Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

I take a step toward her, where she’s bent over my boy, but Brit grabs the tail of my shirt. Don’t make a scene.

Am I supposed to just stand here?

Do you want her to know you’re pissed off and take it out on him?

I want Lucille back. What happened to Lucille?

I don’t know. Maybe she left.

How can she do that, when her patient is still here?

I have no idea, Turk, I don’t run this hospital.

I watch the black nurse like a hawk while she wipes Davis down and washes his hair and wraps him up in a blanket again. She puts a little electronic bracelet on his ankle-like the ones you sometimes see on prisoners who’ve been released on probation. As if he’s already being punished by the system.

I am staring so hard at the black nurse that I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes up in flames. She smiles at me, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Clean as a whistle,” she announces. “Now, let’s see if we can get him to nurse.”

She goes to pull aside the neck of Brit’s hospital johnny, and I’m done. “Get away from her,” I say, my voice low and true as an arrow. “I want to talk to your boss.”

–

A YEAR AFTER I went to Invisible Empire camp, Raine asked me if I’d like to be part of the North American Death Squad. It was not enough to just believe what Raine believed in, about Whites being a master race. It was not enough to have read Mein Kampf three times. To be one of them, truly, I had to prove myself, and Raine promised me I’d know where and when the right moment came to pass.

One night when I was staying at my dad’s, I woke up to hear banging on my bedroom window. I wasn’t really worried about them waking up the household; my father was out at a business dinner in Boston, not due back till after midnight. As soon as I threw up the sash, Raine and two of the guys spilled inside, dressed in ninja black. Raine immediately tackled me onto the floor, forearm against my throat. “Rule number one,” he said, “don’t open the door if you don’t know who’s going to come inside.” He waited until I was seeing stars and then let me go. “Rule number two: take no prisoners.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Tonight, Turk,” he told me, “we are custodians. We are going to clean Vermont of its filth.”

I found a pair of black sweats and a screen-printed sweatshirt I wore inside out, so that it was black, too. Since I didn’t have a black knit cap, Raine let me wear his, and he pulled his hair back in a ponytail. We drove in Raine’s car, passing a bottle of Jägermeister back and forth and blasting punk through the speakers, to Dummerston.

I hadn’t heard of the Rainbow Cattle Company, but as soon as we got there, I understood what kind of place this was. There were men holding hands as they walked from the parking lot into the bar, and every time the door opened there was a flash of a brightly lit stage and a drag queen lip-synching. “Whatever you do, don’t bend down,” Raine told me and snickered.

“What are we doing here?” I asked, not sure why he’d dragged me to a gay bar.

Just then two men walked out, their arms slung around each other. “This,” Raine said, and he jumped on one of the guys, slamming his head against the ground. His date started to run in the other direction but was tackled by one of Raine’s friends.

The door opened again, and another pair of men stumbled out into the night. Their heads were pressed together as they laughed at some private joke. One reached into his pocket for a set of keys, and as he turned toward the parking lot, his face was lit by the glow of a passing car.

I should have put the pieces together earlier-the electric razor in the medicine cabinet, when my dad always used a blade; the detour my father made to stop for coffee every day to and from work at Greg’s store; the way he had left my mother all those years ago without explanation; the fact that my grandfather had never liked him. I tugged my black cap down lower and yanked up the fleece neck warmer Raine had given me, so that I wouldn’t be recognized.

Panting, Raine delivered another kick to his victim and then let the guy scurry into the night. He straightened, smiled at me, and cocked his head, waiting for me to take the lead. Which is how I realized that even if I’d been totally clueless, Raine had known about my father all along.

When I was six, the boiler in our house exploded at a time that no one was home. I remember asking the insurance adjuster who came to assess the damage what went wrong. He said something about safety valves and corrosion, and then he rocked back on his heels and said that when there’s too much steam, and a structure is not strong enough to hold it, something like this is bound to happen. For sixteen years, I’d been building up steam, because I wasn’t my dead brother and never would be; because I couldn’t keep my parents together; because I wasn’t the grandson my grandfather had wanted; because I was too stupid or angry or weird. When I think back on that moment, it’s white hot: grabbing my father by the throat and smacking his forehead against the pavement; wrenching his arm up behind his back and kicking him in the back till he spit out blood. Flipping his limp body over, and calling him a faggot, as I drove my fist into his face again and again. Struggling against Raine as he dragged me to safety when the sirens grew louder and blue and red lights flooded the parking lot.

The story spread, the way stories do, and as it did, it swelled and morphed: the newest member of the North American Death Squad-namely, me -had jumped six guys at once. I had a lead pipe in one hand and a knife in the other. I ripped off a guy’s ear with my teeth and swallowed the lobe.

None of that, of course, was true. But this was: I had beaten my own father up so badly that he was hospitalized, and had to be fed through a straw for months.

And for that, I became mythic.

–

“WE WANT THE other nurse back,” I tell Mary or Marie, whatever the charge nurse’s name is. “The one who was here last night.”

She asks the black nurse to leave, so that it’s just us. I’ve pushed down my sleeves again, but her eyes still flicker to my forearm.

“I can assure you that Ruth has more than twenty years of experience here,” she says.

“I think you and I both know I’m not objecting to her experience,” I reply.

“We can’t remove a provider from care because of race. It’s discriminatory.”

“If I asked for a female OB instead of a male one, would that be discriminatory?” Brit asks. “Or a doctor instead of a medical student? You make those allowances all the time.”

“That’s different,” the nurse says.

“How, exactly?” I ask. “From what I can tell, you’re in a customer service business, and I’m the customer. And you do what makes the customer feel comfortable.” I stand up and take a deep breath, towering over her, intimidating by design. “I can’t imagine how upsetting it would be to all those other moms and dads here if, you know, things got out of control. If instead of this nice, calm conversation we’re having, our voices were raised. If the other patients started to think that maybe their rights would be ignored too.”

The nurse presses her lips together. “Are you threatening me, Mr. Bauer?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I answer. “Do you?”

There is a hierarchy to hate, and it’s different for everyone. Personally, I hate spics more than I hate Asians, I hate Jews more than that, and at the very top of the chart, I despise blacks. But even more than any of these groups, the people you always hate the most are antiracist White folks. Because they are turncoats.