The Obstacle Course

by JF Freedman

  That was it—I was sitting in this Negro church, surrounded by two hundred colored people, and I was happy. I felt good around these people, like I belonged, as much as I belong anywhere. I could see there were a lot of things about colored people that were good, maybe even better than some things about white people.

  And that got me to thinking, pretty deep. I don’t want to be colored, not even for an instant. I wouldn’t wish being a nigger on my worst enemy, not even Danny Detweiler, but I felt comfortable here, in a weird way better than I sometimes do back home, with all the crap going on there. What I realized was, all the bullshit I’d heard all my life about Negroes was just that: bullshit.

  Even though it was night there was still some pink in the sky from the factory smokestacks that pump twenty-four hours a day. Everything was finished now—the service, the singing and testifying, the incredible meal, then more singing after the meal, which had been as much fun as any of the other stuff, they sang all those old Negro gospel songs, and then while they were cleaning up the remains of the dinner everybody socialized with everybody else, old folks with kids, men with women, friends greeting friends.

  People headed home toting their empty plates, drifting off in groups into the darkness. Reverend Williams stood in the doorway, saying “Praise Jesus” and “God bless” to each of his parishioners as they left.

  Then only a few churchwomen were still there, doing the last of the cleanup. I helped out some; I ain’t too proud to sweep a floor or wash some dishes. It seemed the least I could do, after eating that bodacious meal. Burt was antsy, hopping from one foot to the other, wanting to get out of there; he’d had his fill of food and then some, he hadn’t been killed or any of that gruesome stuff he’d imagined, he wanted to be gone, right now.

  I hung back. I still wasn’t ready to leave.

  Reverend Williams said his last good-nights and walked over to us.

  “I trust you young men enjoyed yourselves, spending a few hours in the Lord’s company.”

  “Yeah,” I told him enthusiastically, “it was great, the churches we got at home you can’t even scratch yourself even if you’ve got an itch.”

  That tickled him. He smiled like I’d cracked a good joke.

  “Thanks, it was really nice,” Burt added dutifully. He turned to me. “We got to be going.”

  “Naw, there ain’t no hurry.”

  “We’ve got to be moving on, Roy, they’ll be expecting us.”

  The whimper was strong in his voice again, I could almost hear the tears.

  “Who’s expecting us?” I asked him innocent-like. I didn’t want to be this way with him, I knew I shouldn’t be, he was looking to me for protection, and I was fucking him over. I didn’t want to, I really didn’t, but I couldn’t help myself.

  Nervously he replied, shooting the reverend a look: “You know, down in Texas and all.”

  I scratched my nose—I had come to a decision. “Why don’t you go on ahead?”

  He didn’t understand what was happening. Reverend Williams looked at us, from Burt to me and back.

  “Go on,” I told Burt, “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  I wasn’t leaving. That’s the way it was.

  Burt looked like he might cry.

  “Go ahead if you’re going,” I told him irritably.

  Burt looked at me like he’d never seen me before; then he started down the sidewalk, his head hanging low like he was on his way to the electric chair.

  Reverend Williams stood over me. “Shouldn’t you be joining your brother?” he asked with concern. He placed his big hand on my shoulder.

  “He’s not my brother.” I had to tell someone the truth, I’d been living in this bullshit too long, I had to get rid of it. “We don’t have a grandmother in Texas, either. I made all that up.”

  “I know that,” he said. He did, too, he’d known it from the get-go, I knew it now; I knew everything. “But still,” he continued, “you don’t want to be leaving him.”

  “Yes I do, too. All he wants is to go home.”

  “You should go home with him,” he instructed me.

  “I don’t feel like going home,” I pleaded. “Why can’t I stay here with y’all, just for a few days? Then I’ll go home. They don’t care anyway, I won’t be no trouble to you, I promise.” I was begging as hard as a puppy in a pound but I didn’t care, I didn’t want to leave—I couldn’t, I wasn’t ready.

  Reverend Williams regarded me for a minute.

  “You can’t stay here any longer, son.”

  That was that. We stared at each other in silence for a moment—then he ushered me out the door and closed it firmly behind me.

  I slowly walked down the steps. About a block away I saw Burt, waiting for me.

  We walked down a residential street like the one we lived on back in Ravensburg; white, working-class, common. It was after midnight. The street was dark, empty, lifeless.

  “I’m tired of all this walking,” Burt said. He was tired of everything, all he wanted was to be home, safe in his own bed.

  “Yeah,” I answered by rote. I didn’t care anymore.

  “Niggers,” he muttered.

  “What about ’em?”

  He gave me a look, like “you’ve got to ask?”

  “What about ’em?” I asked again. “You didn’t like that church service? You didn’t like that food? Shit, I thought it was great,” I went on, getting excited again, remembering it.

  “Yeah, you would,” he shot back.

  “How could you not’ve liked that?” I didn’t get it, I knew he was tired and scared, but he wasn’t brain-dead.

  “I hated it, okay?” He was almost yelling. “I hated being in that church, I hated eating that shitty food, the only reason I did was because I was starving to death and if I hadn’t it would’ve pissed them off and I sure wasn’t about to do that. Nigger food, I feel like barfing it all up, I wouldn’t give a shit if they fed me T-bones from now till Christmas, it would still be nigger food. I hate niggers, you know that, I’ve hated ’em all my life with a passion and I always will.”

  “You’re nuts,” I told him.

  “Not me, man. Not me.”

  I was tired of arguing with him. I was tired of all his bullshit completely. I was flat-out tired.

  “Have it your way,” I said.

  He spat on the sidewalk and didn’t reply.

  There was a big Buick sedan parked at the curb. I walked over to it and tried a door. It was unlocked.

  “What’re you doing?” Burt asked in alarm.

  “Come on,” I told him, “get in.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  I climbed in and stretched out on the front seat.

  “We’ll be gone as soon as the sun comes up. Get in. I’m giving you the back, it’s roomier.”

  He didn’t have a choice; it was my way or the highway, and the highway wasn’t for him. Reluctantly, he climbed into the back seat and stretched out. I fidgeted around for a minute, trying to find a comfortable position. Just before I fell asleep I thought I heard a door opening somewhere, but my fatigue overwhelmed me, and within a minute I was dead to the world.

  I came awake with a start.

  The front door of the Buick had been yanked open. I looked around, squinting against the morning sun that was shining on my sleep-smooth face. Half a dozen cops were ringing the car. Burt hung behind them, unable to look me in the eye.

  “I couldn’t help it, Roy,” he whimpered, pleading for forgiveness, “I’m sorry.”

  It was over.

  “That’s okay.”

  I had no malice towards him. He’d done what he had to do.

  FOURTEEN

  THE RIDE HOME ON Trailways took twenty-three hours. Burt’s folks wired us the money. We didn’t say one word to each other the whole trip.

  Mr. and Mrs. Kellogg were waiting at the bus station, which is downtown near the cheap bars and girlie shows, where Burt, this sniveling mama’s boy standing next to me, an
d I would sneak in to look at magazine pictures of big-titted women.

  What the fuck, I thought. He’s just a kid, like me. He showed his emotions more is all. Years of bitter lessons had taught me to bottle mine up. That was the only real difference between us.

  Mr. and Mrs. Kellogg stood back from the bus ramp, holding hands and looking anxious. Burt started towards them, dragging his ass, afraid to look them in the eye, figuring his old man would take half his ass off for openers, but they didn’t have that angry look in their eyes; they looked real happy and relieved to see him. Mrs. Kellogg was crying, you could tell from clear across the floor. As soon as he saw the tears in his mom’s eyes Burt ran over to them. She snatched him up like he was a baby and gave him a big hug. His old man patted him on the head awkwardly, like he wanted to hug Burt, too, but was embarrassed about doing it in public.

  My folks weren’t there. I didn’t figure they’d be.

  “We told your mom we’d give you a lift home,” Mrs. Kellogg told me, looking at me with an awkward stare while at the same time wiping her face with a handkerchief, like she didn’t know how she should be with me. They were all teary-eyed, even Mr. Kellogg, who’s normally a pretty tough customer.

  I nodded. I was acting nonchalant about the whole thing. I wasn’t looking forward to being home. The trip had been incomplete for me, unfinished. And I wasn’t much looking forward to my encounter with my old man, either.

  We walked out of the bus station to their car. I lagged behind, feeling out of it, wishing we’d taken separate busses so I wouldn’t have to watch their mushy shit.

  Mrs. Kellogg turned back to me. She gave me this lame smile.

  “I almost forgot. Your mother asked me to tell you they went over to the Eastern Shore to visit Easter with your grandparents.”

  She was embarrassed, telling me. I’d been gone for more than a week, the whole world had probably figured I was dead, and my parents hadn’t even waited for me to come home, they’d just carried on with their lives as if I didn’t exist.

  The Kelloggs dropped me off in front of my house. I got out of the car.

  “You’re welcome to stay with us, Roy,” Mrs. Kellogg offered. She said it because she had to.

  I looked in at Burt, sitting by himself in the back seat. He was staring out the far window.

  “No thank you, ma’am.” I slammed the door shut. “See you around, Burt,” I told him through the open window.

  “Okay.” He didn’t turn to look at me.

  They drove away. I watched until they were gone, then I walked up the front sidewalk and let myself in.

  It was hot inside; the windows had been shut and locked, the curtains drawn. The air was heavy and still, like in a funeral home.

  A note from my mom was propped up on the kitchen table with a ten-dollar bill attached to it: “We have gone to Grandma’s for Easter vacation. Here is money for you to take the bus there.”

  I stuck the money in my pocket and threw the note in the trash.

  There were odds and ends of food in the fridge. I was hungry as a bear—me and Burt hadn’t eaten anything but a Clark bar apiece on our bus trip, because the money his folks had wired had barely covered the fare. I fixed myself a four-egg western omelette and fried up a couple pork chops to go with it, along with half a loaf of toast. I was starving; as I scarfed down the food I thought of the meal we’d eaten in that church down in Chattanooga. The last supper, before it all ended.

  I cleaned the kitchen, washed and wiped the dishes and pans, put everything away. I hate a dirty kitchen, if I was going to be on my own for a few days until they got back I could at least live in a clean house, for a change.

  What I needed more than anything was a hot bath, something to soak all that road dirt and fear off my body and out of my mind. I walked upstairs, stripping my filthy clothes as I went, balling everything up to chuck in the hamper.

  I opened the door to my room.

  It was a shambles. If the worst tornado in the world had gone through it, the damage couldn’t have been worse. All my models, every single one, lay scattered all over the floor, smashed to bits.

  The only things I cared about in the world had been destroyed. My father’s work.

  I was numb as I stood there, surveying the carnage. Then I turned and walked out, closing the door behind me.

  May

  FIFTEEN

  I WORE A T-SHIRT to school. T-shirts are supposed to be against the rules, along with tight-fitting jeans, pegged pants, full-on duck’s-ass haircuts, and about a million other petty rules. They’d been pretty lax about enforcing the rules this late in the year, though, especially with ninth-graders—the teachers were all looking forward to graduating our disruptive behinds and moving on with next year’s class, which had a bigger share of pussies and not as many bad-asses. It’s a bitch, what things are coming to; Ravensburg has always been known as the baddest of the bad, the end of the line, so to speak, but pretty soon it’s going to be just another sorry junior high, no tougher or ornerier than a junior high in Montgomery County or Virginia.

  To really flout authority, I had my smokes rolled up in the left sleeve of my shirt, which is strictly verboten, getting caught with a pack of cigs in your sleeve is automatic detention or worse, which it would be in my case, given my history of behavior, and it could even award me a trip to Boyle’s inner sanctum, if I was super-lucky I might wind up with another paddling. Give my old lady a chance to doll up and come down, flash some thigh at Boyle like last time. The least I could do for her; to say we weren’t getting along very well, after my trip down south and all, would be the understatement of the century. At this point I didn’t give a shit about any of it, I just wanted the year to end, to be shed of all this crap, take it easy over the summer and have a fresh start in senior high.

  I wasn’t going to be a complete asshole about it, though; when I got inside I’d stash the Marlboros in my locker. But I was in a dark mood, that was for shit-sure, if there was a teacher outside who spotted me, I’d pay the price. You pays your money and you takes your chance, as I always say.

  “You’re taking your life in your hands, Poole, wearing that stuff,” Mary Jackson, a charter member of the big-tit contingent, cat-called at me as I strolled up the front steps.

  “Like I could give a shit.”

  “Tough guy,” she said, smiling uncertainly at me. She’s not much in the looks department, Mary, but big tits cover a lot of sins, as my old man likes to point out. Big tits, a tight pussy, and her own bottle of Four Roses, that’s his ideal kind of woman.

  Speaking of my old man, we haven’t. They came home a few days later, he cracked “look what the cat drug in,” like nothing in the world had happened, and left it at that. No ass-whipping, no threats, nothing. He’d already done the damage and he knew it, anything more would tarnish the deed.

  My mom and Ruthie had been pretty shook up, asking me a million questions, wanting to know why it’d happened, trying to get a handle on it, like was I kidnapped against my will or something, to explain away why I had left, and more importantly, why I hadn’t called all that time. I didn’t give them any satisfaction, it was something that happened was the way I put it, now it’s over. My lips were sealed, which was the only way to get through it, because if I’d told them the truth, that I wanted out of the family, and why, it would’ve at first hurt their feelings something awful, and then they might’ve found a way to accommodate me, send me away for good, and not to anyplace I’d be wanting to go.

  So I kept my big trap shut for once, and after a few days the incident faded. But since then they’ve treated me differently, like I was some alien creature from outer space. That was fine by me; the more space they gave me the better I liked it. I was living in the house, but for all intents and purposes I was on my own. Training for the future.

  There were a whole bunch of kids milling around the front, talking and arguing. Burt and Joe were two of them. I nodded to them, they nodded back. Nothing more. Things are d
ifferent now, we don’t have that same old relationship we did before, no more Three Musketeers. That had ended back in the junkyard, when Burt and I had abandoned Joe. The real bitch of that affair had been that after the junkyard watchman had caught Joe he had threatened him all kinds of ways, scaring Joe so bad he liked to piss his pants, so he told it, but then the guy just kicked Joe’s ass out of the yard and told him to keep out, permanently, which Joe was more than happy to do. When Burt heard that story from Joe he about had a heart attack, ’cause if he had stuck with Joe back there like he’d thought of doing that’s all would’ve happened to him. It was another reason for him to have a hard-on against me, for putting him through a bunch of needless and scary shit—needless and scary for him, not for me of course. I was glad of what had happened, every bit of it.

  It was a shame, the three of us breaking up, but that was water under the bridge. Maybe we’d get back tight again, maybe we wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.

  “What’s going on?” I asked nobody in particular.

  Stevie Worrell, this small, nervous redheaded twerp who has more energy than any other kid in the school, jumped up, practically in my face. There’s something about teensy redheaded kids with freckles that makes them hop around like Mexican jumping beans. He’s been that way since first grade, and his sister, who’s in seventh grade, is just like him.

  “Ain’t you heard the news?” he shouted, right into my ear. “It’s been all over!”

  “What news?” I asked.

  Mary was standing next to me. Her tits, stuck in one of those wired-up bras that push them up to a girl’s chin, poked me in the side. Not much of a feel, but better than nothing.

  “Don’t you watch TV? It was all over the TV last night.” She was right in front of me, practically using her tits as a battering ram. Her face was all flushed, like she was excited. Maybe she liked me, I thought, I’d hardly noticed her before, even though we’d been in class together for three years. Could do worse—not as anything steady, of course, but for one or two dates it might be fun, those big squishy titties.