Chapter Twenty-Six
 

Travis was scared. He wasn’t supposed to be because Douglas told him not to. “You done nothing,” Douglas had said, and it was the first time Travis didn’t trust his cousin. The only reason it wasn’t Douglas sitting in juvie in an orange jumpsuit was because Douglas had decided it wouldn’t be. When he had the opportunity to confess and clear Travis’s name, he didn’t. “You know what it would do to Mama,” Douglas had said about a woman he barely acknowledged.

Travis didn’t want to think about any of it, but he wasn’t given much of a choice. When he wasn’t worried about getting stabbed with a pencil in math class, he was sitting on his bunk, staring at the dirty ceiling above his head. How it managed to get so dirty when it was too high for anyone to touch was perplexing. 

He’d count the damaged tiles while his mind worked out the details. The truth of the matter was that Travis was in the car when Douglas and his boys jumped that old white guy in the alley. The other truth of it was that Travis hadn’t laid a finger on the man except when Douglas had shoved him into the back of the LeSabre. The man’s face seemed at peace knowing this was the end of the line, and Travis had reached out instinctually to take his hand during the moments he had left. The man’s eyes watered, confused at first that one of this vicious crew was capable of an act of kindness, but he must have seen something human in Travis, too, because he didn’t let go.

Douglas and the boys used the hammers they had brought, beating the old man senseless in a random alley until he was dead. Douglas had taken the picture with the old school camera Travis’s grandfather, Franklin, had bought him, and then they all piled back in to drive home. But Douglas had a different idea—said that he and the boys were going to make a quick pit stop and that he needed Travis to drive the car home. Travis didn’t think about it because Douglas was always making “pit stops” to smoke crack or beat his chest in front of the other Bloods. Travis never went into the smattering of apartments where Douglas performed for his fans, always opting to stay out in the car. It was okay for now, Douglas had said. “You’re still young, Baby T. I get it. But you’ll have to make a choice soon enough.”

Ironically, Travis was thinking about that choice he hadn’t yet made—to join the gang or cut ties with his father’s family—when he was driving the LeSabre from the alley back to Douglas’s parents’ house. He shouldn’t have been driving, being just shy of fifteen and not even having his permit yet let alone his license, but he was willing to go home if only to sit in the hot shower until his skin peeled off. He could still feel the old man’s touch.

He hadn’t known what Douglas had planned when he asked Travis to come along for a ride that morning, but Travis understood what the whole gruesome thing had been about. Are you a real man? He could practically hear Douglas asking it in his ear.

Travis hadn’t had time to answer the ghost of his cousin because blue lights flashed behind him. His whole body felt like it was going to implode. He knew this was a situation where he was too black and not white enough. There were always circumstances like that, and then there were others where he was too white, like when Douglas’s homeboys said he looked like someone had dipped him in bleach. Travis was always on a fine wire strung too high in the sky. Take the wrong step and down he’d go.

A busted taillight. That was why the cop had stopped him. But there was a suspicious smirk growing on his face as Travis’s own heart beat viciously in his ears. 

“Wanna pop the trunk?” the cop asked, the “I gotcha!” dancing in his eyes. He looked young, the type of guy whose whole world existed in what his hands could do regardless of what his heart had to say about it.

The trunk popped and there were the hammers. Douglas was smart enough to have taken the camera with him, but that was of virtually no relief.

The arrest was violent as was to be expected. Travis found himself praying for a time it wouldn’t have to be, that maybe one day, someone would see him as innocent until proven guilty regardless of how bleached white or coffee soaked his skin looked.

He read through his prayers against the back of his eyelids, stretched out on his back on his bunk. He recited what he knew God thought about him, the verses like salve on his anxious heart. But then he wondered what his mother was thinking, and the anxiety ate yet another hole.