Now he just leaned against the outer wall, peering into the apartment, thinking about what Lincoln had told him. He wouldn’t find Chelsea. She was strung out, probably dead, but in the wind for certain. She was a year older than him, and light-years ahead in experience. Colesbery knew about cheap wine — Mad Dog, Red Dagger, Boone’s Farm — but Chelsea drank vodka, tequila, and she knew about drugs and where to get them. White neighborhoods that Colesbery didn’t feel comfortable in sometimes. Nobody’s going to bother us, she would say as they rode past small one-story sixties and seventies houses, almost all of them with a small beat-up car and a pickup in the driveway. You think that because you white, Colesbery would say.
It was six months before she introduced him to her parents. Her father, slim and wiry with stringy black hair on its way to gray, owned a tire wholesale shop in downtown Ensley. They shook hands when Colesbery picked her up to go to Junior Achievement, but Colesbery sensed his displeasure at this black boy there to pick up his daughter. Colesbery picked her up every Tuesday for the meetings, which they did actually attend, but they also left early often, rode around and drank, and found dark, quiet, secluded spots to park. At school, Chelsea had taken to pushing Colesbery back into the side room between the shelves and giving him hand jobs. He’d stand between the two shelves, a hand on each to maintain his steadiness; she would unzip his pants and stroke Colesbery till he finished, and when he did, it was often in the pages of a book, which she would then fold closed and return to a shelf. But when they were in the car, Chelsea always pulled him hard inside of her, often grabbing his bare behind with a force that thrilled him. What always surprised him was her need to look him in the eyes when he came. Sometimes he would lower his head and she would place her hands on his cheeks and lift up his face. The first few times they used protection, but when she told him she was on the pill, that she wanted to feel him inside her, Colesbery complied. Sometimes she would cry afterward, tell Colesbery nothing was wrong, that she was just happy. And he wanted to believe her, even after he found out it wasn’t a lie, but wasn’t the truth either.
When Junior Achievement ended, Colesbery started working at Rally’s, and when he got off at night, he would sometimes bring Chelsea a burger and some fries and a strawberry soda. He always parked on the street at the end of the block and walked up the alley. From there he could slip in through the fence and make his way to her window. It was dark, shaded by trees and a fence, and her parents were usually in the den on the opposite end of the house. But one night they were on the porch when Colesbery got there. The grass was thick and usually soundless, but there were still a good number of leaves on the ground, so he had to be careful, move slower than usual. As he neared Chelsea’s window, he heard her parents talking. Before he tapped on the window, her father said his name. Colesbery froze, but no one was coming at him around the front corner of the house. They were discussing him. Her mother, a woman with long and frizzy auburn hair and a penchant for cookbooks, was saying she didn’t like it much better than her husband, but she thought it was a phase, that it would pass. Mr. Gradine then said that he just didn’t want that nigger coming around his house into the next year, and his friends were starting to talk, saying that she was tainted now. He’d heard the word before, but hadn’t expected it here, not after so many months of her parents being civil to him. He wanted to confront them, but just stood frozen, looking into the window of her bedroom. She was on the bed reading, but he couldn’t knock, not then.
He’d left, run back to his car, but only drove around. Fuck that, he kept telling himself. He was going to have to say something. An hour later, near midnight, he was back. Chelsea’s light was still on. When he got to her window, what he saw nearly made him throw up. Chelsea’s nightgown was puffed up near her neck and just over the tops of her breasts, but she was naked from the waist down, her face turned toward the window where he stood. He thought she saw him, but her eyes were blank, absent. Her father was on top of her, then pushed himself up till he could turn and sit at the foot of the bed. He reached down and pulled up first his boxers and then a pair of dingy work pants. Colesbery looked from him to her and back to him. Mr. Gradine rose and left. Colesbery didn’t knock, his anger from earlier now transformed into something that he didn’t know how to handle.
Standing now in his small courtyard, Colesbery replayed those moments in his mind. He could have done something, should have done something. But he just turned and ran, from Chelsea, from everything. Didn’t tell her what he saw either. When he did see her again, there was distance between them, which became less the sporadic interruption and more the norm. They argued more and more. He began not showing up when he said he would. Once, when he was high and stopped by, her father was on the porch smoking a cigarette. She ain’t here, he’d said, but kept talking. Colesbery noticed the empty beer cans, the cigarette butts. That night Mr. Gradine had been the first to suggest Colesbery go to the service, and for once something made sense to him. He could remember it now just as clearly as when it happened. He’d wanted to tell the man to fuck himself, that he should leave, but getting away sounded like the best option. Getting as far away as possible from Birmingham, from his drunk uncle, from school, from Chelsea.
The next morning, after putting cereal into a Styrofoam bowl, Colesbery took several minutes to pour enough milk to nudge the cereal, the white just visible here and there, peeking out. Still, he couldn’t look at the milk, kept seeing faces, boys halfway around the world, dead. He wasn’t surprised, the milk thing had been happening since he got home. He left the milk sitting there, got dressed, and left.
His uncle lived in the same run-down apartment. Colesbery knocked, then walked through the unlocked door.
“What the hell you doing back? You must’ve come back to see ’bout that little white girl who was having your baby when you left.” His uncle was sitting in a goldish-brown chair from another era. His hair was nearly gone now on the top, and his arthritis had turned his fingers into twisted roots and knots. “Go to the kitchen and get me a beer.”
“Just came to see how you doing, Uncle.” Colesbery went to the kitchen and grabbed a can from the refrigerator. “Got to go to the bathroom,” he said as he handed it over. He bypassed the kitchen and went to his uncle’s bedroom. In the same drawer, in the same box. Colesbery exhaled, surprised his uncle hadn’t sold the.38 by now, and relieved at knowing he wouldn’t have to find another one. He checked it over, then tucked it into the back of his pants.
“You coming back?” his uncle asked when Colesbery returned to the den and told him he had somewhere to be.
“I’ll bring you a twelve-pack, Uncle,” he said, and left.
Downtown Ensley hadn’t changed. Shortly before noon, Colesbery parked his pickup in a lot near Carter’s Barbershop and walked back the two blocks, past Hawkins Park. When he was in high school, he and his friends would sometimes gather there, call themselves the Junction Boys ’cause they had been a couple of times to the Function in the Junction, an annual festival that took place in that park and celebrated the musical history of Ensley. But they didn’t know about the history then, just liked to call themselves the Junction Boys because it sounded like it carried weight, like there was something there to be respected. Didn’t know it then, but now it seemed to Colesbery that everything in the world came down to respect. It was his uncle who had told him about how Erskine Hawkins had written and recorded that song as a B side, and about how a white dude recorded it later and had made a boatload of money, none of which went to Hawkins. “It’s always respect,” Colesbery said aloud.