Welcome to Braggsville (11 page)

The Wu-Tang Clan. Quint spit out his drink laughing.

Tiger Woods? The black part was cheating, and the Chinese part was driving when he hit the tree. Charlie shook his head regretfully.

We each give our children funny names. There was silence, until he added, That white people can't pronounce. It's a conspiracy.

White people can't cook our food, but they love to eat it. Though someone here makes good-ass ribs. He hiccuped. Excuse me. Good ribs. That was my black joke. I gotta represent. He gave Charlie a thumbs-up.

Oh yeah. Chinese people got some things in common with Southerners, too. You ready for this, Braggsville? I was at this store—he pointed over his shoulder, Lou's Bait and Cash and Copy.

A few people in the crowd pointed in the other direction.

It's in the other direction!

It's called Lou Davis's Cash-n-Carry Bait Shop and Copy Center!

Yeah! the stripper yelled.

The crowd all gestured toward town until Louis, too, was pointing in the right direction.

Yeah, so Chinese people are big into directions, too. He paused, collecting himself. But, I was at this store, Lou Davis's, and it was like a Chinese store, you had everything: meat, bumper stickers, everything. In Chinatown, it's like that. You can buy fruit and bread and get your teeth pulled in the back. Anyway, at Lou Davis's I saw some strange stuff, like headcheese and all, and thought, hmmm,
headcheese
. Maybe these people are weird. Then I had an image of my grandma eating, guess what, chicken feet!

I thought, Okay, Southerners are like Chinese. We have pig's feet and ears, and even the ovaries. A collective groan issued forth. Louis raised his hands. I don't write the news. I just deliver the paper. Whole point is if we even got the ovaries, you know we don't waste nothing. We eat everything but the oink or, sometimes in our case, the bark.

A hush fell over the crowd. That's a joke, you all, Louis added, and the crowd went into an uproar, clapping and stomping their feet.

Louis paused, savoring the moment. He was much better than Daron expected.

Louis began speaking, but in the corner, Uncle Roy whispered in Aunt Chester's ear, a mite too loudly,
I think he mean they eat dogs. See!
and the crowd went wild again.

Daron's father was red in the face, as was his mother, who clapped both hands over her mouth as she often did when laughing against her will. His cousins held their sides as if in pain, and tears streamed down Quint's face. After the crowd finally settled down, Louis continued.

And vegetarians? Who would willingly give up meat? I saw a menu in Cali with vegetarian beef stew. That's going too far. If it's vegetarian, why does it need a meat name? It just can't be good. It's got to be like sexing a blow-up doll. It'll do the trick for a minute, but you won't feel good about it afterwards, and you keep it to yourself, and you hide it when company comes over. He bowed to thunderous applause.

For the rest of the night, Louis was the star. Daron had wanted to invite Jo-Jo but knew he wouldn't fit in. The last time he'd seen Jo-Jo was over winter break. They'd spent the afternoon on the hill above Old Man Donner's land drinking Old Grand-Dad, sitting Indian-style on a ledge of rock that gun-sighted dead right over downtown, a meager allotment of buildings cupped in a gentle swale, Main Street stitching through like a scar. Once more, Jo-Jo had called him early, asked him to take a ride. Once more, they had ridden in silence.

The Rhiners, the Foldercaps, the Gull prom, some new shirtsleeves at the Hot Air factory, that Mr. Buchanan, the debate coach and eleventh- and twelfth-grade English teacher, had finally been fired, were topics of discussion, but all Jo-Jo had admitted that day was, Thinks she won't find out. But he cain't figure shit. Up at Dougy's every night, tits riding the well with the rest of 'em, telling lies. He cain't figure shit.

Sure can't, Daron had said, after a moment during which, even after three semesters at Berkeley—including an Intro to Social Linguistics class where the professor spent hours lecturing them on prestige and speech communities and attuning them to class inflection in language—he could think of nothing else to say. He had wondered, for the amount of time it takes to crush a can, if school itself was making it hard for him to talk. The prof always said, Learning Spanish doesn't mean forgetting English, but learning English often means forgetting Spanish. Think about that! Daron had laughed it off at the time. He and Louis spent hours in parodic paralysis: Eating pussy doesn't mean cannibalism, but cannibalism means eating pussy. Tink about that, holmes. An oral exam isn't a blowjob, but a blowjob is an oral exam. Tink about that, amigo. Daron had tinked about it a lot since, and knew what the professor meant by
language is power
because the more he learned at school, the more he understood, the less he understood. Maybe language was power, but not his to harness.

And not Jo-Jo's either, not with all his comma-averse posts about the second coming, the first of which Daron had clicked on expecting anything but an animated video on the return of OUR LORD, and after which Daron had read every Facebook FAQ and forum to learn how to adjust his privacy settings to ensure that his two worlds remained just that.

Watching Louis's routine made him wish it were otherwise. Jo-Jo would have found it funny, and they all would have gotten along. He had emailed Jo-Jo that he would be in town soon and would call once he arrived. But Daron hadn't, he knew that Jo-Jo still thought Candice was his girl, and he couldn't face him seeing that she wasn't. Maybe if Jo-Jo saw them all together, if he met Louis and Charlie, he would understand. Daron doubted it. Not to mention Jo-Jo's mullet. Even Iran knew to outlaw that hairstyle.

By the end of the night, Daron relaxed. Over the course of the
evening several people asked Charlie if he was from the Gully or had folks there, but each time he said, No, they answered brightly, Well, welcome to Braggsville! And better yet, when Quint put on David Allen Coe's
You Never Even Call Me by My Name,
Charlie and Louis knew the lyrics word for word, trilling operatic the verses about mama, trains, trucks, prisons, and getting drunk.

It was nearly midnight when Daron sat down next to his friends again. They looked pleasantly tired. He was about to ask them if they were enjoying themselves when his father opened the back door and whistled for him. His parents were alone in the kitchen. His father studied his face, his mother was straightening the canisters, her back to them, but her posture belied where her attention lay.

Call it off, son.

How do you mean?

D'aron, I don't want to keep you from your friends or have a big discussion about this. Whatever you was planning, call it off.

On the way from the airport, his mother had inquired about their plans for the week. As previously agreed, Daron said they would visit Atlanta a few times, and Savannah, and some Indian burial ground. They needed only to keep their secret until the next morning, at which point phase two would begin. The lynching wouldn't get far because someone would stop it, someone would give a fit as soon as rope one got tossed over a branch. Louis and Candice insisted on secrecy because if the townspeople were warned, the spectacle wouldn't have the same effect. There would be no control group, and the postmaim interviews, as Louis called them, would be pointless. Charlie, lastly, insisted this was a situation where it was best to act first and ask permission later. Seemed he was right.

For the first time, Daron felt motivated to do it, to act. He was not one to directly disobey his father. But they had planned this for weeks, and had Professor Pearlstein's permission to do ethnography,
like Zora Neale Hurston or Franz Boas. Daron blurted out, It's fieldwork. A school project, for Christ's sake.

I knew it. His father set his jaw like he'd been swindled.

His mom shuddered, apparently at the notion of fieldwork, not the invocation of Christ, because all she had to say was, Why can't you just read books and write papers, like we used to do in school?

Daron knew that Mr. Davenport would make the final decision, and judging by his silence, it had been made. This was not how Daron would have planned to ask, had he developed a mind to do so. He would have taken his father aside to talk man-to-man, like the adult he was, to explain that times had changed and that direct action was big again, that the South had to catch up with California, and the rest of the world, and stop wading in the sandpit licking its wounds like an old, toothless dog. Yes, reason and rhetoric would have been his strategy.

You best do as I say, hear me, son, or it's me 'n' you.

C
entered on Daron's dresser was an oversize Styrofoam light-bulb graced with an Afro wig. Magnifying glass in hand, Louis alternated between examining the wig and Charlie's scalp. With her hands clasped behind her back, maintaining a respectful distance as though guided by tape on the floor, Candice studied the walls as if some brilliant curator had assembled these posters of Jay Z, MGMT, James Franco in
Pineapple Express
—which his parents still thought was a fruit drink—Miley Cyrus,
BSG,
Jessica Alba, Outkast, and Tool, the latter of which made him terribly sentimental because when he was young, it was his father's mulling music, under the stars, in the backyard, the only sounds
Aenima
and the bug zapper, the first a eulogy, the second what his father called life's biggest lesson.

Quint bounced on the edge of the bed rambling about how they all were coming to his place the next night for another cookout. Chez Quint—Quint's Pub? Louis agreed, but Daron didn't like the idea. Quint's friends liked to wrassle and slapbox and shit like that when they got drunk, though some didn't wait that long. He imagined them fucking up Louis and yelling, Don't you know karate or Hong-Kong-Fooey?

Every few minutes, Quint's girlfriend, Maylene, called him,
triggering his
Knight Rider
ringtone, at which point Louis and Charlie would pop-lock, their performance prompting Quint to ignore the call.

Candice stopped before the poster of Michael Jackson in a scene from
Smooth Criminal,
leaning forward at an impossibly acute angle, covering that halfway was a Harry Potter poster. She traced the outline of Harry's face. Somehow these two belong together, don't they?

Believe in magic. Don't want to grow up. High voices. Not bad, girl, not bad. Quint sucked his teeth as though chuffed, like he did whenever they drove past an ATV/four-wheeler dealer.

Candice blushed like she'd been goosed.

With an orchestral flourish, Daron turned to study the posters. They both represent forbidden desires. Each of them seems uncertain of how to manage the power they have acquired, and confused about whether it resides within them, or requires external agents to activate. MJ felt it was outside of him, but his life was a hero's journey . . . He faded out, not because they were all staring at him, which he expected to see when he dramatically turned to face them, but because they were all ignoring him. Candice had moved on to Jessica Alba. Louis was holding the magnifying glass to his nose, Look, Charlie, could I be black now? Quint was laying a mighty eye on Candice.

Knight Rider
played. Sine and cosine, bitches! Louis did the wave and transferred the power to Charlie, who leaned back in a slow-motion
Matrix
-style pop-locking maneuver.

Quint raised his hands like an emcee, Go Loose! Go Loose! Go Chuck! Go Chuck!

Earlier in the evening, Quint had insisted that Candice liked Daron. Break out Oscar, Quint had instructed. Daron thought his cousin was putting him on, setting him up for embarrassment, but sometimes Quint just knew things about women: if they were single, if not, if they were open to exploration, when they were packing the shark's tooth, if they were a pulsing vessel or a dry vein. As he put it, Trust me. I know these things, almost like I can remember when we
had gills, when we rode scales out of the sea. Swore he could smell it, too, and that made Daron nervous, especially when Candice was all blush and blustering and even she was dancing now, watching Quint out of the corner of her eye. She couldn't like Quint. How could someone as smart and beautiful as Candice even like Daron? And what about Charlie, with his sullen gravity and size fifteens? Everyone knew about those rumors (One Louis punch line: If I was named Tyrell and had a ten-inch dick, I wouldn't go to school, either). And Louis liked her. A year ago, he would never have imagined Candice with someone like Louis, but anything could happen in California.

Quint's girlfriend hung up. Louis sat down. Charlie opened the window, fingered the sweat behind his ears, Shit, that's worse.

Let's go for a walk in the woods, suggested Candice.

Quint jumped to his feet. All right.

Daron glared at Quint. Not at night.

What do you mean, not at night?

C'mon, Quint.

Who shot you?

You don't have to be Methuselah to know.

Damn, your juniors is bounced tight. Methuselah and 'em, now? Didn't you learn nothin' in college? Besides, the Holler don't start for almost a quarter mile back there.

Technically, Quint was right. You had to climb the hill to go down into the Holler, but they were the same in Daron's mind, and always had been. All's I'm saying is everybody knows 'bout the Holler at night. She's thinking about a cornfield in Iowa, and it ain't like that here. It's too easy to get lost. Even Nana got lost back there once.

Quint stared at him so hard that Daron tensed for the blow. The others must have felt the air cool because Candice was, On second thought, I'm too tired. They sat there in silence for a few more minutes. Louis plunked into the desk chair. When Quint's phone next rang, Charlie and Louis stood silent.

Oughten you answer that? Daron pointed to the phone. I mean, she might be worried, is all. She might be worried.