air-conditioned offices were located. Everyone Daron knew spoke of the saw like Canaan. None aspired to the rib, almost as if it was cursed, almost as if it didn’t exist for them, almost as if they went outside and walked around it to get from one end of the compound to the other. Jo-Jo elbowed Daron. The Rhiner girls were peeling themselves off the ground with arched backs, yawns, outstretched arms, and then took to the water with a battle caw, cutting air fifty yards out to Pickett Rock, giggling off the warm sting as they settled on the boulder’s edge, juniors rocking, feet exciting the water, legs exciting the boys, especially where the stringy denim rode high thighs like fine blond hairs.
My father’s at it again.
Sorry, muttered Daron after a moment during which, even after a year at Berkeley—including a special student-led DCal class on interpersonal communication—he could think of nothing else to say.
Daron brushed the rocks from his bottom as he scooted back out of the sun and onto a smoother shelf of granite. The heat wasn’t hearing it, though, and like Georgia humidity was wont to do, the mugginess shadowed him. No one sunned at Berkeley’s Aquatic Park, and the reservoir was polluted, but what it lacked in bikinis, it made up for with decriminalized alien technology and near-perfect Mediterranean weather. Unlike the gorge. Never mind the chain links of light reflecting onto Pickett Rock or gliding metallic along the sandy bed where the lake was shallow, or the buff scent of pine resin, or the empties whistling green and gold as the workers on the far side buckled shut their lunch buckets, he knew what Jo-Jo meant by his father being at it again.
Jo-Jo’s father could be up to any Old Scratch tack, from moonraking, to knocking noggins around the yard, to putting the shine on old Martha Redding down at the Pik-n-Pak, to trying to creep a peek at June Tucker’s butterfly. It was Jo-Jo’s father, in fact, who had told both boys about his infamous and eponymous courtship kung fu move: Just let me stick the tip in, baby. Daron’s own father had told him nothing about sex except to use protection because, Loose lips really do sink ships, and nothing will sink your ship faster than a kid or a disease. Daron’s grandfather, Old Hitch—whom Nana called, in sooth, My right minder—offered the only sober advice: Remember, ripe fruit is always marked down. Gotta see something in ’em they can’t see for ’emselves. Don’t lie, but you gotta be a real generous mirror. (Back in ninth grade, Slater Jones from 4-H said only: I don’t have sex, I make babies. Remarkable prescience for a fourteen-year-old, hence this parenthetical.)
The water clapped below as the girls abandoned their perch. Pickett Rock was chalky where dry and black where wet, so that the wet parts, once the last Rhiner slapped water, were like the shadows of dancing figures, and Daron was reminded of a tenth-grade lesson on Nagasaki, after which the teacher had been transferred out faster than a mad cow. She had read to the class a first-person account by a survivor who was lucky enough to be not only swimming, but also submerged when the blast passed over him. After seeing the flash reflected in the pool, he surfaced to discover that where his friends had once stood only their twisted silhouettes remained, draped on the ground like shadows, forgotten clothes, except white not black. With no frame of reference for such a phenomenon, he could only imagine a bizarre prank, so bizarre that he didn’t immediately notice the damage to the pool house or that the water he trod now felt near boiling. The survivor said he could take no credit for it, that it was preordained that he would live and his friends would die, and he would never understand why. All he knew was who. Who is who? asked the teacher, closing the book with a resolute thump and letting her readers jangle from their rattling beaded-glass tether. It’s us. Japan was ready to surrender as early as the defeat at Midway.
Jo-Jo dragged a heavy hand across his eyes. Now what about those juniors?
Yeah, Daron repeated, nodding, certain that it couldn’t matter because Berzerkeley and Braggsville were two worlds always on opposite sides of the sun.
Chapter Five
His sophomore fall was without incident, but halfway through his sophomore spring, everything changed. As Quint would say, his pancake got flipped. The class was American History X, Y, and Z: Alternative Perspectives. The course reader, peopled with notables such as Freire and Marx, was book-ended by Chomsky and Zinn. The 4 Little Indians had taken the class together to satisfy a core requirement and because they heard it was fun, or at least that’s what they told each other. The professor wore a monocle and resembled Mark Twain, and, better yet, video projects were accepted as capstones.
The first day of class the professor shepherded the students through the maze of Dwinelle Hall and down the front stairs, broad as a stage, across the plaza where Mondays through Wednesdays a man lay on his back all day with his bicycle across his chest like a security blanket, his arms and legs clawing the air in slow motion like an upturned turtle; and into the grand lobby of Wheeler Hall, where an elderly blond man wearing a kung fu gi and curly-toed shoes like a court jester practiced tai chi, his ragged braid gently sweeping his yellow belt: and ending in the Grinnell Grove, where upon a fallen blue gum eucalyptus a bearded man lunched each day wearing Indian dress and twelve multicolored berets stacked on top of his head like a Dr. Seuss character. The point? By the end of the semester, the professor hoped they would be able to tell him.
On Fridays, the professor hosted Salon de Chat, an informal class with the tagline: People who don’t know their history are doomed to eat it! The desks were arranged as four-tops covered with butcher paper and a sandwich board was installed in the hallway. Their bistro, like all classrooms on the south side of Dwinelle Hall, overlooked a thin creek spanned by a wooden footbridge and straddled by a tree shed that blocked the worst of sound and sun. The first few weeks of class, Daron arrived early to ensure a seat near the window from which he could observe the world four stories below—the students eating along Strawberry Creek, rushing to and from the Bear’s Lair café, hustling through the breezeway leading to the bookstore—and imagine himself already a Berkeley graduate; a king of industry on high appointment in his city club; a Carnegie, but a true philanthropist. In his employ even the cafeteria worker who napped where the roots had riven the retaining wall and the earth opened into alcove would be warmed by his generosity. (He would never forget that workingmen, like his father, carried this litter, as the prof called it.) This fantasy lasted only so long as he was alone and soon gave way to fancying that the students tromping in behind were assembling to hear him speak. That whimsy he could retain only until hearing chalk scrape, sometimes a screech as anguished as a balloon at the edge of constraint.
He then was back in 512-A, a narrow classroom with chalkboards on the long walls and, on the ceiling, cocked fluorescent fixtures with those damned baffling fins, Candice never seated beside him. Those fantasies lasted only the first few weeks because by then it was apparent that the professor thought it impossible for a rich man to be a good man. Salon de Chat, though, was always fun. After being assigned to a table of three or four diners, each student received a menu of conversations.
SALON DE CHAT
Starter
Civil Disobedience
Entrée
Tradition and Social Justice
Dessert
Uncivil Disobedience and Protest
As usual, Daron and Charlie sat together, and Louis sat elsewhere with Candice. How Louis always managed to partner with Candice, Daron had not yet figured out. The prof lurched from table to table, ears out, eyes to the floor, finger to the ceiling, nodding, rarely talking, more a mascot than a teacher. Daron was still unaccustomed to this practice, most common among humanities professors, of mm-hmming more than speaking, which was the exact opposite of high school.
Laughter shot across the room. From Louis’s table. His three partners were all doubled over, and Louis wore his famous face of fatuity, eyes
