Malcolm
He thought about the rabbits sometimes, lying awake at night in the little
room in Ella’s house, under the eaves.
It had been back in West Lansing, when he was twelve years old, just after
his mother had taken ill and they had all been split up. A Sunday
afternoon in the late fall, nearly winter. The smell of something burning
off in the distance. The men and boys walking through the yellowed grass,
holding the straining dogs tight on their leashes. Malcolm was walking
with Mr. Gohannas and Big Boy, dangling the .22 off his hip, trying to
whip it all about like he’d seen the gunfighters do in the Western
serials. He held it to his eye and aimed it here, there, even at the backs
of the men around him, until one of them turned and caught him.
“You watch that gun, boy,” he scolded. “Don’t you be pointing it at
nobody!”
Malcolm had dropped his head down, holding the gun steadier, glancing up
furtively now at the other men to see if they had noticed his shame. All
of them darker than he was, their skin the color of burnt coffee or
railroad coal, faces lined and creased like worn car seats. Wearing their
field overalls and work boots, redolent with the scent of men’s sweat and
dirt. Some of them with their boys next to them – wearing their
handed-down overalls; faces exactly the same only smoother, as if all the
creases had been ironed out. Their ragged hair knotted up in burrs and
tangles, like the farmers they were and would always be.
“Get ready now,” Mr. Gohannas told them, his voice urgent though still
kindly.
“Right ’bout here -”
The men stopped at the edge of an open field. At its far end Malcolm could
make out a tangled clump of bent scrub trees, and thorn bushes. The men
looked at each other, a few of them nodding solemnly, then they let the
dogs go and began to fan out, kneeling in the high grass.
“Here they come now!”
The loosed dogs had run straight toward the thicket, baying and scuffling
their way in past the lowered tree branches. There was silence for a few,
long moments – then the renewed sound of pounding feet, as the first
rabbits flew out from the bushes. Lean, gray, winter hares, leaping ahead
with their eyes wide and their long ears back, the dogs scrambling after
them.
“Easy now,” the man nearest to Malcolm whispered tenderly to his son, a
boy younger than Malcolm was, toting a shotgun.
“Let them come back -”
Leaving the hounds still immersed in the brambles, the hares made a wide,
panicked bolt around the perimeter of the field. Running so fast and hard
that Malcolm thought they must surely escape – the only sound their
powerful, widened winter feet thumping softly over the grass. He could not
understand why the men hadn’t fired, all these old, slow, black men still
staring out from the bushes, and he rose as if to run after the rabbits.
But then he felt Mr. Gohannas’s hand on his arm, pulling him back
down – and sure enough, the hares turned and headed back, toward their
hidey-holes in the thicket.
“Now!” the man next to him exclaimed, and his boy fired the crude old
shotgun. The blast knocked him flat on his back but the birdshot picked
off one of the galloping hares in midair, flipping his thin gray rabbit
body head over heels, leaving him to twitch and heave on the ground.
The rest of the men and boys fired at nearly the same time – a fusillade
from all their battered, ancient guns that stunned and nearly deafened
Malcolm. He shut his eyes, and lowered his head against the noise. When he
looked up again he could see five or six more hares on the ground. The
younger boys already running out to claim theirs, picking them up by their
long ears and smashing their heads with lengths of lead pipe if they were
still moving, an act that made Malcolm look away, and his stomach turn
over.
“Here now,” Mr. Gohannas told him, placing a gentle hand on his chest and
turning him around.
The dogs were already flushing the thicket again, and a few minutes later
out came more hares. Running slower and a little raggedly this time, if
just as frightened. For all of their fear they ran in the exact same
direction, around the edge of the field. Making the same long loop back to
their homes, the men firing and yelling exultantly as they turned.
Malcolm fired wildly himself, his shot rustling the branches in some
nearby trees, the men nearest to him snorting in surprise and indignation –
“Where you shootin’, boy?”
– but he had an idea now. The dogs went in to flush the hares a third
time – both dogs and hares moving noticeably slower now – and after he
reloaded Malcolm scrambled out of the blind before Mr. Gohannas could stop
him, Big Boy calling plaintively after him.
“Hey, where you goin’, Malcolm?”
He was already running up along the border of the field, his cracked,
patent leather city shoes slipping along the dead winter grass. He ran to
a spot that was halfway along the hares’ trajectory, as best he could
figure it, just before the point where they were bound to turn and head
back to their thicket. He heard the alarmed shouts of the men behind him,
but he ignored them. Kneeling and aiming carefully this time, taking down
one hare, then another, before they ever got back within range of the rest
of the hunters. The exhausted creatures always flipping over the same way,
their long back feet catapulting them over in one final, cinematic
somersault.
When the shooting stopped it was Malcolm who ran out after them this time,
plucking his hares up by their big ears. Ignoring the continuing, angry
shouts of the older, blacker men – smiling to himself, to think how he
had been able to figure it out when the rest of them had not. They broke
cover and ran up to him, Mr. Gohannas among them, his wide, brown face
looking uncomfortable behind his spectacles.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Strivers Row
by Kevin Baker Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-019583-5
