The Confession of Copeland Cane

by Keenan Norris

  I left Antioch and returned to the Rock. I slept on Keisha’s momma’s couch some nights, her daughter’s bedroom floor others. I remember feeling in the air of the apartment the warm closeness and craziness of community, of all the people who had left and all the people about to get ghost. I remember hearing in the silence at night the sounds of the celebration that took place right there between them quiet walls. I caught the buses across town and ran when I had to and returned to school in physical form. I got back to work in my classes and got to where I would graduate. If you look at my transcripts, you’ll see that my grades was on point all the way till the end. My diploma was due me. Just ain’t make it to the ceremony.

  Meanwhile, my hood matriculated toward destruction. Ravenscourt came down, turning mostly into a memory for those who used to know it and staying a story in the imagination for those who had never trespassed into its reality. Ash and smoke from the demolition hung in the air for days and never really went away. I remember that it held like a veil over us, hiding us away from the rest of Oakland, let alone the city within a city on the other side of town.

  *

  One Sunday morning I went with Keisha and her momma and them to a religious service in this little falling-down church house the size of two apartments pushed together, where the preacher ranted ’bout Christ on the cross and the blood of the lamb. He ain’t read from the Bible not a word, but went in with all haste and fervor about scriptures that don’t even exist. The book of the City of Dope Cain’t Be Saved by John the Pope. Psalms E-40. Todd Shaw 25 to Life. He held the Good Book in the air and slammed it on the pulpit platform, and danced in a circle in the middle of the stage, and sat on his butt right in front of us and swore he was fittin’ to start speakin’ in tongues if that was what it would take to bring the Lord into this house this very morning. I looked around the small church, the walls smudged off-white with a million people’s paws, the broke ceiling fan rusted black, the thin lines of mold and old earthquakes running the length of the ceiling and the side walls, and I looked at the few parishioners, old ladies mostly, and a few girls like Keish, young and doin’ they best, and only but one other boy besides myself. Of all our folks, Jacq, who did I see up in there but old boy DeMichael Bradley, sitting all proper, hands on his lap and shit, next to Granny Bradley. He sported a suit that didn’t fit him right. Looked like he might burst out that mug any moment. The old woman wore an ivory-white skirt and blouse and a pink jacket and a flapper hat the same bright pink decorated in roses and daffodils. The two of them sat in real solemnity in the far corner of the little church, fanning theyselves with the pages of they open Bibles, nodding they heads at the strange sermon. After a while, DeMichael looked over at me where I sat next to Keisha and he nodded a welcome.

  Because her folks wouldn’t cotton to no second scripture, Keisha had to keep her real feelings about the church and the minister to herself while we was worshipping. But after church, she got alone with me and disclosed that she didn’t like this latest church home. “Them fools pass the hat every half hour on the hour, singing, Monay, monay, monay / Monay! and shit, like they dancing for dollars at the club and shit. Homie with his Holy Roller act been tryin’ to holler at me on Instagram ever since I turned seventeen and my ass started to fill out my jeans. Quiet as it’s kept, the way he misspells things in his text messages, I suspect he cain’t read most of the scripture he be claiming to cite in church.”

  I remembered how Daddy used to create scripture outta thin air when his customers played him short, the way he would grasp at anything to make a point about other people’s profligate ways. Back when he was a wild emergency tucked inside some muscle and bone. But at least the old man wadn’t tryna run no church, didn’t try and pass hisself off as a man of God.

  The two-faced-ness of church don’t sit well with me. I prefer the heathens. The next night I showed Keish the vacant where me and Miguel would smoke and bullshit. I smoked and she talked about her future: Oregon, college, religion, track and field. And I listened cuz my future was on hold and outta my control. I wished I had good options like she did, not just the Rock and dusty old Ock.

  Even in May, the cold-ass bay wind blew in, skirted underneath closed doors, slipped thru the rooms, and found us where we lay. The wind lay up with us, hugged up on us and chilled us, as it listened to Keisha and talked to me in its quiet way about how things end, how they come to die. The wind felt like the flu, felt like death even in summer. I didn’t hold myself against it. I made friends with the wind, welcomed it into me with all its ills. I fell asleep somehow. I remember Keish one minute, then nothin’ the next. And then I fell. I’m not talkin’ that teenage falling dream we all know so familiar. This was different. Your sahab went suddenly subterranean, sinking thru sludge, thick layers of landfill, black and thick as syrup cut with oil, and then I seen some boosted bicycle locks and chop shop car parts and a rusted wrench and a dumpster’s worth of tore up trash bags weighted with mulch and weeds and paper plates and used Magnum condoms and emptied vials and cans of gasoline and antifreeze and soup and sardines and other cheap shit, sewage, one perfectly unused Steph Curry basketball shoe, and baby formula behind bulletproof glass, and an en-tire West Oakland housing project in free fall, and pages from textbooks floating like fall leaves, and sheets and sheets of curled and permed and braided and dyed real Indian hair falling, shell casings and waterlogged guns falling, a green shipping container marked for an American city falling, the Marcus Garvey Building falling, the Java House, the kung fu movie theater, and Oakland’s last strip club, and a crack pipe and a heroin spoon, an MC Ant poster, Life Is … Too $hort, 8-tracks, a box of vinyl records, a pair of bell-bottom pants and one worn-out platform shoe, two hair picks, Huey’s spear and wicker chair, the orange fins off some old-ass muscle car, and a newspaper advertisement reading “The Detroit of the West,” and the city charter and a single jar of lye and an ad for skin-bleaching ointment and hella newspaper clippings about everything that had ever happened in Oakland and one, two, three, four badly punctured metal drums that leaked highly radioactive nuclear waste, down and down I went till I came to my old man at the bottom of it all and I heard Love thy father! and I fell farther below the bottom and I heard I love you in the dark. It was just me and Miguel dreaming out loud—

  “For real, Cope. Finna rock niggas this summer. Picture this: banners all over the Rock and the Redwoods. Me and you, the headliners. Our display cases is all glass lit gold, and they’re like columns, like ancient Roman columns lit by classical Roman candles. Every shoe finna be lit bright as the sun. The best DJs, the best rappers. Aye’body and they momma rockin’ and shoppin’. Finna be hella beautiful. I had crazy visions, Cope.”

  “I think I heard that line in a song.”

  “Dreams don’t got owners, Cope.”

  “That’s kinda deep. I feel you. I love—I got love for you, blood.”

  “I love you, too, Cope.”

  *

  I woke alone in the vacant and felt my phone rattle against my forehead. I grabbed it and investigated: it was a text from Keisha.

  “Don’t trip, I had to go home or Mama was gonna kill me. You were too heavy to carry.”

  “Lol—all good.”

  “I was thinking about your situation & I have an idea.”

  “What it is,” I wrote back, jamming my suddenly fat fingers into the phone’s miniature keypad. I was gettin’ used to it, typing as fast as I had on my old phone. I wandered into the Pre-sage app and some of the other curious-ass apps cousin had uploaded for a flat $100 annual fee. To my surprise, they looked kinda cool, like they own little mysteries, not old school or on trend, and definitely not American. I might need to break for Trinidad if everything there was as cheap and as unique as these apps. I played with the apps a little longer ’fore my mind started wandering across the continent and over the ocean. Why was I even living in this extremely expensive city, in this beaucoup expensive state, where the nights was cold and complected people got p
ushed around like pieces on a puzzle board, when there was other places on the map that was so much friendlier to us? Maybe my goal shouldn’t be to stay in Oakland or Antioch or Oregon, but to get out altogether from America.

  “Do you know what a rabbit is?”

  “Run that back??”

  “Do you know what a rabbit is?”

  “You want an animal emoji?”

  “Stop playing. In track the rabbit is the runner who goes out to the front and sets the pace and then steps off the track.”

  “That doesnt make sense. You run to win.”

  “Of course it makes sense. The rabbit can’t win. The rabbit is there to push the pace. The rabbit is there to break up the field so that the fastest runners separate from the slower ones. No pack running. The rabbit helps records to be broken. The rabbit helps other runners make qualifying times. The rabbit sacrifices for the field.”

  “But what does he get out of it?”

  “1st of all who said the rabbit is a he? It could be a girl. They had to outlaw men rabbiting for women’s races.”

  “Why?”

  “The men pushed the pace so fast that the women kept breaking records—women’s records.”

  “Isnt that a good thing?”

  “Idk. Off topic. Real talk I think you would be a good rabbit. It’s a college meet the day after the high school state meet. I could get the Oregon coaches to let you pace their 800 runners on the college day. It would be a good way for you to walk on to the team and it would get you on their radar for next year when they make their scholarship offers. You up for that?”

  “Its a plan.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “I’m down—but what if the rabbit goes ahead and wins the race?”

  “Don’t play Cope.”

  I was so short of sleep it was all I could do to end the text exchange without typing her a text the way people do when they run they whole hand across all the piano keys. I didn’t wanna run races where I was not a competitor. That was whack. But it was way less whack’n what I would be doing if I stayed in Oakland in the vacants, barely able to eat and dress decent.

  I could almost see myself as U of O’s rabbit. Sprint races don’t need rabbits. I would need to work the half mile and the mile. Those would be my specialties. I could do the half mile no problem, but I would need to gain more stamina and maybe reduce my muscle mass for the mile. The mile. Four laps around the track. Three laps and some change for the rabbit. As soon as the gun would go off, I would light out like the only smart black dude ever cast in a horror flick. My adrenaline would carry me thru the first lap, a quarter mile of pure painless speed. The chase would be on and poppin’ behind me, but I would lead them around with a couple strides’ lead over second place, a pace I would pay for sooner’n later. A lesson in fire and brimstone was on its way: the pain would no-knock bust thru my doors like the po-lice. The lactic acid would shoot into me like the fires of hell, the devil in my legs, my chest, my throat. By the third lap, heatwaves would be hovering over the track surface. The pace was set now. Another day, another job well done.

  But it would come a time when I wouldn’t be satisfied with a job well done. I wouldn’t want my rabbit role. I would be way out this rabbitass mind of mines and I’d fight back pain and the job description and lean into everything that hurt. The first command would come loud and clear—Kill the rabbit!—as I completed the third lap and tore into the turn, leaning and digging the rubber out the track. Kill the rabbit! the call would come again. My whole life, I’d been the rabbit, I just didn’t know it and didn’t know how to play it. I was the rabbit when Vista attacked our teacher and I went running ’fore anyone else to find help. I was the rabbit when I took action to sanitize our apartments. I was the rabbit when I wandered too far on the island. I was the rabbit in the jailhouse library, and I was the rabbit when I left the hood for prep school. Kill the rabbit! Pain would pepper my legs like rounds of buckshot burning into my skin. I would be way ahead, not just winning the race but on rabbit record pace, and them jokers in the infield would be having a fit. Just when they was about outta they own minds, about ready to tackle me and make me taste turf, I would do what I now knew how to do from all my rabbit runs: step off the track without breaking the rules, doing the job. It would take a couple seconds, which in a race is forever, ’fore the other runners would pass me. It would still be the race they wanted, with me out the picture just in time. The rabbit cain’t win, after all, even when he’s supposed to.

  *

  Run, rabbit, run. I fell asleep and slept easy, Jacq, for the first time in a long time. Just tucked up and dreamt some easy dreams. When I did come to, it was to a screaming phone full of messages.

  “Where are you Cope?” Keisha asked.

  “Where are you??” her second text read.

  “Where are you???”

  “Where are you Cope?” a text from Momma questioned.

  “Cope???”

  I texted the woman who gave birth to me back first, writing the first excuse that came to me: “I’m ok I kicked it w/ Miguel last night.”

  “What happened?” she wrote back immediately.

  “I’m fine. I’m still in the vacant,” I wrote to Keisha.

  “Nothing happened,” I wrote to Momma.

  “What happened to Miguel?” she wrote back.

  Keisha ain’t write back.

  I began to notice noise filtering in from outside. A low rumble. I went to a window and looked out. The Neiman Marcus threw the green space and everything else beneath it into deep shadow, but the rumble of talk or music or whatever it was still sounded, source unknown, too loud to ignore.

  “What happened to Miguel?” I wrote, meaning to send my text to Keisha but sending it to Momma instead.

  There was no response.

  I hurried outside and realized that the noise came not from inside the complex but from the street outside the gates. I only had to run a few steps toward the sounds to see yellow-and-black tape ribboning a crime scene on the street outside. The tape kept a small crowd from coming closer. The ambulance and po-lice car lights discolored the darkness, flashing crisis colors, red, white, and blue.

  It was a cold, smoky summer night. I could taste the ash in the air, probably from a far-off fire. The air held still, the smoke sitting there thick enough not just to taste but to see and to touch. You imagine that if someone gets shot, it’ll be hella folks crowded around the yellow tape wanting to know what happened. But it was only a couple dozen people barriered off by the yellow tape, if that.

  Up in the mix, the noise of the crowd didn’t seem loud at all. It was barely enough people to call it a crowd, matter fact. I remembered Keisha’s party, how the cars stacked like dominoes and the people crowded in even closer, double sixing every square foot of the Rock. I could see an ambulance and some cops in the restricted zone. They wandered back and forth, unworried and kinda aimless, just like the people without badges and uniforms on the opposite side of the tape was wandering around and not doing and not saying anything.

  I wanted to ear-hustle the facts of the situation, but everybody was whispering to each other or they was on they phones, deep in virtual space. Finally I peeped Free behind a wave of bodies. She was up at the yellow tape, leaning into it like a runner about to win a race. She was so short she was easy to miss, especially as short as it still was. But there she was, leaning over the tape and stretching it to where it might snap, and then slipping under it and walking right up to the scene of the crime. I watched her walk up to the ambulance, which had its back doors open. She was talkin’ to someone inside the ambulance. The first thing I thought wadn’t who was in the ambulance but how she was able to walk right into the restricted area. Back in the day, police woulda beat her ass, if not killt her, for trespassing like that. They feared us nuff to kill us, which ain’t but a box in a paradox, am I right?

  I’ve seen my share of folk die on the Rock. This was different. Free was practically inside the ambulan
ce. Both her hands gripped the retractable metal ramp, not allowing the medics to raise it and run away. She stood there like that talkin’ to them for forever, maybe three, four minutes. Maybe whoever was inside the ambulance was already outta danger one way or another, I thought.

  Then she let go of the ramp and it raised, and a medic came and shut the doors behind him and the ambulance drove off. Free came back across the crime scene, weaving between wandering officers. She jumped over the tape and ran back toward our building. I had to sprint as fast as I could to catch up to her.

  “Free, what’s going on?” I called as I came level with her at the entranceway into Rockwood.

  She stopped and stared at me, and I knew by the dead wild look in her eyes what she would tell me ’fore she had to say it.

  *Silhouetted so the school or the vendors or whoever wouldn’t have to pay him for his likeness.

  *Soclear Security offers a variety of security and investigative services for both business and residential needs everywhere in the United States and its territories. Our services are customized to meet the needs of our diverse clientele. We are dedicated to providing the highest level of protection for homeowners, officers of the law, executives, ambassadors, dignitaries, celebrities, and companies.

  ✦Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: The Harvard University economics major who was taken into custody and questioned by police in relation to the search for black identity radical Copeland Cane V has been released without charge. Authorities do not regard the individual as in any way connected to the case. This represents a major setback in the search for Cane and his accomplices. Authorities suspect that Cane’s female associate may in fact attend a non–Ivy League university.

  *Jacqueline: I did not. All I know about sports is that Michael Jordan was great, Kobe Bryant is gone, and you are fast.