Mr. S
When school is out today, I catch Marcus on the school lawn, carrying his Speedo workout bag to his car.
“Listen, buddy, would you mind if I drove out to your place and talked with your grandfather?”
“What’d I do?” he says with usual Marcus James exaggerated defensiveness.
“You’re clean,” I say, “but I think your gramps needs to know we’re up to speed on this noose business and that at least some of us take it seriously.”
“Man, one reason I let it drop was I didn’t want to worry him. He’ll think Marshall and the boys are fixin’ to string me up for real.”
“Just the same…”
“Yeah, man, okay. I don’t care. But don’t make it bigger’n it is. He worries about me too much as it is.”
“Good for him. You headed for the lake?”
“Uh-huh. Only got another week or so of decent water temp. Then I got to bring it indoors. Hey, man, you’re a history scholar. You know whether any black dudes swum the Channel yet?”
“The English Channel?”
“No, the Kenyan Channel. Yeah, the English Channel.”
“I do not believe any black dudes or dudettes have swum the English Channel,” I tell him, “but I will Google it while you’re out there getting ready to.”
“How about Rhodes scholars?”
“How about Rhodes scholars?”
“Swum the Channel.”
“That would surprise me even more than black dudes,” I tell him. “If you’re smart enough to be a Rhodes scholar, you damn well better be smart enough to stay out of the English Channel.”
“It’s my destiny. The first black Rhodes scholar to swim the English Channel. I’m gonna be so famous.”
I shake my head. “For a minute or two at least. And don’t forget gay. It won’t exactly make you Jackie Robinson.”
“It will to English Channel swimmers,” he says. “Listen, catch you later. I gotta get out there while I still got daylight. Tell my granddad I’m gonna be a little late, okay?”
“Done.” I watch him walk toward his car, swinging his workout bag to the side and over his head, Will Rogers style, singing some rap song. The first gay black Rhodes scholar English Channel swimmer, and I knew him when.
“Yeah, he tol’ me. Damn! What year is this?”
“I know, Wallace. I thought you should know he’s not alone. Marcus didn’t want to worry you more than you were already, but he decided it was okay if I came out. Good thing, ’cause I was comin’ anyway.”
“Sit down, I’ll pour you somethin’ll take the edge right off your day, teacher man.”
“Sounds good.” I take a seat at Wallace James’s kitchen table.
He pours me a stiff Scotch, and one for himself. “Think there’s more to come of it?”
“I don’t think so. Another student called the Marshall kid out in an assembly, so he knows all eyes are on him. I’m gonna sit down with his coach and make sure we have him boxed in. If Coach Steensland knew for sure Marshall did it, he’d boot him off the team in a minute. Steensland’s new here, and he’s a good man; he’d knock that stuff down even if he knew it would cost his undefeated season.”
“That’s good to know. Come out to the garage. I got somethin’ to show you.”
In the garage, Wallace unlocks his toolbox and pulls out the wide, shallow bottom drawer, extracts a flat metal sign, and hands it to me. I read it aloud. “NIGGER DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOUR ASS IN CUTTER. My God, Wallace, where did you get this?”
“Come with the house.”
“What?”
“Guy who sold me the farm wanted me to know what I was getting into. They took this sign down…1969, I believe. Had one near the city limits sign on both ends of town.”
“1969? That’s a year after the ’68 Olympics.”
Wallace looks at me like, Duh!
“Black athlete semi-boycott. Tommie Smith and John Carlos and the black fist. Martin Luther King Jr. had only been dead a year.”
“I know. Ol’ Mr. Bennett—he’s the guy sold me this place—said Marshalls was a lot of the reason the signs were up in the first place. That boy’s grampa was mayor. First couple years I was here, all kinda stuff got broke.”
“So you are worried about Marcus.”
“Been worried ’bout him since I moved in. He seems to get along okay. Got a big mouth on ’im, but he’s kinda funny and that gets him by, I guess. I ’spect I’m beholden to you for keepin’ an eye out for him.”
“No beholden to it, Wallace. My pleasure. That kid keeps me on my toes. There’s not much I teach he doesn’t already know something about.”
“Well,” Wallace says. “I’ll talk to him more about this noose business. When you’ve got enough support, you can make some noise, but if you don’t, well, you better lay low.”
“I’ll back you up. Do you know if Marcus is dating anyone? He talk to you about that?”
Wallace looks embarrassed. “Oh, no. He don’t talk to me about that kind of thing. Why you ask? Marcus spendin’ time with someone? Got to tell you, Mr. Teacher Man, I never quite got it about the homosexual thing. Sometimes I worry more about that than the color of his skin. Can’t very well keep folks from knowin’ you’re black, but that gay thing, I might woulda kept that under my hat. Give these boys jus’ one target to shoot at.”
Marcus
I wish I could tell people, like, you know, articulate, how it feels to get into the water and just start swimming. I wasn’t kidding Mr. S when I said I wanted to be the first black dude to swim the Channel. ’Cept it’s like twenty-six miles, and the farthest I’ve gone is maybe one and a half up in the lake. But it’s calm and there’s this rhythm and you can’t hear anything but air comin’ in and the bubbles goin’ out. You have to be careful swimming in open water, because there are fishermen and water skiers and jet boaters out there and you do not want one of those things whackin’ into you. So you’re supposed to swim with somebody, and I’ve got this flag, which sticks up like a flag you put on the back of your bike when you want to get all visible. My gramps made it from one of those bicycle flags. Attached it to this plastic belt. It doesn’t weigh anything, but it sticks up and says there’s a flesh-and-blood human right under it and please don’t run your motorboat over him. I don’t swim with somebody because, like, who would I get? There aren’t a lot of channel-swimmers-in-training lined up. I use the flag, but that’s a mixed blessing because while it keeps unsuspecting drunk watersportsmen and-women from running over me accidentally, it tells guys like Roger Marshall where I am, and they can come kill me on purpose. On a number of occasions they’ve circled me at high speeds, creatin’ some surf. Those boys are creative. But I’m safe now, because soon as I get in my car I’m headed for the lake and in about fifteen minutes they’ll be headed for the football field.
“James.”
Shit. It’s Strickland. “What?”
“Com’ere.”
“In a hurry, man. Got to get up to the lake.”
“The lake’ll still be there in five minutes. Come over here.”
Motherfucker. None of these guys ever have anything to say I want to hear. Some racial bullshit, or some stupid threat.
I walk over to his car.
“Rog has a message for you.”
“Lemme guess. He wants me to be an honorary member of the Letterman’s Club. Love to, but I really don’t have time—”
“He’s inviting you to shut your fucking mouth about that noose. Let it die so you don’t have to.”
“I didn’t say anything about the noose. I just wore it. Miller’s the guy said you guys did it. If I can’t stop y’all from riding me, how am I gonna control Matt Miller?”
Strickland reaches through the side window and grabs my shirt, pulls me in close. “Any bad shit happens to us, some real bad shit will happen to you.”
I stare straight, past the side of his head.
“You understand?”
I keep
right on staring. One of these days I’m gonna get tired of “managing” how I feel right now and give one of these guys a surprise. Fuckers always get you alone.
“I’ll take your silence as that you do.” He releases his grip. I fight the urge to tell him he could get into community college one day if he learned that the word for “that you do” is assent.
Matt Miller
If I hadn’t been so enamored of flexing my biblical scholarship muscle, I might have saved him. I was planning to run partway around the reservoir after my weight-room workout, but I got waylaid by the BattleCry kids. BattleCry is this organization of aggressive Christians who think they need to define the moral high ground for teenagers who aren’t them. They think it’s a sin to have sex if you’re not married, or if you’re gay, so they’re big on the abstinence-only approach to teenage pregnancy and even bigger into praying gay people straight. What the hell, at least they’ll get a lot of practice. I wish God would get as sick of them as I am and just fire down a lightning bolt and yell, “Shut the hell up!” They have events that fill football stadiums, with Christian rock bands and nationally known Jesus freaks shouting out the Word. Tell you what, I’d follow Jesus into the eye of a hurricane, but saying “Christian rock” is like saying “Caucasian rap.” Ain’t no such thing. I’m a lot more Chris Rock then I am Christian rock, which is probably why I don’t belong with these guys. I wish more people understood that spirituality is private. If you have to fill football stadiums and scream out your message all the time, you’re not too confident in it.
At any rate, they missed the point of my “ministry” this morning in the gym, and as I trot out the front entrance headed for the lake, they cut me off.
“Hey, Matt.”
“Hey, Darcy, what’s up?”
“Could we talk with you for a minute?”
The closer I get to wrestling season, the more fiercely I train. I don’t like to get caught even a little bit out of shape when I hit the mat for the first time. But I can shorten my run a mile or so to take time for Darcy Zindel, who is one beatific Christian, if you know what I mean. I say, “Sure.”
“We’re having an after-school meeting at Mike’s,” she says, nodding to Mike Campbell’s house, just across the street. “Do you have a minute?”
I look down at my sweatshirt, which is doing the job for which it is named. “If you guys don’t mind a little locker-room ambiance.”
She smiles and I melt. “I think we can stand it.”
I follow her and Charles Lott to the Campbell house, noting that they’re holding hands, again giving myself leeway for two of those un-Christian thoughts: throwing Charles into a quick takedown to make him ugly, and…well, I’ll let you guess at number two.
Inside the house I think I’ve stumbled into the Marines of Rapture recruitment center. The honcho, Walt Johns, who I guess cries louder than the other BattleCriers, tells me right off what courage it took to stand up this morning. They too are committed to the truth, and they think it was great how I snuck in the blurb for Jesus. They too think what happened to Marcus was a sin; that there is no room in the kingdom of Heaven for that kind of hate, and though they’re committed to get him to a center for scaring the queer out of him (my words, not theirs), they love him and would I like to join BattleCry because I’d be a strong voice for the Lord.
In a word, “Nope. Thanks, seriously, but not my thing. God created us all: black, white, gay, Down Syndrome, left-handers, deaf, blind, and control freaks.”
We have a short conversation in which we discuss whether or not being homosexual is a choice. Funny thing, not one of them can tell me when they made the choice to be heterosexual. So I say they might do better, and have fewer people think they were nutballs, to get a sense of who the real Jesus was, tell Darcy if she ever comes to her senses she can find me in the wrestling room, and hit the road. Can’t have taken more than maybe a half hour to forty-five minutes total.
By the time I get to the reservoir, Marcus James is dead.
Mr. S
Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, as they say; maybe I should have done it differently. The smart thing seemed to be to go to Coach Steensland. He’s a young guy, but a hard-ass old school football coach on the field, and a guy who knows that only a small percentage of the guys who play for him will ever go on to play in college or beyond. He wants them to lead responsible, productive, well-educated lives. He’s a twenty-seven-year-old throwback, and it doesn’t take a genius to see why his kids play so hard for him.
“The Miller kid is rock solid,” he said to me in his office before practice. “I’ve tried to get him on the football field, but he’s single-minded. A wrestler first, last and always. What he said isn’t proof Marshall did it, but I can’t see him coming out of left field with his accusations this morning.”
“I don’t know him as well as you do, Coach, but I get the same sense. And your boys were pretty cavalier when Marcus showed up in class wearing the damn thing around his neck. Kind of a ‘You know we did it and we know we did it.’”
“Gotta cut this off quick,” Coach said. “I’m calling a meeting with the boys before we hit the field. I don’t want this to blow up and we’re all sitting around afterward wondering if there was something we could have done.”
He asked me to wait in his office and headed for the locker room. When he came back I could have taken his pulse from across the room. “By God, those boys are going to grow up or they won’t play another down for me!” He threw his cap into his chair.
I waited. There’s a reason his players don’t mess with him.
“Damn it!”
“What happened?”
He took a deep breath. “The same damn thing that happened in your classroom,” he said. “They blew it off, laughed until I lowered the boom. I told them I know they did it. Claimed they didn’t but it was with a wink, like, ‘No big deal, huh, Coach?’ I suspended them until further notice.”
“Whoa.”
“Marshall started to come unglued so I threatened him. By God, Simet, I don’t know where these kids get their ideas. Football is a game, it’s not a damned entitlement. They know that from day one if they play for me, but the other students treat ’em like gods and they start winnin’ and it goes to their heads. Well, it is not happening that way on my watch.” He walked to the office window and stared into the empty gymnasium.
“You can only do so much, Coach,” I said. “You aren’t their parent.”
“I guess,” he said. “Listen, I’ve got to get onto the field. I’ve got a game to win this Friday, and I may have to do it without three of my best players. I’ll sit down with them and their folks tonight, and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
I did not envy Coach having to sit down with any Marshalls. They’ve been staples of Cutter football for more than a decade. Most people around here can’t remember a three-year stretch when there wasn’t a Marshall on the team. And always a stud. Way I see it, nothing that happens on a football field could hurt worse than what happens in their house if they fuck up with the old man.
But Coach did not have to make that call.
My classroom phone rings. I set aside the papers I’m grading and glance at my watch: 5:21. Who would think I’d still be here this late? I’m famous for being the first teacher out of the parking lot after the last bell.
“Simet.”
“Mr. Simet. God I’m glad I caught you. Could you come up to the lake? By the boat landing? Hurry.” The voice sounds shaky, urgent.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Matt Miller, sir. Please get here quick.”
Ambulance lights flash as I crest the slight rise on the north end of town. A stretcher, Wallace James, Matt Miller, three paramedics, and a blood-soaked sheet covering the stretcher. Several yards away, Randy Mix, a city policeman, questions the Marshall gang. I slam on the brakes, leave the engine running, and sprint toward the loading dock. Wallace has gathered the blood-soaked sheet covering what I know has to b
e Marcus in his arms, and his back heaves with sobs. “Where’s the flag? Where’s the flag?” Matt kneels beside him, a hand in the middle of Wallace’s back.
I grip Matt’s elbow, pull him just out of earshot. “What happened?”
“Run over by a boat,” Matt says, nodding toward the police questioning Marshall, Stone, and Strickland. “Propeller-blade cuts all up his legs and back. The paramedic says he’s not sure if Marcus bled to death or if the prop cut his spine.” The three are animated, stricken, shaking heads, stomping feet. Strickland’s covers his face with his hands, yelling, “No! No! Oh, God! No! We didn’t see him! I swear, we didn’t see him!”
“Those bastards killed him,” Matt says. “No coincidences, Mr. Simet. No accident. You know it. They killed him.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, son,” I say. “You stand here and listen to what they say. I need to see if I can help Wallace.”
There is no help for Marcus’s grandfather. He is inconsolable, sobbing against the bloody sheet, saying his grandson’s name over and over. I can barely breathe.
The paramedics put Marcus’s body into the back of their truck, and I help Wallace in. “You need me to come, Wallace?”
He shakes his head, leans on the boat. “I don’t need nothin’ no more.”
The paramedic van rolls slowly over the hill; no light, no siren.
Matt Miller and I stand and watch it go, both listening to the police finish up with Marshall and his buddies. It was Marshall’s boat, he was driving. “Coach let us out early from practice,” Marshall says, “so we come up here to do a little fishing. Strick got this new rod and we just wanted to try it out. Swear to God, it was like we said. Fished the cove down there south of the park. Nothin’ was bitin’, so we was headed over across. Thought I hit a log an’ it killed the engine. Looked back and didn’t see nothing, so I cranked ’er up and we headed for the other side. Swear we didn’t even know we hit him till you stopped us when we was loadin’ the boat. It was an accident, Randy. Man, I feel awful.”