We passed a red barn spilling golden straw out its upper holes. We passed a low stone wall. Just ahead, one yellow diamond sign showed a black deer’s outline leaping right to left.

  Hoping to slow Dad, to maybe reinvolve him in our life, I planned to tell him, for a joke: Wasn’t that the silliest thing—ever?—how some guy at a desk in Raleigh figured he could say right where a deer might cross the darn road way out here? A riot, hunh, Dad? Dad?

  That same second there spun before our windshield moving right to left midair three pinkish shapes like hurled doormats carpet-sized. They funneled toward specifics and into being creatures and looked to me like tall odd dogs with bottle racks for heads. The point of one such pronged unit now turned our way. The beast had bristles on its muzzle, a wet black nose, and this became all of one live deer veering right at us and going ninety. It got closer fast but in the slowest way that all of this can happen.

  I had time to know. It was going to hit us. And we, it. Time to think. That we were sitting as still as bowling pins who’ve got whole animals swimming down the alley at them. I saw two others, white-tailed, lift into the air around our car then back-move over it. But the big one, his red-blue tongue out, his longlashed eyes all damp, let his front hoof poke our windshield, as if in the politest water-temperature test. And our whole green male view went female blue with spiderwebbing then to bits then clear. All in total silence. Over the fender, other animals, back-tumbling, became a good clown act. Their speed was as great going north, as our speed grew even faster headed south and gathering them all against and over and then under us.

  Dad’s right hand, still holding the cigarette, shot out, raised itself above my face. His huge hand stretched wide like a pointed star—it accepted the full spray of glass that otherwise, I knew, would now be taking my blue eyes. Dad received all sharpness; he did so—glad as any catcher’s mitt absorbing all it was designed to snag. But (no hands) the car meantime went just where it pleased. Dad stared hard my way, yelling “rightson?” (which I knew was the end of “Are you all right, son?”), and as three bumps each bigger heaved us left so hard, this is what I can’t describe. Even as I’ll try again. This was it, and I, age eight: About to go over with our car, Dad gave me one possibly final look, a look that—in the strange current of time’s slowing, of adrenaline’s emergency-brake favor to us—let me see a new man. I saw my father as some stranger might. And while I braced for impact—as I stared at him all softened up and wounded by my accusation, only now, for the first time in my life, did I understand:

  my father was a Negro.

  Not “a full-blooded Negro,” as we said then. But I knew—clear from my scalp to my scrotum—that, somewhere in his recent history, some one member of his family, had been…. Then I guessed “Aunt Sutie” was his mother, his father some white man submitted to or only half chosen. The railroad brakeman? I now saw in Pop their strange joined moment of forced entry or impossible romance. And Dad’s stiff hair, his skin’s high goldy undercolor meant something else forever. “There’s a lot of humiliation connected with it” now offered me far more. I knew why no townsfolk ever believed I could be Clyde’s. All this rushed forward, unscrolled itself at a child’s own fumbling stubborn pace.

  But, last thing, in the bright flash as our Packard found air and literally left the road, I wondered, why oh why had I just used against him the word “REAL”—used it like a club? Not my REAL father. He’d been born to be a perfect dad! And, in every way but maybe one, he was.

  Right then, with a sound like a house-sized nail being pulled out of a world-sized board, our car refound wet earth and curved so hard into its ditchward roll.

  I was knocked out, or else kept my eyes closed through a white part then the blue part then a moister final black. But after a spell lasting one minute or half a day, eyes somehow freely opened. Funny, all the sound of it came last. Like one full season’s delayed memories: shots and rattles, the shatterings of some short eventful war played back to you full-blast.

  After: some birds went right on singing, “tweettweeter.” Seemed a good sign. I tried to move, but felt my father’s weight pressed flat all over me. He had rung down like a stage curtain. You never know how big a loved one is till you try accepting his deadweight. I shook him and for the first time ever called him aloud “Clyde,” not “Dad.” But I think this mainly came from fellow-feeling, with our being now in such a scrape.

  The mammoth Packard tilted on its side, tires spinning. Our missing windshield now opened only onto smeared mud, sudden plant life. Beyond a dark fringe of Dad’s hair, I could just see clear sky straight up and through the driver’s window. I tried crawling toward that, first depending on the handhold of the rearview mirror, then stepping over and breaking, with the noise of some huge egg busting, his plywood drink-caddy. But I scrambled out. Once I made it up to light, I looked down. It was like staring straight back into a well. My father rested at its bottom; he seemed dead asleep or dead, balled up down there indifferent.

  I checked back along the road, surveying carcasses, two on tarmac, one half opened in a ditch. Past that, small people, those farmers, came running, big bigger still. They had been sitting on the porch and milling in the yard and had seen us and now they’d trotted a good half-mile. They must have heard. We must have just been pretty loud.

  I leapt the five feet down from Clyde’s window. Then I ran back toward them jostling my way, me screaming, “Howdy. Please, quick, my dad’s hurt. Howdy, hurt in there …” I was pointing as they swerved around me, their shoes hard on pavement, a beautiful manly motion directing all of them.

  I saw one slither through our car’s open window and soon start trying lifting my dad out. Clyde looked dead. Even at his liveliest, with the big knobby hands and large head, he could act slack, some demonstrator puppet man. He now appeared looser still. Like he had given up on everything, or been abandoned by it. Hard to explain how changed he seemed from earlier, and not just from being knocked clean out. Maybe it was my guessing aloud I was another man’s. Maybe it was Dad’s even suspecting that I knew his race and history.

  They slapped him, one fellow cupped a handful of water from a ditch and threw it at Clyde’s face, and they were working his head from side to side. I waited behind them, winded, as he finally opened one eye.

  “He drunk, son?” the oldest farmer asked, no judgment. “No, sir. He is born-again,” and then it seemed to me Clyde really had been. After seeing him pulled out of the driver’s window like from the wrong side of something black’s body. The oldest farmer pointed: “For a man, sure is wearing a lot of jewry.”

  “Sells it for a living, sir,” I said.

  “Well … that’s all right, then….”

  Clyde stared at me as at some short adult stranger.

  “Stand out where he can see somebody he knows,” the farmer said, then shifted Clyde’s shoulders forward just a bit too rough. “Know this youngun? Recognize this here boy? You got him some kind of upset, but you’re all right. Know your own boy here?”

  Then, hurt at being called “upset” by people unknown to us, I understood I had been crying without noticing—like it was just a more serious way of breathing. I drew close to Dad, I did my Ollie, puffing my pink cheeks, fooling with the phantom tie, aiming a slow-burn eye-roll: I offered him my all-time funniest expression. And I saw Clyde start to smile his best crazed hopeful grin. It always made a kind of pocket dawn—the way it opened, breaking horizon-to-horizon across the most unlikely pleasing face. But, soon as he smiled, I saw him remember. I saw him know I knew I might not be his.

  Then he fell back into the big hands of the men propping him forward, he let out one pinched cry straight up. It knocked me aside with shame for what I’d done—asking, insisting. Clyde’s groan scared the fellows holding him.

  “Could be it’s his neck,” one said, professional. “Don’t nobody shout out like that unless he’s got something’s bad broke.” Come to find out, it was his arm. “He’s favoring the right one,” the farmer spoke of Clyde as of livestock. “Look at him guard it, like. ’At one’s busted, sure.”

  It was the day we never got to Edenton to see the Colonel and his Marine Corps of begonias. It was the Worst of All Sundays because I had not played dumb, I had overtrusted.

  • • •

  I had thought adults could solve things, and that I would help them do that. I had thought a life was some advanced math problem you could just answer and then be done considering. I didn’t know that the last person who knows how to solve a given problem is usually the person whose life created it. I understood nothing. But I already guessed I’d made a huge mistake, and that I’d only just begun to see its sad results play out.

  And yet (I tried to help myself through this) wasn’t my mistake what’d finally introduced me to my dad? I surely now possessed his past’s single hugest secret. For that, at least, I felt half grateful and even partway proud. I wished we could be driven fast to Sutie’s house. We’d recover there, the three of us eating biscuits on her shady porch, us steadily visiting, me asking everything at last.

  All I knew: I’d far rather be Clyde’s—if that meant “black” or Packard or maple syrup—than “white” in the cold snide way of Doc Dick Dix. I’d do anything to remain Clyde Delman’s boy. Whoever Clyde was, whatever-colored a Clyde he’d likely to stay, I would be right there alongside.

  Could you choose? You can choose.

  Standing here with farmers acting nice to me and asking did I want a drink of water or some sweet-potato pie still hot back at their house, I guessed I must become way stronger. Would these men be acting so kindly if they knew my dad’s real race and maybe mine?

  I would have to try and correct everything for my father now. What had I really glimpsed about his past and color? Was it even true? And of me, too? Didn’t knowing you might not be white itself revoke your front-row pass? So willingly I gave mine up!

  I must now struggle far harder for Dad, I must take over some. Clyde wouldn’t need to know I’d guessed about his and my’s being black and all. I’d hide from him how I must defend forever the man who’d defended and “changed” me from birth on. Clyde I would protect, as he had said that he would die for me.

  I felt my whole life reorganize itself, around the sudden single goal of keeping Clyde my real true dad. I had never asked to be born “White and Blond and Blue.” He never begged for “Black and Blue and Brown and White.” But he’d sure signed on for me. And he sure had me now, forever.

  My one wish: To shield him. To beat the others back. But, standing here, I suddenly felt so old. Older than Clyde. I was now his beholden if maybe unbegotten son. Weak-kneed, huge-headed, I waited here by the side the road feeling older than our world.

  See, I had just become my race plus his—and, I can tell you, that combo is work.

  4.

  Since the farmer’s shirtless son owned the new red wrecker, he said he’d tow our car to Falls, just for the price of his gas plus one in-town meal for him and his folks, okay? Just so’s they’d have something to do of a till-recently slow Sunday. (Now I see this was their country way of not making us feel overgrateful.)

  The red truck soon got our muddied car free of its ditch, back right side up. The tires were okay. So the farmers climbed in; they’d ride in our handsome towed Packard. It was strange to look through the wrecking truck’s rear window and see them, proud, windblown, fiddling with dashboard knobs, playing like they were city folks and us. The youngest boy worked a steering wheel that had no say-so.

  Dad held one arm, cradling it like a baby. He pressed hard and silent against the tow truck’s passenger door. They pulled a spare quilt up around him. Times we would hit a big bump, he’d half-groan. I heard his head knock the rolled-up window, him barely noticing. I felt worried, and I piled against his yellow quilt, maybe hurting him.

  Though the farmers were being very good to us, their strong ruddy son, our driver, couldn’t help criticize Dad’s speed. And on a secondary road and with plenty of warning signs.

  “City people don’t know how many head of deer we got back in these woods. Why, won’t but just last summer—Jenny’s brother’s son?—he seen him a bear, not ten miles from the highway back in Pike’s Woods. A good-sized one, too. Black. And just a-padding along like it owned the woods, which it pertwell used to, I reckon. It didn’t know there was so many head of US out here!”

  And he gave off a grim and snuffly country kind of laugh. But Dad and me didn’t bother to respond. “Funny” was not being much help to us here lately.

  Riding, silent, I became a pop quiz of listed questions: When had my mother learned of Dad’s true racial mix? Had she ever really known? Did she only sense it? Was her fling with Dix a revenge on Clyde’s homeliness or his race or both? Did Falls allow her weekly blond betrayal because it half-suspected? Did all those colored service-station attendants guess Clyde’s history at once? What other codes had been forever lost on me? And how fast could I make up these lapses to “Almost Monster”? Such a name for so kind a man, so true a dad.

  Clyde had asked, “Buddy? Ain’t I been good enough for you?” Ouch. Helping him, I wanted to hurt somebody else now. Proof.

  The farmers said they’d leave us at Falls General Hospital. Then they’d pull his car to the Shell station that Clyde liked. As we finally entered Falls, we passed my school, our church, our American Grill. We drew near the house and—though it was one block over—I saw, through moving trees, one white Pontiac still gleaming there.

  I tipped against Dad’s yellow quilt. It smelled of lye soap and sun from being dried on a line. I still recall the scent as fully Dad’s. Seeing how Dix was yet visiting Mom, I felt an even higher level of guarding was due this fine man I’d come in with. Clyde pretended not to glance that way, but I knew how every pore on that side of his body became a form of eyestrain.

  I felt shaky, as if something great would be expected of me soon. I found myself ready. Ready to do whatever to protect him. I felt that our driver had been hard on Dad about his speeding. The boy didn’t know how good Clyde was, or how many Bibles were in his trunk. I now blamed Mom for everything.

  If she had not done that thing with the Animal Doc and got me in her instead of letting me be my true dad’s, everyone could see I looked like him. And even though I might have got a face catfishy, like father like son, folks would never doubt that I was his. That was the problem—not who or what color Clyde had been all along, but how quick I could become that with him.

  If I had not said the thing straight out and made Dad cry then smoke then rush, if it weren’t for those crazy deers from nowhere, everything’d still be perfect. I could not abide my part in hurting him. Instead I blamed her for all of it, and vowed she would never get to harm him ever again. But I was just making Mom become the only bad part of the world. That just came from my feeling guilty and being so young.

  Now his arm was broken, more help from me was needed. I would be like the Adult. Just as I had vowed to check on that dead dog Trixie day and night. Just like the Ohio man who’d blinked his lights to tell us where the cop hid, I would now take charge of signals. I would straighten everything out and get us past this habit of everybody hurting everybody all around them. Then Mom, Clyde, and me, we could start over clean. I simply had to clear the route. I would be the train’s cowcatcher, sweeping bodies off our silver tracks ahead.

  Parked before the hospital, farmers helped husk the quilt off Dad. With his one working paw, Clyde gave them too much dinner money then offered handshakes to everyone, including the women; and I saw they appreciated this and that he knew the country way. Then I whispered and he bent down and nodded and I scrambled up into the towed car for its keys. I hurried to the trunk and brought out one black Bible for every helper-person present. I saw how this impressed them, it proved that we were not just careless city speeders, but sober citizens, important and God-prepared. I liked having come up with this and felt it showed I was thinking clear for everybody now.

  Receiving God’s Word, the farmers grew stern-faced but pleased, very ceremonial, the way country people are, especially in town. They said their “Thank ye kindly”s as much to me as Clyde.

  Then Dad and I walked right into Emergency. He was known on sight from where he distributed the Nurses’ Whites at their little graduations and visited the sick so regular.

  A blue-black man in a starch-white uniform introduced himself to me and laughed to see Dad. “Well will you look what the cat drug in, what bit you, Clyd-i-o?” My father told, but the short way. How his arm got broke. How we’d got to hurrying. How this here’s what usually comes of that.

  Rory said, “Knowing you, you probably already heard the one about the Nun, the Sheep Dog, and the Preacher’s Wife—or did you tell me it, knowing you?” But when he touched Dad’s arm, Rory stopped joking. Dad said would I consider waiting out in the lobby, please. Rory turned my way and was very nice: “We got us many a funnybook out there under the fish tank. You like funnybooks, Green Lantern? Cause my kids do.—But wait one, you’re right banged up too, look at this eye. And little cuts all over him. But this shiner’s half ripe, older then the others.”

  5.

  It was after they set his arm and did paperwork and swabbed me off and got most of the big glass out of his hand and released him. They said they would drive him home. No problem, not in an ambulance with red lights going, maybe just in Rory’s car, though home was only seven blocks off. But Clyde said no, he was in no hurry, beautiful day like this—are you kidding?—we would hike it easy. Air’d be good for us. We had never made it to our last Bible stop at Colonel Begonia’s out past Edenton. I knew Clyde didn’t want to get us home one minute early.

  So, with my small pliant hand holding Dad’s one good sinewy one, with him protecting the bad arm, we set out. He moved old. I squinted up at him, thinking I had never seen anybody age so quick. I blamed the wreck, and not his guessing all that I knew now.