Small Great Things (11 page)

I wager I taught the students at that school more than any hotshot professor. I showed them the elemental differences between the races. I proved that if you're not the predator, you're the prey.

I
WAKE IN
a pool of sweat, fighting my way out of a bad dream. Immediately, I feel across the covers for Brit, but there's no one there.

I swing my legs over the side of the bed and start moving, fighting through the dark like it's a crowd. I might as well be sleepwalking, the way I'm drawn to the room that Francis and I worked so hard to repaint before Brit was released from the hospital.

She is standing in the doorway, her hands bracing her, like she needs help staying upright. The moon's coming through the window, so she's trapped in her own shadow. As my eyes adjust to the night, I try to see what she sees: the old armchair with a doily over its top; the iron frame of the twin guest bed. The walls, white again. I can still smell the fresh paint.

I clear my throat. “We thought it would help,” I say, my voice small.

She pivots, but only halfway, so that for a second it looks like she's made out of light. “What if it never happened?” Brit whispers. “What if it was just a nightmare?”

She's wearing one of my flannel shirts—that's what she likes to sleep in—and her hands are splayed over her belly.

“Brit,” I say, taking a step toward her.

“What if no one remembers him?”

I pull her into my arms, feel the hot circle of her breath on my chest. It's like fire. “Baby,” I vow, “I'm not going to let anyone forget.”

I
HAVE ONE
suit. Actually, Francis and I have one suit that we share. There's just not much of a need for fancy clothing when you work drywall during the day and run a White Power website at night. But the next afternoon, I put on the suit—black, pinstripes, the kind of thing I imagine Al Capone would have looked really sharp in—and a white shirt and a tie, and Brit and I drive back to the hospital to meet with Carla Luongo, the lawyer in Risk Management who has agreed to see us.

But when I come out of the bathroom freshly shaved, the tattoo on the back of my head stark and unmistakable, I am surprised to find Brit curled on the bed in my flannel shirt and sweatpants. “Baby,” I say. “We have a meeting with the lawyer, remember?” I've told her this a half hour ago. There's no way she forgot.

Her eyes roll toward me like they are ball bearings, loose in her head. Her tongue pushes words around her mouth like they're food. “Don't…wanna…go…back.”

She turns away from me, pulling up the covers, and that's when I see the bottle on the nightstand: the sleeping pills that the doctor gave her to help her transition. I take a deep breath and then haul my wife upright. She feels like a sandbag, heavy and immobile.
Shower,
I think, but that would require me to get in with her, and we don't have time. Instead, I take the glass of water on the bedside table and throw it in her face. She sputters, but it gets her to sit up on her own. I pull off her pajamas and grab the first things I can find in her drawer that look decent—a pair of black pants and a sweater that buttons up the front. As I am dressing her, I have a sudden flash of myself doing this same thing to my baby, and I wind up yanking so hard on Brit's arm that she yelps and I kiss her on the wrist. “Sorry, baby,” I murmur, and more gently, I pull a comb through her hair and do my best to bunch it together into a ponytail. I stuff her feet into a pair of little black shoes that might actually be bedroom slippers and then haul her into my arms, and out to the car.

By the time we reach the hospital, she is near catatonic. “Just stay awake,” I beg her, anchoring her to my side as we walk in. “For Davis.”

Maybe that gets through to her, because as we are ushered into the lawyer's office, her eyes open a fraction wider.

Carla Luongo is a spic, just like I guessed from her name. She sits down on a chair and offers us a couch. I watch her nearly swallow her tongue when I take off my wool hat. Good. Let her know who she's dealing with, right up front.

Brit leans against me. “My wife,” I explain, “is still not feeling well.”

The lawyer nods sympathetically. “Mr. and Mrs. Bauer, let me first just say how sorry I am for your loss.”

I don't respond.

“I'm sure you have questions,” she says.

I lean forward. “I don't have questions. I know what happened. That black nurse killed my son. I saw her with my own eyes, beating at his chest. I told her supervisor I didn't want her touching my baby, and what happened? My worst fear came true.”

“I'm sure you realize that Ms. Jefferson was only doing her job…”

“Oh, yeah? Was it also her job to go against what her boss ordered? It was all in Davis's file.”

The lawyer stands so that she can grab a file on her desk. It's got the little colored confetti of stickers on the side that is some secret code, I imagine. She opens it, and even from here I can see the Post-it note. Her nostrils flare, but she doesn't comment.

“That nurse wasn't supposed to be taking care of my son,” I say, “and she was left alone with him.”

Carla Luongo looks at me. “How do you know that, Mr. Bauer?”

“Because your staff can't keep their voices down. I heard her say she was covering for the other nurse. The day before, she was screaming her head off, just because I made a request to take her off my son's case. And what happened? She was pounding on my baby. I
watched
her,” I say, tears springing to my eyes. I wipe them away, feeling foolish, feeling weak. “You know what? Fuck this. I'm going to take this hospital to the bank. You killed my son; you're going to pay for it.”

Honestly, I have no idea how the legal system works; I've done my best to stay away from getting caught by the cops. But I've watched enough TV infomercials to believe that if you can get cash in a class-action lawsuit for having some lung disease brought about by asbestos, you most certainly have a bone to pick if your baby dies when he's supposed to be receiving choice medical care.

I grab my suit jacket in one fist and half-drag Brit to the office door. I've just managed to open it when I hear the lawyer's voice behind me. “Mr. Bauer,” she asks. “Why would you sue the hospital?”

“You're kidding, right?”

She takes a step forward, gently but firmly closing the door of her office again. “Why would you sue the
hospital,
” she repeats, “when everything suggests that Ruth Jefferson was the individual who killed your baby?”

A
BOUT A YEAR
into my running the Hartford NADS crew, we had a steady income. I was able to lift guns from Colt's by forging inventory, and then sell them on the street. Mostly, we sold to blacks, because they were just going to kill each other with them anyway, and also because they paid three times more for a weapon than the Italians would. Yorkey and I ran the operation, and one night we were on our way home from a deal when a cop car pulled up behind me, its lights flashing.

Yorkey nearly shit a brick. “Fuck, man. What do we do?”

“We pull over,” I told him. It wasn't like we had the stolen gun in the car anymore. As far as the police were concerned, Yorkey and I were headed back from a party at a buddy's apartment. But when the cops asked us to step out of the car, Yorkey was sweating like a coal miner. He looked like he was guilty as sin, which is probably why the police searched the car. I waited, because I knew I had nothing to hide.

Apparently, Yorkey couldn't say the same thing. That gun hadn't been the only deal going down that night. While I was negotiating, Yorkey had bought himself an eight ball of meth.

But because it was in
my
glove compartment, I went down for it.

The thing about doing time is that it was a world I understood, where everyone was separated by race. My sentence for possession was six months, and I planned to spend every minute planning my revenge. Yorkey had used before he became part of NADS; it was part of the skater culture. But my squad, they didn't touch drugs. And they sure as hell didn't squirrel them away in my glove compartment.

In prison, the black gangs have everyone outnumbered, so sometimes the Latinos and the White gangs will band together. But in jail, you just basically try to keep your head straight and keep out of trouble. I knew that if there was anyone in the White Power Movement who happened to be in doing time, they would find me sooner or later—but I was hoping that the niggers wouldn't find me first.

I took to keeping my nose buried in a Bible. I needed God in my life, because I had a public defender, and when you have a public defender, you'd better hope that God's on your side, too. But I wasn't reading the parts of Scripture I'd read before, when I was learning the doctrines of Christian Identity theology. Instead, I found myself dog-earing the pages about suffering, and salvation, and hope. I fasted, because I read something about it in the Bible. And during my fast God told me to surround myself with other people like me.

So the next day, I showed up at the jail Bible study group.

I was the only guy there who wasn't black.

At first we just stared at each other. Then, the dude running the meeting jerked his chin at a kid who couldn't have been much older than me, and he made a space next to himself. We all held hands, and when I held his, it was soft, like my father's hands used to be. I have no idea why that popped into my head, but that's what I was thinking when they started to say the Lord's Prayer, and then suddenly I was saying it along with them.

I went to Bible study every day. When we finished reading Scripture, we'd say
Amen,
and then Big Ike, who ran the group, would ask, “Who's got court tomorrow?” Usually, someone would say they had a preliminary hearing or that the arresting officer was testifying or something like that, and Big Ike would say, “All right, then, let's pray that the officer don't throw you under no bus,” and he'd find a passage in the Bible about redemption.

Twinkie was the black kid who was my age. We talked a lot about girls, and how we missed hooking up with them. But believe it or not, we talked more about the food we craved on the outside. Me, I would have committed a felony for Taco Bell; Twinkie only wanted Chef Boyardee. Somehow, it didn't matter so much what color his skin was. Had I met him on the streets of Hartford, I would have kicked his ass. But in jail, it was different. We'd team up when we played Spades, cheating with hand signals and eye rolls that we made up in private, because no one expected the White Power guy and the black kid to be working together.

One day, I was sitting in the common room with a bunch of White guys when a gang shooting came in on the midday news. The anchor on the TV was talking about how the bullets sprayed, how many people had been hit by accident. “That's why if we ever go at it with the gangs,” I said, “we win. They don't go target shooting like us. They don't know how to hold weapons, look at that death grip. Typical nigger bullshit.”

Twink wasn't sitting with us, but I could see him across the room. His eyes sort of skated over me, and then back to whatever he was doing. Later that day, we were playing cards for cigarettes, and I gave him a sign to come back in diamonds, because I was cutting diamond spades. Instead, he threw clubs, and we lost. As we were walking out of the common room, I turned on him. “What the hell, dude? I gave you a sign.”

He looked right at me. “Guess it's just typical nigger bullshit,” he said.

I thought
: Shit, I hurt his feelings
. Then:
So what?

It's not like I stopped using that word. But I'll admit, sometimes when I said it, it stuck in my throat like a fish bone before I could cough it free.

F
RANCIS FINDS ME
just as I put my boot through the front window of our duplex, pushing out the old casing so that it explodes onto the porch in a rain of splinters and glass. He folds his arms, raises a brow.

“Sill's rotted out,” I explain. “And I didn't have a pry bar.”

With a gaping hole in the wall, the cold air rushes into the house. It feels good, because I'm on fire.

“So this has nothing to do with your meeting,” Francis says, in a way that suggests it has
everything
to do with the last half hour I've spent at the local police department. It was my next stop after the hospital. I'd dropped off Brit, who crawled back into bed, and drove straight there.

My meeting, really, was not even a meeting. Just me sitting across from a fat cop named MacDougall who filed my complaint against Ruth Jefferson. “He said he'd do a little research,” I mutter. “Which means I'll never hear from him again.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That that bitch killed my baby.”

MacDougall didn't know anything about my son, or what had happened at the hospital, so I had to tell the whole sorry story over again. MacDougall asked me what I wanted from him, as if it wasn't evident.

“I want to bury my son,” I told him. “And I want her to pay for what she did.”

The cop asked if, maybe, I was just overcome with grief. If I had misinterpreted what I saw. “She wasn't just doing CPR,” I told MacDougall. “She was hurting my baby. Even one of the other doctors told her to lighten up.”

I said she had it in for me. Immediately the cop glanced at my tattoos. “No kidding,” he said.

“It's a fucking hate crime, that's what it is,” I tell Francis now. “But God forbid anyone stand up for the Anglos, even though we're a minority now.”

My father-in-law falls into place beside me, ripping a piece of flashing out of the window cavity with his bare hands. “You're preaching to the choir, Turk,” he says.