Authors: Chris Crutcher
Mr. S
“So are we flush?” I catch up with Marcus in the hallway. “On to the next challenge?”
“We flush,” he says. “Tell you what, though. Throw my man Matthew Miller’s nuts in the back of your pickup and haul ’em down to the weigh station. School record, I’m tellin’ you. That boy’s ninety-nine percent
sac.
Shit, he barely knows me.”
“I was impressed.”
Marcus laughs. “You just caught his opening act. You shoulda seen him in The Bean’s office just now. I hope he can take care of himself. Marshall looked killer.”
“Matt Miller won state at one-sixty. That makes him a natural at one-seventy-one. Barring the use of weapons, I think he can take care of himself.”
Marcus shakes his head. “Well, let’s hope they bar the use of weapons. I gotta get to class. I feel like giving more people fewer reasons to send my ass to see The Bean for the next week or so.”
Matt Miller
I hope
this
is as strange as the day gets. Guess I shouldn’t complain.
I
decided to take Dr. Nethercutt on, but what choice did I have? WWJD, right? What would Jesus do? Well, Jesus
never
backed down. That’s my standard, though I’ll never approach His state of grace. Man, when I saw that noose…How can you live in this country, know its racial history, know its biases against colors and creeds and sexual preferences, and stay quiet when you see a noose hung on an African-American kid’s locker? And it was
pink
. That’s because James is gay. These guys don’t even know what to hate first. I don’t worry about James. He’s a gay black kid in the inland Northwest, thirty-five miles from where the Reverend Butler had a neo-Nazi compound for more than thirty years, and he’s made it this far. This isn’t as much about him as it is about
us
. I’ve been taught acceptance since I was a little kid, in Sunday school and in regular school. I know about the sixties and the civil rights marches and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I know about Matthew Shepard. As much as I love my country—and I’m going
to find a way to serve it as soon as I graduate—I know we are in no way as cool as we tell ourselves. Right here in my high school lifetime, some white kids hung nooses from a tree they claimed as theirs in a schoolyard in Jena, Louisiana, because a black kid sat under it. He didn’t chop it down, or see how high he could pee on it; he
sat
under it. Even more recently, some college kids at George Fox University, a
Christian
university in Oregon, strung up a life-sized cardboard cutout of Barack Obama. A judge in Georgia put a black, future NCAA scholar-athlete in jail because he had consensual sex with his white girlfriend when he was over eighteen and she wasn’t. And that’s just our racial profile. Take a gander at our sexual preference profile. Back in the eighties when the AIDS epidemic broke out, our government did squat for years, because guess who they thought contracted the disease. Gay men. And you know what the line was on that? It was a punishment from
God
for doing the nasty thing “within gender.” If I’d been up and running when
that
crock was conventional wisdom, you’d have seen some serious
witnessing
. My God, we’re coming to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and there are still people saying
their
marriages would be soiled if we let gay people be married. Like they aren’t soiled by the fifty percent that don’t make it, or the others
that stay together and hate each other. Shoot, if I were gay I wouldn’t
want
to get married; I’d want to call it something else. Some TV preacher said the other day, “If we let gay people get married the next thing people will start wanting to marry is their pets. Where will it stop?”
Listen, people who want to marry their pets have already done to their pets what these guys are worried about. Wanting to marry an animal isn’t about civil rights; it’s about mental health. People just don’t get it about Jesus. When He saw a wrong, He righted it. When He saw what wasn’t His business, He left it the hell alone. I don’t worry about Him wanting me to find a place in my heart for the Marcus Jameses of the world. That place exists naturally. Jesus didn’t care whether you were some other color than pasty white, or whether or not you were gay. His Father made them and He loved them all. Jesus would want me to find a place in my heart for the Marshalls and the Stones and Stricklands, which, if you can’t tell, I have a harder time doing, but at the same time He wouldn’t want me to back off them when they did mean, stupid-ass things, because the thing Jesus loved as much as truth was justice. He’d want me to throw it in their faces so they could learn. This wasn’t a guy looking through some book to find reasons to diminish
others. This was a guy who’d have strapped on His steel-toed sandals and kicked some serious butt when He saw people like the Klan or these idiot neo-Nazis using His or His Father’s name to spread their hate. Everybody’s equal in the eyes of God. End of story. I got a plus in the Big Book today when I came out on the gym floor.
This isn’t over. I don’t like how my gut feels after the assembly and the meeting in Mr. Bean’s office. Something is cooking. Marshall and his boys let it all go way too easily. That’s why I backed off and let Marcus run with it. But my eyes are open; I stuck my nose in it, and I can’t pretend to not know what I know if it hits the fan. Any time there’s a Marshall involved, there’s a better than fifty percent chance of trouble. Roger’s uncle tried to kill his own stepdaughter several years ago because she was mixed race and he blamed her for his troubles. He ended up killing someone else, but what’s stuck in my head is that his family still thinks
he
got screwed. Somebody needs to…oops,
that
was an un-Christian thought. I allow myself several of those a day.
Mr. S
When school is out today, I catch Marcus on the school lawn, carrying his Speedo workout bag to his car.
“Listen, buddy, would you mind if I drove out to your place and talked with your grandfather?”
“What’d I do?” he says with usual Marcus James exaggerated defensiveness.
“You’re clean,” I say, “but I think your gramps needs to know we’re up to speed on this noose business and that at least some of us take it seriously.”
“Man, one reason I let it drop was I didn’t want to worry him. He’ll think Marshall and the boys are fixin’ to string me up for real.”
“Just the same…”
“Yeah, man, okay. I don’t care. But don’t make it bigger’n it is. He worries about me too much as it is.”
“Good for him. You headed for the lake?”
“Uh-huh. Only got another week or so of decent water temp. Then I got to bring it indoors. Hey, man, you’re a history scholar. You know whether any black dudes swum the Channel yet?”
“The English Channel?”
“No, the Kenyan Channel.
Yeah,
the English Channel.”
“I do not believe any black dudes or dudettes have swum the English Channel,” I tell him, “but I will Google it while you’re out there getting ready to.”
“How about Rhodes scholars?”
“How
about
Rhodes scholars?”
“Swum the Channel.”
“That would surprise me even more than black dudes,” I tell him. “If you’re smart enough to be a Rhodes scholar, you damn well better be smart enough to stay out of the English Channel.”
“It’s my destiny. The first black Rhodes scholar to swim the English Channel. I’m gonna be
so
famous.”
I shake my head. “For a minute or two at least. And don’t forget
gay.
It won’t exactly make you Jackie Robinson.”
“It will to English Channel swimmers,” he says. “Listen, catch you later. I gotta get out there while I still got daylight. Tell my granddad I’m gonna be a little late, okay?”
“Done.” I watch him walk toward his car, swinging his workout bag to the side and over his head, Will Rogers style, singing some rap song. The first gay black Rhodes scholar English Channel swimmer, and I knew him when.
“Yeah, he tol’ me. Damn! What year
is
this?”
“I know, Wallace. I thought you should know he’s not alone. Marcus didn’t want to worry you more than you were already, but he decided it was okay if I came out. Good thing, ’cause I was comin’ anyway.”
“Sit down, I’ll pour you somethin’ll take the edge right off your day, teacher man.”
“Sounds good.” I take a seat at Wallace James’s kitchen table.
He pours me a stiff Scotch, and one for himself. “Think there’s more to come of it?”
“I don’t think so. Another student called the Marshall kid out in an assembly, so he knows all eyes are on him. I’m gonna sit down with his coach and make sure we have him boxed in. If Coach Steensland knew for sure Marshall did it, he’d boot him off the team in a minute. Steensland’s new here, and he’s a good man; he’d knock that stuff down even if he knew it would cost his undefeated season.”
“That’s good to know. Come out to the garage. I got somethin’ to show you.”
In the garage, Wallace unlocks his toolbox and pulls out the wide, shallow bottom drawer, extracts a flat metal sign, and hands it to me. I read it aloud.
“NIGGER
DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOUR ASS IN CUTTER.
My God, Wallace, where did you get this?”
“Come with the house.”
“What?”
“Guy who sold me the farm wanted me to know what I was getting into. They took this sign down…1969, I believe. Had one near the city limits sign on both ends of town.”
“1969? That’s a year after the ’68 Olympics.”
Wallace looks at me like,
Duh!
“Black athlete semi-boycott. Tommie Smith and John Carlos and the black fist. Martin Luther King Jr. had only been dead a year.”
“I know. Ol’ Mr. Bennett—he’s the guy sold me this place—said Marshalls was a lot of the reason the signs were up in the first place. That boy’s grampa was mayor. First couple years I was here, all kinda stuff got broke.”
“So you are worried about Marcus.”
“Been worried ’bout him since I moved in. He seems to get along okay. Got a big mouth on ’im, but he’s kinda funny and that gets him by, I guess. I ’spect I’m beholden to you for keepin’ an eye out for him.”
“No beholden to it, Wallace. My pleasure. That kid keeps me on my toes. There’s not much I teach he doesn’t already know something about.”
“Well,” Wallace says. “I’ll talk to him more about this noose business. When you’ve got enough support, you can make some noise, but if you don’t, well, you better lay low.”
“I’ll back you up. Do you know if Marcus is dating anyone? He talk to you about that?”
Wallace looks embarrassed. “Oh, no. He don’t talk to me about that kind of thing. Why you ask? Marcus spendin’ time with someone? Got to tell you, Mr. Teacher Man, I never quite got it about the homosexual thing. Sometimes I worry more about that than the color of his skin. Can’t very well keep folks from knowin’ you’re black, but that gay thing, I might woulda kept that under my hat. Give these boys jus’ one target to shoot at.”
Marcus
I wish I could tell people, like, you know,
articulate,
how it feels to get into the water and just start swimming. I wasn’t kidding Mr. S when I said I wanted to be the first black dude to swim the Channel. ’Cept it’s like twenty-six miles, and the farthest I’ve gone is maybe one and a half up in the lake. But it’s calm and there’s this
rhythm
and you can’t hear anything but air comin’ in and the bubbles goin’ out. You have to be careful swimming in open water, because there are fishermen and water skiers and jet boaters out there and you do not want one of those things whackin’ into you. So you’re supposed to swim
with
somebody, and I’ve got this flag, which sticks up like a flag you put on the back of your bike when you want to get all visible. My gramps made it from one of those bicycle flags. Attached it to this plastic belt. It doesn’t weigh anything, but it sticks up and says there’s a flesh-and-blood human right under it and please don’t run your motorboat over him. I don’t swim with somebody because, like, who would I get? There aren’t a lot of channel-swimmers-
in-training lined up. I use the flag, but that’s a mixed blessing because while it keeps unsuspecting drunk watersportsmen and-women from running over me accidentally, it tells guys like Roger Marshall where I am, and they can come kill me on purpose. On a number of occasions they’ve circled me at high speeds, creatin’ some surf. Those boys are creative. But I’m safe now, because soon as I get in my car I’m headed for the lake and in about fifteen minutes they’ll be headed for the football field.
“James.”
Shit.
It’s Strickland. “What?”
“Com’ere.”
“In a hurry, man. Got to get up to the lake.”
“The lake’ll still be there in five minutes. Come over here.”
Motherfucker. None of these guys ever have anything to say I want to hear. Some racial bullshit, or some stupid threat.
I walk over to his car.
“Rog has a message for you.”
“Lemme guess. He wants me to be an honorary member of the Letterman’s Club. Love to, but I really don’t have time—”
“He’s inviting you to shut your fucking mouth about
that noose. Let it die so you don’t have to.”
“I didn’t say anything about the noose. I just wore it. Miller’s the guy said you guys did it. If I can’t stop y’all from riding me, how am I gonna control Matt Miller?”
Strickland reaches through the side window and grabs my shirt, pulls me in close. “Any bad shit happens to us, some
real
bad shit will happen to you.”
I stare straight, past the side of his head.
“You understand?”
I keep right on staring. One of these days I’m gonna get tired of “managing” how I feel right now and give one of these guys a surprise. Fuckers always get you alone.
“I’ll take your silence as that you do.” He releases his grip. I fight the urge to tell him he could get into community college one day if he learned that the word for “that you do” is assent.