just watched him.
It was Odette, never embarrassed to say what she thought, who broke the silence. “That,” she said, “is one pretty white boy.” Several people heard her and began to snicker. Then conversations started again and the atmosphere returned to something closer to normal.
Clarice said, “I have to disagree with you, Odette. What we have here is the King of the Pretty White Boys.” Barbara Jean giggled, but she thought that maybe it was true. It made perfect sense to her that, if she stared at him for long enough, a jeweled crown would appear on top of his head, maybe with an accompanying trumpet salute, like in the Imperial Margarine commercial on TV.
When Big Earl came to the window table accompanied by the King of the Pretty White Boys, he said, “Hey girls, let me introduce you to Ray Carlson. He’s gonna be workin’ here.”
The boy mumbled, “Hi,” and gave the table a wipe, even though it was clean.
The Supremes were saying hi to him when Ramsey Abrams, who had overheard Big Earl’s introduction, hollered out from a couple of tables away, “You related to Desmond Carlson?” And the place went quiet again.
Desmond Carlson and a few other rednecks were the reason blacks couldn’t walk along Wall Road any further north than Leaning Tree. Desmond and his crew drove their pickup trucks over the northern end of Wall Road on their way from their houses to downtown and to the back-country bars that dotted the landscape outside of Plainview’s town limits. Poor, uneducated, and faced with a world that was changing in ways they couldn’t understand, Desmond and his buddies were perpetually one or two whiskey shots away from stupidity and violence. It was their habit to hurl insults and beer bottles from their cars at anyone with dark skin they found on the section of the road they had laid claim to.
His friends were content to cause trouble at night. But if Desmond encountered a Leaning Tree resident on Wall Road at any time of the day, he would yell out, “Get off my fuckin’ road, jig,” or some other comment that made his viewpoint clear. Then, laughing, he would aim his truck at whomever he had caught trespassing on his road so that they had to jump into the ditch at the side of the road to avoid being sideswiped.
Half of the town was scared to death of Desmond, who was always drunk, always angry, and—rumor had it—always armed. The Plainview police were in the scared half. They used the fact that Wall Road was university property and therefore technically under the jurisdiction of the Indiana State Police as an excuse to avoid having to confront Desmond and his buddies, who all had much bigger guns and were much tougher than the police. The university cops were only equipped to deal with drunken frat boys and they weren’t about to get in the middle of a local squabble that might ignite a civil rights battle. So the residents of Leaning Tree walked a half mile out of their way, around the southern end of Wall Road and onto side streets that led to Plainview Avenue, whenever they left home for downtown.
Ramsey Abrams asked again, “So, what is it? You related to him, or not?”
Ray Carlson said, “He’s my brother,” and a wave of cursing and grumbling moved through the room.
Ramsey said, “Damn, Big Earl, what’d you go and let him in here for?”
Big Earl turned a hard eye on Ramsey and said, “Ramsey, both your brothers is in jail and you don’t see me checkin’ your pockets for silverware every time you leave here, do ya? I figure Ray here deserves the same chance.”
That was that. Big Earl had told everyone how it was going to go down, and there was to be no arguing. Ramsey made a loud snorting noise to show his disapproval and went back to his food. Everyone else returned to eating, dancing, and flirting, the business of being teenagers.
Every so often someone came to the window table to whisper about the white boy. Little Earl told the girls that Ray had come by the restaurant trying to sell chickens he had raised. He said his father gave Ray a meal and then offered him a job on the spot, without the boy even asking. Ramsey came over to repeat his belief that it was a shame Big Earl had given a job to a white man that a black man should