Wingshooters (6 page)

We’d been out there for over an hour, but whatever it was that compelled me to ride was not yet spent that day, so we left the park and continued down the two-lane road that led farther out into the country. There were farms on either side of us, with cornstalks as tall as people that time of the year. I saw cows in the fields, and the ones closest to the road looked up as we passed, their big faces with expressions blank as dinner plates. There were a few horses too, whinnying and shaking their heads, and I thought, what a fine thing to be such a beautiful creature, posing in the light of the fading sun.

I was too young to realize what hard times country people were having then. Family farms that had existed for several generations were being squeezed out by the big industrial operations, or, more mundanely, losing their children to cities and towns and simply fading out. But the evidence was everywhere. Some of the old farmhouses were sagging and frayed, as if they were as tired as their people from the unrelenting effort it took to keep the farms running. Rusted tractors and other machinery sat unused near collapsing barns, and the silos, which must once have been filled with harvested corn or wheat, looked empty and forlorn. I biked past farm after farm, each one in worse condition than the last, turning down smaller unpaved roads to get deeper into the country, and kicking up dust and gravel in my wake.

And then, without warning, we arrived at a cluster of trailers. I knew from driving around with my grandfather that there were little groups of trailers tucked away in all manner of wood and field. In town there were actual trailer parks, and also single trailers on private land, where people were reluctant or unable to build houses. Neither of these arrangements was strange to the town—Uncle Pete and Aunt Bertha lived in a trailer on three acres just outside the town limits, and their son and his family lived in one of the trailer parks. And while the trailers were unsafe in volatile weather (once, a freak tornado hit while Pete and Bertha were at the store, and they came home to find their trailer upside down in the street), there was no particular stigma attached to the people who lived in them.

But the trailers in the country were another matter. If the trailers in town were discarded as people moved on to bigger trailers or houses, this seemed to be the place where the old ones ended up. The trailers I saw that evening were like taped-together scraps of metal, many of the panels not matching in color or even fitting together properly. Some of them didn’t even have steps in front—a bucket or a pile of bricks had been placed where the stairs should have been—and many of the windows were covered with plastic or cardboard. And the children who played in front of them were dressed in torn, faded clothes, their faces and arms streaked with dirt. They were skinny—their knobby knees were broader than their thighs—and their faces seemed collapsed somehow, absent of light, as if they were miniature old people rather than children. I knew these children existed, because a few of them were bused to school in town, including Billy Coles, who was in the other third grade class. They received baths there once a week because some of their trailers lacked running water, and they were regularly deloused.

But it was one thing to see an occasional skinny, unkempt child at school or in town; it was another thing altogether to see them here. I kept riding, a bit embarrassed, as if we had caught them naked. Brett ran along beside me and glanced over at them, but then kept his head down. The children just stared as we went by, but left us alone—to them, we might have been a ghostly vision. But I saw them all clearly, and could not look away—the dullness of their eyes, the unhealthy yellow tinge of their skin. People in town rarely mentioned these cast-off people, and when they did, it was in hushed tones of disapproval, not compassion. Even though I now work with teenagers who live in the inner city, I have never seen anything close to such poverty. These set-aside people were isolated, ingrown, removed from the life of town. As far as everyone else was concerned, they might not have even existed.

The next day, ten students from Mrs. Hebig’s class were absent. There seemed to be an illness circulating among them that bypassed the rest of the school. But from what I could tell from the proud postures and self-conscious gaits of the fifth graders at recess, those who remained with Mr. Garrett were enjoying the attention. Since no one would talk to him, and no one else except for me had heard him speak, Mrs. Hebig’s fifth graders were subjected to all kinds of questions from both children and adults: What does he talk like? Does he have any smell? Does it make you feel scared when he looks at you? And the teachers, for their part, seemed strange and agitated. They saw him but wouldn’t talk to their students about it, despite the persistent questions. Did anyone sit next to him at meetings or in the lounge? Would anyone touch the coffee pot after he had touched it first? There was excitement and curiosity in everyone’s questions, as well as the edge of something else I couldn’t quite define. And there was anticipation too, the awareness that sooner or later something had to change, had to give.

The next day, and the next, there were fewer and fewer students in Mrs. Hebig’s class, until by Friday only eleven reported to school. What I wonder now is not why parents kept their children at home, but why other parents let their children continue to go. I’d like to believe it was a decision that came out of deliberate thought, the strength to do what was right in the face of the town’s small-mindedness—that was the choice I know my father would have made. But more likely the children who remained in class had nowhere else to go, or had parents who somehow didn’t know or care that the regular teacher was gone. Whatever the case, the other teachers spent more and more time talking to each other on the playground and after school, and Miss Anderson seemed more nervous every day. On Friday morning, as she was handing back a spelling test from the day before, she stopped at my desk and cleared her throat. And since she so rarely looked at me or talked to me directly, I knew I was in trouble.

“Michelle,” she said, looking down at me, “why don’t you write in small letters?”

I just stared at her, not knowing what she meant. She waved my test in my face, the red marks of correction vivid and harsh, exposed for everyone to see.

“Small letters,” she said slowly, as if I didn’t understand. “You wrote all these words in capital letters.”

I continued to look up at her. Since I’d written in capital letters all that school year and the year before, I didn’t see why anyone should have a problem with it now. Looking more closely at the words that she held two inches from my face, I saw that she hadn’t corrected any spelling. And yet the paper was covered in red, because what she
had
done was rewrite every single word in small letters.

“Michelle,” she said, with a hostile edge to her voice, “do you even know
how
to write in small letters?”

And it must have occurred to us both, and to everyone else, that I didn’t.

Around me, I heard snickers. One boy hissed, “What a dummy!”

Miss Anderson shook her head and looked at me distastefully. “They must not have taught you very well over there in Japan.”

But they did, I wanted to tell her. Thanks to my mother, I could read and write more kanji than any other child in the Japanese school, even those who had two Japanese parents. I knew characters that fifth graders didn’t know. I had learned the math that she was teaching us two years before and had always scored first in my class. But I didn’t tell her any of this; it wouldn’t have helped.

Instead, I just sat there silently while she declared in a loud voice, “You’re going to really have to work to catch up with the rest of the class. They probably should have held you back another grade.”

That afternoon when I got home from school, my grandmother was already setting the table for company. It was Friday, which meant that Jim Riesling would be coming over for supper. But to my surprise, several of the other coffee shop regulars showed up, too—Earl Watson, Ray Davis, and eventually Uncle Pete, who was a little late, as always. They had come to discuss the Garretts. Because I was the only one who’d actually seen one of them, I was included in the conversation. They let me sit at the dining room table with them while my grandmother ate alone in the kitchen. Normally I would have been thrilled at such an arrangement, at being included in the circle of men. But it didn’t feel like such a privilege that day. Grandma had made my favorite supper—chicken-fried steak, peas, and mashed potatoes—but my food sat untouched while they questioned me. Beneath the table the dog lay on my foot, my only anchor to something gentle and comforting.

“What does he look like?” Earl said, leaning across the table. “I asked Kevin but that boy don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

“What do you mean, what does he look like?” said Ray. “He looks like they all do—black and ugly.”

“Did he try to talk to you?” Earl pressed, ignoring his friend. His eyes were red from anger or beer, and he leaned so close I could see the veins lacing through them. The light shone off his bald spot, which was ringed with the same black hair as his son’s. I looked down to avoid his stare and my eyes settled on his arms. There was a curved, protruding scar on the inside of his right wrist, just where his shirt sleeve ended.

“No,” I lied. “I only saw him in the cafeteria.”

“He ate with you?” Uncle Pete asked, surprised. He was generally so good-natured that it was troubling to see
him
troubled, to see his handsome face screwed into an angry scowl.

“You know, we don’t need to do this,” Jim said, dropping his hands heavily on the table. “Let her be. He has nothing to do with her.”

“He has something to do with
all
of us, even Mike here,” said Charlie, and the others nodded. I didn’t like the expression on his face—it was angry and impatient—so I looked past him at the faded reproduction of the Last Supper, and then to his right, at his gun case. It was like a small wooden hutch for china, lifted up and nailed to the wall. Two shotguns and a rifle leaned with their barrels in grooved slots, their muzzles pointing up toward the ceiling. His pistols—a Colt .38 Special and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum—hung from metal hooks in the back. On the top shelf were my grandfather’s sharpshooting trophies and Brett’s trophies from field trial competitions. Surrounding the handguns, taped to the wood, were yellowed old newspaper clippings from Charlie’s marksman days, and from his time as a baseball player in the amateur leagues.

It bothered me that my grandfather was upset about Mr. Garrett. I had known that he didn’t think particularly well of blacks—I’d heard him say that they were lazy and dependent on welfare, and he seemed to think sensational stories of crimes committed by black people were an indictment of the entire race. But I’d taken these remarks in the same vein as his grunting disapproval of bell-bottoms, or hippies, or war protestors—as general displeasure with difference, a resistance to the world shifting around him. I hadn’t really thought he was serious. And it was one thing to hear his opinions about people
out there
, on TV. It was another to see him directing those feelings toward a real person, someone I knew.

“Listen,” Earl said, and his eyes were piercing. Although it had been over a year since he’d met me, I don’t think he’d ever really looked at me before. “If you see him at school, don’t talk to him. Don’t talk to him, don’t smile at him, don’t treat him like he belongs. He needs to understand that he ain’t welcome here, and everybody in town has to let him know it. That means
everybody
—even you, little girl.”

I looked down and moved some peas around my plate. I wondered if he’d given a speech like this about me when I first came to town. One way or another, the message had been conveyed—Earl’s wife and sons never talked to me.

“I heard the wife’s got people seeing her,” Jim said now, and I was relieved that the men’s attention had been drawn away. “She’s been helping a lot of patients at the clinic.”

“Must be people from out of town,” my grandfather remarked, and he was probably right. It was hard to imagine anyone from Deerhorn going to see her, but people from larger towns like Wausau and Steven’s Point might have felt less uneasy. And those towns had a few black residents too, maybe some who were willing to come all the way to Deerhorn to be treated by a black nurse. She might even have been seeing some black soldiers who were home from the war, since there was no veterans’ hospital in the area. I knew, though, that the other men weren’t happy to hear this.

“Well, the buck’s losing customers, that’s for sure,” Charlie said. “Mike told me there was only ten kids in Janie’s class today.”

“He sounds like a nice enough fellow,” Jim said, seeming almost defiant. “I heard he offered to give some extra help to kids who were having trouble with their schoolwork.”

“Help?” Earl said. “From a nigger?”

With this reproach, Jim settled into silence. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, eyes cast down at the table. I’d always wondered if my grandfather and the other men tolerated some of his unconventional views—like his belief that women should be hired as police officers and that draft dodgers shouldn’t have to serve jail time—because they didn’t take him seriously. But now he was even less aligned with them than usual. After the other men left and we moved into the living room, Jim barely said a word, working slowly on a single beer and staring blankly at the television. He was joined in silence by my grandmother, who didn’t speak to Charlie, but whose sudden, unusual attention to me—a hot chocolate, an extra piece of pie after dinner—let me know she wasn’t pleased about what had happened that evening. I wasn’t feeling very sociable either, and as soon as the Friday Western was over at nine, I escaped into my room.

The room I slept in was actually a guest room, and that’s exactly what it looked like. Because we’d all assumed my stay was going to be temporary, my grandparents hadn’t changed it when I arrived. The furnishings were heavy and wooden, pieces they’d inherited from their families, and the wardrobe was full of my grandmother’s winter clothes. Although the old furniture was big and mismatched, I liked it; it felt substantial and permanent. And I especially loved the old bed. It was huge and enveloping, and that night I dove straight into it, rolling around on the handmade quilt.