The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,58

come back to me,” he said, and split to the bathroom. He made a remark to a table of gals celebrating a birthday. They laughed at him when he went into the men’s room.

Chickie Pete and his trumpet. He might have played professionally, why not? A session man in a funk band, or an orchestra. If things had been different. The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cure diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.

The tablecloths were new since the last time he was here—red-and-white checkered vinyl. Denise used to complain about the sticky tables, in those days. Denise—that was one thing he’d messed up. Around him the civilians ate their cheeseburgers and drank their pints, in their free-world cheer. An ambulance sped by outside and in the dark mirror behind the liquor he had a vision of himself outlined a bright red, a shimmering aura that marked him as an outsider. Everybody saw it, just like he knew Chickie’s story in two notes. They’d always be on the lam, no matter how they got out of that school.

No one in his life stayed long.

Chickie Pete slapped him on the back on his return. He got mad suddenly, thinking about how knuckleheads like Chickie were still breathing and his friend wasn’t. He stood. “I got to go, man.”

“No, no, I hear you. Me, too,” Chickie said, with the surety of those who have nothing to do. “I don’t want to ask,” Chickie said.

Here it comes.

“But if you’re looking for a hand, I could use the job. I’m sleeping on a couch.”

“Right.”

“You have a card?”

He started for his wallet and his ACE MOVING business cards—“Mr. Elwood Curtis, President”—but thought better of it. “Not on me.”

“I can handle the work, is what I’m putting out there.” Chickie wrote his sister’s number on a red bar napkin. “You ring me up—for the old days.”

“I will.”

Once he made sure Chickie Pete was good and gone, he headed for Broadway. He had the uncharacteristic urge to take the bus, the 104 up Broadway. Take the scenic route and absorb the life of the city. He nixed it: The marathon was over, and his feeling of bonhomie was as well. In Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Manhattan, the cars and trucks had resumed ownership of the blocked-off streets, the marathon route disappeared mile by mile. Blue paint on asphalt marked the course—every year it flaked away before you knew it. The white plastic bags skittering down the block and the overflowing trash cans were back, the McDonald’s wrappers and red-top crack vials crunching underfoot. He grabbed a cab and thought about dinner.

It was funny, how much he had liked the idea of his Great Escape making the rounds of the school. Pissing off the staff when they heard the boys talking about it. He thought this city was a good place for him because nobody knew him—and he liked the contradiction that the one place that did know him was the one place he didn’t want to be. It tied him to all those other people who come to New York, running away from hometowns and worse. But even Nickel had forgotten his story.

Knocking Chickie for being a fuckup when he was going home to his empty apartment.

He ripped up Chickie Pete’s red napkin and tossed it out the window. No One Likes a Litterbug popped into his head, courtesy of the city’s new quality-of-life drive. A successful campaign, judging from the way it stayed with him. “So give me a ticket,” he said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Director Hardee suspended two days of classes to get the facility in shape for the state inspection. It was a surprise inspection, but his fraternity brother ran child welfare down in Tallahassee and made a phone call. Plenty of long-standing cosmetic items required attention despite the students’ work details. The sun-cracked basketball court called for a new surface and hoops, and rust afflicted the tractors and harrows on the farms. An alien light radiated when the boys wiped generations of grime from the skylights in the printing plant. Most of the buildings, from the hospital to the