by Kyle Minor
All I can do is go someplace else, to that band room, to Wednesday mornings, 6:30 am, where I am singing—where we are singing—the words of the prophet Isaiah: You shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you. There will be shouts of joy, and all the trees of the fields will clap their hands, will clap their hands.
That, and this: I will grow up to become a person who will be able to make things like this not happen to other people. And I will tell this story. This story. I will make sure everyone knows.
And here I must interrupt the thoughts of my twelve-year-old self to tell you, reader, that I did not grow up to become a person who could keep things like this from happening to other people. And until this moment, this moment I am sharing with you, I did not grow up to tell this story. I tried, a few times, and less and less as years went by, to tell this story. But no friend ever wanted to hear this story. The past, they would say, is the past. Or: That was a long time ago. Get over it. Or: Nobody likes victim stories. And, most often, they would say nothing at all. They would just be very quiet—I could tell, always, from the looks on their faces, that I had made them very uncomfortable by sharing even the opening words of this confidence. I had revealed myself to be a very, very strange and disturbed individual.
I stopped trying to tell the story. I grew up, instead, to become a preacher. Briefly a preacher. Less than two years a preacher. And while I was a preacher I was befriended by a Palm Beach Gardens city worker, a meter reader named Tony Griffin, and it is important to know that Tony Griffin was black and that he was especially sensitive to racial issues, and that I was not—trained as I was, at this school, to not believe in any kind of legacy of racism in America, to believe that any talk of race was necessarily a crutch, an excuse used by black people unwilling to work hard, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and all that. Tony and I had a falling out over this very issue. He was part of a small group of single people in their twenties and thirties who met at my house on Thursday nights to pray and read the Bible and play video games, mostly Madden Football ’99, on my Sony PlayStation. And Tony was sure that the people in the group—all of them white but him—had turned against him because he was black. I was convinced that this charge was completely unfounded, and conceded that possibly the others were growing impatient because they disliked his habit of interrupting the PlayStation games to put kung fu movies in the VCR. So we broke off our friendship, Tony and I, over race and video games and kung fu movies. And then I quit being a preacher, decided to be a writer, lived in my car for a while.
I kept a cell phone, though, and one afternoon two years later it rang—I was near Orlando—and I saw Tony Griffin on the caller ID, and I answered and was glad to hear his voice until he said, “I’m calling because I have leukemia.” And then I was making trips to West Palm Beach every couple of months to visit him in Hospice. And then we had another falling out. I didn’t know that leukemia was a disease of the immune system, and I had a cold, and I came to visit, and I coughed as I walked through the door, and Tony threw a cup of red jello at my head and said, “Motherfucker! You come in here with a cold!” I left the room as fast as I could and closed the door behind me, and I heard something else hit the door, and then: “I don’t ever want to see your ass again until I’m dead and you’re standing over my wooden box.” I honored his wishes for a year, and then his niece called and said, “Come quick, he’s got two days.”
I walked into the room. He lay on the bed. His family was gathered there, waiting. He asked them to leave the room. He said, “No one will be straight with me. Am I going to die?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
He said, “Bring me a mirror.”
I did, and he looked at himself for a long time, and then he said, “You ever see those pictures of the Ethiopian babies starving in the ditches?”
He bore a striking resemblance.
He said, “You see me, don’t you?”
I nodded. I couldn’t talk. What could I do? I crawled into the bed with him. He was naked beneath the hospital gown and he had shit himself and some of the shit got on my pants. I held him for a while, and then he said, “You were right about the kung fu movies.”
And I said, “No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t right about anything.”
This was death talk we were talking.
Then he said something extraordinary. He said, “I’m still praying for a miracle. I’m still believing for a miracle.”
I did not want to tell him so I didn’t tell him what I had learned, what life had taught me, which is there’s no such thing as miracles. God doesn’t probably answer our prayers.
After we said our goodbyes I left and knew he only had another day, probably, and it was not information I was equipped to handle. I hadn’t cried since I was thirteen years old and received the last of my beatings from McKinnick. I had hardened myself so I wouldn’t cry anymore, and then I couldn’t undo it when I needed to undo it. So there I was, driving in my Chevy Corsica down Interstate 95, a little bit of Tony’s shit still on my pants, just a little black stain, the little bit I couldn’t get off with the hospital bathroom’s hand soap and sink water. I was still trying to burn into memory what it was like to hold him and feel his flesh hanging like rags from the scaffolding of his bones, and to feel like if I held him too tightly I might break those bones and that it wouldn’t take much at all. Not being able to cry made it all so much worse. The tightness in my chest was almost unbearable and I needed to somehow loosen the tightness, and even though the air conditioner was making the car uncomfortably cold, I felt a terrible heat in my chest and neck, and the veins in both temples were throbbing so hard I thought the vessels might burst. I pulled the car off on the side of the interstate, near a Jupiter neighborhood called The Heights where an ex-girlfriend still lived with her parents, their house a hundred feet or so from where I was sitting. I wanted to see her. I got out and scaled the six-foot chain-link fence separating neighborhood from interstate. My pants snagged on the fence and ripped a little, and I walked to her house and rang the doorbell. She wasn’t there, but her mother answered the door and asked what was wrong and I told her that Tony was dying, and she said she was very sad and very sorry and wished she had time to talk about it but she had to be off to a birthday party.
And then I scaled that fence again, and ripped my pants some more, and that made me angry, ripping my pants. A state trooper a quarter mile away turned on his blue lights and raced toward me. I was standing beside the Chevy Corsica in ripped, shit-stained pants, my chest tighter, my neck hot, a shooting pain running down my left arm, watching the state trooper’s blue lights parading like fun-house ghosts against the front of my shirt.
The trooper opened his door and stepped out, and then he looked at me, and I looked at him, and I saw that he was Drew McKinnick. I could feel the beating of my heart through my body. I could all but hear the ringing in my ears, and those old, familiar words: “You need to get some humility, boy.” But then I could see that he wasn’t Drew McKinnick. He only bore a striking resemblance. The same cold intensity in his eyes, same square jaw, same dog teeth.
A couple of years earlier, a state trooper had pulled my brother over on a dark road—he was still in high school and wore his hair long—and yanked him out of the car by the arm and threw him over the trunk and threw him around a little, asked him if he knew what happens to people who hit cops.
My officer, when he got a closer look at me, puffed out his chest, straightened to his full height. He asked what I was doing climbing the fence by the interstate. He was almost grinning. What passed between us was not unfamiliar. It was a flash of mutual recognition, the thing that two individuals of certain types immediately know about each other. Minor and McKinnick. I felt very small.
I told him I was having a hard time and I had stopped to see a friend. I said I knew I should not have climbed the fence. I said I would be glad to get back in my car and be on my way. I asked if
he’d let me. I said I was very sorry. I was ready for him to throw me around, knew he would.
He waited a long time. He did not ask for my driver’s license, and this troubled me. Whatever was going to happen between us was going to happen off the record. His nostrils flared when he breathed. He breathed hard. Each breath was like a calculated blow to the stomach. He put his hand on his holstered pistol. He looked into my eyes, measuring. I could not return his stare and shifted my focus to a fixed space beyond his shoulder, the white of the sky. “What happened to your pants?” he said, and I did not want to mention the fence. He seemed to find pleasure in my discomfort. He put his other hand on my shoulder and leaned over me so I had to look up again to meet his eyes. I told him I had ripped them on the fence. At that he grinned again, the predatory grin. His fingers dug into my shoulder. He said, “I don’t want to see you on the side of this interstate again. That’s a warning. I only give one. You understand?” I nodded. He sniffed the air, made a sour face. “Do yourself a favor and take a shower,” he said. He gave my shoulder one last squeeze, then a little shove as he let go and walked back toward his patrol car and got in and waited for me to drive away.
I stepped into my car and drove away, and he followed me all the way to the Indiantown Road exit, and then I exited and he kept going north. I pulled into a service station, and then I began to sob. Present or not, Drew McKinnick had undone what he had undone. I could feel him in the presence of the cop. His joy at intimidation. Somehow I had made it possible. My ears were ringing though they had not been slapped. Somehow I still carried McKinnick around inside me. I cried for a long time, and if I said that I was crying for Tony dying, that would be true, but it would also be a very, very small portion of the truth. Mostly, I was crying for the twelve-year-old boy standing beneath the starfruit tree on the asphalt path and waiting for his beating.
When I had cried all I could cry, I started the car again. I dug through my cassette tapes and found one that Tony had given me, as a joke. It was Parliament/Funkadelic’s Greatest Hits. We used to listen to that tape in the car all the time. I liked it more than he did.
I was listening to George Clinton go through the ministrations of “Atomic Dog”—Why must I feel like that, why must I chase the cat?—and then I was singing along, falsetto: Nothin’ but the dawg in me.
The cell phone rang, and I knew it must be my brother—he was in Nashville auditioning for a six-month touring gig playing bass guitar for a well-known country singer—and I didn’t even check the caller ID display. I answered and said, “Dr. Funkenstein here!”
And the voice on the other end was not my brother. It was Tony’s niece. She said, “Kyle?”
I said, “Oh, oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.”
“It’s Tony,” she said. “He’s dead. He died a few minutes ago. I knew you’d want to know.”
I didn’t want to know. If this, dear reader, was a story like the kind I’d like to write, maybe there would have been a miracle. Most likely, Tony would die, but something else miraculous would happen. There would be a turn toward beauty that would reflect the joy-from-sadness in the prophet Isaiah’s words, the comfort: You shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace.
But I can’t do it. Not this time. At the funeral, when the other men who had been Tony’s pastors gave their portion of the eulogy, their words were full of comfort and hope. They were able to assure his family that Tony was in a better place, that he was, in fact, in heaven, with Jesus and the angels, held close to the bosom of God. But when it was my turn, I had no comfort or hope left to give. All I could say was that I loved Tony, and that he loved me, and that he was a stubborn and intractable person, and that I was, too, and that I believed, truly, that Tony had found his greatest joy in watching kung fu movies. That was all I could say. And when I was done, I stepped down from the only pulpit from which I had ever preached a sermon, and I walked past the altar, and down the steps, and down the aisle, and through the back doors of the church, and I have not been back since.
THE TRUTH AND ALL ITS UGLY
1.
THE YEAR MY BOY DANNY TURNED SIX, my wife Penny and me took him down to Lexington and got him good and scanned because that’s what everybody was doing back then, and, like they say, better safe than sorry.
He was a good boy and never got out of hand until he was seventeen years old and we got out of hand together. Around this same time Penny kept saying she was going to leave and stay with her sister in town. She said it enough that we stopped believing her, but the last time she said it, she did it. I remember the day and the hour. Friday, September 17, 2024. Quarter after five in the afternoon, because that’s what time her grandmother’s grandfather clock stopped when I kicked it over.
Danny heard all the yelling, and he came running downstairs and saw her standing there with her two suitcases and looked at me like I ought to do something. “Goddamn it, I’m not going to stop her,” I said.
“It’s your fault she’s going,” he said.
Penny hauled off and slapped his mouth. “I didn’t raise you to talk to your father that way,” she said, and at that moment I was of two minds, one of them swelled up with pride at the way she didn’t let him mouth off to me.
It’s the other one that won out. I reached back and gave her what she had coming for a long time now. I didn’t knock her down, but I put one tooth through her lip, hit her just hard enough so she would come back to us when she was calmed down.
She didn’t come back, though, and she didn’t go stay with her sister, who claimed not even to know where she was. One week, two, then on a Saturday me and Danny had enough. We hauled Penny’s mother’s pink-painted upright piano out the front door and onto the porch and then we pushed it off and picked up our axes from by the wood pile and jumped down on it. “You got to be careful, Danny,” I said. “There’s a tension on those strings that’ll cut you up bad you hit them wrong.”
It was pure joy, watching him lift that axe and drive it into that piano. Up until then his head was always in books or that damn computer. Dead trees, I’d tell him, got not one thing on milkweed and sumac, horsemint and sweet William. But now I wasn’t so sure, and now he’d caught on. “It’s what you do with the dead trees,” he said, like he was reading my mind.
I don’t know what came over us after that, and it’s not enough to blame it on our getting into the whiskey, which we did plenty. Penny had a old collection of Precious Moments figurines handed down from her own mama and grandmom. Children at a picnic, or playing the accordion to a bunch of birds, or hands folded in prayer, and nearly every little boy or girl wearing a bonnet. At first Danny said we ought to shoot at them—we had everything from assault rifles to a old Civil War service revolver that I’d be afraid to try firing—but then one Tuesday morning—by now it was November, and the old dog pens were near snowed under—he found some of the yellowjackets I had caught in glass Mason jars and forgot about. He found them dead in there and I saw him looking at them and he saw me watching but didn’t say anything, just went upstairs and came down with my old orange tacklebox, which was where Penny kept her scrapbooking things.
“You gonna scrapbook those yellowjackets, buddy bear?” I said.
He said his plan was to shellac them. He couldn’t near do it right, and I said, “Here, let me show you how,” and showed him how to thin the shellac with turpentine and dab it on soft with the paintbrush bristles, which was something I knew from when things were better with Penny and I’d help her with her scrapbooks just so we could sit with our legs touching for a while.
He got good at it fast, and then we caught more yellowjackets and did what Danny had in mind all along, which was shellac them stiff, wings out like they were ready to fly, and set them on the Precious Moments figurines in a swarm.
After a while that stopped being fun, and it kind of took the shock away when every Precious Moment in the house was swarmed like that, plus we were running out of yellowjackets. “We got to get more minim
al,” Danny said, and I could see what he meant. It’s like when I served my country in the African wars. You get to see enough dead bodies and after a while you get used to seeing them, and then you see another and it don’t mean one thing to you. But you run into one little live black girl with a open chicken-wire wound up and down her face and maybe three flies in her cut-up eye, that gets to you.
So after that, we got strategic. We’d put three yellowjackets right by a brown marbly eye, eye to eye. Or one, stinger first.
Nobody but us had got to see what we had done to the Precious Moments until a few days later when Benny Gil, our postman, came by with the junk mail, and Danny saw him and invited him in for a glass of water, and he saw what it was we were doing with the wasps, and he said, “Son, that’s sick,” but he was smiling when he said it, and it was then I knew he was a person who could be trusted. Up until then, he’d always been asking about my methadone, which I got regular from the pharmacy at St. Claire’s Hospital in town, on account of my back pain. He wanted to get some off me because he could trade it for other things he wanted.
This day I asked him, “Why is it nobody writes letters anymore?”
“It’s a general lack of literacy,” he said, and we started laughing because everybody knew that wasn’t why.
“It’s the government,” Danny said, but he was just repeating what he always heard me say, and I wished he wouldn’t get so serious in front of Benny Gil.
“They’re spying,” Benny Gil said, “listening in on us right now,” but he wasn’t serious.
“Best be careful,” I said, because now was a time to keep it light. “Benny Gil here is on the government teat.”
Benny Gil took a sip of his water and smiled some more. “That one,” he said, “and maybe a couple two or three others.”
Danny caught on. “It’s you we saw across the creek there, in the tall grass.”
“I been watching,” Benny Gil said. He leaned back in the wooden chair, put all his weight on the back two legs. I could see by the look on Danny’s face he was still thinking about how Penny would say not to lean back like that because it could put another divot in the wood floor, which was the kind of not important thing Penny was always worried about. There was a thousand or more divots in the wood floor, and by now another one just added a little extra character.