The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,57

of his talent. “That was a long time ago. My hands.” He held up two fingers that curled like crab legs. He said he’d just spent thirty days drying out.

Mentioning that they sat in a bar seemed impolite.

But Chickie had always made accommodations with his shortcomings. The boy had been a reedy little runt when he got to Nickel and regularly punked out his first year until he learned to fight, and then he preyed on the smaller kids, taking them into closets and supply rooms—you teach what you’re taught. That, and the trumpet thing was all he remembered about the Nickel Boy, before Chickie started into his life after graduation. It was a familiar tune, one he’d heard over the years—not from Nickel Boys but from dudes who spent time in similar places. A stint in the army, the routine and discipline appealed to him. “A lot of guys went from juvie into the armed forces. It’s like a natural option, especially if you got no home to go back to. Or want to go back to.” Chickie was in the military for twelve years, and then he had a crack-up and they drummed him out. Married a couple of times. Any job he could get. The best was selling stereos in Baltimore. He could go on forever about hi-fis.

“I always drank,” Chickie said. “Then it was like the more I tried to settle down, the more I got fucked up every night.”

Last May he beat up a guy in a bar. The judge said it was either jail or a program, no choice at all. He was in town visiting his sister, who lived in Harlem. “She letting me stay while I figure out my next move. I’ve always liked it up here.”

Chickie asked him what he was up to, and Elwood felt bad telling him about his company so he cut the number of trucks and employees by half and didn’t mention the new office on Lenox, which he was quite proud of. Ten-year lease. The longest thing he’d ever committed to, and it was weird because the only thing that bothered him about it was that he wasn’t bothered about it.

“My man,” Chickie said. “Moving on up! Got a lady?”

“Never settled down, I guess. I go out, when work ain’t so bad.”

“I hear you, I hear you.”

The light from the street dropped a shade as the taller buildings ushered a premature evening. It was the cue for a dose of the Sunday-night back-to-work blues, and he wasn’t the only one afflicted—there was a rush at the bar. The muscle-bound bartender served the two blond coeds first, underage probably and testing alcohol enforcement south of their Columbia University stomping grounds. Chickie ordered another beer, outpacing him.

They started in on the old days, quickly sliding to the dark stuff, the worst of the housemen and supervisors. Didn’t say Spencer’s name, as if it might conjure him on Columbus Avenue like a peckerwood specter, that childhood fear still kept close. Chickie mentioned the Nickel Boys he ran into over the years—Sammy, Nelson, Lonnie. This one was a crook, that one lost an arm in Vietnam, another one was strung out. Chickie said the names of guys he hadn’t thought of in forever, it was like a picture of the Last Supper, twelve losers with Chickie in the middle. That’s what the school did to a boy. It didn’t stop when you got out. Bend you all kind of ways until you were unfit for straight life, good and twisted by the time you left.

Where did that leave him. How bent was he?

“You got out in ’64?” Chickie asked.

“You don’t remember?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Time served”—a lie told many times, when he slipped up and mentioned reform school—“and they kicked me out. Went up to Atlanta and then kept going north. You know. I’ve been here since ’68. Twenty years.” All this time he’d taken it as a given that his escape was a Nickel legend. The students passing his story around as if he were a folk hero, a Stagger Lee figure scaled down to teenage size. But it hadn’t happened. Chickie Pete didn’t even recall how he got out. If he wanted to be remembered, he should have carved his name into a pew like everyone else. He lit another cigarette.

Chickie Pete squinted. “Hey, hey, what happened to that kid you used to hang around with all the time?”

“Which guy?”

“The guy with that thing. I’m trying to remember.”

“Hmm.”

“It’ll