So his mother had spilled a jarful of coinage that had accumulated for years on her dresser. She was feverishly separating the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, then stacking them in what looked like piles of ten. The scene made Willing sad. It wasn’t only his mother’s desperation. It was the coins themselves. When he was small, a tower of quarters had seemed so precious. Something about the character of metal—hard, shiny, heavy, and immutable—had always made change seem more valuable, more substantial, than paper bills. The jar on his mother’s dresser had glinted like the treasure you might unearth in a buried chest, or raise to the surface with pulleys and divers from the timbers of a shipwreck. As a boy, he had walked the streets with a front pocket bulging with change, which would pull down his jeans on that side and thump against his thigh. Even in grade school he knew that the paper five in the opposite pocket was worth more than the coins. But it was the swinging, sagging swag of copper, nickel, silver, and tin that made him feel rich.
Now a coin was a mere disc, like a Tiddlywink—a historical oddity, since metal money was no longer minted. The change his mother was maniacally separating was rinky-dink, and her project was dumb. After spending an hour on this chore, she’d be lucky to assemble enough legal tender for a can of Coke.
Willing swept his hand over his mother’s piles, and toppled the towers. Coins rattled to the floor and curled under the bed. He surprised himself. There was anger in the gesture. He seldom afforded himself anger, and he wondered where it came from.
“What was that about?” his mother cried. He wished she wouldn’t get down on her knees like that and chase quarters among the dust balls. It was undignified. No one stooped to retrieve a quarter from the sidewalk. “Now I’ll have to start all over again.”
“You’re wasting it.” Willing fetched a sock from Esteban’s dresser, and checked that it had no holes. By the fistful, he loaded coins into the sock, until the toe sagged as his pocket had in boyhood. Then he knotted the sock above the change.
“Green Acre won’t accept that,” his mother said. “They only take coins if they’ve been counted into sleeves.”
“I’ve heard of socking money away.” Willing swung the pendulum, thudding the coinage against his opposite palm. It had force. It had momentum. “This what they mean?” He launched the sock from behind him and whacked the ball of metal against the bedroom door frame. The cracking sound was loud. The coins made a dent in the wood.
His mother looked frightened.
“It makes a good weapon,” Willing explained. “A weapon is worth more than anything this junk would buy.”
“You’re changing,” she said.
“I’m adapting,” he said.
“Stop adapting,” she said.
“Animals that don’t adapt,” he said, “die.”
“Give me the bag.” He said it gently, with a tinge of sorrow. The boy could not have been more than ten or eleven. At least he was white, which would make this easier.
They were on East Fifty-Second, a side street, two blocks from Green Acre Farm. As ever, the walk was blighted by human excrement. Interesting, how readily one spots the spoor of one’s own species.
“I can’t.” Intimidated against a fence, the boy gripped the canvas bag to his chest. He would have been sent to shop for dinner. He was slight and red-haired, with a wary, flinching twist to his face that in a few years would grow permanent. His coat was too thin for the weather. “I’ll get in trouble.”
“Give me the bag now.” Willing swung the sock into his opposite palm, as he had in his mother’s bedroom. For Willing and the boy also, the motion was hypnotic. “Or you’ll get in worse trouble.”
The boy glanced up and down the street. It was scarcely bustling, but it wasn’t deserted, either. They were in front of a house, from which someone peered, then drew the curtain. When the boy’s gaze met the eyes of an older woman down the block, she turned and hurried in the opposite direction. That’s the way it was now.
The kid started to run, but there’d been a tell—a sudden feverish glance in the direction he planned to bolt. That gave Willing time to grab his arm. The contact was shocking for them both.
“Okay, okay!” the boy wailed. He held out the bag solemnly, an offering. Willing let go. With another look at the sock as the sagging toe reeled lazily from his tormentor’s right hand, the quarry ran.
Willing examined the groceries. Artificially flavored cherry drink, the kind of sponges that fell apart, white sandwich bread, a pound of fatty hamburger. Fatty was good. Fatty had more calories. In all, the haul was poor and not to his mother’s taste, but they wouldn’t go hungry. Funny, he hadn’t thought the change on his mother’s dresser would buy anything near dinner, and it just had.
At first he hoped Savannah would be home tonight, so that his commonplace bullying might pass as chivalry. This was the sort of escapade that impressed girls. But he would have to stop himself from bragging, which would sound foolish to his own ears later and would get back to his mother. The most useful skill he’d mastered in childhood was keeping his mouth shut. At sixteen, the aptitude was harder to sustain.
As he walked home with his booty, the thrill of success was muted by melancholy. During previous exploits, he had shied from verbs of thievery; the stashes stacked on back patios had been confiscated, raided, or taxed. But this form of borrowing a cup of sugar from the neighbors felt different, and Willing was aware of having crossed a line. Others would cross it, too, then. Still others had crossed that line so long ago that they’d lost sight of it, and there was no line.
Thus at dinner—a crumble of ground beef, two slices of bread apiece that were soaked in grease—Willing announced, “We need a gun.”
“Are you off your nut?” his mother exclaimed. He would let her sputter through her predictable indignation, but he was bored. “We are not having a gun in this house. I don’t believe in guns. Half the time it’s the person who owns the dratted thing who gets shot. What on earth would we need a gun for?”
“To protect us,” Willing said, “from people like me.”
• CHAPTER 13 •
KARMIC CLUMPING II
Carter accepted philosophically that human life was sacred. He also accepted that in this country all men—women, too, in more enlightened times—were “created equal,” even if, as a well-educated and temperamentally more competitive man than his father ever recognized, he had always found the assertion optimistic. All right, he knew what the Declaration of Independence meant really, not that everyone was good at math but that they all had the same rights. Ergo, even Luella Watts Mandible enjoyed the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the most vital being that first item, since he and Jayne were most certainly denying her liberty, and were she ever to pursue happiness she would forget she was pursuing happiness within sixty seconds and come back instead with a parsnip. Carter could marginally credit the possibility that somewhere deep inside that tangle of rhyming paranoia in his stepmother’s head remained some tiny glimmer, some infinitesimal remnant—under the size of a pea, even smaller than one kernel of popcorn—of the graceful, stunning, well-spoken, black-only-in-the-sense-of-exotic but comfortably-white-in-all-but-name seductress who had stolen his father’s heart in 1992—though Carter couldn’t locate an iota of the femme fatale himself. Theoretically, too, what was at issue in the compassionate, respectful day-to-day caretaking of a woman who through no fault of her own had COMPLETELY LOST HER MOTHERFUCKING MIND and was nothing but a PISSING, SHITTING, SHRIEKING SHELL wasn’t only the physical comfort, sense of self-worth, and feeling of psychic safety of their ward, but perhaps more importantly their own humanity, because obviously the very measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens, so that to save his very soul and to represent the very best in what it meant to be a real American he was clearly obliged to ruin EVERY DAY and EVERY NIGHT of his WHOLE REMAINING MOTHERFUCKING LIFE.