The Obstacle Course (38 page)

I nodded. I was acting nonchalant about the whole thing. I wasn’t looking forward to being home. The trip had been incomplete for me, unfinished. And I wasn’t much looking forward to my encounter with my old man, either.

We walked out of the bus station to their car. I lagged behind, feeling out of it, wishing we’d taken separate busses so I wouldn’t have to watch their mushy shit.

Mrs. Kellogg turned back to me. She gave me this lame smile.

“I almost forgot. Your mother asked me to tell you they went over to the Eastern Shore to visit Easter with your grandparents.”

She was embarrassed, telling me. I’d been gone for more than a week, the whole world had probably figured I was dead, and my parents hadn’t even waited for me to come home, they’d just carried on with their lives as if I didn’t exist.

The Kelloggs dropped me off in front of my house. I got out of the car.

“You’re welcome to stay with us, Roy,” Mrs. Kellogg offered. She said it because she had to.

I looked in at Burt, sitting by himself in the back seat. He was staring out the far window.

“No thank you, ma’am.” I slammed the door shut. “See you around, Burt,” I told him through the open window.

“Okay.” He didn’t turn to look at me.

They drove away. I watched until they were gone, then I walked up the front sidewalk and let myself in.

It was hot inside; the windows had been shut and locked, the curtains drawn. The air was heavy and still, like in a funeral home.

A note from my mom was propped up on the kitchen table with a ten-dollar bill attached to it:
“We have gone to Grandma’s for Easter vacation. Here is money for you to take the bus there.”

I stuck the money in my pocket and threw the note in the trash.

There were odds and ends of food in the fridge. I was hungry as a bear—me and Burt hadn’t eaten anything but a Clark bar apiece on our bus trip, because the money his folks had wired had barely covered the fare. I fixed myself a four-egg western omelette and fried up a couple pork chops to go with it, along with half a loaf of toast. I was starving; as I scarfed down the food I thought of the meal we’d eaten in that church down in Chattanooga. The last supper, before it all ended.

I cleaned the kitchen, washed and wiped the dishes and pans, put everything away. I hate a dirty kitchen, if I was going to be on my own for a few days until they got back I could at least live in a clean house, for a change.

What I needed more than anything was a hot bath, something to soak all that road dirt and fear off my body and out of my mind. I walked upstairs, stripping my filthy clothes as I went, balling everything up to chuck in the hamper.

I opened the door to my room.

It was a shambles. If the worst tornado in the world had gone through it, the damage couldn’t have been worse. All my models, every single one, lay scattered all over the floor, smashed to bits.

The only things I cared about in the world had been destroyed. My father’s work.

I was numb as I stood there, surveying the carnage. Then I turned and walked out, closing the door behind me.

I
WORE A T-SHIRT
to school. T-shirts are supposed to be against the rules, along with tight-fitting jeans, pegged pants, full-on duck’s-ass haircuts, and about a million other petty rules. They’d been pretty lax about enforcing the rules this late in the year, though, especially with ninth-graders—the teachers were all looking forward to graduating our disruptive behinds and moving on with next year’s class, which had a bigger share of pussies and not as many bad-asses. It’s a bitch, what things are coming to; Ravensburg has always been known as the baddest of the bad, the end of the line, so to speak, but pretty soon it’s going to be just another sorry junior high, no tougher or ornerier than a junior high in Montgomery County or Virginia.

To really flout authority, I had my smokes rolled up in the left sleeve of my shirt, which is strictly verboten, getting caught with a pack of cigs in your sleeve is automatic detention or worse, which it would be in my case, given my history of behavior, and it could even award me a trip to Boyle’s inner sanctum, if I was super-lucky I might wind up with another paddling. Give my old lady a chance to doll up and come down, flash some thigh at Boyle like last time. The least I could do for her; to say we weren’t getting along very well, after my trip down south and all, would be the understatement of the century. At this point I didn’t give a shit about any of it, I just wanted the year to end, to be shed of all this crap, take it easy over the summer and have a fresh start in senior high.

I wasn’t going to be a complete asshole about it, though; when I got inside I’d stash the Marlboros in my locker. But I was in a dark mood, that was for shit-sure, if there was a teacher outside who spotted me, I’d pay the price. You pays your money and you takes your chance, as I always say.

“You’re taking your life in your hands, Poole, wearing that stuff,” Mary Jackson, a charter member of the big-tit contingent, cat-called at me as I strolled up the front steps.

“Like I could give a shit.”

“Tough guy,” she said, smiling uncertainly at me. She’s not much in the looks department, Mary, but big tits cover a lot of sins, as my old man likes to point out. Big tits, a tight pussy, and her own bottle of Four Roses, that’s his ideal kind of woman.

Speaking of my old man, we haven’t. They came home a few days later, he cracked “look what the cat drug in,” like nothing in the world had happened, and left it at that. No ass-whipping, no threats, nothing. He’d already done the damage and he knew it, anything more would tarnish the deed.

My mom and Ruthie had been pretty shook up, asking me a million questions, wanting to know why it’d happened, trying to get a handle on it, like was I kidnapped against my will or something, to explain away why I had left, and more importantly, why I hadn’t called all that time. I didn’t give them any satisfaction, it was something that happened was the way I put it, now it’s over. My lips were sealed, which was the only way to get through it, because if I’d told them the truth, that I wanted out of the family, and why, it would’ve at first hurt their feelings something awful, and then they might’ve found a way to accommodate me, send me away for good, and not to anyplace I’d be wanting to go.

So I kept my big trap shut for once, and after a few days the incident faded. But since then they’ve treated me differently, like I was some alien creature from outer space. That was fine by me; the more space they gave me the better I liked it. I was living in the house, but for all intents and purposes I was on my own. Training for the future.

There were a whole bunch of kids milling around the front, talking and arguing. Burt and Joe were two of them. I nodded to them, they nodded back. Nothing more. Things are different now, we don’t have that same old relationship we did before, no more Three Musketeers. That had ended back in the junkyard, when Burt and I had abandoned Joe. The real bitch of that affair had been that after the junkyard watchman had caught Joe he had threatened him all kinds of ways, scaring Joe so bad he liked to piss his pants, so he told it, but then the guy just kicked Joe’s ass out of the yard and told him to keep out, permanently, which Joe was more than happy to do. When Burt heard that story from Joe he about had a heart attack, ’cause if he had stuck with Joe back there like he’d thought of doing that’s all would’ve happened to him. It was another reason for him to have a hard-on against me, for putting him through a bunch of needless and scary shit—needless and scary for him, not for me of course. I was glad of what had happened, every bit of it.

It was a shame, the three of us breaking up, but that was water under the bridge. Maybe we’d get back tight again, maybe we wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.

“What’s going on?” I asked nobody in particular.

Stevie Worrell, this small, nervous redheaded twerp who has more energy than any other kid in the school, jumped up, practically in my face. There’s something about teensy redheaded kids with freckles that makes them hop around like Mexican jumping beans. He’s been that way since first grade, and his sister, who’s in seventh grade, is just like him.

“Ain’t you heard the news?” he shouted, right into my ear. “It’s been all over!”

“What news?” I asked.

Mary was standing next to me. Her tits, stuck in one of those wired-up bras that push them up to a girl’s chin, poked me in the side. Not much of a feel, but better than nothing.

“Don’t you watch TV? It was all over the TV last night.” She was right in front of me, practically using her tits as a battering ram. Her face was all flushed, like she was excited. Maybe she liked me, I thought, I’d hardly noticed her before, even though we’d been in class together for three years. Could do worse—not as anything steady, of course, but for one or two dates it might be fun, those big squishy titties.

“Naw, I wasn’t watching TV last night,” I said. My old man had been parked in front of the tube from right after dinner until bedtime, no way I was going to sit in the same room with him. “So what’s the big deal’s got everybody’s bowels in an uproar?”

“We’ve got to go to school with niggers next year!” Stevie shouted, not wanting anyone else to pass on the news, like he owned it.

I laughed in his face: what a crock of shit. “You’re crazy. Who told you that?”

“It was on TV last night,” he answered hotly, like I was calling him a liar to his face, which I wasn’t, I couldn’t believe it, was all. “It’s all over the newspapers this morning, too, you’re the one that’s crazy, you don’t even watch TV.”

“The Supreme Court said it,” Mary added.

“The Supreme Court said that shit three years ago,” I told her. “That’s old news.”

“They said it about Maryland this time,” Stevie said. “About us.”

Burt joined the group, throwing me a dirty look.

“I don’t give a shit what the Supreme Court said,” he told everyone, but looking at me, “I ain’t about to go to school with no niggers. I’ll quit first.”

As soon as he said that several others kicked in their sentiments, which were all the same.

“My old man said we’d move to Australia before he’ll ever let me go to school with coons,” Burt went on.

“I’ll believe that one when I see it,” I said.

He stared at me, hard and cold.

“Well, I reckon you don’t give a shit if you go to school with niggers or not.”

“It ain’t happened yet,” I answered, shrugging him off, “so I ain’t gonna get my bowels in an uproar about it.”

Joe slid over next to Burt. “When your sister starts dating them you won’t talk so free like that,” he said.

Whoa. I could feel the hairs starting to rise up the back of my neck.

“I wouldn’t talk like that if I were you, Joe,” I warned him, making sure he heard the threat.

He hocked a pearl onto the sidewalk between our feet. “What are you, some kind of goddamn nigger lover?”

Everybody went quiet.

I couldn’t believe my ears. “What’d you say?” I slowly asked him.

“You heard me.”

“Say it again. One time.”

“Nig-ger lover,” he threw in my face, enunciating every syllable clearly.

I was on him before the words were out of his mouth, throwing him to the ground, throwing punches immediately, hard punches, no holding back. I was beside myself with fury—this motherfucker had been one of my best friends my whole life and now he was laying this kind of shit on me.

We went around and around, the others cheering us on; everybody likes a good fight, what they want is to see someone kick the living shit out of someone else. Joe’s a tough guy and he’s big, like me, but I was fighting way beyond normal, Superman couldn’t have beaten me the way I was feeling. I got the upper hand on Joe and started beating the shit out of him, really pounding his ass. I was going to knock every tooth out of his pissant mouth, that’s how enraged I was.

The others weren’t going to let that happen, though, especially Burt. He and some of the other boys jumped me and started wailing away, really beating up on me. I fought like a banshee, I was crazed, it was like they’d been thrown in a sack with a panther, the way I was fighting.

All the shouting and commotion brought the teachers out, Mr. Boyle being the first, pulling them off me, then jerking me to my feet, his hand holding me tight by the front of my T-shirt.

My clothes were torn, shirt and pants both. My face was cut, too, I could taste a trickle of blood in my mouth. I looked over at Joe and Burt. If looks could kill I’d be a dead man several times over. They were as bad off as I was, Joe had blood all over his mouth from where I’d knocked some teeth loose, and Burt was going to have a mighty shiner on his right eye before sundown.

Boyle jerked me to my tiptoes.

“Go to my office, Poole,” he ordered. “Every goddamn time—won’t you ever learn?”

He shook his head, almost like he was sad about it. Whatever he and my mom had talked about or done the last time, he was feeling some kind of sympathy for me, it seemed. But not enough to let me go.

That was all right. I’d made my point and then some.

“Go,” he said, pushing me towards the front door.

I scooped up my crushed pack of Marlboros and stuffed them in the pocket of my jeans. As I started up the steps, I turned back to Joe.

“I’d rather go to school with niggers than you any day,” I spat out defiantly.

I turned my back on them and walked to the front door.

“Nigger lover!” Burt yelled at my retreating back.

Some of the girls giggled. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke, I thought, not turning to look, I was tougher than all of them put together, when they were crying for their mamas I’d be out in the big wide world making my mark.

I didn’t break stride as I flashed my former best friend the finger and marched into the building, head held high.

The rest of the week went by, more or less without incident. I was being shunned by practically everybody, but that was no big thing. I was counting down the days until summer, when I could start all over again.