Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  “Me neither,” Paul said.

  “What if I don’t want to do this?”

  “That makes it sound like you got a choice.”

  Soot’s jaw tightened and his uncle saw it.

  “Look,” Paul said, his voice firm, “I didn’t make this world. But I’m damn sure going to survive in it for as long as I can. And I know you don’t want to hurt anybody. But this ain’t about hurting anybody. This is about staying alive. You saw what happened to your daddy. And I’m damn sorry about that. But I can’t just sit by and watch it happen to you. Your mama told me how she’s been trying to teach you about it. She’s got her way of doing it and I’ve got mine. She asked me to help you, so that’s what I’m doing.” He looked around in frustration. “It don’t matter none,” he said, suddenly sounding very tired. “It’s like taking medicine. Sometimes you have to do things to keep yourself from getting hurt. And the things you do feel like they’re hurting you more than the thing you’re trying to keep safe from. But that don’t change the fact that you need to do them. So this is it for you.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, all the boy would remember was the gun firing over and over and over again. One shot after another. And each time, he felt the gun recoil in his hands. Each shot made his entire body quake. By the end of the afternoon, his hands were blistered and he could barely close them but Paul seemed not only proud but thankful that it had all happened.

  “Let’s go,” he said, loading up the pistol one last time.

  The two of them settled into the truck and Paul returned the gun to the glove compartment. Then Soot was asleep.

  He awoke to find that the evening had come on full and night had bloomed around him and he also awoke to the flash of blue lights again and the sound of the glove compartment opening. “Uncle Paul?” Soot called, trying to decide if he was dreaming or not.

  “Just sit still,” he said.

  Finally, Soot was awake. The flash of the blue lights sent a chill down his spine.

  Soot heard the sound of a car door closing. Before long, the policeman walked up to the truck, shining his flashlight inside. As the light fell over Soot, sweat rose up on his brow.

  “License and registration,” the officer said.

  “I got a pistol in here,” Paul said, keeping his hands on the steering wheel. “I’m just saying that so you know ahead of time. I got a permit for it.”

  The glare from the flashlight ran through the truck. “Where you got a gun at?”

  “On the seat,” Paul said. “In view. That’s the law ain’t it?”

  “I reckon,” the officer said.

  The light fell on the gun, then shined in Soot’s face, blinding him. “Let me see your hands!” the cop said, his voice hard as a knife.

  “Calm down,” Paul said softly. He turned to Soot. “Put your hands up on the dash.”

  Soot did as his uncle told him.

  “Why don’t the two of you go ahead and step out of the truck?” the officer said.

  “What for?” Paul asked. “You still ain’t told me what you stopped me for.”

  “Step on out,” the officer said. His voice rumbled through the small truck and Soot felt his breath quicken.

  “It’s okay,” Paul said. “Just go on and get out of the truck.”

  Soot’s face was streaked with tears. “No.”

  “What you say, boy?” the officer asked.

  “It’s fine,” Paul said. “He’s just nervous. He’ll get out.”

  “I know he will. The both of you are gonna get out of the truck.”

  The officer placed his hand on his gun.

  “Okay,” Paul said.

  It was then that Paul looked back over inside the truck to find Soot missing. “Holy Lord,” Paul said.

  “What is it?” the officer said. He shined his flashlight across the seat and also found the boy missing. “Where’d he go?” The lights rose and fell in the small space where Soot had been sitting. “Where’s he at?” The cop unclipped the gun in his holster. “Step out of the truck and get on the ground!” he barked.

  “Yes, sir,” Paul said.

  No sooner had Paul opened the door than he was pulled from the truck and forced down onto the ground. “Hey!” he roared. “Ain’t no need for all that.”

  “Shut up,” the officer said. “Where’s that boy? Where’s the boy?”

  The cop forced Paul’s hands behind his back and fumbled with the handcuffs. Once the cuffs were on, the cop stood with one foot in the small of Paul’s back. “Get off of me,” Paul yelled.

  “Shut up,” the cop replied. “Stay there before I shoot you for resisting arrest.” The cop’s attention was focused on the inside of the truck. The door was still closed and the window rolled up, so he couldn’t understand where the boy might have gotten to. He walked around to the other side of the truck and opened the door. It opened with a groan. Still, he shined the light up and down in the seat but there was nobody there.

  When he heard something in the darkness beside him, he drew his gun and spun. “Who’s there!” he barked, aiming the barrel of his gun at the outer dark squatting over the countryside. The sound was close by. It sounded like a foot being placed on the gravel in front of him so he dropped to his knees and aimed both his flashlight and his gun at the underside of the old pickup truck. But the only sight that greeted him was the sight of Paul on the other side of the truck, still on his belly with his hands cuffed behind him and his face on the pavement.

  He stood and turned his attention back to the field of darkness beside the truck.

  “Where’d he go?” the officer asked. Still, the glare of his light swung back and forth through the darkness.

  The only answer he received was the gentle sound of laughter coming from Paul.

  The officer came around the truck and stood over Paul. “Something funny?”

  “No crime against laughing, is there?” Paul asked.

  The cop squatted beside Paul. “Look at me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Look up here at me, boy.”

  Paul craned his neck, turning his face up from the pavement.

  “You think I don’t know who that boy is?” the officer said. “You think I don’t recognize him? He ain’t hard to spot.” He looked at Paul’s license. “You his uncle or something?”

  “Something like that,” Paul said. He knew what was about to happen.

  “Well,” the officer said, “I just wanted to let you and him and anybody else know that we don’t really appreciate what happened around here. That cop that you-all are trying to get fired, he’s a good man. He’s got a family. And y’all are threatening his family.”

  Again Paul laughed.

  “I’m glad you find this funny,” the officer said, rubbing his hands together.

  “How do you figure we’re threatening his family?”

  The officer placed the tip of the barrel between Paul’s shoulder blades, the muzzle kissing hard against his spine. “It’s about the way of life. The way of the world,” the cop said. “People like y’all, you want to change the way things are. You don’t know what it’s like, people like you. You think this world just makes itself up the way it is. You’re ungrateful. That’s the biggest thing about it all that gets under my skin, I reckon,” he spat. “This country is the greatest place on this whole planet. And I won’t say it ain’t had its troubles. But when you compare those troubles against the rest of the world, against the way things done happened in other parts of the world, even the worst person in this country has it pretty damned good.” He shook his head. Paul felt the barrel of the gun pressing harder into his spine. “That man that you-all are harassing, he might lose his job.” He cleared his throat. “This job ain’t easy. And sometimes people fight back when they shouldn’t. That’s what happened to that boy what got shot. If he’d
been doing what he was told to do, he wouldn’t have got shot.”

  Paul’s hands trembled in the cuffs. He strained his wrists against them, but the cuffs held. “That was my brother-in-law,” Paul said.

  “Hope his type of behavior doesn’t run in the family.” He kneeled down close to Paul’s face, with his gun still in the man’s back. “It don’t run in the family, does it?”

  The moment stretched out.

  “Does it?”

  Paul turned his face to the pavement.

  “I need you to tell me something,” the cop said.

  “Fuck you,” Paul mumbled.

  “Mmm-hmm.” The pistol cocked. “I reckon it’s a good thing that boy ran off. Makes things easier. . . . You shouldn’t resist arrest.”

  Paul took a breath into his lungs and waited for the shot to go off. He waited for the bullet to penetrate his spine. Maybe it would kill him, maybe it would just paralyze him. He didn’t know which was better and which was worse. He saw, in his imagination, his own funeral. He saw his grave placed next to his brother-in-law’s. He saw Soot, the poor, poor dark-skinned boy, standing over those graves, waiting his turn. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What’s that?” the officer asked. “You say you sorry?”

  The gun barrel was lifted from his spine.

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “I said I’m sorry. But I wasn’t talking to you. You can go to hell.”

  The officer smirked. “Okay, then.”

  Again, the barrel of the gun was on his spine. The shot was coming, just as soon as the cop’s finger tightened around the trigger.

  “Don’t!” a voice called out from the edge of the darkness.

  Paul and the officer both lifted their eyes to the darkness. The cop aimed the gun at the sound of the voice. He squinted, seeing nothing but darkness. But soon there came the outline of clothes rising against the glare of his squad car headlights. Then Soot, with his impossibly black skin that seemed to blend into the night, stepped forward into the light.

  “Please don’t,” Soot said.

  “Get out of here!” Paul yelled. “Run!”

  “Shut up.”

  Soot and the cop stared at one another. The cop squinted as though he were seeing a specter of some sort, something that came from the depths of imagination. “Damn, you’re black,” the officer said. “I seen you in photographs but I didn’t think it was real. Saw you in the newspaper but couldn’t believe that anybody could be as black as you.” He laughed.

  “The kids call me Soot,” Soot said.

  “I can’t blame them. I want to ask you a question,” the officer said.

  “Okay,” Soot replied.

  “You wouldn’t ever resist arrest, would you?”

  “What?”

  “If you were to get arrested”—he gesticulated with his pistol as he spoke—“you wouldn’t fight back, would you? You wouldn’t stand there shouting about rights and race? You wouldn’t start talking about Stop-and-Frisk or search warrants or anything else, would you?”

  “No, sir,” Soot said, his voice quivering.

  “You sure? You sure you wouldn’t?” The barrel of his gun swung to and fro in a dark arc as he spoke. Sometimes it pointed at Paul’s spine. Sometimes, for only an instant, it swung its dark eye over Soot.

  “I’m sure, sir,” Soot said.

  And then there was only silence. A long, sprawling silence that would cast a shadow over the rest of Soot’s life long after he and his uncle were allowed to leave and they drove the entire drive home with Paul not saying anything and, sometimes, he cried gently and Soot reached over and touched him and Paul pushed his hand away and stared out of the window and only shook his head, the only words he could manage being “I’m sorry you were born into this.”

  When I ask The Kid if he’s coming with me to the town hall meeting tonight, he fires back with a surprisingly courteous “Hell nah, dude. I don’t want none of what’s going to be going down in that place.”

  “I hear you, Kid,” I say. “I hear you.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s a sight to see, really. I hardly even know why we’re going to this meeting but if there’s one person who’s positive, it’s Sharon. She’s a sight to see here in this small town wearing nothing less than twenty grand in designer clothing. She looks like she’s escaped from a Paris runway and she stands out like a lightning strike in the middle of the night as we make our way through the long line of muddy pickup trucks and 1980s domestic cars which are the staples of Bolton and all towns like it.

  I wonder how Sharon feels as she walks through the parking lot surrounded by people who can’t appreciate just how exclusive and expensive her clothing is. For her part, Sharon seems to be having a good enough time. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that she hardly seems interested in her clothes and how the small-town hicks react to them.

  “I didn’t think things like this happened in small towns like this. Chicago or New York, I can understand. But this place? It’s just not supposed to happen. Some places are supposed to be immune to this type of thing.”

  “Nobody’s immune to nothing,” I say as we pass through the crowd that is growing ever more dense with each step. The people of Bolton all recognize me as I pass. I hardly recognize any of them even though I know I should. Some sort of selective memory, I guess. Just my brain’s usual way of stuffing the past into the past. They nod and wave and I shake a shit ton of hands. Little old ladies congratulate me on the success of Hell of a Book. They tell me how proud they are to finally have someone from our small town go out and make it in the world. I nod and agree with them when they say they knew someone would make it one day. “We’re a special breed,” they say. “And it’s high time the world knew about it.” The little old ladies are all the color of mahogany. They look so much alike I can’t help but wonder if they’re related. There’s no shortage of families in Bolton who are all connected through the various threads of marriage.

  When it isn’t the little old ladies telling me how proud they are, it’s the middle-aged mothers and fathers shaking my hand and saying how proud they are. They tell me the same thing the old ladies told me: how proud they are to know that someone from our town finally made it out into the world and did something worthwhile. I tell them that everything they do is worthwhile and that I’m nothing special—which I consider to be true—but they silently disagree. Then they ask me if I can come over and talk to their children. “It would be great if you’d come by and say a few words,” they say. “They need to know that they can do it to. They need to be able to believe that they’re not trapped here. You know how it is with Black kids. They don’t ever get to see any role models. Not really. Everybody they see is a rapper or a basketball player, and that’s just not realistic. Those aren’t real people. But writers are real people! And you, you lived here. You grew up on these dirt roads. You know what it’s like and you did something. I need them to know that they can do it too.”

  Before I can say that I’m just as unreal as all those rappers and basketball players and dreams of changing America into a place where people like me aren’t afraid to walk down the street, Sharon interrupts by saying, “He’ll be there. I promise. As sure as Superman, he’ll be there. Just give me your information and I’ll make sure that he comes and talks to your child. In fact, maybe we’ll go so far as to have him do something at the school. He could talk to the whole school and let them know about all the other options that there are for them out there in the world.”

  Then we make our way inside.

  * * *

  —

  Bolton Town Hall also doubles as a church because there is no separation of church and state in southern Black towns. God is everywhere, especially in the law. At least, He’s supposed to be. But I can tell by the tone and timbre of the people inside the walls of this small, ruined church that they�
��re beginning to believe less and less in the ability of God to come along and do the right thing in their lives.

  “Something’s gotta be done,” somebody yells at the back of the church before anyone can say anything.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna do nothing,” somebody else yells. “Nobody ever does nothing.”

  The local minister raises a hand and motions for everyone to quiet down. “Please,” he says in a voice so booming and firm that the choice of the crowd to listen or not is taken away. The crowd wilts into their seats and soon there is only the sound of restless people shuffling upon old, wooden church pews and, before long, that song fades away as well and everyone sits and waits for the minister to tell them what to do. Which, of course, was God’s way of telling them what to do.

  “First of all,” the minister begins, “we’ve got to go ahead, right here and right now, and own up to the fact that we’ve been here before. We’ve been here too many times before so we can’t behave like that ain’t the case.” The crowd mumbles in agreement.

  “We’re tired,” someone shouts.

  “And we should be,” the minister confirms. “I’m just as tired as all of you. My mama was tired. My daddy was tired. My grandmama and my granddaddy was both tired. And on, and on, and on. Tired, tired, and more tired. One after the other. You know it and I know it. And you and me, we’re the children of all of those generations of tired people. The children of those generations of people that were so tired all they could do was hope and pray for something more. Those people that gave themselves over to God because he was the only one willing to take them in love and deliverance. That’s who we are, all of us. And with every generation we grow more weary.” More mumbling of agreement. “And with every generation, we grow more frustrated.” Louder mumbling of agreement. “And before long, that frustration starts to mature into something else, doesn’t it?” The sounds of agreement grew from mumblings to shouts of agreement and confirmation. “And we all know what that something else is. We all know what the word for it is.”