DEAR CADET BUTLER,
I HAD PLANNED TO COME VISIT YOU, BUT IT WAS COMMUNICATED TO ME THAT YOU DIDN’T WANT ANY VISITORS. AND IN TOUGH TIMES LIKE THESE, I CAN TOTALLY UNDERSTAND YOU WANTING AS MUCH PRIVACY AS POSSIBLE, AND HAVE ENCOURAGED YOUR FELLOW CADETS TO ALSO RESPECT YOUR WISHES. NONETHELESS, I WANTED YOU TO KNOW YOUR COMRADES AND I HAVE YOU IN OUR THOUGHTS AND WISH YOU A SPEEDY RECOVERY AND RETURN TO THE PROGRAM. AND TO ENCOURAGE YOU IN THIS TIME, I’VE ENCLOSED A CARD WITH OUR CREED.
ALL THE BEST,
CHIEF KILLABREW
I AM AN ARMY JUNIOR ROTC CADET.
I WILL ALWAYS CONDUCT MYSELF TO BRING CREDIT TO MY FAMILY, COUNTRY, SCHOOL, AND THE CORPS OF CADETS.
I AM LOYAL AND PATRIOTIC.
I AM THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
I DO NOT LIE, CHEAT, OR STEAL AND WILL ALWAYS BE ACCOUNTABLE FOR MY ACTIONS AND DEEDS.
I WILL ALWAYS PRACTICE GOOD CITIZENSHIP AND PATRIOTISM.
I WILL WORK HARD TO IMPROVE MY MIND AND STRENGTHEN MY BODY.
I WILL SEEK THE MANTLE OF LEADERSHIP AND STAND PREPARED TO UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION AND THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE.
MAY GOD GRANT ME THE STRENGTH TO ALWAYS LIVE BY THIS CREED.
If you’re wondering if I had been having nightmares, y’know, about that day, the answer is, no. I hadn’t been. Not until Wednesday. Actually, it started Tuesday night after my friends and family left my room, and I decided to finally read Chief Killabrew’s card. I couldn’t figure out if he had inserted the creed as some kind of reminder to me that if I’m guilty to fess up, and that I was expected to never lie and steal, or what. Maybe he really was trying to encourage me. Maybe he was saying that because I was a cadet, there was no way I could be guilty. I don’t know. I just know that it rubbed me in a weird way, because ROTC, especially to people like my dad, was the first step to the military, and ultimately into law enforcement. I mean, for all I knew, Galluzzo could’ve been in ROTC when he was my age. Was he “the future of America”? Was he upholding “the American way of life”? I guess it depends on who you ask. Maybe. And maybe it was these thoughts rattling around my head that sparked the nightmare.
I was back in Jerry’s, but in the dream, the chips were located in the drink fridge. So I’m standing at the refrigerator staring through the glass, when I hear a voice coming from behind me.
“I know what you’re doing,” the voice said.
For some reason, I didn’t turn around. I just looked into the glass to see the reflection of whoever was there. And it was him. Officer Galluzzo, like Goliath standing with his hand already on his weapon, sizing me up.
“I ain’t doing nothing,” I said, still facing the glass.
“I know what you’re doing,” he repeated, taking a step closer, the sound of his boots thumping on the vinyl floor. I knew I should’ve turned around, but I couldn’t. I was frozen. But I could still see him through the glass, his mirrored image becoming clearer as he got closer and closer. Then I adjusted my eyes to see my own reflection, my own face. But I couldn’t. I mean, my face was there, but . . . it wasn’t. There were no eyes. No nose or mouth. Just blank brown skin.
And that’s when I woke up, my heart pounding, my throat scratchy and dry. The dream seemed to last five minutes, but it had actually been hours, and it was now Wednesday morning. I reached over to the food tray beside my bed for the leftover cranberry juice from dinner the night before. In hospitals, juice comes in the same kind of cups as fruit cocktails and applesauce, the ones where you have to peel back the foil. Damn things are hard to open. My hands, for some weird reason, were weak, wouldn’t work right. Maybe it was the dream. Maybe it was everything that was going on—the reality. Whatever it was, I struggled to pull the aluminum seal back far enough to take a sip of juice. And I needed it. My throat felt like I had eaten my blanket.
I pulled and peeled, until finally the stupid foil snapped away from the plastic and cranberry juice spilled all over the place. Of course.
I snatched the wet sheet back. There was still some juice left, so I decided to get what I could. Right when I took a sip, there was a knock on my door. Now, I know it was probably just a regular knock, but at that moment it sounded like a bang, and I was so jittery that I spilled whatever was left of the juice on myself.
“Shit,” I grumbled.
“Watch your mouth.” My father was pushing the door open. He poked his head in—a strange thing that everyone does at the hospital for some reason—before entering.
“Good morning,” he said, eyeing me as I dabbed juice into my gown, the burgundy blotches on my chest and stomach looking like blood.
“Hey,” I said. “What time is it?”
“Just about seven.”
“Why are you here so early?”
Dad closed the door behind him and came to the foot of the bed. “Wanted to catch you before I went to work. See how you were doing?”
“Oh,” I said, kinda shocked. “I’m okay. How ’bout you? Ma told me you were sick.”
“Yeah. Something didn’t agree with my system. But I’m fine.” He sat on the edge of the bed, which was different for him. Usually he sat in a chair on the other side of the room—as far away from me as possible.
“Cool.” I wasn’t really sure what else to say.
Dad sat there staring at the side table where my phone and the spirometer were.
“Listen, I, uh . . . ,” he started. “I want to tell you a story. When I was a cop—” Pause.
Here’s the thing. My father has three different ways to start a parental sermon about a whole bunch of I don’t want to hear it.
1. When I was your age: always about how he was doing way more than I am when he was in high school. Let him tell it, he put the principal in detention.
2. When I was in the army: always came whenever I was tired. It didn’t matter what I was tired from. If I showed any signs of exhaustion, he would hit me with how when he was in the army he wasn’t allowed to be tired, and that if he even yawned they made him drop down and give them a thousand push-ups.
3. When I was a cop: always came whenever he was either defending cops or insulting teenagers.
“When I was a cop,” he started. He reached up and loosened his navy-blue tie. Then he hiked his khaki pants up, just enough to show his tan socks, peppered with dark-brown diamonds. Office clothes are as boring as offices. Anyway, I braced myself and prepared to ignore whatever was coming.
“One time,” he began, “I got a call that there were a few guys making a bunch of noise in the middle of the night, over on the East Side. You know how it is over there. Nine o’clock, that whole neighborhood shuts down. Now I was used to these quick runs. You drive up, hit your lights and your siren, and if the kids don’t take off running, you just roll down the window and tell them to keep it moving. Never really a big deal.” My father was still staring at the spirometer. As if he was talking to it, as if I wasn’t in the room. “So my partner and I answer the call and head on over. When we pull up, there’s a white kid in tight black jeans and a sweater and this black kid going for it. A backpack was upside down on the side of the curb, and these two were just throwing down, scrapping. The black kid was dressed like . . .” He looked at me, finally. “Dressed like your brother. Hair all over his head. A hoodie. Boots. His pants were damn near all the way down. And he was mopping this boy. My partner and I jumped out of the car and approached them, and before we could even give them a chance to stop fighting, I ran over and jacked the black boy up because I knew he was in the wrong. I just knew it. I mean, you should’ve seen how he was pummeling this kid. And he fought me back, telling me that I had it wrong. He slipped right from my grip and ran for the backpack. I pulled my gun. Told him to leave it. He kept yelling, ‘I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything! He’s the criminal!’ But now he’s wheezing, like he was having a hard time speaking. Then he grabbed the backpack. By now, my partner’s got the white kid. I tell the black dude to leave the bag and put his hands up. But he doesn’t, and instead opens it. Puts his hand inside. And before he could pull it out, I pulled the trigger.”
Holy shit!
“What!” I yelped. I had never heard this story, and I thought I had heard all the stories. I heard all the ones about the people he saved—the woman who had been beaten by her husband; the high-speed chase of a bank robber, who Dad eventually caught after running him off the road, movie-style. I had heard all the stories about how Dad had been shot at. And definitely the one about how he had been shot. I saw the bullet wound in his chest every morning when he got out of the shower, like a tiny crater or a third nipple, a symbol of near death. But I had never, ever, EVER heard this one.
Dad’s Adam’s apple rolled down his throat, then back up. Then he continued. “He was reaching for his inhaler. Turns out, he lived in that neighborhood and was walking home late, when the white kid tried to rob him. He was trying to fight the kid off, and when we showed up, his adrenaline went so high that he couldn’t breathe. Asthma attack. So he had to get to his inhaler, but he was having a hard time telling me that. I just assumed he . . .”
“Wait. Wait . . .” I put my hand up, pushing the words back into my father’s mouth. If there was ever a time that I needed, for once, to control a conversation with him, it was now. I only had one question. “Did you kill him?”
“No.” Dad teethed his top lip. “But I paralyzed him from the waist down.”
I just sat there, dumbfounded. My dad, my dad, had paralyzed an unarmed kid, a black kid, and I had had no idea. My dad shot a kid. I mean, to me, my father was the model of discipline and courage. Sure, he was stern, and sometimes judgmental, but I always felt like he meant well. But to that kid—and now my head was reeling—to that kid, my dad was no different than Officer Galluzzo. Another trigger-happy cop who was quick to assume and even quicker to shoot.
My father filled in the silence my lack of verbal response had created.
“You know, you were still very young, but Spoony remembers it all. The news. The drama. I’m not proud of it. It’ll never stop haunting me, and I think it messes with your brother still too.”
“It probably messes with that boy’s—what’s his name?” I asked, hard.
“Darnell Shackleford,” he rattled off. It was clearly a name he couldn’t forget.
“It probably still messes with Darnell and his family too.”
“Right.” Dad nodded, sadly. “Thing is, I had been in so many other situations where things had gotten crazy. A hand goes in a pocket and out comes a pistol or a blade. And all I could think about was making it home to you, Spoony, and your mother. It’s a hard job, a really hard job, and you could never understand that. You could never know what it’s like to kiss your family good-bye in the morning, knowing you could get a call over your radio that could end your life.”
I could hear the struggle in his voice. Like, he really wanted me to understand this, and part of me did. Part of me could even appreciate knowing he thought of us every time he left the house. But still. “Then why did you choose to be a cop?”
“Believe it or not, I wanted to do some good. I really did. But then I realized after a while that most of the time, I was walking into situations expecting to find a certain kind of criminal. I was looking for . . .”
“For me?”
Dad reached over and picked up the spirometer and started inspecting it from every angle. He couldn’t say it, and instead just finished the story. “So I quit the force.” He took a deep breath, and I got the feeling that he felt both relieved and ashamed that he had gotten that off his chest. “Look, all I’m trying to say is that not all cops are bad.”
“I know that.” I hadn’t even noticed—mainly because of my nervousness—that the foil from the juice cup, I had taken it and rolled it between my thumb and pointer fingers, over and over again, until it had become a perfectly round pellet. A tiny, uncrushable thing.
“As a matter of fact, most cops are good. I worked with a lot of great guys, really trying to make a difference. You need to know that they’re not all wolves.”
“Dad, I do. But not all kids who look and dress like me are bad either. Most of them aren’t. And even the ones who are don’t deserve to be killed, especially if they don’t have no weapons.”
“But a lot of times they do, Rashad.”
“But Spoony was telling me yesterday that most times, they don’t.”
“Spoony doesn’t know everything.” I could tell Dad was getting frustrated. “And neither do you.”
“And neither do you.” I couldn’t back down from him. Not this time.
Dad stood up, smirked, and nodded. He looked at me as if it was his first time seeing me. As if I had just taken off a mask, even though I was practically wearing one with all the itchy gauze taped to my face. Maybe it was him who had just taken off a mask. He set the spirometer down on the side table and reached for my hand. “Listen, I gotta get going. Your mother said she was coming by later, and that she might be bringing a lawyer in to talk to you. She wants to press charges, so . . . yeah. Be on the lookout for her.”
Press charges? My initial thought was that pressing charges was a bad idea. My second thought was that I would have to go to court, which I already wasn’t too keen on. My third thought was just an echo of my first thought, that pressing charges was a bad idea, but there was no point in trying to talk my mother out of it. Even my father knew that.
“I’ll be here.” I stated the obvious. We shook hands, awkward and formal.
“Okay.”
He headed for the door.
“Dad,” I called. He turned around. “If I’m checked out by Friday, I’m thinking about going down to the protest. If I go, you should come.”
He didn’t respond. But as he left the room, something in his face dimmed.
Later, after an hour or two more of sleep, and an hour or two of working on my drawing, sketching and shading some, I guess, screwed-up self-portrait, I decided that it was time for another walk. I took Tuesday off from walking, but I knew I couldn’t take another day off, because if I did, Clarissa would chew me out (in the nicest way ever). And the truth is, I wanted to get out of the room, this little closet room, with the beeping things, and the TV. If it weren’t for Clarissa, my hospital room wouldn’t have been much different than a prison cell. Not that I’ve ever been to jail, but based on what I’ve heard in rap songs, and what my dad always said about it (another one of his tactics to get us to do right was to talk about jail), it seemed pretty similar. An uncomfortable bed. Three meals. Loneliness, even when the visitors come.
So I got up, brushed my teeth, washed my face, closed my gown up tight—what’s the deal with the whole ass-out hospital gown thing, anyway?—and left my room. I was going stir-crazy, especially after my father dropping that bomb on me. My dad. I mean, how could he have just . . . I couldn’t even think straight about what he did. The other thing, though, was that I needed to make sure that if I was going to try to go to this protest—I hadn’t really made up my mind yet, but I was definitely thinking about it—I had better practice walking.
Once I got through my door, the fluorescent white light from the ward hit me, stung my eyes. This time, the plan was to just do a loop. Walk all the way around until I was back where I started. I inched down the hall, my legs eventually returning to normal as the stiffness worked itself out. I tried not to be a creep, but it’s really hard not to look in an open door, and most of the patients on the floor had their doors wide open for whatever reason. A woman sat in a chair, asleep, in Room 413. An older man sat on the edge of his bed, oxygen tubes hooked under his nostrils as he struggled to clip his fingernails in Room 415. A young girl playing on a cell phone as an older woman massaged the feet of a person I couldn’t see lying in bed, in Room 417. And on and on I went. Peeking into the rooms of strangers. Peeking into their lives. Hearing people coughing and moaning. Seeing families gathered together, sometimes talking, sometimes not talking. I even saw a few rooms with TVs on, the news playing, everyone peeking into my life as I was peeking into theirs.
Once I finally finished the lap, which may have taken fifteen minutes—pathetic—I returned to my room to find two women in it, one I recognized and one I didn’t. The one I didn’t was looking sort of down, toward the floor. The one I did recognize was looking directly at the one I didn’t. At first, I thought I was loopy, like I was buggin’, so I stepped out to make sure I had walked into the right room. Room 409. R. BUTLER. That’s me.
I stepped back inside hesitantly.
“Uh, hello,” I said, then spoke to the woman I recognized. “Mrs. Fitzgerald?”
“Hi, baby,” she said grandmotherly.
“What are you doing here?”
“Well, I was coming to bring you something, but when I got to your room this lady was in here. And I asked her if she knew you and she said, not really, so I decided that I would sit in here with her until you got back.” Mrs. Fitzgerald’s arms were crossed, and she was glaring at the lady. She was guarding my room. Shoot, maybe she really did volunteer at the fire department.
“Thank you,” I said, easing farther into the room. I was happy to see Mrs. Fitzgerald, as I’d had no intention of trying to make that trek back to the gift shop—last time damn near killed me. So it was nice that she popped in to check on me. Then I turned to the other lady because, well, now Mrs. Fitzgerald had made the whole situation even more awkward.
The woman stood and extended her hand. I shook it. “Rashad, I’m so sorry for just barging in like this. I’d been meaning to come see you, but things have just been so busy, and I just, well, I just wanted to stop by and see how you were.”
I had no idea what to say, so I just studied her face, trying to place her. But I couldn’t.
“Oh, gosh, you don’t know who I am!” she said suddenly. “My name is Katie Lansing. I’m the lady in the store who accidentally fell over you.”
The woman with the navy suit and white sneakers. The one searching for a beer after a long week.
I reached for my bed and sat, suddenly feeling a little dizzy, my mind racing. Why had she decided to come see me? It wasn’t her fault that all this happened—though that klutzy moment seemed to set this whole thing in motion. No, I take that back. It had nothing to do with her. It might’ve happened even if she hadn’t tripped over me. And if not to me, maybe to someone else. Definitely to someone else.
“How . . . did you find me?”
“This is the only decent hospital in town—lucky guess. Plus, your name’s on the door.” She smiled slightly.
“Well, what can I do for you?” I still had no idea what to say.
“Yeah, what can he do for you?” Mrs. Fitzgerald totally had my back. I guess she could tell I was uncomfortable.
Ms. Lansing’s face went serious. “Well, I guess I just wanted to say I’m sorry about everything that happened, I mean, that is happening.” She blinked hard. I was getting used to the hospital blinks. “I saw everything. The way that officer . . . I just . . .” Now she started to get choked up. “I should go. I just mostly wanted to come by and give you this.” She handed me her business card. “If you need me to testify, I absolutely will.”
“Thanks,” I said, suddenly thinking again about the fact that at some point, once I was out of the hospital and even after the protest, there was going to have to be a trial. I had to go to court. I had never been to court before, but judging from all the TV shows—which is all I really had to go off—it seemed almost as scary as going to jail. But maybe if Ms. Lansing came and told the story as it really happened, they’d believe her, and I could get out of there as quickly as possible. That was my hope. Not likely, but still . . . a hope. And for that reason, I was grateful for her business card, which I set on the side table. And then she was gone.
Now it was just me and Mrs. Fitzgerald. She sat with a plastic bag in her lap, and her right leg crossed over her left, exposing her saggy stockings, which were the same color brown as she was, so it looked like a layer of ankle skin was shedding from her body like a snake.
“So . . .” Mrs. Fitzgerald folded her hands on top of the plastic bag. “A car accident, huh?” Uh-oh, I thought.
“She told you everything?”
“She didn’t have to. I knew who you were when you came into the gift shop. I read the newspaper, front to back, every single day. And I don’t know if you know this or not, but you, my boy, are news.” She glanced up at the TV. It was off, but the gesture was merely to acknowledge that it had been on, everywhere.
“Yeah, unfortunately,” I huffed. “So why didn’t you say something?”
“Say what? To hold your head up? That everything would be okay? Baby, I could tell by the look on your face that you ain’t need none of that. Sometimes, when people get treated as less than human, the best way to help them feel better is to simply treat them as human. Not as victims. Just you as you. Rashad Butler, before all this.”
“Yeah,” I said, really grateful for that, though it had never really even crossed my mind that that’s exactly what I needed.
“But there’s still business to tend to.”
“What you mean?”
“Well, there are still things that can’t be overlooked. Like this protest I’ve been hearing about. You going?” Mrs. Fitzgerald asked, blunt. Old people never hold back.
“Planning on it. I think. I just gotta wait and see if I get outta here first.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Ain’t nobody holding you here. You can walk out whenever you want.” I reached over and slid Ms. Lansing’s business card from one corner of the side table to the other. Then I flipped it upside down and moved it back to its original spot.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. But I don’t know. I just don’t want to get out there and then have something go wrong with my ribs and then I gotta come back here for another week. Better to be safe than sorry.” I ain’t never been so careful in my life, but I had also never felt pain like that before either.
“No, it’s not,” she said, as if she’d been waiting for me to say that so that she could shut it down. “Not all the time.” She glared at me for a moment, and then just as quickly her face relaxed. As if she was scanning me and then found what she was looking for. The chink in my armor.
“You scared.”
“It’s not that, it’s—”
“It is that.” The old lady cut me off. “Let me tell you something. I’m seventy-four. You know what that means? That means I was around during the civil rights movement. Means I remember all of that. The segregation. The lynchings. Not being able to do what you want to do, or go where you want to go. Or vote. I remember everybody looking at my brother, God bless his soul, like a criminal. An animal. Like he was scum or less than, just because of the way he looked. Skin like coal. Hair like cotton—” She paused and tongued the roof of her mouth, so I offered her water in a Styrofoam cup Clarissa had brought in earlier. I hadn’t touched it. Mrs. Fitzgerald took a sip, and then she was off. “I remember the bus boycott, and the Freedom Riders, and all that. I remember the March on Washington, and I especially remember the ones down in Selma.”
“You were there for all that?” I asked in amazement.
She took another sip of water, swallowed, then said, “No. I wasn’t there for any of them.” She got a fierce look on her face. “Because I was scared. My brother took the bus trip down to Selma. He begged me to go. Begged me. But I told him it didn’t matter. I told him that he was going to get himself killed, and that that wasn’t bravery, it was stupidity. So he went without me. I watched the clips on the news. I saw him being beaten with everyone else, and realized that my brother, in fact, was the most courageous man I knew, because Selma had nothing to do with him. Well, one could argue that it did, a little bit. But he was doing it for us. All of us.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald rocked forward in the chair until she eventually got back to her feet. “Now, I’m not telling you what to do. But I’m telling you that I’ve been watching the news, and I see what’s going on. There’s something that ain’t healed, and it’s not just those ribs of yours. And it’s perfectly okay for you to be afraid, but whether you protest or not, you’ll still be scared. Might as well let your voice be heard, son, because let me tell you something, before you know it you’ll be seventy-four and working in a gift shop, and no one will be listening anymore.” She set the plastic bag on the seat. “Brought some snacks. You gotta be sick of this hospital mess by now.”
“What is it?” I asked, reaching for the bag.
“Just some chips. I didn’t know what flavor you liked, so I brought them all. Except plain.”
I sat back on the bed and thought about what Mrs. Fitzgerald said. Tried to imagine protesting in Selma, the March on Washington. Man. And I was worried about a regular street in my regular town. I thought about the fear, but I also thought about how I would feel if I didn’t go, if I didn’t, as she said, speak up. Maybe nothing would happen. But it was at least worth a try. I turned the TV on, and sat and watched the news, but this time I really watched it. Forced myself to see myself. To relive the pain and confusion and my life changing in the time it took to drop a bag of chips on a sticky floor. I pulled out my sketch pad and started drawing like crazy, but it was hard—stupid damn tears kept wetting the page, they wouldn’t stop, but neither would I. So I kept going, letting the wet spread the lead in weird ways as I shaded and darkened the image. The figure of a man pushing his fist through the other man’s chest. The other figure standing behind, cheering. A few minutes more, and normally it would’ve been complete. A solid piece, maybe even the best I had ever made. But it wasn’t quite there yet. It was close, but still unfinished. I took my pencil, and for the first time broke away from Aaron Douglas’s signature style. Because I couldn’t stop—and I began to draw features on the face of the man having his chest punched through. Starting with the mouth.