This is a story of violence.
The MUNI bus lurches forward, enough to rock Richard from his afternoon stupor. Purses slump, an expensive coffee paints a woman’s white blouse the color of dirt.
“Thought it was an earthquake,” someone says, to no one in particular.
MUNI continues the thin metallic wheeze on its rise and fall along Market Street. With rain done for the day, the sky opens up, a single shard of light falling across Richard’s lap through the window. The heat soaks through his creased black slacks.
Richard knows that the bus wouldn’t lurch in an earthquake. He knows if there happened to be one, it would feel more like a bumpy road, more like riding over a deeply-grooved grate. It might even lull riders to sleep. And, with all of the vehicle’s superstructure, it’s probably one of the safest places to be when a big one comes along, the rubber of the tires somewhat absorbing the seismic wave.
When did he learn that? Sixth grade. Earth science kept him transfixed to the overhead projections that Miss Sims slid onto the light box with a grace and ease that made her his favorite, the confusion of kindness and pubescent lust. How he tingled with the possibility of her unbuttoned collar. This is what the Earth looks like, under the surface.
Richard shakes. This comes from deep within his body, from some hypocenter nestled in the layers of muscle and bone and blood, a signal of sorts. He needs something. Perhaps it is hunger, or something of comfort, the chenille blanket he drapes over himself while watching TV on the couch, even when he is not cold. The rippling of this knowledge intrigues him, the want beginning as impulse that quickly surges through like a wave, until the moment he ultimately gets whatever it is his body thinks it needs. Then, all better. A shake, a quench, then all better. He’s been wondering what he needs, but can never satisfy his body with an answer. Loss fills his stomach with a viscera, of regret, an emotion of the gut. The weight of it is unspecific.
He thought his arrival to San Francisco was the first exact moment of his life, a pure fulfilling of need, when there was no toil of choice. He was a seismologist, he loved the arts, and always felt calmer by the ocean, and Caroline would be with him. When he was offered the position with the California Department of Conservation, Mines and Geology division, he immediately accepted. A needle to the groove of the perfect song. He took long walks around Nashville to give the city a proper good-bye, but was overcome with how much he didn’t feel he belonged there. The streets were whizzing with cars, but empty. Bicentennial Park was emerald green in the day, its faux-Parthenon looming dramatically from its low rise, but empty. He walked into his favorite bar in Hillsboro, a dark friendly spot where he’d spent many nights after graduate seminars chatting about sediment, marriage proposals, liquefaction. He ordered his usual Stella. The barrel-chested bartender didn’t recognize him, but smiled anyway. Richard didn’t know anyone in the bar. He finished his beer quickly. It was time to go. He wasn’t quite twenty-nine. He and Caroline packed everything they had into a ten foot UHaul, newly married, and drove West.
Caroline was excited to move to San Francisco, the sophistication of it. She thought Nashville—where she had lived her whole life—was so, she would say, catatonic. She always referred to the people and the city that way. “We are better than this hillbilly town.” Her hair would shake around her face, as if conviction alone could make hair shake. Richard would tilt his head softly, take her hand and caress the lines of her palm to calm her. He would excuse the small cruelty of her judgment as a requisite flaw to an otherwise exquisite creature.
The weeks that followed their move appeared more resolute to Richard. The air was clearer, as if he could feel each atom entering his lungs. The scent of things became more distinct, and didn’t swamp together the way they did in the languid Southern air. Colors popped, felt outlined, like in a grade-school coloring book. The feel of his fingers on jersey gave him an erection, and his love-making with Caroline was adolescent. He marveled at their thighs pressed together, her softness to his knotted muscle, her fine, almost red hairs to his coarse black. Richard felt the molecules of his reality become more crystalized. He decided then that happiness made itself evident in these moments of sensual clarity, that happiness was somehow bound in this visceral shift in perception. All sounds, his favorite song.
He isn’t quite thirty-five.
Three young men enter the bus and sit across from Richard. They wear the baggy jeans that fall well below their asses, a fad that baffles him, particularly for how long it has been a fad, considering fashion’s whimsical attention since the likes of E Network and TMZ. One of the boys has scraggly, dirty blond hair, while the other two have loose fros. Richard can see their boxer shorts thankfully cover what their pants can’t. He wonders what holds up the jeans, and if this trend among young men is supposed to signify having a big cock, one big enough to act as a hanging knob, of sorts. A clothing fad has to come from somewhere. He thinks to look this up on the Internet when he gets home.
They have come on the bus with paper bags of spicy chicken wings. Richard can smell the spice, that tickle in his nostril, then his throat, where taste and smell blur. He would love to take one of those wings, to feel the security of the meat in his own mouth. He realizes now that he is indeed shaking because he is hungry. He recalls the last time he had a proper meal—yesterday morning. By the time he gets home, however, he will walk in to the quiet, empty apartment, Caroline’s clothes missing from the closet, and regret will fill his belly again. Whiskey will be dinner.
The boys begin to eat. Richard wonders if Miss Sims ate chicken wings. Miss Sims was black, the only black teacher he ever had. Her voice was smooth, that of honey being poured into a large bowl, ribboning at the bottom before disappearing into the liquid mound, his memory of that voice the stuff of adult fantasies in his teens, teen fantasies in his adulthood. He would sometimes lay that voice over the shrill of the few women that actually made it to his bed, the ones before Caroline.
An earthquake, class, is what happens when two blocks of the Earth suddenly slip past one another. The surface where they slip is called the fault. The spot where the earthquake really starts is called the hypocenter, buried deep below the surface, unseen. The epicenter is the spot that we can see, but is not the source of the earthquake.
The boys inhale the wings with flourish, almost a highly conscious, theatrical exaggeration. They take a wing, shove all but a sliver of bone into their mouths, and suck the meat off, lips pulled back to reveal gristle and teeth. The sound of the slurp fills the bus, or at least it seems like that to Richard, who watches them out of the corner of his eye while pretending to gaze out the window. He can see the boy across from him, through the reflection, crane his head up and thrust the wing behind his teeth, and suck. Lips smacking, a kind of sex sound, really (maybe the kind he and Caroline had made, when their bodies were still new). And then the chew—open mouthed, the meat churning round his tongue, which wags to catch renegade bits of chicken, another kind of force. An animal sound, something wild, a bear behind a wall. It repulses Richard, the sheer uncivilized nature of the suck and gnaw.
After the boy has ripped the bone of flesh—ligament, cartilage, everything—without so much as a hesitation he drops it, not back in the bag but in the tight space between his seat and the window. Richard is shocked, flabbergasted, appalled. The bone pitifully lolls on the floor. The ease in which the boy does this fills Richard with heat, an embarrassment, not necessarily for himself but for the bus, for the people riding, maybe the city, all of humanity, he’s not sure. It’s definitely the same kind of heat he felt the first time Caroline subtly refused his hand, walking along the Embarcadero on a surprisingly warm evening, not too long ago. Maybe a year, two years ago? Had it been that long? He wanted to bring her to romance, to feel it all around her, to feel it with him. The Embarcadero was a perfect idea. He pulled her out of their flat, her protests feeble enough, but she had been silent the entire ride on the train, staring out at nothing, and certainly not looking at him. Once there, Richard felt hopeful, with the briny scent of the Bay. As they walked, passing restaurants and piers, cyclers and coffee stands, he slipped his hand into hers, and just as smoothly she pulled hers away, and walked ahead silently. They had been married only a few years. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The weight of the refusal had him follow behind for several minutes, his face flushed with a cold fire that didn’t have a source, a locus to identify, so he could fix it, put it out. All he could do was watch her figure, his hands balling to fists, and feel the pounding of his own steps on the concrete walk. It scared him that he imagined running up behind her and pushing her into the Bay, pushing her hard against her back, to send the refusal from his refused hand to her rigid body. When she finally turned around and said, “I’m hungry,” he sucked in a grateful breath and replied, “Let’s check out one of these seafood places.”
Richard thinks to ask why the boy on the bus has done this careless act. The lack of hesitation is what throws him, as if it was impulsive to drop the chicken wing, not a choice at all. It appears to Richard that the boy wasn’t doing it out of protest, or of a need to demonstrate utter distaste for San Francisco public transit—this pure, inherent lack of consideration. Where did this boy grow up, Richard wonders, probably in the ghetto. Richard would italicize ghetto, because it is a foreign word, and all foreign words are italicized. Project housing, with weeds splitting concrete playgrounds, graffiti narrating a lost cause. Maybe the boy still lives there, perhaps somewhere in Oakland. Probably didn’t have a good female role model growing up, he thinks. Has no family unit. Maybe he even sells drugs. Maybe he has been harassed by the SFPD so much and for so long that he feels like the city doesn’t care about him, so why would he care about the city, and certainly this MUNI bus? Maybe the feeling is so deeply rooted in him that dropping the bone willy-nilly is as impulsive as instinct. No matter how Richard considers it, though, he feels the heat in his face and his hands ball into fists.
When Richard first saw Caroline on the quad, the sun was trapped in her strawberry blonde hair, her whole being: teeth, skin and light. All nuance and detail were smoothed by the humid morning. And, in the distance, how could he not fall in love? He was still exhilarated by his presence at Vanderbilt. Nashville had been the far reaches of his world—so far from West Virginia, his family, his small shotgun clapboard cottage on the edges of a small town nestled in hills that felt huge to Richard then, insurmountable. He perhaps had wanted to fling himself farther than Nashville, but everything beyond those West Virginia hills felt like frontier. The frontier is different for everybody, and unless you’re willing to go into the unknown, you settle for the edge of knowing.
He did not approach Caroline quite then. He brought her a flower—not a rose, or lily. Richard picked flowers for girls, because he knew it was thoughtful and that it somehow kept a dying institution alive, but afterwards felt guilty taking a life for the uncertain promise of another. He modified the task to buttercups, wild daisies, thistle, in this case a fallen magnolia blossom. Caroline found him refreshing, a true Southern gentleman, not the chest-beating bravura of Nashville’s gentry that she was used to, and told him so.
Many girls had said this to him, that he was gentle. Every time, his ears grew hot. So, this is what perplexed Richard: the women in his life adored him, initially, always tilting their head with something sweet he said—and meant!—or when he prepared a surprise picnic in the park, or a surprise birthday party, or a surprise gift in between the pillows. By the end, however, the women in his life despised him, and for what? He did not stop saying sweet things to them. He maintained the level of surprise; if anything, the surprises became more surprising, more elaborate, with more effort. When he began to see that his gestures were met with something other than the light he always sought to ignite, he worked harder, consulted friends, family, became more complex in his designs to elate them. “Oh, Richard,” his mother would say, almost cupping his soft, pale face in her hands through the phone, with a bitterness in the honey that Richard never understood.
One night, shortly after his senior prom, April Garrett was crying in the car, parked in front of the dark ribbon of the Kanawha River, where they, on occasion, made out in the dark. Richard didn’t understand. He had just given her a bracelet. It had charms dangling from it—a dancing bear, a Coca-Cola bottle, a garnet heart—really popular at the time. She opened the box, and for a long moment kept her head down, her hair falling in her hands.
After what seemed a full minute of silence, he ventured, “Do you like it?”
And she growled. Low at first, a guttural, ugly sound, but it grew higher and higher until it was clearly sobbing, but an angry kind. Her face emerged from her hair. “Why did you get me this?!”
Startled, Richard’s wide mouth hung long. His blue eyes, large, Kewpie doll-like, opened wide, full of surprise and love. April had seen this face, this utter sincerity, many times, too many times, had fallen in love with this face, before. He knew that she was cheating on him, with Clay Goodall, one of the junior football players. It wasn’t a secret, everyone knew. She pulled Clay into a back room during a party the weekend before, in fact. Richard was there, knew what was happening, even in his drunken, slurred reality. He grew angry—a paralyzed version, anyway—slumped against a couch where a couple had passed out, his stare fixed on the long hallway into which she had disappeared. But, he was afraid to do anything, afraid that opening the door that hid April and Clay would make the act more real, not the dulled unfocused thing that it was. He didn’t say anything, even after she emerged from the hallway, everything about her tousled, her body fiercely electric and ready to fight, her eyes locking with his intently, waiting, or even later, when he drove her home. Instead, he thought to buy her the bracelet. He thought that if he proved how much he cared for her—that he really cared for her—she would choose him.
In the dark interior of the car, she raised her hand to his temple. There was a fairly deep gash, barely-healing, purple and brown, running right to his hairline, his black curls feebly concealing. “And, what about this?”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Your father.”
“It’s nothing.” He tried to take her hand, to comfort her.
With that, she threw herself out of the car, and began to storm off.
“What is wrong?” he yelled after her.
April writhed in her sundress, her slender arms punching the empty space around her. “You don’t get it, Richard!”
“Get what?”
“You give me this stuff, all this stuff. And your head. And you tell me it’s nothing. And…I get angry. And…I want you…to want something from me!”
“I do want you.”
“No, from me. From me. I never feel good enough, Richard. And that sucks.”
Richard felt lost in the words, the simple sounds of them, and it all seemed silly to be arguing over emphasis. Of course he felt she was good enough. Didn’t he want to celebrate how much she was to him, by buying her things like the bracelet? “April, please be reasonable.”
She threw the box and bracelet into the river with a shrill grunt, took a few steps, turned back in shame, perhaps indecision, for just a moment, and then walked into the dark, away from him, for good. He didn’t know whether to stare at the spot in the river where the box had disappeared, or where April had. The heat came into him, the fury, the want to transmit the fury. He clenched his fists, fixed his stare on the black river until it cooled the burn in his face.
On the bus, another wing, another sucking, schlurping, and the boy absently drops another bone, same as before. Richard looks around to see if anyone else notices. If they do, no one acknowledges. He snorts. No matter how bad this kid had it, there still is no reason for such thoughtlessness. It’s not Richard’s fault the kid grew up in project housing. No one on the bus oppressed this kid. Who was he to take it out on them, these people riding the bus just like him? They weren’t that different, all being transported to wherever they need to be. The bus was a place of equality, Richard thought, and he was even surprised by his discovery. Yeah, he prided, the bus was a place of equality. It didn’t know economic circumstance, didn’t know race. Of all places for these boys to be discourteous, why here? Richard snorts again, loud, but not so loud to seem directed at anything specific, though he wants to. Who knows what this boy is capable of? Maybe he even has a gun, or a knife. You can never be sure in a city. Richard wants to say, “Direct your frustration with your life to the proper channels—your parents, racists, your parole officer. Not us.”
Caroline says Richard has bad eating habits. She says he takes too much time cutting his meat, chewing his meat. Eats like a bird. Constantly coos and compliments her food. Rakes the fork along his teeth slowly and “ooh”s. Makes her shiver. She turns her head and rolls her eyes in this way that brings the heat to his face, usually at dinner in mid-description of his uneventful day. Well, if only she could see this guy, he thinks.
Caroline has left him, is seeing someone else. Caroline claims that she and Richard have grown apart. He doesn’t really understand what that means. He doesn’t think of marriage as ever growing together. He sees it more as a parallelism, moving in the same direction, but never explicitly joining. Sometimes, when two forces move jointly, they are not always flush, he knows that. They can drift, open up, only then to realign. Isn’t that better than coming together, better than colliding? Nothing joins together without something of a collision. There are always faults.
The boy drops another bone into the crevice with a small thud. Richard feels helpless. He thinks, how can everyone watch this happen? Of course they see it. How can anyone miss this grotesque display, these punks eating like pigs, with no regard? They speak to one another, about the wings or something else, Richard is unsure, because all he can make out are a series of mumbles. No wonder they are pigs, slobs; they can’t even speak English. Everything failed them—their families, their neighborhood, now their education. This is what gives black people a bad name, Richard thinks. He thinks about the handful of black friends he has had over the years. He bets they would be embarrassed, watching these boys act with so much irreverence. He’s certain they would be just as angry as he is, at the pure irreverence, at the animal in these boys on display, while everyone else on the bus is keeping their animal inside, like civilized people, for the common good. He wishes that one of his black friends were on the bus right now, to let these boys have it, to really have it.
Richard was a graceful boy all during puberty. He didn’t have an awkward growth spurt, and his frame filled itself steadily. The pimples never came in torrent, but spaced themselves out to one here and one there. With his hair curling softly, darkening to mahogany, and his already large blue eyes, Jessica Hawkins took him for hers by the end of lunch on the first day of seventh grade. Richard was enchanted by the affection, and would dress up for school every day—creased pants, button-up white shirt, loafers. She would see him in the morning, tilt her head, “Oh, Richard,” grab his hand and walk into the schoolhouse.
He knew what beauty was, saw the many images of Jesus on posters, Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ hanging in the portico of his small white-steepled church, his pale face looking upwards into the light, the gentle loveliness, and tried to do the same for Jessica. As his voice grew deeper, Richard affected it to sound lighter, breathier, more ephemeral. He insisted to his mother he must grow his hair long. His father, a coal miner who worked the Upper Big Branch, worried that he was going to be a sissy-boy, and pleaded with his mother to “cut the nonsense.” Richard saw his father as the antithesis of beauty, coming home blackened by coal, streaked with sweat lines, bulky. Black and bulky. His father muttered, hocked snot and spit in public, belched at the dinner table. Richard saw the way his mother looked at his father, like something that needed to be fixed. Richard washed himself more frequently, brushed lint off his clothes every morning. His father would look across the room, and shake his head, something sad in the face. Richard entered school and tried to float across the linoleum hallways to avoid making a sound—heel-ball-toe, lift, heel-ball-toe, lift—sliding his clean hand into Jessica’s with the gravity of a feather.
After two weeks of going steady, she pulled away, in disgust. “What’s wrong with you?”
Caroline was worried they didn’t fight. She thought it odd, that instead of a passionate argument with equally passionate reconciliation, they merely “talked about it,” then sat silent across the dinner table, polite and reasonable, the sole sound of fork to porcelain. Richard urged that this was what civilized people did, what sane people did. There is no end and beginning, only a continuance of things, and harmony is more real than resolve. Easier. Caroline would slowly shake her head, and look out the window, so still, the lines of her face tugging gently. “Richard, it’s all right to be angry.” Richard believed that one day Caroline would discover that it wasn’t okay to be angry, that he was being virtuous, this harmony that he worked so hard to cultivate, that if more of their contemporaries acted with the same logic and reason—these wonderfully civilized traits mankind could harness—there would be less suffering, less conflict. Caroline was smart; he was confident she would come around, discover this noble truth he held so deep and sure.
But instead, she packed up her life, and left with a sorrowful apology—a false resolve, he thought. And he has to admit: he was furious. How could she be so blind, that leaving is not a true resolution, that she only upset the balance of her life, as well as his? How could she let another guy fuck her, slip his cock up inside her, open up her flesh, make her feel ecstasy and love, and be fooled that the orgasm was the beginning of something better? Richard used to make her feel that, always tried to make her feel that. And knowing some other man was doing this brought about the hot gnash in his face. He revealed none of this, though. It was rash, emotional fury, and ultimately the expression of human weakness. Lesser men, uneducated men, expressed this animal instinct, and it led to violence, abuse, crime, oppression, misogyny. When energy builds, beyond the friction of its jagged edges, it breaks out, it breaks, he knew that. He enveloped the fury, clutched it, and, with reason, slung it back down into the deeper parts of himself.
He had made Caroline happy once, he was sure—it had been his favorite thing, especially when he could get her shoulders to rock with the deep, throaty laugh that defied the thinness of her. She’d toss her head, her fine red hair sliding along her back, mouth wide and full of tidy, straight teeth. He loved this. When they had just gotten married—he still in grad school—and moved into their first apartment together, he caught her several times worrying over finances. Caroline had never known struggle, he knew that, not like his family had. Once, he caught her staring into the empty space that should have been a dining room. They could not afford a table, having used all their resources for the wedding and the move West. Richard was heartbroken at the worry, the thinning and quiver of her lips. “What are we going to do, Richard?” Later that evening, she walked in from work to see him seated in that same room, wearing his one suit. He had taken a moving box, covered it with a bed sheet, candles, picked flowers and a bottle of cheap white wine. Draped on a folding chair was her favorite dress—the blue jersey sleeveless V-neck that fell on her hips in a way that made her want to move them. He asked her if she wouldn’t mind dressing more appropriately for their date. When she came back from the bedroom, supper was served: mac and cheese with chopped mushrooms, flickering candlelight, and a grinning Richard. She laughed. Afterward, he put on some Dinah Washington, and danced with her in the small room, speaking to her with a horrible French accent, kissing along her freckled arms, from fingertips to elbow. She laughed, her head, her hair, tilted back. Happy.
The first time Caroline came home late, he wasn’t concerned. It had been a warm day for San Francisco, and he knew Caroline relished those days, maybe even missed the balmy nights of Tennessee, and believed her when she said she wanted to walk home from work. She lingered around the kitchen as he finished preparing dinner, and he asked her “You hungry? I could make you some fish.”
She widened her stance. “But you’re making pasta.”
“I could head back to the market.”
She snorted and said, “Jesus,” whipped off her belt, and disappeared into the bathroom. The sound of the shower felt like a wall to Richard.
There were other times that Caroline wanted Richard to know, he can see that now. She told him a few months ago that she was going to see her sister back in Nashville for the weekend, but no plane ticket ever appeared on the credit card statement. Richard took care of all the bills. Caroline knew that. Later that month he mentioned to her before bed that he hadn’t seen a charge. She said, “What do you make of that, Richard?” She stood in front of him in her negligee, arms crossed. The heat came into his face. He wanted to accuse her, call her a liar. But he forced open his hands that had balled into fists, knew these thoughts to be irrational. He instead said, “You look beautiful.” She dropped her head down, only said “Well,” and slumped into bed.
Maybe he did know that she was fucking some other guy. Maybe he simply wanted to trust her, trust that the woman he loved would do right by him. Besides, if she was fucking some other guy, what could Richard do? It was up to her to stop, not him. It wasn’t his fault.
She didn’t stop.
The boy has done it again, dropped another chicken bone onto the floor—ain’t no thing—and this time Richard is certain that this boy, and all of them, are true, real, thugs. So what if the system failed them? That doesn’t mean one needs to thwart all decency. Richard flushes vividly, and he feels his lips snarl over his bleached teeth. These kids are his imbalance, the scourge of humanity that the rest—the thoughtful, the well-intended, the contributors—have to support, so that the whole system doesn’t collapse. And this is how they pay back, by sucking on a fucking chicken bone and tossing it to the floor, that working people’s taxes paid for. That Richard's taxes paid for.
Richard wants to grab that chicken bone. He wants to pull it off the floor with one quick surge of his body and rake the thing across the boy’s face. He wants to grip the bone in his fist and run the sharpest edge through the boy’s neck. All of them. He wants to stab their necks, watch their eyes grow wide as their blood geysers from their arrogant necks. He wants them to look helplessly at the chicken bone, half-drenched in red, then at Richard’s face, and realize their folly, their misdeed, that they are the ones that make good, decent people like Richard angry.
Richard feels the heat all over his head, but especially in his ears, imagines little flames flickering at the tips. And he knows he needs to quell this anger. Anger upsets the balance. He would get to this point after Caroline would go on and on about the same complaints, the failure she saw in him. Where was his passion? Where was his manhood? Him, getting redder and redder. “Grow a dick, for once, Richard.” He would have to walk out of their flat, run down the stairs and step out into the dark San Francisco cooling, walk until the heat left. When returned, certain he could continue the discussion more reasonably, she had given up, retreated into a defeated silence that confused him.
He needs to do the same now, to walk out, into the chill, to quell the fire, but just as he is about to pull the cord, to request a stop, the boys rise. When the bus stops, they exit, but not before the boy, the one sitting across from Richard, the one who dropped the wings on the floor, tosses the whole BBQ-soaked bag behind him, it plopping in the aisle next to Richard’s feet.
The first woman to break his heart was Krissy Montier. Richard had taken one of his mother’s rings and presented it to Krissy at recess. He debated it all morning, staring at his mother’s jewelry box, trying to prioritize the act of generosity over the sin of thievery. He told Krissy that his feelings were real. We all know that life is just as serious, then, as it is, now. Krissy took the ring, examined the bold opal, the thick band, too big for her thumb. “It’s ugly,” she said, and tossed it behind her as she ran to the tetherball court.
Richard ran off, too mortified to go back into class. He realized he couldn’t go home, either. So, he walked along the river, careful to walk the side opposite of town, and waited until his mother would expect him. When he sidled up to the house, his mother was at the screen door. Her robust body near took up the doorframe, and seemed even larger because her arms were propped against the screen. She had been crying. “I’m gonna have to tell your daddy” is all she said.
Richard wet himself from the beating, and for two days he couldn’t sit flat in his chair at school. His mother chopped vegetables, near slamming the knife to wood while the belt snapped across her only son’s body, could hear her husband explaining the beating while he did it. “Because of. a. girl? You. some. kind of. pansy? Dammit, Dickie.” He was crying, too. Richard’s father had a ferocious love for his boy, and beat him for wrongs with equal ferocity. Richard’s mother conceded in these times, while gripping the sides of her dress, that love and violence were indistinguishable when men, like Richard’s father, lived and worked in the dark.
That same week, Richard received his first D, in English. He had been crying in the shabby sandy courtyard of the schoolhouse. Miss Sims noticed, came over and gracefully sat down. He showed her the report card. Miss Sims tilted her head to the side and said, “Oh, Richard,” and assured him it wouldn’t be that bad. Richard looked at her, really looked at her, perhaps the first time ever with an adult, with nothing but what he had, and her conciliatory smile faded. After a moment, she simply slipped her dark hand into his pink hand, with the gravity of a feather, and they stayed there silent for quite a while, both looking out over the Kentucky blue-grass, rustling in the soon-summer wind.
Richard stares at the bag, smeared orange and white, dirty, crumpled, limply balled, and he can’t help but sense the giant failure, all around, in this bag. This bag, and everything failing. The people on the bus are looking into nothing but the picture of their own failures, their jaws slack, their faces pulled down. But Richard stares. He stares at the bag, the tossed bag. Caroline looked at him the same, like a greasy bag. Caroline. Caroline takes her hand, smears it into the grease, and rubs it on a cock—not Richard’s cock—and slides herself onto it, and laughs directly at Richard as she bobs up and down on this cock, as she gets fucked by someone not Richard. He burns the stare, wet and hot, and everything blurs around the bag, his eyes fire, two tight balls of heat, imploding stars. There is a tight, white burn in his gut, a bigger one than ever, something pushing inside him, a pressure that has nowhere else to go. Richard hears his teeth grind against each other.
A young woman sitting in a seat near Richard leans towards him, her crisp blue business suit straining in the thighs. “Are you alright, sir?” she asks, her eyebrows creased in concern.
The question is a portal of sorts, the pressure, and Richard immediately pulls his gaze from the bag to the woman. His hands implode into fists. “Bitch.” He doesn’t dare look directly at her face, Caroline’s face, her face, a woman’s. He imagines her head bleeding, almost the color of BBQ sauce. “Bitch.” Her hair splays out of the neat bun almost in ripples, slathers and clumps with the blood, and the BBQ sauce, too. Over and over, head to floor, he imagines his hands gripping her, slamming her. He can feel it. Head to floor, head to floor. Caroline, how could you? “You bitch.” Over and over.
A girl next to the young woman screams, and Richard starts. He feels the temperature drop, and the rest of the bus comes into view. His shirt pulls with sweat, curls clomped to his head, so much hot water in his eyes, now looking at the woman’s face, which is wide open with fear, her body slowly backing away. He yelps out apologies or promises, but not in a language anyone, including him, understands. I am the center of things, he thinks, there is a world on all sides.
Bodies turn, and an assortment of men jump from their seats, ready to do the thing men do to make things right. The bus driver has already stopped the bus, moving to the back, and everyone is looking at Richard, who is shaking, perhaps shivering, Richard can’t tell. He can’t look at them, their faces full of disgust, and instead looks down at the floor, the chicken bones, and now his shoulders lurch forward, and he cries, large, heavy sobs, curls himself into the bus seat, knees to his chest, his face pressed against the window, the resolute lines of the city blurring with the fog of his breath.
The MUNI bus lurches forward, enough to rock Richard from his afternoon stupor. Purses slump, an expensive coffee paints a woman’s white blouse the color of dirt.
“Thought it was an earthquake,” someone says, to no one in particular.
MUNI continues the thin metallic wheeze on its rise and fall along Market Street. With rain done for the day, the sky opens up, a single shard of light falling across Richard’s lap through the window. The heat soaks through his creased black slacks.
Richard knows that the bus wouldn’t lurch in an earthquake. He knows if there happened to be one, it would feel more like a bumpy road, more like riding over a deeply-grooved grate. It might even lull riders to sleep. And, with all of the vehicle’s superstructure, it’s probably one of the safest places to be when a big one comes along, the rubber of the tires somewhat absorbing the seismic wave.
When did he learn that? Sixth grade. Earth science kept him transfixed to the overhead projections that Miss Sims slid onto the light box with a grace and ease that made her his favorite, the confusion of kindness and pubescent lust. How he tingled with the possibility of her unbuttoned collar. This is what the Earth looks like, under the surface.
Richard shakes. This comes from deep within his body, from some hypocenter nestled in the layers of muscle and bone and blood, a signal of sorts. He needs something. Perhaps it is hunger, or something of comfort, the chenille blanket he drapes over himself while watching TV on the couch, even when he is not cold. The rippling of this knowledge intrigues him, the want beginning as impulse that quickly surges through like a wave, until the moment he ultimately gets whatever it is his body thinks it needs. Then, all better. A shake, a quench, then all better. He’s been wondering what he needs, but can never satisfy his body with an answer. Loss fills his stomach with a viscera, of regret, an emotion of the gut. The weight of it is unspecific.
He thought his arrival to San Francisco was the first exact moment of his life, a pure fulfilling of need, when there was no toil of choice. He was a seismologist, he loved the arts, and always felt calmer by the ocean, and Caroline would be with him. When he was offered the position with the California Department of Conservation, Mines and Geology division, he immediately accepted. A needle to the groove of the perfect song. He took long walks around Nashville to give the city a proper good-bye, but was overcome with how much he didn’t feel he belonged there. The streets were whizzing with cars, but empty. Bicentennial Park was emerald green in the day, its faux-Parthenon looming dramatically from its low rise, but empty. He walked into his favorite bar in Hillsboro, a dark friendly spot where he’d spent many nights after graduate seminars chatting about sediment, marriage proposals, liquefaction. He ordered his usual Stella. The barrel-chested bartender didn’t recognize him, but smiled anyway. Richard didn’t know anyone in the bar. He finished his beer quickly. It was time to go. He wasn’t quite twenty-nine. He and Caroline packed everything they had into a ten foot UHaul, newly married, and drove West.
Caroline was excited to move to San Francisco, the sophistication of it. She thought Nashville—where she had lived her whole life—was so, she would say, catatonic. She always referred to the people and the city that way. “We are better than this hillbilly town.” Her hair would shake around her face, as if conviction alone could make hair shake. Richard would tilt his head softly, take her hand and caress the lines of her palm to calm her. He would excuse the small cruelty of her judgment as a requisite flaw to an otherwise exquisite creature.
The weeks that followed their move appeared more resolute to Richard. The air was clearer, as if he could feel each atom entering his lungs. The scent of things became more distinct, and didn’t swamp together the way they did in the languid Southern air. Colors popped, felt outlined, like in a grade-school coloring book. The feel of his fingers on jersey gave him an erection, and his love-making with Caroline was adolescent. He marveled at their thighs pressed together, her softness to his knotted muscle, her fine, almost red hairs to his coarse black. Richard felt the molecules of his reality become more crystalized. He decided then that happiness made itself evident in these moments of sensual clarity, that happiness was somehow bound in this visceral shift in perception. All sounds, his favorite song.
He isn’t quite thirty-five.
Three young men enter the bus and sit across from Richard. They wear the baggy jeans that fall well below their asses, a fad that baffles him, particularly for how long it has been a fad, considering fashion’s whimsical attention since the likes of E Network and TMZ. One of the boys has scraggly, dirty blond hair, while the other two have loose fros. Richard can see their boxer shorts thankfully cover what their pants can’t. He wonders what holds up the jeans, and if this trend among young men is supposed to signify having a big cock, one big enough to act as a hanging knob, of sorts. A clothing fad has to come from somewhere. He thinks to look this up on the Internet when he gets home.
They have come on the bus with paper bags of spicy chicken wings. Richard can smell the spice, that tickle in his nostril, then his throat, where taste and smell blur. He would love to take one of those wings, to feel the security of the meat in his own mouth. He realizes now that he is indeed shaking because he is hungry. He recalls the last time he had a proper meal—yesterday morning. By the time he gets home, however, he will walk in to the quiet, empty apartment, Caroline’s clothes missing from the closet, and regret will fill his belly again. Whiskey will be dinner.
The boys begin to eat. Richard wonders if Miss Sims ate chicken wings. Miss Sims was black, the only black teacher he ever had. Her voice was smooth, that of honey being poured into a large bowl, ribboning at the bottom before disappearing into the liquid mound, his memory of that voice the stuff of adult fantasies in his teens, teen fantasies in his adulthood. He would sometimes lay that voice over the shrill of the few women that actually made it to his bed, the ones before Caroline.
An earthquake, class, is what happens when two blocks of the Earth suddenly slip past one another. The surface where they slip is called the fault. The spot where the earthquake really starts is called the hypocenter, buried deep below the surface, unseen. The epicenter is the spot that we can see, but is not the source of the earthquake.
The boys inhale the wings with flourish, almost a highly conscious, theatrical exaggeration. They take a wing, shove all but a sliver of bone into their mouths, and suck the meat off, lips pulled back to reveal gristle and teeth. The sound of the slurp fills the bus, or at least it seems like that to Richard, who watches them out of the corner of his eye while pretending to gaze out the window. He can see the boy across from him, through the reflection, crane his head up and thrust the wing behind his teeth, and suck. Lips smacking, a kind of sex sound, really (maybe the kind he and Caroline had made, when their bodies were still new). And then the chew—open mouthed, the meat churning round his tongue, which wags to catch renegade bits of chicken, another kind of force. An animal sound, something wild, a bear behind a wall. It repulses Richard, the sheer uncivilized nature of the suck and gnaw.
After the boy has ripped the bone of flesh—ligament, cartilage, everything—without so much as a hesitation he drops it, not back in the bag but in the tight space between his seat and the window. Richard is shocked, flabbergasted, appalled. The bone pitifully lolls on the floor. The ease in which the boy does this fills Richard with heat, an embarrassment, not necessarily for himself but for the bus, for the people riding, maybe the city, all of humanity, he’s not sure. It’s definitely the same kind of heat he felt the first time Caroline subtly refused his hand, walking along the Embarcadero on a surprisingly warm evening, not too long ago. Maybe a year, two years ago? Had it been that long? He wanted to bring her to romance, to feel it all around her, to feel it with him. The Embarcadero was a perfect idea. He pulled her out of their flat, her protests feeble enough, but she had been silent the entire ride on the train, staring out at nothing, and certainly not looking at him. Once there, Richard felt hopeful, with the briny scent of the Bay. As they walked, passing restaurants and piers, cyclers and coffee stands, he slipped his hand into hers, and just as smoothly she pulled hers away, and walked ahead silently. They had been married only a few years. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The weight of the refusal had him follow behind for several minutes, his face flushed with a cold fire that didn’t have a source, a locus to identify, so he could fix it, put it out. All he could do was watch her figure, his hands balling to fists, and feel the pounding of his own steps on the concrete walk. It scared him that he imagined running up behind her and pushing her into the Bay, pushing her hard against her back, to send the refusal from his refused hand to her rigid body. When she finally turned around and said, “I’m hungry,” he sucked in a grateful breath and replied, “Let’s check out one of these seafood places.”
Richard thinks to ask why the boy on the bus has done this careless act. The lack of hesitation is what throws him, as if it was impulsive to drop the chicken wing, not a choice at all. It appears to Richard that the boy wasn’t doing it out of protest, or of a need to demonstrate utter distaste for San Francisco public transit—this pure, inherent lack of consideration. Where did this boy grow up, Richard wonders, probably in the ghetto. Richard would italicize ghetto, because it is a foreign word, and all foreign words are italicized. Project housing, with weeds splitting concrete playgrounds, graffiti narrating a lost cause. Maybe the boy still lives there, perhaps somewhere in Oakland. Probably didn’t have a good female role model growing up, he thinks. Has no family unit. Maybe he even sells drugs. Maybe he has been harassed by the SFPD so much and for so long that he feels like the city doesn’t care about him, so why would he care about the city, and certainly this MUNI bus? Maybe the feeling is so deeply rooted in him that dropping the bone willy-nilly is as impulsive as instinct. No matter how Richard considers it, though, he feels the heat in his face and his hands ball into fists.
When Richard first saw Caroline on the quad, the sun was trapped in her strawberry blonde hair, her whole being: teeth, skin and light. All nuance and detail were smoothed by the humid morning. And, in the distance, how could he not fall in love? He was still exhilarated by his presence at Vanderbilt. Nashville had been the far reaches of his world—so far from West Virginia, his family, his small shotgun clapboard cottage on the edges of a small town nestled in hills that felt huge to Richard then, insurmountable. He perhaps had wanted to fling himself farther than Nashville, but everything beyond those West Virginia hills felt like frontier. The frontier is different for everybody, and unless you’re willing to go into the unknown, you settle for the edge of knowing.
He did not approach Caroline quite then. He brought her a flower—not a rose, or lily. Richard picked flowers for girls, because he knew it was thoughtful and that it somehow kept a dying institution alive, but afterwards felt guilty taking a life for the uncertain promise of another. He modified the task to buttercups, wild daisies, thistle, in this case a fallen magnolia blossom. Caroline found him refreshing, a true Southern gentleman, not the chest-beating bravura of Nashville’s gentry that she was used to, and told him so.
Many girls had said this to him, that he was gentle. Every time, his ears grew hot. So, this is what perplexed Richard: the women in his life adored him, initially, always tilting their head with something sweet he said—and meant!—or when he prepared a surprise picnic in the park, or a surprise birthday party, or a surprise gift in between the pillows. By the end, however, the women in his life despised him, and for what? He did not stop saying sweet things to them. He maintained the level of surprise; if anything, the surprises became more surprising, more elaborate, with more effort. When he began to see that his gestures were met with something other than the light he always sought to ignite, he worked harder, consulted friends, family, became more complex in his designs to elate them. “Oh, Richard,” his mother would say, almost cupping his soft, pale face in her hands through the phone, with a bitterness in the honey that Richard never understood.
One night, shortly after his senior prom, April Garrett was crying in the car, parked in front of the dark ribbon of the Kanawha River, where they, on occasion, made out in the dark. Richard didn’t understand. He had just given her a bracelet. It had charms dangling from it—a dancing bear, a Coca-Cola bottle, a garnet heart—really popular at the time. She opened the box, and for a long moment kept her head down, her hair falling in her hands.
After what seemed a full minute of silence, he ventured, “Do you like it?”
And she growled. Low at first, a guttural, ugly sound, but it grew higher and higher until it was clearly sobbing, but an angry kind. Her face emerged from her hair. “Why did you get me this?!”
Startled, Richard’s wide mouth hung long. His blue eyes, large, Kewpie doll-like, opened wide, full of surprise and love. April had seen this face, this utter sincerity, many times, too many times, had fallen in love with this face, before. He knew that she was cheating on him, with Clay Goodall, one of the junior football players. It wasn’t a secret, everyone knew. She pulled Clay into a back room during a party the weekend before, in fact. Richard was there, knew what was happening, even in his drunken, slurred reality. He grew angry—a paralyzed version, anyway—slumped against a couch where a couple had passed out, his stare fixed on the long hallway into which she had disappeared. But, he was afraid to do anything, afraid that opening the door that hid April and Clay would make the act more real, not the dulled unfocused thing that it was. He didn’t say anything, even after she emerged from the hallway, everything about her tousled, her body fiercely electric and ready to fight, her eyes locking with his intently, waiting, or even later, when he drove her home. Instead, he thought to buy her the bracelet. He thought that if he proved how much he cared for her—that he really cared for her—she would choose him.
In the dark interior of the car, she raised her hand to his temple. There was a fairly deep gash, barely-healing, purple and brown, running right to his hairline, his black curls feebly concealing. “And, what about this?”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Your father.”
“It’s nothing.” He tried to take her hand, to comfort her.
With that, she threw herself out of the car, and began to storm off.
“What is wrong?” he yelled after her.
April writhed in her sundress, her slender arms punching the empty space around her. “You don’t get it, Richard!”
“Get what?”
“You give me this stuff, all this stuff. And your head. And you tell me it’s nothing. And…I get angry. And…I want you…to want something from me!”
“I do want you.”
“No, from me. From me. I never feel good enough, Richard. And that sucks.”
Richard felt lost in the words, the simple sounds of them, and it all seemed silly to be arguing over emphasis. Of course he felt she was good enough. Didn’t he want to celebrate how much she was to him, by buying her things like the bracelet? “April, please be reasonable.”
She threw the box and bracelet into the river with a shrill grunt, took a few steps, turned back in shame, perhaps indecision, for just a moment, and then walked into the dark, away from him, for good. He didn’t know whether to stare at the spot in the river where the box had disappeared, or where April had. The heat came into him, the fury, the want to transmit the fury. He clenched his fists, fixed his stare on the black river until it cooled the burn in his face.
On the bus, another wing, another sucking, schlurping, and the boy absently drops another bone, same as before. Richard looks around to see if anyone else notices. If they do, no one acknowledges. He snorts. No matter how bad this kid had it, there still is no reason for such thoughtlessness. It’s not Richard’s fault the kid grew up in project housing. No one on the bus oppressed this kid. Who was he to take it out on them, these people riding the bus just like him? They weren’t that different, all being transported to wherever they need to be. The bus was a place of equality, Richard thought, and he was even surprised by his discovery. Yeah, he prided, the bus was a place of equality. It didn’t know economic circumstance, didn’t know race. Of all places for these boys to be discourteous, why here? Richard snorts again, loud, but not so loud to seem directed at anything specific, though he wants to. Who knows what this boy is capable of? Maybe he even has a gun, or a knife. You can never be sure in a city. Richard wants to say, “Direct your frustration with your life to the proper channels—your parents, racists, your parole officer. Not us.”
Caroline says Richard has bad eating habits. She says he takes too much time cutting his meat, chewing his meat. Eats like a bird. Constantly coos and compliments her food. Rakes the fork along his teeth slowly and “ooh”s. Makes her shiver. She turns her head and rolls her eyes in this way that brings the heat to his face, usually at dinner in mid-description of his uneventful day. Well, if only she could see this guy, he thinks.
Caroline has left him, is seeing someone else. Caroline claims that she and Richard have grown apart. He doesn’t really understand what that means. He doesn’t think of marriage as ever growing together. He sees it more as a parallelism, moving in the same direction, but never explicitly joining. Sometimes, when two forces move jointly, they are not always flush, he knows that. They can drift, open up, only then to realign. Isn’t that better than coming together, better than colliding? Nothing joins together without something of a collision. There are always faults.
The boy drops another bone into the crevice with a small thud. Richard feels helpless. He thinks, how can everyone watch this happen? Of course they see it. How can anyone miss this grotesque display, these punks eating like pigs, with no regard? They speak to one another, about the wings or something else, Richard is unsure, because all he can make out are a series of mumbles. No wonder they are pigs, slobs; they can’t even speak English. Everything failed them—their families, their neighborhood, now their education. This is what gives black people a bad name, Richard thinks. He thinks about the handful of black friends he has had over the years. He bets they would be embarrassed, watching these boys act with so much irreverence. He’s certain they would be just as angry as he is, at the pure irreverence, at the animal in these boys on display, while everyone else on the bus is keeping their animal inside, like civilized people, for the common good. He wishes that one of his black friends were on the bus right now, to let these boys have it, to really have it.
Richard was a graceful boy all during puberty. He didn’t have an awkward growth spurt, and his frame filled itself steadily. The pimples never came in torrent, but spaced themselves out to one here and one there. With his hair curling softly, darkening to mahogany, and his already large blue eyes, Jessica Hawkins took him for hers by the end of lunch on the first day of seventh grade. Richard was enchanted by the affection, and would dress up for school every day—creased pants, button-up white shirt, loafers. She would see him in the morning, tilt her head, “Oh, Richard,” grab his hand and walk into the schoolhouse.
He knew what beauty was, saw the many images of Jesus on posters, Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ hanging in the portico of his small white-steepled church, his pale face looking upwards into the light, the gentle loveliness, and tried to do the same for Jessica. As his voice grew deeper, Richard affected it to sound lighter, breathier, more ephemeral. He insisted to his mother he must grow his hair long. His father, a coal miner who worked the Upper Big Branch, worried that he was going to be a sissy-boy, and pleaded with his mother to “cut the nonsense.” Richard saw his father as the antithesis of beauty, coming home blackened by coal, streaked with sweat lines, bulky. Black and bulky. His father muttered, hocked snot and spit in public, belched at the dinner table. Richard saw the way his mother looked at his father, like something that needed to be fixed. Richard washed himself more frequently, brushed lint off his clothes every morning. His father would look across the room, and shake his head, something sad in the face. Richard entered school and tried to float across the linoleum hallways to avoid making a sound—heel-ball-toe, lift, heel-ball-toe, lift—sliding his clean hand into Jessica’s with the gravity of a feather.
After two weeks of going steady, she pulled away, in disgust. “What’s wrong with you?”
Caroline was worried they didn’t fight. She thought it odd, that instead of a passionate argument with equally passionate reconciliation, they merely “talked about it,” then sat silent across the dinner table, polite and reasonable, the sole sound of fork to porcelain. Richard urged that this was what civilized people did, what sane people did. There is no end and beginning, only a continuance of things, and harmony is more real than resolve. Easier. Caroline would slowly shake her head, and look out the window, so still, the lines of her face tugging gently. “Richard, it’s all right to be angry.” Richard believed that one day Caroline would discover that it wasn’t okay to be angry, that he was being virtuous, this harmony that he worked so hard to cultivate, that if more of their contemporaries acted with the same logic and reason—these wonderfully civilized traits mankind could harness—there would be less suffering, less conflict. Caroline was smart; he was confident she would come around, discover this noble truth he held so deep and sure.
But instead, she packed up her life, and left with a sorrowful apology—a false resolve, he thought. And he has to admit: he was furious. How could she be so blind, that leaving is not a true resolution, that she only upset the balance of her life, as well as his? How could she let another guy fuck her, slip his cock up inside her, open up her flesh, make her feel ecstasy and love, and be fooled that the orgasm was the beginning of something better? Richard used to make her feel that, always tried to make her feel that. And knowing some other man was doing this brought about the hot gnash in his face. He revealed none of this, though. It was rash, emotional fury, and ultimately the expression of human weakness. Lesser men, uneducated men, expressed this animal instinct, and it led to violence, abuse, crime, oppression, misogyny. When energy builds, beyond the friction of its jagged edges, it breaks out, it breaks, he knew that. He enveloped the fury, clutched it, and, with reason, slung it back down into the deeper parts of himself.
He had made Caroline happy once, he was sure—it had been his favorite thing, especially when he could get her shoulders to rock with the deep, throaty laugh that defied the thinness of her. She’d toss her head, her fine red hair sliding along her back, mouth wide and full of tidy, straight teeth. He loved this. When they had just gotten married—he still in grad school—and moved into their first apartment together, he caught her several times worrying over finances. Caroline had never known struggle, he knew that, not like his family had. Once, he caught her staring into the empty space that should have been a dining room. They could not afford a table, having used all their resources for the wedding and the move West. Richard was heartbroken at the worry, the thinning and quiver of her lips. “What are we going to do, Richard?” Later that evening, she walked in from work to see him seated in that same room, wearing his one suit. He had taken a moving box, covered it with a bed sheet, candles, picked flowers and a bottle of cheap white wine. Draped on a folding chair was her favorite dress—the blue jersey sleeveless V-neck that fell on her hips in a way that made her want to move them. He asked her if she wouldn’t mind dressing more appropriately for their date. When she came back from the bedroom, supper was served: mac and cheese with chopped mushrooms, flickering candlelight, and a grinning Richard. She laughed. Afterward, he put on some Dinah Washington, and danced with her in the small room, speaking to her with a horrible French accent, kissing along her freckled arms, from fingertips to elbow. She laughed, her head, her hair, tilted back. Happy.
The first time Caroline came home late, he wasn’t concerned. It had been a warm day for San Francisco, and he knew Caroline relished those days, maybe even missed the balmy nights of Tennessee, and believed her when she said she wanted to walk home from work. She lingered around the kitchen as he finished preparing dinner, and he asked her “You hungry? I could make you some fish.”
She widened her stance. “But you’re making pasta.”
“I could head back to the market.”
She snorted and said, “Jesus,” whipped off her belt, and disappeared into the bathroom. The sound of the shower felt like a wall to Richard.
There were other times that Caroline wanted Richard to know, he can see that now. She told him a few months ago that she was going to see her sister back in Nashville for the weekend, but no plane ticket ever appeared on the credit card statement. Richard took care of all the bills. Caroline knew that. Later that month he mentioned to her before bed that he hadn’t seen a charge. She said, “What do you make of that, Richard?” She stood in front of him in her negligee, arms crossed. The heat came into his face. He wanted to accuse her, call her a liar. But he forced open his hands that had balled into fists, knew these thoughts to be irrational. He instead said, “You look beautiful.” She dropped her head down, only said “Well,” and slumped into bed.
Maybe he did know that she was fucking some other guy. Maybe he simply wanted to trust her, trust that the woman he loved would do right by him. Besides, if she was fucking some other guy, what could Richard do? It was up to her to stop, not him. It wasn’t his fault.
She didn’t stop.
The boy has done it again, dropped another chicken bone onto the floor—ain’t no thing—and this time Richard is certain that this boy, and all of them, are true, real, thugs. So what if the system failed them? That doesn’t mean one needs to thwart all decency. Richard flushes vividly, and he feels his lips snarl over his bleached teeth. These kids are his imbalance, the scourge of humanity that the rest—the thoughtful, the well-intended, the contributors—have to support, so that the whole system doesn’t collapse. And this is how they pay back, by sucking on a fucking chicken bone and tossing it to the floor, that working people’s taxes paid for. That Richard's taxes paid for.
Richard wants to grab that chicken bone. He wants to pull it off the floor with one quick surge of his body and rake the thing across the boy’s face. He wants to grip the bone in his fist and run the sharpest edge through the boy’s neck. All of them. He wants to stab their necks, watch their eyes grow wide as their blood geysers from their arrogant necks. He wants them to look helplessly at the chicken bone, half-drenched in red, then at Richard’s face, and realize their folly, their misdeed, that they are the ones that make good, decent people like Richard angry.
Richard feels the heat all over his head, but especially in his ears, imagines little flames flickering at the tips. And he knows he needs to quell this anger. Anger upsets the balance. He would get to this point after Caroline would go on and on about the same complaints, the failure she saw in him. Where was his passion? Where was his manhood? Him, getting redder and redder. “Grow a dick, for once, Richard.” He would have to walk out of their flat, run down the stairs and step out into the dark San Francisco cooling, walk until the heat left. When returned, certain he could continue the discussion more reasonably, she had given up, retreated into a defeated silence that confused him.
He needs to do the same now, to walk out, into the chill, to quell the fire, but just as he is about to pull the cord, to request a stop, the boys rise. When the bus stops, they exit, but not before the boy, the one sitting across from Richard, the one who dropped the wings on the floor, tosses the whole BBQ-soaked bag behind him, it plopping in the aisle next to Richard’s feet.
The first woman to break his heart was Krissy Montier. Richard had taken one of his mother’s rings and presented it to Krissy at recess. He debated it all morning, staring at his mother’s jewelry box, trying to prioritize the act of generosity over the sin of thievery. He told Krissy that his feelings were real. We all know that life is just as serious, then, as it is, now. Krissy took the ring, examined the bold opal, the thick band, too big for her thumb. “It’s ugly,” she said, and tossed it behind her as she ran to the tetherball court.
Richard ran off, too mortified to go back into class. He realized he couldn’t go home, either. So, he walked along the river, careful to walk the side opposite of town, and waited until his mother would expect him. When he sidled up to the house, his mother was at the screen door. Her robust body near took up the doorframe, and seemed even larger because her arms were propped against the screen. She had been crying. “I’m gonna have to tell your daddy” is all she said.
Richard wet himself from the beating, and for two days he couldn’t sit flat in his chair at school. His mother chopped vegetables, near slamming the knife to wood while the belt snapped across her only son’s body, could hear her husband explaining the beating while he did it. “Because of. a. girl? You. some. kind of. pansy? Dammit, Dickie.” He was crying, too. Richard’s father had a ferocious love for his boy, and beat him for wrongs with equal ferocity. Richard’s mother conceded in these times, while gripping the sides of her dress, that love and violence were indistinguishable when men, like Richard’s father, lived and worked in the dark.
That same week, Richard received his first D, in English. He had been crying in the shabby sandy courtyard of the schoolhouse. Miss Sims noticed, came over and gracefully sat down. He showed her the report card. Miss Sims tilted her head to the side and said, “Oh, Richard,” and assured him it wouldn’t be that bad. Richard looked at her, really looked at her, perhaps the first time ever with an adult, with nothing but what he had, and her conciliatory smile faded. After a moment, she simply slipped her dark hand into his pink hand, with the gravity of a feather, and they stayed there silent for quite a while, both looking out over the Kentucky blue-grass, rustling in the soon-summer wind.
Richard stares at the bag, smeared orange and white, dirty, crumpled, limply balled, and he can’t help but sense the giant failure, all around, in this bag. This bag, and everything failing. The people on the bus are looking into nothing but the picture of their own failures, their jaws slack, their faces pulled down. But Richard stares. He stares at the bag, the tossed bag. Caroline looked at him the same, like a greasy bag. Caroline. Caroline takes her hand, smears it into the grease, and rubs it on a cock—not Richard’s cock—and slides herself onto it, and laughs directly at Richard as she bobs up and down on this cock, as she gets fucked by someone not Richard. He burns the stare, wet and hot, and everything blurs around the bag, his eyes fire, two tight balls of heat, imploding stars. There is a tight, white burn in his gut, a bigger one than ever, something pushing inside him, a pressure that has nowhere else to go. Richard hears his teeth grind against each other.
A young woman sitting in a seat near Richard leans towards him, her crisp blue business suit straining in the thighs. “Are you alright, sir?” she asks, her eyebrows creased in concern.
The question is a portal of sorts, the pressure, and Richard immediately pulls his gaze from the bag to the woman. His hands implode into fists. “Bitch.” He doesn’t dare look directly at her face, Caroline’s face, her face, a woman’s. He imagines her head bleeding, almost the color of BBQ sauce. “Bitch.” Her hair splays out of the neat bun almost in ripples, slathers and clumps with the blood, and the BBQ sauce, too. Over and over, head to floor, he imagines his hands gripping her, slamming her. He can feel it. Head to floor, head to floor. Caroline, how could you? “You bitch.” Over and over.
A girl next to the young woman screams, and Richard starts. He feels the temperature drop, and the rest of the bus comes into view. His shirt pulls with sweat, curls clomped to his head, so much hot water in his eyes, now looking at the woman’s face, which is wide open with fear, her body slowly backing away. He yelps out apologies or promises, but not in a language anyone, including him, understands. I am the center of things, he thinks, there is a world on all sides.
Bodies turn, and an assortment of men jump from their seats, ready to do the thing men do to make things right. The bus driver has already stopped the bus, moving to the back, and everyone is looking at Richard, who is shaking, perhaps shivering, Richard can’t tell. He can’t look at them, their faces full of disgust, and instead looks down at the floor, the chicken bones, and now his shoulders lurch forward, and he cries, large, heavy sobs, curls himself into the bus seat, knees to his chest, his face pressed against the window, the resolute lines of the city blurring with the fog of his breath.