Allies

In the morning there’s a body in the pocket-size park off 5^th Street. The body is facedown, one arm bent back and one thrown out to the side, legs crossed over one another like a fall is what killed the body, but it wasn’t a fall. There’s blood to tell us otherwise, and the back of the body’s head to tell us otherwise, hit with something hard by someone strong. The body is attended by the statue in the park of a chimpanzee, Washoe, the first to communicate in sign language, and here above the body the statue signs also with its bronze hands: friend.

We are a small town with a college. We loved the college, which kept mostly to the north side and a few of the bars. We loved the sense of connection to the larger world that the college brought. We didn’t attend the plays on campus, and we didn’t visit the art exhibits, but we liked knowing they were there. The body belonged to that college—it must have, as the college drew students from all over our state to this place. This safe place.

This is a place where a woman might spin her baby around in a dark alley, where the restaurants all close at nine. This is a place with a farmer’s market and Patagonia jackets, a place nestled by hills and known for its wind, the way it might blow your sign away, the extent of our frustrations ending there, or in a neighbor’s yellowed lawn, or in the sad, flatulent tuba practice of the boy on his porch, or in winter lasting a few weeks too long. We were a progressive kind of rural, homey. We did not ask for a body. We were not the place to have one. This is not who we are. Here we are.

Of course the body is a black body. You knew that already.

The woman who first saw the body, Grace Kapnick, was out walking her dog Keeks. The sun had just crested the hills, and this was the first week of icy sidewalks. Keeks was a Yorkie. Grace was up before the city put down any salt. She had the shoes for it, but she had to go slow while Keeks pranced in his bewilderment, sniffing everything’s hard new scent. When she reached the park, which really was just a few hundred square feet of nicer brickwork and potted shrubs nestled between a bank and an alley and then the old movie theater that had become a church, she wasn’t looking. It was Keeks who noticed. A dog is a dog, after all.

Grace’s breath caught when she finally realized what Keeks was stretching leash over. The blood had frozen to the decorative brick. The ice crystals forming on its surface had begun to pink it. Washoe was wearing a cheapy felt Santa hat. We were always finding ways to dress him. He was our friend.

Teddy was the first officer on the scene. He sucked on his teeth, radioed for the university police to come down. The two departments had a cordial relationship. They spent most of their time chasing meth and property crime. Occasionally a rape, but they didn’t much share beers over that. Teddy liked his job. It made him feel like a good guy. Really.

Teddy took one look at the body, though, and knew he was in a new kind of trouble. He stood there in the shadow of the theater church, in a yellowing dawn, while other police blocked off the alleyway and the intersection on either side of 5^th St. Teddy heard the sound of ripping packing tape—the officer up the street was stripping the farmer’s market sign that was still taped to the barricade. Teddy wanted a cigarette. His daughter had made him quit years ago.

When the campus police arrived, they didn’t want the body. Neither did Teddy or Teddy’s boss. It was as though the refusal would make the body go away, but the body just lay there without claimant, its face frozen stuck to the ground by its own blood. Photos were taken, no wallet found. No hat or jacket, either. From the twist of the body’s arms, Teddy assumed that the jacket was taken. Perhaps the hat was knocked off when the blow was struck, but Teddy and the campus police couldn’t find it.

Meanwhile the rest of us were all rising and getting ready for the day. Soon we would ask what the body meant, and the lack of claiming, what it meant, too, and if the police departments didn’t want the body because it was a body or if they didn’t want it because it was a black body. No one had woken yet who could truly consider the body a boy, a glorious and important yearning gone out, or a Derrick, all of which it was.

The news spread up and down blocks as we woke. South to the coffee shop, north to campus. The street was blocked off entirely, as was the alleyway. The pastor of the church that used to be a movie theater was barred from entering, since his office overlooked the crime scene, and he was the one who first brought the news to us. There’s a body in Friendship Park. We sat in our disbelief, holding unsipped lattes. We had shopped so local. We had flown our rainbow flags. We had stickered our bumpers and loved our neighbors as long as they kept scrap metal out of their front yard. Plainly: we were bumblefucked by how we got to here.

In the children’s room of the library, Sarah told her reading group that something bad had happened, but that they were safe, and the police would protect them, and to look for the good in hard moments. A young girl fiddled with the hem of her dancer’s outfit, thinking of later, when she would get to be a mouse in the children’s production of The Nutcracker.

The woman who owned the record store sat outside it smoking a clove cigarette. People walking by regarded her the way they might a panhandler.

A man in no shirt yelled I’m gonna rap your ass raw from his back porch while his son climbed too far up the branches of an old and rotting elm.

Two high school kids went by on longboards, blowing sweet-smelling vapor as they went, hooliganing but not really hooligans.

All over town, people were alive.

In his home office, the president of the university got a phone call about the body and then began drafting an email to the students. When he wrote these emails his body would be wracked—it took physical effort, a tensing of the shoulders and seizing of the breath, to write something that he knew would be, at best, cold comfort. In these moments he felt old, which he was. Keys clacked, taking him further away from the students he sometimes wanted to know how to love.

The body sat on the ground through midmorning while more photographs were taken. A smattering of people watched from each barricade, unable to see around the corner of the building into the park itself. Everyone around town said that it was a shame. The general consensus was that the body had happened to us, as bodies had happened to so many communities in the nation. We called it recent troubles. We called it a symptom of the national mood. It being the body, the body being the black body, the black body being a boy. We did not dare drill down to the bare and ugly truth like that, though. We did not think of how one of us had held a baseball bat, or held a brick in their hand, or held something else, we didn’t know what, we didn’t want to know what, and all of this was such a shame.

On campus, an effort was made, both officially and unofficially, to see who was missing. Teachers checked their rosters. Students texted their absent roommates. The Office of Student Success jackknifed from one plan to another without succeeding at much of anything. Were the students all accounted for? There was no telling. Many of the kids spent their weekends elsewhere.

The body went to the county coroner’s office nameless. The park’s dirt was swept up into evidence bags. The Santa hat, too. The shrubbery was poked and prodded thoroughly. By early evening, a man from the city came with a pressure washer, gave Teddy a cigarette. The sun was plunging beyond the hills earlier every day, and Teddy watched and smoked while the man sprayed the brick in the oncoming dark. Neither of them noticed the way Washoe was misted with blood, his bronze skin mottled already by time and caught in evening light.

That night, Keeks ran without warning into the kitchen and came back with a bloody mouse struggling in his jaws. He shook it, and he shook it. It wouldn’t die. Grace had to bring a heavy book down on it.

We all got very drunk. Big Tom came into the bar wearing his coveralls and cracking jokes about neglecting his wife. He could never read the mood. When we told him what had happened he pulled his hat off, showing his balding head with wisps of hair in every direction, everything about him seeming suddenly saggier than it had been. It was a bad night.

At around one in the morning Teddy stepped out the back door of a bar and vomited into the alley. His wife knew enough not to text him her worry. The town was too small and boring for cheating, and he always walked to the bar when he felt a drunk night coming on. Still, looking at his phone he wished she’d sent him a little something, or that she’d rubbed his back a little before sitting down to dinner. Just something.

He wiped his mouth and lit the cigarette he’d borrowed. His jacket was inside, hung on a hook under the bar. He left it and started walking up the alley, smoking and shivering as he went. He cut over one alleyway so he would pass the park. He couldn’t think of a reason why not, and he wanted to see it again, maybe to assure himself that it was still there at all. Some drunk thinking like that.

This is how he came to find Washoe draped in an olive track jacket, a beanie on his head. He flicked his cigarette into the street and jogged over, furious and dumb-drunk. The beanie was black, and he pulled it off the chimp’s head and held it up to the streetlight. It was stained, a barely visible brown dully shining in the knit.

Teddy stared at the blood. His lips and the top of his cheeks tingled from drink. He rubbed it, the blood. It was dried into the fabric, and it felt a little stiff when he ran his thumb across it. He didn’t want to think about any of this. He didn’t want to think about what it meant to dress Washoe with the dead body’s clothes, or to deal with the way his mind got all knotted up when he tried to reckon with an evil like this living in a place so gorgeous and mundane. That evil isn’t mystic. That it’s small, and petty, and isn’t some force in the world that propels people to do ill but the result of that ill freely being done.

More than anything he wanted to be in bed with his wife, the way they used to get all tangled up and foolish with each other. God, just the smell of her shoulder at night. It carried him through. When we saw Teddy most mornings and asked him how he was doing he’d say Man, the world’s pretty good, right? And he’d slap our backs as he walked by.

He didn’t ever speak on that night, at least not to any of us. He did what he did, maybe because he thought it would save us, or maybe because he couldn’t believe it—that this was his town—and he felt he was being cheated by the mockery of it all.

Had we known his reason—if he would have just tried to explain—we might have forgiven him: he took the jacket and slid his arms into it. He slipped the beanie in a pocket. He walked on home and stuffed both beanie and jacket in the trash outside his back door. He walked into the house and on to the dark of the bedroom.

Later, when he lost his job, it became another part of what the body had done to our town, losing such a steadygoing part of the community. We couldn’t imagine a time when he would stay in his house with the blinds drawn, and then, without ceremony, move over the mountains. But all of that was still on the way.

The next morning we wanted to breathe easier. The body was still in the county but not in our town. Still, Grace found herself taking Keeks up a block instead of going by her usual route, which meant she would walk by the Planned Parenthood and the Ford dealership to avoid seeing Washoe. The fence of the auto lot had been plastered with enlarged photos of angelic, softlit babies, their peach skin seeming to hold all the sunlight, imploring by their very presence opposite the clinic. Grace loved seeing those babies. Her daughter was grown, her little Squish all alive and limby now and out there in the world, wearing a pencil skirt on the west side of the state.

The pastor of the movie theater church made a show of being troubled. On campus, the students clustered their heads together in the student union. Big Tom woke up alone and feeling wounded while sunlight slanted into the room. Teddy called in sick to work. We were all unsure of ourselves in one way or another. A news van from the city stuck around.

Days went by. The body’s people were found. The parents lived in the suburbs of the city over the mountain, in a place where childhoods were good and uncomplicated. They didn’t come, but an aunt did. She arrived red eyed and looking tired. When someone asked her how she was, she said How do you think I am and we all clenched in embarrassment. We told her we were preparing a vigil, which was true. City leaders had been planning it all week. She seemed less than impressed. We kept and kept and kept forgetting her name.

The vigil was held at the fairgrounds. The mayor spoke, flanked by campus and town officials. So much of the town came out to see, to hold candles that were left from last year’s Easter service. The mayor rebuked. The president of the university pounded the podium and said that this was not us, and he turned his words toward the goodness inside each of us, and we believed him. We held signs and cheered. We put our children on our shoulders while our dogs scrapped with each other and tangled leashes. We exhaled and watched our breath disappear into the dusk as the air turned crisp. We lived in the shadow of great mountains, and the snow was headed here to snug us away indoors. The mountain pass would close, and we would bear it gladly, our isolation from the world. The hot cocoa of it all. Though this was a hard time, we felt in that moment that we would find it again, and soon. We looked on one another, glad that this was us. We started to feel something like assuaged.

The aunt came forward.

When she spoke, it was with a small voice, but one filled with shattering, tremulous anger. She called us cowards and fools. She accused each of us of being complicit. She said that this is what white folks do, and that we’d been doing it for long enough that there was nothing else left to define us. She said other things we don’t care to think about. She told of the time she’d sat the boy down and told him to look out, that something was coming for him and he should be ready, that his parents were fools for letting him ever come to a place like this. She said she’d made sure he was ready, but we came anyway. We snatched him right away. We bodied him.

Later, we would find ways to forgive her, to say that this was not what she meant, that she was blind in her grief and saw us as enemies instead of as who we really were. Later there would be time for salve. But there, in that moment, we were laid bare by her rage and we hated her more than we’d ever hated anything, and that’s what was true in each of us.

We don’t know where the first rock came from. We don’t know, except that it came from the crowd, that it came with purpose, and that it struck her square in the chest, causing her to step back. Another sailed beyond her, plonging off the flagpole behind. A third bounced from the posterboard sign that a college student had made that proclaimed love will win. More rocks followed, more than could be accounted for, more than we thought might be found in the grassy muck of the fairgrounds. Certainly more than could come from our hands. Certainly there was some outside force—history, maybe, or the devil loosed in America. Some of them struck true, and some didn’t, and the aunt in her cringing seemed to only become more deserving of welts, of the pain there was to give, of something striking the soft frail parts of her and doing harm. The rocks, they came, and though we would later speak on it like they sprung entire from some other force than what we had in us, there was the weight of them in our hands and the flinging and the gentle spin given by fingertips and the roughness and the chalky residue of rock dirt and the boy of six who threw one straight up in a parabolic arc, glee on his face, that glee we pretend is alien but is wholly our own.

The aunt was hurried to a car, her head down, leaving us there in our not yet shame. And that was that.

The body stayed dead. The question of who made it a body stayed unanswered. I want to tell you that we learned his name, or that we learned his father built airplane engines in the city, or we learned that his mother would come across an old t-shirt in the basement still with the funk of boysweat lingering on it and know fully as she folded it back and tucked it neatly into its box that this would be her life, this always reaching for what’s not there, and that no amount of our being good would make that not what was true for her now. I want to tell you I didn’t kill that boy and leave him there erased just so I could tell the story in a way that made me feel better, that made me feel like I’d done something real about it for once. I want to tell you that not all of this is about me. I want to tell you that I’m an ally, and I want that to mean something, and I want you to believe me.