Boy's Life (72 page)

     A red car pulled up. The blond-haired angel switched on a smile to the driver. The other girls crowded around, their eyes bright with false hope.

     I didn’t like what I saw, and Princey guided me on.

     In a doorway, a man in a denim jacket was standing over a woman sprawled in a doorway. He was zipping up his pants. The woman’s face was a pulped mass of black bruises. “There you go,” the man said. “Showed you, didn’t I? Showed you who’s boss.” He reached down and grabbed her hair. “Say it, bitch.” He shook her head. “Say who’s boss!”

     Her swollen eyes were pleading. Her mouth opened, showing broken teeth. “You are,” she said, and she began to cry. “You’re the boss.”

     “Keep going, Cory,” Princey told me. “Don’t stop, don’t stop.”

     I staggered on. Everywhere I looked, there was only mean concrete. I saw not a hill nor a trace of green. I lifted my face, but the stars were blanked out and the night a gray wash. We turned a corner and I heard a clatter. A small white dog was searching desperately through garbage cans, its ribs showing. Suddenly a hulking man was there, and he said, “Now I’ve got you” as the dog stood staring at him with a banana peel in its mouth. The man lifted a baseball bat and slammed it down across the dog’s back. The dog howled with pain and thrashed, its spine broken, the banana peel lost. The man stood over it, and he lifted the baseball bat and brought it down and then the dog had no more muzzle or eyes, just a smashed red ruin. The white legs kept kicking, as if trying to run.

     “Little piece a shit,” the man said, and he stomped the skinny ribs with his boot.

     Tears burned my eyes. I stumbled, but Princey’s hand held me up. “Move on,” he said. “Hurry.” I did, past the carnage. I was about to throw up, and I fell against a wall of rough stones. Behind me, Franklin rumbled, “Da kid’s too far from home, Princey. It ain’t right.”

     “You think I
like
this?” Princey snapped. “Numb nuts.”

     I came to the edge of the wall, and I stopped. I seemed to be looking into a small room. I could hear voices raised in argument, but only a boy sat in the room. He was about my age, I thought, but something in his face looked older by far. The boy was staring at the floor, his eyes glassy as the arguing voices got louder and louder. And then he picked up a sponge and a tube of glue, the kind my buddies and I put plastic models together with. He squeezed glue into the sponge, and then he pressed the sponge over his nose and closed his eyes as he inhaled. After a minute he fell backward, his body starting to convulse. His mouth was open, and his teeth began to clamp down again and again on his tongue.

     I shivered, sobbed, and looked away. Princey’s hand touched the back of my head, and drew my face into his side.

     “You see, Cory?” he whispered, and his voice was tight with strangled rage. “This world eats up boys. You’re not ready yet to shove a broomstick down its throat.”

     “I want to… I want to…”

     “Go home,” Princey said. “Home to Zephyr.”

     We were back at the railyard, amid the whistles and chugs. Princey said they’d go back some of the way with me, to make sure I caught the right train. Here came a Southern Railroad freight train, with one of its boxcars partway open. “This is the one!” Princey said, and he jumped up into the opening. Franklin went next, moving fast on those big old shoes when he had to. Then Ahmet, his cracked flesh puffing dust with every step.

     The train was picking up speed. I started running alongside the boxcar, trying to find a grip, but there was no ladder. “Hey!” I shouted. “Don’t leave me!”

     It began pulling away. I had to run hard to keep up. The boxcar’s opening was dark. I couldn’t see Princey, Franklin, or Ahmet in there. “Don’t leave me!” I shouted frantically as my legs began to weaken.

     “Jump, Cory!” Princey urged from the darkness. “Jump!”

     The tons of steel wheels were grinding beside me. “I’m scared!” I said, losing ground.

     “Jump!” Princey said. “We’ll catch you!”

     I couldn’t see them in there. I couldn’t see anything but dark. But the city was at my back, part of the world that ate up boys.

     I would have to have faith.

     I lunged forward, and I leaped upward toward the dark doorway.

     I was falling. Falling through cold night and stars.

     My eyes opened with a jolt.

     I could hear the freight train’s whistle, moving somewhere beyond Zephyr on its way to that other world.

     I sat up, next to Davy Ray’s grave.

     My sleep had lasted only ten minutes or so. But I had gone a long way, and come back shaken and sick inside but safe. I knew the world beyond Zephyr wasn’t all bad. After all, I read
National Geographic
. I knew about the beauty of the cities, the art museums, and the monuments to courage and humanity. But just like the moon, part of the world lay hidden. As the man who had been murdered on Zephyr earth lay hidden from the moonlight. The world, like Zephyr, was not all good and not all bad. Princey—or whatever Princey had been—was right; I had some growing up to do before I faced that monster. Right now, though, I was a boy who wanted to sleep in his own bed, and wake up with his mother and father in the house. The apology to Leatherlungs still stuck in my craw. I’d hack through that jungle when I got there.

     I stood up, under the blazing stars. I looked at the grave, sadly fresh. “Good-bye, Davy Ray,” I said, and I rode Rocket home.

     The next day, Mom commented on how tired I looked. She asked if I’d had a bad dream. I said it was nothing I couldn’t handle. Then she made me some pancakes.

     The apology remained unwritten. While I was in my room that evening, my monsters watching me from the walls, I heard the telephone ring four different times. Dad and Mom came in to talk to me. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Dad asked. “We didn’t know that teacher was raggin’ the kids so hard.” He was, as I’ve said before, familiar with being ragged.

     One of the callers had been Sally Meachum’s mother. Another had been the Demon’s mustachioed mater. Ladd Devine’s dad had called, and Joe Peterson’s mother. They had told my parents what their kids had told them, and suddenly it appeared that though I was certainly wrong for flying off the handle and whacking Leatherlungs’ glasses off, Leatherlungs herself was responsible for some of this.

     “It’s not right for a teacher to call anybody’s child a blockhead. Everybody deserves respect, no matter how old or young they are,” Dad told me. “Tomorrow I believe I’ll have a little talk with Mr. Cardinale and straighten this thing out.” He gave me a puzzled look. “But why in the world didn’t you tell us to begin with, Cory?”

     I shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think you’d take my side of it.”

     “Well,” Dad said, “it seems to me we didn’t have enough faith in you, did we, partner?”

     He ruffled my hair.

     It sure was nice, being back.

3
Snippets of the Quilt

DAD DID GO TO MR. CARDINALE. THE PRINCIPAL, WHO HAD already heard rumors from the other teachers that Leatherlungs was a burnt-out case two bricks shy of a load, decided that the time I’d spent away from school was enough. No apology was necessary.

     I returned to find I was a conquering hero. In years to come, no astronaut home from the moon would feel as welcome as I did. Leatherlungs was cowed but surly, Mr. Cardinale’s shrill admonitions ringing in her brain like Noel bells. But I had done my share of wrong, too, and I realized I ought to admit it. So, on that day I returned, which was also the last day of school before Christmas vacation, I raised my hand right after roll call and Leatherlungs snapped, “What is it?”

     I stood up. All eyes were on me, expecting another heroic gesture in this grand campaign against injustice, inequality, and the banning of grape bubble gum. “Mrs. Harper?” I said. I hesitated, my grandeur in the balance.

     “Spit it out!” she said. “I can’t read your mind, you blockhead!”

     Whatever Mr. Cardinale had told her, it obviously wasn’t enough to persuade her to hang up her guns. But I went ahead anyway, because it was right. “I shouldn’t have hit you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

     Oh, fallen heroes! Idols with feet of miserable clay! Mighty warriors, laid low by flea bites between the cracks in their suits of armor! I knew how they felt, in the groans and stunned gasps that rose around me like bitter flowers. I had stepped from my pedestal and pooted as I hit a mudhole.

     “You’re
sorry?
” Leatherlungs might have been the most stunned of the lot. She took off her glasses and put them back on. “You’re
apologizing
to me?”

     “Yes ma’am.”

     “Well, I… I…” Words had fled from her. She was treading the unknown waters of forgiveness, trying to find the bottom of it. “I don’t… know what to…”

     Grace beckoned her. Grace, with all its magic and wonder. The grace of a moment, and I saw her face start to soften.

     “…say, but…” She swallowed. Maybe there was a lump in her throat.

     “…but…
It’s high time you showed some common sense, you blockhead!
” she roared.

     It had been a lump of nails, obviously. She was spitting them out.

     “
Sit down and get that math book open!
”

     Her face had not softened, I thought as I sighed and sat down. It had just been luffing like a sail before its second wind.

     In the hollering madhouse that was called lunch period, I noticed the Demon sneaking out of the lunchroom as Leatherlungs was blasting some poor boy about spending his lunch money on baseball cards. She returned about five minutes later, sliding into her chair near the door before Leatherlungs knew she was gone. I saw the Demon and the other girls at her table giggle and grin. A plot was afoot.

     When we were herded back to our room, Leatherlungs sat down at her desk like a lioness curling around a meatbone. “Get those Alabama history books open!” she said. “Chapter Ten! Reconstruction! Hurry it up!” She reached for her own history book, and I heard her grunt.

     Leatherlungs couldn’t lift the book up off the desktop. As everybody watched, she wrenched at the book with both hands, her elbows planted against the desk’s edge, but it wouldn’t budge. Somebody chortled. “Is it funny?” she demanded, the fury leaping into her eyes. “Who thinks that it’s fun—” And then she squawked, because her elbows wouldn’t leave the desk’s edge. Sensing calamity, she tried to stand up. Her ample behind would not part with the seat, and when she stood, the chair came with her. “What’s going on here!” she shouted as the entire class began to yell with laughter, myself included. Leatherlungs tried to shuffle to the door, but her face contorted as she realized those clunky brown shoes were as good as nailed to the linoleum. There she was, crouched over with her butt stuck to the chair’s seat, her shoes mired in invisible iron, and her elbows stuck fast to the desk. She looked as if she were bowing to us, though the expression of rage on her face hardly approved of the courtesy.

     “Help me!” Leatherlungs bawled, close to maddened tears. “Somebody help me!” Her cries for assistance were directed at the door, but the way everybody was hollering and laughing I doubted if even her foghorn voice could be heard beyond the frosted glass. She ripped the cloth of one arm of her blouse away as she got an elbow free, and then she made the mistake of placing that free hand against the desktop for added leverage. The hand was free no longer. “Help me!” she shouted. “Somebody get me out of this!”

     The upshot of all this was that Mr. Dennis, the black custodian, had to be summoned by Mr. Cardinale to free Leatherlungs. Mr. Dennis was forced to use a hacksaw on the tough fibers of the substance that bound Leatherlungs so firmly to desk, chair, and floor. Mr. Dennis’s hand unfortunately slipped during the hacksawing, and a patch of Leatherlungs’ rear end was thereafter in need of reconstruction.

     I heard Mr. Dennis tell Mr. Cardinale, as the ambulance attendants wheeled Leatherlungs away wheezing and gibbering along the holly-decked hall, that it was the most godawesome glue he’d ever seen. The stuff, he said, changed color depending on what it was smeared on. It was odorless but for the faint smell of yeast. He said Leatherlungs—Mrs. Harper, he called her—was mighty lucky she still had her hand connected to her wrist, the stuff was so powerful. Mr. Cardinale was enraged, in his flighty way. But no jar or tube of glue was found in the room, and Mr. Cardinale was stumped as to how any child could’ve been cunning and devious enough to perform such trickery.