Honor and Duty Read Online Free Page B

dish.
    Please, I said to all the listening gods, let’s not fight Caboose and his brothers. He’s as big as a house, and it’ll be five to two on this here tin roof, and heights make me like to faint and I’m gonna fall for sure, way down there, where some train’ll flatten me and my glasses. I looked down, the bottom of my stomach dropping from me in anticipation, my gorge rising.
    “Yeah, right,” sighed Caboose, peering through thin fog toward the downtown skyscrapers. “What I said—he’s jus’ light.”
    I took a deep breath.
    “But he surely do look like a damn China boy to
me
,” he added, to no one in particular.
    The yards were Jump City for flight out. But Toos only joked about running, and I was never serious about mychances on distant tracks without him. In my running fever, I did not know that leaving Egypt would be hard. Exodus meant making farewells, and this was not one of my skills. I wanted to belong, never to be separated, to be made to stand alone, isolated, hopelessly different, and required to act or to suffer—ever again.
    I was fourteen when we moved out of the Negro Panhandle, where I had been born and the family had lived since fleeing China. I felt like I was already ten feet under quicksand, and said nothing to Toos, Alvin Sharpes, Titus McGovern, or Earline Ribbons, or to anyone. I denied the split. I’ll be back—soon, I said to myself.
    “What’s happenin’?” asked Toos. He frowned at the truck while my father and friend Hector Pueblo moved our furniture out.
    I shook my head, no words in my mouth. We spit in our hands and shook. I was weak, unable to take the comfort of his strength. I was losing my best friend. There would never be another like him. This was where
yeh
played its bitter hand. If I had been more deserving, I wouldn’t have had to leave him and my young heart.
    Now, three long years later, at seventeen, I wanted to leave with the fervor of a Hebrew held in Egypt. I wanted to flee San Francisco, a city I loved, so I could escape my mother, whom I secretly disliked. My mother was Edna McGurk Ting, and to me she was Pharaoh, skilled in abuse and quick with the whip. I was seven when she had come into our family with a reign of cultural terror that ended the Chinese nature of our family. She was from Philadelphia society, and I was her hopeless social project.
    “I hope you do well at the Point,” Edna said to me when I came home the day I was accepted. Her cool eyes were sharply observant. “Your chances are poor. Jim Latre, a very bright, handsome, ex-beau of mine, got shingles and failed that first summer, drawing our sympathy.” She smiled, remembering. Then the frown.
    “Lift your drooping shoulder. West Point is the most difficult school in the world. What possessed us to send you? They will throw you out on your ear. You are so woeful in math, so lacking in ambition, your mind so pitifully
mediocre
, you cannot miss a
single
thing. There, you cannot succeed by laughing or going crazy.
    “But it is that pitiful Negroid neighborhood background thatwill always hold you back. You may not be sufficiently American. I have given you your best chance. But your affection for failure, your penchant for associating with those with no future, will haunt you all your days.” She was talking about Toos and Tony Barraza.
    She ran a green dust rag from a pocket in her peach-toned sweater across the bindings of my beloved books.
Ben Hur
,
Beau Geste
,
Captains Courageous
,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
,
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
,
Pride and Prejudice.
She had taught me English, and I had quickly grasped paradox and irony.
    She sighed. “I had to cleanse you of singing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ in
Chinese.
Then you employed that horrid Negro speech. Now your English is quite correct, thank you, but you still hesitate, your mouth filled with marbles and confusion. He who hesitates is lost. You hesitate.” She sighed, burdened by my shortcomings. “Your father