Amy had been linked to Luther Bond since the beginning of May. Now it was June, and according to Ferguson’s most recent telephone conversation with her, his aggressive, battling stepsister still hadn’t found the nerve to tell her father or stepmother about the new man in her life. That disappointed Ferguson, who had always admired Amy for her guts, even though he had sometimes wanted to strangle her as well, and the only reason he could come up with to account for her hesitation was not that her boyfriend happened to be black but that he was militantly black, a Black Power person who stood even farther to the left than Amy, a large, menacing figure in a black leather jacket with a black beret sitting atop his Afro — just the sort of man to frighten Amy’s gentle, live-and-let-live father into a month-long panic attack.
Then the couple came down from Boston and moved into their summer sublet on Morningside Heights. That same evening, they met Ferguson for a drink at the West End Bar, and when Ferguson shook Luther Bond’s hand for the first time, the cartoon he had drawn in his head exploded into a thousand worthless fragments. Yes, Luther Bond was black, and yes, he had the firm handshake of a physically strong person, and yes, there was a stubborn sort of determination in his eyes, but when those eyes looked into Ferguson’s eyes, Ferguson understood that they were looking not at an enemy but at a potential friend, someone he was earnestly hoping he would like, and if Luther wasn’t the belligerent, hate-filled terrorist of the cartoon, then what was wrong with Amy, and why in the world had she not told her father about him?
He would have to talk to her about that in private and do what he could to pound some sense into her, but for now he had to focus on Mr. Bond himself in order to figure out what kind of person he was. Not a big person, that much was clear, but an average person of five-nine or so, roughly the same height as Amy, and if hair was any indication of a person’s political beliefs, then Luther’s modest Afro suggested he was on the left but not the far left, as opposed to the large Afros worn by the Black Is Beautiful people, and as for his face, well, it was awfully handsome, Ferguson thought, so good-looking as to verge on cute, if such an adjective could be applied to men, and as Ferguson studied that face, he understood why Amy had been attracted to Luther and was still attracted to him after six weeks of talk and steady sex, but putting aside those superficial things for a moment, the extraneous details of how tall or how short and hair lengths and cuteness quotients, the more important thing Ferguson was discovering about Luther was that he had a sharp sense of humor, something Ferguson valued in people because he was so bereft of verbal wit himself, which was why he gravitated toward people like Noah Marx and Howard Small and Richard Brinkerstaff, all of whom could talk circles around him, and when Luther told Ferguson that his roommate at Brandeis had been a fellow freshman named Timothy Sawyer, in other words Tim Sawyer, Ferguson laughed, and then he asked Luther if Tim bore any resemblance to Tom, but Luther said no, he reminded him more of that other character in the Murk Twang book, Hick Funn.
That was funny. Murk Twang and Hick Funn were genuinely funny, the same kinds of two-in-one things Howard would blurt out in his inspired moments, and the fact that Amy laughed made it even funnier, no doubt much funnier, because the volume of her laughter meant she had been caught off balance, which proved she had never heard Luther say those things before, which in turn proved that Luther hadn’t come up with his distorted versions of Mark Twain and Huck Finn last month or last year and had not been going around repeating them to his friends, no, he had invented them on the spot, right there at the West End Bar, and Ferguson appreciated a mind that was quick enough and clever enough to deliver a pair of such delicious puns, or, as he wanted to say out loud but didn’t, such pungent puns. Instead, he laughed along with his snorting stepsister and then asked Mr. Bond if he could buy him another beer.
Ferguson had already been given some information about Luther’s background and the odd path he had traveled from the Central Ward of Newark to Brandeis University in New England, things Amy had mentioned to him on the phone such as the seven years Luther had spent at the Newark Academy, one of the top private schools in the area, not paid for by Luther’s cab-driver father or his housemaid mother but by his mother’s employers, Sid and Edna Waxman, a wealthy couple from South Orange whose only son had been killed in the Battle of the Bulge, an uncommon duo of grieving souls who had fallen in love with Luther when he was a little boy, and now that Luther had won his scholarship to Brandeis, the Waxmans were doing the same thing for his younger brother, Septimus (Seppy), and how about them apples, Amy had said to Ferguson on the phone, a rich Jewish family and a struggling black family united forever in the Disunited States of America — Ha!
Ferguson was therefore up on the fact that Amy’s boyfriend had attended the Newark Academy when the three of them sat down for drinks at the West End, and before long the conversation came around to Newark itself, then Newark and basketball, a sport that Luther and Ferguson had both played in high school, and because the words Newark and basketball had unexpectedly occurred in the same sentence, Ferguson brought up the Newark gym where he had played in the triple-overtime game when he was fourteen, and the moment he said the words triple overtime, Luther leaned forward, made a wordless, indecipherable noise somewhere in the back of his throat, and said: I was there.
So you remember what happened, Ferguson said.
I’ll never forget it.
Were you playing in the game?
No, sitting in the stands waiting for your game to be over so mine could begin.
You saw the half-court shot.
The longest swish on record. At the buzzer.
And afterward?
Yes, that too. As if it was yesterday.
Kids were pouring out of the stands and I got punched, punched hard as I was running out of the gym, punched so hard that it went on hurting for hours.
It was probably me.
You?
I punched someone, but I don’t know who it was. All white people look the same, right?
I was the only person on my team who got punched. It had to be me. And if it was me, it had to be you.
Amy said: The once stable earth is wobbling out of orbit. Tidal waves are rushing across the Seven Seas, volcanoes are wiping out cities. Or am I just imagining things?
Ferguson smiled briefly at Amy and then turned back to Luther. Why did you do it? he asked.
I don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I still can’t explain it now.
It shook me up, Ferguson said. Not the punch, but the reason for the punch. The madness in the gym, the hatred.