Fire Shut Up in My Bones (25 page)

“So, he just gone leave y’all hanging,” Malik said, shaking his head in disappointment, the way he always seemed to do when talking about us pledges. “See, that’s the problem: y’all boys ain’t been pledged right. Come on, let’s go.”

We walked back downstairs and got in the car, and the four Brothers drove Marlon and me to an isolated gravel road running past an expanse of standing water just off campus. There was a cardboard box in the middle of the road. Malik stopped the car. The Brothers got out and inspected the box, then called for us to get out and look. The box was filled with kittens. Marlon and I stood over the box, waiting.

Then one of the Brothers said, “Y’all have a choice. You can get your asses beat or you can throw that box of kittens in that water with that dead dog.” I turned to examine the water, and indeed the carcass of a dog was rotting in it. “So what’s up? What’s the answer? Snap it off.”

Pledges were always supposed to speak in unison—one voice, one answer. Whoever was the lowest line number among any group snapped his fingers so that all the pledges could begin speaking at the same time. Marlon was ahead of me on the line, so he had to snap for us to speak.

Snap.

“Yes,” Marlon said. “No,” I said at the same time.

“What?” the Brothers barked. Now they were angry. Differing answers were not allowed. “Y’all muthafuckas better figure this shit out!”

Marlon and I turned to look at each other, both of us confused and a bit upset with the other. We huddled. “What are you doing, Marlon? We can’t drown those kittens,” I said. “Blow, it’s those fucking cats or us,” Marlon huffed. Before we could settle our disagreement, the Brothers demanded a new answer, one answer.

Marlon snapped. “Yes,” he said again. “No,” I said again. Again we huddled. Again he snapped. Again we delivered the discordant responses.

The Brothers, frustrated, placed the box in my hands. “Blow, since you keep saying no, either throw the kittens in the water or you walk in there with that damn dog yourself,” one of them said.

I looked down into the box full of helpless trembles, faint mewing, and the same sad eyes as the kitten in the picture above Uncle Paul’s bed, and I turned and started walking toward the water. There was no way that I was going to drown those kittens, beating or no. And besides, I had seen so many dead things in my life that the dog didn’t bother me one bit. I would wade into the water and hold the box of kittens up out of it.

As I was about to take my first step into the water, the Brothers yelled, “Stop!” Then, “This was a test. Blow, you passed. Marlon, you failed. Get in the car.” I put the box down by the side of the road and went back to the car.

I now suspected that the Brothers had probably placed the box of kittens in the road before we supposedly happened upon it. I wondered whether the Brothers would circle back to get them. Or would they be able to climb out of the box? How long could they survive if no one returned for them?

As I worried about the kittens, the car pulled into a cemetery far off the highway. We all got out. The Brothers got their paddles out of the trunk. As they made me drink Pledge Juice, they savagely beat Marlon. My anger at Marlon’s cowardice—his willingness to drown the kittens to save himself—quickly dissolved into empathy and unease. He didn’t deserve this, no matter his mistake. I tried repeatedly to intercede, to take some of the blows for him, as we had been taught to do, but the Brothers wouldn’t allow it.

Marlon took more blows that day than I’d ever seen another person take—the beating pushing far beyond making a point or toughening a pledge and into something truly maleficent. In the middle of the beating, Calvin blurted out, “I like this shit more than sex!” The other Brothers turned in disbelief and laughed at him for the sadistic implication of the remark. He insisted he was joking. I wasn’t so sure. When they were done—short of breath and drenched in sweat and cruelty—Marlon could barely stand without using my shoulder for support.

A few days later, as I was getting some sleep in my dorm room—a rare occurrence during Hell Week—the phone rang. Groggy and without thinking, I answered it. That was a no-no. Answering a phone could get you in big trouble.

It was Marlon. “Blow, come get us! We at Malik’s crib!”

“Aiight.”

Damn, I thought. Why was he calling me? How did he get caught, again?

I threw on some clothes and drove over, expecting him and whichever line brothers he was with to be waiting and ready to jump into the car. But when I pulled up I saw no one, just a bunch of Brothers’ cars. I knew immediately that it was a group hazing session.

Impulse said to turn and leave; honor said otherwise.

I walked up to the door. I could hear the yelling, the
thwop
s, the commotion, the loud music that was not able to drown it all out. My heart sank.

I knocked on the door. Everyone got quiet.

“Who is it?!”

“Blow.”

Calvin opened the door with a scowl, his chest heaving, his breath short. The air inside was humid and rank from the smell of sweaty bodies and all-but-broken ones. He grabbed me and snatched me inside. As we passed through the living room I could see DJ Mardi Gras on my right, being forced to drink his own vomit from a blender because he had thrown up the original concoction he’d been given back into the container. On my left, a boy named Don was stretched out on the sofa, half conscious, convulsing like a sprayed roach, being fanned. He had taken so many “cymbals” that his ears were bleeding. Cymbals was what the Brothers called boxing your ears with the slap of open hands as hard as they could, like they were crashing cymbals.

This was crazy. It was a nest of Massive Hazers. Situations like this were so much worse than the chapter-sanctioned hazing sessions at the oil field, where the Massive Hazers were somewhat constrained by more moderate Brothers. At the oil field, the chapter officers’ unofficial job was to make sure that no one got severely injured, so the home chapter wouldn’t get in serious trouble. But no officers were present on nights like this.

When I got to the back of the room I saw Nash. Oh no, I thought.

“Come on, scrub. Bend that ass ova,” Nash said, directing me into the cut for a paddling.

Oh no, I thought again. My wallet was in my back pocket. That was a mistake pledges were taught never to make. The Brothers took wallets. I tried to sneak it out and into my front pocket, but Nash noticed. “Wait a minute. Give me that. Hell, yeah,” he said.

His eyes darted around the room, and he grabbed me, Dexter, and Marlon and ushered us outside and into my car. Nash flipped through my wallet, pocketed the lone twenty, and then took out my bank card. “Let’s go to the bank, Blow.” I searched for a lie to protect my bank account, which had quite a bit of money in it, from unspent scholarship funds and work-study pay.

“Big Brother, that card is on my mother’s account, and she’s watching it. She knows I’m on line. If I take money out, she’s going to know something is up.”

Nash frowned and stared at me from under his bushy brows, knowing that I was probably lying but unwilling to risk creating a problem with the college or the national fraternity this late in the pledge period.

“Aiight then, let’s go. You gone buy me some beer and somethin’ to eat.”

We went to the largest grocery store in town and did some shopping. I paid. We got our bags, got back in the car, and drove to Nash’s house, a small, rundown trailer in the back row of a poorly maintained trailer park. When we pulled up to the trailer Nash said, “Where’s Brandon? I want him!”

All the Brothers wanted Brandon—apart from the payback for his older brother’s cruel treatment of previous pledges, Brandon was full of excuses and always found ways to be safely away from the group.

“We don’t know, Big Brother.”

We took the groceries inside, then Nash said, “Aiight, Blow and Dexter, you go find Brandon. Marlon, you stay here. You ain’t goin’ nowhere till I get Brandon.”

By now the sky was turning the pastel colors of morning, heralding the rising sun. Dexter and I had no idea where Brandon was. But this time I was earnestly searching. I wanted to find Brandon and force him into the car. I figured that boys like Marlon had taken more than enough beatings, and Brandon had avoided many. If I had to deliver Brandon to save Marlon that morning, I intended to do it.

Dexter and I went to the trailer park where Brandon’s girlfriend lived. I got out and knocked on the door. She said Brandon wasn’t there. I figured she was probably lying, but there was nothing I could do about it.

But when I turned to walk back to the car, I saw that Dexter had opened the door, fallen out onto the ground, and started a slow army crawl, on his stomach, knees, and elbows.

I walked beside him, yelling at him to get up.

“Dexter! What you doin’?! Get up! We gotta go!”

“I can’t do this shit no mo’, Blow.”

“What?! Dexter, get the fuck up off that ground!”

“I can’t do this shit no mo’!”

“Fuck it!” I said.

I went back to my car, got in, slammed the door, and peeled out. I looked back through my rearview mirror, watching Dexter crawl in the middle of the street as darkness gave way to light. I was going to have to do this alone.

But my frantic search to find Brandon and save Marlon was failing, and my failure gave way to exhaustion and anger just as I was passing Kaboom’s house. I decided that if I couldn’t save Marlon, Kaboom, as our dean of pledges, needed to. He came to the door at my urgent knocking, not happy to see me. I spilled out what happened at the crazy hazing session, about Mardi Gras and the vomit, Don and the cymbals, Dexter crawling in the road, and the fact that Marlon was still being held at Nash’s house. “Somebody is gonna get hurt.”

“This is Hell Week. I’m not the DP this week. Ain’t no rules.” And with that Kaboom closed the door.

Okay, if there were no rules, then it was on. I drove back to Nash’s house. I was going to rescue Marlon . . . somehow. I knocked on the door. A girl’s voice purred, “Come in.” Nash’s girlfriend was lying on the couch watching Marlon dance, which he was doing with only one shoe on, Nash’s idea of entertainment. He had taken Marlon’s other shoe to make sure he didn’t run away.

“Where’s Nash?” I asked.

“He’s asleep,” Marlon said, still dancing.

“Asleep? Then let’s get the fuck outta here!” I said.

“But what about my shoe?” Marlon asked.

“Fuck your shoe!”

The girl seemed nonplused and said nothing.

As we turned to leave, I saw the collection of Brains and scrolls that Nash had stolen, arranged like hunting trophies on a brass-and-glass shelf by the door.

Each pledge needed his Brain and his scroll to cross over, but giving these items such importance made them targets of all manner of foul play and skullduggery on the part of the Brothers, who tried to get them from us so that they could demand a ransom for their return.

My own scroll had been stolen by a Brother named Adam, who lived in the honors dorm. He knew that I was on scholarship and needed to keep up my grades, so he told me I could come by his room to study during the day if I needed to. I felt a regional kinship with him—he was from Shreveport, about forty miles from Gibsland—and took him up on his offer.

One day in his room he asked me how I was holding up. I let down my guard and began talking to him. Then, without warning, swoosh! In an instant he had grabbed my scroll and swung a razor blade to cut the taut leather strap that held it around my neck.

“That’s right, muthafucka! Got yo’ shit! You gone have to pay me to get this shit back!”

I stood there stunned. Never mind the scroll—he had just swung a razor blade a couple of inches from my jugular. What if I had flinched?

I had to pay Adam $60 to get the scroll back, and I never looked at him the same way again.

I saw now that Nash had more of our Brains and scrolls than I could count. He stood to collect hundreds of dollars in ransom. Why should my line brothers have to pay, I thought. I grabbed them all. “No rules.” Marlon and I broke for the door, got in the car, and peeled out. I knew that Nash wouldn’t stop until he’d made me pay for my thievery, but I didn’t care.

This might have seemed a small thing to some, this bucking of rules in the midst of a brutal survival game, but to me it was a revelation. It was the first time I had taken a bold action, though it would surely bring me harm. It was the first time I realized that my strength was rooted not only in long-suffering but also in risk-taking. I came closer to crossing over into manhood that morning at Nash’s.

Luckily for me, Nash was arrested for an outstanding warrant shortly thereafter. When we heard the news, my line brothers and I jumped and shouted, especially me.

A couple of weeks later, at the fraternity house, we officially entered the brotherhood. It was a rather anticlimactic ceremony, but after came the emotion. Boys who had been on opposite ends of beatings embraced on the same side of membership—laughing and crying, chanting and drinking. It was a time of rejoicing and release, to celebrate completion and new beginnings. All was supposed to be forgiven, the hazing not to be seen as personal but as an essential part of the process. No gripes. No grudges.

On this I failed. I would absolve the moderates but always look askance at the Massive Hazers, especially Nash.

10

The summer after pledging was my summer of listlessness, a time spent mostly resting—trying to let my body recover from weeks of sleepless nights and stressful days.

One of the few things I remember was a ride home from Houston with my mother. Nathan had moved there after college to work with Grandpa Bill on the railroad. That summer Nathan had been badly burned while working on a car when the radiator erupted, and we had gone to visit so that my mother could help nurse him back to health.

On our way back home to Gibsland, somewhere among the one-horse towns and hundred-head cattle ranches of east Texas, my mother spoke.

She told me she had seen a real difference in me, that I was growing up, that I was becoming a man. Among the things left unsaid was that she was proud of me. Proud. Of me. But she didn’t have to say the words for me to hear them. And she didn’t hide the emotion of it in a joke, the way we often did. It stood, naked and tender and true.