The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,33

I was ready to punch this old fool—he doesn’t know me. Don’t know shit about me. I look at him, and he ain’t moving, standing there smoking this cigarette he rolled, and he knows I’m not going to do anything. Because he’s right in what he said.

“Next time I was on a shift, I don’t know, I started doing it differently. Instead of joking with them, I was mean. When they hit the gutter or stepped over the line, there was nothing friendly in my face. I saw in their eyes when they realized the game had changed. Maybe we’d pretended to be on the same side before and it was all equal, but now it wasn’t.

“End of the night, I’d been taunting this fucking peckerwood the whole game. This big heehaw meathead. It’s his turn and he has to pick up a 4–6 split. I said, ‘Ain’t that a stinker,’ like Bugs Bunny, and that’s it for him—he comes charging up the lane. He’s chasing me around the place, I’m jumping from lane to lane, up in everybody’s business, dodging balls, and then finally his friends hold him back. They come there all the time, they’re not trying to make things hard for Mr. Garfield. They know me, or thought they knew me until I started not acting right, and they get their friend and cool him out and leave.”

Turner grinned as he acted out the story. Until the last part. He squinted at the floor of the gazebo as if trying to make out something tiny. “That was the end of it, really,” he said, scratching the nick in his ear. “Next week I saw that guy’s car in the parking lot and I threw a cinder block through the window and the cops picked me up.”

Harper was an hour late. They weren’t going to complain. Free time at Nickel on one side, work time in the free world on the other—it was an easy calculation. “Going to need a ladder,” Elwood told Harper when he showed up.

“Sure,” Harper said.

Mrs. Davis waved from the porch as they pulled away.

“How’s your lady, Harper?” Turner asked.

Harper tucked in his shirttail. “Just when you ease into a good time, they bring up some whole other thing they been thinking about since the last time you saw them.”

“Sure, I know,” Turner said. He reached for Harper’s cigarettes and lit one.

Elwood grabbed everything he saw in the free world to reassemble it in his mind later. What things looked like and what things smelled like and other things as well. Two days later Harper told him he was on Community Service permanently. But then, white men had always noticed his industrious nature. The news brightened his mood. Each time they returned to Nickel, he wrote down the particulars in a composition book. The date. The name of the individual and the establishment. Some names took a while to fill in, but Elwood had always been the patient type, and thorough.

CHAPTER NINE

The boys rooted for Griff even though he was a miserable bully who jimmied and pried at their weaknesses and made up weaknesses if he couldn’t find any, such as calling you a “knock-kneed piece of shit” even if your knees had never knocked your whole life. He tripped them and laughed at the ensuing pratfalls and slapped them around when he could get away with it. He punked them out, dragging them into dark rooms. He smelled like a horse and made fun of their mothers, which was pretty low given the general motherlessness of the student population. He stole their desserts on multiple occasions—swiped from trays with a grin—and even if the desserts in question were no great shakes, it was the principle. The boys rooted for Griff because he was going to represent the colored half of Nickel at the annual boxing match, and no matter what he did the rest of the year, the day of the fight he was all of them in one black body and he was going to knock that white boy out.

If Griff spat teeth before that happened, swell.

The colored boys had held the Nickel title for fifteen years. Old hands on staff remembered the last white champion and still talked him up; other things from the old days they discussed less often. Terry “Doc” Burns was an anvil-handed good old boy from a musty corner of Suwannee County who’d been sent to Nickel for strangling a neighbor’s chickens. Twenty-one chickens, to be