﻿"YOU LIKE TO GET FUCKED, don't you?"
Mickey Johnson was seven and a half years old and sitting in the back of the school bus, beads of sweat collected all around his brow and temples. He wasn't even tall enough to see over the seat in front of him but he dared not look to his left 'cause there would be the bogeyman himself—Cortez Williams.
Cortez was eleven, foul breathed, and bigger than most of the kids at the elementary school (he had been held back three times). Mickey knew that if he looked Cortez in the eye he would be really starting trouble and the school bus was close to Cortez's stop. Mickey held his breath and closed his eyes, frozen. Cortez persisted.
"You be puttin' ding-a-lings in yo' mouth. You a faggot." Cortez reached over and started pinching Mickey's nipple to the point of pain over his Hulk Hogan T-shirt and then he bit him hard on the top of his ear.
The school bus was old and dilapidated—it was probably once the top of the line when it was made in the sixties, but some twenty years later, it was showing its wear. In the winter it was an icebox and now in the summer, one month shy of school being out, it was an oven. Even with all the windows rolled down. You could feel when the engine shifted in the floor of the bus, and at that moment, the engine gave a shift right as Mickey's heart did. As was the rule with this ritual, Cortez pressed his advantage harder and harder the closer he got to his stop.
"You be getting dicked in the butt." Cortez gripped Mickey by the privates so hard that Mickey started to cry. Cortez unlatched his hand and in a swift motion took Mickey's hand and placed it on the crotch of his shorts. Mickey noticed Cortez wasn't wearing any underwear—Cortez never wore underwear.
This is how it started.
Sometime at the beginning of the year, all the classes K–6 sat in the ball field for the beginning-of-the-year speech given by the principal. The rural elementary school boasted just under two hundred students so all the classes fit comfortably on around two acres of field. Earlier that summer a drunken transfer truck driver passed out at the wheel and smacked his rig right into the school, completely destroying the sixth-grade classroom. It was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened in that town. Mickey remembered watching the evening news with his grandparents as a white woman with a perm and a Minnie Mouse T-shirt cried and held her crucifix necklace and pointed it at the camera, saying that it was a miracle that it happened during the summer while school was out and how "the Divine worked in mysterious ways."
"Presently, the principal was talking some jazz about how he loved each and every student and how God protects. Mickey's mind was elsewhere. He wondered what it would be like to be sitting in a room quietly, then all of a sudden a truck ran through it—he couldn't picture it. He lost his train of thought and turned around. Sitting on his butt, legs folded in front, was Cortez in plain view, in little track shorts with no underwear. Mickey could see Cortez's penis. It gave him a nervous butterfly feeling and Mickey stared at it perhaps a beat longer than he should have. Cortez was sitting with his upper torso leaned back and propped up on his elbows: he wasn't really trying to cover himself, and he noticed that Mickey had noticed. The two made eye contact and Mickey quickly turned around.
Later there would be the first confrontation. Mickey's class and Cortez's class took bathroom breaks at the same time. A group of about fifteen boys would all wait in line. If the urinals were taken, the boys would crowd to the two doorless stalls that held a single toilet each. Three or four boys would urinate together at a time. To Mickey's left was Louis Gerbins, who everyone made fun of because he pulled his pants and underwear all the way down to his ankles to pee. Mickey undid his Superman belt and was relieving himself next to Louis when Cortez poked in the stall right next to Mickey, pulled down his track shorts (he seemed to favor track shorts), and let loose a stream of urine all across the belly of Mickey's shirt and the front of his jeans. When Mickey was asked what happened he blamed it all on Louis, who was promptly paddled, and Mickey was sent back to the bathroom to put on the change of clothes his mother insisted that he keep in his cubbyhole year-round.
It was now nearing the end of the school year and Cortez's attacks were becoming more frequent. Mickey always waited to see the town sign. "Welcome to Belle Mina," it said. It was a blip of a town off the I-65 highway. In the distant past the second governor of Alabama had made his residence there. Since the plantation slaves could not pronounce "Belle Manor," the town was named "Belle Mina" after that. Mickey didn't know this. All Mickey knew was that after the sign, the next stop was Cortez's house and that's when the torture would end.
It was a bus of thirty kids. Four white ones who were let off first, and then the Black students who were let off in the nooks and crannies of the farm town.
Cortez lived near the edge of the township in what they called "Camp Town"—several acres of cotton fields surrounded by woods. He lived on a plot of land that was all red clay (no grass grew there ever) and on the plot sat seven dilapidated trailers that all belonged to members of Cortez's immediate family. Cortez lived in one trailer with his grandmother and uncle, who was drunk all the time. The bus came to a stop.
"You gon' be my girlfriend," said Cortez to Mickey, and forced a kiss on his lips.
He looked at Cortez's hair. It was baby soft and blond on the tips, naturally. Cortez was a Black boy with blond hair. Now, someone had said Cortez's daddy was a white man. Nobody knew. But his mama had run away after he was born; she was last in New Orleans. It was understood that he was the son of one of the white men whose family owned the property Cortez's family lived on—that was the way Mickey's grandma had explained it. All Mickey knew was that Cortez intimidated him, and that his presence held Mickey in place like a magnet. Hate was not the first emotion Mickey could conjure when thinking about Cortez, though. Whatever "it" was, it rumbled in his stomach, like a fear or excitement, like those three seconds before a roller coaster hurled itself from a very high peak. Cortez unlocked his lips from Mickey's and Mickey exhaled hard. He was left alone with that feeling of relief that washed through him whenever Cortez exited the bus.
MICKEY LIVED WITH his grandparents and his dad. His parents were never married and his mother had moved up to Kentucky to finish her master's degree. "I'll come back when I can get a better job. I'll move us into a bigger house," she said, packing. The next day she kissed and hugged him within an inch of his life and left for school. Mickey's mother was studying speech pathology; it was explained to him that she was studying to help kids who couldn't speak well mute their r's and clip their vowels, whatever that meant. He missed his mother, naturally, and the way she read to him each night. The last book he remembered her reading to him was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It was his favorite. Sometimes Mickey had half a mind to grab his clothes and sail up a river—or at least he would, if he could swim.
When Mickey got home, the air inside his grandparents' house was smoke-filled, gamy, and peppery. His grandfather had come in drunk and was cooking a rabbit he had run over on the road somewhere; he was fond of running over animals with his car. He was making gravy for the meat and the thought of the poor rabbit in the pan was making Mickey sick to his stomach. "Is that dinner, Pa?" Mickey asked, really hoping it was not.
"No, this ain't for little boys, ya hear? This is for Dad. I'm taking you and your grandma to dinner in town tonight, so save your appetite."
Mickey saw through the window that his grandma was in the backyard taking clothes off the laundry line. If they were going out to eat later he knew that she would be taking her biggest purse to dinner, as always.
Mickey's granddad drove an older Cadillac—what year, Mickey couldn't remember. It only played eight-track tapes and his granddad had to use a converter to play Mickey's favorite tape, a gas station compilation of sixties soul-pop tunes. Mickey sat in the front seat in between his grandparents and swayed his little body to "The Oogum Boogum Song," the Supremes, and "You've Really Got a Hold on Me." The tape had to be his favorite thing in the world.
The trio got up the highway on their way to Quincy's. Quincy's was a steak house and country-style buffet. Their signature was a type of yeast roll put on the table before your meal, and the commercial for the restaurant featured a cartoon anthropomorphic yeast roll with arms and feet singing, "I'm the BIG. FAT. YEAST ROLL." It was all certainly a carry.
Mickey's granddad had been a cook at Quincy's some years before and said he couldn't eat the food there because he knew it was all "utility-grade" meat—that is, animals they would find dead and turn into meat before rot set in. Mickey didn't care; he always ate from the ice-cream bar first anyway. He liked the way the pillowy melted marshmallow foam drizzled down his soft-serve vanilla ice cream, which he often topped with gummy bears. Mickey glanced over at his grandmother going to town on a full plate of fixings. He looked down in her purse and, as expected, she had already found a way to sneak a hellified amount of fried chicken in there, all wrapped up in napkins, the grease from the chicken turning the napkins translucent. His grandfather was smiling at them both, sipping iced tea.
The three rushed back home so his grandfather could catch Jeopardy! The living room was dark except for the bluish light of the TV. Mickey looked down at his Black skin. The luminous effect of the screen made it look simultaneously iridescent and even darker than it actually was.
Right as he got lost looking at himself his father burst through the living room door.
Mickey's father was all about big entrances—you could feel the charisma of him six feet before he arrived. He said a quick hi to his parents, who didn't even look up from the screen to acknowledge their son. Mickey followed his dad to the bedroom they shared in the back of the house.
Mickey loved his dad. It was mostly his smell—a mix of alcohol, pork cracklings, and cheap cologne. He would sit in his dad's lap when he would play dominoes with the men at the pool hall in town, and lean his head against his dad's chest just so he could smell him. It was a very peaceful smell.