Jesus Land (8 page)

I hand the cashier the $2 Mother gave me and face the room.

A girl with a side ponytail and stirrup pants stands a few feet away from me, also holding a tray and looking around. Maybe
she’s new, too. Maybe I should talk to her. But what would I say?
Hi, are you new, too? That sounds so dorky
! As I ponder this, a girl at a center table jumps up and yells “Christie!” and she rushes away.

The aroma of warm mayonnaise and dill pickles from the steaming casserole is making my mouth water.
Where should I sit? What group should I join? Where do I belong
? There doesn’t appear to be a table for Unclassifiable Outsiders. I search the room for someone, anyone, sitting alone, and my eyes drag across the orange-haired boy. He’s sitting with a bunch of farmers along the back wall, facing my direction. He hasn’t noticed me yet. I watch him fork spinach into his hateful mouth, then I walk to a conveyor belt jerking dirty trays behind a wall and set my lunch on it.

There’s a vending machine in the basement, next to the gymnasium. I buy a pack of Boppers and a Tab. I try the locker room door, but it’s locked. So is the gym. Through the glass doors, the wood floor gleams in the pale light cast by the high windows, and the empty bleachers await the next event. A large clock on the far wall says 12:50. Fourth hour starts in ten minutes.

I find a girls’ bathroom down the hallway and try the door. This one’s open. I walk into a stall, slide the metal latch closed, and sit down to eat.

I’m the first to board bus No. 26 after school. The driver motions to the seat behind her when I climb in.

“Y’all sit here for the meanwhiles,” she says, studying her three-inch-long nails, which are painted the same shade of purple as her pantsuit. I slide onto the bench and pretend to read my French book as kids erupt from the school building, yelling and laughing and chasing each other down the sidewalk. As the bus fills, I worry that the driver will leave without David. I stick my French book into my backpack, preparing to get off when she starts the engine if he isn’t here. I’ll find him and we’ll walk home together.

As the driver fiddles the radio to some whiny country music station, I see David rushing down the sidewalk, head down, hands clasping the shoulder straps of his backpack.

“There’s that nigger,” I hear a male voice say behind me.

David stomps up the stairs with a tense face, and presses his lips together as the driver loudly informs him about our reserved seat.

“Scaredy-cat!” a boy calls as David sits down next to me. “Wuss!” David doesn’t look at me.

On County Road 50, the bus gets stuck behind a combine that crawls down the road like a giant metal stink bug. I stare out the windshield, willing it to pull over and let us by. When the driver jerks to a stop beside the bank of mailboxes at the end of our lane, we’re already standing, trying to get out.

I turn to David when we’re halfway across the back field. The Indian summer air is thick with dirt and pollen, the afternoon still but for the lone grackle cawing atop the clothesline.

“What’d you do for lunch?” I ask him. He shrugs and looks at the ground.

“You?”

“I ate some candy.”

He nods, and we walk the rest of the way to the back door in silence, because there’s nothing more we want to say.

After a few days, things settle into a routine. I chug Comfort each morning, not to conjure a party attitude, but to numb myself to the snickering that breaks out when David and I slide into our reserved bus seat.

After hearing “nigger lover” and “there goes nigger and his sister” hurled at our backs too many times, I stop walking into school with him.

Seems we can never just be brother and sister like in other families. Our whole lives, people have felt an urge to make up special names for what we are. At Lafayette Christian, we were the “Oreo twins” or “Kimberly and Arnold” after the characters on
Diff’rent Strokes
. And while those nicknames bugged us, they were certainly preferable to what they call us at Harrison.

“See ya later!” I tell David when the bus door flaps open in front of Harrison. As I rush down the sidewalk ahead of him, I feel a pinch of guilt, but a greater relief as I melt into the sea of white bodies. Alone, I am part of the crowd. Together, we invite notice and ridicule. Why do I always have to be the “black boy’s sister” anyway? Why can’t I be my own person? It’s not fair. This is a new school, and I want a fresh start.

Besides, people will think David’s a sissy if he’s always hanging around me. It’s best for him, too. We’re sixteen, and it’s time we struck out on our own.

Sometimes I run into him between classes, always alone, always rushing and looking straight ahead, his face a blank mask. He’s easy enough to spot because he’s the only black kid at Harrison. A couple of times, he’s rushed right by me without seeing me—I must have been just another white face to him, blurring by. Once I almost reached out a hand to touch him and say his name, but then thought better of it. It’s better for both of us like this.

During Algebra, I’m tipsy enough to start making small talk with Elaine. One day I compliment her white hoop earrings. The next, I ask to borrow her eraser. Then I run into her while I’m buying lunch from the basement vending machine.

She’s crouched outside the glass door leading to the parking lot, her body hidden but her unmistakable red hair blowing sideways across the glass. I buy an extra can of Tab.

She jumps up when she hears the door open and chucks something into the grass before whipping around to face me.

“Jesus Christ, don’t sneak up on people like that!”

I wince at this blasphemy as she bends to search for whatever it is she threw into the grass. Today she’s wearing a pink-and-black striped top that slumps off one shoulder, a jean miniskirt, and ankle boots that have these lacey white baby socks frothing out of them. She looks like that whorish new singer, Madonna. I’ve heard preppy girls poke fun at her behind her back and call her a slut, but Elaine doesn’t seem to care whether she fits in at Harrison or not. I admire her for it.

She straightens, a lit cigarette in her hand. “Sorry, I’m a little on edge,” she says. “How’d you find me?”

“It’s alright,” I say. “I was just buying some food and saw your hair in the window.”

She gathers it to the side of her neck with her free hand and laughs. “Oh damn. Didn’t think of that.”

I stand awkwardly holding the two cans and a Snickers bar as she sucks at her cigarette and squints at a pile of dark clouds on the horizon.
I’ve never met a Jew before. Didn’t know there were any in Lafayette, or Indiana for that matter. Jesus-killers, we called them at Lafayette Christian. But Elaine doesn’t seem like a bad person.
A gust of wind tugs at our hair.

“Want some pop?” I finally ask her, holding out a can.

“Sure,” she says, taking it from me. “Thanks.”

Maybe I could invite her to church one Sunday. I could convert her, introduce her to Jesus. Maybe she secretly hankers for Him like those Third World heathens.

A cow moos loudly across the road, and we turn to watch it plod into the mouth of the graffiti barn, which was raided last
weekend by Westsiders. “Harrison Hicks Suck Dick” it says in big red letters.

“Where you from?” I ask her.

She takes a sip before answering.

“Chicago,” she says, looking at me. “Ever been?”

She is from a big city; I knew it!

“Yeah, in seventh grade,” I say nonchalantly. “We went on this field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry.”

I don’t tell her that our bus driver got lost in the ghetto and a policeman took pity on us and escorted us to the museum.

“My dad was hired as a chemist at Eli Lilly, so that’s why we had to move here,” Elaine says.

The wind shifts, blowing the stench of fresh cow manure over us, and she wrinkles her nose and tells me how sorely she misses “civilization.”

“Did you know that the very word
Hoosier
means country bumpkin?” she fumes, stubbing out her cigarette on the heel of her ankle boot. “Don’t believe me? Go look it up in the dictionary. Hoosier, it says. Synonymous for hick, hillbilly, back-ass-ward.”

I feel insulted, but bite my tongue. I’m in no position to be choosy about friends. We drink our pops and watch cows lug themselves into the dark barn one by one. The buzzer rings inside the building, signaling the end of lunch, the beginning of rejection, again.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” I ask Elaine, trying to control the desperation in my voice.

“Maybe,” she says, shrugging. “You?”

“Probably.”

“See you then,” she says.

As I turn to walk through the glass door, happiness bubbles through me. I’ve got someone to eat lunch with; I’m not a complete reject after all.

We meet at the cafeteria snack bar, loading up on Tab and Baffy Taffy and Funyuns before going outside.

Elaine prefers to talk, and I prefer to listen, so we get along great. As we eat our junk food picnic on the sidewalk outside the gym, she tells me about Chicago—the Water Tower mall, the Cubs baseball games, the Lincoln Park Zoo—and explains why everything is bigger and better there than in Lafayette.

One day we’re walking toward the stairwell with our food when a figure emerges from the boys’ bathroom ahead of us. It’s David. He ambles up the hallway, head down, kicking at a piece of balled-up trash.

I fight an urge to call out to him and ask him where he’s going and why he isn’t eating. I can’t be my brother’s keeper forever.

“See that black boy?” Elaine whispers, slowing down. “He’d be better off in Chicago.”

I nod and watch David disappear around a corner, then hold out my bag of Funyuns to her.

“Tell me about that shopping mall again,” I ask her as she dips her fingers into the yellow foil. “The one with the seven floors.”

Mary joins us. I spot her one day while we’re standing in line at the snack bar. There’s a commotion in the middle of the cafeteria, and we turn to see a pair of jocks in muscle shirts wrestling across the floor. They bump up against the cheerleaders’ table, and the cheerleaders shriek with delight; this is a show put on for their benefit. When the lunchroom monitor— a grumpy, man-like woman who sometimes works the snack
bar—blows her whistle, the boys tumble apart and the cheerleaders stand in unison, clapping their hands in rhythm and chanting.

“Those are some fucked-up mating rituals,” Elaine sneers.

As I nod my agreement, I glimpse a lone figure in a yellow shirt at the far end of the cafeteria. David? He was wearing yellow today. I squint. No, it’s Mary.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell Elaine.

She’s sitting alone hiding behind her long bangs, but she smiles as I walk toward her.

“Where you been at?” I ask her.

“I had strep throat,” Mary says, “but I’m not infectious now.”

I point toward the snack bar. “Me and this other girl are gonna eat outside, wanna come?”

She wraps her cheeseburger in a napkin and follows me across the cafeteria. As we wind through the blue tables, I spot David sitting in a corner with Kenny Mudd, a nerd from my Algebra class. Everyone calls him Casper because he’s albino; his skin is translucent, and his buzzed hair and eyebrows platinum blond. He wears bottle-thick glasses that make his red eyes bug out, and he’s brilliant. Sitting across from each other, David and Kenny look like each other’s photographic negative.

I watch David pick up a French fry and cock his head to one side as he listens to Kenny talk. He’s not looking in my direction, but I grin at him anyway. He’s eating proper and he’s found a friend, even if that friend is Kenny Mudd. The lunch monitor frowns at me as we walk by her, and I smile at her, too, happy that this big grumpy woman is watching over my brother.

We’re okay, we both are.

We organized a “welcome home” party in the basement. Debra put David on the couch and Herb Alpert on the turntable, and while the rest of us boogied across the carpet, David screeched and bounced on the cushions.

Mother raced downstairs and turned off the music.

“No dancing for David,” she scolded. “It’s too much for him.”

He was almost three years old, but he couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t talk. He scooted around on his hands and knees. Such was the legacy of his foster-care “families.” When he wanted something, he’d point at it and scream. If we didn’t understand him, he’d hurl himself to the floor in shrieking frustration, and he’d do the same if he didn’t get what he wanted.