“What if they catch us?” Crash remembered his twin asking at the outset of one such outing.
“It’s not illegal to camp in the park if it isn’t posted,” their father replied with a nonchalant shrug. “But if the park rangers or the police find us, they’ll probably check our IDs and send us home.”
Crash knew that the eastern white pines of the grove gave great cover and so was not worried about being found. His backpack contained a camouflage pup tent, a thin down sleeping bag, a butane hotplate with enough fuel for a week’s worth of cooking, a pot and pan, a quart bottle of water, a battery-powered lantern, and six dried packets of onion and mushroom soup mix that came with a five-year guarantee of freshness. There were various other contents of the pack: three teabags, a tin cup, and a hunting knife designed, as his father said, for industry or defense.
Crash put up the tent and sat next to it eating a PB&J on sourdough. As evening came on, he began to wonder what would be happening between his home and the school. The principal’s office would have called his parents, saying that they had to come in for a special disciplinary meeting. On the other hand, his parents would have called the administration office wondering what the school had done with their son. Sooner or later they would figure out that Crash had suspected why the principal called him to her office and, instead of facing the music, had run.
Down in a clearing below a scrim of pines, Crash saw three deer illuminated by an early moon. He’d turned his lantern on low to read Demian, by Herman Hesse, a book that had been assigned in Mrs. Schrodinger’s World Literature class. Crash liked the book because it saw the world the way he did: not only good and evil but also light and dark mixing to make things so hard to understand. He liked the main character, Emil Sinclair, a lot. He was a misunderstood kid who couldn’t solve the simple problems of life.
“Hey there, little brother.” The voice was both rough and soft.
Crash peered in the direction from which the voice had come, but at first all he could see was darkness. He knew this was because of the blinding effect of the moon and electric light. He wasn’t afraid, because Brother called him “little brother” due to a half-inch deficit in height; Crash had been born seven minutes before Brother, and his jealous twin always tried to make Crash seem the junior.
As Crash’s vision acclimated, there appeared before him a tall and lanky young black man wearing black trousers and maybe a red T-shirt. The dark-skinned lad smiled brightly and said, “What you doin’ out here readin’ a book in the woods, man?”
“Reading,” Crash said, though he knew this was not a satisfactory answer to the question.
“What’s your name?” the young man asked. He took a step forward and hunkered down in an easy movement, right forearm on the knee, the knuckles of his left hand grazing the grass.
“My parents named me Percival, Percy, but everyone calls me Crash.”
“Why Crash?”
“What’s your name?” Crash asked.
“Otis.” He said the word as if it were somehow a defeat. “Otis Zeal.”
“That’s a cool name,” Crash said. It was the right thing to say.
Otis grinned again and asked, “Why you out heah?”
“They were going to expel me from school for helping about a dozen kids cheat on their homework and their tests.”
“A dozen is twelve, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So how much them other kids pay you to help ’em cheat?”
“Nothing.”
“Nuthin’? You mean you helped them and didn’t even get paid?”
“It was kind of like an experiment.”
“Like a scientist, like on TV?”
“Uh-huh. You see, I thought that maybe my friends weren’t learning because the teachers made the answers so much of a mystery. If they saw the question and then the answer, maybe that would help them know what they were learning about.”
“You sound kinda crazy, Percy Crash.”
“Why are you out here, Otis?”
“I always come out to here when I get in trouble too. My uncle used to take me here when I was kid like you, and now if I think somebody’s after me I come here to hide.”
“What are you hiding from?” Crash asked.
Otis embarked upon a meandering tale that made only a little sense to the sophomore from Horatio Prep. The story started with a girl named Brenda Redman. She was real cute, with a fat butt, and she could dance. Otis was a good dancer, and so every time he and Brenda met at a party at somebody’s house in the Bronx, they danced to just about every other cut the DJ played. The problem was this guy named Lawrence. Lawrence liked Brenda, and she liked him some too, but he couldn’t dance like Otis, and Brenda needed to be dancing when she was at a party and the music was playing — especially if there was wine involved. It was the wine, Otis believed, that made Lawrence angry. Brenda wasn’t his steady girl or anything, but even still, Lawrence pushed Otis, and that made Otis mad.
“You don’t wanna get me mad, little brother,” Otis said, in the middle of his story. “When I get mad there’s no tellin’ what I might do.”
Anyway, Otis got mad and stabbed Lawrence, who was a much bigger man, in the shoulder with a little paring knife. Otis always carried an edge — that’s what he said.
“Did you kill him?” Crash asked Otis.
“I ’on’t think I did. You know, sometimes people die when you don’t hurt ’em much, but I don’t think he woulda died. It don’t matter though, because his cousin belongs to a gang, and they’ll be lookin’ for me for a long time.”
There was a lull in the conversation for a while after that. Both young man and boy looked around, appreciating the relative silence of the city park. Then Otis began to shiver. The tremors started in his chest and radiated out toward the limbs. Crash crawled into the little pup tent and pulled out Brother’s afghan sweater.
“Here,” Crash said, “put this on.”
Otis reached out and pulled the woolen garment over his head. He nodded, grinned, and then shuddered once before plopping down into a half lotus.
“That makes the difference,” Otis declared.
Crash thought the words sounded like something a parent or some other elder had often said.
“You want a PB&J?”
“Wha’s that?”
They talked about school because it was something they had in common. Otis had been kicked out so many times that they finally stopped expecting him to come back. Mostly these suspensions were because of his bad temper. Whenever Otis got angry he had to do something hard. He’d throw a glass against the wall, hit somebody, or something else like that. One time he pushed a girl named Theodora down some marble stairs.
“I was already sorry before she stopped tumblin’,” he said. “But I didn’t say it, because I had no right to expect forgiveness. I always keep thinkin’ that maybe I could find a place where you nevah have to get mad, and then I’d be cool. My daddy told me before he died that that place was called Dead.”
When it was Crash’s turn to talk, he said that he felt like an outcast in school. Horatio Prep was better than public school, but still everybody thought that he was tricking them with the way he learned things.
“It’s like when I read a book,” Crash explained. “I turn the pages so fast that nobody believes I’m really readin’, or when people just say a math problem and I know the answer.”
“You didn’t turn the pages fast when I saw you reading your book,” Otis pointed out.
“That’s because, um, after I read a book a few times I go slower and slower, because my mind is making up all this other stuff about how the people really felt and what they looked like.”