South of Broad (34 page)

Our table screams with laughter, and I find myself joining, in sheer relief. All of us feel release from the dissonance of our time in the city.

“Trevor’s in better shape than he has any right to be,” says Sheba. “The doctors worked him over from head to foot. He’s dying of AIDS, but not right now. Do any of you remember David Biederman? He was a cute little guy in ninth grade when we were seniors. He had a crush on me, but of course he was only human.”

We hiss and jeer at Sheba, but she continues on. “Dr. Biederman is sending an ambulance to meet our plane tomorrow night when we land in Charleston. He is going to take on Trevor’s case personally. I just got off the phone with him.”

“So it’s over,” Molly says, with dense, complex emotions. “It’s really over.”

Ike raises his hand and says in a soft voice, “There’s the slight problem of Sheba and Trevor’s old man. The cops think he skipped town.”

“Thank God,” says Fraser.

“That’s the good part,” Betty tells her. “But here’s the part that’s scary. They have a theory that Ike and I agree with, that he’s on his way to Charleston. That he’ll be waiting for Sheba and Trevor because he knows they’ll be going back to their mother’s house.”

“All of you can stay with me,” I say. “I’ve got plenty of room. I’ll buy a Doberman, a king cobra, a flamethrower, and I’ll have nine ninja warriors to guard the perimeter.”

“My men are already patrolling Mrs. Poe’s house,” Ike says. “We can come up with a plan when we get back. Let’s go get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

“By the way, we put Macklin into a drug rehab center today,” Betty tells us. “Ike promised him a job in Charleston if he cleans himself up. I called Macklin’s aunt, who lives in the projects near the Cooper River Bridge. She’ll give him a place to stay.”

“Could I ask where my husband is?” Fraser asks quietly. “Is that a fair question amid all the celebrating?”

Sheba rises from her seat, walks over to Fraser, then sits down beside her to embrace her. “He refused to leave Trevor’s side. When I left the hospital tonight, Niles had put a mattress on the floor beside Trevor’s bed. Both of them were asleep. Here was the sweetest thing I ever saw: Trevor’s hand had reached down and Niles was holding it. Both were sound asleep, but they were holding hands.”

“That’s my sweet boy,” says Fraser.

“I talked with Anna Cole today and made arrangements to send for all of Trevor’s stuff. She said something sweet: she had never seen a bunch of friends as close as we seemed to be. She wanted to know how it had come to be,” Sheba says.

I feel a great discomfort. I finish my drink and look up, surprised that all five of my friends in the top-drawer elegance of the Redwood Room are pointing their fingers at me. Brushing their gestures aside, I shake my head in furious denial, but they continue to point. I can do nothing to stop them as my thoughts storm out in the high air currents over San Francisco and send me reeling twenty years past, into the airlessness and joyfulness of what all of us still refer to as the Bloomsday Summer.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 18
The Renegades

T
he first day of school had always felt like a small death, a long dark fall into some wordless void. Because I was a plain boy, I always dreaded facing the piercing judgment of kids who had never encountered an odd, off-centered face like mine. Though the black hornrimmed glasses gave me a look of some yet-to-be-discovered species of amphibian, they also gave me something to hide behind, a mask that preserved a sense of detachment, if not anonymity. But I was now a senior, and Peninsula High had begun to feel like an extension of my own home. Though I had managed to make only a few friends because of an instinctual shyness and my citywide notoriety as a drug dealer, I was on familiar territory and thought I knew all the ropes and tricks and how to keep myself out of trouble.

I could not have been more wrong.

On the way to school that first morning, my mother assigned me the unwanted task of patrolling the breezeway, a no-man’s-land where the hoods and rednecks and no-goodniks of both sexes gathered because they were far from the gaze and interference of teachers. It was lion country for a boy like me, the dreaded realm where Wilson “Wormy” Ledbetter ruled over his fierce pride of man-eating rednecks, who worshipped him. I had attached the nickname “Wormy” to the Ledbetter family tree; it was the reason Wormy had beaten me up during my freshman year. In the era before desegregation, every white school produced some variation on the theme of Wormy Ledbetter. At Peninsula High, Wormy was the
Tyrannosaurus rex
of the classic Southern redneck. He had beaten me up often and taken pleasure in doing so. Last year, he had broken my nose. My mother scared the bejesus out of Wormy and his parents by letting him know she would throw his sorry butt out of school if he ever dared to look cross-eyed at another student. Wormy was also racist, peerless in his hatred of black people.

That day Wormy was gathered with his usual mob of flat-topped cretins. But that was not what alarmed me when I turned the corner on the breezeway. All the new black kids had also gathered on the far side of the breezeway—an unexpected and historic gathering on the first day of school. Muscle for muscle, they looked equal to Wormy and his gum-popping posse, both groups languidly sizing each other up. The air was electric as I walked between them. It was supposed to feel like the first day of school, but I felt like a French peasant carrying a pike outside of the Bastille. I was close to terror till I caught a glimpse of Ike, standing with a group of the new kids. I caught his eye, then raised my hand in a gesture for him to keep his ranks in order, and he nodded. Then I turned to face the boy who had served as both my nemesis and my nightmare through high school.

“Hey there, Wormy!” I said with false bonhomie. “Gosh, I missed you this summer. Your friendship means so much to me.”

“We ain’t never been friends in our fucking lives and we ain’t never gonna be,” Wormy said. “And don’t you ever call me Wormy again.”

“Everybody calls you Wormy,” I said. “They do it behind your back. Why don’t you come out for football?”

“I ain’t playing for no nigger coach,” Wormy said, but in a modulated voice that made certain he was not heard by the swelling rank of black kids behind us.

“Yeah, that’s what you told me when I called,” I said. “But the team needs you, Wormy. You were an all-conference fullback last year. We could make you all-state this year.”

“Don’t you understand plain English, Toad?” Wormy said. “I ain’t playing for no nigger.”

“Today’s your last chance. Coach Jefferson’ll let you on the team if you come out today.”

“Tell him to suck my white dick,” Wormy said. The crowd behind him erupted in cheers, and he smiled.

“Here’s why I think you’re not going out for football, Wormy.”

“I’m all ears, Toad.”

“You’re a big talker, but yellow as canned chickenshit.” I thought I would be killed in the next several seconds. I waited for Wormy’s charge and was taken by surprise when he did not lunge for my throat. Instead, he shifted tactics and looked past me down toward the motionless, expressionless sea of black faces, with Ike Jefferson a yard in front of his companions.

“I smell a
gar,”
Wormy screamed out. His white mob was ready and waiting to shout the time-honored reply: “What kind of gar? A
cee-gar?”

“No,” Wormy yelled. “A
knee-gar.”

I immediately disengaged and went down the breezeway and faced Ike, who was grim-faced and about to lead half the football team in a headlong charge into the center of the heckling mob.

“I can handle this,” I promised, shouting so all the black kids could hear me. Ike didn’t look too convinced, and I shouted around him to the others, “My fellow students! My name is Toad, the good-hearted white boy. Stand back and watch me kick Wormy’s cracker ass.”

I said it to break the tension, but it had gone too far, and Ike’s face was immobile as he suggested: “Do it fast, Leo. We don’t have to take their shit.”

“No problem, Ike,” I said, though my try at defusing the fight was complicated by the entrance of yet another group of new students who appeared in the breezeway with the cadence and tramping of inexpert marchers. We all turned and, to my horror, I saw Mr. Lafayette bringing in his contingent of twelve orphans wearing those bilious orange jumpsuits stenciled with the ugly logo of St. Jude’s Orphanage. They looked like a dozen pumpkins lined up in a supermarket aisle on Halloween. Wormy and his crew hooted at them in unfeigned hilarity.

I ran up to Mr. Lafayette, red-faced and angry at this new complication to the already overburdened first ten minutes of my senior year. “At ease,” Mr. Lafayette said to his squad, but he didn’t allow them to break formation.

“My mother told Sister Pollywog not to make these kids wear these ugly uniforms,” I told him, and caught Starla smirking at me behind the sunglasses Sheba had given her on the night of my Fourth of July party.

“Polycarp’s my boss, Leo,” Mr. Lafayette said. “I do what she orders, and this is it.”

“Hey, orphans!” Wormy shouted. “Nice threads. I see they even got coons in the orphanage.”

I had endured my fill of the drawling slimeball, and I turned to confront him, striding toward him in what I hoped was an intimidating fashion. He readied himself to punch me through the brick wall of our high school. That’s when Peninsula High, both black and white, got the surprise of our young lives: emerging from the white crowd, a diminutive, parakeet-like white boy, fragile as an elf, rushed toward Wormy. With a slight leap, he slapped a startled Wormy Ledbetter with an open-handed blow that echoed the length and breadth of the breezeway. Thunderstruck, I halted my timid charge, waiting for Wormy either to kill poor Trevor or to simply devour him like a gumdrop.

“Who the hell are you?” Wormy roared.

“How dare you make fun of those kids, you dumbo-brained lout!” Trevor said. I made a mental note that I would have to train Trevor in the indelicate art of cussing out a redneck.

Wormy gained control of himself and his cheering section by saying, “Hey, queer bait, you want to suck my white dick before I knock your block off?”

The second slap against Wormy came from an embattled Sheba Poe, who had fought through the crowd to defend her twin brother. Her slap couldn’t have hurt him much, but the humiliation of publicly taking a well-delivered backhand from a girl made Wormy truly dangerous.

“You want your dick sucked?” Sheba asked loudly. “I’ll suck your white dick, you fucking asshole from hell. But only if I think it’s big enough. Pull it out. Go ahead, you scum-sucking fat pig of an asshole.”

On Southern schoolyards in 1969, whether black or white, this was an extraordinarily rare, if not unparalleled, use of language. It drove it home to me that Trevor and Sheba were a lot of things, but they were not even remotely Southern. Not even Wormy, at his most profane and arrogant in the enclosed privacy of locker rooms or shower stalls, had ever descended to Sheba’s level of coarseness. Observing Wormy’s expression, I knew that a conversation about the size of his genitals was particularly unnerving. Though Wormy had the heart of a thug, he was rendered speechless by the two irrational twins. Both Sheba and Trevor rushed him again, as fearless as gladiators. Wormy hit Trevor with his fist, a glancing blow that knocked Trevor to the ground. But Sheba clawed his face with her fingernails. Wormy slapped her face hard, and her mouth was bleeding when she hit the pavement. When he hit Sheba, Wormy drew down on himself the unappeasable wrath of the orphans.

I was aware that the moment was upon me to summon up the physical courage I did not think I had or would ever have. In the chicken-hearted depths of me, I turned toward Wormy and prepared to get an ass-whipping. Women have little idea of the fearful world their sons grow up in, populated by pin-headed, mean-spirited lunatics—the countless legions of Wormy Ledbetters. Putting up his fists, Wormy smiled as he watched my trembling approach.

But Wormy was having a bad day. He was not expecting the all-out charge of orange furies as Starla and Betty leaped on his back from behind. St. Jude’s Orphanage made an official entry into the fray, and their onslaught brought Wormy to the ground. Both girls were clawing at his face, and Starla was trying to put out his eyes. On the ground, wrestling and kicking, Wormy knocked both girls off him. I helped them both up, then pushed them into the vicinity of an unnerved Mr. Lafayette, who had his hands full holding Niles in restraint. Betty’s participation in the attack had made it racial again, and I turned when I heard the crowd of black kids about to charge. Again, I held up my hand and pointed to Ike, who had taken several steps forward with his fists clenched, his huge hands ready to break the jaws of some loose-lipped white boys.

“Stay where you are, Ike. Please. Let me see if I can handle this,” I pleaded.

“It isn’t working out for you, Strom,” he said. Before any of us could move, however, Niles Whitehead broke free of Mr. Lafayette’s grip. He got directly in Wormy’s face and gripped a handful of his shirtfront.

“Get your fucking hands off me, orphan,” Wormy sneered. “You don’t know who you’re fucking with.”

“Wrong, pal.” It was his perfect control of himself that made Niles seem so dangerous. “I know exactly who you are. You don’t know who
I
am.”

“I’ll know better after I kick your ass, fart blossom,” Wormy said.

“You ever touch my sister again, and I’ll slit your throat, numbnuts,” Niles said. There was not an ounce of fear in his voice. “And if you hit me, I’ll find out where you live, and I’ll slit your mama’s and daddy’s throats while they’re asleep. Then you’ll think twice about calling me an orphan again.”

“Let me take it from here, Niles,” I said. “You get back in line.”

“I can break his ass in front of his friends,” Niles said to me as matter-of-factly as if he were informing me of a changing traffic light.

“You done good, son. But go back. Please. We’ve got to get this school year started,” I said. “Wormy, take your gang of dimwits to the front of the school.” It surprised me to see Chad Rutledge and Molly Huger watching this drama take place while sitting on the hood of Chad’s car in the parking lot.

Itching to salvage what he could from a morning that had turned sour, Wormy threw a right-handed punch that would have knocked me unconscious if it had landed. But that summer had done something to me. I had grown three inches and had spent months lifting weights at The Citadel, running Ike up stadium stairs, and working my bicycle hard on my morning paper route. My father had toasted my brand-spanking-new manhood on the Battery at the exact point where the Ashley and the Cooper meet in all the violent nature and communion of rivers. Because of my father’s gesture, I had known a transfiguration as though I had received an invitation to join a sacred order of knights. I was not the same boy that Wormy had beaten up the previous year. I knew it, but Wormy Ledbetter did not. He threw me his best punch, the same one that had put me on the ground the three previous years. Repetition was not always the brightest stratagem. I stepped back, blocked it with my left hand, then delivered a punch to his face that seemed driven by the Lord himself. Wormy’s nose exploded with blood, making him collapse in on himself, which he did to the cheers of the black students.

By then, teachers had appeared on the periphery, so I held up my hand in an attempt to silence the noise. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said to the students, “welcome to Peninsula High.”

With those words, the bell rang, a merciful sound. And where some things ended that day, many more began. Many more.

B
eing the principal’s son did not always work in my favor at Peninsula High School. My craving for anonymity was thwarted anytime a kid learned that I was the son of the regal and sometimes censorious principal. And today, the whole school was already on edge during my first-period French class when my mother began calling on the loudspeaker for students to report to her office. Unsurprisingly, she first called out the name of Wilson Ledbetter. Before long, the loudspeaker crackled back to life, and she called for Trevor and Sheba Poe. Five minutes later she requested an audience with Betty Roberts, Starla Whitehead, and Niles Whitehead. Then she called for Ike Jefferson. Finally, in her frostiest tone, she called for me.

In the funereal setting of the principal’s office, I reported to my mother’s secretary, Julia Trammell, as I saw the main players on the breezeway lined up awaiting their interrogations.

“Hey, Mrs. Trammell. How was your summer?”

“Way too short, honey bun,” Julia said. “But I’ve got to admit, this joint has been hopping since I got here this morning.”

“Please inform her royal majesty that her prince has signed in,” I said.

“Boy, talk about the village weirdo,” Wormy said, holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose. “No one talks like the Toad.”

I asked, “What’s that you’re holding on to, Wormy, what’s left of your nose?”

“Your old lady just kicked me out of school,” he said. “For the whole year.”