James moved toward him. “You get in trouble last night?”
Dallas shrugged. “Sort of. Sent to my room.”
James nodded silently. Dallas pulled a wrinkled shirt from the pile and stretched it over his head.
“What are we doing today?” asked James.
Dallas slammed the dryer door closed. “We’re going down to the end of the block to get that wood.”
“What?”
“Look at the bruise on your neck. I want that wood as payback.”
“You’re father will kill you. My mother’ll never let me out again. Besides, they probably took it all back.”
“Well, that’s what we’re going to find out.”
“What about Felix?” James looked around, as if Felix were hiding somewhere.
“What about him? We’ll stop by his house right now.”
The way Dallas revealed his plan, as though it was a plan to play kickball, unnerved James. But he couldn’t tell him no. All he could think of was what his mother would say if he were to come home with fresh bruises and cuts, and the possibility of another beating, if the gang they had fought decided to recruit some bigger kids from down the street. He thought there were times when Dallas was crazy. But he also knew he could not let him go alone—the first real friend he’d ever had. He was trying to think of more questions.
“How do we get past your dad?”
Dallas cocked his ear and listened for his father’s footsteps. He could hear the floorboards creaking in the back corner of the basement. “We’ll have to stash the wood at your place for a while before we start to build the fort. But we’ll just tell my dad that we’re going to Felix’s house.” Dallas looked down at the pile and saw the sleeve of a green shirt sticking out. He pulled it loose and threw it to James. “Here, when we get to Felix’s house, put that on. You should probably wear green. Camouflage yourself a little.”
James looked down at his orange T-shirt. He pulled it off, put the green one on, and then pulled the orange shirt back on to cover it. Moments later, the door at the top of the stairs opened, and light poured in. Felix scampered down the steps and stopped short in full sight of his friends. Dallas shook his head.
“Your dad just said we begot violence or something,” Felix said. He looked confused.
“You just blew it for us. Why didn’t you stay home?” cried Dallas.
“Just blew what?” Felix looked at James for the answer. Dallas went over to an empty folding chair that stood lonely in the center of the basement. He dropped down on it and crossed his arms.
“Dallas wants to go get the wood we took yesterday,” James said.
Felix stared at Dallas, and then at James. He noticed the bruise for the first time. “Holy mackerel! Your dad do that to you?” Felix asked.
James looked surprised, and slightly hurt. “No,” he said, rubbing at the bruise and covering it with his shirt collar. Felix stepped forward for a closer look. James shoved him away and moved back. Dallas had been sitting quietly, trying to devise another plan. Abruptly, as if awakened from a trance, he unfolded his arms, slapped his knees, and stood.
“Well, we can still say we’re going to your house, Felix. We hang out there for a few minutes, and then go get our stuff.” Dallas nodded to the other two as if they understood his orders and planned to follow them. This was the way it was. Dallas had thought all through the night about what he’d done. He thought about their chase, about Jason Brock. He saw no reason why this little boy should have to ruin the whole plan. In some way, he saw the boy’s tumble down the hill as a wasted tragedy if they didn’t stick to the plan. He feared what Brock would think of him if, after telling him his fort was to be taken, he didn’t make good on his promise. He was bolstered by the bruise on James’s neck. This had to be done. He knew the chance was great that they would all drag themselves home with broken skulls and bleeding lips, but at least it all would have come to something. Even his father had to understand that. But when he looked at James and Felix, and their worried expressions, he felt they didn’t understand.
“I don’t know about this,” said James, as if he had heard Dallas’s thoughts.
“Those kids were crazy,” added Felix, “I don’t want to get my face broken.”
Dallas tried to plead with them. He looked at James. The collar of his shirt had pulled away from his bruise, exposing the deep black and blue.
“When we’re sitting up in our new fort, James, you’re going to look at your neck and at least it’ll feel like it was worth something.”
James reached up and drew his hand to the crook of his neck where it met his shoulder.
They argued a little further. Felix wanted to know exactly what the plan was. James remained mostly quiet. He rubbed at the bruise every time the other two mentioned it, and he took Dallas’s abandoned seat at the folding chair. Dallas was mapping it all out for Felix. James knew that sometimes Dallas didn’t trust Felix. Other times the two were partners in crime, teaming up, even sometimes leaving him out. But Dallas was ranting now about how he needed both of them. He wanted James to be the lookout, so if trouble came along he could get a head start out. He told Felix that he needed him to convince his mother to come by with the car. He spoke in excited terms, waving his arms around. Like a general in the army, ordering his men. Rounding up their morale for a final push to the breach.
The boys finally agreed, and with a deep breath, James rose from his chair and began to follow the other two up the stairs. Dallas took the lead and turned around to say something when he heard the soft slapping sound of water on the basement windows. He crossed the floor, jumped onto a bucket, and looked out of the small window. Rain began to gently fall, like manna, and the drops ran down the window pane.
“Dammit,” he barked under his breath.
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN DAVID WESTWOOD ROLLED OUT OF BED to answer the phone, his windows were rattling from the wind and rain. He pulled the blinds open quickly, but all he saw were blurry, foggy window panes. He let the blinds spring back into place and crossed the room. It was Matthew Milton on the line. When David heard his voice, his shoulders drooped in disappointment.
“What do you want?” he growled, carrying the phone over to his bed. He dropped down heavily.
“You coming to Darryl’s party tonight?”
“It’s raining outside, are you blind?”
“It’s supposed to clear up before the party starts.”
“I’m painting tonight,” David explained.
“I’m painting tonight,” Matthew mocked. “Come on, Darryl says he ordered an extra keg, and we’re playing drunken piñata.”
“Darryl Knight is a fool. His friends are fools too.”
“Word on the street is, your little girlfriend’s going to be there.” David sat up straight. “She’s coming with Krystal.”
“Who told you she was going?” David asked, trying to be nonchalant.
“She called Darryl last night after she hooked up a ride with Krystal. It’s like, the whole incoming senior class is going to be there. Give yourself a chance to meet some seniors, maybe the year’ll go a little smoother for you.”
“She called Darryl? At his house?”
“At his house? No, on the Bat Phone, what the hell? . . . David, she’ll be there. Probably the only sophomore that’ll be there, but who knows. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of Turnbull shows up.”
“What time?”
Matthew laughed. “Nick will pick you up. What are you doing today?” There was a long pause. “David, hello?”
David snapped out of his daze. “Yeah . . . um. Nothing.”
“I’ll see you, buddy.”
Matthew hung up and David was alone again. It was nearly eleven thirty in the morning. He pulled some clothes on, and ran his fingers through his hair. He opened the bedroom door, walked down the hallway, and went into the garage to look at his painting. Half the American flag had come to life in its contour colors, but the other half was a va
gue sketch. He sat at the low stool in front of the easel and turned it sideways for a better view. Dipping his brush into the open jar of linseed oil, David fixed his eyes on the flag, but all he could think about was how Julia had called a buffoon like Darryl Knight, on the evening that he himself had braved wind and rain to stand before her and declare his love. She had kicked him out. And then, he thought, she immediately ran to the phone to call Darryl Knight.
She wasn’t interested in art, or intelligence. She was interested in what Darryl Knight had to say. Meaningless concerns. What the team planned to do to beat Sagamore this year at homecoming.
It was as if she’d missed the whole point. How one track–minded those kids were, kids like Daryl, running around with erections, trying to make the world a liquid mass of sameness. How David was at least one voice shouting down the marching band sweeping through town, their stupid goosesteps—the same people who called David a traitor. A communist, and why, how, where’s the reason? Fuck them, David thought, I’m not a communist, they’re the communists trying to scare silence into everybody. You want real communists? Try calling Darryl Knight, and she did, that’s exactly what she did, she called that communist while he had trudged home in the rain, soaking wet, half-dead from cars full of more communists trying to get a rise out of him with their honking and swerving, all so she can get right on the goddamn phone and call that traitor with the touchdown brain and yard-mark pecker, all sweat and jersey—him and his ass-slapping troupe he hangs around with like he’s the king of Egypt. And what’s freedom to those jerks?
David reached across his easel to grab the tube of black paint, but stopped himself. He was planning to use it on the flag. He was excited with anger. Too easy, he thought. He’d made a vow with himself to never paint when full of emotion. His work could not be happy, nor angry, nor jealous. He was interested in objects, and how they are seen. Last year, perhaps, he would have messed around with the flag, as he’d done with the Tony’s Pizzeria mural, but not now.
Staring at the stripes on the flag, his mind reeled back to the beginning of last year, his freshman year. Ms. Merrick’s second-period English class. She had asked everyone if they were afraid of nuclear war. He’d raised his hand, along with Hanna D’Amico, the class president. Ms. Merrick called on Hanna.
“I think nuclear war is scary, cause it only takes like one bomb, and that’s it. So it’s like . . . whoever presses the button first wins the war, you know? And this new guy is totally nuts. What if he presses the button before Reagan?”
The class nodded.
“What if Reagan presses the button first?” David asked. Hanna looked over at him and rolled her eyes.
The boy behind her spoke up: “Then we win the war.”
“And it’s all about winning and losing?” David countered. “What about their children and wives and innocent people? If a bomb drops on us it’ll be terrible, but if it drops on them it’ll be great?”
“Better them than us,” another student chimed in.
“Yeah,” another agreed, “what do you care what happens to those people, they started with us.”
“Their children started with us?” said David.
“No,” Hanna jumped back in, “but if their parents don’t want their children to get blown up, then their parents shouldn’t start with us.”
“Get them before they get us!” someone shouted.
“Oh, that’s great,” said David. “If everybody does that, there won’t be a human being left on earth.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. Since when do you care about a bunch of freedom-hating Nazi communists anyway?” asked Hanna. “You know what they do to their children, don’t you?”
“No, what?”
“They can’t do anything. Right now, if we were over there you’d be taken out and shot to death, right, Ms. Merrick?” Hanna always had a nasty little habit of speaking her mind and then asking the teacher if she was right or not.
“Well . . .” Ms. Merrick said.
“I hear the communists got spies all over the country, and they record everything we say over here,” a student in the back added.
“That is such BS propaganda,” barked David, using a word he’d learned in world history the period prior.
“How do you know?” asked Hanna. “Did you see that movie The Morning After?”
“More propaganda.”
“Yeah, they got spies all over the place, the communists. They want to make everybody like them,” another student said.
“You’re probably one of ’em,” accused the kid sitting in front of Hanna. He made slits of his eyes and glared at David.
“Ms. Merrick, we got a communist in our class, kick him out!” another shouted.
“Get out of America, communist!” a quieter boy in the far end of the classroom yelled.
“Love it or leave it.”
“Love it or leave it, yeah.”
“Communists must die!”
“You’re a goddamn Russian commie, Westwood!”
“All right, all right!” shouted Ms. Merrick, calming the students down. “Let’s get ahold of ourselves.”
* * *
David never forgot that day, because his classmates would never let him forget it. The rest of his ninth grade year, his nickname in English class became “Red,” and it wasn’t long before kids who weren’t in his class caught on. Every so often he’d hear a voice shout, “Communist!” from across the crowded hallway. One day he went to his locker and discovered that his lock had been glued shut and the door was painted red with a yellow hammer and sickle.
After that, he came to class carrying a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Wore a T-shirt that read, No Nukes. He scrawled the words Bash Reagan on the cover of his binder, large enough for little Hanna D’Amico to notice and broadcast it to the rest of the class. David laughed at his new identity: the evil communist, plotting to blow them all up. But it bothered him still. To him it was all a misunderstanding. Yet he knew there was no way for him to turn back now, not after all he’d done to perpetuate the myth.
He could feel himself retreating. He first recognized it when he stopped saying hello to people he knew in the halls. Waited for them to say hello first, which they rarely did. To avoid the lunch room, he dragged a comfortable chair down to the stacks of the library and read everything he could get his hands on. Magazines, almanacs, outdated encyclopedias. Leeches and bloodletting were actual operations—how would future encyclopedias explain David’s generation? Here were whole shelves of information most people forgot. It was as though David were tearing up the floorboards of the world and discovering what lay beneath. Donkeys tethered to stones to make wheat. New York City buildings held together by long rods capped on each end with an iron star. There is a city called Rome on every continent. The rule of thumb was a measure of thickness on a stick with which you were permitted to beat your wife.
Through it all, he began to read The Communist Manifesto, rather than just walk around posing in the hallways with it. Inside it he found ideas that thrilled him, ideas not far off from the religious sermons he sometimes received from a schoolmate of his who was also an outcast, and told him about the great lives people would lead where they’d all be living equally on a paradise earth. Food would be in abundance, and nobody would have more or less than others, and God would be the only leader. The kid always left David with tracts and scriptures to prove his point.
What the kid had said gave him his initial idea for the mural on the side of Tony’s store. But David wasn’t religious. He was only drawn to the kid in the way a dog wanders over to another dog, sniffing, investigating the similar “dogness” of the other. David felt somehow connected to this quiet boy—because he was also being called names, for not celebrating Christmas and for saying he would rather face jail than join the armed forces. They had an odd sort of understanding. They nodded to each other in the hallways, but never dared sit together or be seen speaking to one another for more than a few seconds. It was a
s if they both knew the inherent danger. It was never spoken, but they both seemed to respect the crosses they each had to bear, and neither wanted to make it any worse for the other. Then David painted the mural at Tony’s. He’d painted flames on the tip of the flag. Russians shook hands and played with Americans.
One day, David’s father returned from the mailbox raving in anger. “Come outside and get a good look at what you’ve caused!” David flew out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans. He saw his father in the doorway, shaking a fist, telling him he had a good mind to hit him.
“I should crack you in the fucken head,” were his father’s exact words, which still rang in David’s ears. He had stepped into the sunlight and seen the burn marks in the grass. Someone from school had burned the shape of a hammer and sickle into his front yard. His father had worked all year to get a perfectly green lawn. There was also a letter left in the mailbox:
DIE COMMIE SCUMBAG! YOU PEOPLE HAVE SUCH A PROBLEM WITH OUR FLAG, YOU SHOULD GO BACK TO THE COMMUNIST COUNTRY YOU CAME FROM. RED, COMMIE, COWARD SONS OF BITCHES. I HOPE YOU ARE THE FIRST ONE TO GET THE OVEN WHEN THOSE COMMUNIST FUCKS INVADE US. I HAVE TWO WORDS: GET OUT. GET OUT OF OUR COMMUNITY, GET OUT OF OUR STATE, GET OUT OF OUR COUNTRY AND GO LIVE WITH THE REDS IN RUSSIA. I HOPE YOU DIE, YOU PINKO, COMMIE FUCK. DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!
His father told him he had only one thing to say, and there was no discussion. He told David to act normal or get out of the house. When David tried to argue, his father slammed the door behind him. From then on, David kept all his literature in his vandalized locker, which he’d also learned to admire, until one day even that was gone. Over the weekend janitors had taken a fresh coat of green spray paint and covered the door. But the paint was a different tone, and the red beneath made the locker stand out from the others, so the symbolism remained. He was different, and his locker was different, and all the students knew it, and that was fine with him. At the very least, he didn’t have to read the number to make sure he was at the right one. He could see it clearly from down the hall.
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