White Riot

Jimmy was the kid that nobody talked to. Nobody.

Especially in Riverdale.

Sheila Barnaby once tried, and she was pretty tough. She wore dark red nail polish and chewed cinnamon-flavored gum with her mouth open. So scared of Jimmy, she looked down when he approached her on the street. The attempted conversation happened two weeks ago in aisle two at Fontaine’s drugstore. They were both looking at sunblock (although she couldn’t really tell, because Jimmy was always wearing the darkest of dark sunglasses), and Sheila had thought to make a remark about how she was going to the beach later that day, but got nervous when Jimmy cracked his knuckles and stared straight ahead at the five choices of sunblock available in aisle two.

Kenneth Rominski, the bagger at Hermann’s Groceries, would snap the brown paper bags less smartly when Jimmy came in to buy his: gallon of milk, jar of peanut butter, loaf of bread, bar of Irish Spring, pound of coffee, pack of razors, dozen eggs, two pounds of hamburger and quart of orange juice every week. He wasn’t sure if Jimmy was looking at him as he bagged the nine items. Jimmy always stood, hands in his jacket pockets, his sunglasses-covered eyes never belying his true line of vision. Uncannily, Jimmy was always at attention enough to grab the grocery bag from Kenneth when the top was all folded and pressed. Kenneth got goose bumps from the seemingly mundane transaction.

Ruthie Eckhardt stopped cleaning out the parakeet cages at Metzer’s Pet Mart every time Jimmy walked past outside, his sneakers sounding like he’d stepped in gum, his pale skin gleaming like the undead, Walkman blaring Stiff Little Fingers out of the cheap headphones affixed around his small cranium. The dull, paint-it-black hair had oddly wispy, duck-fluff roots peeking out from underneath. The tiny parakeets in their cages involuntarily shuddered because Ruthie would suck her breath in sharply each time it happened. Needless to say, the parakeets’ new newspaper became old again, real quick.

Matt Sutton gripped the handlebars of his kickass BMX bike a bit tighter, half wondering if Jimmy would try to mess with him and take his bike again as he rode past him down Beechnut Street. The trees whispered, “no”, but his heart beat like a rabbit-heart, thumpity, thump, pedal, pedal, pedal, coast. Last week, Jimmy wordlessly grabbed his handlebars at the park and gave him a shove, hopped on the bike and took off like a bat out of hell, only to return the bike to a bewildered Matt five minutes later, out of breath and with no explanation. He had half-thrown it at Matt’s feet, and sauntered off, trying to light a cigarette with pale, shaking hands, turning his head in all directions, the setting sun glinting off of his dark plastic frames. Now, Matt shook the hair out of his eyes, trying to look authoritative. "Just try to take my bike, asshole," he muttered underneath his breath as he veered past Jimmy, who held a suspicious-looking brown paper bag in his pasty hand. Jimmy visibly flinched and his mouth turned downward in a state of startled confusion.

Angela Goodwin sidestepped an oncoming Matt Sutton and wondered if she took that third library volume on paleontology of the Paleozoic Era out of her brown shoulder bag quickly enough, she could defend herself against an approaching and suspicious-looking Jimmy. He’d never actually threatened her, but never say never, right? Would she go for the throat or the kneecaps? She glanced at his brown paper-covered mystery object, his sunglasses-veiled face and reached for her book as though it were made of metal, not paper. “Paper, rock, scissors,” she muttered, “pick your weapon,” as she quickly passed him. Jimmy, again, wondered what the hell was up with people talking to themselves today. He felt the gum on the bottom of his sneakers and stopped to scrape his foot on the curb. Angela looked over her shoulder two seconds later and noticed a group of three neighborhood kids rounding the corner behind Jimmy. He was out of her field of vision. She let her breath out and promptly tripped over an uneven part in the sidewalk.

Mrs. Heckler ‘saw’ Jimmy Albinson coming with her three out of five senses. She could smell, taste and hear as keenly as if she were a flawless, newborn, despite her eighty-three years and terminal blindness. She could smell Jimmy’s Irish Spring sweat under his blue, gabardine zip-up jacket on the May breeze heralded by the wind chime on her porch, she could taste the faint whiff of his open-bottle brown bag on the moisture-laden spring air and hear the swish of the gabardine, the soft thud of rubber sneaker soles and the soft and quick breathing of an out-of-shape punk. She could hear the held-breath breathing of the three pursuers.

Her neck twisted and rose like a bird’s. Mrs. Heckler wasn’t afraid of anything because everything and everyone was afraid of her. “Fools, fools!” she muttered.

Mostly unaware to all of this: parakeets, Paleozoic Era volumes and "paper, rock, scissors," BMX bikes, and brown paper bags, Jimmy Albinson, shrouded in his black sunglasses, clutched his brown bag tighter at the neck when he walked past Mrs. Heckler’s porch, even though he very well knew that old Mrs. Heckler probably had no clue that he was drinking on a public sidewalk.

Still, he rushed past. “It’s too early!” Mrs. Heckler crowed from her porch. She intuitively was attempting to shake off the three following the slight, sunglassed and pale seventeen year-old with her vocal display.

Jimmy didn’t catch any of this. CRAZY, he thought. Too early for what? It’s one o'clock in the afternoon. What a wack-job, he shrugged, thinking, My life sucks enough already, I really don’t need an old crazy bugging me on a Saturday.

Further down the street, the three boys stopped for a millisecond, feeling the unseeing eyes of Mrs. Heckler on them, then continued on, cutting diagonally through the impatiens planted by Geronimo Musselli, the eccentric neighborhood physicist and artist who was on vacation in Naples, down the caving pavement of the alley and into the warm, garbagey smell environment of the alley garages, no noises, save for a baseball game on an AM radio here and there and a couple small, authoritative dogs expressing their Napoleon complexes in fenced-in disdain.

Three boys versus one. The largest of the three was a Gene Wilder type of punk, dealt a crappy head of hair and a crappier dose of teenage acne. He first grabbed the brown-bagged Newcastle out of Jimmy’s surprised hand, then flew the other fist into Jimmy’s small, pointed chin. The second kid pushed Jimmy from behind; the Newcastle bottle flew and shattered, contained inside the bag. The third, as a typical third person does, kept lookout. All wore an unassuming costume of mommy-bought clean T-shirts, jeans and sneakers.

“What’s the matter, punk?” Gene Wilder sneered as Jimmy thudded into the warped concrete, “Gonna cry over spilt beer?”

Jimmy said nothing. He knew it was inevitable. It usually took about two years…he’d been in Riverdale for just under two.

The second one, skinny and slack-jawed and big-toothed, joined in, “Not so tough now, huh, Mr. Fancy Pants?” he mouth-breathed. He kicked Jimmy in the back. The third one, slightly chubby and red-cheeked, pretended not to be nervous, but tapped his right hand against his right hip, his fingers hooked into the belt loop of his jeans and tried to glare at Jimmy, but the sun was too bright in his eyes, and he just glared, in general.

Jimmy winced. Alright, just get it over with, he willed.

“How about some mud all over those Fancy Pants?” Gene Wilder offered, scooping up a convenient clump of rain-soaked sod from the side of the alley and pitching it at Jimmy’s curled-up knees. What fancy pants? Jimmy thought of the normal, boot-cut jeans he was wearing. Now, covered in mud. He held his breath, waiting for more mud to be added to them.

He knew that if he got up and ran, it’d all be over. It had happened once before. He luckily had run past that kid with the BMX, and had taken it for a cruise to lose his assailants that time. Now, not a BMX in sight to rescue him.

Another clump of mud hit Jimmy in the side of the face. Still, he did nothing. What could he do at this point?

This non-reaction reaction pissed Gene Wilder off to no end. Skinny & Slack-jawed echoed the curly-haired fury. They went at Jimmy from both sides, his already-askew headphones cracking in half, his Walkman and cassette dying in a sad chorus of broken plastic. His right shoulder hit the pavement now littered with brown shards of glass and black plastic as his sunglasses slid off only to be crunched like a large, black beetle under Gene Wilder’s white-sneakered foot. This made Gene Wilder laugh. The famous black sunglasses. Jimmy closed his eyes. The sun pierced through his eyelids like a laser.

Another fist to the face and Jimmy’s eyes shot open despite the laser-beam light. The light was white-hot and uncomfortable: those sunglasses had been on for a good reason. He’d worn them outside almost every day of his slightly vampiric life. Gene Wilder and Skinny and Slack-jawed froze and jumped back as though Jimmy were a human electric cattle prod. “What the fuck?” Gene Wilder whisper-hissed.

Jimmy’s pink eyes blinked hesitatingly back at him with a delicate, albino stare. Three pairs of eyes blinked back at him: brown, blue and black. He wondered when it’d be a good time to tell his parents that they might have to move, again…maybe this time, though, things would be different. He wouldn’t get death threats from the older, superstitious neighbors, rocks thrown at him from the football team, whispers of the worst names imaginable from everyone from age three to age eighty-three. Jimmy opened, then shut his naked eyes twice only to see the soles of three pairs of sneakers and three pairs of jean-clad legs run, run, running as fast as they could, first to get away and second to tell everyone, “Guess what???”

once bitten

thud.

Thud.

THUD!

Maggie sat in the chilly humidity of the basement, her fingers poised falteringly over the lower register of the ivory keys. The piano sounded as though it was underwater and she sighed heavily. Didn’t her mom know anything? Pianos shouldn’t be put in basements.

THUDDDDDDDD!!!!!!

Just for emphasis.

The cinderblock walls echoed the muddy notes. The piano was a total pile of garbage: The cat had used it for a scratching post for years and the kids had used it for an emotional punching bag. She unhooked her right foot from underneath her left knee where she’d curled it for warmth in the basement’s damp atmosphere, and shook it a little to loosen the pins; it felt as though someone were pouring cool, dry sand over her bare foot.

At the top of the stairs, a shaft of light jutted through the dim basement, lit with only one overhead bulb. A shadow appeared at the top of the stairs, then an ungraceful and angular figure swung down the stairs, three at a time, using the handrails like monkeybars. Laura.

“Hey,” Maggie said, turning her face back to the tops of the ivories, which gleamed in the double light. The tops were slightly scratched, giving them the appearance of the underside of a leaf.

“Hey,” a husky voice echoed, slightly out of breath. “Where’s Mom?”

“I don’t know. I thought she was upstairs?”

“Good. Can I borrow five?”

Maggie’s eyes shot back towards her older sister, standing outlined by the light of the open door. One hand was on her freshly shaved but still faintly blonde head.

“What did you do to your hair? You look like a total asshole.”

“I didn’t ask for an evaluation; I asked to borrow five bucks,” Laura annunciated, a tiny bit irked that she had pointed out the obvious. “And watch your mouth – you swear way too much for an eleven-year-old.”

“What do you need the five bucks for?” Maggie asked discriminatorily, reaching up to close the cover of the keyboard with a firm indication of what her answer should be.

“A pack. I’m out.”

“You’re gonna get cancer like Grandpa Mike and have to shove a piece of plastic up your nose just to breathe before you’re out of high school. You’re going to look stupid and die.”

“I’m prepared to deal with that.”

“Where’s Jerome?”

Jerome was their five-year-old brother.

“He’s in the bathroom, doing lord knows what.”

“What do you mean, ‘lord knows what’? Aren’t you supposed to watch him so he doesn’t fall in the toilet?”

“I have exceptional hearing.” Laura stuck out her hand covered with a black-inked homemade tattoo of an enormous open-mouthed skull. “I’ll hear the splash and come running,” she guaranteed. Impatiently, she said, “Listen, Maggie, you don’t need to buy anything and you get a killer allowance, so you’re the richest little kid in Detroit. What gives? I’ll pay you back.”

“I charge interest, remember?” Maggie gritted her teeth and pulled crumpled bills out of her back jeans pocket. She reached into the other pocket, and pulled out a small flip notebook. She dated a line, and wrote: FIVE BUCKS. She was into page thirty or so. The thirty pages spoke volumes of her innate idealism.

Laura sucked her breath in sharply, imagining that first, blessed hit of nicotine. Suddenly, she seemed to realize the embarrassing quality of the situation, begging a child five years her junior for money, and got flustered and anxious to keep the continuum of motion in play. “Alright. I’ll be back in a few minutes, okay? I’m just going to the corner.” She turned to go, her sneakers squeaking, but stopped suddenly at the foot of the stairs. She was wearing a lime green thermal that emphasized her paleness and freckles. Her eyes, black in the dim light, lifted Maggie’s up to make sure she was listening, “Can you stay upstairs to make sure Jerome’s okay while I’m gone?”

Maggie dropped her eyes and mumbled, “Sure.” Her sister was always covering her ass for something she wasn’t doing, anyway. Always multitasking.

Maggie looked up. She was gone.

SLAM! The door shook the windows.

Maggie reached up to grab hold of the chain switch between her fingers. She pulled. The basement stairs lightened with each step, and she soon found herself in the bright, drenching sun of the living room: beige carpeting, white walls, mirrors, family photos. The air had gone from basement-damp to late-October--indoors, windows-shut dusty.

She heard the water in the upstairs bathroom running, a dull, inner-wall sound. What the hell could a five-year-old be doing in the bathroom with the water running?

Surprisingly, the door opened right up when she test-jiggled the handle. Jerome was standing in front of the mirror, his huge head of black waves sticking out to shield his face. His hand was in his mouth, wiggling something.

“Dude, you got a loose tooth?”

The wide-eyed expression that met Maggie’s eyes was one mixed with surprise and fear, as still-baby fingers tugged and shook cautiously at the rooted foundations of primary teeth.

“Yea –aeah,” Jerome gurgled, spit and blood making a tiny river down his chin. Obviously, brave curiosity was at play, and he wasn’t crying y-e-t…so.

“Well, you need anything? An ice cube? A hug? A knuckle-sandwich?”

She knew this would make him laugh. It worked.

Blood sprayed all over the bathroom mirror in gleeful, red droplets.

“Thtop it. I’m thrying to thoncenthrate.”

Maggie squinted both visibly and mentally as she evaluated the situation. Should she just let her little brother go to town on his tooth without ‘adult’ supervision, or should she do the whole coaching thing that’s expected in these childhood milestones? She recalled her loose teeth memories, and just wanting to be left alone. In fact, she might’ve swallowed half of her loose baby teeth in her sleep, by accident anyway.

“Want me to stick around to watch the fun, buddy?”

“Eh.” Jerome stated, closing his mouth and visibly wiggling the tooth with his tongue. He had a lumpy cheek. He turned his attention to the mirror, opening wide to reveal the multitudinous future of loose prospects. Maggie looked cockeyed at the red-spattered mirror and shrugged. What more could he do, anyway?

“Well, if you need some help, just let me know,” She looked him in the mirrored eyes – the hazels were more calm now. “I’ll be right…” she pointed outside the bathroom door, “out there.”

“Othay,” he agreed, his tongue wiggling away at the tooth, again.

Maggie closed the bathroom door, and went back into the dusty warmth of the living room. Outside, dry, blowing leaves were wreaking havoc on pretty much any plant life that was still in existence on the ground. She looked out the window, and down the sidewalk. The thin, defiant figure of her sister appeared, her very jeans even arguing her every step, their hugeness blowing in the wind; any other direction than her. Her hair just existed. No movement. The original shoulder-length pigtails were just phantom images now. She looked so goddamn ridiculous. Maggie rolled her eyes, but went into the kitchen, anyway, to be there when she came through the door.

“Lose something?” Maggie shot at her as soon as she appeared through the door.

“What?” Laura asked, looking down and around at her sneakers, baggy jeans, green thermal shirt. She felt her pockets. “What’d I lose?” Her eye looked even more green with that shirt. Confused.

“Your hair.” Maggie inquired, “Where’d it disappear to?”

“Eff you,” Laura slapped down a crinkly, plastic supermarket bag on the kitchen countertop as she bent down to unlace her black Adidas. Maggie saw more than one object in the bag.

“Jerome’s losing a tooth right now,” she announced, craning her neck to get a better view of the contents of the bag. Cigarettes and something else…

“Huh?”

“Yeah. He probably has it out by now.”

“Why aren’t you up there with him?”

“I was. He doesn’t need my help, I guess.”

Laura raised her eyebrows for a minute, then finished shaking off her sneakers. She strode past Maggie authoritatively with her bag and within seconds could be heard knocking on the bathroom door. She waited and toed the kitchen floor. “You forgot my change!” she yelled after a full minute. She looked up.

Laura stood in front of her. “Come with me for a sec.”

Down the stairs and into the basement; on went the lone lightbulb.

“Everything okay?”

Laura was at the piano, lifting the top and peering inside its depths where shiny tines lay like musical teeth. “Uhm-hmm,” she responded. “It’s out – the tooth.” A flash of white paper was handed off to Maggie before the update could register.

“What’s this?” Maggie held a slightly wrinkled and very lumpy envelope in her hand. Opening it, she found several singles, fives…a bunch of twenties. “What is this?” she repeated. “Why’s there money in the piano?”

“It’s yours,” Laura said.

Maggie blinked.

“It’s pretty much everything you’ve ever lent to me over the last few years. I knew you never expected me to pay you back, but I didn’t want to disappoint you by following through on that.” She eye-cornered Maggie with a glance and nervously laughed. “You expect nothing but the worst from me…you’ve got every reason: I’ve been a pretty crappy sibling, but I always wanted to pay you back no matter what, so I’ve made sure to put everything I borrowed into that envelope within a week of borrowing it from you…I just didn’t want you to know yet. I wanted to give it all back to you in a few years to put towards a car, but I think you’d probably rather have a new piano right now? Maybe one that can stay upstairs?”

Maggie looked at Laura, then at the dilapidated piano, then at the envelope full of tightly packed bills. “How many packs of cigarettes is this?” she asked as she gave her sister a hug. She didn’t want Laura to see that she was probably going to cry.

Upstairs, Jerome tucked his freshly yanked tooth underneath his pillow, and ran outside to play catch with his pal, Casper. Maggie went upstairs and looked at the baby tooth under the pillow covered with flying Supermans. It had traces of now-brown blood at the root and caught the glint of the late-afternoon October sun from the window. She cradled it for a few seconds before pulling a fiver from the bulging envelope from her back pocket. She soundlessly slid them together under the flying Supermans and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth.