Small Great Things(13)
When I was six, the boiler in our house exploded at a time that no one was home. I remember asking the insurance adjuster who came to assess the damage what went wrong. He said something about safety valves and corrosion, and then he rocked back on his heels and said that when there’s too much steam, and a structure is not strong enough to hold it, something like this is bound to happen. For sixteen years, I’d been building up steam, because I wasn’t my dead brother and never would be; because I couldn’t keep my parents together; because I wasn’t the grandson my grandfather had wanted; because I was too stupid or angry or weird. When I think back on that moment, it’s white hot: grabbing my father by the throat and smacking his forehead against the pavement; wrenching his arm up behind his back and kicking him in the back till he spit out blood. Flipping his limp body over, and calling him a faggot, as I drove my fist into his face again and again. Struggling against Raine as he dragged me to safety when the sirens grew louder and blue and red lights flooded the parking lot.
The story spread, the way stories do, and as it did, it swelled and morphed: the newest member of the North American Death Squad—namely, me—had jumped six guys at once. I had a lead pipe in one hand and a knife in the other. I ripped off a guy’s ear with my teeth and swallowed the lobe.
None of that, of course, was true. But this was: I had beaten my own father up so badly that he was hospitalized, and had to be fed through a straw for months.
And for that, I became mythic.
—
“WE WANT THE other nurse back,” I tell Mary or Marie, whatever the charge nurse’s name is. “The one who was here last night.”
She asks the black nurse to leave, so that it’s just us. I’ve pushed down my sleeves again, but her eyes still flicker to my forearm.
“I can assure you that Ruth has more than twenty years of experience here,” she says.
“I think you and I both know I’m not objecting to her experience,” I reply.
“We can’t remove a provider from care because of race. It’s discriminatory.”
“If I asked for a female OB instead of a male one, would that be discriminatory?” Brit asks. “Or a doctor instead of a medical student? You make those allowances all the time.”
“That’s different,” the nurse says.
“How, exactly?” I ask. “From what I can tell, you’re in a customer service business, and I’m the customer. And you do what makes the customer feel comfortable.” I stand up and take a deep breath, towering over her, intimidating by design. “I can’t imagine how upsetting it would be to all those other moms and dads here if, you know, things got out of control. If instead of this nice, calm conversation we’re having, our voices were raised. If the other patients started to think that maybe their rights would be ignored too.”
The nurse presses her lips together. “Are you threatening me, Mr. Bauer?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I answer. “Do you?”
There is a hierarchy to hate, and it’s different for everyone. Personally, I hate spics more than I hate Asians, I hate Jews more than that, and at the very top of the chart, I despise blacks. But even more than any of these groups, the people you always hate the most are antiracist White folks. Because they are turncoats.
For a moment, I wait to see whether Marie is one of them.
A muscle jumps in her throat. “I’m sure we can find a mutually agreeable solution,” she murmurs. “I will put a note on Davis’s file, stating your…wishes.”
“I think that’s a good plan,” I reply.
When she huffs out of the room, Brit starts to laugh. “Baby, you are something when you’re fierce. But you know this means they’re going to spit in my Jell-O before they serve it to me.”
I reach into the bassinet and lift Davis into my embrace. He is so small he barely stretches the length of my forearm. “I’ll bring you waffles from home instead,” I tell Brit. Then I lower my lips to my son’s brow, and whisper against his skin, a secret for just us. “And you,” I promise. “You, I’ll protect for the rest of my life.”
—
A COUPLE OF years after I became involved in the White Power Movement, when I was running NADS in Connecticut, my mother’s liver finally quit on her. I went back home to settle the estate and sell my grandfather’s house. As I was sorting through her belongings, I found the transcripts of my brother’s trial. Why she had them, I don’t know; she must have gone out of her way to get them at some point. But I sat on the wooden floor of the living room, surrounded by boxes that would go to Goodwill and into the trash dumpster, and I read them—every page.
Much of the testimony was new to me, as if I hadn’t lived through every minute of it. I couldn’t tell you if I was too young to remember, or if I’d intentionally forgotten, but the evidence focused on the median line of the road and toxicology screens. Not the defendant’s—but my brother’s. It was Tanner’s car that had drifted into oncoming traffic, because he was high. It was in all the diagrams of the tire skids: the proof of how a man on trial for negligent homicide had done his best to avoid a car that had veered into his lane. How the jury could not say, without a doubt, that the car accident was solely the defendant’s fault.
I sat for a long time with the transcript in my lap. Reading. Rereading.