Lessons on Destroying the World Read online

  Mr. Gardner took me down to see the school counselor, but I wouldn’t tell her anything either. I was half crying and cursing, and I couldn’t sit still the whole while I was in her office, so she sent me home.

  I stayed home for two days after that, claiming illness in the note I forged for the school with my dad’s signature. Only I didn’t have to fake too much, since I was so upset about all that crap with Cedric that it made me physically sick to my stomach. Cedric never got into trouble about what he did because I never said a word about it. Even so, when I finally went back to school, he was waiting for me.

  I was walking down the hall to homeroom when this guy I didn’t know came up beside me. “Hey, man. I got that homework you wanted to take a look at. Come on, it’s in my locker.”

  “Wait a second,” I said, starting to back away. “You’ve got the wrong person—”

  “This way,” the guy said, and he grabbed me by the back of the neck and started pushing me down the hall.

  He didn’t take me to any locker. He shoved me into the bathroom, and I saw Cedric waiting in there by the stalls. My throat closed up so tightly, I couldn’t breathe. I tried to run, but Cedric’s friend pulled me back.

  I could see how full of anger Cedric was. His face and neck were red with it. His eyes blazed with it. They both grabbed me, and my backpack fell to the floor, spilling out my books and the peanut butter sandwich I’d packed for lunch. I tried to scream, and then I was in the air as they shoved me into one of the stalls. The toilet bowl was full of piss, and they flipped me upside down over it.

  “I didn’t say anything!” I protested over and over. There was almost as much outrage in me as there was terror. This was all so unfair, so wrong. But they didn’t care. They shoved me down, and I yelled and closed my eyes. Then my head banged into the toilet bowl. Stars flashed in my brain. I tried not to breathe or open my mouth, but water and piss went up my nose, and I started gagging.

  They held me down until I started choking. I fought in a fit of panic, certain that I was drowning. Suddenly, I was free. I flopped down onto my knees, and I jerked my head out of the bowl, gasping for air.

  That filthy water was in my hair, my nose, my ears, and my mouth. It was dripping down my chest and my back. There were footsteps, laughter, and the words “Freak bitch” as Cedric and his friend walked out of the bathroom. I remember feeling crazed, feeling a blast of rage burst in my head, but nothing after that until I found myself lying on a cot in the nurse’s station.

  Mr. Gardner was standing over me, looking down with this deep concern in his eyes. There was a ball of bloody cotton stuffed up his left nostril. “Micah?” he said, his voice thick from the cotton up his nose. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. My jacket was gone, and I was lying there with my shirt soaked and clinging to my skinny torso. Someone had sponged off my head and neck, which felt damp and cool and smelled of soap.

  “Why am I here?” I asked.

  He told me I kicked the door on the bathroom stall until it broke off at the hinges, and that I threw my books and broke every mirror in the bathroom, and that I was trying to kick one of the sinks off the wall when he ran in and grabbed me. He told me I started fighting him and butted him in the face with my head. And when he wrapped his arms around me and held on so I couldn’t fight anymore, I screamed until I went limp. That’s when he carried me to the nurse.

  The nurse was going to call Dad to come and pick me up, but I begged her not to, so she didn’t. She gave me a clean sweatshirt from the lost and found. Some kid had walked into the bathroom and saw Cedric and his friend dunking me in the toilet, so I wasn’t suspended or expelled or anything for all the damage I did and for hurting Mr. Gardner. But I was done with school for good. It was January, and I had flunked most of my midterms, and my mom was now dead. She had wanted so badly for me to finish high school. She’d always told me how proud she was going to be at my graduation. It just wasn’t going to happen, though.

  I couldn’t let the nurse call Dad because the truth was that the number the school had for him had been disconnected months ago, and he hadn’t lived with Mama and me for almost two years. He had somehow gotten word about Mama’s death, and he showed up to make arrangements and go with me to her funeral, but he disappeared again after that, and I wouldn’t have let him come back into the house anyway.

  Mama had shown me where she kept her life insurance policy, on which I was the only beneficiary. She had told me that if anything ever happened to her, I should use the insurance money to pay off the mortgage. She didn’t say it, but I knew she didn’t trust my dad to use the insurance money to take care of me. When I called the insurance company and said I wanted to use the money to pay off the mortgage, the lady on the phone said the insurance company could pay the money directly to the bank if I wanted. She explained everything. I had to sign a form authorizing the insurance company to pay the bank. I had to have someone at the bank call the insurance company with the payoff amount on the house. A few days later, papers came in the mail from the bank showing that the house was paid for in full, and Celeste McGhee now owned it free and clear. The day after that, a check made out to me for $2,454.32 came in the mail from the insurance company with a letter saying that this was what was left after the mortgage was paid. It was all scary and strange, but it was easy too. Nobody at the bank or the insurance company ever asked how old I was.

  I was amazed to see a check in my name for so much money. I used my student ID and cashed the check at the Cash-for-Checks place where Mom had cashed her paychecks. I didn’t blow the cash. There were other monthly bills that had to be paid. That money wouldn’t last forever, though. It would hardly last six months. I knew I was going to have to get a job somehow. Also, I couldn’t let any adult figure out that I was living in the house by myself, or I’d get sent to a foster home or orphanage or something. That was more likely to happen if I kept coming to school and if I didn’t earn money to keep paying the bills. For all those reasons, and to get away from Cedric for good, I caught the bus home that day in January and never went back to Herrington.

  I had to tell you about Cedric, because he was such a big part of the reason I quit school, and I’m glad I’m done talking about him for the time being. I still don’t like to think about him.

  Now I can get back to what happened that Friday in June.

  4

  OKAY, SO I was walking home from the Cash-for-Checks store that Friday. Home was a little two-bedroom, yellow-brick house, which stood two blocks west of the Southgate Shopping Center, across from the Wyndham Apartments on Quinton Street. As I walked down Quinton, I waved at various neighbors I knew, greeting them by name. All my neighbors were black, but they never made me feel as if I didn’t belong. They were nice to me. My being white didn’t seem to matter. I was just another resident as far as they were concerned, and they had treated my mother the same way before she died. By the time I reached my porch, sweat was pouring down my face and neck once again. I let myself in, eager to strip off my sticky, greasy clothes and jump into a cold shower.

  The house was laid out like a cigar box separated into four sections. The front door opened into the living room, beyond which was the dining room. To the left of the dining room was the kitchen. Doors in the kitchen and the living room opened into a hall, which led to the two bedrooms and the bathroom. I’d painted the walls tan, which gave the place a warm, cozy feel. The furniture was more than fifteen years old, another inheritance from my mother, but it was solidly built and holding up pretty well.

  I was as lazy as they come, and housework fell right after getting a tooth pulled on my list of favorite things to do. My mom kept a neat house, however, and it seemed disrespectful not to maintain the things she left me in the way she had. So I gave the place a really good cleaning twice a month. In between, it had a definite “lived-in” look.

  That day, the condition of the house was about what you’d get ju
st before the biweekly cleaning was due. The carpet was gritty, the tables were almost slick with dust, filthy clothes covered my bedroom floor, there was enough dirt under the fridge to grow mushrooms, and the top of the stove was so greasy it could have caught fire at any moment.

  Oh, but it was so good to be home.

  “You’re late.” My father’s voice had this twinge of irritation. I caught a glimpse of him in the living room, his lank body sprawled over my mother’s old leather sofa. A glimpse was all I gave him; I didn’t like the man. He stared at me with his eyebrows raised, anger sketched across his sharply boned face. Without answering, I walked into the kitchen.

  The man got up and followed. I grabbed a glass from the cabinet. My thirst was about as bad as it could get, and I wanted ice water desperately enough to pay cash for it. When I turned to the refrigerator, dear old dad blocked my way.

  Richard McGhee was six feet tall, still a giant to me. My mom’s genes had apparently been stronger than his. She had stood exactly five foot three, like me. I had her light-green eyes, her upturned nose, her curly, light-brown hair, and her small, slightly pouty mouth. I referred to my dad as Dick, although never to his face; my mom didn’t raise a fool. “Dick” seemed to suit him more than “Dad.” At forty-seven, Dick was still handsome. Good looks and a lean, muscular body had let him enjoy a very successful career as a player. As much as he liked to fool around with different women, I could never understand why he ever married my mother. What was even harder to understand was the fact that Mama stayed married to him for so long. She didn’t divorce him until a year before she died.

  The man didn’t like me, either. Actually, I think he hated me. He’d called me “disgusting” so much I’d started to wonder if I had an extra arm hanging out of my back. On my thirteenth birthday, Dick got so disgusted at the sight of me in the present Mama gave me—black work boots, baggy jeans, and a gray Dallas Cowboys jersey—he packed his clothes and moved in with a woman he met in church, of all places. That skank was just one of his seemingly infinite number of girlfriends and one of the five females—aside from Mama—who bore him a child. Mom always kept the door open for him. Lousy husband that he was, he did give Mama money every month until he lost his job.

  In the years before he left Mama, disgusted Dick performed what I believe he felt was his fatherly duty by disciplining me when I got out of line. There were no time-outs or groundings from Dick. This man believed in the good old-fashioned butt kicking as the only effective form of punishment. Looking back, I’m surprised that I survived some of his “spankings.”

  For example, when I was ten, on a hot spring day when I was just about to die of boredom, I whacked a baseball across the shady street in front of our house just for the hell of it. Even then I hated Dick because of the way he treated Mama, so maybe there was something Freudian about the fact that the ball struck the windshield of my old man’s midnight-blue Lincoln Town Car, sending a lightning-shaped crack snaking down the glass from top to bottom.

  My first reaction was total amazement that little ol’ me could smack a ball that far. Next, I felt just a bit of relish at what I thought was truly justice served. Then I realized Dick—who, as luck would have it, had been waxing the damn car at the time—was coming at me like a charging bull.

  Oh shit.

  Dick grabbed me up and started snatching off my clothes as he hauled me toward the house. By the time he got me inside, I was naked except for my white athletic socks. He whipped me with the extension cord Mama used to power the lamp on the little desk in my room, going at it with such dedication that I passed out. He never showed one ounce of remorse for beating me unconscious, but—apparently afraid of what Mama would do if she came home and found me knocked out on the floor, bare-assed and bleeding—he did pick me up and put me to bed.

  Despite the fact that Dick was now dependent on me (I’ll get to that in a second), the man still intimidated me. Seeing him slide between me and the refrigerator now, I moved back.

  Dick stared down at me. His mouth twitched. “Let me hold twenty dollars until the first.”

  Although it hadn’t yet drained his good looks, alcoholism was slowly killing the man. It had sucked out his vitality, leaving him unable to work the construction job that had paid him so well through most of his adult life. He was as thin as me now, all long, bony limbs swallowed up in the black slacks and blue silk shirt of a much bigger man. He received monthly disability checks, but his addiction had gotten so out of control that he spent nearly every penny on drink. He’d lost his apartment, his car, and his last girlfriend because of it.

  I ran across him one day, sleeping under the South Parkway viaduct. As much as I hated the way he had disrespected Mama and as much as I hated him, I couldn’t let him live on the street. He had been staying with me for nearly three months now. Hell, of all the man’s children, I was the only one willing to do anything for him. In the time since I’d taken him in, none of his other kids or ex-girlfriends had even dropped by to ask how he was doing.

  He snooped through my things when I was out of the house. I knew this because one day, he told me I should wait until I turned eighteen and then take the paperwork from the bank showing Mama owned the house free and clear, along with a copy of her death certificate and my birth certificate, to the county Register of Deeds office. He said that would make me the legal owner of the house by way of inheritance from Mama as her only child. I was grateful for the suggestion, because I never would have thought to do that on my own. But I kept the paperwork from the bank, along with all my other important paperwork, in a shoebox tucked under my bed. Not the kind of thing Dick could have just stumbled over.

  A good suggestion here and there didn’t mean I owed the man a damned thing, however. I never expected Dick to help with the household expenses, figuring he’d only be with me until he found a new girlfriend to take him in. It didn’t bother me that he blew most of his money on liquor, but I was damned if he’d get a dime out of me for his poison.

  I backed up another step. “I don’t have twenty bucks to give you.”

  “Don’t lie to me! You got paid today.”

  “I’m not giving you money!” I spat each word with righteous finality. Then I slapped the glass on the counter and started to walk away. I actually believed that was the end of it.

  With surprising speed, Dick grabbed my collar, spun me around, and slammed me against the refrigerator. The absolute brutality in his eyes was stunning. Pinning me against the refrigerator door with a forearm across my chest, he rammed his hand into my pocket and yanked out the roll of money.

  With the cash in his hands, he let me go and moved away, daring me with his eyes to stop him. My chest swelled with sorrow, and I simply watched as he peeled off a twenty, which he balled into his fist. Then, apparently realizing that I wasn’t going to offer any resistance, he slipped another twenty free. He tossed the rest of the money at my feet and scurried into the living room. A second later, the door slammed behind him.

  My back against the refrigerator, I slid to the floor. It was a bad move. When my rump hit the linoleum, I bit my tongue and tasted blood. My eyes filled with tears. The sprightly “Thank God it’s Friday” feeling that had just about sent me floating from Bebe’s restaurant was completely gone, crushed under the melancholy that now dragged on me.

  Five minutes later, I gave myself a mental kick. Hell, my old man was out enjoying himself on a Friday evening at my expense, and here I was slumped on my dirty kitchen floor, crying for myself. Hell with that. If anybody deserved a good time tonight, it was me.

  I pulled myself up, gathered the rest of my money, and marched into the bathroom. Once there, I sighed and rolled my eyes heavenward. Dick had left a revolting ring in the tub and three wet towels on the floor. That was enough to make me pass on the shower. I stripped off all my clothes, got a clean towel, and gave myself a sponge bath at the sink.

  5

  THE SUN dipped below the horizon, leaving in the western sky a s
pray of pink and orange. The temperature had dropped a lot, but it was still a long way from being cool. Kids were all over the parking lot of the Wyndham Apartments, riding bikes, shooting hoops, skipping rope, and otherwise getting their weekend off to a rowdy start.

  I locked up my house and set off down Belz toward Third, wearing a pair of black baggy designer jeans so heavily starched they crackled with every step. The jeans were topped off by a blue jersey and a pair of black Nike sneakers with electric-blue stripes all around. It had taken me six months to save up the money for that outfit. I didn’t have a high school diploma, I’d probably never own a car, and the way things were going, I’d never have my own girlfriend. But, damn it, one thing I could take pride in was dressing nicely. Tonight was one of those times when I needed to feel good about Micah McGhee, and the expensive clothes were one giant step in that direction.

  I’d given myself plenty of time to reach the bus stop, not wanting to raise a sweat before even making it downtown, and my pace was mighty close to a crawl. I had shed the day’s lousier experiences like the grime I’d left ringing my bathroom sink. With my head as vacant as my empty gaze, the dude who came running up behind me caught me completely off guard.

  A hand slid across my shoulder. South Memphis has been described as the kind of place where the devil won’t walk alone after nightfall, and I reacted with a startled “Whoa!” as I slapped the intruding hand away.

  The touchy-feely party was a onetime friend of mine, Lawrence Neal. He had this crazy knack for mathematics, able to work out complex computations in his head faster than the average person could with a calculator. In high school, our vice principal just about begged him to get a college degree in math. Instead, Larry had dropped out of high school and into the neighborhood drug trade. I had promptly distanced myself from him, socially and physically. The likelihood of being gunned down in his company, either by the police or some dissatisfied customer, just didn’t appeal to me very much.