Athletic Shorts (10 page)

The China kids hang out at the top of the stairs, and if they’re going to get you, that’s where they do it. I saw them there, and right away I was going to go back to the other bus; but our school bell rings outside
and
inside, and I heard it and I knew the kids would be changing classes and some of them would come outside and see
me if I tried to go back the other way—and I thought they’d know what I did in the bathroom. I think people just know if you mess up sometimes, even if no one tells them. So anyway, I decided to just go ahead and pretend I didn’t see the China kids and maybe they’d just let me go to the bus so I could go change my clothes.

But they didn’t. The leader, he’s a guy named Kam, was practicing that karate stuff, and the rest of his gang was clapping their hands and saying “way to go.” They call theirselves the Jo-Boys. That’s a really dumb name, and I don’t get it; but I wasn’t going to say anything. I just put my head down and walked around the corner to the steps, trying to make it like no one could see me. I can do that sometimes, but not this time. Somebody said, “Hey, kid!” but I just put my head down farther and kept walking. I tried to do it like when you’re trying to get past a mean dog. My dad told me not to walk any faster or anything, just to act like I’m not there. But this kid wasn’t a dog, and he said, “Hey, kid,” again. I tried to walk faster; but somebody grabbed my shoulder, and I turned around toward him and said, “You better leave me alone,” but I kept my head down.

He said, “That right?” and I said, “That’s right. My dad’s a sword fighter, and he can cut your head right off. He’ll do it, too, if anybody hurts me.”

Then it was a different voice that said, “We’re not gonna hurt you,” and it sort of tricked me, and I looked up and it was Kam, the leader of the gang, and I didn’t quite believe him, but I said, “Okay then, can I just go to the bus?”

But he said, “Well, yeah, but these are our stairs, and we have to charge you to go down ’em,” and I said I don’t have any money, which was a little bit of a lie because I had enough for lunch, but my dad told me to always say I don’t have any.

So Kam says well, how am I gonna get down the stairs, and I tell him, “That’s okay, I’ll just go to the other bus,” because I’m
really
getting scared now, but he says, “Do you see this little area here?” which I think he means where we’re standing and I say yes. So he says that part belongs to them, too, just like the stairs and I have to pay to use it. But when I say I won’t use it anymore, he just shakes his head and says too bad I already did. Then the kid who talked to me first says, “What’s that you got around your waist?” and I tell him it’s my telephone stuff. He wants to know what it’s worth, and I tell him it’s not for sale; but he just laughs, and Kam tells me to take it off.

Now, I’m scared a lot of the time, and most of the time I’m afraid to talk because people just make fun of
me because I have this really deep voice and these stupid zits on my nose plus it’s hard to get the words in my head out so they sound right. So usually when somebody wants to take something from me, I just give it. But they wouldn’t take it, though, if they saw how much it makes me hate them because someday I’ll get all the hate together and do something really mean and get even. But anyway, now I’m pretty scared; but they want my telephone stuff, and they’re just not going to get it. They’re just not. I’m almost nobody anyway, but if I don’t have my telephone stuff, I’m
really
nobody. Absolutely, completely, and all the way nobody. So I scream, “Leave me alone!” and they start laughing and kind of pushing me between each other. I grab the buckle to my telephone belt and hold on to it tight, and they push me harder, and they start sort of singing, “Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone,” so I scream it at them again, only louder this time, and I keep my eyes closed really tight and hold on to my belt buckle with all my might. Then I hear some girl’s voice that sounds like I should know who it is, like she’s from our school or something, but I’m not opening my eyes because I don’t want things to get worse. Sometimes if I scream and scream and keep my eyes closed tight, things just get over.

But then it starts to hurt. I hear some of the boys telling Kam he could probably kick the belt off me, and he starts to try to do it. By now I’m on the ground, and he’s kicking my hands just hard enough to make me let go of the buckle, but I won’t, I won’t, I never will, and he starts kicking harder and I just lay there and scream.

Then all of a sudden everything stops, and I think maybe it worked, but I keep my eyes closed a little bit longer because sometimes that makes sure everyone goes away. Then I open them just a little and take a peek to see if it’s time to get up and run yet.

But what I see is Hawk, and I know I’m done for. See, Hawk is this big nigger that goes to OMLC, and everybody knows if he’s after you, you might as well buy a plot in a cemetery somewhere because he might just be the toughest guy in the world. He’s never teased me before. In fact, he says hi to me sometimes, but I just figure that’s some kind of nigger trick, because that’s what my dad said it probably is. Usually Hawk just walks up to me and says something like “Telephone Man, you a kick,” and he smiles and shakes his head and walks away.

But now I get it. He gets the China kids to beat me up a little, and then he comes along to finish me off. I think, so that’s his nigger trick, and I roll up into a ball
because now I know it won’t be very long until it’s all over.

But then I hear him say, “What you Jo-Boys think you doin’ here?” and there’s no answer. Then Hawk says, “This here Telephone Man. Friend of mine,” and still there’s no answer. “How many time I gotta tell you China boys don’ go be messin’ with my friends?”

My eyes open up now, because this isn’t exactly what you expect from a nigger, and I see Kam doing that stuff that Chinamen in the movies do before they start spinning in the air and kicking people’s heads in. But Hawk doesn’t think that’s all such a big deal. He just says, “You done tried that before, Jo-Boy. You ’member that?” and Kam starts breathing big and kind of crouching like an animal; but right before you know it, Hawk’s got him down on the ground, and he doesn’t get to use any of his karate stuff because Hawk’s choking him right to death. The China kid’s eyes are so big they’re about ready to explode, and Hawk’s only using one hand, ’cause he’s looking at all these other China guys, who must be thinking they should jump on his back and help out their friend. But nobody does it, they just stand there and Hawk says, “Come on. I be closin’ off you number one Jo-Boy air-hole for him; then I take anybody else want some,” and still nobody moves.
Then Hawk turns back to Kam and says, “Gonna let you up, China boy. Nice an’ slow. You try any you Bruce Lee stuff, gonna embarrass you, front you friends,” and he lets a little bit loose.

Kam gets up kind of slow, and when he’s about halfway, Hawk grabs him by his cheeks between his fingers and makes him look at me. “You see that boy?” he says. “Got all kinda telephone shit on him?” Kam doesn’t say anything, so Hawk moves his head up and down for him, like he’s saying yes, and then Hawk says, “You
touch
him, you touchin’ me. Unnerstan’?” Kam doesn’t say anything again, so Hawk moves his head up and down again. “Now you Jo-Boys, get on. This over here be my school, an’ you got no binnis here.” Hawk lets Kam go and the Jo-Boys start to leave, and when I look around, I see some of Hawk’s friends standing there, waiting to see if they’re going to get to fight.

Then the Jo-Boys are gone, and all there is left is his kind and I’m thinking I know niggers are the worst, so maybe they just got rid of the China kids so they could have me all to theirselves to beat up. But then Hawk is helping me up, and this girl named Taronda, who I think I heard her voice before, is looking at my face to see if it’s cut and asking me am I okay. It might
still
be a nigger trick; but it sure doesn’t feel like it, and Hawk
walks me down the stairs to the bus stop and says, “Cripple kid say you got to go home an’ change you britches. See you later,” and he starts walking back up the stairs. When he gets about halfway back up, he turns and says, “Hey, Telephone Man,” and I look up there and he gets a big grin and says, “You a kick. An’ you right. Don’ be lettin’
no
body get that telephone shit off you. Tha’s you one big thing.”

So then I’m on the bus and no niggers beat me up like they were supposed to. In fact, they helped me, and so now what was I supposed to do? I quit worrying about it for a while, though, because there was this awful smell, like somebody hung a bunch of strawberries down in the sewer, and I figured out I wasn’t all done in that rest room and probably getting beat up made me quit paying attention and I had gone and messed up the sweats Willie Weaver got for me out of Lost and Found. I’m pretty sure the people around me noticed it because of the way they looked at me and then how the ones with perfectly good seats got up to stand near the back of the bus. So I got out at the next stop and walked on home, which took me about an hour when I could of got home in fifteen minutes if I would of stayed on. But while I walked, I got to think a little bit, which is something I don’t usually like to do
because it makes me feel nervous, and I wondered if my dad would mind if I stopped hating niggers for a while. I really love my dad and I wouldn’t stop if he said not to, and I wasn’t going to ask him right out because I didn’t want to disappoint him—I disappoint him a lot—but I thought maybe if I started giving a few hints about it, that might give me a chance for him and me to talk about it sometime. And I suppose if I had to, I could
say
I still hate them but not do it really, although I know you’re supposed to tell your mom and dad the truth.

The guy I’d really like to ask about all this is André, but what if my dad found out I went to a you-know-what instead of him? But if my dad made a mistake about
them
, I wonder if he could of made a mistake about the other colors, too.

We’re all bigots. All of us prejudge people on
some
basis, be it race, sex, sexual preference, height, age, or any of scores of categories we use to make ourselves seem superior when we are, in fact, feeling inferior
.

In the past school year, after his football coach had ordered an illegal hit on a black player from another team, Louie Banks took a righteous stand against racial bigotry and stood his ground heroically as he was stripped of his starting position on the team and generally ridiculed for “not having the stomach” to play Trout football. When all was said and done, Louie was proud of his conduct and eventually saw himself as stronger for resisting the pressure to conform
.

But we’re all bigots, Louie Banks included. Now, in the summer following his year of
Running Loose,
another challenge, in the form of his own bigotry, stands before him to be confronted. And the stakes are friendship and basic human dignity
.

I met him in the Buckhorn Bar two weeks after high school graduation. He was tall and thin, with jet black slick-backed hair and a manner I could now only describe as elegant. I guessed the loggers and cowboys who drank here every weekend wouldn’t use that word. At the time neither would I.

I said, “Hi. I’m Louie. Louie Banks. I work here for Dakota. Daytime stuff. You know, replace the kegs, mop up last night’s war, run some errands. Who are you?” It was seven-thirty in the morning, and I hadn’t expected anyone. Dakota never gets down from his room over the bar until around ten or so when I’m finishing up, so usually I bypass the coin slot and stack up enough country tunes on the ancient Wurlitzer to get through the mop-down and all the dirty glasses.

“Hi,” he said back. “I’m Darren. I’m working for my uncle for the summer.”

“Dakota your uncle?”

“You people call him Dakota. To me he’s Uncle Gene.”

“That right? Uncle Gene, huh? I don’t think I’ve ever heard his real name. I didn’t know he had any relatives. I mean, I never even pictured him having—Jesus, why don’t I just shut up?” I put out my hand, and he clasped it in a brief, firm grip. “Wonder why Dakota didn’t tell me you were coming?” I thought out loud.

“He didn’t know. I only called a week or so ago, so he didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. I haven’t seen him for some time, but I visited here often when I was little.”

“Where you from?”

“East Coast,” he said. “A little town just outside Harrisburg. That’s in Pennsylvania.”

I smiled. “I just got out of high school,” I said. “I know where Harrisburg is. And Baton Rouge, and Pierre, and Providence.”

He laughed back. “And Augusta, and Tallahassee. I didn’t just get out of high school, but state capitals are about all that sticks with you from those days. That and chemistry valences.”

This guy had just summed up my whole school
experience, though my transcript indicates chemistry valences didn’t stick. I liked him, though something made me uneasy. “Right. Don’t they know if you’re ever in any of those cities, you’ll see the statehouse and know it’s the capital?”

He laughed. Then he said straight out, “You’re the guy who lost his girlfriend.”

Caught off guard and pretty much speechless, I no longer liked him.

“You don’t want to talk about it.” He said it as a statement of fact.

“That’s not it, exactly,” I said, partially recovered. Then: “Yeah, I guess that is it.”

“Well, if you want to,
some
time, not necessarily now, I’d like it if you talked about it with me.”

I said thanks but didn’t really mean it. This guy didn’t know me. I barely knew his name. You don’t just walk up to somebody and cram a hot branding iron into his tenderest part before you even know if he has a dog or where he’s going to college or if he’s a vegetarian or something, and I resented that. No wonder Dakota hadn’t told me about him; he was probably embarrassed. I snatched a wet rag from the back sink and began wiping off the bar, pretending to ignore Darren sitting on a stool at the end of it. Then I decided to hell
with manners and punched up a few country tunes on the Wurlitzer. That should send him hightailing it back where he came from.

Emmy Lou came on first, singing her sweet dreams, with Patsy Cline right behind her, singing exactly the same tune. Old Rob Simes and Nolton Brubaker near to killed each other one night just before closing time, trying to settle who sings the sweetest dreams. Nolton won the fight, so that put Emmy Lou up one, but if you listen close, it’s hard to pick. Patsy’s got some heart. Plus she gets a few points for singing it first. And probably a few more for dying young.

Anyway, I stuck in some Hank Williams, Jr., and George Jones and Merle Haggard to let him know what kind of a tough corral he’d done rode into and got on back to my work.

“You’re angry,” he said.

I looked up, faking surprise. “Huh?”

“You’re angry. I offended you when I asked about your girl.”

“No, I’m not angry,” I said. I can be
so
chickenshit sometimes. I swore that I’d quit doing that when Becky died, that I’d be honest no matter what it took, because you never know when you won’t have the chance to go back and tell the truth. “I’m just in a hurry to get my
stuff done, that’s all. I’m not mad.”

“Then why are you punishing me with that?” he said, nodding toward the jukebox. “It was an offense, but it wasn’t a felony.”

I smiled and dropped my rag on the bar. “Okay,” I said. “I’m a little sensitive, I guess. A lot. Nobody I knew ever died before. And I didn’t handle it so great if you want to know the truth. I mean, I trashed her funeral, yelled a lot of bad things about God, really messed up some people’s heads….” In my mind I saw my best friend and my worst enemy, a hand under each arm, helping me out of the church through the stunned silence of the congregation. That’s how crazy it was.

Darren put up a hand. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. I just wanted you to know I knew about her so you wouldn’t be careful around me. We’re going to be working together and all. I know a little bit about death.”

I let his last sentence pass, wondering why Dakota had told him. Is that how people refer to me now?
That guy? Oh, that’s Louie Banks. His girlfriend died….

Darren asked me to show him around, so I reached around the back of the Wurlitzer and kicked the volume down a couple pegs, then gave him the grand tour—which lasts maybe ten minutes—through the
back storage coolers and into the narrow opening off the end of the bar where Dakota keeps all the beer nuts and pickled things, like eggs and pigs’ feet and jalapeño peppers. If it don’t go down easy, pickle it.

He told me he was twenty-five years old and that he went to college at Penn State for two years before deciding to take a break and travel around the country for a while, till he could decide what he wanted to do in the world and quit wasting his tuition on Early Tibetan Philosophies and Creative Uses for Nuclear Waste, which I don’t think is really a class but made the point. I told him I was almost eighteen and headed for a little college up in eastern Washington called Clark State, where I had a partial scholarship to run cross-country. He said since he dropped out of the university, his parents weren’t exactly ecstatic about the way he was living his life and had written him out of his inheritance, which was one reason he came clear across the country to see Dakota. Dakota was never real close to his parents anyway, Darren said, even though Darren’s dad was Dakota’s half brother. He said the inheritance was worth probably more than a million dollars, but it didn’t mean much anymore. I said it was hard to imagine a million dollars not meaning much, that I could be written out of my parents’ will and never know the dif
ference, given what they had to put in it, but that they stood by me in the very worst of times. I said I didn’t know if that was better than a million dollars, but it had to be the next best thing.

He said it was the
best
thing. Then he told me about his death sentence. Darren had AIDS.

What I did is I panicked. I did my all-time sloppiest cleaning job and left before I found out any of the things I would want to know later: like did Dakota know, and how long did he have, and how could I get him to stay away from me if he was going to die because that was just what had happened to me already. Darren must have seen how messed up I was, because he backed way off and didn’t say anything more except to ask me not to tell anybody. I said okay, because how could I say no, but God, I
knew
I’d end up telling
some
body, because AIDS isn’t something you just get, like flu. How you get it is the thing. I instantly knew why I’d felt uneasy before; his
elegance
was something I normally associated with someone who’s a homo.

So who do you talk to about
that
? Nobody I knew. I did know I wanted to get as far from him as I could. I’d had about all the death I needed for a while, and
everybody
knows you stay as far away from faggots as you can.

So I lay in my bed that night, long after midnight, twisting and turning so much the sheets almost mummified me, repulsed by what I thought about Darren, and maybe a little ashamed because I thought it, because this voice in me kept saying, “Hey, this guy is
dying
, and no matter what else is going on, still, he’s dying,” and I knew a little bit about how final that is. Those mixed-up thoughts got me thinking too much about Becky, which created so much anxiety I knew I wouldn’t get one bit more sleep, and the only thing to do was get up and run.

My family doesn’t get alarmed anymore—or try to stop me—when I run in the middle of the night, though my little sister calls me Night Speed and asks in front of my friends whether I wear a cape. Night runs have been my common practice since the funeral, and they think it’s what I do to keep my head on straight, which is correct.

The moon was nearly full, and I watched my faded shadow skim over the pocked blacktop stretching the three miles toward the river bridge where Becky crashed that day. I’ve never told anybody this—people think I’m crazy enough as it is—but I still talk to her
sometimes. The reason I loved her so much—besides that she was heartbreak pretty—was that she made sense in ways most adults in my life don’t. She was less cautious—ready to take risks—and she always saw things from a simpler perspective. Plus she stood up for herself, which is the hardest thing for me. Christ, after Coach Lednecky ordered a killer hit on Kevin Washington to put him out of the Salmon River game because he was afraid one player—one black player—would wreck our perfect season, it must have taken me fifty attempts to quit. I wanted to be on the football team so bad I kept forgetting what I believed in. Quit. Want back. Quit. Want back. You’d have thought someone nailed one of my feet to the ground and whipped me with a quirt. But Becky stood right up and said what she thought, and that helped me finally stick to it, and it’s the main reason I still talk to her; because I can listen to her voice and then steal her words for myself and sometimes it works because her words have so much integrity.

So have me committed. I hear voices.

What I said to Becky, and I’m not proud of it, was this: “So what if this guy’s a faggot? So what do I do then?”

I think it’s good to ask a dead person about someone
who’s going to die. Becky didn’t answer. That should have meant something.

After the night of my midnight run I avoided Darren like he had AIDS. I hated knowing his awful secret, and I resented the hell out of him for telling me—like I was supposed to
do
something about it. I began cleaning the Buckhorn at odd hours when I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be there, or I’d take Carter with me so Darren wouldn’t have a chance to talk. He never pushed, but sometimes I’d see him looking at me in a way that made me do a major-league squirm. God, I wanted him to go back where he came from. For one thing, what does it mean when some homo likes you? Just ask anyone.

“So what do ya think of my nephew?” Dakota came down early that day, caught me sneaking around cleaning at 6:00
A.M.
He couldn’t have had more than three and a half hours’ sleep.

“He’s okay,” I said. “Haven’t seen him around too much. He work till closing?”

Dakota nodded, hoisting himself up on the bar. The bar’s got holes all over in it from him doing that. One of his hands is a hook. “Yeah. He says you’re keepin’ clear of him.”

I looked away, stacking dirty glasses from a tray beneath the bar, while my face burned and my heart hammered. I can’t lie to Dakota. When Becky died, he saw me naked.

Dakota came in the side door of the Buckhorn. We were two hours past my having completely trashed Becky’s funeral, screaming at the big-city preacher who didn’t even know her, cursing God Himself before the horrified eyes and ears of the congregation. Dakota would have been well within the confines of decent human behavior to kick my butt across the bar and back. But he looked to my pain. “Figured that must be you,” he said. “Want some company?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

He stood there in the doorway and just looked at me. Finally he said, “Louie, it ain’t safe.”

“You’re right,” I said, “it isn’t. I gotta tell you, Dakota, I don’t get it. Man, what did Becky ever do to get killed? What did any of us ever do? It just ain’t right.”

“Nope,” he said. “It ain’t right, that’s for sure.”

For only the second time since she died, I burst into tears. My chest heaved, and snot ran from my nose in ropes. “It’s just not fair,” I said. “Where’s God,
Dakota? Where is He?”

“Louie,” he said, “I ain’t educated much; but I listen pretty good and I see pretty good, and one thing I’m sure of is that if there’s a God, that ain’t His job. He ain’t up there to load the dice one way or the other.” He paused, thinking, and his voice went soft. “Boy, if you come through this, you’ll be a man. There’s one thing that separates a man from a boy the way I see it, and it ain’t age. It’s seein’ how life works so you don’t get surprised all the time and kicked in the butt. It’s knowin’ the rules.”

“The rules,” I said. “How can you know the damn rules? They keep changing.”

“Naw, they don’t,” he said. “It’s just that you have to learn the new ones as you go. That’s the hard part. Learnin’ the new rules when they show theirselves. You go on blamin’ God, you get no place. You got to understand that the reason some things happen is just because they happen. That ain’t a good reason, but that’s it. You put enough cars and trucks and motorcycles on the road, and some of ’em gonna run into each other. Not certain ones neither. Just the ones that do. This life ain’t partial, boy.”

As I started out the door, he stopped me. “Louie.”

“Yeah?”

“If you was walkin’ in the middle of the road an’ you saw a big ol’ truck comin’ right at ya, you wouldn’t stop an’ ask the Lord to get you out of the way, would ya?”