Angry Management (18 page)

Mr. S

Man, how do I teach civics in Cutter High School? How do I talk to my students about justice and due process when I know damned good and well that a police officer destroyed evidence, lied to his superior’s faces, and is out on patrol as I speak? How do I tell them a prosecutor gave Matt Miller and me twenty minutes before deciding he didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute with nothing but a couple of blurry pictures from a cell phone of a flag in the bottom of a boat; a flag, he said, that
could
have been planted? He’d heard of the bad blood between Matt and the boys in the boat. It would all come down to he said, they said.

Matt, bless his heart, listened to the prosecutor, stood up, and said, “There’s plenty here, sir, and you know it. But I see your heart plain as day, and I know I don’t have a chance. So I’m leaving before I get any of you on me.”

The prosecutor stood, red faced. “You smart-mouthed little prick. Don’t you ever accuse me of shirking my duties. This case is unwinnable.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Matt said. “The law requires you to stand up for the truth whether you can win or not. But I know you won’t. Good day.”

I walked with Matt to the door, felt his forearm trembling beneath his long sleeve. He turned at the door and pointed a finger at the prosecutor. “When you go to bed tonight, ask yourself this, sir. Ask yourself, when you’re standing at the gates of Heaven, would you rather be there as the hater or the hated? There are just two sides to this. This shit gets paid.” We walked to my car in silence, my hand in the middle of his back, knowing I was touching a young man who will approach greatness. When I let him off in the school parking lot, he walked to his car, started to unlock the door, and dropped to his knees, sobbing.

Tuesday afternoon, early November. Marcus hasn’t been gone a week. I drive to Wallace James’s place, park on the dirt road in front, and gather the courage to go in. A bluish light from the TV screen flickers. The rest of the house is dark. I knock, to no answer. Again. I try the door. Unlocked. I have to go in. I have to.

Wallace sits on his worn couch, staring at the television set, a half-full scotch glass sitting on the side table.

“Come on in, teacher man,” he says. “Watch this with me.”

Things have been so crazy around here I forgot what day this is, though I did make it to the polls. On the screen, a tall, young, handsome black man strides onto a stage with his family, a beautiful, confident wife and two smiling, waving kids. American flags stand like a fence line behind him. Tears stream down the faces of many of the tens of thousands of people in the park where he is about to accept his mandate as president of the United States.

I look over at Wallace; tears stream down his face, also. His watery eyes are glued to the small TV set. “Think if this woulda happened ten years ago, my boy would be alive?”

I watch the screen, and my heart swells with Wallace’s. I’d rather be here with him than on the grass in that park in Chicago. Here, I can feel it personally. But…“Probably not, Wallace. The Marshalls are likely watching this over at their house right now, calling our new president a nigger.”

“It’s a start though,” he says. “Maybe
twenty
years from now a kid like Marcus will live because someone steps up.”

“A whole bunch of kids like Marcus will live, Wallace. You’re right.”

He gets up and walks to the kitchen, pours himself another scotch, and one for me, and we sit and watch the news for maybe an hour. There is triumph in the air, but far less triumph in this room. “Hell,” Wallace says as he eases himself back onto the couch, “I don’t even know what they got him for, ’cause he was black or ’cause he was gay. Been sittin’ here wonderin’ which way the hate was comin’ from.” He nods toward the TV. “Look at California. They was gonna let gay folks be married. Now they’re gonna kill it. Word has it my people are helpin’ to kill it.” He shakes his head sadly. “I hope that’s not true; it would mean a whole people, been kicked around all our lives, are votin’ so another group gets kicked. Lordy.”

“I think that’s a rumor, Wallace,” I say. “It isn’t your people who are making that happen; it’s just all those folks who can’t stand to let people be different.”

He stands. “You know, teacher man, bein’ homosexual isn’t somethin’ my boy
chose
. He just was. Somebody’s readin’ the good book all wrong. You ask me, God creates it, God loves it. Simple as that. We got a ways to go.”

They’re replaying some of the new president’s remarks. “Yeah, Wallace, but we just came a ways, too; right here tonight.”

“What about that wrestler boy, he gonna be okay?”

“Yeah, I think so. He’s not a wrestler boy anymore, though. When Coach Steensland said he wouldn’t coach football if he had to take Marshall and his buddies back on the team, and the administration said he had to, he quit. Matt said he wouldn’t wrestle for a school that celebrates murder.”

“He’s a gutsy kid. Wish he’d have known Marcus better.”

“He knows him better now.”

“I guess. I’m puttin’ the place up, you know.”

“For sale?”

“Yeah, I can’t stand it. Can’t walk from room to room ’spectin’ to see him around the corner. Pretty sour on this town, too. I should be able to get enough for it to last out.”

“Where’ll you go?”

“Think I’ll just go.”

“Hey, Matt. How’s it going?”

“Got some more offers to wrestle,” he says, dropping three letters from major NCAA colleges on my desk. “Guess one state championship was enough. Screw The Bean. When I said I was hanging it up, he told me I was ruining my future. Man, I can hardly wait to get out of here.”

“It has been a little toxic,” I say.

“Yeah, toxic enough I’m losing my faith.”

“Your religious faith?”

“I can’t find a way to forgive those guys, Mr. Simet. That’s one big test of a true Christian, the way I read it. I’ve said before, it’s easy to forgive an accident, a lot harder to forgive malice. All I feel is hate. Right situation came up, I could kill those guys. I walk the halls hoping one of them will say the wrong thing. It’s eating me up. I don’t even know what forgiveness would feel like.”

I’m afraid I can’t help. I had those guys transferred out of my class because I couldn’t stand to look at them either. But…“You know, before he left, Wallace told me something about forgiveness that’s been haunting me; said he’s been leaning on it.”

“What.”

“It’s just a saying, really. Mark Twain. His wife used to say it before she died. Wallace’s wife, not Mark’s.”

“What was it?”

“He said, ‘Forgiveness is the scent the violet leaves on the heel that crushes it.’”

Matt runs that over in his head. “Whoa.”

“Yeah. He said forgiveness was probably too big for most humans, that maybe we have to leave it to something bigger. Wallace was being eaten alive, just
like you. He had some big-name lawyers ready to bring civil charges against the families of all three kids. I mean
big
-name lawyers.”

“Why didn’t he do it?”

“He said he didn’t have the stomach to stay here and feel the way he feels,” I tell him. “He said we all grow up thinking how our people taught us to think. That’s Marshall’s problem. But Wallace also said he was still mortified that when he first discovered Marcus was gay, he told him to leave; flew into a rage. Then he read about Matthew Shepard crucified on a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, and he realized people get lynched because of hate, not just skin color. He said something else you would have liked. He said, ‘I still got a little faith, teacher man. Those boys gonna live their lives however they live ’em, but when they get to the gates of Heaven, s’all gonna come out.’”

Matt smiles. “Yeah. Wouldn’t matter to those guys whether or not I forgave them. Those fuckers are too mean to care. It’s for me, but maybe Mr. Wallace is right. Maybe it’s too big.”

“Right. I’m not familiar with your specific beliefs, Matt, but I don’t think humans are wired to forgive right away. In fact, for some things I don’t know if they ever can. And I don’t know that they should. That never
made much sense to me. Twain may have had it right. It’s the scent of the violet, the good that the wronged leave on their way out. The good the bad guys can’t stomp out.”

“May be.”

“So finish your year. Get the grades, stay in shape. Go put all this to use.”

Matt stands and hugs me, and I feel in the power of his arms why he wins on the mat. He waves with his back to me as he walks out the door.

Matt Miller

Meet me at the gates, Marcus James. You can walk me through.

Anger. All those stories. All that rage.

Anger drives a drunken man to push his beautiful three-year-old daughter’s face against a hot wood stove, force her to live looking at life through the prism, and the prison, of those scars. Then, to a great extent, anger drives that burned, broken girl to fly.

Anger burrows deep into the soul to become hate and a promising young gay black man floats dead in a lake, his dreams finished. Done. Then it drives another young, talented man forward to tell the truth at any cost.

A girl and her father yell their angry words at each other so loud they forget they love each other.

Nak closes the door behind him, sits, kicks his feet up on the desktop, intertwines his fingers behind his head. For every story of angry destruction there is one of angry elevation. “Circles right around like a rattlesnake chasin’ its tale,” he murmurs. He thinks back to Hudge, the young impaired boy from all those years ago; the
victim of anger so mean it defied reason. “Wish I coulda stuck a little anger into ol’ Hudge’s gut,” he says again to the empty room. “Powerful bit of rage mighta kept that boy alive.”

It feels so good to be back with the young ones, he thinks. Watchin’ them on the front end of things, with a chance to manage it all. “Not a good chance, maybe. But a chance.”

All those stories.