“Yoke him, man,” they’d say, exhorting. He was the object, the occasion, it was irrelevant what he overheard. “Yoke the white boy. Do it, nigger.”

He might be yoked low, bent over, hugged to someone’s hip then spun on release like a human top, legs buckling, crossing at the ankles. Or from behind, never sure by whom once the headlock popped loose and three or four guys stood around, witnesses with hard eyes, shaking their heads at the sheer dumb luck of being white. It was routine as laughter. Yoking erupted spontaneously, a joke of fear, a piece of kidding.

He was dismissed from it as from an episode of light street theater. “Nobody hurt you, man. It ain’t for real. You know we was just fooling with you, right?” They’d spring away, leave him tottering, hyperventilating, while they high-fived, more like amazed spectators than perpetrators. If Dylan choked or whined they were perplexed and slightly disappointed at the white boy’s too-ready hysteria. Dylan didn’t quite get it, hadn’t learned his role. On those occasions they’d pick up his books or hat and press them on him, tuck him back together. A ghost of fondness lived in a headlock’s shadow. Yoker and yokee had forged a funny compact.

You regularly promised your enemies that what you did together had no name.

Dylan leaked saliva, tears. On a cold day a nostril path of snot. Once, pee. He’d bite his tongue and taste the seepage, the tang of humiliation swallowed back. They made faces, rolled eyes. Dylan was hopeless, stained with shame. They’d try to overlook it.

“Boy bleeds you touch him, dang.”

“Nah, man, he all right. Let him alone, man.”

“You ain’t gonna say nothin’, right? Cuz you know we just messin’ around. We wouldn’t never do nothin’ to you, man.”

He’d nod, collect himself, not open his mouth. Wait to be congratulated for gulping back a clog of tears, for exhibiting silence.

“See? You pretty cool, for a white boy. Get outta here now.”

White boy was his name. He’d grown into it, crossed a line, become visible. He shined like free money. The price of the name was whatever was in his pockets at the time, fifty cents or a dollar.

“White boy, lemme talk to you for a minute.” Head tipped sideways, too lazy to take hands from pockets to summon him. One black kid, two, three. One near a bunch, maybe, you couldn’t say who was with who. Eyes rolled, laughing. The whole event a quotation of itself, a little boring, nearly an indignity to perform.

If he ignored it, tried to keep walking: “Yo, white boy! I’m talking to you, man.”

“What’s the matter, you can’t hear?”

No. Yes.

“You don’t like me, man?”

Helpless.

The fact of it: he’d cross the street to have his pockets emptied. The outcome was obvious anyway. He’d cross magnetized in disgrace, under the sway of an implicit yoking, so no one was forced to say See now I got to fuck you up, cuz you don’t listen, man. It was a dance, steps traced in yokes gone by. Call me white boy and I’ll hand you a dollar spontaneously, I’m good at this now.

“Just come here for a minute, man, I ain’t gonna hurt you. What you gotta be afraid for? Dang, man. You think I’m gonna hurt you?”

No. Yes.

The logic was insane, except as a polyrhythm of fear and reassurance, a seduction. “What you afraid of? You a racist, man?”

Me?

We yoke you for thinking that we might: in your eyes we see that you come pre-yoked.

Your fear makes it our duty to prove you right.

He was caged on street corners, stranded anywhere. A pair of kids made a human jail, a box of disaster waiting on the innocent sunlit pavement, as though he’d climbed into the legendary abandoned refrigerator.

Two voices made paradoxical, unanswerable music. Their performance for one another’s sakes, not his. The pleasure was in counterpoint, no place for a third voice.

“Who you looking for? Ain’t nobody gonna help you, man.”

“Nah, man, chill out. This white boy’s all right, he’s cool. You don’t got to fuck with him.”

“Fuck he starin’ at me for, then? Yo, man, you a racist motherfucker? I might have to fuck up your stupid ass, just for that.”

“Nah, man, shut up, he’s cool. You cool, right man? Hey, you got a dollar you could loan me?”

The distillation, the question at the core of the puzzle, asked a million times, a million ways:

“What you lookin’ at?”

“Fuck you lookin’ at, man?”

“Don’t look at me, white boy. I’ll slap you, motherfucker.”

Here was what Robert Woolfolk had prepared him for. He’d awarded Dylan the gift of his own shame, his mummy’s silence, for use on a daily basis. Each encounter bore Robert’s signature-glancing pain and tilted logic, interrogations spinning nowhere. Ritual assurance that nothing had actually happened. And the guilt of Dylan’s whiteness excusing everything, covering it all.

What

the

fuck

am

I

looking

at?

If mole-boy ever lifted his darty eyes from the pavement he might have been casting around for a grownup, or maybe some older kid he knew, someone to bail him out. Mingus Rude, say, not that he was clear he’d want Mingus to see him this way, cowering at the prospect of a yoke, white boy with cheeks hate-red. Hey, I’m not racist, my best friend is black! This wasn’t halfway sayable. Nobody had ever said who was whose best friend. Mingus Rude likely had a million of them, seventh graders, black, white, who knew. And the mole-boy could have said black aloud about as easily as Fucking looking at motherfucking YOU, man! Anyway, Mingus Rude was nowhere near. The seventh and eighth graders were housed in the main building on Court Street, while Dylan was alone in the annex, one block and a million years, a million terrified footsteps, and one million-dollar kid away.

Abraham Ebdus handled the stack of postcards just as he had the slices of burned toast, loosely, nearly dropping them, and frowning as though they had ruined something or were ruined themselves. He stared at his fingers after he’d scattered them on the breakfast table. Perhaps the postcards had left a scent or a smudge of something on his fingertips. Maybe they’d be improved by being scraped clean, or smeared with butter and orange jelly. Really they wanted to be tossed out. He let the kid have them instead.

“Someone you know in Indiana?”

The boy had come to breakfast with his backpack on, running late, as always. They were like old men at the YMCA, the two of them waking to their two alarm clocks in their two bedrooms and meeting for breakfast. Dylan’s a clock radio tuned to an all-news station which leaked through Abraham’s wall a blaring theme of trumpets and teletype sound effects, a voice boasting “The newswatch never stops,” like being driven out of sleep by a newsreel headache. The kid lived in an anxious world. His nervous system seemed tuned like a robot’s. Now he edged up to the table with the backpack humped up onto the back of his chair and blinked at the postcards while he gulped orange juice.

“The first one came a month ago,” said Abraham. “The one with the crab.”

Abraham Ebdus saw the kid needed new shoes. Dylan crushed his shoe backs by cramming into them with the laces tied, and carved away the inner rim of the heels with his pigeon-toed walk which corrective soles left uncorrected. He wanted to wear sneakers every day, certain sneakers which every kid desired. He’d spoken angrily and Abraham had understood that at stake was less status than a certain bottom line of humiliation, the survival of the kid’s willingness to even keep braving school every day. He’d bought him the sneakers but still insisted on the brown corrective shoes which looked like 1950s boaters. Sneakers two days out of five was the rule.