Welcome to Braggsville (4 page)

I'll take care of that for you. You just focus on your work and let Mrs. Brooks know if you need anything, and remember, you deserve to be here as much, if not more, than everyone else. Repeat that.

I deserve to be here.

That's right. You come back and see me every day if you need to. In the meantime, there are over one hundred student organizations here at Cal. Whatever your interests or beliefs, you can find a like-minded group.

He left relieved to have learned he was not alone in his anxieties, feeling unburdened of a load he had not fully comprehended
the enormity of, much as he had felt after his first real sex ed class (not that makeshift tutorial Quint choreographed wherein a hot dog rousted an unsuspecting chicken). He also found himself wishing, he noted with puzzlement, that more professors were black. He understood them, it seemed, and they him. All the way back to Unit 2, he repeated Mrs. Brooks's mantra. I deserve to be here. I deserve to be here. I deserve to be here. He also resolved to find a like-minded group. All of this he did while wearing empty headphones so as to appear to be singing.

B
ACK HOME IN
B
-VILLE
, GA, the 4 Little Indians would stand out like J. Crew rejects, but in Berkeley they were just four friends, four inseparable friends, four constant companions, so close that he wondered if siblings could be closer. No, explained Charlie when the subject was raised. I love my brother and all, but it's not like we actually talk. We didn't even do that after my dad died.

That was Charlie, wise beyond his years. But they were all savvier than Daron. Louis taught him hard-learned lessons like the wisdom of avoiding edibles after drinking. Candice taught him that one must never follow white with red. Once a month they did medicinal 420 and communally fashioned quotes such as, How do we know stars aren't just holes and God hasn't just thrown a curtain over a cage? Their jointly constructed code word for weed aka grass aka Mary Jane:
alien technology
. Technology because it made them smarter. Alien just because. (Alien because it make my May-he-can real good, hombre, Louis liked to say.) On their languorous strolls the percussion of Daron's flip-flops calmed him, and air running between his toes formed fins that climbed his back and combed his hair into lightning rods. And when they sprawled along the water at Berkeley's Aquatic Park—lungs bursting between breaths, counting ducks as day hushed and short gusts soughed the bobbing grass along the bank, the longer stalks arcing over to nose the lake—passing
headlights might brush Candice's hair, the ponytail resting across one shoulder like a small animal while she absentmindedly stroked it, or sketch Charlie's profile, his regal nose, his broad back exaggerated in shadow, or highlight Louis's sneakers worn like slippers, his habit, when in thought, of axing the thin edge of his hand against his forehead, his hand in profile resembling a cockscomb. Daron (and not only at those moments, to be honest) desperately wanted to hug them all, and instead would settle for the huddles between bursts of Frisbee football.

It wasn't all parties and drugs. There was also sex, or at least the promise of it, which led Daron to hang around the protests. With the exception of the lesbians, and who knew what they did, the women who engaged in protests were said to be the most sexually liberal, their politics freeing them to celebrate their sexuality without shame, supposedly. Daron, though, could never work up the nerve to start a conversation with somebody holding a banner that read
EDUCATION IS AN INALIENABLE HUMAN RIGHT
or chanting, Harvard had a Moor; we expect more of Cal, and so that second semester, his freshman spring semester, was all fits and starts, and he ended it as he began it, as he had ended his high school career, uninitiated into the mysteries of intimacy, though in the late-night cobalt glow of the bathroom stall he observed scores of demonstrations on his laptop, loading many to his hard drive. He was probably better off, having heard somewhere that herpes traveled swifter than Hermes, or at least that's what he said to himself, but that's not how he told it when he went home that summer.

I
T'S NOT THAT
D
ARON LIED
, or intentionally misled anyone. The confusion was preordained; he didn't even know it was happening. The other Little Indians tweeted and Facebooked all summer (or tagged and twitted, as Daron's parents said anytime he was on the hall computer, that old tower that whined and whirred like even
powering down was a burden). They begged him for photos, so he sent a few, of the quarry, of a fish his cousin Quint caught, of one of his mom's cookouts, all, as he knew with tactical embarrassment, much less exotic than his friends' snapshots, no matter how much they
liked
the images,
liked
the way Pickett Rock was frog-shaped unless you approached it from the south, from which angle it resembled an eagle,
liked
the shimmering bass curled in retreat from the sun,
liked
the squat sausages nestled on the grill like chubby kids at their first sleepover, huddled against the dark. Charlie was filing cleats at some fancy upstate New York university football camp, followed by an Airstream to Scottsdale with his high school friends. Louis was visiting family in Kuala Lumpur, and had been to the tallest twin towers in the world (Daron skipped that photo). Candice was in Provence with her parents, trying to dread her hair, from the looks of it. It was these pictures he showed his friends at home, and several from the school year: All 4 Little Indians under Berkeley's famous Sather Gate, in line at Memorial Stadium before the big game against Stanford, in The City at the Golden Gate Bridge. Always places where there were plenty of bystanders to take their picture. Always with Candice standing between Daron and Charlie while Louis crouches in his prison pose. He'd never considered the implications of those group shots until Jo-Jo, whom Daron still considered his best friend, asked him about the juniors.

What?

You prinking? Don't get shy on me now.

They were at the edge of unincorporated Braggsville at Point Pen Dry Bluff, a granite scarp—dubbed The Balcony—from which they'd often Geronimoed into the cool blue twenty feet below, much to the horror of more than one shrieking mother. Earlier that morning, Jo-Jo had asked him to take a ride, which they did in silence, which meant that Jo-Jo wouldn't admit what was on his mind until he'd cracked at least three High Lifes. Jo-Jo was one of those guys
who would snap his fingers and complain—Look here, Cochise, I'm trying to talk to you—even when he wasn't saying anything. Unlike Quint, who'd inherited from his mother a tongue that could talk a gray sky dry, Jo-Jo measured his words like he was underwater. Matter of fact, with that short, perpetually wrinkled brow, he always looked like he was holding his breath.
When Jo-Jo said nothing after the fourth can, except to ask about the juniors, Daron felt a guilty rush of relief and repositioned himself to better appreciate the view. It wasn't called The Balcony for nothing. Mayor Buchanan, who owned the land, years ago had his earthmovers carve the best-lit ledge into a shallow, beach-like slope lined with smooth pebbles, all at his own expense. Now all four Rhiner girls—woman-sized by middle school to the one—lay splayed head to head, spread-eagle, as if to catch more sun. The Rhiners were there when Daron arrived, so maybe Jo-Jo knew this and planned to hang out and enjoy the natural scenery.

Like a snowflake. Jo-Jo pointed.

Or dream catcher. Or, thought Daron, a tête-à-tête, at last recalling the word.

Or semen catcher.

That, too. Daron adjusted his trunks. The youngest sister had been Chinese skinny when he left for college, but now cut quite the figure. She had a split in her bib damn near deep enough to hide a baby.

So, she ever put a finger up in the juniors? asked Jo-Jo.

What?

Don't get shy on me now.

Daron shrugged.

Ever got that velvet rabbit when she was on the warpath?

Huh?

Miss Iowa. When she's scalping.

Yeah.

When Jo-Jo first saw the pictures of the 4 Little Indians, he'd tweaked Daron's titty as if to say, Good job, hoss. The suggestion had indeed pinched Daron at the time, but he had ignored it. He now regretted not correcting Jo-Jo, but at the same time considered this scenario kin to noticing before anyone else that his own fly was undone. Why call it to everyone's attention? Yeah, Daron repeated.

You crack those juniors and get up in that wormhole yet?

Yeah.

She ever swallow your Johnny Appleseed?

Yeah.

Ever blew dice so hard she fell off?

Yeah.

Jo-Jo laughed. Hmmm. Might be I ought get outta Draggsville. Go to college.

Don't see why not.

Might could, but won't, 'cause it costs, and I mean to be paid.

Yeah.

Old man say I can make foreman in two years. Tells me he seen it happen that quick. Get out of the oven, get over to the saw.

Yeah.

Hmmph. Jo-Jo pointed. Through the pines the mill could be seen in parts: the circuit board of ducts and compressors atop the big brick hotbox where it always felt about ninety million degrees and some distance away the sawtooth roof of the shipping warehouse where the greatest hazards were paper cuts and losing hair to packing tape. From where they sat on The Balcony, they couldn't see the building that connected the two—the rib—a low-windowed, narrow block structure where the air-conditioned offices were located. Everyone Daron knew spoke of the saw like Canaan. None aspired to the rib, almost as if it was cursed, almost as if it didn't exist for them, almost as if they went outside and walked around it to get from one end of the compound to the other. Jo-Jo elbowed Daron. The Rhiner girls
were peeling themselves off the ground with arched backs, yawns, outstretched arms, and then took to the water with a battle caw, cutting air fifty yards out to Pickett Rock, giggling off the warm sting as they settled on the boulder's edge, juniors rocking, feet exciting the water, legs exciting the boys, especially where the stringy denim rode high thighs like fine blond hairs.

My father's at it again.

Sorry, muttered Daron after a moment during which, even after a year at Berkeley—including a special student-led DCal class on interpersonal communication—he could think of nothing else to say.

Daron brushed the rocks from his bottom as he scooted back out of the sun and onto a smoother shelf of granite. The heat wasn't hearing it, though, and like Georgia humidity was wont to do, the mugginess shadowed him. No one sunned at Berkeley's Aquatic Park, and the reservoir was polluted, but what it lacked in bikinis, it made up for with decriminalized alien technology and near-perfect Mediterranean weather. Unlike the gorge. Never mind the chain links of light reflecting onto Pickett Rock or gliding metallic along the sandy bed where the lake was shallow, or the buff scent of pine resin, or the empties whistling green and gold as the workers on the far side buckled shut their lunch buckets, he knew what Jo-Jo meant by his father being at it again.

Jo-Jo's father could be up to any Old Scratch tack, from moonraking, to knocking noggins around the yard, to putting the shine on old Martha Redding down at the Pik-n-Pak, to trying to creep a peek at June Tucker's butterfly. It was Jo-Jo's father, in fact, who had told both boys about his infamous and eponymous courtship kung fu move: Just let me stick the tip in, baby. Daron's own father had told him nothing about sex except to use protection because, Loose lips really do sink ships, and nothing will sink your ship faster than a kid or a disease. Daron's grandfather, Old Hitch—whom Nana called, in sooth, My right minder—offered the only sober advice: Remember,
ripe fruit is always marked down. Gotta see something in 'em they can't see for 'emselves. Don't lie, but you gotta be a real generous mirror. (Back in ninth grade, Slater Jones from 4-H said only: I don't have sex, I make babies. Remarkable prescience for a fourteen-year-old, hence this parenthetical.)

The water clapped below as the girls abandoned their perch. Pickett Rock was chalky where dry and black where wet, so that the wet parts, once the last Rhiner slapped water, were like the shadows of dancing figures, and Daron was reminded of a tenth-grade lesson on Nagasaki, after which the teacher had been transferred out faster than a mad cow. She had read to the class a first-person account by a survivor who was lucky enough to be not only swimming, but also submerged when the blast passed over him. After seeing the flash reflected in the pool, he surfaced to discover that where his friends had once stood only their twisted silhouettes remained, draped on the ground like shadows, forgotten clothes, except white not black. With no frame of reference for such a phenomenon, he could only imagine a bizarre prank, so bizarre that he didn't immediately notice the damage to the pool house or that the water he trod now felt near boiling. The survivor said he could take no credit for it, that it was preordained that he would live and his friends would die, and he would never understand why. All he knew was who. Who is who? asked the teacher, closing the book with a resolute thump and letting her readers jangle from their rattling beaded-glass tether. It's us. Japan was ready to surrender as early as the defeat at Midway.

Jo-Jo dragged a heavy hand across his eyes. Now what about those juniors?

Yeah, Daron repeated, nodding, certain that it couldn't matter because Berzerkeley and Braggsville were two worlds always on opposite sides of the sun.

H
is sophomore fall was without incident, but halfway through his sophomore spring, everything changed. As Quint would say, his pancake got flipped. The class was American History X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives. The course reader, peopled with notables such as Freire and Marx, was book-ended by Chomsky and Zinn. The 4 Little Indians had taken the class together to satisfy a core requirement and because they heard it was fun, or at least that's what they told each other. The professor wore a monocle and resembled Mark Twain, and, better yet, video projects were accepted as capstones.