suit over a soiled white shirt with tail out, dress shoes with tassels. Tassel fringes poked out every which way. The outside edges of the heels were worn down to slivers. When Lester came back to the bench, the newcomer followed, sitting between us, by the boy’s pack.
“You come here all the time, don’t you?” he said. “I know, I see you. Started me thinking what I had that you’d like.” He spent the next half-hour pulling various items from his bags and offering them to Lester, a plastic clock with one hand, a pair of white earth shoes gone fish-belly gray, a sandwich bag of paper clips, rubber bands and gum erasers, whether with a thought to profit or as gifts never becoming clear; I’m not sure he knew. Lester would tell him he wasn’t interested and the man would talk for a few more minutes about people in the neighborhood, where he’d obviously spent his entire life, about this one who had been arrested or was in the hospital or that one who had suddenly attacked family members with a crowbar or electric carving knife, before starting up again with “I’ve got just the thing for you” and dipping back into his bags.
“Can’t use it, sorry,” Lester said for the twentieth or thirtieth time.
“I understand, I understand.” He sat quietly for a moment looking off towards the line of palm trees across the street, then towards the fence where the boy still stood immobile. Messages might come through at any time, from any source, any direction. “That’s your boy, right?”
Lester nodded.
“Fine young man. I know, I watch him here, I can see that. They
Chapter Seven
Back in basic, over near Mobile, they put me in a barracks full of white men not altogether reconciled to their new living arrangements. Working beside us was one thing. These weren’t, after all, your educated, privileged young white gentlemen-most of those one way or another got out of serving-so it’s not like they weren’t used to working on farms or in factories or loading trucks alongside Negroes. They’d even got used to using the same bathrooms. But this, sleeping beside us, eating every meal with us, this was something else again.
I’d lie in bed at night after lights-out watching the play of shadows from palm trees on the wall and listening to the wind. It seemed to me that summer that the wind was coming in off the beach always, rushing breathless towards us from somewhere else, washing up in great waves like the tides themselves.
A few days before my own wave peaked, I had watched them grab one of the other blacks, a slow, slightly backward, ever-friendly boy from Texas, out behind the latrine. He’d been lipping off to them, they said-and beat him badly. I had seen it happening, then gone on by, and hadn’t stepped up to them on it. I was still worrying over that, trying to find a place inside myself I could put it. But if I did step up to them, I kept telling myself, they’d only come for me next. At that point I hadn’t learned that it didn’t matter, they’d most likely come for me anyway.
They did, maybe two weeks later, about two in the morning. I heard the springs on one of their beds, then the other, and could follow their progress towards me by the creaking of floorboards. I lay unmoving, one arm hanging off the side of my bunk. Outside, a sudden gust of wind caught in the trees and bounced like a thrown ball from branch to branch.
Moments before they reached me, I jumped to my feet. The radio my mother had just sent me came along; I swung it on its cord in two quick circles above my head before crashing it against that of the nearest of my attackers. I heard the crunch of something internal, radio, head, giving way. The man went down and didn’t move.
Turning to the other, I pulled out the antenna I’d taken off the radio earlier and with a flick of my wrist extended it. I went at him with it as though it were whip and foil in one, slashing, slashing again. Deep cuts opened on the hands he held up to try and protect himself, on his face, on neck and arms. When he began backing away, I went with him, never letting up, slashing, tearing. He tripped, tripped again and this time couldn’t catch himself, falling backwards against the wall.
Thanks, Mom.
During all this, no one else in the barracks had moved or spoken. Now a voice from the far end said: “Those boys through?”
“They be done with, all right,” another said.
Then the first again: “You okay, Griffin?”
I said I was.
“That’s good.”
A pause. I could hear my heart thudding. “Right shame those boys had to tear into each other that way. Who’d have thought there was bad blood between them? Always looked to be close. Just goes to show.… Guess we’d best get the sergeant in here, tell him what happened. Reckon they’ll be in stir awhile.”
Chapter Eight
A few days later, I was able to tell Don: “You look like shit.”
I don’t know why I had been thinking about that incident back in basic on my way to see Don. Just musing on mayhem in general, maybe. Or sending telegrams to myself in code. Sometimes memories are like dreams, artifacts of unknowable civilizations falling into ruin even as you approach them.
Santos had come in with me, then after a few minutes’ badinage left us alone. Don was in one of fifteen glassed-in rooms set like petals of a flower around a central nurses’ station. Phones rang unrelentingly at the station, buzzers and mysterious, unsettling pneumatic sounds came from other rooms, snatches of conversation ricocheted off walls and ceiling.
“Well, that’s some comfort, at least. Good to know I look better than I feel.”
“You’ll want this coffee.” I set the cup down by him. “And today’s newspaper.”
“You could have saved yourself the trouble-”
“-and brought last week’s, I know.” It was an old joke with us: they’re all the same. “Doctors tell me you’re going to live.”
“Ah, still more reassurance. Interesting … They look to be happy with this news?”
“Hard to say. Consensus seems to be you’re one thoroughgoing, uncooperative son of a bitch.”
“All because I told that male nurse I couldn’t use a bedpan, never had been able to use a bedpan, and if he brought the damn thing in here one more time I’d put it away for good where no one would ever find it. You could tell he was giving it some thought.”
“On the other hand, they probably figure that means they’ll eventually get rid of you.”
Don sipped tepid coffee. “My God, that’s wonderful. You forget all the small things, don’t you? Take them for granted. Taste of coffee, or the feel of clean sheets against your skin. When maybe in the end they’re what’s important, what stays with you once most of the rest is gone.”
I sat by his bed. “You’re going to be okay.”
“We always are, you and me.”
“Way a philosopher friend of mine once put it, we carry our okay with us.”
He laughed. A tube went from the upper part of his left chest to a plastic box sitting on the floor beside his bed. When he laughed, valves of some sort fluttered in the box, making a sound like grasshopper wings. Don looked down at the box. Then he laughed again, at a different tempo and rhythm. “Hey, maybe I could learn a few tunes while I’m lying here.” He shifted on the bed. Plastic mattress covers crinkled. “Feel like something from a horror movie, all these tubes growing out of me.”
“Ze pain, it ees not-ing. Endure it, Herr Valshman, endure it in ze knowledge that zoon jew vill be … more than human.”
Don finished his coffee and set the cup down with a soft click.
