The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,42

a staffer’s drink. Why else had Desmond taken it? But it was Jaimie who made the scheme real in his calm rebuttals to the counterarguments. “Who would you give it to?” Jaimie asked his friends in turn, with a rhetorical air. Jaimie had a stutter that slunk out when he asked questions—he had an uncle with a quick hand—but the stutter disappeared during the can discussions.

Desmond fingered Patrick, a houseman who’d beat him for wetting his bed and made him drag his soiled mattress to the laundry in the middle of the night. “That fucking peckerwood—I’d like to see him puke up his guts.”

They were in the Cleveland rec room, after school let out. No one else around. Occasionally cheers from one of the sports fields wafted over. Who would you give it to? Elwood suggested Duggin. No one knew that he and Duggin had had a dustup. Duggin was a stout-backed white man who stomped around with a sleepy, cow-eyed look. He had a way of suddenly appearing in front of you, like a puddle or a pothole, and you learned that his big meaty hands were faster than you’d think, pincering shoulder blades, noosing a skinny neck. The supervisor, Elwood told them, had socked him in the stomach for talking to a white student, a kid he’d met in the hospital. Fraternization between the students of the two campuses was discouraged. The boys nodded—“makes sense”—but they all knew he really wanted to give it to Spencer. For his legs. No one dared mention Spencer’s name anywhere near this daydream or else they’d never have wasted a breath on it.

“I’d give it to Wainwright,” Turner said. He told them how Wainwright had caught him smoking cigarettes, back during his first term at Nickel. Knocked him upside the head so hard it left a lump on his cheek. Wainwright was pale-skinned, but all the black boys knew from his hair and nose that he had some Negro blood. He beat the black boys for knowing what he pretended not to know about himself. “I was greener than you, El, back then.” No one had caught him smoking since.

It was Jaimie’s turn. He said simply, “Earl,” and did not elaborate.

Why?

“He knows.”

The days passed and they picked up the prank between checkers and Ping-Pong. Different targets emerged when they saw another student mistreated or suddenly remembered some personal encounter, a reprimand, a box on the ear. One name remained constant: Earl. Elwood dropped Duggin from his rotation and threw in Earl one day. Earl hadn’t beat Elwood the night they took him to the White House, but he was not-Spencer, Spencer once removed. Close enough.

It’s possible Elwood already knew the answer when he asked, “What’s the Holiday Luncheon?”

The Holiday Luncheon was marked on the big calendar in the dorm’s entrance hall. Desmond said it wasn’t for them, it was for the staff. A nice meal in the dining hall to celebrate another year of hard work on the north campus.

“And they get to raid the meat lockers for some prime beef to give themselves,” Turner said. Boys volunteered for the opportunity to rack up merits by serving as waiters.

Desmond said, “That would be a good time to do it.” Saying it and not saying it.

Jaime, as ever, said, “Earl.”

Earl sometimes worked the south campus, sometimes the north. Under most circumstances, they’d have heard about the bad blood between Jaimie and the supervisor but both of them spent time on the white half and who knew what had passed between them down there. It could have been Lovers’ Lane, some back talk, a frame-up by one of the white boys. Earl was a regular at the drinking sessions at the motor pool. When the motor-pool light was on at night and you heard them carrying on, you prayed you didn’t have a beating hanging over your head or that you’d been picked for a date on Lovers’ Lane. It would end up bad.

Strange medicine in an old green can. The boys gathered the words and intonations of a justice spell. Justice or revenge. No one wanted to admit it was a real plan they cooked up all along. They kept returning to it as Christmas approached, passing the idea between them so each considered its heft and cast. As the prank evolved from abstraction to something more solid, full of hows and whens and what-ifs, Desmond, Turner, and Jaimie stopped including Elwood without realizing it. The prank was against his moral