Kevin was standing at the beverage machine when he heard some boys laughing. He thought they were laughing at him, but he didn’t turn to look. He focused on putting his coins in the machine and getting his soda. The voices floated in the air, punctuated by squeals of glee. “Did you see him go down? On the library steps. He took all his books with him!” a boy yelled. “He like lost all his books, and they went into the bushes!”
Another boy, laughter gurgling in his throat, cried, “He’s such an idiot. He couldn’t even find all the books!”
“And then . . . and then,” Marko Lane said, gasping to breathe between bursts of laughter, “he knelt down in the mud and got brown stains all over his pants. It looks like dog turd!” The laughter exploded again. “Look, look! Here he comes!”
Kevin didn’t turn. He got his soda and started away.
“Hey Derrick, how’d you get dog turd all over your pants?” Marko shouted.
“Huh?” Derrick said. “It’s not turd!”
“Look at him,” one of the boys screamed. “He’s sniffing his pants. He thinks it is dog poo!”
“You guys, it’s just mud,” Derrick replied in a hurt voice. “What’s the matter with you anyways?”
“Poor Derrick,” Marko taunted. “He can’t help he’s stupid.”
“I’m not stupid,” Derrick said. “I got a C in history. Ms. McDowell says I’m doing better.”
Kevin thought to himself, “Why is that guy even talking to those creeps? Why doesn’t he just ignore them? Doesn’t he realize that all they want to do is hurt him?” Finally, Kevin turned for a glimpse of the boy under attack. He wasn’t big. He had a lean frame. He looked weak. Kevin didn’t know anything about him, but he probably wasn’t a great student. He was a thin, clumsy boy with poor grades—the perfect foil for bullies.
Marko and his friends were like predator animals in the brush, seeking to take down the weak prey. But animals had an excuse. All they wanted was something to eat. Marko and the others didn’t have to be picking on Derrick. They did it out of pure meanness.
Kevin glanced at Derrick as he passed by. His face was blank. He wasn’t showing any pain if he felt any. Maybe he was used to this kind of treatment. Maybe he had become resigned to it. Maybe it had been going on for so long he thought he deserved it. Or maybe deep in his heart he hated it, hated them, and hoped they would someday be eaten by vultures.
“Hi Kevin,” a girl said. “How’s your day going?”
Kevin turned. It was Alonee, the girl who explained to him who Harriet Tubman was. “Okay,” he said to her.
“You finding all your classes? It sometimes gets confusing when you’re new at a school,” Alonee added.
“Yeah, I’m doing okay. Right now I’m supposed to be going to science,” Kevin said.
“Me too. Come on. We can go together. You’ll like science. Our teacher—his name is Mr. Buckingham and he’s a big environmentalist. He just fumes about all the damage we’re doing on the earth. Sometimes I think he’d like it if all the people disappeared and the world would be left to the animals,” Alonee laughed.
“Well, I guess we’re wiping out the animals pretty fast,” Kevin remarked. “I saw a show on television that said every day a bunch of animal species disappear and it’s all over for them ’cause they’ll never come back.”
A sad look came to Alonee’s face. “I feel sorry for the little animals in my neighborhood. We used to have a lot of empty fields around here leading up to the hills. Then more houses were built, and now the animals got nowhere to go. Like the opossum, and the raccoons, and foxes. They hang out in back yards and scrounge for food. We put out food for them sometimes,” Alonee said.
“Yeah,” Kevin countered. “The trouble with that is, they get used to people and not everybody likes them hanging around. They think people are their friends, and then somebody shows up with a BB gun or poison.”
Kevin noticed that Alonee was a very pretty girl. She seemed really nice too. She was the kind of girl he felt drawn to, but he resisted that sort of feeling. Back home in Spurville, there were girls Kevin had liked. He had wanted to take them for a pizza or down to the barbecue place. But Kevin was always afraid to get close to anybody for fear they’d ask questions he did not want to answer.
Kevin’s parents were living near Hudson, Texas, when his father was sent to prison. When he died, Kevin’s mother moved to Spurville and worked at a nearby hospital. Nobody in Spurville knew about Charlie Walker, and Kevin’s mother preferred it that way. Kevin did too. He didn’t want any questions then. He didn’t want any questions now.
He would run the script of questions through his head.
“Oh, both your parents are dead?”
“Yes, both of them are dead.”
“They must have died young.”
“My mom died of cancer last year.”
“Oh, that’s so sad. She must have been young.”
“Yeah, forty one.”
“And your father? Was he young too? He must have been.”
Kevin wouldn’t lie about his father. He wouldn’t invent any fairy tale that his father died a hero in some war or fell off an oil rig near Galveston. Kevin’s mother never lied about the circumstances of Charlie Walker’s death. Neither would Kevin. So he thought it was better that he didn’t form any close relationships and didn’t have to face any uncomfortable questions. He didn’t want his skeletons to come tumbling out of the closet for the entertainment of people like Marko Lane or the sympathy of a girl like Alonee.
Kevin and Alonee walked into Mr. Buckingham’s class together. He was, as usual, putting up scary charts marking the decline of flora and fauna all over the earth.
“Pesticides!” Mr. Buckingham shouted once the class started. “Why must we eradicate every poor, harmless weed in our gardens? Why must our lawns look so perfect? Do we not know, especially here in California, that we shouldn’t even have lawns? They require too much water. We should grow native, drought-resistant plants. And if a weed has the audacity to poke its head out somewhere, why not reach down and pull the thing up with our hands? Weeding is good for your health. Don’t turn your yards into war zones where you are blasting weeds with poison gas!”
Kevin found himself admiring the man’s outrage. He was passionate about something important. You had to admire that in a man. Kevin glanced at Alonee, and she was nodding in agreement with Mr. Buckingham. Alonee leaned toward Kevin and whispered. “Isn’t he impressive looking? He looks like a king. Mr. Buckingham’s ancestors were royalty in the Songhay Empire centuries ago.”
“Ms. Lennox,” Mr. Buckingham said in his rolling thunder voice. “I thought I made it clear eons ago in this class that we do not chat with our seatmates when I am lecturing. However, since you are so anxious to be talking while I am talking, I invite you now to tell the class in your own words what I have been saying.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Buckingham,” Alonee replied in a humble voice. “You were telling us that, if we find weeds in our yard, we should pull them up by hand and not blast them with pesticides.”
“Correct,” Mr. Buckingham said. “You are forgiven young lady because you apparently have the rare gift of being able to listen attentively and talk at the same time.”
After class, as Kevin and Alonee were leaving, Alonee asked Kevin, “Do you play football? You look like you might.”
“No,” Kevin answered. “I played a little football in Texas but I wasn’t good at it. The only sport I was good at was track. I’m a pretty fast runner. I love to run.”
“You should join the track team, Kevin,” Alonee urged. “Our coach, he’s been struggling to put together a winning team. He’s always looking for kids who can run or long jump. So far we’ve never won a meet.”
Kevin shrugged. “Maybe I’ll go see him.” He knew that Alonee was trying to befriend him, to get him involved in school activities. Maybe she liked him. He was a big, good-looking boy. Or maybe she just felt sorry for him because he was new and not adjusted yet to Tubman. Coming to a new school with the semester well underway was hard. It was even harder if you were shy like Kevin was. Maybe Alonee saw that.
Once again it came to Kevin’s mind that he could really like this girl. But he didn’t want to get mixed up with anybody. One thing would lead to another, and pretty soon he’d be telling her things he shouldn’t be talking about. And people like Marko Lane would find out about Kevin’s father and have another reason to torment Kevin.
Kevin just wanted to finish his junior year, do his senior year here in California, and then be on his own. He figured he’d go back to Texas. He liked Texas. It was home. He liked the wildflowers and the billy goats eating the brush as they roamed through the acacia, mesquite, and mimosa. Kevin liked places like Copperas Creek with white poppies growing all over. He missed Geronimo Creek and the Guadalupe River. He wanted to stand at Woman Hollering Creek again. He wanted to go home to Spurville, maybe because it was the last place his mom was. Maybe he had some crazy notion deep in his heart that she was still there among the wildflowers, laughing like a girl as she ran with Kevin through the fragrant fields.
Kevin and Alonee had left the campus by this time and were heading home on the same street.
“You seem very deep in thought, Kevin,” Alonee remarked.
“Yeah, I guess,” he murmured.
“Do you live close around here? Most of us walk or bike home, but there’s a city bus that picks up some kids who live farther away,” Alonee said.
“I live on Iroquois Street. I can walk or jog. I walked this morning.”
“Did you notice that all the streets have the names of Native American tribes?” Alonee asked.
“No,” Kevin said.
“Yeah, there’s Mohican and Pequot and others too. That’s because the man who laid out the subdivision years ago had some Iroquois in his ancestry. He thought so many streets are named for famous white people, there should be some for tribes. Most of the houses over there are really small, like they built in the old days.” Suddenly Alonee smiled self-consciously. “I talk too much, don’t I? Mom calls me a motormouth.”
“Oh no, you’re fine,” Kevin protested. “I don’t know much about this place. It’s good to find out.”
Kevin saw his street, and he jogged in one direction while Alonee took another. Kevin’s grandfather had warned him not to loiter after school—to come home right away. “This ain’t Spurville, Texas, boy,” he said. “We got gangs around here. We got nasty gangs and dope-heads, and you don’t want to be hanging around school after it empties out. Then’s when they get you. They come crawling out of the woodwork.”
As Kevin jogged down the street, he thought about the day, and he was pretty satisfied with it. Except for some razzing from Marko Lane, it had gone well. He liked all his classes and felt like he could do the work. He wasn’t brilliant but he was willing to work very hard.
“You’re no genius, baby,” Mom often said, “but you’re darn well smart enough to make your way in this world. You can graduate high school and go to college.” Right now, Kevin did not want to go to college after high school. He thought he’d go back to Texas, learn a trade, and maybe be a mechanic or an electrician.
Grandpa Roy liked that idea. “We got a ton of young ’uns graduating from college who can’t do a darn thing folks need doing,” he lectured. “Can’t fix a car, can’t even fix a toilet. Kids need to train for somethin’ useful. Be able to do somethin’. You be good at fixing somethin’ and folks gonna beat a path to your door boy. A bunch of youngsters in white shirts and ties, and they can’t do a blasted useful thing. They haven’t sense enough to relight the pilot on the gas stove if it blows out.”
Kevin’s grandfather had been a very good carpenter. He belonged to the union and he made good money. Kevin’s grandparents owned their tidy little house on Iroquois Street and had no debt to disturb their peace.
But Kevin’s mother dreamed of something more for her only son. She was always filling his mind with knowledge, trying to make him curious about the world. Sometimes at night, just before he went to sleep, Kevin would see his mother’s sweet oval face, her smooth, milk chocolate skin, her bright dancing eyes. He could almost see the dreams she had for him tumbling in her eyes like pinpoints of light.
Now, as he jogged, Kevin said aloud, “We’ll see, Mom.” Kevin looked around then. He wouldn’t want anyone to see him talking to his dead mother, even though he did it fairly often. He felt like she could hear him somehow, and talking to her comforted him.
“Hey dude!” Kevin heard a strange voice when he was almost home. “I haven’t seen you around before. You new in town?” The owner of the voice was a boy like Kevin, but very well dressed. He wore a silk shirt, and gold chains hung around his neck. He had a hollow-cheeked look and circles under his eyes. He seemed sick with something that had no name.
“I’m new here,” Kevin replied.
“Well, listen up. Name is B.J. Brady, and I got a lot of good stuff going on. If you need a job, plenty of change, I’m the man. Just go down to Papa’s Pool Hall and ask for B.J. I’ll be in touch. I’m the man around here. If you’re hungry for a lotta green, I can find you what you need. Y’hear what I’m saying?”
“Okay, thanks,” Kevin said. He thought about his grandfather’s warning about people who came out of the woodwork. Here was one, Kevin thought.
B.J. nodded and disappeared like smoke around the side of an empty house with a sign out front that said, “Bank Owned.”
Kevin continued to the little green frame house with the well-cultivated garden out front. This was where he lived. He would not mention B.J. to his grandparents.
“Got a lot of homework, boy?” Grandma asked when Kevin came in.
“Yeah. Mr. Pippin gave us some stories to read, and Ms. McDowell gave us a chapter, and I got math problems too,” Kevin told him.
Grandpa was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper. He was seventy-seven years old and he had bad arthritis. Sometimes his walk was very wobbly. Grandma was always after him to use his walker, but he indignantly refused. “I am not some doddering old man,” he insisted. “My daddy didn’t use a walker when he was ninety years old!”
“I’ve got to write a report on some endangered animal for Mr. Buckingham in science too,” Kevin went on.
“I can tell you where there’s an endangered animal right here in this house,” Grandpa snapped. “It’s that cat always wanting to get under my feet. She almost made me trip this morning. I was about to break her neck. She’s running around all day like she’s out to make me fall. Now she’s endangered, I’ll tell you.”
“Taffy don’t mean no harm,” Grandma sniffed. “She is just wanting to play. You got to watch your feet Roy. That’s why you need to use the walker.”
Good smells were floating from the kitchen—fried chicken, potatoes and onions, and fresh baked bread. Grandma was a good cook. She made pecan and sweet potato pie almost every other day.
“Meet any nice friends, Kevin?” Grandma asked.
“Yeah, a lot of the kids in my classes are nice,” Kevin answered.
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Grandma said. “I don’t think folks here are as friendly as they are in Texas, but I say anywhere you go you can make nice friends if you are nice yourself. Even young folks. They aren’t half bad. When I take the bus somewhere and it’s crowded, why those boys get right up and offer me their seats. Maybe they’re dressed funny with strange trousers and hairstyles I don’t get, but they are kindhearted, and that’s what matters.”
Kevin glanced over at the dining room wall. He noticed a new picture on the wall, a beautiful photograph of Kevin and his mother, taken last year when they were all in Texas together. It was the last wonderful vacation they all had together.
“When did you hang that, Grandma?” Kevin asked.
“Just today boy,” Grandma said. “It’s so pretty, don’t you know. You are such a handsome boy and my Ciana is so beautiful, like a young girl. She’s past forty in that picture, but she could be just a girl. I just feel good to have the picture there. It makes her feel closer to me. Do you like it, Kevin?”
“Yeah, Grandma, it’s beautiful,” Kevin said. He had a photograph of his mother in his wallet and he looked at it often. The photograph on the wall both touched his heart and caused him pain. She looked so healthy there. It hardly seemed possible that she had just eight months to live when that picture was taken. They were all so happy that day, as they barbecued ribs along the Guadalupe River.
Kevin also had a photograph of his father in his wallet. His dad was a handsome man. Kevin looked very much like him, except for his eyes. Kevin had his mother’s eyes. Kevin’s father was big and broad shouldered, and he had a wide, smiling face. He was about twenty when the picture was taken. Another nice picture was never taken of him. From then on, all the pictures were taken by the police.
Kevin’s memories of his father were hazy. He was a big, jovial man who carried Kevin on his shoulders and often sang songs like “Ol’ Man River” in a deep, rumbling voice. When Kevin looked at the photograph, he felt sad, but not heartbroken.
Looking at his mother’s picture was different. It broke his heart.