign that you’re not a hick and that you’ve been raised a little bit better than myself.
When I come down the small airport escalator I look around for either The Kid or whoever has been picked to be my Renny in this little piece of the South. I’m back home so I already know what airport this is but I keep hoping I’m wrong.
When I come down the escalator, I’m greeted neither by The Kid nor by any typical Renny but by my agent, Sharon, instead.
In case you were wondering, Sharon is a tall, lean woman who dresses in New York couture and nothing else. She’s the type of woman who judges a person based on where they bought their newest piece of clothing and her judgment is as cruel and sharp as any Khan of the Old World.
“You’re late,” she says as I come down to meet her. As she talks, she never looks up from her phone.
“I was on the plane,” I say. “If I’m late, it’s just because the plane is late.”
“We don’t have time for excuses,” Sharon says. “Just because the plane was late doesn’t make it okay. Do you have any idea how many book sales we lose when an author is late landing in a new ci
ty?”
“Well, I . . .”
“Seven sales per minute,” Sharon says.
“That can’t be a true statistic,” I say.
“And that’s if you’re lucky,” she continues. “That’s if you’re selling well. Which you, by the way, are barely doing. Have you looked at your sales numbers lately?”
“No,” I say. “But everyone I’ve talked to has told me that things are going pretty well.”
“Things aren’t going badly yet, I’ll give you that. But things never go badly right up until they do. And when they do, there’s nothing that you can do to fix them. And when you stop selling books, you lose the publisher’s faith, and when you lose the publisher’s faith, they don’t want to read anything more from you and then, before you know it, nobody wants to work with you. And do you know what that means?”
I’m terrified to answer.
“I can guess what it means,” I say.
“I’m sure you can. Now let’s go.”
We walk out of the airport and into the sweaty open mouth of summer in the South. The humidity is thick enough to push the air from your lungs if you’re not careful. I’m sweating in places I probably shouldn’t be sweating in the time it takes us to walk from the concourse to the limousine that Sharon has waiting. Sharon, by the way, hasn’t the slightest bit of sweat on her person. It’s like she’s invulnerable to the wiles and ways of the southern sun.
“Where to?” I ask.
“You tell me,” Sharon says. “It’s your town.”
* * *
—
Long before we reach the thin city limits of Bolton, we meet the protesters. Thousands of them stand along the highway leading into the small strip of pavement that is Bolton. They wave signs and shout about justice and, just like the way it was back in San Francisco, they are all youths. All of them between the ages of two and twenty. It’s amazing how my hard-luck imagination travels so well with me. I could swear that when I look at those youthful faces standing outside the walls of my beloved hometown, I can see the exact same faces that I saw on the other coast. One of the small children wears a shirt that says i can’t breathe and I find it poignant and ironic that someone who isn’t potty trained is socially conscious enough to hop a flight from the West Coast to the East Coast and stand out here in the middle of this Carolina heat and humidity and protest.