All American Boys (5 page)

The next morning, when I woke up from it all, there was my mother, sitting in a chair on the other side of my hospital room, staring out the window.

“Ma,” I said, instantly wincing. I could feel the gauze taped to my face, to my nose. It's that same tight feeling my skin gets after swimming, after the chlorine has turned me into
cardboard. I cleared my throat and called out for her again.

She whipped toward me, sprang from the chair, and dashed over to my bedside as if I was about to deliver my last words.

“Rashad,” she said, her voice full of all the motherly stuff. Worry and love and hope and fear. “Oh, baby,” she repeated, rubbing her hand on my forehead gently, her voice cracking. “How you feelin'?”

The truth was, I was feeling two ways. Physically, I obviously didn't feel great, that's for sure. But not terrible. Not like I thought I'd feel. But maybe that was the drugs doing their thing. I did feel some soreness, though. My breathing was weird and uncomfortable. Every breath felt like a hundred tiny needles sticking me in the chest. And that was breathing through my mouth. Breathing through my nose wasn't an option. Not yet, at least. But I was okay. Hell, I was alive. And so the other stuff—well, the alternative was way worse.

The other way I was feeling was just . . . confused. I mean, I hadn't done anything. Nothing at all. So why was I hooked up to all these machines, lying in this uncomfortable bed? Why was I arrested? Why was my mother waiting there for me to wake up, dried tears crusted on her face, prayer on her breath?

“I'm okay,” I said.

She sat on the side of the bed. “Listen, I need you to tell me what happened, Rashad. And I need you to be honest with
me, okay?” But before I could answer, my father came into the room, making a not-so-grand entrance. He had two cups of coffee, and even though one was for my mother, my dad's face looked like he could've used them both. And maybe a third. But him being tired didn't stop him from preaching.

“He up?” my dad asked my mom, handing her a cup. He hadn't even looked at me yet. If he had, just for a second, he would've noticed my eyes were open, a sure sign of me being awake. My mother nodded, almost as if she were giving him the green light to acknowledge me.

“Rashad.” He said my name the same way he said it every other day when he was waking me up for school. As if nothing was wrong. As if he wasn't broken up by the sight of me lying in bed, black and blue and taped and bandaged and tubed and connected to machines monitoring whether or not I was actually still breathing.

“Hmm,” I grunted.

“Help me out here, son,” he said in his normal voice, which was his asshole voice. “I need to know what the hell you were thinking, shoplifting. Shoplifting? And from Jerry's of all places?” Dad had that disappointed look on his face—the same face he used to give me before I joined ROTC, the same face he made whenever he talked about Spoony.

“I didn't steal nothin',” I said, suddenly feeling too tired to explain, even though I just woke up.

“Well then, why did the cops say you did?” Dad replied, narrowing his eyes and taking a sip of his coffee. A slurp.

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?” Dad scoffed. “Really, Rashad? You don't know?”

I felt a cough coming on and did everything I could to pinch it back, knowing that if I let it out, my entire body would feel like it was being hit by a million tiny hammers on the inside. I managed to get it down to a single, closed-mouth grunt, and guess what? It didn't matter. Every bone still seemed to tremble, and my head suddenly felt full of helium.

“No, I don't know,” I repeated after getting through the cough.

“Look, baby, just tell us what happened,” my mother said, calming my father down as usual. “From the beginning.”

I started the story but didn't get very far before the nurse came in, interrupting everything with breakfast.

“Good morning,” she said in a singsongy way after a light knock on the door. My mother greeted her pleasantly. My father forced a hello.

“Got you some oatmeal, and some orange juice, and a little bit of fruit cocktail.” The nurse set the food on the tray by my bed. “Is everything else okay?”

“What's your name, hon?” my mother asked.

“Clarissa.”

“Clarissa, everything is fine, thank you,” Ma said. “But do you think we can raise the back of the bed up just a little, so he's not lying so flat?”

“Of course,” Clarissa said, sliding the tray away and coming to my side. She pulled out a remote that was wedged between the mattress and the frame. With the push of a button, the bed started to reposition, which meant my body started to reposition, which meant . . .
ooooouch!

“Is that good?” Clarissa asked. I just nodded, which was hard to do because now my chin was smashed into my chest. I had literally been folded up.

She moved the food tray back so that it was close enough for me to reach, and after telling us that the doctor would be in shortly, she left, and my mother helped me situate myself on the bed so that I could look and feel normal. As normal as possible. Normal enough for my father to get back to business.

“So walk me through this, son. You got to the store . . .”

“I got to the store, just to get gum and chips. I picked the bag of chips I wanted, and then I bent down and dug in my bag to try to get my phone so I could call Spoony. This lady didn't see me squatting behind her, and tripped over me. Then I lost my balance, and the bag of chips went flying. The cop assumed I had done something to the lady, which I didn't. The dude who works the register looks up and thinks
I'm trying to put the chips in my bag, but I wasn't. Then the cop rushed me and yoked me up all crazy.” I paused, then added, “And that's it.”

My mother sat quietly and my father paced back and forth, from the door to the window. Ma was clearly horrified. But Dad, he had on that
Son, you aren't telling me everything
look. It was clear that to him, I had to have done something wrong to bring this on.

“Were your pants sagging?” Dad interrogated, now back over by the door.

“Were my pants sagging?” I repeated, shocked by the question. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Oh, it matters. If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck . . .”

My mother glared at him. “David! This is your son we're talking about. The boy's never even been suspended.”

“But they don't know that,” Dad said. “What they see is what he presents. And it sounds like he presented himself as just another—”

“Another what?” Ma cut in again, this time her voice spiking to that
Don't start
level. Dad swallowed the rest of his statement.

“Well, they said you resisted arrest,” he continued in another direction. “If you didn't do anything wrong, why would you resist arrest?” His voice began to rise. “And how
many times have I told you and Spoony, I mean, since y'all were young we've been going over this. Never fight back. Never talk back. Keep your hands up. Keep your mouth shut. Just do what they ask you to do, and you'll be fine.”

That was another one of those way-too-familiar songs Spoony and I were forced to sing when we were kids. Every time Dad said it, it was always the same. Just like the army talk. But this one was even worse, because it had a rhythm to it, like a poem, or a chant. Never fight back. Never talk back. Keep your hands up. Keep your mouth shut. Just do what they ask you to do, and you'll be fine.

“I know, I know. And I did all that,” I said, running through the scenario in my head again. “I didn't fight back; I couldn't. And I didn't say jack besides trying to explain that I hadn't done nothing wrong, but before I could even get a word out, he was all over me.”

“You couldn't have,” Dad said, matter-of-fact. He looked at me as if he didn't know me and shook his head. As if he was disappointed. As if I asked for this. That really pissed me off. That really, really got me going, because I was being blamed for something I didn't do, not just by that stupid store clerk and that asshole cop, but also by my father. A burning sensation rose in my chest and stomach, the fractured ribs sizzling. My eyes began to water with frustration.

“I did.” My voice shattered in my throat and came out
pitchy and emotional. “You don't gotta believe me. But I did.” I turned my head away.

You know who did believe me? My brother Spoony. He showed up a few minutes later, after working an overnight shift at UPS and catching a quick nap. And let me tell you, when he arrived, he was full of fire.

First was the obligatory mother hug. Spoony ran over to our mom and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Made sure she was all right. Then came the “Dad.” That's all Spoony said to him. Just an acknowledgment of his presence. It's not that he was beefing with our father or that they didn't get along—I take that back. They really didn't get along. They just couldn't see eye to eye on most things. Dad was all about discipline and believed that if you work hard, good things happen to you no matter what. Of course, part of working hard, to him, was looking the part, dressing the part, and speaking the part, which Spoony didn't really vibe with.

Spoony had, I don't know, maybe eight or nine locs sprouting from his head like antennae. Thick and matted like strips of carpet, but I always thought they looked pretty cool. Dad . . . not so much.
They'll think you're doing drugs,
he'd say. Spoony's clothes were always two (or three or four) sizes too big. That was just his style. That was pretty much his whole generation's style. Nineties hip-hop, gritty, realness. Wu-Tang. Biggie. Hoodies and unlaced boots.
They'll think you're
selling drugs,
Dad would say.
Why can't you get a haircut? Why can't you dress like a respectable adult? Why can't you set an example for your brother? Huh, son? Why?
And because Spoony was tired of explaining himself, and Dad was tired of asking him to change, they kept their conversations short and sweet. Like Spoony greeting him, “Dad,” head nod. Followed by Dad saying, “Spoony,” head nod. And that was that.

Spoony came over to my bed.

“Li'l bruh, you good?” he said, something grape-flavored on his breath.

“I'm good.”

“What happened?”

I started running the story down and got about halfway through, just up to when the cop pressed me, when Spoony lost it.

“See?” he said, looking around to our parents. “See? This is that bullshit! I'm so sick of them treating us like we animals. Like we America's disobedient dogs!”

“Calm down, Spoony,” Ma said, which only made it worse.

“Calm down?
Calm down?
” Spoony's voice got significantly less calm. “Haven't we been a little too calm? They get to do whatever they want to us, to him—to your son—and we're supposed to just calm down?” He put his hands on his head, flattening his locs, rocking back and forth in that way people do right before they punch a wall.

“Spoony—”

“And he was unarmed! Calm down? Do you know the stats? It's something like black people are twice as likely to have no weapons on them when they're killed by cops. Twice as likely! Should I run down the list of the people this has happened to? Calm down? Let's paint their names on the walls and watch, there'll be enough to give the entire hospital a fresh new look. Then tell me to calm down. He could've been killed!”

“But he wasn't,” Dad said, deadpan. He seemed totally unimpressed by Spoony's outburst, and probably wrote it off as theatrics. He was always calling Spoony a rebel without a cause.

“But he could've been! For a bag of chips that he was gonna pay for! For having brown skin and wearing his jeans a certain way. And guess what, Dad, that ROTC uniform was right there in that bag. The bag was open so that cop probably saw it. But did it matter?” Spoony's voice fanned, the anger breaking him down.

“That's enough!” Ma said firmly.

Dad and Spoony glared at each other until finally Dad turned away and looked out the window. Ma just sat on the bed, rubbing my hand, her eyes wet from it all. Spoony leaned against the wall. And I sat there thinking about what was going to happen to me. I know my father and brother were
arguing about what
had
happened, but all I could think about in that moment was what was going to happen next. Would the charges stick? Would they follow me around, a smudge on my record until I was eighteen when it would finally disappear? Does anything actually disappear these days?

The silence was much worse than the yelling, so I fiddled with the remote. The same one that controlled my bed controlled the television. I turned it on. Too bad TV sucks on Saturday morning unless you're a little kid or a politician. And politics are painful to watch. Boring. So the sound of helium-pitched cartoon characters had to be the life raft for this sinking ship of awkwardness. Thankfully, the doctor came in to save us from the equally awkward distraction of cartoons.

“Good morning, folks,” he said, full of cheer, which was weird because this was not a cheerful occasion. But I guess doctors always have to try to lift the mood. “I'm Dr. Barnes.”

“David Butler,” my father said, shaking his hand.

“Jessica,” my mother said, doing the same.

“Randolph,” Spoony said, introducing himself with his government name. He got the nickname Spoony because when he was young, he refused to eat with a fork. He was always scared he'd poke himself in the tongue, so he only ever used spoons. But that's not something you tell a doctor.

“And Rashad,” the doctor said, pointing at me. I nodded.
“Nice to meet all of you. I just want to give you all an update on what's happening and what's ahead of us.”

“Sounds good,” Dad said.