All American Boys

by Jason Reynolds

“Right.” Dad nodded, sadly. “Thing is, I had been in so many other situations where things had gotten crazy. A hand goes in a pocket and out comes a pistol or a blade. And all I could think about was making it home to you, Spoony, and your mother. It’s a hard job, a really hard job, and you could never understand that. You could never know what it’s like to kiss your family good-bye in the morning, knowing you could get a call over your radio that could end your life.”

  I could hear the struggle in his voice. Like, he really wanted me to understand this, and part of me did. Part of me could even appreciate knowing he thought of us every time he left the house. But still. “Then why did you choose to be a cop?”

  “Believe it or not, I wanted to do some good. I really did. But then I realized after a while that most of the time, I was walking into situations expecting to find a certain kind of criminal. I was looking for . . .”

  “For me?”

  Dad reached over and picked up the spirometer and started inspecting it from every angle. He couldn’t say it, and instead just finished the story. “So I quit the force.” He took a deep breath, and I got the feeling that he felt both relieved and ashamed that he had gotten that off his chest. “Look, all I’m trying to say is that not all cops are bad.”

  “I know that.” I hadn’t even noticed—mainly because of my nervousness—that the foil from the juice cup, I had taken it and rolled it between my thumb and pointer fingers, over and over again, until it had become a perfectly round pellet. A tiny, uncrushable thing.

  “As a matter of fact, most cops are good. I worked with a lot of great guys, really trying to make a difference. You need to know that they’re not all wolves.”

  “Dad, I do. But not all kids who look and dress like me are bad either. Most of them aren’t. And even the ones who are don’t deserve to be killed, especially if they don’t have no weapons.”

  “But a lot of times they do, Rashad.”

  “But Spoony was telling me yesterday that most times, they don’t.”

  “Spoony doesn’t know everything.” I could tell Dad was getting frustrated. “And neither do you.”

  “And neither do you.” I couldn’t back down from him. Not this time.

  Dad stood up, smirked, and nodded. He looked at me as if it was his first time seeing me. As if I had just taken off a mask, even though I was practically wearing one with all the itchy gauze taped to my face. Maybe it was him who had just taken off a mask. He set the spirometer down on the side table and reached for my hand. “Listen, I gotta get going. Your mother said she was coming by later, and that she might be bringing a lawyer in to talk to you. She wants to press charges, so . . . yeah. Be on the lookout for her.”

  Press charges? My initial thought was that pressing charges was a bad idea. My second thought was that I would have to go to court, which I already wasn’t too keen on. My third thought was just an echo of my first thought, that pressing charges was a bad idea, but there was no point in trying to talk my mother out of it. Even my father knew that.

  “I’ll be here.” I stated the obvious. We shook hands, awkward and formal.

  “Okay.”

  He headed for the door.

  “Dad,” I called. He turned around. “If I’m checked out by Friday, I’m thinking about going down to the protest. If I go, you should come.”

  He didn’t respond. But as he left the room, something in his face dimmed.

  Later, after an hour or two more of sleep, and an hour or two of working on my drawing, sketching and shading some, I guess, screwed-up self-portrait, I decided that it was time for another walk. I took Tuesday off from walking, but I knew I couldn’t take another day off, because if I did, Clarissa would chew me out (in the nicest way ever). And the truth is, I wanted to get out of the room, this little closet room, with the beeping things, and the TV. If it weren’t for Clarissa, my hospital room wouldn’t have been much different than a prison cell. Not that I’ve ever been to jail, but based on what I’ve heard in rap songs, and what my dad always said about it (another one of his tactics to get us to do right was to talk about jail), it seemed pretty similar. An uncomfortable bed. Three meals. Loneliness, even when the visitors come.

  So I got up, brushed my teeth, washed my face, closed my gown up tight—what’s the deal with the whole ass-out hospital gown thing, anyway?—and left my room. I was going stir-crazy, especially after my father dropping that bomb on me. My dad. I mean, how could he have just . . . I couldn’t even think straight about what he did. The other thing, though, was that I needed to make sure that if I was going to try to go to this protest—I hadn’t really made up my mind yet, but I was definitely thinking about it—I had better practice walking.

  Once I got through my door, the fluorescent white light from the ward hit me, stung my eyes. This time, the plan was to just do a loop. Walk all the way around until I was back where I started. I inched down the hall, my legs eventually returning to normal as the stiffness worked itself out. I tried not to be a creep, but it’s really hard not to look in an open door, and most of the patients on the floor had their doors wide open for whatever reason. A woman sat in a chair, asleep, in Room 413. An older man sat on the edge of his bed, oxygen tubes hooked under his nostrils as he struggled to clip his fingernails in Room 415. A young girl playing on a cell phone as an older woman massaged the feet of a person I couldn’t see lying in bed, in Room 417. And on and on I went. Peeking into the rooms of strangers. Peeking into their lives. Hearing people coughing and moaning. Seeing families gathered together, sometimes talking, sometimes not talking. I even saw a few rooms with TVs on, the news playing, everyone peeking into my life as I was peeking into theirs.

  Once I finally finished the lap, which may have taken fifteen minutes—pathetic—I returned to my room to find two women in it, one I recognized and one I didn’t. The one I didn’t was looking sort of down, toward the floor. The one I did recognize was looking directly at the one I didn’t. At first, I thought I was loopy, like I was buggin’, so I stepped out to make sure I had walked into the right room. Room 409. R. BUTLER. That’s me.

  I stepped back inside hesitantly.

  “Uh, hello,” I said, then spoke to the woman I recognized. “Mrs. Fitzgerald?”

  “Hi, baby,” she said grandmotherly.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, I was coming to bring you something, but when I got to your room this lady was in here. And I asked her if she knew you and she said, not really, so I decided that I would sit in here with her until you got back.” Mrs. Fitzgerald’s arms were crossed, and she was glaring at the lady. She was guarding my room. Shoot, maybe she really did volunteer at the fire department.

  “Thank you,” I said, easing farther into the room. I was happy to see Mrs. Fitzgerald, as I’d had no intention of trying to make that trek back to the gift shop—last time damn near killed me. So it was nice that she popped in to check on me. Then I turned to the other lady because, well, now Mrs. Fitzgerald had made the whole situation even more awkward.

  The woman stood and extended her hand. I shook it. “Rashad, I’m so sorry for just barging in like this. I’d been meaning to come see you, but things have just been so busy, and I just, well, I just wanted to stop by and see how you were.”

  I had no idea what to say, so I just studied her face, trying to place her. But I couldn’t.

  “Oh, gosh, you don’t know who I am!” she said suddenly. “My name is Katie Lansing. I’m the lady in the store who accidentally fell over you.”

  The woman with the navy suit and white sneakers. The one searching for a beer after a long week.

  I reached for my bed and sat, suddenly feeling a little dizzy, my mind racing. Why had she decided to come see me? It wasn’t her fault that all this happened—though that klutzy moment seemed to set this whole thing in motion. No, I take that back. It had nothing to do with her. It might’ve happened even if she hadn’t tripped over me. And if not to me, maybe to someone else. Definitely to some
one else.

  “How . . . did you find me?”

  “This is the only decent hospital in town—lucky guess. Plus, your name’s on the door.” She smiled slightly.

  “Well, what can I do for you?” I still had no idea what to say.

  “Yeah, what can he do for you?” Mrs. Fitzgerald totally had my back. I guess she could tell I was uncomfortable.

  Ms. Lansing’s face went serious. “Well, I guess I just wanted to say I’m sorry about everything that happened, I mean, that is happening.” She blinked hard. I was getting used to the hospital blinks. “I saw everything. The way that officer . . . I just . . .” Now she started to get choked up. “I should go. I just mostly wanted to come by and give you this.” She handed me her business card. “If you need me to testify, I absolutely will.”

  “Thanks,” I said, suddenly thinking again about the fact that at some point, once I was out of the hospital and even after the protest, there was going to have to be a trial. I had to go to court. I had never been to court before, but judging from all the TV shows—which is all I really had to go off—it seemed almost as scary as going to jail. But maybe if Ms. Lansing came and told the story as it really happened, they’d believe her, and I could get out of there as quickly as possible. That was my hope. Not likely, but still . . . a hope. And for that reason, I was grateful for her business card, which I set on the side table. And then she was gone.

  Now it was just me and Mrs. Fitzgerald. She sat with a plastic bag in her lap, and her right leg crossed over her left, exposing her saggy stockings, which were the same color brown as she was, so it looked like a layer of ankle skin was shedding from her body like a snake.

  “So . . .” Mrs. Fitzgerald folded her hands on top of the plastic bag. “A car accident, huh?” Uh-oh, I thought.

  “She told you everything?”

  “She didn’t have to. I knew who you were when you came into the gift shop. I read the newspaper, front to back, every single day. And I don’t know if you know this or not, but you, my boy, are news.” She glanced up at the TV. It was off, but the gesture was merely to acknowledge that it had been on, everywhere.

  “Yeah, unfortunately,” I huffed. “So why didn’t you say something?”

  “Say what? To hold your head up? That everything would be okay? Baby, I could tell by the look on your face that you ain’t need none of that. Sometimes, when people get treated as less than human, the best way to help them feel better is to simply treat them as human. Not as victims. Just you as you. Rashad Butler, before all this.”

  “Yeah,” I said, really grateful for that, though it had never really even crossed my mind that that’s exactly what I needed.

  “But there’s still business to tend to.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Well, there are still things that can’t be overlooked. Like this protest I’ve been hearing about. You going?” Mrs. Fitzgerald asked, blunt. Old people never hold back.

  “Planning on it. I think. I just gotta wait and see if I get outta here first.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Ain’t nobody holding you here. You can walk out whenever you want.” I reached over and slid Ms. Lansing’s business card from one corner of the side table to the other. Then I flipped it upside down and moved it back to its original spot.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But I don’t know. I just don’t want to get out there and then have something go wrong with my ribs and then I gotta come back here for another week. Better to be safe than sorry.” I ain’t never been so careful in my life, but I had also never felt pain like that before either.

  “No, it’s not,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for me to say that so that she could shut it down. “Not all the time.” She glared at me for a moment, and then just as quickly her face relaxed. As if she was scanning me and then found what she was looking for. The chink in my armor.

  “You scared.”

  “It’s not that, it’s—”

  “It is that.” The old lady cut me off. “Let me tell you something. I’m seventy-four. You know what that means? That means I was around during the civil rights movement. Means I remember all of that. The segregation. The lynchings. Not being able to do what you want to do, or go where you want to go. Or vote. I remember everybody looking at my brother, God bless his soul, like a criminal. An animal. Like he was scum or less than, just because of the way he looked. Skin like coal. Hair like cotton—” She paused and tongued the roof of her mouth, so I offered her water in a Styrofoam cup Clarissa had brought in earlier. I hadn’t touched it. Mrs. Fitzgerald took a sip, and then she was off. “I remember the bus boycott, and the Freedom Riders, and all that. I remember the March on Washington, and I especially remember the ones down in Selma.”

  “You were there for all that?” I asked in amazement.

  She took another sip of water, swallowed, then said, “No. I wasn’t there for any of them.” She got a fierce look on her face. “Because I was scared. My brother took the bus trip down to Selma. He begged me to go. Begged me. But I told him it didn’t matter. I told him that he was going to get himself killed, and that that wasn’t bravery, it was stupidity. So he went without me. I watched the clips on the news. I saw him being beaten with everyone else, and realized that my brother, in fact, was the most courageous man I knew, because Selma had nothing to do with him. Well, one could argue that it did, a little bit. But he was doing it for us. All of us.”

  Mrs. Fitzgerald rocked forward in the chair until she eventually got back to her feet. “Now, I’m not telling you what to do. But I’m telling you that I’ve been watching the news, and I see what’s going on. There’s something that ain’t healed, and it’s not just those ribs of yours. And it’s perfectly okay for you to be afraid, but whether you protest or not, you’ll still be scared. Might as well let your voice be heard, son, because let me tell you something, before you know it you’ll be seventy-four and working in a gift shop, and no one will be listening anymore.” She set the plastic bag on the seat. “Brought some snacks. You gotta be sick of this hospital mess by now.”

  “What is it?” I asked, reaching for the bag.

  “Just some chips. I didn’t know what flavor you liked, so I brought them all. Except plain.”

  I sat back on the bed and thought about what Mrs. Fitzgerald said. Tried to imagine protesting in Selma, the March on Washington. Man. And I was worried about a regular street in my regular town. I thought about the fear, but I also thought about how I would feel if I didn’t go, if I didn’t, as she said, speak up. Maybe nothing would happen. But it was at least worth a try. I turned the TV on, and sat and watched the news, but this time I really watched it. Forced myself to see myself. To relive the pain and confusion and my life changing in the time it took to drop a bag of chips on a sticky floor. I pulled out my sketch pad and started drawing like crazy, but it was hard—stupid damn tears kept wetting the page, they wouldn’t stop, but neither would I. So I kept going, letting the wet spread the lead in weird ways as I shaded and darkened the image. The figure of a man pushing his fist through the other man’s chest. The other figure standing behind, cheering. A few minutes more, and normally it would’ve been complete. A solid piece, maybe even the best I had ever made. But it wasn’t quite there yet. It was close, but still unfinished. I took my pencil, and for the first time broke away from Aaron Douglas’s signature style. Because I couldn’t stop—and I began to draw features on the face of the man having his chest punched through. Starting with the mouth.

  Thursday

  I woke up a frigging hour before the alarm clock. My mind was racing. Ma was still at work, Willy still snored in the trundle bed below me, and so I got up and stood in the living room, staring out the window. Pink sunrise warmed the houses on the other side of the street, but it was still early enough that the dark blue-purple of night had not completely burned away. The whole neighborhood looked asleep. I headed for the front door, then down the stoop to the sidewalk. There was no one else out. Not a s
ingle car moved on my street or the two avenues at either end. Everything was still and quiet except for the swoop and chatter of a pair of sparrows darting in and out of driveways.

  I was completely alone.

  I looked toward the Galluzzo house. From where I stood, I could see the American flag spearing up in its holder and hanging in loose folds in the air above the front steps, and a memory bit me—the day I stood beneath that flag in a cheap, itchy, dark suit that had once been Paul’s and didn’t fit Guzzo, but fit me everywhere except that the shoulders were too wide. I remembered Paul, squatting in front of me as I stood on the bottom step, patting my shoulders, trying to adjust the seam so it didn’t fall forward over my arm. “Quinn,” he’d said. “There are no words that will make you feel any better that he’s gone, but know this—you need anything, I mean anything, little man, you come to me.” And I remembered how miserable I’d felt, but also that—because Paul made sure I knew he was always going to be there for me—I felt relieved. Even though I didn’t have my dad anymore, at least I had a version of his protection. I remembered how Paul, finally satisfied with the seam, had stood, turned toward the street, and held up his hand to block the sunlight from his eyes, and as he did, the shadow of his body fell over mine, blocking all the sunlight from me, too. I didn’t have to squint. I looked out at the faces of the people along the sidewalk in front of us and I did not feel alone.

  Something else dawned on me. When I’d stood under the flag and I’d looked up at Paul, who promised to take care of me, he had only recently graduated high school. I mean, he hadn’t been much older than I was now. He’d probably been thinking the same thing I was this year: Where am I going to be next year, and what the hell am I going to do with my life?

  What had happened to that guy? Who had he become?

  Until this week, all anybody’d been talking about was the damn basketball scouts. I’d obsessed over it too: what I needed to do to set myself up for tomorrow, next year, and whatever the hell came down the road after that. But as I stood in front of my own house in the cool, violet morning, I had the crazy idea that I could be standing here thirty years from now looking back. In my history class, we’d talked about how some moments in history are moments people never forget. People could remember exactly where they were and what they were doing. I was three years old when 9/11 happened, so I didn’t remember it like all the teachers in school did. But Ma did, because she knew what it meant for Dad. Adults were always asking each other: Where were you when it happened? Where were you?