“Go back to your story,” Bobby tells the kid.
Jules decided she was going to call Frankie at home. Where he lived with his wife and kids. At quarter past midnight. Nobody thought this was a good idea. They all tried to talk her out of it. But she marched across Columbia Road, a dime in her hand, and stopped at the pay phone just outside the subway station and dropped the dime in the slot. The boys stayed where they were, but Brenda jogged across the road to Jules and stood by her while she talked into the phone, ended up screaming something that sounded like “Well, you spend the money!” She slammed the phone down so hard on the cradle that they heard it on the other side of the road.
Rum and George Dunbar considered moving toward the girls, but they could tell by the way Jules was waving her hands and making ugly scrunch-faces that she was crying, and who the fuck wanted any part of that? Then the same spook kid who had driven by in the dying car walked out of the block of shadow thrown by the overpass, and who knew what he had in mind because he seemed to be staring at the girls, so Rum and George jogged across the street in time to hear him say, “Are you okay?”
“We don’t have any money,” Brenda said.
“Who asked for money?” Bobby asks Rum now.
“What? No one.”
“So why did Brenda say she didn’t have any money?”
Rum shrugs. “Why else was he talking to them?”
Even Vincent, no friend to the black man, is bewildered. “To see if she was okay?”
“Fuck that,” Rum says. “He’s not supposed to ask that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s none of his business. Look, we all get how it works. Maybe you don’t, but we do. You don’t talk to each other. It’s that simple. I don’t want no trouble in my life — I really don’t — but if I was stupid enough to roll up on some colored girls in Mattapan Square and start talking to them and their boyfriends showed up? I would fucking expect them to beat the ever-living piss out of me. Nothing personal. Just the way it works. But here’s the difference between me and that dumbass spook — I am not gonna roll up on a pair of spook girls and start talking to them. About anything. Because I’m not looking for trouble.”
“But Auggie Williamson was?”
“Well, yeah.”
Bobby and Vincent exchange a look.
Bobby says, “Keep talking.”
“This nigger asking you for money?” George Dunbar asked Brenda.
Brenda looked into George’s eyes and immediately sensed a major shift in mood on that sidewalk. “Just get the fuck outta here,” she said to the colored guy.
He tried to take her advice, but George blocked his path. “You trying to get money from my girl?”
“No,” the guy said quietly with a tiny smile that he might not have been aware of. “I was asking if her friend was okay.”
“Why do you care about her friend?” George’s voice was so quiet you could barely hear him. And they all knew what that meant.
“I don’t anymore.” The black guy held up his hands and tried to edge past George.
“Just fucking let him go,” Jules said.
“You’re right,” George agreed. “You’ll probably see him in school next week.”
Jules snapped her head up, and something unreasonable found her eyes. “I told you to fucking go.”
The black kid said, “I’m trying.”
He sounded so afraid. Terrified. Of them. It surprised Rum. And offended him at the same time. Maybe they all felt the same way, because the next thing that happened was—
“You happy?” Jules screamed. No one knew at first who she was screaming at. “You got your buses, you got our fucking school, you’re gonna move on to our neighborhood next?”
The black kid started walking a lot faster.
George got a big smile on his face and drained his beer. Practically in the same motion, he threw it at the black guy. It made a loud pop when it shattered.
Brenda laughed. So did Jules. Rum had never seen a person laugh and look so hopeless at the same time. The look stuck with him for days.
“Hey, wait up,” George said just as the black guy reached for one of the doors to the station. “Wait up.”
Now the black guy started to really move.
“We just want to talk to you,” George said.
And they all fell in behind George as he kind of half skipped toward the station doors. Whatever was going to happen, it was now in motion. No turning back.
And who would want to? Rum hadn’t felt this alive in years. Maybe ever.
Inside the station, the spook had already jumped the turnstiles. They all jumped them right after him.
Brenda called, “You run slow for a nigger.”
Jules said, “Yeah, I thought you were all track stars and shit.”
“Hey,” George called to the guy again, “we just want to talk to you.”
On the platform, as they all heard the train barrel down the track toward the station, George threw another beer bottle. It exploded at the black guy’s feet, and the black guy turned with his hands up and said, “Let’s just forget all about this.”
“About what?” George said.
The black guy tripped over his own feet and fell on his back, and George and the two girls found this hilarious. Then—
“Hold up,” Bobby says to Rum Collins. “Where the fuck are you in all this?”
“Huh?”
“Where are you in this story?”
“I’m, like, watching?”
“Then who threw the second beer bottle, numb nuts?” Vincent asks.
Rum stares back at them, a blank slate.
“George threw a beer bottle at Auggie Williamson outside the station, right?”
A nod.
“So that bottle’s gone. Now you want us to believe he threw another one at him inside the station.”
“Yeah.”
“Where’d he get it?”
Rum turns a shade or two whiter. His lips part, but no words leave his mouth. Somewhere back in that pebble of a brain of his, he’s backhoeing like a motherfucker.
“You threw the second bottle,” Bobby says.
“No.”
“Then you threw the first,” Vincent says.
“No.”
“Pick one.”
“No.”
“Fucking pick one!” Vincent flings a black ashtray made of hard plastic right at the kid’s head. The ashtray misses, but the message lands.
“I threw the second one,” Rum says.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Bobby says.
“Forget about what?” George Dunbar asked, standing over Auggie Williamson.
“Whatever,” Auggie said, and they could all hear the shakes in his voice and see them in his hands. “Forget this ever happened.”
“We can’t,” George said, “because you keep coming into our fucking neighborhood.”
It was Jules who delivered the first kick.
“Jules Fennessy kicked him?”
Rum nods. “She was pissed, man. Just out of her head. It was like you could tell she felt bad for him? And the worse she felt for him, the madder she got. It made no sense.”