by Kia Corthron
It takes a moment for this to sink in. Rett pushes up on his elbow.
“Really?”
“I never went to college. I ain’t never said no one has to go to college, but I do think if ya start somethin, specially that close to finishin, ya oughta go on and do it. So all I ask, in return for this, is you at lease consider finishin.”
There’s a pause in the dimness. “I wanna tell you I’m gonna finish, Uncle Dwight. But I’m afraid to, cuz you’d probably just think I’m lying again. But if I wasn’t afraid to tell you, that’s what I’d say.” Moments later, Dwight hears the even breathing of his nephew’s sleep.
It’s after seven when they wake and get on the road to a steakhouse at the edge of the county. “When I was livin here, they wouldn’t serve black. Always heard they was the best steaks in Maryland.”
Near the city limits of Humble, Dwight instructs his nephew to pull over. They stand outside the car, looking at a crowded trailer park in the twilight.
“It sure got extended since Keith was here.” Some children playing hide-and-seek among the mobile homes. “And before that, this was the sticks. Boy in my school, Richard lived out here with his mother and sisters. Good painter. Turned a ole chicken coop into a studio.”
Half an hour later they are seated in the restaurant. The steaks are good, though Dwight would be less inclined to characterize the place with the superlative reputation that preceded it. On the drive back, the outskirts of town, Rett stops the car. “Look at that!” They lean against the sedan, admiring the numerous twinkling lights.
“All I know’s the Big Dipper.”
“Well,” says his uncle, “that’s Pleiades, Seven Sisters. And Orion’s Belt. You know the story of Orion and the Seven Sisters?”
“Oooh! See that?”
Dwight grins. “Shootin star.”
“Meteor showers!” They’re silent several minutes, but observe no more streaks in the sky.
“You going to see Roof?”
Dwight gazes at the star with the orange tint. Mars.
“I don’t know. You think I should? Since you read the whole story.”
“I don’t know.”
A wind ruffling the nearby trees.
“You know all my secrets now, read the manual on em. Seem like your turn, share at lease one a yours.”
Another shooting star, and minutes later a third. Enough time elapses that Dwight assumes his nephew has decided to ignore his suggestion of a fair trade.
“You ever read this book, A Clockwork Orange?” Rett’s voice is soft.
Dwight shakes his head. Then, seeing his nephew isn’t looking at him: “No.”
“This guy. This violent teenager. They do this experiment, fix it so violence makes him sick. Physically ill.” He lowers his eyes to the ground. “I think. Because of my father, I think I kind of inherited that. When I was a kid and boys would pick on me, I couldn’t fight. If they’d hit me, I’d draw my fists but then my body would get shaky, I couldn’t—” His thumb gently rubbing his fingertips. “So I just looked down while they punched me, when they poured milk over my head in front of the girl I liked, she laughed so hard she was crying.” He laughs softly.
“Two years before Roe my mother defends this old black woman, performed hundreds of abortions starting when she was a teenager. Abortion still illegal and there’s my mother, bold! And my father.” He swallows. “The case with the little boys. And the. The voter registration.” A firefly circles in front of him, then vanishes. “So there I am, poli-sci, pre-law. Junior year I’m like: Do I need my head examined? I’m not my parents! I couldn’t even defend myself against a bully, how I think I’m gonna—” A car passes on the lonely road.
“Freshman year I went to IUPUI, remember?” Dwight trying to think. “State college, people outside of Indiana call it ‘Purdue.’ So. Big.” His eyes seeming to see the campus, to be stunned by its vastness still. “Never understood the other students. Getting drunk and getting laid. And getting rich after they graduated, they didn’t care about anything else! And the few who did care about the world would get so. Appalled, like I was some moron if I wasn’t completely up on every single issue.” His lower lip curling under. “Sophomore year transferred, moved to St. Louis, maybe I’d do better in a private school, I got scholarships.” He shakes his head. “No different. What did I think would be different?” Sighs. “Didn’t matter. I studied, kept to myself. I wasn’t there to have fun, I was there to get my degree. There was one phone for every eight dorm rooms but when it rang I never answered except Sunday mornings when my mother would call. It was never for me except when my mother would call, she— Worried.” He considers elaborating, then doesn’t.
“Not long after school started senior year, I saw this news report. These refugee camps and this. Massacre. Hundreds, or thousands, I just saw all these bodies, families, toddlers. I heard the story, I saw the pictures. Then it disappeared. All these civilians slaughtered! and it was news for maybe a day. And no one talking about it. So I researched. Took effort but I found pictures. I photocopied the pictures and I took them around and I started talking about it. Me, who never had anything to say!” Sweat beads appearing on his brow. “No one cared! Or if they did, it was just to get mad cuz I brought it up. The more I had to say, the madder they got.” He falls silent.
“Where all that happen?”
“Lebanon. A Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. These Lebanese Christian murderers that the Israeli army let loose. Bloodbath!” He briefly shoots a look to the heavens in disbelief. “I never had anything to say before, then I couldn’t stop. I wrote to the school paper, I wouldn’t shut up!” A dog barking in the distance. “Got some nasty responses. In print. Rachel Miller, another senior, Robert Cohen a junior. I didn’t know what I was talking about, or, Some appreciation after all the Jews did for blacks in the sixties.” Turning to his uncle for the first time, his eyes glistening. “Well what if it were the Klan, wiping out some black settlement? Or some Southern cracker fire department hosing down a peaceful march? Or a lynching, bunch of whites burning a black man, would they say, ‘Well it’s all so complicated,’ ‘Well there are two sides’?”
They stare at each other, then both look away. A few moments later, Rett calmly pushes his glasses back up his nose, behind his ears, the eyewear having slipped in the fresh perspiration.
“It got— Personal. About me being quiet, no friends. Was I some kind of pervert? They never said what they meant by that, they just threw the word out vague, like since I wasn’t a partier, since I actually spent my time studying there must be something wrong with me, like everyone who keeps to himself must be some—” He shudders. “A couple strangers came up to me, said they liked what I wrote but they never defended it publicly.” Dwight glances at his nephew from the corner of his eye, the latter’s face emanating worry, then just as abruptly the weight of it all appearing to fade.
“Felt like a lifetime but guess the war only lasted two weeks. I couldn’t fight anymore, I just went to class and to work. My old job: the cafeteria slop line.” A pebble at his shoe turns out to be a ball of dirt, and he flattens it. “In the slop line we had to scrape and rinse the cookware before it went into the big dishwasher, so I scraped and rinsed the pots and the pans and the spatulas and the sieves and the butcher knives and the cleavers and one cleaver I slipped under my shirt. I left the cafeteria walking home, it was evening and clear and when I got to my dorm I went up to the second floor where I lived and I went to the bathroom. Took the cleaver out from under my shirt, and I washed it and carried it to my room and shut my door and I took out the campus directory and I saw exactly which room in which dorm Rachel Miller lived and Robert Cohen lived.
“I took out the cloth I used to polish my good shoes. I shined the blade and shined the blade and by accident I cut my thumb and then the clock struck 4 a.m. time to go.” His voice has lowered. “It was Monday night
and Tuesday morning so even the party students were asleep. Crickets. I walked to Rachel’s dorm. No air-conditioning and it was humid so the window to the first-floor lobby had been left open, I slipped through. Quiet dark all dark. I walked through the hall, up the stairs to Rachel’s room, 232. I stood outside staring at the door, 232, Rachel I knew from a history class sophomore year. Always with her friends, always with a boyfriend, her latest boyfriend was this rich guy, Patrick Murphy, I stood outside Rachel’s room and pulled out my cleaver and in my head I saw Rachel talking on the phone, laughing on the phone to Patrick Murphy, talking about their combined income when they graduated, eighty K, a hundred K, and that’s when I did what I came there to do.”
A small creature scurries across the road. It looks like a squirrel but Rett thought squirrels slept at night. Even as it disappears into the darkness he tries to identify it.
“What did you do!”
Rett is startled by Dwight’s outburst, the younger having momentarily forgotten his story. He tries to remember his place.
“So then I did what I came there to do. I turned around and I cut the cord on Rachel’s hall phone. Dead. Then I left her dorm and I went to Robert’s dorm and I cut the cord on his hall phone. It was after five and the campus still asleep by the time I got back home, and on a sudden inspiration I cut the cord on every single phone in my dorm. Then I went to my room and I shut my door and I got into bed and I slept really well, which was unusual. I slept very deep until 7:30 when this screaming starts in my hall, Who got into the dorm and cut the phone lines! It occurs to me that Rachel and Robert must have woken up screaming too, and I found this comforting, and then I was asleep again, I slept a few more hours. My classes that day didn’t start until eleven.” The animal runs across the road again and quickly vanishes. “The violence, cutting the cords. It didn’t make me sick. It made me sad. I guess I was already pretty sad, except before was like being at the bottom of a very deep dark well and looking way up at the light, the tiny distant light. But this sad: no light.” His left arm reaches to hold his right elbow, right arm hanging. “On Wednesday I had slop line duty again, and I put the cleaver under my shirt, and I went to my early dinner because the slop line eats early, and after dinner I walked back to the kitchen to work and I scraped the plates and the bowls and when it was time for the cooking stuff, the pots and the ladles and the pans and the tongs and the butcher knives and the cleavers I slipped my cleaver out from under my shirt and I put it in the dishwasher to be cleaned with the rest.” The wind picks up again, branches swaying. “I didn’t miss a class but my grades dropped, A’s were now B’s, B’s: C’s. Went home for winter break and I came back and I walked into my dorm room and I shut my door and I stayed. I didn’t come out for classes or work and I would hold going to the bathroom till the hall was empty. Sometimes in the middle of the night I’d walk down to the basement television, but I started spending less time with MacNeil/Lehrer and more with MTV.” For several minutes only the crickets, a creek frog. Then Rett gently breaks the silence. “Do you think I’m crazy, Uncle Dwight.” A melancholy but also a resignation, as if he is calmly prepared for whatever honest answer his uncle might offer.
Dwight considers the question a good forty-five seconds before responding, his words soft. “In 1960 I pondered some violence a lot deeper n cuttin a phone cord. Guess we all got our crazy moments, nephew.” They stare into the darkness twenty minutes more before Dwight gently touches Rett’s arm, and they turn to get back into the car.
Between the jet lag and their naps, they have trouble falling asleep in the hotel. Rett turns on the TV and is delighted to catch an old Twilight Zone, but the viewers’ anticipatory smiles fade as they come to understand the plot. A white man accused of killing a brutal Klansman is about to be hanged. While all this is happening, the sun refuses to rise. The teleplay features a monologue about hate by a black preacher, and hate seems to be directly related to the 9:30 a.m. pitch-blackness. Rett and Dwight wait wordlessly to see what event will finally bring back the light but they are surprised by the end: the world just gets darker.
**
The next morning Rett sleeps while Dwight writes in his memory book. The phone rings. It’s Cousin Liddie, excited. Turns out she works at the Kmart with Lucy so heard all about Dwight’s visit with Eliot’s boy. They chat a while, Rett putting his pillow over his head. Ten minutes later another ring. “Jeanine! Liddie called you already?” As Dwight is hanging up, Rett drags himself out of bed.
“Jeanine was your daddy’s friend, they was the same grade. She’d like to have us over for breakfast. Liddie’s our cousin, around the same age as your daddy. She’d like to have us over for lunch. I told em we have a few things to do today, I’d check in with you.”
“Yes, yes,” Rett mutters as he closes the bathroom door.
Jeanine still lives in the house where she grew up. She’d never married, and two years ago had to put her mother into a nursing home. Sausage and eggs and fried potatoes and onions and fried apples and cantaloupe and pulpy orange juice from the carton, the type of feast Jeanine clearly rarely indulges in as she’s quite slim.
“Your uncle tell you we useta call this Colored Street? An him an your daddy lived on Mixed Street?” She’s a jovial sort, and her reminiscences bring out a cheerfulness in Dwight that Rett didn’t know existed: panting as they climbed up to the colored tier of the old movie house, the white driver who nearly hit Jeanine in the snow and got a taste of colored kids’ sass from Mokie the twin. And she turns to Rett and tells him about playing jump-rope with Eliot, about the day Eliot picked Parker out of her cat’s litter.
“You know your daddy was the smartest in our class, firs grade on up.”
As they’re leaving, she can’t take her eyes off Rett. “God, I can’t believe how much he’s Eliot!” Then to his uncle: “You know, I often think about your mother’s funeral. The lass time I seen him. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I guess, cuz the only other funeral we’d both been to was my uncle’s, I was half expectin Eliot to tell me your mama weren’t dead. Was a rabbit in that box!” She laughs and wipes a tear.
Dwight and Rett drive around, the elder continuing to tour-guide his past, and at 12:30 they knock on Liddie’s door. Their cousin answers with a huge grin, giving each of them a bear hug. She’s nearly as round as Lucy.
“That damn Jeanine tole me she was invitin yaw to breakfast, I suppose she done filled ya up before ya got here.”
It’s true. Dwight was bracing himself to politely force down more food but, mercifully, lunch is simply gazpacho, a new recipe Liddie’s trying for the hot weather, with watermelon for dessert. The concept of cold soup was insane to her, but the dish turned out pretty good she thinks, “Delicious” according to Dwight. They sit outside, her backyard patio under a tree.
“Walter Joe got on at the textiles, that’s why we moved back here from Bear. Bear, West Virginia,” she clarifies for Rett. “Then it closed like all the rest of em. The mill, the tires, brewery. Glass where your daddy worked. Anyway.” Sighs. “Jus wish my husband coulda been here to see ya but he’s out at the Kmart too, workin today.” She sucks on a piece of watermelon. “You remember that bike I stole for me an Eliot?”
“No!”
“Borrowed, borrowed!” She turns to Rett. “Me an your father was aroun third grade. My family over for Thanksgivin, an some neighbor white family gone for the holiday. I didn’t see the harm in takin one a their damn bikes jus for a few hours, teach ourselves to ride. Your daddy refused, we hadn’t asked permission. Well I recalled visitin weeks before when we did ask permission, just to share it with the boy, ride it when he took a break. ‘No!’ that stingy brat said, so Thanksgivin I took his ugly ole bike, an by enda the day I could ride! Eliot watchin the whole time, eyes drippin the envy, but he never joined in. He waited till I finished an watched me put that cycle back where I found it, then he gone inside, quiet. I felt bad, your dad
dy’s sad eyes sure whipped the conscience into me. Him goin into law didn’t surprise me a bit, from the beginning he always seemed to have that sense: right an wrong.”
After lunch, she takes them into her living room. Pictures of her parents (“That’s your great-aunt Peg-Peg,” Dwight inserts), of her brother Mitch and his wife and kids (“Yeah that rascal finally settled down,” Liddie remarks), of Liddie’s own five grown children and plentiful grandchildren. Dwight remembers Liddie’s oldests when they were small themselves, the twins Felicia and Fiona.
“Do you have any of my father when he was little?”
She thinks. “You know, Rett, I don’t believe I do. But I’ll ask my mama. She was the keeper a all the pictures.”
They’re driving again, and Rett pulls into a convenience store lot. When he comes out sipping a gargantuan caffeinated soft drink, Dwight is standing next to the car.
“I don’t wanna do this if you rather keep explorin around. But I was thinkin. Maybe I go on and visit Roof.”
“Okay.”
“Visitin hours jus startin. Two. Maybe you drop me off at the hospital? I’ll call a cab to bring me back to the hotel when I’m done.”
“Okay. Or. You just want me to come with you? Stay in the waiting room?”
“Dontchu wanna look around Humble some more?”
“Well. What do you want?”
Dwight gazes at his nephew.
“You know what? Maybe I’ll jus keep showin you around, that’s what we come here for, right?”
“You came here too, Uncle Dwight. You have stuff you need to do.”
Had Rett said want to do, Dwight might have been able to talk himself out of this task.
“Okay. You drop me off, then keep the car. I’ll call a cab later. Meetcha back at the hotel lobby.”
“Okay. What time?”
“Well. Ferguson’s closes at five, so we need to leave the hotel no later n 4:30.”