Giraffe People

by Jill Malone

  She’s doing a good job of catching my parents’ tone. I have no idea what to say. I try to imagine Ernie in a bar fight, or Joe. Trevor is another story, but he’s the devil I know, and not the guy I figure will defend my honor, or whatever. Jeremy would, but his parents would never let him go to a bar, even as a roadie.

  I hadn’t really thought about playing in bars, or anything. When I first learned piano, I’d play once a month for the Protestant service at Ft. Leonard Wood. Hundreds of privates listened and applauded and grinned at the eight-year-old with her feathered bangs playing Morning Has Broken during the offertory.

  Meghan looks me over. “What you need is a chaperone.”

  “You mean like an adult?”

  “Something like that. Give me a few days to think it over.”

  Am I the only person who thinks about the tortoise and the hare when someone says race relations? It just sounds preposterous and archaic, like referring to someone as colored. At Monmouth Regional, there’s a group of kids involved in the Back to Africa movement. They wear leather Africa medallions, and turtlenecks, and dress like geeky intellectuals. In the rap-inspired style of lettered gold rings, capped gold teeth, piled gold chains, and puffed football jackets common at our school, these kids stand out like preppies.

  But they’re also the kids that we all admire. They’re informed and political in a way that seems conscientious and grown-up. They aren’t the kids that we were told about at orientation when we were warned that Monmouth Regional had racial tensions. In the previous five years, the school has experienced a number of racial skirmishes including knifings, brawls with bats and pipes, severe beatings, and a gunshot death.

  During junior high, my friends were nerds and jocks, black and white, military and civilian, and teachers bullied us worse than we bullied each other. Until our basketball game against Asbury Park, only my brothers had ever tormented me. Our team got a police escort from the bus to the gym, security guards throughout the gym during the game, and then another escort back to the bus afterward. It was surreal. I laughed about it until two girls from Asbury Park called me over during warm-ups.

  “Hey,” one said.

  “Hey,” I said back, all grins.

  “What’d you say about us?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “My friend heard you.”

  I looked at the other girl. She glared at me. They were both a little smaller than I was, maybe 5’6” and wearing white sweaters. In the middle of the gym these girls played me, while our friends and family filed into the bleachers, and security guards flexed by the door.

  “Heard what?” I asked. I couldn’t look at the one glaring at me anymore, so I looked at the one talking.

  “You called us niggers. My friend heard you.”

  “I never,” I said.

  “You called us niggers, and you best watch your back.”

  Now I couldn’t look at her either, and so I stepped away, toward my teammates.

  “We’re watching you,” she said.

  I played the worst game of my life that day—well, until the field hockey game against Wall. Even while they were psyching me out, I knew that was the point, and it still didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop it from happening. Those chicks scared the holy fuck out of me, and no armed guard could change that.

  After the race-wars lecture at freshman orientation, I walked through Monmouth’s hallways quickly, keeping my head down when I was alone, or sticking to the right if I was with a friend. Of the three fights I saw freshman year, two involved pairs of black girls, and ended with chunks of hair strewn on the floor by the lockers, and skin under painted nails, and the other was white boys hurling each other into tables in the lunch room. We knew about the drive-bys and the gang wars. We all heard stories about turf, but even those Asbury Park girls weren’t fucking with me because I was white; they were fucking with me because I was on the other team.

  As a freshman, with a handful of friends my own age, I had a serious phobia about getting jumped; and on Valentine’s Day, when I got stuck behind a mob of kids and heard shouting, I’d started to search for another route to the gym when a girl on the edge of the crowd said, “What the fuck you looking at?”

  I kept backing up, when someone grabbed me.

  “I said, What the fuck you looking at?”

  Before I could respond, another arm came around me, and a familiar voice said, “Bitch, who you addressing?”

  “Oh I—” the girl began.

  “Oh you nothing. Get your ass out the way.”

  Propelling me through the crowd—past some girl screaming in an incomprehensible register at her baffled, frightened boyfriend—we arrived at the locker room, and I finally glanced up at Jayna, one of my basketball teammates. If she hadn’t looked so fierce, I might have cried with relief. The girl in the hallway outweighed me by a hundred pounds, and had two friends flanking her.

  “Thanks,” I breathed.

  “Hate that bitch,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m a talk to somebody ’bout her. Tired of that bitch.” She stared at me, and then punched my shoulder. “You a’right. Don’t you worry ’bout her.”

  “No.”

  She laughed, and punched me again. Jayna probably weighed 160 pounds, but she was 6’ 2” and not to be underestimated. I’d seen her scrap on the court against some huge girls, and better them time and again.

  After that, I stopped worrying about getting jumped, and walked through the hallways like a human. In high school, we form tribes of interest, and the girls I played ball with would have done anything for me. They’d proved it on and off the court. They were cool and beautiful and yelled my name whenever they saw me. They called me kid, and meant it kindly. It didn’t matter that I was sick of playing ball, that my body was drained, that the guitar lit me up like nothing before. I played starting point guard on a team that finished fourth in the state; I owed them.

  If Meghan could dream up some genius story to get my parents to let me quit basketball and join a band, maybe she could inspire another version to persuade the rest of my tribe.

  Ineluctable. Not to be avoided, inescapable. Adjective. How the hell do you pronounce this word anyway? The emphasis on the third syllable sounds pretty stupid.

  Nigel and I have our book bags and all our crap spread out on the dining-room table—it’s oval, oak, and has these cool talons like maybe the table is really a petrified creature. If Mom isn’t home—she left us a note that she’d gone grocery shopping; she won’t take us anymore because she says she buys more junk food when we tag along—this is the best room for studying with two long windows and a chandelier, and the glass cabinets of china patterned with swirling blue, and the red hutch with the music boxes, and Pepper’s tail thumping as she dreams.

  Studying with Nigel keeps me honest: he’s the quietest person I’ve ever met, and he keeps busy, so I never talk to him because I feel like I’d be interrupting. He’s working on his Spanish, while I brainstorm ideas for our photography project. Bangs and I are paired again, and this time the assignment is to tell a story in sixteen photographs.

  You know how hard it is to tell a story in sixteen photographs? Bangs thinks we should photograph some drawings and, depending on the way the photos are arranged, the art will be different, so the photographs will be an interpretation of the drawings. I guess he’s thinking like an artist, and I’m thinking like an athlete. My first idea involved static shots of someone kicking a soccer ball into the goal, and my second was Nigel sprinting across the parade ground. All of it seems so common, though—pictures of artwork, pictures of athletes—same old, same old. What about staging a crime? A bank robbery in sixteen shots? Or a murder?

  It’s difficult to concentrate because Mom left lasagna for me to put into the oven, and, according to the timer, it’ll be done in twenty minutes. Despite the spinach she insists on using, her lasagna is pretty much the most fantastic thing you’ll ever eat. Even Nigel, Mr. Concentration, keeps staring at the kitchen, li
ke he’s considering a raid.

  When Pepper jumps up and runs into the kitchen, we know Mom’s home. We also know she’s got groceries. Still, neither of us moves, not even to open the doors for her.

  “Kids,” she hollers from the kitchen door, “I’ve got groceries.” And then less than a minute later, louder, “Nicole and Nigel, let’s hustle.” We drag into the kitchen. On her first trip, she brought four bags in. She’ll stroke out carting the groceries in one day. “You two bring the rest in. I’ll start unloading these. Where’s your brother?” We shrug.

  The entire van is full of brown bags of groceries. Whenever Mom goes to the commissary, it’s like she’s stockpiling goods to see us through for months. Somehow all the food seems to be gone a couple of days later.

  “How was school?” she asks, when we return to the kitchen.

  “Great,” we mumble. “Fine.” We make another trip to the van.

  “Did Nate bring you home?” she asks. Whenever she sees us, Mom asks a thousand questions. She’d have been a ruthless interrogator for the military. I let Nigel answer and go back for another load. Since when do I care where Nate is?

  “Last load,” I say. “And, yes, I locked the van.”

  Mom frowns at me. “Thank you for putting the lasagna in the oven. I bought some French bread too. It’s in one of these bags.” There are bags everywhere. “You two clear your books off the table, and Nigel, I want you to set the table while Cole fills the water glasses. Your father will be home any minute.”

  By the time we’ve cleared our books, and set the table, Mom’s unloaded the groceries and sliced the lasagna. Dad is never later than 5:15, and Nate still hasn’t showed. If he doesn’t make it for dinner, he is completely dead; we need prior permission to skip family meals.

  Dad rides his bike to work. Like a total cornball, he’ll still have his right pants leg clipped after he gets inside. When we were little, we’d wait at the door for him—back when Army uniforms were solid green—and we’d swipe his cap, and help him unlace his boots, and mob him until Mom hollered at us to give him some peace. The back for his Chaplain’s pin used to stab me in the forehead whenever I wore his cap, but I loved the canvas smell, the way he’d push the cap back to kiss my nose.

  Today, he arrives home wearing his dress greens. I’ll say this for the Army: you’d have to be a serious raggedy-ass not to look good in dress greens. He kisses Mom and compliments the lasagna, and pets Pepper as she launches at him. Nigel and I are already seated at the table, both clutching our forks, though we know he’ll change before he joins us. Mom brings a salad, and rolls her eyes when she sees us with our forks.

  She spreads her napkin in her lap and says, “Cole, what’s going on with you and Nate?” I shrug. “Are you fighting?” She looks at Nigel. Nigel has been a rat since birth.

  “Nate’s dating Kelly,” Nigel says. As irritating as he is, at least Nigel doesn’t editorialize.

  “Your friend Kelly?” Mom asks me.

  “Yes,” Nigel answers.

  Mom appraises me, and then looks at her watch. “And he’s missing dinner.” She says this like they equate: dating my friend, and missing family dinner.

  Dad tells us hello, and then looks at Nate’s empty chair as he reaches for our hands. “Where’s Nate?”

  “We don’t know,” my mother says. She’s using her ominous voice. Nate is so dead.

  “Nigel,” Dad says, and Nigel says the prayer. His prayers are even shorter than mine, so that we’re holding our plates out to be served a moment later. The cheese has to be cut between pieces. The lasagna tastes so good that I decide not to mention all the giant raw mushrooms in the salad.

  “Anything exciting happen today?” Dad asks.

  We take turns answering—Mom reports that the water in the kitchen sink and basement laundry was brown again; they’ve had the engineers out twice, and both times the engineers said the pipes are just old, and nothing to worry about. Nigel has a Chess Club competition on Thursday after school. He tends to win these, he reminds us now. And then I tell them about my photography project, and how I’m stuck. That’s seriously the most exciting thing I can think of.

  “What about an instructional story?” Dad says. “Shots of a paper plane being folded, and then flown.”

  “Or a fist fight?” Nigel offers. “Before, during, and after. The final shot could be of a kid with a black eye and a bloody nose.”

  Mom scowls at him, and I decide not to mention my ideas about bank robbery, or car crashes. As though I have a stuntman or stage handy, my ideas seem to lend themselves to short films rather than photography.

  “What about taking photos of actors doing a scene from a play?” Dad asks. “A story within a story kind of thing. You could photograph something famous—like the death scene in Romeo and Juliet.”

  Actors from the drama club would eat this up, especially if I let them do it in modern dress: Romeo as a skate punk, and Juliet in her Guess jeans. Not until I picture Romeo dropping in, his momentum kicking through his hair, his body crouched, then up again in that deceptively laggard way, does it occur to me that Bangs skating some sick trick is the ultimate story.

  “When is this project due?” Mom asks.

  “The day before Thanksgiving break.”

  “Which reminds me,” Mom says, “Meghan’s parents are going to stay with us over Thanksgiving.” She doesn’t even have to finish; I know I’m about to be chucked from my room. “Cole, I’m going to put them in your room, and you’ll be staying with Meghan.”

  “What?” I say, startled.

  “Her roommate is going home for break, and we thought you’d enjoy staying with Meghan a little more than sleeping on the fold-out in the sunroom.”

  I nearly squeak, “What?” again, but stop myself in time. I get to sleep over at Meghan’s dorm room like we’re buds or whatever. That is utterly cool.

  Dad snickers, and then says, “If you’d rather sleep in the sunroom—”

  “Oh no, Meghan’s dorm. Please.”

  “I hope they bring presents,” Nigel says.

  “What?” Mom glares at him.

  “Her parents,” Nigel says, inured to her displeasure. “I hope they bring us presents.”

  Since I approve of presents, I decide to help Nigel out: “Dad, what’s with the dress greens?”

  “Oh,” Dad says pleasantly, “the highest-ranking female chaplain in the military visited the school today. I hosted her meet-and-greets.”

  “How highest-ranking?” Nigel asks.

  “Two-star general,” Dad says.

  A female chaplain? I’ve never even seen one. “What was she like?” I ask. This is how it’ll be next year, when Nate’s away at college; just four of us at dinner.

  “Quite a speaker,” Dad says. That’s code for she’s a liberal.

  Mom tells me to run check the freezer. She has bought an ice-cream cake for our dessert—strawberry with vanilla cake—my favorite. Even as I carry it back to the table with dessert plates and a knife, I know that none of this is real. The evening’s earnest, and friendly, the way things become when we remember them, from some distance.

  Later in the evening, when I call Bangs, he tries to talk me out of using him as the subject of our photo-story. “How about a buddy of mine—Jake? Otherwise, you’ll get stuck taking all the shots.”

  “I don’t mind taking the photos, if you don’t mind doing the tricks.”

  “What kind of tricks?”

  “What can you do?”

  “Are you thinking ramp, or street skating?”

  “Which would give us better photos?”

  I hear the guitar in the background, strummed into a rapid heartbeat. Then the sound cuts out. “Well,” he says, “riding stairs could be pretty sonic.”

  When they were kids, my brothers used to skate down staircases on these fat Nash boards. Awkward, and ridiculous, and so not what I have in mind. “Stairs?” I say, like I’m thinking it over.

  “Yeah, if we do l
ike three flights, and I catch the rail, that’d give you a bunch of shots.”

  “Catch the rail?” I repeat.

  “Yeah, you know, skate down the metal railing on a bunch of stairs. I know just the place, actually. We found this staircase near the courthouse that’s perfect.”

  “Oh,” I say, imagining us cuffed, and tossed into the back of some dirty police cruiser by a fat dude whose undershirt shows. Through the phone a note whinnies. “Yeah,” I say, “that sounds good.”

  After I hang up, I wonder if he’ll wear a helmet and pads, if I’ll get a photo of some horrific accident, asphalt burns and a board rocketing into the street. Why not have the drama kids stage a death scene? Why not be satisfied with something artful and clever? From the alcove, my radio plays the countdown, and an ugly old lamp streaks the ceiling with light, and the radiator clunks like a misstep, and I can’t possibly work on Geometry when I’ve got all this in my head.

  Crouched at the base of the upper staircase, with a ridiculously expensive camera that I’m terrified about damaging—like professional photographers, for magazines or whatever, would love to use this camera, and when I opened the black-leather case and saw one of the lenses for this thing, I figured Bangs must have stolen it—anyway, I take a bunch of shots but the shutter is so fast, that I fuck them up; I’m over-anticipating him. From this vantage, Bangs seems to hop effortlessly onto the lower half of the railing and coast the first flight, before another slap-hop from the pavement onto the second railing.

  He has made me wear a helmet that covers my ears, though he isn’t wearing one, or pads for that matter, and before his first run down the railing, I tried to squirm out of this whole thing; he’s going to be killed doing this. He’s wearing jeans, and a black sweatshirt, his hands red with cold, and the wind pushing through the evergreens to our right. Even with my leather jacket and wool scarf and this stupid helmet, my hands ache when I advance the film.

  I feel guilty doing this—even as a spectator. And if he dies, or has a gruesome accident and is paralyzed, and I’m prosecuted for murder, or as an accessory to daredevilry or whatever, then it’ll serve me right. But I hope he doesn’t get paralyzed. He looks like a sugar glider: fast and fearless and soaring.