Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It (6 page)

Khalfani blasted out of the water, yelling. He jump-kicked his foot straight into the guy’s stomach.

Tank Top Boy grunted and stumbled. No one moved. The boy on my bike stopped bobbing. I’d turned to stone.

The boy regained his balance. He narrowed his eyes at Khal. He still held the pick overhead, but now he waved it in the air like a weapon.

I had to move.
Now.
I jumped up and stepped in front of Khalfani just as the pick came stabbing down.

High block!

My arm popped up, deflecting the force of the blow. A searing pain ripped through my forearm.

Tank Top Boy glared at me and raised the pick again. I forced myself not to flinch. I made my legs like cement and kept my fists near my face. My ragged breaths sounded like a steam engine. I could smell my sweat and almost taste the fresh blood oozing from my arm. Or was my tongue bleeding? It pulsed where I’d bitten it on my way to the ground.

The boy hurled the pick. I watched in disbelief as it spun through the air, hit a large rock and broke.

The tool lay silent, but I still heard in my head the clang of metal striking stone. The pointy end was gone. A jagged edge was all that was left.

“I think that’s enough fun for one day,” the boy said. He turned and climbed the bank. My bike thudded on the dirt as Music Boy followed.

I stepped toward the pick and reached for the handle with my cut arm. Spit Boy stood over me. “Hey!” he said to the others. “I thought
they
had purple blood.” His voice sounded surprised, but it wasn’t real surprise. He was still mocking us.

He stepped on the head of the pick and ground it into the dirt.

My forearm throbbed. Blood trickled from the gash.
Red
blood, same as everyone else’s.

CHAPTER 9

By the time I got home, Dad’s car was in the driveway. The lawn mower roared to life in the backyard. Cool. Dad was out back. I just had to get past Mom.

My arm had stopped stinging, but the rest of me was still burning up over how those boys had bullied us. Worse, Ed’s pick was busted. I had found the pointy end and wrapped it with the tools. Question was, how would I fix it?

I snuck into the house and up the stairs. I tensed when I saw Gladys sitting on the couch—until her head bobbed and I heard her snore. Mom was nowhere in sight.

In my room, I took the black bundle from my bag and unrolled it. I laid the pick and its point on my bed. The tool’s jagged edge taunted me like those rough boys and their sharp words. It was useless. The pick was broken. There was no way to fix it.

My chest tingled as I remembered the pick hurtling past my face and smashing to the ground. Why had the boy done that? Why had they even stopped to bother us at all? We weren’t bothering them.

I pulled out my
Book of Big Questions.
“What makes people be mean?” I wrote. I didn’t know if science could answer a question like this, but it probably could. Science could explain everything.

I went over what had happened, how it had started and what they had said to us. When I got to the last boy, the one who had stepped on the pick, my face turned warm.
I thought they had purple blood.

Khalfani and I were the “they,” and I knew why.

Because we were black.

For the first time I could remember, someone had been mean to me because of my color. I wrote on the next line: “What makes white people be mean to black people?”

Grampa Clem had told me about a few bad things white people had done to him, but it always seemed like a really long time ago. And there was Dad, with his warnings about how things were tougher for black boys. But it had never been something I worried about for myself. I closed the notebook and slipped it behind my bed.

I rolled up the tools and buried them in the box of old clothes. I didn’t even know when I would go back to Ed’s. Maybe now I just wouldn’t.

I took the chunk of rock I’d chipped off the embankment and the one from the stream and set them on my desk. I looked through the field guide for the picture of slate.

My river rock matched the description exactly. Slate could be black, gray, brownish red, bluish gray or greenish gray. Mine was black. The rock came in thin, smooth layers that could easily be split. I didn’t want to split mine, but I could see the layers.

Slate had once been an easier-to-break rock called shale, but heat and pressure had turned it into something stronger, the book said. More than once, Grampa Clem had told me that black people had been made stronger by all the trials they had been through. That sounded just like metamorphic rock, I thought. I rubbed the slate between my fingers.

The rock reminded me of Grampa Clem. It was black and thin, not flashy, but solid. The rock’s pointiness made me think of him, too. Whether he talked or you did, he wanted to get straight to the point. “You can be for Grandpa Clem,” I whispered.

My stomach rumbled like Mount Saint Helens. Was Mom making dinner yet?

I went to the hall and looked at my parents’ door. Closed. I walked to the living room. Gladys was reading her
Jet
magazine. She glanced at me, and without waiting for her to ask, I gave her some sugar.

“It’s good to see you, too.” She opened the magazine to the bikini lady they always put in the middle and clucked her teeth. “I remember those days,” she said. I tried not to imagine Gladys in a bikini.

The door opened and Dad came in and saw me. “What have you been up to?” he asked.

A picture of those four boys on the riverbank—one of them on my bike—flashed before my eyes. “We went to the park.”

Dad ruffled my hair. He smelled like cut grass and heat. “You guys practice your forms today?” He got a glass of water from the kitchen, then sat on the love seat kitty-corner from Gladys.

We had not only practiced, we’d gotten real live experience. “Yeah,” I said.

Mom came down the hall. Her eyes went straight to my arm. She lifted it by my wrist. “What happened?”

I couldn’t say anything about the pick. Then I’d have to explain where I’d gotten it. “Uh, Khal and I ran into some trouble.” I sat next to Dad.

Mom’s forehead wrinkled.

“What kind of trouble?” Dad asked.

“Kind of a fight,” I said.

Gladys perked up. “You beat ’em good, right?”

Mom glared at her.

“There were four of them, and they were older. White boys.”

“Oh, no, here we go,” Gladys said.

Mom put her hand on my head. “Oh, Boo.”

Dad sat up straight with his hands on his knees. “What did they do?”

“Mostly just made fun of us. We were looking for rocks in the water.”

Mom inspected the gash again. “Then how’d you get cut?”

I had to think quickly. “I’d found a rock—a sharp rock—and left it on the shore. They started throwing it around and I tried to get it back and that’s when it happened.” That was basically the truth—with one minor change. “But I didn’t run away,” I said, glancing at Dad. “Because of tenet number five.”

“I’m glad you didn’t run away, son, but you have to be smart, too. If any of those boys had had weapons…”

They did,
I thought, seeing the pick in the boy’s hand. “One of them said something about black people having purple blood. Why would he say that?”

“Because he’s an idiot,” Gladys snapped.

“Just another way to say there’s something wrong with us because our skin’s a different color,” Dad said.

“And one of the boys made monkey sounds at me,” I said.

Dad sat back with his fist on his hip. His jaw bulged on one side. “Some white people like to think we’re more closely related to monkeys and gorillas than they are.”

“Humph.”
Gladys crossed her arms. “Last time I saw an ape, it had thin lips and straight hair. Looked more like a Caucasian to me.” She looked at Mom. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Mom said.

My most recent Big Question came into my mind. “Why are white people so mean to black people?”

“Some white people, honey,” Mom said.

Dad spoke up. “It starts with the parents. They pass on their attitudes to their kids—”

Mom’s head snapped to the side. “Not all kids,” she said.

“I know, I know. You turned out all right.” He smiled, but Mom had gotten as straight and stiff as the toothbrush I didn’t use for a week when I wanted to see if I could grow algae on my teeth.

She patted my back. “Let’s go, Bren. To the bathroom.”

I held my arm over the sink while she poured hydrogen peroxide on the cut. I was so interested in how it foamed and bubbled that I barely noticed the sting.

Why had Mom ended the conversation like that? Was Dad saying that Grandma and Grandpa DeBose didn’t like black people? Ed had been all right to Khalfani and me, so that wouldn’t really make sense. Would it? Unless he’d changed.

Later, at dinner, Dad said, “You know who you are, right?”

“Brendan Buckley,” I said.

“Brendan Samuel Buckley, grandson of Samuel Clemons Buckley. And you know what he would have told you?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t let anyone tell you who you are, or what you can or can’t be.”

Gladys hummed in agreement. “And you ain’t no monkey.”

As I ate my chicken stir-fry, I wondered what my other grandpa would have told me if he’d been here.

CHAPTER 10

I lined up my growing collection on my windowsill—basalt, slate and sandstone, the piece I’d chipped off near the riverbank. I’d learned that sandstone was formed from hardened layers of sand and other small particles. Now I had one of each type of rock: igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary.

The only one I didn’t put out was the calcite, my mineral from Ed. I kept that one in its box in the back of my desk. When I wanted to study it, I hung my
EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS
sign on my door. Mom never bothered me when I had an experiment in progress.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I went over to Khal’s, but by Friday I was itching to stay home and look at my rocks under the microscope.

I also wanted to work on some of the Big Questions I’d come up with since learning more about rocks and minerals. Like why was malachite always green? And how could a rock—pumice—float? And was there any way I could get a real moon rock for my collection?

The answer to that question, I learned quickly, was a big fat
no.
Not without a billion dollars, and probably not even then. I couldn’t find any for sale, not even on eBay. If I wanted to study moon rocks, I’d have to become a real geologist and get a job in an aerospace lab or a museum.

Sometime after breakfast and before I got hungry for the peanut butter and banana sandwich Mom had left me in the fridge, the phone rang. I ran to my parents’ bedroom.

“Hello?”

Silence. “Uh, it’s Ed DeBose here.” He sounded like he had gravel in his throat.

Now it was my turn to be silent.

“Is your mom there?”

He wanted to speak to Mom? “She’s at work.”

“Good. I thought you said she worked Fridays.”

“How’d you know our number?” I asked.

“There’s this old-fangled thing called a phone book. I know it’s not the Internet, but it works.”

“Oh. Right.”

Ed cleared his throat. “If you don’t have plans, maybe you’d like to come to the rock club meeting with me tomorrow?”

“Really?” I looked at the photo of Mom hugging me on the beach in California. She kept it on her nightstand.

“You’ve got to be to my house by ten. Meeting starts at eleven.”

Of course he couldn’t come get me. “Sure.” I’d have to figure out something to tell my parents.

“All right, then.”

“All right.”

“See you soon.” He hung up.

Ed DeBose had called me! Hopefully when I saw him, he wouldn’t ask about the tools. I rushed back to my desk and worked on memorizing the Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, knowing it might come in handy at the meeting.

The next day, I got up and packed my backpack. I wrapped my three rocks in newspaper so they wouldn’t get chipped. I packed the field guide and my question notebook. The calcite went in the outer pocket.

I told my parents I was going to the park to look for more rocks. The fib just sprang out of me like water from a freshly drilled hole, but I decided it was okay. Ed was my grandpa, after all.

Mom’s mouth bunched up. “You’re going alone?” she asked.

I thought she was about to tell me no, but Dad stepped in and said it’d be good for me, something about getting back in the saddle. So I got the okay.

I pedaled to the bus stop and ditched my bike in the bushes. I leaned against the pole and waited.

The whole way there, I thought about going to the meeting with Ed DeBose, the rock club president. I practiced what I would say if he asked me about the tools. I went over the Mohs hardness scale a few times, too.

At the back of my mind, chipping away on my brain like a prospector’s pick, was a question: Would I find out something today that would help me understand why Ed hadn’t talked to us all these years?

Standing on Ed’s porch, my hands felt sweatier than last time.

The door opened suddenly. Ed pushed on the screen and looked both ways down the street. We stared at each other.

“Where’s your dog?” I asked.

“In his pen. You ready to go?”

“To the rock club?”

“Let’s go.” He stepped forward.

“Isn’t it kind of early?” I peered around him at the shelves of minerals.

“You can never be too early. You can only be too late.”

We got in the green truck. It smelled funny, like a bunch of mildew had curled up in the cushions to take a nap. Stuffing poked out of the seat in the space between us. The truck started with a roar.

“This is for you.” He reached into the pocket on his shirt and pulled out a glassy yellow stone. “Corundum.”

I held the translucent mineral in my palm. “Number nine on the Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness,” I said, hoping he’d notice I knew.

“Second-hardest mineral known to science. You know why it’s so hard?”

I had no idea.

“Oxygen-aluminum bonds. Short and strong. The bonds pull the atoms close together. Pretty tough to break those suckers apart.”

The way family should be,
I thought. “Thanks,” I said. I tapped it with my fingernail, then held it up and looked through it.

“Got that one there in Montana.” Ed pulled on the lever near the steering wheel. We rolled down the driveway and into the street. He put the truck in drive and we took off.

“I read that being a geologist is like being a detective,” I said. “They’re both looking for clues to find out what happened in the past.”

“I guess you could see it that way.”

“I’m always trying to figure stuff out, too. I do a lot of experiments and write down my findings in a notebook.”

“Experiments are the only way to know what’s true,” Ed said.

If I’d had a big lightbulb over my head, Ed’s words would have been the switch.

Of course! Being with Ed was like doing an experiment! To find the truth about him, I just needed to apply the scientific method.

We’d learned the scientific method in Mr. Hammond’s class: (1) Observe. (2) Create a hypothesis. (3) Predict what will happen if the hypothesis is correct. (4) Test. (5) Change your hypothesis if necessary and test again until you have a theory.

I had one hypothesis already: Ed had a good reason for whatever he’d done that made Mom mad. He’d just never told her what it was.

Mr. Hammond said the great advantage of the scientific method was that it was unprejudiced. Either something could be proven with evidence and facts, or it couldn’t.

I rolled the window down halfway, then sat all the way back and let the wind blow across my face. I breathed deeply, smelling brown dirt and the not-so-good aroma of cows. I rubbed the corundum in my hand.

“What’d you do when you were a soil tester?” I asked.

“How’d you know about that? Your mom tell you?”

“Yeah.”

“She talk about me, then?”

“Not really,” I said. We were quiet. “I’m sure you had a good reason,” I said. It was time to test my hypothesis—dig for some evidence.

“For what?” he asked.

“For not being around.”

The skin on Ed’s hands stretched so tight, the wrinkles disappeared. He cleared his throat and kept glancing in the rearview mirror as if he thought aliens might land behind us any second.

I started to wish I hadn’t said anything. I thought about opening the glove compartment to see what Ed kept in his truck.

We turned at a white house with a red barn surrounded by miles of cornfields. Was the rock club meeting held at someone’s house? Where were we?

Ed stopped the truck, moved the lever and pushed in the emergency brake. The engine rumbled. “You want to drive?”

My hands and feet tingled. “Really?” Khalfani had a race car video game but I had never, ever, driven a real car. Then I thought again. “What if I crash?” I always crashed the race car—an average of 5.7 times per race.

“My grandpa took me out in his truck when I was eleven. Taught me on a back road just like this.”

I didn’t tell him I wouldn’t be eleven for another forty-three days. He got out and stood at the open door. “Slide on over.”

I hesitated. Then I remembered Tae Kwon Do tenet number three:
in nae.
Perseverance. Challenges help us to improve ourselves and therefore should not be avoided.

I zipped the corundum into my backpack and scooted behind the wheel. I
had
to—it was what a Tae Kwon Do warrior would do.

“When you pull this, the emergency brake will release, so you want to make sure your foot is on the brake, just to be safe. Which one’s the brake?”

I started to move my foot.

“Point to it!”

I jerked my foot back. My armpits were as sweaty as a petri dish.

“I just want to make sure you got the right one.”

I pointed to the pedal on the left.

“Good. Okay, put your foot on that one.”

I pressed down on the pedal and gripped the steering wheel hard. Ed pulled on something and I heard a pop. “Don’t move,” he said. My body tensed. He walked around the front of the truck and got in on the other side.

My head felt light. I was holding my breath. I took a gulp of air. “What would happen if I took my foot off the brake?” I asked.

“Try it.”

The truck just sat there. “Oh.”

“Put your foot back on the brake and pull the lever down until it’s on
D.
”

I pulled the lever like I’d seen Ed do. My palms felt itchy. My back was sweaty. My face was hot. I sure could have used a root beer.

“Now move your foot to the gas, but don’t give it too much. Just a light touch.”

I felt like an astronaut preparing for blastoff. I picked up my foot and tapped the gas pedal. The truck lurched. Too fast.
Brake.

Ed grabbed the dashboard. “Whoa! What’d you do that for?”

I felt stupid. I wished he would take over.

“You gotta keep your foot on the gas.” His voice softened again. “Press it in a little and hold it there.”

I moved my foot to the gas pedal and pushed down with my toes. The truck surged and I started to pull my foot back, but I remembered and held it still. The truck was going, and I was making it go! The steering wheel jiggled in my hands, trying to take over, but I held on. My arms vibrated and my teeth buzzed. It felt like someone was doing backflips in my stomach.

“Keep it steady. You don’t even need to move the steering wheel. Just keep the tires where they are.”

The road ran straight as far as I could see. We could go on like this forever. I was driving!

“How’s it feel?” Ed asked.

“It’s fun!”

“I remember being on that country road with my grandpa like it was yesterday.”

Would I remember this day when I was as old as Ed DeBose? I was pretty sure I would.

We rode like that for a while, until my calf cramped and my foot felt glued to the pedal. I started to worry about how we would stop.

“Keep your hands right where they are. Just lift your foot.” The truck slowed until a worm could have crawled faster. “Now, easy, place your foot on the brake and push it in slow. Real slow.” Ed didn’t even have to grab the dashboard.

“You did good,” he said. His lips pulled down at the corners and he nodded his head. His jaw chewed on the memory of the past few minutes. “Real good.”

From the top of my head to the soles of my feet, I buzzed. The only part of me I couldn’t feel was my hands, which I thought might be permanently stuck to the steering wheel.

“Put it in park—
P.
”

I raised the lever all the way up.

“Push in the parking brake—down on the floor.” It creaked into place.

I looked out the back window, through the camper. I could see where we had turned onto the road. It wasn’t that far, but it felt like I had driven for miles.

Ed DeBose had let me drive his truck. Just like his grandpa had done with him.