Book of Mercy (10 page)

“Knock it off!” He pushed his way into the middle of the group, swatting boys aside with his cap. Quickly assessing that a third of his team was involved in this mess, Coach Mac looked ready to explode. His face was nearly as red as his hair. Teachers were supposed to report all fighting for disciplinary action. “You idiots! Where are your heads at? What use you going to be to me if you get suspended for fighting?”

“He started it, Coach,” Art Junior groused, wiping the blood from his face with his shirtsleeve.

Ryder didn’t touch his face. He let the blood drip. Breathing hard, he simply stared at the coach.

Coach Mac eyed Art Junior with disgust. “Get to the locker room, lunkhead, and clean up. You got some laps to run. All of you. And I don’t want to hear a word about this around school. Fighting on school property is automatic detention. Detention means you’re out for the game that week, idiots. I’m not letting you assholes sabotage my season. Get outta here.” As the football players shuffled off, the coach turned back to Ryder and pointed at him with a sausage finger. “Stay away from my boys.”

Ryder merely stared at the beefy man whose belly flopped over his sweatpants and whose hair, cut military crisp, stood up like the bristles of a hairbrush, giving his freckled face an eggplant shape. “Keep ’em away from me then,” Ryder replied.

The coach shook his head, slammed his cap back on, and stomped away.

Ben pulled out a white handkerchief and handed it to Ryder. Ryder looked at it for a moment then took it. He dabbed at his nose and the corner of his lip. His cheekbone felt like it was on fire, his nose was tender, and he could already feel his lip swelling. “You go get the coach?”

“I memorized the school policy handbook on my first day, especially the part about detention,” Ben said.

“Of course you did.”

“I figured the coach would value his team more than the rules,” Ben continued. “A winning football team is a big deal in Mercy. Art Junior’s an asshole, but he’s an asshole who can play football.”

Ryder nodded. Maybe having a genius in his corner wasn’t so bad.

“You think I’ll clean up good and no one’ll notice?” he asked Ben.

“Not a chance.”

Later, when Ryder let himself in through the kitchen door, Sam was waiting for him. “Star said there’d been some trouble. She was vague about the details.”

Psychic tattle-tail. Now Sam was going to give him crap about fighting at school. But Sam just handed him a bag of frozen peas for his lip, said “Call Star. She’s worried,” and went back to the garage.

R
YDER,
B
EN, AND
S
TAR
huddled on the back porch step and eavesdropped. Through the kitchen window slammed the angry voices of Sam and Antigone. Ryder had grown up in an apartment that had seen more fights than Madison Square Garden, but he had never heard one like this in the Thorne household. It made his skin crawl. His leg jiggled. He had to be ready, he told himself, the first crash of a dish hitting a wall or the smack of a hand on a cheek and he was going in. He didn’t care if Sam outweighed him by forty pounds.

Antigone was determined to speak at the school board meeting the next night and call out Irene in public for banning books. Sam was against the idea.

“I don’t know why you have to get involved,” Sam yelled.

Antigone’s voice rose with each sentence. “Because Nancy’s my friend and she asked for my help. Because what Irene and her club are doing is wrong. Because I don’t want my baby growing up in a world without books. And because that maniac threw a pie at me!”

“So you’re going to march into the Mercy High School Auditorium and tell the whole world your deepest, darkest secret.”

Ryder and Ben exchanged looks. They turned to Star, who pointedly refused to meet their eyes. “What secret?” whispered Ryder. She shrugged.

Silence. Then Sam’s voice again, soft and gentle. “Haven’t I kept your secret? Even though I think you could shout it from the rooftops and nobody would care.”

“You’re not the one who can’t read,” Antigone said.

What? Ryder couldn’t believe it. How could that be? She owned businesses. She was smart and pretty. He knew she was educated just by the way she talked. How could this be true?

Ryder dropped his face into hands. Now a few things were beginning to make sense. The way Antigone always told him to go to Sam for help with his homework. How sometimes he saw her studying the label on a jar as if it were written in some kind of code. And how weird it was last week to walk into the kitchen and find Sam, who is not your cake-decorating kind of guy, carefully writing “Happy Birthday, Ryder” with a pastry tube on his birthday cake. Ryder had watched him for a moment then sneaked back out of the kitchen. A birthday cake was a whole new experience for Ryder, and just the thought of it still made him feel funny inside. But the image of Chef Froot Loops was even weirder.

Sam’s voice carried out the window, “It’s your choice, your secret. I just don’t like seeing you forced to do something you’ve always avoided.”

“It may be the only way to convince them.”

“Convince them?”

“That you can’t take books away from kids,” she said. “They need them.”

Silence.

“Sam, this whole thing gives me that feeling inside.”

“What feeling?”

“The one I used to get when I was a kid,” she paused, searching for the words. “Locked out.”

“Locked out?”

“Yeah, when you want something so badly and it’s just on the other side of the door. The words are always on the other side of the door, Sam. And I rattle the knob and bang on the door . . .” Ryder squeezed his head harder. “When I was a kid, I was desperate to know the secrets in books. They had to be full of secrets, didn’t they? Because they were so incomprehensible to me. Mysteries. I pestered my parents to read to me all the time.”

“And now we’re going to be parents,” Sam said.

“Yeah, we are.”

Ryder felt Star’s hand on his knee, trying to calm his jiggling foot. He forced his foot to be still.

“What if, heaven forbid, Irene and her club are right?” Sam asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Now, hear me out, Tigg,” Sam said. “As parents, we have a right to say we don’t want our children exposed to smut and pornography and vulgar language. Not every book is good.”

Wrong move, Sam, Ryder thought. He heard the simmer in Antigone’s voice. “Do you want Irene Crump deciding which book is good enough for our child?”

“Of course not, Irene’s a nut case.”

“Not to mention a pie thrower.”

Silence, then Sam again, an almost pleading voice.

“Don’t you get it, Tigg? I don’t want my child reading dirty books or watching violent television shows or listening to rap music that tells her to have sex whenever she wants.”

“I want what’s best for our baby, too,” Antigone cried. “But wanting to preserve my child’s liberty doesn’t make me a bad mother.”

“I never said you were a bad mother.”

“Then what—.” Antigone’s voice changed. “This isn’t about my telling people I’m dyslexic at all. You don’t want me to speak against censorship—period. You
agree
with Irene.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You want to control what our child reads.”

“Of course, I do. I don’t want books filling her head with ideas that frighten me, ideas that will take her away from me.” Sam’s voice exploded in frustration. “Do you really want our child to read sex manuals?”

“If she has the parts, she needs to know how they work.”

“Guidebooks to terrorism? Accounts of devil worship?”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

“You’re willing to throw the doors to our child’s mind open to every pervert with a pen,” he snapped.

“I’m protecting her by protecting her rights!”

Silence.

“You’re afraid of losing her,” Antigone said, finally figuring it out.

A chair was shoved aside, and Ryder leaped to his feet. “You’re goddamn right, I am!” Sam shouted and then Ryder heard Sam stomping out of the room, not in their direction but toward the front door. The slam of the door shook the house.

Ryder tiptoed to the kitchen window and peeked inside. He saw Antigone bent over, hugging her pregnant belly, crying.

T
HEY WERE IN
S
TAR’S
backyard. She and her mother lived in a bungalow, two stories, small rooms, nice deck. Earthly Sims liked to barbecue and owned a gas grill that looked smart enough to cook the meat itself. When Ryder was in a mood for a charred-black hotdog, Earthly was his source.

A wooden bench ran the length of one side of the deck. It was there Star lounged, legs tucked under her chin, eyes following him as he paced up and down the yard. Ben sat on the other end of the bench, back straight, eyes unfocused.

At first, Ryder was angry that Antigone was in pain and he couldn’t do anything about it. Then he began to feel something else, the calm that used to come over him when he had to face one of the Boyfriends, the men who plunged through the turnstile of his mother’s life. Users disguised as lovers. His mother had a weakness for beefy hotheads. When Ryder went up against them, he usually got the shit beat out of him. But that’s sometimes what you had to do to protect your mother and your sister.

“Art Junior and his jerks are going to have a field day with this,” he said to Ben and Star. “I can’t let her do it—gettin’ up there and makin’ a fool of herself. We gotta stop her.”

“How?” asked Star.

Ryder stopped in front of Ben. The guy was already mumbling his genius talk, and they didn’t have time for that. “Is it the obligation of the liberal to guard the rights of the racist?” Ben muttered to himself.

“Ben.”

“Is it the responsibility of the close-minded to protect the free thinker?”

“Ben, knock it off.” Ben blinked at him through his thick glasses, a far-off look in those innocent blue eyes, so like the Professor’s. Not another one, Ryder thought and felt like kicking something.

“Thomas Paine wrote . . .,” Ben said.

Ryder’s hand sliced the air. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Paine said, ‘He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition.’” Ryder grabbed Ben by the sweatshirt and lifted him to his feet, nearly shaking him, but Ben kept talking. “‘For if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’”

“I don’t know what that shit means,” Ryder shouted at him. “You’re not helping.”

Star jumped to her feet. She tugged on his arm. “Ryder. Ryder!”

As if just realizing where he was and what he was doing, Ryder released Ben and backed away. He raked his hands through his hair.

Ben just looked at him. “It means this is not just about books locked in a broom closet. This is about liberty and rights and all the stuff we hear people talk about when they talk about America.”

“Wow,” said Star.

Ryder lifted his shoulders. “I don’t care about America. I don’t care about books. How do we keep Antigone from speaking at that meeting?”

“I’m not sure that we can,” said Ben, “short of kidnapping her.”

“Then how do we help her?” asked Star.

“Are you nuts?” Ryder said. “No, we gotta keep her from embarrassing herself in front of the whole town. We gotta protect her from herself.”

“But what she’s doing is right,” argued Star.

Ryder glared at her. “It’s just books; they’re not worth it.”

“Antigone thinks they are,” Ben said.

That’s the trouble when you try to help people, Ryder thought, it gets so damn complicated.

“We need to support her. This is a noble cause,” Ben said. “Besides, not every kid gets to fight censorship in his own backyard. This’ll be fun.”

Ryder took a deep breath to keep from throwing Ben off the deck and into Earthly’s favorite butterfly bush. Earthly would kill him if he wrecked that horticultural baby. “This is not a game, man.”

“Don’t you see? Antigone has the right idea.” Ben leaned forward. “Censorship only succeeds when it’s kept in the dark. Bring it into the light. We’ll pack that meeting with students and signs.”

“Stand with Antigone,” Star said.

Ben nodded. “Make a scene Irene Crump will never forget.”

“Not to mention that cowardly, dirty-fighting son of hers,” Ryder muttered.

Ben held out his fist. Ryder looked at it then gave it a bump. He glanced at Star. She was smiling at him.

I
N 1939, FEDERAL MONEY
dribbled into Mercy, North Carolina, from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Work Projects Administration and accumulated on the walls of the Mercy High School Auditorium. There it was molded into—of all things—a frieze by a then unknown artist named Remo. A little more than a foot deep, the frieze was a white plaster tapestry that encircled the auditorium about balcony level. Titled
Mercy Full,
it was a ribbon of humanity, roly-poly figures, fairly androgynous in appearance, except for the occasional necklace or apron or beard that designated gender or occupation or age. The figures were caught in various forms of work and play.