Dwayne Brewer goose-stepped down the beer aisle of the Franklin Walmart wearing a latex chimp mask he’d found on the floor by the Halloween decorations. The mask was hot and his breathing was loud. The inside smelled of cheap molded rubber and he slicked the nylon hair back through his fingers while he chuckled at a woman who sneered.
She wore pastel-colored scrubs and white tennis shoes, her highlighted hair pulled back in a ponytail. Through the eye slits of the mask, he saw a little girl, maybe six years old, with one of her fingers hooked in the corner of her mouth, standing beside the woman. Dwayne scratched under his armpit with one hand and clawed at the back of his head with the other, hopping around bowlegged like a monkey, and the child laughed. He pulled the mask off and tossed it into the open cooler, his skin cold with sweat as he ran his hand over his face and reached for a case of Bud heavy. Tearing a ragged hole in the cardboard, he fished out a beer and cracked the top.
“Have a blessed day,” he said with a wide smile, tilting the open can toward the woman and nodding. She eyed him like the fiend he was, her little girl hiding behind her leg, spellbound with curiosity as the giant man before her swallowed half the can in one tremendous gulp.
The thing about Walmart was that even a man like Dwayne Brewer could go unnoticed. People pushed their buggies with dead-eyed stares, everything sliding by in the periphery. Consumerism scaled this large had a way of camouflaging class.
At the end of the aisle, he squeezed past a beefy gal in tiny shorts who had a baby on each hip and three children running circles around her. One of the kids reached out as he made his next lap and knocked an endcap of Cool Ranch Doritos onto the floor. The woman was in the middle of a conversation with someone she knew, an older woman who had a toddler with her finger up her nose riding in the buggy. The beefy gal kept saying over and over, “Lord no this ain’t mine,” shaking the child on her left hip, “Me and Clyde stopped after this one,” shaking the one on her right, “This here’s Sara’s. You remember Sara, don’t you? This is Sara’s little girl, Tammy. She’s my niece.”
Buggies were banging and lights were flashing and cash registers were beeping and kids were wrestling a Halloween blow-up ghost decoration that was meant to stand in a front yard and the sheer madness of it was enough to send any sane person into a seizure, but Dwayne didn’t have a care in this world. He strutted right through the middle of the chaos, smiling because it was Friday and he had a wad of cash in his pocket from pawning five stolen chainsaws and a flat-screen TV.
Black teddies and bloodred lingerie were rolled back to $9.87. He finished that first beer standing by the floor rack running satin through his fingers with his eyes closed, daydreaming about the last woman he’d slept with. When he was finished, he crumpled the can in his fist, balanced it in the cup of a beige-colored bra, and opened another.
From where he stood, he could see straight down the shoe aisle where a kid sat on a bench. The boy reminded Dwayne of his brother. Shaggy, strawberry-blond hair covered his ears, and his red skin was dotted with freckles. Aside from a thick pair of Coke-bottle glasses, black military frames, he could’ve been a spitting image of Sissy at thirteen or fourteen years old. The kid wore a shabby shirt and grass-stained jeans that were muddied at the knees. He was trying on a pair of gray-colored tennis shoes, some off-brand jobs with Velcro straps. Out of nowhere two boys came around the corner and loomed over him. A boy in tight jeans, with hair that sliced at an angle across his eyes, snatched one of the shoes out of the boy’s hands, looked it over, shook his head, and crowed.
At that distance, Dwayne couldn’t hear what was said, but he understood. He could read it on that poor boy’s beaten face. He’d heard it all his life, about the house he grew up in and the car his daddy drove, that his shoes weren’t any good and neither were his clothes. He heard it about his drunk grandfather who stood on the bridge in town and cussed at the river when he was old and lost his mind. He heard it about having a funny haircut and for smelling musty after gym class, heard it for getting free lunches, heard it because someone saw him standing outside the laundromat, heard it because his mama worked the register at Roses. He’d heard that word trash all his life and, over the course of thirty-six years, he’d heard about enough.
There were two ways to cope, but Dwayne had only ever known the one. He’d haul off and open a boy’s head to the white meat in the blink of an eye and that’d be that. They don’t talk so much with blood in their mouth, he thought, and it was true. But he’d seen the other way of coping in his brother, the way bitterness and anger, sadness and sorrow meld into a vacant stoicism.
Bury it inside. Keep your eyes forward.
The boy stared straight ahead, expressionless and empty.
The kid with tight jeans jerked his head to the side to flip his hair out of his eyes. He fit his hand inside the shoe and pressed the sole against the boy’s face. The boy didn’t move or say a word. He kept his eyes on the boxes of shoes in front of him while the other boys taunted him. The longhaired boy shoved him hard in the side of the head then and Dwayne’s blood rose up into his eyes. He could feel his fists clenching tight and he took a long slug of cool Budweiser to try and ease that feeling. The bully hesitated for a second, testing the water. When he saw the kid wasn’t going to react, he shoved him again, harder this time, so that he fell onto the floor. They stood there chuckling and the kid climbed back onto the bench and gazed straight ahead until they walked away with wide-set smiles, their eyes aglow with arrogance and pride.
Dwayne watched the boy on the bench for a long time. The boy didn’t cry. He didn’t lash out in anger. He went right back to what he was doing, trying on a pair of kicks, like nothing had happened at all. Dwayne wanted to go over to him and tell him that things didn’t have to be that way, tell him he needed to stand up for himself and bash that little motherfucker’s head in next time, that then they’d learn, but he didn’t. He wandered on back toward the sporting goods, hoping they might have a brick or two of Winchester white box.
He finished his third beer at self-checkout while the attendant verified his ID and plugged his birth date into the computer. At first she seemed like she wanted to say something about him drinking in the store, but in the end she shook her head and stamped away because it’s hard to give a shit for $7.25 an hour. He fed a twenty-dollar bill into the machine and waited for it to spit out his change.
There was a commotion by the entrance, and when Dwayne looked up he saw those same two boys strutting along, the one with long hair hobbling pigeon-toed with his hand limp at his chest, making a face like he had some sort of mental defect. Dwayne looked behind him and that’s when he saw the woman the boy was mocking, a handicapped greeter with a bowl cut and tinted glasses staring on like she was witnessing a miracle. The longhaired boy tossed a set of keys to his buddy and turned into the bathroom as his buddy headed for the far exit.
Dwayne set the suitcase of beer by the opened men’s room and stuck his head inside long enough to make sure the kid was alone. The boy was facing the ceiling with his eyes closed at the urinal, and Dwayne knelt down to make sure there weren’t any feet in the stalls. There was no one in the bathroom but the two of them. A CLEANING IN PROGRESS sign was stashed behind the door and Dwayne barred it across the jamb to stop anyone from interrupting. He walked inside and stood directly behind him, the boy not having a clue he was there until he turned.
Dwayne Brewer was a giant of a man, six-foot-five and two hundred sixty if he weighed an ounce. When the boy turned around, there he stood, and the boy jumped back like he’d walked onto a snake. “Shit, mister, you scared the hell out of me.”
Dwayne didn’t say anything. He stood there for a moment, silently studying him.
The boy had on a black T-shirt that read YOUNG & RECKLESS. A pair of mint-green jeans painted his legs. He had long hair that cut down his face and he kept flipping it out of his eyes like some sort of nervous tick.
“How old are you, boy?”
He looked at Dwayne funny. “Sixteen,” he said.
Dwayne scrubbed at the back of his head with his knuckles, squinted his eyes like he was weighing a tremendous decision. “That’s old enough,” he said. He pulled a 1911 pistol from the back of his waistline and aimed it square at the boy’s forehead.
The boy’s face immediately fell and his arms came up instinctively, hands raised as if by strings.
“You scream and I’ll blow your little pea-headed brains out. You understand?”
The boy’s mouth sagged open and he nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Brett,” he said.
“Brett what?”
“Starkey.”
“Starkey? I don’t believe I know anybody named Starkey.”
“I live up Clarks Chapel.”
“Where up Clarks Chapel?”
“Sunset Mountain Estates.”
“Your family from around here?”
“What?”
“I said is your family from around here?”
“My mom and dad are from Saint Pete.”
Dwayne pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers and closed his eyes for a second, then nodded his head. He looked down at the boy’s clean pair of high-tops. He wore the shoes loosely with the laces untied and stuffed inside, the tongues pulled over the bottoms of his jeans. “How much them shoes cost?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean, I don’t, I don’t know,” the boy stuttered. He had one of those faces that turned beet red when he was about to cry. His eyes were almost crossed as he stared down the gun.
“You mean you don’t know because you don’t remember, or you don’t know because your mama and daddy paid for them?”
The boy gaped dumb and speechless.
“Which is it?”
“My mom bought them.”
Dwayne grunted and nodded his head. “Well, I’m going to need you to go ahead and take them shoes off.”
The boy didn’t move.
“This is the last time I’m going to say it, boy. Take them shoes off your feet.”
Toe to heel, the boy slid his shoes off and stood on the wet floor in bleach-white socks.
“Now, pick them up,” Dwayne said.
The boy did as he was told.
Dwayne nodded toward the beige metal partition sectioning off the stalls. “I want you to go over there to that first stall and open the door.”
The boy walked over and pushed the door open with his elbow.
Dwayne followed and stood with his back against the tile wall by the sinks, the gun still raised and steady. He peered around the boy and saw what he expected: a commode backed up with toilet paper and tinged water. “Go ahead and put your shoes on in there.”
The boy looked at him in disbelief. Tears glassed his eyes. He hovered over the commode and set his shoes down gently.
“Don’t just float them on top. I want you to put them down in there.”
The boy pushed them slightly so that water lapped at the soles.
“I said push them down in there!” Dwayne growled through clenched teeth. He lurched forward until the gun was less than a foot from the boy’s face, and the boy dunked his shoes underwater, his arms wet above his wrists.
He cried hard now. His cheeks were slicked with tears and his breath sputtered from his lips.
“Don’t go getting soft now,” Dwayne said. “You were a tough guy a few minutes ago with that boy, wasn’t you? I saw how you were shoving him around. You was tough with him, so be tough now.”
The boy’s eyes were squeezed shut and he looked like he was going to be sick. He had his head turned away from the toilet and his face shone like a moon lit by the yellow light above the stall.
“That’s good,” Dwayne said. “Now put them on.”
“What?”
“I said put them on.”
Setting his shoes on the floor, he slid his feet inside like he was putting on a pair of bed slippers. A puddle widened around him and his feet squished inside.
“Go on and tie them now,” Dwayne said. “We wouldn’t want them falling off your feet, or you tripping over the laces. That’s no way to walk.”
Again, the boy did exactly as he was told. Dwayne found himself thinking that the kid might’ve been all right if it had been a gun to his head every second of his life. The boy hovered there like he was trying not to put all his weight down. He looked like it was the first time in his life he’d ever been put in his place, and that made Dwayne proud. Everyone needs to be broken, he thought. Empathy’s not standing over a hole looking down and saying you understand. Empathy is having been in that hole yourself.
“I want you to remember this,” Dwayne said. “All your life, I want you to remember this day. What could’ve been and what was.”
The boy stared at him, confused.
“The two of us, we crossed paths for a reason. It was fate that brought me here. You understand?” He tucked his pistol in his waistband at the small of his back and flipped his white T-shirt over the grip to conceal what he carried. Checking himself in the mirror, he strolled toward the door and took down the sign, heading out the way he’d come and picking up his beer as he passed. Outside, things were the same as they were a few minutes before, but inside, inside felt different.
One man could not even the hands of Justice, but he could tip the scales for a moment, pin down the privileged at least long enough to smile. The sun was going down and Sissy had said he’d be home by seven.
Dwayne couldn’t wait to tell his brother the story.