Running with the Pack

Except Tallahassee wasn’t enough of a city to have drive-bys, at least not real ones. A silver hatchback full of white kids would occasionally prowl down the narrow streets to shout or throw trash at the crack-veterans who patrolled Southside like the world’s shadiest neighborhood watch. They had pegged Charles with a McDonald’s bag when he was returning from a library trip, the car’s bass almost-but-not-quite muffling the sound of laughter. Looking down at the class-trash they had nailed him with Charles felt the old sting in his eyes and the shaking in his legs, then let out a long sigh and kicked the bag away. At least they hadn’t jumped him like the crew of Southside locals that took umbrage to a cheeseduplittlebitchsteppinout, or whatever they had said.

“They just think you’re a faggot cause of your glasses,” Charles’s dad had told him knowingly, his sour breath reeking like whatever was on sale at the ABC. “Next time clock’em in the face.”

“I can’t fight them all,” Charles had said, instantly regretting having told his father. “And don’t say faggot. The community’s ignorance about homosexuality—”

“Are you a faggot?” Charles couldn’t tell if his dad was messing with him or not but the way he recoiled reminded the boy uncomfortably of his own reaction when Mr. Matherne had casually mentioned his orientation during one of their first lunches together.

“No,” said Charles, his heart picking up like it did when other kids focused their attentions on him. “But so what? As black males it’s our responsibility to cut out the bullshit homophobia—”

“Don’t take that high tone with me,” his dad scowled. “This ain’t that dumb comic strip, and this community don’t care about hurting your feelers. Fifteen years old and already talkin like her. Comin down here’ll do a world of good for you.”

Her. Charles went inside and his dad stayed on the porch, reflecting through his buzz that it was maybe still a little soon to discuss the problematic rearing his ex-girlfriend had given their only child. He had reason enough to be bitter with her, and once the kid got himself together he’d set’em straight. She’d cut north after graduation, not even telling him about the boy until Charles was five, for christsake, and then refused to take the boy to visit, making him fly up instead, and by then Charles was ten or eleven, already looking like that Urkel kid with those glasses and pressed clothes, so it’s not like he could be blamed for being a deadbeat dad or whatever—he didn’t even know about the kid for years, so how the hell was that his fault?

“These are good,” Charles said as he chewed the turnip greens and surreptitiously pushed the ham further away from his oasis of watery vegetation.

“Long’s you’re in my house you’ll have vegtables,” his gramma said, patting his knee.

“Next time let me know before you cook,” said Charles. “I’d like to learn to cook southern like you, ma’am.”

“Cookin’s good work,” his gramma said, giving Charles’s snickering father a reproachful glance. Since moving down Charles had found himself cooking far more than he ever had at home. There was a hippy grocery store an hour walk or so down Magnolia so he’d been able to spend what little allowance his dad gave him on actual safe food. That, and plain bean burritos at the Taco Bell. Once he had started public school Charles had covertly revolted against his mother’s diet, but ever since the funeral he couldn’t look at meat or smell eggs without getting queasy. He knew it would make her happy if he—

“Jus put the hamhock in with the greens, so they soak the flavor and—” His gramma went on, making Charles’ dad howl with laughter as the boy put down his fork. She broke off, confused. “What? What’s funny, Douglas?”

“Nuthin,” Charles’s dad said, spearing a piece of the pink meat and waggling it at his crestfallen son. “Nuthin at all. Clean your plate, Charlie, or no allowance this week. Serious, now, you need meat.”

Reset vegan clock to zero, Charles thought glumly as he picked up his fork. The longest he had made it so far was four days. By the time he had worked his way through the greens his dad was back on the couch and his gramma took the ham off his plate, winking at him. “Tonight you don’t gotta, but you’ll get sick if you don’t start eatin right, Charlie.”

Charles went to his room and looked at his twin stacks of books. The pile that was on semi-permanent loan from the Matherne Collection consisted of the poetry of Langston Hughes, the fiction of Ernest Gaines, and the autobiographies of Olaudah Equiano and Malcolm X. The other stack came from his most recent trek to the library—non-fiction on werewolves, bigfoot, and more werewolves. Not even losing the only real parent he had ever known had dampened his interest in horror movies and books, although of late his predilections had shifted to what his gramma dubbed “things comin out the woods people never heard of,” instead of more mundane slashers and thrillers. Charles had already worked his way through vampires, and avoided the subject of ghosts as carefully as he tried to eschew meat and dairy.

After a while he put the Dead Prez CD Mr. Matherne had given him into the dusty jambox his dad had left him upon moving out to the living room. Since the self-proclaimed Holten Street Clique had liberated Charles of his iPod, the Let’s Get Free album was the only music not trapped inside his mom’s laptop that he was now only allowed to use for an hour a day.

“They’re from Tallahassee,” Mr. Matherne had told him. “Rickards alumni, even; knew that name was familiar. Pro-veg, pro-active.”

“Really?” Charles accepted the compact disc with the reverence of a relic.

“For real, like Sarandon in Fright Night,” said Mr. Matherne. “I also tried to find The Beast Must Die but it’s out of print. So keep your eyes peeled for that down in the dirty dirty.”

“Are they also positive?”

“Who? Oh, no, it’s a movie. Great white hunter has a dinner party.”

“Except?” Charles smiled.

Mr. Matherne smiled back. “Except all the guests are suspected werewolves. And the great white hunter’s a black guy.”

“Cool.”

“Very.”

“I’m not a hunter, but I’m told . . . that, uh, in places like the arctic where indigenous people, uh, sometime might, might hunt a wolf.” A man lecturing over the sound of howling wolves opened the album, a chairman of some group or movement. “They’ll, they’ll take a double-edged blade, and they’ll put blood on the blade, and they’ll melt the ice and stick the handle in the ice so that only the, the blade is protruding. And that a wolf will smell the blood and wants to eat, and it’ll come and lick the blade, tryin to eat. And what happens is, when the, when the wolf licks the blade, of course, ah, he cuts his tongue and he bleeds and he thinks he’s really havin a good—and he drinks, and he licks, and he licks and of course he’s drinkin his own blood, and he kills himself. That’s what the imperialists did to us with crack cocaine . . . ”

That was when Charles always pressed the skip button. The first time he had put the CD in and heard that bullshit he had turned it off, and it was several weeks before he gave it another chance. That Mr. Matherne would give him something like that right after what had happened to his mother was crazy and stupid, and he had hated his teacher for a few days afterwards.

“And they actually think that there is somethin that is bringin resources to them but they’re killing themselves just like the wolf was lickin the blade, and they’re slowly dying without knowing it. That’s what’s happening to the community, you with me on that? That’s exactly and precisely what happens to the community. And instead of blaming the hunter who put the damn handle and the blade in the ice for the wolf then what happens is the wolf gets blame, the wolf gets blamed for trying to live. That’s what happens in our community. You don’t blame the person, the victim, you blame the oppressor. Imperialism, white power is the enemy, was the enemy when they first came to Africa—”

“Bullshit,” Charles whispered, the word a mantra he recited whenever he heard those lies. Maybe some of it was sort of true on some other, higher level, but the crackhead who had knifed his mom wasn’t a victim, he was a wolf, a hunter, and he didn’t deserve any sympathy or justification. He was a beast, and he should die. She had fed him, fed all of them in that slouching brick building the color of old blood that she had single-handedly turned from a crackhouse into a shelter, she was there six days a week and even brought her son along, made him come along if he wanted the allowance he spent on pizza and beef jerky and chocolate milk and everything else he guiltily wolfed down in the cafeteria after throwing away the tempeh sandwiches she made him, the salads and fruit. The junkie wasn’t the victim of white oppression and imperialism, he was a drug addict and he tried to jack her car right there in the fucking parking lot, and Charles knew she couldn’t have, wouldn’t have fought him over it, probably tried to talk him down like she talked everyone down, but instead of getting talked down he stabbed her twenty-eight times and then crashed her car into a parked police cruiser two blocks away.