Boy, Snow, Bird(46)
A girl in Louis’s class named Barbara Thomas stepped up, beckoned to Louis, and whispered in his ear. It’s not that I’m the jealous type—I noticed that he’d stopped commentating before I noticed the girl Barbara whispering away into his ear. When she’d finished, he laughed, shrugged, said he wasn’t going to waste any steam on a dumb prank, and went back to his boxing match. I knew that fight and commentary inside out from reenactments in Louis’s front yard. “I swing . . . you duck right . . . you think maybe you stand a chance, you come up and find yourself in the middle of a storm, there’s nowhere to turn, fists coming at you from every which way, you guard your head on one side and there’s already another knock incoming on the other side—you’re about to drop, oh, you’re down!”
When it’s just he and I, Louis lets me be Ah Wing Lee. Each time he switches to the role of referee at the end and lifts my arm and declares me the winner, I go weak at the knees for real. How corny is that?
I’d been minding the boy’s jacket, and when he came over to the bench for it, I asked him what Barbara had been whispering about. He didn’t want to tell me, said I didn’t own him and he could have a private conversation with any girl he pleased, but I broke him down in the end. Someone had written LOUIS CHEN IS A VIETCONG in yellow chalk down at the other end of the school yard. Barbara wanted him to hear it from a friend first.
“That’s not actually the dumbest thing I ever heard, but it’s in the top ten,” was all I said, and we went back to class and forgot about it until the head teacher’s voice came over the PA system, instructing the “person or persons responsible for the yellow-chalk graffiti” to report to his office immediately.
So then everyone started asking each other, “What graffiti?” Some people had already seen it, and they told what they’d seen while others looked at me as if they expected to hear my opinion. There was no opinion for me to give. I said to Connie: “Dumb, right?” Connie said: “We’re above and beyond this,” and we went up and began to say the poem we’d learned, but the headmaster got back onto the PA system and cut my part of the recital in half. No one had turned themselves in, so he’d selected two members of the tenth grade at random—they were to go and scrub the wall immediately, remaining in the yard for as long as it took to remove the graffiti. He stressed that he didn’t think the two boys he was about to name were the culprits, but one of the boys was Louis’s friend Jerry Fallon. That sucked. It also got the whole class talking again—some people coughed out “Vietcong” into their hands while my Spanish dried up, and I wondered how big the letters chalked onto that wall were, that two people were needed to scrub them away.
By the end of the next lesson, word had got around that Louis was inviting whoever it was who had made the Vietcong jibe to meet him on the corner of Ivorydown and Pierce Road at three forty-five p.m. sharp, where he’d school them in geography the hard way. That’s a lonely turning off Ivorydown, a spot eleventh graders choose for robbing ninth and tenth graders of their lunch money. I met Louis by his locker and said: “Tell me it’s a rumor. You’re not really going to fight over this?”
He said: “Stay out of it.”
“What’s changed since recess?”
Louis sighed. “It’s getting out of hand. People are saying stuff. Gotta shut ’em up. You’ve got detention anyway. Call me at six and I’ll tell you what happened.”
There was no time to get any more out of him, but in my math class I heard so much idiocy I could hardly stand it.
“I’ll bet Chen wrote that himself, just ’cause he felt like getting talked about today.”
“He probably is a Vietcong.”
“Vietcong just love coloreds. And coloreds love them right back.”
I forced a laugh. Sometimes all the other kids want is for you to show you’re a good sport. If you stand out, you can’t expect people not to mention it.
“Yeah, like that boxer . . .” That was Larry Saunders, pretending he couldn’t remember Muhammad Ali’s name when it was practically written on his heart. “Didn’t he say he’s on their side? He won’t fight in Vietnam ’cause he’s an American Vietcong.”
“He didn’t say that,” I pointed out, on the brink of flipping my table over and my neighbor’s too. “He just said he didn’t have any quarrel with them. It’s not the same thing.”
“Words, words. If you’re not fighting ’em, you’re on their side,” Kenneth Young said. Kenneth and Larry both have fathers who served in Korea, and they talk about their big brothers who are serving the country right now—Larry’s big brother is an air force officer and fits the muscle-bound action man profile pretty well, but Kenneth’s brother works at a naval base. Kenneth calls it “security” and makes out that his brother is important—I asked Dad and apparently “security” means checking passes and pushing buttons to open doors. Big deal. But Dad says that both Kenneth and Larry are afraid that their brothers will get badly injured or die. “Their brothers are their heroes, and if anything happens to William Saunders or Robert Young, Kenneth and Larry might blame everyone around them, because we’re the citizens those men will have died for, and maybe they won’t believe we were worth it. Are we? Have we ever been worth it, any of the times before?” Dad was having a Gee-Ma moment when he said that; he was talking to somebody who wasn’t me, somebody who answered silently and made him hang his head. (I have a letter to Snow that I never sent. Dear Snow, Have you really got to be everywhere?) I was supposed to be in bed, and Dad was just talking. Late at night in the parlor, with a drink in his hand, telling his thoughts to Julia’s piano. If Mom had been there, she’d have said “Oh Lord” and made him eat something to soak up the drink.