The Good House Read online

  T. would never believe this place, Corey thought as he surveyed the street. He wouldn’t believe a downtown with no streetlights, or even a stop sign. He wouldn’t believe there was a bar downtown called the River Saloon, like something out of an old-school Clint Eastwood cowboy movie. He wouldn’t believe how there was hardly any neon anywhere, or how lame the selection was at the video store, which used to be somebody’s little house and had lace and doilies everywhere and still smelled like peppermint and coffee. And he damn sure wouldn’t believe a town with nothing but white faces. Nothing.Nada . Welcome to Our Planet, Stranger. Anytime Corey saw brown skin on anyone, he’d already learned they must be Mexican. There were Mexicans here and there.

  And now here was something else T. wouldn’t believe, Corey noticed. Two boys stood outside the River Saloon across the street sharing a cigarette, and the bigger, dark-haired one was wearing a black T-shirt printed with a big Confederate flag. The boy was giving him a look Corey didn’t like, like he was daring Corey to say something about it. The boy looked more fat than muscular, with his gut stretching out the tucked-in shirt beneath the flag, but he was a good size, not someone to be played with. He might be a senior, probably a football player who thought he was special because he didn’t know how big the world was yet. Someone like that could be a problem, Corey thought. He met the boy’s gaze, and after a while the kid and his buddy started talking, looking away. Corey would never show it in his face, but he was relieved.

  Nobody Corey knew would have the nerve to wear that rebel T-shirt on the streets. Why the hell did people wear rebel flags way up here anyway? Washington hadn’t been in the Confederacy, and that war was over. Just ignorant, Corey thought. He’d never understand why Mom always brought him to this town, except to punish him for being happy the rest of the year.

  A gray horse and rider came clopping from around the corner into the middle of Main Street, like it belonged in the traffic of pickup trucks and other slow cars. The horse looked good, Corey had to admit that. He hadn’t seen a horse that color before, that deep, ghostly gray with a tail and lush mane to match. A car would be all right, but ahorse was where it was at.

  Corey didn’t notice the rider until he was right in front of him, passing by. The kid on the horse was his age, with long hair so blond it was almost white, like an albino’s. He had on a faded Public Enemy concert T-shirt, which didn’t fit the picture at all, unless it was a joke.

  The horse slowed as the boy gave the reins a casual, expert tug, and Corey felt weird about the way those sky-clear eyes bored into him. He didn’t want any hassles, so he looked away.

  “Hey, man,” the boy said. “It’s good to finally get some variety around here.”

  The boy was staring at Corey in a way he didn’t like. Too interested. Either he was a stone redneck or another wannabe. There were wannabe boys like this at his school, talking shit and trying so hard to be ghetto and then going home to their all-white neighborhoods in the sports cars their silicon daddies had bought them. No cops were pullingthem over for nothing, so what the hell did they know about it? Just like Cowboy Joe here probably didn’t know a damn thing about rap.

  “Where’d you get that Public Enemy shirt?” Corey said. “A time machine?”

  The boy’s head snapped back in surprise. “That’s harsh. What do you have against P.E.?”

  The horse wanted to keep walking, but the boy held him in place, tugging the rein with one hand, hardly thinking about it. This kid had probably been riding horses his whole life, like it was nothing. Corey wasn’t sure why that mattered to him, but suddenly it did.

  “Nuttin’. You just look to me like another white boy tryin’ to front like he black,” Corey said.

  The boy grinned. “To me, you sound like another black boy trying to front like he’s a nigga.”

  “Bitch,what did you just say?” Corey could hardly trust what he’d heard, that a white boy had called him the N-word to his face. He took two steps, his hands braced to start punching.

  The boy was smiling. “Dude, you know the way I meant it. Nig-gah. All I’m saying is, why can’t you just relax instead of trying to come off all hard-core?”

  “Man, you don’t know me. Who the hell you think you’re talking to? Why don’t you get down off that horse and say that?” Corey said. Hewanted a fight now, never mind if he might get a busted nose, get one of his eyes swollen, or hurt his knuckles. Corey knew it hurt to hit people because he’d done it before—it wasn’t like in movies. But he was itching to fight in a way he hadn’t since fifth grade, at Cesar Chávez Elementary School. One day a kid had kicked a basketball out of his arm, and Corey felt like he blacked out. The next thing he knew, the other kid was lying on the ground in front of him with a fucked-up nose, too scared to get back up, saying he was sorry. Corey had scraped the skin off his own knuckles, but that had felt good, he had to admit it. For once,he’d been in control. After that, Mom and Dad sent him to private school, probably mostly Mom’s idea, like he’d never seen white kids with good grades and college funds kicking the shit out of each other, too. Corey had steered clear of any other fights, but he still remembered how much he’d liked kicking that kid’s ass. He would like it now, too. More.

  But Corey knew he would have to cool out. The guy in the rebel shirt and his friend would probably jump in, and he couldn’t fight against three, even after tae kwon do classes. Worse than that, he was standing in front of the grocery store’s picture window, and his mother could see every breath he took. She was always watching him, expecting him to fuck up. If he started whaling on somebody right now, this summer would go from bad to worse. Things would get ugly. Uglier than now.

  The boy waved him off. He had no idea how close he was to getting hurt, Corey thought. “Whatever. You know what I meant,” he said. “I’m not tryin’ to mess with you like some people around here would.” With a subtle motion of his head, the boy pointed out the two boys across the street, who were still talking, ignoring them. Or at least they seemed to be.

  “All I know is, you can get your little white ass killed behind that where I live,” Corey said.

  The boy started laughing.Laughing! Corey had suspected this fool might be certifiably crazy, but now he knew for sure. “Okay, forget it, man,” the boy said. “I didn’t mean anything.” He snapped the reins again and his horse sprang into a lively walk.

  “Yeah, youbest ride on. You better hope I don’t find out where you live, Opie, ’cause we’ll see how funny you think it is then.” Corey barely recognized his voice. He sounded exactly like T. when he was in a bad mood. T. didn’t fight, mostly because the sound of his voice scared people off.

  Corey must have raised his voice, because the boy in the rebel shirt and his friend were staring now, too, paying close attention, not talking anymore. Without looking back, the rider waved at Corey over his shoulder.“Adiós , homey. You don’t fool me. We’re not all hicks around here, you know. I’m from Santa Cruz, and my grandmother sounds more street than you.”

  By now, Corey’s face was burning. It was as if this boy in Sacajawea, a stranger, were wearing X-ray glasses and had seen all the way through him to Hollywood Academy.Whassup, Oreo? How you doin’, Urkel? Corey wished he could launch after this fool and pull him off that horse. Smug motherfucker. Who did he think he was?

  “You better learn some respect, or somebody’s gonna teach you,” Corey called after him, loudly. He didn’t care who heard him say it.

  “Public Enemy rules!” the boy shouted into the sky with a raised fist.

  “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back!”

  A man in a billed cap leaving the River Saloon and an old woman in a flowered dress about to walk into Sacajawea Collectibles stopped to look over to see what the boy was talking about. The boy with the rebel flag and his friend were still looking, too. Looking hard.

  “Crazy-ass white boy,” Corey muttered as the boy on the horse rode off.It Takes a Nation of Millions definitelywas his favorite P.E. alb
um because it included “Don’t Believe the Hype.” But that boy was going to need some sense knocked into him.

  “Corey, give me a hand, please. I brought you here to help,” his mother called. She was pushing a rickety cart crammed with brown bags, a load of work for him. She used the voice he hated, the taskmaster voice, like his damn teacher. She was trying to whip his lazy butt into shape every summer, always taking it to extremes. He wouldn’t have minded helping with dishes and stuff like that, but she had him outside pulling weeds and clipping trees in that hot sun. Or going up and down Toussaint Lane, or deep into the woods to The Spot, to clean up other people’s trash. She never remembered to ask nicely. Half the time, he wouldn’t mind if she would just ask another way. Instead, she treated him like a slave, and all because she was mad that Dad didn’t give him any chores at his house. Dad had a housekeeper for that. So what?

  Dad had promised he would talk to her and try to find a way to make things different this summer. Before Corey left Oakland, Dad had promised he would call Mom and try to work it out so she wouldn’t take him to Sacajawea that summer, so she’d keep him in L.A. That could have been all right. He could have seen his old friends, gone to movies every other day. Even better, Dad had said he would offer to pay half of whatever it cost for Mom to take him to New York, or somewhere overseas. Shit, she could have taken him to London. It was cheap to go to London, especially if Dad paid half. He wanted to do something to remember, somethinggood . But Corey was stuck in Sacajawea for the third summer in a row, and it was the same old shit. Dad had let him down. Corey wondered if he’d called Mom like he promised. Probably not.

  Probably didn’t want to deal with her. Corey couldn’t blame him.

  Corey hated to remember how hurt she’d looked when he worked up the nerve to tell her he wanted to live with his father instead of staying with her. He’d survived a year with her after she and Dad split up, but that was all he could stand, the way she got so tight.If you don’t like it, move out, she’d said, and he’d said that was cool with him. She’d just about cried as soon as he told her, but it had to be done. With Dad, he always had someone he could be himself with, watch whatever movies he wanted to, not worrying a cussword would slip out of his mouth, because Dad just laughed at it. Mom was so tight, Corey felt like she was choking him.

  It wasn’t his damn fault they were so messed up they couldn’t live in the same area code.

  “Thought we’d have backyard burgers today,” Mom said, trying to make him smile. She said he never smiled anymore, at least not around her.

  “Sounds good,” Corey said, helping her load the bags into her BMW without another word. He knew Mom hated it when he was so quiet, but what was he supposed to do? He had plenty to say, and she never wanted to hear it. Dad could groove to just about anything—sports, movies, music—but Mom was all about school and goals and chores, and that was about it. When he’d tried to tell her that T. liked his rhymes so much he was going to record them on a CD, all she’d said wasWhat kind of name is T.? Has your father met his parents yet? And then she’d said,That’s fine for a hobby, but I hope you have higher aspirations than being a rapper. Thanks a lot, bitch.

  No wonder Dad sometimes wanted to slap her. He never had, at least not that Corey had seen, but his father’s eyes gave it away: Hewanted to, and Corey didn’t blame him. That thought felt wrong, but its wrongness didn’t make it less true.

  As his mother drove back toward home, Corey searched for the boy on the gray horse. At the end of the street, just when he was sure he must be gone, Corey saw the horse’s flanks. The boy was still mounted, beside a bright red pickup truck with a bed full of baled hay. The boy was having an animated conversation with a large man who looked Mexican. They were at the edge of the road, a few feet from Corey’s car. Through his cracked window, Corey could hear the boy’s voice, and it sounded like Spanish.“¿Es verdad? ¿Estas seguro?” he heard him say, and Corey understood him because he’d studied Spanish for two years and was making A’s.Is it true? Are you sure?

  “Hey, Mom, would you slow down?”

  “What, Corey?” She sounded irritated, as usual, but the car was slowing.

  “Just a sec,” Corey said, and he thumped his window to get the boy’s attention. The boy looked at him, smiling with recognition. He waved like they were buddies.

  Corey pointed at him, then made a slow, deliberate slicing gesture across his throat.You’re dead, he mouthed silently, so Mom wouldn’t hear. In return, still smiling, the boy gave him the finger, pretending to scratch his chin. This boy was looking for an ass-kicking.

  “Have you made a friend?” Mom asked, trying to glance back in her rearview mirror. She hadn’t noticed the kid’s middle finger because he was too sly.

  “Yeah, something like that,” Corey said.

  He couldn’t wait to run into that smart-ass kid again.

  That same day, sweating in the late-afternoon sun, Corey fantasized about Vonetta’s lips while he bagged weeds he and his mother had pulled the day before along Toussaint Lane. Shit work, but at least he was out of the house. As he got closer to the property line, where the trail of uprooted weeds stopped, Corey noticed a little boy who was almost the same color as T., the color of the lattes his mother liked to pick up at the Joltz drive-thru window. The boy was about eight, he had a sloppy reddish Afro, and he was standing next to the neighbor’s wooden fence. He was wearing denim shorts and his legs were skinny, with big, knobby knees.

  There were black folks living next door? Corey couldn’t believethat .

  Walking closer, Corey noticed that the young black boy was talking to that same kid who’d been riding the horse in town. He couldn’t miss his bright hair and Public Enemy shirt. Opie was painting the wooden ranch-style gate with sloppy strokes of a white-dipped paintbrush while he talked to the younger kid, too wrapped up in conversation to notice Corey.

  A man’s call made both boys look back toward their house, and suddenly the little kid scampered off. The next thing Corey knew, Opie was looking right at him. Then he went back to his painting without saying anything.

  Corey walked toward him, shielding his eyes from the sunlight with one hand as he left the shade of his mother’s property. Opie’s house sat far back on the incline, a big trailer with curtains in the windows. There was a barn or a stable back there, too, which Corey had never noticed. The little kid disappeared inside the trailer’s front door.

  If he wanted to thump this kid good, just one shot to the mouth, there was no one to see. But Corey had lost his fire for it now. “Where’s your horse?” he said instead.

  “Grazing out back.”

  “What kind of horse is that color?”

  “She’s an Andalusian. Her name’s Sheba.”

  “Yeah, a’ight,” Corey said. He dropped his plastic bag to the ground, watching Opie’s paint strokes on the fence. He hoped his mother wouldn’t see this kid painting and get any ideas.

  “Want me to get you a brush?” the kid said.

  “Hell, no, Tom Sawyer. Do I look like Huckleberry Finn to you?”

  The boy laughed. “No, I guess you look more like Jim.”

  Corey suddenly remembered why he’d wanted to kick this kid’s ass, because people called the characterNigger Jim, and anybody knew that. But he decided to let it go. “Who was that black kid out here a second ago?” Corey said.

  “Andres? That’s my little brother.”

  “You’ve got a black little brother?”

  “He was born in Puerto Rico. Must be black people in Puerto Rico, too.”

  “There’s black people all over the Americas. You know, the transatlantic slave trade? Learn your history,” Corey said. “So he’s adopted?”

  “Yep,” the boy said. He suddenly stopped painting and looked at Corey’s face. “Why’d you have to be such a jerk in town?”

  “Me? Lemme tell you something, because obviously no one bothered to school you on this before,” Corey said. “Here onthis planet, you can’t ju
st say the first thing that pops out of your head. ’Cause I’m serious—if it’d been somebody else you were saying that ‘niggah’ shit to, you would’ve been knocked off that horse.”

  The boy thought about it for a while. “Okay, maybe you’re right. I’m always pissing people off. I say what I see. Maybe I’m too honest.”

  “No, you’re toostupid.”

  “Anyway, sorry.”

  Corey shrugged. “Yeah, me too, I guess. I wasn’t being cool.”

  Corey had run out of things to say. He was about to ask this kid where all the girls in Sacajawea hung out when the boy spoke again. “If you think I’m stupid, you’re wrong,” the boy said. “My I.Q. is 148. Sometimes it’s higher. Depends on the test.”

  “You always go around telling people your I.Q.? That’s tacky, man. My I.Q.’s 150, and I don’t go around bragging about it. What, you want people to think you’re better than they are?”