by Z. Z. Packer
I look around for someone to save me from this man, but everyone is cheering and clapping for the next speaker. I decide that my only recourse is to shut the man up with the truth. Maybe then he’ll leave me alone. “Don’t get me wrong. I love my Black Nation,” I say, adding the mandatory chest thump, “but I’m just here because my father made me come.”
The fezzed man screws up his face in the sunlight, features bunched in confusion. He puts his hand to his ear like he’s hard of hearing.
“My father!” I yell. “My father made me come!”
People twenty deep turn around to shoot me annoyed looks. One man looks like he wants to beat the crap out me, but then looks apologetic. I in turn duck my head in apology and murmur, “Sorry.”
“Made you come? Made you? This, my brother,” he nearly yells, “is a day of atonement! You got to cut your father a little slack for caring for your sorry self!”
Everyone’s eyes are on me again, but I’ll be damned if this man who doesn’t even know me sides with Ray Bivens Jr. “I thought the whole point of all this was to take responsibility. Put an end to asking for slack. If you knew my father you’d know that his whole damn life is as slack as a pantsuit from JCPenney!”
“Hold up, hold up, hold up,” a voice says. The voice comes from a man with a bullet-smooth head, the man who earlier looked as if he wanted to stomp my face into the ground. Now that he’s turned toward me, the pistils and stamens of his monstrous Hawaiian flower-print shirt seem to stare at me, and suddenly his face is so close I can smell the mint of his breath.
“You need to learn that responsibility is a two-way street!” The Hawaiian-shirt guy points to my chest. “You have to take responsibility and reach out to him.”
Now many, many people have turned to look at us, and though I try not to look guilty, people know the Hawaiian-shirted guy is talking to somebody, somebody who caused a disturbance. The Phalanx of Islam is on its way, moving in the form of crisp, gray-suited men wearing stern looks and prison muscles. The Hawaiian-shirted guy sees them and waves me away with his hand as though I’m not worth his time. Then, suddenly—despite the Fruit of Islam weaving through the crowd toward us—he decides to have another go at it. “Let me ask you a question, my brother. Why are you here? You don’t seem to want to atone—not with your pops, not with anybody.”
Those around me have formed a sideshow of which I seem to be the villain, and they look at me expectantly. The Hawaiian-shirted man folds his arms across his chest and jerks his chin up, daring me to answer him.
“Atoning for one’s wrongs is different from apologizing,” I begin. “One involves words, the other, actions.” I don’t want to dignify all this attention with a further response; don’t want the four men who are now brisk-walking straight toward me to hurt me; don’t want to say anything now that the air around me is silent, listening, now that the sun in my eyes is so hot I feel like crying. I continue, delivering a hurried, jibbering philippic on the nuances between atonement and apology, repentance and remorse. What I’m saying is right and true. Good and important. But I can feel myself getting flustered, can feel the debate judge mouthing Time’s up, see the disbelief and disappointment in the men’s faces, nearly twenty in all, and more turn around to see what the disturbance is about. An Oxford-shirted security guard grabs me by the arm.
“What,” he says, “seems to be the problem, son?”
“Look,” I say finally to him and anyone else who’ll listen, “I’m not here to atone. I’m here to sell birds.”
I finally spot my father, the cages balanced on his shoulders, when the marchless march is pretty much finished. The sky is moving toward dusk, and though there are still speakers on the podium, you’d stick around to listen only if they were your relatives or something. My father and I get pushed along with other people trying to leave.
I don’t bother telling him how security clamped me on the shoulder and sat me down on the curb like a five-year-old and gave me a talking-to, reminding me of the point of the March. I don’t tell him how they fed me warm flatbread and hard honey in a hot plastic tent that served as some sort of headquarters, or how they gave me three bean pies, some pamphlets, and a Koran. I know he can tell how pissed off I am. Anyone can.
And he can see I haven’t sold any birds, and I see he hasn’t either. I wonder if word got around to his section about how security took me out of the crowd for “safety purposes,” but apparently he doesn’t give a shit. Ray Bivens Jr. grabs a passing man by the arm. The man’s T-shirt reads: “Volunteer—Washington D.C.”
“Where’s a good bar?” my father asks. “That’s cheap?”
The man raises his eyebrows and says, “Brotherman, we’re trying to keep away from all that poison. At least for one day.” His voice is smooth and kind, that of a guy from the streets who became a counselor, determined to give back to the community. He smiles. “You think you can make it for one day without the sauce, my brother?”
THE BAR we end up in is called The Haven, and it’s nowhere near where we left the car. Before we left the March, I asked Ray Bivens Jr. how he felt knowing that he’d come nearly seven hundred miles and hadn’t sold a single bird. He didn’t speak to me on the Metro ride to the bar, not even when the birds started embarrassing us on the subway.
The bartender looks at the birds and shakes his head as if his patrons never cease to amuse him.
Even though he’s sitting in the place he loves most, Ray Bivens Jr. still seems mad at me. So do the birds. None of them are speaking, just making noises in their throats as though they’re plotting something. I ask the bartender if the birds are safe outside; if someone will steal them.
“Not if it’s something that needs feeding,” the bartender says.
“Speaking of feeding,” my father says, “I’m going to get some Funyuns. Want any?” He says this more to the bartender than to me, but I shake my head though all I’ve eaten are the bean pies and honey. The bartender spray-guns a 7 Up in a glass for me without my even asking, then resumes conversation with the trio of men at the end of the counter. One man has a goiter. One has processed waves that look like cake frosting. While those two seem to be smiling and arguing at the same time, the third man says nothing, smoking his cigarette as though it’s part of his search for enlightenment.
The smoker ashes his cigarette with a pert tap. “You been at the March, youngblood?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
They all laugh, but no one tells me why.
The bartender towels down some beer glasses. “Anybody here go?” When nobody says anything, he says to me, with a knowing wink, “These some shiftless niggers up in here!”
There’s general grumbling, and to make them feel less bad about missing the March I say, “I didn’t get all pumped up by the speeches, but in a way I was glad I was there. I think I felt more relieved than anything else.”
“Relieved? What about?” the smoker asks, his voice wise and deep, even though he’s just asking a question.
I try to think. “I don’t know. I’m the only black kid in my class. Like a fucking mascot or something,” I say, surprised that I said the f-word out loud, but shaking my head as though I said words like that every day. “I just get tired of it. You skip it for a day and it feels like a vacation. That’s why I was glad.”
There’s a round of nodding. Not sympathy, just acknowledgment.
“Man,” the guy with the goiter says, “I’m happy to hear that. You got the luxury of feeling tired. Back in the day, before you were born, couldn’t that type of shit happen.”
He seems to be saying less than he means, and looks at me, his eyes piercing, his goiter looking like he’s swallowed a lightbulb. “We the ones fought for you to be in school with the white folks.” He looks behind him, as if checking if any white people are around, though that’s about as likely as Ray Bivens Jr. going sober for good. He lowers his voice so that he almost sounds kind. “We sent you to go spy on them. See how the hell those white
folks make all that money! Now you talking ’bout a vacation!”
They all laugh like it’s some sort of secret code that got broken.
“You’ll be all right, youngblood,” says the smoker. “You’ll be all right.”
Just as I begin to realize that they’re humoring me, Ray Bivens Jr. comes blustering in through the door like he lives there. He flashes a wad of money. “Luck,” he says smiling, “is sometimes lucky.”
The trio at the bar high-five one another and laugh in anticipation of free drinks.
“Who,” I say, “did you take that from?”
“Take?” He chucks his thumb toward me as if to say, Get a load of this guy. He counts out the bills so fast that he can’t actually be counting them. “Sold a bird. Rich white dude. Convenient store. I said, ‘I got birds.’ He said, ‘I got money.’ Six hundred bones.”
I’m upset, though I don’t know why. Six hundred bucks. Who in this neighborhood even has six hundred bucks? I lean toward him and whisper, “I bailed you out of jail, remember.”
“Don’t worry,” he says, “I’ll buy you a drink.”
THREE HOURS pass, and my father has beaten all the regulars trying to win money from him at pinochle when a woman appears out of nowhere. Her skin is the color of good scotch. She sits between me and my father, twirls around on her barstool once, and points a red-enameled finger toward the goiter man changing songs on the jukebox. “Play ’Love the One You’re With.’ Isley Brothers.”
“I was going to,” says the Goiter, “just for you.”
She spins around on the barstool again so that she’s facing the bottles lined up on display. “Farrah,” she says and extends a tiny limp hand in my direction. “Farrah Falana.”
“That’s not,” I say, “your real name.”
“Yes it is,” she says dreamily. “Farrah Falana. I was named after that show.”
Now I see that she’s going on fifty. She smiles at me with her mouth closed, and for a moment she looks like a beautiful frog.
My father takes a long, admiring look at her seated behind. “Farrah and Ray,” my father says. “I like how that sounds.” For a moment, he looks like Billy Dee Williams. The smile is the same, that same slick look.
“I like how it sounds, too,” Farrah says. She actually slides on her barstool and leans toward him, leans so close it looks as if she might kiss him.
“Farrah and Ray,” I say. “That sounds like a Vegas act.”
“It does!” she squeals.
MY FATHER and Farrah get drunk while I play an electronic trivia game with the Goiter. He knows more than I gave him credit for, but he’s losing to me because he bets all his bonus points whenever he gets a chance. The Goiter and I are on our tenth game when Ray Bivens Jr. taps me on the shoulder. I look over to see him standing very straight and tall, trying not to look drunk.
“You don’t love me,” he says sloppily. “You don’t understand me.”
“You don’t understand you,” I say.
Farrah is still at the bar, and though she’s not saying anything, her face goes through a series of exaggerated expressions as if it were she responding to someone’s questions. I plunk three quarters in the game machine. “Your go,” I say to the Goiter.
“Does anybody understand themselves?” he says to me softly, and for a second he looks perfectly lucid. Then he says it louder, for the benefit of the whole bar, with a gravity only the drunk can muster. “Does anybody, I say, understand themselves?”
The men at the bar look at him and decide it’s one of their many jokes, and laugh, though my father is staring straight at me, straight through me as though I were nothing but a clear glass of whiskey into which he could see the past and future.
I grip my father’s elbow and try to speak with him one on one. “I’m sorry about what I said at the March.”
“No you ain’t.”
“Yes,” I say, “I am. But you’ve got to tell me how to understand you.” I feel silly saying it, but he’s drunk, and so is everybody else but me.
He lurches back then leans in forward again. “Tell you? I can’t tell you.” He drums each word out on the counter, “That’s. Not. What. It’s. Α -bout. I can tell you about Paris, but you won’t know ’less you been there. You simply under-stand. Or you don’t.” He raises an eyebrow in clairvoyant drunkenness before continuing. “You either take me, or you don’t.” He throws his hands up, smiling as though he’s finally solved some grand equation in a few simple steps.
“Please,” I say, giving up on him. I beckon the Goiter for another game of electronic trivia, but he shakes his head and smiles solemnly, a smile that says he’s more weary for me than for himself.
“Let me tell you something,” Ray Bivens Jr. says, practically spitting in my face, “Lupita understands me. That woman,” he says, suddenly sounding drunk again, “understands. She’s It.”
Farrah, suddenly sober, smacks him on the shoulder and says, “What about me? What the fuck about me?”
ANOTHER HOUR later he says, all cool, “Gimme the keys. Farrah and I are going for a ride.”
I’ve had many 7 Ups and I’ve twice asked my father if we could go, told him that we either had to find a motel outside the city or plan on driving back soon. But now he’s asking for the keys at nearly three a.m., the car all the way over in Arlington, and even the Metro has stopped running.
“Sir,” I say. “We need to drive back.”
“I said, Spurgeon, dear son, that Farrah and I are going for a ride. Now give me the keys, dear son.”
A ride means they’re going to her place, wherever that is. Him going to her place means I have to find my own place to stay. Giving him the keys not only means he’ll be driving illegally, which I no longer care about, but that the car will end up on the other side of the country, stripped for parts.
“No,” I say. “It’s Mama’s car.”
“Mama’s car,” he mimics.
“Sir.”
“Maaaamaaa’s caaaaar!”
I leave the bar. I’m walking for a good minute before I hear him coming after me. I speed up but don’t run. I don’t even know how I’m going to get back to the car, but I pick a direction and walk purposefully. I hear the click click click of what are surely Farrah’s heels, hear her voice screaming something that doesn’t make sense, hear his footfalls close in on me, but all I see are the streetlights glowing amber, and the puffs of smoke my breath makes in the October air. All I feel is that someone has spun me around as if for inspection, and that’s when I see his face—handsome, hard-edged, not the least bit sloppy from liquor.
Sure. He’s hit me before, but this is hard. Not the back of the hand, not with a belt, but punching. A punch meant for my face, but lands on my shoulder, like he’s congratulating me, then another hit, this one all knuckles, and my jaw pops open, automatically, like the trunk of a car. I try to close my mouth, try to call time out, but he’s ramming into me, not with his fists, but with his head. I try to pry him from where his head butts, inside my stomach, right under my windpipe, but he stays that way, leaning into me, tucked as if fighting against a strong wind, both of us wobbling together like lovers. Finally, I push him away, and wipe what feels like yogurt running from my nose into the raw cut of my lip. I start to lick my lips, thinking that it’s all over, when he rushes straight at me and rams me into something that topples over with a toyish metal clank. Sheaves of weekly newspapers fan the ground like spilled cards from a deck. I kick him anywhere my foot will land, shouting at him, so strangely mad that I’m happy, until I finally kick at air, hard, and trip myself. I don’t know how long I’m down, how long my eyes are closed, but he’s now holding me like a rag doll. “What the hell are you talking about?” he says as if to shake the answer out of me. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I only now realize what I’ve been screaming the whole time. “Wind-o!” I yell at him. “You and your goddamn ‘wind-o’! There was never any ‘wind-o’! And you don’t know shit about bi
rds! Arriba! Arriba!” I say mockingly.
When he grabs my collar, almost lifting me from the ground, I feel as though I’m floating upward, then I feel some part of me drowning. I remember something, something I know will kill my father. My father dodged the draft. They weren’t going to get this nigger, was his view of Vietnam. It was the one thing I’d respected him for, and yet somehow I said it, “You didn’t know fucking Huey P. Newton. You never even went to Vietnam!”
That does it. I had turned into something ugly, and of all the millions of words I’ve ever spoken to him in all my life, this is the one that blows him to pieces.
“Vietnam?” he says, once, as if making sure I’d said the word.
I’m quiet. He says the word again, “Vietnam,” and his eyes somehow look sightless.
I try to pull him back, begging in the only way you can beg without words. I go to put my hand on his shoulder, but a torrent of people, fresh from the March, it seems, has been loosed from a nearby restaurant. They slap one another’s backs, smelling of Brut and Old Spice, musk-scented African oils and sweat. I go to put my hand on his shoulder, but already my father has gone.
RAY BIVENS JR. left with the car and Farrah left with someone else. The birds are gone. My blazer is gone. After I have a scotch, the bartender says, “Look. I can float you the drinks, but who’s going to pay for that, youngblood?” He points to one of the bar’s smashed windowpanes.
After I pay him, I have no money left for a cab or a bus. The bridge over the Potomac isn’t meant for pedestrians, and it takes me half an hour to walk across it. For a long time I’m on New Hampshire Avenue, then for a long time I’m on Georgia. I ask for directions to the train station and someone finally gives them to me.
I wonder if he’s right about Lupita. When she sat on the porch and held her head, it seemed she felt more sorry for him than she did for herself; not pity, but sympathy.