T. Johnson - Welcome to Braggsville

Don’t tell your mother I did this. She already hawks about me spoiling you worse than chocolate-covered bacon. He handed Daron an index card. This was taped to the back of the door. I thought you might want it. He was a funny fellow, a good kid.

Spoiled him? Daron didn’t bother asking, How? when all his father would ever say is, Like now. He inspected the paper. Text was written on one side of the card; the outline of a fish on the other side. Louis divided his sets into fish, bird, and human. Fish meant that a joke worked early in a set; bird, middle; human, late. This piece was among Daron’s favorites because he had witnessed its evolution, starting as it did in a conversation. Daron once asked Louis why he didn’t date Asian women. Daron did not mention subservience, but Louis called him out on it, guessing with alarming accuracy, as he often did, what Daron’s thoughts were before they were apparent to Daron. Later, the joke became:

People always ask me why I prefer black girls, who are all rowdy, or white girls, who are self-righteous, to Asian girls, who are demure, subservient, and obsequious, and make very few sexual or social demands. Well, I always say, if I want a pet, I’ll get a dog. Then when I get bored with it, I can eat it if I want, and it won’t complain if I don’t.

When the Davenports returned to Braggsville, their beloved Gearheart Lane was no longer blustering like a three-truck carnival on the set of a doomed B movie. The Nubians and the Klan had pulled up stakes. Only the rainbow coalition remained, and Daron hadn’t yet decided if they were against him or not. After a week, most of them — four out of five colors, to be impossibly precise — jumped tent, too, relocating to the park across the street from the courthouse, where once again they were sandwiched between the odd couple. After that, only the occasional busybody set up camp, never staying more than a few hours, Katy-catch-ups like the International Association to Prevent Bullying or Mothers Against Hazing or some tree-rights watchdog NGO investigating the potentially crippling girdling wounds (rope burns) that the giant poplar sustained from the pulley and harness rig, khaki arborists taking tree pulses and earing tree stethoscopes. Daron was relieved to have the front yard back, but disappointed that only three weeks after Louis’s death, it felt he was mostly forgotten. Charlie felt the same way.

Daron and he talked a few days after SF. Charlie had seen the Otis interview on YouTube and wanted to thank Daron for trying, even though, You got straight Mike Myered. More importantly, Charlie wanted to — and did — apologize for letting Daron run off with a gun, for not preventing him from undertaking a fool’s task that could have been a life-changing event. Daron felt himself grow cold when he imagined what might have happened if he had found his way to the Gully, and grow colder still — a chill so cold as to feel wet — at this thought, new to him, that Charlie should have stopped him. A knot of silence welted tender while he mulled this over, swelling as certainly as the space between him and his friend. After a moment, the conversation turned to the news, how Charlie was glad to see the coverage fade, as much as he wanted to see Louis remembered, and Daron understood anew what Louis meant when he said that a conversation could have an astral body. When Daron hung up and looked at the picture on his phone, Charlie at Muir Woods, he looked a stranger. This would have upset him greatly had he not already started to doubt everything he knew. On his last drive through town, he’d not seen The Charlies in a single yard. The Hobarts’ bumper wore a new saying: I DON’T LIKE HIS WHITE HALF EITHER was replaced with ELECT JESUS TO LEAD YOUR LIFE. Even the Welcome to Braggsville sign was made over like for a morning talk show, and now sported a rainbow heart. The transformation felt a conspiracy, and almost sparked him to reconsider Candice’s account of the Incident, until he remembered that he’d asked his mom to hide everything offensive, and that made him guilty of nothing but discretion.

Only now did it occur to Daron that they’d struck out each day, all 4 Little Indians, with the same intention. Candice reading up on Georgia botany and football, Charlie sifting his memory for his own nana’s tales of the South, whispered as if specters could be spoken into the room, and Louis’s constant efforts to, Keep it real, which translated into assiduous affirmations of all Daron and Charlie said and did. And Charlie, had he really wanted to watch all that Sex-Tube?

In retrospect, Daron understood that he had actively courted his friends, becoming a mirror to their ambitions. By Daron being what they needed, Berzerkeley became less foreign and he more Californian. For Louis, he was the real American, from the original heartland, Clan Davenport staking their claim in the wilderness when the Spaniards were still building missions out of mud and straw; the Davenports fighting the Civil War while Louis’s great-great-grandfather stowed away on the SS Westhall II, praying Buddha would deliver him anywhere but back to Ceylon. To Candice he was the liberal she thought herself to be in Iowa. Despite his rainy-night accent, an accent that bespoke a region staggering yet under the duress of history, a political microclimate where the past was alive and itching like a hive to be heard, his two best friends were of two different races, opposites, if one could imagine such a thing: He made Louis and Charlie a complete set, a triumvirate.

But Charlie was different, at turns chatty and taciturn within the same conversation, always profound, like wading into a lake in which one knew a sudden drop-off existed, but not where. As he did at Berkeley, Charlie had collected many acquaintances in high school, but few friends. He was the scholarship kid that Daron later became, and he tried to show Daron the keys to success, to school him literally: plenty of face time with the instructors, submit all assignments early for review, request extra credit even when unnecessary, in short modeling a work ethic of twice as good to be equal, but they could only be partners in anxiety because Daron couldn’t apply himself that much. Only dumb kids studied, or so he’d thought until meeting Charlie. Besides, D’aron was a black name, Charlie always joked.

But hadn’t they shared the same practical attitude about many things — vegetarianism, for example, began for both as a moral stance held with fundamental certainty. They preferred interracial porn only when their own race was doing the penetrating, and they harbored lurid fantasies featuring the young TAs, and neither understood at heart what it was feminists were in such a row about. In every hall were woman professors and woman administrators and some departments, like English, were nearly all female.

Thinking back, was Charlie only looking at the penises? (There were an awful lot of penises in straight porn. In fact, when he didn’t think about it, the mortar/pestle ratio was more ghoulish than piquant.) Daron wanted to ask but knew he never would. He had been excited to have a black friend, and now felt a little let down that Charlie was gay. That simply didn’t count as much, like if Daron was gay, his being friendly with Charlie wouldn’t count as much. You didn’t have to be Methuselah to know that gay people were friendlier than the Devil on Sunday morning. (As Slater Jones from 4-H once said, How else you reckon the name?)

But hadn’t all three of them swayed after the stats instructor like seamen ashore for the first time in months. The boys weren’t hunting MILF, as some crudely put it, but hadn’t all three of them felt the spike of a strong and willful attraction operating independently of reason while in office hours with the stats professor. Nearly fifty she was if a day, but that mattered not, because in their eyes three ages defined humans: their own, grad students, and everybody else. Hadn’t they all disagreed about whether the photos on her desk were of children or grandchildren. Hadn’t they all fidgeted in that backless chair, smitten by her voice, the soft German accent, gray feathered wings, ripe fruit scent, feigning confusion over problems, leaving with their book bags covering their laps, ashamed that she who possessed this allure was so matronly, and yet even more sensuous because of that fact. Through her window in winter the hills of Tilden Park, flush with snow, glowed like full, pale breasts. Hadn’t they all made a point to avoid mentioning Freud because, You can’t trust every diagnosis to some old dusty tome.