The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,36

as if herding a lamb who’d wandered. Turner was alone again.

“Ain’t that some shit?” he said. He and Elwood were lounging on Cleveland’s front steps after a run to Eleanor. The daylight was thin, winter coming down like the lid on an old pot. Elwood was the only person Turner could tell. The rest of these mutts would blab and then there’d be a lot of busted heads.

Turner had never met a kid like Elwood before. Sturdy was the word he returned to, even though the Tallahassee boy looked soft, conducted himself like a goody-goody, and had an irritating tendency to preach. Wore eyeglasses you wanted to grind underfoot like a butterfly. He talked like a white college boy, read books when he didn’t have to, and mined them for uranium to power his own personal A-bomb. Still—sturdy.

Elwood wasn’t surprised at Turner’s news. “Organized boxing is corrupt on every level,” he said with authority. “There’s been a lot in the newspapers about it.” He described what he’d read back at Marconi’s, perched on his stool during the dead hours. “Only reason to fix a fight is because you’re betting on it.”

“I’d bet on it, if I had any money,” Turner said. “Sometimes at the Holiday, we put money on the playoffs. I got paid.”

“People are going to be upset,” Elwood said. Griff’s victory was sure to be a feast, but almost as delicious were the morsels the boys traded in anticipation, the scenarios in which the white contender lost control of his bowels or threw up a geyser of blood in Director Hardee’s face or white teeth flew from his mouth “like they were chipped out with an ice pick.” Fantasies hearty and fortifying.

“Sure,” Turner said. “But Spencer says he’s going to take you out back, you listen.”

“Take him to the White House?”

“I’ll show you,” Turner said. They had some time before supper.

They walked ten minutes to the laundry, which was shut at this time of day. Turner asked Elwood about the book under his arm and Elwood said a British family was trying to marry off their oldest daughter to keep their estate and title. The story had complicated turns.

“No one wants to marry her? She ugly?”

“She’s described as having a handsome face.”

“Damn.”

Past the laundry were the dilapidated horse stables. The ceiling had given way long ago and nature had crept inside, with skeletal bushes and limp grasses rising in the stalls. You could get up to some wickedness in there if you didn’t believe in ghosts, but none of the students had arrived at a definite opinion on the matter so everyone stayed away to be safe. There were two oaks on one side of the stables, with iron rings stabbed into the bark.

“This is out back,” Turner said. “They say once in a while they take a black boy here and shackle him up to those. Arms spread out. Then they get a horse whip and tear him up.”

Elwood made two fists, then caught himself. “No white boys?”

“The White House, they got that integrated. This place is separate. They take you out back, they don’t bring you to the hospital. They put you down as escaped and that’s that, boy.”

“What about their family?”

“How many boys you know here got family? Or got family that cares about them? Not everyone is you, Elwood.” Turner got jealous when Elwood’s grandmother visited and brought him snacks, and it slipped out from time to time. Like now. The blinders Elwood wore, walking around. The law was one thing—you can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convinced enough white people. In Tampa, Turner saw the college kids with their nice shirts and ties sit in at the Woolworths. He had to work, but they were out protesting. And it happened—they opened the counter. Turner didn’t have the money to eat there either way. You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people.

Which is why Turner brought Elwood out to the two trees. To show him something that wasn’t in books.

Elwood grabbed one of the rings and tugged. It was solid, part of the