Oscar Thompson was nicknamed “Big” in grammar school and it stuck. He was now six feet three inches tall and a few cheeseburgers over three hundred pounds. Oscar had huge catcher’s-mitt hands and a head like a prize county-fair gourd. He smothered the seat of his forklift as he shuttled freight five evenings a week at Central Transfer. Bored tractor-trailer drivers drank colas, ate vending machine junk food and watched while Oscar unloaded and reloaded their rigs. Occasionally, Oscar would climb down off the forklift and muscle an awkward item into place without breaking a sweat. Oscar was big on the outside but his sobriquet and initials, Big OT, Bigot, revealed how small and full of fear he was on the inside.
Moving freight with the drivers, connoisseurs of movement, admiring his dexterity and strength was the best time of Oscar’s day. The half-hour drive to Central Transfer located in an industrial park surrounded by urban blight was the worst. Encased in a four-wheel drive SUV with power everything, Oscar approached each intersection with crawling apprehension. There was one crossroads in particular that he feared. A street corner where Brothers, black descendants of the proud Zulu, Swahili, and Samburu tribes congregated; where Nate Washington, and idle friends lounged, bagged-bottle easy, killing the day.
Nate, blacker than sable and appearing decades older than his thirty-five years with his gaunt frame and studied cynicism, was tired. Out of work, out of wedlock, and out of prospects, he was tired of television, eight ball, booze, crack, and life. But, most of all, he was tired of Henry his younger brother. Henry was a caricature, a ludicrous exaggeration of a sitcom homeboy. He was as skinny as a broom handle, wore an oversized Yankee’s cap with brim turned to the side, baggy shirt that hung below his butt, and too-long trousers that bunched at the top of his gaudy hundred dollar trainers as he moved with sporadic jerks. Still, Henry was around not like brother Luke, dreamy-eyed Luke, who had found religion again shacked up praying with some big Momma.
Nate looked around at his chums from the ‘hood. They looked like a bunch of losers, but Nate knew otherwise. Henry and Fat Eddy worked the night shift maintenance at the super market, Lenny and Cyril were on leave from the Navy, and Jimbo drove bus for the Metro. During off-hours they hung out on the corner to escape the nagging women in their lives – mothers, wives, girl friends. Daytime was for lazing, sipping Colt 45 on the corner, exchanging lies and harassing drive-by Whiteys to hear their power door locks CLICK! They laughed, “We be the kings of Click Corner.”
It was the in-your-face harassment that Oscar feared, those poorly timed crossings of the intersection when he misjudged the signal and had to stop and Henry or Fat Eddy sprayed his windshield with beer then offered to remove it for a dollar. The blade white incisors in the grinning dark faces terrified Oscar. He felt trapped, threatened, diminished by the intimidating black cannibals surrounding him. Oscar slid near the edge of panic as stories from his childhood flooded back to him along with scenes presented by Hollywood of men tied to trees and torn apart, of screaming white captives suspended over pots of boiling oil or pits teeming with slimy poisonous snakes. The women on the streets like those in his dreams, all lips, hips and exotic hairdos, brought it back to him in horrific detail.
Henry shook his head and grinned at the aversion and fear he saw in most drivers’ eyes. Like the big man in the SUV, a bulky side-of-beef compared to Henry, plucked-chicken scrawny. Henry would bounce back to Nate and say, a touch of wonder in his voice, “They be afraid of me.”
Nate always spat, “Shee it.”
It was one of those sultry days with a milky sky and air honey- thick, a day sliding off a cloud mattress deciding what to be. Oscar knew what it was going to be. It was going to be miserable, another murky Monday, and he was running late. It was his habit to arrive early on Monday, the busiest day of the week. A day crowded with truck drivers pissed-off after driving all weekend to make the Monday delivery deadline, a dispatcher with a football game hangover, and paperwork: white, pink, and yellow copies, enough for a Wall Street parade. Oscar pressed down on the accelerator pedal. He saw the traffic signal, two blocks distant, turn green. It would be a stale green ready to turn when he reached it. Like commercial drivers, Oscar had been trained to ease off the gas and ‘cover’ the brake in this situation, but he was in a hurry. He saw the brothers gathered on the corner, Fucked if he’d stop! He pushed his speed up a notch.
Wanda worked as a Dental Assistant to earn her little red car and she loved everything about it. Except the way it made the brothers on the corner act as she drove by, shouting, “Hey, Sister,” ogling, swaying their heads with tongues lolling, and grabbing themselves at the crotch. Disgusting. She saw the signal on the brothers’ corner turn amber. Should she stop? “No way,” she said, and stepped on the gas.
Oscar caught the first hint of red metal when he was only fifty feet from the corner and accelerating. Instinctively he jerked his steering wheel to avoid the little red car and plowed, wheels cramped left, into a parked Buick. The deep tread of the wide SUV tires grabbed a fender, as if grateful for something to eat, and Oscar flipped over and began to roll.
Slack jawed, Nate watched the flight of the SUV. It wasn’t a slow motion Hollywood crash. It was a wham-- bam goddamn twister, and when the upside - down SUV slammed into the marble-faced bank and exploded, Nate dropped his bottle. The roiling blast of air, hot enough to melt the shadows on the sidewalk, knocked Henry’s cap off. People ducked and protected their faces. Then, tight-lipped, unable to take their eyes off the spectacular ball of flame, they backed away and sought shelter behind telephone poles, street signs, mailboxes, and each other. The tremendous heat had a vaporizing effect and the fire subsided quickly.
Henry, Fat Eddy and others began to work their way closer to the burned vehicle, as sirens sounded in the streets. Henry crouched and edged up to the SUV. The heat was forbidding. The stench of smoldering rubber and scorched vinyl hinted of poison in the air. Suddenly, Henry retched and turned back. Wide-eyed, he ran to Nate.
“Henry, Henry, what is it?” Nate grabbed his brother to steady him. “What is it?”
Henry gagged and sputtered, “NNate, Whitey’s face be black as mine.”
Nate stared across the street at the huge cinder in the SUV. He placed his hand on Henry’s shoulder and said, “Henry, we all the same color in the end.”