Response

by Paul Volponi

  I was already feeling a ton of pressure and I didn’t even think about saying something back.

  There was a night-light on in my room, by Destiny Love’s crib. The light was in the shape of a black angel with wings blowing a horn.

  I kissed my daughter on her forehead while she was sleeping. Then I wrapped my hands around the wooden bars of her crib, watching her chest rise up and down, breathing peaceful.

  It was just after midnight, and I set the clock-radio alarm on low for 6:00 A.M., to make the breakfast shift at those damn golden arches. My head hit the pillow and I was out cold. But at 3:31, Destiny Love shook me out of my sleep when she started crying for her bottle. Only that formula wasn’t enough. She needed me to hold her, too. And every time I put Destiny Love back down, she screamed like the whole world was coming to an end.

  I tried to leave her be. But I couldn’t.

  “Noah?” Mom called out. “You taking care of that?”

  “Right away,” I answered.

  Whenever Mom got woke by Destiny Love in the middle of the night, she’d say things like, “Now if I wanted more children I’d have had them myself,” or “I thought I’d get a longer break in between being a mother and a grandmother.”

  I had to walk the floor with Destiny Love on my shoulder for almost forty minutes, looking at the clock and trying to figure out how much more sleep I could get if I got back into bed that second.

  Finally, Destiny Love fell asleep. Then I laid her down in her crib and went back to bed.

  Less than two hours later, I woke up to the alarm, half dazed.

  I left Destiny Love sleeping and the door to my room wide open so Mom or Grandma could hear if she needed anything.

  But I’d got dressed in the dark and didn’t realize I put on a regular T-shirt and not a blue uniform shirt till I’d closed our apartment door behind me and was halfway down the stairs.

  CHARLIE SCAT

  (Alone in his cell doing sets of push-ups, sweating)

  Six feet by ten feet. Every time I pace it off, it’s the same.

  Cinder-block wall, cinder-block wall, cinder-block wall, and iron bars.

  A metal sink and stinking toilet bowl.

  For what? What did I do?

  Protecting the damn neighborhood. That’s all.

  They had to kill that fuck twenty years ago. I’m paying for that now.

  Locked down alone twenty-three hours a day, and one hour out for exercise. Like I can’t make it in here, because jail’s nigger country.

  Bring them on. Bring them all on. I don’t care.

  I’ll hold my weight.

  Come on. Another set. I can do it.

  Forty-one . . . forty-two . . . forty-threee . . . forty-fourrrr . . . forty-fiiive.

  Those black bastards couldn’t stay in the projects. They couldn’t keep themselves in East Fucking Franklin.

  Then they get their ass whipped and go crying to the cops.

  “Oh, it’s a hate crime. He hates me because I’m black.”

  What shit! Stay where the fuck you belong!

  And Tommy Rao. My friend—a rat, first class.

  Like he didn’t do shit that night.

  “Charlie, niggers were at Mario’s like they owned the place, eyein’ Joey’s chain. Let’s kick their asses back to the projects before more of them get ideas.”

  All because his father’s a cop. That’s why the special treatment.

  Fuck his whole scab family. I hope they run every Rao out of Hillsboro.

  Rat bastards, every one of them, out to save their own skin.

  No honor.

  Now I’m the fall guy. Well, fuck that.

  So if my dead father, rest his soul, was a detective, I wouldn’t be here. Right?

  Blue or black, that’s what you have to be in this city.

  I’ll stare laser beams through that punk if he ever testifies against me.

  The cops are probably trying to flip Joey against me, too.

  A setup. That’s all it is.

  My mother better mortgage the house to get that big-time lawyer. That’s all I know.

  Do it, Charlie. Do it. One more set. Watch those biceps pump up.

  Look at those guns, big boy.

  Forty-six . . . forty-seven . . . forty-eighhht . . . for-ty-niiiine . . .

  Chapter FIVE

  THE WEDNESDAY AFTER LABOR DAY, SCHOOL started up, and there were kids from Hillsboro wearing that FREE SPENELLI! T-shirt. Not a lot of them, but enough so I couldn’t miss it. I started wondering which other white kids thought the exact same way but didn’t have the guts to wear that shirt to school, or their parents wouldn’t let them.

  Some kids from Hillsboro were just the opposite and even told me things like, It’s wrong what happened to you. I’m ashamed the way some people from my neighborhood act. We don’t all think like that, Noah.

  I believed them, all right. But I wasn’t sure how many of those kids would really have my back if the shit ever hit the fan in front of them.

  Maybe they’d just take the easy way out, closing their doors and disappearing on me, knowing they’d have to face their racist neighbors every day after that.

  That’s the way Carver High was. Everybody seemed to play the lines already painted out for them. And few kids ever crossed them.

  My social-studies teacher was a light-skinned black dude named Mr. Dowling. All I knew about him was that some black kids called Dowling an “Oreo cookie”—black on the outside and white on the inside—because they said he played every racial thing at Carver down the middle and never really leaned over to our side much.

  I began to feel that way, too, when I complained to him about those T-shirts after class.

  “Remember, I’m supposed to be a teacher to all the students here,” he said. “I don’t agree with those stupid shirts. But it’s free speech. So you better get used to it and stay focused, Noah. Anyway, I shouldn’t discourage my students from taking a political interest in anything.”

  But maybe Dowling went home and took a long look in the mirror. Because when three white kids showed up to class wearing those shirts the next day, Dowling changed their seats. He moved every one of them to the back row and made me sit up front.

  “Just because you’re exercising your constitutional rights, that doesn’t mean Mr. Jackson should have to look at you all period long,” he told them.

  Those kids complained about it like anything, saying Dowling only did it because he was black, and that it was “reverse discrimination.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Dowling answered. “I’ll move any black students wearing that same shirt to the back row, too.”

  That put an end to all the arguing, right there.

  I was making up eleventh- and twelfth-grade physical education, after failing them both for being unprepared—coming to class without my gym clothes ten or fifteen times during those semesters, because I was lazy and thickheaded. So I had Mr. Hendricks, who’d already failed me once before, for a double period every day. And I almost couldn’t believe it when he gave students the okay to wear that FREE SPENELLI! shirt in place of the gold Carver High gym top, after a Hillsboro kid had asked him.

  “I don’t care what kind of T-shirt anybody wears as long as it’s clean. That’s my new policy,” said Hendricks, who’d lived in Hillsboro all his life. “I don’t find this one offensive. That’s just what some people in my community think. It’s an opinion. A few states down South still fly the Confederate flag over their capitol building.”

  I would have called Hendricks a racist to his face, but I needed to graduate on time.

  There were nearly one hundred and twenty kids in those two gym classes combined, and one of them turned out to be Charlie Scat’s cousin, Spanky.

  Spanky was built short and squat, and his head sat square on his shoulders, like he didn’t have any neck at all. Except for the extra weight that Scat carried, there wasn’t much difference between them. And I could have picked those two out of a crowd as
being related.

  Hendricks had set up a batting cage in the corner of the gym and was pitching softballs underhand to kids. Everybody had to take six swings apiece.

  He’d made me and Bonds go into the closet and drag out two big canvas bags. When I heard the bats rattling inside of them, I tensed up supertight.

  “I’ll take ten of you over here at a time, till everyone’s had a chance to hit,” Hendricks announced.

  When my group got called over, I stayed clear of every white kid with a bat in his hands taking practice swings.

  I was supposed to hit next, and Bonds was waiting right behind me.

  That’s when Spanky crashed our group, grabbing a metal bat with the letters R-E-S-P-O-N-S-E across the barrel, just like the one I got jumped with.

  But Hendricks never asked Spanky what he was doing, and he never told him to leave.

  “Come on, Teach. Lay a few watermelons over the plate for me,” said Spanky, tapping the bottom of both his shoes with the bat.

  Hendricks just smiled wide, lobbing one in.

  Then, as he nailed the first pitch, Spanky said, “Jamel,” like he was cracking somebody’s skull.

  “Jammal,” he grunted as the next ball exploded off his bat.

  Bonds got up closer behind me and I could feel his hot breath on my neck.

  Hendricks let go of another pitch with an easy motion.

  “Kareem of wheat,” said Spanky through the ping of the ball off the bat.

  I squeezed the bat I was holding, thinking I could choke the life out of him.

  He smacked another one, calling out, “Tyrone.”

  “Tyree.” He grinned on the next.

  Then Spanky smacked one last pitch, and said, “Tylenol—or whatever made-up medicine-chest names their mamas give ’em.”

  I wanted to really thump his ass. So did every other black kid who was listening, I could tell.

  “You’re up next, Jackson!” barked Hendricks.

  “Here, man. Try this one for size.” Spanky smirked, shoving the bat at me.

  I wasn’t about to back down from that bastard. So I dropped the bat I’d been holding. Then I grabbed the one from his hands, and could feel the heat in it.

  “Show him, Noah,” said Bonds. “Show him how we play East Franklin cracker ball.”

  Then some other kids from my hood started trash-talking, too.

  “Yeah, yeah, cracker ball, Noah!”

  “Rip a few Jimmys and Tommys!”

  “Whack a fat cousin Charlie!”

  I set myself at the plate and took a fierce practice swing.

  I could feel my mouth go bone-dry as Hendricks pulled his arm back.

  “You got nothin’,” said Spanky, low.

  Hendricks’s pitch floated up high in front of me.

  I set my feet and swung with all my might. But the pitch fell a half foot short of the plate. I hit nothing but air, and my arms wound up like a corkscrew with the bat nailing me hard in the back of the head.

  For a few seconds, I saw stars. And when I started to stagger, Bonds rushed in to hold me up straight.

  I heard Hendricks and Spanky laughing out loud.

  “That’s the way it’s gonna go for you in court against my cousin, Jackson,” laughed Spanky. “A big swing and a miss.”

  I changed my clothes in the locker room with every black face looking at me like I’d let them down. And that’s exactly how I felt, with a headache that pounded nonstop for the next couple of days to remind me.

  Two weeks later, I walked through our apartment door after school, and Mom had a serious look on her face. A grand jury had indicted Scaturro and Spenelli on hate-crime charges a few days before, but now the pressure was going to be building on me.

  “The DA called today, Noah,” she said. “The trial date’s set for three months from now, right around Christmas. But they say they need to start prepping you on all the questions you’re gonna hear and the answers you need to give on the witness stand.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked, my voice fading low. “What if those dudes just cop a plea?”

  I guess she saw my shoulders shrinking under that weight.

  “All you need to do is tell the truth,” Mom answered.

  “Then nothing can touch you. No matter what kind of mud the lawyers for the other side think they’re gonna throw.”

  I didn’t know if I believed that or not. I just knew I was tired of getting trapped in lies, like the ones I’d fed my family and Deshawna the night I went into Hillsboro.

  “And part of that truth is you need to do a lot of self-reflection, Noah,” Mom said, the anger building up in her voice. “Outside of these walls, I won’t give those racists a thing to hold against you. But your father and grandmother, and me—we don’t understand how it was you couldn’t tell right from wrong the night this all happened.”

  I knew it was coming. That I’d gotten off light for a while because of my skull. But when Mom finally let loose what she’d been holding back, I felt two inches tall standing in front of her.

  “I know it,” I said.

  “Is that what you want to teach your daughter?” she asked.

  “No,” I answered, feeling even smaller.

  “Because if it is, you didn’t learn a thing from us. Maybe we should have let the streets raise you up. That’s what people will think anyway by your actions. I should have saved myself the trouble,” Mom kept on. “The shame of it, a common car thief.”

  The DA’s office set up meeting times around my school schedule, but they didn’t give a shit about me missing hours at Mickey D’s. I never figured that pointing a finger at those racist bastards was going to put me in the poor-house and make me half a deadbeat with Deshawna and her dad.

  I complained about it. But one of the city’s lawyers told me over the phone, “We can’t worry over your work hours, Noah. It’s insignificant compared to this. You need to see what you’re going to face in court.”

  He could say what he wanted, but I knew he was collecting a paycheck much fatter than mine for just being there.

  My father used his vacations days with the transit authority and came along with me to every meeting.

  “I don’t trust anybody. Period,” Dad said. “You don’t know enough about life yet to challenge what they tell you as true. I wanna make sure you don’t become their boy, ’cause you was mine first.”

  The meetings were held at a downtown office building, with five city lawyers playing different roles to get me used to the feel of a real courtroom.

  They had a black woman lawyer, wearing sheer stockings and a skirt just over her knees, playing the part of Scaturro’s mouthpiece. She hooked my eye, smiling easy, and then she ripped off a bunch of stinging questions.

  “How many times have you been arrested?”

  “What were the charges?”

  “Had you ever stolen a car before and sold it to a chop shop?”

  “When did you decide to take up that illegal business?”

  I looked down at the floor and could hear the same snap in her voice as Mom’s.

  “Eyes up, Noah,” another lawyer coached me. “You look like you’re on trial here, and that’s what the opposition wants.”

  I was sweating up a storm trying to answer everything right, and they told me not to drink any water the next time before we practiced.

  “Excuse me. But the other side’s gonna have a pretty lady lawyer like this one knocking me down?” I asked.

  “Aaron Chapman’s the opposing counsel, Noah,” said one of the lawyers. “He’s an overweight white man with an appetite for chewing up witnesses and spitting them across the courtroom.”

  “See, Noah, I grew up in East Franklin with a mother and grandmother, too,” said the lady lawyer. “I know what kind of heat you’re probably used to catching from them. That’s a good start in standing up to a grilling in court. You just need to become better prepared.”

  There were four practice sessions altogether. And by the end of the
second one, I was speaking slow and steady without using any street slang, and I was looking the lawyers, who were sitting off to the side playing the part of the jury, in their eyes at the end of every answer that mattered.

  Dad didn’t say much in those meetings, but when he did he made sure the lawyers heard him.

  He said things like, “Calling my son a victim makes him sound weak. Don’t tell him not to stare too much at Scaturro. He’s got every right. Noah was the one who got beat, not any of you.”

  I was just starting to trust those lawyers a little.

  Then after our last session, we were waiting in the hall for the elevator. The doors opened wide and that Rao kid and his detective father stepped out. The lawyer who was bringing them upstairs knew right away he’d fucked up, and he got in between us all fast.

  “Nice to see your son when him and his racist friends aren’t trying to beat the black off one of us,” Dad said loud and strong for Rao’s father and everybody else to hear. “He learn that from the stories you told him about policing this city?”

  Rao and his father both dropped their heads, and Dad’s words were still echoing in that hallway after the two of them were hustled into an office.

  I could feel a fire starting in my belly at having to see those bastards. But my father seemed to just shake off whatever he was feeling.

  “Not a word about this to your mother,” he told me on the elevator ride down. “She don’t need to lose another night’s sleep out of frustration.”

  I agreed with him and wished it could be like that for me.

  We always took the subway home from the DA’s office together. My father would flash his conductor’s badge and ride for free. Anytime I ever rode the trains with him before that, he’d pull me through the iron gates right behind him, without paying. But he wouldn’t do it now.

  “You sure?” I’d asked, looking to save money.

  “We don’t need for some cop to stop us and have the newspapers call us crooks over two dollars,” he’d tell me. “So just reach your hand into your pocket and pay the fare.”

  After that last meeting, Dad saw one of his conductor friends working the doors from a little compartment on the train we were riding.