“John, buddy,” one friend whispered. “Your mom is a babe.”
“No shit,” a crass friend said. “If she was my mom, I would have never quit breast-feeding.”
John felt the rage rise inside him, up from his stomach to the back of his throat. He wanted to strike out, to break that friend’s nose, blacken another’s eyes. He wanted to cause them so much pain. He could not believe his friends would talk about his mother in that way. But they also talked about their mothers in the same way.
“My mom’s got a fat ass, all right,” a boy said. “You should see her panties hanging up to dry in the bathroom. They look like sails. Jesus, it’s like the goddamn America’s Cup in there.”
A huge jerk named Michael sat down beside John and started in.
“Smith,” Michael said to him, “I saw your mom at the store last night. You are a lucky fucker.”
Everybody at the table agreed and laughed, punched each other on the shoulders. John stared down at his sandwich. Sometimes he smiled and pretended to laugh when his friends teased him about his mother. He knew that was how he was supposed to react. Other times, he just ignored them and waited for the subject to change. A pretty girl would walk by and all his friends would launch into a long discussion of her alleged sexual history. But Michael would not leave it alone, even after John refused to acknowledge him.
“Smith,” Michael said, because white boys always called each other by their last names. “I was just wondering. I mean, you’re adopted, right? I mean, she’s not even your real mother. Not really. You could get a little of that nookie and it wouldn’t even be illegal, right? Not really.”
John looked at Michael, who was smiling. Michael, with his swollen, bright-pink face. Michael, who would grow up to become an investment banker, a rich man with a wife, two sons, and a relatively clean life.
“I mean,” Michael stage-whispered to John, so that everybody would be sure to listen closely. “Don’t you ever want to sneak into her bed at night and give it to her?”
Everybody at the table was stunned. A few laughed nervously, wanting the good times to continue, hoping their laughter would lessen the tension. One or two smiled, enjoying the torment. Most had no idea how to react, but they all knew that Michael had taken it too far. They waited for John’s reaction. When he sat frozen, Michael pushed further.
“Well,” Michael continued. “She’s a gorgeous white woman and you’re an Indian, right? Don’t you watch the movies? Don’t Indians always want to fuck white women?”
John moved quickly, grabbing Michael around the neck and wrestling him to the ground. They rolled around the floor, throwing ineffective punches and kicks, fighting like people who have never been in a fistfight. The other boys quickly circled them, excited by the violence, but just as quickly the teachers broke it up, and John and Michael were sent to the principal’s office. Michael went inside first, and came out with a forced smirk on his pimpled face.
“Now,” said Mr. Taylor, the principal, when John was finally in his office. “What was this all about?”
Near tears, John breathed deeply and deliberately. He did not want to cry. His chest burned. He looked around the office. He saw the walnut desk, the bookshelves stacked thick with books that had not been touched in years. Various diplomas hung on the wall, a photograph of Mr. Taylor standing near the Pope.
“Are you hurt?” asked Mr. Taylor, a tall, chubby white man in an ugly sport coat. He was the first principal in St. Francis’s history who was not a priest, although he frequently described himself as having been the best altar boy in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
“John,” said Mr. Taylor again. “Are you hurt?”
John shook his head.
“Well, then,” said the principal. “Tell me what happened.”
“Michael was,” John began. “He was insulting my mother. He was saying ugly things.”
Mr. Taylor knew how the boys saw Olivia Smith.
“John,” the principal said, “I’m going to tell you something, but it cannot leave this office. Agreed?”
“Okay,” John said. He was crying now.
“Michael is a jerk. Why did you listen to him? You’re a good kid, John. You should just ignore him. He was trying to get a rise out of you.”
John was shocked. Not just that this man knew Michael was wrong, but shocked at the same time that this offense could be trivialized.
“Don’t act so surprised,” said Mr. Taylor. “I’m not as out of it as all of you think I am. I know what goes on. Next time, you just walk away from him, okay?”
“Okay,” John agreed, knowing that he could not walk away from any of it, but knowing that Father Duncan had walked away into the desert.
“Okay, then,” said the principal and handed John a tissue. “Clean up your face and go back to class. I’ll deal with Michael.”
John stood to leave the office. Before he closed the door behind him, John turned back.
“Thanks,” John said, always the polite student, wanting to push his anger into a small place.
“You’re welcome.”
John left the St. Francis principal’s office and nearly stepped off the girder he was walking on ten years later. He looked at the ground thirty-seven floors below. Three hundred and seventy feet, give or take a few. The foreman was yelling at him.
“Quit your daydreaming and get to work.”
John looked at the foreman, who had begun to speak a whole new language. All of his words sounded foreign. John spoke high school French and German, knew a few Spanish phrases, and had a decent Catholic student’s knowledge of Latin, but the foreman’s language was something else entirely. He had always been a good boss, even though he had never spoken at a volume that John could tolerate, but John did not trust him anymore. Whenever the foreman was close, John quickly evaluated his escape routes and identified potential weapons. He never allowed the foreman to stand between him and the elevator. This resulted in strange conversations. John pretended to talk to the foreman, who hardly ever said anything that made sense. But if the foreman blocked his path to the elevator, John grew more and more nervous. He kept moving and talking, talking and moving, until he was closer to the elevator than to the foreman. The foreman was not stupid. He knew that John was acting strangely.
“I don’t know,” the foreman would often say to his other workers. “That John is acting pretty damn strange lately.”
“Lately?” somebody would usually ask. “He’s always been a little off. How do you tell the difference?”
“But he’s a good worker,” another man would usually put in.
“That’s true,” everybody would always agree. “He is that.”
Whatever the other men felt, the foreman genuinely worried about John. They had never been friends, had never shared one moment of recognizable camaraderie, but after years of working with him, the foreman had learned a few personal details about John. He knew that John was an Indian, that was obvious enough, but he had been raised by a white couple. The foreman did not know how that must have felt to son and parents. It did not make any emotional sense to him, but he knew that John barely spoke to his parents. He also knew that John never dated. At first, the foreman thought that John might be queer, but that was not it. John was just a loner, quiet and distant. It was only lately that he had become truly weird. John spent more and more break time alone on the fortieth floor, even spent work time there, and the foreman had had to go find him more than once.