The Portable Promised Land Page 20

  “Brother Eldridge,” Man says in the very creative visualization, “this is my boy, Sambo.”

  “Good afternoon, sir,” says the son, extending a hand to shake. “I’m glad you could make it to our barbeque. Is there anything I can get for you?”

  The Panther leader says nothing. He just stands there stunned and staring, mouth hanging.

  They had to strain to the edge of their imaginations, but they could see it. And maybe, somehow, live with it.

  The flip side to Sistuhgirl’s postulation was, “If Nappy still looked like Nappy, cute as could be, but every bit as rude and disrespectful as Sambo, would we want to kill him?” They both knew the answer. Hell, yeah.

  Thus, after a long time they decided that they could imagine themselves getting beyond his Samboness. Of course getting beyond being pimp-smacked by your own history in your own home every single day is asking the world of someone, but Man and Sistuhgirl surmised that they had enough self-esteem to find a way. What was impossible to get beyond was that the little nigger was bratty, disrespectful, vile, odious, and insufferable. Thus, they concluded, what mattered most was not that Sambo was a living nightmare but that he was unbearably, unbelievably, unblushingly annoying. They decided, through the sound of stereophonic chomps, to put themselves out of their misery and shoot him.

  Man went into his gun closet. He had six now. The Luger was his favorite. It felt good in his hand. It looked like a gun should. It never jammed. So many times he’d bought a stuffed bear or a book or a little toy and, with care, brought it to Nappy’s room. Now, with the same care he brought his Luger. Sistuhgirl stood by Man as he opened the door to Nappy’s room.

  Sambo sat on his bed, still halfway under the sheets though it was almost noon, doing nothing but chomping away at his watermelon. “What the fuck you want?!” he garbled, his mouth crammed with soft red chunks.

  “We want to end this right now,” Man said. He made the gun visible.

  “End?” Sambo said and spat the unchewed watermelon onto the floor. “Are you gonna kill me?”

  “You aren’t my son. And you ain’t sittin up in this house livin this way one more second.”

  “So ya wanna kill me, bwoy?” he said, standing on the bed, ready to rumble. “Well lemme tell ya somethin! I’m unkillable!” He was leaping around the bed, a one-boy tornado. “I live in the recesses of your mind! You just think you see me! I’m in your thoughts! I’m something you believe in! You can’t kill me because I’m an idea in your skull! You can’t kill me because I AM...A PART...OF YOU!”

  For a long moment Man considered the assertion. Was Sambo part of him? Sambo was the worst image of Blackness come to life, the embodiment of the docile, stupid, happy darkie who didn’t want or deserve freedom, who was no threat at all to a white man or woman. Man was a threat. He trumpeted this in his clothes, his posture, his gun toting, his mindset. His whole life was a war against niggerosity, huckabuckism, Uncle Tomming, and Stepin Fetchitness. This was why he carried himself with royal posture, why he used the words brother and sister as much as possible, why he chose to put his body on the line in confrontations with police. Being a Black man in America was to risk your life, Man thought, but being a Black Panther was to put yourself on the front line.

  And he pulled the trigger.

  One single silver and bronze bullet leapt from the chamber, through the barrel, and into the air. It moved toward Sambo’s open white mouth (which was by then blaring, “I’m INFINITE, motherfucker!”) and flew straight and true, spinning clockwise, then pierced his top lip and moved through his blackened head, ripping a path clean, munching through bone and muscle until it reached the back of his head and exited. The bullet then took wings again, zooming into the wall and landing there, halting among the wood and plaster.

  When that bullet stopped all that remained was the slice of watermelon laying on the bed slowly regenerating. Sambo had broken into a million microscopic pieces. Or he’d spontaneously combusted. Or perhaps he’d been a figment of their imagination, as he’d said.

  “I feeeel good!” Man yelled, James Brown-style. Sistuhgirl laughed for the first time in ages.

  “Feel like some watermelon?” she said, picking up Sambo’s slice.

  “Actually,” Man said, “I do.”

  THEY’RE PLAYING MY SONG

  It all starts on Wednesday in Mr. Sage’s English midterm, where for some bizarre reason the beloved Charisma Donovan doesn’t take her reserved seat in the back row with Abigail Wolcott and Park Batchelder and Brooke Kennedy and Amanda Virtue and Mr. Lacrosse himself, Peter Greenleaf. They’re the popular people. Everyone wants to know what they’re thinking and what they’re wearing and what they’re doing all the time. They go to cool parties every weekend and they go steady with other Beautiful People. They’re, like, movie stars within the ninth grade. Anyway, for some strange reason, Charisma Donovan, the queen, is in the front row, sitting next to me. In a really, really sicken-ingly slutty short skirt.

  The test is all about The Catcher in the Rye, which really moved me. I like that boy Holden. I feel for him.

  So we’re in the middle of the midterm and everyone is dead silent and all you can hear are pencils swashing away and blue-book pages whipping across and people clearing their throats and making their old wooden chairs creak. At that point I have already classified the day as BAD and have no idea it’s about to get MUCH, MUCH worse or I’d just go and jump in Old Lake Clear and get it over with. That morning my stepfather’s executive assistant Jacques calls and says that my mother just can’t get away from Taiwan for at least a couple more months so I’m gonna have to spend the entire spring break in the dorm by myself. Then there’s a bug in my shampoo bottle so I have to rush to morning assembly without washing my hair. And somehow that Beatles song “Let It Be” gets stuck in my head. But not like a normal song stuck in your head kinda thing. It, like, follows me as I go from my room to the shower to assembly. It was weird.

  So we’re in the middle of the test and I’m answering everything when I feel this quick tap on my arm. I peek up and Charisma Donovan is smiling at me. This is a sight I never thought I’d see. Without making a sound, she tosses a folded-up little piece of paper from beneath her desk. It lands perfectly in my lap. I look up to check Mr. Sage. He’s at his desk in the front of the room focused on The New Yorker. I unwrinkle the piece of paper and on it Charisma has written “What was the thing they wrote on the wall of his little sister’s school that P-O’ed him?”

  This, I know instantly, is a turning point in my high-school career. Charisma Donovan is the most beautiful and powerful girl in the freshman class. She’s very blond, very thin, and wears a bra. If she loves you, you become popular. If she hates you, she gets everyone to hate you and suddenly you’re a Siberian exile. Sometimes Charisma just decides to fuck people over for sport, so even people she likes live in fear of her like she’s some communist dictator who’ll throw you in the gulag at a moment’s notice for no reason at all. Take Emma Goldstein-Goodman.

  Emma used to be popular, but a low-level movie star. Like, if Charisma is Julia Roberts, then Emma was Shannen Doherty. But one day Charisma, for like no reason at all, rallies the whole Hollywood crowd against Emma and creates this big trap for her. They tell her there’s gonna be a big party at some place in town for all the cool people. Emma tries to get a ride with people but everyone says their cars are filled. So she puts on her cool clothes and takes a cab by herself all the way into town. She gets there and Charisma and everyone are standing there being totally nice to her. Then Charisma pulls out Emma’s secret diary, which she’d had someone steal right after Emma took off for the party, and she starts reading all this salacious stuff about Emma’s feelings on her parents, her boyfriend, her big brother, Charisma, everything. So embarrassing! A couple of boys hold her and Charisma just goes on reading and reading while everyone laughs and Emma stands there crying, having to listen to it all. A couple days later Emma’s big brother confronts Charisma and s
ays all these mean things to her. Chase is only a sophomore but he’s on the varsity hockey so he has his own superstardom, but it’s like nothing compared to Charisma. She seduces the varsity hockey guys with her evil power and one day, at the end of practice, the guys grab Chase, hold him down, and shave his hair into a mohawk, and then they’re like, “Oh, it’s a tradition for sophomores to get shaved.” It’s against school rules to wear a hat inside buildings so Chase has to go to class with a mohawk. It was like months before it grew out.

  So I look at Charisma’s note and I think, What do I do? I glance at Mr. Sage to see if he’s noticed anything. Charisma makes this face like, He’s nothing, and then, in the quietest whisper I’ve ever heard, says, “I own Jack.” I can’t believe she calls him by his first name. And I don’t even know how to take what she’s said. There was a rumor that she’d kissed him, but when rumors get to me they’re so old they’re dead, so I don’t believe it. Besides, Mr. Sage is the best teacher. It’s like having a member of the Hall of Justice at school. There’s no way he’d ever do anything with someone as evil as Charisma. But I sit there with that one little sentence I own Jack in my head, exploding like one of those bullets that fly apart inside you and I’m trying not to let it infect what I think about Mr. Sage and Charisma but uugghhhh!

  My choices, as I see them, are:

  Refuse to help her! Tell Charisma Donovan to go shove it! I don’t care if you fail, bitch! Yeah! Course, then vicious torture ensues....

  Fake help her! Like, slip her the wrong answer! This is, at first, the most tasty option. But later I wake up with a horse’s head in my bed....

  Real help her. Which seems completely gross except that maybe the next time one of her gilded little friends has a party, I’ll at least hear about it before it happens and I’ll get to say, like, I’m sorry, Augustus Janeway, but I’m not gonna be able to attend your stupid little party because I have a life. Even though I really don’t.

  I decide the least harmful option for all involved is to just help the girl and then block out the moment forever. So on the opposite side of her note I scribble, “Fuck you.” That was what someone had written on the wall at Holden’s little sister Phoebe’s school. Fuck you.

  Charisma opens my note and reads it. I see her jaw drop and her eyes go cold. Of course, she hasn’t read the book so she thinks I’m telling that to her. She glares at me with this death stare and I wanna tell her, No, that’s the real answer, but I can’t make any commotion because the room is totally small and silent and the least little noise and Mr. Sage will hear us and come over and start asking questions and if he finds the little note we’ll both be expelled for cheating. So I go back to writing in my blue book, but I know Charisma is right next to me sending hate vibes and I can feel them and I can only imagine what’ll happen to me after the test is over because of course she won’t give me a chance to show her that I was right and she won’t let anyone know she was played out, no, she’ll just start manipulating everyone against me and my whole life will suck even more than it does now, which is a lot, and these hate vibes keep raining on me like I’m in a Charisma hate shower and I’m going, How can this’ve happened? I truly tried to help and now everything’s out of control and then out of nowhere I hear this piano playing chords. It was playing in a soft, heartfelt way, but the sound was incredibly loud. After a moment a singer began. “When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me.” It’s Paul from the Beatles. “Speaking words of wisdom....

  Let it be.”

  The song is so loud. I try to keep writing but I can’t concentrate. I look around for a boombox but there isn’t one. Everyone around me is just doing their test like nothing is going on and Mr. Sage is just sitting at his desk with his nose in The New Yorker, pretending like he can’t hear that loud-ass song blaring like that. “And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me... .” It’s like my ears are at a concert but my body’s in school. “Speaking words of wisdom.... Let it be!”

  It’s such a sweet song and being inside it feels so much better than being in that Charisma hate shower, so I start nodding along with Paul and soon the song takes over my whole head, like it pushes all the other thoughts out through my ears so I no longer think I’m at school in a test and something in me says I should sing. So I do. “And when the broken-hearted people living in the world agree... there will be an answer! Let it be!” Suddenly Mr. Sage is in my face yelling but I can’t hear a word he’s saying. All I can hear is Paul blasting even louder than I would blast if I was home with the whole house to myself. I try to say, You don’t hear that? But what comes out is, “For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see....” I turn my head and I see everyone in the class staring, pointing, laughing, but Paul drowns them all out, singing loud but sweet from a stereo that seems located right inside my head. “There will be an answer. Let it be!... Let it be, let it be! Oh, let it be! Yeah, let it be! There will be an answer! Let it be!”

  The thing you’re supposed to notice about Cricket Academy is it’s a big old place with lots of big old buildings with pillars in front of them and ivy crawling all over them and names like Forbes, Hathaway, Hallowell, Wolcott. There’s a horse stable, some squash courts, and this massive swimming pool. The library used to be somebody’s mansion. Cricket was founded back in the 1700s and there’s this sign that tells you all about how the school had to stop during the Civil War because people had to go back down South to fight. Most of the teachers live on campus and so do most of the students so there’s a church and a temple and a big dining hall where you have to eat all proper. Most of the kids have parents who run the world and are waiting for their turn to run the world. For now they drive fancy cars and take ina class or two when it fits their schedule and lay around on the quad playing hackey-sack and tonsil hockey and planning to spend the weekend in Nantucket, or Aspen, or the South of France. The way people around here talk, if you didn’t know better you’d think Cricket had second campuses in those places.

  But in truth, Cricket is just a pretty place where they teach us to think in these insane little ways. Just because those ways will help people rule the world doesn’t mean they’re not insane. Like, I swear these professors want us to walk out of here thinking we’re better than people who didn’t go here and any time we walk in a room we should think we’re the smartest person in the room or some crap like that. No one’s ever exactly said this, but I bet if I could get Headmaster Buckminster alone in a room, I could get him to admit that it’s part of the curriculum to get us to feel that we’re the salt of the earth or something and they’ve been feeding that crap to us in all these undercover ways since the first day we got here and got our C sweaters.

  Once I heard some seniors talking about their psychology class and this thing called the Eclipse Theory. They said, everyone knows that if you look at the sun while it’s eclipsing you’ll go blind, but if you look at it through a buffer you’re cool. Well, according to this theory, people we think of as sane are actually the crazy ones. So-called sane people see the world through a buffer by telling themselves little lies. But people who see the world exactly as it is, they crack up. Cricket is just trying to mold us into their way of seeing so we’ll be Cricket-crazy.

  I think about all this in the infirmary. They say I’m not any kind of crazy, I’ve just had an anxiety attack and I should just rest for a while and I’ll be alright.

  On Friday I almost don’t go to Mr. Sage’s class, but I ignore all the butterflies in my stomach and all the stares and whispers

  I know people will make and just walk in the room. But then I get there and I see Charisma and this cold shiver comes over me. She never notices me, but suddenly I notice that she isn’t noticing me. I mean, she’s purposefully not noticing me now and it’s totally different than her not noticing me at all. I feel like a clay pigeon, hovering in the air, waiting to be shot to pieces. I try not to show it.

  For a while the class talks about
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, but it’s one of those lazy Friday afternoons and everyone’s kindof restless because the windows are all wide open and the sun is out and it’s last period, so as soon as class is over everyone’s gonna go do sports or whatever and someone says something about children and someone else asks something all heavy about life and next thing you know Mr. Sage is off the subject and sitting Indian style on top of his desk, telling us about his son. Everyone always tries to get the teacher off the subject, but only the cool teachers will let you. Those are the days when you really learn.

  “Since the day Maximillion was born all he’s ever done is smile,” Mr. Sage says. “I tell people he never cries and they laugh at me, but I mean it — he really never does cry. No matter what happens he meets every turn in life with a smile.” Mr. Sage went to school here, got a big degree from Yale, and came back to be a teacher. He’s still kindof young and hip and comes to class in short-sleeve Ralph Lauren shirts and kinda looks like George Stephanopoulos but tall and when he talks he does the cutest thing. When he’s saying something important he leans his torso, neck, and head way over to the side like a metronome and when his point’s made he snaps back up straight. He’s so cute.

  “At two years old he could speak in full sentences. When he was four he could read real books. I knew he’d grow up to be an important person, but because he never, ever stopped smiling, I also knew he’d do something really, really good with his life. Something helping people. There’s a purity to this kid’s soul. I know I sound like a typical dad, but I’m serious. There’s something different about him.

  “One day my wife and I were in the car with Maximillion in the back. We got into a fight. We almost never fought, but this one day it was in the air. I don’t remember what the fight was about and it’s not important. She started screaming at me. I screamed back at her. We’d always said we wouldn’t fight in front of him so I asked her to calm down but she just wouldn’t. When I looked in the backseat I could see that smile beginning to wipe off of Maximillion’s face. I told her to calm down, that we could work it out, but she just wouldn’t stop screaming. So I stopped the car and I told her to get out.