“Having fun mocking their stereotypes,” he explained.
I couldn’t believe I was hearing him correctly. Considering how
completely I must be misperceiving his words, I was going to need a
high-pressure hose and a plumber’s drain snake to clean out my ears.
“Mocking their stereotypes?”
“Yes, that’s right.” He bobbed his head in confirmation. “Of course
they wouldn’t put it in those terms, but that’s what they’re doing.
Dogs and cats are supposed to be mindlessly hostile. These guys are
having fun mocking that expectation.”
Now Roosevelt was grinning at me as stupidly as the dog and the cat
were grinning at me. His lips were so dark red that they were
virtually black, and his teeth were as big and white as sugar cubes.
“Sir,” I told him, “I take back what I said earlier. After careful
reconsideration, I’ve decided You’re totally awesomely crazy,
whacked-out to the max.” like the darkling beams of a black moon,
lunacy rose in his face. He said, “You wouldn’t have any damn trouble
believing me if I were white,” and as he snarled the final word, he
slammed one massive fist into the table so hard that our coffee cups
rattled in their saucers and nearly tipped over.
If I could have reeled backward while in a chair, I would have done so,
because his accusation stunned me. I had never heard either of my
parents use an ethnic slur or make a racist statement;
I’d been raised without prejudice. Indeed, if there was an ultimate
outcast in this world, it was me. I was a minority all to myself, a
minority of one: the Nightcrawler, as certain bullies had called me
when I was a little kid, before I’d ever met Bobby and had someone who
would stand beside me. Though not an albino, though my skin was
pigmented, I was stranger, in many people’s eyes, than Bo Bo the
Dog-Faced Boy. To some I was merely unclean, tainted, as if my genetic
vulnerability to ultraviolet light could be passed to others with a
sneeze, but some people feared and despised me more than they would
fear or despise a three-eyed Toad Man in any carnival freak show from
sea to shining sea, if only because I lived next door.
Half rising out of his chair, leaning across the table, shaking a fist
as big as a cantaloupe, Roosevelt Frost spoke with a hatred that
astonished and sickened me: “Racist! You mealy racist bastard!”
I could barely find my voice. “W-when did race ever matter to me? How
could it ever matter to me?”
He looked as if he would reach across the table, tear me out of my
chair, and strangle me until my tongue unraveled to my shoes.
He bared his teeth and growled at me, growled like a dog, very much
like a dog, suspiciously like a dog.
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked again, but this time I found
myself asking the dog and cat.
Roosevelt growled at me again, and when I only gaped stupidly at him,
he said, “Come on, son, if You can’t call me a name, at least give me a
little growl. Give me a little growl. Come on, son, You can do it.”
Orson and Mungojerrie watched me expectantly.
Roosevelt growled once more, giving his snarl an interrogatory
inflection at the end, and finally I growled back at him. He growled
louder than before, and I growled louder, too.
Smiling broadly, he said, “Hostility. Dog and cat. Black and white.
just having a little fun mocking stereotypes.”
As Roosevelt settled into his chair again, my bewilderment began to
give way to a tremulous sense of the miraculous. I was aware I L of a
looming revelation that would rock my life forever, expose dimensions
of the world that I could not now imagine; but although I strained to
grasp it, this understanding remained elusive, tantalizingly just
beyond the limits of my reach.
I looked at Orson. Those inky, liquid eyes.
I looked at Mungojerrie.
The cat bared his teeth at me.
Orson bared his, too.
A faint cold fear thrilled through my veins, as the Bard of Avon would
put it, not because I thought the dog and cat might bite me but because