White People (12 page)

Morning, and my room looked the same as ever, collections nicely organized, but I got up feeling bruised, timid, humiliated. I leaned into the hall, saw into the bathroom. The little man stood brushing his own teeth. But it was not a real man. Nothing to be scared of, just Bradley more or less. At breakfast, they fought to be polite. They didn’t mention what had happened but took turns watching me, like at any moment I might drop out of the breakfast nook, fall to the linoleum, me kicking, hissing, in some wild blind lavish fit.

I
PLANNED IT
like a bank robbery. To the minute. I’d been waiting. Only today might I get away with it. Jimmy Otis was moving out of
town. His dad worked at the Du Pont plant and they’d transferred him to Memphis. For the last three months, Bradley and Jimmy had been best friends. Our parents disapproved. So did I. They were pleased to see the friendship broken up so easily. So was I. Mother said, “He is just the grubbiest little red-headed thing.”

“He can’t help it, Momma,” Bradley told her. “He’s poor.”

“Listen, young man, anybody can afford soap and water.”

One afternoon, I looked into Bradley’s room and saw Otis, visiting. He reached up and with grimy fingers tapped a suspended model plane. It spun in circles. “Are these that hard to make?” he asked, almost shy.

“Not too,” Bradley said. “Haven’t you ever done a model?”

“Unh-unh. It always seemed like kind of a waste. Who painted the camouflage on it?”

“I did. I do all my own paint jobs. That’s the important part.”

I sat on my bike, just across the street from the Otises’ stucco house. I sat studying the van, the moving men. A rusted De Soto was parked in the yard. Lampshades were stacked on its backseat. Everything seemed ready to roll. Jimmy came down the front stairs carrying a vinyl footstool. He saw me. I pushed off and, feeling elated, waved back over my shoulder without looking, good-bye Idiot, good-bye School Bully and Bradley’s Best Friend. Good riddance.

On the way home, I biked near Bradley’s Little League game and heard some competitive shouts and whistling. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, steep and brassy. Nobody at home but Ardelia, humming hymns and some of Mother’s show tunes as she ironed. I went up to my room to collect the supplies. A cardboard box, and in it a pair of scissors borrowed from Mother’s needlepoint basket, a can of charcoal lighter fluid from the garage, and matches out of Father’s pipe rack.

Wearing the hiking boots Bradley’s made such fun of, I padded quietly across the hall, closed his door behind me, locked it. I took the scissors, stepped up onto his desk chair and, feeling some stage fright but no regret, cut down the first suspended model plane, tossed it into the box on his bed. I could have just yanked them down, tack and thread and all … but somehow it appealed to me, leaving a
fringe of long colorless strings bearding the whole ceiling. My movement stirred the dangling plane just like Daddy’s war one. That went too. Me, up here among them, snipping. Cut threads, relieved of weight, curled and looped or spun in lazy twists. I stripped his room of every single model: seventeen big ones and twenty smaller designs. I stacked ships and airplanes, crisscrossed in an apple crate, sweet-smelling, rotten-smelling. On my way down the back stairs, I heard Ardelia talking church gossip by phone to her best friend over the steam iron’s slosh and whisper.

I cut across the weedy field behind our house and broke into a run. Plastic jiggled, brittle in the big box. I breathed funny, knowing I was up to something really mean and downright wrong and very hurtful. Bullies must feel like this, day-in day-out. How could their hearts stand it?

At our camp, I stopped. We’d dug this hole together. We called it the Cave. It had once seemed very deep and private but I’d grown, and now it was just an oversized puddle at the wood’s edge. I stood on the brink, panting, quick shallow breaths. I dumped all Bradley’s models into the hollow. My palms sweated as I fumbled with the lighter fluid’s complicated cap. Printed along the red plastic nozzle:
CHILD-RESISTANT
. I felt personally affronted till I recalled how Father himself had cursed it a few nights earlier. The spout snapped up. I looked guiltily around. I squirted out half the can. The whole heap down there looked varnished. The flagship
Santa Maria
was carefully rigged with tiny sails Bradley had stitched himself, while Mother advised. The dye already spread, bleeding as fabric soaked up fluid. With his small jars of candy-bright enamels, Bradley had worked on these for hours: all the wing-tip stars, insignias, and camouflage. I pressed the can’s flat sides until its spout wheezed, gasping.

In an hour, he would wander home from his game, wearing that natty pin-striped uniform, the green felt cap, number 17. A real plane buzzed overhead. I felt almost sad, striking this match, tossing it into the crater. Flames leapt even higher than I’d hoped. I jumped back, then touched my bangs, singed a little. I brushed away scorched hairs, then hunkered down to watch the damage. The fronts of my legs warmed as things below began to snap, like delicate bones
popping in quick series. Jet wings merged with the bulbous undersides of boats. Blue-black smoke, stinky curling stuff, trailed out over the high weeds. On the tilted flight deck of the
Enterprise
, planes no bigger than bees softened to tear-shaped blobs and slid downward, hissing. Plastic rudders and propellers whined, frying to one leaden shape. I found a branch and prodded the debris. Pockets of air snapped loud in toxic farts. When most flames stopped, I shoved the stick into the soft center and lifted the whole solidified mass up out of the hole. I stood supporting this at arm’s length. It smoldered, still creaking, complaining; strings of plastic looped across hulls and blubbery fuselages, all crusted with sand and drooped around my stick like lava. It stunk and clicked like something newly dead, something accidentally deformed in a horror picture: “The Manta Ray from Hiroshima.” Something you could pity.

H
E AMBLED
in from Little League, forty-five minutes late. I’d been seated for an hour at the kitchen table, drawing, Ardelia as my witness. I’d brought one of my better finished crayon drawings downstairs so it would seem I’d been here longer. Now he was tardy and I’d ruined it. I sat recoloring a dark sky for the fourth time. He sauntered past, pounding the palm of his orange pitcher’s glove. “You all win?” Ardelia asked, half-interested at best.

“Sure did. That First Presbyterian is a bunch of nothings. I struck out three of those guys in a row.”

He strode past this table without speaking. Just as he pushed through the dining room’s swinging door, I said, “Oh, Jimmy Otis came over to say good-bye. I thought you were home. I told him you’d probably be in your room.”

“He was supposed to move this afternoon. I
already
said good-bye.”

“Well …” I shrugged, going back to coloring. “He was up there looking for you.”

I listened to his every step. Turning down the hall. Hopping up two stairs at a time. I wished Ardelia would hum less loudly. It took about a minute. I heard him coming back down. Not hurrying. His
sneakers on the staircase carpeting. I pressed my damp palms to the waxy drawing and leaned over it so he couldn’t see my face. He sat at the opposite end of the table, Father’s usual spot. I counted to sixty two times. Finally, I risked it. I glanced up. Bradley’s taken his cap off, his yellow curls were matted on the sides. His face totally blank, drained of character and color, all that pug-nosed male-animal confidence vanished. “My models are gone.”

I slowly chose a new color from the shoe boxful. “Wha?”

“All my models … somebody’s stole all my models.”

I looked down the tabletop at him. Notice this, I told myself. One minute ago he was bragging about pulverizing sissies. Look at him now. But the sight gave me no pleasure at all; it distressed me. I even considered confessing, then got dizzy at the thought and decided I would never admit to this. Ever. How could I have done it, anyway, and why?

“Otis knew I was at Little League. He came over here and took every one, then he goddamn moved to Tennessee.” Bradley hurried to the wall phone, dialed a number. I kept my crayon moving, but felt blind, lightheadedness. The longer he stood there gripping the receiver, saying nothing, the more deeply I could breathe. “They’re gone already. Ardelia, this is important. Did you see a red-headed—well, you know who Jimmy Otis is—did you see him carrying my models out of here? All my models?”

“Ain’t nobody been here this afternoon but us chickens. Just me. And Bryan.”

Bradley’s head snapped my way.

This crayon sliding back and forth, I managed to say quietly, “Otis came to the back door. He wouldn’t leave through
here.”

Bradley studied me, his jaw working. I saw him considering, then his face relaxed to its original frown. He came over, sat again. Some Perry Mason!

“And I gave him a good-bye present. I gave him a model to make. That rat. I’m calling the police right now.” My brother stood.

“Ain’t nobody calling no police till your momma gets back from clothes shopping. And don’t you be saying no ‘goddamn’ around me, neither.”

“That Otis was so jealous of me,” Bradley mumbled. “He was even jealous of you, said you were probably smart underneath—Otis, you’d have to be a pretty rotten kid to do something like this.”

For the first time in years, Bradley was about to cry. I watched, mesmerized. He still can, I thought; he’s really going to. Brother kept shaking his head side to side. “Boy,” he said breathily. “Boy.”

“Bradley. He knew what you liked most. And he took it. I
told
you Otis was bad.”

“Yeah, but my models, Bryan. My models.” He put his head down on the table. The way he’d said my name, without any joke in it, without being bossy, made me think of how things used to be when he was little, when he lived in trouble and I looked out for him.

Ardelia wandered over, a potato peeler now in one hand. She wiped the other palm dry on her apron, then patted his shoulder, stood there absently fluffing out his flattened ringlets. “Your daddy’ll will buy you some more models.”

“Not like those, Dee. Those were
my
models.”

I needed an activity. I went back to coloring but kept glancing down the table. Her hand, dark on back, ivory-colored underneath, pinched at his curls. Bradley’s pin-striped shoulders bucked and his sobs kept cracking, filling this room, all wild and unrestrained, two years’ worth of not crying, packed and condensed in him, now leaping out.

“You buck up, champ. Hear?” Dee said. And he did start quieting. Relieved, I went back to coloring with a Crayole nubbin. That Otis, I thought. That sneak of an Otis. Tears beaded on the layered wax of what, an hour ago, had been a landscape: a smoking chimney, a stream, a horse, a house. Someone had done something really mean to my kid brother. I got furious, so furious I yelled,
“I’m
calling the police.”

“Ain’t nobody calling no police till your momma gets back from clothes shopping.”

Bradley looked up, appreciative, his face all blurred. I sketched, furious. I drew a long curling tail, mint green. I wrote across the blotched colors:
I AM A RAT. I AM A TRUE AND REAL RAT. A ROTTEN
ONE. I LOVE MY BROTHER REALLY. I LOVE MY OWN BROTHER. BASICALLY
.

“W
HY
D
ID
Dinosaurs Die Out So?” Thus ran the name of my searching papier-mâche Science Fair Project, a runner-up locally. As I recognized the lapdogs of Summit Avenue, I knew the shape of each beast unseen for so many thousand years. When I put the question of why group extinction to Miss Whipple, my unmarried appreciative art-and-science teacher, she said, “Because, my Bryan of Bryans” (there were seven in sixth grade), “because they could not change.” “Oh,” I said, and worried.

My head replaced those lumbering and peaceable and mostly grass-eating monuments I adored almost as pets, replaced them with nearer and more recent loved ones. I pictured my born-poor grandfather, ears very large, coming into Falls from deep weedy countryside, wanting not to be so country, wanting to evolve into being one of the old families who seemed least capable of that. Of change. And marrying into one of the old extinct-almost, almost-rottenly-old families. And that was called upgrading. Why Do Dinos Die? Maybe Bradley’s allergies proved some weakness in us whites? “You will be tested on this. Regarding their extinction, regarding anything’s extinction, boys and girls, it’s simply: If a group cannot bend, it fails to grow—it loses out to heartier and therefore worthier life forms. To quote Darwin, ‘In Nature, there is no equality, only adaptation.’ Any questions? This
will be
on your final.”

Quite easy to confuse the long spiny silhouettes of the missing titan-lizards with those shapes I had awarded, via Crayola, my co-householders, my species and my genus too. The local names of holy things extinct. And could we grow and bend? And did we want to? Did we
have
to want to?

Maybe other looser quicker ones would find us, years from now, stuck in our swamps of Packards, patios, soup tureens, needlepoint pillows, model planes? What might reduce us to the palest possible fossils? Fossils that children of some future might collect and swap
among themselves? What shifty, limber, and way-more-colorful life form will nail us first?

P
UBERTY’S DISADVANTAGES
can hardly be exaggerated. Thirteen years old. I’d got there, somehow. Like on vacation in the car, falling to sleep in North Carolina and waking up, rubbing your eyes, to ask, “Are we halfway yet?” And being told, “Oh, you’ve been asleep. We didn’t want to wake you. This is Florida already. We’re here!”

Bradley had been born nearly two years after me. Suddenly, when he reached the same thirteen, his physique forgot this. Things are not supposed to happen overnight. But, against my will, glands conspired to pass me off as someone else. And just then, Bradley’s copycat chemistry got the idea. His same system of vats and ducts lurched and knuckled into action. And I could feel him breathing down my neck, the new him, right behind me, respiration loud and clear, waiting for the straightaway, a roadhog who is definitely going to pass even if the unmarked curve ahead is very dangerous.