Wait Until Twilight (6 page)

T
HAT
F
RIDAY IS THE LAST DAY
my suspension. There’s going to be a short performance in the morning by the YAA order, which stands for the Young African Americans. I know I’m risking worse trouble by going to school to check it out, but it seems like too much fun, and I’m starting to get bored sitting around studying all day at home. So after Dad leaves for work, I put on his old white painter pants, some old white sneakers, and my brown hooded shirt. I’m thinking there’s no way I get recognized in this getup. I drive over to the strip mall down from the school and park in front of the Kroger. I walk across the dewy pasture onto the school grounds. I could have gone around the school to the auditorium, but I want to see what it’s like walking the halls incognito. A mixture of freedom and the fear of getting caught mix into a strange kind of excitement. I’m like a spy. A double agent. I find myself walking behind Candy Phillips, and
she doesn’t even know it’s me. Candy’s a Goth girl who wears lots of black. She isn’t a complete freak, though. She’s easy to talk to and real smart.

“Man, I’m always the victim of bird droppings,” says Candy to Joanna, who was walking beside her. Joanna starts laughing. “No, listen, yesterday, I saw some birds resting on power lines, and I was real frustrated, so I shouted at them: ‘Bring it on!’ I don’t know if I riled them or not, but one of them dive-bombed toward me. I tried to dodge it, but he crapped on my arm. I shouldn’t have shouted at the birds, I suppose…”

I walk past them and head for the west exit. I’m starting to regret wearing Dad’s white painter pants. The material’s stiff and poofy, and I have to walk kind of bow-legged to keep it from chaffing the inside of my thighs. It makes me feel like a cowboy walking around in his underwear. Plus, they don’t look very good. I would have been better off just wearing my jeans.

The performances have already begun when I get to the auditorium. I sneak around to the left and find a seat close to the front. On stage there’re seven doors lined up in a row along a fake wall. And out of those doors members of the YAA order are coming out one at a time. Most of them are upperclassmen, but I recognize Devon from my grade. Then they go back in those same doors with a loud slam. Then come back out again and continue to slam the doors, creating crazy rhythms. The crowd’s really getting into it. They’re cheering and stomping. Who knew door slamming could be so entertaining? But from that first door slam I’m thinking about that godforsaken house and those loud angry door slams that came from the upstairs. It’s like fate has it in for me. It won’t let me forget. I want to go, but turning around and leaving means the danger of being seen. I don’t have to wait too long, though, before the other students start getting up to leave. Apparently door slamming can take you only so far in the entertainment world. I follow them out.
One of the door slammers gets on a microphone and starts announcing, “Be sure to check out our Web site, www.I-Hot.com…” I’m too busy leaving to listen to the rest. That’s when someone slaps my arm. It’s Mrs. Easton, my platinum-blonde algebra teacher and probably the prettiest teacher in the school. She gives me a look as if to say, What are you doing here? I shake my head and keep moving until I’m out of the auditorium and then to the other side of the school heading toward the field. What kind of Web address is I-Hot? It makes me think of blueberry pancakes.

When I get home, it feels real good. It feels like I’ve infiltrated enemy lines and come back alive. I spend the rest of the day building a model F-16 airplane I got at the store last week. It’s very relaxing sitting there at my desk gluing those pieces together. A nice breeze comes in through the window where the sun shines in. I started making models after watching my big brother, Jim, putting together some model ships and cars back when I was in middle school. He was about to start junior high. He’s four years older than me, so at first he didn’t trust me and I had to get my own models. But when I got older, he let me help him do bigger, more elaborate ones. After Jim left for college he used to come home on the weekends. Mom would do his laundry, and he’d sit around eating and watching television like when we were little kids. I visited him a few times, too. The West Georgian is less than an hour away, so it wasn’t a big deal. But that was before Mom died. Since then he’s hardly ever around and never calls, so it’s almost like we don’t know him. I must have seen him a total of two times since the funeral. Both times he didn’t say a word about Mom, even though he was the last to see her before she stopped talking. He hardly even said a word to me. Just, “Hey, what’s up?” Come to think of it, since Mom died it’s like my family disappeared. She was the centerpiece of it all. She was always the one there holding it all in one piece. Once she was gone there was nothing to hold the spokes
together. We all spanned out. Jim stopped coming home. I stayed in my room most of the time, and Dad buried himself in work. We just went our own ways for a while and didn’t really speak for days on end. Dad and I just recently started talking like normal again, but Jim’s still far away. It’s almost like he died, too. I miss him just as much as I miss Mom. Maybe even more because he’s still alive.

I take a break while letting some of the glue dry. In the meantime I make a big batch of spaghetti for lunch so Dad can have some for dinner. I wash it down with a glass of mango juice.

It isn’t until late in the afternoon that I completely finish building the F-16, which I place on the windowsill to dry out completely. The paint and glue smell good, but I know if I stay in there I’ll get a headache, so I go outside.

I’
M SITTING ON THE FRONT
steps thinking about those deformed babies again, picturing them in my mind like it’ll help me understand something, when I feel this vibration come through my body. But it doesn’t make me sick or cold in the guts. In fact, the whole neighborhood is shaking. It’s the booming sound of a huge bass speaker. I can hear them coming from a mile away. David’s Cavalier convertible has a speaker system that shakes the window frames of houses when it passes by. David pulls up with Will up front and Brad in the back. I hooked David up with Will and Brad a few years ago. Since then we hang out whenever we can, even though I’m probably a little closer to David than they are. “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” says Will.

“Go where?” I say.

“Party.”

“No, thanks.”

“Come on, it’s Friday. We’re not going until you get in.” David
turns up the bass even louder. The ground shakes beneath me. It feels like the apocalypse.

“Okay, okay! Just wait a goddamn minute!” I say.

I go to my room and throw on a new T-shirt. I smell my still freshly glued plane and admire its shiny newness once more before locking up the house and hopping in the backseat with Brad. We take off down the road with the bass speaker creating a vibration that goes up my gut through my neck up to the top of my head.

T
HE PARTY WE’RE GOING TO
is way out in the country. David’s heard about it through a friend of a friend who’s way older than all of us. So we’re thinking we’re going to a college party out in the woods. The West Georgian College was known more for partying than its academics, anyhow. David heads due south in the general direction of Underwood.

“Why’re we going this way?” I ask him nervously.

“Do you know any other way?” he says. We end up going way past Underwood, farther south out into the country. I’m talking red dirt roads surrounded by thick jungle-like woods. We go on like this for a while until these cars and motorcycles parked along the side of the road turn up.

“I think this is it,” David says. We slowly back the car up and park. In the distance we can hear loud heavy-metal music coming out of the woods.

“Are you sure this is it?” asks Brad.

“This has got to be it. I mean, it sounds like a party, doesn’t it?” says David. “And there’s only one way to find out.” It takes a good long walk to reach the clearing, and when we get there it’s full of old people, not college old, but middle-aged old. Some of the old guys are wearing uniforms almost like the ones Boy Scouts wear, some of
the others like Hells Angels. It’s a weird mix, but they all look pretty tough. And a lot of them are watching us intently. On a makeshift stage is a band playing that loud heavy metal we heard from a distance. The main singer has this greasy blond mullet and beard. I will say this, he has a kind of charisma that makes watching him strum his guitar and sing entertaining. The guy is chock-full of attitude. I’m not into heavy metal but the band sounds okay at first. Then it starts sounding terrible when the three backup singers start screaming in unison. I mean, it sounds like they’re singing a completely different song. The lead singer takes this time to pump his fist at the crowd, which hollers back at him. As his eyes move over the crowd he seems to stop at me and then points almost right at me for a second, screaming this line, “Blood for blood! Sin for sin! The circle of life comes round again!” before kicking back into the song. I want to leave right then and there.

“Man, look at all these old bastards,” says Brad.

“I think we should go.”

“Me, too,” says Will, who’s looking around suspiciously.

One old bearded guy in a black leather vest and sunglasses comes up behind us and puts his arms around our shoulders. “Hey fellas, what brings you way out here?” he says.

“Uh, heard about this from a friend,” says David.

“A friend, huh? What kind of friend would send you guys out here?” He smiles and pats us on the shoulders.

“We should probably be getting back,” says Brad.

“Noooo, noooo, stay awhile. I was just kidding. We’re gonna have some fun.”

We’re given beers in clear plastic cups, which we politely accept. Everyone’s drinking beer and smoking. We try to sneak away, but that same guy keeps stopping us and gently encourages us to stay. In the middle of a song with the guitars driving and the music really loud, the
singer starts jumping around. He gets so worked up that he takes his shirt off and puts on a blue cap that he pulls from his back pocket. A mosh pit is forming at the front of the stage. Meanwhile, the singer’s running around in circles with that cap on backward. I recognize that cap. It’s the cap on the guy who drove by Mrs. Greenan’s house when I fell asleep on her front porch. In fact, I’m sure of it. It comes back to me, how it felt like someone was strangling the life out of me, those cold hands around my neck. I was just waiting to see those babies, then something like that happens. And it feels like it’s happening again right there in the field. I can feel the gripping sensation around my throat. All the while that singer’s getting more and more agitated. He gets to shaking and flailing his arms about like he’s having a fit. He falls back and starts squirming around, almost like he’s imitating those babies. Watching him makes the choking feeling worse. I put my hands to my neck, but there’s nothing there, just my own hands. Everyone else is enjoying the show. The mosh pit is swarming. Even David and the guys seem intrigued by this guy’s onstage antics. I’m the only one freaking out, and it’s getting to where I’m feeling dizzy and everything’s spinning out of control. Then the song finally climaxes and the singer dives off the stage into the crowd, where he disappears into the sea of overflowing bodies. The song ends, and the pressure around my neck goes away. I start to look for where the singer went, but the old guy standing by us grips my shoulder.

“Where do you think you’re going?” He points to the stage where a man sporting a huge beard, I mean Old Testament, Moses, ZZ Top huge, with a bandanna gets on the microphone. “It’s time for the singing contest,” he announces. “Each group must choose an ambassador and send them up to the stage to sing a song of their choice.” A runner comes around with pieces of paper and a pencil stub for each group.

“Write down a song, Samuel,” says Will.

“Why me?”

“C’mon just write something.”

“Don’t worry, we’re not gonna get picked. Just write one.”

I go ahead and write down “Lift Me Up.” A runner comes by and picks up all the papers and takes them up to the stage, where the emcee starts flipping through them.

“If he calls on us, I’m running,” I say.

“Okay, we’ll all run,” says Brad.

The emcee calls out, “ Lift Me Up!’ Who’s the lucky man? Come on up and represent your group.”

For a split second I think,
Samuel, you can do it. You can go up there and sing
. I try to pump myself up, but that moment of silly inspiration lasts about one second at the thought of that pointing finger and the voice singing, “Blood for blood!”

“You guys ready?” I whisper. We all nod, then sprint toward the road with our youthful legs pumping away. Some hands reach out for us along the way, but when we reach the road the only thing following us is their raucous laughter. We keep running all the way to the car and get out of there as fast as we can turn the Cavalier around.

Down the road a ways we pass a black man walking with a big wooden crate on his shoulders. “Let’s give that guy a lift,” I say.

“What?” says David.

“Those guys back there are nuts. If some of those guys are around, who knows?” adds Will.

“He’s obviously not one of those guys.”

“Never pick up hitchhikers,” says Brad.

“He’s not hitchhiking. Look at the size of that crate. You could fit a black bear in that thing. C’mon.”

“If something happens, it’s your fault,” he says. We stop and go back.

“Where you goin’?” David asks as we drive alongside the old-timer.

The black man watches us suspiciously with his tired-looking red eyes. His shirt is open, revealing a bony black chest. “To ma house,” he says.

“You know about those crazy bastards having a party back there?”

“I heard somethin’ goin’ on. None o’ ma bidness.”

“You shouldn’t be walking around out here right now. Get in, we’ll give you a ride to wherever you’re going.”

“It’s okay, they don’t bother me none.”