“So yawl are sophomores in high school?” said one boy who they thought was named Eric. Gilead was sure he was mixed.
“I’m a junior,” Gilead said. “Russell is a sophomore up in Geschichte Falls.”
“Oh, I got a friend from up there,” the white girl, Jenean, said. She had pale hair and glasses and a cigarette hanging between her lips. Russell couldn’t tell if she and Eric were friends or friends and then some. “She went to this high school called Rosary.”
“Yeah, that’s our sister school,” Gilead told them. “We go to Our Lady of Mercy.”
“That’s straight,” Eric said. “I went to Catholic school. I don’t know what made me wanna come to Barrelon.”
“Me,” Jenean said plainly, and Eric broke into a grin and said, “Girl, you crazy! And the friend you’re talking about, Jenean? That’s Anigel. These guys came with Anigel’s brother.”
“Who?” started Russell.
“Bobby,” Eric said. He pointed to Bobby’s sister. “Her name is Anigel. Like angel.”
“She’s no angel,” Jenean laughed.
“Is she always so mean?” Russell asked in as small a voice as he could use in this loud place.
“Always mean?” Jenean said. “Shit, she’s never mean. She’s like cool as fuck!”
“You all have classes with her?” Russell asked.
“Aw, Anigel’s not in college.” This from Eric. “She works at the curio store a few blocks away. And she writes poetry and shit. She just lives with Greg and Patti. They go to school here. She and Shawn live here. The four of them, but only two in school—”
“Dude,” they heard, “some of the good shit—”
They turned around to see a big, ungainly white dude sitting around the dining room table with some other folks in black. He took out a glass vial, emptied out some white stuff, then, in an instant, snorted it up his nose.
“Holy shit, we’ve gotta go,” Jenean declared, and Eric, nodding, told Russell and Gilead, “Yawl need to get your friends and get the hell out. It’s getting serious here, and the police’ll wanna crack down on this shit.”
“They’ll come?” Gilead said.
“They always do,” Eric said.
Russell was still in shock and he was nodding rapidly as he looked at the folks snorting and began to smell something burning. Gilead was pulling him about the house, looking for D.L. or Bobby or Strogue or anyone when Russell asked him what the burning smell was.
“Bud,” Gilead pronounced, and when he was sure that Russell did not know this term he said, “Weed.”
Gilead was dragging Russell by the wrist, looking desperately for someone they’d come with when he saw Ralph Balusik—whom he would have gladly left to be arrested— standing by a pantry doorway, grinning idiotically while, now and again, he peaked inside.
“Ralph!” Gilead started.
“Shush!” Ralph warned, “I’m keeping guard.”
“Over?” Gilead said.
“Jason,” Ralph hissed and pointed into the pantry.
Russell heard it before Gilead looked into the darkness. Russell’s eyes adjusted to Jason, in the back of the pantry, his trousers down around his ankles, his white boxers around his knees, fucking some girl, her legs rising to encompass his waist, falling, rising up again as he drove himself steadily into her and she cried out in light pants. Russell could not stop looking. There was fierce concentration and loveliness on Jason’s handsome face, a light trickle of sweat. The girl’s hands were pushing frantically through his black curls. Her pale hands were pulling up his shirt, reaching down to caress his ass. Russell saw his ass.
His dick was hard.
Russell felt himself breathing harder and was embarrassed to realize Ralph was right beside him, watching.
Jason’s grey-green eyes turned to them, while he was fucking, looked fiercely on Russell while the girl moaned, and Russell felt all of himself turn red, felt the erection wither. Where was Gilead?
“Ey, Lewis, you like?” Jason’s voice was cruel as if he had caught Russell and not the other way around. “Watch this, Lewis.”
Jason, put his hand to the girl’s face so that she was turned away from him, and then, suddenly, he pushed her down into the floor and started jackhammering her so she cried out frantically.
“You like?” Jason hissed. “You like? You like?”
As he fucked her, Jason kept staring into Russell’s eyes growling:
“You like it, Lewis? How’s it feel, Russell Lewis? Take it, Russ! Take it, Russ. Take my cock! Take my fucking cock, Russ! Take it! Take…Oh, God! Jeeeesusss—” and then he shouted, gasped, and Russell saw Jason’s eyes widen, his face lose control. Russell felt Gilead’s hand tug at his wrist and pull him away. Everything was dizzy to Russell. All he knew was Gilead’s voice asking if anyone had seen Bobby, describing him as best he could. Finally Gilead ended upstairs. Down the hall and into the bedroom that someone had directed him to. Gilead, too exasperated for respect, walked into the bedroom and Russell got one quick glimpse of Bobby Reyes’s round, yellow, shiny ass jouncing up and down and all around and all they heard were the delirious screams of some faceless girl under him.
“Well,” said Gilead, heading down the stairs with Russell in tow, both of them at a much slower pace, “I could certainly use a cigarette about now.”
Someone off in a corner was screaming his head off in the middle of a drug trip, and the air was white and pungent with marijuana.
“I’ve got to get my head clear,” Russell said, his voice a half step off of desperate, and he marched ahead of Gilead to be outside, on the little back porch that looked out onto a small yard. Gilead soon joined him, and they both sat on the porch, in the cool early March darkness, too blown away to even ask the question, “What’s next?”
“This,” Russell decided. “is beyond my depth.”
“You’re right about that.”
The boys nearly jumped out of their socks and turned around to see, in a short black dress, taking a drag that reddened her cigarette tip, one of the most beautiful girls either one of them had ever run across. Her skin was the color of a walnut. She regarded them with dark, hooded, but not unfriendly almond eyes. Her hair was about as black as her dress and down to her back. This was none other than Bobby’s sister they now both realized, and because they’d seen her first as an enraged stranger, it was easier to separate her from their schoolmate who was pumping some girl upstairs.
What was her name? Anigel... Reyes sat herself down between the two of them. Damn, she was tall.
“Cigarette?” she offered. Gilead, despite what he’d said a few minutes ago, rejected it with a shake of the head and a thank you, but something in Russell, in the air, in this night, in the strangeness of this night, made him accept, and he let Anigel light his cigarette. He knew better than to suck on it. He let the smoke sit in his mouth that first time. It was actually a little thrilling to smoke. So this was the mystery his mother and father, Aunt Jackie, and half of his elders had been initiated into so long ago, this gentle intake, this rolling around of the smoke in one’s mouth. He watched the smoke tendril into the dark night from Anigel Reyes’s mouth and nose.
“So are you friends of my brother?” she asked.
“Sort of,” Gilead said. “I’ve known Bobby for about three years.”
“That’s funny,” Anigel mused, crushing out her cigarette. “The two of you don’t look like the kind of people Bobby’d hang around with. I mean, you look like the kind of people he should hang around with, but... It’s Strogue and all them he’s with all the time. You know?”
“Even Ralph Balusik?” Gilead said amazed.
“Ralph?” Anigel twisted her face and laughed. “He’s not that bad. He’s not good either. He’s not really Bobby’s friend. You might say he’s a relation.”
“Wha?” Russell was startled by this new piece of information.
“Our sister, Caroline,” Anigel explained. “She’s married to Ralph’s older brother.”
“The world gets smaller and smaller everyday,” Gilead commented.
“So you do know,” Anigel made a vague gesture with her cigarette at the noisy house behind them, “all of them?”
“We know D.L. more than anyone else,” said Russell. “Actually, Gilead knows all of them. I’ve been keeping a sort of low profile in the school—”
“Bullshit—” inserted Gilead.
“Yeah,” Anigel agreed, chuckling, “How can you keep a low profile looking like,” she lifted some of his vomit colored scarf, “this?”
“Well,” Russell amended. “I just don’t speak to other people.”
“So what happened—?”Anigel interrupted herself. “Wait a minute, guys. What are your names?”
“Gilead Story.”
“Russell Lewis.”
“Anigel Reyes,” Anigel Reyes offered her hand. “I’m pleased to meet you all. Now tell me, Russell, what happened.”
And when he told Anigel about our Lady of the Sacred Marlboro she couldn’t stop laughing.
“I mean,” he went on logically, “for the Mexicans there’s Our Lady of Guadalupe, for the Poles Our Lady of…. Well, a lot of shit. For Black people, Our Lady of Africa---”
“So for smokers, Our Lady of the Sacred Marlboro?” Anigel guessed, slapping her knee.
Russell rolling the smoke around in his mouth, exhaled and said, “You got it.”
“Well shit,” Anigel commented, “That means I’ve got three Virgins to honor!”
“Does your sister have children?” Gilead asked.
“One. Why—oh, yeah. She’ll have four!”
“Only if she smokes,” said Gilead.
“Smoking,” Anigel commented, lighting a new cigarette off the old stub, “is a nasty habit.” She turned to Russell. “Want another?”
The boy looked at her, shrugged, held his hand out. Anigel laughed.
“So, Gilead Story,” said Anigel, “while Russell was hiding out, you were running around being popular?”
“Not exactly,” Gilead answered. “You see, for the bulk of my
Freshmen year I wasn’t Black.”
“Wasn’t?” Anigel started, then understood and nodding, chuckling, ashing, she nodded and let him go on.
“If you speak proper English and act like you have average intelligence, then for some reason you’re not quite ethnic enough. Forget it if they see you reading a book. It was a while before people came around to accepting me as a Negro.”
“How courteous of them,” Anigel answered, remembering similar days. “For me it was the whole being mixed with half of America—part this, part that. Bobby never got the flack though. I hope when you started school Bobby wasn’t one of the assholes.”
“Bobby was always decent,” said Gilead. “But he fit right in whereas I... well, I never fit in anywhere exactly, let alone in our little ghetto.”
“Was that hard?” Russell asked, suddenly aware of a whole different ostracization he’d never known.
“I don’t know, you tell me?” Gilead said, not unharshly. “You don’t fit in any better than me. It wasn’t that I was strange for a Black person. I was just strange.”
“My friends,” Anigel said, lighting yet another cigarette, “I think we are all strange. I was the strangest girl at Rosary when I graduated. The only avowed atheist. I was still a virgin, I was Black, but I didn’t care who knew that I liked to date white boys—who are, by the way no good and that’s why I’m still a virgin—as well as anything else. You know what it all got me?”
“Grief?” Gilead guessed.
“Well that too,” Anigel allowed, “but also—Prom Queen. I still got the tiara too!”
“Shit man!” they heard from inside the house.
“POLICE!” They heard a roar, then a dull screaming which increased.
“Shit!” Anigel swore, spitting her cigarette out and grabbing the boys’ hands. “We gotta hustle.”
They skittered across the yard. Halfway across, the barefoot Anigel said, “Get my shoes. They’re on the porch.”
Then, as Russell turned back and a scream came from the house, she said, “Fuck it. Come on.”
MORE TOMORROW
