Wingshooters (11 page)

The next morning at breakfast, my grandparents were both subdued. They were quieter than usual, not talking about the goings-on in town or their plans for the day, and Charlie hardly touched the eggs and sausage on his plate. I kept waiting for them to say something about the call, about my father, but neither of them mentioned it. They were both especially kind with me, my grandmother letting me put more brown sugar than usual on my oatmeal, my grandfather refilling my milk glass. I thought maybe my grandmother would mention the call after school, when Charlie was gone to the coffee shop, but she didn’t. Neither of them brought it up at supper, either. By the next day, I realized that they weren’t going to tell me, and I didn’t know what that meant. All I knew was that my father might be coming, that I might be seeing him soon. And I was starting to hope that, when he left again, he’d think about taking me with him.

SIX

A
few days after my father called, I stopped at my locker to pick up my scarf and gloves and was a little late in getting outside. By the time I made it out to the playground, Missy Calloway was sitting on my bench with Jessica Brown, speaking in her most teacherly voice about the math test we’d just finished taking. I continued past them, beyond the kids playing handball and hopscotch, and headed for my second favorite spot. There was another wooden bench around the corner of the building, toward the front of the school. This square area of concrete, to the right of the swings, did not have any grass or equipment. Because there was nothing to play with it was usually empty; because it faced east, it was sunny through lunchtime. I liked to sit on that bench sometimes, away from everyone else, and lean my back against the wall. This physical distance made me less self-conscious about being alone; at least here, out of sight, I wouldn’t get teased for it. But if someone approached me in a way that seemed like trouble, I could just slip around the corner, back in view of the teachers.

On this morning, though, when I turned the corner, my usual space wasn’t empty. Several boys—they looked like third and fourth graders—had surrounded another boy I recognized as Billy Coles, one of the children from the trailers in the country. He was sitting on the bench, back pressed flat against the wall, the four other boys standing around him in a semicircle. One of them was leaning over him, finger pointing in his face; Billy kept trying to back up but there was nowhere to go, so he just slipped a little further down the wall. Although Billy wasn’t small and didn’t seem especially weak, he was often clipped on the head or shoved into the lockers when he made his way down the hall. He had a voice that was always on the edge of a whine, and he often scuffled with other boys. But this confrontation was clearly one he hadn’t invited; he looked scared, and his eyes were darting between the other boys’ bodies, looking for a path of escape.

Other than me, Billy was the most unpopular child at school. He had dirty-blond hair that was jaggedly cut, with a ponytail half a foot long. His face and clothes were often streaked with dirt, and his shoelaces were always knotted and clumped, where they had broken and been tied back together. His fingernails were always dirty, and his nose often ran; I’d seen teachers recoil physically when they had to touch him. Billy had several equally dirty brothers and sisters whom I sometimes saw in town—at the ice cream parlor, or the movies, or in the grocery store, anywhere businesses were giving something away for free. His mother was a small, silent woman who came to the market to buy groceries with food stamps. His father was tall and skinny, with tied-back hair as long as Billy’s; I sometimes saw him picking through garbage cans on the outskirts of town, and we’d both turn our heads away, embarrassed. Billy was not the only child at school from the country trailers—once a week a group of them were marched into the gym for a bath—but because he butted heads with the kids from town, he was the one who drew the most attention. I’d never particularly liked him myself—he was one of those children whose own self-pity provokes as much irritation as sympathy—but right then I wanted to say, just slip to the left. Turn the corner and you’ll be safe.

“You stink, Billy,” said the boy who was leaning over him, and I saw that it was Dale Davis, Ray Davis’s son. Dale was a decent, popular boy, and not a known bully. “Why don’t you go take a bath or something?”

“He don’t
have
a bathtub, Dale,” said another boy, Walter Kale. “He’s got to take ’em here.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Dale said, as if this was news to him. He was dark-haired and compact like his father, but there was a self-assurance in his manner—even at age eight—that his father seemed to lack. “You don’t have a bathtub, or a car, or even a bedroom, ain’t that right? Hell, if it wasn’t for the bus that brought you to school, we wouldn’t even know you were out there.”

Billy grimaced, as if these words were a physical assault. “Leave me alone, Dale,” he said miserably.

“You want me to leave you alone, huh?” said Dale, standing up straight and crossing his arms. “I’ll bet you didn’t tell that nigger nurse to leave you alone.”

Now I understood. Dale usually didn’t bother the country children, or any of the outcasts, really. But he’d been listening to his father. And his father knew that people had started going to the clinic.

Billy looked up at him now, and his expression neither confirmed nor denied Dale’s suspicion. Still, Dale stepped in close again. “It’s true, ain’t it? She was out there, wasn’t she? She was out at that clinic they made from the store.”

“I
had
to go there!” Billy protested. “I was getting sick to my stomach and my head always hurt. I didn’t know the nurse was gonna be a nigger!”

“So now you’re a nigger-lover, ain’t you, Billy?”

“No.”

“She touched you everywhere, didn’t she?”

“No!”

“And I’ll bet you liked it, too!”

They began pushing him, poking him, trying to get him to react, emboldened by his anguished “Stop it!” and awkward attempts to defend himself. Their focus and excitement intensified with each passing moment, and then all four boys pressed around him so tightly that I could no longer make him out between their bodies. Billy’s cries and the excited shouts of the boys who surrounded him were noticed by kids on other parts of the playground, who began to rush over to watch.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large adult figure come around the side of the building. It was Mr. Garrett. He must have been on recess duty that day, and he came whipping around the corner faster than I’d known an adult could move. A couple of the newcomers shouted out, “Run!” and the boys who’d cornered Billy all scattered, like flushed birds who fly in no particular direction in their desperate attempt to escape. Even Billy took off, as panicked as all the others.

“Hey!” yelled Mr. Garrett, grabbing this way and that, but the boys slipped through his grasp. “Hey, you’re going to hear about this later!” He turned toward the bench where Billy had been, looking at me for a moment, then looking back.

And then, right after our eyes met, we both saw something else—one boy who hadn’t gotten away. He was sprawled out on the pavement in front of the bench, and it looked like he’d tripped on the thick link chain that secured it to the playground. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and I saw that it was Kevin Watson. His black hair was falling over into his eyes and he was trying to catch his breath. Kevin pulled down the sleeve of his jacket and looked at his forearm—there was a large red scrape, and seeing this, he promptly began to cry. He had always cried easily—I remembered the tears that followed his scolding by a teacher in the cafeteria the year before—but in this case tears were war-ranted. It looked bad—a deep scrape maybe four inches long, blood running down his arm, bits of dirt and rock pressed into the open flesh. When Mr. Garrett saw this, he gave up on the other boys and came rushing to Kevin’s side. He knelt down on one knee and placed his hand on Kevin’s shoulder.

“Are you all right, young man? Let me take a look at that,” he said, and the sternness of his voice from a few minutes before was gone, replaced by a tone of concern.

“No!” Kevin cried out, flinching from his touch. “I’m fine! I’m fine! Leave me alone!”

And there was something other than pain in his voice, something more than the irritation that children sometimes feel in the face of unwanted attention. What it sounded like was fear.

Mr. Garrett must have heard it too. He backed off a bit, but still stayed close. “It’s all right, son. I’m only trying to help. Now let me have a look at your arm.”

Kevin’s face was covered with tears. His left hand was holding his sleeve up and cradling his right elbow, exposing his arm to the air. And when Mr. Garrett inched closer, gently curved his hand around Kevin’s elbow and tilted up his forearm, the boy didn’t flinch or pull away. The skin around the wound looked dry and cracked, and the flesh of his fingers was sickly white. Mr. Garrett carefully pulled out a few of the pebbles, and then unfolded his handkerchief, pressing it just below the wound to wipe away the running blood.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “It’s just a bad scrape. Now let’s get you up on your feet and we’ll take you inside.”

Kevin nodded. He wasn’t looking at Mr. Garrett, but he wasn’t crying anymore either. Mr. Garrett held out a hand to help him, but Kevin refused it. Since his right arm was still elevated to keep the blood from running down, he turned to his left, pressing his hand to the ground to brace himself as he got his legs set under him. And as he rolled that way, facedown, back end higher than the front, his jacket and shirt edged up his back, exposing ten or twelve inches of skin. There was just a flash of something that shouldn’t have been there, several dark strips of color. Then the clothes came back down, and they were gone. I looked at Mr. Garrett’s face, and saw that he had seen them, too.

“Kevin,” he said, and now his voice sounded different. “Stand here for a second. Let me look.”

And maybe Kevin thought the teacher was still talking about his arm, because he didn’t move away or protest. Maybe he’d forgotten what his clothes concealed, so accustomed was he to carrying his secret. Or maybe he knew exactly what was happening and wanted someone, some adult, just to see. When Mr. Garrett lifted the back of the jacket again, what he uncovered was a network of dark, thin marks, some just an inch or two long, some the entire width of Kevin’s back. Many of them were long-healed, hardened and raised; they looked like a game of Pick up Sticks affixed to his flesh. But some were fresh—scabbed over, or still open, oozing tiny spots of red. I did not see how the blood hadn’t soaked through his shirt. I did not see how he could lean back in his chair.

Kevin had turned away from me, so I couldn’t see his face. But I saw Mr. Garrett’s. When he let go of the jacket and straightened up, he looked like he was going to cry. The muscles in his cheeks were jumping, and his eyes were pained. When he spoke, it was in a heavy voice I hadn’t heard before.

“Kevin, who did this to you?”

Now Kevin twisted away and took hold of his arm again. “No one! Leave me alone!” he said, and then he ran away, back across the playground and toward the building. Mr. Garrett stood and watched him for a moment, and I had a sense, then, that he was taking measure, trying to figure out what to do. He lowered his head and shook it slowly, pressing his lips together. Then he straightened up and walked across the schoolyard.

In the years that have passed since 1974, I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Mr. Garrett had kept his knowledge to himself. He could have let Kevin go home without telling anyone what he had seen. He could have just minded his business and let people go on as they always had. If Mr. Garrett had turned away from what we both saw that morning, it might have stayed a secret forever. For surely I would never have revealed such troubling information. I would never have said a thing.

That evening, after supper, there was the now-familiar knock at the kitchen door. This time, though, it wasn’t Earl or a group of Charlie’s friends. This time it was Ray Davis, by himself. When my grandmother pulled the storm door open, Ray was standing there in the olive pants he always wore on duty, along with his police department jacket. He had taken off his wide-brimmed hat, and he stood holding it against his chest as if apologizing in advance for his visit.

“Good evening, Helen,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but is Charlie at home? I need to talk to him. It’s important.”

She hesitated—these unannounced visits were wearing on her—but then she stepped out of the way and said, “Sure, Ray. Come on inside.”

He met my grandfather in the dining room—Charlie, drawn by the knock and the voices, had already gotten up. But when Ray responded to his suggestion that they sit down at the table by saying, “No, Charlie, I think it’s best we discussed this in private,” I knew that he was there about Kevin Watson.

My grandfather took a moment to reply. “All right,” he said. “Well, let’s go out on the porch then.”

This was late October, and the temperature was now down in the forties. My grandfather put on his shoes and a barn coat, and Ray kept his jacket on, and after my grandmother had given both of them beers, they stepped through the door off the living room and out onto the porch. The front porch actually led, of course, to the front door of the house, but no one used that door except the mailman and salesmen and sometimes Charlie, who’d stand out front in the evening, stick two fingers in his mouth, and make a sound as loud as a factory whistle to call me home. But as little as the door was used, the porch was used often. For my grandmother, it was a place to let her pies cool. For my grandfather, it was a place to keep an eye on the neighborhood. It also gave him a place to hold private conversations.

In this second function, though, it was probably less effective than he realized. When he didn’t completely shut the inner door, as he didn’t this time, leaving it open a crack for the sake of light or heat; and when I was perched on the very end of his couch, I could, if I concentrated, generally hear the conversation. I had done exactly that just two nights before, when my grandparents had gone out there after supper to talk about my father. Now, with my grandmother in the kitchen washing the dishes, listening was not very difficult. They began by discussing the weather, which had changed from autumn glorious to prewinter gloom, and Charlie must have been sitting in the chair furthest from the door because his voice was harder to follow. Then Ray cleared his throat.

“Steve Baker called from over at the elementary school today. Someone told him about some whipping marks on Earl’s boy, Kevin.” He paused, and I could picture him gripping his beer can more tightly. “It was … well, it was that new teacher, the colored one. He got a look at Kevin’s back on the playground.”

Silence from my grandfather. Then: “
That’s
what you came over to tell me?”