“You mustn’t talk like that. We were just having a discussion,” my mother said. There was baking flour on her hands and arms and a smudge of it on her cheek.
I went back outside and threw rocks into the canebrake at the end of the street, and did not go home for supper. At sunset, Nick and I sat in the tree house we had built on the edge of Westheimer and watched the electric lights come on in the oak grove where the watermelon stand was. Vernon’s father, with two of his older sons, crossed the street and sat down at one of the tables, a cigar between his fingers, his bald head faintly iridescent, like an alabaster bowling ball. The smoke from his cigar drifted onto another table, causing a family to move. His sons cut in line by pretending they were with a friend, and brought chunks of melon, as red as freshly sliced meat, back to the table. The three of them began eating, spitting their seeds into the grass.
“I hope the Dunlops go to hell,” I said.
“Sister Agnes says that’s a mortal sin,” Nick replied. Then he grinned. The burn on his face looked like a tiny yellow bug under his eye. “Maybe they’ll just go to purgatory and never get out.”
“You stood up for me and I didn’t try to help you,” I said.
“It wouldn’t have done any good. Vernon can whip both of us.”
“You were brave. You’re a lot braver than me,” I said.
“Who cares about Vernon Dunlop? I got a dime. Let’s get a cold drink at the filling station,” Nick said.
Through the slats of the tree house I could see the Dunlops slurping down their watermelon. “I don’t feel too good. I don’t feel good about anything,” I said.
“Don’t be like that, Charlie. We’ll always be pals,” Nick said.
I climbed down the tree trunk and dropped into the tannic smell of leaves that had turned black with the spring rains and that broke with a wet, snapping sound under my feet. Out in the darkness I heard horses blowing and I could see lightning flicker like veins of quicksilver in a bank of storm heads over the Gulf of Mexico. But the nocturnal softness of the season had no influence on my heart and a few minutes later I knew that was the way things would go from there on out. When I got home, my father was gone. That night I slept with my pillow crimped down tightly on my head.
Early Saturday morning, Nick knocked on my screen window. He was barefoot and wore short pants, and his face looked unwashed and full of sleep.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“The flag. It’s gone,” he replied.
“Gone?”
“I left it on the wagon. I forgot to take it in last night,” he said.
We stared through the screen into each other’s faces. “Vernon?” I said.
“Who else?” Nick replied.
I spent the entire day locked inside my own head, my throat constricted with fear at the prospect of confronting Vernon Dunlop. My father had not returned home and I went to the icehouse to see if I could find him. His friends were kindly toward me, and when they sat me down and bought me a cold drink and a hot dog, I knew they possessed knowledge about my life that I didn’t.
I tried to convince myself that someone other than Vernon had stolen the flag. Maybe it had been one of the colored yardmen who worked in the neighborhood, or the Cantonese kids whose parents ran a small grocery up on Westheimer. Maybe I had been unfair to Vernon. Why blame him for every misdeed in the neighborhood?
At dusk I rode my bike down his street, my heart in my throat, as though at any moment he would burst from the quiet confines of his frame house, one that was painted the same shade of yellow as the buildings in the Southern Pacific freight yards. A dead pecan tree stood in the front yard, the rotted gray ropes of a swing with no seat lifting in the breeze. Inside the house someone was listening to Gangbusters, police sirens and staccato bursts of machine-gun fire erupting behind the announcer’s voice. But no American flag flew from the Dunlops’ house.
I made a turn at the end of block and headed back home on a street parallel to Vernon’s, temporarily triumphant over my fears. Then, through a space between two dilapidated garages, I saw our flag and staff nailed at a forty-five-degree angle to a post on the Dunlops’ back porch.
I pedaled straight ahead, my eyes fixed on the intersection, my face stinging as though it had been slapped. I wanted to find Nick or go look for my fath
er again, or to get hit by a car or do anything that would remove me from what I knew I had to do next. The sun was a molten ball now, buried inside a strip of purple cloud, the sky freckled with birds. I turned my bike around and rode back down the alleyway to the Dunlops’ house, through lines of garbage cans, my heart hammering in my ears.
Then a peculiar event happened inside me. Like the stories I had heard on the radio of a soldier going over a parapet into Japanese machine-gun fire or an aviator with no parachute leaping from his burning plane, I surrendered myself to my fate and crossed the Dunlops’ yard to their back porch. With my hands shaking, I pried the flagstaff from the wood post, the nail wrenching free as loudly as a rusted hinge, and walked quickly between the Dunlops’ garage and the neighbor’s to my bicycle, rolling the flag on its staff, confident I had rescued the flag intact.
I stuffed it in one of my saddlebags and kicked my bike stand back into place. Just as I did, I saw Mr. Dunlop shove Vernon from the back door of the house into the yard. Mr. Dunlop wore a strap undershirt and blue serge pants, and he had a dog chain doubled around his fist. He whipped his son with it four times across the back, then threw him to the ground.
“You stole money out of a nigger’s house? Don’t lie or I’ll take the hide off you for real,” Mr. Dunlop said.
“Yes, Daddy,” Vernon replied, weeping, his face powdered with dust.
I thought his father was going to hit Vernon again, but he didn’t. “Folks is gonna say we’re so hard up you got to steal from niggers. What we gonna do with you, son?” he said.
Then he sat down on the step and stroked Vernon’s head as though he were petting a dog. “What are you looking at?” he said to me.