three

THE FIRST THING he noticed was that they didn’t have coats. It was just after dawn in March 1979, a Monday, Larry’s father driving him to school and dragging a fume of blue exhaust behind his Ford pickup. The spring holidays had come and passed, but now a freakish cold snap had frozen the land, so frigid his mother’s chickens wouldn’t even leave the barn, the evergreens a blur outside the frosted truck window and him lost in yet another book. He was in eighth grade and obsessed with Stephen King and looked up from Salem’s Lot when his father braked.

The pair of them was standing at the bend in the road by the store, a tall, thin black woman and her son, about Larry’s age, a rabbit of a boy he’d seen at school, a new kid. He wondered what they were doing here, this far out, before the store opened. Despite the cold the boy wore threadbare jeans and a white shirt and his mother a blue dress the wind curved over her figure. She wore a cloth around her hair, breath torn from her lips like tissues snatched from a box.

His father passed without stopping, Larry turning his head to watch the boy and his mother peer at them from outside.

Larry turned. “Daddy?”

“Ah dern,” said his father, jabbing the brakes. He had to back up to meet them, then he leaned past Larry on the truck’s bench seat (an army blanket placed over it by his mother) and rattled the knob and they were in in a burst of freezing air that seemed to swirl even after the woman had shut the door. They were all forced together, Larry against the boy on one side and his father on the other, uncomfortable because he and his father almost never touched, awkward handshakes, whippings. For a moment the four sat as if catching their breath after a disaster, the truck idling. Larry could hear the boy’s teeth clacking.

Then his father said, “Larry, thow a log on that dad-blame fire. Warm these folks up.”

He turned the heater to HI and soon the black boy beside Larry had stopped shivering.

“Alice,” said his father, pulling onto the road, “introduce these younguns.”

“Larry,” the woman said, as if she knew him, “this is Silas. Silas, this is Larry.”

Larry stuck out his calfskin glove. Silas’s slender brown hand was bare, and despite the quick soul shake it gave, Larry felt how cold his skin was. If he gave him one of his gloves, they could each have one warm hand. He wanted to do this, but how?

They smelled like smoke, Silas and his mother, and Larry realized where they must live. His father owned over five hundred acres, much of it in the bottom-right corner of the county, and on the southeast end, a half a mile from the dirt road, if you knew where to look, was an old log hunting cabin centered along with a few trees in a field a few acres across, just a little bump on the land. Bare furnishings inside, dirt floor, no water or electricity. Heated by a woodstove. But when had they moved in? And by what arrangement?

His father and the woman called Alice were talking about how cold it was.

“Freeze my dad-blame can off,” his father said.

“Mm hmm,” she said.

“You ever seen the like?”

“No, sir.”

“Not even in Chicago?”

She didn’t answer, and when the silence became awkward, his father turned the radio up and they listened to the weatherman saying it was cold. It was going to stay cold. Leave your tap water running tonight so your pipes wouldn’t freeze.

Larry stole a look at the boy beside him and then pretended to read his book. He was terrified of black kids. The fall after the summer he turned eleven he had entered the seventh grade. Recent redistricting of county schools had removed him from the public school in Fulsom and forced him to go to the Chabot school, where 80 percent of the student population (and a lot of the teachers and the vice principal) were black, mostly kids of the men who worked in the mill or cut trees or drove log trucks. Everything Larry couldn’t do—spike a volleyball, throw a football or catch one, field a grounder, fire a dodgeball—these black boys could. Did. They manipulated balls as if by magic, basketballs swishing impossibly, baseballs swiped out of the air, fierceeyed boys hurling and curving through their lives as smoothly as boomerangs. None read, though, or understood Larry’s love for books. Now he glanced over and saw Silas’s lips tense and his eyes moving across Larry’s page.

“What grade you in?” Larry asked.

Silas looked at his mother.

“Tell him,” she said.

“Eighth,” he said.

“Me, too.”

In Fulsom his father dropped the boys off at school, Alice climbing out and then Silas, Larry aware how unusual, inappropriate, it was for black people to be getting out of a white man’s truck. As he slid across the seat Larry glanced back at his father, who faced the road. Silas had disappeared—probably as aware as Larry of the oddity of their situation—and Larry stepped past the woman called Alice, seeing for the first time, as she smiled at him, how lovely she was.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“Bye,” he mumbled and walked off with his books. He glanced back, once, and saw his father saying something, the woman shaking her head.

At lunch in the cafeteria he looked for Silas among the black boys who occupied the two center tables but didn’t see him. He had to be careful because if they caught him looking they’d beat him up later. As usual, he sat with his tray and milk a few feet down from a group of white boys. Once in a while they’d invite him over. Not today.

His mother picked him up that afternoon, as usual, and, as usual, quizzed him about his day. She seemed surprised about their morning passengers. She asked where they’d been standing.

“They didn’t have coats,” he said. “They were freezing.”

“Where do they live?” she asked.

He sensed he’d said too much already, though, and said he didn’t know. For the rest of the ride, his mother was quiet.

WHEREVER ALICE AND Silas lived, they were there the next morning, same place, same time. His father pulled the truck over and the smell of woodsmoke blew into the cab with the icy wind and soon they all rode silently side by side. Larry opened Salem’s Lot and held it so that he was sure Silas would notice. It was the best part, where the girl came back as a vampire, floating there at Ben’s window.

Wednesday and Thursday passed, each day the colored people waiting, his mother picking him up in the afternoon and quizzing him on the morning trip. Did the woman seem friendly to his father? How did his father act? Was he stiff, the way he could be, was, most of the time? Or was he—

“Why do you care?” Larry asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Well? Momma?”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m just curious about your day.”

“I think,” he said, worried he’d hurt her, “they live in that old place down in the southeast acreage.”

“Do they,” his mother said.

At supper that night he could tell something was wrong. She’d told Larry to feed the chickens when he’d already done it and his father had to be reminded to say the blessing. Now neither of his parents spoke as they sat around their dining table and passed squash and meat loaf. And just before she rose to gather their dishes, his mother announced that she would drive Larry to school the following day, in her car.

His father glanced at Larry. “How come, Ina?”

“Oh,” she said. “In the morning that gas man’s coming and I can’t talk to him. You’ve got to tell him to come every week, every week, and make sure he understands. Besides—” She took the dishes to the sink and returned to the table. “I’ve got some things to return at Bedsole’s.”

His father nodded, then looked at Larry before pushing back from the table and bending into the refrigerator for a Budweiser and opening it on the way to his chair to watch the news.

“Carl?” His mother set a pie plate down, a little hard.

“Enjoyed it,” he called back.

As Larry dried the plates his mother handed him, he understood that he had betrayed a trust between himself and his father, and the next morning, in his mother’s Buick, she turned at the bend in the road where Alice and Silas waited, shivering, holding on to each other. As his mother slowed, Larry saw Silas push away from Alice, just as he would have done. Her drawn face pretty despite how the cold made her lips tiny, her skin the color of coffee the way women drank it, her hair in a scarf but her eyes large and frightened.

“Honey,” said Larry’s mother, “roll your window down, please.”

Without looking away from the woman, Larry turned his window crank.

“Hello, Alice,” his mother called as the glass descended.

“Miss Ina,” Alice said. She stood very straight. Silas had stepped back, turned his face away.

Larry’s mother reached over the seat behind them and withdrew a paper grocery bag. From it she took two heavy winter coats, old ones from their hall closet, one of hers for Alice and one of Larry’s for Silas. “These should fit,” she said, funneling them out the window, Larry’s hands poking at the coats, warm from the car’s heater, from the heat of their closet before that and before that the heat of their bodies, now going out to the bare black fingers in the cold.

Alice held her coat, didn’t even put it on. For a moment Silas glared at both Larry and his mother. Then he stepped back.

“You’ve never minded,” Larry’s mother said to Alice, looking hard at her, “using other people’s things.”

Then she pressed the accelerator and left them holding their coats in Larry’s side mirror.

In a moment his mother touched his knee. “Larry.”

He looked at her. “Ma’am?”

“Roll up your window,” she said. “It’s freezing.”

THEY WERE NEVER there again, Silas and his mother. And now Larry and his father, who’d had little to say before, rode the miles of dirt road and two-lane blacktop without a word, just the radio’s agricultural report and the heater blowing on their feet.

He understood that Carl liked most everyone except him. From an early bout of stuttering, through a sickly, asthmatic childhood, through hay fever and allergies, frequent bloody noses and a nervous stomach, glasses he kept breaking, he’d inched into the shambling, stoop-shouldered pudginess of the dead uncles on his mother’s side, uncles reduced to the frames of their boxed photographs now, whom Carl wouldn’t have on the walls. One uncle, Colin, had visited when Larry was five or six years old. At supper the first night Uncle Colin had announced he was a vegetarian. Seeing his father gape, Larry assumed that word, whatever it meant, meant something awful. “Not steak?” his father asked. “Nope.” “Pork chops?” “Never.” His father shaking his head. “Surely chicken?” “Rarely,” the smiling uncle said, “which doesn’t mean rare. Oh,” he went on, picking at his cornbread, “I’ll eat me a piece of fish once in a while. Tilapia. Nice mahimahi.” Carl by this point had put down his fork and knife and glared at his wife, as if she were to blame for the crime against nature sitting at their table.

Also, Uncle Colin was the only person Larry had ever seen wear a seat belt, as they rode to church (where he would refuse the communion saltine and grape juice). The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin’s not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly. Larry had become an expert at reading his father’s disapproval, sidelong looks, his low sighs, how he’d shut his eyes and shake his head at the idiocy of something. Or someone.

“Yall look just alike,” Larry’s mother said at dinner on Uncle Colin’s last night, looking from her brother to her son.

Larry saw that Carl was sawing at his venison.

“My little doppelgänger,” Colin said.

Carl looked up. “What’d you say? Your little what?”

Uncle Colin tried to explain that he hadn’t just referred to his sexual organ, but Carl had had enough and left the table.

“Doppelgänger,” he said, glancing at Larry.

Rather than his father’s tall, pitcher’s physique and blond curls and dark skin and green eyes, Larry got Uncle Colin and his mother’s olive skin and straight brown hair and brown eyes with long lashes which, attractive on women, made Larry and Uncle Colin soft and feminine, seat belt users who ate tilapia.

In addition, Larry was mechanically disinclined, his father’s expression. He could never remember whether counterclockwise loosened a bolt or what socket a nut took, which battery cable was positive. When he was younger, his father had used this disinclination as a reason not to let him visit the shop, saying he might get hurt or ring off a bolt, and so, for all those Saturdays, all those years, Larry stayed home.

Until his twelfth birthday, when his mother finally convinced Carl to give Larry another chance, and so, anxious, afraid, in old jeans and a stained T-shirt, Larry accompanied Carl to Ottomotive on a warm Saturday. He swept and cleaned and did everything Carl told him to and more. He liked the shop’s rich, metallic smell, the way oil and dust caked on the floor in crud you had to scrape off with a long-handled blade, a thing he enjoyed for the progress you witnessed, the satisfaction of driving the blade under the moist scabbery and shucking it away. He also liked cleaning the heavy steel wrenches and screwdrivers, the various pliers and channel locks and ball-peen hammers, the quarter- and half-inch ratchet and socket sets, the graceful long extensions and his favorite socket, the wiggler. He loved wiping them dry on red cotton shop rags and placing them in a row and sliding the oily-smooth drawers shut. He liked lifting cars by pumping the hand jack and letting them down by flipping the lever, the hydraulic hiss. He liked rolling creepers over the floor like large, flat skateboards to stand them against the back wall, liked how the drop lights hung from their orange cords, liked using GoJo to clean his hands.

But he loved best when the Coca-Cola truck had left six or seven or eight of the red and yellow wooden crates stacked by the machine, the empties gone and new bottles filled with Sprite, Mr. Pibb, Tab, Orange Nehi, and Coca-Colas, short and tall. Larry relished unlocking the big red machine, turning the odd cylinder of a key and the square lock springing out. When you spun this lock the entire red face of the machine hissed open and you were confronted with a kind of heaven. Long metal trays beaded with ice were tilted toward the slot where they fell to your waiting hand. The rush of freezing air, the sweet steel smell. The change box heavy with quarters and dimes and nickels. Taking bottles from the cases, he’d place each one in its rack, considering the order, taking care not to clink.

He learned to keep out of sight for most of the day as Cecil Walker, their closest neighbor, and other men began to assemble for what was, to Larry, always a revelation: his father telling stories, something he never did at home. In the late afternoon, as more fellows got off from the mill, they began to arrive in their pickup trucks, sometimes with a knocking tie rod, sometimes a whine in their engine block, sometimes just to listen to Carl at his worktable, the men gathered three, four deep, watching the mechanic place a carburetor on a clean shop rag.

Passing his bottle, Cecil would ask, “Carl, what was that you’s saying other day, about that crazy nigger—?”

And Carl would chuckle while he selected a tiny screwdriver and start the story. Loosening the carburetor’s minute screws, he would tell how Devoid Chapman bought this little red used MG Midget in Meridian and was driving it home to Dump Road when, along about time he passes Ottomotive, its hood unlatches and flies open. Carl pointing with his screwdriver. “Right out yonder there. The car’s a convertible, top folded back. Did I mention that? And Devoid, he has him a Afro, size of a dang peach basket. One of them black power fist combs sticking out of it.

“Now he’s got the top down cause he liked the way the wind friction felt against his hair, he said. And while he ain’t never confirmed it, that very nest of hair probably saved his life as that damn MG’s hood unsprang at fifty-five miles per hour there on the highway. I seen it happen. Swear to God.” Carl dropping the parts into a sieved pan and lowering the pan into a vat of ink-black, foul-smelling carburetor cleaner. “Hood peeled back, hit the rim of the windshield and bent and knocked ole Devoid right on the head, pop! The Midget spun out, lucky it was no other cars nearby, and Devoid luckier still to finally get it stopped there in a dust cloud.”

Talking the whole time, raising the sieve from the cleaner and setting the pan over a clean shop rag to dry, pausing only if something went amiss at his fingertips, a spring stuck in some valve, say. Attending this need might take five seconds, ten, a minute. He might have to excuse his way through the men and get a tiny socket or a different pair of pliers or maybe talk to the screw, “What’s got you stuck?” or he might just grimace, but then, however long it took (never long), the problem solved, he’d go on as if he’d never stopped.

“—got that MG stopped out in front there. Ole Devoid come staggering out fanning dust and holding his head a-yelling, ‘Call a got-dog am-bu-lance!’ Had a line of blood dripping off his nose. A cussing up and down the chart, got damn this and got damn that, son-of-a-bitching shit hell damn. Crazy nigger,” he’d say, laughing, “sold me the car on the spot, for two hundred dollars cash. I closed the hood and wired it shut and give him a ride home in that very car, him hunched down the whole time, worried bout that hood. I asked him did he want a motorcycle helmet but he said no, it’d never fit over his hair.”

All the men would be laughing and Cecil, drunk, a cigarette in his mouth and another behind his ear, laughing the hardest, would say, “You something else, Carl. Tell when you asked him about his name.”

Carl bending low over the table, close to the carburetor. “Yeah, I did. Said one time, ‘Devoid. That’s a hell of a name. You know what it means?’ And he said, yeah, he’d looked it up. ‘Barren. Empty. A wasteland.’ In school said his nickname was ‘Nothing.’”

“You something else,” Cecil would say, shaking his head. “Tell em about that dog, Carl,” and Carl would launch off into the funeral of so-and-so’s daddy where they was all standing around the grave out in the middle of nowhere, ten, fifteen miles to the nearest blacktop. “Somebody’s eulogizing the hell out of M. O. Walsh—that’s who it was—lying through his teeth telling what a gentleman he was, when from out behind us we hear a gunshot. Pop! Next thing we heard was a little ole dog go a-yipping and I bout bust out laughing when that got-dang dog come a shooting out the woods bleeding from the side. It run right through us all and through the tombstones a-yipping fore it went on down the road. I leaned over and said, ‘Fellows, when my time comes, I want me a three-dog salute.’ ”

The men laughing, Cecil hardest of all. They’d have Coca-Colas or beer and jaws fat with tobacco. They’d spit and wipe their lips with the backs of their hands. Most in baseball caps. White T-shirts. All in steel-toed boots. The confluence of pickup trucks framed in the door and the two big electric fans pushing the hot air around and cigarette smoke curling high in the rafters like ghosts of bird nests, the men sniping from Cecil’s bottle, Carl drinking, too, and Larry, hidden, listening, the stories weaving his imagination and the sounds of his father’s voice into what must have been happiness, as his father’s hands lifted the rebuilt carburetor to its waiting car, a clean rag over the intake manifold, the giant hands with the care of a surgeon fitting a heart back into its chest, turning the screws and reattaching the fuel line and listening with his head cocked as the owner climbed into the driver’s seat with the door open and one leg out, gunning it on command while Carl regulated its gasoline flow and, at last, placed the air filter over the carburetor and tightened the wing nut as the engine raced and the air smelled of gasoline and Carl stood back, arms folded, nodding, the shadows of men behind him nodding, too, and Larry watching, from behind the Coke machine, Cecil saying, “Carl, tell that one about that old nigger used to preach on a stump—”

Now, as he and his father bounced over Mississippi on the way to school, as they swung in and out of its shadows and rose and fell over its hills, Larry worried he’d lost the privilege of Ottomotive forever. They were pulling to the corner by the gymnasium where he got out. Before he closed the truck door each day, he’d say, “Bye, Daddy. Thanks for the ride.”

“Have a good one,” his father would say, barely a glance.

IN THE COMING days he’d see Silas across the playground, in his class as he passed on his way to the restroom. In the cafeteria Silas sat with a group of black boys, laughing with them, even talking now and again. A betrayal, to Larry. For hadn’t Silas been his doppelgänger? He’d see him out in the field by the trees, playing baseball, catching fly balls barehanded, his shoes, which looked too big for him, over by the chain-link fence.

Then, one Sunday afternoon in late March, Larry’s mother off volunteering, his father at work (even on Sundays, coming home from church and putting on his uniform and grumbling about all the money they spent, how he had no choice but to work), Larry set off down the dirt road they lived on, his lockblade knife in his back pants pocket and carrying a Marlin .22 lever action, one of his father’s old guns. Since his tenth birthday, he’d carried a rifle with him in the woods. Some days he shot at birds and squirrels halfheartedly, rarely hitting anything, and if he did, just standing over it a minute, two, staring, and then leaving it lying, his feelings jumbled, somewhere between pride and guilt. But today he kept the safety on and carried the rifle yoked over his shoulder. Because the cold weather had lingered, he wore his thick camouflage coat, camouflage cap and pants, his fur-lined boots. He left no footprints in the frozen mud. Most days he would have gone east, along the dirt road, toward the Walker place. Cecil Walker lived there with his wife and his fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Cindy, whom Larry hoped to glimpse. In summer he’d sneak around the house, through the woods, and watch as she’d stretch a towel out across the boards of their deck and take the sun wearing a bikini, flat on her back in a pair of huge dark glasses, one brown leg cocked up, then turning onto her belly, slipping a finger beneath the shoulder straps, one, the other, to lie on her breasts, Larry’s heart a bullfrog trying to spring out of his chest. On colder days she came outside to smoke, stretching the long cord of their telephone out the door, not talking loud enough for Larry to hear. She’d only said a handful of words to him, and some days, the days when Cecil would come outside and mess with her, telling her get off the phone, put out that cigarette, Larry imagined her coming to him for help, and some days, as she lay in the sun or smoked another Camel, he wished she’d see him where he hid, at the edge of the woods, watching.

But not today.

Today he went west, through the wire of a fence into the woods. At night sometimes in these cold stretches you’d hear noises like gunshots. It wasn’t until he’d come, once, to a tree snapped cleanly in half, that he realized the cold would break them. The young ones, the old. A tree enduring another freezing night suddenly explodes at its heart, its top half toppling and swinging down, scratching the land with a horrible creak, broken in half and turning like a hanged man.

Walking, he wondered if they still lived out there, Silas and his mother. He worked his way south, making little noise, and carefully descended the rocky berm and picked through a tangle of briars at the bottom and into deeper woods.

Having a black friend was an interesting idea, something he’d never considered. Since the redistricting he was around them constantly. The churches were still segregated if the schools weren’t, and sometimes Larry wondered why grown-ups made the kids mingle when they themselves didn’t. He remembered two years before, how, in the hall on his first day at the Chabot Middle School, a white boy had come up behind him and said, “Welcome to the jungle.”

Other white boys would speak to him on occasion, usually if they were alone with him, or passed him on the playground away from their friends. Larry hurried through the halls, not making eye contact because it was safer, his nose in his handkerchief or a book, the new kid who was never quite accepted. In groups, the white boys laughed at him though they’d sometimes let him tag along, the butt of jokes but grateful to be included. The black boys were aggressive to him, bumping him as he passed, knocking his books off his desk as if it were an accident, tripping him on his way to the bathroom.

In the seventh grade, near the end of the school year, he found himself swinging with a white boy named Ken on one side of him and another, David, on the other. Both their fathers worked in the mill and both were poorer than Larry—he knew this because they got free lunches. Swinging, Larry kicked his legs as he flew forward, going higher, higher, the classroom building up the hill from the playground, a gray two-story structure with second-story fire escapes where teachers, all black, stood smoking and laughing, out of earshot.

Below them to the right a clump of skinny black girls with Afros and short shorts were standing and sipping short Cokes from the machine in the gym and sharing a bag of Lays, not really watching the boys, just talking about whatever black girls talked about, once in a while breaking out in high, cackling laughter and cries of “You crazy!” that Ken would imitate so they couldn’t hear.

David said, “Them nigger girls sound like a bunch of monkeys,” in a low voice.

“You a nigger,” Ken snapped back, and Larry laughed.

“Yo momma is,” David said, the standard retort of the year.

“Yo daddy,” Ken said.

“Yo sister.”

“Yo brother,” and on until you got to the distant relatives, step-siblings, and great-aunts.

Ken grew bored with naming relatives and, swinging forward, pointed with his sneaker toward the black girls. “Look at Monkey Lips,” he said. This was their nickname for Jackie Simmons, a small dark-skinned girl with big teeth and lips. “She’s so dark you can’t see her at night less she smiles at you.”

Larry laughed and said, “Jackie Simian.”

“What?” Ken said.

“You see them big teefs in the dark,” David said in dialect, “you’ll thank it’s a drive-in movie you be watching.”

Going back and forth, whizzing past one another, the boys began to discuss the drive-in movie theater on Highway 21, Ken saying he’d seen a show called Phantasm there. Larry knew the movie from his magazines. It was about two brothers who broke into a funeral home. Ken was telling about this steel ball that flew around with a blade sticking out that would drill into your head and spray blood like a damn garden hose.

“When yall go?” he asked Ken, who said his older brother would sometimes take him and David with him and his girlfriend, let them sit in the front seat while his brother and his brother’s girlfriend necked in the back. Ken and David discussed other movies they’d seen, Dawn of the Dead, which Larry had also read about and was eager to see, where zombies tore people apart and ate them as they screamed, and one called Animal House, how John Belushi from Saturday Night Live scaled a ladder to spy on girls in a dorm room pillow fighting and taking their clothes off—

“You seen their titties?” Larry asked.

“Shit,” Ken said, “pussies, too.”

“We go all the time,” David said, swooshing past. “Me and Ken going Friday night, too, ain’t we.”

“Hell yeah.”

Larry clenched the chains. “Yall think I could go sometime?” he asked, moving his neck to see David behind him, beside him, above.

David and Ken, swinging opposite trajectories, like a pair of legs running, had to struggle to make eye contact.

“My brother ain’t gone take you,” Ken said and David laughed, like what a stupid question.

“It’s one way you might could go,” David said, and even though Larry saw him cast an evil look at Ken, he couldn’t help biting.

“How?”

“You got to join our club.”

“Yeah,” said Ken.

“How do I join?”

A moment passed, the boys swinging.

“You got to call Jackie ‘Monkey Lips,’ “ David said. “To her face.”

A bell rang up at the school and the teachers began to grind out their cigarettes.

“Watch this,” David said, kicking his legs harder, so hard, going so high, the chains in his fists slackened on his upswing and he bounced hard in the rubber seat and swung back and the chains snapped again and as he flew forward he leapt from the swing, seat flapping in his wake, and sailed a long time over the ground—his shirt flying up and his arms out, feet dangling—and landed dangerously close to where the black girls, headed back to school, were giggling about something.

They jumped and screamed as David skidded and dusted them with playground sand.

“Boy, you crazy,” one said, brushing sand from her backside, almost laughing.

“He go break his neck,” another said.

Up at the school, the teachers had paused before going in, watching.

Before Larry knew it Ken had sailed out, snapping his chains, flapping the swing, airborne, the girls backing up as he landed fancy, doing a somersault and rolling to his feet with his hands out like, “Ta-da.”

“Them white boys crazy,” another girl shrieked, the group moving farther away, but everybody, David, Ken, the girls, the teachers, looking at Larry, as he kicked his legs harder and harder, getting ready. He thought that if he did a good one, better than anybody else, they might let him go to the drive-in, he imagined telling his daddy about it, Where you going boy? To the drive-in movie with my friends, in a car.

He went back, kicked, up, kick, back, the girls waiting, Ken and David watching. He thought if he could land in the center of them, scatter them, what a story it would make, he thought of going inside with Ken and David who’d tell everybody how far Larry Ott flew and how he sailed like a missile into the nigger girls.

He’d jump the next time, as a couple of teachers went into the upstairs door, Larry swinging back, needing more altitude, now the black girls turning, Larry forward, kicking, thinking, Wait, but then the second bell rang and a teacher waved her arm, come on in, as the playground began to empty.

When he jumped only Ken saw, David having given up, too, and Larry sailed out, his legs running, arms behind him.

He yelled, “Monkey Lips!” and landed on the wrong foot and half-ran, half fell to a hard stop, tumbling in his own dust, winding up on his stomach with his breath knocked out, rolling over, opening his eyes to the high white sky latticed with leaves. The face that appeared above him, a moment later, was Jackie’s. He was aware of how quiet the playground had become with everybody inside, how far his yell had carried. Ken and David had stopped and were looking back.

“What you call me?” Jackie asked.

He couldn’t catch his breath. He couldn’t answer.

“Tell me, white boy.”

He opened his mouth.

But she’d turned. She walked away, through her friends who were putting their hands on her back, casting their furious eyes back at Larry. Ken and David hurried off, not even looking at him. Larry pushed up on his elbows, lungs on fire, tears stinging the rims of his eyes, sorry for saying it, seeing the door open at the end of the building and Mrs. Tally, a black teacher, coming out, meeting the girls, just as Ken and David went inside.

“You know what that white boy call Jackie?” one said.

Mrs. Tally knelt in front of Jackie and said something, then sent her and the other girls inside. Larry was on his knees when she came over, her legs blocking the school from his view.

“Ain’t that girl got enough problems in this world without a white boy calling her that?” she asked.

He couldn’t look up. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not the one you need to say that to. You will apologize to Jackie.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I ought to call your daddy,” she said, walking away. “But what good would that do?”

He returned to his classroom where he, Ken, and David were the only white boys mixed in with two white girls, eight black boys, and nine black girls. Mrs. Smith, black, too, shook her head and pointed him to his desk and they finished their world history lesson.

After a time Mrs. Smith told them to read ahead and left the room. Larry, who hadn’t yet dared to look up, was focused on a paperback copy of The Shining on his desk when a heavy world history textbook suddenly hit him on the side of his head. He flinched as the book slid off his shoulder onto the floor, felt like his ear had been torn off, and he lowered his head into his arms, folded over his desk. The black girls and boys began to snicker.

“White boy,” a girl named Carolyn hissed. One of Jackie’s friends, heavyset and light-skinned. Mean.

He ignored her.

“White boy! Brang me that book.”

His head throbbed but he didn’t look up.

“White boy. YOU,” she called, and Larry felt all their eyes crawling over him. He heard Ken and David, across the room, begin to laugh, and then the white girls, both of them, giggled. The black boys were hooting, and then somebody else threw a book. Then somebody else. Larry kept his head on the desk, smelling his own sour breath in the pages of The Shining as more and more books pounded him. He knew somebody was posted at the window, where Mrs. Smith was outside, smoking and talking to another teacher.

Monkey Lips, he thought as more books pelted him. Monkey Lips, Monkey Lips, Monkey Lips. Then, Nigger nigger nigger nigger.

A desk leg screaked the floor and somebody slapped the back of his head. “Boy, you better answer me fore I whoop yo ass.”

“Whoop his ass, Carolyn,” a big black boy called.

Nigger nigger nigger nigger.

She grabbed his scalp, bunched his hair and squeezed it, pulled his head up, the laughter louder without the nest his arms had made. Some part of him hoped the white boys would rally for him, admire him for what he’d said, but they were laughing and pointing at him, as were the two white girls, and he knew this was not going to happen any more than the drive-in movie would.

Carolyn twisted his head harder, and Larry pushed at her arm but she had his hair and he told himself not to cry. Then she slammed his head down, hard, onto his desk. Everybody laughed so she did it again.

He stole a sideways look and saw her face. He’d never been that angry. He didn’t think he had the ability to summon such anger, or the right. With her other hand Carolyn grabbed his arm and twisted it so he fell out of his desk, The Shining landing beside him on the floor.

Still holding his arm, she put her foot on his neck and pushed.

“Carolyn!” somebody hissed. “Mrs. Smith coming.”

In a flash he was let go and black hands were grabbing books. He’d just pulled himself back into his desk when the teacher walked in, chewing a stick of gum, and said, “What’s all this noise?”

She looked over the room, everybody miraculously in their desks, focused on their world history books. When her eyes settled on Larry, she stopped.

“Lord, child,” she said. “You need to comb your hair. And why you so red?”

The class exploded into laughter as Larry sank his head back onto his desk.

EVEN TODAY, MORE than a year later, carrying his rifle through the woods, the memory shamed him. He’d gotten a belt whipping from his father that night—for tearing his clothes jumping out of the swing, Clothes I work hard to buy. He’d apologized to Jackie the following day, gone up to her and mumbled, “Sorry,” but she’d just walked away, leaving him alone.

Now, as he made his way toward the cabin where Silas and his mother were staying, the woods had begun to thin, and as he came to the edge of the field with his .22, he looked over the frozen turnrows and saw the dark elbow of smoke from the cabin’s stovepipe.

He knelt, a fallen log at the tree line like a wall, the bramble cross-stitching his face so they’d never see him from the windows. He knew the cabin, had been there before, had pushed open its door on leather hinges and peered into the dust and dark where fissures of light showed how poorly the logs were mortared. There’d been little else to see. A wooden table and a couple of single beds hunters had once used, a wash pot. The stove in the back corner with its iron door opened and its pipe a straight line to the roof, shored around the top with bent, blackened patches of aluminum. A woodbox coated in dust that held only dead cockroaches and rat droppings when he raised its lid.

He wondered now, watching the cabin, if Silas did his homework by firelight. You’d have to lug water from the creek on the other side of the field, where the trees resumed. Larry wondered if he could get closer, if he should circle the edge of the woods to the point nearest the house, six o’clock to his current high noon. From here was about a hundred yards to there, all open field, just one white oak stricken against the sky like an explosion. Be better at night. They didn’t have a dog or he’d know it by now.

“Hey,” said a voice behind him.

He turned with the rifle. It was Silas, his arms full of limbs. Firewood.

The black boy dropped the wood and raised his hands like a robber. For a moment that was how they stood, Silas in the coat Larry’s mother had given him and one of Larry’s old thermal caps his mother must’ve thought to put in the pocket.

Silas opened his mouth. “You gone shoot me?”

He moved the rifle. “No,” he said. “You scared me is all. Sneaking up like that.”

“I ain’t sneak.” Silas lowered his hands.

“Sorry,” Larry said. He put the .22 against a tree and hesitated, then came forward to shake Silas’s hand. His father’s habit. Silas hesitated, too, then, perhaps because they were alone in the woods, no school around them, they shook, Silas’s fingers again enveloped Larry’s glove.

For a moment they looked at each other, then knelt together to pick up the wood. Larry stacked his limbs onto the top of the pile Silas held. Silas shrugged a thanks and stepped past Larry and went to the edge and stopped. He looked back over his shoulder.

“What you doing out here?”

“My daddy owns this land.” Larry turned to where the gun stood, barrel up, against the bark of a pine tree. “I was hunting.”

“You kill anything?”

He shook his head.

“Cause I ain’t heard no shots.”

“I’m hunting deer,” Larry said.

“I had me a gun I could kill some of these squirrels. Let Momma fry em.”

Larry reached for the .22.

“You reckon I could borry that one?” Silas said. “I bet your daddy got twenty-five more ain’t he.”

He did, he had several guns. Larry brought this one because it didn’t kick and wasn’t as loud as the others, twelve- and twenty-gauge shotguns or higher-caliber rifles.

“How yall get to town now?” Larry asked.

“Momma got a car.”

“How’d she get it?”

“I don’t know. How your daddy get his truck?”

“Paid for it.”

They stood. Silas looked toward the cabin then dropped the wood again and turned, pointed to the .22. “Let me shoot it.”

Larry looked toward the house. “Won’t your momma hear?”

“She workin.”

“I thought she worked the early shift. Piggly Wiggly.”

“She do. Then she work the late shift at the diner in Fulsom. Here go,” he said, stepping forward and taking the gun from Larry who never even tried to stop the black boy. “How you do it?” Silas asked.

“It’s already one in the chamber,” Larry said. “All you got to do is cock it and shoot.”

“How you shoot?”

“You ain’t never shot?”

“I ain’t never touch no gun,” Silas said. He held the rifle by its stock and forestock, as if it were a barbell without weights.

Larry raised his arms and mimed how you’d aim the gun. “Which hand are you?”

“Say what?”

“Right-handed or left. I’m right.”

“Left.”

“So you’re opposite me. See that hammer there?” Larry pointed. “Cock it back.”

Silas did, and Larry watched him raise the rifle to his right cheek. “Lay your face on the wood,” he said.

“Cold,” Silas said.

“Now close your left eye and look with your right down the barrel. See that little sight? Put that on whatever you want to hit.”

Silas aimed at something across the field, closer to the cabin than Larry liked, and then shot and the echo slapped through the trees.

“It ain’t loud,” Silas said. He lowered the rifle and peered toward where he’d fired.

“That’s how come I like it.”

“Can I shoot it again?”

“Go on.”

“How many bullets you got?”

“Cartridges. This one shoots cartridges. Twenty-two longs.”

“It shoot twenty-two times?”

Larry had to smile. “No, this gun’s a .22 caliber. It shoots long or short cartridges. I got longs today.”

“How many you got?”

“Enough.”

Silas raised it again and sighted down the barrel and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

“Work the lever,” Larry said, miming.

Silas levered the rifle and his head snapped when the spent hull flew out of the side.

“Now see how it’s cocked? It’s ready to shoot again, so be careful.”

Holding the rifle with a kind of reverence, Silas bent to retrieve the hull.

“It’s hot,” Larry said, but Silas picked it up with his fingers and then cupped it in his palm.

“What you do with these?”

Larry shrugged. “Throw em away.”

Silas put the cartridge to his nose. “It smell good.”

“Gunpowder.”

“Gunpowder.”

They watched each other.

Then Silas raised the rifle again and panned it over the field, past the house, all the way back around to Larry, and held it on him. For a moment Larry saw into the perfect O of the barrel and followed it to Silas’s opened eye and went numb.

“Now we even,” Silas said.

Then he moved the gun, continued his pan until he stopped on a pine tree and shot. He levered the rifle and this time caught the ejected hull. It clinked against the other in his palm. He put them both in his coat pocket, and it struck Larry with a wave of sadness, a boy saving the hulls as something valuable.

“Go on keep it,” Larry blurted. “The rifle.”

Silas when he smiled displayed an array of handsome teeth. “For real?”

It was the first time Larry had seen him smile. “I got to get it back, though. Pretty soon, okay? Promise?”

“I’ll just shoot me a few these squirrels,” Silas said. He sighted something high in a tree. “You got the bullets? The cartridges?”

Larry unzipped his coat pocket and brought out both of the small white boxes and held them out to the black boy. Silas took them reverently and transferred them to his own coat pocket. Larry showed him how to load it and gave him pointers about aiming and shooting, the same lessons his father had given him. By the time he finished telling Silas how to clean the rifle, the sky outside the woods had reddened and the limbs were darker and the smoke from the cabin had quit.

“Oh man,” Silas said, grabbing all the wood he could gather in one hand, gun in the other. “That fire go out my momma kill me dead.”

With sticks pointing in every direction he raced toward the sun, and only when Larry could no longer discern the rifle barrel from sticks of firewood did he himself turn and walk back into the forest where night had already begun to gather its folds. He felt welcomed by it and full of air. The last thing he did was pull at the fingers of his gloves, removing the left one, the right, and erect a stick the shape of a Y in the cold mulch beneath the leaves. On each peg he left a glove.