He frowned and threw a wild punch. His hand connected with the side of my cheek and I felt blood rise in my skin. His eyes looked scared – of me or of what he’d done to me, I didn’t know which. I backed away and he slid off to the side. Charles moved into his path, started toward him.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Leave him alone.’ I put a hand to my cheek and brought blood away from the split skin. ‘Why’d you do that?’ I asked him but once he’d cleared Charles he ran toward the house. By the time the front door slammed, Charles had climbed into the driver’s seat.
I climbed in beside him. ‘Don’t bleed on the upholstery,’ he said.
We went out the same way we’d come in, the sun shining through the leaves and glimmering on the wet pavement. The skin under my right eye was swelling and my head pounded. The punch hadn’t been enough to make my head ache. But Terrence’s words had. I tried to get my mind around them. He looked like Belinda but I saw nothing of myself in him. The idea that he was my child seemed like a joke or a trick. I was gone, he said. Out of it. Out of what? Out of everything and he didn’t want me in. I understood his anger. But I couldn’t see him as my child. It seemed too much and my head hurt to think about it.
Charles drove with his eyes straight ahead on the road. ‘So you going to tell me?’
I said, ‘What’s to tell?’
‘What happened between you and Belinda that got her family so pissed off at you?’
FIVE
The first rock went through the Mabrys’ window three weeks before they moved in. My friend Christopher threw it. I handed it to him. As the window shattered I felt a release as though the world’s tension had been locked inside the frozen pane and the breaking allowed me to breathe. It was the summer before our senior year in high school and Christopher had taken to sneaking out at one in the morning and breaking into cars and houses if he knew that the owners were away. Some nights I snuck out with him but I stood on the sidewalk while he rifled an automobile console for change and cassette tapes or I hid in the shadows while he broke into the darkness of an empty house. I was a coward then and at heart I always will be.
As soon as the Mabrys bought the house, word had spread in the neighborhood that a black family was coming and Christopher and I started our petty vandalisms. It wasn’t just that the Mabrys were black. It was that they were from Milwaukee and new in a neighborhood where homes had generally passed from one generation to the next for a hundred years or more. The night after we learned that they’d bought the place, Christopher and I blew up their mailbox with M-80s. We’d heard that four of them equaled a stick of dynamite but that seemed a bit much so Christopher taped two together and I lit the fuse.
On the day that the Mabrys moved in we stood across the street with rocks in our hands. But we didn’t throw them. Belinda climbed out of the car first and looked across at us. The rock fell from Christopher’s hand. I gripped mine tighter.
‘Oooeee,’ Christopher whispered. ‘I’m going to nail that girl.’
We crossed the street as Belinda’s parents and her brother Bobby got out.
Christopher went straight to Mr Mabry and shook his hand. ‘Welcome to the neighborhood,’ he said.
I stood in front of Belinda and made the only sound I could bring to my tongue. ‘Hi.’
That was the first time I saw the little tight-lipped smile that rose on one side of her mouth and told me this girl owned the world and everything in it. Twenty-five years later I still saw that smile in my dreams. She said, ‘You’ve got a rock in your hand.’
I looked at my hand, surprised to see the rock there. I held it to her. ‘You want it?’
Her smile broke into a full grin. ‘No, I don’t want your rock.’ She turned and walked to the house.
Her father, who’d moved his family south when Allstate Insurance transferred him, watched Christopher and me with a mix of confusion and appreciation as we carried suitcases from the back of the station wagon to his family’s front porch. His wife caught his eye once or twice with a look that said, See, it’s going to be all right. They’d replaced the broken windows before moving in but they still needed a new mailbox and the spray paint on the driveway wouldn’t come off until they sandblasted it.
Christopher started working on Belinda right off. He all but stood under her window singing love songs with a steel guitar. He’d hang out on her front porch flirting with her in the morning and go back for more after dinner. In the middle of the day he’d find me and tell me again, ‘I’m going to nail that girl,’ though when I asked about his progress he had none to report. He tried to convince her to sneak out with him in the middle of the night but she made excuses, mostly involving her father who may have been an insurance man but was big enough to break her neck if she ever tried something like that and had told her so. Now and then I would go with Christopher and stand on the porch with him and Belinda. She would look at me and laugh and say, ‘When’re you going to bring me another rock?’
One night early in August she agreed to sneak out to meet Christopher. That afternoon I went with him to Walgreens to buy a box of Trojans.
‘You even kissed her yet?’ I asked outside the store.
He looked at me like the jerk I was. ‘I’m not interested in kissing,’ he said.
‘What makes you think she’s interested in even doing that?’
‘Why would she sneak out with me if she isn’t?’
He had a point but I quietly decided I would sneak out that night too.
A family two doors up from the Mabrys had a screened-in poolside cabana that they used for barbeque parties on evenings when the mosquitoes were bad. Inside were two thickly cushioned reclining deck chairs that could be lowered, pushed together and made into a bed. Christopher decided that was where he would take Belinda, and I slipped in with him when the sun set and helped him fix the chairs and watched him put the condoms in a cabinet that the family used for candles and bug spray.
I said good luck and goodnight and I ran home through the backyards. My feet and legs never had felt so light and strong and never have since. The moon was half full and rising, the sky was clear, the heat of the day was gone and the grass had a smell like urgency. I felt happy. I didn’t know why but I did, as if I knew in my bones and muscles that something was about to happen that would change my life forever.
A little after midnight I returned to the cabana and hid in the shadows of a camphor tree which was the kind of place where I seemed to spend most of my time when I snuck out at night with Christopher. In my hand I held a rock the size of a split brick.
At one o’clock I heard voices. Christopher and Belinda were coming, holding hands, talking in whispers though no one but me was awake to hear. Christopher did most of the talking and Belinda laughed a pitch higher than I’d heard her laugh before. She was nervous, excited.
They went into the cabana and Christopher removed a candle from the cabinet and lit it. He stood and kissed Belinda. It was a kids’ kiss, maybe Belinda’s first, nervous and awkward, but then it became something else as if they were relearning an old memory. Standing in the cabana Belinda opened her mouth and seemed to give herself to him.
Christopher’s hand reached to the bottom of her T-shirt and lifted it up her back and over her head. She removed her bra for him and he kissed her again now on the breasts and she ran her fingers through his hair and raised her face to the top of the cabana. From the shadows I saw the tight-lipped smile that rose on one side of her mouth and it made her look like she had power over all that happened in the night.
Christopher’s hands descended to her shorts, caressing, and worked on the front button. Belinda put her own hands on his and pushed them away gently. For a minute he returned to her breasts but then tried the shorts again. She backed away from him and shook her head no. He laughed a quiet, uncertain laugh and stepped after her, pulling her to him, kissing her on the lips and neck. She stood with him until he attempted the shorts again, and she pushed him away and reached to the floo
r for her bra.
Before she could stand he was on top of her. She struggled and made sounds like a hurt animal and he finally got the shorts button and pulled the shorts off over her legs. He held her down and struggled with his own pants until he had them at his knees and he was ready. But by that time I was coming in behind him through the screen door, stepping quietly, easing the door closed against the latch.
Christopher whispered to Belinda, ‘It’ll be all right,’ and I lifted the rock and brought it down on the back of his head.
He hung in the air above Belinda the way a cut tree does before gravity does its work, and he fell face forward on to the cabana floor. Belinda lay in the soft light of the candle and the half moon shining through the branches of the camphor tree, and she looked at me like I was the strangest, most unexpected creature she’d ever seen. So I showed her what I’d used to knock out Christopher and I said, ‘I brought you another rock.’
Christopher never knew what had hit him or if he did he never said. But I took his spot on the Mabrys’ front porch and the August days passed in a sweep of heat and haze. Mr Mabry didn’t take to me the way he’d taken to Christopher, though. Maybe Christopher had fooled him. Or maybe Mr Mabry saw that when I was with Belinda I meant it, and if a fast-talking kid like Christopher was worth keeping an eye on, a kid who was in love was dangerous. Two weeks after I knocked out Christopher I kissed Belinda for the first time under the humming porch light in front of her house and the next day when I knocked on her door her father answered and said she wasn’t available and wouldn’t be, so I could stop coming around and bothering her.
We met secretly. She would walk out with Bobby to a park and while Bobby shot baskets or wandered by himself we would disappear into the shadows of a picnic shelter. The Friday before school started we met alone at the water processing plant a half mile from her house and she gave herself to me in the rain. I didn’t ask her to. She offered herself and I took her.
The first day of school and every day after, Bobby found trouble. He was skinny and black and the other boys sensed he was gay even if he didn’t know it yet and they beat the hell out of him. One afternoon in September the janitor found him in a classroom two hours after school ended and he said he was hiding but they accused him of breaking in and stealing a teacher’s money from her desk and they suspended him for two weeks.
Christopher had continued his night-time outings and had mostly stopped coming to school and Belinda told me that during the suspension Bobby had started hanging out with him and a couple of his friends.
When I found Christopher I shoved him and said, ‘What are you doing? Bobby’s a loser. Don’t mess with him.’
Christopher laughed and shoved back. ‘Who says I’m messing with him? He’s a good kid. I like having him around.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said.
He gave me a grin that told me something was up but said, ‘He’s OK. What do you care if I hang around with him? You’re busy with Belinda.’
That was true. We’d found a spot in some trees between the water purification plant and the railroad tracks, a clearing where someone had left a sleeping bag and empty beer cans. We cleaned the clearing and spent our afternoons there while Bobby was getting beaten up or breaking into classrooms, and afterward I walked Belinda home along the tracks.
‘Leave him alone,’ I said to Christopher. ‘He’s got enough trouble without you.’
He flipped his fuck-you finger in my face and I laughed because what else was I supposed to do?
Christopher had figured out a new trick. There was a strip mall near his house and on Saturday mornings he would stand in the parking lot near a liquor store. Sooner or later someone would come out with a bag, put it in a car and go into the bakery next door. Christopher would be inside the car before the front door of the bakery swung closed and that night we would have a party. Christopher would feed Bobby shots until Bobby was puking in the bushes, passed out on the floor, or dancing naked on the back lawn and we all had a good laugh.
Everything was fine until the Saturday before Halloween. In the morning Christopher had stolen a couple bottles of vodka from the backseat of a BMW. I’d told him I was skipping the party and I’d met Belinda in the clearing after dark. A little before eleven I walked her back along the tracks. When I got home I sat on the front sidewalk unwilling to let the evening end. The night was cool and clear and I felt as happy as I’d ever felt. With the concrete beneath me and the dark all around, the earth seemed a solid enough place to live, a good place, a place where I knew what to do.
I closed my eyes under the stars. Then footsteps, light and fast, startled me. I got to my feet, unsure what was coming, and Belinda crashed into my open arms.
She was crying. In that first moment, I thought her father must’ve figured out that we were meeting and I felt the same strange mix of fear and release that you get when you realize you’ve cut yourself and the blood rises through the skin but the pain hasn’t yet come.
‘It’s all right,’ I said and I thought I heard in my own voice the adult I would become.
She shook her head, sobbing. ‘He’s in the hospital.’
‘What?’
‘My dad took him. Bobby. He was bleeding.’
Her words made me dizzy. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
Her eyes found mine and even in the darkness they glistened with angry tears. ‘They raped him.’
‘Bobby? Who did?’
‘Christopher and his friends.’
‘No,’ I said but I felt it was true.
She nodded, her lips twisting. ‘He was bleeding.’
I pulled her to my chest and she sobbed. We stood like that for a long time until her breathing slowed and her body relaxed into mine like a child easing toward sleep. I kissed her forehead and she looked up at me, calm.
She said, ‘Kill him.’
‘What? Who?’
‘Christopher. Kill him. For me.’
I didn’t kill him.
Of course.
Bobby spent a week in the hospital. I don’t know what his injuries were and never wanted to know. The hospital kept him isolated from the other kids on his floor – maybe because of the nature of his hurt, maybe because he sometimes lost his head and screamed, or that’s what Belinda said. When I visited he was quiet but like someone whose tongue and teeth had been pulled out, not like he had nothing to say. Belinda sat in a chair by his bed looking as if her anger had only grown since she’d found me on the sidewalk.
‘Hey, Bobby,’ I said.
His eyes flicked to mine and back to the white bed sheet. He had an IV in his arm and his hospital gown was decorated with variously colored teddy bears. The shade on the window was pulled and the fluorescent light gave his skin a greenish hue.
‘Sorry … about this,’ I said.
Mr Mabry was standing outside the hospital room talking with a black cop about the same age as him.
‘You’re going to pursue charges,’ the cop said. He was telling, not asking.
‘No,’ Mr Mabry said, as though he were saying no to the world, no to God, no to the rest of his life.
The cop sounded desperate. This was about more than the rape of one fourteen-year-old black boy. ‘The kids that did this … they’re animals …’
‘No,’ Mr Mabry said again.
Belinda looked at me. She mouthed two words. Kill him. Bobby’s eyes rose to mine. His eyes questioned me and I knew that Belinda had told him what she’d asked me to do.
I said, ‘Take care of yourself, Bobby,’ and left the room.
I found Christopher at his house. His mother and father worked and he hadn’t told them he’d stopped going to school, so he would leave the house in the morning and circle back once they were gone. He would get high, lift weights, or watch TV until the rest of us came home. He answered the door, wearing exercise shorts and a sweaty T-shirt, his muscles pumped.
He grinned. ‘What’s up?’
I hit him in the chest and stepped i
nto the front hall. Sun shined through a decorative window above the door and the house was clean and bright and smelled like laundry soap.
‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ he said, backing away.
‘You put Bobby in the hospital.’
He shook his head. ‘He put himself there. We got drunk and he wiggled his ass at us. What were we supposed to do? If you’d been there you’d’ve done him too.’ I hit him again and he pushed back. ‘Don’t do that!’
‘Bobby’s a little kid,’ I said.
Christopher looked at me with scorn as though I’d fallen in his eyes. ‘He’s a faggot nigger. Get out of my house.’
I could’ve killed him then. My dad had bought a Ruger .22 after a string of robberies at the gas stations, and he kept it oiled and loaded on his closet shelf. I could’ve gotten it and shot Christopher.
But I did nothing. I went home and stayed there.
When Belinda came back to school I asked her to meet me in our clearing but she didn’t come. I went night after night by myself hoping she would come and then one night I brought a Bic lighter and lit the drying grass. I wanted to burn the grove of trees. I wanted her to see the flames from her house. I wanted her to smell the smoke.
But the fire smoldered for ten minutes in the grass and went out.
At the beginning of December the Mabrys put a For Sale sign in front of their house. At school Belinda told me they would be moving north over Christmas vacation.
I said, ‘I don’t want you to go.’
She looked at me with her one-sided smile and now I saw sadness in it. She said, ‘It’s not up to you, is it?’
I guessed that was it for us but the afternoon before they moved Belinda knocked at my front door and asked me to walk with her. We went up to the railroad tracks and that afternoon I told her I loved her and she told me she loved me too. That was the last time I saw her alive.
SIX
‘That’s a bunch of shit,’ Charles said and he dropped me off at the Shell station.
I drove home a little after seven. The sky had cleared and the sun had clocked hard to the west. In another hour it would descend into the flat North Florida pine forests as if it meant to incinerate them. Before Thomas was born Susan and I sometimes sat in lawn chairs on the east bank of the river and watched as the sun turned orange and grew huge as it neared the horizon, then dropped under, watched until the sky went black and left us feeling small and helpless except for the little pleasure we could give each other.
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