“This’ll teach you niggers!”

“Wait, wait.”

One grabbed a fistful of his shirt, the other took hold of his arm. Sweed felt himself being dragged and scuffled his feet along the road. He tried to see through the watery blur of his tears. He clawed out at them blindly. Dirt and gravel cut into his elbow, sliced against his waist. He knew they had him at the embankment’s edge. The white men grunted, fighting to get him down the slope.

He mouthed the words help me.

He thought he heard car tires. Then he knew it was true when the men stopped abruptly.

“Somebody’s comin’.”

“Let’s get the hell outta here.”

“What about him?”

The boot came sharp against his groin.

“Next time you won’t be so lucky, boy. We gonna find ya’ again.”

He knotted himself tight, holding onto his throbbing privates and crying; the ache went out in vibrations from between his legs and traveled throughout his limbs. Too weak, he couldn’t fight it as they rolled him down into the weeds out of sight. The rush of their footsteps moved away from him, as did the piercing cry of their tires.

He must have blacked out from the pain, because the next thing he remembered was the feel of a smooth hand rubbing his forehead.

A woman’s soft voice told him, “You’re going to be okay.”

His eyes fluttered open. It was a gentle face framed in a nun’s habit. Was he dead? No, dead men don’t feel pain. It pulsed everywhere.

“Can you walk?” she whispered.

He swallowed, but couldn’t muster the strength to answer. He nodded his head slowly. The nun struggled to pull him up, bracing him by the waist, his arm draped over her shoulder. They crept, limped, to her truck idling not far from where his borrowed car had broken down.

“I’m taking you to the hospital,” she said firmly, but quietly.

He strained out the word, “No.”

“You’re hurt. You need a doctor,” she told him.

He stopped shuffling along. Erecting himself a little, he looked at her. “No. Hospitals. They keep records, don’t they?”

She pulled back just enough to look him squarely in the eye. Without speaking it, she connected him with all she had heard in the news—even the gossip that had made its way to the shelter—there had been two black men mentioned.

“You,” she breathed.

He read the lilt of surprise, the glint of fear in her dove grey eyes. “I need to get home,” he said, almost pleading. And then tinged with defiance: “Don’t judge what you don’t know. I ain’t done nothing wrong.” His knee, nearly crippled with pain, gave out. She caught him before he hit the ground. “Where do you live?” she said.

She called a tow from a gas station to take his car away. And then she took Sweed away. That night when he left Loveless, crumpled in the front seat of the nun’s pick-up, he prayed for the first time—and the last.

The ride back home gave him time to think. Did Ricky make it out okay? What would happen tomorrow? He learned the first answer easily. A phone call to the Chiles’ house the next day, and he was told Ricky had caught the train to visit his girl in Michigan. He had no plans of returning home any time soon. And while Sweed nursed himself well again, Ricky spent the remaining weeks of the summer hold up at his uncle’s grapefruit farm in Florida, until he started school at Alabama State in the fall. To fill the vacuum of Ricky’s absence, Sweed took to the streets with his teeth bared and eyes blazed to learn new things, too.

 

Dr. Alexis Pride teaches at Columbia College Chicago. Short story writer and playwright, her debut novel Where the River Ends was praised by Author Sandra Cisneros . She is currently at work on her novel, Gamekeepers.  Her short fiction has been previously published in Tri-Quarterly Magazine, several editions of F Magazine, and other journals.