I used Dad’s brown shoe polish and colored my skin before I left the house. Movies I’d seen up to that point, like First Blood, had drilled into me that camouflage is needed when embarking on a secret mission.
I stayed out of the streetlights and the headlights of oncoming cars. I thought I was the shadow Grand said I was. Just as I was a turn away from the sheriff’s, I was suddenly tackled from behind and forced to the ground.
“Got you now.” The voice was more growl than anything else.
The perpetrator’s arms were short but strong. So strong, it was like I could do nothing right to get away from him. He kept me forced down on my stomach, my face pressed against the ground and the prickly blades of dry grass.
I felt something wet and hard embedding in the flesh on my arms. The man was biting me, my skin pinched up between his sharp teeth. He tasted the shoe polish. Spit, cursed, and spit some more.
His hold loosened enough for me to back my head up off the ground and yell for him to get off me.
“Fielding?” The growl was gone from his voice.
“Mr. Elohim? What you doin’?”
“What you doin’?” He quickly let me go and moved back. “Walkin’ the hours of night. All niggered up.”
“I’m camouflaged.” I wiped his slobbers off my arm, maybe some of my own blood. “You really bit me hard, Mr. Elohim.”
He stood as he used his sleeve to wipe the polish from around his mouth. “I was merely usin’ an old army technique to disarm the enemy.”
He looked even shorter in the night, all white shirt and white jeans.
“I ain’t the enemy, Mr. Elohim.”
“Shoe polish makes ya close to it.”
*
I sat there long after he left, maybe a little too long. I felt sore in the toes. Like I had been stretched up on them, looking over a ledge, straining to see what was. Up on toes, raising to the truth. Which was what? I wasn’t yet sure. I knew it reminded me of something. Something I’d seen. A tractor breaking cobwebs in a field. Dead spiders on the wheels. That’s what the truth I didn’t yet know reminded me of. That’s what its edge sang to me that night as my toes lowered me back down. Down to the quiet grass. But not for long. I had to pull myself up. I had things yet to hear.
The sheriff lived in a honey-colored brick house close to the center of town. The front of the house was dark, though there was a light in the back. I followed it and peeked through the open windows. The room had a table with three chairs pulled out. There was some hard candy on the table in an offering pile but no empty wrappers. Sal was too smart for that.
I eased down onto the dying grass below the window. I thought they would return to the room, so I sat there and waited so long, I fell asleep.
I dreamed myself, waving. Not hello, but good-bye. The waves falling from my hand in objects. Baseballs. Overalls. Dad’s suits, three pieces at a time. Mom’s aprons. My own fingers, falling. Me crumbling away until no one’s at home. Just a pile of baseballs and aprons.
What was that sound?
The dream getting pushed back behind the reality of a June bug landing on my cheek and its wings buzzing together into a close. I brushed the bug off. It flew away wondering why. It was still night, but the light of the room had been turned off. The lost moment creaked like a door closing.
I headed home. As I was nearing Main Lane, the night filled with crystal sounds. I ran toward those sounds. When I got to the lane, I saw the streetlights were all broken, the lane left in a darkness that allowed whoever was shattering the store windows to do so unseen. I could hear their feet pounding on the brick sidewalks. Sometimes it sounded like one person. Other times it sounded like more.
In the houses close to the lane, lights began to flick on. Porches were lit and screen doors were opened.
Voices called out.
“What’s goin’ on out there?”
“Sounds like glass breakin’.”
“Best check it out.”
And so they came, running toward the lane with flashlights and questions. I was illuminated, while whoever was really at fault was running the other way.
“Hey, it’s that black boy. He’s out here breakin’ the store windas.”
They charged, bright light with feet, blinding my eyes. They were going to teach me a lesson, they said. I felt someone grab my arm. Someone else on the other. I tried to tell them it was me.
“Kill ’im.” A woman’s voice. She said it so casual, I imagined her standing there in her housecoat and slippers and hair rollers, one arm around her waist, propping the other up to her mouth, where a cigarette slipped in and out, smooth like a dream.
Someone wrapped their arms around my neck. I was pulled back into a sweating, bare chest. The hair on it as dense as the foliage of a jungle and me straining not to get lost to the jaguars.
“Hey, let ’im go.”
Was that Grand’s voice?
“I said get off ’im.”