“Knock these dicty jeffs on they diasticusses,” the tall boy said, and the others laughed.
The car smelled of cedar shavings. It was beginning to fill up. Two, three, more white boys swung in off the roof and others crawled through the trap at the far end. Tattered boys in denim and patched khaki, farm boys, city boys with shop grease under their fingernails. They too had weapons. Sticks and short lengths of cane pole, what looked like a corner off a metal bed.
The girls started yelling, calling the africano boys names. Nothing they hadn’t heard before.
The air in the car was cool, but Delvin felt a heat on him. He trembled and the heat seemed suddenly to fly out of him and he was cold. I must be coming down with something, he thought, and then thought, yeah, scaredy-catness. The edges of his body felt numb. His palms were sweating, his heart galloped. He had no weapon but his pocketknife and he really didn’t want to set down his soogan and the little cotton sack Mrs. Parker had filled for him; he didn’t want to draw that. He thought of Celia walking across a grassy lawn to her classes. The buildings, she said, were made of stone that changed colors according to the light. He pictured a rainbow, but the ones she named were hardly colors at all: charcoal, gray, brown like a mule’s back. Maybe Mr. Rome would find her one day. He pictured the little man reared-back reciting the wordy love message he had prepared, and choked a laugh.
One of the boys looked at him. “You pretty bugged-up,” he said.
The white boys moved away from the back wall. A dozen, fourteen, fifteen, a clenched little army. Road toughs, scared boys just looking for work, boys on the run from bad daddies, drunk mothers, no mothers, something sad in their eyes, something wild, something hateful. For a sec he wanted to stick out his hand.
Hopeless, Delvin thought, useless. But then he didn’t mind.
An ache in his shoulders, a sorrowfulness like a headache. He wrapped his right hand in his bandana.
One of the white boys flung a rotten cucumber. It hit a burly stutterer colored man in the shoulder, Coover Broadfoot. Delvin knew him from the Chat-town streets, from games of clip poker in a house around the corner from New Bethel church, from the Emporium, from his auntie’s funeral, from Coover’s teariness, from the set of his head like a little soot-headed lamb’s.
Then somebody yelled and, their eyes slitted and wild, the white boys rushed among them, flailing and whipping their sticks.
The africano boys bunched up and all at once sprang at them, fought back hard and cunningly, striking the white boys across their faces, kicking at their knees.
Delvin caught a glancing blow against his upper arm but he didn’t feel it.
A big africano man, somebody he’d never seen before, picked up a medium-sized white boy with blond hair thick as a pelt and threw him against the side of the car. The boy landed on hands and feet, crumpled into a heap, slowly gathered himself, crawled a few steps and ran up against another africano boy, somebody called Rollie, a ruthless man missing his front teeth, who kicked him in the side. The white boy rolled like a stumplog rolling down a hill.
Delvin punched somebody, cracked somebody across the eyes with the side of his wrapped fist. Somebody whapped him in the back of the head and somebody else caught him with what felt like a firebrand across his lower back. It was a tall boy hitting him with a section of bamboo cane. He staggered away, knocked against another white boy who punched him to his knees. How did he get in this? He saw a blue-colored band of light weaving in among the roiling shapes. He was suddenly off to the side.
All the while the white women shrieked hatefully, their voices, especially the voice of the big woman with the piano legs standing foursquare grasping in her thick chalky hands a piece of broomstick, brandishing it — condemning, excusing nothing. She saw him and shook the stick at him and seemed about to come for him.
Somebody pulled him to his feet and he jammed himself back into the fray. At its densest it was a big pulsing congery of boys, a wild patch. He banged on somebody’s back. Somebody slugged him on the side of the head and he saw red bursts, flares. He was shoved against the wall that gave and bounced him back. The boards smelled of sweat and faintly of piss. He edged away and crouched, sprang up and hit a skinny white boy straight in the nose. The boy reeled backwards into another white boy who hit him and knocked him down. Delvin laughed.
