Authors: Chris Crutcher
Mr. S
You have to wonder how some people get their license to educate. We come to school this morning to The Bean’s announcement, through the school’s morning news anchors, that first period will be canceled for an all-school assembly. That’s nine hundred kids in one gymnasium. While they’re filling the gym, I’m hustling to The Bean’s office. I meet him at the door. “Tell me this has nothing to do with Marcus.”
“It has everything to do with Marcus,” he says back. “You’re right. We can’t sweep this under the rug. Hanging a noose on an African-American child’s locker is unthinkable. We have to bring it into focus for the entire school.”
“What changed?”
“I called Dr. Nethercutt.” Nethercutt is the school superintendent.
“Come on, Andy. Nethercutt is the one person in this community least likely to be offended by a noose on a black kid’s locker, much less a pink noose on a gay black kid’s locker. The guy would make Rush Limbaugh’s
birthday a national holiday. You’ll put Marcus in the sights of every bigot in this school.”
“We’ll be offering a reward,” The Bean says, “for information leading to the identity of the culprit or culprits.”
“And nobody will say shit, and Marcus will be hung out to dry. The only possible witnesses are other ballplayers, and none of them is going to rat out his captain.”
“Maybe you should have thought about that earlier. Dr. Nethercutt decided James will not hold us hostage. As long as he wears the noose, or even threatens to wear the noose, we’re in jeopardy for negative attention. It’s a win-win, as young Marcus would say.”
“So Nethercutt wants to deal with the problem in a way that gives us no chance to actually solve it.”
“You can take it up with him if you’d like.”
“Yeah, I’m the guy to change his mind.” Dr. Nethercutt and I haven’t seen eye to eye on an issue since my first day. He was a believer in No Child Left Behind, and I was a believer that no child was being left behind because no one was going anywhere. We were testing kids into comas. Higher-level education was out the window in favor of teaching to the test. My first all-district meeting ended in his threatening to put me on probation. I’ve been on probation since. I can mess
around with The Bean and find middle ground once in a great while; Nethercutt’s a whole different story. “Come on, Andy. There’s no integrity in this. You guys are setting him up.”
“I have to agree with Dr. Nethercutt on this one, John. Marcus made his bed.”
“Marcus made his bed? Somebody hangs a noose on Marcus’s locker and
he
made his bed? Jesus. And big surprise, by the way, that you agree with Nethercutt on this one. How would that make it different than any other one? You’ve got your nose—”
“I’d be careful, Simet. You’re dancing close to insubordination.”
Marcus and I share a personality trait I’d better rein in here—the one that gets us both in deeper than we should get. Plus, I’d better see if I can get Marcus out of that assembly. About ten things could happen, and nine of them are bad. “You guys are going to do what you do,” I tell The Bean. “When the smoke clears, remember I said the point of no return was when you called this assembly.”
Dr. Nethercutt should have been a politician. He stands center circle in the gymnasium, surrounded on three sides by the student body as if in a giant town hall meeting. The place is abuzz, because we don’t get
Nethercutt here to rub shoulders with the masses unless some serious shit has hit the fan. I’m looking through the crowd for Marcus, who isn’t hard to find in a sea of white faces, but he’s too deep into the bleachers to get to him. At least he’s not wearing the noose.
Then I see at least one reason why. Nethercutt holds it high.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time this morning.”
Like we had a choice.
“How many of you know what this is?” He dangles the noose from his raised hand. It had been behind folders in my filing cabinet. Nethercutt went through my things to get it.
There are a couple of shouts of “Noose” and “It’s a noose.”
From the football section. “A
pink
noose!”
“That’s right!” Nethercutt says into the mike. “It’s a noose. And it was hanging on the locker of one of our students. Now I’m not going to mention the name of that student, because that’s not what this is about. But this is a symbol. A symbol of hate. And I won’t have that in my school.”
I look for Marcus in the crowd, but he has slid down far enough as to be barely visible.
“I’m offering a seventy-five-dollar reward for anyone who can prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what culprit or culprits did this. Serious consequences will follow.”
Nethercutt is offering seventy-five bucks. Jesus wept.
A figure steps out of the bleachers and strides toward him.
I lean over to The Bean, beaming beside me at Nethercutt’s fortune-building offer. “That’s Matt Miller. Kid’s a stud wrestler.”
“Yeah. State wrestling champ at one-sixty, and a heckuva student. Very devout. They don’t come any better than Matt Miller.”
Matt smiles and motions to Nethercutt for the mike, which is gladly given. Very devout. Great. I should keep my biases to myself, but I don’t like bringing the wrath of God into this.
“Good morning. Most of you know me. I’m Matt Miller. Under different circumstances I follow that with ‘and I’ve taken Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,’ but I’m also a believer in the separation of church and state, so I’ll forgo it. “Course
that’s
my way of getting to say it without saying it.”
Marcus has slid completely out of sight.
“Thanks for relinquishing the mike and this time, Dr. Nethercutt.” He looks at the mike. “You may be
about to have second thoughts.”
Nethercutt appears taken off guard, moves toward Miller, but Matt turns slightly, shielding the mike from his reach.
“Our superintendent just offered maybe three tanks of gas to entice one of our gridiron superstars to rat out his buddies. Of course he knows that anyone who takes him up on it wouldn’t live to fill the second tank. If you ask me, this is a good way for our school administration to make a show of addressing the problem while at the same time making sure no resolution is reached.”
Whoa! Couldn’t have said it better. Nethercutt has left the noose on the podium; Miller picks it up. Nethercutt demands the mike, moves threateningly, but Matt Miller is a state champion wrestler. In his state championship match last year, he was taken down only twice, and made lightning escapes both times. “Begging your indulgence, sir. I’m not finished.”
“Oh, yes, you are.”
Matt smiles. “No, I’m not.”
Nethercutt lunges for the mike, and Matt dances easily out of his reach. Nethercutt straightens his suit jacket. “Mr. Miller, I am the superintendent of this school district. I’m demanding that you hand over that mike.”
Matt says, “Dr. Nethercutt, I’m a solid three-six grade-point-average student who has earned a state wrestling championship for my school, and I will give you the mike as soon as I’m finished, which won’t be five minutes.”
Nethercutt hollers for security.
This gym is quiet.
“Young man, your diploma is officially at risk.”
“So be it.”
Whew!
This Christian has some
nuts.
“As a man of God, I’m interested exclusively in the truth. Somebody in our student body hung a noose on an African-American student’s locker.” He stares at the noose in his hand. “And it’s pink. Some asshole who doesn’t know the origin of the phrase ‘killing two birds with one stone’ killed two birds with one stone. He, or they, also committed a hate crime.”
Nethercutt stands with his hand out, flushed bright red.
“When I heard Dr. Nethercutt’s spectacular reward offer, I asked myself something I ask probably five or six times a day: What would Jesus do? See, I know who put the noose on Marcus James’s locker. Roger Marshall hung it, and Aaron Strickland and Ray Stone watched.”
Roger Marshall stands up in the bleachers and yells,
“That’s a goddam lie, Miller, and you know it. What’re you, James’s boyfriend? I’ll see you after school!”
The Bean starts onto the floor, but I grip his shoulder. He glares at my hand, and I remove it. “There’ll be news coverage,” I whisper. “I’d think long and hard before making my next move.”
“I’d love to see you after school,” Miller continues. “If I heard you guys right, Strickland
tied
the knot, but I can’t be sure I heard right.” He turns back to Nethercutt. “I can’t prove any of this. In a court, it’s hearsay, because I was dressing down for a preseason workout in the locker room when I heard them laughing about it.” He offers Nethercutt the mike. “I don’t know what is to be done about it,” he says, “but I just thought I should get the truth out. It’s what Jesus would do.”
I would like, at this point, to take back anything I ever thought about Very Devout Anything. Nethercutt snatches the mike, thumbs the off switch, and says something to Miller between gritted teeth. Miller smiles, pats him on the shoulder, and offers to shake his hand. Nethercutt sneers and turns toward the crowd, flips the mike back on. “What Mr. Miller just did was irresponsible. I want you to disregard it. I assure you all, we’ll look into this and it will be handled appropriately. You may return to your classes now.”
Marcus
Holy shit! I came to school this morning all willing to let the noose hang in midair in Mr. S’s room and just watch what kind of bad mojo it gathered. I told my granddad about it last night, and he looked at me with those big sad eyes of his and said, “You do what you got to do, boy—you always do—but don’t go bitin’ off more than y’all can chew. You be sure somebody’s got your back, or you lay low. Them Marshalls is mean as snakes.”
Plus, I got Mr. S’s point; you choose the time and place to make your stand. All I got to do is lay low and get my ass to Stanford, which was my new plan after talking to my grandpops. But then Nethercutt calls me out. Got to hand it to him; he did what I did, opened the situation right up. See, when I put that noose around my neck and walk into class, it’s like saying, “Bring it.” Shee. Everyone knows where it came from. I been in the South, all the time seein’ pickups; two big ol’ rebel flags flyin’ straight back in the eighty-mile-an-hour wind created by the third-grade-educated rebels speedin’ down the freeway. You know to stay away from
those
dumb bastards; they got a
mandate
to shoot you. And I’ve read about Kansas; I know anybody wearin’ a cowboy hat drivin’ his family in a Taurus up to the Holy Church of Jesus Christ is probably not a good candidate to hear how good his muscular buttocks look in those jeans. There are things you expect in certain parts of the country. But see, you could be wrong. The guy in the pickup
could
be just livin’ out his family history; he read some bullshit American History textbook and came away thinking the Civil War was
really
fought between the industrial North and the agricultural South over economy and his ancestors weren’t racial bigots and they maybe even died heroically in it. You might talk that guy right out of his hate. And the guy in the cowboy hat
could
be headed to the church to tell the pastor that he and his family are scoutin’ out other churches “cause they can’t hang with a congregation that feels gays are an abomination, ’cause one of his kids
is
gay. All that
could be.
But if you live in the northwest part of the United States of America, which didn’t even have a part in the Civil War, and your family has a rebel flag painted all up one side of your barn so you can see it five miles away, and your uncle wears a different color T-shirt every day that says
ONE MAN, ONE WOMAN, ONE MARRIAGE UNDER GOD,
well, let’s just say that stacks the deck pretty good against a Marcus James getting invited to dinner at
your
house unless he
is
dinner.
So laying low wasn’t a bad idea. But Nethercutt aimed every eye in the student body at me, and Matt Miller locked them all in, though Miller’s intent was good, and he may have made me a little bit safer calling Marshall and his buddies out. Something bad happens to me after all that, those guys will fall into the category of “persons of interest.” But all in all, it feels less safe around here than it did, say, this time last week.
“Teachers. Please excuse the interruption. Would you send Roger Marshall, Matt Miller, Aaron Strickland, Ray Stone, and Marcus James to Mr. Bean’s office immediately. Thank you.”
Shit. I’m a smartass and I stand up for myself when I can, but I do not look forward to walking into that particular mix of inhumanity, especially with The Bean and Nethercutt running things. So I’m hauling down the hall, trying to get there first; you know, pee in the corners and establish my territory.
“Mr. James. Good to see you.” The Bean.
“Wish I could say the same, sir,” I tell him. No territory to establish; I’m dead last. Marshall and his guys stare at me like I just scored a touchdown for the other team. Man, how is this shit
my
fault? Matt Miller
leans against The Bean’s desk, arms folded, staring down the Marshall gang. Nethercutt is seated in the corner, jotting down some notes, and The Bean shuffles papers like a rookie dealer in Vegas. He clears his throat. “I don’t know exactly where to start here. We’ve had an interesting couple of days….”
“I know where to start, Mr. Bean, so why don’t I do that?” Nethercutt stands. “I want this solved today, gentlemen, and it will be.” He turns to Miller. “Mr. Miller, I don’t appreciate the position you put me in at the assembly today.”
“With all due respect, sir, I didn’t put you in any position. I simply said what was true.”
“Well, I didn’t experience that due respect. You as much as said I didn’t want to discover the source of this.” He holds up the noose.
“You got all that was due from me,” Miller says back, and I’m getting ready to dive under The Bean’s desk. This wrestler boy’s stayin’ on the offense.
Nethercutt stares daggers at Miller, and that’s
almost
not a metaphor. But Miller looks like you could stick daggers in him all day long and then he’d just stretch out and go to sleep.
“You had better watch your impulses, young man. That state wrestling championship will get you only so much,
and I’m warning you, you’ve about maxed it out.”
“Dr. Nethercutt, off the mat I don’t do
anything
on impulse.”
“Be that as it may,” Nethercutt says. “In my opinion you fanned the flames of a potentially dangerous situation, and I’ll tell you right now there may be consequences for that.”
“If there are, there are, but you might want to remember my mother is a pretty good defense attorney,” Miller says back.
“Are you threatening me?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Whoa!
Miller keeps talking. “Sir, I represent three entities when I act: God, my family, and my school. I’m comfortable that God backed me today, and so did my folks. I guess it remains to be seen what my school will do.”
Marshall stifles a laugh. Neither Miller or Nethercutt even notice; they’re eyeball to eyeball.
Nethercutt blinks. “Look, Matt, I’m trying to fend off a potentially volatile situation while at the same time keeping this school reflected in a positive light going into this bond issue, whatever it takes.” He dangles the noose, turns to Marshall. “Mr. Marshall, tell me what you know about this.”
“Not a thing, sir. Miller is lying. None of us knows what he’s talking about.”
Nethercutt looks back at Miller, who raises his eyebrows. “Hard to know who to believe, huh?” Miller says.
Nethercutt turns to me. “What about it, Mr. James? What has to happen for you to let this go?”
Just being around Miller makes a guy want to stand up and fight, but there’s not a one of those ball players doesn’t outweigh me by forty pounds. “I don’t know,” I say, “I came to school today thinkin’ maybe I made my point. Next thing I know you’re turning me into a marked man.”
“I called that assembly to get to the bottom of this.”
“Was that seventy-five comin’ out of your pocket, or were you gonna get it out of petty cash?” I ask him. “I’ll let the whole thing go right here if Marshall can turn his pockets inside out without double your reward offer falling out on the floor.”
Nethercutt glances at Marshall. Marshall shakes his head.
“I’ll ask again,” Nethercutt says. “How can we wrap this up?”
I say, “You know what? I’m gonna give you this
one, Coach. I’m gonna take one for the mighty Wolverines. I don’t want the football team to lose its big tough studly linebacker, ’cause I kinda like him in those tight pants, and I don’t want the school to give up free lunches and art and music because we don’t pass a levy. So I’m hangin’ up my noose. I would ask a favor, however.”
Nethercutt says, “Shoot.”
“I’d appreciate it if today was the last day you figured out one more way to hold me up to the student body as the token faggot nigger.”
The Bean leaps up. “Mr. James, I will
not
have that language in my office. You will apologize to Dr. Nethercutt, or I’ll be sitting in this office with your grandfather negotiating your return to this school.”
“I wouldn’t advise that,” I say back. “My granddad lays low, but you take him on over a noose and all y’all will be in the news.” I like following this wrestling Jesus freak’s lead.
“You listen—”
Nethercutt raises his hand. “Hold on, Andy. Mr. James made his point. I can handle the rough language. Let’s get our house in order here.” He turns to Miller. “Are you satisfied, Matt?”
Miller doesn’t move; arms still folded, looking at the
floor. He shakes his head slowly. “Naw, I’m not satisfied. I don’t think anyone has taken this seriously enough. As recently as 1969, this was openly a sundown town. That noose represents a whole bunch of what is wrong with this country. You and Mr. Bean don’t get it. You don’t understand that we’re more diminished by racism than Marcus is. It doesn’t cost us as much, but we’re more diminished. I thought I’d see a little more integrity in my waning high school years. But it’s Marcus’s gig, so I’m with him. I’m not satisfied, but if nothing else happens, I’m willing to let it die.” He looks straight at Marshall. “If anything else
does
happen, that noose is part of the history I’ll bring to bear.” He picks it up off The Bean’s desk.
Roger Marshall glares at Miller, then at me, with the steely gaze of a cold-blooded killer, but it’s pretty clear The Bean and Nethercutt prepped him, ’cause he says dick.
I slap my leg and jump up. “Well, I’m glad we had this little meeting, but this is more fun than I can stand. Gotta get me some lunch.” And I take my leave.