Angry Black White Boy (30 page)

“White niggers and black whiteboys,” said Burleigh. “Lions and tigers and zebras, oh my.” He leaned over Macon and rapped on the window. “Hey, Ant,” he shouted, “where we goin’, brother?” Anton shrugged. “Well then, pull over,” instructed Burleigh. “Next big tree you see.”

The fear screeching through Macon’s body jumped into a higher key. “Whatchu got in mind, Burleigh?” he asked. His voice was as sniveling, as utterly powerless, as he could make it. In tone, if not in words, Macon begged for mercy.

“I’m gonna give you one last chance to act like a white man, race traitor.”

Macon clawed wildly at whatever hope might be embedded in the sentence. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“Don’t thank me.” Burleigh jogged Leo with his foot. “Thank him.” The old man didn’t move, so Burleigh covered the top of his beer bottle with a thumb, shook it, and sprayed him with foaming brew. Leo twitched and blinked, the beer dissolving dust and blood. He lifted his elbows to shield his face and screamed when his arm touched his shattered nose. “Look alive, Grandpa,” said Burleigh. “You passed out on us.” Leo said nothing, merely clenched his teeth against the pain.

Anton rapped a knuckle on the glass divider. “What time is it?” he called.

Johnnie checked his watch. “Half past three.”

“Fuck!” The horn bleated beneath Anton’s fist. He leaned back to shout through the window. “I gotta pick up Annabel from school, y’all.”

Burleigh heaved an exasperated belly-sigh. “Sweet Jesus, Anton. Now?”

“Ten minutes ago, brother.” He slowed the truck and spun it in a vicious, fishtailing U-turn, flattening the grass with tire marks.

Burleigh clambered toward the window, bridging Macon’s lap on hands and knees and sticking his head through the partition to bark some sense into his friend. “You’re just gonna pull up at the elementary school with a flatbed full of bleeding, tied-up sons of bitches, Anton?”

The driver was resolute. “Got to pick my daughter up, Burl. Her mother’ll kill me if I flake out again.”

“All right,” Burleigh sighed. Once Anton’s mind was set—and his old lady did most of the setting—the boy was a goddamned boulder. “Drop us back off at the Mart and we’ll take Johnnie’s car instead.”

Anton shook his head. “I ain’t missing this, Burl. No way. Besides, somebody back there’s liable to be looking for these boys.”

“Well, what the hell do you suggest?” said Burleigh, fuming.

Anton glanced back through the mirror in assessment. “Macon doesn’t look so bad,” he said. “How ’bout if we clean him up and lock the nigger in the hold box?”

Johnnie reached across Leo and ran his hand appraisingly over the deep silver trunk that sat in the front of the flatbed. Anton stored his fishing gear in it.

Johnnie nodded. “He’ll fit.”

Chapter Four

^“
You promised,” said Annabel, stamping her little foot so hard her blond curls bounced. Children scurried past her in the parking lot, chattering, finding their buses and carpools. Anton looked from her to Burleigh, still sitting in the flatbed, and Annabel followed his gaze. “Uncle Burleigh, he promised,” she appealed. Her uncles always took her side. Annabel’s eyebrows scrunched and she bit the inside of her cheek, swayed and pointed. “Who’s that?”

“That’s your uncle Macon,” Anton said, extending a hand in his general direction. Macon waved. Burleigh had cut his wrists free with a hunting knife that remained pressed to Macon’s side. “From New York City.”

Annabel ran to the truck. “You live in New York?” she asked, breathless.

“Come on, honey.” Anton said. “Hop in. I’ve got to get you home to Mommy.”

She whirled on him, remembering her beef. “Mommy doesn’t get home today until late,” she reminded him. “That’s why you promised we’d go fishing. Right, Uncle Burleigh?” She smiled at him, then at Macon.

“Right, sugar pie,” Burleigh agreed. “I do recall your daddy saying something like that. And we got the poles lying right here.”

Annabel surged with pleasure, knowing she had won. “Want to come fishing, Uncle Macon?”

He slurred his eyes at Burleigh. “Sure, Annabel,” he said.

Annabel’s small body could barely contain her exuberance. “And you’ll tell me all about New York City?”

Anything you said to her was a promise, Macon realized. “Whatever you want to know,” he agreed.

Annabel skipped over to the passenger door. “Hi, Uncle Johnnie,” she singsonged over her shoulder as she climbed up and in. She stood on her knees to look through the cab’s back window; Anton reached over and fastened her seat belt. “Bob Nathan got in trouble today,” she informed his father.

“He did?” Johnnie feigned supreme dismay.

Annabel nodded. “Uh-huh. He felt on Joanna Kettewand’s behind and Mrs. Meyers sent him to the principal’s office.”

“I thought you was in Mr. Gearing’s class this year, Bel,” Johnnie said.

“I am. But Megan Connolly told me at lunch. She said Bob Nathan was calling his self Bob Doggy Dog.” She giggled. “Isn’t that silly?”

Johnnie forced a gruff chuckle. “It sure is.”

Anton exited the parking lot and made a left at the end of the block. In less than a minute, they were back on another empty road. The school, like the rest stop, was just a small patch of civilization in this sprawling wilderness.

“Do you live in a skyscraper?” asked Annabel.

“Sure do.” Macon smiled.

“You must see a million people every day. I wish we lived in New York . . . Dad.” She turned her head to accuse him.

“You couldn’t go fishing if we lived in New York, sugar,” he reminded her, glancing over with a playful smile and making a right turn. The vines were back, climbing the tree trunks.

“Oh yeah,” she mused, putting a finger to her cheek and then curling it in a ringlet of hair. “Do you know how to fish?” she asked Macon. Pride rimmed the question.

“No, I don’t,” he admitted, lowering his head in humility. “Will you teach me?”

“I don’t know,” she said, solemn. “It’s very hard. Maybe Daddy should teach you. One time he caught a catfish this big.” She rubbed her belly. “Mmm. It was good. You know why fishing is the best sport in the world?” she asked, checking to make sure her father was listening. “ ’Cause you can drink beer while you do it,” she answered herself, satisfied.

The boys broke out laughing. “That’s right, girl,” said Johnnie, nodding deeply. “Did your daddy teach you that?”

“Uh-huh. He won’t let me drink no beer, though. I asked him how’m I sposed to be a fisherman, then?”

Anton grinned. “And what did I tell you, Anna banana?”

Annabel glowed. “He said I’m a fisherlady,” she reported. “What’s the biggest one you ever caught, Uncle Burl?”

Burleigh smiled, and poked Macon invisibly with the knife. “ ’Bout six feet long, I reckon.”

Annabel cut her eyes at him. “Nuh-uh,” she said, over Johnnie and Anton’s guffaws.

“Uh-huh,” Burleigh retorted.

“Did you eat the whole thing?” she asked.

“Yup. Fried it up for breakfast.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Uh-huh!”

Annabel leaned her elbows on the hold box—“Nuh-uh”—and came away with two small, sticky blotches of half-dried blood ringing them. Macon waited for her to notice.

Instead, she turned to him. “Don’t you think I should get a kitten for my birthday?”

A Volvo approached and Macon stared at the driver, hoping stupidly for rescue. The car passed, and Anton made another right onto an even more remote road, practically a trail.

“Absolutely.” Macon nodded, turning back to the expectant girl. “Don’t you think so, Uncle Burleigh?” He had two chances, he figured. Get away somehow—which meant outrunning Anton’s shotgun—or make friends. Which meant outrunning himself, becoming the New Macon with such ardor and velocity that they’d stop hating him, could not hate him because he was what he should be now, a redeemed sinner, a new fishing buddy who’d been crazy before, done some very wrong things and seen the error of his ways, taken the beating he deserved and been reborn, and hell, you couldn’t fault a man for yesterday if he stood changed and repentant today. He would be Uncle Macon, the best damn Uncle Macon he could be, the citified and backward-thinking but fast-learning, lovable, spineless, chameleon-changing, credit-to-his-race, great-with-the-kids, helpless, have-mercy-on-poor Uncle Macon.
He sure do take to fishing, Uncle Macon. Aw hell, let
Uncle Macon go. I couldn’t look my little girl in the eye if we hurt
him; I can already hear her askin’ when her uncle Macon’s coming
back to visit.

“Hey, Annabel,” said Uncle Macon, “how can you tell if there’s an elephant hiding in your bed?”

She giggled. The corner of Johnnie’s mouth lifted. “How?”

“By the peanut shells on the floor.” Annabel threw back her head and covered her laughing mouth with both her tiny hands.

“Tell me another,” she pleaded.

“Why do elephants stand on top of marshmallows?” Annabel raised her shoulders in exaggerated pantomime. “So they don’t fall into the hot cocoa.” Macon could tell she didn’t like it as much as the first one, but it didn’t matter. Annabel was in the mood to laugh now, and she cackled as loud and long as she thought plausible, even slapping her knee for effect.

“Another.”

Macon furled his lip. “That’s all I know. Maybe Uncle Burleigh can tell one.” Macon smiled over at him. Trees on either side of the road leaned together over them, creating a shady tunnel. Soft, mottled sunlight bled through, painting kaleidoscopic patterns on the truck.

“Okay.” Burleigh leaned forward slightly. “It’s kind of dumb. Why do firemen wear red suspenders?”

“Why?” asked Annabel, suspicious. She reached forward and snatched a leaf that had fluttered down onto the hold box.

“To keep their pants up.” She stared at him. “Told you it was dumb.” Annabel crinkled her nose.

Something was spreading through Macon, sliding through his veins. He felt like a high-speed reverse film clip of decay: Instead of ants, microbes, time itself stripping a dead horse of flesh and fat and muscle, picking it dry and leaving the skeleton to rot and disappear, Macon was being rebuilt, stitched together. Strength rushed to his brain for one last panicked, manic rant, all the conviction of his will to live infusing him with a final gobletful of that rugged breakbeat-science, pimp-or-die, tongue-twisting, slick-wristed elixir. Uncle Macon was gonna flip so much motherfucking shit, his shadow’d still be rapping at them while he hobo-hopped the getaway train with the Fleetness.
Let them hang my ghost: I bang the most
plus slang the toast. I ain’t the best? Dang close; peep how my
slang floats. . . .
Fuck Audre Lorde. He would use what hip hop had taught him to destroy what hip hop had made him.

“Hey, Uncle Burl, pass me another beer, wouldja, good buddy?” He slammed it open against the side of the truck and checked the inside cap. “I won!” Burleigh and Johnnie nearly butted heads to look and Macon closed his fist around it. “Just kidding.” He winked at Annabel—“I got them, huh, sugar?”—threw back his head and laughed. “I been tricking them like that for years, doll-face, your daddy, too. We have a good old time. I trick them and they tease me ’bout being a city slicker who don’t know nothin’ practical, like how to fix a truck or catch a fish. ‘Macon,’ your daddy says to me, ‘you wouldn’t last a week out here in Alabama. Why, you couldn’t catch a fish if I threw one right at you.’ ”

Burleigh stared at him with a mismatched expression: brow furrowed, mouth upturned and parted in bemusement. Light and shadows crossed his face with sinister artistry. Macon eye-checked him and rapped on, bobbing slightly as the truck crawled over the rugged road. “So I says, ‘We’ll see about that, my chicken-fried-steak-eatin’ friend. I’m gonna come down there and catch me the biggest fish you ever saw in your whole everlovin’ life.’ What do you think of that, sweetheart?” He tipped his beer to the sky and drank. The bottle caught a sunlight refraction, drenched his face in swirling light. Annabel giggled, half-delighted, half-embarrassed. She knew she was being flirted with, performed for.

Macon killed half his beer and popped the bottle off his lips and kept on talking as if he hadn’t paused. He reached out and tapped Johnnie on the chest with the back of his hand. “Your uncle Johnnie here says to me, ‘Macon, if you catch anything at all, well, I’ll be so surprised I’ll give that fish the biggest kiss you’ve ever seen, smack on the lips.’ ”

Johnnie rubbed at a mosquito bite on his biceps and snorted. “What the hell’s he talkin’ ’bout?” he asked Burleigh.

“Ah, you see that, Annabel?” Macon pointed at him and winked at her. “You see that, Uncle Burleigh? Looks like Uncle Johnnie’s scared he might have to pucker up and smooch that catfish, huh?”

Anton could never watch his daughter laugh without cracking a smile, too. “What’s so funny back there, Anna lama ding-dong?”

She grinned and blew her cheeks full for a moment, finger and thumb clamping her lips shut. It was what she did when she was sore from laughing. “Uncle Macon’s silly.”

“Boy, I’m glad to be out here,” Macon blazed on in the meantime. “New York was driving me crazy. Mix a fella up so bad that he forgets just who he is, just like you said, Burl. I can’t thank y’all enough for letting me come down here and get my head straight. Say, here’s one for you. Thiz a New York joke: If a nigger, a Mexican, and a Puerto Rican are in a car together, who’s driving? The cops.” He’d heard it in high school, “black guy” in place of “nigger,” from some jackass in somebody’s parents’ basement, hazy with weed smoke. He’d let it slide—he’d usually let it slide, he reminded himself. This New Macon wasn’t such a stretch. He’d never given a fuck, really. Not in his heart of hearts of hearts, a place to which he seldom even granted himself access. Johnnie laughed a little. Burleigh’s face did not change.

Macon clocked the clerk through low-slung, ground-zero eyes. “No bullshit, man,” he stage-whispered, snatching an over-the-shoulder look at the girl. “That bus was gonna take me to L.A. and I was gonna catch the first plane outta this country and never be heard from again, I was so fucking sick of my old self. But you know what? I’ll stay right here if that’s what I’ve got to do to show you who I really am.” He released a long shudder-sigh. “You don’t understand, man.”

The truck reached the top of a hill and suddenly Macon’s voice was a whip cracking—“You listening to me?”—and Burleigh flinched before it like a classroom daydreamer called to attention. He nodded and Macon dipped his head a bit and caught Burl’s eyes: held them and flared his own, the flecks of color pulsing briefly like the shards of an exploding firecracker. “When that shit in New York blew up in my face, it was like I came back to my senses,” he said, glancing to his left and then hunching down, intimate. “I feel like I’m back from a war in some savage country, man. Like I got so used to the conditions in some fucked-up village that for a minute I forgot what civilization was like. Burleigh . . .” He paused for effect. “I been living with niggers, talking to more niggers than white folks for years. Can you imagine what that’s been like?”

The truck eased down the slope. Burleigh shook his head soberly. “No, Macon,” he said. “I sure as shit can’t.”

“Well, man, on Friday I saw. I saw what I’d tried to pretend I didn’t know all these years, and I couldn’t pretend anymore.” He halved the distance between them yet again. “They’ll turn on you, Burleigh. On each other. They’re animals. You can’t help them.”

“We’re here,” Annabel exclaimed, and Macon looked up to find that the forest-flanked dirt road had ended in a little clearing. Beyond the trees and scrub-grass that encircled the hollow, down the hill from the incline at which the road culminated, there burbled a wide, well-hidden creek, rushing clear and cold over a bed of polished rocks. Pretty. Macon thought of racing down the hill and jumping in, letting the current sweep him who-knew-where, holding his breath as shotgun pellets punctured the water around him and the girl screamed.

Burleigh jumped out and pulled Macon after him, clutching his captive just above the elbow. The bruises Macon had sustained in the store reasserted themselves as he stood.
What did I do,
his mind crooned in a wry, Armstrongian octave,
to be so black and
blue?
Johnnie double-checked the lock on the trunk, then reconsidered and opened it, lifting the lid and peeping inside like a kid with a field mouse in a shoe box.

“Sleeping like a baby,” he muttered, relocking it and jumping off the truck.

“I only got three rods,” Anton apologized, coming around to unhinge the flatbed. Annabel took her small fishing pole from her father and awarded Macon the extra. “I want to see Uncle Johnnie kiss a fish,” she giggled. They all walked down to the water, then hiked up a small grassy hill that lay a bit back from the bank and, at its summit, jutted out over the creek. “We been fishin’ here since we was her age,” Anton told Macon, tousling his daughter’s hair.