Winter, 1979

I squeezed the trigger, and another steel beer can wobbled off the fence post with the dull ping of a shiny copper BB. Cocking the gun again, I heard Monkey Tail and Cookie far off. Their sounds came at me slowly, in waves, like an echo. That meant Lonny was on his way. When you saw Lonny coming down the dirt road with his dogs and shotgun, you knew we’d arranged it at school the day before. For us, telephones were exotic, shining objects in other people’s houses—exotic like aquariums, color TVs, or doorbells. Hell, the VCR was only a few years away, and still we drove twenty minutes to use the payphone in the booth at the corner of 12th and Broadway. Anyway, you really didn’t see Lonny coming, you heard him, or rather his beagles and their aggressive nonstop yelp and yap. When I heard the clear jangling of chains, I knew—without looking—that Lonny was unlocking the swinging gate. I shot down one more can and stomped off through the frozen pasture to meet him.

The black-and-tan dogs trotted past me, snorting and whimpering at the ground, trailing their breath. I was over at Lonny’s when his uncle gave him the two pups and Lonny acted like he’d just been given a stack of money. Now he walked up in his blaze orange vest and cap, smiling big, holding the .20 gauge broken open—across his arm—in textbook fashion. Lonny was nothing if not careful. That was the only reason my grandparents allowed me to hunt with Lonny and his gun. I wasn’t conscientious; hence the BB gun.

“I heard you comin’ a mile away,” I told him.

“I ain’t tryin’ to be sneaky now,” he said, and we shook hands—an elaborate ritual involving palms, fingers, snapping, clapping, and pointing. Red shotgun shells lined the front of his vest like teeth.

“I can smell me some rabbit fryin’ already,” he said, licking his lips and patting his stomach. He made his eyes get real big. I laughed like always. It was good to be out hunting and not worrying about catching the bus to school the next morning. It was Christmas vacation.

We began to follow the dogs, taking it easy, feet crunching snow. There would be nothing here, around the house. Our object was the open field ahead, past the pond. Although snow covered pasture everywhere, tips of brown grass showed on little mounds here and there, and blackberry bushes were beginning to expose their skeletons. Clouds were breaking after rows of sunless and snowy days, and when sunlight hit momentarily, the snow gleamed like sugar and we had to squint our eyes.

We plodded past my little white house. It looked so quiet and peaceful. Woodsmoke rose from it in a straight thin line, and the windows were steamed around the corners. A tumbling stack of firewood sat on the front porch, covered with a sky-blue tarp. I took the cookie Lonny offered me and bit off half of it. Chocolate. Ahead, Monkey Tail froze at a clump of brush and dug at it with his front legs, barking. Snow, then dark black dirt sprayed out in an arc.

Lonny laughed. “He still ain’t nothin’ but a pup,” he said, cradling the gun against his shoulder like a soldier.

When we went hunting, I followed Lonny. He was a hunter, knew where to look, how to field-dress, look for sign. The extent of my hunting prior to Lonny had been with a long-ago cousin, blasting squirrels out of their nests with a .410. It was a roulette shot from underneath, and if one was home it flew out and plopped heavy and lifeless a few feet away. But when we went fishing, I was the leader. At first, Lonny didn’t even know how to throw his line in. I taught him and even gave him my old Zebco 33 rod-and-reel. The pond where we fished at most was just ahead, powdered with snow, a squatting oval rink.

I knelt and refilled my gun by putting the BBs in my mouth and spitting them rapid-fire into the little hole in the barrel. I’d seen my cousin do that. It left an oily taste but was worth it since it sounded cool. When full the gun didn’t rattle and felt hefty and solid—more like a real gun. I looked out over the field. All white. Cows massed together like statues next to the tree line, and beyond that, red lights of the three AM radio towers blinked steadily, like a pulse, glaring now in the dim light. As I stood, both dogs raised their usual yelping and howling to demonic levels. We had a German shepherd who had just recently disappeared and he barked, but nothing like this. I listened in amazement, but Lonny was already tugging my arm.

“C’moan,” he said. “They on, they on.”

We took off at a light jog. Only in the Arctic does a rabbit blend in with the snow. Around here they were gray with little white cottontails you couldn’t help but keep your eyes on as they scooted and bounded, hugging the ground with electric velocity. The rabbit dashed out to a good lead, then slowed to suck the dogs in. At the last possible instant, with the dogs literally at his tail, it slashed a hard immediate left, ears flattened. As pure a ninety-degree angle as nature will allow. When Monkey Tail fell down rolling, trying to copy the turn, I heard a grumple in his throat. Cookie stayed on her feet but swung way out wide—totally out of the race, it seemed. But Monkey Tail wiggled off his back, and Cookie recovered by pivoting her rear like a bull turning to charge, and quickly they were in chase again. Always there was the constant, maddening bark-howl, which seemed to fill the universe. Lonny held up a hand, and we stopped and knelt by a blackberry bush. The trio was rounding the north bank of the pond like it was a racetrack. Monkey Tail and Cookie were side-by-side, the lead changing only when one or the other fell for a trick the rabbit pulled. The rabbit came at us in a jittery gray blur.

“They’re running him right at us,” Lonny said, and I saw the pride in his eyes. Without looking he jammed three shells into the gun. “This one’s dead meat.”

When Lonny rose and aimed, the rabbit veered left and ran straight across the pond. Lonny lifted the barrel momentarily, then leveled and shot and missed, and when he pumped, a red shell popped out at my feet. He shot again and missed, kicking up snow right behind the rabbit’s feet, and on the third shot the rabbit cartwheeled and spun around and around like a disc in the middle of the pond. I jumped and yelled, high-fiving.

Bluish smoke seeped from the gun, the shots rang away in waves. The beagles chased after the rabbit and went silent when they hit the surface, sprawling like one of those baby deer in the Disney cartoons. Pink tongues hanging and breath steaming into the air, they stood over the rabbit.

Lonny whistled at them, and they raised their heads but would not move. They lowered and shook their heads like cattle and whimpered. We jogged up to the edge of the pond, and Lonny called again, whistling, but they would not come.

“Dang it,” Lonny said.

Lonny tested the ice with a foot and then walked out while I circled and tried to call the dogs. They wouldn’t listen to me. As Lonny neared they waggled their rumps and Lonny began to talk to them and they barked again and everything seemed normal until I heard a wicked crack! and a long split struck out like lightning and Lonny plunged in over his head. He bobbed up screaming and frantically grabbed at the edge of the hole and was half-out when a big jagged plate broke off and he went under again on his back. I ran around the bank to where I was closer to him and stepped out onto where the ice was thick, then I got on my stomach and inched toward him. I screamed his name. He was able to turn around in the water and grabbed at my BB gun. He got one hand around the barrel, then the other, and I pulled and pulled and finally he was able to get a leg up onto the ice and crawl out.

We banged into the house. Granny was at the kitchen table, stringing together acorn shells we would use to decorate the tree Grandpa Chester had cut down. Curling red strips of tin—cut from Grandpa’s Prince Albert cans—were strewn about the table.

“Oh my word, what on earth?” Granny said.

I told them what happened in a rush of run-on sentences and gestures while Lonny stood shivering, hugging himself with a vacant stare. Running to the house, the water had frozen on his jeans and in his hair. We led him to the front room and stood him beside the King woodstove glowing red at the sides. It made a steady sucking sound, like wind. We held our hands over it and rubbed them together.

Grandpa sat in his chair in the corner holding the newspaper out in front of him. When he was reading the paper or watching a football game on TV, you invariably had to repeat yourself when you talked to him. He sat there reading as we shivered and hopped next to the woodstove.

Finally he said, “You boys shoot anything? Where’s all them rabbits?”

“Lonny fell in the ice and lost his dogs and gun and everything.” I was looking at and talking to the front page of the newspaper.

“Huh?” he said, preoccupied, still moving his head over the columns.

I repeated what I’d said.

Slowly, he eased down the paper, revealing his white hair and magnified eyes behind the rubber-banded reading glasses.

“Whaaat?” he said, drawing it out. He looked at Lonny in wonder, took in the soaked clothes. It seemed to hit him all at once. “Well, son of a buck.”

Granny led Lonny to the hot bath she had run and told me to dig up some clothes for Lonny to wear and for me to towel off and put on warm clothes.

When Lonny was in the bathroom my uncle said, “What’s the little coon crying about?”

Growing up one of us was always staying with Granny. In this way I was always meeting one great-uncle or the other. But this one—Elliott—was new to me. He’d showed up the day before, huge, literally filling the doorway, holding a Christmas present for Granny in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. These uncles were always showing up out of nowhere. You looked for a car or something out next to the truck, but there wasn’t anything.

I hung up the sheet to block them out and took off my clothes and toweled off. I felt bad for Lonny, like crying, too. Everything happened so fast. One second we were joking around, watching the dogs chase the rabbit, and the next second Lonny was bobbing in the ice water and the pups were sinking. They went under without ever making a sound. I knew Lonny was crying over the dogs and not the shotgun. I heard him splashing around in the bathwater. I put warm clothes on and went back to the woodstove.

Elliott came into the room. He had short hair and tennis shoes—unlike my other uncles, most of whom had long hair and wore cowboy-type clothes.

“Hey, old sport,” he said, then tried to give me the old one-two, acting like he was boxing me. He had whiskey breath. I liked him okay but right then didn’t feel like boxing around with him and having him jab me on the arm and scruffing my head. The night before he’d showed us some pictures of rodeos. He was wearing a Gilligan’s cap and fake toothy smile. He had on cutoff blue jean shorts over red tights and a pair of high-top Converse. The picture said “All-Indian Rodeo, Barona, California, 1978.” It was taken from above, and Elliott was looking up into the camera. Last night he told me I’d never make it as a bulldogger if I didn’t toughen up. Then came the boxing lessons and the wrestling, which only tickled and made me breathless.

“Lonny just fell into the pond,” I said. “His dogs went under, too.”

“You ever been to California?” he said.

“No,” I said, watching the ash breathe red and gray underneath the vent. There was a tin box under the vent to catch stray chunks of coal and ash.

Elliott pointed westward, shook his head, and frowned. I didn’t understand him at all. He drank from his bottle again and staggered back into the kitchen.

Granny was letting the car warm up. Lonny and I sat in back, and Elliott was with Granny in the front. Lonny had on a pair of my sweats, a sweater, and a jean jacket and cap we’d found in the closet. He’d begun to loosen up. Maybe the shock was wearing off, but I could tell he was still troubled. Elliott reached around and grabbed Lonny by the throat and said real slowly, gritting his teeth, “You fucking nigger.”

Everything froze. Snow drifted lazily in the air outside the car, big flakes which floated and twirled silently, silently. Lonny gripped the armrest, eyes wide in alarm. Elliott’s dark bangs curved over and partially obscured his eyes. His teeth showed. There was a big turquoise ring around one of the fingers around Lonny’s neck.

“Here now, Elliott,” Granny said, “that’s Jordan’s friend. Let him be. Everything’s okay.”

Elliott held his position. The little car rumbled. Steam rolled up into the air from the rear. It was beginning to warm up. The fingers came off Lonny’s neck one by one. Elliott turned up a bottle and finished the clear liquid in three big gulps. He rolled down the window and flung it into the snow. He laughed.

“Oh, hell. He knows I’d never hurt him,” he said.

You fucking nigger.

All this was years and years ago; yet those three words stuck with me. It wasn’t like it was the first time I’d heard the word. But it was the only time I’d heard it said with venom. Until then it was only a word. A word like grasshopper, baseball, flower, or rain. I heard it all the time. Those were the days of afros, picks, and bell-bottoms. The school bus I rode home on with Lonny was all black except for me and the driver. Nigger, this; nigger, that; nigger, hell; nigger, please. Mine was the last stop. The district wouldn’t allow the bus down the dirt road. The driver turned around at the end of the pavement in The Village—as my grandparents nicknamed the all-black neighborhood. It wasn’t like housing projects or anything. These were houses the blacks themselves built in the twenties or thirties. Squat little wood houses with green shingling and various pens and hutches nearby for slaughter stock.

By the time I got on the bus it had already picked up Muskogee High and Alice Robertson Junior High. Usually, I had to stand. Always, I was the last one off unless Lonny walked home with me to fish until it grew dark. The day before Lonny and I went hunting, I rode in back with him singing “I Wish.” Lonny and his partner hammered out the beat with their hands against the seats. Usually I didn’t join in, but that day I’d caved in and sang along. I saw Lonny nudge a friend with his elbow and nod toward me, laughing. The whole bus was like a carnival every afternoon: hellish loud laughing, fighting, arguing, shouting. My ears rang after I’d departed. One afternoon the driver—a kindly old white-haired man with roundish eyeglasses—stopped the bus and said in a very pleasant voice, looking at us in the mirror, “Now, boys and girls, we’ll have to keep the noise down.” I thought, We aren’t boys and girls, we’re niggers. I’m sure I was the only person on the bus who even heard him, anyway.

Growing up, nigger was quite the common term. I never heard Granny use it—she always gave people the last possible benefit of the doubt—but Chester used it on occasion. Meadowlark were nigger quail. A carp or gar was nigger fish.

For football at lunchtime recess it was blacks, Indians, and Filipinos versus the whites. Which meant the blacks, me, and James Suero from Manila, whose dad was a doctor at nearby Muskogee General. One day we were to pick up James for a baseball game because his parents were out of town. They lived in a fancy addition near Pershing School. Sweeping driveway, lawn like a golf course, bay windows, doorbell. I rang it. The chimes cascaded. A black woman answered wearing a business-like navy blue skirt and a white cap of some sort. I stammered that I was looking for James Suero. She invited me in. On the way to the truck I asked who the woman was.

“Oh, that’s my mom,” James Suero said.

When Suero saw my face, he laughed.

“Aw, man, that’s our maid, you turkey.”

I felt embarrassed for the woman. I didn’t know anyone had maids anymore.

Lonny and I played another season of ball the next summer, which was cut short for him when a fiddleback bit him near the armpit after he’d put on a T-shirt which had been lying on the floor all night. It rotted out his flesh and took all season to heal, leaving an angry red scar. Still, he came to games and practices wearing his white sling. He didn’t quit the team. We wound up going to different junior highs in town, and Lonny quit playing baseball, while I continued. We saw each other ever so often during high school, but I heard that he quit and began attending vocational school for air conditioning.

Then, several years later after I graduated college in California, I returned to Muskogee and to the little junior college there to check on a transcript. I was walking across the parking lot, and there sat Lonny in an old blue truck with hutches in back. Our eyes met, and he gave that silent, teethy laugh of his, bobbing his head. He got out of the truck, and we shook hands—not the same ritual we went through as kids but close to it. Waiting on his girlfriend to get out of class, he was drinking tall-boy beers in cans and offered me one. It was a summer evening, and the sky was milky blue, lit up from underneath. It was warm, and stars were beginning to appear. The beer was cool and sweet.

Lonny looked the same, only a little chubbier. He had a thicker Southern accent than I’d remembered, or possibly it was because I had been in California four years. I told him what I’d been doing. His eyes sparkled. I remembered he’d been a brother to me growing up. He told me he worked at Madewell Metals, recycling scrap iron and aluminum. We remembered the time we were making fun of Chester because he pronounced it “alumy-num,” which, frankly, is what it looks like on paper if you think about it. Granny sat us down and told us not to make fun of Chester. He never got to finish school, she said. He had to go to work in the fields when he was only twelve years old and he still works hard every day to feed me, she said.

We were leaning against the tailgate, being secretive with the beer. Inside the bed of the truck lay fishing rods and empty beer cans. It was then I noticed the two beagle pups in the hutches. Lonny got them out and held one up, and it licked his face. Lonny grimaced but let the dog lick his face. One of the dogs barked, and all the memories came swimming over me. The Christmases with the real trees Chester would cut down when we went riding around on scouting expeditions in the country, my uncle Elliott, the youthful lifetime of so-so baseball teams.

“Hold up your arm, Lonny,” I said. “Let me see your scar.”

Lonny put his beer down and raised his arm. I traced my fingers over it. There were raised purple welts where flesh used to be.

“You remember that,” Lonny said evenly.

I nodded and finished my beer. Lonny’s girlfriend came out of one of the nearby brown buildings. Lonny introduced us. She was a pretty girl, but shy behind her thick glasses. I told Lonny the usual: that I’d call, I’d write, or I’d drop by. He still lives in the same house, and one of these days I actually might do it.