T. Johnson - Welcome to Braggsville

THEY’D ALL BEEN TO LOUIS’S HOUSE on several occasions, taking the ninety-minute bus ride to the Richmond district for family dinners with Louis’s parents, grandparents, two great-uncles, and younger twin brothers. Lasagna for the first visit, after that, authentic Malaysian food such as chicken curry, roti canai, nasi lemak. Candice adored the twins and often spent the afternoon with them across the street in the Argonne Playground. Louis’s mother in the kitchen working her magic while keeping an eye on Candice, Candy Can-Can from the land of Candistan, as she called her, and the twins. Candy Can-Can and the boys at the swing set, each one competing for her attention, swinging higher and higher yet, their squeals reaching a crescendo at the zenith where they momentarily vanished into sunlight on noon-bright days. Charlie and Louis shooting hoops. Nonstop bantering. Louis’s secret weapon? The well-timed punch line. Daron reading or sometimes playing hoops — if they were in the mood to take it easy on him — but mostly watching Candice and how natural she was, how she fit right into the family, how even Louis’s mom had noticed, joking once that her sons would do anything for a blonde. They have big blonde spots! So, I fight fire with wood. No, really! Once — Louis hates homework — once I bought blond wig, and said I was teacher now. Do it! He says only if I promise to take off wig. Still worked. Bad report card, he knows I’ll pick him up in the blond wig. And she wasn’t even the funny one. The uncles were.

On their visit to Braggsville, Daron hoped, Candice would play with his little cousins, Uncle Roy wouldn’t tell his racist jokes, and Aunt Boo wouldn’t pass out drunk. Mostly, he prayed that no one would use any of his nicknames. He wanted Candice to fit in, to think of the Davenports’ as the Changs’, another home, but more so. It was more… familiar. Maybe even one of his older cousins would give Candice a new nickname (that wasn’t seventeen syllables long). What he had not anticipated was that Candice might hobble up to the back door about an hour after he’d dropped her and Louis off at Old Man Donner’s, shaking, arms clawed by thorn and bramble, rooted to the back patio, shivering, refusing to come in because, Don’t want to get blood on the floor. Don’t want to get blood on the floor. Her clothes torn, shredded hems wavering around her pale ankles, zipper broken. Daron averted his eyes, but not before seeing a flash of cleavage, a triangle of tiger-striped panties. She had thistles in her hair, and she clutched her blouse desperately across her breasts, her white knuckles scraped and bruised, eyes swollen dark with fear.

Daron yelled for his mom as he and Charlie helped Candice to the nearest chair, but even as her legs shook she stiffened, again because, Don’t want to bleed all over it.

Charlie and Daron stood on either side of her, Charlie holding her arm, Daron the white plastic chair, insistent. Shit, Candice. It’s plastic!

At last she sat, hunched head to knees with her legs pressed tight together, her frenzied hands pawing her face as if she’d been contaminated with pepper spray, and silently wept, more shivers than sobs, her cries barely audible but her body everywhere shuddering in unmistakable grief. Daron felt the trembling in her arms traveling through the chair legs and the sand-set patio stone and into his feet with the insistence of electricity. Charlie felt it too, judging by his mournful expression. He looked on the verge of tears and was breathing steadily through his mouth to fight them back.

Candice, Candice, they whispered. Candice, tell us what happened. Can you tell us what happened?

She shook her head with a low moan and, without looking up, pointed in the direction from which she had come, the direction of the Holler. For some moments this was all she was able to communicate. Then she was still for a few minutes, during which time both Daron and Charlie tried calling Louis, but got no answer. When she did speak, it was in wet bursts between breaths. All of them… Barely got away… All of them were after me.

Louis? Where is he? Charlie looked over his shoulder toward the back fence. Is Louis back there?

Candice, where’s Louis? Daron spoke slowly, nearly slow enough to spell it out. Louis? Where is Louis?

Candice shrieked and stomped. Looking at her feet Daron winced. The ankles and insteps red clay encrusted. The left little toenail ripped off. Muddy blood caulked the cuticle and the nail bed was red as a blister. They… took… him! They… took… him!

They who? They who?

Candice was sitting upright now, no longer clutching her blouse. Her bra, also tiger-striped, poked through the hole where the breast pocket would be. Charlie reached over and gingerly adjusted her shirt, but there wasn’t enough fabric to cover everything.

She looked up at Daron, and her eyes, always a little sleepy in a cute way, were inflamed, and her stare so fixed and piercing, her expression so numb, that Daron turned away, afraid that otherwise she would communicate with that gaze all that she had seen and he simply could not bear it, not in his town, not in his house. All of them, he heard her repeat, but he didn’t look back, instead continuing the course he was charting through the yard away from her.

Charlie called 911 while Daron traced Candice’s footsteps through the begonia bed and to the fence, on which she’d left a bit of her shins. In the distance he saw a feather of smoke — someone was burning trash. He had thought he smelled something burning. He hoisted himself up to the fence top. Footsteps in the dewy grass ran between the edge of the Davenport property and the wood line, forging a path that would cut through the Holler and into the Gully. He was thankful she had made it back. He’d heard tell of people lost to themselves in the Holler for years.

Charlie said something. Candice shrieked again, and yelled, I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!

Daron cursed to himself. Last summer they had walked all the way from downtown Berkeley to downtown Oakland, because Candice wanted to see how black people really lived. ( Really lived, she stressed. How they teased her. Will they have iron lungs and barometric chambers? Do they hang from the ceiling like bats?) Another time they high-stepped over every drunken cripple in the Tenderloin to see Little Saigon. She drove through Hunter’s Point blasting Kreayshawn, and registered to tutor at San Quentin, where she already had a pen pal. Candice, with all her questions about where the black people lived and the Gully, had wandered off on a crusade and gotten herself raped by a nigger. Louis got hisself shanked or shot or Jehovah knew what trying to stop it. Daron was sure of it.

No wonder she was in such shock. She had come to Braggsville only to help. Candice must have felt terribly betrayed to be attacked by the very people she so often advocated for. Daron could not imagine a deception of similar magnitude, except maybe learning much, much too late that you were adopted.

His next thought was to retrieve the shotgun in the hall closet. What if they came looking for her, chasing after her to get rid of the evidence? He had to go back for Louis, too. At the patio door he paused at Candice’s side, unsure whether to touch her, unsure whether he wanted to. She twitched like she was possessed. Charlie squatted beside her, holding her hands, speaking in a soothing voice. She still refused to enter the house. Daron ran inside, calling for his mom again as he went. As he slid the patio door shut, out of habit — Were you raised by jackals, young man? — the cool, conditioned air gave him goose bumps and the smell of bacon made him want to vomit. It felt unreal. How could Candice be out there in that state, just inches away, when inside it was so safe?