All-Bright Court by Connie Rose Porter Read Free Book Online Page A

. . . childlike. But that was the whole point of the book.”
    â€œNaw, I’m saying he a faggot.”
    â€œDon’t use that word,” the teacher said.
    â€œWhy? You asked me to write what I feel about the book. Now you telling me I’m wrong,” Isaac said.
    â€œThat’s not what I’m saying at all. Let’s move on to the next report,” the teacher said.
    â€œFuck you,” Isaac said under his breath. He didn’t know why he was thrown into this school with these people. They were stupid, retards, jellyheads.
    It was after he mowed down half the fence at Roosevelt Junior High that he was transferred. It wasn’t even his fault. The men had been tearing up a field to expand the parking lot. Isaac and Rick had gone there one night to see if they could get a piece of the equipment to work. They couldn’t get the tractor or the bulldozer to start, but Rick managed to get the steamroller started. Isaac was the one who set it in motion. He was playing with the levers, and the steamroller began moving forward. It took off in a slow and steady line, crunching over gravel. Isaac was excited. He felt powerful atop the machine. It was moving like a tank.
    â€œWe at war, Ricky. We killing the Japs.”
    â€œYou crazy, Isaac. I’m not playing no stupid war game with you.”
    â€œWe killing ’em. We at war with them Commie bastards. We going to show ’em not to be messing with us,” Isaac said.
    Rick was the one who saw the fence. It seemed to pop up in front of them right out of the night. He screamed for Isaac to stop.
    â€œI can’t stop it,” Isaac yelled.
    Rick jumped off the side and rolled across the gravel. Isaac was too scared to jump. He could see himself tripping and getting his bones crushed to dust under the runaway machine.
    â€œI’m riding it out, Rick. I’m going through this mind field. If I don’t make it out alive, give my Purple Heart to my mama.”
    â€œYou crazy, Isaac. You really crazy. Bail out, man. Bail out!”
    Isaac stayed on, and they heard sirens. Rick took off, turned himself into a shadow and vanished in the darkness, but Isaac was caught. He was placed in the custody of his father. No charges were pressed against him, but the next morning he had to bring his parents to school.
    â€œYou go see ’bout that hard-head boy,” his mother said to his father. “I’m too shame to go, and say what to them white people—the fool didn’t mean to run down the fence? Far as I know, he did it on purpose.”
    So his father went. Before his hands had even opened, he was sitting before the principal with his hat on his knees and his head bowed. The fence had to be paid for.
    Isaac sat quietly until the principal said, “It would be best to place your son in occupational education.”
    â€œO.E.? No!” Isaac said. “I’m not going to a school for retards. I’m not riding the blue cheese.”
    â€œIsaac, you be quiet when the man is talking,” his father reprimanded.
    â€œI’m not going to no school for jellyheads.”
    â€œIsaac, set there and be good,” his father said.
    That was when the principal told Isaac he would have to leave the office. Isaac stood outside the door feeling as if he were going to throw up. He knew his record. He had failed the seventh grade once, and he was on his way to a second trip through the eighth grade.
    That wasn’t his fault either. He was bored. They were always trying to teach him things he did not want to know, and there were always tricks. He had to find themes in stories, and write thesis statements, and make paragraphs.
    In seventh grade there had been sentence diagramming. That wrecked two whole years for him. Seeing a sentence all strung out, dangling from a line with parts of it sticking off of it like branches from a tree, made Isaac want to crawl out on one of those branches and hang