Pieces Page 5

  Thanksgiving passed, a cold holiday. We missed the turkey dinner because our van ran out of gas a mile from Galloway Lake and Greider had to radio for another van. December came, and with it gray skies and even colder days. Colin said that when it got too cold they’d take us off highway cleanup and put us to work in the kitchen or the laundry room, but all they did was issue us warmer outfits and gloves. In the colder weather there was less trash, since tossing things to the roadside required people first to roll down their windows. Sometimes we’d stretch out in a wide semicircle, Maurice off to the side a little, Greider watching us from the shoulder. We’d talk about football and girls we used to know, our eyes flickering over the flashes of passing traffic. I recall thinking once that to the people speeding by, on their way to school or work in the morning, or in the late afternoon heading home to their families, we must have appeared to be roadside garbage ourselves, littered across patches of grass where no person would ever think to rest. Now I doubt anyone noticed us.

  It was one week before Christmas. Cauldrons in our chests were ready to boil over. The morning was flat and dull gray and bitterly cold, and as we picked our way along the edge of the road toward the blank billboard at Exit 150 that always marked the end of one segment of cleanup, it began, without warning or fanfare, to snow. Fat, heavy flakes swept around us. We acknowledged this development wordlessly and kept on, crouching to scoop up a brown paper grocery bag, or to grasp the long black rubber snake of a blown-out tire. Hot diamonds of snow burned at my cheeks like tears, and I rubbed them away before they could melt.

  At last we climbed into the back of the van for lunch, and it was then, with the winter’s first snow touching softly against the back windows, in the silence created by our disbelief and our madness at the sight of it, that Maurice, face buried in his hands, began to moan a little. He let out a sudden choked sob, and then, to our horror, sat up and began to speak to us, blurry-eyed and disoriented.

  “None of y’all prob’ly give a shit about me, I know that,” he began, and I looked up at John Jay, expecting him to tell Maurice he was right, but John Jay, and the rest of them, were frozen by his voice. “Last night,” he went on, “news came, they got me up outta my bunk.” Then he paused and squeezed his eyes tight against some thought. Again, I waited for someone to interrupt him, to tell him he would not be heard; I didn’t know what he was working toward, but I wanted desperately for him to be quieted. “See, my brother, he ain’t mixed up in nothing. Now that’s a good kid.” Maurice’s voice had a shaky, tremulous quality to it. After every few words he took in a deep, staggered breath and then nodded to himself and forged on. “My brother got good marks. My brother worked up at the . . . at the . . . up at Norton Pharmacy in the summertime. My brother, he come an’ visit me every week, every Thursday, soon as he get off school. My brother, he run track, too. He run them hurdles, he run the relay. Carl Lewis, that’s what I call him. I say, ‘Carl Lewis, you break the school record this week?’ I say, ‘Carl Lewis, you hittin’ the books like I told you?’ Kid always had a head on his shoulders. Kid was like a math genius. He ain’t ever done dirt, I made him promise me that. I told him, ‘Carl Lewis, you ain’t ever comin’ in here like me.’ Kid had his shit together. Had himself a nice girl.” Maurice teetered to one side like he was about to topple over, then righted himself. He took off his glasses, spit into his right hand, dabbed the thumb of his left hand into the saliva, and worked it in slow, tiny circles at the lenses. We must have watched him for five minutes. My head was clouded. A hot emotion flooded me. I felt the blood push sluggishly through my body. Up front, barely audible, was Greider’s country music. A thick white blanket formed over the back windows.

  Maurice seemed to have collected himself, but after he had dried his glasses on his pants with numbed difficulty and replaced them over his eyes, he began all at once to cry. “Chaplain come last night an’ told me. What happened is, what he says is, what he told me, chaplain said, ‘Your brother’s dead.’” He wailed at the sound of his own voice presenting the information. “He got done in. Never meant no one no harm, but they done him in on accident, gunnin’ for Marquis Eddy next door.” Now he was really hysterical, but not a one of us moved or spoke. I was dead inside. Blackness filled me, a bolt of nausea. Something in my core threatened to break apart and I strained to keep it intact. Maurice cried harder, and he kept crying things out. “I can’t go see him,” he gasped, gripping his head with his baby hands, still sitting straight. “I just want to see him but they puttin’ him in the ground. They puttin’ him in the ground. They puttin’ him underground.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I heard someone say slowly and evenly, and then I realized the voice was mine. Maurice kept on, and I said it again, a space between each word as though they were four separate commands. “Shut—the—fuck—up!”

  But by that point he was beyond us in his misery. He cried on for his brother and for himself. “I want to go home,” he wailed. “I want to go home. I want to see my brother. They’re puttin’ him in the ground. It’s snowing. God! It’s snowing!” Tears and snot clung to his upper lip.

  The van started up at that moment and Greider swung us up onto the road; the back end slid a little in the fresh snow. We drove for three minutes to another spot. Maurice whimpered and struggled for breath. As Greider came around the back of the van to let us out, I shouted at Maurice so loud it shook him from his stupor. “You!” The breath caught in his throat. His eyes came into focus. “Now shut the fuck up,” I told him.

  What happened next is a little hard to piece together because it was so unexpected and because it all happened so fast. First the back doors swung open and I saw Greider plainly against the falling snow, a hard, balding man of fifty years, thirty of which he’d spent in Corrections. “Okay, everyone out,” he said. He never bore resentment toward any of us as long as we made his job easy and behaved. I didn’t really know him. Days later, in the aftermath of what followed, I met his wife and his children and his grandchildren.

  The car that hit him seemed to come from nowhere. One moment the road behind Greider was empty, and the next a wide black Buick was flying sideways at all of us. It struck Greider and then the van. The impact tossed us in a heap on the floor. I remember next only that we were all standing outside the van—Colin, Nick, Justin, John Jay, Maurice, and I—and that Greider was crumpled in the snow like a flattened pop can, and that the Buick’s tires were spinning like mad on the shoulder. The tires finally grabbed the pavement, and the Buick shot away and disappeared into the curtain of whiteness. Already, snow had begun to accumulate over Greider’s legs, his back, and his arms.

  The six of us stared dumbly at one another. Here it was, a chance for escape. The keys had burrowed a place in the snow a few inches from Greider’s hand. We could be miles away before anyone even knew what had happened. But our time at Galloway Lake was nearly half over. Running made no sense. They would catch us again, and this time they’d keep us in for longer. In our minds then, we had only a few months to go, and then we would be free.

  Had Maurice remained silent, the next part of it might have gone differently. “My glasses,” he said to nobody, groping blindly toward the ground. “Where are my glasses?” John Jay turned toward him and made this odd sound, a kind of low and disapproving hum, and launched himself at Maurice, ramming him with his forearm and shoulder. Maurice crashed to the earth and lay there stunned for half a second, staring up into the blank sky, before John Jay landed on him, flailing his fists, crying, “Stupid nigger, stupid nigger, stupid nigger.” Then all of us were around Maurice, dragging and carrying him behind the side of the van, out of sight of the infrequent passing cars. He never raised a hand up in defense; he never had the chance. Two of us held Maurice by his shoulders up against the van while we took turns battering him. We hit him with our elbows and with our fists. We kicked at him. We spit on him and shouted things. All the while the snow fell. Giant snowflakes stuck in our hair. Maurice’s blood was pink on our ha
nds and on our uniforms; the madness of it brought great wild smiles to our faces. We danced and sang. It seemed as if our whole lives had been lived in preparation for this celebration. We beat Maurice savagely, with pride, with glory.

  After a long, long time, we had expended ourselves. We stood apart from each other. Maurice lay bloodied and broken, halfway beneath the van. John Jay stared out toward the bare trees of the birch woods before us. Nick caught snowflakes on his outstretched palm. Justin watched the road. Presently, Colin broke away and went over to Greider’s motionless form. “Hey, guys,” Colin said vacantly, “he’s pretty bad messed up. We better get him to a hospital.” John Jay grunted in agreement and the two of them lifted Greider gently into the back of the van. He was still breathing. John Jay climbed in beside him and tried to comfort him. Nick and Justin joined John Jay. I sorted through the spiny ball of keys for the one to the driver’s door, got in up front, and reached over to unlock the far side for Colin. He got in, and then, as an afterthought, we both got out and pulled Maurice from under the van and put him in back with the others. I started the van, crossed the eastbound lanes, bumped over the grassy median, and headed west, toward Jackson and the hospital there, into the snowstorm.

  Already, my mind had recoiled from the beating. It occurred to me in my daze, as I leaned forward in the seat, flipped on the lights and the wipers, and fought to keep the van from fishtailing while still driving as quickly as I could, that just a few hours ago it had been autumn—late autumn, but not yet winter—and that now it was winter. I became dimly aware that although I would be freed in the spring, it would not be long before I was locked up again, and that realization hurt me worse than anything. I knew also that the only way I could have avoided this future of a lifetime of incarceration was if, immediately after the accident, we had grouped up and gone for help, or if right away we had attempted escape. Escape would have been impossible, but flight would have substituted itself for what had just transpired—that terrible release—which I could not in that moment, or for many years, remember.

  THE CARNIVAL

  Clementyne Howard

  At this carnival there was no popcorn. There were no games, no prizes, and no children. There were no laughs, or music, and there were no merry-go-rounds. At this carnival, there was only a bunch of clowns—a bunch of people grouped together in the same white place, all hiding under the same painted-on faces.

  As I walked into the carnival, I was filled with nervous tension. My body was shaking and I was chewing so fiercely on my bubble gum that my jaw began to ache. I signed in and the lady who was behind the counter said to me, “Okay, Miss Ross, if you will just have a seat right over there until we call your name.” The lady was not one of the clowns. She simply worked for the carnival. She got to wear normal clothing—nice black pants and a white blouse with red designs around the collar. She wore a colorful pin that read HAPPY HOLIDAYS. She seemed calm and detached, and her emotionless countenance clashed with the rest of the characters in the room. I guess she was used to the scene, and was used to leaving her emotions at home.

  Everyone else in the room was waiting there for the same reason. We were all experiencing a common fear, and we all wanted this experience to be over so that hopefully we would all be able to go home and take off these ridiculous costumes. I bet everyone there regretted the circumstances that brought them to the carnival. We were all clowns to end up there in the first place.

  The walls in this place were white and the chairs were red. In large black letters a sign read FREE TESTING. There was cheap artwork adorning the wall next to the counter. There was a wooden rack that stood upright containing brochures with titles like “Help for the Needle Abuser” and “Making Sex Safer.”

  To my left a man and a woman sat together holding hands. He was the clown wearing one of those “joke” flower pens—the kind that is actually a squirt gun that fires out black ink—and she was the clown with the sparkled hair. Did she know that the flower was really filled with ink? And how much longer would he continue to think of it as only a joke?

  In the corner was a man standing on stilts, looking more confident than the rest of the people in the room. He had one of those large red smiles painted on his face. He had dark black paint around his eyes, and white paint covered the rest of his face. It looked as if he had spent a long time creating his facade. It looked as though he thought his stilts made him stronger than anyone else in the room. They called his name—“Mitchell . . . Mr. Mitchell”—and he followed a lady dressed in white through a door and down the hallway. The door shut hard and the man was gone.

  The room was quiet except for occasional, brief conversations. I could periodically hear questions asked to the lady at the counter like, “What time is it?” and “Do you know how much longer I’ll have to wait?” The clowns were becoming impatient. I was becoming impatient. I bounced my leg viciously on the floor and I could feel it shaking my chair and the one next to me. My curly yellow wig was beginning to feel too tight. I desperately wanted to pull it off of my head and throw it into the trash can, but I had to keep it on—it was part of my punishment for being part of the carnival.

  I saw one of the clowns, whose name had been called earlier, walk out of the door that led to the doctor’s offices and back into the waiting room. She looked like she was probably in her mid-twenties and she had large red hair and was wearing a dress with polka dots on it. She had been carrying red balloons earlier, but I guess she left them in the doctor’s quarter. She was grinning slightly, and by the look on her face I could tell that she had heard good news. She walked past me and gave me a consoling, sympathetic look. I watched as she pushed her way out of the large, heavy glass door and as she got outside she stopped by the trash can. She pulled the red wig off of her head. She removed the rubber band from her hair. Her long, dark curls caught the sunlight and dropped gracefully onto her shoulders. She tore off her ugly, oversized dress. She had on a brown skirt and blazer. She then balled up the red hair and the dress and shoved them deep into the trash can. Before she got into her car, she looked back at me through the glass as if to once again show me her compassion, then stepped into her black Camry and drove away. She was glad to leave the carnival.

  I envied her. I wanted to be the one who could leave and smile and put the carnival behind me. I wanted these nauseating feelings of intense dread to end. I sat there for what seemed like a painful eternity and suddenly the door to the doctor’s offices swung open and slammed against the wall. Four ladies dressed in white carried the man who had been on stilts through the door. He was crying and wailing and fighting them. His black face paint was running over his cheeks and onto his clothes. The red paint around his mouth was still there, but his mouth was wide open. They carried him across the room and through a set of unmarked doors that I had not seen previously. He was in a state of undescribable agony. Would it be me, too, that they would carry across the room screaming? Would the carnival reduce me to a pile of fake yellow hair and rubber shoes?

  I sat there still, silenced, and shocked, as did all of the others. A minute later a fifth lady in white walked through the door carrying the man’s stilts. One was broken. She carried them across the room and through the unmarked doors. Following her, a lady came out and said my name—“Ross . . . Miss Ross.” I did not want to move. I was too scared. I did not want to be like the man on the stilts. I wished that I hadn’t been forced to come to this carnival. I wished that I was not a stupid clown. “Is there a Miss Ross here?” said the lady. I sighed and then answered—“Yes . . .I’m here”—and I walked toward her. I heard the door shut loud behind me. As I walked down the hall, one of my big red shoes fell off. I wondered if that was a good sign.

  PETTY THEFT

  Martin Wilson

  From up the aisle, where he was hanging packages of press-on nails on a rack, Cary saw a girl holding a brassy tube of lipstick between her thumb and index finger, as if it were a precious vial of something she needed to inspect closely t
o appreciate. And he was still watching her when she tucked it down the front of her shirt into her bra. He had seen this particular girl at the store before—always around three in the afternoon, after the schools let out—roaming the aisles, playing with her stringy, damaged-looking blond hair. He figured she was sixteen, perhaps a sophomore or a junior in high school somewhere in town. On those scattered days, he had never seen her actually buy anything, but he didn’t follow her every move, so it was possible she did sometimes pick out things and pay for them.

  But now he had seen her steal, which may have explained why she always left—when Cary observed her—empty-handed. The girl continued down the aisle, oblivious to him. He saw the white straps of her bra creeping out from under a black tank top that didn’t cover her flat midriff. She wore torn jeans that barely hung on her hips, and her face was painted with heavy black eyeliner and hot magenta lipstick. It was not a look that suited her dainty figure, her fragile-looking face—it was forced, like a costume.

  Cary stopped hanging the press-ons and thought about what he should do. Mr. Haynes, the manager of the store, had told him on his first day that he should always report any suspicions of shoplifting right away. “It’s not usually a problem in this branch,” Mr. Haynes had said, referring to the more affluent area of town where the drugstore—called Harco—was located. “But you never know.”