Sade had measured exactly thirteen feet from an imaginary free throw line on the asphalt to the front of the rim and drawn a ragged line with a piece of chalk. She went and stood behind the line, bounced the ball a half-dozen times on the blacktop and took a two-handed set shot. Swooosh! “Asshole. He told Mr. Hooper he was a boorish asshole with no respect for the rest of the neighbors.”
George retrieved the ball but did not immediately throw it back to her. “Your father’s a troublemaker.”
Sade waved her hand impatiently and he returned the ball. “It’s a little more complicated than that. He thinks everybody’s out to get him.” She pounded the ball four, five, six times on the ground and then sent it, with a hint of backspin, sailing toward the hoop. At the beginning of the season, the coach started Sade in the center position because of her height and ability to aggressively snag rebounds even against taller opponents, but then he moved the girl over to power forward. On defense Sade could post up with her back to the basket or worm her way under the hoop in a man-to-man, zone defense. Now he put her back at center. George didn’t understand the half of what Sade was telling him when she talked strategy. He preferred to just sit in the bleachers and cheer when the Wildcats scored points. “How about some one-on-one?” George grabbed the ball and joined her at the impromptu foul line. “First one to reach twenty-one.”
A beat-up Chevy pickup truck with a blown muffler pulled into the driveway adjacent to the property and Billy Ray Hooper climbed out. Seeing Sade, he waved and cracked a toothy grin.
Sade waved back. “Hi, Mr. Hooper!”
The man crouched down and raised his hands chest high. “Palms up, knees bent when you catch outlet passes.” He winked mischievously and disappeared into the house. Fifteen minutes later George was sprawled out on the grass trying to catch his breath. Twenty-one to eighteen - he had beaten the girl but just barely. When he rose to his feet, she cuffed him on the shoulder and said in a low monotone, “About what happened last Saturday at the reservoir, it was no big deal.”
Mr. Richardson’s silver Audi pulled into the driveway. He got out of the car and smiled at George but it was a cold, reflexive gesture. The smile dissolved into a glacial leer as he grabbed an attaché case and suit jacket. “No big deal,” George repeated as he moved off in the direction of his own home.
The previous Saturday, George rose early and went fishing at the Brandenberg Reservoir. Technically, no one was supposed to fish or swim in the town drinking water, but the youth had found a cove squirreled away down a forgotten path overgrown with weeds and bramble. The cove was hidden behind a wall of pine trees and dense shrubbery. If he headed out around dawn and cut through the woods at the end of the street, the boy could reach the fishing spot well before any hikers were up and about. George had snagged largemouth bass and sleek pickerel casting with lures in the shallow waters. Golden perch and bottom-feeding hornpout were equally plentiful but favored worms and juicy night crawlers. For the first hour, he tried his luck with a standard red-and-white lure, casting out toward a clump of water lilies. He hooked an eighteen-inch pickerel and played the brawny fish in close to shore, but then the pickerel broke toward a clot of reeds and the monofilament line got hung up on a submerged stump.
Around eleven, the sun loomed over the tops of the surrounding trees and the temperature had inched up into the mid-eighties. A light breeze rippled the surface of the water into glossy ribbons. George removed the lure and switched over to a hook and bobber. Spearing an earthworm on the barbed shaft of an Eagleclaw hook, he cast the bobber far out into the cove. Just as the plastic splashed down, skidding across the placid water, he heard the sound of rustling leaves as someone was approaching from behind. A moment later, Sade appeared. She was dressed in shorts and a Wildcats’ basketball jersey. “How was your game?” George asked.
She flopped down on a tuft of grass. “It was a rout – thirty-eight to five. We killed them.”
A painted turtle raised its wedge-shaped snout above the water twenty feet from the bobber. A solitary dragon fly with transparent wings was hovering a few inched above the lily pads. “My parents had a big fight last night,” George said. The bobber was drifting toward a rotted stump. He reeled the line in, steering it away from the wood and placed the rod carefully on the ground. “My father wants to put up a wooden fence bordering the property.”
“Who’s property?” She splayed out her tawny legs and lay back prone on the warm earth.
“Yours…ours. He’s gonna ask your father’s permission. My mother’s worried your dad will think that we’re putting up the fence because we don’t like colored people living next door.”
There was a prolonged silence. A redwing blackbird flitted out across the cove disappearing into a clump of gnarled birch trees. The painted turtle reemerged for a few seconds closer in to shore. “Yes, that’s true,” Sade finally said in a neutral tone.
“Which is true – that my father’s a racist or that your old man’s gonna go mental over the fence?”
“A little of both,” she replied.
George, who was standing near the water, reeled in the line. The worm had been nibbled away to nothing. He replaced it and hurled the line in a sweeping arc into the middle of the cove. The sun was directly overhead now with temperatures topping out in the low nineties. He went to where the girl was resting and threw himself down on the rough grass. “I’m reading this novel by an English writer, E.M. Forster.” There was no reply. “A Room with a View.”
“What’s that?”
“The title of the novel I’m reading.”
She rolled over on her side and stared at him impassively. “Stupid title.”
George couldn’t help but notice that she had grown prettier over the past year. Not that the girl was particularly feminine or cute in the traditional sense. Her ebony skin was so incredibly smooth and flawless that he sometimes had the urge to reach out and touch her face. “It’s not stupid at all,” George protested. Sade tugged a strand of dry straw-like grass from the ground and stuck it between her front teeth. She wasn’t the least bit interested in E. M. Forster or any other moldy, priggish, turn-of-the-century authors. Her team had just annihilated the competition, stomped them into the ground, run away with the basketball game. “In the story,” he continued, “all the adults act silly, like spoiled little children.”
“I see,” she said distractedly. He could tell she wasn’t listening. A pasty yellow butterfly flitted past making an erratic path toward the water line; attracted by the vibrant reds and oranges, it finally came to rest on a flowering bush.
“The grownups act thoroughly ridiculous throwing temper tantrums and feuding with one another over the most idiotic things.”
Sade stared at the bobber. It hadn’t moved an inch since George replaced the worm. “Why are you telling me this?”
He leaned in closer to her. “My father and mother were yelling at each other last night over this moronic fence business. They acted like characters in the Forster novel.”
“The fence - it’s just a stupid pile of lumber.” Sade leaned forward until her face was no more than an inch from George’s and then, without warning, kissed him leisurely on the lips. “I’m not interested in A Room with a View.” She draped a hand around his shoulder and pulled him close again. “Now you kiss me.”
George took her face in his hands and returned the favor. Pushing him gently away, she rose to her feet. “You’re a good kisser.”
George grinned self-consciously. “I don’t have all that much experience.” Actually, he had no prior experience.
“My father doesn’t like you,” she said, a total non sequitur.
“Why not?”
“Why do you think?”
George knew the answer but held his tongue. After a long silence he asked, “Does your father think black people should get reparations for slavery?”
“What sort of crazy question is that?”
“A sim
ple yes or no will do.” George replied testily.
“Yes,” Sade replied, “my father thinks white people should pay reparations to every living black person in America.”
“And why’s that?”
“For all the suffering we’ve endure.” She spoke, not from personal conviction, but as though she was regurgitating her father’s brittle logic.
“But you live in a perfectly nice, middle class community. Your father drives a Lexus and earns a decent paycheck. Why should white people give him any more money than he already has?”
Sade shrugged. “I liked it better when we were kissing and discussing Ian Forest.”
“Forster,” George corrected. “E.M. Forster.” “Okay, so give me another kiss.”
“Reparations,” Sade side-stepped the request, “you didn’t say what that’s got to do with anything.”
“It’s a long story,” George replied evasively.
The previous night, when the quarreling had reached a crescendo, Mrs. Wiener said, “I got a rotten feeling about this fence business. Look at all the trouble Mel Richardson stirred up with Billy Ray Hooper over a moronic lawnmower.” The woman laughed sarcastically. “He’s the kind of malcontent who thinks his kind deserve reparations for slavery.” George was crouched at the top of the stairs listening as the angry tirade filtered up from the kitchen.
“I heard the jerk’s got a six-figure job with the electric company,” Mr. Wiener fumed. “The shvartser will retire with a phenomenal pension and full benefits. What the hell does he need reparations for?” When there was no immediate reply, the man added in a less excitable tone, “Maybe Richardson won’t care about the fence. It’s not like we’re asking him to reach into his own pocket and shell out any money.”
The squabble had run its course, and George retreated to his bedroom. He pulled a dictionary from the shelf and thumbed through the pages to the back of the book. Reparations: compensation (given or received) for an insult or injury; Compensation exacted from a defeated nation by the victors; ‘Germany was unable to pay reparations demanded for World War I.’
A weird thought occurred to George as he lay in bed waiting for sleep: if anyone deserved reparations, it was Billy Ray Hooper. Mr. Richardson had goaded him for no good reason and then felt doubly indignant when the man retaliated – a passive aggressive gesture of defiance – by letting the late summer weeds run amok. Still, despite the bad blood between him and the girl’s father, Billy Ray remained perfectly pleasant to Sade. “Palms up and knees bent when you catch outlet passes!” The last image to flit across his mind before George drifted off to sleep was that of Bill Ray Hooper crouched down on his haunches in a defensive posture, elbows extended and all ten fingers splayed at the heavens.
The kiss changed everything and it changed nothing. It was like taking Holy Communion. Well, no, - maybe that was a bit extreme, over the top. Sade was still the female jock, the center on the girls’ basketball team who effortlessly slid in front of the better-positioned defensive players in the key position and snatched rebounds. It wasn’t like kissing some Barbie doll wannabe with pouty lips and a half pound of velvety eyeliner. There had been no sighing or fluttery sensation in his chest.
They had been friends for three years now, since the parents moved onto Hemlock Circle from Dorchester on the southern outskirts of Boston. Dorchester was a run-down, blighted section pockmarked with three-decker tenements and condemned buildings. Immigrant Russian Jews had lived there half a century earlier only to be driven out - white flight – by uneducated, southern blacks moving north in search of jobs and a better life. In the late sixties following Martin Luther King’s assassination, riots broke out with looting and arson - not as bad as Watts, but scary stuff none-the-less. Now the more genteel, upwardly mobile descendents of those earlier Afro-Americans were drifting further south to middle class suburbs in search of the American dream. So in a symbolic sense, Sade Richardson had been pursuing George for the better part of the past sixty years, and now that the girl with the feathery soft lips and immaculate skin had caught him, the boy was in no great hurry to get away.
Later that evening at supper Mr. Richardson said, “I’m going mow the lawn.” He was steering a row of sweet peas onto his fork. Mrs. Richardson had cooked scrod dusted with Italian bread crumbs in a lemon dill sauce.
“You already mowed the lawn,” his wife replied.
“Not ours – the idiot’s.” The idiot, of course, was Mr. Hooper and the lawn in question was the eight-foot wide parcel of unruly wilderness on the far side of the property.
Sade raised her fork and shook it at her father. “You go over there, and he’ll call the cops and have you arrested for trespassing.”
Mr. Richardson grinned at his daughter, a defiant gesture, but the man was all bluff and vacuous bluster. Sade understood perfectly well that her father was just blowing off steam, a favorite pastime. He would throw back his shoulders, assume a menacing tone; once he had everyone’s undivided attention, he would make a rash, provocative pronouncement. But nothing ever came of it. With Sade’s father, threatening to do something homicidally reckless was more recreational pursuit than indicative of clinical pathology.
Melvin Richardson was a handsome black man with boyish, photogenic features. Like his daughter, the skin was smooth and clear with high cheekbones and sensuous lips. Deep-set eyes framed a broad forehead. When he smiled, he looked ten years younger than his wife who was born the same month thirty-eight years earlier. Mrs. Richardson, by contrast, was light-skinned and rather plain with a nervous, petulant set to her thin lips.
“You shouldn’t have called Mr. Hooper that bad name,” Sade picked up where she had left off. “You keep saying Billy Ray’s a racist and bigot, but up until you started harassing him, the man treated us decent enough.”
“Whose side are you on anyway?”
“I’m just saying maybe you should go over there and bury the hatchet.”
Sade’s little brother, Leon, kept looking back and forth as the conversation progressed. At ten years old, he was still too young to have an opinion one way or the other. “Yeah, I’ll bury the hatchet one of these days,” Mr. Richardson snickered. “I’ll bury it right between - ”
“You seem to be spending an awful lot of time,” Mrs. Richardson turned to her daughter, “with the Wiener boy.”
“George,” Sade confirmed. “He’s always got his nose buried in a book.”
“The Wieners – they’re Jewish.” She turned to her husband. “The People of the Book - that’s what they’re called, because they’re always reading, studying, advancing themselves intellectually.” Fetching the coffee pot, she warmed her husband’s cup and placed a peach cobbler to the table. “I remember the wife brought a chocolate cake over by way of a housewarming present the week after we settled in. Such a nice gesture, don’t you think?” Her husband shrugged noncommittally and nibbled at the dessert.
“He wants to be a writer, a novelist or something,” Sade ventured.
“Who does?” Leon finally entered the conversation.
“George. He reads all these crazy, grownup books and gets all excited and tells me about them.”
“What books?” Mrs. Richardson offered her husband a second helping of the peach cobbler.
“I don’t know. I hardly pay any attention. It’s all too complicated.”
Through the kitchen window, they could see Billy Ray Hooper wearing jeans and cowboy boots sauntering over to his truck. He fired up the engine, pulled out of the driveway and disappeared down the street. “Here’s your golden opportunity,” Sade said in a good-natured, teasing tone.
Mr. Richardson scowled. He placed his dirty dishes in the sink, went back and retrieved his coffee. “I’ll deal with that redneck hooligan another day.” He retreated to the den and the evening news. Leon also brought his plate to the counter and trailed away after his father.
After he was gone Mrs. Rich
ardson said, “You take great pleasure aggravating your father.”
“Mr. Hooper isn’t a bigot. He doesn’t care one way or the other about black people. Daddy got him all riled up and then he had to go and call him an asshole.”
She usually brought her daughter up short for using foul language but did not respond this time. Rather, the woman sighed and stared at her slender fingers. “You know how your father is.”
“Daddy doesn’t especially like white people.”
“No, it’s not that,” her mother protested. “He just gets agitated and acts impulsively.” She began wiping down the kitchen table with a damp rag. “He shouldn’t have said that to Mr. Hooper, but he’s got too much pride to admit that he did anything wrong.”
A week later on a Sunday morning, George went downstairs for breakfast but his parents were nowhere to be found. He glanced out the kitchen window. Mr. and Mrs. Weiner were standing over by a profusion of straggly lilacs in full bloom, jabbering with the Richardsons. They were breaking the news about the fence. The privacy fence – that’s what they had decided to call it. Not an exclusion or security or I-hate-colored-people fence but a sturdy, six-foot cedar stockade that would sit just inside of the Weiner’s property line and give both families a measure of ‘privacy’.
Mrs. Richardson was all smiles. The willowy woman even laughed graciously, her head bobbing up and down in agreement with some point that Mr. Weiner had raised. Mr. Richardson was smiling too, but the expression was anything but congenial. There was much gesticulating plus several loud belly laughs and high-pitched titters that carried all the way across the back lawn and into the kitchen. It was grownups acting silly and totally out of control – it was pure, one hundred proof, straight-from-the-bottle E.M. Forster!