surpassed them.
â
Latin!â
Clarence hooted. âWhatâs a nigger boy like you doinâ, fooling around with Latin?â
I stiffened at the slur and didnât answer.
âWhen they start teaching Latin at olâ P.S. 24?â he asked, still laughing at my expense.
âThey donât,â I said. âI go to Warner Academy.â
At this, Clarence stopped laughing and narrowed his eyes at me. âWhatâs that?â
âPrivate school,â I said. He proceeded to ask me questions about my schooling, and I haughtily explained the circumstances.
âHuh,â he grunted when Iâd finished my explanation. âSounds to me like you think yoâ better than us, boy.â I widened my eyes at the accusation. âYeah,â he continued. âI see the way you been lookinâ at me, actinâ like Iâm gonna give you a case of them head-bugs or somethinâ . . . You think yoâ shit donât stink.â
By this point, his eyes had turned eerily black and the expression on his face had grown hard and bitter.
âBut Iâll tell ya something, boy . . . you may think yoâ something special,but you just a chip off the olâ block. Your mama tell you your old man a war hero. Sureâhe march up Fifth Avenue in that fool parade with the rest oâ us, but that about it. He ainât seen no action in the Pacific. Everâbody know yoâ father discharged for beinâ a coward and a thief.â
âHe saw action in France in the first war,â I said, âand he was discharged for his health.â
âHah! That disability an act of mercy; they couldnât charge him with nothinâ else.â Clarence leaned forward on his elbows and licked his lips. The lamp over the kitchen table threw long, ugly shadows down his face, and I realized he was winding up for some kind of final blow. âHe such a coward, he murdered a man just soâs they wouldnât have no proof oâ his thievery,â Clarence growled in a low, confiding voice.
I got up from the table, trembling, and stormed out of the room. I lay in bed for the rest of the night, hurt and confused. I didnât believe Clarenceâs story; he was a drunk and a bully. Nonetheless, he had struck some kind of chord. There
was
something funny about my fatherâs discharge. A disability discharge made sense on the surface of things: My father was old by active duty standards, and there was no question his respiratory ailment was real. And yet, there had always been something slightly discomfiting, an unanswered question that hovered like a dark cloud. I couldnât shake the image of my father in the living room, his eyes snapping instantly to my face as he rushed to say, âWe donât need to discuss that, Clarence
.
â
Staring up at the ceiling of my bedroom, only a ten-year-old boy, I was suddenly afraid to learn the truth, and this fear remained with me into adulthood, long after my father passed away.
â¢Â   â¢Â   â¢
C larence stayed with us for a full month, well past the point of his welcome, as far as my mother was concerned. Late at night, I could hear her complaining about him, leveling some kind of accusation I couldnever make out, not even with a water glass pressed against my bedroom wall.
As my motherâs resentment mounted, eventually my father had a falling-out with Clarence, and I assumed it had to do with her objections. I could never be certain what the straw was that broke the camelâs back. I caught a few fragmented lines of the final fight between my father and Clarence, but they were cryptic, my father demanding over and over again, âExplain to me what these bars doinâ in yoâ things!â Clarence, for his part, adopted a stance of indignation over the violation of his privacy, until finally he gathered his belongings and I heard the front door
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