Free Ernie's Ark by Monica Wood Page B

it, my stomach fisting as I realized how small and nervous he looked. How young.
    “He’s fucked,” said Bing. Linney roared out to the kitchen to tell Elaine that Daddy was saying bad words again. “Shit,” Bing said, heaving himself into a chair. He liked Tim the best of all of us. “Shit. What kinda idiot did your mother raise?”
    What could I say? There he was, live and in person, apologizing for the town racists. In the meantime Bing and Elaine’s other kids were whooping it up on the street with their cousins in a game of touch football. Bing lurched out to the breezeway and hollered at them: “Kids! Get in here!” I could hear a faint whine of protest from somebody, probably Eddie, Roy and Eppy’s oldest, and then another roar from Bing: “I said
now
!” The kids came in and lined up, goggle-eyed. “I don’t want trouble visiting this house. Anybody asks you about Uncle Timmy, you tell them he’s no part of this family. That’s what you say, you understand me?”
    The kids—nine boys, this family’s loaded with boys—looked at their shoes. By this time Elaine’s out there, crying a little, holding Linney by the hand. “You understand me?” Bing repeated. Bing’s a big, lovable man, and though the kids aren’t exactly afraid of him, they answer when he poses a question. The boys mumbled something or other that sounded more or less like yes but not exactly yes. Tim is twenty years old and they kiss the ground he walks on, just like Tim used to with me, like I used to with my father. “Bing,” Elaine said, very softly, “let them go,” and the kids shot from the breezeway like bottle rockets.
    The next morning Timmy wakes up with SUPERSCAB spray-painted across his landlady’s hedge and front stairs. Goes out to start up his truck and finds the tires slashed, the doors jimmied, and a hunk of dog shit on the driver’s seat. He tells my aunt Lucy, who tells Elaine and Bing, who tell Roy and Eppy, who tell Sonny and Jill, who tell me, and except for my aunt we decide officially that we’re not going to do a goddamn thing about it, that it’s his neck he stuck out there when he should’ve known better.
    Tempers were running short, and money. This strange, gray calm had fallen over the town like the eye of a hurricane, and we were hoping the mediators could figure something out before we all got tempted to cross. We all thought it; you know we did. And Tim was out there shoving our worst secret down our throats. How could he not have known that?
    I bought Timmy his first white shirt, when he was seven years old and making his First Communion. “I’m riding my bike to South America, Danny,” he announced, bow-tied and shoe-shined in the parking lot of St. Anne’s. The Host hadn’t melted on his tongue before he was imagining himself flying away on the midnight-blue Schwinn I’d given him for the occasion. Even back then he was full of plans.
    Don’t get me wrong. I
wanted
him to get out. Me, I could’ve done it, too, I could have gotten out, and I didn’t, and that’s a whole other story. Timmy was getting out and I was glad. We were all glad. He was our boy.
    I froze my backside at sixty-one football games over six seasons. I kept him near me through our mother’s wake and funeral. I taught him to drive. Then one day I woke up and he’d turned into a kid who could cross a picket line and talk aboutcapital, and it’s like he was saying a chimpanzee could make paper, it’s not worth what they’re paying you, you’re lucky to be working at all. This is what you get for loving a child.
    Then, in the fall, eight months in, everything changed. A scab died of heart failure while running the gauntlet in his red GMC pickup. The governor put the National Guard on alert. Three other AP mills—one in Alabama, two in Wisconsin—refused their contracts, the same one we’d rejected, and struck. A week after that, somebody—Tree Liston, is my personal guess—shot up a scab’s house on the