Bridge of Sighs

renewed enthusiasm. The Caddy’s rear window, I saw, now sported a diagonal crack. Gabriel must have heard the Beverlys approaching, then, because he darted off between parked cars, showing more speed and agility than I would’ve predicted in his drunken state. Just as he disappeared around one corner of the building, the Beverlys hove into view around the other, and Mr. Beverly stopped and put his hand on his daughter’s forearm. His intention, I suppose, was to keep her from doing what she now did, which was run over to the car for a closer look, right through the broken glass. Her father stood where he was, gazing off in the direction where Gabriel had beaten his hasty retreat.
    What happened next was perhaps the most surprising thing of all. Nan Beverly began to cry. Father and daughter were twenty or thirty yards from where I sat, but I was still able to read the bewildered, frightened look on her face as he took her in his arms and, I suppose, tried to explain why anybody would want to do such a hateful thing. At some point he noticed me watching, and after getting Nan calmed down and helping her into the front passenger seat, he came over. The windowpane was thick, so his voice was muffled, but of course I didn’t need to hear much to know what he was asking. Had I seen who’d done it? I shook my head, no.
    Back at Ikey’s, after the matinee—which Nan, showing no sign of her earlier upset, attended with her boyfriend—I found myself still wishing I hadn’t lied to Mr. Beverly. I told my father what I’d seen Gabriel Mock do, though I didn’t mention lying to Nan’s father, and he responded just as I’d expected, saying it wasn’t right to damage other people’s property. Maybe Gabriel had a reason, he wasn’t saying he didn’t, but that still wasn’t no excuse. Because I continued to be fascinated by how differently my parents saw things, I later discussed the episode with my mother, going into even greater detail in describing how drunk Gabriel had been, shouting
no more, no more, no more, no more
before smashing the whiskey bottle on the rear window of the Beverlys’ Cadillac. When she offered no immediate comment, I confided to her what I’d withheld from my father, that I’d claimed to have seen nothing. “You know,” she said, “sometimes you make me very proud.”
    I thought about that before falling asleep. It was tempting to take pride in my mother’s being proud of me. But with her, nothing ever came to you clean, and it occurred to me that if “sometimes” I made her proud, there must be other times when I didn’t.
             
     
    T HE NEXT DAY, Sunday, I found Gabriel sitting with his back up against the Whitcombe Park fence, his legs splayed out in front of him. A recent cut cleanly bisected one eyebrow, and I didn’t have to ask where that came from. He must’ve heard me ride up the gravel drive, but his eyes remained closed, and I wondered for a moment if he might be dead. Finally, when I leaned my bike against the fence, he opened one eye—the wrong one, since it caused the eyebrow to split open again and ooze tiny spots of blood.
    “Junior,” he said. “How you be doin’ this fine morning?”
    “It’s afternoon,” I said, sitting down next to him.
    “Already?” he said. “Can’t be. It’s mornin’. I can tell by the sun.”
    I knew better than to argue when Gabriel was sure about something, but in this instance it was hard not to. “It’s afternoon,” I told him. “I can tell by my watch.” I showed him, but he wasn’t interested.
    “Must be fast,” he said, both eyes closed again. “You go on home and tell your mama you forgot to wind your watch. Tell her you don’t know what time it is.”
    “If I forgot to wind it,” I said, “it would run slow. Or stop. It wouldn’t run fast. That’s illogical.”
    “Junior, do me a favor? Go away. I don’t have no strength to argue with stubborn white boys, not today, I don’t. Normally I do, just not today.”
    I just sat there, annoyed, until he finally opened that same eye again, causing the cut to show pink and bubble a second time. “You still here?”
    I said I believed I was.
    “I believe you are, too. So tell me ’bout what all you did last night. You go out howlin’ or what?”
    Over the last month or so, Gabriel and I had agreed on the fiction that I enjoyed howling as much as he did. Sundays we’d each describe the howling we’d done the night before and express