Strange medicine in an old green can. The boys gathered the words and intonations of a justice spell. Justice or revenge. No one wanted to admit it was a real plan they cooked up all along. They kept returning to it as Christmas approached, passing the idea between them so each considered its heft and cast. As the prank evolved from abstraction to something more solid, full of hows and whens and what-ifs, Desmond, Turner, and Jaimie stopped including Elwood without realizing it. The prank was against his moral conscience. Hard to picture the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. dosing Governor Orval Faubus with a couple of ounces of lye. And Elwood’s beating at the White House had him scarred all over, not just his legs. It had weeviled deep into his personality. The way his shoulders sank when Spencer appeared, the flinch and shrink. He could only stand so much talk of revenge before the reality grabbed ahold of him.
Then it popped and the boys talked about it no more. “They’d put us in the ground,” Desmond said, when Jaimie sparked up another round of “who do we get.”
“We have to be careful,” Jaimie said.
“I’m going to play some basketball,” Desmond said, and he was out.
Turner sighed. He had to admit that the game had gotten boring. It was nice for a time to picture one of their tormentors puking all over their yummy spread at the Holiday Luncheon, spraying all those peckerwoods with his mess. Shitting his pants, face gone strawberry-red from pain, heaving until what came out wasn’t food but his own dark blood. A pleasant vision, a different kind of medicine. But they weren’t going to do it, and that fact spoiled it. Turner stood, and Jaimie shook his head and joined them for basketball.
Friday, the day of the Holiday Luncheon, the Community Service crew was out on rounds. Harper, Turner, and Elwood had just finished up with the five-and-ten when the supervisor said he had something he had to do. “I’ll be back in a hot minute,” he told them. “Y’all can wait here.”
The van disappeared. Turner and Elwood walked up the scrabbly alley to the street. Harper had left them alone before, when they were working on a board member’s house. Never on Main Street. Even after two months of back-alley exchanges, Elwood was incredulous. “We can walk around?” he asked Turner.
“We don’t got to make a commotion, but yeah,” Turner said, pretending it had happened before plenty of times.
Sightings of Nickel students on Main Street were not uncommon. The students shuffled off the gray school buses in their state-issued denim for community service—real community service, not the special services of Turner and Elwood’s assignments—cleaning up rubbish in the park after July Fourth fireworks or the Founders Day parade. Once a season the choir visited the Baptist church to show off their beautiful voices as Director Hardee’s secretaries handed out envelopes for donations. A boy might be found in the company of a supervisor darting into town for business. Two unescorted colored boys was a sight, however. It was lunch hour. The white people of Eleanor tried to account for them. The boys didn’t look shifty or scared. Their supervisor was probably inside the hardware store—Mr. Bontemps hated niggers and had made them wait outside. The white folks walked on. It wasn’t their business.
Christmas toys—windup robots and air guns and painted trains—filled the front window of the five-and-ten. The boys knew to hide their enthusiasm over little-kid things that still had an allure. They walked quickly past the bank. It seemed like a place where board members might appear, or at least white men with power who signed official documents, like reform school orders.
“It’s weird being out here,” Elwood said.
“It’s okay,” Turner said.
“No one watching,” Elwood said.
The sidewalk was empty, a break in the noon traffic. Turner looked around and smiled. He knew what Elwood was thinking. “Most of them talk about running into the swamp,” Turner said. “Wash their scent off so the dogs can’t get them, then hide in there until the coast is clear and hitch somewhere. West or north. That’s how they get you, though, because that’s where everybody runs to. And you can’t wash no scent off, that’s only in movies.”
“How would you do it?”
Turner had turned it over in his head many times but had never shared it with anyone. “You head out here into the free world, not the swamp. Snatch clothes from a clothesline. Head south, not north, because they ain’t expecting it. Those empty houses we pass on our deliveries? Mr. Tolliver’s house—he’s always down at the capital for business. His house is empty. You raid them for supplies and then put as many miles between you and the dogs as you can, tire them out. The trick is not doing what they know you going to do.” Then he remembered the most important part. “And don’t take no one with you. Not one of those dummies. They’ll take you down with them.”
They had ambled to the front of the pharmacy. Behind the window, a blond woman crouched over a carriage and spooned ice cream into her baby’s mouth. The little boy was a mess, smeared with chocolate and bawling with happiness.
“You got any money?” Turner said.
“More than you got,” Elwood said.
No money at all. They laughed because they knew the drugstore didn’t serve colored patrons, and sometimes laughter knocked out a few bricks from the barricade of segregation, so tall and so wide. And they laughed because ice cream was the last thing they wanted.
Elwood’s aversion was understandable; the visit to the Ice Cream Factory had left its marks. Turner hated the stuff on account of his aunt’s boyfriend, who moved in with them when Turner was eleven years old. Mavis was his mother’s sister and his only family. The state of Florida didn’t know about her, thus the blank space on their forms where her name should have been written, but he had lived with her for a time. His father, Clarence, was a bit of a “rambler,” not that he had to be told because he had the same affliction. Turner remembered him as two big brown hands and a raspy chuckle. When he heard autumn leaves scuttling in the wind, he remembered that chuckle. The same way Nickel boys remembered White House visits when they heard the smart snap of leather, decades later.
Turner last saw his father when he was three years old. After that, the man was the wind. His mother, Dorothy, hung around longer, long enough for her to choke on her own vomit. She had that taste—rotgut, the rougher the better. The stuff she drank the night she died left her twisted and blue and cold on the front-room sofa. He knew where she was now—six feet under in St. Sebastian Cemetery—which was one thing he had on his upstanding friend Elwood. Elwood’s mother and father had lit out West and didn’t even send a postcard. What kind of mother leaves her kid in the middle of the night? One that doesn’t give a shit. He made a note to save that as a low blow if he and Elwood ever got into a real fight. Turner knew his mother loved him. She just loved liquor more.
His aunt Mavis took him in and made sure Turner had nice clothes for school and three meals. The last Saturday of every month she wore her good red dress and sprayed perfume into her neck and went out with her girlfriends, but apart from that her life was the hospital, where she worked as a nurse, and Turner. No one had ever called her pretty. She had tiny black eyes, an afterthought for a chin, and when Ishmael started courting her, she fell quick. He called her pretty and a lot of other things she’d never heard before. Ishmael was a maintenance man at the Houston airport and when he came by with flowers they almost hid the industrial odor that permeated his skin no matter how much he washed.
Ishmael was a man of secret menace who stored up violence like a battery; Turner learned to recognize these men from then on. How Mavis brightened at the thought of him, singing ditties from the movie musicals she loved, locking herself in the hall bathroom with a hot comb while the transistor crackled. In and out of tune. It never occurred to Turner why she wore sunglasses two weeks straight that one time, why she stayed in her room some mornings and didn’t emerge until past noon, limping with soft moans.
The day afte
r Turner put himself between Mavis and Ishmael’s fists, Ishmael took him out for ice cream. A. J. Smith’s, over on Market Street. “Bring this young man the biggest sundae you got.” Every bite like a sock in the mouth. He ate every miserable spoonful and ever since it struck him that adults are always trying to buy off children to make them forget their bad actions. Had the flavor of that fact in his mouth when he ran from his aunt’s house that last time.
Nickel served the students vanilla ice cream once a month, and it made them so squealingly happy, like a bunch of dumb piglets in a sty, that Turner wanted to knock everyone flat. Third Wednesday of the month, Turner and Elwood carried most of the north campus’s ice-cream allotment through the back door of the Eleanor pharmacy. Turner felt he was performing a service for his fellow students, sparing them.
The blond lady pushed the carriage toward the door and Elwood held the door open for her. She didn’t say a word.
Harper pulled up and waved them to the front seat. “You boys up to no good?”
“Yes, sir,” Turner said. He whispered to Elwood, “Don’t go stealing my plan, now, El. That shit’s pure gold.” They got in the van.
When they drove past the administration building toward the colored campus, the students stood in worried huddles on the green. Harper slowed and called over one of the white boys. “What’s happening?”
“They took Mr. Earl to the hospital. Something’s wrong with him.”
Harper parked the van by the warehouse and ran to the hospital. Elwood and Turner hustled to Cleveland. Elwood scanning every which way like a squirrel and Turner trying to maintain a front, which made him move like a space robot. They needed a report. Despite the segregated campuses, the black boys and white boys passed on news for safety’s sake. Sometimes Nickel was like being back home, where the older brother or sister that you hated warned you about a parent’s black mood or daylong drinking jag so you could make preparations.
They found Desmond outside the colored dining hall. Turner looked inside. The staff table was still set in the aftermath. Half set—the overturned chairs pointed to a fuss, and the smear of blood showed where they’d dragged out Earl.
“I don’t think it was medicine,” Desmond said. His deep voice added a baleful tone.
Turner punched him in the shoulder. “You’re going to get us killed!”
“It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!” Desmond said. He looked over Turner’s shoulder toward the White House.
Elwood’s hand covered his mouth. There was a half of a work-shoe footprint in the blood. He snapped to and turned downhill. To see if they were coming for them. “Where’s Jaimie?”
“That nigger,” Desmond said.
They strategized on the dining-hall steps. Turner suggested that they hang out and gather information on Earl’s condition from the other students. He didn’t say he wanted to stay there because it was a straight shot to the road bordering the east side of campus. If Spencer came up with a posse, he’d be out lickety-split. Can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.
Jaimie showed up an hour later, looking rumpled and a bit dazed, like he’d just had a turn on a Tilt-A-Whirl. He completed the story they’d got from the other boys. The Holiday Luncheon commenced as it always did. The special tablecloth that only got aired out once a year covered the staff table, the nice dishes were wiped of dust. The supervisors took their places and drank beer, sharing rowdy stories and off-color speculation about the bustier secretaries and teachers. It was loud and they enjoyed themselves. A few minutes into the meal, Earl bolted up and grabbed his stomach. They thought he was choking. Then he commenced to disperse his insides in a spray. When the blood appeared they carried him down the hill to the hospital.
Jaimie told them that he waited among the boys outside the ward until the ambulance took him away.
“You’re crazy,” Elwood said.
“I didn’t do it,” Jaimie said. His face was blank. “I was playing football. Everybody saw me.”
“The can is gone from my locker,” Desmond said.
“I told you I didn’t take it,” Jaimie said. “Maybe someone robbed your shit and they did it.” He knocked Desmond’s shoulder. “You said it was horse medicine!”
“That’s what he told me,” Desmond said. “You saw it—it had a horse on it.”
“Could have been a goat,” Turner said.
“Maybe it was horse poison,” Elwood said.
“Or goat poison,” Turner added.
“They ain’t rats, dummy,” Desmond said. “You shoot horses, not poison them.”
“He’s lucky he ain’t dead then,” Jaimie said. Elwood and Desmond continued to press him, but his version did not change.
It was hard to miss the smile that tugged at Jaimie’s mouth from time to time. Turner wasn’t angry that Jaimie lied to their faces. He admired liars who kept on lying even though their lies were obvious, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Another proof of one’s powerlessness before other people. Jaimie wasn’t going to admit it, so Turner just watched the boys and the activity down the hill.
Earl didn’t die. He didn’t come back to work, either. Doctor’s orders. They’d hear about that in the coming days. And a few weeks after that, they’d discover that Earl’s replacement, a tall man named Hennepin, was made of meaner stuff, and he’d subject many a boy to his cruel whims. But they made it through that first evening without being strung up, and when word came that Dr. Cooke blamed Earl’s fit on his constitution—he had a family history, it seemed—Turner stopped strategizing his escape.
Just before lights-out, he and Elwood were hanging out by the big oak in front of the dormitory. The campus had quieted. Turner wanted a cigarette, but his pack was back in the warehouse loft. He whistled instead, that Elvis song Harper kept singing on their runs.
The night bugs started up in a wave. “Earl,” Turner said. “That’s some shit.”
“Wish I’d been there to see it, though,” Elwood said.
“Ha.”
“I wish it had been Spencer,” Elwood said. “That would have been nice.” His palm went to the back of his thigh, to the spot he rubbed when he remembered.
They heard a whoop. Down the hill, the supervisors had turned on the Christmas lights and the boys got a look at the results of all the hard work of the last few weeks. Green, red, and white bulbs sketched a route of holiday cheer along the trees and the south-campus buildings. Far off in the dark, the big Santa at the entrance glowed from the inside with a demonic fire.
“Those are some lights,” Turner said.
Past the White House, blinking lights outlined the old water tower—one of the white kids had fallen from the ladder while nailing them up and had broken his collarbone. The lights floated on the X’s of the wooden struts, circled the huge tank, sketched the triangular peak. Like a spaceship taking off. It reminded Turner of something, then it came to him—that amusement park, Fun Town, from the TV commercials. That dumb, happy music, the bumper cars and the roller coaster, and the Atomic Rocket. The other boys talked about the place from time to time, they’d go there when they were out in the free world again. Turner thought that was stupid. They didn’t let colored people in those nice places. But there it was before him, pointed at the stars, decked in a hundred flickering lights, waiting for takeoff: a rocket. Launched in darkness toward another dark planet they couldn’t see.
“It looks nice,” Turner said.
“We did a good job,” Elwood said.
PART
Three
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Elwood?”
He grunted in response from the living room, where the window kept a sliver of Broadway below: Sammy’s Shoe Repair, the closed-down travel agency, and the median that ran up the avenue. The angle of his vision made a trapezoid, his personal snow globe of the city. It was a good place to smoke and he’
d found a way to perch on the sill that didn’t aggravate his back.
“I’m going out for a bag of ice, I can’t take it anymore,” Denise said, and locked the front door behind her. He had given her a set of keys last week.
He didn’t mind the heat. This city knew how to concoct a miserable summer, sure, but it had nothing on the South on those hot days. The way New Yorkers complained about summer heat, on the subway, in the bodega, made him snicker ever since he got here. There was a garbage strike then, too, his first day in the city, but it had been February. It didn’t smell as bad. This time whenever he left the vestibule downstairs, the stench was a thicket—he wanted a machete to hack through it. It was only the second day of the strike.
The wildcat strike of ’68: an introduction to the city so wretched that he had to interpret it as a hazing. Steel trash cans mobbed the pavement—overflowing and untouched for days—and the newer garbage in bundled bags and cardboard boxes huddled against them. He avoided public transportation in a new place until he got the lay of it and he’d never been on a subway before. He walked all the way uptown from the Port Authority. Walking in a straight line was impossible. He weaved around the mounds of refuse. When he got to the Statler, the SRO on Ninety-Ninth Street, the residents had kicked open a path to the front door between two monstrous piles of garbage. Rats zipped back and forth. If you wanted to break into one of the second-floor rooms, all you had to do was scale the trash.
The manager gave him a key to a place in the back, four flights up. Hot plate, with a bathroom down the hall. One of the guys he worked with in Baltimore told him about the flophouse and painted a terrible picture. It wasn’t as bad as the guy made it out. He’d stayed in worse places. After a couple of days, he bought cleanser at the A&P and took it on himself to clean the toilet and shower. No one else bothered—that kind of joint. He’d scrubbed dirty johns plenty of times, plenty of places.
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