Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 43

BY DAVID WRIGHT.

Because Darryl, at thirteen, was too young to work, his stepfather, Jack Mitch.e.l.l, found him odd jobs when he could. That way Darryl would have his own pocket money, Jack Mitch.e.l.l would explain; it would teach him responsibility. One Wednesday in June, Jack Mitch.e.l.l found work for Darryl and his friend Two pulling weeds outside the new post office.

Jack Mitch.e.l.l and the postmaster, Wiley Edwards, both held seats on the Fitzgerald Town Council, and as fellow councilmen, they did each other favors. For Jack Mitch.e.l.l, such amiability was a political move. For Darryl and Two, though, his political jockeying meant twenty dollars, quick cash in their pockets.

The new post office had been built on a dry, dusty lot on Mesquite Street, just down the road from the county courthouse in downtown Fitzgerald, Texas. Darryl and Two were to pull up the weeds and shrubs to prepare the ground for sodding. It was mindless work, but the sun was demanding, and the roots had dug stubbornly into the rock-hard soil. Whether the boys did the job in four hours or six or ten, the work was worth twenty dollars each. After an hour and a half, they had finished more than half the lot.

The boys had taken their T-shirts off, and the sun scorched their already bronzed skins. Walking bent at the waist strained their lower backs, and the mindlessness of the work wore on their minds. So they started singing.

"You know Chuck Berry?" Two asked.

"Yeah, I know Chuck Berry."

"My daddy's got a lot of Chuck Berry alb.u.ms." Two straightened, stretching out his long back, then bent back to work. "He's got this song, 'School Days.' You know it?"

"How does it go?"

Two's head danced on his neck to the rhythm on the inside. He sang: "Up in the morning and off to schoo-ool . . ."

"Yeah," Darryl smiled, "I know it." His head started its own dance, like a camel's in stride, to the beat beating inside.

Two sang as they pulled: "Teacher be teaching the Golden Ru-ule."

Then Darryl: "Bell rings, time to go home,/ Grab some white boy's change and get 'long on."

They erupted with laughter as they clapped garden-gloved hands, steadily moving down the row.

Two continued: "Boy hollers, crying in his pla-ate . . . Slap 'im upside his head and don't be la-ate."

Then Darryl: "Cops, coming, so fast,/ They gonna get your black a.s.s!"

But Darryl's palm-slapping laughter stopped when he didn't hear Two slap-laughing beside him. He glanced over and saw Two staring straight ahead, and then he saw what Two was staring at: a silver-suited pink balloon-Wiley Edwards-sucking a cigar and looming over them.

Wiley Edwards, his red face puckered around the protruding cigar, glared at the boys a long time. His belly surged over his belt and hung there, almost a separate, threatening ent.i.ty. Darryl and Two straightened, a clump of pulled weeds in each hand.

"Yes, sir?" Darryl asked.

"You boys can go on home," Mr. Edwards said.

"Sir?"

Mr. Edwards pulled a wallet from his inner jacket pocket. "We didn't hire you boys to sing," he said. "We hired you to clear this lot." He gave each a ten-dollar bill. "Now, if y'all want to come out here and be disrespectful and play, well, y'all can just go on home." He turned. "You explain to Erskine why I sent you home." Then he waddled around the building and inside.

Darryl looked at the half-cleared lot, then at Two. "What was that about?" he asked.

"I don't know," Two said, "but I got me a ten-dollar bill, and I know what that's about. That's about seven dollars an hour."

"Jack Mitch.e.l.l's going to kill me."

"'Cause we got the ax?"

"Yeah."

"Can't do nothing about it," said Two. "We was working and white man told us to go on home."

"Still . . ."

"Can't do nothing about it," said Two.

Darryl put the bill in his pocket and followed Two onto Mesquite Street. They walked toward the Flats, where Two lived and where Jack Mitch.e.l.l worked and would be waiting to drive Darryl home to Oakbrook Heights.

Two turned. "Hey, who's Erskine?"

They pa.s.sed the Dairy Queen and crossed the street toward the bowling alley. "My stepdad," Darryl said. "Jack Mitch.e.l.l."

"Erskine Jack Mitch.e.l.l?" Two asked.

"Erskine Elie Mitch.e.l.l," said Darryl. "They just call him Jack."

"Huh," Two said. "Er-skine, Ee-lie." Then he added, "Y'all Northern n.i.g.g.ahs sure is some poetic folks."

"Must be a black thing then," said Darryl, "Bernard Ferdinando Lamar Waymans the second. What, couldn't your folks decide on a name?"

"Yeah," he said. "Two."

Two crossed the parking lot toward the Nite-Owl Lanes. "Let's go in here and spend some of this hard-earned cash."

"All right," said Darryl, but he was still preoccupied with how to explain getting fired to Erskine Elie Mitch.e.l.l.

After getting change, they pumped quarters into video games. They played each other in a football game with such fury that their palms blistered.

"You see that pa.s.s!" Darryl said.

"I saw it." Two's team regrouped in a huddle on the screen while he selected one of the four defensive options. But his best option, it seemed, was to try to distract Darryl from his tactic. "So, what's your middle name?"

"I told you ten thousand times already," said Darryl, never looking up. "I don't have one."

"And I didn't believe you then neither."

"Well, it's true," he said. "I don't."

"You a lie."

"I don't."

"You know you a lie."

Darryl said, "What d'you want my middle name to be?"

Two stopped playing and looked across at Darryl. "Pharmaceuticals."

"All right. I'm Darryl Pharmaceuticals Young."

"Poetic," said Two.

"Just a black thing . . . Touchdown! D'you see that play?"

"Aw, man," Two said, "I wasn't even watching!"

"Well, quit squawking and play then . . ."

"You cheating Pharmaceuticals chump . . ."

"Go on, man," Darryl said, "it's your ball."

In no time they'd whittled their ten-dollar bills down to a dollar fifty (one seventy-five for Two), and they continued toward the Flats. As they walked along sidewalks like hot plates, the soles of their sneakers squooshing like sponges with each step, Darryl rehashed the morning in his head: they got to the post office on time, worked like beasts in that dusty heat, but still got fired. For laughing. They didn't do anything bad; if you can laugh while you work it makes the work go by better, that's all. Jack Mitch.e.l.l would understand that. Of course, Darryl would leave out the part about the swear word.

"Two, man," he said, "we got fired for laughing."

"My daddy says white man don't like to see black folks laughing. Thinks they're laughing at him."

"Jack Mitch.e.l.l'll understand that."

"Maybe so," said Two, "but you better start figuring how to make him understand your magic trick that made a ten-dollar bill turn into a buck seventy-five in change."

"Yeah." Darryl hadn't even considered that. And he only had one fifty left.

They walked on, searching silently for a solution. A Fightin' Pioneers poster taped in a shop window brought them to a halt. It announced the upcoming high-school football season, and on it was a picture of the quarterback, Hoodie Duncan, his arm c.o.c.ked to throw a pa.s.s.

"Hoodie's my man," Darryl said, "Hoodie's my main man," said Two. "Look it the arms on him." Two sat down suddenly on the curb and scrambled in his pockets. "Hang on a minute." He pulled out a fistful of rubber bands.

"What you got rubber bands for?" Darryl asked.

"I been wearing them," said Two. "Make me look strong."

"Huh?"

Two handed a wad of them to Darryl. "That's how folks can tell you're strong," he said, double-wrapping two around each wrist, then pumping his hands to inflate his forearms.

Darryl looked and mimicked Two's actions. "How's that?" he said.

"The veins be sticking out your forearms," Two said, inspecting his, then pumping his hands again. "That's how they know."

"Really?"

"Yeah. You look at Hoodie, or any of them tough brothers. They veins be winding like snakes all down they arms."

"That's true." Darryl remembered seeing Hoodie at the 7-Eleven once. Hoodie joked with the black attendant, signifying with his hands and holding his green and gold letter jacket in his first, and the veins of his arms seemed to jump off his skin. Darryl had been with his mom, who didn't see Hoodie or the attendant or even Darryl, it seemed; their playfulness stopped, though, when Darryl and his mom entered, and their eyes followed her around the store as she busily searched one aisle then the next for the saltines she'd forgotten to buy at the A&P.

Darryl and Two resumed their walk, hands periodically pumping the air. Two said, "My daddy was a boxer and . . ."

"Really?"

"Yeah. In the army. A welterweight," Two explained. "So he could whoop upside some white boys' heads. He told me he used to beat on white boys' a.s.s like there wasn't no tomorrow. Said it was the only way you could get at 'em in them days, with gloves on, in the ring. Otherwise, have the law and all kinds of white folks all after you."

"Yeah, they say it was like that." That Two's father, now just a mechanic for the town of Fitzgerald, had once been a recognized athlete put him in very high esteem in Darryl's eyes. He wished Jack Mitch.e.l.l had been one. But Darryl couldn't imagine primping, bulbous Jack Mitch.e.l.l in a letter jacket.

Jack Mitch.e.l.l was the town's first and only black councilman. That meant something. When he married Darryl's mom and moved the family to Fitzgerald, they made up the town's first interracial couple, ever, and the only one still. Theirs was the only black family to live in Oakbrook Heights. But still, it wasn't the same thing.

Two said, "My daddy, when he was boxing, he said he'd walk around squeezing tennis b.a.l.l.s. It helped his punch. He's still got all kinds of veins sticking out his arms."

"He's strong, huh?"

Two stopped and, face askew, stared Darryl down until Darryl stopped walking, too. "Let that n.i.g.g.ah get a switch after your a.s.s and ask me that again." Then he sauntered forward.

They cut through the Texaco onto Third Street. Walking between the pumps, Two stepped deliberately onto the slim rubber hose that ran out from the station. A bell clanged, but n.o.body stirred, so they continued walking.

Darryl said, "Your dad was a boxer."

"Yeah," said Two. "He was good."

When they arrived at the vacant lot that separated the back of Eastgate Mall from the Flats, Two inspected his forearms, then backpedaled away from Darryl into the shimmering, sun-scorched reeds, his arm c.o.c.ked to throw a pa.s.s. "I'm Hoodie Duncan," he called, bouncing on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet as if in the pocket. "You see him in that game against Dumas?"

"I saw the game with you, Two."

"Man, I ain't never seen nothing like that." Two scrambled left. "Hoodie rolled left, and when the dude grabbed his right arm, he shook him"-which Two did, mostly just jiggling his shoulder-"put the ball in his left hand, and fired it downfield." Two mimed the motion. "Left-handed!"

"Hoodie's tough."

"h.e.l.l yeah, he's tough! You know he's tough. Just six n.i.g.g.ahs on the whole d.a.m.n team? s.h.i.t, you know they ain't about to let n'an one of 'em play quarterback unless he's two times as tough as every white boy on the field." Two caught up to Darryl. "And Hoodie is. Being ambidextrous and all."

"Ambi-what?"

"Ambidextrous," said Two. "Hoodie's ambidextrous. My daddy's ambidextrous, too. It means you can use your left hand just as good as your right. Do whatever you want with either one."

Macadam turned to dirt in the Flats. Darryl and Two walked down the dusty road toward the Three Jacks' Bar, where Jack Mitch.e.l.l (the third Jack) would be waiting. Darryl figured that Jack Mitch.e.l.l had probably already talked to Wiley Edwards, so he was in no rush to get there. Dragging along, Darryl mimed a throwing motion with his left hand. It was awkward, had no force.

Two, watching Darryl, cast his own left arm forward. "I'm ambidextrous, too," he said.

"Sure you are."

"You know I am."

"Right."

"What you boys know?" they heard, and turned toward the porch from where the sound was emitted.