Free The Buffalo Soldier by Chris Bohjalian Page A

any reason why he couldn't stay after school with Tim, and he couldn't come up with one. At some point he'd need to phone the animal shelter and make sure it was okay with Laura--or, at the very least, leave a message on the answering machine at the house. Then, when Laura returned, she'd listen to it and figure out where he was.
    I'll have to call Laura, he said, still unsure whether that meant at the Humane Society or their home. As soon as he'd spoken, however, he figured it would be easier for everyone if he just left a message at the house. He'd probably get Laura's voice mail at work, anyway.
    Terry got a deer yet? Tim asked.
    Hadn't as of last night. And he's coming home today.
    My dad hasn't got one yet, either. But my brother did. A button buck. Sixty-eight pounds.
    Cool, Alfred murmured, guessing that sixty-eight pounds must be pretty good if Tim was boasting about his brother's kill. He wondered what a button buck was.
    When they reached the classroom, they saw Schuyler Jackman and Joe Langford by the classroom aquarium, and without taking off his jacket Tim went to join them. Alfred started to follow, but he had the sense that he shouldn't. Once before he'd accompanied Tim to the group when they'd arrived at the classroom together, and it had been awkward. The other boys lived within blocks of each other in the small village, and had known each other practically since the day they'd been born. The only reason Tim didn't walk to school with them every day was because it was slightly quicker for him to cut across the athletic field and the playground from where he lived. Usually when Alfred saw him alone, it meant that he was running a few minutes late.
    Alfred took off his blue-jeans jacket and draped it over a hook, and hung up his backpack beside it. Then he unzipped the top compartment and reached inside for his loose-leaf notebook. He noticed that he had inadvertently allowed the notebook to mash the visor on the cavalry cap the Heberts had given him, and a part of him wished that he had worn it to school today--if only so the bill wouldn't have been crushed. When he was filling his backpack earlier that morning, however, he decided at the last minute not to wear it. Kids might ask him who the buffalo soldiers were, and he'd have to tell them the little he knew--which meant driving home the point, one more time, that he was black and they weren't.
    By the aquarium the three boys started to laugh at something Schuyler had said, and though Alfred didn't believe it had anything to do with him--at least that's what he assumed--the laughter hurt him if only because he wasn't a part of it.
    HE KNEW HE was the only black kid in the fifth grade, and he was almost as positive that he was the only black kid in the school. Certainly he'd never seen any others. In the entire village he'd never seen any other black people, children or grown-ups.
    The school had a single class for each grade, and during an assembly one morning he heard the principal say there were 119 students in the school, including the morning kindergarten class. The assembly was held in the gym because the school didn't have an auditorium, and so the kids sat on the polished wood floor under the basketball hoops.
    One time when he was standing in the lunch line at the cafeteria with Tim, a first-grader who rode his little bus had asked him why his skin was so dark. The inquiry wasn't meant to be hurtful, but it had made him self-conscious: He was embarrassed because the question was asked in front of Tim and slightly angry because he knew nobody would ever think to ask this six-year-old boy why his hair was so blond.
    Burlington, of course, had had a couple of black kids, as well as a black teacher. Burlington had even had Chinese kids and Japanese kids and kids whose parents had come from Vietnam.
    Briefly he wondered how his friend Tien was doing, and what she was up to right that second. He guessed she, too, was in school, but you could never be sure