I can hardly wait.
Leslie hands out the city maps while Melanie and Alex pass around the art supplies.
“After you mold the mountains and other geographical features, you’ll paint them—blue for water, green for flatlands, brown for the hills.”
Otis raises his hand. “Can we work in partners?”
“I don’t usually like partners work,” Mr. Mitchell says. “But we do need to spread out for this project. And we may not have enough supplies. All right, everybody find a partner.”
Heads spin. Arms reach across rows. Names bounce from mouth to mouth. Otis pairs up with Alex. Susan Campbell with Shelley. Leslie over by Melanie.
“Hey, Charlie, wanna partner up?” Jason Vale calls from across the room.
Ross pokes me in the arm.
“Partners?” he says.
“Yours is waiting for you over there,” I tell him.
Charlie
I make the mountain ranges and Jason figures out where they should go. Just before the bell rings, Mr. Mitchell passes out miniature American flags. He tells us to plant the flag on our map at the exact location of Wonderland Avenue School.
Laurel Canyon is the fourth canyon from downtown. I trace its winding path from Hollywood Boulevard up to Lookout Mountain, then west about a half mile to where Lookout hits Wonderland Avenue. There I raise the American flag.
I look back at the rest of the city, from our Canyon all the way downtown. I remember from the school form that Armstrong lives on Fifty-third Street.
When my dad told me about the Opportunity Busing program last summer, he said the new kids would be coming from a housing development in South Central. Ninety-nine percent black, he said. I pictured Armstrong’s neighborhood at least fifty miles from here.
I take the flag out of our map and touch the point of the toothpick to Wonderland. Then, aiming for South Central LA, I move the flag end over end across the city, until it reaches Fifty-third Street.
I measure the distance against our scale. It’s around twenty miles.
Across the room, I see Armstrong working alone, a thousand flags away.
Armstrong
Those men who mugged Papa Ross did a terrible thing. But why should that bring shame on us all?
If you look at statistics, white people do a lot more violence than black people. How many brothers in history started a war? How many dropped the atomic bomb? Or killed the Indians? It’s mostly white people who’ve done the nastiest deeds.
Look at that. I just passed a black man on the street, and he didn’t mug me. There’s two more sitting on a bench. Did they put a gun to my head?
Here comes Otis’s grandma on her way to the store.
“Hello, Mrs. Greene. Were you planning to mug me today, ma’am?”
“Stop talking nonsense, Armstrong!”
She walks on with her cane.
I’m going to count the number of black people who don’t mug me just to show Charlie Ross how crazy it is to fear us all.
Charlie
I was wrong about the distance to Armstrong’s house. It’s more like fifteen miles.
Armstrong
“Say, Ross,” I tell him the next morning before school, “know how many black people I passed yesterday?”
“No.”
“Forty-two. Know how many put a gun to my head?”
“How many?”
“Zero.”
That’s all I’ve got to say to Charlie Ross today.
Charlie
“Is it because he’s black?”
“What?”
Dad’s in the driveway, washing Mom’s car. She’s been going out more often lately. You can tell by the whitewalls.
I walk over to the bucket and lift out the sponge. I start soaping up the hood.
“Is that why you don’t want me to go over to Armstrong’s house?”
“I told you, it’s the neighborhood. Crime rates are higher down there.”
Dad dips the pad in sudsy water, wrings it out, and scrubs some more. Then he stops and looks at me.
“I can’t help it, Charlie. Now when I see a black man coming toward me, my heart beats fast. My hands turn to fists. They don’t unclench until he’s gone.”
“But, Dad, you don’t feel that way around all black people. You don’t feel that way around Nathaniel and Gwynne.”
“I told you, I’m not comfortable with you going down there. There’s nothing more to discuss.”
He goes back to scrubbing. All the way through the S.O.S pad to his bare hand.
Friday at lunch, I eat alone. Armstrong eats alone. Shelley eats at a table with Alma and Dezzy. I wait for her to crumple up her bag and throw it away.
“Can I talk to you?” I ask.
“Talk,” she says.
I glance over to the secret path behind the building, where we used to disappear together to be alone.
Under our oak tree, I tell Shelley about what I saw happen to my dad and what it’s been doing to Armstrong and me. She doesn’t say anything, just listens. But when I get to the end, she reaches out and takes my hand. For the rest of lunch, we just sit there like that, holding hands. Sometimes we let go to wipe our palms on our jeans. But then our hands come right back together again.
When the bell rings, Shelley says, “Maybe it’s not up to your mom and dad, Charlie. Maybe it’s up to you.”
After school, the buses are lined up in the yard and the drivers are stretching their legs. I walk past Mr. Orr’s small square-backed bus and stand next to the long Crown bus with a rounded back, rumbling engine, and hydraulic brakes. The kind of enormous magical vessel that we only get to ride when there’s a field trip.
When nobody’s looking, I get on that bus and sneak down the aisle to the last seat. I crouch down and hide.
I’m going on a field trip of my own.
· 17 ·
Charlie in the House
Armstrong
AFTER WE PICK UP the Opportunity Busing students at other schools, the bus is loud and full. We’re heading down La Cienega to the freeway when I look out like I always do to see if I can spot Papa Ross in the window at Ross Rents. He’s there, all right, helping an old man find the right-fitting wheelchair to ride. I lift my hand to wave at him, but he’s too busy to see.
On the Santa Monica Freeway we head east toward downtown. Air whistles through the windows. Conversations quiet down. People got their bobble heads on.
One of the high school girls just got mad at the boy behind her. He won’t quit playing with her hair. She goes past me on her way to the last seat.
That’s when she screams.
“MR. SIMMS, THERE’S A WHITE BOY ON THIS BUS!”
“Say what?”
“There’s a white boy on this bus!”
Mr. Simms puts on the hazard lights. He pulls the bus over to the side of the road. A sign says EMERGENCY PARKING ONLY.
Guess whose head pops up from behind the last seat.
“Young man,” says Mr. Simms, “I think you’re on the wrong bus.”
“It’s the right one today,” Charlie Ross says. “I’m going over to my friend’s house for dinner.”
“Is your friend on this bus?”
“That’s him right there.”
He points me out like I’m in a lineup.
“Why aren’t you sitting together?”
“We’re in a fight,” Ross says.
“And you’re going over to his house to make up?”
“Yep.”
Everybody on the bus laughs. Everybody but me. Then Mr. Simms asks Charlie Ross if has a permission slip from his parents.
“Sure I do,” Ross says.
“Let’s see.”
“Yeah, Ross,” I say, “let’s see the permission slip from your parents authorizing you to be my friend.”
Ross digs into his jeans and pulls out a candy wrapper, a stick of Juicy Fruit, and a dime.
“It was here this morning.”
“Maybe you�
��d better put him off the bus, Mr. Simms,” one of the boys from Hollywood High says. “Make him walk home on the freeway.”
“I’ll put him off the bus at Holmes along with the rest of you. Then we’ll make a phone call.”
Charlie
“What’s your phone number?”
We’re standing in the office at Armstrong’s old school.
“It’s 625-3131,” I say, my eyes aimed at the countertop.
Mr. Simms dials and gets a busy signal.
Armstrong stands behind me, a thin smile on his face, while the bus driver dials again—and again—and gets the third busy signal in a row.
“I got to get home to my own kids now. You sure they said you could go over to his house?”
“It’s no big thing, Mr. Simms,” Armstrong says. “We’ll call again from my house.”
“Tell me that number again.”
“It’s 625-3131.”
He dials one more time. Busy again.
“You walk him straight home now, you hear?”
“I’ll run him there, sir.”
Mr. Simms goes.
When we’re outside, Armstrong says, “You’re lucky they’re on the phone.”
“They’re not on the phone,” I say. “I gave Mr. Simms the number he was dialing from. Automatic busy signal.”
Armstrong can’t hide his smile.
Armstrong
It’s a ten-minute walk from Holmes Avenue Elementary to my house. I can see Ross’s head turning from side to side like he’s terrified. The late afternoon sun is making our shadows long. They look like twins, twelve feet tall.
“Look out, Ross. There’s a couple of black men.”
“Where?”
“Right in front of us. Two tall ones on the sidewalk.”
“That’s just our shadows.”
“Well, you’re acting like you’re afraid of your own.”
I throw my arm around his neck and pull him into a headlock. Our shadows bunch together like a single giant walking on four legs.
Charlie
We come to two rows of two-story apartment buildings facing each other across a dry lawn. Some clotheslines are up with shirts and jeans hanging out to dry. A breeze lifts the sleeve of a sweatshirt. It looks like it’s waving hello.
“The buildings all look the same,” I say, more or less thinking aloud.
“Oh, now you’re being racist about the houses, too.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you mean. You think all these project houses look alike. Well, maybe on the first white glance they do. But look at that red shirt hanging out to dry, Ross. That’s Amber Williams’s favorite T-shirt. I told you I know what time she takes it off in the evening. And see that bike with training wheels? It used to be mine, but we gave it to Kaditha Edwards when her son Brian turned five. That barbecue there belongs to the Taylors. Every Sunday afternoon we can smell what they’re having for dinner.”
He points to a corner apartment. In the window, I see a barking dog.
“That’s Patches. He’s not allowed on the couch, but he gets up there anyway to see me come home.”
We walk closer to that unit. Armstrong pulls out a key on a cord from under his shirt. He unlocks the door, pushes it open, and kneels to greet his dog.
“Patches!”
Patches wags his tail and licks Armstrong all over the face. But when he sees me on the front step, he starts to growl.
“Quit it, Patches,” Armstrong says. “That’s Ross and he’s all right.” To make me feel better, he adds, “He barks at Otis, too.”
“Patches is a good boy,” I say in my dog voice. He comes up and sniffs my hand. His tail wags, so I step inside.
“We’ve got two bedrooms. My parents stay in one and my five sisters in the other.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Right here. After nine o’clock, the living room belongs to me. That’s my couch-bed, and there’s that TV I told you about.”
Just then, a voice cracks into the room like a whip.
“Son, get on in the kitchen!”
Patches’s tail goes stiff between his legs as a man on crutches steps into the living room from the hall. He’s got one leg on the ground. The other one disappears into a flap of fabric on his pants.
“Daddy,” Armstrong says, “say hello to Charlie Ross, the boy from my school.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, young Mr. Ross,” his father says, “but your friend and I have some business to discuss in the kitchen.”
Armstrong leads the way and I follow. Behind us comes the boom-creak, boom-creak of his father’s step.
In the kitchen Mr. Le Rois stabs one crutch toward an artificial leg leaning against the wall.
“Now go on and say what you see.”
“I see your artificial leg, Daddy.”
“Say what you see in front of it on the floor.”
“I see a puddle of water.”
“That’s not water.”
“Looks like water to me.”
“If that’s water, why don’t you kneel down and drink some?”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Everybody can work up a thirst for a little drink of water. Go on. Lean over and lap it up. Like a dog.”
Armstrong crouches in front of the puddle, leans his nose toward it, and sniffs.
“That’s not water,” he says.
“Know what it is?”
“Urine.”
“Yours?”
“No, sir.”
“Mine?”
“No, sir.”
I can see Armstrong’s lip start to quiver, but he doesn’t dare laugh.
“Is that a twitch, or you about to bust up at your own daddy?”
“Twitch.”
Mr. Le Rois’s eyes lock on to his son’s.
“It was a twitch, Daddy. I swear.”
“Down and give me five, just in case.”
Armstrong makes two fists, drops to the floor, and does five pushups on his knuckles. Each one brings his face an inch from the puddle.
“Now, I expect we know whose urine it is, don’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Patches is his name, that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your dog has lifted his leg on mine.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“Not half as sorry as you’ll be if you don’t run along and get the Windex.”
Armstrong bolts down the hall to a bathroom, leaving me alone with his dad. Mr. Le Rois stands there leaning on his crutch, studying me with those steel eyes.
“Teddy Le Rois,” he finally says, putting out his hand. I shake it and hear my knuckles crack.
“Your father serve in the Korean War?” he asks.
“No, sir,” I say. “World War Two. In the navy, sir.”
“Wounded?”
“No, sir.” I can’t help it. He’s just the kind of man you have to call sir. “They were on a patrol ship in the Pacific when we dropped the bomb and the war ended.”
At this point Armstrong’s dad leans forward on his crutch, his face coming into the light over the table, and he looks at me. Practically through me.
“You’re wondering about my leg, aren’t you?”
I am, but I don’t dare admit it.
“I was a commander with the Seventy-seventh Engineering Corps, one of the last all-black divisions in the army. And I can tell you that black or white, new soldier or old, we were all scared. Nobody went to Korea prepared for that. They had the Chinese fighting along with the North Koreans. They came at us by the thousands, came at night while we slept. First with their bugles. Then with their bullets.
“We joined with the Twenty-fourth Infantry at the first American battle victory of the war. Needed to make a bridge across the Yechon River. Me and my boys set to building it, and we were almost to the other side when them bugles started spitting brass. It was an ambush and we didn’t have cover. Didn’t have reinforc
ements, either. The enemy lost two hundred fifty-eight men that day. We lost two. Two men and a limb.
“Do you know how many black soldiers were serving in 1950, while we were still segregated?”
“No, sir.”
“A hundred thousand.”
“Know how many were serving by the end, when they let black and white serve side by side?”
I shake my head.
“Six hundred thousand, many of them volunteers. What’s that tell you?”
“People try harder when they’re treated the same?”
“Now you know why we sent our boy to your school.”
I nod. I know it’s more polite to just listen than to ask questions. But there’s one thing I’ve got to know.
“But … how do you fight now?”
“I don’t. Uniform’s hanging in the closet.”
“I mean, professionally, sir. In the ring.”
“The ring?”
“Aren’t you a kickboxer, Mr. Le Rois?”
“A one-legged kickboxer? Whatever gave you that idea?”
Just then, Armstrong comes back with a bottle of Windex and some rags. He kneels down and starts spraying and buffing the floor. His father watches him work.
“Soon as it’s dry you can give me twenty-five.”
“What for, Daddy?”
“Talking about your daddy is a kickboxer. What in the world is going on in that head of yours?”
Armstrong gives me a look that previews the ass-kicking I’m in for.
Then Teddy Le Rois surprises us both. He sinks to the ground, supporting himself on his knuckles and his one leg, and brings his face level with Armstrong’s.
“Let’s you and me do them pushups together.”
They go down together and come up together, down together and up. After six pushups, Teddy Le Rois says, “You wish I had both my legs, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Armstrong answers.
“So do I, son. But I’m not sorry I fought for my country. Even if my country doesn’t always fight for me. Understand?”
Armstrong nods, and they do a few more pushups. Their eyes never leave each other.
“What am I supposed to put down on the school form? Under ‘Father’s occupation’?”
“You can put down that I’m the Man of the House.”
“That’s a job?”
“Yes, it is. It means while your mama’s out earning the money we need to live, I’m at home, minding your sisters and you. That’s something you can be proud of, Armstrong. At the end of the day, not every boy’s got a daddy waiting on the other side of the door.”
Armstrong and Charlie Page 17