When Ghosts Come Home(25)

Jay lifted his right hand and put it on the handle of the glass door that covered the refrigerated drinks. He kept it there for a moment, his fingers closed tight around the handle, waiting to hear Mr. Wright call out from the front of the store: “Little J, what you doing back there?” But he heard Kelvin’s voice instead.

“Mr. Wright,” Kelvin said, “how much is this magazine?”

“Which one?” Mr. Wright asked. Jay had wanted to look up into the mirror again, but doing so would’ve required him to step away from the cooler, and he was already standing in front of it, had his hand on it, in fact, and he knew he couldn’t turn back now without drawing attention to himself.

“Which one?” Mr. Wright asked again.

“This one here,” Kelvin’s voice said.

“What’s that, a MAD magazine?”

“Yes, sir,” Kelvin said.

Jay opened the cooler door, felt its cold air pour out and wrap itself around his fingers. He stepped forward and let the opened door rest against his right hip. He reached for a bottle of Mad Dog with each hand. He grabbed one of Banana Red and another bottle—he was never able to discover what kind—and then he lifted the front of his shirt and stuffed the bottles into the waistband of his jeans. His hands were shaking, and he was trying to unfasten his belt and cinch it tighter when Kelvin shouted, “Thriller! Thriller!” before Jay heard the crash of the door being slammed open and the bell atop it being rung and the sound of Kelvin’s feet pounding across the sidewalk and into the parking lot at a sprint.

Jay had turned away from the cooler, his hands jostling the bottles stuck in his waistband, and made a break for the door. He ran up the aisle by the front windows, his peripheral vision noting the shape of Mr. Wright as he came out from behind the counter. Jay had his shoulder against the door when he felt Mr. Wright’s powerful grip clench itself around his left forearm. He pulled Jay back toward him, and Jay let go of the bottles, which had worked themselves up from his waist to his stomach, where he’d clutched them to his body. One of the bottles came loose and shattered on the linoleum, splashing neon pink liquid across the floor and all over Jay’s and Mr. Wright’s pants.

“Jesus,” Mr. Wright said, momentarily relinquishing his grip on Jay’s arm.

Jay felt the slackening of Mr. Wright’s fingers, and he tore his arm free and stepped toward the door, but his shoe slipped on the wet floor, and he found himself on his back, flailing in the nauseatingly scented liquor and bits of broken glass. Mr. Wright bent down and helped him to his feet, his strong fingers once again closed around Jay’s arm.

“Come on, Little J,” he’d said. “Come on. Let’s stand you up.”

The first call Mr. Wright had made had been to Jay’s mother.

“I should call the police,” he’d said to Jay, the phone pressed to his ear while he waited for someone at the library’s circulation desk to answer. Jay, the back of his shirt and blue jeans soaked through with Mad Dog, sat on the wooden stool Mr. Wright kept behind the counter. Mr. Wright stood, his back leaning against the window that looked out on the gas pumps and the otherwise empty parking lot. “You better be glad I know your daddy,” he’d said. “And you’d better be glad I ain’t calling him right now.”

But Mr. Wright had ended up calling Jay’s father anyway because his mother had been in a meeting and wasn’t able to leave work to come pick him up, and Mr. Wright refused to let him leave the store without talking to one of his parents. But he’d looked just as worried about calling Jay’s father as Jay was. His father worked as a mechanic for DeKalb County, and Jay pictured his father being called out from under one of the county’s cars that he had up on a lift, tools in hand. Jay knew his father would raise his head at the sound of his name, set down his tools, and wipe his hands on the towel he always kept hanging out of his back pocket regardless of whether he was at work or at home. He would walk across the garage, pick up the phone, clear his throat, and then have one of his best buddies tell him about the awful thing his only son had just done.

“J,” Mr. Wright said, “it’s Connie down at the store. I got Jay here with me. I’m going to let him talk to you.”

Jay had refused to turn rat on Kelvin, even though he knew that Mr. Wright knew that the boys had been in it together, even though he knew that Mr. Wright would tell his father exactly what had happened.

And that was why Kelvin’s comment—the one about white folks eating him—really pissed Jay off.

“Man, it’s your damn fault I got in trouble with my pops.”

“Shoot,” Kelvin had said. “Nobody held no gun to your head. Nobody told you to drop that bottle and make it look like you pissed yourself with Mad Dog.” They’d been having this same argument for weeks since the event, but the part about Jay pissing was new.

“You shouldn’t have run out on me,” Jay said. “A friend wouldn’t have done that.”

“He was coming.”

“He was coming because you acted a fool and hollered crazy shit and ran out.”

“Shoot,” Kelvin said.

“If you’d have stayed cool, we’d have been sipping on that Mad Dog with Robin and one of her girls, and then ‘you-know-what.’ But you acted a fool instead.”