The Favorites of the Sun Read online

  “You’re held back by taboos?” Shai said incredulously. “What century is this?”

  Dwayne flashed a little but didn’t respond, saying instead that he didn’t think any group was safe from bigotry anyway. “It’s like antelopes watching a lion gnaw on a Zebra he brought down… they may feel relieved for a while, but they are only safe until that lion gets his appetite back.”

  “The Jews are absorbed here,” Shai said tightly, “we do the brain surgery, hold the mortgages, and solve for ‘X.’” He almost sulked when Mark ignored his thumbs-up signal.

  “What does the American public really think?” Mark intoned in a TV announcer’s voice, “let’s find out—we are now the MDS Public Opinion Survey; MDS for Mark, Dwayne, and Shai—sounds better than SMD or DSM—Shai has the deep voice, he calls citizens from city and suburban phone books and I’ll record this for posterity—keeping a log.”

  “Splendid idea, old man!” said Dwayne.

  “Lucky I came by,” Shai said, still sulking. “Neither of you squeak-voices could have pulled this off…”

  They all got into their roles. There were three questions to be asked after the initial greetings: ‘What is your opinion of Minorities?’, ‘Do you feel that Jews are absorbed in US society?’ and, ‘What will it take for blacks to become fully integrated?’ Shai sounded completely official to the first interviewee: The woman gushed that it was her first poll and she was glad to give her thoughts: Minorities are OK; Jews are wonderful; Blacks may not get integrated, but things will get much better for those who ‘really try.’

  Shai rubbed the stubble of the beard he was trying to grow; proud of his interview voice and the validation of his ideas.

  The next call was different. Shai’s face lost its color and he put down the receiver numbly after the response to the second question. He wouldn’t answer their questions about the call; he said that he was going home…

  At the door Shai simply fixed Dwayne with a kind of tortured glance and said in a low voice: “You were right…” and he was gone.

  The two boys agreed to give up the idea of the MDS opinion poll. Dwayne wanted to know what kind of future Mark had planned for himself and was startled to hear how planned it was: “Brandeis, after High School, and I’ll make Aliyah—journey to Israel during the second year; study at Yeshiva-Jerusalem a full year, then I’ll go back after graduation from Brandeis for a year in the Israeli army… then law school… how about you?”

  Dwayne realized there was a void in his planning beyond the next school term. He filled it with his mother’s plans. “After High School, the Army, I guess; maybe the Air Force because they train in more skills and they travel…”

  “You’re kidding! Your big brain would dry out in the Army—College is the only option for us; we know too much.” His voice had gone ‘top secret’ but Dwayne understood that he wasn’t joking and Mark’s concern felt good.

  “I can’t do math,” Dwayne confessed to his friend. “I get past the basics and the rest jumbles up; it’s the same with chemistry—it seems like the teachers go too fast; they pick out a coven of math freaks who can keep up with them and then go through the term in a blur, now and then they’ll turn and ask, ‘Is everybody clear on that?’ As if some dummy would say ‘No’ and get hit with a zip explanation that makes your head hurt.”

  Mark was thoughtful: “It may be that you can do the math; you may be the way I was… I used to hate math, thought it was boring stuff for accountants and engineers: ‘A train leaving New York arrives in Chicago in three hours traveling at 300 miles an hour. How long will the toilet be occupied if…’” They chuckled. "Seriously, all that schlock about pie charts gets on your nerves if you’re reading earthshaking books… ‘What care I about pieces of pie?’ I used to say.

  “Anyway, my father brought in a good book that got me interested in Math—going step by step, using cartoons, a lot of jokes and writing we literati can live with. I’ll give you the book to take home—I don’t need it now; it focused my mind and I do fine across the board in sciences.”

  Dwayne didn’t look convinced. Mark reminded him that someone once said that no subject fascinating to a wise man can be repugnant to another. He brought out the colorful book and the notebook he’d used to follow the examples and exercises. They hovered over the pages for hours; Mark nudging Dwayne from mastery of one step to another easily.

  “Actually, this is rather plebian, Holmes…” Dwayne sniffed after a while.

  “Elementary, my dear Watson,” Mark told him. He said they could go over advanced work by telephone from home.

  Their day ended. Joel Levy arrived home, as every day, precisely at 5 o’clock and would take Ella and Dwayne to their bus. Esther sat everyone down at the kitchen table to homemade fruitcake and hot chocolate.

  “Eat, eat!” she said with a little irony. She presented Dwayne with his gift: a leather book bag, engraved with his name and filled with bound classics. The math books went in also.

  “Come back out?” Mark asked.

  “Again and again if it’s OK, tell Shai to cool down and we’ll have him around next time too. Maybe in a couple of years we’ll hoist beer steins at Brandeis, buddy,” Dwayne laughed.

  “The beer may be out of place there, but you won’t be, pal,” Mark said.

  M’Dad

  Corcoran Air Force Base, South Carolina, 1965

  It was the First Sergeants fault, he was known for his laziness as he eased toward his Air Force pension, and that afternoon he went home early to match his butt to his thick couch. He’d known there was a new trooper coming in for assignment to our unit, and since the new man’s name sounded black: ‘Leroy Brown,’ First Sergeant left orders for the barracks orderly to move him in with the only Black in the outfit, me; with orders to report to the orderly room next morning.

  Trouble was Leroy Brown, when he appeared, was white as a supermarket pork chop, a tough looking young Rebel from Alabama. He was medium height, blond, and husky; his eyes were sharp blue, and his serious young face came with a voice so deep and strong, it echoed in the chest of anyone he talked to.

  My new roommate dragged his duffel bag and gear inside the room and when he saw me, he blinked once, turned his head aside for an instant, then looked back at me as if I were a mule out of its pasture. “You stay here?”

  “Sure do!” I said. “Howdy Partner,” trying to sound like the Black sheriff in Blazing Saddles.His eyes were serious when he said, “Well, if that’s what they want I guess I’ll share the room, I’m easy—but you got to stay away from my stuff in my foot locker n’ my closet, y’hear?”

  Me, being a homeboy from Brooklyn, I had to answer that shot. I said, “Deal! And I’ll expect you to stay out of my socks drawer.”

  “You’re not from the South, are you?” he said, sounding curious instead of angry.

  “Nope,” I replied, “from Noo-yawk. You not from the North, right?”

  He didn’t seem to catch the sarcasm. “I’m out of Alabama, town called Mercury—first time away from there,” he said.

  His boots, I noticed, gleamed like liquid diamonds. “Where’d you learn to shine shoes like that?” I asked.

  “M’dad,” he said, grinning, like for the first time ever, “M’dad could make a brick shine! Best way to get noted and promoted in the military, he used to say—he made Master Sergeant in three years… Army.”

  “That all he taught you?”

  “M’dad showed me how to do repairs and tune a car engine to nearly new. M’dad worked with me and we put together my racing car out of an old red mustang n’ I raced it and won trophies three years straight!”

  Never having had a ‘m’dad’ myself, he was getting on my nerves. I decided to call Leroy Brown ‘M’dad,’ at least in my head, and I wanted to move on so I used some more sarcasm.

  “Anything else y’dad teach you?”

  He must have caught on, because he said, “To never hang out with trash and jerks.” He turned and went over to his s
ide of the room which was separated by a line of wall lockers down the middle. I heard him unpacking his bags, and bad me wanted to say: “You bring any extra white sheets?” But good me needed to make peace and talk to somebody.

  “Think you could show me how to bring up a shine on these crud boots of mine?” I asked.

  He poked his head around the end wall locker: “Yep, it’ll take you about 2 hours of hard work, lot of focus goes into it, but it’s something you can take home to New York and make a living with.” He was grinning.

  I wasn’t; bad me was saying: “Uh-huhhh—you see?” and nodding its head.

  “New York,” M’dad said suddenly, “Don’t know if I ever want to go there, but I always wanted to hear about that place—what’s it like?”

  He had touched the story-teller in me; I started giving him tales of life in the big city, about electric Times Square with its pleasure places and its tramps and dangerous cops, told him about Greenwich village weirdos and geniuses, girly guys and gutsy girls—told him about the tenements of the Bronx and the shady and grooving Harlem nightlife…

  Just then our door flew open and four or five big white guys rushed into the room. Ignoring me, they went straight to M’dad. “We got word you were in here, dammit! Get your stuff and follow us,” the lead guy, a yahoo called Jack Amos, shouted. “Goddam incompetent first sergeant put you in this zoo—you’re gonna bunk with one of us till we jack up the first shirt in the morning!”

  M’dad stared at him the way he’d stared at me at first meeting, he looked away for an instant, looked back and said: “I’m unpacked, beds made, I’m tired, and I’m not moving anywhere.”

  Another guy, a buck sergeant named Mackie said: “We don’t do this! You telling me you’re comfortable in here?” He glanced at me. I looked the other way.

  “I’m home.” M’dad said with a tight grin, holding the door open for the men to file out, looking like they’d just buried a buddy. He was their kind they knew; the sharp blue eyes, serious voice, tough profile—he would have been, and still could be, their leader.

  “New York,” he said to me as he slammed the door.

  Oh, I laid it on thick then… crime stories, hustler stories, call girl stories, Mafia stories, Harlem nightlife stories, most of it true but heavily padded to keep the audience on board. I was still going long after we’d settled into our beds for the night—my voice slipping across the wall locker barrier, tales of the city…

  After two hours, I stopped, didn’t hear a sound from the other side. I slapped my head thinking I bored the man into sleep with my droning voice. So many times I’d done that before. I shut up.

  After a while as I lay there trying to sleep, I heard the thumps of bare feet on the tile floor. M’dad had walked around to my side and was standing over my bed. I faked a snore.

  “You’d cut a man off in the middle of a long story?” he said. “Ought to be run out of town. Sheet!”

  But then, the clown picked up the end of my GI blanket from the floor and covered me up to the neck with it before padding back to his side. White people.

  Next day, M’dad settled with the First Sgt…. and also with the big guys of the unit, said that he was staying in the room with me. Bigots, not being the brightest candles on the altar, and Leroy being too tough-looking to criticize, accepted his choice, even accepted me a little, also. By the end of the week, they had eased Leroy Brown in as their new leader. He was the best technician at work, best ballplayer after work, and when they went to town, he was a magnet for the chicks; M’dad got over with the best-looking girl, a blond named Lena, and his crew got access to her friends.

  But busy as his workday and sports and Lena evenings were, every night he was back in our room, addicted to my ‘tales of New York’ routines. Soon, he took to bringing his pillows around to the floor alongside my bunk, squirming until he got comfortable and then dragging my stories out of me, real ones and made-ups, about brute cops, slinky prostitutes, drug bosses, beer bars and queer bars, amateur night at the Apollo, Yankee game riots, tenement rats swarming, everything.

  Now, I’m direct, I mean I don’t hold back when something’s not right; so I said to Leroy Brown:

  “What’s the matter with you? How come you’re OK with me, and not like all the others?”

  “The other rednecks?”

  “Ummm…”

  He breathed out a second. “M’dad,” he said, “M’dad says you should turn your back on a man whose only source of pride is his hair and his hide…”

  I felt a warm chuckle pop out and my mind flashed a picture of ‘M’dad’ and I liked him. I also felt good enough about Leroy Brown that I told him about my only father figure, that wise old homeless man named Isaac, who I once asked why white folks act so grumpy and mean. I recalled he said: “Boy, shut up! If you had two inches of bone in your nose you’d be grumpy and mean too!” I recalled how we both cracked up giggling about that, and when I looked over, I saw M’dad cracking up himself.

  Leroy said: “When M’dad was Army, his maintenance unit got a black supervisor, nobody liked it, but some guys got together just before a safety inspection, they broke down safety stuff to make the boss fail inspection, but M’dad went in at night and reversed their crap. He said nobody sabotages and shames his Army unit no matter who holds the clipboard. He didn’t catch hell when the inspection went OK because word went around the inspectors saw all but covered up the bad to save the Black NCO.”

  “I got a question for you,” he said to me, “how come you’re so sarcastic and backbiting most of the time?”

  Didn’t think you could tell, I thought, before I caught myself. “That’s my self-defense,” I said. “That keeps me sane in this stockade,” I reminded him that he’d come into the unit and became an instant ‘good old boy’ while I’d been there a year living like an alien, like the enemy, like a roach in a clean kitchen… I was ranting big time when the guy next door slammed open the door shouting: “Come on, everybody’s running down to the latrine; some unknown guy dropped the longest coiling turd in a commode! It’s the biggest crap on Earth!”

  We jammed each other rushing through the doorway.

  We got along. Between us we kept the room in inspection order, went to the post exchange and the mess hall together a few times. M’dad was easy with me but both me and the crew he worked with never wanted to see him get mad, everybody had the idea that he’d be like a demon, especially with that demonic baritone voice and those muscles and eagle sharp eyes. Word was his unit officers came to him for planning advice. And word was his girlfriend, Lena, fought another girl who tried to talk to him. Anyway, he still belonged to me round bedtime. One night, as he came around the wall lockers I sneered: “Why don’t you bring popcorn along with your bed pillows?”

  “Did he get mad or ashamed?”

  “No,” he said, “‘Nah, ’cause we’d drop bits all over the floor.’” He’d learned how to take the pepper out of my sarcasm and get me to get on with his tales. There came a bad day though: On one of the few times I went into the tiny redneck town near the base, a town that existed on the money the base spent there but treated GIs like they were aliens; watched them and had the two police hunks in town hassle people wearing military issue shoes, especially my tribe. Anyway, I was loping along the main street looking for the fried chicken joint that served Blacks and Mexicans take-out from the back door (Yes, Lord). Anyway, I saw, coming down the street from the opposite direction, M’dad, his girl Lena, and two of his mates with two of Lena’s girls.

  It was going to be an awkward pass-by; I figured Leroy Brown and me would shoot each other a smile, or a wink as we passed; the others had no need to know we were tight story partners; that would freak both our reputations.

  But when he spied me up ahead, Leroy Brown moved his crowd across the street. He shot one glance to where I was walking but his blue-grey eyes looked straight through me.

  No more goddam tales of the city.

  That night I wasn’t goi
ng to face him down, hands on hips and mouthy. He might pound me. Instead, I’d wait for the apology due me. But he came in humming some tune, like nothing happened, went about preparing for the shower, and plumping his pillows for story time.

  I lost it, of course. I told him I wanted to know how he could cut me like that on the street, then come back there like it was nothing.

  “That’s Alabama style,” he said. I moved to give him a good shove but M’dad was quicker, he grabbed my wrists, pinning them to the wall alongside my head.

  “I did not say that to be sly,” he said, in that tone of courtroom English Southerners put on when they think they are saying something important. “I meant that back home when you see embarrassing situations coming—like your good friend’s wife out sporting with another man or you see a man approaching that your drunk friends are getting ready to insult, Alabama manners says cross the road and walk on, cross the road and walk on…”

  I didn’t understand all that, there wasn’t any apology and I resented getting pinned to a wall, so I cut him off from my sagas. After a few silent nights, M’dad gladly took Lena up on her call to spend his nights at her rented room in town. Spit happens.

  I missed the clown. After a few days, I realized I was alone again; after work there was nothing, there were no young black women in yahoo-ville to date, no black bars, nothing. Besides, dozens of sagas popped up in my head that would’ve made good lights-out material.

  Then, one evening when I came to the barracks from the mess hall, I walked into the room and saw it was crowded; M’dad was there along with Jack Amos and their crew. Jack Amos was holding a chokehold on the neck of a guy people called Slime, behind his back. Slime was a hot-eyed loser who’d been suckered into being a spy for the military investigation’s agency on base. They hinted that he might become a suit wearing, credentials carrying agent if he could show his value by giving up information on who was doing what in the barracks; drugs especially, but also loan-sharking, secret affairs with officers’ wives, and of course, any signs of somebody being weird, alcoholic, or queer. Slime had been useless as a spy so far, but people were on their guard around him, knowing that a phone call from him could haul them in for interrogation.