All-Bright Court (6 page)

So his father went. Before his hands had even opened, he was sitting before the principal with his hat on his knees and his head bowed. The fence had to be paid for.

Isaac sat quietly until the principal said, “It would be best to place your son in occupational education.”

“O.E.? No!” Isaac said. “I'm not going to a school for retards. I'm not riding the blue cheese.”

“Isaac, you be quiet when the man is talking,” his father reprimanded.

“I'm not going to no school for jellyheads.”

“Isaac, set there and be good,” his father said.

That was when the principal told Isaac he would have to leave the office. Isaac stood outside the door feeling as if he were going to throw up. He knew his record. He had failed the seventh grade once, and he was on his way to a second trip through the eighth grade.

That wasn't his fault either. He was bored. They were always trying to teach him things he did not want to know, and there were always tricks. He had to find themes in stories, and write thesis statements, and make paragraphs.

In seventh grade there had been sentence diagramming. That wrecked two whole years for him. Seeing a sentence all strung out, dangling from a line with parts of it sticking off of it like branches from a tree, made Isaac want to crawl out on one of those branches and hang himself from a particle, or article, or something. His teacher would put a sentence on the board like

 

When the black cat crept around the corner of the white fence, the brown and tan spotted dog gave chase.

 

and Isaac would say, “That dog stupid to be chasing a black cat. Don't he know black cats bad luck?” Then he would be asked to be quiet, to just do his work or leave the room.

And he was always being asked to draw three-dimensional pictures of boxes and rectangles, and to measure lines, and to find the area of a square.

 

If a man has 77 cords of wood, and his neighbor borrows 10 and burns them, only to discover he had 32 cords of wood in his own barn, how many cords would the man and his neighbor each have if the neighbor returned the wood he borrowed?

 

Isaac could not bear it. There were too many numbers and words thrown together. He would start wondering what a cord was, and why the neighbor borrowed wood if he already had wood, and why couldn't the neighbor borrow more wood than the man had? That was a real test for negative numbers. And why didn't the neighbor just chop down a tree in the first place, and how could the neighbor return wood that he burned, anyway?

He was thrown out of school for three days because of negative numbers.

Isaac knew very well there were negative numbers, but he wasn't interested in them. The teacher told him to think of them as money.

“They not money. If we going to talk about money, let's talk about money.”

“Well, O.K.,” the teacher said. She handed Isaac ten pennies, and Isaac put them in his pants pocket.

“Now let me have them back,” the teacher said, and she put out her hand.

“Naw, man. You a Indian giver. They mines.”

“Isaac, stop this. Work with me on this one. Give me the pennies.”

Isaac dug into his pocket and retrieved the change.

“See, now I'm in debt for ten pennies. I started with zero. Now I'm minus ten.”

“That ain't right. Them your ten pennies, and you took 'em back. Indian giver,” Isaac said.

“Maybe this will help,” the teacher said. She put the money in his pocket. “Let's pretend for a minute. Work with me now. Let's say you owned the pennies—”

“Then I was robbed,” Isaac said. “Talking 'bout give you the money. That's robbery where I come from.”

“Isaac, be serious. You have to let me help you.”

Isaac sighed. “All right.”

“Now, you owned the money, and then
loaned
them to me, and I spent them. Since I started with zero, I would owe you ten less than I have. Let's say then that my husband gave me twenty pennies, and I paid you back, how many would I have?” the teacher asked.

“Ten,” Isaac said.

“Very good!” the teacher bellowed.

But Isaac would have none of it. In a fit, he tore down the number line over the chalkboard and ripped it up. “Isaac crazy,” the students screamed, and then he got three days' suspension.

But as long as Isaac was quiet, his teachers didn't bother him. He asked to be excused almost every period to go to the bathroom, or get a drink, or blow his nose. He roamed the halls.

Down in the bowels of the school Isaac saw enormous furnaces that roared like dragons. In another part of the basement he found cots and cans of food, gigantic silver cans covered with dust. They were big enough to be eaten by monsters, he thought. Why, a monster could eat the cans whole.

Once a year the whole school went to visit the cots and cans. Isaac loved the air-raid drill. In case of a war, everyone would stay down there and eat the canned food and sleep on the cots. But there were only about fifty cots, and three hundred people could fit in the shelter. A yellow and black sign at the entrance to the shelter told you that. Isaac knew there were more than five hundred students in the school, plus teachers. Now
that
was a test for negative numbers. But he figured he wouldn't be one of those minuses. He wouldn't be less than zero. He would be the first one down there, slide right down the wooden banisters all the way from the third floor, and then sprint down the basement stairs. He would eat canned beef and powdered eggs until all the Commies were dead.

When Isaac was in the seventh grade for the second time, a white boy in the eighth grade, a boy no bigger than a ten-year-old, was caught stealing a can of food and was suspended for three days. He was one of fifteen children, and his family lived in a run-down house near the school. “Stupid Polack,” Isaac had said. “Greedy gut. What he want? For us to go hungry in a atomic war?”

Isaac had explored much of the universe by wandering the halls of the school. There were rats in cages, dead newts in jars, sewing machines, maps of other countries and globes that would bounce like balls, charts of the human body full of veins or muscles or bones, strange boxes in the girls' lavatories that read “Modess.” Isaac knew where the janitors ate lunch and when the oil delivery truck came. He knew if you turned the gas on high in the lab and then threw a lit match at it, you could blast your eyebrows and lashes right off of your face. He also knew that if you closed yourself inside a locker, you couldn't let yourself out, and that the fat dictionary in the library had nasty words in it. Isaac knew lots of things, all kinds of things. But still he was failing. That was what the principal was telling his father, that he was stupid, a loser.

Isaac was transferred the next week to the Occupational Education Center in Capital Park, despite his protestations. A tour impressed him, though he would not admit it. There were all kinds of shops, a machine shop, a woodworking shop, even an auto shop. He was told that he would spend half the day in shop and half in classes.

Isaac didn't mind the school that much. It was better than Roosevelt, really. During his first month there he hadn't been asked to diagram a sentence, to add or subtract negative numbers, to draw one geometric shape. In wood shop he learned how to drive a nail and turn a screw. He was even taught how to use a saw, not just the handsaw but the power saw too. He made his own tool box and a pencil box, and he had been allowed to burn his name into the side of each. Now he was working on a footstool for his father.

Isaac's English teacher was beginning to spoil things, though, with this Peter Pan thing. What did he want Isaac to say? He wrote what he felt, and now he felt wrong. Why couldn't you call Peter Pan a faggot? All Isaac knew was that if some boy with those fairy boots came through
his
window, talking about his shadow wouldn't stick to him, he would have beat him up. He would have pushed Pete right back out the window, just like he pushed Rick from the roof, and then he would watch him hit the ground.
Foop!
Pete would grow up then, some stupid white boy with fairy boots and a broken leg, and a shadow all balled up on the ground.

If he had been back at Roosevelt, this would have been the time to roam. During his first few weeks at the new school, Isaac had wandered down to the basement. He had heard sounds coming from one of the rooms there. What he heard sounded like animals, but when he peeked inside, he saw a room full of jellyheads.

They were sitting around some tables with teachers. Their bodies were soft and doll-like. Some were twisted and bent into unnatural positions, some strapped in wheelchairs, some wearing helmets.

One boy knelt in a corner, a helmet strapped to his head, and he was banging, banging, banging his head on the cement floor.

Isaac was staring at this boy when one of the children at a table pointed at him and began making noises. “Ooh ah coa ah coa ah,” Isaac heard him say.

A teacher turned to Isaac and smiled. “He's asking you to come in. Would you like to come join us?”

Isaac took off running, tripping as he climbed the stairs. He got up and kept running, not looking behind him, and he hadn't gone back to the basement since.

If a boy could really fly, these were the children he should take, Isaac thought. He should take these retards and dump them in Never Land.

7

J
UST WHEN
there were no more tears, he died. As she lay on the couch with the television playing to no one, he died again. Just when her eyes were closing and her tears were grains of salt in the corners of her eyes, she blinked, and in a splash of whiteness he died.

A pebble thrown into the ocean at noon, cold and white and hard, splashing water on her. Salty water drying, leaving white rings of salt around her swollen ankles.

“Mrs. Taylor, you should not eat salt while you're expecting. It causes swelling.”

But she was not a salt eater. It was starch she ate, boxes and boxes of Argo. What a country thing to do. She fed it to Mikey and kissed the whiteness from his lips before his father came home.

And she was no dirt eater, like some women in All-Bright Court, sending down south for boxes of earth to eat. She did not eat it when she was back home, even when the women sucked on it to cut their hunger and fed it to children like candy. She never ate it, though they said it was sweet. She ate starch because she was pregnant, sometimes a box a week, and it left her dry.

She had found out she was pregnant a few weeks before Easter when her mouth was searching for starch. It led her and Mikey across the field at the end of All-Bright Court and to the Red Store, a store the people named for its color, the redness of the bricks. Never did they call it Jablonski's Market. It was there in the Red Store that an old man was telling a story to the man behind the counter, a story of a snake.

The old man's cousin had been bitten by a cottonmouth. He was bitten on the shank, and he ignored it. But he had gotten sick some days later, boils rose on him, and a fever burned in his chest. Then the boils erupted, and cotton burst forth from them, cotton white and light as air. Black people ran from him, but some white men came from the state college, thinking he was going to die, thinking maybe they could figure out a way to farm cotton out of a nigger. They collected the cotton and measured it. But when the fever broke, the cotton dried up. The white men went away disappointed. The black people came around again. They didn't know if he had really been bitten by a cottonmouth. He could have ended up that way from picking cotton all those years. Maybe it had gotten into his blood.

Mrs. Taylor did not believe the old man's story. It seemed every week someone was coming up from down south with all kinds of country tales. But the thought of the snake and the cotton sickened her, and she threw up right there in the store. She wanted to clean up after herself, but she didn't have a tissue. Mr. Jablonski had to clean up.

The storytelling man looked at her and her son. He looked at the box of starch in her hand. “What you want this time, a girl?”

She did not say anything to the man. She paid for the starch and left. But this storytelling man knew, knew before even she had suspected. Mary Kate understood that the snake story wasn't true, but that did not stop it from upsetting her. That did not stop it from slithering, wet and cold, back to her.

It came back to her on this day, many months later, after her tears were salt. He was shot again, splash. The snake encircled her ankles. The cottonmouth crawled up her shanks. She could not see it, she was drowning in darkness, but she could feel its heaviness on her legs, pulling her down, back into darkness. And then there was the bite, wet and sharp. She awakened, screaming and beating her legs.

Mikey was lying across her lap, biting her.

“Boy, what you was doing there? Why was you biting Mama?”

“What happened to your stories, Mama? They not on.”

The phone rang. She did not answer it. He would be dying there, on the line, in someone's mouth.

“That why you was biting me?” she asked.

“Can I go play in the snow?”

“I'll see,” she said.

“I didn't have no lunch, Mama . . . The phone ringing.”

“I know,” she said, and got up from the couch. She turned off the television. He was dying in there, in some white man's mouth. “Mama fenna make you some lunch. Come on.”

“You was crying, Mama . . . The phone ringing,” Mikey said.

“I know,” she said.

He was dying there, and she wiped the salt away. How many times could one man die?

8

“S
O WE GOT
a new President,” the butcher at the A & P said to Moses as he wrapped up the smoked turkey Venita had ordered for Thanksgiving.