The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead Page 0,69

day it would open. He waited and waited. In the dark cell, he reconsidered his vigil. The recognition he sought went beyond brown skin—he was looking for someone who looked like him, for someone to claim as kin. For others to claim him as kin, those who saw the same future approaching, slow as it may be and overfond of back roads and secret hardscrabble paths, attuned to the deeper music in the speeches and hand-painted signs of protest. Those ready to commit their weight to the great lever and move the world. They never appeared. In the dining room or anywhere else.

The door to the stairwell opened, scraping against the floor. Footsteps outside the dark cell. Elwood braced himself for another beating. After three weeks they had finally decided what to do with him. He was sure that was the only reason he hadn’t been taken out back to the iron rings and then disappeared—uncertainty. Now that things had quieted down, Nickel returned to proper discipline and the customs that had been handed down from generation to generation.

The bolt slid. There was one slim silhouette in the doorway. Turner shushed him and helped Elwood to his feet.

“They’re going to take you out back tomorrow,” Turner whispered.

“Yeah,” Elwood said. Like Turner was talking about someone else. He was dizzy.

“We got to get, man.”

Elwood puzzled over the we. “Blakeley.”

“That nigger’s passed out, man. Shhh!” He handed Elwood his glasses and clothes and shoes. They came from Elwood’s locker, the ones he wore on his first day of school. Turner was also dressed in regular clothes, black trousers and a dark blue work shirt. We.

The Cleveland boys had replaced the creaky floorboards for the inspection; they missed a few. Elwood tilted his head to listen for noise from the house father’s quarters. The couch was near the door. Many a boy had made the journey up the steps to rouse him from that couch when he slept through reveille. Blakeley did not stir. Elwood was stiff from his confinement and from the two beatings. Turner let him lean on him. He carried a bulging knapsack on his back.

There was a chance they might happen on one of the boys from room 1 or room 2 heading out for a piss. They hurried, as quietly as they could, down and around the next flight of stairs. “We going to walk straight past,” Turner said, and Elwood knew he meant past the rec room to the back entrance of Cleveland. The lights were on all night on the first floor. Elwood didn’t know what time it was—one in the morning? two—but it was late enough for the night supervisors to be deep in some illicit shut-eye.

“They’re playing poker down at the motor pool tonight,” Turner said. “We’ll see.”

Once they got out of the light cast from the windows, they made a hobbled sprint for the main road. They were out.

Elwood didn’t ask where they were headed. He asked Turner, “Why?”

“Shit—they were running around like bugs the last two days, all those motherfuckers. Spencer. Hardee. Then Freddie told me that Sam heard from Lester that he heard them talking about taking you out back.” Lester was a Cleveland kid who swept up at the supervisor’s office and had the line on all the big stuff going down, a regular Walter Cronkite. “That was it,” Turner said. “Tonight or not at all.”

“But why are you coming with me?” He could have pointed Elwood in the right direction and wished him luck.

“They snatch you up in a hot minute, dumb as you are.”

“You said don’t take anyone with you,” Elwood said. “On the run.”

“You’re dumb, and I’m stupid,” Turner said.

Turner was taking him toward town, running along the road and then diving when a car appeared. As the houses got closer together, they crouched and took it slowly, which suited Elwood fine. His back hurt, and his legs where Spencer and Hennepin had sliced at him with Black Beauty. The immediacy of their flight reduced the pain. Three times somebody’s damned dogs started up loud barking when they passed their houses and the boys sprinted. They never saw the dogs but the noise got their blood flowing.

“He’s in Atlanta all month,” Turner said. He’d led them to Mr. Charles Grayson’s house, the banker they’d sung “Happy Birthday” to the night of the big fight. For Community Service they had cleaned out and painted his garage. It was a big house, and lonely. His twin sons